Any Woman's Blues by Erica Jong Page B

store.
     
     
    By the time I was a teenager, Theda’s craziness had long since driven Dolph away. He had a mistress named Maxine, who sometimes stayed with him above the store and who tried in vain to woo me with pseudomaternal affection. But I was intransigent and must have given her a terrible time—almost as terrible as the time I gave my mother. Much as I hated my mother, I was fiercely loyal to her around Dolph and Maxine.
    Sullen, silent, dressed all in black, squired by a black boyfriend—I was every parent’s nightmare of a teenager. I walked down Eighth Street in a cloud of Gauloise smoke, clutching a copy of Being and Nothingness under the arm that wasn’t twined around Snack, while he, in turn, carried his saxophone and a switchblade. Snack was six feet, three inches (I have always liked tall men), and I was then, as now, a mere five feet four (like Elizabeth Taylor, another heroine of mine). My tits were big, my hips big, and my waist almost as tiny as Scarlett O’Hara’s. Considered sexy in a gamine sort of way, I never really thought I was pretty, but boys flocked to me because apparently I had “It.” The scent of sex is a powerful aphrodisiac, and some girls have it, while others—even very pretty ones—most emphatically do not. It has less to do with looks than with smell, for human beings are closer to the insect and invertebrate worlds than their hubris lets them know. With all that sex appeal from my teen years on, I was usually more concerned with protecting myself against the opposite sex than with attracting it. (Oh, nature is cruelly unfair when it comes to love.)
    I fought the white boys off with my wicked sarcasm and my prodigious talent—which I flaunted like a cock—and turned instead to the rebels, outcasts, and blacks. I had no penis envy; I really thought I had a penis. I graduated from M&A in ’61, went to Yale School of Fine Arts, and the summer of ’64 (the summer of my junior year) found me in Mississippi with Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. That I didn’t get killed is a tribute not to prudence but to providence or sheer dumb luck—the same luck that mysteriously preserved me during my drinking, drugging, and driving days. The gods must have spared me for some awesome task, for certainly I was careless enough with my own life. What that awesome task was I did not yet know, but whatever it was, I would fashion it with my own two capable hands.
    From my father I inherited immense skill in making things: craftsman’s hands, an eye that could immediately see the right juxtaposition of shapes and colors. All this I believe is inborn. We are not taught it but merely grow into our real selves if our real selves are not blocked. From my mother I inherited a gift for theatrics that bordered on madness. I was a bad girl in high school and an even badder girl in college. I had a gift for publicity even then. Once, long before Charlotte Moorman wrapped herself in Saran Wrap to play the cello, I wrapped myself in tinfoil to attend the Halloween party of an M&A classmate. At Yale, years before the advent of the Guerrilla Girls, I railed against the male-dominated art world (this was in the early sixties, before feminism was chic, let alone tolerated), yet I was not at all against wooing art critics with my sex appeal if it would help my career. I felt even then—perhaps the spectacle of my mother’s victimization by my father inspired this—that women were so discriminated against as a class that all was fair in love and war. I continued to think so until Dart.
    Because I was so strong in my integrity against the opposite sex, skinlessness was what I sought. Most boys were too weak for me. I could manipulate them too easily. A young woman who knows her own sexual powers is a rarity indeed, but she is unbeatable. And if she happens also to be smart and talented and has the crazed bravado—I cannot call it self-confidence—that a mad mother and an alcoholic father inspire, then