by Larry Kramer
He doesn’t need a book to tell him that there must be complicated psychological reasons why he should have to jerk off in toilet stalls or visit Doris Hardware’s so often to be with Claudia or go with Sam Sport to Stuartgene Dye’s or Dereck Dumster’s when some event is scheduled. (Yes, I’ll find out about all this too.) He considers himself happy, perhaps even very happy. He can imagine no other occupation that would relieve his boredom so profitably. From the bottom drawer of his desk in his office in the Jersualem & Sport Building in the new downtown District of Columbia that he and Sam Sport and Lucas, and Mordy’s father, Abe, have done so much to raise from the decaying ruins of the old Washington, he shows me a mail order catalogue that would bring to P.O. Box 123, Vienna, VA, one rectal vibrator (“a new way to mate your masturbations with the earthquake sensations from a vibrating anal device and its soft vibrating sleeve, both washable and reusable”), one Extasx (“introducing the world’s first and only SUCK vibrator, a cunning device that moves up and down, extending and contracting smoothly without a sound, lifting you to the highest level of sexual fulfillment in the privacy of your home or office or anywhere you wish to be stimulated”), and one Super Pumpit (“the latest and most effective Pneumatic Male Penis Enlargement Device to make your masculinity grow and bring out the best in you, just insert your penis through the foam-rubber, flesh-like collar attached to the ejaculation chamber…”). Mordy’s Friend has tipped him off to all of these. My Friend writes constantly about how everything can always be better.
No, they don’t teach any of this in med school. And quite frankly, my entering this new world of burgeoning sexual revolution without my older brothers to teach me, along with what Fred is writing about from New York, is filling me with growing apprehension.
GRACE HAD WRITTEN TO DAME LADY HERMIA
“YOU ARE THE ONLY FUCKING RELATIVE I HAVE LEFT IN THIS FUCKING WORLD!”
MORDY TELLS DR. KORAH LUDENS, HIS SHRINK, ABOUT VELVALEE PELTZ
An exceptionally beautiful woman by the extraordinary name of Velvalee Peltz, who was from Fille de Maison, in Franeeda County, but much farther out than Masturbov Gardens, came to Washington with the goal of becoming a serious model. By serious, she meant that sex would have no part of it. Because she was both exceptionally beautiful and from a small town, she knew that sex was a part of everything. She also felt that she was strong-willed enough to utilize her beauty to get her own way.
Yes, I know I’m sounding as if I’m writing this up for my magazine.
She wanted to be on the cover of women’s magazines and in the style pages of the newspapers but she most emphatically did not wish to appear nude or in Sexopolis. Since she was not only lovely, but the proper height, coloring, and attitude, there appeared to be no obstacle to prevent her fulfilling this dream of hers.
She didn’t want to go to New York. She didn’t want to become a movie star. She only wanted to make enough money to buy a nice home in D.C. and stay pretty much to herself. She didn’t enjoy the company of others. Most men wanted her in bed and most women were jealous of her beauty. It was an old story. Nothing new about either occurrence. Long ago she’d learned it was safer just to stay indoors and read a book. Beautiful women aren’t supposed to be capable of intelligence. That’s the only thing she wanted, to be smarter. I wanted her even more.
No sooner had she arrived than the leading modeling agency took her on immediately and without her even having a portfolio. Mindy Bruner, who runs Lovely to Look At, takes one look at Velvalee and knows that this woman has a remunerative future. Velvalee is sent out immediately on calls and within her first weeks she’s achieved sufficient bookings to rent her own apartment and begin to be talked about, in those circles where models, photographers, advertising agencies, and representatives of various things that have to be bought and sold talk about beauty as the product that will do it. Her face, particularly, begins to appear on local television and in print commercials.
So it isn’t long before she comes to my attention.
