Jerome Charyn's Marilyn the Wild Reprised

It is frustrating not to be a poet or a good writer. This photograph (even though I took it) is beautiful to me. It is full of an erotic tension (the hands inside the stretched body fishnets) which is ameliorated by the softness of the Kodak Black & White Infrared film I used. In my past as a photographer my favourite subject would come into my studio and I would shoot for hours experimenting with concepts. Now the few subjects I have left want a printed menu before the fact.

 Twice divorced at twenty-five, she could chew up husbands faster than any other Bronx-Manhattan girl who had bombed out of Sarah Lawrence. Isaac had always been there to find husbands for her, genteel men with forty-thousand dollar jobs and a flush of college degrees. Her father sat at Headquarters behind the paneled walls of the First Deputy Police Commissioner. He’s been invited to Paris, she heard, as the World’s Greatest Cop (of 1970-71), or something close to that.  And Coen was Isaac’s fool, a spy attached to the First Dep.

Coen spied an alcove about twenty feet behind Marilyn. It was the entrance to an abandoned toilet. He picked up skirt, blouse and suitcase. Marilyn carried her shoes. The alcove was narrow, and they had nowhere to lie down. Marilyn leaned into a dirty wall. Coen’s pants dropped to his knees. Their bellies met under the coats. “Blue Eyes,” she said. Soon her mumbling was indistinct.

Marilyn the Wild, Jerome Charyn 1993