Hoard of Plenty

In the new, critically acclaimed film Shame--which I saw today and highly recommend to anyone tottering on the edge of the abyss with a searing erection (be sure to quote me in the ads, Fox Searchlight)--there is a scene in which...

Oh, I better pause for a SPOILER ALERT here.

If you haven’t seen Shame yet, directed by Steve McQueen and featuring the breathy song stylings of Carey Mulligan as the Peggy Lee of Prozac, be advised that I’m about to reveal one tiny article of action from the film. So skip the next few sentences if you think such a minor disclosure would ruin the movie for you, because nobody’s interested in hearing your whining about it later. Don’t be one of those people who tweets, “Don’t tell me what happened at the end of Boardwalk Empire! I DVR’d it and haven’t watched it yet!” Nucky gets a goiter, that’s what happened, calm down.

So: After Michael Fassbender’s Brandon is mortified by his sister’s discovery of his porn-hound proclivities (here’s a handy tip, guys: always keep the laptop lid down when you have company over), he goes tearing through his ascetic apartment, removing his porn stash in a rapid fury, as if he were ransacking his own place. It’s radical decluttering by the fistful. Porn mags, DVDs, even the laptop itself--every wank aid he had stashed in case of nuclear attack is plunged into black garbage bags and hauled down to the sidewalk for pickup. Brandon’s apartment space doesn’t appear to offer much storage, but what storage it has was crammed with this garish smut. He’s that rare bachelor bird, the tidy hoarder.

The scene reminded me of a deleted chapter from my 2001 novel The Catsitters. In it, my narrator Johnny Downs is convinced/browbeaten/ordered by his dating coaching and co-pilot Darlene to de-porn from his apartment in order to ensure that no possible future fiancee will stumble upon his “pathetic barn load,” or words to that effect. All women staying over a guy’s place snoop, Darlene informs him, and she knows this for a fact because when she stayed over at Johnny’s place it took all of five minutes of snooping to find blackmail material, “and I was barely trying.”

So Johnny decides to make his apartment a welcoming, porn-free environment. Unlike Fassbender’s Brandon, he doesn’t rip through closets and cupboards as if the narc squad were about to make a bust; he’s much more reflective and methodical in his excavations, realizing that his porn collections tended to fall into geologic phases, accumulating between girlfriends. Each separate stash corresponds to a different breakup, a deeper set of blues. He reaches into the bureau under the sink and gets a handful of fur--his cat Slinky, who is assisting him in the ongoing investigation. Once he’s amassed a pile, he goes downstairs to see the super to get a cardboard box to put the stuff in. Upon returning, he hears the phone ringing; it’s Darlene, with her long-range X-ray vision, reminding him not to forget the library he has squirreled away in the top closet. This being the pre-DVD era, the pile of porn tapes is too much of a haul for the box he borrowed, so he has to borrow a bigger one, a crate that a TV set came in. (TV sets then being bulky heifers.) He loads the box, placing yoga tapes on top to camouflage what’s below, and, not wanting to have the evidence traced to him in the building, decides to nudge the box into the elevator and take it outside, pushing it a dumpster somewhere, a dumpster not unlike the one where Fassbender’s Brandon and a groovy blonde would have vertical, pump-action sex against decades later.

The box is heavy and unwieldy, much harder for one guy to push than anticipated, a sideways Sisyphean task, and a couple of sketchy guys on the street offer to assist. One of them lifts the yoga tape on top and spots the X-rated cassettes below and tells his confrere, like a cast member of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, “We have HIT the mother lode.” They then proceed to inspect the voluminous depths of the tape box, commenting upon the titles, cover shots, and popular porn stars of the day, asking if they could divvy up the contents once they reach an appropriate dumpster. It’s a very sophisticated conversation, as these things go, though one man points out to the other that they don’t actually have a VCR machine to play them on. “This shit is the incentive I’ve been waiting for to GET a machine.” And so the Box of Porn finds a happy new home somewhere in the East Village as our hero returns to his apartment, where the phone was assuredly ringing, with Darlene asking, “Don’t you feel better now with all that stuff gone?” And Johnny admits, “It does feel lighter around here.”

What a heartwarming chapter it was, an inspiration to every depraved, deprived bachelor, but I was persuaded to dis-include it from the novel because it was argued that women readers would be turned off by the hero having such an extensive porn encrustation, that it might render him less likable and sympathetic. I don’t remember putting up much a resistance because I understood the objections; despite its subject, the chapter had something of a vaudeville turn to it, complete with stylized patter, but it’s a subject that arouses so much disapproval that it’s tough to get past that. For all the talk of pro-porn, sex-positive feminism then and now, there’s still a sour attitude of disdain and judginess that wears puritan robes and pathologizes porn as something unsuitable in a novel that might be reviewed by Michiko Kakutani or Janet Maslin and found guilty of immaturity. So I let the chapter go and have given it little thought until today, watching Michael Fassbender have his spring cleaning orgy on screen.

I wonder if I still have that chapter somewhere, packed away in a cardboard box that is absent of hidey-hole porn, containing only notated manuscript papers of the novel in its various versions. I should probably try to dig it out at some point, give it the old eyeball once-over. I believe I owe that to Literature, after it’s given me so much.