The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (5 page)
Read The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories Online
Authors: Pagan Kennedy
But wait! Let's not go there yet. Let's jump back to 1972, to the happy times. In those first golden years in California, Alex and Jane fucked and recited limericks and threw dinner parties. They had set up house outside Santa Barbara, in Montecito, and seemed destined to slither into old age bathed in massage oil. They padded around naked and floated in swimming pools as blue as Viagraâthough, of course, Viagra hadn't been invented yet. The sex pill of choice was still 3-blindmycin, Alex's imaginary aphrodisiac.
At first, Jane “was willing, maybe even eager, to participate in the sexual play,” according to Marilyn Yalom. Alex boasted about her prowess in bed, and even created a stage on which both of them
could perform; in the back of their house, he installed an “Indian room” filled with batiks and pillows where he could throw orgies. “He assumed that the two of them would be the sexual gurus of Montecito,” according to Yalom. “But Jane balked.”
Stranded in an alien country, Jane began to regret indulging Alex's every sexual whim. In the late 1970s, she told her husband she wanted a conventional marriageâno group scenes, no experiments, no second or third wives. “I can still see the look of disappointment on [Alex's] face,” Yalom remembers. “He had more or less contracted for a sexual playmate where the doors would be open. She changed her mind.”
Alex had believed that open marriage and group sex would become the model around which most people organized their livesâand he'd been wrong, on both a personal and a cultural level. According to Yalom, “He didn't realize the strength of monogamy.”
In 1985, he and Jane decided to move back to Britain. Jane would feel at home there, and Alex might be able to resume serious academic work. Besides, they were now well into their 60s. “[My father] came back to the UK to enjoy his old age,” according to Nick. “But that didn't happen.”
In the late 1970s, around the time that Jane demanded his fidelity, Alex's magpie mind led him to return to a question that had fascinated him as a young man: how and why do people grow old?
Since the 1940s, he'd been reading and publishing papers on gerontology; now he hoped to do for the aged what he had once done for the sexually innocent. In 1976, he published a manifesto against the warehousing and dehumanizing of old people, titled
A Good Age.
He intended his new book to be as groundbreaking as
Joy,
a bestseller that would radicalize the wrinkled. However, as it turned out, readers were not as eager to join this revolution. The book sold respectably, but couldn't begin to match the influence of Comfort's big hit. Still, Alex kept on with his crusade. He flew to conferences on gerontology, trying to wrangle his way to the top of the field. When the proceedings bored him, he jumped up on stage and summarized the disagreements with a limerick, written on the spot. He couldn't resist proving how much smarter he was than any of them. The scientists and doctors out there in the audience, those men with their sober expressions and sharp name tags, thought of him as a pop-culture idiot.
Joy
had ruined his reputation among serious people. He wanted it back.
He shed his jumpsuits for tweed blazers; he anticipated the breakthroughs he'd make in the field. He published a shower of books and articles. But wherever he turned, he was dismissed as the guy who had written that sex book.
“There was the publicity roller-coaster which he quite enjoyed,” according to Nick Comfort. “But he wanted to be treated seriously. He was an academic of considerable gravity.” Still, it wasn't just his pop-culture past that tainted his reputation as a biologist. Alex had little interest in making a scientific argument; instead, he published polemics. His crusade had beenâand would beâto convince people to see their bodies as ideas. This may be one reason that he did not anticipate AIDS, even in the midst of the orgies, with fluids splattered everywhere. Alex could not seem to accept that viruses and cells and bodies themselves might have antirevolutionary agendas.
Likewise, he insisted that most of the problems of the old came from discriminationârather than decay or illness. And now he began to imagine a new kind of utopia, a place where the gray-haired could be cherished as sexual and intellectual beings. In such a society, he believed, health problems would nearly vanish for the old.
It was 1991. The house in Kent, England, smelled of curry and pipe smoke. Prints from Indiaâwhich he and Jane had collected during their many tripsâhung above the sofa. Alex had embraced his role as the globe-trotting gadfly; he jetted around, speaking out against age-ism.
Today, he was pottering around in his study, working up notes for a nursing conference in Australia. Except he couldn't seem to concentrate. His thoughts had gone foggy. He picked up a pencil to make a correction on his manuscript. Australia. He'd never been before. He was just entering his 70s, and by his calculations, he had twenty good years ahead of him, at least. The rest of his life stretched ahead, enormous as Australia, undiscovered and sunny.
