Fresh Air Fiend (7 page)

The human sexual imagination may be circumscribed by the instinctive urge to create a master race or ensure the survival of the fittest, but it also is—intensely—about recovering the onset of sexuality, locking on to a desirable image. It is about seeking joy. Most of all, it is the recognition of a love object.

Once, in Hollywood, I marveled at a particular actress's amplitudes—Thomas Hardy uses that nice word. "It's all wire," a producer friend said. I did not know that breasts could be plumped and supported with wire, like roses on a trellis arch. Eroticism is often contained in the secret of our not knowing—in our speculation. A dress is what it is, but it has other functions: what it hides, what it reveals. Nevertheless, it is almost universally the case that a man looks at the woman's face first, and then what he can discern of her body through her clothes, and last of all, almost as an afterthought, looks at her clothes, except when they seem familiar and address (in a sweet voice) something in his past.

Men focus on their object of desire at a place that is deep in the recesses of childhood. I cannot speak for women, but most men's libidos are fixed at an early age. Speaking for myself, I can recall the first flicker of sexuality, the sense of something important happening in my body, a chemical reaction producing heat. It was that summer day at my friend's house in the country, by the lake, the sight of his mother in her white bra and shorts, barefoot.

 

We are the only animals that blush—or need to, Mark Twain said in disparagement—but I think that remark is a tremendous compliment to the human imagination. Shame is a complex reaction, and what causes it is even more complicated. Far from being the only animals that blush, we are the only creatures to contrive a satisfying sexual act exclusively from toe sucking, sodomy, bondage, being a whipper or whippee of the object of desire. The intense non-tactile voyeuristic contemplation of another person is sexually fulfilling for some lovers.

Our behavior is determined to a great extent by the kind of responses we have learned, the libidinal trigger, which varies from person to person. It is not the same as the stimulus-response of an ape female habitually exhibiting her rump to a potential mate. This usually works on ape males, but the human response, easily desensitized, needing variation, would eventually be: There she goes again.

It is a fact of life that what is regarded as human perversity is our most specific humanity. What separates us from animals is our individual weirdness. "Each of us is unique and special" is a common enough platitude, and is intended to acknowledge human individuality. Put another way, what makes us human is our capacity for deviant behavior.

I am perhaps prejudiced in thinking that men are much stranger than women. Men, no matter which ones, look at women and begin to solve the sexual equation, which goes something like this:
Is she displaying sexual interest? and if so, is it directed at me? and
—these facts having been established—
am I interested?

Most of us men look at women and think:
Yes
or
Maybe
or
No.
Those are just questions as simple as blinking lights. Women know this, fashion designers know this, advertisers know this. The questions are not the determiners of the man's desire. One of the fundamental causes of crime is that where women are concerned, "no" is a sexual turn-on for men, a personal challenge. It perhaps originates as much in a dated female coquettishness as in male aggression. I am not making any judgment on this; maybe I am old-fashioned in believing that a woman saying "no" is the biggest turn-off in the world, and "yes" to me is an aphrodisiac. I have the weight of literature on my side, Molly Bloom at any rate: "yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes ... and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

 

From the male point of view, the nature of women's fashion is all about indicating a general sexual mood, specifically a woman's willingness. (And when I say "male point of view," I mean
my
point of view.) Unlike the ape exhibiting her parts to a passing male, there is no single gesture or act, nor any single item of clothing, that expresses willingness. There are conventional clothes—variations of underwear—and there are various forms of nakedness. It is obvious that a woman who dresses up wants to be observed. Men, less subtle, more single-minded, cannot rid themselves of the notion that a woman who wants to be observed and desired also wants to be possessed.

Fashion itself—the enthusiasm for dressing up, no matter what clothes the woman is wearing—is a specific signal to a man. Women say to each other, You look fabulous! Men cannot say that without investing the exclamation in either coy or overt sexual innuendo, because men cannot separate fashion from sexual plumage. The reductio ad absurdum of this is the utter bluntness of the women in Orwell's novel
1984
who wear a red apron on the days they want to get laid. The majority of men would be delighted if instead of an expensive dress, women simply wore a little button on their lapel that read
Yes.

Men, who are fairly stupid when it comes to women's clothes, are seldom interested in fashion for its own sake. But sometimes a style catches on, nearly always erotic—slips, bras, slit skirts, fur, feathers, whatever—and men go weak in the knees.

It goes almost without saying that women's fashion seizes a man's attention when it is motivated by eroticism. Because sexuality whips up the blood and hums so near to the surface in so many man-woman encounters, it is impossible for a man to consider what a woman is wearing without at the same time wondering what is underneath. This is not necessarily the imagining of a naked body, but perhaps of whatever lies next to her skin. Men of a certain age were stimulated by female sexual images before they became aware of the struts and buttresses and technical underpinnings.

Fashion that is completely new and unfamiliar, that does not echo an image from a man's sexually impressionable period, is doomed to failure from the man's point of view. For some men the image is sufficient to provide sexual fulfillment. This is also the reason men are more fetishistic than women. One of the more pathetic generalizations you can make about men is that some of them are perfectly happy nuzzling a woman's shoe. That women are rarely fetishists is yet another difference between the sexes and the manner in which their libidos are awakened.

The object of desire is the "Rosebud" we carry within our imagination. In each man there is a variant image, or some set of associations, comparable to the lipstick-smudged and perfumed cigarette, or the barefoot woman in a bra standing in total concentration; the image needs to be answered in the present. It is exquisite in its tiny way, and overwhelmingly significant.

