New York in the '50s (33 page)

I was left fascinated but puzzled by Trilling's jocular comment that “American popular culture has surely been made the richer by The Report's gift of a new folk hero—he already is clearly the hero of The Report—the ‘scholarly and skilled lawyer' who for thirty years has had an orgasmic frequency of thirty times a week.” This sounded like admiration for a kind of athletic record, something our assistant wrestling coach, rather than a sensitive literary critic, might approve of. It seemed the sexual equivalent of someone scoring an average of thirty points a game during his entire varsity basketball career, yet the coach had led us to believe such “scoring,” when it came to sex, was limited to the first year of marriage.

Was this sexual hero of the report a married man, or was he like one of the underworld characters Kinsey said engaged in intercourse with many hundreds of partners but “cannot endure relations with the same girl more than once”? Why was the criminal able to “score” with hundreds of women, while most college men I knew were having a hard time making it with one? Would my luck increase if I engaged in armed robbery?

I was relieved when Trilling told us the report concluded that masturbation did no physical harm, nor even mental harm (“if there are no conflicts over it”), yet found that adult masturbation was due to “insufficient outlet through heterosexual coitus” and so was an “escape from reality, and the effect upon the ultimate personality of the individual is something that needs consideration.” So even in this enlightened study, conducted by a team of scientific researchers led by a zoologist who wanted only “the facts,” were they telling us masturbation might be “bad” after all? I tried to ascertain the opinion of such an enlightened critic as Trilling, but was left with his observation, based on accepted Freudian theory, that “masturbation in children may be and often is the expression not of sexuality only but of anxiety.” If this held true through adolescence, the student body of Columbia College in the fifties was beset by high anxiety indeed.

One warm spring night as I pored over texts in my dorm room, trying to ignore the distracting fragrance of the season, which
clouded the mind with lyrics of love songs and restless daydreams, I heard a hum and buzz of voices in the quad below, a rising and gathering of excitement, something like the sound of a group assembling for a pep rally prelude to a big game. But this was the week of final exams, and there were no games or social events. I wondered for what purpose the milling group of students was forming when I heard the electrifying cry: “Panty raid!”

These demonstrations of postadolescent frustration were my college generation's version of the orgy, in which male students stormed women's dormitories and demanded not sex but the symbol of it, in the form of panties, bras, and other assorted female undergarments, which the damsels were supposed to drop from the windows of their walled fortresses. Forty such raids—labeled in the press as “lace riots” and “silk sorties”—took place around the country in the spring of 1952 and broke out again the following spring, turning into riots in Columbia, Missouri, where the National Guard was called, and Knoxville, Tennessee, where street lights were shot out.
U.S. News and World Report
informed us that “co-eds sometimes incited the rioters, sometimes fought them off with brooms and water bombs.”

We were, of course, supposed to be more sophisticated in the East, and especially at Columbia and Barnard. Noting the fad at other campuses, the
Spectator
ran an editorial, “Cherchez La Bras,” asking, “Could it happen here?”

It was happening!

I hurried downstairs and followed the crowd that was growing and massing as it moved toward Barnard, growling and whooping, whistling and cheering, stopping traffic on Broadway as the sex-starved students chanted their demand for—women's underwear! Barnard girls came to the windows of the dorms, some of them tossing down tokens of intimate apparel, like morsels of meat to a pack of baying hounds. As the
Spectator
later reported, “The lingerie-longing throng saw three pairs of freshly-laundered white nylon panties floating gracefully from the open windows of the graduate women's dormitory.” When police came to disperse the mob, the Barnard lovelies laughed and called down taunts to the boys, and one was dutifully reported in the pages of the
Spectator:
“What's the matter, did you lose your virility?”

So retreated the motley mob that the
New York Daily Mirror
described the next day as “2,000 roaring lion men.” All the New York papers covered the event, with the
Post
calling the undergraduates “cavemen,” and reporting their “furious assault on the trembling women students in three dorms.… The raiders never did get what they wanted (whatever that was).”

