Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (32 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
In the novel class, last of the day, I made a farewell statement in which I quoted Gide’s saying to me that every man had to (ought to—
“doit faire”
) make a complete break at least once in his life, with his home, thought, apartment or profession—and that this was it for me. A small gasp went up when I said I was retiring from teaching. And I told them that in line with my always finding a quotation of poetry to cover any situation that arose, they would find my major motivations in 1) the first four lines of Michael Drayton’s sonnet, “The parting”
*
2) stanzas 3, 4 and 5 of Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”
*
and 3) the last two lines of Milton’s “Lycidas.”
*
It was quite a little moment.
Steward then moved on in his journal entry to describe the travails of his good friend Hal McEwan, a fashion model, who had been entrapped by police on a park bench on the Near North Side: “Hal said that he felt that if he’d offered the pickup cop $25 it would all have been called off. But he didn’t have it.” As a result, McEwan faced legal bills of more than two hundred dollars as well as a permanent police record for homosexual solicitation.
In the first week of June, his teaching career now officially finished, Steward held fast to the notion that his work for Kinsey would sustain him intellectually as he began his full-time life as a tattoo artist:
Prok came [down to the cage] on May 26th [and] for two hours he watched and listened…With his fresh and scientific eye, he saw and commented on many things which…have become so usual [to me] that I barely see them any more…he saw it, all right, he did. He…said he thought every clinical psychologist ought to spend five or six two-hour sessions observing [in a tattoo parlor] before going out into the field.
Having been encouraged by Kinsey to think that through his journal writing and tattoo research he would eventually find a new scholarly vocation, Steward returned to them with vigor. As he did so, he felt a new compassion for the young men who came daily into the shop, for so many of them seemed to him in desperate need of mentoring and attention. After years of simply resenting the institutions in which he had taught, Steward now began to reassess his own motivations for working with and among the young. In one entry, for example, he noted the real pleasure he took in spending time among the troubled adolescents who had started to hang around the kiosk:
I wish there were some way of getting the feel of the shop into this journal—all the double-tender
*
sexual talk, the gesturing, the fumbling, the hints and talk of blow-jobs, violence, purse-snatching, knifing, the thinly veiled and uncomprehended homosexual motivations of the herd-and-hero instincts. I josh with ’em, scold ’em, sympathize with them—and like a good psychiatrist, priest or scientist, never never criticize. But the life that moves into and through my shop, always changing, is the real thing, seen and touched and tasted after so many years of the counterfeit and sheltered.
Later that week, Steward took stock of his life, noting in his journal that “this first bleak look at [my] future is a hard and depressing one…[But] in a sense, this will weigh and judge me. I will have now to test the validity of everything I have been saying to classes for the past twenty years [about] the…inner strength [of] the man able to think…This is going to be quite a little task…Putting it on paper helps, as the first step.” He echoed these concerns in a letter to Alice Toklas: “The end of school, the real and final end, gave me the weak willies for a day, but I recovered quickly, and hope for no recurrence. What a shallow mocking empty fraud that school was, and my life in it for eight years!”
Unfortunately, the loss of his job was not the only loss Steward was dealing with, for in letting go of his identity as a teacher, he was also letting go of his younger self. And along with letting go of that younger self, he also let go of one of the most long-standing sexual relationships that had been part of it. On June 11, he noted, “Sunday morning at two a.m. Bob Berbich rang the bell, and came up [for sex]. Afterwards, he announced he’s moving to Santa Barbara next month, which will take him outa my picture, and I received the news with mild regrets. I’ll miss that old baseball-bat of his, and his funny odd lower-class ways and expressions.”
