c   h   a   p   t   e   r      2 

 The Electric Adventures of Alvin, Part Two

A Novel of Erotic Satire

Chapter 2 

c:/litnotes/grapeswrath/ rosasharn5

. . . Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him . . .

c:/notes/part2

I’m back. If you have read The Electric Adventures of Alvin (don’t deny it) you know where I went. The Inner Life is a canvas, and I am its Picasso. That was, of course, what started it all: Solitary imaginative adventurism; psycho-erotic escapism; jacking off; call it what you will. Fantasy – a normally innocuous vice that, in my case, has brought me wealth and misery, and may yet bring me a big fat divorce. 

It’s not that my fantasization, per se, is a problem for our marriage. It isn’t. In the years of our co-habitation, Beth and I have developed a Clintonesque ``don’t ask-don’t tell’’ policy regarding my Inner Life. From the start, she has asked remarkably few questions about my odd bathing habits (two long baths or showers a day, at least), or the startling rate at which we go through facial tissue around here. After our first fellatio encounter, before we were married, she began to comment on the notable lack of volume of my ejaculation, saying something about how nice it was not to find herself drowning in it – then she dropped the subject in mid-sentence, as if suddenly realizing, and avoiding, the obvious explanation (How does one keep a pitcher full while constantly pouring from it?). She never has asked the questions that anyone living with a fantasy addict might be expected to ask, and I have deduced that this is because she doesn’t want to risk having to hear the answers.

But my fantasy addiction did lead to my current predicament, in a convoluted Rube Goldberg sort of way, all starting with the non-existence of God. I determined, at age eleven, that God does not exist. This discovery complicated my desire for an orderly universe, there suddenly being no one in charge of the thing (men, I had already concluded, were fundamentally unqualified for the position). With the help of my angelic sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. McCormick (you know her from the book as Mrs. McCarthy), I came to suspect that the only divinity that exists is found between a woman’s legs. That suspicion is what prompted, much later, my search for the divine within the sensual, and then the sensual within the technological. And, finally, to define and dominate the nascent world of Internet sex, to become its first and most famous guru. You must believe me when I tell you I never intended any of this. It started innocently, a new and more electric method of masturbation, nothing more. I’m still not clear exactly where it was that I took the turn which has led me, disastrously, to The New York Times bestseller list.

c:/notes/congressnotes/congress24

SWORN TESTIMONY, SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY, CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE, PRESIDING

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: The chair recognizes the honorable senator from Arizona, Mister Haine.

SEN. HAINE: Thank you, Mister Chairman. Now, Mister . . . Mister Alvin. There is a question that I sometimes used to ask criminal defendants, back when I was a prosecutor. It’s a question that tends to cut through distractions and diversions and posturing and legal triangulation, and gets right to the heart of the matter.

MR. ALVIN: You’re going to ask me something that you used to ask criminal defendants?

SEN. HAINE: Yes. Is that all right?

MR. ALVIN: I don’t know. Am I a criminal defendant?

SEN. HAINE: You tell me, Toots.

MS. SCHUSTER: Mister Chairman, I object to the characterization of my client as `Toots.’

SEN. HAINE: Maybe you should have thought of that before you brought him in here in that ridiculous mask.

MS. SCHUSTER: Mister Chairman!

(AT THIS TIME, CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE CALLED A BRIEF RECESS)

c:/notes/fantanalysis

The thing is, fantasy, like most forms of addiction, requires ever-increasing stimuli to produce the same effect. That’s why it had to go as far as it has. When I was a high school student, the mere sight of my female classmates, walking down the halls, breasts straining against sweaters, was enough to propel me through days at a time. But eventually, if you go to the well too often, you need to see women’s naked breasts in order to reach climax. Then their vaginas. Then the hidden heaven inside their vaginas – their vaginal lips and labias and clitorises (or is it clitori?). And then – if you have a rare chemical composition such as mine – you will find you need an even more private part of her opened to you in order to continue producing the desired effect. It isn’t something you can find between her legs, no matter how widely she spreads them. You will finally need to gaze, unflinchingly, into the furthest corners of her Inner Life. And that’s where I found Alvin.

c:/notes/congressnotes/congress25

SWORN TESTIMONY, SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY, CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE, PRESIDING

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: We’re back on the record. Senator Haine, I would respectfully ask you at this time to adhere to our agreement regarding the issue of how the witness will be addressed.

SEN. HAINE: As ``Mister Alvin.’’

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: Yes. If you would.

SEN. HAINE: (inaudible)

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: I beg your pardon, sir?

MS. SCHUSTER: Mister Chairman, I object to that noise he just made!

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: Senator Haine. Please.

SEN. HAINE: My apologies. May I proceed?

CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: Please proceed.

SEN. HAINE: Mister Alvin, the question I would ask you is this: What would your mother think of what you have done?

c:/mydocs/biochildhood/notes36

I was raised by my father and his brother, no women in sight except the fake ones on television. My father was too old and ruined to have a son. He was as distant to me as an uncle, and my uncle – my father’s older brother – was incomprehensible. Uncle Martin was mentally handicapped, I understand now, though at the time I thought he was just quiet. That’s how little my father and I talked: He never explained to me, in all the years I was growing up, why Uncle Martin spoke only in one-word sentences, and spent most of his life watching television and farting.

I know appallingly little about how I came to be there, living in a large but neglected house in a neighborhood of old people in Indianapolis, with my burned-out father and his mildly retarded brother, two gray-haired shells of manhood whose notion of raising a boy was to make sure they didn’t trip over him. I understood, instinctively, even as a small child, that my father’s life had been ruined somehow, though I didn’t know how, and I still don’t. There had been some shipwreck, before my birth or maybe shortly afterward, that had condemned him to live the rest of his life marooned there on Washington Street with Uncle Martin, who farted, mumbled to himself and occasionally drooled, and with a son who seemingly had been dropped into his lap from the sky.

He never explained to me about women, about their softness and roundness – about their differences.

And he never explained to me about my mother. I don’t know anything about her, except that her first name was Marilyn. I don’t know why she wasn’t with me growing up. I don’t know if it was she who ruined my father’s life, or if she merely escaped from the ship before it wrecked. I’ve never seen her face, not even a picture of it.

c:/misc/biblquotes/matthew7:16

You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they?

c:/mydocs/biochildhood/dad

My father sent me to St. Ignatius, a big dark brick-and-stone all-boy Catholic school in south Indy, in the middle of the sixth grade. All us boys called it St. Ignoramus, and I in particular took bitter comfort in calling it that. I had been in public school, with girls, until my father had taken them away from me, after I had come home one day and asked my father why girls were flat in the front. That’s exactly how I had put it: ``Why are they flat in the front?’’ He had given me his familiar look of confusion, accompanied by that familiar shake of his head. I’d often seen the look and the shake together, the combination that said, ``I don’t understand the question,’’ though he never verbally said so much.

