Search Results for: Business

Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun

Henry Griffin / AP

Sean Howe | Longreads | May 2019 |  15 minutes (3,853 words)

In November 2018, after the Secret Service seized the security credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, the White House Press Secretary stated the reason for the revocation was that the administration would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Within hours, attorney Ted Boutrous responded on Twitter:
Read more…

After a Fashion

Vianney Le Caer / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 |  8 minutes (2,349 words)

Rufus: Models help people. They make them feel good about themselves.
Meekus: They also show them how to dress cool and wear their hair in interesting ways.
Zoolander: I guess so.

The schadenfreude was swift and it was sharp the moment the Met Gala announced this year’s theme: camp. “do you ever wake up in the middle of the night because you remembered the met ball is camp themed this year and so many celebrities are going to have to explain what they think camp is,” tweeted New Yorker fashion columnist Rachel Syme. The idea that the fashion industry, infamously out of touch, was not only bypassing urgent matters of the present to focus on the past, but that the past it chose is defined by its indefinability — Susan Sontag’s attempt, “Notes on Camp,” is a series of contradictions for a reason — was too delicious. We were all Divine, in drag, crouching next to that puli, waiting for that shit. And when Lady Gaga and Celine Dion showed up vamping their souls out, it was the perfect symbol of fashion’s near-constant missing of the mark even when it is the mark. Because camp, a lurid pink flourish on the margins of society, is at its core the opposite of what fashion has become: a sanitized institution that sets itself apart from the mess of our reality. “Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp,” wrote Sontag, “what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.”

The stars who seemed to intrinsically understand camp, from Danai Gurira to Natasha Lyonne, are familiar with the fringes of Hollywood. And it was a surprise to no one when Billy Porter — who made his name in Kinky Boots — arrived like the second coming of Tutankhamun, in head-to-toe gold, carried by a coterie of beefcakes. This is the man whose name few knew three months ago, whose style alone threw him to the top of the red carpet, above the old A-listers in the likes of Chanel and Valentino. Like Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness, he is fashion precisely because he poses outside of it. Established fashion these days is a place where tradition trumps trendiness, and the biggest couturiers seem to be moving backward rather than forward. Prada, Gucci, Burberry, and Dolce & Gabbana, among others, have lately made missteps so basic it has become clear that being clueless is not the exception but the rule. “Fashion is old-fashioned,” says Van Dyk Lewis, who has worked as a designer and teaches fashion at Cornell University. “The clothes might be cool, but actually the sentiment of fashion in our moment isn’t.” Read more…

High Expectations: LSD, T.C. Boyle’s Women, and Me

Illustration by Homestead

Christine Ro | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,208 words)

I’m sweaty, exhausted, and red-faced when I finally emerge from my final acid trip. My apartment is a mess of objects my friends and I have tried feeling, smelling, or otherwise experiencing: loose dry pasta, drinks of every kind, hairbrushes, blankets. My voice is hoarse from talking or shouting all night. I’ve had more emotional cycles in the past 12 hours than in the last several months combined.

What made me want to drop acid wasn’t a friend or a festival, but a book. Specifically, T.C. Boyle’s new novel Outside Looking In. The book has its problems, but one thing it gets right is the intensely social experience of LSD. Even taken alone, even as a tool for introspective reflection, it rejigs attitudes towards other people. This can be a gift, or it can be a weapon. And as a woman, I’m especially aware of the potential for the latter. Read more…

Editors Roundtable: Alma Matters, Raisin Hell, and Upstairs Cocaine (Podcast)

Raisins drying. (George Lepp / Getty Images)

On the May 3, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Fact-checker Ethan Chiel, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Head of Fact-checking Matt Giles, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The Cut, Vulture, The New York Times, Topic, and The Atavist.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


1:47 The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence
(Ezra Marcus and James D. Walsh, April 28, 2019, The Cut)

“…that is sometimes how life is. Stories are incomplete, crazy things happen to non-famous people in ways that are very difficult for us to get the full story on. Sometimes life delivers stories that are hard to tell to completion.”

New York magazine’s wild story about a man named Larry Ray, who moved in with his daughter Talia at Sarah Lawrence College, positioned himself as a mentor to her friends, and basically started a cult.

