Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  He’s got no control of himself in this area, to where even a trip to the doctor’s office for his annual physical leaves him wondering if his dick will turn him in. He jerks off before the appointment (by his calculation, it should be within an hour or so), so that when the guy examines him for testicular cancer or whatever the hell it is he examines him for, he doesn’t show any interest. That would just be too weird. That would just be the bottom of the bottom. He’s thought about switching to a female doctor, but then he thinks that would just be a too-weirdness of a different kind. What if she’s old, like sixty or something, and she goes to examine him, and he just loses it, right there?

  It’s the same when he goes to buy pants and has to be measured for alterations, except with the tailor he doesn’t have to piss himself clean to wash away any of the residual semen to make sure he’s presentable down there. Jesus, he would just shit if the doctor spied any caked-over come at the tip of his cock (and, with a lady doctor, he’d shit and die!), but, with the tailor, it’s just about avoiding any telling bulges, any movement.

  He’s thought this problem through to the floorboards, Pimletz has, although it never helps when the real deal presents itself. When the real deal comes, he’s a force of nature. Here he is, thinking he’s walking around the cabin with nothing left, but Petra Wood at last presses herself against him from behind and starts to nibblesuck at his ear, and he’s variously thinking how stuff like this never happens to him, and how he hopes the ear cheese that has surely formed on the ridge between ear and skull since his last shower is not too terribly noticeable, and how during that last shower, just this morning, he should probably have jerked off one last time, just to be sure, because already the skin of his cock is stretched so taut he’s thinking it might crack.

  “How about a little break, Axel Pimletz?” Petra Wood says, his ear still in her mouth, her voice reaching him as if through an imbalanced Walkman. “All work and no play, Axie,” she says. She lets go the ear and walks a tight half-circle to face Pimletz from the front. She keeps a hand to his clothes as she walks around like he’s a fucking maypole, which, in a way, he might be.

  “Remember that line?” she continues, “From The Shining? From the way Nicholson just kept writing it and writing it, over and over? Page after page, it was just the same thing. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ ” She makes her voice smaller with each repetition, appending ellipsis to her performance. He gets the idea, but she keeps going. ‘ “All work and no play. . . . ’ ”

  She starts in playing with his hair, removes his glasses, moves on to the next thing: “I’ll tell you something. What he saw in that Shelley Duvall, I’ll never know. We met her once at some charity function, and her mouth was, like, way too big for her face. You think? In person, it’s like way too big for her face.”

  Pimletz doesn’t think, or at least he’s never thought about it, and now that he’s been made to, he’s not much interested beyond supposing it is so. For a beat, he’s thinking the obvious Jack Nicholson impression is a back-handed hint that he get moving on this Wood manuscript, implying as it does that even a deranged Jack Nicholson was able to compile hundreds of pages of the same fucking sentence, while Pimletz has only managed a repetitive thirty-seven, but mostly what he’s thinking, now, is that his ear’s a little too wet for him not to dab at it, maybe with his sleeve or with a casual brush back of his hair, but he doesn’t want to get caught at it and leave this woman thinking he’s dabbing at his too wet ear. She might get insulted, and he’s also thinking, Axie? No one’s ever called him Axie, and it never occurred to him anyone might. Mostly, though, he’s thinking he needs to reach into his jeans to adjust himself. He’s angled in the wrong way, pointing down, so that when Petra Wood entered the room and got him going, his straightaway swelling cock pressed up against his boxers and jeans like it was trying to lift weights.

  He allows himself a small joke by association—just a punchline to start, something about the “clean and jerk,” a simple weightlifting maneuver, but then he marries it to the soaped tug and pull of his morning showers—before returning to his dilemma.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he’s got no choice but to say, standing, turning his back to Pet and reaching into his jeans to right himself.

  Pet, noticing, fills the few paces between them. “Here,” she says. “Let me.” She turns Pimletz to face her and reaches for his belt, only when she unloops the front end and drags the hasp back through its hole, she sees that maybe she’s too late. Or, too soon.

  (Better, too much.)

