Kamikaze Lust

by Lauren Sanders

Overview

Kamikaze Lust by first-time novelist Lauren Sanders takes the reader on an electrifying ride through the spectacle of life and death in millennial America. Smart, hardboiled and humorous, the novel taps our obsession with sex and death, sex and popular culture, sex and the written word, sex and pornography, sex and green M&Ms, and, of course, the perennial sex and love.

"Great courage must account for such complete disregard of political correctness, and great sensitivity for such sadness."
—Amanda Filipacchi, author of Vapor and Nude Men

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781888451085
Publisher:	Akashic Books
Publication date:	07/01/2000
Pages:	287
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lauren Sanders is a novelist and journalist who lives in New York City. Her highly acclaimed debut novel, Kamikaze Lust (Akashic, 2000) won a 2001 Lambda Literary Award. Sanders's writing has appeared in publications including the American Book Review, Poets & Writers, and Time Out New York. She is coeditor of the anthology Too Darn Hot: Writing About Sex Since Kinsey, published by Persea Books in 1998. She is a graduate of Columbia University's school of journalism and has an MA in Creative Writing from City College in New York.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter Four: One in the Hand, Two in the Bush

"Hold it!" Alexis commanded. A click and the cameras stopped; all eyes turned to her. Bodies stilled off set as if she'd pressed a pause button. On set, a man relaxed his grip on a woman's thighs, which had been posed missionary-style making her look somewhat like a roasted chicken. Her legs dropped to the bed. He took a few steps back glaring at Alexis as he stroked his erect penis. But for the alacrity of his hand-cock motion, he looked like some kind of sex zombie.

Having arrived just a few minutes earlier, I took the opportunity to move in and claim a camouflaged spot behind a couple of leafy floor plants, going for my usual fly-on-the-wall routine. Alexis sighed, "Billie, you've got to get the light in closer." Without a word, the woman standing behind a massive eye ball of a light dollied forward. I held out my microcassette recorder. "That's it, on top of her, I want to see her pussy glow. And can we get some glitter makeup on her thighs?" A woman with enough unguents to paint the cast of Cats came running. As if she were a gynecologist, she sat down in front of the star's legs and began her cosmetic doctoring. "Beautiful," Alexis said. "We're going for broke here, boys and girls, the fucking of the gods." There were a few giggles. Alexis turned to the naked man. "Mark, don't look at the camera so much. Use your tongue for a while, then pull back and pick up the crystal. Okay, heat 'em up and action!"

Mark, tongue jutting lizardlike from his mouth, moved along the woman's thighs. Two video cameras hovered close to their bodies. The woman moaned, giving what seemed like a virtuoso "...oh, baby, oh..." I tried to remember her name. It began with a T, Tessa something...Tessa Toupee or Tepee or Tempe. And he must be Mark Vladimir, the featured male lead on this latest Zipless Pictures project: One in the Hand, Two in the Bush. It was already being hailed by the Alexis acolytes as groundbreaking erotic cinema.

I took my reporter's notebook from the pocket of my blazer, slipped the ball-point pen from behind my ear, and wrote down a few fragments: Cameras. Smoke machine. Attractive young people with props; clipboards, cell phones, beepers, headphones. Everyone watching. Me watching them watch. The sanctioned voyeur.

Indeed it was like watching the trials I'd covered before the strike, and just as I'd been conscious of researching every case to the last detail I'd come prepared for my virgin viewing of this sex shoot. I'd seen a few videos, skimmed through insider magazines with names like Skin, Video X-tra, and The Bondage & Discipline Tour. I read selections from the classic texts, everything from Freud and Krafft-Ebing to The Filmmaker's Guide to Pornography . Going on-line, I logged into the appropriate newsgroups gleaning information on new releases, industry feuds, HIV rumors, while familiarizing myself with the jargon. I could tell you the difference between meat and money shots, tout the industry's preference for Astroglide over other lubricants, and delineate scenes by their reductive categories: the boy-girl, the girl-girl, the boy-girl-girl, and so forth and so on.

The category of the moment was boy-girl, the action, post-insertion with sex toy, as Mark moved a thick, cone-like crystal in and out of Tessa's vagina, stopping every few minutes to roll his tongue along the clear, wet stick. As they spoke I jotted down their dialogue.

Tessa says: Move me, fuck me with the light of God.
Mark says: Baby, I'm here. I am God.
Tessa says: Oh, I want you inside me now!

