The Reality of the Realist

From the late 50's through most of the 60's, The Realist served as what Mad Magazine had been for all of the 20-something lefties in America.. It was shocking, non-linear, funny and way out front. And always irreverent. A number of schools refused to distribute mail subscriptions in dorm mail-boxes. It printed stories about all sorts of semi-unmentionable things, sometimes by famous people. Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller (Catch 22) each wrote the odd squib for the cheaply printed black and white journal. The issues would arrive unpredictably in size varying from 8 to 32 pages. The 10th anniversary issue appeared in 1970, not exactly a decade after the first one back in June of '58.

A subscription for 10 issues cost three bucks in 1958.

It also sold red, white and blue bumper stickers, with stars, which read "Fuck Communism!" It suggested that if anybody complained, the owner should shout "Go back to Russia, you dirty commie!"

It could be very funny. A near perfect example of Realist style was a boxed feature in a 1959 issue written by Max Shulman. Shulman wrote campus novels which greatly appealed to frat boys, and in the late 50's, for a year or two, he wrote a humor column which ran in college papers as an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes. Yes, children, once upon a time cigarette companies advertised in student newspapers.

Anyway, the prototypical passage reads as follows: (it's a little long, but please bear with me. And him.)

Sociology teaches us that man is a social animal. It is not instinct or heredity that determines his conduct;p it is environment. this fact is vividly borne out when you consider the case of Julio Sigafoos.

Julio, abandoned as an infant in a dark wood near Cleveland, he was adopted by a pack of wild dogs and reared as one of their own. When Julio was found by a hunter at the age of twelve, the poor child was more canine than human. He ran on all fours, barked and growled, ate raw meat, lapped water with his tongue and could neither speak nor understand one single word. In short, he was a complete product of his environment.

Julio, incidentally, was more fortunate than most wild children. They never became truly humanized, but Julio was exceptional. Bit by bit, he began to walk and talk and eat and drink as people do. His long dormant mental processes, when awakened at last, turned out to be fantastically acute.

He was so bright that he learned to read and write in a month, got through grammar school in three years, and high school in two. And last June as thousands of spectators knowing the odds Julio had overcome, stood and raised cheer after cheer, he was graduated valedictorian from Cal Tech with a degree in astrophysics!

Who can say to what towering heights this incredible boy would have risen had he not been killed the day after commencement while chasing a car?

One jape I actually remember was a line in a list of useful things to remember to get out of embarrassing accidents. If you accidentally pull a condom out of your pocket, you should simply say, while deftly picking it up, "Yeah, there a lot of clap going round lately."

Probably the most notorious issue was #74, which contained a story based on the contentless news that Jackie Kennedy wanted to clean up some of the sections in the just completed authorized biography of JFK by William Manchester. Nobody knew what the issues were, so Paul Krasner, the Realist's editor, told us.

His tale prompted the magazine printer to refuse to print the document. It included a passage discussing LBJ fucking the throat wound in JFk's corpse as Air Force One flew back from Dallas to Washington.

Do not stop reading on the first page. The scandalous stuff is on page 18.

I have remembered The Realist not only with affection, but with respect. It either greatly influenced or else utterly reflected a tectonic change going on in the American culture. However, it never seems to get talked about. No old copy has ever popped up when going through a box of forgotten personal effects. But all I could really recall was the gestalt and not the texture.

And then, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the fact that somebody has been putting all the old Realist issues on line, and I have been leafing through the electronic pages, trying to relive my life.

Lawyers, more than most, know about the vagaries of memory. The worst disservice I can inflict upon a client is to believe him, because no client ever tells the truth, and if one gets caught in what looks like a lie, it can eviscerate a whole case. Clients can't be trusted because they just don't remember things right. Sometimes they lie intentionally -- because they are guilty, or embarrassed. More often, they have come to be convinced of the precision of their own distorted memories. Because we keep letters and other documents around so much longer than most people, in at least somewhat organized form, I have, more than once, had the experience of discovering from my own documents that my own vivid and certain recollection of things I did or witnessed is simply utterly wrong.

So, I was shocked but not surprised to discover how non-edgy the Realist was, for the most part. Civil rights represented a real issue. The pill was a hot controversy. Mixed marriages between Jews & goys were worth several pages of discussion. The Roman Catholic Church was a lot more dangerous than the radio evangelists.

While the magazine worked hard at achieving a consistent tone of bad taste, most of that is by now quite flavorless. However, at a distance of a half century, some of the throw-away jokes are now inconceivably tasteless. For example, this smart-ass crack: Some public spirited publisher ought to put out a handbook for Negro youngsters who want to learn how to behave properly. Chapters could include "Power Spitting for Beginners," "Arson Can Be Fun," and "How To Throw Bombs Without Violating a Federal Law."

