WARREN BEATH

It hurt so much when Mel Gibson thought of her sexually with another man.  It hurt when she said that she loved him and that he was special, but there was the evidence in human experience that she had been in love before.  She had feelings and been moved, and cried.  She had learned to love and to make love.  She had cared and crossed continents to be with her man of the moment.  She had given herself and withheld nothing.  She had told men she loved them.  She had told men she wanted to be held by them, she had been flirtatious.  She had allowed herself to be undressed, and there was not an inch of her that had not been touched.  And her mind likewise had been touched, and her feelings sounded.  And poor women get cornered and only can offer the protests that no this one is special or that one is the only one who and I never felt this—  but it was all the same and he knew it.  And there was a deadness to the knowing of that.  He had followed her into this deadend of feelings and all he wanted in return was to be special, and wanted her to love him at that moment in that special way.  What had she done?  She had fallen asleep while he lay there in fear and desire.   
         “. . . . . . And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”

It was an exhausted Mel Gibson who stared at his black razor phone on the settee. The session with his therapist had helped him, in addition to the new swear words he had learned from a cursory reading of the misogynist newsletter in the waiting room. His inner child suffered and the world could not understand and he could himself barely admit. He loved the woman. His Russian model named Osaka or Osama or something was not sprung virginal and fully-grown from the head of Zeus but she had clawed her way to the top of her profession by intense labial suction and she had been roughly-used by men. His, Mel Gibson’s, tender love had been pawed and clawed and handled by a succession of men who did not care for her and by extenuation did not care for him, Mel Gibson, nor his fragile regard for himself. He was tormented by images of her with her ex and when she signed the occasional love note with XXXXs he imagined it was an encryption indicating to him the number of ex’s with whom she had experimented with a variety of positions and attitudes that beggared his— Mel Gibson’s — imagination. In the Passion of the Christ had been the seminal figure of the whore Mary Magdalene and it was no accident she shared the name of His mother because the nature of woman was two sides of the same coin, the daft cows, telling one man this and another the same thing, they were weak and that was why Satan had tempted woman in the garden of Eden and she probably had come onto him just like the Russian model at the debut of the Fall Versacci line— he stopped himself. So he was tormented by the images behind his eyelids and it was of his love and the mother of his child with Timothy Dalton, James Bond himself. Bond was the uber-male, the hyper-masculine alpha-uber-hyper-male that rolled on eight testicles like a juggernaut through popular culture amidships of women with names like Pussy Galore and Tiffany Case and … Tim Dalton. James Bond. Dalton embodied Bond. Bond embodied all the masculine attributes that had threatened himself— Mel Gibson— since the advent of poverty. He meant— puberty. An accident? Because Mel’s self-esteem was intimately linked to his worldly success. And advent itself was a religious holiday or something— and wasn’t Christ himself a sort of spiritual James Bond? And God the Father was like M, equipping the Son with a grab-bag of miraculous gadgets and gimmicks to ensure a doubting world that God could multiply fish and turn water into wine, and even red wine which would perhaps not be preferable with fish but with a meat, say a rib-eye steak with garlic mashed potatos or something equally of the like— which brought to mind the dinner he had shared with the Russian model who tormented his dreams with visions of her encoupled and feverishly entwined with Timothy Dalton/James Bond or even Tim Bond or James Dalton, or some other awkward permutation that would denote the monstrous hybrid of the actor with the cultural colossus of the masculine image of James
Bond. James Bond did not care about his baby his Osaka or Onsuna— the name of the model he cared not nor remembered probably the infinity or couplings. But Mel Gibson knew and he was flagellated by the images of the mother of his child with James Bond or Timothy Dalton or even both of them in a troisome or whatever you called it– a troika or something, unless that was a sleigh of somekind with reindeer. And the incident with the jacuzzi— it was nothing to her she had done it with Dalton probably a brazilian times without complaint. But when he— Mel Gibson— had wanted it she had fallen asleep and was snoring. Her monumental indifference to him was evidence and how was she to know it had been a test, that she was being watched to see if she would care or whether she loved Tim Dalton more. It was these horrible thoughts and sounds that had driven him to inexcusable violence, well inexcusable for him— Mel Gibson— but when Bond had knocked around Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love no one had complained or raised a stink or accusations of misogyny or racism. Was it because she was so old, or had poison-tipped razors in the toes of her shoes? That was indicative of the hypocrisy of culture, you could knock around old Lotte Lenya all you wanted and no one complained or thousands cheered, but you get a little physical with a Russian supermodel and they all came after you. The woman always was the sympathetic figure but it was man who was the weaker and wounded child, thought Mel Gibson as he lay sleepless on his pillow. It was not easy being Mel Gibson— it was not easy to be a man.  He wished he could hit a woman right now!

