The tricycle accident
Tony works for a gravel company in Oakland, Calif. He is an overweight, balding white man of 50, and has been doing this job since he got out of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1979. He served in Vietnam. He’s married and has two sons, both of whom are grown.
I got a gut now, but I was a pretty cute kid. My mother loved me and she dressed all of us very nicely. I liked being a cowboy, so she bought me this fringe leather jacket when I was about 4. It was way cool. I felt like the Lone Ranger in it. Way cool. But I didn’t have it for long because I lost it.
I grew up in San Leandro, Calif., which at that time was a little town with nothing going for it. Still is. There was a vacant lot down the street from where we lived on Dutton Avenue, and I used to play war and cowboys and Indians in the lot with my friend Tommy Wurzback. I think a lot of kids had played in that lot because there was even a series of trenches in it, where you could run up and down, defending the fort, fighting off the Apaches. It’s funny thinking about that vacant lot now. I mean, we just went over there and played. If I’d have allowed that with my kids growing up in the ’80s, they probably would have been abducted or something. Killed in a drive-by.
But, you know, in San Leandro in 1957 you didn’t get abducted. Anyway, Tommy and I were playing in the lot, and I took off my new cowboy jacket. Because it was hot. We played some more, and then I got onto my tricycle to ride home. It was only a block away, and when I got home, my mother fixed me and Tommy a glass of milk and some cookies. I was eating the cookies — chocolate chip! And then my mother asked me where was the jacket? Jesus God! I was afraid right away, because I’d forgotten it. She got really mad at me, and took me right out to the sidewalk, put me back on my tricycle, and marched me right back to the vacant lot.
Well, the jacket was gone. Somebody’d taken it. I couldn’t even remember where I’d taken it off, and we looked all over for it. My mother got so mad at me that she told me to get on my trike and go right back home and up to my room, and my dad was going to hear about it when he got home. I was terrified. So I was pedaling really fast, in tears, you know, sobbing! And turning the corner a little too fast, I laid the tricycle down on its side. I mean, actually, I flew off it headfirst, over the handlebars. And when I landed on the handlebars themselves, I tore up my pecker pretty badly. I mean, I cut it! Probably just a small one because, Jesus, my pecker itself wasn’t all that big! But I cut it, and blood was running out of the cut and it hurt really badly.
My mother came running up behind me because I was screaming, and I’d opened up my pants to see why my pecker hurt so bad, and when she saw it she screamed and picked me up and ran me home, and ran me to the hospital, and Jesus Christ did it hurt! I don’t know what I thought had happened. But I knew that this wasn’t like just some other cut, like on my finger or something. This cut was a bad one because of where it was. I mean, if you had asked me before that happened whether my penis was important, I would have said, “Gosh, I guess. But I don’t know.” Once that happened, though, and especially when the doctor was putting the stitches in it, to close it up, I knew that something bad, really bad, had happened.
I couldn’t watch him, but I sure could feel him. It was like a sewing machine going right through that skin there, pulling that thread. There was even a sound to the thread, like some kind of, I don’t know, the only thing I can think of now is like rope running through your hands. The doctor’d deadened it, you know, with a shot. But the shot itself was awful! Just awful! I was screaming, and my mother was holding on to me. God, I was afraid! And so was she! I think of it now and, you know, I’m OK. I’ve had a successful sex life and kids and so on, and six months after it happened I probably didn’t think about it too much. I’ve even gotten some significant laughs when I’ve told people the story. But, you know, in the end I don’t laugh. I was so afraid, I thought I was going to die or something. And if the cut had been worse. I mean, if I’d been really injured, I might have died right then and there, at least in terms of my life, my feelings.
My poor white pecker
Wayne is a restaurateur who had a career in music management, representing blues and rock ‘n’ roll musicians. He says that he was one of the few honest white managers of black artists, and that he always ensured that they were paid properly by clubs and record companies. He is 60 years old and lives in Detroit.
There were these two fellows in a gym class I took in 1957 at Oakland High School: Latrell and Lavell Jackson. Their father worked at the Gallo Salami factory in San Francisco, which coincidentally is where my father worked.
Latrell and Lavell were sophomores when I was a freshman, and they were both on the wrestling team. Twin brothers, very dark black guys and very small. They could also sing, and they were the high school stars in the drama club and in assemblies and so on. They were our high school’s answer to people like Bo Diddley and the doo-wop groups. Really talented guys. The high school was probably half black and half white among the students, and all the white students came from above MacArthur Boulevard while the black students came from below it.
There was pretty much a divide between the groups — the white kids would eat in the cafeteria and the black kids would go off-campus, to the little markets and diners down MacArthur. It was self-imposed segregation.
Gym class was the great leveler, though, particularly if you were white. I have to say, and I mean this very honestly, probably naively, that I didn’t really notice how different the two groups were. But I’m sure as hell that the black guys knew it. The white boys were the recipients of the greatest affirmative action program that ever existed — that is, by being white. But in those days, a white boy didn’t question the privilege, not being aware in any way that it existed.
But in the gym class, everything evened out. After class, we’d all be in the shower, in the time-honored fashion of boys being in the shower. There was a lot of sideways glances, looking away quickly, not wanting to be caught wondering what other guys looked like. Silence. Schoolboy furtiveness. But one day I was standing at my locker, just finishing toweling myself off, when Latrell Jackson, who had the locker next to mine, looked down at my penis, pointed directly at it, and burst into laughter.
“Look at that thing!” he said.
I’m a redheaded Irish boy barely capable of getting beyond a sunburn during the summer. A tan for me is out of the question. My penis is as white as, well, even whiter than the rest of me. I was holding my towel and, suddenly, I was confronted by six or seven more black kids, including Latrell’s brother Lavell. A cacophony of talk and laughter broke out as I was suddenly the object of everybody’s glee. It was the kind of talk where everybody’s going on at the same time, very loudly, nobody listening to anyone else. It was noisy, outright thunderous laughter, and my poor white pecker and red pubic hair were the source of it all.
I was in that position that a man very often finds himself in, where he is being made fun of, maybe even a fool of, yet he feels that he has to remain manly. You know, John Wayne, etc. Strong silent type. So I held the towel, you know, sort of in front of me, because I was embarrassed. But I was also male. So I felt I had to be stoic, silent, indifferent to the hilarity around me. With that in mind, I held the towel not always in front of me. I let it fall away or wave in front of me or flutter. I was trying to be cool.
Now, when I think back on it, I think of Manolete and his cape work, the way he tantalized the bull and drove it to distraction, all the while himself a model of humorlessness and comportment. But Manolete was the greatest bullfighter in history, while I was 14 and a freshman at Oakland High School. There’s another difference. The great Miura bull standing in puzzled fury before Manolete was not also doubled over in laughter.
