Victor J. Banis is an Author

With my blog. I’ve started posting excerpts from my memoirs, Spine Intact, Some Creases, and people are actually reading them, because I’ve heard from several of you. So, I’m going to continue, and I will try to add them twice a week instead of once, as originally promised, so no one will have to wait a full week for your Victor fix. In the meantime, my next project is to try to figure out how to do links - starting with my good friend, Rick R. Reed - and if I can manage that, then, I’ll add lots of you. But, don’t get too excited yet, I am Mister No-Tech. This could take a while

At age 7 or so. Already looking at the world with grave suspicion

CHAPTER 1

Searching, Searching…

I fell in love with Carol on my first day of school. She was a vision all in pink (for all I can actually remember, she might have been wearing green and yellow, but in my memory I see pink and pink it shall remain).

I can’t tell you what exactly I was wearing except that there would have been new shoes—in my large, poverty beset family, we mostly went barefoot in the summer. And whatever else I wore, I’m certain it was stained when I arrived home from that first day. I was much too shy to hold up my hand and say I needed to go to the bathroom. Anyway we didn’t have a bathroom at home, we had four rooms and a path. Probably the teacher wouldn’t have known what I was talking about if I had said I needed to use the path. Stains were simpler.

We lived then in what we called “The Burnt Place,” a house in the country that belonged to a friend of our parents and which had indeed burned sometime in the past and had never been rebuilt. I was number ten of eleven children and I have no doubt that today they would arrest our parents for moving a brood like that into what nowadays would be considered a deathtrap.

Truth to tell, I suppose it was a deathtrap. There were stairs that ended in landings and nothing but space beyond, rooms with no roofs, some with no walls and even one with no floor. No amount of cleaning or airing ever quite got rid of the scent of charred wood. Outside, and there was lots of outside, there was a creek, a barnyard complete with nasty bull, and a nest of bees buzzing under one of the derelict staircases.

We loved it. We had moved there from “The Streetcar,” which was exactly that, an old streetcar that had been parked on an empty lot and made more or less habitable. Mostly less. When you crowd parents and a gaggle of children into a streetcar, with a sort of kitchen and some accommodations for sleeping, there is not much room left for anything or anyone.

Now we were in the country and there was plenty of room for everyone and no end of places to explore. I very soon discovered that the bees under the stairs, in their infinite wisdom, did not sting me. After that I had great fun stirring up the nest and listening to the screams of my brothers and sisters as they fled in terror. I didn’t say I was a pleasant child.

The house talked to us at night, whispers and creaks and groans, but I think she was happy that we were there. My sister saw a ghost. We all saw our brother, Bill. Bill was the oldest of the boys, away in the war, but there he was one night in the glare of our headlights, by the side of the road, smiling and splendid in his uniform.

Our father stopped the car and we tumbled out to greet our surprise visitor—and could not find him, though we searched in the ditches, behind and up trees, everywhere he might have hidden to tease us.

Disappointed, we piled back into the car. In the back seat, we debated what could possibly have happened to him after that first sighting. In the front our mother only gazed pensively at the darkness beyond the car’s window.

The telegram came nearly three months later. When she read it, our mother gave a single, heart wrenching wail of anguish. Bill had been killed in action, in Italy; as near as could be determined, at the very same time when we saw him along the road.

I don’t imagine there could be a good day for such a telegram to arrive but there could hardly have been a worse one: Happy Mother’s Day, Mrs. Banis.

* * * * * * *

When you are as poor as we were, with a father in ill health and a mother constantly in motion, big sisters are important. Big brothers too, but the times and the ages were not favorable, with the older brothers away at war. This left much of the responsibility for us younger ones to Fanny, who was twelve or thirteen at the time. That is just old enough to look after younger brothers and sisters and yet young enough to communicate on our level—which is to say, the perfect big sister, and so she has mostly remained through many years, though I have no doubt that she has often wished to be rid of the lot of us.

Significantly, the chief weapons in Fanny’s arsenal were books from the library—not just stories, either, though she read those to us as well. Most important, however, we were intended to learn as much as we could, as fast as we could. This, though she did not put it in so many words, was to be our passport to a better life. If we had been given not much in the material sense we had been given brains and we must not waste them.

By the time I was four Fanny had taught me to read and write. I was surprised when, as an adult, I looked again at The Wizard of Oz. It was only a small book after all, though it had looked enormous when I first read it at four. Significantly, it was the beginning of my love affair with books. She also, by the by, introduced me to the Nancy Drew books, which I enjoyed and which later played a significant role in my life’s direction.

* * * * * * *

With or without books, The Burnt Place was definitely a move up for the Banises. Still it was simply the gutted shell of an old house—no central heating, though there was certainly no lack of air. No water, no electricity, no plumbing, much of it, indeed, with no roof. Carol lived in a town manse called Home Acres. I think you can see a problem here.

Miraculously Carol and I did become friends—miraculously, since clearly she moved in a different social circle than I did. To be honest I had no social circle. If I wasn’t alone, as I was most of the time, I was with family. My closest friend in school was my sister Annie—and a good friend she was and has ever remained—who was only two years older than I and is not to be confused with our sister Fanny.

Now before you start blaming the names committee for short-sightedness I might explain that Annie was really Mildred Ann, a name that apparently no one liked because as a little girl she was Gretchen (I have no idea why) and after that, Annie—until she was grown up, when she became Ann, which I think you will agree better suits an insurance executive.

For that matter Fanny wasn’t really Fanny either, but Frances Laverne. She got called Fanny after our Aunt Fanny. Families used to do that more at one time, naming children after relatives. I suppose they got away from it when they realized how confusing it could be in memoirs.

Not that ours aren’t confusing enough as it is. Robert somehow became Dick. Bill remained Bill and Albert was, reasonably enough, Al, but James became Pat, I can’t tell you how any of this happened. I believe that children should remain what their parents called them until they are twelve, say, or thirteen, at which time they should get to pick a name for themselves, which would put an end to the grousing that teenagers have ever done about their names.

I was named for Uncle Victor, who liked to tipple and on his way home from a tavern one night either fell or jumped under a train—and was, as brother Dick so nicely put it, turned into peanut butter. I think this is an unfortunate namesake-legacy with which to burden a child but I cannot say whether it really had any influence on my development. It is true I do like a sip now and again, but I have never fallen nor contemplated jumping under a train, though I think it likely that there has been a time or two when others might have considered a helpful shove. Fortunately the impulse was resisted and I have remained to eat rather than become peanut butter.

* * * * * * *

I’ve no doubt that Carol took her share of criticism for spending time with a rugrat like me but we remained friends and still do. She was wise enough not to take my devotion too seriously and in time I came to realize that my real romantic interests lay elsewhere. It is true, nonetheless, that one’s first love never quite dies, and she remains in a special place in my heart.

All well and good, you say, but what does this have to do with publishing? There is a point, however (you knew I would get to one eventually, didn’t you?) By junior high school Carol too had discovered the Nancy Drew books. Delighted to find this common interest, I began writing Nancy Drew-ish mystery stories, with Carol as the heroine, and, eventually, a number of our classmates playing roles in them.

These were my first literary efforts. Well, they were efforts, I don’t know if you would call them literary. One turned up a few years ago in my late mother’s effects and I could only wonder if, after all, they were to blame for the failure of my abortive romantic longings. Still, they were fun and they set me firmly on the path I was to follow, though there were detours along the way. Nor was it, I might mention, the rosiest of paths.

* * * * * * *

Here is a test:

The year is 1963. You have just finished writing your gay novel, full of hot action, with a laugh on every page, and a romantic ending in which your two heroes ride happily off into the sunset. Your best course of action is:

A) Rush your manuscript off to a major New York publishing house and wait by the mailbox for their check.