Mel Gibson screamed once more into the phone and slammed it his pocket, hyperventilating for a moment as he watched  the aneurysm pulsing from the swollen vein in his neck and up to his temple.  He took his own heartrate and brought it down to double-digits with the force of will which had brought concentration to his role of Fletcher Christian in the third remake of Mutiny on the Bounty.  Women did not understand what a man needed.  Women want and they have it easier, but men have difficult lives as when he himself essayed the role of that guy in the movie about the Indians in the jungle or something.  Wait he had only directed it, but the loinclothes mostly did the acting.  What on earth did she think a man really needed?  Women want, but a man needs.  He thought of writing a book of aphorisms about the difference between men and women, something that could be read in an airport or in the crapper.  Well, there is a Mel Gibson in every man and it may be harsh and demanding at times but it is also the fuse that drives the quest for outer space, and the acquisition of a good table at a restaurant.  Men have different needs and they are stronger than that of women, and all in all more important.  They are driven by testesterone which is secreted in quantity and thickness according to the masculinity of the individual.  Men are angry, and they are angrier and their demands more urgent in proportion to how manful they are.  The louder a man shouts and the more agitated he becomes over the issue of his needs, the less he has to worry about issues like homosexuality or even the absorption in cooking shows such as Iron Chef or the one where they make the cakes and have to carry them to a table in front of judges.  When a man shouts and hits a woman it is to assert a primitiveness and a prerogative which women actually understand and accept as an indication of his level of manliness and freedom from fear of his own effiminancy.  This was simple.  The fans of Mel Gibson had always sensed the volcano beneath the surface of his urbane portrayals.  But it is a scary world when your manful powers are waning and your woman is younger and attractive and knew her way around Timothy Dalton, he could remember a day when he would not have contented himself with knocking out two teeth but would have delivered full body blows to the torso, but that was what it was like when you got older.  He had fathered a child, what more could the world want or even the Pope for that matter?  Mel Gibson smiled to himself at the recollection of a bit of scripture, recalling the synoptic Gospels and even Ur-Mark which had been the earliest form of the recollections of the living Christ by his disciples.  The silly fools, they had eaten honey in the desert and slept in sand, while Mel Gibson had a bathroom of Italianate design and a maid who had a confidentiality clause.  There was at the foundation of every man- woman relationship a tacit understanding that a man has needs and those needs had to be met by a woman, otherwise he would be with another man because of the mutuality of interests such as sports cars the bonhomie of locker rooms and World Cups.  Not for Mel Gibson a yachting regatta which was the athletic equivalent of sipping tea from a demitasse, oh no he remembered as a lad growing up in Australia beating waitresses on the field as his mum and pop cheered from stands and chewed a koala.  Now here was this Russian model stealing his heart and replicating him in female form such as a daughter, and he thought of Braveheart and how he must inside him have a medieval hero in fact to be able to embody such a role to the satisfaction of the men in his audience.  He recalled lighting a match on glass for a Rolling Stone reporter, and acknowledged the admiration of women the world over.  And he had annointed this Russian beauty with his lavishments and even his DNA and look what she had done to him, and what with his shoutingness and manfulness wanting her in the jacuzzi, and what man didn’t?  And what man of the legions crying for his blood like villagers outside the moat in a Universal classic horror film of the 1930s, did not need the same thing and wish that he was great and powerful to demand attentions from Russian models or even models of the non-Russian mode, or even the girl with red lips on the Progressive Insurance commercial?  Every man knew the pain of laying in bed and listening to the snores of a disinterested female who had promised unspokenly to meet his needs.  The warm jets of the jacuzzi only bespoke a more heated inflammation of the skin, and it was good enough for the Pope.  Mel Gibson recalled the Bible verses he had learned at his mother’s knee, and to have risen to the exalted position of directing the famous Film the Passion of the Christ which was notable for having dialogue entirely in Aramaic.  Now there was a language.  In Aramaic there was no word for “penguin” because they had never seen one.  But probably there were dozens of words for sand lice, speaking of which he reminded himself to fire his lawyer and adjust the carburation of his seminal vesicles.  The racial rants were only the expression of the latent prejudices that resided in every man, and women if they admitted it were suspicious of men who did not have at least some bigotry and intolerance, not to mention impatience and several other anti-virtues not mentioned in the New Testicle of the Bible.  He thought with abashment of Bill Bixby and other actors who had died of prostate cancer and contemporaneous judgement of pundits that it was a ten-yard penalty from a wrathful God for man’s mistreatment of models and the hope that a super model would arise in the East who would smite the menful half of the world with reproductive afflictions which may have come true already as evidenced by the Russian supermodel giving birth to a daughter rather than a son.  He felt a boiling rage in the pit of the bowels of his undermost digestive tract, and his finger trembled over the speedial button of his razor phone if they actually have one, and who could be sure of anything in an age where Russian supermodels gave birth to girls and the Pope himself was mute in the Vatican while his favorite son was enduring the calumny of an international press?  Well the good news was that his attackers would wake up tomorrow and be only insignificant nothings among the unimportant people who comprised most of the world, while he would be Mel Gibson superstar.  Haha he laughed to himself.  Life was good.  Damn good.

.

.