| by
Dennis Hensley
On a 737 somewhere
between L.A. and Phoenix, I’m squirming in my cramped
seat, clutching my walkman in my sweaty palms, and trying
not to blush. I have actress Lindsay Crouse in my headphones
and she’s reading Anne Rice’s novel, The Witching
Hour, a book-on-tape that’s gotten good word-of-mouth
from several friends. By the end of side two, I’m thanking
my lucky stars that Ms. Crouse took a break all that film
work to be my narrator today. For here is a woman who truly
understands the meaning of “good word of mouth.”
“He was kissing her,” Lindsay reads, “as
his fingers stroked her breasts. The pleasure was so keen.
Paralyzing.” Seems one of the novel’s main
characters, a doctor/witch named Rowan is getting laid royally
by a ghost in the first class cabin of an airplane. Okay,
so I’m stuck in coach. Still, the coincidence is invigorating.
I lower my tray table coyly and listen on. “He kissed
her again forcing his tongue very gently between her lips
and his fingers touched her nipples. Again he pinched her
nipples, just a little more cruelly. Oh, so delicious. Come
inside me. I want to be filled up, yes, with your tongue and
with you. Come in. Harder. It was enormous yet smooth, bathed
as it was in her fluids. She came silently.” So
did the stewardess who startled me out of my Crouse Coma.
I take my much needed complimentary beverage from her and
down it in one swig, all the while wondering if listening
to Lindsay Crouse get diddled by a ghost on a plane while
on a plane somehow entitles me to membership in the Mile High
Club.
An hour later,
I’m heading out of Phoenix on my way to a home town
family reunion some 3 hours away. I pass by what looks like
a video store. I notice a sign in the window reading, “Heard
Any Good Books Lately?” and stop the rent-a-car. Coincidentally,
in the afterglow of my audio Crouse encounter, I’ve
happened to walk into what I come to find out is the only
store of it’s kind in the country, Redding’s Audiobook
Superstore, a veritable K-Mart of books-on-tape. Claiming
to be a journalist doing research, I state my needs to the
long-haired salesman, Wade. “Wade,” I say. “I
want stars. And I want sex. Preferably on the same tape.”
Wade smiles knowingly, loads me down, and sends me on my way.
Though Wade
rented me novels designed to appeal to every sexual whim and
orientation , I decide to start out with something cheap and
traditional: Heather Thomas reading Rich Men, Single Women
by Pamela Beck and Patty Massman. It takes me a while to get
to the juicy part, but when I do, it’s worth it. I nearly
drive off the road when Heather describes in that unmistakable
voice of hers the following coupling between Nicky and Paige,
who I gather are, respectively, a rich man and a single woman:
“Are you sure you can handle it?” he asked, flipping
them both over so he’s riding on top of her. “I
can handle it,” she promised moving her hips into his
as he controls the pace. This is quite possibly Heather’s
best work since Zapped, I think and listen on. “I
don’t know why I’m doing this,” he hedged.
“Because you can’t help yourself,” she suggested
growing intrigued, both of them growing more turned on. He
was going to burst inside her any second. ” All
my life I’ve wanted to hear Heather Thomas use the word
“hedged” in a sentence and it’s finally
happened. I can die now.
I finish with
Heather and decide I’m in the mood for some smut of
a higher brow. I insert D.H. Lawrence’s scandalous Lady
Chatterley’s Lover read with Masterpiece Theater
aplomb by Janet Suzman. Though I’m sure I’ve seen
the well-regarded British thespian in something, I can’t
recall what so I’m forced to rely on my imagination
to conjure a visual picture. Luckily, Lady Janet paints a
rich and, to quote Anne Rice, “Oh, so delicious”
one: She felt his penis risen against her with silent amazing
force and assertion and she let herself go to him. She yielded
with a quiver and went all open to him. Her hands strayed
over him. How beautiful he felt. His back, the smallish globes
of the buttocks and the strange weight of the balls between
his legs. What a mystery. She crept nearer to him and she
felt again the slow momentous surging rise of the phallus
and her heart melted in a kind of awe, and this time her whole
self quivered unconscious and alive. Janet continues trip
my trigger in scene after quivering scene, but my favorite
comes she straps on a Yorkshire dialect as Mellors, the working
class stud who gives Lady Chatterly a lesson in dirty words
and their meanings: He bent down and kissed her soft flank
and covered it up. “You do care for me,” she said.
“Aye, thou good cunt what I likes.” “What
is cunt?” she asked. “It’s thee, down there,
and what I get when I’m inside thee, and what thou gets
when I’m inside thee.” “Cunt, it’s
like ‘fuck’ then?” “Nay, nay, animals
fuck but cunt’s a lot more than that.” “Oh,
thank thee, Janet,” I sigh. They just don’t read
‘em like that anymore.
Hearing Janet
say “soft flank” in that posh English accent of
hers whets my appetite for more of the same. I pop Juliet
Mills reading Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls
into the car stereo and before long I’m getting a delightful
aural taste of what Juliet’s strapping younger husband
Maxwell Caulfield must get every day. I’m forced to
crack a window when Juliet dances her agile tongue over the
following scene between Jennifer and Tony. Juliet reads as
Tony: “No one should have breasts like that.”
He buried his face in them, sinking to his knees. “Oh,
God, I just can’t believe it. Every time I touch them
I can’t believe it. I never want to move.”
I can’t help but picture Juliet as I remember her, from
Nanny and the Professor. I can see her going topless
between the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family
on Friday nights and when she starts using Queen Victoria’s
royal “We” to refer to herself and her breasts,
I think I might swoon: “We’ll miss you Tony.
