"The Past is a Foreign Country."

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I got my first essay published, which was about my experiences as a foot messenger in Manhattan the previous summer. I became assistant features editor and then features editor by the fall of 1975.

Then it all fell apart for me. My girlfriend at the time - she was two years younger than I was - was on the staff and she got into a dispute with some of the editors there at the time. The reasons are not worth explaining here, but she was forced off the job and I had to go too, although no one explicitly told me that. By January 1976, I was where I had been two and a half years earlier: a mere student among thousands of others. My days as a relatively "big man on campus" - professors would recognize my name from my bylines - were over.

Some weirdness did come back to the paper. Writer Bobby, despite no longer being a student, was allowed to publish an article about how horny one of the basketball team cheerleaders made him. She was wearing a full beaver head over her own head - that was the name of the damn team, The Beavers.

In June of 1977, I graduated. The front windows of The Salient office overlooked the field containing the new graduates and their families. An irony was that I had earlier lost my virginity in that room.

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Yet that wasn't the end of the masturbating nun. She came back, bigger and better than ever. By doing that, The Salient finally destroyed itself.

I guess it got caught between the end of the disco era and the beginning of the punk era. Reviews of Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and The Ramones were appearing in the music section. And the staff failed to realize that, like themselves, the student body had turned over. The attitudes at the school were different from those that had existed there in 1974.

In early 1978, short of staff as usual, The Salient ran an "anybody can edit this paper for a week" contest and I think the readers were allowed to vote on it. There were only three entries, and it was obvious who was going to win this thing by a landslide.

It was a young woman I'll call Jenny. One of the things she wrote was, "Enclosed find a photograph of myself snorting coke and sporting the latest S&M gear." She was nude in the picture, perched on a chair, but sitting sideways so that all her naughty bits were cleverly hidden. She had fairly short dark hair and her height was also on the short side.

Her text in January 1978 read as follows, "My experience as a journalist, editor, strip-teaser, coke-snorter, creative writer, National Lampoon groupie, traveler, and sadist qualify me to be the best editor The Salient has ever had. Also, I love irreverent humor, New Journalism, and poppers."

As I said, there was no contest on that one. If nothing else, every male on the paper wanted this lady to be there. I found out that she did get at least a couple of serious boyfriends from the staff.

Later I wondered if she eventually balled most or all of the rest of the staff just for the hell of it. As weird as she was, I would have balled her too, but I doubt she would have been interested in the likes of me. I just wasn't cool enough, I thought. Anyway, I was already engaged to someone else and I hadn't been at City College since the previous spring.

Jenny had been on The Campus for a brief while before coming to The Salient. In one of her first columns in March 1978 she detailed what she had done during her brief tenure on the other paper. These included masturbating in taxi cabs, "mauling every male there," "serving joints sealed with the saliva of tongues that have probed sweet Christopher Street assholes," and various other activities in that vein.

"At The Campus, I was the office n_____, the girl who couldn't play with the other kids unless I brought my rubber ball. I was the outsider who people sneered at because of my honesty and depravity."

The next issue was, because of budget cuts for the student papers, delayed for nearly two months. It had plenty of that old Salient energy.

Much of it consisted of autobiographical screeds describing the sexuality of various staff members. Among other things, Jenny had her own "Dispatches From the Erogenous Zone," a guy named Peter (who had been my assistant during my days as an editor) wrote "Confessions of a Male Nymphomaniac," and an anonymous "Rick" described his visit to The Mineshaft, the super-hardcore gay club in the West Village. (The Peter I'm referring to here was not the older one who had snapped the Fuck Cover picture.)

Peter's description of growing up in The Bronx not far from where I had struck me with its bluntness and honesty. That was one of the few issues for which I still have as a hard copy. Today there would be plenty of places online to publish this material, but back then one had to scramble to find someplace to get it into print.

By the next fall, Jenny presented herself front and center. In her photograph she was wearing denim overalls without a blouse - maybe without a bra too, although her breasts weren't that large.

Her main announcement: "I told him [a photographer] I wanted to do a live re-creation of [Bobby's] Masturbating Nun. This notorious cartoon provoked the New York State Legislature to attempt to pass a bill calling for the censorship of all college newspapers in New York. I rented the nun's habit, bought the crucifix, and masturbated while the drooling [photographer] shot off [no pun intended?] a couple of rolls of film."

It was a daring move, and she admitted that both the newspaper and she herself risked being suspended or even "disbarred."

I never met her. I suspect that her persona wasn't just an act. At some point, a person's actions are enough to define who they are. I thought she was sexually exciting, although I wonder if she would have had any truck with me. What she is like now at the age of sixty-eight is hard to imagine.

