Kink

by Kink- Stories (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  The first thing she did when she moved into the house in Mount Washington was install dark green shades to keep the light out. She’d become so sensitive to light. Birds woke her up at six, followed by this gray seepage of pearlescent light through the two half walls of windows where she slept. There was a feeling then, that everything was hovering, and she needed to remain there long enough to remember what she’d dreamt. Dreams steered her through the day, and she needed the slight weight of morning vapor to protect her. She was trying to become a writer. Since she’d never been especially creative, the only way that she could think to do this was to transcribe the pictures in her head. She found that sometimes in the darkened room, the pictures moved outside her head and into her entire body, and these, she realized, were the good times. This was what she sought. Sometimes the pictures moved so fast that she could not keep up. Her temperature dropped, and her breath got short. She needed to find words to delineate this thing that moved inside her body like a small, buried animal. She knew it would take a long time to get the animal out, and sometimes she thought she might die before she did this. It didn’t matter that she was not particularly a good writer. If she could just remain within this state for the time it took her to transcribe it, the whole thing might work out.

  Like everything about LA, this goal of filtering the light was difficult but not completely unattainable. She’d found a bin of dark green window shades at Virgil’s Hardware Home Center in Glendale. Left over from the 1970s, they cost less than twenty bucks apiece. They were totally opaque and had old-fashioned crochet pull strings. She’d seen shades like this before in New York City and East Hampton. There, these kind of shades were custom-made, expensive, and high-concept. But in LA, there were so many pockets left of midcentury Americana that had not been commandeered by style masters. Things forgotten, parts of the city no one wanted. Oh, there were upscale malls and concentrations of conspicuous consumption, but in LA, wealth was blindingly direct. Wealth was manifested just by size and newness. Wealth did not insinuate itself by references to values of the past, symbolized by transom windows, onyx doorknobs, wide-plank Shaker floorboards. Whoever planned things here seemed quite happy with the things themselves. There was nothing there to break your heart, and nothing gelled.

  The house was her sanctuary and her brain center, an asbestos-shingled wreck teetering above a canyon on the slummier side of this mixed, bohemian enclave shared by second-generation Okie immigrants and artsy types who valued the “authentic.” Mount Washington, they said, was “the Brentwood of the ghetto.” Still, like every other LA neighborhood, it was zoned strictly “residential,” and there were no corner stores, no reason to walk anywhere unless you were dressed in spandex sweats and carrying three-pound dumbbells. The road outside her house led to a secondary service road, which in turn led to a four-lane service road next to the freeway. Here, on Figueroa, was the Lucky Supermarket, Mobil, the Pick ’n Save, interspersed with body shops and tire workshops, shacks and bungalows inhabited by the exclusively Latino poor. There were no trees along the streets, no, as the urban planners call it, “infill.”

  While Mount Washington had the vague charm of Appalachia butted up against West Coast expat English Hinduism, there was no evidence that Figueroa Street had ever existed any other way. That is, there were no tugs of memory. Back east, she liked to move across the sprawl with X-ray eyes, conscious of four hundred years of history. Driving on the 87 Thruway through northern Westchester County, the exit sign for “Spook Rock” always gave her chills because it made her think of lynchings. As a child in Bridgeport, gazing out the window of her parents’ car, she pictured mail carriers hunkered down in horse carts on the Post Road between Boston and New York City. “Neither wind nor snow nor sleet,” her dad intoned as they passed the Dunkin’ Donuts.

  But Figueroa Street and San Fernando Road, as far as she could tell, had never been anything but a string of stores that doubled as a residential dumping ground for the poor, who gathered every morning at the five-point intersection on Avenue 35 in an unofficial shape-up for day labor. Men in scavenged clothes who pounded on car windows, flexed their muscles, and shouted, “I work good,” and “Hire me,” which were probably the only English phrases that they knew. The first time that she witnessed this, she caught her breath and sobbed, not believing this could be. Later the same week, at the opening of MOCA’s Claes Oldenburg retrospective, she was amazed that there was not a single black person or Latino in the crowd that milled around the corny giant pencil. Los Angeles, she thought, was like Johannesburg. Everyone was white, except for several Asians. Eventually, she got used to it. Later still, she picked up some of these same men to rake her yard and help her strip and bag the old asbestos shingles.

