39
BEING BANNED WAS MY GREATEST FEAR. THERE WERE SIGNS that threatened it. One said “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.” Another, posted in both hallways said, “Customers who fail to follow the rules will be banned from the premises.” Among the listed prohibitions were lewd behavior and loitering, which was essentially a list of the only two things I did there. I couldn’t guess how I would end up getting banned — I was always on my best behavior — but I had a feeling it would happen eventually.
For most my life, I’ve had a similar horror that I might somehow end up in prison by a freak accident or misunderstanding. I’m not certain about the fear’s precise origin, but I have a feeling it might have been coincident with the original airing of the prison-centered HBO series, Oz. I was 18 the year it premiered. Though I was finally able to buy cigarettes legally and to vote, I was preoccupied by the realization that, whatever might happen, there was no longer any possibility that I would be tried as a minor or find myself in juvie. Whatever I might do, however dumb with inexperience I was, the justice system saw me as fully formed.
A girl with whom I worked briefly in my early twenties once broke down and confided that if she was behaving strangely it was because her brother had recently been released from prison and had moved into her tiny apartment, bringing with him an incredible variety of problems. He’d been raped in the penitentiary and was HIV positive now, she said. She also explained that she did his laundry, and that he routinely experienced heavy anal bleeding. She wore rubber gloves to handle his clothes. I was so chilled I could barely remain composed, let alone comfort her. After that day, the subject of her brother was never raised again, though I thought and wondered about it all the time.
The character in Oz with whom I identified was a buttoned-up attorney imprisoned for driving drunk and killing a young girl on a bicycle. He was — as I would be — a poor candidate for prison life. In the first season, he’s raped and made the property of his cellmate, the head of the Aryan Nation in the prison, who tattoos a swastika on the attorney’s ass. As the series progresses the attorney undergoes a transformation. In a final-straw moment, he bites the tip off of a would-be rapist’s penis, a sequence that I found especially powerful and shocking, given that penises were the primary reason I was watching Oz at all. It was arguably the premier place to view naked men for a few years in the late 1990s.
I’m sure if anyone ever bothered to do a survey of the gay population, it would be confirmed that a large percentage of Oz’s viewership was tuning in thanks to a different type of penal fascination. Never was there an episode without a shower scene, and there was always plenty of gay sex, both consensual and nonconsensual. During its original run, when I was still deeply in the closet, even to myself, I wondered if the title was a reference to the famous collective homosexual fixation on Judy Garland and The Wizard Oz, from which the euphemism “friend of Dorothy” originated.
I am sometimes in awe of all that I have been exposed to culturally that I never would have discovered if not for the pursuit of sex or sexual gratification. I think of all the movies I watched when I was young simply because I thought I might glimpse a nude body. I was like one of those men in the 1960s and 1970s watching Swedish films for the breasts and bush, who meanwhile were inadvertently absorbing Ingmar Bergman’s entire filmography and being confronted with his ideas about God’s silence in a random universe. Or watching the I Am Curious films and experiencing the disintegration of traditional editing and story structure just to see some sex and nudity. No doubt, countless intellectuals were born in those theater seats nursing hard-ons and accidentally becoming smarter.
Maybe Edgar Wallace was wrong when he described an intellectual as “someone who has found something more interesting than sex.” Maybe an intellectual is someone who, while in pursuit of sex, happens upon something to fill the time he couldn’t manage to fill with sex.
I must have been exposed to at least some great art in the search for sexual gratification Porky’s? Emmanuelle? Caligula? Cruising? I don’t know what might qualify. I remember having a whispered conversation with a guy at the arcade after a particularly intimate and fun encounter. He said I should read Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and I did, wishing very much to believe, as Pinker postulates, that mankind is improving.
40
THERE WAS A HARLEY-DAVIDSON MOTORCYCLE PARKED BY the door when I pulled into the lot, and I got the idea that I had to connect with its owner. He was easy enough to spot once I was inside. It’s never a mystery with those guys. They’re all such brand junkies. Everything Harley-Davidson. The whole basis of the culture is supposed to be this anti-corporate rebellion and free-spirited journeying out into the world of adventure and unpredictability, but these guys are absolute slaves to the brand name. All of their clothes say Harley-Davidson on them somewhere. Their credit cards, wallets, baby clothes, teddy bears, coffee mugs, shot glasses, Christmas ornaments, their pocketknives, pencils and pens. It’s not sufficient that everyone in the family is labeled, they must be tagged from head to toe in apparel sanctioned and produced by Harley-Davidson, Inc. No other adult fashion phenomenon rivals it.
The part that gets to me most is that the whole thing suggests a tremendous amount of disposable income, which flies in the face of the working man image of motorcycle culture I had growing up, in particular as portrayed in the 1985 based-on-a-true-story film Mask, starring Eric Stoltz as Rocky Dennis, a teenager afflicted with Craniodiaphyseal Dysplasia, a disorder that made his skull grow in unusual ways, so that his head was enormous and oddly shaped. In the film, Cher plays his mother, a biker chick surrounded by her biker friends. Outsiders themselves, Cher’s gang of biker friends serves as an unconventional family for Rocky, accepting him without reservation despite his radical deformity. The same movie could never be made today. The guys with Harleys would be weekend warrior types in the highest tax brackets. They might attend a benefit for Rocky, but would never become a surrogate family to him or even otherwise acknowledge his existence.
The Harley guy at the arcade was mid-forties, relatively fit, short hair. He looked like the kind of guy who might hold season tickets to his college football team, who drives an expensive pickup that he washes obsessively when he isn’t on his bike. He was wearing a Harley t-shirt, naturally. When I found him among the racks of movies in the store and asked the time, he checked his Harley-Davidson wristwatch. He was actually a little too classically good-looking to be my type, but he was close enough. We went to the hallway and found a booth. He touched me a bit and I touched him. It was always an uncertain moment. No one knows where things are going at first. I could tell he wasn’t getting what he wanted.
“To be honest,” he said, “I just came out here to get a blow job. Would you mind?”