THE GREAT GATSBY

“Gatsby” by Seanan McGuire

In the end, Gatsby’s problem was a simple one—perhaps too simple. Simple things are often harder to see when set against a backdrop of the spectacular, like trying to find a single spider in a garden filled with roses. But it is the spiders that will hurt you, in the end. Gatsby’s was a garden filled with spiders, and all because of that one simple thing: No matter how many high-class whores and wild-eyed youngest daughters he brought into his bedroom—or into his hotel suites, rather, for the bedroom was reserved, ever reserved, for the gloriously golden fantasy who had long since claimed her marital privileges, if only in his dreams—Jay Gatsby never learned to fuck like old money.

Old money could afford to purchase pussy like it was nothing. Great teeming seas of heaving breasts and open legs, each with their own mysteries to suck and sample. Old money could try every perversion and permutation of the sexual world before most men could dream of more than a trip to a carnival coochie show, where a woman whose best days were further behind her than an old farm horse might pull her sequined skirt a little too high, granting them a glimpse of the mysteries that lay tucked and dreaming twixt her thighs. Old money could buy the carnival, buy the coochie show, buy the broken-down old dancing girls, if it saw the need. Old money had no need for mystery, for poetry, for anything but prizing wide the legs of the world and ramming itself balls-deep into the dark and hidden places. Old money was carnal, cruel, jaded, capable of almost anything while genuinely concerned with almost nothing.

Gatsby learned this the first time he traded one of those top-flight call girls for a doe-eyed dame with legs like a road to heaven and a cunt like the Promised Land. He’d expected their bodies to come together in erotic verse, his hands and lips and cock writing the depth of his love for Daisy on the body of a nameless stand-in whose pleasure he would pursue almost as apology, for what was fucking without love?

Instead, he had been ridden as hard as a jalopy, pressed broken and sweating into the sheets while the force of nature he had invited into his bed worked through her anger at her father, at society, at the world. She’d kissed his cheek before she left him, told him that he was “sweet,” and slipped, still nameless, out of the room while his prick lay quivering against his thigh, coated in the smell of her.

The fucking of old money, he had quickly decided, would take more effort to master.

So it was more expensive whores. So it was more dissatisfied daughters (and the occasional dissatisfied wife, a rarer, more dangerous beast to bridle, what with the risk of husbands coming home, but most of them had gone so long without a proper fucking that they welcomed him in with open arms). So it was more cheap, impersonal trysts in closets and in cloakrooms and once, when the champagne had flowed particularly easy and the night had grown spectacularly late, in the backseat of a stranger’s car. Lacy undergarments, rumpled curls, and a dozen, two dozen, a hundred beautiful cunts all blurred together into the faint taste of salt and the bruises on his hips. And still—still, for all of that—he came to their beds eager and alert, watching their moods, desperate to please them and to be pleasured in return. If Jay Gatsby had been a soldier before he found his fortune, his cock was a soldier still, surmounting beachhead after beachhead, maidenhead after maidenhead, in search of that perfect degree of jaded detachment.

New money fucked like sex was still something precious and rare and difficult to come by. The tendency of Jay Gatsby to put the pleasure of his partners before his own was whispered through certain secret channels, until he found himself surrounded by flocks of hopefully smiling girls in fringe and sequins, their jaded eyes bright with the thought of tasting—and being tasted by—something new. He was kind to them all, because kindness was a part of the persona he had so carefully constructed, and he thought he kept them at a pleasant distance even when they had their legs wrapped around his waist and their fingers buried in his hair. He was detached. Cool. Untouchable. He told himself that, and he kept telling himself that, and no one believed him, least of all the girls who left him bruised and aching on the floor.

Gatsby cared too much to ever understand the world that he had chosen, that had never chosen him.

