Full Frontal Fiction

by Jack Murnighan

  Fifty-five Fucks

  BY SAM LIPSYTE

  ONE IS HER, Heidi, maybe, or Helene, Heidi with the hair, the face, the nips that ended in little pink knots. Two is Betsy in the shrubs at pottery camp. Three is Lucretia, three is always Lucretia. Four is Kenneth by the lake. Five is Kenneth and his brother Keith by the lake, their cocks like great, quivering cocks by the lake. Six is Moira with the tragic scar from tennis. Seven is me coming in Heidi, or Helene, in the front seat of my Dodge Dart, and me, or maybe not me, thinking nips, or thinking nips, knots, nips. Seven is me or rather not me coming in Heidi, or Helene, but also me throwing my hand over the vinyl seat to clutch the hand of Donna who is topping Brian, who is maybe bodkinned there by Brian, who is coming in Donna in the backseat of my Dodge Dart. Eight is me and Donna, later, near the trestles next to Main. Nine is Ann Anteater, but only my finger, like a great, quivering finger by the lake. Ten is Heidi, or Helene, again. Eleven is very much the same. Twelve is the swineherdess, dressed as a nurse. She was the love of one of my lives. She lays down, or maybe she lies down, with men of other lives now. They suckle, I suppose, that mole on her hip, and I hope they taste me. Thirteen is there is no taste of me. Fourteen is with the girl with the poster of Fanon. Fifteen is somebody and Fanon. Sixteen is what is the strangest place you’ve ever had sex with? Seventeen is reamed by the Space Needle, or sticking it deep in the loop of Orion’s Belt. Eighteen is buggered by chance. Nineteen is the girl who said no. Is it twenty yet? Yes, it is twenty, yet. Twenty is begging those two women leaving the party to let me in their car. Twenty-one is me on my knees, begging them to bugger me in their bed. Twenty-two is me thinking twenty-three. Twenty-three is me waking to me bathed in their blood. Head to toe. Neck to knee, really. Twenty-four is wanting them, the bleeders, to bleed on me over and over again. Twenty-five, twenty-five is to stand before God and confess my fifty-five sins. Lying, after all, is a sin, whereas laying, who knows? Did I say fifty-five? I just wanted the others to like me.

  STORY OF MY COCK

  Listen to this: I had a wee-wee, then I had a dick. Now I have a cock. What’s so crazy about it? I thought I had small balls until she told me they were big. I thought I had a small wee-wee until she told me it was an average-sized dick. Cock, I corrected her. If you prune the pubes the way the men on the videotapes do you get more cock, or more shaft of cock. You get more of a sense of shaftness. You can kneel over someone the way they do in the videotapes, you can bend yourself over them and what you have in your hand is referred to in certain circles as a superabundance. I use my dead mother’s sewing scissors.

  STORY OF MY PUSSY

  What was that about, the way we used to put our things away to make a pussy for ourselves? You fold it down and under, press it into disappearance. You get half of a hairy Star of David down there. It feels like God singing through you when you make a pussy for yourself down there. I don’t want to hear a theory for it. The Nazis are coming. That’s Dad’s car in the garage. You better make a pussy for yourself quick.

  PHONE SEX

  You can get it all the way up in there, but I’d be careful.

  PHONE SEX PART II

  Here’s a good way to go about having what you can never have denied you: Restrict your carnality to the fiber optic kind. What I mean is make sure you do your fucks long distance. Get a headset, do the lotion with both hands. I’m talking as a man here. I’m talking headsets and lotion and I’m talking as a man. I’m also talking as a man talking on a headset to a woman in another country, or in another kind of country than this one. What she has in lieu of lotion is something small and silver (she says), something mechanical and of a genius beyond my means. That’s okay. Most things are of a genius beyond my means. Could I have invented the can opener, for example, that genius device for opening canned-meat cans, if it wasn’t already invented? Not on my life. Still, I do alright. Like the Incas. Look at the Incas. A whole civilization without knowledge of the wheel. How many roads did those Incas build without figuring out the wheel? No can openers that I know of, either. No knowledge of canned meat, that I know of, in terms of knowledge imparted to me. Still, they did okay, the Incas, for a while. They did great until that prick Pizarro dragged his horses to the beach. Which is my point about phone sex, exactly. Point being, have you ever played King’s Fifth? What you need is lotion, a headset, a small and silver thing, a smattering of Spanish and ancient Andean dialects, some canned chicken, and a burning desire to deny yourself what you can never have.

