Today, this book could not be published. Nevertheless, despite its “lavish use of freewheeling, multiethnic caricature,” it has been. That it stands up to a steady stream of accusations and invective that rule the Internet will depend on readers who value truth and logic because it most certainly does not pass muster according to the precepts of Presentism, defined by Webster as an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences, meaning that if you were born one or two centuries ago, you were probably a racist, sexist, and ageist, the inference being, the person accusing you would not have been.
It's in this context that we meet Gus Mazur, a young man who’s making the same mistakes you and I made when we were twenty-something. It’s 1968, the sexual revolution. Gus deludes himself into believing sex with liberated women will ease his frustrations about the compromises he makes at work.
Ambitious, Gus has the brains to rise to the top of network television. Yet, as the only non-white producer at WBN, he’s ambivalent about an industry that values money over narrative, politics over truth. He chafes at running stories that hide the truth from the American people.
It wasn’t a real neighborhood; houses were far apart. Winter’s and Stewart’s were the closest families to ours. My father knew the latter from work. That’s how I met Julissa, their daughter, at a barbecue we were invited to. Right off the bat, Julissa and I didn’t get along, even though our ages matched. She was playing the little helper, passing around homemade pickles. I cracked an off-color joke about pickles and human anatomy to see if I could get a rise. She barely looked at me. Jokes, serious talk, nothing interested her.
The harder I tried, the more she looked around nervously like a person unfamiliar with cats freaks out when one jumps in their lap. I knew I’d get nowhere talking about baseball or mentioning Charlie Parker or Dave Brubeck. I told her we’d studied Hamlet in English class and the Korean War in history, adding my favorite subjects were reading and writing, trying not to sound pedantic.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I dunno. School.”
“What about it?” she asked.
Julissa started petting their large Newfoundland. The dog walked over to m. I put out my hand. Julissa gave me a dirty look; I melted. The slightest put-down exposed my lack of confidence around girls. It never occurred to me it was part of a game she was playing, one she perfected.
It was obvious Julissa didn’t give a hoot about school. If she cared about it at all, it had nothing to do with academics. When I told her there were no girls in my school, she acted surprised and a wee bit more interested.
“Oh my, what’s that like?” she giggled modestly. There was nothing modest about Julissa. She was one of those teenagers whose hormones kick in before they’re supposed to. She’d learned what she could get away with, how to arrange herself innocently while inwardly her intentions were anything but innocent.
In a fruitless attempt to make her daughter look ordinary, her mother styled her blond hair with a bowl and she didn’t allow her to wear makeup. It only made Julissa more alluring. She might have worn a prison jumpsuit; it wouldn’t have mattered; there was nothing ordinary about Julissa or her green and black 1940s-styled short-sleeved peasant dress. Hemmed at the knee—no pleats, no lace, no frills—it was the perfect counterpart to her dark red Keds® and bobby socks.
“That school of yours, nothing to do ‘cept look out the window,” she said.
“Thinking about what we’re missing.”
“I know what boys think about,” she said. “Poor little things need cheerin’ up.”
“From now on, I’ll stare out the window and think about you, maybe.”
“The horses. They’ll cheer you up.”
“Sure will.”
“Last one there is the devil’s plaything.”
She took off for the stable at a run. When I caught up to her, she was standing with her back against the stable wall. I leaned in, my arms forming a circle, enclosing her. She tried ducking under them, making a game of it, laughing. I was too quick for her. She smelled of cow’s milk and clover.
Next thing I knew we were in the hayloft, and she was showing me hers and I was showing her mine. No offense, but at our young age mine seemed to hold more interest than hers, that is until she gently pried the two sides apart and it was like staring at me. She told me to make mine big, which indicated she’d done this before. How else would she know about boners? If she fondled it, it’d get bigger in a matter of seconds, I insisted, but she only poked at it once or twice like it was a dead mamba that still might bite her.
Every time one of the horses moved in their stalls, she cringed and the look of terror on her face frightened me so much I wilted.
Her parents, she explained, were very religious. They belonged to Lambs of the Lord, an obscure, but strict church. What we were doing was a mortal sin. If they caught us, it meant a whipping.
She pointed out a pink area at the top of her, her— cunt was the word I knew from school. The way older boys spoke it, with such repugnance, I hated it. Older girls at her school, said Julissa, referred to it as a pussy, a term I instantly related to.
