by Howie Gordon
“Does Charley want to come out and play?” she would singsong coyly.
“Only if he gets to see Ethel,” I would answer in turn. It was fairly sick. The Charley-Ethel part finally convinced me. I mean, what kind of names are those to give your genitals?
And if I had only known that I was to have had more sex petting with Sally in the ninth grade than I was gonna get for the entire rest of high school, I would never have let her go!
“Scotch and soda,
Mud in your eye,
Baby, do I feel high!
Oh, me, oh, my —”
When Sally’s blue jeans came down that first time and she took my hand and placed it between her legs, I thought the heat in my head would set my hair on fire. She was damp — and hot. She melted into my hand and breathed a hot breath on my neck that made me tingle with an aliveness that I had never before known. This was a new place for me. This was an irresistible place! I had no idea that life could even offer such a thing. It made me wonder what else I didn’t know about yet —
“All I need is,
One of your smiles,
Sunshine of your eyes,
Oh, me, oh, my,
Do I feel high!
Give me lovin,
Baby, I’m your guy!”
Chapter Fifteen
Well, we’re in the game, but we’re still fat. You don’t mind if I include you in here, do you? Being a writer can get awfully lonely.
And you know, when I was working as an actor, going to all those auditions, I used to think that I knew something about rejection. Forget about it! A writer doesn’t even get out of the house!
You can spend forever writing something and then you finally finish it and send it off to an agent, a magazine, maybe a publisher. You wait forever. Before you know it, it’s a month, three months. It’s six months later and you haven’t heard a Goddamn word!
You’ve waited long enough. You call them up. Lord only knows how many calls you have to make before you actually get to talk to someone who is supposed to know something about something, and they say, “Nope, never got that. Never saw it. You want to try resubmitting that?”
And fuckin’ A, you do!
Chapter Sixteen
“You got a potty mouth!” the Voice said to me.
“Oh, God! I didn’t know it was you!” I told Him. “Do you really care about that kind of stuff?”
“Nah, not at all,” He said, “just fuckin’ with ya.”
Chapter Seventeen
Fat. Fat. Fat. I couldn’t kick it. All through the eighth and ninth grade and on into the tenth, just couldn’t kick it. The waistline was thirty-two, thirty-four inches, and going up. By the age of seventeen, I was knocking at the door of a forty-inch waist. Pretty tough to buy off the rack.
My mother, who was also fighting the battle of the bulge, had taken me to the doctor and had me try a couple of different things. I remember taking thyroid pills for a while. Didn’t do nothing. Then there were cans of Metrecal. It was supposed to be this new wonder drink that you’d substitute periodically for meals. It had zero effect, but at least it was chocolate.
It seemed like I was never going to be able to lose any weight. I longed to discover a zipper hidden in my neck that I would one day pull down and be able to step out of that fat body like a person removing a heavy winter coat.
It was around that time that the dream came.
I was alone and crying. A man approached me. He was very well built, abs like a washboard. I guess he was naked or near to it. He kissed me on the cheek. It wasn’t erotic, but it was electric. It sent sparks and shivers through me. I knew I was sleeping and I knew I was dreaming, but something very special was happening, something very real.
It seemed like we used to say such things happened only in The Twilight Zone. Or more recently, perhaps, someone might refer to such an incident as an X-File. No doubt, earthbound psychologists could and would find an entirely different rendering for these events, but I’m not always completely opposed to magical thinking.
The man told me not to be frightened. He said that he was me in the future. There you have it! Cat’s out of the bag! He’s crazy. I’m crazy. You’re crazy for reading this! But that’s what happened, in my dream.
He dried my tears and then posed for me. It was me fourteen years into my own future. I was the 143 1/2 pounds that I would be when I posed to become a Playgirl centerfold in November of 1978. I would be at the absolute peak of my physical powers. I’d have the body of a Greek sculpture.
“Just look at who you get to be,” he said to me. He was fucking beautiful, almost everything that I could have ever wished for. He told me that I should just take it easy, calm down, and that everything would work itself out. Then, he disappeared.
When I awoke in the morning, I was as fat as ever, but with a new feeling of inner calm. I told no one about my dream. Probably shouldn’t even have told you!
Chapter Eighteen
“You’re damn right,” Agent Marty said, “This is crazy!! Where’s all the porn you were talkin’ about anyway? Porn’s better than crazy! I knew porn would be a tough sell, but crazy, crazy would be fucking impossible! Tell me, is this an acid flashback or something?”
“Relax, Marty,” I told him, “it’s all just fiction.”
Chapter Nineteen
I peaked as a fatty mid-way through my junior year of high school. I stood about five foot seven and weighed in at over 200 pounds. I wore “Husky” clothes. Husky was the last designation possible before the department store said, “Sorry, pal, you’re just too fat to shop here.”
After the Christmas vacation, in the new year of 1965, there were two major concerns in my life. One had become getting into college and the other, of course, was still to lose weight.
