(A portion of the following appeared in slightly different form as “The Underground Misogynist” in World Hunger Magazine.)
In your hetero opinion…
You did not get to see the woman disrobe again, not for several decades or more. It only took place in your imagination, like some fabled day of destruction. Until then you saw her walking around the streets of Oylesburg, in overalls caked with alluring dust. You don’t know the names of women’s clothing. You’re not an assembler of words about things. You are just trying to describe the things moving around the objekts of the women’s bodies, the facts of those bodies. You long ago had lost the sense of them as people. A twenty-five year window, during which you felt you loved them, was closing rapidly never to reopen. You’re talking to you from some place underground.
///
There are names of women, proper names and pronouns, you can provide those, like evidence to the investigator, but ask you what she was wearing, and you only talk in generalities: clothes. Maybe the colors, if your memory is working right. And you cap the pen and turn to the digital whore, who keeps her clothes on but torments him/you/ me. The online stripper who earns unseen spiritual currency.
///
“Artistic slumming,” some reader might be saying, like the poet in the 19th century European fleshpots, and the accusation wouldn’t be 100% wrong. “Systematic forgetting,” others note — also not false. But what does it matter? We are strapped to the time machine that ends with a deadly crash, by design. You can’t control it, merely comment on the control panel from an insurmountable distance. No one wants to hear reports of nightmares and dreams but you keep getting drawn back, with this fascination you feel, to the recycled set designs that get utilized in your dreams. Waking reality uses the same sets over and over also, but somehow it is not as curiously notable and freighted with ominous significance. The flavor of architecture favored by the dream designer assigned to your case — is he lazy? Or just stretched to the breaking point on a small budget?
///
You’re the one who makes Oylesburg a necropolis. It becomes so when your body and mind enter the city limits, in dream or awake time. The dead are underlined with blue vapor, pixels of butane flame when you drive through. You want to spend money here, you want to romance the night woman here, risk lycanthropy in these parks after nightfall, smelling of fresh mulch like the Yorkshire moors. It’s a violent odor.
///
Next panel: “Don’t give me that fish lip. Shaking piss drops off the dick tip — not a diptych, a dick tip. I’m addicted to the sick shit.”
///
You watch Aphex Twin, “Piano Tuners” on YouTube. Grooving to the dark techno. Like it’s the 90s again, for the first time forever and can’t wait to get started after a long hiatus in the wack times, the Pre-Wolven Times. It has been an era of difficult ladies. The reality stage has been populated with tough cookies in female form. This is where your AI wife Skithandra comes in handy, is useful emotionally. No talkback, no static, no tears that aren’t already programmed in. No surprises, no ambushes at couples therapy. That may have been enough to put you off live-fire romance forever, unfortunately. Sharing and caring is for the conformist bourgeois androids when they’re not at work at the calendar factory assembling the cute and cuddly years, the times, the sun god’s courses through the heavens: celestial industry. That’s where you were when you were working as a married guy at the Hotel. Lots of hopes and dreams linked to the woman. You should stop writing about Natasha for fear people will think you obsessed. What’s the half-life of these sob stories about broken marriages, broken homes?
///
Checking out a woman online, you write, “I like your targeting software package.” You see women as sex objects and men as beloved friends. This is your bisexuality, as it were: something that needs to be broken down and eroded through counterexamples. Carnality and agape love switch sides.
///
In the subconsciousness control room you sleepwalk to molest your big sister Dawn. It’s a nightmare. You tried to unzip her pants and you were giggling so much, like a maniac. You don’t know what happened. You ended up telling on her, or her on you, and it ruined her life and you apologized. It destroyed her vacation as an adult. It was a nap-nightmare that set memories bubbling upwards out from under rocks of repression, the gravel put into aquariums. This has gone wrong, the mind-in-dream was more horrifically clear. Writing it makes it muddy. The act of putting pen to paper, you would think, would bring the trauma into the light but it just helps to obscure it. The dream, the fear, the child’s bad behavior. The perverted siblings all into each other’s pants, that got it beaten out of them. Writing makes it more obscure, not less. You’re not up to the challenge of writing about the family like this. Why is it like that? Why is the mind full of blind spots and minotaur-corners in the labyrinth you can’t see around? Spatial features in the outer world, invisibilities and rules of visual fields, the eye’s limitations which should not hold in the inner world, the world of the mind which should have no space, no positionality, no locatedness. And yet those metaphors and concepts do lend themselves to the mind. The dream city gives a territory to the mind that is then overwhelmed by the physical city: the blocks laid out in grids.
