|
•
|
|
Campus Sexpot, A Memoir!
She tipped her head sideways, her lips offering themselves to
his. He remembered the fire those lips contained, the promise her kiss held. . .
.
Chapter 8
In Campus Sexpot, there are no magazines or newspapers. In Campus Sexpot, there is no money. In Campus Sexpot, there are no sports. Porn happens in a vacuum. Just as sexual arousal chases all other considerations from the mind, a writer with sex as his subject neglects the rest of human experience. In Campus Sexpot, there is no food, not even at the Europa restaurant, where you would expect to find some. In Campus Sexpot, there is no television. No Rawhide, no 77 Sunset Strip, no This Is Your Life. In Campus Sexpot, there is no music. No Elvis, no Nat "King" Cole, no Kingston Trio. No Drifters, Platters, or Chipmunks. No "Hot Rod Lincoln," no "Alley-Oop." No static-filled tunes from the AM car radio. No strains of John Phillip Sousa from the high school band ringing across campus from the football field. No Percy Faith and his orchestra from Nelda's kitchen radio to keep her company while she irons. In Campus Sexpot, there is no ironing. In Campus Sexpot, there is no recreation. No roller-skating, no picnics, no fishing, no swimming, no water-skiing. In Campus Sexpot, there is no religion—no one goes to church, prays, or thinks on the Lord. In Campus Sexpot, there is no world—no Khrushchev, no de Gaulle, no Lumumba. It's not as if the author didn't know about any of these things. Sports, for example. Dale Koby was on the faculty bowling team, and he knew enough football to be the official cameraman for all high school games. I learned this from a former Sonora High quarterback, who recalls that Koby botched the filming of his best-played game, getting only the players' legs into the frame. But football, which consumed the town every fall, is never mentioned in Campus Sexpot, nor, for that matter, is photography, a known hobby of the pornographer's. Koby knew books too. His former students report reading Beowulf in class, along with Stendahl's The Red and the Black. But only one book gets a mention in Campus Sexpot, something titled Green Eyes, which Linda tells Don she's reading. "It's a really great story about this boy and girl who spend the night in a cabin together," she says. An extended search for a match between this title and this plot yields nothing. Some deep instinct tells me that Koby drew the work from his own unpublished repertoire—an authorial in-joke. If the book offers little outside the realm of sex, does it succeed as erotica? I confess that the good parts work a certain magic on me, but only in a roundabout way, through a historical path where I become a young teenager and understand sex as I understood it at that age. When I read the book now, its verbal avoidance of body parts with which I am actually familiar returns them to a thrilling condition of mystery. I don't have to make an effort to enter this frame of mind. Instead, the words in Campus Sexpot that lead up to a saucy scene fire ancient neurons, and before I know it, I am transported into a state of salacious ignorance. Campus Sexpot seized my youthful imagination because it was one of the few dirty books I got my hands on. Good boys are limited to the smut that falls in their laps—or the smut that they spy in their brother's Chinese chest, known as the "opium chest" in the family, though only he and I knew what it held. I remember just one magazine from his stash and only one item in it, titled "Beauty on the Beach." A photo essay of sorts, it showed a woman lying naked on her back, with sand covering her in three places. That she was on a beach heightened the impact. I went to the beach with my parents—to Pacific Grove every Easter break and to Santa Cruz in August. The beach was something that I knew about. It was easy to install myself in the picture, there beside this woman. Just to be there—think what it would be like! For the few minutes that I held that magazine, it was all I wanted in the world. Yet I knew that anything like it was an eternity away. Around the same time, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, I read a typescript novella, thirty single-spaced pages or so, about two women who compete to see which of them can acquire the smartest outfit without spending any money. Each attires herself by having sex with salesmen and managers of clothing departments. They shop in department stores, not in little dress shops like Sonora's Mode O' Day, so it was a big-city tale. The novella told one woman's story, then the other's. The men, without fail, are willing. One of the women is deemed the winner, and her prize is to receive all the pleasure she can handle from the other woman. This surprising coda didn't puzzle me, at least not too much, because it was presented mechanically: the loser "did" the winner, with no mutual attraction or affection, at least in my reading. But it was all certainly uncharted waters. When I