Mario Mangioni (round 31)
scent of the day: Purpose, by Amouage
Purpose (2023, Quentin Bisch)—a post-human woody-aromatic composition that, tannic like tea and wine (only in the radically bitter way of a banana so neon green your mouth puckers in on itself just looking at it with hunger thoughts), fuses the book-mold-meets-peppery-rose of Opus II (minus the vanillic labdanum) and the saffron-metallics-meets-akigala futurism of Ganymede (minus the immortelle) with the monastic-incense-meets-vegetal-root-vetiver of Kyoto (minus the coffee and cypress) into a citrus-vetiver concoction smelling like an Honour Man whose pepper and vetiver and resins have been stripped of cream—
opens at a whistle-register with bitter-sour bergamot and pulverized spice (rose-bright pink pepper, tingly pimento berry, icy-steel saffron) that together lend a glinting effect (think: the blade reflecting the sun into Meursault’s eyes in The Stranger, only on a much icier beach) to what—and this is largely an effect of the petrified woods (dental-filling akigala, fungal-spore vetiver, bleached-scroll papyrus, attic-dust sandalwood) and the anti-gooey olibanum (its lab-separated terpenes free-floating in space-void disconnection, especially a pinene that could call to mind a coniferous forest perhaps only on LSD-like drugs)—I take to be an otherwise Tundra-like repose as austere and mineralic and cold and glossy and unwavering as Kubrick’s nookless monolith (only here the color is not jet black but more like the moon gray of cigarette ash),
quantum-powder rose and velvet-fuzzy suede and incense-soot mystikal reinforcing the desiccated-dusty texture of the vetiverized whole (a freeze-dried-space-food texture that, along with the nearly tangible bitterness and the freeze-dried phantom of root-cellar mildew riled up by an oceanic breeze whose sodium chloride and magnesium chloride you can taste, prevents the composition from becoming a weightless hologram)—
the overall effect being a cyborg-temple incense fragrance for a warp-drive future of non-steampunk nano technology (think: CdG’s Kyoto, only reimagined as a sci-fi Shinto temple for the Sheikah monks of Breath of the Wild), a star-bound future (well beyond neural link implants) where the meat-body and its pheromonic funk (if it still remains at all) has been all but completely swallowed in the transition toward something more android than human;
the overall effect being, in other words, a composition so dry and bitter (the quintuple IPA of perfumes, if you will) that, although reminiscent in that way of Epic Man (Epic Man as digitized by an AI with Soviet Union programming rending everything a uniform gray), evokes none of the opulence of a Chong-era incense but rather represents what perfumery becomes once tradition is deconstructed and re-coded as sacred interface (alien, astringent, stark, cerebral, meditative, emotionally remote, lonely, droning), perhaps even the default aroma of engineered tranquility inside the suicide pods coming to a city near you, and yet that lonely antiseptic silence, that luminous melancholy of a Squarepusher glacier, is exactly what gives this fragrance, just like Isfarkand Elixer (its brother both in citrus-vetiver smell and haunted-hypermodern aesthetic), an artistry that blows away many other citrus vetivers to which it is often compared);
the overall effect being, to try to say what I struggle to say in different words, a techno-spiritual vetiver-incense (Terre D’Hermes for a dawning day in metaverse, Rocobar in a Roblox world) that brings to my mind the image of a Wookie’s wood-hilted lightsaber (organic fused with interstellar tech) and that places me within the Jedi Archives of Coruscant where, among the thousands of holobooks, a cherished collection of physical texts has just been unsealed, the mustiness of the brittle leather and mold-eaten paper temporarily tinting the recycled air of lab-spun frankincense (a frankincense, scrubbed through akigala-vetiver filters and recirculated through all Jedi spaces to preserve maximal tranquility, that reads of electrical ozone, almost even of burnt wire if you are one who tries to sniff out dysfunction, with next to no hint of sticky resin or warm sweetness associate with the pre-fractionated original).
*Clean up work today, bolded below.
