Memos from Purgatory by Harlan Ellison (Regency Books, 1961)

 

 

 

 

While William Hamling’s Greenleaf Publishing was putting out Imagination SF, Rouge Magazine, and Nightstand Books, there was also the Regency imprint, a second-tier paperback line that published crime, literary, and non-fiction books acquired by Harlan Ellison, who was also editing Rogue and Nightstand. Ellison published, with Regency, the first editions of Gentleman Junkie and Memos from Purgatory.

Playing sociologist or journalist, or even ethnographer,  Ellison decided to join an actual Brooklyn street gang and write about that life rather than rely on news items and imagination as other juvie gang writers did.  he joined the barons for ten weeks, resulting in the novel Web of the City (aka Rumble), the collections The Deadly Streets and The Juvies, and one half of Memos from Purgatory, which also became an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Hour, starring James Caan as Ellison, sort of, and Walter Koenig as the gang prez.

George Edgar Sluser, in Unrepntant Harelquin: Harlan Ellison, a Borgo monograph from the 70s, contends this book is one of Ellison’s weakest, when still figuring out his non-fiction voice, though does note its sociological merits.  Mainly, it is even because the two parts do not exactly make this a whole book but a book of two long essays.

The second part is an extended essay from The Village Voice about Ellison’s arrest and time in The Tombs, New York City’s jail,  for being in possession of items from his gang research: a .22 zip gun and brass knuckles, etc. It is not only a scathing critique of the law, the cops, and the system, but works as an examination of cause and effect: how past research has continued negative effects.

The most interesting aspect, in terms of the this blog, is its original publication by William Hamling as the two were also putting out the Nightstand books.

There are have been several reprinting of Memos:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Campus Tramp by Andrew Shaw aka Lawrence Block (Nightstand Books #1505, 1959)

This was the fifth book William Hamling published at the end of 1959, and the first of many titles that a very young Larry Block furnished for Hamling and his editor, Harlan Ellison.

This is also one of the more hard-to-find Shaws, at a reasonable price, with a but of a cult status among Antioch University alumni from the 1950s and 60s.  Block went to Antioch, later opting out for a career in Manhattan as a hack pulp writer, selling his first novel, as Lesely Evans, to Fawcett Crest in 1958, then to Midwood and Nightstand in 1959-63.

A number of Block’s early books are, well, uneven–they are either good or bad.  Mona was very good and The Adulterers and The Wife-Swappers very bad.  Campus Tramp is not on part with Mona, $20 Lust, The Sex Shuffle, or Candy, but it isn’t bad, and there’s even some sociology involved in the text.

Campus Tramp tells the story of Linda Shepard, a nineteen-year-old young lady from Cleveland, Ohio, who is off to her freshman year at Clifton College, Block’s version of Antioch, a liberal arts institute with a loose structure in experimental (for the time) pedagogy.

Linda is a virgin and has been proud of keeping it that way, as a number of boys in high school tried to claim her cherry but she was firm in her desire to wait until marriage…until college that is. Once at Clifton, she decides that she wants a lover, that she wants to lose her virginity, and while a guy named Joe has his love eye on her, the man she really wants is a senior, Don Gibbs, a sort of bohemian rich boy who edits the college newspaper (as Block did at Antioch).

Many sociological studies have been conducted over the decade about how wild freshmen get in college, especially in the dorms: they are away from home, mommy and daddy, they have access to alcohol and drugs, they let loose. I remember when I was in the “older student” dorm floor way way b ack when, and the freshmen were all on the eighth and seventh floors, said floors in shambles every weekend, shattered bottles, beer cans, clothes everywhere…rooms where a drunk or high 18 year old was taking on anyone, and guys lining up for a turn…yeah, the good old days. Later, the young girls who did this would experience shame, and they’d leave the dorms or even try to kill themselves, or they’d wallow in booze and cocaine and sleep with anyone who passed by…

That’s what happens to Linda.  She gets Don Gibbs, inserting herself into his life, and when she loses her virginity, and experiences lust, she can’t get enough.  She an Don fuck whenever they can; she spends all her time with him, not going to classes, her grades slipping.

When Don breaks up with her over her ultra possessiveness, Linda sinks deep into debauchery, having sex with any boy or guy or man who wants her, a shabby replacement for Don; she thinks of suicide but getting drunk is better to dull the pain, and there are plenty of older students willing to give her the booze in exchange for a romp in the backseat.

