by Dale Peck
“Right now I’m reading Blue Eyes, Black Hair. I’m afraid that Marguerite Duras is going to destroy my style—I find myself wanting to do all this frou-frou shit that I don’t like even when she does it. I’ve been working on this prose thing about longing and absence, what it’s like to experience a person who is not there. Sitting here at my MacPlus, I wonder about my main character—is he a sort of entity haunting the screen—where does he exist? Since I’ve so recently read Mona Lisa Overdrive, I’m reminded of cyberspace, how cyberspace is your metaphor for desire and longing, the way we spend most of our time away from the loved/coveted person, and are frustrated by our unrealistic wish to have them with us instantly on demand. In cyberspace we can relive heightened emotional/sexual states otherwise lost to us just by their being transitory—at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive, Angie becomes not a physical bride, but a bride to her lover’s imagination. I’m hesitant about responding to your writing because you must have responses to your writing up the wazoo.”
Day Ten
Maybe the reader is my lover in some sense that I’m too literal to understand. Into a barely imaginable future I try to project this erotic reader, an incubus complete with organs that function and hands to hold my pages. This image isn’t any more satisfying than if I were to tape an obscene message for my phone machine sorry I’m not home right now but I’m hot for your . . . it just isn’t the same as having a body on the other end of the line, the bona fide heavy breathing.
Ryder, where are you? Wrap your phone cord around your cock. Remember me.
I betrayed my writing for Ryder—for six weeks I did nothing but fuck and get emotional. When he was aroused, Ryder turned monosyllabic, which really did it for me. I’d be chattering away and all he’d say was, “Yeah,” his voice low and raspy, urgent as a wet tongue in my ear. Passion did a quick dissolve and I waxed silent as Ryder filled the frame, became the frame: his body, his emanations. “Yeah.”
Now writing is taking its revenge. The present tense won’t stick to Ryder—narrative has thrust him finally, irretrievably in the past. The tendons there are so pronounced his feet look webbed—I used to run my fingers in the fissures that extend from toes to ankle, daydreaming of roads carved between mountains, of running away. He said that entering me was going home—but what’s home, Ryder—the couch in the living room, where you spend the night, depressed, when your friends leave? When he looked at his house through my eyes, he claimed his things look interesting. From the little I saw of them, his things were simple, mostly secondhand, suggesting a lower socio-economic status than his own. One night while I sucked his toes and he sucked mine, we somehow managed to fuck at the same time, a sort of elongated 69 pivoting on his cock. I turned my head and smiled at him, said, “This is very Kama Sutra.” “You’re right,” he answered, “But what would they call it . . . something like ‘turkey clawing under bright moon.’” We laughed until he fell out of me.
Ryder’s flown into the sun and my heart is in a window display in North Beach—a valentine of dried roses and grass, it looks like a wreath you’d see on a pet’s grave.
Day Eleven
How can I go on writing about desire when it has vanished. I’ve mutated to neuter. But isn’t inconstancy the essence of desire? When you least suspect, it rushes up on you leaving soap suds at your feet. Before I’d ever touched him I wanted Ryder dearly—just the thought of him would get me wet. Once I had his body I was no longer moved by the idea, but by the thing itself.
I can’t stand my own impenetrability—do I love do I hunger? Perhaps the chain reaction is still possible but hidden, and only Ryder can supply the missing ingredient, the lightning bolt that zaps the new Prometheus to life. Or—maybe it’s all been a dream, a very small and savage dream. Maybe his eye contact hypnotized me, leaning so close his breath flushed my cheek, peering into me. He learned every dot in my iris—maybe he used them to navigate his way to my soul. He stole it. And then he went to Barcelona, carelessly tossing it back at me.
All I can imagine saying upon his return is, “I don’t know, Ryder, you feel so alien.”
Duras: “A swell surged up to the wall of the house but fell back at his feet as if to avoid him; it was fringed with white and alive, like writing.” Alive, yes, but at whose expense? I ache for the innocents who try to befriend me. Bloodthirsty and iridescent, writing sucks the marrow from the unsuspecting then sits back picking its teeth with a rib. Poor Ryder never had a chance do what you want with me, he said—now he totters along the shore, his tortured features barely recognizable: a body pink and bloated from fermenting gasses—his pale eyes plead—but the damage has already been done. I’ve seen enough movies to not touch him—the slightest pressure of my hand would upset the delicate biochemical balance. A heap of dust or something more gooey collapsing at my feet, not even a shell would I be left with.
