Little Cat (24 page)

Authors: Tamara Faith Berger

BOOK: Little Cat

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I heard Ezrah snort back to life, a nervous reaction in his nose.

‘I want to wait for more of these feelings, Ezrah, I want to wait every night, ruined or not. It feels good to see these kinds of things, like your brain’s practically dripping from the walls, like your brain can act outside your head, moving without static, like everything is equal, I can understand myself and all men … ’ My voice suddenly got hoarse. ‘Will you tell my mom that I called?’ I heard myself asking. ‘Tell her I’m okay. Tell her I’ll call her.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Ezrah. Just tell her I’ll call her. I’ve got to go now.’

I heard Michael coughing awake.

‘I’m coming there. I’m going there right now. The police told me where that dead girl worked. I don’t care who’s there with you, I’m going to pound his face in. You happy now, Mira? I bet you’re there anyway. I bet you never left that fucking shithole.’

‘Don’t you dare go there. I am not there.’

‘I don’t believe you. I’m going. Getting my shoes on. Getting my car keys … ’

‘Ezrah, I mean it. Don’t go. I’m not there!’

‘I’m leaving in two minutes, coming to get you. I don’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth. It’ll take me a half-hour. See you.’

‘Don’t!’

‘What? Is your boyfriend sleeping there? Is that it? I’ll pound his face in if he’s there.’

‘Ezrah, fuck!’

‘Ezrah fuck what?’

It was the last thing I heard. My fingers were bright red. I ran out of Michael’s apartment, shot down twenty-two flights and out into the world of light and its rising.

They were waiting for me on the opposite sides of the room. I walked to my window and leaned my head against the glass. Gio was at the edge of my bed and Ezrah had his arms crossed over his chest at the wall. I turned on the light and they both flinched the same face. The difference between family and stranger was erased. Killer equalled cousin equalled father equalled pimp. And Jew equalled Jew equalled Jew.

Gio said: ‘You have to rid yourself of this man.’

Red patches rose up and flushed Ezrah’s face. ‘Just fuck off, man, okay?’

My bottom lip started to shake. I had to remember:
collaborate.

‘You’re coming home with me, Mira. Just come now, okay?’

Ezrah was walking right toward me. I had to move away.

I walked to the window, leaned my head against the glass. God, what is this place that it can break people in half? This place where men come to fuck their own daughters. This maze where fathers and daughters meet up …

‘Excuse me,’ Gio said. ‘I think I can explain. Nothing is wrong here. What has taken place here isn’t wrong.’

‘Wait,’ I warned Gio, without looking behind me. How was I supposed to collaborate with them?

‘Why doesn’t she tell me to leave then, you asshole? Mira? Why don’t you tell me to leave? Just tell me to go and I’ll go, okay?’

‘But it’s not you who has to go, it’s Mira who has to stay,’ Gio answered. ‘She still has work to do tonight.’

‘Hang on,’ I said. My throat felt caked with mud. I turned around to face them. ‘I don’t want to be here but I don’t want to leave. I want to finish my job at this place and move on.

‘I want to talk to you both, but one at a time. Maybe, later, I can talk to the two of you together. Maybe, one day, I can talk to a room full of men. Maybe one day I’ll be the Lord of all men. Maybe the Mother of God was a whore. Maybe one day I’ll be naked and shining and you won’t have to worship me or any young girl anymore. Maybe one day we’ll all have holes at the top of our heads and be programmed for God. And women will fuck men instead of men fucking them. And then this place can be burned to the ground.’

I smiled. They were both listening to me.

AFTERWORD

I
remember the embarrassment I felt when
Lie with Me
came out over ten years ago. There was no good way for me to explain why I shot fiction with pornography, hoping for the best. That initial public embarrassment was likely a kind of useless repression. Because I had no big truth to tell about myself. Now, though, in retrospect, I know why I wrote
Lie with Me.
It was to sustain this perfect, merciless feeling I first had while spitting art’s extremity into the suckhole of porn. And it’s not embarrassing for me to admit anymore that I was desperate to find meaning in this action.

Unfortunately, by the end of two books I didn’t know any more about female sexuality than when I’d started out. My mercilessness had not blossomed into compassion either.

Is untapped sexual energy in women even still a problem these days? In 1999, I felt that problem as acutely as my shame. And it was this push-pull of pressures that made me transcribe and complicate the getting-fucked female voice – a voice that I found in porn, a voice that was utterly wasted by porn.

Porn
needed fiction
, I felt. I needed the fight.

Significant visions are not always easy to remember. But memory, sometimes, functions all right. This one feels loaded: 1982, in the basement closet of a girl in my class I saw a bronze naked man projected onto the wall, guffawing and walking toward a very high bed. This bronze naked man had a rod sticking off him. I had never seen a thing like that, I’d only ever seen them mottled and soft and hiding like purses between hairy legs. This one was a workshop utensil! This one was pointing and leading to something airtight. What I got from my first vision of cock: cock was a tool, you had to use that thing right.

