I Married Joan (of Arc), or
My First Former Ex-Wife was
an AngryTeenage Butch Lesbian:
Part II

March 8, 2000
Cortland, NY
 

SCENE:  Jack Danielson's Resturant and Pub
 Cortland, NY (A small college town in central NY)
 Late Evening, early March

 JG. (Jan Galligan) and J. (his friend) are having a
 late dinner and drinks, decompressing from their
 2 hour and 20 minute drive from Albany, and considering
 their next move(s)...

JG: Well, at least you didn't get a speeding ticket.

J: I suppose; how are those porkchops? This chicken breast
 is pretty dried out, and what's that sauce they put
 on your chops?

JG:  Some kind of liquid garnish, but I have to say, it's so
 thick I can hardly find the porkchops. Mine are kinda
 dry too.

Waiter: How's everything here?

J&JG: Oh, fine, thanks.

W: Can I get you anything else?

J: Some more water would be good.

JG: I could use half-a-dozen more napkins please.

JG: So, J., what's new in the world of heteropatriarchial 
 academic administration?

J: You know, same-old-same-old, though we did have this interesting
 case the other day with one of our psychology professors, a
 woman who was doing funded research exploring the uses of
 technology for monitoring and control. She was getting money from
 DOD and NSA to look at implant technologies. Recently she was
 investigating something she called RATT, for Radio wave, Auditory,
 Assualtive, Transmitting implants. Her idea was that short wave
 operators could transmit signals to implants, or scan the implants
 which would then allow them to hear the victim's thoughts and
 speech. They could do this remotely. It only depends on the 
 range of the short wave transmitter. Plus it allows the
 operator to talk to the victim via the implant, remotely
 and anonymously. Kinda like having voices in your head which
 can respond to what you say and what you think. Not too different
 than the old Joan of Arc "I hear voices" thing. Well, anyhow, she
 got a little too far out in her ideas, so they suspended her
 and transferred her courses and grad students to other faculty.

JG: What was the big deal?

J: You remember a few years ago, a student took a roomful of kids
 hostage at gunpoint, right?

JG: Yeah, vaguely.

J:   He was an undergrad. Thought
 that the government had planted microchips in his body and
 they were talking to him. Giving him ideas he didn't want
 to hear.

JG: Exactly, now I remember. What happened to him?

J: Killed himself a few months ago. Hanged himself in his prison
 cell.

JG: Did he have any classes with this woman professor?

Waiter: Excuse me gentlemen, are you finished here?

J.&JG: Yes, definitely.

J: Let's go to the bar, and have another drink.

JG: O.K.

 They move into the adjoining room, sitting down on stools
 next to another man about thier age.

JG: Bartender, two Jack Daniels, on the rocks please.

JG: (Turning to the man on his left) Excuse me, aren't you
 Nicholson Baker.

NB: Why yes, I am. How did you recognize me? I usually don't
 get noticed much out in public. 

JG: Easy, I've been to your website a few times. My name's
 Jan, Galligan and this is my friend, J.

NB: Nice to meet you, Jay and J.

J: You're the guy who wrote the book that Monica Lewinsky gave
 Clinton, right? JOLT, or JOCKS, something like that.

NB: VOX. Right, but I have to tell you, I really dislike being
 associated with those two.

J: Sorry. Look, I really liked that other book about being
 in a shopping mall, going up and down the escalator. What
 gets you so wrapped up in non-sequitors like that?

NB: I do seem to be attracted to things I think are unsung. Or, if I'm
 writing about literary figures, I prefer to write
 about the guy Alexander Pope copied from, rather than celebrating
 Pope, since he has plenty of people making a
 fuss over him. I'm still by nature a contrarian. There's all this
 excitement about online search engines and therefore
 it really is time to take a close look at the card catalog and find
 the ways in which it does certain things better.
 Then you start to feel a little perverse and think that the sung
 things are really so sung that they've become unsung
 and therefore my job to is to celebrate the over familiar. You can 
 get yourself kind of knotted up over what is
 commonplace and what is forgotten, what is neglected and what is too
 familiar.

  Finding the things that people haven't talked about and then talking
 about them is what writers and poets have
  always done. There are just different routes to doing it. I guess I
 felt that I had more chance to say new things
  about the escalator than to say new things about the chrysanthemum
 because the escalator has been around for a
shorter period of time. Although it's mighty exciting when you can
 come up with something new about the
 chrysanthemum. Then you're up there with the Big Boys.

