Movie Sunday: Boxing Helena is the sexiest movie you will ever want to turn off

Image from here

My last post reminded me of one of the most brilliantly disturbing movies I have ever seen: Boxing Helena. Not to say everyone will love this movie. I've had people get very angry with me for recommending it to them. It makes 9 1/2 Weeks look like Sleepless in Seattle, and can be extremely uncomfortable to watch. It also introduced me to the music of Enigma, which Biscuit has really never forgiven.

I don't want to say too much about it, because it would be easy to ruin. But it was the first film written and directed by Jennifer Lynch, David Lynch's daughter, which probably tells you something. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in the same year it won the Golden Raspberry for Worst Director.

Oh, and if you decide to try it, watch the whole thing. Quitting in the middle will just make it worse.

How to build a perfect day

I've had a lot of great days with wives, lovers and good friends. Some even by myself. But like a particularly shiny rhinestone on Dolly Parton, they may have a hard time standing out from the rest of the great days. I think to have a really perfect day, it has to stand alone, unexpected and unencumbered by context.

Image from here

And I'm not talking about perfect moments, like the birth of your child, or the time the guy in your school who looked like Ashton Kutcher kissed you in the closet at your older sister's party. Because the birth was preceded by twenty-seven hours of screaming and threats, and the Ashton look-alike never called again, even though you let him go under the shirt in the closet. See where I'm going here? Minimum six hours, all pleasant. No complications before or after. These are the rules.

I've had exactly three of these wonderful days, and after careful analysis, I have a hypothesis about how one could go about building one for oneself. Because that's what I do. Show me three unrelated food items and I will develop an hypothesis about how they would taste together in a pie. Also, I invoke really old-fashioned spelling and punctuation rules intermittently, and with no perceivable pattern. Anyway, here's my (I'll count when I'm done) rules for building a perfect day.

1. Be in high school. I can't stress this enough. Perfect days require a particular blend of energy, ignorance, and foolishness that should only be found in high school kids. If you are a grownup and still doing/believing/imagining this stuff, move out of your mom's basement and get a job. Or maybe enroll in community college. Either way, the important thing is to take off the cape, put down the bong, and join the rest of us in the real world. Oh, and if you're younger than high school age, you are really not old enough to participate in, or appreciate, the PG-13 type activities required, so you're disqualified. Sorry.

2. Go someplace unusual. Preferably someplace exotic. It doesn't have to be Phuket or Xanadu, but Six Flags or Colorado will work, for instance.

3. Ditch your parents, chaperones, or any boring or ugly friends. You're allowed no more than one wingman (or lady). I really shouldn't have to include that one, but some people just need everything spelled out for them.

4. Meet someone of the opposite sex who is probably out of your league, but just barely. It helps if they are a little bored. It can be someone of the same sex if that's how you prefer to roll. I guess. Never tried it, because it's not how I roll. Not that there's anything wrong with it. And now that I think of it, a perfect gay day may be completely different than what I'm thinking. If anyone has one of those, let me know how it goes, and I will try to develop a hypothesis.

5. Play. Shop in the straw market, ride roller coasters, or explore a frontier town together. Smile. Laugh. Hold hands. You know, the crap they stuff into montages in romantic comedies, accompanied by Beach Boys music, or upbeat indie love songs.

6. Make a fool of yourself. Sing to them, draw their picture, buy them a straw hat and pull it down on their head, or something equally ridiculous. If they don't push you down and laugh at you, this is how you know that you have left reality behind, and it's safe to go on to the next phase.

7. Unexpected deliciousness. Something that indicates you've both lost all common sense and inhibitions. None of my days involved sex, at least not by Presidential standards. But at least two involved things I never expected to do with girls I just met, especially without buying them dinner first. And all three were at least partly in semi-public. In fact, I think we probably need a corollary, or a lemma, or something.

7b. Inappropriate deliciousness in semi-public. Examples include behind the smokestack of the Carnival Mardi Gras, standing on the platform between two cars of the Durango-Silverton railroad, and behind the Spindletop at Six Flags Over Texas. This is just the right degree of naughtiness to ensure that there will be a little (but not too much) shame tossed in, which seems to be important for Americans to feel like they've enjoyed themselves.

