It's Supposed to Be Spectacular

Spell the Fourth

So That Things May Speak and Also Cease to Speak

1.  Things I’ll not do (anymore): 
     

      Henceforth I will only pick up one (1) man at a time.  To pick up three (3) men at the same time and bring them all back to the hotel is ill-advised.  Moreover, it is tacky if they are left waiting outside the door for each other to finish.      

     No more tracking down long-lost relatives to see if they might want something to do with me.  They don’t.  

     No more pouncing naked on people at the door.  I have reached at the age at which supplemental means of inspiration must be found.  

     No more jostling rich white relatives in their rich white worlds.  Zombies don’t wake up.  

     No more fellating the security guard at a hotel where I am a regular guest unless I really like him and am pretty sure he’ll still be cute in 10 years.  Otherwise it just gets to be a chore.  

     No more drinking bottles of red wine and blasting tango music at 8 a.m.  OK, not unless it is an emergency.  And not more than once a month. 

2.  This sky tonight has been done with construction paper and children’s scissors.  Those who came for sunset were disappointed, no sun in sight, but now the sky is all black clouds and, in-between, this here is the Great Pumpkin.  Why assume the world minds the world ending?  As for civilization, we should at least be alert to suggestions it was over-rated.  Even those of us who found it compelling cannot claim that it was wholesome.



3.  When wandering has stumbled on for years, there is nothing one wishes for more than a reprieve for being a guest.  If not a room, a coffee house at least.  A broad clean table bolted to the floor and a mug of bitter coffee.  Security, I think and -- smash -- across the room a glass carafe explodes.  Fuck no, wails the barista, not the poltergeist again!  The bathroom door unlocks and opens.  An old man walks out wearing an enormous feathered headdress.  



4.  Evidently I have swallowed a television.  I can make it large or small but the smaller it is, the louder it gets.  Also there are odd flashes of silver in my head, as if I’d ingested handfuls of aluminum foil.  My blood pressure is presumably terrifying and I want to have sex with everyone.  Of course I always want to have sex with everyone but now I am ready to put my plans into effect.  The name for this, I am told, is hypomania.  It is not nearly as much fun as it sounds.  Even depression would be preferable.  It is far easier to make myself do things, than to keep myself from doing them.



5.  iPhone + PReP + Grindr + Deca + Botox + Uber + Scruff + Cialis = a strange, strange place.  Shouldn’t I be running alongside, offering commentary?  Isn’t that my job?  When it seems vastly preferable to me to drop out entirely.  When did anachronism become a term of high praise?  Oh, to live as one lived when one was still alive!  Also, I am thinking that when the robots take over, officially, it won’t be much of a shift.



6.  Is it wrong to be obliterated?  Or, rather, is it always wrong?  I am one of those persons who believes that sitting down to work every morning at a quarter to eight renders one worthy.  This I will do 9 days in a row, then head to the baths and not be seen for days.  I lose so much time.  But then, the hyper-disciplined days seem wasted too, just differently.  (Can anyone determine what it is I am doing, or whether it is an improvement upon doing nothing?)  Yesterday I traveled to the abode of Cosmos in speedos, the gay beach.  I kept my jeans and my boots on.  In the back corner I sat with two clipboards -- the one for pages and the one for cards.  Venturing near the water would have meant being a lop-sided peg-legged man.  It is so terribly obvious that I am mostly only ever good because I am afraid.



7.  Perfection is nowadays significantly more perfect; the lads at the gay gym are wearing white tights to prove it.  They look like triple X ballet gay action figures.  Which is not meant in any way as criticism.  There are at least 3 doing a circuit now and each is everything you could ever ask for.  Uncut with a generous overhang -- you can see that much.  Between sets each one stares into his phone.  That’s the routine: machine, phone, machine, phone, machine, phone.



8.  About Cialis: when was the last time I saw cock half-hard?  2009, approximately?  Now every 50-something’s hard as a teenage boy.  Photo ready.  Suitable for use as a tuning fork.



