A Moment of Doubt (8 page)

“Yeah?” said a shadow to his right. “Yeah, Windrow? Keep going, Windrow, this is interesting.”

“Yeah,” Windrow whispered, “yeah. That's when a little felony, a big bunko, becomes . . . becomes . . .”

“Becomes . . . ?” the other voice coaxed.

“. . . Becomes interesting, becomes capital crime, murder, and if you get caught, when you get caught . . . .”

The other man laughed quietly. “When I get caught.”

“You burn.”

“I burn.”

“B . . . b . . .” Windrow couldn't talk any more.

The shadow approached him. “Well that's fine, Windrow. That's just fine. You through now? You got anything else to tell me about my career?”

“F . . . f . . . fuck . . . y-y . . .”

“I thought so,” said the voice, and the blackjack came down on Windrow's mind.

There's a porn theater on Chestnut St. where I like to go to think. It's a nice joint, as such joints go, maybe too nice, depends on your taste, but by that I mean there's nobody in the place offering to blow you in the dark, distracting you from your train of thought long enough to tell them yes or no, thank you. It's the kind of place straight couples go in and out of holding hands. Some of them are shy, some smiling, some furtive; they're cute to watch. And the films are mindless enough, so they don't distract you, either. Once in awhile you see something that's very funny, or very stupid, and very occasionally, rarely, something that's horny. But those are the exceptions. Usually the sounds are the same, the visuals are the same, the people are the same. Production values have improved over the years, it's true. These days you see fewer pimples on the untanned body parts, competent
follow-focus, and less of the really disgusting mistakes people can make while they're trying to do outrageous sexual stunts in front of a camera. But by and large there's nothing to distract you, you can just sit there and think, with popcorn if you want, the wall of mindlessness flickering up there like a big hearth in a dark library, so that, even if you were paying attention the absurdity of it all would dawn on you eventually. I mean, in the close-ups the dicks are fifteen feet tall, and the vaginas are automobile-sized portals to other worlds . . . . Well maybe there's something to consider in there . . . . But like a beach or a church it's a good place to think . . . .

This day was no different than any other. There are little incongruities I like about the location. Chestnut St. is a ‘nice' neighborhood. There's a flower shop down the street, an old Italian market, a couple of banks, a fair newsstand full of magazines and newspapers with cigars and of course Amber Twilight books mixed in with the pornography in the back. There are several well-known restaurants and fern-type bars, another, straight, movie theater, liquor stores, respectable town houses and apartment buildings. Amongst it all is this pornographic theater. Usually such things keep to their own neighborhoods, in San Francisco these would be the Tenderloin and North Beach, maybe the Financial District, period. Nowhere else, particularly an upstanding neighborhood featuring mothers strolling their babies, merchants sweeping their sidewalks, a store across the street specializing in jogging
equipage
. But the anomaly persists. Pay six bucks at the turnstile. Get some popcorn, if you like, above a glass countertop full of fleshly videotapes, condoms, and small tubes of ruby lubricants. Pass through a spanking clean lobby, paved in no-longer-obtainable linoleum. Enter through swinging brushed stainless-steel doors
with portholes in them. Try not to trip over masturbators as you find a relatively isolated corner in the dark to relax in, an area—volume, really—whose neutrality will at first seep into your brain and cool it off , filling it with nothingness, before, rested, the mind begins to push its boundaries outward again, and fill not only your head but a territory several seats in diameter with its thrash and conflict and ideas, like the shavings and dust piled up behind a radial arm saw. There're never too many people in the place, especially in the middle of a sunny afternoon, when it's so bright outside that it takes a customer's eyes a full five minutes to adjust to the total darkness of the theater. So you lean against the high rail between the entrance and the seats, eating popcorn, studying the seating arrangements by the light bouncing off the creamy thighs up on the screen. When you find an area without too many heads slouched down in the seats, or none, you then figure a way to get to it without having to step over another patron, so as not to interrupt any jerking off , or disturb his or her—a lot of women come with their men to this theater, the films are rigidly heterosexual— private whatever. Or, hell, for all I know, everybody in the place is in there mainly to think, to escape into a vacuum from everything else, like me. After all, anybody in San Francisco who wants real pornography can settle for a lot more than just a movie.

