1. Sally M is on her way home after work and passes by the Hopkinson Avenue poolroom where I am enjoying a game of billiards with Patsy P. Patsy see her, drops his cue and races out to greet her. He grabs her wrist and tries to drag her into the hallway of the apartment building where he lives. She tussles with him and cries out, “No! Not now, please.”

Patsy continues to pull her. Patsy’s sister sees this from their first floor window. She runs downstairs and starts to pummel Sally. Getting worked up, the good sister is now kicking Sally as she lies on the sidewalk.

“You fucking bitch! How dare you say “No” to my brother?” Unrelenting, she continues her kicking. Sally crawls under a parked car to avoid further kicking. After a few more minutes, Sister grows tired and goes back up stairs. Sally limps home.

2. Jerry brings Sally to a clubroom where 8 or 9 guys are sitting around having a meeting of some sort. Jerry announces he will go first and the rest of us can take turns. Jerry points out that he will also go 4th and 8th. Sally is his, so no one objects. We continue our meeting and Sally even raises her hand because she wants to make a coupIe of points. I draw the 7th spot. I go to a couch with Sally and pretend to have sex. After a respectable 3 minutes, I climb off and zip up my pants. Nobody notices my fraud.

3. Abe and I along with the thirty-something Neddie go up to Marty’s apartment. Abe takes Neddie into a room and takes first turn. Then Marty goes. In the privacy of the room, I am able to pretend. Abe tries Neddie once more for good luck. Mary has had enough. I certainly have had more than enough.

4. I come home from Ft. Dix on a 36 hour pass. For some reason, I go to Arnie’s apartment. Three naked guys are sitting around while the naked Arnie is standing on a stool receiving fellatio from some girl I have never seen before. He is playing, with considerable skill, a clarinet solo. Even as he has an orgasm, he stays in tune. Goodheartedly, he invites me to break the chain of command and says, “Hey, soldier, want some?” “No, thanks,” I say, “I’m really tired.”

Several hours later, I board a bus back to Base. My virginity is still intact.

I want to indulge myself by telling you about a man you probably have never heard of although it is just possible he is known to a million or more weirdoes. He is Dr. Leonard Peikoff, a figure from out of my past. My recollection of him was inspired this morning by seeing his name listed among the celebrity graduates of Brooklyn College. Although Lennie is a only a few months older than I am, I did not know him in my B.C. days. We were fellow graduate students at N.Y.U.

Lennie was an object of mirth and hilarity in my crowd. He had what Brownsville kids thought of as a “very cultured voice and diction.” Because of his magnificent voice, he was a favorite of the great philosopher, Sidney Hook. Sidney, himself, spoke with accents that seemed like a caricature of Leo Gorcey, the actor who starred in the Bowery Boys films. For that reason, we reminded him of himself, so Sidney could not abide us whenever it was our turn to stand up and deliver papers we had written. After about only five seconds or so, Sidney would cry out, “Stop! Let Leonard read your paper for you.” Meekly, we obeyed.

As a philosopher, Lennie wasn’t much but honesty requires me to admit that he was among the 400 million brightest persons on the planet. That’s not bad. A number like that places you in the top 5% of the world. In addition to his voice and low intellectual abilities, Lenny was the most pompous of rascals and it took all our self-control not to drop dead laughing whenever Lennie declaimed.

In due course, Lennie’s bombast paid off. Along with Nathaniel Branden and Alan Greenspan, he inherited the mantle of Ayn Rand. They called themselves “The Collective.” Ayn called Natie her soul mate and he proceeded to screw, nail and hump her on every hard floor in her office. Nate’s wife sat on a couch, watching the action. Nate and Alan, like Lenny, are not exactly intellectual giants but Nate cashed in on all the sex and founded the Branden School of Objectivism – a celebration of Ayn’s genius. He made a mini-fortune. Meanwhile, Al, a bumbling, fumbling, inarticulate sort of guy worked his way up into the highest offices in the land and by controlling the Federal Reserve determined who would be super-rich and who wouldn’t be. Because Al managed to snare a fairly attractive young woman known to all TV watchers as Andrea Mitchell, I rank him in the top 300 million brightest people in the world.

The story of Nate’s screwing the old lady is recorded in a movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand which stars Helen Mirren and Peter Fonda. When Nate double-crossed Ayn by returning to his wife, Ayn ex-communicated him. Lennie-boy took over unchallenged first place and founded the Ayn Rand Institute. Better yet, Lennie became heir to the Rand fortune and executor of her literary papers. Those include The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. As bad luck would have it, the Library of Congress got into a duel with Lennie over possession of Ayn’s papers. A lawsuit would have cost golden-voiced Lennie a couple million bucks so he caved.

