Tall Boys

 

 



“I want to smash the faces
Of those beautiful boys
Those Christian boys
So you can make me cum
That doesn't make you Jesus”
–Tori Amos. ‘Precious Things.’ Little Earthquakes, 1992.

A man past-middle-age is sitting in his La-Z-Boy watching television when the FBI crashes the front door of his house into splinters spread across carpet. He used to body build, used to take steroids, in this moment emits a girlish cry in response to the agents rushing into his living room. His arrest lists drug possession with the intent to distribute. It lists torrented zip folders of pornography with kiddie porn in the mix. But it’s this little SD card that holds the one accusation his lawyer struggles to fight through. A small cache of digital photographs he appears to have made of his past-middle-age wife, fully nude, with her small dog exploring her erogenous zones. It’s for this damning evidence that he has lost his job. It’s the salacious reports of this abomination that shame his adult kids and extended family. It’s the casual bestiality of the photographs that eclipse drug charges with the far more devastating possibility of a registered sex offender list. Never mind that the very concept of the ‘lap dog’ in European society has since the seventeenth century at least insinuated a mutual pleasuring between pet and mistress—Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s ‘La Gimblette,’ c. 1770, is a compelling entry into this history. The dog who appears in the digital photographs though, as one might have assumed, is confiscated by the FBI on their sting, initially as evidence and then executed as an accessory in a crimes against nature case. His wife becomes suicidal. She does eventually expire—not, apparently, at her own hand—and in his mourning, he gets a dog to remember her by.

“The first obvious thing about eroticism is the way that an ordered, parsimonious and shuttered reality is shaken by a plethoric disorder. Animal sexuality brings out this same plethoric disorder but no barrier of resistance is raised against it. Animal disorder is freely dissipated in untrammeled violence. The rupture is consummated, the stormy floods subsides [sic] and the solitude of the individual closes in upon it once more. The only modification of individual discontinuity possible for the animal is death.”
–Georges Bataille. “Sexual Plethora and Death.” Erotism: Death & Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986 (originally published 1957). Print, p. 104.

Speaking of lap dogs, my dad was probably gay. He was definitely southern, white, working middle class, without college education, Republican, and most of all Evangelical Christian. And he definitely sublimated erotic desire into all the chances to touch other men his faith provided—lay hands on them in prayer, rub anointing oil onto their faces, long embraces with them. When I was a child, I thought my father’s favorite man to touch was his friend Tony who was a cop at the time, then became a senator, served as part of Trump’s United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and now heads the evangelical activist group the Family Research Council, whose two primary objectives are the total outlaw of abortion and the absolute elimination of homosexuality from American culture (if not also the world). But in this memory, he is still a cop, I am a child—probably six or seven—and his wife Lawana and my father are my romantic rivals for his attention. I remember distinctly calculating that as a little boy, Tony wouldn’t read into the frequency with which I held his hand (a low key competition to have held it longer and more frequently than my dad did). He wouldn’t be concerned or even really notice when, during a church service or in the church dining hall at some congregation dinner, I would climb into his lap and concentrate all of my attention on the warmth I felt from him beneath me.

One of my uncles had given me a couple of drawing anatomy books, so while I had no comprehension of the mechanics of sexual intercourse, I knew I was fascinated with the men’s genitalia in the example drawings—thick like tallboy beer cans, the artist noncommittal about circumcision or not, so its tip left with less description. Layers of his underwear and pants and my underwear and pants between us, I nonetheless imagined more or less straddling the heat emanating from Tony’s beer can cock as his sonorous voice issued hymns from just behind my ear.