I didn’t have the nerve to laugh back at Latrell and Lavell, whose penises looked so radically different from mine. To do so would have been an unwise choice for me, I think, given that in that moment I was the only white kid in sight. But I was a very embarrassed white kid, trying to keep cool, the sole possessor of a milk-white pecker and, suddenly confronted with that fact, angry about it.
I was being embraced
George is 73 years old and spent his career as an executive for a woman’s underwear manufacturing firm in Chicago. He has several children who have migrated to other parts of the country. His wife, Dolores, died recently and he is now living alone.
Dolores was, well, she was just everything to me. I think it’s unusual to find many people who would say that of someone to whom they’d been married as long as we were married. Most of the couples I know spend the latter half of their marriages bickering at each other, in silence or suppressed anger. Wishing, I guess, to be rid of each other. But we didn’t. She was always generous. And I don’t mean that she abandoned herself to just take care of me. That happens, too, with a lot of couples, especially of our generation. Betty gives herself over to satisfying Joe’s every whim, and that’s a source of anger for her right there! It’s my contention that no one can give their own interests up voluntarily and not resent it. Even those wives who bought in to the middle-class ethic of the ’50s that the little lady should stay at home with the kids. Even if they played that role to perfection, beneath the wedding-cake cuteness of that ideal lies a heart slowly growing inflamed, slowly going crazy.
Dolores was her own person, and it was that that I really wanted in her. There was none of the kind of institutional war in our relationship that exists in so many others, the kind of landmine that is stepped on with the snide remark, the recollected slight, the intentional downturn in the voice.
This was especially so when we made love. Here’s how my penis felt when I made love to my wife. There was a pulse in her, especially when she was having an orgasm. She would get to a place where an orgasm would last, or at least come and go, for several minutes. She especially liked me to make love to her from behind because I could reach further inside her, I think. But I could feel this pulse just before and all during the time she was having an orgasm. I felt, inside her, that I was being embraced, which of course was true. But there was more than just a meeting of our parts, you might say. Because that pulse from her was to me the clue to how much she cared for me. It caressed me for minutes on end, all around the end of my penis, I guess coming from the tissue spreading out from her cervix.
Jesus! Just that kind of medical language makes it sound hardly loving at all. But I felt loved because I felt that pulse. It was like words. It was as though she were whispering to me, “I love you, sweet.” (That’s what she used to call me: “sweet.”) “I love you.” The last time I felt it was the last time we made love, about three months before she died. She was alive at that moment, even though she was beginning to get pretty sick, and I was absolutely alive just because of her holding me inside her and making me feel caressed and enjoyed.
Virile guys and Viagra
Lennie is an automobile salesman. He is 61 years old.
Years ago, you wouldn’t admit to not being able to get it up. It was shameful. But now, with Viagra, and with those ads that show Bob Dole and the race car driver, virile guys telling you about Viagra, it’s all changed. In some respects, I guess, you get to be proud of the fact that you can’t get it up!
I had had some pretty difficult troubles. It would come and go. And when it came, it really didn’t come up all the way. Sometimes it would. But it wouldn’t stay that way. Or it would stay, but only halfway. And lately, it had gotten to be that sometimes it wouldn’t come up at all.
This is a problem. Because most of the women with whom I’ve had the opportunity to be intimate lately (I mean, I’m not talking about dozens or anything. Just a couple of nice women who wanted to have a companion and wanted to have a nice sex life) want to be active. Just because you’re 60 and a woman doesn’t mean that life’s come to an end. I mean, these are real women!
But I haven’t been able to, and I was really ashamed of myself. Mad at myself. It was as though I just didn’t care. That’s how I thought of it. I’d just given up somehow, even though I wanted a nice sex life, too. So I stopped going out because I didn’t want to have that level of embarrassment. And I didn’t want them to be embarrassed. Because I’ve had women ask me if it’s them that’s the problem. “Is there something I’m not doing?” That kind of thing.
But now there’s Viagra.
So I was in my bathroom the other night with Barbara, a woman I’ve been going out with. She’s 52. We’re both a little overweight. Our skin could have a little better tone. But we bathed together and then we stood in front of the mirror. My butt’s mottled. Some skin tags here and there. Moles. A couple of glasses of wine on the counter. But you know, she took me into her hand and gave me a great big hard-on. It was the nicest thing. And even better, it stayed that way for quite a while. Barbara stood behind me and held me in her hand, kind of waving me, maybe, for the mirror.
“Has it always been this way with you?” she asked me.
I told her it hadn’t. I explained the situation.
“Well … so just look at you now!” she said, her hand reaching around in front of me as we looked at ourselves in the mirror. “So grand.” She glanced up at me in the mirror. “So grand!”
I’ve never had a hard-on
Tak is a Japanese-American homosexual who lives in Malibu Beach. He is the personal chef for the CEO of a Hollywood-based talent agency and his family. He is 29.
At first it wasn’t a problem. I was the only Japanese kid in my high school, and I didn’t go out all that much. I suppose I wasn’t expected to get it up.
But when I got to the culinary academy in San Francisco, it was different. I started asking girls out. We’d hang at the clubs South of Market. Actually I got to be very social, and I became much more avant-garde in my appearance. Blue hair. Earrings. Scarves. I’d go shopping with the girls, and I really liked it, especially in the second-hand shops on Valencia, the sound of all those hangers tingling on and off the racks. I love that sound.
I still was pretty shy, though, and I didn’t really get involved with anyone until I’d been at the academy for a couple of years. It was then that I found that I couldn’t really get an erection. I just wasn’t turned on, although I wanted to be. I just wasn’t. It was embarrassing, because the two girls that I tried to make love to were, uh, receptive. A pastry chef from Hollywood, and a sous-chef from San Francisco. Emma and Susan — both white girls. Both pretty far out when it came to personal appearance and the things they’d talk about.
Emma especially wanted to talk about penises, and when it didn’t work out between us, she — well, she didn’t get offended, like Susan did. She just wanted to know if it had been something about her that had turned me off, or was there a physical issue or something. I told her that I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. I was more upset about it than she was, because I really did want to be her lover — I thought.
Then one night, when Emma and I were having a drink together at Julie’s Supper Club, I met Brad, who was beautiful. He was a day trader. He didn’t have a job. He was on the computer all day, buying and selling stocks, and he was extremely clean-looking. Very precise. He only wore Levi’s and sport shirts. But they were always ironed. In fact, Brad looked like an ad, one of those building-sized posters that you see on the sides of huge edifices downtown, with people like Shaquille O’Neal, for sport stuff and the latest in underwear.
