Bell currently lives in Amsterdam and speaks at film festivals, porn festivals, and feminist porn festivals. Her life is full of the dualities of life, parenthood, marriage, career. She has a toddler and has been searching for preschools recently. Several years ago she set up her own production company, Blue Artichoke Films, to make and distribute the movies she wanted to see. Now she’s working on a series of three interlinked films and is just finishing a documentary in which she followed a woman embracing her submissive side around Amsterdam for three years. We spoke about film theory, porn, sex and ethics.

***

The Rumpus: How did you become a filmmaker?

Jennifer Lyon Bell: I’ve always wanted to make erotic films. I’d seen porn when I was younger and I had thought that it was really ridiculous and nowhere near as sexy as the fooling around my friends and I were doing. So when I was a teenager, I thought it would be neat to do something better. Only I went off to college, to Harvard, and it didn’t really occur to me that that was a legitimate career option. I was into sex-positive feminism, reading Susie Bright and Carole Queen, but I didn’t really consider that erotic film was something I could do. Instead I went into advertising and had a career there for ten years.

Rumpus: So what changed?

Bell: I moved to Europe with my boyfriend and thought it might be time. I’d talked about making erotic films to everyone, friends and family and strangers on the street. In Amsterdam I decided to get a masters in film theory just to study erotic film and come up with a template for why I believe film is sexy. Is it just a matter of showing body parts or is there more to it than that?

Rumpus: A few years ago the New York Times did an article I think in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section about someone trying to make porn films for women. It was all about the Prada shoes, like if you get the fashion aspirational enough, women will be turned on. But that did nothing to change porn or the tropes, say, of what is sexy, which is what you’re trying to do. We’re conditioned to see porn in a certain way and you’re trying to subvert what that is.

Bell: It’s true. We’ve created a separation between sex and the rest of life that’s unnatural, so I want make films that bridge the explicit sexuality in, let’s call it, porn with the artistic expression and emotions and plot lines you’d see in art films. It’s not just a way to make interesting film but is a metaphor for what’s compelling about sexuality. It’s part of life, so acting like it’s some kind of separate ghettoized experience that we need to hide and not discuss is silly.

Rumpus: How did grad school help? What did you do there?

Bell: Specifically I was thinking, does having character and narrative make you feel more erotically charged by a film and if so why? There I had a framework to understand why I believe making something sexy isn’t just about showing body parts, and I stumbled on cognitive film theory, which talks about why everyone – not just women but men and women – feel what they do when they look at the screen. I became interested in sympathy and empathy.

Rumpus: Do they relate to that weird truism you hear spouted off about women and erotic material, that women need character development and narrative and men need visual stimulation? Is that even true?

Bell: I don’t believe men and women are terribly different when it comes to looking at erotic materials and getting aroused. Culturally we act like women need to have a huge complicated story to feel connected to a sexual relationship, but I don’t think that’s true. Plenty of films that don’t have much character I find arousing. Still there’s a basic statement a film can make that enables you as a viewer to become much more engaged. Having sympathy and empathy means you get more turned on.

Rumpus: So, obviously we’re talking something more involved than just tits and dicks, say. More than just anonymous consumer porn.

Bell: Yeah, the statement a movie can make is that these are basically decent people. These are moral people, and that sounds funny to talk about morality when you’re talking porn, but for all kinds of film, porn included, being engaged with the story and its characters involves you in their choices and actions and how you ought to feel about them. One way of talking about it is it boils down to morality. Is what they’re doing good or not? And, when people are basically good, you feel bonded with them and you want to feel what they feel. Use that in an erotic move and we can really get into the action. You can create that bond in an erotic documentary with real people’s stories and personalities and showing what they’re actually like and that they’re basically good people. Or, you can do it with fictional characters. Watching them struggle with their morality makes it more interesting and enhances that erotic bond you have with them.

Rumpus: Which you’re doing now in a bondage documentary, right?

Bell: Yeah, it doesn’t have a title yet, but I’ve been following the main character Lotus around for three years. It’s the true-life coming-out story of a submissive discovering her BDSM side in Amsterdam. She approached me because she’d seen the other films and wanted me to film her life as she went through this. It took her a while to convince me. I didn’t think she was serious but was just being flattering. We just shot the final scene recently and she’s happy with how everything turned out.

Rumpus: How is stuff for Lotus now? What’s her life like?

Bell: It’s changed so much. She’s much more sure of herself.  Before she questioned herself and wasn’t as happy in her love relationship. Now she’s in a satisfying one with a man who she’s been with for quite a while. That happened during the filming, and she’s had fantastic BDSM experiences that have made her more happy and has this boyfriend who loves and supports her. The movie’s message matches up with my personal belief in sexuality, which is that only when you feel safe enough to be honest with yourself, with what really turns you on and what you really want in your heart of hearts that you can live your life to the fullest.

Rumpus: As we’ve talked about morality and character that’s made me think of Russell Banks new novel Lost Memory Of Skin about a kid committed for a sex crime. Basically he’s a porn addict, and it’s beautiful, very sensitively written. Banks gives him humanity and depth. As you were talking about a moral sense, it made me think of the Kid (which is what he’s called in the book). He’d been a consumer of internet porn and there was no human aspect to it, just a consumption-addiction driven thing where he was inured to porn. In a way the book was about how and why he couldn’t be open to something slower and deeper and more emotionally driven. It was partly about the larger culture of how that happens, that deadening.

Bell: We contribute to a culture where the only ways of engaging are turned on or not turned on – orgasming or not orgasming, as if it’s binary. Being aroused can have a very different flavor based on what kind of film you’re watching or what kind of situation you’re in and they’re not all the same. Arousal is not all the same. Some people maybe want to have the option of a really quick, not very involved orgasm sometimes. That’s okay, but I think it’s on a broader psychological and philosophical level it’s important to say, there’s arousal that’s more fulfilling for you if you want to find it.

Rumpus: So how does that actually come into your movies?

Bell: My first film Headshot – it’s a remake of a classic Andy Warhol movie from 1964 – and in the original, Warhol detaches the viewer from the image by never letting you see who’s giving the blowjob. You get no sense of the relationship between the two people. And, it’s a silent movie, which also goes a long way towards distancing you. I thought, wow, wouldn’t it be cool to do the same thing and bring in the emotions that come from sound and from seeing the relationship. I remade it with a man and a woman, and you still never see the person who’s giving the blowjob but I tried to bring out his personality.

Rumpus: You get a really quick sense in it that he’s totally up for this, a bit charged by on-screen sex with someone he’s never met, but also that she is too.

Bell: When he and this woman meet each other, it doesn’t take long for you to understand what’s exciting to both of them in this situation, so you’re invested in their having a great time for a couple of minutes because that’s all it takes.

Rumpus: How did you find him? He seems so very dude, like kind of some ur notion of male up-for-it guy?

Bell: At the cast party for Matinee, one of the crew members said he’d like to be in a film for me, and I immediately thought of Headshot. He had no experience at all. He was just a regular guy who wanted to explore his sexuality on film, so when I had the idea he was the first person I called.

Rumpus: How did Matinee work?

