The Reluctant Exhibitionist Read online

  These were drug-aided insights I hoped that Eivor could share—the experience of the Great White Light so as to lessen her general gloominess and fear of dying, and give her the fullest appreciation of the absurdities of social convention so that she would not go through unwarranted craziness whenever I happened to turn on to another woman.

  But it was out of my control. She took the tab, all right. But every time I tried to get her into the ultimate religious experience by reading to her from Timothy Leary’s adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, all she did was laugh and say, “How silly.” And then it was, “Come make love to me.”

  So here was I, lying in bed with Eivor after fucking for the fourth or fifth time, with my mind blown on two accounts. One was merely the juxtaposition of my past trip with her present one. I, a six-foot-tall, strong, and supposedly lustful male had been scared shitless by a five-foot, two-inch girlfriend guide, with so many thoughts flying through my head, when I wasn’t in a panic, that sexual, or any other, contact with a human being was the last thought in my mind. Whereas my presumably brittle, puritanical, scaredy-cat wife was relatively comfortable and copulating with man and nature.

  And secondly, I had been complaining both silently and openly for the past two years that Eivor wasn’t loving enough, available enough, or just plain cunty enough for me. But after the fifth fuck I wondered what I had made such a fuss about. An old Buddhist saying fluttered around in my mind: “The only thing worse than not getting what you want is having your heart’s desire.”

  Thursday, July 2

  Who am I?

  A thirty-five-year-old man. Married for seven years. Three sons. Citizen of the planet earth. A toad.

  Son of a loving father and a Jewish mother. Lover of sensuality and student of death. A Taoist come lately.

  An adolescent artist. A dabbbler in politics. An anarchist, socialist, humanist wearing the mask of a liberal Democrat.

  A psychiatrist. A group therapist. A defrocked psychoanalyst.

  A Toscanini of the tambourine.

  An aficionado of Alan Watts and John Lennon, psychedelic drugs, and “The Incredible String Band.”

  Most recently a writer.

  An aspirant to live out my desires, to presume nothing, to expect anything. A wanderer upon the Tantric road.

  Today I must confess experiencing a certain cowardice along my chosen path. No. “Chosen” is not the right word. For I could no more choose the road I wander than I could choose the time and circumstances of my birth. But I can report with some accuracy on the journey itself. And cowardice (or, at the very least, shyness or hesitancy) seems to me a correct assessment of the day’s major event.

  On Wednesday evening I took time off from my vacation. I traveled to Baltimore in order to do a television interview this morning publicizing my second book. Returning to New York I was supposed to meet Tom and Mary Boyle. They were working on a project designed to set up a center where the beautiful people could mix with the relevant ones—Panthers and politicians, leaders from business and bohemia, feminists, therapists, writers, the whole works. I was asked to be a charter member—and tonight’s meeting was one at which other interested people could hear more about the project.

  Yet the project interested me less than the prospect of seeing Tom and Mary. Tom was a former clergyman, a big, mustachioed, barrel-chested man of great gentleness and warmth. Mary, for whom he gave up God’s ministry, was and is a remarkably bright and beautiful woman. An archeologist by profession, she looked more like a beauty contest queen, with her long black hair, penetrating brown eyes, and inviting smile.

  It had been only six weeks ago that the three of us had come together, as it were. And I was eager to go beyond that previous encounter. Riding back to New York on the Metroliner, reading The Sensuous Woman, my mind raced from the “Butterfly Flick” (J’s description of how to give the perfect blow job) to our last meeting.

  We had gotten together at that time for the purpose of feasting on one another. Being virgins to that particular triangle we went through much hesitation and pot-smoking before the drama began. Stretching out on the floor of their apartment, surrounded by pillows and rugs, the sweet smell of cannabis filling the warm night air, we began to play with some acrylic paint. Tom placed his brush at the top of Mary’s forehead and slowly began to halve her, going down her nose, lips, chin, neck, and throat. Stopping at the top of her blouse, his eyes sparkling, glancing briefly at me and then intently back into Mary’s eyes, he began to unbotton her blouse and continued his stroke—now to her chest and then to her belly. I began to unhitch her slacks and continued the line myself, into the soft down of her black tuft. Then Tom undressed himself, and I did likewise. Waiting for the next step, my mind still too alert to please me (I could not subdue its watchfulness for all the grass in Mexico), I began willfully to stroke Mary’s cunt. But I wasn’t sure it was right. I was their guest. Should I be the first to take my friend’s wife? Would he mind?

