[sic]: A Memoir (7 page)

I’m a survivor?

“You’ll get it. You’ll survive this thing, believe me. I know it. But you’ll leave something behind. A part of your humanity. And in a way, you care about yourself so much more, and you care about other people, so much more, much more. But the survivors walk a different line. Like suicide. Before I thought it was this big thing. Now—and let’s not talk about those who are just depressed and can be saved—but for me, suicide, it doesn’t really matter. The superb freedom I have—and you will have—is that of a being who’s already died. And it’s so sad, that you died. I can see the sadness in your face. I know that face so well: you’re dead. But in a good way! I mean, it’s sad. But along with this sadness is this great freedom: you can do absolutely anything, there are no consequences, it’s exactly like a lucid dream, except you never wake up.”

III

THE SLAVE MARKET

Her mouth crueler than a tiger’s, colder

than a snake’s, and beautiful beyond a

woman’s. She is the deadlier Venus incarnate:

'Aϕροδíτη: πολλ μεν εν θεοισι [
sic
]
^*
κουκ αvωvυμοζ Θεá

[Aphrodite: I am not a nameless Goddess,

but one truly powerful among the Gods]

from Euripides,
Hippolytus
1–2

—
Swinburne
, Essays and Studies

Carmilla, needless to say, was a free spirit. I was
really dating Caroline. I can’t remember exactly when I met her—I guess it must have been sometime during the first six months of chemo. I suspect I don’t recall the circumstances of our first meeting because they were unremarkable: or rather they were so similar to those of so many altogether remarkable meetings I was having at that time as to be virtually indistinguishable, one from the other: indistinguishable as the sea of faces I would find myself scanning, and remarkable as the one face that would gently loosen itself from the rest, the single petal on a wet black bough. Caroline’s face was one of these: “petal” isn’t bad, actually, because I always imagine Pound’s petals as white, as I’m sure he intended, letting the reader pump up the contrast (pull-down menu: Image—Adjust—Brightness/
C
ontrast . . .), no need to specify color, what with the cost of words in this Imagist economy. In any case, Caroline’s face was white, quite white, but not unhealthy. “Wet” isn’t bad either, for her eyes shined glossily, and her mouth was wide—an exigency, we might recall, to which Ian Fleming strictly held his female characters, at the risk, I’d always thought, of boring his hero. (“The only problem with beauty,” my father—who unlike me had bisexual leanings—once said, “is sameness.”) What if James Bond suddenly became exasperated by the repetition and turned elsewhere for satisfaction? I’m not the first to wonder that. Of course there’s a difference between being beautiful and being pretty; pretty allows for a greater degree of heterogeneity, and Caroline was textbook pretty, by which I mean features that verge to the sharper rather than the rounder side of things, along with an indefatigable winsomeness, an essential cheer that never approached shrill. And then of course she was young, and petite. So we met at a bar and suddenly we were together and that was that. And that is what was remarkable and unremarkable about this whole period; while the six months of chemo didn’t have the physical effects I’d feared—I lost a bit of hair and a bit of weight, but not much—still, it couldn’t have been a beauty regimen. And yet for some reason, here I was, as they say, no question about it, getting lucky!

Caroline was a dancer with the dancer’s body, tight and compact, too short for ballet but well suited for the slightly but not too ironic take on old-school burlesque shows she had come to New York to produce and perform. This trope—the kid from the provinces dancing her way into the Big Apple—was such hilariously antiquated, fairy-tale stuff that it couldn’t help but be utterly charming. To make ends meet, Caroline found work as a stripper, which eventually led to an even more lucrative day job as a dominatrix at an S&M club in the East Village. Caroline was not the first stripper I’d dated, but I believe she was the first professional dominatrix I’d dated. At this point, I might as well go on the record to say that I’ve never been a fan of strip clubs and actually have never quite understood the idea. They make me feel acutely uncomfortable. Prostitution, while the idea is depressing, and while I’ve never partaken, at least makes sense: desire is consummated. But strip clubs by definition and by law forbid consummation. Sure, they get around this with the loophole of the lap dance, but the lap dance is messy, absurdly overpriced, and, at least to my mind, as unerotic, because as unintimate, as an encounter could possibly be. Other than that, in a strip club, one pays to watch, and only watch. I could understand it as a kind of live pornography, but pornography—not unlike sex, with which it’s closely associated—is best when shared with a partner. And everyone knows that these high-end Wall Street strip clubs are overwhelmingly populated, every night of the week, not by couples but by men, some single, but most in groups. It’s a stereotypical macho excursion, like the steakhouse, the gym, the hunt. You and six or seven of your buddies head over to the strip club and sit around Caroline or some girl from Romania or the Ukraine and everybody gets erections. What’s the point of this? And if big Biff over there gets a lap dance, everybody watches and cheers him on. Why? Why does Biff enjoy this? Is he proving to his colleagues that a beautiful unclad girl gives him an erection? And that if she rubs her clothed ass along his clothed cock he will eventually ejaculate in his pants? Why would Biff’s friends need to be reminded of this fact, and to, in turn, provide to Biff and to themselves irrefutable proof of their heterosexuality? I’m always reminded of being over at a friend’s house in high school. I didn’t know the guy well at all. He was some sort of athlete. I have no idea, actually, why I was at his place. It was like a friend of a friend of a friend, one of those. He was watching a porno, and his legs were spread wide, and he was rubbing his erection through his pants, staring at the television. I was, to say the least, uncomfortable. Then I wondered, is my discomfort symptomatic of prudishness, homophobia, repressed homosexuality, or simply a general lack of interest, at best, in another man’s penis? Bingo. I have my own to worry about. I don’t have the time or energy to take on another project. (It’s been noted, too, that football, that least gay of sports, consists of men watching other men dance around in tights and then crumple upon each other, tired and happy.)

