Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

  The few great vintages I have left I reserve for the fall during bird season. Otherwise, to put them back in reach I go to France on book business once a year and mope around prayerfully. The French are relentlessly up for a special occasion and when a book is doing well my French publisher, Christian Bourgois, tends to order Côtes Roties from the seventies, and if I visit Lulu Peyraud in Bandol, I get to drink the older Domaine Tempier that has somehow disappeared from my cellar through enthusiasm. As with spotting a rare bird I remember the entire ambience and surroundings of a great wine. The magnum of Mercurey Clos des Barraults (1990) at Gérard Oberlé’s in Burgundy includes the morning trip to the market in Moulin, the roses in the yard, his Alsatian dog, Eliot, barking at the neighbor’s Charolais, the cooking of two lobes of foie gras, Gérard’s so-so singing of Purcell’s “Come All Ye Sons of Art” as he serves the meal. With booze the most memorable aspects were the hangovers.

  Years ago I had a short correspondence with the fine American writer Ray Carver. I remember thanking him for a review he had given me at a particular low point in my life. When he wrote back he apologized because he couldn’t remember writing the review or much of anything from those years. And this from a grand talent, perhaps genius, seems sad indeed. Life is so short you want to remember all of it, bad and good. It moves so quickly you easily forget that it is utterly unforgiving. You wouldn’t willingly drive a car without brakes, would you?

  STRIPPING

  When you are eleven and looking at a girl in the fifth grade, a classmate you’re fond of, it is part of the biological imperative of our species to wonder what she looks like without the pretty clothes. This is a decidedly nonintellectual mystery, and quite literally twists and forms our prepubescent bodies and souls according to its verbless dictums. When your third-grade girlfriend steps out of the outhouse on her parents’ farm, lifts her skirt and drops her panties, bends over and yells, “See my ass,” you are stricken with a feeling that you are walking up smooth hot planks in your bare feet. This is desire before it becomes desire. There is the faintest recollection from Sunday school and other sources of the Great No that hounds our lives that naughtiness is present but there, twenty feet away, is the very bare butt of the beloved. You don’t know whether to do a somersault, shit your pants, or run for cover, so you do nothing but stand there and gaze with eyes that are apertures taking a permanent photo, a rendering that will last until your brain dies.

  This desire before it becomes desire is a cloud that moves non-directionally, a truly fuzzy puzzle for the young mind who is mere grape juice that has not yet begun to be wine. With other boys he positions himself in front of the swings to watch the skirts flutter up revealing bare limbs. With other boys he dog paddles under the ladder up to the diving board to watch the legs and crotches ascend. He can even develop a fetish of sorts for this act of looking upward. There is a somewhat comic category of soft-core porn called “raised-skirt photos,” doubtless harkening the viewer backward to the first lineaments of desire: the ungainly boy taking a peek here and there and anywhere possible. He takes many peeks but hasn’t yet taken aim.

  I recall quite clearly when I was nineteen and had run off to Boston to become a great writer, how a Greek waiter explained to me that young men generally don’t begin to know what they are sexually until the age of sixteen. He took me to a club where we watched a belly dancer who performed with astounding grace. Partial nudity seemed well adapted to the dance, which didn’t count the prancing hermaphrodite I’d paid a quarter to see at the Michigan State Fair at age twelve. That particular set of plumbing seemed confused indeed. Age nineteen, however, is a time in life when a ballet dancer on the stage a hundred or so feet away can give you a hard-on. The ballet, Petrouchka, is supposed to be an aesthetic experience and I remember struggling to be high-minded but underneath the aesthete a beast of prey lurks. This pink-limbed young woman whirled and jumped with surpassing grace so that the heart, soul, and pecker lifted in unison. It wouldn’t have been the same thing if she had been dressed in a pantsuit or overalls.