But escape, as we all know, is a relative thing, if possible at all. I found a seat. I had no popcorn. I just sat there. The film apparently had attained some peak of interest, for it was tangibly quiet in the theater. A lot of oohhs and ahhs were coming out of the sound system. These effects were intended to convey intimacy. But they were loud, and thereby ridiculous. The scene of a woman sucking off a man was basically a quiet one, punctuated only
by the kind of sounds you might ordinarily expect from a hushed party of spelunkers feeling its way through a damp cavern. Someone loudly cleared his throat in the balcony, but it was badly synchronized with the opening of a zipper, which was plainly audible. The effect was so theatrical, as if deliberate, that someone laughed on the other side of the theater.

This business of the Moral Imperative annoys me. In my line of work, detective novels, and in thrillers in general, while the clichés are bad enough, one is constantly grappling with the Moral Imperative. Which is, the bad guy gets his comeuppance in the end, period. Black and white, bad and good, plain as day the justice is meted. One cannot simply allow the criminal to escape unscathed by the vehemence of his own crimes. Either his conscience drives him mad, or the sheriff drives him to jail. Frequently, he's betrayed and done in by the depravity of his
milieu
. This is irony. Check out any Jim Thompson novel.

The variations on this scheme are endless as they are boring. Once in awhile one of my colleagues comes up with a new wrinkle, but it's usually as annoying as it is unoriginal. The net result remains the same. One way or another, by hook or by crook, the bad guy gets his dessert in the end. The Moral Imperative must prevail.

No one is prejudiced much, either, about how this comes about. Since Poe let the cat out of the bag we have seen criminals ‘sent over' by Chinese aristocrats, corpulent aristocrats, cocaine addicts, faggots, little old ladies, Navajo Indians, cowboys, gourmets, guys with scars on their faces from the acid thrown on them back when they were on the force but their revenge must be and will be strictly in accordance with the letter of the law, ex-detectives, divorced people, lonely people, incredibly raventressed, silken slim-hipped hard-fucking/never-fucking beauties, etc. etc. Even an honest cop or two has done the right thing. And of course, the hard-boiled private dick.

There is plenty of ready psychology available to explain this phenomenon, too. People hardly ever see justice done in real life so they like to see it in fiction, is the most common explanation. The rest of it is just mindless entertainment. And there's nothing wrong with either, I'm thinking. It's just that I'm tired of being a part of it. The literature that has resulted from this one little sociological problem is sinking my brain, right here in this porn theater, on a sunny day in California. And, while we're on the subject, just how
is
Martin Windrow going to react to being sodomized by a portable whale with AIDS?

By now the camera has pulled back on the blow-job and we have the interior of an apartment. Behind the sweating couple is a window, and in the window, we can see, is a lovely view of the San Francisco Bay, with just a hint of the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge in the far background. After some simple triangulation, we can see that this blowjob is taking place on a beautiful, clear day, high atop Russian Hill. Moreover, as the camera moves clumsily from one static angle to another, with only one subject in ‘mind', we notice that this apartment is rather a well-appointed one. There's quite a nice pseudo-Flemish tapestry to one side of the window, beneath which are a lamp and a table most definitely designed by Mies van der Rohe, displaying a gorgeous ashtray of hand-blown glass with a roach clip in it, atop a copy of
Architectural Digest
. Things are heating up now in the foreground, between us and the decor, the guy, who is on his back with a pillow under his ass, quite naked, has placed his hands on the skull of the nude lady hovering over him, and begun to squint as he gyrates his hips into her face, so that she violently engulfs the entire and of course not-inconsiderable-by-your-and-my-standards length of his cock, accompanied by sounds not incomparable to those of a laundromat in a singles neighborhood on a Monday night.

