JFK:  A SEXUAL MEMOIR

c 2007 Tristan Winter

 

 

Mostly I was interested in nature. I was a very frail three years of age, and what I observed around me seemed far more relevant than the incongruous behavior of the adults. Delightful as well, for, perhaps due to illness or medication, I almost constantly enjoyed what are termed visions. I understood and remembered everything discussed within my hearing, but for the most part maintained an urbane silence, which came about naturally since the others rarely acknowledged me when I pointed out to them how this or that object was vibrating or hovering in mid-space. All this might have been serendipitous indeed seeing as I was usually dressed in a midget Salvador Dali suit, complete with my own natty bowtie. Naturally, as such a paragon I was proudly introduced to my parents’ friends at dinner parties. I’d enormous eyes and quietly intrigued the ladies further by a habitual mysterious smile. These vivacious and very beautiful women were charmed to the utmost extent when, dinner being announced, I would gallantly scoot out their chairs for them. Their velvet or brocade bottoms delightedly lowering themselves to within an inch of the seat, I would then, with the dash of a magician, whip the chair out from under them to watch them shriek and break a coccyx. Though a nearly moribund child I was nonetheless an excellent sprinter, although this boast might be qualified by the fact that my father had only one organic leg, and I’d early on learned the advantage of madly serpentining.

Fortunately, in those days, the weather was generally fine. I did my damndest to charge around unencumbered by rules, exploring trees, grasses, insects and nests of black widow spiders under the house. Once indoors, there was not much to do. I could hunt phantasmagoric beings or paint, or paint myself, for so long only, but at that age the days loped on for what seemed to be years each. My curiosity was constrained in the house and what stimuli there were to be found was ominous. Understand that my very earliest visuals consisted of what was within reach -no higher than the average coffee table- where lazed magazine covers documenting the times; meaning photos of famished cherry-eyed infants, lynchings, people being blasted by fire hoses or mauled by police dogs, sad and silently proud faces living grief, and always, on the side of what surely seemed to be the perpetrators of mayhem, faces contorted in sheer ignorant rage.

Television was largely staid back then, only perking up every now and again with more frightening images of the violent world, but mostly I remember it operating at a very dull pace and enticing me little. Only cartoons had action. And, furthermore, action of a clearly subversive course. The physical world was ripped from the hands of the geezers and emotional pinwheels who ran it and I studiously watched and learned how to undermine the concept of cause and effect in a manner that exposed the false logic of the tall fools around me. Some animation was, to my squirming disgust, rather sentimental, and I’ve never understood how any studio could make money off such guff. On the other hand, I had seen on the same TV a glimpse of humanity in its highest manifestation. At three years of age I was fortunate enough to have witnessed a clip of Groucho Marx eructing lines and breaking into uncanny dance steps, and I knew immediately that here was a man -a real man- who made the notion of adulthood worth pursuing. It was only later, when I was nine and had been kidnapped and sequestered in the Marshall Hotel, where the beds were mammoth and old fashioned and required much effort to climb up into, that this vision of perfection reappeared in my life and took ineradicable hold of my being; for downstairs in the main saloon, they stretched out a screen one evening and I sat rapt, watching W.C. Fields in The Fatal Glass of Beer, and Duck Soup -not then knowing that this was the Marx Brothers at their apex.

But six years earlier, on that particular day, I had been parked before the television so as to free my mother up for domestic labors, which usually consisted of speaking into the telephone for hours. I was gaping at the cartoons then being presented by some clearly despairing man in a costume designed to degrade beyond hope -it might have been my favored Hobo Kelly- when then fun was slashed short by sudden, dull realism. A stodgy gray man in a stiff gray suit interrupted the program to make a dead-eyed newscast. This, mind you, was an unheard-of occurrence, a violation of all life’s feeble order, and with an almost adult decisiveness I was incensed. As I shrilled my objection, my mother released the phone and ran over to join in with howls of her own. Over her cries of oh my god no I plainly understood the man who’d interrupted the show to say that the President had been shot, although I was unclear on who that might refer to. My mother ran back and forth between the phone and the television, clutching and disseminating what news there was, while I tore my hair, at a loss to understand the recalcitrant contraption.

