I’m not expecting this. What does he mean?
‘I have cancer,’ he says.
‘Do you?’
‘Yeah – I’ve been in remission for nine years,’ he says, rightly proudly.
I shake his hand by way of approbation. And view him as a human being for the first time in our encounter. Over on the small dinner table, one of the Chihuahuas is licking from the bowl of someone’s unfinished breakfast.
‘Yes, I’m a cancer survivor,’ he says.
‘Congratulations,’ I say. ‘So why do you feel she’s helped you survive cancer?’
‘Coz she’s taken care of me.’
‘Right,’ I say. We’ve got pathos here. It’s emotional. Woody’s eyes are filling with even more water than before. The juxtaposition of this pornographer being cared for by his wank-fantasy nurse/wife takes the bizarre nature of this union to a new level. It’s like Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, but with massive tits. I’m already looking forward to the film, starring Jim Broadbent as Woody.
‘Whereas probably no one in my condition one year ago would have took care of me like that…’
Minka’s full lips turn upwards. Oh my God, she loves him. I’m confused. And so I should be. That’s love.
We go upstairs on the softest, mushiest carpet I’ve ever stepped on. The Americans do mushy like no one else. The carpets are mushy, the suspension on their cars is mushy and 98 per cent of the food is too. Americans like things to be soft and squashy. I think it fits in with the first of the two American obsessions: comfort and convenience.
We make our way conveniently up the staircase to ‘the office’, inside which is a large computer, an ironing board and a green parrot. The parrot is called Buddy and he is Woody’s. Why do certain members of families appropriate certain animals? Surely if an animal lives under one roof, it belongs to all the inhabitants. Rusty was our gorgeous German Shepherd when I was growing up. He belonged to me, my brother, my two sisters, and my parents. In fact he belonged to hundreds of people, as I grew up above a pub in Camden in London, and anyone who purchased a pint of Ruddles County, or Carlsberg, essentially bought a share of Rusty as he meandered around the pub hoovering up discarded Golden Wonder Prawn Cocktail crisps. But he was no fat pet. More on them later…
To prove his ownership of the soul of this parrot, Woody essentially proceeds to French kiss the creature. This is a difficult thing to watch. Which is saying something in a room which contains over a thousand hard-core pornographic DVDs. None of which, mercifully, feature Buddy. Minka does though. We look at one DVD cover – it’s Minka with naked breast exposed, being licked by another, fair-haired lady.
‘Is that a friend?’ I ask. ‘Who is that lady?’
‘That’s Maxi Mounds,’ says Woody. This is the legendary Maxi Mounds, the most enhanced woman in the world, on paper at least. But as a quick call to her agent confirmed, she is currently retired. It’s hard to picture a woman that looks like that being ‘retired’. I can’t picture her playing for pennies at a local bridge club, or wandering the aisles of B&Q, looking for solar-powered garden lamps. Maybe she just knits.
‘Woody, I’ve just noticed one of the films there is The Milking of Minka,’ I say. I suspect it’s thin on plot. ‘And then there is another one called The Orient Express, what’s the storyline in that one?’
‘It’s the Orient Sexpress,’ corrects Woody.
I wasn’t playing dumb. That’s how green I am about these things – I actually missed the very demonstrative pun. I go on reading the blurb about it. ‘Starring Minka, Mr Hanks…Is that Tom Hanks?’ Now I am playing dumb.
‘That was me,’ says Woody.
‘Oh, you were in one of those movies?’
‘I have done a lot of the movies with her.’
This is a surprise – I didn’t have Woody down as front of house. So it turns out, like Bogart, his doppelganger, he has a career on celluloid too. Though I suspect The Orient Sexpress isn’t quite the cinematic masterpiece that Casablanca is.
‘So you have starred in these adult movies, most of the movies?’ I ask.
‘Yes, because there is things she will do with me in a video that she won’t do with other guys.’
‘OK,’ I say.
He goes on. ‘She will do me orally without a condom, but she hasn’t done that lately and she has got to go back, she has got to go back to doing the nasty stuff for it to sell.’
I go on to ask him what the nasty stuff is. He gives me an example.
‘Well, do you know the expression cream pie?’ he asks.
‘No I don’t.’ I don’t.
‘It’s when a guy comes into the woman and you have a close-up of the vagina as the semen comes out,’ he says nonchalantly.
The expression ‘I wish I hadn’t asked’ can’t be more appropriate at this juncture. And I have had those moments in the past. I’ve asked plenty of women who were overweight when the baby was due. And, enquiring as to how long they were staying with us, I asked a gravely ill friend, ‘When do we lose you?’ Thankfully they actually survived, and spared my blushes…
But asking Woody to elaborate on the context of the ‘nasty stuff’ is my gravest error. Aside from the misfortune of being presented with this image in my mind, I am amazed at Woody’s sheer boredom at describing these things. It’s like when the heroes of the trenches during the First World War became very sanguine, nay flippant, about death and images of death, so Woody is a veteran of the sex industry and thus has a certain attitude to the human body and its reproductive processes, which is reflected in the language he uses. But how can you possibly talk about your wife in these terms? It struck me at the time as cold and brutal, and even now, looking back on it, fills me with a sadness.
But the flipside of it is they are married and she did nurse him through cancer and I think they genuinely care for each other. Love comes in all shapes and sizes and though I felt sorry for one of the parties involved, ultimately their relationship functions. It works and each partner has a set of duties and expectations on them which are wholly unconventional and unedifying, but that is the relationship. It’s ironic to think that this dysfunctional union has escaped the statistic of one in three marriages failing. Woody and Minka, for all of the horror of their domestic arrangements, are still together after all these years. And they clearly need each other.
‘Minka, how do you feel about this, this business of having to do the nasty stuff?’ I ask. She is leaning on the ironing board, which is creaking at the combined weight of her, and her breasts.
‘Hmm, I have to do it, I have to do it. They want to see something different, you know. I have to do it. It’s money yeah. Income,’ she says.
I feel that she’s rehearsing the party line. But she believes it too. That said, there is no enthusiasm in her answer. It strikes me as a doleful acceptance of the status quo. They do live in a big house. They have cars, jewellery,
