Why must I be a (filthy rich, 80-year-old) teenager in love?

FRIDAY, MAY 2, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#674)

Why must I be a (filthy rich, 80-year-old) teenager in love?

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — If you listen to the full nine-minute dialog between L.A. Clippers erstwhile owner Donald Sterling and his mistress, V. Stiviano, you come across one of those prickly been-there, done-that moments that might just make you feel a creepy pang of sympathy — well, pity — for Sterling.

I mean, we’re looking at a white bigot who — for all practical purposes — owns a dozen Negroes who — literally — run and jump at his behest. Here’s a crumbling, jowly, butt-ugly, octogenarian bag of guts who, thanks to a private fortune close to $2 billion, has his pick of the juiciest, willingest, blondest and buxomest starlets in all of Hollywood.

And yet, listen to him. After arguing with Miss V. for about five minutes about her unseemly habit of sashaying out in public with black people, poor Donny just sort of sighs and says, “I really don’t feel like going anywhere… I don’t feel like just going through the whole thing. We’ve got a bi-ig problem.”

He’s exhausted, because, OMG, she doesn’t get it. Donny doesn’t just need her to love him. He needs more. He needs a soulmate. He needs her to believe in him, to get her mind right and follow him wheresoever he leads. He knows he’s right, for so many reasons. He’s a man, not a woman. He’s older. He’s got more money. He’s smarter because — again — he’s a man. Plus, he’s white, she’s not.

Besides, he’s paying her. He’s given her a condo, a Ferrari, a Range Rover and spending money up the ying-yang. Why in God’s name is this woman disagreeing with him?
You see, there’s the rub. You want to hate this guy, but you know how he feels, and what he’s up against in this conversation. I’ve been there, in the same quarrel, arguing not for white supremacy but for true love, in my second year in college with a girl named Cindy, in my freshman year with a girl named Janice, in my junior year in high school with a girl named Sue, and even further back, to tenth grade and a girl named Toni.

Your first glimpse of the girl, it’s always the same — the epiphany that struck Donny when he first laid eyes on Miss V. She is a pure vision — Botticelli’s Venus — an ingenue without flaw, without a voice, without history or personality. She is a paragon of feminine innocence who can be, if only she sits at your knee, gazes into your eyes and drinks in your every word, a vessel of virginal perfection and a veritable fountain of romance, forever and ever unto the twelfth of never.

If only she’ll stay that way. And pay attention, dammit!

But listen, again, to Donny: “I don’t want to argue with you, baby!… You can’t be flexible… You change from day to day. Wow. So painful, wow.”

And here, the saddest words of all: “You’re supposed to be a delicate white, or a delicate Latina, girl.”

Donny knows the vision, exactly. He’s had it in his mind all his life — 80 years! To be the vision, to be showered with the bounty that flows from embodying that “delicate white” ideal, all the stupid bitch has to do shut up, and cooperate.

Why does she resist? “Who would want to love a woman like you?” Donny whines. A woman with a mind of her own? A woman of color who objects to the venomous racism of her sugar daddy? “All you ever want to do is fight,” cries Donny. “You’re a born fighter.”

Amongst all the bizarre statements about race and sex and Miss V’s unseemly public displays of tolerance, the undertone of this wonderful quarrel caught on tape for all the world to hear and remember, is its undiluted air of adolescence.

The magic of the oblivious Miss V’s power over Donny is that she has reduced him, emotionally, to a teenager in love, begging her to love me, need me, hold me and help me, and — a moment later — demanding that she follow and obey, do what I say, and think what I think because… Because? Why because? Because we belong together. Because I can’t live without you and you can’t live without me. DON’T YOU SEE THAT?

God, I remember those arguments. They always came right before the girl got exasperated beyond all restraint, pushed me up against the wall and started screaming, please, please, please, you needy, groveling, begging tyrant! I can’t take it anymore. No more phone calls, no more little notes in my mailbox, no more ambulatory soliloquies as you chase me across the campus and down the halls and please, for God’s sake, PLEASE! No more poems!

What did I do, I wondered, but love? Love with all my heart. I loved Cindy, Janice, Sue and Toni just the way Donny loves Miss V, until Miss V can’t stand it anymore, can’t stand another day of his pontification and arrogance, can’t stand to be held in his grasp like a toy, can’t stand all that constant, hovering, proprietary attention, can’t stand his voice and his breath and his flab and his wrinkles and even his sticky, clinging, humiliating money.

But there it is, the money.

Last time I had an argument like that, an argument with a girl about why she wasn’t more like the way I imagined her to be the first time I saw her, why she wouldn’t become the perfect little sex-pet that I wanted her to be? Well, that was Becky and I was about 20, and I grew up after that. Not right away. But I’d begun to figure out the prohibitive cost — in money and sheer energy — of make-believe.

As they say, rich people are different. Donald Sterling, with all that dough, has the rare wherewithal. He can go back to being a teenager in love over and over again forever, no matter how pathetic it looks. Which explains Miss V, and explains why she eventually betrayed him. In the tempest of their mutual adolescence, she felt for Donny but — like Ann Darrow in King Kong — all that feeling finally boiled down to pity.

Leaving us, the voyeur public, with a slight variation on the movie’s benediction, uttered by Carl Denham, a sleazebag impresario in the Sterling mold: “Oh, no! It wasn’t the bigotry. It was Beauty killed the Beast.”