by Alison Tyler
Whatever. You sit on the throw rug and she orders you to scoot.
Scoot? Which way?
This way, she says, so you scoot this way.
Further, she says, and there’s an odd tremble of frustration in her voice, as she realizes this takes a little practice. Time to figure out how to use these props, play the game right. You scoot more and more, getting rug burns on your ass. Some folks would think that adds to the ambience, but it just stings.
Scoot!
I am!
More!
Jesus Christ, lady, the fuck you want me?
There, she says, and you get the picture. You slide down to the radiator and she snaps the other cuff in place.
It looks more fun when they do it on the nasty-sex cable channels. There, everybody is greasy and laughing and raring to go. Here, it feels like you’ve been kidnapped by the Sandinista rebels.
Kathleen does a slow striptease act, humming to herself like she’s on stage, but slightly embarrassed by her own grin. You know the feeling. You’re both acting roles that weren’t exactly designed for you, but what else is there to do in the city on a Sunday night at 3:00 a.m. except give it a whirl?
She’s pretty good actually, taking her time and moving around the room with authority, giving you a peek here and there. Flashing the undersides of her tits, the hint of an inner thigh. You like what you see. You’re aroused and sort of surprised about it. You’d think the harsh pressure of the radiator vents digging into your back might be too annoying, but now it’s pretty much all right. So long as nobody puts the heat on.
You’re supposed to be the submissive here, the one who takes orders. The pawn, the tool, the toy who waits, but to hell with all that.
You start giving her the mastering gaze. It usually doesn’t work. You try to influence your will upon the world like everyone else. This one, she sidles closer doing a baby-girl pout, and drops her clothes with an air of virginal please-don’t-hurt-me.
You’d think that being shackled to ninety-year-old piping might be a giveaway to helplessness, but it’s not. You arch your hips a little, pressing your cock forward. She squats above and eases onto your shaft.
She’s still giving you the baby bottom lip but instead of thrusting up into her for all you’re worth, you slip your free hand to the side of her face, move to nuzzle her neck. She sinks another inch into your lap. You both grunt but there’s almost something sweet about it now. This bondage thing, it’s for the pros. You try this shit without reading a study guide or two and you might hurt yourself.
Except for the naked woman slamming on your groin, you’re in somewhat the same position as everybody your father ever arrested. You try to hold her in place but you’ve only got the one hand to do it with. She grunts deep in her chest, and it’s a noise that tickles your nuts.
There’s an animal inside all these modern sensitive-man neuroses that keep your analyst’s kids in college while you try to figure out why you feel guilty for a normal mortal’s sins.
The atmosphere shifts some as she lets out a laugh. You can’t help yourself and you do the same. It feels good, sort of. Kathleen’s bouncing around faster and faster, and you’re digging the feeling but it’s still rough going. You’re just doing your best not to pop your shoulder out of the socket. Every time she zigs left you’ve got to zig with her or you’ll tear your rotator cuff. It happened once during college football and probably cost you a very minor career.
It’s hard to shake off the absurdity of yourself in the moment, but when she grinds into you like this, leaning over to whisper in your ear, you can nearly let go. It’s nice enough. She’s got the rhythm down just right and her voice is sufficiently sweet to make you think this might not be just a one-night stand.
That’s gotten more important as you’ve grown older, though maybe it shouldn’t have. You suck on her nipples and thrust into her, moaning in a whiny way that doesn’t befit a man. She doesn’t seem to mind, and that’s all it takes to bring you to the edge.
But you’ve got your duties, so you hold off and wait until she’s shuddering, leaning forward to perch herself against the wall. She slips and clonks the radiator and the vibration races through the cuff and rattles your teeth.
She’s banging away like crazy and you’re really hoping she’s getting off because you’re patient, but you can’t sit on this fence forever. She screams, Now, which may or may not be a order.
It doesn’t matter much. She’s hit the spot and you fire off like you’re getting paid for it.
