“You got a whole pack!”
“Doesn’t mean I want ’em all crushed.”
We’d look around—where were we? Somewhere between an invitation and a car ride home. Somewhere between Wyo and Mars. Somewhere between a marble floor and a cat—it peed on a supermodel’s fur coat and arched across the room, its own fur grazing the ceiling. It hit a politician in the head and made his security guard shriek, “What the FUCK?!” It slinked away with its mouth oddly open and someone snapped its pic.
“Let’s just stay for one more drink” became the thing.
“Let’s go F in the john so we can stay” became a tactic.
So we’d F in the john and then I’d go find a couch to sit on while Carol walked the room doing our socializing. I sat below one of my own paintings once and didn’t know it. Someone was like, “Can I snap a pic?” Till I figured it out and said, “Oh. Fine.” Popped a fart out to put some color in the face, to fluff the couch, to assure the photographer wouldn’t sit to chat after his camera flashed. He sat right down in the fart.
He said, “I’m Keith. I was named after a belt buckle in the hospital gift shop.”
A passerby said, “Oh, cool! That’s so white trash!”
Keith said, “Excuse me? Thanks a lot? Don’t you think it’s inappropriate to apply that term to a complete stranger?”
“I think it doesn’t matter,” the passerby challenged back.
They sworded with limp penises trying to get them into boners so someone could win. The Haircutter chuckled, making Keith lightly bounce. A cheeseball arched cat-like across the room and a man caught it in his mouth like a politician’s head. First thing he did was turn to see if The Haircutter saw, and said, “Score.”
One day, I got another white card from Charlie Quick:
Please come to the gallery to speak to Mr. Christmas.
I said to Doorman Diego, “They’re telling me to go to the gallery again.”
He nodded and pressed some buttons on his controller.
“Famous,” he said, pointing at me.
I laughed, “Haha!”
I went to the Thank You Gallery and found Christmas standing before a painting. The painting was: The End?
He was wearing his red-and-green plaid suit. When he saw me come in, he said, “This is stupid, get rid of it,” and Charlie Quick appeared to take the painting out of sight.
“What are you doing next?” Christmas said, and a piece of spit landed on the back of my hand like it was tapping it to ask a question.
I said, “Uuuuuh?”
“The next piece in your body of work. What’s next, what have you thought of?”
I said, “What?”
He howled and went to a wall and slid halfway down it to speak to me in an invisible chair. “It’s easy, Haircutter. Your excuse for the hairboard was that cutting hair was the only thing that made you feel.” He grunted from the strain of holding his pose. “Perfect,” he said. His face got redder and redder and his long thin thighs began to quiver, then he shot up bouncing and said, “Your next project will be what makes you feel now. You say you aren’t cutting hair anymore because of your new girlfriend, is that right? Because you don’t need to cut anymore. Well, why. What has replaced your feeling.” His veiny hands shot up to rub his veiny brain, while his cufflinks flashed in the polluted sunset coming from the Hudson River down the block. “And I don’t want you to go to museums, okay, I want this to be as virginal as you are. I want you to tell me, to show me, what it is now that makes you most feel. I want you to decide on a way to present that, and I want it presented, and I want to sell it, and I want you to create another piece after that. This is what I’m doing with you. Let’s play. I know how to play, do you? You create the oeuvre of The Haircutter and I’m going to sell it for you.”
I said, “Huh. Well I don’t know what the hell else is making me feel except Carol.”
Laughter and a snap that told me to follow his dress shoes peeling beneath his swagger.
We went into his office and he made us both espressos (to make me crap when I fart). He took his espresso back like a shot and rolled his enormous head around on his neck, making him almost fall backwards since most of his head is on the back side of his neck. I flinched and reached out to catch it, but he was suddenly putting chapstick on his turtle’s lips and rubbing them together. He said, “If it’s Carol, then what is it about her that makes you feel?”
I said, “Oh hell, what? See I just don’t speak that language is what.”
His eyes puckered into stars and he laughed. “Well what would you do for another art piece? What do you like to do most with your time?”
I said, “Oh hell, just hang with Carol. She’s the one who does the datebook, so. I can have her bring it in if you let me use the phone.”