I had answered by pointing at my crotch, at the little sixth-grade bulge that was there, and saying, insistently: ``They’re flat in the front.’’

His confused look had dissolved into his oh-no look, the one he got whenever I dragged him into a topic that he couldn’t dispose of with one-word answers. The oh-no look involved pursing his lips tightly together and directing his eyes slightly away from mine, so that he gazed at whatever happened to be just over my left shoulder. After a moment of looking there, he had looked back into my questioning face and said: ``We’ll talk about that later.’’

We never did talk about it later. Instead, I went to St. Ignoramus the following week, a school where no one was flat in the front, where everyone had little bulges, where the crucifix, that gruesome symbol of torture and death, seemed to adorn every wall, door and window.

c:/mydocs/biochildhood/notes56

I’d never been in a church at that point that I could remember, and I had seen crucifixes only in passing. St. Ignoramus might as well have been decorated with shining little guillotines for all the sense it made to me.

c:/scifi/notes/realchat

The most common question I get from readers of The Electric Adventures of Alvin who send me letters – even more than the anatomical questions – is the question: ``Is the book real?’’ They are obsessed with the issue of reality in a way that I’m usually not. Maybe it’s because I reached the conclusion, so long ago, that fantasy is at least as valid as reality.

Generally, yes, Alvin is a true story. But not every detail. For an idea of what kinds of reality and non-reality went into The Electric Adventures of Alvin, consider the passage below, lifted from the final published version of the book. It’s in Chapter twenty-six, during one of the Internet sessions in The Room between Alvin and his friends, their typed words crawling across the miles and into one another’s computers:

Alvn:               I bet Gem wears that California sunshine like a summer

dress.

Gem4U:           Sometimes it’s the ONLY thing i wear, Alvin.

MinniMous:    I like a cold weather. Something to bundle up against.

Gem4U:           I’ll give you something to ``bundle up against,’’ dear :)

MinniMous:    Promise? ;)

Alvn:               I see your point, Min.

Alvn:               There is something about exterior cold

Alvn:               that makes interior warmth that much more appealing.

JaneyX:           What about it, Mikey? U need sub-zero to put you in the

mood?

Mikey000:       Hmm? What? Oh, sorry . . . I’m pondering ``interior

warmth’’ . . .

MinniMous:    lol!

Gem4U:           Just how `interior’ are you wanting to get, Miikey?

Gem4U:           Because I’m feeling my sunshine-dress starting to slip off me  . . .

Okay, now the real conversation, as it occurred, before I reworked it for the book. (I keep text copies of all my Internet exchanges, in a sub-directory in our computer marked ``SciFi’’.)

Alvn:               cold as hell in the mwest. gem I envy you

MinniMous:    fucking insruance guy wouldn’t leave us alone.

Gem4U:           minnie you fucked the insurance guy? good job!

MinniMous:    youd fuck the whole insurance company (slut)

JaneyX:           oh Alvin, you made me cold. Im getting some coffee

Mikey000:       i got it at 47, before it rose

Gem4U:           miky are you gay? i’m naked here. quit talking stocks.

MinniMous:    god you’re gross gem

Gem4U:           should try uncrossing your legs some time, min  :)~

MinniMous:    my legs are fine thanks. go stroke off and let us talk >:(

Mikey000:       anyone here got microsoft? microsoft’s up today

So, no, Alvin wasn’t word-for-word reality. Would you have paid twenty-one ninety-nine for it if it was?

c:/mydocs/notes12

If my father was trying to divert my attention from Femaleness by removing me from the midst of females, it had the opposite effect. Long before puberty, I harbored a platonic fascination with the female gender that laid the groundwork for my later obsessions. Like a scientist in the field, I studied their soft edges and hairless faces, sampled their perfumy smells, observed their smooth necks, lacking of Adam’s apples and better for it. Before women’s breasts were sexual to me, they were interesting. What the hell were those things? Getting to know the female gender as I toddled out into the world was something like exploring a new planet.

I decided, even before puberty, that I liked their planet better than mine. My mind was perpetually fixated on a different woman every month, it seemed, from the time of my earliest memories. (Women, not girls my own age. Even then, girls seemed to me to be but slight variations on boys – and therefore uninteresting – but by eleven, I’d figured out that women were a whole different story.)

Of course, there weren’t any women around who I knew well. But there were teachers, neighbors, my friends’ mothers, women in grocery stores, women in cars that passed by our car as my father drove me to school each morning. Through pre-pubescent eyes I looked out the back window at them like someone might look at a strange new animal in a zoo, something exotic and mysterious and possibly dangerous. Were they poison? Did they bite?

c:/misc/mccorm

St. Ignoramus was, ironically enough, where I first fell wholly in love with a woman. Two women, actually.

One was Mrs. McCormick. You know her, from Alvin, as Mrs. McCarthy, Alvin’s teacher. She’s the character that the Cleveland Board of Education labeled a statutory rapist, because of what I thought was my loving depiction of our relationship. ``Lolita in reverse!’’ fumed one school board member, as quoted by a Chicago Tribune article about the book being banned from the classrooms there. (The ban increased sales throughout the Midwest, according to Carol, my agent.)

c:/docs/wrathnotes

My other love that year was Rose of Sharon, the young pregnant woman depicted in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. We read the book in an English course taught by a nun who, I suspected from her disengaged teaching style, hadn’t actually read any of the material she was making us read. Grapes of Wrath was proof of it. It clearly was too advanced for most sixth-graders to even understand it, and for those of us who did, there were some savage assessments of religion. To this day, every time I see a panting dog, I think of that pervert preacher.

Then, of course, there was the book’s description of Rose of Sharon’s ``plump body – full soft breasts and stomach, hard hips and buttocks that had swung so freely and provocatively as to invite slapping and stroking . . . ’’

c:/thoughts/rosasharnbreasts

Steinbeck’s physical descriptions of Rose of Sharon wasn’t actually what made me fall in love with her (though it was a good start). It was the last page of the book, in which the Joads meet up with the starving man, and Rose of Sharon, in the closing lines, bares her breast and takes his mouth to it.

