A COUPLE OF QUESTIONS
I’ll get on with it, but first I have a couple of questions that bother me, that are always lurking around in the background. Like, what about all this NSA and Homeland Security surveillance? Does it make you feel safe? Or is it true what Billy said in the movie: Did we all get chicken? For me the answers are yes, maybe we did get chicken, and no, it doesn’t make me feel safe. I feel like my freedom is being taken away while I’m not paying attention, one little thing at a time. The Fourth Amendment, habeas corpus, voter fraud, stellar wind. That I’m being lied to and spied on and know it, but am mysteriously numb and paralyzed, as if I’ve been poisoned. The thought that those anonymous gray men in cheap black suits and crew cuts can monitor people’s phones and computers, and frame anyone they want to as a terrorist, makes me fear the government more than any shadowy terrorist boogeyman. I want gas for my bike, but I don’t want to get spied on: Are those things really incompatible? Do people need to be kept in slavery or bombed into dust so I can enjoy my gas and ride? Sometimes I wonder if my bike is my price; as long as I have one and access to that pleasure, I’m acquiescent to the bigger picture; the surveillance, the killing. What does it have to do with me? I might not want to admit it, but my behavior seems to say, fuck the world, fuck global warming, fuck everybody. It’s all too late. It’ll all be over soon. Grab what you can. This is where karma put me, on the luckier side of things. Should I feel guilty that I’m not some kid in Iraq with his arms and legs blown off? Can’t I just live my own life and try to be free? But it nags me when I pay my taxes—that I’m complicit in the murder of children, that I’m feeding those monstrous corporations, that I am docile and submissive. Am I an accomplice or just another phony? What are you supposed to do?
To protest his own government’s encroachments, in 2013 a Russian artist named Pyotr Pavlensky stripped himself naked and nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square in Moscow, right in front of Lenin’s tomb. You can see pictures and video of him on the Internet. He’s thin and wiry, with a bony, ascetic face, mournful sunken eyes, and a shaved head, sitting on the ground with a gleaming silver nail driven through his pink scrotum into the dark gray stone. He performed this action on a holiday known as Police Day, though the police didn’t seem to understand what he was doing or even know whether it was illegal. They covered him with a blanket to protect the public from the sight of his genitals, and called an ambulance. Then they pried the nail out, hauled him off to the station, and later released him. Pavlensky called this act “Fixation” and said of it, “a naked artist, looking at his testicles nailed to the cobblestone is a metaphor of the apathy, political indifference, and fatalism of modern Russian society. The government wants to turn people into safe and secure, gutless cattle, which are allowed only to work, consume and multiply. We’re heading towards a police state … and ordinary people are allowing this to happen.” There were different reviews in the media, some critics and journalists placing him in traditions of Actionism or self-immolation, likening him to the Desert Fathers or medieval flagellants. They mentioned people like Günter Brus, for example, who in 1968 at the University of Vienna stripped himself naked, cut himself with a razor, then pissed in a glass and drank it, smeared his body with shit, and sang the Austrian national anthem while masturbating. He was arrested and did six months in jail for “degrading state symbols.” They compared Pavlensky to Joseph Beuys, who made furniture from the excess human fat of the imperial world and wrote, “he who can live carefree and sleep peacefully knowing that two thirds of humanity are hungry or dying of starvation while a large portion of the well-fed third must take slimming … to stay alive … ld1 ask himself what kind of man he is and whether, moreover, he is a man at all.”
I loved Pavlensky’s gesture for its deliberate futility—how it seemed both selfless and narcissistic at the same time, and like a parody of crucifixion, as if he were saying you can’t do anything, but you have to do something; either way they’ve got you by the balls. But what would it accomplish, really, to nail your balls into Ground Zero to protest the Patriot Act, or to the Western Wall in Jerusalem for the depredation of Palestine? It might make a nice selfie or brief meme before merging into the sludge of used information, but then what? Is it worth getting arrested for?
TRUE SKETCH OF A MALE FANTASY
Summer afternoon. I rode past my friend Gigi’s place of work. Gigi is a beautiful blond woman, forty-five, an actress, a yoga instructor, a spiritual therapist with a deep and zany sense of humor. She has a wide face, with big blue eyes, a gap-toothed smile, and an easy, old-fashioned glamour that gives her the look of a forties starlet. Somehow she manages to be both sultry and childlike at the same time. But she’s a little bored, like she doesn’t really know what she wants in this world, whether nothing or everything. She doesn’t want a husband or even a boyfriend, but she likes sex a lot, and she’s picky. “Most men bore me,” she’ll say, “they’re so needy and insecure. Right away they’re all over me, like a cheap suit, you know? Clingy, trying to control things. Or they’re selfish and vain, like you are, just looking for a little wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, and then gone till the next time they feel like calling you. It’s amazing. It’s like nobody has any manners anymore? I don’t know why I like you, but I do. At least you’re funny. And I do like riding around on that bike of yours. I just want you for sex too anyway, so there’s a little taste of your own medicine for you. Some companionship is nice, maybe for a night or so, but that’s it. Once a week would be perfect. I don’t have time for anything more, at least not until my daughter’s out of the house. Seems like a perfect arrangement to me.” We’ve known each other on and off for years but it had been a while since we’d seen each other.