  After a while she stopped looking for shots of content from the landscape.

  It was the first house she’d ever bought and lived in by herself, without her husband. It was what she could afford. “It’s perfect for her,” her long-ago ex-boyfriend had reportedly said to her then-boyfriend, an ex-filmmaker-turned-carpenter who was renovating the house. “It’s a real shithole.” She imagined the two of them chuckling. But who’d laugh last? Neither boyfriend past or present had ever owned a house; both were heading into middle age with artistic aspirations and boring jobs they had to keep, while she was living on her own now, for the very first time since she’d been destitute and single.

  “My goal,” she told everyone she met upon arriving in LA, “is to become famous in the art world.” Since everyone she met was somehow in the art world, they failed to get the joke and regarded her with some embarrassment. “I figure it will take two years,” she added, deadpan. Because who gave a shit? Unlike NYC, no one in the LA art world struck her as especially admirable or smart. There was just one game in town, and that was neocorporate, neoformalist conceptualism.

  Back in New York, when she was still trying to become not famous in the art world, but an actual artist, she had no reason to believe she wouldn’t die in her rent-stabilized, two-room slum apartment. Desperate about her situation, when she turned twenty-eight, she worked extra shifts of night word processing in order to consult an astrologer and a psychotherapist. “What’s all this scarcity shit about?” the astrologer asked, and offered her a discount rate on a prosperity consciousness workshop. “You are a masochist,” the therapist sighed when she confessed to hoping she could eventually support herself as an experimental multimedia theater artist. Meanwhile in the building, the old Italian lady died across the hall. When Social Security learned of her demise and stopped emitting checks, her fifty-five-year-old son became a crack dealer. Downstairs in #1E, Frank, a retired featherweight pro boxer with no known relatives, contracted Alzheimer’s. Within a year, she saw him smearing handfuls of his shit across the hallway wall, but there was no one there to stop him. Eventually, he died, and his body rotted for five days before the Turkish super finally showed up with a cop to break the door down.

  But in LA she had a part-time job teaching at a rich prestigious art school. The LA art world was starting to be considered “hot,” and since it revolved entirely around the schools, the job conferred an instant credibility. This particular institution was at the forefront of a movement to expunge identity from contemporary art. It was a two-year hazing process that utilized Socratic modes of instruction. That is, when the students weren’t tearing one another’s work apart in carefully orchestrated “theories of construction” seminars, their time was spent in private meetings with instructors, whose job it was to draw them out in “discourses” about their “practice.” Faced with roomfuls of acrylic paintings of computer chips and monochromes, she learned to cultivate a dreamy vacant stare, to verbalize non sequiturs, and finally to drop the names of first-wave minimalists with a slight inflection upward at the end, as if these names themselves were challenges or questions.

  Black security guards in golf carts crawled around the lawn while she and other part-time faculty sat beneath the
pepper trees discussing the technological sublime, spatiotemporal realism, Kant, and Hegel. None of the other part-time faculty were any more or less qualified than she to talk about these things. No one had any formal training in philosophy, much less a PhD. It was a kind of heaven. Better still, unlike the other part-time faculty, she didn’t have to teach at other schools in order to get by. Her husband was still living in New York, and he was nominally employed as an advisor to the institution. Every other week, two checks—a large one in her husband’s name, and a small one in her own—arrived, totaling $2,500. She cashed them both. And so at forty-one, she had the thing she’d always secretly known to be her birthright: independence and enough money to walk into a store and buy a Chanel lipstick without calculating how many hours of word processing it would cost.

  The house was up a flight of seventy-three cement steps. (A Guatemalan laborer’s son had counted them one day when they were hauling bricks to build a patio.) Scrunched between two rubber trees, it looked out across the canyon. Lying in the bed she’d set up in the living room was like living in a tree house. It was the perfect house for Pippi Longstocking. Except she didn’t feel like Pippi Longstocking, because there was hardly any promise of adventure beyond the house outside.

