Everything Happened to Susan
Read Everything Happened to Susan Online
Authors: Barry Malzberg
Happened
To
Susan
Barry Malzberg
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
Susan permits the man to enter her, feels him squirm and inflate inside, the rising pressure, and then, as if from a great distance, the sting of his discharge. “Oh boy,” he gasps unprofessionally, obviously out of the role, and then he remembers his lines: “Screw you, lady,” he says, disengaging with a grimace, “that’s just to show you you don’t mean nothing to me. I don’t get involved with women.” He staggers to his feet, breathing heavily, a strange and absent look on his face, twitching under the lights. Then, “I don’t believe this,” he says. “I just can’t believe any of this.”
“Cut!” the director screams, “cut, you screw-up!”
Susan groans, knowing there will be a retake, and thinks about the pain of entrance. She is not quite sure how long they have been working, but she is sore all over …
Susan has answered an advertisement in a weekly sex newspaper calling for young actresses or models, one hundred dollars a day, honest work, no fooling around. No other details were offered. The answering service which took her call told her to report to an address on the upper West Side the following morning where she was subjected to an interview, which necessitated her undressing. Ten or fifteen girls had shown up but only three or four passed. Susan realized the advertiser was in the pornographic film business when she saw the script and was told she would have to pretty much work on her actor’s instinct to improvise dialogue.
The man conducting the interviews said his name was Phil and that he really had nothing to do with the owners, and did not, in fact, know who these owners were. “You got to face the facts,” Phil told her after she had put her clothes on and finished the biographical details, “there’s a big market for this kind of stuff, and, it can be done with taste and style. Potentially, skin flicks are a very good thing; we can reach all kinds of people who would otherwise have nothing to do with their messages and we can teach them something, if we only learn to sneak it in. What we want is a more intellectual kind of production: a little taste and skill along with the heavy stuff. There’s got to be plenty of plot to make it redeeming. But you don’t have to worry about nothing when you go to work for us; if you go good, there might even be legitimate opportunities for you. This is a growth situation.” Phil had added that he had absolutely no personal interest in the actors or actresses, a lot of these damn fly-by-nights were just using blue films as an excuse for sex or worse but he, Phil, was all business and had no intention of asking Susan for a date. On the other hand, if she wanted to have a cup of coffee with him after the session that was perfectly all right. He would like to get to know her a little better and discuss several interesting things. Right after the filming, he would look forward to it …
In the script, Susan is playing a young girl who has come to New York to look for a legitimate break in show business but has instead been forced into the making of pornographic films to support herself. The girl she is playing has had some kind of unhappy affair with a naive man who thought her forward and accused her of making indecent advances to him out of the sacred bond of wedlock. Resultantly, she suffers from a deep sense of shame and now seeks to degrade herself. All of the characters in this film are seeking degradation. In the course of the role, then, she is to have intercourse three or four times, as well as much petting, and one incident of sado-masochism with a tall man holding a whip. “He won’t really hurt you but you’ve got to
scream,”
the director said, and when the whip comes down on her naked back, she feels cold terror moving through her and she screams so loudly that the whip-man backs off, trembling. “What’s this?” he says. “Why are you taking it so personally,” and the director says
cut this,
and that is another sequence that must be reshot.
Susan also came to New York several months ago to look for a legitimate break in show business, but, the fact is, she has very little talent and no luck and thus she has been forced into the making of pornographic films to support herself. Presently she is living with an unpublished writer named Timothy West who feels he is on the edge of a major breakthrough in style and technique but, at the present time, is an assistant supervisor for the New York City Department of Welfare at a salary of twelve thousand dollars per year. “You have no idea how doomed the welfare system in this country is,” Timothy has told her, “but you can make a very good living at it, and you can hardly call it work.” He’d met Susan at a singles bar five or six weeks before and had little difficulty in talking her into living with him after their first night together since she was two months overdue in her rent and her landlord was quite hostile. “I don’t know what to say, Susan,” he’d said to her when she’d explained to him that, on the following day, she was going to report for an interview for what she suspected was a role in a stag movie. “On the one hand, I think we’ve reached a point in our relationship where I very definitely don’t feel personally threatened by this kind of thing but, on the other, I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing you should be in, for your sake.
“Of course the dirty movie is more or less a metaphor for the total corruption of human relationships which we’ve seen in the Assassination Age, the utter collapse of real feeling and connection but then again, maybe a new ethic will come out of these ashes, one built upon an acceptance of the body and all that it entails. It has to be your decision, doesn’t it? Whatever you do, I’m sure that it will be for the best.” And then he had suggested that, since they both had to get up early in the morning, they postpone having sex for just this one night so that they could be well rested and build up even more anticipation for the next night.
