Dangerous Characters

By Elaine Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson

Dangerous Characters is about people of all kinds, stuck with their unique personalities and trying to negotiate their ways through lifes bramble strewn path. As intellectual historians, psychologists of love, and psychotherapists, Elaine Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson bring to bear their sharp and wry observations upon a constellation of vivid characters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 19, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462805860

Elaine Hatfield

Elaine Hatfield, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii, has written 12 books—two of which won the American Psychological Association’s National Media Award. Richard L. Rapson, Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, has also written a dozen books, most of which have focused on the psychology of American life, past and present. He has been a T.V. moderator, Dean of New College, and named by the Danforth Foundation as one of the nation’s best teachers. Together the authors have published a sextet of serious novels and detective stories.

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Copyright © 2008 by Elaine Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson.

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Contents

SEARCHING FOR LOVE

SELF-DELUSION

FAMILY VALUES

FRIENDS

STREET PEOPLE

WORK

CHILDREN

ENDINGS

SEARCHING FOR LOVE

missing image file

Name: George R. Kelly aka Machine Gun Kelly

Offense: Kidnapping

Date of Offense: October 12, 1933

Sentence: Life

Criminal History: 3-14-27. Received at State Prison Santa Fe, NM: Charge, Violation of National Prohibition Act. Paid fine—$250 and released. 7-10-27. Arrested, Tulsa, OK; Charge, vagrancy, released. 8-11-27. Arrested, Tulsa: OK; Charge—speeding dismissed. 9-26-33. Arrested, Memphis, TN. Charge, kidnapping; current offense.

Remarks: Born George Kelly Barnes, from a wealthy family in Memphis, TN. Left home at 17 and became small time criminal until he met and fell in love with Kathryn Thorne, a bootlegger’s mistress and seasoned criminal. Under Thorne’s influence, Kelly received Public Enemy #1 status. Thorne marketed Kelly to organized crime world as Machine Gun Kelly. Kelly’s incarceration on Alcatraz stemmed from his capture for kidnapping Charles Urshel, a wealthy oil magnate. The trial was a courtroom sensation, since Kelly was the first to be tried under the Lindbergh Law that made kidnapping a federal offense if mail service is used for ransom demands or if victim is taken across state lines.

Pompeii

Today, a young man,

a tiny young man,

smiled a cocky, arrogant smile,

And I am transported

back 30 years.

Swaying on a chair lift,

Ratcheting up Mount Vesuvius.

Sulfurous steam jets,

catch at our breath; mist our vision.

Then,

a tiny Italian worker, sitting next to me

reaches out, and

Slowly, So Slowly

begins to slide

his sinewy fingers down

the silken back of my blouse.

All the men I had known were soft city men.

No little man,

No compact little man,

No calloused hand,

had ever touched my back,

almost touched my back,

like that before.

Alert.

We held our breath together.

Pretended what was happening,

was almost happening,

was not happening.

The ride ended.

As we disembarked,

We were careful not to be caught looking

at each other,

to see if the other was

carefully not looking at us.

Our skylarking smiles

gave us away.

An ancient ride, forgotten.

until a small man, smiled an arrogant smile.

And set Pompeii afire.

• Pompeii. (Summer and Fall, 1997). In the Spirit of The Buffalo.

Double Talk

Double Talk is the satirical story of a beautiful woman, whose words are as confusing as her intentions. Her husband seems to be a tough guy. But in this post-modernist story, things are not always as they seem.

They were an unlikely couple. Liza O’Brien Weinstein was a delicate Irish beauty. She had lovely light apricot-colored hair, which spilled to her shoulders, bright green eyes, a perfect little nose, and wonderful teeth. She dressed with casual elegance. The last time I dropped by Liza and Pete’s place in Pacific Heights to ask them to sign some legal papers, they were on their way to the tennis courts. Liza, perfectly turned out, wore a creamy white sweatband with a pencil thin Pompeian-red stripe, designed to keep her wild hair in place, Armani tennis whites, and ColeHahn tennis shoes, both lined with that same single sienna stripe. An up-market Tiffany ruby and gold tennis bracelet dangled from her wrist. Every inch a lady. Or so it seemed.

