The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 “There’s gonna be trouble,” I heard some prophesy gleefully. “Woman’s Lib ain’t gonna let him get away with it.”
-	The scene as I approached Zellerbach Auditorium seemed to bear out their warnings. In front of the ticket line, a handful of demonstrators were holding up their placards: “A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul, says Norman Mailer.” Surprisingly, the militants were primarily gays, not women. Super macho meets the army of gays. It seemed to promise a classic contest: Classic Comics, perhaps.
+The scene as I approached Zellerbach Auditorium seemed to bear out their warnings. In front of the ticket line, a handful of demonstrators were holding up their placards: “A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul, says Norman Mailer.” Surprisingly, the militants were primarily gays, not women. Super macho meets the army of gays. It seemed to promise a classic contest: Classic Comics, perhaps.
-		I was surprised to find my instinct was to defend the champ. Couldn’t they picket grosser offenders than Mailer? Or was it only that he had the boldness to announce unpopular views and the foolishness to take on all comers?
+I was surprised to find my instinct was to defend the champ. Couldn’t they picket grosser offenders than Mailer? Or was it only that he had the boldness to announce unpopular views and the foolishness to take on all comers?
+“Aren’t you being silly?” I asked them.
+“Oh, really?” they sniffed at me.
+I was afraid the evening would be spoiled.
+The audience settled in their seats. The gays positioned themselves for the battle to come, and the speaker was announced. He strutted up to the lectern, short and swaggering, dressed in black boots, blue jeans, black turtleneck and black blazer, tough but elegant, looking like a hip longshoreman or a punk professor. A schizoid balance, but on him it worked. The blue Levis seemed to say to the Berkeley audience, “I’m with you baby,” but the blazer was a touch of sartorial splendor; it put him a notch or two above us. He was looking good under the lights, ready to go fifteen rounds, a presence, close to fifty but could pass for a prematurely white-haired forty. He stood there, a celebrity, star of stage, screen, and the printed page, enveloped in a wave of cheers and boos.
+He paused a second after the noise died down, sniffing the air, trying to gauge the mood. “What’s the score?” he asked the crowd, like the gangland boss from the East Side ready to parley with the mob from the West. “Are we going to have a good time tonight?” A flurry of cheers.
+“We’re going to have the greatest miserable time tonight! I have the fond hope that my dear friends from the liberation are here?”
+One lone female shout: “Oh, yeah!”
+“You sound kind of friendly,” Mailer told them. “Hasn’t the word reached you?” He is the sort of man who actively seeks out confrontations rather than avoiding them.
+The audience was ready to pick up the gauntlet. “Norman, you shmuck!” yelled a woman’s voice.
+“Sweet heckler, all I heard was schmuck. I’m sure you don’t know the meaning of the word. The meaning of ''shmuck'' is ''cunt''. And if I’m a Male Chauvinist Pig, I could not possibly be a cunt. God would not so honor me. So ‘''shmuck you''.’”
+Cheers.
+“Now I would like those dear ladies in the audience who are in the liberation and have hostile feelings toward me to hiss.”
+Loud hisses, as of a nest of rattlers, or Medusa with her hackles rising. Mailer hunched toward the microphone, and through tightly compressed lips, bit out: “Obedient little bitches.”
+Much laughter and prolonged applause.
+I could see his strategy: he was warming up the audience, playing them and drawing them out. His mood was genial. Maybe the crowd was his.
+After a series of one-line gags, he announced two topics for the evening, and it would be his task to put them together: “Woman’s Liberation and Richard Nixon.” The conjunction of these wildly disparate topics provoked more laughter. Just like Mailer to try to yoke together incompatible extremes.