FRESH YARN presents: The Man Who Could be Hung... by Hayward Hawks Marcus

FRESH YARN presents:

The Man Who Could be Hung
By Hayward Hawks Marcus

"Whoever called it necking was a poor judge of anatomy."
Groucho Marx

The Great Byron 1890's Bazaar was great indeed -- or at least it was for me. An outdoor festival coordinated by entrepreneurial bohemians, it happened during the summer of 1972 and was set in the dusty hills fifty miles east of San Francisco, at the defunct Byron Hot Springs resort. This centenarian spa -- once an elegant architectural grand dame -- had attracted wealthy and famous world travelers in her yesteryear heyday, but, much like a prim Victorian lady, had fallen out of favor during the swinging sixties, and was of little use to the current owners except as fairgrounds for a themed event such as the Bazaar.

Bedizened with 1890's trappings, the Bazaar was hung throughout with red, white and blue bunting, and this patriotic frippery seemed a bit out of place amongst the anti-establishment, anti-Nixon peaceniks and flower children who were running the shebang. Still, most of these social fringe participants presented the crowds with a somewhat straitlaced representation of nineteenth century Americana. All vendors and hawkers had repackaged themselves and their saleable items in pseudo-vintage wrappings. Unshaven earth mothers costumed themselves in the long gowns and parasols of their suffragist grandmothers, but eschewed corsets and hairpins to keep their freak flags and bosoms liberated. Hippies sporting curly waxed mustaches pedaled dangerously tall antique bicycles with front wheels as high as their pot-headed riders. Entertaining the masses on several open air stages were San Francisco's finest motley gangs of musicians, hoofers, and street performers, rounded up from squalid North Beach dives and Haight Ashbury communes -- silent mimes and barking sideshow men, sultry flamenco and jiggly belly dancers, twangy bluegrass troupes and brass bands squawking out John Phillip Sousa's Favorite Hits.

And then there was me, publicly billed as The Lovely Olivia. I was pulchritudinous stage dressing and perpetually smiling cohort to William Wizard; a master of prestidigitation, legerdemain, or, for those of you who don't like long words, magic!

I was barely fourteen years old, and had just embarked on my career as magician's assistant. William Wizard was my mother's current boyfriend and my reluctant chaperone during the weekends that we worked the Bazaar. We traveled together in his car from San Jose and camped over at the fairgrounds on Saturday nights, and William had the unenviable task of keeping me out of trouble. I may have been fourteen, but I had just sprouted a body like that of a mature eighteen-year-old and, as I paraded myself through the ersatz 1890's throng in an olive-green bathing suit-like costume, legs clad hip to ankle only in black fishnets, I discovered my new power to turn male heads.

My very first weekend there, I was smitten by the charms of an older man of twenty-four, a thespian by the name of Richard Kelly. Dark-haired and possessed of a sensuous, mellifluous voice, Richard's act was titled, Abraxas, the Man Who Could Be Hung. A macabre performance that would have fascinated the Victorians, Abraxas was condemned to die for killing a man over the woman he loved. Led by an executioner to the gallows, his hands tied behind his back, he strode bravely to his doom while a band droned a slow dirge. Stepping onto a stool, a noose was placed over his handsome head and tightened around his throat, and a curtain drawn to obscure the upper part of his body. After a long, nerve battering drum roll, the stool was kicked violently away. Abraxas struggled frantically for an interminable moment while we watched, breathless, until he finally fell limp. His lifeless legs swung eerily to and fro, the only sound came from his hempen necktie as it creaked with his weight against the wooden gibbet. The connection between mock death and sex was visceral. Audiences gasped, and wondered aloud. I fell in love.

I had caught Richard's attention as well, although he had no idea that I was only fourteen. We flirted whenever we met, and I saw in his eyes a mysterious glint absent from the eyes of the eighth grade boys I knew. This eye sparkle of Mr. Kelly's caused me to have romantic daydreams, wherein Richard would lead me down a sun-specked path to the edge of a tinkling creek, and lay soft kisses over my face and neck. Beyond this, my daydream became vague and nondescript. The bare fact was that I had no idea what adults did with each other once kissing had commenced.

My puerile naiveté did not last through the course of the Bazaar, however. One bright Sunday morning, just as the fairgrounds were opening, I was searching for my diary that I'd stashed with my gear inside William's dilapidated Honda. Not finding it in my bag, I began to hunt through the usual collection of fast food containers, magical gimmicks, and unpaid bills that carpeted the floor of his car. As my hands pawed beneath the seats, I was lost in romantic Richard reverie, my idyllic innocence intact, when I suddenly pulled a paperback out from among the old combs and candy wrappers. The cover not only caught both my eyes, but it changed how I saw through them forever.

NICE GIRLS DON'T SWALLOW CUM ON SUNDAYS it declared, in large white letters against a bright pink background. Beneath its blaring font, a naked nymphet performed an act upon a male protuberance that may have ultimately led her to do exactly what it was you wouldn't do should it happen to be Sunday, and you were a nice girl. And, as if this weren't enough, inside were more photos of things nice girls didn't do on Sundays, complete with erotic commentary, of course. It even had a glossary of lewd sexual terms to answer my immediate question about what this cum stuff was. I was transfixed. Facing the stark, graphic truth about human sexual congress, I was repulsed, embarrassed, and thoroughly fascinated.