He squirmed and spoke then in a voice I’d never heard him use: it was a normal person speaking honestly, politely. His ego hung in the air around us, flapping its wings, letting Christmas be frank[incense].
“Confidence … equals … pretend you’re from the future,” he said.
I put a hand to my chin and nodded, pretending I was understanding. This perked him up again, and put him back in his standard deportment, which was the kind you felt compelled to toss a cane to.
I said, “What’s the deal here? So what makes me feel’s the question? Coming into Carol, pretty much. She’s on birth control, so.”
His barking laughter. “Do me a sex project!”
I said, “Huh?”
He screamed, “Go home! Go home and think about it!”
Sex. A disgusting ritual. There were two times—two?—where I folded up over myself like a snake shedding skin and like a skinned penis I throbbed in the color pink with my eyes drooped and I was like I get it, I get it. Maybe that was the time or two that we touched “making love.” Otherwise, it was all just fucking, with Carol’s round rabbit eyes darting. Using our piss and poop holes to get to the Human Nature button inside of us, to press press press it, losing our ages and identities. “Fucking.” You’re rubbing up against a tree trunk while onlookers at the zoo go, “Eew!” Your eyes droop and then you “come” and then your red penis retracts back into your fur as you walk your cage with your butt still faintly humping like the bumblebee that flew over to sniff your semen puddle. It should be embarrassing, but it’s celebrated instead. I fucked today! like that sticker for voters. Whistlers in the morning office say someone had a good night last night. People are weird. Neverthefuck, we fucked nonstop.
She’d throw herself on me like she was the sea and I was a sea rock to be engulfed, massaged, and dripped on. We got more and more vocal during sex—we explained it, poked at it, told it to roll over so we could tickle its belly; we affectionately stroked it while we ate.
You think I’m kidding about that? Later we’d whisper: Man we were horny, huh? Haha yeah weird, I ate my whole plate. Haha yeah I sall that. I almost stabbed the back of my throat with my fork when you did your comin’ thrust. Oh no!, I’m glad you didn’t.
We were on the same page of the same sick book. Titled Sex by Fuck. I’d fuck her with my deflated socks on. My thing was more in a boner than not. Was it sore? Felt about ready to fall off. There’s a mental aspect that controls you when you’re in a groove like that, just like shooting heroin into the same over-used volcano on your arm, I’d imagine. My penis is seven inches when erect, it’s 5.75" in circumference, and it’s unclipped.
Waiting for her to orgasm was like waiting for a stampede of mixed animals to come charging through the room. I sometimes winced watching it come around the bend. She’d flail her arms, screaming, with her mechanical pumping rump keeping her attached to me by the dick. Afterwards, she’d slide her legs off the bed and her body would follow like water. She’d go “tinkle” and come back to stand on the rug saying, “That was goooood,” pushing baby hairs off her face with her clity hanging from her flaps like an exasperated tongue.
And so, we began forming our sex ses
sions into a presentable format for Christmas. I went out and bought a bunch of petri dishes to ejaculate into so we could make a big artful heart made out of petri dishes with sex essence in them. Carol, smiling widely, would hold a dish up to my thing and get it to come in there. Or we’d be doing it at the stove, say, while she was cooking, and I’d open a cupboard like I’m looking for spice, but I’d pull out a petri dish and I’d pull out of Carol and try to get the dish to catch my come. It was disgusting, but so is coming into petri dishes in the name of Art. As a counting system, we unwrapped a condom every time we had sex and tied it to a condom chain for Christmas to hang up banner-like at the opening. Carol, loving the entire thing more than a person would ever think, wore the condom banner as a scarf/necklace jig that she would have just loved to wear outside of the house, but we had to be clandestine so no one would copy. I recorded our heart rates with watches that we’d put on before we’d start and I logged them later and did charts of comparison using a ruler, glitter, and glue (Carol’s idea). During her orgasms, I’d photograph her with her black camera, which we kept by the bed. I think we had around seventy orgasm pics of Carol, sometimes looking in the lens, which looks more like she’s about to puke then it looks like she’s in the middle of an org. One day Carol was writing and I came up and braided her hair (best I could) and I was like, “About what?” and she told me she’s doing a sort of “wife-of-the-artist biography.” She said that while I’m working on The Sex Project, she’d be journaling about it.