  “Jesus,” Pimletz says, coming, crazy at the thought of this exotic Pet reaching for his pants as much as at any actual friction occasioned by her reaching. He can’t help himself. “Jesus,” he says again.

  Pet rubs at him through his jeans—she doesn’t want not to participate, after all—and purrs wetly in his ear and keeps rubbing until he’s well past through. “It’s okay, baby,” she purrs. “It’s okay.”

  “Fuck!” Pimletz cries out, done, pissed at himself for not keeping control. He slams his hand into the cabin wall in an embroidered show of frustration. He hurts his hand doing this, his friction hand, but he wants to sell the point that this isn’t how things usually are with him, that he’s as surprised as she is. What the hell is this all about? he means to suggest. Hey! When the hell was the last time a couple layers of denim and cotton-polyester weren’t enough to keep a grown man from spilling himself at the near touch of an amazing-looking woman? Tell him that.

  “It’s okay,” Pet says again. She strokes at his hair with one hand, finishes with his belt with the other. She’s up so close against him he can smell the fabric of her clothes, the kind of shampoo she uses, and Pimletz is so caught up in her smells and his disappointment he doesn’t notice what she’s doing, not at first. She unbuttons his jeans, slips her hand under his shorts and around to his ass, slides his pants down over his hips. He doesn’t know how to tell her to stop.

  “You must be a mess,” Pet says sweetly, somehow producing a moist (and somehow hot) towel and working it tenderly around his dick and balls, like a waitress in a deservedly popular Japanese restaurant. The towel reaches his spent cock like a redemption, a forgiveness.

  Jesus, this woman comes prepared, Pimletz thinks. Not him. He just comes.

  “I was in a band once,” she says, out of nowhere, working her towel, “back in school, we called ourselves Nocturnal Emission, we did a song about this. ‘Emission Control.’ Get it? It’s like a play on words. Nocturnal Emission? Emission Control?” She looks to see if he does. “It was like our theme song. That, and ‘Emission Impossible,’ which was like the flip side to the whole deal.”

  She looks up at Pimletz, gets back nothing, continues. “Oh, don’t mind me. It’s just, you know, you reminded me.” She seems to drift off, onto another line of thinking, but then she’s back: “God, I haven’t thought about that in years. I was on drums, can you believe it? A girl drummer, back then.” She bunches the towel and tosses it aside, then drops to her knees and takes him in her mouth and works him like a mother cat. She licks at the messed hair around his balls like he’s a kitten in for his bath, like it’s her privilege. Her tongue is warm against his wet skin, the inside of her mouth like the mattress side of his pillow.

  “Nice,” Pimletz says, thinking he needs to keep up his end.

  Pet isn’t listening. She’s back in school, banging the skins, rocking the house. She starts to sing: “If you can’t come when you’re invited, what’s the point of coming at all?” It’s the chorus, apparently, so she sings it again and again. It’s one of those songs that just drifts away, so this time her ellipsis is a fade. She looks up, sung, to see how Pimletz is doing. “Maybe you saw us?” she wonders. “We were up at Smith, but we played Boston all the time. The Rat. The Paradise. Some place in Cambridge, I can’t remember. Late seventies, around in there. Girl groups were
pretty happening. The Pretenders. Blondie. All those strung-out chicks.” She laughs. “Hey, the Strung-Out Chicks. That’s what we should’ve called ourselves.”

  Pimletz can’t think what to say. He looks down at this amazing-looking woman with his dick near her mouth and thinks if he had a million bucks for every time he found himself in this pose with a woman in that one he’d still be scrambling to make his rent.

  “It’s okay, Axel,” she says, standing to face him. She’s back in the moment now, back to her soothing. “It’s no biggie.” She laughs, not meaning to. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks,” he says, smiling, as if he can laugh it off as well. “Thanks a whole fucking lot.”

  “Sorry.”

  Me too, Pimletz wants to say. Jesusfuckingchrist, him too.

  Pet retreats to the back bedroom for her little joystick. It’ll just take a sec, she tells Pimletz. They can finish her off, you know, if he doesn’t need to get back to work. Pimletz stands there, momentarily alone, his pants bunched around his ankles. He’s replaying what just happened, fast-forwarding to the next scene with the dildo and the finishing her off, and he’s hard in his head, but nowhere else.

