The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex
Introduction from Pagan Kennedy
I learned about the secret doorways when I was a kid. One summer afternoon, my grandmother and I perched on her bed together; she balanced a book on her lap read to me about Alice, who passed through a mirror as easily as you'd push through a curtain.
"I'm going to do that," I told my grandmother, touching the illustration, which showed a girl in striped stockings emerging into Looking Glass Land.
"Oh no, Honey. She didn't really. It was just dream she had by the fire," my grandmother told me in her breathy Virginia accent, which turned the word "fire" into "far," and made everything sound like a question.
I knew she was wrong. Books didn't lie. Why would an author sit writing at his desk for years just to describe a world that didn't exists? And besides, this business about Alice was clearly meant to be a set of instructions. You only had to follow them to get into Wonderland. Any idiot could see that. "I'm going to do it," I said, and jumped off the bed, padding over to the other end of the room. I stood in front of my grandparent's oval mirror, which I had already decided must be magic because of its extreme age, tarnished glass, and gilt frame. I leaned so close that my breath fogged up the surface. I touched the mirror, gingerly, probing for a chink. When that didn't work, I studied the images reflected on the glass for clues: the backwards room, a curtain curled around buttery sunlight, and my grandmother propped up on the bed, her panty-hose-covered legs a curious and unconvincing shade of skin tone. Objects carried a significance that they did not have in real life. Outside the mirror-window, in the wrong-way yard, a cedar tree pointed like a gnomon with its purple shadow. What lay beyond? Was there a reverse me hiding in the topsy-turvy streets? Like Alice, I was convinced that on the other side, just out of the frame of the mirror, reality warped and buckled.
I scooped up the book, and then carried it over to the mirror, holding it open to its own image. There I saw its code, the backwards writing like a dispatch from another universe. I was on the right track. The secret had something to do with books and language, and the places where the world turns weird. But I still couldn't find the way through.
When I was in my 20s, a pattern of leaves on the sidewalk or the crook of a lamppost would fill me with longing. Out of nowhere, I would be seized with homesickness for a place that never existed. When that happened, I would rush back to my desk and begin a short story. By making a spell out of words, an incantation of characters, I hoped I could travel into that other land, the place where I belonged.
In those days, I also wrote nonfiction, but only to pay the bills: I churned out last-minute blurbs for Interview, think pieces for The Village Voice, ruminations about literature for The Nation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the alternative weeklies ruled the publishing universe; they paid well enough that I could scrape together living from them. Still, I considered myself a fiction writer. Making stuff up would be my "real" work. I needed to find the place that - more than America - I knew to be my country. But I only seemed to travel to my homeland in the saccade of reading, that instant of the eye catching up a bundle of words and transmitting a pulse of understanding in the brain. In the next moment I lost my home. Blink: I had it. Blink: it was gone. How to live there?
More so even than novels, I loved the New Journalism of the 1960s, those bad-boy books that turned reportage into a grand, show-offy art. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hells Angels by Hunter Thompson, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, and anything at all by Truman Capote - these books as if they had simply winked into existence, too grand to be the work of one human being. I used to stare at pages of Electric Kool-Aid, trying to understand how Wolfe had managed to turn raw experience into a fable. Had he used a tape recorder all through the months he spent with the Merry Pranksters? Would a machine even be able to capture conversation on a noisy bus? And once he had thousands of pages of notes, what alchemy had he used to make his book feel like an acid trip?
So for years, I was a fiction writer with a side-fetish for truth stories. Or rather, I was too intimidated by the prospect of uniting the techniques of journalism and fiction to attempt it myself. And then one day in 1996, I stumbled across an untold true story, one that I knew would make a magnificent book. Once that story, questions about research and technique hardly mattered. Obsession became my teacher. While reading a history of Africa, I had come across a fascinating anecdote: In the late 19th century, two American missionaries set out to explore the Congo and establish an outpost there. One of the men was black and the other white. In the United States, Jim Crow laws would have barred the two men from so much as eating together. But in the Congo, the two missionaries slept in a tent together, nursed each other through illnesses, and eventually founded a town together. After Sam Lapsley - the white man - died, William Sheppard became the first explorer ever to enter the "forbidden kingdom" of the Kuba people; he also collected evidence of atrocities that put him at the center of an international human-rights effort. The story haunted me. I could not stop wondering about William Sheppard.
I felt utterly unqualified to tell this story. Still, what choice did I have? Here was the doorway into another world, the kind I'd been looking for all my life. Sheppard seemed to hold the key. I had to understand who this exceptional man had been, how he�d managed to reinvent himself from dirt-poor preacher to internationally known explorer. I pored over his writings in attempt to get closer to Sheppard. He came to me in dreams, in his high Victorian collar, with that glint in his eye, but he would tell me nothing, not even in the realm of sleep.
