Twentysix (6 page)
Authors: Jonathan Kemp
Y
ou tell me you want to lick your boyfriend’s cock while he fucks me. You tell me you don’t often get to see your boyfriend fuck someone. You are as excited as a child on Christmas morning. I am on my hands and knees, impaled so deeply by your boyfriend’s cock that it seems like he has penetrated the entire length of my spine. The tension unravels and my rectum flickers around the solidity of him, responding to its presence in waves of muscular pulsion as we fall into the rhythm of each other. I can hear you both breathing behind me. I can feel your face against my buttocks as you lick him. You are so excited by this that you come, all across my back, loudly howling and barking your immense pleasure. Later you explain that the first time you had sex with a man was in a cave by the sea, and once you were inside the cave five fishermen in their boats set up just outside the cave’s entrance, so you both had to come without a sound. Ever since, you tell me, you have these occasional intense orgasms that tear themselves out of you like a birth, leaving you fragile and bereft. It’s like a near-death experience, you explain, and one day, you are
convinced, it will kill you. This little death – this savagery that tears us momentarily from our bodies – will one day gather up its strength and fell us. Just as no man can know another’s death, so we each remain isolated in our pleasure, this delicate shell of nerve-endings acting like a barrier, a boundary, against which the world dissolves. The soul is made of the same stuff as ghosts, after all. It haunts our bodies, ranging through the empty, dusty rooms of the flesh looking for a mate, and, finding none, imagines itself alone, when in truth, in the next room, breathing stirs the embers: existence toiling like a beast on all fours against the dissolution of personal identity.
W
e are waiting for another man to arrive, whom we’ll call S. S arrives, and he is taller than me, stockier, shaved head, pleasant face, and almost immediately R has pulled down S’s trackpants to reveal a thick, cut, semi-hard nine-incher, which he proceeds to suck into full splendour. I watch from the couch, loving the sight, until R gestures me over and I kneel beside him, and he feeds me S’s cock. The chemicals are kicking in now and knocking down all my reserve like a bull at a gate. S’s cock feels so good. I take it right down to the thick root until it fills me entirely. The surrounding presence of wounded males is already a blessing that is granted me in this festival of inner calm. I suppose I could describe the combinations of bodies, the interactions of sensation, the way R and I take turns riding S’s huge hard cock, the sight of R draining a pint glass of my clear beery piss – I could try and capture that, somehow, I suppose. I could try to find words that might inscribe the warm outlines of our intensity, but how can you draw a line around a flame, around the molten heat of my orgasm – R working my arse with the thickest black
rubber cock and S pushing his prick deeper down my throat? Deep within my body the tip of S’s cock touches the tip of the dildo, and a blue bolt snaps between them like a synapse.
Erotic play discloses a nameless world, which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night, but by dawn it has been forgotten. The kisses the three of us shared cannot be shared. They are from a world only we inhabited; a land of dark and innocent pleasures, a land that could sustain us with its natural resources if it weren’t so ripped and torn and plagued with insanity. The land of a joy only shadows can know and taste. It cannot be demonstrated, cannot be shown, except at the point of its own rupture, its own disappearance.
I
n the blue-licked curves of a shoreline cave, saltwater lapping at their thighs, two naked men stand, prick to prick, so sweet, locked in a clinch that craves. Their ascent to the summits of pleasure marks the beginning of time: this is the way the world begins. In shadows and heat, in caves where silence echoes. On hitting the water, their sperm turns into a shoal of silvered fish that swims around their calves, sparkling like tiny lights and plucking kisses from the sweet flesh.
This a world I will never know, and this is a world I defend. Language makes the soul possible, yet every statement we make remains a betrayal. This is the way the world begins. Like a dream we try to locate and unpick, these emotions unravel their wares. It remains like a sensation, like a memory, this other life, rippling beneath my skin, turning me into a beam of light as it cuts through a wave.