B) Write to Boy’s Life about the possibilities of serializing your opus, First North American Serial Rights only.

C) Cut the pages in half and stack them, clean side up, in the bathroom cabinet, for that inevitable morning when you discover you are out of toilet tissue.

I’m sure that many writers would have opted—indeed, did opt—for the other choices, but alas, in 1963, your best hope of getting any reward for your efforts was C—believe me you”d have had far less crap to deal with in the long run.

How do I know? Sweetheart, I was there. Between 1963 and 1985 I wrote, as I said in my Foreword, something in excess of one hundred novels and nonfiction books—mostly paperback but some hardcover as well and some shorter pieces, even some poetry. We will skip the subject of restroom walls.

I can’t tell you exact numbers—I stopped counting at one hundred. And I can’t list all the titles, though I’ll do my best to provide a bibliography. I’ve forgotten many of them and no longer have copies to refer to. Some of them, in fact, were titled and “bylined” by the publishers and I never saw them once the manuscripts had been mailed. From time to time I still pick up a paperback book at a flea market and am surprised to discover that it’s something I wrote in the distant past. How was I to know they would pick a name like Flaubert?

As it happened my paperback years coincided with a time of major revolution in the publishing industry. An entire new, alternative publishing industry was bursting onto the scene. Mostly this was a West Coast phenomenon, though there were a few houses in the East and Midwest. At the time the major publishers on the East Coast tut-tutted and looked condescendingly, at best, at what was happening in California. In the late sixties Publishers Weekly replied to a query from me with the information that they had “no interest in California sex publishers.”

Well, yes, to a large extent, sex was the engine that powered this publishing revolution—let’s face it, if the Constitution had been written in California, sex would have been mentioned in the Bill of Rights—but it was not only that. Milton Luros owned one of the largest of these publishing operations in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. His critics called Milt the King of Pornography, but that realm apparently had many “kings”—the title got passed around a lot. The thing is, Milt was a graduate of New York’s prestigious Hunter’s College and an artist of some note. Like many of these early pulp people, Milt started out in the science fiction and fantasy fields, and several of those early sci-fi and fantasy pulps featured covers by Milt. So far as his own publishing was concerned, Milt’s real interest lay in high quality art books.

San Diego’s Greenleaf Classics, another major player, did paperback editions of classic novels. In Los Angeles, Sherbourne Press aka Medco Books published books on witchcraft, male baldness, betting systems—a long list of non-sexual subjects.

Even where sex was a factor, it wasn’t necessarily of the sleazy, pornographic sort. The Other Traveller line of books was an offshoot of Maurice Girodias’ legendary Olympia Press, which for years published major but out-of-the-mainstream works in Paris in familiar green covers; think Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, or Vladimir Nabokov.

Luros’ operation in the San Fernando Valley published paperback editions of such works as Terry Southern’s Candy (1964), and Sherbourne Press published Robert Rimmer’s The Harrad Experiment (1966) and the fledgling efforts of Joseph Hansen (writing as James Colton), who went on to well justified fame for his Dave Brandstetter mysteries, among other efforts.

It was largely the work of these West Coast publishers that pushed the borders of what was permissible to say and to write about, sexually. It was they who left behind “his manhood” and introduced “his cock,” and made an honest orgasm of “her fulfillment.” I’ll leave it to others to debate the good or bad of that but I will say that the freedom today’s writers enjoy—mainstream romances today are far “hotter” than anything I wrote then—came from this revolution of the sixties.

Even more significant, in my opinion, were the doors that were opened to alternative themes. Gay novels were rare and mostly a sorry lot heretofore. The California houses—with a big push from yours truly—jumped into gay in a big way. There were books, too, on S&M.—I wonder if The Story of O would have made it to print without them? Larry Townsend became the premier writer for those interested in the leather world. John Maggie wrote about boy-love in neither a condescending nor a prurient voice—I can’t imagine what New York publishing house even today would have the guts to tackle his novels. And if they did the watchdogs of our morality would be on them in a thrice, you can take my word for it. As adults, it is important that we have someone decide for us what it is safe for us to read, don’t you see?

None of this came without a price. The would-be censors, the Federal Government, particularly the U.S. Postal Service, waged a decades-long campaign to shut these publishers down. There were obscenity trials all over the place—usually in small towns where it was hoped community standards would be stiffer than the big cities—the scatter shot approach, as it was known.

I was arrested twice (I went through one long, scary Federal trial in Sioux City, Iowa, which I will get to in due course) and threatened with arrest on more than one occasion. Publishers, editors, writers, and others actually went to jail for exercising their free speech rights. Even where the publishers prevailed, the costs—financial and otherwise—of defending these cases was enormous.

Milt Luros once said to me: “In every revolution, there are those on the ramparts taking the slings and arrows, and there are those back snug in the castle enjoying the fruits.”

Personally I would have preferred curled up in front of the fire on some bare skin. I certainly never set out to be a revolutionary and I suppose I would have preferred not to suffer the slings and arrows. When I look back now, however, I can see, as I said, that I did indeed play a part in a genuine revolution, not only in publishing, but in social customs as well.

I was certainly a key player—maybe the key player—in that gay publishing revolution. There were others, of course. I mentioned Larry Townsend above, who is still writing at the dawn of the new century, and I don’t think his role in the social upheaval of the sixties has ever been properly acknowledged. Joseph Hansen (who wrote as James Colton), Marijane Meaker (as Vin Packer), Ann Weldy (as Ann Bannon), and Clarence Miller (as Jay Little) were among the early pioneers in gay fiction.

There were editors, too, who were willing to take that big—and truly risky—extra step: Gil Porter of Sherbourne Press, for example, and most notably Earl Kemp of Greenleaf Classics. It wasn’t only the publishers of these books but the editors as well who could end up facing indictment and possible prison sentences—a chilling subtext to editing books.

The important thing is, there’s little question that the revolution in publishing and the sexual revolution of that era fed one another. It wasn’t only books that changed, it was how we lived our lives.

My books reflected what was happening then, which probably explains in part why many of them have become collectors’ items, and why younger gay people ask me often about my role in our history.

As I said earlier, I seem to have become a cult figure in my old age.

All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced in any formwithout the expressed written consentof the author and publisher.

The cover from the original Italian edition. I'm the one on top.

Copyright © 2004, 2007 by Victor J. Banis

Printed in the United States of America

These excerpts are from the 2nd (American) edition of my memoirs, published by the Borgos Imprint of Wildside Press

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION  

When I first wrote this book of memoirs a few years ago, I had mostly been out of the publishing arena for several years. Since then, I have gotten more involved in it, and I have found that the business of getting published is far harder today than it was for me in the past, although that may be in part because I am less driven to do so, feeling as I do that I have little left to prove. That is not to say that I am any less motivated to write; indeed, I think that I am more so. Certainly I am enjoying writing now in a way that I never did before—and, again, that may be because I am less concerned with seeing anything published, and am content to write for no profit but my own pleasure—and I am inclined to think that, as a result, I am actually writing better.

I do see, however, that some of my remarks on the subject of getting published may seem a trifle ingenuous to today’s writers, who face different challenges, harder ones, I think, than I faced in the past.

Likewise, during this same period of time, I have had the opportunity to read a great deal of new gay and lesbian fiction. If, as I assert in the original edition, we have yet to see the Great Gay Novel or the Great Gay Novelist, I must say that, with writers of the caliber of Dorien Grey, Rick Reed, Lori Lake, Ruth Sims, Anthony Bidulka, Allen Hollinghurst, Gregg Herren, E. M. Kahn, Adam Berlin, Dean James, and Gregory Hinton plying their craft—and I am sure I have forgotten one or two others—and with old pros like James Purdy, William Maltese, and Ann Bannon still at it, I think that the future of gay and lesbian fiction is in very good hands indeed; and since I have not yet read everything by any of them, it may even be that one of them has already penned that great novel, and the more fool I.