Most startling perhaps is the essential irrelevance of gays. There is one fag joke on the cover of the very first page, but the first substantial attention I have noted comes only in issues #36, in the summer of '62. Three consecutive issues are largely devoted to printing the transcript of a long radio program on NYC's WBAI. The editorial introduction explains that "Recently WBAI was approached, --on the basis of its belief in the right of minority expression -- to allow homosexuals to speak for themselves as persons and not as objects of study. The result of that request was a taped informal conversation carried on by a group of seven practicing and therefore anonymous homosexuals." This was daring stuff.

The issue for May/June 1970 (and the only issue to come out in 1970) had a banner headline: National Guard 4 -- Kent State 0. It also had two big stories. One was titled: Charles Manson Was My Bunkmate. The other was Behind the Gay Liberation Front. The latter explored, shortly after Stonewall, the raging battles within the fledgling gay rights movement: the right ring wanted gay marriage while the left opposed such bourgeois submission. The article is interminable and impossibly dated - but this is where we were on the radical fringes just four decades back.

It's worth taking a look at, The Realist, both because it still is funny and because it is so dated. There has been some hard travelin'.

PS. For those too lazy to look, the LBJ fucking JFK story starts here and jumps to here. And, since you're so close, you might also check out this homage to the real world of Disney.

Does This Boy Have Flaxen Hair

I have a problem. Or several.

Many months ago, I noticed that there was someone named Ryan who was posting a lot of comments on Jackdaw's blog, comments which tended to be strikingly smart and insightful. And also shrewd. When Jack posted about getting blown in a gay bar near my home when he made a surprise trip to the States last Spring, Ryan responded with a list of a dozen bars where he thought this might have happened. And the right one was on the list. When I screwed up and posted a couple entries which if read together provided a clue as where Jack was writing from, I corrected my error after only two or three people had even read my blog. But one of them was Ryan, who solved the unstated problem.

The comment connections indicated that Ryan had a blog, but it was only open to invited readers. I asked Jack to see if he could get me the password; he asked Ryan who invited me in. I found Ryan's blog to be admirable, from the very start; the author had a voice of his own, an ear for the good line and an eye for the revealing detail. Now and then he revealed himself to be an obtuse adolescent asshole, but that's entirely appropriate for someone still in college.

I have a knack for writing a good fan letter. I sent one to Ryan and we've been corresponding regularly and at length since last May. My amazement has grown geometrically.

It was obvious from his blog that Ryan had a serious interest in music - but the music which interested him seriously was rap and hip-hop, -- a taste which could scarcely be more foreign to my own. For some reason I can't recall, I sent him a link to the ravishingly beautiful song which concluded the memorial service for my late wife. I was astounded by his response: he understood it. If you are in a mood to be moved, here it a link to it, but be forewarned that the static graphic is utterly inappropriate to the words and music.

And then, an equally grave gamble, I sent him the song sung by Jack after he climbs down the beanstalk in Sondheim's Into The Woods, a song not simply about giants in the sky, but simultaneously as song about puberty. (Now a days, we all know what it really is that grow so mysteriously big at night while lying in bed, and its connection to a couple seeds.) It's a beautiful piece of work, but subtle and delicate. And Ryan got it. He reported finding himself singing about sky bourn giants while in the aisles of the grocery store as he shopped for staples.

I started sending stuff off at an accelerating clip. Sondheim, Weill, Piaf. Not everything worked, which only confirmed my sense that his customary excited pleasure of discovery was genuine. I even started throwing in the odd, short, simple, complex bit of poetry -- Hopkins and Houseman. Routinely, there were references he could not pick up because he lacked the context, but just as routinely he saw the subtext on first viewing, including the intense but wholly obscured homosexual meaning of the marching soldier's glance. My high school English teachers never noticed that the poem reeked of homosexual longing.

I learned that Ryan had had a standard enough utterly wretched childhood. Knowing he had gone to college in Connecticut, I assumed he was a Yalie with working class identification issues. I was wildly wrong, but had graduated from four years of public higher education which seem to have left him largely as ignorant of the humanities as he was when he entered. I seemed to be meeting one of the most acute minds I had ever run into, but utterly virginal with respect to conventional art. (He had somehow, on his own, found Debussy and had fallen in unlikely love with the super delicate girl with the flaxen hair.) I could hardly have constructed a more unlikely first steps into classical music.