Liza’s husband, Pete Weinstein, on the other hand, was a hayseed. When he was a young, he’d been quite good looking in a disheveled, rough-and-tumble way. He had curly chestnut hair (badly in need of trimming), big brimming brown eyes, and a wide grin. But now, in his 40s, he’d gone to pot. His paunch bulged out over his belt. And he dressed peculiarly, even for San Francisco. He sported a fancy cowboy hat, a white dress shirt that strained over his big gut, faded Levi’s, and expensive hand-tooled red and brown cowboy boots. Nonetheless, women liked him. One of Pete’s old girlfriends tried to explain his appeal. Pete melts my heart, she said, in the same way my ratty old Pooh Bear does. It might have lost one of its eyes and its stuffing may be bulging out here and there, but that doesn’t mean I love it any less. Its ruin just makes me want to snatch it up, take it home, and nurse it back to health.

Pete was intelligent, you had to grant him that. His parents, Wolf and Sadie Weinstein, were Russian immigrants. Pete had grown up in a grim walk-up on 94th and Amsterdam in New York. He’d always been a wheeler-dealer. When he was seventeen, he somehow managed to wangle a scholarship to Yale, despite the fact that his grades were so-so. He claimed to have logged into the Yale computer system and raised his grades. Maybe he had. After he’d been at Yale a couple of months, he spotted a chance to make some real money. Yale men were obsessed with sex, Pete with money. His friends spent their free time bemoaning the slim pickings in New Haven and daydreaming about the women at Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Radcliffe, Wellesley, Barnard, and Sarah Lawrence—ripe peaches, just waiting to fall into their hands. If only they had some way to get there. Pete borrowed a little money, bought a fleet of rattletrap cars, and began ferrying sex-crazed Yalies to Western Massachusetts, Boston, and New York on the week-ends. After a couple of years he was raking in so much cash that he decided to drop out of Yale and concentrate full time on empire building.

About a decade ago, Pete took his first trip to San Francisco. He was chatting up Tony, the maître d’ at Zack’s, an old San Francisco establishment. Pete’s ears pricked up when Tony began to complain about the near-impossibility of getting the high-class, fresh produce trucked in from California’s interior valleys. (At least once a week, the rogue truckers who hauled his wines, meats, mushrooms, fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers failed to turn up because they were on a binge, stuck in traffic, or on-strike.) Within two weeks Pete had started up his own company—San Francisco Fruits. Before long S.F. Fruits was listed in Fortune 500.

Although I was Pete’s best friend and his lawyer at Beck, Brown, Ichiwara, and Kim, and I certainly knew as much about him as anyone, it was difficult to tell exactly how successful he was. Sometimes he claimed to be a multi-millionaire, at other times to be just scraping by. For Pete was a teller of tales. Truth and absurdist fantasy merged synergistically. He told preposterous stories (at least I think they were stories) of Mafia Dons skulking into his house at midnight to solicit favors, of piloting produce rigs through a rain of bullets during a bitter wildcat strike, of fast-track deals, and pay-offs to local Senators, judges, cops, and cab drivers. I was never sure how much of this stuff was true, how much tongue-in-cheek. Pete loved to reel in his listeners, piling plausible truth upon impossible lie. It was only later that his audiences would wake up and realize it was all a hoax.

There was the time that Pete claimed he’d spent the evening caucusing with Joe the Shoulder Neapolitano, the local Mafia chieftain. Joe was a couple hours late, Pete added. Bus service is always a little slow on weekends. It was only the next day that I realized, with a roar of laughter, that he’d been having me on. (The image of a menacing Mafia chieftain and his strong-arms, patiently waiting for the local MUNI to cart them to some Syndicate summit, kept flashing into my mind all day. I cracked up.) That son-of-a-bitch!

Liza was a bit thick, however, and she believed everything Pete said. She was sure that Pete was Mafia all the way. That he had millions if not billions salted away in secret Swiss bank accounts. That the only reason Pete pled poverty when she wanted to buy a Pegge Hopper painting or two was because he was a cheapskate. Actually Liza’s epithet was cruder than that. He’s your typical kike, was what she’d really said. She was certain that Pete was a charter member of a secret world-wide consortium of Jewish movers and shakers who controlled the universe: a cabal of Arab pashas, Mafia thugs, Israeli terrorists, Colombian drug kingpins, Chinese Tong overlords, and patriarchs from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Kennedy clans. She believed it because Pete told her so. Maybe some of it, especially the bits about Pete’s Mafia connections and his secret bank accounts, was true. Who knows?

