Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (28 page)
Authors: justin spring
Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Social Science, #College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, #Gay authors, #Literary, #Human Sexuality, #Novelists; American - 20th century, #General, #Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, #Psychology, #Artists; Architects; Photographers, #Body Art & Tattooing, #Authors; American, #College teachers, #Gay authors - United States, #Steward; Samuel M, #Tattoo artists, #Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, #Novelists; American, #Gay Studies, #Authors; American - 20th century, #Education, #Art, #Educators, #Pornography, #20th century, #Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, #Sexology, #Poets; American, #Literary Criticism, #Poets; American - 20th century, #Biography & Autobiography, #Teaching Methods & Materials, #Biography
Jimmy and Lonnie Knight now live on the third floor in a room about 50 x 20—used to be an old ballroom. Jimmy had said there would be lots of pretty people there; and I think I dashed him when—after meeting fifteen—I said please tell me when the pretty ones come in. I saw out of the whole crowd only one, a Dick somebody—with a low brow, big hands, a kind of bohemian workers body, and a little expression which recalled that of Art Craine to me. I was struck with the isolation of each one of us all, including me;…There were few “movers” or mixers; most of them stayed in the groups they came with. All of them were the elegants, or the semi elegants,—and I felt out of place. But instead of the wretchedness borne of shyness and timidity in the face of beauty, I was somewhat gratified to find myself caught in violent little webs of scorn when I looked at their cufflinks and their carefully tidied hair—oh, the glittering facades, hinting the hollowness within…The fear lurking in them, the arched and plucked eyebrows, the powdered pastiness of the skin (not hiding the wrinkles of the neck when the head turns sidewise—so), the elegant postures, the lines of well-cut Brooks Brothers suits, the rings—my God, the rings! The Dick I liked most, the Neanderthaler, ruined himself (for me) with a three-quarter inch square black stone on one thick and hairy finger, as out of place as a diaper on the David.
I hate bitch parties…I tolerated [tonight’s] better than usual, however, for at the end of the evening I knew there lay waiting for me the antidote to the smoke and the rings and the Cub Room and the Knize Ten—Bob Berbich, the lanky truck-driver with his skull-like face, his body in which each muscle stands out, with skin of the worker who never has the time to seek out the sun and who retains the winter whiteness all year round…Bob Berbich, who has been…faithful all these years, with his poor grammar, his limited view, his total and utter absence of “culture” in any form, his proletariat pleasures (a new car every year, the old one traded in…)—and [I imagine him] standing there, cock uplifted, his hands clasped behind his head (fearful that if he should touch me while I kneel before him, that some of my queerness will rub off on him), and leading me here and there around the room, my following him around the room almost on my knees—and then his final going to the bed, where…his head elevated on the pillow, his hands still behind his head…we set to work in earnest…at the moment of orgasm, there is only a slight, very slight contraction, a tiny spasm, and a little “oh!” escaping muffled from his mouth, or a small exhalation of air. When I go to spit, I know that by the time I get back he will be up and dressing, his shorts on—and then a final handshake, a promise to call me next week, an admonition to get some new “pitchers” to stimulate him, and off he goes.
Time and the repetitions have worn down the excitement he first brought to me to a bare nubbin—and yet as I sit here writing and thinking about it, I am certainly moved to say that I wouldn’t trade him and that weekly or bi-weekly visit for any encounter with anyone of the bitches at Jimmy’s party. He is…“pure trade”—no foolishness, very business-like and matter of fact. I sometimes wonder just what he thinks about [our meetings]…how he phrases it. “Well, it’s Sattiday—guess I’ll give him a call, and go out and let ’im have it.”
Through the journal, Steward was coming to a clearer understanding of the new life he wanted to lead. He was coming, as well, to recognize some other dark desires:
[An executive I know] wanted a “party boy” for one of Young & Rubicam’s clients. I said if he were to call me next week I might have some news for him…I called Bobby Krauss and asked him if he wanted to be a party boy for ten dollars—for someone who was about 40, tall, and “I don’t know whether he’s good looking or not; that’s a personal matter.”…The whole episode…excited me quite a little. I’ve arranged scores of people for people, but as far as I know, this is the first direct pimping I’ve done…maybe I’ll demand fifty cents from Bobby, just for a souvenir piece. I can follow the whole thing in my mind—Bobby in slacks and jacket, knocking at the hotel room door; it opens; he’s there—a bathrobe carelessly parting on a tall frame, a big cock erecting, and little Bobby earning his money, and myself demanding a cut of it. It’s extremely and delightfully wicked, of course, especially since Bobby is only seventeen—something Genet himself would admire, I’m sure.