JG: Yeah, right.

NB:    I felt I had all these little
 private discoveries. Of course they weren't. They
   were discoveries that every fairly normal human being makes -- for
 instance, that it is very satisfying to write on
   the blade of a Rubbermaid spatula or the little door seals on a
 refrigerator with a ball-point pen, especially when
  you're talking on the telephone. But once you've written about it, it
 becomes part of the common currency, the
  vernacular, and it's no longer a private joy. I hoarded all these
 things up, observations that I'd made and typed
  out, that I'd thought about, and didn't want to give away. But then,
 we had a baby, and I quit my job and I had to
 write a book. Naturally I turned to this little bank of observations
 and produced "The Mezzanine," and decided
  that the whole idea of keeping things rare would simply not work for
 me as a writer because I'd never make a living.

J:      Not with so many secrets.

NB:     No. So since then I've tried to tell as many secrets as I possibly
 could and get them out there, in bulk, to the
  reading public.

J:     Do you ever worry about running out of them?

NB:     Well, there are all different kinds of them, different emotional
 flavors. I went through that little sex phase, you
      know. There were lots of big secrets there. And it felt like a big
 enough subject that there were lots of subsidiary
      things that, as I was writing them, felt a little under-talked-about.
 But then again, I don't want anyone else to write
      about sex. That's how sick I am. I would like to tell these little
 things and then have it be the final statement.
      Nobody ever again would write about sex because I'd written these two
 books. But it doesn't really work that
      way, does it?

J: No, I guess not.

NB:     Ah, but that was the question. In the case of writing on a rubber
 spatula, I can write that and someone can say,
  "Oh, yeah, I enjoy that, too," and I can think I'm a normal person 
 and part of humankind having the same
  meditative, idle thoughts that everyone else has. With "Vox" and "The
 Fermata", it hasn't been quite so clear,
  especially with "The Fermata". Half the people who read it just hated
 me. So I didn't have quite the same feeling
  of being part of the chortling mass of humanity.
 With "The Fermata" I also felt I was writing the textbook of my
 private method. What I was trying to do as a
  novelist was to cause interruptions in time that were long enough to
 do justice to whatever piece of the world was
   before me. To think about it, to find out where it was funny and
 beautiful and then to put it on the page. That takes
 a lot of time. When you're writing and things are going well and
 you're thinking about something hard, it really
 does feel as if the rest of the world is in a state of suspension. It
 was a novelistic fantasy. But somewhere along the
  line, it also became important to me to be true to my own early use
 for this fantasy, which dates from the fourth
 grade and which was definitely sexual. I thought of stopping the
 fourth grade class and taking off my clothes and
  taking off the teacher's clothes.

JG: (Aside to J.) Jesus, doesn't this guy ever shut up.

NB:     It's bewildering to write about sex because you get this chorus of
 horrified people who say, "What has he done,
  what has happened to our little Baker who used to write about the
 earplug and now he's writing these 'grisly sex
  scenes,'" which was a phrase from a review. Especially in England.
 It's interesting to watch reviewers. You can
  see them on the page thinking, "How can we really put his eye out? 
 How can we hit him so hard that he bleeds
 from the spleen? I know how we can do it, we can say that it seemed 
 as if his early books were interesting, but
  really they were symptomatic of a mental deviation that now is clear
 with 'The Fermata.' We can say not only that
  'The Fermata' stinks, but that it invalidates all of his earlier
 work." Maybe it was in part because the book sold
  really quite well there and was number one on the bestseller list. It
 seemed to cause a sort of teeth-clenched hate
  over there. So I had this shocked, disgusted reaction on the one 
 hand, especially with "The Fermata." Then, on the other hand
  there are all these cool people around, who are pierced like crazy
  and say "Oh, tame, tame." And I think, Gee
  I've done my best not to be tame. This is as untame as I can be. I am
 just not temperamentally into things that are
  considered now trendily untame. Any sort of violence or simulated
 violence or anything like that is an automatic
  turn-off to my imagination. Much as I would have liked to deliver
  what would be taken as a shocking book by the
  really cool San Franciscans who know about these things, I can't do
 it.

JG: I was in San Francisco, last summer. My friend J.C. Garrett
 lives there. I went...

