YOU'RE (NOT QUITE) THE TOP - AND DON'T EVER FORGET IT!

 

A friend who knows our affinity for bric-a-brac and our willingness to clutter up the place with it sent us a box full of stuff. It was good stuff. Old holy water bottles, mermaids, do-dads, curios, whatnots, a roll of crafting foil, etc. One of the things in the box was a celluloid wedding cake topper from the 1950s.

I have real problems with frou-frou driven weddings and everything that adds to their frou-frou-ness. Fancy cakes and cake toppers usually fall into that category. Boring, redundant, unoriginal. But mostly boring, redundant and unoriginal. However, this topper is interesting. And honest in ways it probably never was meant to be.

The groom is generically stiff in his tuxedo with its creased trousers. His shirt is still white after all these years. His hair is slicked back. He's not wearing a ring, so whatever is going to happen hasn't happened yet. Or maybe it has and he is one of those guys. He stares straight ahead, as manly, upright and true as any other little plastic 1950s guy.

But the bride is a different story. It was the tilt of her head that caught my eye. She is looking down. Is she simply meeting expectations? A woman of her time? Is it a subservient he's-in-charge nod? Or maybe it's a look of resignation? Or sadness that it came down to this when she had other plans? Or that she is settling for her little plastic man when she could have done so much better? Or maybe she's pregnant and the girdle she is wearing to help hide it is uncomfortable (those were the days). Whatever it is, she looks completely miserable with what is happening to her and what will be happening to her from now on. Those thin little lips and downcast eyes. She has seen the future and it doesn't look good. 

But there is a hint that she just might have had a little fun before she headed down the aisle. It's the dress. Yellow? Off white? Ivory?  Either way, my wife has told me that in the secret code of wedding dresses (of which I knew absolutely nothing until she explained it to me) that not-white - even if it is not-quite-white - means the wasp-waisted bride with her small and simple bouquet of flowers is not a virgin.

In a time when virginity was considered a good thing if not everything why would anyone wear a dress that delivers such a message? Probably because her disappointed mom or pissed off dad insisted on it (because the wedding rulebook said that is the way it should be and people in the 1950s followed the rules. Or at least pretended to. No wonder the children of those people threw out as much of the rulebook as they could when the 1960s came around). The 1950s spawned nothing if not hypocrisy. I figure many a bride wore a white dress that really was a white lie and heard about one whose mother insisted she wear white because, "I want you to be a virgin when you walk down that aisle," even though she knew the bride was more than a little pregnant. But not this girl on the cake topper. Is she being honest or being demeaned, humiliated, punished in some way because she messed around with some guy in the back seat of his car at the drive-in movie? Maybe even this stiff little plastic guy (but I hope not). Either way she doesn't look like she wants to do it again. At least not this way.

We can only hope: 1) she enjoyed it and 2) she saw what she was getting into, left little plastic man standing there, and skedaddled before it was too late. But probably not. It was not a time of diddling and skedaddling. So who knows. Maybe she's your mother. Or grandmother. Or some other woman sitting over there with her eyes downcast and her legs crossed.

 

Cake topper confessions. Our wedding occurred during a potluck picnic at a friend's house by a lake in Minnesota, so this was the photo on our invitations, a cake topper atop an antique Dutch oven. A topper with its own kind of commentary, I suppose. We refuse to be those people, always have. Still have it.

HAPPY PILLS: LIVING WITH THE GREAT DEPRESSION

 "...a double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible...."

David Foster Wallace on chronic depression

I was raised by parents who believed that the only real depression was The Great Depression. So they refused to believe it when I was diagnosed in my mid-20s as being a suicidal manic-depressive and hospitalized for several

months in the late 1960s. Before that there was a breakdown and I ended up in the emergency room. Even though I was a man who had not lived at home for several years, someone called my mother and she came to the hospital after midnight with my little brother John in tow. John was 10 or 11 years old. More than 40 years later he vividly remembered seeing me in a hospital bed, shot full of Demerol and unable to stop weeping. We were there all night. Why was he there? Who the hell knows? What was my mother thinking? What did he think? In one of my final telephone chats with John a couple of years ago (within a few days he died in a motorcycle accident) I asked about that night. "It freaked me out. You were my big brother." What did he think was going on? Why was I there? "You were addicted to drugs. Mom said you were addicted to drugs." And if anyone else asked? "They said you were addicted to drugs."

