by Nick Spill
Gibbon could understand the irrational in history. Few historians could grasp this profound fact. Men fucked up. Even great men made mistakes. And history was full of them; mistakes, that is. This was Hone’s inspiration, to write a definitive history of Maori from the 17th century to the present. He understood what an enormous task this was, especially as there was no real written material, no texts to base his research on before the mid-19th century, and even then they were inaccurate and rife with biases. This was about the time Brahms was writing this sextet. What an incredible juxtaposition: the build up of the Pakeha and their lack of culture in their self-confessed colonial wasteland and the finest chamber music being created on the other side of the world, in Germany. The true intellectual giants came from the 18th century, like Gibbon, Hone mused. And there were some definite parallels between the current state of Pakeha society and late Imperial Rome.
He was thinking about Wiremu when the phone rang. With his hands full, he was reluctant to answer, but he had a feeling only his brother would disturb his perfect evening at home.
“What took you so long? You okay?” Hone heard Wiremu’s distinctive voice.
“Yeah. What’s up?”
“Plenty. Tell you later. This phone good?”
“Sounds clean.” Their ears were attuned to the bugging devices the police had connected to their phone lines at the local switching office.
“Right. I’m at the corner of Parnell Road and Newmarket. You know the phone box?”
“Yeah.”
“On top I’ve put car keys. The car is at the bottom of Summer Street and John. It’s a black Lincoln. New looking. You can’t miss it. Roll it down the hill and then start it. Leave it somewhere safe, off the road. Check with our friend in Traffic so we can get the registration. I’ve got the owner’s wallet. We’ll work out everything later when I reach you. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
Hone put down his heavy book, after carefully replacing the marker, a pressed flower in a plastic sheath from Haifa. He had not heard Wiremu sound so excited in a long time. Whose car? Whose wallet? What plan?
Hone poured the rest of the brandy down his throat, squeezed into his Dr. Martens and trudged out the back door, up a damp narrow path to Basset Road. He would need Hei Hei to drive him across town. Hone did not have Hei Hei’s new phone number. He secretly hoped Hei Hei was not doing anything to Moana. Hone did not mind Hei Hei bringing her down from Hokianga, but Wiremu, if he found out, would go crazy. All those years in prison had made Wiremu into a celibate prude.
“She’s tangata whenua. If she comes down here she’ll get fucked up, mentally and spiritually. I’ve seen it so many times. She’ll get pregnant with someone she’s met once. Then it’s all downhill. No. She stays with her grandmother, up on the land. If her parents don’t want to look after her, her grandmother will. There’s plenty of things for her to do up there. If she comes down here all her values, all her sense of Maoritanga will wither.” Hone could hear Wiremu’s argument in his head. Only Moana never went to her grandmother. Hei Hei got to her first.
What a mad brother. Fancy firing a shotgun over the heads of cops. It made no sense. Yet Hone was not angry at him. Hone realized what prison life and endless persecution had done to Wiremu.
Hone knocked on the front door. He could clearly hear Hei Hei’s sound system pounding out “Bungle in the Jungle.”
Hone knocked again, louder. Hei Hei peeked through the side window and quickly opened the door. He was careful not to show Moana cowering on the sofa.
“I didn’t hear you,” Hei Hei yelled over the Jethro Tull track.
Hone noticed Hei Hei had not buttoned up his jeans.
“Get the car keys. We’re going out. Hurry.”
Hei Hei scrambled behind Hone to the car, a 1963 light blue Morris Minor. Hone noted how tense Hei Hei was.
“Hey. What’s up with you?” Hone asked.
“Fuck! They hate to fuck, and when you do fuck ’em they pretend to not like it so when you leave and don’t fuck ’em, they hate that too! We’re fucked! You know? We’re fucked! Shit! Fuck! We can’t fucking win!”
The thought of Hei Hei being interrupted amused Hone.
“What a car.” Hei Hei grinned. “Top speed thirty-five. Gears so worn you don’t have to use the clutch. Probably banana skins in the transmission.”