So, the temptation was there, to revisit what I had written and to update it, but for the most part, I have resisted that temptation. This book was ever an imperfect one, more a personal journal than any literary achievement. I have apologized elsewhere already for its discursive nature, and explained, I think quite clearly, that it is little more than a summing up of my experiences and of the opinions that I have formed as a result of them. I meant it to be read much as if the reader and I were sitting together in a room chatting, and I am happy to say that many of those who read it found it to be exactly like that; and with that, I remain content.

I have never pretended to be a great writer, though I believe that, at my best (and every writer deserves to be judged by his best), I am a good one. I have come to believe that I can take little credit for that, however. The rain dancer dances, but when the droplets begin to fall, they are nonetheless a gift from Heaven. I have worked hard to learn the steps and sometimes the Gods have smiled upon me, but the raindrops are still a gift for which I can only be humbly grateful.

I could certainly without pause name a hundred or so writers better than I am, and I am sure that everyone reading this could add as many or more to the list. I can say with all due modesty, however, that there are probably few who have been as devoted to their craft as I have been over the last several years of my life; and none, I am convinced, more dedicated to furthering the genre of gay and lesbian fiction.

* * * * * * *

Someone recently referred to me as one of the Grand Old Men of gay writing. Mister Maugham was once asked how he came to be The Grand Old Man of English Letters, and he replied that it was easy: he had simply outlived all the others.

I’m not sure that I qualify as a grand old anything—well, I suppose I must grant the “old” part of it—but in any event, my reply would certainly be the same. With the exception of James Purdy, and surely he must be regarded as The Grand Old Man of Gay Writing, there are few gay writers still around who go back as far as I do and are still at it—I have already mentioned William Maltese and he is indeed a fine writer, and came along only a few years after I did, but I think that he would agree with my assertion that those few years are significant.

Apart from Purdy, Larry Townsend, and, in the realm of lesbian fiction, the also already mentioned Ann Bannon, I can’t think of anyone who was with me in the starting gate (and, in all fairness, Ann Bannon and James Purdy were there ahead of me), though it is possible that I have overlooked someone, in which case I apologize sincerely.

Does my fortuitous longevity make those opinions I express so cavalierly any more valuable? Probably not. I have said before, and have no reluctance in saying again, whatever treasures I have gained from having lived these many years, wisdom is not among them. But I like to think that you may find some of those opinions amusing. Better yet, it is my fondest hope that they will inspire one or two of you to ponder the points I raise, perhaps even to disagree with them.

That is a good thing, I think, and perhaps as much as any writer can aspire to.

