My earliest memories of school are idealized images like the image of myself to the left. It was taken at Bagg School when I was five years old. Although my lazy eye was to straighten itself out over the years, it is still detectable in this photograph. It is an image of a small boy who, moments before the photograph was taken, has had his first actual erotic experience. I describe it as erotic only in retrospect, I didn’t know anything about such ideas at that time. I was standing in line to have my picture taken. I had worn my best shirt, which, as you can see was my Roy Rogers shirt. Adults were passing by in the hall, they were all strangers to me. Some young woman I had never seen before crouched down in front of me, took me by the shoulders, and looked into my face carefully. She said, “You can’t get your picture taken looking like this.” She proceeded to open her purse, take out a comb and comb my hair. She took her time doing this with me looking straight down at the floor. When she was done she took hold of my face tenderly by the chin and twisted my face up so she could see what a good job of combing my hair she had done. She held my face and looked into my eyes and this was the first time in my life I experienced that sensation of one's stomach turning over, because you see this feeling in someone else’s eyes, and it invades you, and takes you over.
All this is an adult’s retrospective elaboration, made the more clumsy by my ineptitude in describing it. But I do remember thinking, “She likes me.”
Perhaps it was doubly memorable because I was not petted and made much of as a child. If it had been my mother she would have said, “Hold still,” and she would have given me a vigorous washing of my face with saliva and a handkerchief, and the photo would have made me look like I had smallpox.
I suppose also that I should at this point attempt a description of myself. Actually I am quite vain, and all my life I have considered myself to be very beautiful. At times of the greatest adversity and catastrophe in my life I have always been able to look at myself in the mirror and be pleased with what I saw there, even now at 63.
The fact that I received little physical attention at home as a child was more than made up for in the outside world. There is always a group of young attractive women in the world who feel they have the right to descend on any young boy under the age of ten, and do anything they want with him. They will pick them straight up off the floor, pretend to dance with them at parties, refer to them as their boyfriend, and flirt with them in every possible way. This was done to me throughout my childhood, but most frequently by strange beautiful women who would corner me someplace, grab me by the shoulders and exclaim always practically the same words, “What are such long eyelashes doing on a BOY?” Then they would look at me in that way, as if they were attempting to make me a part of some collection they had at home.
There is a little known short novel of Dostoevsky’s called “The Little Hero,” in which a young boy describes such experiences that lead to his falling in love. The boy enters a theater alone and can’t find a seat. This voluptuous blonde stranger sees that he can’t find a seat and grabs him by the hand and forces him to sit on her lap. He sits there mortified and she will not let go of his hand. As the play progresses and reaches a critical moment she suddenly starts to squeeze his fingers so tightly that he is in agony, yet he can’t cry out. He struggles to get free but she won’t let go of his hand. So begins a most charming love story that should be read by anyone who thinks that Dostoevsky is all crimes and punishments.
My looks did not belong to me alone but was evident in my extended family. If you got us all together in a room we looked like a set of the Fayum Portraits, which can be seen in the Egyptian section of the Metropolitan. Those portraits were all faces painted on casket lids. That's me, second from the left, two thousand years ago.
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