When Daisy finally came to him, pale and perfect and trembling, he thought the world was finally setting itself right: that at long last, the story he had been composing for years was beginning to be told. He fell upon her with all the lessons he had learned from his nameless girls—but, ah, this was no hired harlot; this was no bored and bloodless heiress. This was Daisy, his Daisy, and when she spread her legs for him, his heart stopped, just like it had on that long-gone North Dakota day when the lady at the carnival coochie tent had taken his quarter and shown him her secret, hidden labyrinth of pleasures. How could he be detached? She was everything that he had ever wanted and more, and she wanted him, and all he cared about was pleasing her as a woman should be pleased. His tongue was Theseus in search of the Minotaur, and when he found the hard knot of its lair at the top of her cunt, he bore down until she moaned like Ariadne in the dark. When she left him come morning, her dress clutched around her and her knees still weak, he knew that she had been most thoroughly and sincerely fucked. And that, in the end, was his undoing, for there is no hiding such sincerity in a world of pasteboard and façade.

A man may change many things: his name, his standing, the cut and fabric of his shirt. But he cannot change the nature of his prick or the memory of a carnival dame with her skirt hiked and her eyes shadowed by the ghosts of the sweet young girl she once had been. Jay Gatsby fucked with sincerity. He fucked like new money, like every lay was precious and not his due. Perhaps if he had learned to do differently, he would have fucked for longer. But not, perhaps, with half so much brilliance.

“Caring for and Using Your New Car” by Jeffrey Cranor

So you just bought a brand-new automobile. Congratulations, car-buyer. Auto-haver. Drive-taker. Stick-shift fiddler. Road-rubber. Asphalt dry-humper.

You have joined the prestigious club of horseless carriage owners, but what next, rich guy? You certainly know how to spend your money… how to release the burning leather throb in your pants pocket. But how do you take care of the darn thing?

Well, relax, muffler-lover. Just follow these three simple guidelines for upkeep of your new car:

PART ONE: Engine maintenance

Check your oil every three to four weeks. To do this you’ll need to open the hood. Just reach your hand down below your seat. Between your legs you’ll find a thin, hard wire. Tug on your wire until you hear a mechanical thump.

Now step to the front of your vehicle and place your fingers under the open edge of the hood. Raise the car’s top slowly, because what is underneath is extremely hot. Slowly. Yes. Slowly lift its top.

Now bend forward. Lean forward, deep into the purring hollow. Find the dipstick. It’s a small firm knob. It’s very difficult to find. Move your face around the engine until you locate it. You will know when you do.

Don’t move so quickly. Slow down or you’ll miss it. Go up a bit. No, up. Up. There. There. That’s it. You’ve… Nope. That’s not it. To the left some. Maybe move your hands about a bit. It’s a small iron loop, okay? Maybe if you put your fingers in there to feel about. Yes.

Yes! That is it!

Now pull that dipstick and check the oil level. That’s it. That was pretty good for your first time.

But look at you. Covered in oil and holding your dipstick. You’re a sticky mess.

Do you have a towel? You probably should have brought a towel. Definitely wipe that thing off before you put it back in.

PART TWO: Proper body care

Care for your paint job like you would care for your own skin. You wouldn’t NOT take a shower, would you? You wouldn’t forget to put on lotions and powders, would you? You would never leave the house without a quick spritz of pleasing aromas—or as they sell in France: Axe body spray.

So why would you not also give the body of your car a similar caring touch? A car is an extension of your own self. Like you, your car is elegant, sleek, hard, pricy, loud, not as valuable as when it was new, covered in bird shit sometimes, an indifferent capitalist monolith, and supremely beautiful.

Wash your car with warm water and soap once a week. Use a terry cloth to rub out the dirt buildup. Get on your knees and put your hands along the long chrome bumper and stroke it clean. Stroke it till it squeaks. Wear old clothes so you can get a little dirty. You don’t have to worry if you splash a little warm soapy water down the front of your too-tight white shirt.

But be careful! You accidentally spilled a whole bucket on your shirt, and trying to rub it dry with the already soapy sponge is not helping.

In fact, it looks like you tore the top of the shirt a little, and now it’s splitting down the middle, your hard chest pressing out, shiny and smooth with sudsy foam. Maybe you should just rub your soft, wet pecs up and down the warm shaft, just so you don’t waste any soap. Yes. That’s it. That’s a very good rhythm. Just lay your slick skin against the hard metal tube and glide back and forth in smooth, even motions.