The team discusses the need for contextual disclosures of reporter-subject relationships, the pleasure of discussing magazine journalism with friends, and reporting as a finished product versus a tool for further intellectual property sales.

9:35 In Conversation: Anjelica Huston
(Andrew Goldman, May 1, 2019, Vulture)

“Sometimes I think that interviews can be sort of boring or sometimes celebrity profiles can be sort of boring but this one was great. At one point she’s asked what makes good cocaine.”

The Longreads team discusses Huston’s relationships with, and current takes on Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Jeffrey Tambor in light of the #MeToo movement and whether it’s difficult for women to be frank about the misbehaviour of men. They also muse about Huston’s relationships with Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson and her father, as well as her evocative description of the 70s. Finally, they touch on the behind-the-scenes craft of celebrity interviews and how they come together.

Huston’s two memoirs are A Story Lately Told and Watch Me: A Memoir.

16:26 The Raisin Situation (Jonah Engel Bromwich, April 27, 2019, The New York Times)

A look at Harry Overly, the CEO of Sun-Maid Raisins, and his attempts to grow the raisin industry, including getting millennials to eat raisins. The piece examines how the industry works and the relationships between growers in and around Fresno and the California Central Valley and raisin companies. Overly is the central character and hero of the story, perhaps at the expense of some other possible directions.

18:50 The Big Business of Spring Water (Katy Kelleher, April 2019, Topic)

The team discusses specialty water, theories of labour, value and property, and how things that are good enough for everybody, like public water, vary in their quality. They also discuss the raw water movement and reference Nellie Bowles’ New York Times piece, “Unfiltered Fervor: The Rush to get off the Water Grid.

27:33 The Heart Still Stands (Elizabeth Flock, April 2019, The Atavist)

“It’s a story about love, it’s a story about distrust, and about broken promises, which are very sort of historic, inherent to the relationship between Native Americans, indigenous people, and governments.”

On the third anniversary of Standing Rock, The Atavist shares the story of Red Fawn Fallis, an Oglala Lakota Sioux woman arrested while protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and charged with attempted murder for allegedly firing a handgun at officers who had tackled her. The gun belonged to her boyfriend at the time who turned out to be working as an FBI informant. Reporter Elizabeth Flock gives context to this relationship and the history of the FBI use of informants going back to the 1960s and 70s with the American Indian Movement.

* * *

Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

Take Two Stem Cell Injections and Don’t Call Me Until After I Cash Your $10,000 Cheque

Stem cell. Getty Images

Getting older? Feeling the aches and pains that come naturally as we age? If someone suggests that stem cells will ease your ills, ask to see some science, and maybe a valid medical license. Stem cell purveyors are popping up all over the United States in a new, “largely unregulated” industry — and they’re charging $5,000 to $10,000 for a single injection.

As Caroline Chen reports as part of a joint investigation by ProPublica and The New Yorker, “Unscientific methods, deceptive marketing, price gouging and disregard for patients’ well-being were rampant across the amniotic stem cell therapy industry.” The investigation “found disgraced doctors who were recast as salespeople, manufacturers that cloaked themselves in pseudoscience and had few scientists on staff, and clinics that offer to treat conditions like multiple sclerosis or kidney disease without specialized training.”

These clinics are multiplying in the United States. According to a tally by Leigh Turner, an associate professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, there were 12 such clinics advertising to consumers in 2009; in 2017, there were more than 700. Unproven cellular therapies are a $2 billion global business, according to a recent paper co-authored by Massimo Dominici, the lead investigator at the cellular therapy lab at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, in Italy.

They were there to see a presentation by Dr. David Greene, who was introduced as a “retired orthopedic surgeon.” Atlas Medical Center, a local clinic that specializes in pain treatment, hosted the event. Greene, a short, trim man with his hair slicked up, ignored the stage and microphone and stood close to his audience. After warming up the crowd with a joke about his inept golf skills, Greene launched into his sales pitch. A tiny vial no larger than the palm of his hand, he told the group, contains roughly 10 million live stem cells, harvested from the placenta, amniotic fluid, umbilical cord or amnion, the membrane that surrounds the fetus in the womb. Injected into a joint or spine, or delivered intravenously into the bloodstream, Greene told his listeners, those cells could ease whatever ailed them.

