A Solvent Moment of Self-Disgust

Chapter 15 – A Solvent Moment of Self-Disgust

The Beginning of the End: The Discovery of Polaroid Photos of Teenage Prostitutes Above the Drop Ceiling in the Basement of Carson’s Suburban Home.

It wasn’t really kiddie porn, although no court of law would have ruled in his favor. Fortunately, he was able to gather up all the photos, just after Beth flung the entire stack at his face. She discovered them stashed in a manila envelope above the ceiling tiles in the basement. She had been searching for places where their son Scully might have hidden his drugs. When Beth came across the pictures, she thought they belonged to Scully. Then she recognized the handwriting. Carson had stupidly written crude remarks on the white strips at the bottom of each photo, physical descriptions of the girls, like, “superb ass,” or, “large cunt lips.” Some denoted their special preferences and areas of expertise, such as, “nasty talker,” “loves cum on her face,” and, “begs to be pissed on.” He knew he was courting problems when he brought those photos into the house. But he had a weakness for them. He’d come to rely on the images while masturbating. He pulled them down from the above the ceiling when Beth and the kids were away and he was alone to indulge his fantasies, many of which were variations on his encounters at the Joy Fuck Club.

The JFC, as it was known among its members, was a clandestine group of men in the Valley. They met irregularly but they had a clear mission statement: to gang bang and sexually defile teenage runaways in need of money or attention. The club was organized by Wally Syrus, an L.A. County sheriff who worked out of Van Nuys. Carson knew Wally through Wally’s brother Kenny. Kenny Syrus was a deacon at the Lutheran church where Carson and Beth attended. Kenny and his wife befriended the Carsons when they joined other church members on a weekend Lutheran junket to Las Vegas. The two men hit it off, especially after they teamed up in a Texas Hold’Em game at Benny Binyon’s. Kenny was a novice and Carson offered to swap him some action. Kenny went on tilt almost from the get go, but Carson had a good run and made five thousand, 20% of which went to Kenny, according to their arrangement. Out of gratitude, Kenny took Carson to a titty bar later in the day, while the wives went shopping at the Bellagio. After a few drinks, Kenny filled Carson in on his brother Wally’s scam. Carson could buy in to the JFC for $500 every time the club met, usually at a club member’s house but never in the same place twice. What he got in exchange was free food, an open bar, and five to ten girls from the ages of 12 to 18 whom they fucked at will over a six-hour period. Because Wally Syrus was a detective on the vice squad of the Sheriff’s Department, he had his finger on a steady supply of under-age party girls. He knew every teenage girl in the Valley, from Pacoima to Chatsworth, who was on the lam from mommy, daddy or a group foster home. He knew which ones were clean and which to avoid, and which ones were eager to sell their flesh at a bargain basement price. The girls got a percentage of the take, a good meal, all they could drink, and lots of adulation. Wally was there to make sure there was no rough stuff and everybody went home drunk and well-depleted. For an additional $250, members could engage in a private photography session with up to three different girls. This was how Carson had come into possession of the photos Beth had found stashed above the ceiling tiles.