I told her, “Let’s put it in the project then!”
And she was like, “Exactly!”
Later in bed I was like, wife? It made me smirk so hard I rolled over and asked to make L.
I recorded our moaning with a tape recorder when we were at the height of our moaning and I was careful to press Stop before any orgasms so that the tape was entirely of moaning from all different sessions. To pair with the tape we purchased a video camera and had Charlie Quick film us having sex outdoors with a blanket over us. It was a scratchy black blanket of Old Auntie’s that probably had her dead skin cells shaking from it when we humped. We sprinkled her cells all over town. We’d stop on whatever corner and say, “This’ll do,” and Carol would spit on her hand and get herself open, and Charlie Quick would toss the blanket over us and cross the street to get a good shot of our black mass amongst the pedestrians. I’d hump away, the both of us laughing like donkeys. Till we’d start liking it and we’d get all serious and moany. I told Charlie Quick to film the part of us running away too. Carol shouting, “Go, go, go!” with her hair flying back and with one of her titties hanging out of her shirt. Once, we did it on the subway right at the foot of people’s feet. Bing, bang, boom. Carol put on a show for them with her Oohs climbing a scale of pleasure. The final high note she sang graduated mega-cum-loud from our Insanitute. It all sounds crazy, but when you put us next to a pic of a leper beggar pulling himself down the subway car by the arms with his lower body draped over a skateboard, it’s pennies. I called the project, blandly, The Sex Project. And Christmas later changed it to Private Particulars.
One stormy Sunday, when we were getting ready for a sex session, I watched Carol put on her heart rate watch. She was standing by the window in flashes of lightning at 4:00 p.m. I came up behind her and touched her forearm—she froze. I slowly slipped the watch off her wrist and it dropped to the floor. I slowly turned her around and saw her eyes and mouth be like, “What’s he about to show me that’s new?” We passionately kissed, the thunder clapping. I didn’t come into a petri dish, we didn’t snap her orgasm pic. We laid in bed smiling after. I shouted, “Man, I love you!” over the rain. “No, I do!” she said. We both knew then that it was time for The Sex Project to come.
(If only I had known the horror in store for me. I would’ve skipped all this “art project” bullshit.)
We put everything in a cardboard box meant for office files and brought it in to the gallery. When we walked in the door, Christmas said, “Shh!” and proceeded to search for a cricket stuck in the room. Carol unpacked the petri dishes, arranging them in the shape of a heart (which Christmas later showed us how to “mount” so it could be hung on a wall). I saw the cricket hop past Christmas’s office so I shouted, “By your office!” Christmas hopped across the room with one pointy dress shoe up and ready—he killed the cricket, then swiped his fingers through the juice and laughed with spirals in his eyes. In France, a pretty teacher wrote cliché on the blackboard.
He walked toward us then, smooth as water, until he realized what we’d brought in. His hands shot up to his brain and he yelled, “Quick!” Charlie Quick appeared with a magnifying glass. Christmas looked through the stack of Carol’s orgasm pics, he saw our petri heart, he saw the crafty heart rate chart, he read Carol’s biography which was only two-and-a-half pages long and ended mid-sentence mid-word on the word “artistic.”
… brushing his teeth more often, I’ve been having harder orgasms. Maybe if I had known that banging was so artis
I had Charlie Quick hold one end of the condom banner and walked across the room holding the other end for Christmas to see. He clapped for fifteen minutes. Till Carol said, “Wait, not yet!” Charlie Quick wheeled out a TV and I put in the black blanket porn. Carol pressed play on our moaning tape at the same time that I pressed play. Christmas held his brain and paced with his legs bent, “Yes.”
“Yes,” he said.
I already had my arms crossed, but I spread my stance wider.
Before we emerged from our black car the night of the opening, Carol said, “Speak quotably.” She’d tied her lace duster around her neck like a leash for me to hold during pics.
