I think I may have excised the riverbottoms from me, at least for a while.
I had to kill a boy first, metaphorically of course, erase him, conquer him, place his mouth inside my pocket.
Last night I promised myself I wouldn't go there. Stop. Just stop. I went for a long run after work and then visited my friend Tom to have dinner and drink wine.
We sat on his porch and smoked and sipped wine and talked at Walter Benjamin and Goytisolo.
I excused myself at ten pm.
By 10:15 I was at the bottom of the city's deepest vein, stepping over trunks of fallen elms sinking into the sand, flotsam, no barges this time, the farther bank of smooth granular lime, lit up by the cloud cover, orange, that reflected the downtown city lights from four miles away back at us like a lens, the wind smelled like reeds, the water smelled like warm bathwater. I stood on the bank and let the river ignore me for a while.
At first the place seemed empty. Though the reason I go there: purgatory, suspension in a colloidal, brain-death. I walk around and smoke cigarettes, walk slowly, sit on limestone bluffs and watch the old men inch their ways along the inside edge of the scabbard of the river like decrepit mountain goats, kicking stones down at times to ting of the rocks; I imagine them deep up in the bank, licking drops of spring water. Once I came across a Native American, long black hair, naked from head to toe except for a pair of hiking boots, flogging his shaved cock and drawing deeply from a small bowl of amyl; he was being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Here was the Gay Savage, attacking from the tops of the rocks, his cock like a cougar.
Escape myself. Stop being me, and therefore forgot about the writing projects I'm not working on, the fact that I am alone, the fact that work is not going so well. I guess others drink alcohol, or do meth. I just walk around the river and occasionally have sex. Sex plays its various roles in this ritual: object to be searched for, method of erasing the self, and finally the switch, the
petit mort that shuts off the ritual and allows me to become my banal self again. Here then is the progression....
- Searching, wandering, smoking, patterns, for hours and hours. Reject and be rejected, watch but don't touch, suspend the feeling for as long as possible, do not look yourself in the eye.
- Fill yourself with stimuli until you no longer exist. Cock in your face, inhale deeply, open your eyes wide, burn his imprint on your brain, mouth on your dick, suck down poppers until your brainpan blossoms into a throbbing bloodbath, the forehead breaks down, you are flowing into him and the river.
- When it is all over you must go home to your boring life and look at the empty white pages again and shower. Sleep alone.
For the past week or so this process has become a pathological compulsion. I've dropped off the face of the earth. Every day exists for the river. I nap after work, wake as the sun begins to go down, have a bite to eat, and head to the river where I will stay until I am exhausted.
Edmund White sometimes told me similar stories about his youth, during the pillow talk we would have that always bored me to death. He worked for Time Magazine or some such publication in Manhattan, and his days were boring. He often only had to write one caption a day. He would go home, sleep for several hours. Wake near midnight, eat a tomato and some cottage cheese, and then go cruising all night long down at the piers.
I think of Hampstead Heath and Derek Jarman, the many hundreds of men that crowded the woods near Jack Straw's Castle on the warm summer nights and the entrepreneurs who would arrive and sell coffee, drugs, sandwiches.
For my own part, I have seen strange things these past few days. A small speedboat moored in the middle of the river playing loud rap music. A wild turkey. A crazy old man cackling loudly through the bushes and muttering over and over, "all the high class gays are in Florida..." and the potential queer bashers and the man, passed out on the beach, who I thought was dead but was really just very drunk and sleeping it off in the balmy sand of the beach, like a Robinson Crusoe, washed up from the wreckage of sex. Then, just the colors on the river, the sights of men fucking among driftwood, chipmunks, mallards fighting. The quotidian beauty--I can't ignore that part of it.
As well, there is the subtext of the game of power, of rejecting and being rejected, of manouvering yourself among these circulating men to end up with the configuration that best suits you, which for me always involves power...I need to reject a few guys, push their hands roughly off of me, ignore them flat out. Deadpan across their ugly, old fattie faces, snigger to myself as they stumble along the steep paths, or walk away from them across some treacherous crevasse, and the laugh to myself when they can't follow me.
Of course the same happens to me, I am rejected too, and when I am the slight burns on me like a brand, like a razor slash, eyes like talons, liver devoured. Branded, ashamed, the curtains fall away from the play and innerworkings are revealed, the ropes and pulleys of insecurity and fear and compulsion whose machinations drive me. Then, I must seek revenge.
