Thy Neighbor's Wife (27 page)

Born and reared in a tough ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn where youthful cruelty was rampant and the favorite game was shoplifting, Goldstein was a stuttering, flabby, fearful adolescent who wet his bed until almost reaching his teens. Intimidated by the dour Jewish women who taught public school, he kept his eyes lowered in class, trying to avoid their glance as he concentrated on drawing endless pictures of World War II fighter pilots shooting one another down in dogfights. He flunked the fifth grade and was sent for treatment to a child psychologist assigned by the Board of Education; but his schoolwork did not improve and his morale worsened. Humiliated at being left back with the younger students, and at being rejected and ignored by his peers, his alienation became fused with hostility, and after school in the street he was regularly beaten up by older boys, particularly the blacks. Soon he almost began to like it; he was at least getting their attention and, in a strange way, their respect as he subjected himself again and again to their punishment. He would see gangs standing on the corner, the school athletes, the muggers, the super-shoplifters, and he would provoke them with gestures, and they would predictably pounce on him and pummel him with their fists as he fought crazily back, cursing them and challenging them to hit him again.

His mother, who stuttered as badly as he did, was a compassionate but unassertive woman, the daughter of Russian immigrants; and his father, who had dropped out of grade school on the Lower East Side to become a motorcycle messenger with International News Photos, and eventually a photographer with that Hearst-owned organization, seemed lost and almost cataleptic when he was not harnessed with camera straps and running with a pack of news hounds chasing a story. On those occasions when the family would dine at a Chinese restaurant his father would sit meekly at the table, addressing the Chinese waiter as “sir”; and in the house he was either quietly disapproving or uninvolved with family activity. The only thing that aroused any curiosity in Al about his father was the fact that he kept hardcore pictures of nude women in his bureau drawer, some of them
of Orientals that he had photographed during the war while he was a Hearst photographer in the Pacific, and others that he had obtained from friends in the New York Police Department after there had been a porno raid on Times Square.

The only male figure in the Goldstein family that Al admired was his Uncle George, his mother’s brother, a large and personable Damon Runyon character who was divorced and lived in a hotel apartment off Broadway in the theater district, where he operated a busy parking lot and was constantly behind the wheels of some very important cars. While he would never know the owners as intimately as he did their vehicles, he nonetheless conveyed to his nephew a convincing familiarity with most of Broadway’s top producers and stars, gamblers and pimps; and his persuasiveness was such that when he expressed dismay over the fact that his nephew was still a virgin at sixteen, Al’s humble parents wearily conceded that this might represent yet another problem in their son’s troubled life, and they welcomed George’s offer to resolve it. Soon Al received a call from his uncle instructing him to appear in his hotel suite on the following evening at ten, where a woman would be awaiting him.

Dressed in his bar mitzvah suit, Al Goldstein arrived at the hotel a half hour early. His uncle greeted him, poured him a drink of whiskey, and then took him across the street to a drugstore to buy him a condom, an expensive lambskin premoistened Fourex brand that his uncle considered to be the Rolls-Royce of rubbers. Al was then told to take a long walk around the block before returning to the hotel, by which time the lady should have arrived.

The door to Suite 709 was half opened when Al reappeared twenty minutes later, and in the darkened living room he saw his uncle sitting in front of the television set watching a wrestling match. After waving him in, and asking him to remove his jacket, his uncle pointed to the door of the bedroom and wished him good luck.

Nervously, Al opened the door and heard in the complete darkness a woman’s husky voice say, “Hello, I’m Helen. I’m glad
you’re here.” As he held on to the knob, she said, “Come in, close the door. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She seemed friendly and gentle and, though he still could not see her, he could distinctly smell her perfume.

“You nervous?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Would you like to take off your clothes and join me?”

“Yes.”

He was beginning to see her now in the unlighted room, sitting up in bed under the covers. She appeared to be a blonde. Carefully he removed his shirt and tie, and heard coins and subway tokens jingling in his pockets as he lay his pants over a chair. Slowly approaching the bed, he felt her hands reaching out to him; and soon she was cuddling him in a motherly way, softly directing his hands around her body, letting him stroke her large breasts, her stomach, and the hair between her legs. She was a very large woman but not fat, and when he pressed his mouth against her breasts, she said encouragingly, “That’s right—anything you want is all right.”

