Half Empty (18 page)

Clearly—and history thanks them for it—people did. And they have not stopped trying, either. We get back in the car and drive about thirty miles south to Rozel Point on the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake proper, to the Spiral Jetty: Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork, arguably the most significant piece of environmental art in the country, along with Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico. The directions, downloaded from the Dia Foundation website, are exhaustively chatty. They also warn us that the quality of the road diminishes precipitously after the Golden Spike, and they’re not kidding. Rutted and dusty and cratered with potholes, Wyatt has to serpentine the Jeep and slow down to such an extent that we eventually give up and get out and walk the last bit.

The hills are littered with black basalt boulders. Below us to our left the jetty projects out into the lake. Cue the screeching brakes of dashed expectations. It’s still an impressively huge project, but the thirty-seven years since its construction have
not been kind. Its shape is barely discernible, certainly not the pristine fiddlehead fern the photographs would have one believe. Whatever whorl Smithson constructed is now largely lost; we think we make out a counterclockwise swoop but it stops well before another arc doubles back. And the whole is further diffused with random rocks and old wood pilings. Picking our way down the hillside, we resolve to make the most of it and walk along whatever portion of the earthwork we can still find.

The jetty’s decay is a bit of a surprise. Given the meticulous stewardship of the Dia Foundation—to say nothing of their website which documents essentially every pebble that might fly up to the undercarriage of our vehicle—one would think there’d have been some warning or indication of the depredation of this, one of their jewels. It feels vaguely dishonest. The ingredients are all present and accounted for: the setting, the Great Salt Lake, black basalt. But it’s like the Internet date who didn’t lie, exactly; he
is
an underwear model, but for a prosthetics catalog.

We mask our disappointment with Pollyanna chatter about how fine the day, the relief to be out of the car, and similar platitudes. At one point stepping along the makeshift path, my feet sink down into the sucking mud. I pull my boots out with a terrestrial fart and soldier on with forced
Smell that air!
cheer. In the end, Wyatt’s odometer will measure our journey at two hundred and fifty miles round-trip, and for what? A walk over crushed water bottles on sodden, uneven ground.

The day is a wash. We turn back from a good quarter of a mile out on this ruin and survey the shore. There, parked on the hillside, five hundred yards to our left, we see an SUV that had passed us earlier. And there down below, also five hundred yards over, two small figures quietly standing in awed silence beside Robert Smithson’s perfect, sublime Spiral Jetty.

Oh.

I once knew of a Swedish piano student at Juilliard who spent his first six weeks in New York thinking that Americans were a bunch of delusional blowhards before he understood that the Statue of Liberty that was underwhelming him daily was a one-two-hundredth-size replica on top of a carpet store on the West Side of Manhattan.

There have, in the past, been years-long stretches when the jetty was submerged and largely invisible, but the water level has gone down, leaving in its place a hard-packed, blinding white tundra of salt. The gyre of ebony basalt couldn’t be more beautifully visible, a black curl as pristinely contrasted on the salt sheet as a hair on a bar of soap. We are able to walk over and all around the 1,500-foot work on the surface of the lake, hard as solid ground in places, pleasingly slushy in others. In the distance, the roseate glow of the salt-loving algae makes a pink ribbon on the horizon. Smithson had likened the lake to a red Martian sea. The boulders of the spiral exposed to the windward side of the lake have taken on a tufted rime of salt, covered in small blunted protrusions; a stubby, thick fringe of sausage curls that make the rock resemble a line of sleeping lambs. Unyielding mineral rendered suckling-sweet. Like at the Golden Spike, the wind is a constant, cleansing hum on the ears.

The other couple moves silently about the jetty, taking long-exposure close-up photos of rock, puddle, and the supersaturated lake’s crystalline progress that has built up in places to a cubic-zirconium size and brilliance. They don’t say a word to Wyatt or me or to each other during the entire time we are there, although they occasionally bestow on us the almost drowsy half smile of the devotional pilgrim. The notion of pilgrimage was central to Smithson’s vision of the work’s impact. He chose Rozel Point because of its remoteness. As for the jetty’s shape—a snapshot in stone of an unfurling galaxy—it spoke to his interest in
notions of entropy. “I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day,” he wrote. “Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal … Nature is never finished.”

Nor are we. Around us are odd bits of industrial detritus—a barely standing low concrete structure where we left the car, the decoy jetty we mistook for the real thing—all remnants of human effort, spinning out in ever-wider circles. Smithson saw it all as “evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.”

