Superflux of Fucking

Groove, Bang and Jive Around by Steven Cannon. Blank Forms, 242 pages. 2024 (1969).

The first thing we learn about Annette, the protagonist of Steve Cannon’s Groove, Bang and Jive Around, is that she is fourteen. The second is that “she didn’t care.” Groove is a book about a child who has an unbelievable amount of sex, and unbelievable kinds of sex. In the first hundred pages, Annette, a Black New Orleanian, goes on a date with a teenager named Dip but evades him temporarily to have sex with another man in the bathroom, the act witnessed by her date and overheard by the whole bar. Annette and Dip get their turn alone later that night, and once again under the tutelage of an obese matron. In the morning, Annette heads back home, runs into her dad, and has sex with him four times. She also gives her brother a handjob, and another father (this one a Jesuit priest) goes down on her. She has sex with an anonymous man in front of a bar full of couples, then with assorted geriatric New Yorkers in a “Secret Ceremony,” and finally with her aunt, who she’s just met. Those first hundred pages are also the novel’s first twenty-four hours.

Percival Everett once wrote, “Wisdom does not come with age. Wisdom comes from periods of excessive sexual activity.” A peculiarity of Annette is that her sexual experience is represented as entirely coincident with her desire—what she gets, she wants. The thing about desire is that it is, fundamentally, the condition of not having something. Cannon’s protagonist can have anything she wants, and what she wants is non-depletable, but this is neither the telos of her character nor the novel: by the end, Groove’s narrative settles somewhere between the polemic and the anagogical. Annette accomplishes her freedom because her world has. The straight reading—if any book with characters named Asshole Jerk and Shitface Turds can be read straight—is that Groove is like porn, which is to say thin and unthreatening. A more uneasy reading (call it the “serious” one) is that Cannon wrote a sincerely realist novel, representing various people living, working, and struggling in believably individual ways, just one that also features both kinds of skyjacking.

Cannon was born in 1935 in New Orleans to a Baptist minister and a mother who would die when he was a few months old. The writer died in 2019 having been a soldier, been homeless, written this novel, purchased a house, acquired four stepchildren, grieved his son, been a professor at CUNY, lost his eyesight, and started an art gallery and magazine, which is to say that he knew a lot about having and not-having. He remains best known for the magazine and eponymous arts space A Gathering of the Tribes, or just Tribes, which is characteristic of Cannon’s efforts in being impossible to describe without concession to an inventory: Tribes was a magazine started in 1991, and from 1993 also a place for readings and performances, art shows, and hanging out and getting trashed.

Both the magazine and the arts space were headquartered in the East Village townhouse Cannon bought with the proceeds from Groove. This was possible because, though undertheorized and neglected today, the book sold 150,000 copies when it was published in 1969. Cannon riffed up some of the material for it hanging around a downtown bar called Peewee’s with Ishmael Reed, who was writing what became Mumbo Jumbo.

Given the real-life characters involved in making Groove, it’s hard to imagine the book being other than how it is. According to Cannon’s brief memoir-sketch, his editor, a white woman, “happened to have her black boyfriend up in jail in Connecticut; she would take him up a pound of reefer to satisfy his needs while he was in the slams.” Cannon describes her as “a damn good editor and a lot of fun to be around,” and it’s like she could have been ripped from the pages of Groove. (We also owe her the book’s title—Cannon wanted Annette’s Blues.) Cannon sold the manuscript to Ophelia Press, an imprint of Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press. Girodias is said to have remarked that “a four-letter word never killed a reader,” and while Groove’s catalog of obscenities would seem a good bet for making a liar out of him, he knew what he was talking about: Olympia had published the SCUM Manifesto after its author, Valerie Solanas, shot Andy Warhol.

SCUM—the Society for Cutting Up Men—is proposed in the funny, surprisingly amiable screed as an organization for eliminating men, all who collaborated with them, capitalism, and culture as it is. Solanas included in her list of eligible members of the Men’s Auxiliary to SCUM “makers and promoters of sex books and movies.” They’re included because they hasten the day “Suck and Fuck” are the only products of American culture available at all, and men will “drown in the passive flesh that they are” because they have destroyed any capacity for real thinking, or even feeling solidarity with each other. Had Solanas ever read Groove, she would have seen in Cannon the perfect candidate for chief of the Auxiliary.  

