Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The Professor decides to deal with her as if she were the worried parent of a teenage son, not a parole officer. He tells her that he understands her concerns, and he sympathizes. He’s willing to help her by checking in on the Kid daily and reporting to her afterward, either directly by phone or, if she prefers to have a written record of his visits, by e-mail. The Kid, of course, would continue to check in with her on his own once a week as required. His camp is not really at Benbow’s anyhow, he points out. He’s pitched his tent in an isolated spot outside the area where people gather, on a piece of property owned by Benbow, close to the Bay. His job is as a maintenance man, a part-time day job, so he’s not around the place at night. And as for the filming, there seems to be no evidence of it at present, and he, the Professor, would be sure to keep the Kid away from the scene if a crew and actors showed up and started to make an adult film. He certainly wouldn’t want the Kid mixed up in any of that!

He’s thinking, however, that maybe it would be interesting to interview some of the actors — a separate research project — and find out how they came to this line of work, how the males manage to keep their erections for so long, and do the females have actual orgasms or do they fake it? Do the actors take sexual pleasure from their work? Do the directors and the crew get turned on while filming? Or is it all, for everyone concerned, purely and simply work? Skilled labor. The manufacture of a product. Do they take pride in their product? Do they in a Marxist sense identify with it?

He’s in no sense an expert, but he’s seen plenty of porn films in his time — who hasn’t? Anyone who’s spent a night in a hotel or motel room has seen a porn film. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection has watched clips from porn films. He’s seen enough of them both ways, films and Internet clips, to find pornography too boring to watch anymore, even when he has an itch to masturbate and is alone. But he’s never seen one being made, has never seen a porn film live, as it were. Never been in the audience for a live sex show. At least not in America, and suddenly for the first time in years the Professor is remembering live sex shows in Thailand and Malaysia. He recalls being a member of an audience, being pressured by the audience, all men, mostly Europeans and Americans, to become aroused by the coupling taking place on the stage. The members of the audience nudged one another with their elbows, laughed and cheered, whistled and stomped, then settled into rapt silence, their hands buried in their trousers. No matter how odd or bizarre — male performers with grotesquely large penises, racial mixes, dwarves, huge multicolored dildos, chains, whips and rubber suits, twins, once even a set of triplets — it didn’t work for him. His fly stayed zipped, his cock remained stubbornly flaccid, buried beneath rolls of belly fat. Somehow the pressure he felt from the other men in the audience interfered with his ability to respond sexually to the show. He grew quickly bored, then detached, and finally analytical. He ended up considering the cruelly exploitive politics of the event. Another instance of late capitalist imperialism.

It would be a lot more interesting, possibly a lot more arousing, he thinks, to watch a porn film being made, to be on the actual set, close enough to the actors to see their sweating faces and the women’s breasts and nipples and their vaginas and anuses and the men’s huge thrusting penises, and to know that everything, the sucking, licking, squirming, jamming, and ramming, is being done, not for the sexual stimulation of the director and crew or for the other performers, but for the camera. For an audience that’s not present and is not situated in the present, either, but is instead located somewhere out there in the future, unknown and alone in a darkened motel room or at home in front of a computer screen, invisible to the performers and to the people observing and filming them live in real time. For pay. For money fed to the computer or the TV pay-per-view cable company by credit card number.

The parole officer, Dahlia Freed, says, Okay, I’ll give it a shot. Only temporary, though. I gotta check out the situation in person first.

When? I’d like to be here and introduce myself.

I don’t give advance notice when I make my visits. And you’ve already introduced yourself, thanks.

Well, perhaps I’ll come by your office.

Call ahead.

I will.

K: So you’re back. And lugging another gift box, I see. Whaddaya got for me this time, Haystack? No more household goods, I hope.

P: I think you’ll find these items somewhat more useful. Sorry I misread your needs this morning. Here we have a Swiss Army knife. Many blades, nine by my count. Very handy, given your circumstances. And this terrific little radio. Doesn’t need batteries. You just crank the handle and it charges the radio for eight hours’ playing time.

K: Cool.

P: And a portable telescope. To help while away the time while you’re sitting here by your tent.

K: I ain’t a peeper, y’ know.

P: Yes, I know. But you could watch the cruise ships come and go and the birds and keep track of cars and check out the visitors arriving at Benbow’s from right here by your tent. You could watch the stars at night.

K: What’re you, like the white explorer bringing high-tech presents to the low-tech Indians?

P: (laughs) Something like that.

K: What’s the Indian supposed to do in return? Carry all your shit on his back into the jungle?

P: Just talk into the little black box for an hour or so every few days.

K: It don’t look like no recorder. Is it running? I thought you was just gonna use a tape recorder.

P: It’s a digital camera. A minicamera. Very useful for making both a visual and aural record of interviews. In my field visual cues are as telling as linguistic cues. I’ll just set it on its little tripod here in the sand… and we can forget about it. It’s miked, of course. It has a very good microphone. We can speak normally and just forget it’s there.

K: You can forget about it maybe. Not me though. It’s a fucking camera. I don’t mind recorders but cameras make me nervous, man. Surveillance cameras, hidden cameras, cameras you don’t know are watching. And cameras you forget are there. Especially them. Is it running?

P: It’s running. Okay, where do you want to start?

K: No, where do you want to start? You ask the first question. Then I’ll like decide if I want to answer it. I’m only doing this because I guess I owe you. Like for talking with Dahlia this morning and cutting the deal with Benbow and all. And bringing me the knife and radio and shit. But that don’t mean I hafta tell you shit I don’t feel like telling you. Right? You’re not interrogating me, you’re interviewing me. There’s a difference, man. You’re not a cop, you’re a professor. Correct?

P: Correct. This is an interview, not an interrogation. So let’s begin by talking about your family. Everything starts there, doesn’t it? Tell me about them. Your mother, your father, and so on. Your siblings.

K: My family. That’s a joke. Siblings, that’s like brothers and sisters, correct?

P: Correct.

K: Okay. No siblings.

P: An only child then. Everyone has a mother and a father, however. At least in the beginning they do. Tell me about your parents.

K: Sure. I have a mother. No father though. I mean my mother raised me, not my father. Like there was someone who “fathered” me, but nobody who was my father. My moms, she’s the one who gave birth to me and you could say she took care of me, at least till I was a teenager and was more or less on my own. She’s alive and I guess well and lives right here in Calusa. She’s out in the north end in a house she owns where I used to live and where she has a job as a beautician that she’s had since Day One. My moms is okay. At least I assume she’s okay. I haven’t seen her in a while.