"In a dark time, the eye begins to see": Theodore Roethke. I'd take flight from my Bronx friends if they prodded me to renounce my filthy habits. To me, scanning graphic, uncensored images was what freedom was all about. So many magazines, the choices overwhelmed me: Ah capitalism, ah humanity.
The clerk looked at us horny sexual rejects, every now and then reminding us this wasn't a public library, but a business, so if a magazine got damaged from handling, you had to buy it. Sometimes another clerk with a small baseball bat stood next to the cash register. I never saw semen-friendly women until those photos on magazine covers. Wasn't this what liberation was all about? Could that anarchist magazine offer anything grander than erections in women's hands?
And the peep shows: for a quarter a minute I saw everything needed to relieve myself behind the curtain. Such an easy operation, yanking off in private stalls, but I never did that. Businessmen, young, old and in between, all must have done that, but I refrained. Especially on a quiet morning, the start of a new shift, it would have been more clean-cut to yank off. There were paper tissues, wiper-uppers, as natural as Tampon dispensers. I even entered homosexual peep booths. Was that what the creator of Paramount, Adolph Zukor, had in mind when he started with nickelodeons in the early 1900s?
On Eighth Avenue, I never looked into the available prostitutes' faces, real women who used rooms of hotels surrounding me: too real, those proletarian hookers. To have something to talk about on my return, I often saw legitimate movies: The Magic Christian, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Midnight Cowboy. But what use was I to the Revolution, squandering my time in Times Square? I loved the environs' filthy streets, haggard folks, bums, hotdogs and sauerkraut, people talking to themselves. I even had a donut and coffee in Bickford's, the hangout of William Burroughs.
Both Maria and Kate would have given the green light. Sex was alive and throbbing in 1970. But, instead, I spent money on sexy movies showing more than Hollywood allowed. My personality was attuned to the solitude and sinister city-scapes of Edward Hopper's paintings.
When Kate's sister arrived from California, revising my life would be Julia's task. She wore a lamb's wool coat, knee boots, a colorful Russian peasant blouse, and a turquoise bandana around her head of shoulder-length blond hair. I thought her arguments stronger that Kate's. For Kate, power came in epigrammatic bursts, but Julia's strength was sustained by gentle flattery and steady persuasion.
Wouldn't it be a shame if I threw whatever creative talent I had down the shitter? The fact that Kate cared enough to tell Julia about me boosted my self-esteem, soaring higher than the Grateful Dead playing at the Fillmore. Julia gave me the address of Liberation magazine, said Dave Dellinger, a prominent anti-war speaker at rallies, hung around there, and made my non-believing soul feel guilty as sin if I didn't work for the magazine. The following day I walked into the magazine's office.
I barely spoke to anyone as I worked with a razor blade cutting out lettering for headlines. I hated it, lacking confidence to speak with others in the small office. Paranoia and suspicion rippled through the rooms, draining what little coherence I had. Females, who ran a radical women's liberation magazine next door, started singing The Internationale. "Arise ye workers from your slumber..." and then three others near me leaped up and joined others in the hall. "Servile masses arise, arise..." I was the only one who didn't get off their butt and start singing because I was ignorant and failed to commit to memory the immortal lyrics. Even Jim Morrison's long cut, "The End," which I played repetitiously in a mental ward during the summer of '68, hadn't lasted as long as the damn Internationale. It seemed they dragged out all the song's three verses only to highlight my outsider status. "The International unites the human race." I nearly panicked and fled, bolting down the stairs and head back to Times Square and porno.
But the anthem finished and they understood my non-participation as betrayal: I was an obvious informant. What kind of revolutionary wouldn't know the words to the ur-song of Revolution.
At lunch I didn't say a word but nervously laughed at a very funny joke told by the Jewish editor who used Borscht Belt dialect. Afterwards, back in the office, he gave me $80 and a Pitney Bowles stamp machine. I went to the nearest post office. They obviously discussed why such an odd mute would volunteer. Was I working for New York City's Red Squad? I bought postage and went back with the machine. At least they knew I wasn't a petty thief. I left for the Bronx at three, breathing comfortably, at last.
The next day, midmorning, Dave Dellinger arrived. I knew him from photos taken during the Moratorium demonstration last November. He was strident leader in the anti-Vietnam war movement. A friendly face, he looked at me without distrust and nodded, then swept into the inner office with the editor. Three staff members followed, shut the door, leaving me alone. I wasn't angry or hurt that they excluded me because I read in the radical leftist Guardian how the FBI infiltrated organizations and groups in the Movement. Their precautionary move was justified since I'd demonstrated nothing that bonded me with them.
When the door opened and Dellinger walked out talking with a staffer, both leaving the building, that was my cue. Ten minutes later, I exited quietly. The stint lasted two days. My friends never scolded me for being such a loser.
That Friday, Dorr declared he passed the required foreign language exam. He never set foot in a French class during his entire academic career. Student life entailed more than sex, drugs, hardball Marxism and demonstrations. He paid someone to take the test. Dorr hadn't time to learn another language other than fluent Spanish he could speak. After all, the second American Revolution would be heard and written in English, wouldn't it?
The ends justified the means. Dorr, Maria, Kate and I drank two bottles of Dom Perignon, complements of Maria's father, to celebrate the nimble rite of passage. I went to the trailer when they began fondling each other, thinking how natural that was, in theory, yet I couldn't do that. That was why I pulled off alone in the trailer while Kate was off to Tokyo or Rio de Janeiro. I imagined her in faraway places, doing it gangbang style, the raunchier the better. She'd told me she and six Japanese men went to a ski lodge together. Once stuck in my respective intellectual attic, it was impossible to step down the ladder back into the carnal house below.
I tripped on the step entering the trailer, surprised to find both Julia and Kate.
"We want your body, Ron," Julia said. Kate groaned, laughed furiously, and asked:
"Why don't you change into your paisley shirt, you look cute in it," she said to me.
Both tittered, and Julia sat close to me on the couch.
I thought that strange but enjoyed their manipulating me, so I looked for the shirt. I searched all over. Not only the shirt was missing but also the rest of my clothes. I even went into Kate's bedroom in the rear, a no-go zone at that point. Gotta find my clothes. Nakedness wouldn't prevail, not if I could help it. I, freak of nature, panicked, my voice tensed, fear swam in my belly, my skin went clammy, and my entire body blushed.
"Where, goddamnit, are my clothes?" The sisters howled. I'd have to spend a big wad of my traveler's checks on new clothes if they wouldn't turn up. I looked in the fridge, finding only Velveeta cheese and hotdogs. Then I opened the oven and all my clothes were jammed inside. I pulled them out and stuffed them into my suitcase.
"They stunk. You never wash them," Kate said. "Didn't your parents teach you personal hygiene?"
"Fear they taught, not the social arts." I sat next to Julia, Kate standing close.
I never looked at Julia, and tried to remain sexless, immune from desire. Kate stared at Julia. The root chakra controlled both sexuality and flight-or-fight response: Confusion staged a putsch.
"Julia, what are you doing?" Kate asked, and she smiled. I'd never seen her smile like that. Julia said nothing, and Kate rubbed her hips, her knee touching mine. I knew Julia showed her breasts, but I never turned to see them.
"Ron shouldn't see you like that, come on," Kate said. This reminded me of skits I saw at a Chicago burlesque show.
Finally, Julia rose, and buttoned her blouse. Julia slept with Kate in her single bed.
