Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  Yeah? What?

  Household items. For your campsite.

  The Professor slides back the side door of his van and pulls out a cardboard box and sets it on the ground. The Kid walks up to the box. He purses his lips, crinkles his brow, and peers skeptically into it, as if wondering what this weird fat dude wants in return. It’s got to be some kind of trick. What’s the exchange rate here?

  Early this morning before leaving for his office, the Professor raked through the kitchen cupboards, linen and cleaning closets, filling the box. Gloria asked him what he was doing, and he told her he was bringing a few things to the Kid. Necessaries, he called them. She said nothing in response, just stood with her back to the stove and watched in silence, wondering: What’s the exchange rate here? What does her husband really want from this person?

  The Kid reaches down and pokes through the contents: a cast iron skillet, a large pot, a spatula, a small wooden salad bowl and serving spoons, a set of old mismatched bath towels, laundry detergent, several bars of hand soap, a gallon-size thermos jug.

  The Kid grunts. I can’t use this shit. I can’t use any of this shit, man. I travel light.

  What could you use, then?

  A Mercedes S-Class coupe. A condo twenty-five hundred feet in the air in a building where no children are allowed. That’d be enough, I guess. For a start.

  No, seriously, Kid. You might be settled here for a while now.

  I don’t think so, man. Benbow didn’t give me no guaranteed lease or anything. He could boot my ass outa here anytime he wants.

  No, he can’t. I arranged for you to stay.

  There’s still the problem with my parole officer, man. My caseworker, she calls herself. But she’s a parole officer and she can pretty much ruin my life if she wants to. The part that isn’t already ruined. Anyhow, she don’t want me settling here. She didn’t say it, but she wants me to go back to the Causeway. Did you bring the map? The treasure map?

  It’s in a file in my office at the university. I’ll bring it next time. I’ll speak with her. Your parole officer.

  The Professor pulls out his cell phone and hands it to the Kid. He instructs the Kid to call the woman and tell her that someone wants to discuss the Kid’s housing situation with her. I’ll take it from there.

  The Kid shrugs and punches in the caseworker’s direct number, which after these many months of reporting in to her every week he has memorized. Her name, he tells the Professor, is Dahlia Freed. She’s a black lady, he adds. Cold. And hard. Goes by the friggin’ manual.

  When Dahlia Freed picks up, the Kid in a flat, uninflected voice tells her that he has someone here who wants to speak with her about his housing situation. The guy’s some kind of professor. He’ll explain, he says and passes the phone to the Professor.

  Benbow has stepped from his trailer and stands on the steps watching the Kid. Benbow pointedly looks at his watch, and the Kid immediately goes back to work picking up bottles and cans, leaving the Professor alone by his van to speak with Dahlia Freed.

  He introduces himself to the woman and informs her that he is a professor of sociology at Calusa State University.

  She is not impressed. She sounds bored and skeptical. Okay, so what’s the purpose of your call? She has a Brooklyn or Queens accent. Queens, he decides. She was probably a New York City cop before coming to Calusa. Half the Calusa police force are ex-cops from northern cities. Snowbirds with badges and guns.

  The Professor explains that he’s doing field research for a paper on convicted sex offenders and the causes of their high rate of homelessness and low rate of recidivism. He wants to interview young Mr. Kydd, who has agreed to talk with him about his present situation and his personal history. He invites Ms. Freed to verify his academic credentials and the seriousness of his project by checking the faculty listings on the university’s website or by looking him up on google.com, where he has many listings. She can visit his personal website as well. You will find that I am a legitimate researcher and social scientist and have published numerous monographs and studies on the subject of homelessness. I’m now trying to expand my research into the lives of convicted sex offenders who happen also to be homeless. A subject I’m sure you’re more than familiar with.

  So why call me? You want to interview him, go ahead and do it. You don’t need my permission.

