Read Online My Generation by William Styron - Free Book Online Page B

I sealed my doom? Even in those repressed years of the Bible Belt South, to have had at nineteen only three partners, two of whom I'd met in boozy mayfly matings already dimming in memory, scarcely made me feel like a red-hot lover, much less the randy alley cat generally associated with the disease. Still, as Winkler pointed out, even though syphilis was not as widespread as the clap, all it took was one quick poke in the wrong partner's hole and a man could be done for. Whose hole, then, and when? The actual encounters were all so recent, and together so few, that I could easily let my mind pounce on each one, trying to figure out which specific grappling had permitted the
T. pallidum
to begin its infestation.
    On a bright morning, as I sat on my camp stool plunged into one of these self-lacerating reveries, Winkler came up with a mournful look to say that he was sorry but my Kahn remained “highly reactive.” Then he announced that Dr. Klotz—finally, after many days—wished to see me, to take my case history. Was I religious? Winkler asked. When I said that I wasn't but asked him why he wanted to know, the corpsman rolled his eyes, then declared,“He's got a kind of narrow-minded view of things.” He added, as he had once before, that it was all part of a “personal fixation.”
    As I look back on that time, I can see that Klotz, whatever the complexities of his motivation, had a need to squeeze the most out of the vindictive rage against syphilis already prevailing in the armed forces—one that mirrored the broader abhorrence in American society. While Klotz was doubtless not typical of navy doctors, or the medical profession in general, he was working well within the pious and cold-blooded restraints regarding sexually transmitted diseases that had prevailed in the navy for many years. During the First World War, President Wilson's secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, a godly North Carolinian if there ever was one, made history in a small way by banishing alcohol from officers’ wardrooms and elsewhere on naval ships and bases, thereby bringing to an end an ancient and cherished custom. But at least this created no mortal danger. In his intolerance of carnality, Daniels ruled against a proposal that sailors and marines be given free access to condoms, and thus became responsible for unnumbered venereally related illnesses and deaths. Apart from his own belief, Klotz was obviously the inheritor of a tradition with a firm root in Southern Christian fundamentalism.
    In presenting my case history to Klotz that morning, I had to describe my relations with a girl and two older women. Klotz referred to these as “exposures.” While the doctor took notes, I told him that, almost exactly two years before, I had lost my virginity for two dollars in a walk-up hotel room in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was a college freshman, and the woman was about thirty-five. In answer to his question about whether I had used protection, I replied that I thought so but could not be sure, since I had drunk too much beer for clear memory. I then went on to the next exposure. (What I did not describe to Klotz was the interminable anxiousness of waiting in the dismal little hotel lobby while my anesthetized classmate, a raunchy dude from Mississippi, who had initiated our debauch, preceded me for what seemed hours with Verna Mae, which was what she called herself. Nor did I tell the doctor that my memory of Verna Mae was of an immensely sad and washed-out towhead in a stained slip and dirty pink slippers who raised a skinny arm and took my two dollars with such lassitude that I thought she might be ill; nor did I recount being nearly ill myself, from apprehension and a stomach-churning disbelief at the idea that what I'd awaited with anxious joy since the age of twelve was about to happen, something so unbearablymomentous that I barely registered the words when, sliding the two bucks into her brassiere, she said in a countrified voice,