He is gone, but he sustains you with a sense of possibility, of pleasure. You may be freshly divorced, you may live in a city where the women are strong and the men are pretty and you may think your chance of finding a wonderful straight single man to date are about the same as San Francisco’s chance of having another big earthquake (it could happen, but you don’t really believe it). But somewhere in the back of your mind is that face, that desire and that island. It lifts you back to buoyancy, even if you don’t expect to see or hear from the French professor you met on Ischia ever again.

Then one day a postcard from Paris arrives, a colorful Matisse print of a woman dancing. “It was great!” he writes. “I can’t forget … Love, M.”

It is a little treasure you look at too often in the next few days. You wonder about writing him back and hope that his wife doesn’t open his mail. You think maybe it’s better not to write, though, better to leave that perfect fantasy, those four splendid days together, alone. And so you don’t.

But then a month later you are packing a bag for a business trip and find a roll of film. You develop it, and there’s the postcard sunset, there’s the view from your terrace of whitewashed houses with pots of geraniums trailing down to the beach, and there’s the French aesthetics professor himself, leaning back in sunglasses against the white railing of the ship, flawless blue sky and sea behind him, collar open, cigarette clasped in his smirking mouth. You can’t resist.

So you enclose the photos in a plain brown envelope with no return address and mail it off. You write in Italian that before you went to Ischia, you had a fantasy about encountering a lovely man for a little fling. The reality was so much better than the fantasy, you say, that now you have a much richer imagination. You remember his astrological sign and tell him happy birthday, too.

Not long after, you are feeling depressed and exhausted. You’ve spent most of the day in divorce mediation, using all your wits against an adversary who knows your vulnerabilities better than anyone else. You go home alone while the ex goes back to his new girlfriend. But there is a little package waiting for you from France: a tin of Gitanes cigarettes, the type you used to steal from M. after dinner. You go outside to smoke, which you never do, and the terrible day dissipates in the pleasurable haze of memory.

You realize that it is dangerous to rely on the French professor to cheer you up. So you hold on to the image of M. only to remind yourself that there are lovely, intellectual men out there who are relaxed and romantic, who have a delicious sensibility about life. There are men who make you feel like a woman. You wonder if there are any American men like that.

You’re thinking about this one evening and have another one of his cigarettes and a tiny folded paper flutters out of the tin. Your letter arrived exactly on my birthday, M. writes. Better that these photos exist, because otherwise I couldn’t believe it was all real. Today under cold, gray Parisian skies, “Penso con piacere al piacere,” I’m thinking with pleasure about pleasure.

By spring he is suggesting a little rendezvous somewhere between Paris and San Francisco. You tell him that the aesthetic choice would be to never see him again, to keep the memory of your romantic chance meeting intact. He says that as an art professor, he likes your argument very much, but as a man he wants to know: What are you doing in September? You say that the only place between Paris and San Francisco is Newfoundland, and that would be a bit brisk for sunbathing, no?

In May, a friend announces at a dinner party that she’s rented a place in Florence for a month and everyone is invited. You think it would be nice to go to Italy for a few days just to flirt. Italian men, unlike American men, like to flirt even when there’s no chance of any tangible outcome. They just like to let you know, in restaurants and on the street, that they appreciate women, all kinds of women, that in fact they like women better than anything else in the world, and thank God he made creatures like you.

American men, you think, have more of a museum gift shop mentality about women: What’s the point of spending time in the actual museum appreciating the art if you can’t take it home with you?

So you hope the dinner-party friend was serious, and you book a ticket to Italy for a few days. It seems rash, but traveling where people flirt will help you stop feeling so invisible. As an afterthought you scrawl a postcard to M. telling him when you’ll be in Italy. You know he teaches and has a family and won’t be able to get away.

Your phone rings one evening and someone sounding like Gerard Depardieu in “Green Card” asks, “Is Laura?” It is so surprising you can barely speak. He asks if he’s disturbing you, and you say of course not, you’re quite content to hear his voice. He is abrupt: When does your plane arrive in Milano? You tell him the details. “I’ll meet you on the steps of the Duomo at 10,” he says. “Ti aspettero.” I’ll wait for you.

