Upper West Side
I met Irma on a subway, she was straphanging, I offered her my seat, she asked where I grew up, I said I had never, and it started.
After a few phone get-to-knows she rings up, would I go to a movie premiere tonight? You bet. The premiere is in a movie theater on the Upper West Side. There’s something about the crowd out front when I get there, but I’m still a newbie here, I don’t read it.
The flick turns out to be a dud, stiff dialogs, strained acting, in a word cheap indie. After a few weeks only one scene sticks on. Two guys in socks rush into a bedroom, one nose-dives onto the bed, the other one leapfrogs atop him. The one on top slithers his tongue into the bottom one’s ear, while with his toes peeling off his, then the other guy’s socks. Then he slinks those toes up the other guy’s cheeks. Yack.
Normally, we are repulsed by other people’s bodies, and when you’re attracted to a woman, in the case of a man, the repulsion is overruled by desire. Also it subsides in families, where you have a strong bond between the parents, the parents and the kids, between the siblings. Between some cousins, probably because of greater genetic proximity. But even between the best friends, although the soul-brotherhood runs stronger than in a family, when the bodies come too close, you feel discomfort. Sweat, something worse. And here, in the movie realm, where we typically identify with the characters, these characters are two human studs sticking the wetties into each other’s cracks while cuddling with hairy thighs. If one isn’t a homosexual, surely such mixing of body fluids would repulse him, even on the screen. Like it or not, such will be the reaction.
I could count the bumps in the dilapidated movie house chair with my back, so much was I leaning away from the screen, not wanting to be splattered by saliva, or something worse, even in imagination. And I felt good about it, a signal was reaching me from deep within, from millions of evolutionary years, approving of such a response.
Most of the audience, though, were not only sitting straight, but leaning forth, on occasion. This stuff was actually pulling them in. They must be homosexuals, and the lesbians, too, who also have a dog in this fight, I concluded after not a very strained mind effort.
That’s what I said to Irma after the screening, when we stopped at a bar for a drink, that it was a cinema for the homosexual men and the lesbians.
“I-am-not-a-lesbian,” Irma coldly returned.
And she became upset. She was Jewish.
