1 At that time, Jim hadn’t actually got his diploma; he didn’t get it until several years later. My impression is that he was an absolutely competent designer and draftsman but that he perhaps, in those days, had to rely on one of his colleagues or a builder with practical experience to tell him if his projected house would stand up and keep the rain out.
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Jim’s statement that he was “a lousy lay” may have been meant as a flirty come-on; however, Christopher found that he had had
surprisingly little sex experience for his age. He had had almost no serious involvements, either with men or women. Since moving
to California, his only contacts had been while cruising the coast highway in his car; he picked up hitchhiking servicemen and bought them drinks, after which they sometimes let him blow them. Jim was extraordinarily persistent in his cruising––if necessary, he would pick up half a dozen prospects in the course of one night––but he was also strangely shy when he had to make the pass, so every score cost him a maximum effort.
While staying in Arizona, Jim had met Max Ernst the artist. Ernst had told him that he was the kind of boy who ought to be fucked every day. I don’t know if Ernst had meant literally fucked by another man or merely that Jim should get himself laid by a person of no matter which sex. Anyhow, Christopher did literally fuck Jim, for the first time in Jim’s life. (“You took my cherry,” Jim later growled.) I have only one clear memory of Christopher’s first sex encounter with Jim––the uncoy, entirely matter-of-fact way Jim took off his clothes, almost before Christopher had had time to close the door of his room at the El Kanan. He was like an athlete eager to start playing a game. Having undressed, he threw himself naked into bed, as if plunging into a swimming pool. Nakedness made him seem very
young, almost babyish; a baby who was also a puppy.1 He giggled, bit, kissed, licked, sucked and bounced up and down on the mattress.
He wouldn’t even pretend to be serious. While Christopher was inclined to verbalize the situation, paying his partner compliments, uttering erotic words and generally talking up the orgasm, Jim said nothing. He came easily, without fuss––after which he would usually make some nearly inaudible wisecrack.
Jim was highly potent. He could have two or more orgasms (as he later demonstrated) with anybody who wasn’t altogether repulsive.
Many of his subsequent sex mates told him that he was “insatiable.”
But Christopher nevertheless got the impression that his behavior in bed was affectionate rather than lustful. He loved kissing. He would kiss and hug you almost indefinitely, if you didn’t insist on going further. He was never in a hurry. Jim’s childlike affectionate playfulness was touching and curiously innocent––it made him delightful to go to bed with. But Christopher had to admit to himself that, as far as he was concerned, Jim lacked one important sexual virtue; he 1 Christopher decided, very early in their relationship, that Jim was a Dog Person. Indeed, it was impossible to think of him as being any other animal.
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was too wholesome to be really exciting, his sex making was
vigorous but bland. (Here, I am trying hard to be objective––
which Christopher ceased to be, after the first time they had sex together. Thenceforward, Christopher’s reason for wanting to continue going to bed with Jim was simply that Christopher had fallen violently in love with him.)
What had made Christopher fall in love with Jim? The most
comprehensive answer I can think of is that Jim appealed to him as The American Boy, a boy out of Whitman’s poems. Jim was in many ways a much better specimen of a Whitman American than Vernon Old. Jim, like Vernon, was a twentieth-century town dweller, but it was easier to imagine Jim living in the country and the nineteenth century. Jim had a much more poetical feeling for landscape than Vernon had––though Vernon cared more for animals. Jim’s descriptions of western canyons and deserts and forests were graphic and full of poetry for Christopher. And Jim, despite all his hang-ups, seemed more spontaneous and therefore more like a Whitman boy than
Vernon––at any rate in bed, which was where it counted most. You could imagine Jim as a “Tan-Faced Prairie-Boy” lying all night out of doors kissing Whitman under a blanket. Whereas Vernon would have soon started to complain that he was getting sleepy and that Whitman’s beard tickled.
Self-reliant solitude is one of the chief characteristics of Whitman’s wandering American Boy. Christopher saw this charac-
teristic in Jim and it moved him deeply. Later, he tried to describe it when writing about the character he called Bob Wood1 in The World in the Evening:
What struck me chiefly about him, always, was his quality of
loneliness; and this was even more apparent when he and Charles came to visit me together. When, for example, Bob was fixing our cocktails, his slim figure with its big shoulders bending over the bottles would look strangely weary and solitary, and he seemed suddenly miles away from either of us. He was like a prospector preparing a meal in the midst of the wilderness.[*]
For Christopher, born on an intimate little island, The American Boy embodied his country’s fascinating and challenging aloofness.
Christopher felt challenged to break through this aloofness and make 1 Bob Wood isn’t a portrait of Jim, however; he is described as a crusader, a potential revolutionary––which Jim certainly wasn’t and isn’t. But Bob is described as being one of the Dog People.
[* Part three, chapter three.]
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a closer contact with Jim––and yet he didn’t really want to, for that would have destroyed much of Jim’s romantic appeal.
Even after Christopher had known Jim for years, he remained
deeply impressed by Jim’s self-reliance. He was always able to look out for himself and keep himself occupied––he was never at a loose end. When Christopher came to visit, he would find Jim drafting plans for a house, or making a model of a plane, or drawing nude teenage boys, slim, crop-headed and snub-nosed, who grinned as they played with each other’s cocks. (Christopher called them Charlton Boys; they all looked a bit like Jim.) Jim was also an efficient cook and a neat housekeeper. Whenever he moved into a new apartment, no matter how shabby and temporary, he would
make it recognizably personal––painting it in amusing colors, fixing up odd lamps and covering the walls with striking pictures and clippings from magazines. If Jim felt restless, he would take off in his car and explore some remote stretch of country, all on his own.
Once, when he had gone swimming in an irrigation ditch in the desert, miles from anywhere, he had discovered that he couldn’t climb back up its concrete walls and had been trapped there for hours until someone happened to come by. On another occasion, he had been climbing a cliff by the seashore and had fallen. He had had to drive himself home with his leg broken.
Jim had been born in Reading, Pennsylvania. But he preferred to recall the fact that he had been conceived at Love Field in Dallas, Texas––since both the name and the state sound more romantic.