Kamikaze Lust Read online

  “I’m sorry, I’m a little frazzled,” Alexis Calyx said. She sat down behind a functional, Plexiglas desk and sighed. I took one of the leopard-skin chairs on the other side. “I just came from the set. It’s a total zoo, my A.D. had a fight with my male lead and bolted. Okay, so Blink can be a prima donna, but this is news? Now I’ve got to find her, like I’m the goddamn missing persons bureau. If you want something done do it yourself, I know, I know…anyway, it’s just one of those days. Coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Good because that machine drives me nuts, you fill it to five, and it gives you two and it tastes like a burnt bagel, I don’t know. We don’t want coffee, right? What am I going on here for?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. So, Alexis Calyx was a little neurotic. This talking at warp speed, and like everyone in my family, she followed her words with emphatic hand movements and pushed the envelope on facial expressions. I felt immediately comfortable with her.

  “Right,” she pointed her index finger at me and looked down. I watched curiously as she moved her iridescent blue fingernails over the shiny white pages in front of her, which I assumed included the resume and clips I’d faxed her. Her lips cracked into a shrewd smile. “So, Brooklyn College?” she said.

  “Yeah, I almost went away, but things happened.”

  “Tell me about it.” She put down the resume and looked at me. “I did a semester at Queens, back when I was getting into the business, but, believe me, school was the last thing on my mind. Took me twenty years to get my degree. You grew up in Brooklyn then?”

  “I did.”

  “What part?”

  “Bay Ridge.”

  “Me, I’m just a little Italian girl from Bensonhurst myself, but nothing like Miss Norma Jean or the other one. Shit, who was the other one? Come on, help me out here, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? ”

  “Jane Russell.”

  “The Cross Your Heart bra lady, I’m impressed. But I’m hardly from the wrong side of the tracks. So don’t you get any ideas.” She smiled, and I thought, that’s it—Alexis Calyx was the Jane Russell of Bensonhurst, a grown-up version of my youthful wanna-be fantasies. I couldn’t help wondering how this little girl from Bensonhurst made it to the front lines of the sex industry.

  “I didn’t know Brooklyn had any right sides,” I tested.

  “Au contraire, my dear journalist. Sorry to say I had a happy childhood.”

  “Really? What was that like?”

  She laughed. “In due time, all in due time. Today, I get to ask the questions.”

  I leaned my right elbow back on the chair and said: “Fire away.”

  She took out a pen and yellow legal pad, then launched into a rapid succession of questions. Whenever I spoke she scribbled on the pad. She asked me who my favorite actor was. I couldn’t think of any. Actress? Too tempted to say Jane Russell, I begged off that one as well. Who would I be voting for in the Mayoral election? I never voted, in journalism school some professors said it wasn’t entirely ethical. Did I believe politicians had any business messing with people’s sex lives? Absolutely not. Interfering with the arts? No way. Regulating pornography? Well…um…maybe when it came to children. Did I have a favorite X-rated film? Aside from fragments on cable television and the original Last Tango in Paris, which I hated, I’d never actually seen an X-rated film.

  I enjoyed the question-and-answer game and the congenial badinage that stemmed from her queries. It was the easiest job interview ever, and I had to admit she was intriguing, this brick shithouse from Bensonhurst. A bit frazzled, yes, but she was smart in an actions-speak-louder-than-words way, frankly the kind of intelligence I always admired.

  “Okay, let’s cut to the chase.” She put down her pen, locked her fingers beneath her chin, and looked me straight in the eye. “You’d have to watch my erotica, some of the hard core, too. You’re okay with that?”

  “Sure.”

  “And come to the set, of course.”

  “No…I mean, it’s no problem.” Even if it were a problem, I wouldn’t have said anything. I don’t know what kind of brainwashing or subliminal seduction was going on in that office, but my do-the-right-thing claims to truth and public service were dwarfed in the presence of Alexis Calyx. I wanted the job with her.

