Lights, camera -- inaction

November 5, 1981

I expected a dark room filled with angry men and cold ruthless women more befitting the name blue movies than the glass sided house in Hollywood Hills with a view of Los Angeles so spectacular I thought I had arrived in heaven. True, the rooms had beds and cameras, but the sunlight blinded me to nearly everything, even the dread I had carried up the hill in the car from the modeling studio.

The women attracted me in the same way that pretty science teacher in junior high school had and one of them kept saying, “Hold on, boy, you’ll poke your eye out with that thing,” and I only laughed.
But brightness could not hid the hardness in the men and women, especially the guy named Dayko, who gripped a cigarette holder and let smoke come out both sides of his mouth, telling me or no one how we couldn’t waste time and how the place was costing him a bundle to use, and urging everybody to get “in the mood” quick to shoot.

“The view is better at night,” he said. “But then we have to use lights and I like things natural – if you know what I mean. Besides, we don’t want neighbors seeing what we’re doing up here. They might call the cops.”

This shoot was for all the dirty old men in all the dirty 42nd Street theaters to gawk at, the camera man said to me, then went to shoot the first set in which I was only to play a prop.

“You’ll come into this later,” one of the other women said. “So put your gun down, boy, and watch.”

The other woman, with bright brown hair and large breasts, kept complaining about the lack of heat.

“No heat is good,” Dayko told her, and pinched her nipple. “Besides, don’t you know this is LA, it’s never cold here.”

My girlfriend looked nervously around, under dressed, but not like the other women were, looking at, but not complaining about the costume she was expected to put on.

One of the other girls did complain.

“When’s the last time you washed any of this shit, Dayko?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dayko said around another puff of smoke. “You won’t have it on long.”

“You scared, honey?” a blonde woman asked, her lipstick so red I mistook it for blood.

I nodded. She touched my shoulder.

“You’re new?”

I nodded again.

“Well, don’t you worry about a thing, I’ll walk you through it. We have the next scene after she is through,” she said, nodding in the direction of my girlfriend, who Dayko was already telling to get dressed, and positioning her, and calling in the two men who were supposed to do the scene with her.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Dayko shouted. “We’re losing light.”

And so it started, and I wanted to be remote, pretending like it wasn’t my girlfriend I was watching, and that she wasn’t doing it with two strange men, but the pain started the minute the filming did, rising up from somewhere deep inside of me.

I thought it would be easier to be on the set to somehow manage to stop this, but seeing it was worse than hearing about it, and I knew I could not stop it, trying to turn away, the woman beside me, squeezing my thigh telling me not to be nervous – and time ground on as they shot and reshot, and were finally done, and it came my time to take center stage, by which time, the girl’s had something else to complain about.

“Hey Dayko,” one complained. “He can’t do this like this.”

“Well,” Dayko said amid more smoke. “Encourage him. You know how to do that, don’t you.”

“Give me a kiss,” the blonde woman said.

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

I could not explain it, since I loved kissing almost as much as making love, and that sometimes that’s the only thing I had on my mind, even back in the theater as an usher when we all ached to go all the way with any girl who we could get into the balcony.

“Dayko!” the women yelled. “He’s not cooperating.”

I couldn’t get the previous scene out of my head, my girlfriend with the other men. It felt wrong, and though I thought I might shocked my girlfriend into quitting, if I did it, too, I just couldn’t do it, could not bring myself to take that step even when everything inside of me ached to do something.

Dayko replaced me with one of the other men, who was not too tired from his shoot with my girlfriend to earn a little extra.

Although I would try again on a number other shoots, the pain never left me, and though I managed to fake my way through some of the scenes, it was inconsistent. It all needed to mean something to me, and none of this meant anything to anybody, least of all my girlfriend, who laughed too much between sets, each making the pain worse, even if I never let on.

Years later, this pain would linger in me long after my girlfriend and I merely became friends, a twinge of regret, of sadness, of something lost each time I looked at her wall calendar and saw times inked in on some appointment I knew no longer involved a camera.

How I got into porno without really trying

(one of a series of essays written for a college feminism class)

November 11, 1981

She wanted to go; I didn’t want her to.

This was when I was still naïve to believe I could influence a woman to do anything but what she wanted to do and that I had no right to stop her, even if it hurt me.

Later, I learned (and am still learning) that regardless of how painful, the best thing to do is to step aside and let her do what she wants, and hope that she still wants me when it’s over.

We argued, but no matter what I said, the debate ended with her even more determined to go that before, and me even more helpless to do anything.