Now, my parents were both artists, painters of realistic works of human anatomy, and our home library was chock-full of books of nude males and females, but nothing like this. Also, the sex education that I'd received in 1968 at age ten had been sparse; a birds and bees pamphlet that my mother shoved my way before slinking off for a peach daiquiri. It had described sexual intercourse in the most boring, frictionless way possible, apparently to underplay the inherent fun of it all -- When a husband and wife love each other very much and want to have children, they lie very close together. He inserts his erect penis inside her vagina and ejaculates his sperm to fertilize her egg. Nine months later, a baby is born.

I sat in the car and read Nice Girls until the red-hot profanity was burned deep into my gray matter. I closed the book and realized in an epiphanous flash that this cheaply printed text I clutched in my fevered hands had changed me, better than any pituitary gland ever could, for I now saw the full spectrum of my sexual capabilities. This stunning insight was more transformative than the Wizard's bellowing incantation during our Hindu Basket Trick, when he turned me -- twice daily -- from girl into snake.

I placed the book back under the seat. To look for my diary now seemed pointless, since my virginal scribblings were made positively anemic by this latest discovery. Besides, how could I ever begin to chronicle this? And then I noticed it -- a libidinous warmth which germinated from deep within my pelvic region. It crept up my spine like some blob-like monster escaped from a cell, growing in girth and strength, and soon reached my brain and began to eat it, rendering me nearly witless.

I exited the car, the Lust Monster happily gnawing at me while I roamed the Bazaar in a daze. Making my way through the crowd of 1970s faux Victorians, I envisioned every adult I saw engaged in unspeakable acts, doing some very un-Victorian things to one another. And I suddenly understood why parents locked their bedroom doors at night, and it was not -- as I'd previously thought -- to keep the burglars out, but rather to keep the pure minds of their youngsters safe and sane.

I headed for the Wild West Saloon Stage where, at noon and four o'clock, William Wizard brandished swords and guillotines to perform feats of magical mayhem upon my lithe body while I grinned and gestured like a numb idiot. There, next to the stage, I spotted Richard, my would-be paramour, breakfasting on a hay bale beneath an oak tree, looking none the worse for having been hanged three times the previous day. My mind was suddenly filled with fantasies of what might transpire after we kissed by the tinkling creek, and, in this newly revised daydream, I was definitely not a nice girl anymore. Worse yet, this was Sunday.

Richard looked up at me and smiled, and the monster in my brain grew wildly electric. The air turned to some viscous substance, and I froze -- a just-ripened fruit suspended in Jell-O. Breathing was out of the question. Yet everything inside swirled and pulsated in a sexual vortex.

I found myself standing before Richard without ever feeling my feet touch the ground. As he spoke in some unintelligible foreign language, I tried vainly to apprehend the meaning of, "Have a seat." Repeating the phrase -- which I guessed to be either Finnish or Hungarian -- he patted the hay bale while pulling me by the hand toward it. As soon as I sat I was struck by an odor. In junior high school, we would have called it B.O., but, as it exuded from Richard, it could only be dubbed the Essential Perfume of Man. My monster reeled at the scent. Speaking in tongues again, he attempted to hand feed me a bite of his sweet roll. I stared stupidly at him, the morsel hanging from the side of my mouth. He poked it in further, and, as my lips closed around his little fingertip, I knew it was Richard Kelly I wanted to devour, and not some tasteless bit of food.

With a gust of primordial feminine cunning, I looked at him with huge, limpid, Bugs Bunny eyes. "I need to lie down," I muttered, spewing forth a fountain of crumbs over my lap and his. Summoning what little saliva I had, I swallowed the remaining bready sawdust and added, " -- backstage." Richard nodded, understanding that my desire to be horizontal had nothing to do with any sudden illness.

I was totally unprepared for the rapidity with which the experienced male moves when faced with the promise of promiscuity. Whisking me through the wooden door to the empty dressing area just behind the stage, Richard found an unclaimed tie-dyed poncho and spread it over the dirt and sawdust floor. Then he pulled me with him to the ground, and kissed me. Not the soft kiss of my daydreams, this, but a forceful, penetrating, wet kiss. The French kiss of rumor. The kind of a kiss one giggles about while watching late-night uncensored movies at a girlfriend's slumber party. My Lust Monster was now hopping up and down, making gleeful noises like that of a rapidly beating heart. I had never kissed this way before, and began exploring the endless possibilities of kissing as I fell and tumbled, like a triple X rated Alice, down a bottomless rabbit-hole of sex. Hands and fingers began to dance over my flesh. Juices I never knew I had magically appeared. Saliva was no longer a problem.

I had just begun to investigate Richard's body and the carnal possibilities of The End of My Girlish Niceness, when I heard a familiar voice calling from far, far away. The kiss ended. The voice grew loud and harsh, scolding in tones unsuitable for lovemaking. Suddenly Richard was scrambling to his feet, not looking at all like the sophisticated lover he had been just seconds before, and I could see a wizard's goatee wagging furiously in the doorway while words like fourteen and jailbait flew violently about the room. That was the last time I saw Richard, who, I imagine, spent the rest of the Great Byron 1890's Bazaar pursuing less illicit female prey.

William, on the other hand, spent the better part of that Sunday informing any potential lotharios that any solicitations towards me would not be dealt with lightly, thereby killing my prospects for offering up my virginity at the Great Byron 1890's Bazaar. I was understandably peeved, and still sometimes wonder how different my defloration might have been, if, instead of eventually succumbing to a fumbling adolescent with a swarm of pimples and dearth of chest hair, I had actually roped The Man Who Could Be Hung.