White Girls

by Hilton Als

  Everybody said how white I was, reading the world. But after I was in the world, white people didn’t believe how much I’d read; that’s not what a black bitch is supposed to do. Heh. The stories, the characters I found when I was a little girl—they told me how I could live if I busted out of all that pussy and death.

  I’ve decided to close the book on a real white woman, though. She’s the enemy of sisters like myself. You know her. There are enough famous photographs of that writer dressed in linens and hats, that long face a kind of weeping willow of thought—Virginia Woolf, also known as Suicide Bitch.

  In some of the pictures I’ve seen, she’s surrounded by homos. I hear that. But what I can no longer hear is people in your line of work going on about her meaning. Her feminism. Her process of intellection. Her mean-spiritedness, which passes as a kind of high literary style. To me, her life and work taste as insulting as the toe jam not looked after before the foot is shoved in some unsuspecting lover’s mouth. As a woman, I’ve tasted it. As a woman saddled with a famous brother, I know more about what she thinks she’s writing about than she’ll ever understand. Her name—don’t make me say it again—sounds as ugly to me as you asking after Richard.

  In A Room of One’s Own, she writes a kind of fairy tale. She says, What if Shakespeare had a sister named Judith and the sister’s brilliance went unrecognized because she had to take care of everyone else? Had to mother a father and look after the cutlery? Suicide Bitch probably made Shakespeare’s sister up because she never knew a bitch—including herself—whose gifts were obscured by any living man. But I have. I’ve tasted nothing but what she thinks she’s talking about. I am the contemporary Shakespeare’s sister. Except instead of saying “Fear it, Ophelia, fear it my dear sister / And keep you in the rear of your affection / Out of the shot and danger of desire,” Richard said something like, “My daddy told me once, ‘Boy, whatever you do, don’t eat no pussy.’ I couldn’t wait to eat a pussy.” Did that destroy me? I survived. Suicide Bitch would never have the slightest interest in women like me, women who endure a brother’s fame and emerge from its jaws mangled but intact. That would be too complicated for her reason.

  But to continue. Buried in A Room of One’s Own is this line: “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine Negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.” I took this to mean: Who gives a shit about a colored bitch; your invisibility is your freedom. I agree. I do voice-overs in front of actors who don’t even know I’m there. But why does Suicide Bitch have to drag a Negress into it? Because that black bitch by definition tells a white bitch who she is.

  Listen, my job depends on my physical invisibility but never my absence. My voices are real because I believe in them enough to apply my interior voice to their reason. I resent Suicide Bitch. I resent her talking about me as though I wasn’t in the room.

  In something else, about Middlemarch and Jane Eyre, Suicide Bitch wrote, “We are conscious not merely of the writer’s character...we are conscious of a woman’s presence—of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.” She goes on:

  This brings into women’s writing an element which is entirely absent from a man’s, unless, indeed, he happens to be a working man, a Negro, or one who for some other reason is conscious of disability. It introduces a distortion and is frequently the cause of weakness. The desire to plead some personal cause or to make a character a mouthpiece of some personal discontent or grievance always has a distressing effect, as if the spot at which the reader’s attention is directed were suddenly twofold instead of single.

  Looking at the kettle calling the snatch black, I blanch. If there’s anyone we can hold at least partially responsible for the mealy-mouthed nonthink that permeates contemporary women’s writing, let alone their lives—all of us Negroes!—it’s her. Everything she ever wrote was infused with special pleading for her genius, her madness, her Leonard.

  And anyway, what’s an artist but a mouthpiece for his or her sensibility? Look at Richard. And actually, Suicide Bitch is just the kind of girl Richard would like—imagine Richard fucking Suicide Bitch! Talk about riding Miss Daisy! Talk about a joke that would play well under layers of voice-overs. I saw him with someone like her so many times: a homely white girl who grew even more smug under his hetero heaving. I hated the black girls who became enamored of Richard even more. They all had terrible voices, the kind of voices that made my ear ache with their flat whininess, their mean, competitive, cunty femininity. Those black girls, their talk was imitation talk. And the sound they were imitating—are imitating still, for all I know—was the sound of white girls whose hair and career they envied.

