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.