Men (4 page)

I said that women are trained to lie to men, though I wasn't sure he got the sarcasm. “Women have the same problem about their breasts as men have about their penises,” he assured me. “If someone could somehow get men and women on the same wavelength about this breast–penis thing, I think it would do more to enhance everyone's life than anything else.” It was a rather utopian vision, coming from a scumbag pornographer.

Since then I've followed Flynt's exploits from a distance, watching as he's evolved into a sort of elder statesman–pornographer, weighing in unpredictably on national matters and civil liberty issues. When his would-be assassin, Joseph Paul Franklin, was about to be executed in Missouri in 2013 for killing a man outside a synagogue in 1977—just one of at least twenty race-related murders he'd been convicted of or implicated in—Flynt filed a last-minute motion through the ACLU to halt the execution. He was against the death penalty, he announced, and didn't believe the government should be in the business of killing people for vengeance. Franklin was executed anyway, amidst a national controversy about whether the drugs employed in the lethal injection cocktail would cause him to suffer. Flynt, who after years of brutal pain finally had the nerves leading to his legs cauterized to stop all sensation, said he'd love to spend an hour in a room with Franklin inflicting the same damage on him that he'd inflicted on Flynt, but didn't want to see him die.

A couple of years earlier I'd been contacted about blurbing his latest book,
One Nation Under Sex
, a coauthored account of the sex lives of American presidents throughout the nation's history. I labored to come up with a good quote and finally arrived at this: “Larry Flynt has waged a lifelong battle against hypocrisy and prudery, shattering every propriety and slaughtering every sacred cow. The political classes have never been safe from his special brand of satire. Now he turns his rabble-rousing sensibility back though time with a similar imperative. No more whitewashing! Smash decorum! Bring down the elites!”

I was happy to be in touch with him again, even through intermediaries. He'd meant something to me—he made me examine my limits, he'd challenged me at my corked-up core. I liked the idea that he still thinks about me, as I do about him. I imagined myself giving him a call the next time I was in LA, but I suspect it won't happen.

 

The Con Man

Every woman adores a con man—to steal a page from Sylvia Plath. Especially one who knows you better than you know yourself, who looks into your eyes and reads your dirty secret desires, who knows what a bad girl you really are under the prim professional façade, and then takes you for everything.

Such a man is “Mike”: sleek, a reptile, but a sexy reptile, the kind you hate yourself for wanting to fuck. He exudes confidence, as a con man should. “I want to see how you operate,” Dr. Margaret Ford tells him the second time they meet, and she sure gets what she asked for. She wants to
write
about him, she says, to
study
him for a book or article, but it's pretty clear what she's really come back for. “You want to see how a true bad man plies his trade?” he banters knowingly. “Plies his trade” should be understood as a euphemism.

I don't expect many people will recognize the setup of David Mamet's 1987
House of Games
: it didn't exactly kill at the box office and isn't part of anyone's twentieth-century film canon, though it pulled down a handful of foreign awards. But most moviegoers probably have a film or two filed away in the “hated it but can't stop thinking about it” category, catalogued thus not because of any intrinsic merits or demerits, but because it cuts too close to home. It tells you something about yourself you'd rather not know, or something about the world you don't want to accept. If I say that the storyline of
House of Games
involves an overly cerebral woman spying on a bunch of sleazy but sexy men and then getting her comeuppance, possibly you can see why
House of Games
would be a movie that makes me nervous.

A deeply repressed psychiatrist, Margaret Ford is the author of a pop-psychology bestseller,
Driven: Compulsion and Obsession in Everyday Life
. There's something off-putting about her from the minute she strides into the frame: with her barbershop coif, stubby nails, no-nonsense gait, and boring businesslike suits, she's denuded of all the conventional attributes of femininity—asexual or mannish, take your pick. Worse, she's so humorless—when she smiles, only her mouth moves; the rest of her face is immobile. As played by Lindsay Crouse in a stiff, stagy, mannered performance, it's like watching an articulate piece of wood. (As it happens, Crouse was married to writer-director Mamet at the time the movie was made; they divorced three years later. If the way he directed her in this role wasn't one of the grounds, it should have been.) Dr. Ford needs you to be aware of her elevated place in the world—you see it in the hoity-toity way she brandishes her professional competence, which is irritating. Then there are the small hypocrisies: supposedly an expert on compulsion, she's a workaholic and a chain smoker herself, obsessively scribbling data about her patients in notebooks while trailing Freudian slips behind her like a piece of toilet paper stuck to a shoe. “Physician,
hear
yourself,” you want to say.

