Any Woman's Blues (29 page)

How else dare to create, if you do not dare to destroy? The madness is the same madness, the fever in the blood, the pride of creating a world out of nothingness. Fevered, maddened, I look at the snippets and pieces I have been playing with all day, and my head throbs. The veins in my temples twitch. My throat pains me. My neck aches. It is nothing that could not be cured by a night in bed with the right man.

I put down my scissors, go over to the Rolodex, and start flipping through. What a testament to mutability my Rolodex is! Half the phone numbers are obsolete; people who have not divorced or married have died! What a mortality rate the Rolodex reflects! I take the Filofax (where I keep the names of special, intimate friends: “close personal friends,” as they say in Hollywood—as opposed to what? “impersonal” friends?) and flip through
that:
old boyfriends, estranged husbands of dear friends, or estranged husbands of estranged friends! Unpromising stuff! I make a little list of the possibly fuckable men in my Rolodex and Filofax—and my heart sinks. What problems lurk behind each of those names! What untold depths of fear of intimacy, fear of commitment, fear of falling, fear of flying, fear of fucking!

A nice first dinner date, a return engagement, movies, theater, safe condomized sex on the fourth date, without exchange of bodily fluids, and back into the Filofax they go, as if laid between the fresh clean sheets of a hospital bed. Why bother? Why not just stay here in the country, collaging my life?

I begin a piece called
Sex in the Age of AIDS,
based on all my obsolete Filofax pages and Rolodex cards. On a C print of Dart as a rock star, I begin to arrange Filofax pages, Rolodex cards, old
Playbill
s, menus, and more Polaroids of Dart. I cut the
Playbill
s and menus into sensual, even genital shapes, dismember the Polaroids, and even paste one pink-wrapped Excita condom in the center of the piece. I tear through my stack of old magazines, looking for one of those amazing pictures of a woman innocently massaging her neck with a phallic-shaped vibrator. I laugh out loud at the imposture. As I change and rearrange the snipped pieces, I dream of a lovely boy stud who could be summoned to my side as simply as one summons a masseur.

What a flourishing business for busy creative women! AIDS-tested studs for the creative woman (or the busy executive) who doesn’t want to get involved. But of course it would never work. Most women don’t want studs, AIDS-tested or not—they want
love.
They want
romance.
And so the escort business would never work.

It wouldn’t work for me—no matter how appealing the fantasy seems. I may
pretend
to myself that I
want
a stud, but alas, what I want is frighteningly more complex: a lover, a partner, a friend, a daddy, a baby. A stud would be too easy—even if I had the faintest idea where to find one.

So I go on making my collage, like a woman possessed, hoping that all the passion and energy and lust will go into the paper, all the blocked come will go into the glue, and the images will vibrate like an orgasm well and truly achieved. I could also call this collage
Empty-Bed Blues.
And I could dedicate it to Bessie, Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, my heroine.

—
Freddie Spruell

 

 

W
ayne Riboud hasn’t been heard from since the night he disappeared into a covey of tootsies at the roadhouse in the absurd suburbs of New York. Now, suddenly, he is on the phone, importuning me as if nothing ever happened. Men who vanish for weeks at a time and then reappear used to mystify me. Now I know they are either in retreat from intimacy or pursuing other women—which of course amounts to the same thing. I left Wayne because he was drunk—or did I?

How often in my life has the man who has just fallen for me taken off and seduced another woman—just to prove he’s not trapped? Truth is, I’ve done it myself and know the beast for what it is: fear of getting close. Did I abandon Wayne, I wonder, because of his drinking, or because he stirred something in me and I panicked? I’ll never know. Since AA, everything in my life has been called into question. I don’t know whether I drank as an excuse to fall into bed with men, or fell into bed with men as an excuse to drink. I don’t know if my addictive substance was booze or cock—or a combination of the two.

Now Wayne’s inviting me to spend a night on the town in New York. Am I sober enough to do it without drinking?

“Come on, Leila—you haven’t been seen for weeks. You’ll
die
in that fucking silo. Let’s do a night on the town—downtown style. I miss your giggle.”