NB: "Vox" was very nice because they're both talking and can stop talking
  at any time, a consenting situation. "The Fermata"
is about a sneaky guy who goes around taking women's clothes off
 without asking them. Obviously, that is a
  regrettable thing for him to be doing and he should not do that. But
 is this something that has crossed people's
  minds? It turns out that it is. I really don't like talking about 
 sex at a dinner party in a yo-ho-ho
 way. Having published two books that are fairly
   dirty, I find there's a funny thing that happens, especially with men. 

J: I see.

NB: They think, "Nick Baker is one of those horny
  guys who likes to talk about sex, so I'm going to tell sex stories."
 The conversation suddenly becomes sexualized
  and everybody's kind of squinting, and waving their arms around and
 thinking "Let's not be here." And it's all Nick
  Baker's fault. But I don't want any of that to happen because I want
 it all to happen in the book, while the reader
  is in a state of receptive, imaginative sympathy with the character,
 or maybe horrified fascination, but somehow on
 his or her own and able to think about it in private.

JG: You know anything about Napster?

J: Nick, what about your family?

NB: With "The Fermata," there was a moan of unhappiness from some family
 members. . .well, notably from my
mother, when it became clear that there was going to be another book
 that she wasn't going to be able to read.
  That makes sense. Do you as a parent really want to know all that
 about your kid? No. Margaret, my wife, liked
 "Vox," so I thought I was OK there, then I tried out the idea of 
 "The Fermata" on her and she said, "No, that's a
  terrible idea and it doesn't do a thing for me." So immediately it
 became an "underappreciated idea" and I could
  think to myself that I would give it the treatment of all treatments
 and even Margaret who thinks it's extremely
  unpromising will see how truly great it is as a subject for a novel.
 And it almost worked. But she still sometimes
 gets pissed off at me when we start talking about "The Fermata."

J: Actually, my first ex-wife is a writer. Playwright. More exactly
 a former teenage angry butch lesbian turned author and performer.
 She's doing a one-woman version of the Joan of Arc story here
 on campus tonight, called "The Second Coming of Joan of Arc".

JG: Yeah, that's why we're here.

NB: Hmmm. Well, anyhow I didn't tour for the hardcover of "The
 Fermata" because I didn't want to go around
 reading this thing that would upset people. I did tour when the
 paperback came out because I figured that anything
 that was going to happen had already happened. I found that getting
  up in front of people -- and it's not like I
  haven't done readings before -- I would not just blush, but turn a
 kind of mahogany color. I could feel myself
  radiating this massive blushing force into the room. By nature I'm
  the sort of person who's going to blush. When
 you write a novel, of course the page is black and white. There is no
 change of color. Maybe with the newer
 novel on screen, as we got to the dirtier passage, the background
 could kind of shade to suit it.

JG: Mr. Baker. Why are you here in Cortland?

NB: Oh, Women's Studies brought me in to do a reading from my new
 book about my daughter.

JG: I've got a daughter.

J: So Nick, what about all this sex stuff, doesn't it bother people?

NB:  I don't think that anyone gets upset when reading about sex
 anymore. It's so much read about, written about that, if anything, it
  fails to be upsetting enough and it's kind of exhausting. Nobody got
 upset really when reading Vox because it's a kind of congenial
 conversation between two people who want to be talking together. But
 they got upset about The Fermata because, well obviously,
  this sneaky guy is going around and he's doing things to these women
 they haven't said he could do. And that's very upsetting. I
 mean, it's upsetting if it really happened to one, I suppose. But 
 it's physically impossible. It could be interesting to think about 
 for six and a half hours. That was my thought. Apparently I was wrong.

J:  So what would you say to the obvious feminist argument that this
 is objectifying women and therefore it's evil.

NB:  Oh well, I don't have a good counter argument to that. I think
 clearly the book is objectifying women. But when I asked people,
 men, what they would do when they stopped time, they came up with 
 some little scenelet that involved the objectification of women.
  And it seemed somehow pressingly important for me to capture in as
 complicated and interesting way I could this obviously
  widespread adolescent urge that men have and put it down on paper. 
 Then we can all sort of buy it warily and sort of make sense
 out of it.

J:  Well, the thing that I noticed about it is when you gave these
 same women who were upset about it a couple of drinks, they
     volunteered that at least one of the things they would do if they 
 could stop time would be sexual. I felt like that that answered the
     argument.

