“You’ll still come to nothing,” I told them. “My wish has not yet come true. It’ll just be a stupid murder.”
The Teacher barged through the line of glowering masks, dwarfing them, forever little children at her knee. Her bright black mask was the size of an automobile hood. But I recognized her voice. “His wish must be granted. But we could not read it. Shoddy penmanship. . .” Her massive hands knitted together and popped knuckles like starter pistols. “A guessing game should be most diverting.”
“No!” Uoht said. “Enough of this shit! Tell us your wish, nobody!” His knife went through my shoulder, just above my lung, and emerged from my back, just inside the wing of my right shoulder blade. I gasped as he lifted me to my toes by the wound. I could not speak, but I could point to the concrete plug at my feet. I could not kick at the crack I had made with the crowbar, but I tap-danced on it. Uoht and Cassilda knelt to inspect it.
“It’s just a manhole.”
“No. . . it’s a wishing well. . . My father made. . . a wish. . . with his life. He. . . who serves in shadow. . .”
Uoht drove me down to my knees with the knife. “Am I the only one who wants this over with?”
Several others rushed forward with their knives, but I surrendered. “I wished. . . for my father to come back. . . to me.”
The concrete plug flew up like a cap on an oil well, crushing Uoht’s legs and pinning him at my feet.
“Your offerings have amused us,” I said, mouthing the words that came into me down the strings at the back of my soul. “But the Hour has passed. None of you shall wear the Crown. All shall serve in shadow.”
Cassilda staggered back, dropped her knife and tried to run from the golden coin I held out to them. They all tried to run, but it was too late. The scrub brush, the trees turned white and dissolved in clouds of ash.
I took off my mask.
GIRL ON GIRL
CHANGE POSITIONS, BACK TO THE KNEELING MADONNA SNORKEL EMBRACE . . . AND, ACTION!
The set barely suggests a schoolroom, but the scene needs no embellishment beyond the three actresses. The schoolmistress stands behind the two defiant girls, still roughed up from fighting, and stroking their backs, brings them together into a smoldering embrace.
Though this is the end of the shooting day, the crew stands raptly watching, almost forgetting to breathe when the girls’ heads bow together and their lips brush. A flash of pink perfect tongue welds them together.
In spite of all the strange men and equipment ogling their act, the acting ends and real passion takes them and makes them stroke and pinch at each other, still fighting, but with new weapons. Their mouths lock and their eyes close, tongues twining and cheeks belling as if some magical and mysterious breath passes from mouth to mouth between them.
“Slow down! Jesus, you’re in a girl’s school, not the Isle of Lesbos! This is a first kiss. You were fighting in the last scene. This has to be a slow burn. Ingrid, rein them in, won’t you?”
The schoolmistress tosses her hair to obscure her face. She goes on stroking and nurturing them as they experiment with first love.
Together, they turn to stare at the director, flashing eyes and lips telling him that what he wants will rip him to shreds.
“God, but isn’t that beautiful?” the director says, in a different tone, hushed, reverent. “Really takes you back, don’t it? It’s important that they keep that connection, looking back at you, for approval. They’re doing this for you. That’s the dream.”
Ever notice how the brunette is always the seductress? Brunettes are smarter, they scheme, they seduce the “dumb blonde ingenue,” who catches on pretty quick. . . I like to flip it sometimes, so it comes as a surprise. Sometimes the blonde is the one who initiates the kiss of Sappho, y’know?
They shouldn’t look at you when they’re doing it. I know it’s supposed to put the viewer in the scene, make the viewer feel like he’s a king, but it perpetuates the insupportable illusion that they’re doing it for you. It’s bullshit. These beautiful women are for each other. It works much better when they’re lost in the moment. Plus, of course, you can’t get them to do that look, anymore, unless they’re looking at another girl. . .
That was always my thing. I moved up from cheap print mags to the slicks, and I saw which way the wind was blowing with the Internet and I started marketing my own brand while the other guys were still trying to figure out how to give it away.
I saw the hook in it long before Madonna and those other tramps made it a mainstream commodity. I’m not taking credit for inventing it, or anything. I just saw it, because it was there.
After Playboy got passé, only the real thing would do, but who wants to look at some greasy pimply ass spoiling the view? It’s hard enough to imagine your dick in her mouth, without a steroid case hung like a Lippizaner stallion in the picture.
And threesomes—they’re just a passing fancy. But the lesbian scene, that hit some nerves that nothing else could touch.
I’m not talking about real lesbians, no offense. Those chicks really know how to swing, but in every couple, one of ‘em looks and acts like a man, so there you are again, with the pimply ass. No, my girls never looked like lesbians, because that tapped into the fantasy that we all secretly feared was true.
You know, these porn chicks, there’s this stereotype that they were all molested, and there’s some truth to it sometimes. You try to get a dumb blonde with a 38” chest to market in a shithole burg where it’s either the jailbait or the cows every Saturday night without a few eggs getting broken.