On the endless flight to Milano you read a fat book, “The Decameron,” to calm your nerves. Written in the shadow of the 1348 plague, Giovanni Boccaccio’s comic masterpiece is about a group of 10 noble young women and men who gather in villas outside Florence to wait out the Black Death by dancing, eating, playing music and telling tales. For 10 days they each tell a story on such themes as love, deception, adultery and getting out of tricky situations with a witty remark. In the midst of death, fear and sorrow, they live in the moment with as much pleasure as possible. The stories celebrate luscious sensuality above all else. There is the tale of a judge’s wife, for instance, who quickly tires of her husband’s feeble sexual appetites (pre-Viagra, he downs vernaccia wine for its uplifting properties, to little effect). Kidnapped by a handsome young rogue, she pretends not to recognize her husband when he comes to rescue her. “I would never go back to you,” she says when she finally lets on that she knows him, “because if you were to be squeezed from head to toe, there wouldn’t be a thimbleful of sauce to show for it.”

The tales describe the endless varieties of love — adulterous passion, courtly love, enduring marriages, homosexual love, forbidden love, infatuation. The moral — if you can call it that, and why not — is that fulfilling sexual desire is more important than any of the constraints society might put on people’s inclinations to “forgather” together. As one storyteller comments after a tale of adultery, “And by proceeding with the greatest of discretion, they enjoyed their love together on many a later occasion. May God grant that we enjoy ours likewise.” This, you think, is what Italians read in school instead of “The Scarlet Letter.” No wonder they’re better at flirting.

You wonder about the varieties of love, you who have been so hurt by adultery and divorce, you who are about to spend a weekend with a married man. Is it possible, you wonder, for couples to have affections on the side that don’t erode their marriage? Is it possible to have a second fling with a French professor (who is full of sauce) without ruining the first brief romance? Without some part of you falling in love?

When you can’t read anymore, you chat with the Milanese in the seat next to you, who, once you land, offers to take you to the center of town with his friend. You reach a bar a block from the Duomo and it is 10:15 and they ask you to have a coffee. It is impossible to refuse, so you drink your cappuccino and watch the clock move closer to 11. Finally, they show you to the Duomo and wave ciao-ciao.

You roll your suitcase along the cobblestones and scan the faces of the
young people sitting on the steps of the enormous cathedral. You don’t
see him. You panic: You’re late, and you have no back-up plan. There is
no way to reach him. You sit on the steps and wait, bleary from the
sleepless flight, anxiously glancing in all directions. You have no idea
what you’ll do. Here you are in Milano, the ugliest city in Italy, under
thick threatening skies, and you are worried that even if he shows up,
it will rain and you’re tired and there’s nothing romantic about Milano
and no nice place to stay. You consider leaving.
You get up and wander toward the doors of the cathedral, then turn
around and spot his denim jacket and the curls at the nape of his neck.
There is an empty space beside him on the steps. You quietly sit down
next to him and he doesn’t see you. You press your skin ever so slightly
against him and there is a little frisson before he turns. “Ciao,” you
say, and he smiles in an excited way the French rarely allow themselves
to smile, and then he takes you in his arms.