8. Leave everyone wanting more. You're going to want a hard deadline. Let's face it, most of us lose our luster pretty quickly, and if someone is going to populate my fantasies, we need to hit it and quit it before they start telling me I would look better with long hair, or how I remind them of somebody famous but they can't think of who and it's going to drive them crazy all day.* Or how their college selection process is going, or what sort of car they hope they get for graduation. The park needs to close, ship dock, or train arrive while we both still think it's going great.

9. Never see them again.  This is really an extension of the last one, but I'm starting to feel like I can stretch this to ten rules, so I'm going for it. It's okay to write for a while, if you must, and you can stalk them on Facebook when you're older, but don't try to parlay this into any sort of relationship. First of all, it's never going to work, and you're just going to end up ruining a perfectly good memory. And no one wants to have to explain to their steady girlfriend or boyfriend why this person from Stone Mountain, Georgia, keeps calling their house.

10. Don't go back there. It's good not to return to the scene for at least twenty years, after everything has changed and you're not 100% sure you can recognize the place where all the fun happened. If you go back too soon, you're either going to put ridiculous expectations on yourself and whomever you're with for how much fun it's going to be, or you will see your original experience in the harsh light of reality, and realize that what actually happened is a mutual sexual assault between two underage strangers who were overcome by boredom and an unexpected blast of hormones. Great memories are like great wines. They definitely benefit from aging. And there is always some crap in the bottom of the bottle that you don't want to examine too closely.

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*It's either Jeff Bridges or William Hurt. Let's move on.

Good girls

A little later this summer, a hundred or so alumni from my high school will gather in the bar of the restaurant where many of us drank dinner before the prom, and marvel at how old and fat everyone else has gotten. I was discussing the event a few days ago with an old classmate who won't be able to attend.

I mentioned our senior banquet, which was one of the only times our class was together as a group, without dates from other classes or schools. The theme was the Roaring Twenties, so all the boys dressed as gangsters, and the girls mostly went as flappers. My steady girl was a year younger*, so I went to the banquet with my friend Sharon. I was half hoping that she might throw me some "we're never going to see each other again, anyway" action, but Sharon had other plans. She had hatched some sort of Lucy and Ethel scheme with our mutual friend Vi. I was apparently on Vi's high school bucket list or something, and after a short string of shenanigans, Sharon informed me that I would be taking Vi home after the banquet.

Good wholesome fun, pretending to be bootleggers and whores.

It turned out that I wasn't taking her straight home. We went skinny dipping in the Arkansas River with about a dozen other people, and I forget what happened after that. I walked in the door at 7:00 am, wearing different clothes than the night before and carrying the newspaper. My mother was walking into the kitchen and assumed I had just gotten out of bed and gone outside to fetch the paper. This was another of the incredible strokes of luck that I enjoyed during those years.

It was the mention of the skinny dipping that apparently blew my friend's mind, and led to a flurry of e-mail messages that continue still. She has always believed herself to be a borderline bad girl in high school, mostly because she drank a couple of beers and may have given up some over the sweater action to a long time boyfriend. The fact that her friends and classmates were carousing naked in groups seems to have turned her world upside down, and I think she may have felt like the only virgin in the class.

The truth is that probably half of the girls in my class graduated with their virtues intact, or only slightly dinged. That figure went down quickly during freshman year of college.** We grew up in the middle of the sexual revolution, and our generation was trying to reconcile the Puritan morals we were taught with the obviously changing reality. Girls who did it usually kept it quiet, often not even telling their closest friends. Boys were boys, but the ones who were smart knew to keep their mouths shut if they wanted to do it again.

The decisions were as individual as the people making them, but the narrative was much less diverse.  Girls who weren't sexual enough were fish.  Girls who gave it up were sluts. There was an exemption for long-term relationships, but only if no one spilled details or got pregnant. I still remember listening to one douche canoe telling the entire football team how his girlfriend of over a year had come across with a bj, and the whole group spent several minutes talking about how gross it was, and what a ho-bag she must be.  I resolved never to hang out with any of them, and made a mental note to call her if they ever broke up.

Apparently, this inhibition is hard to shake. My friend spent the weekend with some of her sorority sisters, and since she is now obsessed with this topic, she apparently interrogated each of them. Only about half were willing to talk about their high school experiences even now, all these years later. My impression is that girls today are much more open with their friends, and that perhaps there is a little more freedom to make your own decisions. But I could be wrong. I get all of my information on modern culture from watching Glee.***

So how about it, girls? Any stories you care to share?