Mark took a step back and ripped open a condom wrapper. It was a Zipless rule that couples practice safe sex, HIV test or not, yet there were exceptions: the married couple, the long-term lovers, or women with women who outright refused to work with those silly dental dams. But Mark and Tessa were a non-exception couple. That even I noticed this couldn't be good. No wonder Alexis looked dyspeptic, as if she were on the verge of bursting into bitter song; if this were indeed a musical and not a sex film shoot. The rest of the crew seemed constipated, watching nervously as Mark, a hirsute figure with a penis about the length and width of the average-sized banana, fixed an airhole at the end of his condom, smiling perfunctorily at Tessa, whose face, though done up like a side-show gypsy, conveyed a fuck-me-yes-but-I-don't-have-to-like-it quality. Was it me or did she appear sorrowful beneath her rough and tumble exterior? I couldn't stop staring at the bottoms of her feet. Black from stomping back and forth on the dusty wood, they would need a touch of air brushing in the edit suite. The condom wrapper fell to the floor, sounding a light slap. Then came a collective sigh of relief as Mark, penis erect and snugly encased, put his palms on Tessa's thighs and pushed them upward. One camera clung to their torsos, the other moved to Tessa's face. Mark took his penis in his right hand and guided it inside of her.

"Okay," Alexis said, "pickup with the other camera, keep going, on their faces. Good, good...shit! Tessa, be a goddamn martyr if you have to, but don't look like one. Cut!"

As from the sudden burst of a water balloon, frustration splattered in every direction. "We're going to be here forever," a guy in faded jeans, with headphones and a boom mike mumbled to nobody in particular.

"Shut up," Tessa snapped at him. "He smells like onions. I mean once or twice, but this is too much, and he's all soft again. You try smiling about fucking a slinky."

"You think you smell so great with all that flowery crap you rub on," Mark said. "She wonders why I lose my concentration."

"I thought the onions were supposed to help," Tessa whined, as if she were a Class A tattle-tale. I wondered if she had older brothers.

"What is with the onions?" Alexis asked.

"He says they make him more vee-rile," Tessa sneered at him.

"That's not what I said, you little...uh!" Mark jerked his head back in disgust, ran his right hand through his hair and then glowered back at Tessa. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he started to speak. "I said they make my cum more milky."

Alexis quickly moved between them, taking Mark by the elbow. "Look, we're wrapping today, and I absolutely refuse to be here all night. So go brush your teeth and no more onions. What do you do, eat them raw?"

"Like an apple," he said.

Alexis shook her head. "Honey, next time you're worried about the plumbing try zinc capsules like everyone else. Now, you want to clear the set?"

"That's not the problem."

"Yeah right," someone murmured.

"Okay, enough from the peanut gallery. If you want to help, do a private little rain dance for Mark, and you," Alexis turned to Tessa, "go use your vibrator a few minutes. You're being paid to fuck a slinky if you have to."

Alexis sighed, leaned back in her director's chair. She caught my eye and motioned for me to join her. I did as instructed, like everyone else. For as plagued by perfectionism as Alexis was, when she said cut, no matter how long they'd been shooting, everyone stayed with her vision. I got the feeling they all believed they were doing important work, trekking beyond the traditional porno métier...where no man had gone before. Women worked cameras, carried cell phones, and swung mikes. Yet even for these millennial years, it veered toward parody. A vision of Lesbos within the drab fascism of California porn.

And where on the Left Coast would you find a director who treated her actors and crew as if they were her own children? The other day I heard her on the phone asking Mark if he'd taken his C's--he had a cold coming on; now she was pained by Tessa's phallophobia.

"I just don't get it," she was telling me. "I love using her because she doesn't have implants and her tits aren't that big, it's a different kind of aesthetic. It says something. You're recording this?"

I nodded.

"Don't," she said, rubbing two fingers on each of her temples. "I'm too riled, I have to think it through."

"Why are you so upset?"

"Why? I have a feature star who flips out when a man gets near her and you ask, why? Girl-girl scenes she's the best, but this isn't a lesbian company, that's not all we do. I've been telling her she doesn't have to feature, which would be a shame because every time she's on screen, it breaks ranks. She's not what a porn star should look like, blah, blah, semiotic bullshit maybe...but it's true."

"Because she's flat-chested?"

"Yes, of course. But if she won't do men, it's less powerful. Women don't have the tit fetish, most of them anyway. And that's not the point here. She made such a big deal about not wanting to be pigeonholed, not wanting to be an industry dyke. A lot of women are like that, they'll only do girl-girl scenes. It's safer, they feel less pressured with women."

"Less pressured, that's a laugh," I said.

Alexis looked at me, her brow furrowing inquisitively. "Are you a lesbian?"

"No."

She eyed me suspiciously and within seconds I was ten years old again, running to confession for a crime I didn't commit.