returned the manuscript to my brother, he was still with his friend who had somehow acquired it and brought it by the house, so I must have read it in one alert sitting. They laughed at my boner, evident against my pajama pants. From my present perspective, the main thing that strikes me is that I could walk all the way through our L-shaped ranch house, from one end to the other, with an unflagging boner. The trash we read as kids stays with us—the characters, the words. The unresolved questions about technique and anatomy linger for decades. When Campus Sexpot came into my hands forty years after being out of them, as an experiment in memory I explored what I could recall from the book before opening it. I wrote down all the names I could remember:
Mike Allata Linda Franklin Merkovich Stoper Pomo Highway
Don Kaufield's name failed to make the list, but I got all of these right, though misspelling "Allota." I then summoned up what plot I could and wrote it down: Mike, a cruel, dashing fellow, hot to trot, knocks on Linda's door (house? bedroom?). She doesn't want to do it—why not?—and says through the door, "I'm not dressed" (or "I'm naked"). And he says, "Why bother? You're just going to get undressed again anyway." Cruel laugh. She lets him in. He says he wants to take a shower. My reaction as a kid: Why would he take a shower before sex? Wouldn't he want it after sex? I would. Mike's not dashing, so I misremembered that, but he's certainly cruel. We are told this so often that it's no wonder I retained it. As for the scene in question, in chapter 9 Mike indeed knocks on Linda's front door. Here, from the novel, are the actual words that more or less stayed with me for forty years: "Just a minute," Linda called. "I've got to put some clothes on," she lied. "Don't bother," he called coarsely. "You'll just have to take 'em off again." He laughed an evil laugh.
The shower memory actually derives from a scene with a different girl, five pages later, where Mike says, "I'm goin' into the bathroom, and take a quick shower. When I come back, you better be ready for me. I want a good piece, understand?" My recollection of the story, while oddly selective—a single frame or two from an entire reel—was fairly accurate. Why would I recall these moments rather than a sex scene? Because they involve people, they are specific, and they are mean-spirited. As for the sex, well, who's going to remember "They were as one, blood pounding rhythmically together," or "She sought nothing from him but surcease from her own passion"? I remember only one other published sexy novel from my younger days, but I remember it well. The hero is a driving instructor for adults, and he ends up steering most of his female students into the sack. But we also see the drudgery of his work—an honest narrator, I remember thinking. When our hero has sex for the first time with one driving student, she's very excited, so he deliberately slows everything way down. What does this mean? I wondered. What would happen if he didn't slow everything down? (We remember not the good parts but the confusing parts.) Near the end, after the hero gets beaten up badly for some reason or other, as he gets into bed with the woman he truly loves, she says that because of his injuries, they'll have to make love slowly and carefully—the way they'll make love when they're very old, she adds sweetly. I fell for that. We long for the human touch, even in the riot of a porn fest. I didn't own this book for long, but while I did, my friend Alex happened to spend the night with me. He shared my bed, so we must have been pretty young. After I fell asleep, he read the book in one long sitting. I hope that's all he did. Outside the genre of smut, I was a catch-as-catch-can reader as a boy. I didn't catch very well, and no wonder: not a bookstore was to be found within fifty miles of town. There was only the Sportsman and Burns' Cigars, general stores of ill health where tobacco, beer, and candy were sold, along with a few magazines and paperbacks. Burns' Cigars went up in smoke years ago, but the Sportsman still stands on Sonora's central corner, with its bifold wooden doors and long vertical sign listing the wares: "Cold Beer, Knives, Guns, Ammo, Supplies, Gifts." In these stores I bought my first books. I bought To Hell and Back, the memoir of World War Two hero Audie Murphy. I remember just one thing from the book—a Hispanic soldier in Murphy's outfit calls the Germans a word I'd never heard before, "sonsabeeches." It was a short-lived acquisition for me. When I tried it out on my mother, she ran to me as if in rescue, her hand raised to cover my mouth. I bought and read Hot Rod by Henry Gregory Felsen. The hero of this book had the manly name of Bud. Bud was a philosopher of driving, at least until he wiped out in his red convertible. He didn't believe in ever slowing down. His creed was "When you get in trouble, use your head and drive your way out," which my brother fiercely