White Girls (29 page)

Of course, underneath their sympathy, they visited him out of envy. By not shooting them all, he had indirectly denied them their tragic heroism; no one would ever talk about those women in the way he remembered and talked about that dead girl. All they’d been left to was cooking and eventual bitterness. They didn’t even keep up with that man when he was released from prison; they couldn’t put their fantasies on him in the free world, so they weren’t interested.

I thought about all that. And then I went into the booth and did my part. And I nailed it.

There’s this trend—have you noticed?—of boys who are into barebacking. Fucking without a condom. Cum dripping out of that
pink-brown hole, cum dumped there with no thought of the scum bucket dying. People tell me there are clubs devoted to this activity, people taking cum, others giving it. Most of the movies I’ve seen featuring this practice are set in Palm Springs, for some reason.

When I watch those films I look less at the men shooting shit into gaping holes than I do at the boys on the other end—something else to identify with. The men shooting shit—that’s what men do. But what about the queens who walk away with the Condition because of the shit so to speak that’s shot into them? It’s the doll lying on her back, maybe acting, but I don’t think so, saying, “Give it to me, Daddy, Daddy give it to me,” that has me upset. Does that make them more fabulous? Their gayness more real? I say, are they actresses?

Maybe those barebacking queens are saying they literally put their ass on the line for a part. Acting is acting and I’m using what I’ve got and I needed to play the part of bottom bitch for whatever reason. Maybe they’re saying, opening their assholes up: AIDS is my Oscar.

Those bitches dripping cum, eyes dead, but still looking for the cameraman’s key light: that’s what happens when you’re an actress. All an actress is ever saying: Look at me, even as I’m dying.

Love is complicated, if it exists.

Stanislavski wrote that acting was an “if.” And that “if” was synonymous with intention. Let’s say you’re playing X. X must want something from Y. Trying to convince your stage or film lover that they must run off with you in order to prove that they do indeed love you, for example. That’s the part about acting that has always confused me: my
intention. I have never had one, other than to be an actress. I could never imagine wanting anything except the praise of the queens who loved me when I first started out, and who love me still. Me: a black, uninhabitable rock with maybe a couple of talking birds pausing on it in the middle of the sea.

Aren’t the tech boys fabulous?

When I go to work I’m treated like the star they know I am. They get me a glass of water or anything else I need before setting me up in the booth, facing the screen. I put my script on a stand. The tech boys make sure my headphones are clear, free of earwax. I’m the Marni Nixon of the gash-and-gnash set.

There in the booth, I stand in front of the microphone until I feel I’ve found the voice I need. And when I do feel it, I give the cue to roll tape. A director is rarely, if ever, present nowadays. No need, no need. I’ve been doing this so long, no one can tell me how to do it more real than it needs to be. I’m an actress.

My friend Charles got me into all of this. There we were in L.A., in the mid-seventies, broke and brotherless, and Charles got me work doing some looping for a B movie he was in. Something by Roger Corman. They needed a girl to approximate the offscreen sound of Charles fucking a girl in a motel room. One thing led to another, I met one person and then another; I established a reputation. So far, I’ve survived. Porn shot on film and then on video; nice seventies pussy hair and then shaved, babylike snatch; Tom Selleck lookalike mustaches and butt-fucking against a black velvet scrim followed by what we’ve got now: barebacking in Palm Springs. I stick to what the audience needs, which doesn’t really change all that much.

I like to mix it up, though. Throw in portions of myself—my thinking—into my characters’ voices, when I can. The other day, I came across a tape I did some work on:
Mandingo Makes Manhattan
(1983). The film is a little riff on
Roots
. The protagonist is Kunta Kinte Johnson. He’s black, naturally, and does a number of white or mulatto-looking women. The director asked me to supply a few of the requisite oohs and aahs for Kunta and the colored women. He wanted those oohs and aahs performed in the Negro style—all guttural, like a funky urban chorus. As it happens, I find Negro and Puerto Rican voices difficult to perform. Their performances—if that’s the word—are so stilted. Not to get all Mary McLeod Bethune about it, but since those people are looked at in the wrong way most of the time, they can’t fuck in a way that lends itself to the viewer’s imagination. They’re too self-conscious, too mindful of the camera. They act like people in a documentary.