“When I rub there softly... It has to be just right, my whole body...” In the words of a fifteen-year-old, she described an orgasm so seductively it had me fully erect. Her face flushing, her titties tingling, molten liquid gushing from within, her body erupts like a volcano is the way she described it. Only lasts thirty seconds, she said, sometimes a whole minute.
“How could it be sinful?” she asked. “If it was a sin, God wouldn’t have put it in our bodies.”
“That’s the whole point of religion, overcoming temptation. Says so in the Bible, on page one. Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit.”
She wanted to see me do what she’d just described, the way boys do it, she said, watch me spurt. I proposed lying back while she used her hand. At first, she was unwilling. I asked her if she’d done it with other boys. She swore that she’d merely exchanged glimpses—a few boys had shown her theirs and she’d reciprocated. She hadn’t had many opportunities; her parents didn’t want boys hanging around. I was there with my family; that was different, she said. Besides, I was deemed trustworthy because, as my father described it, my prep school practiced the honor system like it was a religion.
Julissa pushed me back into the hay and started to explore me. I let her. She spat into her hand and applied it to my... we didn’t use the word penis in those days. Cock was customary, although I liked Knob, the term Pop used, mainly because no one else used it. Anyway, she fondled it a while before wetting her hand again and finding a suitable motion.
She’d learned how from her older brother who was in Korea now, she said. He’d shared certain techniques, often describing the things men like.
“I did it for him once or twice, but that’s all. I swear.”
They’d been in clandestine revolt against their parents’ fanatical fundamentalism, she said. We exchanged looks as she went at it, her mouth wide open, panting.
My breathing quickened. Soon, she had me on the verge. Using her index and middle fingers, she dipped into the flow when I came, slurping a gob or two off her fingertips while making a funny face and giggling. I was pretty sure she hadn’t learned this from her brother.
Julissa was a much better kisser than I was. Her tongue was everywhere. After a while, I caught on. By that time, I was hard again and wanted to go all the way. Julissa was all for it. She rolled me over on my back. Gasping, mouth open, as if inhaling a sigh, she lowered herself onto my knob, guiding it into her. Bracing herself with her arms, she leaned back and started to move up and down and around with abandon. It wasn’t her first time; that much was obvious.
That thought cost me an instant, a fraction of a second, time to realize I might be in real trouble. More than once, my mother had explained how girls got pregnant. Still, I had no intention of stopping. She let out a cry before finding a rhythm she was comfortable with; she looked down at me and smiled.
I might have labeled it ecstasy, had my rational mind been functioning and I had something to compare it with. It was like we’d crossed into another world.
“Julissa…”
“Honey baby.”
I couldn’t believe it. After a miserable beginning, feeling I’d never get anywhere with a girl, I was doing it with one.
Well, almost…
Fifteen measly seconds into it, the shit hit the fan. The sound of someone, perhaps, two people approaching the stable, fussing and making a racket. Heaven on Earth had evaporated just as we were beginning to savor its delights.
In the rush to disentangle herself, Julissa must have sprung halfway across the hayloft. She was fully dressed before I finished struggling with my pants. We were able to slip out the back way and pretend to be moseying in from the pasture where the cows were; it was her mother and grandmother.
“Where you been, girl?” snapped her mother.
“Nowhere,” said Julissa.
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing.” There was the slightest flicker of defiance in her voice. Her mother knew it was there, but it wasn’t overt enough to be called out on, even though the hay in Julissa’s hair was a dead giveaway.
I should have thanked those interlopers. Had I gotten Julissa pregnant, my life would have been over. I never would have left Oklahoma.
A few days later, Julissa’s father called Pop, ostensibly to ask if I’d be attending the local high school. He knew I played football. Pop realized that wasn’t the main reason for the call, so when her father got around to explaining Julissa was boy crazy, he knew it was about the two of us disappearing during the barbecue.
“Nothing personal, you understand. He’s a fine boy. It’s Julissa we worry about. If she should get in trouble...”
“Thanks, neighbor, it won’t be our boy. You can be sure of it.”
After dinner, while reading the latest Submariner, Pop came over to my chair. “You only live once, Monk,” he said putting his arm around me like I’d caught a touchdown pass. “Get as much as you can while you can.” Pop was full of aphorisms when it came to sex. Nevertheless, Julissa Stewart was off limits, he said. My only souvenir?— the scratch marks her fingernails had gouged on my back. No more swimming with the family this vacation.