You both take a couple minutes to wind down, catch your breath. Now that it’s over, you can see she’s a little worried. Your wrist is bleeding and your elbow’s scraped and bruised. There’s a price to pay for every damn thing you do.
Where’s the key? Kathleen asks.
You blink a few times to get the sweat out of your eyes.
Hey, you tell her, that there, that’s a good question.
You think it might be in the nightstand.
She rummages around and says she can’t find it.
You have visions of the landlord coming in with the plumber discovering you here like this, the guy screaming about how the radiator is dented. How it’s going to come out of your deposit. The plumber just standing there and laughing, saying it’s the third time this month he’s found some schmuck cuffed to the piping.
Wait, wait, she goes, here it is, I’ve got it.
She lets you loose and leads you to the bathroom and swabs your cuts with witch hazel and gives you two aspirin. Even she knows you’re going to hurt in the morning. She washes up beside you and dresses carefully.
Before she applies a new coat of lipstick she hugs you to her and plants one on your mouth. The moment lengthens and becomes more tender, and then she’s out of your arms.
She’s pulled out a pad and pen from the drawer and written her phone number on it. Her full name beneath. No smiley faces or happy hearts with wings. Nothing cutie-pie about it, you’re already past that. Which is encouraging, all things considered.
Kathleen draws the back of her hand across a sheen of salt on your chest and then she’s out the door.
Dad. Dad, maybe he’s looking down going, Son, the police force has rules about this sort of thing. Those handcuffs, they aren’t a toy.
You head to the kitchen and grab an ice pack for your shoulder. You get back on the bed and hit the remote. LeeLee’s trainers are looking even worse for wear, their eyes wide, their terror pretty damn obvious. In the background, LeeLee is typing out commands and glowering at the camera.
It reminds you that you haven’t been to the zoo in a long time. You reach for the phone and groan in pain.
Jesus, how do they do it, the pros? Hanging upside down with chains threaded through their pierced nipples, leather plugs jammed all over the place. What, they go to classes for this, use safety lines? They’ve got trainers? Stunt coordinators?
You give Kathleen a call. She’s not home yet but you leave a message, asking if she wants to go to the zoo on her day off. A regular kind of date, with ice cream and balloons and stuff.
It might scare her. It might piss her off. You’ve run into those types before, the ones who want to screw but don’t want to go catch a movie. Maybe you’re even one of them, but you just can’t be sure.
So now you look back to the television and LeeLee’s got some poor bastard cornered in her cage. She’s typing furiously at the weeping keeper, and you try to imagine what kind of love letters she might be composing.
You grab the pad and start writing your own, hoping you can compare.
See Dick Deconstruct
Ian Philips
I’m thinking of an image. It’s from one of those stories where Our Father throws Lucifer out of the house for good. I can’t remember which.
Maybe Faust.
Maybe Paradise Lost. It doesn’t matter. All I remember really is the image.
It’s of the future Satan sitting among us and forever looking back toward the
one place to which he would never be able to return. And this, of course, leads to more stories. Ones where, to soften the pain of remembrance, The Fallen One tries to stick it to The Man by sticking it to one of The Man’s favorites.
Think Job. Think Jesus.
In a way, this is one of those stories.
Sort of.
I have no idea what The Man or any other god thinks about my little boy. But I do know that before we met he was fast becoming a darling of the Academe. Not any just any old university. The Academe—site of all discourse and inquiry located in that great metanarrative in the sky.
I’d seen his name several times before he told it to me that night. He’d been a contributor to various anthologies. Ones with glossy covers in garish colors drawn on a computer. Covers that promise a mondo-pomo-homo-a-go-go world within. Then you turn the page. Instead it is only a book filled with straggling bands of menacing, jibbering words from the clans Tion or Ize. Words that must wander those pages forever at war—sometimes even with their own in the same sentence. Leaving behind a field of white, strewn with participles dangling, dying.