I was not ever addicted to drugs. 

I am sure the way my parents saw it drug addiction was preferable to mental illness, easier to explain, especially in those days. Drug addiction was a cause and effect problem. You take drugs, you become addicted, you go to the hospital and come out cured. If the cure doesn't work you can do it again. Easy to understand. Logical. And what with all the hippies and pot and LSD and long hair and God knows what else around in those days, no wonder. Drug addiction was easy.

But mental illness was difficult. It was a what-if problem. What if manic-depression was a cause and effect problem too? Even worse, what if they were the cause and I was the effect? I know that was their fear. I know it is what my mother feared most. She would never cooperate with my doctors because she was sure they would pin my problems on her. "They were just looking for someone to blame," she said. And while my parents were to blame for lots of things (just like all parents are), my manic-depression was not one of them. It had a mysterious cause and a disturbing effect. That was the trouble. They wouldn't - or couldn't - see it that way. Manic-depression? Oh, come on. What does that even mean? Who needs a hospital? Or a psychiatrist? Their cure for it was easy: "Get over it." They didn't understand that I couldn't simply get over it. I wanted to. I tried. I really tried and I had been trying for a long time. "Try harder." That's what they said. I wanted to, but I couldn't. Those months in the hospital saved my life. When I told them that, their answer was: "From what?" 

When they said that I realized I always would be a man they refused to know. So I went away to become a man they couldn't know. And I did. I am sure they were puzzled about why I went so far away and stayed so long. It's how I saved myself. But I never told them that. Why would I?

I was born into the wrong family. At least it was the wrong family for a diagnosed manic-depressive (bipolar these days). But it wasn't just me. When I was in the first grade my father spent most of a year unemployed and lying on the sofa in the living room of our duplex. He was there when I left for school (first grade). He was there when I came home. Luckily the school was directly across the street. When I told him years later that depression sometimes gets between a person and doing anything at all and that maybe that was what was going on that year on the sofa, he said he never had been depressed in his life. My mother insisted she never had either, even as she struggled through the thick, heavy muddle of her life. Both of them came from families laced with misery and suicide, alcoholism and anger, people pretending they were strong even they weren't, refusing the possibility of help, pretending they could try harder and get over it. Always pretending.

For a while I thought that might change.

My mother died in 2006. A couple of years before that she had surgery to remove a benign tumor that was wrapping around her optic nerve and threatening to blind her. Either she could not stand the thought of blindness or she wanted to die and decided to try suicide by surgeon. Or some of both. She went ahead with it. She survived and did not go blind. However a stroke in the recovery room left her comatose, physically incapacitated and nearly unable to speak for the remainder of her life. It also left her totally dependent on my father. It was the worst possible outcome she could have imagined. 

He looked after her from the day she went home from the hospital. Most people believe he lovingly cared for her in those final couple of years. I believe he had her right where he wanted her. My father was a tyrant. He had good intentions. He always did. But well-intentioned tyranny is still tyranny. Care was not always something he did for her; sometimes it was something he did to her. He took control of her condition and her life. It started with the happy pills.
 
People who have brain surgery usually suffer from depression afterward. They are prescribed antidepressants to help them as they heal. I talked to my mother's brain surgeon about it when I visited her at the hospital after the surgery. I also cautioned him that the belief in my family was that there is no such thing as depression and that he would have to make sure she received the antidepressants. And that she took them. He assured me he would.

After she was home, I asked my father about them. He said he threw them away. "She wouldn't want any happy pills," he said. I tried to explain about brain surgery and depression. I tried to explain that there were no happy pills - "No such thing" - but antidepressants would help her feel better. He wasn't buying it. "I won't do that to her," he said.

"Do what?" I wanted to know. "Help her feel better? Help her get better?"

What did he say (after telling me it was none of my business)? "Not like that." There would be no antidepressants and there never would be the recovery - including speech - she should have made. There would be only the loving tyranny of his care for the rest of her life in a world where the only depression was The Great Depression, no happy pills were allowed and there was no escape.