Last Sunday I noticed a cute boy wandering around the cruising area. He was wearing a baggy hoodie that had emblazoned on it the name of the local Catholic private college and he was wearing workout pants that swished as he walked. He was impossibly cute, about 21 or 22 years old, thick head of hair. He looked...privileged. The private Catholic school attire, the nice haircut, the youth...he seemed out of the league of the men here, white, rich, straight. Of course I had to have him. I had to inflict some kind of imaginary violence on him. I followed him, cruised him, moved in for the kill, and his forearms crossed in front his crotch and barred me. I retreated, wandered around, the queer bashers followed me and I took to carrying a large stone in my pocket; eventually I hid from them and they left muttering about 'freaks.'
At the bottom of the stairs, this young boy and his short, older, black male companion, passed me and headed up the long flight of stairs that takes you up from the river bank to a wide plateau between the river and the street. I followed them, gathering that they were about to leave.
Instead, the young man went straight up to these two old fucks, pulled down his track bottoms, and shoved his dick into the coupling, adding a third node to the circuit of two, juiced by lube.
I joined them eventually, and we were joined by others, and still more, until this young man was the center of attention, mouths of his dick (including mine, after a rush of poppers) and he just stood there, shirt lifted up to armpits, expressionless face, pants around his ankles.
Eventually someone got me off--the death I had been avoiding/seeking. I couldn't stay or do anything more. I had to leave and go home, shower and sleep, rejoin the banal and unfulfilling routines of my life.
Woke up and biked to work, pushed some papers around.
Oh, made some dinner for myself, bought some crackers.
Listening to some new bands...
All in the back of my mind, the boy haunting me...how he rejected me only to hook up with those ugly, nasty old men, how his lube-covered cock tasted in my mouth, how he never reached out to touch me and get me off.
I obsessed over him...was this his first time at the river? Who was he? What was he studying at the private Catholic college? Was he out? Did he have a boyfriend? What was he doing right now with that beautiful body of his?
I kept going back to the river all this week seeking out my revenge for the slight, someone to fuck in the face.
Last night I was back at the river and there he was with his short black friend. They passed me, walking quickly along the path, and he quickly made a detour and doubled back to me. My body flushed with power. He was waiting for me now. I approached them both and they took out their cocks and I took out mine. He remained soft for the entire exchange, as though he was high on meth, even as the crowd grew around us his dick remained flaccid but elongated, slightly cold to the touch, as though it were rubber through which he pumped saline.
But he was mine--last night I killed him, controlled him, got what I wanted from him to make up for Sunday night and all the nights that have come before or since and all the failed daily routines as well that have nothing to do with sex or getting sucked off but they all come back to power, lack of control. He wanted me, he moved in to me, grabbed my dick and felt up my chest and I felt him up and touched his ass and it was wet with lube, I slipped fingers up his ass and he moaned and then I did it again and he moaned more and I looked deeply into his eyes and noticed the lines of his face, the flaws, I DEVOURED the flaws and they are burned on my memory, as are his eyes when he met mine, and the loosness of his ass, in which I swirled my fingers like you widen the hole of a soft fruit, COREING it like yoou would an apple. And my face kissing his neck and biting his ears and then us making out, his jaws unhinged like a toothless cobra, giving me access to everything in his mouth, my tongue swabbing his teeth and lips and gums, rubbing the roof of his mouth and pushing his tongue out of the way to crawl deep into the back of his throat, down his esophagus, depositing the poison pill.
Others took up positions behind his ass; I let them. I was interested in his face and I needed him to do something to really set the balance back to zero, to really make up for everything going wrong in my life, and that is I needed him to suck my cock. He pushed off guys trying to bareback him but let them rub their cocks in the crack of his ass and he grabbed an elm and bent over double and bit my nipple and I pushed his head down farther until it made contact with my cock and he began sucking it. I felt such TRIUMPH. Then again, he sucked it some more and some more and then I came...his black friend, who was now completely naked except for his shoes and getting fucked roughly by an old white dude, reached out his hand and grabbed the cum shooting out of my dick like he was collecting it. What did he do with it? put it in his mouth or on his dick or in his pocket? I left them, I left that boy with dude's faces in his ass, falling over against tree, I didn't need him anymore, he was dead to me. I stepped away, lit a cigarette. Ben called my cell phone and I answered, told him about a fun house party this Saturday night...
