Believe it or not Joel looked very much the same, his hair a little darker and more curly.
The second friend I made at the Med. in my college years was Joel, a dwarf. He was in the mathematics department at Berkeley. He was about four feet tall, with a large shock of curly black hair and a moustache, tawny skin and lively motions when he talked. He came to the Med. about once a week to ogle at the girls with lecherous intent. He always took the same seat right at the top of the stairs in the mezzanine, to have a commanding view of both floors. He would pick out his prey, contrive to introduce himself to a good looking one sitting alone, and strangely enough, every once and a while, as if fishing, he’d hook one. I asked him one night, early on in our acquaintance why he stared at so many women when (as I saw it) he had next to no chance of scoring a date. He told me he was oversexed and couldn’t help it or thinking about them.
But then he told me the strangest thing. He said some women, a very few, had a penchant or a strange desire to sleep with a dwarf and he could tell this within a few minutes of staring at them intently and inviting himself over to their table and chatting with them. He even knew the ones he had the best chances with if he noticed them throwing a few quick glances back at him. It had something to do with his shape and their imaginations. He said some were perverse and strange in their sexual thoughts, they just never admitted it. He told me he never had to get them drunk, like most men. With a little smooth talk he’d slip them his address, which he had ready in his pocket. Then he’d politely leave for his pad across campus, on foot, as he didn’t drive. Bruce and I often noticed that about ten minutes later the woman would demurely get up from her table and leave. This usually meant that Joel had scored and the woman was heading to his flat. We even made bets on it and would find out the next week, because Joel’s greatest pleasure, after having sex, was telling us about it, his one expertise in life, besides mathematics, and for a person four feet tall, pride is a tall factor.
Once in his pad there was little talk or socializing. It was ripping off clothes and straight to bed. His parts were normal, you could even say he was handsome, except that his head was strangely large, which his tall, bushy hair and huge mustache only amplified.
I’ve seen representations of Greek Satyrs that resembled him. Some are even pictured as short and tawny skinned, and covered in dark, curly hair. Anyone could see he was oversexed by his excited, quick glances whenever any especially pretty woman walked up the stairs. I think the women could read that too. He’d gained so much experience and had such vitality, he boasted he could please them for hours, and with this confidence, he would invite them over, on some innocent pretext, like seeing his record collection. Then he’d slip her his address and rush home.
He did have a very posh flat, close to campus, the whole bottom floor of a brown-shingle house on a steep hill, with nice furnishings, a large living room and bedroom. He lived there all the years I knew him. I asked him once how he could afford it. He told me his parents were rich.
He said that once the guest arrived and stepped inside, she would immediately strip off all clothing and they’d go at it, madly, with all sorts of kinky ideas and positions in her mind, which she suggested and as if it had been long premeditated. She would later sneak out into the dark and that would be it. He told me only a few ever came back for a second time and that his record so far was four nights with the same girl. Yet his great and insurmountable handicap was that none of them dared to be seen with him in public, holding hands, or even walking down the street together. So he never had a lasting date. The women didn’t want anyone to know that they’d slept with a dwarf. It would be a huge embarrassment and a fall from grace in their social circles, making them a permanent laughingstock. He complained of this, never having a pretty girlfriend he could hold hands with, or the possibility of a wife.
So he settled for second best, (maybe the first in some men’s minds) dozens of clandestine rendezvous over the years, built on the twisted, secretive, lusty dreams ranging about in their pretty heads. Many were tall, good looking sorority types and I surmised, as we talked over this anomaly, that they were probably fed up with the typical frat boys’ two minutes of foreplay and one-minute performance, and that they wanted something strange and new. He said he didn’t care about their motives, just the delights. But he did deliver, and some told him so as they left when it was over. I suppose once they’d tried it, they could put that fantasy away for good, in some dark, closet of their mind. I’ve always found, from my own experience, that a woman’s imagination has the most inscrutable circuitry in the world.
So there we were, three misfits at a table, enjoying our talk and totally oblivious as to what anybody else might be thinking of us. On rare occasions Chuck would come up and join us and make a fourth. The list of my closest acquaintances made up a gallery of misfits. But I never saw them in that light. To me they were just friends. And we were happy together, talking away. My life might seem like a carnival back then, of my own choosing. But it was a very happy one, as we were all in the prime of youth.
I introduced Joel to some of my dorm buddies when I was living with George. One Friday night I invited him to my place from the Med., just eight houses up the street. Phil and Doug and Richard came by and we had a drink fest at our place, getting so wasted we talked Doug into driving him to his apartment on the other side of campus. He was too far gone for a walk home. We all piled in the car. At the house there was a long set of wide, stone stairs down to his flat and as he got out, he stumbled at the top one and rolled like a bowling ball to the bottom, some twenty steps down. We all saw this from the headlights and ran down to see if he was still alive, so fast was his descent. But he stood up, brushed some dirt off his jacket and told us he was fine. He didn’t even have a scratch. His body was such that it curled into a perfect ball. Anybody else taking such a fall would have broken limbs.
We stayed friends even after I returned to Berkeley, after quitting Toronto in 1977. I invited him to a few of our wild parties at the Plough. He was in the graduate department of mathematics by then and brought a pretty woman to our pad one afternoon as she wanted some speed to stay slim. She was a tall and striking blond but just a little over-weight, maybe ten pounds, with a bit of puffiness to her face, hinting that she might soon grow fat. I don’t know if this was his girlfriend. But Bones and I immediately agreed to this request (stricken by her looks) and sold her a gram for eighty dollars. This was the last time I saw Joel. But we did see her again, one more time. She knocked on our door one morning about three weeks later, and as we opened it our jaws nearly dropped. The change was miraculous. She’d lost the ten or fifteen pounds, her waist was now perfectly slim, her chest and rounded ‘derrière’ as shapely and sexy as ever. But her face had undergone the most amazing change. It had lost its puffiness and was perfect in its oval beauty. And she was dressed to the hilt, looking like some rich executive. She was a ‘ten’ again. We invited her in, sat her down on the couch, told her how gorgeous she looked and asked her how she did it.
She explained that she jogged daily and watched her diet carefully, eating as sparingly as possible. Yet it was never enough. She still slowly put on weight. But with the speed, she told us, she could have breakfast, then do some four or five small lines over the hours and skip two meals, with only the slightest snack before bed, which along with the exercise made her lose the weight quickly. She told us ours was excellent in quality, clean, and not like some other peoples’ she’d bought which she knew was cut and made her ill. She begged us for one more supply, implored us with her hands together before her face, as if making a wish. So Bones and I sold her two more grams, for a hundred and sixty, as she seemed to have lots of money. But we also told her that we couldn’t keep doing this as our supply was dwindling. She gave Bones a hug after he weighed it out and handed her the bag, calling him a lifesaver and that she’d never ask again. We both wished we had more so she would keep coming over, forever. She was such a picture of elegance. But this was late February and our supply was down to some ten grams. Our parties were over, and we kept what we had left for us and just a few friends, like John and Kim. All the mountains we had at the beginning were used for one reason only, partying, and given away for free.
