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From: Matt Huang <Shadowarbiter@aol.com>
Subject: Thought of the day
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Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2004 21:39:17 +0100
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===================
My boyfriend, Brad, always spoils our love-making by going
berserk at the end. I like the pleasure of sexual union to spread
deeply through every crevice of my being, like the mysterious smell of
incense permeating every room in a quiet house. Just as incense makes
familiar, worn-out places seem exotic and imaginatively alive, the
sensual rhythms of love make the body ripple with newness, feel
freshly created, closer to everything, seen or unseen.
But Brad doesn't want any of this. He just wants to thrash
like an animal dying wildly in a steel-fanged trap. He wants his eyes
to bulge and his chest to heave; wants to feel his loins go seismic, his
mind shatter into sparks and smoke, his voice wear away to a sandpaper
bugle.
He wants to die frying in the electric pussy.
But this isn't me at all. I'm not the glittering slut-queen
of Babylon; I'm the woodland nymph, bedding in ferns, dining on
baby mushrooms, shy even at the sight of racing squirrels.
"That's a load of crap!" Brad belched when I tried to explain
this to him. "You're as timid as a brain tumor devouring the cortex
of a rotting hobo. Christ, I mean, most people need to take angel dust
to get as surly as you."
He was lying when he said this. When I was a child I used to
think I was made of delicately folded tissue paper. I really thought
this; I thought I was a paper doll crafted by a laconic, lonely widow
who never had children. Somehow I had been kidnapped by my imposter
parents then forced to pretend that I was a resilient, growing creature
who toughened up under adversity and learned, rather than shredded,
under stress. Self-protective, clever, strong enough for a randomly
vicious society and an impassively stampeding race. Yet the thrust of
time just mangled me, crumpled me up, discarded me into the spongy
safety of my inner fantasy worlds.
I was a ballerina who accidentally twirled into the midst of
a street-gang.
"Yo, give a crack pipe and a pistol to the girl with the frilly
skirt."
"Look at them hazy eyes, man. Shit, she already high."
"Ballerina?" Brad mocked me delightedly. "You're as graceful
as an elephant on ostrich legs."
The thing is, the whole world had this perception of me. And
when everyone seems unanimous in misunderstanding you, you start to
wonder if it isn't you who's making the misunderstanding. Or at least
you do if you're a fragile paper doll.
But to get back to Brad's atomic love-bomb thrust-o manic
brain-pop approach to lovemaking: my real problem with it was that I
wanted my love to have a stilling effect; I wanted my affection to sooth
like a honeyed melody, to charm to life the quiet, delightful side of
my boyfriends, re-awaken the playful, tender little boy in them.
"You want to kill me, dammit." Brad had weird interpretations
of the things that I said. "You want your pussy to be a deadly weapon,
a frightful tool of domination. Like most women, you're silently
furious at your own frailty, and want nothing more than to conquer,
crush, demolish all life -- especially male life. Like most women,
since you have the capacity to give life, you think you should also
be able to destroy life. Well, I think that really sucks."
Brad accused of really being a passion-crazed berserko when
it came to sex. I think he was just projecting; trying to make
his propensity for carnal frenzy seem less weird by saying that it
was really, deep down inside, what I wanted as well.
"You're not comfortable with your own sexuality. That's
the real issue. You're afraid where it'll take you if you let go
of the reins."
The first time Brad met my parents was at a big family picnic in
Griffith Park. We were all gathered at an enormous picnic table, really
nicely done by my aunt. We had all brought foods -- hamburgers, steak,
chicken, a glorious array of salads, a zillions kinds of chips, all
imaginable shapes and colors -- and during one of the few silent moments,
one of those odd synchronous breaks in all of the conversations going on
simultaneously, Brad said through a mouthful of potato salad, "You know,
this tastes exactly like clitoris."
The silence held. My mother looked over at me, her mind
set like Jello. I could feel her struggling not to cry.
That night, me, Brad, my older (by one year) sister Kim, her
boyfriend -- an extremely polite Jehovah's Witness guy in his early
forties -- and our two cousins Joe and Mark and their friend Pam,
who seemed to be dating both of them, all went camping in the hills
around an old, grafitti-covered watertank just east of the Hollywood
sign. The terrain was very
rocky, with lots of dense, crunching shrubs and tall, dry grass.
Patches of wild sage and other herbs that we couldn't identify to
made the air smell very mysteriously perfumed, rich, and wild. Every
few minutes Brad howled like a wolf, and as the sun began to set he
ripped off his shirt and began running in circles around our campsite.
"Is this normal for him?" Pam asked.
"No," I said. "He doesn't get out of doors very much."
"I have to say I love his energy," she said dreamily.
Martin, the Jehovah's Witness guy, sat with my sister under
a tree reading from the Bible. Our two cousins heaped sticks on an
old fire spot encircled by round rocks, though we had already
determined that none of us had matches or a lighter.
