It would be perfect to hold her still. Pin her to her innocence. But who am I kidding? She is more knowing than I. I do pin her into door frames, against walls while she tries to squirm away. I fuck her and kiss her and make her come. I pin her to her own capitulation.
It wasn’t until forty that I really embodied my dick. Before that, I was amorphous and bookish and repressed. I had wan lesbian sex with nonrepresentational implements. Then something rustled in my briefs, just as corn shoots up audibly at night, and from that day on I sought the feelings I found with twenty-year-old Lo. I was once afraid of my desires, but I am no longer afraid. I have met the gutting knives of her gazes, and savored the bloodless high as my entrails spilled from me. Lo’s young lust has liberated me.
“Come on, come on,” she says impatiently, tugging my hand. She takes me to the edge of the city, where the caverns begin. I punish her for casting a glance to the rocker boy stoking the bonfire outside as we enter the cave. I shove aside her skirt and fuck her against graffiti and she becomes a limp vowel, her sweet juices spilling on me. “You’re mine,” I tell her. “You fucking tease.” I push her down to her knees by her head. She makes lipstick graffiti on my cock. She is thin kindling and I am an illusion: flat as newsprint. When I fuck her, I am a flat-hatter skimming her rose bushes, flying away so fast she does not know what left her so turned on and
trimmed. I am certain she sees me as a transparent chump, but she doesn’t let on. She acts like this is not the most threadbare perversion in the literary canon: a dirty old guy and a nymph. Later, she moves one hand up my pant leg, teasing out my blood, pushing it to a mottled point. She has no idea how she turns me on. All she has to do is rub a straw between her lips, cross her knees. Unbeknownst to her, even her fabric comes on to me.
When we kiss, when I unbutton her blouse, when I lift out her breasts—and, best of all, when I make her lips part: it is too much. Life spills out of her, and I scoop it into my pockets, as the old do. My skin biodegrades like cellophane each time she exhales a little breath.
Then I fuck her: oh
god.
I fuck her with my mind, my hands, what lays wait in my pants. I fuck her in my dreams, in my car, under weeping willow trees. I fuck her in hotel rooms where I use pseudonyms like Mr. Wood, and she pretends to be my daughter in a strappy dress. I tell her to ride my cock harder while the curtains snap closed in disgust. I tell her to spread wide, then wider, for my cock. Every part of her swallows me, every membrane breaks. I am the black widow’s dinner and I’m willing, I’m there. I give my spindly self over to her.
It is the way she touches me. We used to watch water bugs gliding across the creek: like reflections trying to escape a mirror. She touches me so lightly and delicately until I am just honed glass, no longer a likeness. I have never felt so touched as when she touches me.
And how she kisses me. The gasp of suspension bridges, hummingbirds with sugar water, things that feed only on sugar and air.
In my dreams, her head is in my lap, and we are simple. In my nightmares, my car is spinning out of control, and she has stolen the steering wheel. I wake up gasping, my rubber dick the only steel rod holding my flaccid bones in place. “Lolita,” I’m screaming, but she is no longer there.
Lo pretends to be morose, wears little goth skirts and dark eyeliner and dyes her hair black. She listens to my old Smiths albums and puts safety pins through her skin. Sometimes, she nearly rips my cock out of my pants, starving for its girth. Sometimes, she has fits about how she can’t take living with an old
perv.
She goes to clubs and comes home at 3:00 a.m. I am tortured to think of the boys and girls who bite her lower lip, but relieved when she walks through the door sullen and drunk and wanting me. Even when she tries to appear somber, the day skips around her whims. She lifts up light wherever she walks. She has piercings all over, reflective metal on skin. I stare at her necklace and want to unlace her, fuck her angry and raw. I run my fingers under the clasp, tease her vulnerable veins. I play with magic and metalurgy. She gasps. She gives in. Then I am sliding my fingers into her, cupping her liquid in my palm.
She is not dragging invisible chains like I am.
Oh, my little Lo, if only I could always have her burrowing around my sheets or giggling, flopping her legs over my lap. If only I could keep her collared and tied. If only I didn’t have to resort to Japanese rope bondage, and chain, and clothespins I use to decorate her skin. If only she didn’t like to be bound and tied and crosshatched by whips. If only she didn’t like to be bruised and spanked and cajoled and stripped. If only she didn’t like to be on all fours, like a colt. Or splayed out while I fuck her up the ass. If only she didn’t kiss like a cottonmouth,
and like cotton. If only I could crawl into her skin, and be that young again. If only it weren’t so terribly taboo and wrong. If only the dark roar within me didn’t feel like a religion, this twisted psalm. If only it didn’t make me pray to the child who would lead me, lead me home.