"Really, I'm not," I said.

"I'm sensing something, a sort of karmic sound bite. Are you in therapy?"

"Been out a few years, thank you very much." That question was easily answered. As far as I was concerned I'd fulfilled my quota on shrink time with Sam in Miami.

"Then you must have hit on this?" Alexis said, eyebrows raised as if she were waiting for a salacious disclosure. I became conscious of my tight-fitting blazer, the double-breasted, wool jacket that wasn't exactly power suit material, but had been conservative enough to get me through the courts. Here it felt constricting, and heated up the back of my neck as if I were hiking the Stair Master. Besides, all the lights and cameras and action had made the set extremely hot.

Think journalism, I told myself. I am a journalist. My job is asking questions. Ask a question. I squeezed into my reporter's face, the one where my brow caverned in between my eyes and my lips pursed downward.

"So what happens if Tessa won't do it?" I ventured.

"Oh, she'll do it, she just needs a little tender loving care. Anyway, forget her for the moment. I want to know what's got you so flustered."

"I'm not flustered."

"You are too. The second I asked if you were a lesbian your entire face changed."

"It did not."

"You should see yourself, your cheeks are all red."

"It's hot in here, aren't you hot?" A bead of sweat dripped down the side of my face.

"Heat is an emotion."

I laughed out loud. "That's ridiculous. Heat is a physical condition."

"Brought on by emotion."

"Or temperature."

"The temperature in and of itself is irrelevant. Unless you're moving through it or self-combusting, you don't feel the heat. This is basic physics. So what's got you all worked up? What's making you feel the heat, so to speak?"

"I don't know, maybe the goddamn klieg lights."

"And why?"

"Because they're hot."

"What if I told you the lights were shut off ten minutes ago?"

"Were they really?"

"Immaterial."

"Of course it's material, you just said what if. I have the right to know whether we're speaking hypothetically or not."

"That is exactly my point. We're not talking about the lights, we're not talk ing about the heat, we're not talking about any physical characteristic of the set. We are talking about why when I asked if you were a lesbian you got flustered."

"I am not flustered!" I shouted, heat brimming beneath my skin, a mockery of my argument. Whatever argument that was. Confused, and embarrassed by the force of my words, I turned my head the other way. Across the set, a group of young women sat laughing and smoking cigarettes. Their easy communication made me angry. So free and libertine they were, working on a radical porno film. I felt even more isolated, more protective of my own world.

Alexis put her hand on my shoulder. "I didn't mean to upset you. I have too many freaked-out people around here already."

"I'm not freaked-out." I turned to face her. "It's just that this ghostwriter thing won't work if you keep asking the questions."

"But it's only fair. Yesterday I talked for three hours about my adolescent masturbation to Playboy. All I'm asking for is a little reciprocity."

"The more you know about me, the less you'll trust me. I lose my authority."

"You have no authority, Rachel, you work for me."

I stared at her eyes, the folds around them conferring an air of wisdom earned the hard way. Times like these she looked her forty-two years, distinguishable from the rest of her cast and crew, from me too. She took her hand from my shoulder and tapped my thigh twice, letting her palm linger a moment on my leg. The gesture wasn't at all sexual; it was, in a word, maternal. "All I'm saying is stop being so rigid, this isn't some dumb news story-no offense. Whatever you lose, who cares? Look at what you might gain." Her voice was a combination of brass and silk, it was a Penthouse spread transported to the New York Philharmonic, and it provoked the same mesmerizing power I'd felt upon our first meeting, the baptismal belief that my life would be incomplete were I not her ghostwriter. What I hadn't realized was just how unfulfilled I'd been until then. Something like a ghost.

"I really don't want to talk about me," I said finally.

"Oh, I think you do, you've just never been able to. You haven't felt safe."

"You know, I can get this kind of self-help crap anywhere. I didn't have to come to a porno film."

"Say what you like, but it's true. Do you know how many times I've been called a pervert? And practically anytime anybody reviews one of my films I'm mistaken for a whore, but this is what I do, it's who I am. When you're honest with yourself, it makes no difference what anyone else says."

"Just measure it in inches, right."

"Pardon me?" She studied me as if I were speaking a different language. I'd forgotten how sensitive this industry could be about measurements.

"That's...uh...Warhol," I said, my ears tingling at the silent valleys in between my words. "He...you know, he said you shouldn't read your own press...just measure it."

"I've been saying that for years and I never even knew him. Some of my friend s did back in the Seventies, but how did you know that? Did you know him?"

"No!" I almost laughed out loud, imagining Andy Warhol coming to Bay Ridge for Thanksgiving dinner.

