You Are Getting Sleepy: The Disturbing Case of the Risible Rapist
I spent three weeks with Bill Cosby. And, total disclosure: I wish him ill.
“What’s with all of the homosexuality?”
My mother, in a very roundabout way was asking me a very specific question that wasn’t the question she seemed to be asking. And she was asking it of me in relation to my novel, A Long Slow Screw, a derivation of a criminal heist unfurl as twisted as it is unsparing, and that featured not an insignificant amount of violence…with strong homosexual undertones, up to and including rape.
While I believed she was asking me if I was trying to send a personal message, I responded that all of my messages are personal but in this case it was structurally and artistically necessary.
“Explain.”
Well, Hollywood is never honest about rape. Unattractive people get raped every day and yet, we never see the cinematic depictions of the rape of unattractive people. Not once. How do I know? Let’s start with the anecdotal: A Hollywood producer (who will remain nameless here) maintained an extensive library of every rape scene seen in films he could get his hands on. Thousands. No ugly people.
This is far from accidental. Hollywood plays with rape. Rape as titillation. Rape as foreplay. Rape as plot device. Rape as wish fulfillment.
Which is to say even the word “rape”, insofar as it evokes the rape of other people, rarely involves people who people don’t want to imagine being raped and who, if you’re one of those people now imagining it, will always imagine the victims to be attractive. Because if they weren’t, well who, after all, would want to rape them?
And when I say “people” here is it necessary to say that I really mean “men”?
I don’t think so. So if I am going to use rape as plot device as I have in my novel — translated in French as Paternostra (éditions inculte) and soon to be in Italian — I’d like it to be understood as what it is. That is: brutal and life denying. Sans Hollywood dishonesty.
Because the reality is even if you’re a gay man, unless this is your very specific kink, being raped is not, nor should it be, understood as pleasant. Women understand intimately and immediately that it is not. It’s heterosexual men who have to have the point driven home and this was the only way to do it, I said.
Much more instructive for me to make mention of the women I know who haven’t been sexually assaulted. Because that number is shockingly small…
But beyond that, if you’ve not had your powerlessness provide a field of play for players and bad actors alike, this is the closest I could get you.
Did it work? Touring on the book, people walked out of some shows. People who talked to me before the show refused to talk to me after the show. People who had bought the book before the show asked for their money back after the show.
And when I say “people” here is it necessary to say that I really mean “men”?
But now sitting in the makeup chair on the set of what was later determined to be the worst movie of 1987, the execrable Leonard Part 6, I had been surprised and semi-excited to see the film’s star and driving force behind it, Bill Cosby post up in the chair next to me.
I’ve already written about what it was like to work on that hallucinatory and horrible bit of film, but I leave stuff out so like an onion it unfolds and in a blast of recalled memory on the occasion of him just now beating his conviction for aggravated indecent assault, I remember this makeup chair moment.
“She’s so fucking fat now.” Still not used to America’s Dad cursing I stared at him in the mirror, before looking away, while the person who did my makeup was doing exactly what I was doing: listening while trying to seem like we were not listening.
For his part Cosby was oblivious. He was at the height of his powers then. He was Cliff Huxtable, Jello Brand man, and the film’s star and producer. His story about a recently un-retired secret agent named Leonard who was going to battle with a radical animal rights activist played by The Matrix’s Gloria Foster was expected to be a massive hit. It had 24 million 1987 dollars poured into it.
Put more succinctly he didn’t give a shit who heard him hold forth on singer Angela Bofill. So for a good 10 minutes he dressed her down. To a captive audience. And while I don’t know that it matters, I was a Bofill fan. I thought she just seemed like a cool person and I dug her voice.
“Disgusting,” he leaned back in the chair, satisfied. Talked about how he and Miles Davis were laughing at her. Behind her back.
I also remember a production assistant who had told me, sidebar style, that she had been invited to where he had been staying…he had rented out large chunks of space at Ghiradelli Square in San Fran, a place as tony as it comes when it comes to San Francisco. She was about 25. She reminded me of one of my four sisters.