The passage sent me scrambling to the school library, to the medical references there – b, breast  – and when I finally made sense of what it was she was doing for him, I fell so hard in love with her that my sixth-grade mind gave her a face and a voice and a persona free of the page, and a place in my narrow low bed, where she would spend many nights, saving me from starving.

c:/bibnotes/genesis4

. . .  And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch . . . And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech. And Lamech took unto him two wives . . .

c:/poboxlist/misc/couchwoman1

Here’s one of the letters from Alvin’s post office box. I’m looking at it now, lying in the open pages of a dictionary, which I will quickly and quietly close if I hear Beth stirring in the other room. It is a business-sized white envelope addressed simply to ``Alvin,’’ followed by the address of my publisher. There is an Oklahoma City postmark but no return address. It arrived three weeks ago.

Inside is a handwritten note – a woman’s writing, no doubt about it – in blue ink. I’ll scan it into my computer soon, but I like to hold it first. It came with three dark, grainy Polaroid pictures of a naked woman who looks to be about forty years old, maybe one-hundred-fifty pounds, with dark, mid-length hair, thick legs but fairly thin arms, low-hanging narrow breasts, each capped with an unusually wide areola, covering the whole end of each breast and centered with a stiff, round-topped nipple. Between her legs is a vast shock of black pubic hair, extending from either side of the vagina past the crease of her thighs, so that a bikini wouldn’t have worked, and upward well into the curve of her lower belly, which protrudes in a little hint of middle-aged spread.

She is reclining on a gold-striped couch, a worn-looking one. Her eyes have been blotted out with a black marker, mask-like, right on the surface of the Polaroid, but everything else is perfectly visible and carefully kept in-frame, from her wide, toothy smile right down to her painted toenails. The photographer had to have been standing at least ten feet back.

In the first picture, the woman has her legs together and is leaning back on the couch and lifting her hips forward, so that her thick pubic hair forms an exaggerated mound of black. In one hand she holds a large pink dildo with a bulbous head and rubber nodules near the base – and, you can barely make out, the word ``Alvin’’ written in black marker along the shaft.

In the second photo, she has spread her legs wide open, to reveal pink labial lips, clitoris, and the hint of empty darkness at the opening to her vaginal canal. One hand is pulling the upper vagina open – a thumb and forefinger holding apart the lips on either side of her clitoris, red and shiny – and the other is holding the pink dildo and resting the bulbous head of it at the very bottom of the vaginal opening, with the shaft still positioned carefully to show the word ``Alvin’’ on it.

In the third photo, the entire dildo – I’m estimating nine inches here – has disappeared into her vagina, so that only the very back end of the plastic is visible, barely poking out from the pink, shiny flesh. She uses both hands to hold her vaginal lips wide open, showing how much of the dildo is inside her. Her smile, in the last picture, is directed at the camera, and wider than in the other two photos.

c:/poboxlist/misc/couchwomanNoteScan

This is the handwritten note:

Dear Alvin: My husband took these! Do you like them? We took them after I read your book! You made me cum so many times with that book Alvin! I loved chapt. 11! I told my husband to fuck me from behind when I was reading it and he did! Do you like my pussy? I used to shave it but I stopped after I read your book! I know you like hairy pussys! I grew as much hair as I could! All this pussy hair is for you, Alvin! I hope these pictures make you cum! I’m going to tell my husband to fuck me now and I will pretend its you! (don’t worry he knows I’m doing that!) love ml!

c:/nunthoughts8

During those Grapes of Wrath weeks, I suspected that most, perhaps all, of my classmates hadn’t actually read the book, but were just skimming the Cliff’s Notes, as was customary. Still, I couldn’t believe the nun had actually assigned it. I cautiously brought it up with her once, during class discussion – ``I didn’t quite understand the ending,’’ I lied. ``Can you explain it?’’ – and she responded with an earnest monologue about how government intervention during the Depression had saved ``millions and millions of Americans, including the Joads.’’ I had no idea what she was talking about until years later, when I happened to catch the Henry Fonda movie on late-night television.

c:/misc/femlist0

I sat down once, a few years ago, and tried to list all the women I’ve been in love with in my life. I listed more than two hundred of them, starting with Mrs. McCormick, and working my way clear through to the woman who had smiled at me at the check-out counter at the donut shop where I had bought a cup of coffee the morning that I started writing the list.

c:/mydocs/mccormthoughts

Mrs. McCormick was one of my teachers at St. Ignoramus when I was eleven. I got her fired late in my second semester. It was on the same morning that I discovered God doesn’t exist.

c:/mydocs/mccormthoughts2

Mrs. McCormick. Isn’t that stupid? For all the love and lust she has inspired in me for the past quarter-century, I don’t even know her first name.

c:/notes/miscnotes/sindi69a

One of my first on-line friends and lovers was a woman named SINDI-69, who told me during our first Internet chat that she didn’t intend to die silently. She put it just like that: ``i dn’t intend to die silently.’’ I met her in a chat room after I was married, not long after I first learned to use the Internet, but long before I wrote Alvin and got rich and ruined my life.

Sindi fancied herself a self-trained computer expert (I’d had my doubts, even before she stunningly confirmed them later). She was obsessed with the fact that she had nothing left of her dead mother except flat, lifeless photos; no thoughts, no feelings, no words. Not wanting that fate, she began keeping a journal on her computer, intended to go to all her friends and family if she died.

But then she worried that, if she died suddenly, those people wouldn’t think to look in her computer and would never find the words she wrote for them. So she created an elaborate computer program to automatically fire off copies of her journal to everyone she knew, via email, if she didn’t enter a password every week. She called it her ``Post-Mortem Program,’’ and she dreamt of pitching it to Microsoft. As long as she entered the password by midnight every Sunday, the journal would stay tucked away in her computer. But should she ignore it for more than a week – because, say, she’d been hit by a truck and was dead – the program would automatically kick in and fire off copies of the journal to every email address she had listed.

This wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill diary, either, but a complex, remarkably complete documentation of her entire life and what she called her ``Inner Life’’: the dormant feelings, hidden memories, base philosophies and unutterable fantasies that make up the secret worlds inside our minds.

