Mission (16 page)

Perhaps my fear was a lurking remnant of my Jewishness. A racememory of pogroms past, or a touch of the guilts about a society that enabled me to live in style while others slept six to a room in cold water walk-ups. Or whatever. All I know is that some of the people who eye you on that street are really evil-looking bastards.

And there's another kind, that look as if they've just crawled out from underneath a rock; the kind it's hard to imagine walking the streets in broad daylight. Graduates from Dracula's Charm School. When I see them, I always ask myself – what the fuck do they do? How do they earn a living? I wouldn't even offer them a job in our mail room for fear they'd give our clients gangrene through licking the flaps on the envelopes. Maybe they do nothing; just exist on food stamps and welfare. Maybe some of them are even beyond that.

We stopped and looked into a bar drenched with blood-red light. Four topless go-go dancers stood on a ledge above the bottles of booze and worked the fat off their hips with the help of some funky rock. Their faces frozen behind masks of make-up; their unseeing eyes focussed on infinity. Below them, the bartenders dispensed drinks with a staggering indifference.

‘It's a local custom,' I said, as we regained the street.

The Man nooded. ‘They had the same kind of thing in Rome. Only the music wasn't so loud.'

‘What were you doing there?' I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Just passing through …'

We moved on and, before I could grab him, he stepped inside a bookstore retailing hardcore magazines and fun things for fetishists. I took a deep breath and plunged in after him. My one big worry was that he might go ape and start busting up the place; like when he overturned the tables of the money-lenders inside the Temple. But as it turned out, he was on his best behaviour. He just eyed everything with a kind of bewildered amusement. I'd seen enough of the product not to be shocked but, even so, some of the stuff on display was pretty dreadful.

And somehow, very sad.

The defiant full-frontal had come of age about the same time as I had, but years of over-exposure had dulled my initial delight at being afforded sharp focus close-ups of the female pudenda. How many trees, I wondered, had been killed to provide the paper to print all this junk? How did little girls who had skipped to school, stared wide-eyed at their first snowflake, posed prettily in pig-tails and their first party-dress, had known the joy of a kitten, the magic of fairy tales and Santa Claus – how did they end up fingering their private parts in front of a camera? What was the process of dissolution? The answer had to be more than just one hundred bucks an hour.

I glanced along the racks of magazines. Row upon row of full-page pictures of what the trade called ‘split beavers'. The Temples of Venus that had served as Muse to generations of ardent poets; inspiring them to produce lambent sonnets that had caused ladies to blush and virgins to swoon, along with more robust rhyming couplets such as those found in
Eskimo Nell.
It was a magnificent obsession; but there was little poetry to be found in the explicit anthologies on offer which, when isolated from the attendant anatomy, bore a depressing resemblance to the unstuffed gizzards of Thanksgiving turkeys.

I turned to The Man. ‘Not a pretty sight.'

‘It never was,' he replied.

I took him by the arm. ‘Come on. Let's get some fresh air.'

We went out into the street and wandered on. Wherever we looked, it was more of the same. Finally, we ended up in front of a Broadway movie theatre where they were screening
Deep Throat.
There was a small crowd gathering in front of the box office in readiness for the next performance.

The Man ran his eyes over the front-of-house display then eyed me. ‘Do we have time to take in a movie before Miriam comes off duty?'

‘We do,' I said. ‘But this isn't it. We can go to one of the places on Third Avenue.' I took hold of his arm.

He didn't move. ‘What's wrong with this one?'

‘Look,' I said. ‘Enough is enough. You saw that stuff in the bookstore. This is the film of the book. You don't need to watch this kind of thing. You already know we're sick. It will only upset you.'

‘Leo,' he said, ‘I've been around for a long time. For a lot longer than you can possibly imagine. People now aren't any different from what they were two thousand years ago. Only the scenery is new. Besides, what harm can it do me? Your head's still in one piece, and
you've seen it three times.'

I felt myself go red with embarrassement. ‘True. But that was years ago.'

