The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy Read Free Book Online

himself remained in the shadows. He might have exploded into fame as Timothy Leary had, might have become a walking advertisement for his own brand of utopia. Except, of course, Leary possessed the movie-star jaw, the Pepsodent teeth, and the boyish physicality that allowed him to transition from professor into pop-culture icon, and Alex… didn’t. Had you met him in 1973, you might well have mistaken him for a car mechanic. He made the rounds of newspaper interviews in a blue jumpsuit—no need to wash shirts, he liked to brag, if you only wore zip-up suits. He slumped in his chair with a hunched-over posture that made him look older than his 53 years, and kept his breast pocket stuffed with a line of cigars, and another stogie clamped in his mouth. Photographs of him during this period suggest that he washed his gray hair as infrequently as his costume.
    And anyway, Alex did not crave fame of the Leary variety. Rather, he saw himself as the man who lobbed the bomb, caused
the big explosion that changed society, and then ran away. An avowed anarchist, he lived for the moment when the old system fell apart and the new order was born.
    Ever since the early ’60s, he’d imagined himself in the role of world-class trickster. In his 1961 novel Come Out To Play, he had created a character—Dr. Goggins—who represented his ideal. A genius in bed, the doctor opens a school in Paris where he and his girlfriend teach their students advanced love-making skills. “Bill Masters thought I was writing about his clinic, but I was able to tell him I wrote that book back before Masters and Johnson were heard of,” Alex bragged in 1974. And now it appeared that what Alex had imagined a decade earlier might come true.
    In the novel, Dr. Goggins meets “a French chemist who’s happened on a drug [that] can turn people on. Not raise the libido, but thaw the superego, the part of the mind that says ‘mustn’t.’ I call [the drug] 3-blindmycin,” Alex explained in one interview. Dr. Goggins—believing that enough orgasms could bring an end to war—constructs a Molotov cocktail, fills it with a huge dose of the drug, and sets it off in front of Buckingham Palace. The queen, parliamentarians, barristers, peers and bureaucrats all huff in the substance and become flower children. The military brass retire to
the country. The rocket scientists lose interest in building phallic weaponry and run naked through their neighborhoods. War ends forever.
    â€œCome Out To Play started to be simply a comic novel. I think now it was the manifesto of which The Joy of Sex commences the implementation,” Alex told a journalist. After 1972, he tried hard to sell Come Out To Play to Hollywood—with no luck. Still, he could imagine exactly how it would look on the big screen. Peter Sellers would star as Dr. Goggins, the ultimate prankster, a man who brings about true democracy by wiping out the will to power. In the early 1970s, Alex could believe that he had himself become the Peter-Sellers-as-Goggins character; Joy was his drug, his 3-blindmycin. With the right words, he had transformed the mores and habits of the entire English-speaking world. He’d turned what used to be called perversions into “pickles and sauces”; he’d written the manifesto that people were using to refashion their lives, putting the orgasm at the top of their agendas.
    Up until now, Alex had been out-of-step with the mainstream; in the 1940s, his countrymen denounced him as soft on the Nazis; in the 1960s, moralists had crusaded against the radical
agenda he put forward in Sex and Society. Now, for the first time, he led the crowd.
    THAT BOOK
    The runaway success of Joy presented one problem for Alex: he’d made Ruth’s life hell. Every one of her acquaintances, from grocer to next-door neighbor, had likely heard about her husband’s exploits with Jane. And though Alex had gone through