And then he collapsed.
It was Jane who found him. She punched numbers into the phone. Soon, paramedics crowded around, snapping their latex gloves, prodding him all over. He rode in an ambulance and then a helicopter. The next day, he woke up in a new country; it was not Australia. The monitors beeped beside him. The nursesâwhom he would never again lecture in conference hallsâwhisked in and out. His jaw had frozen up. He shook all over. The doctor came
by and explainedâslowly, as if Alex were an idiotâthat he'd suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. He'd obviously taken a hit to his motor cortex. Years before, writing
A Good Age,
he'd been so confident: “The human brain does not shrink, wilt, perish or deteriorate with age. It normally continues to function well through as many as nine decades,” he'd asserted. But now his own brain begged to differ.
He drifted in and out of consciousness for weeks. Someone held his hand and told him Jane had died. She'd suffered a massive heart attack.
Seven months later, they put him in a wheelchair and his son Nick wheeled him out into the world of taxicabs and crowded crosswalks, where everyone had somewhere to rush. Everyone but him. Nickâthe son he'd hardly knownâwould handle most things for him now, from bills to fan letters to updating the next edition of
The Joy of Sex.
He would be installed in a little flat around the corner from where Nick, his wife, and the grandchildren lived. And do what? “Leisure is a con,” he'd written, but now he had nothing but idleness ahead of him. He would enter that condition he feared most, and which he'd tried to eliminate with his theories: he'd become an unperson.
When the next stroke hit him, paralyzing his right side, he moved into a nursing home. On Sundays, he rode in an ambulance to Nick's house and sat immobilized while his grandchildren ran around him. When he spoke, people leaned in, wrinkled their foreheads, and asked him to repeat himself.
The book had made him a multimillionaire and vaulted him to worldwide fame. But he didn't want to be famous like this, a wax figure propped up in a chair, expected to talk endlessly about the same goddamn thing. “
Joy
is frankly an albatross,” he said to one journalist in 1997, pumping his thumb for emphasis.
In his mid-70s, Alex Comfort had shrunk into a codger with Einstein hair and furious eyes, immobile in his wheelchair. With his right hand paralyzed, his left thumb had become his only lever on the world. He typed poetry with it, one painful letter at a time. He gestured by wiggling that thumb, so that his whole will seemed to live in that snail-like appendage.
Today a young reporterâa girl, reallyâwould be visiting him; she'd told him she was doing a story about the 25th anniversary of
Joy.
Before the girl came, his nurse, Linda, set him up in a spotless suit and arranged him in the chair.
The reporters always asked the same question. How did he come to write
The Joy of Sex?
And behind their question lay another question that he heard in the snigger of their voices. They cared nothing about the other 50 books he'd written, now arrayed on shelves behind him. Always
Joy, Joy, Joy.
Had they not read his poetry? His scientific papers?
The reporterâa beautiful girl, just as he'd hopedâentered and reached out for his hand. But he had nothing to shake, so she smiled awkwardly. She asked where to put her tape recorder. “Stick it wherever you like,” he tried to quip, but his mouth wouldn't cooperate.
The girl questioned him for hours, and because she was kind enough to flirt a little, to make him feel human for a moment, he did his best to answer.
She wanted to know whether he'd marry again.
He laughed. Who would want a cripple stuck in a wheelchair?
But your brain works, the girl said.
Yes, that's true, he replied. But no one wants to marry a brain.
He wanted to tell her it wasn't supposed to go like this.
He thought he'd known his enemies: the Tories, Thatcher, the sword rattlers, the physicists who designed bombs, the prudes, the teetotalers. But now he'd been defeated in the way he least expected. The true enemy had turned out to be so small, and not at all political: bits of brain tissue in the motor cortex and possibly the parietal lobe. And
Joy
had become an enemy too. The book was an albatross straight out of Coleridge.
Remember how the poem goes? A ship gets lost in a storm, and bangs around among ice floes; the sailors believe they'll die at sea. Then salvation comes in the shape of a bird, an albatross that leads them to open water. The sailors venerate the bird as an emissary from Godâor most of them do. One free-thinking anarchist on board refuses to acknowledge the bird as holy. This anarchist, who loves shocks and explosions of all kinds, shoots the albatross dead.
