Kamikaze Lust Read online

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No way, man. You don’t know.” His voice was getting contentious.

  “Please. Let’s not fight about it.”

  “I’m the one who takes care of her,” he cried. “You don’t know nothing!”

  “What’s it she don’t know that you think you know?” Mom said. I had no idea how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me hook up the television set.

  “Hello, Mom,” I said.

  She smiled slyly beneath her creamy brown bouffant and walked toward me, turning her cheek for me to kiss it. She smelled sickly sweet, like Poison or Opium. “And what’s this?” she said.

  “It’s a television.”

  Rowdy was flustered. “Both of you don’t know dogshit, I’m the one who’s here all the time.”

  Mom ignored him. She’d been jealous of Rowdy since he became a credentialed schizophrenic, robbing her of the family’s Most Mentally Ill title. I thought she had it all wrong; his illness, if anything, gave credence to her own.

  “I know what it is,” Mom said. “How did it get here?”

  “I bought it for Aunt Lorraine.”

  “Rachel’s some big spender now. No job, but she’s buying TVs and you, what do you care? You’re off in Atlantic City—”

  “Shut up, Rowdy.”

  “Atlantic City?” I said. “I thought you hated gambling.”

  “We’re not talking about me.”

  “They go for that Merv Griffin stuff. You know, Ma likes the shows.”

  “Look, there’s nothing wrong with me spending some time with my boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend,” I said. “You’re almost sixty-five years old, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Maybe she’s jealous,” Rowdy said. I ignored him this time.

  “Look, don’t you blame me that you can’t keep a man,” Mom said. “I’m sick of all your projecting.”

  “What do mean, projecting? I don’t project!”

  Just then, Aunt Lorraine’s eyes opened. I jumped up onto the bed with her and took her hand. Though frail and bony, it felt like one of Ethan’s suits, cut from the most expensive silk. “How’s the patient?”

  “Lousy. They’ve got me on more pills than…look at them…” she motioned to a tray of plastic containers on the side table, “red, yellow, blue, I’ll tell you something. I stopped taking them.”

  “She thinks she’s her own doctor already,” Rowdy said.

  “You really should take your pills.”

  “I’m sick of being a Jell-O head,” she said, then looked over my shoulder. “What the heck is that thing?”

  “She says it’s a television set,” Mom said.

  “I can see, but why? I liked my old TV.”

  I let go of her hand and huffed. “Forget it, I’m leaving—”

  “No no, honey, I love it.” Aunt Lorraine winked at me, eyes glistening like the old days. “Come, come, did you bring my tape?”

  I nodded, standing up to get the tape out of my bag.

  “What’s it she’s got there?” Mom asked.

  “Oh, you know, it’s the death video I wanted to see,” Aunt Lorraine said.

  “The what!” Mom arched her eyebrows, Gloria Swansonlike as usual.

  “The one from the television program—Rachel knows that Doctor Kaminsky.”

  “She knows him,” Mom said. “You know him, that monster?”

  “I was covering him, I told you that.”

  “You did not!” Mom said. “And why do we have to watch it, I don’t know which one of you is crazier than the other. Have some respect for the dead, would you?”

  Aunt Lorraine shrugged. The Docudeath video burned against my fingertips. I’d already seen it once, and though it was tastefully done in a tear-jerking, save-the-children sort of way, there was no doubt that it was a step-by-step guide to suicide.

  First, however, we experimented with the television set. I showed Aunt Lorraine how to flip the channels, program the split screen, set the clock and timer. No flashing 12:00 in this bedroom. Excited as Aunt Lorraine was, it was the video she’d been waiting for.

  I dropped the tape in the VCR and looked at Mom. “Are you all right?”

  She shrugged this time.

  “Look, Stella,” Aunt Lorraine said. “If you don’t want to watch, go downstairs.”

  “Leave now or forever hold your peace,” Rowdy said.

  “I don’t like it at all,” Mom said. She pulled up the chair next to Aunt Lorraine’s bed and sat down.

