How to Be Alone

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How to Be Alone Page 22

by Jonathan Franzen


  Provenzano, who initially agreed to talk to me for “a few minutes,” ends up chatting for an hour. When, on my way out, I show an interest in a pair of Levi’s, he confirms what chain-store salesmen in my past have always vehemently denied: that 501s of the same marked size vary widely in their cut. He doesn’t have the preshrunk 32x34s I want—his stock is not large—but he is able, with much measuring and comparing, to locate a pair of 33x34s cut small enough to fit me perfectly.

  “I’m having problems with Levi,” he says as he rings up the purchase. (The price is a chain-store price.) “They say I’m short on volume. We’ve been selling Levi’s for sixty years, and now they say I’m short on volume.”

  After teasing me affably about my growing waist, and then asking me for my shirt size, he presents me with a T-shirt to wear with my new jeans. It’s stenciled with a drawing of the Federal Prison Camp.

  IF SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II HAD LIVED in Alcatraz in the 1930s, he might have noted the uniqueness of its design and setting, the splendor of the scenery around it, and the romance of its imperfect security. Richard II in ADX Florence would see perfect, anonymous utility in the middle of a blasted landscape. Comparing the prison where he lived unto the world of 1995, he couldn’t miss seeing money. Dollars within, dollars without.

  What’s futuristic about ADX and CSP is not their high-tech accoutrements (you won’t see the exoskeletal uniforms or blaster guns of sci-fi flicks) but the social context in which these facilities are coming on line. It isn’t hard to extrapolate the logic of our political economy’s solution to the crime problem. In many respects, the future is glimpsable in our not wholly unpleasant present. The murder rate is plummeting in New York City, for example, as New York State’s prison population soars. Three-quarters of the inmates in the state system come from just seven impoverished neighborhoods in New York City. Apparently it’s genuinely feasible simply to lock away the problem. Across the country, educational programs for inmates are on the wane, executions are mounting, and more and more legislators are clamoring to reduce recreation for prisoners and to extract greater revenues from prison labor.

  The black or Latino youth whose father is in prison and whose neighborhood can offer no better job than bagging groceries commits a crime, is processed, and is then shipped to a warehouse in a rural white community. Between strikes one and three there’s a cynical calculus: the imprisoned youth emerges from jail embittered and unemployable; inevitably, he commits another crime; inevitably, there are innocent victims. Residual crimes are the cost of doing business in this country, and even these pay the dividend of keeping the public’s fear of crime ever fresh.

  The social Darwinist may here ponder the beauties of our economy’s evolution. The press covers crime (especially the relatively rare instances of random violence against white people) because crime sells—because the white audience loves to hear about it. Then the intensive, decontextualized, and highly salable coverage of crime becomes evidence of a Crime Epidemic; the Audience gets “sick and tired” of hearing about a thing that every marketer knows it actually never gets sick or tired of hearing about, and it empowers its elected representatives to Get Tough. Thus the criminal is demonized. The distance between Us and Him grows and grows, thereby ensuring that here in the country that invented the Western and the crime drama and the News at Eleven, in the country that celebrated the James brothers and Bonnie and Clyde, we will always be able to hear what we most don’t want to hear, which is what we most want to hear. In enjoying and then punishing our murderers, we are continually trying to exorcise the contradictions that make us Americans. Our love-hate love affair with crime is the epos of the controlling dollar at war with the wild frontier.

  Eventually, when the black or Latino youth whiffs at his third spitball, he’s remanded for life to a system that maintains internal order and earns money by forcing its prisoners to do, for a dollar or less per hour, the menial work that as free men they refused to do for a minimum wage. For the men who won’t cooperate, there’s always a stint in dispensaries of benevolent discipline like ADX and CSP. At first hearing, Ray Levasseur’s description of ADX as a “proto-techno-fascist’s architectural wetdream” sounds like tired agitprop hyperbole. But consider fascism in its original (Italian) sense of getting government to work with the bloodless efficiency of a corporation; of making the trains run on time. Fascism’s real essence is a patriotic corporatism that presents itself as beneficent and effective. In light of the future we are building in Fremont County, Ray Levasseur and Mutulu Shakur, whose claims of being “political” make them anomalies, are actually the system’s most typical prisoners. It may be true that each of the individuals in our nation’s prisons represents a story of personal irresponsibility. But the whole of a million and a half of these stories is greater than the sum of its parts. The whole is political, and Levasseur and Shakur are the voice of the statistics. They are saying, Let’s think about what a million and a half men in jail might imply about the way we do business.