On a screen behind him, Greene displayed a densely printed slide with a “small list” of conditions his stem cell product could treat: arthritis, tendinitis, psoriasis, lupus, hair loss, facial wrinkles, scarring, erectile dysfunction, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, emphysema, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, ALS, neuropathy, pelvic pain, diabetes, dry eye, macular degeneration, kidney failure. And that was just a sample. “I need to add a couple more slides,” Greene said with a laugh.

Soni told Longo that three more injections were required for him to feel a significant difference, but, by early May, Longo had decided not to seek further treatment, saying that his left knee hadn’t improved any more. “I don’t think the regenerative properties were happening,” Longo said.

Earlier this year, Soni’s Web site displayed the names and faces of a team of clinicians, including a cardiologist, a cosmetologist, a neurologist, and a urologist. None of them were listed on New York State’s license look-up page, and their photos were traced back to stock photo websites.

When initially asked about these specialists, Soni said, “They are all seeing patients for me” and changed the subject. After ProPublica and The New Yorker expressed doubts about the clinicians’ existence to Soni, the names and photos vanished from the website.

Read the story

The Price of Plenty: How Beef Changed America

Longreads Pick
Source: The Guardian
Published: May 7, 2019
Length: 17 minutes (4,415 words)

Game of Crones

Illustration by Homestead

Laura Lippman | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,090 words)

[1]

My daughter was 10 days old the first time I was asked if I were her grandmother.

It was the second week of an unseasonably early Baltimore heat wave and I had managed to maneuver her stroller across my neighborhood’s bumpy, narrow sidewalks to my favorite coffee shop. Almost nine years later, I still remember the one spot on our street where the juxtaposition of a tree planter and a set of rowhouse steps made it physically impossible to push a stroller through at any angle. One either had to lift the stroller a foot in the air or bump it over the curb into the street, a solution I figured out only after much grunting and angling. By the time I arrived at the coffee shop, I was sweaty and unkempt.

A young man peered into the stroller, then glanced at my face: “Oh, are you her grandmother?” Only three days earlier, a woman had seen me boarding a plane with my newborn, eyed me approvingly and whispered: “You look amazing!” An unearned compliment — my daughter didn’t come out of my body and my body’s not that great, anyway — but I had been happy to take it. I’m not dumb. I knew the grandmother question would be asked again and again, and that compliments would be rare.

I tried out a simple, direct reply, the one I use to this day: “No, I’m her mother, but I am old enough to be her grandmother, so it’s understandable that you would ask.”

I thought my answer generous. But in the years since my daughter was born, I have discovered that people who ask rude questions feel terribly affronted if you say anything that implies they have just asked a rude question.

“But I’ve seen that baby with a young couple,” the man said. “Out and about in the neighborhood.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No, I absolutely have,” he insisted. “She’s been going around with a young couple.”

I let it go. I live in a city that, year in and year out, has a startlingly high teenage pregnancy rate, and consequently a high number of young grandmothers, some of whom end up raising their grandchildren. I’d be proud to be one of those women. But I am not. I’m just an old mom and I’m cool with that. Say a word or a phrase often enough, and it loses its power. I’m an old mom. I’m 60. I’m a 60-year-old woman with a third-grader. I am old. I am 60. I am old. I am old. I am old.

“You don’t look old to me,” my daughter has said on more than one occasion. “You could be in your 40s, your 30s, you could be in college, you could be in high school.”

Uber drivers say something similar, but at least I know why they’re blowing smoke up my ass. I’m not sure what my daughter wants, but she’s been eyeing the American Girl Doll spaceship, which lists at $449.99 on eBay. Good luck with that, honey. Mama’s got money, but she’s not crazy.

Read more…

Critics: Endgame

Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 9 minutes (2,309 words)

It’s a strange feeling being a cultural critic at this point in history. It’s like standing on the deck of the Titanic, feeling it sink into the sea, hearing the orchestra play as they go down — then reviewing the show. Yes, it feels that stupid. And useless. And beside the point. But what if, I don’t know, embedded in that review, is a dissection of class hierarchy, of the fact that the players are playing because what else are you supposed to do when you come from the bottom deck? And what if the people left behind with them are galvanized by this knowledge? And what if, I don’t know, one of them does something about it, like stowing away their kids on a rich person’s boat? And what if someone is saved who might otherwise not have been? If art can save your soul, can’t writing about it do something similar?