Neighbors began to pour in around me, and I was surprised and somehow suspicious to see that they were so much more upset than I. Soon the house was full and everyone was flailing with hysteria, the assumption at the time being that the country was undergoing a coup d’etat along the lines of the later Pinochet atrocity in Chile. There was validity to this anticipation since most of the group had been exposed to rampant McCarthyism and had inherited the joys and paranoia of their own left-wing or immigrant parents. Living in a southern California enclave surrounded by John Birchers who inexplicably blew up the mailboxes of anyone they suspected of Democratic thoughts certainly must’ve intensified the dread. As night came down and the broadcast droned on unceasingly, they all took on, in my eyes, the eternal forms of ghosts, a keening pulsating group in the horror light of the TV, and the curious image wavered until I flowed into unconsciousness beneath the table.

The following two days -it was a weekend- were both a prolongation and escalation of the initial panic. People, including many of the beautiful ladies I had often pulled out chairs for, issued furtively in and out of the house. Some truly expected to be seized and shipped off in boxcars within hours. The people shuddered, wept, and argued down one or another’s naivety while the television rolled its grimy footage nonstop. My sisters and I looked for food on the floor. And still there were no cartoons. Furious, I shook my fist at the screen and invoked the wrathful gods of anarchy to restore their scheme to my life. Finally, at a loss over everything, my parents themselves had filtered out, leaving us in the care of a babysitter.

Around the corner from us lived an extensive family of what I would later learn to recognize as white trash. I remember fossicking through natural surroundings with a girl from this brood who was of my own age and in fact quite beautiful, at least then, with silky golden hair and lapis eyes set in a soft round face with a dovehearted mouth. Her name, I believe, was Lisa. Somewhere at the upper end of the spectrum was an older sister, fourteen years of age, whom I can definitely say was called Pat, and it was this older child of hokum my parents enlisted to babysit us that hysterical weekend.

Pat was thin and therefore unnoticeable to me even though she might actually have been lovely. She calmly absorbed instructions from my harried parents and herded them out the door to mourn somewhere else. Hoisting me onto her lap, she announced what any child in my position was dying to hear, namely that it was now time to watch television. I turned my attention to the TV and saw with horror that there were still no cartoons.

Needless to say, by this point I was seriously smoked. Not only had the cartoon embargo destroyed several days out of my febrile life, but we were suddenly expected to have assimilated patriotism and accept as its reward the tedium of watching the President’s funeral. Pat mowed down my objections with some incomprehensible tale of duty, or what was more likely, in her oxidized mind, a fascination with duty. The damn thing seemed to take an eternity. We were apparently supposed to devote the rest of our days to watching some shiny box being hauled through the throng at a subaqueous  pace. Hardly ripe box office diversion. I remember men in white drill, saluting and firing guns in unison, at what, I could not descry. Women veiled, jowled men moping, people sobbing and gnashing bits of cloth. The camera repeatedly caressed a small boy looking bored and bewildered and with whom the babysitter compared my own gravitas as she inserted her hands into the front of my pants. Astute as I was, I asked her what she was doing, to which she replied that she was merely warming her hands. Sounded specious to me, but overall it enhanced the funeral, at least for Pat, and perhaps it was after all no more than the instinct for togetherness that everyone was grabbing in their sorrow. So there we sat for the rest of the day. I mentioned those hours of genital geniality to no one, quite simply because I hadn’t minded and gave it no thought.

But my formation at the hands of those hillbillies was not yet complete. A very few days after the Kennedy mishaps had climaxed, the young vision of delight named Lisa returned to my purlieu to play and ponder as we had before. In the yard we returned to our calm life. We explored and we imagined. Much of this passed until Lisa suddenly grew grave. She sat me down in the dirt beside her and said she wished to speak of serious matters. What days those were! I was told that I was special amongst men; that she loved me. As a result of this, she continued, picking up a small crooked twig, she wished to do something for me to show her devotion. Extending the twig to me like the very gift of life, Lisa then lay down on her belly and, looking back at me with bewitching eyes in a way which was to ravage my heart many times in future years, her luscious face more solemn than ever, announced that I should stick the twig up her ass.

My imagination was no less vivid then than it is today. Though inexperienced in matters of penetration, the juxtaposition in my mind of the scabby gnarled surface of the twig and Lisa’s cherubic form, both external and internal, scraped my sensibilities. Also, by then, I believe I had seen the expressions on the faces in various Japanese prints, not to mention Oswald’s when Jack Ruby shot him, and I firmly declined. My demurral was thus more aesthetically than morally based but, in retrospect, I do not feel that this was foolhardy, especially as my mother came out into the yard about twenty seconds later.