Making Love

An Erotic Odyssey

Richard Rhodes

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780671870720
• eBook ISBN: 9781476709574
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

A brilliant and illuminating exploration of one man's sexual odyssey, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and A Hole in the World. Making Love marks the first time a major author has written with such unapologetic candor of his most intimate experiences, fantasies, and thoughts. From his sexual coming of age to his work with ESO (Extended Sexual Orgasm), Richard Rhodes has created both an insightful memoir and a provocative treatise on sex, taboo, love, and power.

I Lost My Virginity . . .

I lost my virginity to a New York dance-hall girl when I was eighteen. I use the words “virginity” and “girl” in their conventional senses. Of the many virginities forfeit across a lifetime, I had already given up two, and the girl was a muscular woman, hard-faced but kind, a part-time prostitute at least forty years old.

I’d spent my adolescence at a boys’ home and farm in Independence, Missouri. I was skinny and morbidly shy when I arrived at Yale on scholarship in 1955—all pecker and feet, as Ozark people say. By the next spring, lonely, seeing my classmates dating, blind-dating myself but barely able to muster enough presence to kiss a date goodnight, I was desperate. I told a fellow freshman, H——, my problem. I’m not sure why I told him; I’d hardly spoken to him outside of class before. He was private school Greek-American—a classic nose, a head of curly hair, cocky, literal-minded, not all that bright. I suppose I thought he knew his way around.

If only I could get past my wearisome virginity, I told H——, maybe I wouldn’t be so shy with a date. I’d have more confidence. I’d know what to do.

H—— knew what to do. He’d heard about two sisters in New York, he said, who were notorious for relieving geek preppies and weeny Yalies of their virginity, the King sisters, Gussie and Sally, dance-hall girls. If I was serious, he’d find out how to get in touch with them. He’d take me down to New York and they’d fix me up. It would probably cost some money. Maybe forty bucks. Was I serious? I was serious. He’d see what he could do.

Across the weekend and into the next week, coming and going to class, studying in my room, I thought about H——’s plan, fantasized about it, but I didn’t really believe it. It was like signing on for a parachute jump: easy to do because you can’t imagine ever actually jumping out of a plane. But later in the week H——called me and said he’d talked to one of the sisters and we were on. My heart started pounding. I was avid. I was also terrified.

We took a Saturday morning train to Grand Central and then a taxi. Somewhere in Brooklyn or Queens. We found the block but couldn’t find the address. H——called from a pay phone on the corner. The doorway next to the Tammany Hall mid-block, a second-floor apartment, up a flight of stairs.

The older sister answered the door, Gussie, a great head of bleached hair and a tough face swollen with smoking and booze. I still hadn’t jumped, so I still couldn’t imagine. Sally was shorter and thicker. We gathered awkwardly in the middle of the room. A double bed in the corner. A doorway to a second room closed off with a curtain. A shallow fireplace with a gas grate, and over the mantel a strip of Yale-blue banner lettered in white:

WHEN BETTER WOMEN ARE MADE, YALE MEN WILL MAKE THEM.

“The Whiffenpoofs gave us that,” Gussie announced proudly. “They come down sometimes and we party.” Gentlemen songsters off on a spree.

While I pretended to study the banner, H—— conferred with the King sisters. I heard the word “virgin” and the sisters’ voices murmuring sympathy. H—— left them and drew me aside. “Twenty bucks,” he reported. It didn’t seem enough. Only twenty bucks to lose my virginity? Why had it taken me so long? “But I’ve got forty,” I called across the negotiating space to the two women. “Nah, it’s twenty bucks,” one of them said, “we don’t want to cheat you.” We paid up, awkwardly. Then Sally and H—— were pushing through the curtain into the next room and Gussie was leading me to the bed. My heart was racing. The wind was tearing at the open door and the jumpmaster beckoned. The ground was a long way down.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Gussie told me. “You go ahead and get undressed.” She studied me for a moment and her face softened. “It’ll be all right,” she said.

