by Lydia Lunch
And as for me … I participate in your ills and ask you—who dares to measure the tranquilizer for me? In the name of what superior light soul to soul can you ever understand me—or expect me to understand you? You who are at the very root of knowledge and clarity—all on account of your insistence … our persistence in suffering. We whose pain forces a journey into our souls in search of a calm place to cling to. In search of stability in evil, as others search for it in good. We aren’t crazy. We know the necessary doses to calm the insatiable sensibilities of the ruptured soul. The trial and error of terror as tranquilizer from which lesser mortals would flee screaming. But still we are not committing suicide—why?
And two weeks later he was dead and they held some stinking lousy memorial that none of his real friends went to. That I didn’t go to either because I don’t get along very well with professional mourners, being one myself. I’m always getting into fights at funerals. No one wants to hear that none of us expected to see thirty anyway and now that a lot of us aren’t, everybody’s whining and crying about those who were the first to go. AND FUCK IT! If you aren’t ready to die every other second of every third day, then you aren’t really living. Because to know about LIFE we have surrounded ourselves with DEATH. With the dead and dying. With the dope fiends, drug addicts, sex fanatics, alcoholic under-achievers, the thieves and prostitutes, the dropouts and deadbeats, and all the misfits who didn’t belong, didn’t want to belong to any clique or coven or cult. Who by no accident or freak of nature got chosen to be called up … like they always knew they would. Which is why they glutinized and devoured and eventually choked to death on a life that raced forward faster than a speeding bullet.
By simply suppressing drugs or sex you won’t suppress the need for crime, the cancers of the body or of the soul, the propensity for despair, inborn stupidity, the frailty of the instincts. You won’t be able to stop souls from being predestined for poison, whatever kind that may be. The poison of isolation, of onanism, of deep-rooted weakness. The poison of alcohol, of an antisocial nature. There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. If you take away from them one means of madness, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create means more insidious, more furious, absolutely desperate. Nature herself is antisocial. Let the lost get lost. They are lost by nature. And all the ideas of moral regeneration won’t do anything about it. There is an innate determinism, an indisputable incurability about suicide, crime, idiocy, madness. There is an invincible cuckoldom of man, a fallout of character. There is castration of the mind. Hell is already of this world and there are men who are unhappy runaways destined to repeat their escape eternally.
No one cries for the dead. They cry for themselves … those living through death. We, who in our own individual pain, replay the same horrifying scenes in subways and tenements and nightclubs and bars and baths in this blood-soaked necropolis where night fatigue and the hint of catastrophe make sex without secretions seem almost unbearable in this the age of the death of seduction—where the pleasure palaces have been turned into torture chambers in this, the killing zone of false memory.
[Author’s note: The Beast was Bradley Field, drummer for Teenage Jesus. This piece thieves such an incredible amount of philosophy from Antonin Artaud’s “General Security: The Liquidation of Opium” that I hereby implicate myself in the commission of criminal plagiarism. Deal with it. Now go and read the original text.]
JOHNNY BEHIND THE DEUCE
You can’t save anyone from themselves. You will lose everything by attempting to play savior. You will never heal the wounded. You cannot repair the damage already done by selfish parents, vicious exlovers, child molesters, tyrants, poverty, depression, or simple chemical imbalance.
You can’t undo psychic wounds, bandage old scars, kiss away ancient bruises. You can’t make the pain go away. You can’t shout down the voices in people’s heads.
You can’t make anyone feel special. They will never feel beautiful enough, no matter how beautiful they are to you. They will never feel loved enough, no matter how much you adore them.
You will never be able to save the battered from battling back at a world they’ve grown to hate. They will always find a way to pick up where the bullies have left off. They will in turn become bullies. They will make you the enemy. They will always find a new method in which to punish themselves. Thereby punishing you. No matter how much you’ve convinced yourself that you have done absolutely everything in your power to prove your undying devotion, unfaltering commitment, and unending encouragement, you will never be able to save a miserable bastard from himself.
