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By Root 1309 0

remotely deviant: oral and anal sex of course; homosexuality obviously; even normal, polite sex between consenting but unmarried couples. In Indiana you could be sent to prison for fourteen years for aiding or instigating any person under twenty-one years of age to “commit masturbation.” The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indiana declared at about the same time that sex outside marriage was not only sinful, messy, and reproductively chancy, but also promoted Communism. Quite how a shag in the haymow helped the relentless march of Marxism was never specified, but it hardly mattered. The point was that once an action was deemed to promote Communism, you knew you were never going to get anywhere near it.

Because lawmakers could not bring themselves to discuss these matters openly, it was often not possible to tell what exactly was being banned. Kansas had (and for all I know still has) a statute vowing to punish, and severely, anyone “convicted of the detestable and abominable crime against nature committed with mankind or with beast,” without indicating even vaguely what a detestable and abominable crime against nature might be. Bulldozing a rain forest? Whipping your mule? There was simply no telling.

Nearly as bad as having sex was thinking about sex. When Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy was pregnant for nearly the whole of the 1952–53 season, the show was not allowed to use the word “pregnant,” lest it provoke susceptible viewers to engage in sofa isometrics in the manner of our neighbor Mr. Kiessler on St. John’s Road. Instead, Lucy was described as “expecting”—a less emotive word apparently. Closer to home, in Des Moines in 1953 police raided Ruthie’s Lounge at 1311 Locust Street, and charged the owner, Ruthie Lucille Fontanini, with engaging in an obscene act. It was an act so disturbing that two vice officers and a police captain, Louis Volz, made a special trip to see it—as indeed did most of the men in Des Moines at one time or another, or so it would appear. The act, it turned out, was that Ruthie, with sufficient coaxing from a roomful of happy topers, would balance two glasses on her tightly sweatered chest, fill them with beer, and convey them without a spill to an appreciative waiting table.

Ruthie in her prime was a bit of a handful, it would seem. “She was married sixteen times to nine men,” according to former Des Moines Register reporter George Mills in a wonderful book of memoirs, Looking in Windows. One of Ruthie’s marriages, Mills reported, ended after just sixteen hours when Ruthie woke up to find her new husband going through her purse looking for her safe-deposit key. Her custom of using her bosom as a tray would seem a minor talent in an age in which mail was delivered by rocket, but it made her nationally famous. A pair of mountains in Korea were named “the Ruthies” in her honor and Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille visited Ruthie’s Lounge twice to watch her in action.

The story has a happy ending. Judge Harry Grund threw the obscenity charges out of court and Ruthie eventually married a nice man named Frank Bisignano and settled down to a quiet life as a housewife. At last report they had been happily married for more than thirty years. I’d like to imagine her bringing him ketchup, mustard, and other condiments on her chest every evening, but of course I am only guessing.*9

For those of us who had an interest in seeing naked women, there were pictures of course in Playboy and other manly periodicals of lesser repute, but these were nearly impossible to acquire legally, even if you cycled over to one of the more desperate-looking grocery shacks on the near-east side, lowered your voice two octaves, and swore to God to the impassive clerk that you were born in 1939.

Sometimes in the drugstore if your dad was busy with the pharmacist (and this was the one time I gave sincere thanks for the complex mechanics of isometrics) you could have a rapid shuffle through the pages, but it was a nerve-racking operation as the magazine stand was exposed to view from many distant corners of the store. Moreover,