  Norman can’t write the truth without understanding the scene. It’s easier for him to visualize the piece if he sees himself in the role, if he sees the set, the props, the particulars. It’s a layering kind of process. Right now, it’s just Norman Wood in his shitty little apartment, but the effect is the same. The juice of the story is Norman and Woodman, but it’s also about Norman and Brian Dennehy, or, as it turns out, maybe Charles Durning, or whoever he gets to play his father. It’s about what’s missing, now, in their relationship, what will be forever lost to Norman with his father’s passing. But it’s also about how much easier it will be to film the relevant scenes if he confines his search for these missing and lost aspects inside his apartment, just, if there’s no reason to take the story anywhere else. He reaches for the truth of his own story, but he’s careful not to let his reach exceed his budget.

  This is how he works. This is how everyone works around here. It’s this, or get nailed. The deal is, he’s supposed to produce a shooting script by the end of next week—forty pages, tops, it’s just a short—and yet he’s managed only a couple sketchy scenes. He knows what he wants to say, what’s universal in his relationship with the Woodman, but he doesn’t know how to narrow the focus. They’ve taught him this, in theory, but he doesn’t get it. (Not just in theory, but in Theory, an actual class.) He wants to tell the whole story, all at once, fully-realized, but he’s stuck having to pick and choose from among his experiences. He gets these flashes in his head, these different scenes, and they have nothing to do with each other or with the piece as a whole, and what bogs him down is that the distance from where he is to where he wants to be is, like, way fucking long. He doesn’t see a solution.

  Stuck, he flips on the television. Maybe a half-hour or so of tube will spark something for him, or at least leave his head sufficiently numbed that he might better recognize a new idea. Plus, he’s up for anything might keep him from writing. Always. Even Three’s Company. This is where he lands, so he gives it a try. This is Norman for you. He’ll grace even the most dubious entertainments with the benefit of his doubt. Maybe it’s because he grew up on the industry’s fringes, but he feels an obligation to watch what passes in his view. He knows the work that goes into it. He knows the people involved, or people who know the people involved. He owes it to them to watch.

  He never noticed Three’s Company much as a kid. Its first run was a little ahead of his time, but the premise is somehow a part of him: this guy Jack pretends to be gay in order to fool his stuck-up landlords and live platonically with his two attractive female friends in a great apartment. Norman wonders how he knows this, but, more than that, how it passed the dozens of rewrites and story conferences and network suits to emerge as a viable concept for a situation comedy.

  Here, now, Jack is dressed as a woman trying to pass herself off as a man, so he’s kind of back where he started with just this extra complication thrown in. It is not immediately clear to Norman how this complication came about or how it fits with this episode’s story, but he is mildly distracted by the effort. It all seems to matter to these earnest people on screen. There’s some shtick with Jack’s fishnet stockings underneath his suit trousers, with the way they show when he crosses his legs at a job interview. Then the camera cuts to show a dangling hoop earring left behind on his ear, and the laugh track lets on that this is funny. Norman is stuck marveling at the effortless physicality of the guy who plays Jack and at the difficulty he’s having with his own material. This, what he’s watching, seems written without a thought; this other thing, what he’s working on, has been thought through to the ground without his having written a word.

  A commercial break lets him change channels without hurting anyone’s feelings, and he bounces remotely along the dial in search of diversion: infomercials, soaps, talk shows, old movies. Ah, here we go. On TNT, they’re showing True Grit. It looks from these first couple scenes like he hasn’t missed much. He sparks to the connection. Usually, with these old movies—late 1960s through, about, early 1980s—there’s a connection. With Wood gone, Norman can’t look through the cable listings without drawing a line from whatever’s showing to some aspect of his father’s career. It’s like that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, the one that holds that everyone in Hollywood is linked to Kevin Bacon by a flow chart of no more than six pictures. (His roommate is friendly with one of the guys who thought it up.) He maps his own path from Wood to Kevin Bacon: Sixes and Sevens, with Yul Brynner, who also appeared in The Magnificent Seven, with Steve McQueen, who also appeared in Papillon, with Dustin Hoffman, who also appeared in Kramer vs. Kramer, with Meryl Streep, who also appeared in The River Wild, with Kevin Bacon. There are shorter paths, but it’s more of a challenge by way of Papillon.