  “Brilliant,” she beamed, and I wasn’t sure whether she meant me or my porno naïveté. Either way, it didn’t matter. Nor was I concerned that we spoke no specifics about the job itself. I figured I was in when she started picking through the shelves lined with videotapes, some still masked in plastic, others in generic, white boxes with titles scrawled in black magic marker. She stood on a chair to reach the higher shelves and handed tapes down to me in an assembly line process, during which someone knocked at the door.

  “Come in, come in,” Alexis said. A red-headed woman in a tight black body suit and jeans inched open the door. We both stared at her. “Well, what is it?”

  “Um…Alexis?”

  “Yes?”

  “You…um, better come here a sec,” the young woman said, and they exchanged the kind of tell-all glance that informed me they’d known each other for a while. Alexis jumped down from her chair and turned to me.

  “Would you excuse me one moment, please?”

  I nodded, “Sure.”

  I sat down again, glanced around the office. Aside from the rows of tapes kept in their black metal cage behind the desk, the decor was minimalist. A poster for a movie called Sensurround, starring the one and only Alexis Calyx, hung by the door. An abstract painting in black, white, and gray covered most of the wall perpendicular to the desk. Opposite the painting were two windows, Levelors pulled up, unveiling a courtyard view of amputated branches, split fences, the backsides of weathered brick buildings with scaly molding, rusted bars covering the lower floor windows, and a few air conditioners bulging like cysts.

  Alexis still gone, I turned my attention to the pile of videotapes and thumbed through a few titles: All the President’s Women, It’s a Gang-Bang New Year, Sheila and Her Purple Penis, Brothers Do It Deeper.

  I felt as if I’d been yanked from the glamour and excitement of a movie set and deposited in the back alley of Zipless Pictures. I couldn’t help but think of my brothers: Rowdy and his random fits of cursing, spitting in my face, or shoving me around; and Neil, who never hit me, but was always drilling holes in my wall or breaking through the dead bolts I put on my bedroom door with a crowbar. Sometimes he showed up under my bed. Other times he left me dead water bugs and pictures of naked girls with an arm or a leg missing. Once, he locked me in a pair of handcuffs and Dad had to cut them off with a huge metal clip.

  Neil seemed, like the wounded vets home from Vietnam, lost in maze of contemplative terror that as time went on made him violent and angry; Rowdy, on the other hand, maintained the demeanor of a pathetic, petty criminal. Before going to jail for the first time when he was nineteen, he let me in on one of his schemes. He had tape recorded the sounds that different coins made when they were dropped into a public telephone (b-b-b-b-buuup was a quarter, be-beep a dime, boop a nickel), and dubbed them onto myriad cassette tapes. The system worked like this: You dialed a number, the operator said please deposit X amount for X number of minutes, you put the mouthpiece to the tape deck and pressed play. The sounds registered as real coins.

  He rigged it for me one day. We got the number of a hotel in London from the travel section of the paper and dialed. “See, no coins,” Rowdy whispered, as he held the receiver to his boom box. Right away, a woman with a thick English accent said, “Hullo!” I made a reservation.

  When Neil got wind of Rowdy’s Rube Goldberg contraption, he saw greenbacks glowing behind the empty eyes of his older brother. He sent Rowdy peddling tapes through Brooklyn’s immigrant communities, while he stayed home counting and dispensing their earnings. Years dealing nickel bags of skunk weed had given Neil the ability to turn a profit on such low-level commodities. At least he was selling the pot himself and not broker
ing it through his idiot brother.

  For months, the cops combed the borough looking for the notorious Telephone Thief until one day they spotted a man standing in a phone booth for hours with a tape deck the size of a traveling suitcase. They brought him in for questioning and, within hours, the cops were ravaging through Rowdy’s room where they discovered cassette tapes replete with thousands of b-b-b-b-buuups, be-beeps, and boops.

  Rowdy was sent to Rikers; I went to confession. I’d seen enough movies to know exactly what to do when I walked into that cold, intimidating booth. “Forgive me Father for I have sinned,” I said, and then recounted the story of the telephone fiasco, altering enough facts to protect my fraudulent claims to Catholicism. At ten years old I was already quite the little story teller. I talked. The priest listened. Then he blessed me and sent me on my way.

