I’ve never done this before. Extend. The tip’s at my lips, then deeper, then I close around my mushroom head. It’s warm, fat, and all very flattering. I can taste the zing of something about to happen.
“This is it. Shoot yourself in the head with that weapon, and try not to spill. Who’s doing this to you, hon?”
She knows damn well who’s doing it. I look up in worship at the gargantuan poster dick above me.
“Sean is.”
And that’s all I can say before I shoot cum down my throat, while Crystal snaps the shots I hope no one will bring out to my book signings as a practical joke.
I have to come clean with you again. I never figured out how to bend a MetroCard to make it work forever, but I told you I did because I needed a superpower to make you believe in me. I had to convince you that I could rise above the shit of life, and that I could do it in style. I hope that knowing this won’t change your impression of me.
You know, sooner or later, you’re going to have to share some secrets with me, or I might have to stop trusting you.
I might have to shut up.
Yesterday, there was an event.
I called Derek’s painting “infantile.”
You have to understand: there are two million words, all of them inappropriate, that I’m capable of saying at any minute of the day, to all the wrong people.
He misunderstood me.
The idea is this: words tick, fizzle, and explode in my mouth if I don’t let them out.
Open a grammar book and you’ll see a list of my heavy artillery: impersonal pronouns, punctuating adjectival clauses, gerunds and infinitives, paired conjunctions, modifying adverbial phrases, transitions, mixed conditionals, prepositions, modal auxiliaries, uncountable nouns, comparatives and superlatives, transitive verbs.
I have a particular problem with garden-variety adjectives.
Trapping them in, I feel the combustion building up, and then when my tongue blasts flapping out of my mouth, there’s no telling what I’ll say. Even worse, in polite social situations when I have to swallow these dangerous subject-verb-object combinations (which often seem quite harmless to me), my stomach’s at full blowout risk.
I called his painting “infantile,” but I meant to say “innocent.” Is that the worst crime in the world?
Screw vocabulary.
Gem Spa on First Avenue is the coolest bodega I know, and not only because they have the biggest magazine selection in the East Village, or because they have those quirky red-and-white striped paper cups that you can’t find anywhere else.
It’s because of the clientele, but not who you think.
Liza Minnelli on one of her midnight benders? Who cares.
Alec Baldwin getting a New York Post and flipping to the Page Six gossip column so he can remember what he did the night before? Old news.
Susan Lucci mapping news clippings of herself into some kind of astrological chart to predict when her second Daytime Emmy Award win will be? As if.
These and other washed-up stars lurk around in semi-transparent shades, checking to see if they can still make the magazine covers. The glasses are semi-transparent because they want to be recognized, of course, while they still can.
No, Gem Spa’s main attraction is somebody entirely different.
Celebrity photog, image-maker, master of the beautifugly: David LaChurch.
May’s covers are stacked in a grid of risers—a magazine altar. I want to lick the fruit-loop ink right off them because they celebrate everything I hold dear about hard luck. David LaChurch is the only photographer who can make a candy-coated masterpiece out of the sheep manure that life slings at you.
The Face: Drew Barrymore in a banana yellow waitress’s uniform, sprawled on the floor of a typical New Jersey diner, miles away from the set of E.T., one perky breast hanging out amid spilled grapefruit and maraschino cherries. She’s wearing a cutout paper tiara made for the disposable age.
Details: Leonardo DiCaprio, post-Titanic but looking pre-pubescent, bleeding sexily under a crown of thorns. His lips are so red, it’s either lip-gloss or blood. There’s something quintessentially New York about glorifying little-boy masculinity. There’s something hopelessly LA about a corrupted Beverly Hills brat striking a Jesus pose.
It disgusts me that these actors know nothing about the hardship they’re portraying, but at least they’re trying to make it look real.
Rolling Stone: Trent Reznor with his lips sewn shut, lying on a bed of white fur. Cheap, silver-painted Realistic microphone for the Lo-Fi age. Everybody knows there’s no way to shut Reznor up, so we’ll chalk it up to LaChurch’s meticulous airbrushing team.
Interview: The hotel room is washed Pepto-Bismol pink. An overweight Courtney Love look-alike in a pink Chantilly lace prom dress and messy lipstick. She’s serving a rat on a silver platter to a faux “Girlie Show”-era Madonna (in a wheelchair, no less) who’s smoking a set of wrinkles into herself. Nipple tassels for the age of the young-at-heart, when you can be anyone in the world. Not that you’d want to.
Paper: Lily Tomlin in a fern-choked forest, sitting on a giant spotted mushroom, using a lichen for a footstool. The spots make her mottled complexion look amazing by comparison. She sips, shell-shocked and staring into the camera, from a straw stuck in a red-and-white striped Gem Spa cup.
Spin: Tom Jones in a hot pink catsuit, hanging off the mirror bracket of an eighteen-wheeler that’s stopped in front of an inflatable Uniroyal tire the size of a house. The gayest straight man in pop music (aside from Ricky Martin) is singing to the vanishing point on the road in front of him. An anthem for the lost and misguided.
