An Old Maid's Tale - How Racy Novels Stirred A Librarian To Sexual Delights

Melinda Potter had been an ordinary child, an ordinary student, and a quite ordinary looking little girl; and as such she was an ideal offspring.  She caused her parents little trouble and less grief. 

While other children were going through the terrible twos, Melinda sat quietly reading her picture books. When older girls threw tantrums, tortured the cat, and ran off, Melinda drew pictures - inspired, gentle pictures of sunshine, cornfields, and happy families. 

As she approached adolescence, her parents took a deep breath - the lull before the storm.  Her good behavior could just as easily turn into a tempest of sex and drugs, dangerous risk taking and misbehavior.  To say that Frank and Isa Potter were on their guard was putting it mildly, for they deployed a platoon of forward observers - teachers, priests, neighbors, and relatives - to let them know when their daughter began to slip off the rails. 

 

At thirteen, however Melinda was still the quiet, patient, untroubled child she had always been, helping her mother wash the dishes, making her bed, picking up her clothes, and always on time for school.  

At fourteen, the age when if a storm comes, it comes with a vengeance, Melinda was still a model of quiet patience, good manners, and propriety.  Although her parents considered themselves lucky - the secure, white, middleclass neighborhood of University Park seemed to have as much delinquency as the worst Hartford slum - they began to wonder if their daughter suffered from some sort of arrested development.  She had no interest in her personal appearance, always dressed properly but plainly, and at this rate she would end up a wallflower unpicked and unhappy. 

None of this concerned the girl, however, and she went about her business with a smile, always in the middle of the class, outstanding in nothing but never failing, agreeable on the sports field but never a star.  While her classmates clamored over Robbie Phipps, the football captain, or the Brad Pitt lookalike in homeroom, Melinda never made a fuss over boys.  Nor did she have a crush on Miss Purdy like many girls did or wonder what her parents were doing in the bedroom with all that moaning and thrashing around. 

The high school yearbook included her in the graduating class, but there was no other notice of her - no debating club, honor society, Oklahoma!, field hockey, or St. Anthony's Kitchen.  It was as though she did not exist, some insubstantial presence, a 'Present' checked at the beginning of class but then forgotten. 

 

Her grades were good enough for Montgomery College, a two year public school for those of lesser academic promise or financial means and, as could easily be predicted, she did modestly well without  notice but with enough successful courses to attend the state university for her last two years. 

Again as predicted, there was nothing remarkable to report about this phase of her life.  While college for many was the first flowering of adulthood, the shedding of dependency and the first step to maturity, for Melinda it was a passage from nowhere before to nowhere after - never unpleasant but far from those bright college years that adults often talk about. 

Having minored in library science - a career that fit her character, personality, and modest interests - she easily secured a position at her hometown library, and was quite happy filing, checking books in and out, helping patrons find the volumes they were looking for, and occasionally taking over Children's Hour, a short session where little children were read to. 

It was at the library one day when she happened upon a novel by P. Pritchard Stone, one of a hundred short paperback romances that housewives borrowed until they were dogeared and had to be retired. Unrequited Love had been the most sought after, often put on hold, and its racy cover - a busty brunette tearfully in the arms of her lover - was surprisingly tempting. 

 

She borrowed the book, read it through in one evening, and was delighted.  The woman on the cover eventually found true love but not before she had given herself to an unscrupulous cad whom she later poisoned.  Mr. Right, the police chief investigating the crime, falls in love with her, ignores the evidence, and takes her away to Europe where they lived quietly in a turf cottage on the Irish Sea. 

P. Pritchard Stone had written over fifty novels, and Melinda read all of them, each one racier than the next, more thrilling and more sexually passionate.  The heroines were always weak at first, tentative, and hungry for love; and they all fell for the strong, silent types who wooed and bedded them then left them alone and disconsolate. But they all recovered and became sexpots, women of loose morals and uninhibited passion.  Nothing could dampen their sexual desire or their willful satisfaction of it. 

By the time she had finished Volume 52, Stone's latest and last book of the series, Melinda wondered where she had been all her life.  Where were her suitors, her sexual adventures, her thrills, her motel rooms, her assignations, and her lust?  She was no longer a spring chicken and well past the age at which most of her classmates had been married and had children, but most of her life was still ahead of her, and there was no telling what or who she might become. 

