"ARI INVITES Cam behind the counter. He explains that he is going to make a stencil and transfer it onto her skin. She nods, watching him closely. She makes him nervous. Pretty girls always make him nervous. He'd rather tattoo ugly people only; less pressure. Also, lately his work has been so-so. He's the only one who notices. Customers always seem thrilled, but he knows the difference between a decent tattoo and a great one. When he started, when he was sixteen, every piece he did had life to it, an energy under the skin. Lately the tattoos are just there.
An excerpt from "Blue Star," by Sera Gamble, from The Best American Erotica 2007
Cam leans against the wall by the stencil machine. "How old are you?" She asks.
"Thirty-three," he says.
"That's about what I was gonna guess."
Ari is twenty-one. People have always guessed him older. He got his apprenticeship here when he was a few days shy of fourteen, on a fake ID that made him twenty. No one's ever called him on it. Either they all buy it or they don't care. He leads Cam to the chair and asks her to untie her bikini top. "What about you," he asks.
She tugs the string and catches the cups of the bikini in her hands, holding them over her breasts. The strap has left a ghost of untanned skin. "I'm twenty-five," Cam says. This close to her, he can see that her shoulders are freckled. A fine white down covers the back of her neck where her home-cut hair ends. A few tiny braids tangled in the hair. Boredom braids.
She pulls the bikini off, then leans forward into the chair, topless. There's a scent under the salt-water dried onto her skin, a hint of sunscreen long washed off, clean sweat, something green like tea.
Ari explains he must shave her before he transfers the stencil.
"I'm hairy?" she asks.
"No," he says quickly. "Just, any hair gets in the way of the ink." He wets a cloth and eases it down her back, then smoothes on shaving cream.
"Why a diamond?" He asks her as he runs the disposable razor between her shoulders.
"It's instinctual," she says, after a moment. "It seems like the right thing to get. I've been doodling diamonds since I was a kid, then filling up all the empty space in the middle."
Ari dries her skin and centers the stencil. She checks the placement in the mirror, nods okay. "This your first?" he asks as he lays out his inks: black, titanium white, three shades of blue, silver and a golden yellow for the glint of the jewel. She nods.
When Ari tattoos, the skin in front of him becomes his whole world. Skin only looks smooth from a distance. Up close it's porous, shifty, alive; tricky terrain. Some people bleed more than others. Many jerk back from the first sting. Some inch away from the pain. Some lean into it.
He cups his hand over her stenciled skin. She's warm. Her back is almost as muscular as a man's. A surfer's back. She pulls the bikini off over her head, then leans forward into the chair, now topless. Ari realizes he hasn't seen breasts in months, and the last were those of a fifty-year old woman who was getting a turtle tattooed between them. Cam's breasts are full, pressed into the vinyl of the chair, the outer roundness of them just visible.
Ari realizes he hasn't even jacked off in days. He feels that dead feeling, the one that’s been following him around, the one that comes up behind him sometimes and throws a black sack over his head. His dick is getting hard now, which only makes it worse. Body waking up, reminding him of his life: coffee-ink-sandwich-TV-bed, his apartment up the block with its big rooms and practically no furniture.
Ari takes his hand away and snaps on latex gloves, loads ink for the outline. "Ready?" She presses her face into the back of the chair, hugs it with both arms. Ready. He adjusts himself in his pants. Holding the tattoo gun instantly calms him. "First line's gonna hurt," he warns.
She sits still, waiting. He turns on his gun and presses it lightly to the point of the diamond, then moves his hand away, anticipating her flinch. But she doesn't move. She exhales softly. He stretches the skin with his right hand, inks with the left. "Not a flincher, huh," he says.
"I have a high tolerance for pain," she murmurs.
He wipes the blood away with a tissue. "But you're a bleeder," he tells her.
"Huh. Must be the aspirin."
"Did you take some today?"
"I take it all the time," she says, just loud enough to be heard over the buzz of the needle. "I have a headache every fucking day. I thought I had a tumor, but I don't."
"Does it work?"
"Does what work?"
"The aspirin," he says, whipping a quick upward line, then catching the blooming blood in a tissue. She bleeds as much as anyone he's tattooed. The tips of his gloves are red and sticky already. Her odor intensifies, sea and earth mingling with the antiseptic, the latex of his gloves, the ink and blood.
"Yeah, just taking it feels good. I chew them. I like the taste, now. Oh, that part hurts," she says when he runs over her spine. Then, "But not like a bad hurt."
"People get addicted." He thinks about how stupid he sounds, spouting the great cliché of tattooing.
"I'm not surprised," she replies. "I shoulda taken more aspirin, maybe?"
"It wouldn't help. You'd just bleed even more."
"I have this monster bottle. My dad bought like twenty of them. His doctor told him to take one every day after he had a heart attack. It's supposed to prevent another one."
"Did it?"
"No," she says. "Last year." She holds her voice as steady as her body, but last year is not long ago. Ari knows. When someone is dead, last year is yesterday.
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I like taking his aspirin, you know?" And then they don't say anything else....
