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  Keep death daily before your eyes.

  —Saint Benedict

  The Dirty Hat

  The first touch of winter in North Florida, especially when the cold front triggers a long day of rain, always makes you feel that life is turning inward, that when you get home, there will be someone there. But in my case there wasn’t, which was why in December of last year I went back to the video store on Highway 301.

  It was the second week of the month, the middle of a cold, gray Thursday afternoon, when I stopped by after not having gone there for a long time. I’d been driving through the sort of fine mist that had me turning the windshield wipers on and off, on and off, since what was on the windshield didn’t seem like enough moisture to qualify as rain and yet after a few minutes without the wipers I couldn’t see. It was as if I were driving through a cloud. In Florida rain is almost always accompanied by lightning and thunder, but that day the whole world was wet, gray, soft, and gentle, so soft and gentle that it seemed to require some sort of touch, if not tenderness, which was why I decided on my way home from Gainesville to stop at Orange Heights—a place without a single citrus tree, or any elevation whatsoever; an example, I suppose, of what Henry James meant when he called Florida “a fearful fraud” in a letter to a friend.

  I was sure no one would be there on such a cold, wet day, though even that, I told myself, would be just fine. Sometimes you go to these places to be alone. But to my surprise, as I put on my turn signal, the white truck I’d been following since Gainesville did the same, and when we came to the video store, it turned into the parking lot. Even more surprising, after we turned off our engines, out of the white truck that had preceded me emerged a tall man whose silver hair, glasses, and neatly pressed blue denim shirt made him look like a prosperous farmer who belonged to the Baptist church we had just passed on our way here, the most conventional paterfamilias one could imagine. Watching him walk by, in fact, made me think of that story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which Young Goodman Brown goes into the forest at night and finds the leading figures of his community at a bonfire worshipping Satan.

  The video store had not been opened for satanic rites—though the people who went to the Baptist church down the road probably thought so; it had been opened for truck drivers on their long haul down to South Florida. That was why it sat on the southwest corner of the intersection of 301 and Highway 26, the east–west state road that connects Gainesville and Putnam Hall.

  Roads are to Florida what syringes are to veins—the swiftest means to introduce a foreign element into the body; in this case, humanoids. Build a road, and there goes the forest. Highway 301 was built as a sort of conveyor belt to move visitors to Central and South Florida as fast as possible, one of the first four-lane expressways to do this. That’s why for many years whenever I drove to Gainesville on 26 I had to come to a stop at 301 and wait for the light to change. This eventually made the intersection a magnet for businesses: two gas stations, the video arcade, and a fish and tackle store. Yet no intersection could have been less bustling. Even after the video store opened, the crossroads retained its somnolent air, because by that time 301 had been superseded as a major north–south route by two newer highways to the west—441 and I-75. And it was only because those new highways had reduced the traffic on 301 that truck drivers still used the latter, though they never stopped at the video store. What the customers in the video store got instead was the sound of their rigs whooshing by outside the blacked-out window behind which people stood, wondering why truckers didn’t stop there anymore.

  It wasn’t just the lure of I-75 and 441 that made the video store a rather sleepy place, however. Two years after the fish and tackle store closed, the state built an overpass so that people going to and from Gainesville on 26 wouldn’t have to stop at 301 at all. Before the overpass one had no choice, which meant that, during the interval created by the red light, one would inevitably count the cars in the parking lot across the highway and, depending on their number, have to consider dropping in—one more choice in a consumer society. But once the overpass was built there was no need to make a decision—instead of stopping at 301 to wait for the light you could drive right over it on the bridge and keep going.

  As I glanced down from the overpass, in a state where you rarely see anything from a height, two things never failed to impress me: one, how flat Florida is, and two, how quiet 301 is now. Florida is not an exciting state to drive; there are no mountains, nothing spectacular on the horizon. Years ago a friend from New York who’d decided to drive to Key West with his mother turned back north of Orlando because, he said when he called from a rest stop, “It’s just so boring!” Another friend got no farther than Kissimmee, where he called from the restaurant in which he was having lunch to say it held only two kinds of people: old men in neck braces and teenage girls dressed like prostitutes. Maybe that’s just Central Florida. But I understand how the flatness of the state, the absence of any interesting features, does make a drive down to Miami pretty monotonous; the last time I did it I needed an audiobook of Barbara Bush reading her memoir—descriptions of trips abroad after her husband had left the presidency that not only surprised her with their pomp and circumstance but also got me to Fort Lauderdale.

  Florida comes to you only when you stop somewhere and get out, preferably near or on a body of water; and then you see its esoteric beauty. Seen from the window of a speeding car it’s mostly drab. Looking down from the overpass across 301, however, it wasn’t only the flatness that struck me. There is something about an overpass that momentarily detaches you from your life. It’s like looking out the window of a Boeing 737 as you’re flying somewhere and seeing a private jet streak by below you in the opposite direction.

