Screengrab by Various Today in Nerve's film blog: We list our greatest guilty pleasures. You can't imagine the shame!
61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: A piping a hot plate of Tim Curry, Half-Life for a dollar, and adventuring with Adventure.
No sooner does my husband roll over into a post-orgasmic doze when I start wondering what it would be like with that zillionaire fugitive, Marc Rich, the one who ran off to Switzerland with $48 million in government money. Everybody — from New York's Mayor Rudy Giuliani to House Speaker Tom DeLay — is furious at Clinton for pardoning Marc at the last minute, but the reason that I, Kitty, am attracted to him isn't because I'm keen on tax evasion or embargo-breaking Iranian oil deals or whatever it is that Marc's been doing over there in Zug. What gets me so interested in Mr. Richie Rich is his ex-wife, the five-hundred-times millionairess, New York celebrity-hugger, Denise.
The question for me isn't "Did Denise's generous campaign contributions and gifts to the Clinton war chest buy Marc's pardon?" I mean: Duh! What intrigues me, though, is why a smart gal like Denise would compromise both herself and the Clintons just to snag a pardon for some felon who dumped her for a younger piece of lapcandy. All I can think of is that Marc-o the Shark-o must have been the most astounding, gut-wrenching, mind-bending fuck a girl has ever known. At least for her.
So, to maximize the experience, I imagine that I am Denise. Back in '88, when she was still in her mid-forties, when her last eggs were screaming to get fertilized and being on the lam still felt glamorous. Back when she half-believed her husband innocent. Back before she wrote the songs that made the whole world (including Celine Dion and Aretha Franklin) sing. Back before Marc met that family-wrecking little rollatini, Gissela Rossi.
So here I am, Denise. Marc has just financed the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team, for which you've just got to love him. It's three years after The Wall Street Journal described my beloved as "a beautifully sinister executive who could frame deals with the artistry of a pool shark." It's six years after he fled Giuliani's flying monkeys (I think he's right that Jews get indicted for tax fraud while gentiles get multibillion-dollar tax cuts).
We've left his make-shift five-bedroom mansion in Switzerland, the servants, the Picassos, for this little seaside estate in sunny Spain we've had to buy because they won't let my husband even visit the Hamptons. Fernando brings the sangria — gracias, 'Nando. Fernando returns my enormous smile. When he leaves I take off my top and the sun assures me that my ridiculous optimism is good. I hear the water.
Then, suddenly, a shadow falls over me. I look up into Marc's hooded eyes. Anger, pain, avidity, larceny, lust, sexiness — I suddenly realize that all these things look alike, and maybe are. "Beautifully sinister," he says, kissing me as if I was the last deal on earth. Half the songs I'll eventually co-write well up in my throat, songs like You're All I Know, I Would Walk Through Fire, In Over My Heart, Let's Make It Last All Night, Your Love Is Everything, Love On and On and Poacher Man.
His rod is hard as platinum. His chest hair vicuna. He bites my neck like a gypsy testing a wedding ring stolen from a ravished bride. The waves that protect him from arrest beat on the shore and in my heart.
I take one ruby nipple between my lips and tug on it until he growls. My bandito. He smells like the money he's getting from the U.S. Mint for all that copper and nickel and zinc he bought, God knows where. He touches me, tenderly, and when I open, sinks a thumb, another. "Goldfinger!" I gasp, making him laugh. The world is his, and I'm his world, spinning. Suddenly he's behind me, pushing me into the warm sand. Now I'm a wave, breaking.
When he shoots his golden semen deep into my loins, like he was pumping Iraqi oil to Serbia, South Africa, Cuba, I feel the way the aluminum and tin markets might have felt — if they could feel — when he illegally cornered them . . . totally, utterly in his possession. And he is in mine. We are two waves — incoming ? outgoing — canceling each other out in a hiss of foam, a scurry of small birds.
Later I will love other outlaws, especially Billy C. But I will never love them the way I loved Marc, with nothing between his self and mine. I'm too me for that, now. Too sated with fame, money, charities, celebrity friends, family, all the small-R riches I made from all that humiliation and pain that big-"R" Rotter caused me. But in the end I got from him the one thing he had worth taking . . . The artistry of a pool shark. And, now I've got immunity, I'm sinking everybody's balls big time. Watch me: I'm running the table.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
