Week 44 (9)
The alt.sex.stories Text Repository (kind host to this and many other websites) is shifting digs to a newer, faster, kindlier, gentler ISP. No more delays in downloading! Zippy access to this and oodles of amateur internet text-based porn! Higher ISP bills to be met only through the kindness of your hearts!
But: to effect this change, the whole of ASSTR must needs go dark from about noon EST Saturday till sometime Sunday, post meridian. Including me. (Well. I’ll still be online; just not my site. You can even email me, if you need a fix while it’s down. No guarantees, but.)
So: fair warning. We’ll be down—but we’ll be back.
So we were headed, the Spouse and I, for this club carved out of what used to be a Mongolian grill—the sort of place that has a big round firepit where a smiling quasi-Mongolian chef tips your bowlful of veggies and whatnot onto a sizzling hot round stone the size of a breakfast nook table, tumbles ’em about with water and a sauce of this and that, and deftly scoops ’em back into your bowl with a practiced flip of the spatula—only they’ve dumped the stone and filled the pit up with charcoal and keep an open fire blazing away, and call themselves Dante’s (occasionally, Dante’s Sinferno [sic]); the sort of place where people-watching is as likely to troll up a frat boy in an A&F sweatshirt who booms, “Naked chicks? Where?” as it is a painfully self-assured boy in a tight rubber dress down to his ankles and black, elbow-length opera gloves, a scattered tuft of glossy black hair left here and there on an otherwise pale shaved pate; where the coffee drinks are decidedly superior to the g&ts and whiskey sours; the sort of place one goes to observe erotic cabaret acts performed by a) two charming young men who did rather surprising things with hula hoops and b) two winsome twin sisters with a film to flog.
Naturally enough, I wore tweed.
Tweed, a tie (pale yellow), a nice shirt (grey with a hint of shimmer), a vest (leather—brown, patrician, pastoral leather; the sort of vest worn by a yeoman farmer on a Jethro Tull album cover; not black, shining, Harley Davidson leather. Not with tweed). The Spouse dressed practically: sweater, jacket, scarf, jeans. —”I want,” she said, “to be comfortable.” Given that performances were scheduled to begin around 11 p.m., which meant by our vague calculations we’d be returning about 1:30 or 2, this was not an unreasonable desire.
I mention this because as I was tooling our redoubtable ’91 Mitsubishi Mirage through Old Town in search of a parking space, I saw something in the rearview mirror I haven’t seen in, oh, years: cherries. Cop lights.
(Despite my reputation as something of an aggressive driver, I am quite good, or, at the very least, quite lucky. Knock wood. Aggressive, perhaps, but carefully so; and anyway, I have timid friends. Who are always asking me to drive.)
So I pull over and start fishing about for my license which is when the Spouse kicks open the glove compartment and starts to mutter something about the registration not being there, since (and forgive me, but my pseudonymical conceit is falling short; I just can’t think of one for her; “she who must not be named” being entirely too melodramatic, even for me; perhaps I’ll just italicize the feminine pronoun and leave it at that, for now) she had removed the registration to deal (abortively) with the traffic citation received one year ago—which finally stripped her of her license, we later learned, despite not (really) being at fault; a long, dispiriting story which we’d best skip past, once we’ve noted the salient point: our registration is not in the glove compartment. (We’d each of us noted this fact before, on separate occasions, and to each other; but, being also absent-minded—and who in this obscure anecdote is not guilty of that sin?—we had yet to address the issue.)
Luckily, the cop is quick; he’s at the window before fear has time to congeal in my belly. My mien is calm as I ask, “What’s up, officer?”