The climate report, that metaphorical iceberg, hit in October. You know, the one that said we will all be royally screwed by 2040 unless we reduce carbon emissions to nothing. And then came news story after news story, like a stream of crime scene photos — submerged villages, starving animals, bleached reefs — again and again, wave after wave. It all coalesced into the moment David Attenborough — the man famous for narrating documentaries on the wonders of nature — started narrating the earth’s destruction. I heard about that scene in Our Planet, the one where the walruses start falling off the cliffs because there is no ice left to support them, and I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Just like I couldn’t bring myself to read about the whales failing to reproduce and the millions of people being displaced. As a human being I didn’t know what to do, and as a cultural critic I was just as lost. So when Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation launched “Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World,” along with a piece on how to get newsrooms to prioritize the environment, I got excited. Here is the answer, I thought. Finally.

But there was no answer for critics. I had to come up with one myself.

* * *

Four years ago, William S. Smith, soon to be the editor of Art in America, attended the Minneapolis-based conference “Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age” and noticed the same strange feeling I mentioned. “The rousing moments when it appeared that artists could be tasked with emergency management and that critics could take on vested interests were, however, offset by a weird — and I would say mistaken — indulgence of powerlessness,” he wrote, recalling one speaker describing “criticism as the ‘appendix’ of the art world; it could easily be removed without damaging the overall system.” According to CJR, arts criticism has been expiring at a faster rate than newspapers themselves (is that even possible?). And when your job is devalued so steadily by the industry, it’s hard not to internalize. In these precarious circumstances, exercising any power, let alone taking it on, starts to feel Herculean.

Last week’s bloody battle — not that one — was only the latest reminder of critics’ growing insignificance. In response to several celebrities questioning their profession, beleaguered critics who might have proven they still matter by addressing larger, more urgent issues, instead made their critics’ point by making it all about themselves. First there was Saturday Night Live writer Michael Che denigrating Uproxx writer Steven Hyden on Instagram for critiquing Che’s Weekend Update partner Colin Jost. Then there was Lizzo tweeting that music reviewers should be “unemployed” after a mixed Pitchfork review. And finally, Ariana Grande calling out “all them blogs” after an E! host criticized Justin Bieber’s performance during her show. Various wounded critics responded in kind, complaining that people with so much more clout were using it to devalue them even more than they already have been. “It’s doubtful, for instance, that Lizzo or Grande would have received such blowback if they hadn’t invoked the specter of joblessness in a rapidly deteriorating industry,” wrote Alison Herman at The Ringer, adding, “They’re channeling a deeply troubling trend in how the public exaggerates media members’ power, just as that power — such as it is — has never been less secure.” 

That was the refrain of the weeklong collective wound-lick: “We’re just doing our jobs.” But it all came to a head when Olivia Munn attacked Go Fug Yourself, the fashion criti-comic blog she misconstrued as objectifying snark. “Red carpet fashion is a big business and an art form like any other, and as such there is room to critique it,” site owners Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan responded, while a number of other critics seized the moment to redefine their own jobs, invoking the anti-media stance of the current administration to convey the gravity of misinterpreting their real function, which they idealized beyond reproach. At Vanity Fair, chief critic Richard Lawson wrote of his ilk offering “a vital counterbalance in whatever kind of cultural discourse we’re still able to have.” The Ringer’s Herman added that criticism includes “advocacy and the provision of context in addition to straightforward pans,” while Caroline Framke at Variety simply said, “Real critics want to move a conversation forward.” Wow, it almost makes you want to be one.

I understand the impulse to lean into idolatry in order to underscore the importance of criticism. Though it dates back as far as art itself, the modern conception of the critic finds its roots in 18th-century Europe, in underground socially aware critiques of newly arrived public art. U.K. artist James Bridle summed up this modern approach at “Superscript,” when he argued that the job of art is “to disrupt and complicate” society, adding, “I don’t see how criticism can function without making the same level of demands and responding to the same challenges as art itself — in a form of solidarity, but also for its own survival.” Despite this unifying objective, it’s important to be honest about what in actual practice passes for criticism these days (and not only in light of the time wasted by critics defending themselves). A lot of it — a lot — kowtows to fandom. And not just within individual reviews, but in terms of what is covered; “criticism” has largely become a publicity-fueled shill of the most high-profile popular culture. The positivity is so pervasive that the odd evisceration of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, for instance, becomes cause for communal rejoicing. An element of much of this polarized approach is an auteur-style analysis that treats each subject like a hermetically sealed objet d’art that has little interaction with the world.