The wounded will always find a way to spread their pain over a vast terrain like an emotional tsunami which devastates the surrounding landscape. An ever-expanding firewall which will singe everything and everyone in its wake. The longer you love a damaged person the more it will hurt you. They will mock your generosity, abuse your kindness, expect your forgiveness, try your patience, sap your energy, and eventually kill your soul. They will not be happy until you are as miserable as they are. Then their incredible self-loathing will be justified by the perpetuation of a cycle from which there is little recourse.
Once you enter their free fall, it will be virtually impossible to turn your back on them. You will be racked with guilt, frustrated by your own impotence, and made furious for ever buying into their bullshit in the first place. Of course, the more damaged, the more charismatic. The more brilliant. The more sexually intoxicating. The more dangerous to your own mental health.
I have spent months, possibly years, comatose on park benches, tracking the periphery of playgrounds, skulking through shopping malls, falling asleep in the library, trying to capture and trap a fleeting image. The image of a young boy, at just the right moment in his life, that transient fleeting second when an incandescent light falls on the hollows of his cheeks, a splash of sun dances on his lips, and that blossom of purity etched deep within his innocent smile rebirths something in me that was lost long ago.
There’s something about how fine their bones are. Under their flesh. The possibility of shattering them under my need. Skin pulled tight around bony joints. The flattering reflection of my own beauty divorced of disease, my multiple sicknesses, a withering-away abated. Transformed into a healing tonic, a sexual salvation, vacation from the devastation that has ringed the well-spring of my life.
Not that I could ever forget how much of my life has already been melted away. How much I gave up, gave over, wasted. How much has already been stolen. Destroyed. You don’t have to fight yourself too hard to fall in love at least for half an hour, twenty minutes, two days, a week, with a young boy who finds in you the love they never found in their own mother’s arms. And reciprocates it twofold. I’ll play Mommy. I need to and I’m good at it. There’s nothing to lose, and what it is you gain is their life force, a transformation, resurrection, a reckoning, a day off from playing wet nurse in the trauma unit nursing damaged junkies back to health.
But I’m too far gone now, too fucked up, too ill spent to really carry through. Shot to shit and forced to struggle against it. Broken down, battered. Used too much up. Nothing left inside my angel’s saving graces, that busted little cherub with dirty feet and greasy wings whose tender ruby-rich kisses have resuscitated so many burning embers and dying remains that I have become a mortician’s reanimator, stuck forever in a purgatory that so many dying men have come to rub their poison against.
Even my breath has become toxic. An aerosol taint of glue, sugar water, paint fumes, dead roses, and runoff. But young boys don’t know that yet. Don’t see it, can’t smell my true essence over the sweat of their own passion. Over the smell of their own vinegar, saltwater taffy, dirty towels, steam heat. They wouldn’t recognize it even if they did. They have no reference point. No landmarks. No track record. No wars below their belt.
No idea what it’s like to inhabit this fleshy prison of blood and bones, as if entombed in an unnamed Nuremberg c
athedral which forty years later still remains swept to the side of a blood-stained street, the bones of her confessional stacked helter-skelter, shattered under the steel rods, the rebar of the enemy pilot jets who blew in one day with the taste of her death on their breath, and in their wake, there she still stands, torn to little pieces, praying to be glued back together again. Praying for resurrection, for redemption. Praying with blind faith and stupid adoration to a cruel and vindictive god that does not exist, that one day the wounds will heal over. That a dark angel will tumble down from the heavens, your name on his lips, and with a single kiss, the multiple fractures where memory and madness commit soul murder will cauterize. Will mend. Dissolve. But as with most prayers, I’m wasting my fucking breath.
I fell into his hollow, the vacuum in his eyes, that empty space inside, where beyond his obvious pain, trauma, tragedy, a little boy had long ago been murdered. Butchered. Bludgeoned. Massacred. Left abandoned on some shit-stained road, marked not on any map, but well-defined enough to read in braille.
And it was written all over Johnny. Dead End. Do Not Enter. End of the Road. Cul-de-sac. No Outlet. Lost Highway. I should have known better. I did know better. I just couldn’t stop myself.