Then he felt her hands exploring him, touching his penis, exciting him in a way that was strange and wonderful. When she asked if he had brought a condom, he replied that he had; but as he stood up to get it, and saw his erection in the window light from the tall Broadway buildings across the street, he was embarrassed and turned his back to her as he fumbled through his clothing. He searched through his pants pockets, then his shirt pocket, then back to his pants before finally finding it; and after he had climbed back into bed, hesitating, she took the condom from him and opened it, and then expertly slipped the sheath over his penis, again saying; “Everything is going to be fine.” He was too excited to speak.

After wetting the tips of her fingers in her mouth, and touching herself between her legs, she pulled him on top of her, inserted him, and then began to move up and down in a rhythm he imitated. He felt totally enclosed in this large woman, comfortably ensconced within her heavy legs and long arms, and when he
came she hugged him and said, “Oh, that was nice.” He had never felt happier.

Later, relaxing next to her, she asked him how he liked school and other general questions, but she revealed nothing about herself; and he was too shy to inquire. He would have liked to remain longer with her in his uncle’s bed, but it was already late, and, since he had school in the morning, he finally said that he should be returning home. As he dressed she remained in bed, and when he said good night and thanked her, she kissed him.

In the living room his uncle, who was still watching the wrestling on television, stood up and asked if everything had gone well, and he seemed genuinely pleased to hear that it had. Al shook his hand and thanked him, and soon he was down the elevator and out in the night air of Broadway, surrounded by people and noise and glowing lights; and he felt older.

Within a few months, having turned seventeen, he dropped out of school and joined the Army. A letter to the Pentagon from one of his father’s friends at Hearst was instrumental in getting Al Goldstein into the Signal Corps, where for the next two years at various installations he worked as a photographer, taking pictures of hundreds of military parades and medal-pinning ceremonies—and once, at the request of his sergeant, he photographed the former being orally gratified by a prostitute.

Goldstein was a regular patron of prostitutes in both the United States and Europe while in the Army, and it was not until he had been discharged and began attending Pace College on the G.I. Bill, in the winter of 1958, that he did not automatically expect to pay money for sex—and it was the first time, too, that he did not feel socially and intellectually inferior to nearly everyone around him. He had matured in the Army, had done considerable reading during many lonely nights in the barracks, and at Pace College he was two or three years older than most of his classmates, had traveled more than they had, and he enjoyed a certain status as a returning veteran. In addition to his success with his
studies, he wrote for the campus newspaper, and worked each night after class as an apprentice photographer with his father at International News Photos. Having overcome the worst of his stuttering, he joined the college debating team, and was elected its captain.

But the realization that he was now more acceptable did not make him more accepting of other people; if anything his new self-confidence and status encouraged him to express more fully the hostility and frustration he had long felt. Now that his words could be understood he wanted to vengefully compensate for his many years of stifled rage and incoherent muttering that people had often mimicked; and if he should somehow achieve success in life, he knew that his greatest satisfaction would come from knowing that his old teachers and classmates in grade school had failed to perceive his winning potential.

Winning meant everything to Al Goldstein as a college debator, particularly when Pace was challenged by teams from the Ivy League, whose members he saw as socially privileged and rich, and therefore worthy of his scorn. In order to gain points against them Goldstein would do anything: He would falsify facts, would distort and lie in a dozen different ways—none of which disturbed his conscience because in his view Ivy Leaguers
deserved
to be lied to.

Soon, much of his churlishness was directed at Pace College itself. He began to feud with his professors, to write editorials denouncing campus policies, to rebel against the custom of students’ wearing a jacket and tie to class. As a twenty-one-year-old junior, Goldstein had grown a beard and was recognized as the school’s foremost beatnik; and as he neglected his textbooks for the novels of Kerouac and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, his academic rating declined, although this was also due to the excessive amounts of time and energy he was devoting to an elusive, pretty co-ed who was on the debating team.

