Frantic Romantic

Alistair McCartney

1. When I’m Dissolving

I’m a very hot jock-boy. I live in a jock-house. With a red roof. Woof-woof! All fours. I need my butt-hole worked on: Finger it suck it lick it or just fuck me until I shoot my huge load. All over the favorite part of your dog-eared copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The part that makes you cry, feel alive.

This is why I do it: Sex is the only thing that makes me feel alive. I have my needs. The structure of my day is as follows: Wake crave dream. When I’m bored I lick books, I like the taste of ink: A boy who licks books all day long is naturally called a book-licker. I love lockers, aging coaches, moldy jockstraps, boys who date cheerleaders. I don’t brush my teeth. I don’t have to. I have dentures. Dentures set you free. I take them out at night. If you sleep with me, you’ll see. If you stay with me, you’ll see how I take them out and place them in a clear glass of water. Will you stay the night? If you stay with me, let’s cuddle like real lovers. Let’s snore. I want to hear you grind your teeth as you grind your hips into me. Let’s hold each other as if we’re conjoined twins, fused at the hip. Let’s love each other as if we share the same spine. Either we’ll both die, which will be romantic in a Wuthering Heigbts-y, AIDS-y sort of way, or one of us will have to die to let the other one live a relatively normal life.

If you’re kind enough to stay over, I won’t be able to sleep, your presence will distract me, you’re a distraction to me, but I’ll guard your dreams. I’ll wash the sheets as soon as you leave. I’ll shoot anyone who tries to stop me from dreaming. Steps a foot on my property. Please, when you finger-fuck me: Please keep your wedding ring on. Put your wedding ring in me. Please. I like the feel of diamonds up there. Cutting into me. I sparkle. You make me sparkle. With your fingers in me, I’ll think of crabs, the rapidly disappearing art of ventriloquism, and a sideways movement: Crab’s shells are bright orange. My ass tastes like the rind of an orange. Sex is a rapid disappearing. I’ll resent you if you don’t make me dissolve. I want a veil. I want a wedding cake. I want a knife to cut the cake. Will you take me to the hospital if you burst me? If you split me? If you rupture me? Will you order an ambulance for me? Will you ride with me in the ambulance? Will you make sure they have the siren wailing? Will you flirt with the hospital orderlies, who are always hot and sexy? That’s my ideal man: a hospital orderly. Will you hold my hand while they stitch me up like a dress? I won’t mind if you cut off your tongue and place it in me. I won’t get angry. Will it feel rough or slippery?

In Sierra Leone, teenage boys high on cocaine hack off the limbs of men women children babies everybody as a warning, for diamonds. They sew diamonds beneath their skin to get them out of the country, diamonds scar differently, diamonds make for strange scars. If they can why can’t we? I’m your warning to you. But don’t worry. I’m not only a good fuck a god fuck. I’m easygoing. I like to kick back. I enjoy baseball canoeing and roller-blading at the beach. I shoot like a firehose. You can reap the rewards. You get to keep all the gold you mine from me. I like the feel of felt. Fire engines and fire hats and sex all have one thing in common: They are all red. I’ll wail when you fuck me. I’m 6 feet tall, 180 pounds, all-American boy with a great body, washboard abs, like they used to wash clothes on in the olden days, prior to washing machines: What is America? What is all of America? Why do we desire what we desire? What is a boy?

My body is splendid and plentiful but my face got burned in a fire. It used to be pretty: Now it’s scarred. Scar-red. Scars like little red ribbons. Scars like little red ribbons that little boys lust for. I can’t afford plastic surgery. My ex-boyfriend set fire to my house to get back at me. For betraying him. All my treasured possessions were burned, all my original copies of nineteenth century novels, all my porn tapes—pre-AIDS— in the nineteenth century they had social realism; in the twentieth century we had pornography. Yes, everything got burned, but only half way, singed sort of, at the edges, so they’re still usable, I can still read my copy of Madame Bovary. I wish I had ovaries so that I could have your babbling babies. I’d make the best jock-momma. But I wish everything had burned down until it was nothing but ash so soft and black that I could trace my finger through it. Write love letters to you in it, you my little burned-down house. You my red lacquered thing. Love is a singeing, many-scarred thing.