When our paths did cross a few years later, she snubbed me. Rumors swirled around Julissa. If true, she ran around with certain townies, making up nasty things about me. Like hinting I was responsible for her abortion, the one her super-religious family had no trouble arranging when it concerned their daughter but, oh Lordy, how they condemned it when other young girls became pregnant.
I could tell Pop wanted to quiz me about Julissa, the horny bastard. My mother heard him and chased him away. These things were never discussed between generations. Later, it was alleged that Julissa’s father had raped her repeatedly.
* * *
I’ve tried to forget the day Pop turned up at Winter’s, but it keeps cropping up, a souvenir of my father’s struggles with alcohol and the source of our estrangement. He’d fallen off the wagon again; my mother and I had stopped counting.
This on again, off again merry-go-round, said my mother, was like dealing with two different persons, neither of whom were conducive to a caring and giving family life. It wasn’t always that way, she said. When they first got together, Pop was a social drinker, the most gracious, fun person she’d ever known. Unfortunately, that sobriquet was short-lived as tends to happen with so-called social drinkers.
According to her, in holding his Mr. Hyde persona in check by not drinking, his Dr. Jekyll side was devoid of empathy. When that happened, he couldn’t stand himself, so he’d start drinking again. Drunk or sober, there wasn’t much difference.
Drunk or sober, we lived in a house of gloom, waiting for a pin to drop, for his inevitable next outburst. My mother, cringing at the sound of his footsteps or a cough from the bedroom after his nap. Nap, my ass. The night before, he’d passed out at nine-thirty and was just now thinking about his first drink of the day. I felt like a coward, leaving my mother to deal with him, but I had to get away.
I wolfed down my Wheaties and hightailed it out of the house before Pop got going. Three or four times a week, all summer long, I’d trek down the hill from our house in Carmelita, Oklahoma, to fish, hunt, and play backyard baseball with the Winter boys.
Now that I’d finished my summer reading, my visits were even more frequent. The Winter kids weren’t educated like I was. When I mentioned summer reading, citing titles: The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, King Lear, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, they laughed and teased me. They might not have read Beowulf or studied solid geometry, but they had the kind of cunning and determination that comes with working the land.
Perhaps, like me, you knew a family you wish could have been yours, a house you hung out at, hoping somehow they might adopt you. In my life, it was the Winter family.
Imagine my surprise when Pop materialized at Winter’s that afternoon, his face distorted with rage. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t know the Winters, where their house was, or who they were, partly on account of their being shunned by the fundamentalist families because they were Catholics.
Outside of boxing lessons, an occasional movie, or one of his patented tirades, Pop never showed much interest in me during summer vacation, even when he was sober.
I realized he was not only drunk, but he was also making a beeline for me. I had no clue as to why. Something I’d forgotten to do? Firewood? Garbage? Some other chore? No, I was all caught up. I should have run, but I just stood there on the burlap bag we used for a base.
There we were, the four of us, the only time Paul, aged sixteen, the oldest of the Winter brothers, and I teamed up. We were batting against Randy and Willie, Paul’s younger brothers. Sixteen and fifteen versus fourteen and twelve.
“Fifty-three to four,” Paul shouted as he crossed home plate and I slid into third base behind him.
Abruptly, the sky turned molten chromium—a color so malevolent it made my teeth chatter. At first, I thought this change in the weather might have something to do with Pop’s arrival. I froze. I wasn’t alone: birds, animals, mankind, all moving creatures froze when he grabbed me, hauled me off the base, and started herding me up the road toward home. “Your aunt and uncle just arrived, in a taxi. You were supposed to go with me. Where were you? I looked all over.” In my rush to escape from home before my father, I had forgotten their arrival.
Sensing something amiss, Eloise, the boys’ fourteen-year-old sister, who usually ignored our antics, came through the screen door in time to witness my humiliation. Still within earshot of the stunned Winter family, he let loose, “Five minutes I been watching you pick on them young boys.” (Pop adored bad grammar, using it to bolster his prizefighter credentials.) “Is that what they learn you in that fancy boarding school back East? Is that what we’re paying for, Monk?”
He punctuated each pronouncement with a whack to my tail with his walking stick. “How to bully little kids?” A string of curses. “We’ll see about that. You can damn well go to school right here in the real world, learn you some fair play, goddamn it— you little monkey.”
He was so angry he started hissing, as if someone had put his false teeth in a microwave while they were still in his mouth, causing him to emit a blend of high-frequency warbles and muffled phonemes.