Bell: It’s a story of a couple portraying lovers in a play  in Amsterdam and the woman, Mariah, struggles with whether or not to actually have sex on stage with her partner on stage. The play is a struggle and she wants it to be a success. It’s very much her, Mariah’s, story. I want people to be into her and invested in this boundary she decides to overcome. She doesn’t let him know what she’s decided to do, so when it comes to her making this move and having sex with him, you’re completely into it, and you want her to have a good time.

Rumpus: Your movie Skin Like Sun has no dialogue or story, so how do we invest in the characters there?

Bell: It was commissioned for a feminist porn festival, and I made it with Mureille Scherre, who’s also a DJ and lingerie designer. We wanted to bring to life the female character’s experience. One way we could do that was taking a lot of shots that represent how she feels in sex. Those are likely to be shots you won’t see in straight porn since it’s oriented towards men. We tried to take close-ups of when she’s touching his hair and ears and meld that all together so it feels like one continuous experience and you feel their relationship in a broader, closer way. The most important decision was to make it feel like real time. We wondered if it would make us feel closer as viewers to her experience.

Rumpus: The movie has a sweetness to it in all the touching and affection. Those are the telling details that make it clear they love each other. Somewhere I read that in looking at erotic images men are more likely to look at faces first, then genitals, which I thought was interesting and unexpected.

Bell: If you’re looking to understand how someone feels in a certain situation, the look on their face tells you a tremendous amount that can make you feel connected to that person. In traditional porn, men’s faces are largely absent. We see the woman’s face and body and genitals but we don’t see much of his body, and we definitely don’t see his face. But I want to. I miss it. In moments where characters go through a change where they get much more aroused I don’t want to be looking at their body parts but the reaction in their faces.

Rumpus: What movies inspire you?

Bell: Larry Clark’s films, hands down. He has a real feel for how complicated sex can be and that there are different kinds of arousal that being anxious or nervous and how those negative emotions can play in an erotic way. I really love how he has focused on that and made it the emotional centerpiece of his work, showing how sex is so much more than intercourse. He’s particularly interested in adolescents because at that age we don’t have words yet for everything we’re going through, and that makes it a really volatile and exciting time. I’m interested in those same phenomena for people of all ages. Sex is much more complicated and dynamic and electric than it looks on film. I also love Lars von Trier’s movies and how they show people pushing their own boundaries. I love the idea of incorporating that electricity of boundary pushing into my erotic filmmaking. I’d like to think everyone who’s worked on my films has a positive experience. I’ve never had anyone have a nervous breakdown like Bjork was reported to on his, but I respect that he’s not making a simple easy film. He’s throwing his whole self into making it and he expects his actors to do the same.

Rumpus: So how do you balance being married and having a kid, with making sexy movies? You don’t look or act like you have a dual life.

Bell: People always say to me, ‘You don’t look like someone who makes erotic films. I expected someone to be wearing a leather outfit or a vinyl bustier,’ but that taps into what I really want to be saying about sex. There aren’t sex people and non-sex people. Sex is part of everybody’s life and that you can be incredibly sexual and wear a flowered dress. Also making a film of any kind puts you in a vulnerable position. Well, I feel vulnerable making erotic movies because they have to be sexy to me. Each one is like saying this is what I personally find sexy. That’s scary for me even now.

Rumpus: Yeah, I was a stripper but don’t want to write about it in my fiction because I’m uncomfortable with people thinking that was/is/could be me. And, I don’t really like talking about my own sexuality partly because I have a hard enough time not judging myself for it. So, how have you gone beyond that?

Bell: I spend a lot of time managing my boundaries. I need to feel free and comfortable working with my actors and writing my scripts and doing the things that I need to do to make a movie that’s moving and exciting to me. I often spend months building up relationships with the actors. On set there are also all these fine gradations that I’ve learned to manage where someone says, well, how do you feel about – anal sex, say? Or, if someone says, how do you feel about sex doggie-style? I have to be careful to separate out my feelings about whether doggie-style sex makes sense in this film from how I feel about it in all erotic films and how I personally feel in my own bedroom. It’s a balancing act that can come down to a pronoun or else talking to fewer people at one time. Everyone on set has a different comfort level but I have to be able to talk about sex bluntly, and I have to respect my partner’s privacy too. Like, he may or may not want me talking about sex in a way that exposes him and his feelings.

Rumpus: Respecting a partner is one thing but you have a daughter? Wait, I didn’t mean that to sound like I’m shocked. At some point you’re going to have to have a discussion with her though.

Bell: I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to practice what I preach and raise a daughter who’s sex positive. I think I make the kind of films that I’m proud to stand behind. I think they say something good about sex and the way sex really is, and I hope to raise her with open and body-positive attitudes and to talk when the time is right about what I do and she’ll appreciate that.

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I first heard of Lisa Carver in the late 1980s, when we were both about 19 or 20. Performing under the name Lisa Suckdog in shows that involved screeching, screaming, pissing, and violence, she was often spoken of in the same breath with notorious scum-rocker G.G. Allin, and I was impressed that a girl my age was making herself a legend in the punk underground. But I didn’t become a bonafide fan until I stumbled upon her zine Rollerderby a few years later. At first I was disbelieving: Who would have guessed that the hurricane Lisa Suckdog could write so well? Her voice was perky and zinging, irreverent but commonsensical, unabashedly feminine as well as manifestly horn-doggish. I wasn’t the only one who was charmed; she had fans galore. In 1995 the Utne Reader listed her as one of “100 Visionaries Who Will Change Your Life,” and 1996 saw the publication of Rollerderby: (the Book) and a collection of essays called Dancing Queen. By the early 2000s, I would occasionally stumble upon her hosting an episode of HBO’s Real Sex or on MTV. Her byline appeared in glossy magazines. She also published another book, The Lisa Diaries, that drew from her weekly sex column at Nerve.com. When I learned she had a memoir, Drugs Are Nice, published by Soft Skull Press in 2005, I gobbled it up.

Drugs Are Nice fills in some of the blanks left in her earlier relentlessly upbeat (if also gory and obscene) work. She sketches a chaotic upbringing split between a sickly, pill-addicted mother and drug-dealer father who went to prison when she was six. She talks about escaping an abusive relationship with the father of her first child and the reality of raising alone a son born with a chromosomal deletion. But as it turns out, Drugs Are Nice, for all its stripped-back honesty, presents only a fraction of Lisa’s life story. In January, she self-published _________, an untitled book that collects around 80 paintings she created intuitively in late 2010 and early 2011 as part of the effort to recover memories from an early childhood so horrific it’s hard to look at squarely. Through painting and through therapy, Lisa came to recall being abused, molested, and prostituted by her father as a very young girl, and she began to understand the process of disassociating by which she had coped and functioned. In the text accompanying the images, Lisa writes about her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder and gives interpretations of the paintings.

Lisa and I spoke for nearly two hours on the phone about the book, childhood sexual assault, memory, truth, and disassociation, among other things. At the end of the conversation, Lisa said, “I think when you write about things that are really deep and personal and important to people and when they give you feedback from a deep important place inside themselves, that’s so similar to sex. I feel like we just had sex.” And I did too. Really good sex.

