He ventured into no more kissing games during his teens. But with the onset of manhood and the removal of the braces, there came the usual stirrings of sexual desire. And with them came the proof that this condition of his was no mere teenage clumsiness, but an active fact of his life. It showed itself in many different ways, but the result was always the same: Herbie always failed to make out with the fair sex—and he always failed in some hilariously disastrous manner that couldn’t have happened to another man in a million years of concentrated effort.
Take his latest fiasco with a female. It could only have happened to Herbert Lansing.
After years of flopping every place but in bed with females, Herbert had decided that the trouble was he’d been concentrating on the wrong kind of girl. He’d been going out with ordinary females-—secretaries, college girls and the like. But he obviously had an extraordinary problem and it obviously called for an extraordinary kind of female to help solve it. This led Herb to seek feminine companionship at a notorious coffee house in the beatnik section of Caldwell. He figured he’d find someone there who was poetic and intellectual and extraordinary. Besides, rumor had it that these chicks put out.
A So he crammed his lanky frame into a corner chair at the coffee house and seared the skin from the roof of his mouth with the bitterest brew he’d ever tasted while he studied the beat chicks present. They were typical of the species, with hair as lank as the place was dank, shiny-nosed and lipstick-less, un-girdled, un-bra’d and un-combed, as alike one another as they were different from the ordinary girls Herb knew. Herb sat there, alone and ignored, for quite a while.
But the place was filling up, and finally a girl, unable to find a seat anywhere else, asked if he minded if she sat at his table. Herb assured her that he didn’t, and she wrapped herself around the chair like an arthritic snake looking for a comfortable position. She looked at him for a long moment, took a long gulp of her coffee, smacked her lips as if she really enjoyed it, and said, “Do you agree with Mailer when he says ‘Hip’ is the true American existentialism?”
Herb opened his mouth to reply. Fortunately, since he hadn’t the foggiest idea of what she was talking about, she didn’t give him a chance to. Instead she launched into a discourse which was unintelligible to him, filled as it was with words like “determinism” and “Zen” and “Oedipal” and “semantic” and “fix” and “pad.” But Herb soon discovered that all he had to do was nod in the right places to set her off on one conversational tangent after another. After a while he became aware that each such nod was raising him in her esteem. Obviously she thought him as entranced by the sound of her words as she was herself.
Finally, she took a deep breath, looked at his wristwatch, and informed him that it was time for her to “split”. Herb asked if he might see her home and she said that would be real “cool”. Enroute they swapped names, and hers turned out to be Adrian.
Adrian asked him in for a nightcap, and Herb began to feel as if he might be about to get some place. While she was fixing the drinks, he casually looked over the books in her bookcase. It was filled with works by Kierkegaard and Ferlenghetti and Camus and Gide. There wasn’t an author there whose name he recognized.
Adrian came up behind him. “Are you interested in philosophy? I am. I really dig the nihilists. Existentialism really grew out of their work, you know, Who’s your favorite philosopher?” This time she waited for him to answer the question.
Herb groped for the name of a philosopher. He could only think of one, so he used it. “Norman Vincent Peale,” he told her.
She looked at him as if he was something that had just crawled out from under a rock and she didn’t know whether to step on it or just ignore it. “I see,” she said in a withdrawn tone.
“I like to read, though.” Herb tried lamely to retrieve their former rapport.
“Really. What?”
“I beg pardon?”
“Who are your favorite authors?”
“Oh. Well, uh, Frank Yerby. Harold Robbins. Grace Metalious. Say, did you read Peyton Place?”
“No. And I didn’t read The Carpetbaggers, or Gone With The Wind, either.”
“I really liked Peyton Place.”
“I’ll just bet you did.”
“Gee, you don’t have to be sarcastic about it. Everybody’s got different tastes.”
“Yeah. Some are born square; some achieve squareness; and some have squareness thrust upon them.’ ”
“I beg pardon?”
“Just paraphrasing Shakespeare.”
“Oh . . . You mean I’m square; is that it?”
“Geometrically perfect.”
“You’re right; I am.”
“Well, at least we agree."
“I’m square, all right, and I admit it. But that’s no reason for you to act so snobbish about it. It’s not my fault that I ’m not hip. I’ve just never had the opportunity to learn about these things. And if everybody who isn’t square, like you, is just going to sit around looking down their noses at people like me and keep on acting so superior and all, how can you expect us to ever wise up?”
She studied him for a moment. “You know, in your own primitive way, you’ve hit on a real truth there,” she told him.
“Darned right. Look, Adrian,”-—he moved closer to her on the sofa-—“I really do want to learn. I may be uninformed, but I’m not stupid. And even if I am square, you can’t deny that we had a real rapport going for a while back there in the coffee house. Like I say, I want to learn. And you can help me. What do you say?”
“Play Pygmalion to your Galatea, huh?” Adrian was intrigued by the idea. “But how does one go about it with a genuine American primitive?” She was thinking out loud. “To bring you to a point of intellectual hipness would take years. And it might not be worth it because it might fall short of the only truly worth-while ultimate goaclass="underline" oneness.”
“Oneness?”
“Becoming one with the world and the universe. Sacrificing ego completely to find the larger self which is all. Divesting oneself of mind and body and immersing one’s spirit in the Life Force. There are many roads to this goal --existentialism, Zen, Confucianism, Yogi . . . That’s it!” She snapped her fingers. “There’s no need for intellectuality at all! I’ll guide you down the path of oneness by instructing you in the art of Yogi.”
“Isn’t that some kind of exercise program?”
“It is a bodily discipline designed to merge the self with the Life Force, to make the individual one with all. Come, I’ll show you, and we'll do it together.”
Adrian took the drink from his hand and led him over to the opposite wall. She seemed to crumple to the floor before his eyes, her limbs rearranging themselves in a position that Herb would have sworn was anatomically impossible. “Just relax like this and let your mind go blank. It’s simple,” she told him. “After a while, you’ll feel the waves of oneness washing over you.”
Herb tried to copy her contorted pose and found he couldn’t. She leaped lithely to her feet and helped him. Oblivious to his grunts and winces, she twisted his arms, legs and body until he was in the position she’d demonstrated. He was literally tied up in knots and couldn’t move a muscle, but to his surprise he found that it wasn’t at all uncomfortable.
Adrian assumed the same position alongside him. “Now don’t talk,” she told him. “Just concentrate your mind on utter blankness.”
Herb tried to do as he was told, but found after the first five minutes that it was impossible. So, instead, he just let his mind roam at will. This lead him into a very pleasant daydream of how this Yogi lesson would culminate in an erotic interlude with Adrian which would fulfill his idea of what “oneness” ought to be. After all, this definitely came under the heading of establishing rapport; and that, according to what he’d heard, was the one essential in bedding down a beatchick.