November 12, 2005--Saturday Story: "Larry the Fag"

Larry the Fag

It was not a good thing to be the neighborhood Fag. Certainly not during the 1950s, and especially not on my block in Brooklyn. It was such a bad thing, in fact, that even before any of us knew what a Fag really was, it was still not considered to be a healthy condition. It might have been sort of OK for him (if nobody else knew about it), but it was dangerous for the rest of us because we feared it might be catching.

Whatever the “it” was. Like the croup or polio.

But let me take a step back and tell you what we knew about sex at that time, or rather what our parents referred to (if the subject ever came up)--as “the birds and the bees.”

What we knew came from two very distinct streams of information—from quick glimpses at books such as The Stork Didn’t Bring You (there was a sticky, dog-eared copy in my Aunt Tanna’s apartment tucked behind the Haggadah); and much more intriguing, there was what we picked up on the street from the few Italian and Irish kids who lived among we Jews. (The assumption being that they “did it,” again whatever the “it” was.)

The Stork Didn’t Bring You was full of what I would today understand to be euphemisms—about how if Mommy and Daddy hugged each other closely when they were sleeping together, a little fish that came from Daddy swan over to where Mommy was and then together with Mommy’s egg a Baby moved in to live in Mommy’s stomach, growing bigger and bigger. And then one day, after nine months, Mommy would go to the hospital and come home a week later with a Baby Brother or Baby Sister. And so you see though the stork didn’t bring you, you picked the Baby up in the hospital. Like it was store for babies.

From the street we learned that girls had big dark holes where we had our dicks, and that if you put your dick in that hole and peed in there you would make the girl get a baby. We also learned that girls started out as something the Irish and Italians called “virgins,” which meant that no one yet had put their dicks in their holes because they had teeth in there that needed to be pulled before you could do it without getting your pecker bitten off. If the girls didn’t want to be virgins anymore—before they could get dicks put in their holes or get married or just wanted to be bad (we understood that something like that would happen maybe once every ten years)--- they had to go to special kinds of dentists to have those teeth pulled out.

When we learned about those teeth and those dentists, we hung around Dr. Glick’s office to see if he was that kind of dentist. Unfortunately, though we took turns staking out his office, we never saw any girls going in there who seemed to have any teeth down there. But when we heard that the neighborhood shoemaker, John Innusi, was going to get married, even though he just got here from Italy and didn’t speak much English, we figured out that he didn’t know about those teeth and that he had better get Maria to Dr. Glick before they got married because otherwise he would have his dick bitten off when he stuck it in her hole.

At our urging, he did make an appointment for her, accompanying her there a few weeks before the wedding; but when he returned to his store, where we were eagerly awaiting a firsthand account, he said nothing. In fact, he never again spoke to any of us. And when we would come into his store to get a new used rubber heel to play Heels with, he would pick up his largest hammer and chase us down the street and around the corner, screaming in incomprehensible Sicilian. (We did get even with him though—frequently firebombing his store with Stink Bombs made from rolled up photo negatives.)

And so, armed with all of this basic knowledge about sex (amalgamating what we read in The Stork with what we were told by the big kids), we were ready for the next stage in our sexual education.

Larry Diamond’s dog was very helpful in this regard.

Larry was the only rich kid on the block, which meant that his parents owned a house and didn’t even have to rent the basement. They also bought a new Buick every year, while those other families who had cars, far from most, hondled for theirs in New Jersey, near the Lodi Traffic Circle, which was famous for its used car lots. The clunkers they would buy there often died on the George Washington Bridge on the way home, and those that survived the interstate trip rarely live through a full year.

We never figured out what Larry’s father did for a living, but we did know he went to whatever he did for work at about two in the afternoon and reportedly returned home about two in the morning. Though they lived in the neighborhood for at least 10 years I think I only saw him only twice. (Both times he needed a shave.) Whenever we were over Larry’s house he was said to be on the third floor sleeping.

Since they had a house all to themselves, they also were the only one’s to have a dog—Sludge. Sludge was unusual for a number of reasons—first of all, as the only dog nearby, he was a biological curiosity. We knew about dogs from comic books and from the one they had in the neighborhood firehouse, but we had limited experience with any dog in the flesh. And Sludge was, if anything, all about flesh.

He was famous for licking his dick compulsively and, more to the point, dry- humping your leg as soon as you came in the front door. He would wrap his incredibly strong front legs around your pants (you couldn’t pry him loose--not that we tried very hard since what he was up to was so fascinating) and hump away until he made your pants wet with some sticky stuff that wasn’t pee. And when he was done he would resume his licking.

Only Larry seemed to know what was going on, telling us it was a version of what his father sometimes did to his mother up on the third floor. Try as we could, it was hard to imagine how Mr. Diamond could wrap his legs or maybe arms (since he had only two legs) around her leg and hump it and make it wet. But Larry was a year older than we and his family owned a house of their own and a new Buick and thus we assumed he knew what he was talking about. But still, it was hard to form a picture in our minds of what his father and mother were doing upstairs while we were in school.

Larry played a role in our sex education in yet another, also unusual way—he had a darkroom where he would develop and print photographs (need I say his was the only darkroom in probably all of Brooklyn?). There was to be sure the virtual miracle of the photographic process itself, how images would form in that black lit room, seemingly as if by magic, from the bottom of those trays. But beyond that magic, often, when we came over, and squeezed into the darkroom with him, the images that would emerge from that chemical soup were grainy pictures of what looked like naked women. Naked women!

You need to know that the closest we ever came to seeing naked women at that time were from the brassiere ads in the Sears Catalog (no one had the money yet to subscribe to National Geographic where much later we could get a close and clear look at African women’s chests).