I’d been looking for a particular woman, a very particular woman, with whom and through whom I could increase the scope of my magazine. She would personify class. Most women I used didn’t and couldn’t do that. Sexual mores are beginning ever so slightly to shift from the bacchanalian toward more individualized, one-on-one pursuits. The pendulum always swings. The damn thing never stops swinging. I’d caught it as it went up and wanted to survive if it’s going down or sideways. Best, always, to greet change, which is inevitable. Hence my search for the Classy and Elegant New Woman.
She’d be like owning the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo. She’d look gorgeous on our cover, completely clothed. In Chanel.
Very much against her will, a meeting was arranged between us.
I become businesslike. Yeah, she’s gorgeous but there’s never been a gorgeousness I couldn’t seduce, journalistically, financially, or sexually. I’d seen her pictures, so I knew she was physically perfect, in the way America likes its female flesh: natural, long blond hair, tall but not too tall, willowy, long daffodil legs, hazy green eyes, inquisitive without being intrusive, aloof without being withdrawn. Oh, and perfect teeth. Very white. No stains. No jaw filled with oversized overbites. Americans demand perfect teeth.
But, shit, I couldn’t get away from it. I wanted her. And Mordecai Masturbov is going to have her. She sees it immediately. She sees I’m not going to take no for an answer. It’s going to be everything awful she had known it would be. She thinks of leaving without even opening her mouth. I saw this look cross her face and I frowned. She realizes we’re all alone and that I could stop her physically. She decides to just start talking.
“It may sound stupid but my biggest ambition in life is to become like the Cosmo Girl. I know there are many other girls I could become. I cut cabbage for coleslaw in the back of Deltoid’s Barbecue way out Bladensburg Road Extended and I looked at this big blow-up from some New York newspaper stuck up on the wall by some girl who’d worked there before me. I can still recite its words. This beautiful girl, beautiful hair mussed up just right, looked straight out at me for months and months, until the grease from the griddle spotted her up too much, I could still read, ‘I can earn as much money as my darling Robert. My favorite magazine says part of the glory of being a woman now, this moment, is being allowed to live up to every ounce of my perfection and my potentiality. I am allowed to go where my beauty takes me, and letting other people, including male people, live or not live up to their perfection and their potentiality, which is not my problem. God bless me because I’m a Cosmo girl.’ Isn’t that the most selfish shit you ever heard?”
“Then why are your ambitions still limited to becoming the Cosmo girl?” I realized these were practically the first real words I was saying to her, after only nodding hello, and being so struck by the necessity of having her in my life, and I was already noting everything in reference to her, historically: this is what I wore; this is what she wore; this is what I said; this is how I felt. My body feels too inferior to give to her. No, I couldn’t let her know that. I like to tell my readers how I feel about everything, all my innermost thoughts and emotions and fears and hopes and dreams. It didn’t make any difference if I never saw the girl again. Only now it does.
“I don’t want to hear anything about Sexopolis” is her answer. “You sent me that roomful of roses. Listen, back home roses grow wild and don’t have much value as tokens of anything much. Please, I don’t want to be in your magazine. Sexopolis is real sex and Cosmo is fake glamour and I don’t want to be a sexual symbol. Please. Please don’t pursue me. Please leave me alone. Please.”
“You sound like a virgin desirous of sex but protesting for propriety’s sake.”
“That’s an awful and untrue thing to say. You don’t understand me at all.”
“I’m sorry.” I had never meant to apologize. It is not my style. It has never been my style.
“I just know you’re not going to take no and I’ve had a lifetime of
defending myself against … oh, I don’t want to accuse you, but you must know what I mean and what I want and how I feel and men look at me and want me and it takes so much energy just fighting each day.”
“I’m sorry you’re saying what you’re saying. I feel good about you. The way you look out at me so. I know you think I’m this guy whose first, middle, last name is dirty sex. I’m sorry you think of sex that way. I think I’ve been a hero. I took sex out of the dark closet, out of the dark bedroom, and I’m proud of that. Even if some people hate it and me, I know that this time and this place we’re at, well, we wouldn’t be here without what I’ve done to bring relaxation of rigid standards and enlightenment to what were the dark ages.”