They both are dead now, buried side by side in a church graveyard in North Carolina. My brother John, who lived nearly to the last day of his life believing I had been a drug addict, is there too. Whatever trauma he suffered from seeing his big brother weeping without stopping in that emergency room - and his troubled life was a traumatized life, often self-inflicted - is reduced to ashes and sharing my mother's grave. I love them all. But there are times I wish I - the living medicated manic-depressive they lost the chance to know - could go and stand over them and shout at the top of my voice. "I exist! Depression exists! Happy pills do not!" But wouldn't it be wonderful if they did? I would happily become an addict. I know I am not the only one.

I am still here.

MY PLAYBOY COLLECTION: CONFESSIONS OF A TEEN-AGED SMUT PEDDLAR

I began buying Playboy magazine when I was in high school. I bought my first one on a dare in 9th grade. The news stand wasn't supposed to sell it to boys my age and a couple of friends dared me to try buying one. They figured I wouldn't get away with it. So did I. But we were trying to figure out what boys our age could get away with and we were all tired of sneaking into our fathers' stashes of girlie magazines (top drawer under the boxer shorts). If this worked I could act like a man and hide my own stash. We pooled our money - 50 cents, Playboy was a cheap thrill back then - and I went in and they sold me one. Just like that. The only question: "A bag?" Of course. I remember leafing through it, giggling with my friends outside the store and on the bus ride home, afraid to unfold

Stella Stevens, my  first centerfold

the best part for fear of getting caught. By whom? Call it porn-paranoia. You never knew.  Mom-spies were everywhere. In loco parentis was all over the place. Buying it was one thing, getting caught was unthinkable. I also remember stuffing it bag and all down the front of my pants under my shirt to get it in the house, where I hid it first in my top dresser drawer (like father, like son) then on the floor of my closet under the shoes.

I already had some experience in purchasing dirty books. In junior high school, after a good deal of dithering around by the rotating wire rack of paperback books in the

neighborhood drugstore, I purchased a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover. The smarmy smiled (or was that just my good-boy conscience?) clerk wrapped it in brown paper and taped it tight. I knew the book had been published recently in the U.S. after being banned along with Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill for many years. Filth. Obscene books. Who wouldn't want one? I even loved the word obscene. I had to have one. A judge unbanned them and introduced the strange notion of "redeeming social or literary value" as a defense against obscenity charges just in time. So I bought a copy. 

I read Lady Chatterly in a few hormone-fueled, late-night, under-the-covers sessions. The idea of reading a dirty book

was a sexual experience for a boy like me. But the truth is I didn't understand much of it, was bored by a lot of it (D.H. Lawrence was no Edgar Alan Poe, not by a long shot), thrilled by other parts. One thing I understood was that there was money to be made from the dirty parts. So I carefully marked them, took the book with me to Lindley Junior High School, and became a smut peddlar.

I hate the word "entrepreneur" and have come to believe that any word built around "entrepreneur" is more obscene than anything ever banned in the U.S. But suddenly I was one. Kim Kardashian (she's the entrepreneuriest) says: "I am an entrepreneur. 'Ambitious' is my middle name." My guess is people can think up lots of other middle names that have nothing to do with

Kim's Ambitious Ass

ambition. And it turned out that I was plenty ambitious but never entrepreneurial enough. If I had been I probably would have ended up in the smut business and made a lot of money at it (didn't Kim Kardashian?). I didn't. I sneaked Lady Chatterly off to school and proceeded to pimp her out for nickles and dimes (just like Kim's mom did with her kids). I rented the book out to guys one class period at a time, the dirty parts - also known as the "good parts" - all dogeared, underlined and ready to read. Here's the famous "consummation" scene. Lawrence loved words and used a bunch of them - i.e. "Her tormented modern-woman's brain still had no rest" -  just to say, "They fucked on a blanket in a hut and it felt good." It goes on and on. Lawrence's brand of sex was a vocabulary building exercise. Get a room! That's what we tell obnoxious lovers. But Lawrence's lovers needed a dictionary before they spread that blanket on the floor.

