in its Golden Age, called a play about a love-struck Hercules, Fieras afemina amor (Beasts are feminized by love).
Still, we need her, we stupid male creatures. We can’t live without her. Or rather we do live without her but we live miserably. No wonder so many artists blow their brains out.
It was Milton who first got it. His theme was the Fall of Man, and for that he needed her. Oh, it was a convention borrowed from the Romans who borrowed it from the Greeks. But their themes were the wrath of Achilles, arms and the man. The Fall needs her, even if she can’t catch him, Man, as he Falls, just like Yvonne couldn’t catch the Consul in Lowry’s Under the Volcano on his fatal fall down the ravine. Homer needed her, Dante needed her, Petrarch needed her, Milton needed her, Lowry needed her, Balanchine needed her. And all she can do is watch him fall.
Sing, Heav’nly Muse.
●
The Savage God
Even in my darkest nights of the soul, the romantic ones a person indulges in while young, I could not contemplate the now real possibility of suicide by neglect. Always it had been the pistol to the forehead, the jump off the balcony, maybe the overdose. Never the slit wrists—I would’ve fainted as I cut my skin, and what could be less manly than to faint as you’re trying to kill yourself? It’s not that “nooses give” as the poem goes, it’s that my head would fill with horror as I contemplated the pain of hanging—or anything else—to death.
Years ago, I found a way. Quaaludes, the wonder drug. A physician friend prescribed them for me to party with, although, in retrospect, I think I used my Rx mostly for the standard medical reasons: anxiety and sleeplessness. Still, it was a good party drug, as long as one did not party to excess or with a mixture of intoxicants. It was easy to lose track of how many you’d taken, and drinking while popping ’ludes was playing Russian roulette. I used them very, very cautiously. But it was a great sex drug, if by sex one means slo-mo encounters, like erotic bumper cars, and possibly, though not necessarily, hitting the bull’s-eye. My doctor friend, who I think had serious issues, once described Quaaludes as a painless means of suicide. If you took enough of them, you fell asleep and died completely relaxed. Years later, when I hit rougher spots, there were no such drugs at hand. But now…
It’s simple, really. All I have to do is give up, which is precisely what I want to do when I get down. Just give it all the fuck up. No more therapy to soothe my head and open my eyes. And, most definitely, no more cancer treatments. I would simply stop my hormone shots and PSA tests and let the devil cells do their work. Eventually, the cancer would kill me. That’s it. No need to screw up my courage to jump off a tall building or pull the trigger—though, of what? I don’t own a gun nor do I know how to use one. Just let it be. Let it be death.
The thoughts came again yesterday as I felt—if that’s the right word—the void between my legs. Everything was there as I had left it, and I could feel it all as part of my body—were you to kick me I’d double over in pain. But just when I thought I was getting used to the lack of sexual feeling, I wasn’t used to it at all. In fact, I was tired of this lack. When I started writing this, it was, precisely, to avoid killing myself. And I was better for it. Writing engrossed me. It was, I thought, the substitute for Eros. But not yesterday. The rest of my life stretched before me like an eternity of sexless blah. And that’s when the thoughts came: Get it over with, give it up, die.
That was yesterday. Today I am writing.
Besides, when I told my shrink about these thoughts of letting myself go and letting the cancer kill me, he said, “Yeah, and it may take twenty more years.” Sobering thought.
●
Fire and Ice
By the time the ice storm hit, the party was over.
The storm that froze Connecticut in the winter of ’73 was the setting for Rick Moody’s 1994 novel and Ang Lee’s 1997 film about an exurban bourgeoisie experimenting with the era’s sexual liberation. The story culminates in a “key party”: the wives pick at random from the bowl where the husbands have dropped their keys when they walked in, and each woman walks out with a new mate for the night. In the film at least—I never read the book—the party is going on as the storm gets worse and the weather—which actually results in the death of one of the local teens—is an objective correlative to the bad karma the sexual shenanigans bring to a head.
As always in an American movie, you play, you pay.
I remember that storm well, for I was living in Connecticut at the time, though no one invited me to that key party.
An ice storm is a weird phenomenon for someone like me whose sense of weather was shaped in the tropics. It rained and then the temperature fell and the water from the rain turned to ice; it seemed to turn to ice even as it rained; it seemed to be raining ice.
Icicles formed on trees and, worst of all, on the wires that brought electricity to our homes. The weight of the ice would bring down tree branches and it would bring down wires that, as in the movie, sputtered live and lethal on the ground. We were all advised to stay indoors until the danger could be repaired. I was living in a house with a fireplace at the time, and since the fallen wires meant we were without electricity and, therefore, without heating, I fed the fireplace to keep my family warm as we huddled in the finished basement, where the hearth was.
Hearth is an exaggeration. I was, as they say, between jobs. Academic jobs. For a while I had to vacate my faculty house—provided for a modicum of rent by my employer—while I looked for a new position. My college-owned home was in an older and more central part of town; the house I had moved to with my family was straight out of the song that decades later would become the theme of the comedy series Weeds. Made out of ticky-tacky and they all looked just the same.
What I would’ve given to be living in a gracious old colonial, where the old fireplace would’ve been up to the task of keeping us warm. Indeed, some of my friends lived in such houses, in the old part of town from where I’d moved. But it was far from my current ticky-tacky subdivision and, in any case, it was dangerous to go outside.
It was not the most fun time my family enjoyed together. And the thought of sexual shenanigans was the last thing on my mind. Not that I hadn’t had my share of them, for, as I said, the party was already over.
No key party, though. Sometime in the early ’70s, I heard of such phenomena, but though a wild promiscuity blew like a hot wind through my circle of friends, we would never have thought of re-pairing in such a random way. Not that we might be troubled by the choice of partners luck brought—in the end, everyone slept with everyone else, or at least it seems that way in my memory. But that’s not how we thought.
We were under the influence of what came to be called, in retrospect, the ’60s, though, in fact, it was the late ’60s and early ’70s—the key-party-people in The Ice Storm were, too, but we young faculty types, fresh out of graduate school where we lived the student uprisings of the late ’60s, were under a more direct influence.
The rise of the counterculture came when I was in graduate school in the Midwest, and it seemed like, from just one year to the next, everything had changed. Artsy, brainy, bohemians, dismissed by fraternity and sorority types as “greenbaggers” because they often carried green burlap book bags, were now “hippies,” and they included the boys and girls in the Greek houses. At the Connecticut college where I taught in the early ’70s, one of the fraternities reinvented itself as a commune.
Mind-altering drugs, long hair and a studied, disheveled style of dress replaced beer, neatness, khaki jeans and pleated skirts and V-neck sweaters.
