I wonder what my time with Cicciolina did to my nervous system. I wonder if there’s a point of no return that, once crossed, renders those simple, perfect pleasures—the full eye contact, the gasping ‘I love you’s, the heads nestled into chests, the touching pinkies—unsatisfactory. I wonder if those threesomes and coke-fueled orgies, that whole depraved year-and-a-half of emotionless fucking, may have created an irreparable disconnect between love and sex.
Things were good with Molly. She was between films but she never let up, six hours of French immersion a day—Camus, Genet, Balzac, Foucault, Sartre, Le Clezio literally creating a sag in her book shelf. I was working on “The Color of Money,” with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. There was a barroom brawl scene that never made the final cut. We had a couple dozen bottles of Jack Daniels. Not real ones, but the movie kind. You can smash them over someone’s head and they crush softly, as if made of sugar. I brought one home, set it on the nightstand. For about a month I just looked at it, smelled it. It looked stately, like honey.
One night Molly and I were laying in bed reading. I turned to her. “Here’s how it’s going to go,” I said. “At 5pm tomorrow I’m going to enter the house (she’d given me keys, a three-bedroom Craftsman in Los Feliz). I’m going to walk into the kitchen, grab a Hansen’s mandarin lime soda, and head toward the bedroom. As I’m walking down the hall you’re going to sneak up behind me and smash me over the head with this (I passed her the JD bottle). I’m going to fall in a heap, pass out. You’re going to shimmy me on to the bed, which will be covered in plastic, a fresh pad of butter on a plate set right here (I pointed to her nightstand). You’re going to tie me up, blindfold me, and leave me alone for 24 hours. When you return, when you peel off my blindfold, I want you and your girlfriend Moon lying on either side of me.
Molly complied. The three of us had a good time. Dare I say it might have brought us closer.
A few months and a few scenes later I found an isolated cul de sac in Bel Air that was dark, tree-shrouded, no street lights. The pavement ran into a springy chain link fence. We were sitting at the table eating dinner. Johnny Hallyday's "Rock'n Slow" played on the stereo. "Here's how it's going to go," I told her. "We're going to drive up there at 2 in the morning. Along the way we're going to get in a fight. You're going to order me out of the car. I'm going to walk toward the fence, and as I near it you're going to gun the car at me, ram me right up against it, then back up and do it again. Then you're going to screech off and leave me there."
Things were never the same between us.