We both need to cum in the morning. I know we should conserve the day’s energy for partying and socializing and activism, but fuck it, we’re slaves to orgasm, and we both serve as terrible reminders of that fact to each other. I was ready to try my sex game. It’s the epitome of disempowerment. I wondered what my activist friends would think.
That morning, the sun was streaming through cracks in the blinds. It cut across our limbs and caught the blond fur on his legs.
Let’s do it.
Okay, maybe.
I’ll need more than a maybe.
Do I have to wear anything?
No, you actually have to wear nothing.
Then what do I have to do?
Why do you automatically assume submission?
Is submission involved?
Yes. But I’ll be the one submitting.
But if this is your game and you’re telling me what to do, doesn’t that make you dominant?
Oh my god, do we have to be such basic queers? Can we step it up?
Okay, tell me about it and I’ll consider.
You’ll be face fucking me, and I’ll be resisting you.
That sounds pretty vanilla. What framework will we have in place for continued consent?
Don’t ruin this for me.
I’m just being responsible.
I handed Eric a stack of numbered cue cards. For dramatic inspiration, I wrote them while watching General Hospital, my favourite soap opera. I watched it with the sound muted and put words in the mouths of the actors. The character arcs would never be the same, not after what I made them say to each other. Eric appeared troubled as he flipped through the stack. He started shaking his foot, a nervous tic that rarely manifested.
I don’t want to be responsible for damaging you.
You won’t. This is my idea.
I still want you to have safe words for different levels of escalation, especially considering where you’re taking this.
We can stop if it gets too heavy for you.
Eric sighed and closed his eyes, perhaps to get into character. Then he opened them and read the first cue card.
Say my name.
It gave me an instant erection. Not bad for a guy with an early case of erectile dysfunction. I turned bright red and got very hot and shy. This was an immaculate transfusion of devil’s blood.
Say my name. I said, say my fucking name.
Eh-eh-eh-
Say it.
Eh-eh-eh-
Swallow, choke, vacillate, my entire world a hesitation. His aggression made it impossible to close my mouth to enunciate the letter R.
Say it.
Eh-eh-eh
He slid himself higher in juxtaposition to me on the bed.
Say my name, you stuttering freak, you deformity of nature.
I started to pre-cum hard, a stream of semen unspooling from the top of my dick into a growing dark spot on the sheet. Like when I pissed the bed as a little boy, I couldn’t hide my humiliation.
Eh-eh-eh
I’ve said his name perfectly thousands of times, but in this situation, I was powerless. For a stutterer, there is no safe word, because there is no guarantee you’ll be able to say it.
Eh-eh-r-eh
I couldn’t get my top teeth to touch my bottom lip long enough to form the letter. My jaws felt like the north poles of two magnets being held against each other.
Can’t say it? I didn’t think so.
He moved up the bed, grabbed me by the hair, and yanked my face closer to him. My head jerked and spasmed. I tried to say his name, a simple two syllables any idiot could manage, any idiot but me.
The reason you can’t close your mouth is because you’re waiting for me to shove my dick inside. You want me to face-fuck the stutter right out of you.
He pushed his crotch closer. I shook my head “no” as my nose filled with the smell of his big sweaty balls, dangling in my face. I tried to push him away, but he restrained my hands under his knees and sat on my chest. I made one last effort to say his name and avoid the inevitable. I took a deep breath and tried again.
Eh-eh-eh-eh-Eh-r-eh
He shoved his fat uncut cock right into the space of his half-uttered name and pushed himself down my throat until I gagged and almost puked. I tried to buck him off me, but he was too heavy.
Fucking look at me. I’m the word you are trying to say, and now the word is coming to choke you.
He pumped my face silly until tears streamed down my cheeks. I looked up at him in fear and terror and love. Perhaps as a reprieve, Eric pulled his dick out of my face to give me one last chance.
Eric.
I did it. Flawlessly. But he closed his eyes just as I said it, so he didn’t see. An aspect of the game I hadn’t considered.
He stuck his cock back inside me to make up for my deficiency, to correct it. By then, I had surrendered to him. He expanded in my throat. At our age, in our early twenties, less than five decades combined and already jaded, this was hardly enough to make either of us cum, so he used his speaking privilege to deliver the final blow, his coup de petit mort, and it was ruthless and brilliant on my back molars and in my spinning, exploding head. He enunciated better than any actor I had ever seen on General Hospital.
You’re just a little boy who has never learned how to speak.
Those words. My orgasm was a series of tiny moments, finite particles accelerating to an infinite crash: Eric suddenly pulled out, and through his legs I saw my foreskin sleeked back in my hand; I was a kid again, with a boner so hard it wouldn’t bend, squeezing knuckle white, squeezing knuckle red, fingers coated in the first dribble of sperm lava, no pubes in sight because they were hidden (unless they had fallen out in the shiver of fantasy) squeezing knuckle red, squeezing knuckle blue, fingering my tight boy ass and wondering how much it could take. When had I first imagined anything so elaborate and exquisite and sinister? I just started to laugh, because my dick poked through my Donald Duck boxers where Donald’s beak hole would be, so both Eric and I were, in fact, face-raping a stutterer.
