The film about Josephine Mutzenbacher would be shot on location in Vienna. The director was Jerry Rheinauer, the Cecil B. DeMille of pornography. The article referred to her, Eve LeSage, as the Grace Kelly of porn; it was a universe of derivatives, of quasi-artists trying to gain status through references to real artists, to other stars who had shone without the rancidness of smut.
I was dressed too warmly, the sun was scorching now. This was not a place where one could do without sunglasses. The light was too bright, it made my eyes water. Through the blur of tears, my gaze fell on a review in the Must See Art section: a new exhibition, Abgrund, by Bodo Schultz, at the Steinson & Freeler Gallery.
Bewildered, I took the paper inside and read the article there. In an exclusive move, Bodo Schultz’s agent has offered the gallery new work. The art critic describes what he has seen: a film made by Schultz, ragged and intense. Schultz leads us along the brink of an Abgrund, a chasm of his own making, not the chasm of the soul but a physical one, somewhere in the jungles of Panama. He himself does not appear on camera, except for one moment; the camera is fixed on a single point, we see a man approaching and then, behind his back, there is a huge explosion. The camera is knocked over by the shockwave; a few moments later someone picks it up, it’s still running, the camera’s eye slides across a man’s torso, his face: Schultz. The charge has gone off prematurely. A slow, silent film, for the rest; each time Schultz launched into his poisoned litanies, the viewer was shocked. It was a video report of his project in the jungle — he was destroying a mountain. A mountain. The critic was impressed by the ruthlessness, praised him as a man of extreme consistency. A ‘must-see’, in other words.
There was more of Schultz’s work on display at Steinson & Freeler, but that movie, that apparently was what it was all about.
I had found information about my father on the Internet, at the terminal in Alburgh’s little library, articles about the moral implications of his work, but nothing that had interested me much at the time. To me he was the man from the postcard, Mediohombre, the one-armed, the one-legged. I often had the feeling he could see me.
I walked back to the hotel along broad avenues. The gallery was open from eleven to six, and closed on Sunday. La Cienega Boulevard, I had to find out where that was.
‘Where were you?’ my mother asked. ‘You mustn’t just go away without telling me where you are.’
We were in the Ocean and Vine restaurant at the Loews. I put the LA Weekly on the table, with her picture facing down.
‘They’re exhausting, interviews,’ she said of her own accord.
She waved her hand to dismiss the world.
‘Rollo hired a suite on the top floor. I think there must have been ten interviews in all. I barely had time to eat breakfast.’
She stuck a porcelain spoon into her decapitated egg, the soft yolk welled up, gleaming like an abscess. A little egg white was clinging to her lower lip. The droll voice of our biology teacher, Mr. Bonham Carter, when we stopped beside the Amorphophallus titanium during our tour of the botanical gardens at Cambridge: Associations drawn at your own risk.
The toast crackled between her teeth.
‘This is a lovely hotel,’ she said.
‘Who’s paying for all of this? It’s insanely expensive here.’
Her glance shot back and forth between the egg and me; she was trying to hide her uneasiness, to decide what she could tell me and what she couldn’t.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. .’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘it’s already in print somewhere.’
I turned over the magazine and found the review of the exhibition. Jabbed at it with my finger. She looked, her head tilted slightly in order to read it better.
‘Aha,’ she said, leaning back in her chair.
‘Don’t you want to read it?’
‘Tell me what it says. I forgot my glasses.’
‘That’s weird,’ I said.
‘Well?’
I read aloud to her. She sat there, motionless. She didn’t touch her brunch after that. And when I was finished, ‘That man is becoming more deranged all the time.’
She flagged down a waitress.
‘Would you like something else, Ludwig?’
I passed.
‘Everything on the bill of room 304, please.’
She had no desire to go to the gallery. In the elevator she said, ‘That man destroys everything he touches.’
‘But aren’t you curious? I bet you’re dying of curiosity.’
‘Let him pay his back alimony first.’
La Cienega Boulevard was too far to walk now, I saw on the city map I’d bought that afternoon. I would have to wait until tomorrow. I hung around a bit on Main Street and was amazed by the number of holistic services on offer there. I seemed to have stumbled upon a marketplace of karma-yoga, Ayurvedic consumer goods and glass capsules filled with ionized water to help against jetlag, hangovers and all sorts of radiation, for sixteen dollars and fifty cents apiece. From all those little shops wafted the odor of incense and aromatic oils. The hippie dream had become an industry, supported by vegan surfers and Buddhists wearing flip-flops. I hissed fuck off at a girl who tried to press on me a flyer announcing a meeting with Yogi Amrit-something-or-other. Experience love beyond words, I read in passing.
It was easy to see why these surroundings and this climate were so suited to the sort of ironclad hedonism expressed so abundantly here — you couldn’t imagine this kind of bullshit in Djibouti or at sub-zero temperatures. It was a delicate lifestyle that could survive only in highly industrialized surroundings where others did the real work, or in artificial biotopes in the Second or Third World that relied on the monoculture of tourism. The hippies’ kids had grown up, this was their world — their egoism seemed even more monstrous than that of their parents.
I realized why my mother felt attracted to the West Coast. For her this was where it had all started, after a disappointing study of classical song at the conservatory in The Hague. She had a nice voice, it had been her diva dream to become a singer. But polyps on her vocal cords and, in the long run, not quite enough talent had been her downfall. In the course of her study they made it clear to her that she would never be more than a middling choir singer. With her boyfriend, she had left for the United States. He, Jelte Boender, was a rocker from Groningen province who wanted to travel Route 66. After two weeks on the road they drove into Los Angeles; the sparkle, the party everyone was talking about. They performed on street corners, he played his guitar, she sang — ‘Nights in White Satin’, ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’; slow, maudlin songs that made his skin crawl but that fit her voice, a bit sing-songish, without much power behind it. One day they saw Richard Burton and Liz Taylor walking down Hollywood Boulevard; she felt the old ambition flare up, the burning scar of the semi-talented. She should be the one walking there, stared upon, untouchable — handing out the occasional autograph like a benediction.
She and Jelte Boender slept at a boarding house in Culver City and lived off the pittance from their busking.