That’s the art of cleaning the chrome. Next, let’s shine that paint job. So you got a yellow car? Well, how fashionable. Nothing says “disposable wealth” like a yellow car. Nothing says “I don’t give two flapper fucks; look at my yellow fucking car, you proletariat dogs” quite like getting a yellow car. Plus, dirt doesn’t show up on yellow quite like it does on darker colors. But blood does. Sometimes the American Dream just wanders into the middle of the road and you simply don’t have the time—or the empathy—to hit the brakes before splat! American fucking Dream symbolically streaking across the symbolic yellow fenders of your symbolic automobile… parentheses hubris.

But as long as you wax regularly, you oligarchic titan you, you should have no problems keeping your outer appearance clean.

PART THREE: Proper operation of an automobile

We’ve talked about maintaining the engine. We’ve talked about keeping the car’s good looks, but now the most important part: How do you even use a car?

This is an important question on the minds of many first-time 1920s car buyers. You must be asking yourself the obvious question: How do I fuck this car? I’d like to rev my odometer needle into the red. How do I go about fucking this vehicle?

First off, never fuck a car. Very few cars are ergonomically designed with fucking in mind. Also, while they are not sentient, and are thus unaware of being fucked, no car has ever agreed to a fucking. Third, even if it could agree to being fucked, I repeat, it is not sentient and thus could not enjoy nor reciprocate the enjoyment of fucking, which is a necessary part of fucking. Finally, it’s likely you are saying, “But what about the exhaust pipe?” And that’s a terrible point, as no human can fill an exhaust pipe with their member. Your flesh shaft would just lie there, pitifully small in the much larger metal shaft; imagine a breadstick getting an MRI.

But while car fucking is out of the question, fucking in cars is completely acceptable. In fact, 75 percent of car owners never actually drive their cars; they just fuck in them.

Fucking in a car is fun and easy. First, ask someone if they would be down for some mutual backseat cum sessions. Second, that’s vulgar and probably didn’t work. Try asking them more subtly, like, “Hey, I like you. We’ve been dating awhile and I think we’ve reached a point in our relationship where it is time to sit in a backseat and touch each other until we explode liquids across our bare skin, surprised faces, and plush leather foldaway seats, heaving and breathing and feeling the lights of the city far below our sweat-dipped bodies.” Third, okay, that approach didn’t work either, so look, just pull into this rest stop and jerk off. Hurry up. Okay, you can clean yourself with those Carl’s Jr. napkins that have been in the cup holders for… God, you can’t even remember the last time you had Carl’s Jr.

Well, anyway, congratulations, you’ve just fucked in your new car.

And that’s it. You are now ready for the thrill of car ownership. You can put on your racing goggles, open those windows, and ease down your trousers. It’s time to hit the road.

“Eyes of the Beholder” by Mara Wilson

Clara couldn’t see a thing.

“You broke them again?” her mother scolded. “No man will ever marry such a clumsy girl!” But it hadn’t been entirely Clara’s fault this time. She could never tell her mother what had truly happened.

Fred—poor Fred, the skinniest boy on the wrestling team—had taken her out driving, just the two of them and a flask. In the midst of their petting, Fred, flush with hooch, had asked her if she wanted to try that thing he’d heard Flora did to Skip. Clara had enjoyed it more than she had expected—yes, it ruined her perfect Louise Brooks lipstick job, but there was a look in Fred’s eyes she had never seen before. He was enraptured, and for once, he didn’t look as though he, too, was wishing for a superior specimen. But it had all fallen apart when, in the height of ecstasy, he had knocked off Clara’s glasses and stepped on them. Fred had driven her home in a panic, too embarrassed to look at her. Or maybe he had; it was hard to tell without her glasses.

Poor old Dr. Goldfarb didn’t work on Saturdays, so Clara’s sight was entrusted to a perfect stranger. Now, all alone in a small, dark, and unfamiliar room, she knew her mother was right. Clara buried her face in her hands. She had tried so hard! She had bobbed her hair, but her finger curls never stayed. She had tried to smoke but had only given herself an attack of the vapors. She would never marry an Ivy League man, never even leave Queens, never go driving with any boys ever again. With her long, thin, ivory fingers over her eyes, Clara began to sob.

“Sit up, please.” The voice was warm, deep, authoritative and seemed to come from everywhere. Clara looked up, but the room was dim, and there were only blurs.