________ is available on Ebay and suckdog.net.

 ***

Rumpus: When I saw you have a new book coming out, it sent me back into your catalogue. I noticed that in Rollerderby your parents are quite present—you interview them, talk about them, they’re totally part of your life. Dancing Queen is dedicated to them. In Drugs Are Nice, you’re more critical. By the end of the book, you had cut your dad out of your life, because you recognized he wasn’t being responsible in the way he was dealing with Wolf, your son, and he was sort of stalking you. I always had a picture of your dad as a strange, off-the-wall, dangerous character, but there’s no mention in Drugs are Nice of any molestation or child prostitution or anything like that, and I wonder when you started suspecting you had these memories that you weren’t able to find.

Carver: Certainly not when I was writing Drugs are Nice, because as I was telling that I was telling the most truth that I could. I was not trying to hide anything. So, it was hidden from me. I had no idea at all.

Rumpus: You were starting to see these fucked up dynamics and analyzing them more closely, but you hadn’t gotten to the bottom of them.

Carver: Well, I knew that I presented as somebody who had been molested, that was obvious. But I thought it was just coincidence. Or maybe I thought that cool people are like this. I didn’t know. You can’t know what you don’t know.

Rumpus: What let you or compelled you or forced you—I don’t know how you look at it—to try to locate those memories.

Carver: I didn’t try. I certainly didn’t go looking. There was actually something involving one of my children, that I won’t talk about, that was an impetus. I had to protect one of them from something, and that brought up these feelings that…  I felt very scared, and the fear was far out of proportion to what was actually happening to my child. I’ve always been very proud of my normal parenting, my healthy parenting. I felt like it was OK that I was so destructive in my personal life and my sex life and my career because I kept it together with my kids. So when I reacted that irrationally, I realized that my unhealthiness was affecting my life with my kids.

Rumpus: What role did painting play in discovering you were dissociative? Were you already starting to explore some of this stuff in therapy when you started the painting, and was the painting part of the therapy? Or did what you were painting send you to therapy?

Click Image to Enlarge

Carver: I think the painting was first. I mean, I was already in therapy. My therapist had been, for probably about five years, trying to get me to recover memories, because my childhood was a blank. But I always refused, saying there was no reason for it. I didn’t want to. Then when this happened with my child and I was painting these scenes that looked like something had really happened that I didn’t know about, that’s when I agreed to the treatment. And so the two were playing off each other. I was going in and having this treatment to recover memories, and I was painting them at the same time.

Rumpus: In the book you mention that you had given up writing for a livelihood around this time, in response to what you were discovering about yourself, and you were selling the paintings as soon as you made them. Was that for financial necessity?

Carver: Well, of course I needed a job, but I also just wanted the paintings out of my house. I didn’t want my children to see them, and I didn’t want to see them. And every single one of them except for “Wrists Attack Razor” were gone the minute I put them up. They would sell. All these horrible, ugly, nasty things. There’s a market for that, I guess.

Rumpus: Were the buyers fans of yours? I’m wondering about the relationship between being a public person and going through this super scary and personal and deep thing. People are kind of watching you, and hopefully you’re feeling like they’re caring about you, but…

Carver: It was really great. I was on Facebook all the time, and I would put up the paintings as I was working on them, and I would talk about the things that had happened to me.  I was very excited to not have these things be secret, and it made me feel very comfortable and safe that there were all these people watching me. I had felt at-risk from my father, but now he couldn’t get me anymore, because now everybody would know it was him. That’s the feeling that I had. That’s not the reality really, but it was the reality for parts of myself.

Previously I had been mind-fucked to the point where I was telling people who might have helped, “Yes, this is my father, this is OK,” and I wasn’t trying to escape anymore. And now I was telling everybody what had really happened, and everybody knew, and everybody was around and encouraging, and I felt like, even if I forget—and I’m always worried that I’m going to forget; I still doubt myself—I know that everybody else could hold that reality for me. And I could go pick it up sometime if I lost it again. It’s really strange to… I even feel strange talking about it. It feels very strange to not have your memories or your own sense of reality. The best you can hope for sometimes is to pick good people to hold it for you, instead of somebody who wants to use it against you.

Rumpus: That gets at the claim you make throughout the book that the cruelest thing that was done to you as a child was not the rape or the trafficking of you, it was the fucking with your mind.

Carver: The thing that my father did was to make me say and believe that I wanted this. That I wanted to be sent off with strangers as a tiny child. He would torture me emotionally to the point where I would say that I wanted anything. Until I asked for it. He made me ask for it. And then I became convinced that it was all me. I think. I don’t know.

Rumpus: You present some factual information about dissociative identity disorder in the book. At what point did research started to inform your understanding of what was going on with you?

Carver: Like most people with multiple personalities, I had long been drawn to other people, especially lovers, who had multiple personalities. So I was researching the symptoms—to try to cope, to understand why these guys were behaving like they were. (That started back when dissociative identity order was called multiple personality disorder.) But I had no idea that it related me, at all.

Rumpus: So you had all this background information to draw on when you when you were piecing this together for yourself?

Carver: Oh, I was so familiar with it. And then also I have always been really morbidly obsessed with children who get murdered and kidnapped and raped. Who get pornography made out of them. So I already knew a lot about that because I was just so drawn to it all the time, again not knowing it related to me personally.

I want to ask you a question. Do you relate personally at all to disassociating?

Rumpus: I don’t know that I relate to disassociating exactly, but I do have… I was molested as a child at a young age, starting around four. It has nothing to do with your situation. It has nothing to do with my parents, and they were loving parents. But definitely I’m interested in the fact that we’re the same age and this is coming to you in your forties, because I’ve become sort of obsessed with these childhood experiences in my own life lately. And it’s hard to precisely remember things from when we’re little—some things are really blurry, isolated moments are crystal clear, some memories come forward in a way that actually hurts my brain— and I’ve definitely spent a lot of my lifetime telling myself that I don’t need to think about this, and who cares, and it wasn’t a big deal. Even—and I still think some of these things—even thinking in some ways that it was not that negative, that it developed some positive traits in myself, and the discomfort of that feeling…

Carver: I think it probably did. And in other eras and other countries it’s the norm. You think all these things. And it is so incredibly prevalent…

Rumpus: It is. What, like one out of three or one out of four people experience…

Carver: That’s what they say. And that’s just one out of three people who know it and admit it and are believed. The reason I asked you that was because the book is so inside the experience of disassociating, and I was wondering if anyone could relate to it who didn’t know what that was like.

Rumpus: Reading the book was a very powerful experience for me. One reaction I had is to feel almost guilty about how much I connected to it. How can I compare my experience to your experience, which was so much more extreme? And yet some of your images and descriptions are so vivid to me, they strike a painful and electric chord. I think the book could speak to anyone who was sexualized really early. It’s a confusing thing to have happen. You can want it to go away, but it doesn’t go away—or it doesn’t stay away. And then questioning that: Why am I thinking about this? Am I misremembering? Am I reading too much into this? Am I creating memories?

Carver: Am I being a crybaby? Am I trying to get people in trouble?

I look at other people’s history and think about how much worse they had it than me. That makes me discount my own experiences. Everybody does that. Everybody compares. But the thing is, when you’re a child, your reality is total. So it doesn’t matter if you get punched in the face once, or if, you know, you’re prostituted every single day. For you, it’s a total experience.

