PINK STEAM

suspect thoughts press

Contents

Barbie's Dream House...........................17
You Edju.......................................20
Complicity.....................................24
Can You Hear Me Major Tom?.....................37
The Debbies I Have Known.......................42
White Space....................................70
Spew Forth.....................................72
The Mayonnaise Jar.............................83
Reptilicus.....................................92
Dear Diary Today...............................105
Kong...........................................111
Hallucinations.................................117
Delinquent.....................................134
The Flowers of Mina Harker.....................142
Sex/Body/Writing...............................144
Tell Somebody Something........................148
Doing Bernadette...............................152
Reading Tour...................................156
In Dutch.......................................167
Notes From the Field...........................173
LA-Kevin.......................................179
Not Clinical, But Probable.....................184

Chapter One

In the tight framing of David Levinthal's close-ups there is no human-or doll-body to establish a sense of scale. The Dream House loses its status as miniature, and we the viewers lose our identity as the big ones. We are thrust inside the Dream House. The sofa will seat two of us. From our Barbie's eye view, the bed seems kind of short-our permanently high-heeled feet would hang off the end. This bed, taut as an Army cot, and oddly sized, midway between a twin and a double, announces our sexual ambivalence. I imagine walking through Barbie's living room feeling off-kilter as I did in the '70s when I took acid and ambled through my own apartment looking at all the toys-kaleidoscope, hookah, waterbed, stereo, Silly Putty, wire whisk-thinking how thoughtful, how kind of this Dodie person to acquire these marvelous things for my pleasure. The objects felt slightly smaller than usual or I was slightly larger, an oaf moving through someone's stage set. The cheap cardboard walls are those of postwar prefab housing. My father was a union carpenter, and the two things he railed against the most were scabs and prefab houses. I remember him ramming his fist against our thick plaster walls and declaring that if this were a prefab wall his fist would have gone right through it! Now that I'm in them, Barbie's dreams seem rather modest, flimsy.

This Dream House, Barbie's premiere Dream House, was manufactured in 1962, and the sharp corners of its streamlined furniture mirror the creamy angularity of Barbie's body. Barbie's only been around for three years. Her arms and legs are not yet bendable, her lips are perched in a sophisticated, decadent pout. (She will not smile until 1976). Her favorite outfit is "Gay Parisienne": in white cats'-eye sunglasses and red chiffon scarf Barbie leans against a shadow-crazed wall, mysterious and dangerous as a spy in a Stanley Donen film, her gigantic red and white striped breasts pointing straight to Russia. 1962-the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedys, Khrushchev, freedom riders, student sit-ins, Timothy Leary discovers LSD, hootenannies, the U.S. Army occupies Saigon, American astronauts enter outer space, Marilyn Monroe and Hermann Hesse die, On the Road is sanitized on TV's Route 66, Findhorn and Esalen are founded. None of this infiltrates the Dream House, except obliquely, like voices whispering in a novel by Robbe-Grillet. On the console TV, the same picture day after day, always the cartoon woman with the phallic shaped object floating beside her head.

Abandoning the neutral color schemes mandated by bourgeois decorators, the Dream House's insistence on gold, magenta, and cobalt hints at a disquieting bohemia. Framed abstract art dots the living room wall. In the more naturalistic painting beside the bed, an exotic mosque-like turret looms above the tricycle in the foreground. Nat King Cole's jazzy Love Is the Thing is tossed across the coffee table. A hutch holds twenty-five hardcover volumes. I can't read the titles, but I imagine they're classy with an edge: Franny & Zooey, Ship of Fools, Sex and the Single Girl, Fail Safe, Youngblood Hawke. Leatherbound Great Books editions-no trashy pocketbook The Carpetbaggers. This is a Dream House in which martinis are consumed-in martini glasses.

Details accrue to suggest a life. But whose? Barbie's name is on the box, so it must be hers. But what kind of life does Barbie lead? Sophisticated, suburban, vapid? Does Barbie ever read those provocative books above her bed? And what about those college banners? Their false naïveté seems kinky amidst all this sophistication. The longer you stare at it the tenser the Dream House makes you feel. Props keep shifting just beyond the periphery of your vision. From photo to photo the pancake pillows move about the bed. In one scene two of them have leapt to the sofa. At first Ken's portrait is prominently displayed on the console stereo. But when we blink our eyes, he's been exiled to the empty closet. Nat King Cole moves from coffee table to the console, which is now open, revealing a big hole with a turntable at the bottom. The cartoon woman, as always, seems satisfied; as always the phallic object floats to her right. The blue ottoman from the bedroom has joined her. Ken has evaporated from view. Who rearranged these accessories? Barbie seems remarkably absent. (Where are her clothes?) Is some voyeuristic giant looming just offstage with a hand as big as King Kong's? Or is the Dream House a magnet for poltergeist activity? Barbie's adolescent sexual secrets burst through cardboard dimensionality and things fly about. Barbie, the all American girl, is based, it is said, on a German pornographic doll, Bild Lilli. Barbie and Ken are really brother and sister, named after the children of their creators, Ruth and Elliot Handler. Incest, pornography, Euro-decadence ... what next? I never owned a Barbie, but I touched one, pulled down the top of her swimsuit and rubbed her rock hard breasts with my thumb. The yellow puddle beside the bed is a trapdoor-it opens, whooshes me to The Basement.