Maybe they’re too vulnerable to the whole enterprise. When you watch fucking, you want to be the one to take off the girl’s (or boy’s) clothes with your eyes, your imagination. What you don’t want is for the fuckers to make you feel as if not only shouldn’t you be stroking, but you should be in church, or contributing a little something to Planned Parenthood.

Rarely do the visuals in my work bother me, but something—a pile of sick—wells up in my stomach when I watch all those black and Latin people fucking. Maybe they remind me of my brother. Maybe they’re not my type.

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Of course, there are certain tonal facts about my voice that I can’t ignore. I am a Negress. As such, I have a great deal of bass in my speech that cuts girlishness off at the pass. In addition, being a black American, I make of English what I will, since it’s not, historically speaking, my first language. Or, to put it another way, I have made of English a form of American that other Americans don’t speak, because they don’t have the confluence of history and genetics that I do. It’s interesting.

I think the best vocal interpreters of Gertrude Stein’s work, for instance, are people like me, since we get her form and her brilliant, protracted insight that American makes no sense to begin with. It lies too much, just like her bastard son—artistically speaking, anyway—Richard Pryor.

I was able to infuse some of my disgust—similar to the disgust I feel about today’s acting bitches, marriage, my brother—into
Mandingo Makes Manhattan
. In the film you see two blacks—a man and a woman, named Kunta and Re-Re—fucking. Re-Re is called Micro-Pussy behind her back, because she can’t take all of Kunta’s quite considerable dick. So: white sheets. Lube and pussy juice shining in the key light. Then you hear me. I say, as Kunta, pushing my dick into Re-Re, panting: “Can I go deep?” And then I say, as Re-Re: “No.” But as Kunta you can hear me go deeper anyway. Playing Re-Re, I object: “I told you no. Hey!” They fuck some more. And then a kind of haiku laid out, as it were, in philosophical terms:

KUNTA: Nigger, I ain’t going deep.

RE-RE: Nigger, how in the fuck you gonna tell me?

KUNTA: ’Cause I’m looking at my dick, all right?

RE-RE: You ain’t in my pussy, either.

KUNTA: I am in your pussy.

RE-RE: No, I’m in my pussy. I can feel how deep you going, nigger.

KUNTA: No, your pussy is yours. I’m in your pussy.

RE-RE: So, I know how deep you’re going, so back up. I’m serious.

KUNTA: Look, Re-Re.

RE-RE: Nigger.

They fuck. Then:

RE-RE: Come on, nigger, hurry up.

He comes.

It wasn’t until I’d listened to this again recently that I thought how many of the feelings you’d like me to express about my brother are expressed there, depending on how you listen.

I love my work.

It provides me with certain necessities. This so-so apartment in West Hollywood (the walls are too pink, though; I’m not thrilled about the constant sunlight). The requisite car. Stamps to put on the envelopes to mail the bills.

On the job, technical problems arise from time to time—a glitch
in the projection, audio wires crossed—but that interests me, too. The downtime provides me with more time to read. I am an actress, and, as such, much of life is made up of waiting, reading, looking for characters to imagine playing in the books I read while waiting to be told whom to be.

An actress’s job description is this: the search for self through words, characters, and situations that are not your own. Another reason I could never be a star: I lack a fundamental interest in finding the phrases that fit my personality. Because that’s what stars do: find the parts that define their personality further. Kate Hepburn is Jo in
Little Women
, that kind of thing. Had I been young enough in the eighties, or interested enough, when women were shoving yams up their twats while talking about the patriarchy or what have you—well, maybe I would have gotten somewhere, talking about a brother. But all of that was as distasteful to me then as my need for you to listen to all this is now.

