Life Drawing

“Solipsism is a lonely island.
That’s why I have so many imaginary friends.”

Jack: So what sorta books you read?
Jordan: I don’t. I get all my education from fucking living, man.
Jack: Have you ever read a book?
Jordan: Well…Not cover to cover but, I’ve used telephone directories…and maps…and I used to look at pictures when my mum was preparing a recipe from a book. Hers always looked like burnt shit by comparison. I went to a boarding school and if you’ve ever read Black Narcissus you’ll know why I don’t read. I was ten fucking years old, man. I read art books. Mainly.
Jack: So you can read then? Or do you just look at the pictures?
Jordan: Don’t take the piss, fuckhead.
Jack: I wasn’t, it was guileless enquiry…Art criticism or catalogues?
Jordan: Fuck you. Why, whadda you read?
Jack: Oh, French authors mainly. English translations thereof, I should say.
Jordan: Cool. I fucking love Nietzche.

Jordan binds Jack’s pale hands with rough coils of bailer twine. His legs are bound at the ankles with a pair of old stockings found by Jordan in a nearby bin. The dust in the barn makes Jack’s eyes trickle more than they already are. He’s propped up by an old mangle which occupies the centre of the room, and which at Jordan’s insistence has swallowed the boy’s school-tie, meaning, Jack’s head is about three inches from the mouth of the rollers. Basically, he’s fastened tight to the mangle. The delicate hissing of water is audible from outside. It used to be a water mill, but the mill wheel came unattached during a storm last winter, and the village never having recovered from the crops dying back in 1962, were unable to summon funds for its repair. Now it’s just a disused barn with an adjacent stream.

Jordan: You want a drink?
Jack: Yes.
Jordan: Address my like we agreed or I’ll leave you here.
Jack: Yes, Oh omnipotent fuck-lord, please aid in my rehydration before commencing armageddon.
Jordan: Haha. Cool. You are so my clay, Jack. I’m really gonna fuck you up.
Jack: Good. I deserve it. Can I have that drink?
Jordan: Yeh, well it’s only water, but here. Physical labour does have a tendency to leave a guy parched…

Jack awkwardly but eagerly swills back lukewarm water from Jordan’s rusted, plaid thermos. Jordan is in a postion to provide or prohibit everything Jack needs. Jordan stuffs a fistful of hay in Jack’s mouth. Seconds later it blasts onto the floor; Jack spits and sneezes.

Jack: Fucker.
Jordan: Well, I thought it was funny. Sorry.
Jack: Can we just get on with this.
Jordan: Sure, let me get a photo first. You look so hot like that y’know?
Jack: Well it’s fucking uncomfortable.
Jordan: Yeh, well obviously, and that’s half the appeal. Whatever you do, don’t smile.
Jack: Believe me. I’m not going to. Get on with it. Nietzche’s German by the way.

FLASH.

Jordan: Hahaha. I swear your skin is like a space blanket, boy, photographically I mean. There’ll probably be a you-shaped blankness in the photo. That surely hurt my eyes more than yours. Seriously.
Jack: Whatever, I’m not gonna get a tan in this barn so get on with it so we can fuck off out of here.
Jordan: Look, this is supposed to be fun, just get in the zone and stop being a miserable whiny little runt.

Jordan stands behind Jack’s incapacitated body, reaches around to his flies and lowers his trousers and boxer shorts.

FLASH.

Jordan (singing) Oh…there’s a…moon out tonight… Looks like a full moon to me.
Jack: Shut up dickhead.
Jordan: Ooh, a method shot coming right up.

FLASH.

Jordan: Right, I’m gonna gag you now, ok?
Jack: Yeh, good, just get on with it. I’m cold.
Jordan: I’ll warm you up, baby.
Jack: Hmmm. Talking dirty huh? Finally.
Jordan: Look, I know Nietzche’s German, y’know? Just ‘cause I choose not to read all of your poncey literature doesn’t mean I’m illiterate or academically-retarded. I hate that fucking snobbery. Do you know much of Francis Bacon’s work?
Jack: What’s he written?
Jordan: You are joking, right, or…at least attempting to?
Jack: Yeah…
Jordan: Whatever. Here goes.

An oily rag binds tightly binds Jack’s skull. His hair is messily strewn about by it’s application. Jordan kicks him hard in the ass, kisses him on the cheek, yanks his hair real hard, and starts laughing.

FLASH:

Jordan: (rubbing his eyes and hopping from foot to foot)
Fuck yes! What a shot! Ok, you ready?
Jack: MMnnnff…Mnnnfff.
Jordan: I’ll choose to interpret that as ‘bring it on motherfucker’. I can’t believe you don’t know who Francis Bacon is. By the way, Lucien Freud isn’t the cartoonist in The Independent, either, y’know? Let’s keep this educational, we are doing homework after all. What’s that, you wanna say something?

Jordan lifts the gag briefly.

Jack: Don’t kick me again fucker.
Jordan: Oh, is that all? Ok, I promise. It was funny. Right, that’s all from you for a good while my friend. We’re so getting top marks for this.