Columbia's dean threatened disciplinary action: the worst threat was loss of student deferment from the military draft. Adults had been more disturbed than amused by the panty raid craze of 1952 and 1953, claiming such frivolous nonsense was an affront to the many young men who were fighting in Korea.
U.S. News and World Report
bluntly asked of the panty raiders: “Why aren't they in the Army if they have so little to do?” College authorities warned that deferments went only to students in good standing, and those leading raids were in “uncertain standing.”

The biggest scandal in the dorms during my years at Columbia took place in my own room, when I was paired for one semester with a notorious wild man for a roommate. This devil-may-care cad once smuggled into the sanctity of our male dormitory room a Barnard girl. She was dressed in men's dungarees and work shirt, and her longish brown hair was tucked up into a working-man's cap. The wild man had sneaked her up in an elevator, and everyone on our floor came to peek in the room and see the incredible sight: a fully clothed girl sitting on the top bunk, swinging her legs back and forth and smiling. That was it. Then the adventurer hustled her back down the elevator and safely to her own dorm.

The only men I heard of who “made out” when I was at Columbia were veterans and/or graduate students, men of experience and maturity who had obviously learned secrets as yet unrevealed to me and my still-innocent cohorts. It was not until forty years later that I actually met one of these legendary cocksmen. The novelist David Markson had graduated from Union College in Schenectady and served his time in the Army before enrolling at Columbia on the GI Bill in 1951. Recounting his access to willing young ladies he met at the West End, Markson says, “I thought there was no need for the sexual revolution in the sixties. As far as I was concerned, we had it in the fifties.” Evidently, grad student veterans were as skillful at
making out on Morningside Heights as those gangsters whose exploits were described in the Kinsey report.

I knew of only two of my fellow undergraduates at Columbia who claimed to have had sex with a woman during our time in college. One was a guy from New York who said he made out with a girl he knew from high school, at her parents' apartment when they were out of town. The other was a student from out west who said he knew a Negro prostitute who took him to a room she had around Morningside Heights. He said her name was Honey. I never saw her. One of my friends told me about a middle-aged woman who “took on” college boys for sex and had a reputation for being kind to them (translated, that meant she did not make fun of their ineptitude). This woman, too, lived not far from campus, near Riverside Drive, and one day I set out to see her. First I had five or six beers at the West End, to get up my courage, then walked to her address, tapped lightly on the door, and was greeted by a rather weary if kindly voice speaking from the other side of a peephole. “I'm busy now, dear,” she said, “but come back in half an hour.” I pictured a washed-out blonde in tattered underwear and a worn robe. I fled and never returned.

My only sex during college came when I finally got rid of my virginity (which had come to seem like a giant albatross), with the help of an understanding girl I knew from home who had come to New York on a spring break visit. I took her to dinner at the V & T Pizzeria on Amsterdam Avenue and then to a dank and dusty hotel room on Broadway where, after struggling with a condom, I officially entered the promised land of sexual completion—if not what either my partner or I could by any stretch of the imagination call fulfillment.

The other thing I learned about sex while going to college was the most crucial piece of information for a young person coming of age in the fifties: there was now a way to discover the hidden factors from the past that caused sexual problems, and in so discovering their causes, cure them. The name of this seemingly magical, but certifiably scientific, process was psychoanalysis.

The sky above New York City in the 1950s was crowded with dreams. To the naked eye there were only flocks of clouds and
spires of skyscrapers, but sometimes I got a glimpse of the dreams, not just the old ordinary kind that people had always had above this island—dreams of roses and diamonds and bubbling champagne, of starring on Broadway or singing at the Met, making a fortune on Wall Street or becoming an advertising mogul on Madison Avenue. Now there was a popular new variety of dreams that featured long hallways and sinister figures, mountain peaks and rising towers, limbs and faces juxtaposed and jumbled like Picasso's paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. Nothing was what it first seemed in these dreams, for they were Freudian dreams, filled with symbols, and they had to be interpreted by an expert.

