White Girls

by Hilton Als

  In some ways, Pryor probably realized that his legendary status has weakened the subversive impact of his work. People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control. It’s not difficult to see how historians will view him in the future. An edgy comedian. A Mudbone. But will they take into account the rest of his story: that essentially American life, full of contradictions; the life of a comedian who had an excess of both empathy and disdain for his audience, who exhausted himself in his search for love, who was a confusion of female and male, colored and white, and who acted out this internal drama onstage for our entertainment.

  YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?

  SOME FAMOUS PEOPLE get cancer. That’s a look. Other famous people—my brother, for one—get MS, and that’s a look, too. But the attitude I can’t take is the one that says you better sympathize. Like when a famous acting bitch gets pregnant. Bitch plays her condition up like it’s Mother Superior time. You’ve seen it on Access Hollywood, on the TV: Bitch pushes that baby out and Hollywood acts like she ain’t ever laid down with dogs, gotten up with fleas, and bitten their heads off. In the press, she’s pressed, correct, done, ’cause she’s living the right way: Mrs. Morality.

  Acting has come to this: engaging less in make-believe than in making a bad carbon copy of reality. All an actress needs to do to get a little juice these days is give up on being an actress and take on the real-life role of wife. Or mother. I never got to that. I always preferred playing myself.

  Famous Bitch says in an interview (simpering voice): “Well, even though I done sucked off every piece of trade from Hollywood to wherever to get what I wanted, I’m pure now—I have a child.” I say, is this a woman? She goes on: “Oh, no, I could never do that now”—be it drugs, going down on a girl producer, whatever—ever since she’s given birth to innocence. Breasts leaking, she could feed a nation. I say, is this a woman?

  Uh-huh, especially when she’s a so-called actress. For them, the world is a photo op too great to give up once it’s been gotten. There she is, working the phone lines on TV telethons, raising funds for the surviving family members of this or that whatever. Fuck Medea. Fuck doing rep. Tell today’s acting bitch where America’s axis of sentiment is turning, and she’ll turn that way as well.

  I won’t live long enough to learn how to play that part. I’m sixty-four. And look what I got. A half-assed career. Laughter. Many faggots on my phone: That’s hysterical.

  Aren’t the queens fabulous? They don’t want much: an orgasm and a cocktail. And all they want from an always-looking-for-a-job acting bitch like me is that I be fierce, go to premieres, be. And I love it. Love their demands. Helps keep my shit rigorous. Don’t get it twisted, though—a queen will find the holes in a bitch’s fishnets. They just won’t try to kill you for being different.

  Sometimes, at the video store, in the rock-and-cock section, I rent what the boys are doing, just to stay in touch. I love those dolls. I take those tapes home and watch assholes puckering. Leather straps. The pizza boy, the pool boy. Drama and attitude and then the cock shot.

  I’m in a similar business. I do voice-overs for porn films. I’m an artist of sorts—a Foley artist for rock-and-cock movies. Split snatch, too. My voice goes both ways—male and female. My mind goes both ways, too. I’ve been at it for nearly twenty years now, ever since Richard failed me for the last time. In a sense, he and I are in the same business: talking dirty. But that was his choice. This is my survival.

  I have appeared—if voices appear, and they do—in everything from Fags in Love, Fags on Vacation (1992) to Mystic’s Pizza (2001). You’ve felt yourself while you’ve felt me doing Polish accents. Or anal discomfort. The old gag and sputter when it comes to oral. I do it all.

  No one does it better, either. (I’ve twice won the porn industry’s highest honor, the Hot D’Or, for Best Sound, Oral Division.) No one does it better because no one in the business I’m in believes what we do has anything to do with acting. But it does, because acting is convincing folks to feel something. And you’ve felt yourself while I made the sounds that made you feel something.

  Just recently I did a scene where the woman—a skinny white girl who looked like she’d just been shipped in from Estonia—was getting spanked and rimmed by a trannie who may or may not have also (at least in the movie) been her uncle. The director couldn’t get the money shot right. Not the close-up or the cum, but the sound of joy and pain that the girl onscreen needed to make while her uncle ate her ass, her face buried in a pillow, a few sparkles from out of nowhere on the small of her back.