F
ascination is a process by which we are pulled further away from reason, and thus it threatens to destabilise the world as something known.
A shaft of sunlight picks out the smooth whiteness of a man’s naked body through the trees, reclined on a towel spread over the grey of a gravestone. He’s playing with his semi-hard cock and, as I stand observing, another man approaches him and lowers his open mouth onto it. I walk on, down the narrow, angular pathways, not knowing quite what I am looking for until I find it. How it will arrive, and what it will look like, are unknown to me as yet, and the mystery fuels the search. The summer sun is hot as I pass through patches of it breaking between the trees in bright flickers of light. I want everything. The freedom and the guile. I don’t want to leave here without it.
In this place of the dead we bring ourselves to life, our seed enriching this soil, these feral shadows. We scratch and claw amidst the undergrowth like animals and we rut and rut, locked into a present we want to sustain. The frenzy, perhaps, comes from knowing we can’t. It ends.
It ends. And even now you’re miles away, boxing with your absurd shadow. Does the body reconcile us to death or does it provide a diversion from it? And these places we find, these arbitrary places of furtive pleasure, what kind of map do they draw? All this I am, and I want to be: at the same time dove, serpent, and pig.
W
e need a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of pleasure, a self-consciousness that does not steal away when it is time to explore possibility to the limit.
I made so much noise when I came that you asked if I was all right. This disembodied voice from behind the door. For twenty minutes you’d sucked me into a frenzy, an infinity, a place I cannot name. And the anonymity breaks, a subjectivity emerges from behind the sensation of cock and mouth, beyond the noise you pulled from me, like a lifeguard hoisting a drowner from a pool.
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
The door has graffiti on it, some primitive drawing of a spurting cock. It keeps me both inside your flat and outside your flat at the same time. I am in the hallway, at the top of a flight of stairs. Behind me, the wall is adorned with camouflage netting. Techno music bleeds from behind the door in which two holes have been cut and curtained with black fabric. I seek pleasure. I seek the nerves under my skin. The narrow pathway; the layers; the scroll of ancient hieroglyphs.
If identification is a nomination, a designation, then simulation is the writing corresponding to it, writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the real. Desire is part of the infrastructure.
Beyond the anonymity, our separate lives spin their own particular courses, going to people and places we will never share, or never know. In this thought – perhaps – lies at least part of the pleasure, expressed directly in those sounds that ripped from me. This body is stolen. This simple world becomes too much. These limbs are not my limbs.
The section entitled ‘P’ contains a quotation from Jean Genet’s novel,
Funeral Rites
, translated by Bernard Frechtman, New York: Grove Press, 1969, p.21.
Section ‘R’ includes a quotation from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p.288.
The biggest love to my family, and to my Benjamin.
To my agent, Adrian Weston, and the team at Myriad Editions – Candida Lacey, Vicky Blunden, Corinne Pearlman, Linda McQueen and Emma Dowson – I owe everything. This text is what it is thanks in particular to Vicky and Linda’s skilled eyes, creative insight and patient hearts.
To my fabulous, loyal and indulgent friends, especially Michael Atavar, Darius Amini, Abigail Bamsey, John Lee Bird, Alex Black, Helen Boulter, Pippa Brooks, George Cayford, Matthew Fennimore, Lucien Gouiran, Sally Gross, Hally, Wendyl Harris, Alexis Joshua, Louise Lambe, Sadie Lee, Clayton Littlewood, James Maker, David Male, Steve Muscroft, Joe Pop, Clive Reeve, Chris Rose, Stephane Sionville, Matthew Stradling, Justin Ward, Sue Smallwood, Roy Woolley. Huge love to Mich Jamieson and David Hoyle.
To Jim MacSweeney and Uli Lenart at Gay’s the Word, the best bookshop in the world, where I first read some of these pieces in public.
An extract from this work appeared in
The Everyday Experiment: Sampling the design, the queer and the politics in the everyday,
edited and published by Andrew Slatter, 2010.