  That’s how I felt glancing down at 301 from the overpass. For some reason the trucks looked motionless, like objects in a diorama, a diorama of my life before the overpass was built, when my younger self had to wrestle with stopping at the video store—though I rarely did, even in my thirties. I preferred the boat ramp six miles to the east, where I could meet people in more pleasant surroundings. Video stores like the one on 301, its plate glass windows painted black as if to blot out not just the sunlight but also the judgment of other people, always seemed designed to make you feel that what you were doing there was “dirty.” Not the boat ramp. At the boat ramp you could sit in your car under the live oaks on autumn afternoons watching the squirrels run up and down the tree trunks. You could admire the egrets and blue herons standing along the canal while you waited for the man from Florida Pest Control to drive in—until the police clamped down, that is, and drove away everyone who was not there to fish, which left us with the video store.

  The video store was so depressing compared to the boat ramp that even after the latter was off-limits I seldom felt an inclination to stop at Orange Heights, and when I did, whatever pornographic fantasies I walked in wit
h always disintegrated in the sight of the glum and silent men walking up and down the hallways, men so nondescript you would never have suspected them of being homosexual. If aesthetic standards are the foundation of your sexual requirements, I learned, you have restricted yourself to a very small portion of the human race. That was why I was grateful for the overpass—it meant there was no need to debate whether or not to visit a place that I was certain would be a waste of time.

  After the overpass was built you had to want to visit the video store, because to get there you now had to take a detour. Driving to Gainesville you had to get off just east of 301 at a vegetable farm where people could pick their own strawberries, proceed to the intersection, and wait for the light to cross. Coming from Gainesville you had to turn off a quarter-mile west of 301 onto a two-lane road that went by a big white Baptist church that over the years had been adding more and more ancillary buildings as the congregation prospered. In both directions one had to go out of one’s way, which made visiting the video store a commitment—not something one did on the spur of the moment.

  There was, however, one reason I’d stop at Orange Heights on my way home from Gainesville that had nothing to do with sex or loneliness, and that was to listen to the music on the public radio station broadcast from the university, because its signal extended only as far as 301. WUFT-FM, like many public radio stations, had played classical music until the mid-1980s, when it switched to all-talk, which upset so many listeners that the station created a separate frequency, a spin-off for people who could not bear the loss of Beethoven and Brahms. But the signal of this subsidiary station did not go nearly as far as the main frequency; in fact it stopped, more or less, at Orange Heights.

  There had always been something frustrating about WUFT-FM when the station played classical music—as if the selections were being chosen by music majors who refused to play masterpieces because they were too popular. When it became all-talk the station was tedious for other reasons. Its few local shows were dumped for syndicated programs that continued even after their moderators were no longer with us. Even after one of the hosts of Car Talk died, for example, they kept broadcasting reruns on weekends.

  The spin-off station created for classical music presented another problem. If, say, they did select a Brahms symphony while you were still in Gainesville, the minute you crossed 301 it disintegrated in a burst of static. So when some masterpiece of nineteenth-century German music, the only balm, I often think, for being alive, was played, I’d have to make the detour to Orange Heights and listen to the rest of the piece in the parking lot of the video store; and then, when the Brahms or Beethoven or Mozart was over, I’d start the car and drive home, because there was no point in juxtaposing the emotions created by their music with the feelings that greeted me the minute I entered the video arcade.

  But one day when Mozart’s last piano concerto was on the radio I stopped in the parking lot to listen to the final note and decided to go in. What a mistake! Once inside I stood in my usual corner just inside the entrance and watched the expected assortment of nondescript men walk around until they all gave up and left, at which point a very young man in khaki shorts and a baseball cap came in and they all returned, like buzzards on roadkill. It was the old story: the power of youth and beauty, in this case a student who, when he left, took all the hope and energy with him. There was nothing to do but get in the car, drive across 301, buy pecans for my sister at a roadside stand, and go home. And that was the last time I visited the video store until that cold, wet December day I am speaking of, when I was in such a mood driving back from Gainesville in the mist that even though there was nothing on the radio but some Renaissance dance music involving hautboys and drums that I would have been perfectly happy to have disintegrate into static, I decided to stop at Orange Heights.

  The minute I parked and turned off the engine, what struck me was the silence—not just the silence of the intersection, but the deeper stillness animals must feel when they are stalking their prey. There is something primal about cruising. In fact, I was so nervous about going inside that wet day that I remained in my car leafing through a book I’d just taken out of the library in Gainesville even when the man from the white truck passed my windshield.

