January 29, 2007

• self-analysis of a reluctant virgin

  

  It has been about ten months since I posted a memoir episode.  I have not been entirely idle on the memoirs in that time.  I’ve done some editing and revising, added some new scanned images and replaced a few that had gone missing because they weren’t originally uploaded to Xanga.  A few times, Xanga temporarily wouldn’t let me upload photos, so I did a workaround and used some webspace of Doug’s that he wasn’t using. He no longer has that space, so I’ve been uploading here to fill some empty spaces. 

  One of those photos is the shot of me, above, in my favorite cousin’s bike basket, taken circa 1946, from the parents and early memories segment.

  Ten months ago, The Xanga Team’s paranoia over kiddie porn prosecutions, and the resultant flagging program for systematic censorship, had a chilling effect on my writing at a critical point in the story.  Today I have been reading and revising some of the posts that came just before that break.

  I tidied up the prose and added a few new recollections to the “late ‘fifties North Texas low-rent romance” episode, and to “baptism, B12 shots and burning drip.”  I have also expanded the analytical piece below, and am reposting it as an introduction to what comes next. 

  [edit 5/3/2008:  For a while, during the censorship flap, I placed some of my sensitive posts in the "protected" category.  Since then, John has explained to me that they are safe as long as I rate them "C" for caution.  As far as I know, I have made all my formerly protected posts public.  If you find a "bug" or get an error message with any of my links, let me know and I will fix it.]
  
  While I was digging around back there in last year’s work, I found the Grundy-inspired piece, “how sex got so perverted,” which was protected for a while, and possibly worth reading if you missed it at the time.
  

  ---

  Originally posted in slightly different form on April 4, 2006.

  I did this a few times while writing the memoirs of my childhood and
  those of my twenties:  paused the narrative to examine myself and make explicit some things about my psychology and inner
  feelings.  This seems like a good place for such a pause… or
  maybe I just want to see it that way so I can drag my feet a bit.  What’s coming up next in the story wasn’t one of the happiest times of my
  life.

  I had been showing signs of psychopathology ever since my father died
  when I was seven.  His death all by itself would have been
  traumatic even if I hadn’t blamed myself for causing it, because we
  were close, much closer than I ever was with my mother.  My father
  and I spoke the same language and had several shared interests, while
  my mother and I shared only one interest:  my father.  Due to
  her absence during my infancy, I had a stronger initial bond with him and
  modeled myself more on him than on her.  That atypical role-modeling has served me well in my life, but has also added challenges and complications to my life.

  The atypical upbringing is good cause for some pathology, and some abnormality that is not necessarily pathological. 
  Normal girls model themselves on women.  My mother’s girlishness
  looked to me like foolishness.  I held her in contempt for the
  mechanical, mathematical and manual incompetence that to her was
  nothing more than appropriate feminine behavior. 

  I enjoyed doing
  the maintenance on Mama’s car and calculating her income
  tax, and it also gave me more reasons to feel superior to her.  I
  was glad that she was so easy to manipulate, but my being able to talk
  her out of grounding me for breaking her rules only deepened and strengthened my disrespect for her as I matured.  It also enabled me to get myself into a whole lot of trouble, and to gain a lot of experience I would not otherwise have gotten.  Am I adequately conveying my judgment that this was all neither “bad” nor “good”?

  Mama and I both were emotionally needy, co-dependent, and
  fearful.  There was adequate reason for being fearful. 
  Economically, we lived a marginal existence.  Additionally, we
  both lived with the fear caused by my chronic illness and the dire terminal
  prognosis I’d been given by my doctors.  She was afraid I’d
  die.  I had that fear, and was also afraid that she would die like
  Daddy did and leave me all alone.

  I wasn’t popular in school, didn’t have “nice” or fashionable clothes,
  couldn’t compete at sports.  I suppose I had most of the “normal”
  angst of adolescence, all except for acne.  I had freckles to make
  up for that lack, and my illness, weakness, and frequent absences from
  school.   Highly intelligent and proud of it, I was better at alienating people than befriending
  them. 

  Granny’s next door neighbor in Wichita, a weird middle-aged bachelor who liked to hang out with us kids, called me, “overbearing.”  I
  didn’t know what the word meant (means arrogant and domineering) but I
  could tell by the way he said it that it wasn’t a compliment. 
  Secretly, I was hurt, but I sucked it up and pretended I didn’t
  care.  That was Daddy’s influence.  He had taught me not to show
  hurt, not to cry.  Outwardly, that had some advantages, especially during the time I rode with outlaw bikers in the 1960s.  Later on, in therapy, as I learned to express my feelings, it became clear how and why I’d gained some of my thornier psychopathology.

  My mother’s reticence on all matters sexual and her harsh restrictions
  against touching myself “down there” became a wall between us even
  before my fumbling romances with  Leroy Coy and “Frenchy”. 
  I was addicted to masturbatory orgasm, and to sugar, and just like an
  adult addict I kept those addictions hidden, indulged them in secret, felt guilt
  over them and rationalized the guilt.  That’s all very normal but
  not at all healthy.

  I can now recognize in some of my behavior patterns the signs of
  obsessive-compulsive disorder, but apparently no one saw it then. 
  I played with fire until I was caught at it.  I took insane risks
  on my bicycle, had a number of predictable injuries from it, but didn’t
  stop until the bike was junk.  I had ADD, but my mother and my
  teachers thought I was just lazy, sloppy, uncooperative and
  absent-minded.  My mind was absent, all right.  I was off in
  a world of fantasy, romantic fantasies modeled on love songs, movies and soap opera
  love.

  I couldn’t differentiate between sexual feelings and love.  It was
  an era when sex wasn’t talked about in polite society or shown openly in movies.   There’d be a tender kiss, then fade to black. 
  The censors required each of the actors in a love scene to have at
  least one foot on the floor.  Married couples on TV slept in twin
  beds.  “Making love,” was the popular euphemism for sex. 
  Everything I knew about love made it attractive to me.  I wanted
  to be loved.  I wanted to make love.

  In Vernon, Texas, as I grew into my ‘teens, I learned from other kids that some girls “did it,” and that
  boys would go out on dates with girls who didn’t, and then after they
  took the “good” girl home, they’d go to a “bad” girl’s house and do it
  with her.  I thought that being one of those girls that all the
  boys loved would be just great.  I picked up on the idea that some
  people did not think highly of those girls, but that really didn’t make
  sense to me.  There was a popular song:  “Birds do it; bees do it, even educated fleas do it; let’s do it, let’s fall in love.”

  One steamy evening in Eddie Duncan’s car, he’d slid out from under the
  steering wheel and I’d turned, curled my legs up in the seat and leaned
  across his lap, and we kissed and fondled and rubbed up against each
  other as was our custom on our dates.   We had both been
  right at the screaming edge of orgasm for an interminable time, when he
  put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back, saying, “No, we
  can’t.”  I asked him why not and he said it was because I was a
  virgin.  Then he took me home.

  I didn’t want to be a virgin
  anymore.  My virginity had become an impediment to “love.”
  

  • 9:30 pm
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