  And here is the thing: the Feds aren’t friendly to me, their reserve won’t thaw. Whereas every Coloradan I speak to is a person of visible hopes, dreams, fears. It takes me only an hour to love them. They are not positive of anything. They seem at once freer and more captive than the federal functionaries who by day are sealed inside their compound and by twilight commute to Pueblo West. Free to be confused and suspicious, and captive to the perpetually self-perfecting mechanisms of control and cash flow that are stalking the last of America’s traditional communities. Captive to the federal agency that allows a town to hope for construction jobs that don’t materialize, promises three prisons and throws in an Alcatraz as an afterthought, hints at trade with local businesses but ends up using prearranged suppliers; captive to the inescapable efficiency of strip malls and tract housing. There’s no conspiracy here, no conscious intent to deceive, no grand ironies. There’s only, in this valley of erosional mesas and spent mines, the stepwise dwindling of an innocence. When Merle Strickland says that her community’s greatest asset is its water rights and not its people, she’s both exactly right and exactly wrong.

  At night the prisons glow in the desert like a reactor, a launchpad, some latent federal thing. From miles away you can see that nothing’s moving inside the wire.

  [1995]

  BOOKS IN BED

  In the erotic broadsheets of the New York Times, which every morning lies on my breakfast table, silently awaiting my attentions, there recently appeared what seemed to me a wholly reasonable op-ed piece by Adam Hochschild on the horror of airport television. “At gates cursed with the TV’s,” Hochschild wrote, “most of the passengers are trying to talk, work or read. But the penetrating TV noise needles itself into the conversations and onto the pages.” His complaint soon brought replies from the Refiners, Resonators, and Rebutters who typically write letters to the Times. One Refiner suggested that airport TVs might play silently with captions. One Resonator wrote movingly of the kindred horror of “smelling and hearing popcorn” in movie theaters; another invited readers to “try spending a night in any moderately priced hotel without enduring the buzz-muffle of televised talk.” (The rage palpable in the word “buzz-muffle”! Nothing more reliably bolsters my faith in humanity than the dyspepsia of letters to the Times) There was also, however, a classic Rebuttal from the president of Turner Private Networks, who claimed, bizarrely, that airport TV is “not intrusive” and, more persuasively, that Hochschild is “more alone than he might think.” Apparently, Nielsen surveys show that ninety-five percent of air travelers believe that television enhances the airport environment, and eighty-nine percent believe that “it makes the time spent in an airport more worthwhile.” I pitied Hochschild when I read this. Here he is, trying bravely to give voice to a silent majority of sufferers, hoping to incite communal outrage, when along comes somebody with a figure—ninety-five percent—to knock his legs out from under him. He’s mugged by a norm.

  This business of norms, whic
h are a fixture of the information age—as friends or as tyrants, depending on how normal you are—was on my mind this winter when I embarked on a survey of contemporary popular sex books and was confronted with evidence that I am one of the few heterosexual men in America who’s not turned on by elaborate lingerie. In bookstores, pop-sex books are usually shelved under Health (a topic of such importance to the culture that every book now published, including novels, could arguably be shelved there), and, since sexual “health” is impossible to define objectively, they offer the reader a uniquely rich array of normative pronouncements. “Matching lacy bra and panties, garter belt and stockings, bustiers, G-strings, and teddies—most men can’t get enough of this stuff,” Sydney Biddle Barrows, the Mayflower Madam, writes in Just Between Us Girls. She later adds: “Whatever the reason, bustiers and merry widows seem to be almost universally popular garments.” Dr. Susan Block, in The 10 Commandments of Pleasure, commands the female reader, “Wear lingerie,” and explains that “men who love sex love a woman who thinks about it, dresses up for it.” Susan Crain Bakos, the author of Sexational Secrets, concurs: “Men love it when you come to bed in high heels, bustier, and stockings.” Lest these generalizations seem unscientific, the authors of Sex: A Man’s Guide report that, according to their survey of Men’s Health readers, lingerie is “without a doubt. . . the U.S. male’s favorite erotic aid.”

