Even now I can’t hear it without the winds from the Aegean
blowing right by me. But when it comes to conveying ideas
without words, jazz triumphs. A U. S. writer without jazz and
blues in her veins must have ice water instead.
11
The Pedophilic
Teacher
I was lucky enough to have three brilliant teachers in junior
high and high school. The first, in junior high, was Mr. Smith,
who was a political conservative at a time when the word was
not in common usage and not many people, including me,
knew what it meant. He taught English, especially how to
parse and diagram sentences, over and over, so that the structure of the language became embedded in one’s brain and was like gravity - no personal concern yet omnipresent. You could
run your fingers through English the way God could run his
fingers through your hair. He was the Czerny of grammar.
The second was Mr. Belfield, who taught honors American
history. I had him for two years, the eleventh and twelfth
grades. Very lit le at Bennington later was as interesting or as
demanding. He had unspeakably high standards, as befitted
someone who had wanted to be secretary of state. It was wonderful not to be condescended to; not to be simply passing time; not to waste the hours waiting for some minor diversion to make one alert; to have one’s own intellect stretched
12
The Pedophilic Teacher
until it was about ready to break. He too was a political
conservative and seemed to live a solitary, affectionless life.
But then, I wouldn’t know, would I? And that is exactly right.
There is no reason for any student to know. The line separating student and teacher needs to be drawn, and it’s up to the teacher to do it. The combination of Mr. Belfield’s own
intel ectual rigor and his substantive demands were a total
blessing: he taught me how to write a book. I worked hard in
his class, and I cannot think of any other teacher who was so
authentic and commit ed, whose pedagogy was disinterested
in the best sense, not a toying with the minds of students nor
fucking with their aspirations for bet er or worse: he wanted
heroic work - he demanded it. You might say that he was the
Wagner of American history without the loathsome anti-
Semitism and misshapen ego. Other people accused him of
ar ogance, but I thought he was humble - he was modest to
use his gifts to teach us. Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Belfield
ever al owed the deep sleep of mediocrity; neither wanted
narcoleptic students; you couldn’t play either of them for favors,
and they didn’t play you.
The third great teacher was dif erent in substance and in
kind. He liked little girls, especially little Jewish girls. I don’t
mean five-year-olds, although maybe he liked them too. But
he liked us, my two best friends and me. He had sexualized
relationships with the three of us. He played us against each
other: Who was going to get him at the end of the day or
13
Heartbreak
through his machinations get to skip a class to see him? Who
had spent the most time with him that day? Who had had the
sexiest conversation with him? I thought that he and I were
going to found a school of philosophy together; he would be
the leader and I would be his acolyte. The sexiest thing about
him was the range of his experience, not only concerning sex.
He knew jazz; he introduced me to Sartre and Camus, though
not de Beauvoir, certainly not; he had smoked marijuana and
talked about it; he encouraged identification with bad-boy,
alienated Holden Caulfield and through Holden the wretched
Franny and Zooey; he drew me pictures of al the sex acts,
including oral and anal sex; he printed by hand the names of
the acts and instructed me in how to pursue men, not boys;
he suggested to me that I become a prostitute - as he put it,
it was more interesting than becoming a hairdresser, which
was the one profession in his view open to women of my
social class; he encouraged disobedience in general and
af irmed that I was right to be so disenchanted with and contemptuous of the pukey adults who were my other teachers and to hate and defy al their stupid rules. At the same time,
he was very controlling: my friends and I danced his dance;
he partnered each of us and al of us; he created configurations
of sex and love that manipulated, sexualized, and intensified
our friendships with each other - it was a menage a quatre; he
knew what each of us wanted and there he was dangling it and
if you were part of his sexual delight he’d give you a taste.
14
The Pedophilic Teacher
We thought that he was the one honest one, the one hip one.
He knew who Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were; where
Tangiers was; the oeuvre of Henry Miller and of Lawrence
Durrell; what the politics of the Algerian War were, especially
as it related to Camus; in fact he had actually been to Paris; he
knew that sometimes, like Socrates, you needed to swallow
the poison and other times, like Che, you needed to use the
barrel of a gun. In other words, he was dazzling. He was the
world outside the prison walls, and escape was my sole desire.
His best trick was giving the three of us passes to get us out
of classes we didn’t like, and we’d get to spend that time with
him learning real stuff: sex stuff or sexy stuff. For instance,
instead of the traditional candy bar, he of ered me writ en
excuses from my mathematics classes, time bet er spent with
him: it’s a wonder I can count to one. He fucked one of us on
graduation night and kept up an emotional y abusive relationship with her for years. I almost commit ed suicide at sixteen because I didn’t think he loved me, though he later assured me
that he did in a hot and heavy phone cal : under his influence
and Salinger’s I had walked out into the ocean prepared to
drown. The waves got up to about chest level when I realized
that the water was fucking cold, and I turned myself around
and got right out of that big, old ocean, though the ocean
itself, not suicide, continues to entrance me. In my heart from
then to this day, I became antisuicide; it took me longer - far
too long - to become antipedophilic.
75
Heartbreak
I thought Paul Goodman was right when he wrote in
Growing Up Absurd that sex had always been passed on from
adults to children; college-aged, I met Goodman, watched and
experienced some of his cruelty to women, and was bewildered, though I knew I didn’t like the cruelty and I didn’t like him. How could someone write a rebel’s book and be so
mean? To me, that was a formidable mystery. In later years my
friend Judith Malina, who directed a play of Goodman’s
though he taunted her repeatedly by saying women could not