by Camille Roy
Sex life, sex death—I don’t have an opinion. I’ve got a waist and a knife instead. Anita said the difference between a violent act and a sexual one was that if you chopped all the fantasy out of the violence there’d be something left over: damage. But sex without fantasy—is nothing. When I read Max’s porn, I like to think of that particular nothing and what falls into it. That reminds me of my life.
1. The Female Boyfriend
When I was twenty-two, I was fucked over by a bisexual. Alternate Wednesdays and weekends, when her husband was on business trips. I liked it. Her name was Kate. As Kate stroked my lips, she said,
An ideal surfaces. Interrogation is what’s left after you spread your legs.
Kate was a successful journalist, and she wanted me to be a journalist too. She said I could break into the business with either sex or politics, but sex was easier because it required less analysis. She arranged for me to interview a prostitute named Becky. Kate said,
Whores accumulate privacy. What you do with it is your business.
Becky was a dyke. While I interviewed her, she was washing her pickup truck. I didn’t know what I wanted. Was there such a thing as a female boyfriend? So I asked Becky, “In the lesbian world, what is the difference between butch and femme?” Becky said,
Femme means making pink the color of your interior, and then drinking a lot of fluid.
When Kate was out of town, I snuck out to a gay bar. It was all men until midnight, when a female boyfriend walked in, wearing a satin tux the color of blood. She approached me, and all my hairs grew wet while purses opened their tiny mouths next to my skin. She said, Touch me there. I said,
Which is the fold, the dot, the persuasion?
She answered, Accent the positive. So I did. But there must be something inside.
2.
An ideal sniffs my rust. An idea surfs crust.
My mistress cuts & tucks one silicone 38D into my chest and then another, while I’m bound to our massive brass bed. Her kinky breath is soft as suede.
When I cry she tells me,
The best titties are raised on the farm.
When I scream she says,
Pain shreds & relaxes. You’ll stumble over the real thing.
Think of scrub brushes and the perfect ending.
When I sob in agony she comforts me,
Later we’ll take a tour of the castle.
My mistress is cruel. She’s bright as breath.
She whispers to me as she cuts,
I’m a fan of the flesh—tits, stuffing, sweetmeats. I suck the juice from the roast, I’m a pig with a straw.
3. Becky
Kate asks me about my interview with the whore Becky. I told her about the female boyfriend in the beautiful red tuxedo. Kate said,
I’m not prejudiced but I just like men better.
I relaxed. Relaxation is a cruel mistress. How many kinds of lace do I have in my pocket? One, two kinds. The princess in the castle showed me her precious garment: black panties knit from pubic hair. He plunged his face into my hairs, the princess reported. Great, said my mistress, We’ll make a sex video from crushed lips & your razor.
When I’m scared, I remember what the female boyfriend told me. She said that sadomasochism makes theater from the alienated boy—I mean body. I know that. I mean, We’ve always lived in the castle, but true love is more subjective.
I think about the “lower stories” when I glimpse their fluids. Vulva is bright noxious atmosphere, gleaming below. Don’t you wish you had a more stretchy wish, and a little privacy for your skin? It’s easier than thinking, & a few stripes cover the living room. One day, you’ll believe your couch is your leg. Think about which is the female. Remember, it’s that or nothing—I mean a whipping.
Don’t eat anything in this room. There are too many visuals.
1. Methods
Writing I find exciting often gets called experimental. In America, this is another word for marginal. It’s patronizing. Other countries distribute legitimacy in literary culture differently. For example, while living in the U.K., Kathy Acker wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. Can you imagine Acker writing for the New York Times Book Review!? Just the experience of reviewing her work in the NYT Book Review caused several reviewers to spontaneously combust. On the other side of the Atlantic, debates on literary aesthetics are part of public—not just academic—life. Not so here, which means the conventions of representation that underlie mainstream fiction in this country can’t be effectually critiqued. (I don’t consider academic debates to be part of public life.)
So what conventions of representation am I talking about? Consider identity. Mainstream fiction tends to assume separate and coherent individuals, each with a single body and character which is built, rather than destroyed, by conflict.
I believe it is possible to have one identity in your thumb and another in your neck. I think identities can travel between persons who have an unusual mutual sympathy. Let’s not even mention multiple personality.
But what I want to talk about today is the manipulation and construction of social distance. Mainstream fiction assumes a position not too close, not too far away. A situation is implied, an entire social horizon, which is speckled with white individuals who maintain distance from one another and from social “problems.” Containment. Segregation. A narrative structure which covertly mirrors the growth of white suburbs since WWII, where there is no discomfort around racism because only white people are present. Breaking this long chain of social convention at any link can easily result in personal and literary deformity, which is another term for experimentation.
My sister said I shouldn’t have sex until my nipples turned brown, which I figured she thought would never happen. She was older, and kept her drugs and screwing
in the basement the same way she kept her jewelry there. Her lovers were thin white men whose trouble was drug-related. When Paul left Cook County Jail he carried an odor of rape
he had large nerve spots in his eyes. Fear moving like a breeze in a prison yard, I could feel that in my stomach when he was around; otherwise I didn’t care. I thought about Monica.