Read the rest of the story in BAE 2007!
Interview with Sera Gamble :
SB: I've been reading you and your friend Simon Glickman's new web site, Very Hot Jews. I was startled when you first sent me the link. VERY HOT JEWS? So disrespectful! I had a shocked mother's reaction. Why do you think a word picture like that incites both humor, and the sense that you're going to get a scolding?
SG: It almost sounds like a porn site, doesn’t it? We felt the title captured something about the blog’s tone: fun, self-deprecating, irreverent. We were out to push those buttons you’re talking about.
My generation learned that our approach to our own Jewishness must have gravity. Because we were recently the target of the best-organized genocide in history. For people like my parents and grandparents, who actually survived the Holocaust, any brash and colorful declaration of Jewishness caused an involuntary shot of fear. My grandfather was very upset that my parents “risked” giving my brother and me Jewish names. The underlying message I inherited was that if we Jews were too loud, we might bring the next avalanche down upon ourselves.
But while I understand why they believed that message, I can’t subscribe to it. It perpetuates the notion that there’s something wrong with being Jewish. It just feels like… more punishment. And if my family went to the considerable trouble of surviving the Holocaust, the least I can do is broadcast my own particular flavor of Jewishness for the world to see.
Even sticking “Jew” together with “Very Hot” has inspired a more heated response than we anticipated. I recently talked to my mother about this. She grew up in post-WWII Poland, often the only dark-haired, Semitic girl in a sea of blondeness. It was made clear to her that it is not possible to be both Jewish and pretty.
I can’t tell you how painful that is to me, to think of her growing up that way. It makes me so angry.
Though I was born here, where concepts of beauty are more diverse, I think I internalized that lie about Jewish women not being hot. Some part of me believed I could be hot despite being Jewish, but not because of it or including it.
I was all ready to write my issue off as specific to immigrant families from anti-Semitic countries... but then I just sent around a questionnaire, for a feature we’re going to run called “Profiles In Hotness.”
I sent one to a gorgeous, American-from-way-back friend. She called to say it was the first time in her life she’d had her hotness connected with her Jewishness. She got emotional, because she realized she’d been separating this essential ingredient of herself from the whole. She was like, “I’m a hot Jew! It’s revolutionary!”
SB: Lately, I guess it's because of things like HEEB magazine, and Sarah Silverman's talked-about projects, there's been a lot of visibility for a biting kind of humor about jewish sexuality and femininity. It's different from Joan Rivers... although it's interesting to think about that lineage.
SG: Joan Rivers did a lot of making fun of herself and her Jewish neurosis. To contrast, I think Sarah Silverman is making fun of other people for buying the story that Jewish girls are frigid JAPS or, on the other end of the spectrum, nymphos. To be in on the joke, you have to agree with her that the stereotype is ridiculous.
Sarah Silverman posed for the cover of HEEB, wrapped in the mythical sheet-with-a-hole-in-it (the kind that Hassidic Jews of yore supposedly had marital sex through in order to maintain modesty). Simultaneously sending up at least three stereotypes about being Jewish, female, and sexy: awesome. To answer your question, yeah— I like.
But, you know, I’m not really a comedian. I think I’d probably suck at standup. I see myself as part of a slightly different lineage, of women writers. I’ve taken cues from writers like Jill Soloway, who in her essays talks a lot about sex and femininity and being Jewish. (She’s helped me quite a bit in my career, and when I thanked her, she told me she was just doing her part to ensure the continued defeat of the Nazis.)
The difference is that while writers like Jill are funny, their primary goal is tell personal stories and ask hard questions. There’s a vulnerability there. I think we owe something to the Jewish comediennes who came before us, but also to the previous generation of feminists who wrote honestly about sexuality and womanhood.
SB:
Many people have told me Blue Star is their "favorite" in BAE, and have said, a little shyly, that it's so romantic, so sad in that way you want to hold onto. What do you think it is, when eroticism and loneliness make such good literary companions?
SG: Maybe eroticism and loneliness make such good buddies because they share the same root: longing.
My own favorite erotic moments in books and movies often spring up out of loneliness. The moments tend to be quite small. They’re very… un-decadent—born less from desire and more from need. No orgiastic feasts. More like the intensity of a single orange when you’re starving.
“Blue Star,” by the way, is one of the most personal things I’ve ever written. The situation and characters are made up, but when I look at it now I can see that it’s infused with the grief I feel over the death of my father. One of the realizations I’ve come to is that without him, I will feel a deep loneliness for the rest of my life. The hole is unfillable.
But something else has happened to me, too. I’m now able to recognize that kind of hole in other people. We can’t do anything, really, about each other’s pain, but there are occasional beautiful moments where we see each other. I think that’s something I tried to capture, in the way Ari sees Cam. It’s funny—that feeling is not especially romantic, but it evolved into something romantic in the story.
SB: Do you consider yourself a romantic writer? Why do you think there's such a gap between genre romance and literary romance?
