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Keith Knight: Cleaning out Gunther

Incoming freshman seek advice. Ask questions, give answers in the Education area of Table Talk

Financial roulette with Sallie Mae
By Kristina Blachere
Make no mistake, the corporate mistress of student loans will get you in the end, but in the meantime you can play her at her own game and sometimes win
(10/12/98)

Creeps on campus
By Dawn MacKeen
Do bad guys have a right to higher education?
(10/09/98)

My crabs or yours?
By Dan Stern
Protecting yourself from the creatures of the sexual swamp
(10/07/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
Trouncing feminist film criticism and its cadre of ass-kissing puritans
(10/07/98)

Scholars of smut
By Carina Chocano
World Pornography Conference: Academics cheer as porn stars theorize
(10/05/98)

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GEOMETRY AND HOT PIX | PAGE 1, 2
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Back home, we sit around for a while and drink juice. Kevin thumbs through the yellow pages.

"What are you looking for?" my father asks.

"Just looking."

My father turns to me. He wants sympathy and solidarity plus a little company: two perplexed souls shaking their heads. His face wants my face to explain this boy for whom the absurd is often more compelling than the real. But I clean away all expression. I don't want to fall into this.

After the yellow pages, my father wanders off and Kevin puts in 45 minutes with the geometry textbook. I sit beside him. I answer what I can, he asks what he can. We discuss triangles. Not knowing where the real problem is, he can only offer token questions. None gets at the heart of anything, but we manage to make our way through the weekend's homework. At one point, I hear steps outside the door. They're my father's, I know, and for an instant I squeeze my pencil and pray that he not come in. I can tell Kevin is praying the same. Don't come check on his progress, I plead in my head, don't even offer to turn another light on; we're getting somewhere. The steps linger but move on. Kevin's relief is clear, though he doesn't say anything. We get back to the math and eventually finish all 30 problems. His teacher's assigned a bonus question, something about planes, but Kevin leaves it. I can't solve her problems for her, he says, and I decide it's probably good to have a sense of humor about it all.

"Good work," I say. It's better to encourage, I've decided, than worry about whether it sounds like I'm talking to a dog. I punch him lightly on the knee and get up to find a book of my own. As I'm leaving the room, a couch pillow hits me in the back.

"You just threw a pillow at the wrong guy, buddy."

I turn. A second pillow hits me in the head.

"You just threw a second pillow at the wrong guy, buddy."

I pull him off the couch mid-giggle and we're at it like old times. He's gotten stronger, but I manage to get him in a half nelson. The half nelson has been the terminus of every roughhouse we've ever conducted. Shall we dance? I ask him for the 1,000th time in our lives. He declines demurely and I release him back to the couch.

"I tried reading the Bible last night," he says as we catch our breath. "I got through Genesis."

"When did you get so bored?"

"I didn't like the fall of man stuff," he says, ignoring my question. "It seems like a weird way of explaining things."

"The fall of man," I say. "I used to think it was poetry. I thought they meant the autumn of man."

Kevin smiles. I can tell he likes the autumn of man, at least as much as a 14-year-old can like something he can't point to. I laugh at something too, and punch him on the knee, and go to find a book of my own.

The books in my parents' shelves look wrong -- old, but not old enough. I feel fussy. They are about politics or parenting or French spies. They give the impression of all having the same ugly cover, the way all cars from the 1970s seem brown and dented. A book, I've learned, is about the only thing you can judge by its cover. I grab a couple but head downstairs to the computer.

Checking my e-mail I find a letter from SuziExtreme@hottail.com. She's written to tell me about a Web site featuring her giant tits. She's probably written to a million guys like me, or a million guys different from me, but I'm not offended. Nor am I offended that these people have used their tech sense to figure out my e-mail address. One visit to a Web site, I've been told, and they mark you. For all I know, they have access to every file on my computer. Still, one's capacity for outrage abates looking up a bound teen's skirt. Can I really complain about my privacy?

To visit SuziExtreme's site for her giant tits, of all the giant tits in cyberspace, is like going to the Redwoods to see a particularly tall tree. I go, but only because I was invited. Despite my better judgment, a part of me worries no one will show up to see her naked. I picture her putting her pants back on after a while, sheepishly, quickly, more embarrassed than when she took them off.