But it wouldn't help. This lady shrink is such a stranger to her own desires that she's lured into acting out her own humiliation in an elaborate con game orchestrated by an ensemble of charismatic con men whose perfect understanding of the female unconscious lets them play her like a jukebox. It doesn't help that she's the least self-knowledgeable shrink on the planet, which is—though I am not any sort of shrink myself and would even agree that your average psychotherapist is not, as a matter of course, exactly neurosis-free or especially self-acute—a joke I take to heart nonetheless. In fact, the movie accrues many such jokes at its protagonist's expense. Consider the overabundance of vehicular symbols—“Ford,” “Driven…” from which an automotive-age Freud would likely deduce a condition of being stuck, stalled, fixated—thus compelled and doomed to neurotic suffering. Which is, indeed, the small jest that motors
House of Games
.

Things first start to go south when one of Ford's patients, Billy, a compulsive gambler, pulls a gun and threatens to shoot himself in the middle of a session. Ford coolly bargains with him: “Give me the gun, and I will help you,” she says confidently. “You don't do dick, man, it's all a con game, you do nothing,” he taunts. Nevertheless, a suddenly docile Billy hands over the gun along with a challenge: he owes twenty-five grand he doesn't have to a guy named Mike—“the Unbeatable Gambler, seen as Omniscient,” according to Ford's notes—and they're going to kill him if he doesn't pay up the next day.

“Give me the gun and I will help you” is the first of a series of exchanges Margaret Ford enters into with men, exchanges that take the form: “You give me something and I'll give you something.” The problem is that she so overestimates her bargaining power that you're embarrassed for her. She's negotiating with counterfeit currency—her professional expertise, soon her sexuality—though she won't find out what a fraud she is until way too late. A problem of equivalences haunts the story—what does Ford have that's equal to that gun? Not one thing.

Nevertheless she marches straight over to the House of Games, a seedy pool hall–bar with a backroom poker game, striding in like she owns the place. (Psychotherapy consumers in the audience will be laughing bitterly into their popcorn, accustomed as we are to the brutal finitude of the fifty-minute hour.)
“What the fuck is it?”
Mike (Joe Mantegna) demands, strolling onscreen, backlit as a man of mystery should be. When he steps into the light, the first thing you notice is how good he looks in that suit, if maybe a little slick—you can practically smell his aftershave wafting into the theater. “You think you're a tough guy, I think you're just a bully!” Ford upbraids him on her patient's behalf, after telling him why she's there. Apparently impressed with her mastery of the situation, Mike compliments her on her skills of perception. “How'd you size me up so quick, that I'm not some hard guy who's going to rough you up or something?”

“Well, in my work…” she begins.

“What is your work?” he naturally inquires.

“None of your business,” she tells him tartly, all business.

Okay, we've been here before: the heiress and the gangster, the lady and the vulgarian she cuts down to size with her classiness and poise. Ford demands that Mike cancel Billy's debt, which occasions the film's second exchange, this one initiated by him. He'll tear up Billy's IOU if Ford pretends to be his girlfriend and spies on another player in a high stakes poker game. (
Pretend to be his girlfriend?
You already know she's dying to.) What she's supposed to look for is a “tell” that this player is bluffing. A tell, as Mike explains it, is a behavior that gives something away. Margaret herself has a tell—she gestures with her nose toward the hand in which she conceals a chip, meaning he can read her secret correctly every time, as he proceeds to demonstrate. In other words, he can see her in ways she can't see herself, which is a sexy quality in a man.