She disappeared into the bathroom. What was I wearing? Probably a white or blue oxford button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up, tan chinos, unbleached wool athletic socks and loafers—in those days the Yale uniform. I undressed down to my white Jockey undershorts and perched on the end of the bed.

Gussie appeared before me in a bathrobe. She let it slide from her shoulders. My eyes widened; her naked body was solid and healthy below her ravaged face. She bent, full breasts swinging, cupped my chin and kissed me, a smoky kiss that felt motherly. She noticed that I was still wearing my undershorts and smiled. “This is like taking candy from a baby,” she said. Catching the band of my shorts at each side of my hips, she began skinning them down. I leaned back on my elbows and raised myself to help her. She had to work my shorts over my penis. I was already fully erect, pulsing. She knelt between my legs. Abruptly her hand was on me. She took me in her warm, wet mouth and I was weightless, not a thought in my head, joy diffusing through my body like water after thirst, and all my fear was gone.

Two or three strokes with her mouth, a quick warmup, and she climbed onto the bed and lay on her back. I followed her around and lay propped on an elbow beside her. She guided my hand to her breast. It was firm but fluid, weighted and warm. The muscles of her shoulders and arms had definition, I suppose from dancing. Her abdominal muscles strapped her belly, dividing around a deep navel. Her black pubic hair was curly and profuse. I could feel the stubble on her legs, unexpected but not unpleasant. In the strange country where I’d landed anything was possible. Gussie’s body was a woman’s body, generous and real.

“You need to make sure the girl comes first,” she instructed me earnestly—good advice. “Here, see,” she went on, spreading her legs, moving both hands to her labia and opening them, “feel here, this little button, see, put your finger here and feel.” I did, not knowing what I was feeling for, feeling wrinkled soft tissue like a hen’s comb and ligaments and a smoothness below them like the inside of my cheek. “You rub this, see,” Gussie demonstrated, guiding my hand with her own, “until she comes. Then you won’t leave her hung up.” I rubbed a little bit, uncertainly. End of lesson. “Now you get on and put it in.”

I got on, outlandish, lying on top of a naked stranger. Gussie scooped a finger of cold cream from a bedside jar and slicked herself and guided me in. I was used to my own cool hand. She was burning hot. I felt as if I’d plunged into an oven. A roaring began in my ears. She locked her legs over my back. I buried my face in her smoky hair, pumped, came.

With a cock of her hips she popped me out. Drugged, I slipped down beside her on my elbow again. “You should let a girl know when you’re coming,” she chided me mildly. “Then she can get off too.” Abruptly her professionalism cracked and tears welled in her eyes. “It was your first time,” she said, to herself more than to me. “And now you’ll find a girl, get married, have babies . . .” As she had not and never would, I understood she meant. I was sorry for her and thought to comfort her. “I’ll never forget you,” I told her sincerely. She glared at me, sure I was mocking her, but I never have forgotten her and never will.

She carried her bathrobe into the bathroom and closed the door. I heard water running, the toilet flushed. My shyness had vanished; arms behind my head on the pillow, I let my detumescing genitals dangle. They were wet with her smell. I gloried in it. P——, a high school girl, was the closest I’d come before Gussie to sex with a woman. After weeks of necking, summer nights parked in her family car, P—— let me work one middle finger around her panties and inside. The first time it happened I’d carried that finger home like a trophy, flared my nostrils like the bull at the boys’ home to sniff it, guarded it unwashed for two days. Now I had a profusion of Gussie’s juices drying on my genitals, her musk mixed with the smell of cold cream in the air. I lay on the bed filled with happiness, one with the universe.

Gussie emerged from the bathroom brushing back her hair. She looked me over. “I put out a washrag,” she said. “You’d better wash.” I sat up. “You oughta use a rubber,” she cautioned me. “To be safe. It’s okay with me, but you never know.”

I found the cloth and washed, reluctantly. A red rubber douche bag dripped from the inside of the bathroom door. I looked in the medicine-cabinet mirror and grinned.