Mario Mangione
How could it be avoided? Outward appearance is the first thing we notice. If that makes us objectifiers, so be it. Our flesh—billboard of evolution’s unrepentant advertising, every curve and bulge sculpted by a rutting chain of endless payloads—hums with inborn desire. Our souls—perhaps no more than epiphenomenal vapors (if not mere phlogiston)—find themselves bound up in this panting flesh, their taproots corkscrewed into the rank depths of the groin. Millennia of Darwinian chiseling (granular, pitiless) have etched libido into the deepest strata of our style. And as our mushrooming brains folded in on themselves in the arm’s race for processing speed, our techniques for stoking that libido reached headcase heights: from the hot-for-teacher daydreams that have our textbooks tented over our hard-ons up at the chalkboard, to the taboos—and the ecclesiastical infrastructures to enforce those taboos—that sharpen our don’t-press-the-red-button ache (increasing our drive, and the carnal calculations to fulfill that drive, to Diddy forbidden fruits to hymenal shreds). It would be no surprise to learn, in fact, that imagination (our crown-jewel power to form internal pictures) came on the scene, let alone grew to the Asimovian vividness we take for granted, as a sex toy aiding and abetting the horniness at our core—the primordial itch that drove perhaps every technological leap: the be-kind-rewind VHS cassette to jack off to; the cryptocurrency to launder our whoremastery (can even the nastiest toddler, self-propelled as if some trifecta-holed dwarf straight from hell, ever deserve the title “whore”?); the cyberspace of high-speed haptics to bypass the calorific cost and herpetic risk of flesh-on-flesh transactions. Pick the example. Even the aqueduct, long before enabling bathhouses steamed in HIV-slicked sleaze (yet another, after Rice-A-Roni, San Francisco treat), hydrated our health, our stamina—ultimately, to fuck. We are not just horny. We are engineers of horniness.
What help is there for it, really? Let congregations clasp clammy hands and whisper benedictions, praying away the human nature as they might the gay. Even if performed in full saccharine sincerity, the theater deconstructs into a self-parody straight out of Derrida’s dreams. The mingled musk within the well-wisher huddle, vulvic tang screaming for cream, betrays the futility of the endeavor—an endeavor so obviously self-defeating, every “amen” a moan of foreplay, that even mockers of tinfoil conspiracy might suspect design, an ecclesiastical edging game: its ultimate purpose, beneath the anti-fire hoopla, precisely to stoke the fire (sort of like all those #breastisbest breastfeeding videos on Instagram, tea-saucer areolas studded with Montgomery tubercles as latch-worthy as the nipples themselves, that have us imagining, less and less merely in the vinegar strokes, nutting gooey pearlescence over the throbbing fontanelles of innocence, and now—with all the footage from Cuba and Papa New Guinea and Brazil and Guyana—over the faces of piglets and possums and deer and monkeys). Shock therapy, lobotomy, the guillotine—short of such extremes (electrodes crackling temples, ice picks scrambling frontal lobes, steel whistling toward the neck), man’s marrow refuses to yield.
And now in the hyper-mediated West where moans taunt from every digital dimple of cellulite (“Beat it up nigga!”) like a cultural death knell, hope’s thread—already delicate (since, after all, we cannot bud like hydra or divide like flatworms)—seems to have snapped. Behold the Hotlanta spin, a no-hands Makeiva-Albritten twirl around the strip pole, we have put on that tired tale of civilization’s twilight. The flapping and clapping of gelatinous meats, slow-motion reverberations, clear enough to catch sight of an ingrown pube or that one anal stray, clear enough even to smell (if only the FOMO scroll did not banish us from the inner core of monastic tranquility needed to reconstruct the pissy civet and shitty hyrax of it all)—such an avalanche of gyrating visuals (so much twerking, baby-oiled to the gleam of supermarket poultry, that the question should have been “Why didn’t Diddy have more bottles?”) serves as visual garnish for the nastiest verbal apocalypse of hypersexuality: psyche-burrowing lyrics (as fuck-tomorrow as coal-burning), mainlined right into the earbuds, oontz-oontzing down to prepubescent perineal nerves already creamed as it is from the diesel rumble of the school bus. Wet ass pussy (extreme mop-bucket sloshing, as extreme as the alien mouths and gravity-defying tits of even just “regular” podcast thots), tossed-salad anuses fizzing with half-dissolved Percocet tabs—the global parade of such verbalized imagery, outcompeting counterbalancing values (sublimations of libido themselves), staggers the mind: infecting even loincloth jungle enclaves and far-flung rice paddies (almost as if some Bilderberg cabal had something to gain with everyone having their snouts buried in snatch like truffle-hunting warthogs). The taunting edge cutting deeper than the nymphomaniacal depravity (“Beat it up nigga, catch a charge / Extra large, and extra hard”), and clearly reflecting the mentalscape of at least two generations of young people weaned on unadulterated access to incognito-tab rape porn before ever losing their virginity—we all know the lyrics, pop lyrics one could only wish were no more than what would be bad enough: soda pop for the soul. And we all know that, like it or not, these lyrics do not merely present a whore ideal. Dripping with the nihilism of a TikTok age desperate to dildo and squirt away the traumatic impacts of Camusian imagery proliferated with abandon, an abandon reflective of parenting inattentive to the importance of delusion as a buffer against the indifferent void that gobbles prayer and orgasm alike (thank you, NASA livestream, for that 24/7 feed of our you-are-here marble pirouetting in the vacuum), these lyrics—now the world’s lingua franca—celebrate the whore ideal with gaudy flourishes that make Trump Tower look Amish.
