July 08, 2004
Fiction
Withdraw, Withdraw!
My girlfriend is getting her PhD in American Studies, but her real subject is how structures of oppression harness sexual energies for profit and to maintain and reproduce the hegemonic control over our surplus libidinal value. She told me this at the party near campus where we met, right after introducing herself as “Elizabeth, call me Liz.” We fucked on the first date. Now Liz shows me a weird picture, it looks like a very low-res image of some kid. I look closer, it’s Davy Jones from The Monkees, and even closer, I see that the picture was actually produced on an old typewriter — ms and ps and rs arranged ever-so-carefully to create the lights and darks of the singer’s hair, bangs, cheeks and lips. This image is the subject of her thesis.
“Imagine it,” she tells me. “There’s three channels on TV, no computers, no Web, nothing but the TV show once a week, and every month the teen magazines.” Liz inhales deeply, licks her lips. “So you’re a girl and you get these magazines to see more of your favorite pop stars, to plaster them on your walls all over your little pink bed while you touch yourself at night, but that’s not enough either, is it?”
I shrug. “Uh . . . of course not.”
“No it isn’t, because young girls are a boiling rage of hormones, just like guys. So the same corporations that create bands like The Monkees to teach girls how to consume, the same people who sell them the teenybopper magazines, they start putting instructions in every issue — ‘Type a Davy of your very own’ — and why?”
I’m looking at her throat as she talks. It seems to contract and glisten with a little sweat when she gets intellectual. “Why?”
“To teach them how to type, of course! All that libidinal energy is sublimated and poured into vocational training. After a few years, these girls are young women, ready to work and dripping wet every time they sit down to take a memo.” Liz slides up onto the corner of her desk and crosses her legs. Her pencil skirt looks a bit like something a secretary from the ‘60s would wear. “A whole generation of girls trained to salivate and cream for minimum wage…”
“And trained to accept a little grab-ass from the boss too, right?”
“Right.” She leans in closely. I grab a handful of thigh, and we’re off. Two minutes later her skirt is hoisted up around her hips (rough going, I smacked her ass a few times to get the wiggle right), her back arched over the desk and her little wrists clamped together by one hand. She grunts like a man as we fuck, which is a little disconcerting so I slap her bullet-bra tits with my free hand, then bite her cheek lightly to get more feminine whimpering out of her. She calls me ‘Sir’ and I come quickly enough for her to smooth out her blouse and get back to her research before my lunch hour is even over.
•
My girlfriend is the intellectual; my job at KPBG is pretty simple. I read the wires and add interesting-seeming stories, international, national, and local, to our local news program’s Web site. I also upload the video for one story a day, you know, for all the people who find it easier to watch thirty seconds of news on the Web instead of watching thirty minutes of news on TV. War stuff usually, these days. If not for my education, I’d never have landed such a sweet gig. My third-grade education that is; everything after that was pretty much just gravy.
Also gravy, I get the news before you do. I get satellite feeds and surreptitious email forwards from journalists all over the world. Liz loves it. Whenever I call her from work she asks “Is the Pope dead?” I got Liz the Paris Hilton sex tape (not the two-minute version with ninety seconds of her crawling across the bed to get ready for her close-up, but the good one) and bring home every infomercial that turns sex into products for her. Her fave is World Wide Health and Beauty Discoveries (for Nad’s, the Australian hair-removal product that is inexplicably marketed to women instead of men), but I prefer anything featuring International Fitness Instructor of the year Mandy Milrea.
She finds a ButtMaster at the Goodwill (“ThighMaster LBX!” she insists) and has me videotape her using it in the nude. She likes it when I shout “Faster, faster!” in a vaguely European accent. She says she replays the footage while working on her literature review. It encourages her, even though she has to take lots breaks to fuck herself with the sleek purple vibrator she keeps by her bed, right out in the open like a clock radio.
