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Ask anyone connected to the legal system, from the circuit court clerk tucking motions into folders to the convicted gangster paying off guards to mule Marlboros: there’s no one more reviled than a sex offender.

Most prisons and jails have “protective custody”—use of solitary confinement as a safety protocol—for sex offenders: in “general population” they’re easy pickings for stabbing and beating, which is why the Federal Bureau of Prisons operates low-to-medium security penitentiaries devoted mostly to their incarceration, with some prisons having a sex offender population of up to 85-90%. Even for a convict with the ethical compass of Whitey Bulger—wherein robbery, drug peddling, and cold-blooded murder are fair game—taking a child’s innocence is one step too far.

But a child molester is not a monster: he (they’re almost always male) is still a human being. In her debut true crime book, The Fact of a Body (Flatiron, May 2017), former attorney and writer Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich delivers this point—no matter how heinous the crime, there are few monsters, just men who commit monstrous acts.

On Feb. 7, 1992, 26-year-old Ricky Langley, a twice-convicted child molester, strangled Jeremy Guillory inside a home in the small town of Iowa, Louisiana, a town so small, the streets have no names. Even the Law had trouble finding Guillory’s address when his mother reported him missing. After Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s investigators found Guillory’s corpse stuffed in Langley’s closet, the recently paroled sex offender confessed multiple times to the homicide and was convicted and sentenced to die at the state’s notorious Angola Prison.

It’s debatable whether or not Langley sexually assaulted Guillory prior to the crime—a minor point Marzano-Lesnevich brings up, but never tries to resolve, in her work. Instead, she leaves it up to the reader to decide, just as three Louisianan juries would decide throughout Langley’s appeals process.

Fast forward to 2003, and Marzano-Lesnevich is interning at a law clinic strictly dealing in death penalty appeals. The daughter of two New Jersey attorneys, Marzano-Lesnevich has been opposed to capital punishment since she was a child. The clinic just overturned Langley’s death penalty conviction, knocking it down to a lifetime bid. With the practicing lawyer of the clinic absent from the interns’ orientation due to an appeal in Texas, the clinic shows the aspiring attorneys Langley’s confession tape.

At this point, the book takes a turn:

        “I came here to help save the man on the screen. I came here to help save men like him. I came here because my ideals and who I am exist separately from what happened in the past. They must. If they don’t what will my life hold?

          But I look at the man on the screen, I feel my grandfather’s hands on me, and I know. Despite what I’ve trained for, what I’ve come here to work for, despite what I believe.

            I want Ricky to die.”

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is a sexual abuse survivor. As the memoir moves forward, the author reveals that her grandfather molested her during childhood—how her family handles it, well, that’s her story to tell.

Interweaving Langley and his clan’s past, along with her own, Marzano-Lesnevich explores not just the crime, but the human condition. Ricky Langley didn’t want to molest kids, but he did nonetheless, almost like a drug addict who cannot resist a dose of heroin; he tried to seek help for his pedophilia, but was turned away prior to going into the system. Marzano-Lesnevich tries to make amends with her family, but she never quite gets there. Unlike Ricky, who grows up in poverty and is subsequently at the receiving end of the justice system, Marzano-Lesnevich’s background allows her to flee the bad memories by attending college and later, Harvard Law School.

Despite this blind spot about her own privilege, which I’ll address later, Marzano-Lesenvich’s juxtaposition of a predator and a victim shows the difficulty of achieving salvation—both Langley and herself are caught in a struggle to save their futures from their pasts, to prevent repeating the sins they either perpetrated or suffered. Yet they come up short each time.

What’s impressive about this work is not just the subject matter, but the true-crime vibe: fast-paced storytelling; hard deep looks into the lives of the prosecutors; the sheriff’s investigators; and the victim’s and perp’s families. But unlike the seminal true crime work, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, this memoir does not read like a lawyer’s prose. While Bugliosi delivered a truly genre-defining work, trudging through his account of the Manson Family murders is almost akin to reading a primer for a first-year law student, weighted with explanations of legal procedure and law. Marzano-Lesnevich doesn’t fall into that trap—if anything, she writes more like Joan Didion:

          “With only two days left in Louisiana, I know what I’ve been avoiding. In the tens of thousands of pages I’ve gone through, the transcripts and serology reports and bodily fluid reports and the documents from Ricky’s life, his mental health records from Lake Charles and then from when he was imprisoned in Georgia, the only photographs I’ve seen of Jeremy are the ones in which he’s alive.

          But that’s not how his story ended. I have been driven all along by the belief that there is a knot at the heart of the collision between me and Ricky that will help me make sense of what will never be resolved. The way my body is evidence, yet I will never fully know what it contains. I carry what my grandfather did in my body. I carry it through my life. All the records I’ve seen have made me imagine Ricky, imagine family, begin to empathize with him. I can’t not know—I can’t not face—what he did. I can’t allow even any part of myself to think that Jeremy remained the boy in his school photo. Unchanged and alive.”

For The Fact of a Body, the crime is the frame; the story’s in the raw emotion Marzano-Lesnevich delivers across the page, much like Didion’s exploration of the Patty Hearst case in California Notes. As with Didion’s work, Marzano-Lesnevich uses the great gift of empathy to explore her subject, instead of only relying on rhetorical flourishes. The facts in this work provide a vehicle for a deeper exploration of human emotion in the aftermath of an evil act—indignation, forgiveness, fear, resentment, understanding, etc.

What the average reader might not know about The Fact of a Body is that the murder of Jeremy Guillory, and the author’s own experiences with sexual abuse, are tragically mundane—take it from me: a burnt-out small-town newspaper reporter. Marzano-Lesnevich’s judicial aspirations petered out after one summer at a death penalty clinical; it took two years covering car wrecks, homicides, and child rapes for the toll to catch up with me, and I’ve been paying the emotional price ever since. Like Marzano-Lesnevich, I view the legal system as a necessary evil, one that sorts out the facts well, but fails to address the circumstances that lead a human being to commit crimes in this world—circumstances that often take years to develop.

When I read this memoir, I could feel the pain Marzano-Lesnevich went through—I’ve seen that pain too many times, when a child placed on the stand confronts his or her abuser. I’ve since taken a hiatus from newspaper reporting.

II

Here’s how the murder of Jeremy Guillory would go down in my newsroom experience. First article: the reporter flips a press release about the missing boy, maybe goes to the scene and interviews neighbors and relatives once the search truly gets underway. Second article: our reporter writes up the arrest by dropping in a few quotes from the sheriff’s small-town press conference—along with dirty little details about the homicide contained in the criminal complaint submitted by the investigator to the local judge. Then comes the victim profile: a sympathetic write up about the victim’s life, accompanied by a front page spread of his grieving mother, clutching his framed picture while sitting on a front porch. If the victim is even somewhat innocent, a jury will be sworn in to determine not if the defendant is guilty, but to what degree.  Most murders aren’t “who dunnits” like on TV; they’re “why dunnits” or “just how bad they dunnits.”

After a year of small “briefs”—250-word articles updating the case—one day the courtroom is filled with 100 citizens. It’s trial day, and somber justice is in the air. For a crime reporter, the case will finally be resolved, after a long season of sitting on wood benches and scribbling away in a notepad, hands cramping. Perhaps it will last a couple days, maybe a couple weeks. Either way, the crime reporter worth his or her salt will be there from gavel to gavel, from selection to verdict. Tears will flow and tension will hang in the air until the foreman reads, “Guilty.” And because it’s murder in the first-degree, the crime reporter knows there isn’t going to be a sentencing hearing—the judge will send the defendant up that night.