When I read her journal that winter, having received it through my computer one Monday morning along with just about every other person Sindi ever knew, I was struck immediately by how familiar her secret world was to me. Her Inner Life, like mine and the others we chatted with, was heavily mired in sexual obsession and the complications that always seem to follow it. In her journal, she confessed to a lengthy affair with her husband’s sister – that was the bad one, in her view – and scores of lesser offenses, sexual and financial. She told of the time she stopped at the roadside bar in an unfamiliar town on her way to a conference one recent summer and, intoxicated with her anonymity, stripped for the patrons and serviced three of them in a small office behind the kitchen. She told of stashing away something like sixty-thousand dollars in company funds during her twelve years at her job as a junior partner at a Minneapolis consulting firm, a little at a time, keeping it in a vinyl lunch bag in the employee refrigerator, right next to the celery sticks her boss ate for lunch ``every fukking day of his worthlss life.’’

In the journal, she told the friends she’d never truly liked exactly what she thought of them, while confessing unbridled lust for several others, who’d certainly had no idea of it. She revealed to the general universe that her secret nickname for her sexually inattentive husband was ``Limpy.’’ She had carefully arranged it so that, should she die, all of them – friends, boss, Limpy, me, everyone – would instantly know everything about her that she couldn’t reveal while she was alive.

As time went on, she took it further, arranging to live out certain fantasies after death that she couldn’t realistically do in life. She scanned into her computer a series of explicit nude photos of herself, face and all, taken with a camera on a timer (because her husband didn’t do those sorts of things, she explained in the journal, bitterly) and addressed it to the Hustler magazine website, with a note giving her full name, address, occupation, her ``likes and dislikes’’ (``pulsating shower heads, yes; my husband’s limp cock, no’’) and a signed release form – for use in their ``Beaver Hunt’’ section in the event of her death (``always wnted to do it but cant in this life, w/my stuckup job & repressed husband,’’ she told me once).

She also scanned in a series of financial documents making clear that she’d bilked the government out of almost fifty-thousand dollars in taxes. She addressed it to the IRS website with the simple message: ``I won.’’

I knew about the existence of the journal before I ever saw it – Sindi had bragged many times during our chats about her clever Post-Mortem Program – so when I signed onto the Internet that Monday before dawn and saw it sitting there in my email file, I assumed the worst. I was grieving inwardly while trying to act normal over breakfast with Beth that morning, and I cried softly for a half-hour after she left for class.

Around noon that day, I got another email from Sindi, this one sent minutes earlier, according to the data trail:

c:/mydocs/mynotes/sindinotes

Alvin: not dead, had a glitch in the post-mortem program, it sent out to everyone. Shit. Flying out of twin cities this afternoon, cant say where, i have some legal problems. Limpy has locked me out. Just wnted to let you know Im alive, will check in later –sindi (ps – I hate to ask but no one else is speaking to me – - will you please call hustler and pretend to be my lawyer and threaten to sue if they publish those pics? thanx)

c:/notes/sindihustler

I did what she asked and called Hustler and tried to bluff them into not publishing the photos, but I’m afraid I didn’t do a very good lawyer impersonation. The assistant editor I talked to – a woman, strangely enough – said their own lawyers had reviewed the release form and given the go-ahead to publish the photographs.

``I have to warn you,’’ I said, trying to sound lawyerly, ``if you do that, we’ll, um, get an injunction.’’

She paused and said: ``An injunction?’’

``Yes. A really, um, serious one, too. A federal one, if necessary.’’

She paused again and said: ``How do you get an injunction after something is published?’’ At which point I hung up.

c:/misc/mccormknotes3

Mrs. McCormick was probably in her early thirties, at most, when my eleven-year-old eyes first landed on her at St. Ignoramus, though like all grownups, she seemed impossibly old to me. I loved her from the second I saw her. She had long, reddish-gold hair, freckles, warm eyes, wispy orange eyebrows, blinding white skin. She was (I understand now, in memory) heavy around the hips and rear end, but I saw it only as softness. Her breasts were modest but, in my sixth-grade opinion, magnificent. She smiled at me, a little longer than was strictly necessary, as I walked into class that first day, and that smile was enough to put me in love with her.

She was one of two teachers in my religion class. The other teacher was Father Lovett, a hulking, gray-templed man with horn-rimmed glasses and thin lips. He was in charge – men were always in charge of women, I was learning – and Mrs. McCormick mostly stood to one side of the blackboard as Father Lovett dryly explained God and the universe.

While Father Lovett glowered from the front of the class, behind an imaginary line that neither he nor the class ever crossed, Mrs. McCormick walked among us, passing out the tests and collecting them, leaning over desks while we worked, offering guidance. She was quiet, but she smiled a lot, especially at me. I was her favorite, there was no doubt about that. Maybe it was my straight, oddly adult nose, or my lack of interest in the boyish nonsense that occupied the rest of the students. Maybe it was the flawlessly organized way I arranged my work on my desk – pencils at the top, pens at the bottom, erasers to the left, papers to the right.

Or maybe it was something else entirely. Sometimes I’d look away from one of Father Lovett’s dusty monologues to see Mrs. McCormick standing there by the side of the blackboard, just staring at me and smiling warmly behind her freckles, like we had a secret together, like she understood me, strange as I obviously was. Like I was part of some hidden and exclusive club, whether I knew it yet or not.

She dressed modestly, her blouses always buttoned high, which only added to my need to know what was under them. One morning early on, while she leaned over my desk helping me fill in the blanks in a story about the Jesus myth, I saw the deep shadow of her cleavage when the fabric of her blouse between two of her front buttons creased just right, divine intervention if there ever was any. I saw the soft swell of the top of her firm right breast, a lonely little freckle there, similar to the ones all over her nose and forearms, but sitting there all by itself under her blouse. Were there more of those freckles on the rest of her breast, I wondered? On the gently hanging underside of it, on the soft round outer edge, around the swell of her nipple? I felt an erection, one of the first ones I had ever been conscious of, and I marveled at the apparent cause and effect.

From that point on, I spent every day of class looking at Mrs. McCormick’s breasts and feeling my tiny penis swell, then looking away from her breasts and feeling it deflate, then looking back at them and inflating it again. I had an almost scientific detachment from what I was doing; I might as well have been pushing a button on a strange new machine, over and over again, watching how its gears turned.

The problem is, at age eleven, I had not yet learned the art of looking at breasts, that way of glancing at them, surreptitiously, while their owners’ eyes are turned away; of visually caressing them, lovingly but quickly, watching the eyes and the breasts at the same time and releasing the breasts a split-second before the eyes return. I hadn’t yet learned that kind of subtle strategizing. I spent every day of class staring at Mrs. McCormick’s breasts as openly and directly as a more normal kid would stare at a television set.