This was not the only astounding virginity to emerge. While had bedded and blogged about lots of girls, he also disclosed that he had yet to have sex with another guy. He knew that he wanted to, he knew that he someday would, but not yet. The gay bars he rattled off to Jack were all the result of his careful reading and research, all as unexperienced as was he inexperienced. I'm not even sure that the guy is gay, but he's profoundly attracted to something. It might be rebellion and defiance, not cock. But its something he needs to do, if only to learn that he doesn't need it.

I find myself deeply intrigued and determined to learn just who this idiot savant is. But Ryan stated early on that he never meets anybody encountered through the Internet. I've assured him that I am not going to attempt to pierce through to the secret identity, though he has dropped enough random factoids to permit a search. I've gone on to assure him that my interest is not focused on what's in his pants, but rather upon what's in his head.

One possible answer to the question of who Ryan is of course, is that he isn't, that he is the literary creation of some middle aged faggot queen with keenly developed taste who has invented this persona simply for Internet titillation. I met Jack in the first place because in the early days of discovery (of the internet and, perhaps, myself), I was playing around on line, pretending to be a bright and breathless youth. Jack has told the story. Possible but unlikely, since the effort to sustain such a consistent and developing fiction over years of blogging would require a level of effort and concentration out of proportion to whatever satisfaction he might derive from the game. And, further, anybody who would play so prolonged and consuming a game would have to be interesting in his own right.
A more personally flattering possibility would be that Ryan really is as turned on by the intention, intelligence and artistic entry I have been giving him, and fears that were we to meet, I would be so disappointed that the relationship, whatever it is, would rapidly eviscerate. Maybe he's ugly, maybe he eats with his fingers, maybe he speaks with an impenetrable Azerbaijani accent.

It is also possible (and even more dangerously flattering) to take seriously the seductive asides which have started to emerge in his messages. He recently wrote:


"I get upset when you say that you're not gonna make a move on me. I knowyou're not gonna rape me. Also, I've been raped before, and it's not that big of a deal. I'm positive that you are not gonna make a move on me when you see me.

"If anything, I'm gonna wanna sleep with you because I put you in that Daddy role. Yeah, I went there. I also don't think I'm dumb. I know I'm dumb, and I think it's more endearing in real life than it is on the computer. But I know I haven't given you any other reasons why we haven't met yet.

"It's the same reason why I'm not trying to date anybody. It's the same reason why I been trying to not talk to you on MSN every day even though I love talking to you. It just makes the relationship bigger. It just makes it hurt more for all parties involved (but I don't care about how I will feel because I can take it) when I'm upset or when I disappear - and that happens a lot. I'm sad. I'm not good. I'm bad news. Stay away. Stay away. Stay away."


Is he putting the make on me? I have told him that I'm perfectly safe because I am so fucking well aware of being 69 years old, 30 pounds overweight, unavoidably bald and by and large unable to get it up any more. He responded, "Also, being 30 pounds overweight is not so bad when I'm trying to gain 25. Also, if you think bald is bad, you've really got no idea how gay I can be. Also, as long as your butt still works, it doesn't matter. But I'm not in love with you or anything. I'm just saying."

Eliza died nearly four months ago. Since then, I've been OK with the knowledge that my active sexual life was over. Because of her illness, there had been no heavy duty sex for many months prior to that. Now, while it is not surprising, I am nevertheless surprised to realize that there is still some spark within me which thinks that it would be nice to touch the body of a young man I've come to care for. I'm also aware that of how appalled I am by the prospect of becoming not just a dirty old man, but a fatuous old fool as well.

I have no aching wish to sleep with Ryan, -- but what if he in fact wants to sleep with me? I want to know who this kid is and what the fuck if going on, but do I really want to know the answer?

Jack writes that he can sense quite well how people think and feel about others, except when the other is himself. Not everyone is as good as he on the former front; the latter lament is pretty universal.

Can anyone out there answer the simple question: What the fuck is going on?

Bloody Busy

A couple months ago I had progressed all the way to half a century back in the planned exposition of my life. I had left house and high school and was standing outside a college dorm with a gaggle of other awkward over-read sixteen year olds fervently discussing really weighty topics. I had finally left the hearth for home.

What follows is probably egocentric excess, but it does show where I have come from.

My university and I were built for each other. The first couple years, I managed to straight-A my way through the curriculum. Can anybody imagine reading Milton's Paradise Lost three times before the final. That gave way a bit as I confronted the joys of being a master of the universe, or at least the campus. My glowing ambition was to become a great playwright, winning the Pulitzer before I was old enough to drink. I got involve in the theatre and was lucky enough to get cast in the part Tyrone Power played on Broadway in my first show. But, the theatre wasn't getting enough publicity in the student newspaper, so I joined the paper staff to slip some extra press into its pages, and soon enough was "Culture Editor". And then the editor-in-chief and the president of the theatre. And then came student politics.

