The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death

By Tom Slattery

The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death revolves around a nude female nightclub stripper, Selina, and a nude male art model, Owen. Conceived of as a modernized "Adam and Eve," gender-reversing Owen tempts Selina with a piece of plastic sculpture.

A generation later, their daughter, Lisa, who had been adopted as a baby, learns of them from a psychology professor who had met them while researching pornography in which they peripherally participated. As the story unfolds, Lisa learns that her biological parents were also talented artists.

The story itself is a love story of a young black woman, Selina, and an older white man, Owen. If their art and love may be the "good" of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, neo-Nazi racism and drug gang-banging may be the "evil." The underlying theme is a triumph of art and life over pornography. The story's complex ending may bring sorrow and meaning while gladdening the heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 28, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469753904

Tom Slattery

Tom Slattery was born and grew up in the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area. He wandered through the world with an interested eye, a knack at seeing things differently, a fertile mind. He worked for colleges, universities, and research facilities, and lived and worked for years in Asia and Europe.

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San Francisco, California, Monday, July 15, 1974.

Outside, it was early afternoon. The fog had burned away. In the sleazy South-of-Market district, blazing sunlight composed stark pictorial contrasts, bright images set against dark shadows. There was little color. The area was dabbed with small noisy manufacturing and commercial workplaces, gay bathhouses, S & M bars, motorcycle club bars, lowcost apartments and flats largely housing second and third generation Filipinos, and nearly a dozen rundown hotels built for visitors to the San Francisco World Exposition of1915.

These dingy old hotels were inhabited by a composite of permanent poor elderly surviving on minimal Social Security, poor transient workers, and assortments of druggies, small-time drug dealers, welfare people, and stock alcoholic down-and-outers. On the ground floor of one of them was a small movie theater that had once been a storefront church. Since the beginning of the public pornography revolution five years earlier, it had exclusively shown amateurish heterosexual interracial X-rated films. Virtually all of these half-hour-to-forty-five-minute color X-rated films had been produced specifically for the small sleazy one hundred twenty seat theater by the group that leased it.

Upstairs inside this hotel, in a dingy paint-peeling corridor with a threadbare gray rug, a motley mixed group of permanent residents and sleazy transient renters were gathered around the open door to a room and craning to look in. What was on the other side of the doorway had become a one-or-two-hour weekly spectacle, virtually the only live entertainment most of them had access to. And when this weekly spectacle was over, the better-off of them would go back to sit in their gloomy rooms and watch small cheap black-and-white TVs, and the even poorer of them would sit by cheap old radios or read and reread the daily newspaper.

Inside the dingy room, a paunchy graying middle-age black man with a two-day beard and wearing an old tee-shirt and faded jeans squinted through the viewfinder of a dented and scratched black 1960s-vintage sixteen-millimeter movie camera while aiming at the double bed. Standing behind him inside the room were his assistant, a thirty-something brown-haired white woman in a psychedelic blouse and tie-dyed jeans who held a nicked and scratched 1960s-vintage sound boom over the bed, and six others, including four guests in business-suit attire from the financial district several blocks away, two male office managers and their two female secretaries, who had paid the cameraman five dollars each to watch, and two of the cameraman’s friends who helped with production.

on the bed were two more people, a twenty-something black female and a thirty-something white male. Neither of them had on clothes. From their vantage out in the corridor the group of hotel residents could see that the naked young black female was on her hands and knees in front of the naked kneeling white male. While they could hear telltale slurping sounds, they could not, at that particular moment, see for certain whether the female was performing a well-known oral act and could only guess from the context of the weekly event that she was.

The cameraman, on the other hand, had a clear image of the act in his viewfinder. His assistant was carefully watching it while holding the sound boom above the naked young woman’s head in order to record her lewd slurps. The two business-dressed couples quietly watched the activity with interest while exchanging appropriate sneering grins and smirks. And the two production-helpers had grins, but of the sort that comes from having already watched similar scenes a couple dozen times.

About time for another can, James? one of the production men asked the cameraman.

Yeah, James answered while continuing to film the oral activity of the young woman while squinting at his two interracial models through the movie camera viewfinder. Film’s about out.

The production assistant broke open the cardboard carton of film. One of the two houseflies that had been buzzing around the room all during the filming buzzed by his face. He took a swipe at it, but missed. He pulled out a can of unexposed sixteen-millimeter film and held it ready.

James moved sideways and eased the movie camera in closer to a new angle.

Owen, he yelled at the naked white male, keep your hands out of the way!

