Care of the Self / Killing him

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....

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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...

Barges

Got home from work last night at six, immediately took a long nap. Woke up at 7:30, ate a banana, went out cruising at the river bottoms. No one around really, just fended off a few stragglers, sat on this log and smoked Camels and watched the barges ply the river. As they turned the corner their giant floodlights would alight the woods like the edge of a crime scene, like ground zero, and all the man sucking each other off were thrown into relief.

Got home at 11 pm, sexually frustrated, dick untouched, and jerked off. After I came I tried to sleep but couldn't. Got up and jerked off again.

Felt like Edmund White, or Huckleberry Finn, or this guy.

Recent phone sex acquisitions

This is Bjorn. He said he was originally from Scandinavia but for some reason is living in a Midwest red state. He did write in broken English to me, but that can be easily faked, as can this photo, which is so obviously not a Scandinavian boy and just look at that hair, so 1994. The grainy webcam quality of the image and the cheap pressboard in the background speaks of trailer-park faggotry and Fantastic Sam's two-dollah hair cut and the bitch said he was a top. He asked for my number so I gave him the phone number for the Tampa Police Department and told him to call in five minutes because I had to go get my dildo out of my older brother's bedroom and I also needed to do another bump. After about five minutes he started messaging me again and he was fire pissed. Said he was going to track me down and kill my muthfuckin faggot ass. I just LOLed at him a lot and then hit 'ignore.' I fucking hate Scandinavians.


Speaking of meth, while I was online someone from my hometown messaged me. Said he was high on meth and that his boyfriend was gone for a few days and even with his boyfriend there the dude doesn't get fucked enough and right now he just wanted a big fat dick in his hole. He sent me his photo and said he was the guy on the right. So we chatted a little bit. I said, 'you look like you like meth' and he took that as a compliment. He said he worked at the SuperAmerica near my apartment. So, let's meet up boy and I'll fuck your tight little boypussy I said and he was like, I'll bike down. We agreed to meet at this intersection at a bus stop beside a laundromat. I arrived early and sat across the street on this picnic tables outside a coffeeshop and I read a new age publication they distribute for free around town. I was reading about crystals when the dude shows up at the bus stop on his bike. He had brunette hair and was really scruffy. Maybe the photo was him from about four years ago but he looked like hell now. The meth had really carved holes in his face or maybe just the tears had eroded out his cheeks and the skin just hung on them like scruffy animal pelts. I got up and nonchalantly walked away. Now my friends and I go into SuperAmerica to buy cigarettes and they're all like, "which one is the methhead bottom boy" and I'll point to him behind the counter and say, "there's the bottom faggot." I was using a fake pic anyway so he never recognizes me.

On location

This post over at Land of the Bat reminds me of last Sunday*. I was on a giagantic bike ride and after about twenty miles or so I was parched. The city had not yet turned on the municipal drinking fountains. I bought some Gatorade and chugged it while walking around the cruising area in that one spot of the river bottoms. No leaves on the trees yet and with the bright hot sun it was like this arid desert, an elephant graveyard, and all the guys were just kind of wandering around in the bare sun and totally exposed.

I met this cute boy named Angel. He was latino, born in Texas but grew up in Mexico. Said he was bi and invited me to his friend's pool this summer.

We found a secluded spot and he was feeling me up. He said he had just come from work at a bindery and his crotch was smelly so he wouldn't let me take his dick out.

He was sucking me and we heard a crashing in the brush and he jumped up quickly but it was only a wild turkey lumbering around.

He was going down on me again when we heard more noises, only this time it was a big fat man wearing a tiny black bikini brief walking barefoot along the wet sand at the edge of the water, wildly scanning the opposite shore.

Angel gave me his phone number and made me promise to call him.

*except mine really happened

Bar close

It's after two am, and I really should be in bed.

The bars are closing, and through the open windows I hear people shouting in each other's ears as they walk down the sidewalks.

Not that anyone is listening.

I'm just typing to myself.

