I drained out every ounce of his anxiety, he was grateful, I tinged his dreams, contaminated like a metastasis; he was cautious at first but like the good rock climber in a sterile indoors he was, strong and adventurous, he yielded to the challenge, in the summer he would go back to windsurfing he said, so many dangers besiege the modern man, life is so fraught with dangerous desires. I smiled as he slowly let go of his hands, his selfish thick lips, his pristine teeth, his tongue, his words, his lukewarm saliva, the misty suburban memories of his life (that we all learn to describe as repressed childhood recall of abuse), nothing to shout about, and his juvenile ambitions (and his wallet, his apartment keys, his car keys). I taught him secrets, intimacy, to give in, to trust me, I should know well that shattered dreams, chard and turds can be satin, velvet or silk, it’s all about lightning and location, location, location. I initiated him in the perverse secret of my flowers, the poisonous vibrations of the raging stems that can keep an erection solid for hours, the roses with thorns gently scratching his back until it bleeds, just barely, his bound wrists, his legs spread apart until the abductors are slightly strained, my lips around his shaft, careening his ravines, descending into every little crevice. One day my fingers fondled his sensitive ass, timidly, another rose that was, slowly blooming, a few seconds at first, later some more, longer, until finally bathed in that strange summer early morning light, the window wide open, the calm breeze blowing through it and through my lips like the fluttering wings of a hummingbird, his back tensed, his hands trapped in cuffs, his eyes blindfolded, his mouth gagged, his ears covered, deliciously moaning like the precious male animal that he was, that he is, and I couldn’t hold my shape any more.
[Cut to: Inside the young businessman’s gentle period house located in the shaded street.]
I say, you will kill for me, he says he doesn’t understand her, that he will not drink what he drank last night (and the night before and the night before) on the rocks, that it gave him nightmares, a bad headache, that he felt strange. How strange that is? I ask. He admits that he rather not have her play with his ass like she did, it hurts, in fact, it is ablaze now. How good is it? I ask. He is befuddled. Good? He doesn’t want to understand but for the time being we have more important things to occupy our minds, his life crisis, leaving that silly career job, getting more fat into his body, beer and fries, getting used to the sudden swings in my mood and the inflections in the sound of my voice, my late-night vanishings leaving him alone in the bed, wanting more, puzzled and in pain; we have to deal with the eviction notice slid under the front door, the concerned calls from cut-throat colleagues, ex-girlfriends, and faraway American relatives.
One day he says he doesn’t know how it has all happened that everything seems to be tumbling down . . . but she is in his life and that is all that matters, that he knows that he loves her, that he wants to lose himself in her, kneel down in front of her, keel over, his eyes uncovered to see the things she does to him, how she tattooes bluish graffiti on his body. The atomic iron doors that barricaded this sanctuary have swung open, drums resounding in the sky of my soul, and the feelings imprisoned inside now overflow. He says he would do anything for her. I say, just wait until you come away from this neighbourhood into my house, no, you’ve never seen it, I seem to be here all the time, that’s right, all the time, wait then, you say you would do anything for me, wait. In front of his eyes almost coming out of their sockets, I return to my original shape.
In my long life of foster homes, petty crimes, convenience store hold-ups, run-aways, screeching old tyres in the greasy pavement of road gas stations, I went scurrying from trailer park to trailer park like an itinerant circus freak show, eating road kill, for so long, couldn’t let anyone see the real me, so whimsical, so damaging. Since I was a child I was looking for God, but there was no God for those like me and I understood I had to create my own. So I came, not looking for mister right, just looking for the right one for me, couldn’t let the police get near me, the social services, the scientists, the counsellors. When it got too close for comfort I’d disappear and go and settle in the next squalor, amble around the fancy area of town, the towers, the wall-to-wall fantasy, do my little facts-finding, and proceed with extreme caution, handle with care, sheltered by the shadows. Shady identities I created, ghouls lifted right out of B-movies I watched late into the morning, being one of those who don’t need to sleep much, did menial work, underpaid, until I found the next suitor, always hoping this would be the one, emotional mobility, transient, instability as noted in the psychiatric diaries. One by one I faced the many disappointments, a personal trainer in an uptown gym with expansive hands crowned in ten killer fingers, a roller coaster of bulging muscles, feet odour, I excused that, a small member, I excused that, it is not that I wanted children, voracious appetite for the kinky, there was my loophole, I thought I would hang on to that psychological handle, exploit that vein, but no one is as twisted as they would like to believe they are, that is why they watch movies, to compensate for what they don’t dare to do, hesitant, envious, even in their fucking fantasies. Or the dutiful middle-class entrepreneurial father, Fatal Attraction’s victim, still so gullible after so many years of horror tabloid headliners, ready to fuck the baby sitter at the mere sight of her small cup bra. Don’t these affluent businessmen read The Enquirer? Enchanting innocence is the innocence of these otherwise respectful citizens. Or the police chief in his early fifties who would eventually introduce me to his half sisters, half his age, whom he fucked avidly. Oh, sweet perversion, tailored and seamed into the staunchest uniforms! They became an acquiescent audience in one sultry evening viewing inside a 1950s motel room; two pairs of mesmerized owls they witnessed me, perched on top of him, something grotesque and alive, drying breasts, immersed in the delicious agony of metamorphosis that yielded no butterfly out of a cocoon but another worm, bigger and better, Aliens, the umpteen sequel, an improved “Me” in neon fucking lights pumping meat into this venerable patriarch, the keeper of the law and order, his generous sweat covering his heroic and medalled chest and his glistening ample forehead, imploring for his women’s forgiveness, hard panting, as I completed my ferocious ramming up his ass with triumphant colors, the crying of the women, the Greek choir to his futile tragedy. With stories like these and so many other stories was cluttered my life before he came along, to all the men I loved before, big and strong, like songs, like clichés, like long and drawn puffs of smoke.