The interpreters of dreams (like Joseph in the Old Testament, except with medical degrees) all had their offices on Madison or Park or Fifth Avenue between 60th and 90th streets, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the sky above that area was like a whole traffic jam of dreams. It was there people lay on long black couches, telling their dreams to the experts who sat behind them in leather chairs, and I imagined the dreams then drifted into the air above those buildings and bumped into all the other dreams emanating from the analysts' offices as thick as factory smoke until they were crowded off into space and finally disappeared because the earth's atmosphere over the Upper East Side of Manhattan simply could hold no more dreams.

I dreamed of snakes.

Weren't they supposed to be sexual symbols? Wasn't the fact that a snake slithered into my dreams a sign I was making progress? The analyst wouldn't tell me. He sat in an easy chair behind the black leather couch I lay on and said only, “Yes, go on.” A hard-core Freudian, a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Association, the real thing.

I dreamed of my mother.

“Is that good?” I asked.

“What?”

“That I dreamed of my mother.”

“What do
you
think?”

“You're supposed to be the expert.”

No response. Only heavy breathing. Was he having a dream of
his own? Did he ever dream of his mother anymore, after being analyzed himself?

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“Yes, go on.”

I did. I even dreamed I had sex with my mother. (Surely
that
would get his attention!) The dream was curiously unemotional and bland, like something constructed for the occasion, invented to display in class. I was a good boy, a good student, and I wanted my dreams to get good grades. No grades were issued, though, nor was much of anything said by the expert behind my head except “Yes, go on,” and at the end of the fifty-minute hour, “We have to stop now.”

Since the analyst rarely, if ever, commented on anything the patient said, including the fabulous, fascinating (to the patient) dreams he or she dutifully reported, the patients felt the need to tell their dreams to others, so at least someone would appreciate them. The unconscious had gone to all the trouble to concoct terrific dreams full of symbols laden with meaning—like the hidden-picture puzzles of seemingly ordinary landscapes that revealed faces and figures in the branches of trees if you looked closely enough—and you wanted the damn things to get their due, wanted some other sensitive, perceptive person to acknowledge the cleverness and complexity of the mind that dreamed it. So people exchanged their dreams. They told them to friends and lovers over dry martinis in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel or over draft beers in the back room of the White Horse Tavern. While dining on steak tartare at “21” or stew from the steam table at the West End, in taxis and subway trains, in bed and in the office, young New Yorkers in psychoanalysis traded their dreams like some wampum of the psyche that had inherent value when understood by the person who gave his own similar currency back.

There was no use telling your dreams to your parents from Indianapolis when they came to town, or to your old high school buddy from Sheboygan. Such unenlightened people would simply stare at you blankly and think you must have really run out of things to talk about if you had to resort to boring them with some damn dream you remembered that didn't even make sense. It took other analysands, who were also dreaming for a purpose, to appreciate
the value of your dreams. Really good dreams were passed on to others and made the rounds of New York like good jokes or literary gossip. One of the favorites was a dream dreamed by a woman someone had pointed out to me at a party. She wore a plain black dress and no makeup and was said to be a Barnard graduate—good preparation for complex, interesting dreams. After seven years of being in analysis, she dreamed she was swimming toward a shore. As she reached forward with her last stroke, just before the dream was over, her hand touched the sand of the beach, the dry land. It meant she was coming to the end of her analysis. Of course.

That dream was so damn good I wanted to have it myself, but I knew it was way out of reach, since I was only in my third month of analysis. In the kind of Freudian (“real,” I thought of it) analysis I was in, you went four or five days a week for a minimum of four years, but there were people I met all over New York who had gone for ten, twelve, even fifteen years. I heard from a man a long time later who told me, “I was in analysis twenty-five years, and then my doctor up and died on me. That's how I got out.” So I wasn't even in sight of the shore—I mean, I had hardly left the place you dive in to start the long swim to that promised land of freedom on the other side of the psychic ocean, where monsters of the deep lay in wait, and you had to pass Scylla and Charybdis just for starters. Three months in analysis was only like dipping your toes in the water.