  You see a lot of those types of black girls in Hollywood now. They’re jumping out of airplanes every other second and then heading straight for the hills, looking for a male star who’ll make them a star, too, while keeping their eye out for that white girl to hate.

  Maybe Suicide Bitch would be too much for Richard. They were too much alike: one big “I” insisting on their reality. I’d like to fuck some truth into Suicide Bitch, if I could get it up. I could tell her a thing or two, while I humped her, about what Shakespeare’s sister really felt like, my hot breath on her dead white face, saying: I lived, this is what happened, all of life is imagined and made into art so that I can bear it.

  Aren’t the old songs the best?

  When we were little, Richard and I used to sit in Mama’s yard and sing:

  Salty dog, salty dog

  I don’t wanna be your Annie doll

  Honey, let me be your salty dog

  Candyman

  Two old maids

  Sittin’ in the sand

  One were a she

  The other were a man

  Salty dog

  Candyman

  Worst day I ever had in my life

  My best friend caught him kissin’ his wife

  Salty dog

  Candyman

  The lyrics tickled our noses like sand. We laughed so hard when we came to “Two old maids...One were a she / the other were a man,” because back then, when we were certain that time would never use us and spit us out, we knew we’d never end up being anybody’s old maid.

  We were sitting in the grass when we sang, and Mama wasn’t technically our mother; she was our grandmother, our father’s mother. Our daddy never had a chance with a mother like that. Even though she was a whoremonger, Mama was a woman of such enormous efficiency that she swept any ambition our parents might have had under the rug, like dust.

  As I started to tell you before, in the nineteen thirties Mama—me and Richard’s grandmother—owned one of the most popular cathouses in town. (She didn’t close up shop until forty years later, when Richard hit.) She absorbed her children into the business. First she had Daddy working for her, running errands: picking up Kotex for the whores (there were about five girls who lived with us, aside from our mother and grandmother), finding doctors who would kill babies. By the time he was sixteen, my daddy was a baby pimp.

  When he met our mother, he was in his early twenties. She was sixteen, a pretty girl he knew from around. He didn’t even have to seduce her into giving her pussy up. The promise of his love made her do it. But Daddy didn’t love her anymore afterward. She was always looking for the right wrong person to do that.

  It was like growing up in show business. I never knew anything else. Daddy was the kind of man who was so stunned by his mother’s formidable presence that he used to grind his teeth as she shaped dough into ovals on a Sunday. Other times she carried a knife around and he lived in fear of his own face. Often he looked like the fear you hear in Richard’s voice, in one of his routines. Skittish, like he’s telling a joke—on Mama. And she’s waiting offstage to give him the back of her hand, by way of a little colored criticism.

  Richard loved Mama. Her control. She was a star who dominated everything around her. I think he was hell-bent on becoming a star in ord
er to duplicate her power, but he never had her inside strength. He thought that by imitating her image, he’d be a Mama, too, but he was always too lovesick for that, and not nearly as ruthless. He was much more like our real mother.

  Richard went off to the army when he was eighteen, right after he found out that Daddy had been fucking some girl Richard loved. Daddy got that girl pregnant, but the girl lied and told Richard it was his. As I’ve said before, the business I’m in now—nasty talk—it’s a family tradition. Lies, too. Daddy hated Richard as much as he hated his own mother. To him, his son was just another woman: charismatic and awful.

  Eventually my brother came to stay with me in New York for a while, after I moved there looking for work as an actress. Did anyone tell you that? That was in the sixties. He got a few TV spots; he wore black pencil suits; he was a less-menacing-for-all-his-jocularity Bill Cosby. In the late sixties, right before he found his voice and blew up, he moved to California. And in the hope that his star would confer some star status on me, I followed him out there. For the record: he let me into his house for a bit, but not his career. I haven’t seen him in more than thirty years. When we were kids, it was like we were married. Now I call him my wuzband.