At first there were the little changes - a bit of lipstick, a dash of perfume, pearl earrings, and a less severely cut dress - but as time went on and as she delved more deeply into the world of women's romance, she was more forthcoming and more attuned to her growing need for male attention. 

Along with the modest changes in her appearance, she felt something more fundamental as well.  In the verse of the romantic novels, 'something stirred within her'; and while she was at first unsure of what it was, she gradually came to a very surprising conclusion,  

Some men just want it, cannot do without it, look at every woman as an irresistible sexual object, and make clear, unmistakable overtures.  It was to these men that Melinda was attracted.  She had heard the feminist cant about 'sexual singularity', the 'internal value' of women, and their right to respect and admiration; but she rejected it.  She knew who she was and couldn’t care less if anyone else did. 

This is not to say that Melinda was without taste.  She was as bright and canny about her choice of men as any female animal who senses virility and fertility.  She might not be looking for a long term mate - she was far beyond her pull-date for that - but she still did not want to waste her time. 

'Why, look at Melinda Potter all tarted up like a regular Mata Hari' said a classmate who had spotted her at Sloane's on one of her trips home; and to be quite honest she had in the years since her epiphany, come out quite boldly from her own shadow.  'Tarted up' was unkind but not too far off the mark. Melinda had blossomed into a Belle de Nuit, a woman 'of lesser propriety', quick to please, and more than happy in her new guise, the persona of a sexually liberated woman. 

Just like the Catherine Deneuve character in the film, Melinda, a proper, well-brought, up, respectable woman had a strong sexual desire not for the right man but any man.  There was something  particularly satisfying about pure, unadulterated, uncomplicated sex that made her more of a woman, more of a unique woman.  Looking for the ideal mate was so ordinary and predictable, so pedestrian leading nowhere.  Accepting her womanhood - her defiant, demanding female sexuality - was the only validation she needed. 

Anyone hearing Melinda's story might wonder who the real Melinda was.  Could such an ordinary, plain, sexually indifferent girl really mature into a sexually prolific woman?  Or was this sexuality always there but tamped down and repressed? 

A moot point, of course.  Many who did listen and appreciate Melinda's particular and unique vitality are still so confined by their proper past that they can only wonder what will happen to a woman like that.  How will she end up?

But of course Melinda never gave this a second thought.  One cannot be fundamentally physical, sexual, and female without a disregard for the ordinary. Who cares? Melinda might have answered if asked. Whatever her end, she was one of the few who added and never subtracted. There are plenty of women in boardrooms and on medical faculties, but few who really get what makes women tick .

Tart, loose woman, a Belle de Nuit? Perhaps, but more power to her. 

Ayahuasca In The Amazon - An Iowa Baptist Is Born Again As A Sexual Influencer, A Tantric Goddess

Jose Miranda Xoclicotl was a curandero, a brujo, and a guide to the spiritual world of The Angel of Death, the spirit visited on those who drank ayahuasca, the potent psychotropic drug that the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon had been taking for years, centuries, and long before discovery by European adventurers. 

Ayahuasca was not only a well-known hallucinogen of the order of peyote and psilocybin but one which had particular spiritual consensual qualities.  Everyone who took the drug reported seeing the same images - a powerful, demanding, inescapably transformative force; a benign/malignant spiritual being who led one into unexpectedly fearsome but revealing realms of consciousness. 

How could this be? asked psycho-scientists who had studied the drug and its effects.  It was one thing for a drug such as LSD to provoke profound spiritual experiences, but to provoke the very same experience in those who took the drug?  What could that mean?  What peculiar and remarkable properties must the drug have?  And didn't universal experience suggest a creator?

Controlled experiments - the most disciplined and scientifically rigorous in Ghent, Belgium - only concurred on the commonality of the experience.  Subjects indeed saw the very same image - a goddess who resembled the Hindu figure, Kali, the goddess of destruction, handmaiden to Siva as he destroyed and recreated the world - but this figure was different.  She was more terrifying even than Kali often depicted as a terrifying harridan, frightening, predatory, and adorned with a necklace of  human skulls. Why, who, what had created, engineered, insisted upon such a thing?

 

It was with that background that Belinda Ames, Iowan farm girl, devout Baptist, respectful daughter travelled down the Napo River to visit Jose Miranda and for once in her life expose herself to something other than the predictable and the ordinary. 

