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If dark comedy with a sordid edge is your cup of tea, then you might want to check out Permanent Obscurity: Or A Cautionary Tale of Two Girls & Their Misadventures with Drugs, Pornography and Death by Richard Perez. Truly a wickedly funny and unconventional novel, it mostly tells the story of two bungling nitwits trying to get their act together while launching their fetish film career. The book is about a lot more, actually, a story of what it might be like to be young and lost in America (although the story is set during the dark Bush Years). Dolores, the main character, like many young people is deep in debt from student loans, largely unemployable, and an unacknowledged weed addict. Both she and Serena, her best friend, seem to bounce around like pinballs in this roller coaster of a novel, broken into three “episodes” or parts.

It’s Serena who’s the leader in this book, with Dolores telling the story, and mostly the book is about their bickering, babbling “odd-girls out” relationship — from wanting to make an impression in the arts to making due with pornography or fetish work. The subplot threads entwining with the central theme reference boyfriends: Raymond for Dolores, “Baby” for Serena. But these boyfriends are just peripheral, and it’s the central relationship of these two women that holds this book together; the give-and-take friction between them is engaging, even if you don’t really feel sympathy for them in the beginning.

Part One introduces us these young ladies and their sordid Downtown world of casual street drugs and “female domination” Craigslist ads. Both of these women are reckless, but since Dolores is telling the story, she seems the most normal. Serena, on the other hand, is the femme fatale of this “noir” comedy and she seems to harm everyone she comes in contact with. It’s Serena who takes out the ads on Craigslist, trolling for hapless masochists who might contribute to her way of life, which largely revolves around “yeyo” or coke. A failed singer in a string of bands, she’s constantly scheming for ways to gain control of her floundering career without having to go the 9-to-5 route. Dolores, a photographer of some promise, seems equally lost, unable to gain a toehold in her field, and so she settles for temp jobs and smoking weed until she can figure things out.

Part Two, called “Strange Hungers,” plunges the two ladies headlong down the rabbit hole, following Serena’s disastrous attempt to make a “femdom” movie with gangsters, and Dolores being terminated from her job. The two scheme and bicker and literally arm themselves for the ordeal they’re about to face: making a perverted movie to pay back drug dealers who are quickly closing in. Insecurity abounds and neither Dolores nor Serena know what they’re doing, so they place yet another ad on Craigslist for a writer who might provide a properly perverted and filmable scenario. The writer character, Dick, as it turns out, provides not only the script for their femdom movie, but the meaning behind the entire novel’s title.

Part Three: “No Man’s Land” — by far the best part of the book — follows the fallout of the disastrous porno shoot, as Dolores and Serena flee into New Jersey to dispose of some unfortunate evidence (I can’t be specific without giving away a few surprises). For this, Serena’s part-time boyfriend, Baby, appears as the getaway driver, replaying an earlier role he filled in the book. From here things just get progressively worse for the characters, and it includes drug dealers and shootouts and, climatically, a high-speed police chase.

Since this is a “cautionary tale,” both women are caught finally and must do penance for their antisocial behavior. The ending finds our narrator, Dolores, all alone contemplating her place in the world and showing remorse and true empathy for the first time: “And, at night, I think of all the loneliness and sadness in the world and shake my head and even cry.” (p.448)

Permanent Obscurity: Or A Cautionary Tale of Two Girls & Their Misadventures with Drugs, Pornography and Death by Richard Perez.

Recommended for the brave non-mainstream reader.

Barnes&Noble or Amazon.

Book Review By Robert Mead

Permanent Obscurity plays out like an existential BDSM sex farce written by Jean Paul Sartre. At the center of this black comedy is Dolores and Serena, two bickering, self-deluded wannabe artists. Dolores, our quasi-teenage narrator, rages about society and how she’s oppressed while puffing away nonstop from her weed pipe; Serena, a self-absorbed beauty, can’t be bothered to work for a living so she puts out Craigslist ads for slaves who provide her with the adoration and attention she craves as a failed singer and performer. One such “slave,” who becomes an important character in the book, is a man referred to as “Baby,” a self-sacrificing little saint who can’t stop from bending over backwards for Serena, even though it’s clear she’s moved on to others, including a new male servant who might better serve her purposes. Appropriated slave #2 is a failed writer by the name of “Dick,” who may or may not stand in for the author himself, Richard Perez.

Dizzy yet? There’s more. Raymond, Dolores’s brow-beaten 40ish boyfriend, can’t seem to stop apologizing for an infidelity while Dolores makes sure she rubs his nose it, since she’s carrying his child. Like Baby, Raymond seems like another lost and haunted soul. The give-and-take (apologizing and Dolores’ refusal to accept an apology), comprises the romantic comedy subplot and is a running joke in the book.

Dolores and Serena take to living on the run, after it becomes clear that drug dealers (more and more piling up, appear as the story goes on) are closing in. Along the way, Serena has progressed from fetish model to would-be dominatrix-headliner in a film that Dolores and she attempt to make. The BDSM movie — or the attempt to produce it — becomes more or less the central plot of second act of the book. And page after page, Dolores and Serena find new ways of fouling things up, until the climatic event itself (the actual sex movie shoot) turns into another disastrous reversal. And suddenly Dolores and Serena find themselves as murderers. This is the existential part of the tale, like a trap door opening up in the story, plunging the girls into the third act of the novel, “No Man’s Land,” in which they’re made to finally deal with the consequences of their dissolute lives.

This is a long and heady story told from the meandering point of view of a pothead, Dolores. And appropriately enough, it meanders but never becomes dull. In the beginning of the novel, Dolores and Serena almost seem like tabloid caricatures, which may or not be a side effect of Dolores telling the story. But as the story progresses, the characterizations deepen. The dialog also becomes heavy with urban slang as Dolores’ re-telling sinks into flashback and more or less stays in flashback, until the end of the novel when we’re jolted back to the beginning and we fully understand the meaning of the opening quote of the book and how it relates to “Permanent Obscurity.”

This is a wild and entertaining novel, rough in spots, but ambitious in it’s own gritty, low-rent kind of way. But not for everyone with its non-mainstream BDSM sexual content, staggering drug use, and heavy foul language. Dolores, our narrator, and her best friend Serena would best be categorized as anti-heroes, certainly not role models.

Available from Amazon.

Full title of this novel: PERMANENT OBSCURITY: Or a Cautionary Tale of Two Girls and Their Misadventures with Drugs, Pornography and Death by Dolores Santana (as told to Richard Perez)

[Book Review by Robert Mead]

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Learning how to stop a porn addiction involves taking specific courses of action that you did not attempt in the past. Mental blocks can stop a person from change if they don’t spend time correcting them. Porn addiction can rob you of freedom and fill your life with guilt, fear and secrecy. In this article I cover five great guidelines with resources of help.

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