SG: I consider myself a romantic writer only in the sense we just talked about— I write a lot about lonely people trying to connect. The moments when they finally do are sometimes romantic.
Now, about analyzing the gap between genre and literary romance… I should start by saying I have nothing against genre romance. I grew up reading bodice rippers. I still occasionally read them—that’s right, I said it. Nothing like a paperback emblazoned with the image of Fabio naked on a horse to cleanse the palate after, say, The Year of Magical Thinking.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by gap. There’s often a gap in quality, because the market for genre romance is so voracious that publishers race to put out dozens of titles a month.
But if you mean a gap in content… that, it seems to me, springs from a substantial difference in intent. Genre romance runs on an engine of emotional justice. That’s what the readers are after; that’s what scratches the itch. It has a strict set of rules about structure and character that lends itself to this idealization of romantic love as the force that will make everything work by the last page.
And the characters, especially the men, tend to be attractively flawed in unrealistic ways: they’re promiscuous in a way that is curable by true love, and they’re emotionally damaged by their childhoods in a way that is fixable by the heroine.
Those stories often boil down to the hero and heroine saving each other. That’s where they lose me. I don’t much believe in people saving each other with their passionate love.
On the other hand, there’s room for a lot more human messiness in literary romance. The best romances in literature are often the most deeply fucked up. That I can get into. Passion that is clumsy and painful, at moments funny, often riddled with mistakes and regret. Madame Bovary and Romeo and Juliet and Lolita and Written On The Body. I’m not sure I can boil the driving force down to one thing, but “the impossibility of making love stay” seems like a factor in a lot of literary romance. Which, said another way… is emotional injustice.
SB: Okay, you've talked about working in strip clubs and also a bit about working in Hollywood TV-Land. Your five=point program on what they share, or how they differ?
SG: "How Hollywood TV-Land Pitching is Like Selling Table Dances"
1. Passion sells the project.
2. It helps if they’re drunk and you’re sober.
3. No perfume will adequately disguise the smell of desperation.
4. Five minutes later, no one can remember what anyone’s name was.
5. It’s important to wear the right shoes.
SB: Do you have any tattoos?
SG: I have one, a tribal design on my back. I got it when I was 18 or 19; as soon as my friends and I hit legal age, we went apeshit with the tattoos and piercings. Luckily, the design is meaningful to me and the artist did a good job. Considering the rush I was in, it could be a lot worse.
I’m still obsessed with tattoos. I read blogs like Body Modification E-zine, and I’m always asking strangers about their tattoos. I’m fascinated by how people decide on the image they’ll wear for the rest of their lives.
There’s a huge range in the decision process— some people do a lot of research, some feel guided by intuition, and some just walk into a tattoo parlor because they want a souvenir of their vacation. It’s a great window into personality type.
Lately, I find myself envying people I know who collect tattoos with enthusiasm, especially the ones who don’t dwell too much before jumping in. They trust themselves. They don’t tie themselves in knots worrying about regret. I always imagined I’d get tattooed again, but for the last couple of years I’ve over-thought everything so thoroughly that I talked myself out of every idea. I suppose I’ve been in a self-serious phase. I hope I grow out of it.
SB: What do your parents think of your erotic work, or your sex work? If you were raising your very own bundle of joy, what is one thing you'd do that would carry on a tradition your family raised you with, something they did you esteem? And then the opposite— what is something in your progeny you'd like to change forever, and break the mold?
SG: If by my erotic work you mean my writing, my parents have always been supportive. My dad just wanted to see me work at my writing; I never saw him balk at subject matter. Nowadays, my mom wants to read everything I write— I still get a little embarrassed to have her read some of the darker or more sexual stuff, but she’s ready to get out her pom-poms for all of it.
As for actual sex work— the time I spent as a stripper— I can’t say they were happy about it, but they never challenged me. I was so political and defiant about it— didn’t exactly invite their opinions.
Hmmm, my own bundle of joy…
I should preface this by saying that I’m aware that the reality of raising a kid tends to crush one’s lofty plans like a giant Godzilla foot. That said, my family raised me with a keen understanding that we live in a big world. That America is just one part of it. And that my life would be richer and deeper if I expanded my own world view. So, big-time education and also traveling and taking an interest in people who seemed unlike me were encouraged. Of the things I carry with me, this seems one of the most valuable. It’s worth passing down.
As for the buck that’s stopping with me— I think this interview makes it pretty clear that I’m going to do everything in my power not to let my own fear guide my child-raising. Beyond that, I don’t have much of an agenda. I hope to be able to roll with whatever the person needs and whatever they bring to the table.
When I hang out with my goddaughter— she’s seven now— I am amazed by her. She is unique and shockingly substantial. Her perspective is constantly evolving. I don’t want to shape her; I just want to help facilitate her miraculous growth. When I imagine having my own child, I think of it as a chance to help a brand new human being discover themselves.
What can I say, I’m a people-watcher. Much as having a kid sounds terrifying and also like the most epic pain in the ass ever, getting to watch someone starting at Day One sounds worth the price of admission.
Is The Best American Erotica over?
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