“I never dreamed I’d see you again so soon,” he says. He tells you,
appreciatively, that you look the same, and you tell him he does, too,
but in truth he looks much more skinny and haggard than you remember. He
asks if he looks thinner, and you say maybe a little, and he says he
hasn’t been eating, it has been a long story these past few months. But
he likes himself this way. I don’t know, you tease him. You used to have
a rule that you never sleep with anyone who weighs less than you. He
looks at you doubtfully and then draws himself up to seem bigger and
taller. “Va bene?” he asks. You say well, probably, and he says the only
rule you should have is never to sleep with a man who likes his body
better than yours. He takes your hand. “Andiamo.”
You walk across the wide piazza, glancing at each other with shy
surprise and frank expectation. He says he has found a charming little
hotel nearby. In Milano, filled with big, anonymous modern business
hotels, this is a miracle. You climb the stone stairs in an ancient
building to land at a cheerful, airy hotel, with hand-painted furniture,
fresh flowers and views of the historic center. Inside the room,
everything suddenly seems so small, so intimate. He puts down your
suitcase and you don’t know what to do.
“A shower?” he asks, and you nod, good idea, and disappear into the
bathroom. You return, refreshed, with some courage, and flop down on the
bed next to him, tossing away your towel. Ah, he says, and he runs his
finger down your spine. He caresses you and your weariness from a long
flight turns into dreaminess as you make love. After, he strokes your
hair and whispers that he’s going out for a couple of hours, that you
should nap after that long flight, but not too much.
In what seems like a moment he is back again, and he draws the curtains
so you can watch the fading light outside. He climbs back under the
fluffy comforter and you think, we have only two days and nights
together, maybe we will never get out of bed.
But eventually you dress and wander outside to the nearby castle
grounds. He asks you about your divorce and you say you feel better,
it’s been a year, and now you just want to cut the ties completely, get
on with your life. Also, you say San Francisco is a desert for dates.
Don’t worry, he says. It’s early. Maybe, you say, but the shock of being
suddenly single after many years is the feeling that women over 35 are
no longer considered attractive, not even by men over 35.
It’s a pity, he says. The problem with American men is that they are so
superficial. They want youth and beauty right up front in their faces.
That isn’t interesting. European men like to discover what’s beautiful
about a woman. Your beauty, he tells you, sneaks up on you. He didn’t
see it right at first, meeting you over breakfast in a pensione on an
island, reading your guidebook, asking practical questions, so serious.
He had to figure out how to make you smile that soft smile. That’s the
pleasure.
He squeezes your hand and you ask about his long winter. It was
terrible, he says. His wife fell in love with another man and almost
left him. He couldn’t imagine his life away from her, from their house,
from their children, their routine. They’d both had little stories with
other lovers before, but this threatened everything. He was scared and
lonely, but exceptional circumstances, he says, make you become more
exceptional. That, of course, made it a more difficult choice for her,
he says, with empathy and no bitterness. His wife stayed, but it’s
different now. It does give him more freedom to travel, though.
Your wife, you tell him, would have to be completely crazy to leave
you, and you mean it. He’s grateful for that remark, and you realize
that the tables are oddly turned from Ischia. He is heartbroken and you
are stronger, comforting someone who seemed so invulnerable. He feels
sad, he says, but something positive came from it. For the first time he
had to really talk to his friends about his personal life. Before, he
says, there was no one I could even tell about meeting you on Ischia.
Nobody.
You walk quietly for a while, crossing a busy street back to the center
of town. Did you tell anyone about meeting me on Ischia? he asks. Well,
yes, you say, a few people. Actually, quite a few people — you wrote a
tiny little story about it and published it online. He seems amused.
When can I read it? he asks. You spread your hands in an Italian gesture
of helplessness. Sorry, you say, it’s in English. “I learn fast,
sweetheart,” he says. In English.
In the evening, outdoors over pizza, you talk about his new book idea,
your work, his students’ art, your families, and you realize that the
conversation is much deeper than it was on Ischia, that something else
is happening.
You have a grappa in the Piazza del Duomo when it starts to pour. You
abandon your drinks, splash through the streets and take refuge in the
covered open-air market square, which is empty. You watch him leaning
against a stone pillar and you tell him he looks good from a distance.
He tells you that you have to drink grappa more often, and he walks
toward you and wipes your face dry with his foulard. Alone in the market
square, with lettuce leaves scattered at your feet, you make out like
teenagers, rain splattering all around.

