“You got me. Okay. I was only playing at being polite. That kid was being polite, inviting me, and the polite thing would have been for me to tell him I couldn’t make it, offer some excuse, but I don’t need some polite kid honoring me with a brunch invitation I’m supposed to refuse, so, to fuck with him a little, I told him I’d be there. Don’t act disappointed. You don’t want me there, anyway.”
“That’s not—”
“You’re relieved, Bill. Come on. Keep pretending you aren’t, I’ll start to feel offended. Let’s go watch your video.”
* * *
At the start of the segment with the fat kid, the cat, and Percy the Curio, my father leaned across the couch and smacked me on the shoulder. “I figured it out,” he said. “What this reminds me of. It’s like that one tape. You remember that tape?”
I remembered the tape. Around the turn of the millennium, just as DVDs were gaining popularity, my father’d brought home a VHS tape that was being passed around among the workers at the plant. Bumfights Gone Wild by the Bell, Maybelline, If You’ll Give Me a Chance. It was, for the most part, a bootlegged compilation of “best of” moments from two mail-order video series: Bumfights, in which homeless men, paid by a crew of pop-collared frat brothers, beat each other up and self-harmed for the camera; and Girls Gone Wild, in which drunken coeds on spring and winter break flashed and kissed and groped one another in exchange for T-shirts, beads, or money, depending on what they’d been able to negotiate with a wholly different crew of pop-collared frat brothers. Other clips appeared on the tape as well, usually between, though sometimes intercutting, those mentioned above. There was one of a man, allegedly Chuck Berry, urinating onto a woman in a bathtub, afterward telling her to give him a kiss, then pushing her away when she leans in to kiss him, and saying, “Bitch, you smell like piss!”; one of a child beauty contestant descending a triple-tiered dais, victorious, while vomiting down the length of her gown; an educational film, ca. 1970, for newly pubescent mentally retarded girls, in which the film’s protagonist, Jenny, a twelve-year-old with Down’s, puts the question “What’s a period?” to her mother, then her sister, and then her father, and they each respond by twice repeating the sentence “Once a month, blood from inside a woman’s body comes out from an opening between her legs”; and a seventeen-minute, unsolicited audition for the after-school sitcom Saved by the Bell, in which a markedly non-telegenic teenage boy in a Waikiki belly-shirt praises both the writing and the acting on the show as “the best there is,” then vogues atop a bar stool to “Pump up the Jam” by Technotronic in his parents’ suburban, wood-paneled basement, and ends things by begging the show’s producers to give him a chance: “Just a chance. One chance,” he says. “I’ve earned a chance, I deserve a chance, just give me a chance.” There were other clips too, at least a dozen more, but I couldn’t remember them. I hadn’t seen the tape in over a decade.
“I guess that it’s kinda like the tape,” I said.
“Right,” sneered my father. “Only kinda cause the tape wasn’t a ‘documentary collage.’ ”
“Well—”
“The tape wasn’t ‘art,’ right? Unlike this masterpiece here, I mean.”
“I was gonna say the tape was a lot more random.”
“And this thing isn’t random?”
“It’s less random,” I said. “So far at least, the segments all have something to do with cures.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I guess you got a point.”
A couple minutes later, our washer’s buzzer sounded and my father got up. I paused the video.
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m done. I think this kinda thing—it’s not really my thing, you know? Especially not this early in the day. I’m gonna go switch that shirt, catch a workout or something.”
It wasn’t til he’d left that I looked at the pause screen. The digits in its upper corners informed me I’d watched twenty-five of 170 minutes, was in the midst of the seventh of twenty-six tracks. This was unwelcome news. The clock said 10:10, and was ten minutes slow. I had just thirty minutes before I had to leave: half an hour to watch more than two hours of video and formulate a critique of what I’d seen. Well, more like forty minutes to formulate the critique—I could, if I wished, think about the critique during my ten-or-so-minute walk to the compound—but, still. Not enough time to do the job right.
How big a deal was that? Maybe not so big.
Were I, at brunch, to tell Triple-J the truth—that I hadn’t suspected how long the collage was, and so hadn’t budgeted enough of my morning to view and properly critique it—he would, I imagined, be disappointed, but I doubted that he’d be hurt or offended, as long as I assured him my critique was forthcoming.
Except then, of course, I’d still owe him a critique. And owing to that critique’s delayed delivery, there would be a lot more pressure on me to make it a useful, insightful critique, the kind I’d have to watch most, if not all, of A Fistful to formulate.
And I didn’t want to watch most or all of A Fistful. I didn’t want to watch any more of A Fistful.
What I’d seen so far had left me feeling compromised.
* * *
—
I don’t much go in for critical theory, but when, years earlier, I was working on my third failed novel (the one about Josephine Singer, the staggeringly gorgeous intersex sex-worker-slash-wunderkind of critical theory who marries a billionaire), I read Fondajane Henry’s seminal treatise on sex work, Flesh-and-Bone Robots You Think Are Your Friends, the fifth chapter of which, “Violent Pornography,” describes a series of “large-scale arousal studies” performed at Stanford and Oxford Universities. The studies’ subjects, while hooked up to a kind of polygraphesque technology (e.g. sensors measuring skin conductivity, pupillary dilation, heart- and respiration-rates, etc.) viewed two sets of eighty photographs. The photos in the first set were of pairs of human eyes dissociated from the faces that housed them (i.e. the faces in which the eyes resided were cropped above the brows and below the cheekbones), and the photos in the second set were of two-inch-square patches of decontextualized human flesh (i.e. each photo showed, in close-up, two square inches of a haunch, a belly, an ass, or a leg). Each of the photos was shown for two seconds, and each subject was asked to rate the “beauty” of the eye pair or flesh patch it depicted on a scale of 1–10.
According to the rating data, a roughly equal proportion (about one-third) of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual men (none of the studies included women or transgendered persons) found pairs of eyes that welled with tears to be more beautiful than pairs of eyes that didn’t well with tears, and twice that proportion found patches of flesh that had, moments before they were photographed, been molested (slapped, punched, or pinched) to be more beautiful than unmolested patches of flesh. According to the autonomic response data, the proportion of subjects who preferred molested flesh was consistent with that which was indicated by the rating data, but the proportion of subjects who preferred welling eyes was significantly greater (120 percent greater) than the proportion indicated by the rating data.