Smithson’s right about everything except for that penultimate word, “abandoned.” Maybe it’s the unwavering brown that greets the eye, or the parching airborne salt one can taste on the breeze that jump-starts some atavistic impulse to defy such inhospitality and to shape this intractable land to our will. Looking around, it seems that aspiration might be the only thing that has not pulled up stakes here. The pioneers who founded Zion are long dead. The dust that was once those railroad barons has little need of the personal fortunes they amassed, but aspiration remains as green and tender as a lily stem. Even Smithson himself, devotee of atomizing dissipation, dead in a plane crash before the age of forty and gone from this earth for more than thirty years, constructed what might as well be a diorama of this unyielding faith. Newly emerged from decades of underwater obscurity, Spiral Jetty is now visible from space.

The positive psychology movement began, in part, to address the perceived imbalance where the attributes of excellence at the upper end of the human spectrum were always being outshone by the negative. Society’s greater respect for these lesser traits was baffling, it bordered on lurid fascination, and only served to bring the rest of us down.

Practitioners might take heart, then, from one arena. A vital and vibrant parallel universe where only the perfect survive: where the cable repairmen show up on time—early even—and are willing to go that extra mile; where the swim coaches, while stern, are also fair, with the benevolence and open-mindedness to consider a bargain with an athlete on probation who will do
anything
to stay on the team; where unmarried women have the self-possession and admirable self-respect to answer the door for the pizza boy wearing full makeup and heels, to surround their baths with lit votives, and to dapple the fragrant water with rose petals, even if no one else is around. Here is positive psychology made flesh. A realm devoid of frailty or failure.

It’s nice to picture a world where even the most mundane encounter results in gymnastic, geysering, mind-bending sex. There is a reason that porn is a multibillion-dollar industry and documentaries are not. In a cinema verité world, one would have to think about what a pain candle wax is to scrape off porcelain,
and how those rose petals are going to turn into mushy vegetable matter in about four minutes and just clog the drain. Or how the more likely cable-man scenario usually involves screaming “Fuck you, Time Warner! I take the day off work and your guy doesn’t show?
Fuck you!
” into the phone. And surely no school would hire a coach who’s clearly the same age as his athletes. Didn’t they check his references?

According to the entrepreneur in a black double-breasted suit—what I will come to recognize as the uniform of choice for middle management in the adult industry—the contents of the slender steel can in his hand could transform even the coldest, most uncinematic reality, turning any day into my lucky one, if I knew what he was driving at. Only a fool wouldn’t want to get in on the ground floor. His low-voiced talk is all about securing the American packaging and licensing rights to the obscure Chinese berry that delivers the tonic’s unprecedented priapic oomph. Decades ago, he would have been a grizzled huckster, an old merchant seaman with fading Polynesian tattoos and missing teeth, producing from his rucksack a cork-stoppered bottle of brown glass. He would whisper of the mysterious contents, a vague pedigree of ground horn, dried animal penis, and the pulverized carapaces of rare insects.

The teamsters are running late and will not let us into Pier 94 on Twelfth Avenue. They are still securing the vinyl banner, as lurid pink and hot to the touch as a slapped face. It’s an inauspicious beginning to New York City’s first Exotic Erotic Ball and Expo. Starting on time seems the bare minimum to ask of an event featuring the titillating promise of ritual discipline—meted out with numerous leather crops, clamps, rubber horse bits, handcuffs (both regulation steel and marabou-trimmed), and ball gags—with a stage mocked up to resemble a medieval dungeon complete with a restraining device known as a St.
Andrew’s Cross, and, eventually, numerous women punished for their nameless and hypothetical infractions by being variously ridden like oil-slicked ponies, spanked like recalcitrant children, and trussed up like a really good stuffed rolled pork loin I’ve made.

Then again, punctuality is less a moral virtue here than is Freedom of Expression. The term comes up in every single interview, conversation, and release. The ball began in San Francisco in 1979 as a campaign fund-raiser for one Louis Abolafia, who was running on the Nudist Party ticket, under the slogan “I have nothing to hide.” (According to the press materials, it was Abolafia who also first coined the phrase “Make love, not war,” although the most cursory Web search attributes it to sociologist-philosopher Herbert Marcuse.) In the ensuing years, the ball has gone on to become one of the mainstays of the Bay Area’s legacy of libertinism, with official mayoral proclamations and the like. Past balls have featured the likes of Grace Jones, Joan Jett, and Kool and the Gang. For its New York debut, the organizers have scheduled a two-day trade fair to precede the Dionysian antics. The expo will have celebrities and vendors, along with seminars on how to become a performer, lectures on the current state of anti-porn legislation making its way through Congress, even a talk on pheromones. For the actual ball on Saturday evening, they have lined up all-around genius and musical innovator Thomas Dolby, as well as George Clinton and that living embodiment of the music-porn nexus, Tommy Lee.

