Popping downers (6/5/07)

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Sleeping with Bad Boys. [Alice Denham, 2006.]

The Sixties. The Fifties. They came after the Forties. They began. They ended. What did they mean? What could one phenomenally stacked Southern girl know? I pushed my 38-DD headlights out and gave the mousey gray men in the green eyeshades my fourteen-hundred-watt smile. Their puny members quivered in their bourgeois boxer shorts. Their cameras went off prematurely. Outside gunshots announced the assassinations of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse. “Let us go then, you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky,” I murmured. “Like a patient etherised upon a table,” Lemmy Caution replied. His throbbing Ford Galaxie hummed down my darkened boulevards, glistening with lubricious neon. “We’re on a journey to the end of the night,” Charlie Parker agreed, dying abruptly of an overdose. Not to be outdone, Mailer drained another bottle of bourbon. “The white Negro must dare to walk the plank,” he said. He ripped the clothing from his Jewish-dumpling body, and naked rode a unicycle back and forth upon a tightrope stretched between the bestial and the divine far above the unforgiving pavement of anonymity. “I sing the body dielectric!” he exclaimed. “I advertise myself!” His were not, I perceived, the Olympian testicles of Hemingway. I ignored them, and the question they presumed. His wife took umbrage nonetheless. She stripped and attempted to smother me with the sacred melons of the writer’s spouse. Robert Evans took notes and sold the treatment to Doris Wishman for Chesty Morgan. Suddenly James Dean, William Gaddis, and E. Howard Hunt made their entrance. Gaddis had exquisite cheekbones and the biggest dick, though I quarreled with the conceptual premises of The Recognitions. I disrobed and they cast lots for my garments. I realized suddenly that I had to write, no matter what the world might think. “Let’s fuck and then you can cook and do my laundry,” said the one in the funny hat. “Quiet,” I said. “I’m working on my ‘a’s.”

The Sixties. The Fifties. James Dean hurtled off the road in his Porsche Spyder. This never would have happened if he hadn’t dumped me for that notalent Italian bitch. Bettie Page was shameless. Was there anything that slut wouldn’t do? Katherine Anne Porter had great boobs, even though she was seventy-six. The Mamie van Doren of her day. No, Mamie Van Doren was the Mamie Van Doren of her day. Never mind that, there was war in Vietnam. Astronauts circled the earth every ninety minutes. Literary giants circled my pudenda every ninety seconds. Brando, that enigma. I drenched myself with Mazola and, nipples ruby-red as laser beams, posed wrestling a giant octopus. Sucker marks darkened my aureolae for moons thereafter. Bettie Page would have done a threesome with a squid and a sperm whale.

The Fifties. The Sixties. The members of the camera clubs drooled upon their bibs, and left their lenscaps on. I did paperback covers. I did movie posters. I did comic books. I was Aelita, Queen of Mars. I was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. I was Azusa-Pacific, Queen of the Khyber Rifles. I was all of the Girl Gun Runners of Saigon, except the one in the upper left. I was Secret Agent X-15 of the OSS, though Saul Bellow agreed with me that X-27 would have been better. Number ruled the cosmos, said Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Eros ruled the human imagination, said Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud. Folly ruled the hearts of men, said Renaissance humanist Erasmus. Failed promise and the search for lost time ruled the five and dime, said Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean. I posed for Nugget Gent Bent Swank Rank Dank Crank Stud Schtup Schwing Boing/Boing and El Kabong. “My presence in this narrative is a statistical improbability,” said mathematician Patrick Suppes. “My presence in this narrative is a symptom of the emergence of a higher consciousness,” said LSD advocate Timothy Leary. “My presence in this narrative is a logical necessity,” said article-omitter Alice Denham.

James Baldwin. Slight. Sensitive. Gay. Black. Not white. Not gray. Strasberg. The Method. The Lack Thereof. Philip Roth was insatiable. I worked on my ‘g’s.

Pictures of me began to appear on postcards everywhere.

Pictures of me appeared on billboards in the heartland. The Bible Belt revolted and seceded from the Union. Having developed a taste for armed insurrection, they seceded from themselves and came back. Nobody noticed.

Pictures of me were projected onto the Moon by NASA rocket dweebs who had no girlfriends. Fascinated, we smoked many more cigarettes and drank much more whiskey.

The East Village. Could that be William Randolph Hearst? He seemed fragile somehow, weighed down by age and the burden of his millions. I feared that if I dropped his name I might break it.

Hemingway. Yes. The bullfights. And then he shot himself.

Money came. But then it went. Historians debate the significance of this. Sex clubs opened. The universe expanded. Pictures of me radiated outward into the cosmos, borne upon the cosmic winds. With magnifying glass and infrared lantern I dusted my diaphragm for fingerprints. The butler did it. I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth. You know, that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth. “I do not find/The Hanged Man,” she said. “Fear death by childbirth.”

Jack Kennedy nailed everyone but me, though Michel Foucault argues it would have been the best thirty seconds of his life. “Still, one must imagine Sisyphus is happy,” said Albert Camus as he expired in an automobile accident. Simone de Beauvoir invented the Second Sex. Science labored to discover a Third and a Fourth. Undaunted, I continued to investigate the First.