The next morning you wonder what you’ll do in gray Milano. You have
pots of cafi au lait in bed and then he says that since we’re island
specialists, we’ll have to go to an island. You have no idea where the
train you board will take you, but an hour later you arrive in Stresa, a
lovely little town on the edge of Lago Maggiore. You descend to the
boardwalk and follow a path lined with Liberty-style villas and flowers
everywhere — azaleas, rhododendrons, roses. You go to the edge of the
enormous lake, surrounded by high granite mountains and green valleys,
and take a water taxi to Isola Bella — “beautiful island.”
The island at first appears covered with bad restaurants and tourist
kiosks selling the same Boticelli ashtrays they sell everywhere in
Italy. But then you enter the Palazzo Borromeo, Conte Vitaliano
Borromeo’s 1670 hideaway, and you’re in another world. The huge palace
rests on the edge of the island cliffs, and you walk through room after
room of overdone gilded splendor. Here is a grand ballroom, here is the
canopied bed where Napoleon slept (twice, behind Josephine’s back: once
with an Italian princess, another with an opera star), here is a little
stage with fierce marionettes that must have terrorized the children. M.
explains that the way you can tell this is a baroque, not
Renaissance, room is that you have the feeling that you can’t escape;
you don’t see the other rooms or have a sense of the building. It’s
handy, you think, to have an affair with an art professor.
You pass by rooms filled with armor and go downstairs into the
grottoes. “Incredible,” says M., and you have never seen anything like
it, either. The cool cellars are lined, floor to ceiling, in mosaics
made of pebbles, in sea themes, with swirling shells, starfish and
mermaids, room after room of fantastic designs. There is a smooth white
marble sculpture of a woman sleeping on her stomach, with a pretty curve
in her back. “That,” says M., “is obscenely beautiful.”
The grottoes open out into classic Italian gardens, with infinite
varieties of exotic trees, plants and flowers. Huge terra cotta pots of
lemon trees and geraniums perch atop the cliffs against the blue water.
White peacocks traipse around the lawns, displaying their spectacular
tails whenever a drab little peahen shows the slightest interest.
Delicate, pastel-colored water lilies float on a reflecting pool. Statues
of gods and mythical beasts face the lake, standing on ever-higher
terraces of roses. You explore together, taking paths, and are
comfortable not saying anything at all.
The sun breaks out and M. sits down in an ornate iron chair on a lawn.
“Imagine it in the evening, at a party, lit everywhere with candles,
with a banquet there and a string orchestra over there,” he says,
gesturing. “You and I were born three centuries too late.” You picture
him telling tales in “The Decameron,” sneaking off between times into the
grottoes or a secluded corner of the gardens — with you.
Reluctantly, you leave the palace grounds and stand in line for a boat
to another island and you hear someone call your name. You turn and see
a woman who seems familiar but whom you don’t recognize. She introduces
herself and you realize it’s a foreign student who lived with you six
years ago; you’ve bumped into the only person you know in Switzerland
here near the border. You are so surprised you introduce her to M. but
completely forget his name. You chat for a while but then it comes back
to you that you didn’t like her so well and even if it is a phenomenal
coincidence to see her, you hope she sits somewhere else on the boat,
which she does. M. watches all of this and you tell him it was
remarkable to run into her, but in fact you weren’t really friends. “I
noticed that right away,” he says. “Now I know something new about you:
You can be cold.” You say you hope you weren’t rude, and he says no,
it’s just nice to know you’re so warm to him when you can be so chilly
to others.
You stroll around another island — Isola Madre — taking trails that snake
through lush woods to wide flowery meadows that are thick with exotic
birds. “We’ve seen so many beautiful things today,” he says, content,
smoking a cigar on a bench overlooking the lake. Amazing, you say. This
was every bit as enchanting as Ischia.
Snuggling on the train ride home, he touches your arm tenderly, easily.
You think about the habit of American men who jump right into sexual
intimacy, but then are afraid that if they touch you affectionately
outside of sex you’ll want to marry them or something. They confuse a
woman’s desire for ambient affection with demands on their freedom.
It’s late and you’re hungry when you return to the hotel, but you’re
hungrier for each other. You play and play and he keeps offering you
more until you tell him, loosely translating a French phrase he’s used,
that he has killed you so many times you’re dead. Famished, you walk out
and wander in the old Jewish section of town until you find a trattoria
tucked in a side street. You both order risotto milanese, with its rich
aroma and saffron-gold flavor, and you suspect that the reason it tastes
so good has to do with veal broth, and even though you’re a vegetarian,
you don’t care. You order porcini mushrooms and place one in your mouth
and while it melts you realize you have never tasted anything so good in
your life. You will never have another porcini mushroom like that
porcini mushroom. And looking across the table you wonder whether you’ll
ever have a chance to have another meal with him again.
It makes you a little sad, you have to leave so soon. This visit will
become another snapshot of paradise that you tuck away in your desk. He
seems to sense what you’re thinking and he asks you: What are you doing
in September? You forgot about September and a nervous thrill shoots
through you, but you calmly say you have no real plans.
I’ve never been to California, he says. I think I would like San
Francisco.
You try to digest this while you walk back to the hotel, and you’re
excited and scared. He says he is making plane reservations for
mid-September, and he will leave everything about this romantic trip up
to you. He says nothing more about it.
In the morning, you have early trains. This time when he kisses you
goodbye in the station, it isn’t so hard. You’ll see him again. But you
wonder if the next time you say goodbye to each other, it will be much
more bittersweet.

