Her daily existence becomes a Sadeian procession of humiliation and pleasure.
One man asks her to pummel his body, harder, harder, I want it to hurt, before he can get hard. She concentrates on all those in the past, the betrayers, the abandoned, to focus her anger and strikes him with repeated fury. When the blood begins to flow from his nose and lips, she panics and flees, without payment.
She signs on for a porno loop. Three black men fuck her in the arse in quick succession while she stands bent over a wooden table. The filmmaker only has a super-8 video camera and never turns to film her face. For days afterwards, the pain endures and she hurts when walking. They’ve actually torn her. To think she once shuddered at the thought of Caesarians. She heals. For another pervert, she accepts to be tied up in a cave where she is administered an enema by a pocked, butch dyke, while he noisily jerks off. She wallows in the expelled liquid, rubs her skin, bathes in the shit-infested waters surrounding her on the black rubber sheet. She allows a one-legged grizzled and bitter Vietnam veteran to fuck her with his stump. While he moves the bone inside her bowels, he loudly sings Born In The USA off-key. And then actually cries when she leaves his motel room.
The cycle of inevitable degradation continues.
Like a penance.
One night, in dire need of junk, she’s at the bar of this swank hotel, looking for passing custom when Steve Gregory walks in. Silk suit and all attitude.
“Christ, baby, you’ve let yourself go,” he says. “But, you see, it’s destiny, we meet again.”
She smiles feebly.
“I need cash, Steve,” Katherine says.
“You need a fix, more like. If you stay here, you’re not even going to get spare change, Eddie.”
He ponders one moment.
Her brown eyes beg.
“Come to the car,” he says. She follows.
He drives out of town. Parks in the darkness, near the Boeing fields. Slips his hand under her blouse. Feels her up.
“Still nice and firm,” Steve says. “That’s the nice thing about smallish tits, they seldom go flabby. That’s an asset you’ve got there, honey.”
He opens the glove compartment and hands her the junk. She shoots up. It’s good quality stuff. She listens to the stars out there, allows the river of ice to invade her whole body. It’s too strong, like a whack to the heart, she’s obliged to put her head on his shoulder.
“I’ll take care of you, Eddie,” Steve says.
He doesn’t even want to fuck her anymore. She’s beyond it.
“See, I know this very private club down in New Orleans,” he tells her, caressing her cheeks with genuine care and concern as she dozes on. “I think we’re going to make a great team, you and me, Eddie. A great team. You’ll like it there, the food is just too much and it’s never cold. You’ve never told me if you like sea food? Do you?”
She assents with a shake of her head, his fingers move through her hair, playing with the tired curls. “Goodbye Seattle,” she whispers. She likes it when men play with her hair. Yes, she does.
Katherine dreams.
Of New Orleans. A city she has repeatedly been told is wonderful. Fragrant. And deliciously evil.
Yet another place her lover insisted he would take her to and no, he hadn’t. They had not embraced in an assortment of fancy New Orleans hotel rooms which had once been slave quarters and where cockroaches roamed free. And never would. A city of cemeteries, storms and bewitching music.
Her pale skin shivers as a last ferry leaves the harbour for the journey across Puget Sound to the scattered isles.
New Orleans.
Katherine finally sleeps. The pain goes away.
GINCH by Michael Perkins
YEARS AGO YOU probably would have recognized Parker Coleman’s name. Parker Coleman – wasn’t he one of the movers and shakers who put together the Woodstock Festival? A record producer? One of four guys Bob Dylan slugged in 1968?
Parker popped up everywhere in the sixties; it was a decade he always claimed he invented. Certainly he exploited it better than almost anyone else I’ve heard of under thirty. Parker was a Zen hustler with a beard before the words “hippie” and “businessman” were joined together by Time magazine. While the rest of us floated lazily downstream on what we had been told was the current of history, smoking good weed and blithely awaiting the news that the revolution of consciousness had swept the board room of General Motors and the Pentagon, Parker made a few grand by swimming upstream – hawking psychedelic buttons, T-shirts, records, rock magazines and concerts, and once even a child guru from Ceylon named Bubba Sammy.
You might say that Parker saw us coming, because he was always paddling the other way. So he made money in the sixties, and he got a lot of ginch – his word for fuckable women.
Ginch. Think about it, because it will tell you everything you need to know about Parker’s attitude toward women. His Kansas accent, overlaid with the street black’s drawl he’d picked up, stretched the middle of the word like a rubber band.
Since his reputation as a cocksman was nearly as great as his reputation as a hustler, Parker had ample opportunity to select candidates for his private stable of ginch from among the finest examples of concupiscent American womanhood. There always seemed to be two or three twenty-two-year-old deep-breasted, deep-fried long-legged blondes dressed in eye-popping T-shirts trailing him as he moved from appointment to appointment, usually in a limousine. It was boom time.
Then one morning Parker woke up in a rented house in Topanga Canyon, and the sixties were over. National Guardsmen at Kent State shot the shit out of them. The seventies dawned gray and cold, and Parker’s tired Aquarian customers – a generation of big-eyed Keane children – went home to catch some Zs. When they woke up, they began looking around for jobs.
Parker had overextended himself financially. When his customers disappeared back into the middle class from whence they’d come, he was wiped out. An overnight has-been.
Decline is somehow more uncomfortable to bear in California than in colder places where people work for a living, so Parker returned to his native city of New York and took a loft on Varick Street in Soho where he could meditate and try to figure out his next move. It didn’t take him long to come up with the idea of making pornographic movies: low investment, high return, and ginch to boot.
In short order he had established himself as the boy wonder of porno films. Small distinction, perhaps, but his own. He cranked them out in his loft like home movies, which is what the loops you see in porno theatres basically are – good old American home movies full of fucking, sucking, golden showers, S/M, and come facials for the apple-cheeked girls Parker recruited from his stock of ginch.
The first time I talked with him on the telephone, he was getting ready to shoot his first feature film, a rip-off of Charlie’s Angels that – naturally – he called Parker’s Angels. He woke me out of a sound Tequila-induced sleep into one of the worst hangovers that ever sank its claws into man’s cerebellum.
“Yeah?”
“Nick, this is Parker Coleman. Grinning Bare Productions, you know.”
He sounded like Ralph Williams selling used cars on television. I moved the receiver a few inches from my ear and picked dirt from between my toenails while I listened. I used to meet him a lot at parties, but we’d never spent more than five minutes together. What he wanted was for me to write a script for him. He’d seen stuff I’d done in the underground papers and I guess he figured I was good enough to do the job for him, and poor enough to accept the postage stamps he wanted to pay me with.