Now installed in the back room in the role of Mike's girlfriend and drawn in by her seeming ability to discern the other gambler's ostentatious tell, she offers to stake his hand with a personal check for six grand at a crucial point in the game. Suddenly things get tense, the other gambler brandishes a gun … which on closer view appears to be leaking water. Whereupon Margaret retrieves her check, whereupon all the players chuckle and break frame—ah, they'd been setting her up, turning her into a mark. The whole poker game had been staged to con her out of her money.

“It was only business … nothing personal,” says Mike, unperturbed, handing her a chip. “Here's a souvenir of your escape from the con men.” This elicits an actual smile from Ford—a crack in the façade,
finally
. When she laughs she's a different person, like the uptight secretary who suddenly lets her hair down, though Margaret's hair is too short to either put up or let down. “You're a lovely woman,” Mike murmurs meaningfully later that night, all oleaginous charm, putting her in a cab. And bidding him goodnight, in the soft glow of the streetlight, she suddenly does look a lot less like an iceberg.

What a great move: letting Margaret see them trying to con her and failing to; letting her think she's outsmarted them. Flattering her intelligence, inviting her into their club—giving her a little tour of their world, schmoozing over late-night sandwiches—oh yeah, she's
one
of them now. These guys are so good at what they do they can see five steps ahead; predict Ford's every response while letting her think
she's
the one in the driver's seat.

What Ford doesn't know (nor does the audience at this point, because we're
all
being taken for a ride) is that Mike and his merry band of con artists are so skilled in textual hermeneutics that they've managed to discern from a close reading of Ford's bestselling advice book that there's a pathological aspect to the author's nature that will make her
want
to be their victim. The screwed-up Dr. Ford doesn't just
write
about compulsive behavior, she's so afflicted by some little-understood compulsion of her own that she's practically begging to be taken, in all senses of the word.

Having caught the bad men in the act, hubristically thinking that her savvy inures her to their wiles, Ford returns to the House of Games in search of Mike. She has a “proposition” for him, she says. She wants to write a study of the confidence game, and she wants him to cooperate. Mike readily agrees, and another exchange is initiated. But what's in it for him? Just the implied quid pro quo—the double entendre of the “proposition”? Indeed, after the first evening's tutorial, Ford follows him to a hotel, where he cons his way into an out-for-the-evening stranger's room, adding to the evening's illicit thrills. They go to bed, and afterward she's suddenly quite lovely, eyes sparkling, in softer focus (we also see that she was wearing pretty lingerie under the mannish outfit—yup, she knew how the evening was going to end when she got dressed). On the way out she slips a lighter from the bureau into her purse as a souvenir, as though bedding Mike had unloosed something a little delinquent in her.

Then somehow, like in a bad dream, they run into Mike's pals and she finds herself swept up in another con, this one involving a briefcase containing eighty grand in cash, supposedly borrowed from the mob. Things go awry, someone gets killed, the briefcase goes missing, and
uh-oh,
Mike's in big trouble—the money's due back the next day. Ford, thinking
she's
the one who screwed it up, maybe even got the guy shot, heads to her bank to withdraw eighty grand from her own account and save the day. (Courteously, the con guys drive her there.) She hands over the money, still not realizing that the con
was on her
all along, though by this time the audience is catching up. But how could she fail to put two and two together, even after Mike had said pointedly during one of his tutorials, “Everybody gets something out of every transaction”? Or, when back in the hotel room and Margaret, mooning around in a post-coital glow, had mused, “Some people would say you're an interesting man,” and he'd said coldly, “I'm a criminal. I'm a
con man
. You don't have to delude yourself.”

Avoiding self-delusion: here's a useful life lesson for all of us, though easier said than done, self-delusion being pretty much the definition of the human condition. Ford's finally jolted back to reality when, suspicions aroused, she follows her patient Billy and spies on a scene she's not meant to see: Mike and his con men pals divvying up her money, the eighty grand she'd beneficently come up with to repay the mob. “Mike, how'd you know she was going to go for it?” one of them chortles. “Go for it? The broad's an addict,” he answers. “Took her money and screwed her too,” someone compliments him. “A small price to pay,” he smirks.