À la recherche du Insane Desire
Charles Rammelkamp
“‘Do you want to come up here and do that in front of the class, Teddy?’ Doris Bailey’s voice broke the schoolroom silence. Her sixth-grade class was ostensibly reading the geography assignment. The Iberian Peninsula dangled down off western Europe like a dog’s genitalia. Or so it seemed to Teddy Hershberger as he looked at the map, thinking idly of Caesar, the family’s Labrador.”
Will Devine looked up from the podium at the audience in Minas’ Gallery, gratified by the titter that rippled through the room. There were at least two dozen people seated in folding chairs.
“The entire class looked over at Teddy, some craning their necks for a better view. What had he been doing?
“The same question went through Teddy’s mind as well. What had he been doing? Miss Bailey was always finding fault with somebody for something – except Sylvia Baldwin and Howie Hirsch, who could do no wrong. Was he reading the wrong lesson? Hadn’t she told them to read the sections on Spain and Portugal?
“‘Get your hands out of your pockets, Teddy,’ Doris Bailey commanded. ’Put them on your desk where we can see them. That kind of behavior isn’t just shameful, it can be dangerous; it can lead to serious medical conditions.’”
“I really liked your story,” Ryn Michalski told Devine after the reading. Ryn was a local writer who had helped organize the reading series. She must have been at least a quarter-century younger than Devine. “I remember autocratic teachers just like that. You really nailed her.”
“Thanks,” Devine replied, gratified. “Actually, the character was based on an English teacher I had when I was in tenth grade, Potawatomi Rapids High School.”
“Potawatomi Rapids?”
“A small town in Michigan where I grew up. I had this teacher named Doris Bailey who told me I was too stupid to comprehend The Brothers Karamazov when I handed in a book report on it, so then I wrote one on a cheap porn book.”
Ryn smothered a laugh and was about to comment when Debra Butler threw an arm around her. “What a lovely reading!” Debra congratulated Ryn and realizing she had interrupted Devine’s conversation, she nodded at Devine, “I liked your story,” But when she turned again to Ryn and began to talk about another reading event, Devine took his cue and touched Ryn’s arm.
“Thanks for including me!”
Driving home, Devine remembered again the contretemps with Doris Bailey. Actually, she’d reacted more humanely to his insulting book review than he’d probably deserved. (“This book is about a man who gets so much pussy he’s afraid he’s losing his mind.”) True, he’d spent a week in detention, received an F for the book review and had been made to do extra homework assignments, but Doris Bailey seemed to have developed a kind of respect for him, he’d thought. Perhaps she’d realized she’d hurt his feelings and, in spite of herself, bore him grudging admiration for his response. Or maybe she was just afraid he’d “go postal.” But schoolkids didn’t do that back then, did they? Enter a school with semi-automatic weapons and rip the place apart because somebody bullied them? Even post office employees weren’t yet going postal in the 1960s.
Devine wondered if Doris Bailey were still alive. It had been over half a century since the incident, and she’d seemed ancient to him then, but she’d probably been younger than he was now when he was in her class. His classmates and he had joked about her sexlessness, speculating that she was still a virgin. They’d even scrawled cruel jokes on the bathroom walls and carved graffiti into desktops, puerile drawings of Bailey as a witch-like hag with enormous penises squirting all over her.
Devine also remembered his brother Dan, from whom he’d gotten the “men’s novel” he’d written his scurrilous report on. Insane Desire had been hidden in Dan’s desk drawer beneath crushed packages of Camel cigarettes, pouches of cheap pipe tobacco and burnt-out corncob pipes.
Daniel Devine had died three years before. It had been particularly wretched for Will since they’d drifted apart over the decades and he’d always harbored a latent desire to reconcile with his brother. They’d only had perfunctory contact since Will graduated from high school several years behind Dan. The political climate of the late had driven a wedge between them and they’d become ideological enemies, which seemed so silly now, in the 21st century when, paradoxically, it seemed to be happening all over again. Maybe times had never changed. For the last thirty-odd years their contact had merely been strained and civil, no confidences between them.
But they’d been close as conspirators when the Insane Desire incident had occurred, Danny had chuckled mirthfully over it, admiring his brother’s moxie, though strenuously denying to their parents any knowledge or involvement, his instinct to save his own hide always strong. Not that Will held this against him; he took full responsibility for his impulsive actions, even though he’d hatched the plot in his brother’s bedroom over forbidden cigarettes, Danny encouraging him to do it.
Will felt an overwhelming sadness come over him again, as he often did when he thought about his brother. If only they’d been closer all those years. Danny was the only brother he’d ever had. It was such a damn shame. Then he laughed again, remembering the Insane Desire events all over. What had happened to that book? Will had looked for it again in his brother’s desk but it had been removed. Had Danny put it someplace else? Had their parents confiscated it? At the time he couldn’t ask Danny without revealing that he’d been snooping through his brother’s desk drawers, and when he did ask a few years later, Danny couldn’t remember.
As he attempted to parallel park in front of his Charles Village rowhouse, it occurred to Devine that Insane Desire might actually be available on the internet. Everything else was. It was worth having a look. Why not?
Holed up in the third-floor garret that was his study, the curtained dormer windows overlooking Guilford Ave., Devine entered “Insane Desire” into the Amazon search box and was both surprised and gratified when the screen displayed a thumbnail of the red paperback cover, as vivid as it was in his memory, though he had not actually seen it in over forty years.