I laughed and laughed and sprayed the bed with hot cum until I was empty of mind and spirit. Empty in reams. Empty of dreams. Thunder doesn’t only happen when it’s raining. You can be draining, too.
He got off me and I collapsed into his arms, exhausted, happy, and full of wonder about the world and my place in it. He seemed remote. Are you okay?
Yes.
Why didn’t you cum?
This was about you.
Did you like it?
It was good.
Just good?
You’re being insecure. I would like you to be more secure in the cruelty you inflict on yourself.
We each retreated to our side of the bed. I felt like telling him that there can be no regret for a perfect orgasm, no matter what it takes to get there. That, like modernist art, it needs no justification. That fantasy cannot crumble our belief systems. But he was already engrossed in a book, and soon I was too. I wondered if we were both reading aimlessly while our brains worked out the question of whether or not we were bad people.
I wondered what it would be like to do what he did to someone else.
SCREAMING HANDFUL OF NOTHING
For some reason, I started to panic that I wouldn’t find the music I was looking for at CKUT. Radio stations could be tune cemeteries, for all I knew, where pop hits went to gentrify and die. Maybe the answers were lurking in random Walkmans and Discmans around the city, in the secrets that people played to themselves as they caromed around and avoided each other. I decided to put my theory to the test.
I found myself in the Place-des-Arts Metro station one day, staring at people more than I usually do. There was a twenty-something guy with cornrows and a beard and a really creative way of twisting a scarf through his hair so it looked feathered. His clothes were filled with mysterious pockets. I eventually landed on his eyes, and we locked. I held them across the platform and pulled him several feet before finally letting go.
Then there was the person in the clothes of the preppy young professional—pinstripe suit, crisp and starched white dress shirt, canary-yellow hankie—obviously so many secrets to hide under all those codes. Made me curious. But soon I was distracted by a new round of passengers who had just descended into the station: Woman in punk T-shirt, baby punks in big punk clothing, day jobbers and people coming home from all-nighters. They collectively turned into a grey sludge of humanity, a mass of meat run through a sluice and decayed to the colour of rotting flesh and maggots. I wanted to know what music they listened to, what had made them that way. Perhaps I craved their boredom.
Their eyes were like mine, empty mirrors, reflecting pools with holes in them, searching for a missing piece of themselves in another, endlessly darting from face to face, as I was doing, looking for a spot of recognition in the light of another, a place of relief to rest temporarily, take a break from the search. All eyes travelling and revealing nothing. Birds over the ocean with nothing to do but keep flying.
I started to notice the people wearing headphones. They were different, their eyes free of armour. There was honesty in the waves of their movements. It connected in my head like a line of dots, like little blue stickers.
I knew that the only way to honesty, to the truth, was to rip the headphones off every music listener I passed in the hopes of finding out what made them so peaceful and remote, not necessarily in contrast with the others on the platform, but rather, in contrast with me. I did it one by one, swiped their headphones in swift moves, knocking off hats and sunglasses, completely destabilizing them while they tottered at the edge of the platform as a train approached.
I lifted the jangle of headphones up to my head, a multi-headed hydra hissing treble and screaming mid-range. I listened intently but heard nothing that I was seeking in this cacophony.
Trouble is, I couldn’t shake the wires. I ran off the platform and up the stairs dragging all this music behind me, with angry people trying to grab me by the strings.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE LETTER M
There is a slew of things I want Eric to hear, and it upsets me that he can’t. So I just keep lists of them and randomly Hotmail them to him, hoping the imagined sounds burst the hidden eardrums in his head:
Machine-gunning through broken concepts that are otherwise smooth, murderous attacks on consonants, murmuring to make the listener think the problem is their hearing and not my speech, mixing metaphors if the conflict will be less than a mouthful, meandering from the subject, mmmmm sounds that lead people to believe I find daily existence more delicious than it actually is, marbles tumbling in the space a name should occupy, milking the first half of a word, hoping the last half changes shape before coming out, mangling a thought to the point where someone questions my sureness or my honesty, mouthing things to myself seconds before I say them, missed practice runs, mistaken signs of affection, Morrissey, Mike + the Mechanics, Massive Attack, Maori singers, mamase mamasa mamacusa.
Mostly, I want him to hear that I speak everything voiced to him, when all he needs is to see my mouth.
I want him to know that I stutter for him even though I don’t have to.
IN THE LIONS’ DEN
When I think back to the Jehovah’s Witness literature I used to “read,” there were some pretty hot illustrations of Daniel in the Lions’ Den.
If I have to analyze how I really feel about the story, I’d have to say it’s completely overblown and far too allegorical. The prophets were deluded and wrote their spurious scriptures while high on lead poisoning, so you can’t really blame Daniel.
After discarding a theory I once considered—that the lions’ mouths weren’t actually sealed, but rather, the lions were simply afraid of stuttering and showing weakness—I concluded that it is actually the story of a prisoner and his captor.