“I don’t want relaxation of standards, and what enlightens you does not enlighten me.”
Now it’s my turn to talk.
“Well, things are going to change, are in the process of changing, are already changing. I guess we’re all freed up, Americans, and I don’t want to tucker them out. I’m afraid men can only fuck so much. I may be showing the American Male as many naked ladies as any imagination can possibly absorb. Fantasies, too. A lot of them have come true for a lot of horny buggers. Because men now have the wherewithal—by which I mean the courage, the guts, the ability to overcome possible rejection—to bring fantasies into action. I helped make all that happen and I’m damn proud. But what’s the next step? I think the men of America are telling me that they’re ready for something new, that it’s time to move on to something new. I don’t mean to sound like I’m going to desert the men who have been so loyal and faithful. But I want to find something new. All life is the search for something new, or should be. But I think that the progress that has to be made now isn’t with men. Those pieces in the puzzle have been set in place. No, the next step is with women. It’s their turn now. Your turn. Perhaps it’s given to us, the chance to do some exploration. All life is exploration, or should be.”
She interrupts: “All those layouts of naked women, they weren’t for women, they were to excite men.” Her voice bristled.
“To relax them. In the face of voluptuous strangeness. To give the traveler a map.”
“You’re not going to put out a magazine filled with pictures of naked me, to give anyone a map!”
“No, that isn’t what I have in mind. Although the principle isn’t so far off the mark. What I want to do now is re-create my magazine so it’s directed to men and women. I mean a mature appraisal of where women are today and how to capitalize on these gains and become stronger and stronger, both as a group and as individuals, and both intellectually and sexually. Women are now more than ever aware of their bodies, aware of their physical and emotional, spiritual, and yes, their intellectual needs.”
Somewhere about halfway through my words she senses that I’m winging it, making it up as I’m going along.
“And I want Velvalee Peltz to be there at my side helping me!” I lost a bit of my cool saying this. “I want to make you the New Modern Woman!”
She was afraid of me. And we were alone. I could see her thinking, What can I say that can get me out of here safely? “Will you let me think about it? Would you call Mindy and I’ll talk to her and it’s been very nice meeting you, I’ll just slip out now because I have a booking and it’s clear on the other side of the city in ten minutes…”
She ran, she ran, oh, did she run. She didn’t want to see me ever again. She makes me feel dirty.
KORAH WRITES HER SIDE OF THINGS
A CASE HISTORY
Somehow Mordecai courts, follows, pursues, tracks, overwhelms Velvalee Peltz to such a degree that there is no place in the entire Washington metropolitan and suburban area she can escape from some reminder of his presence. She sees his limousine following her, waiting outside her apartment in the Dorchester Arms on Sixteenth Street, a big doorman building that was meant to provide security. There is not a day that does not bring her overwhelming explosions of flowers, bursts of blooms she’s never seen before. Clothes and jewelry she leaves in boxes in the mailroom. She will not take them in. So they pile up there until garbagemen or neighbors remove them. “Don’t you want this brooch?” “Don’t you want this heavenly coat?” “You must be crazy.” She becomes so embarrassed that she moves, not once but several times. But he always finds her. Why doesn’t she go to the police? She asks a lawyer, who tells her: “But he isn’t doing anything illegal.”
She receives a letter from him one day that is strangely different from the rest, which have all been solicitations for meetings, for acknowledgments of an interest she simply doesn’t share. This one offers a conference “with a wise woman, a psychoanalyst whose name, Dr. Korah Ludens, you can check out with anybody, who will tell you she’s the best. She’s offered to meet you, with me, without me, both, I hope, and you can talk and say whatever you want to.”
I am unprepared for the touching beauty of Velvalee when she finally comes. But then I have been unprepared for much of what Mordecai has talked me into over the years of his analysis. He is among the strangest of many men I have taken on as clients, either here in Washington or in New York at the institute I finally started there. No, that is not correct. Dr. Stuartgene Dye is no picnic. But Stuartgene is not strange. Stuartgene is deeply disturbed, beyond strange. I try to think of him as little as possible, as if he might go away and I would not have to deal with him. And I can handle Mordy. Besides, it is fascinating to analyze the man who has changed the sex lives of the world. He has now arrived.