This self-appointed amateur psychologist, my pop, was angrier about the baseball game than not being able to find me. In his mind, we had traumatized Willie and Randy for life, even though they had enjoyed the farce as much as we had—a kind of zany diversion when the usual order of things is reversed—the whole thing being Willie’s idea.
“So long, Gus, you little monkey.” I heard Paul shout, and I realized I couldn’t count on sympathy from the Winter boys. True to their cornpone sensibilities, they thought it all very funny, escorting me up the hill with taunts and catcalls that only made Pop angrier. I feared he might forbid me from ever visiting them again. “White trash,” he muttered.
“We’ll save you third base, Monk,” said Paul.
“So long, Gus,” came the refrain. “See you.”
All the while, balling my way up the hill, I told myself: You aren’t paying for school. It’s not you; it’s Aunt Alice and Uncle Phil.
People who knew my father, Raymond “Ray-Ray” Mazur, liked him. At gatherings, he told funny stories about his boxing exploits. People loved having a minor celebrity as a neighbor. I loved the stories of his heyday too, but not the moods that followed them. No one had the slightest clue about the real Ray-Ray Mazur. He fooled everyone but my mother and me.
I told her about the Winter family, and how nice it was to have someone to do things with. I might have mentioned them to my father once. If I did, he’d nodded and cleared his throat. His usual reaction to anything I said. I hated the nicknames he gave me; I hated the moods; I hated him.
The afternoon of his appearance was the only time Paul and I had teamed up against the younger boys, but Pop was in no mood for explanations, and I couldn’t get the words out. Why try to justify myself when deep down he must have known he’d gotten riled up over something he couldn’t walk back without appearing weak in front of us?
That his anger wasn’t justified, that he knew only part of the story, that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion was as obvious as the monstrous unfairness in making me the instigator. But I’d been powerless to speak. His anger had morphed into a fiery animus. I knew I could outrun him (he was huffing and puffing), so I started sprinting up the hill. When I got to the house, I passed it by, disappearing into the woods to the stream where I kept the six-pack of beer Paul Winter had procured for me. I vowed to never again find myself at a loss for words. I would master words, their meanings, and their usage, and I’d have my revenge, which, when dealing with family members, I would discover, is never entirely satisfactory.
One Budweiser later, I headed home. Hearing loud voices through the screen door as I approached the house, I hung back, singling out to the most prominent voice—Pop’s. It didn’t take long to catch the gist. Pop was threatening to pull me out of boarding school on account of what he thought he’d witnessed at the Winters’. Furious at my father’s misinterpretation of events, I felt a hot wave engulf me, soon realizing Aunt Alice was letting Ray-Ray sound off, all the time knowing that he’d capitulate without her ever having to remind him of her abundant financial support. The whole thing reminded me of the Kabuki theater my aunt had taken me to last Christmas vacation in New York: lots of bluster.
From the bushes, I heard Aunt Alice lead Ray-Ray to the bar and open a Coke, his favorite beverage. He polished off ten or more a day when he wasn’t drinking. It turned out he’d also forgotten their arrival because he was drunk, using me as a scapegoat when they arrived in a taxi. He sobered up quickly. He didn’t dare take a drink while Aunt Alice and Uncle Phil were visiting.
“This way,” said Aunt Alice, after my brush with Julissa was explained to her, “he won’t get a local girl in trouble and be obliged to spend the rest of his life in this backward—” She handed Ray-Ray his Coke over ice and kissed his cheek. “So, it’s settled. He goes back East to us when summer vacation ends.”
A Coke served with soothing words; Ray-Ray was already feeling justified. My wild man of a father grumbling, attempting to save face, realizing the futility of it.
How could a brother and sister be so different in so many ways?
The screen door opened. My mother stepped outside, cooing to me, “Come inside, child. No need to fret. You’re going to stay with your aunt in New York—just like you want,” she said. “Wouldn’t be that way if you was white.”
* * *
It was a long time before I returned to the Winter house. I made sure Pop was working when I finally did. Eloise, who rarely spoke, even to her brothers, sat on the side-door stoop watching Willie and me outscore Paul and Randy for the first time. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her watching us.
When we’d finished with baseball, Paul suggested hide-and-go-seek with me taking the first turn at being it. After I’d found all the brothers except Paul, Willie stood in front of the house as if to divert me from looking into the crawl space under it as the house was elevated on blocks a good two and a half feet off the ground. I peered into the darkness without seeing much, then I crouched down and started crawling. After I disappeared in the dark, Paul appeared from somewhere and the brothers began chanting, “Gus loves Eloise; Eloise loves Gus.” That’s when I discovered Eloise had made her way under the house, all shy and serious in her cotton-print farm-girl dress.
