(Please note: This is a follow-up to, and meant to be read after reading “Peep Show,” which was also posted serially here back in September and which can be read all in one piece by clicking on "Peep" or "Show," above.)
(Barely relevant introductory anecdote:
At a party now nearly a year ago, among about a dozen people at a long restaurant table, a poet friend of mine, slightly tipsy, uttered the kind of wisdom that only the truly wise and tipsy can intone. She got the attention of everyone around her by loudly proclaiming, in response to overhearing someone’s discussion of something naughty she’d recently seen, "I LOVE porn!" There was a pregnant pause as we waited for potentially juicy bits to follow, but our friend said no more and people went back to their conversations. My poet friend sat for a moment, gazing confusedly at her mesclun, and then said almost to herself now, "I don’t love porn," and then finally, "I hate porn." "Peep Show" and now, "After," are, in part, my infinitely more wordy version of her three statements after twenty-plus years of ambivalence about porn, strippers, and, you know, all that kind of stuff.)
***
After (part 1)
Cliches to live by:
1. Sex sells.
2. Write what you know.
In June 2002, my therapist of six years was retiring from her practice, retiring quite young – around 50, I guessed – to pursue the sculpting career she’d abandoned long ago. My wife had left me eight months earlier (on September 12, 2001, to be exact, that timing being just about her only unforgivable act ) – women were ditching me left and right. “Laura,” my shrink, was a native Californian, a small, attractive woman in her late mid-forties with freckles and blond hair with some pleasant grey sneaking in; she was thin and thoughtful, with a face that, while lined and angular, was still gentle. She had kind eyes and solid insights. During that final appointment, we were talking about one of my fundamental topics, porn and strippers, of course, and about their relationship to me, and my relationship to my mother and her feminism, and round and round we went, as ever. One of the main reasons I had originally gone to therapy was to address the shame and guilt I felt about my sexual predilections. Actually, that’s not quite right – I went to therapy, in large part, to “cure” myself of said predilections/obsessions, of the need to get off by objectifying women through porn.
But this session was about closure (I had long since decided that a “cure” was not the solution any more than it’s the answer for a guiltily gay man) and we were focusing on my desire to write about all of the above. (The other major reason I started therapy was to rid myself of my hopeless procrastination. What I had succeeded in doing for much of my time in therapy was to neatly combine these disparate elements: I procrastinated about dealing with wanting to write about porn.) A dozen years and four therapists later, while the shame was not gone, it was markedly reduced, but the “adult” material remained, if less obsessively and tortuously so, a substantial part of my sexual life and identity, a part that I had come to, more or less, accept. During that last session, Laura and I talked about my progress over the years, about my plans for the future, for the writing. I told her that I was petrified, that any such writing, if done properly, would offend some people, alienate others, and, worst of all by far, expose me. As the session ended, I told her that I didn’t know if I could go through with it. Laura paused, I think pondering the uncharacteristically sweeping statement she was about to make, and the burden she was going to leave me with: “It’s kind of your life’s work.” It’s the last thing I remember her saying.
***
After reading “Close” in public at the benefit, after reading it in front of Sassafras(!), I basked in it for a day or two, after which I allowed myself a jarring, thrilling, obvious thought. What happens when I go back to the club and see her? Was my ultimate fantasy now over? Would it be tainted, somehow, by our quasi-contact in the “real world” – the world so far removed from the capsular one of the Lusty Lady? Will she like me more, or less, as a customer? How will I feel when I see her, besides more self-conscious than ever? I considered, for about a second – okay, less than a second – just avoiding her, going to the club when I know she won’t be working (I knew her schedule by heart, after all) and leaving if I saw her when I dropped in my quarter and the window opened. But, of course, that wasn’t going to happen – after the reading, I was more drawn to her than ever and much too compulsive to let it alone. And remembering her smile through the crowd as she left the benefit gave me confidence that I wouldn’t be scorned, snubbed, or laughed at. But what if I am snubbed, what if she sees me and turns away? Or sees me and is over-solicitous, patronizing? Or turns to the other strippers, and says Hey ladies, this is the guy I was talking about, the head-case who read that story about peep shows the other week. And they all come over to my window and wave and giggle and I feel humiliated. I imagine being described as “that writer guy who’s like totally obsessed with me.” I am almost physically revulsed by the thought. Nothing could make me feel worse as a peep show customer – not only to be recognized, and recognized as a pig, but, much worse, to be recognized as pathetic, obsessed, maybe nut-case pig.
Two weeks later, on a chilly Sassafras Tuesday at 7 p.m., I head to the Lusty. The Lusty Lady sits on the border of San Francisco’s Chinatown and Italian North Beach neighborhoods and the area is always bustling with tourists. It’s evening, and I stop in at Mr. Bing’s, the tiny Chinese/tourist bar around the corner from the club for a shot and a beer. I sit down at the bar – there are no tables, no room for them at Mr. Bing’s, just a bar. College basketball blares from the wide-screen TV, which competes with the jukebox, which competes with the small Chinese men in the corner playing liar’s poker who laugh and shout as they slam dice cups on the bar. I read a little and write in my journal. A couple sits at the far end of the bar, in the only seats even vaguely obscured from the plate glass windows facing touristy Columbus Street. He is boringly handsome, a 32-year-old sandy-haired former jock in a Men’s Warehouse gray suit, carrying thirty pounds he keeps swearing he’s gonna work off; she, more casual in skirt and blouse, is a work subordinate. She’s thinner, younger, wide-eyed, dishwater-blonde hair with highlights. He is married, she is not. She’s in love; he’s in trouble. I’m stalling, distracting myself with my fantasy of their tawdry rendezvous, but I’m also enjoying the anticipation, milking the moment.
The juke plays Frisco-heavy cheese (“I left My Heart . . .”, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” Journey) mixed with old disco, Billy Joel, Abba – name your musical guilty pleasure, Mr. Bing’s got it. Something about all this sensory input feels just perfect. I have a second beer, stay maybe 45 minutes all told. Then I settle up, thank the late-middle-aged Chinese bartender who I always assume is Mr. Bing himself, and head across the street and the maybe fifty paces up Kearny to the Lusty Lady.
I get singles for a twenty from the scowling punk-rock youth at the front desk, then quarters for a five from the change machine, take a deep breath, and step into a booth. I drop in a coin and the window grinds up and . . . she’s not there. Panic, dismay. I had imagined I’d feel some relief if she weren’t there, but I feel none. I linger for a half an hour, hoping maybe she’s on dinner break, but no Sass. I swallow my pride and go to the front desk, offer a mumbled question to Scowling Boy. There’s something about asking an angry 22-year-old about the whereabouts of a stripper stage-named Sassafras that makes me feel old, uncool, and very dirty. He smiles, choosing extra-friendly as his mode of derision, loudly tells me that Sassss-aah-frassss is on vacation, she’ll be back next week. I jerk off to bad porn in a sticky-floored video booth and skulk home.