During November, while working as a curtain boy at the opera (Callas was singing
Norma
and
Traviata
, and Steward was sitting just a few feet away from her for every performance), Steward learned from Tattooed Larry that a tattooing booth at the Sportland Arcade on South State Street was available for rent. Just south of the Loop and just a few streets in from Lake Michigan, South State Street consisted in the early 1950s of various empty lots, antiquated amusement arcades, burlesque shows, pawnshops, and flophouses. Winos lay passed out in doorways, and the gutters stank of vomit and urine. Steward recalled his first sight of the arcade years later:
The Sportland looked dead and dingy from the outside, and darker and deader inside—long and gloomy, with dirty walls. Against the left wall, running clear back to a shooting gallery, was a tightly packed row of vintage stereopticon peepshow machines [which] dated from the 1920s…A glass-enclosed Egyptian fortune-telling painted plaster lady with a rotting veil peered at a row of cards…
•
He moved into the nine-foot-square space, which he nicknamed “the cage,” on November 11, 1954,
*
initially planning to share it with an alcoholic tattooist whom the arcade’s owner hoped to evict. That tattooist, Randy Webb, had been friends with Mickey Kellet, the wino who had sold Steward his tattooing equipment, and in fact Webb had hoped that Kellet might join him in the space. When the arcade owner chose Steward as a tenant instead, Webb took an instant dislike to him, and the feeling was mutual:
[Webb was] a [toothless] little old man with yellow-brown hair…Not only did his chin nearly meet his nose…but he had one of the worst complexions imaginable…covered with rum-blossoms—big scarlet and purple pustules which he was fond of squeezing and popping out about a quarter-teaspoon full of pus and yellow matter. Beyond a doubt he was the nastiest looking person I had yet to see on the street, and [in time he would prove] the slyest and craftiest back-stabber of them all.
At first Steward occupied the booth on Wednesdays and weekends, Webb the rest of the time. But as Steward established himself as the superior craftsman, customers in search of tattoos began abandoning Webb in favor of Steward. In retaliation, Webb put the word out that Steward was homosexual. “In those days,” Steward later wrote, “you had to keep it hidden. Otherwise [you either risked a beating, or else] would be bartering blowjobs for tattoos.” (Faced with a sudden influx of “barter-boys,” Steward simply told them they had the wrong man, and directed them across the street to a grotesquely ugly and alcoholic tattoo artist named Shaky Jake.)
The neighboring Pacific Garden Mission also proved problematic. While it trafficked in “the usual holy-roller stuff of the far-right fundamentalist kind, derived from…Billy Sunday,
*
who had actually been ‘converted’ on their premises,” the mission quickly revealed itself to Steward as yet another racket—one that after giving free doughnuts and coffee to sailors later milked generous donations out of their worried parents. Particularly galling to Steward was the mission’s practice of sending out its temporarily reformed drunks, known as “runners,” to stop sailors from getting tattooed. Steward eventually hired a lawyer to keep the mission from interfering in his business.
In opening his booth at the Sportland Arcade, Steward knew he was taking an enormous risk with his academic career. But it was, in fact, a calculated risk—for although he knew he wanted to be a tattoo artist, he did not yet know whether he would be able to make enough money at the job to survive, and he wanted to hold on to his DePaul paycheck for as long as he possibly could. While his moonlighting was surely an expression of rage against the university—for he felt extremely ill used by its administration—working as a tattoo artist was yet another form of thrill-seeking for Steward. Never before had he done anything so potentially dangerous to his livelihood and professional reputation, and never before had he worked in any place so perilous as South State Street. As a result, he wrote, “The street’s miasma and excitement began to play hob with my sense of reality, giving me an almost schizoid separation in my mind and emotions…I [had entered]…the seamy, sodden world of whores and pimps and pushers and winos and con-men—yes, and of tattoo artists.”
While living a double life of this sort might well have been difficult for the average man, Steward was far from average. He had, after all, lived with a strongly divided consciousness since childhood, when he had appeared angelic to his aunts and teachers, yet as a renegade to neighborhood boys. As a closeted homosexual with an exceptionally dynamic sex life, he had again needed to live a life of constant concealment and trickery. For years he had courted danger and discovery as he moved between a series of highly compartmentalized personas. Now, however, he had become another person altogether: professor Sam Steward by day, tattooist Phil Sparrow by night.