  He explains that it would be helpful to him if Mr. Kydd could remain in residence here at Benbow’s while he’s being interviewed, since he’s already encamped here and has even arranged to be employed by Mr. Benbow. Otherwise it may be very difficult for me to track him down again and interview him in an ongoing way for the length of time required by my project. I need to meet with him many times over several months in order to test the veracity of what he tells me.

  Yeah, yeah.

  This is very important work I’m doing, Ms. Freed. Someday it may turn out to be helpful to you in your line of work as well. In fact, I might want to interview you yourself. I’m sure your perspective would be helpful. I would give you proper credit in print, of course. Which might be useful to you down the line. With your department head, when you seek promotion.

  She barks a laugh. Maybe. Maybe not. But I don’t like him living at that place. Benbow’s. It’s got a reputation. Supposedly they do all kinds of fashion shoots there. Fashionistas. It’s like a whaddaya call it, a location. But even if that’s all they do there, it’s still clothes coming off and on, cameras rolling, lights, et cetera. It’s only a step or two removed from the porn industry. Which is something I heard they’ve done over there in the past anyhow, make porn films, and are probably doing it still. So-called adult films. It’s not illegal, although you ask me it oughta be illegal. Besides, Benbow’s is a known hangout for upscale junkies. Which means there’s dealers present—we’re talking coke mainly and smack. Lots of soft money moving around. And where there’s upscale drugs being bought and sold, Professor, there’s pretty little sex workers standing on the sidelines looking for work, male and female. And some of them are underage. He’s gonna get caught up in that, one way or the other. At one end of the trade or the other.

  The Professor decides to deal with her as if she were the worried parent of a teenage son, not a parole officer. He tells her that he understands her concerns, and he sympathizes. He’s willing to help her by checking in on the Kid daily and reporting to her afterward, either directly by phone or, if she prefers to have a written record of his visits, by e-mail. The Kid, of course, would continue to check in with her on his own once a week as required. His camp is not really at Benbow’s anyhow, he points out. He’s pitched his tent in an isolated spot outside the area where people gather, on a piece of property owned by Benbow, close to the Bay. His job is as a maintenance man, a part-time day job, so he’s not around the place at night. And as for the filming, there seems to be no evidence of it at present, and he, the Professor, would be sure to keep the Kid away from the scene if a crew and actors showed up and started to make an adult film. He certainly wouldn’t want the Kid mixed up in any of that!

  He’s thinking, however, that maybe it would be interesting to interview some of the actors—a separate research project—and find out how they came to this line of work, how the males manage to keep their erections for so long, and do the females have actual orgasms or do they fake it? Do the actors take sexual pleasure from their work? Do the directors and the crew get turned on while filming? Or is it all, for everyone concerned, purely and simply work? Skilled labor. The manufacture of a product. Do they take pride in their product? Do they in a Marxist sense identify with it?

  He’s in no sense an expert, but he’s seen plenty of porn films in his time—who hasn’t? Anyone who’s spent a night in a hotel or motel room has seen a porn film. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection has watched clips from porn films. He’s seen enough of them both ways, films and Internet clips, to find pornography too boring to watch anymore, even when he has an itch to masturbate and is alone. But
he’s never seen one being made, has never seen a porn film live, as it were. Never been in the audience for a live sex show. At least not in America, and suddenly for the first time in years the Professor is remembering live sex shows in Thailand and Malaysia. He recalls being a member of an audience, being pressured by the audience, all men, mostly Europeans and Americans, to become aroused by the coupling taking place on the stage. The members of the audience nudged one another with their elbows, laughed and cheered, whistled and stomped, then settled into rapt silence, their hands buried in their trousers. No matter how odd or bizarre—male performers with grotesquely large penises, racial mixes, dwarves, huge multicolored dildos, chains, whips and rubber suits, twins, once even a set of triplets—it didn’t work for him. His fly stayed zipped, his cock remained stubbornly flaccid, buried beneath rolls of belly fat. Somehow the pressure he felt from the other men in the audience interfered with his ability to respond sexually to the show. He grew quickly bored, then detached, and finally analytical. He ended up considering the cruelly exploitive politics of the event. Another instance of late capitalist imperialism.

