“It doesn’t matter if I like them or not. I watch them, if that’s what you mean. I’m alive, aren’t I?”
Bill tells me he’s an independent filmmaker in addition to a student. He tells me he sees something in me, some kind of charisma or energy.
I inform him that I’m perfectly aware of my raw Benjaminian aura.
Bill wonders if I’d like to star in this docu-porno he wants to make about contemporary college life.
I explain that I really only enjoy pornography in private life, whether I’m involved in it or merely standing on the sidelines. Also, his idea isn’t terribly unique.
Ignoring the latter assertion, Bill tries to convince me that public sex, and the dissemination of public sex, is a good thing.
Uninterested in “good things,” I cut him off and underscore how I’m not passing judgment on pornography and have no moral objection to it. “My concerns are purely subjective. They belong to me alone.”
We discuss what specifically constitutes pornography and the dynamics thereof.
“Surely just having sex in public isn’t pornographic,” Bill remarks. “And yet if other people can see what’s going on, then it becomes pornographic, doesn’t it. Pornography is pornography because of the gaze of the other, isn’t it.”
I want to go back to talking about Hawaii and the Brothers Cazimero. Their song “The Pueo, Tara & Me,” about an owl, really stuck with me. Sometimes it makes me cry if I think about it too much. If I listen to it, I’ll definitely cry. But I don’t want to make a stink about our discussion of pornography. Bill clearly wants to talk about it. As is often the case with people I am not inclined to beat, I allow him to take the discursive reigns and acclimatize to the direction, the speed, the tonality of his interlocution, chiming in at key moments with sighs of affirmation, with engaged modulations, and sometimes I respond outright, but no more than a sentence or two at a time, and after awhile I can tell that Bill is really enjoying himself.
At some point, the professor stops lecturing and just stares blankly at us. So do all of the other students.
I turn to the professor. “Do you harbor fantasies of dismemberment? Do any of you?” I look around the room. Most of the other students look away. The students that don’t — I keep my eyes on them, one at a time, until they look away too.
When I turn back to Bill, he’s gone. I never see him again.
23
Apropos dismemberment. .
My field of interest — although not my field of specialty — is the grotesque. Who isn’t interested in the grotesque? Either it repels you or it attracts you. Either way it interests you.
Thus everybody’s field of interest is the grotesque.
Here are some terms we might associate with it:
Lowly.
Earthly.
Uncanny.
Male bodily fluids.
Zoomorphology.
Kristeva: Abjection. That which is cast off. That which wallows in the dirt like the memory of a dead soul.
Lacan: Crasse!
OED: “Picturesquely irregular. Fantastically absurd.”
Dryden: “An hideous Figure of their Foes they drew, Nor Lines, nor Looks, nor Shades, nor Colours true; And this Grotesque design, expos’d to Publick view.”
Finally, Bakhtin [to a lover]: “I don’t like your mouth. That gaping aperture unnerves me. That wide-open bodily abyss reminds me of your anus. And I prefer your anus. Copulation, defecation, mastication — these perfectly terrific and disgusting enactments constitute the same prenumbra. All of them grope the sordid privates of the beginning and the end of life simultaneously.”
24
My parents come to see me. They supported me during my first voyage dans la lune in graduate school. Naturally they want to see how I’m holding up the second time around.
The first thing they do when they come into my dorm room is turn on all the lights and open all the window curtains. “You need light, son,” my father explains. “We come from light, you know.”
“We come from wombs. Uteri. Uteri are dark. Coffins of flesh and tubes and moisture.”
It’s early. Even the ex-Ph.D.s are asleep. Some of them are in their early 60s. Everybody sort of groans and I snap at them to keep quiet and pull the covers over their heads and lay still. My parents are elderly. This instance of bawdy aggression makes my parents nervous and fitful. I assure them that everything is ok, that my roommates and I have a special relationship.
“For instance,” I explain, “last week I decreed that they couldn’t look me directly in the eyes. If they do, I beat them real good. Sometimes I just put them in the closet for a few hours.” I point at the closet and snap my fingers. The door opens and a head pokes out. I snap my fingers again and the head disappears, the door closes. “In theory I don’t have a problem with my roommates looking at me. It’s the principle of it. Hence our special relationship.”
“I understand,” says Dad.
Mom starts cleaning things up. I order her to stop. “The more you try to dispose of trash in a dorm room, the faster it accumulates.”
“He’s right,” says Dad.
I put on a tie and we go out to eat.
The restaurant is crowded and there’s an agglomeration of townies in the lobby. They just got out of church. Or they’re on their way. The men wear lint-ridden sweater vests that leak crinkled shirttails. The women wear funny hats and cheap mother-of-the-bride uniforms that accentuate the worst parts of their physiques.
I push through the throng, dragging my parents behind me, and confront the hostess. She stands behind a podium like a doe that’s about to be slaughtered. She’s holding a bunch of menus and she doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. I think she’s in my econometrics class. I ask her what the fuck’s going on with all of the people and so forth. She says she doesn’t know and I say, “What the fuck is happening! How much fucking longer do we have to fucking wait! Give me the information! FUUUCK!!!”
“Son,” says Dad, placing a hand on my shoulder.
I feel badly, but that doesn’t change my attitude. Nor does it change this simple human fundament: parents incite adamant regression.
I berate the waitress for awhile. Then the manager or somebody managerial-looking comes out. He apologizes and seats us. On the way to the table, I assure my parents that you got to take the reigns before they’re even tethered to the sleigh. It’s the only way to ensure that things get done the way you want them done.
We sit in a booth. Me on one side, my parents on the other side.
Now the hard part.
Buffet or menu?
I don’t remember what I decide on. Maybe the menu because I don’t go up to the buffet and I end up getting a bunch of food.
During the meal I forget my parents are there.
The book I’m working on right now is harrowing me. It’s all I can think about. I can’t sleep. I can’t study. The flows of my desire shoot in awkward directions.
My thesis is devolving like a Morlock. I don’t know why.
I spread all of my notes across the table and try to figure out what’s wrong as I drink my coffee and eat my poached eggs and my turkey sausage patties and my demitasse of mixed fruit.
“Son,” says Dad.
I look across the table and remember that my parents came to visit. They’re sitting there shoulder-to-shoulder like two wrinkled children who have been sent to the principal’s office. “Oh. I’m sorry, parents. What was I thinking. Let me put this away.”
It takes me about 10 minutes to get all of my papers and things back into my satchel — about half of the time, I gauge, it took me to get everything out. And I must have poured over my notes for a good 30 minutes. I wonder what my parents did while I was working. I lose track of time when I’m working. I don’t think I heard their voices. I’m pretty sure they didn’t have anything to eat. I would have noticed (i.e., remembered) if they slid in and out of the booth a few times to go to the buffet table. I want to ask them, but I’m admittedly embarrassed and I don’t want to call attention to the fact that I forgot about them. As an only child, my cognizance and affections mean everything to my parents. The mere suggestion that I “lost” them — even though they witnessed me “lose” them — would be a demoralizing blow, no matter how I structured my discourse.