And then the winds cease, the sails drop, and the ship founders in the terrible silence of the sea. The other men hang the dead bird around the anarchist's neck as a sign of his sin. Years pass. The anarchist recants. And yet, still he wears the ghost of that dead bird around his neck. It weighs him down. It humbles him. And eventually he and his greatest mistake merge into one.
Alex Comfort died in 2000.
Alex Comfort obituary.
The Guardian
(London), March 28, 2000.
Allyn, David.
Make Love, Not War: An Unfettered History.
New York: Routledge, 2000.
Banks-Smith, Nancy. “Privates on Parade.”
The Guardian
(London), Jan. 5, 2001.
Comfort, Alex.
Come Out To Play.
New York: Crown Publishers, 1975.
âââ.
A Good Age.
New York: Crown Publishers, 1976.
âââ, ed.
The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking.
New York: Crown Publishers, 1972.
âââ, ed.
More Joy.
Crown Publishers, 1974.
âââ.
The Silver River: Being the Diary of a Schoolboy in the South Atlantic.
London: Chapeman & Hall, 1936.
âââ.
Writings Against Power & Death.
London: Freedom Press, 1994.
De Bertodano, Helena. “25 Years of Joy.”
Chicago Sun-Times,
Jan. 5, 1997.
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Courier Mail
(Queensland, Australia), Nov. 23, 1996.
Dery, Mark. “Paradise Lust.”
Vogue Hommes,
Spring/Summer 2005, pp. 244â7.
Gray, Paul. “Less Joy.”
Time,
May 19, 1975.
Hammel, Lisa. “Will the Real Alex Comfort Please Stand Up?”
The New York Times,
June 2, 1974.
Heller, Zoe. “Where's the Beard?”
The Daily Telegraph
(London), Sept. 17, 2002.
Hunt, Liz. “Alex Comfort's Joy ofâ¦Poetry.”
The Independent
(London), Nov. 12, 1996.
Illman, John. “Has the Joy of Sex Stood the Test of Time?”
The Guardian
(London), Nov. 12, 1996.
Jones, Patti. “Better than Sex.”
The Seattle Times,
Jan. 27, 2003.
Jones, Steve. “Adventures in Thought: Experiment in Literature and Science.” Transcript of a talk given at the University of East Anglia on June 16, 2006.
âââ. “My Greatest Mistake.”
The Independent
(London), Sep. 3, 2003.
Kenner, Hugh. “The Comfort Behind the Joy of Sex.”
The New York Times Magazine,
Oct. 27, 1974.
Martin, Douglas. “Alex Comfort, 80, Dies⦔
The New York Times,
March 29, 2000.
Salmon, Arthur E.
Alex Comfort.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.
Savage, Dan. “The Doctor of Love.”
The New York Times,
Jan. 7, 2001.
Sayre, Nora. “Ahh!”
The New York Times,
Feb. 11, 1973.
Stuever, Hank. “Joy of Sex Back on Top?” Author's Son Updates a 30-Year-Old Classic.”
The Washington Post,
Feb. 25, 2003.
Talese, Gay.
Thy Neighbor's Wife.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1980.
Twenty Twenty. “The Joy of Sex.” First aired on BBC Channel 4 in 2001.
Updike, John. “Coffee Table Books for Higher Coffee Tables.”
The New York Times,
Oct. 28, 1973.
Walsh, John. “Everything We Wanted to Know about Sex.”
The Independent
(London), July 16, 2002.
Nick Comfort, interviewed by Pagan Kennedy, 2007.
Robert Greacen, interviewed by Pagan Kennedy, 2007.
Marilyn Yalom, interviewed by Pagan Kennedy, 2007.
She's striding down a hallway at MIT with a bucket in one hand and a length of string in the other. Amy Smithâwinner of inventing awards, and the brain behind such creations as the screenless hammer mill and the phase-change incubatorâmust fish some water out of the Charles River before she can teach her next class. As she lopes along, Smith describes the ordeals of testing water in remote villages. Her words spurt out. She's a woman on fast-forward, and she does not so much talk as download information. I'm jogging to keep up with this lanky, deeply tanned scientist and the bucket bumping against her leg.
We reach the massive front doors of MIT's main building and she pushes out into the crisp air and roar of traffic. She hurries toward the steps. Without interrupting her disquisition on water-testing, she perches sidesaddle on a banister. Elegantly poised, she slides down the handrail, still talking.