9.  In public spaces, ear plugs are remarkably useful.  Not just the plugs themselves -- yellow or orange foam, translucent putty -- but also the process of fishing them from one’s bag, removing them from the box, rolling them between the fingers, inserting them into the ears, and checking to make sure they are functional and secure.  Without even a glance at cacophonous persons in the vicinity.  With zero dirty looks.  Very often persons will notice, “that man has resorted to ear plugs so as to survive my presence” and spontaneously and with hardly a thought those persons will compose and diminish themselves.  A miracle which could not ordinarily be accomplished even by punching them in the head -- which is another of those treacherous stray desires that is as unhelpful as it is deeply felt.



10.  And the waves, one after another, after another, boom onto the shore.  To me it seems the waves are the cause of tight knot in my chest, the terrible intensity of the smallest news, even a chair pulled out from the table across the room.  To me it the waves are the cause but I assume I’m wrong because -- I assume I’m wrong.  And just the same it seems to me that the waves are breaking, breaking on the shore but in me they’re adding, adding up.



11.  At the bar behind the gay beach the wrinkle-free old men are discussing the price of Xanax all over the world.  Then Retin-A.  Then AndroGel.  Then Ambien.  South India, I could tell them.  And the MEN!  But dammit they do not deserve it.  My hunky Tamils aren’t for sharing.



12.  This is a question for Spanish speakers.  After a very long and boozy Sunday brunch, the young and gleaming muscle man at whom I’d stared all morning stood up to leave.  He and his buddy, nearly as perfect, had had 3 cocktails a piece at least, as well as a double tequila to polish off brunch.  Both young men were impossibly handsome, upholstered, super-deluxe, with the air of young porn stars so in demand they are now being offered serious roles.

I’d had no cocktails, only coffee.  Several cups.  The most beautiful young man was directly in my line of sight, straight ahead, so that, whenever I looked at the sea, I couldn’t help but look at him.  I have a problem with staring.  A serious problem.  Intrusive and voracious staring is one of my most evident and appalling qualities.  I could not satisfy myself that it was actually skin they were wearing, beyond the edges of their taut t-shirts -- so smooth it was, a darkness full of light and gold.

Do not be taken in by lazy, fancy words.  My staring is disgusting.  It is intrusive, aggressive and rude.  He was right there, so that I was always looking at him, even when I was looking at the sea.  Some men are so beautiful that I do not understand how it is possible, so that I look and look and look, always thinking that, the next time I look, I will understand.  But I don’t understand.  Not ever.  I just stare.  It’s rude.    

At last they paid their bill -- exorbitant, I saw -- downed the last drops of tequila and stood up.  The one most god-like, a young man whose elegant breakfast had doubtless been impinged by my obsessive leering, was wearing thin gray sweats over hugely muscled legs, like the undergear of a jack-off fantasy lumberjack.  If he’d adjusted himself just then I would have died of an aneurysm.  Instead my reprehensible yearning life was spared. 

So greedy was I of my last chance to view him that I did not even pretend to look away.  (Generally I act clueless at the critical moment, as if I hadn’t seen or looked or noticed anything all along.  It is the only reason I still possess something like a nose.)  As he stepped around the table to depart he looked right at me and said, huarache.

I bowed my head and he departed.  I assumed huarache is Spanish for nasty old gringo queer who stares all through breakfast -- equal parts cockroach, loser, faggot.  I was ashamed.  I am ashamed.  Of all my faults, leering is perhaps the most egregious and never have I made any progress with it.  No doubt it has gotten worse.  In a boy staring might be excused.  Not so for a slouching pot-bellied man with a gray and scraggly beard.  

I paid my bill and scuttled back to my hotel.  Back in my room, with the aid of my computer, I pored over a list of Mexican insults.  I was quite sure it wasn’t a ‘ch’ sound.  As the meaning could not be the standard one, I searched vocabulary, alternate spellings.  Huarache.  Is this another way of calling a person a “heel”, as we do in English?  Or is it actually possible that, after all those cocktails, that last tequila, he was actually just struggling with his sandals?

None of this, of course, serves to excuse my appalling behavior.  Upon which I must someday urgently get a real and proper grip.



13.  I chose the paragraph because it was the home I could afford.  It still is.  I chose the paragraph because the other vehicles required gasoline or coordination, because I could hardly look at them without imagining a gristly, ghastly accident.  Straight up into the air, up from the wreckage, the paragraph rises, until the curve of the Earth is visible.  The danger, it’s true, is real, but at least we make do without the din of helicopters.