How to Be Famous

  More girl screams.

  “Well, I have a pack, too. And when one of your pack has been done a great wrong, you have to stop, for a moment, and help your pack member back up again. Which is why, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to welcome to the stage the most burningly brilliant creature, who has a few things she needs to say to the world. I want you to go wild for my girl, Dolly Wilde.”

  There is applause—and as I walk out onto the stage, into the bright, white light, and Suzanne’s hug, I marvel, once again, how the simple act of banging two hands together can take on an emotional timbre. This applause sounds . . . confused.

  There is one man, however, who isn’t confused.

  “Suck my cock!” he shouts, from down the front, as is the traditional greeting of men to women, when they walk onto a stage.

  “Suck your own goddamn cock—she doesn’t have time,” Suzanne replies, briskly.

  There is a ripple of laughter.

  “So, Dolly’s here to discuss . . .” and then Suzanne, perhaps uniquely in her life, stumbles for words.

  “My Sex Tape of Shame,” I say, helpfully. “Hands up here who’s heard about it?”

  There is a confused, abashed pause—and then pretty much the entire audience puts their hands up. It’s a horrible moment. The absolutely indisputable evidence my shame is vast, and real.

  For ten heartbeats, I feel the most pure terror imaginable. I look at Suzanne, helplessly. She leans in, off-mic.

  “Go to work, kid,” she whispers.

  It was the best thing she could say—for I am never, ever afraid of work.

  I take the microphone.

  “So. As you have all just confirmed, to me, I am currently famous for having had some sex, one time.”

  There is applause.

  “Given how—for want of a better word—successful this sex tape has been, I thought I might capitalize on its success, in the way one does with any popular entertainment,” I continue. “This is why, therefore, tonight, I offer you the chance to hear a director’s commentary on the original footage. Are you ready?”

  The audience registers applause, and more confusion. They don’t understand what is going on.

  I nod to Suzanne’s tour manager—and the grainy footage of the Worst Fuck in the World starts projecting onto the screen behind us.

  I look at it for one second. There I am—in my sexual hopefulness, lying on Jerry Sharp’s bed. And there—moving away from the camera, that he’s just turned on—is Jerry.

  “Let’s see your dark side, Dolly Wilde,” he says, on screen.

  “This,” I say, “is the footage from that night, supplied by a friend from a hard-core feminist collective. This is me being fucked by Jerry Sharp.”

  Absolute pandemonium breaks out in the audience. They cannot believe I am showing my sex tape on a big screen. To be honest, neither can I.

  On the screen, we hear Jerry saying, “So—shall we find out what you can take, you dirty bitch?” as he comes back to me on the bed. And that’s not a happy thing to hear someone say to you. I freeze again.

  Looking across, Suzanne sees my terror, and steps in. With the casual air of a Las Vegas MC, she leans on her mic stand, and asks, “So, my lady, what’s going on here?”

  I stare at her.

  “Come on. What’s Mr. Chips doing up there?”

  She points to me, on the screen.

  “Just say what you see. Show me on the doll what he did to you.”

  She hands me a whisky bottle. I take a swig.

  “So, if we could pause here, for one second?” I ask the tour manager. He pauses the video.

  I am caught in midframe—staring, slack-jawed, at the camera—with Jerry looming over me. The video camera on his dressing table captures the whole tableau: his bed, the bedside lamps blazing—and Jerry pointedly maneuvering me into the best position, so I am wholly visible to his future audiences. He looks like a contestant at Crufts, manhandling their dog so that it looks at its best for the judges. I am that dog. I am a Cock Spaniel. I am a Golden Receiver. I am a Labiarador.

  It is not a scene of glory.

  I stare at the screen for a moment. There is a reason most people have sex in the dark, I think. It’s because they all look as awful as this. I look at Suzanne. She hands me a lit cigarette. I take a deep drag.

  “Okay. So. Just in case some of you don’t know, I am going to tell you how women have sex with men. The unwritten rule. Okay. Here it is: you have some of the sex he’s having.”