“Yes, Hei Hei. A real drug dealer’s car. That’s what I like about you. You’ve got class. Not like the Mongrel Mob and their Yankee limousine. You’re real inconspicuous.”
• • •
Plum fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow on the sofa. Clovis lay out on the carpet in front of Plum with a cushion under his head. He shut his eyes, but could not sleep. His mind was racing. He felt too hot and agitated. Here he was back in safe little New Zealand, and he could not stay in his own place. Was Plum the target, or were they after Wiremu? Perhaps he had made the wrong decision in letting Wiremu stay with them. Would they have been safer in New York? Here they had Mel to protect them. But he had successfully auditioned for an orchestral position, something he would not dare to have contemplated before he left for New York.
He stretched out on the carpet and recalled how he had found Plum Blossom in New York. He had made a phone call, to a 976 number he saw in a magazine, 976-FUCK.
After he had heard her voice eight times, he went out and rummaged through every softcore porn magazine he could find. He was dressed in an army surplus overcoat, with a fur-lined hat; it was so cold and windy out on the streets.
“If you don’t buy it you can’t look at it!” the little man in the last shop had yelled at him from behind the counter. It was in that shop that Clovis found who operated the 976 number he had been dialing all night, Spunk Productions, owned by the legend of porn, Sammy Goldstein.
The next afternoon Clovis strode up to the offices of Spunk Productions. It was on West Twenty-Fourth Street, a bleak sunless canyon of tall warehouses. Small mounds of black ice were left over from the last blizzard, stuck in corners that would not see the sun until May. Dog turds and pieces of garbage were imbedded in the ice.
Clovis had stated, in his best Kiwi accent, to Goldstein over the telephone that morning, that he was a journalist from New Zealand writing about “girlie” magazines in New York. He was especially interested in the “976-phone-sex-phenomenon.” Could he see him today? His magazine had such a small budget he could not afford to stay at a hotel overnight. He was catching a flight to London that night. Mr. Goldstein was too much of an egotist to refuse having himself written up in New Zealand, especially a national publication as illustrious as the New Zealand Women’s Weekly.
“What is that? Some kind of lesbo mag?”
“Not really,” Clovis parlayed. “It is very butch though.”
“Yeah. I can imagine,” the President of Spunk Inc. retorted. “I’ve met some of the women from down under. Oh boy. Have you guys got problems.” He laughed.
Clovis laughed. The interview was set for three that afternoon. Ten minutes max.
After waiting thirty-six minutes in a nondescript reception area that could have been a dentist’s office, if it had been cleaner, Clovis was ushered into the inner sanctum of the Spunk Empire: Mr. Samuel Goldstein’s office. It was an oversized living room gone wrong. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with framed photographs of women, naked or near naked, in various anatomically revealing poses. Mr. Goldstein half rose from an oversized vinyl-covered executive chair to reach over his oversized desk to give Clovis a wet, limp handshake. Clovis pricked his finger on the president’s diamond-encrusted pinkie ring. He briefly glanced at the glossy color photographs spread over his desk and gave a genuine impression of being overawed by the amount of pink labial flesh exposed to him from all sides. Next to the phone was a row of progressively larger rubber dildos, lined up like soldiers on parade.
On an oversized coffee table in front of the desk were stacks of 8mm films and magazines. A television set stood in
one corner; in another were racks of stereo equipment with huge black speakers, the size of coffins. The president gestured to the oversized stained couch. Clovis seated himself and realized his interviewee, a man in his late forties with balding hair and a stomach that bumped up against the desk, was at least twelve feet away. Clovis observed that the pale overweight man had far too much energy and vitality for such an unhealthy individual, with sparkling eyes, gesturing hands and a head that appeared loosened from the neck.
“This is where it all happens. Where all the work gets done.” He chortled. “The buck comes here!” he declared, not for the first time, Clovis assumed. Clovis took out his new notepad and pen and sat on the edge of the sofa as far away as he could from the stain. What would a real journalist do now? Start asking dumb questions, dummy!
“No tape recorder?” The president sounded disappointed. He had never seen a journalist write anything.