But that’s not even most of them. You don’t have to molest a girl to screw her up. My heart goes out to the fathers, seriously, anyone who tries, but they’re doomed. Everything in the world is telling them to lay down and let the nearest bohunk dipshit pump their asses full of true love, to make a declaration of independence out of banging strangers. To celebrate the essential nature of womanhood as being an object hungry for attention. But once we get them, we don’t want to look at them all the time, any more than we want to look in the mirror all night. And so they end up making out with each other, just to get the boys’ attention.
They’re for each other. We polish and flatten all the ambitions and dreams out of them and tie them up in slutty outfits and tell them, “Yeah, baby, you’re liberated.”
But you take two of those mirrors and turn them to face each other, and out of those flat surfaces. . . infinity.
Whatever games they played with men to get validation and cash and status. Behind any closed door, any beautiful girl might lock eyes with her tennis coach, her friend, the Avon lady, and that spark would kindle into a flame like nothing any man could make them feel. Out of your sight, they became animals, but only for each other.
Am I an exploiter of women? Are priests exploiters of God? Are artists exploiters of beauty? I love women. I love these women more than they love themselves, hell, almost as much as they love each other. I don’t expect them to respect me or feel gratitude, but. . . it chews on my guts to know how they feel about me, the one who set them free.
And that’s what I did.
My wife. . . Yeah, that’s how it started. Ariane was everything I loved about women, so perfect I guess I never accepted she was real. You’ve seen her pictures, everybody has. . . so you’ll think you know what I’m talking about.
We met at a festival I was shooting in this Swiss chalet. They were going for a record, the most people masturbating together in one place, or some such shit. Fucking disgusting, the mess
. . . She was in the midst of it, shooting this still layout with this Greek creep. He gave the camera to his lighting guy and tried to jump in on her, and she wasn’t having it.
She didn’t need my help, but I kicked the guy’s ass and took his camera. Those pics I shot of her there, I ended up keeping them. They were soft, not like any of the stuff she did for me later.
I wasn’t just smitten, I was ruined. We split so she could go back to Paris.
I went to do a shoot in Poland. But I tried to get her to drop her catalog shoot and come to this beautiful old nunnery we were using to shoot a lesbian epic.
So, anyway. . . Why Poland? Eastern European women—it’s the fantasy come to life. They’re beautiful, so bountifully curved, with generous lips, and you can see it in their eyes, they know what they’re here for. You don’t have to cast schoolgirls with collagen-injected lips and tramp stamps to find someone ready and willing. They’re on each other like dressing on salad. It never looks or feels like an act. You don’t even have to hook ‘em up with molly to get them grinding. They’re not any less feminine or more naturally dykey than western chicks, believe me.
There’s lots of theories. . . Their men smoke and drink too much, tend to run husky and cherish a proud tradition of being inconsiderate lovers. Also, they’re just a bit closer to starvation. People’s minds forget so they can deal, but the body remembers, and it passes that shit on, that instinct to do what it takes to survive. Questions of individual morality were a luxury bred out of them generations ago. They just seem to relax into it. Just because you have to do it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it, right?
I’ve heard rumors about how the Soviets fucked with their hormones, stuff they did to up milk production and birth rate, or just to make them whores for ugly Party apparatchiks to bang and use on each other.
She dropped everything and came out, but I couldn’t draft her into the production. She’d done some porn, but mostly solo webcam stuff and still layouts, like splayed out on the terrace of some chateau with her treasure spread open and pouting, that Someday my prince will come kind of thing. . .
And she was gorgeous, she wouldn’t have to do this shit at all if she didn’t want to, and I told her that. You have to, because even the self-actualized ones who’re made out of steel and they go on about how it’s their choice and you don’t find out about the damage until you’ve broken them for good.
She stopped working for anybody but me.
Nobody was going to stick a dick in her ever again, I couldn’t bear that. I’m not jealous, it’s just, why risk some ramrod pumping her full of DNA and smegma and disease? I know these guys are supposed to get tested, but why gamble? She didn’t want to fuck any other guys, but man, she couldn’t get enough of it. She needed it in her hand, her mouth, her cunt, constantly. Needed to be photographed. We had a pretty good thing going with just her solo act, but something else had to come out. She wasn’t going to settle down and go home, and I didn’t want to direct guys to bang my wife. It took all of an hour to figure out what I wanted, but months to make it work.
You know, when you meet a man of destiny, you find out their great ideas, their drives to succeed, aren’t gifts. They’re curses that drive them. Fears older than potty training that only grow longer teeth and bite deeper as they grow. Ariane wouldn’t agree to it. But I didn’t get where I am by taking no for an answer.
So I pushed her.
I set up cameras throughout our place. I sent girls over to massage her, to follow her into the changing room at department stores. Everywhere I could get her alone, I sicced my ringers on her. And she turned them down. Graciously, she never made a scene or anything. . .
She had a fascination for other beautiful girls. What model doesn’t? But no more than normal instinct and environment had wired her for. It was a tailbone, not a tail, and I knew she’d never swing by it. Still, if I was the kind of guy willing to let well enough alone, I’d settle for begging one bitter JAP to blow me once a month, instead of conning six desperate porn prospects into going ass-to-mouth with the Hedgehog before breakfast.
