At the touch of my hand on me, in the tremble of relief, of sensation, I promptly entered a territory of sexual hallucination . . . masturbation is a plenum of hallucination; my solitude fills promptly with hallucinatory fullness—love is now naked in the world. Isn’t it deathless here now, for a while? Aren’t we all gathered here—anyone I want? Hallucination—and sexual will—clobber me with softly ravenous wingbeats. The heft of things and the cawing of nerves (here, where gesture is soliloquy) becomes a tautening balloon of sensation. No one has told me how sexual reality tugs and pushes at a sane sense of things. I find out for myself. The morning drama and the insanity of pleasure and the overripe silliness of pulls-pushes, yanks-presumes—I move without moving. Hallelujah—semi-Wowee . . . The moment, unbridled, boy-bridal, is loathsome, racked: exaggerated, and grotesque—and okay. Disgust, fear, bitterness, horror, boredom, pleasure—it’s of a puzzling enormous interest to me.
In the act, my skin feels like warm cloth on me—a privacy of heat like being rolled up inside a smouldering mattress, in the stuffing. Tickled, sweaty, blotched with heat—IT’S HOT, I’M GETTING HOT—I feel self-contempt; and I stop. Self-contempt cools me.
But I remember—and am oddly unsettled—that the rhythms and touch had been blowsily explosive. I refeel some of the sensations scatteredly. And piercingly.
Then I remember being a little kid and my wet bathing suit coming off me, the bareness and hurtful readiness of the self back then—ignorantly alight; and my dad, too, but unignorant, him.
Pleasure now, in some almost childish sense, means that a childhood sense of something odd is rectified.
Then, in a trance of exaggerations I begin again—giant breasts on a giant woman, giant prick, I have giant hands—as if I were nostalgically in or half in the scale in which childhood is set. I ache. God, this is foolish. Other boys seem to me to be professional, expert and well instructed—and practiced—in this stuff and in being boys generally whereas I am unprofessional . . . uncertain and capricious, goadedly unsteady . . . personal . . . (this was tied to the age I was).
I had tried to remember, but pleasure is not knowable by memory with anything like its passionate convincingness when it is directly gained and present. Reality has a monopoly of real pleasure. A lad and his lamp. The alluring, imaginarily dimensioned dementia of meaning tucked into the animal bribe with its hint of favorable apocalypse: I have to fight it off, this sense that the conclusion is ALL. Masturbation is nutty with idealism, with hallucinations, with self-induced finalities.
The boy has big red convulsed zeroes and pallid ones that moo or mow at him: mad doorways: this is his sense of sexuality for the moment. It is so interesting that, as he denies it, some of the stitches of the self break at odd seams. It is a killing sense: it strains him and it feels like it is shortening his life.
I proceed in a sensible or greeting-death way, a little shocked, a little resistant . . . Bits of throbbing and twitching sweetness—motionful, honied—storylike pricklings. I can see where advertisements come from. Odd and loony with lapses and collapses, I avoid the jerking dance of coming—I lie here and let it die away. Nothing can undo your life. I am in a lurching and shoving, half-breathless gauntlet-labyrinth of mind and body in the morning. I am in a state of sensationalism and puzzle-ridden semi-discontinuous attention.
The not-stayingness of pleasure hurts oracularly—and intimately. Heats and oils, exudations and flares of consoling and BRILLIANT renderings of pleasure become a momentarily irreversible knowledge that pleasure exists ON ITS OWN TERMS. This chimpanzee reality and the light, I have been in love with these Tarzan doings, these animal carryings-on, since I discovered them two years before; it is almost true in sex that easiness and lies rule the world. Some people are good at this stuff. Some are against it. Christ, the beauty of what some people know. I am homemade flesh, I am sincere—I am a sincere jerk-off. I miss my father.
I turn over and move; my hands are under me on the linen sheet; I move in A KIND OF anxiously flinching recklessness—in a pathos-tinctured heat of the body . . . As in the bony hand of a girl. Of a boy.
The sensations, good, bad, dry, moist, effective, ineffective, imtating, inside a clouded mass of hallucinations, and then, at the edge, neural and a thing of the flesh, and then outside and watching but half-painted with the oddity of the aching intoxication of onwardness—as if one were in love with time and the future—actually the boy was—and with the foolish shamefulness of such a complex state calculatedly brought about and yet partly accidental, the increasing number of more and more serious seizures and the abrupt passages of decline as a kind of meaning (of refused sobriety), I laugh at myself and this stuff (pleasure and absurdity), I laugh out loud but under my breath, I laugh at the world’s history as it is known by boys.