I asked Brad to go to the movies with me, and we did the following night. We went to his place that night also, and I was just amazed at how wonderful he was. But then, the same thing happened with Brad that had happened with Susan and Emma. Brad lay there in bed, big and full, so gorgeous. But I was like an old sock! We tried all kinds of things. I mean, Brad tried all sorts of things, bless him. But I began as a sock and remained a sock.
I’ve looked for help with this from doctors, psychiatrists. But nothing seems to help much. Viagra, maybe, but I haven’t tried that yet. This is the saddest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. It’s made me feel that I’m the same way inside — motionless, dead. The black I feel inside is like death. I weep sometimes. But at least the weeping shows that I have feelings. It’s like mourning. We know that the dead person has gone elsewhere. But what are we left with here? You know, the fact is I’ve never had a hard-on. I don’t know what it’s like.
Monday: Feeling alive
Little Timmy
Tim was once a salesman for a printing company.
I hate to tell you this. I mean, I’m pretty embarrassed. But I was working at a company until last year, where I’d been for 10 years. There was the “A Team” and the “B Team” and I was always on the “A Team.” They were the salespeople that sold more than $10 or $12 million dollars a year of printing. So there were cruises every year, golf vacations, stuff I won all the time because I sold so much.
I had three clients, the largest of which was a huge bank. The buyer there was a woman named Beth, and I’d always liked her. So much that I broke the one rule that I said I’d never break. I took her to lunch, which was OK. I took her to dinner, which was OK. We played golf. But we got involved.
I’d never done that sort of thing before because I knew how dangerous it can be. But she had made it very clear that she wanted me. And, once we’d consummated the affair, how much she wanted Timmy. “Timmy” is what she called my penis. “Little Timmy” actually. She had names for every part of me. My balls. (I won’t tell you what she called them!) My tongue. My right hand. But Timmy was always Timmy.
She loved Little Timmy, who she said filled her up. Also he had talents at the entrance to the Tunnel of Love. Her skin was very soft there, like little flesh tulips, sort of. And she loved it when Little Timmy kissed her there or, you know, sort of mooshed around, up and down, in and out a little bit. Kind of playing with her there at the entrance for, you know, a long time! Used to drive her to distraction if you want the truth.
Something happens when you display that kind of interest. That kind of playfulness. I was amazed at what power those sorts of “nothing” actions can have. But they do! They have real power. But what happens sometimes is that you get to places where you feel immune to ever being caught, like those securities traders at big companies who lose billions for the company and their clients. Because they feel they’ll never be seen, that their abilities to hide money transactions show how smart they are and how they’ll get away with the whole thing.
The same thing happened here, only I wasn’t trading billions of nonexistent dollars. I was just mooshing around. Like a dummy, I got panicked. I couldn’t stand the pressure. Those meetings with my VP of Sales every month, when he’d ask me, “So, Timmy, how’s Beth doing over there at the bank?” Of course he meant, “How’s the account doing?”, not “How’s Beth’s love life?” But every time he’d ask a question about her, I worried that maybe he knew what was happening.
No, the pressure got to be too much. So I asked Beth, could we stop? Please! Couldn’t we just go back to the way it was? Her response was to get so angry with me that she threw me out of the office. Then she called me, time and again, many times. I’d talk with her, but she couldn’t understand what my problem was. Weren’t we happy? Didn’t I love her? She came to my house one night and confronted me with wild weeping. I had to ask her to leave, which only made her more furious.
So my VP called me in after a few weeks and asked me “What’s this about Beth?” I asked him what he meant. He told me that she had called him and asked that I be removed from the account. I was untrustworthy. I wasn’t responding to her calls. I’d become indifferent to the account, she said, and here she’s got a half dozen printers a day calling her for her business.
“So what’s goin’ on, Timmy?” he asked.
I mumbled a few answers, which he interrupted by calling Beth while I was there, and asking for an appointment with her. Could we both come to see her? She said yes. So we went. When we got into the office, she went into a monologue about what a silent salesman I’d become, how it was that I seemed so absent, that I didn’t care for the account anymore, that I didn’t return phone calls, that I didn’t send her paper samples, that proofs were always wrong, that I missed appointments — it was all a lie, but it got me fired, finally.
She had gone on to say that any company that would hire someone like me, any vice president of sales that would hire a guy like me, didn’t deserve her business. The VP guy told me later he’d never been so pissed in his life, sitting there taking shit like that, getting blind-sided like that. He said he’d always thought I was a stand-up guy, and here I’d been deceiving the company about my activities. Not returning phone calls! “How could you do this, Timmy?”
I never admitted to him the truth of why Beth was so angry because I felt that if I did he’d not only fire me, he’d probably kill me as well. So I’m out! The company’s out. Little Timmy and I got fired, and he’s the reason I’ve got such a bad cash flow problem right now.
You know I worry very much about this. It’s as though my penis were my personality, and what’s that all about? Power? Maybe, but I’m the one who’s powerless now. I thought I wouldn’t get caught, and it was all for that feeling of release, that clutch that coming gives you, and all the liquids and the writhing and the movement. It’s all so glorious. But in this case it was also all so misleading. I just worry that I’m hanging off the end of it, instead of it’s hanging off the end of me.
The father of all letter carriers
John is a printer of religious books in Atlanta. He speaks in a very refined way with a deep Southern accent.
When I was in high school I read a lot. This was a kind of secret endeavor because my friends were the guys on the football team, student government types, and guys who owned and worked on cars. Reading was not their first choice of something to do.
What I read drove me even further into a kind of secretiveness. I liked parlor novels. So, “Little Women” has always been a favorite of mine. I can read Jane Austen over and over again. Barbara Pym is a true model for how to write such stuff. “Mrs. Dalloway.” I was a guy, nonetheless. I mean, a guy. I did sports and became an outdoorsman, a skier, a hiker. Women have always told me that that’s a source of my appeal, that I am such a guy.
What they haven’t always known is that this particular guy is interested in 19th century women’s dress, in the unexpected revelation of love in a letter to the heroine from an unknown admirer, in the details of a ride through the English countryside in a chaise-and-four. In the way sisters help each other find a beau. In the worried meddling of mothers. Even when I’ve told women about my reading, they still have told me “Gee, that’s wonderful, especially in someone like you who’s so obviously — a guy!”
So a few years ago I decided to just look at myself. I mean, literally. In the mirror! I hadn’t thought about it much, if ever. What does a guy look like? I mean, I know what a guy looks like, but I’d never really looked steadily at myself to see what it is that makes me a guy. There were a lot of things. My chest is big, muscular. My legs, too. The feet and hands aren’t so big, but they’re thick, especially my fingers. When they’re resting on my chest, they wouldn’t be mistaken for a woman’s hands. I looked at all kinds of things. My upper legs. The way my feet approach the floor when I walk. All kinds.