  It would be a lot more interesting, possibly a lot more arousing, he thinks, to watch a porn film being made, to be on the actual set, close enough to the actors to see their sweating faces and the women’s breasts and nipples and their vaginas and anuses and the men’s huge thrusting penises, and to know that everything, the sucking, licking, squirming, jamming, and ramming, is being done, not for the sexual stimulation of the director and crew or for the other performers, but for the camera. For an audience that’s not present and is not situated in the present, either, but is instead located somewhere out there in the future, unknown and alone in a darkened motel room or at home in front of a computer screen, invisible to the performers and to the people observing and filming them live in real time. For pay. For money fed to the computer or the TV pay-per-view cable company by credit card number.

  The parole officer, Dahlia Freed, says, Okay, I’ll give it a shot. Only temporary, though. I gotta check out the situation in person first.

  When? I’d like to be here and introduce myself.

  I don’t give advance notice when I make my visits. And you’ve already introduced yourself, thanks.

  Well, perhaps I’ll come by your office.

  Call ahead.

  I will.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  K: So you’re back. And lugging another gift box, I see. Whaddaya got for me this time, Haystack? No more household goods, I hope.

  P: I think you’ll find these items somewhat more useful. Sorry I misread your needs this morning. Here we have a Swiss Army knife. Many blades, nine by my count. Very handy, given your circumstances. And this terrific little radio. Doesn’t need batteries. You just crank the handle and it charges the radio for eight hours’ playing time.

  K: Cool.

  P: And a portable telescope. To help while away the time while you’re sitting here by your tent.

  K: I ain’t a peeper, y’ know.

  P: Yes, I know. But you could watch the cruise ships come and go and the birds and keep track of cars and check out the visitors arriving at Benbow’s from right here by your tent. You could watch the stars at night.

  K: What’re you, like the white explorer bringing high-tech presents to the low-tech Indians?

  P: (laughs) Something like that.

  K: What’s the Indian supposed to do in return? Carry all your shit on his back into the jungle?

  P: Just talk into the little black box for an hour or so every few days.

  K: It don’t look like no recorder. Is it running? I thought you was just gonna use a tape recorder.

  P: It’s a digital camera. A minicamera. Very useful for making both a visual and aural record of interviews. In my field visual cues are as telling as linguistic cues. I’ll just set it on its little tripod here in the sand . . . and we can forget about it. It’s miked, of course. It has a very good microphone. We can speak normally and just forget it’s there.

  K: You can forget about it maybe. Not me though. It’s a fucking camera. I don’t mind recorders but cameras make me nervous, man. Surveillance cameras, hidden cameras, cameras you don’t know are watching. And cameras you forget are there. Especially them. Is it running?

  P: It’s running. Okay, where do you want to start?

  K: No, where do you want to start? You ask the first question. Then I’ll like decide if I want to answer it. I’m only doing this because I guess I owe you. Like for talking with Dahlia this morning and cutting the deal with Benbow and all. And bringing me the knife and radio and shit. But that don’t mean I hafta tell you shit I don’t feel like telling you. Right? You’re not interrogating me, you’re interviewing me. There’s a difference, man. You’re not a cop, you’re a professor. Correct?

  P: Correct. This is an interview, not an interrogation. So let’s begin by talking about your family. Everything starts there, doesn’t it? Tell me about them. Your mother, your father, and so on. Your siblings.

  K: My family. That’s a joke. Siblings, that’s like brothers and sisters, correct?

  P: Correct.

  K: Okay. No siblings.

  P: An only child then. Everyone has a mother and a father, however. At least in the beginning they do. Tell me about your parents.

  K: Sure. I have a mother. No father though. I mean my mother raised me, not my father. Like there was someone who “fathered” me, but nobody who was my father. My moms, she’s the one who gave birth to me and you could say she took care of me, at least till I was a teenager and was more or less on my own. She’s alive and I guess well and lives right here in Calusa. She’s out in the north end in a house she owns where I used to live and where she has a job as a beautician that she’s had since Day One. My moms is okay. At least I assume she’s okay. I haven’t seen her in a while.