A few snippets from just the bruised-cervix side of the aisle, where the demand for pussies to be “beaten up like Pacquiao” passes the smell test of sincerity with too many feral colors to be written off even as mere Stockholm, should suffice to showcase our nosedive into self-radicalized neon. A barrage of verbal smut presenting sex to young minds not as the profound bonding experience it could be but rather (and this is only in the shallow end of the pool) as the lonely bumping and grinding of organs—who really needs examples? For whereas once it was a requisite for a political candidate to proclaim belief in God to have any chance at election, now they must—often taking on cringey blaccent (“no cap frfr”)—seek the public endorsement of whore rappers. Who could be so deep in a bunker that these baselines, as root-chakra vibrating as a Hitachi wand bent on rug-burn demolition, fail at least to tickle?
“You can block my number, but he still gon eat my ass / He just paid for my titties, that’s why you bitches mad / I suck dick like a champion when he put the Perc in my ass. . . ./ Rachet ho, but I feel like Kim Kardashian / My pussy good, that’s why a bitch stay pregnant / I swallow nut, I really feel like a elephant.”
“If your ass a broke nigga, hell nah, I can’t meet ya / If your ass a rich nigga, I’ma fuck ya ‘til you ain’t one.”
“My pussy is the most expensive meal.”
“Oh, you like big butts, well I like big bucks.”
“Put your hands all in yo pockets / Then you pull out that wallet / Tell that nigga stop flossin, you know this pussy costly / Want it dripping like a faucet? You got to make deposits.”
“Spank me, slap me, choke me, bite me. . . . / Give a fuck bout what your wifey’s sayin. . . . / I just want to fuck all night.”
“If you got the sense that God gave you / don’t leave me round your man. . . . / I drop the Perc in his drink / and I don’t give a damn.”
“Lick between my booty crack / I’m a hoochie mama, slash hoodrat / Hoes hate on me cuz my coochie fat / Put a Perc-30 in my asshole / Yo’ bitch boring, she a lame ho. . . . / Nigga, put that dick / balls deep in my liver (sex, sex) / If you got the sense that God gave you / don’t leave me round your nigga (sex, sex) / He finna eat this ass / I made him spend them bands (sex, sex) / Went through the pussy-nigga pocket / cuz he was too high off the Xans.”
“My son need a new pappy / Too many bitches, where the niggas at? / I’m tryna get my coochie scratched / I’m tryna get my coochie stretched. . . . / I can’t say his name cuz he be cheatin (I love you, baby) / Yeah, and I’m the reason.”
“I’m faithful to a nigga that’s married / Steal niggas, I’m the Grinch, Jim Carrey / I wanna choke right now / Put the dick in my throat right now. . . . I’ma fuck your baby daddy and I’ma fuck him again / I’ma suck his dick, without no hands / Spend his bread then fuck yo’ man / You heard what I said, what the fuck I said / I’ll beat yo’ ass then fuck yo’ man. . . . / I take yo’ nigga, put this pussy on his tongue / Deep-throatin dick, I got cum all in my lungs.”
“Yo’ main dude wanna feel on my body / And if I take him, bitch, I won’t say I’m sorry. . . . / A bad bitch with no morals, I’m sinning).”