But what I found myself not looking at was my penis. It was as though I wasn’t supposed to look at it. It’s not something that I’ve paid a lot of attention to in my life in any case. It’s just a part of me, and I haven’t much thought about it as a being unto itself. But when I realized that I was being prudish, that I was being shy about my own penis, I decided to go ahead and have a look.
This was a revelation because I quickly realized that I was observing the part of my body that is most spectacularly intimate. It’s the channel that delivers my entire genetic make-up to someone else! The whole message that I have to give is contained by that penis for those few seconds of passage, as my sperm surges up it in a mad race for release, for embrace, for connection, the intimate connection with someone else’s message. It’s filled with nerve endings, and each one of them is seeking release, a glut of release. So it plunges into the closest of intimacies, and glories in it when it gets there.
Knowing this, I look at my penis now whenever I have the chance. The father of all letter carriers! This has also helped my reading. I now know that novels are a similar form of intimacy to what I found in my penis. They bring the glut of feelings and thoughts that the writer has to offer. The book is the penis that, in a desirous frenzy of words, gives me the message.
What I’ve always liked in the novels I read is the sensuous detail. The women and men who write such books understand that perfectly, so Jane Austen, with all her delicacy, is writing all the time on every page about sensuality. I wonder if she realized that, pen in hand, she was fashioning a penis of her own.
The laundry
James is a wealthy man with a tight, pursed demeanor who parlayed millions in inherited money into many more millions through his management of a group of news and media companies. He is 60 years old and a very conservative Republican.
I was going back to Yale for my second year, and my father was driving me to the railroad station. Whenever you looked at my father, no matter what time of day or night, chances are he would be wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, dark tie and black shoes. I’m not sure he even owned a pair of brown shoes. He was a gruff man. His patrician clothing and frigid manner, his distance from everyone around him, belied his very occasional salty humor.
During our drive to the station in his Packard, he engaged me in the first conversation I ever had with him about male sexuality, the function of the penis, about my sexuality and my penis in particular.
“James,” he said, turning a corner, “we’ve had to send too many of your sheets to the laundry lately.”
That was it. I went back to Yale. The remark was typical of my father. Deadpan. Understated. Dry. Hilarious. But I have a large regret about that day. That is, that one of the most humorous opening gambits toward a really important conversation I’ve ever heard was not an opening gambit at all. It was a closing gambit, an endgame. My father and I never talked about sex again.
Tomorrow: Penis problems
A grand lover of women
Eddie is a limousine-for-hire driver in Chicago. He’s a very large black man of 38. He wears a black suit, white shirt and black tie when he drives, and black leather driving gloves. His sunglasses are by Gianni Versace. Extremely articulate, he is nonetheless soft-spoken and very kindly.
I wanted to cultivate this image of being a grand lover of women. So I speak this way, with this voice, because I want to be a man of authority. Not cruel authority. Rather the kind of man in whom women feel they can find strength, sympathy, intelligence.
I’ve found that women respond very favorably to a man who does two things: He asks them questions about themselves, and then he listens to the answers. It’s remarkable how few men seem to do this. I’ve been very successful doing it. If you show respect for someone, they’ll respect you, and I’ve had many women fall in love with me, or just want to go to bed with me, simply because I listened to what they had to say. I ask more questions and listen to more answers, and it has always worked.
In my work, I meet a lot of women. Women going to the airport, women going to the theater, women going to the museums. We talk while we drive, and that’s where I find out if I’m going to … well, usually I can see it in the rearview mirror, the way their eyes look at me. So I’m asking questions, listening to their answers, and watching their eyes. Not directly. Not overtly. Just glances from time to time. I can see it in the glances.
If a woman invites me into her apartment, I know I’m in. I’m very considerate. I don’t push too hard. I don’t insist. But when we begin making love, things change. Then it’s as though this engine takes me over, and my penis becomes the center of everything. It feels that way to me, and the women feel the same way. They tell me that. They think I’m fine, attractive and all that. But they think my penis is a dynamo, some sort of creative blizzard.
This has been going on for years, and I used to classify it as a kind of gig, like a musician’s gigs. But lately I’ve begun to understand what it’s like for a musician to be on the road, night after night, club after club. It’s got to be difficult for them, playing in so many places to so many audiences. But I imagine the thing that sustains them is the fact that they’re playing. They’re improvising all the time. They’re looking into their hearts, no matter whether it’s in Philly, Pittsburgh or Chicago. No matter the moment, they’re feeling their heart.
It’s not like that for me. I’m beginning to think that, although my penis is talented, its talent is nothing more than superficial. I’m playing the notes, but what the tune can mean, what it can make you feel — that eludes me. These are nice women, usually. Some of them have even been in love with me. Some of them. But after it’s all said and done, they don’t really seem to be into it.
My penis is into it, but not my heart. So every time I get into my car and drive away, I feel like this beautiful limousine is pulling from the curb with a well-spoken, considerate, grand lover of women in it who, way down deep, is a shallow loner.
A gringo lover
Jeffrey is 28 years old, born and raised in Los Angeles. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, works in investment banking and is a salsa dancer of remarkable ability.
It doesn’t interest me so much, but it sure interests the women I dance with that I’m white. I mean, look at me! I’ve got this curly blond hair. I look like a Swedish accountant. If you were a film director and you wanted to cast some swarthy matinee idol to play the lead in your movie about Che Guevara, maybe you’d go to Benicio Del Toro, but you’d never even look at me. Maybe you’d let me park your car or something. I mean, you wouldn’t even notice me.
But I was born in the barrio in East L.A. My parents had grown up there and the Latinos just moved in around them over the years. I spent years dancing salsa, at junior high school parties and in high school. I’ve been going to the Mayan in downtown Los Angeles for years, and that’s the biggest salsa club in the world! So, I can dance! Salsa, son, son montuña, mambo, merengue — all of it.
Everybody was used to me in L.A., so this wasn’t a big deal. But here in New York, it is a big deal. You know the Copacabana on West 34th? Every Tuesday night at 6 they have a deal where you can get in for 5 bucks. Five! And that includes a buffet meal — you know, chicken, rice and beans on a paper plate. But it’s delicious. The crowd gathers outside after work, so you see hundreds of women, every kind of woman, mostly dressed for work because that’s where they’re coming from. Wool skirts. Heels. Conservative! But these are Latin women, so they’re there to dance.
The minute the doors open, the DJ starts up, and those guys play the best music ever. The dancing is immediate. The first time I went to the Copacabana, I couldn’t get anyone to even look at me. I stood in line, and I had a coat and tie on because that’s the way I have to dress at work. I did get a few looks, but they were mostly of, uh, amusement. I went inside and got a plate of food, and sat down to watch the dancing. It was right away astonishing, just as good as at the Mayan. The difference was that at the Mayan the women are dressed in next to nothing. It’s L.A., after all. At the Copacabana on Tuesdays they all look like lawyers. But they’re lawyers that can dance.