At this point, my grandma - the one who introduced me to Alice and mirrors - was dying. She'd lost most of her hearing and was completely blind, shut into her own memories. To communicate with her, you had to scream into her good ear. I wrote a letter to her about my Sheppard project; someone had to shout the message to her. And then she dictated a message to me: she had something important to tell me about Congo missionaries. Next time I traveled down South to visit her, she propped herself up on her bed, her blue eyes staring out at nothing, her hair perfectly coifed into a meringue, and told me that her first cousin had been a missionary in the Congo in the early 1900s. In that moment, I discovered another door leading from the real to the fantastic - and once again, my grandmother had opened it for me. In my researches, I had frequently come across references to Robert Dabney Bedinger; he had written the first-ever biography of the William Sheppard, who had been his colleague in the Congo. Bedinger had been Sheppard�s greatest defender. I had never suspected a connection to my own family. Now I knew it was in my blood. My grandmother's maiden name - signifier of her lost girlhood identity, of her lost Alice-hood - was Bedinger.
It was at that point that the Sheppard project had evolved from hobby to avocation. I wrote up a book proposal, working to master the unfamiliar form of the "nonfiction novel." Viking Press bought the idea, and the book became my full-time job. The production of this biography felt entirely different than anything I'd done before. As a novelist and short-story writer, I'd had to force myself to park myself at my desk. To invent imaginary characters, you have to create a vast fake film set in your brain where your fake people can pace, gesture and speak. This can be horrible, especially when your jerry-built world reveals itself to be nothing but cardboard. Now, however, I found myself working for twelve hours with no effort, pulled by my research into what had become a labyrinth of clues about William Sheppard.
The facts infected me like tropical fever, and I couldn't stop digging for more, another document, another revelation. I wrote with a new kind of vigor; I wanted everyone to see the shining shards I had dug up, to understand them and to care. It saddened me that so few Americans knew what had happened during the worst years of the Congo holocaust. I wrote that book under the shadow of the Rwanda genocide of 1994, disgusted that my country done so little to intervene, and asking myself painful questions about why I failed to live up to my own values. As I pieced together William Sheppard's story, I sometimes felt I had plummeted straight through a wormhole, into another person�s mind; at other times, William Sheppard seemed to run far ahead of me, impossibly remote, and the best I could do was study a boot print he'd left behind. Even when I was lost, I felt passionately in love with Sheppard and his story. Now I knew that I'd always been a nonfiction writer. And indeed, though I have returned to fiction occasionally, the true story remains my true love.
After the book came out in 2002, it won awards. Magazine editors began approaching me, presenting me with offers that I had never dared to hope would come my way. Now I suddenly could fly around the country and chase down true stories as they unfolded. Of course, I'd been a journalist off and on for fifteen years, but in the past, I'd usually worked on the cheap. It's amazing how much difference an expense account makes - now I could follow my subjects for days, a spy with a rental car. After years in the library, I was intoxicated by the possibilities of reporting on the present moment. The wealth of detail dazzled me; I could study their clothes, gestures, knickknacks, voices; I could hang around for days and watch events unfold, accumulating twenty hours of tape. It felt almost like cheating to me, this process of observing, recording and boiling it all down into a story.
And so I found the doorway to my homeland where I'd least expected it: here in America, in the truth.
No one can agree what to call this chimerical genre, journalism wrapped up in art of fiction. Truman Capote described In Cold Blood as the first "nonfiction novel." Lee Gutkind, renowned teacher, calls the form "creative nonfiction." My friend Kent Bruyneel - editor of Grain, a Canadian literary magazine � has come up with the moniker "not fiction." I've always been partial to the term "true story," because of the simplicity and democracy of that phrase.
Why so many names? I suspect it's because everyone has a different opinion about the truth. For some writers, it's OK to merge alter minor details in the service of the story; for others, this fudging of the truth amounts to a lie. I spent too many years as a fact-checking drone to be able to cheat the details - I don't fabricate at all. Still, I have to say that great art excuses everything. I understand when a nonfiction author makes a few minor tweaks in service to the scene. When you examine some of Truman Capote's true stories - for instance, the psycho-killer-on-the-loose thriller, Handcarved Coffins - it becomes clear that he must have smudged some facts, for the story fits together too neatly. At the end of the piece, Capote "solves" the mystery and "finds" the killer inside of a fantasy � because, in real life, he was unable to nail the powerful rancher who probably committed the murders. Had he published the piece today, he no doubt would have been called on the carpet by Oprah and forced to account for his lies and inventions. And that would have been a shame, because Handcarved Coffins, is a masterpiece; indeed, when as you read it you feel yourself to be gripped with a fever dream in which accuracy is simply beside the point.
And yet, Capote was at his greatest when he stuck to the facts. Even the most fertile imagination could not invent some of the dialogue of In Cold Blood. Perry, on death row: "I really admired Mr. Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat." That's the kind of dialogue you can only bag after spending days listening to someone, and then sifting through your transcripts for the one sentence that contains that character's very DNA.