—Some geopolitical backdrop is necessary, regarding Portland neighborhoods. We had pulled out of Old Town, the blocks just to the north of Burnside (the mighty thoroughfare which runs straight and true from the West Hills to Mount Tabor and beyond, splitting the city north and south; the river splits it east and west. With this basic quadrilateral in mind, and an understanding of the fundamentals of a grid, one can navigate almost anywhere in Portland. —Always excepting such tangled pockets as Goose Hollow, Ladd’s Addition, St. John’s, Sellwood, the entirety of North Portland); a suddenly gentrifying neighborhood of transient hotels, condos, low-income housing, what passes for bodegas, vegetarian delis, tres hip night spots, the oldest punk club on the West Coast, good cheap sushi, Chinatown (two of the restaurants therein, ironically enough, are reputedly fronts for those outliers of the Cosa Nostra that have taken root in Portland), the bus station, and arriviste design firms with signs posted in their windows alerting all and sundry that they will report all suspicious behavior that smacks to them of drug transactions. South and east is a tangle of slightly more upscale nightspots, clumped around the infamous Saturday Market; hippies drum in the waterfront park by day, and there’s a pizza joint owned by some surrealistically vengeful quasi-mobsters; the Liberation Cooperative sells anarchist propaganda and posts enormous signs shaking brave but impotent fingers at our mayor and our police chief (he’s from LA, where he invented SWAT teams—aren’t we lucky?), and the Paris is surrounded at odd hours by surly clumps of gang-bangers, or goths, depending on what flavor of death metal is on tap that night. Further east, of course: downtown, heralded by its massive outrider, Big Pink (what used to be the US Bank building; I forget which bank owns it now. Legend has it that when the ribbon was cut by Mayor Goldschmidt or Governor McCall, whichever, he said, “I guess every city has to have one of these damn things. I’m glad we’ve gotten ours out of the way”); west is the cheekily named Glamour District, home of gay bars and drag revues, more transient hotels (cheek by jowl with really, really good ones), the inimitable Roxy, Powell’s (blessed be its name), and what used to be the industrial sprawl of Henry Weinhardt’s, where bottles would ring a merry tune crossing dark streets on skyborne conveyor belts, and great steeping vats of malt and hops and water would smear an odor over a great deal of the city not unlike Fritos, or old socks of a certain provenance, or a bowl of mostly-eaten Wheaties left a bit too long in the sink; you either hated it, or didn’t mind it so much, but now it’s gone, packed up, vamoose, and being dug out into new condos and an upscale grocery store and the deepest goddamn parking garage I’ve ever seen. Of course, we’ve crossed Burnside again into the north and west, shading over into the Pearl, and all that that entails. (More condos. New-built lofts to look like lofts converted from the warehouses which used to stand where the lofts have been thrown up. Boutiques inspired by the edgy little art galleries that can no longer afford the place now that the boutiques have moved in. Used to be you could wander into this enormous shell of a warehouse and see some of the most wondrously bewildering art, strange installations, machines that did nothing immediately apparent, huge canvasses covered with the sort of obsessive juvenilia scrawled on the back of the stoner’s spiral-bound notebooks in junior high, and all the while some amazing band you’ll never hear again is practicing somewhere up in the warren of halls and lofts [floors as yet unfinished, walls as yet unscoured, not repainted]: thudding beats drip down the elevator shaft, a spectral guitar skirls through the airshafts; now: lofts; a bar with valet parking [strange, in this once-industrial neighborhood, with loading docks and half-buried railroad tracks smothered in a fresh coat of asphalt to protect (I kid you not; when do I kid?) the suspensions of all the SUVs now being driven there]; a boutique with a really, really neat end-table, trompe l’oeiled as a stack of giant leather-bound books, and my God, did you see the amazing stuff in that Asian importer’s new gallery? Those woven silk spreads? Those red lacquered cabinets rejiggered as entertainment centers? That antique green apothecary’s cabinet? Homina.)
I tell you all of this so that you have some grounding, so you understand: when the cop saw a battered if well-used10-year-old red hatchback with a malfunctioning taillight being driven through Old Town (punk clubs; drug deals; transient hotels; good-but-cheap sushi) and nosing its way back onto Burnside, he popped his cherries and pulled us over. But when he strolled up to the car and looked inside, he saw—
—not a Hispanic couple;
—not a black couple;
—not (ding, ding!) some Arabs, Palestinians, Afghanis, Pakistanis;
or other species of Muslim;
—not a couple of club kids;
—not some gutterpunks in musty army surplus and old punk T-shirts;
—not a working individual and a trick, or any other type of
illegal business transaction in some species of flagrante delicto;
—not some (obvious) anarchists or ecoterrorists;
—not some deviant rubber-latex-leather freaks;
—not a couple of residents of a transient hotel, or candidates
for one of the missions or soup kitchens thereabouts, seeking somewhere
to park for the night so they might sleep in the car (illegal hereabouts,
just so’s you know, if you’re ever planning a trip);
—but a clean-cut young white man, caparisoned as aforesaid (my barber—he’s from Arizona, or Arkansas, I can never remember; dresses as a rockabilly, has the pompadour and a giant daisy tattooed on one elbow—my barber, when he’s brushing off my shoulders after a close haircut, he says, “There’s that clean-cut all-American kid”); a similarly clean-cut young white woman, wearing nothing more outré than an oxblood leather jacket, her hair unobtrusively dyed a deeper red than nature perhaps intended, and though cut short, well within today’s modern, more lenient tolerances—
“What’s up, officer?” I ask.
“You have a taillight out. Did you know that?”
—There’s a bedeviling Phillips-head screw that has worked itself loose once before, last year, cutting off the flow of electricity from wire to terminal to light bulb. Apparently, it has worked its way loose again. I explain this briefly to the officer, and turn to the Spouse (still digging through the glove compartment in the faint hope that we are wrong; that our registration is still stashed within) and ask if we’ve left a screwdriver in the back.
“Oh,” says the cop. “You don’t have to do anything about it right now. I’m not giving you a ticket or anything; just letting you know. Get it fixed, okay?”
He never even looked at my license.