Mrs. McCormick was obviously, painfully aware that she had become my training ground in Femaleness. She still smiled at me, but now the freckled affection in her smiles was augmented with saintly patience. She began crossing her arms a lot, or holding her papers strategically over her breasts, shielding them from my insistent gaze. I vividly remember a few times when I awkwardly craned my neck to try and get a view of her breasts around some notebook or folder she had put there to prevent me from seeing them.

c:/misc/mccormknotes4

What can I say? I was eleven.

c:/mydocs/mythoughts/mccorm

Through all the breast-ogling and breast covering-up, I never sensed anger or annoyance from Mrs. McCormick. She knew she had something a little dangerous, as all women do – not something bad, but certainly not something for an eleven-year-old boy. She was protecting me from it. She was locking the liquor cabinet, hiding the car keys, covering up the electrical outlets. But she never blamed me for trying. She understood that part, even if the laws of man and God prevented her from obliging it. She kept smiling, patiently, even as I methodically attempted to get around the obstacles she placed between me and her breasts. God, I loved her.

c:/documents/biblenotes/genesis2:17

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

c:/misc/mccormknotes7

The morning I got Mrs. McCormick fired was a warm one in spring, sunny and bright, the warmest morning we’d yet had that year. I often think about the way the sun lit her up as I watched her, through the second-story classroom window, walking alone away from the stone-and-ivy campus of St. Ignoramus. The sunlight glowed on her red-gold hair and made her look like she had a halo – ironic, when you consider the reason she’d gotten fired. She turned a little when she got the front sidewalk, so that I could see her face, and could see that she was still smiling.

The morning had begun with a lecture from Father Lovett about Adam and Eve, a concept I was already having a problem with. The year prior, I had been in a public school, where a biology teacher had explained to us that we couldn’t marry our own relatives because that would reduce the gene pool and allow genetic deficiencies to flourish. Now here was Father Lovett, telling me that all of us – me and my friends and my dad and my Uncle Martin and Mrs. McCormick – we all came from Adam and Eve, two naked people who had gotten punished for the crime of gaining knowledge.

Two people. Just two. It didn’t take a biologist to figure out the problem here.

I raised my hand, interrupting something Father Lovett was saying about Original Sin. He stopped talking, looked at me coolly over his horn-rimmed glasses, and said: ``Yes, Alvin?’’

``It’s `Adam,’ ’’ I corrected him.

c:/misc/mccormknotes8

Yes, that’s how I came up with the screenname Alvin. Because that gray-skinned priest always called me that. You’d think he, of all people, could remember a name like Adam.

c:/litnotes/grapeswrath/preacherdog

A thick-furred yellow shepherd dog came trotting down the road, head low, tongue lolling and dripping. Its tail hung limply curled, and it panted loudly. Joad whistled at it, but it only dropped its head an inch and trotted fast toward some definite destination. "Goin’ someplace," Joad explained, a little piqued. "Goin’ for home maybe."

The preacher could not be thrown from his subject. "Goin’ someplace," he repeated. "That’s right, he’s goin’ someplace. Me I don’t know where I’m goin’. Tell you what, I use ta get the people jumpin’ an’ talkin’ in tongues, an’ glory-shoutin’ till they just fell down an’ passed out. An’ some I’d baptize to bring ’em to. An’ then you know what I’d do? I’d take one of them girls out in the grass, an’ I’d lay with her. Done it ever’ time. Then I’d feel bad, an’ I’d pray an’ pray, but it didn’t do no good. Come the nex’ time, them an’ me was full of the sperit, I’d do it again . . .’’

c:/misc/mccormknotes9

``If Adam and Eve were the first people,’’ I asked Father Lovett, ``then where did the rest of us come from?’’

Father Lovett blinked, like he didn’t understand the question. Then he said: ``Well, we … we came from Adam and Eve. That’s the whole point here.’’

``Okay,’’ I said. ``But … so … Adam and Eve had children?’’

``Yes,’’ said Father Lovett. ``Of course they had children, otherwise none of us would be here. But they only had children after they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Before that, they were pure and free from sin, so they couldn’t have had children.’’

Mrs. McCormick was, as usual, standing to one side of the blackboard when Father Lovett said this, and I’m sure I saw a shadow cross her face.

``Okay, but if they were the only people,’’ I continued, ``and they had children, and we all came from their children …’’ I noticed Mrs. McCormick looking at me, not quite smiling. She knew where I was going with it.

``Two of their children were Cain and Abel,’’ Father Lovett said, looking away from me and getting back into lecture mode. ``Can anyone tell me the story of Cain and Abel?’’

I raised my hand again, then spoke up without waiting for Father Lovett to call on me: ``But who did Adam and Eve’s children marry?’’

c:/misc/mccormknotes11

Father Lovett stopped in mid-sentence, and stared at the floor for a moment, annoyed, before looking at me again. He had seen the question coming and had been trying to avert it, but now here it was, demanding that he deal with it. He eyed me with a mix of consternation and resignation. Then he said dryly, as if reading from a cue-card: ``That’s one of many questions that the Bible doesn’t specifically answer, and doesn’t have to. We accept that Adam and Eve’s children got married and populated the Earth. Now, like I said, two of Adam and Eve’s children were Cain and Abel, who …’’

``Okay,’’ I interrupted again, ``but Adam and Eve’s children had to marry someone. Did they marry each other?’’

``The … the Bible isn’t specific about that,’’ said Father Lovett, his annoyance deepening.

``That would be incest, wouldn’t it?’’

``Look, Alvin, there are some things we just accept as …’’

``It’s `Adam’.’’

``Adam. Right. Look, the story of Alvin and Eve … um, Adam and Eve … is very complex, …’’

``If they didn’t marry their sisters,’’ I pressed on, ``then that means there were other people who weren’t the children of Adam and Eve?’’

``We are all the children of Adam and Eve,’’ Father Lovett rasped. ``There wasn’t anyone else.’’

``So their children married each other?’’ I asked again.

``Maybe,’’ Father Lovett said, apparently hoping the compromise would end the issue. ``The Bible doesn’t say. Now, about Cain and Abel –’’

``So they committed incest,’’ I said, not judging but merely trying to get it straight. ``Isn’t incest a sin?’’

``Yes, incest is a sin, and no, we don’t know that they committed incest.’’