“Doctor?” she said. “I… I’m sorry… I just…”

“Went and got your glasses broken,” said the voice. “But it wasn’t your fault, was it?”

“How did you know?” she said before she could stop herself.

“I see a lot of patients,” said the voice. “Now pick up the paddle to your left and look straight ahead.”

Clara blushed. The paddle looked like a smaller version of the paddle Sister Hyacinth had used to spank her at St. Mary’s School for Girls. How humiliating it had been, her skirt pulled up, the paddle coming down again and again, feeling all the other girls’ eyes on her… She could feel them still.

“Is something the matter?”

“No,” she said. “I was just thinking of… What should I do?”

“Hold it over your right eye and read the chart.”

“Um, E? R? B?”

A blur moved in front of her eyes, adjusting the chart.

“Do that again.”

“B… D… S… ” The letters were much bigger and much easier to read this time.

“It’s better when it’s bigger, isn’t it?” said the voice.

“I’m sorry?” blurted Clara.

“You’re very nearsighted.”

“Oh. Yes,” she said, feeling embarrassed. What on earth could she have been thinking he meant? She covered her other eye and tried to focus on reading the chart. The room felt warmer, and there was a scent in the air, something decidedly masculine.

“Move forward and put your chin on the chinrest.” She moved her chair, reaching vainly in front of herself.

“Here.” And then his hands were on her, guiding her. His touch was warm, even through his gloves. His hands were large and strong, the first grown man’s hands ever to touch her.

“Yes. Right there,” said the voice, and Clara felt one of his hands slip down her neck. Was it her imagination or was he letting his hand linger where Fred had left a mark? She shivered.

A chair moved. She could feel his knees on the outside of her own.

“Try it now.”

The scent was stronger now, bringing to mind all the same improper visions that played in her head when she was alone in bed at night or when necking became tiresome. Her nipples grew harder, pressing up against her chemise, and she pressed her legs together, trying to quiet the aching need growing deep between them.

“Is that better?”

“Yes,” she whispered. Something other than the chart appeared on the other side of the lenses, and for the first time, Clara saw the owner of the voice. This wasn’t a perfect stranger. She knew those eyes. The color was somewhere between ice and steel. Younger than she had expected, yet somehow ageless. They had peered down on her from billboards in Queens, and once—her heart quickened at the memory—while she was out with Fred. That had been the night they’d first…

Clara gasped. Without even thinking, with her face still immobilized by the machine, she had begun to rock herself against the chair, feeling the hard, smooth, polished wood against her most intimate areas. Pleasure flooded her body as new lenses clicked into place and the eyes on the other side became clearer.

“Do that again,” he said.

“Do… do what?” Her heart did the Charleston in her chest.

“You know what,” he said, and his voice was as icy and powerful as his eyes.

Tentatively, she rocked herself forward again, her bare knees kissing his clothed ones.

“Yes…,” he said, his voice all around her. A jolt went through Clara’s body, and she reached out for him, gripping his knees. He took hold of her hands and gently led them down to her own sex.

“Please,” she moaned. “Please…”

“Do it,” he said, pushing his chair just out of her reach. “I want to see you.”

As quickly as she could, with trembling fingers, Clara shimmied out of her knickers. Her knees were still touching as she slipped her hand down onto her sex, already wet with her desire. She traced along her folds, gently at first, then with more pressure, stroking herself until there was nothing but that electric ecstasy enveloping her. Her legs parted, as of their own accord, and even with her eyes closed, she could still feel his eyes on her. He watched her as he had always watched her.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, his voice husky with desire as she slipped a finger into herself. “Right there…”

Clara moved faster, harder, pulsing, luxuriating in her own slick softness as she heard his breath quicken. His enrapture only strengthened her own, and she moaned as she had never done with a man before. There was only her and him, his scent and his voice and his eyes… his eyes… She threw back her head as a final, penetrating wave of bliss washed over her.

Clara opened her eyes. Still shaking, she pulled up her knickers. His hands were on hers, holding a small piece of paper.

“Take this to the front shop,” he said. “Get a rimless pair—you’ll look marvelous.”

“Thank you,” she said, taking it. “Thank you for everything.”

He crossed behind her, out through the door and into the daylight.