  She was trying to become a writer and was discovering that this required large blocks of empty and unstructured time. She drew the shades and read and masturbated and lit a candle at her desk. At night sometimes she used the automated sex ads on the phone. She liked that they could link her up with other outposts of loneliness around the city. She was living entirely within her head. For a while she experimented with keeping pets.

  * * *

  Half a century ago in Poland, the director Jerzy Grotowski began developing a technology through which his actors could attain heightened states of performative extremity within the framework of dramatic texts. Because he sought a confrontation between the actors and the text, the plays he chose were always mythic, because by that time myths were dead.

  The Polish Laboratory Theatre techniques were exercises aimed at pushing actors into states of pure intensity. It was the kind of “cruelty” Artaud envisioned in the 1930s, inspired by traditional non-Western forms of dance in which performers enter into trance states simply by repeating ancient gestures. According to the American Lee Breuer, it works this way: “The Kathakali gestures reverse their way up through the stimulus system of the body. The movement of the hands transmits sensation to the nerve centers of the brain, and this creates emotion. There is a loop.” But Artaud had never studied Kathakali, and he was mad, and the only person who he ever could enact this “cruelty” on was himself.

  And so for fifteen years in Warsaw, the Polish Laboratory Theatre devised a system that would make these heightened states repeatable and teachable. They devised a set of exercises called plastiques: exercises that pushed the actor beyond ordinary endurance, in order to break down the gap in time between cognition and response. After several hours, “[impulse] and action are concurrent,” Grotowski wrote. “The body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses.” And in this way, “[the] actor makes a total gift of himself.”

  Grotowski, a midcentury Eastern European, never saw the “self” as a buried treasure, waiting to be probed and finally revealed. This came later, in America. To the Poles, the “self” was more like a translation, the energy that flows between the dialectics of behavior. A moving thing. Acting was releasing, and yet it never was a matter of “release.” Like the ancient Kathakali gestures, the movement patterns of plastiques left no margin for improvisation. They were rigid, codified. “We find that artificial composition not only does not limit the spiritual but it actually leads to it.” Years later, he spoke scathingly of the experimental theater orgies staged by his US imitators as “wretched performances… full of a so-called cruelty which would not scare a child.”

  Working in small cities in midcentury Eastern Europe, Grotowski saw theater as a technology through which we might “transcend our solitude.” It is hard to get a picture of just what that “solitude” might have been. Grimy, dark cafés and baggy overcoats; unspoken yearnings underneath a fixed circle of routines and friends? Rehearsal and performance both involve “an utter opening to another person… It is a clumsy way of expressing it, but what is achieved is a total acceptance of one human being by another.”

  * * *

  When the carpenter boyfriend, who she’d seriously considered impoverishing herself to marry, dumped her for a woman he described as “a really nice girl,” her truck flipped over on an icy highway in the desert. For half an hour she was trapped inside the cab, feet forward like an astronaut. She thought she was an animal. For two days, she was trying to explain this on the phone to anyone who’d listen, her husband and her therapist, her friend Carol Irving in New York, until she finally passed out. The hospital diagnosed concussion and sent her home. Shortly after this she decided she was much too old for conventional romance.

  * * *

  “Tonight,” Jeigh said, “I am going to teach you the difference between pleasure and pain.”

  I’m curious to learn this. I’m curious to learn just about anything he wants to teach me. Today the television said it was the 159th straight day without rain. I can’t remember when they started counting. For weeks or even months the leaves of all the eucalyptus trees along the 110 freeway have been a brittle brownish green. The sky is white, and nothing breathes. It is a kind of summer hibernation, hovering like the smoggy air.