Rumpus: It’s such an unusual book. It’s so deep and raw. It has messages to us now as a society, it has messages to people who’ve survived stuff in their childhood, and then sometimes it’s just very vivid description of the disassociation and… just the perspective of a helpless child. It’s doing a lot. Nothing about the book is typical. Even the trim size, the way the images are placed, the use of two different fonts… The format and structure and language of the book seem to be representing the splintering of memory and identity, the disassociation, but it doesn’t feel self-conscious in that way. I didn’t get the feeling that you’re formally experimenting with how text can represent consciousness, for example. So I wondered about the process of creating this book, about how intentional it was, or whether you were working from a more purposefully unconscious process like the one you describe you used for creating the paintings themselves.

Carver: The stuff that’s in Times font, that was me as a writer making sure I was getting things correct, making sure I was getting the chronology OK, making sure I was saying what I believe was true. The stuff in the sans serif font, I did not exert an editor or a narrator or a writer onto that, I just let the experience tell itself; I let the memory tell itself. I didn’t question it. I didn’t try to make it good. I didn’t try to make it right, because that was how I kept lying to myself and everybody else all my life. And that was the bad thing about writing. I was able to lie convincingly and look very naïve, because I was trained in that, so when I told the stories from within themselves about what was happening, I didn’t question it. I didn’t ask my approval.

Rumpus: What about the fact that the titles of the paintings are listed in the beginning and organized carefully into groups, but on the pages themselves, the paintings are not titled, and the commentary about them does not always appear on the same spread, which can be disorienting. Was that disorientation intentional, or was that part of the giving-permission strand in the book?

Carver: You can go look for the title of a painting if you want, but you won’t be compelled to attach my title to the image. Because I was hoping that people would tell their own story through reading this, that it would wake up something in them. I didn’t want it to be only about my experience. I wanted people to feel what they had hidden inside themselves.

Rumpus: It was very successful for me on that level. It was disorienting at first—not in an off-putting way; I devoured the book in one sitting—but then I kept going back to it. There’s a certain kind of work that has to be done by the reader. I was very involved with the book, and personally involved, and the one other person I know who’s read it has felt similarly.

Carver: I’m happy to hear that. I’ve always tried for that, even as a teenager performing on stage. Or even in my personal life. I always try to get people off balance. It’s kind of Buddhist and it’s kind of performance arty, but it’s a way to wake people up. Every time I’ve learned a lot, it’s when what I saw as walls were knocked down and I could go in any direction. But the movement is preceded by a period of uncertainty, of feeling lost or confused. That’s part of it.

Rumpus: In some ways, I can compare this book to Rollerderby and the anarchic format of a zine, where you’re fitting things on the page in odd ways, putting in weird ephemera or hand-written notes, where the whole project feels more impromptu. Then there are your books, and you’re a great writer—technically good, pitch perfect in your voice, adept at structure—but the books feel very contained.

Carver: It’s true, when I started being published by big magazines and big publishing houses, I lost some thrill. And I gained some money, and some social position. But it really wasn’t worth it, and I was really happy to go back to self-publishing. I did not want anyone to tell me one word. I didn’t care if I did a really bad job, it was going to be my job, and I didn’t want anyone else to look at it.

Rumpus: I want to talk about something you write in the book. When you explain why you felt like you had to give up writing for a living, you say: “My success in writing came out of the same formula I learned as a child prostitute: find out people’s dreams and make them believe not only that dreams can come true, but their dream already is true… I take their hand and show them. I make them laugh. I appear to be dirtily innocent and happy – utterly without fear or disgust, and I make them feel there’s no reason for them to feel any fear or disgust either.” That’s a great description of your voice, and when I read it I had a strong response, because I loved your voice. I loved your energy, your optimism, your combination of craziness and sensibleness, and it is a harsh toke to have to look at all that in the context of traits demanded by a child prostitute. We do all want to feel OK about our lust and our desires and our messy parts, but of course some lusts are not OK to act on, and it’s hard to walk that line. It can be confusing for people who have spent a lot of energy and a lot of their lives convincing themselves otherwise.

Carver: An editor who was really important to me, Ada Calhoun, said basically what you just said. She apologized because she felt that she had somehow taken advantage of me as an editor, taken advantage of that child-like voice, by encouraging me to be like I was. She said she was crying when she read this book, and she felt like she had taken part in something wrong. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I love writing. I love being happy about my life and accepting it. I loved helping other people accept themselves. And I loved being a prostitute as an adult. I loved having open relationships. I loved experimenting and living with gusto. And writing with gusto. And saying fuck you to anyone who tried to control what I was doing or call me names. I loved it. And so I don’t want to take away any of the glitter or happiness. It was all real.

I went through a period where I realized that I was also, at the same time, reenacting my past, telling people, “It’s fine. You’re fine. That’s the way human beings are. Accept yourself.” On the one hand that’s totally true, and I really believe that. On the other hand, now I know when to stop. When it’s not right. When it’s gross. I didn’t know before.

Rumpus: In the book you talk about having a backlash against your interest in BDSM, and then you talk about coming to a place where you’re able to reclaim it as your own. There’s a really beautiful passage where you talk about becoming bigger than your father’s influence over you.

Carver: I think my father was compelled to do everything that he did. He had no control. At this point in my life, if I do something, if I have sex or if I hit someone, it’s because I want to. I know what I’m doing. I’m not compelled; I’m not reenacting anything. Up until I painted these paintings and wrote this book, I, too, was just compelled. Needing to do something to someone. Needing to run away from something. Needing and not knowing. Just doing what I knew how to do.

Rumpus: You were 26 when you had your son Wolf, and leading a super alternative life.  You found it in you to be a good parent in a really difficult situation, with a baby with serious special needs and a partner who was…

Carver: Who had special needs himself! Alcoholic, depressed…

Rumpus: I was moved by your explanation of where your parenting instincts came from, which was from having parented yourself in your imagination when you were a child and no one else was taking good care of you. But what else did you draw on? Because parenting can be hard even in optimal conditions.

Carver: I do think my ability to deal with all that came out of having dissociative identity disorder, because I had separated out a part that was a mother, and that part had been alive almost as long as I had, and that part could take over at any time. That’s the great thing about being dissociative: you can rise to any occasion without internal conflict, because you shut down the other parts. A really hard thing about being a parent is not being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it. But I didn’t have to experience that, because if it was time for me to parent, I just shut off that other part, and the mother part took over. There was no conflict. There was no resentment. There was no confusion. I’ve always been that way, no matter what the circumstances were.

Rumpus: So there’s a case where dissociation has been a strength.

Carver: Oh, It’s been a strength in everything in my life. I was good at it. In fact, I feel the loss of it very much now that I’m mostly integrated. I feel so much more conflict and resentment and so many more negative emotions, like anger and like feeling trapped. I never ever felt that, until I was, you know, “cured.”

Rumpus: What’s a benefit of being cured?

Carver: I haven’t been this way long enough to really be able to say much about it. But I am alive, and I really don’t think I was ever truly alive. I was playing roles, and half of me or three quarters of me or nine tenths of me was dead all the time, and there was this stunted part that was playing a role and she knew, or he knew, that the role would be over and they would be dead.

There was a lot of desperation and feeling disrespected by myself. And now I don’t have that. I’m all alive all the time. But it’s just not always good. Sometimes it’s really inconvenient. I don’t want to have to be sad. I don’t want to have to be patient. I want things to be really easy and magical, and they’re not all the time.