She must have heard my bike go by or seen me out the window, because about twenty minutes later, she sent me a text that read:
Someone ought to do a study on the female response to the sound of a harley
I typed back:
Why? What’s yours?
Pelvic floor awareness, release of oxytocin,1 slight wetness, possible increase in heart rate … irritability.
That would be a good study. I’d participate. I bet harley might even sponsor it. Imagine the advertising potential. Nothing wets a woman like a hog … but why irritability?
Oh, hot and bothered like. Just fuckin pavlov’s dog really, nothing special. How about you, dog, getting scratched behind your ears?
No, not really. Been a little slow lately. Would you like to go for a ride, gg?
You know I would.
I picked her up a couple of hours later, after work, just before twilight. I love that moment, in the long days of summer, when the sky goes purple-blue and the heat and traffic slowly relax into evening. It’s almost like the city is sighing.
Gigi was dressed in skintight light denim jeans that grasped her curves like a glove and a skimpy tank top tracing the silhouettes of her nipples and ribs in its light, snug fabric. Her hair was braided into girlish pigtails. She looked like a textbook sexual cliché, the “hot little blonde,” and she knew it. We both did. I just wanted to rip her clothes off, lick her up and down, and screw her. And she wanted that too. We were both stereotypes: horny biker and saucy blonde, like characters out of a tattoo. Live to ride, ride to live. A pair of skeletons, dancing bones akimbo, drinking martinis.
We went for a drive out of Manhattan, through the Battery Tunnel, to the BQE, over the Gowanus and the long straightaway through Industry City and Sunset Park, then out along the bay and under the Verrazano Bridge, which glimmered in the twilight air like an ancient wonder. The bay was a heavy, luminous silver. It was so beautiful, and I was so happy to be moving like that through the warm air, with Gigi wedged up against me, the V of her crotch and her breasts grazing my back, a simple, material, worldly physical pleasure. The vibration of the engine was turning her on and before long Gigi was squirming forward on the seat and rubbing herself into me, reaching around my waist and squeezing, clicking her helmet into mine like a flirtatious bird. A warm throb began to push against the front of my jeans.
After a while, we couldn’t take it anymore. I took her to a discreet little motel where you can rent a room for a few hours of anonymous seclusion. Sign your name as Jesse James and get a three-pack of condoms from the candy machine in the lobby. We got a tiny cubicle with mirrors everywhere and an enormous bed that took up almost the whole room. A clumsy fresco of clouds and blue sky on the ceiling, plexiglass panels around the bed, and closed-circuit porn on TV. We jumped on the bed and stripped each other’s clothes off.
At some point I happened to catch sight of us in a long mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Gigi was standing and leaning forward on her arms, her back arched and her head tilted backward, her face a squinting mask of ecstasy. I was behind her with my arms clasped around her sides and my hands cupping her breasts from below, my face in her hair, humping her doggy style. When I saw that, it hit me how funny that word is—“hump”—its comical accuracy. My lower back was curled around her as I thrust my hips up and forward in that same exaggerated curl of a dog hunched in the street around a slowly emerging turd, and looking off in the distance, slightly ashamed. There I was, fixed in the mirror: a humpbacked satyr, pumping away with his flagrant lipstick wiener. Satyr and nymph in the grove of a cheap motel.
We changed positions and moved around to different corners of the bed, probing and enjoying, licking and moaning. I sucked her vagina for a while, snuffling in its musky tang, massaged her, pressing my thumbs into the flexed muscles of her shoulders as I slid in and out from behind. Her anus looked like a large pink raisin. My penis seemed like a hand, or a blind neuron, reaching into her and grasping at something unknown, transmitting it back to the brain in waves of dopamine. I found myself looking into the same mirror again. This time Gigi was on her hands and knees stretched forward before me in a blowjob. I watched her from behind, the edges of her blond hair fluttering like a halo2 as her head bobbed up and down in slow rhythms. Her shoulders and sinuous sides tapering down to slender hips and the rise of her luminous ass, the mesmerizing dark where it spread downward and split into a mossy mound of vulva. Such a beautiful body, the eternal, beautiful, naked female body. Her mouth’s warm suction and her moving tongue made me close my eyes, and I could feel them rubbing against their eyelids as my head swayed backward and forward like a palm. I was gone. I didn’t know who I was anymore, just gusts and gasps of pleasure blown across a shore.
Copyright © 2017 by Alan Fishbone