embraced from atop his J. C. Higgins bicycle, shouting out the name "Bud!" as he careened down the steep hills above town and crashed into oncoming cars. I bought and read The Kid Who Batted 1,000, a novel about a boy with the uncanny knack of hitting foul balls. In every at-bat, his coach directs him to foul off one strike after another until the worn-out pitcher finally walks him. So how does he bat a thousand? (A great title; the question nags at the reader.) On the last day of the season, the kid rebels against the coach's manipulation, and by making a slight adjustment in his swing, he hits a ball that nicks the fair side of the foul pole, then clears the fence for a home run. With one swing of the bat, the boy achieves statistical perfection and independence from an autocratic adult. It was the best book I had ever read in my whole life. I stumbled onto The Kid Who Batted 1,000. How does a boy pick a book? He doesn't have a clue. I regularly went to the city library, a one-room structure, long and skinny as a train car, and the chief engineer was Pearl Soulsby, aged, perfumed, powdered, always alone, and always emerging from the bathroom at the rear, where, it was said, she kept a bottle. My sister had worked at the library before escaping to college, and Pearl had just two things to say to me: "How's Carole?" and "Have you read Freckles?" I remember this book, by Gene Stratton Porter, as the portrait of a young man at one with nature who builds twiggy little abodes in the forest. It gave me the creeps—a quintessentially sissy book. Later I found out there were two libraries in town. In addition to Pearl Soulsby's collection of Freckles, there was the county library, whose vast, stately stacks I didn't discover until late in high school. By then I was doomed. It was too late. I kept going to Pearl Soulsby, kept telling her how Carole was. That other library was an alternative fate, an intellectual fortune that had slipped away from me. Many years later, Carole explained to me that bad blood from a feud of some kind kept our family away from the county library. Kids end up reading what's around the house, so the popular books of their parents' generation have a delayed second impact, a boomlet. A house title that intrigued me for years was Zotz!, a 1947 novel written by Walter Karig. It's about a man who acquires psychokinetic powers. It all starts with a fly, as I recall—the hero points at a fly and discovers he can control it. When my father saw me reading Zotz!, he chuckled. I asked him why, but he just chuckled. Toward the end of the book, the hero makes a pass at his girlfriend, but it doesn't work because his powers have made his touch sizzling, or electrifying, or something like that. The judge thought that was pretty funny, I guess. As I neared high school, I discovered the literature of fear. My 1950s equivalent of Stephen King was a collection of horror called Zacherley's Vulture Stew, a paperback with a cover illustration of grisly animals boiling in a cauldron. But most terrifying of all was my heavy reading in a genre that I hope no longer exists—gang literature. Evan Hunter is the only author I recall, but there were others, and they wrote about city toughs who brawled and raped their way through life. One sordid tale began, "A plastic bag is a perfect murder weapon." Plastic garment bags were fairly new at the time, as was awareness of their danger, especially to young children. The hood-narrator of the story is a delivery boy for a dry-cleaning store, and he likes the look of one of his customers, a young mother. He extorts sex from her by threatening to suffocate her toddler, which he would never really do—the narrator tells us this so that our strong affection for him won't be diminished. The story ends with the mother turning the tables by tying him up and cinching a plastic bag tightly over his head. "Yes," the tale concludes, "a plastic bag is a perfect murder weapon—and I ought to know." Not a dead man's narrative, exactly; more a moribund man's narrative. Gang literature taught me that the world was not a safe place. I peopled my little town with gangs, finding likely candidates for membership in the harmless louts who slouched outside the Gay Nineties saloon. I became a Johnny-Stay-at-Home, as my brother called me, afraid that if I showed my face in town these thugs would drag me under the Sonora Creek bridge and whip me with chains. Relations between the sexes were strained in gang literature. In a story called "Walk Away Fast," two hoods knock each other senseless through most of the story until they realize that a girl they're both enamored of has been pitting them against each other and cheating on them to boot. They track her down, punch her out, dump a garbage can over her head, and walk away fast. It was stories like this that taught me respect for women. This one prepared me for my treatment of Marcia Labetoure, whose bosom, you'll recall, I related to inconsistently. Thus at