“No. We’re old fashioned down under. Do it by hand,” Clovis replied.
“Oh! I get you.” The president laughed, seeing a joke where Clovis intended none. The interview proceeded painlessly, Clovis remembered. He dutifully wrote out the statistics of dialing porn. In New York City alone, men dialed to hear the Spunk girls one million times a month. With the money collected by the respectable New York Telephone Co., Goldstein was grossing $150,000. Every month.
“Hey! Let’s face it. I’m a nice Jewish boy. My mother wanted me to make a lot of money. She wanted me to be a doctor. So instead of putting them in stirrups and staring at their pussy and charging ’em $100 a visit, I became the doctor of porn. And I pay them to do the same things. Do I feel guilty? Do I need a psychiatrist’s couch? No way, Isaiah! This is an ethical way to do business and, believe it or not, it’s all part of the women’s liberation movement. These women are getting paid far more to do this, which is essentially harmless, than work as some goofball’s secretary and make his coffee and pick up his dry cleaning and all that shit. Now that is degrading.
“We’re at the forefront of the post-revolutionary liberation for women, and all those hard line bitches, god bless their unfucked pussies, don’t understand this. I’m really a radical feminist. Tell the lesbians in New Zealand that. That’ll give ’em something to choke on.”
Clovis tried to write down everything the man behind his desk spat out. But there was a magazine on the coffee table in front of him, entitled LONELY TEENS. Where was that girl, in pigtails, putting that broomstick? She looked not a day over thirteen.
It was unbearably hot in the office, a wet 90 degrees. Clovis could feel the sweat dripping down his armpits. He did manage, however, to find out that all the audiotapes for the phone messages were recorded at the Silent Studio, one block away in a basement.
“You’d be surprised. Some of the ugliest people we auditioned have the sexiest voices. So I made a policy decision. Beautiful bodies, beautiful voices. You like it? It worked. Look at the figures.”
Trying to find out who was the saleswoman in the men’s trouser department proved impossible. Goldstein did not seem to hear the question, or for that matter any question, unless it pertained to himself and what a great businessman he was. On leaving, Clovis obtained the phone number of Jose Fibilitis, the manager at the Silent Studio.
Clovis called Jose from the corner payphone and booked an immediate appointment with him. “Hey! Any friend of Goldspunk is a friend of mine. Come on over.” Jose sounded too loose, too happy.
The studio consisted of two small rooms in the basement of a brick three-storey building wedged in between two tall industrial lofts that were being converted into co-ops by artists and attorneys. From the street, Clovis was buzzed in through the steel door. He felt his way down a damp creaking staircase to another steel door with a red light outside. This door clicked open and he found himself in a small carpet-lined waiting area facing another solid door. Jose slipped through the door and looked confused. He did not know who Clovis was. Clovis reminded him of the phone call a couple of minutes ago. Jose started to grin, grabbed Clovis’s hand and shook it violently. Clovis was ushered into the control room, a brightly lit space with a clear glass panel on one wall looking out to darkness.
Jose was a small Puerto Rican with a big bushy beard and long curly black hair. He had dark shining eyes that never stopped on one place long enough to focus. Clovis noticed he wore high-heeled cowboy boots as he stepped up to the control board. Several tape machines were stacked on the opposite wall. An engineer with thick headphones was remixing an audio track for a radio commercial and muttering under his breath.
Clovis noticed a cereal bowl that looked full of sugar. They must drink a lot of coffee, he thought.
“Want some?” Jose smiled, his eyes glazing over.
“Coffee?” Clovis guessed.
“No. Coke.” Jose rolled his eyes.
“Gosh.” Clovis tried to be cool. “I’ve never seen that much. I mean, I don’t even use that much flour when I’m baking bread.”
“Oh, we’re a bit low at the moment. Help yourself. The agencies drop it off in bags.” Jose shrugged. It was just like the seltzer delivery.
“No, er, thanks. Not when I’m on the job. I haven’t even seen it.” Clovis began to think he could write an article and send it back to New Zealand. Maybe the Listener would publish it? But would anyone believe him?
