My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (8 page)

I remember afternoons of great fun with this gang. We would get into a flock of cars and race off to one of the little towns that stood out in the majestic desolation of big sky and endless cornfields, towns with names like Lone Tree or What Cheer. There was always a speakeasy in such a town. Iowa had remained a “dry” state when Prohibition ended; you had to get your wine and spirits in state liquor stores, and other than beer there was no drinking in bars or restaurants. Little towns with no-account populations fell off the radar of the Liquor Commission police or the bars bribed them. The places we went to were always dark. There were folks sitting at the bar, others clustered around the two or three pool tables, while the tables set up in the gloom of the cavernous space accommodated men who sometimes sat alone. The talk in the bar was frugal, bitter, and harsh; they were minimalists, those people, the bartender, the men and women getting a drink in the middle of the afternoon. It had the mood and ambience of
The Last Picture Show
or
Paper Moon.
In 1946–47 the condition or at least the mood of the Great Depression had not left pockets of the rural Midwest. My translation into this world was no less than Dorothy’s experience of Oz in reverse. The adults, with their pinched faces and thin-lipped mouths and their sparse fatal talk, were dramatically unlike the teachers in my high school, with their constant good cheer, their obsessive uplifting effacement of the bitterness of life. Odd folks they were, too. Farmhands on an afternoon off, women looking for some fun, or wanting to earn a little money giving someone else a little fun, people who had strayed from a traveling circus, salesmen, hitchhikers who had been dropped off somewhere in the vicinity, often demobilized soldiers trying to get back to the big transcontinental highways and on to their homes.

My “bad boy” friends were equally refreshing. With no standing in the school, often ashamed of their homes or their family situations, determined to fail in class so they could drop out at the first opportunity, they were cynical, funny, harsh, and abrupt, talking of things I had never considered. They took me on as a mascot. They were highly amused at my jokes and anecdotes, they loved my accent, my large vocabulary, my sissy, dainty, pretentious manner. They taught me pool, they taught me how to drive a truck, they taught me how to take a crap in a field when nowhere else was available, how to wipe myself with leaves. They explained to me as best they could the innards of a car, showed me how to change a tire, gave me new and unusual illustrations of life, what to do when the police are after you, for instance, or what to do with your dick if you are facing a wide-open pussy in front of you. They didn’t exactly ruffle my hair and give me a smile whenever I rode along in one of their cars, but they were enormously protective of me, and so friendly, happy to know, I suppose, that if they suddenly felt horny there was someone at hand to give them a blow job. From time to time when they offered lifts to the hitchhiking servicemen they urged them to take advantage of me in the car for some relaxing fun. In the bars where we became—what shall I say?—occasional regulars they presented me as their friend who liked to suck cock, and there was never anyone who seemed to find this remarkable or reprehensible. They all liked my style as well. I felt the welcoming wide embrace and learned to take a certain amount of teasing from my guys and their bar friends, teasing that was based on my sexual interests, but it always seemed affectionate. Afternoons with these boys made me feel “special” rather than “queer,” as the one who had a difference that could be useful and pleasing to my friends, a difference that could be amusing as all differences are, but not to be disparaged.

My other great talent highly valued in that long hot Iowa summer was dancing. Iowa City maintained a recreation center for the teenagers and young adults, where we could congregate on Friday and Saturday nights for dancing or Ping-Pong, where the beverage of choice was Coca-Cola. All so innocent and dear, and all so long ago! And all so sweaty, I might add, when dancing in a room with temperatures at least in the high eighties and humidity to match left us all awash in our bodily fluids. The brace that held my spine so it would grow straight could be removed from time to time with no damage. The pain of excessive articulation of my hips and pelvis was a trade-off for the joy of dancing. Years later, when I was out dancing among a group of African Americans, a friend remarked that I was the only white guy he had ever seen who knew how to throw his crotch around. From my experience of teaching white boys to dance, I would have to agree that they were all afraid to acknowledge their crotch and swing it. These things go in phases, of course; one remembers the tight jeans of the sixties worn without underwear so that their owner could put everything he had on display. Nowadays it is depressing to see that males are so alarmed at the notion of exposure that they wear baggy pants down to their knees on the court and in the pool, a costume that ludicrously mimics the billows and flairs of a woman’s skirt, effectively obscuring any hint of masculine sexuality from waist to knee.

Dancing in the forties was mostly the foxtrot or jitterbugging. Girls favored the former if they liked their partner enough to want to be close; boys, who might well have yearned for the proximity of the foxtrot, were usually so awkward that they chose to jitterbug, to avoid unseemly stumbling. Most boys, in fact, stood at the periphery with their hands in their pockets—controlling their erections, probably—and made dumb jokes. I danced every dance, every style. This was my high school moment; I was a wonderful dancer and everyone knew it. There wasn’t a girl in that recreation center who did not yearn to dance with me; I heard it again and again through the years when my classmates reminisced at the reunions. And to make it Andy Hardy perfect I had my driver’s license and my mother’s car almost every weekend night. The difference was that after squiring the girls home I often parked in a shady grove with the other male of our double date.