There’s an old adage in the news industry that “if it bleeds, it leads,” referring to the typical reader’s inability to prevent themselves from consuming horrible, horrendous content. We’re repulsed while drinking our morning coffee, but we can’t seem to fold up our newspaper and put it down until we’ve read the full article. But in the small towns that dot our land, where one can’t wear jeans to church without catching an earful from an aunt the following Monday, the murder of a child takes on a different tone—the readers buy the paper to read about the crime because they’re bleeding, too. No matter whether they’re bleeding with despair, hate, anger, pity, or curiosity, the reader bleeds nonetheless. And the crime reporter with a heart bleeds as well. I recognize that feeling in Marzano-Lesnevich’s memoir.

The murder of Jeremy Guillory, if it made the Associated Press wire service, would be about 250 words, pure filler for the papers around Louisiana. As for the crimes committed against Marzano-Lesnevich, that type of sexual abuse is sadly about as typical as jaywalking. The public’s perception of the ski-mask-wearing rapist waiting to jump a female jogger in the park after dark is pure BS—it’s the uncle, the step-dad, the father, the boyfriend, or in Marzano-Lesnevich’s case, the grandfather.

And that’s the hugest tragedy of all: it’s someone we trust who harms our children. Marzano-Lesnevich explores this idea, with pain and hurt I could never imagine resonating from the page. Maybe she wouldn’t like to hear this, but I’ll say it anyway—by sharing her experience, and humanizing it from all sides, she gives voice to the voiceless, one of the highest virtues of journalism and nonfiction writing. She is a hero. When it comes to child molestation, there’s rarely a “pedophilic monster,” a ghoul lurking in the shadows of playgrounds waiting to trap children inside a windowless van. Instead, the perpetrators are seemingly well-adjusted gentlemen, generally without criminal record, who have one compulsion. Marzano-Lesnevich appropriately humanizes Ricky Langley for the reader, but in the same breath reminds us that Jeremy Guillory is dead, and Jeremy Guillory had a life, too. In a world with Serial and Making a Murderer, Marzano-Lesnevich pushes true crime to the next level—she humanizes the perpetrator, without turning him into a hero, or still worse, a victim.

III

In this proud Southerner’s opinion, Marzano-Lesnevich does a good job not “othering” the South when she describes the struggles and trials of the Langley and Guillory families. Descriptions of gun racks on pickup trucks and “welfare motels” in Iowa, La., are a little on the nose. The Southern reader might throw the book across the room at that point, but I would urge them to pick it back up; she doesn’t dwell on these details, nor does she poke fun. She also doesn’t caricature Southerners as toothless hicks, white trash. Marzano-Lesnevich instead treats them like people, although at times I felt she stretched herself when relating her own experiences as an upper middle-class Northerner with the lives of poor Southerners: pain is pain, but the pain of poverty will never be understood by the wealthy. Struggle is struggle, but no matter how much empathy Marzano-Lesnevich expresses, she makes the jump a little too suddenly without checking her own privilege.

This becomes evident in the closing third of the book, when Marzano-Lesnevich begins to tie up the two main strands of the memoir, her struggle as a survivor and Langley’s struggle as a perpetrator. However, in her effort to link these ends, she reveals a hole in her perception; Langley and Guillory were both poor, while she came from privilege. The fact is, Marzano-Lesnevich can, and to a large extent, has exorcised her demons because she has the resources to do so. While sexual abuse transcends class, Marzano-Lesnevich had the opportunity to escape her condition and put her past in perspective, a reprieve afforded to Ricky only in a Georgia prison. Somehow, with all the empathy Marzano-Lesnevich displays throughout the memoir, she seems to miss this point.

Ultimately, The Fact of the Body isn’t just true crime, and it isn’t just memoir: it’s Gonzo-style journalism at its finest. Unlike Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s chemically induced rants and ravings, Marzano-Lesnevich uses a writing aid much deeper than cocaine, LSD, mescaline, and Wild Turkey—she uses the ghosts of her past.

Excerpts:

 11/13/2012

Dear Professor,

I just got out of the doctor’s office:

they wanted to scar my face and kill what’s inside me.

I ran out and did not pay.

Jacob A.

12/5/2012

Dear Professor,

Things on the streets have been really crazy. I have been very distracted watching and listening to what is going on, it is somewhat out of my control. But, I miss you and class. I will be in class on Monday.

Thank you,

Bye

Sandra

5/29/2014

Dear Professor,

I have registered for your [Course Name] starting June 4th and very much look forward to these sessions. Unfortunately two weeks ago while in the Sahara desert I fell off a camel and fractured 4 ribs. I am in Paris recuperating but as you probably know only time and pain killers are the treatment. I will not be able to travel in time to make the first session on 4th June but hope to be in New York in time for the second and subsequent sessions.

I would appreciate your input on the following:

–venue as to where to meet at 3:15pm stating on June 11th

–should I obtain any reading or other materials needed or desirable for the course

–would you have an outline or any notes you could let me have on the material you will cover (and I will miss) for the first session.

I look forward to meeting with you.

kind regards

Paul C. 

4/18/2015

Dear Professor, 

I am very sorry about the lateness of my assignments. And my absences during the semester. I am graduating after this semester and I found myself swamped with a ton of work I was not expecting. All of this piled up with vet visits, caring for my new puppy, and other things getting in the way I lost a lot of my energy this semester. I’ve attached all the assignments in this email. And if there is anything else I can give you please let me know. 

Thank you for a great semester and for understanding,

All the best,

William

12/7/15

Dear Professor,

Excuses section: I’m sorry that I had to leave early on Tuesday last week and was additionally unable to attend on Thursday. On Thursday something came up and I was sadly unable to attend any of my classes. For Tuesday I do not have such a good reason, if I am honest I left 20 minutes early because of a beautiful girl (the only and last time I would use this reason and I apologize, I let instinctual hedonism take over for better or worse!)

Interesting section: I have been working on this piece “To Fear with Love” and thought you might appreciate it as per our earlier discussion about writing. It is attached below for your enjoyment and I would love any feedback/criticism! 

Best,

Abraham

“I felt it myself, and made others feel it.”  –Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“For the first time in motion picture history, members of the audience – including you – will actually play a part in the picture. You will feel some of the physical reactions, the shocking sensations experienced by the actors on the screen.” So warned 1950s horror maverick William Castle, as he introduced his 1959 camp classic and deliciously sadistic Vincent Price vehicle, The Tingler. Both enticement into never-before-seen-or-felt terrors and warning of the physiological danger of sitting and watching, the film announced the arrival of the latest innovation in cinema technology: PERCEPTO (a close cousin of the oft-lampooned Smell-O-Vision, the immersive Emergo, and early 3D), a sleight of hand through which audience members would become “living participants” in the “actual shock-sensations” and “physical reactions” of their screaming on-screen counterparts. Imagine the gall and genius of PERCEPTO and its conspiring theaters: Here, in this theater, no one is safe from experiencing real sensation. Here we are all participants.

The so-called King of Gimmicks, Castle outfitted theaters to make moviegoers directly feel on-screen action: he provided PERCEPTO instruction manuals and kits to install vibrating motors under seats to shock and surprise – and remind audiences of what their bodies already knew. Built on a fusion of early 20th-century amusement park immersive spectacles (Coney Island simulations of the San Francisco earthquake, Pompeii eruption, and other historic natural disasters) and 1950s marketing of new technologies to fill seats in an era when livingroom television threatened to eclipse movie theaters, PERCEPTO called out its audiences and their comfortable viewing distance. Promotional posters and advertisements invited audiences into real bodily experience, the movie-going version of a game of Chicken, baiting: “DO YOU HAVE THE GUTS TO SIT IN THIS CHAIR?” 