Regarding college, it had begun to dawn on me that my brother’s being smart really wasn’t going to do too much to get me into college. Though I was still being included in the advanced classes, my academic career to that point had been decidedly mediocre, mediocre and less.
I had always taken it for granted that I was smart because my brother was, but school had been his arena to excel, especially in math and science. I just turned off to all that stuff, barely earning myself passing grades.
Y’see, I was gonna carve out my own path and it wasn’t gonna be in doin’ no schoolwork! It was gonna be baseball. I was shooting for the Big Leagues! I was gonna play for the Pittsburgh Pirates! And along the way, I’d make it to college alright, but it would be on an atha-letic scholarship. That was the plan, anyway. Yeah, that was the plan.
Chapter Twenty
Continuing Sex Education
It was a school night and I was in the tenth grade. We had high school fraternities in our community. This was the rush season and the fraternities were after their next round of pledges.
The older boys, the seniors, were taking us out for the night. They drove. They had cars. They took us to the Casino Burlesque in downtown Pittsburgh. We were gonna see naked women.
Irma the Body was the headliner. She was a little long in the tooth, but what did that matter to us! We were greener than the hills in May and she was gonna get naked. Besides, Mae West was still considered sexy and she was about 110.
It was a mob scene in the theater that night. Young men were everywhere. They had definitely turned a blind eye to age requirements at the front door. All that mattered was the color of your money. “Move along, son, move along. Show’s gonna start in about ten minutes.”
Irma the Body did not disappoint. She was voluptuous and creamy and got as naked as the State of Pennsylvania would allow back in 1963. At the end of her act, she took a rose, a long stemmed rose. One could only assume that it had been shorn of its thorns. She placed that rose between her legs and made a wriggling delightful show of squeezing it hard with her thighs. When she withdrew the blossom, it was still intact. She languidly raised it to her nostrils and inhaled the fragrance deeply.
“Hmmmmm,” she
said with a sleepy smile, “does anyone want to smell my rose?”
Around 300 very teen-age boys lost their minds!
Chapter Twenty-One
I don’t know why the weight came off when it did or why it hadn’t all those other times before. Didn’t seem to be any magic to it. It was all just diet and exercise.
My parents allowed me to largely stay home for most of January and February of that junior year in 1965. I studied hard for the college boards and I exercised. I restricted my diet to meat and salad and began a running program. I took practice test after practice test of the SATs and just about memorized Thirty Days to a Better Vocabulary. I studied “specious, rococo, to weltschmerz,” like it was Tinkers to Evers to Chance.
I raised my verbal score almost 150 points. I raised my math total by about a hundred. And in just under three months, I lost fifty pounds!
Chapter Twenty-Two
The new me. It was like being reborn. When I went back to school in March, I got my first taste of being a “sex star.” Walking down the halls, I got lots of smiles and stares. People were astonished at my transformation, but none more so than me. Before the end of that Junior year of high school, I got myself elected to be the President of our Senior Class.
I gave the bandleader back his fekukteh tuba. No more tuba, I was done with the tuba. Kiss my ass, tuba!
I went from playing center to halfback in football. In baseball, well, I just stayed at catcher. I liked playing catcher. I was pretty good at it. Losing weight only made me better, but I still stunk in basketball.
On the stage, however, I went from being cast as the fat, funny sidekick to contending with all the pretty boys for the romantic leads. That was fun!
And de womens? De womens, dey began to notice me! Girls who had ignored me for years were now sniffing around. My parents were kind of amused by all the girls suddenly come a-calling, but my mother drew the line at lying for me on the phone when I sought her help in juggling some of these new ladies.
My parents were a lot more pleased that I had begun to take my academic life seriously. I had applied to and was accepted by Northwestern University’s National High School Institute for a summer program in Journalism. I fancied myself becoming a writer.
My success that summer against top-flight competition from all over the country gave me a huge boost in confidence. I finished second in the class of 150 “Cherubs,” as we were called.
Early in the program, one of the teachers took to the blackboard and simply wrote: “A writer writes.”
I began keeping a diary on August 4, 1965. Vol. #149 began on May 19, 2013. It remains a work in progress.
By the way, I had a great senior year!
Chapter Twenty-Three
“The book could end right there, y’know,” Marty said. “You could flesh out some more chapters about all that painful crap, the rejections, the loneliness, and then, BOOM!” I think he scared himself with the noise he made.
“BOOM!” He said more gently, like a stage whisper. “It’s like a fairy tale! The Princess kisses the frog and Boom — ”
“Enough already with the booms,” I told him.
“ — and he becomes a Prince! Did you have a girlfriend back then?”
“I did.”
“Well, there you go! You’re a fuckin’ fairy tale!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Whatsa matter?” God asked. “What happened?”
“I’m stuck,” I told Him.
“So? Get unstuck,” He said.
“In the end,” I told Him, “it all just sounds like, ‘ain’t I great? ain’t I special? I don’t want to write that anymore!”
“You’re not at the end,” He said. “You’re barely past the beginning. You know what, you’ve just discovered, ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,’ and now you’re depressed. That’s happened to a lot of people.”