  The human genome is an often insufferable dictator. We are directed by what still can’t be seen in a microscope that costs as much as a Ferrari. Our life juices are electric. If only sex were what we pretend it to be. Once I had drinks in Missouri with a racist, right-wing ex-con, happily married with three children, who spoke with boozy affection for his federal-prison lover, a black transvestite with the marvelous name Tawna. I asked him if he ever tried to get in touch with him and he corrected me with “her.” He insisted she was “all woman” though of course she had a dick. When he returned to my question of getting in touch with Tawna in Kansas City he said, “It wouldn’t be right,” meaning ethical. This avowed Christian who once had been caught with several hundred thousand Percodans had passed easily from a sexual attitude of any port in the storm to the sacrament of marriage. Life is like that, we agreed. You may control your own sex life with a strong mental dog collar and leash but your brain will continue to spin its own stories for you to enact.

  It is our societal and religious rage for order that tries to confine sexuality to marriage. The fact that it leaves out single people and gays is irksome indeed. If we don’t behave ourselves maybe the economy will cease working. As I said, if only sex were what we pretend it to be there wouldn’t be all of these problems. The statistics on marital infidelity are boggling when you go to a movie, concert, or ball game and the numbers acquire faces. Doubtless the fear of AIDS has done more in favor of marital fidelity than religion or societal opprobrium. What is permissible? is the question. Self-righteousness has become both a disease and an industry. Sexual content on TV is avidly discussed in Congress as if there were no sexual content in life, but then historically political corruption has always been singularly humorless. The most degraded feebs in recent history have all stood foursquare for “family values,” whatever those are.

  Still, in every reasonably sized city in America there are porn stores, and at least an attempt at a strip club. The opponents of their existence should understand that these are relatively safe environments for lust usually with not much more character than the steam valve on a pressure cooker, which is their actual function. Strip clubs show you an often delightful parody of what you’re in for if you have the time and inclination to seduce someone, or be seduced. On rare occasions in specific locations the dancers have extraordinary talent. Sometimes they seem so strung out on downers they trip over the dollar bills placed on the stage by burly businessmen and younger men who, having finally resolved their skin problems, have freak hots for this public display of fleeting genitalia or, if strictly monitored, wriggly damp mice trying to emerge from the G-string mouse strap. And on the rarest, rarest, rarest occasions you become a witness of true beauty, a marriage of nudity and dance so compelling that your breath shortens, the heart heats its staccato tachycardia of actual lust, the kind that persistently fills the world with people, the summum bonum of desire that the best of the world’s poets have been singing for five thousand years.

  * * *

  I’ve occasionally wondered if the raised platform, the runway or stage, in a strip club isn’t inadvertently designed to pander to our first sexual feelings. The nudity, full or partial, harkens our cojones back to aunts and teachers and, God forbid, our moms. Zow, I saw some hair, say playmates to one another. The girls onstage or runway look bigger than life just like women did way back when, when we weighed not much more than one of our teacher’s big pink legs. Big eaters are admired in the Midwest and this teacher always packed five sandwiches in her flower-decorated lunch bucket. Under the desk the view was as mysterious as the first view of the Carlsbad Caverns. She shaved her legs short of her kneecaps which wasn’t quite adequate. Over the decades I’ve come to know a few of these strippers as a wise older step-uncle and they’re rarely big on ground level. The stage is, in fact, a raised enlarged pedestal of lust, a grand altar to summon our desire in the form of the money we offer. When I was four
teen a preacher advised me that “a naked pretty girl can pull at your heartstrings.” He was on the money, though I did not accept the intended warning in the statement. Built into both Calvinism and Catholicism is the implicit threat that anything truly wonderful should also make you feel guilty, especially the skin we were all born in. As Jack Nicholson once said about network television, you can shoot a girl in the tit but you’re not allowed to see the tit.

  Back to the early days. At twelve, despite being in a state of continual tumescence, things can go wrong. In the hot tent with the not altogether healthy-looking strippers at the Michigan State Fair, with the extra twenty-five cents still in the offing to view the genitalia of the hermaphrodite, there is the disturbing odor of manure that men have tracked in from the exhibition barns for the cattle, pigs, and sheep, not to speak of the cackling breeds. This is not exactly a sexy odor even to a farm boy. The scent of the manure in the overheated tent mixes with the stomach’s unrest from cotton candy and com dogs, the french fries that were an effective wick for the grease. The boy has wriggled his way to the front and is smart enough to know that it all looked better farther back. There are grayish splotches of talc except around the amipits and inner thighs of the women where the sweat has absorbed and banished the talc, which smells of the baby powder his mother applies to his younger sister and brother. One very large and sallow stripper has a bounty of pubic hair, truly a wig dropped in the lard crock. Before the hermaphrodite displays the double whammy, the com dog has begun to argue with the cotton candy which shrinks in terror from the french-fry grease. After this a trip to the swine bam and seeing the ass of a friend’s Duroc sow will be a specific relief. A five-hundred-pound pig makes total sense to a pork lover and I’ve held in my arms a piglet this sow, named Myrna, has delivered forth.