FOREWORD   This is not, and was never meant to be, a story of my life. For starters, I can’t imagine who would want to read that. I’m not a star nor a celebrity nor even (it seems to me) in any way unique, and I would probably pass out if I were even asked to be on a tv talk show.My dreams are unique. I am the only person I know who dreams cartoon characters. I once had an incredibly torrid adventure with Bugs Bunny. You really don’t need or want to know the details, trust me, but I’m sure you will agree that it is peculiar. Another time it was Cathy from the comic pages, in company with Tom Cruise, and absolutely nothing sexual occurred, unless you count Cathy’s fainting dead away when she met him. I don’t know about you but I certainly think it unique, if not downright bizarre, that anyone would dream of Tom Cruise and not a hint of anything sexy going on. Talk about a waste of pillow time.But those are just dreams and I don’t care how hard you pedal you are not going to get over the rainbow with nothing more than that. Dreams aside, what I am is an ordinary, upper age gay man. Yes, that does mean that like every gay person who grew up before the revolution I am at least a little bit crazy, but even that isn’t very interesting, is it? I mean, these days if you want to stand out from the crowd at all you really have to be certifiably sane, don’t you?So when I was first approached about writing these memoirs, I asked that very question: Who would want to read them? Anyway, those who know me know that I am a very private person, almost certainly to a fault. I was frankly intimidated by the thought of focusing so much attention on myself, my private thoughts and feelings and my personal experiences. I’m embarrassed if anyone even sees me washing my step-ins, for Heaven’s sake.I resisted the idea for the better part of two years (the idea, you understand, of writing my memoirs, not of washing my undies). Still, while I worked on other projects and tended to laundry, I became increasingly aware that I had played a part, if a modest one, in what has proven to be one of the most historically significant periods of social revolution.How could I not become aware, when suddenly the reminders seemed to be popping up everywhere? I found my name appearing again and again in the indexes of other books dealing with the era. Writers and historians were now referring to me as a part of that history. All right, yes, someone did refer to me recently as ancient history, but you cannot keep other people from being snotty and anyway that’s probably another subject.I began to hear with growing frequency from scholars looking into the period, wanting information from me. Book collectors and dealers sent me copies of my books to be autographed, to enhance their value; I was astonished to learn that they had “value.” Astonishing value, as it turns out. Copies of these one-time 75¢ books are now offered for sale on the Internet for as much as $175. I don’t even want to think of the rate of inflation.And it isn’t only my books on the Internet. I was asked by the creators of an “Internet Museum” devoted to the pioneering gay magazine, Der Kreis, to provide an essay and photographs. There I am, seen in my early twenties, my middle years and in the recent present, so you can watch me age before your eyes—but don’t say I didn’t warn you.A local businesswoman and gay history buff, Audrey Joseph, offered the San Francisco Public Library a five thousand dollar donation to do an exhibit of my work in the new main library then nearing completion. That is to say, my literary work. There are some of my talents that have really never been documented. Anyway, I nixed that idea when the library’s price got up to twenty thousand—minimum donations?—but it was flattering to say the least.By the late nineties at least two different companies were issuing postcards, address books, and other such paraphernalia, with reproductions of the covers of my books.Michael Bronski dedicated his book, Pulp Friction (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), to me—along with three other writers—for “(pioneering) what we now call gay and lesbian literature.” High praise indeed from one of the gay world’s top historians and chroniclers.Students at San Francisco State University learned about me in their History 313 course—“The History of Sex” (which I suppose does make me, after all, an historical artifact).I was even approached with requests for interviews in the gay press. I had done interviews in the press before, notably The Advocate, but that was at a time when my books were all over the place. By this time it had been more than fifteen years since I had a book on the shelves.“But what am I to talk about?” I asked one would-be interviewer.“About your contributions,” he replied.My contributions? I had never been aware when I was living through that era that I was making “contributions.” I was earning a living and having fun—and from time to time tweaking a few blue noses and running scared for my efforts.Still, it began to look as if I had become a cult figure in my old age. And it seemed that it behooved me at least to give some thought to what those “contributions” had been. If they had been. I sat down one day to see if I could list any.Yes, it was true, because I had dared to portray lesbian activity in a positive light, I had been involved in one of the earliest and biggest of the anti-obscenity trials of the sixties—and that trial in itself had nudged the then nascent free speech movement forward. That was a contribution I supposed, if an indirect one.It was true as well that, thanks to the notoriety that I garnered from the trial, I was able to persuade a number of the West Coast publishing houses, who until then had no interest in the genre, to begin publishing gay material. My 1966 novel The Why Not was the first gay fiction published by Greenleaf Classics. As a result of its success—and my lobbying efforts—Greenleaf went on to become the biggest of the gay pulp publishers throughout the sixties and early seventies. And with their track record to bolster my arguments, I was able personally to convince other pulp publishers to “go gay.” My campaign succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and launched that entire boom in gay publishing that so changed the book and social landscape of the sixties, unloosing a heretofore unimaginable flood of gay and lesbian fiction and nonfiction. Certainly, for gay people, that could be counted a contribution, couldn’t it?Having broken the ice with The Why Not, I went on to write literally scores of gay novels and nonfiction works (and non-gay as well, I should probably point out) under my own name and as Victor Jay, Don Holliday, J. X. Williams, Jan Alexander and dozens of other names, in quantities that I am sure remain unequaled.In addition to the American and British editions (hard and soft cover) of my books, I was eventually translated into German, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian—even foreign language audio editions.It was said in the late sixties, and I have no reason to doubt it, that I was at that time the most widely read gay writer in the world—or, more correctly, the most widely read writer of gay material. I hasten to say that this was in part a matter of having written large numbers of different books and not because any single book racked up such spectacular sales figures, though certainly many of them did well. By the early seventies, by the most conservative estimates, there were more than three million copies of my gay books in circulation. Mere peanuts for writers like Danielle Steele or Stephen King, but not bad for a paperback writer whose name never graced a bestseller list. More importantly, not bad for a market that only a few years earlier was thought not to exist.I am not altogether sure, you understand, that everyone would consider that contribution a welcome one.There was no question, however, that I had been a major factor in creating the soon burgeoning demand for gay material. To help fill that demand, I went on to train other writers and even to represent many of them as an agent. For the next several years my writers and I supplied far and away the majority of gay fiction and nonfiction being published. There was a joke going around the industry in the late sixties, to the effect that the gay publishing revolution had mostly happened around my kitchen table. It wasn’t too far off the mark, actually.At the same time, in book after book, we continued to break down the barriers to what could be said or described in print and so opened doors to alternative themes. I was among the first to write openly and in depth about a number of theretofore taboo subjects—Men and Their Boys (1966) looked at the relationships between adult males and teen boys, and Black and White Together dealt with interracial sexuality. In various books I cast light on bisexuality, incest and homosexual rape, subjects barely whispered about then and with which many people even today remain uncomfortable. I thought, and still think, that they ought to be looked at more openly.I published straightforward male nude photography when it was still far from clear whether we could do so legally, and while I was at it launched the careers of underground photographers like Pat Rocco and Tom Di Simone. And along the way fought often and vigorously with those who thought male nudity obscene. I was convinced that it was not.Indeed, I believed wholeheartedly that in a free society people should be free to write, photograph, print, publish or read what they choose. History has tended to agree with me but let it be said, history took some persuading.I produced the first of the high quality, over the counter books containing sexually explicit photos, breaking one of the last remaining barriers to free expression. Perhaps a dubious contribution, but the jury is still out on that one, I think.I helped launch the Groovy Guy Contest, the first of the male beauty pageants (as opposed to body-building competitions) and subsequently much imitated. Yes, a minor contribution at best. Nevertheless, Tinker Bell, if you like beautiful men strutting their stuff, this is the time to applaud.Throughout the sixties and early seventies I brushed shoulders (and sometimes more) with many, perhaps most, of those leading the sexual revolution. I swapped gay porn and bisexual musings with Hugh Hefner, the bunny man himself, and discussed the legal niceties of sex-oriented publishing with Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey’s one-time righthand man and ultimately his successor at the Kinsey Institute.For twenty plus years I worked as writer, publisher, editor, agent, and writing instructor, and in all of those roles fought stubbornly (if not always wisely) for the rights of writers and publishers to say what they wanted to say, how they wanted to say it.By the mid-seventies I doubt if there were many in the publishing world who didn’t at least know my name, though they may not always have spoken it with pleasure.Alas, I should no doubt point out that at the same time all of this was going on I was endlessly harassed by the would-be guardians of our morals, particularly the U.S. Postal Authorities. Many of my books dealt in a positive way with homosexuals and homosexuality, which in itself made them—in the view of the Federal government—obscene and so placed me outside the law, a criminal. I was arrested twice on obscenity charges and lived for many years with the threat of arrest and prison confinement hanging over my head, and was nearly forced into exile to avoid prison. It was not altogether a glamorous profession. * * * * * * * Well, I suppose those were contributions, if not all of them positive. When I turned my attention to that period in time, I was surprised to discover that so much of it, in particular the publishing revolution of the era, of which I had certainly been a part, was so poorly documented. Not that there had been nothing published on the subject. Indeed, there were some very fine books and articles available. But everything of consequence that had been written had been written by East Coast writers for East Coast publishers, and critiqued by East Coast critics—when in fact that publishing explosion had been primarily a West Coast phenomenon. I found nothing of consequence that did not share that bias; which is to say, nothing that told the whole story.It began to seem to me that perhaps I ought to share my experiences with those others who were interested in the era. And quite frankly I realized that if I were going to do so, it needed to be sooner rather than later. Already names and dates were fading from my never-very-perfect memory.I sat myself down before the word processor and began to type, with reluctance at first but with more enthusiasm as the pages went by. Not that I was any less concerned about my step-ins; but it was an exciting time that I was describing and reliving it turned out to be more fun than I had imagined. What began as a chore became in short order a labor of love.When my friends at Bolerium Books of San Francisco, Mike Pincus and John Durham, originally asked me to do this for them, it was meant to be something in the nature of a pamphlet to be distributed through their mailing list and on their web site. It soon became evident that there would certainly be more than a pamphlet. Well, I couldn’t have written all that stuff if I hadn’t been wordy, could I? Anyway, I am particularly grateful for their generosity in letting me develop their idea for someone else.I have written this more or less as it occurred to me, without strict allegiance to time sequences or any sort of logical structure—more as if I were sitting chatting with the reader. You may find it helpful to read it in a corresponding manner. So far as that goes you don’t have to read it at all. That’s the nice thing about freedom, it works both ways.For the most part I have tried to tell the story of the revolution of the sixties and seventies, though for the sake of historical perspective I have written as well about the earlier years: the early sixties, the fifties and, to a lesser degree, the forties.The story I have told, however, is a personal one: the era as I experienced it. Which is to say, it is not the history of the sexual revolution that occurred then, which it seems to me yet remains to be written, nor of the companion revolution in publishing. But it is a small bit of that history and I can only hope it will provide a glimpse or two of what happened and what changed in those ten or fifteen years.I hope too that you will find it interesting. I certainly did, both living it and reliving it. Although I said at the beginning that this was not the story of my life, I could hardly write about my experiences without sometimes talking about myself and how I came to be who and what I was, so, yes, some of my life pops up here and there; but you expected that all along, didn’t you?It is, as I have indicated, a discursive work, and some of the subjects I touch upon will no doubt seem arbitrary and certainly peripheral to the main theme. Since I wrote at length, for instance, on my success in teaching other writers, it seemed to me that I should give some idea of how or what it was that I taught them. And since I wrote what I can now see was a rather large if uneven chapter in the history of gay fiction, I felt qualified to offer my opinions on the subsequent state of gay fiction. And after that I thought, “What the hell?”—and threw in some sleazy gossip and a few diet tips because, let’s face it, those things sell better than history.Soon enough, however, I began to worry that I might have left myself open to charges of venality, so to be safe I added my thoughts on religion and the soul. Hmmm. Better, surely. No one could accuse me now of prostituting my art.But then I got to thinking about those diet tips. Anyone who sees me on Oprah will know at a glance that diet tips are not my strong suit. So to offset that, because I didn’t want to come across hypocritical, I added some recipes, good fattening ones that would be more in keeping with my image. Or at least more in keeping with my figure.And after that…but the point is, you can see that things get away from me. Which really is the story of my life, although I realize I promised at the beginning that this wasn’t going to be that.I have made free with my opinions on all of these matters but they are only my opinions. I have also been cavalier in ignoring, where I chose, the thoughts or positions of others on the same subjects. You may object all you want. This is a personal expression. If your objections are particularly vehement or you think your diet tips are better than mine, you can always write your own book and leave my coattails alone—or as an old friend used to say, “Get off the runway, Rose, it’s my turn.”This is a work of nonfiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is probably unavoidable. * * * * * * * I have written, in addition to verse, short stories and articles, well over one hundred books. The best estimate I can make is somewhere around one hundred and forty. This, however, was far and away the most difficult writing I have ever done, for the very reason that it was so personal.The only easy part was a phrase that I ran across in a book collector’s catalog, describing the condition of a particular book offered for sale: Spine intact, some creases.“Little book,” I thought, “I know just how you feel.”And dog-eared, too.

