Arguably: Selected Essays (65 page)

“The magic and might of her own soft mouth …” Erotic poets have hymned it down the ages, though often substituting the word “his.” The menu of brothel offerings in ancient Pompeii, preserved through centuries of volcanic burial, features it in the frescoes. It was considered, as poor Humbert well knew, to be worth paying for. The temple carvings of India and the
Kamasutra
make rather a lavish point of it, and Sigmund Freud wondered if a passage in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks might not betray an early attachment to that “which in respectable society is considered a loathsome perversion.” Da Vinci may have chosen to write in “code” and Nabokov may have chosen to dissolve into French, as he usually did when touching on the risqué, but the well-known word “fellatio” comes from the Latin verb “to suck.”

Well, which is it—blow or suck? (Old joke: “No, darling.
Suck
it. ‘Blow’ is a mere figure of speech.” Imagine the stress that gave rise to that gag.) Moreover, why has the blowjob had a dual existence for so long, sometimes subterranean and sometimes flaunted, before bursting into plain view as the specifically American sex act? My friend David Aaronovitch, a columnist in London, wrote of his embarrassment at being in the same room as his young daughter when the TV blared the news that the president of the United States had received oral sex in an Oval Office vestibule. He felt crucially better, but still shy, when the little girl asked him, “Daddy, what’s a vestibule?”

Acey told me she was at a party and she said to a man, What do men really want from women, and he said, Blowjobs, and she said, You can get that from men.

—From “Cocksucker Blues,” Part 4 of
Underworld
, by Don DeLillo

I admire the capitalization there, don’t you? But I think Acey (who in the novel is also somewhat Deecey) furnishes a clue. For a considerable time, the humble blowjob was considered something rather abject, especially as regards the donor but also as regards the recipient. Too passive, each way. Too grungy—especially in the time before dental and other kinds of hygiene. Too risky—what about the reminder of the dreaded
vagina dentata
(fully materialized by the rending bite-off scene in
The World According to Garp
)? And also too queer. Ancient Greeks and Romans knew what was going on, all right, but they are reported to have avoided the over-keen fellators for fear of their breath alone. And a man in search of this consolation might be suspected of being … unmanly. The crucial word “blowjob” doesn’t come into the American idiom until the 1940s, when it was (a) part of the gay underworld and (b) possibly derived from the jazz scene and its oral instrumentation. But it has never lost its supposed Victorian origin, which was “below-job” (cognate, if you like, with the now archaic “going down”). This term from London’s whoredom still has a faint whiff of contempt. On the other hand, it did have its advocates as the prototype of Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck”: at least in the sense of a quickie that need only involve the undoing of a few buttons. And then there’s that nagging word, “job,” which seems to hint at a play-for-pay task rather than a toothsome treat for all concerned.

Stay with me. I’ve been doing the hard thinking for you. The three-letter “job,” with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American. Perhaps forgotten as the London of Jack the Ripper receded into the past, the idea of an oral swiftie was re-exported to Europe and far beyond by a massive arrival of American soldiers. For these hearty guys, as many a French and English and German and Italian madam has testified, the blowjob was the beau ideal. It was a good and simple idea in itself. It was valued—not always correctly—as an insurance against the pox. And—this is my speculation—it put the occupied and the allied populations in their place.
“You
do some work for a change, sister. I’ve had a hard time getting here.” Certainly by the time of the war in Vietnam, the war-correspondent David Leitch recorded reporters swapping notes: “When you get to Da Nang ask for Mickey Mouth—she does the best blow job in South-East Asia.”

