Pornography-1968 by Wayne Karlin

Nights he sat in a concrete box of an apartment on Ventura Boulevard, watching his war in silent black and white on a ten-inch television screen, a disembodied eye on a pressed-wood dresser.  

Days he took classes at a community college and worked a job the State of California employment office had gotten for him at the warehouse of a pornography publisher in the Valley. He stood alone in a cavernous warehouse in Van Nuys pulling covers decorated with pictures of splayed women off magazines returned from adult book stores, so that the publisher could re-cycle them. The covers were printed without dates. Shelves pressed all around him, stacked boxes of paperbacks: The Sexual Habits of College Coeds, Secrets of the SS Brothels, Backdoor Delights, Candystripe Confessions, written by housewives and retirees from the Valley who used academic titles and the names of local streets for their pen names. Dr. Sherman Way, PhD.  The magazine titles were more direct, turned to the East: Slanty Sluts, Anal Asians, Oriental Orifices. He got it. Mentally edited the titles down to their true meaning. Gook, Dink. The women’s eyes on the covers raked him.  He lay his hands over them, pushed them down.  He was the Manual Stripper, abbreviated as M.S, on the company’s orientation sheet.  His M.O.S.—Military Occupational Specialty— is M.S, he told himself.  He would pick up a carton of magazines from the floor and put it on a long table, take out one magazine, pull the front and rear cover to one side with his left hand, hold down the body of the magazine with the palm of his right and the weight of his body, and neatly pull off the cover. Bing-bang, the past was gone. That easy.

He’d put the stripped magazine (SM) into another box. He stood at his table stripping covers. Someone else would re-cover them. It wasn’t his job. The women looked up at him, their eyes accusing. He put his palm against their faces, their breasts, their pink and pearly genitals, and pushed. He couldn’t separate them from the dead.  They piled around his legs, clung to his knees on the deck of his helicopter.  Hot casings from his machine gun showered them. They entwined, bleeding into each other, reaching up, clutching at his knees.  How had he gotten here? He was an unlinked bullet. Torn from the umbilical-dangled belly of the helicopter into the belly of the C-147, spewed out into America, 

into waking up one dazed morning utterly alone in a ten by twelve studio apartment in a small complex of stacked concrete boxes between two gas stations on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana: a linty, purplish rug, a monk’s bed, a black velvet Keene picture, a chipped desk and bureau, and a black and white TV.  Shadows from his war played on it, grainy, nebulous. Robert Kennedy died on it live one midnight, in the same lambent light.  How had he gotten here?  What the fuck had all that been about?  Where was everybody? Streams of traffic passed indifferently outside his window, shadow people on their way to shadow lives, oblivious to the shadows pressing weightlessly against them on their seats, open mouths pressed against all the windows. The driver and their passengers cursed rubbed frantically, with their sleeves with handkerchiefs with the flats of their hands, at the mist, the women’s breath, the breath of the dead spreading over the glass, distorting Ventura Boulevard, the shapes of gas stations, fast food restaurants car dealerships diffused through mist, flickering apart, braiding into other shapes, into eyes formed out of fire and palm fronds and sunlight sharp as knives, into eyes that disappeared when the drivers strained to see them but lingered in the corner of their visions. He had the photos he’d taken in Vietnam developed, bought albums, spent sleepless nights arranging and rearranging photographs, tearing them off and re-pasting them and ripping them away again and pressing them back down as they pressed stigmata up into his palms, again and again and always there, and in the morning the women always waited with their eyes.

Wayne Karlin has published eight novels, a collection of short stories and three works of non-fiction. He has received two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction, the Juniper Prize for Fiction, and the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in the Arts Award.

6 September 2024