Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

Sometimes it’s hard to write honestly. Without truth, without the revelation of what things really are, it’s just more lies. More shadows in want of flesh.

It says — in Ezekiel, I think: I make blood your destiny. That’s God talking, not me. And if God can’t reveal the truth, who can?

So I guess that’s what this really is. I guess this is my blood.

***

Smith wasn’t sure what to make of it; he approached the way dared children might edge toward a house said to be haunted. LIVE SEX! boasted the sign in blue neon. D.C.’S BEST! ALL YOUNG PRETTY GIRLS! LIVE SEX LIVE SEX LIVE SEX!

The place was called The Anvil; Smith smiled at an obvious symbology. He remembered it as one of the many bottomless bars wedged into the city’s porno district. Now, though, it seemed The Anvil had graduated to more definitive designs. Smith felt confused. What, after so many years, had brought him back? He was a writer; he wanted things to write about, real things, real truths in a real world. He wanted substance, not tales; he wanted people and lives and honest experience, not cardboard cut-outs and soap opera dialogue. He figured his professional insights had posted a challenge. So here he was. Couldn’t better judgment, in a sense, also be called cowardice?

Music rocked into the street when he opened the door. He shouldered through a standing crowd in a brick- arched entrance, craning his neck to sense The Anvil’s depth. The $25 cover didn’t seem to thwart business — people were jammed in attendance. Smith had come here a few times during college, with friends. It seemed larger now, a cavernous expansion of the layout he remembered. The main stage existed in a stagnant haze of glare, accentuated by multicolored spotlights set to throb with the music. Around all this, dozens of tables and chairs were arranged in uneven concentric circles. The stage was empty, save for an armless chair and a loop harness suspended from the ceiling. The loop cast a shadow like a hangman’s noose.

Two stone-faced city cops eyed for minors near the bar, but no one seemed to care. Smith thought, temporal excommunication. They were invisible here, shunned. Outsiders in the chasm’s jubal.

A large video screen rounded one corner — entertainment between the acts. Smith winced. This was “homegrown” fare; you could always tell by the trackmarks on the girls’ arms, and forced smiles full of broken teeth. The grainy shot zoomed in from behind for the eloquent close-up of frenetic copulation. Then a cut to the girl’s head rocking on the desk. Was she asleep? Eventually the penis withdrew and offered its obligatory ejaculus externus. High class stuff, Smith thought.

Consciously he wanted to leave — this was not his territory. Places like this were dangerous, and not of his ilk. Drug deals took place here; prostitution was solicited. Fights broke out on a regular basis. There’d even been police raids. But down deep Smith wanted to see—he needed to — as if seeing would verify the reality he pursued, whatever that might be. He was an outsider, too, goodie two shoes in the den of iniquity. His discomfort excited him; it made him feel, somehow, more like a writer. Cowards die a thousand times, he reflected and almost laughed. But when he began to search for a table, his arm was grabbed, spinning him around. Suddenly a girl was shouting in his face. “Hey— hey! It is you! My God, I haven’t seen you in ages!”

The moment warped, mental feelers searching for a bearing. Then: recognition. He knew this girl.

“Lisa?” he queried. He’d had a crush on her as a kid, but the crush had never progressed past distanced longing. Her odd haircut and glossy blue-vinyl overcoat made her look like some kind of pop baroness. It dizzied him to see her in such contrast — in school she’d always dressed like a minister’s daughter.

“Lisa,” he finally managed. “The last time I saw you was in—”

“High school,” she finished. “I know, I know. Ten years.”

Smith groped for some cordiality, but before he could speak she was yanking him through the throng by the arm. The meeting had transpired so quickly Smith was flabbergasted. He couldn’t stop wondering what Lisa, of all people, was doing in this seamy place.

She led him to a table marked RESERVED, then ordered two beers from a mohawked blonde with glittered nipples and an orange g-string. When Lisa looked at him she seemed to smile through a wan aura. Smith felt hit in the face by a flying stone; it was the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen.

“Surprised to see me?” she asked.

“I, uh,” he replied. He shook his head. “You look as good as you did in ’83.”

“Do I really?”

“Well, no. Actually you look better.”

She leaned forward, coyly, as if to tell a secret. A subtle scent drifted up, clean hair and a hint of perfume that Smith found intensely arousing. “You know, this is really freaky,” she enthused. “But I was poking around my basement today, and I found one of my old yearbooks. I opened it up and the first face I saw was yours. And here you are, a couple of hours later, sitting right in front of me.”

“A classic example of the power of the feminine mystique,” Smith joked. It might make a good social allegory. “Come to think of it, I did trudge here in zombie-like state, beckoned by your psychic call.” He grinned stupidly, lit a cigarette. “I still can’t believe it’s you.”

Her big brown eyes beseeched him over a beautiful smile. She paused dreamily. “There’s so much I remember all of a sudden…”

“Like what?”

“Like how you used to look at me. Follow me around. Think of the silliest questions just for an excuse to talk to me…”

Smith turned red.

She touched his hand, laughing. “I’m sorry. I’m embarrassing you.”

You’re goddamned right you are, Smith thought. But then, weirdest of all, he replied, “I remember, too.”

The waitress brought the beers, and stooped to converse with Lisa. Smith used the distraction to take a good look. A black velvet choker with a tiny silver penis at its center girded her throat. Her hair hung perfectly cropped in a straight line, cut at the same level as the choker; it was lank and shiny as black silk. Barlight and shadows diced her face into a puzzle of hard, pretty angles. Her eyes were so big and bright they dominated her face almost surrealistically.

Smith’ hands tremored. He drained half his beer in one hit. Perhaps here was some of the very truth he felt bereft of. This was more than a girl — this was his past coming back to him, a reclamation. But what had his past been? Innocence? Smith frowned. Not innocence as much as intimidation and failure. He couldn’t see between the lines. Was this his past coming back? Or his weakness?

The waitress ignored him and sauntered away when he pulled out his wallet. “These are on the house,” Lisa told him. “In case you haven’t guessed, I work here.”

Smith had already figured as much. “What, waitressing?”

“Something like that.”

Probably a hostess or manager or something. Smith didn’t push it. For the next twenty minutes they talked, chatted to no account about innocuous things. She didn’t seem the least impressed that he was making a living as a writer.

It caught him off guard, however, when she observed, “But you’re not happy with your writing. You’re not fulfilled.”

She knows how to hit the nail on the head, Smith thought. Could he be read that easily? Or had his despair merely steepened to the point that it now showed? God knew he’d seen it happen to other writers. “I have this absurd and completely egotistical compulsion about… I don’t know. About the truth of things.”

“We all have our compulsions,” she remarked. She was looking right at him, smiling bright. “Nietzsche said there is no truth, right? And Sartre said it’s only in yourself. But I think they were both wrong. Truth is all over the place. You just have to know what door to look behind, or what face.”

Smith was bewildered; he could’ve laughed. I’m sitting in a strip joint with a girl I haven’t seen in ten years, talking about epistemology and abstract existential dynamics. Happens everyday. He