Lucking Out (24 page)

When we reascended to join the surface dwellers, Hilly was still papa-bear-ing it at the front, his interlocutor gone. One of us asked about Joey Ramone, who was in the hospital with lymphoma, which had been taking it out of him for seven years. “I hear he’s doing better,” Hilly said. “Touch and go, but last I heard he was improving.” It turned out to be the last rally before the final out, Joey dying not long after, on April 15, 2001, a year that had a lot more waiting for all of us. A stretch of East Second Street was later renamed in honor of Joey, the commemorative sign eventually raised twenty feet above ground level after having been stolen so often. That’s where so much creative excitement ends up, with souvenir collecting. After years of Laocoön legal and real-estate tax battles, CBGB’s closed for good in 2006 with a farewell performance starring Patti Smith, which was only righteous, Patti’s birth star being where it truly began and now would snuff out. At one point she relayed a message from an absent Tom Verlaine: “Tom reluctantly sends his love.” I laughed at home, listening to the live broadcast on Sirius satellite. It was the best use of an adverb since Hemingway’s “magnanimously” in
A Moveable Feast.
I had been invited to CBGB’s finale but decided not to go on the afternoon of the show, telling myself I was on deadline (I was, I always am), that it was too much of a drag to go that far downtown, that it would be a complete mob scene, all that. But I also think it was because I was afraid of how happy I might be to see everyone again after so many years, a coward when it came to unembarrassed joy and affection. I might have gone on a hugging spree, which is not how we did things back in those outlaw days.

A fiction writer friend of mine once told me about the exact moment she knew her marriage was sunk. It was the afternoon that she entered their East Village apartment and in the living room sat her husband and his brother, watching a porn movie together. That wasn’t what unnerved her. What unnerved her was that they heard her come in, saw her standing there (the reaction on her face must have made for a classic close-up), and yet remained fastened on the screen action in the room, as if it were an NFL game, not even bothering to mute the groans or hit the pause button, perhaps not wanting to interrupt the “flow.” For my friend, this was it, the final indignity. It betrayed such a down-deep disregard and disrespect for her feelings, such sofa-slug inertia and evolutionary backdip, that “alienation of affection” was no longer a legalistic phrase but a palpable presence, a cold slap. It was right out there in the fuck-you so-what open, a form of infidelity so indolent it didn’t even require another actual woman. I shared my friend’s revulsion—I hadn’t met her husband but had always assumed he was a snake, based on creditable hearsay coming mostly from her (she is now happily remarried)—but for me the real mind-boggler of the story was that this skink had been watching a porn movie
with his brother.
I have three brothers of my own, and I couldn’t imagine settling in with a snack tray and watching a wankeroo with any one or any combination of them—how tarantula-crawling, the very idea. What if Mom found out? The very prospect made one crinkle inside. No, I maintained a more traditional attitude. As far as I was concerned, porn was to be enjoyed solely within the privacy of your own shame and guilt, or among strangers, unable to identify you from police suspect photos.

That’s how the seventies raised me, one of the enduring values they instilled.

