Do You Mind if I Put My Hand on it?: Journeys into the Worlds of the Weird

‘OK,’ I say.

He goes on. ‘She will do me orally without a condom, but she hasn’t done that lately and she has got to go back, she has got to go back to doing the nasty stuff for it to sell.’

I go on to ask him what the nasty stuff is. He gives me an example.

‘Well, do you know the expression cream pie?’ he asks.

‘No I don’t.’ I don’t.

‘It’s when a guy comes into the woman and you have a close-up of the vagina as the semen comes out,’ he says nonchalantly.

The expression ‘I wish I hadn’t asked’ can’t be more appropriate at this juncture. And I have had those moments in the past. I’ve asked plenty of women who were overweight when the baby was due. And, enquiring as to how long they were staying with us, I asked a gravely ill friend, ‘When do we lose you?’ Thankfully they actually survived, and spared my blushes…

But asking Woody to elaborate on the context of the ‘nasty stuff’ is my gravest error. Aside from the misfortune of being presented with this image in my mind, I am amazed at Woody’s sheer boredom at describing these things. It’s like when the heroes of the trenches during the First World War became very sanguine, nay flippant, about death and images of death, so Woody is a veteran of the sex industry and thus has a certain attitude to the human body and its reproductive processes, which is reflected in the language he uses. But how can you possibly talk about your wife in these terms? It struck me at the time as cold and brutal, and even now, looking back on it, fills me with a sadness.

But the flipside of it is they are married and she did nurse him through cancer and I think they genuinely care for each other. Love comes in all shapes and sizes and though I felt sorry for one of the parties involved, ultimately their relationship functions. It works and each partner has a set of duties and expectations on them which are wholly unconventional and unedifying, but that is the relationship. It’s ironic to think that this dysfunctional union has escaped the statistic of one in three marriages failing. Woody and Minka, for all of the horror of their domestic arrangements, are still together after all these years. And they clearly need each other.

‘Minka, how do you feel about this, this business of having to do the nasty stuff?’ I ask. She is leaning on the ironing board, which is creaking at the combined weight of her, and her breasts.

‘Hmm, I have to do it, I have to do it. They want to see something different, you know. I have to do it. It’s money yeah. Income,’ she says.

I feel that she’s rehearsing the party line. But she believes it too. That said, there is no enthusiasm in her answer. It strikes me as a doleful acceptance of the status quo. They do live in a big house. They have cars, jewellery, and huge medical bills (welcome to America). Minka has certain material expectations which trap her in a job she would rather not be doing. But while plenty of people compromise professionally to keep themselves in iPods, foreign holidays and posh sausages, few have to make their bodies available to the latest well-hung movie star. And even fewer have to pay the 24/7 price of carrying these monsters around, even when asleep. Minka’s never off duty from her own body.

‘But is money really worth it for what, you know, for what you go through?’ I ask Minka, pushing this point.

‘Money, money, power. Money control whole, all over the world. Right?’ she says.

Woody fires up, almost evangelically. ‘You can’t live without money,’ he announces. ‘The bottom line, this is a business; any business the bottom line is money and you got to do what you got to do to make the money.’

Minka then interjects, supporting Woody. They’ve cornered me. It’s good cop, bad cop. Big-boobed cop.

‘They want to see something different, you know. I have to do it. It’s money yeah. Income,’ she says.

She seems convinced. And it’s time to experience one of the fruits of Minka’s labours now. It’s time for Minka’s tennis game at her local club. We are on our way in the car. A white Mercedes with cream leather seats. The seats are firm, not mushy. The Germans don’t do mushy. Woody has the hangdog expression of a professional chauffeur as he ferries his VIP with the USPs to her next engagement.

There is a brief, amusing argument about how Minka is flaky when it comes to her financial paperwork. Woody is still sore from a lost three-week period in which Minka didn’t put her petrol receipts through the books. Something you’d think would be hard to get cross about, but Woody’s rage grows as he recalls this fiscal misdemeanour. There’s a serious hue to this discussion though, as at the heart of it Woody is anxious that she couldn’t manage on her own without him. A scenario less abstract for him than most, since his brush with the big C. Minka reverts to her inner pouting teenager during this discussion. The look on her face says ‘woteva’. She claims none of this is true, though notably she offers no evidence in her defence. I tend to side with Woody on this one. He’s clearly business-minded to the core and, like all American citizens, has an acute, vitriolic hatred of paying tax. They continue to and fro with this argument, which has a rehearsed familiarity to it – it feels like one of their argumentative ‘greatest hits’. Like a well-meaning child sitting in the back, I change the subject to try to stop ‘mummy and daddy’ bickering. In much the way I used to try to stop my parents having their occasional ruck. Except I’m not related to these people, and I’m a thirty-five-year-old man.

‘So how often do you play tennis?’ Trying to sound cheery, to break the tension.

‘Every morning,’ says Woody grumpily. ‘Her world revolves around tennis.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Her entire lifestyle revolves around tennis,’ he repeats.