  So I searched what I had been once and when I could have made a sound like that, just to add a little reality to the scene. Background.

  * * *

  I went looking for it blindly, like a mole distressed by hunger. I tapped into a little memory of pain and confusion, the high drama of it. I’m in the kitchen with my mother and some of her friends. We are in Peoria, Illinois. The time: the late nineteen forties. I may have been four or five, I can’t remember. I may have been standing in between my mother’s legs. If I am, she has just washed my hair and is greasing it. She had to be doing something. She didn’t just sit down and hold you. This was back in the day when grooming a child was as sincere a form of attention as a black mother could muster, mammy myths to the contrary. I am bearing the weight and sound of her circling hands working and working the grease into my scalp, the warmth, the grease, the murmur of voices rising and falling, fighting the need for sleep. The two or three other women in the kitchen are doing what women do: creating an atmosphere of domesticity that could shift, at any moment, into an atmosphere of violence. Snapping peas and then threatening to break some errant child’s neck. The story they tell—it sounds like a round—is a story they like telling and elaborating on, when they can. It reminds them of when they were young and nothing had run out, least of all time. The story goes: Once, long ago, they knew a girl, very beautiful, who had a great love. He was handsome and had sworn his heart to this young beauty early on. Before they could marry, though, he was drafted into the service. World War II. He made it through, four years, and he came back home afterward, after saving all those Jews. He had a part in his hair. He was with his girl in her mother’s kitchen, a celebratory dinner. His girl had curlers on; she was wearing a pair of pedal pushers. She was sitting on her mother’s blue-and-white-enamel-topped table. To impress his love, the young man showed her a gun, something called a Luger; he had smuggled it out of Germany. The young man had assumed the safety was on, but it wasn’t.

  I remember thinking back then: So this is love: happiness burning on the stove while a section of the dead girl’s flesh smoked, too. I wondered, then, where the fatal wound had been inflicted. Her chest? Her stomach? None of the women ever said. But as they talked, they provided the voice-over and the laugh track to my imagining the dazed and inconsolable lover being led away in handcuffs, the great outpouring of Negress sympathy that met him as his part grew in, behind bars. The girls who had known the accidental murderer and his dead lover grew into women, visiting him in jail, taking him fresh-baked pies with no files in them. They carried those pies and new gossip, tightly wrapped in their white scented handkerchiefs, right up to the grille, all in love.

  Of course, underneath their sympathy, they visited him out of envy. By not shooting them all, he had indirectly denied them their tragic heroism; no one would ever talk about those women in the way he remembered and talked about that dead girl. All they’d been left to was cooking and eventual bitterness. They didn’t even keep up with that man when he was released from prison; they couldn’t put their fantasies on him in the free world, so they weren’t interested.

  I thought about all that. And then I went into the booth and did my part. And I nailed it.

  There’s this trend—have you noticed?—of boys who are into barebacking. Fucking without a condom. Cum dripping out of that pink-brown hole, cum dumped there with no thought of the scum bucket dying. People tell me there are c
lubs devoted to this activity, people taking cum, others giving it. Most of the movies I’ve seen featuring this practice are set in Palm Springs, for some reason.

  When I watch those films I look less at the men shooting shit into gaping holes than I do at the boys on the other end—something else to identify with. The men shooting shit—that’s what men do. But what about the queens who walk away with the Condition because of the shit so to speak that’s shot into them? It’s the doll lying on her back, maybe acting, but I don’t think so, saying, “Give it to me, Daddy, Daddy give it to me,” that has me upset. Does that make them more fabulous? Their gayness more real? I say, are they actresses?

  Maybe those barebacking queens are saying they literally put their ass on the line for a part. Acting is acting and I’m using what I’ve got and I needed to play the part of bottom bitch for whatever reason. Maybe they’re saying, opening their assholes up: AIDS is my Oscar.

