Thy Neighbor's Wife (26 page)

After she had completely removed his clothes, and her own, she asked him to lie back on the bed, which he obediently did, and then she lay next to him and gently massaged his body. Though they had previously spent uncountable hours in bed together, this was the first time that he had felt her tenderness.

After they had made love, Bullaro felt his anguish dissolve, and he briefly fell asleep in her arms. But he was awakened by odd sounds coming from the other room, and when he got up and opened the door, he saw, lying on the rug in front of the glowing fireplace, two naked bodies together.

The woman was on the bottom, lying on her back with her eyes closed, her blond hair touching the floor, her legs spread wide and held high with her toes pointed to the ceiling. She was sighing softly and edging her hips forward as the broad-shouldered man who hovered over her was penetrating her with a penis that in the firelight looked like a burning red rivet.

Having never before observed from a distance two people making love, Bullaro was stunned and awed; and for moments he watched with fascination as the interlocked bodies moved in the changing light amid the crackling sounds of burning logs, and for the briefest moment he regarded the sight as beautiful. But then he recognized the familiar shape of his wife’s thighs and saw the foreign fetid penis oozing in and out of her, provoking her pleasurable sighs, and pounding back her buttocks, and ripping into Bullaro’s guts with such violent force that he suddenly felt disemboweled.

Bullaro fell back, stumbling as he turned quickly toward the bedroom. He felt Barbara reaching out to him, trying to embrace and comfort him, but he abruptly slapped her hands away, no longer wanting to be touched by her, or by anyone, as he slammed the bedroom door behind him and collapsed crying on the bed.

C
ONVINCED THAT
the balance and order of his life had been destroyed, a vengeful John Bullaro quietly plotted the murder of John Williamson and also contemplated his own suicide. Williamson’s death could be easily achieved with a few quick pistol shots in the back while Williamson was in the bedroom with his head buried between Judith’s thighs, and if Bullaro was content to spare his wife, it was mainly because she would be needed to care for the children. As for Bullaro, he saw himself sinking into the Malibu surf during the final session of the scuba-diving class he was enrolled in, a romantic exit that he replayed in his mind many times as he drove back and forth to the insurance company.

Listening to the news in his car, Bullaro was somewhat consoled to hear that he was not alone in his turmoil—in fact, the entire nation throughout 1968 seemed preoccupied with acts of violence, insanity, and self-destruction. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis, Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Los Angeles, and, in Bullaro’s native city of Chicago, there were gory confrontations between the club-swinging police and thousands of antiwar demonstrators and Yippies who had been lured to town by the spotlight of the Democratic National Convention. Among the many innocent bystanders along the sidewalk who had been shoved and hit by the onrushing swarms of police was a spectator named Hugh M. Hefner.

In Vietnam thousands of American soldiers continued to die in the unwanted war that no one seemed capable of stopping, and President Lyndon B. Johnson was so unpopular that he decided not to seek reelection. As peace activists besieged campuses across the nation, civil rights protesters tried to desegregate a bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina, resulting in the death of three black students and injuries to thirty-seven other people in battles with the police. At the Olympic games in Mexico City two black sprinters who won medals and then raised black-gloved fists in the air during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” were dismissed from the American team. In Nevada the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever exploded in the United States sent vibrations from the remote desert to the dice tables of Las Vegas one hundred miles away.

Admirers of Fidel Castro hijacked American commercial planes and diverted them to Cuba. Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s most glamorous widow, flew in a private plane to a private island in the Ionian Sea to marry the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. After seven hundred prisoners rioted at the Oregon State Penitentiary, causing $2 million worth of damage, they were assigned a new warden. Indicted by a federal grand jury in Boston on charges of conspiring to counsel young men to evade the draft were the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale chaplain Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. Twenty-three years after American Marines had captured it in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, the Pacific island of Iwo Jima was returned to Japan. Narcotics agents on the New York waterfront discovered 246 pounds of heroin, worth $22.4 million, secreted in an automobile shipped from France.

Paper money was suspect and financial investors rushed to buy gold. Arab sheiks, saturated with American dollars from oil royalties, were among the most active traders. The California industrialist and art collector Norton Simon paid more than $1.5 million for a Renoir painting. Nude body-painting studios opened in several cities, and the one in Chicago was managed by twenty-
eight-year-old Harold Rubin. The year’s best-known character in literature was the chronic masturbator in Philip Roth’s novel
Portnoy’s Complaint
.