“They have my contract,” she kept saying. “I signed it”

She had gone before, aching to become a movie star or model like the sign said at the Hollywood Boulevard office, and for the first few times I didn’t ask what it was she did, until she told me – scalding words describing acts I mistakenly believed I had exclusive rights to (yet one more misconception on my part). The best you can do is accept it or leave, wisdom I had yet to learn as well.

So when she said she was going back for more, I said no, she said yes, and she went, and because I could do nothing else, I went  down to the office to see about getting her contract back, my imagination filling in the details of that acts I knew went on as I did.

In the office, I told the receptionist I wanted the contract; she said I could not have it, that it was between management and the client, and since I obviously wasn’t the client, I should get lost, implying naturally that there might be serious repercussion if I made a scene.

I wanted to beg her to understand – when I was the one who didn’t get it. This was business, nothing personal, and what my girlfriend did had nothing to do with me, only making money, and that I should go home and wait, and appreciate how hard she worked to get the money she got.

All these years later, I understand that, although it still hurts when something like this happens. I just learned not to interfere with something I can’t control.

But back then, at age 19, just how of a year in the army, hunted by the police and mobsters for some stupid crime I committed back east, I was scared and lonely, and clung to the illusion I had rights to things I had no right to. You either accept it or walk away, someone told me later.

Back then I could do neither. These days I swallow hard, still struggling with the basic concepts, but understand I have no real say in the matter and reluctantly, painfully sometimes, accept it.

Then I did beg, telling her that I needed to contract or I would go nuts.

She told me to leave even more coldly than the first time – or else.

Then, something stirred in the back of my cave man mind, some pathetic idea that soon grew into something of a curious plan, a way – if not to fight back, then to stand my ground.

I said: “Do you give contracts to men?”

The woman behind the desk eyed me very strangely, then a bit less coldly, looked me up and down. After a year in the Army, I was in good shape – although my folly would not reveal itself until later, the ups and downs, the embarrassing moments of inflation and then the even more embarrassing moments of deflation. She said, “Yes.”

“Then give me one,” I said.

It didn’t solve anything.

My girlfriend still did what she wanted to do, and when push came to shove, I refused to do some of the stuff they asked of me – clearly unwilling to share the same men my girlfriend did, but it was the deflation that did me in at the end – utter dread of public humiliation and the dread that I was helpless to fate or change any bit of destiny as I learned the one basic fact of life: everybody has the right to do pretty much what they want to do, regardless of what I think, and that in the end, it is a matter of not trying.

“If you can’t beat them, join them,” one of the other men told me. But he never had deflation issues and no problem being with other men.

A test of wills

January 8, 1973

I held the cup of coffee near the open window trying to get it to cool enough for me to drink, at the same time, trying to keep the driver from seeing it.

A test of wills: me sneaking the cup onto the bus each morning despite the sign posted saying no drinks allow and the wary eye of the bus driver looking for an excuse to toss me off.

He’d caught me twice already and made me dump the cup before I got on, so as to be extra wary of me when I came on, eyeing my heavy coat for suspicious lumps.

I hate losing these little mind games, beyond the fact that I might get fired from the job if I’m late too often.

I like getting over on the guy, especially knowing he knows I’m getting over on him, but is helpless to stop me.

Yes, it’s petty. But sometimes small victories are you can expect, especially when you work dead end jobs like I do at the card company where I pick, pack and load orders all day.

Outside, Montclair passes into Verona, a once wealthy world for an up and coming one, with a line of mansions along the boundary I’d pull teeth to live in, even though I’m not much for playing big shot.

I live in a rooming house in Montclair where I pay $100 a month for a room with a bathroom in the hall, and the landlord bitches when I stay up too late tapping out poetry on my portable typewriter. I tell him I’m going to be famous one day. He tells me he can’t wait so he can raise my rent.

Another test of wills.

He doesn’t hate me so much, and thinks I’m up to no good. He’s convinced I deal drugs – sometimes I do, but only pot, and only because it’s the only way I can afford to pay rent and still have enough to live on.

I sip my coffee, but it’s still too hot, and look at the baseball scores, cursing the fact that the store sold me an early edition so the late scores aren’t listed.

I ache to talk to the pretty girl seated a few seats up from mine, but I never do, aching a little over the breakup I don’t talk to anybody about, trying to stay loyal in case the girl I broke up with takes me back and I don’t have to feel guilty about anything, when all I do is ache and know she’ll never take me back.

