That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields (7 page)

In a bathroom at a gas station?

Yeah.

Why a gas station?

I don't know.

Trying to explain to my actress friend in LA why I far prefer rehearsal to performance…

Annie Ernaux's writing is so unpretentious and simple and concise. I like how she occasionally reveals herself in this mysterious way, never giving away too much but letting you in enough to want more. That's a huge difference between French and American culture. Living abroad has made me see the American impulse to talk about everything as veering at times toward the grotesque.

Last night I went to the cinema by myself to see
Amour
, which would never have worked had it been
done in the States. Hollywood would have made everything over the top and too revealing, pounding it into the ground. Its sole purpose would have been to be a platform for an actress to win an Oscar. They would have used a forty-something actress to portray an eighty-year-old, transforming her face to show she could “play ugly”; then she'd appear at the Oscars as a Botoxed princess.

In '95, after graduating from college, I moved to LA “to break in to the business” and worked a few nights a week in the bar at Marie Callender's. During a staff talent show, after I got attacked in the kitchen by the head chef, I drove out to a dangerous neighborhood to buy cigarettes. Talking to a bum, smoking in the parking lot, I got that Kill Me Now feeling.

I've been haunted by the article about Lindsay Lohan you forwarded to me. Obviously, she and I are very different. Some of her behavior, though, is very familiar—not the spoiled-brat, diva stuff, but fear of being alone (which her director remarked upon), pushing limits, etc.

Women in LA definitely have their own way of dressing. One step above hooker. They really accentuate their asses.

The women and men in the movies I dubbed were usually so cheeseball. My mother “told” me they're gross and wrong. All the women look pretty much bog-standard: fake tits, blow-job lips, and pretty fit, nothing that stands out to me. The guys are hulky and stupid, shallow, just a dick. One particularly sexy couple sticks in my mind, but I enjoyed watching their chemistry more than I wanted to join in. I crave that chemistry with someone I know.

In college I got really angry in my first Women in Theater class. The typical nineteen-year-old revolutionary phase—discovering all the ways in which women are objectified, suddenly feeling all the frat boys around me, dragging their tongues on the ground at any female—and I wanted to kill them. A bunch of throbbing penises everywhere. I dressed in ways that hid my body and I didn't want anyone to look at me. They were to like my brain, not my face or body. That might have been just
another excuse for feeling ugly, to hate them before they could tell me I was ugly.

Suffered through a cartoon dubbing session this morning. Not feeling it at all. Not inspired in any of my work right now. I hate living in this passionless state. I'm boring myself. No highs or lows, just gray and dull. Must be this No Vices month. February is almost here, though.

Medea was exotic. She was half-Chinese, kinda punk, and had already lived in France for a year or two, traveled around, posed naked for pictures (which she showed me), and brought back this French photographer, François, as her husband. She was nineteen. He was huge—stocky and tall—and had a shaved head except for one tiny purple ponytail on top. They were so cool. She used to stare at me in this adoringly innocent way, loved my shiny red lips, told me I looked like a '70s model. To this day, I thank her.

One night, she and another boyfriend (François had gone back to France) and I were sitting around on her bed. This boyfriend was looking at the differences between our bodies as if he were about to draw us both, like the beginning of an adult movie. I was a bit on the
Rubensesque side at that time and she was a waif. He liked my curves, liked her boyish body, and touched our legs simultaneously, stroking them. Because we were all “artists” and young, this was okay in that moment.

It wasn't okay a second later when she left to use the bathroom; he took a nosedive into my neck and I shoved him off. I actually had defenses: I had an instinct that kicked in and said no instead of freezing and conceding. The “normal” thing would have been to do what he wanted, to make him feel all the things he wasn't: attractive, desired, sexy. It would be normal to say “yes” because “no” could turn to violence. My half sister Rebecca had trained me how to respond to an “aggressive” male. When she was raped by a guy, she told him how much she loved what he was doing to her, saying how good it felt. She'd practiced that technique over and over with Carl until one day she couldn't handle it anymore, moved out, and got her own place at sixteen. I guess it didn't work out so well, but, anyway, the fight is what they want. It's the
no
. Apparently, this reverse psychology works like a charm when trying to get a rapist to stop raping you.

One night, Medea came to a party at my house. We sat on my roof outside the kitchen, smoking cigarettes, and she told me, “I got dressed up for you.” I was
beautiful in those words. Everything she said seemed like it came out of a six-year-old's mouth. You know how you laugh when little kids say something “grownup”? That's how I felt every time she spoke. She didn't understand why people laughed at her. Nor do six-year-olds. We talked about how neither of us had ever had sex with a woman, giggled, and made out next to the stereo system. We lost our girl virginities together. I didn't once feel like saying no that night. There was no baddy in the room. No threat. No danger. Her pussy wasn't “perfect” (whatever that means), and that imperfection became even more perfect for me. She didn't know it wasn't, or maybe thought it was, or simply didn't care. That was liberating for me. I came and didn't tell her. I loved every minute of it and loved myself and my sex a little more after that.

We saw each other the next Monday or Tuesday, whatever day it was in our Women in Theater class. I felt a twinge of jealousy, thinking someone else could have her and she might turn her adoration away from me, but she was mine.

I'm comfortable when I know I'm doing what makes the other person happy. I like to be directed; I used to get off
on that (not in a sexual way) with directors. Maybe it was that if I could do exactly what they imagined, it gave me power. I could see a look in their eyes—a recognition that I'd understood exactly what they were saying; there was a look almost of disbelief that I could get it so quickly, which was a sort of intimacy in itself. They felt understood, and I was helping them externalize/realize their ideas. Perfect intimacy-junkie scenario, really.