  My question was soon answered when I became aware of Tom, hovering on all fours, his unshaven face above my crotch, lowering his head still further to suck upon my cock. The novelty of this, my first homosexual experience, quickly wore off. I closed my eyes, placed my fingers more deeply into Mary’s reassuring cunt, and felt Tom’s mouth pumping, sucking, pulling my cock ever more firmly and fully into his mouth. I soon realized that mouth on cock was mouth on cock, regardless of the body that was built around that mouth. If the suck was gentle and rhythmical it felt good and it felt right. And with that realization I gave myself up to the experience and exploded inside his mouth. He extracted all that remained by swallowing and sucking me dry. The three of us then disengaged and Tom mounted his wife.

  I lay there, spent, for a while and then felt a desire to be a part of them again. My cock still limp, I crawled behind Tom, who was now sandwiched by Mary and me, and began, by force of my own pelvic thrusts, to whip him more insistently into Mary. His body fell limp, and I, sensing the power of a steam-hammer operator, drove him ever more frenziedly home. Mary’s legs went askew, her arms extended past Tom, her fingers dug desperately into my back, and her sighs and groans filled the room. Then the moans and noises of all of us got lost, one upon the other. My mind went blissfully to sleep and the three of us achieved union.

  The spiritual high I received from being part of their orgasm soon aroused me again, and greedily I determined to have Mary myself. She was resting on a couch in the corner of the room looking radiant and at peace. But as I moved toward her and mounted her I had a sense of incompleteness—an incompleteness born not so much from guilt over Tom’s exclusion, but from sensing that as he had done to me, so did he wish from me. And by the feeling that whatever happened that night should rightfully be shared by all.

  Moving on Mary, I saw Tom, lying on his back, watching us. His prick began to swell, softly at first, rising and falling from side to side, like those speeded-up films of plants growing. I motioned him with my hand and mouth to join us, and he did. As he stood above us I began sucking mechanically on his cock, for my attention was really focused on my own, which was now fully expanded and ripe inside of Mary’s cum-filled cunt.

  After my orgasm, when my last drops of semen fell quietly into Mary, I no longer had interest in him. I removed my mouth from his prick (somewhat contritely for not having completed my suck-off end of the bargain), dismounted Mary, and pushed Tom back in my place, where together they came again.

  I left that evening feeling good, sheepish, and strange. My mouth had lost its virginity and I felt that to be, if not a breakthrough, at least another new experience to chalk up along the Tantric road. Still, I hesitated in sharing it with others. Would they think I was mad … or perverse? In my heart of hearts I knew it was true and right and good. Yet how would others receive it? Could I tell Eivor? Better not. She didn’t like the Boyles very much. And I was sure that she would see my quest to experience everything solely in sexual terms. Psychoanalysis has taught Everyman and hi
s wife to see sexual symbolism in any and all mundane transactions. What it has not done is to make people realize that sexual transactions are also symbolic of such things as the desire to achieve harmony, union, and closeness, to abolish jealousy and possessiveness, to know oneself and others more fully, and to ponder on the mysteries of one’s own birth. And what better way to do that than to explore with your eyes and hands and nose and mouth and feet and prick the cunts and cocks of oneself and others.

  I was still lost in this remembrance as the train pulled into Grand Central station at four-thirty. I realized, upon reading J, that I had not really experienced “cock in my mouth.” And it was not just that “anycock’lldo”—as the rooster said—but Tom’s in particular that I wanted to know and know fully. I hoped that the three of us could get it together again.

  By five I had arrived at the Boyle’s home—some two hours before the meeting was to begin—sweaty and turned on. I was greeted at the door by Tom and we embraced in a warm and friendly way. Mary, wearing and open shirt and nothing else, gave me a quick hello and friendly peck when I stepped inside. “So far so good,” I thought, and after a few remarks back and forth about nothing in particular I went to their bathroom to shower.

