Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  P: Why were you discharged early?

  K: (long pause) Porn. Distributing pornography, they said.

  P: Pornography! What type of pornography? You mean children?

  K: No, no! Just the usual kind. Videos. Triple and quadruple X. Your basic hard-core. I wasn’t really distributing them anyhow. I was only giving them away free to my buddies. Some DVDs I bought and paid for myself. It’s a long stupid story. You don’t wanna hear it.

  P: I do want to hear it. Tell me.

  K: Well, like I said, I was stationed up at Fort Drum which is only about an hour’s drive from the Canadian border, and over there in Ottawa on the French side of the river there’s a lot of strip clubs and such, and I overheard some of the guys in my outfit saying that this actress who’s my favorite porn star was appearing in a place called Lucky Pierre’s. Her name’s Willow. Just Willow. Which is cool. No last name. I mean she has a last name but she doesn’t use it in her profession. And she’s really special. At least to me. Not like your regular suck-’n’-fuck porn actresses with tats on their butts and clit rings and nipple rings and shaved pussies and who all they do is moan and groan and squeal and can’t act for shit. Willow’s different.

  P: How do you mean, “different”?

  K: I dunno. Most guys don’t really get off on her. Her Internet videos only get one or two, sometimes two and a half stars instead of five and not many hits compared to Cassidey Rae say or Brianna Banks or Hannah Hilton who look like they’ve had these huge breast implants installed and get thousands of hits. Maybe not Cassidey Rae. Her tits are pretty normal-looking. But Willow’s tits are kind of small. Like plums. With these dark almost purple nipples. Willow’s more natural, if you know what I mean. Also her teeth aren’t perfect white, and she has curly brown hair instead of straight blond like she’s maybe Italian or Jewish. She’s got this fantastic warm smile. Actually, I bet she’s French Canadian, which is why she was performing at Lucky Pierre’s. It’s on the French side of the river in Ottawa where they’ve put all the strip clubs and hookers for the Canadian politicians that keep their offices and homes over on the English side. She was probably in town visiting her family and took the gig to pay off some of their overdue bills. She looks like she comes from a poor family. Her website says she was born in Colorado and went to college in Southern California and studied architecture, but they always lie on those websites. They’d never say things like she’s French Canadian from Ottawa, Canada, and dropped out of high school and got into stripping and porn to help support her family. But that’s what she looks like, and that’s one reason why she’s my favorite porn star. Or was. I don’t have any favorites anymore.

  P: Why not?

  K: Dude, get a clue! On account of I can’t watch porn anymore! I’d get busted. Back then though, like all the guys in my outfit, I watched porn all the time on my computer, and I really wanted to meet Willow, so I hitched up to Ottawa on a two-day pass. I had to hitch because none of the guys who had cars wanted to take me where they went on passes and hung out, and none of them gave a shit about Willow, and to tell the truth I wasn’t tight enough with anyone to ask any favors, let alone borrow their car. Besides, I didn’t have a driver’s license. I pretty much kept to myself most of the time because from the first day of basic guys gave me a lot of shit. Not just the sergeants and officers. Every outfit has somebody who gets shit on by everyone else, and I guess I ended up being that somebody. You know what I’m saying?

  P: Why, do you think?

  K: I dunno. It’s my personality maybe. Most people’s personalities have like a specialty. They tell jokes good or they know a lot about cars or computers and video games or heavy metal music or they excel at some sport or at least if they don’t play sports they know everything about the NFL say or the NBA. Or they’re religious and can talk about Jesus and the Bible and shit. There were some guys like that in my outfit. Jesus freaks. Or they can talk about all the women they fucked. My personality just doesn’t have any specialty. All I know about is iguanas, and who gives a shit about iguanas? Plus I’m shorter than most guys and kind of skinny for my age, so I look younger than I’m supposed to be, which means that guys my age and even younger tend to treat me like their stupid little brother. Or they just ignore me. It was like that in school. It’s always been like that for me. You get used to it, and I didn’t mind it after a few years. It was weirder in the army, though, because it was the first time I had to shower naked with other people, and I had the biggest dick in the outfit, and you’d think that would have got me some props—

  P: Wait a minute! You had the biggest penis in your outfit?