Father Lovett was nearing his limit with me, but Mrs. McCormick’s face was again lit with a small smile. She was amused, but there was more than that behind the smile. A decision was being made, I know now.

c:/litnotes/grapeswrath/preacherdog3

Joad carefully drew the torso of a woman in the dirt, breasts, hips, pelvis. "I wasn’t never a preacher," he said. "I never let nothin’ get by when I could catch it. An’ I never had no idears about it except I was goddamn glad when I got one."

"But you wasn’t a preacher," Casy insisted. "A girl was just a girl to you. They wasn’t nothin’ to you. But to me they was holy vessels. I was savin’ their souls. An’ here with all that responsibility on me I’d just get ’em frothin’ with the Holy Sperit, an’ then I’d take ’em out in the grass."

"Maybe I should of been a preacher," said Joad.

c:/notes/mrsmcckthoughts

I’m not arrogant enough to assume that my childish questions in class were what caused Mrs. McCormick to revolt against God. Mrs. McCormick (I believe now) had been dancing very close to a very deep line for a very long time. I merely nudged her over it.

c:/mydocs/fatherlovett0

``If they didn’t commit incest,’’ I continued, emboldened by Mrs. McCormick’s smile, ``then that means there were other people.’’

``There weren’t other people. I already told you that.’’ Father Lovett had had it. ``Listen, Alvin –’’

``Adam.’’

``– there are some things we just accept, and this is one of them: There were no people before Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve’s children didn’t commit incest. Period.’’

And that’s when Mrs. McCormick spoke up from her post at the side of the class. She said, softly but clearly: ``That’s impossible.’’

c:/notes/mccormick57

Her voice was like a breeze as she said it. The whole class froze, Father Lovett froze, time, it seemed, froze. I looked at Mrs. McCormick as intently as I’d ever looked at her, not at her breasts this time but at her face, at the wide, alive eyes and the small, confident smile. She was the most beautiful thing that had ever breathed. Father Lovett was staring at her, too, but he clearly didn’t share that opinion.

``I’m sorry, Mrs. McCormick?’’ he asked, deep red warning in his voice.

``It’s impossible,’’ Mrs. McCormick said again, lightly. ``Either there was someone other than Adam and Eve’s family, or else their whole family committed incest. It’s a logical axiom.’’

``Mrs. McCormick,’’ Father Lovett said, ``you’re not being helpful right now.’’

``And in fact,’’ Mrs. McCormick continued, ``if you’re going to take that story literally, then we all commit incest, every time we have sex.’’

Father Lovett was red as blood. ``Mrs. McCormick, you will not use language like that around these children – ’’

``Sex? Is that the problem?’’ Mrs. McCormick was smiling wider now. ``Oh, yes, that’s always the problem, isn’t it? You men tell them all these stories of murder and rape and hell, but the second someone mentions sex . . .’’

``Mrs. McCormick,’’ Father Lovett said quietly, ``I’d like you to leave the room now.’’

She wasn’t smiling anymore. She said, slowly, demandingly, her voice laced with quiet outrage, the kind that builds for years:

``How dare you tell children that making children was the worst thing humans ever did?’’

c:/mynotes/wikipedia/breastnotes2357

Breasts play an important part in human sexual behavior; they are also important female secondary sex characteristic.[9] Compared to other primates, human breasts are proportionately large throughout adult females' lives and may have evolved as a visual signal of sexual maturity and fertility.[10] On sexual arousal breast size increases, venous patterns across the breasts become more visible, and nipples harden. Breasts are sensitive to touch as they have many nerve endings, and it is common to press or massage breasts with hands during sexual intercourse (as it is with other bodily areas representing feminine secondary sex characteristics as well).[11] Oral stimulation of nipples and breasts is also common. Some women can achieve breast orgasms. See also: Mammary intercourse; Toplessness; Breast fetishism.

c:/mydocs/mccormick58

Mrs. McCormick stared down Father Lovett and let the question hang there a moment. He didn’t have an answer.

She glared at him a moment longer, studying him, not so much angry as dismissive. He was vanquished; he had nothing else to say. He glanced at the door and silently invited her to use it. As the class watched in a tomb-like silence, she gathered up some papers, held them across her chest with both arms, and stepped toward the door.

She stopped in front of my desk, right in front of it, and smiled down at me. She didn’t say goodbye, but her smile told me many things, one after another, in those few seconds, changing shape on her face almost imperceptibly with each message.

c:/notes/mccormick59

First, her smile said, Don’t feel bad about this, it wasn’t your fault.

c:/mycomputer/programs/notes/ mccormick69

Then it said, Good luck in life, Adam, I’ll be thinking about you.

c:/mccormick61

            There was a Thank you in there somewhere, I’m certain.

c:/mydocuments/misc/ mccormick01

And then there was the message from the smile that my eleven-year-old mind couldn’t quite decipher, but which I recognize now, in memory.

This is what you’ve been wondering about, it said. This is for you.

 Her eyes widened a tiny bit, her smile tightened a little at the edges, and without apparent impetus or warning she lowered the bundle of papers from her chest, so that she was holding them at waist-level.

Instinctively, my eyes dropped from her face and settled on her breasts, straining behind the fabric of her light-green blouse. Each of the two gentle mounds was topped with a tiny hint of protruding nipple. I zeroed in on them like a hawk spotting prey.

I can only imagine what the scene must have looked like to Father Lovett and the class: A student and teacher facing each other in silence, not talking, not quite making eye contact. She just stood there, still smiling, still holding the papers at waist-level, declining to block my view of her breasts.

c:/mynotes/wikipedia/breastnotes2358

Zoologists point out that no female mammal other than the human has breasts of comparable size, relative to the rest of the body, when not lactating and that humans are the only primate that has permanently swollen breasts. This suggests that the external form of the breasts is connected to factors other than lactation alone.[citation needed]

c:/notes/mccorm&rosasharn

Late that night, in bed, I re-read the end of The Grapes of Wrath, the part about Rose of Sharon, offering up her soft full bosom as if on a plate. I knew, even at eleven, that I wasn’t supposed to find the scene as . . . affecting . . . as I did – she’d lost her baby, he was starving to death, it’s a good bet neither was really in the mood. But why then did Steinbeck have her smiling at the end? Smiling ``mysteriously,’’ as he put it.

c:/notes/mccormick72

Mrs. McCormick didn’t move until I looked back up at her eyes; I swear, she would have stood there all morning, waiting for me to decide when to look back up. When I did, she casually brought the papers back up to her chest, then gave me one last smile. Welcome to a new world, it said.