From time to time over the last few decades, reveries of Lennie intrude into the consciousness of my friends and myself and we laugh our silly heads off at his fame and success. No one – not counting Alan Greenspan – could deserve it less.

So, this morning, after seeing Lennie listed as one of the finest examples of what Brooklyn College is all about, I looked him up on the internet. And now he rises infinitely in my estimation of his political keenness. For here is what Wikipedia has to say:

“In 2004 Peikoff endorsed John Kerry (despite thinking of Kerry as a “disgustingly bad” candidate) against George W. Bush (whom he called “apocalyptically bad”), on the basis of Bush’s religiosity and his refusal to crush Islamic regimes, especially Iran, along with his “doomed” economic policies. In advance of the 2006 elections, Peikoff recommended voting only for Democrats, to forestall what he sees as a rise in influence of the religious right, adding:

Given the choice between a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer [Democrats], and a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer [Republicans], it is immoral to vote for the latter, and equally immoral to refrain from voting at all because “both are bad.” Right on, Lennie, and now for the terrific wind-up:

In 2008, Peikoff refused to vote for either major party’s ticket, saying that John McCain “comes across like a tired moron,” calling Barack Obama a “lying phony” and Joseph Biden “a hilarious windbag,” while saying of Sarah Palin that she is “an opportunist struggling to learn how to become a moron, a phony and a windbag.”

Doggone it, Lennie, I take it all back. You may be dumb as a post but your politics are as solid as the Rock of Gibralter. Welcome home, Lennie.

Best I can remember, the expression , “She’s hot” is of very recent origin. I’ll guess it did not exist prior to 1970 and, even going back that far, is a bit of a stretch. I asked several 20-or-something people what it meant. Unsurprisingly, those that used it were unable to articulate its meaning or too embarrassed to speak forthrightly. I looked it up on the internet and learned it was considered slang for “She is sexually exciting.” I think that is pretty close to being right but it only scratches the surface.

What it doesn’t mean is that the woman in question is very beautiful. Sophia Loren, now 75 years old, is widely regarded as still very beautiful, even by men who are not yet pushing 30. Still, young men do not find her sexually exciting and don’t describe her as “hot.” To be sexually exciting is to have some characteristic that moves men to want to shtupp her, lay her, bang her, screw her, nail her, hammer her, do her, hump her, ride her, plow her, ball her, and, with most finality, fuck her brains out.

All these expressions indicate that men do not wish to do something WITH women but to do something TO them. “She’s hot” is nothing much more than a squeamish, polite way to sum it up. The women who are hot tend to be extraordinarily beautiful but VAPID looking. Their vapidity makes them poor candidates to want to spend time with on a couch, reading love poems or commiserating over the repercussions of the financial bail-out. When Christie Hefner was in her 20s and 30s, she was head and shoulders in beauty above most of the models who “graced” the covers of her Playboy magazine. She played down her good looks but they could not be ignored. Nevertheless, as a woman whose face fairly screamed out, “Brainy!” at us, she was never ripe for the encomium (if that is what it is), “She’s hot.” Such a combination of brains and beauty is not a come-on for most habitués of Wednesday night bowling allies. In her prime , she was the very apotheosis of intimidation.

Once upon a time, the most beautiful Hollywoodians did not, I think, arouse men to masturbatory fantasies. Consider Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, Kathryn Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly or even the adolescent Elizabeth Taylor. When the statue of Venus came alive, transformed into the form of Ava Gardner, ["One touch of Venus"], nothing much was altered in our psyches. She was still untouchable. To be sure, the Hollywood Code of demureness held sway over the bedroom scenes we were permitted to see but that doesn’t explain men’s own timid reveries that could not be censored.

Many sociological tracts have been written on the growing sexual liberation of our times but they don’t get to the heart of the matter because, at best, they present women as having 3/4 the freedom that is traditionally the prerogative of men. The fact remains, however, that women have not climbed out from under men although they may have treated themselves to knee-pads when they need only to be four feet high. Women may have come a long way but they don’t stand around corners in hard hats, giving wolf whistles at GQ type men and screaming, “Hey, Baby, let me put my jack-hammer in you.” Of course, they would need somewhat different metaphors since men get into women and women can only aspire to engulfing men. “Oh, Baby, come close and I’ll drown you” may be okay for a first try.

To some extent, shifts in language influence attitudes. For example, when gay men began openly calling themselves “fairies, and “queers,” it defused the intensity of those slurs. In general, however, I think language shifts derive from shifts in attitude. However, I am dubious that we have sufficiently explained the vulgarisms of sexual discourse by reference to the growing sexual liberation of our time. But I haven’t got the answer.