Sometimes I go through these periods where I feel like my life is completely out of control.

Like there is this dynamo inside me, a strange machine. And when it gets switched on (the location of the switch is mysterious, and constantly changing) then I'm powerless to switch it off and I just have to go along for the ride until the turbines wind down the ironworks grind to a halt.

Then I might have a few days' respite.

It's fueled by porn and poppers.

Often it's like revving a car and spinning the wheels with the clutch out--gears grind away and produce a smell of distressed metal.

This weekend I let the machine carry me to the riverbottoms, where the men go to cruise. I was there on Saturday night for about four hours, on Sunday afternoon for about two hours, and on Sunday night for about two hours.

It just felt so good.

So anonymous.

It was the good old times.

Like when I used to spend hours in that park in London, cruising...all night long sometimes.

Just wandering in circles, smoking cigarettes.

Hours and hours.

Not that I would actually orgasm--that's saved for the end. The bottle of poppers, until the last cigarette has been smoked.

Nah, it's just in the wandering, circulating, exhausting my body, running it down the drain until I am forced to cum and then fall into bed, freshly showered, my lower back aching, my lungs ashed, my nose flaming from the amyl, my dick a bit raw.

Someone please castrate me.

Je suis geryon

I just discovered that I write exactly like Anne Carson. Not her practice per se which includes a house stripped of furniture in Michigan and a summer off from teaching.

But read Autobiography of Red and you'll see what I mean.


Learned about the nesting rooms of the world at an early stage.

His mother left him at the doors of the school bus, that opened like those of silently-still observed clams at low tide.

From then on, the ride to school and the walk to the front doors, he was alone.

He wasn't stupid; he knew to stay silent.

It was early fall and as he walked toward the school the summer before turned red in his mind, and then brown like a leaf that is melting under frost.

The optics of the school--the windows--through them he saw the struggles of children fighting over paste.

He kept his hands in his pockets and took one last look at the world around him before entering school. Miles of blackboards stretched down the road where they had been planted in their wooden legs in cement and the wind caused some of them on looser spigots to twirl like windmills, revealing logical fallacies on the opposite sides as they blew in circles. Then, further off, the fields of desks, as far as he could see, ending where a barn broke up into the horizo like a black scab, and some of the desks were glistening in the sun from the water that the automatic irrigation system had just passed over them in a wand that looked to him like fairy dust.

The giant legs of first graders came down among the rows and rows of desks, and their books fell like avalanches. The air grew ashy with dust and the smell of burning book-ink.

He entered the school, which had the affect of swinging back on a swingset so that the ground and sky switch places and one experiences the vertigo of the little birds who fly to high toward the sun--the rooms were carpeted in moss and empty of people. He walked toward a stream flowing down the hall, his crawfish bucket in his hand...

Speech

Jacques Nolot in Porn Theatre. He is a gay man chatting with the woman who takes tickets for the porno theater in Paris:

no one wants to hear what you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them

I slept incredibly well last night because the suburban boy came over and we fucked a couple times on my bed. Kid's so fucking precocious I can't believe it. He works at a tanning salon and is going to get me a free unlimited month-long pass, natch.

Probably because I was thinking about highschool as I fell asleep (and what I pussy I was in highschool) I had this fucked-up dream.

The dream took place in this giant hotel/convention center kind of a place, perhaps a rearticulation of the choir trips I'd go on as a highschool kid, you know, to other cities in the spring, staying at large hotels and riding elevators around, smoking pot out of pop cans, kids mostly unsupervised, fucking each other but never me.

Three bullies bullied me in an elevator. And weirdest of all in the dream, one of the bullies, the hottest one (though he didn't look like anyone I knew, just a kind of skinny hick with a mean, sharp face and short blond hair) took a shit in the elevator. In the dream I got scared, you know, its intimidating when someone takes a shit in the elevator you are riding in. All the boys laughed at him and at me, the smell filled the small carriage and made me want to puke. The boy took a piece of paper towel from his pocket and wiped his ass and the doors opened and we all exited, me quickly, ahead of the boys. The boy who shit ran up in front of me with the shitty paper towel and tried to hold it in front of my face and this is when the fantasy set in, because I grabbed his arm and twisted it and took the paper towel and shoved it in his fucking mouth. I shoved his own shitty ass-towel in his mouth.