Rumpus: I was struck by the end of the book, where you’re describing going into the desert with the man that you love. The voice there seemed very recognizable to me—the syntax, the gleeful energy—it was the “Lisa Carver voice” that you refer to earlier in the book as being sort of an act. But it seems like that must be an innate part of you, too, that it’s not just an act or a lie. Or were you going for the trope of the happy ending there?

Carver: It was never a lie. That voice was always a part of me, but yes, that was the trope of the happy ending. I hadn’t been integrated long enough to be able to speak with authority about what my life looks like now, so I think I did call on my old voice. Sort of like, hey, can you say something here that’s happy and true? Because I can’t yet.

But that all definitely happened. I went to Nevada. I was with someone I loved. I didn’t think about my father all day. Definitely one of the best days of my life. But I wasn’t able…  I’m not able even now to describe what it’s like to be a real person.

Rumpus: You say at the very end of the book that you still, after all this time, feel like you’re lying. There’s an obsession with the real in memoir. Writers talk a lot and write a lot about the slipperiness of memory. You, of course, are talking about something far beyond that everyday slipperiness that most of us experience. There was someone who was purposefully trying to fuck with your memory…

Caarver: More than someone. It was a whole system. My father and my mother and the girlfriends and other family members all played their part…

Rumpus: So you had nowhere to look for an accurate reflection, or no one to reflect back to you your own experience…

Carver: I have my cousin. She saw a lot, and we’re still close, and we are able to say to each other yes, that really happened. And then I have police records, and all the letters I’ve kept from my childhood. And I have some photos. I still have these actual things, and I can turn to these things to help me…

Rumpus: It sounds like these physical artifacts have been important to you. You say, “A believed child is the safest child.” And it’s so easy to tell a very young child they’re wrong, or to dismiss a very young child’s account of something. It’s difficult for anyone looking back into his or her own childhood and trying to locate the truth, or the honest perception. I’m wondering how you see the relationship between factual truth and honesty, an honest accounting. How do we trust children or our selves as children, our very early memories?

Carver: I don’t really care if it happened exactly as I remember it or not. It doesn’t matter. Obviously I was really fucked with. The details, some of them, I’m sure I invented at the time to cover up other stuff, and now what I remember is the invention, and that’s OK. I know the dynamics now, and that’s all that matters.

I know—well, I believe—I have a memory of—pornographic films being made of me when I was a little child. My father was eventually reported to the police for being a child pornographer, so that sort of corroborated my memory of it being done to me. And I met one of the people who’s now grown but who had as a child been filmed by my father. While I was writing the book I was pretty obsessed with tracking down one of these films with me in it, because I still doubted myself. But now, if somebody handed me that film, I would absolutely not watch it. There’s no reason I need to see myself or any other child being raped. How it plays out in my relationships now matters, but the details of what exactly happened, and my veracity, my exactness, that doesn’t matter. What do I care? It’s over.

Rumpus: It must feel good to be at that point.

Carver: I think that I really cared so much before because parts of me knew that they had to hold on to that information for me. They had to keep it safe for future me, for me now, or they would be dead like my father wanted them dead, like all perpetrators want that memory dead. So those memories were like people, like little girls, and they had to be believed; they had to be seen.

This is going to sound like weird therapy talk, but once I said to the little girls, the memories, “I believe you all. I believe all of you. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says. It doesn’t matter if there’s any proof otherwise, I believe you all,” it was like they all said, “Oh, thank God. I did my job, and I can rest.” Like they all grew up at once and became part of me. So now I don’t have to hang onto it anymore.

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The movie is a cult classic and has spawned sequels as well as inspired later films, such as The Ring (and its Japanese original) in which the same sort of thing occurs except this time (perhaps more germane to the topic of pornography) from a VHS tape.

The obscenity trial of Michael Peacock arose from such fears of the supernatural power of the image and word, and even though he was found not guilty and we are told these laws will perhaps undergo a radical reevaluation, the fear will stay with us.

 ***

Peacock, a sex worker, was arrested in 2009 by an undercover policeman from the UK’s Human Exploitation and Organised Crime Command for selling sexually explicit DVDs that featured fisting, piss-play, and BDSM. He was charged under the Obscene Publications Act. Though the acts on the DVD were not illegal, selling depictions of them was.

The obscenity laws hinge on something less defined, even, than pornography: “moral corruption/depravity”. A legal definition is, “to deprave means to make morally bad, to debase or to corrupt morally. To corrupt means to render morally unsound or rotten, to destroy the moral purity or chastity, to pervert or ruin a good quality; to debase; to defile it.” Of course, it doesn’t matter much what the state’s definition is – they will choose what depraves and corrupts.

The counter to this, often raised by intellectuals and cultural heroes concerned with sexuality, is that sexual morality and ethics are about consent. This is true, and well-said. But this is not, as often thought, a point overlooked by obscenity laws. Indeed, it is a truth all-but conceded by them. The substance of these laws is that when we watch certain sexual acts, we give up our consent. The distribution of and ultimately the encounter with these images corrupts us without us having much say.

Like the kids in the woods, by the time the tape is playing, it’s already too late.

During a sexual act, consent should generally be easy to establish (of course there are exceptions and victims of these exceptions) – it is an inner feeling of “go ahead” or “stop” expressed outwardly to our partner(s). This go-and-stop is ongoing throughout the act, though it can become increasingly more difficult to flesh out consent after initial consent is given.

An image, however, is one-sided. It can only assume you’ve said yes to its effects.

When we encounter an image, we are thought to be saying, “go ahead” to the image. To decide to watch or to see at all implies consent. But is it so simple? What if the recording contains something we do not take seriously, but has serious effects? What if it unleashes something we’re not ready for?

While some commentators have pondered the newness of these questions in an internet age, the magical quality of the danger in The Evil Dead and The Ring show us that these are not new questions at all, but ancient ones.

I agree wholeheartedly with the Michael Peacock’s innocence, but it will be an incomplete victory if we merely applaud and do not go on to ask these questions:

How do the image, the word, the symbol truly affect us?

***

Another recent item of porn – and law – related news: The Los Angeles City Council recently voted that porn performers must wear condoms. This law vote was ushered through under auspices of performer safety. But of course, a cultural element echoes through the decision: Should bareback porn exist?

Gay men, whether porn-performer, producer, or consumer have been arguing this at great length for a long time. Some demand it be legally abolished: It is said to promote and inspire sexual behaviors that could lead to illness.  Others revel in it: It is a demonstration of sexual freedom, and it shows that condom-less sex is not dead or wrong. Because pornography is often one of the first affirming depictions of homosexuality a gay man will see, its power to influence is understood. In fact a gay porn performer can even become a sort of cultural icon for his work displaying a sex-positive attitude.

Another example: do constantly sexualized depictions of women (or men, for that matter) in advertising affect how women feel about their bodies and their behaviors? Many liberals would be fine with pornography, but less willing to give advertisement – conceived of as being wed to corporate power – a pass. Progressives with media literacy campaigns are often the most vocal about their concerns about “objectification.”

I know firsthand that body image and presentation of the body are wed to corporate interest. Though most porn studios and producers have proved compassionate and kind, one studio owner once assured me that I needed to lose weight if I wanted to continue working, and another gently asked me to do steroids. They had perceptions of what the public wants to see, and pressured me into conforming to that image.

