by Mike Heppner
Allison, who’d never read anything by Roth, said, “There’s a big difference between something like that and Ilsa: The Wicked Warden.”
“Not necessarily. A Roth novel can be as fucked up as any sexploitation film. What you’re reacting to is the difference between two art forms. Film is more visceral than print. There are things people will tolerate in a book that they’d never stand for in a movie.”
“Whatever.” She turned off the TV with the remote. “I think the whole idea of misogyny is misogynous, anyway. It’s patronizing.”
“Being misogynous?”
“No, always saying, ‘Oh, that’s misogynous,’ just because you think I don’t know how to stand up for myself.”
He reached across the bed and took the remote out of her hands. “You know that’s not what I think. I just don’t want you to be offended by the film.”
“I’m not.” She rolled out of bed, threw on one of Heath’s shirts and went into the tiny bathroom off the kitchen. Her muscles had tensed up during the movie, and she now found herself unable to pee. Flushing the toilet anyway, she washed her hands under a trickle of water and returned to the kitchen to make coffee. Heath had put on a Beach Boys CD, one of his several bootlegs from the legendary Smile sessions of late ’66, early ’67. Heath was a Smile fanatic, and his collection of memorabilia from that particular era in the band’s history was extensive. Each bootleg was slightly different, and the same songs often had different titles—“Friday Night” was also “I’m in Great Shape,” or “The Woodshop Song,” even “I’ll Be Around,” depending on which reference work you consulted. As for the songs themselves, most were just brief, elliptical patterns— “feels,” as Brian Wilson called them—more like backing tracks than finished compositions, as if all the rhythmic and harmonic sequences had been laid down without the melody. Part of Smile’s appeal was that, as a record, it only partially existed; various parts of it were lost, destroyed, never recorded, still sitting in a vault somewhere. Unlike the other relics of the sixties—Sgt. Pepper, even the Beach Boys’ own Pet Sounds—Smile’s power came from its very inscrutability, the fact that it didn’t exist in any definitive form. Much of what remained of the sessions sounded trite and sophomoric, hardly the stuff of myth. Smile was certainly not up to the refined level of Brian Wilson’s other, better-known efforts like “California Girls” and “I Get Around.” But at the same time, it was a masterpiece, because what he’d managed to capture on tape, however fleetingly, was the sound of his own mind coming apart. Even the titles suggested a young and once-brilliant Wilson struggling with his exhausted imagination: “I Love to Say Dada,” “Do You Like Worms,” “Tune X,” “I Don’t Know.” Smile’s drama was real, not a fabrication. Heard over and over, those chants and ostinatos came to mimic the obsessive ruminations of a confused, broken man. It was music worth obsessing about: “Heroes and Villains,” “Surf ’s Up,” “Child Is Father of the Man.” The most beautiful music ever.
To Allison, it sounded like noise. “Something else, please,” she called across the room.
Heath turned off the music. “What do you want to hear?”
Focused on her task, she spooned three dark heaps of ground coffee into the basket filter of Heath’s never-before-washed coffeemaker. “Actually, nothing right now. I’m still thinking about that movie.” Starting the coffee, she pulled up a stool and sat down. Her feet were dirty from picking up dust and bits of uncooked rice from the floor. “I wonder why they don’t make movies like that anymore. I mean, it’s just porn. What’s the big deal?”
“It’s not porn, Allison.” He moved in on her; this was a subject that he took very seriously, and his unshaven face—which Allison had once likened to a banana, an image she hadn’t been able to shake since—regarded her with pity and concern. “Porn is its own thing. I’m not interested in porn. I’m interested in transgressive cinema.”
