Free Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal Page A

the teaching level, leaning over backwards to give work to almost any show-biz-type Negro who comes his way (the Stepin Fetchit Lecture Series, however, fell through at the last moment, due to a contractual snag). But at the student level, integration has not been easy. A vocal minority are prejudiced, possibly because many young white males fear the Negro cock. Time and again I have observed white youths inadvertently clench their buttocks at the approach of a black man, as though fearful of anal penetration, not realizing that the legend of Negro size is just that legend. The dozen or so jungle bunnies I have trafficked with were perfectly ordinary in that department... in fact, two were hung like chipmunks (Myron, incidentally, was larger than any of them, a fact which, paradoxically, caused him not joy but despair). The physiological origin of the myth was once explained to me by Dr. Montag. Apparently the Negro penis limp is almost the same size as it is when erect, a phenomenon which, though it causes consternation in a shower room, brings no added joy to the bedroom. Nevertheless, uneasy white males still continue to tighten their rosy sphincters at the approach of spooks. In defense of the Buck Loner philosophy, Irving Amadeus (he pretends to have been Jewish before his conversion to Bahai) spoke of love. "It is necessary to have love for all things, particularly those young people entrusted to our care." "Love," I said, "ought never to exclude truth." "But love does not wound." He continued for some time in this vein. Fortunately Miss Cluff, the other teacher, has no interest in love, at least of the caritas sort. She is lean and profoundly Lesbian, forever proposing that we go to drive-in movies together in her secondhand Oldsmobile. Temporarily she is teaching the Bell Telephone Hour Course in Song in order to make enough money to pay for a concert debut in New York. "Nonsense!" she said to Bahai, cutting him short. "We must wound if we are to create artists. I myself am the result of an uncle whom I hated, a teacher of piano who forced me at the age of nine to practice seven, eight, ten hours a day, striking my lingers with a stick whenever I got a note wrong. This was in Oregon." We all recognized the plot of The Seventh Veil and so were able to ask the right questions in order to help her complete the fantasy whose denouement was that, in spite of everything, she had come through, become an artist, after the obligatory nervous breakdown, et cetera, and she owed it all to her uncle who had been cruel but cared. I found this conversation pleasing, for I am always happy when people resort to the storehouse of movie myth in order to create for themselves attractive personas. I was not prepared, however, for her next observation. "There is really only one talented student in any of my classes and that is a girl called Mary-Ann Pringle." I sat up, almost spilling the dregs of my coffee. Had I missed a trick? "But I know the girl. I have her in Posture. She is a complete nothing." "Except," said Black Beauty, "for her connection with Rusty Godowsky. I have him in Atavistic Rhythm, and I am here to tell you that that ofay boy has really got sex appeal in spades!" (All in all, not a happy figure of speech, I thought.) "I know what he's got," I said too quickly, and not quite accurately. "Then you know he is absolutely total man, or, as we in Bahai believe..." "What," I turned to Miss Cluff, drowning out Mother Africa, "is so talented about Mary-Ann Pringle?" "Her voice! It is the pure, the white bel canto. Untrained, of course, like a smudged diamond, but a jewel no less. She could be a star of the same magnitude "Kathryn Grayson?" Miss Cluff is too young to know from experience the Forties and too self-absorbed to attend films seriously. For her the movies are simply a pretext for getting girls onto the back seat of her secondhand Oldsmobile. "She could... she must sing opera." But Darkness at Noon saw, perhaps rightly,