Mallory's Camera

AND... Another sexual content TRIGGER WARNING!

At a dinner party I attended recently, I sat next to a man and talked to him about his marriage.

Not the marriage he’s in now – which technically is not a marriage because for whatever reason, he and his partner of 25 years don’t like the idea of same-sex marriage –

“But it has so many tax advantages!” I pointed out.

He rolled his eyes. “I am just totally not into it. And those transgender sex change people! God! They are so irritating. Being gay was so much more fun when it wasn’t mainstream.”

Bob. His name was Bob. And his partner’s name was Bob.

“That must make having sex together a bit like masturbation,” I said.

He hooted. His laugh sounded like a Basenji dog yodel. “Not quite. But I catch your drift.”

In the late 1970s, he’d married a woman, and they’d remained married for close to a decade.

“Did she know?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I was very covert. Still am if it comes to that.”

“Are you still in touch?”

“Oh God, no. No. Last time I heard about her was in the 1990s sometime. She’d had two kids, remarried. I guess she finally got what she wanted.

“I couldn’t stand looking at her anymore let alone having sex with her, so I finally told her: I like men. She cried. She thought it was her fault. She thought she’d done something wrong. As though any of it was about her.” He laughed again.

I wanted to ask him, So how did you manage to have sex with her? But I didn’t. There are limits even to my indiscretion.

###

I thought of Bob yesterday when I heard ______ bullying his little wife Leslie.

“Do you think that Indian restaurant in Rhinebeck is open tonight?” he asked me.

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,” I said. “It’s Friday.”

“What’s the name of the restaurant?” Leslie asked meekly.

“I already told you the name of the restaurant!” ______ said savagely. “Why do I waste my breath telling you anything?”

“I was going to look the hours up,” Leslie said.

“Why don’t you just pretend to listen to me? No one’s asking you to actually listen to me! Just pretend, okay? We’ll get along so much better.”

###

In college, I had a gay boyfriend for a year. Paul Drexler. (Not his real name!) He'd obviously modeled his look after Tab Hunter or Troy Donahue except that his skin was much worse. He was very blond, had narrow blue slits for eyes. He practiced walking a particular way, putting one foot directly in front of another. “I want to move soundlessly, like a cat,” he told me.

I can no longer remember how we hooked up. I know I didn’t like him all that much, but it was very important to me at the time to have a boyfriend.

I knew all about same sex attraction. I’d gone to an all girls high school, after all, and my best friends and I would have sleepover dates, which would evolve into little orgies after the parents had gone to bed as we kissed, suckled, petted, rubbed and played. We had to know what we’d be expected to do when we finally got to practice on boys, we told ourselves.

But it would never have dawned on me in a million years that same sex attraction was something that males would feel for other males. Male bodies were just so ugly. Ugh! That penis thing, that flesh-colored, somehow unfinished-looking prong. The weird, rubbery texture of their skin. The sweaty socks smell of their genitals, and that spoiled beef stink of their armpits.

Who could possibly be attracted to men?

I knew you had to fake it – because not to fake it was to enter a pariahdom whose awfulness was impossible to imagine. You’d have to cut your hair really short! You’d have to stop wearing eyeliner and lipstick! You’d have to gain a lot of weight, start wearing lumberjack shirts, learn to roll your own cigarettes and burn them right down to the nub, holding them between your thumb and index finger. It would be awful.

###

Since those days, I’ve developed a considerable affection for the male body – particularly that V-shaped muscle, the Adonis belt, the external oblique musculature that runs along the hips in men with low body fat who work out a lot.

But there’s no denying that this is an acquired taste – kind of like moldy cheese, black coffee, or kimchi.

I do tend to prefer men emotionally. They’re a lot more straightforward and don’t seem to be as much into that social tracking that generally seems to me to be a complete waste of time. Men and women are both into power, but men are more forthright about it – which is refreshing – while women jockey for dominance through this extensive scrim of game-playing that I find trivial and exhausting.

So after I got through my promiscuous fuck-anything-that-walks stage, I found myself gravitating mostly toward men. For the emotional component.

###

But I digress. Back to Paul. He was hyper-critical of me. Always saying mean things. Criticizing my appearance, my behavior. The only reason his behavior didn’t sink to the level of bullying is that I didn’t actually like him all that much, so it didn’t really matter to me what he thought. I knew perfectly well that he had his own reason for being in a relationship with me just as I had my reason for being in a relationship with him. I didn’t really care what his reason was.