In any case, when people first met Pete and Liza, they would be wowed by Liza—so charming, so intelligent (or so it seemed), so gracious, so thoughtful. They’d shake their heads: What was she doing with him? Once people got to know them, however, they changed their minds. Now they wondered: What’s he doing with her?

For Liza was not what she seemed. She was pretentious. Inferiors, she assumed, were born to serve. Her friends found this to be especially galling since Liza’s lineage was certainly undistinguished. Her Irish father was a ne’er-do-well—usually drunk and rarely employed. Her mother claimed to be a born-to-the-purple descendant of Irish aristocracy, who’d lost everything during the Troubles. Maybe.

In fact, the beauteous Liza was fairly stupid. Her logic tended to be slightly a-tilt. The last time we met, for example, she greeted me with: Well, Samuel, how nice to see you. I wouldn’t have recognized you. You haven’t changed a bit. A few minutes later, she started to complain about the temporary job she had taken at MOMA in SOMA to earn some extra pin money: You couldn’t pay me to do this job. I only do it for the money. And it wasn’t just her logic. Words often failed her too. During that same conversation, Liza told me she’d been reading a novel about Custard’s last stand.

Now, if Liza had been a sweet person, her little absurdities would have merely added to her charm. But she wasn’t nice. She was a born-again Christian, who intoned God is love, but I think she had a greater capacity for naked hatred than anyone I have ever known. Sometimes I thought her malice was due to the meanness of her intellect. In court I’ve sometimes had to represent thugs who were so stupid that they could only manage to see things from one point of view—their own. It was impossible for them to even imagine that their victims minded being beaten, robbed, or dumped in the street. (Hey! Lighten up, was their philosophy.) Liza was a small step up on the evolutionary ladder. She was able to keep two categories fixed in her little mind—us versus them. As long as people seemed to agree with her, she was charming, kind, and considerate. But the first time they stepped over the line and dared to disagree ever so slightly, all bets were off. Now they were the Anti-Christ, The Other. She was ruthless. They deserved anything they got. And, of course, to her mind so did all those Others—Arabs, Mexicans, Blacks, Jews, atheists, women’s libbers, gays, professors, and (ultimately) Pete.

Pete remained, in Churchillian terms, an enigma wrapped inside a conundrum. Sometimes I thought he was just an old softy, pretending to be tough. At other times I’d decide maybe he was a tough guy, just a little smarter than the rest: tough enough to pretend to be tender. Maybe he was both. He boasted of being a Male-Chauvinist-Capitalist-Pig, but in fact, if someone was really in trouble, whether male or female, ex-drunk or ex-thief, European, Hispanic, Black, Chinese, Samoan, or Latino—they could count on Pete. Pete felt a secret kinship with anyone who’d had a hell of a time. After hours he and his truckers would often stick around to have a drink together and Pete would end up giving them little mini-lectures on how to make it in corporate America (if that was what they wanted), or how to beat the system (if that was what they really cared about). It was things like that made me suspect that Peter might be a thoroughly nice man.

My trouble with Liza began in the fall of 1993. Around then the San Francisco economy hit the skids and Pete’s business started falling apart, so he decided it was time to return to Yale, take a few Japanese language classes, and complete his B.A. (Pete had bragged to everyone about graduating from Yale twenty years before, but he hadn’t.) Pete decided it was time for S.F. Fruits to go East young man. Very far East. Of course, he was right.

As I have said: Pete and I were best friends. We trusted each other. So, when Pete asked me to look after Liza and their five-year-old son, Peter, Jr. (who they’d nicknamed Pete-and-Repeat), during the three months he’d be gone, I assured him that I’d be more than happy to help. (Pete wanted Liza and Repeat to come to Yale too, but she demurred, claiming it wouldn’t be good for Repeat to be dragged out of St. Edward’s just now.) But then Liza made a strange request. I missed its significance at the time, but I sure registered its importance later. Liza said with a devilish little grin: You guys have to promise that anything I tell my lawyer will remain confidential. Samuel, she said turning to Pete, "isn’t allowed to tell you anything I tell him. I looked at Pete and he returned my look. We were confused. She looked directly at Pete, with this challenging, wicked, and very sexy look on her face. Like she was kidding. But something in her voice hinted that she might not be. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, I said fumbling. Pete, are you sure you want that? After all, I’ve been your lawyer for a long time. I can give you the names of a couple of therapists and lawyers that Liza could talk to if you’d like. This idea. I’m not sure."

