Waters’s essay about Garcia, a reclusive pornographer who has been filming and having sex with male marines for about thirty years, presents the most lurid, most squalid, and most Watersesque portrait of all. The answer doesn’t turn out to be no, but coming from him, the question has a startling edge. “Can living in a real John Waters movie ever bring any kind of joy?” he asks. But Waters’s admiration is complicated when he seeks out Zorro’s daughter, Eileen, and gets her take: cockroaches, years without heat, abusive drunks. There’s an elegiac quality to Waters’s portrait of the stripper, who gave her preteen daughter a joint-rolling machine, and it must have been tempting to lapse into sentimentality. Today, Lady Zorro might end up on a makeover show or some other reality-TV concoction, but she died of cancer in 2001. The thread that links these varied but extreme personalities is of course the raunchy provocateur himself. This kind of dual portraiture surfaces throughout Role Models, with Waters’s appreciations of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Little Richard, Leslie Van Houten, Tennessee Williams, Cy Twombly, and Bobby Garcia revealing as much about his idols as they do about him. “She just came out nude and snarled at her fans, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ To this day,” Waters writes in his splendid new book, “Zorro is my inspiration.” In the 1960s, John Waters was an admirer of a lesbian stripper in Baltimore named Lady Zorro.
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