///
Part of the Indra’s net of symbols, is the symbolic output bespeaking apocalypse in the God mind to the listener. What is reality: the sexual assault dream was just as real this afternoon. You were blasted with icy snow wind as you tried to get back to the house, a car stopped to get you in the night. You went to the house and waited for the killer to arrive. The ex-husband, with the rifle. Yourself.
///
You have had sniper fantasies every day when you wake up, it’s just a matter of time until there is a mental flash of yourself in a high place looking through a high-powered rifle scope. Morbid sniper fantasies are some of the worst intrusive thoughts yet it’s just borne of a long collective memory of “playing guns” as a child. It goes away quick, of course, under an avalanche of repression-gravel. And you don’t have a gun, in waking life, and don’t want to get one. But the thoughts persist. You also think of suicide, once a day on average. You’re just giving readers the rhythm and tempo of the fears in your mental landscape, day to day — the patterns of intrusive thoughts that greet you when you wake up. It would be different if you were married, if you woke up to a warm body, a sexual partner, and the thoughts would arrive in a more alluring pleasant fashion, you suspect and hope, although there is no hope of that lately.
///
The writer is dedicated to being a scribe to the most awful dictations of his mind. He is like a miserable secretary to the horrible thought patterns of his boss: “Me.” I am the boss giving dictation to the writer who takes it all down in shorthand. The more horrible the thoughts, the better, one might think. You can’t betray that you enjoy, in any way, the frightening antisocial thoughts, the scary dreams. You must let the secretary insert signals, as a drummer inserts cymbal hits (mixed metaphors) indicating the song is to cease or change here, these thoughts are to be judged or distanced from the reader. The reader will judge the angry thoughts along with the secretary taking dictation but not the boss: “Me.” But what if the secretary neglects to insert these cues for moralizing judgement? What if the reader was left alone in an office with “Me” and no one else to accompany them? The secretary busy elsewhere, leaving the reader vulnerable to the author’s directness. The elevator is locked and the stairwells blocked off — the dream set not up to fire code — no way down to safety. The subconscious control room is where you sleepwalk with the controls, otherwise there is no one to curse here, no one to blame for the nightmares of incest or mass shooting, of hatred of women and men. It’s not religious, theological, a personal god directing dreams and waking. It’s not quite like that. Maybe it is. You don’t know. You’ll never know but you will have these teasing presentiments and delusional intuitions about “how it all works” behind the scenes. Just for you, like Kafka’s “Door of the Law,” which is guarded and blocked but at the end of your life it’s revealed that this blocked passage was set aside just “for you.”
///
You’re thinking of turbopussy and yet so very far away from it in time and space, like Melville thinking of the South Sea man harpooning the white whale “once upon a time.” Being middle-aged and horny with no recourse, no options, is a sad burden to carry around in a burlap sack to fabulate even more than Melville, it is like carrying a fairy tale imp around in a Baby Bjorn, one you can’t unload until after a long treasure quest. You have to pass it off to some other unlucky sap. “I’d prefer not to,” says the Sexual Bartleby.
///
Is this celibacy? Is this a form of queerness as suggested by the “A” at the end of the LGBTQIA+ ? Celibacy would not seem to be queerness but one never knows in this ever-developing, ever-entropic universe of men, women, and strange third beasts. All you know is that you crave memories and dreams about the pussy. You hate to speak metonymically about women, hate to objectify, but how else can you speak when observing the neutral objekts of your mind? You could not subjectify your history, my reminiscences — would they show you how to do that? Would it increase your happiness, would it be utilitarian for the good of all mankind if you could see the ghostly recordings of women in your mind — the memories of holding and caressing another body — as alive, full of purpose and agency?