  I have no objection to a nice bra, still less to being invited to remove one. But brothelwear of the kind sold at Frederick’s of Hollywood seems to me scarcely less hokey than a Super Bowl halftime show. What I feel when I hear that the mainstream actually buys this stuff is the same garden-variety alienation I feel on learning that Hootie & the Blowfish sold thirteen million copies of their first record, or that the American male’s dream date is Cindy Crawford. In a sense, I’m proud of not being like everybody else. Like everybody else, though, I’m anxious about sex, and with sex the recognition that I’m not like everybody else leads directly to the worry that I’m not as good as—or, at any rate, not having as much fun as—everybody else.

  Sexual anxiety is primal; physical love has always carried the risk that one’s most naked self will be rejected. If Americans today are especially anxious, the consensus seems to be that it’s because of “changing sex roles” and “media images of sex” and so forth. In fact, we’re simply experiencing the anxiety of a free market. Contraception and the ease of divorce have removed the fetters from the economy of sex, and, like the citizens of present-day Dresden and Leipzig, we all want to believe we’re better off under a regime in which even the poorest man can dream of wealth. But as the old walls of repression tumble down, many Americans—discarded first wives, who are like the workers displaced from a Trabant factory; or sexually inept men, who are the equivalent of command-economy bureaucrats—have grown nostalgic for the old state monopolies. What are The Rules if not an attempt to reregulate an economy run scarily amok?

  Until the Rules become universal, though, such comfort as can be found in the market economy comes principally from norms. Are you worried about the size of your penis? According to Sex: A Man’s Guide, most men’s erections are between five and seven inches long. Worried about the architecture of your clitoris? According to Betty Dodson, in the revised edition of her Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving, the variations are “astounding.” Worried about frequency? “Americans do not have a secret life of abundant sex,” the researchers of Sex in America concluded. Worried about how long it takes you to come? On average, says Sydney Barrows, it takes a woman eighteen minutes, a man just three.

  The problem with relying on norms for comfort, however, is not only that you may fail to meet them but that you may meet them all too well. Who really wants to be sexually just like everybody else? Isn’t the bedroom where I expect, rather, to feel special? Unique, even? The last thing I want is to be reminded of the vaguely icky fact that across the country millions of other people are having sex. This is the conundrum of the individual confronting masses about which he can’t help knowing more than he’d like to know: I want to be alone, but not too alone. I want to be the same but different.

  POPULAR SEX BOOKS are only a part of the sex industry, but one could argue that they’re the most representative wing, in that they are books. If a sexual fetish is understood as a displacement of genital energies, then language, even more than lingerie, is by far the most prevalent paraphilia in the country today. You can’t show a bare breast on network television, but there’s no limit to the backdoor prurience of talk about rape, incest, and sexual harassment. Cybersex and phone sex are vastly more popular ways of avoiding intimate fluids than is the worship of, say, knees or feet.

  Although our pop sex writers seem to recognize the ascendance of language, they don’t trust their readers to know how, or even when, to use it. In Sex: A Man’s Guide we learn that lovers can be encouraged to talk dirty by making lists of “clinical” and “dirty” terms and comparing them. Dr. Block reels off forty-five possible pet names for a penis, including “peenie-weenie,” “dipstick,” and “lovepump,” and commands her readers: “Take your pick.” (More adventurous souls are urged to “make up something special” to suit their “very special wonder worm.”) Susan Bakos cues Tantric lovers to the appropriate moment for “whispered terms of endearment,” and she suggests that women who want to learn to talk dirty rent some video porn and study it carefully. “Once you are comfortable saying the words as a scriptwriter wrote them,” she tells us, “you can personalize them to make it sound more like you speaking.”

