I will never forget the day that George Washington died of VD.
It was a pleasant summer morning, with only the faintest contrail of soot wafting across the athletic field from the Clairton Coke Works a few miles away. My classmates and I were bored silly and not overly pleased at being in school again, but it was either take the one-quarter credit health class we all needed to graduate now, in one exceptionally boring week, or string it out over the course of tenth grade in between the rest of our classes. We'd already had the Drugs Will Kill You So Don't lecture, and the Smoking Will Kill You So Don't lecture, and the VD Will Kill You So Don't lecture, and it was only Wednesday or Thursday. Our regular teachers were boring us stiff teaching us about how everything and everyone would and could kill you, at least some of us had better things to do on that nice sunny day, and if some of these better things involved the consumption of illegal substances, first-hand smoke, and exploration of the physical bodies of our classmates, well, it was June.
In short, it was the first week of our summer vacation, and no vacationing was being done.
I was doodling in my notebook and trying not to think about all the books I could be reading or the sleep I could be getting when one of the math teachers came in with a corpse over his shoulder. We all paid attention at that - what else could we do? - and actually sat up and stared as Mr. Goedel carefully laid the limp and unresisting body of a middle aged white male in the middle of the floor. He (the victim, not Mr. Goedel) had the waxy complexion, staring eyes, and slightly parted lips of someone who'd been dead for quite some time, and his limbs sort of flopped about in a really disturbing way. His hair, which was almost the same bleached ivory color as his face, stood out about his face in a stiff, slightly curly aureole that looked positively ghoulish against the red one-piece tracksuit that encased his body.
"My God," muttered Fuzz, the class musician. "It's George Washington."
We all peered at the red-clad figure and agreed that Fuzz had a point. Mr. Goedel, who was more patriotic than the Bill on Capitol Hill, scowled.
"It most certainly is not," he said. "It's a medical dummy. You're going to learn to perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on him."
"Oh no," said Fuzz. He held out his hands and shook his head. "He looks - "
"Dead," supplied Oizzum, the class clown.
Mr. Goedel's scowl deepened. "He was never alive."
"I'll bet he died of VD," said Fuzz, shrinking back in his chair as if someone were attempting to feed him a spoonful of yogurt laced with active spirochete cultures. "No way I'm touching him."
"That's ridiculous!" exclaimed Mr. Goedel, hands on his hips. He pointed at Oizzum and someone else who was, thank God and the angels, not me. "You two go first."
And so we all got to watch as Oizzum (and then Fuzz, and then someone else, and someone else who was not, thank God and the angels, me) knelt down on the floor, blew air into George Washington's waxy corpse-like lips, pumped rhythmically on his narrow and ill-proportioned chest hard enough to make his legs bounce up and down, and made health class entertaining enough to keep us all from falling asleep until it was time for our parents to free us from durance vile.
We all went to our respective domiciles for lunch since one of the small mercies of summer school was that the cafeteria was closed. And despite this being 1975, and cell phones being a fever dream indulged in only by Trekkies, the mysterious osmosis of high school had taken place and every single rising sophomore on that fine summer day, regardless of whether they'd actually been in my section, knew that our CPR dummy looked like George Washington, that he had died of VD, and that since one followed the other, the Father of Our Country had perished of a social disease.
Who says you can't have fun in health class?
As I'm sure you can guess from the above, Health 100 was not precisely a high priority for anyone at my school. It was there because the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had decreed that anyone who wished to obtain a high school diploma in William Penn's Quaker paradise had to suffer through it, and what passed for a curriculum was, to be blunt, lame in the extreme. I'd learned more about human reproduction and sexuality from the Kotex Starter Kit Mum had given me a couple of years earlier, complete with The Belt, than I did from my state-mandated class, and I highly doubt that I was the only person in that class who came away with little more than a couple of anatomical drawings and Mr. Goedel's repeated insistence that the only way to avoid George Washington's sad fate was to maintain a dignified celibacy until marriage.