  Aunt Lorraine, clinging to the remote, pressed play, but instead of Ida and Marvin, what appeared on the twenty-five-inch, precision-image screen was a couple of women, one lying naked on a wet, ceramic tile floor, the other, dressed in a French maid’s uniform, caressing with red fingernails the passive woman’s stomach, moving up, and up, and up, following slowly with her mouth until she came to the woman’s nipples, hard as finely cut diamonds, and her tongue wended its way between them, in long, lulling licks that caused the supine woman to scream out above the stringy soundtrack. Off to the side, a tan, mustachioed man sporting button-fly bell-bottoms and a bad haircut watched intently, his dark eyes conveying a sense of longing so real I found myself identifying with him.

  “Ida and Marvin must have had some life,” Aunt Lorraine said. Her attention was fixed to the screen.

  I jumped up to stop the tape.

  “Is this your idea of a joke?” Mom said.

  “No, it’s not a joke.” I turned to face her. “And don’t look at me like I’m some kind of pervert. It’s research, for a job. I brought the wrong tape.”

  “Matter of opinion,” Aunt Lorraine said. I frantically searched the top of the TV set for the off button. Couldn’t find it.

  “What do you mean, work?” Mom said. “What kind of work are you doing?”

  “Stop the tape! Where’s the damn remote?”

  “She got it,” Rowdy pointed to Aunt Lorraine. He smiled, “Man-O-Manischevitz, Rachel, I never knew you were so cool.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You can shut it off, Aunt Lorraine… Aunt Lorraine?”

  No use. She was hooked. I continued to search for another off button.

  “Man, this is classic,” Rowdy murmured. “Must be at least twenty years old.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked him.

  “Shit, everyone knows Sensurround.”

  I took a few steps backward. So this was the infamous Sensurround, starring Alexis Calyx and Robbie Rod, her ex-husband, who had also directed the film. It was a parody of those seventies disasters like Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. I remembered the poster Alexis had hanging on her wall. Then, a fragment from her effusive, confessional essay: “the sexual choreography runs so close to the apocalypse.”

  With the world crashing to its grand finale, desire reigned supreme. Everything was sex. Raw sex. Desperate sex. Slippery, condomless, big-death/little-death sex. The kind of sex I’d never had. The kind of sex I craved.

  On screen, the French maid kissed the naked woman, whom I now recognized to be Alexis. A storm thunderbolted outside the window next to them. The man (Robbie Rod) was naked, too. His penis was absurdly large, the biggest I’d ever seen.

  A flash of silver lightning smashed through the window, sending shards of glass sparkling through the air. The music grew somber. Crescendo speeding up with an accent on the horns. The French maid was gone. Alexis and Robbie Rod lay together, his back to the floor and she on top of him. His toes curled against her right knee cap. The gesture seemed too intimate for this kind of movie, for any kind of movie.

  But I couldn’t stand another minute of it now. Here. With Aunt Lorraine watching studiously, Mom pretending not to, and Rowdy talking back to the screen. It could have been the Docudeath or Shoah or any Hollywood action film for that matter. I got up to leave.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Mom said. “You still haven’t told us—”

  “That woman, Alexis Calyx,
I’m ghostwriting her autobiography.”

  Mom frowned, disaffectedly. As if I’d somehow disappointed her by not claiming to be at least a consumer of porn if not a porn star myself. “What’s the matter, not scandalous enough for you?”

  “Jeeze, you hit the big time,” Rowdy said.

  Mom didn’t think so. “Can’t you find any nice people to write about?”

  “Nice, who’s nice?”

  “You used to be. We put you in little dresses.”

  “Get over it, Ma. She ain’t your dress-up doll no more.”

  Our words were stymied by a stereophonic boom rising from the TV speakers. Another window came crashing down on top of Alexis and Robbie Rod. They fucked obliviously, wholeheartedly, apocalyptically. My thoughts came in fragmented clichés. Goodbye cruel world. Out with a bang and not a whimper. For forty days and forty nights. He died with a smile on his face.

  Robbie Rod stood, his back a mosaic of blood and broken glass. He took his penis in his hand and it was as if he were grabbing a thick pole. I couldn’t believe that thing had been up inside of Alexis without bruising her internal organs. But she showed no outward signs of damage. She looked up at her man, reverently, part damsel in distress, part lady in waiting. I bolted from the room before the final shot. Before the easy come moment had gone.