Jordan lowers the gag and then his trousers. Jack is panting heavily through the oily cloth. The taste is doing untold weird shit to his brain. It’s safe to say he’s in some discomfort. Jordan tosses the gaudy disposable camera towards an accumulation of straw. It hits a plough and breaks, landing on the straw in three pieces. Shit. Jordan produces a Swiss Army Knife from his pocket, unleashes the small blade and waddles across to Jack. With the blade he makes an incision in the captive boy’s blazer, somewhere near the tailbone; he slices all the way up to the collar, grabs both sides of the bisected blazer and in one action tears it off of Jack’s body. Complete removal of the blazer is blocked by Jack’s wrists, so it just dangles there. Same goes for the shirt which meets the same fate. Jordan bares his upper teeth and drags them from the nape of Jack’s neck, across the dim bumps which constitute his vertebrae, right down to the tail-bone. A faint red column forms in his wake. Jack shivers. He grabs Jack’s buttocks with his palms and prises them apart. Jordan fucks Jack, unlubricated for about twelve minutes, hands on his hips, nails digging into the soft pits either side of his stomach, which is concave and untoned. Read less and eat more, Jordan thinks as his cock pummels Jack’s insides. It has the rhythm of a mantra he contends. His thumbs massage the skin over Jack’s kidneys, and his teeth are clamped across his left shoulder. Jack is contorted, attempting a wriggle, he’s never been fucked by Jordan before and wasn’t prepared for such unchecked animalism. His wriggling looks ludicrous given how impotent to resistance the mangle and various bindings have him, but the ridiculousness endears him to Jordan’s paternal instincts. Jordan slams Jack’s head three times into the mangle. Blood pools form and mingle with the rust. His teeth grind their way into meagre flesh on Jack’s neck. Jack’s still being fucked. The larger blade on the Swiss Army knife now shreds huge clumps of hair from Jack’s bleeding scalp. These are tucked inside the gag, stuffed up Jack’s nose and otherwise strewn about the floor, where the similarity of his hair’s consistency to hay does not go unnoticed by Jordan, despite his attention being concentrated elsewhere. Jack’s sporadic thatch now gleams with blood and sweat. Jordan is etching a cartoon drawing of a little box house. Jack’s back is the canvas. Only just breaking the skin, so blood bubbles to the surface intermittently along the outline. Jack’s left kidney is punched. The toothpick from the Swiss Army knife is introduced to the gap behind Jack’s left collar bone, it greedily swallows its entire length. The tweezers follow, arms separated somewhat, into the gap behind the right collar bone. Jack’s state of consciousness paddles between total panic and a lolling grogginess and there’s little he can do to harness either into a decisive action. Jordan unholsters his cock from Jack, grabs him roughly by the hips and spins him round so his chest and stomach are exposed. This elicits choking from Jack, the skin on his neck is burnt by the tie, upon being so roughly whipped around. His eyes are leaking, not quite bulging. Blood drips in two thin lines from behind his collar bones, disappearing behind each armpit. Jordan at one point licks these dry, albeit temporarily. He kisses Jack’s eyelids. Jack’s attempting to convulse and loosen his bindings, but they’re too tight, so he recants. The small blade drags snowy curls of white skin down from Jack’s sternum. His cock is semi-erect; Jordan takes it in the palm of his left hand and squeezes it rhythmically whilst etching who-knows-what into his chest. The heat of his palm induces a full-on erection in Jack. Jordan has never touched Jack’s cock before, despite being regularly invited to do so at parties. Jordan kneels down and fellates his model in true casting couch tradition, while his right hand unhooks the corkscrew from the Swiss Army knife. This he proceeds to screw into the side of Jack’s abdomen, probably directly into his left kidney. Once it’s fully wound in, he yanks it our in one move. Jack would like to scream; instead a hoarse but muffled roar escapes and, small doubt as regards the purity of the sentiment behind it, fills the gag but little else. Instead, Jack’s sphincter relaxes and he unleashes a torrent of piss into Jordan’s palpating mouth. A reflex hurls Jordan backwards, then he whips around sharply and spews the piss in an arc, straight at Jack’s face. He then sits down on some hay, wipes his face on Jack’s coat, which rests on top of the two boy’s bags. He hums some ‘…Valkyries’, then giggles…Nietzche…Wagner. Snap out of it man. Jack’s bag is opened, his lunch box emptied on the ground. From his pocket, Jordan produces a hypodermic needle, this is filled with milk from a carton, which continues to dribble milk from the point of entry as Jordan injects milk into the white of Jack’s right eye. The needle remains hanging there, an absurd protrusion, a surgical horn, the sort of appendage they’d make the village fool wear in a future dystopia if villages still exist by then. Jordan kicks him in the groin. Jack is shaking involuntarily. Jordan takes the large blade and carves the outline of a square into the skin covering Jack’s stomach before tracing the outline of his kneecaps with the corkscrew; moons of blood form and gather at the base the knees, dripping down his shins, flooding down over his trousers and immaculately polished schoolshoes. He then jabs arbitrarily around the soft patched behind the kneecaps, soon rendering Jack’s legs useless. Jack is basically supported by the tie around his neck. The needle is shaken free from Jack’s eye. Jordan collects it, sprays whatever fluids up into Jack’s right nostril, then refills it with some stagnant water from an old feed trough near the door. He grabs Jack’s bound wrists, loosens some cloth with the knife and injects a needle full of it into the most immediate vein. He’s finding this cool and amusing, but not so funny that his hard-on isn’t raging. Digging the fingertips of both hands into the deepest fissure available in Jack’s lower abdomen, he peels open a flesh crevice just large enough to muscle his cock into the warm folds. He obviously hasn’t punctured the stomach lining yet because the guts haven’t yet spilt forth. Nevertheless, the presiding aroma would suggest that Jack has shit himself. Jordan thrusts himself into the envelope he’s carved below Jack’s ribcage. He bites a small shaft of skin away from the tip of his nose. He’s actually a tiny bit sorry to see Jack’s eye bleeding. No other eyes used to be able to articulate sorrow so quintessentially. Jordan is anxious that he’s getting slightly bored, so he retreats from the warmth of Jack’s abdominal slit, takes a moment to centre his strength and pushes the mangle over, which of course, means Jack is dragged over by his throat. The gag has slipped over the right-hand corner of Jack’s mouth throughout this action, but even if he wanted to speak, swear, scream, words are by now, ridiculous, anachronistic conceits, way too crude for this context. That considered, Jordan rips off the remaining gag. Jack vomits down his chest. Jordan’s cock snakes back into the brand new cunt Jack sports on his belly, the familiarity soothes, as he grinds deeper into the fissure, purring deep within his throat. His hand reaches behind Jack’s convoluted shape and drags forth a palm full of shit. He smears this into Jack’s face, punches him twice, and smashes his head into the mangler. Weirdly, he’s still vaguely conscious, or not least not totally blacked out. This surprises and pleases Jack. He pulls off one of Jack’s blood-saturated shoes and jams as much as possible of it – toe first - into his mouth, after prising his jaws open as wide as they’d go, and then some. He whacks the heel repeatedly, hammering it centimetre by centimetre, further into Jack’s throat. He can hear ligaments, maybe bones adjusting, maybe snapping to accommodate. The leather is slippery with blood. He’s stopped gyrating his cock into the stomach crevice, he’s already filled it with his ejaculate and he barely noticed, but he leaves it in there for the warmth. Jack is no longer hard. Jordan’s fingers stumble across the syringe. He licks a stripe of blood from Jack’s chest, takes a moment to reflect on the taste, and then hauls his cock out of the heavily-pounded gap below him. He drives the needle into the gap, which is swimming with various fluids, not all of them originated by Jack. He draws back the dropper, watches his semen flood the little glass window along with blood and something of a dark, bilious hue. He slaps Jack around the face, the shoe barely quakes, it’s fairly tightly lodged at this point. The needle is slid gingerly into the base of Jack’s scrotum, up between his heavy, hot, wet testicles. He pauses. Then in a sharp movement he uses the needle to tear a tiny gash in the wall of the scrotum, as though he changed his mind about something halfway through the operation. The needle has left Jack, not for long. He licks the needle clean, cold metal always polishes up well. He injects his sperm, blood, bile cocktail into Jack’s left testicle, a sliver of which smiles through the parted skin of the broken scrotum. Jack writhes and spasms in a rapid vibrato. His jaw is probably aching like shit, which is the surely worst thing if you’re of the mind to use your final breath to scream.

