that he would have died if not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
because he shortly would have been sent to “the war in the
Pacific” as it was cal ed. When Truman used the nuclear bombs,
he saved my father’s life. I thought my father was pretty selfish
to hold his own life to be more important than so many other
lives. I thought it would be a good idea not to have war
anymore. I could feel nuclear winter chilling my bones, even
though the expression did not yet exist, and I had a vivid
picture of people melting. I’ve never got en over it.
44
Cuba 1
There was one day when al my schoolmates and I knew that
we were going to die. According to historians the Cuban
missile crisis lasted thirteen days, but to us it was one day
because we knew we were going to die then, that day. I don’t
know which of the thirteen it was, and I don’t know if I’m
col apsing several days into one, but I remember nothing
before the one day and nothing after. In the back of the school
bus al the girls gathered in a semicircle. We talked about the
sadness of dying virgins, though some of us weren’t. We spoke
with deep regret, like old people looking back on our lives; we
enumerated al that we had not managed to do, the wishes we
had, the dreams that were unfulfilled. No one talked about
get ing mar ied. Children came up in passing.
The Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The
missiles were pointed at the United States, and the range of
the ICBMs was about from Cuba to the school bus - the
northeast corridor of the United States. For probably the first
time, I kept my Che-loving politics to myself. I don’t think
I even had any politics on that day. I don’t remember
the geopolitical blah-blah or the commie-versus-good-guy
45
Heartbreak
rhetoric - except that it existed - or how the United States was
the white hat standing up for the purity of the Americas. I do
remember television, black-and-white, and the images of stil
photographs, a grainy black-and-white, showing the bombs or
the silos. The United States had been untouchable, and now
it could be touched, and we’d feel our own bones melt and in
the particle of a second see our own cities drowned in fire. I
wasn’t afraid to die, but sitting stil and waiting for it was not
good. I still feel that way. We al , including me, felt a little
sorry for ourselves, because everything we had ever known
had been touched by nuclear war; it was the shadow on every
street, in every house, in every dinnertime conversation, in
every current-events reprise; it was always there as threat, and
now it was going to happen, that day, then, there, to us. The
school bus was bright yellow with black markings on the outside, just the way they are now, but everything was different because we were kids who knew that we were going to be
cremated and killed in the same split second. I could see my
arm withered, the flesh coming off in paper-thin layers, while
my chest was already ash, and there’d be no blood - it would
evaporate before we’d even be dead. Inside the bus the boys
were up front, boisterous, fil ed with bravado. I guess they
expected to pull the missiles out of the air one by one, new
superheroes. The girls were serious and upset. Even those who
didn’t like each other talked quietly and respectful y. There
was one laugh: a joke about the only girl in the school we
46
Cuba 1
were sure was no virgin. She was famous as the school whore,
and she was widely envied though shunned on a normal day,
since she knew the big secret; but on this day, the last day, she
could have been crowned queen, sovereign of the girls. She
represented everything we wanted: she knew how to do it and
how it felt; she knew a lot of boys; she was really pret y and
laughed a lot, even though the other girls would not talk to
her. She had beautiful y curly brown hair and an hourglass
figure, but thin. She was Eve’s true descendant, the symbol of
what it meant to bite the apple. Tomorrow she would go back
she was Cinderel a an hour before midnight. I wished that
I could grow up, but I could not entirely remember why. I
waited with my schoolmates to die.
47
David Smith
He was one of the United States' greatest sculptors, not paid
attention to now but in my high school and college years he
was a giant of an artist. He was especially at ached to
Bennington College, where he had taught and near where he
lived. One night I went to a lecture by art critic Clement
Greenberg, probably the most famous visual arts writer of his
time. Greenberg was a name-dropping guy, and most of his
lecture was about the habits of his bet ers, the artists he
deigned to crown king or prince. At some point during the
lecture, Greenberg said that great sculptors never drew. A
huge man stood up, overshadowing the audience, and in a
deep bass said, “I do. " While Greenberg turned beet red and
apologized, the big guy talked about how important drawing
was, how sensual it was; he gave specifics about how it felt to
draw; he said that drawing taught one how to see and that
drawing was part of a continuous process of making art, like
breathing when you were asleep was part of life. After the
lecture a friend who was a painting student asked if I wanted
to go with her to meet David Smith. “I wouldn't want to
bother him, " I said, not having a clue that the big guy was
48
David Smith
David Smith and he was staying that night in Robert
Frost’s old house, owned by painter Kenneth Noland, rented
by the English sculptor Anthony Caro, who was teaching at
Bennington. We got into my friend’s truck and went. I felt
shielded by my painter friend. The visit was her brazen act,
not mine.