I gained their respect after that. And rather than retaliate, the boy became this little submissive bitch around me. Like, later on we had a conversation where he called me a name and I said, "how did your own shit taste, you fucker?" and then I was like, "maybe I should kick your ass again," and he quickly replied, "maybe you should fuck it?" and in my dream-mind I was like, ooooh ya.

I woke up this morning with a big erection but I never got to fuck this elevator-shitter's shitty ass. At first I was disappointed as I frottaged with the bed after I hit the snooze alarm but then I remember...I fucked ass twice last night--for real! And I felt better.

Okay, so I spent the last hour of work yesterday fine-tuning my email to Shy. Here's what I finally came up with:

> Hi Shy,
>
>
> I hope this note finds you well and enjoying a nice spring.
>
> I know it's a ways away, but I'll be in town the week of May 22-28
> and I'd like to see you. Will you be around?
>
>... me


And guess what? He quickly replied saying he wants to hang out with me! Today, I'll spend several hours booking flights. It's a good day! Hot out, I'm waring capris, booking flights, half-day at work, and today is the day Jesus is killed! Hoorah.

flights of fancy

I am totally crushing on a guy.

First, consider the unique alignment of events that have made this possible. A few weeks ago I moved into a new apartment; the move was precipitated by months and months of hellishly living in hellish living conditions. Construction all around me, deadbeat landlords fucking around, breaking the lease, and then the compounded stress of looking for a new apartment and then moving. I'm happy to say I'm in a great new apartment, thank you very much. But it came with a cost. Though distance-wise its the shortest I've ever had to move (four blocks) it's taken the longest amount of time...moving all my shit into a truck on one evening, leaving the truck parked out on the street containing my entire life for two nights, and then moving into my new place.

Also, consider that work has finally slackened off a little bit and I have some more mind-space available, now that work and moving aren't taking up too much room, to think about things.

Also consider that it is spring, and a boy tends to get randy at this time of year.

I dunno, it's about driving with the windows down, long hot afternoons napping and frottaging with the pillow, bare calves, skateboarders, body odors...I'm in lust with the world.

And I don't just want to do you, I want to hold you in my arms and make you pancakes and do you again and then take you out shopping and buy you furs and diamonds.

Back in March, I was out of town for work, attending panels and having meetings with prospective "clients." I had been email corresponding with this one guy, we'll call him Shy, because, well, he is. Shy and I had corresponded, shared some stories about living in the same town, studying in the same department, a few years apart, etc.

I met him in the hotel lobby--he looked cute, and was dressed down unlike everyone else, in a Belle & Sebastian t-shirt. We had serious business to discuss over our drink, and I asked him to recommend a place--any place other than the hotel bar. He had no ideas, so I casually asked, "do you want to go to the leather bar?"

He broke out in a smile and said that yes we would really like that, so we had our meeting at the leather bar, which was a riot, and actually we spent most of the time just getting to know each other. Soon after I started crushing on this boy, dimply, a little shorter than me, sharp as a tack and witty as well.

But he lives in NYC and I live here.

I keep thinking about him, and I know its flights of fancy that prompted me to massage my grapevine and get some dish on him...a friend of a friend casually asked him what he thought of me, and the answer I got back raised the hope that indeed, he may be crushing on me a little bit.

So what am I doing about it?

I'm booking a flight to New York City.

Not entirely a flight of fancy. I have a good friend in D.C. so I am going there first, and my best buddy, Marcus Aurelieus, lives in New York City, so I'll see him and stay with him and that's really why I'm going. But yeah, I'm totally going to email Shy and ask him to hang out with me while I'm there.

