Harvey's Havana

Socialista sits somewhere between Soho and Lower Manhattan and according to Google, “evokes Old Havana with antiques and plantation-style decor.” Upscale clients, many of them divorced from reality, unwittingly here to serve as background for a show of deranged fantasy.

Old Havana is reimagined as a tax haven for cheats and scoundrels of the I Heard You Paint Houses variety, echoing the music of potbellied men roaming in the Caribbean, beholden to their honeypots and exotic mistresses. Antiques signal expressions of doubt in the face of new modernism; faithful but rusted Bible-truth. Plantations are an aporia, a haven for the persecuted but merciless Europe-bred contingent, who in turn mercilessly breed a nation of African people cursed to forever wander and gawk at their own displacement.

The lounge—“lounge” used here describes a total disregard of a particular brand of quickness that is typified to the lower classes—boasts of booths where celebrities touring the coasts have been stealthily initiated into mindful centuries of Cubano heritage. The eighteen-dollar Cuban sandwich here is the pinnacle of abject consumerism, appreciated as an accomplished le résultat of bread and cured ham. The tourists are here to marvel and eat and laugh and drink and fart and forget that they are, in essence, touring the past and its unwanted scenes of abjection.

This place, with its plush furniture and low-hanging chandeliers, has seen its fair share of bacchanals consisting of men and women in stiff linty gowns masking their terror with off-kilter smiles, braided egos and harmonized Progressive-era values. Glorified Catholic mob bosses heap on death threats in conversation like a ton of parsley in a Tabbouleh salad. Skinny debutantes who plow Manhattan beauty stores everyday for fittings and job holdings hold on to their tresses and gab about fine things while young Wall Streeters, newly minted, chase tail and tell long-winded tales about their unacknowledged mistresses entombed in lofts within city limits.

Sinatra-era music plays in the backdrop, seducing listeners and their windswept hair (they just happened to catch a chill in the parking lot); the music’s heady voice and dandy lyrics steadily rise above the din. They drink and make fools of themselves, of each other, and have fitful white-hot liquor visions of gods and monsters mute and resolute. The palace stands as if in a Solomonic dream, wisdom and wealth accruing over the years, filling the crevices, rattling the floorboards.

All the creaking and heaving would misinform you, we are not in a shipyard, the past merely has us caught between its jagged teeth, we slip through its gummy openings, dance in the jungle wallpaper like Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy. The rafters open up like rib cages and the walls dissolve into the montage; the clock counts down into the next century, its hands spinning away at hypnotic speeds. The chorus of laughter rises like leavened bread; an earmarked postmodernist draft blows through the windows, the curtains billowing like soft clouds. Here is where we meet our famed, infamous anti-hero, “fat fuck” and “self-proclaimed owner” of the stage we’re about to set.

Harvey Weinstein, the co-owner of Miramax and creator of beloved flicks such as Fruitvale Station and Good Will Hunting, responsible for birthing a litter of beloved three-dimensional cultural and cultic figures, such as Django and Aldo. With his hulking self, ready to undermine Socialista’s exclusivity with a pedestrian act taking center stage in subways all around New York and Japan.

My girlfriends and I once talked about our favorite porns and they turned out to be endeared to perverts groping unsuspecting subjects on the subway, bypassing consent as if it were another fussy garment and establishing clear violations of bodily autonomy. I myself happen to be a pervert, though I prefer vocalized enjoyment over violation. I let other men of similar mind suck me in public bathrooms, letting me cum all over their chests and faces then wearing me home like a scent, like a naughty little secret whispered just between us two and maybe a not-so-belligerent third party.

Speaking of cum, or spunk, or ejaculate as it is formally known, and scent, the sensory details that elevate the story beyond mere urban legend, travelling well beyond words, we follow the trail of ejaculate, the smell of expensive cologne, the dirty leather-tanned hundred-dollar bill Harvey pushes into the hands of the bewildered sous chef before chasing him out of the kitchen. The kitchen, probably industrial, serving its patrons a medley of culinary delights, is the liminal space where the offensive act occurs.

