WARREN BEATH

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!