I had grown up understanding Blackness to be a visual marker of “cool” and “tough,” particularly when set up in opposition to a suburban kind of Caucasian lifestyle. But the problem here was that Bert and Darth didn’t provide quite as much contrast as one might have hoped. They were being set up as “sex machines,” I supposed, but one look at Bert’s hungry eyes, damp with aging desire, pretty much took the air out of that balloon. I was in charge of a charade, all right, and it was plenty transparent enough to anyone who cared to detect it—though I’m not sure many did.
Hoping to take my mind off my romantic and professional failures, I decided to pay a visit to porno’s version of the public library: the adult video store. My local branch was a sad, fucked-up smut shack named “Stan’s of Hollywood,” down on Third and Western. The energy at Stan’s was foul beyond belief. It was profoundly weird and desperately lonely—but like all porn stores, Stan’s constituted an edifice of epistemology: a tiny berth from which to behold, and perhaps decode, the byzantine history of smut.
And make no mistake, Stan’s selection was impressive. There were so many tapes, in fact, so many staggering pyramids of cleaved genitals and crimson buttocks, that if you faltered, even for just a moment, vertigo and giddiness could take over, and you’d be dragged into an avalanche of bad decision making, leaving the store hundreds of dollars poorer. Over the years, I’d learned to be careful. Not all tapes can be trusted.
Entire eras, in fact, are suspect. I’ll come right out and say it: I dislike most pornos from the 1970s. Film buffs can go on all day about the celluloid-laden “Golden Era,” but the truth is, 99 percent of those movies are garbage, embarrassingly crude follow-ups to the more imaginative and better-shot exploitation films that preceded them. Even standout efforts like the Mitchell Brothers’ Behind the Green Door and Radley Metzger’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven feel like they’ve been written in a single afternoon by some halfsmart fourteen-year-old boy. And not that it especially matters, but the wank factor on those films is so low that it’s almost not worth mentioning.
Of course, the films that followed them were no more skillfully conceived; if anything, their scripts were even worse. What’s exceptional about 1980s pornography, though, is the jnusic. Everyone jokes about the “campy” wah-wah of 1970s porn tracks, but that funk-band-in-a-box sound isn’t campy—it’s unlistenable. The 1980s ushered in Video Sex, but it was also the Age of the Synthesizer; we shouldn’t forget that The fuckings of superstars Randy Spears, Tom Byron, and Peter North (and the women! those aggressively coked-up, highly aerobicized, poisonous-silicone-betitted women!) were set to the strangest of keyboard sounds. To me, the retarded computer-generated loopings actually work: complementing videotape’s bleary, vacant resolution to perfection, synth sound created a production value that is lo-fi at its very best. It provided an ambience that underscored the majestic cheapness of pornography—its poverty of connection and hope.
And then the 1990s happened. The ’90s are a problem. When you watch a 1990s porno, you’re getting an up-close-and-personal look at some of the scariest tit jobs ever created. Full-to-bursting, Alien-style false breasts, full of gristle and hard-packed meat, mark their hosts like a disfiguring tribal brand. And though it hardly seems possible, the men from that era are even scarier. Thong tans and long Fabio hair were the flavor of the day, creating a douchebag panache that, combined with blank, hungry eyes, quietly implied, “I’m so blitzed on stolen meds and Mexican steroids that all I want to do is get naked in front of a huge shoulder cam and do whatever the fuck I’m told.” Performers in the ’90s would do absolutely anything—as evidenced in Leisure Time Entertainment’s Kinky as They Cum #2, wherein a succession of rat-haired degenerates strap mammoth prosthetic wieners to their groins to simulate a host of bizarre sex enactments. But Kinky isn’t the only flick where you witness this kind of deviant pantomime: a rash of terrifying penis-replicant movies were released in near-simultaneous succession in the spring of 1993 by several unrelated companies, and the occurrence was too peculiar to chalk up to mere chance, or even drug-induced collective dementia. By the later part of the decade, thankfully, nonsense of this kind was almost unheard of, and many actresses had begun to move back toward the “natural” look, but the damage had been done.
Now we had arrived in the New Millennium. And I was carrying the torch. It was an awesome responsibility. For the first time, I took a careful look at the hapless hordes of men who surrounded me, shuffling mutely among the aisles, whirling adrift in their angry, psychic energy. They deserved something better than this. They needed me.
And yet—what could I really do for them? Even at my best, I couldn’t give them what they really wanted: a loving relationship. My heart fell, momentarily, for I was in that same boat, too. Oh, Sex Shop Faithfuclass="underline" pathetic and weak, we might not be making eye contact, but in some strange, unspoken way, we are a team, and I think we all know it. Every one of us has admitted, just by walking through that door, just by agreeing to stay awhile, that we simply cant get with the program. That we have dreamed, more than once, of a world in which women existed only as props.
Maybe we were scared of real women. Perhaps we were just frustrated. As we passed one another in the aisles, eyes fixed firmly on the racks, I could sense the ire and the silent arousal of the men around me. It sounds weird, but I felt reassured by the understanding that we were equally confused, equally burdened by the weight of conflicted emotions. We wanted to lavish whispered praises and gentle sensuality on sweet, graceful women—then we wanted to fuck them in half, call them whores, and make them disappear.
I wandered for a while. Eventually I came across a beaten copy of Naughty Little Nymphos. Kate’s tape. It was a weak consolation, but it was something. I paid my $29.99 and got the hell out of there.
TWELVE
While I was growing up, my psychoanalyst dad had his office at home.
Originally a teacher by trade, my father fell in love with the couch during the mid-1970s. Gradually, he came to the decision that he wanted to dedicate his life to the practice of psychoanalysis, so he downsized expectations at his first job and went to night school for half a decade. He added the office on to our house in 1983. A full-time home practice began in 1985. My most vivid childhood memories include the continual stream of unfamiliar cars that rumbled up our gravel driveway every afternoon, punctuating my solo games of Wiffle ball, interrupting confidential conversations with my dog.
Back then, I’d wave and say hello, never feeling there was anything strange about the situation. Innocent and happy, I played child-host to a steady procession of men and women who were paying to engage in expensive psychotherapeutic wrangles with my dad in his soundproofed office.
But damn if, looking back, I don’t feel a bit used. The sight of the doctor’s little boy had undoubtedly served as a sort of trigger: a prompt, a key to unlocking some parent-child memory of their own. Unwittingly, I’d positioned myself as an emotional pawn, a jumping-off point for an hour of probing therapy. I’d been duped, and what’s more, I’d never been properly compensated. So if I’d set out to torture my folks just a tad with my new profession, was I not merely taking a little of the back pay rightfully owed to me?