Linda starts to get a reputation as the campus tramp, and guys ask her out only with sex on their minds. Linda doesn’t care what people think of her.  Her roommate, Rachel, is quite concerned, and one drunken night, when Rachel gives Linda a massage, the two girls go at it.  Linda is shocked by what she has done, and her roommate confesses that she’s been a lesbian since she was fourteen.

Then Linda realizes she is pregnant, and she has no idea who the father could be…just as she decides to stop drinking and tramping and get her grades back up, the school informs her that they want her to leave for a year or face explusion…and now she is pregnant…she isn’t getting a break anywhere.

The book doesn’t wrap up as expected — usually these stories, for moral standards, have the wanton floozie realize the errors of her sinful ways, and finds the boy who loves her…we thought it would be Joe, that seemed to be the set up, he confesses his love despite her reputation, but she just fucks him and drops him…

Instead, Linda returns to Don Gibbs and tells him she’s knocked up and needs help.  He’s willing to help because, unknown to her, he broke it up because he was in love and was afraid of the emotion…

Creeping Hemlock Press recently reprinted Campus Tramp as a a trade paperback, with an intro by Ed Gorman and an afterword by Block; the afterword is worth the price of admission: Blocks talks about leaving high school and going to Antioch as a would-be young writer, sellingb his early novels, moving to New York, and being asked to leave Antioch in a way that Linda is asked to leave Clifton.  He talks about the book’s cult status at Antioich, and how some students and faculty thought the book was his way of “getting back” at Antioch.

Clifton College appears in a number of Andrew Shaws, referred to in one Sheldon Lord, and is the setting of one of Donald Westlake’s softcores, as Edwin West.

Creeping Hemlock is set to reprint the Seeldon Lord, April North, which has many similarities to Campus Tramp.

Registered Nympho – Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Companion Book #524, 1967)

A great cover but a disappointment in that this is not an original Elliott but a slightly revised version of Loren Beauchamp’s Nurse Carolyn.  Character names are slightly or completely changed — Carolyn White becomes Evelyn White, her doctor boyfriend Dick Evans becomes Joe Bevans, and instead of calling her “honey” in 1960, he calls her “baby” in 1967.  The dirty old rich man she works for, Cornelius Baird becomes Conrad Folsom.

There are other slight line changes, and excess chapter fodder is cut now and then, but really the same book.  The question is: why?

Silverberg did revise some of his Bedstand books from 1959-60 for Midwood (e.g., Thirst for Love becoming Wayward Wife), books he didn’t get paid for, and later, when William Hamling bought Nightstand, those former Challon/Ryan books were reprinted as Don Elliott books.  By 1967, Midwood had to sell off some of its old stock for a debt, so maybe the rights on Nurse Carolyn went to Cornith…Companion Books was yet another one of many Hamling imprints when his company was based in San Diego.

Who knows.

Who cares.

Registered Nympho (although the character is hardly a “nympho”)  is a collectible item, but not a new read, not here at least. If you have not read Nurse Carolyn, this this will be a fun new read.

Passion Pirate – George Baker (Bedside Book #1228, 1962)

It seems Bedtime/Bedside Books had three owners in its short life from 1959-1963.  It was a pioneer in sleaze, and Robert Silverberg’s association with them as David Challon and Mark Ryan was impetus for William Hamling to start Nightstand Books, starting with Silverberg’s Don Elliott novel, Love Addict.

Owned by Valient Publications, when Hamling bought the company out in 1961, Bedstand was changed to Bedside and was owned by Pert Publications, one of Hamling’s many shell companies. Looking at Victor Berch’s Bedstand/Bedside Checklist in Books Are Everything#20, the Haling run started at #1201 with Silverberg’s Don Elliott Woman Chaser, and went to #1224, Lawrence Block’s Andrew Shaw Gutter Girl . All the bylines were Cornith regulars: Dean Hudson, Alan Marshall, Clyde Allison, Al James, etc.

From  #1225 to #1251, the books were issued by EKS Publishers (seems to be the same as LS Publishers, with Bellringer and Gaslight Books) and the bylines were different.  My theory has been that Hamling still owned the imprint but changed the shell company and pen names to keep the feds off his back for them.  This seemed apparent to me with #1225, Sin Professor by Frank Peters, that read a lot ike Hal Dresner’s writing and had a character named Poltnik in it, for Dresner’s buddy Art Plotnik.

The bylines for Bedside’s end run seemed to all be generic names like Peters, and David Andrews, David Spencer, Jack Lechien.  The only names that I have seen with other publishers is Monte Steele and William F. Frank.