…[T]hat version elided over what I was trying to Paul Revere into existence: Cosby was much worse than just not a nice guy.
When later asked about it, she waved me off. She hadn’t wanted to go if his wife wasn’t going to be there, and so she didn’t. Though his family was intermittently present — often showing up on set to gather round a custom made orange Porsche, a seeming gift for his then still living son Ennis — their presence was not constant. And there had been…rumors.
When the film wrapped I wrote my first piece about it. I sent it to my agent first. He contacted me immediately and strongly suggested I not publish it. Which is what everyone said. I eventually entered it in a story competition at Stanford Magazine where it took third place. But even that version elided over what I was trying to Paul Revere into existence: Cosby was much worse than just not a nice guy.
The unfunniness of the aforementioned “pussy eating story” provided an entry into a churlish, mean-spirited scold of a man. A characterization that spun out in his hectoring of the Black community in scenes that set the scene for his later dismasting. A guy from the streets of Philly catching airs and then the grand reveal when Hannibal Buress put him on blast.
Followed by the then slow-motion car wreck of 60 women rolling into decades old reminiscences of him drugging and fucking them. Much like lots of other Black celebrities — OJ, MJ, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — who are Black when it suddenly suits them (read: they get in trouble), this was now a “lynching”, according to him. And both his real and his TV wife lined up behind him.
After all how could a multiply unfaithful man who was spending significant amounts of solo time with probable/possible gold-diggers attracted by his immense wealth and power who were just trying to grift this good man, be guilty of drugging and fucking them as well?
How they answered that and lived with it is between them and their ruling g-d, but the devil is in the details. And the details are depressing.
The percentage of women I know who have been sexually assaulted is staggeringly high. Let’s make that STAGGERINGLY.
Much more instructive for me to make mention of the women I know who haven’t been sexually assaulted. Because that number is shockingly small: probably not more than 10.
Raped by fathers, brothers, dates, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, strangers. Insofar as I have been able to help, I have but you can’t beat them all with baseball bats.
He admitted to bringing quaaludes as a prelude to sexual contact with a variety of women he wasn’t married to. For the record, and I started having sex in the ‘70s, I have brought along quaaludes a total of zero times to every single sexual contact I’ve ever had.
But different strokes for different folks.
So because his admission was part of the civil case, it had been determined that prosecutors had incorrectly used this to secure a criminal conviction that was just voided this past week.
Then the murmurs of how this is just a rebalancing of the scales of justice that so often served rich, white folks and now should be bent to serve traditionally disenfranchised Black folks.
Well, show me a disenfranchised Black folk and I’ll push to have justice rebalanced in their favor. But I don’t know too many disenfranchised Black multimillionaires. And, truth be told, Cosby was and is as franchised as they come. So this, to me, is a meditation on the corrosive power of fame. Fame and cash. Against a judicial system susceptible to both.
Will he reoffend? Do 83-year-old men reoffend?
Of course they do. As part of a piece I’ll write about later, I interviewed Eva Kor. She and her twin sister had been operated on by Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz during World War 2. Famously, and years later, she publicly embraced and forgave former Schutzstaffel agent and Auschwitz accountant Oskar Gröning while he was on trial for being an accessory to murder.
I interviewed her a month before she died, a few years after the trial, and so know that she went to her grave believing that forgiveness was the better part of valor.
Gröning, for his part, had welcomed the hug and though he was convicted he fought it in appeal on the grounds that while he was “morally” guilty he was not “legally” guilty. But he certainly was not ever, by any stretch innocent, even he agreed on this point.
Cosby? With his conviction voided is free to claim innocence. And chunks of America will line up behind him and I can only hope their mouths, like his, fill with ash. Every time they try to explain that he was just badly misunderstood. Sixty times.
So land of the free? Home of the brave! “Happy” “Independence” “Day”? Not even a little bit.
Very well-said!