Day Twelve
A shifting, a readiness—fear—my body is a mold waiting for plastique. In just a few hours he’ll be near enough to know . . .
My mind is clear, clear as the night we parked in Marin overlooking the bay. There in the front seat of his car Ryder first made me come. He marvelled, the witness to a miracle—or, a child with a toy that finally works. I teased, “Ryder, it’s a normal body function.” The Golden Gate Bridge filled the windshield, gold and gleaming. “The tower of Camelot,” Ryder said. Craning his neck up at the heavens—boyish—he pointed out Orion, only visible in the Northern Hemisphere, only in winter. We huddled together, our clothes still undone, watching the crescent moon blink through wisps of clouds, and I thought to myself this is happiness.
The last time I kissed Ryder he was in a doorway, leaving. I stood on my toes to get closer and breathed, “I’ll immortalize you.” There’s something Faustian about this story. I can invoke his name, his personality, but my loving descriptions of his body are bloodless, as though I were parroting another author. I remember his penis was friendly—just like him. But that’s it. If I touch him again will it merely feel awkward . . . or good as a first time?
Late this evening Ryder returns and this memoir will be over.
Writing versus life—is the one flight, the other hot pursuit? I don’t remember. I once was a nerdy high school girl with nothing much else to do than lie on her twin bed filling a spiral notebook with poems of isolation and black curtains a vulnerability so coddled it grew sentient.
If this were a modernist novel, in the end I suppose I’d choose Life. The phone rings after midnight. A man’s voice on the line, urgent and impossible. He doesn’t identify himself, implores, “Can I come over I need to see you. Right now!” Without missing a beat I chirp back, “Well, Babe—what are you waiting for?”
Spiral
by David Wojnarowicz
1
Back near the monitor the blazing light of the hand jerking the hardened dick is creating a blind spot to the right of it in the room and I can just about make out some silhouetted shape of a guy in shorts and shirt opened, knowing this because as he moves from dick to dick his shirt floats like a curtain billowing into no light and disappearing again and he’s got a baseball cap on. I’m moving into this blind spot to watch and he’s on his knees sucking some kid’s prick. There’s an old man in the darkest shadows his flesh is a bland color just a dead white, emptied of blood and he seems afraid of the light keeps shifting weight from one foot to the other in a squatting position at some point the sucking guy has his back to the old man and he’s leaning over the ledge to get another guy’s prick in his mouth and the old man takes a large hand and peels the guy’s shorts down in a slow motion insistence and soon has his tongue planted firmly between the guy’s cheeks. The guy starts rolling his ass in the air in circular motions and continues sucking the prick of the stranger before him. The old guy is lapping away like a puppy with a bowl of milk and I’m standing there in the darkness and there’s a stream of water or something snaking across the flo
or and the pale glow of faces staring towards us at the monitor that I can only see sideways and on the angled screen is a pair of eyes looking dreamily up at the owner of a fat dick that’s slowly sinking down his throat. A man enters the basement and walks over in my general direction momentarily blinded by the monitor and he runs into me before his eyes adjust, instead of backing up he reaches out and pulls me into a hug his arms muscled and hard and his embrace is squeezing air from my lungs. I rub my hands over the surface of his body his clothes and an almost indiscernible dampness to his shirt his body hard as wood his lips grazing my neck his hand pulling my head down so that he can softly bite the nape of my neck dragging his tongue around to my ear up and down the lines of my throat and my fingers are loosening his belt and my hands slip through his open zipper into all that warmth inside his underwear and down under his balls and his hand is on the back of my neck on my shoulders and he’s pushing and I’m sinking down slow into a crouching position and from there slipping my hands beneath the edge of his white T-shirt and the T-shirt is tight and he’s beginning to sweat his body generating intense heat and my mouth is opening and I’m licking under his balls the length and head of his dick is falling across the bridge of my nose resting against my eyelids and one of my hands swings up to wipe across my mouth to collect spit and then falls to my cock and I’m slicking it up with spit creating a random rhythm while licking at the base of his dick his hands are in my hair moving around cradling the base of my skull. As I stand back up I’m losing myself in the pale cool color of his flesh in the shadows and he takes my head in his hands and pulls my face close to his gaze and I realize he’s one of those guys that you know absolutely that if you’d met him twenty years earlier you both could have gone straight to heaven but now mortality has finally marked his face. He was really sexy though; he was like a vast swimming pool I wanted to dive right into.