3
The tittering old nurses adore Finny. He indulges their gummy speeches about the good old days at boarding school. They tell him how handsome he is, what a
catch,
then giggle about his gender camouflage when they give him sponge baths. I call him Granny’s boi because they like him so much. They read him books from the library and giggle over the dirty parts. I don’t care how Nabakov got his rocks off: I like bois. I adore Finny’s salmon-hued cheeks.
“They gave me a suppository last night,” he says provocatively when I walk in. “I’m a clean mean pooping machine.”
“Very kinky,” I reply and nervously pace near the window. I can see the tree from here.
I made him topple from the branch to get a piece, a separate piece of him, for me. What good was a God in the sky? The eloquence of his body tumbling was a ripped treble clef, and I could not bear any more singsong choirs with the war raging overseas. War made us horny and confused. We did not know what to do with the bulls in our balls. So I jiggled the branch, and Phineas fell to the ground, and broke his bones. I shook the branch to understand my own desires. Haven’t there always been casualties from that impulse?
From the infirmary window, all I can see are maples. Wood waiting for confused bois who want to maim something so they don’t have to go off and kill. Our lives here are a denuded fairy tale. I grab my belt to jiggle my package. “I hate this fucking wheelchair, G.,” he says. “Nobody understands me but you.” I’m too shy to look at his trousers, to see the bird folded in the nest, bring the worm. In the wheelchair, he is my prisoner of war. “I know, Finny,” I reply. “You deserve a hero’s welcome.” I slowly unzip my fly. My shirttails, like a stage curtain, part. My dick is the star attraction: no longer his understudy. “I’ve got to tell you something,” I say. I am jittery, but I turn around and face him. “But first, I want you to put my cock in your mouth. It’s your one-gun salute. Your dicker tape parade.”
He grins. He takes my rubbery dick in his warm hands. I can’t bear his serene confidence, how he shines without fuel. I want to make him gag on my poverty, my putrid soul. “Tell me anything,” he says, rubbing his hands on my shaft. “I’m your man.” Even many of the nurses don’t mistake him for a girl: he’s not obvious like me.
I’m the geek. I need philosopher’s proofs. A Kantian escape from the cunt. I’m not a sculpture brought to life, a body that makes everyone believe that he or she can thrive and live eternally. I am not he. “I’ll tell you this much,” I say. “You’re a born cocksucker. You’ve got gunpowder in your gullet.”
I grab a clump of his perfect hair in my fist, so forcefully he gasps. His lips are scarred with a color too red to persist. In times of war, life has to downgrade, or it will ache. My cock is too big for his wet red lips, but he wraps his whole mouth around me, starts moving it down while he grips my pockets. “Mmmm.” Finny moves like hummingbird wings. He’ll give to me no matter how bankrupt I am. He sucks me perfectly. The best blow job ever. He never gags, not even when I rough him up, and force my cock to the back of his throat. I moan
and glance over my shoulder at the door handle and then, suddenly, I start to sob. I’m just a little boi. Finny grabs my ass and holds me. He licks slowly up my cock. He sucks my grief right out of me.
“I did this to you, Finny,” I cry, barely scraping out a whisper. “I shook the branch and made you fall.” His eyes grow big and blue: the madness of porphyritic bedpans. He will not let me pull away. His hands form a swing for my ass.
“Stop saying that! Don’t be an animal,” he shouts angrily, then slaps my cheek hard. The sting moves all the way through my groin and I moan. It’s so hot when he gets angry. “That isn’t funny.” He slaps me a few more times, harder with each hit so the tears are shocked out of me. He turns me and sits me down on his lap and reaches around and jerks me off. “I’ll shake your fucking branch,” he whispers. “Close your eyes, boi. Fall.”
The knot of guilt sinks through my torso and splits into big, aching acorns in my balls. I fall back and whimper as he makes me come by jerking his hand on my strapped cock and pressing its base into my little boi-dick underneath. He kisses my ears. “Don’t mess with me like that,” he chides sweetly. “You’d never hurt a fly.” I turn around and press my lips to his and flick my tongue in his mouth. He grabs a crutch and swings it toward my head. He knocks me lightly on the skull so I fall over, dizzy, laughing. Then I start crawling toward his chair and I pull out his cock. “God, Finny,” I say hungrily. “I want to fuck your cleaned-out ass so bad.” I wrap my lips around his cock. He starts groaning and raking his fingers through my hair as I tease the head of his dick.
