Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (37 page)

Through Renslow, Steward was now meeting one hustler after another, and in some cases developing ongoing (paid) relationships with them—most notably with a former Mr. Chicago and Mr. Illinois state bodybuilding champion named Ralph Steiner.
^*
Renslow, however, fascinated him more than any hustler ever could. “Now with the added increment of his new sadism, [he is] a tremendously stimulating figure [to me],” Steward wrote in his journal. “I’m afraid of him, and yet strongly drawn to him. It’s all this damned new ‘S’
^*
personality of his.” Renslow unwittingly fanned the flames of Steward’s desire by sharing many sexual confidences; in one instance, “Cliff Ingram [telephoned Chuck the other night] asking for a[n S/M] session at the gym [and] he got it; [afterward] Chuck detailed it to me over the phone with great glee.”

Steward was now finding the desire to be punished and disciplined during sex ever more central to his sexual practices. His advancing age, diminishing libido, and rapidly deteriorating self-esteem all seem to have played a part in this growing desire to be physically and verbally abused:

But the encounter with Steiner was a bust. “At least it had the saving grace of being amusing,” Steward wrote the next day, “and kind of charming, for Ralph is a big sweet dumb boy, and he can’t help any of it, no matter how hard he tries. I explained that I was a masochist, and [that] I’d like him to beat me a bit. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that!’ he said. ‘I don’t know you well enough.’ That tied it.” But Steward hadn’t wanted to be “enslaved” by Steiner in any event; it was Renslow to whom he wanted to “submit.” “Chuck will soon have a vast number of slaves running around town,” Steward noted in his journal. “[Since] it looks as though I’ll never have a chance to be [his slave]…I would like to put the whole g[o]dd[a]mned thing out of my head, but that’s impossible I guess, with Renslow always feeding new details [of his conquests] into my overactive imagination.” Renslow had in fact propelled Steward into a state of such sexual agitation that it began to cause Steward both headaches and sleeplessness. Rather than give in to Steward’s importuning, however, Renslow merely offered Steward a shrug and a bottle of Miltown. When Steward continued to press him for S/M sex, Renslow finally agreed (despite misgivings) to “let him have it” once and for all.

The encounter, though ideal for neither man, nonetheless managed to convince Steward that his fantasy of being pimped out, abused, and sexually dominated by Renslow was basically impossible. “In some ways, I was a little disappointed,” Steward wrote afterward; “in other ways it was a rich and gratifying experience. I think I’ve learned one thing from it: there is not so much masochism in me (from the point of view of physical pain) as there is the slave complex. I adore that Renslow boy, despite all the humiliations he forced upon me, or rather because of them…He was hardly demanding enough for me within the radius of my fantasy, but on the other hand he was working under extreme difficulties…[and] the fact that he pulled his punches somewhat is a witness to [our friendship].”

As fall turned to winter, Steward realized that there would be no further developments in his relationship with Renslow—for, quite apart from being a friend, Renslow was a full twenty years younger than Steward, and even if he
had
wanted to have sex with him (which he didn’t), Renslow found Steward almost impossibly fussy about anything the two might have gotten up to during the course of an encounter. Since Renslow was just then surrounded by legions of handsome would-be hustlers down at the gym who were eager for any amount of no-holds-barred sexual exploitation, he really could not be bothered with Steward.

With no other outlet for his sadomasochistic obsession, Steward now began writing about Renslow on a daily basis, both in his experiments with fiction and in his journal entries. “A chorus boy from
West Side Story
[told me he wanted to be an ‘m’] so I called Chuck,” Steward noted one afternoon, “and to my horror [I] found myself bargaining with [Chuck], saying I’d send him this Roger Benson if he’d beat me up Monday…all the way home I kept saying [to myself] ‘Just what the hell happened to you?’”

By the end of the month, Steward had gained some perspective on his desire to be “abused,” and he had come up with a new plan for dealing with it as well:

The idea of hiring a violent heterosexual sadist to beat and abuse him seemed sensible enough to Steward, particularly since he knew he would get no more abuse from Renslow. While turning over the possibility in his mind, Steward attempted to understand his S/M ob session by reading Theodor Reik’s
Masochism in Modern Man
.
^*
One of Freud’s first students in Vienna, Reik has suggested that patients who engaged in self-punishing or provocative behavior did so to demonstrate their emotional fortitude, as well as to induce guilt responses in others and thus to achieve a sense of “victory in defeat.” Steward thought Reik’s ideas on masochistic relationships chillingly accurate, and after reading Reik cover to cover, he ventured some of his own thoughts on what he termed “the ‘tonic’ benefit of cruelty.” Specifically, he wondered if the intensity of the rejection he was experiencing at Renslow’s hand might somehow be linked not merely to Renslow, but rather to Steward’s own aging process:

On November 11, Steward celebrated the fifth anniversary of his career as a full-time tattoo artist by observing that “the prospect of retirement, or life in Europe, is not more than three years away (if all goes well).” He went on to describe a short story he had recently written about Renslow’s evolution into a sexual dominant. He hoped, oddly enough, that Burckhardt might publish the story, entitled “Baby Tiger,” in
Der Kreis
.