“I’ll be seeing you.”

“Daisy in Profile” by Joseph Fink

So to start off with, my name is Daisy Fay. I’m five foot something or other, and I’m always surrounded by flowing white cloth. It’s kind of my thing. My measurements are enough, yes, more than enough, and none of your business.

What does one usually say in these things? Favorite food? Happiest memories?

There was this one time when I was absolutely paralyzed with happiness. Or, not happiness. What’s that word for when someone has a tongue on your clit and a slowly increasing number of fingers inside of you, and it’s been that way for twenty minutes or so, building and building? It’s like happiness, but it’s… Oh that’s right. G-spot orgasm. I was paralyzed with a G-spot orgasm. Then I was flailing around and kicking with a G-spot orgasm.

By way of thank you, I ejaculated all over the young officer’s face, which I was just then making use of, and he responded, “Glad to oblige, old sport,” or rather, since I shoved his tiresome mouth right back into my East Egg, “Grrgh to obbgge, olff sprtt.” He had this vibrator on me, a big, fast yellow one, and as I came, I thought, Well, this could about kill a woman.

And, yes, I am very open to experimenting with my West Egg as well.

My favorite kind of food is anything with gold leaf on it. Have you ever seen someone come on gold leaf that is itself on food? It is truly one of the most decadent things. I once had a husband with whom that was a nightly ritual.

Actually, he had a hard time coming on anything that wasn’t gold. He’d gotten so caught up with the idea of wealth that he wanted to actually fuck capitalism itself. I had to paint myself to look like an Academy Award and shove a diamond in my twat just to get him to fuck me.

Oh, speaking of which, I have a daughter. I’m very much a proud mother. Her name is Pimmy or Puny or Pussy. I’m not sure. Honestly I forget her sometimes. I find that most people do.

“I don’t even remember Daisy having a child,” they’ll say.

“I have the same problem,” I say. Then I sit on the person’s face and neither of us has any problems at all. Until little whatshername starts crying or wants food or something annoying like that. Ugh. Kids, right?

What else should I say? More favorites?

My favorite city is Chicago. So many skyscrapers but without all the emotional men who seem to hang around New York. One time I was in a skyscraper and I had the most fascinating conversation with the man who worked the elevator.

“Keep your hands off the lever,” he snapped.

“What, this?” I asked as I jerked off the lever with both hands.

“Yeah, what are you even doing?” he said.

“Nothing at all,” I said, adding a twist to my two-handed elevator lever jerk technique and licking at its wooden tip. “I certainly could not imagine what you are talking about.”

“That’s gross,” he said. “I have to touch that thing every day.”

But that did not stop him from changing out of his elevator outfit into an outfit issued to him by God herself. He had a brute of a cock. A great, big, hulking physical specimen of a cock.

I told him to get back to work at once and he did. And while he was working on one end, the elevator lever worked the other. As big and stiff as the elevator man was, he had nothing on his elevator’s lever. Unfortunately, the movements we were engaged in caused the lever to move up and down, and thus the elevator itself to careen wildly between floors, occasionally opening the doors to display to an entire gape-mouthed office the sight of me bent over, naked, and burning the candle at both ends, as it were.

What was I talking about? Right. I like Chicago. What else?

Do you always watch for the longest cock of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest cock of the year and then miss it.

Let’s see, what more about me? Maybe talk about my friends?

I had one friend once, won’t say who she was but she was a famous athlete if you call golf a sport, and let’s just say that I let her take a few swings at me.

Or I won’t just say that. Do I seem like the type of person to deflect with a sports pun when I could tell you about the time she had me upside down on the divan, with my dress flung over the top of me, giving me the old silent talking to down there, when who walks in but my cousin of all people and we have to swing right around and sit there like nothing is happening while I’m feeling like I’m sloshing around in a kiddy pool, and even after my friend wiped her mouth off, she had to keep her chin at this weird upturned angle so no one would see the Daisy run-off all over it. Her lips wouldn’t stop fluttering, like she was still going at me. Why, our dresses must have looked like she had just blown me all over the house, because that’s what had just happened.

But enough about my social life.

This is my first time using OkCupid, so I certainly hope that was enough information for a profile. If you’re interested, do shoot me a message.

