L. says that the hippy motto is total nonsense—why make love not war, if you can do both? “War is an aphrodisiac,” he says. “It heats up your blood just like love. Plus it’s summertime!” If he had kissed me right after saying that, I swear to god I would have led the people’s insurrection myself—the Fifth International, pro-China and pro-Viet Cong, and you know what else? After that I would have nationalized everything, thrown all that Peronist nonsense straight out the window, a workers’ insurrection pure and simple, government of the people. Oh, Moo! What I wouldn’t give to have him between my legs again, and we’d do it slow, everything he wanted, and then we’d do it again!
At about this same time in Kamtchowsky’s life, the Brazilian wave of Gal Costa and Maria Bethânia, of “Eu preciso te falar,” of “Amanhã talvez” and Rita Lee’s hit “Lança perfume,” came to an end. An extensive marketing study determined that the wave’s commercial success had been due mainly to a certain timbre in the treble equalization; apparently the sound engineers had set out to light up the same cerebral pleasure circuits that respond to cocaine. Against all reasonable expectations, the wave’s popularity was immediately usurped by César “Banana” Pueyrredón’s pop ballad “Conociéndote,” followed by a final twitch from the death throes of his career, “No quiero ser más tu amigo.” Then Kamtchowsky’s father left for Chile to manage the construction of a new factory, and she never saw him again.
The fifteen years that passed between her initiatory bloodshed and the beginning of this story proper were difficult ones for Kamtchowsky. It was all too clear that other people found her frankly unattractive, and her mother seemed to wish her dead. She suspected that she had no idea how to “let herself go,” and soon proved this with Mati, a classmate who was quite ugly himself. Kamtchowsky tried to adapt herself to his rhythm; she parted her lips lasciviously, threw her head back. Some of the “sensual” moments were frankly uncomfortable, but she did her best to please.
Mati and Kamtchowsky spent most of their time rubbing their stubby little bodies together, then staring meekly at one another, waiting for emotions to occur, mirroring each other’s expressions as best they could. The activation of their reproductive apparati was compulsively enriched by Mati’s onanistic research. While most of what went on could clearly be termed exploring (an adventurous euphemism for all activities related to physical development), the bulk of their efforts went into the process of working through the script that begins with Curiosity and proceeds into the singular experience of Romance. In fact these were two separate stages—one instinctive and animalistic, the other human and rational—and the natural thing was to progress from one to the other. Loving and being in love were also important, of course, almost as important as homework. Mati and Kamtchowsky generally got bored fairly quickly of all the thrusting and staring, put their clothes back on, and hooked up the Atari. Mati was rather chubby, with thick lips and bulging eyes that gave him the look of a stunned beetle; a few years later, during his growth spurt, his eyes would migrate toward the sides of his head, making him more of a tadpole, as if to indicate the potential that croaked softly within. That was also the period during which he discovered that he was ambidextrous in terms of jerking off and of drawing pictures with his pee in the urinals.
Kamtchowsky was strangely conscious of the fact that this relationship was no more than a test run for the future, and in general she let Mati have his way. She suspected that he acted as he did in order to seem cool, though he obviously couldn’t pull it off; she wanted to caress his little gel-stiffened quiff, to say that he could calm down, that they would learn soon enough. Then, much as her father had discovered how to calculate Fourier series functions at the tender age of ten, Kamtchowsky made her own unoriginal and thus trivial discovery: that fucking consisted of a set of procedures which could be serialized. Given the constant acceleration of repeated motion aligned vertically inside her (glans [G] = force vector), the mathematical operation in question would result in Kamtchowsky lying beaten to a pulp against the wall with her skull pierced along its horizontal axis (the abscissa) as follows:
When the sense of decency inherent in his self-awareness gave out, Mati dedicated himself to the art of hurting Kamtchowsky precisely where she was most vulnerable. He told her he’d figured out that she faked all of her orgasms, that she was cold as a fucking fish, that if she wanted to turn him on, she should come over here and suck him off, and if she was lucky, just maybe he’d stick a finger up her ass and cum on her tits. The two of them moaned their way through an emotional duty-free zone where erratic and relatively aggressive behaviors soon to include eating disorders, suicidal tendencies, substance abuse and stress were celebrated as rites of passage demonstrating a particular sensibility given a relatively orderly freedom to develop. Both Kamtchowsky and Mati had grown up in nurturing environments that encouraged displays of sensitivity, creativity, and originality, particularly on the raised stage that is sex, sphere par excellence of liberty and play. Kamtchowsky became furious. Something—feminine intuition?—told her that she was smarter than him, that she always had been, that she shouldn’t just let him win. She shot a glance at his crotch, let drop a particularly acidic bit of commentary, and walked out the door.