As little as I learned, I was comparatively lucky. At least I'd had the Kotex Starter Kit and those anatomical drawings. My parents and their friends? Not so much. The Greatest Generation hadn't exactly had the Greatest Sex Education, especially in heavily Catholic industrial centers like Pittsburgh. "Stay pure in thought and deed" was the watchword for all too many in the 1930s and 1940s, which is why Uncle Sam had a lot of work to do to educate GI Joe about how "prophylaxis could beat the Axis" before half the infantry was laid up with the clap. What we'd now call comprehensive sex education was reserved only for those lucky enough to attend progressive schools, contraceptives were hard to get even for the married, and there was a huge amount of inaccurate, terrifying, and just plain stupid advice out there for the unwary.
This may be why a certain type of publication has long flourished in George Washington's homeland, often right under the busy noses of the righteous who would keep our youth untainted by the baser extincts. We're all human, you know, which means that we're hard-wired to want intimate physical relationships with others, whether or not said intimate physical relationships are legally and religious sanctioned or not. And that means that if the law and the church say "don't," and one decides that it's easier to agree than risk jail, scorn, or damnation, well, isn't it a good thing that there are plenty of books and pamphlets and stories and (now, at least) Internet sites that will help one take the edge off.
That the vast majority of these useful publications are mind-numbingly similar to each other in terms of plot, characters, even the illustrations, doesn't really matter. Like all things, most are mediocre at best, with a tiny handful being good enough to entertain at a level that transcends arousal.
And then there are the others, and don't you dare pretend you don't that I'm talking about Sleaze So Bad It's Good:
Spicy Detective and its ilk - pulp magazines of the early 20th century had the widest audience of any form of entertainment. This was deliberate; the pulps were a high volume business aimed at the lowest common denominator, which meant that the more types of fiction that appeared on the newsstand, the more customers and the more money for everyone.
This meant that there were a bewildering variety of pulps. Romance, mystery, adventure, science fiction, confessions, Westerns, war stories, sailor stories, magazines dedicated to single heroes like Doc Savage or the Phantom, magazines dedicated to a single genre like Black Mask, magazines dedicated to a specific type of technology like ray guns or ocean liners or zeppelins (at least until the Hindenburg lit up Lakehurst, New Jersey, in its own inimitable hydrogen-fueled way)...there were pulps for every possible taste, age range, or gender.
And, humans being human, that meant there was a crying need for pulps catering to manly, red-blooded boys and men in search of relations between men and women that didn't end with a peck on the lips and a proposal of marriage, yet were still mild enough to be sent through the mail.
Culture Publications, based in (of all places) Delaware, saw this market. Saw the taut, aching need of millions of Americans of the male persuasion. Saw the money that could be made. And, this being America, in 1934 Culture Publications decided to fill the huge gaping hole in pulp literature through a line of magazines that plunged into the virgin oh god i am going to HELL gap between family-friendly and outright obscene.
The result were the so-called Spicies.
These magazines, most featuring cover art of lovely young women with almost bared breasts and terrified expressions, ranged from the expected (Spicy Detective) to less common (Spicy Western). About the only genre they missed was Spicy Zeppelin, but that likely has as much to do with the Hindenburg (see above) than anything else. These magazines, which had unmarried young men and teenagers taking many, many, many cold showers, seem ludicrously tame by today's standards, but for their time they were pretty hot:
"You can't say 'no'!" I panted. "I must have you!" Frantically, I glued my mouth to her lips. For a moment they remained tight and cold. Then, as though some movement of my hand over her melting curves had given the spark to her emotional tinder, her lips parted and she went limp against me. Immediately I was caught and lifted to exotic heights of whose existence I had never dreamed. Her mouth became a writhing well-spring, fused to mine by its own searing heat; a sweet, soul-destroying succuba.
Alas, this is about as spicy as the average Spicy ever got: plenty of kissing, melting flesh, "ivory globes" (either breasts or buttocks, but usually the former), panting, writhing, and then, just as the tension became unbearable, a timely fade-out that preserved Culture's mailing privileges and might, just
might, keep Sister Mary Margaret from whacking little Stevie over the knuckles with a metal ruler and confiscating that precious copy of
Spicy Adventure he'd borrowed from Jimmy or Alec. It must have been incredibly frustrating for the average Spice Boy in the 1930s, especially those too young, too poor, or too repressed to find the
real porn until they got up the gumption to ask a pretty girl for an actual genuine date.