We waited for H—— and Sally, Gussie on the love seat by the fire, I in a chair. We talked; I don’t remember much of what we said. I remember noticing on the mantel a printed invitation to a headmaster’s tea at Deerfield, past due. Some prankster must have arranged to have it sent. There was a snapshot of a burly sailor framed on the table beside my chair. “That’s my sailor boy,” Gussie told me proudly. “We just got back from a cruise.”

Then Sally came out through the curtain and waved her sister over. They conferred. Sally went back into the other room and Gussie returned to the fire. She shook her head. “Your buddy’s having problems,” she said quietly. “Sally says he’s got a little one. He can’t get it up.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t used to discussing sexual problems, especially with a woman. I switched to my student mode. “Does size make a difference?” I asked.

“Nah. Not to a woman. It does to some guys. I think that’s what was wrong with Jack the Ripper. I think he had a little one and he took it out on the girls.”

“Is my size all right?”

“Yeah. You got a good one.” She winked at me. “The girls’ll like that.” I liked her saying so even though it contradicted what she’d said before.

H—— emerged looking miserable. Sally followed him. “It happens,” she consoled him. “No big deal. Better luck next time.”

Out on the street I asked H—— what went wrong. “She started sucking me,” he said. “All I could think about was where her mouth had been. It really put me off.” He looked at me. “Didn’t it bother you?”

“I thought it was wonderful,” I announced, too happy to sympathize. The sun was shining. It was springtime. I jumped into the air and clicked my heels.

Two weeks later I went back on my own to see the King sisters again. Gussie answered the door. I gave her a box of chocolates, gift-wrapped. It amused her. She thought it was sweet. I’d fantasized having her again. She put me off. “I don’t feel so good today,” she said. “Sally’s in the other room. She’ll take care of you.” I pushed through the curtain feeling rejected. Sally was sleeping on a single bed; I had to wake her. There was a double bed in the room as well and a man turned away on it snoring. I’d come a long way from rural Missouri.

Sally hooked us up and we fucked. The release I felt wasn’t much more than I could do for myself. It certainly wasn’t what I’d dreamed of. I’d dreamed of Gussie luxurious beneath me, of reliving the first time again. Not even Gussie could have done that for me. Maybe she knew.

I Experienced Orgasm . . .

I experienced orgasm for the first time when I was ten, climbing a rope in fourth-grade gym. I didn’t know what was happening. I was light and strong, climbing a rope, pulling myself up and then locking my legs to reposition my hands, when I felt a sensation of intoxicating warmth spreading from my groin downward into my legs and upward through my trunk into my shoulders and arms, into my head, drawing down the muscles of my face. It made me feel sleepy and weak; my eyelids fluttered and I stopped climbing, drooped, barely hung on. I assigned the sensation to the same category as the shudder that sometimes shook my body involuntarily when I peed. I didn’t immediately assign it value, good or bad. I didn’t know what to make of it. I put it out of my mind.

After that it turned up irregularly when we were rope-climbing. I began to watch for it and wonder how I could make it happen deliberately and draw it out. I liked rope-climbing anyway. Now I looked forward to it eagerly: the smell of varnish in the gym, rushing to the side to uncleat the clothesline that hauled the big climbing rope up out of the way, releasing and lowering the twisted hemp thick as my wrist, lining up to climb, mounting the bulging knot that weighted the lower end. Sometimes the sensation came. Sometimes it didn’t. When it did, usually three-quarters of the way to the top, twenty feet or more above the floor, I stopped and clung and drooped. It wasn’t exactly pleasure. It was closer to a seizure, but it compelled.

I let down my relay team. We were an eager four against two other teams of four at two other ropes. I was anchorman—third in line—because I was strong and fast and could make up time. But my mysterious ecstasy seized me halfway through my turn and paralyzed me. I wanted to move, to keep on climbing; my muscles wouldn’t obey. My teammates shouted at me to go on. They got mad at me. I was too weak to finish the climb. I slid down. Disqualified, we lost the race. I tried to explain what had happened. Fantastic tale. My teammates thought I was lying. They’d never heard of such a thing.

