On Twenty-Third Street, traveling west, big humid gusts blew against the bike. Lightning flashed, the city sky clicking from off to on to off. Pedestrians scattered as the thunder cracked. I went north, up Sixth Avenue, and at each light wondered if I should turn south, go home, and avoid the downpour. I kept going north.
At Forty-Second Street, I headed west toward the orange colors of Times Square, so bright against the blue-gray of storm clouds. There was another flash, a distant rumble. Drops began to fall.
I pulled the Moto Valera up on the curb, thinking I’d find someplace to wait it out. I rolled the bike onto its centerstand, took out the ignition key, and there I was, under the face of the soap-flakes model.
Behind the Green Door
I looked at her and at the old ticket vendor, the showtimes. The next viewing was in twenty minutes. I traded two dollars for a stub.
No one buys popcorn for a porn film. They didn’t sell it. I passed through the lobby curtains into what looked like a regular movie theater, red vinyl seats, slightly sloped floor, a stained screen, smaller than I expected. Sparse audience, all male, each with a safety buffer of empty seats around him. A few glared at me, rustled bags, which lone people were for some reason required to do in movie theaters, to rustle paper bags no matter what genre of film, Chinese opera or Mature Audience Only.
I sat on the aisle in the last row, close to the exit.
* * *
In the beginning, a truck, a truck stop diner. A woman who could have been Giddle, gray uniform with crisscross-backed apron. But unlike Giddle, who was, in essence, a crypto-bohemian pouring coffee, this woman was just a dour-faced waitress, not ironic. This woman, I thought, was what Giddle impersonated. It somehow did not occur to me that the waitress in the film was even more of an actress than Giddle was. She was acting. In a movie.
The daytime television voices of porn actors.
A man in resort wear, white shoes and yellow socks, saying, Sour cream, borscht, herring, chicken, and bananas. Gimme a break. Sour cream, borscht, chicken—
Cut to the soap-flakes model driving a Porsche 356 cabriolet up winding mountain roads. Not with a dubious clandestine, a Gianni. On her own. In a ski hat, maxing the gears on hairpin turns. Smiling, private, solitary, in her cutely boyish wool hat, red like the car.
These things were behind the green door:
Rules and codes.
Crotchless white stretch-Lycra tuxedos. Somehow not funny, not meant to be.
Fat people in masquerade ball masks. The people in masks seemed to believe they were hidden, like a baby who hides its face. “When baby Kotch covered his own eyes,” Nadine had told me, “little thing thought he’d disappeared to everybody else. Where’s Kotch?” The fat people up on the movie screen acted hidden, leaned back in their chairs with the unselfconscious posture of watchers, their hands unzipping their own zippers and pulling up their own skirts, shifting in their chairs for maximum access to self. Efficient hand flicks.
What the masked masturbators behind the green door watched:
Live sex, the soap-flakes model and a man in tribal makeup. She and the man both seemed deep in the moment but also hyperalert to how they looked deep in the moment. There was something stoic about them, a shared feeling between them that sex was miraculous, that it was a strange and incredible thing people did to each other, that it never lost this strangeness, its thrill. They had that reverence, she and the man in tribal makeup. It remained, even as the sex became pure repetition, gliding and hardness and softness and pushing, their faces up close, his beads swinging, the masked voyeurs who surrounded them, the small and obscene movements of their hands, local movements, and we, the Times Square voyeurs, in the theater, and who knew what the men seated sparsely around me were up to, their own local movements, and then the screen went dark.
Paper bags rustling. Someone saying, Hey. Hey.
A few minutes later, the film started up again, the sound warbling to life, and then almost immediately it shut off once more. No image, just the projector’s insect rattle.
An usher’s flashlight bounced down the aisle, his voice next to me, intimate in the dark, echoless against the carpeted wall.
“Movie’s over. Save your ticket. We’re having a power short. Exit slow and calm.”
I felt my way up the sloped aisle, moving through the curtain into what I expected would be light, but it was only more darkness. The men who’d parked themselves far from one another in the theater were all crowded together, finding their way to the exit. Emergencies bring people together. The porn theater was not a place for that. The men dispersed like rats, fleeing through the theater doors into the dark.
No lights shone or jumped in Times Square. There was no skyline of gridded, glowing windows, no blazing billboards, no silken glide of LED.
A half-full moon, egg-shaped, glowed up above, polished and white, the dull white plastic of dark theater marquees visible in its light.
People flooded the sidewalk. It was dense with the heat of them, clustered in large groups but speaking in hushed voices.
Taxis and trucks moved slowly and did not use their horns. Not a single car honked. Traffic edged along in caution and doubt. Horns were about the opposite, righteousness behind the wheel.
The vehicles passing through Times Square were the only light sources, except for the prostitutes who had flashlights, which they swung around, calling from doorways, It’s good in the dark.
It’s everywhere, someone said. Cigarette cherry zigzagging as he spoke.
Lightning knocked it out.
The murmur of a transistor. Wait, I’m tuning it in.
Shit. I thought the Russians nuked.
I wove through the crowd, crossing the sidewalk to my motorcycle. A woman brushed by. I felt but didn’t see her, a body moving past, and when I looked again I saw only white short shorts. A black woman whose body melted into the darkness, her short shorts hip-height and bodyless, the leg openings stretched wide like rigatoni.
I could have stood there watching and deciding for hours. There was no city actively guiding me, the shops and walking masses and traffic lights giving their deep signals of what to do, where to go, who and what to see, what to buy, how to feel, what to think. All flow and force as a city had been suspended. People on the sidewalk talked in quieted tones as if darkness called for a new level of discretion. Some of it talk of the moment, the blackout, but most of it just life.
She’s already committed herself.
The thing I learned was I’m my own worst enemy.
Well, I tried writing her a letter.
I started the bike, flipped on the headlight, stupidly amazed for a moment that it worked, as if all units of power were directly connected to the city’s grid.
I popped from the curb and joined the shy traffic inching south on Seventh. We were like those vehicles that roll along the floor of the ocean, marking out volume with their headlights against a dark void. Everyone drove haltingly and slow. An eerie echo of sirens, louder the farther south I went.
At Union Square, women were pulling shopping carts out of Mays, multiple carts tied together and crammed with merchandise, their metal wheels making the clattering bright sound of poured money as the women dragged them along the street.
Merry Christmas, motherfuckers! a man shouted. Then he shouted it again.
Merry Christmas, motherfuckers!
Satin sheets, one woman called to another. Always wanted them.