Atari Joystick (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Carnal Flower, by Malle
carnal flower highlights green camphor mothball milky feral facets of tuberose, not just the floral: the full experience / serge’s tuberose criminalle is more of the menthol / wet juicy flower bouquet of robust naturalism / seems to be unique because more like actual flower than simulation—although this comes out after the first hour more since the beginning is straight suntan lotion / will seem super indolic to those with less experience, but this is mid to me / green opening is not as big as I would have hoped / water and greenery fades and when that fades a lot of realism does with it/ the pulpy fibrous coconut sandalwood combo comes out to give potpourri vibe / with potpourri it now seems like perfume instead of naturalism scent / carnation-clove eucalyptus with coconut cream all in service of tuberose / a better performer than Odor 93 but by no means as good (and this is decidedly feminine whereas odor 93 is more masculine leaning) / i feel much more white flower and coconut and suntan lotion than greenery with carnal flower / rich entitled white woman lotion / she screws the pool boy—likes to be treated like a goon hamster / next to backyard LA pool in the rain (or maybe Hamptons pool)—Kim Catrelle / like The Graduate movie (Hoffman)—like that woman but more like Catrelle (blonde) / I think of a sloppy white woman who is plastered by 4pm each day and will do that fake slap to the crotch as she semi-fake nods off even on her teen nephew’s lap to get the dicking reprieve from the existential pain she is after / white woman rage—carnal flower embodies that / sun bathing in the back, sunspotted to all hell and loaded to the gills on anti-depressants and alcohol waiting for thar pool boy (like Kim Catrelle in the Hamptons drunk) / highly dangerous and ruthless: that sense of carnal plus lust sense—this white woman embodies that/ She is the sort of white woman who sent black boys to their death with cries of rape / She has teen pool boy act out rape scenes on her / pool hidden from neighbors but walls of greenery / a lot of lactone milkiness gives it a suntan lotion and sweat / suntan lotion but not youthful / washed-up actress, a hot mess sort of like Bridget Jones, and with one hell of a sweet tooth for high school boys / she has “Lupita” (whose real name is Gwen) bring in fresh flowers each day, setting them out as soon as she opens the curtains and gives her employer her wakeup medicine: gin and tonic / she abuses these pool boys mentally: mocking them for their rap music and how they dress and their lack of sophistication / She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee), but white-woman edition /wish this had more funk / Even Bianchi does it better, to say nothing of Liz Moores / the cheryl criw lyric: i like a good beer buzz early in the morning plays in her head when she takes her first breakfast drink even though that drink is gin
*Let’s workshop this poem about how an interpersonal survival tactic collapses into a closed circuit of self-pity, eventually hardening into a hollow spasm that the young misread as living cry for help.
Atari Joystick
All the parishioners had begun to orbit the new priest and his slick-backed hair—not just the sweetmeats but their boilermaker fathers with spark scars on their forearms and retreat mothers with casseroles fogging their aluminum foil. But the spread of bitterness, a flush of poison through the presbyterate, could not be reduced to the man’s radical popularity. True, that popularity—in a zero-sum competition like this—meant fewer after-service stragglers who might have trouble back home, fewer moist-eyed boys looking for counsel. It meant hours alone, the bible throbbing on the table, with nothing to entice would-be mentees—the right ones with tight lips—into the snare of private quarters. Much more factored in, however.
Father Phielie moved. That was another factor. Even under the cassock—during the most solemn elevations, not just down the catwalk splashing people with the aspergillum but even behind the altar as the bell trembled and the host rose white as a moon over the bowed congregation—his hips betrayed range and stamina, some terrible suppleness that could last all night. Out back at the church hoop, stretching before layup drills, he drew eyes without appearing to solicit them. All loose heat and animal mechanics—he looked like a stallion smuggled into parish life and taught to say Mass.
The older priests, his haters, had never possessed such motion. Even decades back, before lung tar and rectory whiskey left them wheezing after two flights of stairs, their best was the ten-Mississippi pelvic piston of white motion. But even then, in the wake of that ecstatic reward for countless hours building trust (and enough mating juice, the endless-wipe creampie, to ruin a boy’s appetite for smores), they would need a day’s recovery. Just a spoon-position quicky in the camp tent, a little detour on the pretense of gathering kindling, would have them wrecked.
The physicality plus the popularity—these did not suffice, even taken jointly, to explain the intensity of their resentment, FOMO-tinged. That nothing stuck to the man, that he could be so brazen about his dealings—that was the final ingredient. Desire, which they had spent whole clerical careers disguising as concern, seemed in him to require no disguise at all. He could be an animal. He could mouth ass like a watermelon-eatign competition. The Teflon impunity—that was the knife twist.
His dozens-of-deaf-ears nickname, “Touchy,” both adolescent and adult gossipers alike tucked with a chef’s kiss between the honorific and the surname: Father Touchy Phielie. This very pun—so constant, so communal, so lovingly nasty in the parish mouth—only seemed to help the predator hide in the light of day. Rather than expose him, it disarmed everyone to him.
A plane-crash joke during turbulence releases pressure in the cabin. The laughter lulls passengers into a false sense of security. Some of the mechanism is chemical: adrenaline drops and shoulders unclench, the terror—at least as far that the body is concerned—defanged by the cathartic distraction. It is not all body cope. Logic, albeit fallacious, is at play too. What are the odds of the plane actually going down after someone has just been vulgar enough to say it? That is the idea anyway.
So it was with Father Touchy Phielie. The nickname became the parish’s little turbulence joke. That undersells it, though. The nickname worked to lower everyone’s guard against the headboard-cranking monster on the pulpit much more than crash jokes could lower everyone’s anxiety. Part of it, of course, was that not everyone could feel the anal-fissuring turbulence that radiated out from the man whereas on the plane everyone, not just some select male passengers under the age of 13, were getting battered around. But another part was twofold. First, the nickname ritual played into an opposite-day custom where we call the biggest guy on the block “Tiny.” Touchy Phielie, by the logic of playground irony, would not be touchy in real life. Second, the nickname ritual was more efficacious at ensuring the Phielie not touch any kid than a crash joke could be in stopping a plane from crashing. The repeaters, unlike the plane jokers, are not just passive observers. The predator, unlike an act of God like a plane crash, is susceptible to being moved by the nickname. It is not as if Phielie did not know of the name. What were the odds, then, that he would do the very thing—even just a quick dip of a finger or three—language had already pinned him as doing?
The fusion of these two points, however, created a complacency good for few but Phielie and surgeons for nether tears. Think of how processing the idea of achieving a goal feels so similar in the human brain to achieving it that it can undercut the drive to achieve it. It was as if, likewise, parents mistook the constancy of the riff (“Here goes Father Touchy Phielie”) for the constancy of vigilance. Each smirk and each elbow, each stage-whispered “Here comes Touchy Phielie,” let the adults feel they had handled the matter because they had named it. It was as if parents mistook the communal theater of the repetition for the real labor of ensuring the children’s holes stayed tight.
The lowering of guards, the reinforcement of complacency, would have been bad enough—or good enough, depending on the perspective. But among the boys themselves the theater of joking even seemed to build an alluring mystique around the man. The joking made the man the stuff lore. It gave him the whiff of danger seemingly without the consequence of danger. it made him less a priest than a dare passed mouth to mouth in the humid dark of adolescence.
Father Phielie was handsome, no doubt. But he was no Brad Pitt. What else could explain the way certain boys returned from errands too flushed or too silent? What else could explain the steady stream of bodies coming in and out of the side door to his basement?
