Now, to some this might seem an exotic pastime, but to Dog Bites it's almost commonplace. Because, like repeatedly riding our bike into a Holiday Inn swimming pool, we've done this before.
The first time was back in 1995, when we were new in town and, due to the recent soul-searing breakup of our long-term relationship, looking for frisky experiences to take our mind off our suffering. We convinced a friend who was soon to move out of a Lower Haight rental to let us lug a baby pool into her back yard, fill it with gelatin, and host a party around it. Though Dog Bites had pictured a scene straight out of Tom Jones, with attractive folks writhing in passion-red goo, it ended up being more like a tense clamming expedition, as uncomfortable people rolled up their pants and waded gamely through the sludge, grown frigid and stiff under a windy, 60-degree S.F. night. Though Dog Bites cavorted and squirmed mermaidlike in the pool, we were unable to coax anyone else to do the same.
Our second gelatin outing was much more fulfilling. For reasons known only to themselves, the editors of the now sadly defunct Fnord Magazine elected to feature Jell-O wrestling at a 1999 benefit, and, even more mysteriously, got the also-defunct North Beach bar Club Cocodrie to agree to host said melee. Dog Bites arrived late, drunk, and dressed like a giant baby with a comically enormous pacifier and rubber pants. We were the first one on our feet when the MC asked for wrestling volunteers, issuing belligerent challenges to the ladies and gentlemen in our row. "C'mon, you pussies!" we shouted. "Who's going to take me on?" Dog Bites asks you to remember that we are not used to strong drink and had consumed several Slippery Nipples that evening in anticipation of our public display.
When we finally gained a wrestling partner and slipped into that gleaming cherry-flavored pool of goop, it was like diving into a big, wet French kiss, only about half as sexy and twice as sticky. The two of us rolled, slipped, and tittered in the mess, finding it almost impossible to gain purchase on each other's slick flesh. The Jell-O was everywhere. Our hair was slimed with it. It gurgled and bubbled between our toes and crept into our bra. When Dog Bites started laughing like a mental patient, our opponent slapped Jell-O into our mouth, sending thin ribbons of the stuff spurting through our teeth and out our nose. At the peak of the combat, when we were finally just about to force our nemesis' shoulder down in the muck, a Peachy's Puff girl wandered into the bar, spied the slithery spectacle, and gaily sailed into the soup herself -- tray, fur skirt, high heels, and all.
This was more like it! But, just as every rose has its thorn, the Jell-O extravaganza had its dark side: the resultant mess. A giant mess, a gargantuan mess, a mess that could have had entire Broadway musicals written about it. Though amiable Cocodrie employees hosed the wrestlers down in the bar's kitchen, reportedly our antics left muck everywhere. Floor. Walls. Ceiling. Tracked into the manager's office, handprinted on the bathroom walls, blood-red stains ground into the corners. Since Dog Bites used to dye our hair with Jell-O powder (no Manic Panic hair coloring to be found in our tiny Florida hometown in the '80s), we could have told the Cocodrie folks they were looking at a horrifying cleanup. As it was, our nubile body remained so covered with red stains post-match that people on the bus on the way home stared at us as though we might be returning from a Santeria sacrifice.
Thus we're pretty amped for tonight, when Dog Bites' $20 entry fee has bought us an evening of spoken word, smutty cabaret, and a chance to swim through the strawberry-banana Jell-O quivering in giant-size lasagna containers at a SOMA benefit for the women artists' organization Femina Potens. We're excited all right. But even as Dog Bites listens attentively to chanteuse Cherry Terror (who's forthrightly singing about her desire to be loved by you, and you, and also back there in the last row, sir, you), we're noticing a fly in the ointment.
With just a scant square of plastic duct-taped around the Jell-O-ready kiddie pools on the concrete floor, Dog Bites is concerned about the extreme lack of goop prophylaxes. We have, of course, come prepared: wearing clothing we're not afraid to mess up, carrying a backpack full of towels, and draping a plastic-backed tablecloth (formerly used for a giggly "kitchen torture" scene at the Power Exchange) over our car seats.
We needn't have worried, as it turns out. The night's entertainment draws to a close, and the time for the main event is at hand. "And now there's supposed to be Jell-O wrestling," says the fabulous Tina Butcher, the architect of tonight's event, glimmering onstage in her form-fitting beige nightgown. Dog Bites strains in our seat with anticipation. "But it's gotten really late -- I don't know. Does anyone want to Jell-O wrestle?" she asks plaintively, looking toward Dog Bites, who had earlier expressed a fervent wish to do just that. We are sheepish: It is late. It will make a monumental mess. We might even feel guilty enough that we'd have to stay after and help clean up. Dog Bites is not getting any younger, you know. So we tell the fabulous Tina that it's OK. Don't go to any trouble for us. Dog Bites will find a way to make a story out of this. And as you can see, that's just what we've done.
-- Joyce Slaton
On a chilly, fogbound evening last week, small clusters of friends strode past the Roxie Cinema, en route to the appointments of their Mission District night lives. Ad hoc movie posters, made from grainy black-and-white photocopies of publicity stills, papered the theater wall. Eyes were caught, and, almost imperceptibly, paces slowed. Animated conversations lulled, as during that moment in a road trip when the radio dial lands on a song everyone has agreed to hate, but the station mysteriously doesn't get changed, the music somehow becoming the only sound.
As the posters bulgingly indicated, the Roxie had devoted its week to Pumping Iron, the 1977 bodybuilding documentary that recently re-emerged as an 86-minute gubernatorial campaign commercial. The matter of which campaign it advanced is open to interpretation, but a sense of historic eminence is widely acknowledged. As many have observed, Paul Butler and Robert Fiore's movie is the first whose credits say "Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger."