He explained to Jose, in what he thought were professional journalist terms, what he was doing with his article and asked a few questions about recording the phone fantasies. Currently three or four girls came in and taped a week’s worth of sixty-second spots. The spots counted out to thirty-five to forty-five seconds, with a twelve-second plug for a live sex call on another phone number, if they had a credit card.
Credit card call? This was getting more and more bizarre. He had missed this detail when he listened to Plum Blossom. Then he remembered the pages and pages of advertisements in the girlie magazines with girls sprawled out on satin sheets wearing garter belts and high heels with their fingers between their legs and a telephone pressed to their ear. Live phone sex, they claimed. How could you have live sex with someone over the phone? And masturbate whilst having it charged to your credit card? Clovis thought this concept absurd, like performance art with no audience.
“You gotta see it from here, man. These chicks are hot. The way they move over that microphone. Unbelievable. Then we get them ripped, so juiced up, they’re amazing,” Jose continued. The engineer snorted and grinned at Clovis.
If Clovis asked Jose outright about a woman who resembled Plum Blossom, he would get suspicious. Jose was that kind of guy, Clovis surmised. Stroke his ego, ask him flattering questions, and he would love you to death, but throw him a pointed question or slip in a snide remark and he would turn against you faster than you could say Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
While Jose went into some technical detail about the eight-track tape machine they used, Clovis pretended to take notes. He moved around the small room trying to locate a list of women’s names, phone numbers, some contact sheet that Jose had amongst the debris littering the control room.
“How do you find new talent? I mean new voices. You must get new talent occasionally.”
“Goldfuck. He selects them. He gets them to sit on his couch, stands right over them and puts a tape recorder to his zipper and auditions them.” Jose tried to keep a straight face, but the engineer who had taken off his earphones broke out in knee slapping laughter.
“He uses a small microphone so his dick looks bigger,” the engineer gushed in one breath.
“You mean he doesn’t say anything? Or even point?”
It took several minutes before Jose could calm down enough to continue the interview. In that time, Clovis managed to see a clipboard with a list of girls names lying half under a carton of cigarettes. At the top of the typed sheet was the title “SUCK TAPES.”
“Tell me about some of these new girls.”
“Well, last week, or was it the week before. Shit. I dun
no. We got the cutest little Asian.”
“What a bitch in heat!” the engineer let out.
“Very quiet. Very professional,” Jose continued, his pupils expanded and contracted as if connected to a weight machine.
“She wouldn’t do it for twenty or all the coke she could snort,” the engineer piped in.
“You mean they do it for you?” Clovis was incredulous. He felt sick to his stomach at the thought of Plum being propositioned.
“Whaddaya think? They’ve been working over that microphone for hours. They’ve already creamed their pants. Now they want the real thing.” Jose puffed up his chest.
“Perhaps she was an actress” Clovis tried.
“Yeah. They’re all actresses,” Jose retorted cynically. He reached over to the clipboard by Clovis. “This is her. Plum Blossom. What a name!”
“You’re pulling my leg.” Clovis reached for the clipboard. “Let me see.”
Clovis memorized the phone number and put down the clipboard. He quickly wrapped up the interview and promised to send them copies of the published piece.
“Hey! If you’ve got any New Zealand chicks you know, send them to us. We’ll give ’em an audition. And we’ll give ’em some toot!” Jose threw out at Clovis, who could not leave fast enough. He felt blood pounding in his head like a drum track speeded up.
At the corner payphone, Clovis dropped a quarter and dialed the number. After twenty rings, he hung up, collected his quarter, redeposited it and dialed again. He was in a trance, connected to Plum again by a telephone line, yet unable to reach her. A bike messenger screeched to a halt by the payphone and brought Clovis back to the world. Clovis jumped, hung up and walked away, leaving the quarter in the coin return for the messenger to grab.
Clovis could not understand how Plum had progressed from working in a massage parlor in New Zealand to recording sex tapes in New York. This was not furthering her acting career.
