Kamikaze Lust Read online

  When I said no, Ethan assured me she was all the rage in some circles, particularly in the oxymoronic adult film industry where she’d won numerous Skin Awards and had become one of the first video-box girls. Apparently, she started her own production company, which produced what she called feminist erotica, material that found her enmeshed in the censorship wars. “She testified at the Meese Commission,” he said as if it meant something to him.

  “Wait a second, you want a piece on a porn star?”

  “No, even better, she needs a ghostwriter. See, she’s got this contract for an autobiography and doesn’t have time to write, or maybe she’s illiterate, who knows? I just met her a couple of weeks ago.”

  “But I don’t know anything about pornography.”

  “I figured as much,” he snickered, and I remembered how much pleasure it had given me when Freddy bit him last night. “Alexis is keen on that, actually. The last ghostwriter turned out to be some sycophantic fan. Freaked the shit out of her.”

  “This is what I get for sleeping with you,” I said. Two women at the next table looked over.

  “Here’s a novel concept,” Ethan said. “Someone does you a favor and you say thank you. Want to give it a shot?”

  I was getting ornery with everyone today, wasn’t I? I apologized to Ethan and asked for the information. My black roller ball bled into the front page of The Free Spirit, upon which I scrawled the name Alexis Calyx and beneath it, her phone number. When I clicked off the phone, I noticed that I’d drawn a few five-point stars around her name. I would soon learn how apt my etchings had been, but for now I repeated the name out loud: “Alexis Calyx.” What a brush of palate-licking that wrought, a name spoken in tongues and multiple entendres. I pictured a woman in white taffeta running through fields of blazing grass and dewy, wet flowers. I was going to hate her.

  Stepping out of the bathroom, Shade jolted me from Merchant-Ivory dreamland back to the thunderstorms along Ninth Avenue. I tore the name and number from the newspaper and shoved it into my back pocket. With it went all thoughts of porn stars and ex-boyfriends and everyone else around us. My focus was entirely on Shade walking toward me in her velvet hip-huggers as if she were working a runway, smiling as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.

  An espresso machine slurped and steamed. Spoons clinked into ceramic cups as couples practiced synchronized stirring. Shade and I were no different. Sitting across from each other again, not saying a word, she drew circles with her finger on the steamy window pane, and together we looked out into the rain, its reverberant pounding a reminder that we were part of something else, just as a lover, even a bad one, can affirm that you still belong to your body.

  I turned back to her, saw her floating in a glowing nimbus like the paint-by-number pictures of Christ they sold on the street, and at that second felt as if months…no a lifetime goddammit! I felt as if a lifetime of Novocain was beginning to wear off.

  STILL LIFE WITH VIDEOTAPE

  The Master of Self-Deliverance spoke about his thirty-minute Docudeath tape of the Ida and Marvin Salinger suicides. I sat silently, preferring to listen to Kaminsky a while before saying anything myself. I hated being back in this office with its obese metal desks and finger-printed walls, the fiendish glow of the fluorescents, the antiphonal chime of the fax machine. And I was here sans working papers. Last time I’d come as a reporter, when Kaminsky still needed the coverage. I’d felt protected, bivouacked by the same credentials that allowed me entry into worlds I would not otherwise see: Congressional assemblies, a Senator’s motel room, towns devastated by natural disasters, crack houses, fairness-in-media conventions, and, most recently, the New York City courthouses. Armed with the First Amendment, the public’s right to know, and occasionally a press pass, I could go anywhere, say anything to anybody, and never take no for an answer. On my own, I was too shy to walk into a bar or go to the movies by myself.

  “We’ve just completed the home video copy,” Kaminsky said, sitting perpendicular to me in a chair of peeling chrome and yellow-green vinyl. Apparently, orders for the tape were coming in faster than calls to the Home Shopping Network on a bottom price item. He had set up an 800 number and had an intern monitoring the phones. Then there were the television and radio call-ins, the satellite conferences, round tables on the Internet. His was a conundrum fit for the modern MacLuhanite: so many tools, so little time.