  I did not have to rush; I knew what was waiting for me. The video store consists of a big room lined with racks of pornography and sex toys, a theater in the back where heterosexual porn films are shown, and a small annex for homosexuals off the entrance foyer you can reach without even going into the main room, where the cashier sits on a raised dais supervising his or her domain. That day the cashier was a woman who happened to be standing outside the door smoking a cigarette on her break, smiling graciously at the men going past her like the hostess in a restaurant—a sight so unnerving that I waited till she had finished smoking and gone back inside before I got out of my car. Then, once inside, I walked quickly past the doorway to the big room, entered the gay annex, and paused just inside the doorway to adjust my eyes to the darkness before walking down the narrow corridor lined with video booths to see who if anyone was inside.

  I’d been watching so much pornography at home that it seemed to me I needed to see real people having sex. Given the abundance of porn on the Internet, though it sometimes took hours one could always find people with whom one wanted to have sex, and when you did you were given the rare privilege of watching two or more individuals who would never give you the time of day in real life make love to one another while you were, so to speak, in the room. The disadvantage, of course, was that you weren’t, and when it was over you hadn’t really had sex. You hadn’t touched or been touched. The reason I was at the video store that wet December afternoon was that the night before while I watched two men make out in a film, the younger one had turned his face up to the older man in the middle of giving him a blow job and the two of them had begun kissing, and I realized at that moment that the young man was saying to the older one: I am yours, my body is yours, you can do anything you want with it—anything. His whole posture, sprawled like an odalisque across the older man’s outstretched leg, feeding on his genitals, made the moment when the young one suddenly lifted his head to kiss the older man a gesture of complete abjection, one that said: I surrender. Of course, the danger when I got in the car and drove over to the video store was that I’d see no one to whom I wished to submit—and the other problem: Who would want a man my age to surrender in the first place?

  Indeed, the idea of touching an actual person was becoming increasingly unimaginable, for not only was I wasting enormous amounts of time watching porn—unless no time that is devoted to erotic matters is wasted—but watching sex on film (where nothing could go wrong) had made me reluctant to have sex in reality, where so much can.

  The problem was that my life had acquired an element of sexual frustration unlike anything I’d ever felt before—I’d been feeling almost sick to my stomach, as if I was coming down with the flu. I’d found myself the day before standing at the stove putting on a pot of soup for lunch when I began pushing my groin against the oven door; and when I went over to the kitchen sink, I began to hump it. I need to check into the hospital in Gainesville, I told myself, and ask the nurse to hook me up to an IV—an IV filled with semen. Instead, I was watching movies on my laptop, clicking on one film after the other in search of a scenario (Japanese Businessman, Extreme Grandpa, Motel Hookup, Doctor’s Visit) that would give me an orgasm, just the way I’d spent hours at the baths in Jacksonville walking the halls, or sitting in my car at the boat ramp waiting for the Florida Pest Control van to drive in.

  There was another problem: my father had spent the final years of his retirement playing solitaire on the very table on the back porch on which I liked to put my laptop when I watched porn. He’d sat there with his back to the lake, drumming his fingertips on the table in an expression of profound boredom, until one day, while I was reading in my bedroom, I heard him call my name and went out, and he said to me, “I cannot
raise my right arm.” In other words, he’d had a stroke—just a few feet away from the chair in which years later I found myself sitting as I searched for a porn film that was sufficiently well filmed but truly amateur. The only difference between us was that he had played solitaire and I was watching people have sex: a generational decline, I suppose.

  Solitaire is just that: a game one plays by oneself. He was waiting for the right card to turn up. I was spending hours searching for a scenario that would lead me to an orgasm, though I could never relax at the table, given what had happened just a few feet from my chair. I’d have to go back into my bedroom, the room in which I’d heard the words that announced what was, eventually, his death, as sudden and life-changing as the apparition of the Archangel Gabriel when he appeared to Mary to announce her pregnancy. But that was just a matter of using my imagination. When faced with actual images on my laptop, I had become aware that the more porn I watched, the more sensitive I was becoming to the slightest thing that would destroy the illusion that I was watching people really having sex. All too often I could see that the men were merely acting—especially when there was no chemistry between them, and the sex seemed to be an athletic exercise in which the actor was trying to strengthen his glutes with thrusts so rapid and forceful they made one think that Americans don’t really enjoy sex but only time at the gym. Pleasure seemed to be the last thing on anyone’s minds in these movies; it was rare when someone took his time and treated the other person with any sensuality. That was why I found myself searching for films that looked amateurish—for the genuine, the authentic, though now that everyone can film themselves having sex they are so video-savvy that the frequency with which they stop to adjust the camera angle makes one miss the old days when people would pause only to take a hit of poppers. Many nights I’d gone to bed after four or five hours looking for some elusive film I couldn’t find, and now, that wet day in December, I was more than normally depressed—not just because I hadn’t found that film but because Christmas was coming.