I would fantasize about him leading me to the bathroom—the one just off the main church sanctuary or at, say, a Wendy’s on a Sunday afternoon where we may have stopped for fries and frosties for an after service treat. I didn’t know the specifics of what I wanted us to do in the bathroom, just that this was the place where people partially unclothed, and I wanted to be with him when he did that, and I wanted him to show me how tough he had to be as a cop. The full extent of what I wanted was to see and touch Tony’s version of the thick cock I saw in my drawing book, his police uniform opened unzipped unbuttoned, and his law enforcement aggression similarly unleashed toward me. I wanted to hear the church congregation continuing to sing praise and worship to their god, loudly enough they wouldn’t hear what we were doing or the sounds what we were doing was causing us to make. I had been kissing the neighborhood boys at this point, and I knew I wanted Tony to kiss me like they did. I admired his college ring he wore; I wanted to feel his hand and his big shiny jewelry on my bare skin. And at the time, my fantasies resolved at the wish for Tony to kidnap me. That was the word I said in my thoughts. I think I wanted him to choose a life with me over his wife and over my father—running away together, kidnapping and smuggling me into a life where I could be everything I wanted us to be, holding hands running off into the sunset.

“You innocently gave me your hand, and because I was holding it I had the courage to submerge myself. But don’t try to understand me, just keep me company. I know your hand would drop me, if it knew…I had entered the Sabbath orgy. Now I know what happens in the dark of the mountains on the nights of orgies. I know! I know with horror: things enjoy themselves. The thing of which things are made delights itself—that is the raw joy of black magic.”
–Clarice Lispector. The Passion According to G.H. Translated by Idra Novey. New York: New Directions, 2012 (originally published 1964). Print, pp. 100, 103.

“You know god loves you, right? Even with all this dressing as a woman. Why is you dressed up as a woman? You think he likes that? Man, I could have you so fucked up before any cops could be here.” He is turned in his seat on the bus to look at me directly behind him; he is holding a slender knife, resting it on the top edge of his seat, but his fingers and wrist fidget so it’s clear he can use it at any moment.

My attention is prismatic. I hear him but also smell his greasiness, his mildewy saline damp earthiness. I am so aware that he is directing a hostility at me that was previously directed at him, that he has been made to accept. His words are not only directed toward social unacceptability, they seem to proceed from some prior scene of it as well. I am so frightened, a knife tip a matter of inches from my tits. Days later I’ll start to be able to give words to some of my more subtle feelings: among them that he feels like he is acting from desperation and survivalism, a high stakes crucible of passing abuse along the circulatory systems of the social, lacking empathy but needing to not feel as threatened and dehumanized as something has made him feel before now—this interaction proves to him he is not the worst, the lowest—he has found a transgression more affronting and a transgressor more vulnerable. I smell of French perfume, smoky, cosmetic, affectations of flowers in decay. He is weaponizing love, pointedly interrogative, and he asks about what I know when he doesn’t know that I live my life not only for love but at the precise threshold of epistemological doubt, questioning not the known but the means by which the knowledge is formed in most every aspect of my life—my dress as he notes, my perfume, and all the rest of it. This love that gives him cause to get me fucked [up] is adjoined to some ancillary god concept—his religious invocation is probably meant to lend authority to his subsequent observations, but what he doesn’t know is my long and storied instruction in the intricate ways god is a roiling threesome, another way men have dreamt up to be triple penetrated—let him into your heart—by an orgy of a zaddy, a scruffy bearded otter, and a queerdo. Crucifixion scenes are among my earliest pornographies: bare penetrated flesh, godlike physiques, BDSM inflections. And beneath the watch of those effigies, men devise elaborate rituals to touch each other. The excesses of signification in his four or so sentences, the violent and erotic and experimental ways people try to alleviate their loneliness with digital cameras and knives and laps and dogs… he might say, ‘before a cop could come,’ to further crystallize the plethora fantasies memories stories myths indicated by his sentences. The hymns are sung, the nipples sniffed and licked, the knives stab, the tumult of implications writ, or rather, drawn all too legible, suggestive, emphatic.

“Father says bow your head
like the Good Book says
I think the Good Book is
missing some pages…
And when my hand touches myself
I can finally rest my head
And when they say take of his body
I think I'll take from mine instead”
–Tori Amos. ‘Icicle.’ Under the Pink, 1994.

 

 

–Matt Morris
November 2024