New Year’s Day, January 1, 1994. I’m 21 years old, sitting on the floor in a dorm room at Cal Arts with Josh. Josh was the one man who held me so closely in his heart that I began to feel beautiful and take good care of myself.
“Hey, Cat, isn’t this your dad’s house?” John, my junior-high love and now very good friend, had just pulled an issue of Penthouse out of the trash and was thumbing through it. Josh and I had driven down from Goleta to ring in the New Year with John and his girlfriend, Marie. Having dated John so long ago, he was now more like a brother than anything else.
“Seriously, check it out.” He passed the issue over, page opened to a black-and-white spread entitled “Home on the Range.” There was the truck with the devil horns, the converted storage barn-be-cum-saloon, a woman bent over revealing her propped-open vagina through spread legs, her perfect, airbrushed ass. How did I feel? Vulnerable, exposed. I felt less than perfect: flattened in my mind to an onion-skin illustration of my body superimposed over her photo, reduced to flesh and bone and raw sexuality. My father’s perspective on women: our key qualities –all else a waste.
My father, a man of no boundaries and endless self-promotion. My stepmom, a former sex surrogate. They met at Elysium, a now-defunct nudist park in Malibu. As my stepmom tells the story: “I was tanning on the grassy hillside, watching this handsome man approach me from afar. He squatted down with his cock directly in front of my face, at eye level. Oh, I knew what I was getting into.”
She was his perfect mate. She had been a well-known sex surrogate before a car accident left her with brain damage and the need for a complete facial reconstruction. Her language was at the level of a five-year-old child, as was her emotional state. Her stories always meandered into the sexual and the deviance of exhibitionism. The year I graduated from high school, she appeared on the cover of a French magazine, fully nude, posed on a footed tub perched on the side of the hill behind the house.
Now they were renting out the property – “The Ranch” – for pornography. My childhood home appeared in photo spreads and videos for Vivid, Penthouse, Hustler, Playboy, and High Society. My father had cameo roles in many of them. While I oddly admired him for building a world in which he could maintain his own concept of reality with his narcissistic sexual addiction satisfied, I mostly ached inside. There were photos of orgy scenes shot on the dining room table where I’d read Judy Blume’s Blubber. My parents had held shouting matches at that table when I was seven.
After my parents divorced that table was used for poker games. I remember my dad and his cronies, watching the movements of my body as I brought out snacks and refilled their beer. It became a world of foggy boundaries now fully re-created, replicated on glossy paper, in marketable, pornographic form.
In Penthouse, my father’s vision of women was exalted, reduced to submissive bodies: our mouths, anuses and cunts penetrated, skin taut, thoughts and words constrained.
I passed the magazine back to John. “Would you please pass me the pipe?” I took in a huge hit of sweet marijuana smoke, and another, and another. I turned my head to look at Josh, intertwined my fingers with his and leaned against his warm, comforting body. I knew I wasn’t alone. My friends with me, Josh’s warmth around me. Still, I felt isolated and lost in the depths of my own emotions.
