(above panels = 1/2 the "Aaron" chapter

Pornhounds #1 is a 32-page comic about my first job in porn publishing, illustrated by Mark McMurray, Ed Piskor, Matthew Shultz, Robin Bougie, Jim Rugg, and Sophie Crumb. Covers by Joe Simko. Each chapter is dedicated to a different one of my co-workers.


So I've been thinking about mortality and about Boyd and David, looking back at the time we all worked together. And the first thing that comes to mind about that time, I mean what really stands out above everything else is the simple fact they were such nice guys.
Boyd, called "Ben" in the Cameos page, was the production manager. By the time I met him he'd been HIV-positive for years, since the early days of AIDS. Yet he'd suffered amazingly few health complications over the years as a result of being positive. And in fact he never got AIDS. But he’d seen all of his friends die. I would wonder sometimes if he was lonely and how utterly fucking horrible that time in his life must have been. Boyd was reserved until he knew you; when he did he was warm and funny and for some reason I absolutely loved hearing him tell horror stories about old roommates. I remember one story about a roommate who would just get irate anytime he’d see Boyd had left bread out on the counter to get stale. Boyd would leave it out on purpose—he actually liked eating stale bread, which completely, supremely annoyed this roommate to no end. And I while realize this doesn’t sound funny here, hearing Boyd tell it had me in tears. And I've been thinking about moments like these. About the pleasure of laughing with a co-worker in the middle of a long work day. Just how fucking nice that can be. How it gets you through to another day.


Then there was was David Aaron Clark. He was the associate editor. He did all kinds of writing for the paper, and that included chronicling his own sexual exploits in a column called “Sex Beat.” I realize a sex column may not sound so remarkable. But in this case, it kind of was—because David was fat. He was fat and unabashedly sexual and he wrote all about his sex life, past and present, much of it on the S/M end of the spectrum. And the writing was beautiful. I just had tons of respect for all of that. He had this rock-solid core of self-respect and when I was around him it always rubbed off on me—he'd always make me feel, without trying, just sort of better about myself. David was a great listener, always interested in whatever I had to say regardless of the fact I was the definite “square” in the office. He encouraged me to write; he encouraged me to take myself seriously as a writer. I wasn’t aware of it then, but looking back I can see he was just one of those touchstones in life, someone you happen to meet and just by the sake of who they are, you wind up twisting off in a slightly different, slightly better direction. Plus he turned me onto Battlestar Galactica.

True Porn 2, a comics anthology edited by Robyn Chapman, wound up including my chapter about David (called "Aaron," and beautifully illustrated by Jim Rugg). Sequart.com reviewed the anthology and singled it out: "The best-written piece may be Aaron, written by Lintz. She writes about porn for a living and this tale of a friend of hers in the industry is oddly compelling, as the reader comes to share her admiration its lead."

Anyway. David eventually moved to L.A. Then I moved to NYC, and then to Florida, then back to NYC. My favorite thing about Facebook is that it allows me to be in touch with friends who live far away, to be in tune with the rhythm of their everyday lives, at least to a certain degree. It was great re-connecting with David in this way, seeing what he was up to, what he was reading or watching, which was always smart and probabaly scifi.

Some time ago I posted the covers of five old sci-fi paperbacks I’d found back while I was in the middle of chemotherapy. They’d been tucked away in this small bookcase in the cancer center waiting room, all covered in dust—old Ace sci-fi paperbacks, Philip Dick, Michael Moorcock—just awesome, so I took them. David commented, “Oh my god, what gorgeous editions! Congrats on finding transcendence in unlikely places ...”


When I first read that quote I thought of course, how beautiful, how awesome, that’s what I want, to remember that I'm naked and be fearless. And sometimes I think I am doing that, that I'm an at-peace "survivor," that I acquired some kind of special peace-conferring wisdom during cancer treatment. But the fact is, it's easy for me to think I'm at peace when I'm not actually, really thinking about death. I'm tolerating meds really well, I mean I'm doing really well on the whole, and I'm alive and know how lucky I am to be alive, and when everything is going well I can pretty effectively kid myself that I'm somehow at peace with mortality. But then I'll start thinking about other people who have died, just the random insanity of it, of Boyd and David for example. Like I'm thinking about them right now. And I just wonder how this could all be. How fucking strange it all is. And then I'll think about this weird pain I have in my back left ribs. And that I've had it a few weeks. And that I have to call my oncologist about it. And that I know she's going tell me to wait another four weeks to see if it goes away on its own. And then I'll remember I had a clean bone scan a year and a half ago so that’s good right, but wow the pain is there, and wow I really felt it moving that bookcase, and is it getting worse hard to tell, and it could be a lot of things, and I need to make an appointment for my Zometa infusion, and so on.