And then she stepped through the door and was gone. The bell rang a few minutes later, just in time to allow me and the rest of the class to stampede to the window and see Mrs. McCormick walk off the campus for the last time.

c:/misc/lovett28

Father Lovett watched her go, too. Then he looked down at me and said darkly, ``I hope you’re happy.’’ I was.

c:/misc/chat/churchtalk

MinniMous:    U never go to church alvin?

Alvn:               Why would I?

MinniMous:    you need it more than most

JaneyX:           ha ha

Alvn:               min, yor married. what would your preist think of our

chats?

MinniMous:    wouldn’t like it.

Gem4U:           people this conversation is getting BORING

Alvn:               don’t you masturbate?

MinniMous:    yes the church is wrong about that one

Alvn:               don’t you agree with right to divorce?

Alvn:               and right to marry outside your religion?

Mikey000:       lighten up alvin

Gem4U:           zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Alvn:               and arent you prochoice?

MinniMous:    yes and I don’t agree with church on everything …

MinniMous:    … but on a lot of things I do agree …

MinniMous:    … I take the good parts of it and ignore the bad.

Alvn:               So the church is a smorgasborg?

Gem4U:           yes. EAT ME, minnie.

c:/mydocuments/notes/pbrtythoughts

Two years after the last time I saw Mrs. McCormick, puberty hit (like a train) and my love for her and all other women was joined by lust. (I had by this time returned to the coed public school system, my father no longer able to afford a religious education, thank god.)

By age thirteen, watching women had become my primary reason for getting up in the morning: watching exquisitely blossoming women in the desks around me at school, watching professional women standing at the blackboards, watching motherly women with babies in tow at the grocery store. I was erect more often than not. I loved watching the swelling fabric of their shirts, the flatness between their legs, the tiny shadow of cleavage below their collar bones, promising the only heaven that exists. I am a feminist – don’t laugh, I am – but it is a great myth of the feminist movement that obsession with female bodies necessarily signals intellectual diminishment of the women who own them. I loved their mounds and flatness and curves for the same reasons I loved the life in their eyes, the composure in their voices, their quiet strength, their tendency toward tolerance, the patient way their minds worked. It was all part of the combination that made them women, and women were the whole point.

The men in my life up to that time had been the church priests, my father and Uncle Martin, that honorable trinity of manhood: intolerance, silence and flatulence. Men, I concluded (by age thirteen), were a junk-gender, completely without redeeming qualities, having no legitimate purpose on earth but to help promulgate the female of the species. It was a great accident of history that men had emerged as the dominant gender, something that would be funny if not so disturbing, as if we woke up one day to find that the dogs were walking the people. It was so clear to me, even then: Men were irrelevant; women were the whole point – the whole point.

c:/notes/clarencechess

``I’m surprised you like chess,’’ Clarence, my heavy homosexual co-worker, asked me once, while we played on the plastic chess set in the break room at Lawrence, Hardy & Robinson during lunch.

``Surprises you? Am I that bad?’’ I asked.

``I just know how you feel about men. Chess is a masculine game.’’

``Bullshit,’’ I said, moving my rook into attack position. ``It’s a feminine game. I’d even call it a feminist game. Masculine games require helmets. Chess is a game of thought.’’

``It’s a game of war,’’ Clarence pointed out.

``The queen is the most powerful piece on the board,’’ I countered. ``The king is practically impotent.’’

``Especially yours,’’ Clarence said, moving his bishop. ``Check-mate.’’

c:/notes/Minnie/mintalk3

By the end of high school, I was an awkward, skinny, pimply kid whose voice cracked and whose clothes never matched, but I also had more female friends and than any male I knew. Women loved me for my lack of threat, my apparent lack of sexuality. Can you believe that? In a way, they were right. Even then, I didn’t specifically want to have sex with them. I definitely wanted to look at them, and preferably to look at them naked (though that happened just once), but the act of thrusting my penis into their vaginas wasn’t a goal that drove me in the way it drove every male around me.

That’s not to say there wasn’t an intensely sexual component to my female friendships. There was that component, especially with Mindy, the slight, small-breasted, plain-looking, dishwater blonde girl who decided for some reason (starting when we were both fifteen) that I should be her primary confidant on sexual issues. Mindy told me about her thoughts, her dreams, her plans (she was going to be a lawyer). And her body. By the middle of junior year, she’d offered enough information about the landscape under her clothing that to this day I can picture her naked, in detail, though I never actually saw her in that state. I deduced, for example, that her nipples were unusually stiff much of the time, presenting problems (``I do wear a padded bra, but only because I, um, need to, ah, keep things under control. Two things, actually. You know?’’). I knew that the mound of hair between her legs was also an issue, especially in the summer, during bikini season (``I think I’m, uh, kind of, um, shall we say, abundant, in some ways. Thank goodness for Nair. You know?’’).

She routinely reported to me, in a strangely official way, the few things she let boys do with her, the French kissing and the inner-thigh-touching, and the first time she let a boy fondle her cone-shaped breasts under her bra, in the basement rec-room of her house. I wasn’t invited to do any fondling myself; that wasn’t my role, and I never sought it. She called me ``Adam-ski,’’ an amalgam of my first and last names.

c:/notes/Minnie/mintalk4

``I didn’t like it when he squeezed my nipples. It hurt a little,’’ she told me, as we walked to geometry class. ``But it was okay when he was just sort of brushing his fingers against them. You know?’’

c:/medianotes/alvinbans

By Claire Ottoman

Chicago Tribune

CLEVELAND – The Cleveland Board of Education on Tuesday voted unanimously to ban the controversial book The Electric Adventures of Alvin from school libraries throughout the district, citing its depiction of an unconsummated romance between a female teacher and a young male student.

