I guess the 1920’s could be described as the last decade when sex was still under a rock. At least it was with my parents, my teachers, my boys’ club leaders, and just about every other adult I met. They were all too religious and decent and refined to talk honestly about anything as nasty as sex.
But we kids now, we talked about it frankly all right. In fact we talked about little else. We had an endless supply of dirty stories that we’d tell while sitting under a lamp post, or loitering in a cave, or resting our backs against a house somewhere. Most of them featured newly-married couples: “Hey, have you heard the one about the bride whose nightie got starched before the wedding night?”
“No, how does it go?”
“Well … you see .…”
As ten- and twelve-year-olds we sure knew an awful lot about what went on in conjugal bedrooms.
We dug a cave in the willow bush out at the end of our street. Three rooms it had, connected by tunnels ten feet long. What a cave! Brother Hub planned and supervised the work from beginning to end. It was at least eight feet deep, and the main room contained a small stove that we’d pinched from behind a garage on Clarence Avenue. And there we’d sit of a fall evening, munching carrots pinched from the experimental gardens of the university, and roasting their best hybrid corn, and smoking cigarettes that Windy Watson had lifted from Macdonald’s grocery store where he worked.
Windy Watson–now there was a kid who was hep. He knew more, that kid, than most adults do today. He got his knowledge, as we all did, from experience. His father’d been killed in the war, and his mother made aprons that Windy sold from door to door. He had the best spiel of any kid I’ve ever heard: “Daddy was killed in the war, you see, and Mummy and I are having a hard time making both ends meet.” He would look so sad and forlorn and miserable standing there clutching his pitiful little aprons that no one could resist him. When he’d made the sale and was out of sight he’d chortle to himself, light up a fag, have a few quick puffs and chew some sen-sen before going on to the next house. By working in Macdonald’s grocery and selling aprons, Windy practically kept his family, and also managed to have time for the shenanigans that went on in the cave.
I remember when Windy began to show up with expensive presents and Hub, who knew everything, was worried. A big, brown leather catcher’s mitt that cost at least twelve dollars was proudly exhibited one day. Another day, a camera. Another day, a new sweater.
“Where in hell are you getting all this stuff, Windy?” Hub wanted to know.
“From Bart.”
“Who’s Bart?”
“A guy I know. Lives in an apartment down in the Drinkle block.”
“Married?”
“Naw. Lives alone.”
“Yeah–well, just don’t turn your back on him, that’s all I’ve got to say. I’d like to see where that guy lives.”
Windy took us to the apartment once, I remember, when Bart was at work. It was well-furnished, with fancy carvings of things and pictures on the wall, and it had a sort of funny feeling about it. I didn’t feel comfortable there. Windy showed us some of Bart’s magazines with pictures of nudes in them. He even dug out some dirty postcards that Bart kept in a drawer, one of which featured a boy on his knees in front of a naked man.
Hub became even more worried about Windy, but Windy assured him he needn’t be. Turned out all right, of course, because when Bart finally got around to what he was after, Breezy just told him to go screw himself. And that was that.
But to get back to the cave. We had some fine times there. Windy kept us supplied with cigarettes, cigars, chocolate bars and other goodies from the store. I don’t know why Macdonald never became suspicious of him, but he didn’t. In fact, he boasted about him: “That Watson kid is the best boy with customers I’ve ever had.” On Sundays, he let Windy ride the big black mare which, during the rest of the week, pulled the delivery cart, and Windy magnanimously let us have a ride now and then. He was never stingy like a lot of other privileged kids are.
The cave was also a marvellous place to take girls. And, of course, there were girls curious enough to want to go there with us. It was all innocent fun. We learned a few things from them, and they learned a few things from us. We were too young for anyone to get pregnant, and the adults didn’t seem to mind much. I’m sure some of them must have known what was going on, but nobody called in the morality squad.
The room in the cave where we carried out our fumblings was always kept dark–I guess the girls insisted on it–and it was always cool and damp, the way caves are. For a long time afterwards my thoughts of sex were associated with cool, dark places, furtive whispering and giggling, and the fetid smell of girls’ drawers.
As I say, our elementary sex education was simple, straightforward and right. It wasn’t until we graduated into secondary sex education that things got fouled up. This happened after I entered high school, when I was removed from the straightforward atmosphere of the gutter and came under the influence of adults. I was thirteen years old, and I’m sure that must be the worst time in any boy’s life. Thirteen sure is an unlucky number. And whatever guy dreamed that notion up must have been thinking of boys, because my thirteenth year was the worst one of my entire life.
My parents would never speak of sex at all. I’m sure they must have practised it because–well–eight kids, but they certainly never recognized it in any other way. Once, while rummaging in my dad’s dresser, I came upon a brown book that was so old the pages were yellowing, and the spine had been broken so that the book was really in two halves. Faint gold lettering on the scurfy cover said that it was the Young Husband’s Guide to Married Sex.
