Hall of Mirrors, Part II
(Continued from yesterday)
Although I’d been listening to Top 40 radio since I was ten, it was only in the winter of 1973-74 that I became acquainted with the Beatles. The red and blue albums, compilations of their greatest hits, had recently come out, and my two older sisters each got one for Christmas. They and my older brother and I listened to the four-record set so often you’d have thought we were taking a Berlitz course in a foreign language.
I was already a fan of Paul McCartney, ever since his song "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" had hit the charts a couple of years before, but the Beatles -- trim and fresh-faced on the cover of the red album, older and breathtakingly hairy on the blue -- were something else entirely. Discovering them a full decade after their American debut, I felt as if I’d come upon a long-lost archive, a dusty, cracked -- yet somehow brand-new -- testament to the founding of a culture.
Over the next few months, I began spending almost all of my free time during the day in the library of my Catholic boys’ school flipping through back issues of newsmagazines from the ’60s. A review of the Magical Mystery Tour TV special, an item about he Beatles’ trip to India, an article on John and Yoko’s Bed-In -- I reveled in anything even peripherally related to the group. All the while, on some less than conscious level, I positively muddied myself in their maleness. Paul’s fluted lips, John’s half-mast eyes, Ringo’s thick handlebar mustache. (George never did a lot for me; he just came with the package.) I saw the pictures, from a decade earlier, of teenage girls at their early concerts. Would I have been up in the theater balconies with them -- screaming, weeping, and clutching my cheeks while "Please Please Me" strained to be heard?
My fascination with John, Paul, George, and Ringo had been foreshadowed some years earlier by the Monkees’ TV series, which I’d watched when I was little. Never having heard of the Beatles at that time, I had no idea the Monkees were designed as a calculated response to the Brits’ popularity; I didn’t even have a conception of rock and roll yet. But Peter Tork’s long, stringy hair, in need of a good washing,* was the most erotic thing I’d seen, long before I knew what erotic meant.
In the intervening years, I filled in the blanks of my desire by visiting an odd little attic of titillating flesh: In those days, in the back of my mother’s House Beautiful and House and Garden magazines, one could reliably find, among the advertisements for antique appraisals by mail and shrubbery catalogs, small black-and-white ads for sexy undergarments and nighttime wear. A favorite display featured a well-proportioned man and woman wearing sheeny, metallic-look underwear -- bra and panties for her, skimpy, attribute-hugging briefs for him.
The winter of my private Beatlemania, my school-library research caused me to stumble upon another image: Burt Reynolds in his famous Cosmopolitan centerfold from 1972. Not the original photo, but one reproduced slightly larger than postage-stamp size in Time magazine. I’d heard about that picture -- no doubt from an appearance by Burt on Merv Griffin’s talk show, one of my daily news sources back then -- but I never dreamed it would drop unannounced into my lap.
Other than what I saw from furtive glances in the locker room at the Y in the summer, Burt Reynold’s was the first fully nude adult male I ever laid eyes on. He lay, hairy-chested, on a bearskin rug, a cigarette dangling from his devilish smile, his head propped on one arm, the other casually draped between his legs -- one of my first tastes of the revelation of concealment.
Over the rest of the school year, I returned regularly to that magazine. Self-consciously casual, ever vigilant of a classmate’s or priest’s intrusion, I’d lean into the corner between a bookcase and a window, my hands shaking slightly as I pretended to browse through the magazine, always returning to that same page. As best I could, I resisted my arousal, tried to think it away even as my eyes stayed fixed on Burt.
____________
* I wrote this description long before I had access to the Internet. This is how I remember Peter Tork, even though the pictures would seem to indicate he knew his way around a bottle of shampoo well enough.
(To be continued.)
Although I’d been listening to Top 40 radio since I was ten, it was only in the winter of 1973-74 that I became acquainted with the Beatles. The red and blue albums, compilations of their greatest hits, had recently come out, and my two older sisters each got one for Christmas. They and my older brother and I listened to the four-record set so often you’d have thought we were taking a Berlitz course in a foreign language.
I was already a fan of Paul McCartney, ever since his song "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" had hit the charts a couple of years before, but the Beatles -- trim and fresh-faced on the cover of the red album, older and breathtakingly hairy on the blue -- were something else entirely. Discovering them a full decade after their American debut, I felt as if I’d come upon a long-lost archive, a dusty, cracked -- yet somehow brand-new -- testament to the founding of a culture.
Over the next few months, I began spending almost all of my free time during the day in the library of my Catholic boys’ school flipping through back issues of newsmagazines from the ’60s. A review of the Magical Mystery Tour TV special, an item about he Beatles’ trip to India, an article on John and Yoko’s Bed-In -- I reveled in anything even peripherally related to the group. All the while, on some less than conscious level, I positively muddied myself in their maleness. Paul’s fluted lips, John’s half-mast eyes, Ringo’s thick handlebar mustache. (George never did a lot for me; he just came with the package.) I saw the pictures, from a decade earlier, of teenage girls at their early concerts. Would I have been up in the theater balconies with them -- screaming, weeping, and clutching my cheeks while "Please Please Me" strained to be heard?
My fascination with John, Paul, George, and Ringo had been foreshadowed some years earlier by the Monkees’ TV series, which I’d watched when I was little. Never having heard of the Beatles at that time, I had no idea the Monkees were designed as a calculated response to the Brits’ popularity; I didn’t even have a conception of rock and roll yet. But Peter Tork’s long, stringy hair, in need of a good washing,* was the most erotic thing I’d seen, long before I knew what erotic meant.
In the intervening years, I filled in the blanks of my desire by visiting an odd little attic of titillating flesh: In those days, in the back of my mother’s House Beautiful and House and Garden magazines, one could reliably find, among the advertisements for antique appraisals by mail and shrubbery catalogs, small black-and-white ads for sexy undergarments and nighttime wear. A favorite display featured a well-proportioned man and woman wearing sheeny, metallic-look underwear -- bra and panties for her, skimpy, attribute-hugging briefs for him.
The winter of my private Beatlemania, my school-library research caused me to stumble upon another image: Burt Reynolds in his famous Cosmopolitan centerfold from 1972. Not the original photo, but one reproduced slightly larger than postage-stamp size in Time magazine. I’d heard about that picture -- no doubt from an appearance by Burt on Merv Griffin’s talk show, one of my daily news sources back then -- but I never dreamed it would drop unannounced into my lap.
Other than what I saw from furtive glances in the locker room at the Y in the summer, Burt Reynold’s was the first fully nude adult male I ever laid eyes on. He lay, hairy-chested, on a bearskin rug, a cigarette dangling from his devilish smile, his head propped on one arm, the other casually draped between his legs -- one of my first tastes of the revelation of concealment.
Over the rest of the school year, I returned regularly to that magazine. Self-consciously casual, ever vigilant of a classmate’s or priest’s intrusion, I’d lean into the corner between a bookcase and a window, my hands shaking slightly as I pretended to browse through the magazine, always returning to that same page. As best I could, I resisted my arousal, tried to think it away even as my eyes stayed fixed on Burt.
____________
* I wrote this description long before I had access to the Internet. This is how I remember Peter Tork, even though the pictures would seem to indicate he knew his way around a bottle of shampoo well enough.
(To be continued.)
posted by Billy at 12:39 AM
1 Comments:
The Burt Reynolds section reminds me of my fascination with a photo of Mark Gastineau [NY Jet in the 80s] in one of my brother's Sports Illustrated magazines. I obsessed over that picture.
And my parents thought I wanted a subscription because I was interested in sports. *heh*
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