I was not a kept woman. I could not be a kept woman. I would never be a kept woman. I would not, could not keep. My shelf life was inadequate. I accessorized poorly, and shopped not for ball and chain. Collars made my neck break out in a rash. I read Dostoevsky and listened to Bartok. They would have loved my tits.

New York in the Fifties. Paris in the Twenties. The solstices. The pregnant pauses. Which was Geist, which Zeit? When I ask not, I know; when I ask, I know not. If my clothes fell off in the forest when there was no one there to watch, would the photographs be sold to the usual venues? to Cavalcade, Escapade, Stag, Bachelor, Dude, Duke, Ace, Modern, Ancient, and Medieval Photography, True Action, Equally Valid Opposite and Equal Reaction, The Journal of Molecular Biology, The Paris Review, Male, Men, Nude on the Moon, Soldier of Fortune, Planet Stories, True Detective, the Philosophical Review?

Alexander Grothendieck. I never heard of him, nor did I attend his legendary Seminarie de Geometrie Algebrique, where shutters would have clicked as men refused to take me seriously. But he would have brought me to the casting couch in his office at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, and declared his right to do mathematics in my every topos. His chalk, I am confident, would not have gone soft upon the blackboard of a woman who dared to be his equal.

We smoked, We drank. We bulged. We invented bulging. Our jeans were so tight I discovered my clit. “That’s it over there,” said Gore Vidal. “It dots the ‘i’ in ‘Levi-Strauss’.” “No,” said Ad Reinhardt, “it’s the thing at the end of the row of buttons.” He painted it black as a joke. As always the critics didn’t get it.

We drank to excess. Men were allowed to drink more than women, because they did not suffer penis envy, with the possible exception of James Earl Jones. The Forties. The Thirties. The Jazz Age. The Age of Bronze. What were they thinking? We picketed Anthony Scalia’s office for abortion rights. Too bad we didn’t fucking bomb it. The Sixties. The Age of Reason.

Richard Alpert. The war, the drugs, the age of liberation. “You are all a lost generation,” said the woman of great wisdom. “Well, maybe just a really stoned generation.” Faulkner. Yes. But what about this kid Truman Capote? Historians weigh the relative significance of their dicks. Uncharacteristically bashful, nude sunbather Henry Miller covers himself with his hat.

Joeseph Heller. He wasn’t famous yet. Then he was. “Why haven’t we ever balled on the top of a Ferris wheel?” he asked me mournfully. “You’re married, Joe,” I said. “And think of the scheduling difficulties.” Nodding hello to the Lion Tamer, the Horse Whisperer, the Dishwasher from the Wailing Wang, Hurricane Carter, playing upon his blue guitar, and other members of my three o'clock. “Oh well,” he said. “what the hell.” He danced a jig and left the room walking on his hands. Outside, more gunshots. Nixon was attempting a military coup. Meanwhile sexual intercourse had recently been invented and it showed much promise. I finished the first half of the alphabet and called Hugh Hefner on a whim and said I’d flash him my high beams if he’d publish it. “Sure baby,” he said, using a screwdriver to adjust the expression of his face. “Look what I have under my robe. It rhymes with ‘guerilla insurrection’.” Sure enough in Bolivia Che Guevara was striving to raise the consciousness of the peasants. Where would it end? Hefner was dispassionate and metronomic and methodical and substantial and boring and possessed of an accountant’s soul though since a publisher potentially a means to an end and had a great stereo. He adjusted his staying power with a set of sockets and a pipewrench. I watched myself search for adjectives in the mirrored ceiling of his seven-acre bedroom. My father had a heart attack. My mother hated me. My father had a heart attack. My mother hated me. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” said my darling whitehaired Dad as his arteries cemented shut. My mother hated me. “Wny don’t you get a job, and marry a wealthy newspaper magnate,” she asked. “I can’t,” I said. “I have to write. It is my destiny, my kismet, my raison d’etre.” She shrieked her incomprehension. I worked on my ‘q’s. The long loops indicated genius. J.D. Salinger published Franny and Zooey. The short loops suggested a predilection for the reverse cowgirl position. My mother was a psychotic bitch. Mailer wondered why we were in Vietnam. My apartment was two hundred thirty-six and a quarter square feet. Catch-22 sounded better than Catch-18. Though I would have preferred two to the catchier fifth power. Rod McKuen published Song of Myself. No, that was someone else. Rod McKuen was not Whitman. Whitman was not F. Scott Fitzgerald or E. Power Biggs. I worked on my ‘t’s and then on my ‘a’s again. A background in ballet helped. Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend answered the door in the nude and put us up for the night. Lyndon Johnson was disgusting. “You are an adventuress,” said the man of the hour when he beheld my spectacular rack. I strove to remember what man, which hour.

The Fifties. The Sixties. And then more decades. The end.

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Sympathy for the Devil (3/28/07)

Pillow talk.