His first assignment for us was the aforementioned study of the means of sperm emission in the human male, because this was essential to our understanding of conception in the female. The medical literature of the time maintained that it was necessary for sperm to spurt out under pressure in order for fertilization to occur, but our data showed that the majority of males did not spurt but rather dribbled. And so Prok determined on a trial. We went to New York that fall (of 1948, that is, and I recall the date because the trip caused me to miss John Jr.’s first Halloween celebration — Iris dressed him as Tigger from the Winnie the Pooh books, in a costume she’d sewed herself from a pattern, and she was furious with me) and booked rooms, as usual, at the Astor. Aspinall showed up with his business partner, a man around my age whose name escapes me now — let’s call him “Roy,” for convenience’s sake — and Roy, who had extensive H-contacts, assured us he could get us the one thousand volunteers Prok had decided on for a definitive sample.
Prok was skeptical at first. “One thousand?” he repeated. “Are you sure? Quite sure? Because anything less would be a waste of our time.” We were in our room on the fifteenth floor, looking out over the crush of humanity in the square below. The curtains were open wide — Prok favored light — and the furnishings were what you’d expect from a hotel in the low- to mid-priced range.
Roy — struck wire, amphetamine-fueled, a little man waving his arms — let his voice ride up the register. “No, no, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. I know this boy, he’s a genius. He’s beautiful. Seventeen years old, perfect skin, hair like Karo syrup, he’s a German refugee, or Austrian maybe, with just a trace of that accent to spice things up, if you know what I mean. Right now he’s the hottest thing on the street, at least in this neighborhood. It’s two dollars for each volunteer, right? And two dollars for the kid for every one he brings in?”
Prok, frowning, showed him his wallet.
“Okay,” Roy said, “okay,” and Aspinall gave us a nod of assurance. “Tomorrow night, five p.m., at our studio, right?”
The following night, Prok, Corcoran and I turned the corner onto the block where Aspinall and his partner ran their photographic business out of the ground floor of a brownstone, and my first thought was that there had been an accident, a fire, people evacuating the building and the hook and ladder on the way. It took me a moment to realize that the line of people stretching the entire block — the line of men, exclusively men — wasn’t leaving the building, but entering it. A number of them recognized Prok as we ducked through the crowd, calling out his name, pressing in for autographs, but Prok gave them his dispassionate face and reminded them that they were participants in a scientific experiment, not a radio quiz program. A hundred hands shot out to touch him notwithstanding, and he shook as many as he could, his grin fixed like a politician’s, as we climbed the stairs and strode through the open door of the studio.
Everything was ready for us, camera, lights, mise-en-scène and a cast of hundreds, the young blond hustler at the head of the line awaiting the signal even as he chatted up those immediately behind him. “First, first,” he kept insisting, as we squeezed our way into the room, “I do first, and then I go out and bring more custom, ja?”
Prok gave him a judicious look. Then he separated two bills from the wad of singles he extracted from his pocket and handed them over. “Yes,” he told him, “yes, good thinking,” and the eyes of the men in the hallway fastened on us as if to memorialize the transaction: this was for real, and so was the money.
Roy and Aspinall had pushed the furniture back against the wall and created a stage in the center of the room by means of spreading a sheet over the carpet and positioning the lights and camera above it — the idea was for each subject to disrobe, lie on his back on the floor and consummate his business as expeditiously as possible, and the photographers had provided a small mountain of pornographic magazines, both of the homosexual and heterosexual variety, as a stimulus. Aspinall hovered in his trench coat and dark glasses, fidgeting over the equipment, while Roy escorted us to the three chairs he’d set up just out of camera range, and then the filming began.
We’d budgeted five minutes per man, one after the other coming in, removing his clothes and taking his position on the floor even as the man before him vacated it, a kind of assembly line, but it soon became apparent that we would have to find some means of speeding things up because there were the inevitable delays, subjects unable to perform for the camera, those who needed extra time, a trip to the bathroom and so on. After the first couple of hours we came to realize that just the undressing itself was taking too much time — thirty seconds, forty, a minute — and Prok asked Roy if he wouldn’t have the next several men in line undress in the hallway, distribute the magazines and prepare themselves, as much as possible, beforehand. Corcoran had maintained that it didn’t make much difference whether the men were clothed or not — all that mattered, really, was the penis, the hand and the ejaculation — and I tended to agree, but Prok, accusing us of undermining the project, insisted on full-frontal nudity. “We want everything, technique, facial expression, the works,” he said in a tense whisper, even as the fiftieth or sixtieth subject was going at it on the increasingly soiled sheet, “because all of it is relevant — or will be relevant — in the long run. Jackknifing, for instance.”
“Jackknifing?” I said aloud, the man before us in the shaft of light pounding at himself as if he meant to tear the organ right out of his body, his expression hateful and cold, hair all over him, bunched on the backs of his knuckles and toes, creeping up over his shoulders and continuous from neck to hairline, an ape of a man, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, and if you think sex research is stimulating, believe me, after the initial jolt — whether it be living sex or captured on film — a debilitating sameness sets in. We might as well have been counting salmon going upriver to spawn. It was past midnight. I stifled a yawn.
“Yes, of course. At orgasm. One percent of our sample reports it, and I should say, Milk, that you, of all people, should be aware of that fact. Very common in some of the lower animals. Rabbit, guinea pig.” Prok looked bored himself. Looked testy. He glanced at the man grunting on the floor, leaned over and said, in a soft voice, “If you could please just come now—”
We were there ten days in all, and toward the end we tried doubling up the sessions for the sake of expediency, and finally tripling them, Aspinall expertly maneuvering the camera from one subject to the other without once missing the climactic moment. I don’t think any of us, no matter our degree of dedication, had even the slightest inclination to observe masturbation in the human male ever again, but Prok did finally get his one thousand subjects on film and was able, on the basis of it, to settle once and for all the question of the physiology of ejaculation. It was a job well done, if tedious — and expensive, coming to just over four thousand dollars in fees to the subjects and the little blond hustler, who must have been the best-heeled teenager in New York by the time we left — and we were in a mutually congratulatory mood in the train on the way back. I remember Prok springing for drinks as the dining car trawled the night and presented us with fleeting visions of dimly lit waystations and farmhouses saturated in loneliness. I had the fish, Prok the macaroni au fromage, and Corcoran the porterhouse steak. We grinned at each other throughout the meal, and Prok retired early to his berth to write up his observations while Corcoran and I sat up over cards in the club car, drinking cocktails and smoking cigars. I slept like one of the dead.