(Some years ago, we lived in the Northeast part of the city; when we reveal this fact in passing, others—white others, if it needs be specified—get wide-eyed and exclaim, “Oh! You lived in the ’hood!” Aheh. Yes, it’s a predominantly black neighborhood; the predominantly black neighborhood, truth be told. MLK Boulevard [is it always a boulevard?] runs through here, after all. It’s gentrifying, too, slightly, and in some positive as well as fractious ways: the art galleries fleeing the Pearl have set up shop along Alberta, following the flagship of the Rexall Rose; the vegan restaurant [really good] over on Killingsworth, not far from where we lived; the overly zealous neighborhood watchers with the 24/7 video cameras on their corner lot; the crappy-looking but locally built low-income housing; and adidas is setting up their new American headquarters on the campus of the once-deserted hospital, built some years back [when it was still illegal for Asians to own property, or for blacks to stay in most hotels; 1950-something, I think] on land cleared either by breaking leases and dumping families [black, of course] on the street, or buying them out by grace of eminent domain for pennies on the dollar. —We lived, as said, not far from Killingsworth, next door to a drug dealer. Lovely people; the uncle ran an unofficial jazz club out of the garage in the back of their house, with a pool table, a camper, and album covers from bands long dead tacked up as decorations. They weren’t the ones who engaged in a firefight the day we moved out. [Packing up some boxes alone, upstairs, I heard a pop!pop!pop! and looked out the window to see a strange, unreal sight, something from a TV screen: a man, flying out the side door of a house across the street and down the block, flattening himself against the wall of the house, his hand held just so as he leaned around the doorframe, lifted it, it jerked—pop!pop! I found a hallway in the middle of our little house and sat the fuck down and didn’t really do much of anything until it all got quiet again. —And I never heard a cop car go by; not once, that entire day. I also never heard gunfire at any other point the whole time we lived there—excepting New Year’s Eve. (“That’s an automatic rifle,” said our friend, who’d lived in LA, and was something of a connoisseur of gunshots.) But someone did once randomly fire a single bullet through the nurse’s big front window, just three blocks away.] —Now, the drug dealer’s clientele did get a bit out of hand, there towards the end. Being accosted at five in the morning on the way to work because someone got the house number wrong [to say nothing of missing certain vital visual cues in the person being accosted]—it got old, fast. And I, for one, never knew quite what to say to all the people asking me, “Are you cool? You cool?” —Did it mean, “Do you take drugs?” In which case the proper response [for me] would have been, “No, thanks. I’m not looking.” [I do take drugs, or have, from time to time; but not those. —And thus do I engage in my own racial profiling.] Did it mean, “Are you set? Do you have everything you need?” In which case the proper response [again, for me] would have been, “Why, yes. Thanks. I’m not looking.” Or did it mean “Are you carrying? Can I buy?” Unlikely, perhaps, but: “No. I am not. You flatter me by asking, though.” Or did it mean “Are you cool?” In which case: “No. Not at all. Dreadfully unhip, old chap. Good-night.” The Classicist got asked a different question when she waited for the bus: “You workin’?” Much easier to parse. —But these were minor nuisances, really; little quirks, compared with the cops.
(They were or so they thought closing in on our neighbor, the drug dealer. And so there were always squad cars trolling slowly down our street, and spotlights shining through our living room window when we were trying to watch TV, and when they got pissed off and frustrated, they’d ticket every car parked slightly wrong, an inch too far from the curb, facing the wrong way along the street. That was an expensive neighborhood in which to park. —And yet, we never thought to call them when our cars were broken into all in one night; whoever it was made off with an old CB radio and a busted car stereo, but left behind a screwdriver and a half-drunk 40; we came out slightly better on the deal, I think. But even though a principle of some sort might be said to have been at stake, the cops would have been useless.
(One night, coming home from something or other in the selfsame small red car: myself, the Spouse [not yet the Spouse], the Classicist, the boy who was crazy [then]. That’s how I remember it, though the other shaggy cartoonist might well have been there, as well, or instead. There’s a whole passel of cops along our street, a squad car blocking one end of the intersection, cops wandering around the front yard of our neighbor’s house with flashlights. One of them spies us turning in and marches towards us, light up; as he gets closer, we can see his face: firm, harsh, resolute.
(“What the fuck?” says someone.
(“I don’t know,” says someone else.
(He leans down by the car, shines his light in—and melts. Almost literally: his face sags into a smile, his posture relaxes, his head bobs in a friendly nod, his hand comes up to languidly wave us along. Almost instantly. Because, you see, he’d shined his light on us and seen the color of our skin. We were cool. We could pass.
(I have never hated cops more than at that moment. —We had to park two blocks away, and I don’t think they ever caught him, not the whole year and a half we lived there.)