  I went back a few times until he started asking me whether I’d accepted the ways of the Lord Jesus. Now, I had no great love of the Jewish religion, which came to me in a genetics of weakness, assimilation, and death, but never did I think of becoming a full-time Catholic. Besides, I couldn’t see that confession actually did anything. I wanted change, not absolution. I wanted better brothers.

  “That’s a bit scary, trust me.” I was shaken by Alexis’ voice; Brothers Do It Deeper fell to the floor. Alexis scooped up the tape and walked back behind her desk. “I was such an ingenue back then, so young and stupid. Then again, we all have our crosses, don’t we?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I nodded, still flustered by streaks of childhood.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry, but I have to cut this short. My A.D.’s resurfaced with a list of demands. Apparently, she thinks it’s Lebanon or something. She runs off my set and has the balls to come back with demands—like I have time for this. I have an exam at five.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “A mid-term no less.”

  “I thought you finished your degree?”

  “You listen, I like that.” She set down the tape and stared across the desk at me as intensely as she’d eyed the woman who interrupted our earlier conversation, and, once again, I experienced the subterranean tug of her personality.

  She smiled. “You want all the answers, don’t you?”

  “Just one for now.”

  “Fair enough. In the real world, my dear scribbler, I’m in law school. I have a torts exam today.”

  “Wow.” I half-laughed, feeling as dumb as my language and a bit out of my league. Alexis Calyx wasn’t supposed to be book smart. Interesting, yes. Worldly, sure. But law school?

  “What can I say?” Alexis said. “It took me so long to finish my degree I got used to having school in my life. Of course, it’s not really that simple, but you know that. Or you will soon.”

  She turned around and shuffled through the stack of videotapes on her desk, every so often placing one in a pile for me. I watched her shuffle the porno tapes with her glittering fingernails and tried to imagine those same fingers lugging a briefcase full of legal documents downtown. She would have to use a different shade of polish. No lawyer I knew wore iridescent blue.

  “You don’t mind if I do the contract myself?” she asked as she led me back outside through her industrious minions.

  “Not at all.”

  “Good. I think we’re going to get along just fine, Miss Rachel from Bay Ridge. The thing to remember is this is a business like any other….Hey, hey, Alia.” She stopped a woman in big brown sunglasses and a tight satin overcoat who must have been about my age. “Un-uh, not on your life. Once shame on you, twice shame on me.” The woman laughed as Alexis turned to me. “Rachel, meet Alia, my stellar A.D., the one with demands. I’m surprised you didn’t take hostages.”

  “That’s a good idea. Next time.”

  “Trust me, honey, there will not be a next time. Are you this much trouble over at that Hollywood finishing school?”

  “Hollywood finishing school?” I asked. The three of us walked outside into the crepuscular haziness, a cocktail-hour laziness.

  The stellar A.D. smirked, “N.Y.U.”

  “Back in the seventies we would have laughed if anyone came to us from film school, but what’s that Dylan line? Come on, help me out here.”

  “Dylan Thomas?” said the A.D.

  “Dylan Bob.”

  “The times they are a’changing,” I said.

  “Precisely,” Alexis said. “Anyway, we’ve got to run.”

  A short goodbye, and I was left standing in front of Zipless Pictures, my arms stuffed with tapes and the draft of an autobiographical essay Alexis was writing for a snappy feminist journal called Good Witch. As I skimmed the piece in the shifting rays of sun, the world of Alexis Calyx spurted into my veins. Curiosity, once peaked, was my favorite high. Some reporters got off on the rush of breaking a hot story, and yes, I had to admit it was trippy knowing that people sitting down to their morning coffee would gawk a holy shit! gaze over your words. But I was a process junky, more excited by travel than the final destination. By the time I finished a story I was already tracking down the next; rarely did I read my own work in print. One might say I suffered from fear of little death syndrome.

  And what of its cure? Years cavorting with post-Freudians—the Kleinian or Lacanian crowd—at one hundred fifty dollars a forty-five minute hour? I don’t think so. I simply went on believing that each story might be the one that stopped me dead in my tracks. Forever waiting for the big O.

