Christopher Hacker - The Morels

That year, Sarah and Dolores were having a particularly difficult time, and perhaps as a way of hurting her mother, or maybe just out of loyalty to Doc, she began to take particular interest in what she saw as her father’s plight and would relate daily updates to her best friend, Cynthia.

Cynthia said, “Sarah and I lived across the street from each other. She spent many nights at my house — and I spent many afternoons at hers, listening to Sarah tell the saga of her poor daddy and her evil mother. To tell you the truth, I tuned it out. They were grown-ups: What did I care? I had bigger things on my mind. It was 1967. I wanted out, I was going to the city. I was going to be an Andy Warhol superstar! There had been a screening of Chelsea Girls at the old Criterion. Do you remember the Criterion?”

“Sure. Beautiful Greek columns outside.”

“It was a big event, this screening. Rated X. The manager was young — he’d been a star of our drama club. God, what was his name? Rudy Jackalone. Jackalane? And he had notions of making our theater into a kind of art house. Ha! They got halfway through the film that first night before the cops raided the place, confiscated the film, arrested half-a-dozen people. On obscenity charges. It made quite an impression on me, and I thought if this is what art can do, cause a stir like this — everyone was talking about it, months after — then count me in! I learned all I could about him, about the Factory. Earlier that year, or the year before, he had staged a happening. He called it the Exploding Plastic Inevitable . I read about it in the library — they had bound back issues of the major newspapers. There in one volume, six months’ worth of news, and I could see it just reverberate out, in stop motion, column after column. Like what happened in our town, but on a much-larger scale, from the announcement the day before to the review of it in the arts section, to the op-ed pieces that appeared weeks later, how mention of it showed up on the fashion page, a music review, a piece about local politics. It really did explode. That one event reverberated outward for six months, a year, reaching as far out as here, our small New Jersey theater, and who knows how much farther out? Well, that was it — I wanted to be at the center of the explosion. I sent away for a silver wig and patent-leather boots from a mail-order place in Van Nuys, California. Remember those?”

“You looked like a Forty-Second Street hooker.”

“I don’t remember you complaining back then.”

“Who’s complaining?”

“I had that Velvet Underground record, the one with the banana on the cover? I played that album constantly. It drove my mother nuts. She banned it, so I had to come over to Sarah’s and play it. Sarah had no idea. She was innocent. She thought I had a crush on Andy Warhol. She wanted to make this some teenage heartthrob thing, which was sweet. She decided that she was in love with Lou Reed — as though these were the Beatles we were swooning over. But it wasn’t about that for me. Not at all. I mean, Blow Job was a movie in which Warhol films DeVeren Bookwalter getting a blow job . His oxidation paintings were done by putting copper paint on a canvas and then inviting underage boys drunk on wine to piss on them. This wasn’t about love — this was about freedom! I felt so much older than Sarah, though we were the same age. I want to say she looked up to me, but that may just be fantasy. I don’t know if she really knew what to make of me. We would lie there in her room — she would be on the floor on her back — and she would tell me about her poor father and her evil mother, and I would sit in front of her dressing-table mirror, puckering up, putting on makeup, getting myself ready for my fifteen minutes. When did I first notice Doc?”

(This is what she would do — what they both did — throughout the interview: ask themselves questions and then proceed to answer them.)

“I think it was when I caught him watching me undress. That time I think it made me angry. Later, I thought maybe I was angry, not because my best friend’s dad was a pervert violating my privacy, but because I felt that my privacy was being violated. You see, I thought I was enlightened . Here I was, walking the walk in these boots and that wig and some nobody watching me undress has the power to send me scurrying into another room! How bourgeois can you get? I don’t know for how long he’d been watching me—”

“A while—”

“—before I noticed. But after I noticed, I thought, Okay, let’s give the old perv a show. Why not?”

“Our houses were directly across the street from each other, and all of the houses in the neighborhood were the same—”

“So from my bedroom window I could see Doc there watching me from the upstairs bathroom. I don’t know what you were doing in there while you were watching me. You weren’t brushing your teeth, that’s for sure.”

“I was masturbating.”

“There. He was masturbating. I found it terribly exciting, to tell you the truth. I did it as a kind of lark, a what-the-hell sort of thing at first, but it was tremendously arousing. My whole body came awake, my skin was alive. I felt nervous and self-conscious and sick to my stomach, but, oh, terribly excited! When did we first fuck?”

“She’s no romantic, this one. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, I remember. I just think you should tell it.”

“She showed up — for an appointment. I saw her there in the waiting room — those boots and that hair — I mean there was no mistaking her, she was one of a kind. The kids were beginning to dress wilder by then, long hair, fatigues, and those long shapeless flower dresses — it was like your generation was trying on costumes.”

“We were. We were trying to figure out who we were. It’s no different now.”

“It is different. It all comes prepackaged.”

“Okay, whatever, moving on — you don’t want to get him started.”

“I could barely contain myself with some of the girls that came in, girls who feared the needle, girls I knew from the age of six and seven, to them I’m the same old white coat, the same old nightmare in a face mask, but to me they’re — in that chair, grown up, vulnerable, beautiful, eyes closed, mouth open, supplicating. That’s what it was, almost religious, a blessed offering. They had no idea. But this one, sitting in the waiting room. She knows me. She’s seen my desire, stoked it even. She puts down the magazine she’s reading when she sees me, gets up. ‘Right this way, Miss Bonjorni.’ ”

“The appointment had been made for me a ways back. My mother, she took care of those things. I was going to cancel it, but then I thought — why? Let’s see what happens. I knew I was going to fuck him.”

“She knew. I didn’t know. I left her in the chair for—”

“An hour!”

“While I tried to pull myself together in the bathroom. I brushed my teeth several times. I flossed. I gargled mouthwash. I was very paranoid about my breath, I remember. And my hands. I scrubbed my fingernails. I filed them down and buffed them. I don’t know why — I wore gloves. I come back in. ‘And how are we doing today?’ All formality. ‘Lean back for me, that’s it. Rinse, if you please.’ I had an assistant, where was she? She wasn’t there that day, that’s right, which must have been why I was so nervous. With my assistant around, it would have been an entirely different encounter.”

“I would still have fucked you.”

“How could you?”

“I would have found a way.”

“She’s very persistent. She would have found a way. So, routine examination, all tact, very gentle with the instruments. Nothing is said out loud that betrays our, um, relationship. It’s all in the eyes. I say, ‘That wasn’t so bad,’ and she says, ‘It was fine,’ and it’s the eyes that say everything. ‘You’re a bit too big for a lollipop, I think,’ and she says, ‘I’ll take one anyway, if you don’t mind.’ We did it right there on that chair.”