There was, of course, no explaining any of it to his friends. Even among the most permissive and sympathetic of them, Steward could hardly begin to describe his erotic fixation on tattoos and tattooing, for at that moment in history, such markings were looked upon largely with horror, and were worn almost exclusively by misfits and outcasts. (Nor could he explain to his friends his overpowering attraction to delinquents, criminals, street toughs, and working-class men.) To many of his most liberal acquaintances, including Kinsey,
*
tattoos were a mark of degradation, and to be a tattoo artist was to traffic in corruption. In that sense, tattooing was just the opposite of Steward’s vocation as a teacher, for he had by now devoted nearly twenty years to the enlightenment of young minds. Even Steward himself was quietly conflicted about this new activity, for a great deal of its allure came directly out of his gut sense that what he was doing was profoundly bad, sinful, and wrong. “[My] secret embarrassment over the whole matter,” he later wrote, “led me to denigrate the skill by usually referring to it as ‘tattoodling’…as if to show my ‘intellectual’ scorn of such a profession.”
After Steward had set himself up as a tattoo artist down at the cage, Kinsey made a proposal, one that would add an intellectual component to the work there:
After a month or two passed in my new career, [Kinsey said], “You are probably one of a half dozen literate tattoo artists in the country—if indeed that many. And we’ve noticed tattoos on hundreds of persons during our interviews. But they seem totally unable to tell us why they got them, and we don’t have the time to probe as deeply as we would like into that aspect…[So] keep a journal for us on what you can perceive as the sexual motivations for getting tattooed. You may not be a trained scientific observer, but you have a writer’s keen eye, and you should be able to unearth a great deal.
Steward’s sex-and-tattooing journal would run for six years, and ultimately amount to more than a thousand pages in single-spaced typescript; with it he kept remarkable statistics about physical and emotional responses to tattooing, basing these statistics on interviews he conducted informally with his clients. He later noted that along with its investigations into the psychology and sociology of tattooing, the journal evolved into a partial record of segments of the subcultures that existed in the 1950s. “The tattoo shop was of course a magnet for the very young boot sailors stationed at nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Station, but it also drew into it the youth gangs of Chicago, the juvenile delinquents, the sexually confused and rootless (sometimes illiterate) young men—the rebels without causes. In a sense, the journal crystallize[d] a troubled time that included McCarthyism, Korea, and the seeds of the deeper rebellion of the 1960s.”
What Steward neglected to mention in this description, however, was that the journal was also a highly detailed sexual confession—for even as he began it, he found himself erotically transfixed by the men coming in for tattoos, and also found himself surprisingly successful at propositioning them. Through the strange sorcery that came with applying tattoos to bodies, he discovered he was able to establish a powerfully intimate connection with one young man after another. Sometimes he merely observed sexual responses in the men; at other times, he ended up having a sexual interaction with them. Just as often, however, he found himself becoming emotionally overwhelmed by these men whose bodies he was handling so intimately, for their exceptional youth and beauty left him in a highly responsive state. As a result their joys were his joys, their sorrows, his sorrows:
[The other day at the tattoo kiosk] there had been standing around a young 17-year-old in a big black navy raincoat and a civvie hat…Came his turn—he took off the raincoat [and] he was wearing a grey corduroy jacket too small for him, and a pair of nondescript trousers…[I put an arrow-pierced heart on his] forearm…He was a little pressed for time, mentioned East Liverpool
*
and the train leaving shortly. It was only when he stood up to put on his Navy coat, however, that he took hold of the corduroy jacket, and said, “Navy suit.” Whereat the whole story tumbled out—he had got to Great Lakes, and there been rejected for a strain or sprain, and was now going back. I was floored, and felt the emplastic unfolding within me so much that my own lip began to tremble, as his was doing, restrained only by will. I felt it all vividly, perhaps because it was so close to my own experience: the shame at rejection, the great burning to wear the uniform—and then to that I could add his feeling of loneliness in the big city, and the final desperate gesture of something to remember the Navy by—or some little sign of his all too short period of service: the tattoo, to show the folks at home, at least, a pathetic souvenir of a career cut short, and high hope extinguished.
I was more shaken by the kid than I cared to admit…