Why must I be a (filthy rich,
80-year-old) teenager in love?
By David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — If you listen to the full nine-minute dialog
between L.A. Clippers erstwhile owner Donald Sterling and his mistress,
V. Stiviano, you come across one of those prickly been-there, done-that
moments that might just make you feel a creepy pang of sympathy — well,
pity — for Sterling.
I mean, we’re looking at a white bigot who — for all practical purposes — owns a dozen Negroes
who — literally — run and jump at his behest. Here’s a crumbling,
jowly, butt-ugly, octogenarian bag of guts who, thanks to a private
fortune close to $2 billion, has his pick of the juiciest, willingest,
blondest and buxomest starlets in all of Hollywood.
And yet,
listen to him. After arguing with Miss V. for about five minutes about
her unseemly habit of sashaying out in public with black people, poor
Donny just sort of sighs and says, “I really don’t feel like going
anywhere… I don’t feel like just going through the whole thing. We’ve
got a bi-ig problem.”
He’s exhausted, because, OMG, she doesn’t get it. Donny doesn’t just need her to love him. He needs more.
He needs a soulmate. He needs her to believe in him, to get her mind
right and follow him wheresoever he leads. He knows he’s right, for so
many reasons. He’s a man, not a woman. He’s older. He’s got more money.
He’s smarter because — again — he’s a man. Plus, he’s white, she’s not.
Besides, he’s paying
her. He’s given her a condo, a Ferrari, a Range Rover and spending
money up the ying-yang. Why in God’s name is this woman disagreeing with
him?
You see, there’s the rub. You want to hate this guy, but
you know how he feels, and what he’s up against in this conversation.
I’ve been there, in the same quarrel, arguing not for white supremacy
but for true love, in my second year in college with a girl named Cindy,
in my freshman year with a girl named Janice, in my junior year in high
school with a girl named Sue, and even further back, to tenth grade and
a girl named Toni.
Your first glimpse of the girl, it’s always
the same — the epiphany that struck Donny when he first laid eyes on
Miss V. She is a pure vision —Botticelli’s Venus
— an ingenue without flaw, without a voice, without history or
personality. She is a paragon of feminine innocence who can be, if only
she sits at your knee, gazes into your eyes and drinks in your every
word, a vessel of virginal perfection and a veritable fountain of
romance, forever and ever unto the twelfth of never.
If only she’ll stay that way. And pay attention, dammit!
But
listen, again, to Donny: “I don’t want to argue with you, baby!… You
can’t be flexible… You change from day to day. Wow. So painful, wow.”
And here, the saddest words of all: “You’re supposed to be a delicate white, or a delicate Latina, girl.”
Donny
knows the vision, exactly. He’s had it in his mind all his life — 80
years! To be the vision, to be showered with the bounty that flows from
embodying that “delicate white” ideal, all the stupid bitch has to do
shut up, and cooperate.
Why does she resist? “Who would want to
love a woman like you?” Donny whines. A woman with a mind of her own? A
woman of color who objects to the venomous racism of her sugar daddy?
“All you ever want to do is fight,” cries Donny. “You’re a born
fighter.”
Amongst all the bizarre statements about race and sex
and Miss V’s unseemly public displays of tolerance, the undertone of
this wonderful quarrel caught on tape for all the world to hear and
remember, is its undiluted air of adolescence.
The magic of the
oblivious Miss V’s power over Donny is that she has reduced him,
emotionally, to a teenager in love, begging her to love me, need me,
hold me and help me, and — a moment later — demanding that she follow
and obey, do what I say, and think what I think because… Because? Why
because? Because we belong together. Because I can’t live without you
and you can’t live without me. DON’T YOU SEE THAT?
God, I
remember those arguments. They always came right before the girl got
exasperated beyond all restraint, pushed me up against the wall and
started screaming, please, please, please, you needy, groveling, begging
tyrant! I can’t take it anymore. No more phone calls, no more little
notes in my mailbox, no more ambulatory soliloquies as you chase me
across the campus and down the halls and please, for God’s sake, PLEASE!
No more poems!
What did I do, I wondered, but love? Love
with all my heart. I loved Cindy, Janice, Sue and Toni just the way
Donny loves Miss V, until Miss V can’t stand it anymore, can’t stand
another day of his pontification and arrogance, can’t stand to be held
in his grasp like a toy, can’t stand all that constant, hovering,
proprietary attention, can’t stand his voice and his breath and his flab
and his wrinkles and even his sticky, clinging, humiliating money.
But there it is, the money.
Last
time I had an argument like that, an argument with a girl about why she
wasn’t more like the way I imagined her to be the first time I saw her,
why she wouldn’t become the perfect little sex-pet that I wanted her to
be? Well, that was Becky and I was about 20, and I grew up after that.
Not right away. But I’d begun to figure out the prohibitive cost — in
money and sheer energy — of make-believe.
As they say, rich people are different. Donald Sterling, with all that dough, has the rare wherewithal. He can go back to being a teenager in love
over and over again forever, no matter how pathetic it looks. Which
explains Miss V, and explains why she eventually betrayed him. In the
tempest of their mutual adolescence, she felt for Donny but — like Ann
Darrow in King Kong — all that feeling finally boiled down to pity.
Leaving
us, the voyeur public, with a slight variation on the movie’s
benediction, uttered by Carl Denham, a sleazebag impresario in the
Sterling mold: “Oh, no! It wasn't the bigotry. It was Beauty killed the
Beast.”
Friday, May 2, 2014
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