“How can I resist someone who misses my giggle?”

“You can’t, babe. Also, we pay for everything with my bills. It will be a gas.”

“My license is suspended.”

“Ha! And you thought
I
couldn’t drive! I’ll drive,” says Wayne.

“Oh, no you won’t. Never again.”

“Then take the train or get a driver.”

“What do I wear?”

“Black leather.”

“Just remember, I no longer drink or do drugs.”

“I have
other
intoxicants, babe,” says Wayne. “Have no fear.”

 

 

I leave the twins with Lily and hire a driver—a slender young black man called Charlie—to blast down from Connecticut in DART.

We stash DART in my garage, Charlie takes off, and I meet Wayne in his loft on La Guardia Place.

I’m wearing a black lace bustier, Madonna style, black leather jeans, black S&M spike-heeled sandals, and a black motorcycle jacket that used to belong to Dart.

My hair is wildly teased by the ride down from the country, and I don’t brush it. I have that crazed, semihysterical feeling that overtakes me when I’ve been working like a maniac and what passes as real life interrupts. (As usual, I don’t know whether I’m painting or living.)

“Kiss me,” says Wayne. I kiss him, smelling the booze. Horny as I am, it turns me off. I tell myself I’m still bleeding a little, so it’s dangerous to have sex. Since I stopped drinking, my sexual signals are slower to switch on. My sane mind seems more and more in charge. What a crock of shit sobriety is! It makes everything that used to be easy suddenly so
hard.

Wayne walks me through the teeming summer night to the East Village. We enter what looks like a meat-packing warehouse, go through double metal doors, and find ourselves in a large room with folding chairs. Every chair is filled. Wayne and I stand against the wall near the door.

The audience is a mixed bag of artistic East Village types, uptown suits, and thrill seekers from abroad. I hear Japanese spoken, and German—the Axis has invaded New York. (And guess who’s winning?) The show begins.

A leather-masked man walks to the front of the room, steps up on the makeshift stage (covered with tarpaulins), unzips his mouth, and asks: “Who wants to leave before the doors are locked?”

Nobody gets up to go.

“Let’s leave,” I say to Wayne.

“We just
got
here,” he says. “You won’t regret this, I swear. It will
inspire
you.”

I look into his squinty green eyes, smell his booze breath. I want a drink, I think. And then I tell myself: You only
think
you want a drink, because you’re scared.
Feel
the fear—but don’t let it make you drink. It will pass, like weather. Feelings are not facts.

The room suddenly blacks out, and I hear metal doors slam and lock.

Here goes. The room hushes. People shift in their seats. I can
smell
the fear.

Music begins. Electronic music, a Moog synthesizer or a Kurzweil. A science-fictiony sound that could have been made by my friend Julian. Then a spot finds a young woman in black, with a huge pregnant belly. And another spot picks out a menacing masked male figure brandishing a samurai sword. (The same man who made the announcement?)

The samurai swordsman pursues the young woman around the stage in a stylized dance, whipping the air with his sword. He seems to lash at her neck, her ankles, her wrists—pale stalks of flesh compared to her bulging, black-shrouded belly. With a whoosh, he brings the sword down on her belly and slices her open. A dozen rats tumble out, clawing the air, and scamper over the raised floor of the stage. Claws skitter on the tarp.

The woman screams, “My babies! My babies!”

The masked man pursues the rats, feinting at them, decapitating one (a gush of blood), stabbing and dismembering others. The woman is screaming, loud ear-piercing bursts. I’m covering my eyes, my belly cramping, my gut heaving as if I’m about to be sick.

The audience is riveted, silent. Nobody breathes. The room grows hotter and hotter.

I peek between my fingers. The stage is spattered with blood. Some rats are twisting in their death agonies.

Still others are dead, disemboweled on the stage. Others have skittered away God knows where.

The masked man stands center stage with one still-wriggling rat in his hands. He unzips his mask, opens his mouth, and bites the rat’s head off. He spits it out, then squirts the girl with the rat’s blood.

