thought that I would go to heaven because at Bennington I
never slept with faculty members, only their wives.
Music 2
Mrs. Smith used to give her students stars and points for
memorizing pieces. I was used to being a good student. I got
a lot of stars and a lot of points. But there was a piece I could
never remember. I worked on it for months, and the denouement was in the two terrible black stars she gave me to mark my failure. The piece was
Strauss. I like to think that my inability to stomach that piece
was a repudiation of the later Strauss’s Nazi politics, even
though I didn’t know about the former or the lat er’s politics
at the time (and they’re not related). In the same way, there
was a recur ent nightmare I had when I stayed with my
mother’s mother, Sadie Spiegel. The room got smaller and
smaller and I had trouble breathing. The tin soldiers I associated with
molestation of them. Their father was Sadie’s favorite, the
youngest of her children; he was bril iant as well as blond
and beautiful, had a role in inventing the microchip, and he
stuck his penis down the throats of at least two of his children
when they were very young, including when they were infants
5
- I assume to elicit the involuntary sucking response. Even
though my cousins told me this horror years later, I like to
think that reality runs like a stream, except that time isn’t linear and the nightmare was a synthesis, Strauss and my uncle, Nazis both. And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in
an infant’s mouth belongs in Himmler’s circle of hel .
Music 3
There was jazz and Bessie Smith. When I'd cut high school or
college and go to Eighth Street in New York City, I'd find
used albums. I listened to every jazz great I could find. My
best friend in high school particularly liked Maynard
Fergusson, a white jazz man. I went to hear him at the Steel
Pier in Atlantic City when I was a kid. (I also went to hear
Ricky Nelson at the Steel Pier. I stood among hundreds of
screaming girl teens but up front. The teens who fainted, I am
here to tel you, fainted from the heat of a South Jersey
summer misspent in a closed bal room. Still, I adored Ricky
and Pat Boone and, special among specials, Tab Hunter with
his cover of “Red Sails in the Sunset. ”) There was no gambling then, just miles of boardwalk with penny arcades, cotton candy, saltwater taf y, root-beer sodas in frosted-glass mugs; and sand, ocean, music. I listened to Coltrane, had a