Owen McNeese quickly put his hands flat against his bare buttocks to keep them out of the camera view while his naked pornographic co-star continued her on-camera oral act.

Keep it sounding sloppy and obscene, baby, James advised while he continued filming her.

Several of the observers, both in the room and in the corridor, could not suppress snickers, but all held them to levels that they hoped the sound boom would not pick up.

James continued to film the young black woman’s oral virtuosity until the film ran out.

Okay, you two. Take five while I change film, he told the young woman who had not yet ceased her oral performance.

The two naked models disengaged from their public sex-act. They awkwardly struggled around on the yielding surface of the mattress and sprawled on the bed, both leaning back and resting on their outstretched arms with their legs spread somewhat apart.

The assistant holding the sound boom moved it away from them and set it on the bed. The audience inside and outside the room heaved sighs and began exchanging mirthful commentary.

James cloaked his movie camera for good measure, snapped open the circular film housing, popped out the roll of exposed color film, put it in its can, and popped in a new roll of unexposed color film. He had access to communal film processing equipment at a reclaimed factory building three blocks away called The Project, run by remnants of the Flower Power people who had arrived with literally high hopes in San Francisco seven years earlier.

This the first porno movie for both of you? a young woman observer in a red business suit superciliously asked the naked models sprawled on the bed in front of her.

No, did seven. So far, Owen told her matter-of-factly. He knew that the ever present and always aloof guests spiced up their experience by eliciting trite chitchat from naked models who were at recess between carnal acts, taunting and having fun with them.

My third, the young black woman added.

The businessman in a gray suit and loud tie standing beside her looked over the crotches of the two bare bodies. You two looked like you had experience, he said in a tone of insinuation.

one of the two houseflies landed on the bedspread between the bare young black woman’s legs. She waved her hand and shooed it away, and it took off and landed on the windowpane.

You do all of them for James? the other secretary in a flower-patterned summer dress asked.

No, owen answered her. He cleared his throat, glanced down, noticed his male organ, and then looked back at the woman’s mocking smile as she pointedly looked over his bare flesh. Did four for other filmmakers.

I did one for another group, the young black woman added.

James snapped the film housing shut. His assistant glanced at him for her cue, and he nodded it.

She turned to the young black woman and pointed a finger to the bed beside her. Lie on your back. Spread your legs apart, sweetie, she directed.

Owen, eat a box lunch. Slide your hands under her butt to keep them out of the way, and keep your bare behind up high.

The two naked models scrambled clumsily in their nakedness on the yielding mattress and got into the directed positions while observers murmured and snickered at what the porno models were doing and anticipations of what they would see them doing on-camera.

Early afternoon, nine days later.

Owen, now dressed in worn jeans, a secondhand long-sleeve plain blue dress shirt, and fraying sneakers ambled to the box office booth.

Showing two of yours today, the sixty-something gnarled white woman with dyed blond hair in the booth told him. One you made last week, and one you made about six weeks ago.

They like my dong? he asked facetiously.

I think because you do it dirty, she grinned. You like to see yourself doing it?

Yeah, Owen told her. Kind of neat.

The elderly lady pointed her finger past him. Got customers. Go on, she told him.

Owen turned around to see a pleasingly plump thirtyish blond woman he knew was a local prostitute. She recognized him, and he recognized her. They exchanged wisps of hesitant smiles. Both knew the other’s sexual repute, but neither said anything.

She wore tight white shorts cut to reveal the bottoms of her buttocks and a yellow blouse unbuttoned to reveal that she did not wear a bra. She was with a man who would have been in a business suit and tie if he had not removed his suit coat.

Six years after porn entrepreneurs had broken through American legal taboos and had begun publicly showing hardcore porno movies, some more raunchy downtown male business types still found it exotic to take prostitutes to one of the several porno movie theaters ringing the downtown area.

Most preferred more respectable places in better areas of downtown San Francisco like The Mitchell Brothers theater, or Alec DeRenzy’s Screening Room Theater, or the Sutter Street Theater, all three of which also made their own porno movies, but much more professionally, with big-name porno stars, and internationally distributed. The small sleazy South-of-Market storefront theater had to counter this draw by making unique interracial porno movies that had come to be known as the dirtiest movies in San Francisco.

Owen knew that he was one of the porno models who had helped the theater earn that reputation. He went in.

The familiar deep movie-theater darkness hit him. Its only relief was light from the projector flickering on the old battered screen. The upper right of it had a small taped-together rip that went unnoticed amid acute interest in publicly shown naked people engaging in sex-acts.