She smiled at him. “No, I know you are, honey.” Her eyes went dreamy as she appraised his body; his long, dyed-blond hair, black at the roots; the impressive musculature he’d built up from years of lugging camera equipment around and that now seemed wrong for his personality. She’d never dated a boy like Heath before. Two, maybe three nights a week, she stayed with him in East Providence, their dates consisting mostly of takeout pizza, one or two rounds of lovemaking (at twenty-one, Allison’s sexual proclivities were still rooted in adolescence: candlewax and flavored condoms) interspersed with late-night screenings of Zabriskie Point, I Am Curious (Yellow), I Am Curious (Blue), Salon Kitty, The Naked Ape, Last House on Dead End Street, Guyana: Cult of the Damned, any number of Umberto Lenzi films, Jungle Holocaust, Farewell Uncle Tom, the uncut Lolita, the uncut Caligula, the European-only version of Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, all preselected from his ever-growing library of rare and imported videos, DVDs, and even 16mm, which he showed against a baby-blue bedspread hung over the wall. For her part, Allison did her best not to draw any conclusions about her boyfriend’s sanity based on his cinematic preferences: banned films, films involving rape and torture and child molestation, films at the very least rated NC-17 but generally not rated all. She was beyond drawing conclusions about anything. Besides, she didn’t want to look like a wimp.
Ever since college—as expected, she’d graduated with honors in Comparative Literature, with a minor in Postfeminist Theory—she’d been crafting a new persona for herself. Though she still kept in touch with her former housemates, she now considered almost everything about the Ivy League experience distasteful. During those four years at Harvard, she’d gotten laid exactly once and not since her first semester. The drugs were good on campus, and easy to find, but the only place she liked to get high was the aquarium—check out the fishes, whoa—and the only clubs in town usually played too much eighties retro for her taste. Freed from the bonds of academia, she wanted to explore life a little, maybe get arrested, try heroin once, have a “lesbian experience,” read James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, wear slinky black dresses instead of sweaters and jeans, high-heeled sandals instead of shapeless brown loafers, Poison instead of patchouli.
When she’d first met Heath back in June—the Wild Colonial wasn’t his usual hangout, but it was Bloomsday, and every year the bar undertook a daylong reading of Ulysses in the back room—some of those transformations were already in place. She’d taken to wearing her sandy blond hair long, her bangs trimmed in the front. If she was beautiful, she preferred not to think of herself as such. Striking, perhaps, or disarming, both of which qualified her looks in terms that she could understand. At bars, she displayed proof of her education the way some women flashed the pepper spray on their key chain: both as a warning and, to the right man, a challenge. If you didn’t “get it,” you didn’t get it. Wherever she went, she carried a tattered copy of The Golden Notebook in the pocket of her blood-red sweater-coat. This, like everything else, was a test. The man she was looking for had to be smart, older (Heath was twenty-six), left wing and politically active, an artist, kind of cute, pot-friendly, acid-friendly, vegan-friendly but not militant about it. Heath was all of these things.
Best of all, he wasn’t a Rhode Islander. Allison was tired of guys from Cranston, Warwick, East Providence. Heath had a vibe that set him apart from those losers. He’d left home, moved on with his life. He hardly even talked about his parents, who were both still down in North Carolina, where he’d grown up. Allison couldn’t imagine making such a clean break from her past. Her family had always been a tight-knit crew, and not even her parents’ divorce three years ago had done much to change that. Allison’s mother, Renee, had since moved to an expensive flat in London, where Allison had spent recent summers. Her parents continued to get along, though seeing each other only occasionally. Renee, who’d turned into a bit of a fag hag in Europe, still called long-distance every few weeks, trying to fix Gregg up with one of the many pretty boys in her coterie. It was no big deal; these were modern times, and there was nothing anyone could do about it anyway.
&n
bsp; Not surprisingly, the person most affected by the divorce was Allison. She’d begun to suspect something about herself recently that she could hardly believe, given that it contradicted everything she’d always regarded as fair and decent and open-minded. The truth was, she didn’t like gay men. Being charitable, they made her uncomfortable; that’s how she sold it to herself, by easing into the semantics of her own prejudice as a swimmer might enter cold water an inch at a time. Phrasing it thus, she acknowledged the problem was her own—the fact that all of the gay men she’d encountered in college had seemed like such stereotypes was a reflection of her own personal shortcomings, and not any fault of the men themselves.
“What should I wear tonight?” Heath asked, his arms around her waist while he nuzzled her in the kitchen.
