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Portfolio Scott Neary
Door Willem van Malsen
Toen de Arbeiderspers mij enige dagen geleden verzocht een begeleidend woord te schrijven bij het Portfolio van de tekenaar-etser Scott Neary, die ik onder mijn vele vrienden mag rekenen, had ik enkele klemmende argumenten om tegen te sputteren. Neary was niet in Amsterdam. Wist de heer Sontrop misschien, waar het Amerikaanse wonderkind uithing? Immers, zo'n artikeltje behoeft feitelijke informatie: Plaats en datum van geboorte. Eerste seksuele ervaring, etcetera. Duidelijk liet ik bij de heer Sontrop doorschemeren, dat ik de affreuze journalistieke mentaliteit om het pennevolk onder hoge spanning en dientengevolge dronken of trippend, een stukje in elkaar te laten flansen, ten zeerste afkeurde. En zie, als een blad aan de boom draaide hij om. Een en al begrip en beminnelijkheid. Als mijn tekst dat behoefde, kon ik natuurlijk (!) op kosten van de uitgeverij de hele wereld afbellen.
Na twee dagen succes! Scottie zat doodgemoedereerd bij zijn moeder in de Bronx. Ik kan u verzekeren, lezers van Maatstaf, dat zo'n telefoontje vanuit een stulpje even buiten Parijs, heel wat voeten in de aarde heeft!
‘Dag mevrouw Neary, u spreekt met Crétin in Parijs. Mag ik uw zoon even?’
‘Zeker, meneer Crétin. Hij zit naar de televisie te kijken. Ik zal hem even roepen.’
‘Hello, Roly. How are you?’
‘Fine, Scotty. I'm writing a paper about you and I need some information. What are you doing?’
‘Oh man, I've been glued to the television all day, gorging myself on: a movie with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart called Marked Woman, followed by Billy Wilder's The Lost weekend, with Ray Milland playing an alcoholic writer who goes on a binge one weekend and ends up hallucinating bats and mice on his kitchen wall, and finally Footlight parade, with James Cagney and Ruby Keeler, a gigantic Busby Berkley song and dance spectacular. Of course at this moment, my eyes are dangling out of their sockets, but I just had a little nourishment, in the form of a peanut butter and marshmellow fluff sandwich, plus two little disc-shaped pieces of yellow dough, which when inserted into my toaster, were magically transformed into pancakes, complete with butter and maple syrup flavor.’
‘Very interesting. Born?’
‘Huh?’
‘Date of birth, please.’
‘20-4-1949.’
‘Place?’
‘Bronx. New York.’
‘Fine, fine. Hold on, I'll have to write this down. By the way, why are you blasting away at my ear like that...?’
‘Oh, Roland, violence is rampant in this city, every day on the news or in the papers there are more horror stories of people getting stabbed, beaten, burned or bombed.’
‘Wrong President.’
‘Every day in the newspaper is another picture of Gerry Ford doing something stupid and the latest rage is Gerry Ford jokes - example: “Why did Gerry Ford go to China?” - so he could fall off the Great Wall.’
‘That's very funny, indeed. Why are you making drawings?’
‘It's a great pleasure for me, Roly.’
‘Your first drawing?’
‘A portrait of the Kindergaten teacher. Teachers impressed me. At college - I was specialised in art and film - we had Nicolas Ray for a while. The first thing he told us: “Boys and girls, I'm a man who fucked
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Case 43... L., journeyman employee, was arrested for having in public, cut off a large piece of skin from his left forearm with a pair of scissors. He confessed that he had for a long time the urge to eat a piece of a young girl's fine white skin, and that he had to this end followed a suitable victim with the scissors held all ready for the act, but owing to lack of favourable prospects for such behavior he had given up and cut himself as a substitute.
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Case 98... X appeares to have been afflicted even as a child with an inexplicable urge to destroy things... in the ensuing years it was apparently at intervals of some fourteen days, plagued each time with a violent headache, that he felt the urge to commit brutalities on a corpse. He dug the corpses out with his hand and in his excitement did not even notice the damage he did to his hands... then he cut up the corpses, tore out the entrails and masturbated in that situation... after he had cut them to bits, he buried the corpses again.