  Unless you are afflicted with satyriasis (an actual disease), mood is everything in sexual matters from which a high degree of pleasure is expected even though the pleasure might be limited to the visual. Mood is utterly dictatorial and sometimes it’s as hard to reestablish a good mood as it is to reconstruct a spiderweb. Improbable, in fact. Sometimes the situation shows how dumb some of us are. In an Ann Landers column a wife was turned off during foreplay when her husband mentioned how sexually attractive he found her younger sister. When he got home from work this guy must have shut his head in the car door. This particular mood problem will last for a while, say in contrast to trying to make love to a girl in the backseat of a car on a college campus the night before the big game. In the distance a group around a bonfire is singing the college fight song. You are an aesthete and your pecker wilts when confronted with the naked banality of this song. You drive a dozen miles into the countryside where through the open window you hear only crickets and the rasping whisper of cornstalks, the moon wishing its own slow arc of flight through the steamy window.

  At my favorite strip club in America, the Night Before, in Lincoln, Nebraska, which I often visit with prominent academics from the local university who use me for this purpose as strip clubs are not an acceptable activity in modern universities, I was feeling distraught one evening and not able to emotionally relate to my then favorite stripper, Bonny, though her pubis in the clutches of a violet G-string was a scant two feet from my nose. My mood was sodden but my mind was clear and I could travel back in memory an entire two hours to when I had ordered an appetizer of deep-fried chicken gizzards to precede a two-pound porterhouse. I can’t say gizzards are delicious, rather an acquired taste to give you something to fiddle with delicately before the steak arrives. These gizzards, however, were proving to be obnoxious ballast. I couldn’t very well forsake my cronies and wrestle with the gizzards in the privacy of my quarters at the Cornhusker Hotel (actual name). My academic companions had had their faces buried in books awaiting my summer arrival and now their normally mildewed faces were glowing. In short, I had to hang in there despite the fact that the gizzards had come back to life in my tummy.

  I was saved by an electric moment. The Night Before allows you to hoist yourself over the stage rail and proffer a dollar, or a five or ten, in your teeth while flat on your back, and the stripper plucks the bill away by clenching her buttocks. According to Kinsey this is a view savored by many of our male citizens. The electricity came from a sturdy but attractive ranch girl who took off her cowboy hat revealing a pale forehead above a face darkened by the sun, a sign of authenticity, and flipped onto the stage with a fiver in her teeth. She lay down with a pretty grin and a hundred male faces tightened. The stripper paused, shrugged, laughed, then went for it. There were suitably wild cheers, in themselves a nod to sex in our time. Despite a hundred thousand laws enacted mostly by dead-peckered suits, everyone gets to do it. This experience is as vital as a bean-soup lunch and an envelope of cash for a Washington lawmaker.

  Meanwhile, my gizzard gristle dissolved only to be met by a full discussion of sexual taste. Books have been written on the subject, albeit clumsily, not taking into full account our twelve billion brain cells and thirty billion synapses that conduct this taste with greater speed and completeness than Bill Gates’s gizmos. I don’t feel drawn to tall women but once I saw a tall stripper who reminded me of my tall seventh-grade teacher, Jeannie Phillips, over whom I fantasized moment by moment when within visual range. Suddenly tall women became a possible source of rapture. A friend with you might exclaim over a girl that reminds you of Planet of the Apes without the pelts. Her eyes are too close together and her left heel is excessively calloused. Her voice has a trace of the clarinet and her grammar is bad. I’m not a marine, I’m a poet. Luckily for them only one woman out of a thousand reddens my ears with lust. The ratio goes way up in strip clubs because you’re not going through weeks of quiet suffering before you see their butts, plain and simple.