NB:  Is that true, really, that when you plied them with drinks they
 said, I would take out a shirt sleeve and I would unbutton
 the....What would they do?

J:  Mostly it involved the same thing, looking at them without their
 clothes, or putting themselves in a place so that the guy
     couldn't see them.

NB:  Where more could be seen than was permissible.

J:  Exactly.

NB:  Where my character errs is simply that he does it too much. I mean,
  that seems to be what ticks some women off. Yes, sure they would
  break the law five times, and pull a man's pants down and check him
 out. But not a hundred times. That's what's so wrong. But I
  never really was convinced by that argument from quantity.

J:  Morally, what's the difference?

NB:  Well, I suppose morally there is a difference. It's worse to steal
 a lot than it is to steal a little bit. There is a difference; 
 it's  not quite as strong an argument as I first think I'm going to get 
 when a women says, 'Well, that's horrible. That's a revolting thing  to do
  and I would never do that.' And I kind of think, okay, then, 
 I'm on very weak ground. But then later on they say, 'Well, I would  do it, 
 but not so much.' And that doesn't
 quite have the umph somehow.

J:  What's the difference between pornography in, say, Hustler and The
  Fermata? How are they different?

JG: Hustler! Do you know Paul Krassner, Mr. Baker? He edited Hustler right
 after Larry Flynt was shot and he got religion from Jimmy Carter's
 sister, Ruth...

NB:  The first thing is, it must be 15 years since I've seen Hustler, so
  you're asking the wrong guy, but you mean the written porn in
 Hustler? The standard Penthouse Forum porn and The Fermata? Gee, I
  hope that it might have some of the same effect, that it
 might be sexy. I certainly think that some of those Penthouse letters
 are not to be underestimated.

JG: I wrote a letter to Penthouse once, but they never answered.

J:  The argument I'm trying to get at is when people said, 'How can
 you read that? That's not Literature! That's pornography!'

NB:  The risk is that you run down Penthouse letters as this pathetic
 form. It's actually a sophisticated achievement that's been
  developed and honed for decades to come up with this strangely 
 rarefied vocabulary. But what The Fermata is is, I just wanted it to
  be funnier and more intellectually complicated. I wanted it to have a
 more interesting...

Another man (JN) saunters over to the bar.

JN: Hey! What's all this shit about Hustler and Penthouse. I've been
 in both of them. It ain't no biggie.

JG: Whoa. Aren't you Jack (The Mayor of Hollywood) Nicholson?

JN: Listen, don't give me that "Mayor" bullshit.

JG: Oops. Sorry.

NB: ...verbal surface. That's why I spent time thinking
 of new words for things, you know, naming dildos and all that. Trying
 to figure out what the right plural of a dildo might be in an
 overexcited sexual state. Maybe dildos plural wouldn't be an i, as if
 it were a masculine noun. Maybe it would become neuter or a
 feminine plural, or maybe it would become a Germanic plural, if you
 were really turned on.

J:  Of course! It makes perfect sense!

JN: Dildo's? Those things are for sissies and old women.

NB:  I was trying to get at that confused, but cheerfully aroused state
 that some of us can sometimes hit when things are going right.
 I can't piece out or spell out what the difference is between a
 standard Penthouse letter, say, and the short story about the woman
on her riding mower. But mine is just, I hope, stranger and I really
 do like that confused...

JN: Lawnmower? What fucking woman is gonna write a letter to Penthouse
 about her lawnmower, and which fucking guy is gonna read it 
 anyhow.

NB:  ...state where you might be laughing but
 afterwards remembering it as sexy or you might be aroused and
  remember it as funny. Sometimes Penthouse letters do that, but they
 don't quite do it, I think.

J:  But what you did instead is you got the use of language right. I
 think you're more artful in using language, that somehow
     transcends or parodies porn.

NB:  Yes, see we've got all this porn floating around, video and weird
 junk e-mail coming all the time and Penthouse letters and
  everything and the novelists' job is to adjust to it and take the
  next step and help figure out how we really think about that stuff. 
 In other words, The Fermata would be impossible without plain vanilla
 pornography. It's an attempt to leap beyond, while tipping its
hat in pornography's direction.

J:  That's true.

NB:  Thank you! I'm standing on the shoulders of giants!

JN; Yeah. And I'm sitting next to a bunch of assholes. Listen, you
 guys coming to the screening of my film tonight? 