  All of this and the Attorney General couldn’t substantiate any of the charges against him. It didn’t hurt that he’d hired a celebrated attorney and an upscale public relations firm, which had leaked snippets of the Ida and Marvin tape. What TV station could resist these cherubic faces telling America that suicide was a lifestyle choice? Hours later came the faxed release stating that proceeds from the video sales would go to medical research foundations.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of Shade’s perfect comment about the suicides being a septuagenarian snuff film. Fidgeting in my chair, I uncrossed my legs, then quickly crossed them the other way. My stomach gurgled in stereo, so I had to speak. “When they came to you…” I said and almost didn’t recognize my own voice, “did they know what they wanted?”

  “Oh, yes, they knew,” he nodded. “You have to, otherwise I won’t get involved. There’s too much risk.”

  “You mean legally?”

  “At the very least.” He stared at me so I looked away. I saw he had hung my jacket from a coat rack frond; a mound of leather protruded in between its shoulders like a Hollywood gun hidden in a suit pocket. That was so bad for the leather.

  “You see, Rachel.” Hearing my name brought me back, a bit horrified that I returned to him. I had to fight the desire to grab my jacket and run. “You don’t mind me using your first name, do you?”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “I simply cannot afford to be wrong. Do you realize how many requests I get a day? And since the suicides, this popularity, I can’t tell you…I talk to everyone. You cannot even imagine.”

  “I’m afraid I can.”

  “So, we’re talking about cancer here?”

  I nodded yes, but was tempted to say no. Even sitting in this office with the Master of Self-Deliverance, I had trouble admitting to myself just why I’d come. I thought of Aunt Lorraine at home in bed and wished I was there with her, watching games shows, playing backgammon, keeping this damn disease away from her.

  Kaminsky smiled and his deeply creviced face went from dour to distortedly happy. His upper lip twitched. “Cancer is my soft spot. I was once an oncologist, you see? So much pain.”

  “The thing is I think it’s more that she’s afraid of dying, than actually…she doesn’t want to, to…” I was stalled by a lump in my throat, then surprised at how the words had begun to come out. If I continued to speak, however, I was afraid of what might come next. Where I used to tether my emotions with a performer’s professional grace, I felt as if, recently, the reigns had been cut loose.

  “I had a patient last year, a lovely woman,” Kaminsky said. “She had bone marrow cancer. The way her family talked you would have thought she couldn’t make it another day. I met with her a couple of times, we talked. She ended up living almost a full year after that. She took a trip to Belize. Went to her grandson’s high school graduation.”

  I didn’t say anything. Just ground my teeth against the rim of the paper cup.

  “The reality is, sometimes just knowing I’m here, whether we go through with it or not…it’s enough. They say knowledge is power; well in these cases the knowledge that there’s help is a measure of control.”

  “Control? What kind of control can she have on television? I don’t want her on television,” I blurted out.

  “It is quite troublesome.”

  “But you said you film everyone.”

  “No, I don’t film anyone. I simply suggest that people document the process themselves, for their own protection. These are legal questions, not moral. For me the only morality is seeing that each patient gets the dea
th he or she wants. Within that framework if one wishes to take a stand—go on television for instance—so much the better. But it doesn’t often happen that way, the logistics alone take months, and, sadly, the segment of the population I’m dealing with doesn’t usually have that kind of time.”

  I stared at him, this little man with his gaunt cheeks and white-gray hair with whom Aunt Lorraine felt kindred because his parents, like her father, had perished in Nazi-occupied Poland. They were survivors long before the word was usurped by talk-show shrinks and twelve-step programs.

  “She wants to see you.” My eyes welled and my head grew heavier. Looking up, I saw my leather jacket still stretching from frond contact. Noticing it seemed stupid, insignificant, of a different world than Kaminsky and me. I turned back to him, and although I’d expected the twisted glint of a mad scientist, he actually looked sad. As if his face had absorbed my aura.

  “I will see her then,” he said, and I felt soothed momentarily in his presence. A comfort akin to getting your period after a two-week pregnancy scare, but comfort nonetheless. These days I took whatever I could get.

  I breathed deeply, swallowed back a tear as Kaminsky and I matched our filofaxes for a date. Before leaving, I asked if I could buy a copy of the Docudeath tape. He handed me a video in a plain white jacket. “Take it,” he said. “It’s a little bit longer than the ones we’re selling.”