Please be wealthy, well spoken, well endowed, all the wells. Also, please do not be a weird ex-boyfriend who uses a fortune of illegally acquired funds to stalk me at my vacation home and spends evenings jerking off to colored lighting. Been down that road already, thank you.

Oh, speaking of roads, it’s probably best if you drive on the date. I have a few points on my license.

Love,

Daisy Fay.

“Nick Carraway” by Carolyn Ho

He reaches down and pulls out the enigmatic wonder of his smooth and clean-shaven testicles. Each one resembles a dark poached egg from which a lingering smell of pickles, groin sweat, and cheese inebriates me, a waft so thick I salivate and moan. I do not mean to moan, but for all my ability to remain aloof I cannot contain myself. My eyes roll back. And I faint. When I regain my senses, I am unable to move beneath my dear Gatsby’s surprising paunch, a robust thing once restrained behind silken finery, now wild and flapping ecstatically upon me. Yes, my darlings, Gatsby is in fact flabby. Regardless, the world ends briefly now, in this moment, as I’m happily smothered by a wealthy millionaire; he collapses upon a bisexual, incest-loving, sardonic bondsman. And after a few seconds of rapid blinking, Gatsby’s face hovers over mine. His lips tremble as he places his soft fingers on my hair, my neck. His fingers trail down to my ass and he calls my name with the urgency of someone calling another off a balcony, off a ledge, off a bridge. “Nick, Nick, oh, Nick, I’m bad. I’ve been such a bad, bad little boy.”

I’m not ashamed of his sex talk, until a small dog comes close to the door, peers through the glass into the dim sitting room, and sits, watches diligently as I and the great Gatsby fuck as only gentlemen can, on the ground, slacks and boxers loose around the ankles, sock garters high on the calves. We collect our hair pomade and gather it generously around my buttocks. The dog, unblinking and unforgiving, seems to say, “Nick, old chap, what’s happening?” I have no reply. I move my arms about as if shooing away a fly, but the dog sits, unflinching. It seems determined to stare, to be the voyeur. Eyes locked, we remain still, until it begins to yelp as only small dogs can, high-pitched and relentless. It even begins licking itself. Barks and then licks. And then more avidly bites its little groin as Gatsby increases his pace behind me. No matter how hard or fast, I cannot focus on Gatsby in the least, so we stop and resume outside into the ambiguity of the night.

And we do continue. On the beach he reaches down and once again pulls out his smooth, pungent balls, and I am both hungry and aroused and again cannot contain myself and come prematurely in my pants. And again, my eyes roll back. And again I faint.

After a few seconds I am awake. Gatsby stands upright and flicks off the sand lodged between his testicles and his anus and slaps my bare back as if congratulating me on a good game of tennis. “Good try, old sport.” With almost all his clothes on, he offers his bejeweled hand to help me up. His every nail is manicured and smooth, his palms lotioned so softly, I instantly imagine the supple but firm penis that would be gloved by such a velvety grip and accept the gesture. We are, after all, more than men, but the quiet roar of the ocean, two great whales dancing, the sexing of water in the dark night, the sound of buttocks and balls clapping like the crashing shore around us, the thrashing and undulating slipperiness of a thousand phallic sea anemone reaching toward the surface of sky and opening. This is love. And I want more. I cannot stop touching myself.

We try again, and this time I can feel Gatsby’s parts, their light knocking against my inner thigh as they tickle incessantly, balls tapping like impatient fingers. I cannot tell the difference between him and Daisy for a brief moment and almost call out her name. As if Gatsby’s staccato engulfment of my anus and Daisy’s strap-on dildo are one—a fluid transgression of time—and if Gatsby’s dainty balls were not beating lightly upon my skin, I would have forgotten him altogether, lost in a memory. Gatsby’s hips and hands are so like Daisy’s, so familiar. I could almost see it now, that one summer vacation back home from Yale, visiting Daisy in the rear garden, her fingers twirling her hair and then tenderly stroking it. She had asked if I still remembered her, and I did. She placed her hand over my eyes, that delightful girl, and before I could ask further, she undid my belt and yanked my pants down with her other hand, and to my great surprise, managed to insert her new dildo with a swift and hard push, and giggled. But more so, I remembered her delicate, thin hands around her new wooden toy. Her hands were so smooth, so refined, like Gatsby’s hands now, placed in mine, that the garden suddenly merges with the black beach side, a blurring of horizons. In one push of his pelvis, the past becomes the present and time becomes singular. I cannot tell you what happened next, other than I involuntarily whisper Daisy’s name into Gatsby ear, and abruptly I hear the clear sound of water breaking as Gatsby’s body stiffens. He coils away from me instantly, covers himself, and leaves without looking at me, without pausing, without a word.