Of course it wasn’t a good idea. Talk about conflict of interest! I should have been quicker, but I was thrown off by Liza, assuming that her stipulation was a big joke… or that her little secrets would consist of trivial revelations like I drank too much at the Black and White Ball and told old Daimler to Shove Off or I bought this silk dress, see. (In Liza’s lingo, I guess you’d expect something like: I got this fantastic dress at I. Magnin’s semi-annual Christmas sale. Some little thing like that.)

Pete obviously had the same kind of thing in mind. Of course, he said, waving away my concerns. Talk to her. So we both agreed. Anything Liza said was off the record.

During the three months Pete was holed up in New Haven, studying, Liza got into the habit of dropping by my office a few times each week. At the beginning, I had trouble figuring out why she was coming to see me so often. Once I got the distinct impression she was flirting with me, but I dismissed the idea. It seemed too preposterous. I was, after all, Pete’s best friend and legal advisor.

Liza’s concerns varied: She was worried about Repeat. Did I think the St. Edward’s pre-schoolers would like him? (I did.) Was there anything she could do to insure that Repeat would have every opportunity? To insure he’d make it into Deerfield and Harvard? (I assured her there wasn’t.) Did I think she should invest in a sure thing that her friend Weed Crippin had told her about? Pete had given her $100,000 in case any emergencies arose while he was at Yale. (Pete always assumed the worst.) Did I think he’d mind if she trusted the money to Weed? (I did.) Did I think there was anything she could do to make the servants shape up? (I didn’t.)

Sometimes I got so bored with all this trivial chatter that I found my eyes glazing over. So, to entertain myself I began to jot down a few of Liza’s wanton malapropisms. They were wonderful. After a month, I had quite a collection:

On Fashion: Gucci pantyhose are fabulous. My friends don’t wear anything else.

On Dogs: Naomi’s new puppy is part Great Dame and part Alaskan Hussy… Carrie’s dog eats anything. It’s especially fond of children.

On foreign travel: When Pete and I go to Paris, we’re planning to visit this old cemetery where all these immortals are buried… Our hotel in Tuscany has a fabulous view. You can swim in this pool and drink it all in.

On Social Activism: Ned set up this great program. If you’re illiterate, all you have to do is drop Pete a line and he’ll give you free tutoring.

Liza’s syntax, at least, was scintillating.

But around mid-October, I began to feel uneasy. Liza began to touch on topics that weren’t quite so banal. To pose questions that weren’t quite so benign. It began to dawn on me that Liza might possess a secret life. She began to mention Weed Crippin, her new investment counselor, with disturbing frequency. Well Weed isn’t a stock broker exactly, but he advises people, sort-of, she said, clarifying his position. Weed was evidently everything Pete wasn’t—stunningly good looking, lean, upper-crust, old money, and sensitive. Since I’ve been married to Pete for ten years, she mused idly, I’m entitled to half his property if we divorce. All of it. That’s right isn’t it? Just asking. She talked an awful lot about cocaine. I have friends who swear by it, she said. Science has proved that both Ecstasy and cocaine are even better for you than alcohol. That’s what they say. Whaddaya think?

Alarm bells were going off all over the place. That’s all I needed. If Pete came back to San Francisco and found out that Liza was sleeping with Weed Crippin, siphoning off Pete’s money, and taking Repeat with her on drug runs—and that I knew all about it and hadn’t bothered to warn him—that would be it. Pete wasn’t the kind to understand subtle ethical niceties of client privilege.

So, the next time Liza seemed on the brink of revealing something she shouldn’t, I called a halt. Liza, my love, if you are about to tell me what I think you’re about to tell me, you better quit right here. I don’t want to know anything that will compromise my friendship with Pete. I don’t want Pete to feel betrayed. If it’s something like that, you better confide in your psychiatrist or another lawyer. Not me.