Oh, by the way, I also love sucking and gagging on cock, I love coke, and I like it when I can’t speak. I like old Charlton Heston movies, Charlotte Bronte, men in tunics, mad love, brunettes, bluntness, thighs, fakery, making you shoot, or just getting your fat cock ready for my hot pink satin hole, satiny and pink as a pink satin-lined hat-box your mother kept her pink foamy hat in, the horrible one she only wore on special occasions. It lurked in the box like a shy animal. Think of me as the bright snare that sits in a forest waiting for unsuspecting creatures. I’m waiting for you pink and wet and dripping like the world after its been raining. God started the flood so that the world would forget the meaning of the word dry. I’m wet thinking of the idea of you. My hole’s twitching like an eye, like we’ve all got something to be nervous about.

God started a flood, so why can’t I?

2. The Frozen Spaces

I’ll find you. Stay still. Your staying still will help me find you. At the end of breath you’ll always find a boy. I’m looking for one sincere young man, eighteen-thirty, who wants to learn about gay sex from an older, fifty-nine-year-old more experienced man. I was born during the war; my father died in the war, a bomb explosion, I love to shatter grammar with a hammer, how horny is a large body of men organized for warfare? How horny? During World War II, all the men had great upper bodies, but their legs were spindly like pipe cleaners. I’ll teach you about the war. I’ll teach you all sorts of interesting things. You youngsters don’t know anything.

My hair is red, like Lucille Ball’s. I have a sense of humor. Though in actual fact my hair is orange, to call it red is inaccurate, but we go on calling it red. Tongues are a habit. My hair is curly too. I can teach you to shave: We’ll stand together in front of the mirror in our wife-beaters. I have a lovely wife and three lovely children. All estranged from me. We’ll shave with no pants on. Snicker-snicker. Wakey-wakey, hands off snakey. Going to sleep is infinitely more sexy than waking up. We’ll both have silver razors. I’ll make the first swipe over my skin, and you’ll follow, and if you cut yourself, I’ll put a little piece of toilet paper on the cut, that’ll stem the blood flow; maybe later when I know you better I’ll taste your blood. But we’ll save that up for later.

I’ll teach you to drive too, if you don’t know how. Instead of screaming at you when you make a mistake, I’ll fuck you. In your car, in the parking lot behind that Jack in the Box where they beat that boy senseless the other night, carving FAG into his back with a Swiss army knife. I’ll teach you to swim. I’ll teach you roman numerals and all about the birds and their detachable wings and the bees and their little black stings that look like the letter I I I...this is a beehive we’re in. I’ll shovel my honey into you. If you get stung, I’ll try not to push the sting further into you. Desire is a complex, honeycombed structure. Many-stinging thing. I’m clawing my way out of my own lined gravity-flying skin in my search to find you. It’s as if you’re one of those cute boys who were in that plane crash, that plane that crashed into the pointy icy tip of a mountain, icy like my heart, pointy like my dick. I need a boy to melt me. For the frozen spaces in me. There was a movie about it, but it was real, they were soccer players, boys on soccer fields at night are illuminated. I see halos above the heads of pretty boys. The halos are fashioned from pipe cleaners.

We’ll take it at your own pace. Real slow, as a snail: Did you know a snail could crawl across a razor without harming itself? Wouldn’t it be fun to be able to do that? Maybe when we’re together, our love will make such razor miracles possible. You’re the kind of young man who wears shirts with collars and buttons: You button the buttons to your throat. That’s nice and polite: It shows you’ve been raised properly. But you do this to hide the hickeys from your family. The hickeys that I’m going to give you. On your neck in your car. I’ll fuck you and make you claw at the fake upholstery. You’ll suck on the silver door handles. I’m a kind man; I’ll be very kind to you. I’m the kind of man who counts the hickeys on your neck, and writes down the number of hickeys and the day the hickeys were imprinted by me into you, in a little exercise book. In a separate column I write down whether there were clouds in the sky that day. I’m a kind-as-kind man. I’m kindness in the shape of an old man, don’t listen to what they say. When I’m inside you it’s raining, it’s pouring. I’ll transport you. We’ll arrive we’ll arrive we’ll arrive. I’m the kind of man who will tear off the buttons on your shirts while you’re sleeping, drooling over your pillow, all that dream drool, I love it, I love it, I love it, I’ll lick up your dream drool, I’ll bottle it in old jam jars and sell it at church fetes to widowers and spinsters. I’ll tear off your buttons just so that I can show you that I know how to sew on buttons. How kind I am.

