Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [153]
AND WHAT ABOUT ME? Well, I was a kid in the 1960s.
I was sixteen. I was a sophomore in high school. Though I liked books and was still moved by religion, I mainly had one thing on my mind—the same thing most kids I knew had on their mind, one way or another: sex.
I didn’t really know all that sex was about. Nobody in my family had ever taken me aside and told me the first thing about it. I learned what I could by stealing a look at the occasional Playboy and by reading Henry Miller’s novels and John Cleland’s and Frank Harris’s pornographic classics. I hid these things in the closet of my bedroom and brought them out late at night, when I was done with Franz Kafka and Herman Hesse. The truth is, I read Miller and Harris more attentively than I ever read Hesse or even Melville. Sex seemed like it must be the most exciting and desirable thing in the world. I already looked forward to it more than anything else.
At the same time. I knew that it was not a good idea. My church absolutely forbade any form of premarital or nonmarital sex. Sex was a holy gift for procreation, we were told, and misusing that gift in any form was a sin so severe, it was second only to murder. At our Sunday priesthood meetings, our counselors were always warning us against this temptation. God found it an abhorrence for a man to spill his seed in any manner other than marital intercourse, and even then, seed should be spilled only for the purpose of procreation. An act like oral sex was an outrage. So was jacking off. Although these teachings weren’t exactly enough to stop you from having an erection, they could make you ponder what to do when you did have one. Somehow, praying for a hard-on to go away never worked.
So, like most teenage males, and like probably every young Mormon man I knew, I masturbated—sometimes to my own passions or imagination, sometimes to the books and magazines I mentioned above, sometimes to the women’s underwear section of the Montgomery Ward catalog. And, like the other Mormon boys I knew, I was feeling guilty about what I did. Always resolving never to do it again. One time, I even made that resolution last for a while. Two weeks, I think.
ON WEEKENDS, I WAS GOING TO THE TEEN DANCE CLUBS in downtown Portland. One of them, the Headless Horseman, was located in the space of an old gangster’s nightclub, where Gary used to hang out. Now, it was full of teenagers, all decked out in the semi-mod fashion that preceded the soon-to-come hippie era. We would go there in our wide-wale corduroys and polka-dot or flower-print shirts with white collars and cuffs, and our knee-high boots. My mother didn’t have much money, but she did her best to make sure I always had modern and fashionable clothes, bless her.
Inside the clubs, we would ask teenage women in short skirts and hoop earrings to dance to the club’s regular bands—local groups like the Kingsmen (of “Louie, Louie” fame), the Wailers and, once in a blue moon, Paul Revere and the Raiders. Sometimes we would talk the girls into leaving the club and going to hang out in the stairwell of a large parking structure a few blocks away. We would kiss for hours—we called it making out, of course—and we would try to run our hands over the young women’s breasts or between their legs. I remember one girl telling me: “You sure have busy hands for a boy your age.” I guess she was right.
The next morning I would be in church along with everybody else, worrying about salvation.
THIS COULD GO ON ONLY SO LONG. It went on until the summer of 1967—the summer that became known in pop history as the Summer of Love. Hippiedom and psychedelia were in full bloom. The Beatles had gone from their pop-informed style of rock & roll to the avant-garde-inspired terrain of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Young people were growing their hair long, dressing fancifully, trying to break themselves off from the conventions of their parents and the surrounding culture