Before Finny, I was little more than a wooden foot soldier, a chess pawn. He was the one who rippled the nervous tic that shook my legs that shook the branch. I’ve wanted to be inside of him forever. Finny has never let me fuck him up the ass. I’ve thought about it every single night while staring at the moonlight squinting through the trees. “I’m helpless, Gene,” he finally says. “You pretty much could prison rape me any time in here.”
I reach an arm behind his back and lift him out of his chair. He is perfect. Even the scribbles on his cast are calligraphic, well-penned. He is breathtakingly pure.
I lay him down gently on the hospital bed and put his broken leg in traction and his other leg to the side. I shove some pillows beneath his lower back to lift him. I grab a tube of lube from the hospital tray, and work a little around his hole with my finger, teasing the opening as the tender skin pulses. I kneel at the end of the bed and start to rock my cock into his ass. His hole clenches around my cock, then lets go—like the pond swallowing a jumping boi. It feels amazing, and I hold down his arms and pump deeper. Finny’s face goes starkly peaceful. I hold his hand as if I’m a hospice aide. “Let go,” I say. I cock back my swollen cock and aim and fire. Just as he’s moaning “Oh, god,” I look out the window and see the headmaster’s daughter pulling strands of gum from her mouth. She must be the angel of death.
Much later, a woodpecker plays its own version of “Taps” and I feel senselessly alive. The funeral party has gone off to eat a smorgasbord of food. The woodpecker leaves a hole in the tree that looks like Finny’s sphincter. Pushed by my rough-neck hormones, I shove my pecker in the hole and thrust. My cock is just a piece of rubber tree, but all life blooms inside its awful rage. I violate the tree. I shake its trunk in rage. I bone upon it and I try to make myself as hard as Finny would have
been, as brave. The bark abrades my boi-tits and arouses me. I wrap my arms around the tree and hug it, fuck as deep as I can get. The leaves are dying slow, civilian deaths. My trousers drop atop my knees. I take my other hand and pull my tie, to choke myself a bit. The air teases the little hairs around my ass. My dick is growing from the swell of choral voices changing as they steel up for the war. I’m coming as he’s passing out of here and melting into sky.
I smoke a cigarette, then climb the very branch I shook. Up high, I look around and all I see is sex, the green that is so vast it is almost unbearable. The anti-war.
The temporal beauty of this arbor I abhor.
4
I’ve wanted to get to the marrow of earth, its watery depths.
I’ve been on a hunt for as long as I can say, for thundering butches with whitecaps in their veins. I’ve ridden seas of cocks and fists, gone deep-sea fishing with sailor-mouthed sods. I’ve fucked the sperm whales with realistic cocks that squirt fake cum, the codpieced pieces of work who think courtship is a Renaissance religion, the clammed-up stones who speak in a Morse code of thrusts. They have wailed inside pussy trying to reach my belly, cast fishhook glances with their eyes, bit my lips bloody. They have held me by the scalp and circled my wounds, as hammerhead sharks would do—butting me with their cocks.
But I just want Melville.
I sink into the bar stool at the Pittsfield Whale and gaze at her. Her hair is bristly and uneven, as if she cuts it in the dark. I watch as she works one hand with a dishrag, moving it like a fin around a damp glass. She doesn’t raise her face to look at me when she plunks down my drink. She curls over one bent arm at the other end of the polished oak bar fabricated from an old ship’s deck. She talks to a pride of butches with Massachusetts accents, their salty voices a creak of metal shoring up against the relentless cold. “Wicked starm, eh?” one says. “Yep, pissin’ down snow,” the other answers. They glug frosty ales. I have only lived in these parts a few months, and I seek out the Whale most weeks.
I know her two fetishes: sappy karaoke and fishnet stockings. Whenever I wear fishnets, her eyes snag upon me for a moment, checking out my legs. Tonight, she sings “Rio” by Duran Duran. Her hands form twisted shipyard knots on the microphone and, knowing snow is piling up outside the door, she wails, “Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand.” By the time she finishes, all cars in the parking lot are buried. The trucks make their way to the road, but my pathetic Volkswagen is unrecognizable, a Galápagos turtle that has taken a bad turn. I stand in the door of the Whale shifting my feet. I feel the wind howling through the holes in my fishnets. Melville lumbers up behind me.