“My rent due, nigga, let me suck on it / Put that dick in my throat, I wanna lick on it . . . . / Big dick in my stomach, I wanna feel it / Bitch, I eat the cock like a Hot Pocket / Dance on that dick, pop, lock, and drop it / Before a nigga fuck, I need a big deposit. . . . / We ain’t got no morals, we some fuckin hoes.”
“I’m sexin raw dog without protection, disease infested.”
“Double-hand hand twist the pipe but I ain’t even plumbing / He like em nasty-nasty, bitch, I’m Mrs. Put That Thumb In.”
“Lay on my stomach, toot it up, do the crybaby (Crybaby)/ Look back, hold it open, now he annihilated (Yeah)/ Moaning like a bitch when he hit this pussy/ Damn, he probably wanna wear my hoodie (Ah)/ Choke me, spank me, look at me, thank me (Thank me)/ If I give it to another n—, he’ll hate me (He’ll hate me)/ Spit, slurp, give him that work/ Fell too fast for me, now the n— hurt/ Deeper, deeper, I need a reaper/ Thought I was in trouble how he tearin’ them cheeks up.”
“Thinkin he’s a player, he’s a member on the team / He put in all that work, he wanna be the MVP / I told him ain’t no taming me, I love my niggas equally.”
“And when you get it, don’t be telling where you get it from / I know you young but you know I like that young money. . . . / See, little boy, I can be your little teacher / And if you ball, then meet me behind the bleacher.”
“What your girl don’t know won’t hurt her / Anything to make this love go further. . . . So what’s my chance / I’m willing to do anything to get in your pants / You don’t have to worry, I won’t say a thing / And if she finds out, I don’t know nothing.”
“If he knew the things I did, he couldn’t handle it / And I choose to keep him protected / So I creep, yeah, just keep it on the down low.”
“How about I cum all on your dick and then I lick it off?”
Enter a man named Mario, shell-shocked veteran in the crosshairs of the contemporary sex craze. He breathes the recirculated smog of unguent nymphomania like the rest of us, only it has him nauseous. Whenever enough is enough (and enough-is-enough comes much sooner than it used to, now that the bukkake wads are just too much for the cerebrospinal fluid of deep sleep to hose away in preparation for another day)—whenever enough is enough and he finally reacts outwardly to their bass-thumping singalongs (“All she wanna do is pop a Perc and get her pussy beat (ba-ba-ba) / Take this dick, bitch, stop pushin me / Face in the pillow, bitch, don’t look at me”), the response he often receives from his fiancé and friends and siblings is the standard “I don’t pay attention to the words. I just like the beat.” Whatever the truth might be in their case (although it should be said that the ambient-noise interpretation is somewhat curious given the way they stress the “dick” and the “bitch” and the like, stresses—and not to mention the well-timed bites of the bottom lip and sometimes even demonic tongue teases—that cannot help but suggest their at-least momentary empathy with the rapper), Mario does pay attention to the words. He deconstructs every vulgar syllable, every prolapsing metaphor—the perpetual strip-mining motion, the very motion that earned him his doctorate and the honorific on which only his students ever insisted (“Dr. Mario”), barring him now from any layers of sleep deeper than night-sweat purgatory.
Knuckles white in the involuntary intensity of steering-wheel grip, blood vessels threading his sclera like crimson lighting—above the dashboard on his mumbling way to a menial parttime (in what should be his fifteen-minute sanctuary from the unmooring barrage) what nonsurprise does he behold? A cluster of Omegle girls cross in front of him on their way to school. Baby-fat cheeks dimpled with childhood (childhood not only more titillating than ever but riskier now that the industrial era’s norm of Snickers and Netflix, coupled with decreased disease burden and increased endocrine chemicals, have plummeted the age of menarche into single digits from the late teens of the hunter-gatherer era)—whatever else these school girls do, grind the doddering crossing guard (a senior citizen who must work in his retirement because of his white privilege) or stick up their middle fingers to him with a “Fuck you, old nigga” or so on, they are bound to chant some sort of depravity. Monday it might be: “Rich nigga eight figure that’s my type / Eight inch big ooh that’s my pipe / Bad bitch I’ma ride that dick all night.” Tuesday it might be—all of it blurring really: “Yo’ dick brick hard like a medal (uhh) / I got three holes for it, like a pretzel (uhmm).” He wishes he could jam the signal. An artist type, hypersensitive antenna picking up even faint frequencies, the cosmic background radiation enters his overeducated brain in 4k resolution no matter how loud he might shout his transcendental-meditation mantra or otherwise try to redirect his mind with thoughts or memories—thoughts or memories never vivacious enough to keep the dark at bay. He is no puritanical prude. He wishes neither to conceal nor to extinguish the sexual-fire that animates humanity. His quarrel, so at least goes the elevator speech, is with the relentless amplification, the stripping away of alternatives, the suffocating omnipresence—sex, as if we have been reduced to gonads with credit cards, no longer one among many facets of human experience but the only one worth tuning into.