The trip down the river was quick - the current was strong and steady, and the 3HP motor on the dugout was only for the upstream return.  She was let off on a bamboo dock with the farewells and prayers of the Indians who were headed farther down the tributary into the Amazon itself.  They knew where she was going and the fearful stories that had come from the jungle sanctuary of Don Jose, and God's intercession would certainly be necessary, 

It took her hours to make her way down the jungle path to the village, but the directions given to her at Puyo had been good - turning to the left at the fork at the big banyan tree, right where the river 'boils and seethes', and straight under the ferns of St. Peter. 

Don Juan was cordial and welcoming, and as night fell he prepared the ayahuasca, gave it to her to drink, and sat playing a plaintive Quechua melody on his one-string violin. 

She remembered nothing about the night, the experience - that is the practical sense of time, thirst, hunger, fatigue - but when she woke up she felt changed, different.  She thought more clearly, more deliberately, and more decisively.  It was as though the doubts with which she had entered the jungle - about her nature, her sex, her desires - had never existed.  Not that they were gone; they never had been. 

She had not seen the Angel of Death, perhaps because the savvy brujo had dosed her down as he had done with other expectant foreigners.  He didn't want to scare off them and their two hundred pesos and ruin his business. Or because despite the researchers at Ghent and the paisanos of the forest, there was no such unifying, spiritual force behind the drug; and it was simply a powerful, independently active psychoactive agent. 

Whatever it was, whatever the composition of the drug, however the effects took hold, she felt she was a different woman; or rather she was, finally a woman.  Her parents, her church, her colleagues, friends, and neighbors were now irrelevant, supernumerary wannabe influences, confining, limiting, faux advocates of some undefined, wobbly righteousness. 

She slept with the boatman in Misaualli, the Napo River port village where she boarded the dugout for the trip downriver, not her first sexual experience, but the first since ayahuasca.  He smelled bad, had few teeth, and straw mattress was bulky and uncomfortable, but those indecencies were only remnants of her past emotional illegitimacy, quickly overcome.  She came and came again. 

Back in Ames, sitting on the front porch with Alma, Ricky, and Ralph, she had a moment of disorientation.  The jungle, the brujo, and coming thrice under the laboring boatman, Rinaldo were all part of an unsettling emotional broth.  How was she to square that with Iowa, the farm, and her upcoming matriculation?

Whether the drug found some invasive pathway into the DNA configurations of a good girl, or it simply acted to release the genetic sexual energy latent in those X chromosomes, is indefinable.  What is known is that Belinda Ames acquired 'a reputation' - that old fashioned, outdated, patriarchal obloquy - that had nothing to do with her unique, newfound sexuality. 

 

There were many distinct points on the fluid gender spectrum but 'omni-sexual' was not one in bold.  Mentioned only as a footnote it described the desultory and unconcerned, the indifferent, those who merited only mention not recognition. 

Progressives who were responsible for the whole idea of sexual neutrality completely missed the point.  Belinda was not at all indifferent but omnivorous.  Ayahuasca had not enabled random desire, but validated purposeful, meaningful sexuality.  

'A hot ticket', one Deke frat brother said to another, another Yale fool taking Belinda Ames as 'another cunt from Vassar' but missing the point.  Any man man enough to win Belinda's affection would be another Petruchio to Kate the Shrew, savvy, deliberate, and opportunistic.  Romance is not an intervening variable in any sexual equation. 

Tears And Flapdoodle, A Holiday Party, And Crying In The Eggnog Over Donald Trump

Veronica Peoples had given more to the black man than most white liberals - she had been the Dean of the Philosophy Department at _____, a black land-grant college.  She had gotten tenure at the school during the days of Martin Luther King, the heady years of black-white cooperation, the Summer of Love, and the promises of racial integration, had stayed in place despite the growing demand for black 'totality', she had been a tireless supporter of the black cause.  

Now in her approaching old age and a bit at sixes and sevens since her career of doing the right thing was over but liberal juices still ran in her veins, she turned to pottery and volunteering.  For the first she had no talent, but like everything else she did, she invested a huge amount of energy and commitment.  The rack of cups, pots, and bowls she put on display in her modest suburban home should have been an embarrassment; but her friends, all of the same can-do liberal enthusiasm, saw latent talent there. 

