As we ate our croissants and drank a new thing in London, caffe lattes, Karen would fill her notebook with mad ideas for game shows, suitable for breakfast and daytime TV, which had just started. At that time daytime was a huge vacant space, soon to become even more vacant. Programmes were beginning to be made quickly and cheaply; cameras got smaller, and recording tape was of better quality. The contents were cut-price too, since the participants were not movie or even TV stars but “real” people discovered by researchers, who could become enviable just by appearing on TV. To me it sounded like music halclass="underline" television versions of the mad variety shows my grandparents used to take Miriam and me to on our holidays. At the end of the pier at the seaside, we’d watch jugglers, knife throwers and fat comedians telling risqué jokes. After, we’d scoff “hot sandwiches in gravy.”
For me all this was an amusement, but for Karen it was a kind of calling, an opportunity that few people realised was there. I guess I realised the extent of her cultural terrorism when I suggested we might go to see a film which happened to be subtitled. “No-never!” she cried. “Not a foreign film you have to read! Are they in slow motion? Can’t you feel yourself ageing?”
When I recommended the theatre or a gallery, it wasn’t that she refused to go; it was not that attending such things made her feet ache-which wouldn’t have surprised me, as she wore stilettos most of the time: even her slippers were four inches from the ground. It was that she considered art to be showing off, empty, worthless, an insult to the public, and if subsidised, a waste of public money. “Tchaikovsky’s Crime and Punishment, Chekhov’s Last Symphony-yuck, fuck, muck!”
As a Thatcherite, she wanted to be rid of it. Here, at “the end of history,” the television ruling class, the old sensitive if not effete Oxbridge mob along with the monarchy and the Church, would be replaced by “the people,” by which she seemed to mean the ignorant and wildly coarse. I wasn’t the only one killing fathers. In the 60s and 70s, there was a cult of it, as patriarchy and the phallus were attacked. And what did we end up with, at the end of that iconoclastic decade? Thatcher: a fate worse than a man.
Now, of course, we live in Thatcher’s psyche if not her anus, in the world she made, of competition, consumerism, celebrity and guilt’s bastard son, charity: bingeing and debt. But then, these views were a novelty.
At least, with Karen, I learned to make no distinction between high and low art. I guess I’d been something of a snob before, wondering whether it was healthy to be so moved by Roy Orbison and Dusty Springfield. But Karen unintentionally showed me the futility of such distinctions.
Not that I could interest Karen much in what I was doing; although she left me alone to study, she considered analysis “unconvincing” as a profession, as though I’d decided to become an astral channeller or soothsayer. I realised this not only when she had difficulty-and showed considerable reluctance, if not embarrassment-in explaining to people what it was I did but also when she decided, without asking me, that I’d be better off as a TV presenter.
There were few black or brown faces on TV; my fate was to correct this imbalance. I informed her it was hopeless, but she insisted I endure two auditions for the job of presenter on a new TV media show entitled Television/Television.
In front of a camera and wearing a borrowed Armani jacket, I had to sit at a desk (on a cushion, as it happened, being little) or on the desk itself. Then I would be instructed to walk around this desk, while saying repeatedly, “Hallo, good evening and welcome to Television/Television. Tonight we have an exclusive interview with Sviatoslav Jarmusch, who claims that digitalisation is the future of this medium. To discuss this, we have in the studio…”
I guess I could have done it, and I’d be someone recognisable in TV now, but I fucked it up beautifully. I was bafflingly disappointing, like someone who’d never spoken before.
It wasn’t, however, the end of my media career. Karen and I had talked of making porno films to earn money: her producing, me directing, neither of us starring. But she knew enough about the media to realise making such films took too much time; it wasn’t a part-time job. It was less of a palaver to write the stuff. I had bought a fast electric typewriter-with a “golf ball,” which flew madly about like a bird caught in a chimney-and I liked writing. After becoming a murderer, was there nothing I considered beyond my talents?
At first I sent in stories to magazines at the low end of the market. When they were published, the editors started asking me to write more. Initially it was fun, trying to organise the story, the rise and fall of which represented coitus itself. I learned to write them quickly.
There’s nothing more conventional than the sly prophylactic of pornography, with the end a foregone conclusion. Anna Freud, the eternal virgin, said that in fantasy you can have your eggs cooked any way you like, except you can’t eat them. Relying on fantasies is like trying to devour the menu rather than the meal. For those who want the same thing over and over, that is more than enough. Indeed, it was the same words: I made a list of them, the basic ingredients of word-porn, spicy and resonant-harder, harder, come, come!-and was sure to salt the text with them each time.
However, the magazines also let me work on semi-pornographic material, articles on de Sade, Beardsley, Hugh Hefner, the history of pornographic pictures, for which I enjoyed the reading.
One time I was sent to meet a sleazy guy in a dirty hotel who asked me to write short novels with titles like The Disciplinarian. It was big work-almost everything is, I was discovering-though if I got into the groove I could do a dirty book in a weekend. But not for long. If pornography is the junk food of love, I couldn’t swallow any more. Being young, I was tempted to add, digress and generally express myself. What did the couples do after sex? Did they find it difficult, embarrassing, boring? What did they do at home? What did they say to their parents? They were bar-maids, businessmen, hotel maids, people meeting casually for one reason only, a reason that wasn’t compelling enough. The whole pornography scam collapsed when I wrote a novel about a couple married to other people who met only to talk.
“Talk! Anyone can talk! Where the fuck is the fucking fucking?” my man in the hotel yelled, rifling hopelessly through the manuscript and finally frisbeeing it across the room. “What is this-Plato? It’s certainly not Plato’s Retreat!”
The line between literature and pornography was uncrossable. Breaking the porno spell was like that moment at a party when the lights came on and all you saw were haunted faces and debris. Now pornography is getting emotional, and straight movies more sexual.
It was a strange business, being in a celibate relationship while thinking of sex continuously. I’d discuss the stories with Karen, and she’d suggest ideas, often from her own life. This was where our sexual relationship was, in this talk and in my work.
For me, everything was “good enough” between Karen and me until she became pregnant. Such an event might seem awkward to achieve in a celibate relationship but not, as I discovered, impossible. Platonic love is a gun you don’t know is loaded. At her place, going to bed drunk, as we did more often than I’d like to admit, we copulated in our sleep. I remembered enough to know it happened. We both took it for granted that she’d have an abortion. They knew her down at the clinic, and I joked that she had an account there; one morning she set off with her overnight bag.