Of course “perfect” bodies – cut abs, huge muscles – are almost an artifact in porn. Wedged between average-bodied men of 1970s and early 1980s porn, and today’s slew of wildly popular amateur pornography and XTube, the chiseled man’s popularity may turn out to be a 1990s blip. But the idea and effects of image still drove the porn producers to push me to unhealthy acts to meet their imagined standard.

In a strange imaginary loop, these two porn producers were creating the images that they thought the public wanted, which reinforced their idea of the sort of porn they should make. Whether they were right or wrong, I struggled with both insistences, and eventually decided to ignore them. But it sure didn’t feel good. And it’s not difficult for me to see how the viewer could feel the same if he or she begins to compare himself to the models – in porn or in advertising.

 ***

Since on the one hand, we say no, media cannot affect us, and on the other, we fear its affects we turn to the experts:

A popular approach to answering how the image affects us has been through scientific experimentation and social science surveys; and science is our most occult of philosophies, filled with symbols, images, and tools. But there, we have mostly failed. Not because we haven’t gathered evidence, but because all the evidence seems to clash. How can there be so many books on sex and violence that reach different conclusions?

In the meantime, a demand is made: Take sides.

Will watching fisting make someone want to try fisting? Yes or no. Do you believe that bareback sex in porn makes the viewer want to have condom-less sex? Yes or no. Will watching horror movies make you more prone to violent acts? Yes or no. Do fantasy portrayals of incest in pornography glorify abuse?  What about portrayals of rape?  What about gay or lesbian sex?  What about general corruption and depravity – can watching a sexual or violent act make you a worse person?

The questions gather and back us into a corner, so it is easy to see why such a callous and ridiculous statement as Andrea Dworkin’s, that, “The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too,” becomes appealing: It’s not an answer, it’s an escape.

***

Just give up one or the other – your values or your sexuality.

Yes or no, please.

But most importantly, answer quickly, there are monsters at the door.

***

Permitting one form of the image on principle or cultural critique alone, but not permitting it in another form proves very difficult, and all arguments seem to undo themselves.

For example, one might object to comparisons of pornography and sexualized images of women in advertising because porn is consumed privately and advertising (sometimes) isn’t. But the logical consequence could easily – and often has easily – become: we cannot have women depicted sexually in public. To keep the argument logically consistent: in porn, we consent and so it’s okay, in advertisement, we don’t consent, so it’s not. That means banning advertisement with questionable content, back to women showing their ankles off in ads, and wearing full-length dresses otherwise.

More evidence for how problematic this is: Would you object, as many did, to gay cruising site Manhunt.com’s billboard campaign prominently displaying two men about to kiss (and surely, one thing leads to another) to anyone on the street? Yes or no.

What if they were kissing and you had your kids with you?

Since you’re reading this essay, I suspect your answer would be no, but you can see how the question weaves into others, and evades easy answers.

What if they were fucking?

Whether it’s behind closed doors or freely displayed must shrink in importance in our conversation next to the question, “How does the image affect us?” But to answer, we need to do more than respond with feelings and thoughts.

The menace of the image and its affects leads some to talk supernaturally about images, as if stating their names is evidence enough for their power. Because the depiction of the act is what has initially repulsed the critic, one only needs to state what the act is to argue. This is why arguments against pornography are often simply descriptions of the act. “He had a bullwhip up his rectum!” anti-Maplethorpe censors cried. Or, in Chris Hedges’s essay (in an otherwise thoughtful book – Empire of Illusion -from an otherwise thoughtful man, in which he desperately clings to Dworkin’s escapist quote), “The Illusion of Love”, he falls under the (sexual?) trance of naming what he sees and believing this naming presents some sort of  self-evident truth:  “…oral sex, vaginal sex, double penetration, and double anal.” He quotes a performer who says during a shoot, “Shove it up my fucking ass…: and “Fuck, motherfucker…” and “Fucking love it…” No explanations required for Hedges, who is always more rigorous than this.

The supernatural: To say its name is to evoke it.

 ***

Of course, no name, word, image, has the same effect on everyone. And each image changes meanings in context. A doctor sees (and even enters) naked bodies all the time, but this is not considered sexual. Yet I’ve played a doctor in a porn, having sex with my “patient” – and this, of course, was meant to elicit arousal. Furthermore, some patients may be aroused by their doctors, and vice versa, or else why would the fantasy be portrayed in pornography at all?

***

All of this is another way of saying that – even in the light of Peacock’s innocence – the State and its supporters still consider us their children. Why else would they present us with monsters? How else could an entire law hinge on something as clumsy, as childlike as “to make morally bad”?

We’re expected, not just through obscenity laws, but by so many governmental and corporate actions, to share morality. And this morality will be decided by a group of our leaders. This, in spite of the fact that we all agree they are no longer our leaders, now that confidence in government has waned.

They and their processes are, we all know, corrupted and depraved.

Their argument goes that individual morality is impossible. Better to come up with it under a system and a structure, otherwise there would be too many individuals striving for too many different goals, and all those would clash. Especially when it comes to culture, individual morality would collapse all order. We’d have burning buildings, raped women, busted out shop windows. The environment, the whole world would turn against us. The demons would be unleashed.

But if we trained ourselves to be unafraid of individualized morality, we could see easily that everything they’ve told us to be afraid of is already here, and that they are the product of collective morality. Destruction, famines, sexual fear. And of course, war is collective morality’s greatest expression.

 ***

“Sexual morality is about consent.” What “consent” really needs to indicate here is context. Contexts arise from a strata of culture, nature, race, class, but most importantly from the individual. Our duty is to be unafraid of bearing the responsibility of the image, especially the sexual one. We continue to be the children of the State so long as we do not (or are not allowed to) develop – and it’s important to note here that culturally as well as biologically, sexual development is a dividing line between being a child and being an adult.

So Michael Peacock’s innocence is not merely a legal triumph, but an invitation to a shift in thinking. The responsibility of sex, pornography, and more broadly, the image is more and more becoming ours. Now is the time to investigate what that means or we’ll still be stuck in the old narrative, and we must be willing to do this as individuals. We must even go so far as to say that it is our right to decide whether we want to be corrupted or depraved.

Pornography, the image, and art in general is not fantasy, nor is it real. It is something beyond both. It has fantasy effects and real effects and everyone will encounter them differently.

We cannot understand if it affects us without understanding how and why – and that is a long and sometimes frightening trip that only freedom can afford. If we leave any aspect of it to the State, we only have the two choices presented in The Evil Dead: Throw it all into the fire or die.

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“No one tries to figure out how someone ended up straight, though it takes just as much explaining as being gay. All etiological arguments are reactionary from the start.”

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I’d found the only room I could afford near the Prado in a pension that was being run as a transvestite brothel. We all shared the same bathroom. The boys called me El Guapo when they passed me in the hallways. They worked outside the gates of the Parque del Retiro while the Moroccans sold hash inside the gates or near the pond with the rowboats. The Moroccans even had business cards. It was all very civilized.

Then it was four late one night or early one morning. I hadn’t talked with anyone or slept for so long it didn’t matter. There was another argument cooking up from behind a wall in my room. The police had come the night before and left after a few minutes.