  Reading a book of expert sexual instruction must rank near the bottom on the scale of erotic pastimes—somewhere below peeling an orange, not far above flossing. One problem is that, although the intention is precisely the opposite, these books collectively and individually make the world of sex seem very small. Never mind that there are only so many ways to fit body parts together or that Alex Comfort has already said and said well, in works that have sold better than eight million copies, pretty much all there is to say about it. There seems, in general, to be far too little lore to go around. Author after author derives the etymology of “cunnilingus,” stresses the importance of doing “kegel” exercises to strengthen the pubococcygeal muscles, and quotes Shakespeare on the topic of alcohol. (“It provokes the desire, but takes away the performance.”) Author after author insists that men are “visual creatures” and that the size of a penis matters less than what its owner does with it. When the lore runs out, the advice turns bleakly otiose. Dr. Susan Block commands lovers: “Use babytalk, or at least ‘pet names.’” In Sexational Secrets, whose subtitle promises “exotic advice your mother never told you,” Susan Bakos instructs masturbating men to use, “in various combinations,” the Slow Single Stroke, the Fast Single Stroke, the Slow Two-Hand Stroke, the Fast Two-Hand Stroke, the Cupped Hand, the Finger Stroke, the Wrist Pump, the Slap, the Beat, the Rub, the Squeeze Stroke, the Open-Hand Stroke, and the Vagina Simulator Stroke; instructions for each are provided.

  The italicized cheerfulness with which pop-sex authors convey the useless and the banal is identical to that of the newscasters on airport.TV, whose most striking talent is the ability to summon (or to fake, like an orgasm) fresh wonderment over the latest wrinkle in automobile safety. Trying to make fascinating and new what is neither, the authors tirelessly coin neologisms. They toss off “sexation,” “prime-mate,” “soulgasm,” and “partnersex” with the supreme self-assurance that American audiences now demand from professional exhibitionists. Dr. Block, who calls herself an “erotic philosopher,” illustrates her commandments with glimpses of her husband and herself in bed: “Max grunts like a bonobo chimp when he wants to go down on me, then moans and coos and tells me I’m delicious as he slurps away.” For people who have never shared a fantasy with their lovers but “would like to try,” the philosopher has this advice: “Watch the Dr. Susan Block Show together—that’ll stimulate your fantasies!”

  Not every pop-sex book points
to television quite this literally, but all the books seem bent on enmeshing sex (formerly life’s one free pleasure) in the web of consumer spending. The reader is relentlessly exhorted to buy erotic videos, high-quality lingerie, candles, champagne, incense, oils, vibrators, perfumes, bath-bubble mix. Betty Dodson, Ph.D., sounds less like a prophet of an autoerotic utopia than like an infomercial host; she twice gives readers an address from which her videos may be ordered. Sydney Barrows suggests that renting luxury cars, wearing full-length fur coats, and taking expensive vacations will spice up the deadliest marriage. In Sexational Secrets, Susan Bakos sets out to gather for the presumably impecunious reader the rarefied sexual know-how that members of the moneyed classes spend thousands to obtain. Apparently, the best sex is being had today by a lucky international elite who can afford $625 for multiple-orgasm workshops. Whether Bakos is interviewing “beautiful French courtesans” or a master of Kundalini yoga, she goes out of her way to stress the demographics of their clientele. They are “sheiks,” they live in “secluded” suburban homes, they wear “business suits” and drink “flavored coffees.”

  As for the benefits of better sex, Betty Dodson reports that after attending one of her lectures on the vulva a woman asked for a raise at work “—and got it!” (Dodson attributes the woman’s enhanced self-esteem to becoming “cunt positive.”) And a raise at work is small potatoes compared to these authors’ promises, expressed and implied, for the sexually liberated society as a whole. We can look forward to the disappearance of “prejudice and bigotry, heartache and misery, loneliness and violence”; the obsolescence of guns and missiles; the release of “the spirit of creativity” and the renewal of “the joy of living.” Here is Dodson’s “futuristic fantasy” of liberation:

 

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