'Now that is a marvelous piece', said one, pointing to a misfired vase in which Veronica had placed a spring of holiday holly. 

'Oh, that's nothing', said Veronica smiling and inwardly delighted at the comment.  Pottery meant so much to her as memories of her deanship faded, and as her love for her students became part of a warm, comforting past.  She smiled at thoughts of the high cackle of LaShonda and Demetria in the lunchroom; the pimp-walking Pharoah and Na'Richter Evans, and the open-mouth stare of her pet project, Letitia Brown, an intellectually challenged student invited to attend the university to round out its diversity profile but who turned out to be a perfectly sweet, angel of a girl. 

'I've had a good life', Veronica said. 

Volunteering was another anodyne to her sadness and feeling of emptiness; and now that Donald Trump was in office, the need for organized opposition was never more urgent.  The man was a moral reprobate, a misogynist, racist, and fool - a running dog as Maoist Chinese politburo used to call American capitalists - and every day he added to the misery he heaped on the poor, the black, and the disadvantaged.  

 

Veronica had known nothing but liberalism since her earliest days.  Secure and insulated in the liberal colleges of her school years, professor at one of these same institutions, and finally administrator at ______, she cannot be faulted for her innocent and very passionately felt progressivism.  Yet at the same time, it was surprising for such a mature and not unintelligent woman to have the most reflexive sympathy for any and all liberal causes and the most horrendous antipathy to anything right of Samuel Gompers and Al Sharpton. 

So, the Christmas open house she hosted was to be much more than a time for holiday cheer.  It was to be a gathering of the willing - academics, non-profit retirees, community organizers, and members of the Peace, Women's, Gay, and Environmental movements of the nation's capital.  It would be a heady affair, a closely-knit brother- and sisterhood of the committed, a jamboree of likeminded assurance and validation of long years of reformist struggle. 

Veronica made special quince tarts, Swedish canapes, hummus minibites, and garnished the smoked salmon with beluga caviar.  She knew that the salmon-and-caviar might send the wrong message - a bit plutocratic - but it was so good that she could hardly keep herself from devouring all of it before her guests arrived. 

 

Of course there were no Christmas decorations in the house - the invitees included Jews, Muslims, and nonbelievers - and the music playing in the background was one of Bach's decidedly non-religious pieces, but 'festiveness is as festiveness does', Veronica always said, and the guests themselves would generate the holiday spirit. 

After an hour or so when all the guests had arrived, Veronica tinkled her dinner bell for attention and said, 'I think it would be fitting to remember those who have suffered in this year of misery, and I have asked Fenwick Lent to read from his latest collection of poetry - one we all hope will be published by Scribner's in the coming year.  Fenwick, if you please...'  

The clink of classes and silverware quieted, Fenwick straightened his collar, brushed a stray thread from his jacket, cleared his throat and began: 

Mercy me, said the little black girl by the well 

Tumult and misery abound in the fell

The light in the vale, cherished but pale

Is the way to promise, from hill to dale...

 

That was the only beginning, and Fenwick went on for what seemed an eternity reading his treacly, rhyming elegy to the suffering and the destitute.  The one or two outliers - Sunday football husbands getting drunk on Lambrusco - thought it was a joke. The guy couldn't be serious, but the more he read, the more Veronica's guests nodded in approval.  When he finally finished, they surrounded him and gave him hugs.  'No one could have said it better', said one. 

Fenwick's poem opened the floodgates of political sentiment.  Somehow the images of the poor and hungry that Donald Trump had tossed in the trash like 'the crusts of stale bread' invoked by the poet, brought up the bile, the intemperate hatred, and the venomous acrimony felt by each and every one of the guests nibbling the last crumbs of Veronica's quince tarts - except for one football husband, soggy with sweet wine who startled his neighbor when, through a mouthful of rice crackers and brie, he said, 'Bullshit'. 

The white people at the gathering made a big fuss over a busty black woman in an Easter hat who had done something noteworthy or other.  They had so few occasions to socialize with black people, that this could go on their unwritten resumes.  She didn't give them the time of day, preferring to squirrel herself in a corner with a sister and talk 'black shit' as the football husband remarked after catching a snippet. 

Veronica was delighted at the turnout, the appreciation at her table, the poem, the camaraderie, and the good cheer.  'I must do this again next year', she thought, although at her age next year was only a supposition not a guarantee.