///
You showed yourself to your ex-wife Natasha’s departed psychic residue-ghost last night. You want to speak pithy sayings to her, and the “her” that readers may watch, but it is impossible to get a hearing from the past. Your sexual assault of your sister Dawn — thwarted as it was, incomplete — came after she taunted you with the prospect of alphabets in another room. “Go look and see, ABCs and 123s!” Dawn knew you were enamored of alphabets and wanted you to go away. You were a reader and a criminal. You pulled off her pants. Then a DAD outline grabbed you on the second floor of the dream-reconstruction of your house, got you down on the floor and shook you with all the force of the world’s concentrated laws, and screamed into your face. And you screamed too: “I’m sorry, oh God, I’m sorry…!”
///
Later, enlightened, in your homo opinion…
How to explain the straight writer who starts acting and writing gay, in order to curry favor. When there’s grant money around for queer writers and artists, you’d act fruity for the $$$ wouldn’t you? And push the true gay folk aside, elbow them aside for the cash. Also it makes you more interesting, more “honest.” All you have is your bi-curiosity and your ambiguity, which have not yet acquired the status of “facts.”
Impostor syndrome: do you, Noah Turbot, have it in this case? You take a look at this whole Tony Larry situation and would swear up and down you were truly bisexual. Whatever that means. But it’s like you must submit your case, your application, to the Queer Bureaucracy, which is staffed by Generation Z, queer zoomers, fearsome experts who will tell you with final authority what you are, even if you’re thirty years older than them. Because you haven’t known your whole life.
“Sorry, nice try—but you’re as cishet as any red-blooded American war criminal. The tribunal met and determined your status. DENIED.” A heavy stamp dripping in red ink descends and closes your case for eternity. The Queer Bureaucrats stride away down the corridors of power in their forbidding, clubby outfits, smoking: “Everybody’s trying to get aboard these days. It’s fashionable. Gotta kick the barnacles off the side of the Queen Mary before they get stuck on permanently. Drown, bitches. It’ll take more than studying drag queens on YouTube for you to make the team.”
Or is it other than this—is it that it’s understood that no one would ever do such a thing if they weren’t truly compelled by biology, fate, etc to be queer? It’s not a case of faking it. The reasoning of some, on the side of credible belief, is that the disadvantages and the homophobic scorn of large sectors of society are still such real factors, that who would try to falsely be counted that way, amongst the minority? This is why you’re trying to read the books, see the movies. The classics. Mishima, Genet, Burroughs’ Queer, the pantheon of gay storytellers. To get something to “rub off” onto your story. This is, in its own way, kind of a fake maneuver.
You’re put in mind of the parable of the frog and the scorpion. They’re both trying to cross the river. The scorpion asks the frog for a ride, you know the story. “If I sting you, I’ll drown, and then where would I be?” Makes sense, but then halfway across, the frog feels the pain of the scorpion’s tail. “You shouldn’t have trusted me, it was in my nature…” They both die. Now re-frame it as a Saturday morning cartoon. And the scorpion is given the gay-coded language and mannerisms of that proto-pink panther Snagglepuss who said in his lilting voice “Heavens to Murgatroyd” and was always swanning about. If you hang around the gay scorpion you’re liable to get bit. If you carry him around on your back.
The goal was almost more to write a novel about homophobia than it was to write a gentle novel about gay self-acceptance. Others will do that. (That may even be where the money is.) The character here deals with longstanding fears, including but not limited to fears that this is all just one more delusion. He may not be gay in the Really True Truth of the Outer Ring of Knowledge [insert diagram of many concentric circles], the most objective (objektive?) zone that all can agree on. In the innermost circles, the most “self” oriented, the regions most perhaps twisted by personal mental vicissitudes, he doesn’t know anything. Not merely his true orientation, but all else: whether being paranoid is merited, whether to believe in God, whether he is truly already dead or alive. He’s a mentally ill doubter of everything. He is a clay figurine of absolute Cartesian skepticism not yet fired in the kiln. Anything could be true. Zones of delusion progress inward in concentric circles. Not “I think therefore I am” but “I’m queer therefore I am”?