The girl’s mother called her name from upstairs.

The bronze king honed in on the very high bed where there were two women waiting with soft boobs and flipped hair. Those two were like chipmunks, fawning on their knees.

Something was about to happen, something I knew I had to see.

The girl’s mother yelled, ‘What on earth are you two doing down there?’

The king’s rod was about to be taken, or hung off or fed to the fat-cheeked females! I felt something freeze inside my gut. The girl’s mother was walking down the basement stairs. My friend knew when to stop. The film caught and snapped dark; light got suddenly sliced up inside our closet. I heard my friend laughing and I ran upstairs after her, confused and coughing, past her mom. We burst out the front door onto shining concrete. My laughs were dry yelps. That girl’s mother knew. Her lips were down-turned. I knew it wasn’t the first time that the girl had done this, i.e., shared the miraculous inevitable.

I hung out with that girl for at least another year, but I never thought about what happened to her that night. Did she get in trouble with her mother? Did her mother go into the closet after we’d left? Did she rewind the film that her daughter stole from her drawer? Was a kid supposed to get in trouble for seeing this?

I didn’t contemplate any consequences for seeing a cock and two girls put to work – nearly. What I understood was that adults were very powerful creatures. Sex was their secret and inborn pact. That circle-edged, soft-core minute of film pushed at the edges of my growing girl mind. It shouldn’t be nightmarish to admit this as true. People today seem terrified of the effects of precociousness in girls. But after the bronze cock vision in the closet, I did not go out and start to fuck. Porn did not shut my mind down. It ripped and stained my mind’s eye, maybe, but I don’t even think it’s as ominous as that. I had a truck load of shame to tar and feather myself with yet. A dream is a dream. A kid is a kid. Some dreams get trampled, some thrive, some expire.

Enter James Deen, L.A. porn-boy-next-door. It’s 2013. James Deen hadn’t even been born when I was indoctrinated in that closet. James Deen is the pre-eminent sign that the ‘chipmunk-cheeked’ don’t have to feel shame anymore. James Deen says that he will not have sex with a woman on camera who does not want to have sex with him. James Deen reverses the poetic violence of the porn I first saw, read and wrote, because he’s so transparent, so puppy-like; because he does it
with
the girls, not
to
them at all.

Sex is like soccer, says Deen. It’s fun and athletic, and you should do it with your friends.

It’s possible, though, that shame is essential for growing a spine. Maybe humans are just all mutations of shame. Maybe James Deen is the devil in disguise and porn today is an apolitical trick. Ariel Levy wrote the book
Female Chauvinist Pigs
about the misogynistic impulses in and around porn, porn that is often full of sexually traumatized subjects.

It’s true that porn is full of misapprehension. Porn ill-advisedly too often gets rid of our shames.

It seems fitting, regardless, that a man should put us chipmunks at ease. James Deen, the sweet metafictional entertainer, takes my decade-old, shame-laced, porn problematic – how can a fucked woman speak clearly? – and he turns me to look in the mirror while doing me up the ass.

Speak up, he implores. Don’t rest there dammed-up, hiding or weak!

Okay, James, Motherfucker:

Porn’s a non-functioning hologram where men and women are equally fucked, each according to their wishes, each according to their need. This alleged egalitarian space in real life is a particular
Deenian
paradox – the naked and the public are slut-loving and safe; it’s the end of being born female as a receptacle for shame. And if our current, steady Canadian existence is threatened by juiced-up females roaming and fucking in packs, in my opinion, there will still be empathy.

Notes and Acknowledgements

Reference is made to the following authors and works:

Acker, Kathy.
In Memoriam to Identity
. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

Buber, Martin.
Tales of the Hasidim
. New York: Schocken Books, 1975.

Genet, Jean.
Our Lady of the Flowers
. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Mirabai.
For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai
. Trans. Andrew Schelling. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1993.

Nietzsche, Friedrich.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, Fourth Part, 19.
The Portable Nietzsche
. New York: Viking Press, 1968.

Reines, Ariana.
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/16/preliminary_materials_for_a_theory_of_the_young_girl

‘The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt as told by Sophronious.’
Medieval Saints: A Reader
. Ed. Mary-Ann Stouck. Canada: Broadview Press, 1999.

Thank you, Alana Wilcox, little cat! Thank you, Evan Munday, and thank you, Leigh Nash and Heidi Waechtler of Coach House Books.

About the Author

Tamara Faith Berger
was born in Toronto. She wrote porn stories for a living and attempted to make dirty films before publishing her first book,
Lie with Me
, in 1999. In 2001,
The Way of the Whore
(
A Women Alone at Night
in the U.S.), her second book, was published. Her third book,
Maidenhead
, came out in 2012.
Little Cat
is a re-release of her first two novels in substantially revised form.

Typeset in Whitman and Trade Gothic.

Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg
KORD
offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox

Cover design and hand lettering by Ingrid Paulson

Author photograph by Christine Davis