She lands on the sidewalk with a practiced leap. “You slide faster in the winter,” she says, “when you've got a wool coat on.”
If you're an inventor and you ride the banister below the pillared entrance of a university, there's a good chance that you could come off as way too cute. It's something Robin Williams would do if he were playing an inventor in a Disney movie. But Smith can
get away with this kind of flourish. She is, after all, one of the brightest minds in a movement that sets out to prove that the best technology can be cheap and simple. The banister is a perfect example: it requires less energy than the stairs, and it's free.
In a culture where innovation means coming up with new functions for the cell phone or new spam-busting software, Smith is gloriously out of step. She designs medical equipment and laborsaving machines for people who live at the far end of a dirt road in Africa. Her inventions cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few pennies. “You can't understand how important a grain mill is,” she says, “until you've spent three hours pounding grain and gotten a cup-and-a-half of flour.” It is this kind of understandingâof tedium, of tired muscles, of hunger pangsâthat Smith brings to her designs.
An hour later, in Smith's “D-lab” class, students gather around a huge, black-topped slab of a table. It's the first semester of design lab, and these undergrads are learning about the politics of delivering technology to poor nations, how to speak a little Creole, and the nitty-gritty of mechanical engineering; during the
mid-semester break, they'll travel to Haiti, Brazil or India. There, they will act as consultants in remote villages, helping locals to solve technical problems. Oh yes, and the students will also test village drinking water for dangerous bacteria.
Today, Smith is training them to do just that. Students practice, using a small pump to pull polluted water (from the Charles River) through a filter. Smith points to a piece of the water-testing rigâwhat looks like a silver barbell. “This test stand costs $600. Personally, I find that offensive.” When the students work in the field, she says, they will be using a far cheaper setupâone that she patched together herself for about $20 last year, using a Playtex baby bottle. “You can do a lot more testing for the same amount of money.”
Now the students have made cultures of Charles River water in petri dishes. The next step is to incubate the petri dishes for an entire day at a steady temperature. But how do you pull that off in a lean-to in Haiti, with no electricity for miles around? Again, Smith has a solution. She passes around a mesh bag of what appears to be white marbles. The “marbles” contain a chemical that, when heated, will stay at a steady 37 degrees Celsius for 24 hours. The balls are the crucial ingredient in one of Smith's inventionsâ
a phase-change incubator that requires no electricity. The design won Smith the 1999 BF Goodrich Collegiate Inventors' Award. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may soon endorse her incubator, and “from there it's not a big step to go to the Red Cross,” she says. One day it could be a key piece of equipment at rural health clinics in Africa, Haiti, Indiaâwhere doctors depend on intermittent electricity or none at all.
At the moment, however, Smith is still in the process of manufacturing the incubatorsâshe has founded a startup company to handle the exigencies of getting her incubators up and running, and out into the field. “I have 6000 of these balls on their way here from China as we speak,” she says.
Now, Smith wants to demo a bacteria test in the dark. She asks a student to cut the lights. He flips a switch. For a moment, nothing happens and then the room vibrates with a mechanical hum, and panels close over a bank of skylights in the ceiling. Everyone cranes their necks to watch. The panels move in menacing slo-mo, like something out of a James Bond movie. A few people giggle, as if they've suddenly become aware of the contradictions thrumming in this roomâthey've come to one of the best-funded technical institutes in the world to learn how to work with Playtex baby bottles.
A few weeks from now, Smith will give them one of their toughest lessons in the gaps between first world and third. The students will spend a week surviving on $2 a day in Cambridgeâthe equivalent of what the average Haitian earns.
Last year, Jamy Drouillardâwho TA-ed Smith's classâperformed the assignment along with his students. Drouillard grew up in Haiti, but that didn't give him any special edge. He laughs, remembering his chief mistake. “I bought a bunch of Ramen noodles, a bunch of spaghetti, and some ketchup. It got sickening after Day Three. Actually, before Day Three. I should have mixed and matched instead of buying ten boxes of spaghetti. In Haiti, people come up with creative ways of varying their food intake.” He said the assignment drove home Smith's point quicklyâliving at subsistence level requires enormous creativity. The African farmwoman who finds a way to make a scrap of land yield enough cassava root for her family, she, too, is an inventor.