I sat and watched for about an hour, and no one even noticed me. But then I asked this one girl to dance. Alma. She’s Puerto Rican, very cute, with beautiful makeup. She was wearing a business suit, kind of State Department style, you know, dark blue with a dark gray blouse. Except she had on 3-inch red heels that she’d brought in her purse. I asked her to dance because she was absolutely the best dancer on the floor. But when I asked her, she looked at me as though I was the geek who wins the science prize in high school. I think what got her to acquiesce was that I asked her to dance in Spanish. That was a big surprise.
The bigger surprise came after we’d danced a number (it was a Ray Barretto) and she asked me to dance another one.
“Where you from?” she asked.
“L.A.,” I said.
“Everybody out there dance like you?”
She had kind of a Robert De Niro accent. I liked it.
“No,” I smiled. She smiled back. “I’m the only guy that dances like me,” I said.
Something that has always attracted me about Latina women is that they represent the Mediterranean to me. Warmth. Blue sea. They’re very comfortable with themselves. I mean, anyone who can dance the way they do, can look at you the way they do, has to be comfortable about how they feel about themselves. Because they’re moving in fact the way everyone else can move, but doesn’t.
But Alma saw me as the exotic, I guess because she thought I’d had to come so much greater a distance than she had, just in order to dance the way I do. I mean, an emotional distance. A cultural distance. A white boy who dances like this?
Not that we talked about it all that much. Mostly the exotic thing for Alma once we had a chance to really, uh, relate is how my penis looks. We had danced several nights together, and really had started going out. She asked me to her apartment one morning after we’d danced all night. We were lying on her bed and she was kissing me. She was a little undressed, beautiful dark skin, with a gold necklace on, her eyes made up in blues and dark purples, beautiful. Black hair, fine hair shining in the light. And she took me into her hand and began giggling, a giggle of surprise, of delight.
“I never saw such a thing before,” she said. She glanced up at me, into my eyes.
“I never made love to a man like you, Jeffrey.” She kissed me.
“How so?” I asked.
“You’re so pink!”
Lately, from some of the remarks that friends of Alma make — kind of behind my back — I think I’m getting a little reputation. I’m unusual. You know, there’s always been this thing about Latin lovers? Well, I’m a gringo lover, and so there’s a lot of speculation about me. It’s nice speculation, just like Alma’s laughter is nice. It’s the laughter of — discovery.
Jolene
Jolene’s given name is Edward. She’s been Jolene for about 10 years and is very close to signing the paperwork for a sex-change operation.
I told my mother, and even though she was shocked out of her mind at first, she finally agreed, and now she supports what I want to do. My mother’s been just great, really great about it. I’m not sure my dad would have been so, you know, so willing to go along. In fact I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been, and I guess it’s good that he passed away before all this got to be such an issue. I’ve been through all the hormone changes. I haven’t shaved in years. I’ve got tits now, beautiful ones and, you know, I’m kind of shapely!
The one thing that I find both funny and irritating, though, is that I still get these looks now and then from people in elevators or at the supermarket. It’s as though they know! They can see that I’m, well, a tranny. Not quite a man, not quite a woman. I think it’s because of my hands, actually, and maybe my shoulders. I’m a little embarrassed by my hands, if you want the truth. They’re like my father’s hands, and he was a building contractor. His were like slabs of meat. Mine are too, sort of, even though they’re, well, they’re more refined than his were! But it is hard to find a nice ring for my fingers. Women’s rings don’t come in my size.
This paperwork’s a problem, though. Not that there’s so much of it or anything. I mean, I can fill out a form! But I can’t really do it yet. It’s not as if I don’t want to. I knew when I was 3 that I was a girl. Being a boy just never was interesting to me. So even though I had nice pairs of jeans and cowboy shirts and all that, I spent all my time being a girl, at least in my heart. I got beat up a few times in high school, by those jerks that go around beating up queers.
So it was a real blessing for me to get out of Las Vegas and go to Columbia. I was happy at Columbia. I got to read what I wanted to read, wear skirts and blouses, go shopping for shoes with other girls and be a girl, like I always wanted to be.
But still there’s this paperwork. And here’s the problem. I sit at my desk with my robe on. It’s satin. It’s dark blue. Real cute. There’s all this paper in front of me. Releases and newsletters and legal documents and all this stuff! But there’s also me spread out before me. And when I open my robe and look down at me, that’s me there. My penis! I never thought of it as even a penis. Maybe a bulbous vagina. Or a kind of large-ish, uh, clitoris. But when you get right down to it, it’s a penis. That’s for sure. Can I possibly just erase it, like I’m planning to do? Is that fair? I mean, is that fair to it? Oh, I know I’ll have a nice little pussy and it’ll be pretty and womanly and all that. But I think, despite everything I just said, I worry that that penis really is me! It’s just very confusing!
Everything in my life has been aiming toward this change, and in my heart, now, for the very first time ever I realize I’m a man, too. I sit here wondering, how can this be? Me? A man? So I touch it and a look at it and I try to figure out how I feel about doing it in like this. I probably will. I’m pretty sure I will. I’ve always been excited about what I’ll be gaining when I do that. But it’s likely I’m going to be losing something very important, and I’m worried about it. Worried about it! Which is something I never thought about until the moment I started filling out the damned paperwork.
Tomorrow: Little Timmy gets me in trouble
We thought it was time for a series on men and their penises. Penises are often overlooked, underdiscussed and taken for granted unless they’re in use. Many men are hesitant to speak about their penises except in the crudest, or most perfunctory, ways.
Novelist and screenwriter Terence Clarke has broken through these barriers and is in the process of interviewing more than 200 men — from a black limo driver to an underemployed Irish poet, and even a man who is becoming a woman.
The pieces running this week are selections from an upcoming book called “Cleopatra’s Needle: A Report From the Heart and Soul of Men’s Last Taboo.” The idea for the project came about when Clarke and editor/publisher Alan Rinzler were talking about Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues” and realized that there was no comparable work on men. Clarke says, “Men keep quiet about their penises but underneath all that silence is an authentic universal preoccupation with precisely what is never mentioned.”
All names have been changed to protect the privacy of the penises.
Horacio, my pretty flower
Pedro is an intake clerk for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. He’s 31 years old, a small man, very dark-skinned, who wears tinted eyeglasses and a suit and tie every day to work. He does not care for the sloppiness of the contemporary workplace.