Feminists criticize strip clubs for the alleged degradation of women, but in my (admittedly paltry) experience the women play very little role in the equation at all. Which of course is, in its own way, degrading; but not, I think, in the way the critics mean: they’re thinking of the naked slave at auction, of Gérôme’s
The Slave Market
. Of all the strippers I’ve ever known, in fact, none felt degraded in this sense, although more than a few were somewhat mystified, or bemused, by the fact that they were actually paid to dance around and take off their shirts. (And just hold on—I’m describing a highly circumscribed, rarefied sector of the industry: these are very high-end, exclusive clubs, with sufficient security, etc. In other words, we’re not talking about Eastern Europe. That’s for later.)

I didn’t ask Caroline too much about her stripping experiences because (a) neither of us found it particularly interesting as a subject, (b) I was more curious about her other day job as a dominatrix, and (c) we devoted much of our time to carefully fucking, because after I got the bad news that the six months of chemo did not in fact do the trick, we both were aware that in a matter of weeks I would be entering the hospital with a slight chance of never coming out, and with the certainty that there wouldn’t be much fucking for a while, coming out or not. And I say “carefully” because, like every stripper I’ve ever fucked, coincidence or not, she had hepatitis B, and I had to be careful of that due to my already compromised immune system, which was shortly to become more compromised before being entirely eradicated—the ultimate strip tease, further than even Caroline and the girls went. Even deep kissing can be a little dangerous, so we were careful indeed, even when, after a discussion over
caccia e pepe
on the finer points of Japanese pornography—during which this professional dominatrix savored the irony that she was personally a confirmed submissive—we fucked outside on a SoHo street, her hands gripping the cold metal pipe of scaffolding. That pressing, that pressure, the tightening of the air into one’s ears, the clenching of the stomach muscles, the “let us not lose a moment”—hence on the street, in the cold, I felt the
I need it now
of the addict, the compulsive, the
satyriasic
, the manic; her arms outstretched, head thrown back, her lovely midriff rippling, her lovely ankles pinned together.

Jean-Léon Gérôme,
The Slave Market
, 1867.

Why relate all this? On October 10, 1985, Merv Griffin, on his television talk show, asked his Wisconsinite guest Orson Welles whether he (Welles) would ever write his memoirs. Mr. Griffin confessed that he was curious about Welles’s marriage to the object of his (Griffin’s) youthful sexual fantasies, Rita Hayworth. Welles replied that the idea of writing a kiss-and-tell repelled him. Of course, there was always something old-fashioned about Welles; maybe he was one of those born too late; and indeed, two hours after he told Mr. Griffin he’d never do such a thing, he was dead. Paul Klee, on the other hand—one of my saving graces in the hospital was an old book on Klee, I’ll talk about this later—once inscribed a painting with a list of his sexual conquests. I’ve been trying to find my copy of this, I know I’ve seen it before, I know it’s in my parents’ collection of art books, but I’ve been unable to find it. Klee, who had originally wanted to become a musician, was enamored of Mozart’s opera
Don Giovanni
, the story of Don Juan. A famous recording of this opera—some will say the best, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini—was in my parents’ record collection, which I discovered as a child at about the same time I uncovered the art books. There’s a celebrated scene in the opera called the “catalogue aria” in which Don Juan’s valet, Leporello, goes through a list of his master’s seductions. Mozart and the Rolling Stones were the two musicians I had vastly underrated until I was actually in the hospital, and the title track of the Rolling Stones’ album
Some Girls
is a type of catalogue aria. So why did Klee and Mozart and the Rolling Stones write about all this, while Welles did not? I don’t know. I think one reason I’m dwelling on Caroline is to reflect on the fact that all this tumescent pleasure was squeezed between so much suffering, and that this may not be unusual. Really, if you think about it, a good editor—a real old-timer, a Hollywood pro—could just cut directly from Eve biting into that apple (slightly arching an eyebrow as she catches, with her tongue, a bubble of juice mixed with her saliva) to the final twist on the cross, the expatiation, the inevitable conclusion to sensuality’s vexing irritations. A real editor might tell the director that he can skip all that Act II stuff in the middle where the hero sleeps with a few girls, and somebody tries to seduce him, and there’s a car chase eventually involving a speedboat and a small airplane. Oh and he’s captured at one point, and is tortured, and narrowly escapes.