  All summer long, Jeigh and I’d swapped sexy voice mails before we ever talked. I listened to his voice mails from the ferry terminal in Canada; I listened to them in New York. His messages intrigued me, turned me on. His Dom voice reminded me of a freakish grade school teacher who we all called Snagglepuss. The kind of guy who might describe himself as a “gentleman.” Low-class, middle-aged fag trying to play butch. In his phone ad, Jeigh described himself as “intense, creative, and, oh yes, very dominant,” and that he was. He didn’t seem to be afraid of me, so I figured he was smart.

  I think it was his second visit when this happened. He’d instructed me to undress at seven thirty and kneel, naked, by the phone. Sometime within the next half hour he’d call with more instructions. The phone rang at 7:59. Well, I found this pretty fucking witty. How many times have I, has every heterosexual female in this culture, spent evenings mooning around our houses and apartments, psychically stripped bare and on our knees while waiting for “his” call? Why not take the courtship ritual literally? And then there was the psychophysical part: thinking it was silly but suspending disbelief enough to do it, and then waiting on my knees until I felt a queasy, shuddering anticipation, like being in the car that’s at the top the moment the Ferris wheel stops.

  He arrived to find me kneeling naked in the studio downstairs. He said: “We need to have a little talk.” I didn’t look at him. My eyes, as he’d instructed when he called, were focused on the floor.

  “There are three stages in a relationship between a dominant and a submissive. The first stage is to play together once. The second is to agree to play together on an ongoing basis. And the third—do you know what the third stage is?” I shook my head incredulously, imagining scenes out of Pauline Réage. “No.” He laughed. “I didn’t think you did.”

  He told me he would put me on probation. If I consented, we were entering the second stage. The rules were: He’d decide when and how often we would see each other. He’d decide when and how often we’d talk on the phone. I would not know his address or phone number, but I was free to leave as many voice mails for him on the service as I wanted, providing that they made him hard. I found this very liberating. How many hours had I spent in “normal” dating situations, pondering the etiquette and timing of the post-fuck call?

  And then his voice turned mock-solicitous. “I’ve even thought about your safety. If when we’re playing, any of this becomes too much for you to take, you’ll say, ‘Enough.�
�� And within thirty seconds of your saying it I’ll pack my bag and be out the door.”

  Because we were listening to each other hard, the room seemed small.

  * * *

  For the first few months after she moved into the house, she rented out the downstairs studio to a girl named Aimee. Aimee was the girlfriend of an artist she’d met outside the institution, a hippie guy who painted Disney characters humping one another in the woods. In terms of art-world discourse, the guy didn’t have a clue. At twenty-two, Aimee was a goddess: tall and lean, with masses of blond hair. Born in a redneck desert town, she was brilliant and completely fearless. Aimee’d spent a good part of her sixteenth year in a mental institution, like most of the other working-class girl geniuses the woman knew. Every boy that Aimee met fell instantly in love with her, and Aimee loved boys, too. Reading Charles Bukowski, she’d arrived at a goddess vision of the world that echoed the belief system of Hasidic Jews. It went something like: men should have all the power, run the world, because they’re spiritually and biologically inferior to girls. Still, they became good friends.

  Aimee’d just dropped out of Cal State Northridge to become a full-time singer-songwriter. The woman hired her as her assistant and let her have free rent. Together, they produced a philosophy rave in the Nevada desert. For nine months, they sold tickets from their office in the tree house and chatted up the press while Aimee elaborated her existential views on being and becoming: “You’re born into the setup…” The event was finally a huge success. There was a gorgeous shot of Aimee singing on the stage in a cocktail waitress outfit, towering above a short, fat, famous French philosopher on the front page of the Los Angeles Times that day—a thing, it seemed, so easy to achieve it hardly counted. Aimee had drinks with managers, sat in with famous NY bands, but then she got depressed, spent days in bed. She stopped working, couldn’t find another job, and then she started borrowing money. But on sunny days that winter, Aimee would get up for a while and sit on the steps outside the studio, writing songs on her guitar. Music pouring out across the canyon. Aimee’s vibrant brash soprano voice, singing strings of words about spiders and machinery. The woman was so certain Aimee was about to become a star.