Lost Years (22 page)

I don't remember that Christopher got La Turista on that trip, but he suffered at first from the altitude. He had palpitations, which he cured with some drug he was sold by a chemist—I think it was digitalis. Soon after, to his dismay, he felt definite symptoms of an attack of flu. Not wanting to succumb until he had to, he went along with the others to visit the church of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Christopher stood for some time watching the worshippers who hoped to be healed of their sicknesses, as they approached the shrine inch by inch on their knees, up the nave from the west door. The look on some of the faces moved him profoundly and his eyes filled with tears, but he could never have joined them; he didn't even feel that what they were asking for was right—according to his own beliefs. . . . It was only much later, when they had gone on to Teotihuacán and were climbing a pyramid and Caskey was saying, “
We
don't have to worry about those human sacrifices—they only use virgins!” that Christopher suddenly realized his flu symptoms had completely disappeared.

On New Year's Eve, they didn't go to bed at all, since they were to leave early next morning. They drank and danced at a succession of bars, ending up in one which was called The Paricutín.
^[
25
]
(“As explosive as its name,” Christopher says politely in his article, but I don't remember that anything dramatic happened there.)

¹
Christopher always thought of Caskey as being much more Irish than American. Actually, Caskey was also part Cherokee Indian. He himself believed that this strain was dominant.

²
When Caskey did hit Christopher, Christopher seldom hit him back, either. One such occasion is mentioned in
The Condor and the Cows
—at Trujillo, Peru, on December 12, 1947.

³
The statements made in this and the following paragraph raise, but do not answer, the question:
Why
is wrestling a feature of the Whitmanesque relationship? Here is an attempt at an answer, made after much introspection. It sounds corny and is embarrassing to put into words—which suggests that it may come fairly near to the truth.

    Whitmanesque homosexuality is concerned with the mating of two completely masculine males. One of these males may be younger than the other, but both must be real men—no effeminate intergrades need apply. A Whitmanesque male must have acknowledged another male to be a real man before he can accept him as a lover. First, they must test each other's virility. Therefore they have to fight. A sex duel is the necessary prelude to sex play. But the sex duel isn't really a fight. The would-be lovers are in no sense trying to destroy each other. They wrestle naked, without weapons. There need not even be a winner and a loser. Wrestling is an isometric exercise; it makes both wrestlers stronger than they were before. And, as they wrestle, they discover and learn to love each other's bodies.

    Sex making can be accompanied by all kinds of pretenses, concealments and theatrical performances. But in the utter nakedness of the sex duel there is no room for a lie; this is basic physical contact. So it can be claimed that you reveal more of yourself and find out more about your partner while you are wrestling with him than while you are making sex. That was how Christopher often felt. To him, the experience of the sex duel seemed so intimate that he was usually shy about admitting to other people how much he desired it. Among the German hustlers he lost all his shyness, however; that was what made his sex life in Berlin so wonderful. Stripped and locked body to body with one of those sturdy shameless youths, he felt strong and free and uninhibited as never before in his life.

    Boxing also could be a form of the sex duel, though the pleasure Christopher got from it was of a different quality, tinged with sado-masochism. At St. Edmund's, there were regular boxing sessions, supervised by a member of the staff. Anybody who wanted to fight could volunteer and an opponent would be chosen for him. Christopher found a sexual thrill in the very idea of being
matched
with another boy—even if it was with a boy who didn't attract him physically. There was an atmosphere of solemn exciting ritual as your gloves were tied on and the two of you stepped out into the cleared space and faced each other. You were like a wedded pair, joined to fight in the presence of these witnesses. Christopher regretted having to fight in shirtsleeves. He would have much preferred to be naked or at least stripped down to gym shorts. And the fight itself was spoilt by the formalities of competition. The master who supervised the boxing was himself homosexual and no doubt got his kicks from watching it. But he was obliged to keep up the pretense that this thrilling sex ritual was just another good-sport schoolboy game. There were rules and scoring—at the end of the bout, you had lost or won on points. Christopher was lacking in competitive aggression and he disliked getting hurt. So he usually lost.