Generally speaking, successful theoretical models of standard adolescent behavior show a pattern of superficial benevolence; the empirical soil in which these models are grown, however, is swampy, demoralizing, and vulgar. Kamtchowsky’s classmates spent their post-pubescent years working through a catalog of personality vectors, each of which could be accessed by exaggerating personal details that they had come to understand, suddenly and at quite a young age, as belonging to them as individuals—which is to say, as authentic, as real. Identifying these details enabled them to draw up strategies they could use to call attention to themselves, thus giving them additional mechanisms for regulating their minimum caloric intake of personal self-esteem, in accordance with the formula whereby the audience/empathy binomial becomes an existential modality. In Bambi (1942), the fawn’s emergence in the forest initiates the hero’s apprenticeship in full view of the multitude. The creatures of the forest gather to watch him rise to his feet for the first time; his mother nudges him with her muzzle, and Bambi staggers, lurches back and forth, strains to stay upright, then tumbles to the ground. He’s charming. He’s also very young, and thus clumsy and weak, in need of attention, of care: it is by falling flat on his face that he gains the love of his woodland audience.
In order for initiational observations to be transformed into personal belief systems, the little subjects must be convinced to dive deep into their own pasts, believing wholeheartedly that within the timeline of their life there lies a key. The process of searching for ways to atone for one’s behavior naturally favors those with a predilection for dwelling on the most sordid, violent facts of one’s past—those moments when the little ones’ humanity is delineated with great quickness and clarity. Likewise, the process trains the little ones to accept as naturally as possible the camaraderie of older men and women who refuse to conform to proper models of adult behavior.
One day, however, Kamtchowsky grew up and said:
–Given the absence of any binding objective morality, we have no option but to entrust ourselves to the privacy of an ethics of mental processes. This is where a form of personal responsibility branches off. Such a system, of course, has nothing to do with any sort of Kantian obsession. At no point have I assumed the existence of any true “us” whatsoever.
Shortly after jotting down this affirmation, Kamtchowsky managed to land herself a boyfriend. His name was Pablo. He wore glasses, and paired every bodily movement with an expression of pained discomfort. They’d run into each other several times at the MALBA cinema, had watched each other from afar, but both of them thought themselves too horrible looking to be desirable even to someone who was equally repulsive. Moreover, each detected the repellent top note given off by the biographical
elements they had in common. Both had quickly abandoned the simplistic comics of Anteojito for the ineffable Humi, the magazine for progressive primary schoolers; both had parents who’d never put much effort into hiding their copies of Sex Humor, giving the hormonal development of their children a completely unfounded air of natural ease; growing up, their loyal companions had been video cassette recorders, microwaves, and yogurt makers rather than some guilty-looking dog snuffling at the air and hoping for permission to defecate.
At about this time, Kamtchowsky decided to start wearing skirts: she was afraid that her backside would burst out and hurt someone if she kept trying to encage it. The eyeshadow she used was a particularly repellent shade of green, and she hid her double chin under scarves. She wore platform shoes, and socks with patterns involving microchips and circuitry. She sat near the front of the cinema to avoid the promiscuous laughter of others; there, she sprawled across her seat, sucking on chewable mints and pretending no one could see her.