Feminists at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City burned their brassieres. Largely due to the Pill, the American birthrate was the lowest since the Depression. Male and female frontal nudity was displayed on the New York stage in
Hair
and in the imported Swedish film
I Am Curious
(
Yellow
). On the day before the nation elected to its highest office the man who promised to combat sexual lewdity and organized crime, and to restore law and order to the land, there was published in New York City the first issue of a ribald tabloid newspaper devoted entirely to sex and pornography. Its name was
Screw
.

Taking the position that nothing between consenting adults is obscene, and that pornography—no less than any other form of expression—is a way of knowing nature, and that the portrayal of open sexuality principally offends those who are most offended by their own nakedness,
Screw
quickly assaulted the Nixonian bourgeois culture with a view of contemporary American life that no establishment journal would have deemed fit to print.

Each week, at thirty-five cents a copy,
Screw
published photographs of people flaunting their genitals and giving the finger to polite society, and the newspaper’s captions and articles contained four-letter words that it believed reflected the anger and frustration of the average man with his government. Its cartoons depicted brutish politicians and judges involved in debauchery, and four-star generals were shown buggering one another after they had dropped their bombs over Vietnam. The FBI director was criticized in a
Screw
article under the headline that brazenly asked what many people had long wondered: “Is J. Edgar Hoover a Fag?”; and while the paper ignored the rhetoric of civil rights leaders it did cover the story of a black man who charged racial discrimination after he had been denied service at several legalized brothels in Nevada.

Although the photographs of nude women in
Screw
were rarely beautiful, it was always the intention of the paper to present unretouched realism, ordinary-looking females with their natural blemishes and faults—the modern-day Molly Blooms and Constance Chatterleys rather than the plastic perfect playmates of
Playboy. Screw
chronicled America’s increasingly depersonalized society by detailing the escalating sales of vibrators to women and the new male market for artificial vaginas and inflatable rubber sex dolls; and
Screw
’s advertising columns published the solicitations of prostitutes, the longings of lonely spinsters, and the uncommon desires of solitary men: “Handsome foot specialist seeks girls with sensitive soles. Write: Ed, GPO Box 2428, NYC 10001.”

Screw
’s scathing and scatological editorials railed against a meddlesome government that justified war while imprisoning such erotic magazine publishers as
Eros
’ Ralph Ginzburg; and after the New York police had closed down the stage production of
Che
, arresting ten cast members along with the theater’s floor sweeper because the show included an act of fellatio which was considered morally perilous to theatergoers,
Screw
demanded to know why the police that week had not also closed down the city’s streets, on which 145 people had been killed. The frequent police raids against the sex shops, adult bookstores, and porn theaters in New York were reported in
Screw
with cynical alarm, for it saw behind each policeman’s angry nightstick a sexually frigid Irish-Catholic mother, a drinking father, and a latent homosexual priest in the confessional deploring fleshly pleasures between men and women. When a parish bordered on a porno district, as did Father Duffy’s old Irish neighborhood west of Times Square, there were endless battles between proponents of individual freedom and religious restraint; and while the major daily newspapers endorsed the city’s latest antismut campaigns in Times Square (which would eliminate, for instance, the coin-operated peep shows patronized by the hoi polloi but allow the continuance of high-priced sex shows like
Oh! Calcutta!
for patrons
of the legitimate stage), the staff of
Screw
defended the pleasures of Dirty Old Men, espoused the sidewalk hooker’s right-to-life, and was unappalled by the sight of black devils from the ghetto cruising through the blue-collar neighborhood in Lenten-purple pimpmobiles.

Refuting allegations that Times Square had become less safe and inviting since the proliferation of sex businesses in recent years,
Screw
pointed out that the Square has always been a garish, tawdry part of town dominated by transient talent and tacky tourists, a place where people seek what they would rather not find in their own neighborhoods; and furthermore Times Square was now better-policed and less dangerous than it was in Father Duffy’s time, when impoverished youth gangs from nearby Hell’s Kitchen overwhelmed the area with their maraudings and murders, and where earlier in the century there were so many prostitutes south of Forty-second Street that a resident bishop claimed they outnumbered the city’s Methodists.

