Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

‘California, here I come,’ I said to myself quietly a few times, but couldn’t hold on to the feeling for long.

At a little breakfast place on Ocean Avenue I pulled a copy of LA Weekly from the pile. After taking a walk, on a bench outside an alternative coffeehouse I sat down and read the cover story. The article was in two parts, an overview of her career and the account of a press conference. My eyes skimmed back and forth over the lines, Mister Rollo Liban, Miss LeSage’s agent. . major deal. . Watchtower Productions. . high-class porn. . return of porn-chic. . Autumn would see the release of her first film in twenty-four years. Yes, she was older, she must be close to fifty now, the journalist wrote, but she was still absolutely dazzling. If she had been preserved so wonderfully without the benefit of plastic surgery, he noted, then it was nothing less than a miracle, comparable to the wondrous conservation of the remains of the nineteenth-century saint Catherina Labouré in Paris.

‘Do you think your body can still stand up to it, to all that tumult?’ was one of the questions asked during the press conference.

She had smiled and said ‘This body is the tumult, Mr. Journalist.’

Concerning what she’d done between then and now, where she had been, she spoke only in guarded terms — Europe, a family, life on the sidelines. And why had she chosen to make a comeback now? Three reasons, she’d said: for the money, for the money and for the money. And the fourth reason: for the light. The light was her metaphor for attention, the fame she had left behind for a man. That explained the text on the cover: EVE LESAGE BACK IN THE LIMELIGHT.

It amazed me to see the matter-of-fact tone in which they spoke of a comeback in the world of porn: no sniggering, no moralizing. Perhaps it didn’t matter what you were famous for, perhaps politics, entertainment, criminality and pornography all enjoyed the same status here.

A contract had been signed with Watchtower Productions for three major productions: First Lilith, The Second Coming , then Josephine Mutzenbacher’s 1000-and-1 Night , and finally Testament , a delirious, pornographic reconstruction of three sexually laden stories from the Old Testament: the tale of Tamar, Onan and Judah, the story of David and Bathsheba and that of King Ahasveros and Esther.

The film about Josephine Mutzenbacher would be shot on location in Vienna. The director was Jerry Rheinauer, the Cecil B. DeMille of pornography. The article referred to her, Eve LeSage, as the Grace Kelly of porn; it was a universe of derivatives, of quasi-artists trying to gain status through references to real artists, to other stars who had shone without the rancidness of smut.

I was dressed too warmly, the sun was scorching now. This was not a place where one could do without sunglasses. The light was too bright, it made my eyes water. Through the blur of tears, my gaze fell on a review in the Must See Art section: a new exhibition, Abgrund, by Bodo Schultz, at the Steinson & Freeler Gallery .

Bewildered, I took the paper inside and read the article there. In an exclusive move, Bodo Schultz’s agent has offered the gallery new work. The art critic describes what he has seen: a film made by Schultz, ragged and intense. Schultz leads us along the brink of an Abgrund , a chasm of his own making, not the chasm of the soul but a physical one, somewhere in the jungles of Panama. He himself does not appear on camera, except for one moment; the camera is fixed on a single point, we see a man approaching and then, behind his back, there is a huge explosion. The camera is knocked over by the shockwave; a few moments later someone picks it up, it’s still running, the camera’s eye slides across a man’s torso, his face: Schultz. The charge has gone off prematurely. A slow, silent film, for the rest; each time Schultz launched into his poisoned litanies, the viewer was shocked. It was a video report of his project in the jungle — he was destroying a mountain. A mountain. The critic was impressed by the ruthlessness, praised him as a man of extreme consistency. A ‘must-see’, in other words.

There was more of Schultz’s work on display at Steinson & Freeler, but that movie, that apparently was what it was all about.

I had found information about my father on the Internet, at the terminal in Alburgh’s little library, articles about the moral implications of his work, but nothing that had interested me much at the time. To me he was the man from the postcard, Mediohombre , the one-armed, the one-legged. I often had the feeling he could see me.

I walked back to the hotel along broad avenues. The gallery was open from eleven to six, and closed on Sunday. La Cienega Boulevard, I had to find out where that was.

‘Where were you?’ my mother asked. ‘You mustn’t just go away without telling me where you are.’

We were in the Ocean and Vine restaurant at the Loews. I put the LA Weekly on the table, with her picture facing down.

‘They’re exhausting, interviews,’ she said of her own accord.

She waved her hand to dismiss the world.

‘Rollo hired a suite on the top floor. I think there must have been ten interviews in all. I barely had time to eat breakfast.’

She stuck a porcelain spoon into her decapitated egg, the soft yolk welled up, gleaming like an abscess. A little egg white was clinging to her lower lip. The droll voice of our biology teacher, Mr. Bonham Carter, when we stopped beside the Amorphophallus titanium during our tour of the botanical gardens at Cambridge: Associations drawn at your own risk .

The toast crackled between her teeth.

‘This is a lovely hotel,’ she said.

‘Who’s paying for all of this? It’s insanely expensive here.’

Her glance shot back and forth between the egg and me; she was trying to hide her uneasiness, to decide what she could tell me and what she couldn’t.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. .’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘it’s already in print somewhere.’

I turned over the magazine and found the review of the exhibition. Jabbed at it with my finger. She looked, her head tilted slightly in order to read it better.

‘Aha,’ she said, leaning back in her chair.

‘Don’t you want to read it?’

‘Tell me what it says. I forgot my glasses.’

‘That’s weird,’ I said.

‘Well?’

I read aloud to her. She sat there, motionless. She didn’t touch her brunch after that. And when I was finished, ‘That man is becoming more deranged all the time.’

She flagged down a waitress.

‘Would you like something else, Ludwig?’

I passed.

‘Everything on the bill of room 304, please.’

She had no desire to go to the gallery. In the elevator she said, ‘That man destroys everything he touches.’

‘But aren’t you curious? I bet you’re dying of curiosity.’

‘Let him pay his back alimony first.’

La Cienega Boulevard was too far to walk now, I saw on the city map I’d bought that afternoon. I would have to wait until tomorrow. I hung around a bit on Main Street and was amazed by the number of holistic services on offer there. I seemed to have stumbled upon a marketplace of karma-yoga, Ayurvedic consumer goods and glass capsules filled with ionized water to help against jetlag, hangovers and all sorts of radiation, for sixteen dollars and fifty cents apiece. From all those little shops wafted the odor of incense and aromatic oils. The hippie dream had become an industry, supported by vegan surfers and Buddhists wearing flip-flops. I hissed fuck off at a girl who tried to press on me a flyer announcing a meeting with Yogi Amrit-something-or-other. Experience love beyond words , I read in passing.