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 ric Bogosian has spent a lot of time thinking about beautiful women. But in his gritty second novel, Wasted Beauty, the notoriously unretiring monologuist, playwright and screenwriter has also lifted a few rocks and explored the slimy undersides of a seemingly charmed life.Gawky, twenty-year-old Reba has already suffered plenty at the hands of men when she ditches her possessive tyrant of a brother, Billy, at their apple stand in New York City. But with the help of a famous photographer, her career arc from upstate farm girl to upscale cover girl is fast and steep. (The "loose" part comes a little later.) Meanwhile, on the other side of town — and the other side of middle age — successful-surgeon Rick is fighting a bad case of penis ennui. Sure, he loves his wife and kids, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he still wants them around. As the two unwittingly circle toward their mutually assured destruction, Bogosian takes some deliriously grumpy shots at smug scenesters and suburbanites alike. Hooksexup reached him at home last week, where he discussed his main character's fixation with semen and reminisced about watching porn in which women buried men alive. — Emily Mead Aside from the fact that it gave you a perfect title, why did you choose to make Reba a model? I'm fascinated with the idea of beauty as something that isolates a person, and for which they get absolutely no sympathy because everybody thinks it must be wonderful. I wrote a Gia [Carangi] movie for Paramount before HBO did theirs, and it has sat inside of me for years, wanting to be exorcised. She was very working-class — like someone I could have gone to high school with — and she liked to party. She was pretty raw. Her picture got sent to New York, and within months she was a cover girl, then she became a junkie and was one of the first women to have AIDS. And in my old age, I'm writing more and more women characters. Why is that? Maybe the testosterone is dropping in my bloodstream. By the standards of my hometown, anyway, I'm kind of feminine — I cook, I talk, I do all this stuff that I'm not supposed to do. I have a theory that men are becoming less sure in their identity and more concerned with their appearance — the new women. Appearance is a big thing for women, but I think as a factor of inclusion, as a bonding element either with one person or with a group. Whereas with men, it's always about pecking order. To this day, if I walk into a room full of new people, I very quickly size up who are the men I can take and who I can't take, which is a terrible way to look at things. So much for a drop in testosterone. Reba and Billy and Rick all have factors of my personality, but I come from a position, whether I'm writing fiction or a play, that these aren't real people — they're constructs. The fun is how they seem to fit into the real world, like keys in a lock. Do men and women define love differently? I'm a little suspicious of clear-cut theories that try to put a grid over the ways we go about our business. But I've talked to other men and heard similar stuff. The classic [difference] has to do with basic horniness. There's a whole mythology that there are all these incredibly randy women who just can't wait to jump on any stranger and be penetrated and have come shot into them from a man they don't even know. My experience with women is that they may fantasize about that, but there does seem to be a rhythm that women want to be in that has more to do with peaceful coexistence, from which comes intimacy, from which comes lovingness, from which comes sex. Whereas, a lot of men will just say, "What's the problem with jumping each other's bones like they do in the movies?" I've had those telling moments with my wife, when I'd ask, "How come you rejected my advances last night?" And she'd say, "Because we were arguing all afternoon, remember? It doesn't put me in a sexy mood." And I think, "Why not?" Why do Rick and Reba both have so much trouble knowing what they want? They both have huge blind spots. There are plenty of people writing who will explain to you why a man does what Rick does, or the mechanics of narcissism for Reba, but I just tried to write them in a way that resonated for me. I mean, I think of Hooksexup as being sort of a freak-sex place, a place of libertinism, but that's probably something that many of the people who are hooked onto it are going through because they're at a certain age. But I'm not part of that world today. When I was, it was fucking a hundred thousand years ago! It was pre-AIDS. Everybody was stoned, and we were just jumping on each other. Maybe people still do that, but I've been married for more than twenty years. At that point, there's something that goes on with two autonomous, intense people who have stuck with each other for so long. And a lot of it I didn't understand, so I wanted to get my claws on some of that with this guy [Rick]. Rick's also a little obsessed with his own spunk, especially when it winds up in inappropriate places, like the deck outside the neighbors' bedroom. Is this a common fascination? It's fascinating stuff! I just read A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, which is a great book by David Friedman. The dick is really central to a man's life, but no one wants to talk about that, especially now, with the mechanization of the dick through Viagra. But sex is not "poles 'n' holes", it's about all kinds of other stuff. That said, a guy is very aware that this thing down there seems to run his life. We like to think that we're in some kind of miasma of love or passion, but when Rick is peering in on his neighbors, it's like seeing two animals going at it, unconscious of what they're doing. How far removed from that are we? How different is it from a couple of dogs fucking in the schoolyard and looking in two different directions with their tongues hanging out? You gotta wonder. I gotta wonder, anyway. Perhaps someone else hasn't been as driven as I have been by this chunk of flesh hanging off of my groin — Is this ground zero? Is this the center of the universe, this ejaculate? I was so fascinated by this show I heard on NPR about testosterone. I mean, forget the sex stuff, just the aggression and focus and appetite that testosterone provides — I thought, "Wow, this is what I'm about!" Could contemporary porn be a robotic, mechanizing force, too? Many years ago, Esquire asked me to pick someone for their cover story, "Women We Love." [I chose] this big porn star named Barbara Dare, who had done a really funny porn tape of naked girls who take all these men and bury them up to their necks in sand and spray their heads with water hoses. I thought this was a riot. [When I talked to her] years later, she was complaining, "It's all anal now, I never did anal!" The operating thing of porno is that beautiful women are being subjugated to the force of men's dicks. She never got that — she really enjoyed fucking, and liked the idea of people watching. It never occurred to her that it would be for lonely guys with no access to pretty girls. And this is something that I really grapple with: Is there something in the beautiful face itself that says "I'm kind, I'm good, I'm mothering"? It [inspires] some kind of ur-emotion that men are always trying to get back to, and not necessarily the bad shit, like subjugating and beating. It's more like, "Just pull me in and absorb me and love me . . . " n°
©2005 Emily Mead and hooksexup.com.
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