I’m always being loyal to the wrong things, always trying to keep ties that have long come undone.

I sip my coffee and stare up at the driver, waiting for him to look up into the rear view mirror and catch me.

That’s part of the game, too, tempting fate, leaving just enough steam in the cool air so that he knows what I’m up to.

Maybe I’m a sucker for pain, needing to get caught, or worse, needing to get a fix on being naughty while pretending I’m nice.

A test of wills with myself, maybe.

I sip, then lower the cup just in time for the driver to miss me sipping, I smile at him, he scowls. I hope the coffee cools soon so I can gulp it in time to reach my stop.

Yet one more test wills.

Confessions to the river

  

November 1, 1981

It’s Sunday.

A day of peace and the river flows below me here like a silent friend, who shows his wounds in rusted tin cans and broke bottles, and the oil slick that covers the surface like a second skin.

I come here often with my woes, and though the river gives no advice, it gives comfort, accepting my pathetic ranting about lost love and minor infractions, and flows on with them.

Today, I rant about “me,” a self-centered bit of tribe that devours me from the inside with its narcissistic poison.

I feel it spreading through my chest, leaving me cold and distant.

I’ve constructed a shell around myself, emotionally, if not spiritually, trying not to let other people’s opinions bother me.

“You have to protect yourself,” others have told me, “Look out for number one.”
And I do. And yet it bothers me.

Sometimes, I suffer from spiritual narcissism, aching just to grab and run, and not look back at the landscape of damage my personal greed might cause.

I problem is I always look back, always feel bad, and though I still look out for myself, I feel guilty about it, thinking there has to be a better way to do things that doesn’t cause other people pain.

The donut cook where I work tells me I’m nuts, saying that we can’t look out for anybody but ourselves.

This kills me. It makes me wonder if we have managed to evolve at all from animals the way we like to think – doing onto others before they do onto us.

It’s not the murder and mayhem I have a problem with, it’s the mistrust – and how I ache to trust everybody I meet, and most times it’s the right thing to do, but not always, and I don’t want to be one of those people with my hands in other people’s pockets, or to grab the last donut off the shelf.

I don’t want to walk around thinking I’m the most important person on the planet the way many people do – most often, they aren’t, but think they are. And yet, there are times when I catch myself trying to get the larger piece of the pie, if only to keep some other son of a bitch from getting it first.

I read a newspaper article about one of the mill owners claiming the dead fish floating near one of the mill drains has nothing to do with his operations.

I see jerks with cross bows shooting fish from the top of the Outwater Lane Bridge just because they like killing things.  Some kids set fire to the dry brush just because they can.

And me, I guess maybe I want a piece of the action just like all of the high rollers that come up the parkway from Atlantic City, I just want to be able to look myself in the mirror and say I got there because I earned it, and sometimes, I don’t want to go through all the fuss.

So I confess my sins to this old friend, river, both of us suffering each others pain, knowing that when I walk away I’ll feel a little better, until next time.

Art for fart’s sake

 Jan. 29, 1981

It’s easy to get pissed off at the limited mentality of our so-called academic saints, those grand masters who in their egotistic self-aggrandizement, establish the rules for what it takes for an artist to achieve greatness.

Many of these academic bullies have a stranglehold on truly creative people while they themselves have largely been unable to attain any status except as arbitrators of other people’s talent.

They hold the keys to the promised land of greatness, and force young aspiring artists to jump through academic hoops in order to qualify.

These fools try to channel young artists into categories, comparing them to those who came before as if that is the only criteria.

Yes, it is hugely important to know what came before, how great artists achieved mastery, and what specifically made them great.

But to assume that a young and upcoming artist cannot come up with original and great work on his or her own is arrogant.

Van Gogh, Walt Whitman, even beat poets and writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac defied traditions, while still maintaining the continuity. I love Blake as much as I love Shakespeare, but I don’t see either one confined by rules set up by academia – if anything the opposite is true. These people learned what they needed to learn, then ran to the edge of the world and jumped off, relying on some inner instinct to raise them to the heights of greatness.

But from what I’m getting in this place of higher learning is this idea that we should not try and put two words together without first consulting the literary elite to get a gauge on whether we are going in the correct direction.

Michael talks a good game and has irritated a number of professions with his punk approach to art, but in the end, even he seems to be married to the academic standards he slowly loudly protests.

I guess my coming out of a working class tradition makes me sympathize more with ritual, seeking to draw art out of something more inherent in human nature than in the repeated diatribes professors give us.