  Those bitches dripping cum, eyes dead, but still looking for the cameraman’s key light: that’s what happens when you’re an actress. All an actress is ever saying: Look at me, even as I’m dying.

  Love is complicated, if it exists.

  Stanislavski wrote that acting was an “if.” And that “if” was synonymous with intention. Let’s say you’re playing X. X must want something from Y. Trying to convince your stage or film lover that they must run off with you in order to prove that they do indeed love you, for example. That’s the part about acting that has always confused me: my intention. I have never had one, other than to be an actress. I could never imagine wanting anything except the praise of the queens who loved me when I first started out, and who love me still. Me: a black, uninhabitable rock with maybe a couple of talking birds pausing on it in the middle of the sea.

  Aren’t the tech boys fabulous?

  When I go to work I’m treated like the star they know I am. They get me a glass of water or anything else I need before setting me up in the booth, facing the screen. I put my script on a stand. The tech boys make sure my headphones are clear, free of earwax. I’m the Marni Nixon of the gash-and-gnash set.

  There in the booth, I stand in front of the microphone until I feel I’ve found the voice I need. And when I do feel it, I give the cue to roll tape. A director is rarely, if ever, present nowadays. No need, no need. I’ve been doing this so long, no one can tell me how to do it more real than it needs to be. I’m an actress.

  My friend Charles got me into all of this. There we were in L.A., in the mid-seventies, broke and brotherless, and Charles got me work doing some looping for a B movie he was in. Something by Roger Corman. They needed a girl to approximate the offscreen sound of Charles fucking a girl in a motel room. One thing led to another, I met one person and then another; I established a reputation. So far, I’ve survived. Porn shot on film and then on video; nice seventies pussy hair and then shaved, babylike snatch; Tom Selleck lookalike mustaches and butt-fucking against a black velvet scrim followed by what we’ve got now: barebacking in Palm Springs. I stick to what the audience needs, which doesn’t really change all that much.

  I like to mix it up, though. Throw in portions of myself—my thinking—into my characters’ voices, when I can. The other day, I came across a tape I did some work on: Mandingo Makes Manhattan (1983). The film is a little riff on Roots. The protagonist is Kunta Kinte Johnson. He’s black, naturally, and does a number of white or mulatto-looking women. The director asked me to supply a few of the requisite oohs and aahs for Kunta and the colored women. He wanted those oohs and aahs performed in the Negro style—all guttural, like a funky urban chorus. As it happens, I find Negro and Puerto Rican voices difficult to perform. Their performances—if that’s the word—are so stilted. Not to get all Mary McLeod Bethune about it, but since those people are looked at in the wrong way most of the time, they can’t fuck in a way that lends itself to the viewer’s imagination. They’re too self-conscious, too mindful of the camera. They act like people in a documentary.

  Maybe they’re too vulnerable to the whole enterprise. When you watch fucking, you want to be the one to take off the girl’s (or boy’s) clothes with your eyes, your imagination. What you don’t want is for the fuckers to make you feel as if not only shouldn’t you be stroking, but you should be in church, or contributing a little something to Planned Parenthood.

  Rarely do the visuals in my work bother me, but something—a pile of sick—wells up in my stomach when I watch all those black and Latin people fucking. Maybe they remind me of my brother. Maybe they’re not my type.

  * * *

  Of course, there are certain tonal facts about my voice that I can’t ignore. I am a Negress. As such, I have a great deal of bass in my speech that cuts girlishness off at the pass. In addition, being a black American, I make of English what I will, since it’s not, historically speaking, my first language. Or, to put it another way, I have made of English a form of American that other Americans don’t speak, because they don’t have the confluence of history and genetics that I do. It’s interesting.

  I think the best vocal interpreters of Gertrude Stein’s work, for instance, are people like me, since we get her form and her brilliant, protracted insight that American makes no sense to begin with. It lies too much, just like her bastard son—artistically speaking, anyway—Richard Pryor.