The coffee was ready; Allison lifted the carafe and poured herself a cup. “Wear whatever you want. My father doesn’t care. He’ll probably wear a suit, but that’s just his personality.”
“Then I’ll wear a suit.”
“Don’t.” She glared at him. “If you wear a suit, you have to get a haircut. That’s the rule.”
Climbing down from the stool, she took her coffee into the other room and said, peering out the high basement windows, “Maybe we should stay at my house tonight. We’ll probably be too drunk to drive back after dinner.”
“Is your dad a big drinker?” Heath asked, helping himself to the half-cup of coffee she’d left for him in the carafe.
“No, but we are.” Taking off her shirt, she went to the closet and browsed through the three or four outfits she kept at his place. “Let’s bring some pot, too. I want to get stoned.”
An hour later, they’d both showered, dressed and walked up the broken cement steps to the parking lot behind the apartment. Allison drove them across the Washington Bridge to Fox Point, then down along the boulevard and past the mental hospital to where she and her father lived in a three-story brick and shingle Tudor, set off from the road by a tall hedge and a circular driveway. The BMW was parked in front of the house, along with a car she didn’t recognize. Pulling up behind it, she turned to Heath and made a face. “I hope we’re not having turkey.”
Once inside the house, she led him through the smell of turkey cooking into a lamp-lit sun parlor, where her father and another man were sitting over drinks and appetizers. The other man was Nathaniel Pike; Allison hadn’t expected to see him here.
“Honey.” Gregg Reese got up from his wicker chaise lounge and kissed his daughter on the cheek. The drink in his hand looked like a Scotch on the rocks. “Was the drive down easy?”
“Dad, it’s five minutes.” She smiled tightly at their guest. “Mr. Pike, this is my boyfriend, Heath. Heath . . .”
The man leaned out of his seat to shake the boy’s hand. “Nathaniel Pike,” he said.
Heath’s face burned as he heard himself saying hello. It seemed an unlikely combination—Nathaniel Pike and Gregg Reese. Reese was the kind of middle-aged man that others referred to as “youthful-looking.” His short, grayish-blond hair stood on end, wet-gelled to a punkish bristle, and his frosty blue eyes were set in deep dark sockets like lights inside a cave. As the public face of the Reese Foundation, he rarely appeared as anything other than rigidly uncomfortable in front of a camera, and he carried the same stiff, reading-the-cue-cards demeanor to his private life. The other man was a goof, a wasteful libertine. Every town, Heath supposed, had its Nathaniel Pike: the archetypal kook who resurfaced every few months, jabbering his opinions to local reporters about the issues of the day. Both Pike and Reese were so wealthy that the money seemed abstract—inexhaustible and therefore beyond reckoning. But to a basement dweller like Heath, who tended to regard the enlightened upper class with some suspicion, Nathaniel Pike was infinitely hipper than Gregg Reese.
“Mr. Pike,” he managed, letting go of his hand. “It’s an honor.”
“I’m not staying,” Pike explained, primarily for Allison’s sake. “I just stopped by to drop off a bottle of something.”
Politely, not wanting to make a big deal about it, Gregg protested, “No, Nate, I’ve already told you. We’ve got plenty of food.”
“Oh, no, no. I don’t want to ruin your Thanksgiving.”
“You’re not ruining anything.” Gregg smiled, showing his teeth. Allison sometimes wondered how her father appeared to other men. Was he attractive? The idea freaked her out a little.
Turning to her, Gregg asked, “Allison, what would you and Heath like to drink?”
She answered coldly, “We’ll help ourselves,” and hurried off to the kitchen, where she waited for Heath to catch up. “God,” she hissed, “I cannot believe he actually wants Nathaniel Pike to stay for dinner. Maybe we can sneak out early.”
Heath still felt dazed from shaking Pike’s hand. “I didn’t know your father and Mr. Pike were friends.”
“My father doesn’t have any friends.” Struggling with the corkscrew, she tried to open a bottle of Chardonnay. “Pike’s been scamming off of my family for years. He used to hang out with my mom when I was little. He had her going on some lie about needing money to make a movie. I’m sure they probably fucked.” The cork came out with a pop, and she poured them two brimming glasses, emptying most of the bottle. “The dude’s completely bonkers,” she said, “and he’s a total perv.”