  I pause, for a moment, and stare out at the audience—so everyone has time to think about it—before resuming.

  “Sex is the copyright of men. It’s a thing they invented, to do with women—and, once you’ve gone to their house and taken your clothes off, you’re kind of contractually obliged to go along with it.

  “Of course, you’re allowed to say ‘STOP!’ if he really hurts or frightens you—it is 1995, after all!—but, as for the rest of it, you’ve bought your ticket for the ride. You can’t get off until the end. A grown woman is supposed to see the sex through to the end—like a sexual soldier, on a mission. You get into bed, are given your sexual orders, and you must carry them out. You can’t stop now.”

  I look up at the audience. It is agog. The video starts playing again.

  “So here I am, having Jerry’s sex. Because that’s what coming to his house means.”

  On the screen, Jerry’s slightly-out-of-focus mouth is on my slightly-out-of-focus breast.

  “So, we’re starting with the breasts. I’ll be honest—I’ve never understood all the hoo-ha here. For me, someone fiddling around with my nipples is a bit like a drum solo—the person doing it always seems to be enjoying it more than everyone else in the room.”

  On the screen, Jerry lumberingly crawls behind me.

  “Still, I’m not bored for long because, as you can see, all the foreplay is over now—that clocked in at just under a minute, for anyone keeping notes—and it’s time for Jerry to get down to the real business. It’s the beginning of the actual sex!”

  I let the video run for a while. Jerry is pumping away, behind me, as I stare at the wall, with an expression that is . . . stoic. I look like an eighteenth-century shepherdess, walking through a storm to find my sheep.

  The audience is alternately laughing and gasping.

  “So, what we have here is some classic sex,” I say. Suzanne hands me a pointer stick.

  “As we all know, the key erogenous zone of a woman is here—”

  I point to my clitoral area.

  “It is, odds on, pressure on this area that will make me orgasm. As Jerry is not touching it, we can conclude he does not wish me to orgasm. What Jerry’s doing, instead, is having the kind of sex he has seen in porn films.”

  Jerry, still pumping hard, slaps my arse. My face on screen registers shock. The audience gasps.

  “There’s a lot of slapping in porn films. Personally, I’ve never understood it. Perhaps all men hope they have found a delightful, one-off freak, whose clitoris is on their bum cheek. Like the plot to Deep Throat, but with a bum. Deep Bum. Sadly, I am not Deep Bum. When he slaps my arse, it very much feels like he’s just slapping my arse. You know—like parents do, with children. In my case, this is the first time I’ve had my arse slapped since I was nine, and accidentally taped over my mum’s copy of Yentl. So it’s not terribly sexual for me.”

  Jerry, pumping harder, spanks me again. My face looks oddly blank—punctuated with the odd grimace.

  “That grimace,” I note, “is because I am now thinking of my mum. Oh Mum! I don’t want you in my head right now! I’m going to think about Barbra Streisand, instead. That will make it marginally better.”

  On screen, you can see the brief ghost of a smile on my face.

  “That’s my Barbra Smile,” I say. “I am now thinking about her wearing a gold lamé dress in Hello, Dolly! And now I am thinking about me wearing a gold lamé dress. These are nice distractions. These are what I am thinking
about while this sex happens.”

  The audience laughs. I continue.

  “So, with Jerry not even attempting to make this pleasurable for me, and me pretending I’m not there, the question we have to ask here, ladies and gentlemen, is—is this actually sexual intercourse?”

  I point at the bad fucking going on behind me, and then open the dictionary I am carrying.

  “Sadly, according to the dictionary, it is: ‘Sexual intercourse: sexual contact between individuals involving penetration, especially the insertion of a man’s erect penis into a woman’s vagina, typically culminating in the ejaculation of semen.’ There is, you will note, no mention of female arousal, or orgasm. Is there little wonder that Jerry does not think of my sexual pleasure, when it’s not even in the dictionary? Ladies—our sex is not even in the dictionary.”

  The women in the audience boo/cheer. I point at the screen, where Jerry and I are still humping. Me on all fours; Jerry behind me, still spanking. He looks like a horny jockey, trying to win the Grand National.