``Unconsummated, my foot!’’ exclaimed board member Russell Baxter, during a heated exchange with a small group of the book’s fans who challenged the ban. ``You don’t have to read very far between the lines to see that it wasn’t arithmetic she was teaching that kid!’’ . . .

c:/misc/miscnotes/firstfuck

I had sexual intercourse for the first time at a Christmas party during my senior year of high school, with a casual friend and classmate, Cathy McKendricks, a short, blonde fellow senior festooned in knit leggings and smeared mascara who, drunk on spiked eggnog, led me into the basement rec-room of the house where the party was and kissed me there on a worn green couch and unzipped me and took out my erection and yanked down her spandex pants and straddled me and took me deep into her folds. I came immediately. She continued squirming around for a minute or two, then excused herself, went into the bathroom around the corner, vomited, and passed out. I walked home. I wouldn’t attempt to enter a woman again for another two years.

c:/tkbk

In the notes Mindy used to pass to me in class, she would sign them with an acronym: TK&BK. She put it in my yearbook as well. I didn’t understand what it meant, but I felt like I was supposed to know, and I didn’t want to let on that I didn’t know, so I never asked. The initials weren’t hers or mine or any that I recognized. Just four little letters, apropos of nothing.

c:/adamwritingnotes/web notes/religion

Some pop-culture website with too much time and bandwidth on its hands (Slate, I think it was) posted a long analysis last year positing that The Electric Adventures of Alvin is ``the Bible of a new form of secular religion,’’ one based on sex and technology rather than myth and mysticism, but sharing that ancient religious goal of building a belief system to help us define the indefinable questions of life. ``The book may appear at first to be strictly lascivious, but the old, stubborn question that has founded many a church – what is truth? – lurks behind every passage,’’ the piece revealed, which was news to me. ``Strictly lascivious’’ would have been just fine, in my view.

But I have to say, I was intrigued with the wider premise: That as religion falls away in an increasingly enlightened world, two resulting, intertwined aspects of our evolution – sexual exploration and technological advancement – are rising to replace the old myths and superstitions that were once our primary tool for defining reality. I don’t necessarily want the responsibility for that task, defining reality (if you’ve read Alvin, you’d have to agree that I’m probably not the guy for the job). But it did get me thinking about what it is that prompts us to create such complex and encompassing networks among ourselves – in society, in bed, on the Internet. Are we, at some level, attempting to build a structure of shared experience and knowledge and beliefs – a structure that helps us define reality, or ``truth,’’ or whatever you want to call it – that we as a species inherently need, and used to get from religion? I actually think there might be something to that, though how it relates to Gem flashing her vagina at Alvin in every other chapter, I still haven’t figured out.

c:/notes/Minnie/mintalk17

Mindy and I never so much as kissed, and I never felt deprived for it. It was enough for her to tell me her female secrets, to give me my first peek at Femaleness from a female point of view. She alerted me on the days her periods started. She told me when her breasts were sore, and once even pointed to one and explained which part of it was the sorest. She wasn’t coming onto me. She wasn’t sexually aggressive, certainly not sexually experienced. She didn’t lose her virginity during high school, with me or anyone else (I know this because she told me everything that happened, and didn’t happen, with every boy she dated while we were in high school). Her demeanor with me, as she told me everything there was to tell, was almost never anything more than matter-of-fact. To her, I was Adam-ski, a pal, one of girls, someone she could talk to about this strange new world of womanly secrets without fear that I would attempt to do anything with the sacred information.

The end of senior year was our goodbye. It wasn’t tearful. But she kept my yearbook for three days and filled it with a final barrage of secrets – a dozen pages of big, loopy, high-school-girl writing covering topics from her fears to her fantasies to her future lovers yet unmet. She handed the book back to me in the hallway one day outside the cafeteria, and smiled and walked away and blew me a kiss over her shoulder and said, ``Seeya later, Adam-ski.’’ It was the last time I ever saw her.

c:/notes/miscnotes/miniboobs

            I constructed a fantasy back then, one that I sometimes return to even now, in which Mindy is explaining to me which part of her breasts are sore during her periods, pointing to herself and bidding me to look, the way she did that day in our junior year. Except that in the fantasy, her breasts are naked.

c:/ documents/mydocs/GOWprof

We read The Grapes of Wrath again in my senior year, this time for an American Lit teacher, a graceless male with longish hair and a beard. Unlike the nun of my youth, he clearly knew the book well, and he wanted our sincere opinion about it, as long as our sincere opinion was that it was a searing indictment of capitalist society and a call to arms for the labor movement.

I knew the book well myself – I’d re-read it a dozen times by this point, often while flipping through pregnancy and lactation photos that I’d found in an old medical reference book in my dad’s study – but I’d apparently missed the point. On our final exam that semester, we were asked to identify a central metaphor from the book and explain what it stood for. ``Rose of Sharon’s milk-laden breasts,’’ I wrote (relishing the opportunity to dress up my years-old Rose-of-Sharon-breast obsession in staid academic language), ``are a metaphorical representation of humanity’s capacity to save itself through the grace of womanhood.’’

c:/ documents/mydocs/GOWprof2

``Wrong,’’ the Lit teacher scrawled next to that answer on the test. ``It has nothing to do with womanhood. It’s clearly symbolic of the necessity of nourishing and growing the nascent farm-labor movement of the Depression Era, and the need to cast off the capitalistic impediments to that goal, as represented by the blanket she takes off.’’ He gave me a C-minus.

c:/desktop/documents/minyearbookScan

Adam-ski: I can’t believe we made it! Pinch me, willya? (no, don’t really). I’m going to miss you this summer, and I’m going to miss you even more next year. . . .

. . . I want to thank you for always being there. It’s meant a lot to me, being able to tell you so many things. Thinking back on it now, I guess I did most of the talking, and I’m sorry about that. I should have let you talk more. I hope you didn’t mind having to listen to all that girl-stuff from me :) . . .

. . . I wish we were going to the same college next year. I know you’re going to do great, wherever you end up. You’re going to be a famous writer some day, Adam-ski, I’m predicting that right now. You heard it here first!

-- TK&BK

c:/notes/minTK&BK

It would be well over a decade before I learned the meaning of that acronym, scrawled out in Mindy’s big, loopy, high-school girl handwriting:

``To know & be known.’’

It was, she would eventually explain, her way of marking what she recognized, even then, as my obsessive need to decipher her Femaleness (if not her acronyms) – to connect with what we would now call her Inner Life, and to offer some connection to mine. It was, in hindsight, a remarkably sophisticated socio-sexual instinct for a teenage girl. Or perhaps even for a thirty-something mother of two with career plans that didn’t quite work out and a husband who was neither knowing nor known.

c:/miscmin876

I tell you all this about Mindy for two reasons:

One, she was my first clue that the female Inner Life exists separately, as its own thing, without graceless males promoting it for their own base reasons, as I had fervently hoped that it did;

And, two, Mindy would return to my life, in a very unusual way, many years later, to become the character that readers of The Electric Adventures of Alvin know as ``Minnie."

c:/litnotes/grapeswrath/rosasharn6

               . . . He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. "You got to," she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. "There!" she said. "There." Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.

c:/notes/min93

Yes, Minnie is real. More on that later.

Contact: alvinpart2@yahoo.com