We dropped a lot of acid together. One night, we dropped acid, built a fire, and put Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. We tried to make love, but it was clear that he really wasn’t into it.

Was it then that we had The Conversation?

I don’t know because I don’t actually remember The Conversation.

But The Conversation must have taken place because a year or so later, long after we’d broken off – did he break up with me, or did I break up with him? I really don’t remember – I got a phone call from him: He wanted to meet.

By then, I’d started modeling. I was hot shit. An objet of infinite désir. My memories of Paul were not fond. I thought he was a jerk.

“Please,” he said. “It’s very important.”

So, I agreed to meet him.

He had just gotten a letter from the draft board informing him that he was due to report on such-and-such a date. This was during the Vietnam War. He was terrified.

“I was hoping you’d write a letter for me –“

“Me?” I said. “Whatever for?”

“Well,” he said, looking down at his fingers. “I'm a homosexual. You were the one who told me…”

“Told you what?”

“That I liked men,” he said, looking up. His slitted blue eyes were open wide for once.

“I did?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And I can get a draft deferment for that. You told me that I liked men and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with liking men. I owe you a lot.”

I didn’t remember telling him anything of the sort.

I told him I’d consider his request and got up to leave shortly thereafter.

Fuck Paul Drexler, I thought.

I didn’t write him his letter.

I have no idea what happened to him.

###

I think of Paul sometimes when I talk to ______. It’s so obvious to me what ______’s true predilections are. Can it possibly be a secret to him? How could it be?

And I think, Right. LDS Church; the strong, strong tie of family going back hundreds of years – because they’re all into genealogy. Making that break seems impossible to him. Being that disappointment. Easier to sit on it. Easier to repress. Easier to hope that it buries itself.

But what does it bury itself in?

And in the meantime, I feel frightfully sorry for Leslie. She’s so young. Barely 21. She can’t possibly know – she has nothing to compare it with. And when she finds out, she’s going to blame herself: I did this to him. It’s my fault.

Release of that Bill Cosby deposition is making me wonder just how much of the much-vaunted Boomer “sexual revolution” of the late 60s and 70s would be described as “rape culture” today.

The line between seduction and rape wasn’t clearly patrolled in those days. Don’t be so uptight, men were constantly scolding reluctant women. Here. Have some of this – ludes, grass, wine, acid, whatever. It’ll help you shed those bourgeois inhibitions.

“Bourgeois inhibitions” being a code word for, No, I really don’t feel like fucking you.

Of course, Cosby went well over even this line by dispensing with the offer or lying about the offer – This is Benadryl! For your allergies! Ri-i-i-i-ght. Some serious psychopathology at work there. Who knew Dr. Huxtable was such a serious student of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice?

Still. The basic modus operandus – Relax! Here – have some drugs! – was pretty much par for the course back then in the circles I ran in whether they were the political activist circles at UCB or the club circles in the back of Max’s Kansas City.

Ironically, this was the time when feminism was taking off.

###

Of course, I was a particularly vulnerable young woman. Raised by a woman with a severe borderline personality disorder. Utterly invisible, a piece of baggage in the back of this woman’s life, until suddenly, at the age of 16, I was gifted with a superpower – supernatural beauty! Helen of Troy was jealous. I had PREY written my forehead in letters that were invisible to me but clearly visible to anyone who’d ever written away to Playboy or Penthouse for those magic glasses. My experiences may not have been typical. I craved attention, and sex was a surefire way of getting attention.

Still…

###

I had to walk out of Godfather II. I’d been taken to see it by a young investment broker in New York, handsome enough, personable enough, but Not My Type so I had no interest in dating him let alone sleeping with him. But he had been very, very persistent. So I thought, I’ll go out with him this once. What harm can it do?

There was this scene in the movie…

A young hooker had just been killed by a Senator. He’d gone berserk while having sex, smashed in her head. And the Mafia guy called in to fix the situation soothed the Senator, “It’s gonna be okay. She has no family.”

Those words pierced me to the very bottom of my soul. She has no family. No one to protect her. No one to care about her. All she was was a sexual commodity.

I had no real family either.

I got up at that point and walked out.

The handsome young investment banker followed. He was furious. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” he hissed when we were back in his Porsche.