I’m older, more conflicted if not wiser, and attention from a cop no longer necessarily means a perceived threat to my person or my wallet as I go about my daily round—unless, of course, the registration papers aren’t in the glove compartment; oy. And I fully appreciate the good that cops can do, and what things would be like without them, and what heroes they can be, yes, and yes. But it’s a flawed system, enforced by humans who have all too many flaws, and I can’t help but feel some rage and frustration and impotence when its injustices are so glaringly made evident, even as I am cravenly grateful that once more my mask of privilege has worked in my favor. (Christ. You think I wanted a ticket? To prove some obscure point?) —And even as I shiver at the feeling of that mantle, settling itself that much more firmly onto me; as that creeping sense of entitlement twists the screws a quarter-turn deeper— Stop.
After all, isn’t this pretty much the reason she got pulled over? Last year? That damn loose wire in that damn taillight? Only she—she has as much Cherokee in her as I do, which is to say neither of us will be making it into the tribe any time soon, but it sits differently on her; she can, in bad light, pass easily enough for Hispanic. Which she did. And she flusters easily enough, and transposed the numbers of her new street address—but did that really make the cop suspicious? Or was he already? “You say it’s 1417,” he snarled, “but the car’s registered to 1714. What’s up with that?” —She burst into tears. Upshot? She got a $400 ticket (somewhere in all that she—Hispanic, female, mid-30s, or so it was estimated on the incident report thingie—did something which the cop judged to be an attempt to flee the scene: looked away, perhaps, or took a step towards the little red car she’d borrowed from us), two endless, fruitless trips downtown to the courthouse based on conflicting advice to attempt to argue down some of the charges (hence the borrowing of our car’s registration); an eventual throwing up of hands and renunciation, of ticket, charges, license and all, as we later discovered. (And much else besides, but that’s a longer and even more dispiriting story.)
Us?
“Just letting you know. Get it fixed, okay?”
Yes, sir.
I should probably just not worry about it. Let it pass. But that damn list is weighing on my mind. First, of course, the potential for disagreement, which can call into question not only my taste, but my intelligence and very character: how, for instance, can I possibly like Helena Bonham Carter? After all, she is neurotic, whiny, abrasive, annoying, in sum: neurasthenic. What could I possibly be thinking? —I could just shrug and twist off a wry smile and mumble something Woody Allenish, the (insert organ here) wants what it wants, but that would be disingenuous, wouldn’t it? Especially for a journal that purports to explore issues of sex, pornography, eroticism, in sum: horniness, and one person’s response thereto.
Second: the rather grab-bag nature of the selections. I certainly attempted to indicate that it was but a partial list, a list compiled on the fly, thrown together from a random assortment of what was passing through my mind; oddly enough, I should, perhaps, have taken more time to think of more varied and oddball items. (There are plenty of odd things out there that trigger the most unexpected thoughts.) A list of this sort tends to flatten everything out, render all equal in import and impact and intent, when in fact all that any of those listed have in common is the ability to make me stop and go—ah—in a particular way; still. “Nina Simone... Rupert Everett... Reese Witherspoon... Allyson Hannigan... Delaney... and Michael Dalton?” One does feel foolish when it’s put that way, doesn’t one. (A little.) (Though one should point out that each is at the top of his or her respective game, with respect to the impact of whatever game that may be on the [insert organ here], which does tend to want what it wants. So. There.)
Third: such lists end up being shopping lists, really, more than anything else. Commodification. Hey: look at the neat things I’ve bought. Listened to. Watched. Experienced. Want to have the same feeling? Watch this. Listen to this. Experience this. Buy a copy on your way out. —Certainly, there’s a lot that’s sexy about pop (and other) culture, and one of the neatest things about consuming pop culture is the way it can be eroticized, with or without the complicity of the original author or artist or performer. It’s a fun parlor game. And one could write a book about the tangled relationship between sex, desire, and consumer culture. (One is also pleased to learn one has yet to lose one’s appreciation for gross understatement.) But there’s more to sex and sexiness than buying stuff, or my (or your) personal reactions to stuff bought—to words on paper, music in the air, brightly colored moving pictures of people on a screen.
Fourth—but is that a whiff of rank self-justification I smell?
(And anyway: there’s all the people left off, like how on earth could I have skipped Paul Pope, or Wm. Michael Kaluta [when working with Elaine Lee], or Elaine Lee [when working with Wm. Michael Kaluta], or P. Craig Russell, or Vittorio Giardino, or—)
Eh. I’ll be out late tonight. Working, thank you. Covering an erotic cabaret organized by these intrepid entrepreneurs. Further bulletins as events warrant.
Don’t do them much these days, aside from the holy trinity: alcohol, caffeine, nicotine (on occasion). Actually, aside from those and the occasional hit of Sudafed or ibuprofen, I don’t do any at all, these days. (Hmm.) And there’s the whole snarly issue of the prescriptive psychopharmacopoeia, which we’ll skip for now, beyond noting that it gives me a royal wiggins: a) I’ve seen the effects of its abuse firsthand, which tend to outweigh (for me, at least) the stories of its wondrous successes when properly used; and b) acting as it does to alter personality and behavior—the very self—with nothing more that simple cascades of chemical reactions, it rather callously tramples the (for me) sacred Cartesian split between body and mind. (We’ll leave off for a moment the ironical fact that what follows are anecdotes about precisely those moments when cascading chemical reactions from pills or other substances ingested altered my personality, perceptions and behavior, aside from noting that it is appreciated; I said the Cartesian split was sacred. —I never said it was true.)