“Didn’t Shakespeare write that?”
“No, it was Ecclesiastes, a long time ago.” We were quiet for a while. “You know what I like about you?” God asked.
“No, what?”
“On your desk,” He said, “You took this little, toy dog, it was a plastic Pluto doll from Disneyland. It was made with its tongue sticking out like it was licking something. You took that Pluto doll and you made a real-looking cock and balls for it! Yeah! You put a small screw right into the dog’s missing genital area, and then you used some plastic clay to sculpt his brand new cock and balls right over that screw. I watched you do it! That was fucking genius! I mean, I was doing stuff like that in Genesis!”
“And then, you put that dog with his little, erect penis and his tongue sticking out, you put it right behind a small sculpture of a buxom, trashy, hillbilly-type woman wearing extremely short, cut-off jeans. She’s bending over with her ass sticking out. You put the Pluto doll right behind her so that it looks like Pluto is licking her ass, and she’s got this completely stunned look on her face, y’know? Like there’s a cold, wet dog nose right up her ass! Now, that’s funny!”
“And that’s why you like me?”
“Son, the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Lookee here, “ He said. God clearly had fallen into this whole country-western thing. Who was I to stop Him? “This here job you’re doing — your job is just to entertain the troops. Stop taking yourself so damn serious!”
“Sex is one of the best things I done. I liked it so much I gave it to all the plants and all the animals. It’s only you people that are having so much trouble with it, I just want you to tell your story, son. Y’know? It just might help somebody out.”
“Okay,” I said, “okay.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I lost my virginity three times.
Number one was with Sally back in the ninth grade. Remember? I was in her an inch deep — actually, on more than one occasion. Her panties used to wrap around me like a cotton condom. That’s gotta count for something!
My penis is almost six inches long when it’s hard. So, at least one-sixth of me lost his virginity ‘round 1963. It wasn’t until I was in college three years later that the other five inches got invited to the party.
All through high school, I pretty much thought that if I had penis-vagina sex with a girl, I’d be obligated to marry her. Nah, no thanks. I waited. And then when some of my buddies graduated to paying the whores in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, I passed on that too. It grossed me out. I was waiting for true love,
I ended up going to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It’s fallen on hard times in recent years, but way back in the 1960s, it was a happening place!
Antioch long had enjoyed a reputation for its experimental programs and its innovative educational philosophies. It was a haven for social activism, Utopian communities, and humanist politics. Antioch’s motto came from its founder, the great nineteenth-century educator, Horace Mann, who proclaimed, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some great victory for humanity.”
In June of 1966 when I was finishing up high school, none of that meant bupkis to me.
I chose Antioch because I didn’t get into Harvard. I chose Antioch because I was afraid that Northwestern would prove too expensive for my family. I chose Antioch because it was a work/study school. You spent half the year studying on campus and the other half earning real money at a real job somewhere that they would provide.
My going there was all my brother’s idea. Our parents didn’t have a lot of spare change for sending either one of us to college. My brother had gone to Antioch before me and had just graduated. He convinced me that I should go there too, because it would be much less of a financial burden on our parents than any of the other schools I had chosen. Done. I became an Antiochian.
Oi.
In June of 1966, when I graduated from high school, I was a well-adjusted senior class president wearing saddle shoes. I was a good boy. Five-sixth of me was still a virgin. I didn’t get in fights. Didn’t steal shit. Never was arrested. Never had been expelled. Didn’t hang out in po
ol halls. Didn’t drink no beer and the only drugs I took were aspirin and Pepto-Bismol.
After two months at Antioch in the fall, I was an alienated, pot-smoking, socialist, communist, Darwinist, humanist who was going on protest marches and had developed problems with the Draft Board.
There really wasn’t anything else to do at Antioch. In place of sororities and fraternities, we had organizations like SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the Black Panthers, the Young Maoists, the Young Trotskyites, C.O.R.E. (Congress of Racial Equality), S.N.C.C. (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), the A.C.L.U. (American Civil Liberties Union), the S.C.L.C. (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), the Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam, the (Draft) Resistance, and LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide). That last one was a joke. LSD wasn’t an organization. It was an exploration, an entertainment. It was twelve hours on a roller coaster where you would surrender your sanity and just hope that it would be returned to you at the end of the ride.
I was so out of my league. I played a lot of touch football. I grew my hair long and dressed like a hippie. In time, I discovered that I liked psychedelic drugs and I definitely signed myself up for the sexual revolution. That much I could relate to.
Soon, the ideas of people like Wilhelm Reich (The Function of the Orgasm), and those of Alan Watts (Nature, Man, and Woman), helped me to melt whatever barriers I had left from embracing a greater sexual freedom.
In other words, hell with waiting for marriage to have sex. Let’s go!
I lost what was left of my virginity when I came back home for Thanksgiving of that freshmen year. Her name was Donna. She was one of the three wonderful women I had been dating during my senior year of high school.