The rare disruption these days tends to come from — you guessed it — writers of color, from K. Austin Collins turning a Green Book review into a meditation on the erasure of black history to Doreen St. Felix’s deconstruction of a National Geographic cover story into the erasure of a black future. This is criticism which does not just wrestle with the work, but also wrestles with the work within the world, parsing the way it reflects, feeds, fights — or none of the above — the various intersections of our circumstances. “For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race,” the Pulitzer committee announced in awarding New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als in 2017. A year later the prize for feature writing went to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, the one freelancer among the nominated staffers, for a GQ feature on Dylann Roof. Profiling everyone from Dave Chappelle to Missy Elliott, Ghansah situates popular culture within the present, the past, the personal, the political — everywhere, really. And this is what the best cultural criticism does. It takes the art and everything around it, and it reckons with all of that together.

But the discourse around art has not often included climate change, barring work which specifically addresses it. Following recent movements that have awoken the general populace to various systemic inequities, we have been slowly shifting toward an awareness of how those inequities inform contemporary popular culture. This has manifested in criticism with varying levels of success, from clunky references to Trump to more considered analyses of how historic disparity is reflected in the stories that are currently told. And while there has been an expansion in representation in the arts as a result, the underlying reality of these systemic shifts is that they don’t fundamentally affect the bottom line of those in power. There is a social acceptability to these adaptations, one which does not ask the 1 Percent to confront its very existence, ending up subsumed under it instead. A more threatening prospect would be reconsidering climate change, which would also involve reconsidering the economy — and the people who benefit from it the most.  

We are increasingly viewing extreme wealth not as success but as inequity — Disney’s billion-dollar opening weekend with Avengers: Endgame was undercut not only by critics who questioned lauding a company that is cannibalizing the entertainment industry, but by Bernie Sanders: “What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from Avengers to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million — over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes.” More pertinent, however, is how environmentally sustainable these increasingly elaborate productions are. I am referring to not only literal productions, involving sets and shoots, but everything that goes into making and distributing any kind of art. (That includes publicity — what do you think the carbon footprint of BTS is?) In 2006, a report conducted by UCLA found that the film and television industries contributed more to air pollution in the region than almost all five of the other sectors studied. “From the environmental impact estimates, greenhouse gas emissions are clearly an area where the motion picture industry can be considered a significant contributor,” it stated, concluding, “it is clear that very few people in the industry are actively engaged with greenhouse gas emission reduction, or even with discussions of the issue.”

The same way identity politics has taken root in the critic’s psyche, informing the writing we do, so too must climate change. Establishing a sort of cultural carbon footprint will perhaps encourage outlets not to waste time hiring fans to write outdated consumers reviews that do no traffic in Rotten Tomatoes times. Instead of distracting readers with generic takes, they might shift their focus to the specifics of, for instance, an environmental narrative, such as the one in the lame 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, which has since proven itself to be (if nothing else) a useful illustration of how climate change can blow cold as well as hot. While Game of Thrones also claimed a climate-driven plot, one wonders whether, like the aforementioned Jake Gyllenhaal blockbuster, the production planted $200,000 worth of trees to offset the several thousand tons of carbon dioxide it emitted. If the planet is on our minds, perhaps we will also feature Greta Thunberg in glossy magazines instead of Bari Weiss or Kellyanne Conway. Last year, The New York Times’ chief film critic, A.O. Scott, who devoted an entire book to criticism, wrote, “No reader will agree with a critic all the time, and no critic requires obedience or assent from readers. What we do hope for is trust. We try to earn it through the quality of our writing and the clarity of our thought, and by telling the truth.” And the most salient truth of all right now is that there is no art if the world doesn’t exist.

* * *

I am aware that I’m on one of the upper decks of this sinking ship. I have a contract with Longreads, which puts me somewhere in the lower middle class (that may sound unimpressive, but writers have a low bar). Perhaps even better than that, I work for a publication for which page views are not the driving force, so I can write to importance rather than trends. I am aware, also, that a number of writers do not have this luxury, but misrepresenting themselves as the vanguards of criticism not only does them a disservice but also discredits the remaining thoughtful discourse around art. A number of critics, however, are positioned better than me. Yet they personalize the existential question into one that is merely about criticism when the real question is wider: It’s about criticism in the world.