Since my grandparents were smokers and alcoholics, my mother was a militant anti-smoker; as a result, in college, I went straight from booze to acid. Pot held no allure to me, and besides, it stank. —So much for gateway drugs. My first trip was with two other friends, even as three others dropped themselves; I ate a little piece of paper with a brief and ghostly bitter taste, and nothing happened. A half an hour later, I ate another, which the other shaggy cartoonist seemed to think was a terribly funny thing to do. And then—
(“You don’t really think you heard them. Do you?” said the girl I dumped, afterwards. —She hadn’t wanted to trip then, though she did, later. Without me.
(“I was standing there, in the field; lights were chasing the edges of the grass, wind blowing, and I heard fiddles. And pipes.”
(“But you don’t really think they were there. Do you?”
(“It’s what I heard.”
(“Yes, but—really?”
(—None of which makes much sense, unless you know a) the general hothouse atmosphere of magic and superstition—your standard issue melange of Western European influences known by the horrid if appropriate neologism “neo-pagan,” with a strong if muddled yen for Nature, and the Fæ—which subsumed the whole of the small, private liberal arts college I attended, or at least my own clique and claque therein; b) the specific mythology surrounding the girl I dumped, my best friend, her fiancée, and, to a lesser extent, myself [plus, on occasion, Richard, and the boy who went crazy (then)]; among other aspects, she had when much younger been vouchsafed certain evidences intimating she was, shall we say, from Somewhere Else, not of this earth; and thus that c) I was teasing her mercilessly. No. I did not then, nor do I now believe, that little men for fear of whom sane men dared not go a-riding were lurking in the grasses lighting their witchy little lanterns, a-sawing at their fiddles and a-winding of their pipes. But: I saw lights. I heard music, wild and free of melody and rhythm. And I danced: alone, in a dead field in the middle of the night, the black back-end of February, dark of the year, with dead trees all around me shaking their empty branches at a blank black sky, calling up sudden skirling bursts of wind that tore at my coat. No little men: just me, and earth, and grass, and trees, and wind, and lysergic acid diethylamide. But I did hear what everyone’s heard, who’s ever heard the færies play. —Hence the teasing.)
—And all of which was just the smallest part of that first trip.
I do like acid. I like how expansive it is; how it lasts forever. I like what can happen when three or four close friends who already share a large number of points of reference can hit a groove of inside jokes and ride it, telepathically, to places rich and strange. Check, please! —Knowing, for instance, what the other shaggy cartoonist wanted on his sandwich without having to ask, which was good, since he wasn’t exactly capable of speech at the time. Being with people who understand without belabored explanation what it’s like to be chased by the point of view from Evil Dead. (Seen the movie? You know what I mean.) Tripping the night that clocks are sprung forward for daylight savings, and finding ourselves wandering about in the hour that is thereby lost, cut off from everyone else. Not having to come home alone to the houseful of zombies, none of whom lived there, all watching Eating Raoul. I even like the jittery cramps in your thighs and that strychnine grin, coming down. You don’t get visuals, much (at least, I don’t, or didn’t), but you do see what’s there differently, and your brain is so much faster and more nimble than before, more crisp—even as it’s silly and loopy and paranoid and strange. —Of course, I have tripped so hard that I did not see what was there so much as—and if you want the mundane explanation, I’m sure it has to do with the persistence of vision, but to me at the time and even now it seemed as if I were seeing an instant into the future, seeing all the possible positions of every tiny quantum particle that makes up this world, vibrating, humming, and so all was blurred (but crisply so), indeterminate and impossible to make out, and yet I did not get lost, or blunder into a tree; and even though I’ve since looked into mirrors while tripping and seen the dreadful Mirror Me, Meat Me, all gritty too, too solid flesh, pore-ridden, stripped of illusion and shorn of pretence, Me as I Am—the very first time I ever looked in the mirror while tripping I saw instead a tree of light: my nerves, perhaps, or the blood in my veins, shining—
But ’shrooms are, in my experience, better for visuals. Boston Commons, transformed into a fairy garden of light, all the buildings looming over it like the stage set of some children’s show. —Of course, I misplaced my usually inerrant sense of direction; my best friend’s sister, who could get confused in her dorm, led us through Beacon Hill without faltering. There was also the magic of Butterhenge, shown to me in a moment of crisis by the mad Greek (“I’m a Lesbian!” he would cry, at the top of his lungs; it was true. He was from Lesbos)—I was, apparently, boring people with my bitter insistence that they show me something magic, right now, and then my maniacal laughter at their blankly quizzical faces. So the truism that acid messes with your mind and ’shrooms with your eyes isn’t nearly as true as some would like. —But it does come close to delineating the difference between them.