Perhaps my most glowing moment as an undergraduate was a weekend where a weekend regional conference of student leaders which I had organized was held on campus. I was planning on running for chairman of the group in the elections at the end of the conference. I was also in the last week of rehearsals of the full length Cocteau play I was directing at the theatre, which production was the focus of the formal BA thesis I was also writing. There was, as always, the weekly newspaper to produce. And then, there was the abrupt scheduling of a screening of Cocteau's by me unseen key movie, Le Sang d'un Poete by the campus film society, right in the middle of everything. Because I was running everything I was able to manipulate the schedules so that in the middle of publication, rehearsal and convention, I was able to slip away from the lot for an hour to see the flick. True masters of the universe must feel all of the time as I did at that moment.

A key part of the pleasurable sense of near omnipotence was the sense, as I sat there in the dark screening room, that nobody in the world knew what I had done, indeed nobody in the world even knew where I was, except for the head of the film society who had of course let me in for free since he, too, wanted to ensure good free publicity in the paper.

At that point, it had yet to occur to me that I would spend the rest of my life at one or another school much like this, if not this itself, as an academic playing with art and ideas and schedules. And then the CIA fucked everything up. But, that's another post.

Prince of Tired

Last weekend I saw a performance of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre This was a play I had never before seen, never read, never heard anything about. This promised to be an almost unique opportunity to experience Shakespeare without any preconceptions.

It turns out that there were very good reasons for my ignorance. I have always half believed that man had a moral duty to know everything. There just may be a foot note exception to the general rule covering Pericles. Not only were both script and production beyond redemption, but the subsequent discovery that this was among the guy's most popular works during his lifetime calls into question the reputation of the entire Elizabethan age. This show wouldn't pass muster as a summer television series.

Meanwhile, there is a story I am exceedingly eager to hear. Jackdaw has been off in Ireland for over a week, and has had two extended stays with Sam and took Sam and his parents out to dinner in Belfast. (Sam and Jack seemingly had Dublin all to themselves.) Last I heard, Sam had described Jack to the folks as a straight widower from the Continent. Sam's been too busy to do more than stammer out a few flash points; Jack hasn't been heard from at all. There have to be good stories to come.

And the only reflected comfort I can take from my Periclean disappointment is that there is still always King John, about which I know only that Shakespeare never got around to mentioning the Magna Carta.

First Queer Kiss

Another sweet and I hope short and simple story, with even a shimmer of hope in it.

I have been following the soul of Trinidad and Tobago for over 40 years now. For accidental reasons, I have been able to do so from the inside.

For years, I was unable to see any significant signs of anything gay down there. There was the transvestite dancer who would make ritual appearances at Hindu weddings. One knew that the designers of the flamboyant costumes in the dancing bands at Carnival had to be fags. There were rumours of a gay bar somewhere near the Hilton in Port of Spain. Deep into my personal adventure, I met and came to care for a closeted East Indian Muslim boy, and through him met a few other members of the tribe, and, of course, I knew what the actual statistics had to show. But there were no visible signs of any actual gays being themselves. This was particularly true in the rural almost entirely East Indian Southern part of Trinidad, the section I knew best.

Late last year, two close friends about whom I should someday write much more than I shall here, Dane and Lorand, decided they wanted to spend two winter weeks on a warm vacation where Lorand at least could scuba dive. Dane was interested in Trinidad from all my stories, and Lorand already knew that the coral reefs around Tobago were splendid for diving, so my offer to help plan a two week vacation for them there was accepted. Later it developed that I could get away for the middle week of their two week trip to lead them about directly.

I arranged to spend half a week among my friends in the South. I was, however, uneasy with the possible resentment of my fobbing off a couple unwanted faggots upon them, so took the politically incorrect precaution is asking the intended hosts if they would be uncomfortable extending hospitality to a pair of homosexuals. I felt no need to talk of trios.

As I expected, I was assured that all my friends would be welcomed. I don't know if the answers were truthful when given, but it turned out to be true enough. Dane and Lorand were smart, gracious, interested and respectful and they were a big hit. I suspect the Indians' feelings were not unlike the pleasure white guys felt thirty or forty years ago when they could finally claim to have a black dude as a buddy.

We stayed in the home of a guy I've known for 41 years who had moved to New York City with his family. The otherwise empty house was lived in by a cousin, a 20-something student named Faleen, who was delighted to have late night conversations with three worldly urban intellectuals who were prepared to take him seriously. It was a happy and educational visit all around. We've each been invited back, -- not that I need one.