Some of you who haven't seen the movie are probably familiar with its reputation. But for those people who preferred to pass by on the other side I should perhaps explain that with this particular work, skinflicks came of age. Its screening caused a minor sensation and a polarisation of opinion among committed liberals in the same way that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia following the ‘Prague Spring' of '68 caused a split between Euro-Communists and hardline Stalinists.
Deep Throat
is not a movie that invites interpretation. It has all the subtlety of a visit to a slaughterhouse.

Despite my whispered protests, The Man joined the line and blew the last of my loan on two tickets. After that, there was nothing to do but follow him inside; which I did with some misgiving.

You may have guessed that, despite my triple exposure to the unique talent of Ms Linda Lovelace, this was not my all-time favourite movie and certainly not one I would have chosen as an introduction to the art of the cinema. But there was no doubt that it told The Man where a goodly number of our heads were at. As I mentioned earlier on, Miriam was into Fassbinder, Varda, Wertmuller, Kurosawa and Antonioni. The last time I'd seen this kind of picture was five or six years ago. The magic, you might say, had worn off.

We found a couple of seats on the aisle and, as we settled in, I wondered why he'd decided to put me on the spot like this. I've got a certain amount of
chutzpah
but I didn't have the brass neck to sit through this particular movie in the company of Jesus without feeling uncomfortable. And he knew that. I could only be because he wanted to teach me something.

The house lights dimmed and I found myself praying for another black-out to hit the East Coast. I waited but, by the end of the main title, I realised that God and his son were ganging up on me.

It goes without saying that the whole sorry experience was coloured by the presence of The Man but, looking back, I believe it only heightened my objectivity; the feeling of detachment that had invaded me while standing with him on the street corner. My perception of the city, the people, of life itself, had changed; sharpened; become less – worldly? Whatever it was, I knew that there was no going back. I had not yet found The Way but The Man had gently coaxed me to take an irrevocable step forward. And as we watched Ms
Linda take an incoming round whilst massaging her gums on the pillared flesh of a second faceless studio buck, I could not help but reflect on the tawdriness of the spectacle and the spiritual poverty of the performers and producers. The explicitness of the farmyard action, the total lack of ennobling emotion and the baseness of the motivation behind its conception suddenly seemed to epitomise the mind-shrivelling nihilism that underpinned the permissive society.

Like Conrad's hero, I had journeyed towards the heart of darkness only to recoil before it engulfed me. Perhaps out of an instinct of self-preservation. For it was not only the leaden exhaust fumes, industrial wastes, aerosols and oil-slicks that were polluting the wafer-thin life envelope that was wrapped around our planet. It wasn't only our bodies that were at risk. Our minds were in danger of slow death by suffocation on the glutinous quicksand of homogenised porn that now covered the Western world. Pricks, beavers and over-blown jugs had become the graven images of the new religion, and sex-shops its shrines.

It was only new, of course, in the sense that it was the modern, media-fuelled expression of mankind's apparently timeless preoccupation with sex. As a hobby; a favour; to relieve boredom; for financial gain; as a bonus for the boys following military conquest; as a means of achieving social advancement; as a revenge weapon deployed to compensate for psychological inadequacies; as the box-office attraction in certain pre-Christian religions and the Californian brand of psychotherapy.

But in the past, excesses had led to the violent eclipse of nation-states; perversions had been held in check by hard-nosed prophets like Moses and Elijah. And they had needed to be. One of the host of injunctions that Moses had slapped on the Israelites put the blocks on anyone who got his kicks with oxes, asses, sheep and goats. Sodom and Gomorrah got theirs for indulging in more of the same only in spades. And in Greece, where they were kinder to animals, the Minotaur got his rocks off with Cretan maids and local boy scouts until Theseus turned him into ox-tail soup and made the island safe for tourists.

But nowadays, it was different. Protest was not only unfashionable, it was downright anti-social. To acolytes of the new religion, sexual licence and unbridled perversion were the central articles of faith and the cure for all the ills that beset mankind; to overtly challenged this assumption was regarded as a major heresy. Any modern, would-be
Theseus would immediately find himself denounced by self-appointed apologists for paedeophiles, necrophiles, snuff-movie fan, clubs, pig-fanciers from Appalachia, and mother-fuckers everywhere.