You’ll come to my house, which is located in a very nice part of the San Fernando Valley. I’ll give you clear directions. It’ll be easy to get to. You won’t get lost unless I want you to. I can roll up a map real tight with an elastic band and fuck you if you like, a map-fuck, you’ll have geography inside you. I happen to live right next door to the house where that poor boy got raped by at least six other boys; a friend found him unconscious in his bedroom, lying on his bed with the pink frilly polyester bedspread, your asshole will be pink and frilly like the edge of your mother’s nightgown, by the time I’m done with you, that highly flammable one she wore, it’ll be Elizabethan, it’ll be nostalgic, his airbrushed posters of horses all over the walls.

Sex is like being at sea and not wanting to go back to shore. The poor boy was the kind of boy who loves horses. There are many such boys. Freud was particularly interested in, that is attracted to, these boys. Freud wanted to fuck every one of his patients. Freud’s therapy sessions were like phone sex, but more intimate. Confession without the screen. Alfred Hitchcock was also interested in boys who dug horses. Hitching boys to horses. His fat belly rubbed against boys.

From my kitchen window I can see right into that particular bedroom. I’ve peered often into that bedroom. Especially at night, about nine o’clock, after I’ve eaten my meal, while I am washing the dishes. There’ll be no more of that, once you’re here, you’ll be responsible for the dishes, for the suds and the silver and the china. I like the sight of a boy, his hands hidden in suds. I used to enjoy watching that boy in his bedroom, on sultry nights, his sulky silhouette, just a slip of a thing slipping out of his tight dresses that revealed every boy curve and his slutty short-short skirts with the slits and the boob tubes with glittery strips and lacy panties and his bra. Made me feel all slurry. Thinking wouldn’t it be nice to have been born a boy? When his friend found him he wasn’t sure if the boy was dead or dreaming. He didn’t move him because he knew that you’re not meant to disturb a dreaming body. It’s dangerous to disturb a dreaming boy. The boy had been raped and sodomized by at least six other boys. All the boys were members of a graffiti tag team. The boy’s body was covered with their tags, bruises, cuts, abrasions, and bites of various shapes and sizes. Despite himself, the boy’s friend got aroused at the sight of his dead or dreaming friend.

Every year it takes more and more to arouse us. He considered for a moment also raping him, what’s one more, they wouldn’t notice one more, but then he decided against it and paged the boy’s mother. He had a page-boy haircut; all the other boy’s heads were shaved. Baldies. Fucking is going against the I, derailing identity; I love boy’s spines, pale pale train-lines, time-lines without the numbers. Sex goes tearing into time.

Apart from the smog and that incident, the street I live on is relatively peaceful. It’s real quiet. You can even hear birds if you listen hard. Can I drag a bird’s beak down your spine? We’ll talk and relax and get to know each other over a drink of coffee or milk or Coke or some other sort of soda. If we both want to proceed to explore a sexual relationship, we’ll take it one step at a time, itty-bitty baby steps, babies gurgle and fall over; we won’t do anything we don’t both enjoy. You can be my kitty. I’ll take little bites out of you. You can be my kitty boy. You can be. No hurry no rush no hassle. If one of us is unhappy with the way things are going, we’ll be honest about it. If we can’t resolve a problem we can part company with no hard feelings. Or, we could haggle over the issue. I could take you to market. I could always drill a hole in your head and pour soda pop in it. Enough of you, now, for me. I have to tell you: I have thinning hair. I am almost completely bald.

I cannot tell a lie: I’ll chop down that cherry tree of yours, boy. Boys in period clothes are a plus. Those lovely red curls aren’t mine. It’s actually a wig, a toupee that I wear on special occasions. I’ll wear it when you first come over, but gradually you’ll grow to love the real me. I love showering. I don’t usually get into anal stuff, like running your tongue along a gutter, silver, and fear of waste is at the base of desire, but I have been a top in the past. I appreciate all races, white, black, but especially Asians, Latinos, Mexicans, and Germans. The Nazis judged the desirability and durability of people on the shapes of their skulls. I won’t do that to you, but I’d expect that you would shower right before stopping by my lovely home, I’d expect that of any idiot and any boy, I would be doing the same. If you liked, we could have another shower together when you arrived. I could wash you thoroughly, scrape away at the surface of desire and tell you what I see. I could wash between your toes so that you don’t develop fungus, and behind your ears so that you don’t get pimples there although I have a weakness for pimples, delicate volcanoes. I could wash your ass until there is nothing to remind me that you are human.

For anyone who is interested in exploring this idea of sane, safe intimacy, please respond to me.

Immediately.