The discovery of the photos would have been shocking, even brutal, for any number of wives, but Beth had to endure the added indignity of not having been fucked by Carson in several years. Carson thought this was nothing unusual. He knew more than a few men who, after a couple of drinks, freely admitted to fucking their wives only under duress, as a way to keep the peace at home. He had loved Beth, he just didn’t desire her after the fourth or fifth year of marriage. He justified his hands-off approach by believing that marriage didn’t have to be built on sex at all. There were plenty of other reasons to stay married: the companionship, the tax benefits, status in the community, the kids. Aside from the periodic bouts of loathing that he assumed all married couples experienced, he liked the way he and Beth complemented each other. She was intelligent, if not widely read, and had a wry sense of humor. She took being a mother seriously. And she put up with Carson and his spendthrift ways, when he would have divorced himself long before. And she lent him money, or used to, until he stopped paying her back. She was a realtor and had an independent source of income. This was another reason – no small one, he admitted – for staying married, especially after his card sharking demanded higher and higher stakes. He knew he could count on Beth, at least in the beginning, when he was able to repay her loans. Before things got out of hand, he made a point of keeping the pot sweetened with trips to Hawaii, the Caribbean, or the occasional surprise gifts of jewelry, designer clothing, or a new car every couple of years. This had worked. Beth loved things, shiny things. Carson used to kid her that if she saw a diamond bracelet dangling from an erect cock, the cock would perish for want of attention. But the photos had changed everything. Before their discovery the two of them could pretend there were no big problems. But finding images of naked women in the rafters of their basement rec room – under-age girls with their legs spread wide apart – forcefully impressed upon Beth that she was way outside the loop about Carson. The knowledge of his secret made her ashamed, too, at the barrenness of their own sex life, and furious for coming upon very strong evidence of being lied to and duped.

Even with the photos in hand she still didn’t want to accept their reality. At first she was desperate to believe his explanations: that they were years old, from a bachelor party he’d attended, pictures that he’d long forgotten. But her fear of being deceived was more urgent than her preference to forego difficult questions. Her husband’s willful deception was more discomfiting than the emerging knowledge – knowledge that had always been within her grasp but which she’d chosen to ignore – that Carson was some kind of sex pervert with a big-time gambling habit. The gambling had never reached the reckless state, she told herself. He managed to break even every year, never netting less than the equivalent of his earnings at the phone company. And his sex tastes had never appeared to go beyond the legal, if unconventional, porn that constantly passed through their bedroom. But these pictures were like nothing she’d seen before, and the fact that he’d hidden them from her emphasized their volatile nature and his precarious secret life.

“Is this why you’re not fucking me,” she screamed at him. “You’re too busy beating off in the basement to this trash?”

“Look it, don’t start that tired old argument,” he answered, as though she were blowing everything out of proportion. “Don’t give me that victim routine, the ‘poor, neglected wife, if the world only knew the depth of my woe’ schtick. Give it a fuckin’ break, Beth. It’s an innocent outlet; that’s all those pictures are. Nothing else.”

He tried to direct her line of inquiry away from the photos, but this time she resisted.

“Why should I work my jaw into a lather over someone who can’t get it up,” she said. She could be cruel, too.

“Is that something a woman’s gonna get excited about? Or am I just too old for you? Is that it? My body just ain’t good enough any more? I have to lose 25 years before you can get an erection in my presence? Well, fuck you! How old are these girls,” she waved the photos in the air, as if by holding them up and exposing them to daylight might be enough to shame him.

“You could get into deep trouble with these photos, Carson. This is criminal. You would jeopardize our family by bringing this filth into our home?”

“Give me those damn things already, Beth. They’re nothing. I’ll get rid of ‘em.”

“Why are you doing this to me? What am I supposed to think anymore? You need help, you need therapy. You’re sick, Carson. Do you hear me? Do you know that? You’re sick. How could you bring this into our home, with our children? What the hell’s the matter with you? What would have happened if Liza found these? Oh, my God, the thought of it sickens me. You shit! What would you have done? How would you explain to your daughter these pictures? Or your son? Scully and Liza have a right to be protected from this crap, and what do you do? Their own father. You bring these pornographic pictures of young girls into their home. They would never forgive you. I will never forgive you. They don’t know you. I don’t know you, what you’ve become. You’re sick, Carson, do you know that? Sick! This has got to come to an end. I can’t take it anymore. Either you get help with your addictions, your gambling, your perverted sex, you do it soon, or it has to end. I don’t need you, and our children sure as hell don’t need you, not the kind of father, the kind of man, you’ve become.”