The following are excerpts from the novel, HOLIDAY GAY, originallly published in 1967 and reissued in 2008 as part of the anthology The Man From C.A.M.P. (MLR Press)

There was something about the holiday season and Christmas time that Jackie Holmes always especially liked.  Most of all, it was evenings like this one, set aside for trimming the tree.  Here he was, in a cozy warm apartment.  The fire was blazing brightly in the fireplace.  A tall fir tree had been correctly placed in its stand and was already saturating the room with its delicious scent.  Hot toddies had gone a long way to putting him in a dreamy mood.  And to make the picture complete, he had the benefit of delightful company.  There beside him was one of those beautiful young men one usually just dreams about - tall, husky, with gray eyes behind long lashes, olive hued skin, and erotically carved mouth.  The picture couldn’t have been more perfect.            “How do you like those balls?”            “Perfect,”  Jackie murmured appreciatively.  He traced a finger over one of them.            “What about this, do you think it’s too big?”            “Not at all.  It looks better standing, though, than it did hanging.  I wish we could put it on top of the tree.”            His companion laughed, a deep, throaty sound that sent a shiver up Jackie’s spine.  “Too Much weight, I’m afraid.  It would bend the tree down.”            “I guess you’re right.  But the color’s perfect - that deep red crown.”  Jackie paused for a moment, devoting himself to his efforts.            “That’s better,”  his friend surveyed the results of the efforts.  “That gives it a shiny look, makes it glisten.  I think that’s more appropriate.”            Jackie frowned thoughtfully.  “Maybe just a little more,”  he suggested.  After a moment, he added,  “Christmas just isn’t Christmas without sweets.  Hard candy at that.”            “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed the season more.  I almost wish it were Christmas Eve.  That part about going off up the chimney always gets to me.”            “Sounds like a waste to me,”  Jackie answered.  He turned slightly on the bearskin rug, and his glance fell momentarily on the tall Christmas tree.  Beside it, still unopened, was the large trunk in which he always stored the decorations.  Oh well, he thought philosophically, he could always trim it tomorrow.  As it turned out, he had far more urgent things to tend to this evening.            He looked back at his companion.  Like Jackie, Lorenzo was naked, reclining lazily on the soft rug.  He smiled, his dark lips parting to reveal dazzling, even teeth.  In the firelight, his satiny skin gleamed maddeningly.  Jackie reached out to the broad chest, and ran one finger lightly over a brown nipple.  His finger slipped downward, over the rippling surface of a brown stomach.  It curled in the thick patch of gleaming black hair, and then it was back to its previous source of pleasure.            A massive arm moved about him, pulling him close again, and Jackie felt himself drawn into the gray depths of those haunting eyes.  His lips were crushed beneath another pair, and then a warm tongue invaded his mouth.  Jackie shivered as a strong male hand stroked his back, making its way downward.            ”Beautiful box,”  Lorenzo managed to whisper.  “I wouldn’t mind getting something of that.”            “I hope you don’t want to wait till Christmas.”  Jackie tensed momentarily, and then relaxed to the firm, confident exploration that was taking place.  Sexually, he regarded himself as a seasoned traveler; and the seasoned traveler, he had learned from experience, had to be prepared to travel whatever route necessary to reach his destination.  At times, that had meant traveling virgin territory, but not in this instance.            He was rolled gently over, onto his back.  For a moment they lay like that, the powerful weight of Lorenzo’s body crushing him down against the rug.  It lifted then, and he felt his legs being raised into the air, balanced on wide, thickly muscled shoulders.  He opened his eyes to smile up into Lorenzo’s eager, thrilled face.            “Should I say please?”  His companion wanted to know.            “Save your breath for ‘thank you’,”  Jackie informed him.  They kissed, and he felt the first, tentative probings, then a slowly increasing pressure.  He was reminded for a brief second, of his companion’s impressive size, but the memory was not an unpleasant one.  He moaned softly, more from pleasure than from pain, and then he felt himself filling up, seeming to swell with pleasure as the sensations moved rigidly deeper.            Lorenzo kissed him, and then buried his face in Jackie’s hair, gasping hoarsely.  “Dio, it’s never been like this.  I’m in Heaven.”            “I’ll be there myself by the time this is finished,”  Jackie informed him.  “Because I think I’m going to have the hell screwed out of me.”            He was right in his expectations.  Until now, it had been forceful, but cautious.  It moved on until its journey was completed, the lovely ornaments that Jackie had admired before brushing gently against against the smoothness of his taut buttocks.  Then, scattering goosebumps over his flesh, Jackie felt it withdrawing, slowly, slowly-only to come crushing into him again, this time with an intense ferocity.            Jackie moaned again, arching upward off the rug.  “Careful of the rib cage,”  he managed to gasp, as the plunging became a roller coaster ride at breakneck speed.            “Ah, ah,”  Lorenzo sighed and sobbed, hurling himself against his partner.  “So beautiful, so unbelievable, It’s like a miracle.”            Then so abruptly that it was shocking, he came to a complete stop.  “It is a miracle,”  he exclaimed, his eyes wide with astonishment.  “Listen, I hear bells!”            For the first time, Jackie heard them too, filtering through he haze of his arousal - chimes, actually, a special signal that only he would understand.            “Christ!”  he swore aloud.            This exclamation only increased his partner’s consternation.  “Then it is truly a miracle, a virgin birth - the second coming!”            “Hardly virgin,”  Jackie reminded him.  “Although any birth from this would certainly be a miracle.  Anyway, I think we can forget about coming.”He extricated himself from the now passive embrace of his befuddled partner.  “Don’t go away,”  he said, heading with reluctance toward his bedroom. Annoying though it might be, he could not ignore the summons of the chimes.  His training on that score had been thorough, and he was dedicated to his duty.            In the bedroom, he went directly to the long low dresser.  On its surface was a figurine of a naked youth, seated.  Its appearance suggested nothing more than a piece of decorative art, but in reality it was more than that.  Jackie lifted it from the surface of the dresser, knowing that a concealed switch would start it operating at once.  He turned the bottom side up and lifted it to his face.  On this surface, too, it appeared perfectly innocent, but concealed cleverly within the posterior anatomy of the figurine was a miniature speaker, into which he now spoke, in low, terse terms.            “Holmes here,”  he addressed the porcelain buttocks.  They were, he decided a poor substitute for the lovely pair he had so recently been fondling.  “Jackie?”  He recognized the familiar bass voice at once.            “Yes, Rich.  What’s up?”            “Maybe I should ask you that,”  the voice chuckled from the area of the porcelain crotch.  “Your voice has that come hither sound.”            “Hither, thither - how can I get around to coming anywhere when these damned chimes are always going off before I do.”            “Sorry about that,”  Rich said, then grew sober.  “But this is really hot.  Upton’s called, he wants to see you pronto.  Use Contact Hustler.”            Jackie’s annoyance paled - Contact Hustler meant something big.  ”I’m on my way,”  he answered.  Without waiting for further comment, he replaced the figure on the dresser, and started at once back to the living room.            Lorenzo was still bare on the bearskin rug, looking confused by the entire situation.  “Sorry,”  Jackie said as he entered the room.  “But that was business, big business.  I”ll have to go out.”                         “What about this big business?”  Lorenzo asked, indicating.  For all the distraction, his business was still up and throbbing painfully.

