It was spring at last, the sky a creamy blue, tweety-birds a-tweeting, lords and ladies leaping. In Central Park anyway, on every bench, against every tree, couples were frantically entwined. It was like Watteau in there! One sunny day, and out come the flirtatious looks and the mandolins.
“What a cliché,” Mimi witheringly observed. “Just because it’s spring doesn’t mean you have to mate!”
I was about to concur, the first impulse of the lover, when I remembered that all of my own romances, the more major ones at least, had begun in the spring (including this one)—how biological can you get? And yet we soon we succumbed to some canoodling of our own, along with everybody else.
“Let’s try to knock this thing into shape,” she declared abruptly.
“Knock what into shape?” I asked eagerly, looking around for a more discreet hidy-hole.
“Your speech, Harrison, your speech.”
“My what?. . . Oh.” We had already covered many types of oral presentation, I fondly recalled, devoting ourselves daily to questions of expressiveness, responsiveness, fairness, intimacy, inclusivity, rhythm and repetition. . . I’d totally forgotten about my speech. Who could think about Chevron High in the midst of this?! Why taint love with worry? But now it seemed it was School Time again.
“Ya do remember my book, right?” she asked. “So, what’s your Speech Objective?” We wandered aimlessly through a sunless sinless clearing, devoid of couplings. I tried to remember what I could of Mimi’s book. I knew it mentioned something about Speech Objectives—but what?
“My Objective,” I said boldly, “is to survive.”
“Hmmm, maybe we’ll work on the Objective later,” Mimi conceded. “Now, how about content? If you could talk about anything you wanted, what would it be?”
“Melancholy?”
“Nah. Not for a graduation speech, Harrison!”
“Why not?”
“You really need to be thinking more in terms of a pep talk, ya jerk. Give ’em something rousing, something a little jazzy! What else you got?”
“Crapholes of the famous?”
She’d seen the book, but no.
“What about your job, you wanna talk about that?”
No, I wasn’t going to talk about my stupid job. Things had recently reached a new low at the office. The police had dropped the charges against the pole-dancer’s father, on the grounds that they’d found no evidence. No evidence, my ass. What was the pole dance she did if not “evidence”? When I objected to their decision, reminding them about the broken arm, which alone was a classic sign of violent abuse, the cops said that, according to the girl’s mother, the kid fell down in the playground. So they believed the cowed mom, not me. But I’d looked into the guy’s soul, and it wasn’t pretty in there.
What’s more, the fat woman with the burn scars, who’d wanted to protect her son from bullying, had now undergone the liposuction she demanded, and died from post-op complications. So now the boy didn’t have a fat mom—he had no mom at all! And I’d attended a group scold-fest about freebies for nothing (in needless preparation for fixing those scars of hers), a whole hour of being lambasted for letting the side down and making my colleagues look bad, just because I did the occasional charity procedure.
“Nope, don’t want to talk about that,” I told Mimi.
“Oh.” She looked at me inquiringly. “Okay. Well, what happened to your ‘How I Hated School’ idea?”
“Okay, I’ll do that.”
“But you’ve got to narrow it down, Harrison.”
“Aw shucks.”
We walked on through dim-lit glades. And then I had it.
“Sex camp!” I declared, scaring a squirrel.
“Sex. . . what?” Mimi asked.
“Sex camp. It’s an old idea of Pete’s, a pal of mine in Virtue and Chewing Gum. We decided it was cruel to force teenagers to go to school. Nobody can concentrate at that age! They should all be having sex all day long, until their hormones settle down enough to study.”
“So you’d send them to some kind of concentration camp where they have to have sex all the time?”
“A nice camp! Where they have consensual sex. With each other, by the way, not dirty old men or something. Look around you, babe!” I said, gesturing at some horny youngsters we’d just passed. “Those kids don’t need high school, they need sex camp.”
“So, how long would they go for?”
“As long as it takes. Months. A few years maybe. Maybe more!”
“Hmmm, I just don’t think you’d get many parents to agree to their kid leaving home as soon as they hit puberty and going to a sex camp, however ‘nice’ it was.”
“I was thinking more around the age of fifteen or sixteen. And it would be totally voluntary! You don’t have to go. If you’re happy living with your stupid folks and going to school, stay there. But if you’d rather get laid, this is the camp for you!”
“And they just have sex? All day?”
“Sex is what the teenage body’s made for, not dribbling basketballs. Sex is all they’re good for! Nobody learns anything in high school. They’re too busy suppressing their sex drive. Most teenagers spend the whole time stoned, listening to crappy music, playing computer games, and turning into self-obsessed nut-jobs. By the time they’re old enough to wield any power, they’re too apathetic and depleted to use it. They’re ruined by all those years of sexual deprivation. High school’s such a waste of youthful energy, which should theoretically be a useful global resource. These kids should be out saving people from floods and famine, building pyramids, starting revolutions, and having sex!”
