Me and Suerken

Vespas on Corfu. Suerken’s undoing.

I was feeling guilty because I hadn’t done enough for Suerk. As I was updating, I saw this comment on an earlier post here.

SteveJune 18, 2020 at 3:24 PM

If you'd like to reach me sometime, you can contact me at [stevenblank]@yahoo.com I was Paul's close friend for many years, and I think I can address certain things that you've brought up. I absolutely loved (and love) Paul, and I know he felt the same way. The story is a little bit more complicated than I'd like it to be, but perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between, as the old expression goes. In any event, you have my email address. 

The boldface is mine. Steve’s right. The truth is always more complicated than the politically correct want it to be. Yes, Suerken was gay. That didn’t make him a pedophile or a predator. I am in a better position to know that than most. He had a boyfriend at Mercersburg, another thirtyish esthete, who taught Greek to high school jocks. He didn’t prey on kids either. The two of them spent their summers off in the Greek islands, principally Corfu, where they rode around on Vespa motorbikes, which is exactly how Suerk finally got the head wound that plagued his last days with brain damage.

So let me tell you about Suerken. The innocent and the not so. Then you decide if we’re allowed to destroy his memory. 

An innocent anecdote. One night, Suerken and his friend the Greek teacher got drunk at the Mercersburg Inn and wound up chasing each other in cars around the grassy area between the dorms and the football field. Suerken had a Volkswagen, the Greek had one too, and they went round and round for half an hour or so.

Here’s the thing. Nobody made a big deal of it. We got to see it all. Which hot wife was sleeping with somebody she shouldn’t, what master was showing up too often in the boys’ shower. Sexuality was no mystery to us. We all followed, without ever spilling the beans, the affair between the German teacher and the choirmaster’s wife, until they actually ran off together, and then sullenly returned, wherewith we still did not spill the beans. Because it was all so entertaining.

You’d have to be an idiot not to know that unmarried masters living on dorm floors are homosexual. We weren’t idiots. We had a Spanish teacher who looked like his mother dressed him every day. He even had a penny in the top slot of his over-polished Bass Weejuns. He was cute. Nobody even made fun of him. He was another entertainment, not less so than Alfred Mattes who taught us the Bible, Old Testament and New, widely regarded as a simp, though his townie son was a high honors boy and was not persecuted for being either a Townie or his father’s son. He was just ignored altogether.

When you’re in prep school, you tend toward your English teachers. You know. You’ve read the same stuff. You have the same existential problems. I could have gone to Wirt Winebrenner. Yale College, Harvard Law, English teacher with two little boys who looked exactly like him and his wife. Same pursed little lips. Two demerits: Wirt was not as good a teacher as Suerk. And he had been on my case for the same reason my Dad was. I was just feeling sorry for myself, with my 93 General Average and no one to take it home to. My parents weren’t talking to me, and Wirt was disingenuously on their side while pretending to be on mine. He was the reason I applied only to Harvard and Yale. Nobody did that then. I had early admission to both. Off the record.

So I went down two floors at Kiel Hall and talked to Suerken, who had given me the highest grade I ever got on an English Literature exam. He even detected the moment when I was done writing and there was still nearly half an hour of exam time left. He dinged me for it. I knew he was honest.

I told him I was depressed, unappreciated by my parents, pissed off at the world. He listened. I was in his apartment. I’m a writer. I see things. I saw no sign that he was anything but a man who loved music and lived alone. I was 15.

Suerken invited me to a day off. Why I should be a chief witness for the Suerken pedophilia trial. Except that he never laid a hand on me or made a single suggestive remark. We drove all the way to DC in his VW, and we talked about music along the way. I confessed to him, back in those pre-Internet days, that I had spent years (and years) looking for music he had played in his class for me. From a movie called “The Story of Three Loves.” I had even learned how to pick out the main melody on anybody’s piano. suerken’s music appreciation course did it by dint.

Did Suerken seize on the lovely, naïve boy? No. he took me to a German restaurant in Georgetown, where I had sauerbraten for the first time (great great great), and then he took me to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in Cinerama, which was actually three enveloping screens that blew us both away.

Then we drove back to Mercersburg, both of us chattering about meaning, grumping about meaning, never arriving at dog squat about meaning. Except that I had figured it out on my own, and left Suerken in the dark.

Thing is. I was the best looking boy back then. Do you doubt it?

But, as Steve says, there is a complicating factor. Suerken did take a handful of us to see, in the DC theater in the round, Marat/Sade, which shocked all of us. Marat with a permanent boner watching, watching. De Sade enjoying. Thinking most of you never saw it. Suerk piled us back in his CW and made no comment on the way back to the ‘burg. Maybe what Steve was talking about.

All I know, no hand was ever laid on me. And I’m glad I saw Marat/Sade. Couple years later, at Harvard, I was required to go see Andy Warhol’s flick Flesh, which was rated ‘XXX’ and not allowed for me to see in Boston. I had to write a paper about it. The Brutalist School of architecture. I buffaloed the guy at the admissions office with my explicit remembrance of Marat/Sade. I was a professional reviewer, I told him. It worked.

Could have sent me to MOMA to see Picasso. Did that later.

Was Suerken a perv? If he was, he was preparing us for the world in which I would be required to see something I could never unsee. And I still admire him. For all he taught me.

And it’s true I left something out. Read on.