It was in the seventies that porn swamp-gassed into an atmospheric condition in culture and society, became part of the parlance, no longer treated as contraband or projected on a sheet in your weird uncle’s living room. If in the sixties sexual liberation promised rainbow-arching orgasms that would melt the shoe buckles of puritanism and banish possessive ego to the bourgeois boneyard, that illusion was pretty much shot once the peace sign from the Summer of Love was bent into the swastika self-carved on Charlie Manson’s forehead as the symbol of the decade. Porn was the prowler that made itself permanently at home, a movie projector beaming from the rear cave of the urban skull. Urban, because it was in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York that movie porn was produced, played in theaters, and available to choosy shoppers, the day of the local strip-mall adult distributorship having not quite blearily dawned. (In the better-stocked outlets along Eighth Avenue, you’d see guys going up to the counter with their arms full of shiny VHS cassette boxes, stocking up as if preparing for a long siege that might disrupt supply routes.) The Naked City conferred a cloak of anonymity, the opportunity to go undetected, unjudged. Even if one (and by “one” I mean me, and by “me” I mean a bodiless junior me delegated to revisit the past) decided to head-duck into a porn theater to catch a double feature of
The Filthy Five
and
The Promiscuous Sex
or some other inspired booking, it was considered discourteous to sit too near another patron, a buffer zone of two empty seats considered adequate, three exemplary, and choosing a different row altogether the truly gallant thing to do. Walking into the middle of a movie and asking someone to clarify a plot point—very poor form. Unlike gay men, whose porn-going was of a more active, participant nature, based on the recitals I’ve heard, straight men preferred to be left alone with their sunken thoughts in such situations without the chapel spell being broken, even those masturbating away as if to the beat of a Sousa march. In a memoir published in
The New Yorker
, David Denby describes attending a porn film with Pauline Kael, Pauline wanting to be up on the latest thing and perhaps throw a scare into William Shawn at the prospect of her turning in four thousand words on
The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann.
Denby reports that Pauline’s verbal captioning for the action on-screen was unwelcomed by those in the audience trying to concentrate and lose themselves in the beauty of the moment. “She was the only woman in the room. Onscreen, one of the studs melted for an instant and Pauline let out a loud, disappointed, ‘Awww.’ Men in black raincoats sitting nearby rustled in their seats. After a few minutes, two rounded bottoms appeared, juxtaposed one on top of the other, and Pauline said, ‘That’s sort of sweet.’ The raincoats turned and glared angrily in our direction; some of them stalked out.”

Not every porn audience was as rapt as Antonioni fans trying to figure out what gives with Monica Vitti in
Red Desert.
Heckling voices were often raised during bad-dialogue scenes, of which there was no scarcity, voices that tended to belong to black men amusing themselves mightily and their fellow comedy fans. In one porn parody of a sci-fi epic, in which costumes and scenery owed pretty much everything to the crinkly versatility of aluminum foil, an actor so blatantly homosexual that he didn’t bother feigning otherwise saucily informed the Empress Z’anna that he was going to ram his royal scepter deep inside her, to which a voice piped up, “Better ask your boyfriend first.” Another time, when a porn stud sought to ejaculate on his co-star’s face and overshot the landing area, hitting the pillow, someone chortled, “Y’ missed, Robin Hood!” Such merry interjections were not the norm, however. Young and middle-aged couples would occasionally date-night at a porn film so that they could snuggle together and feel adventurously naughty, presumably hoping to take away a few pointers that they could put into practice later, the cuties cozying into their seats for a bit of fun only to become uncomfortable with the sexual entrées being projected in proctological detail, their giggles and whispered asides drying up as the power plays between the characters on-screen got ugly, too forcibly overt and face-slapping for any ironic distance. As such couples slunk off in Napoleonic defeat, their bodies remained in a head-ducked semi-crouch all the way across the row and up the aisle, Groucho Marx–style, as if fleeing the scene of a bad idea. Some of them may be grandparents now, chuckling at the memory. Flickering shadows on the screen, migrating shadows in the theaters, and a Proustian forget-me-not bouquet flavoring the air—it is the sickly sweet reek of cherry disinfectant that conjures porn in the seventies for me, a candied aroma that imbued XXX theaters in Manhattan with a mortuary subduement, a certain consoling melancholy, like the bleak emptiness of a pizza take-out place at Christmas.