  In a year I probably don’t spend more time in a strip club than I do reading the Bible, another childhood habit, and just any old strip club won’t do. If they’re too fancy as in New York City or on my one trip to Las Vegas I don’t feel at home. I feel shabby and literary among natty men flashing their bull-market or gambling thatches of cash. The air is excessively sanitized, the decor as expensive as a Westin lobby. The bouncers are in tuxes and call you “sir.” All the titties tend to be artificial, well-fleshed softballs. The girls are Olympic gymnasts with a little too much gym time showing, and possessing all the spontaneity of a beauty pageant. And sometimes the girls are simply too beautiful, too perfect in the manner of the ten thousand anonymous starlets drifting around Hollywood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica. There’s a tinge of the android, of a miraculous walking form of Madame Tussaud’s genius. Maybe they don’t even need toilets in their apartments! In public they seem to eat lettuce and raw vegetables and perhaps like Peter Rabbit’s sisters they leave only discreet droppings in the shubbery.

  During my single visit to Las Vegas, a matter of sixteen hours, my stomach muscles ached because I had been laughing nonstop at the actuality of the place, which deafened my senses, a place that had zero to do with the history of Western culture but had everything to do with its future. In a place called Club Paradise all of the girls resembled these L.A. starlets. Seated a few feet away I looked hard, pondered, and craved for a few flaws. During a twenty-buck table dance my nose brushed dry skin that should have been moist. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had heard an electronic hum inside her butt, which wiggle-waggled close to my nose and looked like it had been used only in outer space. I admit my worm turned and my heart beat faster but the girls were simply as unimaginable as Christmas every day, or God actually saying to you in basso profundo, “Take heart, kiddo.”

  An intimate part of “what we wish sex to be but it isn’t” is false male gusto, an uncritical and affected enthusiasm for all things sexual. You see a lot of boozy camaraderie in strip clubs that has more to do with cronies on a night out than anything onstage. Even the most careworn business dweeb, the most devout techno-lackeys, like to feel a little “naughty” though t
hat word is slipping from usage. Once again, how can you have pathology when everything has become pathological? Naughty presumes adventure and only failures have time for it. Unbridled lust is a rare commodity that isn’t liberally dosed out for all eight girls in the rotation. Sometimes you have to wait a whole hour again to see the girl you liked best and the other seven seem to diminish with your impatience. You become as sullen as the twelve-year-old you actually are at a strip club. During the downtime you gaze around and note that all of these men are trying to look more attractive than they are. A man in an unmodish business suit strides to the men’s room in the manner of a top-of-the-line street fighter. Whenever men stand up they are filled with the effort of sucking in their guts or modestly flexing their muscles. They cast smoky smiles just short of drooling. However old they are, they have become younger. With the help of naked women they are back at the fantasy stage of “women want me but they don’t seem able to express it.” But all in all it’s not the least bit pathetic. And it’s not voyeurism, which assumes that the objects don’t know they’re being viewed. It’s been going on a long time and it seems apparent that it’s not going to stop. Men say to themselves, “At least this is real life, not fantasy.” Of course strip clubs bear the same relationship to reality as the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. If our man Herbert believes that this highly structured ritual is reality the management should be congratulated. This public display of beauty instigates desire, where in our “real” reality it is desire that instigates beauty. This is an important point. We have all read recently of the rampant sexual misbehavior in a western senior-citizens’ community. A jaunty geezer feels a nut twinge and goes for broke, and equally often it is a granny that makes the first move. None of the residents by our culture’s definition are attractive. There is a somewhat wretched country song that goes, “The girls all get prettier at closing time.” In a bar a lady your own size, say about two hundred pounds, flutters at you with a witty “My body belongs to Marvin but he’s a Navy SEAL stationed in the Philippines.” No one wants to be attacked by a vicious SEAL, real or military. You feel smarmy desire. Certainly she is as attractive as a pork roast and you love pork roast. She leaves three lit Kools in the ashtray as she gets up, saying wittily, “I gotta take a piss.” You have become part dog and you either hang in there or don’t. She’s been drinking maybe a dozen Kahluas mixed with orange pop, according to the bartender. What if she pukes in the family Subaru? This is another clear case of sex as it is wherein desire turns a pumpkin into Cinderella, a sow into a bulky Cameron Diaz.