We are pack animals. No one can fully resist the pull of the norm. Mario is a writer. So how can his own horniness in the head, a birthright of Darwinian selection, not show through his prose in such times of sex saturnalia? We are communal creatures, less atomistic than we might imagine. More sleepless nights we have spent huddled for warmth and protection on tree branches and in caves than we have spent as humans. How can we expect his poems, the artifacts of his relentless processing, not to skew toward sexual themes, enveloped as he is by the equivalent of cupcake-gorging mukbang for the akratic dieter: this sex-mania music, bacchanalic in the background of every car ride (even if just to the supermarket and not to the “clurb”) and often involving everyone singing along like possessed cultists? The singalong is always the knife twist—or, to put it in the cyber-speak of today: “It’s the singalong for me.” “They say she’s young, I should waited. But she’s a big girl dawg when she’s stimulated.” Too often he feels like the jailbait in this indicative ditty. It seems like no matter how hard he tries to resist, the fingers of culture—greased with the gooiest of hawk tuas—always pin his still-baby-pink bean. Indeed, each squirm seems to leave him more perfectly positioned, as if—and, especially in our never-blame-the-victim era, he really does try to prevent activism from closing down the possibility—he was deep down asking for it (like one might say even of the little girl fully, almost too fully, into the role of being mommy to her baby doll).
Writing, although less now than a decade ago, serves as rite of exorcism. It helps him purge the intense emotions around the sex-sex-sex, the brown bootyhole of the cultural ass-eating contest slurping at his spirit like a relentless car alarm outside his window as he is trying to think and write and achieve something more fitting to the human as envisioned by Aristotle rather than to the human as envisioned by Sexxy Redd. Other times, now more than ever, his pages read like surrender (a sad capitulation to the logic of “If you can’t beat em, join em”), each sentence a dash of accelerant upon the inferno. Joining in on what pisses him off (twice as loud, three times as filthy), just like when he points the alarm of his bullhorn (“WOOO-OOO WOOO-OOO”)—one he bought from Amazon, yes, for precisely this reason—back toward the offending car, is straight from childhood’s desperate playbook: a style of response ingrained from before double digits.
Mario knows he has this self-defeating tendency. He reflects on it often. And like a true addict, the reflection process often converges with the poison’s ingestion. He believes he knows the exact night when that tendency—having transitioned, likely over years before this point, from infestation to possession—took root, the exact night when he welcomed it in. After a decade of realizing that nagging did nothing to stop his dad’s drinking (if anything, it only made the old man thirstier), one night—when the mumbling bitterness shifted to the reliable apneic rattles of death rehearsal—the guardrail broke and he made that sad pivot of too many kids in his neighborhood. He glugged down what remained of the bottle on the table, making sure to leave just enough for his dad’s breakfast—only, after enough nights of this, compassion eventually curdled into calculation. For he knew that morning glug, which he would swirl around his dad’s nose with a couple of forehead flicks if need be (“♪ the best part of waking up ♪”), would be the best hope to get his dad up early to score more fuel for the torch.
Watching and rewatching C. Delores Tucker’s 1993 speech on how the “pornographic filth” of rap music—boy, she had no idea of what sort of “psychological genocide” was to come only a few years later—threatens black youth (“[we must stop] continuously exposing our youth to . . . the lyrics of rappers who display no respect for women, no respect for families, and little respect for themselves. . . : no one has a right to poison our children’s mind and destroy our African cultural heritage”), Mario liked to put an other-oriented spin on it: “What prolapsing damage—as much psychic as physical—is done to our children when their visions are narrowed to no more than the grimiest forms of fucking?” But the deeper radix of his hatred was a fact it pained him to acknowledge: his unfair exclusion from participation in the orgy. The pro-black and children-protecting concern was not untrue. It simply paled in comparison to the personal resentment. And there is something to it.
