by Dale Peck
Dean’s appearance was nothing to write home about, so I figured I loved him for who he really was. He was tall and gangly and his face was full of odd scooped out angles and flatnesses. It had a certain grace, though. People sometimes said he was so ugly he was almost beautiful. Even if they never left out “almost,” he was beautiful to me. He was a person for whom I’d gladly have given up my will, if you see what I mean. Anyway, Dean was my comet passing once, and strictly poison. Unattainable people usually turn out weak and ridiculous once your feelings for them go; that happened to me once with a junkie landscape gardener, and another time with an opera queen who had astigmatism. But a certain few prove strong and dangerous: that was Dean, all in all. My wanting him stirred up a deep-buried stratum of nastiness in Dean, an excessive viciousness that sprang from some copious childhood reserve. Some people run away from unsolicited attention, it’s the usual thing to do. Others channel these surprising energies and put them to work, the way voodoo doctors set zombies out in the fields to plant cane.
I didn’t see Dean so very often at first, because this type of relationship doesn’t exactly improve your mental health, even if it does give you something to think about most of the time. We went to dinner occasionally, flirting desultorily and keeping the muck underneath at arm’s length. Later, though, there were several periods of intense, daily contact. Dean wasn’t a big talker but he had an eloquent physical vocabulary. Silence can tell you a lot of things. Large tracts of emotional sewage passed between us in a wordless miasma. I wanted him desperately. Dean enjoyed this with indecent detachment. Something hideous generally occurred when we saw each other with any regularity. The more I saw him the less I liked him, but that didn’t affect my desire for him even slightly. In fact, as I peeled the onion of his personality to its dark center and found more and more to despise, the stronger my need to possess him became. Dean revealed himself as a creature of masks, a manipulator of ambiguities spun in silences as deadening and calculated as surgical anesthesia. After knowing him awhile I started tagging his masks and numbering them in my head. Whenever his blankness became too terrorizing for me to manage I’d do something spiteful to drive him off. Then I’d spend weeks rolling everything around in my head, finding obscure and noble motives for the rotten things he’d done, and in the end I’d miss him. There was something about Dean’s physical aura that gave me a weird high. I always broke down and called him. And he always threw himself back into my life with numbing, amnesiac enthusiasm.
We were in a Mexican restaurant once upon a time, and I, with great tequila courage, said: “Dean, I can’t see you anymore.” I felt strong, too, because Jack had screwed me the previous evening. “I’m in love with you, I want you, you know, physically, and if that isn’t what you want it’s masochism for me to be around you.”
Marimba music poured from two minispeakers near our table. Dean had heard all this before. It bored him. His long face took on a flinching, pained look that I’d recently decided to call Mask Number Three.
“I’m not ready for a physical relationship,” Dean said. “I mean, we can be friends, and someday—”
“No, we can’t. I can’t just will my feelings away and act like they don’t exist.”
“I’m not saying you have to, I’m just asking you to give me some time.”
“Time to do what, Dean? Excite yourself with my frustration?”
“Thanks.”
My thought was: if I were a decent human being, I’d accept this situation as it is and love him that much more. But I’m not a decent human being. Decent human beings live in India and perform blessed works among the dying.
“It’s making me crazy to see you, Dean. I want you every second. When you aren’t there I think about you. Constantly. It’s idiotic. You don’t love me, I don’t even understand what you find tolerable about being with me.”
“I do love you, I’ve told you before, I’m too fucked up right now to get involved with anybody in a, a sexual relationship.”
The sense in which we were already involved in a, a sexual relationship was one that didn’t elude Dean, exactly. Looking at it now, I think he always had half his mind on what things looked like to other people, and how far he could go without becoming involved in his own actions. In the material sense of sticking parts of his body into holes in other people’s. The mind, whatever its penetrative capacity, is, after all, photographically invisible.
“Then we should go away from each other,” I told him, not very firmly. “It can only make me bitter against you to want you when you don’t want me.”
“If you love me the way you claim you do, you wouldn’t insist on that physical thing, there are other ways to love people.”
I considered these other ways while Mask Number Two, an expression of incipient and sensitively withheld lust, began working itself through the skin of Mask Number Three. Dean was never as convincing onstage as he was across a restaurant table. But we’d done this number so many times that I simply watched the morphology shifting, as if witnessing some geological process beyond my influence. I’d known him for seven months, and registered every nuance of his voice, his eyes, his fingernails. Nothing he did would ever surprise me again. When I tried to break it off, he turned seductive and coy, opened his legs a certain way in a chair, brought his body closer to mine in a room, lit my cigarettes, kissed my neck when my head was turned to the clock on the wall or the exit sign in a cinema; when I responded, he withdrew with a fluttering of petty details, an abrupt assertion of surface. Mask Number One was a glossy, impervious fish face that all desire bounced off like a superball, and its appearance was inevitable. When Dean needed an emotion he pulled the appropriate face out and held it up until the crisis passed.