  K: Yeah. Not the thickest. A guy from Akron had the thickest. I had the longest. But they just treated it like it was a joke. Like it was wasted on me, which was sort of right. I think it’s because I didn’t know how to brag about it. You know. And show it off. That sort of thing. I mean, I didn’t have a lot of sexual experience, to say the least, and was kind of shy about my dick and actually didn’t realize it was unusually long until I was in the army, because I didn’t play sports in school and the only other dicks I had seen up to then belonged to male porn stars, and their dicks, except for the really freaky gonzo-size ones, were the same size as mine more or less. Or when I was a kid and sometimes accidentally saw the dicks of the guys who stayed at our house with my mom, which from a little kid’s perspective seemed really huge, even though they didn’t even have a hard-on at the time and were just walking naked from her bedroom to the bathroom or the kitchen or sitting on the couch in their skivvies watching TV and their cock and balls would fall out.

  P: So what happened with Willow up in Ottawa?

  K: Oh, man, it was awesome! It was a pretty cool club, better than anything I’d seen in Calusa. And for sure not what you’d expect to see in Canada. They had a couple of small stages for the pole dancers and a Plexiglas booth where they put on shower shows—

  P: Shower shows?

  K: Yeah, like a naked woman takes a shower in this see-through shower stall, and you get to watch. It’s kind of cool if you’ve never seen it before, but once you have it gets sort of boring, unless she flips her button and jerks herself off or has a dildo to play with. That can be interesting. Anyhow after a couple of numbers by the local talent, which wasn’t much, Willow comes on. She’s dressed in a tight nurse’s outfit with furry white boots and pretty soon she’s down to a thong and the boots and then just the boots. It’s supposed to be a little story about a doctor’s office visit and she’s the nurse and she’s wearing a stethoscope that she puts the head of it into her pussy and then sucks it and so on. But mostly she pole dances. The DJ’s playing these old Bee Gees songs, but Willow’s a real good dancer so the audience is into it, especially me, because her and me are having serious eye contact, like she knows I know she’s special and probably because I’m not like the rest of the guys in the audience, who are all these red-faced Canadians, most of them drunk and older than me and yelling and grabbing their junk and so on, while I’m just sitting there quiet all by myself watching her pole dance like she’s dancing for me and nobody else. Like we’re alone together. Y’ know?

  P: Yes. I know the feeling. It’s a good feeling.

  K: Yeah. Anyhow, at the end she does a split and a couple of final butt flashes from the pole and starts scooping up all the cash the guys in the audience have been tossing up there. I snake my way up to the stage and hand her an American twenty, which stands out because the rest of the money is mostly Canadian twos and fives, and she takes the bill, looks at it a second, then looks at me and purses her lips in a pretend kiss. “American?” she asks and I say, “Yeah, U.S. Army,” and she says, “Awesome.” Then she prances off-stage. But a minute later she’s back, wearing just the thong and the furry booties and sitting at a table at the end of the stage with this huge stack of DVDs of her newest movie, Willow’s Day Off, that she’s selling and autographing. There’s only a couple of wrinkled, red-faced, old guys who’re buying the DVD, and I fe
el kind of sorry for her and pissed off at these Canadian guys, who don’t know what they’ve got. They don’t know how lucky they are. So when there’s nobody else in line I go up to the table and tell her I want to buy twenty copies of Willow’s Day Off. She goes, “Wow, dude! What do you want with twenty of them?” And I go, “They’re for the guys in my outfit back at Fort Drum. You’re our favorite porn star. They sent me up here to buy them each a copy of the DVD,” I tell her. Which isn’t exactly true, but it makes her feel real good, I can tell. She asks if I’m going to Afghanistan, and I say, “Yeah we’ll be shipping out in a few weeks.” Which was true. I promise her we’ll take her DVDs with us and share them with the other guys over there, which practically gets her crying. No shit, real tears in her eyes. You never see porn stars cry, man. Never. They’re like trained not to cry. “You’re real sweet,” she tells me. And she goes, “You guys’re risking your lives over there to protect our freedoms from the terrorists. I’m gonna give you a free lap dance,” she says, and when the music comes back on, that’s what she does. Gives me a free lap dance. Right there in front of everybody. I could smell her perfume, man.