•
My girlfriend has me going to the gym attached to her condominium complex because, honestly, she’s much hotter than I am. I’m balding, have a spare tire, and I work at the local TV station. In the basement. Pasty doesn’t begin to describe it. We don’t talk about it much, but the gap between our physical theory and practice is pretty clear to me. The first time Liz took me to one of the dinner parties her advisor is always throwing, she grabbed my arm, brushed a lock of my hair behind my ear and asked her friends, “This is Todd. Isn’t he a cute thing?” to the sound of crickets and tumbleweeds. So she asked me two days later to come work out with her, and I do, three times a week for a few weeks now.
I’m doing curls on one of the machines, and am half out of breath already. She’s on the rowing machine, wearing a little green Lycra number and complaining about her dad at length without even a huff.
“And then he said, ‘Elizabeth, when you enrolled, you ensured me that you’d be studying American literature, not hardcore porno.’ And I told him, ‘Daddy, porno is the American lit of the twenty-first century. Is there really, fundamentally, any difference between how Hemingway and Ron Jeremy perform hegemonic masculinities?’”
She turns to look at me and asks, “Do your parents ever try to pull stuff like that about your life?”
“Uh . . . no,” I say. “My father worked in a factory, he wasn’t a professor like yours.” I did another rep and had to pull hard to do it. “He did this for a living, working a stamper. Man, he got paid three hundred bucks a week to do this, and got health insurance to boot.” I let the weights down, exhale too hard (Liz frowns at me), then do another rep. “Meanwhile, I’m paying three hundred bucks a month to do the same thing.”
“Yeah, but you’re getting healthier,” Liz says.
“Uh-huh.” Another rep. “I lose two pounds of weight in sweat to this workout bench every time we come down here but sure don’t feel any healthier for it. You might as well plant me in some auto parts plant, so I can feel useful.”
She smiles. “I probably shouldn’t discuss my dissertation with you anymore.”
Liz says she likes the way I smell after we work out, when I don’t shower. It makes her feel like an animal, she says. At home I take a thick collar and wrap it around her neck, then slide two fingers through the D-ring and pull to the bed. I tie her ankles together with a towel and pull her legs up and bend her double, to tie the other end of the towel to the D-ring, bringing her cunt and her round ass conveniently into position.
“That’s the way I like my little bitch,” I tell her (I always add the word little; she says it makes the verbal abuse more affectionate), “three of her fuckholes all in a row.” I push two fingers in her mouth, and she tongues and sucks on them like twin cocks. I smack her ass, then massage her little hole with a thumb. I smell her getting wet, and swat her pussy lips with the flat of my hand, then reach between her legs and tug on her pubes till she cries out.
The sex goes pretty well, since Liz is light and easy to drag around the bed. I fuck her mouth like it was a wet little cunt, then spin her around on the bed, and both her pussy and ass, pulling out and trading holes whenever she seems ready to come. She grabs at my arms sometimes but can’t wrap her legs around me given that her feet are tied right under her chin. Finally when I have her so sweaty that even the smells of her post-gym shower are gone, having been replaced with the scent of her bittersweet juice I fuck her hard, my balls slapping against the flesh of her ass.
We’re close now and she says, “Withdraw, withdraw, please Sir, withdraw!” I nearly lose it right there (the D/S mood, the erection, my ability to not just crack up). It just sounds so clinical, like an Englishman at a bank. It’s like a principle for her — every act has to end with a money shot — instead of what I want it to be, a hunger, a demand. I want her to love the way my come feels on her face, hot for only a moment, then cool and clammy. Humiliating. I lean down with all my weight and bite her cheek lightly, then growl in her ear,
“What, what do you want me to do, you stupid little cunt bitch?”
“Withdraw!”
I slide my hand under her shin and twist her left nipple hard, pulling it till it turns white, “Try again, slut!”
“Pull out . . . come all over my face . . . your slut’s face . . . please please . . .”
That request I can fulfill without feeling utterly ridiculous, so I do. Then she sucks me clean, slurping my half-wilted dick like a pacifier till I get hard again.