We talk about certain statements as having a "ring of truth" to them, as if a sentence is a tuning fork, something that we can tap and listen to for its tone. And I think that's right. Truth has a hum to it. You can tell.
Several years ago, I found myself in a park in Savannah, leaning on a croquet mallet. I'd flown to Georgia to write a profile of Cheryl Haworth, a 19-year-old who had recently thrown more than three-hundred pounds over her head, proving herself the strongest female weightlifter in the world. That day, her best friend Ethan - a beanpole of a boy - had tagged along. I watched in the shade with Cheryl's mother, who did her best to answer my barrage of questions. At one point, out of nowhere, Cheryl's mom told me that Ethan planned to become a Catholic priest and then work his way up so one day he could be Pope. Right then, I knew I had a story. An aperture had opened up, a chink through which I could peer at the Looking Glass Land of a two Southern kids. I had found one of the magic spots where the ordinary melts into the fantastic. Ethan wants to be Pope. Ethan wants to be Pope. My tape recorder hummed in my hand, its reels collecting the evidence. This is what I lived for.
In official terms, I was a "magazine writer." But, really, I'd embarked on a safari, searching out a particular kind of true story. I tracked down visionaries who dared to find solutions to the big problems. These people shared my homesickness in America, and it motivated them to reinvent the this country (and others) as a kinder, sexier, smarter, funnier or more compassionate place. They were possessed of such large ambition that they seemed to violate the very laws of space and time. And, quite often, they managed to bring about the impossible.
For instance, I became fascinated with Gordon Sato, a chemist who had figured out a way to transform the ecosystem of an entire African country. When I met Sato, he'd already succeeded in creating a three-mile strip of mangroves, enough to furnish an entire village with food. But he was running out of money.
I followed the 76-year-old Sato in the suburbs of Massachusetts as he plotted the future of the African coast, argued with his wife, and ate a few bites of the lunch meat she put on his plate. All the while, I waited to find out why he - a frail old man - needed so badly to transform a desert into a tropical paradise. Eventually I learned that Sato (who is Japanese-American) had been interred in a concentration camp in California as a teenager. Sixty years later, he is still trying to erase the memory of another desert long ago, of a boy - himself - digging in the dust. His outrage is so large as to warp the very fabric of reality. Months after I published my story about Sato, I heard he was sailing to Africa on luxury cruise ship with a band of millionaire donors. It was the kind of surreal adventure that seemed ordinary to him.
Some people I profiled in this book are famous. Others live in semi-obscurity, each struggling to built his or her paradise out of nothing but sand. Two of the people who appear here went on to win the MacArthur "genius" award. For me, researching these stories felt like scientific observation, an investigation into the nature of personality and reality. How can one man like Sato violate the laws of common sense and live according to his own lights? And how can he convince so many others to join him? Does it come down to American self-invention, this knack we have for making ourselves up out of nothing? Or does the urge come from some more primeval part of the personality? The method of study was simple: I showed up in the right place, and I stayed as long as I could. If possible, I would follow people for days - observing, snooping, asking questions, rifling through their drawers, searching in the cracks between the upholstery in their cars.
And, too, I intended to illuminate and celebrate genius, which always has one foot in reality and another foot in Wonderland. The subjects of these stories consulted the backwards land of their own imaginations, and then made scientific breakthroughs or started new cultural movements.
Most of the stories I wrote under contract to magazines. Two editors - Hugo Lindgren at The New York Times Magazine, and John Koch The Boston Globe Magazine - became my champions. They suggested story ideas and provided the enthusiasm that fueled my work. Knowing that I could place these stories in magazines kept me going.
However, the title story, The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex, was simply too odd to publish in a glossy magazine. I wrote it anyway. When I found out that Alex Comfort, the author of The Joy of Sex, had started his career as a virgin and workaholic, I had to know more about him. I wanted to trace his evolution from somber scientist into a pop-culture guru nicknamed Dr. Sex. How could one man change so utterly?
Comfort died in the year 2000, so I couldn't report on him in the usual way; instead, I had to resort to the methods of a biographer. I interviewed his son at length - and here I should thank Nick Comfort for graciously opening up his life to me. I also tracked down many others who'd known Alex Comfort, and read through dozens of books and clippings. In the end, I became fascinated by Comfort's decline rather than his rise - his final ten years trapped in a paralyzed body. That was the kind of plot twist beyond my powers of invention.
As I trailed after my subjects, I was continually amazed by the lines of dialogue that they dropped - their speech so much more poetic than anything I could have made up. And I was awed, too, by the sheer creativity that goes into being human: the anecdotes people think up to explain themselves, their rituals, their plots, their costumes.
In most of the stories collected here, I have tried to open up a doorway between the ordinary and the fantastic. My method was to hang onto the coattails of exceptional people and let them zoom me through magic doorways, into strange new realm: America as it exists all around us. America, the real.