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Porn  

Eric G. Wilson

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Coitus perpetually a mouse-click from your eyes, you think about nothing else, but coitus a click from your eyes. The cosmetic genitalia so close to the real, you think you can transcend your own grim privates, rise to the pleasure of repeated pleasure. A machine is this and no that, this and no that, this and no that. “Life is just one damned thing after another,” Toynbee wrote. Civilizations, he believed, decay from within. Thomas Monson, head of the Mormon Church, calls pornography the “bark beetle” to the elm of humankind. Monson worked as an advertiser for the Deseret News. When interviewed by this paper, I said: “If you create a narrative that’s so far removed from yourself and your circumstances, that will lead to sorrow.” For his service on the National Executive Board of the Boy Scouts, Monson received a Silver Beaver. I attended Boy Scout Camp, and I shared a bunk with Joe, a stranger. The first night, he said, “I hate pornos where you see the stretch marks.” My friend Shane, no Scout, led me to his brother Billy’s room. It was dark and crimson, with a poster of Linda Ronstadt on the wall. Model jeeps appeared everywhere. A tiny plastic skeleton leaned against one. Under Billy’s mattress were a Climax, whose cover depicted a penis inserted into a woman’s anus, and a Rouge, where a bearded man touched a vagina with his tongue. “Let’s go to the basement,” Shane said. Last summer I toured the Utah desert in an off-road SUV. Lemuel, the driver I hired, weighed two-fifty and sported a shovel-head beard. The stunts he performed enlivened the rocks. He raised hell in the seventies, he confessed, but converted to Mormonism, quit drinking, raised twelve children. When he saw a Jack Daniels mini in my seat—fallen from my pocket—he shouted, “Never forget the murder of Joseph Smith is essential to our faith.” Then he pointed to the west. A cave was there. For fifty extra, he would take me. Shane called his basement the cavern. It smelled of detergent and glue and motor oil. In the center, two black leather sofas faced each other on a square of black shag. The lamp suspended above was red and globular. Shane and I each sat down on a sofa. The women in the mags looked bored. Their tans touched the pearl-white circling their aureoles and spreading like wings from their pubic V’s. The faces of the men remained unseen. Joseph Smith enjoyed forty wives. Nathan Mitchell portrayed him in Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration. Mitchell has acted in several Mormon films and leads troubled youths on retreats in the Arizona wilderness. Willem Dafoe played Christ. He was also expelled from high school for making a porn film. “Anything to get out of [Wisconsin],” he exclaimed. Dafoe enjoyed an early sexual encounter with Wendy Witt, whose parents “were relaxed about sex because they didn’t want us to be fucked up about it.” Wendy O. Williams is who I watched at the age when Dafoe was filming sex. In the video for “The Damned,” O. Williams stands atop a school bus speeding through the desert. She wears a black bikini top, a black loin cloth, high black boots. Metal spikes thrust from her black elbow pads, and her bleached Mohawk stands four inches high. The bus crashes through a wall of stacked televisions. Before her punk fame, O. Williams appeared in the porn film Candy Goes to Hollywood. Her character, named Wendy Williams, competes in a talent show. From her vagina she shoots ping pong balls, while her male partner, dressed like drum major, attempts to catch them in his mouth. My testicles, by the time I had finished the Rouge, hurt. At the age of forty-eight, a tormented O. Williams walked into the woods near her Connecticut home, fed acorns to squirrels, and shot herself to death with a pistol. In her suicide note, she wrote “much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.” I am forty-eight. Porn, regular as a mechanical pen or a gun, goads and numbs. Unperceived goes the discord in the players. What was occurring behind Shane’s jeans, I could not fathom. “Have you ever stroked it?” I asked. “No,” he said. “I used suntan lotion once,” I admitted. Shane is now an evangelical minister. Our senior year in high school, O. Williams released the single “It’s My Life,” in which she wails “shining from the roof.”