What a guide! I Naturally I pored over it, and naturally I was baffled. The language was incomprehensible and the advice was ridiculous. There were no illustrations, the print was tiny and faded. As I sat there on the edge of the big bed where all of us children had been conceived, stealing this surreptitious look into the forbidden world of erotica, my father came into the room and stood tall and silent before me. Without speaking, he took the book from me and replaced it in the drawer. Then, still not talking, he took another book from another drawer and, without looking directly at me, placed it in my hands. “Here, I guess you’re old enough to read this.”
As one looks back over one’s life, certain people and events stand out as having a profound effect on one’s future. Such an event was the discovery of this old, old masterpiece. It was called The Solitary Vice, and it scared the bejesus clear out of me. I still get horrible feelings of guilt and fear, and my brow starts to sweat, just thinking about it.
The writer of The Solitary Vice had the most graphic style of any writer I’ve since encountered. He described the terrors of masturbation as they’ve never been described before. Compared to it, leprosy, rabies, bubonic plague, syphilis even were no more than slight aggravations. I can’t think of one catastrophe that wouldn’t befall the practitioner of this awful crime. He would go blind, insane, hairy-palmed, impotent, until he cried out in his misery, “Oh who will deliver me from the body of this living death?”
I sat there on the edge of that bed, and the sweat poured off me in buckets. I have never been so terrified of anything in my life. Of all the good things my father did for me–and he did plenty–he came close to wiping them all out by placing that awful book in my hands.
I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I dreaded being alone, I prayed long and earnestly to be saved.
Just about that time, too, I came under the influence of the drill and hygiene teacher at high school. He was a fine man, I suppose one of the finest in the city. He was tall and straight arid hairy-chested and frightfully religious. He didn’t drink or smoke or fool around with women. He was without doubt the leading boys’ worker in the city, being the head of the largest boys’ club. He was absolutely full of good advice to boys, and constantly lectured us on the virtues of honesty, manliness and good sportsmanship, “play up, play up and play the game”.
> And he was never more vehement and earnest than when lecturing us on sex. Since we were segregated from the girls for these classes he could be perfectly frank. I can still see him standing up there in front of the class, jaw out-thrust, eyes flashing, warning us of the dangers of losing our manhood. He was far too decent a man to use words like masturbation, of course, but he made his meaning clear, all right. He told us about capons, for instance, and Steers and geldings who had all their masculinity taken from them by the removal of their “vital parts”, and he made it clear that we could destroy our own manhood by indulging in sinful practices.
While he was at it, he warned us of the dangers of having anything to do with girls. Plenty of time for that later in life, he said, but now there were more important things to be done. He instructed us in methods of sublimating our sex drives (never using the words, of course) by playing hard and working hard. “Take it out in good manly sports–such as boxing, wrestling, club swinging, rugby and the rest.” I was so ashamed I couldn’t look at him.
He had a tremendous influence on the young, that drill teacher. On weekends he would take boys on hunting and fishing trips, and after church he always had a group of his favourites come to his home–he lived with his mother. Here, they would discuss deep and religious matters. Some of the boys would even stay all night and sleep with him. The devotion and dedication of this wonderful man is something you rarely see in teachers today.
I never went to his home after church, or on any of his hunting or fishing trips. I was too ashamed. For I had the solitary vice. God, how I had it! I Each day I inspected my hands for signs of hair; every night I prayed to be spared the horrors that I knew lay in wait for me.
My situation was made worse by the fact that I was alone so much of the time. Each evening, right after school, I tore down the short hill, across the old traffic bridge, north along Third Avenue to 20th Street and the office of the Star-Phoenix. There, I loaded a hundred and twenty-five papers on my back, trudged back across the bridge and began delivering my route, which took me up to Eighth Street. A couple of hours later I staggered into the house, tired and hungry.
It was during those two hours that I had my worst times. Nothing to think about but sex. Not the girls in my room at school–I was shy with them–but Clara Bow and Norma Shearer. Clara Bow–you dimple cheeked, round-assed little devil you! I could hardly walk for thinking of Clara Bow.
To alleviate my condition, and keep my mind off Clara Bow and my hands off myself, I began to memorize the poems of Robert Service. “The Cremation of Sam McGee” came first, and then “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”. Then I got Rhymes of a Red Cross Man and learned “Bill the Bomber”, “My Foe”, and “The Wee Penny Whistle of Sandy McGraw”. The rhythm of Service’s poems just suited my stride, and as I walked back and forth along 12th Street, 11th Street, 10th to Main, 9th and 8th I recited them to myself.
Rarely, if ever, have the poems of Robert Service been recited with more determination and conviction. Dan McGrew died a thousand deaths as I trudged along the streets with fifty pounds of papers strapped to my back.
Indirectly, I suppose, I owe a lot to that solitary vice and the poems it inspired. Every Friday evening at high school, we had a meeting of the literary society, or as it was generally called a “lit”. Talent was always in demand, and one night I found myself on the stage reciting, with appropriate gestures, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”. At first I didn’t do so well, but when I began marching back and forth across the stage with the same stride as I used on the street, the whole performance gained style and momentum. The audience, who had never seen a striding reciter before, thought it was something new and gave me a big hand. After all, if a bagpipe player can walk, why not an elocutionist? Henceforth I was known as “the roving reciter”.