I am not saying that climate change must be shoehorned into every article‚ though even a non sequitur would be better than nothing — but I am saying that just as identity politics is now a consideration when we write, our planet should be too. What I am asking for is simply a widening of perspective, besides economics, besides race, beyond all things human, toward a cultural carbon footprint, one which becomes part of the DNA of our critiques and determines what we choose to talk about and what we say when we do. After more than 60 years of doing virtually the same thing, even nonagenarian David Attenborough knew he had to change tacks; it wasn’t enough just to show the loss of natural beauty, he had to point out how it affects us directly. As he told the International Monetary Fund last month: “We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.” In Our Planet, Attenborough reminds us over and over that our survival depends on the earth’s. For criticism to survive, it must remind us just as readily.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Age of Forever Crises

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Efrem Lukatsky / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Linda Kinstler | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,527 words)

How does one recognize catastrophe, when it comes? What does it look like, how does it sound and smell? If it is an invisible catastrophe, how can you know when you are near it, and when you are far away? And what if it is an everlasting catastrophe, a disaster with a long half-life, so no matter how much time passes, it never quite goes away, and in some places, it only grows stronger? And when a decision from on high announces that it is time to try to move past it, to lay a wreath and get on with life, how does one mark the anniversary of a disaster still in motion, a crisis without end?

Last week marked yet another anniversary of the explosion of the Vladimir I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station’s Reactor No. 4. Thirty-three years ago, in the early hours of the morning on April 26, 1986, an ill-fated safety test unleashed an explosion equivalent to sixty tons of TNT, obliterating the reactor and sending the contents of its core — uranium fuel, graphite, zirconium, and a noxious mixture of radioactive gases — into the surrounding air, water, and earth. Read more…

What I Learned From Doing Amateur Porn

Illustration by Homestead

Nancy Jainchill | Longreads | April 2019 | 22 minutes (5,383 words)

 

“Peter, I can’t do this.” I grabbed my boyfriend by the arm.

The crew with whom we were making a porn movie had just arrived, their footsteps like drum beats as they made their way upstairs to our second floor flat. I stared at the doorway. Didn’t they realize they had the wrong house? I must’ve been crazy to say yes. Their footsteps continued. Maneuvering past me, their tripods were like hulking robots, their metal legs clattering along the wooden floor. Peter stood nearby, lit a joint, and turned to me. “Where’s Charley?”

Of course he was concerned about our dog.

***

My star turn began in a Berkeley flat on a summer morning in 1970. As our kitchen was heating up from the sun, Peter stripped off his flannel shirt, rubbed his hands up and down on his chest, and pointed to a classified ad, “Bus boy wanted. Starts immediately.” He took a sip of coffee.

Okay, he was right. We were short on rent money, and Peter solved problems. Except Peter wasn’t bus boy material. No way that would be happening. His mother had served him dinner in front of the TV every night until he left for college, and he didn’t do dishes. Sitting down next to him, I leaned over to see what he was reading.

Balancing his cigarette on our kitchen table’s edge — one of those fifties-era Formica tables, mottled red and white with a metal rim that couldn’t burn — he flattened the paper out with both hands. “Wow. Nancy, look at this. Become a porn star overnight.” He tapped his pen on the ad, and circled it.

I sputtered on a sip of coffee. “Are you kidding me?”

Peter’s voice quickened as he read. “Listen. ‘Having trouble paying your bills? Enjoy yourself while you earn your way out of debt.’” He shoved the paper at me. “Why not? We’re short on rent money. This looks easy.” He wasn’t joking.

After scanning the ad, which offered cash for taking off my clothes, I got up and walked to the window. While I wanted to make Peter happy, this hadn’t been part of the plan. Not for me. It wasn’t that long ago that I never took off my coat. Summer or winter, my coat stayed on. I had the idea that my body wasn’t good enough, so I kept it hidden.

“C’mon Nance.” He gave my butt a light slap.

He knew I’d give in. When was the last time I’d said “no” to Peter?

Read more…