I want to believe in people like Jack London are just as valid literary snobs like T.S. Elliot (who I love despite his footnotes).

I want to think that there is hope for people like me, who are not geniuses like Shakespeare, but who struggle to write about the birds and bees, and the deeper human emotions I see in everyday people around me.

Shit, man, I’m only a street kid, who wants to mug and rape you with pen and paper rather than a switch blade or a gun.

I want you to feel every thing I want you to feel, the high emotions, the low, the good feelings, the bad, the bitter and the sweet. I want to make you love me or hate me, want you to praise me or curse me, I want you to cry when I say cry, and laugh when I say laugh. I want to be able to do anything I want to you, take advantage of you, make you ache for me in ways only my words can make you do.

I don’t want any academic master’s permission. In fact, what I want most is to piss that person off, to make him eat his or her own words about what he or she claims is great, to admit that anyone who works hard enough and gets to know enough about the inner workings of people can achieve greatness, even without first genuflecting in front of some poetic pope some self-righteous critic, and better yet, I want some squirt of a writer who is even young that me to come up and do exactly the same to me, to move me in ways that I never imagined anyone could move me, not because he or she uses the correct form, but because he or she has a handle on something I’ve never seen or heard or read or felt before. I want that person to hit me harder than I have ever been hit before, fuck me better than I could ever do, and to pour his or her words over me in ways I could not do – and having done this to me, made me want to do be that good. I don’t want to learn stupid rules of art, I want to feel it in my bones, I want to be challenged by someone as good as I am or better than I am, so I can become better, too.

I want to be Gaughan to Van Gogh, I want to feel so strongly about art that I might be willing to cut off my ear or nose or some other valuable part in order to create a masterpiece that is all mine, made possible because someone else could create great things, too.

I came here to learn how to make what I do better – and find that there are gates in the way, and guardians who make claims as to what shall pass.

Fuck them!

Okay, so I’m hungry for concepts such as symbols and signs, want to make love to every rose I see, bring down every glass house I walk into, break down every egotistic, monolithic literary dynasty, create art through revolution, draw out of common experience, raise up the rabble and their feelings and their lives, and bring about true art that is not exclusive and cannot be caged or contained.

Michael thinks I’m crazy. A lot of people do. Some even want to stop me.

Let them try.

A triumphant return?

February 6, 1986

So who should show up last night at work?

Joanne again, dismal, curious Joanne looking for comfort in that wondrous way of hers.

She returned like a stranger, someone once utterly in love with the mall, but now divorced from it and aching for the old feelings she used to have for it, calling from the bagel shop for permission to see me, so she can slip passed guards whom she believed wanted to keep her out.

“That’s silly,” I told her over the phone. We could almost see each other across the dark hall.

Not so silly, she told me, since management has warned all the night guards against her, making her one of the most disliked people in the mall.

She is a liar. She even lied to me last night about Phil and her other job, still trying to sound more important than she really is. It is hugely important for her to be someone.

She is a thief, too, though not nearly as bad as many of the others who used to work here. She steals little things, like people’s souls, attaching herself like a leech to men like Danny, filled with an intense need to have him hold her, something that did not sit well with Danny’s wife.

But deep down inside of Joanne there is another person, a gentle caring child who trusts too much, presuming that others – especially men – won’t hurt her, therefore allowing them to hurt her even more.

She is not a pretty woman by many standards, but she is cute in her own fashion – a cuteness that draws men’s attention no other more eloquent women are around.

She has dark hair and dark eyes that remind me of one of those puppy pictures they sell in the center of the mall, and often acts the part of a puppy when she’s attracted, bobbing up and down at someone’s side.

A closer look, however, shows her hunger. She licks her lips when she is horny, and pressed her chest into the person she’s attracted to. She has a crooked smile that flashes on and off like an advertisement.

But she is slovenly, too, and slumps, and on bad days she smells for lack of a shower.

When she isn’t putting on a front, when she’s just herself, she had something of a bland look, lost and lonely, hunted and mistrusting.

Last night, she was ON, wearing a wrinkled silk shirt with an uneven collar, and jeans patched in stylistic copy of poverty. When she crossed the hall, she staggered a little as if drunk, glancing this way and that at the old sights, and saying when I let her into our store that she didn’t miss the place at all. Not long later, she moved around the store again as if she owned it, using the toilet (where she once made love to Danny during the busy shift), making herself coffee, pausing from time to time to stare through the gate into the hall, shaking her head, saying how everything had changed, looking every bit like the lost soul again, only to snap back into character.