  ONE IN THE HAND, TWO IN THE BUSH

  “Hold it!” Alexis commanded. A click and the cameras stopped; all eyes turned to her. Bodies stilled off set as if she’d pressed a pause button. On set, a man relaxed his grip on a woman’s thighs, which had been posed missionary-style making her look somewhat like a roasted chicken. Her legs dropped to the bed. He took a few steps back, glaring at Alexis as he stroked his erect penis. But for the alacrity of his hand-cock motion, he looked like some kind of sex zombie.

  Having arrived just a few minutes earlier, I took the opportunity to move in and claim a camouflaged spot behind a couple of leafy floor plants, going for my usual fly-on-the-wall routine. Alexis sighed, “Billie, you’ve got to get the light in closer.” Without a word, the woman standing behind a massive eyeball of a light dollied forward. I held out my microcassette recorder. “That’s it, on top of her, I want to see her pussy glow. And can we get some glitter makeup on her thighs?” A woman with enough unguents to paint the cast of Cats came running. As if she were a gynecologist, she sat down in front of the star’s legs and began her cosmetic doctoring. “Beautiful,” Alexis said. “We’re going for broke here, boys and girls, the fucking of the gods.” There were a few giggles. Alexis turned to the naked man. “Mark, don’t look at the camera so much. Use your tongue for a while, then pull back and pick up the crystal. Okay, heat ’em up and action!”

  Mark, tongue jutting lizardlike from his mouth, moved along the woman’s thighs. Two video cameras hovered close to their bodies. The woman moaned, giving what seemed like a virtuoso “oh, baby, oh! ” I tried to remember her name. It began with a T, Tessa something…Tessa Toupee or Tepee or Tempe. And he must be Mark Vladimir, the featured male lead on this latest Zipless Pictures project: One in the Hand, Two in the Bush. It was already being hailed by the Alexis acolytes as groundbreaking erotic cinema.

  I took my reporter’s notebook from the pocket of my blazer, slipped the ball-point pen from behind my ear, and wrote down a few fragments: Cameras. Smoke machine. Attractive young people with props; clipboards, cell phones, beepers, headphones. Everyone watching. Me watching them watch. The sanctioned voyeur.

  Indeed it was like watching the trials I’d covered before the strike, and just as I’d been conscious of researching every case to the last detail I’d come prepared for my virgin viewing of this sex shoot. I’d seen a few videos, skimmed through insider magazines with names like Skin, Video X-tra, and The Bondage & Discipline Tour. I read selections from the classic texts, everything from Freud and Krafft-Ebing to The Filmmaker’s Guide to Pornography. Going on-line, I logged into the appropriate newsgroups, gleaning information on new releases, industry feuds, HIV rumors, while familiarizing myself with the jargon. I could tell you the difference between meat and money shots, tout the industry’s preference for Astroglide over other lubricants, and delineate scenes by their reductive categories: the boy-girl, the girl-girl, the boy-girl-girl, and so forth and so on.

  The category of the moment was boy-girl, the action, post-insertion with sex toy, as Mark moved a thick, conelike crystal in and out of Tessa’s vagina, stopping every few minutes to roll his tongue along the clear, wet stick. As they spoke I jotted down their dialogue.

  Tessa says: Move me, fuck me with the light of God.

  Mark says: Baby, I’m here. I am God.

  Tessa says: Oh, I want you inside me now!