Pablo had similar moviegoing habits, having cribbed them from her. Now he waited for the lights to dim, and sat down two seats away. She moved her backpack into the empty seat between them. He matched her peevishness by lowering his rucksack ever so slowly to the ground and staring at her for the rest of the film. Kamtchowsky sees everything, saw everything, but left her legs splayed wide open on the back of the seat in front of her.
The movie was Pabst’s Don Quixote (1933). Kamtchowsky ignored Pablo programmatically throughout the film. At the end he leaned over surreptitiously and whispered in her ear: “Smart-ass lil’ bitch.” Then he stood and walked away.
When Kamtchowsky came out after the credits had rolled, Pablo was waiting for her, holding a small bouquet of grass ripped out by the roots. “I’m sorry for insulting you,” he said, “but I didn’t want to come right out and say that I find you very attractive.” She made it clear that she understood perfectly, and taught him how to make her cum with a packet of Sweet Mints. And thus, though she hadn’t moved a muscle while Pablo (hereinafter known as Pabst) drilled a hole in her silhouette with his laser-like vector of ugliness, she had been reading in the most fundamental sense, had been sharing in the pertinent signs.
4
Pabst added Kamtchowsky’s blog to his blog roll, and she added his to hers. His had a black-and-green background, with multicolored text in Helvetica. It manifested a serene sense of nostalgia for the 1990s, the decade that had seen him develop from a fat little dwarf into a person of normal proportions, albeit completely devoid of beauty and vitality. The blog was thick with references to the singers and songs that had once sent him running from the quinceañeras of all those girls who were out of his league. Milli Vanilli, Jazzy Mel, Ace of Bass, Technotronic—the entire soundtrack that played in the background whenever the innocent face of Flora G. or Caro T. or Maru Z. appeared. Nowadays, Pabst listened to these same songs as he worked himself into a froth of humiliation—an appetizer he’d only recently discovered—very exciting.
In the fantasy world of his wanking, the plot was structured as follows: the birthday girl made her way from table to table, posing for a picture with each group of invitees, and Pabst came up to her from behind, spun her around, grabbed her by the shoulders and locked his lips onto hers, pressing himself up against her breasts as best he could. She pushed him away in disgust, wiping his saliva off her chin; his feet got tangled in the hem of her dress, and he tripped and fell to the ground in full view of everyone. Bringing this mental residue to life, Pabst stroked himself harder and harder until it started to hurt; he wanted to put an end to the whole mess once and for all. The abrasions grew more and more painful; ejaculation tended to take a while, which gave time for the other guests at the imaginary party to make all sorts of unpleasant comments, competing amongst themselves to see who could insult him with the greatest degree of precision and ingenuity. The culmination was a mixture of tears and semen, and it felt extremely therapeutic.
His blog was peppered with encoded references to this habit in the form of short poems:
Lore—no law, no lei
has stained—the Dress—with salsa
the Salsero shakes and—won’t dance to Vilma Palma.
He had lost all contact with his classmates from those days of mediocre betrayals, of wiping boogers and zit-pus on the bottom of the classroom desks, so there was no one left to offend. And nobody read Dickinson any more.
On his blog he maintained an updated list of online resources for sharing pirated software, as well as an interesting selection of macabre pornography. It wasn’t that contemplating the systematic abuse of pregnant women gave him as much pleasure as cyber warfare, but that his mind, already polluted with obsessions particular to unassailable self-esteem, had concluded that the access protocol for modern empathy involves the intelligent, glamorous use of cruelty.