She was one of the original mall rats, having come here when the mall opened in 1970, a mall rat who must have wrenched something inside her when forced to leave 15 years later. The last time I saw her here, she had men lined up waiting to take her out to their cars, with me aching to be one of them, and never was. Now the men here are all strangers, and she talked of other men, other places, other times, before fading away back into the night, leaving the place that much more devoid than it was before.

Night in the Blue Motel

 

Monday, December 24, 2012

I must of passed this motel hundreds of times since my first coming up this highway in the Chevy pickup truck we had converted to use as a camper for the long trip from New York City to Portland, me, my girlfriend, my daughter, Michael, the man who’d made the FBI’s most wanted list for a week earlier that year, and his girlfriend – packing our entire lives in the back of the wooden box we have built so that we looked very much like Okies from The Grapes of Wrath.

Each time I returned to visit Scranton in the subsequent years, I always took this highway, first because it reminded me of who would become my ex-wife, in whose footsteps I walked dozens of years – never ceasing to love anyone I once loved. I’d even traveled this road that time when she wanted to see me and I drove west with my two best friends, who hoped they could help convince her to take me back and allow me to feel like a father again, a romantic’s notion that never transpired, then later, I took this route because the road was one of the blue highways, an up and down ribbon through time and space that brought me back to an era before the super highways and modern concepts of speed. I always drove slow here and looked to the trees and ponds, yet oddly, have over looked this particular rundown motel, something straight out of post World War II with few modern conveniences except a pub that had beer signs posted over its front windows and two handwritten signs on the door: bikers welcome and closed until further notice.

I had called well enough in advance to make reservations and when I pulled the car up in front of the place, I celebrated my foresight, seeing pickups and other trucks sprawled on both sides of the highway in front of it – perhaps hunters coming in for their Christmas kill.

“No it’s an auction,” the woman proprietor told me when I finally tracked her down, trying all the doors to the office and then the closed pub, only to find them locked and their interiors dark.

I saw the door bell on the office door only after I saw the woman coming to open the door, and when I told her my name, she nodded, took my credit card and ran this through a swipe that did not take.

“It doesn’t work,” she said.

I was certain I had enough credit left to pay the $50 fee. But I gave her another card. This didn’t work either. Then I gave her a debit, and when that failed, I gave her the cash.

“We had a power outage last week,” the woman said. “Maybe the machine is broken. I’ll have to get someone out here to check it.”

But from the look of it all, the machine was not the only thing broken. The three building complex tended to sag in places it out not, and the driveway between these buildings can strong evidence to the heavy weather the snow-laden sides of the highway had only hinted at on our way there, ice covering the asphalt (and fortunately filling the holes that might have swallowed my small car).

She handed me a key to room #6.

“Check out is at 11,” she said. “Just leave the key in the room when you leave.”

Since I was on my way into Scranton to see my daughter, I only dropped off a bag with a change of clothing. But this gave enough of a glimpse of the interior – or rather, a sniff. Decades of cigarette smoke lingered inside, part of the charm of a room that barely had space for bed, table and chair. A TV set blocked most the way on one side of the bed. A small refrigerator sat in the bottom of a closet which had no bar or hooks to hang clothing. The bathroom had a window that looked out onto the pub’s back porch, which looked like something out of The Hobbit, only far more deteriorated, with old bar signs used to patch the broken spaces on the roof.

The toilet had another handwritten sign like those on the door of the pub saying “hold the handle down to flush,” only there was no handle, just a kind of button.

While the room had towels, it had two pathetic pillows and a very thin blanket. The heater, although claimed to have grades of heat, in truth presented only two options, scalding and frost bite. I chose frostbite and put on most of my clothing. The bed sagged in the middle and groaned like a wicker chair if you moved – or breathed too deeply. Needless to say, the night was one of waking and trying to sleep again.

And strangely, I loved it, reminding me of those days living in cold water flat in Passaic when I first re-hooked up with my ex-wife and daughter again, when I still believed that I would become a great novelist and was suffering for my art, when I placed myself not in some fancy hotel or celebrated venue, but in the down-and-out world of poor painters and suffering writers.

The night in the motel reminded me of what the artist life is supposed to be about, and how in the end, the work is what matters, not the accolades, and each time I work up and I thought again – to chattering teeth – of how special a place in the world artists hold because we do indeed owe a debt of gratitude to moments like this when we are reminded that the real satisfaction comes from what we do – even it if took the better part of the next day to work out the kinks in my back the lack of eat and bad bed causes.