"Is he a maniac in bed?" She asked.
"Depends on what you mean by maniac, exactly."
"Does he use his feet?"
I called to my cousins, telling them I'd found some more
sticks for them.
"The soul speaks through every part of the human form," Pam
said in the eerie, remote voice of something disembodied, "And sex
is the cry of the soul in a forest of accumulated un-desire."
The cousins began fighting over the best way to arrange the
sticks. One of them threw a branch in anger.
Martin and my sister stood up facing the sunset, reciting the
Lord's prayer in deep, resolute voices. Brad raced around us in
narrowing loops, his howl hoarse and shrill, his feet now bare.
"Sex turns no one back," Pam said, stroking her hair. "It is
the only way into the dark waters of the soul."
When Brad simmered down and came back to the camp, he was
wearing an old jacket he had found in the bushes. He pulled something
from one of its pockets and began eating it.
"Next," he said with his mouth full, his narrow eyes set
on my forehead, "Next I devour you."
My sister gulped.
"The Lord will protect us from this sick man," Martin
assured her quietly, petting her clasped hands.
We had brought sleeping bags with us. Martin didn't share
one with my sister; he slept on a wool blanket on an old road
winding around the hill, its tarmac cracked into discrete slabs,
weeds sprouting from the cracks. His Bible lay open beside his head,
its print illuminated by the moon and the stars.
One of the cousins slept with Pam for the first part of the
night while the other continued reorganizing the stacked branches,
muttering quietly to himself, occasionally tossing branches into the
shrubs surrounding the camp in a hurt, frustrated gesture. Later I
woke up and saw the other cousin there, lying asleep beside the
unlit heap.
Pam seemed to enjoy hearing her voice cry out in the
night, echoing against the hills. It seemed to heighten her sexual
excitement to hear herself crying out like an animal.
"No," I said to Brad, pulling away from him and trying to zip
up my sleeping bag to keep him out.
"Lady," he said angrily, "We are the last survivors of a
nuclear halocaust. The future of the race depends upon our
reproductive strength, our courage to face sex as something more than
mere pleasure. We have a job to do, and we must do it selflessly."
The moon swelled above our camp, looking both icy and hot,
pregnant with the glow of the sleeping sun. The mountains ached with
the echoes of Pam's passionate love-cries, and drew back from my
clamp-jawed silence.
When I woke up from a long, dreamless sleep, the cousins
were gone. Martin was jogging in place, reading the Bible. Kim was
folding up bedding. Pam was sunbathing nude in the golden morning
light, answering "meow" like a cat whenever anyone said anything to
her.
We left Brad, still sleeping, alone on the hill.
As I drove out of the park back to my apartment in Glendale,
I remembered seeing a "CAUTION: RATTLESNAKES" sign at the head of
one of the trails.
I had recently heard radio news reports about scorpions
being found down in Long Beach. Tiny, pale, fragile ones that
would surely have gone extinct long ago were it not for their
highly concentrated venom, their spring-like stinger-tails. Radio
anchors speculated about them marching north to the city through
roadside dust.
Africanized bees had been spotted on the fringes of Los
Angeles county several times in the past three months; a long
awaited intruder, madly aggressive, darkly swarming. Humming nets
of pain that pursued people tirelessly, even to their own death.
For a couple of weeks I wondered. Once or twice I began
driving back to Griffith Park to search the hills, to call out and
listen to the echoes of his name, but I always stopped at 7-11 and
bought a Slurpee instead.
As far as I know, Brad never came out of the park. He may
have gone completely feral. I imagined him eating leaves and
gnawing on roots. Masturbating in the moonlight. Capturing errant
dogs. Concealed behind bushes, a muddy-faced, crazy-haired,
menacing clown. Gazing down from the hills at the city surrounding
the park, increasingly beffudled by the sight of civilized dwellings.
I didn't miss him, actually, because it turned out he really
wasn't very unique. My next boyfriend, who I habitually called
Brad even though his name was Bob, had the same propensity for rude
physiological detonations. A seismic fault through his spine, it
seemed. Madness lurking like a speck of shadow in the nuclei of all
his living cells.
It wasn't just sex with him, though, so I suppose he was even
worse than Brad. Whenever he finished anything at all, he had to go
through some sick little ritual of finality. A mini-funeral for
finishing a meal (leaning back, patting his boulder-like stomach,
groaning with exaggerated pleasure), or
losing a video game (stooping down over the controls, cursing,
lightly pounding his hands against the machine), or
ending a telephone conversation (summarizing the most irrelevant
parts of the conversation, proclaiming his enthusiasm about our next
date, thanking me for my time, spewing assurances of his love), or
completing whatever he was doing in my bathroom (looking me dead
in the eye then declaring, "Okay, I'm all done in there. It's all yours.
