August 24, 2012--Chapter 4: Larry the Fag

How else to put it--during the 1950s, and especially on my street in Brooklyn, it was not good to be known as the neighborhood “fag.”  

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 good thing.  It might have been OK if nobody knew about it; but, if you did, it was thought to be dangerous because we feared it might be catching. Infectious like the croup or polio.

I need to take a step back and reveal what we thought we knew about sex and what we learned on those rare occasions when there would be awkward conversations with our parents about what they referred to as “the facts of life.” 

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

The Stork Didn’t Bring You was full of what today would be considered euphemisms—about how if Mommy and Daddy “hugged” each other when they were sleeping, a “little fish” that came from Daddy would swim over to where Mommy was and then together with Mommy’s egg a Baby would move in to live in Mommy’s “stomach” where he grew 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, the book taught, the stork didn’t bring you--you were picked up at the hospital as from a store for babies.

From the Italians we learned that girls had holes where we had dicks, and that if you put your dick in that hole and peed in there you would make a girl get a baby.  We also learned that girls started out as something the Italians called “virgins,” which meant that no one yet had put their dicks in them because they had teeth down there and you couldn’t do it without getting your pecker bitten off.  If the girls didn’t want to be virgins anymore, they had to go to a special dentist to have those teeth pulled out.

When we learned about the teeth, 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 we knew going in there to have those extractions.  Just to get X-rays and fillings.

But when we heard that the neighborhood shoemaker, John Innusi, was going to get married, even though he just got to America from Italy and didn’t speak much English, we thought that if he didn’t know about those teeth he had better get his Maria to Dr. Glick before they got married because otherwise he would have his dick bitten off when he tried to stick it in her hole. 

At our urging, he did make an appointment for her with Dr. Glick and accompanied her there a few weeks before the wedding. But when he returned to his store, where we were eagerly awaiting a firsthand report, he refused to even make eye contact.  In fact, he never again spoke to any of us.  And when we would come into his store to get a 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.

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 Italians, we were ready for the next stage in our sexual education.

Larry Ruby’s dog Sludge 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 have to rent out the basement to help pay their heating bills.  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 noted for its many used car lots.  The clunkers they would buy there often died halfway across the George Washington Bridge, and those that survived the interstate trip rarely were still running a year later. 

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

Since they had a house all to themselves, they also were the only ones on the block to have a dog.  Sludge was unusual for a number of reasons—first , 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 dry-humping your leg as soon as you came in the front door.  He would wrap his incredibly strong front legs around your thigh--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 came out of his dick that wasn’t pee.  And when he was done he would resume his licking, clearly doing what had to be done to prepare for his next humping

Only Larry knew what this was about, telling us it was a version of what his father sometimes did to his mother up on the third floor when he wasn’t working.  Try as we could, it was hard to imagine how Mr. Ruby could wrap his legs around Mrs. Ruby’s leg and hump it until it made 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 way.  His father had a darkroom in the basement that he would allow Larry to use to develop and print photographs.  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 alchemy, 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 women.  Naked women.

You need to know that the closest we ever came to seeing naked women were from the brassiere ads in the Sears Catalog or from pictures of mud-smeared pigmies in National Geographic.   So when Larry would finish printing one of his magical 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 anatomical innocence, was that they did not hang like sacks from a slot in women’s chests but rather seemed to be attached around their entire circumference.  The pictures weren’t clear enough to learn much more, that we hoped would come later; but what we saw there was intoxicating, and caused my dick to get hard.

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

So when one day Larry called to say that his parents were away and that he had something very special to show us, it was not much of an effort to get Heshy Perlmutter, Mel Lipsky, and me over there before he could hang up the phone.

We arrived breathless.  Smiling slyly, Larry asked if we wanted to play cards.  Just playing cards didn’t seem to require us to rush to his house because his parents were away. And with Sludge locked in the basement—we could hear him whimpering--that suggested something more than a game of Go Fish was on Larry’s mind; and so, with wildly beating hearts, speaking for all of us, Heshy said, “Sure.  Why not.”

Larry had us sit around his mother’s bridge table and pulled a pack of playing cards out of his back pocket.  He shuffled them theatrically and then, with the cards face down, dealt each of us in turn five, 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, titillated, nodded, “OK.” 

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

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, after exchanging glances and shrugs, 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.  We did as we were told.

On each of those cards were pictures of naked people. 

Not just naked people, which would have been excitement enough, 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.

Our mouths literally hung open. None of us was breathing. Just gasping for air.

Watching us with evident pleasure, Larry told us they were called French Cards. 

I glanced at one, afraid to stare, fearing I would go blind or be bewitched and turned into a crazy person who would have to spend the rest of my life confined to the Kings County Insane Asylum. But still I could see that in the pictures all the men were naked except for black socks, most with garters, and hid their faces behind sunglasses. The women wore nothing at all.

After we managed to calm ourselves down, 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 to his side of the table but also to have remained fully clothed.

Then he paused to look deeply at each of us in turn and said, “It’s getting hot in here,” and with that quickly took off all his clothes and slid them into the pot in the middle of the table.  Announcing that he was anteing everything he had for one final Winner-Take-All hand. 

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

He dealt the cards slowly, savoring the slow pace and how we were shivering in anticipation of what might be in store for us.

As usual he won and pulled everything across the table, enfolding all of our clothes in his naked arms. 

The game was over with Larry the big winner, but with all four of us as naked as the men on the cards. Though we too hadn’t taken off our socks.

Leering, 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 face down on the rug and swished them about so as to mix them.  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 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 in the picture.”

And with that he bent over toward Heshy in a version of what the woman was doing to the man.  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 though his hands were shaking. 

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, bent over, 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, as if hypnotized, did. 

It showed a man and woman facing each other, apparently about to do 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 between us slowly.

But unlike Mel and Heshy I didn’t run away.

                                                  *    *    *   

Some weeks later, Heshy and Mel and I met in front of Larry’s house, thinking we could get him to come out and play Heels.  It was a game at which we excelled and where we often took advantage of Larry’s lack of skill.  We were hoping to retaliate for having done so poorly at Five Card Stud and wanted to clean him out of his baseball playing cards—the currency for which we gambled when playing Heels.

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

The next day stories swept the neighborhood about how the Rubys had moved out quickly and silently the night before, under cover of darkness.  Some thought that they had gone to Miami. 

Others claimed that Mr. Ruby had been arrested and was in jail for some reason having to do with his business.  No one knew what that might be. 

Heshy’s father, Mr. Perly, who was a Communist, was convinced that he had cheated on his taxes. "Capitalist!" he spat.  

Mel’s father, Mr. Lipsky, who drove a taxi, said maybe he was a Bookie and was hiding from one of the Italians who had won a lot of money betting on the horses. 

Or even better, I thought, maybe Larry's father had murdered someone.