Memories of my sophomore year naturally brought up anxieties as I started back to school for my junior year, but it was all so different almost immediately. I was old news now, the shock value was gone, the jeer factor useless. Teenagers are a fickle lot. To use contemporary slang, I was “so last year.” I did not, however, disappear into the faceless mass. The school administration embarked on two radical efforts at social remodeling. One was to organize a series of girl-bid dances in the gym, an obvious attempt to minimize the notorious power to create wallflowers that males traditionally possess. The other was to establish two lunch-hour periods a week during which there would be dancing in the large open foyer of the school. The motive here, it seems, was to keep the kids from spending their lunch hour smoking and God knows what else in the parking lot. Since everyone lunched at the same time, there would be no unseemly music disrupting studies. The right to choose partners immediately flowed from the one event to the other, and I was besieged on every side. In retrospect it surprises me how many girls wanted to invite me to the girl-bid dances. Yes, I was good-looking, a wonderful dancer, had a car, and I was witty, but I was not the slightest bit a studly emotional thrill and they all knew that. As for the lunchtime dances, I was on my feet for every number. I could not get enough of dancing, ever, and it’s true even today. I particularly liked partnering girls who were not only skillful but exhibitionists as well, so that we could let ourselves get carried away. I was also happy, very happy, indeed, to note the circle of boys, the wannabe dancers with the wooden feet, who stared hungrily at the seeming seduction that dancing can imply.

One social triumph led to another. I joined the drama club at the suggestion of some of my more demonstrative dance partners, where my major role that year was as the evil genius in a kind of made-for-kids Restoration drama where I teetered about in fake eighteenth-century boots with high heels and fought a duel with one of the school’s true hotties, an assessment I was lucky enough to confirm from personal experience before the year was out. I also took up debate and participated in the tournaments in which our coach entered us throughout the Midwest. The debate society was a very serious group of students who never in any way acknowledged that they might have heard of the scandalous doings of their newest member. After a meet, their enthusiastic approval was registered by a restrained “Well done,” voiced together with a pat on the back.

The national debate organization had set “Socialized Medicine: Good or Bad?” for the topic in the school academic year 1946–47. For this they sent out a large booklet containing materials for study so that the debaters would be well prepared on the subject. It led me to a surprising minor career for the rest of my high school years: the writing of term papers for students at the State University of Iowa. I say minor career, but in fact it was a major intellectual stimulus for a teenage boy. It all began when I encountered a former City High student bemoaning the assignment that confronted her for a longish paper on socialized medicine. “Gee, I could write that for you, Dottie,” were the first words out of my mouth, and history was made. She got an A for my ten-page effort; I got ten dollars at a dollar a page. It was not long before her friends sought me out, and I set up a system: supply the topic, the relevant books from the university library, give me a week, and you would have your paper. My second masterpiece was “The Annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the First World War,” another A. The requests came thick and fast. My sainted mother, president of the school board, was sufficiently insouciant to write endless classroom excuses so that I could stay home to sit at the card table I had set up in the living room to manage my term-paper factory.

I branched out, buying back used papers, as it were, at half price, and retyping them for someone else’s submission. I naturally charged less for these, seventy-five cents a page, as I remember, but there was little to fear. This was the era of the GI invasion of the university; general education humanities courses could have an enrollment of up to a thousand, and tired graders could only remember so much. I am sure the Declaration of Independence would have slipped through. What interested me in reviewing the grades of papers sold and bought back several times was the range. I grew to believe that teachers tend to dole out the grades that they fancy the student deserves rather than what the specific work suggests. Nothing in my later teaching career has made me think otherwise, for which reason I always tell youngsters go for the A’s at the start, then sit on your ass, and the A’s will keep rolling in. I am always amused at horrified responses to my term-paper-writing anecdote, which stress my years as a university professor, as though a seventeen-year-old boy is thinking of academic values. Those who question my willingness to practice something dishonest, if not illegal, forget that a homosexual in the forties was liable to a prison sentence if caught by the police
in flagrante
. Thus, for someone outside the law, the practice of paper-writing might be considered no more than a logical extension. I quickly learned how little the teaching faculty valued the papers as a genuine form of dialogue, and grew indifferent. But it did influence me in making term-paper assignments throughout my career, where I have tried as far as possible to tailor the topics precisely to the terms and values of discussion employed in the class.

My term-paper-writing business would never have gotten off the ground if I had not started the first semester of my junior year with a course in typing. I was not the least bit prescient, but anxious to round out my social life, such as it was. “Everybody” took typing, not just the girls who were looking at a secretarial career. This was because the teacher, a young, truly beautiful, terribly lax disciplinarian and high grader, made the hour so much fun. Why she was never fired, I cannot imagine. The classroom was filled with the hubbub one associated with the lunch hour, and that was because everyone who sat at the best tables in the cafeteria was also in Typing I. Not to mention Typing II. It was an ideal locale in which to solidify my acceptance among my classmates, although I don’t remember being that calculating about it. No one could leave for fifty minutes; conversation flowed back and forth all around the room over the list of assignments we were sharing. Boys who had only known me when they made their nervous drives at night to take me to a dark place for their satisfaction had to interact day after day and discover that there was no complication, shame, or tension in having a verbal relationship with me. Of course, all my girlfriends were in the room as well, making for an enormously positive Charlie experience for everyone.

I came to be known as more than a resource for term papers. Perhaps as a hint of my future career as an academic I taught a few boys how to dance and how to drive. The first category of student came about out of the sheer desperation of a classmate who was determined to make it with the girls through dancing. He had calculated the risk, he told me later, of spending hours in my arms, bodies pressed together, as he with furrowed brow counted out the side of the foxtrot square and tried to yield to my insistent swing and flow and dip, the fluid movements of the experienced dancer. That we got erections in the contact is what one would expect from teenage boys, especially when one of them is tinged with so erotic a coloration. That he learned to dance well and that we had sex were both true, and it gave him sufficient satisfaction that he told a friend or two. The first boy I agreed to teach to drive looked at my car with such wistful yearning that I could not resist humoring him. I chose the back road in the city park where he would meet no other car, and over the next half hour he shifted, stalled, shifted, jammed on brakes, accelerated too fast, too slow, and stalled, while he puffed in serious concentration. When the lesson was ended, he leaned back, exhausted, and I, thinking of the number of boys who had assumed exactly that pose in this very car, could not resist placing my hand on his crotch, which he must have expected, since I could feel him springing into action.