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Case 51... An extremely decrepit Russian prince used to insist on his mistresses sitting above him with their backs turned to him and defecating on his chest, and it was only in this manner that he could activate the remains of his libido.
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Case 139... Doctor X., a public school teacher, has caused public offence by being seen running round with exposed genitals in front of women and children in the Berlin Zoological Gardens on several occasions. X. admits this but denies any desire or awareness of causing offence and seeks tot excuse himself on the grounds that running about with naked genitals gave him relief from nervous excitation. His maternal grandfather was a mental case and ended by suicide, his mother was a constitutional neuropath and sleepwalker and had been a grave mental patient. X. often has dreams of running around mentula denudata or hanging on a horizontal bar with his head downwards, so that his shirt falls down and reveals his erect member. These dreams lead on to pollution and then, he says, he has peace for three days or a week.
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Case 73... X., thirty years old, a sensitive personality of fine feelings; from early childhood a lover of flowers even to the extent of kissing the flowers, but without any sexual relationship... whenever he could, he used to buy roses, and kissed them, getting erections in the process, used to take them to bed, without however bringing them into contact with his genitalia. His pollutions were from that time on accompanied by dreams of roses.
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Case 60... Mr. N.K. collects slices of sausage from any and every country. He has a whole museum of slices of sausage, which are preserved in formalin spirit. Each slice stands in a glass case bearing a label which shows the place of origin and manner of acquisition. Long journeys were undertaken for the purpose of enriching the museum with interesting specimens.
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Case 89... X., thirty four years old, married, felt the urge at the age of seven to busy himself with womens shoes, or, as the case might be, the nails of their shoes. The sight of them, and still more the touching of the studs of the shoes and counting them, gave him indescribable pleasure... often enough he took shoes from female companions, and if he only touched them with his penis he got an ejaculation. X. is otherwise intelligent, diligent at his job, but it is in vain that he fights against his perverse desires.
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Case 19... Twenty nine years old, cursed by heredity, a lady the prey of phobias and fixed ideas. Suffered for eight years with a violent impulsion to sexual congress with one of her nephews. Her desire was principally concentrated on the eldest, when he was about five years old, and was transferred at times to the younger as he grew up. The sight of the child in question sufficed to provoke an orgasm... She had no taste at all for adults.
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Case 103... Y., twenty nine years old, a merchant, since his sixteenth year a masturbator using a pocket electrification gadget, impotent at eighteen, met one day in the street a nurse with a white apron... he could not resist the temptation to steal the apron. He took it home and musturbated on it, and then burned it while masturbating anew... on other occasions he had chanced to notice a stain on a lady's clothes and this had sufficed him to have an orgasm. He attained the same effect by burning holes with his sigar in the clothes of women passing by in the street.
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Case 57... K., forty five years old, said to have no afflicted heredity, male in his behaviour, no signs of degeneracy, otherwise faultness in conduct, was picked up one evening while trying to get away from the place of their concealment with a quantity of stolen female underwear. He was found with some three hundred objects of female toilette, including not only chemises and leg wear but also night caps, garters, even a female doll. At the moment of arrest he was wearing a female chemise on his body... He donned the stolen things at night in bed, and thus imagined lovely women to himself and detected pleasurable sensations and loss of semen.
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Case 148... A gentleman of superior social position, aged 28, appears every three or four weeks, where he announces himself in advance with a letter in the following terms: “Dear Gretchen! I am coming tomorrow evening between eight and nine. Knouts and whips! Heartiest greetings...” X appears at the appointed time with leather belts, riding whips and knouts. He stretches himself out, lets himself be bound hand and foot with the straps he has brought, and then beaten on the soles of the feet, the calves, the backside, with the appropriate instrument until ejaculation takes place. He never expressed the wish for anything else...
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Case 85... C.P., thirty eight years old... “If I meet a woman who seems attrictive to me,” he writes, “my wish is not to have sexual intercourse with her, but to lie on my back on the floor and be trodden on by her feet. She must be elegantly dressed and wearing pretty high heels and low shoes, either open so that the instep is visible or else fastened by a single strap, or band. The edges of the skirt must be raised high enough to give me the view of the foot and observe a fair amount of ankle area... I spare no expense or time or other effort to get under her feet, and wait with anxious tension to be trodden on with the greatest energy.”
