Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Lincoln felt a sense of growing anticipation as he turned the box over and began examining the cluster of small pictures, still shots that had been taken from the movie using the same process that had put Newell's stare from that pizza party on hundreds of lamppost fliers. Did the blonde look appropriately excited about being bent over the copy machine? What was the deal with the little redhead spreading her legs atop the file cabinet? Lincoln started to read the summary— When sexy computer programmer Prada Nightingale takes a temp assignment at industry-leading Byte Software… — then just took the thing up to the counter.

On the drive he called Lorraine— Yeah, honey, McKagan screwed everything up. I've got a shitload of stuff to fix. Unless of course he did not call home, but just headed back to his office and pressed a button and closed the blinds on his windows. The Khan's administrative level was high enough that nobody could see inside, but Lincoln closed the windows anyway. Maybe five or six times Lincoln also watched in the dark stillness of his own living room. He could not help himself, those times, and Lorraine was barricaded in her cave, and he would load a newly purchased black videotape into the machine. Admittedly, those were always uncomfortable experiences — in each case, Lincoln's conscience would disturb him and he'd lay off for a while afterward. Far easier, far safer, was to head back to work, shut the door to his office, and close the blinds. It still felt dirty, but in a way that was acceptable to Lincoln, a way he could live with. He fired up the machine he used for reviewing promotional materials and ad agency stuff. He hit the play button on the remote and then manipulated the dial thingy to adjust the tracking. Then, always, Lincoln turned down the volume so nobody from the next office could overhear. He performed this small and secretive ritual and the television screen went from blue to black and, inevitably, a blonde in a pink neg-ligé began fellating an earpiece; an olive-skinned brunette put the receiver between her obviously inflated breasts. She said, Pick up the phone and make me moan, and a 976 number flashed on the screen. Lincoln would learn to fast-forward through the commercials, as well as the public service announcements about free speech, and the WARNING disclaimer things, the bright orange counter speeding ahead.

Of course, part of the goof was how dead-on the jokes and stereotypes turned out to be — all the nonsensical blue-collar fantasies, clumsy takeoffs of popular movies, and plot machinations that were nothing more than the flimsiest of excuses to mix and match fornicators; the acting beyond even the most patronizing expectations, portrayals of seduction and attempts at erotica that were nothing less than embarrassing, and background soundtracks so bereft of even vaguely redeeming qualities that they hardly qualified as music. In Temporary Positions, the software office was barren of computers. The programmers wrote their codes on paper, stored their files in cabinets. The hackers held up pliers and power tools before announcing a system was easy to crash. Mistakes someone had to know better than to make, and yet there they were, so numerous and unrelenting and varied as to guarantee that, sorry, no one knew better. But did it matter? The blonde from the cover sashayed onto the screen at double-time. Lincoln hit PLAY.

A stunning woman. Really. In a world where children did not disappear, she would have been a model. A starlet. Perhaps even a showgirl in a Las Vegas review. And it wasn't only her. The executive's personal assistant was breathtaking in a particularly devilish and filthy way. The mousy programmer was a find. The women whose presences never got explained nonetheless were hot. Lincoln Ewing's life was a functioning state of purgatory, a daily walk amid incomprehensible circumstances. He loosened his belt and remained in his seat. He pushed at the carpet with his feet and rolled his chair back and provided himself a little more room to, ah, operate. Lincoln watched Temporary Positions. He watched Executive Privilege. He watched Going Down in Suburbia. One scene at a time, one tape at a time, a collection accumulating in the bottom right drawer of his desk at work, Lincoln Ewing entered a parallel dimension, where every woman was as beautiful as a medicated dream, eager as a honeymoon bride: leggy drinks of water who had not yet grown into their bodies; statuesque, hourglass-figured veterans with eye-popping, scientifically supplied cleavage; God-fearing corn-fed daughters; black chicks; Asians; ones who had heavy European accents; ones who had long Slavic faces; Mexicans; mulattos; white trash; each and every single one of them beyond the pale and orbit of mere mortals: with all-body tans or sexy bikini lines; with dragon lady fingernails painted in metallic colors and gold bands around index fingers and turquoise bands around manicured toes; women with visible rib cages and tummy chains and sexy tattoos on the lower part of the smalls of their backs; with nipples that were dark and pointed as chocolate kisses, with tongue studs and nipple rings; women with the glowing skin of youth and the slightest thickening to their tummies; with bruises on their legs from pole dancing mishaps; with teething marks; with pregnancy scars. Women varied and distinct and similar as the sunsets. Women young and no longer young, some as old as thirty. Lincoln did not know their names and did not want to know their names, and despite himself he would come to recognize a few: the Honey Linguses, the Chastity Cleavages. He would come to recognize more as well; hairstyles that defied both logic and gravity, dyes and streaks that had been done to match the style of popular Hollywood celebrities, but that had turned out like something more suited to Long Island drag queens. The sky would be black and Lincoln would be sitting in his ergonomically adjustable executive roller chair and his erection would be protruding through the flap in his silk boxers, and on the screen, three semi-beautiful idiots would be in varying states of undress, and all of a sudden Lincoln would find himself processing some woman's collagen pout and concave cheeks, her unnaturally wide nostrils, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the bags beneath them and that flat, uncaring stare…

Some things must be learned over and over, and with every tape, with almost every scene, Lincoln witnessed firsthand that nothing can live up to what a mind imagines, that the idea of porn is far more erotic than its reality. This wasn't the kind of realization that blows your mind; at the same time it wasn't necessarily easy to accept. Lincoln had participated in more than his share of freaky shit back during his skirt-chasing days. Absolutely he had. But as he sped through one mechanical plow after another, it became impossible to deny the hard kernel inside of him that held the act of sex to be intimate — even the sport fucks and hogging and beer-goggle bangs of his youth, even the most impersonal lays, the bootie calls where he'd gotten caught up in his own pleasure and the chick had become amorphous, yes, even the dead fish, the one-night stands that Lincoln had fantasized through and forgotten and been razzed over. The intimacy may have been limited, varied in intensity and degree. But for some scant shred of time, without a doubt, some form of intimacy had existed. And it seemed to Lincoln there was a definitive, canyon-size difference between the privacy that formed between two people as they engaged in the most intimate act in which two people can engage, and the reality of a woman having to constantly brush hair out of her face while she performs fellatio on a guy, between the act of sex, or the activity of making love, or even the physical process of fucking, between any of these and the sequence wherein a woman is getting pounded from behind, and she looks straight ahead at the camera and deliberately brushes the hair out of her eyes, and then makes a face — pretending not only that she is having the time of her life, but that the jackass watching the tape is providing it.