Through eyewitness accounts, we see the “before” and the “after” and not the “during.” The epithet “fat fuck” establishes undesirability as subtext. The unseen conjectured scene unfolds like a rolled hundred-dollar bill, and its exposition, though worthless in the face of many social ills, marks the kind of gratuitousness I am looking to elaborate on and perhaps embody. A man with a woman on his arm and his other hand on his penis, stroking and moaning and trying to aim. The aimlessness of it all—we always return to masturbation and copulation like hungry dogs who have been programmed for their daily dose of Xanax.

The kitchen pot has been “defiled,” the staff say, the pot is not culpable in any way, except perhaps as a prick tease. Initial reports suggest a plant was involved but the equation seems too terse to hold up. The replacement of “plant” with “pot” unravels the plot further marking the whole scene as pathetic; an invalid’s pissing pot, a bed pan for a neurologically challenged geriatric. He has ‘forgotten his marbles,’ they will say.

Thanks to the hundred-dollar bill, some kind of transaction has taken place, therefore some kind of dignity has been restored to the unwilling participant, never mind his protesting otherwise. The faces of the culinary crew sour at the thought of being conscripted into sexual matters, even though the matters of food and pleasure are closely interlinked. They condemn the old man with his melting gray skin and his missing Jewish foreskin, wondering how such a man comes to dominate them in the social sphere when he throws his money at the chance to hump things like a dog.

The act of cruising, the practice itself, a sanctuary for the queer collective, can be reimagined in Harvey’s practice, its intent, bears a similar time signature. He means to tug at the fabric of intimacy itself and then quickly make off like a rat tearing ropes on a shipboard. His cum in a pot, drippy, effusive, makes a mockery of the intimacies of saffrony, lemony, minty and buttery hints which culinary utensils hold. Butter can be used to fix any dish, apparently. The world even. Cum, sticky when wet and rubbery when dry, has similar adhesive properties, especially when not confined to dirty socks and rags.

Culpability, likewise, while completely stuck to the individual, does not exist apart from society.

We’re all, in a way, Harvey with our dicks out; it’s a shared experience, like the Pope holding mass on religious holidays. Episcopal. It feels romantic to explore the possibility of our natural instincts, to have people see us, our filthy hearts, our decaying minds, how close we are to death.

Un petit mort, as the French say. There’s mild compassion for the pot too, an animistic belief that the utensil suffered an indignity and pleasure it had never known before. It had probably been spat on, or touched with toilet hands, but this was different, a reckoning with its ontology.

Anyway, there are those who would object to the sacrosanctity of public masturbation like Christian zealots. Because consensual shit, you know. I’m merely a conduit, and this is merely play, entirely prismatic, not meant to reverse or traverse the bounds of some moral universe. This is meant to be a vivant understanding of how the vacuum of need is filled, a sketch of fetish as it saunters towards ferality. Along with rather rote quizzings on how big and full, heavy and plump Harvey’s cock and balls are. Imagine them hanging off his crotch area, nestled inside his Fruit of the Loom tighty-whities.

Historical and fictional parallels abound. If you’re thinking sperm, that is. Cuban secret missiles. The Trojan horse. The Iron Throne in the Red Keep in “Game of Thrones.” A ton of cordyceps underneath the floorboards in “The Last of Us.” Harvey’s act is stealthily meant to be self-propagation as well as a joust for power. It’s therefore unsurprising that Socialista’s clientele, among them Armin Amiri, were unified against Harvey and his wandering hand, of course. For this is the golden age of hetero-pessimism with heterosexual men bearing the brunt of it. Their advances, and their fluids, are unwanted; their displays of offbeat machismo lose face by the day.

The remainder of the generals who would pillage and kill and rape and set the new lands ablaze for spices and cloth. Lone cowboys chewing a blade of grass in their mouths while they hold down the fort. The last of the Mohicans. Harvey is spotted “fixing his belt” after his jerk-off moment. The pot is “placed back on the stove.” It’s one-thirty in the morning. The sous chef wants to quit, for unrelated reasons. Harvey is an investor in Socialista, therefore Amiri refuses to confront him about the pot. He cannot prove anything.