For all the soft core frustration engendered by the Spicies, they proved popular enough that other publishers decided that if Culture could do it, why, so could they. This led to an astonishing one-off, Passion Pulls the Trigger, by one Arthur Wallace.
This lurid little title, issued by a publisher called Valhalla Press that may or may not have been based in Delaware, chronicled the racy, sexy, dare I say spicy adventures of Val Vernon, a Manhattan-based gumshoe who fights what the dust jacket calls "the lure of the flesh" in his quest to uncover a killer. And oh, how that flesh lures him - !
The thrill of it all shot down to the pit of Val's stomach. Her hands covered his and pressed them hard on the coned badges of her femininity. He could feel the throbbing pulse-beat of her flesh and the warmth of her curves against his thighs.
She drew her mouth away slowly, letting the dampness linger. "I must dress, Val, darling," she panted. "After the show tonight? Huh?"
One can just imagine the reaction of the average reader to this lovely example of
literature interruptus. Or this one:
Val's hand fell on her knee. Bunny's dress bunched above the rolled tops of her stockings. The smooth skin of her thighs gleamed white.
"Kiss me!" she panted. "Love me!"
She slid down further into the confines of the couch. Her long limbs, made more seductive by sheer hose, were columns of alabaster roundness. Val's mouth went dry. He knew he had to resist the pulsating passion of her. It was going to be hard.
I'll just bet it was, too, especially since Val and Bunny never do actually get past the writhing, panting, and pulsating of their frustrating lust to bare the coned badges that are probably breasts so Val can explore his hardness and Bunny's dampness in proper style.
Alas for both posterity and the youth of the Greatest Generation, the Spicies didn't last all that long. By the early 1940s the Post Office got involved, both to protect the morality of American teenagers and to cut down on the supply of prophylaxis needed to beat the Axis the amount of paper used for non-military publications of low societal value. Spicy Detective was renamed Speed Detective and its content made even less spicy, the lesser Spicies went out of business, and Sister Mary Margaret breathed a sigh of relief that little Stevie grew up, joined the Army, and wasn't her problem any more.
Of course, little did she know that after Stevie won the war, married a WAC, and bought a house in Levittown while studying on the GI Bill, he (or possibly his kids, or even his WAC) might once again look to the newsstand for solace, comfort, and the sort of passion that only overheated prose can bring....
(to be continued with next week's thrilling installment: Revenge of the Sleaze! Strike quick! Time is short! Tune in next Saturday, same Kos-time, same Kos diary!)
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And so, my friends...did you, too, have to perform CPR on George Washington? Have you ever seen a Spicy pulp at an antiques mall? Seen an Army PSA about proper hygiene? It's Saturday night and you know what that means....
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Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule
DAY |
TIME (EST/EDT) |
Series Name |
Editor(s) |
SUN |
6:00 PM |
Young Reader's Pavilion |
The Book Bear |
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9:30 PM |
SciFi/Fantasy Book Club |
quarkstomper |
Bi-Monthly Sun |
Midnight |
Reading Ramblings |
don mikulecky |
MON |
8:00 PM |
Monday Murder Mystery |
Susan from 29 |
Mon |
11:00 PM |
My Favorite Books/Authors |
edrie, MichiganChet |
alternate Tuesdays |
8:00AM |
LGBT Literature |
Texdude50, Dave in Northridge |
Tue |
10:00 PM |
Contemporary Fiction Views |
bookgirl |
WED |
7:30 AM |
WAYR? |
plf515 |
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Bookflurries Bookchat |
cfk |
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8:00 PM |
Write On! |
SensibleShoes |
Thu (third each month, beginning 9/20) |
11:00 PM |
Audiobooks Club |
SoCaliana |
FRI |
8:00 AM |
Books That Changed My Life |
Diana in NoVa |
SAT (fourth each month) |
11:00 AM |
Windy City Bookworm |
Chitown Kev |
Sat |
4:00 PM |
Daily Kos Political Book Club |
Freshly Squeezed Cynic |
Sat |
9:00 PM |
Books So Bad They're Good |
Ellid |