used birth control. Beyond this she would not go, no hints as
to how or what.
One night I was summarily sent to the local Jewish
Community Center by my parents acting in tandem. There
was to be a lecture on sex education, and I was going to be
forced to listen to it. I cried and begged and screamed. I
52
Contraception
couldn’t stand being treated as a child, and I couldn’t stand
the thought of being bored to death by adults tiptoeing
through the tulips. I had learned that adults never told one the
real stuff on any subject no mat er what it was. It stood to
reason that the sex education lecture was going to be stupid
and dull, and so it was. There was the sperm and the egg and
they met on a blackboard.
By that time I had learned always to listen to what was not
being said, to the empty space, as it were, to the verbal void.
The key to al adult pedagogy was not in what they did say but
in what they would not say. They would say the word “contraception, ” but they would not say what it was. This was a time in the United States when contraception and abortion
were both still illegal. I knew about abortion, or enough
about it to suit me then. I asked about contraception and got
an awkward runaround. I fucking wanted to know what it
was, and they fucking were not going to tell me. I couldn’t let
it go, as usual, and so got from them the statement that they
discussed contraception only with married people. The group
that sponsored the lecture, with its almost-famous woman
speaker, would not come clean; now that group, headed by
the same woman until she died in the last decade, is part of
the free speech lobby in the United States protecting the
rights of pornographers.
What I learned was simple and eventually evolved into my
own pedagogy: listen to what adults refuse to say; find the
53
Heartbreak
answers they won’t give; note the manipulative ways they
have of using authority to cut the child or student or teenager
of at the knees; notice their immoral, sneaky reliance on peer
pressure to shut up a questioner (because, of course, if one
persists, the others in the audience get mad or embarrassed).
The writing is in the configuration of white around print; the
verbal answer is buried in silence, a purposeful and wicked
silence, a lying, cheating silence. Every pregnant girl owes her
pregnancy not to the heroic lover who figured out how the
sperm gets inside her but to the adults who will not show her
a diaphragm, an IUD, a female condom, and - sor y, Ma - a
rubber. I left the lecture that night with the certain knowledge
that I did not know what contraception was even if I knew the
word and that adults were not going to tell me.
Miss Bel , my physical education teacher who also taught
health, had the only method that successful y resisted both my
Socratic urgency and emerging Kabalistic axioms: on one test
paper she mimeographed a huge drawing of the male genitals,
and the students had to write on the drawing the name of
each part - “scrotum, ” for instance. In an equivalent test on
female sexuality, she had this true-or-false statement for extra
credit of twenty points: if a girl is not a virgin when she gets
married, she wil go to hel . I was the only student in my class
not to get the extra twenty points.
54
Young Americans for
Freedom
I wanted to know what a conservative was. I read William
Buckley’s right-wing magazine National Review, as I stil do. I
knew about the KKK, and I had an idea of what white
supremacy was. One girl in my class had neighbors who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, which she seemed to find reasonable.
I had an English teacher in honors English who was the
equivalent of Miss Bell, the gym-health teacher; but because
he was more literate there were many paths to hell, not just sex
outside of mar iage. Told to stay after school one day, I faced
Mr. Sullivan as he opposed my reading Voltaire’s Candide,
which was proscribed for Catholics, which I wasn’t but he
was. He told me I would go to hell for reading it. I stood up
to him. I thought he was narrow-minded, but conservatism
seemed something different, Buckley’s magazine notwithstanding. What was it exactly, and why didn’t history teachers or political science types or civics teachers talk about it?
It was a mess just to try to think about it. Walking home
from high school one day, I passed a neighbor, Mr. Kane. No
55
Heartbreak
one on the street talked to him or his wife, an auburn-haired
model. They painted their ranch house lavender, which was
downright unusual, though it framed Mrs. Kane’s auburn hair
beautiful y. Mr. Kane cal ed out to me and asked me to come
inside the side door to his house. I knew that I was never
supposed to talk with strange men or go anywhere with them,
and Mr. Kane was strange as hel . But I couldn’t resist, because
curiosity is such a strong force in a child, or in me. Inside Mr.
Kane had literature: he wasn’t the sexual child molester, no, he
was the political child molester, with endless pamphlets on
how JFK, a candidate for president, was the Catholic Church’s
running dog, so to speak; on how whites were bet er than
what he cal ed niggers; on how kikes were running the media
and the country. He gave me leaflets to take home: these went
easy on the kikes but hit the Catholics hard. At home I felt
ashamed to have even touched the things, and also I knew
that I had broken a big law, not a small one, by going with a
strange man. I tried to flush the leaflets down our toilet and
when they wouldn’t flush I tried to burn them. Wel , yes, I did
get that in the wrong order but I was guilty of fairly heinous
crimes and was desperate to get rid of the evidence. I was just
trying to find a shovel to dig a hole in the backyard where I
could bury them when my mother came home. She saw the
stuf , dripping wet al over, an additional sin I hadn’t thought
of, and sent me to my bedroom to wait for my father. I knew
the stuff was filthy and bad, my own behavior a mere footnote
56
Young Americans for Freedom
to the sinister material I had brought into the house. It’s
amazing how seeing hate stuff and touching it can make one
viscerally sick.
I was called out into the living room. My mother and father
were sitting on the formal sofa that we had and I was expected
to stand. My father had the junk beside him on the sofa. He
had called the FBI. They were going to come and question
me. They came and they did. Mr. Kane disappeared from the
street and Mrs. Kane would stand out on the lawn, her auburn
hair crowning her beauty, alone; she was now alone. Their