DICK GIBSON: [Upset. His wound, where Mel struck him with the revolver, is throbbing. Fantastically, it occurs to him that if Mel kills himself or if Behr-Bleibtreau takes his voice, he will never have done a quiz show.]
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to … Night School! This is your host on the college of knowledge, quizzer whizzer Dick Gibson. Tonight’s contestant is Mel Son the Suicide, Amherst d.j. and d.o.a. Let’s try to get some answers — Mel?
MEL SON: Quizzer whizzer?
DICK GIBSON: Yez zir, yez zir. Are you ready for the first question?
MEL SON: I am. For the time being I am. But hurry, hurry. I’ll plug my pulse and blast my blood. I’ll shoot my shirt and kill my collar. I’ll—
DICK GIBSON: All righty. (to his mute guests) No coaching from the audience. The question is … Why? Do you have that? Would you like me to repeat the question?
MEL SON: Would you repeat the question?
DICK GIBSON: Surely. Why?
MEL SON: Sin.
DICK GIBSON: Sin?
MEL SON: Sin, sir.
DICK GIBSON: Sincerely?
MEL SON: Sine qua nonly.
DICK GIBSON: Could you develop that a little? This is an essay question.
MEL SON: Well … because. Let’s just say that I’m petitioning for an undress of griefiness.
Mel Son’s Story:
Mel Son was a normal child, no more curious than any other child his age — and no less. His hands had spent time in his mother’s brassieres; he’d fingered Dad’s jock and spied on Sis. But necessity wasn’t involved. It was just that same neutral obligation that makes an older boy smoke his first cigarette or one ten years younger sit behind the steering wheel of the family car while his mother shops.
Puberty hit him as hard as it does others, but if he was uncomfortable he was no more so than anyone else. It was as normal as the day is long. There were wet dreams — I don’t remember them, only the sensations — and some masturbation — I found it difficult; I could never really decide what to think about — and once in a while dates. It was a routine adolescence, steady as she goes.
Then, one night when I was fifteen years old, an old man sat next to me in a movie theater. He put his hand on me and stroked me till I came. It felt good and I let him. Maybe it was because there was a girl with me and my senses were already aroused, or that I knew that there was no chance, absolutely no chance in the world, that this girl would do to me what the old man was doing. Or it may have been something else, something about the old man’s surreptitious skill. Sly and smooth he was as a pickpocket … Whatever, I let him.
Do you see what I’m driving at? Do you know what I’m saying? That I’m queer? No! It was normal. That the pressures I felt, the feelings I had — they were mine, my own. What did they have to do with girls or women? What did they have to do even with that old man in the theater? Do you see? It was my thigh, my neck, my cock, my balls. Not pussy, not tits. It was my young man’s own ass I sat on, my skin I lived in, my reflexive flesh. I never made the leap of sex.
And how is it made? What round peg/round hole argument in sex waiting on puberty like the plain geometry? How does it happen? What Noah instinct is it — in me omitted — that drives us two by two to beds like polite company approaching table? By what inevitable degrees does bent become inclination, inclination tendency, tendency penchant, penchant disposition, disposition fate? Is there glue in those brassieres? What lodestar astrology shoves our lives? Where’s it written, eh? As if love could only be the prescribed friction! Hah! I’ll write you a new prescription! Why, love machines! Marry the bus that takes you to town, that throbbing thing! Embrace wind, kiss the earthquake, hold the sea! Make up to gravity! To all the physics of adversity!
Feelings’ other was never for me. Erection was extension, not tropism. I was born sexually intransitive, a sort of mule, but complete too. Or now complete — since that old man complete. Anyone would have done: the girl I was with that night, men, whores, boys, wives — anyone. Or anything: my prick lapped by dogs, flies walking the white underside of my arm, tight squeezes, the warm pressure of the bathwater, Foot-Eeze machines, spot- reducing machines, whirlpool baths, a fast trot on a warm day on a good horse over rough ground!
And I was no more grateful to the man than I would be to the fly or the horse! And I wasn’t reciprocal; I have never wished to hold or mount or touch or taste another human being. Oh my body’s buttons, oh its levers, oh its zones! I want hands on me, in me, breath in my ears, fingernails on my back, a tongue at my toes, cunning massage. And I’ll tell you something else: it’s too damn much work to jerk off. Though after the old man I at last knew what to think of: why me, why myself! After the old man I couldn’t look at my naked reflection in the full-length mirror in the bathroom without getting excited!
So that’s about it, quizzer whizzer. I’ve lived with bad men, men so bad they’ve never wanted anything from me in return.
[He winks at State Assemblyman Victor Ash.]
DICK GIBSON: You’re killing yourself for your sins?
MEL SON: Foo on my sins. Nah, what do they amount to? Lust and sloth. Nah. I’m killing myself because my gloss is going, because I’m heavier, because my hair’s falling out, because my teeth are rotten and my breath is bad. Even dirty old men draw the line somewhere. I will not live without pleasure. Where’s the solace, eh? I’ll put a ball in my balls. That’s it! Up my testicles to death. Whoops, confession’s over. I’m back in the trance.
DICK GIBSON: This is terrible. Will he do it?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Of course he’ll do it.
DICK GIBSON: [There is still the possibility that it is all a joke, but he is caught up in the strange program, the strangest he’s ever been on. Not really understanding how they’ve worked it, but suspecting — where were the telegrams? — that the show might not be going out over the air at all. (The engineer, given great powers, emergency powers, one of those like tugboat captains or bombardiers, say, who rise to command for brief interims, or secret servicemen who under certain conditions tell Presidents what to do, bishops crowning kings while the kingdom floats leaderless and unmoored — ultimate privilege hiding in them, all the more awesome for its ordinary invisibility and its provisional quality— could have cut all of them off the air whenever he chose.) But even if it wasn’t actually going over the air — and he still had the feeling that it was — it might be on tape, and even if it wasn’t on tape there was still the studio audience to think about, and even if they were all deaf as well as dumb, then there was still Behr- Bleibtreau and Mel and himself. The show must go on. And this, he thought, is all I have for principles.]
When? (softly) Shouldn’t we try to take the gun away from him?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: If you struggle with him you could be killed yourself.
DICK GIBSON: Mel? (no answer) Mel? (nobody home) Mel. (out to lunch) Mel, it’s Dick, (closed for the duration) Mel Son. (Nobody here by that name; try down the street.) Professor Behr-Bleibtreau. (This sotto voce: in the style of the outnumbered, the beleaguered, two pals in ambush) (This is serious, Professor. That gun could go off any minute. Maybe if we could get him to keep talking … Why don’t you release his tongue again?)