Johnny bruises a tender ache inside of me. Even after an all-night bender when he comes swaggering back to my bunk, bent on an ugly kind of drunk, stinking of Wild Irish Rose, sporting another black eye and limping again, the way his face lights up when he knows I’m half awake, been waiting up staring down the clock, sucking up caffeine and codeine, worried sick and swollen from not enough sleep, and pissed off, yeah, pissed, but still thrilled, can’t fake it, I just want a kiss, and he gets to live another day, so I get to live another day, which is all the reason I need to forgive him, at least for now.
Because I can’t face the fucking fact that one day I may have to live without him, and that day may come sooner than either of us want to admit, but for today, for right now, which is all that matters, he wasn’t set up and offed in some two-bit hustle, didn’t play patsy to a sleazy pickup line whispered under the breath of a serial-killing sex stalker, he didn’t stumble into a speeding car before passing out and pissing all over himself … He didn’t fall off a fire escape trying to jimmy open and pry out one of the frail old sex queens from a ratty roach-infested bed set on fire in an opium haze by a lit cigarette dropped from the limp fist of some young trick he got dope, dick, and the drips off of …
Which he almost did, fall five stories that is, from the roof of the shitbag hotel he night watches, said he didn’t even try to catch himself, didn’t care, was ready to curse Creation and kiss the concrete, just to see how many bones would shatter, and how bad it would feel when they did, but his belt got looped around a broken rung and instead of wringing his neck, it saved his ass. And that was just last week.
“If I was a soldier, I’d trip over a land mine,” he laughs, small belly chuckle, eyes not faking too hard an innocence he still manages to maintain, and with all my might, try as I do, I just can’t decode how …
But the beauty is, Johnny doesn’t get it either, doesn’t see it, can’t feel it, so busy dousing his wounds with Betadine, counting his scars, picking at scabs, another hairline fracture here, a small concussion there, bloody rags wrapped around the temple, soaking up the fallout from the body as battlefield to be trampled under by his big black boots …
Storm troopers kicking the shit out of the enemy within, waging counter-offensives which will guarantee mutually assured destruction not only against himself, not only against me, but aimed directly at the shell-shocked and battle-fatigued little boy who screams for ceasefire in the bunker and wants his mother to kamikaze in to the demilitarized zone …
That unchartered territory where a part of him still lives, the part that cowers in the far corner late at night, scared of shadows and holy ghosts, scared of losing life before figuring out exactly what it means to fucking live, and his life is an endless barrage of bullshit and petty disasters, where losing whatever it is you’re desperately trying to hold on to is not only natural but almost genetically preprogrammed, and Jesus Christ, I want to save him from himself, want to take care of him, mother him, love him, get him to love himself, be saint, savior, and favorite sin, but we’re both sick with need, sick on each other, and not a single day goes by that I don’t whisper a stupid prayer that smears God’s name to keep him safe. But he’s not safe. He’s not safe. He’s not safe from me. And I’m not safe from him.
* * *
Johnny crawls into bed bloody and beer-stained. He’s cut himself again. I pretend I’m still sleeping. He feels closer to me, safer, he relaxes when I’m half dead. He cradles into my coma. It calms him down, slows his blood. He presses himself against me. His thick leather belt sweats against my back. He buries his face in my hair. Inhales slowly. Supping on my dusky aroma, a dirty-white honeysuckle stained with night’s runoff. I am the oxygen he feeds upon. A cleansing hallucinogen, the undercurrent of musky heat radiates life into his open mouth. When he’s with me he can breathe again.
I feel his excitement building. The air catches fire in his dry cottony throat. He swallows, mouths, I want so bad to love you like you pretend to love me. I tremble. Not moving. Frozen like a still frame cracked and trapped inside a broken movie projector.
I want so bad to lash out, thrash against him, scream his name. Pound his temples. Smash him in the face. Shoot him in the fucking head. Stab his lower lip, his arms, his legs, his back and chest, cut him into a thousand crimson ribbons so that he would, for that one moment, truly comprehend just how much I do love him. How badly I want him, how needy I really am. How hungry. How incredibly moist.