No, I don’t like the way people seem not to care about themselves anymore. The way they dress at work, they look like bums! My grandfather wouldn’t have stood for it, and I feel the same way. So I try to look sharp every day at work. I remember him, although he was very old when I was a kid here in San Jose. My grandmother told me a lot about him. He was from Guadalajara, a furniture salesman. They met in Guadalajara and, you know, in the early 20s he didn’t just go out with my grandmother. You didn’t do that. He’d ask her to go for a walk on the ramblas on Sunday afternoon, and her mother’d go with them. Or he’d come over for a visit some evening, and they’d sit in the parlor while her mother sat in the living room, which was right next to the parlor, knitting or something but really just watching them. No touch. No making out. None of that.
But, you know, my grandmother, she loved that man! She always told me how beautiful he was, and formal. How he treated her like a lady, a woman! Which meant that he treated her in a manly way, brought her flowers, respected her wishes and always, always greeted her mother and father with real feeling, real respect.
So when I’m at work, I try to be the same way. And I’m that way with my wife, too. She even calls me “Horacio” sometimes, which was my grandfather’s name. But, I mean, you know, you asked me about my penis? My wife calls it “mi linda flor,” my pretty flower. I like that. But I like it just as much when she calls it “Horacio.”
“Please take me to bed”
Clifford is a marketing executive in San Francisco in his late 50s. He was married for 23 years and has one adult son. He is a fallen-away Catholic, an avid reader of South American novels, and loves his social life.
When I was a little boy, my father instructed me to keep my arms and hands outside the covers when I slept. When he tucked me in, he would arrange the blanket and sheet over me, with my Lone Ranger pajama arms resting above the blanket, my hands folded together over my stomach.
“Keep them that way, Cliffie,” he would smile, tousling my hair before moving toward the light switch. “And sleep tight!” I didn’t succeed. His admonitions reminded me of the similar instructions he gave on those occasions on which I had to wear a coat and tie somewhere — Christmas mass, Easter service, a funeral — and I felt similarly restricted, similarly tightened.
For me, one of the lovely pleasures of sleep has always been to become immersed in the sheets and blankets and to allow their dreamy warmth to steal over me like a warm fog, quickly. So as soon as my father left the bedroom, I’d bring my hands beneath the blankets, roll over on my side and go to sleep.
I did not do what he was worried I would do, which was to masturbate. I didn’t question why he wished me to be so formal in my sleeping. But the answer became very clear, like lightning, one remarkable night when I was 17 and a freshman at the University of California, alone in bed with a sudden erection. I took it in hand and, well, the rest is history!
For me, onanism came late in life. By 17, most men have become expert in the practice. So I was a late bloomer. But once I did discover it, I recalled my father’s loving — and now suddenly failed — advice. I had never asked him about it. I never spoke to my father about sex in any way. My mother was the source of all such information as, later, friends were and, much later, some generous, kindhearted and barely contained women. After my discovery in Berkeley, I knew why he had been so careful.
But now, given the pleasure I had found, I wondered why he had cared about it so negatively. Before then, I had thought of my penis as an odd sort of tube to have flopping around before me. What god would have invented that? It was convenient in that toilets were perfectly situated to receive the liquid that periodically ran from it. But what was the point of it otherwise? There were moments, of course, when it got big, and I knew why it got big. (My mother had explained it to me.) But I really didn’t understand the consequences of its getting big — that is, the immediate consequences and the immediate solutions.
I had this vague understanding that lovemaking — which at the time I really didn’t understand — was intended for making babies. I had been told so by Jesuit priests during Catholic Church retreats in junior high school, and as far as they were concerned that was the only thing for which lovemaking was intended. But the priests had said this in a tone of voice that implied that, in the case of boys, the penis could be put to other quite dastardly purposes as well. Even though they didn’t describe masturbation or fucking or the well-intended, perfumed caress. None of that.
I almost discovered one of those purposes when I was 16 and making out on the beach in front of my high school girlfriend’s house (I’ll call her Mary Jo) on the Balboa Peninsula of Newport Beach, Calif. I had just learned how to make out, and Mary Jo was really enjoying what we were doing. I wasn’t feeling her up or anything, although I had been told how to do it by some friends of mine. As a good Catholic boy, I knew that feeling Mary Jo up would be a sin. So we were just kissing. But my penis was very taut, very strained against the jockey underpants I was wearing. I occasionally had to adjust it so that it could avoid rubbing against the zipper of my pants. The underpants provided some protection against the zipper, but not much.
Mary Jo whispered into my ear, “Oh Cliffie, please, please take me to bed.”
I stood up and helped her to her feet. She lived with her parents and sister in a second-story flat that looked out on the beach. None of them was home that evening, and I escorted Mary Jo up the stairs and into the apartment. Ever the gentleman, I tucked her into her bed, kissed her good night, and left, thinking I had obliged her every wish.
Mary Jo’s affection for me waned after that. She soon started going out with the high school quarterback. But as I drove home that night, I noticed the transformation that my penis had undergone. All for Mary Jo. For one, it was messy with pre-ejaculate liquid and clotted pubic hair. It felt quite sensitive to the touch, rubbed raw here and there by its confrontation with my underpants and zipper. Also I had a severe case of what my friends called “lover’s nuts,” the dull, even agonizing ache that takes over your scrotum sack when you’ve been very excited but have not had a proper orgasm. I didn’t know what a proper orgasm was.
When I got up the next morning, the lover’s nuts had subsided. I kept from my parents what Mary Jo and I had been doing on the beach, and what she had said to me in so frenzied a tone of voice. But I marveled in private at the transformations my penis had been through. Radical size shifts. The surface of its skin, changed from loose to taut to slick to sticky. Its color, now in places quite red, as though it had been sunburned. It had had a personality when Mary Jo and I were together. It had sought release. It had been disappointed. It had grumbled in pain. It had complained. But — it had not succumbed to the ecstatic purpose to which it had been tempted. I was not to understand that purpose — and all the subsequent others — until I got to Berkeley and beat off that night.
Now, after long marriage, a grown son, divorce and 10 years of being single again and being taught, again, by even more gracious women, I see how full a life a penis can have. I mean, it now delivers itself of opinions. It rests, content that it need not bestir itself right this minute, but that it surely could if it wanted to. It is calm, assured, maybe a little too settled and self-congratulatory. It has found capabilities for subtlety of action, the giving of pleasure, thrilling moments of sudden change, surrender and release that, lying on the beach with Mary Jo, I would not have even possibly imagined.
I only wish that my father were still alive, so that I could tell him.
I always loved me mickey
Liam is a poet from County Galway in the west of Ireland who now lives in New York City. He is 35 years old. He dresses poorly, in jeans, cowboy boots and secondhand shirts. He has very little money, because he insists he will be a poet and nothing else. His hair is frequently dirty. He refuses to work for a living, and his income comes from his writing and from welfare.