I bolt up and begin beating on the metal door like a crazed claustrophobe. Wayne tries to restrain me, but I’m flailing, terrified I’ll never get out of this nightmare.

Time slows to a crawl, dream time, slow motion, nightmare to a nine-year-old. After what seems an eternity of beating on the metal door, I feel it yield. Wayne and I are released into the cool anteroom of the charnel house.

I rush out into the street. Wayne pursues.

“Baby, baby, you really freaked out,” he says, holding me.

“I don’t want to live in a world where people consider that entertainment!”

I am shaking all over, bleeding from the womb, my knees shaking.

“I hate the world we’ve made! I hate it!”

“Baby, come, sit down. I’ll buy you a drink.”

“A drink! That’s all you can fucking think of. A world so ugly you have to be anesthetized to bear it! I don’t want to live in this world. I want to go back to Connecticut and hide! This is the fucking last days of the Roman Empire. If I were God, I’d kill off everyone and start over again.”

Wayne leads me into a little bistro, a sort of cave where small marble tables stud the gloom and the chairs are woven Parisian café chairs. The crowd is Eurotrash to match the furniture, debutramps (with trust funds) pretending to be artists, gay male models pretending to be straight.

Wayne orders wine for himself. I ask for a Diet Coke with lime. I’m still crying and shaking. I hold on to my glass for dear life.

“Baby, it’s just a performance,” says Wayne.

“Those are real animals and real blood and a real woman and a real man. Don’t give me this performance art shit. We allow stuff like this—but sex freaks us out. It’s crazy, Wayne, crazy. I don’t want to live in a world like this. I want people to be kind and tender and love each other. Why is it all so fucked up?”

Wayne puts his arm around me. “I’d never have brought you if I’d thought you’d freak out. I guess that leaves out Madame Ada, the dominatrix. That was to be our next stop. But if it upsets you, we can catch a movie instead. Maybe
Bambi
’s playing. Okay by me, Leila. I just thought you should
see
this for your art. It’s important. It’s what’s happening downtown. I think you need to know.”

I look at him with sheer hatred (especially because of the Bambi remark). “
Why?
”

“Because it’s the secret history of our epoch. Like my bills, it calls into question what we value. We’re part of this, and unless we find the secret part of ourselves that
loves
this stuff, we haven’t a prayer for abolishing terrorism or torture. You have to find the torturer in your
own
heart. That’s why I want you to meet Madame Ada. But if it’s too rich for your blood, forget it. We’ll do it another time.”

Wayne calls over the waiter, who scribbles out a check. From his elegant black calf billfold Wayne produces a splendid representation of a hundred-dollar bill done in a rainbow of colors, like some banana republic currency.

The waiter, a gay young thing of twenty-two or so, with a bolt in his left ear and a gold pirate hoop in his right, stares at the bill, then says, “I’m terribly sorry, sir, I can’t accept this. We take American Express, Visa, MasterCard. . . .”

“Excuse me,” says Wayne. “Do you know what this bill is worth?”

“No, sir.”

“I’d say it’s worth about at least one hundred times its face value. If you sell it—to Leo Castelli down the block or to Holly Solomon or
any
one—you could pocket a clear profit of nine thousand nine hundred dollars. Do you know what you could do with nine thousand nine hundred dollars?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Acting classes for a year!” says Wayne. “A new car—albeit a little Korean one.
Time.
Do you know what
time
is worth?”

“Sir—I’m terribly sorry, I cannot take this. Amex, Master, Visa—even a personal check with proper ID.”

“What’s a year of your life worth? You could live for a year without working this crummy job—if you lived modestly. What’s that worth to you?”

“Sir,
please,
” says the waiter, clearly upset.

“What’s your name?” asks Wayne.

“Bruce,” says the waiter. “Bruce Berlinger.”

“And what do you do?”

“I’m an actor, sir, take classes with Stella Adler, sir.”

“Well, Bruce, that’ll buy a lot of classes with the old buzzard—and a lot of time. Surely you want
that.
”

“Sir, thank you, but I cannot accept this.”