Sarcastic, mocking, and dizzied, hoo-ha—okay?—holding myself and fucking my hands and the bed, I keep my mind on this matter long enough and completely enough that length and completeness are felt as dimensionally sexual things—maybe the only sexual things—the half-witless, the neurally witty, biologically universal thing of the whole thing . . . my scandalous attention to it . . . I love this . . . I love this bed—ha-ha . . . Love can be extorted. I laugh some more, hotly, under my breath the scandal of close attention in a state of whitelit, repetitive shock, pausing only to spit, childishly, on the palms and fingers of my hands which I promptly reinsert and I start being tender with little motions of my fingers while I inhibitedly fuck in the face of death and of youth—I mutter, Oh you DARLING—and hallucinate rhythmically . . . in a junior or juvenile brute romanticism . . . I wouldn’t want anyone to see me like this. Who, seeing me, would forgive me? Who would join me? Who would like me? Whooo-ahhhhhh-eeeee: the world is dangerous . . . The unsystematic twists of the lips and blurredly mad eyes and the pantomimic jerkings, the sporadically blabbery pseudo-boneless writhing of sensation—OH FUCK and OH YOU DARLING and KAZOW, KAZOWIE. And OHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh. How strangely worded A Book of Fucks would be. Whatever is gathered in the body, the sibling—the congressional—the running mind feels as gathered force which spurts, not in orgasm, but still in unexpectedly sensible ways in further spasms. It spurts like light and seems to be thought-and-vision giving answers now, musical answers, substitute compensations and apings to improve one’s sense of THE REAL.
The mental spurtings of light are a kind of explanation of the world, realer than a dream, but it is wakefulness of a sort. And this is only a corner of the world although it feels like a center. But nothing is more beautiful or commanding than this light. It is dreamlike-and real both. I thought I saw why it was that male virginity was not widely praised except in special instances. This self-enclosed stuff involves an irreversible alteration, a mysteriously and tentatively ripening sense of a glory—a personal beauty of that sort. Fear and attention sheathe me in a weirdness of sexual discretion, however. The unease is pretty complete. I think it is scandalous. I think it is scandalous to be a real person alone in a room. I think this is a scandalous attention to pay to anything.
The boy’s head, as if in a kind of a pointless accident—as with a land mine—jerks upward in a baffling noise of breath, torn spinally by sexual sensation, large and jolting, and accompanied by a beautiful whitish light spread out in neural marvelousness. The bleached solar pleasure, if one persists in searching out this disappearing and then reflaring light, one comes. One is a gateway away from the world in an almost silent furnace. An explanatory light. To pause in astounded denial of this shit—to resist its power is independence that causes a kind of nervous, thin-fibered throbbing, also some laughter at the soul’s throbbing now, the soul’s readiness (to die), the will’s unwillingness to die. How can it be that one is sheltered by that shelterless stuff? Nature—and any easy idea of God—is a swindle.
Among boys, practicing this stuff is a virtue. The shaking escapee’s is in a spasm of denial that spreads through his spine, buttocks, neck, the insteps of his feet. The tuneless physical hilarit
y and its shadow of deep (and yet minimal) omnipotence has a matching but confusing element of an omnipotence of modesty, of shame—I guessed this was normal. I wondered about it—normalcy . . . the category of the really human or maybe not . . . (This is part of the retreat from the nowhere which is a somewhere briefly of as-if-explanatory light.)
It is a game like hopscotch to catch bits of sensation in memory and to advance in knowledge of the sensations while backing off from them. It is like some weird sport that isn’t a famous sport, MY BIG FEET and skinny legs brace themselves; and then, stringent and vigorous jerks and tics of the torso, of the torso muscles and of the muscles at the backs of the thighs, and in the muscles of the behind are sex, the memory of the recent sex, and me backing off from sex—dick and hands and mind.