[Cut to: A decrepit and untidy trailer in a noisy suburban park. A radio blasts Meat Loaf.]
But men, they say, are like buses, they come every fifteen minutes, at least if you are in the city, they pick you up and you move on with them only to get off at your most convenient stop. Tired of the house in the shade of the magnolia trees, the number of distressed calls from friends and family, the number of people who have seen way too many reruns of “The Silence of the Lambs” I needed to move on myself, so I called the jock, fine, I’ll give you back your fucking BMW and I will stop the threats of sending an anonymous letter to the bride-to-be, lovely she is indeed, barren though . . . yeah, I saw the gynecologist’s report . . . never mind how I saw that, fuck I’ve almost been inside her fucking cunt! Got pen and paper? You got something out of school after all, pretty boy. Did I mention you tasted positively good? A jawbreaker the crazy piece of yours is. No, I said tasted as in your oozing precome not tested as in HIV positive. Please, don’t gag. Write this address down. Hey, you’ll get to meet the real improved “Me” in neon fucking lights . . . click. How rude!
I dance for him the lewdness of a cheap 1980s punk song, endless love, each night the last, spirits rise, late into the morning light, every day a beginning, lap dance, and the dance is unrehearsed, a little stream of beer flows from the end of his lips, through his rough beard to his gut. The monumental energy of his early thirties help him lift me from the floor, shove his cock inside me, as if lifted by a huge crane and crashed against a brick wall, again and again until a gush
of fermented liquid empties inside me, like the blood hurrying through the thick veins in his neck and the storm of his alcoholic breath as enraged as his temperament all deposited inside me. I had to teach you so much, my puppy love, now you love me for what I am, a bit of this and a bit of that.
As in the movies, the way I like it, the jock comes in as told, pushing with terror the door ajar and he finds us in the stinking room, he on top of me having his way, damsel in distress, and he goes to my help once more like that night I had been left behind in the highway near the motel where the he found me. He has found me again, he cannot see the resemblance, masqueraded I am by his own petty arrested adolescence desire, he sees a woman being devoured by a monster, a damsel properly saved is a sure shot damsel in the sack. Keep your eyes on the prize. Poor jock, so gullible, reaches fast for the fireplace tool and spears him good in the back. I fall back on to the suede sofa. Thank you. I cry inconsolably, monster blood, sweat and tears dripping down my lovely dress, with trembling hand I point out at the BMW keys, I sob that he was driving that when he picked me up in the nearby highway where I was stranded. I search for my cell phone, the monster hid it, I have to call my new job in the steel minimalist tower, I just started there, and they might be wondering what has happened to me. The jock finds it and hands it to me, frail and sitting on the floor in a corner of the revolting trailer. I dial 911. Police? Firefighters? No. Paramedics, from the closest station. Jimmy knows. Jimmy knows that Jag, 24, the one with the cinnamon skin, the turban and the dagger, has begun to work as a paramedic in the third shift a month before. Jimmy hopes to be moving on.
Butt Hutt
Matt Thorne
I first met Isobel in an Internet café. She was looking up hardcore pornography. Normally this wouldn’t have caught my attention (especially if it was one of the places in the centre of Soho, where no one cares what their neighbours are accessing) but because it was the Internet Exchange in the Trocadero and she’d already attracted the interest of the muscular blue-shirted staff, I found myself taking the silver seat next to her and asking,
“What site is that?”
“The bald guy. It’s a sex-tracker.”
“Aren’t you worried about getting in trouble?”
“Why?”
“You seem to be getting some dodgy looks.”
She swivelled round on her seat and looked at the man coming towards her. “Oh, shit,” she said, shutting the machine down, “it’s all right, I’m going.” I laughed. Picking up her stuff, she asked, “What’s your name?”
“Terry.”
“Have you got much to do, Terry?”
“Not really. Just checking my e-mails.”
“Well, I’m going to McDonald’s. Come join me for a drink when you’ve done.”
I didn’t say anything, instead tapping my password into the screen. Then I turned to check out her legs as she walked away.
Isobel was looking up porn at the Trocadero because her home computer was broken. Too concerned about the secret stash on her hard-drive to take it to a repair shop (we joked about how computer repairmen should sue Gary Glitter for lost income), she was waiting for her friend to come round and fix it. In the meantime she was using Internet cafés around London, although this was the first time she’d tried the Trocadero, and had only really done so because she’d come into town to buy some CDs.