JG: What film?

JN: "As Good as it Gets". You know. The one they were gonna call
 "Where's the Kitty Litter". The Psychology department brought
 me here to show the film and do a little song and dance after.
 What are you guys drinking?

JG: Jack Daniels.

JN: Jackie. Set these guys up with another round of doubles, and
 give me a couple for myself too.

JG: Listen, Jack. Thanks for the drink, but can I ask you
 something personal?

JN: Shoot.

JG: Is it really true that you sister is your mother?

JN: Well, that's the price of fame, people start
  poking around in your private life, and the next thing
  you know your sister is actually your mother.
 But it wasn't what I'd call traumatizing. After all, by the time I
  found out who my mother was I was pretty well psychologically formed.
  As a matter of fact, it made quite a few things clearer to me. If 
 anything, I felt grateful. About the only lasting effect it had on me 
 was it sort of polarized my feelings about abortion. I think 
 it would be comically incorrect for someone in my position to be for 
 abortion. But I am pro-choice. People always say, 'How can you be 
 pro-choice and against abortion?' Well, I tell them, this is one 
 of the ways."

J:  Amazing! 

NB:  Well, I did used to read those letters in Penthouse and things, I
 mean I am a more visual person than verbal, or at least I was as
 an adolescent. When I first thought...

JN: Penthouse? Shit, it was Hustler that first told the public
 about my sister. That asshole Krassner's the one that did
 it. Then for some fucking reason it showed up in Penthouse,
 in the letters section, then the whole goddamned world knew
 about it and I started getting letters. I thought I'd write
 'em a goddammed letter myself...

NB: ...I would like to be a writer, and I thought about genres, one 
 of the things I thought I would like to
  do was pornography. But I had the same problem that Arno in the
  book has, which is, you know how he talks about how simply
  starting the story, typing capital s-h-e, you know 'SHE walked into
  the room,' and knowing that all kinds of naked stuff was going to
 happen was too much for me. So it took me ten years to finish the
 paragraph, in some sort of coherent form. I guess I finished with or
 outgrew my wish to add my little contribution to the grand 
 pornographic tradition after The Fermata. I'm done for the time 
 being.

JG: I wrote a letter to Penthouse once, but they never answered.

NB:  A guy came up to me in Portland the other day and said, 'I need to
 talk to you about that passage when you're pre-bunching
  your socks.' He went into this thing about what he does is lie on the
 bed when he gets out of the shower and he does a little dance
   and sort of wipes his feet off on the bed clothes. And he says, 'I just
  don't understand why you didn't...

JN: Who gives a shit about your fucking socks?

NB: ...talk about that. Couldn't you
 have? I always wanted to tell you that.' So that's a nice thing. And I
 get letters from people who kind of want to go on with their
 additional tricks and adjustments to these things. Sometimes they're
 things I've thought of and thought, well I'll spare the reader that
 one. But sometimes they're things I haven't thought of, like I haven't
 ever really tried to lie down on my bed after the shower and do
 a little dance. I don't think our bedspread...well, it's gray, I guess
 it would be okay, but, I don't think my wife would go for it and I
  wouldn't really either.

J:  And then again, it might get those little marks on it from where
 your feet were everyday.

JN: I'd leave some tracks in your bed, alright.

JG: Hey, anybody got the time?

NB:  I see now the problem is needing to slow the world down in order
 for my prose to catch up with it. That's kind of what I do in
The Mezzanine. A footnote in a sense was kind of a preliminary attempt
 at time perversion, in that you stop in the middle of a
 sentence, something that talks about straws, and then you switch time
 off and drop down to the bottom of the page, and then have
 this whole secret life of straw thoughts that the sentence doesn't know
  about. So that is how to do time perversion given an
 uncompromisably...

JN: (aside to JG) What the fuck is he talking about? It's 8:16.

NB: ...realistic set of assumptions. But what The Fermata
 tried to do is say, okay what is something you like doing?
 You like having these secret reservoirs of intellection that go on in
 the midst of life. Why not assume that it could actually happen
 and imagine the switch that could really turn the universe off. What
 would that really involve? What would happen to the sensation
 of water if you swam through it with time stopped? What would happen if
  you got out of the car if it was driving fast? So it's an
  extension of the earlier interest in the manipulation of time, but it
 brought up its own problems. Part of the fun of the book was trying
  to decide about those problems.