The Advocate: It makes sense that a celebrity photographer is his own best model. David himself in a boxing ring, looking bruised but defiant, swatting at invisible ghosts who shadow-punch him. Good metaphor for how the pundits get on his case about taking vacuous pictures of nothing, and him hustling past those who can’t appreciate the nothingness of life.
May is a Technicolor sweep. I hear that David’s making a film, something to pull us all deeper into LaChurch Land. I can hardly wait for these covers to come to life.
Then I see it.
It looks right at home, nestled between Leonardo and Trent.
Playguy: Jaeven Marshall in a concrete half-pipe, sprawled topless in skintight grass-stained jeans, holding a skateboard between his open legs. If you focus real hard, you can almost see the wheels spinning. Baseball cap cocked to the indigo sky, middle finger sprouting from a hand scraped red and raw. Shadows play with the contours of his crotch. A hero for the can’t-give-a-shit.
These tiny shards of chemical glass that I swish into cans of Red Bull (sometimes it’s a yellowish powder that smells like cat pee—every bathtub lab is different) is finally creeping into New York. They say it has already eaten up all the young gay men on the West Coast, and now it needs new blood. They say it makes us unsafe, makes us fuck each other without condoms. It wastes us until we turn into gargoyles and paw at each other’s deformed faces. Friends become impossible to recognize, so they say.
Whatever.
Some people are oblivious to the fact that there are always two ways to spin something, that every side effect has an equal and opposite benefit. Some people are stupid. Most of them, actually.
It’s very simple. ADD takes my alertness away. Crystal meth gives it back. The universe takes care of itself.
A lot of kids smoke it, but that’s too junkie for me, and snorting has never been my trip. Sure, meth can make you sick if you drink too much of it, and some people have to get their stomach pumped. I’m not like that, though. I would rather stick my fingers down my throat than visit a hospital. They take your drugs away in there, believing the media hype.
Anyways, it was all I could do to get through a Richard Rorschach photo shoot and have me be anything but a blur. He’s too intense for me.
“Look at you, right.”
Richard dipped the tea bag in his cup like he was go
ing fishing.
“You’re still beautiful,” he went on. “New York has had its paws all over you and you still shine.”
I wondered if he could see my teeth chatter and my eyes go squiggly. He was expecting me to say something.
“Right,” I said.
Richard led me to a work table, gave me a magnifying loupe, and slid a row of negatives on the light tray, as neatly and meticulously as he did everything.
It was from the last photo shoot. I had gone crazy with a roll of masking tape, fashioning myself a coat of beige adhesive armor, then a baseball uniform, then binding and gagging myself. A knight, an athlete, a prisoner: masking tape versions of people I’ve wanted to be, each of them heroic in their own special way.
“It’s amazing how many different Jaevens can be convincingly you. You’re the real deal.”
“I see.”
Richard pressed my hand on the light tray like a cop taking fingerprints.
“Yeah, right, look.”
When a light flushes your skin, your skin turns into glowing rice paper. Your veins pulse red and translucent. The mystery of you disappears, and so does the fear. Richard was the real light box, and he shone brightly through me every time I was with him.
“So what are you going to give me today?”
Thank God Richard didn’t shoot porn.
I tore the cushions off his couch and threw them on the floor. This was going to go down as planned, as I mapped it out when I was giving ass to a boring trick and I needed to escape cerebrally to a sixth floor in Tribeca.
“I’m going to show you what I feel like these days.”
Cushioned thud. The weight of limbs. I fell on my face, all the while locking gaze with the camera lens, with Richard. I wanted him to capture the look in my eyes just before I hit the floor—what I imagined would be a creeping fearlessness. The look of young men when they realize they own the city they’re enslaved to.
We shot a couple of rolls. There were no mirrors in Richard’s place. I tried to picture what he saw that day, what gave him that slapped look of awe, what made him emerge from behind the lens and stare straight at me as I fell time and time again. Maybe he was seeing invisible bruises. There were real ones for sure, when my shoulder missed the cushion and slammed into the hardwood floor, but those aren’t the kind that stay with you.
We finished and he snuck the film away to what I guessed was his darkroom. He came out after a while, pensive and quiet. I whipped out my notebook, lay shirtless on the floor, and started to write about Derek.
“I mean the pillows, right?” he said. “There’s someone you trust or want to trust, so it was like, let’s go there.”
“I see them more as cushions.”
“Whatever, come on.”
“You’re still way off.”
“I mean, your face was like, hello?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Okay, good. Because you should just let it happen. Do you mind if I shoot? Why don’t I get you a tea?”
“Whatever. Sure.”
“Don’t stop what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s cool.”
Our relationship changed. From that day on, I went to Richard’s to write, he shot, and he brought me a piping cup of jasmine tea roughly every four pages.
One of the massages that made me famous:
Full Swedish treatment including muscle pulverization. Phil cried like a little boy.
Inches cover, June 1999. Phil convinces Lower East Side photog Richard Kern that there is more to erotic photography than anorexic junkie girls with track marks on their cooch. We hop the fence to an abandoned amphitheatre in Riverside Park that’s covered in graffiti. I hang rat traps from my foreskin for full extension.