Well, you know that, despite the common myth about Catholics, we don’t fuck much in Ireland. But I’m ever vigilant and I always loved me mickey. I almost hate to use the term because it sounds so disrespectful. I really feel that he’s my friend, and I don’t want to use him for bad purposes. I care a lot for my mother and sisters and, you know, the truth is I love myself. So I wasn’t going to allow my penis to be some kind of warrior that I’d use to defeat women. I don’t view women as though they’re the English.
So I was reading the Chilean Pablo Neruda the other day, one of his “One Hundred Love Sonnets.” There’s a relationship, you know, a famous one, between the Spanish and the Irish. Irish soldiers were forever fighting for the Spanish against the English. Regiments of them! I think there’s a political reason there. As they say, “England’s troubles are Ireland’s gain.” But I also have this vision of the poor surviving sailors of the Spanish Armada coming ashore in the north of Ireland in 1588, cold and smothered with seawater and Triton’s cold weeds, dying, and the first thing they see is a group of Irish girls standing on the beach, barefoot, smiling, surprised by these handsome dark men floating on the waves, red-haired girls and gorgeous, you know. Can you blame the Spanish for feeling saved?
Anyway, I was reading Pablo Neruda. And he has this poem, it’s No. 12 in that book of sonnets. He’s writing the poem to his wife Matilde. All of them are written to this woman, and, Jesus, he must have loved her. To distraction, I mean, because few women have been written about the way Neruda writes about her. He calls her a “meaty apple”! He calls her a “hot moon.” And then he says: “I cover over your small infinities, kiss by kiss, your edges, your rivers, your diminutive villages, and the genital fire, transformed to a delicacy, runs up the narrow lanes of the blood until it spills itself … a carnation nocturne flower, until it is and is nothing, save a glimmer in the shadow.”
Now what’s that? That’s his mickey he’s talking about. And he’s coming! Isn’t he? Fire and delicacy! Lord help us. “The narrow lanes of the blood …” Can you imagine anything as beautiful as that? His penis is a deliverer! It brings her such a gift! A flower! A glimmer! A shadow! Sure you’d have to go a long way to find a mickey as glorious as that.
Tomorrow: A grand lover of women
By now, the oppression of the Tibetan people, their culture and their religion by the Chinese government is a proven and accepted fact. Since 1950, when the Chinese invaded sovereign Tibet, the circumstances of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people have been chronicled in print and film many times over, as have the destruction of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, priceless art and the livelihoods of many more thousands who have had to flee that country.
One aspect of the situation that has been less chronicled is the migration of thousands of Tibetan children every year, very often without their parents, over the Himalayan Mountains to Nepal and India. Usually they go in groups, led by mercenary Tibetan guides who are paid for their efforts by the families of these children, who wish better lives for them than can be found in Tibet. Many thousands of children have reached the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan capital-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. Some have not. The routes are dangerous and on occasion deadly, simply by virtue of the weather and terrain. The children can attempt escape by less arduous routes as well, although these routes are frequented by Chinese police and army, Nepalese bandits and other brigands who may attack, imprison or rob the children.
New York photographer Nancy Jo Johnson helped three young Tibetans leave the country in 1996. Her harrowing effort was chronicled the following year in a LIFE magazine article, accompanied by her photographs. She first encountered Tibetan refugees in the early 1980s while living in Katmandu, Nepal, and has been involved in the Tibetan issue ever since. She is a member of the board of directors of the United States Tibet Committee.
Johnson has been working to raise awareness about Tibetans through her photography for over 15 years. A recent exhibit of her work, “Tibet: Survival of the Spirit,” held at the Canon Rotunda of the U.S. House of Representatives, was sponsored by Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., and former Rep. John Edward Porter, R-Ill., co-chairman and honorary co-chairman, respectively, of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. It commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s March 1959 flight to exile in India. In a recent conversation, Johnson talked with Salon about Tibet past and present.
The story of the children that you brought out of Tibet is a kind of mini-novel in the Graham Greene mold, of a Westerner risking her life for three Tibetan children who, until shortly before the story begins, she had not even known. This was an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. Where are the children now?
There are three of them: Tsering Norden, a boy, who is 9; Lhakpa Dolma, a girl who is 13; and Tsering Dorje, another boy who’s now 17. They’re living in northern India at one of the Dalai Lama’s compounds that is called a Tibetan Children’s Village. There are many of these villages, and they’ll contain schools, medical facilities and so on. So the children are getting an education in Tibetan, English and Hindi. The purpose of these villages is to ensure that the children maintain their Tibetan identity. The environment is entirely Tibetan, or as much so as possible without actually being in Tibet itself.
I plan to sponsor the higher-education studies of the children I brought out here in the U.S.
Does the Tibet — or more specifically, the capital city Lhasa — that existed in 1950, or even as recently as 10 years ago, still exist?
The fact is that the cultural and religious landscape of Tibet has lost its traditional basis, by now almost entirely. But there are many people who continue to believe that their children will be able to better maintain themselves as Tibetans elsewhere — in India or elsewhere. They worry that, if their children stay in Tibet, they will not have even the opportunity to know their Tibetan identity.
But this wish for escape is not universal among Tibetans?
No, not any longer.
What’s happened to change that?
It’s important to know that, from the 1950 Chinese invasion up to about 1989, 90 percent of the Chinese presence in Tibet was military personnel. Before 1989, the uprooting of the Tibetan culture had not really happened in the way that it has happened since 1989. So when I went there the first time in 1987 and observed the military occupation, the place still felt like Tibet in every way that we think about it: historically, culturally … in the way that we’ve read about it. Even though most of the monasteries were destroyed in the occupation and during the Cultural Revolution, those few that did remain cultivated a religious activity that was more pure in the traditional sense than what is taking place there today.
Starting in 1989, the Chinese government developed a policy of population transfer, to move Han Chinese citizens from Mainland China into Tibet. They offered bonuses, financial and otherwise. Basically, they helped them get set up there. By 1995, everything in Lhasa had begun to have the Chinese look and feel, from the bottom up — store fronts, schools, whole neighborhoods. And there were profound cultural upheavals as well. The curriculum in schools, for instance, which was taught almost entirely in the Chinese language. I visited a couple of schools in Lhasa that Tibetan kids go to. They get instruction in the Tibetan language. But it’s simply a class that is part of the larger curriculum.
So, you’ve had a generation of Tibetan children caught in this change that are now in their 20s, who’ve either been raised in these Chinese language schools inside Tibet or who were shipped off to mainland China to school and have since returned. They’re speaking fluent Chinese, and have been brought up under the Chinese political system and its propaganda. So they’ve actually changed. They don’t present the same portrayal of religion, spirit and energy that had fascinated so many of us on the outside when we had first encountered the Tibetan people some years ago.
