Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

“If you can pay in yen,” the woman says, leaning across her wares and lowering her voice a bit, “I can work you an even sweeter deal.”

Sylvia puts down the statue and walks away without saying a thing. She studies each booth and table she passes and begins to realize that this entire warehouse, this entire flea market, is exclusively selling items of the sexual variety. This is a clearinghouse for libido tools, a discount department store for all things carnal or erotic. She sees marital aids and lingerie, lotions and balms and ointments, something called the booth of dancing eggs, something called The French Tickler Showroom, a Peg-Board displaying thirty different brands of handcuffs. There are blow-up plastic dolls whose polyurethane skin can be selected in a variety of pigment hues. There are demonstrations for the Waxman Vibrating Bed, available in twin to king sizes. There are brochures for institutes of sensual massage and Kama Sutra academies.

And there are the books. Everything from the pulpiest of magazines that look, even from a distance, as if they’d dissolve in your hands after the first reading, to thick and encyclopedic texts with color Mylar illustrations and cross-referenced indexes. Paperback novels. Coffee table art volumes. Erotic comic books. Works customized for the motorcycle enthusiast and the bank clerk and the S&M housewife. Tomes for the gay and the straight and the confused. Bibles of the sensuous for the timid and for the crazed. And hundreds of self-help manuals. A banner hanging above one book booth seems to say it all: There isn’t a variation we don’t carry.

Then, of course, there are the films. Stockpiles of the oldest smokers, grainy black-and-white reels shown at carnivals and men’s clubs decades ago. There are bootleg 16 mm spools that purport to hold lewd images of hundreds of your favorite celebrities. There are homemade efforts, husband and wife teams from the heartland whose crude technical skills are promised to be overshadowed by the genuine depths of their passion. There are expensive laser disc spectacles worthy of some sex-obsessed MGM, with big casts, special effects, lush sound tracks, and state-of-the-art decadence. But most of all there are videocassettes, an endless supply whose diversity seems to surpass even that of the book section. The video hawkers all have TV monitors set up on their counters and tabletops, showing a taste of some of their offerings.

Sylvia stops for a second at a half dozen screens and watches a multiplicity of couplings and gropings and longings, combinations and recombinations that go so far beyond her paltry imagination that she’s forced to wonder if she’s defective in some way, if the world is really just some seething, teeming throng of frenetic and ever sweating partners, engorging and releasing twenty-four hours a day, never tiring, perpetually hungry. And if she’s gone unaware of this dripping world since day one.

She looks up from a flickering screen filled with naked sky divers reaching across blue air for their partners and sees Propp munching on a Sno-Kone in the corner and staring at her. He raises his brows theatrically when their eyes meet and, ridiculously, she’s embarrassed.

Sylvia walks over to him and he extends the Sno-Kone in her direction. The shaved ice is dyed a deep purple color and she shakes him off and says, “You come here a lot?”

He shrugs, swallows some ice and says, “What do you mean by a lot?”

“The police know about this place?”

“He gives an indulgent smile: isn’t this provincial child amusing.”

“And they never bust the place?”

Propp looks out at the room in general and says, “The place is sort of a co-op. Every merchant pays a booth fee. Some percentage of the gross goes in the right pocket every month.” He looks back at her and says, “Besides, Sylvia, fifty percent of what’s in here is legal.”

“And what about the other fifty percent?”

“What about it?” he says. “That’s not my judgment to make.”

She shakes her head, looks at the floor, tries to let him know she expected a better answer from a myth-figure.

“What?” he says. “You want to have the standard debate? You want to take positions here? Spend the night making points? Or do you want to see things you’ve never seen before?”

“Maybe,” she says, looking back up at him, “this subject doesn’t interest me the way it does the rest of this room. Or the way it does you.”

“Could be,” he says, staying loose, possibly trying to bait her. And possibly not. “Interest in sex is a brain function like anything else. Could be some people get too much. And some get too little.”

“And,” she says, “could be that kind of labeling is both useless and insulting.”

“I’m not trying to insult anyone, Sylvia.”

“I don’t get you. Back at the diner you were warning me away from Hugo Schick and the Skin Palace—”

His tone changes immediately and he snaps, “That’s different,” and then he realizes he’s going to have to explain himself.

“I mean,” he says, “Schick, as an individual, is different. Schick doesn’t give a goddamn about anything erotic. He cares about money and manipulation. And his own ego.”

Sylvia stares at him, shocked, and she gives him a second to turn what he’s just said into a joke. But Propp doesn’t take the opportunity and Sylvia can’t help putting her hand on his shoulder, giving him a patronizing pat and squeeze.

“Money and manipulation and ego,” she says. “Yeah, there’s none of that sitting in this room.”

“You don’t know Schick—” he starts.

“Is that right?” she says, wanting to capitalize on his mistake. “And you’re the guy who called the Proppists fools because of their willed innocence.”

“I didn’t—”

“So what’s the truth, Propp? Is there a difference between the erotic and the pornographic?”

He calms down, looks behind him and throws the SnoKone into a trash barrel.

“There probably is,” he says. “And it’s probably different for every individual.”

“Right. Except some individual’s judgment is less valid than others. Like the Proppists. And like Hugo Schick. And like me.”

“Maybe,” he says, “the Proppists haven’t earned their judgment.”

“Earned?” she says, really stunned by the road he’s heading down. “Earned their judgment? Could you just tell me who makes that determination? Is this what happens to someone when they become a hermit?”

“I’m no hermit, Sylvia.”

She can’t help smiling at how self-deceived this man is. “You know, my boyfriend has some new associates you should meet. You’d really get on.”

“You’re misinterpreting everything I’ve said.”

“Just tell me how, exactly, you earned these critical skills that everyone around you seems to be lacking. For God sake, you say Schick has an ego.”

“You don’t know me, Sylvia,” getting angry now, the comparison with Schick pushing his button. “You don’t know where I’ve been, the things that have happened …”

“That’s right,” she says. “That’s completely correct. And no matter what you think, you don’t know me either. No matter what sources you have. No matter how much you’ve spied on me or tried to look into my life, you know nothing about me.”

A naked, heavily tattooed woman with snakes coiled around her neck walks up to them and starts to display her product, which Sylvia guesses to be the snakes. Propp runs a hand over his face and moves brusquely to the other side of the room and Sylvia follows.

“Have you ever been to Bangkok, Sylvia?” he says, staring ahead as they walk. “The real Bangkok. The city in Thailand, you know, that this neighborhood is named after.”