Eldridge Cleaver's New Pants

Eldridge Cleaver's voice was soft and modulated and sprinkled with pauses as he discussed his latest venture--not his efforts to return to the United States, which he was loath to discuss, but his new role as entrepreneur, the designer of a new line of slightly obscene men's trousers.

"Well, the ideas for these pants came out of an article I'm writing about the uni-sex movement, attacking the uni-sex movement. While I was writing the article I started thinking of tangible ways to express my ideas, you know? And these pants are the natural outgrowth of that."

Cleaver took another sip of red wine. He only drinks red wine, he said. All this red wine and soft talking lent to the image of the new Eldridge Cleaver, who is really quite a relaxed guy. Not at all what you'd expect of a former convict, rapist, Black Panther Minister of Information, best-selling author of Soul on Ice.

A group of four young people, including three Harvard undergraduates, sat around and listened to Cleaver that night in August. Cleaver had come to visit his friend Jack Caball, an American expatriate novelist (one of a dying breed) and talk about his pants. The setting was intimate--the room in the Latin Quarter of Paris was dark and warm, with wood ceiling beams, tall bookshelves, a Calder print above the fireplace and a Chagall lithograph over the grand piano.

"Well, what exactly do these pants look like?" Mr. Caball's son Bruce asked. He knew very well what they looked like. His father already had described them to him, adding that "These pants are a disaster for Cleaver. I've seen writers invent plenty of ways of keeping from writing, but these pants are a disaster for Cleaver." But Bruce wanted to hear Cleaver describe the pants.

"Well these pants look like a regular pair of men's pants except around the groin, you know?" Cleaver said. "In a conventional pair of pants the penis gets tucked behind the pants, you know?" He imitated a tucking motion with his hands. "But in these pants, the penis is held in a sheath of cloth that sticks outside of the pants."

"You mean the penis protrudes out--it's hanging in this tube of cloth--outside the pants?," Bruce said loudly, his voice rising in glee. "Like a codpiece?"

"Yeah, that's the idea. Now you see how this is a direct attack on uni-sex. Women can't wear them, right? Take a look at what you guys are wearing. You're wearing sissy pants," Cleaver said.

"Well, uh," Bruce began, "couldn't these pants be dangerous? I mean, couldn't you get hurt wearing them?"

"No, man, how are you going to get hurt? What could happen?"

"But how about wearing them in social situations? Couldn't they be kind of embarrassing--like if you're dancing of something?"

"You mean, about getting an erection? You see, this is the thing I'm trying to get away from--that fig leaf mentality. I'm trying to get people in touch with their bodies and sexuality. It's amazing now to think that thousands of years ago men were walking around with no clothes on, and thought nothing of it. Now men walk around with clothes on and think nothing of it. What a shock it must have been then, to see the first person wear clothes! And what a shock now, to see a person without clothes. Or with these pants on.

"I'm really amused by the way people react to these pants. People who talk radical, about politics, then start talking conservative about these pants. What's wrong with getting an erection and letting people know about it? If a girl turns you on, why not let her know about it? There have been so many games going on between men and women for so long, that when sexuality finally comes out, it takes some pretty weird forms."

Cleaver took another sip of his wine and waited. He turned his head slowly. His face is striking mostly for its rich color and almost pliable quality of skin. At 39, he still seems to have a baby face. His eyes are distinctive in their brownness and almost quivering sensitivity. He has the thinnest eyebrows, and a thin moustache.

Now he sat straight in the chair, his legs folded, his big torso looking lumbering and ungainly. The way he walks, and talks, and moves--so slowly and precisely--belies what seems to be a hidden volcano within him.

"This uni-sex stuff--I was talking to some people in the clothes business about fashion and they told me that the areas of the body that are getting the most attention now aren't the breasts or crotch or reproductive areas. All these designers are concentrating on the bottom, you know? They're all accentuating your "boo-boo," you know? They're not concentrating on those areas that really differentiate a man and a woman. This is what I'm trying to get away from."

That Cleaver is serious about the marketing of his pants seems clear. He has been awarded an international patent on the design and its many variations, and he fully expects not only to sell them around the world, but to have them on the covers of Vogue an Harper's Bazaar. He even speculated that every man in the United States will feel so compelled to buy the pants that the economic recession here will end overnight.

The Cleaver who is proposing this salvation for capitalist society--could he be the same who wrote, in the 1969 introduction to Jerry Rubin's Do It!, "I can unite with Jerry around hatred of pig judges, around hatred of capitalism, around the total desire to smash what is now the social order of the United States of Amerika"?

And where do these pants fit in with the old image of Cleaver, rapist? In Soul on Ice, he wrote, "I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto--in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day--and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically....Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling on the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women...."

After dinner Cleaver modelled his pants. He disappeared into an adjoining room and emerged with a pair of blue jeans on, his protusion hanging down, looking less than revolutionary.

