The Naughty Bits (19 page)

The poem below demonstrates why Sappho’s name is still known to us today. For indeed she was justified when she wrote to one of her lovers, “Take this to heart: In the future / we will be remembered . . .”

He who sits in your presence,
Listening close to your sweet speech and laughter,
Is, in my esteem, yet luckier than the gods.
The thought makes my heart aflutter in my breast.
For even seeing you but briefly,
I lose what words I had;
My tongue finds not a sound;
My eyes fail to see, my ears set to ring;
A fire runs beneath my skin;
Sweat pores from me and a trembling takes my body whole.
I am paler than summer-burned grass, and, in my madness
I fear that I too may die.
And yet, I’ll dare it. Just a little more!

—translated by Henry Thaston Wharton,
modified by Jack Murnighan

from
Neuromancer

WILLIAM GIBSON

Soon after its 1984 publication, William Gibson’s
Neuromancer
emerged as the defining novel of the virtual age not only by coining the term
cyberspace,
but also by generating enormous buzz around the still-nascent cyberculture. Gibson’s timing and tack were perfect: using a sci-fi story line in an ultravivid near future, he managed, years before the emergence of the World Wide Web, to crystallize an image of interface technology as a potentially traversable habitat, thus establishing himself as both prophet and pundit of a techno-society in the first throes of a major transformation.

But not only does
Neuromancer
have its thumb on the pulse of late-century Zeitgeist, it is also one of the slickest books of science fiction ever. Winning the triple crown of sci-fi awards (the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick), it made Gibson an instant household name. Not bad for a first novel.

The world Gibson creates in
Neuromancer
is an all too convincing dystopia, and not even sex remains unaffected. The steamy scene below involves
Neuromancer
’s two main characters: Case, a burned-out cyberspace hacker, and his bodyguard, Molly the “razorgirl,” so-designated for the four-inch retractable blades concealed beneath her fingernails. She’s a real bad-ass who beats people up for fun and sports sunglasses surgically inset in her head, but she has a bit of a soft spot for Case (most convenient for film adaptation). The selection is a nice example of Gibson’s precision with detail; in a coffin motel in Chiba City we will witness both the pitfalls of sex with cyborgs and a hallucinatory image of the orgasm of the future.

He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back, kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.

“How come you’re not at the Hilton?”

She answered by reaching back, between his thighs, and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden against the temperfoam.

His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down . . . She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. “Don’t,” she said, “fingerprints.”

Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips.

from
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

MARK LEYNER

Mark Leyner’s
My Cousin, My
Gastroenterologist,
was one of the favorite books of my now-Mesozoic college days. Although all my friends were striving to develop sophisticated,
New
Republic
–y prose styles, I was still lapping up Leyner’s playful indulgence as the alpha and omega of good writing. Now, a decade later, as the first grays start to insinuate themselves in my Etonian coif, I occasionally still find myself reading
Gastroenterologist
and doubling over with laughter.

The selection below is classic: it’s the one I always read out loud to my friends to turn them on to the book. Now all I have to do is say the opening words, “Hello Mark. This is Elizabeth Hurlick,” and I get immediate laughs. As a whole,
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
suffers from having too many discontinuous one-liners and not enough glue; in this passage, however, Leyner stays focused and harnesses the full force of his wit. Enjoy, then, this heady shot of Leyner: he’s a rush like no other.

Hello Mark. This is Elizabeth Hurlick. I’m one of Trudy’s friends from school. Trudy asked me to call and tell you that when she gets home from work she’s going to want to make love tout de suite and then eat ’cause she’s got an early squash practice so she wants you to . . . put the chicken in the oven . . . run a hot bath . . . and soak in the tub for a while . . . She said that while you’re in the tub you should masturbate almost to the point of orgasm and stop and that way you’ll have a more copious ejaculation later when you have sex with Trudy because Trudy says you have to propitiate the squash god and the squash god is in the mood for a really super-copious ejaculation, and she said to tell you that . . . she doesn’t want you to use any deodorant under your arms because when you’re having sex she wants you to smell kind of macho sort of raunchy kind of ruggedly homo sapien kind of rural and she wants you to wait for her wearing the . . . red kimono . . . and when she comes through the door . . . you should nonchalantly let your kimono fall open so your meat sort of pokes out, and then she wants you to lift her skirt up and take her underpants off and rub your knuckles up and down her perineum, if you’re writing this down that’s p-e-r-i-n-e-u-m . . . I hope you don’t mind me leaving this sort of intimate personal message on your answering machine, but I’m a really really good friend of Trudy’s and Trudy’s told me all about you and I hope we can all get together sometime . . . Trudy says you’re creepy in a sort of attractive way and that sounds fun.

from
The Book of Margery Kempe

MARGERY KEMPE

Margery Kempe, born around 1373, is among the most famous and important of medieval English mystics. Her
Book
is the first autobiography written in English and one of the earliest works in English by a woman. It recounts her long and variegated life, first as a wife and mother of fourteen children, then as a religious mystic and pilgrim who communed with the Lord, wept uncontrollably, and wore the white habit of a virgin (despite the kids).

The excerpt from Margery’s
Book
presents a familiar situation: a wife denying her husband sex, claiming to have no interest when in fact she has a lover on the side who gets all her attention. It’s a Hollywood story line, but Margery Kempe’s version has a few twists. The first is that the piece was written in the beginning of the fifteenth century; the second is that her paramour is no ordinary man, nor does he use ordinary means for the seduction of the good woman.