For anyone who's been through cancer, a weird pain or a lingering fever or whatever will stir up thoughts like this. And at some point these thoughts will to turn to mortality, as in your own, even if what you're thinking about is how you don't want to think about it. So here I am, with this fucking pain, and I'm being effectively reminded again that I'm naked, that I'm mortal, etc. And I don't feel at peace. I feel instead like I'm in a dream, like the kind where you suddenly see that you're naked, and holy shit, and you'd like to run for cover but you can't, and you feel naked in the worst possible way, and you're afraid. But this isn’t a dream. If I go about my day, if I effectively distract myself, I know this feeling will recede. And then it will flair, and if I'm not able to immediately get my brain onto something else or otherwise very, very quickly tamp it down, this sudden remembering-I'm-naked will once again chill me to the fucking bone. And then the feeling will recede, and then flair, and so on. Thing is right now I just don't want to remember that I'm already naked. I much prefer remembering my nakedness when I don't have any pain in my back. Because I'm still not right with being naked. And anyway god knows I really do want to be grand and wise and fearless in the knowledge of my own mortality but the fact is I can’t even seem to get off the couch do that stack of dirty dishes. Plus I'm watching Castle on Hulu.

Which isn't to say cancer didn't come with rewards. It did, no doubt. Like before cancer I used to be terrified to drive in NYC. Now I'm not. Plus these days the quotidian hell of riding a crowded subway has lessened for me considerably. Because instead of feeling profoundly hassled, or like every other person on the train is my enemy simply because they're contributing to the crowd that's making my commute a fucking hassle, instead of all that, post-cancer I've found myself experiencing moments on the train of opennness and connection. Like all at once I'll understand how it is that we're all human, that we're all hurtling from point A to point B, that we all want love and acceptance and here are on this train, and so on. And I don't mean to present this "understanding" as something I come to after working through various thoughts that lead to any logical conclusion of connectedness. Because this feeling of understanding just happens; I mean somehow I'll understand all of this, all at once, without actually thinking. This understanding, this feeling of connection rushes into me pre-thought, or sub-thought, or something. It's like a getting sudden fever.



I've taught Hamlet I think five times in the past three years. And I'm still amazed at how very contemporary the play seems when it comes to death. Take the Yorick scene. Hamlet holds Yorick's skull, wondering at the strangeness of the fact Yorick was once here, but now isn't. Anyone alive today has pondered this very same thing at some point; if they haven't they will. Because death is as deeply strange now as it was 400 years ago. And in fact wondering about Boyd and David and their deaths is what precipitated this endless diatribe to begin with. And there's of course Hamlet's famous speech. Why live, why decide "to be" when living can so profoundly suck? Hamlet wonders. And then he answers this question. We press on because we fear death, the unknowability of it, the mystery. That’s it. Not because there's any grand meaning or anything inherently profound about getting up in the morning. So I think about Hamlet and I think, wow, this was written 400-odd years ago and people are wondering about all this still, like what the hell, and why, and what is this life and what does it mean; and how to find worth, and how to make sense of anything if there is no meaning outside of our own thoughts and perceptions; and how it is we all die; and how it is we all wind up worm-food or dust or whatever.

Now I’m generally not someone who wracks my brain contemplating the meaning of existence, but David and Boyd and cancer are on my mind and it’s late at night and so here I am thinking about this, thinking again about Hamlet. And how his perception of death makes sense to me and how I want to be ok with the fact it makes sense to me, with being another speck in the universe. And then I think about David and Boyd, such cool and interesting and funny guys. And I think how they were specks too, and how nice it was crossing paths with them for a little while.

11/15/2011




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