  “And so the description of what’s going on here depends on who you are. Men, you are absolutely watching sexual intercourse. For you, this is a sex tape. Women, on the other hand—what we are watching is, in fact, a man having a wank into a woman. I’m not having sex here. Someone is just having sex on me. I know that now. Since this fuck occurred, I have—to be wanky for a moment—discovered my own body. I know what makes it feel happy. I know it would be far, far happier, at this moment, walking in the rain, or jumping into a lake, or even just lying in bed with a friend. If my body could talk, it would tell me it does not want to be in this room, having this one-night stand. My body is getting nothing out of this. Oh, body! I am sorry I put you there!”

  On screen, pumping so fast he’s almost a blur, Jerry reaches over, grabs my hair in his fist, and pulls it. My head jerks back—my throat is exposed. I wince as I watch it. It just feels . . . sad to see him do this to me. For there to be a record of this joyless event.

  “Don’t worry, ladies!” I say. “I know in any other filmed medium, if you saw this, it would be just before someone had their throat slit, in a battle scene. But that’s not what’s happening here! This isn’t Conan the Barbarian! This is just ‘rough sex.’ Except, if the woman doesn’t feel like she’s having sex, then all we’re left with is . . . rough. That’s what I’m having. Some rough.”

  On screen, Jerry has started pulling my hair so hard that I begin to slip across the bed. On the muffled soundtrack, you can hear me say, “Fuck me harder.”

  “Could we pause the video again for a second?”

  The video pauses, freeze-framed.

  “So the one thing I want to make very clear here is: this is consensual sex. Absolutely. As you can hear, I have just asked Jerry to ‘fuck me harder.’ So I am consenting. I believe, for many people, me saying ‘fuck me harder’—in a Wolvo accent, not a Birmingham one, you ignoramuses—is the bit they talk about most. The moment where they really laugh. When I’m asking to be fucked. Women asking to be fucked is funny. Awful, and funny. I don’t know why.”

  I take another drag on my fag.

  “But here’s a secret: I am saying ‘fuck me harder’ not because I’m enjoying this—but just because I want it to end. And saying ‘fuck me harder’ is the only way I can think this will happen. Anyone else here ever do that?”

  Sheepishly, about three hundred women put up their hands.

  “Right? It is a well-known technique. I wasn’t crazy for more of Jerry’s sweet loving. I just wanted to go home.”

  I sigh.

  “Look. I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I just want to thank you for letting me show you this film, because—now it’s not a secret anymore—now I’ve shown it to the entire Astoria—now I have stood here and described every second of it—no one has anything on me anymore. You know everything about me. And that makes me—free. If you are a man presenting an awards show, and you have a joke about me fucking Jerry Sharp that’s better than Deep Bum, come at me. Otherwise, I think this is done. I have carried around a weight of shame that has crushed me. Before it turned me into something harder—and I am harder now—it almost broke me.”

  And here, I start crying. Not sobs. Just hot, angry tears.

  “But then! But then I realized—I should never have been carrying this shame. No woman who has had this happen to her should. The idea that women carry the shame for shameful things that have been done to them is Bible old, and Bible black. This shame is yours, Jerry Sharp. You may have it back. It is not mine, and it never was.”

  I put out my cigarette, and leave the stage.

  On the screen, the video comes to an end—with Jerry flipping me over onto my back, saying, “Open your mouth,” and drowning what I was trying to say, as he comes.

  I have no idea how the audience is responding, because the whooshing sound in my head has returned. I appear to have gone deaf from trauma.

  I reel into the wings, where Zee catches me. “I want to go home,” I say. I am suddenly so, so tired—tired in a way that takes your legs out from under you.

  I can see he’s talking to me—“Dolly. Jo. That was amazing”—but it’s like when the teacher talks to Charlie Brown, and all he can hear is a wah-wah trombone.

  “I need to go home,” I say again.

  The floor has started shaking, so I presume The Branks have begun their set.

