The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(64)

*

Twenty minutes later, we pull into the driveway of a suburban brick house. The kitchen windowsill is covered in owl figurines; crocheted pot holders and sunflower dish towels hang from the oven. There are checkered drapes by the windows and the smell of years of pot roast and rhubarb pie baked into the Formica. I don’t even know what rhubarb pie smells like, but still I believe it’s what the kitchen smells like, the idea of rhubarb, the idea of readying for a picnic in the shade on a June day in the Wisconsin suburbs.

“I got the call when I was with the World of Wonders,” Raymond says, tossing pink puzzle pieces back into a box. “My mom had just died.” The fridge hums behind his whispered explanation as he gets up and searches one of the cabinet drawers for pens. “I left the show, came home right away. That’s when I started making movies.” For four years since then, he’s been living in this house with his dad, who’s getting on in years. He helps his sister, who lives close by, with her daughter. He makes his movies down in the basement.

“Here we go,” Raymond says, setting down three stacks of paper and three pens in front of us. “A contract?” I ask.

“To protect the adult entertainment biz. So that actors can’t have some come-to-Jesus moment later in life and ask that their kinky porn be taken down by the production company.”

I can see the words Moral Consent printed along the top of the paper.

“Driver’s license?” he asks, holding his hand out.

I’m surprised by the formality surrounding this papier-maché-monster-fetish-movie-filmed-in-dad’s-basement, but it also feels somehow good to be bound to this. To have no option of backing out. Aside from agreeing that Raymond can use any video or audio he takes at any point tonight for any purpose, there is no more information about a binding “moral code,” what it means to give away the rights to one’s own future moral perspective. There are plenty of contracts to be locked into—loans, cell phones, insurance claims—but they are all uninterested in the kind of people we will become. This contract asks that my judgment at this moment be forever binding. How much do I trust myself right now? I sign.

Raymond has requested bare legs, so I peel off the fishnets I’ve been wearing for fifteen hours. Per usual, I have the distinct imprint of diamonds down my legs, something reptilian or fishy. I have on bicycle shorts beneath my velvet flapper dress, and heels. Because it is already the end of a fifteen-hour performing day, I look like I’m at the end of a fifteen-hour performing day. Sweaty. Makeup a little smeared beneath my eyes, glittery on the bluish puffs, and the black specks of fallen mascara on my cheeks. I take out my makeup kit and try to do some of the fix-its I’ve learned on the road, dotting concealer under my eyes, adding another, darker line of liquid eyeliner on top of the fading, smudged one, applying new lipstick. I’m getting better at burying who I am.

Two steps down into the basement and I stop. Must. Scents of the other world, of families, of my grandmother’s basement with a furnace that would whoosh on, its starving mouth full of fire and malice, this American middle-class suburban basement smell that, though I’ve only been on the road for two months, feels alien in its suggestion of permanence, the possibility of generations living together under the reign of mothballs.

It’s hard to miss the monster in the basement. He is huge, rounded, about four feet by four feet, big enough to eat a whole human, green, made of papier-maché and foam. Before we start shooting, Raymond brings his can of green spray paint over for some touch-ups.

“Try not to touch the monster except for when you’re being eaten,” he says, touching Vore. He pulls his hand away and it’s covered in green crumbles. Vore is decomposing.

“What’s he made of?” I ask.

“Lady bodies,” Raymond says. He moves quickly around the basement, setting up his tripods and framing images from behind the stairs, on top of the box of Christmas ornaments, his flip-flops thwacking against his heels as he steps. I haven’t seen him hold still for more than two seconds since I met him.

“Okay, here’s the plot,” he says. “Tessa and Pipscy are chained up, back to back, over here. You guys figure out why,” he says, nodding over to us. “At some point, Sunshine will come into the frame. She’s your capturer. I don’t care who throws who into the monster, but at some point, you will escape or be released from the chains and then each be thrown or fall into Vore, or he will decide to eat you himself and his giant pink tongue will capture you. Sound good?”

We nod.

“Don’t worry,” he says, spray-painting the sections of Vore that just crumbled off. “We’ll make it look good. I like taking advantage of creative inspiration as I go.”

“Well, let’s go quickly, Raymond,” Sunshine says. “It’s already one forty-five and I want a cigarette.”

“For the record,” Raymond says, suddenly serious and standing up straight, “I don’t know why this turns people on. The monster thing.” He looks from one face to another with some hint of apology in his eyes for just a flash, but then it’s gone and he’s back to arranging optimal locations for the camera.

“Don’t look at the camera, and kinda overact,” he says. “Big gestures play well. Thrashing and struggling. That’s what makes the hits.”

There’s an old exercise bike in one corner of the basement, boxes of seasonal decorations in another. In between, shelves and piles and stacks gather the physical refuse of a loss, the banal items that you somehow don’t seem to have enough authority to get rid of. I know about these items. Picnic baskets. A waffle iron.