“Never whore, ” he said; “it ruins your art. ” He told me never
to tell anyone and until now, with some private exceptions,
I haven’t. He’s been dead a long time, and that puts him
beyond the shame he felt that night. He said that taking his
signature off the pro-Cuba petition had made him a whore
and he couldn’t work anymore because of it. “Work” was
literal - it meant making sculptures; “whore” was a metaphor
- it meant not compromising one’s art. He warned me repeatedly; I only wish he had meant it literally as wel as metaphorical y because I might have listened. Since then - since I was eighteen - I’ve always measured my writing against his admonition: never whore. He also taught me how to drink 100-proof Stoli, my drink of choice until in the late 1970s I switched to
bottled water and the occasional glass of champagne. He was
talking to me, not to my painter friend; I’ve never known
why. I always hoped it was because he saw an artist in me. A
week and a half later he died, crashing his motorcycle into a
tree, the kind of death police regard as suicide.
Contraception
At some point when I was in junior high or high school, my
father gave me the inevitable books on intercourse, more
commonly called “how babies are made. ” He was embarrassed; I rejected the books; he shoved them at me and left the room. I read the books about the sperm and the egg. There
were a few missing moments, including how the sperm got to
the egg before it was inside the vaginal tract, for example,
intercourse, and how not to become pregnant. By the time I
was sixteen, I understood the former but not the lat er. When
I asked my mother, she said that one must never let a man use
a rubber because it decreased his pleasure and the purpose was
to give him pleasure. Always ready to beat a dead horse into
the ground, I elicited from my unwilling mother the fact that
she had never let my father use a condom and that she had
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
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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