            Jackie went past him to the table where he had left his gift wrapping paraphernalia.  He selected a large ribbon with a bow and, coming back to his companion, slipped it neatly around the prominent portion of Lorenzo’s anatomy.  “Put it under the tree,”  he suggested.  “I’ll be back to open it later, okay?”

Having learned that jewel thieves are using department store Santas to rob the stores of jewelry Jackie subsequently goes in drag as child actress Shelly Tipple to try to crack the case - with unexpected results…. 

  At first, Rich did not recognize the creature who entered the apartment the next day.  It was exactly as though the child actress had stepped from the movie screen of several years ago.  Her blonde hair hung in curls over her shoulders.  She wore a jaunty sailor cap, and a frilly skirt, and there were large bows on her patent leather shoes.  In one hand, she carried a small purse, and in the other, a huge lollipop.            While Rich stared in amazement, the little moppet did a brief soft shoe and sang, in a high, lisping voice, a few bars of the hit tune from her baseball movie:  “Show me your balls and I’ll take a crack at them.”            “It’s unbelievable,”  Rich declared.  “You look like a sweet little girl.  You look, in fact, exactly like Shelley Tipple, a few years ago.”            “You say the nicest things,”  Jackie answered in his normal voice.  “But I’m glad you like it.  After all, I want my daddy to be happy with me.”            “Your daddy?”            “Of course, I’ve always said I wanted you for a daddy.  And a little girl like me can’t just go running around town by herself.  Suppose I got molested?”            “Perish the thought,”  Rich said with a laugh.  “Well, I suppose you’re right.  I’ll have to clear it with High Camp, and arrange to have the office monitored.  But, frankly, I don’t think I’d want to miss this performance for anything.”              A short time later, they were making their way through the crowds at Marcy’s Westside department store.  Jackie held tightly to Rich’s hand, tickling the palm occasionally, to Rich’s discomfort.            The Santa Claus department was on the fourth floor.  Already, though it was early, there was a long line of children waiting with their mothers and a few fathers.            “Oh, Daddy,”  Jackie squealed, jumping up and down on one foot,  “There he is.  It’s Santa Claus.”            Rich smothered his embarrassment and took his place in line with his “daughter.”  The line moved forward slowly.  The children fidgeted.  Some of them cried, or yelled.  The little boy in front of them stared at Jackie for a while and then stuck out his tongue.  Jackie stuck out his as well.            “Now be nice, dear,”  Rich warned him, tugging his hand as the mother turned around to glower at them.            “Oh, sure,”  Jackie agreed reluctantly.  He shoved his lollipop in the little boy’s face.  “Here, wanna suck?”            The mother nervously yanked her son in front of her.  ”Charming little girl,”  she said without enthusiasm.  “But isn’t she a bit big for this sort of thing?”            “Jackie Sue?”  Rich asked.  “Oh, she’s just tall for her age.  She’s only eight.”            “Heavens, what on earth do you give her to eat?”            “Oh, she eats a variety of things,”  Rich said. “She can’t seem to get enough of the things she likes.”            “Mostly meat,”  Jackie Sue added.  “I love tons of meat, fresh, hot meat, especially big fat sausages.  And loads of cream.”            “And cheese,”  Rich suggested.            “Ugh.”  Jackie Sue made a face.            “Sounds like a heavy diet for a young girl,”  the woman said doubtfully.            “It puts hair on my chest,”  Jackie Sue answered, to the woman’s dismay.            “She’s got quite a sense of humor,”  Rich said, giving Jackie’s hand an anxious tug.            “So I see.  Well, as big as she is, I’ll bet the boys don’t tease her much.”            “Oh, I hate a boy who’s a tease,”  Jackie Sue said.  “I like boys who are soft on me.  But if a boy gets hard, why, then, I sit on him.  I’ve sat on lots of boys.  They always come after a while.  To their senses, I mean.”            The line moved forward again.  The woman seemed to have given up the conversation.  After another long wait it was time for her son to chat with Santa, and Rich and Jackie were next in line.  Jackie took advantage of the opportunity to study the Santa.  He looked like an ordinary department store Santa Claus, and not at all like a jewel thief.  But then, Jackie reminded himself, just at the moment he didn’t look like a secret agent, either.  You just couldn’t go by appearances in this business.            At last it was Jackie’s turn.  Ignoring the surprise on Santa’s face, he skipped up the length of the carpet and proceeded to climb up on one big knee.            “My,”  Santa said, obviously finding this visitor heavier than most.  “You’re a big girl, aren’t you?”            “The better to climb your tree,”  Jackie quipped in his little girl voice.  He had decided to make his play right away.  Without waiting for further conversation, he broke into song – “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly . . . “  He paused at this point.            Santa gave him another surprised look.  Then, after a pause, he laughed and finished the line – “Fa la la la la, la la la la.”            There was an awkward pause.  Uncertain just what the procedure was with the gang, Jackie decided to continue.  “Tis the season to be jolly . . . .”  This time Santa didn’t laugh, but with a shrug added the fa la las.            “Don we now our gay apparel,”  sang Jackie.            “Are you planning on becoming a singer?”  Santa asked, tiring of the singing game.            “Have you heard enough?”  Jackie asked.            “Oh, quite,”  Santa assured him, getting a bit impatient.  “After all, you didn’t come here to serenade Santa, did you?”            “Oh, no, not at all.  I came to get some goodies.”            “I see.  Any special goodies?”  Santa had regained his usual air of good cheer.            “Very special ones,”  Jackie replied in a lower voice.  “Something with feathers.            “I see.”  Santa was momentarily at a loss.  “Well, I don’t think we have any canaries on hand, but maybe by Christmas Eve . . . “            “Why don’t you just slip it to me?”  Jackie whispered, giving the bewhiskered man a wink.            “I beg your pardon!”            “You know, what you’ve been saving up for me.  Give it to me, okay, pops.”            Santa’s face reddened.  He cleared his throat.  “My, you’re a precocious thing, aren’t you?  Could it be possible that you’ve heard rumors about me . . . ?”            “Not just rumors,”  Jackie assured him.  They were talking now in lowered voices, although Santa kept glancing nervously at the waiting line of parents and children.  “I know about your special things for little girls – the right little girls.  I’m here to get mine.  And I assure you, I’m the right little girl for you.”            “Well, yes, of course, I can see that,”  Santa said with a nervous giggle.  “But of course, you know I couldn’t do anything like that here, with all these people watching.”            “Then I’ll meet you somewhere.  How about in the stock room?”            “The stock room?  You want – you want to meet me?”            “Sure, and anyway you want to spell it, too.”  Jackie winked again.            “Oh, I see.”  Santa seemed increasingly nervous. “What did you say your name was – Lolita?”            “Jackie Sue.  Look, I haven’t got much time, I’m meeting another old guy later.  Can we make this a quickie?”            “What about your daddy?”            “Him?  Oh, don’t worry, he’s in on it.  He always goes along when I’m after this sort of thing, just to make it safer.  No questions asked that way, don’t you get it?”            “Yes.  I must say, it’s a unique arrangement.  Well, I take a break in fifteen minutes.  If you’re sure, why don’t you sort of hang around and follow me down to the stockroom.  “We’ll work something out, okay?”            “Now you’re talking.”  Jackie raised his voice again.  “Oh, Santa, you’re such a card.”  He gave Santa a smack on the cheek with his lollipop.  “I can’t wait to see what you’ve got for me.”            “Well, it’s nothing spectacular,”  Santa admitted ruefully.  “I mean, don’t expect too much.”            “It may be small,”  Jackie whispered.  “But I’ll bet it’s priceless.”            Santa blushed again.  “I’ve been told it’s very nice,”  he admitted.            The other children were getting impatient. Santa reached into the large box beside him and brought out a small present – not, Jackie noticed, a lavender one.  “Here’s a little something from Santa,”  he said loudly.  In a lower voice, he added,  “I’ll have something special for you down in the stockroom.”            “Goodbye, Santa,”  Jackie chirped, climbing down off the knee.  With a final wink, he skipped over to where Rich was waiting and grabbed Rich’s hand.  “Okay, Daddy, let’s go,”  he said, tugging his partner away.            “How did you do?”  Rich asked as soon as they had moved away from the crowd.            “Fine,”  Jackie assured him.  “although personally I think this guy’s goofy.  But I’m to follow him to the stockroom in a few minutes.  He’ll give me the real stuff there.  Apparently, they aren’t taking any chances.  They may be getting nervous.”  He related his conversation with Santa.            “I don’t know, it sounds strange to me,”  Rich said.  “Maybe they have gotten wise.”            “I don’t see how.  Anyway, this guy is just so much blubber.  I can handle him all right.            “Maybe so.  Still, while you’re waiting for him to take his break, I think I’ll check it out with High Camp, just to see if there’s any dew developments.  You never know.”            “Okay.  I’ll wait here where I can watch Santa.  But make it fast.”            Rich hurried away through the crowds, in search of a phone.  Jackie turned back, to discover that Santa was just closing up his shop – to take a break, the sign said, to feed his reindeer.  As the red-suited man crossed the store, he gave Jackie a wink and a quick nod of his head.  There was nothing Jackie could do but follow him and hope that Rich would not be gone long.            Santa disappeared through a door marked EMPLYEES ONLY.  Jackie paused, glanced around to confirm that he wasn’t noticed, and slipped through the door.  Ahead of him, Santa paused beside an aisle that led through the stock bins.  When he saw Jackie, he again jerked his head and disappeared down the aisle.  Jackie followed him.  As he came to the end of the bin, he found Santa waiting for him, safely away from any observors.            “Well, have you got it with you?”  Jackie in a low voice.            Santa looked startled.  “I could hardly leave it behind,”  he said.            “Where is it?”            “Where . . . ?  Why, in my pants, of course.”            “Oh.”  Jackie was increasingly uneasy.  This man seemed to be stalling for some reason.  Maybe this was a trap.  Or, maybe Santa still wasn’t convinced that he was a member of the gang.            “Well, let me have it,”  Jackie said.  “I hope that it’s lavender, with feathers.”            At this Santa truly was startled.  His eyes went wide.  “What the hell do you want with feathers?”            “Maybe I like to be tickled,”  Jackie answered, giving him a coy smile.            “Oh, I see,”  Santa said nodding.  A lecherous expression came over his face.  “Just playful, huh.  Well, come here, you little minx, Santa will tickle you plenty.”            He made a grab for Jackie, flinging his arms around the ruffled shoulders.  “Hey,”  Jackie gave a muffled squeal.  “Take it easy.  I have to see you package first.”            “Heavens, you are certainly forward for a little girl.  But, if you insist . . . “  Relinquishing his hold on Jackie, Santa began to unbuckle his wide belt.  “Did anyone ever tell you you look just like . . . ?”            It was at that moment that Rich appeared, rushing down the aisle.  “What’s the big idea?”  He demanded in an angry voice.            “Oh . . . !”  Santa stopped with his pants hanging open and his stiff rod jutting out – he had certainly been right, Jackie thought, when he had said not to expect too much.  He gave Jackie a look of consternation.  “I thought you said Daddy knew all about this.”            “But, Daddy,”  Jackie tried to say, puzzled by Rich’s show of temper.  “This nice man . . .”            “Never mind,”  Rich bellowed.  His loud voice had produced instant results.  Already other employees had stepped into the aisle to stare at the trio.  “How dare you, you monster – molesting my innocent little daughter.  I ought to thrash you.”            But – but . . .”  Santa sputtered, looking about in horror at the growing crowd of angry and shocked onlookers.            “Daddy, darling,”  Jackie tried again.            “Come on, dear.”  Rich grabbed his hand and fairly dragged jackie away.  “We’ll talk to the manager about this.” 