the end of prom night, I knew what to do: accompany her to the front door, spin on my heel, and walk away fast. Rape was a staple of this genre, but not as it occurs in real life. The rapes I read about were light in violence and cavalier about emotional consequences for the victims. In one story, after a cop saves a woman from a gang rape in a park, he has consensual sex with her right on the spot. It seemed perfectly natural to me since she was nearly undressed already. "Rape" was a new word to me, and in this and other stories, it was so much like sex that I had to ask my brother if "rape" meant the same thing as "fuck." Contributing to my ignorance was the joking treatment sexual assault frequently received. A paperback book called Pardon My Blooper was all the rage at the time—a collection of cartoons illustrating broadcast mistakes. In one of these, the announcer, intending to say "Rug and Drape Shop," said "Drug and Rape Shop." The illustration showed a leering pharmacist, with mortar and pestle, chasing a screaming woman through a drugstore as he mixes a prescription. In all the time I lived in Sonora, no rapes were reported or rumored in the town or the county. I never heard or read of an accused rapist coming before Judge Carkeet. Yet surely in a town of twenty-five hundred, and in a county of fourteen thousand, over an eighteen-year period, someone was raped. One summer afternoon near Phoenix Lake, I was helping a friend and his dad, a surveyor, shoot some property lines on a back road. The mosquitoes were bad, but I didn't mind. To a Sierra teenager, surveying was the coolest possible career. It took place outdoors; it involved mysterious instruments and the appearance of higher math; and the surveyor's word carried weight: Let this be the corner. As we worked near the road, a clunker zoomed by with three or four guys in it and just one girl. I watched them pass, and I realized that the boys were all going to have sex with the girl. I knew it for a certainty. She seemed willing—she smiled and waved at us, rather like a bride—but I feared for her. This happened not long after my first reading of Campus Sexpot, and a scene in the book—a scene that I find disturbing still today—probably colored my interpretation. It begins with Linda phoning Mike because she needs to talk to him about something. Mike answered the phone. "Mike's Cat House," he said. "Where quail tail's for sale." "You're impossible, Mike," Linda said. "True enough, chick." They make arrangements for him to pick her up that evening, but when he does: They drove to a frosty shop on the edge of town, where Mike's three buddies climbed silently into the back seat. Mike says he needs to drop them off somewhere, but he drives deep into the woods. "This is the spot," he said. "Perfect, ain't it?" "Yeah," said one of his buddies. "Like rightsville." "What . . . what are you going to do?" Linda asked nervously. Mike explains that she must pay for the beating he suffered from Bill Alleyn at the Europa after the Friday-night dance. "You're going to make it up to me and my buddies. And I'll bet you can guess how." He grinned an evil, lecherous grin, made more horrible by the deep shadows cast by the dim lights from the dash. "I won't," Linda snapped fiercely. "I won't. You can't make me." "I think you will," Mike said. "There are enough of us to make sure that you do. You guys get out my side," he ordered. "I got firsts." "Lucky bastard," said the first boy as he got out. "Hurry up, Mike. I got sloppy seconds," the second boy said. Linda tries to talk Mike out of it but fails. Mike was soon ablaze with passion, but for the first time in her life Linda experienced nothing. Watching him in the near blackness and feeling him paw her, Linda hated him, hated all boys and men who sought her only as a sexual object. She vowed that this was the last time she would allow anyone to touch her until she married. "Listen, bitch," Mike said. "You give my buddies some, or I'll knock you silly, understand?" She nodded mutely. Mike left the car, and the next youth crawled in and began pawing her. She swallowed hard to keep back the tears. Later, torn both physically and emotionally, she stood weakly beside the car. "Not bad, huh, baby?" Mike said. After Mike roars off with his buddies, Linda walks down the road to a distant general store to telephone for help. When, during our surveying in the woods, I saw that girl and those guys, I knew that at best hooligan serial sex was about to happen. At worst, there was this possibility: although the guys knew they were going to have sex, maybe the girl didn't know it. And if she didn't, would she be free to decide one way or the other? I can't remember who the guys were—they are as anonymous to me now as Mike's unnamed buddies. I don't know who the girl was. I have no idea what happened that day. What I saw in that glimpse—the clunker zooming by, the cheerful wave—is all I really know.
Read an interview with David Carkeet |