Jordan’s always bored the instant they die. So he retreats from Jack’s ‘body’, hoists up his pants and trousers, frowns at the broken camera, perches on the corner of a bale, absently sifts through the contents of Jack’s bag, finds a sketch pad and a tin of pencils and decides to sketch the present scene, as though he were a courtroom artist. Although in court, of course, they didn’t sketch because the court photographer’s disposable camera shattered the morning of the trial, they sketched because cameras are forbidden in court. About two hours into the sketch, the light begins to fail, and he’s happy with his depiction. As a parting whim, he eases the shoe out of Jack’s mouth, the unplugging of which heralds the flow of all manner of juices. Once these are amply flushed, he uses the small blade to saw through the tip of Jack’s fat, dead tongue. He drops it in his own mouth briefly like Mary Poppins administering a boiled sweet to a child, sucks on the various juices analytically, and then rolls Jack’s lower body over, spits the excised tongue onto his back. He stuffs it deep into Jack’s asshole using his index finger, the action of which for some reason reminds him of a meercat documentary he saw when he was a kid, and using a stapler from Jack’s pencil case attempts to staple the buttocks together. The buoyancy engenders some natural resistance. It’s only marginally successful. The buttocks are more perforated with staples than married by them. Whatever, the tongue is pretty much buried and sealed tight under two grossly mutilated, mounds of meat; and Jordan’s closing thoughts as he gathers his stuff together and leaves the barn are that a) it’s the intention not the execution that counts this late in the game and b) he doesn’t especially mind that this last minute inspired frippery renders his sketch somewhat untruthful. Still, he hopes to keep a straight face when asked by the art teacher where he got the inspiration for such a grotesquely silly and brutally bizarre pose.

Nick Hudson.

Black 'n' Red: The Paper Doll and The Carpenter.

I’m at primary school. I’m a sadistic little shit who looked like a bulbous Chinese girl as a baby because of jaundice. My primary school being a quaint retro-topia and this being the eighties, playtime entails the construction of artworks from dense wooden blocks. I’d laboured over an intricately conceived fortress for a whole lunchtime. War iconography never interested me as much as grandiose architecture and theatrical costumes may have done. I later learned to admire people who could make things out of wood. There we are. My best friend Peter – inasmuch as we’d put in more hours socially together than we had with anyone else – was insistently tugging at me to accompany him somewhere. I steadfastly declined.

Informed by the Jilted Impulse: the citadel meets the Indian kid’s foot with vulgar force, scrambling my vision with tears of outrage and inducing blood fever.

Informed by The Architect Undone: the Indian kid’s head meets a lengthy hardwood cylinder with diabolical vigour. Inside the theatre of Peter’s mind’s eye electrifying palpitations seize his nerve endings, the clarity of his vision landslides into mire, as though his collapse into supine delirium were viewed through Janet Leigh’s windshield some way into ‘Psycho’.

Teacher: what’d you do that for?

Me: because you do not incur the wrath of the vengeful angel of death.

Teacher: what did Peter ever do to deserve that?

Me: he kicked over my castle because I wouldn’t go and play football with the retards.

Teacher: well, he shouldn’t have done that, but you can rebuild it, and violence is not the answer at any rate, you understand?

(Teacher’s Internal Monologue: what a spiteful, sadistic, fuckhead of a child. Still, he’s only seven and if I moralise piously now, his soul may just be redeemed, so I won’t come down too heavy on his little ex-yellow ass. This time. Rice or cous-cous? Shit, that kid’s gonna have a serious lump for a few days. Poor cunt. And his daddy built all those hospitals in Calcutta. If I believed in karma, I’d be concerned that a huge Nicholas-shaped typhoon might hit Calcutta and obliterate them, but that’d be totally okay because, by extension, the typhoon’d carry huge chunks of timber over the oceans to this very school, and they’d come careening through the roof and pin Nicholas to the floor by his virulent, screaming head. But, I don’t, so I don’t have to develop a guilt complex for thinking about it. Yeh, in my most neurotic moments, I succumb to a psychosomatic interpretation of the world and get all Catholic at all but the most detergent of thoughts. My chest seizes up.)

Me: Yeh, I understand. But he ruined my castle. And it won’t be the same if I rebuild it.

Teacher: ah, but the next time, it could be even better, huh?

Me (piqued with woe): but, alack, the moment has whithered.

Teacher: don’t be such a pretentious, queenie litte bitch: you’re only seven.