Once on the stage I couldn’t get off. The applause of the crowd infected my mind like a virus. After that, I would leap onto the boards and ham it up at every possible opportunity. From that came writing skits, and from that, other types of writing. Who says there’s nothing good to be said for masturbation?
It was just about this time, too, that I discovered pornographic literature. I didn’t have to hide it under my mattress or in a dark closet. It was perfectly legitimate and respectable, bound in a big brown volume, written by that master pornographer, William Shakespeare.
Because we were still poor, purchasing textbooks was a major problem. I think the play in the Grade Nine course of study was King Henry IV and, since I didn’t have a proper text, I began searching through the bookcases for a copy of the play.
Our house was full of bookcases. My father was a great lover of books, and in his more prosperous days had spent thousands on them. There were sets of books in those cases that I’ve never seen anywhere else. The complete Mark Twain, for instance, and a whole shelf of books containing all the works of Alexander Dumas. A famous set of travel books, full of beautiful pictures on glossy paper, called Stoddard’s Lectures, with captions on the pictures like “A Thing of Beauty” or “A Characteristic Cascade” or “A View from Murren.” A set called The Makers of Canada and another, in twenty volumes, with each book distinctively bound, which was called The Great Events by Famous Historians. There was also a book entitled Modern Eloquence, containing speeches by Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, and countless other great orators. It was from these that I cribbed speeches for boys’ banquets, and thus gained something of a reputation as an eloquent chap.
Among the shelves of books I found two complete works of Shakespeare. One was small and dainty, bound in padded black leather covers, with gold lettering on the outside and the smallest conceivable print on the inside. It was a present from Dad to Mother in 1897, four years before they were married. The other was a hefty brown volume, which contained all the plays, all the sonnets, all the poems, and copious notes. I carted this “big brown book” off to high school, where it caused me no end of embarrassment.
For the book wasn’t the censored, watered-down version that appeared in the high school texts. The plays were there exactly as first printed, with all the good round oaths and lusty references intact. It was the custom of Miss Ranken, our teacher, to have us read the parts in the plays, and it was a source of great amusement to the other kids when I read about whores and whoremasters and the like. We’d be droning out the words in our Saskatchewan version of Shakespearese when I’d come out with a line like, “Why, thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-ketch –”
Everybody would stop and look at me. Miss Ranken would blush and try to pretend she hadn’t heard it, and Bill Reid or some other wag would put up his hand and innocently enquire, “Please, Miss Ranken, I can’t find that part about whores in my book.”
“Never mind, just go on reading.”
The first time it happened, Miss Ranken asked to see my book and, after glancing through it, suggested that perhaps I’d better get an authorized text. But I never did.
The big brown book had a much more devastating effect on my delicate young mind, however. One day as the class was ploughing its way through a scene and I had no part to read, I idly turned over to the back of the book, and began reading at random from one of the poems. This was the line that hit me:
“He on her belly falls, she on her back.”
Holy prozotsky! I just about went up through the ceiling. A description of sexual intercourse right here in a book–a legitimate book!
Hurriedly I thumbed back to the beginning of the poem. It was “Venus and Adonis” and right from the beginning it was perfectly plain that this beautiful, voluptuous, naked goddess of love was doing her best to seduce this beautiful youth, also naked. Man! This has got to be the sexiest situation in literature. Here she was, panting after the boy, using every wile in the female arsenal to get him to respond. Wow! Such imagery!
‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemmed thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.’
On and on I read, going hot and cold by turns, panting as even Venus herself did pant. Yowee! Verse after verse of the same thing. It was almost more than the flesh could bear.
So absorbed was I with the problems of this beautiful goddess and her reluctant swain that I didn’t notice the stumbling voices around me had become stilled. In fact a complete silence had descended upon the room, and gradually, through the mist of erotica clouding my brain, this fact became apparent to me. I heard Miss Ranken’s voice, as unlike Venus’s sweet tones as any voice could be, “… Max, I asked you what you are reading!”
“Um … mm … what?”
“It must be very absorbing. I’ve asked you the same question three times and you haven’t even heard me.”
“Well … uh … just … uh … Shakespeare.”
“Indeed. We’d all like to share it. Perhaps you could read it for us.”
“This? No … Miss Ranken … really, I couldn’t.”
“If you please.”
“Uh … which part of it?”
“Right where you’re reading will be satisfactory.”
“Out loud?”
“We could scarcely hear it otherwise.”
“Well … okay .…”
And I started to read:
Now is she in the very … uh … lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter:
But that’s as far as I got. Bill Reid let out a low whistle. Somebody else shouted “Wow!” and started to applaud. Miss Ranken came skidding down the aisle, snatched the big brown book from my desk and glared at it. Then she slammed it shut and plunked it on her own desk, very red of face and flustered. Mercifully the bell rang then and the class filed out of English in high glee. Later, I got my book back, and no more was said of it.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 14