I could tell Mimi was getting to like the idea—she was a firm opponent, after all, of sexual deprivation. “So you’d give them a few other tasks as well, at this camp of yours, besides sex? A pyramid to build or something?”
“Oh, I guess so. If they were in the mood. And a bit of first-aid training maybe, carpentry, cooking, that sort of thing. Nothing too taxing.”
“How about contraception?”
“Yeah, get them straight on that first of all.”
“I think they should learn handyman skills, and. . . and farming. And teach them about the tides, Harrison! Nobody understands that stuff. And what about art, music, dancing. . . ?”
“All a fine complement to sex,” I agreed.
“And pottery? And then there’s weaving, and quilting!”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so. . . ”
“Sounds like matriarchy to me!”
We walked on, arm in arm, Mimi dreaming of matriarchy, and me mourning my past. All I did as a teenager was stare at my zits for four years, surrounded by beautiful unreachable girls that drove me nuts! I was stuck for a whole year sharing a bench in chemistry with Arnie, a seating arrangement we attributed to the fact we both had zits. One day the chemistry teacher, Mr. Zomboni—where do teachers get those names?—brought in this big bottle of hydrochloric acid and warned everybody it could cause severe burns. So Arnie turns to me and says, “You think it would work on zits?” That’s how much we hated ourselves.
We had no idea why we wanted the girls, or what we wanted from them. Most of our interpretations of womanhood were based on movies like Psycho (we’d moved on a little by then from maniac stories). We had developed a taste for the doomed and the damned, nice worn-down women ripe for the picking (this was the only type of girl we could imagine putting up with us!). Despite my awareness of Bee’s painful struggles to get dates, I was heavily influenced by people like Gus and Chester, who convinced us that girls had no real interest in sex and only put up with it as the result of a dreary system of bribes, lures, tricks, and entreaties. On my allowance, that meant no action at all: I was never going to come up with the corsages, fake pearls, and ice-cream sundaes necessary to make any headway towards getting some head.
We wasted years puzzling over girls and their labyrinthine mysteries (some cyclical, some conical!), combined with the widespread supposition that everybody was gay: we vastly underestimated the heterosexual impulse. (For all his bellowing about homosexuality, Gus was famed for his falsetto and butt-wiggling imitations of girls.) Chester with his big chest was our puberty mascot. We watched him, to see what would befall us next, not just biologically but emotionally. The perplexities of his love affairs! Chester finally tried to simplify it all for us by dividing girls into nuts or sluts. Nobody liked or trusted Chester, but we had a grudging respect for his encyclopedic understanding of the opposite sex, due primarily to his long-term molestation of his own sister, now dead: she’d drowned by accident, swimming in the Chevron (not strictly his fault, but somehow it shamed us all).
Adolescence is such a dead end, you put up with all this depravity because you think there’s no escape. There was a period when we were trying to deduce how big a bush the girls had, using their eyebrows as a gauge. The hairier the brows, the hairier the bush, we arbitrarily decided, and the hairier the bush, the more we scorned the girl! (Bette Davis’s eyebrows in Now, Voyager would have terrified us!) And what gets me now is how beautiful they all were, even the ones we were sure were ugly. We had our pick of a bunch of sixteen-year-old dolls and all we could do was mock them, number them according to our manly, mutually agreed bombshell-appeal score sheet, and plan mass outrages against them (never carried out). Our ignorance made us hate them; we blamed them for our own ineptitude. Oh, we were a pretty discriminating bunch all right, questioning every flaw and keeping a sharp eye out for bow legs, knock-knees, thick ankles, flat chests or alternatively, huge, unruly melons, stupid hairdos, mannerisms, and accumulations of fat in what we considered the wrong places. Now, after years as a cosmetic surgeon, all I wanted to do was look upon women with their flaws intact. Rounded, dented, dimpled, flabby thighs, what of it? they’re female legs, right?
The need for sex camp was clear—how else do you turn these fickle lads, these horny heathens, into valued members of society? Something Gus never achieved. Gus’s only solution to high-school dissatisfactions was to fantasize at length about a school massacre: Mrs. Benkowsky, the history teacher, begging for her life, Mrs. Hamnavoe breathing her last among her algebra books, Mr. Zomboni (chemistry) exiting fatally through a third-floor window, and old Mr. Leigh Hampton (woodwork)—best not to go into what Gus had planned for him, but various saws were going to come in handy. And then, the hundreds of girls caught in the crossfire, or machine-gunned on purpose, hiding under library tables or dying in full view with their skirts conveniently hitched up or torn off. “Yeah, yeah,” we told him, bored stiff, but still he continued, picturing the river of blood in the parking lot and having to thread his way through the bodies for a defiant stand-off on the roof of the gym. . .
I had to listen to this stuff! I was stuck with these guys: it was either them, or sitting around with Pete and his doldrums, his melancholy, his complaints about the low avocado quotient in his avocado salad. I shunned him, I shunned everybody, and risked even the accusations of homosexuality in my Herculean, Evel Knievel efforts to manoeuver my way through those corridors—throwing myself into books and music, and eventually launching myself over the heads of my contemporaries like they were so many empty barrels to vault.