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Marilyn Monroe.” He ended with heroin.’ ‘Pfh... Tell me something about your first sexual experience, Scott.’
‘Hahaha, you mean Debby? Wanna hear dirt... saw Debby last week, she had just gotten fired from her job at the gallery... because of her big mouth and lack of tact and sensitivity. She was sitting with the boss one night and managed to turn the conversation to sex and the next day his wife heard about it, and two days later Debby was given the shaft. Now she's living on West 94th street and sits around eating all day like a wildwoman; I was there for an hour, and in that time she devoured a cheese omelet, half a chocolate cake, two coffee rolls and a chicken sandwich... and when her mouth wasn't stuffed, she kept saying how she had to go on a diet. She is suffering from cunt disorders and can't fuck anyone unless he's wearing a condom.’
‘Oh, boy! Scott, why did you become an artist?’
‘Complicated question... You see, my father, who is an Anglo-Irish catholic, pushed art and my mother, who is a Russian-French jew, wanted me to be a doctor. Perhaps, that's why...’
‘Why do you live in Amsterdam?’
‘London and Paris are too much like New York.’
‘Busy now on something special and beautiful?’
‘I just finished a number of illustrations of Sexualis Psychopathia. Kind of a documentation of all possible sexual aberrations by Krafft-Ebing. Hope it will be published soon.’ ‘Oh, Scott, I'm so curious! The famous book by Krafft-Ebing! Completely unavailable, the last twenty years. Where did you find it?’ ‘Waterlooplein.’
‘What did you say?’
‘The Dutch Marché aux puces.’
‘How exciting and romantic... By the way, still boozing around in clubs and cafes?’ ‘Most of the hangouts have closed down, replaced by slick, new spots for the teeny-bopper and under-sixteen trade. I looked in the White Horse Tavern last week, saw a few familiar faces, but most of the old crowd has gone, and I'm left with a lot of ghosts and memories. Speaking of ghosts, I was visiting some friends living at the Chelsea Hotel and their room is next door to where Dylan Thomas lived, and they swear that sometimes late at night they hear the sound of bottles and someone reciting poetry with a thick Welsh accent. Yeah, the action is all happening in Soho now, the new mecca for the hip and the hopeful; loads of galleries, fancy restaurants and smart boutiques, all surrounded by the industrial filth of lower Manhattan. Last week I went to a performance, the kind of thing that is very popular here these days, - Robert Wilson, an avant-garde playwright. In a large loft was an enclosed space of plastic, and within the plastic twelve video monitors, plus twelve people who had been sewn into sleeping bags and were crawling around the floor, and in the middle, a woman was sitting in a plastic beach chair, her hair in curlers, listening to a transistor radio and holding a fishing rod, while above her a guy was suspended in a metallic silver jumpsuit, supported by four cables and every ten minutes he would yell out the name of some popular hit song from the Top 40. Later I went to a party in someone's loft... these places are like airplane hangars, capable of holding up to two hundred people or ten airplanes comfortably. Quel scene, music blasting from six speakers, everyone jivin' and a buffet of joints and cocaine.’
‘Jesus Christ, were you alone?’
‘I was there with Lidewij, funny name, hein! She's Dutch and since she's been in New York, she is on a big fuck crusade and constantly on the make. Every guy she meets she asks for his telephone number and her address book is as big as the Manhattan Yellow Pages. Unfortunately, at this point she's had more telephone numbers than fucks, so she often slips into one of her paranoid-persecution rejection syndromes...’
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‘Scotty, listen, I suppose I really do have enough stuff for the article...’
‘Hold on! Newest rages in town: the l.a. and the Latin Hustle, both incredible dances; downtown discotheques that are equipped with ten sets of quadrophonic sound systems that pulverise your eardrums while you sip fruit juice that's been spiked with lsd; putting Preparation h - which is cream you stick up your ass to get rid of haemorrhoids - under your eyes to get rid of wrinkles; Frye Boots; straight legged jeans; Patty Smith; supper clubs with transvestite entertainment; and the hottest place in town is a sleazy bar on the Hudson River, under the West Side Highway which is called The Anvil, and boasts a live fistfucking show and a bartender who shoots ice cubes into glasses from his asshole...’
Hier heb ik de telefoon maar geaccrocheerd.
Roland Crétin
(vertaling Remco Campert)
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