When they returned from the kitchen, Pike asked, “Heath, what do you do?”
Embarrassed, Heath sat down, and Allison dropped into his lap. “I’m an independent filmmaker,” he said.
“Heath has every film that’s ever been made on videotape,” she added.
He gave her a secret, disapproving look. Meeting Pike for the first time, he wanted to present himself on his own terms, without her girlfriendy interjections.
Smiling broadly, Pike said, “I used to produce movies—a long time ago. I tell you, that’s a hell of a business.”
“Didn’t you do Emmanuelle on Taboo Island?” Heath asked. Some other titles then came back to him: The Succubus. Fatal Warning II. A whole video library’s worth of glorious junk.
Pike looked pleased. “Not guilty. I made a cannibal flick with Laura Gemser, though, if that’s what you’re thinking about.”
Heath told himself to quit fawning. “I’m writing a screenplay right now,” he said. “It’s sort of an homage to counterculture exploitation films like Trash and Easy Rider.”
“It’s a spoof?”
“No, not a spoof, although . . . I could make it a spoof.”
“Something like a funny version of Easy Rider. But deliberately bad.” Pike had a swallow of his drink. “That’d be interesting.”
Gregg perked up. “Maybe you could get Mr. Pike to produce it for you, Heath.”
Hearing his voice—bright and well intentioned—Allison felt a surge of love for her father.
“Oh, I don’t think I’m quite ready for that,” Heath demurred. Of the three, it seemed to him that only Pike was taking him seriously.
“I’ll tell you an idea I once had,” Pike said and helped himself to a brimming handful of mixed nuts. “Now, maybe you can do something with this. It’s called Boring Movie. And the gag is, the whole film’s tedious and dull for an hour and a half, then it’s over.”
“I see,” Heath said, not following.
“A deliberately boring movie.”
“But how would you—”
“You wouldn’t! Don’t play it for laughs. That would spoil the gag.”
“That’s stupid,” Allison snapped. “What’s the point in making a movie if it’s just a waste of people’s time?”
“But that’s what’s great about it!” Pike’s voice rose to an indecorous level. “Your generation always takes things too literally, Allison. When Gregg and I were your age—well, maybe not Gregg, but . . .”
Allison glared, defending her father by ignoring the joke.
“We knew how to have fun. Look at history. The only things worth doing are pointless things. Because if there’
s a point? Then that’s all there is to it. ‘And now this movie is going to show you how to comb your hair and be a good little American.’ No!” Waving both hands, he nearly sloshed his drink onto the carpet. “I want a movie where the screen is blue for three hours.”
Doing his best, Heath offered, “Kind of like a post-Warhol—”
“I want to read a book and be able to say, ‘Now what the fuck was that?’ when I get to the end of it. I want to have my expectations underwhelmed. I want to leave the theater dissatisfied.”
Pike’s bluster, his hyperbole and whiz-bang hand gestures left little room for discussion, but Gregg tried anyway. “There must be a way to tie it in with something else,” he said, “because if you think about it, maybe the film’s not really boring, maybe it’s just that our attention spans are so—”
“No!” Pike slammed down his glass. “See, you’re ruining it by talking about it too much. Everything beautiful has been ruined by critics and academics. It’s not enough that something just is. It’s got to mean something, too.”
Heath nodded in appreciation; these were all points he’d made before, to college friends, to girls he was trying to impress.
Changing the subject, Pike asked Allison, “So, what have you been doing with yourself lately?”
She glanced at her father, then said, “Looking for a job, I guess.”
“Why don’t you work for your old man?” he suggested. “Hell, I’d hire you.”
She briskly discarded the idea. “I think I’d rather work for my father, Mr. Pike, but thanks. Actually, I’m considering taking the year off.”
Turning to Gregg, Pike asked, “What do you think of that?”
“Whatever she wants is fine with me,” Gregg said. “I won’t pressure her. Just as long as she gives something back to her community. That’s what this family has done for generations, and when I go, Allison will be there to take my place.”