I put on my clothes and find myself suddenly cold and more flaccid than I have ever been. My knees ache. I watch Gatsby’s shadow return to the glow of his party. His outline grows smaller, sinks into the brightness. I follow him as one follows a broken heart, regrettably, and tragically still—my stained boxers are ruined and I am no longer hungry, for anything. With each step toward the spectacle of affluence and glittering excess of millionaires, I am more consumed by thoughts of how I could apologize, undo the damage of a name. I could send him hair pomade and attach a love note that reads, This is as much for you as it is for me. I fantasize chance encounters near the bathroom among his hand towels, miniature soaps, and gilded faucets. He would catch me grinding along on his laid-out tailored suits and shimmering ascots. Or perhaps the pool… yes, the pool, which was so like the ocean. Maybe I could swim naked, an elaborate backstroke with my penis floating left, then right, waving to him. I continue thinking of the pool and how the dramatics of the world required much maintenance, much plotting, and I was no exception to its tireless intricacies.

At some point, Jordan finds me engulfed by the view of the ocean from the balcony. She smiles as she hands me a flute of champagne and asks, “Finally having a gay time, are we?” And I am. Certainly. With thoughts of Gatsby, I feel every pubic hair stand straight up, stiff by the mere thought of his name. “Indeed,” I say. The future seems orgasmic and stretched out like refractions of light from a place that could never be touched or held, and immediately I drink everything in one sip and ask for more champagne, endless champagne.

The future seems orgasmic and stretched out like refractions of light from a place that could never be touched or held, and immediately I drink everything in one sip and ask for more champagne, endless champagne.

“Myrtle Wilson” by Jacquelyn Landgraf

ARE YOU GODDAMN KIDDING ME????!! thought Myrtle Wilson in the split second of consciousness she had left after that hysterical wisp of a flapper twat plowed the car into her supple body, ripping off her gigantic left breast like some Amazonian sacrifice, ending with a final rimshot that dream deferred, raisin-in-the-goddamn-sun life of hers. She sucked in one last great gulp of the Valley of Ashes—also known more plainly as just the goddamn sorry-ass borough of Queens—and as her tremendous vitality mingled with the gravel of I-95 in the form of dark blood and vitriol, the three men who shaped her sad destiny flashed before her eyes.

Myrtle remembered all those nights bent over the gas pump. “You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever,” she would moan in a stage whisper, her thick knuckles blanching as she desperately pumped herself again and again with the curved iron nozzle, the brute force of the hard cold pipe incrementally raising her internal odometer at increments of ten until she orgasmed angrily into the vast expanse of ashes, screaming bitterly, “America! America!”

This nightly habit began shortly after she married George Wilson. He had fucked her exactly one time: their wedding night. He had just barely managed to heave her ample body over the threshold of their garage when she overtook him and pinned him to the hood of the Ford Model T he’d been repairing. Before he knew what hit him, Myrtle had bitten off and swallowed the three buttons of his borrowed wedding suit and was plunging his own astonished gearshift toward the back of her throat, where he felt not one but strangely several very muscular tonsils shoving the head of his penis in every direction, like bullies on a schoolyard. Next she had him on the ground, writhing in a puddle of grease, staring up the skirt of her wedding dress as the lips of her personal two-car garage opened hungrily and clamped back down on his unsuspecting emission hose. He tried to kiss her. She punched him in the nose.

Four hours later, without removing his cock from her muffler, Myrtle managed to carry George, his legs wrapped around her waist, into the twenty-four-hour diner next to the garage. The Greek who ran the joint turned away, nonplussed, as the Wilsons crashed into the kitchen. Myrtle instructed George to ram her from behind as she grilled herself a Monte Cristo and gulped down six Coca-Colas and a lime Rickey. She teasingly hid five hard-boiled eggs between her enormous heaving breasts for George. He could only find one. It was all he had eaten that day.

