Sam Benjamin
American Gangbang: A Love Story
“One of the sexiest books of the year.”
—San Francisco Bay Guardian
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For my family, who stood by me loyally — no matter what
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ONE
Once upon a time, I was twenty-two and fresh out of college, with a heart young and open and free, and I had but one dream: to move to California.
My father seemed rather unwilling to grasp this concept. “Are we really that bad? You can’t even consider staying on the east coast?”
“David, calm down.” My mom nodded at me apologetically. “He really doesn’t mind the idea so much.”
“I don’t like New York,” I said. “In fact, I hate New York. I can’t even stand to be there for two days. You know that.”
“I have never met anyone who honestly hates New York. It just doesn’t happen very often. Quite likely you are the only Jewish person in the whole world who hates New York.”
It was hard to win an argument with my dad—being a psychoanalyst, he did this kind of thing for a living—but in this case, I didn’t have to win. All I had to do was leave. So I did. I took my graduation money and I bought a 1980 diesel Volvo,vind I drove it to California. To a place called Santa Cruz.
A funky ad tacked up on a health food store bulletin board led me straight to a two-man bungalow on the east side of town, inhabited by a forty-year-old vegan named Periwinkle. He was a spiritual gardener hailing from Berkeley, California, with an enormous experimental music collection, impeccable aesthetic taste, and a passion for social justice. He also had about twelve cents in the bank. Periwinkle refused to buy any new articles of clothing, a policy that extended to underwear.
“You can find great underwear at the Salvation Army,” he scoffed. “There are too many wonderful pairs of underwear out there in the world today to justify spending seven dollars on new ones.”
Periwinkle was forever out in the front yard, laboring with grand enthusiasm and perfectionist fervor on his small, beautiful garden, when he really should have been working at someone else’s place, for money.
“I don’t care, Sam, that’s the thing,” he explained to me. “I’m so happy gardening—so much happier than I used to be. Do you know what I used to do?”
“No,” I said. “What?”
“I used to be a traveling salesman'. I’m dead serious. I’d go from town to town, selling life insurance policies for some company that I’d never even visited, making tons of money, flushing it all down the drain. It’s incredible — incredible that it took me so long to wake up. Incredible that I finally did wake up.”
One evening, Periwinkle and I rocked back and forth in a salvaged chair on our tiny front porch, listening to the Pacific Ocean. “Tell me, Sam,” Periwinkle said, “what really motivates you?”
“Ah ...” I hesitated, hoping to come up with an answer that would suitably impress my new friend. “Civil libertarianism?”
“I would have guessed girls,” Periwinkle said, smiling.
“Well, that’s probably a little closer to the truth,” I admitted.
“Art’s really my bag, though.”
“Art!” Periwinkle said, approvingly. “How’d you get into that?”
“College. It was my major.”
“Very cool. What’s your medium?”
“Well, I used to be into comics. But I was pretty terrible at drawing, as it turned out. So then I tried writing short stories. But that got boring. It was like, just me and my computer, you know?”
“Sure,” Periwinkle said, taking on his bowl. Like most other Cruzians, Periwinkle had a real fondness for marijuana, but the difference was, he smoked leaf. No buds: just leaf. An eighth of chopped marijuana leaf went for around ten bucks in those days. He was dirt poor, Periwinkle, but he really loved to smoke. All the time.
“And now?”
“Well, now, nothing, I guess. I’m still trying to figure out what I’m good at.”
“You know what I like?” Peri said, the weed sparking his enthusiasm. “You know what I think is art? Cable access. That stuff is brilliant! We had a station in Berkeley when I was growing up.”
“Well, sure, cable access is cool.”
“Do you want to start your own show, then?” Periwinkle asked, hopefully. “Santa Cruz could use a really smart, strange cable access show.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I would make much money at it.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Periwinkle said, eyeing me distrustfully. “No one makes money from cable access television.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Consider it. Follow your passion.” He bit off the last word with surprising spitefulness, as if he’d spent a regrettably long stretch of his own life doing just the opposite.
The truth is, I wanted to be an artist. I wanted sit bad. Precisely how I was to accomplish this was unclear, since I was not proficient at drawing, painting, sculpting, or any other artistic pursuit; nonetheless, art is what I had my sights set on. Thank God for postmodernism.
My alma mater, Brown—like most American liberal arts institutions operating in the latter part of the twentieth century—had adopted the postmodern way of thought as a virtual religion. The upshot was that you no longer had to be able to draw to be good at art. Take, for instance, Conceptual Art: Sherrie Levine photographed other people’s photographs. No skill needed there—just a good idea. Piero Manzoni sold his own breath (in balloons). Robert Rauschenberg erased a Willem de Kooning drawing. And how about Found Art? What else was there to say about Found Art besides acknowledgment of its basic genius? You found a piece of crap on the street and called it Art. Yes.
Goofy-ass Video Art, for instance, was one of the greatest things Pd ever seen. In my History of Contemporary Art class, I’d watched a guy named Chris Burden purchase ad time on a Los Angeles station, then run a freakish, disturbing thirty-second clip that showed him dragging his naked body through piles of crushed glass. Inspired, I decided to give Video Art a whirl myself. Using the postmodern technique known as “recontexualization,” I simply “re-presented” an old videotape of the 1983 Miss Teen USA Pageant to my class. I admit, I did so with some trepidation: my peers could become intellectual bullies at the drop of a hat, especially amid impassioned classroom critiques. Best friends had cut each other to ribbons over minor cultural missteps in the past. But, to my delight, my classmates adored the bold move.
Clearly, I had found a formula. I began to run with it. For my next project, I took a mysterious German porn flick that I’d found in a sad New York City smut shop and completely reedited it, inserting English subtitles, removing every trace of sex. What remained was an unfunny, cheaply produced, highly degraded specimen of subcinematic dogshit. A classmate declared that while watching, you were confronted by the absence of porn. Inside, I beamed.
From that moment on, there was no question in my mind. I could go pro; I could use my brain to make a buck. It was just a matter of figuring out how.
It was a slow month in Santa Cruz. I haunted the local cafes, sadeyed, pouring dark coffee down my throat, waiting for some sort of inspiration. But nothing was coming, and I was floundering. When my twenty-third birthday rolled around, I decided to take advantage of the occasion. I headed out on the town for a night of debauchery.
There was a downtown bar that I’d had my eye on for some time—the Asti. A lot of mean boozers hung out there, which didn’t bode well for me, but the only known pub alternatives were the Drop Inn, which was equally full of dangerous shitheads, and Rosie McCann’s, a pseudo-Irish joint full of assholes watching ESPN. But none of that mattered to me that night. It was my birthday, and I couldn’t stand the idea of spending it alone. So I headed for the Asti.