Something like what? Liza asked.

Well: Suppose you told me something like, ‘I’m having an affair,’ or ‘I’m transferring Pete’s money to my own Dean Witter account,’ or ‘exposing Repeat to a lot of druggies.’ Something like that.

Liza rose, bestowed a chilly nod, and walked out.

The next day, I received a computer printout in the mail. The document could only have come from Liza. It was part legalize and partly Mrs. Malaprop:

This is to inform you that you are hereby enjoined from revealing anything that your client, Mrs. Liza Weinstein, has ever told you to Mr. Peter Weinstein, her husband, or to anyone else. Everything that she has ever said or done falls under protracted lawyer-client privilege. If through any means, Mr. Weinstein comes into possession of the incidences Mrs. Weinstein confided in you, at your instigation, you will be persecuted legally.

It was unsigned.

I immediately called Liza and assured her that I would not dream of revealing her, or any, client’s secrets. That would be immoral and unethical. Any lawyer foolish enough to do so would be disbarred. She listened, replied with a crisp fine, and hung up.

At Christmas time, Pete returned. The next day, he dropped into my office. What the hell’s going on? he asked. Liza just told me that you’ve refused to see her any more. She’s really hurt. She can’t understand it. She says she’d had a really bad day, and was feeling lonely and overwhelmed, and needed to talk to you just for a minute or two to set things straight, but you claimed to be ‘too busy’ to see her. That doesn’t sound like you. Then, she says, a few weeks ago you told her you never wanted to see her again. You advised her to see a psychiatrist! What’s going on?

I told Pete it was complicated. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Liza, or that I was too busy to see her, or that I thought she was crazy. It was just one of those legal things. For legal reasons, too complex and convoluted to explain, I thought I’d better avoid any potential conflict of interest and refer Liza to someone more qualified to deal with her problems.

Pete pressed me for more information, but in the end, he shrugged, and acquiesced. Probably he thought I was a little nuts.

As soon as Pete walked out of the office, however, it hit me. That bitch! She knew Peter had only one friend—me. She knew I was his confidante and lawyer. She was trying to set me up! When she dumped Pete, and now I was sure she was about to, she would just happen to mention that I’d known all about Weed, the $100,000, Liza’s new nose buddies. He didn’t think it was so bad, she would say.

Pete might know intellectually that I couldn’t reveal Liza’s secrets, but in his heart he could never accept the fact that I’d let Liza to cheat on him, drain him dry, and risk Repeat’s well-being, without giving him even a hint. Not Pete. Liza would have crushed Pete, destroyed our friendship, and probably removed me as Pete’s advocate, all the while smiling prettily. Liza may have been dumb, but dumb with cunning malice aforethought.

* * *

Well, I turned out to be right. A month after Pete’s return, he caught Liza in bed with Weed Chippin. At first I heard Pete and Liza were getting a divorce. Then (when it turned out that Weed wasn’t willing to leave his wife (his old money turned out to be his wife’s money), the divorce was off. Pete and Liza reconciled. Then, when Pete found out that Liza was now seeing Adam Brent on the sly, the divorce was on again. Adam was Liza’s old lawyer-boyfriend. He was the one, it turned out, who had suggested Liza craft the threatening letter warning me to back off, after I warned her about conflict-of-interest. After a few more starts and halts, Pete and Liza finally did get a divorce.

The final settlement turned out a draw. In the end, Liza and Pete turned out to be well matched after all. Liza won legal and physical custody of Repeat, but Pete won ample visitation rights. Liza’s property settlement turned out to be stunningly small. They put the Pacific Heights house on the market, but as I said times were tough and so by the time the Weinstein’s paid legal and brokers’ fees and paid off the mortgage, Liza ended up with only about $100,500 on the deal. Of course, Liza had squirreled away several hundred thousand in a personal trust Weed had helped her set up, and Adam Brent, who was now her lover and lawyer, billed Pete $300,000 for the legal advice he had given Liza while Pete was away, presumably because I was unavailable. But that was it. Certainly not the millions she had been expecting. Pete continued to insist that times were tough and that was all the money he had. Of course, Liza didn’t believe him. She and Adam hired the best tax accountants in San Francisco to investigate, but they couldn’t turn up anything. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps Peter didn’t have anything. Maybe it had all been big talk and bluff. On the other hand, perhaps he had millions salted away in secret bank accounts in Switzerland. Who could tell?