PERCEPTO also strived to make “real and powerful” for audiences what phenomenological approaches to cinema take for granted. Equal parts gimmick and revolution in cinematic empathy, this new technology understood that the experience of watching a film activates physiological and cognitive response beyond our eyes and ears. It also ventured beyond a two-dimensional understanding of movie screens to underscore how, as art historian and curator Catherine David has described, “projected images have been overflowing the flat, frontal limits of the traditional screen and moving into the bodies of spectators ever since the origins of cinema itself.” It grasped film as a medium that engages multiple senses simultaneously, impacts blood pressure and nerve response, the movements of muscle and bone, the complex result of “mysterious electronic impulses” relayed in the central nervous system. Castle insisted that audience members would “actually take part in” and “feel” what hitherto seemed simply a two-dimensional image plane: a Chicago-area advertisement promised “YOU actually FEEL real physical sensations as you shiver in fright to its FLESH-CRAWLING ACTION!” Sign me up.

While his films are often dismissed as B-movie body horror, Castle was exploring embodied and participatory spectatorship in a way that resonates with Vivian Sobchack’s understanding of “embodied perception” and “lived-body experience” in film viewing. A central voice in the phenomenology of film and sensory responses to cinema violence, Sobchack provokes us into taking cinema seriously as an enterprise connecting bodies and not just minds: “more than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience,” an encounter structured by the relationship between consciousness and carnality. Perhaps unlikely bedfellows, Castle and Sobchack share a belief in the sensory experience of images, particularly those that bring us closer to others’ bodies in pain or poses of death, extending our mechanisms of witness beyond the realm of the visual and intellectual into the physiological and carnal. Whether in a darkened theater or interacting with various screens, this is a voyage beyond voyeuristic pleasures into empathetic encounters we can feel in our muscles, nerves, bones. Blood pressure rises, palms sweat, we grab onto our seats and prepare for a physiological ride.

Castle’s Vincent Price vehicle The Tingler is self-aware (dare I say meta-cinematic) in its exploration of the bodily consequences of viewing; on-screen characters and the theater audience alike are, like Sobchack, “achingly aware” of their bodies as “sensuous, sensitized” physiological entities. Price portrays Dr. Warren Chapin, a pathologist and coroner for the State prison who performs autopsies on executed prisoners and studies the physiological effects of fear in his own theater of death (not unlike the surgical theater captured in Eakins’ 1875 painting, The Gross Clinic). Through the magic of PERCEPTO, The Tingler translates its on-screen camp-horror into actual sensations the audience feels in their seats, making manifest the bodily experience of cinematic perception: the film’s central monster-baddies – parasites who feed on human fear and enter characters’ spinal cords (those command centers of sensation) – enter the theater as back-lit projections and shock-vibrations on filmgoers’ spines, synchronized as audiences come face-to-face (and spine-to-spine) with scenes of attack and death. A primal scene: As we sit and watch, we feel the danger of viewing scenes of violence inflicted on other bodies. Our sensorium activated, we experience physiological responses to on-screen sensations that extend into the theater aisles, under our seats, vibrating within our skin. 

The Tingler refused passive viewing and wanted audiences to understand how watching can be a dangerous enterprise, one in which our bodies (not just our mind’s eye) are impacted. This recalls the notorious surrealist montage that opens Un Chien Andalou (1929 silent film co-conceived by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel), a cinematic primal scene that climaxes in an act of sadistic film editing as a single razor blade slices through the moon and then an eyeball, a proxy for our own eyes – an enticement and warning that seeing is never purely about vision; it has real physical effects. Whether viewing an extreme close-up of a finger penetrating a seething bullet wound in one of many interrogation scenes in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), watching Alex sit in “the chair of torture” with eyes clamped open and forced to “viddy” films of rape and murder in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), encountering the ritual crosscut slaughters at the climax of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), or witnessing the dry heaving of a former leader of Indonesian death squads as he returns to the site where he killed hundreds in The Act of Killing (Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, 2012), as members of the audience we flinch, take part in, and feel pain at the sight of others’ experience. We check our limbs to feel for wounds, our eyelids hurt, we feel nauseated. This is more than alienation in the face of spectacle violence; this is participatory, embodied empathy in action.

In July 2013, hip hop innovator, artist, actor, and poet Mos Def (rechristened Yasiin Bey) “starred” in a video reenactment of the standard operating procedure for force-feeding hunger striking detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Released by the British human rights organization Reprieve and initially posted on The Guardian online, the video went viral within hours and circulated to an audience of millions via international media websites. On one hand, this was a film with a lead actor in the role of orange-clad detainee, a cast of Guantánamo “guards” wielding handcuffs, “medics” outfitted in green scrubs and plastic gloves, and a director (British filmmaker Asif Kapadia, later lauded for his 2015 gut-wrenching documentary Amy, is never on screen though audible as he shouts “Cut!”). Yet Bey did not merely inhabit a fictional role or function as an artist engaged in activist performance art, but his was a real body actually experiencing the force-feeding procedure. As a stamp of documentary authenticity, the film announces “This is what happened” as prelude to Bey’s entrance on screen. The Guardian described how “There was no rehearsal: after all, no acting would be required. In an instant, he was no longer Mos Def – rapper and Hollywood star – but a powerless prisoner, experiencing what hunger strikers in Guantánamo Bay endure daily.” 

In the central reenactment sequence lasting two and a half minutes, Bey wears the requisite orange jumpsuit metonymic of detainees in the War on Terror, the most widely recognizable postmodern prison uniform, and steps into the bodily experience of a hunger-striking detainee. The camera cuts quickly between close-ups on Bey’s exposed wrists and ankles, as guards handcuff and chain together his hands and feet, all strategically framed so we can see neither the faces of “guards” nor “detainee.” Everyone is an incomplete body, the manacled limbs and administering hands standing in for a whole set of prison relations – the spectacle of race, discipline, and state violence visible in the contrast between Bey’s blackness and the white tattooed arms of guards. (Such details quietly recall the 2001 death-row drama Monster’s Ball, which Bey costarred in alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs and Halle Berry, and similarly features a chair of discipline and torture.)

In the guise of detainee strapped to restraining chair, Bey gives form to both a physical site (Guantánamo Bay Prison) and physical experience (force-feeding procedure, nasogastric plastic tubes forced up the detainee’s nose, down throat, into stomach) that are so often representational black holes outside comprehension, seemingly impossible to access via empathetic engagement. Yet at the same time that the film allows us to “see” Guantánamo, it is highly stylized and readily acknowledges its status as a staged reenactment. Bey the individual (not yet detainee) first walks on screen and enters a stark white minimalist soundstage reminiscent of a modern art gallery or site for a performance action (think: Marina Abramović or Joseph Beuys). Upon closer inspection, we notice this is a heterogeneous space containing the equipment of both a film set and medical-prison discipline: key lights on tripods stand next to towering bags of IV fluid, all positioned around a single restraining chair, doubly suggestive of an electric chair and canvas director’s chair (an actual director’s chair appears following the reenactment sequence). Dressed in head-to-toe designer black, from modified fez to wing tips, Bey speaks out from the screen and directly addresses the audience as a prelude to the performed reenactment. The entire video is shot on this soundstage, a decontextualized blank slate that feels far from the store of images we associate with “prison.” Yet this is a different kind of prison than exists in the American popular imagination. We’re not inside recognizable cell blocks popularized in films Escape From Alcatraz (Dir. Don Siegel, 1979) or In the Name of the Father (Dir. Jim Sheridan, 1993); the blankness of the space is fitting for the decontextualized site of Guantánamo and undisclosed detention centers throughout the world that remain black sites invisible to public eyes.