I have purchased a number of these, looking for Cornith styles. When reading Passion Pirate, I at first thought this was an Lawrence Block — it opens, in tight Block-like prose, with two broke drifters seeking out women to use and live with, scouring Greenwich Village.  They are Sebastian Wolff and Earl Dreggs.  They seemed a lot like two similar Lotahrios in Block’s Sheldon Lord Pads Are for Passion.

Reading further, however, I realized this was not Block, and when I got to a scene where a character puts on a record by an Albany-based singer named Plotnik, I realized George Baker was the same as Frank Peters, and this wasn’t Hal Dresner but Art Plotnik.  Plotnik was indicating that he was the author by adding himself in, and making fun of himself, as a character mentions having seen Plotnik in person and was “kind of weird.”

Plotnik was handled by the Scott Meredith Agency, so Bedside was getting its books from the same wellspring as Midwood and Nightstand and who-knows-who-else.

Passion Pirate was surprisingly good, a terse tale with real-feeling characters. Sebastian is the ladies man, a sly devil who seems to be able to hypnotize any woman who crosses his path, causing them to become submissive and hand over their pads, money, and hearts.  His sidekick, Earl, is a lug who seems to only get the leftovers and broken hearts — you know, the fellow who takes advantage of women hurting and on the rebound.

At the top, Sebastian picks up Christine, a 22-year-old Village nowhere girl whose rich Boston daddy is supporting for her a year as she writes poetry and tries to make a name for herself.  Sebastian wiggles his way into her pad and her heart, promising her he knows a literary agent who can get her poems published.

The agent is Cynthia, a married older woman who had a one night stand with Sebastian two years ago and still yearns for him.  She agrees to handle the poems if he agrees to fuck her twice  a week.  She claims her husband or no man has been able to please her since her once time with him.

Many women  seem to be the same. Sebastian is not only a lover, but a fighter, defending the honor of women with his fists, “speaking like an actor,” moving like a panther through the Village streets and bars.  Despite living with Christine, Sebastian can pick up women within an hour, make them fall in love, and break their hearts.  One is Ginny, that Earl runs into — Ginny was Earl’s ex-girlfriend that Sebastian has seduced.  Ginny lets Earl move in with her but she really wants him to get Sebastian back.

A lot of libertine sex goes on, including one gang bang scene with Christine as she fucks five guys in a row to get back at Sebastian’s infidelity.  The scene is more sad than erotic.

The novel ends in that weird way some of early Block books do, but this isn’t Block. I am convinced it is Art Plotnik now.

Shame Agent – Don Bellmore (Ember Books #943, 1964)

Reading Shame Agent and knowing that it was an element behind the lankmark obscenity case Redrup v. New York, something any lawyer well-versed in censorship and the First Amendment knows, makes me amazed to think that this rather sexually tame and funny book was considered so offensive as to throw a man in jail for selling it — and had the feds known who wrote it, they may have gone after the author.

The Many Faces of John Dexter #5: No Longer a Virgin penned by Lawrence Block/Donald Westlake (Nightstand #1513, 1960)

Lynn Munroe  suspected that either Block or Westlake or both penned the very first John Dexter novel, the 12th book William Hamling published, edited by Harlan Ellison, No Longer a Virgin:

Lawrence Block says he never wrote as John Dexter, and while I wanted to note that first, we should remember that he is the author of a book called Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. He also told me he never wrote as Sheldon Lord, etc. So this one is just conjecture on my behalf. One thing I noticed in my research of the Nightstand writers was that every single one of them told me that sometimes their books would come out under a house name like John Dexter. The only authors who claim not to be Dexter are Block, Westlake, and Dresner. The Alan Marshall books are full of references to Dexter. One of them mentions a playwright named Dexter St. John. Nightstand editor Earl Kemp told me that whenever they had two manuscripts by the same writer, they would stick a house name like Dexter or J.X. Williams [after that pseudonym was abandoned by John Jakes] on the second one. It is obvious when reading Dexters that they are the work of a wide variety of writers.

Everybody, at one time or another, was John Dexter, so we can deduce that Block was probably Dexter too. Then there’s High School Sex Club (NB1517) […] which lists [Andrew] Shaw as author on the cover but Dexter on the title page. Is this a typo, or were Shaw and Dexter linked somehow?

Block later admitted to one Dexter: Shame Dame, that I discussed here.

After reading No Longer a Virgin, I can confidently say this is another early Lawrence Block with the aid of Donald Westlake — published the same year as A Girl Called Honey, the narrative voice is the same and the female protagonists are somewhat alike…the breaks in style and dialogue are obvious, just as they were in Honey...