• Double Talk. (Spring, 2004). The New Orphic Review, 7, 29-37.

A Man Is Just A Woman

A Man is Just a Woman is the bitter-sweet story of the complexities of sexual identity. Susan, a sweet young high school teacher, falls in love with a classmate at the Kinsey Institute. They seem to be soul mates, sharing the same sweet, irreverent sense of fun. When Susan discovers Tony was once Antonia she tells herself it shouldn’t matter: Men are just like women. They simply come in bigger packages. Alas, Susan soon discovers she is more conventional than she had thought.

She met him at a poetry reading and, for a while, he seemed to be everything she had ever wanted.

Susan had only been teaching for two years when Mark (Beaky) Harriman, her principal at Stevenson High, assigned her to spend her summer developing a Human Sexuality course. Teenage pregnancies, socially transmitted diseases, street drugs, and even AIDS had begun to creep past Stevenson’s leafy borders. So Mr. Harriman had said that the only favor he’d ask of her during the summer break was to develop a sex syllabus that pulled no punches while, of course, being sensitive to Stevenson’s parents’ concerns. That was all.

Susan was always amused when the self-centered assumed they were requesting the merest trifle, when in fact they were demanding the impossible: All I’m asking for is your love, Just one more chance, All I need is a small advance. She tried to escape by protesting that she didn’t know anything about sex, but Beaky Harriman had a solution at the ready. Each summer the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana sponsored a two-week workshop on sex education. He’d reserved a place for her.

Actually, Susan ended up enjoying her time at the Institute. Generally, she took a rather long time to make friends. At mixers she tended to disappear into the wallpaper. She’d once overheard a Stevenson matron’s introduction that sort of summed things up: And over there is Susan… uh, Susan somebody or other. Never mind, she’s nobody. Susan was, she had to admit, nobody. Her students sometimes referred to her as old Dobbin behind her back, and the description was apt. Her wispy, cornsilk hair persisted in sticking out at odd angles above what must be confessed was a bit of a horse face. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were so blonde they were almost invisible and her large cornflower blue eyes gazed placidly out of a mud-lark face. Dobbin was definitely a dray, not a stallion. But once people got to know Susan, they quickly changed their mind about her. She was sweet natured and kind, but with a wicked sense of humor. These traits had won her few passionate lovers, but she possessed rafts of chums.

At the Kinsey Institute, though, people formed fast-friendships fast. Susan met Tony De Cano and most of her fellow students Sunday night at a get-acquainted reception in Morrison Hall. They sat around talking and sorting through their orientation packets to see if there was anything doing at the University during their stay. They were thrilled to find that W. S. Merwin would be doing a reading that evening. They decided to have dinner at The Tao and walk over to the University Theatre together. Susan and Tony got on well together. They found all the same things charming, touching, or irritating. When Merwin began to recount the Comte d’Allers’s (Fatty’s) nefarious schemes while he was mayor of Saint-Val (for raising money to preserve the town’s ancient buildings)—starting with his own château, of course—Tony started to grin, his mouth twitching in an effort to repress excessive amusement. But Susan caught his expression, and it was too late: both were convulsed with laughter. They couldn’t stop. They spluttered and giggled and pinched their lips tight together to stop themselves; but nothing helped. Finally they had to leave the hall.

Soon they were searching for each other in the mornings so they could sit together during all the meetings, whispering and nudging each other every time something tickled their funny bones. And at the Kinsey meetings there was a lot to smile about… . The Institute didn’t fool around. Classes were scheduled every day from 8:00 a.m. to 6 p.m. The participants previewed a mind-numbing selection of graphic videos—so that once they knew all there was to know about sex they could select the best of the aids for their classes. Somehow Susan didn’t think that any of the films would receive a Sensitive to Stevenson Parents’ Concerns (SSPC) rating. They watched: Dr. Boggs, wearing scrubs, solemnly demonstrating self-pleasuring techniques on anatomically correct figures. Hunky young gay men making athletic love in bedrooms ablaze with more flickering red votive candles than Susan had seen at Easter midnight mass. They watched men and women, men and men, women and women, and men and women all in a jumble, playing at love. Love is a many gendered thing, Tony whispered after the last video. Susan choked back her giggles. Most of the sex films seemed to be accompanied by sitar music. Evidently the films had been shot in the l970s when Ravi Shankar was at his peak. There is nothing particularly erotic about the twanging sounds of sitar, but soon all the audience had to hear was the throbbing, off-key rhythms and they’d respond with spontaneous giggling and good natured cat-calls: Bring on the girls,  . . . GUYS, Sing Melancholy Baby!