Groove has a superflux of fucking. That any given encounter is distinct means they are each erotic and well-drawn, even when somebody ejaculates four times in the space of one song, or when descriptions of genitals make the proportions of bathroom graffiti look newly plausible. The sheer amount of sex also means that the discrete couplings (and throuplings, and more) are made to do what in other books would be imparted through conversations, letters, or internal reflection. That those techniques sometimes seem crude in comparison is testament to Cannon’s achievement. The book’s first sex scene, in the bathroom of the dance club where we first met Annette, is a masterpiece:

He felt the blood throbbing at his temples, at the pressure points between his thighs; and felt his insteps rise, trying to climb up into his ass, and his dick got harder than when he had been sitting out in his car thinking about her and his chances of a good fuck. She reached down behind and under her ass, grabbed his joint and slipped it in her well-juiced young, not-over-fourteen, dripping-come-all-over-the-commode cunt, squeezing with her muscles, and looking in his eyes as she shook her ass up and down, sideways front and backwards, both of them moving now, their lips glued together, tongues fighting inside their mouths, and feeling transport like Onassis and Jackie on a love seat instead of this dirty-assed commode. Working and working, him going up, she coming down, Willie ran his hands up and down her spine and images of chickens and dogs and bulls and cows fucking ran through his mind as she grabbed his asshole and made him push his dick further up her snatch.

The insteps, the president’s widow, the chickens! This is the first chapter, and one can be forgiven for thinking Groove is a renovation of de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, but one thing it resolutely isn’t is Lolita. Despite age fourteen being Humbert’s upper limit—and the two books sharing in Olympia a publisher—Annette has nothing in common with a nymphet but the rhyme. Humbert remarks of his victim, “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Annette is different. She had nowhere else to go either, so she left. When she says, “Hell, yes, I like to fuck, screw, and jive around, plus I’m tired of all this shit about the Church, the School and these fucked-up rules,” there’s no way to disagree: Why would anyone want to live with that, or want Annette to?

Cannon’s selection of heroine isn’t prurient. This is a man who would name his son Karl Marx Cannon. The writer explained in his memoir-essay that his choice of a fourteen-year-old girl “who didn’t take any crap from anybody, including her parents” was a conscious engagement with the women’s liberation movement he saw “in its inception.” What looks like a transcript of Annette’s descent into abasement is better interpreted as a history of her liberation. That’s no different than the revolutionary American novelists of the thirties. Think of Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread, or Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed, or Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, or Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio. All of them have their promiscuous young revolutionary women (or imply them through the figure of an oversown matriarch struggling for a better world for her daughters).

His emphasis there on daughters and mothers is borne out by Groove because the reader never sees Annette’s dad—at least, not her real one. We are led to believe the man Annette has sex with is her real father, and aren’t corrected until the very end of the book, but the scene is a rare moment of access to a character who isn’t our heroine: 

She laid her head down on his chest. He watched the stars fulfill their missions, the greyish-black night, the moon dropping below the horizon and wanted to dream like a kid, about what the fuck is man if he ain’t allowed to fuck his daughter.

And that should settle it, for any doubters. Cannon is, like any student of Friedrich Engels, longing for a world after the family, if only to leave behind this kind of pathetic, maudlin self-aggrandizement. Annette isn’t wrong to fuck him (he’s not actually her father), but old dad is incapable of deriving anything from the experience beyond an affirmation of his claim to his daughter. Or, to turn again to Solanas, “Each man’s end is all the pussy for himself.”

After Annette runs away from home—her mom hears what she did with dad and catches her fondling her little brother—a creepy, blond factotum in a spacesuit picks up in a limousine and brings her to a religious ceremony-cum-orgy. There, Annette meets the book’s first white character, a priest named Max, and the ceremony’s leader, a white woman named Marie, who tells Annette she’s her aunt. From Marie and Marie’s superannuated mother Annette learns a new version of her genealogy: her dad isn’t the man she was having sex with at sunrise, but the governor of Louisiana (just called “the Governor”), and she was born while her mother was imprisoned in the notorious New Orleans Parish Prison.