  “The director’s cut?”

  “Rachel,” he put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt a rumbling inside my chest. “You have more strength than you’re aware of, you’ll see.”

  I couldn’t hold back the tears this time. Kaminsky sat me down again, took my hand. “It’s okay, this is all very normal.”

  “I’m sorry,” I hiccuped.

  “No apologies.” He handed me a tissue, and I blew. Already, I feared needing him too much. I wanted to thank him for his kindness, then tell him I’d made a mistake and would never see him again. But I could only cry incessant streams of tears until the little buggers robbed every ounce of fluid from my body. Through it all, Kaminsky stayed calm.

  Outside, I wiped a few crispy leaves from the window of my jeep. Last week’s heat wave was a vague memory, repressed by chilly winds and dipping thermometers. Fall in New York had officially begun.

  I climbed inside, turned the rear-view mirror toward me. Using a tissue I found on the dashboard, I scraped the lines of mascara from my face. I didn’t look that bad. My eyes and cheekbones and mouth all appeared softer than they had in weeks. But I didn’t trust my reflection. I blanketed my cheeks and nose with a fresh layer of beige cover-up, and reapplied slightly gothic proportions of black mascara. The engine grumbled to a start, and I was off to meet Alexis Calyx.

  At first, the voice on her answering machine had unnerved me. It was so strong and passionate, like a Patti Smith song. Nothing 900-number about it. I hung up twice before finally mustering the courage to leave a message. She picked up as I was talking, which meant she knew it was me who’d hung up before, and therefore had probably surmised I was nervous or a person of strange telephone habits. Not a good start. Now, having just spent an hour discussing Aunt Lorraine’s death-bed wish, I was even more unsettled about meeting the porn star. From death to sex in less than thirty minutes. I suppose I was luckier than those who’d gone the other way, people who died accidentally from auto-erotic asphyxiation. Nelson Rockefeller.

  I downshifted into the lunchtime gridlock that was Broadway, thinking: what am I doing? Writing a porn star’s life was no job for a journalist. Aunt Lorraine would be horrified, and she was the one who’d introduced me to the profession. We used to sit in the basement—before Neil coopted the space as his metal workshop/dungeon—and watch old newsreels on Dad’s rickety 8-mm projector. A buddy in the electrician’s union had given Dad the newsreels. I loved the beginning shots, with newspapers flying from the presses faster than anything I’d ever seen. Then came the zooming headlines, mostly about World War II and the Holocaust.

  As I watched Hitler’s face, streaked by the old film, I would ask Aunt Lorraine to tell me the story of her escape.

  “Again, you want the story?”

  “Please.” I batted my eyes, knowing she couldn’t resist.

  My paternal grandparents had lived in Lodz where my grandfather was a writer, a newspaper man. Early on, he sensed trouble and put his sister, his wife, and her two children on a boat for Argentina, where his own mother had been living for almost ten years. “I remember throwing up a lot,” Aunt Lorraine said. “The four of us clung together on that boat with only one blanket for weeks. We ate stale bread until it ran out. Then your father one day came back with a pickle and cut it into four pieces with his pocketknife. I never tasted a pickle so good. At night we slept crowded next to each other and your father, you know his bladder troubles. I worried nobody would let us in the way we stunk.”

  As she spoke, I saw it all in grainy newsreel images: the ramshackle ocean liner, the itchy wool blanket, my father, Aunt Lorraine, even my grandfather who was shot dead in a Polish ghetto after refusing to stop publishing his newspaper. My family history unraveled in a soundtrack of Polish, Yiddish, and Spanish. Those Sonnanovicz-turned-Slivowitzes with their bizarre migratory patterns had traversed ghettos from Lodz to Buenos Aires, and, finally, ended up in Bay Ridge, a hodgepodge of language, culture, and custom. By the time I was born, nobody knew what came from where. We ate kasha with pinto beans, brisket with Ragu spaghetti sauce. By day I saluted the American flag and sang “God Bless America;” but by night came the mournful sounds of Agustin Magaldi singing “Adios Muchachos” from Dad’s lopsided record player.