I personally went from the experience of Lhasa years ago as a place that had a kind of underlying tension everywhere you went, where the religion was alive, where there was a fierce defense of it against very stiff odds, to a place that now suffers a clear sense of resignation. I felt this very strongly during my last two trips.
There’s a point where you fight the system or you join it. People are making money now in Lhasa. You see cellphones. SUVs. Theme parks for children! Children dressed in frilly and colorful imported clothing.
Are the Tibetans themselves allowed to buy into this new Tibet?
Yes. Absolutely. For example, the woman who helped me obtain all the permits I needed during my last trip — which would be a very tough thing for me to do alone, dealing with the Chinese government as an outsider — was a 30-year-old Tibetan woman who had started a travel business, speaks fluent Chinese, regularly shops in Hong Kong, whose parents still speak only Tibetan. She’s not interested in the Tibetan traditions at all. She never goes to a monastery. She’s not religious. She’s an entrepreneur, and a very successful one. She goes to a Lhasa health spa in the evenings, where the better-to-do Chinese prostitutes go to work out. There are other wealthy Chinese women there, wealthy Tibetan women. She invited me to go there one evening for a massage. So I went. I was very curious.
What language were the Tibetan women speaking at the health club?
Chinese! So you wonder, are these women speaking Chinese to their children? And the answer is, yes.
What happened spiritually is that the Chinese government went into the monasteries and imposed a re-education process upon them, in which they made it illegal to worship the Dalai Lama. Anyone who had a picture of His Holiness had to get rid of it. Imagine having to burn the very representation of your heart’s center! When that process began, we saw a huge escape from Tibet of young monks and nuns who had been trying to hold out under the Chinese influence. This was very recently — 1998, 1999.
But then the Chinese government realized how forceful the Tibetans outside of Tibet really are. So now they’ve changed that policy. Now they say, “OK, you sent your monks and your kids out of Tibet. You get them back right now, or you guys will go to prison.” They now realize that maybe those kids and those monks that went to Dharamsala are not ever coming back. Maybe they’re going to join the Free Tibet movement (what the Chinese call the “Splittist Movement”), and maybe now they’re going to have a voice! So the Tibetan parents that are left in Tibet don’t know whether, or how much, they can trust the Chinese, because the Chinese change their tune so often and so violently.
Also, when you land in Lhasa and encounter the Chinese who work at the airport, you know that you’re in a police state. It’s clear. People don’t smile. And when you consider the traditional Tibetan culture, in which people did nothing but smile for thousands of years, and then consider what’s happening now, with this new Tibetan consciousness (like that of my woman friend at the health club who is so driven to succeed) you realize the level of confusion that exists for the Tibetan people now. You realize, seeing what has happened, that maybe the parents of these young Tibetans who did not leave the country saw that their children, in order to survive, had to buy in to the Chinese model. Those parents didn’t cop out. They didn’t have any choice, if they wished for their children to survive.
What is the instance now of Tibetan young people going to university in China?
Much higher. The Chinese took a lot of Tibetan students, even at the high school level, out of Tibet and into China, where they gave them an extensive education. Those students are now back in Tibet, a part of this “successful” Lhasa business community. I’ve worked with them.
This Chinese higher university education scheme for the Tibetans is even more pronounced now. It’s almost as if the opportunities for education are attractive to anybody, whether it’s Chinese education or not. And the Dalai Lama himself will say the same thing. I paraphrase him: “OK, we had this large percentage of our population that was not educated. At least now they’re getting an education, even though it’s totally directed by the Chinese. It’s better than no education at all.”
I have met a lot of those kids, educated in India, who have gone back to Tibet. And what happens is that they no longer have access to books, other than what’s available in the Chinese-controlled situation. The kind of freedom of creative thinking … whatever they worked so hard to develop in exile, it just gets squashed when they get back to Tibet. They become very lazy. They get really depressed. They go to the discos that are offered to them now, and they just seem to exist. This is tremendously sad.
Presumably they’re not speaking Chinese when they come back.
They have to learn Chinese in order to get work. There has to be communication on that level as well as in English. A lot of the older kids who have come out do speak Chinese already. In fact, my older boy, Tsering Dorje, has just taken his vacation from school to travel to Nepal and work on his computer skills and his Chinese language skills. He speaks Chinese, and I’ve made a point of having him continue that Chinese language instruction because he will need it if he ever decides to go back to Tibet.
Are they teaching Chinese in Dharamsala?
Privately, some do. Some of the schools are trying to get it into the curriculum, as an elective for those older escaped kids who want to keep up their fluency in Chinese.
There’s a certain irony in that, of course.
Of course!
What I understand to be the case is this: There is a continuing resistance effort in Tibet. There are still freedom fighters. People are still trying to get out. But as the economic situation improves there for the Tibetans themselves, and as they begin to be immersed within the Chinese society — economically, linguistically, etc. — the opposition to the government and the need to flee seem to be less. And the Tibetan consciousness, that was so famous and so much in the foreground 15 years ago, is slowly being reduced and reduced and reduced.
I think so. But, I must say that that is completely and totally my own opinion. No one wants to hear it, I will tell you that. But I think it is the truth. So … now there is this new, young class of Chinese nouveaux riches in Lhasa. They bring their children to an amusement park that the government recently built. And the upwardly mobile young Tibetan parents bring their children there, too. They’re all mixing together at the amusement park. You see people renting these little go-carts for their kids. Go-carts in the form of Chinese tanks or Chinese dragons. Two or three of the families will be Chinese; one or two will be Tibetan. They’re all getting into these weird little decorated carts, and the whole thing is so surreal!
It’s surreal because this park is located on a big open square right below the front of the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s old monastery-palace, an ancient monument and a place sacred to Tibetan Buddhism. It is almost too much to bear. It is so painful that, well, you just can’t think about it too much. On my last visit there, I vowed to try to look at such things in the new Tibet objectively, which, with my history in Tibet, is almost impossible to do. To really see that these young Tibetans are now living in a society in which their children are eating well, they’re going to school … They’re not unhappy! They may not be happy in the way that they were, but it’s a changed world.
The most tragic part of it, though, is the loss of the spiritual element. Somehow with Tibetan culture and the Tibetan Buddhist Dharma, there was a practice that was really true in the lay people. The whole spiritual community was supported and embraced by the lay people in a way that wasn’t just an activity. It was a way of life. There was a characteristic of inner beauty that always came to the surface. Famously so. And I think it is that that they’re losing. I think it’s maybe what they have already lost.