“Relax,” he said at last. Marimbas jingled in stereo as we laughed off another horrid moment. When I think about Dean today, there are always waiters on the periphery of my mental picture, flashing cocktail trays and setting down silverware. And unpleasant music playing, through high distortion speakers.
I never told Dean about Jack, but he must have known a Jack existed somewhere: when I felt contented, and acted emotionally detached, Dean switched on the full voltage of his charm, became proprietary, gave notice to my person. He knew, he must have known, must have studied the problem carefully: if he’d fucked me in the first place he’d have lost all power over me. That wasn’t what I wanted from him. It was the tangible aspect of what I wanted him to be for me—my lover, the person whose flesh was his bed. I wanted him beyond any simple craving, as a metaphysical principle: not to fuck him, but to disappear inside him.
This business of being in love, it’s nothing but a little dance around a straw puppet unless the other person plays. Everyone knows this. What confused me in those days before the war was that Dean did play, right up to the edge of carnal finality. And there he flew away, to the next branch, like some mating parrot in the Amazon. Without letting go of a thing, he kept himself the most important thing in my life.
This all had its effect on my Friday nights with Jack. My taste for disconnected sex was turning to nausea. His cock began to hurt, though it never had.
“I can’t, Jack. It’s too much.”
He pulled out instantly. “It’s okay, baby. Let’s get some sleep.”
“In the morning, Jack.”
“Sssh. Shut your eyes. Have a pretty dream.”
I didn’t even know I was crying. Jack wiped my face with the heel of his palm.
“You got hurt, baby,” he whispered. “How did that happen?”
“I don’t know,” I sniffled. Jack crinkled the cellophane on a new pack of Camels. “Because . . . oh, Christ, Jack, because I’m such an asshole.”
A match lit up his face. He frowned, leaned over, and kissed my forehead the way you kiss a small child, holding his cigarette with thoughtful poise.
“We’re all assholes,” Jack said, with gravity.
There was a cheap alarm clock near the bed, its face glowing dimly with a pinkish, defective-looking light. It was new. That apartment had hardly any natural light, waking in it was like waking underwater. We had never known exactly what time it was, on any particular Saturday, for a year and a half: hours had gone past like minutes, minutes like hours. The afternoon sun had always been a stinging surprise.
“I’ve never been good to you,” Jack said, “except in bed.”
“That’s not true,” I said. I kissed the warm flesh of his back. “You’ve been great. I’m just sorry I’m so fucked up.”
I grabbed his arm and pulled him down to me, wriggling free of the sheet, wrapping my legs around his waist. I felt the head of his penis glide through the opening under my spine and pushed myself over his stiffening organ, folding him into me with a kind of mad insistence, arching over him as he lowered his back to the mattress, his lower back crushing my feet. I forced him through me and felt my insides tearing apart, ramming myself down on the thick, stinging prick until I could feel his pubic hair sweating against my balls. I freed my legs and shifted my knees, sinking my weight down against his lower abdomen and then slowly rising until the rim of his dick lay just at the edge of my sphincter muscles, holding him there and then delicately sliding the curled lip of flesh in and out of the slackened opening; I could feel the blood flowing in the veins of Jack’s cock, and slid greedily down the hard tube of flesh, rose up again, and now Jack’s hips began pounding him into me and out again, I braced myself with my fists buried into the mattress around his hair. I felt my bowels loosening and everything inside being pummeled into shit and blood and pure pain, and finally felt his sperm squirting through me like a random laser, rivers of it splashing across the walls of my intestines, the cock burning like coals as it shrank and very gradually slipped out of my ass and slapped against the sheet.
The bed felt wet and when Jack turned the light on we saw it was soaking with blood, both of us smeared with it, though it seemed to have stopped flowing out of me.
“Jesus,” Jack said, pulling the sheet from the bed. He guided me into the bathroom, where he washed me gingerly with a face cloth and wiped the blood off his cock. “Wow, I’m really sorry.”
“It isn’t your fault,” I said. “Anyway, I’m still alive, Jack.”
The History of the World
Jim Lewis
We put a new sheet on the bed. Jack went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of orange juice.
“Have some juice,” he told me.
“Oh, Jack.”
We studied each other in the dim greenish light of the room. My brains felt scrambled, I could barely focus my eyes. Jack sucked on a Camel, looking bewildered and suddenly much older than himself. Neither of us wanted to say, but it was one of those strange moments when reality foams up around your ears unbidden, so to speak. I put down the juice glass and slid off the bed. Jack picked his underpants from the floor and pulled them on.i
iThe dream of a king affected the lives of thousands. The mouth of the river is a strategic point. If something was not like anything else it was ignored until it was forgotten. It rains for days on end; crops are washed
away. As human beings evolve they retain the juvenile characteristics of
their ancestors; large eyes, a less prominent jaw, and so on. A lamb could
“Listen,” I told him when I had my clothes on, “you’ve been great to me, Jack, don’t ever think different.”