Last week, Faleen passed through New York on his way to Canada where he is starting to do graduate work. Dane and Lorand offered to reciprocate the earlier hospitality and invited Faleen out for drinks and dinner. I tagged along.

We started in a preposterous and implausible East Village bar masquerading as a speak easy. One cannot even enter without an arduously obtained reservation. Entrance is through a non-descript falaffel store where one goes into a telephone booth, punches a discrete buzzer and a secret panel opens in the back of the booth and one enters the bar as if entering the center of sin.

Faleen and I sat across the dark corner table from the other guys, sipping away are preposterous cocktail constructions. Lorand had been away for a week and he and his lover were manifestly glad to see each other. In Trinidad, their behavior had been impeccable. I had even taken the precaution of asking Faleel if he would be uncomfortable if they shared the same bed in the house he was guarding. Their East Village behavior was also impeccable, but from a different standard. They embraced and had a long deep kiss in the mouth.

I'm sure Faleen had never before seen two men kiss. I'm no less sure that Faleen is straight. He was delighted. He whipped out his cell phone so he could record the embrace. He then asked if he could put his arm around me and asked one of them to photograph us.

His pride with himself for being such a sophisticated man of the world as to be able to sit across a table from two faggots french kissing and not only be OK with the sight, but be on a first name basis with each was glowing.

The world is changing, and Faleen will never be quite the same. One thing is constant though: he did remind each of us not to mention to his Muslim relatives that he had been drinking.

Treading Blood

Here is a sweet story about art - high and sometimes low. The Bacchae is the last play Euripides wrote and its is more than a little weird. Pentheus, the King of Thebes, has insulted the demigod Dionysus by denying his divinity and as punishment is clawed to death by a frenzied band of Theban bachiantes, led by Pentheus mother, Agave.

Still with me?

A new production of the work is opening tonight at Shakespeare in the Park, with new music by Phillip Glass, directed by his ex. The buzz is it will be a hot show. I'm seeing it tomorrow night.

But back in 1968, when we were all still hippies, it was a different now legendary production of the same script which was the hot show. It was called Dionysus in '69.

A prof at NYU had recruited a small band of theatre kids who spent eight or nine months re imagining Euripides. Retaining many of the original lines, they converted various plot points into contemporary equivalents. Instead of humiliating Pentheus by getting him to dress as a woman,k Dionysus humiliates the king but getting him to give the god a blow job. The production was staged in an old downtown garage, the audience sat on mats or wooden towers, or simply wandered. The staging moved from group gropes to group therapy sessions to unabashed orgies. The cast was fully naked fully half the time. Despite my mocking tone here, it was an extraordinary smart, supple and engrossing exploration of the intertwinings of ecstasy and fascism.

At one point, in an effort to avert him impending doom, Pentheus turned to the audience seeking some woman who would love and thus save him, climbing into the shapeless throng of witnesses to select some appropriate, appealing female. One memorable night the young woman propositioned thus accepted and the actor and audience member left the theatre hand in hand. With his life saved, the show had to end right there. This quite pissed off the rest of the cast.

There is available an extraordinary book with detailed information concerning the development and variations of the script, and dozens of still evocative photographs from actual performances. Brian de Palma filmed one performance which is almost impossible to find.

Here is the sweetness. The actress who played Agave, the murdering mother leading the bacchanal was a 25 year old girl when the show opened in the still unpopulated warehouse district which became SoHo back in 1968. The same actress, now well into her sixties, is playing the same role in the Central Park production playing now.

What distances we have travelled, and so quickly

Been there, done that -- good thing

Jackdaw gave me my first magic mushroom when I was in Europe last month.

My kids don't quite believe my claim that when I was a student, the great universities of America were free of fags, drugs and tattoos. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly. It turns out that in addition to myself, I knew quite a few people back then who would have been fags if they had had the balls. But I know I knew no druggies and no one had any ink.

I had my first recreational drug in the summer of 1967. Sgt. Pepper had come out a week or two before, and I had been admitted to the bar a month or so before that. A journalist friend decided it was time to introduce me to rock and roll and weed, all at once. They went well together. I followed certain sorts of cerebral rock for the next twenty years or so.moving from the Beatles to the Stones and beyond -- the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, Talking Heads, Lou Reed. I was once present at the Fillmore East, quite stoned, when The Who smashed their instruments on stage, a just discovered shtick I hadn't yet heard about and which, in my inebriation, scared the shit out of me.