I wasn’t the only one. I saw Dick Cavett interview Lily Tomlin once on television. He asked her delicately about a certain backyard clothesline pole she’d climbed in childhood. I suppose she’d mentioned it in one of her routines. She told him it ought to have a bronze plaque affixed in commemoration.

And how many more of you are out there?

When I arrived at the boys’ home I was twelve and pre-pubescent. The housemother assigned me a bed on the aisle in the east wing of the second-floor dormitory. A bedside chest separated my bed from the next bed in the row.

One day not long after I arrived, a boy asked me if I “jacked off.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. He explained. That night, after lights out, under the covers, pretending to sleep, I followed his instructions. A few quick strokes, dry. When the sensation burst it burst abruptly, locally, painfully, like the passage of a Roman candle charge up its tube and out. It burned. It was nothing like the ecstasy of rope-climbing, which hadn’t happened in years and which I’d almost forgotten. There was ejaculate. I don’t remember how much, or what I did with it. But here was something new, a mystery, something to focus my curiosity on, something to learn.

Since we were boys and various—various backgrounds, various ages—coming of age preoccupied us. We watched for the least hint of pubic hair and offered it in public display. We showed off morning erections, ran contests to see whose erection could support the largest number of wet towels (the record was four). Yet the unwritten code that prevailed in that time and place stigmatized sex. Everyone masturbated but no one admitted it. Getting caught provoked months of merciless ridicule. Older boys, bullies, smacked you on the back of the head on the school bus, taunted you to tears. I only got caught once; I made sure I was never caught again.

I was a frightened child anyway—bookish, anxious, escapist, desperately lonely. Self-stimulation transported me to an inward place of altered consciousness that I could populate with sensation. Miraculously, my body could generate pleasure out of itself.

My record, an experiment I ran, was seven ejaculations in one day, the last time or two raw and sore. I was on house that week, which gave me opportunity, cleaning bathrooms and dust-mopping rooms and halls when everyone else except the housemother—one housemother or another, they came and went—was outside working. I avoided housemothers by hiding out in bathrooms and switching floors. I wonder if they knew. Often enough my face was flushed and my body trembling, stigmata of my crime, just as the Boy Scout Manual warned.

I suppose some of them knew. I know Mrs. C—— knew. I thought she was beautiful. She wasn’t more than forty, tall, her skin colored between cream and olive, veins prominent in her hands that shone in lamplight. Long, firm legs. Arrogant pelvic crown that made her loose peasant skirts ride high. I’ve thought it over. Sloping buttocks, the shape and weight of them low. Something of a belly, a splurge of fat over hard muscles. Big, pendulous breasts, the only breasts that should be allowed at a boys’ home; I could imagine their dark nipples big at night as thumbs. Yet fine, long feet and slender hands. A fine, long head with a wide mouth, full lips and spiritual eyes, eyes wide and brown and brimming, as if Mrs. C—— were always on the verge of tears.

I could hardly bear to be in the same building with her. She was safe only within her own room. It was a room within a room, really, an apartment built along the hall between the two wings of the dormitory. God, it must have been a hotbox in those days before air-conditioning. It had interior windows that opened into the dormitory wings. The architect may have intended them for inspection ports. That worked both ways—looking out, looking in—so they’d been covered over with wallpaper, but the wallpaper fit badly at the edg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1: I Lost My Virginity . . .
• Chapter 2: I Experienced Orgasm . . .
• Chapter 3: There Are Styles . . .
• Chapter 4: Yet Through These Years . . .
• Chapter 5: That Was Childhood . . .
• Chapter 6: The Summer After . . .
• Chapter 7: Each of My Partners . . .
• Chapter 8: After N——and I . . .
• Chapter 9: “As If Inhabiting . . .”
• Chapter 10: What an Odd Organ . . .
• Chapter 11: One Summer Morning . . .
• Chapter 12: I Heard G——’s Lovely Voice . . .
• Freight
• Copyright