In the center of the back wall, resting on a built-in vanity, a tinfoil mirror reflects and distorts, reflects and distorts. This mirror is the only thing in the house that doesn't look biodegradable, a shiny bit of stuff I imagine a bird weaving into her nest, its silver surface reflecting the room back on itself. I remember my wobbly reflection in the rest room of a mental hospital. It's 1962, in fact-I'm eleven years old, visiting my uncle. My mother tells me the mirrors are metal so the patients can't hurt themselves. Next to the rest room is a beauty parlor, and this is very confusing to me. I can't imagine being crazy and getting my hair done, sitting in one of those barber chairs and looking in the mirrors at my warped lopsided perm. Once you're inside the Dream House, the ground keeps shifting and shifting ... In the distance we hear the clicking of Barbie's high heels-she's stalking us in her black and white striped swimsuit-so mysterious, so foreign-a zebra with thick kohl-lined eyes.

Chapter Two

Each morning when I open my eyes the first thing I see is Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton's Judy Garland pinned to the side of my armoire. A long pale yellow rectangle, pale brown pine grain lapping its sides, wavy as a dream dissolve. Judy stands in the middle in her famous hobo outfit, aging, bloated, taking a break. She's the size of a well-fed house cat. Her left hand rests on her hip, her right hand holds a cane and a cigarette. Her right leg crosses her left at the knee, the toe of her combat boot touching the "ground." Another, slightly higher positioning of Judy's bent leg has been whited out. Did Caitlin change her mind-or is this some past movement that Judy herself can never fully eradicate? Judy is a woman with an intricate shadow, a gold puddle crisscrossed with bronze lines that form diamonds, silver circles at the intersections, black dot in the center of each circle. Once again verisimilitude goes down the tubes. Judy looks very tired. Her head hangs to the right, her full lips are relaxed, parted, her heavy lidded eyes are cast downward. She's thinking to herself, wondering what "outsider art" really means. Is it merely talent that unwinds "outside" the art establishment-or does one have to be a weirdo? Judy's thoughts turn to the Henry Darger show. "Outsider Art," it said in bold black letters, right there on the wall of the old Chicago public library. She's glad she saw Darger's illustrations of hermaphroditic war-torn children in his hometown, midweek, in the loneliness, the eeriness of an empty hall. Whenever she turned her back to them, the children snuck away from the cataloged voyeurism of the gallery, reverted to the unseen, cluttered limbo of a janitor's bedroom. Judy exhales a big puff of smoke, her chest deflates for a moment then floats back up. Darger's watercolors remind her of Raymond Pettibon's work, more of a spiritual kinship than a specificity-the lack of formal training, the cultural infusions, startling convergences, the whole image/text thing, the hyperintelligent primitivism, obsessiveness, the narrative impulse, the volume. Fame hasn't brought Raymond much happiness. She's often thought he'd feel more comfortable with Darger's life, isolated, unknown, amassing these thousands of images in his tattered Hermosa Beach home. That's what he expected for himself, she's sure of that.

Jeweled winged creatures come to rescue Darger's children. If Darger's children are life, the winged beings are larger than life, pale humanoid butterflies as tall as the paper they're rendered on, languorously poised to battle the weather, their multicolored wings beacons against impending storm clouds. Judy raises a finger to trace their outlines. She can see herself reflected in the protective glass, can feel the children suffocating beneath it. A museum guard appears beside her, says, "How did you get in here with that coffee? You'll have to take it outside." Outside of what she wonders.