I never did it much, but I grew fond of the occasional joint. I suppose I resisted it for as long as I did from some concern that if I lost my self control, some hidden truths about my sexuality might slip out. Of course, no such luck. I associated the herb with a mental state where connections and interconnections became visible. I could find a logic in the light shows and an interlocked poetry in the most prosaic sets of words. Perhaps the best high I ever had I spent listening to Mozart's opera Cosi fan Tutti with the full score on my lap and different ice creams melting at my side. I could hear the different vocal and instrumental lines both separately and together and do so simultaneously, always keenly aware of the wit which permeated everything.

I only once did I go beyond weed. On a Caribbean trip with several dozen other adventurous Wall Street lawyer types, somebody gave me some peyote. I swallowed. Nothing happened. I decided that since nothing else was happening, it was finally time that I really learned to snorkel and went out to marvel at all the colorful little fishies. Turns out I was out there marveling for three uninterrupted hours. That night my sorely sunburned back was aware of the impact of the drug my mind had refused to acknowledge.


It was pleasant, but never amounted to much and I suspect it's been years since I last lit up one of those.

Jack I know has had a wonderful time with his mushrooms. Sam tried them too, with good reports, when he visited Jack earlier this year. I was interested to try. Unfortunately, I probably went about it the wrong way using the sorts of stimuli which had worked so well with weed. Also, because we had been rushing about so much, I had not been able to alter my diet to maximize the mushrooms' effects.

I was half way through a remarkable tour de force novel, Everything Is Illuminated and Jack had a DVD of the movie. Indeed, it was at Jack's recommendation that I was reading the book. (He had stopped reading, opting instead for the flick.) I'm pretty sure the film was not nearly as solid as the book, but it held me absolutely rapt. I could not take my eyes off the wide, clear TV screen, even though I was vaguely aware that strange things were happening to the furnishing and the light in the room at the side of the set. I couldn't move my eyes to check out the mystery at the edge. I also couldn't quite bring my mind to focus on the film. It had my full attention, but not my full intellect.

When it finished, Jack suggested I lie back on his sofa and close my eyes, a transformative suggestion. Stoned on marijuana, I looked for light shows. High on mushrooms, I discovered that I carried my light shows with me and that they were playing on on the inside of my eye lids. I did not sense the customary patterns behind the fireworks, but I also didn't need the patterns.

The trip ended after Jack played the cd of Sondheim's show, Into The Woods. This score doesn't mean much to Jack, but he knows I think it to be one of the consummate woks of genius of the 20th Century. To me, the difference between a very good and a great work of art is that while a good work remains satisfying even after many repetitions, a great work gets better each time around, as more is discovered within it. Jerry Robbins' ballets were usually very satisfying the first time around, and always fun to see again; Ballanchine's ballets continue to get better with each viewing. So it was with the Sondheim on schrooms -- but, then, that's true without the drugs too.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery was the absence of any sexual layer. There was always something sensuous about grass, if only the ice cream. There was no equivalent here. I thought perhaps this was because my still function super-ego had stayed busy reminding me that Jack and I were intimate friends, but not fuck buddies. However, Sam had been fucked by Jack, to his delight and distended discomfort. They had used each other's bodies in just about every way known to man. But Sam tells me that after Jack, in his capacity as dirty-older-man, fed him the fungus, the trip was intense but totally asexual.

If I'm every back that way, I suspect I will be eager for a return journey. This time, however, I'll take the first steps knowing what not to look for: a marijuana moment.

Nude or Naked?

Jackdaw is a little annoyed with me because I have posted nothing about the two and a half days I spent with him when I was in Europe last month.

It's hard to write about somebody who has become so emotionally close while remaining at such a geographic distance. It's also fraught. I hurt Aaron's feelings with my first post about him and Bulgaria: he felt that I didn't present him as a sufficiently serious person, and/or that I didn't present his nation as a sufficiently serious country.

I know I will eventually have to do better than this, but can excuse myself for a bit with the knowledge that he hasn't been able to write about my visit either, and perhaps for similar reasons.

One deep observation. I have long thought that one of the many ways of dividing the world into two is to separate those people who move into a new office and sit down and start to work and those who move into a new office and proceed to rearrange the furniture. Turns out I really need a trichotomy here, since Jack falls into neither half. He would enter the new office and neither start working nor moving the furniture; rather he would spend time thinking through the solution to the question of design. Also, people like that tend to keep their desks clean. I delight in bringing intellectual order out of chaos, and therefore I really need a filthy desk top in order to function. Even were I not hopelessly old, Jack and I could never have been a couple. He's simply too fixed and rigid to be turned into a companionable slob.