I didn't leave a mess, I promise. You have nice soap, by the way."), or
celebrating victories by his favorite hockey teams (driving along
the Golden Sand freeway late at night firing what he called his "pet
revolver" out the window at the sky).
It was like every time anything ended, no matter how trivial,
it reminded him somehow of his own eventual death. To sweep every
trace of death thinking out of his mind he had to perform a ritual
cleansing.
Sometimes, of course, his moronic little performances were
quite dramatic. On the afternoon that he finished filling out his tax
returns, he bought a pair of doves to celebrate and let them go in
his car.
"What the hell are you doing?" I demanded.
"I'll let them live in here. It's like a zoo on wheels now."
"What the fuck?"
"I figure I'll get about forty dollars back from the I.R.S., so
why not spend the money promoting life?"
Eventually the birds suffocated in his car, and he pretended
not to notice. For weeks he continued talking sweetly to the dead bird
on the dashboard, continued breathing the noissome bacterial vapors.
Bob got so whacky I had to see a psychiatrist to deal with his
problems. The shrink, whose name was Thelma Rheinquist, M.D., mostly
just blabbed about how I was having trouble imposing my affective
language on the men I was allowing to take advantage of my dependencies
on the male archetype within my own sub-psyche, and recommended that I
start taking either Prozac and Xanax, or Zoloft and Trilafon, or
Thorazine and Imipramine, or any quadrupling thereof. I found my
discussions with her cold and ridiculously cognitive, but she dressed so
well that it seemed worthwhile just to make mental notes about her
attire.
Bob liked to work on jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes he had trouble
sleeping, and instead of reading, or watching television, exercising, or
masturbating, he would go into the livingroom to work on puzzles. One
of the puzzles was a large, blank white rectangle.
"It has no picture on it," I pointed out.
"That's what makes it challenging."
One evening I found him working on it with the lights out;
feeling the edges of the pieces with the tips of his fingers.
"I was going to say that'll drive you insane, but..."
"I know what you're going to say."
"You're already crazy."
"If I finish it, I'll be enlightened. Insanity means nothing
to the enlightened. You see, the universe is a jigsaw puzzle designed
by god and pieced together by his angels. In mastering jigsaw puzzles,
you learn the underlying structure to the divine scheme of the
universe. `Sane' is a code-work in our militaristic society for
`harmless.' The question is, if `insane' means harmful, what sort of
harmfulness is it? Harmful to what, exactly?"
When he finally finished this puzzle, he insisted on taking
me out to dinner to celebrate.
"I'm enlightened now," he said, honking his horn at another
driver who hadn't done anything, then flipping him off. "Omniscient,
you know? I could drive with a blindfold over my eyes; I could drive on
the wrong side of the freeway, dodging opposing traffic. I could pilot
an airplane from here to Moscow, even though I've never flown before."
"Because you finished a jogsaw puzzle."
"Because I've touched my seeing fingers on the braille in which
God wrote the instruction manual of the universe."
"In a jigsaw puzzle."
"I have lain my head on God's chest, right above his heart,
heart the patter-patter-thump, patter-patter-thump of the loving
heart of God. Listened to it. Grasped its meaning. Incredible.
Totally incredible."
At the restaurant, he yelled at the waitress because she tried
to give us a seat in the middle of the room instead of a booth by the
window. Finally she relented.
"This view," he said, "Enchants me."
"You didn't have to scream at her."
"This is a view of the labratory of social kindness. Everything
is, when you've risen up to saintly intimacy with the handiwork of
God."
Bob insisted on ordering a whole candied chicken, though this
wasn't on the menu, insisting to the waitress, "Look, I'm entitled to it;
I have figured out things about the universe that you will never, no
matter how many times you're reincarnated, discover. Ha! Unless you're
reincarnated as a candied chicken."
He didn't speak at all while we waited for the food, but stared
with a look of critical curiosity at the people walking past the window.
I wasn't interested in provoking further maniacal outbursts from him, so
rather than attempt conversation I took out a sheet of graph paper and
began creating a cross-word puzzle of obscenities (this was my latest
hobby), and didn't look up until our food arrived.
They brought a whole roast chicken for Bob, a darkly glistening
lump that smelled like maple syrup, which he attacked with his saliva and
his fork, stripping off all the skin which he stuffed like stained paper
into his mouth. When he had stripped the chicken naked, he put his fork
down and began staring out the window again.
As we left the restaurant, he complained weakly of feeling sick,
then announced: "My former life has come to an end. It's a new chapter
for me. You know what I mean? Things are turning. I'm a new person.
I'm not sure you know how to deal with this, girlfriend."
