What is seduction? It's when you aim to persuade someone to have sex with you, whether they want to or not. But maybe it's lots of other things. I’m open to that idea, though right now I’m thinking of the woman I saw two days ago who tried to seduce me and invited herself to visit me in the city. She said, “I'll sleep on the sofa.” I told her I had no sofa and that she’d have to sleep on the floor or get a room in a motel. “I don’t sleep in motels,” she said. Then she tried to talk me into buying a sofa. Downsizing is now the name of my game. I didn’t and don’t want a sofa. I don't want more furniture, more stuff. I told another woman at another party last week that I had written about my own sex life. She said that she had looked me up on the Internet and the first thing that came up after my name was “degenerate.” I have Googled myself and there is no such thing. It makes me wonder what if any reality she inhabits.
California has a reputation as an unreal place of sexual liberation, sexual exploration and also sexual decadence – all that Charlie Manson stuff and Sharon Tate and Roman Polansky and low life Harvey Weinstein. I don’t know any now, but I did know producers and directors who were loathsome. Older powerful men, younger beautiful women and promiscuity which leads to Jeffrey Epstein, the degenerate who didn’t have the courage to face his accusers and took his own life in his cell. It’s a decadent society we live in.
Christopher Caldwell, who went out of fashion decades ago, nailed it when he titled his first collection of essays, Studies in a Dying Culture and his second collection of essays, Further Studies in a Dying Culture. I read both books when I was at Columbia College, though I was rebuked by my professors and encouraged to read Freud instead. Most of them were lapsed Marxists or Trotskyites.
Caldwell could have gone on writing more studies in a dying culture. The dying goes on and on decade after decade and there’s no avoiding it because we’re all tainted. We all live in this monstrous moment, where I’m told, I’m a degenerate and that my tainted reputation is all over the Internet and also that if I mean to be a kind, caring person I have to buy a sofa. My friend Lizzie says, I should write about my sex life in a way that makes me sympathetic to women readers. I tell her I’m not interested in sympathy, but that I’m trying to tell the truth and to understand myself, but those two goals—truth and understanding—must be woefully out of date.
My whole sense of morality seems to be obsolete. I judge harshly, my friend—actually she’s more of an acquaintance than a friend—though I have known her for 45 years. She cooks elaborate meals and invites friends, acquaintances and strangers to her house and charges them money: $20 for a meal. Outrageous. I mean she’s a lawyer and owns her own home and doesn’t need the money. She and I went out to dinner twice. The first time she said, “I’m so glad you’re back in my life,” though I was not back in her life in any way, shape or form. The second time we went out she said, “I’m not interested in marrying you.” I had not the slightest interest in marrying her, but I didn’t say anything. There was no point in being hurtful.
What some women I know don’t seem to recognize and understand is that men can be as horrible to other men as they are to women. Look at what white northerns did to white southerners in the America Civil War. Slaughtered one another. White violence is directed to whites as well as women and people of color. Look around you today, men rape other men, torture them, carry on psychological warfare and kill them in the most gruesome ways. It’s enough to make me want to separate myself from the whole human race, and go into the woods in Siskiyou County near the Oregon border, but there are fires there and a drought and outlaws too, with guns looking for stuff to steal. I know. I’ve been there. I survived.
My friend, Wavy Gravy, of Woodstock fame, once entertained me in the woods of Mendocino County where he had an outdoor office: a chest of drawers, a mirror, a mattress and a photo of his guru. No walls, no floor and no ceiling except the sky. Wavy had downsized in a big way. There was the time, he told me, when he was living at the Hog Farm in Southern California and this guy shows up in a yellow school bus and wants to hook up to Wavy’s electricity and water. He tells Wavy he can make it with any of the girls on the bus. Wavy doesn’t have to think long or hard. He doesn’t have to look inside the bus. He tells the guy “No,” and then shortly after that conversation he reads about that very guy in the newspaper and sees his photo. It's Charlie Manson and Wavy is so happy he made the right choice and wasn’t tempted or seduced by the offer of the girls in the bus.
Best not to put oneself in temptation’s way, best to stay out of trouble, out of strange beds with strange women, or strange beds with strange men. I don’t need or want to crawl into anyone else’s bed. I like my own bed here at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where it’s foggy and windy during the height of summer, and where most of the women in the neighborhood are Chinese widows in their eighties and nineties who are so frail they are easily blown about by the wind like reeds in a pond.
How would I approach them and talk to them? How would I entice them into a chaste conversation? How do I persuade them to invite me into their apartments where I know from my brother, a long time resident here at Ocean Beach, that they live alone, and have food delivered by the Wheels on Meals Samaritans who keep the old and the dying alive for another day. Time to put away the old dying culture of seduction, the degenerate Charlie Manson/ Jeffrey Epstein/ Harvey Weinstein conquest and capture and invasion and occupation of the bodies of women syndrome, whether in California or New York or in Japan which I sometimes think I can see in the distance when I stand at the shore and stare at the Pacific, a wilderness big enough to embrace all the pain and sorrow in the world, big enough to carry us all away, and wipe San Francisco off the face of the earth. I think I’ll take a hint from Christopher Caldwell—the bloke who died at 29 in Spain fighting fascists—and write my own studies in a dying culture.
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