[ week 26 | 40 ]
Honk! Honk! (Okay, maybe it is just me.)
Wednesday, 00.48
So Heather says Harpo isn’t sexy.
(It’s down there at the bottom of the entry of 25 June, after some misadventures with some ladybugs and a refrigerator that I’m going to steal for a story some day, you just watch and see if I don’t.)
Now, my first thought was, roughly, shyeah. As if. I fired off a quick note, something to the effect of, “Look into those eyes and tell me he doesn’t curl your toes, I double-dog dare you.” —But I was running on memory: flitting images of that deceptive grace hunched over, showily hiding itself away in those slouchy clothes, that implacable smile, those eyes, those hands. But mostly the eyes. So I go digging around for some photos, and, well—there’s a certain, oh, I dunno. Solidity? A fleshiness, that memories don’t have? An imperfection, a vaguely reptilian quality, a forced air to some of those garish grins, a sense of effort, maybe, that memories tend to gloss over. And anyway, there’s the image of him on that old Today show, hopping up and chasing the weather woman around and around and around the news desk. Which is lust, which is a cartoon of lust, and is hardly, well, sexy. (I was sitting on a bed in the dorm room that belonged to the girl from Miami and wondering—aloud, mind—why she wouldn’t let me kiss her, and she giggled, and said she took sex far too seriously; she’d never sleep with anyone who could make her laugh. Which—well. You do the math.)
So.
Sexy? In a mouth-drying, lip-licking, heart-racing, hand-quivering, eye-grabbing, lubricating, tumescing kind of way? Maybe not. Not exactly. No. (Are you kidding? You want a pretty boy, you should maybe look to Zeppo, two brothers down.)
But...
See, I’m thinking about that walk. The grace. The time for God’s sake that he pulled a hot cup of coffee out of his coat pocket. Groucho got the one-liners; Harpo got whatever wasn’t nailed down, and usually managed to walk off with the nails when you weren’t looking. And even if I’ve seen him pull that mirror trick in Duck Soup, what, a hundred times already, I still stop whatever I’m doing when it’s on, look up to the screen, a little shiver of delight and anticipation goosefleshing my arms, a goofy-ass grin on my face. Delight, anticipation; all bets are off, and anything can happen. He isn’t sexy, no. But he can effortlessly turn his back on the Ten Thousand Things and with a stupid physical gag wei wu wei himself into that place where any sexiness worth its sweat is aiming to end up. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?” —So in that sense, yes. Sexy-ish. Sexy-esque. Delightful. But at the same time—all bets are off, and anything can happen. Salvador Dali drew him, after all...
(I mean, if you’re just looking for an orgasm, that’s easily enough done: a few moments of privacy, a hand, at most a battery-powered appliance of some sort. We’re after other game, deeper down. Illusory, perhaps. Smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand to cover what are at base mere physical lusts, brutish stimulus and response; to let us pretend there is something more at stake than just a gamete’s rather touchingly elaborate way of making more gametes. But isn’t that the point? Isn’t it all more—well, more of everything, when we play those sorts of games with ourselves? No damn cat, no damn cradle, but the patterns are pretty cool, don’t you think? Look, I’ll make it go away, and here’s another—)
And anyway, I’m telling you: it’s those eyes. Wow. Hubba hubba.
(But not the wig. Definitely not.)
