Twentysix (5 page)

R
r

Y
ou press the buzzer and the black door releases with a click. On your left immediately as you enter: a doorway, leading to a badly lit room. You walk into it and approach a counter where a portly man with a grey ponytail and beard greets you.

‘That’ll be five pounds, dear,’ he says, and you hand over the folded note in your hand. The act of submission, in other words, is linked to the very process by which knowledge is acquired.

You then remove your jacket and swap it for the ticket another man is holding out to you. You feel a mixture of emotions, lust mingled with fear, inhibition fighting courage and curiosity, and gradually losing. Your thoughts tumble and dance, a mixture of memories and fantasies, lighting the fuse, lighting your way.

You turn and look around, taking in the vintage porn-mag collage papering most of the walls and the timelessness it seems to create. In one corner, an L-shaped unit of cushioned seating, on which a topless man is sitting, rolling a spliff. A television screen shows a silent moving image of men having sex. You see a
cock slide into an eager mouth as you make your way to the door on your right, a door through which you walk to find a staircase leading down. You descend into the Sybarite’s cave – a cellar divided into rooms, all of which have bare, black walls licked with condensation. You can smell amyl nitrate spit sweat and semen blended into some odour you recognise. It is hot, and it takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. A man wearing nothing but a jock strap and army boots passes you, exchanging a glance.

You follow him into a room with a bench running along two walls, upon which sits a naked man, sucking off the man standing before him. In another corner a crowd of men are gathered around a man on his knees, taking it in turns to feed him their cocks. Your ears fill with the deep slow lowing of the pleasured. You pass through this room and find yourself in front of a doorway, curtained off with a black piece of cloth.
A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject.
You push aside the curtain and enter the darkroom. You can hear the sounds of slurping and sighing, gagging and groaning unfolding in the darkness around you. The familiar sounds lash around you like the ropes that held Odysseus. Hands are unbuttoning your jeans, easing out your cock and you feel lips around it. Within seconds you are
rock-hard
, tuned in to every sensation. You reach out your hands and find a cock in the darkness, seeing with your fingertips its dimensions, its girth. Your hands explore
your surroundings, the bodies in your vicinity. You select the one you want and move towards it, withdrawing from a mouth unwilling to release its prey.

Stories must contain things that are not simply replacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis.

That is how we need to feel.

You fall to your knees before your chosen prize and anticipate the feeling, the taste, a second before it becomes reality, unlocking doors into your soul. Nothing else exists for you but this throatful ease. Hands caress your hair, as you caress his furred, tense buttocks.

This is the way the world ends. Annihilation of the self is so close to pleasure as to make no difference. This is the way your world ends. You enter this new life with its fog of joy and intensity. You groan as you become something else, something not quite human, some dark hybrid hanging somewhere between man and beast, some creature nothing and no one can ever fully tame; and this realisation, this transformation, always leaves in its wake, always, every time, that unnameable feeling of a werewolf showing remorse for those he has slain and devoured. By claiming the existence of ‘innocent’ monsters, the poet-narrator is thus securing for himself an exoneration from blame or guilt: he cannot help his passion, his fascination, his curiosity.

S
s

T
here are places only the night knows, places only shadows can show us. The city wears a different face when darkness falls, a face I prefer. I walk the occluded streets looking for something, looking for something, looking for something. A knowledge of the shadow, that eats away at logic, creating patterns far brighter than I can bear; patterns that burn at the temperature of wanting. It traces its way through my veins, this wanting, finding solace only when I fall and feast. I find solace only when I fall and feast. This map I draw with the tip of my tongue takes refuge in a book of dreams. Forgive me for not having the words to describe it, this place in which I dwell. I have tried, I have tried. I have drenched myself in words and sensations, seeking a way to make them speak to one another. This is all I have to offer.

The body wants what it wants. The chaos of the body’s wants – as we know – will never surrender itself to language, can never succumb to reason, even if, even if, even if it wanted to – which it never will. Words will help you to live, as your body will help you to die. When
the body lets go, the mind lets go too. And fear is the least part, that’s what I learnt first.

I know I fly, like Icarus, too close to the sun; I feel its heat on my wings. But I also know that only this
white-hot
danger can ever bring me peace. As the wax softens and gives I feel the height more keenly; the altitude, the drop, entice me like a siren song: oblivion, waiting to enfold me.

T
t

M
ovements, becomings, in other words pure relations of speed and slowness, are below and above the threshold of perception. Nothing left but the zigzag of a line, like the lash of the whip of an enraged cart driver shredding faces and landscapes.