The other tiny thing worth noting is that I found myself in a strangely uneasy moment of uncertainty. I spent two nights with Jack, sleeping in his bed. The first night, he was in the bathroom when I got into bed, and I found myself wondering whether good manners called upon me to ask him if it was OK for me to sleep naked, -- as I have been doing for roughly half a century now. I solved the problem by stripping and pretending to fall into instant sleep. I think I was vaguely aware all night long of positioning my body so that I would not touch his. The bed was huge.

We were together almost constantly and I never saw him naked. Nor he me. I did tell him that at some point I wanted to see if his dick were really as large as he regularly reports on his blog, and he did show me the rubber model of his hard on. He's telling the truth. Other than the fact that we were with each other almost continuously for more than a couple days, there was no particular reason why we would have seen each other nude. But perhaps there was a reason why we didn't.

In passing, does the gentle reader know the difference between "naked" and "nude?"

The answer is socks. One can be naked with socks on, but nudity requires nothing.

Touching Moments.

It has been a quiet, reflective period for me of late. The reality of the loss of a life partner whom I never expected to survive has gotten more firmly wedged in place. There was no sex in the last three years, while Eliza was dying, nor any wish to seek the furtive the furtive, illicit, queer blow job which has been the bulk of my gay experience. Indeed, I can't remember how long it has been since the last raging erection not built upon a little blue chemical foundation. I know that the sense of loneliness will lift and that I may yet again feel love and desire, but I'm also (at least at the moment) that even if I never again intimately touch another naked body, that I shall continue to touch lives, and with great intimacy.

This weekend I got a phone call from an old friend on the other coast who has been going through a terrible time of late. She called to tell me that a few months ago, I had saved her life. I have no clear recollection of what I had said to her, but pretty clearly I said the right thing at the right time. Genie had worked for us for a couple years as a live-in nanny. At first I found her rather terrifying; she was a firmly built afroed black dyke who conjured up the already dated and hopelessly politically incorrect epithet "mau-mau". Then one day my oldest kid came home from school bitching about the teacher who had wasted a whole hour telling them about the wonderful writings of Nostradamus, who had even had the brilliance to predict that Napoleon would be the Third Anti-Christ! I asked Genie if she had known that Napoleon was the Third Anti-Christ, and without missing a beat, she replied, "No. I always thought it was Robbie Benson." For the vast bulk of you who don't get the joke, take my word: it was brilliant. I fell in love and she became a part of the family.

Long ago she moved to the Bay Area, trying to build careers as a caterer, a consultant, a comic, a writer, making do at each but never hitting the top at any. A year or so ago she had an atypical affair with a guy with a boat, and they would sometimes screw while sailing out in the Bay. He gave her AIDS. She lost her work, her money, her teeth. Social Security and the rest of the support system were screwing her as badly as the fellow with the plague. She told me over the phone of her thoughts of offing herself. I don't even know how I responded, but apparently it was instinctively right. Maybe I just told her that she was loved.

I am pretty sure that I have saved several lives. I know that I have profoundly altered the course of a good many more for the better, such as the sweet Trini boy or the Australian slave. I am not so good at recalling the failures. I'm sure that a lot of people who are as old as I am could claim the same sorts of successful interventions, if only because the the opportunities which flow from longevity. But, I also know that my profession primes me for some special role here.

Ultimately, I got into law through theatre. The details of that are a different post. Here it is enough to say that I have always loved stories, and that any time anybody gets involved in a litigation, some sort of passion is driving something, and where ever you have passion, even if only a passion for money, one has the makings of a good story. In law and in theatre, stories have beginnings, middles and ends. Not all professions are so lucky. The lawyer gets to skip the boring exposition of the First Act, make a dramatic entrance in the Second, and help write the Third.

Someone once pointed out to me how few people are licensed to touch their clients. Somehow, this license creates a kind of intimacy which invites and maybe even compels disclosure, even confession. Gym trainers and hair dressers hear a lot of secrets. We know where the massage table leads, and those secrets may transcend the verbal. Doctors and nurses touch,, tho the clinical setting in which the operate alters the dynamics. Three years ago a doctor told me, three years too soon as it turned out, that Eliza would die within the hour; a young intern at that point put his hand on my shoulder. It was immensely important that he did that.

Lawyers have no such license. I have probably never touched more than a very few clients at any body part other than the right hand. What we are licensed to do is to ask any remotely relevant question which comes into our hand. No client should ever be trusted to tell the truth; believing a client is the first step toward betraying him. But, there is always some sort of truth embedded in the answers, even if knowingly false, and over time and with persistence something true enough will out.

The hardest part of my job is getting a client to tell me what it is he or she really wants, because that question requires knowing what they can do without. My job is to guide them in the process of self discovery. It gets to be a habit.

