Empire of Lies Read Free Page B

afraid the ugly truth was: I liked the way I looked in that outfit. And the upshot was I appeared in those days as every inch the solid pillar of society I would one day come to be.
    But oh, my soul.
    I was miserable. I was miserable and I was proud of it, the way intelligent young people often are. I wore my inner pain like a badge of honor. It showed I was too sensitive for the harsh world, too honest for its corruption, too independent for its iron chains of conformity. Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can't reconstruct the
details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life.
    And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.
    I don't remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for
them,
you know, for society's evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.
    Sex, though—sex was for
us.
It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folk as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.
    My depths, unfortunately, had been forged in the fire of a very unhappy youth. Rage at my mother's fate, confusion at my father's, a wellspring of pent violence opened by my brother's bullying brutality all played a part. And when I really delved into the nature of my desires—and how, given my theories, could I do otherwise?—I discovered I had a simmering penchant for cruelty. This had to be
developed—so I decreed in the name of liberation and integrity—not to mention the fact that it turned me on.
    Which brings me to Lauren Goldberg.
    Lauren was the child of a teacher-slash-filmmaker and the paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist whom he divorced. The years of their marriage, of course, were Lauren's golden era. Till the age of eight, she could trust and believe in family and love and the gentle guidance of the teachers at her private school. After that, her world was all recriminations and disillusionment and shifting sand—plus the cold chaos of public education when the parental breakup sent the family budget to hell. The contrast between these two periods was the source of—or at least the excuse for—all Lauren's bitterness and all her yearning.
    She had long black hair, a small, thin, nicely proportioned body, a harshly attractive face with her father's aquiline Jewish features and her mother's white German-Irish skin. She was young, like me. Smoked, like me. Saw sneeringly, like me, into the grimy heart of the pseudo-immaculate American dream or whatever it was we were sneeringly seeing into the heart of. She worked as a photographer's assistant. Her ambition was to become a photographer herself.
    We met at a poetry reading held in a church. We drank wine out of plastic cups and talked, standing close to each other in the