I got away with book pimping for one day and most of the next. Then the science teacher caught some guy reading it, the reader said it was mine, the book was confiscated (even arguing that it had "redeeming social or literary value" didn't help my case). I made about a dollar and ended up in the principal's office. He said he wouldn't tell my parents, if I promised my entrepreneuring days were over. Did I understand? Yes, sir. Later I bought Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill  but I kept them to myself (I remember Fanny Hill as the downest and dirtiest of the lot despite such lines as: "Here I lav'd and wanton'd with the water, or sportively play'd with my companion...," which simply means "We got naked and did it in the pool....").

After that I quit being a smut peddlar and became the Kind of Man Who Reads Playboy. It was far more interesting than Boy's Life magazine ever was back when I was a Scout. Boy's Life encouraged healthy activities with other guys. Playboy encouraged activities of a different, more solitary kind. It was an interactive experience of the finest sort for a young man like me. The opening up, the unfolding, the smell of it. For the Kind of Man Who Reads Playboy, sex always smelled like a magazine. Nowadays entrepreneurs would say I had a satisfying customer experience. I kept buying. I couldn't wait for the next issue. I learned the news stand at the bus station was the first place in town to get the latest issue and sometimes I was there waiting when it arrived. The magazine pile on the floor of my closet kept growing, even after graduation in 1963.

It was not enough that they were Miss Whatever-the-Month. They had names and I learned them: Joni, Tonya, Christa (a particular favorite),

Christa Speck, Miss September '61

Jean, Merle, Laura, June, Phyllis, Terre, Donna, Nancy Jo, Ashlyn, Sue, Lannie, Allison, Judy, Fran, Connie, Nancy, Melodye, Paige, Cynthia, Claudia, Gloria, and on and on. They were large-breasted, their most private parts just out of view. Hugh Heffner - we all called him Hef - wanted to leave us something to find out on our own; he was good that way; besides, anything more would have been pornography and he knew it. Pubic hair didn't appear openly in Playboy until Miss January 1971 - Liv Lindeland - and there was not a full frontal pubic playmate until Miss January 1972 - Marilyn Cole; I was shocked, scandalized, offended when I saw her. What was happening to my girls? The ones I carefully unfolded, refolded and kept hidden away. My Christa Speck (Miss September 1961, Playmate of the Year 1962) never would have shown anyone such a thing. In her centerfold she was wearing a negligee and painting her fingernails. My playmates were like that. Girls next door, primly naked. Respectable girls, respectably photographed. Naughty but not quite obscene. Close but just out of reach.

That collection and the ability to drink large quantities of  Budweiser relatively unfazed became a large part of my identity among my friends in those days (especially when I didn't go off to college). I could drink better and drive better drunk than anyone I knew - and anyone they knew too. More philanthropic than entrepreneurial, I loaned some of the magazines out from time to time.

Then I loaned the whole pile to a guy named Hunter and never saw my Playboys again. I must have been drinking. Hunter was younger than I was and still in high school, Catholic high school. I remember him as thin, dark-haired, persistent, eager. He begged and I relented. One afternoon when no one was home we hauled them up to the attic room he shared with his brother. He was eager to sin and impatient to get on with his solitary reading. I knew the feeling. So I left him there and he began working his way through the pile. I don't know how far he made it.

A few days later when Hunter arrived home from school and went up to his room his mother was sitting in a chair in the corner surrounded by naked young women. Magazines were

Christa Speck, Playmate of the Year 1962

on the beds, the floor, the desk. They all were open, the centerfolds unfolded, Stella Stevens (Miss January 1960), my first, stark naked on her belly on red cushions with what appears to be a diary in her hand, and fresh-faced, dark-haired, big-breasted, tastefully towel-wrapped Marla McBane (Miss May, 1965), my most recent. And the beloved Christa Speck (including her Playmate of the Year issue) somewhere in between. Nearly every issue (at least 40). And his mother, weeping among them.

"Hunter?"

"Mom?"

Who would dare supply her beloved oldest son with so much temptation (I think she actually said, "pictures of these whores," a word Hunter didn't know his mother knew). He said I loaned them to him and he would give them back to me as soon as possible. She had other plans.