  I remember my father spoke mainly Spanish, preferring its romantic lulls and rolls to the colder, more guttural phonetics of the shtetls and to the slippery slang of Brooklyn English. It also came in handy whenever he and Aunt Lorraine didn’t want the rest of us to know what they were saying, though this peeved Mom. Not only did she feel excluded, but she herself had come from a long line of German Jews, the Most Favored Nation among the diaspora. Growing up, Mom’s voice shadowed me: You listen, Rachel! We might live with these Slavs, but you must understand the family you come from…you know who they mean when they talk about the chosen.

  Yet, those chosen among the chosen couldn’t forgive one of their own for marrying a Polack, and a Polack who moved comfortably through Brooklyn’s bodega culture was downright scandalous. Mom lost her MFN status the day she became a Slivowitz. Marrying for love was my biggest mistake. I was once a Durkheim, and now what? A nasty liqueur…where did they ever come up with that name?

  Later, having my own problems with that name, I would molt the Slivowitz skin myself. But as a young child, before I internalized the undercurrent of self-hatred that follows survival and started passing as Italian, I loved those zany Polacks; my grandmother and great Aunt Ida who fed me sweet babka and smiled, “good girl, good girl;” the brood of chubby-cheeked, hyperactive cousins, all boys, who fought with Rowdy and Neil, although Neil always ended up bruising this cousin’s wrist or sending that one home with a bloody nose.

  “A shame we Slivowitzes don’t make too many girls,” Aunt Lorraine used to say. “You’re the only one, the only girl. You’ll make us proud.” I remember her crying the day I received the scholarship to journalism school. It was the only time I ever saw her cry—not even recently, through all of the doctors and chemo, did she shed a tear in front of me—and I knew she thought I was honoring the memory of my grandfather, the newspaper man of Lodz. Although this was partially true, the means by which I secured my Columbia scholarship were questionable enough to weigh heavily on the mind of this “good girl,” who needed Aunt Lorraine’s approval. I wanted her to be proud of me so I kept quiet about the loose ends.

  After a few circles around the neighborhood, I landed an unmetered spot a block away from the East Village address Alexis Calyx had given me. A deep breath. The click of my keys in the door. I hiked my bag over my shoulder and walked beside
a row of brownstones in the nip of the afternoon, wondering about Alexis Calyx. What if her office were a sexual heroin den, like something out of Caligula, where upon entering she made you remove your clothes as casually as you had to relinquish your shoes in those Japanese restaurants I always avoided? If I wanted to eat with my shoes off, I would stay home. Neither were my clothes coming off. But what if she were the dominatrix type? If she locked me in a pair of handcuffs? Or taunted me with a rattan cane in a game of Singapore sling? I might be forced into something dangerous, like taking the job.

  I thought about climbing back into my jeep and going home, although I knew I couldn’t. Ethan would kill me, and though I had fantasized about killing him since our unenchanted evening, I couldn’t afford him thinking me irresponsible. Pragmatism in personal relationships was a key to success. I believed strongly in not breaking badly, in keeping all files active; you never knew where you might end up, whom you might need.

  Case in point: I was walking down the cracked, concrete stairs into the basement storefront that was home to Zipless Pictures. I pressed the doorbell, and it bounded back with a loud ring like the sound from an old rotary phone. Someone buzzed me inside.

  She spoke my name, and I recognized her voice, although the woman coming toward me with her hand extended was hardly the sexual commando I’d imagined. Alexis Calyx had thick, dark hair like mine, but pulled to the side with a fashionable clip, and a sweet, omniscient smile which, oddly, made me think of Aunt Lorraine. She wore a black, tailored suit with no shirt underneath and formidable platform boots that gave her about a foot on me. Her skin was a few pigments darker than mine, leading me to believe her roots were Mediterranean, and her body…for the first time in my life I was tempted to say built like a brick shithouse, although I had no idea what a brick shithouse was, let alone what one might look like.

  Poised, as if my heart were not pounding like a cement drill, I exchanged formalities with her, and followed her past the cluttered desks and shelves stocked with video boxes, around a group of young women, all fully clothed, sitting in front of a TV screen, eating burritos out of aluminum containers and wielding telephones in exasperated importance. They ignored us as we made our way through the railroad flat, passing colorful, geometric spray-paintings, framed movie posters, a few closed doors, and ended up in a small office.