It’s not a thing he’d say now. Indeed, the former misfit kid has become so respectable, one could mistake him for his favorite alter-ego, Elvis Presley, who inspired several of his best roles (“Wild at Heart,” “Honeymoon in Vegas”). His recent roles in several “boy movie” blockbusters — “The Rock” “Face/Off,” “Con Air” — left longtime fans wondering whether it was a sign that he’d finally sold out to big-budget Hollywood. But Cage insists he’s as weird as ever as the fast-talking, corrupt cop Ricky Santuro in Brian De Palma’s “Snake Eyes” — he even picked out the loud Hawaiian shirts his character sports himself.

Salon caught up with Cage at the San Francisco International Film Festival last spring, where he spoke about some of his favorite roles and why he moved from method acting to “Warholian” acting.

What does acting mean to you?

I’ve always seen acting as medicine. When I first saw James Dean in “East of Eden,” that scene where he wants to give his father all the money, and his father gives it back, saying, “I don’t want it,” and he’s weeping and weeping — well, it just ripped my heart clean out. I felt so, so sad. And it was at that point that I thought, well, that’s what I want to do. That’s what I want to say. I think audiences can relate to having problems in their homes and schools and lives, so I wanted to rip the mask off the superhero and get in closer to the community that way.

The characters you play are often flawed, in an almost cartoonish way.

When you play villains you can go one of two routes: You can make that villain so unglamorous that nobody would ever want to be that kiss-of-death ugly person. “Gee, don’t want to go there. God, that looks ugly.” Or, you can go the other, cartoon route, the overblown villain nobody believes in anyway.

I remember once my father said to me, “Tom Cruise sells perfection, you sell imperfection.” My characters are generally flawed — neither all bad, nor all good. So I always look for a little bit of humanity in them, give them hope. It’s irresponsible not to.

Do you remember when you first got the bug for acting?

I first knew I wanted to be an actor when I was about 6 years old and watching the television. There were people moving around inside that thing and I thought, “Wow, how do they do that — how do they get to be inside?” When I was 8 or thereabouts I was bullied on the school bus by a boy who kept stealing my Twinkies. So I got dressed up as my bigger brother, slicked back my hair and put on his shades and boots, along with a lot of attitude and swagger, and tried to pass myself off as Nicky Coppola’s brother Richard, and told him I was going to kick him right up his ass. Nobody stole my Twinkies again.

Also, my family, and Uncle Francis [Ford Coppola], were very inspiring for me. They cultivated me, exposed me to great works of art. They played me movies like “Nosferatu” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” with great stars like Max Schreck and Conrad Veidt. There were other things that really stayed with me, and really wonderful old movies bring it all up for me again.

What was it like playing Ben, the suicidal alcoholic in “Leaving Las Vegas”?

I had a very unique connection to the character in “Leaving Las Vegas.” When I read the script, the lines just sang to me. That script affected me deeply, not so much because of all the drunk stuff, but because it’s about the love between two people who had been broken in life, yet had this incredibly beautiful, cool relationship. They were giving to each other without judging each other.

When I was preparing for it, I watched a lot of movies about alcoholism, like “Days of Wine and Roses,” where Jack Lemmon gets delirium and phobias, and “The Lost Weekend” with Ray Milland. Dudley Moore in “Arthur” was excellent, I got into his idea of talking too loudly. With “Leaving Las Vegas” I wanted to embrace all those aspects and add something else — make it fun and funny, not just to have Ben traipse off to the Betty Ford Clinic, or have him consider doing himself in. He wasn’t a Skid Row person, he could still get cash from his credit card. He just sort of took himself out of the equation. I wanted to take the label off some of his behavior and really play up the love that these people still had. I mean, if you do drink that much, you’re gonna pay the consequences and the bottom line is eventually you die.

Typically, great English actors like Laurence Olivier start with the makeup and voices and work backwards, while Hollywood method actors like yourself grow the inner psychology first.

Yes, but the best acting mingles the two. That way you cultivate longevity. I’ve seen a lot of actors who have not cultivated the more external technique and unfortunately what happens is they eventually intense themselves right out of business. They become so way-down they become that teardrop in the corner of the room.