As threefold spectator-voyeur, proxy detainee, and performer-activist, Bey exists in complicated relationship to actual detainees, as do we as spectators viewing this video reenactment. Although he temporarily steps into the role of detainee and experiences a procedure similar to those on 2013 hunger strike, he still retains agency as a performer and American citizen whom has “volunteered to undergo the procedure,” a privilege not permitted the 44 detainees “force fed against their will.” Dismissed by some as propaganda spectacle and “publicity stunt,” hailed by others as an act of protest and “legitimate performance art” that draws immediate attention to the ethical trespasses of Guantánamo allowing audiences to engage viscerally with detainees’ experience, it functioned both as media event and reenactment art with ethical intent. Bey’s performance also evoked connections between force-feeding of detainees and violent policing of African-American masculinity, the reenactment video distributed online via YouTube and Vimeo alongside Facebook livestreams of police-involved shootings. 

More than an ethical wake-up call and indictment of the Department of Defense under Bush and Obama, the reenactment also raised questions and provoked provisional answers on the role of art in generating communities of empathy and catalyzing political change: How might we attach not just an image to the representational void of Guantánamo but also a physiological experience that we can feel in our bodies? While disclaimers that accompanied online postings of the video believed this was dangerous physiological business – “Warning: the video is hard to watch and extremely upsetting” and “Some viewers may find these images distressing” – are there limits to what we can feel as viewers in the face of “distressing” or “upsetting” images? Beyond purely affective or emotional response, it’s impossible to deny the “hard to watch” physical consequences of watching Bey undergo this procedure as a reenactment of what the 44 force-fed detainees actually experienced. Yet are there limits to what Bey can claim to experience through his voluntary participation in a dramatically truncated force-feeding procedure (his two and a half minutes vs. the typical two hours it takes to administer to detainees) and because he can tell his “captors” to stop or the director may step in and call “Cut”? And finally: though wildly different in tone and intent than The Tingler, the audience to Bey’s reenactment similarly becomes a community of “living participants” who “actually feel real physical sensations” – a community of feeling both on and off screen, collapsing the point-of-view of experiencing subject and viewing audience into simultaneous first-order bodily experience.

One last set of questions – a challenge to film viewers, artists, and critics to scan their senses and confront how bodies-that-watch feel, experience, and desire what happens on screen: How do sadistic spectatorship, masochistic participation, and human curiosity fuel the relation (and collapse the distance) between viewer and performer, or between Bey and the Guantánamo detainees? How does viewing Bey’s painful experience of force-feeding – his gagging, flinching, and difficulty breathing, the low-angle shots capturing his flared nostrils and neck muscles tensed, a series of bodily events “happening” yet also strategically staged – expose the impossibility of separating the aesthetics, ethical-ideological, and complex sensory-erotics (senserotics) of empathetic encounter? This is not a matter of diagnosing film experience as sadistic or ethical or transformative or perverse or life-affirming or life-destroying (it is surely all these things and more), but of being human and living inside a sensing body.

Whatever your specific response to viewing his reenactment-performance, likely some combination of recoil and perverse fascination with scenes of prison discipline usually hidden from public view, there’s no escaping that watching Bey’s body “actually” undergo the procedure makes the viewing body feel something. We all enter the prison simulacrum and inhabit a shared body of sensation and suffering. We are then faced with a choice about whether to keep viewing, sensing, participating in what’s experienced on screen (what Sontag dubs the ethical challenge of “co-spectatorship”). Ultimately the audience is confronted by the same question that Tingler posters posed as a taunt and a dare to be more human, to stop merely looking at screens but to participate in what we see: “Do you have the guts to sit in this chair?” 

Do you?

First, I’d like to define what I mean by style. Or rather: what style means to me: The expression of an author’s subjective truth within the framework-truth of his time.

Usually an author writes

a) about what interests him. (i.e. about something he likes    hates    fears, etc.)

b)    hopefully    about what he knows.

(No one can write successfully about something he doesn’t know. & by this I don’t mean phantasy. But you’ve got to know something about nursing, about hospital administration, if one of your characters is to be a nurse. About sickness and its horizontal helplessness, if the character is the patient.)

The author’s subjective truth is already to some extent expressed by the selection of his material & by the angle from which he presents it.

His objective    or collective    truth is the validity of the selected material within the context of his time.

(Of another time, if he chooses to write about historical events or characters. But they must be relevant to the truth of his own time as well. As for instance Brecht’s Mother Courage or Arthur Miller’s Crucible.)

(Personally, I like to write about anonymous often nameless people. He/She/The Woman/His mother’s sister’s husband/ etc. By remaining nameless they become more prototypical of their specific situation or relationship. They grow from the inside out, their world ripping around their thought of themselves.    —I’m forever fascinated with the ego-image & its outward reflection, or projection.—    I have tried to render the ‘essence’ of a Mother/Daughter stalemate    in a play Breakfast Past Noon    by putting the dialogue into the past tense…)

Every thought    or situation    has its own heartbeat. Its own breath cadence. Its own organic page-duration. The very choice whether a thought    or situation    should become a short story     a novel    a play    & of what length    is already part of the style. Or form.

To me, even a potentially exciting thought or situation is dulled & becomes irrelevant if the form    or style    is not the perfect mirror of the content.    (Perhaps this is why a finished stylist like Flaubert never quite succeeded in realizing his great ambition: to describe boredom without boring; in Sentimental Education…)     Kafka    Gertrude Stein    Beckett    Borges    Nathalie Sarraute    Robbe-Grillet    Claude Ollier    & many other recent Americans like Stephen Koch & Joseph McElroy    are all masters of mirror-description, in a my opinion.     Usually through repetition with a slight variation; an almost hallucinatory groping.

(By repetition I do not mean: writing on after one has nothing left to say. Letting a story    or play    run on & on, like a beheaded chicken running around a courtyard. As I’ve said before: the length of a story is an organic part of what the story wants to say.)

The inseparable bond between style & content becomes particularly evident when one tries to translate a work. (& I’m not only thinking of translating puns.) Each language has its own recurrence of vowels; its own sound associations. When influence    slant    direct    an author’s thinking whether he realizes it admits it or not. A language is, after all, the expression of character & thought pattern of the people who live in it. & vice versa. & the grammar that regulates the sequence & importance of the different words within a sentence is the psychological key to the character & thought-pattern.

—The same applies to the slang, that constantly changing language within a language. That changes: as to like; switches from cool to heavy; that blows your mind & freaks you out.—

Nothing reveals a discrepancy between content and its expression as blatantly as the attempt to express that content in another language. (Which is another reason why plot stories that place little emphasis on style are more popular export articles.    —Why an author like Günter Grass, with his Tin Drum, is a lot more popular in America than his compatriot Uwe Johnson, a stylistic innovator, with his also bulky Speculations about Jakob, or his Third Book about Achim.—    A faithful rendering of STYLE requires the self-effaced patience of a translator of poetry.

Truth & reality    at least the interpretation & expression of truth & reality are as subject to fashion as our concepts of what is beautiful & what ugly. Which no one will deny are subject to constant change. Yet, many people do deny that their points of view aesthetic as well as MORAL follow trends of fashion.

When pointed shoes & spike heels came back, replacing previous rounded flatness, many people said: God! How can anybody walk in that! Until many of those many people began walking in them… Because they no could longer face themselves as ‘clodhoppers’.

& when flat-heeled roundness made its first reappearance, just as many people regretted the days of gracefully tip-toeing helplessness… Until many of the many began feeling that: ‘Only prostitutes willfully reduced their mobility…’ & descended from their pointed heights to the respectability level of comfort.

When hemlines went up, so did eyebrows.    For a while.