J:  What about rain?

JN: What rain?

NB:  I only treated rain briefly at the end when, finally, thank God,
 poor Arno found a kindred spirit somewhat and he then takes her
  back to her apartment so that she'll have this abrupt transition
 between being in the restaurant and being naked in bed with him. It
  was raining when he stopped time, and so the whole trip through the
 city involves his creating this path through the halted drops.
   And then they could retrace that path if they wanted. Say if you shined
  a flashlight over the halted rain, assuming the light was
     working properly, you would be able to see that darker tunnel that you
 had created in the drops. This is what interested me when I was
     writing it...that you would get less wet in the frozen universe as you
 were walking than if you were walking in a normal rainstorm,
     because you were only passing through the raindrops that are already
 there, not the ones that continue to come down. I think that's
     true. Now that I think of it, I'm wondering. Anyway, those kinds of
 little puzzles were much of what was fun about writing the book,
     that is when I wasn't so beside myself with arousal that I could
 actually write. There's another characteristic the book seems to
     have--it follows a kind of smut curve. It just gets dirtier and dirtier
  as you go. Do you find that?

NB:  Well, why not, right?

J:  In a way you become more and more tolerant as it goes on.

JG: Listen, J. It's getting late. Jack said it's 8:16. I think the show
 may have started already.

NB:  Yes, I'm wearing the poor reader down!

J:  Wouldn't it be interesting to plot the blood pressure of the irate
  feminist as she pages through the book?

NB:  I think really that a lot of the people who disliked the book
 didn't read it, and that's a good thing. I don't want people to be made
     angry by the things I write. I'm honestly not that kind of writer. So,
 I don't think that the people who really disliked it read it, except
     maybe the people who had to out of duty because they were writing a
 review. The idea so turned them off that they hated me from
     the outset. That's sort of what's supposed to happen. If you as a
 reader hate the idea, don't read the book and everything will be all
     right. And the other thing that's maybe heartening about the way things
 work now is that I know that a number of producers at NPR
     hated the book because I heard this from several people who are
 inclined to do what publishers do, which is get me interviews on
     radio shows. Producers at NPR are women, and there certainly are a
 great number of women who don't like this book. So thirty years
     ago if those same women disliked this book, nothing would have
 happened. But now, because women have power, real measurable
     power in this culture, I don't get on the radio. And I think that's
 very encouraging. It wasn't so perfect for me or maybe my publisher,
     actually it was a relief for me because I want to do as little
 publicity as I can. But it shows that now women have the ability to make
     taste in way that they might not have had thirty years ago. NPR is
 really the most important outlet from the publishers point of view,
     I think. So, anyway, I think that's encouraging.

JG: J. We gotta get out of here, right?

J: Yes. Actually, I hope you, Nick, and Jack, will excuse us. We
 have to get over to Old Main. My former first ex-wife butch 
 lesbian is performing her one-woman show and it may have already
 started. I haven't seen her in almost thirty years...

JN: Yeah. All my former ex-wifes are butch lesbians, or most of 'em
 anyhow.

JG: So long Jack. See you later, Mr. Baker.

JN: Right. So long you guys.

JN:  Say Nick. What's up with your books regarding movie rights?

NB:  Oh, I've gotten a few offers for The Fermata, but nothing that
 quite made me think I wanted to do it yet. It would just have to be
     done so carefully. Otherwise, the images wouldn't work. The way you
 present this halted universe is very tricky. It has to be this
     sort of rich frozenness. It can't look like the single frame of a
 movie. I don't know, I guess I just haven't had the right offer yet.
 But I am much more willing to sell The Fermata than Vox. It seems as if it
 would be a completely different final product, whereas with Vox
     it's really as if I would then have written the screenplay and that
 they would shoot. I wanted it to be private. I like the idea of
     thinking about the reader reading that book and imagining the two
 voices and having it be that kind of telephonic experience
     between the book itself and the reader.

JN: Come on, Nick, cut the bullshit. Maybe we can work out a deal here.
 Fermata, right? What's that? Time stops. I can see myself as the main
 character. Zappo, I've whacked time, right in the kisser. Everybody's
 frozen, and I'm walking around. I go up to the first sexy broad I see.
 I pick up her skirt. I pull down her panties. She's mine, and she doesn't
 even know it. Nick, this is some great idea you got here. Come on Nick.
 Talk to me; let's make a deal.