Stanislavski said that nothing changes but change itself; so you try, hopefully, to find new ideas all the time. He also said that imitation was the worst form of acting. So when I was trying out Sailor in “Wild at Heart,” my playing Elvis Presley for two hours was imitation at a higher level. I tried to think of it as my Andy Warhol performance, because when you take these big icons and make them your own, you then create these images over the icon. I thought if Warhol could do it with painting I could do it with acting, be Warholian.

You’ve had your share of critics, particularly for your role in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” which your uncle [Coppola] directed.

Oh yeah, I was going through a tough period just then. I was very influenced by the painter Edvard Munch, and read this book about how he was completely slammed by the critics and got this idea that if you were young and great you had to be slammed by the critics. I remember the whole of Tristar studio flew up to the set and sat around my uncle Francis, and Francis cooked a big pot of spaghetti and said, “Look, this is the character and this is what he’s doing, don’t worry, it’ll all work out in the end.” So Francis was my champion — he really did stick by me on that one. And I’m happy with the results, as well as with the critical backlash. I was so over-the-top I remember doing one scene with my cousin Sofia at the piano, and she was going, “Down! Down! Keep it down!”

You seem to be very supportive of your female costars — Meg Ryan, Elizabeth Shue, Kathleen Turner, Cher, among others. But lately you’ve been working more closely with male actors — is it different?

Because love is the white light at the end of the color spectrum, you can show anger, bliss, any other emotion, all of which makes more sense when acting with actresses. I’ve always felt an actual connection that is like a dance and which just occurs naturally. There’s an energy there.

With male actors, it’s not quite as magical. It’s more technical, but still fun. Working with Sean Connery [in "The Rock"] was a blast, because he came on the set and he was, uh, Sean, and it took me three weeks just to get used to looking at him. But he was incredibly giving and dignified, and I learned so much from working with him. He was mentoring me.

And with John Travolta, it was all, well, a laugh. We were a couple of kids playing in the backyard together in “Face/Off.” We were always teasing the other guy while muttering “Die!” or getting caught in one of those “Are we in trouble yet?” moments.

Do you have any plans to work on any projects with your wife, Patricia Arquette?

Yes, and we want to redo “The Thin Man,” but the studios won’t hire married couples — they think it takes the magic out of the movie. There is this perception that couples don’t do well at the box office.

But at this point I want to step back and recharge, maybe go to Europe and learn something about culture and art. It’s time for me to go back to that learning mode, like when I was a kid.

Master Plan? As in Final Solution? The surviving members of the Grateful
Dead — which has always struck me as probably the most culturally destructive cult American
popular music has produced — are planning to build a museum to themselves in
San Francisco. Called “Terrapin Station” in honor of the band’s 1977 album of
that name, the bunker — I mean church, no, wait, I mean “entertainment and performance
complex” — will supposedly include exhibits, a restaurant, an archive
and library, an auditorium called the “Jerry Garcia Theater,” named for the band’s late leader, and the all-important gift shop filled with Deadhead merch.
Plus, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, there will be
a space provided that would feature “percussion instruments for spontaneous
jam sessions or drum circles by museum visitors,” to be called the
“Rhythm Devils Room.” I think “Get a Life You Brainwashed Dummies” would be a
more poetic title. Because as anyone who lives in San Francisco can tell you,
nothing spoils a nice stroll through Golden Gate Park on a sunny
day like an eyseore gathering of the great unwashed blocking the footpath
with their bongs and bongos.

I asked my old San Francisco neighbor Gina Arnold, Salon contributor and music columnist for the
East Bay Express, what she thought of the new intrusion. “If it’s
going to be in any town, it should be in my town,” she says. “But I object
to it in any town. Still, I’m happy, because it will bring the Grateful Dead’s
secret hypocrisy out in the open. There will never be any pretense of
respect once they’ve done it. Remember their whole thing about how they
were ‘genuine musicians’? Nobody can pretend that anymore when this whole
thing happens.”

I don’t live in San Francisco anymore. I live in Chicago, where people are
crazy-cranked about guys who wear much better uniforms — the Bulls. At least
Michael Jordan, unlike Bob Weir & Co., isn’t pretending he’s not milking his
fans for every cent they’re worth. At least MJ’s selling out on TV every two
seconds nice and public-like in honest-to-God car commercials, instead of
peddling skull-logoed, thousand-dollar watches in the name of peace and love.