Me: Shit, yeh, sorry. It’s gonna take me a good few years to reconcile the idea that, hey, the rigorous revision of my creative work can actually be a wholly constructive enterprise and one whose rewards are immediately and richly manifold. The immersion of myself in the smoothing out and tightening of my prose and the finessing of my metaphorical tools, are processes which while sacrificing the quaint sense of having harnessed unsullied a moment in the butterfly net of my creative purge, are to be undertaken simply because it, well, makes my writing, well, better. Well better. I’m in horrified denial over how long it took to expel from my artistic self the romantic notion that the artist is an un-autonomous vessel channelling inspiration through his fingertips, distilling the divine. I’d say it was ‘unfeasibly puritanical’ if the words ‘lazy’ and ‘pretentious’ weren’t competing for prominence in my head. Maybe I’m too hard on myself. E-mail me. In the poetic realm however, I’ve always been ruthlessly surgical. Perhaps the epiphany occurred when I stopped distinguishing between the modes.

So I’m getting ahead of myself by a good few intellectual continents. But the point remains, at the time I was savagely fucked off at that whiny little prick for having decimated my grand vision – kick me, not the fruits of my artistic labours, fuckwit – whereas now, well, I try to regard such apparently shitty twists of fate philosophically. But at seven, I had yet to ingest ketamine. Not that ketamine is the zen lube responsible for all of my advanced wisdom and well-reasoned perspective, but in recent weeks it has contributed..

That said, according to my bilious, wayward moral geography, I was more in the right to cudgel the fucker than he was to kick over my little wooden castle and I’d do it again right now and enjoy it.

Haha:

Another afternoon that term: Peter started walking away from me whilst I was talking to him so my arm lashed out, grabbed his ankle; he landed on his nose, which bled profusely. Once more, I stood righteously in the moral sunshine. I was raised a polite child and I uphold my parents good intentions in this endeavour, even when it means breaking a child’s nose.

At lunchtime, Matthew compulsively tried to engage me in fights. I was…eleven. Perhaps fists and grappling were a crudely manifested expression of his unconscious desire to fuck me or maybe he genuinely thought I was an annoying, inscrutable little prick. Maybe I fancied him and had my fingers crossed that other undercurrents were at play. I could never do football. I could never fight. He had me in a stranglehold. I was gasping. Headlock, my face pressed into the armpit of his V-neck blue school jumper. I quite liked the proximity, but breathing was becoming tortuous, or I would’ve stayed there, dimly masquerading a resistance whilst trying to obscure my hard-on with contorted spasms. I ripped his glasses from his skull, they fell to the ground. I stamped on them. He winded me: you stupid fucking faggot. I swear he was almost crying. Blond guys look pretty cute when they’re on the verge of crying. The actual production of tears blunders the creamy topography of their features, and if I were directing their faces as filmed opera, I’d holler ‘CUT!!’ right as the tear ducts moistened. I’m crumpled, sub-humanoid on the floor getting kicked in the kidneys. Physically, I like the attention but as each mercilessly blunt impact deadens my already scant flesh in that area, I’m relieved when Hallelujah enters the room:

Teacher: Matthew! Get off him RIGHT now.

Matthew: (tumbleweeds of humilation scurry in a crossfire with Morricone-bells of righteous indignation, as the bestial raptors of dizzy myopia circle atop the scene) he broke my glasses.

Me: he kept trying to fight me. He was gonna break my arm.

Teacher: both of you, come with me. You can explain all of this to the headmistress.

(Teacher’s Internal Monologue: I hope Matthew hasn’t seriously injured Nick’s back – he does seem to be bent double. They do seem to fight a lot. I’d rather see Nick win, if I’m honest, which of course, the internal monologue allows me to be: Matthew’s been heralded as an academic super-achiever by his parents and fuck he knows it. But behind the arrogant sheen he’s sterile…anodyne. Nick has something…rich, untapped complexity…He’s certainly capable of wry, acute analyses of stuff when you catch him off guard. But...achingly…he seems always on guard. En guarde? I get the impression there’s a lot unexpressed by this kid. He never laughs at the same things the others do. He’s a bit of a space monkey…never participates in straight conversation…finds it difficult…or boring? I wonder what he does in the evenings at home. Now would I buy tickets to his internal monologue between the ages of eleven and sixteen? Yessir, yes I would. Artaud’s silent scream in the (approximate) shape of a boy.)

So we trudge to the headmistress’ office. Thankfully I’m no longer hard. Matthew’s less weepy. Fucking worm: crying because I broke his glasses and he’d be out of action in maths until the replacement frames arrived.

Maths Teacher: It’s OK Matthew, until your glasses are fixed, I can dictate all the problems to you, and you can answer without notation because you’re daddy’s precocious little supernova and you can work it all out in your head. Suck my cock.

Me: I don’t recommend it sir. But he has nice armpits and looks kinda cute when he’s on the verge of crying. Quite a broad spectrum of tones in that ostensibly blonde tuft isn’t there? Not that I’ve been studying him in class or anything. Watching his shoulders heave beneath the ill-fitting blazer as he knuckles down to some hardcore problem-solving. Y’know, the chairs in these classrooms really fuck with my back. Little wonder I frequently leave class bent-double.

Matthew and Joe once stuffed me in a sack, bound my hands and kicked the shit out of me. That was fun. If I could have left the room standing I would’ve been, uh-huh…

When I was six, Christina lunged at my back with a pitchfork because she thought it’d be funny. In retrospect I can empathise with such conjecture. I swore for the first time: arsehole. I feel empty even now at how remarkably un-cathartic it felt. Still, it wasn’t as anticlimactic as when I first received a blowjob and my foreskin peeled back raw and inflamed for days because of some chaotically-employed teeth. And, at least my first swearword was directed at a girl. I’m daddy’s little anarchist. Only this time, I left the scene bent-double not because I was hiding anything, but because four pockmarks were sending liquid shards of agony through my body and even being rude to a girl who liked horses hadn’t eased my plight.