I leaned out the window looking over the little courtyard and lit a cigarette staring at the hung laundry of dresses owned by the skinny South American boys. There was an ashtray on the windowsill with a train wreck of cigarettes scattered in its palm.

I’d written her a letter and she’d promised she’d come see me.

She was going to stand me up.

I’d never gotten over her, the best kiss I had. She was a hooker. But she hadn’t told me she was. I didn’t know her name for the first few days. It wasn’t even a contrived gimmick. Somehow it just hadn’t occurred to me to ask for it.

I’d thought she was a little nervous to sleep with me because she was a virgin.

It only lasted three days.

The last time I saw her was on her porch:

“What’s wrong Brin?”

“I dunno. I just don’t have anything to ask you and I don’t have anything to say to you. I don’t know why.”

“Well, that’s when you say goodbye.”

She was right.

The night I met her I’d been working on a story about someone with the lousy luck of falling for a prostitute. When we were eighteen and first visiting Europe, a painter friend of mine had sketched a portrait of a haunted and haunting girl standing behind a window in the Red Light District and had given it to her. The real girl didn’t especially care, but the girl in my story did. And I was trying to figure out a way for them to kiss and have it mean something because I liked the poetry of prostitutes withholding a kiss and giving up all that other stuff.

The girl behind the counter at the cafe followed me outside where I was smoking and asked what I’d been writing about, then gave me a very startled look when I told her. I asked if I’d said something wrong and she asked if I could walk her home when she got off at 3am.

Along the way she told me she enjoyed the walks to the boys’ houses more than the boys.

I’d been waiting for her a long time.

I’ve been waiting for her a long time.

I’ll be waiting for her a long time.

At some point I needed to put some miles between us.

I hadn’t told anyone when I flew over to Madrid and stayed out all night Christmas Eve until that strange hour when the Chinese step out into the copper street light haze and huddle on hundreds of street corners across town clutching dozens of shopping bags full of to-go food for cheap. Chance being stuck over a toilet for 10 hours and go sightseeing through the nighttime streets that get started around 3 am. Walk until the Chinese have abandoned the street corners and turn off the Gran Via and head down to Puerta del Sol along a path where all the Africans are waiting for you peddling movies and music and scarves and sunglasses on blankets that if a whistle echoes down a corridor that Policia are approaching are packed up by the hundreds, swept up as quick as dominoes tip over, and two seconds later a thriving black market economy is a ghost echo of footsteps haunting 80 different directions, weaved into all the other squeaky Windex-scrubbed reflections on storefront windows of urgent men casting hectic glances at their fake designer watches.

Nurse your hangovers with scenic strolls down the street for some coffee near that statue of a bear reaching up into a tree who looked just like you going for a first kiss, just as shy and deliberate and off-key pilfering some girl’s museum gift shop while she was a little amused that you offered to read her palm because obviously you couldn’t read palms and just wanted an excuse to touch her.

For entertainment give Don Quixote another half-assed try in Spanish on a bench until the tourist buses roll up and the Gypsies move in like a kicked over ant nest and set up their coordinated strikes.

Then someone knocked on my door.

“El Guapo! Correo!”

I open the door to one of the transvestites with half her makeup off. I was pretty sure her name was “Daisy.” She handed me a letter. I opened it.

Just a date and a time and a place.

“I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope they won’t.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

You can always tell the people who fall for the kind of beauty that subtracts rather than adds something to their lives.

She had cigarette-stain eyes. I look into brown eyes rather than at all the other colors. I looked into her eyes and saw my own private pawnshop. I kissed her and it turned into a warehouse. Pure and complicated. The more she talked the less I knew about her. I liked the stories she told. Her body language stuttered to keep up. Holding her hand felt like sanitizing a lethal injection needle.

With no buildup or wind-down, apart from us nearly fucking, we’d said goodbye. She’d just finished doing some handstands for no particular reason. I didn’t see her again for three years.

I was outside her cafe again, long after she’d quit working there. I was leaning over a table writing in a notebook when I heard some roller skates smack the pavement. I looked up and saw her.

“Can I sit down?”

I stood up and we looked at each other for a while. I pulled out her chair and she sat down.

“I know you.”

I nodded.

“Brad?”

“Something like that. It doesn’t matter.”

“I remember. You were writing a story about a guy who falls in love with a prostitute.”

I nodded.

“It’s strange, it happened to me.”

“Hold on a second.” I tried to calibrate this. “You fell in love with a gigolo?”

“No,” she smiled. “I was a hooker.”

“When?”

“For the last 5 years. I just got out last summer.”

“You were a hooker when we met?”

“I was.”

“But you were working here.”

“Part time.”

“But you were in school.”

“How do you think I paid my tuition?”

“Your step-dad was a dentist!”

“It’s creepy you remember so much. Are you in love with me or something? I came so close to telling you but, you know, it just sorta took care of itself.”

***

In Madrid my phone rings…

“You know who this is?”

“You’re the only person who has my phone number.”

“I’m at Plaza Mayor.”

“Okay. You’re close by.”

“I’m high on ecstasy.”

“Delightful.”

“I’m drunk, too.”

“Come over.”

“You’re sure you know who this is?”

“I already answered that question.”

“Where do you live?”

I gave her my address.

“I’ll call you when I leave.”

4am. Phone rings:

“Still up?”

“No, I’m fast asleep.”

“I’ve been dancing all night. I just got out of a swimming pool five minutes ago. I stink. Still want me to come over?”

“Get over here.”

“Positive?”

4:15am. Phone rings:

“I’m getting the heebie-jeebies. I haven’t talked with you in a really long time. This is really weird.”

“Don’t worry. I have strawberries. It’s fine.”

“You have… strawberries?”

“Exactly.”

“You have strawberries?”

“Exactly. Nothing weird. Bowl of strawberries. Very wholesome arrangement. Everybody’s happy.”

“Okay.”

“Just come over.”

There was a pause and I felt something in my brain creak.

“I don’t think I––-” Raped-, pregnant-, aborted-pause. “Okay. I’ll be there in a second.”

A few minutes later I saw her get out of a cab on the Gran Via. I dug into my pocket and pulled out my keys and flicked them out the window. I heard them connect with the pavement.

She entered the room and sat on the floor and grabbed a handful of strawberries and smoked from a pouch of Drum tobacco.

She didn’t say much at first. Every ten minutes or so she’d go to the bathroom and leave the door open while she pissed. After the first time I leaned over and watched her.

“Why don’t you close the door?” I asked.

“Why should I?”

This seemed to me a very sensible answer.

“I dunno.”

“I’m peeing.”

“I know that.”

“Welllll?”

“Well, do you ever close the door?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No. It’s just weird you’re so… ”

She wiped herself and flushed the toilet.

“What?”

“I dunno,” I said. “It’s intimate.”

She came back over to the carpet and sat cross-legged facing me.

She wouldn’t say anything.

“Tell me how you got into it,” I asked, feeling like a jackass.

“Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.”

I gave her a look.

“My sister.”

“Is she still working?”

“No,” she said, pressing a strawberry against her lips. “She was a meth-addict. So was my mom. But my sister kicked it and got out of turning tricks.”

“So you worked on the street?”

“No. I worked at places they have set up for it.”

“Which ones?”