All ordinary shocks—as of swallowing—are amplified and are clownish in the actual light now. Alternate and quieter attention gapes, semi-scientific, quick-witted (in a way), at the novelties of illumination in the morning. My mornings are partly a matter of engineering my masculine citizenship. But I don’t want to be forceful, fully grown, opinionated yet. I don’t want to be known and final. Voluptuarial—polyphonic—boyish knowledges: almost a first movement of a piece—after a fallen childhood.
Genital size and one’s courage and one’s right to breed; and the piercingness, the quality of okayness, of duty—the pain in this thing of being a recruit (for natural increase), I stare at it now, I guess, helplessly. I am almost lunatic with mourning, the foredoomed obscenity of this essentially nameless state—my adolescence in St. Louis . . . I hate being dumb. The after-echo of two departed physical realities—of my father and of sex—have the hilarity of presence, of after-echoes. I want to survive my grief. Shrewdness in a neurally tense moment is because I feel how prompt madness and disorder might be if I don’t do something such as be shrewd. They appear anyway, madness and disorder. I am poignantly addled. I can hear fragments of all my weeping in childhood and since. I reexperience, almost as if in synopsis, what seems like all the pain I ever suffered plus the recent grief. I seem to remember tensely every moment of difficulty that I ever had. It seems that way in the pangs of agony. One has such a grotesque need of consolation that one understands the semi-masturbation retroactively. In the agony, presences flicker, and I contort and constrainingly, and partly surrenderingly, hug my fatally bent self, groaning a little, murmuring under my breath: It’s okay, Kiddo . . . It’s okay . . . canoodling around . . . It’s all too much for you . . . Big deal . . . All of it, all seems MASTURBATORY . . . The grief is slowed, elevated, private, kind of inspired in its recurrent flare-ups of heat, then in its chilled rushing fall. I realize I have made A MISTAKE in waking up, in having a second father . . .
The grief is a muddle of electricity, joltingly without a conviction even of a limitedly favorable meaning in my world.
The clasping, warm agony, the visceral heat, do not explain themselves . . . I am tired of being young. The last is a familiar reality. The phosphorescent heat of the grief and the mirror soul have elements of an aesthetic arrangement to them. Some bandit-deserter-like element of the soul goes running away into shadowy territory saying, This is the way to evade grief. The moment: its whole name is What-my-life-is. Hey, Wiley, bullshit causes cancer . . .
It hurts to remember the size of my dad’s hands. You have to get up, Kiddo . . . Dad in the past said that.
I want to be unawed and unpersuaded by grief (or sex). I am a kicking captive, sort of, of grief . . . I want to enter that state that Daddy used to describe as Can’t complain . . .
It’s sad inside me . . . the willfulness and the intensity of feeling. If I looked in the mirror at this point, I might think, I don’t want to be shallow but I don’t want to feel this much either . . . I suddenly imagine my own face here a sharp dark-whitish blur of emblematic and compromised presence. Not real. I am very still. Oh, the tight-balled grief . . . I have a rictus-smile. On my palely sweating face. I’m ashamed of my dad’s death. I feel shame that death exists. I feel amazingly lost and wrong—muscularly and electrically jangled. This grief—I am adopted. It burns, the thing of being awake and real: it burns. Daddy sometimes said when I was in pain about something, JESUS GOD, LOOK AT YOU; and I would blush and try to be deadpan.
The blaze of supreme heat behind my eyes: juiceless and hot, ironic, lunatic—the lostness—one’s flammable breathing edged hoarsely with upset at absence, loss—a noticeable sound: one knows oneself this way from before . . . Peekaboo, Bad Times; whoop-de-doo . . .
The fear of the wild world, this partly obliterated world (by grief, the continuums of grief, of griefs of all kinds) I am cheatingly ashen and sweet, tense-nerved, stinking—and secret. I don’t like the force there is in grief. I stare blindly in the weirdly lit lightlessness, the whitening real moment. One piece of pinkish light is on the window screen. I smile wryly. The tastes I had that year were foul and rough—tender and sincere—childish and hidden—but wartime-fashionable, all in all. I don’t know about others but I want to be able to be a brave soldier. I compare my reserves of strength and my state now. I oppose the anguish, if that is what it is, to my morning strength and my chances of living through the day and lasting to tomorrow. I don’t really know about tomorrow or if I’ll make it until then and be sane, I don’t even know about the next few minutes, but I’m not going mad in this grief just now.
This part is over and I’m safe for a while . . .