That night when we had sex, right as he ejaculated, he shot
himself in the head with his pet revolver. This had a pretty big impact
on me, at least from an emotional point of view, because for a long time
I thought that his deadness (he was still inside me sexually when he
croaked) entered my psyche. I have no illusions about death being a
sexually transmitted disease in itself, as opposed to the climax of
some S.T.D.'s, but I certainly didn't want a big fat smudge on my
life-force. So I fired my psychiatrist and went to a psychic for regular
soul-cleansing.
I invoked spirits from other planets and other planes; some
soon to be incarnated in human form, some descended from the kind of
fungus that lives on stellar light; I absorbed the energy of crystals,
some material, some ethereal; I conversed with the quasi-sentient
vestiges of pre-human earthly civilizations; I embraced the consciousness
of a race of musical notes that breeds only with instruments of fire.
And then I met Larry.
I met him in the produce section of Verna's supermarket.
Verna's fruit is arranged in precarious pyramids with the most rotten
ones at the apex, and all of the others essentially inaccessible unless
you were willing to risk upsetting the balance and triggering an
avalanche. I considered this arrangement unfair, deliberately designed
to frighten people out of buying the healthy fruit for fear of
embarrassing themselves by making a mess. They cunningly forced you to
buy the rotten fruit. Other, less penny-pinching markets would just
throw that crap right into the trash. So I found the most luscious,
pristine looking apple at the very base of the pyramid and yanked it
from its former branch mates. Apples bounced against my ankles, swarmed
in a widening circle around me like fat, blushing, legless rats, dove
under the wheels of other shoppers' carts.
People were staring. Some horrified at what they were
witnessing, with a "You selfish bitch" look. Others smiled, admiring
me, always having been too fearful to do what I did.
A little girl standing near me was looking up with confusion,
anxiety.
"Nice going, you clumsy twit!" I yelled at her. "Try being
more careful next time."
Within five seconds of the apple debacle -- I swear, within
five seconds -- as if he could feel the shock of the fruit hitting the
floor like a blow to the overall life energy of the supermarket, or as
if viewing the accident with an invisible omniscient eye, the manager
spoke over the P.A.:
"Clean up in produce. Clean up: produce."
Then a man began scampering around my feet like a frenzied
worshipper, stooped, his face bright with concern, gathering the apples
from the floor in a plastic basket, then with lightning speed replacing
them in on the metal stand. At first I thought he was an employee.
"Don't worry, it happens to everyone," he said at the level of
my knees, gathering more broken-skinned fruit from the disinfected floor.
"That's nice of you."
"Oh, no. It's nothing."
Larry was just like that. Lovingly picking up the apples I'd
knocked over in a fit of resentment, and grateful to do it for me. He
would've picked up three million of them if I had spilled that many,
would've spent the rest of the year doing it.
For me. A stranger.
"I like to really stretch courtship out," he told me on our first
date. "I mean, why rush? Savor every moment, every tiny leap in
affection, every new petal that unfolds from the blossoming love. Do
you tend to share that view?"
"But do you...I mean, what's your view on sex? How do you like
it? Really frantic and wild, feverish and stormy?"
"Oh, heavens, no. I like it to be like a slow vitamin drip
into my soul. Sex should nourish, not exhaust."
The first few times we were intimate, we didn't even sleep in the
same bed. He brought an old sleeping bag out of his closet and unrolled
it on the floor. Instead of touching each other, we fondled symbols of
each other. He gave me a transparent crystal ball the size of an apple,
and I gave him a simple, round cup made of amethyst, or whatever sort of
crystal it was. I dunno, maybe just glass. Anyway, we lay in our
respective beds and silently stroked the symbols: I rubbed his ball, and
he carressed the interior of my cup. Once in a while one or both of us
gasped, or moaned.
After a few dates he began licking my empty cup, and this worried
me a little, but after about an hour of doing it he fell asleep. I
walked over and put his ball in my cup, which he was still grasping
in his slender, hairless fingers. The next morning he told me he'd
felt more closeness with me the night before than he'd ever felt with a
woman before.
Larry came into my life at a time when I had all but given up
on men because they were so demented and animalistic. Everything seems
so bloody urgent for men; it's like they consider their genitals an
endangered species and must, absolutely must, use them to maxiumum
capacity while they're still hanging around.
But Larry was not afflicted by the usual masculine insanity.
He once told me: "I wish I were just a little one-celled
bacteria living in your intestines."
He wanted me to be the world for him. The sun, the ocean,
the nighttime sky, the majestic mountains rising through the swelling,
wandering, struggling human hoards.
"Darling," he said once, his tongue a little swollen from
licking the cup for four hours, his teeth getting a little loose from
accidentally biting down on it, "I wish I were a hair on your body.
A flec of dandruff on your scalp. A bug on the ground for you to stomp
on. I wish I were one of those apples, perishing from your omnipotent
touch."
With Larry, everything seemed like a beginning.