In Crossroads of Lust, the character Beth remembers reading No Longer a Virgin and how by chapter three, the girl in the story loses her virginity in a motel room with an older man; variations on the name “John Dexter” pop up now and then in Andrew Shaw and Alan Marshall books.

The heroine of the tale, Ann,  discovered the wonders of physical contact with boys youug…

She liked the feeling of men’s hands on [her breasts]. She liked it from the beginning, when she was twelve years old and they were already strongly building, and the boys used to rub them in the darkness of the neighborhood movie theater during the Saturday matinee.  Even then, she liked the touch of their hands on her breasts, and she liked to be kissed.  But she never let any of them touch her below the waist. (pp. 5-6)

Ann was determined to remain a virgin until her marriage. Even with her high school beau, Dan, “sex” was mutual masturbation.

That changes when she heads to New York City after graduating high school, with some stenography classes under her belt, and a typing certificate of 50-words-a-minute.  On the bus she meets 35-year-old Roger, an ad guy coming back from St. Louis. She lies and says she’s 20, and they share a motel room at a stopover.  She doesn’t want to seem inexperienced so she goes to bed with him and, as the title states, she’s no longer a virgin.

The innocent girl seduced my the men of New York is a common story in sleazy books of the 1950s-60s — sometimes they become prostitutes, sometimes they become tramps, sometimes they meet bad ends, and sometimes they seek redemption after months or years of sin.

She soon finds that men try to make her every way she turns — there’s the Broadway producer, Barry, and he has her strip to her underpants during a job interview; and a fat slob of a building manager who talks her into a quick bout of sex in exchange for a one year lease on a nice Brooklyn apartment.

Women, too.  She first stays with a girl from back home, Janet; one day she comes home drunk and lets her know she’s a lesbian and has designs.  What happens is basically a lesbian rape scene, but Roger arrives in time to save her, punching the lesbian out after a boxing match between the two.

She likes Roger a lot — why not, he took her cherry and was her knight in armor, saving her from forced twilight perversions.  But Roger is a “forever bachelor” at 35; he doesn’t want to get married or share an apartment with her.  Still, she refers to him as her “boyfriend” to others.

Then she learns he has  wife and kids, the hard way…

She learns that men are liars.  But is she. When Dan shows up out of the blue, missing her badly, she does everthing she can to keep Dan from finding out about Roger, from knowing the truth — she even has sex with Dan and makes him believe he just took her virginity, but it all backfires her and she loses both men in her life.

But she knows the city is full of men to sleep with; there may not be love or commitment or even truth,

but I won’t be alone, she thought. Never that.  At least I won’t be alone. (p. 191)

Not a remarkable story, and very little “story” at that, but it does end on a bleak note, rather than the typical romantic ending where the wanton girl finds true love and is happy. This one is more, well, realistic.

One thing is certain: Block, with Westlake, were the first faces of the prolific sleazemeister  John Dexter.

So Wild the Flesh by Mel Corbin (Saber Books, 1969)

I picked this one up for he cover. Saber/Fabian books always had slightly odd-looling people on their covers — maybe more odd than Novel/Merit Books art and photis.

But what is the story behind this almost-naked woman pointing a heater at this fellow’s noggin?

You never know what you’d get with a Saber or Fabian from Sanford Aday’s company — sometimes good stuff, sometimes awful shit.

The book — short, at 35K words or so — starts off with Eddie, a newpaper reporter, getting a vist by a girl named Sharon who says he has to help her, her life is in danger, someone is out to kill her.  He suggests that she hire a private eye but she thinks having a reporter writing about her plight would protect her, if the public knew.

He goes along, as he thinks about her pussy and his “shaft gets hard looking at her.”  Thats the thing with this one, publihsed in 1969:  the indency laws had become lax and the books started to get hardcore. So there’s plenty of sex here — straight and lesbian, and lots of talk about vaginas and dicks.

Hardcore has its place, I have certainly written my share of it, but here it seems to only cheapen the novel than add to it, almost as if the sexual asides and thoughts were added in to an existing manuscript.

Plus, it’s hard to follow what the hell is going on. I was lost. I couldn’t get past page 50.  What was this all about, or was the set-up just an excuse to write explicit sex scenes?  Sharon takes Eddie to her big home — she’s rich — where her mother and a servant live, and all kinds of sex follows.

This is porn, but I ca’t say it’s good porn.

Others might like it.