It was my first year at Bennington, and I did not know the
anthropology of the place. Anyone famous who came to
Bennington was provided with one or more Bennington girls;
my college was the archetypical brothel, which may have been
why, the semester before I matriculated, the English seniors
recreated the brothel in Joyce’s Ulys es as a senior project and
for the enjoyment of the professors.
So my friend and I got to the old Robert Frost house. It
was deep in the Vermont countryside, old, simple, painted
white, with hooks from the ceiling on which, I was told, animals
had been hung and salted. There were bookshelves, but they
were mostly empty, with only a few books about Kenneth
Noland, at least in the living room. Mr. Smith was deep in a
bot le of 100-proof Stolichnaya and scat ered like inanimate
dolls were some of my fellow students from Bennington,
each in a black sheath, each awaiting the pleasure of her host,
Anthony Caro, and his guest, David Smith. As happens with
habit
ually drunk fuckers of women, Smith could not have been
more indif erent to the women who were there for him, and
he wanted to talk to me. I was trying to leave, embarrassed for
49
Heartbreak
my classmates and too shy to talk to Smith. But Smith did not
have to be nice to the women acquired for him, so he wasn’t.
He dismissed my fellow students with a gesture of the hand
and told me and my friend to sit down and drink with him.
He said that he had always wanted to provide Bennington
with a graduate school in art; that his name had been on a
pro-Cuba petition signed by artists and intellectuals; that John
Kennedy had cal ed him up and told him to get his name of
of that petition or he’d never get his graduate school; that
he had removed his name and in so doing he had whored.
“Never whore, ” he said; “it ruins your art. ” He told me never
to tell anyone and until now, with some private exceptions,
beyond the shame he felt that night. He said that taking his
signature off the pro-Cuba petition had made him a whore
and he couldn’t work anymore because of it. “Work” was
literal - it meant making sculptures; “whore” was a metaphor
- it meant not compromising one’s art. He warned me repeatedly; I only wish he had meant it literally as wel as metaphorical y because I might have listened. Since then - since I was eighteen - I’ve always measured my writing against his admonition: never whore. He also taught me how to drink 100-proof Stoli, my drink of choice until in the late 1970s I switched to
bottled water and the occasional glass of champagne. He was
talking to me, not to my painter friend; I’ve never known
why. I always hoped it was because he saw an artist in me. A
50
David Smith
week and a half later he died, crashing his motorcycle into a
tree, the kind of death police regard as suicide.
51
Contraception
At some point when I was in junior high or high school, my
father gave me the inevitable books on intercourse, more
commonly called “how babies are made. ” He was embarrassed; I rejected the books; he shoved them at me and left the room. I read the books about the sperm and the egg. There
were a few missing moments, including how the sperm got to
the egg before it was inside the vaginal tract, for example,
intercourse, and how not to become pregnant. By the time I
was sixteen, I understood the former but not the lat er. When
I asked my mother, she said that one must never let a man use
a rubber because it decreased his pleasure and the purpose was
to give him pleasure. Always ready to beat a dead horse into
the ground, I elicited from my unwilling mother the fact that
she had never let my father use a condom and that she had
used birth control. Beyond this she would not go, no hints as
to how or what.
One night I was summarily sent to the local Jewish
Community Center by my parents acting in tandem. There
was to be a lecture on sex education, and I was going to be
forced to listen to it. I cried and begged and screamed. I
52
Contraception
couldn’t stand being treated as a child, and I couldn’t stand
the thought of being bored to death by adults tiptoeing
through the tulips. I had learned that adults never told one the
real stuff on any subject no mat er what it was. It stood to
reason that the sex education lecture was going to be stupid
and dull, and so it was. There was the sperm and the egg and
they met on a blackboard.
By that time I had learned always to listen to what was not
being said, to the empty space, as it were, to the verbal void.