A few days later, he seemed much closer to a reconciliation with his feelings. “There’s an empty saddle in the old corral, and it’s mine,” he wrote. “I have vacated my stall at the Renslow stables…[and] all morning the old battlecry of Teufelsdrockh in
Sartor Resartus
has been hammering through my brain: ‘I am not thine, but free forevermore.’”
^*
Then, to finalize the matter, Steward telephoned the heterosexual sadist hustler and set up an appointment for the beating that would hopefully clear him once and for all of his S/M obsession.

As he nervously awaited the encounter, Steward attempted to use what he had learned from Reik to make sense of his decision to pay an unknown man to beat him up. “My ‘m’ aggressiveness is a more intense form of the ‘magic’ gesture directed towards Chuck [Renslow], typified by the idea: ‘You’ll be sorry you wouldn’t accept my love; I’ll give it to someone else,’” he wrote. “Further: I seek punishment from Chuck because I am subconsciously aware that my aggressiveness [toward him] may cause me to lose him…So I seem to be wanting him to punish me and help me to be good so that he will love me. My violent claim to love gives me the feeling I have the right to punish him. And with this, a feeling of righteousness, possibly arising from the superego.”

The next day the hustler came, beat Steward, collected his fifteen dollars, and left. Rather than achieving a much-needed release, however, Steward emerged from the experience finding it highly unsatisfactory: “Once more I am astonished to learn with what ease an ‘m’ can control an ‘S,’” he wrote resentfully in his journal. “I was wanting to be severely marked so that I could show Chuck, and Lord, there isn’t a single pink line on me anywhere today.”

Since Wardell Pomeroy was just then visiting Chicago from the Institute for Sex Research, Steward sat down with him and confided the entire situation. Pomeroy, however, had no constructive suggestions for Steward on how he might take hold of his emotions. In despair, Steward ultimately turned to Gracián’s
Manual
,
^*
a book with which he had been consoling himself regularly since the early 1930s. A day later, aware of the depths of despondency and self-pity into which he had sunk, he attempted once and for all to let go of the bitterness he felt toward Renslow, and in doing so to start over, “like Housman’s Terence.”
^*

By early December, Steward had regained his sense of humor about the situation, noting in his journal, “I no longer clutch at my breast or put the back of my hand to my forehead in the Lillian Gish manner when Chuck leaves—or doesn’t show up at all…[And I had] a long talk with Dom last evening [which] was very helpful [too.]” During the course of that talk, Orejudos had apparently explained to Steward that Renslow thought of him not as a potential sex partner, but rather as a much-needed father figure. “And so,” Steward wrote in his journal, “with the resignation I have generally been able to find myself at times of great stress, I decided to accept that role…[and] things were eased almost at once…This damned h complex always keeps people thinking they’re younger than they are: I don’t seem like 50 to myself, but I am, and to others, too.”

After a lifetime of sexual adventure, Steward was now faced, through Renslow’s categorical rejection, with something entirely nonnegotiable and new, and something for which, despite every precaution, he was nonetheless entirely unprepared: his transformation, at age fifty, into a sexually undesirable older man.

In the months after calling it quits with Renslow, Steward nonetheless continued to seek out sadomasochistic encounters, for his desire to be “abused” remained strong. The combination of sex, pain, and terror, properly administered, was in fact so stimulating to his senses that he now craved it above all other experiences. Along with regular meetings for rough sex with Paul Jefferson (a “highly intelligent, semi-Beat Negro” who was prone to alcoholic fits of temper) and the equally abusive, stunningly handsome black bodybuilder Bill Payson (whose preferred way of having sex included heavy verbal as well as physical abuse), Steward hired a ten-dollar hustler in early December, an Italian named Pete who had recently been released from jail after serving time on a manslaughter charge.
^*
He also noted a moment of profound self-loathing during an encounter with a hillbilly hustler named Jimmy Willers:

The new series of short stories Steward wrote during this time reflected this resurgent interest in deeply humiliating, often life-threatening sex. The first, a story based on Chuck Renslow’s transformation into a sexual dominant, had been fairly discreet in its handling of the subject matter, and was published; but Burckhardt sent the second one back suggesting an entirely rewritten ending—in Steward’s words, “the propaganda-type of
Kreis
ending you see so much of in that silly little sentimental magazine.” In attempting to describe the sexual fantasies that had taken over both his imagination and his day-to-day existence—inciting strangers and near strangers to physically abuse and degrade him—Steward was now in complete and utter conflict with
Der Kreis
, which wanted to publish life-affirming stories concerning masculine affairs of the heart, not chilling tales of semi-anonymous sadomasochistic encounters.