In the living room at Hermosa Beach a cat sat on a table, I bent down to pet it, "Hi kitty!" It bit my arm, not a little love bite, but viciously. Fortunately I was wearing a jacket. When I fled to the kitchen Raymond gave this embarrassed not-again sigh. "It bit you? Damn." The cat, he explained, used to belong to a Brazilian movie star. His brother's girlfriend rescued it from veterinary death row, where it was being used as a blood donor for better-socialized pets. The cat clawed the star's face so badly she had to have plastic surgery. I was spending the weekend with Raymond and his mother in their two-story stucco house. Also staying there were Raymond's brother and his girlfriend and some other guy. I never figured out who the other guy was, but he was in trouble, I got that much. I gathered that people were always coming and going. I slept in Raymond's studio, in a cot with racks of his drawings so low above me I could barely sit up. I enjoyed being stacked beneath all that art, imagined the papers flapping and fluttering, navigating my dreams. Raymond showered me with money, so much money I finally barked, "Raymond, stop trying to buy love!" But the money meant so little to him, he had pockets full of it, I did take some. I like money. We talked endlessly over martinis, brunches, dinners, red wine. "Gratuitous sex and violence," I remember him saying, "I have no problem with that." Raymond's mother told me grisly stories of the Russian invasion of Estonia, how she fled in a German ship as the Russians opened fire. She's still beautiful, looks twenty years younger than her eighty-some years, eats health foods and jogs every morning. And such a keen mind. She told me about Raymond's ancestors, his childhood, his IQ score so high the school insisted on a second testing. I felt comfortable there with Raymond and his mother, not like a guest-more like I was absorbed. Their limitless generosity was beautiful, but rather startling. Raymond's mother also told me his faults, all of them, as if she were trying to win me over, to have me all to herself. Or maybe she was trying to scare me away. I don't know. I felt like if I wanted to-and part of me did want to-I could stay there forever, eventually people might complain, might say I was bad news, dangerous, but as with the psychopathic cat nobody would bother to oust me. The cat was like Fate. Who has the momentum ...

I was raised in Hammond, a working class suburb of Chicago. In the industrial Midwest of my youth, strong lines were drawn between inside/outside, normal/abnormal, natural/freak-and those lines were brutally enforced. In high school I was a lesbian, i.e., on the wrong side of all those slashes. I was terrified of anybody finding out-especially because of Edju Tucker. Edju went to a high school on the other side of town. I never saw him. I didn't need to. Edju was a legend. Carloads of teenagers would drive past Edju's house honking their horns and yelling, "Hey Edju!" On a good night, Edju would dart onto the front lawn and bare his ass. Edju was said to suck cock, and all the kids would jeer at one another, "You Edju," meaning, "You queer." Edju was a punching bag, a blob of flypaper snagging jock fist after jock fist, but I never knew if he actually existed, as more than a (sub)urban legend, an object lesson of what would happen if "they" found out you were queer-until 1997, when I flew home for my father's funeral where, for the first time, my brother and I really talked. In 10th grade, I learned, Joey fell in with a bad crowd-drug dealers and car thieves. Our parents "did some job of raising kids," he joked. "I'm a convicted felon, and you're weird." Joey was particularly close to one dealer named Cindy, for whom he used to hold money, thousands of dollars at a time. Cindy introduced Joey to Edju Tucker. I felt this Big Chill frisson at the mention of Edju's name. "Oh yeah?" I said casually. "What's he been up to?" Edju, Joey told me, is now a 300 pound drag queen who works with caustic chemicals at the sanitation department, and the fumes have burnt out his nostrils. Joey refers to Edju as "it." "So now it can't smell anything." Edju still likes to suck cock, won't let anybody touch his body. Cindy, Edju's only friend, died a few years ago. These days not even the high school kids bother with him. Edju pangs my heart. I wish I could be his John Waters and crown him the new Divine. I imagine treasures inside his apartment, wherever it is, hidden among his huge gowns and chipped coffee cups. I hope they're there. A magical realm of winged children without noses, of winged cocks dying to be sucked.

Judy's cigarette burns down, singes her fingers. She doesn't bother to move.

Chapter Three

In Medias Res

After midnight in Lizzie's Sonoma county studio apartment, a garage converted into a ski loft: beamed ceiling, redwood walls, and funnel-shaped fireplace. On the radio, a phone-in psychologist. Lizzie nervously sets down her lemon grass tea, a fluted cup with roses, and calls. "I have this problem, you see, I uh shoplift. Compulsively."

The radio psychologist tells Lizzie that stealing is a substitute for love.

Things Lizzie Has Stolen for Me

1. Two 100% cotton knit tops, multicolored nubby boat neck and smooth cream scooped with large buttons down the front. The tiny curtained cubicle, I have tried on four things, the ones I want disappear down Lizzie's tan pants. Then she switches the 4 item tag with a 2 item one that happens to be in her purse. Standing in the hall so the clerk is sure to hear, she yells, "Hurry up, I'll meet you in the car."

2. One facial mask, with Elastin, crushed almonds and thyme, a woman's naked shoulder on the label.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from PINK STEAM by Dodie Bellamy Copyright © 2004 by Dodie Bellamy. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

BACK TO TOP