BANGALORE: Not long ago, I was reading David Denby’s “weird navelgazing” book called American Sucker that detailed his massive porn surfing for six straight months.
Every word resonated with this particular fling of my non-existing life that led me to fritter away what could have been my own “happily ever after” love story.
We met at Bengaluru Film Festival. While the projectionist was biding his time for the cognoscenti to arrive for the early morning screening, she was reading the editor’s note in Sight and Sound and adjacent to her was yours truly, who was tittering away to glory at Andrew O’Hagan’s travails as movie critic that he brilliantly brings to life in Granta Film.
Surprisingly, my suppressed chuckles drew her attention and in no time we discovered that we both chewed Tabucchi to the nasty bone, shared contempt for the empty prose of Beckett and dug Yo La Tengo with feral intensity. For the next two hours, while watching Godard’s “Contempt”, we had our own skirmishes over armrests and she was yet to discover that my laugh is irritating.
Like the poster outside the theatre foretold, we both too had the chemistry going.
And why not? She was both urbane and passionate. Something, that I have seen only in a woman called Pauline Kael.
In no time we were sharing the same bed and as she removed that beige top of hers, I got to see something that was a full-blooded assault on my solar plexus -- unshaved armpits. Now, I am someone who was lucky enough to be privy to the secrets of Carmella Bing, knew every fantasy of Jenna Jameson and had the bird’s eye view of the bordello of Stacy Valentine.
None of these Cajun goddesses had a strand of hair on their errogenous parts and here is this woman, who is, of all the things in the world, hirsute.
At that moment I couldn’t bring myself to burrow my face and get lost forever in those thick bushes. Before you say “eeks it’s so gross”, you have to understand that real-life sex is hairy and messy. Pornography is the end of imagination.
Anyway, as I was naive at that moment I refrained from consummating our relationship and that baffled look of hers still haunts me. Anyway, another day another screw.
m bngexpresso@epmltd.com