As with punk, my formal introduction into the porn funnel had begun with a
Village Voice
assignment. I was doing an essay on the eroticization and exploitation of young girls that puddle-jumped from Lewis Carroll’s photographs to Lolita to Jodie Foster in
Taxi Driver
to Brooke Shields in
Pretty Baby
to wherever the last station stop in the piece ended up being. I needed to check out rumors that illegal underage porn was being openly sold in Times Square adult video stores and started scouting the aisles. It didn’t take much scouting. The jailbait items for sale jumped out at you. It was there for peep-show viewing (peep-show booths, those Dr. Who telephone boxes for the sexually dispossessed), the footage imported from Denmark and other countries that didn’t seem to care, vignettes involving young teens in student uniforms or Girl Guide outfits; likewise, bestiality films, also imported, judging by the peasant attire of the human participants on the packaging, the dirndls. I didn’t want to imagine the sort of man who would linger too long at this county fair, because only a man would. Only a man would stage these things, film these things, watch these things. I was a man too, maybe not much of one yet, but enough of one to feel complicit simply knowing such things existed, maggot colonies of them.

I filed the piece, a responsible-toned cultural-reporting essay that avoided tabloid sensationalism and easy moralizing (it was not a subject suited for flippancies, that I knew going in). But after the article was printed I continued dropping in to Times Square (and by “dropping” I mean just happening to be in the slummy vicinity after making a trip expressly for that very purpose), making the irregular rounds of the theaters enough to be as up on the latest trends in smut as a racetrack tipster. Caution in my case being the better part of cowardice, I never had sex with a prostitute or ventured into the sicky-poo Krafft-Ebing side alleys of voyeurdom, priding myself on my vanilla tastes, pride being the better part of self-conceit. I intermittently haunted Times Square and it haunted me, the place exerting a pull even as it deadened the nerves, nerve deadening being part of the pull. Porn has all the attributes of junk, wrote Norman Mailer, and I interpreted his use of “junk” not simply as a synonym for trash but as a slang term for heroin and any other hook-sinking hijacker of body and soul. Porn was an addictive fix—masturbation as self-medication—and porn addiction doesn’t carry the cautionary-tale romance of penthouse highs and gutter lows, just a sputtering stop-start series of catch-and-release buildups and let-gos that offered none of the humpbacked redemptive arcs of other addiction narratives. Porn hobbyists and rapid rejaculators with dark circles under their eyes and dull hair never reap the benefits of the dramatic gutter romance of alcohol or drug addiction, the binges and blackouts and bleary dawns in strange beds, the Christly withdrawal convulsions of the racked flesh and the beatific predawns that lead to the resurrection of recovery, reentry into society. For a porn addict, the blinds are always lowered and time inches sideways, other narcotics at least allowing one to forget oneself for a longer, self-losing spell, a deeper erasure. Kicking cocaine can be a conquering feat; kicking porn barely merits a back-pat and a discount coupon at Wendy’s—the man with the flailing palm can’t compete with the Man with the Golden Arm. I was once a guest at an AA meeting in which one of the regulars received a customary round of applause for saying how long he’d been sober, another round for how long he’d been nicotine-free, yet another for having given up caffeine, but when he topped it off by announcing it had been three months since he had masturbated to porn or images in his head, I was the only one who began to clap, stopping my hands in midair. Even for this receptive audience, he had pushed it a little too far, went for too many sympathy votes. Having run out of things to give up, he concluded his testimonial but looked tense the rest of the meeting.

Yet it wasn’t necessarily all psychologically corrosive, the puppy stage of being a porn hound. It did have its vitamin side. It is standard operating procedure to decry the objectification of porn, its privileging of the Male Gaze (those mythical ray-beams that take colonial possession of the phantom of desire and pin it to the trophy wall), but there’s something to be said for porn’s de-subjectifying powers. At least there was back then, in the days when the printed word had a stronger muscle grip on our overstoked imaginations. For someone like myself, a bookworm with bulging lobes who drew most of his vainglorious ideas about sex, conquest, and the mercurial enigma of Woman from novels written by men who really knew how to grill up a hot paragraph, the actual act itself loomed like a parachute drop into existential night, where the chute might not open. The exalted glory of two bodies fusing into one and bursting into forked flame set the bar a little high for those of us fairly new to pole-vaulting. Each encounter seemed a test, a trial, pitting you against yourself and your grandiose expectations against whatever expectations she—She—brought to the encounter, your sexual pride and reputation riding on the line, at least in the amphitheater of your own mind. In his long story “The Time of Her Time,” Mailer made the yeoman task of bringing a woman to orgasm into a symphonic clash of the titans, as if his stud alter ego were taking Omaha Beach against spirited resistance from one smart bohemian ball-busting recalcitrant, the aurora borealis of orgasm awaiting just over the shadowed ridge at the head of the bed. Mailer at least was super-vivid in his play-by-play description of this mattress prizefight, as was Henry Miller whenever he got goaty under the slanted roof shingles of Paris. Half the time I didn’t know what was going on in a D. H. Lawrence sex scene, only that man and woman had joined lava streams, which was of limited utility.