Last year, at a lavish banquet, Smith pulled out crackers from her pocket and nibbled while colleagues feasted around herâshe was sticking to the $2-a-day assignment, in fellowship with her students. For Smith, the exercise must have been a snap. She had, after all, lived at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
“I never got very good at the Bushman languages. My accent is really bad,” Smith says. “There's fourteen different clicks and I always did the wrong ones. So I used to click as I walked around, trying to get it right.”
In the late 1980s, as a Peace Corps volunteer, she was stationed in Ghanzi, a backwater of Botswana down a dirt path that could take as long as two days to travel. “Nobody wanted to live there. You got sent there for punishment if you did badly in a job.”
Smith taught local kids math and science. She coached volleyball and ran the beekeeping club. To escape the stray cats that had taken over her bedroom, she slept outside her rooms, at the brink of the desert.
“I knew I wanted to stay in this country,” she says, even though a certain loneliness was setting inâthe loneliness of the nerd.
Smith's father taught semiconductor physics at MIT; her mother taught junior-high math. At the dinner table, the family would chit-chat about ways to prove the Pythagorean theorem. In her first couple of years in the Peace Corps, she missed the kind of people she'd known growing up in the orbit of MITâpeople willing to engage, for instance, in passionate discussion about the
innards of a motor. “I'd run into development workers who had no clue about engineering. They wouldn't understand that there was a way you could solve a problem” for the Africans. And she wanted very badly to solve the problems for the people she'd met, women ferrying water on their heads, grinding, washing, lifting, churning their lives away.
In 1987, she received word that her mother had died. She flew home to Lexington, Massachusetts. “When you're deep in grief it's harder to be tolerant of a society's excesses,” she says. Wandering through a supermarket after the funeral, she marveled at the lunacy of her own countryâan entire aisle just for soup? It seemed impossible to reconcile the two places she loved, to bridge the gap between America and Botswana.
About a year later, Smith was gazing out the window of her room, studying the expanse of the Kalahari Desert pocked by thorn bushes. Suddenly, she understood the arch of her life: she would learn how to be an engineer and bring her skills to a place like this. She sent away for applications to graduate programs. Fateâor rather, the kooky force that passes for fate in Smith's lifeâintervened. “A cat had kittens on my grad application for U Penn. It was just covered with placenta stains, and I didn't feel I could
send it in. So that's how I ended up returning to MIT,” she says. “That's how life always works for me.”
Sometime after she got back, a professor suggested that she try to solve a problem that bedevils people who live in rural Africa. It involves the hammer mill, a no-frills, motorized grain mill that women use to grind sorghum or millet into flour. The hammer mill can do a job in just a few minutes that might otherwise take hours, which makes it a hotly coveted item in developing nations. But there's a built-in flaw: the mill uses a wire-mesh screen. When that screen breaks, it cannot easily be replaced, because parts like that are scarce in Africa and not easy to fabricate. So for lack of a wire screen, grain mills often end up in the corner of a room, gathering dust.
What was needed was something that could not only match the efficiency of the hammer mill but also use materials available to a blacksmith in Senegal.
A group of MIT students had come up with some ideas, but Smith, who had ground sorghum by hand in Botswana, knew they weren't fast enough. So she devised a system based on an elegantly
simple element: air. She redesigned the machine to use the air passing through the mill to separate particles. The smaller onesâa.k.a. flourâget carried out while the larger ones stay behind. The resulting machine would cost a quarter of what its predecessors had and use far less energy.
But figuring out how to distribute her machine has turned out to be a far more vexing challenge. Originally, she worked with a group in Senegalâbut they changed their mission before Smith had tweaked the design for the mill. Now, she's collaborating with a metalsmith in Haiti, who will translate the design specifications into French, which will allow her to bring the plans to an NGO in Mali that will aid local groups in manufacturing the machine.
For her screenless hammer mill, Smith became the first woman ever to win an MIT-Lemelson Student Prize. Past recipients of the high-profile award for inventing include David Levy, who patented not only the smallest keyboard in the world but also a surgical technique that speeds the splicing of severed arteries.
Smith has a rather tortured relationship with prizes. When I asked her about being named Peace Corps Volunteer of the Year while she was in Botswanaâbeating out 2,500 peopleâshe offered up whimsical logic to explain why she didn't deserve it,
something to do with a batch of brownies. Nor does she take her science awards too seriously. “Winning the Lemelson was helpful. Some people changed their attitude toward me after I won,” she says, and leaves the rest hanging.