    [Only one person] ever really shared Christopher's mystique about boxing. Both of them were deeply aroused by the shape and smell of boxing gloves and the feel of leather on their bare flesh. [This boy] got excited by the mere mention of the word “fight.” Unlike Christopher, he wanted to punch and be punched hard; if his nose was bloodied, so much the better. Christopher has a vividly erotic memory of sparring with him, early one morning, in [his] living room on Amalfi Drive. [The boy] has nothing on his naked body but the big leather gloves. (“That's all you ever ought to wear,” Christopher used to tell him.) As [the boy] jumps back and forth, punching and dodging and grinning at Christopher, his erect cock keeps slapping against his belly.

[
⁴
Also known as Matty's Whore House; it supplied hustlers to such well-known clients as Cole Porter and the character actor Monty Woolley.]

⁵
Some specimens of Caskey's humor (taken from the notebook or from memory): Carlos McClendon (
see here
) had been talking about a rich man he knew, saying what an unpleasant person he was. Caskey: “Why, Carlos, I'm afraid you only dislike him for his money!”

    Caskey (looking out of the window at 4 a.m., into thick icy fog): “It's going to be a scorcher!”

    At one of the beach restaurants, there was a notice on the back of the check which asked the customer to state his opinion of the portions, the cooking and the service, choosing an adjective to describe each. The adjectives from which the customer was to choose were—
portions
: too large, enough, too small;
cooking
: delicious, satisfactory, fair;
service
: excellent, adequate, poor. Caskey suggests that the waitresses themselves should be classified as: delicious, satisfactory or too small.

    Christopher had been to a puja at the Vedanta Center and been given a whole cake as prasad. At their next party, they served it to the guests. Caskey said: “
Do
try some, it's delicious—Chris brought it from heaven.”

    Caskey's humor, like most people's, depended largely for its effect on the way he delivered his lines. He made jokes with an air of great enjoyment, giggling as he spoke. He pronounced words like “delicious” mockingly and campily. He seldom said anything bitchy. His fun was nearly always good-natured. In fact, he was the very opposite of the sourly witty, deadpan comedian.

⁶
[Another boy Christopher knew] had had one adventure in the classic Whitman style—at the age of fourteen, he had left the city and taken to the road, wandering away down into the deep South. One day, out in the country, several blacks had taken a fancy to him and had forced him to strip and have sex with them by threatening him with their knives. [The boy] admitted that this had excited him, even though he was terrified. He had had an erection throughout the “rape.”

⁷
There is a demonstration of how a myth can keep a marriage going, at the end of Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
. When Jimmy and Alison find it intolerable to go on being themselves and still relate to each other, they change focus and become The Bear and The Squirrel in their private myth world. And instantly they are happy and safe, because, in the world of the animals, hatred is impossible; The Bear and The Squirrel can only love each other. They focus their aggression on mythical external enemies.

⁸
The parrot may have been suggested to Christopher's imagination by the “parent—parrot” misunderstanding of the previous day. But it's curious to remember, in this connection, Christopher's vision of the parrotlike bird which is recorded on November 12, 1940 [in
D1
].

⁹
According to Caskey (in a letter written twenty-five years later and therefore not absolutely to be relied on) The Pits had disappeared by the fall of 1948, when he and Christopher returned to California. Their site became part of the grounds of a beach club, which also owned the Marion Davies lot. Her beach house was torn down but her swimming pool is still in use.

¹⁰
George Platt Lynes, Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton, Horst.

[
¹¹
He was a captain.]

[
¹²
Keate recalls it was the Hollywood Biltmore, not the one in downtown Los Angeles.]