Delicately, I tried to raise the subject of why she was looking up porn, which so far she’d failed to explain. She told me that she supplemented her income from working at the Royal Bank of Scotland by putting together a weekly guide to Internet porn-sites for a small list of subscribers. She explained how most men and women (or at least those who subscribed to her magazine) tended to have one special peccadillo. Often these were quite subtle, and hard to find through uneducated surfing. The broader, grosser tastes could be easily satisfied (there were a cornucopia of coprophilia pics, and almost any single sexual word typed into a search engine would send you straight to donkey-fucking), but it was surprisingly hard to find say, softcore photos of redheads with unshaven vaginas, or even naked men alone without erections.
Not that she was only into soft stuff. If you had appetites you were ashamed of, chances were you’d find something satisfying in Isobel’s cc’d catalogue. I didn’t want to seem prudish, so I told her that the service she was offering seemed a useful one. Then I mentioned an article I’d read in the problem page of Time Out New York about a gay man who was irritated because his boyfriend made him wank him off while he looked at pictures of amputees.
“Stumps, yes, that’s quite a common one.” She looked me in the eye. “But what about you, Terry? What are you into?”
“It’s stupid . . .”
“Everyone feels like that.”
“No, I don’t want to say, because it’s not something that has anything to do with me sexually really, I just like it in pictures.”
She smiled. “OK, Terry, I understand. How about I’ll tell you mine and you tell me yours?”
“That seems fair.”
“OK,” said Isobel, “I’m into dressed genitalia.”
“What?”
“You know, cunts with glasses placed on them so they look like Eric Morecambe. Cocks dressed up like Marilyn Monroe.”
I frowned, unsure whether she was winding me up. Until now, Isobel had seemed a completely normal woman. She was very attractive, with the kind of distinctive features that meant she didn’t have to worry too much about clothes or make-up, wearing today a pair of blue jeans and a smart blazer over a cream top. Her hair was brown, clean, and held back by a red Alice band. There was nothing about her appearance that suggested she’d be interested in Internet porn, still less that she got off looking at photographs of comedy cocks.
“Your turn.”
“OK, I’m going to tell you, but sorry, I do have to ask. Your fetish . . .is that a serious thing?”
“Yes. And it’s very popular. There’s lots of sites dedicated to it. Although it sort of crosses over into insertions.”
“Insertions?”
“Yes, you know, girls with bottles up their pussies or ice creams sticking out their backsides. A lot of the funny-face cunts actually cross over into insertions. Things like Winston Churchill, for example, because of the cigar.”
“Of course.”
“So . . .”
“Yes?”
“What are you into?”
“Socks.”
She nodded. “Any particular colour?”
“Oh, only one colour. Pink. I like pink socks. On beautiful American girls.”
“I see.”
“I don’t know why. I think it’s a whole eighties thing. I don’t really like magazine pornography that much, but when I moved into the flat I’m in now I found a whole stack of Knaves from the mid-eighties. I was in seventh heaven.”
“So you go for all that eighties stuff? Madonna gloves, and legwarmers?”
“I used to, but not any more. Now it’s just . . .”
“Socks.”
“Yes.”
We talked for the rest of the evening. I let slip that I was single early in the conversation, but Isobel retaliated by telling me how happy she was with her current boyfriend, Stephen. As it drew close to the time of my last tube, we swapped e-mail addresses and went home alone.
Three days later, I received an e-mail from Isobel. It told me I might like to check out a site called Butt Hutts. I typed the address into the server, and it took me to the usual page of disclaimers and a photograph of a small wooden shack. Butt Hutts was written in comic bubble-lettering, making the whole thing look like the video jacket of a Lemon Popsicle movie. With low expectations, I clicked on ENTER and waited to see what would come up.
The next graphic was a row of five huts. Each hut had a number above it but no description. Isobel’s e-mail had instructed me to check hut three so I clicked that one first. The screen shivered and the next picture was of three fully dressed women. Next to each girl wa
s their name and a small icon to click on. The girls pictured were called Amber, Candi and Helen, I clicked on Amber.
The next page was a full screen photograph of Amber. Dressed in a plain blue dress with the top two buttons undone, she had dyed red hair and a pair of sexy white boots. Beneath the photo was the following text:
Hi, my name’s Amber, and I live in Butt Hutt #3 with my friends Candi and Helen. If you’d like to see me take something off, stroke now (the mouse, silly.)
Disappointed, I clicked on the photo and it was replaced by a second one which showed Amber without her boots. I’d come across these sites before, and they were always incredibly frustrating, usually consisting of a series of pictures which led up to a final one of the girl topless but still wearing knickers, and a message telling you that if you wanted to see anything more you’d have to input your credit card details, either because it was a pay site or because it operated an AVS. Still, I clicked through the pictures, wanting to see why Isobel recommended it. I expected it was probably because one of these three butt hutt babes was wearing pink socks in one of the pics. It clearly wasn’t Amber, however, and after I’d got her down to her knickers I was about to move on, when, to my surprise, it seemed I could click again without resorting to a credit card.
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