The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [64]
Jack might have been lying in bed, poked at by a team of doctors, but even here he saw himself as a vibrant sexual being, unlike Lem and his other wimpy friends. “I don’t know why you and Rip are so unpopular with girls,” he wrote. “You’re certainly not ugly looking exactly. I guess they’re [sic] is just something about you that makes girls dislike you on sight.”
He was ready to instruct his pitiful friends in the art of sexual conquest. “I’m writing Rip against taking Nancy Williams,” he told Lem about a planned weekend. “She is an ugly bitch and we’re not going to load the place with your women.” As for Lem, at least he could pay to have sex. “It seems to me, you prick, that if you can afford a week fuck fest with you paying Joe and I and Caesar $5.00 each for every fuck and paying the doctor bills for sif [syphilis] which you are certain to pick up in this nigger place.”
Jack slashed at Lem with one blow after the next, attacking his friend’s sexuality and his relative poverty, his two greatest vulnerabilities. Lem either ignored Jack’s thrusts or attempted his own minor feints, but he was largely defenseless.
When Jack could get out of the hospital in the evenings or on weekends, he spent much of his time looking for women. He did not share his big brother’s belief that a man—a gentleman, that is—did not attempt to seduce women of a certain quality, manner, or faith. Jack was nothing if he was not fair. He considered all women fair game. He discussed women with other young men like a woodsman sharing tips on how to set his steel traps.
One of his friends, Pete Ramney, had gone out with one of Jack’s dates. He boldly asked Ramney how far he had gotten with her. When Pete told him he had reached “second base,” Jack was incensed. Ramney had gotten further than he had. “The next time I take her out she is going to be presented with a great hunk of raw beef,” he wrote Lem, “if you know what I mean, although I doubt it.”
Here, as at Choate, Jack’s proud sexual boasts may have been written with a novelist’s imagination and read with guileless credulity by a Lem Billings who was far more sexually insecure than his friend. Jack’s close college friend and roommate James Rousmanière, is one of the skeptics. “I think he was making it up,” Rousmanière asserts. “That was the masculine ethic. And I think he made up three-quarters of it. And I don’t hold it against him.”
As a young man, Jack wanted an audience for his sexuality. He was at his most aggressive when there were other men around whom he wanted to impress even more than he did the woman of the moment. She was interchangeable; they were not.
These letters then should be read in part as Jack’s vision of what he could be or would be. He created a Don Juan image of himself long before he became one in reality. In sexual conquests, there are few things as helpful as a bad reputation, and in the end Jack became the sexual being he thought he wanted to be.
Jack was “getting rather fed up with the meat here, if you know what I mean,” he wrote Lem, though he knew his friend didn’t know. “They haven’t found anything as yet except that I have leukemia and agranulocytosis. Took a peak [sic] at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin.”
But two sentences were quite enough on the dark subject of a disease that probably meant his death. “Eat drink and make [out], as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral,” he continued. “I think the Rockefeller Institute may take my case. Flash! Got the hottest neck ever out of Hansen Saturday night. She is pretty good so am looking forward to bigger and better ones.”
The doctors tinkered away a few more weeks after they decided that Jack did not have leukemia. Many patients would have been infuriated that the doctors could make such