His eyes began to make out the interior of the 100-seat theater. It had five seats on each side of an aisle and was only ten rows deep. It had a musty odor tinged with that of stale beer that had been brought in and spilled.

He worked his way down to rows of seats near the center, and sat in one on the aisle. The couple who had been behind him found seats near the rear and slipped into them.

On the screen, Owen could see the larger-than-life color image of his bare body. He was, at that point in the film, kneeling in front of a naked young black woman engaging in oral activity with his face pressed into her crotch.

A female voice cackled from the back of the theater, either the blond prostitute or another woman some guy had brought along to view what was then a brazen novelty. At that point, only five years into the era of publicly shown porno movies, the shock value of seeing filmed sex-acts still stirred people to that kind of involuntary commentary.

About the time she ceased cackling, the film broke.

Dammit! barked someone in the projection booth up above their heads. Owen knew it was James. He doubled as projectionist.

The theater stayed dark. It had become policy to protect the identities of some of the more skittish theatergoers and to conceal certain effectively illegal public sexual activity that might be taking place in the back rows.

The film often broke. Often the original was shown, especially when the total film turned out to be so below commercial average that it had no potential sale value in the highly competitive pornography business world, but still had that dirty quality that attracted porn customers. These originals, as well as most of the color prints that had broken in the old projection equipment, had been tape-spliced. The tape-tabs often caught in the projector sprockets and broke apart the splices.

James adeptly and quickly repaired the damage, and the screen lit up with porn action again.

The audience watched the shapely naked young black woman grinning down at naked kneeling Owen’s face. Then his active tongue excited a sensitive spot and her head spontaneously reeled back as she exhaled a sexual groan.

Cleveland, Ohio, September 2019 AD.

The first thing one notices about Alan’s living room is a large throw rug sparkling with tiny multicolored iridescent lights in waves of melodic patterns. It was state-of-the-art, and Alan had splurged a couple months pay to get it.

Nearly microscopic cold-lights and computer memory chips are contained within the thin hard flexible new-plastic threads of the rug fabric. The computer and lights draw energy from ubiquitous radio waves permeating the air. The plastic fabric can withstand several hundred thousand pounds pressure, so mere walking across it, even in high heels, has no effect on the computer chips or cold-lights.

New teflon-like cleanshoe leathers and soles make such rugs possible. Alan has, in addition, installed a panel of ultra-suction mini-vacuums beneath the genkan-like apartment-entrance cavity to minimize dirt damage to the rug’s computer-and-light fabric. The rug is generally sold with rodent-like mini-robots that seek out each tiny piece of dirt and literally pick it up and throw it away, and Alan has these on timers to work through the wee hours.

The light-show effect of the rug is delicate and symphonic, but not enough to call attention to itself.

Two people sit in contemporary mini-adjusted-pressure air-chairs watching a digitalized version of this same porno movie on a flat-wall TV screen in Associate Professor Alan Boswell’s living room.

Alan, a brown haired white man, now in his forties and averagely athletic appearing, is not only a currently-teaching psychology professor, he is the campus psychological advisor. In both of these capacities, he tries hard to identify with the students by dressing like them and talking their dialogue.

He sits watching the digitalized early-seventies porno movie dressed in sparkle-slacks and a sheen-shirt, but asserts his campus professional status by wearing a tweed sport coat with artificial leather elbows.

Lisa, an attractive light-skinned young black woman in her late teens wearing sparkle-shorts and a sheen-tanktop, sits in a contemporary chair near him. She is a beginning froshperson at the university, and her hair is sparkle-blued, as are her eyebrows, in the current student style. She watches the recently digitalized ancient porno action on the flat-wall TV screen with a keen interest that is neither academic nor erotic.

Filmed in seventy-four, Alan tells her. Transferred to videotape eighteen years ago. Digitalized ten years ago.

You know him well? Lisa asks with a touch of almost desperate hope in her tone.

I would say, he returns. Knew him for over a decade.

For some long seconds there is silence while they both attend to the action on the screen. Lisa nods to indicate it.

But that’s not my mother, she states in an uncomfortable question to Alan as she turns to him.

No. Selina came later, he tells her.

You had to know Selina, she again states as an uneasy question.

He holds up his hand flat at the screen. The TV’s computer will identify it as a command waiting to be given.

You want to watch more of this? Alan asks the young woman who seems slightly uneasy with it.

Yeah, it’s interesting, she surprises him with her answer.

He shrugs, places his hand up flat toward the screen again to tell it to reject the previous alert.

Knew her less time, he tells the young woman. Maybe better, though.

She again nods to indicate the action on the screen.