Fan letter to Inches, July 1999:Dear Inches,
Thank you for finally printing a picture of a guy I can keep in my wallet. What a hunk! Can you tell him that I just want to hold his dick against my face when it’s soft and kiss his foreskin? Better yet, can you pack him and his big beautiful dick up in a suitcase and post him to Brighton? We English lads will treat him right (as if!) and we’ll make sure to send him back in one piece. Every time I look into his deep blue eyes I get this feeling of total surrender.
And I’m already stocking up on rat traps!
Bill in Brighton, England
As a person who is often photographed, I will now posit an interpretation of selected quotes from Susan Sontag’s On Photography, a book I stole from some trick’s shitter:
“To collect photographs is to collect the world ... To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
Wow. Bang on. Sometimes I wonder if Susan Sontag was a hustler boy in a previous life. For aging Manhattan art fags, the next best thing to a night with me is a picture of me. They want to own me, take me home with them, imprison me behind glass, and then jerk off carefully. Putting something behind glass speeds up the disidentification process. You can only fetishize somebody you can’t relate to, and the best way to make that happen is to dehumanize them, turn them into a two-dimensional copy. Drain the fluids, and suck out the person-hood so it doesn’t stink up the display case.
“Photographic images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it.”
When photographers ask me to sign prints of myself, I understand what this is about. Personalization. A DNA imprint. What is called “realia” in academic circles. So I lick the corner, gob it up with snot, leave a smudge of pre-cum or a bloody fingerprint. Do they want a piece of me or not?
“Photographs furnish evidence.”
Evidence of me.
I was here.
I existed.
I was totally hot.
People felt things when I fucked them.
I made people cum.
I made people happy.
I was ignored.
My brain was never validated.
I’m too beautiful to write something deep.
I’m too naked to be a writer.
I’m too exposed to be published.
I’m a raving ADD case, if you haven’t already noticed. I have a hell of a time recording dates and places and situating myself in a timeline of events that may or may not have happened. Sometimes the only way to know what I’ve done and where I’ve been is to flip to HX magazine’s Who’s Who society pages to find my drunken face laughing off the page, stumbling out of a club I can recognize from the décor and the tricks holding me up.
“The camera record incriminates.”
You said it, philosophy sister. This is a partial list of things I’ve been caught doing on camera:
Swiping photo equipment for easy resale (never from Richard), sliding a broken condom out of a model’s ass and smiling at the goo, blowing my meth dealer in a bathroom stall (the stuff is hard to find), posing with an intense pile of trash (hour forty-seven of a dumpster-diving adventure), punching out the photographer.
That’s why it’s useless to have a pseudonym. Slap whatever name you want on the picture, it’s still me.
“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”
Susan has obviously never met Richard Rorschach.
No, I don’t talk about crystal meth a lot. Would you? The world is full of judgmental people ready to label you an addict, conveniently forgetting the substances they funnel into their own bodies, and the reasons they do it. Maybe you’re one of them.
Like you’ve never loaded up on sugar to keep depression from dragging you down. You have never saturated your bloodstream with caffeine to give yourself just one more hour, frantically wasting another sixty minutes of your life. You have never been swimming in so much alcohol that drowning sounded like a fun proposition.
You have never worshipped a little cylindrical god packed with nicotine, pausing before you lit it to make sure you had at least one more left.
You have never used another person as a tool to hit that orgasmic sweet spot.
In the words of my friend Richa
rd: yeah, right.
Another reason I don’t talk about it is because it’s impossible to describe how tweaking feels. I can say that when I shovel a thumb of meth into a can of Red Bull for midnight breakfast, it coasts into me like it’s riding in a limousine, but you won’t understand unless you’ve done it. I can say that there’s a little animal that tickles me with its furry hooves, but it would be meaningless. You won’t understand the high of staying up for three days straight and rooting through trash cans for fun things to take apart, like inferior shoes held together with glue. You won’t understand the thrill of watching the city from a distance—the morning coffee scramble, the screams and fights and sales pitches, the squeals and crashes and depressed laughing, the scrape of shoes and tires, the drunken yawns and stumbling home—and being immune to it all.
It’s impossible to explain what being a vampire feels like.
The main reason I don’t talk about it, though, is because I’m not addicted. There’s a difference between a user and an abuser. I know better than to let a drug take over my life.
Guys I’d like to fuck:
Lower East Side nihilists, twenty-four, twenty-five. Subdermal implants and other body modification that fucks with the social order one patch of skin at a time. Pants slung low on the hips, and truck mud flaps sewn on the ass, dragging down six inches of crack as a statement. Trucker hats are their only nod to pop culture. They stomp around with this sexy look on their face like they would rather you committed suicide. Inexplicable yet pleasingly macho fascination with trucks.
Computer geeks, nineteen, twenty. Tall, lanky, hunching around with laptops underarm. The sexy rings under their eyes attest to long nights trawling for Internet porn. Don’t get enough sunlight to grow their patchy facial hair more evenly. You can see their dangly cocks flopping commando-style in their pants, cocks as long as their nailbitten typing fingers. They stink gloriously of B.O. and semen.
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