At hour thirteen they were back in the garage and George felt momentarily revitalized when Myrtle turned the hose of the air pump toward his face, but then, raising an eyebrow in curiosity, she inserted the hose into herself. He felt the head of his beleaguered pecker curve downward slightly and soldier on, like a determined migrant worker forging forward through the Dust Bowl. Which had not yet even occurred. A pair of rusty alligator clamps were chomping steadily at either end of their nipples in a bloody game of tug-of-war when, at the twenty-hour mark, out of sheer boredom, Myrtle stuck a wrench up her ass and tried to unscrew something. But it wasn’t until the final minutes of their first and only consummation when Myrtle at last felt the stirrings of something akin to satisfaction. With great ceremony, she locked eyes with the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, spilled a can of motor oil onto her genitals with one hand, huffed a gasoline-soaked cloth with the other, and came with a barbaric yawp heard over the rooftops of Flushing. George, sobbing with relief, ejaculated a small hiccup of ashen-colored semen and promptly slipped into a coma for a week. Myrtle Wilson had fucked her husband for twenty-one hours straight, and in those twenty-one hours he had given her all there was of his manhood, all he had in him, forever.

Tom Buchanan could get it up, that’s for sure, thought Myrtle as the dust that the careening car left in its wake settled on her exposed heart cavity. The mere thought of polo mallets, New Haven, white supremacy, or his own body sent Tom’s pocket rocket pummeling forward like the Wabash Cannonball, and thus he had a constant, aggressive erection. Myrtle would sit alone in the train car covertly humping her portable gas can, sighing over the enormous trunk of dresses she was forced to bring anytime she went into New York City to fornicate with Tom. Tom’s spooj could fill the Hoover Dam. Myrtle would turn on some Scott Joplin hymns, climb aboard his cock, get fucked hard and dirty for five minutes flat, at which point Tom would bellow into her knockers, “I AM THAT YANKEE DOODLE BOY!!!” and promptly break Myrtle’s nose. She would double back as his semen hurled at gale force into her East and West Eggs, beat a hasty retreat, and spewed ecstatically back out of her vaginal maw, peopling every object within a three-yard radius with the excessive seed of Tom Buchanan. “I love him,” she confided softly to her puppy as she cleaned the cum out of its fur, bandaged her nose, changed her dress, and prepared to go at it again.

But she loved Tom the way she loved taking a gulp of battery acid on a hot day in the Valley of Ashes: It was a quick reprieve from the existential crisis of her life as a plot device in the Great American Novel. She realized this as black bile began to trickle slowly out of her mouth.

Her thoughts turned to her one great love, that wild wag of an oculist, Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. At age sixteen, Myrtle wandered into an Astoria optometrist’s office, a budding virgin who just recently had developed X-ray vision. Teej found her astonishing. They spent an entire chaste summer at each other’s side. It was Myrtle’s idea to put up the billboard above the highway announcing his new practice. They stood, hands entwined, beneath the fresh paint that immortalized the spectacles that only had eyes for Myrtle. That very night she gave herself to him, and it was then, sitting on T. J.’s face, that Myrtle realized the tremendous power of her own vitality. As the eye doctor licked, sucked, bit, and gnawed his way through her velvet curtains, electricity powerful enough to light all the skyscrapers in Manhattan surged through Myrtle’s body. She bore down harder and harder as she came into herself, into this country, into her Manifest Destiny—and especially, into the face of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. She finished triumphantly, unfastened her mountainous thighs from around his beautiful head, and… let out a desperate wail. She looked down at her lover’s lifeless body, suffocated by the power of her ambition.

So it was with one final effort, as she lay mangled on that gravel road, that Myrtle lifted her skirt to place one hand over the lush forest of pubic hair that concealed the secret homage to her love—a tattoo of an eye chart, the tiniest letters readable only by a man who dared to place his face directly on her clitoris… which after T.J., no one ever had…

Myrtle Wilson took one last look at the sorry-ass borough of Queens, stared longingly at the eyes of her beloved Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, and goddamn died.