I am hanging, suspended, like an angel trapped in the branches of a tree, sling-shot and low-slung; the cum of twenty men drips from me, like hot wax, creating a pool beneath me on the pearl-licked floor. I hang like a cage between heaven and earth, inside which, perched on a swing, my big red heart is singing. The taste of twenty men bruises my lips. I suffocate in an aroma composed of sweat and amyl and the cold damp of bare brick. I am euphoric with weightlessness, lost in some transcendence that still defies language, try as I might to trap it in the loose-knit net language offers. Each grunt still rings in my ear, each thrust still lodges in the archive of my skin. Each touch and taste documented, etched with crystal on the cold metal of my memory. Every detail hovers above the moment like a halo: the leather encasing my back, the metal links kissing my legs, the circuit of
pleasure flickering around me like static, the solidity of the last cock inside me.

And still… still I want more, still I feel a need within that nothing can assuage, a deep, dark thirst or hunger that comes from some place I have yet to find. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps this maze inside me leads nowhere at all. I am raw from the roaring of my soul, for tonight my evil twin stormed the city gates and besieged me.

I am pure sensation, no consciousness, no ego. Pure id: still demanding, still hankering.

The claims society makes on the body will, perhaps, always be at odds with the claims the body makes on itself. As I reach for my clothes, still stoned from the experience, still wobbly, and proceed to dress, I find the pieces of that other self I left behind in the scramble to obey my every wish. I wrap my self around me like a life. I retrieve the fragments of another individual and assume the shape they offer. For now I can inhabit the oblivion, like an addict after a fix, a cloud around my head that will rain down happiness. Everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations. Each moment is as empty or as full as a mirror.

U
u

I
am oblivion, I recognise no law, belong to no one, but all belong to me.  I move towards a darkness only I can see or feel. I am that which can never be caught, never delivered, that crawls between bodies, towards the new night that promises to be glorious, festooned with wounded males, praying for rack and ruin.

As the sun is setting I step off the train at an unknown station in Essex, make my way outside and climb into the passenger seat of a silver BMW, and this man I am meeting for the first time, let’s call him R, greets me. Handsome, stocky, rough. As we pull out of the car park he places my hand on his crotch, and I know I am in for a good time. After five minutes, we pull into the gravel drive of a large detached house. In the driveway stand two ice-cream vans. Once inside, we begin to kiss and before long I am kneeling with his glorious prick in my mouth. He pulls back the foreskin and I can taste the fat head. We swap places. He stands and opens the fridge door, pulling out a can of lager and handing it to me.

‘Drink,’ he says, ‘I’ll be wanting your piss later.’

In the intellectual representations in circulation, pleasure is reduced to a concession; in other words, it is reduced to a diversion whose role is subsidiary.

Pleasure is expenditure; we exchange kisses that chew at flesh and lick at teeth, drawing sighs and some kind of sweetness from deep within. We create an economy of pleasure. He dribbles spittle into my mouth. I drink it. We move to the bedroom and strip and climb onto the bed. I nuzzle the fur on his chest and release a groan. This is a great place to be. I hold it, this place, for as long as I dare. (In many ways, I have yet to let go, even now, all these years later. The combined sensation of his fuzzy chest against my face and his hard cock pressed against my stomach still hovers somewhere just underneath my skin. It would take nothing, a mere thought or gesture, as now, for me to conjure it and hold it again. The memory is a gift I cherish.)

He gets up and goes into the lounge, returning with a small plastic box from which he removes a blue diamond-shaped pill. He snaps it in two with his teeth and hands me one half, which I swallow with a swig of beer. He necks the other himself, swallowing without beer. He holds out his open palm and I lick up the white tablet that lies in it. He swallows his and we come together again in kisses that say all we need to say. It is raining outside. It has been raining all day. I can feel it on my skin. It dissolves me. It washes away all anxiety as it soaks through to the marrow, making my body disappear completely, leaving me naked, vulnerable as happiness itself. Half an hour later, we break for a
cigarette – at least, I smoke, and then place my lips upon his and blow the grey fumes into his mouth.

Like the anus, the mouth is a site at which the dispersion of the body’s drives and instincts becomes concentrated, crystallised, and dangerously pleasurable.

He inhales, taking the smoke deep within his lungs, throwing back his head and closing his eyes as the diluted smoke shoots out of his nostrils. With the tip of my tongue I trace a line from the hollow of his neck to the nub of his chin.

‘Second-hand smoke tastes so good,’ he says with a white grin. Chaos and calm: it seems sometimes that all of my life has been spent shuttling between those two emotions, the one pushing the other like a magnetic pole until some kind of brief, momentary harmony between the two forces is achieved, only to be broken in a split second which tilts me back again to one or the other. It exhausts me, this battle, but such exhaustion has a compulsion all its own that draws me towards it nevertheless, like seeking transient reprise in a hurricane’s eye.

This exchange, from my lungs to his, this rope of smoke that encircles our spirits like a garland – this is what I came for.