Despite my recalcitrance as a student now, Mimi was determined to help me, so from that day on, we would often head over to the Village, eat some meatballs at The Little Owl and then go back to Mimi’s place to study famous speeches. According to her, Obama’s were models of hooks, inclusivity, anecdotes, limited-opportunity windows and whatnot. We looked at his inaugural, which was fine, but Kennedy’s is more memorable: “ask not. . . ask what. . . ask not. . . but what. . .”
“It’s the repetition,” Mimi informed me (she was very keen on repetition), “that gives the audience a chance to catch up. It’s comforting, and it helps emphasize stuff. Repetition can hide a lot of inconsistencies too. Of course, you can overdo it and sound like a feeb!”
“Thanks for the warning.”
“Martin Luther King’s a genius with repetition.”
“You mean the ‘I have a dream’ stuff.”
“Not just that. There’s one bit where he keeps saying, ‘Now is the time. . . Now is the time. . .’ Under all the gentility, he’s impatient. That’s what comes through.”
“Now is the time to kiss,” I ventured, and she concurred.
“Hey, wait, I’ve got a tape of it,” she cried, and ran out of the room.
“Of what?” I called after her.
“Of all these speeches.”
“I was scared you’d say that.”
We had one whole tutorial just on old Gus’s favorite, Winston Churchill, whose 1940 speech about fighting on the beaches had everything, according to Mimi: honesty, rhetoric, rhyme, passion and repetition. To me, it read like a lesson in military history, and suffered from purplish prose. But you can get away with a lot in wartime. Mimi pointed out that it’s when he quits reciting past events and changes into the future tense that the rockets really start to fly. She also liked it when he lowers his voice for the most famous bit.
“See, he holds back, and back, and back, only rising on the ‘never,’ in ‘we shall never surrender,’” she said, and played me the section several times, in which he talks about fighting in the fields, and in the streets, fighting on the hills and dales, with growing strength and confidence. . .
“We shall fight with commas,” I joked (on the page, I felt Churchill could have done with a few more periods).
“The audience provides the punctuation, if you say it right,” Mimi assured me. “That speech had them all yelling and weeping at the time. It’s dramatic stuff!”
I was touched by Mimi’s efforts. She really didn’t want to fail me as my presentation coach, and even though I couldn’t concentrate very well right now (just like a teenager in the first throes of lust!), and had managed to forget how scared I was of the whole faraway occasion, I appreciated her interest in instilling in me the rudiments of speechmaking success—and her apparent conviction that it would work.
Next, we read what Mandela said at his trial, a five-hour oration in which he coolly outlined the four forms of violence open to protestors, after law and democracy have failed them: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution.
“Ya see?” said Mimi. “He uses repetition too.”
But it was the ending that got me: his declaration that he’s willing to die if necessary, to achieve freedom and democracy.
“Now, there’s a guy who knows how to end something!” I commented.
Then we did Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956: Comrades! Comrades! What Mimi liked best about this one was the reference to Lenin’s wife. In the middle of the speech, Khrushchev quotes a letter from Lenin to Stalin, showing Lenin already knew what a scumbag Stalin was in 1923—because he was obnoxious to Mrs. Lenin on the phone. For Mimi (and maybe even for Khrushchev), this told you all you needed to know about Stalin. I took a liking to Khrushchev—but his speech was so long!
Old Russian joke: Is it possible to wrap an elephant in newspaper? Yes, if Khrushchev gave a speech the day before.
Long speeches reminded me of Gertrude. There’s a reason why conversation exists. It’s unnatural for one person (Gertrude) to hold the floor for ten hours! But Mimi said the whole trick of public speaking was in creating the illusion that it is sort of a conversation.
Gaddafi’s rambling speeches outdistanced even Khrushchev’s. Some of them could go on all day and night! But Mimi was lenient: we looked at one that was a mere four hours, and we really just skimmed it, paying particular attention to the ways in which the technique of repetition can go wrong.
“The guy’s trying to hang onto power by boring everybody to death,” Mimi said. “Like, giving a never-ending speech will somehow save him.”
“Yeah, who does he think he is? Scheherazade?”
It now occurred to Mimi that it might take me about four hours to explain my sex camp idea: unlike those guys, I’d only have about twenty minutes to get my message across at the graduation ceremony. “Not all audiences have the patience of Gaddafi’s crowd,” she warned. Aw, phooey, back to the ol’ drawing board! Now I had no topic, no skills, and I was no Churchill.
“I’m no Churchill,” I said to Mimi.
“Yes, you are,” Mimi said, with a confidence I found absurd, even from my loving speech coach. To make up for it all, she came out with me afterwards to buy a state-of-the-art toolkit.
“Why do you need it?” was her only question.
“I don’t know. I just always felt it was something I should have.”