  P: That’s incredible.

  K: That’s what I thought. It was like the best night of my whole life. But then after that everything went downhill.

  P: How do you mean? (to the dog) G’wan, scat! Go home!

  K: No, she’s okay. Let her hang out with us awhile. Those guys, Benbow and whatzisname, Trinidad Bill, they treat her like shit over there. They treat the parrot like shit too. Both those guys are a buncha turds, if you ask me. They like to throw pennies at the parrot and make him yell swears at them so people’ll laugh. (to the dog) C’mere, girl. Wanna treat, Annie? Want a Cheez-It? (to the Professor) She likes Cheez-Its, which is good because I like them too,and it’s the only treat I got for her. Her name’s Annie they told me. For Raggedy Ann and because she’s got red hair. Reddish yellow hair. Only I like thinking it’s for Little Orphan Annie instead, on account of there was this porn movie named Raggedy Ann and Andy that I never liked. It was all about sex dolls that suck and fuck. There’s probably a porn movie named Little Orphan Annie too, but if so, I’ve never seen it. Iggy used to like Cheez-Its.

  P: Iggy?

  K: My iguana. The cops blew him away the other night when they raided the camp at the Causeway. I hadda bury him at sea. But don’t get me started on Iggy. Jesus!

  P: Okay. Tell me how everything went downhill after that night in Ottawa with Willow.

  K: You know what a GO-1A is?

  P: Hmm-m. General Order Number 1A?

  K: Right. You must’ve been in the service, Professor. They passed it in the first Iraq War and updated it after 9/11. It bans you from drinking alcohol in Muslim countries plus doing other shit the Arabs dislike that Americans sort of take for granted, like gambling and drugs and borrowing money with interest, which means no credit cards except on the base. And no promoting Christianity. And no pornography. No porn at all. Nada. Not even skin magazines. Not when you’re stationed in an Arab country. The rest of the time the army don’t bother you about porn, so everyone is into it. I mean, what else are you gonna do with your free time? Everybody’s into porn, even the officers. Especially over there in Iraq and Afghanistan I heard. In spite of the rules. It’s practically un-American not to be into porn. Especially if you’re a guy although I heard the female soldiers are into porn pretty heavy too. Downloading from the Internet onto your computers and iPhones and swapping with your friends and family members and sending out pictures of your dick and your wife’s or girlfriend’s tits and bush to your friends and exchanging sex organ pictures with your wife or girlfriend back home to let her know you’re thinking of her and of course triple and quadruple X hard-core DVDs and jack-off magazines and other shit like that. Except for distribution. That’s out. You can collect and swap skin magazines with your buddies. You can watch porn videos and share them with your homies and exchange sex-oriented family photos with your wife or girlfriend or if you’re a female soldier with your boyfriend or husband. But if you’re U.S. military personnel you can’t like distribute porn, even here in the free world. Which is a pretty fine distinction, if you ask me. Between consuming and distributing. You can be one but not the other. Anyhow, I get back to the base from Ottawa with my stash of twenty copies of Willow’s Day Off, and before I have a chance to give them away to the guys, they do a surprise search of the barracks, and they find the DVDs. It’s called a “Health and Welfare Inspection,” but all it is is a drugs and non–U.S. Army issue weapons search. So they grab all my DVDs, even the ones in my personal collection, and impound my computer and toss me in the brig until a week later, when they haul me before the base commander where they had this hearing, and they shit-can me. They gave me a general discharge and my pay and returned my computer, but they kept all the DVDs and my signing bonus money and handed me a one-way bus ticket to Calusa. None of which made my mother happy, except that she was sick of taking care of Iggy by then and could turn his care and feeding back over to me. A good thing for Iggy as it turned out, because in another week or two my mother would’ve probably given him away or dropped him off at a golf course. He was practically dead of starvation anyhow when I got home.

  P: Iggy. The iguana.

  K: Yeah.