“I don’t know why I am here,” Velvalee says immediately as Mordecai enters my office. She is very nervous, walking around, touching things here and there, not for any reason, but perhaps just to touch something, a piled-high stack of journals, a small pile of rubber bands and paper clips in a mound on my desk, unemptied ashtrays from earlier sessions today, the chewed-up toys of the my small golden cocker spaniel who’s called Ranger, and who plays quietly at his mistress’s feet. “This man wants an involvement, a relationship, and I don’t, and I told him so from day one, from the very first minute, God I’ve told him so so many times I don’t know what there is left to say! Why doesn’t he take no for an answer!” She’s hardly paused to breathe and there’s desperation to her immediate assumption of Dr. Korah Ludens as her ally that I find moves me deeply. “He sent me your books. I read your books. You are brilliant! You are a brilliant woman who has achieved mightily in your world. How did you do it? How do you stand up to men? Please tell me how. That is why I agreed to come.”
I find myself asking too directly, perhaps even too soon.
“So, Mordecai, why have you brought this charming young woman here? If she’s been saying these things to you, why haven’t you been listening?”
He looks at me with huge eyes filled with his sense of having been betrayed by his best friend. “I am paying you eighty-five dollars an hour! Please tell her how wonderful I am and how she must stop being so frightened of me and running away! She doesn’t even know me. I want her to at least try to get to know me.”
Velvalee, who is still standing, never looks at him, never looks at anything but my face and eyes. “He keeps writing me these notes telling me I’m running away. He uses the same word over and over again: relationship. Well, I don’t want one of those. Why does he keep telling me that I’m frightened and running away and why can’t he understand that whatever it is he wants in or out of bed I don’t want it with him?”
The rejection, repeated again and over and over, makes him wince more than he thought he would have to. He knew it would be painful, though he’d been willing to take the chance. But now he finds himself like a lawyer in court, his arms outstretched to the judge and jury, as if he’s caught the witness in an inconsistency.
“You see. You see!” he bellows. “First she says she doesn’t want a relationship with anyone, not especially just not with me, and then she says she doesn’t want one with me, specifically me. That isn’t very consistent. That isn’t very open-mind
ed. We can’t get anywhere with her acting like that, saying things like that.”
And then he sits down in the big leather armchair with the arms that had bits of leather picked off by years of nervous patients, and he says very softly, to nobody really, just out loud: “I am a very nice man.”
“What am I doing here what am I doing here what am I doing here,” Velvalee keeps mumbling. Why does she feel she is losing ground that she never inhabited anyway? She is unaccustomed to discussing personal matters, that’s for certain, and certainly not so endlessly and in such great detail as she’s discovering is asked for here.
“Look! I refuse to be made wrong in this situation!”
Hearing her talk like this makes Mordecai want her even more. He had no idea she could speak with such grown-up terminology. He gets up to rush to her, but she runs for cover to stand behind me and he stops dead in his tracks. His mouth sputters out words that his brain is not hearing. “What’s the use. Nobody loves me. What’s the use? Goodbye.”
But he doesn’t turn to leave. He falls to the floor, upon his knees, in front of her, in the classic position of suitors.
“I think about you all the time and all I can say is that I hope you will reconsider and please know that whenever you want to you’ll find me here waiting. I could love you.”
He raises himself from the floor and, evidently liking the sound of what he’s just said, says it again, softly. “Just know that I could love you.” He wants to say it a third time, so much does he like the sound of his voicing of these words, the feelings of this feeling, and this situation, all rolled together into such a nice little emotional scene, as if his whole life is meant for the voicing of these words, the validation of himself. “Just know that I could love you,” he does say again, softly, before at last turning away and leaving.
