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
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
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.
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