When we walked in it sounded like a sudden downpour. (“PSH!!!!!”) They clapped curls out of the smoky air, slapping their palms together so hard it jiggled their faces, making some women’s clip-on earrings drop off. Flashbulbs popped and popped. I held Carol’s lace duster leash and walked her around the square room. People tossed words at us like confetti. I was like, “Okay, thanks.” Carol was like, “Thanks-uhhhh!!! Thanks so muuuuch-uuuuh!” Our video was projected on the wall where The Hairboard had hung, and speakers framed it projecting our moaning tape. Carol’s orgasms framed the room in frames. The condom banner hung wall-to-wall. Old Auntie’s black blanket was pinned up bat-like having no choice in the matter. There were several glass cases for the memoir and the heart rate chart. On the third wall hung our petri heart. People were looking at me every time I looked around for the catering boys who had little hot dogs. The oldest man I’ve ever seen put a lit cigar in my mouth and I spat it out shocked. He said, “Cripes!” and his grandson came to say, “I’m sorry, I thought you’d like that!” A lady with a shaved head wanted our autographs on the old Artist’s Statement from The Hairboard opening, and then a lineup grew where people wanted us to sign this opening’s invitation and the Artist’s Statement that Christmas and Carol had drawn up. Blah, blah, blah. In Ten Sleep, my father sucked jelly off the sleeve of his flannel shirt, saying, “This place is a fuckin’ pigsty, Patty.” Patty Reilly in her purple sweatsuit brushed her hair and it made a crackling sound in electric harmony with the velvet horses couch she sat on. Darron spun circles at the saloon, and the yellow-suited cowboy spun in the fresh, cold, Wyo air. On 37th and 6th Avenue in Manhattan, my papers went crisp in the same fresh cold coming through the rattling window frame above my writing table. On 20th and 10th, I ate a hot dog and watched myself have sex on a subway train under a blanket. Everyone around me laughed so heartily at the passengers’ reactions, they bent in half and tangled their legs to clutch their champagne in. Ting, ting, ting—they asked for a kiss by tapping their pussy little glasses. Carol came to flick tongues. Someone put a garland around our heads. Everyone sighed collectively, flashbulbs going off. Carol and I spread apart and strained against the garland until it burst undone, petals spraying.
After the opening, Christmas threw a party at the top of a building on Broadway Street. I had never seen
the building before. Everything with him was like it was made specially for a scene in a movie and, come morning, would disappear. Carol and I saw out over the sparkling New York skyline holding the familiar weight of champagne glasses in the hands we gutted deer with as children.
“We’re standin’ on top’a this town,” Carol said.
A boa constrictor slithered by with a video camera on its “back.”
“You’re happy then?” I said.
She said, “I’m only just gettin’ started. Your bow’s my life’s work.”
She’d pronounced bow like in a doggie’s bow-wow.
“My bow?” I said.
“Your body of work.”
“Your body’s a work of art,” I said, and she kissed me, “Thank you!”
Carol then played Twister, genital crabs jumping sprightly from player to player, crawling up their legs and finding they’ve already been in those pubes before.
Scott Harp approached me with his tie slung over his shoulder saying, “Carol is amazing.”
I said, “I ain’t blind! I’m the one who went to Wyo and caught her!”
That wolf was my wolf and then there was some black-haired man with eyelids like dick skin saying it was his wolf. Or some shit like that. Whatever it was, I hated him.
“Nice piece,” he said. “I love that Carol’s so dedicated.”
“I know it!” I grouched, and walked away to go stand by a butch lesbian who’d just entered the party on a pogo stick.
“I get around town like this,” she said and twitched her head so hard, her hair cleared off her freckled forehead. “Are you the guy whose show it was?” she asked casually in a low, out-of-breath voice as she collapsed her pogo stick and put it in a special carrying case.
“You’re my favorite person I’ve met in a long time. I knew it right away,” I said, and she yanked her face in toward her neck, confused.
Just then, a human-sized hamster ball rolled into the room. People had to jump out of the way. Inside was a little elf, with unwrapped candy bars clacking around to make like turds. People screamed, and he rolled around until people started cheering. “That’s Siedle!” I heard. “That’s Siedle the elf. He’s rad!” I heard. “He’s a good listener!” I heard.
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