They had been through this routine plenty of times, minus the new wrinkle added by the photos. Carson thought it wasn’t Beth’s body so much as her uninspired lovemaking, the almost frigid, timid approach she had to sex. She shrank from sex because she hated her body. And he blamed her for it. He wasn’t responsible for her self-image. Even if she were more aggressive in bed, more confident about sex, he believed it wouldn’t change the situation. All his fantasies were about shapes different than his wife’s, as if their two dimensional properties were an antidote to her flesh and blood. Perhaps it was her body after all that chilled him. Maybe his physical aversion to her type only fed her insecurity. And the more she recoiled from sex, the less she allowed herself to share her erotic feelings with him. She closed down because she felt sexually rejected by Carson. It had gotten to the point where she had become an asexual creature, someone who didn’t or couldn’t enjoy it. That attitude affected Carson. It had become an effort to be aroused by her, to manufacture an erection to please either of them. It required the not wholly unpleasant task of fantasizing about someone he’d seen in a magazine, a movie, or a new client he’d met that day. Still, it was a chore. He wanted to fuck a slut. And Beth, picking up on his aversion to her drooping breasts, her sagging ass pock-marked by cellulite, drew further and further away from any physical intimacy with him. This only reinforced the discomfort she felt with her body. The sex was way too bland, and Carson lacked the ability to help his wife by encouraging her, supporting her by saying kind things about her body. He couldn’t do it. He knew that he was caught, arrested in some state of adolescent lust. But all he could do was lament the pitiful condition of his sex life with her. He, too, began to retreat, first to his imagination and then, later, to prostitutes, phone sex and Internet chat rooms, trying to placate the increasing urgency to fuck more and more, as though it were a metaphor for an insatiable, implacable condition of the mysterious part of his consciousness, expressing desire for a completion, a wholeness that mundane living could never offer, at least not without having to sacrifice a basic human need, the base impulse to spray his semen as often and as far reaching as he could. It was narcissistic and immature, but he was unable to commit to the civic-minded outlook in his life, to be the family man who, as part of his maturation and involvement in a responsible world, had to govern his impulses. Why was it necessary to live his life sexually-impaired? It was not the world he had created. That world had forced him to make decisions before he was ready; before he was fully conscious. Why couldn’t he fuck with impunity? To trade that freedom for a life of limitations, for the questionable and conditional contentment of religion or philosophy or marriage, seemed to be a bargain that had been fabricated by the grand engineers of control, founded upon tenets of obsolete notions of what constituted a sound society. It was a notion that had been around so long that it was incredibly hard to resist its arguments. Yet there had always been people who rebelled against those premises, or contravened them in some manner. They were the hypocrites and outlaws, the deviants and reprobates who chafed under the collar of whatever norms were prevalent in a society. Carson didn’t see himself as being anyone special. He wasn’t seeking some kind of elevated status in his own estimation of self or anyone else’s. He had no inclination to glorify his condition, his inheritance, but he was damned tired of pretending that he had to be anything other than the piece of shit he was, if that’s how people chose to view him. 

He knew that Beth wasn’t really an asexual person, even if she acted like it with him. He had always kept a few tit and ass magazines at home, in the bedroom, not hidden in the basement. And he knew full well that Beth often masturbated alone while looking at those same magazines. She always had one or two stashed beneath the bed next to her large electric vibrator. And like him, she was attracted to the magazines featuring young models, those who were photographed to appear under the age of 18. Perhaps it was their sleek hips and tiny breasts that fascinated her, reminiscent of her own before work, childbirth and time had robbed the suppleness from her skin. It was a fact. Beth and Carson both had very active masturbation lives when they were alone, as compensation for the frustrations of their sex life together. Or, as Carson sometimes thought, because they just happened to be very horny people. In the early years of their marriage, when they were more honest with one another, she would tell him, “I gave it to myself real good four or five times today.” Carson suspected that was still true, but she didn’t tell him any more. And the thought of Beth masturbating had no power to arouse him.

