VIVA

Sculling with avidity, through the ocean of the internet (but more like Tallulah in Lifeboat these days), I came across the above photo.  Like the picture of the fellow in the subway in the previous post, I felt my brain prompting me to answer, without, in a way, knowing what the question was.  Such is the subconscious need for one's awareness to connect the dots.

My mother was doing her best in the 1970s to be a modern woman.  When my future brother-in-law stayed over for the first time (I greeted him at the door by punching him in the nuts) my mother told him she would have let him sleep with my sister under the farmhouse roof, but my father wouldn't have liked the idea.  My mother tried pot and flirted with vegetarianism, but dropped such a radical change in her diet after discussing it with the family doctor -- and being told all her teeth would fall out.  It was all about emancipation in the 70s.  In the bathroom, behind the door hanging next to the linen closet was a mauve banner, a souvenir of our first trip to England.  In gothic letters it announced 'This has been stolen from Carnaby Street'.  Visiting that avenue of bygone fashion, my mother had done the right thing and shoplifted it.

So one day I discovered a copy of VIVA on the toilet tank.  This must have been right in the middle of the 1970s.  I recall it just appeared one day, half buried with Maclean's and a copy of Saturday Night.  I was prepubescent, probably 13 years old or so, and not quite yet acquainted with my first orgasm (it would happen later that same year, 1976).  The magazine looked vaguely Art Deco, bold stylized letters and a soft focus cover page.  I assumed it to be another women's general interest magazine.  Then I saw the photo spread.

HELLO!  Our bronzely-tanned hero was sauntering around a swimming pool, looking completely at ease in his verily hung nudity.  I was mesmerised by the man's penis.  It really was the birth of another size queen, truly.  Then and there I staked my claim, and tied my flag to the phallic pole and never looked back.  For God's sake, I followed the building of the CN Tower in the middle 70s (with interest) and was fascinated with dirigibles.  The Hindenburg was a favourite movie.  I was chock-full of Freudian symbology.  There was no escape.

Where had this magazine come from?  I was convinced it was my mother pushing the edges again, but I never asked and never found out if it had been her.  I got used to it being there, and it seemed to hang around for months.  He and I became old friends.  I recall innocently mentioning it to my mother one day.  I can't remember what I said, but shortly after that my old friend disappeared from the toilet tank FOREVER.  Until a few days ago.  It really is amazing how a picture can pull you back into a time and place that is so long forgotten that your brain seems to freshen in a high speed rewind.

It would be in that bathroom some months later that I would practically fall over with the first orgasm of my adolescent life.  I do recall my knees buckling, literally giving out, but it was without my poolside friend.  Come to think of it I can't recall what prompted me, but nature and intuition were on my side, and I made a proper mess.

"What part of the ship are you from, darling?"

"Engine room. I was off duty in the washroom, thanks ..

caught with my .. I was washing my hands when the torpedo smacked us.."

Tallulah Bankhead and John Hodiak

Lifeboat

Alfred Hitchcock, 1944