Pabst had established deeper and more interesting relationships while sprawled back in his desk chair caressing a plastic bowl and masturbating than ever before in his life; he had gotten to know nicer people, who enriched his life with funnier, defter, haughtier comments, and he had an arsenal of mp3s and jpegs to share. Out there—that is, inside the heads of others—the same epic play of the pollywog scrivener who assists at the call to Being was being staged. Pabst had glimpsed the underlying structure of this logorrheic art of the I in love with its own vulnerability, and thoroughly enjoyed terrorizing the weak.
To Pabst’s own solitary surprise, verbal sadism and high-speed typing weren’t the only skills that could be combined to produce highly tolerable tête-à-têtes and contacts leading to personal satisfaction. New psychopathic plains emerged spontaneously, and Pabst was proud to see that a certain subterranean connection between evil and voluptuousness had (at long last) begun to play in his favor. Much as “lactescent,” “milky,” and “spurt” can be satisfactorily combined to evoke the mental image of semen, Pabst’s discursive brutality and his superciliary control over discussions—demonstrations, both, of his superiority—were together apt to attract (much as certain orchids use the smell of the insects decomposing within them to attract still more insects, who are apparently convinced that they are somehow different from the others, that they can feed there safely) those who sought some strange, tortured, doomed beauty; some majestic castle to which only the few are admitted, and allowed the short-lived pleasure of sliding unprotected yet unharmed through the cacti. Through his daily regimen of hating all and sundry, Pabst gained access to a new self-image, one richer in the flair of lucid Adonis than Pabst could ever have managed on the strength of his physical attributes. All of which is to say that Pabst told lots and lots of people to fuck off, and was told to fuck off by lots and lots of people.
At long last he was able to make good use of the personal liberty for which his education had prepared him—a sharp contrast with the crap uses his garbage life had thus far been able to make of it. Exercising his anonymous right to violent aggression, Pabst fought bloody battles against invaders and enemies (all of them potential admirers). Trolling about in his native element, he seemed preternaturally gifted at creating irritation and discomfort in others, as if born with foreknowledge of the winding paths of electronically manifested disdain.
Pabstian cruelty was most often decoded as “critical” in some sense, as part of some larger program of self-improvement, thanks to one very simple principle: striking a passive-aggressive or openly destructive attitude obliged one to articulate the weaknesses of that which was being read/disdained, texts whose I, unweaned of its need for attention and thirsty for distinguishing traits, was always fodder for discussion. His regular visitors, their absurd nicknames favoring “alternate spellings” using k’s instead of c’s or q’s, insulted his posts with varying degrees of candor, precision, and lucidity, turning his blog into a theater of war. Pabst’s taunts consisted of categorical judgments sprinkled with references to films, TV series, people with facial burns, pop miscellanea f
rom the ’80s and ’90s, nudists, zombies, Sideshow Bob, giant squid, and all kinds of other irrelevancies. His observations were concise, categorical, and invariably right. The Internet provided a context wherein the protocols of association permitted one to control both one’s own spontaneity and that of others, thus providing a social context that was far more sophisticated than the mere bad weather of raw behavior. Violent as they may have been, Pabst’s relationships with others came to seem like a twisted form of affection: in the long term, paying attention to something and disdaining it became one and the same project. Dealing with a certain amount of contempt was not only possible, it may even have been healthy. Each act walked the fine line between spontaneous conduct and performance; and even in the worst of cases, one always had the consolation of thinking oneself “misunderstood,” which linked the writer to his or her favorite forbears, namely other misunderstood individuals, tortured souls, film characters, accursed poets, et cetera. Even masochism itself grants its victims a certain distinction. In such a swamp, the path toward existence postulates that any given child can find access to an audience in exchange for making him or herself visible, and thus vulnerable. Of course there was hatred embedded in the judgments of others, but—and this was the most surprising discovery of all—there was love, too. The search for like-minded beings gave all the pollywogs the opportunity to praise themselves over and over, yielding sensations in turn multiplied by thousands upon thousands of hyperlinks, producing a style of communication that was both intimate and open all at once.
Savage Theories Page 3