Suddenly, wearing a flowered summer frock and exuding the freshness of every breathless ingenue who has ever come to New York to make a name for herself, she arrives, her heels making her pick her way over the shimmering asphalt. She stands there tentatively, placing one gloved hand—yes, short white gloves, just like Hope Lange in
The Best of Everything
—at the back of
her head as if to secure the wide-brimmed hat she is not wearing. Craning her neck, she looks up and surveys the place that will be her home for the next two days. The only clues that she is doing this for our benefit—that she might be feigning her sense of wonder—are her vibrant no-carrot-found-in-nature-orange hair and her extraordinary better-living-through-surgery figure. That, plus the fact that Pier 94 is all of two stories tall. She should leave the pantomimed golly-gee-whizzums awe to the young Asian fellow standing nearby, who has arrived a touching two hours early. Ingenuous in equal and opposite measure where she is practiced, he is unable to close his mouth or tear his eyes from this display. Like an elevator gone haywire, his Adam’s apple rises and falls in a cartoonish homage to the Jessica Rabbit proportions of her body.

“Is she a porn star?” another early bird asks me. A bearded amateur photographer, he is toting a large camera bag and elaborate equipment; he has cleared it with the expo officials that any pictures he takes will be for private use. I’m about to make some crack as how I actually think she’s Madeleine Albright, but his attention is already elsewhere, following the backside of someone who
could
be Madeleine Albright: a sexagenarian Eileen Fisher–clad Mendocino art-therapist type (what magazine could she possibly be covering this for?
Tikkun?)
. The mere fact that a woman has maybe had sex in her life—or might at some time in the future have sex again—seems to be enough to occasion neck-craning ass-spectatorship.

The erotic-tonic magnate’s girlfriend slips me a can of the miracle stuff. I chug it to beat some of the heat in the parking lot. It’s passably refreshing and raspberryish, and any worries that I’ll be walking around with an irrepressible boner are allayed when she concedes that the drink’s wallop is from good old caffeine, three cups of Java worth. Finally the doors open and we enter the vast space of Pier 94. After the midday sun of a June
heat wave, the huge shed’s highly effective air-conditioning is a relief. Out of nowhere, a small Chinese woman firmly places her hand at the small of my back, urging me over to the phalanx of those forward-leaning chairs in the corner of the cavernous space. “Massage! Massage!” she repeats. I beg off, mumbling something about journalistic impartiality but she appears to neither understand nor care. She has moved on. A true pro. I will not know it at that moment, but this is just about the most exciting thing that will happen over the next two days.

Carpenters are still at work, putting the finishing touches on a curtained-off area that will show vintage adult films at the ball. A workman is assembling the onstage torture chamber. Vendors have set up booths to hawk their erotic wares and services. Postcards are being fanned out, small baskets of chocolate kisses and single-serving lubricant are being set out on tables. The fifty-odd exhibitors are dwarfed by the ninety-thousand-square-foot room (this is only half of the building; it will be double the size for the ball). With so much unused space and with so few of us here, there is a depopulated-prairie-town languor to the proceedings, scored with the low hum of hushed conversation. After twenty minutes, I have visited every booth. After forty, I am on a nodding acquaintance with virtually everyone in the place. I look over the gags and paddles of a company called Ruff Doggie. The owner of a New Jersey sex shop, with the face of every Jewish girl with whom I ever Israeli folk-danced, pours a small amount of Porno Popping Climax Candy into my palm, gratis. I toss them back. Pop Rocks. I have world enough and time to examine the jewel-colored, jelly-rubber phalluses sold by Ricky’s, a chain of New York drugstores that, rather than challenge the competition-killing kudzu ubiquity of the city’s Duane Reade pharmacies, cannily reinvented itself as a dildo-and-boa emporium, catering to the needs of that Venn diagram of exaggerated
and ghoulish femininity: drag queens and drunken bridal-shower parties. I spend a while talking arts and crafts with the latex-dress designer. I watch the feeble progress of a body painter as she (really poorly) executes a Puerto Rican flag on the hairy torso of her boyfriend. It’s a little like being given a toy castle and realizing in short order that the flags on top of the turrets don’t move, and the gothic windows, blue-water moat, drawbridges, all of it, is one piece: a dead end of rigid, injection-mold plastic.