In the interest of historical perspective,
Screw
often reprinted the faded nude photographs of ancient prostitutes and show girls that were once the horror of New York’s fusty “Little Flower” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia; and in a weekly feature entitled “Smut from the Past,” it printed old privately taken hard-core snapshots that it received in the mail anonymously from septuagenarians wishing to will to posterity visible proof of their long-ago lust, no longer caring what the neighbors thought because all the neighbors were now dead.

The first police raid on
Screw
’s offices occurred after the issue of May 30, 1969, printed a composite picture of New York’s Mayor John Lindsay displaying a hefty penis, and the accompanying text suggested that the mayor’s political ability was no match for his agility in bed, limited though it was to the missionary position. Although
Screw
’s top editors were charged with obscenity, were fingerprinted at the police station and held briefly behind bars, the paper continued to appear each week, shameless as ever, because its sudden financial success allowed it the luxury
of hiring top lawyers to defend its First Amendment rights in court and win the freedom of its editors. After one year of publication—though the police continued to round up sidewalk news vendors who openly sold
Screw
, including some vendors who were blind—the paper’s weekly circulation reached 140,000 and the novelist Gore Vidal hailed it as the only newspaper in America that properly serviced its readers.

Assuming that a majority of its readers were very curious about, if not always participants in, the assorted sexual subcultures that existed in New York,
Screw
described and listed the addresses of bars that catered to swinging couples, lesbians, homosexual males, and the leather fetish set; and the reader also learned where to find the best buys in dildoes and French ticklers, superior condoms and aphrodisiacs. Knowing that many people who bought “marital aids” through the mail might be too defensive or shy to complain if they received faulty or worthless merchandise,
Screw
took it upon itself to purchase and test the mail-order gadgets in its office laboratory and to publish negative stories if the items proved to be fraudulent, such as a reputed penis enlarger, or overpriced, such as the erection-sustaining salves that were no more effective than several desensitizing lotions sold in drugstores at one-tenth the cost.

Aware that newspaper advertisements of porno movies invariably exaggerated the film’s erotic content,
Screw
’s critic noted in his review of each new sex movie the number of erections he had while watching it, a fact that was calibrated in the “peter meter” rating
Screw
gave to each film. The paper conducted investigations of certain swindling lonely hearts clubs and deceptive dating bureaus; and it not only reviewed novels and nonfiction books that were explicitly sexual but conveyed a sense of the writer’s style and candor by quoting at length from the book’s most passionate passages.

Screw
was the only newspaper that, when reviewing the new Viking paperback edition of
The Selected James Joyce Letters
, quoted liberally from the raunchy correspondence between Joyce and his wife, Nora, when he was away from home for an ex
tended period—letters that perhaps shocked the more prim journals because they revealed Joyce’s interest in sexual masochism (
I would love to fee whipped by you, Nora
) as well as fetishism and anality:
The smallest things give me a great cockstand—a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers…to feel your hot lecherous lips sucking away at me, to fuck between your two rosy-tipped bubbies, to come on your face and squirt it over your hot cheeks and eyes, to stick it up between the cheeks of your rump and bugger you
.

“This is fairly standard fuck fantasy fare,”
Screw
commented, although it welcomed the Viking publication, which confirmed what H. L. Mencken had stated long ago: “The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.”

The individual most responsible for the content and philosophy of
Screw
was its executive editor and cofounder, Alvin Goldstein, a man who did not aspire to influence society so much as to reflect the world as he knew it was being lived each day and night by thousands of unnoticed people like himself. At thirty-two, Goldstein was shy, overweight, sexually frustrated, and restless. His first marriage to a Jewish princess, which had been opposed by her parents from the start, had ended bitterly; and his second marriage, to a comely airline stewardess taking flight as a feminist, was not destined to endure. Since he had dropped out of Pace College in New York, where he had majored in English, Goldstein had been an insurance agent, a taxi driver, a glass packer, a welfare recipient, a carnival pitchman at the New York World’s Fair, an industrial spy for the Bendix Corporation, and a creator and writer of bizarre tales for a sensational weekly tabloid called
The National Mirror
. The stories that he wrote described acts of pleasure followed by punishment and pain, in the best Judeo-Christian tradition, and the fact that he was so prolific a producer of them was due less to his imagination than to his memory of the past.