Mario cannot stand being singled out. Beaten for jaywalking by a cop while everyone continues to skip across traffic, he receives extreme heat simply for doing like everyone else. The better way to put it, in that case, is that the fellow jaywalkers themselves are beating him for jaywalking—their self-righteousness swelling with each blow they land, as if they regarded jaywalking as the worst of sins and for that reason (in the style of the faggot megachurch pastor who leads “God Hates Fags” campaigns) needed some other toward which to funnel their communal anger: some fall guy to hurt as a way to find purpose and belonging; some scapegoat to punish as a way to cleanse their own guilt and preserve their self-image. The exile from the very orgy the culture mandates, the hypocritical targeting, the “p” for “pervert” branding —that abuse, mental more than anything, is really what has been the chronic trigger to bitterness.
The micro-aggressions are endless. Right in home and hearth he gets side eyes of accusation whenever he looks at Megan the Stallion, or merely tries—the trying itself a tell—not to look (a head-scratching duck or a “Did you hear something outside?”, the whole nine of misdirection), Megan the Stallion spread out for the trillionth time on the screen. He has the common courtesy to suppress moans and tongue slithers at the Amazon commercial. He does not race to polish off a spit shine on the toilet: “Damn, I gotta take a shit.” But still he is guilty. Let one grunt of “Hmm” or “Yum” slip past his guard (little more helped than a rape orgasm, asking for it or not), and the inquisition begins: “Why do you objectify women?” “Why do you focus on looks?” The judgments, questions if only in look, rain down with televangelist conviction—spat out in fullest sincerity (as much sincerity as every “Yass queen” every time Megan’s does that camel-toe-revealing lift of her right ass cheek), spat and spat even as both he and the judger swim in same plastic stream of BBLs and mega alien lips. (Those lips, by the way, are the same inflated specimens that show up on the TV-static succubae of sleep-paralysis nightmare. Dare he hold up a mirror to this funhouse-mirror reality by pointing out the lip connection, or dare he—God forbid—mourn the extinction of unfiltered and unscalpeled beauty (because, yes, his hatred and disgust for the plastic-surgery-look norm has only increased as more and more of those that judge him for focusing only on looks celebrate such looks and even engorge their own looks to the cannot-not-look extremes of baboon vulva in heat), and the verdict comes swift: he is just another make-America-great-again bigot, perhaps even Dark MAGA or groyper or whatever.)
That gets us to the deeper issue. For the exclusion is not all micro. What has made the sex-sex-sex world most infuriating to Mario, what has turned his knife into something serrated for bleed-out pullback, is that his professorship was terminated over sexual content in his poetry. You cannot make this stuff up. The clinical sentence, as final as a guillotine blade, was signed and delivered by the same left-leaning mouths that gargle along to “Pound Town” between faculty meetings. It is too wild to believe. And it gets worse. The spokesperson of the kangaroo tribunal, the chair of Mario’s department, is a former prostitute who—before, of course, going into requisite barrage of pronouns and attire descriptors for the visually impaired as well as apologies to the First Nations—introduces herself as an “out-and-proud whore.” When a fellow professor, whose latest academic articles had been titled “Whoring as an Antidote to Whiteness” and “My Pussy Pink, My Bootyhole Brown: The Emancipatory Potential of (Raw) Fuck Work in the Postcolonial Black Experience,” had caused as scandal for renting out her pussy to graduate students—well, guess who rushed to her side? The same force that saw to Mario’s destruction offered the following lines in defense.
“Studying sex work from a nonparticipatory standpoint, from the disinterested remove characteristic of the white gaze, inevitably reproduces the very epistemic violence that contributes to sex workers’ marginalization. Detachment, no less than clock time or perfectionism, is a technology of whiteness. Detachment, to borrow the language of the oppressor, is not “natural.” Detachment, even worse and even if more sneaky than what we usually see from whiteness, is a form of entrenching problematic power dynamics. This understanding is built into a phrase we all like to repeat—like to repeat, unfortunately, more than we like to live: ‘If you are not anti-racist, you are racist.’ The general principle is not difficult to extrapolate. Detachment is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Rhonda’s refusal to engage in the embodied dynamics of erotic labor, then, is itself a political stance against oppression. Rhonda’s approach, grounded in critical phenomenology of embodiment and informed by neo-materialist feminist praxis, seeks to inhabit the structural position of the erotic laborer in order to understand, firsthand, how sex workers are positioned, disciplined, and often mistreated within patriarchal and racialized economies of desire.