Which I remember thinking was a bizarre thing to say. First because he didn’t ask me why I’d gotten up and left, and second because he assumed there would be other times.

Then he reached over, grabbed me by the neck, thrust his face against mine and stuck his tongue down my throat.

I broke away and slapped him. Hard.

He grabbed the top of my dress and ripped it.

I went straight for his eyes with two fingers.

I’m still not sure how I had the presence of mind to do that. This was at the height of my modeling career when I was down to about 120 pounds and looked like an Auschwitz camp counselor.

(A couple of years later, I was deep into Tai Kwon Do. With my Tai Kwon Do skills, I actually managed to roundhouse kick a guy in the face when he was trying to grab my purse once. I broke his nose.)

But anyway, I got out of the investment banker’s car, and it was weird because I didn’t even feel all that upset. This was just something else that had happened. I figured out how to rearrange the torn dress so I could subway back to the apartment on West End Avenue I crashed at when I was modeling in New York with seven other girls.

Kiki noticed the rip, asked me about it. I told her.

Kiki made a face. “Oh, one of those,” she said. Then her face brightened. “Hey, you wanna get high?”

And that was that.

I still haven’t seen Godfather II to this day.

Life's a bitch and then you die
That's why we get high, cause you never know when you're gonna go
Life's a bitch and then you die
That's why we puff lye, cause you never know when you're gonna go

At the end of Andrea Arnold’s movie Fish Tank, there’s an extraordinary scene in which three women dance together to Nas’s Genius.

The three women – a monstrously self-absorbed woman and her two damaged daughters – have been out of sync for the entire movie, and as you watch them slowly catch each others’ rhythms, begin mirroring each others’ moves, you realize you are witnessing the vicious cycle of their lives in microcosm, a karmic cycle of neglect never-ending. The mother is doomed; her cruelty and carelessness ensures that both her daughters are doomed. No beneficent, whimsical Fate is waiting in the wings to punk these characters with a happy Disney ending.

Watching this scene, the hairs on the back of my neck literally stood up.

It is a great, great, great cinematic moment.

The movie is narrated from the point of view of the eldest daughter Mia, a tough 15-year-old who’s just been expelled from school and dreams of becoming a dancer.

The family lives in a council flat somewhere in England. I’d always – rather stupidly, I’m sure – imagined “council flats” to look like the snug collier cottages in D.H. Lawrence novels, but no, they’re vertical tombs, squalid cement block towers that look like the worst housing projects in the South Bronx or Long Island City except in a far more suburban landscape where there’s never enough light for the background and the foreground to remain in focus at the same time.

Mia is abrasive, foul-mouthed, and mulish. I never developed the slightest affection for her even though she is so firmly embedded in the film’s camera work, but it is impossible not to recognize that her story is the starkest kind of tragedy.

Her mother has a new boyfriend, Connor – played by the always intriguing Michael Fassbinder – and insofar as the film has a plot at all, the plot involves Connor’s seduction and abandonment of Mia – and Mia’s subsequent revenge.

The seduction is dispatched with a minimum of foreplay – which felt just about right given what I remember from the sexual habits of several British guys I fucked in my long-ago youth – and in the midst of it, Connor asks breathily, “My cock is bigger than your worthless little boyfriend’s, isn’t it?” (Or words to that effect.) And this felt just about right, too, across a broader spectrum of international sexual experiences.

I mean, I get it! What gets you off is what gets you off, and there’s no real arguing with hard-wiring. Still. Why are men so obsessed with the size of their dicks? Is this some kind of biological thing? If you could decode what passes for thought in a dog’s mind during sexual congress, would you also find the equivalent of, It’s big, bitch! Isn’t it? Take it!

Trust me, you will never find a woman in the throes of sexual ecstasy, throwing back her head and crowing, “My clit. Look at how huge it is!”

Anyhoo…

Fish Tank is apparently an example of “kitchen sink realism,” a term that is mostly used to describe gritty British black-and-whiters like Look Back In Anger and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, made in the early 1960s, although I think it’s also applied to contemporary British filmmakers like Mike Leigh. The first Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, could actually be seen as an exercise in kitchen sink realism that turned the genre on its head. (Richard Lester was a most brilliant and, for the most part, under-appreciated director.)

Arnold here does her own transformative magic by turning the protagonist from an angry young man into an angry young woman.

Very interesting film and well worth watching.