2
All I can remember was the beautiful view and my overwhelming urge to puke. I was visiting my friend in the hospital and realizing he was lucky. Even though he was possibly going blind he did get the only bed in the room that had a window and a view. Sixteen floors up overlooking the southern skies as all the world spins into late evening. It was a beautiful distance to drift in but I still wanted to throw up. There among the red and yellow clouds drifting behind the silhouettes of the skyline was the overwhelming smell of human shit. It was the guy in the next bed; all afternoon he’d been making honking sounds like a suffocating goose. He was about ninety years old and I only got a glimpse of him and saw that they’d strapped an oxygen mask over his leathered face and when he screamed it sounded like a voice you’d hear over a contraption made of two tin cans and a piece of wire. Calling long distance trying to get the operator. Someone in charge. Someone in authority. Someone who could make it all stop with a pill, a knife, a needle, a word, a kiss, a smack, an embrace. Someone to step in and erase the sliding world of fact.
3
This kid walks into my sleep he’s maybe seventeen years old stretches out on a table says he’s not feeling well. He may be naked or else wearing no shirt his hands behind his head. I can see a swollen lump pushing under the skin of his armpit. I place my hands on his stomach and chest and try to explain to him that he needs to be looked at by a doctor. In the shadows of this room in the cool blue light the kid, a very beautiful boy, looks sad and shocked and closes his eyes like he doesn’t want to know or like somehow he can shut it all out.
Later some guy appears in the place. He has an odd look about his face. He tries to make it known that he knows me or someone close to me. He leans in close has flat dull eyes like blue silvery coins behind his irises. I think it is the face of death. I get agitated and disturbed and want to be left alone with the kid. Try to steer him away to some other location. He disappears for a moment and then reappears in the distance but far away isn’t far enough. I turn and look at the kid on the table he looks about ten years old and water is pouring from his face.
4
Two blocks south there is a twenty story building with at least three hundred visible windows behind which are three hundred tiny blue television screens operating simultaneously. Most of them are tuned to the same stations you can watch the patterns of fluctuating light pop out like in codes. Must be the war news. Twenty seconds of slow motion video frames broadcasting old glory drifting by in the bony hands of white zombies, and half the population ship their children out on the next tanker or jet to kill and be killed. My friend on the bed never watches his tv. It hangs anchored to the wall above his bed extended over his face and on the end of a gray robotic-looking arm. If he bothered to watch the tv he would see large groups of kids in the saudi desert yakking about how they were going to march straight through to baghdad, find a telephone booth and call home to mom and dad. Then he’d see them writing out their wills on the customary government-supplied short forms. Or maybe he’d catch the video where the commanding instructor holds up a land mine the size of a frisbee and says, if you step on one of these there won’t be nothing left of you to find . . . just red spray in the air. Or the fort dix drill sergeant out of view of the rolling cameras, when ya see those towel-heads . . .
But my friend is too weak to turn the channels on other people’s deaths. There is also the question of dementia, an overload of the virus’s activity in his brain short-circuiting the essentials and causing his brain to atrophy so that he ends up pissing into the telephone. He sees a visitor’s face impaled with dozens of steel nails or crawling with flies and gets mildly concerned. Seeing dick cheney looming up on the television screen with that weird lust in his eyes and bits of brain matter in the cracks of his teeth might accidentally be diagnosed as dementia. I catch myself just as all this stomach acid floods up into my throat, run out to the hallway to the water fountain.