He looked down at his pants abstractly, proudly, and said inconsequentially, "I made these pair myself. The tip used to hold a little jewel, a fake ruby, but it fell off."

"Will you make pairs with falsies on them? To make it look longer?" Bruce asked.

"Sure," Cleaver laughed. "I can make any design, any dimensions. Custom-tailored, too."

Everyone stood around and looked at Cleaver's groin. There was something very funny about it all, and half a suspicion that it was all a joke.

A buzzer rang in the hallway, signalling for someone to let in Mr. Caball's daughter Marion, who is 25 and conservative.

"Maybe I'd better slip into the other pair," Cleaver said almost apologetically.

"Aw, come on Eldridge," someone said. "Why can't you wear them now? I mean, if you're going to break down the barriers you've got to start somewhere." It seemed that Cleaver himself had been embarrassed by the pants. He was about to make some excuse when Marion walked in.

"Uh, Eldridge, this is my daughter Marion." Mr. Caball said ironically. "Marion this is Eldridge Cleaver."

"Hi pleased to meet you," Marion said. She had peripherally noticed the aberration in Cleaver's pants without seeming to do so. There was a chill in her voice as these men surrounded her in a circle, mocking her slightly, and this big black man, the self-confessed white-girl rapist "on principle," with his penis slouching down between his legs, shook her hand. From that moment she was not fond of Eldridge Cleaver.

As Marion retreated into the kitchen to get her own dinner, Cleaver changed trousers and when he reappeared, described the reactions his pants had caused.

"Yeah, I've walked around Paris with the pants on. I get some strange looks. Yesterday I was going to my publisher's office with them on and got into the elevator. There was just me and this woman in the elevator. She walked in and pressed the button for her floor, you know, and then the door closed. Then she took a look at my pants. And then she took another sly look. Man, as soon as she caught sight of those pants she pressed the button and got off at the very next floor!"

Marion returned and the conversation drifted to other subjects. Cleaver talked only briefly about his efforts to return to the United States. He said he has a request for a full pardon, exonerating him from skipping bail and leaving the country, before California's Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. Asked why he wants to return to America, he answered, "Well, don't you want to go back?" Someone asked where he would settle, and Cleaver answered that he hadn't even given it thought, that he just wants the freedom to return but doubts he'd settle here.

But Cleaver obviously didn't want to talk about returning to the States. He was more willing to describe his life in Algeria. He said the period was most difficult when Dr. Timothy Leary visited him.

"Man, Leary was a real problem. I didn't want the man to come, you know, cause he was such a problem, but he showed up at my pad anyway. It was kind of funny--when Leary announced that he was going to Algeria, the Algerian government got very excited. They didn't know anything abouth him except that he was a big Harvard professor coming to live in their country. So they were really proud, and played it up big on the television news. They were going to have a big reception committee meet him at the plane and a press conference and a dinner in his honor. Whew, that was too much. I called up the government and told them just who this guy Leary is and what he had done, with LSD and everything, and they cancelled their plans pretty quick."

'Have you ever taken LSD, Eldridge?" Bruce asked.

"Yeah, twice. Once in San Quentin and once in Algeria. I didn't like it though. I didn't like the feeling of not being in control of myself."

"What was Leary like?"

"Leary is completely crazy. His mind is really fizzled away. He can talk pretty coherently, but what he chooses to talk about is really crazy. Man, Leary was a big problem. Because wherever he'd go, there would be kids following him, kids who he had turned on to LSD. They were coming back to their guru, convinced that he could get their head back together again and no one else could.

"When he was staying with me, there'd be all the kids coming over who were completely gone in the brain, you know? This one kid came over who was really not there, you know? And he had travelled thousands of miles just to see Leary. Man, I don't know how he even got it together to board the plane. Anyway, Leary didn't want to have anything to do with him. So I made Leary sit down in a room with just me and the kid, to face up to it. But it just didn't work out. Leary couldn't face up to his responsibility for this guy's life."

* * *

Bruce and his father didn't see too much of Cleaver after he left that night in August, although they ran into his wife once and were startled to see her face covered by a big butterfly-wing bandage. "I bet Cleaver hit her," Bruce said later. That made Cleaver an even more confusing figure: rapist, convict, talented author, a man seeking to return to the country he denounced, a man promoting a pair of pants to give a new revelation to our sexuality.

As for his pants, Cleaver is still looking for a manufacturer. He doesn't know when they'll be on the market. "Already I've got a few names for them, though--the Whip, the Snake, or in France, the Mauvais Garcon."

"Or how about Meat Cleavers?" someone suggested.

"Yeah, sure," he said. "There are plenty of names."

Eldridge Cleaver sips wine in a Paris apartment and talks about the new pants he's designed: "What's wrong with getting an erection and letting people know about it?"