First she had Hunter look at each centerfold and describe what he saw there. Playmate after Playmate. Forty times or more. How could she? How could he? Playmates were a feeling with a language all their own. How did he find the words to satisfy his mother's need? I imagined him stumbling through it. I've always wondered how he described Christa and her demure negligee and fingernail polish. I am at a loss for words just thinking about it. Then she made him refold them and carry the magazines out to the barbecue pit - one of those backyard brick monstrosities popular back then - douse them with gasoline meant for the lawnmower and burn them all. Hunter said they were both crying by the time it was over. At least it was all over but the Confession, the priest and all those Hail Marys

Poor Hunter. Did that afternoon of book burning affect his view of women, his view of his mother, his sex life, his family life, being a Catholic, his fear of fire, his ability to get an erection? After he apologized for what happened and offered me money for my lost magazines, I never saw him again. Money?

Fuck the money. Fuck Hunter. What about me? All those Playboys up in smoke. I imagined Christa and the rest curling, darkening in the heat bursting into flame, the smell of Playmates burning. It was a hell of Hunter's mother's own making. Mom's are real hell-makers. I expected to fall into a hell of my own when my mother found out. But if Hunter's mother called my mother I never heard about it (and I would have heard about it and heard about, etc., it if she had).

I bought the next issue when it arrived at the bus station. June 1965. The Playmate was Hedy Scott, reclining tastefully on a chaise lounge with a yellow cushion. The big deal was

nude photos of actress Ursula Andress by her husband John Derek (obviously the Kind of Man Who Reads Playboy). There was fiction by Robert Ruark and Ian Fleming. An interview with Melvin Belli. Jules Feiffer and Shel Silverstein both made contributions. And there were "Dear Playboy," "Playboy After Hours," "The Playboy Advisor," "The Playboy Forum" (those were really the good stuff, as chock full of information as the Boy Scout Handbook only better stuff (and nothing about camping and tent pitching and fire building). They were about how to do it, when to do it, where to do it, what to eat and drink, what to play on the record player, what to wear, all the important stuff a young Man Who Reads Playboy should know to pursue his Playmate. But it wasn't the same. I put it on the floor of my closet and left it there when I moved out of my parents' house. I let go of Hef's hand and didn't buy another copy for years.

I wandered through the rest of the 1960s without a guide, became lost in ordinary things and nearly died (turned out I wasn't very good at ordinary things), settling for playmates who weren't Playmates (they were mostly the un-Playmates and un-un-Playmates insecure guys find) but reaping many of the benefits championed by Playboy as the '60s progressed and the world loosened up. Life without Playboy wasn't easy. But I was changing too. Everything was changing in those days. 

Finally at the end of all that wandering and change I found my wife, the beautiful woman at the end of the tortuous trail (it was if I had been heading in her direction all along), who as a young girl learned a few things by sneaking peeks at Playboys left lying around in houses where she babysat. We have been happily married for 27 years now. We went to a garage sale sometime in the early years of our marriage and I saw a box of old magazines. On top was a Playboy I recognized. It was the September 1961 issue. It was the Christa Speck issue. I had to have it. And underneath it were magazine after magazine, cover after cover that I recognized, all from the early to mid-1960s, nearly all the Playboys that carried me through that strange time. I felt the old thrill and tingle. I had to have them. And I do.

And so we arrive at the recent news that Playboy magazine is going to stop publishing photographs of naked women in an effort to get with the times and re-establish its cultural position in an age when porn is just a click away and some studies show kids are bored with it by the time they are 11 years old. So we'll see how that works out. After the thrill is gone.

---------------------------

And Christa Speck? She was married for 48 years to Marty Krofft, pupetteer and children's television producer. She was a mother and grandmother and, always, Playmate of the Year 1962. She died from natural causes March 22, 2013 at the age of 70.

Christa Speck and Marty Krofft

----------------------------- 

A COUPLE OF NOTES: First, yes, I did read the articles more and more as time passed and they gave me a real taste for good writing. The list of writers who appeared in Playboy is amazing. Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, John Steinbeck, Roald Dahl, Jack Kerouac, Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and many others. Photographs of anything naked - including Playmates - can become boring after a while, but words never die.

We know for sure the late genius Ray Charles bought it for the articles. In a show dedicated to him at the Country Music Hall of Fame (on the anniversary of his incredible album "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music") there were Braille copies of Playboy.