It was a prison of the Biblical variety, but modern with wrought-iron bars and locks. The same kind of prison exists all over the world today. The formula caught on. It doesn’t matter what the prison looked like. But let’s say the walls were covered with insanities, etchings of the minds of the obscene, prisoners gone mad with the imperceptible passage of time. It doesn’t matter if there was one prisoner or there were many; they would all experience pain to the same extremity and lose themselves in one another. They would try to murder each other, thinking it was suicide.
The captor never spoke.
One day, a prisoner convinced himself that the captor was there to hear his confession. Perhaps there was something in the quality of the captor’s silence that made him think that. Something patient. Something receptive.
So the prisoner unburdened himself.
“This is my confession. I have lied in the eyes of the Lord for unjust gain. My neighbour undertook to purchase an ass from me, and I misrepresented the health of the animal. The ass was indeed quite lame, but I exacted a premium price for it. The animal died the day after purchase, and I went to bed laughing at the misfortune and stupidity of my neighbour. I have every right to be in this cell.”
The captor still didn’t speak. He sat on a wooden chair in the heat, scraping the resin off the chair’s back leg with a knife. He smeared it on a tiny piece of dry bread and ate it. He stared at the wall with no facial expression that the prisoner could recognize.
The prisoner assumed that the captor was dissatisfied with what he’d said, that perhaps he hadn’t been forthcoming or contrite enough. Because the captor was silent, the prisoner didn’t know what else to do except fill the air with words.
“This is my confession. I have lied in the eyes of the Lord for unjust gain, but not completely how I just told you. The animal got well again and became one of the strongest working asses. It took load after load without a complaint, and allowed its body to be broken under the weight of barley and millet. In the hot sun, it refused to drink water lest it be considered a lazy and selfish beast. The weight of the produce of the earth carved into the animal muscles of marble, and its work reaped many spoils for my neighbour. I grew jealous of this, of how the animal worked harder for my neighbour than for me. So I poisoned the animal in the night, and then, when the neighbour mourned over the corpse, I came behind him and slit his throat, and I took back my money.”
Still he didn’t speak, the captor.
It is not part of this story to explain if God sealed the captor’s mouth, or if Satan did it. And I don’t know what effect wood resin has on human lips.
The captor played with the key to the jail-cell lock. He bent down to dig a keyhole into the dirt floor. He scraped and scraped and jammed the key into the ground. The captor created a lock that wouldn’t turn. Just for fun. This drove the prisoner resolutely mental. It snapped something deep in his cerebellum, releasing a poison into his brain. It was the poison of words he had never heard himself think before. The prisoner filled the air with them. It didn’t matter what they were or if they were true. He just filled the void because he had to speak for both of them.
“In my lifetime, I have drilled holes into boats on my birthdays so I could watch them sink and the sailors perish at the precise moment I turned another year older. I have baked bread using glass powder and served it to royalty to see if their insides disintegrated at the same speed as those of common folk and if their vomiting of blood was as pedestrian. I have defiled whole herds of swine in the rectum, held a prophet at knifepoint and forced him to write scripture in which he cast me as a saint. I have eaten cloven-hoofed animals on the holiest of days and proclaimed Beelzebub to be my Holy Father. I have shown up in court numerous times, at random trials of accused I did not know, to provide the false evidence the executioner needed to hang them, merely so I could witness the spontaneous erections of other men while they strangled—as a form of personal pornography.”
The prisoner, utterly exhausted from his performance, began to shake and fell violently upon the ground. Did he think his confession would earn him quicker release, a fuller pardon? Does honesty breed sympathy?
&nbs
p; He said nothing, the captor.
The prisoner—about to lose consciousness, feeling close to death, certain that all his organs would fail at any minute now that he had emptied himself of every criminal possibility true and untrue, feasible and unfeasible, damnable and undamnable—stared at the keyhole the captor had dug into the dirt floor. He then began to wonder: If the floor was made of dirt, why hadn’t he thought of digging himself out?
“I didn’t do any of it.”
The captor finally spoke.
“I know. And that is why you are here. We are in the business of imprisoning innocent people.”
COPROFAGIA
I was once again stuck in a capitalist wet dream with a boyfriend who wasn’t remotely interested.
He’s the better lover by a long shot. He’s less abrasive, less presumptuous, kinder, more thoughtful, more responsible, more forgiving. He holds the threads of a relationship more delicately. He’s good at spotting moments better shared than experienced alone. The best, embarrassingly so.
But he is absolutely terrible at buying furniture we don’t need. I, on the other hand, excel in that area of wastefulness.
I was still apologizing to Eric for having tried to push him toward hearing restoration surgery when he didn’t want it. I had even booked a consultation without telling him, and it turned out to be the worst birthday present I ever gave anyone. I had been in damage-control mode ever since, but I was afraid that my overtures were falling on, ahem, deaf ears. So I tried other ways of showing him that I was sorry. In a bid to give us a fresh start, I had proposed that we ditch all of our furniture and start over, reupholster our lives anew. We were adults but would soon be grown-ups. He gingerly agreed to a few new pieces.
Mouthquake Page 8