Now, the same heads shake their regret of long-legged liberty at the sight of a maxi-coat, climbing into a bus. (Paradoxically enough: older women who might have more reasons for hiding their legs & seek additional winter warmth besides, do not go in for maxi-coats;    At least not yet.)    Etc.  Etc.  Etc.

Or, on another level: when the Renaissance introduced perspective into 
painting belying painting’s basic truth: 2-dimensional flatness    it introduced a new way of seeing. A new & different pictorial ‘reality.’ That eventually went to extreme in trompe-l’oeil reality or Campbell soup cans. & every time, people’s vision adjusted itself. & the memory of previous visions was effaced. Until the landscapes around Arles began looking like Van Gogh’s paintings…etc…

Every taste    every moral indignation    every life & death sentence    has its lifespan of truth & reality. Until it is superseded by the next. & every time, we speak of: progress. & look back upon the immediate past    over fashionably padded or drooping shoulderlines    with a condescending smile for our childhood follies.

While annotators annotate.

& analysts analyse

(a recurrence of fashion in clothes not so unlike what people wore during the bloody days of the French Revolution. A cut of coats not so unlike those worn during the civil war…).

& prophets prophecy doom & subsequent enlightenment.

& historians mutter about: history repeating itself.

& tired cynics take refuge in the triteness of proverbs. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

& prophets prophecy doom & subsequent enlightenment. & subsequent doom.

& critics criticize, & shake their heads…

& all are safe. On the safe side of basic absolute truth & reality. On the premise that human life on earth continues to pose more or less the same basic problems    of survival    individually as well as collectively. From one millennium to the next.

Granted: primitive man running from a dinosaur was not so differently motivated from a jaywalker in city traffic. By a similar mixture of imprudence & fear for his life. But the FORM of his imprudence has changed.

An author attempting to describe the jaywalker’s feelings cannot borrow imaginary retrospective fear-drama from the dinosaur contemporary. & yet, certain authors try to do just that. It is not so uncommon on television or in the movies. & certain critics applaud. & recommend them as examples.

Or, on a psychological level:

The jealousy    outrage    possessive indignation    that prompted Othello to smother his loyal wife may still be felt by a husband/wife/lover party to a wife-swapping club of bridge-bored suburbanites in search of release. He might even be prompted to act in Othello’s old-fashioned fashion.

But an author describing    or inventing    or reinventing such a drama cannot justify the righteous indignation    the concern with shame & honor    that was the fictional reality in Shakespeare’s days.    —Which was perhaps equally unreal, untrue to life even then. Today’s author would at least have to touch upon the mixed-marriage problem somewhere along his storyline. Go into housing discrimination, etc. Nor could he blithely reuse the handkerchief evidence, in this Kleenex-age. Unless he made a special point of his heroine’s using a handkerchief, rather than Kleenex. Which would give the lady a different character, setting her off as something of an original among her fellow suburbanites.

Still: there are many readers    & networks; & especially certain critics    that cling to this bygone fictional reality. & have nothing but scorn & yawns    if not outright hatred    for an anti-novel like Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie which is    to me    a perfect modern— (& timeless) reality portrait of jealousy. Of suspicious spying & speculating from behind half-closed shutters. & no more ‘an unnecessarily repetitive complicating of a banal incident’ than somebody’s varying stages of degrees of jealousy.

But to certain critics who are looking for past centuries’ fictional reality in contemporary writing    (& it seems to me that the tendency to look back oriented certain of these critics in the choice of their profession)    La jalousie is a failure of a novel. A bad boring book. Because it does not offer a clear-cut plot, elaborated according to the standard: beginning-middle-end prerequisite by an omniscient author. Who makes his characters behave as though there was no such thing as multiple motivation. Or a subconscious. As though each knew on page 1 where he’d have to be at the end. After a detour-conflict in the middle.

As though truth & reality were stately unshakeable absolutes.

There is perhaps a deeply rooted psychological reason behind this attitude. Behind this distrust of style. Especially of stylistic innovations; unconventional punctuation or spacing; lists; ampersands instead of spelled-out ands; figures not spelled out; varying indentations of paragraphs, etc.etc. A distrustful moralizing attitude that feels    at best    that form should not be noticeable, in a work. (I think that it is the effort involved in creating the form that should not be noticeable.) That style    or form    should be totally subordinate to the content & not an integral indispensable part & aspect of the work, as important as the content.  —A soul without a body is a ghost.—    That a work cannot be successful, if the style is noticeable. That a noticeable style obstructs/obscures the content. Or    the most common accusation    that it is used as a screen behind which to hide a lack of content…

It seems to me that the psychology behind this ‘formophobe’ attitude is the same that attaches a value judgement    a moral evaluation    to the basic differentiation of:

positive & negative

active    & passive

light      & dark

white    & black

right     & left

& finally, to sum it all up & get to the crux of the problem of

male     & female

masculine & feminine.

At the risk of being accused of blatant feminism and prejudice    (men have opinions, women are opinonated) , I’d like to point out that form is a feminine, a female concept.

Which explains perhaps its dubious reputation. & the constant attempt, on the part of certain    usually male critics    to keep    or to put    form in its subordinate place.

Whereas the concept of content is definitely male.

All of life around us    all of nature    electricity    the kabbala    all teachings of wisdom    show that one cannot exist without the other. That content & from shape one another. Feed one another. That they are originally bound to each other in never-ending interdependence.

Why speak ill of the surface. Only the void has none…

(& already each of you who may be drawing a picture of the void in his mind is giving it a form. A different form in each mind…)

Odee Bones was an autograph name, a stage tag, a nom de la rue as she often said. Her real name was Odile Bonnard, like the famous painter, but not that family. She was a raven-haired woman, or as Frank imagined her, a Poe-haired woman. She had an Edgar Poe-like personality—morbid, dark, seemingly bred in some remote country you never heard of. And, except for a few absurd tics, she fit quite well in the parade of that depressed poet’s heroines—a Lenore or a Legeia—all the femme fatales of the stewed Romantic imagination.

And Frank often pictured her just that way: Odee Bones, weeping by the cold tomb of her mother; Odee Bones languishing in the musty bed chamber of some gothic mansion clutching a crucifix; Odee Bones standing alone in a wolverine fur cape at the end of a stone jetty in the English Channel during a storm; Odee Bones, wounded and bleeding at the bottom of a ravine in an upstate New York forest, while Catskill coyotes howled at the moon.

She had that seductive quality of women who are aligned with the death drive, be it by choice or accident. Sex with such women was dangerous. It might start out fun, but somewhere in the middle you begin to realize you’re dissolving into the all too real and indifferent universe, an inorganic molecular void in which your lust was the product of chemical imbalances and your precious personal thoughts were nothing but crashing atoms spinning endlessly down through bottomless space. Which is to say, she could make you afraid, but somehow that only increased Frank’s attraction, an attraction that was currently drawing him away from Lincoln Center and toward his home downtown.

He passed the A-C-D subway station north of Columbus Circle. He should have got the train and rode home, but this night, he decided to walk instead. He would walk all the way downtown. Hell, he might even stop for a beer somewhere to make the walk more lively. You couldn’t drink openly on NYC streets anymore thanks to Herr Rudolf—no more brown paper bags in his Broken Windows world, or as Frank liked to think of it—Broker Windows, i.e. making the city safe for Wall Street, their clients and children.