His entire marriage, his entire life as a father, Carson had tried to juggle two selves, the first one founded upon appetite, the second on sacrifice. Any dolt could see the two approaches to living were not compatible. He realized today that a betting man, if he saw a snapshot, a schematic diagram of Carson’s conflicted psyche, would have no problem in determining which approach would prevail. It was humiliating for him to admit that in a contest between the love of one’s children and the love of money and sex, money and sex had won. In fact, there was no contest; only a protracted struggle to postpone the inevitable.

When he was with his kids, in the days when they could only worship him, Carson used to think it was easy to go to the beach on Sunday and toss the Frisbee or boogie board with Scully. Or roller blade with Liza along the boardwalk to the Santa Monica pier and back. They were his duties as a father, but duties that had also been pleasurable. And they were easily accomplished. He could easily do those things with his kids before setting off later the same day, casually and habitually, to the casino in Bell for a few hours of Hold’em, then topping off the evening at Selena’s, his favorite bargain whore who lived in Culver City, draining his balls on her plucky breasts and, finally, getting home at 2 a.m., climbing into bed next to Beth and falling asleep without even so much as washing the prostitute’s dried juices from his fatigued dick.

None of this had troubled Carson. Being a family man, a devoted father, didn’t preclude hanging out with card sharks and paying to get laid. His idea of a family man was just that, an idea, a construct, a device and a persona. His conviction was that as long as he did right by his family, provided for them materially, was home for birthdays and went to his daughter’s soccer games, he was doing what was necessary to raise a family. What was hidden from them, what they didn’t know, had no effect on his ability to be a good father. It was simply time spent away from them, just as if he had a job that required him to travel. But the result was something he hadn’t anticipated. The gambling and the need to fuck more and more women rapidly encroached on all his waking thoughts. Even while with his children, watching TV together, going to a ball game, opening Christmas gifts or going to church; he wasn’t really there. His mind was at the poker table, or lodged between the legs of a young and tiny whore, preferably one who talked like she’d been coached by a casting agent for a low-budget porn video shot in a dingy bungalow in Canoga Park.

Another thing he hadn’t counted on was how much of his identity was at stake when Beth finally kicked him out. His response had been, “well, fuck it. I’ll make a clean break from everything. Why keep a straight job when I’m no longer part of a family I have to support?” And he got himself fired from his sales job so he could play the card circuit full-time, convinced that he was good enough to make some interesting money. But without his job and his family he was without a self; without the basic and fundamental structures he had formed over the years that told him who he was everyday. He always thought that his hidden identity, the one he kept from Beth and his employer, was his essential self, the true self that had been compromised by his more respectable front as father and businessman. But without Beth, the kids, his desk at the office with his name on the door, the calls to clients, his business cards, all the routine and dull details of his normal life, without these he found he didn’t know what he was. There was nothing and no one left to consistently tell him, “This is who you are, Carson.” The old Carson was defrocked. He was left with the gambling/whoring Carson, dependent on card sharks, on indifferent and meretricious women to coldly remind him who and what he was – a shill, nothing but a means for other people’s livelihoods. If on occasion he had failed in some area of his life in the past, he at least had a structure built around him through his family that had cut him some slack, forgave him, continued to love him despite his faults. But now when he failed, nobody was there to say it was okay. They just thanked him for his money and went on their way. With the card sharks, they either hated him when he was winning or mocked him when he lost. And with a whore, there was only one way to keep her happy and it had nothing to do with dick size or the intrinsic value of his soul. With a whore he was everything he wanted her to believe until his time was up. Then he was nothing but an empty wallet – his stories, which an hour earlier had her laughing, now made her yawn and tell him she had an appointment to keep, and to please close the door on the way out. In a solvent moment of self-disgust, Carson thought to himself, “You paid to be told you have a huge dick; if you need a reiteration, buy yourself a fuckin’ parrot and a full-length mirror.”