Her sharp teeth and brown cheeks. The way her greed slid across my hips could be scary but her palms were narrow as slots, that made it okay to have sex with her.
Monica was Black in a segregated city; so the closer we got
the more transparent I became, my longing vicious
as wavering lights of association. Relation—the spot where
we’re the same, or at least rolling downhill on a boulevard
lined with palm trees and novelty shops.
So when Sam said, Any real man would rape a 14-year-old
if he saw her naked,
it shut me up.
(My X Story)
The well-modulated distance of mainstream fiction not only distances social conflict, it also doesn’t represent lesbian relationships very well. Mainstream literary forms reflect conventions of identity that are dominated by the masculine and the heterosexual. I am not arguing for femininity in literature here. I don’t find those essentialist positions very interesting. But I think relations between women have the potential to strain conventions of representation. HOW exactly? Consider the characteristics associated with women: weak boundaries between self and other, heightened capacity for intimacy, identification of self with other, and a more fluid sense of self. In mainstream contexts, these capacities are exploited until you reach, at the limit, erotic positions which have been emptied of subjectivity, e.g. BIMBO/CUNT. I think it’s quite difficult, perhaps impossible, to represent a dyke as empty in that way. The corollary in the lesbian world to the empty sexual object is an erotic position I think of as invaded subjectivity.
I was her idea, the fix for a wife with lesbian dreams. She never told me the details, but I could feel them pushing out at night, in the way that there’s a ghost town inside every city. It made her ferocious but not personal. She really thought I’d be
grateful later. Adolescence is a form of brain death, she told me. Thanks, I said, and she laughed. Now she’s silent because she’s in the past, like someone dead.
(Sex Life)
I take it as a given that the well-modulated distance of mainstream fiction is a system that contains and represses social conflict, and that one purpose of experimental work is to break open this system. But experimental work can require a context of aesthetic ideas which many people who might otherwise be interested in it don’t have. In this context, intimacy, autobiography, and direct address don’t function just as content but are strategies for pursuing a reluctant audience. So are genre narrative forms, such as sex writing or horror.
There are many roads into the succulent interior. How can the mechanisms of genre fiction get us (the cabal of experimental writers) there?
Consider porn narratives. Usually people do not appreciate being taken apart. They rely upon having an ego, enjoy feeling integrated and in control, and experimental work that questions this can arouse distaste. What is so interesting about pornography is that losing it is the point. People want to be taken apart so that ego control (resistance to pleasure) is subverted. Where there was distaste, there is now desire mixed with dread. Pleasures of the rupture, rack and screw. The audience becomes an unwitting collaborator in its own disintegration, in the interest of pleasure, or just feeling, period.
Genre fiction is not about representing experience but producing and organizing feeling--sexual excitement, horror, mystery, fear. The aim is to invade the reader’s subjectivity. To control, and then to release. The desire of the reader to be aroused or to otherwise escape is the keyhole through which all the mechanisms of the narrative operate (note, this turns the writer into a kind of spy!).
Because genre writing deals in something as low as feeling, these forms are relatively easy to use in other contexts and for other purposes. They are already degraded, so their resistance is weak. Experimental writers using genre forms are like drag artists. Let us acknowledge the camp aspect to our more extreme performances.
My mistress cuts & tucks one silicone 38D into my chest and then another, while I’m bound to our massive brass bed. Her kinky breath is soft as suede.
When I cry she tells me,
The best titties are raised on the farm.
When I scream she says,
Pain shreds & relaxes. You’ll stumble over the real thing.
Think of scrub brushes and the perfect ending.
When I sob in agony she comforts me,
Later we’ll take a tour of the castle.
My mistress is cruel. She’s bright as breath.
She whispers to me as she cuts,
I’m a fan of the flesh—tits, stuffing, sweetmeats.
I suck the juice from the roast, I’m a pig with a straw.
(Fetish)
How to pass suffering, eroticism…from one person to another? Where does coherence fly apart? The answer to these questions does not lie in one or another particular strategy, but in the sensual devotion of the writer, taken to formal extremes. We explore our narrative tools, discovering exactly how they manipulate or release the contorted social body—because it’s the one we live in, the one which feeds off us, the one which has swallowed the visible horizon.
2. Monsters
One of the forms of narrative I write is software. It’s lucrative. About four years ago, I used stock options to buy a house right around the corner plus one block from one of the worst housing projects in San Francisco. A couple thousand people live there. It gives my neighborhood the highest child hunger rate in the city. Our first night in the house someone got murdered, just before midnight. It was a block away but the shot sounded like it was in our back yard. One shot, a pause, then another. Purposeful. Somehow I knew it was intended to kill, and not just a couple of kids shooting at the moon. Plus the neighbor told us he’d had his car stolen three times.