  I was able to infuse some of my disgust—similar to the disgust I feel about today’s acting bitches, marriage, my brother—into Mandingo Makes Manhattan. In the film you see two blacks—a man and a woman, named Kunta and Re-Re—fucking. Re-Re is called Micro-Pussy behind her back, because she can’t take all of Kunta’s quite considerable dick. So: white sheets. Lube and pussy juice shining in the key light. Then you hear me. I say, as Kunta, pushing my dick into Re-Re, panting: “Can I go deep?” And then I say, as Re-Re: “No.” But as Kunta you can hear me go deeper anyway. Playing Re-Re, I object: “I told you no. Hey!” They fuck some more. And then a kind of haiku laid out, as it were, in philosophical terms:

  KUNTA: Nigger, I ain’t going deep.

  RE-RE: Nigger, how in the fuck you gonna tell me?

  KUNTA: ’Cause I’m looking at my dick, all right?

  RE-RE: You ain’t in my pussy, either.

  KUNTA: I am in your pussy.

  RE-RE: No, I’m in my pussy. I can feel how deep you going, nigger.

  KUNTA: No, your pussy is yours. I’m in your pussy.

  RE-RE: So, I know how deep you’re going, so back up. I’m serious.

  KUNTA: Look, Re-Re.

  RE-RE: Nigger.

  They fuck. Then:

  RE-RE: Come on, nigger, hurry up.

  He comes.

  It wasn’t until I’d listened to this again recently that I thought how many of the feelings you’d like me to express about my brother are expressed there, depending on how you listen.

  I love my work.

  It provides me with certain necessities. This so-so apartment in West Hollywood (the walls are too pink, though; I’m not thrilled about the constant sunlight). The requisite car. Stamps to put on the envelopes to mail the bills.

  On the job, technical problems arise from time to time—a glitch in the projection, audio wires crossed—but that interests me, too. The downtime provides me with more time to read. I am an actress, and, as such, much of life is made up of waiting, reading, looking for characters to imagine playing in the books I read while waiting to be told whom to be.

  An actress’s job description is this: the search for self through words, characters, and situations that are not your own. Another reason I could never be a star: I lack a fundamental interest in finding the phrases that fit my personality. Because that’s what stars do: find the parts that define their personality further. Kate Hepburn is Jo in Little Women, that kind of thing. Had I been young enough in the eighties, or interested enough, when women were shoving yams up their twats while talking about the patriarchy or what have you—well, maybe I would have gotten somewhere, talking about a brother. But all of
that was as distasteful to me then as my need for you to listen to all this is now.

  I like metaphors. I like history. It plays tricks on my mind as I stand in the recording booth, watching whatever. Faces grimacing in some hotel room in Cleveland or wherever with no sound or the wrong sound coming out, waiting for me to correct them—those faces are bracketed in my mind with soldiers in the trenches in World War I, men dressed in green woolen coats, pith helmets, bandages tied around their calves, the gas about to disfigure their enemy’s eyes, his mouth, melt the skin.

  I don’t know what makes my mind work that way, makes my eyes see the things it sees. I grew up with books—there were so many people, all of them talking, that reading was my only way out then.

  You know the facts: me and my brother, Richard Pryor, were raised in Peoria, Illinois. I was born in 1938, a little bit before the war started, Richard in 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor. Our mother was a whore. Our grandmother ran a whorehouse. Our father loved them both. Pussy was the family business. There was so much pussy around, I used to wonder: Do I have a pussy, too? And: If I have a pussy, will that make me a whore? I used to sit in the corner of our grandmama’s living room, playing with my titty and eating a honeybun, waiting for somebody to love me the right way, like anybody knew what that was.

  I’m reluctant to talk to people like you, a reporter, because Richard talked to you all all the time. And the shit he didn’t tell you he talked about in his act. Maybe that’s one reason I became an actress: to be free in a different way than my brother was free, spewing his guts that way. My freedom comes when I have another name, a different voice. Same as when I was a kid. Everybody was involved in the real-life drama of living in that house; everybody talked and talked. Living there, I could barely hear myself feel. Books were my release.