  I say, “I would really like to go home now” to him five times, until he finally nods, takes me outside, and puts me in a cab, mouthing the words, “Are you okay? I will come to see you, later,” and I nod, because I need this car to go. I just need to go home, immediately. I have burned up a whole life onstage. Whether it was mine or Jerry’s, I still cannot tell.

  In the cab, I curl up on the backseat. The driver is alarmed.

  “Hey—you’re not going to be sick, are you?” he says.

  “No,” I reply. “The night’s catharsis has been emotional, rather than emetic.”

  He doesn’t like that reply.

  “You’re not going to be sick?” he repeats, more urgently.

  “It’s only my shame that has been voided,” I say. I seem to be stuck in the 1700s. “My gorge will not rise.”

  I think he just presumes I am foreign at this point.

  “DO. IT. OUT. THE. WINDOW,” he says, loudly. “OUT. THE. WINDOW.”

  From my prone position, I give him a cheerful wave.

  “Will do,” I say.

  We track the way from Kentish Town to Camden, the driver complaining, all the way, about some bad driver who’s “up my arse.”

  We arrive outside my flat, and I get out of the cab, slowly. I feel very old, and frail, as I hand him a tenner.

  “Christ, this clown again. Pardon my language,” the driver says, as a minicab pulls up abruptly behind us.

  And from out of it, running: John.

  34

  In my front room, I sat on the sofa, still mute from the evening, shaking.

  Without saying a word, John put a blanket around me, got the dog to sit next to me, and gave me a shot of whisky.

  “I hope you’re enjoying my enforced presence,” he said, gently. “I thought you might want some company.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I felt like I’d run out of words.

  John—seeing I was in shock—quietly put the TV on, put a cushion behind my head, and then sat next to me, in silence.

  It was the snooker. I’ve never understood snooker, but it looks pretty—a man dressed up for ballroom dancing, gently nudging pretty-colored balls with a stick. The gentle applause. The quiet murmurs of anticipation as the blue bounces off the cushion, and rolls toward a hole. It’s comforting.

  “The blue one’s my favorite,” I said, conversationally, leaning my head on John’s chest. Now, it felt right to be near him. Now, I was allowed to touch him. He stroked my hair.

  “I like the blue one too, baby,” he said, companionably.

  We sat like
this for ten, fifteen minutes. It felt like I’d been sucked out of an exploding plane, and had now landed in a field, in France, stunned and winded.

  We continued sitting, like this, as the phone rang and rang.

  In the end, John reached over, and pulled it out of the wall.

  I settled closer to him, and sighed.

  It was after a particularly, soothingly uneventful ten minutes—where the men had failed to get in any balls—that I said, quietly: “John. Have I just done the maddest thing ever?”

  “Absolutely,” John replied, stroking my head. “You are demonstrably insane. In those situations, you’re just supposed to stay silent, push all your emotions down into a toxic ball in the bottom of your stomach for twenty years, and die of a furious, inoperable cancer. Couldn’t you just be normal, like everyone else?”

  “No,” I said. We were still staring at the TV. It felt very peaceful.

  “Why did you do it?” he finally asked, gently. Curiously.

  It was a big question. There were a million things I could say. About how angry I am, that I had something stolen from me. The unfairness—the terrible unfairness—that others got to judge me. The horror of realizing how disgusted the world is by women. A desire to haul Jerry into my shit. Some not yet fully formed awareness that, out there, there are other girls, who shouldn’t think that it’s acceptable that this happens. I opened my mouth to start this huge, tumbling, impassioned rant, but what came out was:

  “The idea made me laugh.”

  And that was actually the main reason. Letting secrets go makes you laugh. Showing everyone your terrible fuck makes everything . . . lighter, in the end.

  “I feel—better now.”

  And I did. I felt as if I had just stepped out of endless darkness, into the light.

  I started laughing—because it was over, and I was happy. And because nothing makes you laugh more than someone else laughing, John started laughing too. We became quite hysterical for a while—in the way you often are, after dramatic events. Weeping, and gasping for breath, before finally subsiding, exhausted.