strangely dim, perhaps because Christopher had to make a mental blackout, switching himself back from a grown-up man to a twelve year old, before getting into bed with him.) When Christopher entered the world of the Berlin hustlers in 1929 and found himself able to act out any sex fantasy which appealed to him, he always wanted to wrestle naked; nothing else excited him as much. Boxing excited him, too; he had a fetishistic attitude to boxing gloves. Many of his obliging young sex partners found all this perfectly natural. (This sort of sub-sadistic sexual violence––which also includes mild nonbrutal beatings with a leather strap––seems to suit the German temperament.) A boy who was basically heterosexual would sometimes suggest wrestling of his own accord, get violently aroused during the fight and have more than one orgasm. Later, he would excuse his pleasure by saying that it was something you couldn’t do with a girl, something for men
only––and therefore, he implied, the only nonperverse homosexual act. When Christopher was taken to Matty’s Cell House[*] in New York in 1938, he asked to be introduced to a German-American
boy––meaning that he hoped for a reasonable facsimile of a Berlin hustler. Thus he met [one boy who,] oddly enough, despite his hang-ups and considerable sexual selfishness, [. . .] did prove to be “German”
in his tastes. He was always eager to wrestle and box. But Christopher now wanted to be fucked or fuck after wrestling, and [the boy] refused to do this. He only liked fucking teenagers. With Christopher, he wanted to lie on top, belly to belly, and come with his cock between Christopher’s greased thighs. This wasn’t ideal for Christopher, but he scoring––at the end of the bout, you had lost or won on points. Christopher was lacking in competitive aggression and he disliked getting hurt. So he usually lost.
[Only one person] ever really shared Christopher’s mystique about boxing.
Both of them were deeply aroused by the shape and smell of boxing gloves and the feel of leather on their bare flesh. [This boy] got excited by the mere mention of the word “fight.” Unlike Christopher, he wanted to punch and be punched hard; if his nose was bloodied, so much the better. Christopher has a vividly erotic memory of sparring with him, early one morning, in [his] living room on Amalfi Drive. [The boy] has nothing on his naked body but the big leather gloves. (“That’s all you ever ought to wear,” Christopher used to tell him.) As [the boy] jumps back and forth, punching and dodging and grinning at Christopher, his erect cock keeps slapping against his belly.
[* Also known as Matty’s Whore House; it supplied hustlers to such well-known clients as Cole Porter and the character actor Monty Woolley.]
¾ 1946 ¾
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enjoyed it because [the boy] excited him terrifically. He was, in Christopher’s eyes, a genuine teenage stud. (Looking back, I get the impression that [this boy] jumped from adolescence to middle age without ever pausing to be a young man.)
Wrestling and other forms of erotic violence are a feature of what I call a Whitmanesque relationship (see page 13). But Caskey was most definitely not a Whitman character. The love duels of naked camerados had no place in his fantasies. When Christopher suggested wrestling, Caskey was amused, in a grown-up way; he referred to it as “prep school stuff ” and Christopher was so embarrassed that he never mentioned it again––though he sometimes pretended to
himself that Caskey and he were wrestling, in the middle of a sex act.
(The violence between Christopher and Caskey (see page 52) was grown-up violence, full of love–hate––quite unlike affectionate immature Whitmanesque violence. It resembled the fighting of
married heterosexual couples.)
When Caskey and Christopher were getting along well––which
was most of the time, during 1945–1946––their domestic life was placid and curiously polite. They entertained each other with stories and jokes.1 They were very much on their best behavior. They were considerate. They contrived to flatter each other subtly. (I’m trying to describe the impression they would have made on someone who 1 Some specimens of Caskey’s humor (taken from the notebook or from memory): Carlos McClendon (pages 65‒66) had been talking about a rich man he knew, saying what an unpleasant person he was. Caskey: “Why, Carlos, I’m afraid you only dislike him for his money!”
Caskey (looking out of the window at 4 a.m., into thick icy fog): “It’s going to be a scorcher!”
At one of the beach restaurants, there was a notice on the back of the check which asked the customer to state his opinion of the portions, the cooking and the service, choosing an adjective to describe each. The adjectives from which the customer was to choose were—portions: too large, enough, too small; cooking: delicious, satisfactory, fair; service: excellent, adequate, poor. Caskey suggests that the waitresses themselves should be classified as: delicious, satisfactory or too small.
Christopher had been to a puja at the Vedanta Center and been given a whole cake as prasad. At their next party, they served it to the guests. Caskey said: “Do try some, it’s delicious––Chris brought it from heaven.”
Caskey’s humor, like most people’s, depended largely for its effect on the way he delivered his lines. He made jokes with an air of great enjoyment, giggling as he spoke. He pronounced words like “delicious” mockingly and campily. He seldom said anything bitchy. His fun was nearly always good-natured. In fact, he was the very opposite of the sourly witty, deadpan comedian.
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Lost Years
watched them while they were alone together and sober.) Their relationship when sober seems to me now to have been a surface relationship; they make me think of children playing at being grown-ups.
Down below this relationship, on the deeper level of drunkenness, two individuals confronted each other who were neither considerate nor polite. Neither trusted the other. Both were ruthlessly alert to find an opening, a letting down of the other’s guard. Nevertheless, this was intimacy of a sort. It wasn’t playacting. And I think that Caskey and Christopher felt that this confrontation was what really mattered to both of them; it was what held them together.
Taking a relationship apart and finding out what made it work (or not work) is so exquisitely difficult that I shall only be able to do it by slow degrees and ultimately by lucky guesses––if at all. One more idea occurs to me at the moment––namely that the Caskey–
Christopher involvement lacked an element which was present in all Christopher’s similar involvements; it lacked a myth.
What do I mean by a myth? I mean an abstract, poetical concept of the person you are having a relationship with which makes you able to regard him in double focus, either as a private individual or as a mythical representative figure, whichever you like. For example, Christopher saw Vernon Old as Vernon Old but also as Whitman’s American Boy. The contrast between these two aspects was ridiculously great––the hardboiled twentieth-century city youth and the sweet innocent nineteenth-century prairie comrade. Yet it was this myth which made him able to feel romantic about Vernon Old as Vernon Old.1
A myth relationship has to be reciprocal, obviously, if it is going to work for long.2 Did Vernon have a myth about Christopher? I 1 [Another boy Christopher knew] had had one adventure in the classic Whitman style––at the age of fourteen, he had left the city and taken to the road, wandering away down into the deep South. One day, out in the country, several blacks had taken a fancy to him and had forced him to strip and have sex with them by threatening him with their knives. [The boy] admitted that this had excited him, even though he was terrified. He had had an erection throughout the “rape.”