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* Steady was a fluid concept for me in those days. Hey, don't judge. It was the 70's. I was up front about it. And I was a seventeen year old boy.

** Like your mom.

*** Just kidding. I would rather stick a needle in my eye than watch Glee.

The Road Always Taken

Every now and then, I find myself needing to impress upon a skeptical female exactly how small the difference is between a teenage boy and a spawning salmon swimming up waterfalls and into the mouths of bears in the slim hope that there just might possibly be some sex at the end.*  In these situations, I often tell this story.

The summer after my second -- and last, for a while -- year of college, I lived with two other guys in what was known that year as The Piranha House. The name came from a Monty Python sketch, and my two roommates came from other planets. I have oscillated in my life between being the most normal of my friends and being the most strange. This was definitely a case of the former. But I digress. One thing that was relevant was that Doug and Dinsdale both had steady girlfriends, and I did not.

The house was coveted by college students throughout the small town of Conway, where I was in school, and we had only gotten it because my best friend was the previous tenant. The Piranha House was situated on a tiny block by itself, and the closest neighbors were a funeral home and an old deaf lady. It had a huge front porch and a big back yard.** The three of us split $180 rent, so you know it was nice. In other words, it was a perfect party house. And we threw one perfect party after another. On any given Sunday morning you could find a person-sized pile of cans and bottles by the curb, and usually a person or two lying somewhere in the yard.

They weren't all big parties. Many were impromptu sessions where a few people would come over, consumables would be consumed, and things would just go along that way for far too long. Perhaps there was light commerce, I forget. Something seems to have affected my memory of that period. On more than one occasion, small gatherings turned into big parties, as more people showed up and no one left.

The only party that didn't really turn out that well was the one we tried to plan. And by plan, I mean we got the money and transportation together to drive all the way to Little Rock for a keg, and told people that we were having a party. I forget the details, but we had neglected to account for some real-world event happening that same night, and we only got about ten people total. Still, we were nothing if not intrepid, so we kept at it until we floated the keg. This was about midnight, and coincident to me deciding that I was "lonely."

The only girl I knew at the time who I was pretty sure would welcome me under these circumstances was going to school in Fayetteville, almost 200 miles away by mostly narrow, twisty mountain roads. (Within a few years I would know two people killed in separate incidents on this same route, in broad daylight and bright sunshine.) Did this deter me? Of course not, and I was the cautious one in the group.

My roommates, being steadfast friends concerned for my safety, made sure I was supplied for the trip, and even suggested we take tequila shots "for luck" to ensure a safe voyage. I had recently acquired a beat-up 1967 Volvo sedan that would strand me all across these United States of ours in years to come, so obviously nothing could go wrong there. Thus fortified, I set out.

Within about thirty minutes I was enveloped in the densest fog I can remember. It was also getting pretty hard to see outside the car. I drove into a wall of fog on an otherwise clear road, and never drove out of it. Visibility was about two car lengths, and steadily got worse. Eventually, I was straining to see the road directly in front of the car. I drove most of the way at 25 mph or less. For much of the last hour, I was driving about 10 mph.

I pulled into Fayetteville just before sunrise, exhausted and very much sobered up. But not exhausted enough to forget what I came for. I spent a pleasant morning and afternoon with my friend, and then made an uneventful trip back to Conway that evening. I don't recall a lot of time for sleep in there, but that didn't seem to bother me in those days.

Parts of this trip are fuzzy in my memory, but one thing I remember very clearly is that I never even considered turning back. I remember thinking that I should turn back, but it was in much the same way that I now think I should spend more time reading journals or get a colonoscopy. I can't even explain it, now that I have more or less wrestled control of my consciousness away from my junk, but in those days it wasn't even a fair fight. Actually, it was no fight at all. The whole team was on board, with laser focus on a single goal. Night and day, day in and day out, month after month and year after year.

This is not exactly behavior I am proud to admit, but I wasn't really any more of a slimy douchebag than other guys my age. (I mean, I was probably in the top third, but that's only because I could get away with it.) There were girls for whom I developed deep feelings, and I felt love's sharp sting more than once. But that was all irrelevant when it came to meeting basic needs. To a nineteen year old boy, it's like saying you can't eat on vacation because there is food at home. It just doesn't make any sense. The only reason most guys that age even have girlfriends is for regular sex.