  * * *

  As it happens, she wasn’t wedded to anything. As it happens, she lived in a way that suggested she could pull up stakes at any moment and hit the road—to join a traveling circus, say, or do a little summer stock somewhere in America, dressed in spangled tights and a red tiara. In her sitting room—which is where the reporter conducted the interview—there were books, VHS tapes, a video player, a DVD machine, two chairs, and a sofa. The reporter sat on one of the chairs facing her. She sat on the sofa, his tape recorder between them. The furniture was of a type peculiar to Los Angeles, irrespective of class: white linen with a fine dusting of cat hair, even though there was no cat in evidence. It all looked as if it could be folded up and put in a box in an afternoon.

  That was always the dream of the girl performer, no matter what her age: packing up and heading off to illuminate the darkness, a sparkler in each hand eclipsed by the brilliance of her smile. As it happens, Richard Pryor’s sister did not smile. She sat with her feet arched, balancing the lower half of her plumpish body on her prettily painted toes, ready to spring for her suitcase.

  As Richard Pryor’s sister spoke, the reporter was aware of a peculiar sensation rising up in him. When Richard Pryor’s sister said “Peoria,” “house,” or “when Richard and I were children,” he stopped listening. He stopped doing the work of the reporter and instead ran with his preferred translation of Peoria: a green-and-brown landscape. Richard Pryor as a child, his nose bigger than his head, his sister’s white cotton socks slipping down into her patent leather Mary Janes. There they were, Richard’s older sister pulling their shared red wagon, Richard sitting in it, his little baby tits jiggling, a somewhat somnolent breeze wafting over their sweaty little bodies performing the perfect relationship of love: one being carted and the other carting. Thank God for the tape recorder. Otherwise, the reporter would have had no idea, after a while, what Richard Pryor’s sister had to say.

  He had been interviewing her for three days now. He’d been with Richard for much longer, two years or more. When he began his work, the reporter had approached his subject with the best intentions in the world. Acquaintances and friends of friends of Pryor’s called to set up meetings, clamoring to be heard. They showed up for their interviews with eyes narrowed against the past, but dressed well enough for the mirror and an expense-account lunch. The interview “process”—strange word—was always the same for the reporter, no matter whom his subject was. But what made Richard Pryor different—and one of the reasons for the reporter’s continued interest in him—was this: Richard Pryor had all but stopped speaking.

  In the early days, people on both sides of the fence—family members and film producers alike—were “intrigued” by the project. There was much back-and-forth between the two camps. Each used the reporter as an intermediary, not least because he had read all the material and knew the players involved. He had many lunches with screenwriters who wanted to soak up his “insight” before they went in for a pitch meeting. But invariably those screenwriters were vetoed by one or another of Richard’s kin—his wives or children or former schoolteachers—because they felt, for one reason or another, that the writer didn’t have the right to take on their Richard, whoever that was. Richard Pryor’s life story was not his own but theirs, and since he rarely spoke now, what objections was he going to raise about how his family saw him, or saw themselves through him, in the refracted light of his fame? The two or three—and then ten—producers who were attached to the untitled Richard Pryor project would individually take the reporter out to discuss the nonexistent deal, and to talk about the ways in which his behavior was or was not helping the project move along. Perhaps he should consider, they said, being a little more rock and roll, or rather gangsterish, when he met with potential screenwriters? To give them a feel for what the material could be, as opposed to just the facts, ma’am?

  In the end, the producers went away. If only, they said, the conditions his heirs attached to the project were not so risky, and—in the Hollywood parlance—Richard Pryor not so “dark” a subject. Still, it had been interesting for the reporter not to write, for a while, and just have lunch.

  When I first began doing this kind of work, I looked into its history. There’s a link between the Foley artist and what came before: the Japanese benji. I love shit like this. History no journalist can fuck with. In the nineteen twenties, before sound came in, Japanese movie-theater owners hired live orators to recite the dialogue through megaphones. Some of those orators became as famous as the stars on the screen. Listen to this bit of beauty from a book I cherish: The Talkies, by Arthur Edwin Krows. It’s from 1930.