Since I don’t have to live in San Francisco anymore, since I won’t have to
walk past this Tower of Tie Dye on any kind of frequent basis, I almost
enjoy imagining how this little “idea” will work. What if the Dead actually came
clean? What if, instead of painting smiley faces on their image, they’d
actually ‘fess up to their true selves, accept their blame, as if on trial at
Nuremberg, and make a monument to their folly? What if, instead of doling
out the whole strange-trip-I-will-survive nonsense, they’d repent? What
if, every day, Bob Weir would stand out front like a greeter at Wal-Mart and
repeat, over and over, “We are responsible for inspiring two
generations of American citizens to listen to dreadful ‘songs’ that went on too long and
had no point, shell out millions of dollars for cheap, tie-dyed, teddy
bear-stamped crap and dress not just badly, but badly and
exactly alike! And, my fellow Americans, I’m standing here to tell you,
all I can do is apologize and throw up. I. Am. Soooooooooo. Sorry.”

Or maybe Weir shouldn’t stand there. Those Berkeley punk kids
beat up Jello Biafra for selling out, so there’s no telling what could happen
to Weir. The complex’s exhibits and concessions could tell the story of the
band’s totalitarian spirit. For example, the cutesy parking lot planned for
the entrance that’s supposed to recall how all the sheep, er, fans would
gather before shows could be entered through an arch inscribed “Faulheit
Macht Frei” (laziness will set you free). Souvenirs would be purchased at a
shop called “The Banality of Evil Bracelets ‘n’ Things” and the ubiquitous
Cherry Garcia ice cream would be sold by the pint at the “Let the Dead Bury the Dead Cafe.”
There would be innovative carnival rides like the “Altamont-A-Whirl” or the
“Lifelong Drug Habit Ferris Wheel.” Exhibits such as “You Followed Around a
Man Who Married Someone Named ‘Mountain Girl’ For 20 Years. What Were You
Thinking?” or “The Pothead Years: You’ll Never Get Them Back, Ya Sucker”
would spark conversation and self-examination among former Deadheads.
I say build the thing. And let the healing begin.

According to a newly released report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studies at 26 VD clinics across the nation show a dramatic rise in gonorrhea among gay males — traditionally a marker for rising HIV infection rates. The cause? According to the Los Angeles Times: “Experts suggest that the increasing success of HIV treatment with triple-drug therapies has lulled gay men into a false sense of security that may lead to a disastrous recurrence of the AIDS increase observed in the early 1980s.”

Of course, neither the L.A. Times nor any of the other mainstream media reporting these statistics has focused on the real source of the problem: the re-emergence of a bathhouse-sex club culture that fosters large cohorts of promiscuous strangers spreading the infection in urban gay centers. San Francisco, the most developed of these subcultures, has the highest gonorrhea infection rates, currently, by a wide margin. Cowed by the politically correct activists who have crippled the battle against
AIDS, the media have turned a blind eye to the rash of new sex clubs and refuse to make the connection that AIDS is as much a behavioral as a clinical disease.

About the time my Salon article appeared, a group of left-wing
academics known as “queer theorists” met at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center at New York’s City Hall. Among those present were professors Michael
Warner of NYU and Kendall Thomas of Columbia University, living examples of how the universities routinely provide a political platform for extremists, especially sexual extremists. The group gathered to found an organization called Sex Panic, whose agenda was twofold. First, to oppose any attempts by health authorities to curtail or restrict public anonymous sex and the institutions that support it; and second, to destroy
the reputations of the handful of courageous gay
activists — Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, Larry Kramer and Andrew Sullivan among them — who were fed up with the homicidal sex strategies of the gay left and had the guts to publicly say so.

Warner is Sex Panic’s best-known theorist. He
declares himself (and all queer theorists) a militant opponent of “the regime of the normal” — a regime that includes standard public health methods for fighting epidemics. Here is Warner defending the death camps of the current contagion: “The phenomenology of a sex club encounter is an experience of world making. It’s an experience of being connected not just to this person but to potentially limitless numbers of people, and that is
why it’s important that it be with a stranger. Sex with a stranger is like a metonym.” (Warner is a professor of English literature.)