Why not? I have a lot of available credit on my credit card. I have the vacation days. And I have friends that I can fall back on. But living in this town, doing what I do, I rarely meet someone that right of the bat gives makes me lust for his body and his mind at the same time. I have to see where this might go.

God is in the kitties

Ides of April

* Spring in my city. One of the many reasons why I love living in the city of ________; yesterday, riding my bus through the center of town on the way home, a cute, normal boy in the back was whistling out the window at other cute boys on the sidwalks.

* Smoking. I feel like shit this morning from smoking several cigarettes last night...my goal is to quit smoking (again) on May 1st.

* What my therapist has to say. I need to draw up two big signs and hang them above my computer. The first sign should say, "DO YOU REALLY FEEL SEXUAL DESIRE?" and the second sign should say, "IT WON'T BE PERFECT THE FIRST TIME."

Mattering that matters

A good friend of mine found out this weekend that his ex (a man he had lived with for over fifteen years and who he was close to despite the fact that they were no longer 'together') had committed himself to a Maryland mental institution.

My friend went to visit him this weekend and it was sad of course...he sent back a long report that ended with,

I went out the door and along the narrow sidewalk to the distant parking lot. The building entrance faces west, and the sun had just gone below the horizon and the light after the rain was soft. The institution with its patients and attendants was behind me, and not a single person was visible. Walking alone, I had a feeling of
the greatest bleakness I have ever experienced. I felt like there was
nothing anywhere that mattered or had any significance to me. My outlook is
generally bleak, but this was different, and I wonder if it will be like
this from now on.

Driving out of the hospital grounds, there's an small upscale shopping
center. It has a Chipotle, and I thought about going in for a burrito but
didn't. There was a Starbucks, naturally, so I went in and got coffee and
drank it as I drove home. By the time I got home it was dark, with stars
unusually clear after the rain, and far away.

At the same time that I felt for my friend's aloneness, I could nonetheless recognize the universality of the feeling...I've felt it myself, often at the moment of the petit mort, when the boy beneath you, who had up until that very second seemed impossible close, flesh of your flesh, suddenly feels, as the serotonin drains away, impossibly far removed from you, or on certain buses heading south in London at five in the morning after being out all night in parks cruising, or perhaps alone in my apartment, you know, just pacing about, waiting for the noodles to boil so I can make some mac and cheese.

For me though, it is an awareness that while things matter to me, that connection doesn't matter. In other words, it doesn't matter that things matter. Usually I'm okay with that, although being the atheist that I am, I'm aware (and here the chasm yawns) that upon my death, the mattering won't even matter to me. It's less than a pauper could eat on, the mattering that doesn't matter to anyone else but me.

Laying on of hands

I walked outside and it was suddenly April.

Millions of snow fleas flitted in the last snowbanks, almost invisible among the crusts of dirt.

Dog shit washed away.

It is raining now and from that we'll be thinking of tulips and wondering how much earlier tomorrow the sun will creep across the windowsill.

I returned home, feeling not quite right, as though something that had been diffuse through my whole body, an armada of toxins and viruses, had coalesced somewhere deep inside of me.

Oprah was on t.v.; I tried to concentrate; force down some potato salad.

Suddenly it was all up over the front of my shirt, pooling in the bib, I unlocked the cuffs so I could try to stumble to the toilet but the puke came out of me like a gun firing, pooling on the wood floors, creeping into the cracks.

Sweat beaded and fell, beaded and fell.

A lump rose in my throat, the gorge pushed up like a geyser, a giant blockage.

I laid on the ground giving birth to something horrible.

My esophagus milked it up out of me and it landed in my throat--hot and textured, a small fist in my mouth, the texture of it was like shit or a living thing, a mouse squiggling between my teeth, the very feeling made me dizzy.

I spit it out onto the floor and it laid there.

A pellet about four inches long and two inches wide, deep brownish-red, like coffeegrounds or bloody stool.

Poking at it with a fork I noticed patches of fur, bits of broken beak, liverish material that shined like an eye.