I like that I left a dinner party to talk more into my phone…

My half sisters, Rebecca and Louise, were my idols. Louise and I were never very close, but I wanted to be. She was seven years older, had thick, dark brown hair and the same legs I have. I secretly wished she was my twin. She was gorgeous before she got in an accident at seventeen, on her prom night; a drunk driver in a semi smashed into her car. The right side of her face was partially paralyzed. Her mind was never the same, either. She was skittish. After the accident, one of her eyes was smaller and she looked like she was winking at you all the time. She accompanied that twitchy winking with a shrieking laugh, as if it were all on purpose. I talk about her as if she were dead.

About a week after my nauseating Thanksgiving encounter with Carl more than twenty years ago, Louise called me. This was the very last time we spoke, she and I. “Samantha? Sam?” She had this knowing-hushed-panicky thing going on in her voice. “What happened?” She knew what had happened even before I told her. That day on the phone, I romanticized this link, the abuse link—a sixth sense she had for another suffering sibling who'd undergone what she'd gone through for years. She knew how I felt. “I knew it. I knew it. Sam, you don't owe them anything, okay? Just stay away from them.”

She told me she no longer talked to either of our brothers. Maybe they were next to her with a gun to her head. Maybe she helped in the planning of it all. My half sisters have always been jealous of me, and a little suffering might do me good. My brothers and sisters all have that David Lynch perverted-clown look. Something definitely off-kilter.

Carl is following my public Facebook posts. I couldn't help it and had a look through his Facebook photos and videos—which was like licking a battery. One video he titled,
Awwww even my mom likes this one
. Two teenagers are outside a house and the guy asks the girl to give him a blow job. She says she can't because they might
get caught by her parents. The boy's hand has been on the intercom the whole time and the family has been listening to the conversation. Suddenly his little sister opens the front door and says to the girl, “My dad says will you just get on with it or he says he'll come down and give him the blow job or even I can do it, but please just give him the blow job.” What's that “Awwww” about—suggesting it was a “cute” video? That he and his mom had an innocent, nostalgic moment watching this together? How many blow jobs did Carl's mom give him?

On Facebook, there's a picture of Carl (or “Karl,” as he now spells it) sitting on a kitchen floor in his underwear, his matted hair standing straight up, a crazed, sick look on his face, as he holds a half watermelon that looks like it's been ripped apart, not sliced. He's been eating it by shoving his entire face in it. It's all over him. Another video is a close-up of one of his eyes. It pans out and we see his whole Buffalo Bill face. He says very eerily, “Helllllooooo.” I consider myself a pretty intuitive, empathetic person and I don't understand what he's doing in any of these videos. It's a code I can't break, yet it's completely familiar. They disturb me and I'm compelled to look at them again and again. Am I seeking pain by watching these videos, trying to relive that darkness because it's the only thing that feels really real?

About ten years ago, Carl told my dad he was married to two women and they all lived together. Rebecca told me their mother openly had sex in the front room with various partners during the day and the kids just came and went as they pleased, observing it all.

One day, when I was five, we dropped off my four half brothers and sisters at their mom's, my dad's ex-wife's house—Karin. Not “Karen.” Karin. As we pulled up, she came out into the street in a négligée with nothing under it. I saw her nipples and pubic hair and remember thinking the hair down below was darker than the red hair on her head. My own mother went rigid. Actually, I think she might have started to yell at Karin, who sang a hello to my parents like a prostitute saying how much she'd charge to be fucked up the ass. That was one of the first times I saw sex being used as a slithery weapon. In the same voice, she'd call our house day in, day out: “Hiiiiiiiiiii, Saaaammmaaanthhhhaa, what are you dooooing? Is your daaaddy home, hooonnneeyyy?” This skanky, twisted Cruella de Vil wedged herself into our house, causing endless fights between my parents until one day my dad took her to court and got a restraining order put on her.

At my tenth birthday party, Rebecca, around twenty-one at the time, couldn't help herself and randomly asked all the girls if they knew what a blow job was. I could hear
Karin in her voice as she explained to all of us that it had nothing to do with a blow dryer. She then made sure we really got it by miming the act as if the cock she was sucking were twenty inches long and so wide she could barely get her mouth around it. She laughed a nasty, sexy laugh. All of my friends went silent. My humiliated parents barked at her.

Sometimes when I'm lying in bed, my body turns to stone and I feel like it's such an effort to crack out of the position, to move my arms just the tiniest bit. I have the need to jump, to twitch, to shake my body to keep it from freezing up again. Sometimes it's so intense my body feels as though it's being crushed by two cement walls. Awwww.

There are some kisses where they kiss only with the tongue and others that are the “dive-in” type, meaning heavy breathing, like taking a bite out of something. He pulls off his own clothes really fast and attacks her body with squirrel-like energy—really fast movements. She gets more excited and gives him a blow job, very enthusiastically. This goes on for what seems like ages. She gives him a look, like, “Jesus Christ, how long is this blow job going to last?!” Finally, he goes down on her and she says, “My god, I thought you'd never go down there. I was dying for you.” She goes into “ecstasy” and starts doing the Dolly Golden face.
Do most people lose their primal attraction for the other person after six months? Eighteen months? I didn't want to live the rest of my life that way with Jaume, avoiding him (sexually). Extremely weird that he and I were able to do this scene together two months after we split up—

MATTHEW
: Lisa, wow. It's been—

LISA
: Years.

MATTHEW
: Yeah—four years. And you're still—

LISA
: Finishing your sentences.

MATTHEW
: So it worked out, your marriage?

LISA
: Yeah.

MATTHEW
: I'm glad for you. Really.

LISA
: And you?

MATTHEW
: Nothing to report.

LISA
: Four years, and there's never been—