‘Minka…?’

She doesn’t have time to speak.

Woody continues his moan. ‘It’s interfered with our business.’

‘Has it really?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Sometimes tennis comes first,’ I suggest.

‘Yeah yeah, and that’s when we get to really going at it,’ he says.

‘That’s when you get really fighting?’

‘Yeah, I get very, very argumentative when the tennis comes, when she puts the tennis before the business.’

‘Do you think the tennis is an escape from the breast business?’

‘Yeah yeah it’s an escape for her,’ he concedes.

He says this with a reluctance, rather than any sense of being pleased for her. Like an uncaring farmer allowing his livestock fresh straw not because that would be nice for them but because they’ll die if they don’t get it. And that would be inconvenient. We get out of the climate-controlled Benz and step into the climate-uncontrolled Vegas heat. It’s lunchtime, the point of the day at which the Nevada sun is at its most unforgiving. The tarmac on the road looks as hot as the day it was laid. Minka is resplendent in an all-white tennis outfit, with that shade of white only a very bleachy washing powder can manage – the kind a generation of babies in the Seventies were subjected to, creating a mini eczema epidemic at that time – ah happy days. In fact her outfit is so bright, pressed and consistently white, she could have been the darling of the Lawn Tennis Association. Though her chest would have the older members of the club spluttering into their English Breakfast tea.

She has invited me for a game. Now at this point, I am reminded that there are almost no things I am good enough at to compete in an actual game. When ‘playing tennis’, something I have probably done about eight times in my life, I normally request to my colleague that we play ‘Dolan rules’, which involves hitting the ball to each other very slowly, the aim being to keep the ball in play. Any obeying of the boundaries of the court would be against Dolan rules. So there’s no ‘in’ or ‘out’. The ball is literally inside the court or over the fence, and not in the court. Those are the rules. Serving is a no-no too. Especially with Minka – I would need to be in the car park to return one of her serves. It turns out, in my unqualified opinion, she’s extraordinarily good at tennis. She’s fast, powerful and accurate. She ignores my gentlemen’s agreement about the rules, and plays proper tennis at me. I say ‘fucking hell’ a lot.

But as with all matters Minka, it always comes back to the breasts – they are the two elephants in the room, as it were. And out there on court, the last thing you will notice is her backhand or volleying. Her untamed bosoms dart around the court quicker that she does. It’s actually painful to watch. It looks totally uncomfortable. It’s ironic that the one pastime about which she is truly passionate is the one which graphically illustrates the price she has paid – and pays – for her day job. If it wasn’t sad it would be amusing. But after having spent time with Minka, having eaten her chilled, crunchy apples, having played with her dogs and having asked her how much she paid for her fridge, I’ve grown very fond of her. She has a dry sense of humour – often asking me in hushed tones, ‘You like blow jobs, Mark?’ not because she’s being lewd, but she has discovered that kind of chatter makes me uncomfortable. She is intelligent, knowing, wise and funny. But at an earlier age, she met a man from another, more economically robust continent, with big ideas about their future together. A man with a big-breasts fascination, with connections in the pornographic world. So this woman morphed into his wet dream, both in the bedroom, and on the balance sheet. It’s now what they both do – and it’s hard to change that, especially when one of the parties is doggedly committed to that path, and when the other has a body which says there’s no turning back.

I had one last go at cornering Woody as to his role in this path Minka has taken.

‘I think the problem is, Woody, that people will think you particularly like big breasts. You have met this young woman in South Korea, you took her to America and they will see that you are very much the driving force in all these really big choices. What do you think of that?’ I ask.

‘She hasn’t done anything that she didn’t choose to do, OK?’ he counters.

‘But is she and also this lifestyle an embodiment of your personal fantasy?’

‘No.’

‘Even though you like the big boobies?’

‘She had big boobs before, they are just bigger now that’s all.’

‘Quite a bit bigger,’ I say, and it’s an understatement.

‘Which is fine. But she was plenty big before.’

Hmm. I’m not convinced.

This is as far as I feel I’m going to get with Woody. The best I can say about him is that he isn’t breaking any laws. But I do feel their relationship is unequal, and unbalanced, like Minka’s very body. I just hope at some point she does retire, because although material comfort is alluring to almost all of us, I feel that for Minka it’s reached the point at which the material stuff is the tail that wags the dog of their life. Before I leave to pack my bags in my tiny room in one of the Pyramids, I put this to her. Wouldn’t she give up the endless strain on her upper body and having to sit by the pool, naked, in her fifties, sixties and even seventies, being photographed for her website by her husband who’s telling her, ‘Close up. Smile. OK. Turn your butt around…’ Wouldn’t she rather be playing tennis?

‘When I am playing tennis I am not in the business. Sometime I wanna get out from, you know, I am telling you true, do I love it tennis? I love it. Just bottom line is money.’ She says, wiping a bead or two of sweat from her brow.

‘But wouldn’t you rather live in a small house and drive an old car and then only play tennis?’