Around the age of five I used to read a magazine in which certain pages featured paper figurines designed for the reader to cut out (with the help of a responsible adult, or a parent if the former was unavailable) and dress. These flimsy, 40gsm ‘dolls’ would either be nude and hermaphroditic, or sporting hilarious, wartime undergarments. Their clothes would be printed on the opposite page, and there’d be tabs extending from the arms and legs with which the stylist would attach them to the model free of adhesive, thus allowing for costume changes whenever the social function these flat pixies may have been attending became more informal. The image of these tabs has lingered for some reason. At thirteen, I remember sitting behind Joe in a German class, visualising for the first time an erotic encounter between myself and another boy. We lie wrapped in and facing each other. He was on top, and binding me into blissful fusion he’d wrap his legs around my own like thick vines, his arms doing the same until his palms rest on my shoulder blades, squeezing, his fingertips gripping the edges. And how my bones used to protrude - as a teenager I had a body oft-termed ‘sharp’. In the ‘formal’ world I was sitting behind Joe, oblivious to the headmaster’s blind abuse of the German language, catatonically immersed in this bruising theatre of bodies melting into each other, flesh invading flesh, skin fluid as liqueur, the absorption of my body into/by another. Wrapped in this vision, the dormant playmat of my body yielding to the boastful grip of his masterly physique, I had to repeatedly seize the image away from the ruinously intrusive analogy of these paper dolls in tabbed clothes. They were categorically pathetic. In one such aside, I contend that Joe, being the active agent was the garish floral petticoat pinning the tabs around the shoulders of my vacant, vaguely Nordic-looking doll.

And yet, my body, basically impotent beneath the writhing muscle of the stockier boy, and this foreshadowing a general, often necrophiliac-baiting passivity in my subsequent erotic fantasies, perhaps the paper doll will be the more enduring image? Who knows? Paper burns so easily. I’ll e-mail you. Conversely, I feel at times like I was programmed to desire to be physically worn by other people and discarded like an oily T-shirt only ever used for manual labour on a Sunday. I remained seated for ten minutes after this lesson while things down south cooled off. No amount of crooked posturing, this time was going to shield the evidence of my libidinous wanderings. In the classroom, I performed the illusion of taking notes whilst ineptly sketching a frieze from the above scenario. I realised that my fundamental crappiness in the field of observational drawing rendered all my figure work crudely four-dimensional, which must be a regarded a talent somewhere, by some svengali of outsider folk art, or a patron of trash… a post-ironic tycoon of the terrible.

I decide I’d like to be fucked on ketamine to see if I notice I’m being fucked and to see how great I feel when and if I realise I am being.

Instructions to the paper doll:

Follow the analgesic-peddling carpenter down the K-hole and have a hungry, deviant ass torn into the hermaphroditic landscape of your spotless rear, open wide and have his pre-scored tab grind its seed into the mouth between your hips. Tongue, cock, nails, teeth and bones lashing paper cuts all over your doleful, dormant pulp, crease at will and have ruddy crayon marks deposited in every crease he leaves in you reaped and gaping. Art brut.

Instruction to the analgesic-peddling carpenter whose shape is akin to a petticoat, with tabs:

Saturate and disempower the hungry paper doll with your tabs which are barbed and scarring, like a boy-python squeezing the archaic niceties from, in this case, very willing, if inexpressive prey. He wants to be ribbons, streamers, confetti when you’re done brutalising, his body, ephemeral and sporadic as lace. He won’t feel a thing. Ever again.

On ketamine I would barely flinch; my consciousness a voiceless, hollow ether expanding and contracting somewhere above the scene. Or a string hammock suspended between the barren sandstone fixtures of two opposing rocky outcrops, through which half-thoughts tumble, skittering across the mattress like hail stones infused with incommunicable truths born in some catatonic gulf, but like hailstones, prone to melting before a shape can be discerned. The last pathetic gasp of a funfair goldfish, convulsing within the schoolboy’s cruel fist before it enters the sea and rediscovers life.

My interior landscape while I’m anally fucked from within the K-hole:

The Overture: a Jungian coyote on a plateau, gibbers howled incantations across the decimation witnessed below. A symphony of unintelligible mutterings, the shrieks of feral children, mouths vomiting overly fragrant blossom over wings glued together from the ashes of atrocities by the blood of their memory. My skull, a deep, narrow well, walls jagged with the mosaic of chemical uproar, at the bottom of which dwell my eyes, lolling futilely like grapes in a halloween cocktail, lidless, disaffected and conspicuously never once wired to my brain or that of anyone else… A pearl of insight forms on the lowermost thread of the hammock, with the ebullience of a newborn stalactite:

And the Rest: The son of a recently dead sheepherder perched in solitude and sullenly on a red precipice. Legs rocking, desperately trying to smoke the impossibly tight cigarette he wrestled half-smoked from the stiffening fingers of his dead father. Perhaps hoping to inhale the dwindling essence of his forebears before they attain union with the mescal soul somewhere behind Orion; he spies an altercation between two ranch-hands way down in the valley. The valley is empty aside from an eaten old mattress, and a pervasive red light palpates with the rhythm of the air. The puckish onlooker is less interested in the rape-like overtones that are blossoming, than in the chest-crippling action of drawing smoke from his dead father’s last cigarette and honouring some invented, temporary, cross-dimensional transaction.

It’s OK dad. The indignity of having died mid-cigarette need not be advertised.

And from this ledge, it does look a lot like rape. The orphan’s breeches are tightening around a vague sensation close to/below his stomach. It hurts. He loosens the breeches and releases his cock. Awareness of the hard-on is negligible next to that of the various whispy smoke spectres escaping his mouth. Perhaps voicing in smoke, spare reimbursements to the dead man who, probably by now, will feel superior in altitude to most living entities - the eagles, and the souls of dead Indian chiefs patrolling the lower atmospheres in shamanic reverie. The bulkier ranch-hand, satanically handsome in greasy overalls, has punched the slighter one in the head because he thought it’d be funny; he looks unconscious as his dungarees are shredded in fistfuls by a ravenous pack of knives, his asscrack breached by an angry new weight, but he clearly isn’t. Besides, he’s conscious enough to recognise that it’s not entirely unwelcome. His eyes crinkle at the force of entry however. The cigarette is gone, the dead paper flutters as forgettable as a raindrop into the patterned embellishments on the mattress. The boy starts running his knuckles along his teeth hoping to reintroduce some heat and thus dexterity to his fingers, which if cast in bronze in this position would suffice and furthermore sell as the platonic ideal of cigarette holders. He breathes into cupped hands, the aromatic ricochet is a broth of tobacco and, he aspires, his father’s breath. Something is disturbing his colon. That’s weird.