I had come from a humane, wholesome family but, like my contemporaries, I had swung through the Sixties, stalked the singles bars in search of talent, watched the girls on the gate-folds of
Playboy
sprout nipples and pubic hair, had subscribed to the success of
Hustler
and had treasured their famous break-through issue with the ‘Sniff-Me' cover.

I had plumbed the depths of eroticism in print and in practice and if, in the end, I had found it wanting, it was not for lack of trying. To be fair, my encounters had been limited to those available to an imaginative heterosexual but apart from that minor character defect I was a man of my time. A fully paid-up member of this crooked age. But the process of disengagement had, in all honesty, begun before The Man had arrived to bug me.

It was right that the web of hypocrisy surrounding our sexual relationships had been blown away but as society had shed its inhibitions, it had become ensnared in a new web of deceit spun by the dream merchants. The new freedom it purported to represent was merely a new form of bondage. The expanding market created the need for new and ever more extreme forms of sexual imagery to stimulate the jaded appetites of its customers. But to satisfy the desires of some meant the exploitation of others. And they were not all consenting adults working for a hundred bucks an hour; or for free, just for the hell of it. Did the five-year-old kids cajoled into
fellatio
ever recover? Did the South American slum whores killed in snuff movies ever collect? The excesses of the permissive society were no more a celebration of life than a prison riot was the celebration of the fellowship between inmates and warders.

The dream world of sexual fantasy was a cruel illusion and all attempts to turn it into reality merely increased the alienation between human beings. What we needed was not sexual freedom but freedom from sexuality. It was not a question of it being wrong, or bad, or sinful. It was unnecessary. A blind alley that led us away from self-realisation; not towards it. We had been assiduously conditioned to think of the outward expression of our sexuality as a measure of male virility and female desirability. The power of our animal magnetism and its assiduous application assured us of a favoured position
in the social pecking order. I realised now what The Man had meant when he had said that language had been designed to prevent us from understanding one another. For the misuse of language played a major part in the all-consuming quest for self-gratification. Speech had not been heaven-sent. It was a gift from ‘Brax. It made it possible for us to lie to one another, and fuelled our infinite capacity for self-deception. We all knew what was going on yet we remained party to the continuing conspiracy to deprive language of its true meaning. It had become a debased currency and the supreme example of this relentless devaluation was the word ‘love'. A word that described everything that The Man stood for, and which had been taken over by ‘Brax.

Love, in its truest sense and purest expression was a universal, self-denying emotion. Though it might, on occasion, be the bedfellow of desire, they were, in fact, discrete states of being. Physical desire was an affirmation of self; its fulfilment meant the possession of another human being. From experience, I knew that could produce some delectable moments. But I also knew that, as a social activity, it manifested itself in many guises; from a loving, stable, one-on-one relationship all the way down to gang-rape, child molestation and the Boston Strangler. And that because of it, a lot of people had, quite literally, fucked up their lives. ‘Making love', when stripped of its camouflage, described two aspects of sexual intercourse: procreation and fornication. Both well known to the prophets of old. The impulse to procreate is, as the exponents of socio-zoology tell us, triggered by the implacable desire of our genes to reproduce themselves. Fornication, strictly defined, was sexual intercourse between the unmarried but, by extension, had come to mean fucking, in any known permutation, for its own sake instead of for the sake of the kids.

A way of making friends and influencing people.

Don't let's knock it but, at the same time, don't let us delude ourselves by dignifying these two buttock-heaving modes of human behaviour with the word ‘love'. Love can exist without sex, but sex often needs to cloak itself with counterfeit love in order to make itself acceptable. Which does not mean to say that you cannot love someone and also desire them. Just don't kid yourself that they're the same thing. There is, in fact, an acid test you can apply to your relationship with the person you share your bed with. And you don't need litmus paper. All you have to do is ask yourself the following question and answer it honestly: would you still want to be with them, sharing their joys and sorrows, would you consider spending the rest of your
life with them without ever engaging in sexual intercourse? If the answer is ‘Yes', then you may really be on the point of discovering what love is all about.