Titian,
The Flaying of Marsyas
, 1575–76.

The dominatrix industry works pretty much along the lines of the Italian Renaissance: there are studios, there are masters, there are apprentices. (You know, like sometimes you’re at the museum looking at a painting, with unbelievable colors, of Apollo or some such deity and it’s attributed not to, say, Titian, but to the “school of Titian.”) Caroline was an apprentice. When one of the masters decided to give up the big city and move back out West, Caroline took her place, took her clients. Caroline, with her theatrical background, her looks, and her intellectual curiosity, was a natural. Here’s the irony: while Caroline didn’t mind stripping and actually sometimes found it enjoyable, it was the domination gig she found degrading, and she did not attribute this to the fact that she was naturally, as she put it, a bottom. Stripping, in its lack of intimacy, in its status as public performance, was “real.” It was anonymous, and Caroline, in an invisible and protective cage, like Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane, could dance for herself, spend some quality time with herself. She even found it a little self-indulgent, the way some girls splurge at the spa, except stripping is more narcissistic. (On the other hand you’re burning calories.) But the dominatrix/submissive routine, like the therapist/patient face-off, was direct, one-to-one, and not “real” but ritualized: and not ritualized in a good way but in a depressingly self-conscious way. Her masochistic clients were drawn from the same ilk as the strip club habitués; they weren’t in themselves more pathetic but, isolated, appeared so: greyer, maybe; definitely heavier. All or nearly all (I can’t remember what she said, but it might have been all) were married and all were, of course, type As, Wall Streeters, lawyers, balding, heart-attack candidates. Caroline was continually surprised at the enduring effectiveness of the same template, the unvarying rote, all the clichéd trappings, from the tried and true fetish gear, the thigh-high latex stiletto boots and the leather corset, the whip that she’d pinch delicately between her thumb and elegant forefinger, cleverly disguising her lack of enthusiasm as a supremely imperious indifference. Caroline and I discovered that we were both fans of a book called
Le lien
, a startlingly moving memoir by a beautiful twenty-one-year-old French woman, Vanessa Duriès, who was tragically killed in a car accident just months after its publication. It recounts, in unashamed, frank, and sometimes intense detail, her foray into a world of what people refer to as alternative sexuality, and there’s something impressive and brave and even inspiring about it. What depressed Caroline about her dominatrix sessions, and what depressed me, too, when she described them, was that they seemed to speak to the failure of what one would assume the whole idea of “alternative” sexuality was in the first place, what the philosopher Michel Foucault talked about (occasionally overdoing it, but still): sadomasochism as the harnessing of violence; the transformation of that violence into positive energy; reclaiming the passion and the white heat, white light of sexuality, making it personal, individualizing it. Subverting it. Such, at least, were the hopes. That’s what Foucault found so revelatory in San Francisco in the 1970s. But we know how that turned out. Some time later Foucault was claiming that he found sex “boring.” He started writing
The History of Sexuality,
which was in fact a
critique
of the West’s identification of the sexual self with the true self, and while he was writing this, he died of AIDS. Every now and then I picture Caroline hearing herself shouting to her client about how small his penis was, and hearing herself doing her best to pretend she hadn’t yelled this to the same guy at the same point of the same routine for thirty sessions now; or Caroline watching herself pretend to linger over the choice of the riding crop or the cat-o’-nine-tails, all the while calculating how many dollars she was making per minute, how many cents per second, and (crack!) what this would be in (“Thank you, Mistress”) pounds or (“Louder!”) euros.