“Of course,” he had said, clenching and unclenching his hands, a fine line of sweat appearing above his upper lip as he flexed his shoulders over his typewriter and shook his head, rereading a difficult paragraph, “of course, if you feel that this is a defense-mechanism of some sort and that I’m really
avoiding
sex or if you really want it, then, well, just say the word and we’ll go to it. I have a great deal of desire, it’s just that I think we shouldn’t take sex as a matter of course. God, I can’t seem to make the metaphors in this scene work. If only I could do it, I could send it to the
Hudson Review
but for them the point of view has to be basically urbane.” She had to say no, that it was perfectly fine with her, that they certainly could let the sex go for this one night. Timothy said the trouble with the short-story market is that it seemed to be almost all gone even though the short story was the basic American form, but, if you could get something into one of the prestigious quarterlies which still carried them, editors and publishers all over New York would come to your door extending contracts and checks for your first novel.
The actor with whom she has had most of her scenes had ejaculated early on, of course, and since then they have been simulating. It is very late in the day, however, and even simulation is becoming painful for him; the director has had to conceive certain camera angles to hide his genitals. “I don’t want you to think there’s anything wrong with me,” the actor whispers to her as he wedges against her thighs, seizes her breasts, begins to work on them for the twentieth time that day (she has long since lost all sensitivity there), “but I just had a real heavy session last night, not expecting today would be anything like this and there just isn’t too much left in me. Do you want to go out and have a cup of coffee afterward? I feel that we should establish some kind of relationship.” He says all of this as he is slobbering over her breasts, which causes some of the words to be mumbled so that she catches only half. She says thank you very much but she already has an appointment with someone. Amazingly, he has a sudden erection; it prods her enormously as the director gives an
ah
! of satisfaction, and the actor says he understands perfectly …
There are five or six actors in the film Susan is making; she has no clear impression of any of them other than the boy she is with. From time to time, the script calls for group scenes but, for reasons best known to the director or the scriptwriter, she is to engage in sexual acts only with this one boy. The others pair off. While she is on the floor, underneath the heavy lights, she can hear the sounds of stroking and gasping around her; she has a sense of beams of light cutting through the scene and imagines that a panoramic technique is being invoked. Then too the light will cut off suddenly for seconds or minutes while she supposes the focus of the film swings to the other pairs of actors. In addition to what is directly involved in the film, there seem to be a whole series of films being made in this enormous loft. Down at its perimeter there are other groups of people, more cameras; in the exact center of the area, a more ambitious documentary seems to be in preparation with domestic animals posed around a couple on the floor and almost concealing them. This particular operation is a very large one, but perhaps a number of film companies are saving on expenses by using one common, huge space. Susan tries not to think about any of this too much. At the beginning of the shooting session she decided that a narrowing of perspective is the solution, a focusing of her responses to the immediate situation in which she is involved and leaving the larger implications of what life is all about to others.
Early in her dramatic career, in a class called Intermediate Acting, she had been told by the university instructor that she seemed to do her best work when she was in a limited, concrete situation, and she had never forgotten this. “Try not to think of abstractions,” the instructor warned her, “most actors find these very confusing.” Susan has resultantly not thought of abstractions in many years although the instructor had turned out to be a compulsive adulterer who had had relations with most of the girls in his class and, in a fit of insanity, had married one of them as the only way of getting into bed with her.
Susan, now twenty-three, had not had intercourse until the age of seventeen, having come from a closely knit suburban family in northern Ohio where most of the opportunities offered her had been in the back seats of cars parked dangerously near the road. She had felt that there must be something more to life and its Ultimate Act than headlights, insects, and the whimpering of the male as he jammed a knee against the steering post trying to lean over the seat. She had been deflowered in a fraternity house during her freshman year at college, however, and had not had any problems with sex since. In her junior year she decided to limit her sexual activities to those boys with whom she had established a relationship of some sort and this cut down on the frequency, if not on the intensity, of her couplings. She had never had an orgasm but had not found anything objectionable so far in sex.
After college she lived with three men before Timothy. Two of them had been vaguely artistic; the other had wanted to marry her after they had established a comfortable, continuing relationship of many years’ duration. Aside from one demented coupling with her roommate in their sophomore year of college (her roommate had offered to show her that orgasm was always the same no matter who the partner), Susan’s sex life had been thoroughly unremarkable up until this point. It was in no way a preparation for this branch of show business.