  Coming out, clad only in a towel, I sat down on the floor at the foot of the couch where Tom and Mary were sitting. My arm was draped casually over Tom’s knee. I looked at him invitingly and he looked back with equal openness. Yet neither of us said much of anything. After some more “catching-up” conversation among the three of us, I broached the subject by telling Mary that it would be nice to continue where we left off last month.

  “I’ve been off men for the last three weeks,” she replied sharply, and then went on with a whole lot of women’s liberation shit and how she was more turned on to girls at the moment.

  We sat around and talked until the meeting began. But I knew that I still had enough shame to fail to be out front with my desire. I wanted Mary involved as a catalyst, one that would mask my outright desire for Tom. Instead I used her reluctance as a cop-out.

  IV

  “Doctor Shepard sucks wood,” Harcout gleefully explodes. He is a young, militant, bright, goateed Black Muslim, currently serving a two-year sentence for armed robbery at the New York City Adolescent Reformatory at Rikers Island. “I thought you was just jivin’ us when you told that story before, but damn …” He shakes his head, half in admiration, half in contempt.

  “You are a crazy, mother-fuckin’ psychiatrist,” says Tommie, another twenty-year-old Black. A child with the strength and size of a giant, he is about to be paroled after having served two and a half years for burglary and narcotics possession.

  We are all seated about a table in the prison library, having a group encounter. I’ve been working here part-time now for well over two years. And I enjoy the give and take with these men. They have just finished leafing through the first three chapters of this autobiography.

  “Who are these people in your dedication—Judy, Eivor, Marc, Richard, Yan, and Mac?” asks Rafael, better known as “Bluebeard.”

  “Judy is the woman I’m living with now; Marc, Yan, and Richard are my eldest sons, Eivor is the wife I recently separated from, and Mac is my father.”

  “And I’m one of those you’ve pained and loved?” Bluebeard retorts—it is more of a statement than a question. He is playing with me, I know. A mean, mean heroin addict, he has mellowed a lot in the two years we’ve been meeting. His smile has less of a sneer in it now, and I know he genuinely likes me and wants me to like him back, in spite of his embarrassment over stating this directly. Only a few months ago he paid me the high compliment of calling me “an all-right honky.”

  “Where’s your respect? You’re crazy,” says Stan, another adolescent convict. “How you think your wife going to feel, lettin’ everybody know you’re plowin’ her?”

  “I don’t see what she’d have to object to. She’s a damn good fuck. And I loved her. That’s respectful, to me.”

  “But what about privacy? You want everybody to know your business?

  “You act like I was up to something ’specially bad,” I counter. “What’s the big deal? Every man fucks his wife. It’s no different than anything anyone else is doing.”

  Heads shake in bewildered disbelief.

  These men/boys in prison, nearly all Black or Puerto Rican, surely are a paradoxical bunch. To steal a woman’s purse, to beat up a prostitute and steal her money or her dope, to threaten a reluctant date with physical violence unless she puts out for him and/or his friends is par for the course for many of these men. Yet they will guard their mothers’ reputation with the last drop of their life’s blood. And they are genuinely shocked by what they feel to be my lack of civility in candidly discussing my sex life with Eivor.

  I am glad of that. Glad that I have been able to gain their respect. Glad that I am able to shock them. Glad that I have the ability to confuse them and get them at least to question their moral priorities, whether it involves privacy, their reverse racism, or their sneering attitude toward homosexuality.

  “So Doctor Shepard sucked wood. So what?” I ask. At first, the crazy psychiatrist is playfully serious: “One or two sucks, you know, make you a philosopher. It’s only when you get into the habit that you’ve got any right to call yourself a homosexual.”

  But the ploy doesn’t work. Harcout keeps up his attack. I know he respects my forthrightness even if he sees this homosexual experience as something that has made me less of a man. He sneers. He shakes his head. He teases. He feels he’s got me in a corner, and he wants to make a kill.

  It’s heating up and I’m grooving on the adrenalin pumping, enjoying my anxiety. Enjoying my role as counter-puncher.