A Brief History of Being Loved (and Unloved)
The faint early morning illumination is shimmying in the room’s emptiness when the boy-bride of grief sits up. I swing my legs over the side of the bed. It’s a thing of being alive AFTERWARDS . . . very stark and clownish. Daddy asked me not to say Kaddish for him: Fuck the Jews . . . My heart is bad . . . I have to go bye-bye because the Old Ticker won’t work no more . . . it’s all iffy-andy-butty for me . . . His big-deal, baritone, snorting voice. Come on, Willsy-Wiley-poop, be PHILOSOPHICAL. Or DON’T BE PHILOSOPHICAL, which meant the same thing: Be human, let me talk . . . Bear up. Let my mood dominate . . .
He used to complain, I wasn’t saying something for the ages, for God’s sake. Don’t pay so much attention to what I say . . . Understand me. Have a heart, be human. Let me have the last word, do you mind: BE PHILOSOPHICAL . . . Or: Don’t be philosophical . . . Just listen to me . . .
He didn’t want me to like famous philosophy . . .
Let it go. Let it go. Be of good cheer, smile and show your dimples. Have a good time—is that all right with you? It’s all right with me. Let’s have a little peace, is that all right with you? It’s all right with me. He said, Every man is a great philosopher. Every man has GREAT THOUGHTS: that’s what it is in America . . . Dear Dad the dear doodad. Don’t stand near the window: you’ll drive all the girls MAD . . . Be nice . . . Keep it up for a while . . . (Being nice . . . )
I was a little kid, undiapered, standing on a bureau. I felt the light on my short legs . . . Daddy was wounded in the First World War . . . a good-looking blond rajah of a man: Lila said that of him. My mother. By adoption. Daddy said of the First World War, That war was filth . . . And life went on afterward anyway. He said to me, in an odd tone, when I was little, You like being reckless no matter who it kills: you’re the Wild Man of Borneo. I don’t know what age I was. He said it when I was a lot of different ages . . . You look like the Wild Man of Borneo (from third grade to sixth grade). You are one hell of an ugly kid—you are goddamned ugly: they call you Mutt-puss at school? The Hunchback of Notre Dame? We should put you in the movies: you could be the child Wallace Beery. I am famous for my sense of humor. Don’t pay any attention to me . . .
He said things over and over, but he said them differently each time. It wasn’t me being nuts that I thought he was cold-and-sad, or affectionate or really affectionate (which was very different from affectionate—like night from day) but all in the same words when he spoke. Sometimes this made me laugh when I was little—especially when he meant th
e opposite of what he said—Oh ho ho ho, I’d go helplessly when he said, You are one hell of an ugly kid, and kissed me and said, You are a hell of a tearing beauty of an adopted kid, you know, even if you are retarded. He did think I was retarded for a long time. Sometimes he was deranged and as if shell-shocked . . . Male. Sometimes other people upset him, but sometimes it was me. He could say stuff like the above and mean it was sad that a kid’s looks mattered when kids’ looks wouldn’t matter if this were a better world and people were really kind. Or he was addressing himself to the merit in plain boys, sometimes to the conceit of pretty boys . . . Or of smart ones. In the same words—not the same voice. It was the voice of idle grief, of him feeling sorry for himself, of him feeling sorry for me: You’re some ugly kid. Or it might be a tearing rage—God and Christ, the range of the different ways; he didn’t like me when he didn’t like me; and the split ways, as when he didn’t like what I looked like but he still liked me—or not, as the case might be, as the case was. I would just sort of throb sometimes with the mad, I guess grammatical and inflectional, the emotional excitement of talking to him. I would go deaf, just looking right at him, hearing, in advance, some wild thing coming from him: Are you a sparrow on a branch? Are you a sparrow or a branch? That was nonsense. Are you as happy as a bird coasting up in the air so high? Ironic and vaguely dirty lyricism cleaned up for the kid who was of a different species—morally—from him.
Staring at him, I often kind of half thought I knew what he was saying, and partly I did know, and partly I didn’t pay real attention—Just as he often said. It was too hard. But if I did pay attention, it seemed clear to me that what he was saying wasn’t what he wanted to say. After all, there’s the stuff he better not say to a kid; and there’s the stuff he can’t say, that he isn’t able to say; and there’s the stuff he just won’t say to me that he maybe says to Momma, or to women. I don’t know.
The Runaway Soul Page 2