At some point, though, there must have been a crossover in which a largely forbidden act of slightly gay character was imported into the heterosexual mainstream. If I have been correct up until now, this is not too difficult to explain (and it fits with the dates, as well). The queer monopoly on blowjobs was the result of male anatomy, obviously, and also of the wish of many gays to have sex with heterosexual men. It was widely believed that only men really knew how to get the “job” done, since they were tormented hostages of the very same organ on a round-the-clock basis. (W. H. Auden’s New York underground poem titled “The Platonic Blow”—even though there is absolutely nothing platonic about it, and it lovingly deploys the word “job”—is the classic example here.) This was therefore an inducement the gay man could offer to the straight, who could in turn accept it without feeling that he had done anything too faggoty. For many a straight man, life’s long tragedy is first disclosed in early youth, when he discovers that he cannot perform this simple suction on himself. (In his stand-up routines, Bill Hicks used to speak often and movingly of this dilemma.) Cursing god, the boy then falls to the hectic abuse of any viscous surface within reach. One day, he dreams, someone else will be on hand to help take care of this. When drafted into the army and sent overseas, according to numberless witnesses from Gore Vidal to Kingsley Amis, he may even find that oral sex is available in the next hammock. And then the word is
out
. There might come a day, he slowly but inexorably reasons, when even women might be induced to do this.

Through the 1950s, then, the burgeoning secret of the blowjob was still contained, like a spark of Promethean fire, inside a secret reed. (In France and Greece, to my certain knowledge, the slang term used to involve “pipe smoking” or “cigar action.” I don’t mind the association with incandescence, but for Christ’s sake, sweetie, don’t be
smoking
it. I would even rather that you just blew.) If you got hold of Henry Miller’s
Sexus
or Pauline Reage’s
Story of O
(both published by Maurice Girodias, the same Parisian daredevil who printed
Lolita
), you could read about oral and other engagements, but that was France for you.

The comics of R. Crumb used to have fellatio in many graphic frames, but then, this was the counterculture. No, the big breakthrough occurs in the great year of nineteen
soixante-neuf
, when Mario Puzo publishes
The Godfather
and Philip Roth brings out
Portnoy’s Complaint
. Puzo’s book was a smash not just because of the horse’s head and the Sicilian fish-wrap technique and the offer that couldn’t be refused. It achieved a huge word-of-mouth success because of a famous scene about vagina-enhancing plastic surgery that became widely known as “the Godfather tuck” (sorry to stray from my subject) and because of passages like this, featuring the Mobbed-up crooner “Johnny Fontane”:

And the other guys were always talking about blow jobs, this and other variations, and he really didn’t enjoy that stuff so much. He never liked a girl that much after they tried it that way, it just didn’t satisfy him right. He and his second wife had finally not got along, because she preferred the old sixty-nine too much to a point where she didn’t want anything else and he had to fight to stick it in. She began making fun of him and calling him a square and the word got around that he made love like a kid.

Earthquake! Sensation! Telephones trilled all over the English-speaking world. Never mind if Johnny Fontane likes it or not, what is that? And why on earth is it called a “blow job”? (The words were for some reason separate in those days: I like the way in which they have since eased more cozily together.) Most of all, notice that it is regular sex that has become obvious and childish, while oral sex is suddenly for real men. And here’s Puzo again, describing the scene where the lady in need of a newly refreshed and elastic interior isn’t quite ready to sleep with her persuasive doctor, and isn’t quite inclined to gratify him any other way, either:

“Oh that” she said.

“Oh that” he mimicked her. “Nice girls don’t do that, manly men don’t do that. Even in the year 1948. Well, baby, I can take you to the house of a little old lady right here in Las Vegas who was the youngest madam of the most popular whorehouse in the wild west days. You know what she told me? That those gunslingers, those manly, virile, straight-shooting cowboys would always ask the girls for a ‘French,’ what we doctors call fellatio, what you call ‘oh that.’ ”

Notice the date. Note also the cowboys, likewise deprived of female company for long stretches. Now that we know about Blowjob Mountain, or whatever the hell it’s called, I think I can score one for my original theory.