Alexis tilted her head back and forth. Watching her, the weight of my own hair grew heavier. I tucked it back behind my ears, one side at a time. "Rachel," she said, "if there's one thing I know-well, of course, I do know more than one thing-but I'm an expert on people." She took a deep breath, and I thought if we were part of the movie she would have taken a drag from a cigarette for effect. Instead she made a quick surveillance of the set. The young women were still laughing, a miasma of shimmering hair and cigarette smoke, the man in jeans fiddled with the knobs of a sound mixer, a woman with a clipboard sipped from a paper cup rimmed with big cherry red lipstick stains.

"You can see how being a student of human nature helps in this business," Alexis said, still scanning the set as if we were sitting together at a basketball game.

"No doubt," I feigned sophistication, but my words reverberated self-consciously. Alexis pivoted toward me. "What I'm saying is, I've been watching you. You hide behind your one-liners, your facts and pithy insights. Believe me, I know irony feels like a safe space, but its not. You're entitled to your emotions, Rachel. Especially the heated ones."

I felt a disabling sensation, like gas pains. In just a few minutes, Alexis Calyx had managed to disrupt the entire journalistic relationship. If anything, a reporter was supposed to remain emotionally disconnected. Alexis should know better. She'd been interviewed hundreds of times before, even once by Kim Mathews, the doyenne of TV interviewing and perhaps the country's most recognizable journalist, though I use that term loosely.… I stopped myself, for I was indeed making light as she'd accused me of doing, but also because I realized just how flimsy my credentials were around here. I felt like Tessa Tureen, splayed with my dirty feet in the air.

Any real world concerns had spilled out into the East Village streets, while within the studio's sound-proof walls was a greenhouse of possibility. I could have known Andy Warhol. I could be gay. I could be anything I wanted here.

I clutched the back of my neck, wet with perspiration, and stared at Alexis. Our faces were indeed similar, oval shaped, with dark brown, hard-to-manage hair and black coffee eyes; just two little girls from the biggest of boroughs. We shared the ineffable bond of a Brooklyn childhood, just as Aunt Lorraine and Kaminsky together conjured ghosts of Nazi-occupied Poland. In spite of my anger at her invasiveness, as well as her reckless disregard for the tenets of my profession, I was drawn to her. A sensual telotaxis I could barely contain, let alone control.

"I'm too old for this," I said.

"Please, then I'm a dinosaur." She tapped once more at my thigh, and I wanted to tell her about the time Neil locked me in the handcuffs. How I was more afraid of telling on him, of what he might do next, than I was of the restraint. Before I could say anything, however, Alexis and I were interrupted by Alia the A.D. Everyone was set to go. Alexis stood up and winked at me, "Watch closely, this is the take."

My eyes trailed her as she walked toward Tessa, all dolled-up in her red teddy and g-string combo. Alexis leaned her elbows on the star's shoulders. Their eyes locked, Alexis talking, and occasionally slipping a couple of fingers through Tessa's strawberry blond hair. The doe-eyed porn star looked almost innocent, an admirable feat given her attire. Again, I felt the encumbrance of my own clothing. Next time I would wear jeans and a T-shirt like everyone else.

Tessa's bare arms locked around Alexis' crisp, white V-neck. Alexis towered over her, stroking her hair. They could have been mother and daughter. Who else would hug her half-naked child that closely? I thought of my own mother, and how I couldn't remember her once putting her arms around me. All my life I'd been waiting for the repressed memory that would prove me wrong.

I felt slightly put off. A little bit of sibling rivalry. Or perhaps the roots went deeper. For they could have been mistaken as lovers, Alexis and Tessa, their bodies entwined in what seemed a comfortable power imbalance.

Alexis gave Tessa's butt a light tap the way football players do after a huddle and then clapped her hands: "Okay, let's get on with it." Tessa flashed her a final adoring look, and I wondered if she was a lesbian. I remembered reading that lesbianism among women off set was as common as men with plumbing problems on it. Somehow, this made sense.

Yet we were all soon shrouded in the shadows of heterosexuality. Only the white of Mark and Tessa's skin shone in cones of amber light. Even Alexis had stepped back as the scene fell into formation. Mark, his limbs sparkling as if they'd been dipped in a barrel of glitter makeup, had no erection trouble. Tessa, too, was more accommodating, her face a blush of lust and satisfaction, her body in tune with Mark's thrusting. Their rhythm was a modern ballet for an unknown audience.