Have no idea who “Mel Corbin” is.  Seems the name is only on this one book.  Could have been Aday writing under a pen name.

It’s interesting to consider that had Saber published this novel ten years earlier, a lot of people would have been behind bars, and indeed, by 1963, Aday did wind up doing time for Sex Life of a Cop, which was far less explicit than So Wild the Flesh.  But the cops and local authorities in Fresno, California, had been after Saber for a while, losing several court cases on obscenity. With J. Edgar Hoover watching quietly, gioing after all sleaze publishers, they were bound to get Aday on something, just as they got William Hamling and Earl Kemp later on.

We must keep in mind that it was not long ago, in America, that people were illegally spied on and harassed by the government and went to jail for practicing first amendment rights.  And while things are different now, as George Orwell warned us in 1984, things could easily revert back to 1950s suppression and repression.

In that light, the fact that Saber published a book like this as an act of free speech is not only comendable, but noteworthy in the history of publishing and the First Amendment.

Loser’s Lust by Alan Marsh (Donald Westlake)

There’s no date printed in the book but most likely it’s 1963, for that brief period  that Bill Hamling and Earl Kemp published the Ember and Pillar titles with house names slightly changed — Dan Eliot for Don Elliott, John Baxter for John Dexter, Andrew Schole (A. Schole?) for Andrew Shaw, Alan Marsh and Alan Marshall…

Apparently it had something to do with a court case that was going on.  It’s never been clear why…

Mona ended in Las Vegas and Loser’s Lust begins in Las Vegas.  I can’t say much because I was unable to get half0-way through this one. It was just…boring…this was not one of Westlake’s best early efforts.  It centers around three characters: a woman who has come to Nevada to file a divorce, a career black jack dealer and woman player, and a waitress in a casino.

Perhaps I am too used to funny Westlake. I like Westlake’s humorous crime books.  He went through periods — I’ve yet to read his noir period stuff. In this one, the action was slow (and the sex scenes come in rather late, surprusing for a Cornith which relied of x number of sex scenes every 18-20 pages to give it “flip appeal”).  The inside information of casino workings, and how black jack delaers operate the game, was cool, but I didn’t care about the charcters and I wasn’t clear on the point of the story.

Maybe there is non point — people go to Las Vegas for many reasons: for fun, for profit, for crime, for divorce, for loneliness…

Westlake fans will find this interesting for hois early voice.

The Many Faces of John Dexter #3: The Abortionists by Harry Whittington (Nightstand #1790, 1966)

One of the “missing 38” of Harry Whittingon’s ouvere, as he produced a book a month for William Hamling and Earl Kemp between 1964-1967, 38 in all (only 36 have been “found,” however).  The books were published under the John Dexter and J.X. Williams house names, and then as Curt Colman, an exclusive pen name for Whittington.

For a while in 1966, Nightstand was issuing books without cover art and with a strange eye-straining design as seen above. Lynn Munroe speculates that a court case may have been going on, like when Hamling briefly spelled the house names differently (John Baxter, Andrew Schole, Dan Eliot, Alan Marsh).  Most likely this is the case, but we might also consider the topic of this novel, which was a political and social suicide bomb in the mid-60s, with heated curltural and legal debate and religious debate on abortion, murder, a woman’s right to choose, women dying in back room abortions, health care, and so on.

Apparently this novel is expanded from a story Whittington published in a romance pulp.  It may have also been an unfinished or unsold nurse novel he had (he wrote a number of them under a female pen name), since the obligatory sex scenes seem to be “dropped in” — the first is a masturbation scene, the next a double rape.

This is a combination southern gothic and nurse tale. Munroe tells the synopsis better than I on his website:

Virginal nurse Mary Hood fights off all the advances from the lecherous doctors at home and takes a job offered by her Uncle in the Deep South. She travels to Mayesville, a town run for years by the Mayes and Conline families, called there by her handsome Uncle, Dr. Mayes Conline. His hospital is located on the grounds of his decaying Southern mansion, complete with insane relatives locked in upstairs rooms and strange goings on throughout the dark nights. On page 100, there is a shocking surprise: Dr. Conline is performing abortions late at night at his hospital. That is, it was designed to be a shock, but the editors put a new title on Whittington’s manuscript, one that gives everything away.

Mary has fallen in love with the brooding and mysterious Dr. Mayes Conline, and the plot twists and thickens from there. Whittington’s challenge was to describe sexual activity without using any naughty words. I think he fares well here when he refers to Mary “taking her pleasure from the obelisk of his strength .”