Philip Roth took the same ball and ran with it, though he served up his guilt and angst with different seasonings. Imperishably associated with handjobs as his name will always be, his Alexander Portnoy fights like a wounded puma, throughout his boyhood, to find a girl, however hideous, who will get her laughing-tackle around his thing. When he finally persuades the woman he calls “The Monkey” (“a girl with a passion for The Banana”) to do it right, his whole system explodes into a symphony of praise. “What cock know-how!” he yells to himself (thus rather confirming the nature and essence of the word “job”). On the other hand, his blonde WASP chick won’t do it at any price, partly from disgust but also from a lively fear of asphyxiation. Portnoy resentfully ponders the social unfairness of this: She kills ducks in rustic settings but she won’t fellate him. “To shoot a gun at a little quack-quack is fine, to suck my cock is beyond her.” He also visualizes the awful headline if he presses things too far: JEW STRANGLES DEB WITH COCK … MOCKY LAWYER HELD.

Thus the sixties—the sixties!—ended with the blowjob still partly hyphenated and the whole subject still wreathed and muffled in husky whispers. The cast of
Hair
sang of “fellatio” under the list of things like “sodomy” that “sound so nasty,” and oral sex was legally defined as sodomy by many states of the union until the Supreme Court struck down those laws only three years ago—Clarence Thomas dissenting. The colloquial expression in those intermediate days was in my opinion the crudest of all: “giving head.” You can hear it in Leonard Cohen’s droning paean to Janis Joplin in “Chelsea Hotel #2,” and also in the lyrics of Lou Reed and David Bowie. It was a “knowing” and smirking term, but it managed somehow to fuse the mindless with the joyless. This state of affairs obviously could not last long, and the entire lid blew off in 1972, when some amateurs pulled together $25,000 for a movie that eventually posted grosses of $600 million. Is this a great country or what? This film, with performances by Harry Reems and Linda Lovelace, was one of the tawdriest and most unsatisfying screen gems ever made, but it changed the world and the culture for good, or at any rate forever. Interesting, too, that
Deep Throat
was financed and distributed by members of New York’s Colombo crime family, who kept the exorbitant bulk of the dough. Mario Puzo, then, had been prescient after all, and without his deep insight the Sopranos might still be sucking only their own thumbs.

The recent and highly amusing documentary
Inside Deep Throat
shows—by re-creating the paradoxically Nixonian times that re-baptized
Deep Throat
to mean source rather than donor—how America grabbed the Olympic scepter of the blowjob and held on tight. In the film, there is the preserved figure of Helen Gurley Brown, den mother of Cosmo-style journalism for young ladies and author of
Sex and the Single Girl
, demonstrating her application technique as she tells us how she evolved from knowing nothing about oral sex to the realization that semen could be a terrific facial cream. (“It’s full of babies,” she squeals, unclear on the concept to the very last.) In closing, Dick Cavett declares that we have gone from looking at a marquee that read DEEP THROAT, and hoping it didn’t mean what we thought it did, to “kids who don’t even consider it sex.” This would leave us with only one problem. Why do we still say, of something boring or obnoxious, that “it sucks”? Ought that not be a compliment?

There is another thinkable reason why this ancient form of lovemaking lost its association with the dubious and the low and became an American handshake and ideal. The United States is par excellence the country of beautiful dentistry. As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British “National Health” practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs, its steely-wire “braces,” its dark and crumbly fillings, and its shriveled and bleeding gums, I can remember barely daring to smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue. Good grief! What else was there to think about? In order to stay respectable here, I shall just say that it’s not always so enticing when the young ladies of Albania (say) shoot you a cheeky grin that puts you in mind of
Deliverance
.

The illusion of the tonsilized clitoris will probably never die (and gay men like to keep their tonsils for a reason that I would not dream of mentioning), but while the G-spot and other fantasies have dissipated, the iconic U.S. Prime blowjob is still on a throne, and is also kneeling at the foot of that throne. It has become, in the words of a book on its technique,
The Ultimate Kiss
. And such a kiss on the first date is not now considered all that “fast.” America was not the land of birth for this lavish caress, but it is (if I may mix my anthems) white with foam from sea to shining sea. In other cultures, a girl will do “that” only when she gets to know and like you. In this one, she will offer it as a
baiser
as she is making up her mind. While this persists, and while America’s gay manhood is still sucking away as if for oxygen itself, who dares to say that true global leadership is not still within our grasp?