M
Y RECORD
was so bad (the FBI was sent to check up on you then) that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker, and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. The alternative was Vietnam—this was 1963, and President Kennedy was still muddling dangerously along. I was sent to Nyasaland. And then a month before my two-year stint was over, I was "terminated"—kicked out—fined arbitrarily for three months' "unsatisfactory service," and given hell by Peace Corps officials in Washington. Of course they believed the truth—that I had been framed in an assassination plot against Dr. Hastings Banda, the President-for-Life ("Messiah," "Conquerer," and "Great Lion" were a few of his lesser titles). But the case against me looked bleak. I was debriefed. Airfare from central Africa to Washington was deducted from my earnings, and I ended up with two hundred dollars. Out I went. It was now 1965, and I still had the draft to contend with.

It was a mess, and for a long while afterward I hated the Peace Corps and laughed at its pious advertising campaign: "The toughest job you'll ever love." Ha! I hated the bureaucracy, the silliness, the patronizing attitudes, the jargon, the sanctimony. I remembered all the official freeloaders who came out from Washington on so-called inspection tours, and how they tried to ingratiate themselves. "You're doing wonderful work here ... It's a great little country," they said; but for most of them it was merely an African safari. They hadn't the slightest idea of what we were doing, and our revenge was to take them on long, bumpy rides through the bush. "Sensational," they said. They went away. We stayed. Most Peace Corps volunteers know that feeling: the smug visitor leaving in the Jeep and the dust flying up, and then the dust drifting slowly down and the silence taking hold.

On the subject of Vietnam, these Peace Corps bureaucrats were surprisingly hawkish and belligerent. Most of them believed Vietnam to be a necessary war. The volunteers were divided. This was an important issue to me, because I had joined the Peace Corps specifically to avoid being drafted, and I was dismayed to find so many of its officials advocating the bombing of Hanoi. As a meddlesome and contentious twenty-two-year-old, I made a point of asking everyone his views on Vietnam. I believed the war was monstrous from the very beginning, and I have not changed my views. What astonishes me today is how few people remember the ridiculous things they said about Vietnam in the sixties.

No one now remembers how confused Kennedy's Vietnam policy was or how isolated the student movement was. I had been involved in student protests from 1959 until 1963, first against the ROTC, then against nuclear testing, and then against our involvement in Vietnam. How could I have been inspired by Kennedy to work in the Peace Corps? I had spent years picketing the White House, and in doing so had made myself very unpopular. When I applied to join the Peace Corps, this career as an agitator was held against me. It was all a diabolical plot, I felt. And there was the president with such style—money, power, glamour. He even had culture! And I didn't know the half of it, for somewhere Marilyn Monroe was dialing his number, and somewhere else a Mafia moll was painting her nails in expectation of the president's visit. I had to fight my feeling of distrust and alienation in order to join. There were many like me—anti-authoritarian, hating the dazzle and the equivocation. And when the news broke that the president had been shot—I was sitting through a lecture in Peace Corps training, something about land tenure in the Nyasaland Protectorate—we were all properly put in our place. More revisionism, more guilt, and I thought:
Get me out of here.

 

Nyasaland—soon to become the independent republic of Malawi—was the perfect country for a Peace Corps volunteer. It was both friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems: poverty, ignorance, and disease. It had only a handful of university graduates. It had lepers, it had Mister Kurtzes, it had Horatio Alger stories by the score. It had a fascinating history that was bound up not only with early African exploration—Livingstone himself—but also with one of the first African rebellions, Chilembwe's uprising. It was the setting for Laurens van der Post's
Venture to the Interior.
The people were generous and obliging, and as they had not been persecuted or bullied, and had been ignored rather than exploited, they were not prickly and color conscious like the Kenyans and Zambians. There was a pleasant atmosphere of hope in the country—not much cynicism and plenty of good will. The prevailing feeling was that the education we were providing would lead to prosperity, honest government, and better health.

An added thrill was that many British settlers were still in residence. Some of these were old-timers—wog bashers, as they sometimes called themselves—who remembered the place when it was even wilder and more wooded. They had little contact with Africans—the place had never been a colony in the strict sense, only a backwater—and they resented us. Most of us hated them and mocked them, and we had a special loathing for the few volunteers who began moving in settler society. These pompous creeps—so we said—went to gymkhanas and cocktail parties at the local club and dated the settler children when they returned from their Rhodesian boarding schools. We saw them as social climbers and traitors. It was not uncommon for a Peace Corps volunteer, in town for supplies, to approach a group of settlers in a bar and say something crudely provocative, such as "The queen's a whore" (Elizabeth's portrait always hung above the bottles behind the bar), and nearly always a fight would start. To Africans these antagonisms were very exciting.

We had arrived in the country speaking Chinyanja fairly well, and we had plunged in—made friends, taught school, ran literacy programs, coached sports, and generally made ourselves useful. We were, as the English say, "at the sharp end," on our own and exposed, and doing the toughest jobs. The Africans were eager. Afterward it occurred to me that over the years of British rule the Africans had become sidelined, always seeing whites at a distance and wondering what the hell they were like. The Peace Corps volunteers were the first foreigners to offer them a drink. They were amazed that we were interested in them, and they repaid our interest with hospitality.

In addition to my teaching, I collaborated with a man at the Ministry of Education on writing two English textbooks, to replace the miserable ones that had been written for schools in Ghana many years before.
Foundation Secondary English
(Book One and Book Two) is still being used in Malawi twenty years after it appeared, and I am still receiving royalties on it.

We were pestered by Israeli soldiers who had been taken on to train our students to become single-minded cadets in a goon squad, but apart from them the school ran well. I planted trees, and we put a road through. I was proud of the place; I liked my students, and I enjoyed working with my colleagues. The country affected me as no other country has, before or since. I felt I belonged there. I was having a good time as well as doing something worthwhile—what could have been better?