The Professor and Other Writings (21 page)

Adding to the general hubris: my social life, though still sheltered, had likewise improved somewhat over the course of my undergraduate career. In high school I had been almost freakishly solitary and skittish, with no idea how to comport myself in ordinary-teenager fashion. A certain embryonic yet disabling class discomfort was involved: I was mortified by the fact that my parents were divorced (something still fairly unusual in the middle sixties) and that “home” during my adolescence was a tiny flat in the Buena Vista Garden Apartments, the somewhat rackety low-rent complex where we lived for the eight years before my mother finally married Turk. Bizarre as it sounds, by the time I left for college I had never once called anyone on the telephone or invited a classmate over after school. Nor had I myself been so called or invited. Not once had I sat on the bedroom floor with a set of girl-chums, gossiping about boys and teachers, “ratting” our hair Shirelles-style (still a preferred SoCal mode as late as 1970), listening to the radio, or having long metaphysical conversations about
Jesus Christ Superstar
. On the contrary: I'd been reclusive, a regular
Secret-Garden
-Frances-Hodgson-Burnett-Girl-Hysteric-in-Training. At seventeen, I remained passionately (if uneasily) mother devoted; frighteningly watchful, in school and out;
abnormally well read in Dumas novels, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, H.P. Lovecraft, and the lives of the poets (Keats being the huge sentimental favorite); but in all other respects mostly shy, quiet, lumpish, and dead.

In contrast, by the time I was a senior in college I felt I had “lived”—especially in what I imagined to be an erotic sense. Not that I'd been completely in the dark earlier: again, several achy-yet-pleasurable crushes on female teachers in high school had suggested the direction things were tending. In fact, if only abstractly, I was already half-cognizant even then of my budding sexual orientation and took a precocious scholarly interest in it. Various “grown-up” literary discoveries helped to shape it. With a forwardness and frankness rare at the time, for example, my tenth-grade French teacher had been inspired one day to tell us the checkered story of Rimbaud and Verlaine—the tumult, the buggery, the absinthe, all of it—and I had been riveted. Not a surprise, I suppose, that said French teacher, a
gamine
yet severe young woman we addressed as “Madame Moller,” was one of the main crushes. Though hailing from Omaha, she refused to speak English, played Brel and Juliette Greco songs for us, and seemed unimaginably cosmopolitan, having once been an exchange student in Nice. Her Navy ensign husband was on a river boat in Vietnam.

I began devouring certain louche modern authors in secret: Gide, Wilde, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, even Yukio Mishima, then at the height of his celebrity in the West. Sexual deviance, or at least what I conceived it to be, began to exert a certain unhallowed, even gothic allure—a glamorous, decayed, half-Satanic romance. (Hesse's
Demian
, one of the now-forgotten cult books of the era, was for some time my dark anti-Bible.) Not least among the attractions that such literary homosexuality proffered: some drastic psychic deliverance from familial dreariness and the general SoCal strip-mall stupor. In
Death in Venice
, after all, Aschenbach never had to go out to eat at
a Carl's Jr. with Turk and the squalling stepsibs, let alone shout his fries-and-shake order through the tinny speaker at the drive-through window.

As for “homosexual practices”—and I confess I wasn't exactly sure, mechanically speaking, what they were—they sounded sterile and demonic but also madly titillating. Well I remember when Mishima, in uniform and at the head of a crazy little band of gay right-wing militarists, had himself decapitated by his homosexual lover on the balcony of the Japanese Defense Command in Tokyo in 1970: I'd read all about it—bug-eyed and agog—in my mother's
Time
magazine. Anything could happen, it seemed, in the fascinating world of sexual inverts. Lesbianism didn't figure much, if at all, in these early reveries: one of the oddest parts of the fantasy, I guess, was that I was male, dandified, and in some sort of filial relationship to various 1890s Decadents. I knew more about green carnations, the Brompton Oratory,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol,
and the curious charms of Italian gondoliers than I did about Willa Cather or Gertrude Stein—not to mention Garbo or Stanwyck or Dusty Springfield. Some of the obliviousness was due to the times: lesbianism was seldom mentioned—ever—in those days and the sparse information one did come across left more questions than it answered. I was vaguely conscious of
The Killing of Sister George
, the notorious lesbian stage play made into an X-rated film starring Beryl Reid and Susannah York in 1968, but also bewildered by what I read about it (again in
Time
magazine); it didn't seem to involve pining surreptitiously after a blond fellow schoolboy in some oppressive yet romantic Prussian military academy. Even today after repeated viewings—requisite because I suffer, alas, from a never-to-be-requited crush on the deceased but still superhot Coral Browne—I'm still not
entirely
sure I understand the bit with the cigar.

