Sexist Pendulum

1970s

People are always talking about backlashes, about pendulums swinging the other way. In my experience cultural ricochets are fairly feeble phenomena: the genocidee is seldom much of a threat to the genocider, a few ex-peasants killed a few ex-aristocrats, but I can't think of any ex-peasants who enslaved any ex-aristocrats over any long series of generations.

Feminism is nothing new. It wasn't new in the 1960s. It wasn't new when GBS dramatized strong women in the early Twentieth Century. It's not just that Shakespeare had already done it; it's that Shaherazade had done it many centuries earlier: and I doubt that she was the "first." But extreme expressions of feminism are not an everyday occurrence: at least not on the personal level: at least not for this person.

Construction workers whistle at the girls, make raucous comments, occasionally lewd suggestions ... Some women say they object. Many actually may. I remember a story about 50's super-model Suzy Parker (see her cameos in the credits of Stanley Donen's great Funny Face [1957]). Suzy is walking down the rue in Paris with the likewise delicious Juliette Greco. The guys whistle. Parker gets all huffy: good Puritan American pseudo-virgin; Greco turns and blows kisses. Parker questions her. Greco defends the men's action and hers. Suzy Parker rethinks culture.

But any picture of a bunch of gals lolling around the saw horse, making sucking noises at any males that pass, is imaginary: 99% fiction. Though isolated incidents do occur. I got slurped and sucked at—very loudly—on the only occasion on which I ever walked through Brooklyn in my army uniform. September 1963. I was on my way from my new apartment on Manhattan's 4^th Street off Second to Fort Hamilton where the First Army was to release me from bondage a month early so I could "better" myself with a master's degree. (I assure you: my MA made me not one whit better than I already was.) The route exposed this momentary pedestrian to a "black" neighborhood. Let me tell you, those girls make their sucking suggestions more shrilly than any oral tricks I could perform without sticking two pairs of fingers in my mouth to whistle: and this despite the fact that I'd locked myself out of my new digs short the army's black leather shoes and my army cap. Otherwise in uniform, I jumped on the subway: already late. Fort Hamilton sent me right back home again: threatening to send me to the brig. (I didn't believe them. I think they were as anxious to be rid of me as I was to be gone.) (They'd never before met me at Fort Hamilton, but they learned fast enough.) (Those details may turn up in my army directory.)

I regret that I never passed that crowd of girls again. If I had, I might have been ready for them: might have laid straight down on the sidewalk so they could take turns squatting on my face. You wanna suck me? I'll show you who likes to suck.

Sudden memory: the first girl ever to grab my dick — uninvited — and pinch —hard — can't have been more than eight years old. I was eighteen and working for the municipal parks department. The bunch of us were sent to paint a fence in, your guessed it, a "black" neighborhood. This little girl apparently hadn't heard about feminine passivity.

(The second girl ever to grab my dick — uninvited — stank of cheap wine and poor hygiene. She too was hardly WASP. She soon got her comeuppance but I don't think it had anything to do with morality.) (That story is told elsewhere.)

I began this memoir thinking that the coming event was a first. But no. As I write it I recall other incidents: cultural reverses. So I just leap straight to my intended goal. I was walking on Madison Avenue. 1973. I was within a block of the gallery where I was Director: Madison and 76^th: a few doors up from the Whitney; several doors down from Southby's across the street. It was after closing time. I'd stepped out for some reason, having stayed late, as usual. I was on my way back to the gallery to close up, grab my helmet, jump on the Yamaha, and spew blue smoke as I blatted and exhaust-farted in a streak through Central Park and westward.

New Yorkers are used to numerous bodies in close proximity. But sometimes you sense a particular one: as a warning; or as an attraction. There was that time I almost caught my tongue under the car tire as I gawked at the ass a half a block away. She turned to look. She felt me rooting in her privates, my eyes alone about to fertilize her, and she turned: almost immediately: and smiled: such a sunny smile: and I saw that she was only eleven or twelve years old!

Well this time I'm walking along and sense a particular person right behind me, practically touching. When she spoke, it was right in my ear: not whispered, but softly crooned: yet there was no actual contact: not of so much as a hair from her head tickling my ear hairs.

Ah, here's something walking ...
[demoting me to a thing]

with something in his pants,
something between his legs ...

I swear I remembered her exact words, remembered them for years, thought I'd be able to spit them right up here, no trouble, photographic recall ... But it's been three decades. I leave my recall as it is. Better memory will bring me back if I can make the time. But I ask you to imagine. She went on: right at my ear.

I walked without turning. Suddenly I was at my gallery door. My hand went to my pocket. Out came my keys. I turned to the entrance ... and she was no longer at my ear. I didn't turn to scan the crowd, didn't try to guess which one she was. The voice was ... oh, thirty-something: I think. I matched my interpretation with no back, no ankles walking away: sought no turned head: evidence of her taking another look. I just poked my key into the hole, tumbled the lock tumblers, and was inside.

Now why didn't I spin around and catch her mid croon? Why didn't I stick my mouth against her ear—whatever she proved to look like—and croon to her that my gallery was a mere step away, that I had a private basement, that I could relock the door, take her downstairs, and show her, by then, that what she sensed hanging between my legs, the elastic part of it at least, was now standing at a stiff oblique, more by my belly button than by my knee ...?

I didn't. She'd been right. Everything was still hanging: merely. Nothing was saluting, nothing at attention. There was nothing erotic about the experience: merely curious.

And I suppose it's a good thing. I'm sixty-three: sixty-three and a half by now. My damn army barracks gave me crab lice in basic training. I couldn't help that. And getting rid of them was a horror. They lingered till I'd infected my girl friend as well. But apart from those outer critters (though they do poke around under the skin), I've experience no inner critters: none that don't come naturally to the healthy. I've suffered no clap, no syph.

I guess I've had cold sores, but doesn't everybody? I had them as a kid. We must be born with those critters: virgins and everybody.

My pecker's been in more than one place, and any place at all is a risk. So I've been lucky.

But it ain't just luck: not dumb luck. I took chances, but I also exercised judgments that turn out to have been fairly right. I picked up a Barnard girl in the library one night and walked her home. She phoned me a month later to tell me that she'd apparently been incubating something. We hadn't exactly fucked, but I had been rooting around pretty close, she'd had me in her hand ... against her cheek ...

No. I lucked that one too.