The Porn Critic
Kromer couldn’t operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a pinned cylinder operates a player piano. What he knew came mostly from books — Anaïs Nin, William S. Burroughs, The Hite Report, stuff gleaned as a teenager from his parents’ shelves. Yet in his current circle of Manhattan friends, who were mostly graduate students and legal proofreaders, Kromer played the role of satyr. The more he protested that it was only a single heroin-laced cigarette that had happened to be placed in his hand, or that his so-called threesome had consisted of scarcely more than heavy petting and a brush with sleep apnea, the more they looked to Kromer as their saint of degeneracy.
Kromer’s reputation had its origin in the parties he was dragged to by a former schoolmate: a raven-haired, baggy-eyed heiress named Greta. Though these parties were invariably disappointing, Greta invariably closed them down. When a host was reduced to switching off lights and hinting that the sofa wasn’t available, Greta took Kromer on her finishing rounds, often in the rain. Kromer worked nights, so the hours didn’t bother him, and he had nothing else to do. Greta’s legacy, a large trust fund she wasn’t permitted to touch until her thirtieth birthday, drove her mad with the determination to die squalorously before she became wealthy. “Hell, I’ve been in three kinds of threesome,” she once told Kromer, her lips tremulous and her eyes fixed on some dreamy distance, in a way that made her look as if she were on the brink of tears or insane laughter, but in fact indicated that she hadn’t slept for two or three days. “With two boys, with two girls, and with a couple. The only kind I can’t ever be in is the kind I’d really like — three men.”
Greta was, in her desultory way, the real thing. The difficulty was an uncooperative world, slouching through a new propriety under Clinton. Everyone else Greta knew had been molesting their trust funds since prep school. That was the problem — they were responsible to their money, while Greta waged war on hers. Her only privilege was the use of her father’s “man,” a do-anything emissary and delivery person, who always picked up the phone and, astonishingly, would deliver Corner Bistro hamburgers fresh and hot to any downtown dive bar, usually one occupied primarily by pre-op transsexuals, where Greta and Kromer might be hanging out. Greta sometimes needed to borrow the fifty cents to make the call. Kromer, once he’d learned the trick, urged Greta to use this service often, as it would generally put an evening out of its misery, bringing on the sleep Greta badly needed but resisted. Kromer assumed this deliveryman or fixer was really a butler, but the one time he referred to him as Jeeves, Greta seemed not to get it.
From Greta’s many aspiring transsexual acquaintances Kromer remained terrified of accepting even a blow job. None of them could have guessed what aura they’d transferred to Kromer. The process was mysterious. A book nerd, a clerk, Kromer sat failing even to drink very much among young blacks in stuffed brassieres who the following day would be late for beauty school or, in some cases, Intro Soc or Psych at Queens College. Their special language—“shemale,” “pre-op”—made them a nerd species, too, Kromer understood. Yet, the next day, attending afternoon breakfasts with his wondering cohort of PhD candidates and proofreaders, Kromer played the part of Rasputin or Gurdjieff, expected to launch foul seductions or even abductions. Perhaps this was a matter of sheer phrenology — the suggestion of something sallow and ominous in Kromer’s jawline and eye sockets.
Renee and Luna, in History at the Graduate Center — Kromer’s names for them were Beautiful Renee and Invisible Luna — practiced the buddy system, never letting themselves be caught alone with him. Kromer learned this fact from their bolder colleague Sarah, who was willing to meet Kromer unaccompanied in Union Square, at least by daylight. The afternoon was bright, pigeons combing mud baked by winter, a scarf keeping Sarah’s mouth hidden. Kromer had been speculating that Sarah might want him herself, when she mentioned Renee and Luna’s policy.
“They shouldn’t be afraid of me.”
“They’re not afraid. They’re dizzy and repulsed. They want to be able to compare notes.”
Notes? Kromer was a hinge between worlds, a glimpser. All he had to offer them was his own notes, not the world itself. This situation he couldn’t make understood.
Nor could Kromer confess that it was Renee, all-but-dissertation on contemporaneous Western representations of the Boxer Rebellion, whom he loved. Renee Liu, who wore turtlenecks and resembled a whippet, her nose a beacon of melancholy, who furrowed her brow and laughed in suspicion of anything Kromer said that was halfway sincere, whose older sister had been at college with Kromer and Greta, and whose tiny Chinese parents Kromer had once therefore seen picking up Renee’s sister and her belongings at her dorm.
Kromer had no idea whether Renee knew this, or whether her sister had told her terrible stories about Kromer’s college years. But he couldn’t interrogate Sarah on the subject, for fear that she might be injured by being overlooked in favor of Renee. What Kromer wanted to injure was the image of himself as debauchery’s emissary. He said nothing. They fled the frozen park for a coffee shop, where Kromer suggested hot chocolate, adding, he hoped, a brushstroke of harmlessness.
*
Was it Greta and her pre-ops, or the depth of Kromer’s eye sockets? Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preempting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.
Sex Machines’ interior and stock had been painstakingly derived from that of a famous San Francisco shop, founded by a sex-positive lesbian collective. In lieu of such a collective, the owner had installed Kromer, transferred from the video-rental outlet, as both manager and night man. Night hours were what counted in this instance. A wizard salesman, Kromer switched on and demonstrated the range of speeds on any number of devices with a shame-dissolving forthrightness. At those moments, he thought of himself as a Conceptual Lesbian, a term he’d invented and never spoken aloud, nor advanced into any coherent definition. Kromer was fairly certain he’d never experienced an erection within the bounds of the shop.
Four things. Pre-ops, eye sockets, Sex Machines, and the state of Kromer’s apartment. Few had been inside, but word evidently got around. Kromer’s boss, whose video store featured “staff picks” shelves with extensive written remarks, had insisted that Sex Machines produce their own version of the San Francisco collective’s newsletter, a hallmark of that store’s unfurtive friendliness. In the newsletter, pornographic movies were extensively categorized according to predilections and interests, and rated on several indices: number of key scenes, story or its desirable absence, diversity of performer types, et cetera. It seemed that this was the way to sell porn to bored marrieds, a market Kromer’s employer characterized as “Moby Dick.”
Kromer, outed once in conversation as a novice writer, was deputized as the editor of the Sex Machines newsletter, as well as its sole contributor and reviewer of new materials. His apartment was a maze of stacked porn. The volume was staggering. The disarranged piles melded into a wallpaper of ludicrous fonts and slashes of pink, brown, and yellow flesh; though the job was chiefly a matter of inventorying characteristics, tabulating spurts and lashings, Kromer couldn’t get through the tapes fast enough. As invisible to him as familiar bookshelves would be to another, the accumulation tended to make a powerful impression on visitors. This Kromer ought to keep in mind, but hadn’t.