Kingsley Amis once said that religion and masturbation were alike in one regard: feel free to practice them, but no one really wants to hear you go on about it. Which I just think is completely wrong. I mean, I just couldn’t disagree with that statement more vehemently. I think religion and masturbation are probably the two most interesting things a person could ever talk about. And you’ll be able to make your own assessment once you’ve actually heard the excerpts, but I think a very strong case could be made that Gone with the Mind is fundamentally an autobiography of religion and masturbation, that is to say, an ontogenetic history of religion and masturbation, a study of religion and masturbation as it pertains to an individual organism, an individual organism whose first erection was inspired by a viewing of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which was shown to us by our seventh-grade English teacher, a bulimic ex-nun who, as it turned out, was very fond of my poetry. This, of course, predates by a good six months or so the dawning of my erotic obsession with Nadezhda Chizhova, a twenty-two-year-old Soviet shot-putter, whose photograph I first beheld in an old issue of Life magazine, which I’d unearthed one summer at a house in Deal, New Jersey, that my parents co-owned with my grandparents (my mom’s parents, Raymond and Harriet) and my uncle and aunt (Lew and Fran, my mom’s sister), and which, like all shore houses, boasted an extensive archive of moldering magazines that any pubescent boy with a lot of time on his hands (free time being surely the greatest gift that summer bestows on a pubescent boy) can scour for prurient images, which in my case could be simply a sweaty, androgenized Eastern European woman flinging a discus or putting a shot.
In retrospect, I can see that it was my incipient questioning of the unified subject and of normative meaning (as well as the onset of puberty) that led me from Sad Sack and Baby Huey to Mickey Mantle to these autoerotic assignations with Nadezhda Chizhova. And soon I’d feel as if I’d betrayed Nadezhda, I really did…I think we’re much more chivalrous when we’re young than when we get older…because I also started leering at photographs of her great rivals, the two East German shot-putters Margitta Gummel and Ilona Slupianek, both of whom were given Oral-Turinabol, the androgenic anabolic steroid used by the East German government in its State Plan 14.25 under the supervision of Stasi, the GDR state secret police. (I really think it helped me immeasurably to relate to other people when I realized that we all probably remember, with an especially fine-grained attention to detail, the first time we masturbated to pictures of a doped athlete.) This was a period of time when I began associating photographs of androgenized Eastern European women throwing javelins and tossing hammers with my own gratification. For me, the steroids they took bestowed an aura of martyrdom upon them. The Oral-Turinabol seemed to endow them with an excess or superfluity of sexuality, an excrescence of sexuality…a burden, which I found tremendously arousing…I was beginning to realize that sexuality (the drives, the impulses, the appendages themselves) is a kind of cross to bear, a heavy shackle one’s obligated to drag around…and the heavier and more cumbersome, the sexier — if that makes any sense. It was also a time when I began to view my own penis as an instrument of self-annihilation. As a “way out” for my mind.
It is evidence of my own curatorial slackness that I neglected to save these images of Chizhova, Gummel, and Slupianek, which, over time, had actually bleached in the feral, polymorphous intensity of my…my scopophilic gaze.
I should add that, for me, there was an aura of martyrdom about Mickey Mantle too, with his fractured kneecap, his torn ACL, the cartilage damage, the osteomyelitis and cirrhosis and hepatitis…the photographs of Mantle applying thick wraps to both of his knees before each and every game, and then soaking in a stainless-steel whirlpool bath after each game…And, of course, I ogled those photographs as one might ogle paintings of Saint Sebastian bound to a stake and impaled with arrows. I had a treasured issue of Life magazine (July 30, 1965) with a cover story about Mickey Mantle entitled “Mantle’s Misery.” The subhead was “He Faces Physical Pain and a Fading Career.” And because I strove to emulate Mantle so absolutely, I very much desired similar physical pain and, even as a little boy, very much aspired to a fading career. I think I took care of the first part when, in the assassination attempt my mom mentioned in her introduction, I was hit by a car in Culver City, California, and tore the meniscus, anterior cruciate ligament, and medial collateral ligament in my left knee, almost identical injuries to those Mantle sustained when he tripped over an exposed drainpipe in center field during the second game of the 1951 World Series against the Giants. And as far as the second part goes, the “fading career,” if tonight’s turnout is any indication, I’ve succeeded in that regard beyond my wildest expectations.