The seller, an outfit called Pandora’s Books, was asking $27.50 for a flimsy paperback that had cost fifty cents back in the day, whose literary value had surely not increased in all that time, but Devine had to have it, and with a few clicks of the mouse, he purchased it.
Pandora’s Box -- it contained all the evils that were to be unleashed on mankind, all the ills, toils and sickness, but it had also contained hope. Recognizing his superstition for what it was, Devine nevertheless held to the hope that recovering Insane Desire would in some measure restore his dead brother to him; like the taste of Proust’s Madeleine, simply holding the book in his hands might bring the past flooding back, back to before their silly political differences, when they were just brothers sharing animal appetites, back to the stale tobacco smell of Danny’s desk drawer, the rank odor of a boy’s sheets, spattered with dried semen.
Just then, the family cat, Benezir, jumped into Devine’s lap. He stroked her black fur as she circled around on his thighs before curling up into a contented ball. True, they’d acquired and named her years ago, before the Pakistani leader had been assassinated, but her name was a constant reminder of how sudden and unexpected death could be – as Danny’s death had been unexpected. Benezir’s brother from the same litter, Pervez, whom they’d taken at the same time, had been struck by a car two years before. Devine had found his crushed body in Calvert Street, guts smeared into the pavement, orange fur matted with blood.
While he waited over the next few days for the book to arrive, Devine did some haphazard internet research on the author Adam Coulter. He assumed it was a pseudonym, or possibly a brand name, any one of a dozen writers churning out the purple prose.
There were at least a dozen books for sale by the same author on Amazon.
Curious, Devine spent an hour trolling the internet for information on Adam Coulter. Between 1961 and 1965 he'd published some dozen and a half novels, with titles like Web of Lust, Lesbian Captive, Uninhibited Blonde, Stud King, Telephone Lover, Couch of Desire, Carnal Frenzy and Four to Go-Go-Go! Who was he? Devine came up with nothing but a possible “real” name on an obscure website called “efanzines” - James T. Smith, in reference to 1962’s Golden Lust and 1963’s Big Mama. James T. Smith! About as promising as John Jones or Bob Brown. Devine idly speculated writing a comic essay on Coulter for The New York Review of Books, a homage to “The Master” and his inspired, productive period. “Adam Coulter at the Dawn of Sexual Liberation,” he would call it, heralding the age of uninhibited pornography, anticipating and ushering in an unfettered use of language and explicit erotic literature. He would compare the elusive Coulter to J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie during the years he was living under the Ayatollah’s fatwa. What had become of “The Master” after 1965? Was he still alive? As “Adam Coulter” or “James Smith”?
Devine chuckled to himself at the thought, creating a literary legend out of the pulp porn writer. He wondered if anybody knew who this guy Coulter really was or anything about him. There was an e-mail address for an Earl Kemp on the efanzine site, but when he wrote to Earl, he received a curt reply asking who he was and why he wanted to know. Devine explained that he was a writer living in Baltimore and only wanted to know because he’d read Insane Desire as an adolescent. Earl replied that he had no other information than Coulter’s real name, James T. Smith. A dead end.
“Expecting something?”
Devine looked up from the handful of mail he was going through like a poker player calculating the value of the cards he’d been dealt. He wondered if he had the fevered look of a prospector sifting for gold. His wife Janet eyed him curiously.
“A book,” he answered laconically. How could he explain without sounding like a fool?
“Something good?”
“No. Yes. Insane Desire,” Devine muttered, self-conscious. “Just something from my childhood.”
“Isn’t that the book you wrote the smutty report on in high school?”
“I told you about that?”
“So did your parents. So did your brother.”
“I found a copy online. I was curious.”
Devine remembered the first time he’d gotten high from marijuana. It had been Danny’s doing, of course. He and his friend Chris were in Potawatomi Rapids on spring break their freshman year. Will had smoked pot before but had never been convinced he’d felt any effect.
This time he knew for sure. He’d gotten ripped. They’d driven around town in Chris’s VW bug, howling with laughter at the most trivial, inconsequential things. It felt like a waking dream.
Devine remembered the road trip he and Danny had taken, driving out to Ithaca at the end of the summer to retrieve Danny’s belongings that he’d stowed there when he went off to basic training. Danny was preparing to marry Sharon in a few weeks. It was the last time Will felt close to his brother. They’d shared the driving across Michigan, Ontario and New York state, the radio tuned to Top Forty radio. In New York, where the drinking age was 18, they’d had a beer in a bar, first time for Will.
“Still no Insane Desire?”
Janet stood over him as he knelt on the floor sifting through the mail.
“Not yet.”
When at last the book arrived, a worn, slender paperback whose pages had browned with age, Devine felt the letdown he’d known he would all along. The whole thing was comical, from the cover (“for adults” in a discreet black box in the upper left corner) to the prose (“her firm, pointed breasts”; “fondling her tip-tilted breasts”; “exposing her delicious, ivory thighs.”) It was just a joke, not the momentous epiphany he’d anticipated.
Devine felt a little cheated, even as he’d known this would probably happen. The memories did not come flooding back. Daniel was as elusive as ever, as lost to Will as he’d been the last three years since his death – as lost to him as he’d been since 1970.
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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press. An e-chapbook has also recently been published online Time Is on My Side (yes it is) –http://poetscoop.org/manuscrip/Time%20Is%20on%20My%20Side%20FREE.pdf Another chapbook, Mortal Coil, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing. A full-length collection, Catastroika, is also forthcoming from Apprentice House.
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