I got over the smoking thing (naturally enough). Even though the one time I’d eaten pot (brownies. Of course) nothing had happened, I did eventually try smoking it, because I wanted to say I had, and because the film school student was offering, and I thought she was cute. So I did. And—
Okay. See. I’d start a thought. And about halfway along, I’d either have gotten distracted, or the thought would lose momentum, or something, and so I’d have lost track of where the train of thought was going, and to try and recapture it, I’d go back to the beginning of what I’d been thinking about, and try to tease it out by retracing my steps, and, either through having gotten distracted, or the thought losing momentum, I’d lose track of where the train of thought was going, and to try and recapture it, I’d—
(I tell lots of people I hate pot because it makes me stupid. “Right!” they say, as if this were self-evident, and they look at me as if I were mad. Hmmph.)
And what’s worse: I’m sitting on the film school student’s bed, and she’s lolling there beside me in her bathrobe, one long bare leg in my lap, and the leg is nice enough, but whatever it is she’s saying is—is empty, and vapid, and granted, I probably couldn’t do much better at the moment, but I physically can’t say a word, and what’s worse than that, I can’t think of anything to say or to do to extricate myself from a situation that’s spinning beyond all endurance. —So maybe the circumstances had something to do with me souring on pot (and the film school student), but I’ve tried it since, and not had any more fun. (Even hash, the mechanics of which were fascinating: setting the tarry little lump to smoldering, holding it under a glass bell to let the smoke build up, tilting the glass bell to suck it in—and then starting a thought, losing track, trying to recapture it, losing track, and—)
Nitrous, or “whippits”: a few times. But it’s more like bungee jumping than, you know, taking a drug. Though trippits, I understand, are a different thing entirely—inhaling nitrous while tripping. But watching the boy who went crazy (then) do this—the look that passed over his face, shaking his head, in greater and greater consternation, “No,” he said, “No, no! No!” He shuddered, jerked, his head flew back. “No!” And then, a deep breath, and the most evil laughter I have ever heard—I wasn’t tempted. Still ain’t. —The Hallowe’en party I attended, dressed as the Fool, to find the film school student dressed as Death, from Sandman (nice enough legs, as I said): that was where I saw the nitrous hookah, and the electrical muscle stimulator (therapeutic purposes only, uh-huh), and the room at the top of Everest, and the TVs scattered hither and yon playing random anime, and what happened when a number of these things collided, with acid, in this guy’s system (he fell to his knees and cried out to Allah, among other things); that, though, is maybe a story for another time. —That night I walked with Death in a graveyard as the Fool, with acid as my little dog, nipping at my heels; that was fun. And the start of the crush on the film school student. Sex and Death...
—And I’ve watched my hand become someone else’s (“Have you ever really, you know, looked? At your hands?”), and I flirted with Howard Cruse over the phone (later, I waved at him marching past in a New York City Gay Pride Parade, the day I met the Spouse), and I’ve stood in the sunshine in an ice cream suit, handing out programs to parents and watching banners ripple in a wind that wasn’t there (none of the parents knew, but the little kids all had me pegged as Someone Weird, and they giggled, or ran away), and gotten lost while wandering around in a Bach organ fugue (they’re big as cathedrals, you know), and yet I’ve never had sex, or even wanted to. (Mind? Body? Did somebody order a duality?) Heard a great story once, about Boston (again), the Commons, a flowerbed, and a beautifully simultaneous orgasm—though that might have been a hallucination—
The Spouse has never done hallucinogens, to her great regret. —Aside from the half a handful of ’shrooms in Provincetown; enough to know you were tripping, but not enough to trip. Sigh. As a point of research, she feels she ought to, at some point. But. We’re neither of us terribly street smart, and don’t hang out with chemistry students. And the last time either of us had a couple of days to spare was—when, exactly?
And anyway: Cruse, who’s said a lot of smart and wise things about his own experiences with hallucinogens, said something about coming to a point where he just didn’t want to any more; he knew he’d done it enough. Which I didn’t understand at the time; now I think maybe I do.
Maybe. Next week, who knows—I could meet a chemistry student, get struck by a sudden whim, take a day or so off by brute force, drag the Spouse along with me. —I’m just mercurial enough to do it, too. Darn it.
Schizophrene.
Tuesday, 14:13 [posted 22:51]
I wake up, shower, get coffee, scan the news online. Put on some pants. Pour a bowl of granola. Turn on the television—not for news, or traffic; no. I won’t be home tonight (class), so Buffy will have to be taped (not that it wouldn’t be anyway; fanboy, yes, yes, now shut up and let me finish), and despite paying AT&T an outrageous sum of money each month for basic cable, the channels at the bottom of the dial (and think, for a moment, of how outmoded that metaphor is, and how mixed) are fritzy and uncertain at best. But. UPN’s coming in nicely enough, and the chipper morning person on the chipper morning news show of the type to which I am highly allergic says, “Coming up: Britney’s in hot water again, over her new album.”