  P: How long is that?

  K: Not since I got convicted and sent up. About two years now, I guess.

  P: Does she know you were living under the Causeway?

  K: No. Unless she figured it out on her own when it got into the newspapers and such. Though the papers never used my name or singled me out. She’s not much for newspapers anyhow. I know she didn’t learn it from me. Not that she’d give a shit. Which I can understand.

  P: I’ll come back to that. What about your father?

  K: Yeah, right, what about him? My so-called father took off as soon as he knocked up my mother. They should have a different word than “father” for someone who just happened to fuck your mother and she got pregnant from it. To me he’s not even got a name. They were never married or anything. That’s why my last name’s the same as my mother’s. He was from up north and went back there supposedly where he probably already had a wife and kids. He was like a roofer or something. Even my mother doesn’t know much about him. One of those northern guys with a pickup and a set of tools who shows up for work after the hurricanes. They fuck all the women and girls for a few months, spend a lot of government and insurance money on booze and drugs and then disappear back north till the next hurricane. My mother’s a sucker for those guys. Especially the black dudes. She likes only black dudes with northern accents though. The same with Latinos. Like Puerto Ricans from New York. That’s what she says anyhow. Maybe she thinks inside they’re really northern white guys, only outside they’re these sexy dark types, if you know what I mean. It’s sort of racist but she doesn’t have a clue. She thinks it’s liberal and all. My mother’s okay but kind of a dim bulb.

  P: Was your father black?

  K: You shittin’ me?

  P: Latino?

  K: Look at me, for chrissake.

  P: How old is she? Your mother.

  K: I dunno. Maybe in her late forties.

  P: How old are you? The registry says you’re twenty-two.

  K: Registry?

  P: The National Sex Offender Registry. I looked you up online this morning.

  K: Oh yeah. So you know everything
worth knowing about me already. Why bother interviewing me then?

  P: To learn what the registry leaves out. And to let you tell your story yourself. Like about your mother. Tell me more about her. And about your childhood. Would you say you had a happy childhood?

  K: C’mon, man, what’s a happy childhood? Anybody says he had a happy childhood is bullshitting. But mine was okay I guess. At least nobody beat on me and I didn’t starve and I always had a roof over my head, thanks to my mother, which are things she always likes to remind me of. Until I enlisted in the army anyhow. Although afterward when I got out she let me have my old room back. So I can’t complain about my childhood. Or my mother. Not really.

  P: You were in the army?

  K: Yeah. For a while. I signed up when I was twenty right after I lost my job at this light store which closed on account of the guy that owned it got killed in a robbery. It happened on my day off, so for a while there the cops thought I was involved and almost busted me for it, but I had an alibi. My mother. Another thing she did for me and won’t let me forget. She said I was home with her all day. Which was basically true, since I really was home all day, only not with her, because she was at the beach working on her tan with her boyfriend of the moment. That’s okay. I was home alone with my friend Iggy but he’s an iguana and couldn’t testify. Or he was an iguana. He’s dead now.

  P: I’m sorry. You were in the army? For how long? Did you get sent to Iraq or Afghanistan?

  K: I really wanted to. Yeah, Afghanistan, man. I was jonesing for Afghanistan. But no. I only got as far as basic training at Fort Drum in New York State which is way the fuck up by the Canadian border in the middle of winter, man. Freeze your ass off up there. Not exactly good preparation for desert warfare. Except you get really buff in basic, plus you learn how to use your weapon and shit.

  P: You didn’t complete basic training?

  K: You could say I got discharged early. Not a dishonorable though. I got what they call a general discharge. So I never made it to Afghanistan. Pissed me off. I think I would’ve done good there, kicked some serious Arab ass. I could like kill people with my bare hands, man. They teach you that in basic.