  Mark took a step back and ripped open a condom wrapper. It was a Zipless rule that couples practice safe sex, HIV test or not, yet there were exceptions: the married couple, the long-term lovers, or women with women who outright refused to work with those silly dental dams. But Mark and Tessa were a nonexception couple. That even I noticed this couldn’t be good. No wonder Alexis looked dyspeptic, as if she were on the verge of bursting into bitter song; if this were indeed a musical and not a sex film shoot. The rest of the crew seemed constipated, watching nervously as Mark, a hirsute figure with a penis about the length and width of the average-size banana, fixed an airhole at the end of his condom, smiling perfunctorily at Tessa, whose face, though done up like a side-show gypsy, conveyed a fuck-me-yes-but-I-don’t-have-to-like-it quality. Was it me or did she appear sorrowful beneath her rough and tumble exterior? I couldn’t stop staring at the bottoms of her feet. Black from stomping back and forth on the dusty wood, they would need a touch of air brushing in the edit suite. The condom wrapper fell to the floor, sounding a light slap. Then came a collective sigh of relief as Mark, penis erect and snugly encased, put his palms on Tessa’s thighs and pushed them upward. One camera clung to their torsos, the other moved to Tessa’s face. Mark took his penis in his right hand and guided it inside of her.

  “Okay,” Alexis said, “pickup with the other camera, keep going, on their faces. Good, good…shit! Tessa, be a goddamn martyr if you have to, but don’t look like one. Cut!”

  As from the sudden burst of a water balloon, frustration splattered in every direction. “We’re going to be here forever,” a guy in faded jeans, with headphones and a boom mike mumbled to nobody in particular.

  “Shut up,” Tessa snapped at him. “He smells like onions. I mean once or twice, but this is too much, and he’s all soft again. You try smiling about fucking a slinky.”

  “You think you smell so great with all that flowery crap you rub on,” Mark said. “She wonders why I lose my concentration.”

  “I thought the onions were supposed to help,” Tessa whined, as if she were a Class A tattle-tale. I wondered if she had older brothers.

  “What is with the onions?” Alexis asked.

  “He says they make him more vee-rile,” Tessa sneered at him.

  “That’s not what I said, you little…uh!” Mark jerked his head back in disgust, ran his right hand through his hair, and then glowered back at Tessa. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he started to speak. “I said they make my cum more milky.”

  Alexis quickly moved between them, taking Mark by the elbow. “Look, we’re wrapping today, and I absolutely refuse to be here all night. So go brush your teeth and no more onions. What do you do, eat them raw?”

  “Like an apple,” he said.

  Alexis shook her head. “Honey, next time you’re worried about the plumbing try zinc capsules like everyone else. Now, you want to clear the set?”

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “Yeah right,” someone murmured.

  “Okay, enough from the peanut gallery. If you want to help, do a private little rain dance for Mark, and you,” Alexis turned to Tessa, “go use your vibrator a few minutes. You’re being paid to fuck a slinky if you have to.”

  Alexis sighed, leaned back in her director’s ch
air. She caught my eye and motioned for me to join her. I did as instructed, like everyone else. For as plagued by perfectionism as Alexis was, when she said cut, no matter how long they’d been shooting, everyone stayed with her vision. I got the feeling they all believed they were doing important work, trekking beyond the traditional porno métier…where no man had gone before. Women worked cameras, carried cell phones, and swung mikes. Yet even for these millennial years, it veered toward parody. A vision of Lesbos within the drab fascism of California porn.

  And where on the Left Coast would you find a director who treated her actors and crew as if they were her own children? The other day I heard her on the phone asking Mark if he’d taken his Cs—he had a cold coming on; now she was pained by Tessa’s phallophobia.

  “I just don’t get it,” she was telling me. “I love using her because she doesn’t have implants and her tits aren’t that big, it’s a different kind of aesthetic. It says something. You’re recording this?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t,” she said, rubbing two fingers on each of her temples. “I’m too riled, I have to think it through.”

  “Why are you so upset?”

  “Why? I have a feature star who flips out when a man gets near her and you ask, why? Girl-girl scenes she’s the best, but this isn’t a lesbian company, that’s not all we do. I’ve been telling her she doesn’t have to feature, which would be a shame because every time she’s on screen, it breaks ranks. She’s not what a porn star should look like, blah, blah, semiotic bullshit maybe…but it’s true.”

  “Because she’s flat-chested?”

  “Yes, of course. But if she won’t do men, it’s less powerful. Women don’t have the tit fetish, most of them anyway. And that’s not the point here. She made such a big deal about not wanting to be pigeonholed, not wanting to be an industry dyke. A lot of women are like that, they’ll only do girl-girl scenes. It’s safer, they feel less pressured with women.”