Impenetrable poverty plus dumb fuck rules, class and race segregation: I’d moved into the only San Francisco neighborhood that duplicated on a smaller scale what I grew up with. It annoyed me.
Locality, forever. Skewed. Something huge gets mutilated as it slides through a stuffy tube. We’re on the beach very far to the west, watching what pops out. It contains all of American culture. I came here so tightly wound. Born on 43rd Street, South Side Chicago & haven’t been back since I left the hospital.
From my dining room window, at the rear of the house, the project looks strangely vacant. There just never seem to be many people around. The buildings proceed down the hill towards the old industrial port like giant shabby steps, but there is never anyone on the racks of balconies. I’ve rarely driven through it. Structurally, it’s sort of a dead-end place, the way it’s laid out, like a suburban subdivision: streets point into it, then twist up like spaghetti. The few drive-through streets are dotted with dealers scoping out the passing cars. I’m just talking about the roads.
When I first moved in, I often found myself dreamily staring out the dining room window. I wanted to check out one of those balconies. The view would be amazing, they practically hang over the bay. Developers have been salivating over that piece of land for years. Nowadays they are nibbling at the edges of the project, building expensive live-work lofts for software designers on adjoining vacant industrial land. It’s weird. Different economic classes get spliced together via crimes. The mode of interaction being criminal. So, one day, I mentioned to a friend of mine that I didn’t get it, how did dealers get kids to work for them, playing courier, or delivery boy. What would a dealer have on a kid? Why get involved with some jacked-up, scary asshole? I felt like an idiot as soon as the words left my mouth. Patiently, step by step, my friend explained how it was done, until I could have done it myself, as obviously he had. All I had to do was ask. Knowledge. The getting & taking and the tearing up. Did I want to go there?
Of course I did. One day I walked in, took a place on the balcony next to all of my friends & drank their salty water. I listened to the radio. I watched as a crack lady ran down the street behind a white dog. Then the dog was scratching at the door. When I woke up, that sound was the shade, bumping against the window frame. And I was thinking, as I am always doing and my thinking told me this: This is what I want. It’s inside my system of attractions. I’m penetrated by the present and it’s always the same: chronic anger. Awful but refreshing.
From up here, it is all visible. From down below, also. Radiant contradiction. Eyeballs: the severely vivid mechanism. Finally what is seen is not a target but just circumference, expanding. Highlights scatter across the field.
I walked into the projects a couple of weeks ago. It’s right around the corner, why not just walk? It was a friend’s birthday. She told me where she lived, but it wasn’t easy to find. The apartments didn’t have numbers on them, you had to just know. I asked a bunch of people. Kids were running everywhere. How come I hadn’t seen them from my back window? I look whiter than usual, I thought, looking at my hand. Up here and not even shopping, that made me odd. People looked at me skeptically. I felt skeptical about myself, but slick, as in greased. I wanted to fall off my little ledge. Bored with what had gotten dished up as myself. The backwash of swallowing it. That nausea.
The balcony was great. I hung with my friends and listened to the radio. They played that song I like, the one about money. Later, we went out to eat birthday steaks.
California is shallow. That’s true. Though it thrills me that I can walk across the city without getting beat up for crossing some invisible dividing line of racial turf. Of course, I could get beat up for something else. I’m so easy to please. It’s the instability at the heart, which is to say the heartlessness of just washing away faster.
I’m supposed to write about narrativity but these problems of locality are where I get started. For me, writing grinds itself into what’s familiar yet unbearable. Add mobility to that and, voila, narrative. Disjunction is the formal consequence of this ripping and
tearing, and it’s packed with information, almost to the point of being insensible.
The streets I walk measure me. They measure you too, through mechanisms both criminal and friendly. Including that knowledge is a kind of spectacular innocence—the moment of saturation feels dazzling, but there is probably no point. Still I love it, formally and erotically and intimately. It’s all about nested structures. I entrust my twisted little pieces to the warm nest of the sick social body, and I feel our bond. It nourishes me.
To theorize my point of view, to pursue critical formalism as a ritual and as a grasp for power, let me put it this way. Narrative provides context so that the rupturing of identity is recognizable. I think we are impossible beings. We ruthlessly evade scrutiny, yet recognition is the beginning of transformative emotion. It’s a feeding process. You don’t know if you’re creating a monster.
As a narrative writer I improvise recognition. It’s like a location from which mutant beings emerge. This feels true, in life they never stop emerging. Look—they even swarm through this text. I allow it because I’m terrified and seduced. To encounter them via narrative is to formalize a moment of surrender.
BABY can’t stop himself from being born. Cut from a knotted uterus then jerked free, he’s so sick he can’t breathe. BABY’s grey as a rat & limp as a noodle. Rivulets of blood run through his toes & puddle on the blue sheet covering his entire mom. The doctor and nurses are wearing blue sheets, with white latex fingers poking out. Metal implements hang from the white walls. The doctor lifts BABY up before the witnesses and says,