I like metaphors. I like history. It plays tricks on my mind as I stand in the recording booth, watching whatever. Faces grimacing in some hotel room in Cleveland or wherever with no sound or the wrong sound coming out, waiting for me to correct them—those faces are bracketed in my mind with soldiers in the trenches in World War I, men dressed in green woolen coats, pith helmets, bandages tied around their calves, the gas about to disfigure their enemy’s eyes, his mouth, melt the skin.

I don’t know what makes my mind work that way, makes my eyes see the things it sees. I grew up with books—there were so many
people, all of them talking, that reading was my only way out then.

You know the facts: me and my brother, Richard Pryor, were raised in Peoria, Illinois. I was born in 1938, a little bit before the war started, Richard in 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor. Our mother was a whore. Our grandmother ran a whorehouse. Our father loved them both. Pussy was the family business. There was so much pussy around, I used to wonder: Do I have a pussy, too? And: If I have a pussy, will that make me a whore? I used to sit in the corner of our grandmama’s living room, playing with my titty and eating a honeybun, waiting for somebody to love me the right way, like anybody knew what that was.

I’m reluctant to talk to people like you, a reporter, because Richard talked to you all all the time. And the shit he didn’t tell you he talked about in his act. Maybe that’s one reason I became an actress: to be free in a different way than my brother was free, spewing his guts that way. My freedom comes when I have another name, a different voice. Same as when I was a kid. Everybody was involved in the real-life drama of living in that house; everybody talked and talked. Living there, I could barely hear myself feel. Books were my release.

Everybody said how white I was, reading the world. But after I was in the world, white people didn’t believe how much I’d read; that’s not what a black bitch is supposed to do. Heh. The stories, the characters I found when I was a little girl—they told me how I could live if I busted out of all that pussy and death.

I’ve decided to close the book on a real white woman, though. She’s the enemy of sisters like myself. You know her. There are enough
famous photographs of that writer dressed in linens and hats, that long face a kind of weeping willow of thought—Virginia Woolf, also known as Suicide Bitch.

In some of the pictures I’ve seen, she’s surrounded by homos. I hear that. But what I can no longer hear is people in your line of work going on about her meaning. Her feminism. Her process of intellection. Her mean-spiritedness, which passes as a kind of high literary style. To me, her life and work taste as insulting as the toe jam not looked after before the foot is shoved in some unsuspecting lover’s mouth. As a woman, I’ve tasted it. As a woman saddled with a famous brother, I know more about what she thinks she’s writing about than she’ll ever understand. Her name—don’t make me say it again—sounds as ugly to me as you asking after Richard.

In
A Room of One’s Own
, she writes a kind of fairy tale. She says, What if Shakespeare had a sister named Judith and the sister’s brilliance went unrecognized because she had to take care of everyone else? Had to mother a father and look after the cutlery? Suicide Bitch probably made Shakespeare’s sister up because she never knew a bitch—including herself—whose gifts were obscured by any living man. But I have. I’ve tasted nothing but what she thinks she’s talking about. I am the contemporary Shakespeare’s sister. Except instead of saying “Fear it, Ophelia, fear it my dear sister / And keep you in the rear of your affection / Out of the shot and danger of desire,” Richard said something like, “My daddy told me once, ‘Boy, whatever you do, don’t eat no pussy.’ I couldn’t wait to eat a pussy.” Did that destroy me? I survived. Suicide Bitch would never have the slightest interest in women like me, women who endure a brother’s fame and emerge
from its jaws mangled but intact. That would be too complicated for her reason.

But to continue. Buried in
A Room of One’s Own
is this line: “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine Negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.” I took this to mean: Who gives a shit about a colored bitch; your invisibility is your freedom. I agree. I do voice-overs in front of actors who don’t even know I’m there. But why does Suicide Bitch have to drag a Negress into it? Because that black bitch by definition tells a white bitch who she is.

Listen, my job depends on my physical invisibility but never my absence. My voices are real because I believe in them enough to apply my interior voice to their reason. I resent Suicide Bitch. I resent her talking about me as though I wasn’t in the room.