It also never occurred to me that Vickie -- I'm pretty sure that was her name -- was a real person with feelings and motivations and some opinion about why this boy would drive all night to see her. And I mean never. occurred. to me. I will never know what she thought about the whole thing, but I would be willing to bet it was significantly different from what I thought. There were probably butterflies and unicorns involved.

Luckily, blood flow was rerouted and some semblance of sanity returned to me within a few years, though I was pushing forty before I really felt like the primary head had gained the upper hand for good. I suspect this is why men are so protective of their daughters. Because they know, and they know they will never be believed when it matters. As for any teenage girls out there who are sure their boyfriend is different, don't say I didn't warn you.

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*The reasons I find myself needing to communicate this vary, though it's most often to young women who are involved with some boy that they are positive would never do X, Y or Z just to get in their pants. In these situations, of course, they never, ever believe me.

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** That's what she said.

Lost in Time

I've talked a little about my days as a roadie, back in the day when shorts were small and socks were tall, but it's been a while since I've thought about what I gave up to take that job. I had wanted to work for SHOWCO ever since I knew there was such a place, and had already made one ill-fated move to Dallas to try to get hired on. In fact it was the fallout from that move (long story best left untold) that found me living in Fayetteville, Arkansas in the Fall of 1977, sharing a studio apartment with a part time accident photographer and working various food service jobs to make my half of the $125 per month rent. (That's not where most of my money went, believe me.)

About two months after moving to Fayetteville I met Anne. She had attended the college where I met my roommate, and they apparently renewed their acquaintance when both moved to Fayetteville. Anne was tall and blond and beautiful -- I mean really beautiful -- and for some reason she seemed to like me. The next six weeks or so comprise one of the most amazing periods of my life. Without going into detail, let me just say that we enjoyed each other a lot. A lot. A lot. She taught me to drink spiced tea with milk and honey. I don't know if I taught her anything. I don't remember a cross word passing between us. She got frightened once and I was the one she called. We went everywhere together. No wait -- we didn't. We went where we wanted when we wanted and we both seemed good with it. It was perfect.

And then the first week of November I made the call. Every time I called SHOWCO they always told me to check back in a few months. So I would call and they would tell me they didn't have anything and I would live another chunk of my life. Except the first week of November when I called, they had just lost someone and needed a replacement and the RCO All Stars are playing in Fayetteville tonight so why don't you go down and talk to this guy Buddy Prewitt and he will tell us whether we should hire you or not. And I did and he did and they did and I was gone two days later.

And just like that Anne was out of my life. Well, not just like that. We talked of her moving to Dallas after I got settled, and for a couple of months I really thought it might happen. But she got a job she wanted in advertising and our relationship did what long distance relationships tend to do, and within a year or so I had completely lost track of her.

Since then I have evolved really mixed feelings about those weeks. I don't think Anne ever knew how close I came to turning down that job. If it had not been my life's dream* I probably would have stayed where I was. She also has no way to know how long I pined for her, or how close I came to packing it in on multiple occasions that first few months, when I was lonely and homesick and the new job wasn't what I expected. I had some pictures of her that would almost (but apparently not quite) disqualify someone from being Miss California, and I kept them for far longer than was appropriate. My ex-wife finally threw them out during a move about a decade later. No one would ever have suspected how much time I spent looking at her face in those pictures, though the other parts were good, too.

On the other hand, it was six weeks. Almost all good relationships are good for six weeks. And I don't even know how much we really had in common. I'm sure we carried the seeds of our destruction, and if I look close enough I can almost see them. There was probably a sad or bitter or fiery end in our future, and we just never had to live through it. I think in some ways we were too much alike, which I only found out was bad many years later.

Or maybe that's all just rationalization. The entire weight of my life since then conspires to ensure that I am happy with my choice. Either way, the direction of my future balanced on a knife point one day many years ago, with two of the best things I can imagine on either side. I chose. What else can we do?

In the end I decided to treat those six weeks as sort of a capsule, like a great book or a favorite song**. Those weeks are almost completely disconnected from the main thread of my life, no longer food for regret or wistfulness or nostalgia. At the same time those weeks embody for me a feeling of love and relaxation and good fortune that is as personal and private as anything can be. It is without cause or effect or consequence, except to remind me that I have been blessed. Wherever Anne ended up, I hope she remembers the time half as fondly.


*I know. I was 20. Shut up.

** Or the time when I was fifteen and an eighteen year old girl I had never seen before stuck her hand down my pants on the Silverton railroad. It was a really good day.