To be honest, I don’t know if it was just dumb luck or synchronicity that led me to answer his personal. And, after what I did to him our first night, he’s the one who’ll want to dig up Jung and ask him whom or what to thank. I merely made the most of a moment.
His personal? Something about a Queer, White Dork, this weight and that height, goatee and glasses. Has a hard spot for hairy, horny daddies. Grooves on the transgressive in theory and praxis. Then the standard blah, blah, blah.
I had no plans for what we’d do if things clicked. Not even after I recognized QWD’s name. My inspiration came only after he offered me a cigarette.
I smiled and shook my head. His brand, not his offer, had surprised me. American Spirit. This boy had spent a lot of his time and someone’s money redecorating his mind in early ’70s French cultural critique. I’d expected Gitanes. Or maybe, in the down-and-dirty spirit of Genet, that he’d have rolled his own. But no, he smoked American Spirit—filtered. He’d been out here on our brittle bit of the Rim of Fire longer than I’d thought.
He lit up. A real feat since we were sitting outside this café on Market Street. That shouldn’t mean anything to you unless you’ve been to San Francisco in the summer. It was late afternoon when we put our first pints on the table. And a late summer afternoon in San Francisco means that the fog flying in over Twin Peaks uses Market Street as its landing strip.
So as gust after gust touched down, he lit up. On the third try. And, by then, he was curled so tightly around the cigarette he looked like a fetus hugging its heart.
He sucked a few times on the burning paper and then spoke. I had the masculine signifiers he wanted—bulk, a beard—or so he said. But, he added, I was smaller than the men he’d been with before. And I thought, Yes, I am small; beware the small.
I know. I know. You probably don’t give a shit what we said or what I look like. You only want me to describe my dick and what it did. I won’t. Call me a tease, but we both know one man’s dick is another man’s dink is another man’s dong. Besides, I’d rather give your puny little imagination a workout. So maybe I have one. Maybe I don’t.
The boy and I kept talking. Through several more beers, cigarettes, a course of spring rolls and pad Thai, then along the streets and up the stairs to my apartment and down the hall to my bedroom.
We stopped beside my bed. I put one of my short, thick fingers to his lips. I stepped back. “Strip.”
He nearly beamed. Quickly, he gripped the bottom of his terry cloth shirt of many colors and yanked it over his head and down his arms. His nipples stood out on the pale skin. Two dark dots. Alternating patches of muscle and bone. All strung together by a few hairs running from his breastbone to the rim of his shorts. He knelt and unlaced his Airwalks. They’d been the color of wet sand, but in the unsteady light of the room’s candles I could barely see the whites of their laces or his socks. He put them all against the wall and returned to the spot beside my bed. He unbuttoned his shorts, let them drop, stepped out of one leg and, with his foot in the other, kicked them over toward his shoes. I could forgive this smiling eagerness to please as a bit of nervous excess, but that kick smacked to me of precociousness. My suspicion was confirmed when he tried to lock eyes with me as he tugged his white cotton briefs down over his budding cock and then his thighs. He had to look down once he got to his knees. As soon as his underwear was at his ankles, he raised his back so I could get a good view of his dick. It was long and fat like an animal’s snout. It flopped against his balls while he shook one, then another, foot free.
It’ll do, I thought.
I looked up and met his eyes. “It’s interesting how it’s often the choices made with the least thought that carry the most damning consequences.” He blinked. “Like your high kick. Very precious. I don’t like precious.” His eyes widened. “Maybe I should just send you home….” He blurted out something. The beginning of a plea. I jerked my right index finger to my lips. He swallowed a paragraph of yet-to-be-spoken words.
“What—no one’s ever spoken to you in the conditional? I said ‘maybe.’ I said ‘should.’ You’ll stay as long as I want you to stay. And that might even be the whole night if—if you obey my one rule: you may speak; but each sentence may have only three words; and each word may have only one syllable. Otherwise, you can jabber away at the cab driver on your way home. Agreed?” He nodded. “Are you sure you don’t need me to diaper that mouth with a gag?” He shook his head so hard his balls swung from thigh to thigh.