And then one day, this kook who’s partially financing the project comes up to me on the set. We get guys all the time, they have gimmicks they think we’ll buy up in bulk. . . aphrodisiacs, wang-enhancers, guys who wanna inject caulk into your talents’ tits. . . Their own dicks don’t work for shit, so they figure we’ve all got to be using gimmicks.
A couple actors told me their method is, whenever they’re gonna come too soon, they just remember getting molested. No shit. One time this asshole came on set after dipping his wick in Anbesol, you know, the dental topical anesthetic. . . His lucky costar lost feeling in her vagina for a week and never could come for real on-camera after that, she got all paranoid. See? They say the girls in porn are fucked up. . . Don’t get me started about the guys.
Anyway, this guy, he said he was from Transnistria, he said they were doing all kinds of stuff with “psychic driving” in media when the Soviet Union collapsed, and he’d dug up a bunch of old gear and found the old notes and he was working on something I might like to make my films more “persuasive.”
We went to lunch at a shadowy pension that looked like it never got fixed after the Allies bombed it. The waiter brings us this plate of meat, I nearly throw up.
I’m not, strictly speaking, a vegetarian, but I’m not gonna eat mass-produced beef, I don’t even care where it came from. This plate, it’s a safe bet it ain’t grass-fed Kobe beef, or even Harris Ranch Angus sirloin. It’s almost purple, it’s so old. . . and it’s raw. It’s glistening like snails got to it, then the smell hits me and this raw, almost-spoiled beef, it’s drenched in raw egg.
I’m not going to let this fucker run game on me so I’m reaching for it, but the little geek runs the waiter off with it and apologizes to me. The steak tartare here, it’s not safe, but the chicken is excellent.
I have some kind of goulash. It has beets in it and it’s cold. I finish two bowls while he talks.
What this goof did—his name was Emil something, he changed his last name every time we talked—he said he had perfected that subliminal shit advertisers were obsessed with in the Seventies. . . you know, where they show single frames of stuff cut into the footage and the mind supposedly processes it deep down in the subconscious. . . Well, I told him he was full of shit, and to have a nice day, and he says wait, he’s got two good reasons why it works.
One, the Soviet technology didn’t have a high enough frame rate, still dropping their “program cues” in at one-twenty-fourth of a second, while HD is, you know, up to forty-four or higher, for some of these new specialty systems. . .
And Two. . . It needed some kind of a carrier tone that opened the mind up to the program cues. He’d perfected this and worked it into a variety of content so it was invisible to the naked eye.
The Soviets, he said, were way behind on this stuff because none of the engineers and scientists who worked on it really wanted to hand the Party another tool to keep Communism limping along, brainwashing the few people dumb enough to believe it. Hypnosis works, but you can’t get all Telefon with the shit. Nobody will do something to hurt themselves or others. Even the most suggestible subject can still resist, or I’d have made some fucking great movies back in the day, I’ll tell you. . .
Anyway, he said this shit probably wouldn’t go over big selling shit nobody wanted, but to sell sex, to really open up the trapdoor in the back of every viewer’s brain and get our content in there. . . Well, our audience is already begging for the experience.
But what he was offering was something any advertiser would’ve killed for. Maybe I should have been more suspicious right then. I asked enough questions, threatened him with all kinds of violence. You have to make a lot of noise just so as not to disappear in the middle of a deal like this.
These images, the goals, he called them, they get all tangled up in peoples’ pleasure centers. When they see it, their brains unload the oxytocin and they got to have that shit.
So the waiter comes in and he turns on this big flat screen on the wall, brand-new LG in this place like the end of Saving Private Ryan. And he turns on this video. . .
I don’t know, there might’ve been something in the food, is what I remember thinking, at first.
It was more real than HD. It was more real than a hole in the wall looking into a Turkish harem would’ve been.
The frame rate is unbelievable. Every
pore, every blemish and hair against that creamy skin, and Emil is still talking and I’m nodding and I wave the waiter over with another plate of that purple shit. And I’m nodding and I’m not hearing anything for looking at the naked woman on the screen. She’s adrift in black and her hair floats around her like she’s underwater.
And by the time the waiter comes back I already have a fork in my hand and I dig in, nodding until he says, so we have a deal?
And I go, wait back the fuck up, what did I just agree to?
And then I realize what my mouth is full of.
I’ve eaten more than half of the steak tartare. The same plate they brought around almost an hour before, it must be. A fly is trapped in the tacky yellow slime of half-congealed yolk.
I want to finish it even as I am throwing it up. I want to rub it on my chest and fuck it. I want to live and die on that plate.
Emil is sitting on the counter by the sink when I come out of the bathroom stall. “So we have a deal?”
“I’m not sure I believe it yet,” I tell him. “I want to do a test.”
A week later, I cancel the evening shot and take my wife out. I’ve rented the Zentropa Theater in town and installed a special digital projector. Had to replace the screen, too. The movie starts. She gasps. It’s her favorite, the one she watched when she was a little girl with her mother.
Strategies Against Nature Page 21