  Norman and his film school buds have made the same game out of Woodman’s career. (They can get to Darth Vader and back in just four pictures!) He worked with everyone, by the time it was over, rubbed, in some way, against virtually every studio production. The True Grit connection is hardly once removed. Wood originally was signed to play the Glen Campbell part, actually showed up for the first day of shooting. But the story he told was that he got into this right-out-of-the-gate pissing contest with John Wayne, and when it became clear to Wood that the Duke was producing a mightier stream at that time in his career, there was nothing to do but kick up some dust and walk. Hal Wallis, the producer, had been an old friend until Wood’s walking caused this great falling out; as far as Norman knew, they never spoke again.

  The more likely version was that Wood arrived on the set to find that True Grit was clearly John Wayne’s picture, and also that he wasn’t inclined to help him carry it. No way was he working in support of a bigger legend. Plus, it turned out to be a nothing role. For Glen Campbell, maybe it was a big deal, but for Wood it was insignificant. He might have known, but in the script he’d read, and in the novel on which it was based, there’d been a little more balance to the story. Wood seized on this as the basis for his dissatisfaction. Norman, when he was old enough to get what was going on, never understood his father’s surprise. Come on, he always thought, this was John Wayne. John Fucking Wayne, a goddamn legend. What the hell did the Woodman expect? What, he wanted the Duke to dilute the role of a lifetime to leave room in the picture for an upstart pain-in-the-ass like Terence Wood? Yeah, right.

  The truth, Norman later found out, was that Wood had a hard-on for the Rooster Cogburn role and couldn’t stand that he wasn’t long enough in the tooth to battle it out for the lead. (The Duke had about twenty-five years on him!) No way he was gonna sit back and watch John Wayne act the shit out of a part that, in another lifetime, might have been his. Which was why Wood, unnominated, passed the Academy Awards ceremony in Squaw Valley that year, watching from a slopeside condominium with his first wife, Elaine, and the reaction sh
ot to John Wayne’s best actor Oscar was the Woodman running outside to take a shit in the resort’s heated pool. He had to pay to have the pool drained, cleaned, and even regrouted, but he made all the papers, borrowed some of the wind at the Duke’s back, and made himself feel a little better at what he’d missed. It was never his to miss, but Wood didn’t see it that way.

  Norman, watching, not thinking of his script, tries to imagine his father in the Glen Campbell part. There’s no easy fit, but he works at it. There’s no edge to Glen Campbell, no danger, and Wood was always a little wanting in the sweetness and hope departments. It would’ve been, like, a completely different picture, like It’s a Wonderful Life with Edgar G. Robinson as George Bailey. Toward the back of the movie, there’s this scene with Glen Campbell’s dead body being dragged along the plains by his horse, and right away Norman flashes to an image of his father, body-bagged, being dragged down Sunset Boulevard by his beloved Pathfinder. It’s the weirdest thing, this leap from Glen Campbell to Woodman, from the horse to the sport utility vehicle, but Norman worries it won’t leave him. It’s with him, still, when the closing credits roll, when he goes to shut off the television manually and press his hand against the static of the screen. It’s with him as he crosses to his desk, to return to his script. It’s with him when he looks for something to eat in the refrigerator. It’s with him when he leaves the apartment for a slice of Ray’s down the street, or maybe a two-frank special at Papaya King up the block in the other direction. It’s with him, he’s guessing, for the next while.

  Don’t talk to Grace about patience. Don’t get her going. She’s about had it with the wholesaler she’s been dealing with, the guy who delivers her milk and cheeses and ketchup and other foodstuffs. Some guy named Howie, tall drink of water, too big for his hats, calls from his cell phone to tell Grace he’s just around the corner, the kind of guy who actually refers to himself as a tall drink of water, who seems to be having entirely too much fun at a job that’s got no right being any fun at all.