The lover, the reader soon discovers, is the Lord, and he’s got the moves. It was not uncommon in the Middle Ages for religious mystics to have forms of spiritual union with the Man, but what is particularly interesting about Margery’s tale is that God does not simply arrive in a visitation (like Zeus in the golden rain), but speaks to Margery in her soul and gets her to fall for him. But I, for one, can’t help feeling for the poor husband—talk about being outmatched!

So, in the Christian spirit of trinity within unity, you should read the piece below for the humor, the sexiness, and to see the Almighty’s unique version of the flowers/chocolates/sweet-nothings approach to the age-old art of MacDaddyism. God can definitely make time.

One night, as this creature lay in her bed with her husband, she heard a sound of a melody so sweet and delectable, she thought she had been in Paradise. And then she got out of her bed and said, “Alas that I ever did sin, for it is truly joyous in heaven!” . . . And after this time she never had desire to have sex with her husband, for the debt of matrimony was so abominable to her that she thought she would rather eat or drink the muck in the channel than consent to any fleshly commingling . . .

And so it happened one Friday . . . that her husband asked his wife a question: “Margery, if there came a man with a sword and would smite off my head unless we had sex together as we used to, tell me according to your conscience—for you say you will not lie— whether you would rather my head be cut off or that I play with you like we used to do?” . . .

“Truly I would rather you be slain that we should turn again to our uncleanness”

And he said to her: “You are no good wife.”

[Some time later] as this creature was in the Apostles Church in Rome, the Father of Heaven said to her, “Daughter, I am quite pleased with you . . . I will have you wedded to my Godhead, for I shall show you my secrets and my counsels, and you shall live with me without end.” . . .

Our lord also gave her a token which endured about sixteen years and increased more and more. That was a flame of fire wonderfully hot and delectable and comfortable, not diminishing but ever increasing, of love, for, though the weather be cold she felt the heat burning in her breast and her heart, as truly as a man would feel the material fire if he put his hand or finger in it. When she felt first the fire of love in her breast, she was afraid of it, and then our Lord answered in her mind and said, “Daughter, be not afraid, for this heat is the heat of the Holy Ghost . . . And therefore you shall have greater cause than ever to love me, and you shall hear what you’ve never heard, and you shall see what you’ve never seen, and feel what you’ve never felt…

[And then the Lord spoke in her soul:] “It is convenient for the wife to be intimate with her husband. No matter how great a lord he is or how poor a woman she is when he weds her, yet they must lie together and rest together in joy and peace. And such it must be between you and me . . . Therefore I must be intimate with you and lie in bed with thee. Daughter, you desire greatly to see me, and you may bodily, when you are in your bed, take me to yourself as your wedded husband, as thy dearest darling, and as thy sweet son, for I will be loved as a son should be loved by the mother and you will love me, daughter, as a good wife ought her husband. And therefore you may bodily take me in the arms of your soul and kiss my mouth, my head and my feet as sweetly as you wish.

—modernized by Jack Murnighan

from
The Thief’s Journal

JEAN GENET

Genet. As if more needs be said. The
prince noir des lettres
stands alone, monolithic, iconic, and synonymous with the idiom he invented. To include Genet in a Naughty Bits anthology is like inducting Babe Ruth into the Hall of Fame: it confuses the categories of whole and part, for indeed there is no fame if not Babe’s, nothing naughty if not Genet.

Orphan, thief, vagabond, homosexual, prostitute: these, the oft-mentioned components of Genet’s life, get so overromanticized by people who share none of them that, when I catch myself doing it too, I end up not even wanting to like Genet, not wanting to be another Sartre sitting in the comforts of the rue d’Ulm eulogizing Genet’s black-nailed alterity. Yet the beauty of Genet’s prose demands no badge of authenticity, no street scars or bruises, and certainly no saccharine sympathy. We might try to read Genet as tourists, but we’re all too likely to go native, to feel, alongside our masterful guide, the hard heat of a man’s body pressed against us in a sordid cell, and to suspect that our own scrubbed experiences blanch in comparison. Reading Genet, I see the safety of my own life present before my eyes as a blank screen on which he projects a dance of passionate shadows.

In the scene that follows, Genet sketches, in two paragraphs, the vicious interlacing of shame, desire, and self-loathing that consume his male lover as they fuck for the first time. Yet the sad fact is that Genet seeks out these “queers who hate themselves,” finding, perhaps, in their pained concessions to desire a Dantesque punishment for his own inescapable self-hatred.

When I buggered this handsome twenty-two-year-old athlete for the first time, he pretended to be sleeping. With his face crushed against the white pillow, he let me slip it in, but when he was stuck, he could not keep from groaning delicately, the way one sighs.

Deeply threaded by my prick, he becomes something other than himself, something other than my lover. He is a strange part of me which still preserves a little of its own life. We form one body, but it has two heads and each of them is involved in experiencing its own pleasure. At the moment of coming, this excrescence of my body which was my lover loses all tenderness, clouds over. In the darkness, I sense his hardness and can feel that a veil of shadow is spreading over his face, which is contracted with pain and pleasure. I know that he knows he derives this pleasure from me, that he awaits it from my hand which is jerking him off, but I feel that the only thing that concerns him now is his coming. Though we are bound together by my prick, all our friendly relations are cut off. Our mouths, which could perhaps re-establish them are unable to meet. He wants only to be more deeply impaled. I cannot see him, for he has murmured “Put out the light,” but I feel that he has become someone else, someone strange and remote. It is when I have made him come that I feel him hating me.