18 November 2020
When I attended the Michigan State Universe in the mid-1970s the world was a different place. We still had hope in the future. We still held the notion dear that we as a people were evolving toward a nation where gender and race would no longer be limiting conditions. We fully believed that literature’s best moments were still ahead. Clearly this was evidenced by the high quality shown by the writers of letters to Penthousemagazine.
On one occasion several of my fellow MSU students and I pursued a public reading of one of these great works of art. We did this on a warm and sunny fall afternoon in the public lounge area of our dormitory. Our simple goal was to promote this uniquely evolving form of great literature. We just didn’t understand how the Pulitzer literary prize committee failed to acknowledge the talent of these great writers year after year.
On one sunny Saturday afternoon we picked a story at random from the September 1976 issue of Penthouse magazine. The particular topic involved was stacks assignation. Penthouse letters had a number of recurring themes, trysts with a friend’s fiancée’ (or mother), couplings in elevators, and finally encounters with persons with differing personal attributes.
Letters on library stacks assignations were particularly interesting to us because we undergraduates were for the most part were barred from the research stacks. At the Michigan State Universe undergraduates were expressly forbidden to be in the ‘research stacks’, the place where scholarly journals and quarterly publications were all neatly arranged in university bound color coded volumes. Titles like The University of Alberta Journal of Hydrological Data Assessment were arranged neatly in row after row floor after floor. Only serious scholars were allowed to wander there among that mixture of thickly bound material and dust, each title having its own unique smell.
Because of the serious reverence for the knowledge in these books very few undergraduate students got there. (There was a back way in but that is for a different story). Master and doctoral degree candidates were allowed to roam these oft vacant realms. Decrepit professors could cruise up and down these aisles. Their numbers were sparse and the stacks remained very quiet day after day, week after week. A pencil left on the floor in an aisle separating journals could remain there untouched for days.
It was the near vacant nature of the storage space for these learned treatises that gave rise to the stack assignation stories. These stories followed a pattern. First, the narrator would specify why they would be in the stacks, always stated to be a deep and scholarly interest. Next the teller of the tale (always a male) would find out that someone else was in the nearly deserted area. Given it was Penthouse the writer would find a comely member of the opposite sex lingering between the rows of books. Of course, the person discovered would be observed doing something suggestive. I won’t dwell on the wild variations of the suggestive activities but assume it something like leaning over a sorting cart in a short skirt exposing lace fringed silk undergarments. Invariably this would lead to a discussion of gymnastic sex worthy of the pliable nature of Olga Korbut’s limbs.
Well, there we were in our mixed gender, mixed race group, sitting around the western lounge of Mayo Hall. As I have said we decided to promote public awareness of this great literary form through a public reading. We would accomplish this by handing around an open Penthouse neatly concealed in another mass market publication like Time. Each of the 12 or so of us would read a single paragraph out loud continuing to hand the magazine to the person to our right until the letter concluded.
The first people to read got off relatively unscathed in the endeavor. The first two or three paragraph of these letters, and they were long missives, were ones describing the writer’s work assignment, the locale of the action within the rows of dusty cobweb covered books, and the pink silk underwear of the soon to be member of Olympic fornication squad.
Readers four through ten got the yeoman’s task of reading the descriptions of the sexual athleticism of the writer and his brave cohort. Readers four through ten also got to use the wild and varied adjectives and adverbs contained in the tale. Moist, sweaty and wildly are about the safest of those words to recount here. These determined orators also got to use the action verbs like thrust, and all its variants, voicing them in stage voices that would have made Sir John Gielgud proud. Hand gestures would accompany the narration, mostly staging directions (although sometimes they would be graphic representations of particularly difficult to understand maneuvers outlined in the text of the letter).
I did mention that this was a public reading. I did mention this was in a ground floor lounge of a dormitory. What I did not mention was that this ground floor’s suites of rooms had been occupied that year by a bunch of clean-shaven, short haired young men whose purpose, at that moment in their collective lives, was to proselytize to the world at large what they believed was the proper route to salvation. To those who went to university in the 1970s these were the gents who stood out on the corners in center campus handing out small green copies of their sacred religious texts one day a term. These were folks who did not drink, dance or smoke. They also did not believe in having sex standing up because it could lead to dancing.
Now as reader seven was in a grave and serious tone describing a sexual maneuver that had about the same difficulty as a gymnast performing a double salto tucked with two full twists, a stranger approached the circle unnoticed by most. The listeners were really engaged in listening to the reading, enrapt perhaps. The telling had captured their late teen/early twenties minds. Their heart rates were elevated and there may have been stirrings in their loins. The listeners were hanging on every word that was spoken with faster and shorter breaths.
At this moment, when the narrator was describing two people hanging nude from what must have been an industrial grade light fixture, a young clean-cut gentleman continued his approach from the monasterial region of the dormitory. The reader having seen the approaching stranger stopped his reading midsentence and closed the Time magazine thus hiding the Penthouse and its racy cover. The excited listeners looked confused but then they saw the approaching stranger too.
Coming to a halt dead center in the half circle of literary enthusiasts, this gentleman (let us call him Barry) produced a religious text from under his arm. Barry opened his sacred book and asked if the listeners if they would mind if he read what he believed were the holy words related directly to what he saw as a universal plan of salvation. All twelve pairs of eyes focused on the floor. Indistinct mummers were heard but there was no overt or unambiguous refusal to Barry’s proposal. Taking this as acquiescence, Barry spoke with passion. As he spoke the blood that had been pooling in specific places among the twelve listeners dissipated. Pulses slowed and breathing returned to regular rates. Barry’s stump speech was short and sweet, maybe 3 minutes maximum. At the end he gently closed his book, thanked the listeners and walked off with a strong steady stride away heading for the lounge of the east side.
When Barry was gone the then reader, who had quietly closed the Time/Penthouse combination left the magazines closed. Giggles came gently at first. Then came sheepish and guilty laughter. Then people began falling out of their chairs with guttural laughter and flushed red faces. I think Barry’s departing comment that the part that burns most in hell is the part that you sin with struck a chord with us.
We did not return to our public promotion of literary talent on this particular day. Maybe it was shame, maybe it was guilt, but we just didn't pick up where we left off. Instead, we wandered on to other activities like campus movies and cruising through the local downtown looking for posters to decorate our rooms. Some people might have picked up incense or market spice tea. Others wandered down to the river to feed the ducks.
Penthouse’s letters never received the literary plaudits we felt they truly deserved. I think we can only blame ourselves for not further promoting public awareness through additional public readings.
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