Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

P: Why, do you think?

K: I dunno. It’s my personality maybe. Most people’s personalities have like a specialty. They tell jokes good or they know a lot about cars or computers and video games or heavy metal music or they excel at some sport or at least if they don’t play sports they know everything about the NFL say or the NBA. Or they’re religious and can talk about Jesus and the Bible and shit. There were some guys like that in my outfit. Jesus freaks. Or they can talk about all the women they fucked. My personality just doesn’t have any specialty. All I know about is iguanas, and who gives a shit about iguanas? Plus I’m shorter than most guys and kind of skinny for my age, so I look younger than I’m supposed to be, which means that guys my age and even younger tend to treat me like their stupid little brother. Or they just ignore me. It was like that in school. It’s always been like that for me. You get used to it, and I didn’t mind it after a few years. It was weirder in the army, though, because it was the first time I had to shower naked with other people, and I had the biggest dick in the outfit, and you’d think that would have got me some props—

P: Wait a minute! You had the biggest penis in your outfit?

K: Yeah. Not the thickest. A guy from Akron had the thickest. I had the longest. But they just treated it like it was a joke. Like it was wasted on me, which was sort of right. I think it’s because I didn’t know how to brag about it. You know. And show it off. That sort of thing. I mean, I didn’t have a lot of sexual experience, to say the least, and was kind of shy about my dick and actually didn’t realize it was unusually long until I was in the army, because I didn’t play sports in school and the only other dicks I had seen up to then belonged to male porn stars, and their dicks, except for the really freaky gonzo-size ones, were the same size as mine more or less. Or when I was a kid and sometimes accidentally saw the dicks of the guys who stayed at our house with my mom, which from a little kid’s perspective seemed really huge, even though they didn’t even have a hard-on at the time and were just walking naked from her bedroom to the bathroom or the kitchen or sitting on the couch in their skivvies watching TV and their cock and balls would fall out.

P: So what happened with Willow up in Ottawa?

K: Oh, man, it was awesome! It was a pretty cool club, better than anything I’d seen in Calusa. And for sure not what you’d expect to see in Canada. They had a couple of small stages for the pole dancers and a Plexiglas booth where they put on shower shows—

P: Shower shows?

K: Yeah, like a naked woman takes a shower in this see-through shower stall, and you get to watch. It’s kind of cool if you’ve never seen it before, but once you have it gets sort of boring, unless she flips her button and jerks herself off or has a dildo to play with. That can be interesting. Anyhow after a couple of numbers by the local talent, which wasn’t much, Willow comes on. She’s dressed in a tight nurse’s outfit with furry white boots and pretty soon she’s down to a thong and the boots and then just the boots. It’s supposed to be a little story about a doctor’s office visit and she’s the nurse and she’s wearing a stethoscope that she puts the head of it into her pussy and then sucks it and so on. But mostly she pole dances. The DJ’s playing these old Bee Gees songs, but Willow’s a real good dancer so the audience is into it, especially me, because her and me are having serious eye contact, like she knows I know she’s special and probably because I’m not like the rest of the guys in the audience, who are all these red-faced Canadians, most of them drunk and older than me and yelling and grabbing their junk and so on, while I’m just sitting there quiet all by myself watching her pole dance like she’s dancing for me and nobody else. Like we’re alone together. Y’ know?

P: Yes. I know the feeling. It’s a good feeling.

K: Yeah. Anyhow, at the end she does a split and a couple of final butt flashes from the pole and starts scooping up all the cash the guys in the audience have been tossing up there. I snake my way up to the stage and hand her an American twenty, which stands out because the rest of the money is mostly Canadian twos and fives, and she takes the bill, looks at it a second, then looks at me and purses her lips in a pretend kiss. “American?” she asks and I say, “Yeah, U.S. Army,” and she says, “Awesome.” Then she prances off-stage. But a minute later she’s back, wearing just the thong and the furry booties and sitting at a table at the end of the stage with this huge stack of DVDs of her newest movie, Willow’s Day Off , that she’s selling and autographing. There’s only a couple of wrinkled, red-faced, old guys who’re buying the DVD, and I feel kind of sorry for her and pissed off at these Canadian guys, who don’t know what they’ve got. They don’t know how lucky they are. So when there’s nobody else in line I go up to the table and tell her I want to buy twenty copies of Willow’s Day Off . She goes, “Wow, dude! What do you want with twenty of them?” And I go, “They’re for the guys in my outfit back at Fort Drum. You’re our favorite porn star. They sent me up here to buy them each a copy of the DVD,” I tell her. Which isn’t exactly true, but it makes her feel real good, I can tell. She asks if I’m going to Afghanistan, and I say, “Yeah we’ll be shipping out in a few weeks.” Which was true. I promise her we’ll take her DVDs with us and share them with the other guys over there, which practically gets her crying. No shit, real tears in her eyes. You never see porn stars cry, man. Never. They’re like trained not to cry. “You’re real sweet,” she tells me. And she goes, “You guys’re risking your lives over there to protect our freedoms from the terrorists. I’m gonna give you a free lap dance,” she says, and when the music comes back on, that’s what she does. Gives me a free lap dance. Right there in front of everybody. I could smell her perfume, man.

P: That’s incredible.

K: That’s what I thought. It was like the best night of my whole life. But then after that everything went downhill.

P: How do you mean? (to the dog) G’wan, scat! Go home!

K: No, she’s okay. Let her hang out with us awhile. Those guys, Benbow and whatzisname, Trinidad Bill, they treat her like shit over there. They treat the parrot like shit too. Both those guys are a buncha turds, if you ask me. They like to throw pennies at the parrot and make him yell swears at them so people’ll laugh. (to the dog) C’mere, girl. Wanna treat, Annie? Want a Cheez-It? (to the Professor) She likes Cheez-Its, which is good because I like them too,and it’s the only treat I got for her. Her name’s Annie they told me. For Raggedy Ann and because she’s got red hair. Reddish yellow hair. Only I like thinking it’s for Little Orphan Annie instead, on account of there was this porn movie named Raggedy Ann and Andy that I never liked. It was all about sex dolls that suck and fuck. There’s probably a porn movie named Little Orphan Annie too, but if so, I’ve never seen it. Iggy used to like Cheez-Its.

P: Iggy?

K: My iguana. The cops blew him away the other night when they raided the camp at the Causeway. I hadda bury him at sea. But don’t get me started on Iggy. Jesus!

P: Okay. Tell me how everything went downhill after that night in Ottawa with Willow.

K: You know what a GO-1A is?

P: Hmm-m. General Order Number 1A?