A SILENT BOOMER TALKS PILLOW TALK

When "Pillow Talk" with Rock Hudson and Doris Day came out in Oct. 1959, I was a few weeks from turning 22. I'd been out of the Navy nearly a year, and I was dating the young woman who was to become my first wife. To my entranced eyes, she looked like Doris Day in "Pillow Talk". She owned and often wore a tight, black sheath dress, tighter than Ms. Day's white sheath dress in that film. She wore her hair in a beehive, also like the coiffure of some of Ms. Day's photos in other films. My wife combined her sheath dresses with a girl next door's shy allure. Both together, wrestling in my libido, made her hotter than a recently fired pistol. Our adventures as we parked in her driveway in my powder blue, 1957 Chevy after returning from a well-dressed movie date to see "Pillow Talk" must be left to a reader's imagination, unless in a future book of essays, I reveal more detailed accounts. I'm sure I've got essays about film-going running out of my psychic sorehouse [sic].

Poster by Universal International Films

I just watched "Pillow Talk" again, thanks to the Encore Retro cable channel. I'd never before realized how completely false that film is to the human condition nor how ugly and sordid and maddening that film would be to a naive young man and his soon to be wife. The irony of Doris and Rock, playing wannabe lovers in that film and his death by Aids are well known, but as I watched the film recently, I was struck by the smug ugly nature of that whole wholesome striptease act being put on for the gullible audiences of that time. The film's message was if you love me you won't want to fuck me and if you love me you will be so hot for me that it's all a woman can do to resist your irresistible charms. 

Torn by that unwholesome lie festering in his psyche, it's a wonder that any young man's arrow ever found the quiver in his woman's thighs without also feeling a lot of guilt about any possibility of enjoying a good, hot roll in the hay. Pardon the metaphor, but even in this day, a man can't be too careful. There might be a fanatically prudish fundamentalist around any transom, trying to get a peek at what goes on between real, as opposed to reel, men and women. 

3 AM IN THE DARKEST PART OF THE SOUL

Fitzgerald photo from NYTimes

It's midnight as I shut down the process of translating the second novel I ever wrote from typed pages to editable computer files. Only 70 more pages to go of 606 pages. "It's always three am in the darkest part of the soul." That's what F. Scott wrote in his autobiographical collection, The Crack Up. 

I used to feel like that all the time. It's an alcoholic's thing, but I'm free of that for a long time, but I'm amused by my continued striving to "make it" with my writing. At age 75, it's kind of silly, but...what?...I'm not alone in this striving? What writer stops before he drops dead or his mind gives out...if...he hasn't won any recognition? I mean, if he's seriously got the writing bug, if it's something he does almost in his sleep? The few times I stopped writing creatively, I went on letter writing binges and email bombastic adventures or filled journals. If I took all the hours I've sat with pencil and paper, or before a typewriter and, finally, a computer keyboard, I'd pretty near have an additional life...well...a short life, but at least a life of some kind, different from sitting down expressing thoughts and feelings that no one might ever read.

Jung wrote that a "man" was supposed to spend the first half or his life achieving his professional successes and the second half attending to his philosophical life. Well, I did finally do something to shore up my financial picture, but it wasn't doing what I thought I'd love to do every day of my life...writing. No, I did it as a machinist in a machine shop. Somehow, I think I'm trying to combine philosophizing and writing in this last phase of my life. I'm getting pretty philosophical about failure. If it wasn't for my successful and happy life with my wife, Mertie, I'd really be desperate. This is real joy, isn't it?

THE SILENT BOOMER BEGINS 3RD INSTALLMENT OF MARTA

Me at 25 

"Not long after the incident with the boys in the Winton barn, Marta first heard her name and Melvina’s name mentioned in the same breath. The girl was walking home from Crossroad High on an unusually warm spring afternoon when two junior high boykins shot past on bikes, shouting at her—Melvina Marta! Melvina Marta! They laughed loudly, their grinning mouths hidden as they looked back over their shoulders at her. The mean laughter confused the girl because she had no context for understanding where these taunts came from or how her name had suddenly come to be connected with Melvina’s name and shouted at her in the streets of Crossroad by two boys on bikes. No response entered her thoughts that she could shout back at them. Frustrated and feeling shamed for no reason, she watched the two boys bike speedily off and disappear around the corner."

So begins the third installment of the sexual adventures of a precocious young girl in 1940 Iowa. If I don't lose interest, these stories could be the backbone of a new novel, but who knows? At my age, things often change. I lose interest quickly. It seems I am often charged up by some idea, then I commence to carry it through, then I lose interest. I've written enough novels to understand that the initial impulse toward a book is usually intriguing and exciting, but the effort to carry it through to completion is a whole 'nother ball of wax! The very first book I finished, I was still a typist. No personal computers yet. To make copies you used carbon paper. What a process! The photo above represents roughly what I looked like when I began to think I'd be the next great American novelist.