In which the Underground Diner, The Friend and The Mother, go upscale at the Lucky Pierre Truck Stop and Dining Room….

The Mother was certainly relishing her salad by this juncture of the evening and was leaned over her tray with both hands moving like lightning, which is truly a sight to behold if you have never seen it, but she did say that she was off the beans after what had happened earlier, and besides the air at our table didn’t need any more perfuming, and she just did not care to even have them on her plate at all as they were spoiling her appetite, but she couldn’t see anyplace to put them as The Diner refused to have them added to his Jumbo Shrimp Cocktail Pierre, until she espied that the woman at the next table, who had been laughing the hardest of anybody, had left her purse sitting open on the floor by her chair leg. So The Mother rolled what was left of the beans up neatly in some slices of the deli ham, and pointed across the room and shouted, “I see what you are doing over there under that table,” and when the lady stretched her neck to see, The Mother deftly slipped the ham and beans into the woman’s purse and snapped it shut, which she had disposed of the problem neatly, she said, and ordered herself another Jack to celebrate her own cleverness, as she put it.

There was a bit of a brouhaha between courses when the manageress, Miss Macilhenny, showed up to complain that The Mother had disabused the salad bar, which wasn’t meant to be partaken of on waiters’ trays, and there was now a rather large crowd of diners milling about and poking at those wilted cucumber slices, which was all that was left.

The Diner could see that the manageress did indeed have a point about the waiter’s tray, but as The Mother pointed out, our server, Maybelle June, had assured her that she could make as many trips as she liked to the salad bar, and as she was in a wheelchair and it was inconvenient for her to be scurrying back and forth every few minutes, which would have been a lot easier if they had placed the salad bar somewhere closer to our table and not halfway across town, and what difference did it make if she got it all at once and saved herself the trouble? Anyhow, as she put it, she thought the salad bar had abused itself, as the cucumbers were wilted, which The Friend was willing to attest to, and the deviled eggs had been so long out of the nest that they wouldn’t have recognized their own mother’s patootie.

Which Miss Macilhenny replied to with a rude suggestion that concerned her patootie, and The Mother retorted that Miss Macilhenny was so dumb she wouldn’t know the south end of a chicken going north, and there is no telling where this conversation would have gotten to, but it was culminated when The Mother accidentally rolled the wheel of her chair over Miss Macilhenny’s toes, this being the danger of wearing open-toed shoes in a job as physical as hers was, and when Miss Macilhenny began to shriek and flail about with her arms, The Mother got disconcerted and ran back and forth several more times over the toes before she got her senses back, and by this time considerable damage had been done, including dumping The Diner’s Jumbo Shrimp Cocktail Pierre into his lap which necessitated his eating the rest of it from there, and which caused some other diners to give him peculiar looks, but at a dollar ninety eight before seven P.M, he was not about to waste a good shrimp cocktail and besides the levis had just been washed and ironed, including a pleat.

The busboys rushed up to help Miss Macilhenny away, and since she was of an ample size, they hoisted her onto the leather horsey and carried it through the dining room, which The Mother said was the first time she had ever seen a horse with two hind-ends, and she further opined that Miss Macilhenny was the only thing there older than the macaroni salad, and the woman at the next table got to laughing so hard at The Mother’s witticisms that she reached in her purse for a hankie and now she was wiping her eyes with a slice of deli him.