Dr. Mayes Conline is also her uncle — not by blood, the second hubby of her Aunt Rose, a man 10 years younger, and a seemingly successful good ol’ southern physician.  From the start, Mary is attracted to him, and Conline is drawn to her, and he says, “I must keep in mind that you are my niece.”

A gothic is not a gothic without some incest brewing in the backwoods, after all.  But 19 year old Mary, a nurse, has left the big city in favor of the woods because she loathes the world that orbits sex, a world where men see her as nothing but vagina to conquer.  In one flashback scene, on graduation day for the nurses, a drnk intern, Cal, rapes her.  She had looked up to Cal, even favored romance and marriage, but he forces himself on her — when she runs off, clothes torn, legs and boobs sticking out, and tells one of the doctors what happened to her, the doctor is turned on by it all and rapes her too.  Two rapes back and back — the invitation to be a nurse at her uncle’s southern bacwoods hospital sounds like a good way to get away from the evils of the world.

Hardly…soon she finds out why her uncle works late hours and sleeps till noon.  At night, he performs illegal abortions, where he makes more money than taking care of the elderly and sickly.  Women who have complications and die from the procedure are tossed into a river or left in the woods (back then, some abortionists would have dead patients cremated, to get rid of the evidence).

The novel moves into the moral and medically ethical questioning of abortion, a quagmire for Mary since she has the hots for her uncle.  Whe her aunt dies, the path is clear for romance, but can she love a man who is a murderer of children?

There is also the evil head nurse who gets in the way and hates Mary’s coming into the picture and stomping on her territory — where can all this lead but the fires of hell, physically?  No gothic can have a happy ending, like your usual nurse novel…

Not the best Whittington in my opinion, but not the worst (I prefer crime noir and hardboiled Whittington).

I feel like getting on a nurse novel kick here — next up: Nurse Carolyn by Loren Beauchamp (Midwood, 1960)  and Man’s Nurse by Orrie Hitt (Chariot, 1963).

The Housewife’s Guide to Auto-Erotic Devices in the Home by Jane Long (Greenleaf Classics, 1970)

This is one hilarous book, from William Hamling’s Greenleaf as it headed into the 1970s under the helm of Earl Kemp.

Jane Long is, I think, Linda DuBriuel…reads like her style.

This is a faux “sex study” where the author interviews various housewives to find out how they get off while the hubby is away and all they have at hand are common household items.

Many women in my life have confided to me their discovery, a teenagers or earlier, the certan joys of shower nozzles, candle holders, and kitchen utensils.  These things happen.  Read this confession  from this book:

I was vacuuming out the bedroom, I remember, and I was in my usual summertime house-cleaning costume, which is to say, I was nude. Okay, there’s my narcissism coming out again, I know, but it’s just the way I like to operate. Well, there I was stripped to the buff and whirling around that apartment like nine devils were after me. I hadn’t realized that I had this erotic mood coming over me until all of a sudden I looked up and saw myself in the mirror, across the bed. I had the vacuum cleaner tube in one hand; I’d been vacuuming off the baseboards.

I’ll have to admit that I do think I have just as nice a body as those girls who pose for magazine centerfolds. Not that I’ve ever actually seen any of those models in the flesh, but lots of the men passengers leave their magazines behind, you know, and some of them have mighty revealing pictures.

Anyway, as I was saying, I stood there turning this way and that, admiring myself in the mirror. I moved over closer to the mirror so I could see more detail, especially down between my legs, the part I most like to look at. You see, I have this peculiarity: I have a lot of hair up high, on the love mound itself, but I’m nearly bald, I guess you’d call it, down where the lips and clitoris are. It’s odd, or I think so, but it makes it handy for viewing, if that’s what a person likes—and I like it.

I accidentally touched the vacuum cleaner tube to the skin of my thigh as I was standing there admiring myself. It attached itself to my thigh, right on the inner side, about halfway between my knee and my crotch. I pulled it off, impatient with myself for dawdling around, but then I realized it had felt sort of good when I tried pulling it off. Even my thighs get very sensitive to the touch when I’m excited like that, and I saw that I’d hit upon something very interesting.

A recommnded funny sleaze read, and example of Greenleaf Classic’s heydey.  It’s hard to find and pricy but seems Olympia Press has turned it into an e-book over here.

Sex doesn’t always have to be dark and serious.  As my colleague Larry McCaffery has often said, “Too many people never appreciate how humor there is in sex.”  He’s right: when you think about it, all that groping and coupling is hilarous.