Elvira

It’s unusual to know exactly when your pubescence ended, but I do. It was the summer of 1990 and I was newly eleven, standing in my friend Louis’ kitchen while he changed channels on a small television. He stopped at the sight of a Saturday Super Movie preroll on Philly 57. FADE IN ON: a woman with pale skin, dark hair cascading around her shoulders and piled in a beehive both, a woman whose black wrap dress was cinched with a vaguely Arabian dagger and whose décolletage was cut in a V terminating at her solar plexus, a dress that exposed two halves of the largest, most beautiful breasts I had ever seen in my life.

“Stop,” I said urgently.

I sat down and watched the whole rest of the movie while Louis (I think realizing his friend was entering a powerful fugue) generously played Nintendo alone in the other room. The plot was meaningless and there were moments of dispensable parody, but what sang out was how all the characters, in their own ways, were obsessed with the woman, Elvira. She was quick, resistant to imposition, cheerfully selfish. What she wanted for herself was a captive, impersonal paying audience and by the end of the film she has it. She performs a burlesque in a nude bikini embroidered with black crystal spiders, twirling tassels on pasties.

Elvira was a crucible that burnt away my childhood and Elvira provided the physical prototype that shuts down my forebrain: pale ravenesses, stacked. Real girls aside, she has been in my heart since that summer. I know all there is to know about her, have seen every photo, every frame of film and even her unaired CBS pilot, which was passed to me through a network of fellow-travelers.

Before you email the cops, I should say that I have no interest in Cassandra Peterson, the actress who created and plays Elvira. She actually posed for a few magazines – skin rags – in the late 70s, and of course I have seen these images but they don’t wreck me the way her second self does. Cassandra is soft honey poured over sunshine but Elvira is sex and death in one, the face and torso of upbeat nihilism, the centerfold for a world without god.

We will never meet