I liked that she wasn’t a giggler like Julissa. After I’d moved alongside her, after we’d stared at each other a while, she asked me about New York City and boarding school. We talked for ten minutes before she inquired, “Would you like to go together? Be my steady, Gus?”
“Sure,” I replied, not understanding what going steady entailed.
“Only...”
“Only what?”
“Nothin’.”
“C’mon, it must be something.”
“Is it true you’re some kind of Indian?”
“Part Cherokee on my mother’s side, I am. There are many of us in Oklahoma, didn’t you know?”
“Is that why you’re dark?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t mind... I think you’re swell,” she said. “I didn’t like what your dad done that last time.”
“Ain’t none of your business.”
“You did it with Julissa, didn’t you?”
“We didn’t do it,” I said. “I only saw her once. Why?”
“Only that she’s telling everyone.”
When the talk stopped, the brothers reckoned we were kissing, which we were. The harder I became, the more she pressed her crotch against mine, the more the boys teased until my breathing turned hyper—a signal inspiring her to cup my stiffness with her right hand as it started to throb. After, she whispered, “Gus. You do love me. I know it.”
“You know I do, love you, Eloise.”
“Cause I’d never go all the way before becoming fully acquainted, you know, engaged.”
I waited for an answer to materialize. Words failed me.
I’d dry-humped her, or wet-humped her. I didn’t know which. Only that it was the high point of my life up to the moment. She was so beautiful. She made me want to share my dreams, starting with my favorite books, Antic Hay and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. How the authors, Aldous Huxley and James Joyce broke with conventional morality in a search for truth. Their hedonism and excesses, their revelries, their witty conversations, the failures that haunt aspiring writers and their persistence, Paris and London, their sexual freedom (although I didn’t use that term).
I got right to the edge of revealing my innermost thoughts and stopped. To continue or not to continue; that was the question. Although she wasn’t like her brothers, she’d probably start laughing when I described the struggles of would-be writers in a world that doesn’t appreciate writers. The more I spoke, the more I sensed her agitation. I was sure she’d find my ramblings wicked or whatever words her church used to describe someone like me. How could she not, given the differences between my world and hers? London in the 1920s was about as far from Carmelita, Oklahoma as Oz is from Kansas. For all she knew, I could be talking about Sinbad the Sailor, not about two of the most influential writers of our century.
Nevertheless, l risked ridicule. I told her how Mr. Swartz, my English teacher, said I had talent and he’d given me those two books. Now, thanks to boarding school and the subversive elements within, outcasts like myself, I had a model for the life I was going to lead, starting ASAP.
“Gee,” she said, snuggling up to me, “the way you talk, the things you know. I love to read. It’s about all I do ‘cept for washing my brothers’ underpants.” She paused to let me picture it, then added: “London, Paris. They seem so far away, although I did play Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest, last year’s school play.” She hesitated a beat, before reciting a few lines from the play in perfect King’s English. “ ‘I wish Uncle Jack would allow that unfortunate young man, his brother, to come down here sometimes. We might have a good influence over him, Miss Prism.’ I was the only actor to get the accent right, you know. We watched a movie of it before the first rehearsal.”
Boy, was I wrong about Eloise. She went on to tell me about Carson McCullers and other writers she admired: Lillian Hellman, Stendhal, Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner. Babbitt, A Doll’s House, and, of course, The Catcher in the Rye.
“I can picture us five years from now, Eloise. Strutting down the Champs-Elysées, sipping Pernod on the Left Bank, waving to Scott Fitzgerald at the next table, if he was still alive, that is.”
“Gee.”
Every so often when I think of how my father dragged me away from third base, I think about Eloise Winter and how, had I not gone away to boarding school, I would have married her, had a family, a farmhouse, and a job at a country newspaper. That’s as far as that fantasy went. One week later, I was back at school in Connecticut and living permanently with my aunt and uncle in New York City. Each time I returned to Carmelita, Eloise was away, at parochial school or an extracurricular activity, 4H, or some such thing. I never saw her again. But I counted on the memory of being dragged away to reincarnate her in my imagination. In my most recent visit home, the Winter family had moved. The farmhouse had been torn down and the land was being developed.