To get a proper feel for the mood of the electorate, and risk being diagnosed with fetishist tendencies, Dog Bites had been attending consecutive screenings. (We swear we didn't know columnist Matt Smith was going to go see P.I. this week with mayoral hopeful Matt Gonzalez. Swear.)
People sheepishly approached the box office window, by themselves or in dawdling pairs. In the lobby they skulked, glanced over their shoulders, in the way people sometimes do when they get near a voting booth. But Sam Neira, of San Francisco, was in an outward, sportive mood. "I don't really know anything about the film," he said, his eyes bright and curious. Neira had the affable air of a political moderate and movie buff. "But I'm fairly confident that he's going to be our next governor." He took a fistful of popcorn. "I think it's going to be a good insight into how his presence really helped his career." Neira didn't figure the movie would change anyone's mind, at least not in these parts, but he admitted his own inner conflict: "I'm still torn. I'm not gonna vote for him, but I'm definitely a fan. Over the last two months, I've tried to see every one of his films." Suddenly Neira's face fell, twisted with the memory of an ancient trauma. "With the exception of Red Heat," he added. "That one is awful. I mean, poor Jim Belushi."
The tiny lobby was filling up. No "Total Recall 2003" T-shirts were in evidence, nor any (declared) opposing candidates, and in physical stature the average moviegoer tended more toward the 98-pound-weakling type than the Charles Atlas. The gathering crowd of about 50 did contain a proliferation of young couples, sharing sweets, toying with each other's hair, and otherwise lending the disquieting impression that Pumping Iron might also have become a date movie.
"I figured people would read into it what they wanted to read into it -- pro or con," Roxie owner Bill Banning said later. "We just thought that people -- voters -- should be informed." The Roxie had not been authorized to screen it, and the film eluded Banning for a while, but "about three weeks ago, we discovered a collector had a print. We decided, 'Well, let's just show that.'" The theater would then donate proceeds to the Hunters Point Community Youth Park Foundation, on behalf of Mr. Schwarzenegger. "That might allay any legal problems," Banning explained.
Pumping Iron, which was recently described in The New Yorker as "the Rosetta stone of Schwarzeneggerology," sets the bodybuilding scene, and watches the then-28-year-old heave and undulate his way toward a sixth consecutive Mr. Olympia title in 1975. Of all the faces on which Butler's camera spends any time, Schwarzenegger's is the only one that never looks worried -- not even in one memorable close-up, extreme by any definition, of him prostrate in the gym, bench-pressing God knows how many pounds, and writhing in the glorious agony of pumpitude.
The offending champion recounts his boyhood dream of making it huge in America, and his commitment to not interrupting his training, whether it be to faint, throw up, or attend his father's funeral. His resolve is unbreakable but jovial, even insouciant, and he makes short work of barbells and opponents' psyches alike.
"I'd thought he was mean and venal," Banning continued. "My recollection of the film was somewhat corrected when I saw it again." In other words, the nature of competition is what it is; everyone knows it takes a killer instinct to become a champion, let alone an electable public servant. "It just seemed a little more benign than I'd recalled," he said. Banning spent most of the week at a film festival in Canada, so he hadn't had the chance to learn how locals were responding to Pumping Iron.
"Were they enjoying themselves?" he suddenly asked.
Among the sounds emanating from the theater during a given screening were frequent gasps, hisses, cautious applause, whispers of "Jesus," a collective "Awww" when something cute happened, or an "Ewww!" to acknowledge the grotesque grunts and guttural roars -- these from within the film, and without -- and, most commonly, laughter. If the home stretch of a California recall campaign could have a soundtrack, this was it.
There was also the swanky soul-fusion throb of the music, to which some heads wagged. We couldn't help but imagine another cut in which the director gamely confronted the film's gay-porn subtext head-on, as it were. Had this occurred, who knows how it might have affected the candidate in the long run, but Dog Bites sensed that the Roxie audience giddily would have gone there.
All of this was summarized to answer Banning's question. "That's good!" he finally said, sounding relieved.
As he left the screening, Sam Neira's eyes were brighter than they'd been going in.
"It was an awesome movie!" he said. "I never knew even a small amount about bodybuilding." But the real subject of his education, of course, was the star.
"If he brings even a 10th of the determination and focus to solving California's fiscal problems that he showed in there, there's gonna be another golden age. If he can un-fuck California's political situation in the way that he did that, I mean, look out."
It is, Neira admitted, a formidable task. "Politics is a blood sport," he said. "Here, at least grown men can stand naked in the shower together, admiring each other's biceps, and it's OK."
Neira said he would entreat his Republican friends, most of them McClintock supporters, to see the film. "If you just see the intensity ...." He shook his head, astounded.
Others also shook their heads, astounded. They were less pumped. They hesitated in the lobby, no longer sheepish but now resigned, all but conceding the governorship. As with bad blockbusters, there is a certain sickening to be had after the indulgence of guilty-pleasure politics.
The candidate could also be seen on nearby street corners in newspaper boxes, where headlines still referred to him, reductively or hyperbolically, depending on your position, as "actor." Perhaps his 14-letter last name had consumed too much ink, or his first name had become too cozily familiar to read well in the stilted voice of daily journalism.
From somewhere across the street, someone shouted, "Ahh-nold! Ahh-nold is so hot right now!"
With glum resignation, the moviegoers sealed their coats against the night and ventured out, ready, finally, to hit the voting booth, and then maybe the gym.
-- Jonathan Kiefer