So when Larry would finish printing one of his fascinating pictures we would run from the darkroom, with the paper still dripping fixative, out to where the light was bright enough to enable us to peer through the graininess to, above all, see how the tits were attached to the women’s chests. A revelation to us, in our pre-anatomical state, was that they did not hang like sacks from a sort of slit in their chests but rather seemed to be attached around the entire circumference of each of them. The pictures weren’t clear enough to learn much more, that would come later, but what we saw there was intoxicating, and for a few of us caused some mysterious stirring down below in our dicks.

As you might imagine, there was more.

From all the pictures of the naked women that Larry kept developing (though none emerged in any sharper focus than any of the others), we began to figure out that his father’s business was somehow related to those intoxicating images. We didn’t have a name for that business yet, or a sense of how he could make money from even such things, but we were aware enough even at that early and naïve age to understand that the Diamond’s material well-being was somehow related to what that darkroom could produce.

So when one day Larry announced that his parents were away and that he had something very special to show us, it was not much of a problem to get me and Heshy Pearlmutter and Mel Streisand over there in about two minutes flat.

We arrived breathless and Larry slyly asked if we wanted to play cards. Playing cards didn’t seem to be reason enough to have us rush over there, but we trusted Larry sufficiently in the realm of sly to say, “Sure. Why not.”

So he sat us down around his mother’s bridge table and pulled a pack of playing cards out of his back pocket. He shuffled them and then, face down, dealt each of us in turn five cards, announcing we would play poker. Strip Poker!!

In truth, neither Heshy nor Mel nor I knew how to play poker, but we had heard about Strip Poker on the Street and thus nodded, “OK.”

So Larry said, “Before you pick up the cards, let me tell you about Five Card Stud.” And so he did--about how two pairs beat one pair; what a straight was and a flush. And how before each hand each of us had to ante up something and how the one with the best hand at the end of each game would win all that was anted up and in the pot. Enough to get us started.

Then before he would allow us to pick up the cards he told us that for Strip Poker you anted up clothes! With that, he pulled off his shirt and put it in the middle of the table, telling us we had to do the same. Which we did. He told us he’d talk us through the first hand until we got the hang of it. And then instructed us to pick up our cards. Which we did.

There were pictures of naked people on each of the cards! Not just naked people, which would have been enough to stop our hearts with excitement, but rather pictures of naked women and naked men in various poses. Poses that reminded us of the things Sludge did to himself, and to us!

Since your imagination is much better equipped than anything I can tell you about what was pictured on what Larry called French Cards, please imagine away! One hint—all the men wore sunglasses and black socks, most with garters.

We got the hang of Poker pretty quickly, enough to get Heshy and Mel and me down to our underwear in less than 15 minutes. Larry was obviously experienced enough with Five Card Stud to not only have gathered virtually all of our clothes on his side of the table but also to remain fully dressed.

Then he paused, peered at us, and said, “It’s getting very hot in here,” and with that quickly took off all, and I mean all of his clothes. Announcing that he was anteing everything he had for one final Winner-Take-All game.

This meant that we would have to ante what we were left with, just our Jockey shorts. Which we did.

He as usual won and pulled everything across the table. And so the game was over with Larry the big winner, but with all four of us as naked as the men on the cards.

Larry then said, "Let's play a different game, also using the cards."

We were sufficiently compromised and excited that we continued to trust him and again nodded our heads in unison. He said, “Let’s take the cards with us into the living room." Which we did.

He placed all 52 cards face down on the rug and swished them about so as to mix them up. He then told Heshy to pick one, any one, which Heshy did. Larry said, “Hold it up so we all can see.” Which Heshy did. It was a picture of a French women doing something with maybe her mouth to the French guy’s dick.

Larry said, “OK Heshy, you be the guy, and I’ll be the girl. Let’s act out what they are doing on the picture.”

And with that he bent over Heshy in a version of what the woman was doing to the guy. Heshy jumped back before Larry could get close enough to touch him and scrambled away, looking for his clothing.

Larry next turned to Mel and asked if he wanted to pick a card. Which he did. It too was of a man and woman, this time in a position quite similar to the one Sludge assumed when he wrapped his paws around your leg. To simulate this picture, Larry turned his naked back to Mel and instructed him to play the man. He would again be the woman. Mel as if in a trance began to approach Larry, but before he got to touching distance he too ran from the living room.

That then left just Larry and me.

He told me to pick a card from the pile. Which I did.

It showed a man and woman facing each other, apparently about to do to each other what the Italian kids said men did to women. Larry, once more playing the woman, his favored part, waved me toward him. I closed the distance slowly.

And we did touch.

* * * *

Some weeks later, Heshy and Mel and I met in front of Larry’s house, thinking we could get him down to play Heels with us. It was a game that we excelled at and where we often took advantage of Larry’s lack of skill. We would clean him out of his baseball playing cards—the currency for which we gambled while playing Heels.

His house looked still and empty. We went up the stoop and rang the front door bell. Repeatedly. There was no answer, just the sound of chimes echoing in what felt like a deserted hall.

The next day stories swept the neighborhood about how the Diamonds had moved out quickly and silently the night before under cover of darkness. Some said that they had moved down to Florida. Others that they were upstate.

And furthermore, Mr. Diamond had been arrested and was in jail for some reason having to do with his business. No one knew what that might be—maybe for cheating on his taxes, maybe for stealing, maybe for gambling. Perhaps he was a Bookie. Or a murderer!

Heshy and Mel and I had our own ideas about what he was in jail for. But we never told anyone. We never even talked with each other about the cards much less the Poker game.

But our education had taken quiet a leap forward, and we knew what Larry was.

And I knew that it wasn’t catching.