You could smell it, too; the soured lotion, the sweat, the onions, the sex. It came to me in a craving so ignited, so aching, so incomprehensible, I felt myself blush. And I was pulled toward Tessa, this woman with her body arched and head thrusting back and forth. A clump of hair snagged across her mouth, and Mark without taming their beat moved his fingers to her face and gently pushed it away. His touch was so private, so spontaneous, and the way they eyed each other, as if love might be the byproduct of sex and not the other way around, made me envious. Seeking solace, I looked around the audience as if staking out the faces of fellow movie-goers, trying to gauge...what? If anyone else was moved by this? If anyone was aroused by it? Ashamed of it? Part of me wanted to giggle childishly...these people are fucking! Yet another part wanted to jump into the scene, to lick Tessa's nipples, to suck Mark's penis, and sandwich myself between them, the three of us thrashing and burning until we all collapsed in a nest of exhausted arms and legs.

Mark, sweat dripping from his rosy face, shouted, "I'm going to come." Tessa screamed back at the top of her lungs. No words, just a series of loud grunts that had me leaning forward with my eyes shut, slipping into the heat, the motion, a desire so palpable it dripped down my limbs. I could barely catch my breath. Mark screamed, "Oh baby, I'm coming!" I slipped backwards, my eyes shot open. Mark fell on top of Tessa and his breathing slowed...and her breathing slowed...and my breathing slowed

Alexis, face glimmering proudly, screamed, "Cut!" I leaned against a folding chair, still captivated by the naked bodies on set. So at ease in the aftermath, they gave the impression of being a long-married couple. Next to them I felt almost prepubescent.

Mark jumped up and shook out his hair. "That was so hot," he said, giving Tessa's forehead a light kiss. "Did you want to come?"
"In front of all these people, are you kidding me?" Tessa stood up and purred a round of thank-yous to the crew parting beside her with coos and compliments as she retired to her dressing room. A job well done. And she didn't come. And nobody found this strange or incomplete. Nobody questioned her womanhood, suggested analysis or stomped with iron feet back and forth, trying to resolve those issues that would set her orgasm free. She walked off the set even more of a diva for not coming. The next time anyone complained about me not coming I would say I was a porn star. The idea stayed with me as I waited for Alexis amid the end-of-day collapsing of the set. Before today I would have thought my breasts too small, but they weren't any smaller than Tessa's. Maybe I wasn't as skinny as Tessa, but I wasn't exactly fat. Actually, I was in pretty good shape for a woman just over thirty who hadn't been to the gym in a few weeks. I would work out more. I would also need a few glasses of wine, or--who am I kidding?--I would need a couple of Quaaludes before I could take my clothes off in front of all those people. No wonder most porn stars used pseudonyms. Perhaps, then, it was someone else people were ogling at, panting with, masturbating over. Alexis herself had adopted a whole new identity upon entering the industry; few people were aware her real name was Patricia DeFabio. If I were to take a name, I would keep something of myself in it: maybe Rachel Sliver or Rachel Slipper. No, I liked the word silver, its prurient shine, the way it bit back when you had it in between your teeth. And it was all mine, the name I'd chosen myself on my eighteenth birthday. Silver...like the chrome of the klieg lights, the glint from Hi-8 lenses, the beams, the rays, those silver rays...oh, yes, Silver Ray...sweet sobriquet. One in the Hand, Two in the Bush staring Mark Vladimir, Tessa Touche, and Silver Ray. Yes, I could be a porn star if I wanted to.

What People are Saying About This

Amy Ray

Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls

Lauren Sanders' novel Kamikaze Lust makes a connection between unrealized lives, sexual repression, and the fear of death. In her hands, what is usually clichéd or gratuitous is hot.

Amanda Filipacchi

Amanda Filipacchi, author of Vapor and Nude Men

Great courage must account for such complete disregard of political correctness, and great sensitivity for such sadness.

Kate Christensen

Kate Christensen, author of In the Drink

Kamikaze Lust puts a snappy spin on a traditional theme--young woman in search of herself--and stands it on its head. In a crackling, rapid-fire voice studded with deadpan one-liners and evocative descriptions, Rachel Silver takes us to such far-flung places as a pompous charity benefit, the set of an "art porn" movie, her best friend's body, Las Vegas casinos, and the psyche of her own porn-star alter ego, Silver Ray, all knit together by the unspoken question: who am I, anyway? And as Rachel tells it, asking the question is more fun than knowing for sure could ever be."

Editorial Reviews

Lauren Sanders has a great ability to describe and create characters that seem to breate; they exist believably in reality and fantasy. Sanders also has an interesting understanding of how the heart and mind work, and somehow takes those thoughts we would rather keep to ourselves and makes them acceptable in the context of her novel.

Bust Magazine