  AUTOINFECTION

  Get this: I was celibate for a few years, and after most of it I got a thing on my thing. Do you know what that means? Jesus, can you even get your head around what that might even possibly mean? I’ll tell you, so you can pretend you’re not one of the dumb ones who can’t get his head around what it might possibly mean. It means I gave it to myself. It means I gave myself the syph, the clap, the clyd, the King’s Fifth, whatever the hell you want to call that thing on my thing.

  Beat that.

  A SEXY NARRATIVE FOR THE EROTIC MARKET

  I wanted to make her come. I wanted her to love me for trying to make her come. I wanted her to think of me as Jesus come back from my daddy’s throne room just to make her come. I wanted her to come in a way that all the times she might ever come afterward with anybody else or all alone would just be some twitchy thing to do instead of reading that book again or making that call she didn’t want to make. I wanted her life to be somehow ruined by the exaltation of this one moment of coming, ruined in the sense that life in its wake would be a kind of falling away.

  Guess I had some problems.

  Guess I still do.

  So what, glass houses, pal, know what I mean?

  Natoma Street

  BY TERMINATOR (J. T. LEROY)

  IT’S LIKE I’M PUSHED from behind, pulled down the slope of Natoma Street like it’s a ramp down into another world. All the buildings are low and tight, huddled around me. Heavy-gated sweatshops, sunken-down tenements, windows filled with dusty laughing Santas and graying fake snow, ancient slaughterhouses with rusted metal beams jutting suddenly out above me. I watch my shadow slip underneath them, sharpen under the piss-colored street lamp and slide unsliced over the green and white pebbles of smashed glass almost worn smooth from streams of urine. And behind me somewhere is the rainlike sound of a car window being smashed, and in front of me the crunch-crunch under my boots, pulling me forward. I tilt my head to listen to the blood in my own ear and all I hear, and all I feel, is a cold ache. The sheet metal door glistens in front of me like an axe blade, and the sound of my pounding fist on the door echoes through me and down Natoma Street. Each split second of contact with the frozen metal is like a jolt trying to wake or stop me, but all that’s racing in my blood is too old and too known and too mechanical to be turned back. I stand and wait and watch delicate white puffs of air float out from me. And it’s amazing anything can come out of me. Soon nothing will. I bang on the door as hard as I can, bruising my knuckles, and wait a few seconds.

  “C’mon.”

  My teeth are clamped. I kick the door with my boot. They’re gonna find me collapsed here, as drained and empty as if a vampire had fed on me. I kick the door again and again, and it shudders. I feel the panic and desperation in my stomach spread as my blood roars away, feeding on itself.

  “You’re supposed to...” I kick and hit the metal door. “Fuckin’ be here!”

  From behind me a window slams open.

  “People sleeping, people sleeping!”

  I turn and look up to see a bald Chinese guy, his face so chubby and squished he looks like a smiling Buddha. Christmas lights flash like a strobe around him.

  “You go way, go way!”

  I stare as he points the way out with a stubby thick finger. From behind me, I hear heavy latches and bolts moving. I twist in the direction the finger points, and it’s like an opening in the world, with cars, lights and people passing the mouth of Natoma, and they have no idea I’m he
re.

  “God damn, you’re eager.” The door pulls open like a bank vault and blue light reflects onto the sidewalk. “It’s just 11:30 now; I don’t start early,” he says in a deep radio-announcer tone.

  My ears pound, and I look back up to the Buddha man, but he’s gone, just the empty flashing space of his gaping window.