While Steward kept a distance from Renslow during this period, he could not break with him outright—for, apart from remaining sexually infatuated with him (“just like a 17-yr old schoolgirl”), he was largely dependent upon him for hustlers. One Latino hustler in particular caught his fancy:

A teenager who played guitar and wanted to be a rock-and-roll star, Reyes seemed to Steward to have all the “sullen moods and romantic charm of a latin Heathcliff.” Renslow had photographed him extensively, both in the nude and in a posing strap, for he had a very large and well-formed penis as well as a fine body. Renslow had already had sex with him repeatedly, and had sent him out to many other clients before passing him along to Steward. But Steward quickly developed a close personal bond with Reyes, one that immediately transcended the usual hustler-client relationship, and that ultimately lasted the better part of a decade.
^*

While Steward’s use of hustlers had been minimal, even incidental, five years earlier, they were now a mainstay of his sexual life. In 1954 he had spent only $63 on hustlers, but by 1956, that amount had grown to $205, and in 1959, to $300—meaning approximately sixty paid encounters per year, or more than one per week. In 1960, the number of paid encounters would more than triple, with the lion’s share of the $953 in payments, $750, going directly to Johnny Reyes.
^*

Unfortunately for Steward, few hustlers were interested in (or even understood) the heavy sadomasochistic role play he most craved. In his desperation he managed to negotiate one final, absurd S/M encounter with Renslow, “but it was a hasty little pudding we whipped up, with absolutely none of the ritual,” Steward wrote. “In the midst of things rising to a climax, [Chuck] came spontaneously and threw himself on me panting, and it was all over. At least, he said he came; I’m not certain that I saw any evidence. The truth is more likely that he looked at his watch and saw that it was time to [pick up] Dom [down at the auditorium], and so phonied up his orgasm.” In truth, both Renslow and Orejudos were by now more than indifferent to Steward; they were bored by him and irritated by his constant importunings. While Steward had once fascinated them with his vast knowledge of tattooing, they had by now largely absorbed all that they needed of that knowledge, and were putting it to use on their own. As a result, they considered him no more than a lonely, embittered, and slightly pathetic older man with little left to offer them.

Steward, however, was slow to realize the shift in their feelings toward him. Upon returning from Christmas (which he spent with his sister in Dallas), he had been invited by Renslow and Orejudos to exchange presents with them at their home, and in a grand gesture of friendship he had bought them a hundred-dollar Zenith Super-Symphonaire Radio. They accepted the gift happily enough, but offered him no gift in return. A few days later Orejudos came down with hepatitis and Steward heard no more from the couple. “We have been drifting further and further apart,” Steward noted sadly in his diary. “[Renslow] has now reached the stage of lying to me in order to stop my importuning [him for sex]—and good God, I don’t bother him
that
much!”

Pondering his increasingly miserable life situation in a journal that no longer seemed to him to have any purpose, Steward observed, “Sometimes I wonder just to what extent I have profited or lost in knowing [Chuck and Dom]. I have a feeling that something in the past two years has diminished the capability with which I was guiding my life into the channel I wanted, or that my progress to my goal is being delayed, or that something has seriously undermined my faith and confidence in myself, whether in the form of my ego or simple self-respect.” And, indeed, Renslow seemed more and more to Steward to have used him and cast him aside. “I try to think what my life was like before knowing them,” Steward concluded. “It seemed fairly simple, peaceful, channeled and selfish. But it has become a thing of chaos and turmoil and confusion.”

•

Having had no sex in Dallas over the holidays, Steward came back to Chicago hungry for something big, and so arranged for another brutal S/M “do” with the heterosexual sadist hustler Al Simpson. But news of Orejudos’s very serious case of hepatitis (contracted, Steward was sure, through oral-anal contact) gave Steward second thoughts, for he knew Simpson would insist on that activity. Rather than face such a health risk himself, Steward telephoned Ralph Mills and invited the defrocked priest over to take his place on short notice. Steward then hid in another room and watched the entire encounter through a peephole:

During this truly dark moment in Steward’s life, he found himself tempted into alcoholic relapse. Instead, in semidesperation, he turned to barbiturates, which offered a similarly pleasurable sensation of alcoholic detachment, but with fewer immediately addictive or toxic side effects. These Seconal pills, known as “reds” (which were then being widely abused and were relatively easy to obtain on the street) quickly became Steward’s drug of choice. Over the next decade he would develop an addiction to them that would last to the end of his life. Bob McHenry, an amiable former sex contact from Steward’s Polaroid-party days, later recalled visiting him at the tattoo parlor during this time, noting that Steward was clearly “bleary eyed and goofy” from them.