He put his chin on my shoulder and said, “Someday we’ll figure out that we really needed each other.”
“Uh-huh.”
When I thought about it later I realized it was the most upsetting thing anyone ever said to me. It was the last time I went to bed with Jack; a few days later I began taking a lot of speed and went through another strange time with Dean, the last one as it turned out. For some reason Dean was also taking a lot of speed, and since I had the better supply he began turning up at my apartment every morning to replenish himself. By this time I just thought of him as a jerk, and had difficulty finding my former interest in his awkward body and oblique manner. He had always been punitive towards me, but now he seemed coarse and brutal, too. The last day I saw him, Dean said something so baldly insulting that it gave away his contempt for me more directly than he’d intended, and I walked out of the room. Dean followed me into the kitchen. I poured some black coffee into a mug, paying no attention to him.
“Philip, do me a favor.”
“What, Dean.”
“Don’t put on that wounded bird look. It just pisses me off.”
“I’m not putting on any look. This happens to be the way my face is. I think I can look however I want in my own apartment, anyway.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“I know you don’t like it. You don’t like it, you don’t like it. Maybe you should go find something you do like and stop subjecting yourself to me.”
A provocative, familiar silence. Long enough for me to catch myself and apologize. Long enough to read the New York telephone directory aloud.
“If that’s how you want it.”
“Dean?”
“What.”
“This is all just words, you know.”
“Meaning what.”
“Meaning that we never really discuss what’s going on between us, and you like to think if we don’t discuss it that it doesn’t exist, which is nice and safe for you, but I’m . . .”
“Listen to yourself, will you?”
“Listen to you, listen to the tone of voice you’re using right now.”
“You’re crazy, Philip.”
“I know that. So what. Who isn’t.”
“Yeah, but you’re really crazy. Do you really want to destroy everything between us over nothing?”
“According to you there isn’t anything between us. According to you I’m a nut case like that broad in Play Misty for Me, going bonkers because some guy won’t fuck her. So why keep coming around, Dean? To cop amphetamine? Clint Eastwood wouldn’t do shit like that.”
“I care about you, shithead.”
I realized we were on the verge of something really irrevocable and said it anyway: “So prove it, Dean. Get out of my life.”
And he did. Slunk out, more or less, but with an atmosphere of great pride later on, as if it made any difference. So it ended with Jack and it ended with Dean, and I suppose something new might have started with other people, but then the war came, which ended a good deal one might have looked forward to. A few years later I ran into Dean in a back lot and we fucked on a mattress in a pile of rubbish, but I didn’t realize until later that that was him, and I don’t think he recognized me either.
This man Bill woke up in the big room upstairs in an old house on the edge of some fields where he lived. He blinked in the sunlight, and he rolled over, putting the pillow under his chest and resting his chin on his crossed arms, and he listened to
the local news on the radio on the table beside the bed. After a few minutes he rose and put on a pair of pants and a shirt and went down to the kitchen, where he put some water on the stove to boil. While he waited for it he wandered through the rooms downstairs; through the kitchen door and into the front hall, from the front hall to the living room, and from the living room to the room with the TV in it, where he sat on the couch and rocked sleepily back and forth, rubbing his thighs with his hands. When he heard the water in the pot boiling over and hissing on the stove’s flame he went back through the living room and the front hall, into the kitchen, and he fixed himself some coffee. He spilled some hot water on the formica-top counter as he poured it into his cup.
As he sat at the kitchen table sipping his coffee he ran his hands through his hair. It was windy outside, and he watched through the back window as the wind bent the grass in the fields. What he was thinking about was what the wind was doing. B
ill, he said to himself out loud.
He went back upstairs and he went into the bathroom, and he looked earnestly at his earnest reflection in the mirror, and he watched his hand move as he moved it up to rub the side of his neck. He brushed his teeth, and then he turned on the shower, and as he waited for it to heat up he went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed and smoked a cigarette.ii
iisubstitute for a person in a ritual sacrifice without diminishing the people’s satisfaction.
We don’t trust accounts of events given by people who were drunk at
the time, or the insane, or by those who may have some reason for wanting the event
to be seen in a particular way. Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered by water.
The domestication of animals helped end man’s self-identification with nature. Individual events of apparently slight importance create severe unrest among
It was a chilly morning, and as he dried himself off after his shower he shivered and goose-pimples rose on his skin. He put his pants and shirt back on, and he put on a pair of socks and a pair of leather shoes. He took a jacket from the back of a chair and he went back downstairs. There was a gun and a few loose bullets in a chest of drawers in the living room, and he carefully loaded the gun and put it in his pocket, and then he walked through the front hall and through the kitchen and out the back door.