I think that in this process of rediscovering and redefining myself, as I try to figure out now what it is that I really want, it might be useful for me - and of interest to at least some of you -- to tell some stories about meaningful interventions.

Scotch and Sanity

The summer of my 16th year I was sent off to the American Legion's week long Boys' State encampment. We (all male) leaders of tomorrow were to spend seven days pretending to by the state government. As I recall, one of us was even elector Governor, but since the election came at the end of the week, he didn't get to enjoy many spoils of office. Wanting nothing much to do with any of this, I opted for the fourth branch of juvenile government and joined the newspaper. My great journalistic moment was when I got to ask the representative of the State Auditor who filled in for the elected official's scheduled appearance before the august assembly of annointed youth whether the Auditor's absence had anything to do with the just starting to circulate newspaper stories about financial daring-do in his office. I was assured that nothing could be farther from the truth. The Auditor wound up spending quite a few years in the slammer.

One of the other budding journalists was a kid from the small city near my small town where my orthodontist spent his days peering into people's mouths. I had to go there every other week for tightening, so the next time I drove to the dentist, I dropped by the guy's house to renew the acquaintance. I rapidly discovered that we had very little in common except for a distaste for the American Legion and started to make motions toward leaving.

However, just before I got out the door, his step-mother arrived, a tall, thin and angular woman wearing, I think some sophisticated bracelets. I was introduced to her and the first thing she said to me was: Do you take your Scotch with or without water.

I fell in love. Instantly. My first sophisticate was offering me my first Scotch.

Now, I had had the odd beer (furtive or by teach-the-kid-to-drink parental grace) and the occasional sip of wine. I had yet even to sip hard liquor. I knew about Scotch of course from reading novels about sophisticated people, but I still had a vague notion that a double scotch was something that tasted quite as scotchy as a regular one. I presumed some sort of connection with butterscotch.

Knowing nothing except that I was at a key point in my life, I could only tell her that I'd be happy to have whatever she was having.

Thereafter, every time I went to town to get my braces tightened, I'd go to her place to get just a little tight. Soon I met her husband who was another of those fabled urbane intellectuals. He was a lawyer, the first I ever met. He was a Yalie. He had traveled enough of the world to be a world traveler. He showed me some of his work and introduced me to the literary potential of the law.

They were both deeply involved with the Institute of General Semantics, which advanced the ideas of Alfred Korzybski who developed an anti-Aristotelian mode of analyzing language.

I had read Aristotle's treatise on tragedy, The Poetics, and had concluded with passion that I disagreed with every word of it, so the discovery that this Scotch drinking, journal reading and even convertible driving cosmopolitan couple shared my distaste for Aristotle was truly to good to be true. I adopted their conviction that the dichotomy was a dangerous device as quickly as I did their taste in booze.

This continued for a full year. Every other Saturday, scotch and intellectual chatter. I would borrow books, both to read and to ensure an excuse to return. I was even able to introduce them to a splendid thing or two. Nichols and May for one. Every couple months I'd run into the fellow Boys' Stater, but since he didn't like his step-mother, he did his drinking on has own.

However, as Huxley once wrote, Time Must Have A Stop and all good things must end
and after a year, my braces came off and the Saturdays ceased. I transferred to the University in the city, and she came in to see her shrink. We had lunch maybe thrice that year. Much as I loved her, I can't recall ever touching her beyond a handshake. Undoubtedly she was flattered by the utter adoration I exhibited, but I had to be the more deeply flattered party by the fact that the two of them took me seriously.

The next summer, two years after I met her, I was off working in Wyoming. (Note the casualness with which I reveal that I'm not from Wyoming!) I received a letter from my mother (who must have worried a lot about what the hell was going on) containing a newspaper clipping of the story of my first love's suicide. Asphyxiation. No note, no explanation.

I saw the husband a few times after that. He even worked hard at getting me to go to Yale for law instead of Harvard. (I probably should have listened.) But he could never explain to me why she took her life, and I've never had a clue.

Much has changed since then. I've reread Aristotle for one thing and actually he had some pretty good things to say in The Poetics. I haven't used "dichotomy" as a curse word in decades. Korzybski's most famous disciple turned out to be S. I. Hayakawa, who became a reasonably objectionable college president and then U. S. Senator. But I still drink Scotch, only now I drink it neat. I suspect that most people don't really know the reason why their drink of choice is what it is. But I do.

One further confession. I never actually read Korzybski's supposed masterpiece, Science and Sanity, though I cited it often enough as an authoritative source. Korzybski is an awfully daunting name. The book is now hopelessly out of print. But, I have just tracked down a used copy on line and have ordered it, and this time I will read it. I owe her that.