Marry us Tony. We want to belong to you.”
With about forty five miles left to drive, and my windows
fogged up to the point of being hazardous, I decide to cool
my jets a bit by listening to Eric Stoltz read Michael Chabon’s
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. With Eric, I figure, if
things get too steamy, I can just imagine him as Rocky Dennis
in Mask, or, if that doesn’t cool me off, recall the
infamous “gizmo slipping” scene from Waterdance.
At first I think I’ve got the wrong tape, because the
reader sounds like a girl, but it is indeed Mr. Stoltz floating
out of my speakers, portraying a young man about to have his
first same sex experience: ”Could we please do it
slowly?” “No,” he said. And he was right.
We did it very rapidly in the weatherwoman’s bed passing
through each backward and alien, but familiar, station on
the old road to intercourse. My heart was simultaneously broken
and filled with lust. I was exhausted and I loved every minute
of it. It was strange and elating to feel myself, for once,
the weaker. It hurt a great deal, but when he said he’d
finished, I did not want him to stop and I started to cry.
Oh, Eric, you really had me going ‘til you got to the
crying part.
I arrive home
and after a few hours of doing the family thing, I sneak off
to my old room to indulge in more audio passion, a pastime
I liken to having phone sex with the stars. I stretch out
on the bed I slept in when I was a child and decide to take
in a Morgan Fairchild double feature. First, Morgan reads
me John Lutz‘s Single White Female, and though
I initially envision a pert Bridget Fonda as I listen, by
the time Morgan gets to turning phrases such as “the
rising and falling contortions of her glistening body”
and “a rhythm as old as time,” Bridget is but
a memory and my mind is filled only with Morgan. “Give
me more Morgan” I mutter as I replace SWF with
Pat Booth’s Malibu. Before long, Morgan rewards
me with this interlude: “Tony Valentino had taken
Alison Vanderbilt as Stanley would have taken Blanche. Cruelly.
Greedily. His body was taut like the strings of an instrument.”
I can’t decide if the churning sound I’m hearing
outside of my headphones is my mother blending something in
the kitchen or Tennessee Williams rolling over in his grave.
I turn my attention back to Morgan just in time to hear her
describe Alison’s long legs “thrashing in the
liquid aftermath of his crude invasion.” Though I’ve
never heard anyone else say it, I doubt there’s an actress
on earth who can say “liquid aftermath” with as
much erotic charge as Morgan Fairchild.
After dinner,
while listening to Judith Krantz’s Scruples,
I decide that one of my favorite features of this audio-novel
business is that it affords stars the opportunity to play
roles that they would never be considered for in reality.
Where else but in an audio-novel could I get Dana Delaney,
my current reader, playing out a love scene between two gay
men? The woman’s won Emmys for less challenging work
than this: “You’re dying for it,”
Dana growls as Sergio (Gay Man #1) “It’s the
only thing you really want. I’m going to lock this door
and you’re going to give it to me right here, aren’t
you Alan? Aren’t you?” I can just imagine
Dana sitting at the recording session, her chin tucked into
her neck, trying in vain to sound like Harvey Feirstein in
Torch Song Trilogy “Yes. Yes,” Dana
sighs as Alan (Gay Man #2). “Oh, yes, Dana, yes,”
I sigh and fall asleep smiling.
During the
course of the weekend I continue my listening rampage. I listen
to Loretta Swit describe one of the characters in Sandra Brown’s
French Silk as having “a mouth that made him
glad some laws were unenforceable.” Hot Lips, indeed.
I endure James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice
read by Aidan Quinn who sounds absolutely sedated until he
gets to the following juicy part: “I took her in
my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers. “Bite me.
Bite me.” I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so
deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running
down her neck when I carried her upstairs.” I follow
up with David Lindsey’s S & M thriller Mercy,
which, as read by Judith Ivey, makes Aidan sound like a Jersey
Boy Scout: “When the last buckle was snapped,”
Judith reads, “she suddenly felt lighter than air,
as if she had been released rather than bound. The choreography
was followed precisely. She cried and writhed and fought the
bindings. She begged for it to stop. She pleaded. But it continued.
She rolled and tossed upon waves of pleasure that she had
never imagined.” When Judith goes on to explain,
in a dialogue between a cop and a lesbian, the difference
between being a “top” and being a “bottom”,
all I can say is “Judith, you’ll always be the
top in my book.”
I’m
a hour out of Phoenix on my return trip and I’ve listened
to all but one of Wade’s rentals. I’m reluctant
to listen to the final book, Robin Leach’s reading of
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, not only because
it’s not a novel like the others, and he’s not
an actor like the others, but because Robin Leach strikes
me as being about as sexy as diaper rash. But, by this time,
I’m so wound up and curious, I stick in the tape anyway.
Before long Robin’s giving me the full poop on Clark
Gable and Carole Lombard’s sex life: “Lombard
liked to pull pranks on Gable”, Robin shouts, “such
as leaving a gift-wrapped knitted cock-warmer in his dressing
room with a note, “Don’t let it get cold, bring
it home hot for me.”” I have to rewind. Did
Robin say “cock-warmer”? I listen again. Yes,
he did say “cock-warmer”, but he just as well
have said “Son of Sam” for as much oomph as he
was bringing to it. Come back Heather Thomas. All is forgiven.
I eject Robin disgustedly and return him to Wade without rewinding.
It’s
been two weeks since my jaunt to Arizona and I haven’t
listened to a book-on-tape since. I blame my indifference
on the bad taste Robin Leach left in my ears. I guess audio
love affairs are like real-life love affairs. One lousy one
can put you off them completely.
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