My girlfriend likes to intellectualize, postcoitus. It was great at first; it beats cuddling and pretending to have something to say other than “I do too” when some girl goes on about how much she loves the connection between two people, how soothing it is to hear my breathing, the whole bit. But one day I fear she’ll reach down to the floor and come up with her laptop to show me a PowerPoint slide presentation on the body as text and the psychodramatics of differance. Yes, with an a. I ease my arm out from under her soaked back and tell her that I’m going to make a sandwich as she talks about sadomasochism and how it works to constitute the materiality of bodies in the service of consolidation to the heterosexual imperative and then she stops when I’m halfway to the kitchen and calls out to me, “What kind of lunch meats do you have?”
It’s 3 a.m. This is one of many reasons why I prefer the term “cold cuts” to “lunch meats.” “Just turkey,” I say, “well, a little bologna too.”
“Oh, I’ll have a bologna on white. Cut off the crusts!”
I’m making her after-sex ritual sandwiches now. Christ. The floor is cold on my feet.
•
When the pictures first come in, I think I’m looking at porn. What else can a pyramid pile of asses be? They’re strangely disembodied, so then I think that they’re corpses, ones piled up like cordwood. I got these before you did, remember, so I had no context at first. The short-haired chick pointing to the cocks of the chained Iraqis? My jpg didn’t have pixilation around their crotches. Their limp little cocks were dark, dusky gray, one had a half hard-on, and I felt for him. The private’s smile looks like she practiced it watching movies. Mel Gibson. Hell, it looks like the smirk I use in bars to get cute bartenders to serve me — it used to work too before the male pattern baldness and all.
There are others, they trickle in over the course of the hour. Some you’ve seen: the one with the guy chained to the bunk, a pair of panties stretched over his face. They look like some soccer mom’s panties. The image with the dogs. The private again, dragging a naked guy by leash and collar. I wonder if she was so eager to taunt the men because she looks a bit like a dyke. How else to show the other troops that you’re down with the cock? Prisoners kneeling in front of others, their bagged faces shoved into some stranger’s crotch.
But there were others you didn’t see. The kid being raped. Not the fake porn shot with the woman kneeling in front of camouflage cocks, I mean a twelve-year-old kid, wrapped as tightly in a ball as he can be, his spindly arms hiding his face, while someone grabs his ankles and tries to squeeze his dick between the child’s brown ass cheeks. Off to the side, some other soldier gawks like a hillbilly. We didn’t air that one on the news; and the word on that came down from higher than you think.
I call Liz.
“Is the Pope dead?”
“No news so good,” I say. “I’m sending you some stuff you got to see right now.”
I forward her the pics while she waits on the phone. We don’t say much as she scrambles for her laptop. It takes only a few seconds; then she says, “Wow. Wow, this is it. This is going to be a whole chapter in my book.”
The pics keep coming, and I drag them to my email and send them to her; I don’t even bother looking too closely at what I’m sending to her, but I see heads held in toilets by thick black boots, men smeared in shit and chained to one another, something that looks like a cow’s head being posed over a soldier’s crotch.
“Wow, wow.” That’s all she can say. For once she’s almost speechless. Then she starts:
“These are amazing. They really get to the heart of my theory: imperialism and the regulation of sexuality, the conjoining of whiteness and moral superiority allowing an anarchic performative hypermasculine sexuality . . . even the girl is really butch, or at least a trannyboi or something, eh? Forget discursive relationships and how they construct masculinities and femininities, these people actually have imperial legislation written on their own bodies!”
“Liz, but what do you . . . I mean . . .”
“Jesus, is that a cow’s head?”
“How do these photos make you, you know, feel?” I ask her.
“These are some of the most intriguing images I’ve ever seen. Are they going to be public domain?” She’s not giddy or anything. All business, really.
I hang up on her then. I stop opening the files — they’re still pouring in from a few of the regular sources that like to pass the gory shit around — and drag all but the few pics cleared for publication from my desktop to the trash in the corner of my computer screen. I don’t care what of my stuff I’ve left at Liz’s house. She doesn’t call back anyway.
is the author of the recently released Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground (Night Shade Books) and regular features for Razor and the Village Voice. His essays and short fiction were collected in 3000 MPH In Every Direction At Once by Prime Books in 2003. Nick just moved to Berkeley, California after a lifetime in New York City. http://www.kynn.com/wwnkd/