  A few days later, on a crisp Halloween morning, I drove out to Bay Ridge with the Docudeath tape and a brand new television set. It was an early Chanukah gift for Aunt Lorraine, a big, fancy model with a built-in VCR. Over the years, after I’d moved to Miami and started making money, I occasionally bought Aunt Lorraine and Mom expensive gifts to assuage my guilt for leaving. I wasn’t about to let the strike break me of this habit, at least not while I still had credit cards and Aunt Lorraine was stuck with a set so old the figures swelled and released as if they were controlled by invisible sound waves. Aunt Lorraine said she didn’t mind, that she felt as if she were watching life through a kaleidoscope. That was when she could still make it downstairs for anything important, cop shows or Press Talk.

  I paid two boys who lived across the street five dollars each to carry the set inside and up to Aunt Lorraine’s bedroom. Rowdy followed silently behind, eyeing them nervously as they dragged the set across the rug and over to the foot of Aunt Lorraine’s bed.

  “Wow!” The smaller boy jumped back upon noticing Aunt Lorraine, who was asleep with a dry, white tongue hanging against her lower lip, and her eyelids twitching. “How’d her face get so puffy?”

  “Cancer,” I said.

  “Oh,” he nodded sagely, as if he should have known from her greenish skin tone and the IV tube plugged into her arm. He nudged his brother out of the room, and I realized it was the tube that sent jitters so deep inside my stomach I couldn’t eat for hours after I’d been here.

  Aunt Lorraine had once been the most vibrant woman I knew: always reading and talking and asking questions long before Alexis Calyx had even left Bensonhurst. Who was the greatest American president? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Why did so many Nazis flee to Argentina? Because that’s where the Jews were hiding. Until recently, I always knew the answers she wanted to hear.

  Apparently, she’d had a feeling about the cancer for some time but kept it to herself. Only when the lump in her breast grew as big as a golf ball did she acquiesce to seeing a doctor, who turned her over to an oncologist. Both of her breasts were removed; she underwent chemotherapy. But it was too late. About a month ago, they found that the cancer had infiltrated her bones.

  Mom said Aunt Lorraine’s bedroom was starting to smell like a nursing home, a peculiar statement coming from a woman who never stepped foot inside of a nursing home. When her own mother lay dying at Sunset Estates, and I sent her plane tickets to come to Miami, each time Mom succumbed to one of her fainting spells and was unable to visit. Death, Mom said. She knew its scent and
it made her nervous. It also gave her cause to tap a mother lode of anti-depressants and spa in New Jersey with her gentleman friend, Hyman Hogan. Thankfully, Rowdy was around to clean Aunt Lorraine’s commode and change her IV unit or bandages when the nurse wasn’t there.

  Looking at him sitting on the edge of Aunt Lorraine’s bed with his clammy face and those big yellow stains under the arms of his T-shirt, I thought it odd that at the age of forty my balding, dim-witted brother had become Florence Nightingale.

  He caught me staring at him. “How’d you know about Beta site anyway?”

  “The what?” I squinted as if focusing on him might give me some insight into his world.

  “See it’s got the test scanner on it.” He walked over to me and pointed to the panel of buttons on the television set. “You know like in the supermarket how they got those scanners, right? Well, a lot of people don’t know this, but they can read your brain with them, but only if you got implants. They started with dogs, and then they moved on to people, prisoners first. That’s where I got mine. In prison.”

  “Do I have one?”

  “Nah, only people who been down by the government,” he said. He walked back to the bed and sat down, bugging his eyes back and forth between Aunt Lorraine and me. “It’s going to blow up when she sleeps,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, I know how to hook up a TV.” Despite the various instruction manuals and stray wires all over the floor, I knew what I was doing. It was an ego thing that I had a handle on technology. My father was the autodidactic electrician, after all.

  Rowdy laughed hysterically, his mouth open so wide I could see all of his missing teeth. “No, I mean Aunt Lorraine.” He held both of his hands over his stomach. “Her face blows up when she sleeps.” I had to laugh along with him. “Then, she starts shrinking and by the end of the day she’s a skeleton like the faces they got in the drug store, you know, for Halloween. Oh man, she’s so sick…” his voice tapered off, and I watched a tear drip from the corner of his eye.