  The prime point here is that too much stress should not be placed upon what is sound and what is picture. As soon as talking films became a theatrical actuality, critics sought their standards in distinctions between these; but the artistic differences are not between sight and hearing as such. The truest, most genuine appreciation of art takes no cognizance of eye or ear. In admiring a fine statue no one thinks importantly about the physical fact that he sees it, or, in listening uninterruptedly to a beautiful symphony, is for a time aware that he hears it. The instant he is conscious of either, then his enjoyment ends.

  That’s what I’m talking about. My voice is equal to what you see. For some, what’s heard during fucking is more powerful than watching the act itself. When I first started off, I had to do much more than voices; I had to put on rubber gloves and submerge my hand in a jar of lube while rimming a carrot in order to get the sound of penetration right. As my voice earned some demand, I didn’t have to do so much incidental stuff. But in a sense, doing Foley for stroke flicks is the greater challenge, since the sound makes the surreality richer. The films you hear me in are about people pulling out at the deepest moment of connection.

  I define that as the sound of love. It’s also the sound of me loving and being abandoned by Richard.

  On January 18, 2001, Adult Video News reported this: the institution, in the porn industry, of the Cambria List. The list is named after Paul Cambria, a lawyer specializing in the First Amendment. He represented Larry Flynt; the list was supposed to help the rest of the industry stay out of trouble during the Bush administration. Here’s what it said, under the heading BOXCOVER GUIDELINES/MOVIE PRODUCTION GUIDELINES:

  Do not include any of the following:

  No shots with appearance of pain or degradation

  No facials (bodyshots are OK if shot is not nasty)

  No bukakke

  No spitting or saliva mouth to mouth

  No food used as sex object

  No peeing unless in a natural setting, e.g., field, roadside

  No coffins

  No blindfolds

  No wax dripping

  No two dicks in/near
one mouth

  No shot of stretching pussy

  No fisting

  No squirting

  No bondage-type toys or gear unless very light

  No girls sharing same dildo (in mouth or pussy)

  Toys are OK if shot is not nasty

  No hands from two different people fingering same girl

  No male–male penetration

  No transsexuals

  No bi-sex

  No degrading dialogue, e.g., “Suck this cock, bitch,” while slapping her face with a penis

  No menstruation topics

  No incest topics

  No forced sex, rape themes, etc.

  No black men–white women themes

  Notice that nowhere on the list is there an edict against the voice—that is, there are no directives against the way the voice can and should be used. Of course, there’s that reference to so-called “degrading dialogue”—e.g., “Suck this cock, bitch”—but when isn’t need degrading? In any case, I get around that particular mandate by making it sound more like a question—“Suck this cock, bitch?”—or punk-ass pleading, and therefore more like love.

  Sometimes it’s fun to make shit up. Maybe as a way of getting at myself without having to go through all the boring pedestrian shit you want to hear, like where I was born and what it was like, having a brother. Cancer Bitch made shit up all the time. Acted in plays, acted in movies. I was her paid companion and half-assed dresser from 1961 to 1964, beginning the year I moved to Manhattan from Peoria. Cancer Bitch—that would be Diana Sands.

  She and I were friends until her death. Who can forget her? She was tiny, with high, high hair that didn’t necessarily make her appear taller but gave her a kind of heft she didn’t have otherwise. Black hair, shaped like a pineapple; light came through the curls. Bee-stung lips, I guess you could call them. She looked like a light-skinned colored lady of a certain age no matter what age she was. And then there were her eyes—rent one of her movies and see them in close-up. No amount of pain you’d ever experienced could ever eclipse the sadness in them. She was always alive, even when she had cancer. Not just alive to the scene or character or camera she was playing to, but available to the alchemy that was happening right before you as you watched her watching, holding on to her character’s life with her hands, a character she made live in her admirers’ minds by doing what used to pass as an actress’s work: taking the page and running it through her body, her mouth, her brain. And when you went home after watching her onstage, her character went home with you, too. She was that good.