5
It’s a dark and wet concrete bunker, a basement that runs under the building from front to back. There is one other concrete staircase that is sealed off at the top by a street grate and you can hear the feet of pedestrians and spare parts of conversations floating down into the gloom. At a midpoint in the room you can do a 360-degree slow turn and see everything; the shaky alcoves built of cheap plywood, a long waist-high cement ledge where twenty-three guys could sit shoulder to shoulder if forced to, the darkened ledge in the back half hidden by pipes and architectural supports, and the giant television set. It’s one of the latest inventions from japan, the largest video monitor available and it is hooked into the wall, then further encased in a large sheet of plexiglass in order to prevent the hands of some bored queen from fucking with the dials and switching the sex scenes to Let’s Make A Deal. The plexi is covered in scratches and hand prints and smudges and discolored streaks of body fluids. At the moment the images fed from a vhs machine upstairs are a bit on the blink. When the original film was transferred it was jumping the sprockets of the projector and now I’m watching images that fluctuate strobically up and down but only by a single centimeter. Each body or object or vista or close-up of eye, tongue, stiff dick, and asshole is doubled and vibrating. Kind of pretty and psychedelic and no one is watching it anyway. There is a clump of three guys entwined on the long ledge. One of them is lying down leaning on one elbow with his head cradled in another guy’s hand. The second guy is feeding the first guy his dick while a third guy is crouching down behind him pulling open the cheeks of his ass and licking his finger and poking at its bull’s-eye. The shadows cast by their bodies cancel out the details necessary for making the vision interesting or decipherable beyond the basics. One of the guys, the one who looks like he’s praying at an altar, turns and opens his mouth wide and gestures towards it. He nods at me but I turn away. He wouldn’t understand. Too bad he can’t see the virus in me, maybe it would rearrange something in him. It certainly did in me. When I found out I felt this abstract sensation, something like pulling off your skin and turning it inside out and then rearranging it so that when you pull it
back on it feels like what it felt like before, only it isn’t and only you know it. It’s something almost imperceptible. I mean the first minute after being diagnosed you are forever separated from what you had come to view as your life or living, the world outside the eyes. The calendar tracings of biographical continuity get kind of screwed up. It’s like watching a movie suddenly and abruptly going in reverse a thousand miles a minute, like the entire landscape and horizon is pulling away from you in reverse in order to spell out a psychic separation. Like I said, he wouldn’t understand and besides his hunger is giant. I once came to this place fresh from visiting a friend in the hospital who was within a day or two of death and you wouldn’t know there was an epidemic. At least forty people exploring every possible invention of sexual gesture and not a condom in sight. I had an idea that I would make a three minute super-8 film of my dying friend’s face with all its lesions and sightlessness and then take a super-8 projector and hook it up with copper cables to a car battery slung in a bag over my shoulder and walk back in here and project the film onto the dark walls above their heads. I didn’t want to ruin their evening, just wanted maybe to keep their temporary worlds from narrowing down too far.
6
The old guy is still honking away when I get back to the room. There are tiny colored lights wobbling through the red threads of dusk and I’m trying to concentrate on them in order to avoid bending over suddenly and emptying out. I’ve been trying to fight the urge to throw up for the last two weeks. At first I thought it was food poisoning but slowly it was civilization. Everything is stirring this feeling inside me, signs of physical distress, the evening news, all the flags in the streets, and the zombie population going about its daily routines. I just want to puke it all out like an intense projectile. I sidetrack myself by concentrating on the little lights at dusk; imagining one of them developing a puff of smoke in its engines and plummeting to the earth among the canyon streets. Any event would help. The nurse finally shows up and behind the curtains I hear the sounds of a body thumping, the sounds of cloth being rolled up, of water splashing, and the covers being unfurled and tucked. Finally she leaves taking the smell of shit with her in a laundry cart. My friend wakes up and starts weeping; he’s hallucinating that he can’t find something that probably never existed. I understand the feeling just like I understand it when he sometimes screams that he hates healthy people. A senate group was in new york city recently collecting information on the extent of the epidemic and were told that in the next year and a half there will be thirty-three thousand homeless people with AIDS living in the streets and gutters of the city. A couple of people representing the policy of the city government assured the senators that these people were dying so fast from lack of health care that they were making room for the others coming up from behind; so there would be no visible increase of dying homeless on the streets. Oh I feel so sick. I feel like a human bomb tick tick tick.