Her methodology—autoethnographic, risk-assumed, ethically reciprocal—is rooted in a commitment to refuse the extractive and voyeuristic traditions of Western research. ‘Better to put myself at risk than to use sex workers as data,’ she says. And she meant it. She meant it so much that she put her own body at risk. Not only is this stance ethical, it is theoretically sound. No one, after all, can know the truths of anyone else without living them. We would never presume that individuals outside a marginalized identity can apprehend that community’s lived realities through abstraction alone. Do we allow white people to speak on Black topics? No. Should not the same apply here?Sex positivity, in Rhonda’s framework (and one I share), is not indulgence. Rhonda is a Black woman! The Jezebel stereotype—we all know it: Black women and Black girls are sex maniacs from birth (so seductive and promiscuous that, according to plantation logic, they are functionally unrapeable). We all condemn it, of course. So why are we using it to inflict violence against Rhonda? As a community committed to equity, we know better. What machination of whiteness must be at work if I have to explain, as a defense for someone who is already defenseless in a society that has declared open season on the Black body, that sex positivity—the sex positivity of a Black female declaring her self-defined erotic autonomy—is about dismantling the shame regime. It is about dismantling the shame regime imposed by a heteropatriarchy that has historically positioned women of Rhonda’s color and curves as hyperavailable sex spaces of colonial fantasy, black holes whose only promise of agency is an insatiable hunger more befitting an astrophysical phenomenon than a human agent.
Creating space for consensual erotic exchange in an academic setting and for academic reasons, which is what Rhonda did, provides not only an opportunity to challenge internalized repression but also a means of destabilizing power hierarchies from within. If the goal is to dismantle the stigma surrounding erotic labor (and that is the goal), then the researcher cannot occupy a position above the laborer. Rhonda’s work seeks to collapse that hierarchy. It seeks to reveal the dynamics of power not from the outside but as they are lived, embodied, and negotiated. For that she should be praised, not condemned.”
The biggest problem lies here, and Mario sees it writ large: a society that mainlines sexuality of prolapsing proportions in every artery—music, media, politics—while crucifying individuals like him who reflect it back. Funny enough, most of that poetry labeled “inappropriately graphic” fell toward the Onion extreme on the spectrum between parody and complicity! The irony of it all would be delicious if it were not strangling.
Why him? His every twitch magnified as others revel freely in the carnival of tangled flesh writhing in serpent ball, why is he the target of this collective contradiction? Life is as capriciously unfair as it is impermanent, of course. So in one sense it would be ridiculous and pathetic, deeply ignorant of the casino nature of the card game, for him to ask “Why me?” It is just as it is in his case as it would be in the case of the teen who asks “Why me?” after the cancer diagnosis. He knows this. Yet he continues to ask, asking now a comfort now all its own. In his favor, though, he does not mean “Why me?” in the world-revolves-around-me sense of “woe is me.” He literally wants to know why. He want to know, if he cannot know the full why, at least some of the how-oriented factors motivated by the why. And there is something to know, some mechanism, even in the cancer case: was it all the years swimming in the superfund creek downstream from IBM? And even if asking why were ridiculous in this more scientific sense (as opposed to the thinking-you-are-special pity sense), could he be blamed? Here he is, dinged for his words while look what ass-rippling fiasco ripples on the screen—yes, even in commercials, where “nigga” (the word that even his characters cannot use) is freely sang: “she a real bad bitch / got her own money, she don’t need no nigga / on the dance floor, / she had two-three drinks / now she twerkin’, she throw it out and come back in. What would you do?
