A Fluffer with Frontal Nudity

The Perk of Having People Falsely Believing Your Dad is a Child Molester

My brother Gary and I share a room my first year of high school when he is eighteen, and I masturbate myself to sleep into a gym sock, some nights fantasizing about him. He makes a funny comment once about knowing I jerk off a lot, but I don't think he quite understands it is sometimes about him. Maybe he does. He is pretty comfortable with being desired by the hoi and the polloi, and at the time is having an affair with a much older woman. She is twenty-three.

I remember everything in my childhood, everything of importance, and as much as all the facts seem like they should point to some sort of sexual abuse in the home going on behind closed doors it never happens. Okay, there is the man I've written about before who my father is friends with when we live in Cairo and I spend one night with him and his family. I am scared and want to sleep with the man. Once we are alone in his bed I ask if I can hold his penis. He looks a little mystified but nods. When I am looking at it, he explains about circumcision. Then I start to cry and he has to call my father to come get me.

My first movie turns out to include a fairly accurate depiction of my vivid childhood fantasy that starts when I am about six, of wanting to get back at my father; the razor-naked-chair thing I have also written about before, where he is naked, tied to a chair, and I slice him up with a razor blade, refusing to kill him, so he can be awake to feel the pain.

In the movie I want to depict the violence of my upbringing, and I want to explore early sexual stuff, but I don't want to make a gay movie since I figure there will be such a limited market for it. I compromise by telling the story of a girl whose father returns after being in prison and wants to take up his sexual relationship with her. She kills him in the end after also accidentally shooting her sister and probably implicating her best friend as well. I wish I could say it is a musical.

On the film festival circuit a lot of the press coverage surrounds my own experiences as a self-proclaimed abused child. As carefully as I explain that my father never sexually abuses me, lots of reviews and articles take to referring to me as a survivor of incest, which I start finding fairly funny. After all, though I know my father has never done anything of the kind, it's a kind of perk if people come away from the movie thinking he is a child molester. That's what I gleefully tell people anyway. It isn't really how I feel. I have no way of knowing since everything in my life becomes a story, a dinner-party anecdote, a way of sparkling in a room. I can't be sure this blog isn't more of the same. It feels honest. What is honesty? I say all this stuff about how there is nothing ever directly sexual with my father, and yet he is always the Naked Dad to me, and while shooting the movie I am hugely attracted to the actor playing his doppelganger, who has a scene with frontal nudity, and likes to tease me by asking me to be his fluffer.