Needless to say, all this inward high-school posturing went undisclosed: as noted, I kept no journal then, nor had I any confidante or
sidekick. I wouldn't have dreamed of bringing up intimate subjects with my somewhat addled and uncomprehending mother. Though we never discussed it, I know that she was already worried—when she had the time to think about it, that was—by my balky ungirlish demeanor and the fact that for some reason my period hadn't started. Nor would it, mortifyingly, until I was almost eighteen. (One's hormones were plainly on strike: talking tough to management and holding out for a better deal.) At the time I left for college I had never slept with anybody or even kissed anyone; nor, when you got right down to it, could I really imagine doing so. The idea of sex with a woman, of “having a lesbian lover,” was simply unthinkable, like living alone at the North Pole or deciding to become a lycanthrope. If the thought existed at all, it was as a mote, a sweet nothing—a little “feather on the breath of God,” barely sensed now and then, but mostly hidden away (
pace
Donald Rumsfeld) in some dastardly psychic dossier labeled “Unknown Unknowns.” I was innocent—gruesomely so—or that was how it seemed.

All this changed in college, as if someone had flipped a switch. Within a day or two of arriving at my new dormitory, I'd already met the aforementioned Phoebe, whose bare feet, Joni Mitchell LPs, elaborately macraméd jeans bottoms, and well-thumbed volumes of Anaïs Nin's diary proclaimed her—thrillingly—a Free Spirit. She was a sort of apprentice-Earth Mother in fact: a Northern California hippy-girl of a kind altogether unknown in right-wing San Diego, home of gray steel battleships and the myrmidons of the Pacific Fleet. Her dorm room, a short trek from mine, was a little temple to dreamy Marin County bohemianism. On her dresser, for example, next to a weird yet intriguing arrangement of pine cones, dandelion fluff, and dried seedpods, she had placed an ancient-looking copy of
Leaves of Grass
, several poetry books by Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth's translations from the Chinese. Her clothes were rustic, homespun, hand-sewn, nothing like the matching stretchy-
polyester top-and-pants outfit, hideously enlivened by orange and white stripes, that my mother had bought me—along with a towel set and a little study lamp—at the Fed-Mart just before I left for college. (My mother cannot be blamed for this eye-slitting ensemble: I'd coveted the stripey top especially and had implored her to buy it for me. Didn't realize it then, of course, but the whole look was distinctly baby-butch jock
avant la lettre
: the perfect thing—in another world—for the annual “Dyke-A Shore” ladies' golf tournament in Palm Springs.) Phoebe was the first person I'd ever met who'd been to the People's Park in Berkeley, had sat on the grass there in fact, and wore huarache sandals made out of old tires.

I was mesmerized, and Phoebe in turn took a pensive, if ponderous, interest in me. We bonded at once over our snobbish disdain for our female dorm-mates, especially the idiotic Pi Phi's, a giggly, geese-like set of sorority sisters who occupied one wing of the dorm and constantly ran shrieking up and down the hall with large plastic curlers in their hair. We preferred deeper mysteries—things shamanistic. We became inseparable: P. took me on long spontaneous nocturnal walks in the rain, showed me how to do the I Ching (the slow, old-fashioned way with yarrow stalks) and gave me one of her precious embroidered shirts from Guatemala. Proud of our outsider status, we ate every meal alone together at a little table upstairs from the main college dining room, even as hordes of our uncouth classmates happily stuffed themselves on industrial meatloaf and mashed potatoes under a large WPA-style mural featuring Paul Bunyan and his comely pet ox, Blue Babe.

As it happened we were in the same introductory humanities course that fall: a weird class on myth and religion in which we read Jung, Bachofen, Malinowski, and a truly dispiriting pile of “existential theology” tomes, including Rudolf Bultmann's less-than-scintillating
Kerygma and Myth
. I know I described my college curriculum earlier as somewhat less than rigorous, but in the light of this scary
Tübingen-style booklist I should perhaps amend that slightly. Having originated as a Christian teaching college, the school had still a number of professors who were ordained Protestant ministers, mostly of a severe, if not Ingmar Bergman–ish, intellectual stripe. Our religion professor was one of these men of the cloth: blond, handsome, and chillingly ascetical in steel-rimmed glasses. Seated at the end of a seminar table, he looked just like the young Max von Sydow.