Tucking himself into me, a fleshy surround. I submit to his filthy electric force field and fold myself under him. Into him. My body seems to dissolve, shrink, condense, and unfold into a small pocket, hollow pillow, pussy willow soft, which he blankets in dusty skin. The 147 self-inflicted scars on his chest and arms are cool pink fingers which mouth my surrender. I have no resistance left, not an ounce, once they press up against me. Skin sliced to the bone. Brilliant. Because it defines so well the pain we both share, but can never, either of us, ever admit to.
Johnny doesn’t start violent, but I know that’s how he’ll finish me off. Finish himself off. He knows I want him to hurt me. I need to be hurt. Need to be reminded how much he loves me. Loves me enough to hurt me even though he hates me for wanting it. Hates me for what I do to him, make him do to me. Hates me because he needs to hurt himself too, and now I am the most available tool.
But first, his soft wet lips, sweeter even than a virgin’s pouting mound, surprise the back of my neck. Disappear into collar bones. Crawl up into my hair. He inhales, sucking in a fistful of auburn locks. His tenderness is made so much more desperate, delicious, cruel, by where I know he’ll take me. How he’ll take me. How far he’ll push it. How far he needs to go.
He can’t resist much longer. If I exhale a certain amount of breath … when my rib cage rises and falls into the light and shadow of early-morning exhaust … and the air jet streams from my mouth signaling a passive languor, that’s when he’ll pounce. He stuffs his fingers in his mouth. Small sucking sounds. I still don’t move. His left hand dances down my spine. His right pulls my panties aside. They cut into my thigh. Scald the fleshy inside. With surgical skill he spreads me open, so slowly I can barely feel the pressure of skin separating, flowering. It’s only the influx of moist body heat which signals the stretching of succulent meat. He slips two fingers inside me. Inching up to the last knuckle. Taut resistance. Gentle spasm. He’s in my ass, that glorious masterpiece, the maker’s most temperamental vestibule. Pressing against me from behind, he’s getting hard, a fallen angel, blessing me with the salvation of his sex.
He still thinks I’m asleep. Removes his fingers long enough to smell and lick. Sticks them back in. Takes them out again. Smells and licks. He’s now too hard to resist my fragrant blossom. He’s forcing himself in. Mass
ive expansion of tender cubby. I’m stuffed to bursting, terrified. But no time to contemplate the consequences. The clock’s gone haywire. He’s suddenly impatient. Rough. He shoves one hand over my mouth. I can taste my almond musk.
“This is what you want, isn’t it … isn’t it? Tell me how much you want it, tell me how much you want my cock, tell me, baby, you know you want it … tell me,” he threatens under his breath. Thrashing against me. Pumping fingers down my throat. Glued like a puppet on a flesh stick.
Then I see it. Out of the corner of my eye. Steel tip glint. I hear his skin rip. Deep crimson incision. Small audible shudder. Slight smile. Sweet kiss. Another laceration to his chest, under his collar bone. Flesh tone turns fatty pink then deep scarlet. Eight or nine inches of thick syrup flows down his chest in bloody rivulets. Cakes around the base of his dick. Trickles onto and tickles his balls. Hot dribble drives his delirium. Can’t stop himself now from banshee bucking. Fury fucking the drippy dry glue into the base of my spine from the outside in.
Lubricated with his browning blood, my delicate camellia revolts and tightens, almost tearing, searing itself on his poisoned heat flow. Pummeling me senseless, there is no recourse other than to meet his thrusts with equal dementia. Sticky and slick turns gummy and thicker still. Hideous swell. Horrible explosion. Mutual expulsion. He jackhammers the last few droplets of come and blood into my hollow. Squashed under him, I collapse. Feel myself drain, deflate. He ebbs out slowly. Gagging for air.
But there is no air. It’s too thick to breathe. The swampy atmosphere is stained with spunk and plasma. Johnny burrows into the small of my back. Tickling, licking, lapping at my oozing wound. His lips and tongue bathing my bruise. “We’re both bleeding …” he baby talks.
I had been running the straight-and-narrow for as long as I could remember. For no good reason other than loneliness hit harder while nursing a hangover. A brain-crushing headache and sour stomach became a tiring way to greet the day. Then came Johnny.