in all my life have I seen such a swollen and discolored face; with one exception, and that exception died a few days later as a result of his terrible blows in the face. I told my landlady I had been in a fight defending a woman from her drunken husband. I telephoned my office that I was slightly indisposed. Thus emphasized so no business associate would call.[1]
After two weeks, when my face had become somewhat presentable, I ventured to the office still retaining only a black eye. "In my room in the dark, I struck the edge of the eye-socket on a chair spindle."
I doubt whether all believed me, but none proved so impolite as to ask embarrassing questions.[2]
**********
But Harvey Green! I here address you in case your eyes should ever fall on these lines. I shall remember you to my dying day as occupying third or fourth place among the hundreds of hero-boys with whom Providence permitted me to commune. I never
- ↑ In a later catastrophe, one did call. I was compelled to tell the truth, but he proved sympathetic and respected my confidences. He subsequently asked his physician about homosexuality and was informed it was deepest moral depravity and merited no sympathy. He himself happened to be one of the most broadminded of men. He remarked that physicians as a class are narrow-minded since most have not taken a liberal-arts course.
- ↑ In a later scrape, after being laid up for a week, I ventured to my large publishing office with practically no skin on my nose, that member having a week before been badly smashed. My physician had furnished me with the explanation that he had applied a mustard plaster for a cold and the nose resulted! But the better joke was that simultaneously another university-trained androgyne working in the same room was limping around with a crutch. He said he had been thrown off a horse, but I never doubted he had been crippled by some sexually full-fledged brute as a punishment for his androgynism.