Since she represented his very first love experience, his ardor was as romantic as his expectations were naïve, especially since she was a sexually adventurous and popular young lady who had
made it clear from the beginning that she did not intend to limit her social life exclusively to his nightly desires. Occasionally with his knowledge, and sometimes covertly, she dated other men—not consistently, but just often enough to keep Goldstein in a constant state of uncertainty and despair. His problem was that he could neither withdraw from her nor control her. She obsessed him physically. On nights when he was not in bed with her he masturbated to her image, seeing with maddening clarity her lean graceful figure and long, slender legs wrapped around the bodies of men he feared were more worthy than himself.

Though he was overweight, he had an aversion to overweight women; and despite the fact that his mother was large-breasted, or possibly because of it, Goldstein was lured by the smaller, firmer breasts of the sort that adorned the girl on the debating team; and while she had caused him much anguish since they had begun dating, reviving his old feelings of self-doubt, she also aroused his new combative spirit, his grim drive to conquer—she was, like the challenge of a debate itself, something he believed that he could finally win with his cunning mind, his quick mouth, and, in this particular instance, his cunnilingual tongue.

If there was a way to her heart, it was possibly through virtuoso performances upon her vulva, a conclusion he tentatively arrived at one night after she had gently pushed his head down between her legs and pronounced this to be her favorite pleasure. Prior to this, he had hardly every heard of cunnilingus, and certainly never by that name. On the rare occasions when it had been referred to in the Army or in his Brooklyn neighborhood, it had prompted only vile and scrubby descriptions, the most polite of which was “muff-diving,” and no self-respecting macho street hoodlum of his acquaintance had ever admitted to indulging in it. It was unmanly, if not unsanitary. It placed a man in a submissive role to a woman. It was primarily for perverts.

Indeed, after Goldstein had done research on the subject in the sex encyclopedias of various libraries, he discovered that cunnilingus, along with fellatio, was officially defined by the government as an obscene act, a form of sodomy, and it was illegal in
most of the American states even when practiced in private by married couples. In Connecticut the crime of oral sex could be punishable by a thirty-year jail term. In Ohio it was one to twenty years. In Georgia such a “crime against nature” could lead a practitioner to life imprisonment at hard labor—a penalty far more severe than having sex with animals, which in Georgia was punishable by only five years.

The laws against oral sex evolved of course from ecclesiastical law, which since the Middle Ages had determined these unprocreative acts to be unnatural, even though they had been natural enough to the multitudes that had practiced them since the earliest days of recorded civilization. Pictures showing people engaged in cunnilingus and fellatio could be found on Chinese scrolls dating back to 200
B.C.
, and also on ancient oriental rice bowls, perfume vases, and snuff bottles. Sculptured figures in erotic oral postures had appeared on early temples in India; and the first-century Roman satirist Juvenal referred often to cunnilingus and fellatio, suggesting that both were common during that time among heterosexuals as well as homosexuals. While the medieval church heavily penalized those who confessed to such pleasures, and created guilt within those who did not admit their sins, the oral predilection continued unabated for centuries in private, though it was rarely described and depicted openly except in forbidden art and literature, such as the eighteenth-century novel
Fanny Hill
and the much-censored work of Henry Miller.

Having read most of Miller’s books, Goldstein was not only impressed with the author’s vivid description of cunnilingus but was convinced that Miller himself greatly enjoyed bringing pleasure to a woman in this manner—and so did Al Goldstein, after much practice and encouragement from his young lady friend. When he had his head between her legs, and his tongue caressed her clitoris and vaginal lips, and his hands were firmly holding onto her buttocks and moving her at will, he sensed his power over her as he did at no other time. His tongue was a more potent weapon than his penis, or so it seemed to be during this period of his life; it was more reliable, tractable, responsive to his every
command—his penis could be limp, unarousable, but his tongue was always capable of thrusting, curling, and whirling its way into her good graces; and as his mouth was upon her he was conscious not only of the luxuriance of her loins but also that he was making a literary connection with Henry Miller.