After a lingering not to say infinitely long close-up of this action, during which the camera has a very diffi
cult time keeping its subject within the frame, we get another medium shot, from a new angle. He's going to come, you can just tell it, and he does, all over her face, which must surely be two of the most diffcult things required of porn actors, taking it out like that, taking it in the face like that, humping it all the way to the bank, some people are just naturally talented, I guess. And that thought is idly recurring to me, when I see that there is also a large bookcase in this well-appointed apartment, beyond the twitching couple, against the wall on the other side of the lovely view. With no more ingenuousness than as if I were actually in a bookstore, I tilt my head to one side, to browse the spines beyond the endless come shot. Wilhelm Reich, Huysmans, Burroughs—Edgar Rice and William S.—, Lenny Bruce, Hemingway, Beardsley illustrations, Henry Miller,
A Man With A Maid
by Anonymous,
Charbroiled Exeunt
—that's an Amber Twilight title. These are some literate Russian Hill dwellers here, I'm thinking . . . Then
Lady Chatterley's Lover
,
The Bell Jar
,
Delta of Venus
,
Th e Story of O
, a long row of Nero Wolfe mysteries . . . and—what's this? About six inches of Martin Windrow titles. A first edition of
Th e Gourmet
—and the second edition of it! Then
Ulysses's Dog
,
So Long, Pockface
,
This World Leaks Blood
, and
Squeam with a Skew
,
Heart of Mercury
. . . What? Wait a minute. I haven't even
written
that one yet. Come to think of it,
This World Leaks Blood
has been written, but it's not
published
yet—is it? I squeezed shut my eyes and opened them again. The bookcase was now out of the shot. The girl in the movie was cooing over her boy's performance, licking the tip of his cock and trying to get her tongue far enough out of her mouth and around the corner to get at a rivulet of sperm sliding down her cheek, and there's laughter in the theater . . . .

Every writer's dream. How interesting.

I could no longer think. But the laughter. The whole theater was laughing.
I
was laughing, too, it was true, but I had a reason, I was going insane and intended to enjoy myself. But the whole theater? What did they know about BOOK.SUB? Were they an embodiment of the Moral Imperative? Was my conquest of the banal to be paid off in turpitude-awareness therapy? Was some shit-for-brains author out there somewhere orchestrating this whole scenario?
I
am the shit- for-brains author around here. But even as I stood in confusion, the laughter subsided, and I saw an ostensible reason for it. A couple in the balcony had evidently forgotten themselves, and were fucking passionately against a wall. Apparently they were heterosexual. He, standing, supported her by her buttocks. She clasped her legs around his hips and gripped his shoulders. The entire audience turned in their seats or stood to take in this scene. It was indeed remarkable, if only on account of the degree of lust expressed by it, but in point of fact not much different from what was supposed to be on the screen. This was a penetration scene. People were half in and half out of their seats, looking uncertainly backwards. I turned and looked at the screen. A different man and woman now made eyes at each other over cocktails, in a different apartment. Generic EZ rock suffused their inane dialogue. Glasses clinked, the camera pulled back. A huge bookcase loomed behind them. I quickly
averted my eyes. I looked down. Some kind of fluid, leaking along the sloped floor, gleamed in the darkness. The man and the woman grappling in the back of the theater screamed mutually, and the audience applauded. The man, staggering beneath the weight of the woman wrapped around his hips, and the necessary exertion, sagged with her against the wall. She, leaning her head back, made long, sweeping strokes along his back and his head with her arms and hands. I stole a glance at the screen. The scene had changed to a bedroom, and the man and woman of the previous shot were removing each other's clothes. No shelves of books were in sight. My eyes lingered gratefully on the simple tableau of a man and woman undressing in the banal privacy of their own home. Their bedlamps matched. The room was paneled in a natural wood stained beige. A huge, primary-colored football-player-catching-a-pass poster, framed in chrome, hung directly over the bed, between the lamps. The bed linen was carefully made up, with a red quilt on top. The message, when it flashed in the lower left hand corner of the screen, caught me unawares.