Oh yeah. It hurts, so very, very much. Not that I notice.

The moon enters a state of eclipse. The delirious, buckling waif down below – who surely cannot be more than fourteen – bleats garbled protests which the wind’s conductor has whipped into semi-muted groans of ecstasy to the ears of the chattering, solar-phallic orphan on the ledge.

Anything goes right? It’s an (O)K-trip.

The aggressor, who appears to be about sixteen, is dark, sleek, carpenter’s hands, his fringe, a thick anarchic moss strung with rivulets of sweat. A peddler in equine analgesics, he’s filling the waif with dreams, pouring his brashness like molasses into virgin intestines. His reasoning is troubled by a whole cocktail of fierce amphetamines; he barely factors his boy as more than a receptacle, an experiment. The boy doesn’t necessarily want compassion from whoever fucks him anyway. The aggressor clearly works outside in all weathers, but his skin is so irresistibly immaculate, his eyes are K-holes in themselves. There’s something Dorian Grey to his sublime exterior. The waif would consent to anything at the fists and rapiers of this alchemist. His teeth are exposed, lips eked back in grimacing homage to the blasphemous labours underway below. The waif is perhaps a pretender, a countrified faux-naif, diagnosed aged six with a consumptive chest and a fair, unmanly disposition, he’s spent much of his youth indoors baking cakes with his oppressively fussy mother or playing scrabble with his doting but bigoted grandmother. He used to make chains of doll clones from folded sheets of paper, an orgy of connected flesh. So lazy, so smothered, so effete. The carpenter’s hands have never been inside oven gloves, or carefully traced with scissors the outline of a crudely-drawn doll, but his cunt-starved muscle (remember if you will, this is the patriarchal old west) has many a time risen inside the oven of a young boy’s steaming offal, and he has frequently torn new holes in dolls themselves. The doped kid is unapologetically broken in, thrust by thrust until his insides are numb to his invader’s brusque, propulsive enquiry, charred by the sun and bleached of sensation.

One day, the house burned to pieces because his mother never returned to announce that the cakes were amply baked and since that day he’s been an accessory (more a key fob than an accomplice) to his drunk father’s shamelessly haphazard attempts at gambling his way into grandiose fortunes. And histories and specifics meld like mucus threads drawn together at the jut of a coyote’s mandibles. We converge in…an omnibiography?

The carpenter unleashes a valedictory howl from deep within his gut as his energies spasm into the bowl of the waif’s rectum. In the auditorium of the orphaned voyeur’s head, applause sprinkles the air like confetti at a chemical wedding. Of course now his father’s stiff and cold, and there’s not even a cigarette from which to draw warmth – an encore unlikely - there’s little reason to linger beyond the climax. He stands, hoists aloft his breeches, dusts off with his hands, and surprised at the unusually violent contours of his groin, and the semen splattered across the denim, leaps from the red precipice, a mid-western Peter Pan soaring through solar halos, his hole a searing, screeching oriole. A kamikaze phoenix blazing towards ground zero again and again.

Carrion raptors trace terrible shapes in the sky. The shapes used to be birthday benedictions wrought in smoke by a swastika tattooed biplane, back in the day when equine analgesics were used on horses.

He plummets into the chasm, flushed of colour by the kinetic chute of air he now occupies, his shape refracts. He appears of every age at once as though a summation has been attained - robustness compromised, he lands a pinprick, a chime on the pounding head of the drugged, raped waif and melts, assimilated, into a tear, an abstraction, an aborted sentiment. The scream is no longer silent and the profanity has graduated beyond ‘arsehole’ however much this may be implicated in the context of the scream. Atop the precipice a fresh apparition manifests like a coy revolution, ginger as a newborn stalactite and this circular dialogue perpetuates, like the water cycle, a quantity theory of orphaned conceits, or, say, a hailstorm of half-truths.

The paper doll emerges from the K-hole raw, saturated with blood and sweat, the latter not exclusively his own. The tears however belong to him alone. The carpenter cuddles him close and they dwell in the shallows until the analgesic wears off. The paper doll would like this part to last forever. In every way he is irrigated with light which blinds and heals. Put succinctly, the world is much bigger now, and so is his status within it. He can stand proud and erect. The masquerade has boiled itself dry into redundancy. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m crying and I hurt all over and I got what I wanted and I just want to stay in his arms indefinitely if you don’t mind but I don’t know if he genuinely likes me or just wanted to fuck me in every conceivable sense but I don’t really care about motives just outcome.

When I was nineteen.

Nick Hudson.

Reconnaissance

Blonde hair stacked like the hay and just as flammable in which I used to roll and sneeze when my body was smooth and unblighted by corporeal want, before my navel dropped between my legs not many years later. For the sake of thematic consistency, let’s say the eyes were blue like the sky whose cloud voyages I used to mutate whilst reclining on the hay and just as malleable on which I used to roll. Emotionally I mean.

Four cold fingers on the back of my neck, manipulate my field of vision forever in the direction of:

‘Please wrestle my physical autonomy from me so I can be the plateaux on which things grow instead of the axis around which my anxieties and aspirations orbit.’

The opposable thumb allows my captor to squeeze, my hairless neck a malleable dough.

How old were you when you first got hard in public?

One finger smothers the past.
Another strangles the future.
The next is the blue touch paper of fusion.
The fourth burns the blueprint into my erotic heart.

I was seven and the teacher warned that he might paralyse my neck.

The thumb dug like the pitchfork my mother’s father used to ventilate the hay in which I used to roll leaving a white spectral hand of shadows inside which I dwell like I would a creamy blissful oubliette if at times I could find one.

She spoke of paralysis in negative terms. I think he was called Wayne, like the moon the arrival of which used to signal that I’d mutated clouds long enough and it was probably cold and time to eat sometimes does only spelt differently.