“A bunch.”

“What kinda type goes for it?”

She smiled. “There’s no type. It’s everybody. Nobody.”

“So what celebrities did you fuck?”

“Sometimes. Sure. That guy, Ruffalo. Something Ruffalo. Christian Slater was a client––-”

“Only Vancouver?”

“No,” she said. “Other places. They give you an apartment. They set you up with a room. I’d write my essays or study and the johns would come over and I’d buzz them in. They’d leave, I’d go back to the books until the next one arrived. I worked at a place in Japan for a while. Hostess thing. I didn’t go over there for it. But it finds you.”

“How’d you get out?” I asked. Are we on Larry fucking King? KISS HER.

“Roll me another cigarette.” She waited until I’d finished and handed it over and lit it for her. “You do that nicely. I always was a little crazy for how you roll and prepare those things. Well, a john approached me and I could see it in his eyes.”

“See what?”

“It happens to these guys. They fall for you.”

“But you never fall for them?”

“Anyway––-this guy was gray, gray but not ugly. He was wearing an expensive but all wrinkled-up suit. And he came over to the bed and sat down beside me. He told me I didn’t belong there. And I was pretty cold about it and told him if he was feeling something for me it was probably a useful thing to know that for me love was money.”

“You still believe that?” I asked.

“No,” she corrected. “But he said that was all right. It was fine. He took a second looking at the ground then turned back to me while he reached into his briefcase. He told me he had money. Then he asked what my price was to get out. I asked him to repeat himself—just to be a bitch about it—and he found the checkbook in that at-ta-ché briefcase of his. I couldn’t breath when I saw it. Sorry. I have to pee.”

She tried to get up but stumbled. Behind her I saw a wallet drop from her pocket. She struggled to get to her feet and made it, albeit a little woozy. With her back to me I swiped the wallet. She had the bathroom door open so I couldn’t case it.

“Had you ever put a price on getting out before?”

“Roll me another one,” she said, flushing the toilet. “No, I’d never put a price on it. Not before that moment. But I thought about it. And I just, you know, crunched the numbers.”

“What’d you come up with?”

“I told him I wanted him to pay my full tuition up to a doctorate in whatever I wanted. I wanted a car. I wanted an apartment for a year. I wanted 20 grand upfront.”

“And he tore off a check?”

“He tore off a check. We walked out the door together.”

“You were with him?”

“No. I saw him. But I wasn’t with him. It was just your average sugar daddy arrangement for a while.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Anyway, then I met somebody. And I fell in love with that somebody. That had never happened before. Or since. And I told the guy who’d gotten me out of the game and he was good about it and backed off. He gave me space with it. And the guy I fell in love with fell in love with me. We played house. Two years I was with him. And it was––I’m not sure how to put it––it was true.”

I reached over and took the cigarette from her mouth.

“Why are you looking at me like that, Brad?”

“You knew my fucking name when you were on roller skates, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Is everything you’re telling me made up?”

“Maybe.”

“Keep telling the story, Roxanne.”

“I played it straight with this boy and a lot of stuff was around the corner. Playing house was nice. But one night I’m out walking my dog and I bump into that john. The sugar daddy. He offers me 15 grand for one night. I took it. Turned the trick. And the next morning I go back to the guy I was living with and confess it.”

“Why?”

“Because I loved him.”

“I got that part. I meant, why’d you turn the trick?”

“Anyway––I told him it was a horrible mistake. I told him that I loved him. And he said he loved me and that we were done. That was a few months ago. Biggest mistake of my life.”

“So the john bought you out and bought you back in?” I felt like a CNN ticker.

“I’m getting tired.”

“Did you kiss the john?”

“I’m sleepy.”

“Sleep here.”

“Umm… I don’t think so.”

“Not with me. Just sleep here. I can’t sleep on the bed anyway.”

“Why?” she asked.

I shrugged. “It intimidates me.”

“I can’t stay here with you. I can’t stay here.”

“Why?”

“Because this is better. For you I mean. It’s a good little memory to gnaw on as it is.”

She got up off the floor and looked at me, tilting her head to one side.

“I have your name,” I said.

“Do you now? You know my name?”

“I don’t know it,” I corrected. “I have it.”

I pulled out her wallet and stood up and gave it to her. We both held onto it for a second before I let go and went over to my window and watched the dawn breaking until she came out the entrance of the apartment a suicide’s jump below my window.

Later on I had a book reading to give in Vancouver. She found out about it. She wrote me that she wanted to come. Then she fucked up the dates and missed it. She said she was going out of town for the summer but wanted a copy of my book. We were supposed to have a walk before she left but she screwed up preparing to pack and a bunch of stuff so all I had was five minutes to give her the book, have a cigarette, and say goodbye.

Then there was the issue of writing an inscription.

I went downstairs to meet her in front of my apartment building and she arrived and it was rainy and she had a hood on. Her car was crammed full of stuff and there was more tied down to the roof. She came over and I lit two cigarettes in my mouth and gave her one and my hand was shaking a little. I gave her the book and she glanced at the cover and compared the photo of me as a kid with my face now.

“That’s you, huh?”

“That’s me.”

I was watching her very carefully. I did not want that fucking inscription read until after she was out of my presence. I didn’t want to be accountable for it. Especially not at that moment. I kept thinking, Take the book hooker-bitch. Take it. Just take the fucking thing and go.

She went to open the front cover.

“Hey! Quit it. Don’t open that here.”

“Why? You gave it to me. It’s mine, isn’t it?”

She opened it.

“What does the title of your book mean, by the way? What does Sic mean?”

“It’s a dumb title because nobody gets it. You write ‘sic’ beside something when you’re saying it’s their mistake and not yours. It’s about fault. It’s attribution of blame.” I end up speaking like my father when I’m nervous.

“I get it. So, should I, like, write ‘sic’ beside this inscription?” She pointed at the word love.

I put my head down for a minute.

“Attribution of blame,” she repeated. “Fault. Whose fault is that… Brin?”

She giggled a bit and stood up and flicked her cigarette.

I walked into the rain to see how hard it was coming down. It was kinda misty.

“Do you have a pen, Brin?”

“Yup.” I gave it to her.

“I know whose fault it is.” She opened up the front cover and glared at the word.

She leaned over and I pulled back and everything was fine until she kissed me hard for a few moments, then slipped off my lips as softly as snow falling from a branch in the stillness of night.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Artist Jason Novak brings us his tale “Depressing Sex: An essay in pictures.”

Enjoy:

***

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“It’s become a high holy day of whores. The one day that we all remember the real victims, not these made up situations. A lot of them are not victims, but people like to think we are.”

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At The Advocate, Conner Habib reflects on the “outing” of teacher Kevin Hogan as a former gay porn performer, articulates the cloudy nature of public conversations about porn in our society, and argues that Hogan’s potential firing should be a “shared responsibility.”

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To read it, click the image, then zoom toward the text at the center of the graphic.

Click image to download and enlarge:

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A NY Times Magazine article on the state of sex education highlights a Philadelphia Quaker Friends high school teacher’s comprehensive approach to teaching sex ed. With Mr. Vernacchio’s emphasis on pleasure as well as emotional complexities, acknowledgment of gender biases, and lessons on female ejaculation, this looks like possibly the best course ever.

(Via Feministing)

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