Now Phoebe was a rebel—or fancied herself one—and I, in turn, viewed her as my oracle in all things. One dank night that term, having scornfully agreed that Bultmann was too irksome to be endured a moment longer, we decided to renounce him forever and so tossed our paperback copies of
Kerygma,
etc. into the thick undergrowth beneath the dripping Douglas fir trees near the dorm. We were cackling away like a pair of
Macbeth
witches after this unholy sacrifice when suddenly Phoebe turned, embraced me, and kissed me—thoroughly, warmly, wet raincoat and all—and said she loved me. That was the first time that
that
had happened. I declared in turn, somewhat squeakily, that I would throw myself under a truck for her. Would in fact be eager to do so. I guess I meant it—at least to the extent that an emotionally retarded eighteen-year-old
can
mean such a declaration. In any case, my heart leapt up in the event: the bolts-in-the-neck Frankenstein-loneliness of teenagerhood was now presumably at an end. I went to bed that night in ecstasy and although I crept out early the next morning, I confess, to retrieve poor Rudolf, soggy and grubby and limp with the dew, from the bushes (I had started to worry about needing him to study for the final exam), the feeling of dizzy exaltation lasted for some time.

It lasted for almost three years, in fact; but three years also imbued with so much angst and frustration, one could hardly have called the relationship—my first
coup de foudre
—a particularly wholesome one. For all her moody artist charm Phoebe turned out to be a
coquette—a veritable Zuleika Dobson of the Pacific Northwest—and ultimately heterosexual in a curiously leaden way. She excelled at a sort of dreamy, noncommittal, D.T. Suzuki–Zen-and-the-Artof-Archery seductiveness. The first year I knew her, for example, she would often tut-tut, with a long-drawn-out sigh, over the fact that her middle-aged high school English teacher, a shy misfit bachelor named Mr. Smith, had been besotted with her all through her school days and indeed still was. (He was the person, I later learned, responsible for her interest in Eastern religions; along with the I Ching, she was always going on about
saddhus
and
bodhisattvas
.) It was true: occasionally she would even let me see some of his plaintive letters. These were often accompanied by sad little koan-like love poems executed in black ink with Chinese brushes on homemade brown paper scrolls. One of Mr. Smith's more lugubrious poetic efforts, I recall, was an effusion entitled “Handicappèdness”:

Liberally blotted with odd accent marks, ink splotches, and jokey Zen-master exclamation points, these little poem-scrolls seemed to me to indicate a woefully unbalanced mind. Yet they struck a chord, too, somehow. Pleased by his attentions, Phoebe kept the hapless Mr. Smith dangling on the line by writing back to him, long poetic missives in which she made a point of never once acknowledging his lovestruck appeals. She'd expatiate for pages instead on rain forests, the beauty of the Sound, mysterious bearded men she'd met while hitchhiking
(possibly
bodhisattvas
in disguise?), peyote visions she had read about, or whatever other West Coast woo-woo was preoccupying her that week. (Sweat lodges? Carlos Castaneda? The Book of Thoth?) Like the cryptic notes she would leave for me in my dorm room when I wasn't there—one consisted of the whole of Matthew Arnold's “The Buried Life,” transcribed without explanation—P.'s sibylline messages were typically embellished, Art Nouveau–style, with luxuriant, strangely accomplished doodles: alchemical signs, vines with curly tendrils, elongated damsels, star-forms, and the like. I was ravished by it all.

But though ultimately consummated (farcically) the relationship was hardly a joyous initiation into Sapphic life. Over the three years of our folie à deux, I had become ever more self-conscious and chatty about what I called my “inversion.” (I'd discovered
The Well of Loneliness
by this point—not to mention D. H. Lawrence and the kinky early novels of Iris Murdoch. It was perversion full speed ahead.) Meanwhile Phoebe became ever more the not-so-unconscious tease. With what seemed to me distressing calculation she lost her virginity during our freshman year to a rail-thin boy in a neighboring dorm who wore a Pendleton jacket and was seven feet tall. I was distraught and promptly followed suit, losing mine a month or two later to a nerdy youth in my poetry class who still lived at home with his parents and while hardly seven feet tall—more like five-eight—had a ten-inch-long penis. I was too ill-informed at the time to know there was anything out of the ordinary about this astonishing pink saber, or the explosive clumsiness with which its inexperienced owner wielded it. (A similar cluelessness would beset me again, many years later, when friends tried to teach me to play bridge. Through some freak of cosmic probability—similar no doubt to the one said to have produced the Big Bang—I drew all thirteen clubs on my first hand.) Yes, I now felt “experienced,” but the act itself—nerve-wracking, pointless, and seriously yucky-poo—also seemed inconsequential. My ardor for Phoebe raged unabated.