Always the student, I thought, craving tests. Good, we’ll begin with the hardest one first. So, I decided to take a few long minutes and bind him tight with the one thing I knew he feared most—silence.
It began when my face stiffened into a stare. He smiled nervously for the first few seconds. I think it was a minute before I even blinked. By then, his lips had filled in the gash of teeth. We listened to our breathing. To the sputtering of the candles. Finally, I turned and walked out of the room. I left him alone in the squirming shadows. It would be three, maybe five minutes more before I’d return with a wad of pink fabric tucked in my right fist.
I tossed it toward his feet. The wad fluttered up into the air and blossomed into a pair of pink silk panties, a size 5 women’s, a snug fit even with his narrow hips. The one-petaled flower fell fast to the ground. “Put them on.”
He crouched to pick them up. He fumbled trying to get the crotch going the right direction. He stepped out of one leg and turned the material around the pole of his other. The panties slipped up his calves and over his knees. Then, he had to tug slowly up along his slim thighs, over the ass I’d yet to see, and around his resistant cock. The waistband snapped at his hips and the dick was plastered against the right side of his pelvis. He looked up. Either the material chafed or he was pantomiming defiance. I didn’t care.
“Take off your glasses.”
He nearly chirped. Something about no longer being able to see.
“What’s to see?”
I walked up to him, pulling a strip of leather out of my back pocket. I let it hang out of my right hand, though I doubt he could see this. I got behind him and lifted it above my head, then over his. I tied it around his eyes. I stepped back in front of him. As I pressed my hands close to his eyes to adjust the blindfold, I could smell his face. It was bitter with smoke and fear. I lingered long enough for his cold skin to feel the warmth from my breath.
I moved away. “You’ve talked a lot tonight. Most of it, I enjoyed. In fact, by dinner, I felt like I was back in school. Shooting the shit at three in the morning with a paper due at ten.” I paused to cross the room and return with my butterfly knife.
“I just have one question. It’s about what makes a man. You seem to know. Well, you did in that article for Homosex(e).” He started as he realized how naked he’d become. “What was your thesis for that one? Something about ‘penetration
being a mode of production in the manufacturing of the masculine.’” I stopped to let his own stilted words limp over to him.
“I’m sorry. Here I am contextualizing my question and I haven’t even asked it. Let me try this again. First, I’ll introduce some givens, then the question.” I opened my left hand. “This is a dick,” I said while I pushed my palm flat against the pink panties and then his prick until each were mashed against the wall of pelvic bone. I waited for his dick to stiffen and push back. Hand and cock then began a little dance until the hand had shuffled the tip of the dickhead up and under the strangling elastic waistband. Below it, a swelling pink stem was pointing toward the ceiling.
“Then,” I said as I plucked the head, nearly in full purple bloom, “to use your own terms,” and I pulled flower, stalk, and the taut rim of the panty out to me as far as I could—I almost lifted him up off his feet—“there’s what you called the concretized phallus.” And now my right hand and its knife reached into the gap between his dick and his belly.
I turned the knife on its side and stroked the dull edge of the cold blade up the shaft, prickling with hairs and goose bumps. “Actually, anything with a point’ll do.” My left hand slowly let go so that only the knife held his cock and the over-extended waistband in place. “So here’s my question. If I took this,” and I flicked my left index finger at his dickhead, as if it were a marble and this were a game. I paused to feel it thud against the warming metal. “If I took this and left you with this,” I pushed the concretized phallus against the cock that was trapped on the other side by my finger, “would you still be a man?”
I waited.
The muscles of his stomach flinched, shaking the skin that rippled the air that stirred the hairs on my arm that held the knife. I hoped that this was his answer. I waited. It was.
I almost smiled. I was beginning to enjoy our date. For now I could spend the rest of it teaching him the deeper meaning of his wordless response.