In any case, there used to be a bar around 61st and Broadway—a McCann’s or a Miller’s. Frank couldn’t remember the name, but he used to hang there decades ago when he was naïve and young and had no confidence or talent. It was an old school New York steam table bar where you could get a pastrami sandwich or mashed potatoes and gravy and sit in a booth scribbling in a notebook like a hoarder taking a break from his collections. No one bothered you. Such bars were an important form of escape in Frank’s early NYC life. Of course, one of the illusions of youth is that you can actually escape from yourself, your family, your spouse, your history. Thirty years might pass before you realize you can’t, not even at the friendly bar rail of McCann’s. In part, because McCann’s wasn’t there anymore. It was now one of those ubiquitous Korean-run salad bar joints with their over-priced convenience and their perpetually grumpy cashiers.

Frank passed the salad bar and continued to Columbus Circle. To his left was the skeleton of a new Trump Hotel. They were stripping the façade off the former Gulf and Western Building, to rebrand it. The whole area was just beginning to attract the new money class. The high towers and stone facades to the east were there to house both the power brokers of the city and their imitators who paced back and forth in their luxury apartments overlooking the park, sipping martinis through crystal straws similar to those used to suck up the life blood and brain waves of all the anonymous Janes and Joes wandering in the streets below.

Fuck them, Frank thought as he made his way around the circle’s west side to 9^th Ave and turned south. Back in the 70s, he used to live in a building on 57^th and 9^th. The building was boarded up now, but Frank would always walk by when he was in the neighborhood. 400 W. 57^th was the address, but the door was on 9^th. The building sometimes reminded him of a ghost ship rising out of the turbulent sea of his own past bearing the Ark of some Frank Payne Covenant, and if and when the wrecking ball ever hit it, the ghosts and stories of thousands of departed residents would come raging out like a psychic storm howling over the now trendy west side.

Despite the scaffolding, there was no construction, and hadn’t been for years. In the middle of one of the most rapidly developing parts of Manhattan, this particular building remained abandoned, a sore thumb of resistance in the fetishistic creep of Midtown glass and steel. Rumor had it that some tenant refused to leave. The landlord could not legally evict the person so they had to wait until he or she died. But then, who knew if that rumor was true.

Some buildings take on a sinister quality over time, and 400 West 57^th was one of them. It had a definite “don’t-go-there-aura” like the house your grandma used to warn you about on at the end of Death and Disease Street. Such buildings might be associated with murder, suicide, Satanic ritual or extreme and unnatural sex. They were often accompanied by ominous music too, and because of their geological intensity they had the ability to bend light, to glow eerily and warp the space/time matrix for blocks around. On humid nights the streetlights would hiss and crackle, radiating diffuse halos of impending mental pain. And so Frank walked by his old haunt with trepidation, and the 70s walked alongside him when he did. Odee always claimed he was a man out of time, living in limbo, with no fixed identity or purpose.

The 70s were like an alternative universe, a traveling black window-pane next to Frank’s ear. All he had to do was pop his head inside that little window and he would be back in that old black and white New York he loved—a city of deli sandwiches and shot and beer specials, a city where men wore fedoras and overcoats, and made important calls from phone booths, feeding the quarters into the slot and listening to the slow syncopated beat of the falling coins as they hit the bottom of the box.

That old room, as he remembered it, had a certain disturbed perspective, claustrophobic and fast, but at the same time, static. Frank would sit in the fourth floor window watching the shadows moving in the street below while smoke and steam rose from the vents of Hells Kitchen and Midtown. He used to imagine the water tanks were music notes on a patchwork staff of asphalt rooftops. He listened to radio dramas in his room back then—rebroadcasts of The Shadow and the Isaac Asimov Hour. Everything that came out of the radio seemed old—old singers, old songs, old stories. Even the timbre of men’s voices was different—a post-war tremor still lived in them, a gee-whiz paranoia that mixed innocence with the toxic ambitions of the capitalist age.

He remembered the other men who lived in the apartment with him: drifters and odd balls with old-timey nick names like Laughing Ralph, Jimmy the Kid, Broadway Danny, and Mickey Leftovers—fringe dwellers and misfits with adjectives attached to their names as if to scaffold their fragile identities. None of them would ever be famous for anything, so they needed those adjectives if only to avoid disappearing into the void of city life.

But disappear they did. Jimmy the Kid disappeared one day. He left all his stuff in his room and they had to throw it out. It was mostly stolen stuff anyway, because, as Ralph always said, the Kid was nothing but a petty thief and his day of reckoning had probably come. Mickey Leftovers went to the hospital and never came back. They carried him out on a stretcher, fighting the whole way, his bedclothes stained with blood and urine.

Ambulances came and went with a certain frequency on that corner. One day Frank and Laughing Ralph were standing around down on the corner watching the aftermath of a car crash. Car crashes, like fires, were good entertainment in the days before computers. People would meet their neighbors and catch up on community gossip. “Hey Jimbo, how’s the wife and kids?”  “I hear Finkelstein’s pharmacy is closing.” Ralph swept his flabby arm across the 9^th Ave. landscape and laughed: “Just think, all this madness when all people really want to do is watch TV, have a decent meal and fuck.” Frank though it was a profound comment at the time. A month later Laughing Ralph was also gone—some kind of heart problem.

Back in the 70s, Frank used the phone booth across 9^th as a personal phone. Passersby would shout up to his window, “Yo Frank, your girlfriend’s on the phone.” Frank’s girlfriend was Darley Cohen, a Brooklyn gal, from way out in Sunset-Flatbush-Midwood world, a land of cut-rate upholstery shops and bagel bakeries. You could smell the sea from the stoop of her house but you couldn’t see it. The sea was still ten subway stops away. Sometimes, they would go and look at the sea, but the cold grey aura of human insignificance often got to be too much for them.

Now Darley Cohen was no Odee Bones; she wasn’t “artistic” or “creative” but they did share certain traits. They were both dark-eyed and tragic. They both had an engaging sarcastic laugh, and they both had a certain languid acceptance that suicide was probably the most likely outcome to a life without logic or vector. Happiness was a matter of getting by day to day and keeping a short focus. Both women were runaways if only in spirit. In some sense, Frank provided this service for each of them—he was the perpetual stranger in town, any town, and as such he was an easy substitute for running away from home. It was an odd role for a boyfriend but he wore it with pride because it worked for him.

One night after drinking at some Wall Street Irish watering hole with his dishwashing buddies, Reid and Warren, he came home quite late and there was Darley, sitting in front of his door with a half-assed bandage tied around her left wrist claiming she had just tried to kill herself but she decided to come see Frank instead, as if he might offer her some reason to live. Frank knew he was the last person anyone should call if they needed a reason to live, but apparently he was just that person for Darley that night. And Odee must have felt the same way that day she showed up downstairs of his Lower East Side apartment twenty years later with a suitcase and a perverse bond to an old abusive boyfriend named Otto, the Oedipal Austrian.

Now, as often happens, there’s a movie in Frank’s head closely associated with the building at 400 W 57^th St. It’s called Angelheart, an Oedipal mystery in which Mickey Rourke plays Harry Angel, hot on the trail of a crime of which he discovers that he himself is the perpetrator. Certain scenes were pertinent, especially the shot of a lighted window high above a midtown street, where Harry Angel sold his soul to Satan. Frank had made a similar transaction, which was somehow related, after the fact, to Darley’s suicide attempt. It was a week or so earlier. There was pint of bourbon, a candle, a jack-knife, and, if he tried, he could still feel the heat of that candle flame and the knife blade edge against his palm, but he couldn’t remember what got sold and to whom? Who was the seller and who was the buyer? Was it Existential Despair that drove it? A taste for Dada? Or plain old morbid Romanticism.