The Gut Chronicles: Closure.

Dear George,

This letter will almost probably never reach you because it is addressed to someone I don’t know; to my idea of a someone I once figured was a vital appendage to my life; to a notion, a concept and a romance in the truest fantastical sense. I invested so much hope, energy and blind but robust faith into this balloon-like phantasm, so desperate was I to satiate what ill-defined paramerters of love and romantic fulfilment I’d previously entertained. I invented you based on the scant and nebulous symbols you emitted on our first sleep-deprived night together; I was the writing I read between your few spoken lines – it took me a while to step out from the shadows – and to reconcile this has been an arduous and painful trip. Like many arduous and painful trips, the revelations have been at least equally intense. Your presence; your existence became the stage in my theatre of idealism and I poured every dramatic conceit available into this fleeting vessel. I tried on every costume of every hue in love’s wardrobe to acquaint myself with the taste of loss desire, guilty lustfulness, hopes scrambled, bliss exploded, faith galvanised by modest epiphanies, when on occasion your actions would sing in tune with my ideals.

The first time you broke it all off I intercepted your text whilst in the toilet at work, and those 150x characters changed me more than 100,000 words of my favourite ever work of literature ever have could or might. That afternoon, three hours into a debilitating and hysterical fit of tears and despair, I got sent home from work. Add that to the inventory of transactions; thus kickstarted the waveform of our brief but tumultuous romance – I invested such volume, depth and complexity into your every – and frequently dull- utterance that it became impossible for your words to breathe outside of the zeppelin of my soaring, apocalyptic imagination. My sub-schizophrenic stream-of-consciousness shredding and mutating your naïve memes into stark evil, agenda-governed clones; chattering wind-up dolls marching into the dawn of our malaise. And yet my resolve never wavered. Whereas you were and are content to crystallise your woolly impulses into abrupt and devastating decisions, I was alternately seared, lashed and cauterised by the weight of my responses to them. Glibly, you’d text news of our latest split with the matter-of-factness of a veteran newsreader. For the first few instances, I’d be torn up, my cynicism exhumed and battered raw by the cold shovel of your bombshell. Then with increasing regularity you’d be quick to resume where we left off, and I’d dismiss your spells as the by-product of a young mind negotiating the landscape of a new attachment. I suspect you judged me as “intense” and “heavy”, and yet given such taciturn and volatile posturing, how would even the most serene and self-assured player react?

I’m barely convinced you ever existed, given how much your solidity was based on the flesh of my ideas wrapped around the admittedly beautiful bones of your physical form. If a vacuum is laid open to the world, then the world climbs inside, as an infection patronises a wound. Perhaps this can be read as an absolute distillation of love? A harmonious dialogue between two people’s idealising of each other – a mutually, and happily blind participation in a great lie, where the psycho-emotional work of each participant remains unacknowledged except between the most ardently and comfortably analytical of punters. So much of long-flourishing romance seems to be based on a mutual and indomitable willingness to interpret your co-pilot idealistically. The castle of love can collapse as nondescriptly as a pool of sand once that foundation is banished in a wash; a blink. Once that rare beam of objectivity illuminates the holes in the sails, the yellow stain and errant threading on the sheets of halloween spectres, the boom mic invading the frame, the artifice snared and paralysed by the light of the hunter’s torch.

I don’t love you anymore, because what I loved never existed and the theatre has become an exhausting contrivance. I can hear the stagehand whispering; the dialogue has become leaden, club-footed and vulgar; I no longer find your banal chatter endearing, the sweetness of the innocence I projected onto your fair-skinned screen has soured into a bored stupour. I was so eager to learn to love and in that respect you’ve been a healthy endeavour, the fall-out of which I’m attempting to process philosophically and with much faith in the concept of fallibilism. No experiments are failures if they yield results as learning can be gleaned from all data – even an absence of data – when contextualised with perspective.

I’ve inhabited the various mindsets of a romantic nosedive – the finding of solace in confidantes, the rage and resentment, the wishing of ill-tidings on the absent party (although now I realise how truly absent you were from day one) and yet I toed only the shores of self-pity. I declare this not because I regard myself as the heart’s most robust trooper, but because I hate the cheap, squalid quagmire of that particular attribute; the dirty speed of emotion next to which mescaline may be the blissful, unconditional love I’ve so far experienced only in solitude. Given the implicit barking blitzkrieg gaping inside each and every human heart (the natural and only reaction to an environment whose engine is chaos) perhaps investing all of one’s emotional hard-currency into one other being is the most foolish conceivable act. When the membrane of faith collapses, all that remains is a decision based largely on the state of decay. Do you abandon the skeleton who’s hitherto celestial image you’ve been fucking, or do you keep grinding those old bones until you’re both a subterranean powder bound by the cements of age, self-doubt, comfort, familiarity, and ultimately complacency?

The summation at this point is: all romantic love between two humans is compromise, checkmate, and the longer you can pump blood into the phantom in the magic lantern, who’s dance brings such ecstasy to your dreams, the greater the capacity of your emotional flux to excite and devastate. Once the artist exhausts his material he ceases to breathe, when you fail to find that fresh element in the ideal of your partner, all is rendered stale. You are reduced to either flogging the horse or dismounting. The former, tantamount to selling it for glue with which to fasten your memories to the present – where nostalgia replaces action, where a photograph replaces an event. The latter, you send your steed packing to the wilderness and are condemned to walk again, your feet susceptible to sores, your knees to arthritis, your line of sight a good distance beneath the visible heights of the foregone union. Your horizons have slipped. I’ve realised you can attain similar heights alone, and thus perhaps the only possibility for an enduring and brilliant relationship between two humans is for both participants to be entirely and comfortably accustomed to solitude, and to functioning healthily within the limitless confines of their own hearts and consciousness’. Dependency breeds disappointment, preconceptions spawn resentments and the projection of unsatiated ideals onto the lacking party.