I have a weakness for the ridiculous, yes.
After some commercials for auto insurance and breakfast cereal (apparently, women must struggle and strive to look as good as they do; however, at least one man believes that Special K does not look like that much work. It’s unclear why he is concerned with this topic, or what he means to do about it: steal the cereal for himself? Look like a fool bouncing on a trampoline? Weak on structure and narrative, to say nothing of character development), and a trivia question involving what song the Jackson 5’s “ABC” knocked out of the top ten (“Let it Be,” the Beatles, and don’t say I never taught you nothin’), I am treated to a video clip of Ms. Spears, her hair disarrayed such that it suggested recent, strenuous activity, her eyes ringed with smudged, dampened make-up suggestive of a bedroom, or a cranky raccoon, and, as a long shot revealed, wearing a clingy, revealing top tattered so as to suggest post-apocalyptic fashion (something about the setting was post-apocalyptic as well: a vague sense of deserted corridors in a high-rise condo, a late-afternoon city desolated by an EMP blast, perhaps; I could, of course, be reading a bit much into my brief glimpse) and revealing a generous expanse of taut belly-flesh, slicked with sweat or a make-up artisan’s simulation of same. What she was singing could not be made out, as the chipper voice was chirping away over it: seems the starlet’s in hot water for using the words “damn” and “hell” on her new album, and various parents’ groups are claiming this challenges her previously wholesome image. I pause, spoonful of granola dripping milk into the bowl, and I’m trying to parse this (previously wholesome image? previously wholesome? “hell” and “damn” are all that’s challenging said image? and shaking her money-maker at Bob Dole did what, exactly? for starters—) when the chipper voice relates Ms. Spears’ response: she says, it seems, that people shouldn’t be offended by her use of such language; she used those words, you see, to express frustration. Not to swear. No. Not at all.
Um—
(A true anecdote, or as true as they come: me and the high school sweetie, hanging out in her house. Her mother comes home. Learned English as an adult from watching Perry Mason. Wicked sense of humor, but prim and even a little proper. Never cursed or swore. Carrying two bags of groceries. Handle rips on one. Cans of food, bottle of detergent, box of pasta scatter across the floor. She stomps her foot, fumes, her mouth tightens, and then, “Oh, oh—fuck!”
(Sweetie blinks. I blink. Sweetie’s mom smiles, suddenly. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. I get it! That’s why you do that! It felt—so good! Fuck! Fuck! God damn!”)
So. On the one hand: it’s deplorable that such a—pathetic charade is necessary; that we have a mass audience so hungry for images of sex, and sexual expression, yet so ashamed of anything sexual that the actual import of those images must be denied and suppressed. And it’s deeply disturbing, how profound the disconnection is between sign and signified—this weird, untouchable, protean-yet-immutable archetype of virginal kinderwhore who knows all the tricks, but not why they’re tricky; a master of surface and artifice, yet profoundly, willfully ignorant of the depths and reasons—this is not a healthy symbol. —And I’m someone who loves slippery, prickly ambiguity, and who prizes style over substance any old day of the week.
On the other: I guess it’s nice to learn that subtext is alive and well—
What else, aside from the already stated? And. Are we talking about those who are sexy, or those who do sexy? (There being a difference between, shall we say, Rufus Wainright, and Momus.) And are we talking light and airy frothy playful treatment of sexy themes, or direct go-for-the-groin gusto? (There being, again, a difference between Momus, and Rufus Wainwright.)
Those problems noted, but not necessarily addressed, herewith a (partial) list:
Nina Simone. Björk, Laurie Anderson, Janis Ian, Dusty Springfield, Tori Amos, Lea Krueger, Katie Jane Garside, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda, Rose Thomson and Hanna Fox (and Tim), Helen White and Wendy Stubbs (and Martin), Sarah Cracknell, Miss Murgatroid, Billie Holliday; yes, and yes. But Nina fuckin’ Simone.
Neil Hannon. Momus, but Neil. Bowie, not so much. Tim Thomas (and Rose, and Hanna); Martin Barnard (and Helen, and Wendy). Mike Scott. Tom Waits (of course; Jim White, too). Leonard Cohen. Bach, wearing nothing but a cello.
Joseph Fiennes. Rupert Everett. (Can we please have a polymorphously perverse James Bond, as likely to go for the pool boy as the showgirl, and can we please cast Rupert Everett to play him? Now?) Denzel Washington. Martin Donovan. Ewan Macgregor. Chow Yun Fat. Julian Sands, but only every now and then. Wong Kar Wai, who doesn’t act, but directs, and whose every movie makes me weak at the knees and light-headed from all the blood rushing away from my brain.
Janeane Garofalo; Cameron Diaz. Reese Witherspoon; Emma Thompson. Christina Ricci; Claire Danes. Oddly enough, I’m having a hard time with the women here. Meaning what, exactly? I dunno. —I’ll get back to you. Susan Sarandon. Helena Bonham Carter.
