I don’t recall the weather. It might have been raining, that sheer relentless outpouring typical of the wet season in California, but that might have been another time and another place altogether. I do remember the hall, though. Or rather the field house. This was more usually the scene of intercollegiate basketball games, but now, because of the uncontainable enthusiasm for Prok, Prok the author, the celebrity, the annihilator of sexual taboos, it had been given over to us for the afternoon. All seven thousand seats had been taken some two hours before the lecture was scheduled to begin, and even as we arrived university officials were scrambling to set up an additional two thousand folding chairs in the aisles and on the floor of the basketball court itself. Can I say that excitement was high, and leave it at that?
We were escorted to one of the coaches’ offices, in a side door and down a cordoned-off hallway, where the man who was to introduce Prok — the vice president of the university, no less — urged us to make ourselves comfortable while he went off to see to the final details. “We’ll need ten minutes or so,” he said, and I have no recollection of him whatever, so I’ll assign him the shrewd narrow features and evasive eyes of the congenital bureaucrat, “and please, if there’s anything I can do for you, just holler.” And then he shut the door and left us to ourselves.
“Quite the elegant dressing room, eh?” Prok said, turning to us — to Corcoran, Mac and me. We looked round us. The room was cramped, piled high with athletic equipment, mismatched sneakers, yellowing volleyballs, bats, spikes, mitts, rackets, helmets and the like, the walls all but obscured by team photos and two towering bookcases sagging under the weight of their collective trophies. The smell — of the adjoining locker room, of the distilled and rancid sweat of the generations — brought me back to high school and a reverie I’d had after my concussion on the football field. They’d brought me into the locker room on a stretcher, my mother’s voice floating round the door like a bird battering its wings against a pane of glass, my consciousness fading and then looping back on itself till the world opened up on me like a woman’s smile, though there was no woman there, only the grim bald-headed team physician, administering smelling salts.
“Yes,” Mac said, “and you see what your celebrity gets you? Next thing they’ll be putting us up at the Ritz, Prok. Just you wait.”
We laughed, all of us, though Prok’s laugh was more of a whinny and his eyes jumped from one of us to another, as if we’d all collectively spoken. Was he nervous? Was that it?
At that moment, as if in response to my question, the building seemed to shake with the vast stirring of the crowd just beyond the door and down the corridor. Thousands of undergraduates had simultaneously stifled a yawn, shifted in their seats, elevated their voices so as to be heard over the building expectant hum of the crowd.
Mac had moved to Prok’s side, the two of them poised there in the center of the room as if listening to the rumble of distant thunder. “Can I get you anything?” she asked, her voice muted. “Coffee? A glass of water? Cola?”
He seemed to hesitate — Prok, who never hesitated, never wasted words or motion — and then, so softly I could barely hear him, he said: “Water.”
“Good,” Mac murmured. “I thought you’d be dry, Prok — you’ve got to keep your throat lubricated, you know. I hate to say it, but you’re almost like a star tenor at the Metropolitan — or a radio host.” She turned and gave Corcoran and me a look.
“I’ll go,” Corcoran said. “Just water, right? Plain water?”
The crowd shifted again, a great and vast soughing of bench, chair, muscle and sinew. It was as if all the air had been squeezed out of the field house, the corridor, the coach’s office, and then it came back again, on a wave of echoing sound. I tried for the light touch because my heart was going as if I were the one about to mount the podium: “Sounds like the natives are restless.”
Prok was standing there rigid, the fingers of his right hand arrested in the act of running through his hair. He gave me an acerbic look, a look that pinned and measured me as if I were one of his errant gall wasps. “Don’t be childish,” he said. “This isn’t the time for levity, nor the place either.”
Mac was at his side, one hand on his arm, just above the joint. “Prok,” she murmured, “now calm yourself,” but he snatched his arm away.
He was still focused on me, his jaws clamped in fury, and there was a minute twitching of his lips, as if he’d tasted something bitter. “That is precisely the sort of thoughtless remark that undermines the entire project — that has been undermining the project for as long as I’ve known you. Your work is retrograde, Milk — is, was, and always will be. Do you hear me?”
The crowd breathed as one. The building quaked. I bowed my head. “I was just, I, that is — it was only a joke.”
“And stop stuttering, for God’s sake. Speak up like a man!”
“Prok,” Mac said, interceding for me. “Prok, please. He was only trying to—”
“I don’t give two figs for what he was trying! He should know, of all people, that I don’t need his assistance”—and now a look for Mac—“or anybody else’s, for that matter, when I prepare to address a gathering …”
Mac’s voice was reduced. “Perhaps you’d like us to leave, then?”
It was at that moment that Corcoran, the fair-haired boy, appeared in the doorway with a glass of water, the vast percolating intensity of the crowd arriving with him in a wave that rolled through the room and crested against the trophy-laden bookcases. “Yes,” Prok snapped, stepping forward briskly to snatch the glass from Corcoran’s hand, “yes, I’d like you to leave. Most emphatically. And take him”—the accusatory finger pointed at Corcoran now—“with you.”
By the time we’d found the seats reserved for us in the front row, I’d already forgotten — and forgiven — the incident. It was nerves, that was all. Prok was under intense pressure to perform, and though I’d never seen him waver in any of the hundreds of lectures for which I’d been present, this one was special. There had never been a crowd like this, and he would have been less than human if he didn’t have a case of nerves. At any rate, the vice president — that generic face and figure, the academic, the bureaucrat — made his own stab at levity in his introductory remarks, and the students in the audience let out a collective titter. Shuffling through his notes and gazing up myopically at that mass of humanity, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m pleased to see so many faculty here today, and faculty wives, in attendance at a university meeting. Of course, most of us must view the subject to be discussed largely in retrospect.” There was a pause, as if the audience hadn’t heard him right, and then the titters ran through the stacked tiers of chairs and benches like a motif out of Die Walküre.
Then there was Prok. He strode out of the wings, chest thrust forward, spectacles flinging light, and mounted the podium to an avalanche of applause, which suddenly died to nothing as he raised a hand to adjust the microphone. As usual he began speaking extemporaneously, without notes or props of any kind, his voice low and unmodulated, adopting the matter-of-fact tone that had served him so well through the years. He started off with variation and how the extremes at both ends of a given behavior define the norm, an old theme. Listing the various outlets available to the human animal from puberty on — masturbation, petting, coitus, the oral component — he went on to discuss frequency, and here the crowd, which had been slowly awakening to what he was saying, nearly got away from him. “There are those, for instance, who require no more than a single orgasm a month or even a year, and others who require several per week, or even per day.”