Probably the most Angelhearted thing about the building was the elevator. It was a narrow beige box resonant with the smell of wigs, second hand suits, hair product, and little dogs. When you were going down it felt like it would keep going down, past the ground floor, through the sub-basement and into the very crust of the earth. In fact, there were buttons on the elevator panel that didn’t have numbers on them, as if the panel was originally made for a taller building, or one that had private floors. Frank had even pushed these buttons a few times but they didn’t do anything. At least that’s what he thought at the time.

 Frank remembered nights riding that elevator past the third floor, the one below his, and he would often hear a Billie Holiday record playing all soft and crackly somewhere in the interior. Sometimes the elevator would stop on that floor all by itself and the door would open, but nobody ever got on. And there was always the music—he could still hear it, echoing around the empty halls.

It was a scene straight out of Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch, but this movie was directed by Frank himself, and he could walk into that scene; he could get off over and over on the 3^rd floor and walk down the hall like a lost actor on the wrong set until he reached the room where the music played. The door was open and Frank entered. The room was empty except for a man sitting at a table with his back to the door. The man seemed to be writing something, scribbling in a notebook while the record was spinning on an old phonograph.

Frank walked up behind the guy, took him by the shoulders and turned him around in his swivel chair. That’s when realized the body had no weight! In fact, it was nothing but a dusty old suit stuffed with straw. But there was a face to it, not unlike Frank’s own face. It was rubbery and gooey and the features were smeared into a blur somewhere between laughter and disgust. Suddenly Frank understood why they couldn’t tear the building down.

He pleaded with the guy: “You’ve gotta let it go man. You’ve got to let me out of here.” He shook the over-sized sad doll, but there was no answer, because you can’t answer when your mouth is just a smear on a pitiful illusion. And Lady was the perfect soundtrack for the ambiguity. “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” she sang. Take what away? And who from? And why did Odee love that song? 

Did I mention that Billie Holiday was Odee’s favorite singer. She said the voice had a sense of decay about it, a sense of falling or of having already fallen. She said listening to Lady was like walking through a graveyard with a forced smile. And did I mention that Frank first met Odee Bones in a Brooklyn waterfront bar on New Year’s Eve, the same symbolic night that Harry Angel sold his soul to Satan. The noose of associations was tightening like a string of prayer beads around Frank’s mind, beads he counted to a beat marked off in images of tombstones in a moonlit cemetery and jagged water tanks on Manhattan rooftops and the rattle of subway cars making down rails to dark outer boroughs and the whistling of lonely homeless men in scaffold shadows. Music was everywhere, but it was the tone that concerned Frank most—it was disturbing and not a little prophetic. As Billie herself might sing: “Swing Brother, Swing.” Shoobeedoobeedo. Here comes another dewey-eyed fool. And so, on that note, Frank crossed 56^th and continued walking south, thinking his sweetheart Odee Bones might actually be home when he got there.

Greyhound tomorrow

Axe, leathers, Aqua Net: check

“Adios, Fort Wayne!”

♫You know where you are?

You’re in the jungle, baby!♬

DISHWASHER WANTED

Looks that kill, pipes too

LA’s most dangerous band

Own transport a plus

Rat and Dee can shred

Drummer Spike’s a dick, but hey

He’s got good contacts

Slayed the Troubadour

A&R guys want us bad

The chicks want us more

“You’re gonna be huge!”

“That’s why we hired you, Sal”

“Next time knock, capiche?”

“Squeeze” video shoot

The boa looks underfed

Chrissy’s cool with it

“Dude, I saw her first!”

Spike’s pissed, Dee nods off on set

Reputation sealed

MTV loves us

Sal says Trixter digs our shit

Time to hit the road

Pyrotechnics fail

Rat’s eyebrows were nearly toast

“Can you insure bangs?”

“Turn the Page” was right

Your thoughts will be wandering

“Goodnight, Milwaukee!”

Spike frowns at breakfast

“Chrissy like the ring you bought?”

“Code of the road, bro.”

Back in studio

Maybe it’s the crack talking

We sing like angels

Sales figures are low

Something called “alternative”

Sal says it’s a fad

A meeting is called

The gigs with Warrant are off

“Too late for haircuts?”

Hi Mom, Hi Major

Fishing in Alaska pays

Forwarding my mail

“A postcard arrived.”

Spike and Chrissy got married

Love really does bite 

Lorna’s instamatic camera has passed between hands often and long enough at least for someone among the gathered to snap a picture of her in mid-motion, to the right of Magali who remains as well unaware of the shutter, both faces transfixed by something beyond the frame. It occurs to me now to ask, wishfully, did I take the photograph?

Magali’s face brightens behind clear plastic glasses, her deep red lipstick and shoulder-length hair, jet black, further enhanced by a close-fitting sweater, deep yellow, loose sleeves pulled to mid-arm, one hand firmly on hip. Bewildered, but ever undaunted in mood—as in the reportaje she’s published last month on sex work in Mexico City—Magali’s uncertain smile now lingers as a dare.

Next to her in the picture, Lorna, unmistakable, is a radiation of silver hair and sapphire eyes, lips parted in midsentence, as though deliberating the merits of who among our clan had featured in the group exhibition at Benjamín’s gallery or maybe rather a riposte to some entanglement now occurring at this daytime viewing party she is hosting on the rooftop of her apartment building, a courtyard vecindad on Calle de San Luis Potosí in the Colonia Roma neighborhood.

Her flawless Spanish is ever so slightly betrayed by a clip in cadence more than by accent, unidentifiable at any rate, between English and French, the languages of her life before Mexico. She resumes, possibly now with Gabriela or Luciano, also present, relating the recent plot turn in the ongoing comedy of communication breakdown between French executives, the local film crew, and Lorna’s work of cultural diplomacy on the conquest of Mexico epic in pre-production.

It’s Thursday, we’ve assembled around noon with an abundance of cold Tecate, in league with Mexico City’s twenty million inhabitants similarly congregating around balconies and rooftops, or on the streets, to witness what TV and radio have christened The Great Eclipse of Mexico … millones y millones seremos testigos directos de cuando el día se hizo noche… many millions of us about to witness as day became night. The eclipse’s path: ten thousand kilometers of darkness 250 kilometers wide, enough to blanket the capital and its surroundings. 

Lorna again has the camera. 

With her encouragement and some stage direction, I prepare myself for the snapshot, remove my glasses, and as though to lampoon a public service announcement, I hide my face behind the cardboard mask, two holes punched in front, little touches of green and red ink flared at the left and right edges, a corner bearing the government seal of Mexico.

My thumb and forefingers hold up the viewing card, an official thing that circulated in a state campaign to prevent any incident of blindness among the imagined throngs determined to stare down the diminishing sun, still an hour away, and we’re counting. My face is cast in shadow, hair high and tight, a tousled flat top groomed by the only reliable barber in Mexico: Emilio, whose skin is the color of caramel, doused as a rule in bergamot aftershave, upper lip bearing the trim of an impeccable pencil-thin moustache. Had he noticed but said nothing about the over-exuberance of my gold-orange floral shirt, ill fitted, and just feminine enough, at any rate short of what passes for masculine in Mexico, to confirm a tiny calculus of queerness in plain sight? 

The rooftop azotea, coveted for socializing in Mexico City, is here a tumble: a clothesline sagging from one wall to another, behind me a partition of angled slats, the slack curve punctuated with cheap commercial clothespins—red, light blue— the plastic curled over time by the sun.

Below this is a hammock slung from one corner of the lattice screen to the other. The smell of concrete fuses with a metallic tang from yesterday’s rainfall, a few puddles evaporating around the escape drains, and with the scent of laundry soap, released from the pink onetime bricks of Jabón Zote mostly now dissolved, misshapen, and strewn around the utility sinks in the chain link cages outside the cuarto de servicio.