The woman she believed was her mother—whose home she just fled—is actually Marie’s sister; Annette’s real mother is long dead. (For what it’s worth, all of Marie’s genealogy will be contradicted by other characters by the end of the book.) The blond man from the limo is Annette’s mixed-race uncle. Charles is otherwise differentiated—it’s suggested that he has been castrated—and he isn’t the story’s only mixed-race character, just the only one who doesn’t travel to the hidden post-revolutionary utopia at the end of the novel. He stays in our world, inside the space suit that marks him as not really meant to survive there. In that way, he’s like Annette, whose race and descent are only clarified for the reader just before the book’s end, with its final image of “history turned on its ass,” in a coffin, with “red, white, and blue IDENTITY CRISIS marked across her chest.” America is hostile to life. 

Cannon embeds countless clues and nudges about who is which race, or races, and why; it’s difficult to keep track even when reading carefully. This superabundance interferes with a reader’s inclination to use race as a heuristic for reading characters’ affinities, whether ancestral, political, or affective. Cannon piles all these up so he can sweep them aside in favor of a feminist class politics. Groove represents family and the home as war zones, in another testament to its social conscience, and it’s spangled with comparisons between the war in Vietnam and Annette’s home life.

Cannon had been a paratrooper in Korea, and in Groove demonstrates an understanding of how America’s violence abroad is emergent at home, fully “domestic” in both senses. To choose among many: when Annette is in bed with her brother, thunder rumbles “over the east like bombs dropping over Hamburger Hill,” an echo of the description of her breasts as “hamburger hills” when she’s having sex with her dad just pages before, and the scenes are an almost unbearably literal representation of the war coming home. Annette’s noncompliance with membership in a family, the least requirement of midcentury American ethics, makes her a fifth columnist. Family is a draft you can’t dodge, but you can refuse to fight.  

And once you’ve done away with family, the world is yours to give birth to. After running away from her family, Annette ends up in a limousine with the Jesuit priest Max she met at her aunt’s orgy. It delivers her to her father the Governor’s airplane, destination New York. For most of the trip the passengers get top billing: Max and Annette; the Governor; and Reverend Afterfacts, an influential Black clergyman and the Governor’s sycophant; and the Reverend’s white wife. Groove threatens to overshoot the mark during the plane ride. Relief comes in some good jokes at the expense of Annette’s hosts (“I’m so hungry I could eat a nation of pigs”), but the reader’s sense is more of ludibrium than edgy fun (“RIFFS: To Be Blown on Meat Flutes or Piped-In Organs”). There’s the inevitable orgy, by now somewhat dutiful: Dorothy Baker wrote in her jazz novel Young Man with Horn, “Memphis style is sometimes called ‘take your turn,’ and New Orleans has everybody in at the same time.” Even in the air, the sex stays New Orleans.

Taking advantage of the bedlam, the Governor’s two bodyguards make their move: “Someone was gonna have to apologize. And it wasn’t gonna be the third world, you kin bet your sweets on that, tootsie.” A good old-fashioned hijacking, like how they used to make them. The pair lands the plane in a place called Oo-bla-dee, a maybe-utopia founded by jazzman Dizzy Gillespie. A first it looks like a mere inversion of the social order in New Orleans—“Old blonde hags, blue-eyed monsters, stepped out of soul-sisters’ kitchens where they’d been cleaning house, taking care of babies, washing clothes, making beds and cooking food”—but there’s more.

There were no cops, politicians or other lowly creatures in the Land of Oo-bla-dee. Hence, no welcoming committees or ticker-tape parades or speeches at city hall. The people ran their own lives.

Oo-bla-dee is a post-revolutionary paracosm, not that all the sex was for nothing. Engels, in a letter to the writer Margaret Harkness, remarked, “The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.” And where better to hide those opinions than under a pile of smut?

There’s an interview on YouTube with Cannon a few years before his death, and it has a moment when interviewer says, playfully, “I disagree with you, [everyone] disagrees with you!” Cannon laughs and, still grinning, agrees: “You’re right.” This also works as an explanation for Groove’s gregarious maximalism: all the contradictions, emendations, and riffs conceal a revolutionary novel at the same time as they constitute its dissent. Groove isn’t a pornographic allegory, but the inventory of an encyclopedic realist. Cannon had to include the parallel utopian civilization, ghosts, and magic to really contain and then devastate Great Society America. Right before Annette gets the full story of her ancestry from her real mother, who’s actually been in Oo-bla-dee the whole time, she is confronted with everything that has happened in the couple of days that comprise Groove: “It all returned with the suddenness of the universe exploding into bits, then imploding into unity.” Some might call it vulgar Marxism, but Annette’s is as good a definition of the dialectic as you will ever find in porn.