The group listened to sober lectures on the STD’s: the old-time favorites (syphilis and gonorrhea) and the newer villains, chlamydia, herpes, and AIDS. The teachers were given free samples of condoms in red, yellow, and green; ribbed and smooth; lambskin and latex; and a sample packet of the new one-size-fits-all female condoms. The gigantic size of the latter set off yet another round of nervous laughter. It was loads of fun.

In the evenings, Susan and Tony sometimes went to dinner at The Tao (there wasn’t much else open), and took long walks around the Arboretum.

They spent one rainy afternoon looking at the Institute’s collection of ancient pornographic films. They started with the oldest films ever made. There were old silent films, flickering in black and white. They saw several mini-cartoons in which the best-beloved children’s cartoon characters—Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop and Krazy Kat—cavorted in a startling fashion. In one early movie, the newest invention, a dangerously unstable bi-plane, pretended to buzz a nude bather, who had assumed she was safe from prying eyes. In her attempt to prevent the pilot from seeing more than he should, she managed to reveal a lot more than she hid.

Most of the other Institute participants had been watching a Boston Celtics-Detroit Pistons’ game, but when that ended they straggled into the video room. The group looked through the collection of tapes and decided to view the first porn film ever made in color: Loves a Licking. The scene opened with Lance Big Boy Cannon just about to consummate his marriage to Hot Honey, naked except for her bridal veil. Evidently, the thick-witted but generously endowed hero had been too busy with wedding preparations to rehearse, for he didn’t seem to have his part down. He stared groggily at Honey’s breasts. He seemed to recall that he was supposed to do something, but what? He tried to sneak a look at the cue-cards cunningly placed on the pillow to his right. He strained to make out his lines. He sounded out the words. Clearly not a speed-reader. He had it! He reached out and pinched Honey’s right nipple. Like a safecracker: two turns to the right, one to the left. That should do it. Then, back to the script. Now, Lance was stalled, looking befuddled.

My God! Susan whispered. What a performance! The rowdy crowd evidently agreed with her, because they started shouting out instructions.

In the front, one guy yelled. Right there, below her navel.

Draw him a map, another shouted.

Shussssh! the audience hissed.

The last film of the evening, Sexual Variations, was a stunner. It illustrated fist fucking. A man’s brawny fist and forearm seemed to disappear inside his male partner. To the accompaniment of jarring sitar music, of course. There was a collective gasp from the audience. Silence. Anguished Argggghs. Then a cheerful Bronx cheer from the audience: And his Timex is still ticking! stopped the action cold. Everyone went home chuckling.

Weekends the whole crowd went out to dinner. They drove over to Molly’s Cafe in the outskirts of town. After dinner, people came home a little drunk and slightly out of control. Sometimes they went out dancing at Buddy’s Tavern, inventing goofy dance steps on the spur of the moment. Somehow it seemed appropriate just to jump up and down, doing the jump shot, or building a house, mimicking hammering, stringing wire, moving concrete blocks, and so on.

More often the whole gang went swimming. The Kinsey staff tried to keep the attendees in check: There will be no nude swimming from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. tonight, they’d announce in a firm tone. We mean it! Susan was never sure if the announcement was meant as a backhanded invitation to do the forbidden or as a warning. If a warning, why announce the time? In any case, people dutifully showed up at 9 p.m., buck-naked.

Back home in Ann Arbor, Susan had often sauntered along State Street at dusk, in the hope of spotting strollers with red striped hair, nose rings, or something that might add a little excitement to her rather dull life. At the Kinsey Institute, in the midnight swims, she was equally voyeuristic—only here the swimmers were nude. Such an array of bodies! One old man, sparse of hair and full of figure,