The Mother however, pronounced herself “downright ticked off” at being treated like a second class citizen, and out of spite she scraped the rest of her salad onto the floor under the table, the pickled eggs of which landed on one of The Diner’s white snakeskin boots and stained the toe bright pink, which he tried to get off with the corner of the tablecloth, but to no avail, and The Friend said probably he would just have to dye the other one to match, but The Diner said he could not very well go around wearing pink boots because what would people think, and The Friend said that was a laugh coming from a man who liked to wear women’s panties, and The Diner said she didn’t have to trumpet everything she knew for all the world to hear, since the woman at the next table was now all bent over laughing and was trying to blow her nose on a string bean, and anyway, he only wore the panties when he and The Friend were engaged in some romantic interludes, and The Friend said she didn’t see anything romantic about a man in pink panties with Love Will Come embroidered across the front of them, and that was the only thing that did most times anyway.

The Mother, who is nothing if not fastidious, said she had had enough of this kind of gutter talk, and she drove herself back to the salad bar with her tray, which was now being hastily restocked by a half dozen busboys.

Well, it seems Miss Macilhenney’s foot was being treated at the hostess counter with bacon grease on her toe, because some people say that is good for an open wound like hers, and the grease was being applied to the wound by one of the chefs, which The Diner must admit was pretty ugly, and Miss Macilhenny saw The Mother aiming for the salad bar again, and she had barely gotten a fork into the pickled tomatoes, though as she said afterward, she’d have gotten there in plenty of time if she hadn’t “out of the kindness of my heart” stopped on her way past one of the tables when a woman complained that there was a bug in her potato salad and The Mother said, “if you think that’s bad, you ought to see the mess on the floor under our table,” and from the way she described it, three people got up to come and see for themselves, and they were shocked, but none of them had any suggestions for getting the pickled egg stain off the snakeskin boot, so I guess that will just be a loss, and also by this time the woman at the next table had gotten herself into such a lather that she had slid right off her saddle chair and which she was laughing so hard she couldn’t get up to make it to the bathroom so this was another mess on that floor, which the visitors took note of, and the fact that the woman was wearing beans all down the front of her dress, which all agreed was an unusual fashion statement.

But I have gotten off the sidetrack here, and to recapitulate, however, when Miss Macilhenney saw The Mother making her comeback at the salad bar, she snatched a fire extinguisher off the wall and came charging across the room after her, and The Diner has to say, she was moving pretty good for a hefty woman hopping on one foot which if you have never done it is not easy to do and shoot someone in the face with a fire extinguisher while you are at it.

Needless to say, The Mother did not take kindly to a face full of foam, which she said left such a bad taste in her mouth that she was off her feed for a week, and she snatched a crutch right out from under an old codger who had the misfortune to pass by at that very moment, and who in his unbalance toppled across a table full of people who were just dishing around their All-You-Can-Eat-Spaghetti-Platter-For-A-Family-Of Six, which sent spaghetti flying everywhere and they thought that he had been stricken of a coronary, and there was lots of screaming, and someone dialed 911 and reported a man had just died at the restaurant, and the 911 woman said, “Oh, not there again,” and told them someone would be there by and by, and never to order the Tunafish Special Surprise at that place, if she had only known ahead of time, she would have been sure to warn them, and the health department ought to put up a sign about that, if you asked her.

Meanwhile, The Mother was stabbing Miss Macilhenny in the belly with the tip end of the crutch to keep her at bay, and one of the ladies at the table across which the old codger had toppled, thinking that he needed reviving, was attempting to give him mouth breathing, and he thought, as he explained later, that she had simply been overcome with a fit of passion and was trying to have her way with him, though why he should have thought that The Diner had no idea, since he wasn’t but a scrawny stick of a thing anyway, but it is always those fellows who think they are God’s gift, as The Friend points out, and he was trying to fend her off and his wife, who had taken good notice of those young ladies at the bar and thought that perhaps this one had started her evening at that location, was whacking at her with his other crutch, which she had outfought The Mother for, and he had just attained to his hands and knees in the spaghetti sauce when Miss Macilhenny, who had managed by now to hoist herself up atop the salad bar to get a better shot at The Mother, stepped into the new container of cottage cheese which the busboys had just replaced, with her good foot and went sailing, and lighted right astride the same poor fellow’s back, and he was so overwhelmed by being assaulted with not one but two amorous females, as he thought it, that he fainted dead away, and the mouth breather was at him again, to the additional dismay of the wife, who took off a high heeled shoe to replace the crutch which Miss Macilhenny’s spectacular descent had knocked to the floor and which The Mother was now wielding two of, which gave her a good advantage in the weaponry, the fire extinguisher having stayed behind amongst the pickled beets.

Now, The Diner is not one to point fingers, because as it says in the Good Book, let him who is without rocks cast the first stone, but he does hold of the opinion that what happened subsequently belongs right at the foot of that 911 operator, because she admitted when everything came out later that she had her mind just full up with that Tunafish Special Surprise, which she said was surely a surprise all right, and which had caused her three calls in the last month alone and she was just plain aggravated about, and she had just gotten a call as well of an illegal bingo game at Saint Alfonso of the Valley Church, and she got the addresses mixed up, so instead of the paramedics, we got the raiding party and the paramedics went to the church, which worked out just fine for them, because two of them came out winners, and the Pastor said he had never seen newcomers with such luck and he hoped that they put at least a little something into the poor box before they left, which only one of them did so.

When the raiding party came in, The Mother showed how fast she could move when she wanted to, and she abandoned her wheelchair, which was covered by now in fire extinguisher foam anyway and she put in a claim the next day for a new one, and where it asked the cause of the damage, she said she had met up with a cow which the agency said had never happened before in that neck of the woods, and she hightailed it back to our table, and the police officers, seeing three women on top of a table in what looked like a gang assault upon the person of an unconscious and helpless man, they arrested Miss Macilhenny and the mouth breather and the wife all three, and they took the codger with them for good measure, because as the Vice Captain, Vernon Melon, said to The Diner when he identified himself as a Gentleman of the Press, he might have been feigning unconsciousness to egg them on. “Some of these old coots can be pretty cagey,” as he put it in a nutshell, and also arrested was the woman from the table next to ours as well, even though Captain Melon admitted as to how he wasn’t sure what she had been up to, but as he put it, there was something awful suspicious about a person lying in a puddle of pee on the floor of a restaurant that has a string bean sticking out of her nose and can’t stop laughing long enough to give you any kind of explanation for things.

Excerpted from Life and Other Passing Moments, due fall/winter 2007 from Wildside Press

An excerpt from Life and Other Passing Moments, in which The Underground Diner, reporter for the Waltonsberg West Panhandle Express, takes The Friend and The Friend’s Mother, out for a romantic dinner. 

Fred and June’s Dew Drop Inn Live Bait Shop and Luncheonette is a casual dining experience, and the three of us had dressed accordingly, The Mother of course in that blouse that wouldn’t stay put and her brown mohair Capri pants which when she walked looked like two groundhogs wrestling, and the rest of us were in sundresses and tee shirts, the former of which The Friend had donned and The Diner was in the latter, in case you might have had a peculiar picture in your minds, as The Diner would not want anyone to get the wrong idea, especially after some certain remarks that someone had made publicly to one and all on our last outing, and The Friend wore her Peek-a-Boo blouse, of which she said laughing that she hoped somebody might peek, and I said I just hoped they didn’t say boo, and she did not talk to him on the journey either, which The Diner privately thanked the Lord for small blessings.

We were greeted at the door by a perky Almondine Crumpet, who both of them recognized one another as she and The Mother had gone to school together, but Almondine is years older, as The Mother is ever at pains to po