Steward’s ever-growing awareness of his age was beginning to affect him down at the cage as well; in the same journal entry, he noted feeling “old and dirty and soiled” in front of so many “healthy and wholesome” young sailors. While his sex life remained good—he had just seen Wally Kargol, the ex-marine he had first picked up in the dunes of Indiana Harbor in 1951, and with whom he had since developed a highly satisfying “boots, whips and commands” relationship—he nonetheless found himself growing increasingly bored and impatient with his older contacts, noting, for example, that “Wally…has risen to be chairman of the grievance committee at Monkey Wards,
*
and is hard at work developing a new social consciousness, with so much talk about being the workingman’s friend, that he begins…to wear very thin…I found myself wishing that he’d leave, once the encounter came to an end.”
As men his own age ceased to interest him, Steward found himself more and more attracted to younger ones. In a journal entry two weeks later, he described four sensationally attractive young men who had just dropped by the cage, then added, “Sometimes I think I’ll go utterly nuts having them so close and not being able to do what I’d like.” However, he consoled himself with the knowledge that his business was doing better and better: “June continues good…total to date—$962. I was impressed by the fact that—to the dollar—I made in the week of June 17th the equivalent of a full month’s pay at DePaul: $384.”
It was not only closeness to so many young men in his shop that made Steward conscious of his advancing age. He was now repeatedly finding himself either ignored or passed over in sexual situations, as contact after contact instead chose someone younger and more attractive. The situation was particularly maddening for him since in most instances he was setting up the very orgies at which he was being rejected. After a daisy chain at his apartment, he recorded that among the nine young men present, only one had paid him any attention, leading him once more to wonder if he “ought to give it all up gracefully before the talking about me as an old auntie grows too painful.”
But there was not much to be done about middle age. As a result, Steward began slipping into the role of the friendly mentor—a role he had long since mastered through many years of teaching. In doing so, he seems to have reconciled himself to the never-ending ache of unrequited love—a sensation that had tortured him throughout his earlier, more closeted academic years in Helena and Pullman. After one particularly handsome young man named Gordon Krull stayed late with him at the tattoo shop, Steward simply abandoned himself to morose delectation, and took the rugged, unattainable youth out to dinner at a local cafeteria:
He was a big lad, about six feet two, [with] an excellently profiled face…so beautiful that everything once more flowed out of me, leaving a vast emptiness behind, that terrible ache I get in front of beauty…I several times found myself partly erecting, an amazing phenomenon for me after all these years. He thanked me for the dinner, and finally left about seven-thirty to get his train…Days such as this leave me exhausted, and restless, and a little unhappy because they can have no issue in any practical fulfillment.
*
On June 26, Glenway Wescott passed through Chicago. Wescott had been doing work at the Kinsey Institute on a project (never to be realized) of detailing the sexual lives of artists and writers—a project that, in the words of a Kinsey biographer, “essentially…seems to have been Glenway spouting intimate gossip.” He visited Steward down at the tattoo cage, hoping to be invited to a
spintriae
; Steward, however, ducked out of hosting him, and declined even to invite him back to his new, uptown apartment. After receiving a note of reproach from Wescott the following week, Steward responded,
The fantastic episodes continue to pile up here in my shabby little gold mine, and I have been so deluged with tightpantsed (!) tawny-armed beauties that I’ve lost nearly all sense of selectivity—handsome and ugly, they all run together. There’s such a thing as having too much beauty around you, I guess; you become insensitive to everything.
I did not leave you for an assignation; at least, there was none intended, although after I got home one did materialize—a truck-driver…and tonight a marine sergeant, and so it goes, extremely full to the brim, and my own cup half-empty most of the time.
So let us forgive each other our own emphatic projectings, and have only a few regrets. Some time we shall make up for our delicacies.
In losing his position at DePaul—and with it, in a sense, many long-harbored pretensions about himself—Steward felt free, as well, to let go of Wescott, a pretentious literary man he had never really liked.