The October Lingua Franca describes a recent public meeting of Sex Panic at which the assembled treated with respectful silence a convicted child molester and his declaration that he was one of them. Another gay man who said that he felt the gay community’s celebration of promiscuity made it more difficult for him to maintain a monogamous relationship was heckled. The
flyer announcing the event was headlined “DANGER! ASSAULT! TURDZ!” The “turds” in question are Rotello, Signorile, Kramer and Sullivan.

The author of the Lingua Franca article, a gay graduate student at
Columbia University, could not find one queer theorist who defended
the infamous four, or who believed that shutting down sex clubs or avoiding promiscuous, anonymous sex had anything to do with battling AIDS. Instead, Warner and his fellow queer theorists proudly declare, they are opponents of “not just the normal behavior of the social, but the idea of normal behavior.”

They couldn’t have it any other way. Any acknowledgment of “normality” would suggest that the promotion
of promiscuous sex in the
midst of the AIDS epidemic is perverse at best and accessory to murder at worst. If heterosexuals were defending gay sex clubs in the face of the AIDS epidemic, their
motives would be properly suspect. Still, their silence, whether in the groves of academe or the pages of the liberal mainstream press, lends a quiet support to this intellectual fascism and sexual fanaticism that diminishes the prospects of survival for America’s gay men.

But it disturbs me, this strange lack of love for a place where so many good things happened. I know it is the Southerner in me that shivers at this chill wind off the Pacific. I know it is the Southerner in me that dreams of the oak trees of home in these barren hills. Nevertheless, San Francisco is unique—a generation of ideas, an academy of nonconformity—and the visit has brought many splendid moments.

In spite of a very busy schedule, I managed to watch the second Clinton/Dole debate. At times my anger toward Senator Dole knew no bounds. When the Commander in Chief does not do what you want him to do while in office, that does not mean that the Commander in Chief is AWOL. Dole’s insults were despicable. And it was heartwarming to see Clinton’s grace under fire. I suspect the race is over, but it is terribly important that every one of us Democrats votes because we have a real chance this time to take back the House of Representatives. So, remember—even if you think Clinton is a shoo-in, go out and vote for Democratic congressmen on the ticket. President Clinton probably will be seen by history as one of the most exciting presidents that we’ve had.

Meantime I continue to receive wonderful responses to my books, and am amazed to discover that some people are only just now finding “Servant of the Bones,” though it was published August 1st.

Once again, it is impossible to describe an average Anne Rice reader—there is no such being. It can be a lady of 80 years of age with cream ruffles at the neck of her burgundy jacket, or a 12-year-old child with Coke-bottle glasses. It can be a gay person, a businessman, a psychic or a priest.

Highlights of the San Francisco visit include being onstage at City Arts and Lectures with my beloved friend and colleague Mike Riley, and also seeing that nothing in this modern world—not computers, not vacuum cleaners, not the Internet, not changing social mores—can change the ambiance of Dark Carnival! Jack and Jay, the owners of the store, remain their incorruptible selves through thick and thin. The bookstore is a real place, an unforgettable place—a shelter on the road of life.

At City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco, surrounded by the venerable murals and chandeliers of the Herbst Theater, I declared frankly that I was proud to be a pornographer and the audience applauded. I am blessed to be both a religious writer and a social scandal.

Of course we are having fun, even without the bus on which we traveled on the East Coast. I can’t say sitting on the floor of an airport is as much fun as bouncing along in a bus, watching Antonio Banderas shoot guns with two hands on TV, but it is wonderful to be back on the road and to see my readers.

One final exquisite note: In both Sacramento and in Berkeley, we had the great honor of meeting a sublimely beautiful child … a toddling little boy with an irrepressible smile and blonde hair whose name, we are proud to say, is “Eric Christopher Lestat.” Though we’ve met many cats and dogs named “Lestat,” only now are we beginning to meet children of proud parents with Lestat’s name. We were deeply honored and this little boy seemed surrounded by a golden light. What a paradox—Lestat the Vampire is my moral hero and I get to hold this beautiful baby in my arms. It is the end result of writing about good and evil, salvation and damnation, sensuality and virtue.

I’m confused. I’m tired. We’re going to Los Angeles. The airport is crowded and I want to start walking, but it is too cold. I will be live on the Late, Late Show with Tom Snyder tonight. I look forward to it and I hope I have a chance to talk politics as well as fiction.

Keep sending your responses to Servant of the Bones and keep telling me how you feel about Azriel, my new angelic spirit hero.

My love,

Anne Rice