¹³
For some reason which I can't recall, Christopher associated this song particularly with Caskey. Another Caskey theme song, in Christopher's mind, was “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

[
¹⁴
“Seascape, with Frieze of Girls” from C. K. Scott Moncrieff's 1924 translation, vol. 2.]

¹⁵
Simone de Beauvoir had been one of Natasha's professors at a college, when Natasha was seventeen or eighteen. Natasha, who could be very witty at times, later described her as “an alarm clock inside a frigidaire.” De Beauvoir can't have been all that frigid, however, for she had had an affair with Natasha before passing her on to Sartre.

¹⁶
To be fair, I must add that Salka herself, in her autobiography
The Kindness of Strangers
, mentions Christopher's move into her garage apartment but says nothing about Caskey. Is this discretion or snobbery? Probably a mixture.

¹⁷
There was another literary project on which Christopher must have worked during 1946—a translation of Shankara's
Crest-Jewel of Discrimination
which Swami Prabhavananda made and Christopher polished. The book was published in 1947, which means that Christopher must have finished work on it before he left for England in January. I'm sure he didn't take it with him.

    When I think of Christopher at work on the language of Shankara's brutally uncompromising opening statements, I realize what a profound conflict they must have stirred up in his own subconscious mind:

 

    Only through God's grace may we obtain those three rarest advantages—human birth, the longing for liberation, and discipleship to an illumined teacher.

    Nevertheless, there are those who somehow manage to obtain this rare human birth, together with bodily and mental strength, and an understanding of the scriptures—and yet are so deluded that they do not struggle for liberation. Such men are suicides. They clutch at the unreal and destroy themselves.

 

    Shankara points his finger straight at Christopher. And what could Christopher reply, by way of an excuse? Nothing. What can he reply now? Only that he
has
begun to struggle—very little and very late. (See also page 121 [
note
], for mention of yet another 1946 project.)

[
¹⁸
“The Emigration,” in
D1
.]

¹⁹
One episode occurs to me which I may as well record right away, because it has no connection with anybody I shall be mentioning in this book. It happened while Christopher was working at MGM, probably sometime in 1940.

    In the men's washrooms in the Writers' Building, the partitions between the cubicles which contained the toilets didn't come all the way down to the ground. In the open spaces between partition and floor, spittoons were placed, filled with water. I doubt if people spat into them, but they were convenient for putting out your cigarette. They also performed a function which certainly hadn't been intended for them. When you were sitting on the toilet seat, you were able to see (dimly) the person who was sitting on the seat in the next-door cubicle. The water in the spittoon reflected him—or rather, a small section of him.

    One day, when Christopher was thus seated, he glanced down at the spittoon to one side of him and saw the reflection of a naked erect cock, standing up out of its bush against a strip of bare belly. As he watched, a hand appeared and began patting it lightly, then stroking it, then gripping it and jerking it.

    Instead of just watching and maybe jerking off too, Christopher gave way to curiosity. He wanted to see the face of the unknown masturbator. So he leaned forward until its reflection indistinctly appeared—quite forgetting that, as soon as he could see the stranger's face, the stranger would be able to see his. The stranger did see it. For some moments, the two of them regarded each other—as wild animals might, on suddenly becoming aware of each other's presence while drinking from a jungle pool. It was a subhuman confrontation, which excluded all possibility of pretense. It was also a marvellous opportunity. Christopher might have said, “Let's jack off together,” or he might at least have reassured the stranger by laughing or making a joke. Instead of which, he sat and stared. The other face withdrew its reflection, and then Christopher saw the reflected cock, no longer hard, being stuffed back into its trousers. Both of them sat perfectly still, listening.

    At last, Christopher adjusted his clothes and left the cubicle. But he was still curious. He loitered in the passage, just outside the men's room. About five minutes passed. Then the door swung open and the stranger came out. He recognized Christopher instantly, turned and hurried away. Christopher had a good look at his face. It was youngish, pale, unmemorable. They must have seen each other many times after this. But Christopher was never able to identify him for sure.