•
As he began tattooing full-time, Steward became more and more attuned to the life of the streets, including the lives of street gangs. “I’ve come closer to breaking into the closed circle of the Road Wolves than that of any other [pachuco] gang,” he wrote after learning that one of its members was regularly performing oral sex on the others, even though none of them considered him homosexual. He later noted that his tattoo-artist identity gave him intimate access to the otherwise closed world of these gangs, for “a tattoo for the gang members or the delinquents was a visible sign of their rebellion, their manliness, or their affiliation with the stratum that was in revolt…[and since] I performed a function of which their parents disapproved…I was therefore one of them [and] they talked freely in front of me…The fact that I furnish[ed] them with their ‘badges’ [eventually] opened most of the [Chicago] gangs to me.”
In his free time, Steward began keeping newspaper clippings relating to the tattoo cage and its “regulars.” There was a nineteen-year-old named Bob Berullo, who had hung around the shop for several months, and who frequently asked Steward if he needed anyone beaten up. He subsequently disappeared. Steward discovered his name in the newspaper a short time later, in a report stating that Berullo had been given a sentence of ten years to life on one of two counts of robbery, and two to ten years on another count, with the two sentences to run concurrently.
Steward had other rough young men who interested him as well, chief among them a handsome, hulking seventeen-year-old Polish boy named Tommy Saklovitch. Saklovitch had initially tagged along with the Road Wolves gang on their visit to the cage one afternoon for gang tattoos. The gang members had shunned Saklovitch, however, thinking him “violent, stupid and crazy.” Steward subsequently ascertained that when still a child, Saklovitch had been subjected to shock treatments that left him permanently confused. Rejected from the marines for lack of intelligence, he was well-nigh unemployable. Steward, however, found Saklovitch sexually attractive, and so began inviting him over to his apartment regularly for sex. The friendship between them was such that as a gift for Saklovitch’s eighteenth birthday, Steward tattooed a fly on the head of his penis. An August 1 journal entry gives a sense of Steward’s oddly tender relationship with this otherwise totally unloved boy-man—a sex relationship that would last, on and off, for nearly six years:
*
The night Tommy left for Milwaukee [to try to get a job] he came out to stay the night with me, and we went thru our regular ritual—first both of us climbing in the shower together, and me scrubbing that great animal body, and kneeling again to wash his feet, with my eyes centering on the little fly on his cock, dangling an inch from my mouth…and then going to bed, and using the vibrator on each other, and then to sleep. I suggested Tommy use my new “Heaven Hole” but he said no, he’d already tried something like that in a sponge rubber shop.
A born tinkerer and inventor, Steward was now constantly creating devices such as the “Heaven Hole” during his free time down at the cage:
This new thing I had made up at the foam rubber shop on Broadway—a six inch cube of foam rubber with a hole down the middle the size of a silver dollar. I then got some liquid latex at the art store, and gave three-four coats to the rough inside of the center cut…I put the cube under one of the sofa cushions and kneel in front of it, so that by leaning on top I create pressure and squash the hole narrower. Then I insert the rubber cup of the vibrator on the far end; the latex coating picks up and transmits the vibration through the whole opening…I’ll be damned if it isn’t the most realistic thing I’ve ever felt, outside of the genuine article—and what a greater advantage, to be able to store your wife in a closet! No expense, all the pleasure. Orgasm is terrific, every time I’ve used it yet.
In late July, Steward encountered an old acquaintance from his Polaroid days: Bill Payson, a devastatingly handsome black weightlifter whom he later described in his Stud File as “
beau comme l’aube
”:
*
I talked [him] into coming down to the shop, and he came…and then I suggested [a] blow-job; he was reluctant at first, and then said yes. He was no kinder than formerly…all my gaggings and efforts to escape from the inexorable ram availing nothing—he proceeded to thrust it in and out of my throat until I couldn’t breathe and the tears ran down my face from the choking. He finally came, completely and satisfyingly uncaring about my discomfort…Finally he released me…I said goodbye to him, still blinking and breathless from my lovely ordeal, he looking at me with quiet amusement, as if saying, “Well, white boy, that’s a blowjob you’ll remember.” And I will, too.