For us unfrocked English majors it was difficult navigating sex with this library of crescendos lodged upstairs—Lawrence coined the phrase “sex in the head,” but who warehoused more sex in the attic than he did?—while having only the haziest idea of what we were doing and hoping word didn’t get around. After several unsatisfactory off-Broadway tryouts in the sack with my first real girlfriend in New York, I horse-whispered to myself that I was Norman Mailer before the Ravel
Boléro
lovemaking soundtrack started, putting my hips into command mode and getting a pretty good locomotive head of steam going, indeed began feeling so devilish that I thought I might sprout a pair of warlock horns and a swishing tail, but then a strand of her hair got caught in my wristband and extricating it brought me back to reality, where I was at a distinct disadvantage. Also, I needed to rest a little more weight on my elbows, because (as she diplomatically put it) “I was kinda crushing her.” Perhaps if I had read more sex-spiked novels by women, I would have gotten a better training manual to put into application, but the ones popular and prevalent then were of the bitter-blow-job roman à clef variety, in which the heroine would go down on a guy to get rid of him faster. I already knew plenty of girls who were quite happy to get rid of a guy without a lovely parting gift, so such fictions weren’t much help, whatever their other merits as indictments of callous creeps by the women who debased themselves before them, practically throwing away their college educations.

Porn was all verbs and no adjectives. It got into your face mask. Despite liberal use of Vaseline on the lens for
Elvira Madigan
soft-focus lyricism, it couldn’t keep up pretenses to pictorialism for long, innocent gambols requiring meadows and such. It developed its own bordello mise-en-scène. Old-school seventies porn is preferred by old-school porn enthusiasts because there were actual, if modest, production values, not simply a couch on which couples splayed, as has been the minimalist tack since digital turned every porn director into a human fly buzzing around the room. (Andy Warhol, a forerunner in so many fields, was the pioneer of couch porn with his 1964 black-and-white silent grinder, set entirely on the old Factory’s well-ridden red couch.) And there were story lines too, however borrowed or imitative they may have been, with actual dialogue typed onto a page by human fingers, even though the actors mouthing them often sounded like hypnotic subjects dubbed into English. But what truly endowed old-school porn with a more relatable, mortal dimension were the bodies belonging to those actors on-screen, which exhibited the lumpy normalcy of our imperfect species rather than the later cloned master-race Las Vegas red-carpet ideal that would discard individual personality as if it were needless lipo. The bodies and behaviors belonged to flawed beings who had more moon than sun in their constitutions. Pre-Viagra, erections flew on a wing and a prayer. Once achieved, they didn’t look like redwoods or swollen membranes, their veiny veins competing with the veins on the actor’s forehead for aching intensity. And the women, especially the older women—there was something poignant about them, the veins in their hands, the ladylike manner in which they dressed and primped in the mirror and adjusted their lingerie just so (a single strand of pearls completing the routine), the way they tipped their chins slightly up in every dialogue exchange to make a point of their actressy dignity, this resigned determination to hold on to what they had left because in a few years it could all go. Kay Parker, Veronica Hart with her retroussé nose—they make the MILFs and cougars of today look like tramp-stamped dirigibles. One of the seventies hot mamas, Jennifer Welles, a favorite of Norman Mailer’s, was like Gena Rowlands turned experienced call girl, a blond fantasy genie-rubbed from a jar of cold cream.