SuziExtreme, it turns out, doesn't exist. The site bearing her name instead contains photos of women named Racquel, Samantha and Julee. There are always choices in these places, such a funny occasion for pluralism. I click on a miniature picture of Julee that promises a larger one. Some whirrings and the promise is kept. Julee's feet and legs float askew, thrown up haphazard, a dramatic flail about them: She's falling. Not literally, of course -- her back is square on a shag carpet -- this is a reenactment, a dramatization of the fall. The picture gives no clue from where. And maybe in the end, this is where the porn lover gets his true kicks: One could imagine any number of heights from which she fell, or was pushed, or jumped. For all that these shots don't leave to the imagination, after all, the connoisseur must still provide context. Without an invented narrative -- even the tacit and uncomplicated kind -- a penis inside a vagina is just a penis inside a vagina, flesh frozen two-dimensionally in a moment the viewer can never penetrate.

So he imagines the fall. She was a cheerleader, a nurse, a next door neighbor, a teacher. She was upright, virtuous, chaste, pure. She flitted girlishly about a world that spun far above the lair of Internet perverts. But she was also other things: the virgin-whore, the tease, the coed too innocent to remember underwear. She didn't see it coming, perhaps, but felt it when it came. And when it came, when gravity clawed her body down at 9.8 meters per second, when her own weight sent her floor-ward all the faster, a man with a digital camera made sure she never landed.

It's little comfort that my porn fascination is not really about sex, if there's even such a thing as not really about sex. I don't want to be one of those men for whom it is a cultural artifact. I'd rather read a book. Still, these days I turn on the computer and, so often, end up in terrible, weird places. Soon, I know, the disgust that overwhelms me after five minutes in these places will occur before I even get there. I will outgrow this phase and remember it with uncertainty and complicated theories.

The computer off, I go to find something else to do. My father stops me at the stairs. His face is sad and thin, I notice suddenly, like a man's rather than a dad's. He looks to me again for something. I don't know how to give it. I start to tell him not to worry too much, the old advice standby, but he interrupts.

"He's my child," he says. "What else am I going to do?"

"Maybe he needs to hit rock bottom," I suggest. This little gem is just as insipid, but maybe with a teen you can't stray from insipid. What am I even talking about? I ask myself, having caught this last thought. I'm in over my head.

"When's rock bottom? When's that?" he asks, but I'm already on my way up the stairs. I can't solve his problems for him, I think. I leave him standing there.

We all have dinner together later, a soup I've cooked, plus salad, and we talk about the weather. It's October, the autumn of man, and outside another squirrel is rustling around in some bright yellow leaves. There's a breeze. We agree it's a very good season.

"Maybe I'll be a weatherman when I grow up," Kevin says. He's in a good mood.

My father wants to say you'll have to pass the ninth grade, but he refrains. I pour him more soup as a reward.

"I think you'd be a very good weatherman," my mom says, back in the game. "You already have that plaid jacket."

After dinner, we disperse. I double-check the Greyhound schedule and make plans with friends back in New York. They ask how my homecoming went. I say the home team's not doing so hot. Season's not over, they offer. No one likes talking about family.

I turn on the computer but turn it off. I remember the first instance of pornography in my life. I was 10 and I found a torn ad on the way home from school. The ad, announcing the opening of a strip club somewhere, featured a naked dancer facing the camera. She had a big forced smile that made her look sick. See Me Live, it said in big letters near her mouth. I misread it at first: as a plea for someone to witness her living.

Kevin wanders into my room and it's nice to see a real person.

"What were you doing?" he asks.

"Thinking. How about you?"

"Same, I guess. Thinking never feels like thinking, though."

"That's true," I say. We're formal and stiff sometimes. All those half nelsons, but we're formal and stiff sometimes.

"Well, I guess I'd better study some more."

"I don't know -- maybe you should take the night off. You shouldn't kill yourself over this stuff."

"Yeah," he says. "But I think I'd better study some more."

"All right. Good luck, then."

"Thanks for helping with my homework earlier."

"Don't be silly."

"All right. Well, I guess I'll see you in a while."

"November," I say. "I'll be back for Thanksgiving, if not sooner."

I decide not to say good luck on the quiz. He says to hug him goodbye in the morning and I promise to. He goes off to work. I sit there a minute, then pick up one of the books I took from my parents' shelf. It's a thriller. It promises a tidy and sensible roundup of everything by the last page. I stretch out and start reading. By the third page someone's stabbed. By the ninth page I'm struggling to pay attention.

Some time later, a heavy book shuts in Kevin's room, snapping me a little more awake. Julee, with her crazy fake name, pops into my head. Those girls aren't falling, I know. To believe they are is to hide from a scarier truth: There's no such thing as falling. There are no heights to account for differences within us, no falls to explain what is profane or just sad in the angles of someone's life. Nothing quite makes sense of a voice begging See Me Live. Things are arranged laterally and loosely, one big unreasonable plane, with shapes pressed flat and not always connected to each other.
SALON | Oct. 14, 1998

Chris Colin is a freelance writer living in Oakland, Calif. He graduated from Vassar in 1997 with a degree in English.