I entertained vengeful thoughts. Momentarily my fantasies laboured on the image of you kidnapped, raped and strangled. I decided to want to administer to you the worst imaginable fates; merely to elicit something resembling a pure sentiment from this corpse of a boy I pumped so much of my hopeful blood into. The truest vocalisations of authentic emotion occur either upon orgasm or under abject suffering; I wanted to flay the performance from the doll and masturbate as the flesh beneath seethed like a disturbed wasp nest. At another point, I decided to want to abase myself to neediness. I decided that I loved you, that I depended upon your cool, distant presence to complete me. I eroticised your bewitching of me. I empowered you with my reliance upon your approval and acceptance of me. This conferring of power I found profoundly erotic; when I charged you with this sense of command over my emotional trajectory – and this notion of deferment has always been a peculiarly fetishistic transaction for me. My erotic concession to self-destruction is the deifying of a boy into an untouchably potent entity whose dominion of me is absolute, who drives rabid my urge to worship, flatter and compliment. This is how it played out with you. In these circumstances, I would go wild with sexual frenzy at your apathetic passivity as I study and pray at the altar of your divine body; as you ration our kisses; dictate what I can and cannot do; as you deny me interaction, fusion and warmth, my body and spirit shimmer with sexual excitement. And yet, I genuinely believe, based on our few sexual moments together that you have eroticised your need to be needed into a sexual craving to be worshipped by the guys that you sleep with. That first time we crept illicitly upstairs to the forbidden sanctuary of the double bedroom, you reclined corpse-like. Aware of my fondness for your tongue, you simply opened your mouth and offered it for me to bite, suck and engage with – not even the dialogue of a kiss – just you, silent, stationary, tongue available to my worship. This will remain a salient image from our time together.

I wonder if to your mind, the power dynamic appeared the inverse of my interpretation – to an unbiased audience I would doubtless have appeared the active partner - and yet within the cocoon of our coupling, and by manipulating the nature of my actions, you invariably held the reins, driving me insane through the denial and rationing of access to certain parts of you. You controlled my fix, and my concession to this base imperfection still confounds, enrages and arouses me – the awareness and dislike of my perverse trappings only makes their erotic qualities soar. I would chew and nuzzle your armpits long into my years, and in a sexually excited state I would sacrifice every quality of life, to be stranded on the desert island of your body beneath our dome of neuroses and excruciating teases.

Upon externalising all of this as prose I realise how enormously the shelf-life of our fling was fuelled by sexual dependency, need and desire. I’d tolerate your wildly fluctuating moods in the hope that my patience would pay off in a session of ecstatic foraging. Obviously it would be utterly sociopathic to discuss such transactions in these terms from within the eye of the storm – in relationships we poeticise the basic sexual need into the language and performance of love rituals, if only to galvanise our flimsy reckoning of ourselves as social, civilised beings. Fortunately, the storm having passed, I now appreciate that you were essentially dull, passionless, crudely unformed, selfish, crippled by neuroses, superficial, and that I’m happy in this epiphany, whilst being grateful to nobody in particular for our time together, grateful primarily for the rich tableaux of realisations I’ve encountered in the hinterland of solitude. My textbook romance with a sixteen-year-old called George. I contended that when, inevitably, the romance flatlined, I’d hate you and channel all of my negative energies into destroying you for having used and betrayed me, but my posthumous insight is textured much more mildly. I just don’t like you. You are no longer remotely engaging except as a blackboard on which I chalk my analysis of ‘love’s unravelling. Perhaps you were the dress rehearsal for something more substantial and enduring? Perhaps my dalliance with that stunningly gorgeous drug tsar may blossom into a beautiful and mutually healthy romance, bound into fortitude by the self-sufficiency of both parties? Preconceptions, clearly can kill, especially when applied to or of other humans, so fuck the contemplative conjecture. I’ll leave this open-ended.

In my apathy as to what you think or don’t think anymore, I’m finally satisfied in the knowledge that I’m totally over you. If I were nostalgic I may be sad, but I can disassociate the memories from the present enough to safely dwell in them for the duration of a satisfying wank before detaching immediately and without remorseful pangs of yearning. The future, I suspect has so much more exciting potential than the past and may just be the only temporal state that can be built upon, so thanks George. I’d be content to never hear from you again. I say this not because it would bring flooding back painful memories, not because I hate you and resent your treatment of me, but because what you now represent is something so uninspired and unworthy of my time and energy that the notion of you only bores and irritates me. No vendetta, no smear campaign, no unnaturally protracted masquerade of a friendship salvaged from the wreck… Adios, and despite your irrelevancy to my life from here-on-in, I genuinely wish you well, whilst recognising how much internal modification you require to be able to manifest this. All the same, many thanks, onwards and upwards. It’s been invaluably educational,

Nick.x

PS:

A quote from the boy himself:

“The only thing I have to look forward to is who I’ll next go out with.”

- GSL, 26th December 2005.

A Polite Enquiry...

When life becomes difficult do you:

a) contemplate committing suicide
b) commit suicide
c) drug yourself into a coma
d) find God
e) find God and talk him into committing suicide
f) find God and drug him into a coma
g) recognise that where society is concerned b) = f) and thus contemplate committing suicide?
h) emote yourself clean through the mouth of a self-indulgent ballad?
i) anonymously fuck yourself blind?
j) saturate your body with hardcore spirits?
k) snort your woes away like a grand thaw?
l) work harder?
m) using a baseball bat, project your thorny existential mire onto a convenient loved one?
n) set fire to your hair, coat yourself in syrup and choke to death on your own fist?
o) philosophically transplant yourself to Buddhism?
p) smile?
q) gamble your beans on a lame donkey?
r) gun down thirteen of your fellow students and four teachers?
s) join a monastery?
t) erect a monument in your garden to the life you could have had?
u) tread water forever?
v) donate your life to a wife, kids, dog, job, smooth predictability?
w) freak out your shrink by telling her the truth for the first time?
x) seek an exoricist?
y) move on with a hungry resolve?
z) all of the above at various instances?

"Please try keep love buoyant with your ideals; better to inhabit the lie than to be buried with the truth before you've loved."

- **** *** ******