She did write an article about her work as a stripper. An amusing side-note is that an ad appeared from an agency hiring go-go/exotic dancers. Letters appeared from the readers, some of them denouncing Jenny's new role as editor. She pushed back pretty hard. "For a proud Roman Catholic, you sure do work will up same hot fantasies. How many times did you sin, whacking off to the image of the Bowery bums, Sid [Vicious] and me?"

Finally, in May 1979, it was time to unveil "Sister Jenny" in three glorious black and white photographs. The main picture was indeed a recreation of artist Bobby's masturbating nun drawing. Jenny was sprawled on a couch, her habit thrown open, and she was moving a crucifix into her shaved cunt. The only thing missing was the black stockings of the original, which I had thought of as a nice touch.

A secondary photo was a close-up of the crucifix going into her. On the opening page of the issue there was a straight-on view of Jenny with her cross. There was a diagonal banner going across the page that said, "Hot Pix Inside."

There was a brief explanation from Jenny that told of some of her motivations for posing as the nun. Among them were, "3. The cellophane-wrapped beam of the crucifix felt wonderful against her clitoris; 4. She wanted all her friends at City College to have some hot pix to jerk off to, sort of a parting gift; 5. It was a nice way of saying 'fuck you' to the many assholes who had occasionally made Jenny's stay at City College an ordeal. You know who you are folks."

Needless to say, I still have a hard (no pun intended) copy of that issue.

I have no idea what went on over the summer. I was extremely distracted by several personal problems during that season. From what I can gather, the Student Senate offered a vote to the student body, and they - or whatever number who bothered to cast a ballot - ended the funding for The Salient.

This is speculation, but while City College may have once had a plurality of Jewish students, it now had many more Catholic Latinos attending the place. I can offer no evidence that it made a difference in the voting. I know some students burned copies of the issues they found around the campus. Such an action would have been unlikely a few years earlier,

According to a staff member in the very last issue, September 28, 1979, the newspaper's office on the third floor of Finley had also been taken away from them. Nevertheless, he remained optimistic. "Well, if everything goes according to schedule, you'll be seeing us five more times this semester. Rumors of our death were premature, a case of wishful thinking by the Ayatollahs of Convent Avenue, those rabble-rousing holy rollers who deceived and used the students of City College for their own Moonie purposes."

The main article in the paper was "A Nun's Story," Jenny's description of the creation of the photographs and the aftermath. "Interviews with NBC, The Village Voice, and The Soho News resulted in no serious, or honest coverage." Nevertheless, "I am delighted at having been a minor media star for a moment." Her next big project: "What I want and hope for most of all now is a publisher's advance to finish my first book. 'The Autobiography of a Topless Dancer Whore.' "

Anyway, Volume 66, No. 1 was the last issue to appear. I suppose they could have foregone having an office, and used people's apartments instead. Yet, despite that staff member's optimism, the paper couldn't survive the lack of money for typesetting and printing. None of them, mostly liberal arts students at a public university, had access to their own funds to keep it going. No patron of the arts came forward to save them.

Today, forty-two years later, probably no memory of The Salient remains at the college. Even Finley Hall itself was demolished in 1985. Only the people, now all at least in their sixties, who were actually on it remember the forty-two-year history of the publication.

The woman whom I met on the paper in 1975 and eventually married - I've been divorced from her for twenty-two years now. We have two children who are now adults. They seem to have little interest in The Salient per se, but they wouldn't exist if I hadn't responded to that ad in 1973.

I have no idea of what happened to Jenny or her proposed book. Today, I can find people online with the same name, but none of them seem to be her. Writer Bobby had a successful writing career and he has published a number of books. Other people I knew had careers in various fields. I haven't had any contact with them in years.

A few including artist Bobby, who once had a studio in Long Island City, and "male nymphomaniac" Peter, have since passed. I think Peter wound up as a professor at La Guardia College by the time he died at the age of fifty-five in 2009. Despite his attitudes in the 1970s, he married and had a daughter by then.

Sometimes I wish The Salient still existed, with a new office in the North Academic Center which has the new student center. I would like to wander in and tell stories of the old days. But it burned itself out long ago. Perhaps it was of a time and place that no longer exists.

Yet by 2018, I was ready to try my hand at writing essays again, plus a lot of fiction, much of it erotic. I wonder what the old-timers would think of what I'm doing now, and whether any of it would qualify for Bobby's short-lived Weird section. Perhaps I have outdone some of the materials published then. I like to think I have come back around after many decades to a place where I once was but had to leave prematurely.

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