Campus Sexpot: A Memoir

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“Just Wondering,” says the headline of a light piece in the Sonora High Wildcat of February 17, 1961. Among the whimsical questions posed in the article is “Just wondering who’s sorry that Mr. Koby left.” This could be a lament (He brought Beowulf to life!) or a Koby-neutral question for the ages (We pass through this world and no one gives any thought to our leaving). But most likely it was written with a wink (How could anyone be sorry? He was a kook!). Whatever the meaning, it was the middle of the school year and Koby was gone. Why did he leave? Where did he go? No one knew. Koby gives no reason for his resignation in A Teacher Confesses to Sex in the Classroom. He only remarks that a colleague told him that he was headed for trouble anyway because of his “reputation for popping bras of the girls.” From Sonora, Koby went right to Mexico, where he wrote Campus Sexpot in six weeks. The sole interpretive comment on the novel in A Teacher Confesses to Sex in the Classroom is this brain-cramper: “When the book was published, the townspeople were not to understand it the way it was meant.” What possible meaning could Campus Sexpot have other than sexual excitation 11 110 and, for every Koby-named citizen in its pages, defamation either by direct negative portrayal or by association with a seedy context? Copies of Campus Sexpot began trickling into town a year after Koby’s departure, in January 1962. Local oral history confers the honor of the Great Discoverer of the book on various competing candidates, former Koby students who had graduated and moved to big cities where such books were found—a rancher’s son attending Sacramento State, the former Sonora High Science Club president in San Francisco, the Methodist minister’s daughter somewhere else. Recollections by my classmates who read it are foggy about the chain of transmittal: the book was suddenly in their hands. (But one report from a younger alum is quite specific. A mere seventh-grader in 1962, he would first learn of the book six years later, when, in the course of trading paperbacks with Navy shipmates on an aircraft carrier off North Vietnam, Campus Sexpot fell into his lap. We can easily imagine his disorientation in those foreign waters to find his beloved hometown so oddly memorialized .) I have no idea how many copies of the book made it to Sonora, nor do I know how my mother obtained the one that she and I read (and I then incinerated). In recent years, for my return to Koby’s world, a classmate who is a retired California highway patrolman managed to conjure a Campus Sexpot from his basement . His mother’s pale signature on an inside page claims first ownership. No doubt a few other copies throb in the darkness of Tuolumne County cellars. Campus Sexpot did not mark the end of Koby’s literary exploitation of Sonora. He wrote Airborne Passions, published in 1962, which, according to its cover copy, treats “a new breed of airline tarts, who crave a man at every airport from Frisco to Idlewild,” and while little Sonora, with its pathetic private airport, merits no 111 direct rendering, the main character is all screwed up because of her domineering father, “the high school superintendent in a small mountain community.” This would be Koby’s old Sonora High boss, whose welcoming speech to students in Campus Sexpot is denounced by Linda Franklin as “crap.” We’ll never know the full story behind that particular enmity. Focus on Flesh (also 1962, a productive year) takes place entirely in Sonora but without any recognizable townspeople in it. The locale is captured in many details as well as in one broad description: “There was an air of antiquity about the town that suggested it had been left just this way by the gold-hungry miners who swarmed in the area some hundred years before.” A nice sentence, but the rest of the book is a mess, as are Airborne Passions and yet another novel from this year, Darkroom Sinners, set in San Francisco with one mention of Sonora environs. In all these post–Campus Sexpot books, stalwart heroes who happen to be excellent cocksmen are menaced by one-dimensional villains acting out of obscure motives. Inspired by the hard-boiled genre...