On the side of the card, I hold to my face are the instructions in ALL CAPS for the protective filter pressed between the encasing: ÚSELO 10 SEG. CUENTE DEL 1 AL 10. DESCANSE 50 SEG. CUENTE DEL 1 AL 50.  And below that: SI EL FILTRO TIENE RAYADURAS, DOBLECES OR RASPADURAS, NO SIRVE, DESTRÚYALO.

I follow those directions as the model observer for the camera, count to ten, look away in a rested count to fifty, and confirm that the filter is free of scuffs and scratches. By now the effects of many Tecates have so fueled my expansiveness, my commitment to sociability and the will to further conceal my sense of crisis. 

But I’m still posing for Lorna and the camera. Now, click, an AM radio resounds from another rooftop, an upswing horn section swelling with the first bars of a pasodoble mambo, Daniela Romo’s “Todo, todo, todo.” Some among this rooftop crowd, with decidedly loftier aspirations, puff in gestures of disdain, but really few of us can resist the brawny voice of Daniela Romo as she swoons—“Papá”— above the counter-rhythms of this dance floor torch song.

It’s about an abusive lover, ever aloof, the singer’s longing no less fierce despite the distress she designates—“…porque sabes que te adoro, me tratas mal / crees que estás en tu derecho pero te has equivocado…” In a fervid lull she summons the strength to refute desire and wish instead for retribution—“…crees que estás en tu derecho pero te has equivocado / y un día de tantos me decido y te pongo en tu lugar.”

Romo sings of her weariness even now as the song structure builds to its chorus. Goodbye to the withholding lover, surrender to forgetting: it’s a heart that swells again with memory, it’s her lover’s eyes, verdes, flesh on fire, every smile in syncopated recollection, everything “…todo, todo, todo.” It’s tawdry and trite and engineered to perform straight, but clearly coded otherwise—a trashy anthem to unreciprocated desire and all the emotional amplitude that betrayal is able to contain. 

It suits me to cover my face in that staging for a photograph—but I’ve lost my bearing as to how the lines connect between the snap of Tecate pull-tabs, cigarettes interjecting in the air, a surge of chatter and laughter, pitched higher as the sky begins to darken and somebody roars the manic reminder to avoid directly staring at the sun. I’ve been hiding, not only behind the viewer, in line with the dimming midday countdown, and I further disassociate.

I’m in the room now where I belabor, aching to fill the void with fractions of speech and living, before I sink again into prolonged silence, drawn to the watermarks on the walls and ceiling. How much more is there to say about the turbulence of separation and heartbreak?  How much more about the repertoire of figures—antagonist, mentor, guardian, lover, my once and future self—blurring one into the other and deposited in a person from all the experience I manage to extract into spoken scenes that would redirect my excess of attachment, my dispossession pursuant to a man who wasn’t there, a former lover’s anatomy the source of all the invalidation I am able to claim is my birthright.

A thousand faces for my disembodied voice so straining within a part of me that would avert the walls from collapsing on this person I want to release from reluctance, fragile and unformed, compelled to endeavor, committed to reconcile the near and far in this place that, maybe then or only just still had now begun to feel like home, like a pattern exalted as belonging but plain and infectious as a pop song on the radio.

It’s 1:24 on Lorna’s rooftop, and I’ve been drinking. So when the disruption begins between the uncanny twilight and the anxious clamor from the neighboring crowds—peals coalescing anxiety and joy, repeated intakes of breath and sudden applause—I’m focused instead on the voice of news anchor Jacobo Zabludovsky in real time coverage, as though issued in time-lag reverberation from a hundred Colonia Roma TV sets. He’s broadcasting the distance the eclipse will have traveled from Hawaii to Brazil, by way of La Paz, Guanajuato, Valley of Mexico, and Federal District. He’s preparing us for the eclipse’s diamond ring effect, the satellite footage, the next seven minutes of darkness, the drop in temperature, the sense of expectancy. 

In the growing dark I must be stumbling, so I go inward, to a dream I’ve already recounted to the analyst this week. I’m on an arid landscape, altogether flat and barren but for the scattered brush that disintegrates on the horizon before my eyes can settle. I head in the direction of a spot in the far distance when I realize that my body now defies the laws of gravity, and I diminish the closer I get to the vanishing point that, in turn, continues to recede. I observe in horror as the landscape begins to implode, a surge of water rapidly draining through the point ordained for me in space—my navel to be exact, insomuch as I’m abruptly inside out, a liquid glove, even as I am able to breathe now that I am fully underwater. I puzzle the word scar (my navel), repeat it over and over again until it so transfigures as to sound like scale. 

And this other: I hunt among the city newsstands for the morning edition—for something of mine in print—but I wander instead into the vast hull of an abandoned factory. I walk up several flights of stairs at the other end of the building to find there a swimming pool and two teams engaged in competition. I recognize a rival of mine who calls me over to explain the benefits of an unspecified sport: its impact on the cranium; diagrams, explanations. Elsewhere in the factory my opponent hides his secret sharer and I’m given to understand I must make this double speak. I insert my right forefinger behind his neck so that my index now functions as a surrogate tongue, promoting all manner of wild assertions from the cavity of his mouth. 

*

The abrupt dawn gives way to an even louder din surrounding us now along with the regenerate daylight…. “the scent of copal, the sound of rattles, ceremonial dances performed in total darkness around the city zócalo.” Again the voice of Zabludovsky. “And contrary to popular belief,” he surmises,” no hospital has reported complications during childbirth, or any infant born with cleft lip and palate…” The incongruous crack of this television coda kills the romance with my own disquiet, and elicits howls from some of the revelers, “¡No mames, güey! Between my reveries and waking life, a swell of fellow feeling allows me to so acknowledge my own little ceremony of initiation as to dismiss my mood of uncertainty, sorrow, and starting over.

I’ll yet perform a sorcery that connects the images of Lorna and Magali—now welcoming several latecomers into the fold of our scrappy assembly—to a reverence for that which the eclipse serves as my double. I’ll make it speak. I’ll make the lapse of seven minutes stand for all the eventualities as yet undetermined by time; for all the hedging still to come but never quite yet becoming in this performance of vitality and vocation to estrange. I’ll need everything—todo, todo—at once prodigious and pedestrian to ground a form of life for finding my kin, situations of exchange, loves worthy of heartbreak, dreamwork to further puzzle meanings that merit the wager.

WORKPOINTS

• Hart Crane on stars of memory; i.e., that they overwhelm us in the present.
• Milenio, issue 3, May-June 1991, edited by Fernando Fernández, cover photograph by Eniac Martínez; cover theme, “Noches de la ciudad/ City Nights,” articles by Magali Tercero (“Una noche de putas”), with photographer Francisco Mata, Guillermo Osorno, Gonzalo Celorio, and Amílcar Salazar.
• Opponents and partners; cabarets, clubs, cantinas; Secretaría de Gobernación.
• Situations into scenes; scenes into provisional circumstance.
• Zabludovsky: “At the Chapultepec Zoo, animals startled by the sudden nighttime skies, reported to have fled, disconcerted, to their shelters….”
• Éxitos de 1991 (julio): 1) Burbujas de amor, Juan Luis Guerra; 2) Déjame llorar, Ricardo Montaner; 3) Vuela, vuela, Magneto; 4) Demasiado tarde, Ana Gabriel; 5) Si te vuelves a enamorar, Bronco; 6) Bella señora, Emmanuel; 7) Bachata rosa, Juan Luis Guerra;  8) Tiempo de vals, Chayanne; 9) Todo, todo, todo, Daniela Romo; 10) Hasta que te conocí [en vivo], Juan Gabriel; 11) Amante del amor, Luis Miguel…..
• Flourish—ironize—promise