Ben Browder? Check. Claudia Black? Check. Sarah Michelle Gellar? Not so much. Allyson Hannigan, check. David Boreanaz? Nope; but James Marsters, check; Anthony Stuart Head, oh Lordy. Allison Janney, indeed.
Donna Tartt (oh, it’s there: dry and cool and deliciously thrilling and half the time gone before you figure it out; the sort of girl in glasses at whom you make passes). Sarah Waters. Paul Park—less for the actual sex (not much) than the places he offers in which to imagine having sex—or at least seeing, and hearing, and touching. Delaney, of course; Samuel R. Delaney. Michelle Tea, though I’ve mentioned her already. (I’ve mentioned Delaney, too.) Michael Dalton, yes, though easy on the cheerleaders, boyoh.
Bare midriffs. Navels. Shoulders. (The Spouse does not wear nearly enough sleeveless tops. —Then, it has gotten cold, of late.) The word “belly” is unaccountably sexy. Arch French terminology, properly applied. A cigarette, deftly wielded. That itch, vague, undefined, in the skin at the base of the cock, underneath it, shading over and onto the testicles. The feeling of an erection lifting free from loosened garments. It’s—
I— Ahem. Excuse me.
I’ll just—
I’ll be right back. Honest.
Of course, I’ve since thought of a number of good horror films that don’t ask you at all to empathize with the monster—unless you’ve got a very broad definition of monster. Or empathize. Doubtless you have, too: The Haunting, for one (Robert Wise’s adaptation, please); Alien, for another. —Besides: what a fatuous sentiment. Of course we sympathize with the monster in Ginger Snaps; the entire structure of that sort of movie is designed to make the audience do just that. Oy. Glaven.
Well, of course I saw Mulholland Dr. Which is the first Lynch I’ve seen since a couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, and, naturally enough, Blue Velvet.
My own response?
Eh.
Do you tend to stay awake when you watch movies? Do you not have much trouble with sudden flashbacks and non-linear (but still sequential) narrative tracks? Do you have the patience to trust that, okay, this little bit may well be explained later, I’ll file it away and see what’s made of it? Can you appreciate an artist indulging themselves in their own little stylistic quirks for quirkiness’s sake without rolling your eyes too terribly much?
Then you won’t have any trouble following the movie. Trust me. You won’t need to see it twice.
Of course, I should point out that the plot, such as it is, ends up being depressingly mundane, even sordid (and not, I should note, in a good way); that, while there are some gorgeous, achingly beautiful moments (everything that happens in Club Silencio, without which I would have felt cheated—that, and the audition scene, which you’ve doubtless heard described by now, and which isn’t achingly gorgeous, but is a bravura display of acting technique, which I always like to see), the movie as a whole is a little strained, and the colors do not pop like a whore’s lip-gloss, thank you; that if there are any “extended sequences of lesbian sex,” I sure missed ’em (the one comes rather out of the blue, despite some little subtext; some nice kissing, a little tentative breast play—ooh, that’s a nipple; another, an implied attempt to finger someone who doesn’t want to be; the most radical thing that’s done sexually is an extended shot of a woman—depressed, unhappy, unhinged, self-loathing—masturbating); and that it’s fun to chew over, worth seeing on the big screen to see what gets done with, you know, the big screen, but. Don’t expect too much.
And if you go hunting for what other people have to say about it, you’ll end up terribly depressed at either a) their own level of intelligence, or b) their assessment of other people’s intelligences. —Hard to say what’s at play, precisely, in that piece.
Ginger Snaps , on the other hand, which is out on videotape (talk about instant gratification), was a hoot and a half. The Spouse, who likes dogs rather more than I do, was put off from the start, and, though the initial review I’d read mentioned it was a “suggestive” horror flick, it isn’t, and she gets squicked by that sort of thing. (Though the opening credits do a wonderfully cheeky job of playing with staged gore, simultaneously sensitizing and desensitizing you to what’s to come, it’s one of the bloodiest movies I’ve seen in quite some time. Of course, I’m not much of a gorehound. —The level of violence isn’t beyond what one might see in a typical, say, Buffy episode; but the results of that violence are displayed rather more—realistically?—viscerally.)
As far as its being a feminist horror film goes—on the one hand, I’d like to think that we’re past the time when it’s something special to see a film that treats mythology—pop and otherwise—from the perspective of women (or girls) (we aren’t, but I’d like to think that); and anyway, it’s a horror film, which means it’s inherently conservative, even reactionary—people who transgress get punished. Of course, it’s hardly that simplistic; it’s got a morally complex, complicated, conflicted response—as with all decent horror films, it subverts itself, daring us to empathize, even identify, with the monster; as with all good horror films, we can’t help but do so.
And it’s still hard to find flicks that pass Alison Bechdel’s test. Easier than it used to be, but. So that’s nice.
nicholas urfé
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