The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Palin camp may get SNL time to respond to Fey sketches. Wahlberg camp still mum on their demands. Plus: Dexter, Brothers and Sisters and Gwen Ifill reacts to Queen Latifah.
I'm all wet. Been hosed down like a twitchy-cunted bitch in heat by a committee of censorious stormclouds gathered above the East Village. I'm soaked down to my carefully-chosen thong -- Natori lace in goldensmog -- and matching bra (total cost to destitute, Gold-card carrying zine editor: eighty-five dollars). The cracked, hallowed steps to my ex-boyfriend's apartment still have a familiar shake to them, but he has painted a target around his buzzer. The bull's-eye is a collusion of red, orange and purple that is the color of my bedroom walls, my bicycle, the birdcage in my kitchen and the throat of the bird inside it; the color of the three eyeshadows blended on my lids. My index finger frets, hummingbirdlike, over the buzzer and withdraws. I have the sensation -- heart racing, chest clogged -- of being caught shoplifting. But there is no wadded up baby-T, no breathless security guard, just me. Me, who spent the better part of college burning tiny holes in this guy's heart like a cheap bedspread. I sit my ass on the edge of a step, floored by my cruelty.
Then I snap out of it. This will be a good thing, I tell myself, a healing thing. Besides, I'm not here to stir things up, just to pay the most talented artist I know to take my picture for the cover of my zine. And, yes, Rocco happens to know that under the lens, the skin comes right off my bones (easy as darkmeat), and that my snaky, sinning underself likes to wriggle in the light.
Rocco takes his time to buzz me in. Maybe he had to say goodbye to the black-haired Lulu who bursts out the front door, swinging a sidelong glance at me from crowlike eyes. Since me, Rocco's been with a string of French salesgirls from a boutique where we used to go to admire the costumes (I thought), and as I peek at raven-woman striding away in white leather tubedress, I recognize her as one of them. A perverse part of me hopes she recognizes me too, and that she's taking note of every inch of me, up to the shade of my rouge à lèvres, which I apply while looking into a compact propped on the intercom box.
On the eighth floor, a salmon pink door opens and Rocco's slouch fills the frame. He is one of the few people in New York who has a history on me. Through two years of college we languored, content in each other's dirty rooms. We smoked pot, watched Fassbinder movies and always, eventually, screwed. But I never could stand his small hands and there was no changing that. We broke up shortly after I "followed" him from California to New York. Our final month together was relatively painless, whiled away in the therapeutically stark rooms of Soho art galleries, in steamy-windowed diners with his art school friends who never slept, and in his cubicle bedroom where we negotiated between his lust and my indifference. Once I had my bearings, I ended what he called "our mutual love affair with you."
"Hi," I say, trying to breathe like I'm not out of breath from climbing the stairs. "I'm soaked." Heat rises to my face. Clearly, we are not friends. I am sensing something of a bouncer/clubber dynamic. I'm on the sidewalk side of the velvet rope, shivering in high heels that hurt my feet and twist in the cobblestones.
Rocco says "It doesn't matter, come in," and disappears down a dark hallway. He reappears with my old Special K beach towel, which is now stained with malodorous darkroom chemicals. Handing me the towel, he says without a trace of humor, "Don't even think about taking that back." Busily drying off, I feel his eyes move down me to the puddle forming at my feet, and back up to my smeary, diverted eyes.
That was always the difference between us. He, staring holes through thin skins that blush and prickle; me, forever pretending discretion, stealing impressions of people's bodies, their intimacies, even their car wrecks, through my peripheral vision. Ten or twenty pounds heavier and sporting a powder blue work suit, Rocco, once a young-Elvis-look-alike with his asphaltic pitch of hair and fawn-lashed blue eyes, now prematurely resembles the King in his later years. I have no idea if I'm looking better or worse now, in my almost-late twenties. At least I've learned not to straighten my hair. Rocco pours two cups of coffee, adds half-and-half to mine (pointedly not asking) and leads me into his bedroom.
The stark white walls are covered with women, colorful and subdued, all hair and flesh and fabric and eyes and hips and laughing teeth and open palms and sharp elbows. The series he took of me naked through the glass walls of a greenhouse is up -- moist green fronds stroking my blurred, root-pale limbs -- as is an eleven-by-fourteen of the back of my head, half-shorn in a tomato-red barber's chair. I'm happy to see myself here, like an old friend at a stranger's party, but I'd rather not give him the pleasure of watching me stare at my own portraits. Besides, I'm afraid I'll see in shameful measures what is true of all us amateur models -- we feign oblivion to the camera, as if it captures us unawares, but all the while we are high on the envy we want desperately to invoke.
The only thing to look at besides the flesh-bespunked walls is the bed, completely stripped. Nice touch. He listened when I said I wanted Raw. He flips a switch under an umbrella and eight a.m. light saturates the stained, baby blue mattress. Somewhat gingerly, I sit on a corner and begin to shed, combat boots first, and slowly. I untie the laces, pressing the small of my back into an alert arc, lifting my chin just the littlest bit, hoping he will pick up the camera and shoot. I used to love to lean back -- in tall, wet grasses; on stacks of pillows; in my best friend's lap -- and stare into the click and whir of the shutter. It occurs to me, this was how we fucked. Just shoot, I will him. He picks up the camera and begins.
to my ex-boyfriend's apartment still have a familiar shake to them, but he has painted a target around his buzzer. The bull's-eye is a collusion of red, orange and purple that is the color of my bedroom walls, my bicycle, the birdcage in my kitchen and the throat of the bird inside it; the color of the three eyeshadows blended on my lids. My index finger frets, hummingbirdlike, over the buzzer and withdraws. I have the sensation -- heart racing, chest clogged -- of being caught shoplifting. But there is no wadded up baby-T, no breathless security guard, just me. Me, who spent the better part of college burning tiny holes in this guy's heart like a cheap bedspread. I sit my ass on the edge of a step, floored by my cruelty.
impressions of people's bodies, their intimacies, even their car wrecks, through my peripheral vision. Ten or twenty pounds heavier and sporting a powder blue work suit, Rocco, once a young-Elvis-look-alike with his asphaltic pitch of hair and fawn-lashed blue eyes, now prematurely resembles the King in his later years. I have no idea if I'm looking better or worse now, in my almost-late twenties. At least I've learned not to straighten my hair. Rocco pours two cups of coffee, adds half-and-half to mine (pointedly not asking) and leads me into his bedroom.