  P: So there you are, back in Calusa, living in your mother’s house, without a job, no friends except Iggy. No girlfriend, I assume.

  K: Yeah. I never had an actual girlfriend anyhow.

  P: So what’d you do?

  K: Pretty much stayed in my old bedroom. Watched television. Watched a lot of porn on my computer. I tried to get a job, but when they found out I was discharged from the army before completing basic, they said forget it. Plus my only work experience was in shipping for a light store, and the guy who owned it was murdered and the new guy still thought I was involved, but I wasn’t. I had a little money left over from my army pay and a debit card. So I started making friends and talking with people on the Internet. Not real people, just people I met in chat rooms and such. I mean, they were real enough. They were real girls who liked to talk about stuff. Some of it sex stuff, but mostly just passing the time. Only not people I knew like in person.

  P: We’ve talked for an hour already. That went fast, didn’t it? Let’s quit for now and come back to this in a day or so. I still have a lot of questions. Incidentally, Kid, I really appreciate your doing this.

  K: No problem. What about the treasure map? Did you bring it?

  P: Oh, I’m sorry! I forgot it again! I’ll bring it next time, I promise.

  K: Yeah. Try and remember, okay? It’s sort of our deal is how I understand it. Maybe you can bring a compass and one of those GPS things that can locate coordinates like latitude and longitude. You probably know how to use that kind of gear, being a professor and all. Were you in the military? They teach you how to use those things in the military, but I never got to that particular lesson, so I don’t know how to use a map to find a spot that’s marked with an X.

  P: Was I in the military? No. When I was your age it was the 1960s, and I was deeply involved with the movement to oppose the war in Vietnam. The only honorable path for me when I was drafted into the army was to refuse to serve, which I did. I spent a little time in the brig myself. I was in effect a draft dodger. And I’ve never regretted it.

  K: No shit. How’d you dodge the draft? I heard that was hard unless you said you were a fag. Was it by being so fat?

  P: Neither. It’s a long story, Kid. I’ll tell it to you sometime.

  K: Yeah, I’d like to hear it sometime. That and the treasure map. I’d like to see that map sometime.

  P: You will. I’ll bring it tomorrow. I promise.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A THICK MIST HAS SPREAD ACROSS BENBOW’S settlement. It hovers low over the sandy grounds between the shacks and the bar and trailers, spreading into the mangroves toward the narrow inlet on one side and over the berm out to the point, where the Kid has
pitched his tent, and on to the back side of the settlement, where the pickup truck and several vans, SUVs, and panel trucks are parked. As it grows in density and height it blocks the morning sun and blue sky above. The vehicles slowly disappear from view. The half-dozen men and women standing near them fade and are gone. The buildings and trailers and barrels filled with trash and empty bottles and beer cans are embraced and then swallowed by the silver-gray mist.

  It’s hard to tell where the mist is coming from or if the entire island has been devoured by it or possibly the whole city of Calusa and its suburbs all the way west to the Great Panzacola Swamp and beyond to the Gulf of Mexico. Or if it originates out there in the Gulf and has been blown east across the vast swamp to the city and the Bay and Anaconda Island, driven by the morning breeze off the Gulf, the breeze stirred to life by the colossal swirl of a tropical storm named George three hundred miles at sea.

  The mist here at Benbow’s is now so thick the Kid can’t see a person, building, or vehicle farther than ten feet away from where he stands. It muffles sounds—the lap of low waves off the Bay, the seagulls and waterbirds, the softly rocking, derelict shrimp boats tied to the posts of the crumbling, half-rotted dock by the inlet.

  He knows he is not alone here; there must be dozens of other people close by. He heard their cars and trucks crackle across the crushed coral earlier, heard the doors of their vehicles open and slam shut. He heard them talking to one another, giving orders, arguing and discussing work of some kind. But he can’t hear them anymore, as if, when the mist swept in and settled and thickened, one by one everyone left Benbow’s settlement and the island. He can’t see or hear the parrot, because he can’t see the bar where its cage is kept; he doesn’t know north, south, east, or west, for the sun has long since disappeared; he can barely tell right from left.