  I explode. “What kind of mother-fucking bullshit are you laying down on me? You and your superman, super-dude, macho bullshit. Fucking among you cats here goes on like there’s no tomorrow. Every time the homosexuals pass down the hall, it’s all you guys can do to sit in your seats and stay in this room. Your eyes open up like they’re never gonna close again.”

  There are shouting and protestation from all sides. Great passion, great heat. Not much light yet, but real involvement all the same. I overshout them all and go on.

  “And this ridiculous bag you’re all coming out of. You go and take off some other poor kid, dick him in the ass, and then insult him as being the homosexual. Well, whose dick is it in his ass? Yours, isn’t it? What makes him the homosexual and not you?”

  Reasons, denials, excuses, rebuttals fall like angry rain.

  “I’ve never pal’d anyone in this place, and there’s no man here can say I have,” Harcout proudly shoots back. “I’m not interested in any man’s ass or dick or nothin’. It’s a sign of weakness in a man.”

  Bluebeard feels it should be evident to all that in any sexual encounter between men it is the passive partner who is the true homosexual. And the surly contempt he feels for those he’s “pal’d” or “plowed” or “stuck” just goes to prove that it’s the other fellow, and not he himself, who is the homosexual. It’s never occurred to him that neither of them is a homosexual.

  Poor, sad, dumb motherfuckers. They just don’t seem to realize that it’s all okay. That if you’re horny you have to get it off one way or another. And that masturbation is not as meaningful as an involvement between two human beings. But they have to degrade it, insult it, deny the affectional component, lest they feel less adequate as “men.”

  “Let me tell you something. It took me thirty-five years to become sure enough of myself as a man so that I could allow myself this experience of sucking my friend’s cock.”

  It’s quieter now. I think I’ve gotten something across. Something that might make them more tolerant both of themselves and others. Something that might lessen their meanness.

  “Anyway, Harcout … do you like what you’ve read?” I ask.

  “Real psychedelic … but, yeah. Yeah!” He looks me in the eye and smiles. The fi
ghting is over. “That all you going to have in your book?”

  “No. I want to get in some serious things, too. Not just things that have been important in my personal life, but things that go beyond that—like what’s been happening in prisons, for example.”

  Last week during one of our biweekly sessions, this same group of adolescents tape-recorded their experiences both in and out of jail. They wanted to do an article or a book based on the recording. And well they might. For the way we run our prisons reflects much of what is wrong with our society. Not only wrong but short-sighted.

  But nobody seemed interested in publicizing the material. “We’ve already done enough pieces on prisons,” said an editor of The New York Times Magazine (this was before Attica).

  “There’s no market for another prison book,” said my agent. “People don’t really give enough of a damn.”

  I drop this load at your doorstep, Mayor John V. Lindsay, because I think you don’t give enough of a damn. If you cared more—or cared less but had more foresight—you would at the very least fire George McGrath and get yourself a Commissioner of Corrections who knew something about rehabilitation.*

  I drop this load at your doorstep, Mr. McGrath, for being overly fearful of the prisoners in your institutions and for the “good name” of your department.

  I drop this load at your doorstep, prisoners, for not sticking together and respecting one another. For involving yourselves in petty personal crimes and in-fighting instead of attacking the social evils that have spawned you.

  I drop this load at your doorstep, citizens, for not waking up to the fact that your “guardian-of-morality,” short-sighted drug laws are as responsible for your getting mugged, robbed, shot, and taxed into oblivion as are the so-called criminals themselves.

  Perhaps 80 percent of the people in jail at Rikers Island are serving time there because you have made it illegal to buy drugs over the counter. With that you immediately legislate an enormous number of crimes without victims; people are arrested simply for possession, sale, or use of some narcotic or psychedelic agent. These laws initiate the endless cycle of thievery and assault that becomes necessary to support an illicit habit. Drugs that in an open market would cost pennies a day wind up costing fifty to a hundred dollars or more. And to support a fifty-dollar heroin habit means that an addict must steal three hundred dollars worth of merchandise for resale. Either that or take the fifty directly from you at gun point. How much simpler if he could just buy his fix at the local drug store!