Steward had also started developing some more serious health issues, including erectile dysfunction. His sexual problems were not so severe that they prevented him from achieving orgasm, but they did limit the types of sexual activity in which he could successfully engage, and they became yet another source of personal humiliation for him, particularly since he was now frequently having sex with exceptionally virile younger men who had no such problems.

He also developed a varicose vein in his leg that required a hospital operation. While confined to his hospital bed, he was robbed of forty-two dollars by a night nurse, but without friends or family to intervene on his behalf, he could do nothing to get the money back. Steward was shocked to find himself so vulnerable and alone in life, and this new sense of vulnerability prompted him, while recuperating, to write the story of an impossible love between a tattoo artist and a heterosexual serviceman. He noted in his journal that it “was about [my experience with] Chuck Liston, and [I] called [it] ‘The Sergeant with the Rose Tattoo.’ To avoid possible repercussions…I set the scene in Paris, and managed not to make [the] Chuck [Liston character] until he was discharged from the army. (What projection! Not only regarding the boutique in Paris, but the making of that boy!) Well, midway, I got kinda disgusted: all those damned
Kreis
stories are too formula-ized, too facile, ending too happily. I was tempted to make this one bleak, but relented.”

Despite his health problems and the period of introspection prompted by his hospitalization, Steward returned to rough sex within a month of his release. In the aftermath of one such encounter with Paul Jefferson, he discovered that Jefferson, while doing time in federal prison for drug pushing, had murdered another inmate by bashing in his head with a brick. Later, in his journal, Steward noted that Jefferson had said, “‘I was surprised at how soft the skull was…like a mushmelon.’ This little bit of news excited me a lot, and I thought of Genet and Weidmann.
^*
…Paul worries the hell out of me when he’s been drinking.”

By far the greatest shock of Steward’s spring came not from Paul Jefferson or Bill Payson, but from Johnny Reyes, who one afternoon let slip that he was only seventeen—and thus still a minor. Steward’s old friend Robert Dahm had just spent twenty months in the Raiford penitentiary in Florida for engaging in sexual activities with a sixteen-year-old, so Steward knew all too well the danger of being sexually involved with one so young. In an attempt to swear off Reyes, Steward started up with a thuggish, chain-smoking new hustler of Renslow’s named Clyde Wayne. He also resumed his sexual relationship with Pete Rojas, his former student at DePaul. Though the bookish Rojas was hardly as sexually compelling as Reyes, “[he] is still pretty charming,” Steward noted in his journal that May, “and said some extraordinary and flattering things about me, that I was the only person at DePaul who had made him feel anything about the school was worthwhile, how I had ‘formed’ him, and so on…I wrote and told Rudolf, who at once said I sh[oul]d do a story [about it].”

•

That same month, while avoiding Reyes, Steward met up again with Paul Jefferson. As it happened, Jefferson had been released from a dry-out clinic that afternoon, and was on a particularly out-of-control drinking spree. During a long backroom session at the Tattoo Joynt, Jefferson caned Steward severely, forcibly sodomized him, and ultimately beat him up so violently that Steward remained black-and-blue for more than a week. Though Steward went so far as to describe the experience in the Stud File as a “rape,” he became completely obsessed with Jefferson as a result of the encounter—for Jefferson’s heavy drinking, combined with his recently revealed real-life history as a murderer, now made encounters with him particularly thrilling.

While tending his wounds in the days that followed, Steward realized that repeated encounters like the one he had just had with Jefferson would probably one day end in his murder. Though he and Renslow were no longer particularly close, he called Renslow to discuss the situation, and Renslow, after some thought, offered to give Reyes instruction in the art of sadomasochistic “abuse.” Steward wondered if doing so could possibly work, for Reyes was neither sadistic nor violent. Moreover, being so young, he lacked an authoritative or domineering presence. But when Renslow made clear to Reyes that Steward would offer him a financial bonus for being just as rough as he liked, Reyes (who had, after all, been beaten and terrorized for years by his uncle) dutifully took up the challenge—and, in the end, put in an impressive performance. Steward’s intense guilt about being involved with one so young—and in so perverse a manner—intensified his pleasure at being punished and hurt by the handsome adolescent. As a result, his passion for Reyes intensified. Meetings between them became more frequent, the beatings heavier, the payments more substantial.

Instructing hustlers in sadomasochistic domination was no easy thing, however, and Steward quickly found himself exasperated with the mood-killing work of explaining to each and every young hustler sent over by Renslow just how he wanted to be abused and mistreated. Remembering similar moments of adolescent apathy from his previous life as a teacher, Steward typed up a “handout,” which he began presenting to each hustler upon arrival, asking him to carefully review the material before beginning the session.