The key to al adult pedagogy was not in what they did say but
in what they would not say. They would say the word “contraception, ” but they would not say what it was. This was a time in the United States when contraception and abortion
were both still illegal. I knew about abortion, or enough
about it to suit me then. I asked about contraception and got
an awkward runaround. I fucking wanted to know what it
was, and they fucking were not going to tell me. I couldn’t let
it go, as usual, and so got from them the statement that they
discussed contraception only with married people. The group
that sponsored the lecture, with its almost-famous woman
speaker, would not come clean; now that group, headed by
the same woman until she died in the last decade, is part of
the free speech lobby in the United States protecting the
rights of pornographers.
What I learned was simple and eventually evolved into my
own pedagogy: listen to what adults refuse to say; find the
53
Heartbreak
answers they won’t give; note the manipulative ways they
have of using authority to cut the child or student or teenager
of at the knees; notice their immoral, sneaky reliance on peer
pressure to shut up a questioner (because, of course, if one
persists, the others in the audience get mad or embarrassed).
The writing is in the configuration of white around print; the
verbal answer is buried in silence, a purposeful and wicked
silence, a lying, cheating silence. Every pregnant girl owes her
pregnancy not to the heroic lover who figured out how the
sperm gets inside her but to the adults who will not show her
a diaphragm, an IUD, a female condom, and - sor y, Ma - a
rubber. I left the lecture that night with the certain knowledge
that I did not know what contraception was even if I knew the
word and that adults were not going to tell me.
Miss Bel , my physical education teacher who also taught
health, had the only method that successful y resisted both my
Socratic urgency and emerging Kabalistic axioms: on one test
paper she mimeographed a huge drawing of the male genitals,
and the students had to write on the drawing the name of
each part - “scrotum, ” for instance. In an equivalent test on
female sexuality, she had this true-or-false statement for extra
credit of twenty points: if a girl is not a virgin when she gets
married, she wil go to hel . I was the only student in my class
not to get the extra twenty points.
54
Young Americans for
Freedom
I wanted to know what a conservative was. I read William
Buckley’s right-wing magazine National Review, as I stil do. I
knew about the KKK, and I had an idea of what white
supremacy was. One girl in my class had neighbors who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, which she seemed to find reasonable.
I had an English teacher in honors English who was the
equivalent of Miss Bell, the gym-health teacher; but because
he was more literate there were many paths to hell, not just sex
outside of mar iage. Told to stay after school one day, I faced
Mr. Sullivan as he opposed my reading Voltaire’s Candide,
which was proscribed for Catholics, which I wasn’t but he
was. He told me I would go to hell for reading it. I stood up
; to him. I thought he was narrow-minded, but conservatism
seemed something different, Buckley’s magazine notwithstanding. What was it exactly, and why didn’t history teachers or political science types or civics teachers talk about it?
It was a mess just to try to think about it. Walking home
from high school one day, I passed a neighbor, Mr. Kane. No
55
Heartbreak
one on the street talked to him or his wife, an auburn-haired
model. They painted their ranch house lavender, which was
downright unusual, though it framed Mrs. Kane’s auburn hair
beautiful y. Mr. Kane cal ed out to me and asked me to come
inside the side door to his house. I knew that I was never
supposed to talk with strange men or go anywhere with them,
and Mr. Kane was strange as hel . But I couldn’t resist, because
curiosity is such a strong force in a child, or in me. Inside Mr.
Kane had literature: he wasn’t the sexual child molester, no, he
was the political child molester, with endless pamphlets on
how JFK, a candidate for president, was the Catholic Church’s
running dog, so to speak; on how whites were bet er than
what he cal ed niggers; on how kikes were running the media
and the country. He gave me leaflets to take home: these went
easy on the kikes but hit the Catholics hard. At home I felt
ashamed to have even touched the things, and also I knew
that I had broken a big law, not a small one, by going with a
strange man. I tried to flush the leaflets down our toilet and
when they wouldn’t flush I tried to burn them. Wel , yes, I did
get that in the wrong order but I was guilty of fairly heinous
crimes and was desperate to get rid of the evidence. I was just
trying to find a shovel to dig a hole in the backyard where I
could bury them when my mother came home. She saw the
stuf , dripping wet al over, an additional sin I hadn’t thought
of, and sent me to my bedroom to wait for my father. I knew
the stuff was filthy and bad, my own behavior a mere footnote
56
Young Americans for Freedom
to the sinister material I had brought into the house. It’s