Is it his height, his posture? Is it his tone of voice? Is it his face asymmetry, his expansive vocabulary, his high energy? Whatever the full calculus of his damnation might be, surely his “problematic optics” (white and not just male but cis male) do not help—an understatement of the century in an identity-based circus of the most insane double speak: where “progressive” translates to “Nancy-Reagan-style censorship to ensure non-white non-cis safety” and “diversity” translates to “lockstep adherence to the sanctioned (safe-space) ideology on pain of exile” and “empowerment” translates to “terminal victimhood” and “equity” translates to “the public execution of excellence.” Just look around. We are in a world where people who look a certain way risk career loss and social ostracism if they—in “complete disregard for the importance of affinity spaces” (coming to campus even on “Inclusive Excellence Day,” coming to the movie theater even on the opening weekend of Disney’s Black Panther)—refuse to let BIPOC populations “have one damn day, just one, to breathe unoppressive air!” We are in a world where people who look a certain way lose their jobs just for saying phonemes that merely sound close to what others with different optics say freely on every city bus and Dunkin line.
No doubt there is more to it. Perhaps the sex-order’s guardians (their stewardship unconscious, for the most part) cannot bear the mirror he holds up to their grotesqueries. That would answer the puzzle, in fact, as to why his parody poems—the Onion ones you would think these cancelers would champion (or a least give a pass to), given the prudish language they weaponize in their rage (“hypersexual,” “triggering,” “unsafe,” “harmful,” “problematic,” “disturbing,” “not okay,” “vulgar”)—are precisely the ones that draw the most rabid ire. The mirror, illuminated, spoils the sex party. If you snap on the overheads in the clurb as clapping black asses gobble up the rain of dollars in a frenzy of prehensile precision that would leave Attenborough himself speechless, some of the “queens”—unable to stand their own simian reflection, the unfiltered realism of their own high-apocrine ass reek—would lunge out at your throat. Had the sheer jouissance of satirizing not rendered empathy for his victims such a reach, Mario would see that his mirror kills the mood. Think about it. His mirror is, for many people at least, the psychic equivalent of a late-night phone call from an ailing mother whose conduct expectations for her children reach as high as her trust in the phrase “Jesus is Lord.” It is that very phone call, so let us imagine to drive the point home, playing its identifying ringtone (Boyz II Men’s “A Song for Mama”) in the ankle-pooled rocawear jeans of Jay-Z—Jigga himself, Iceberg Slim—right in the middle of reaming out the cavity doublet of some champagne-drenched preteen, Diddy high-fiving with one hand (when not swatting away her not-so-deep hands, that blurred-lines gesture universal to old and young alike) and pinning back leg resistance with the other: the vibe goes flaccid no matter how much the fun-sized body squeals in deliverance and no matter how much the slavered mouth in the undercarriage shadows, neck extended like a turtle (dear God, not our beloved Beyoncé!), slurps upon the offending scrotum for extra engorgement, ribbed engorgement that the child—“IN THE NAME OF JE-SUS” (said in the accent of Nigerian Pentecostalism)—surely does not need. So perhaps these furious culture-keepers, their rage a form of insecure self-recognition in the light of his lampooning impersonations, are more like Trump than they would like to admit: all-too-ready to murder Alec Baldwin, if only they could get away with it, just for nailing the impression.
Look at it another way. Unlike these artists who simply glorify kinky excess, Mario often frames his writing as a form of “shadow work” meant to force confrontation with the string-pullers hidden in each of our depths. Might it be, then, that the Jungian shadows—chthonian forces desperate to run wild (slavering even for incest, and for turkey-carcass gangbangs during lunchbreaks at the Purdue plant)—writhe in Pazuzu rage when Mario names them directly? The non-othering nature of the naming, an exposure process whose demystifying implication is that these shadows are literally us and so—in what amounts to the best hope at taming them—must be embraced if we really love ourselves, only provokes deeper fury. That makers solid sense. Like a rage-filled man growing more violent when met with that calm compassion that thwarts each lunge toward the catharsis of chaos (“I hear how deeply this is affecting you and, especially because I have similar emotions on the topic, I believe we can move forward together”), the empathetic softness of Mario’s spelunking headlamp (which exposes even the moldiest cave-creatures with non-demonizing grace) surely threatens their preferred ecosystem of denial and shame in way that an exorcist’s scream (“Vile demon, begone!”) never could. Denial and shame are, after all, what has the altar boy looking irresistibly sweet to the priest, sweet enough to risk so much on that tried-and-true path toward anal creampie drippings collected in Christ’s own blood chalice (yes, for collective sipping between predator and prey)—a path banal and predictable enough to be the stuff of nature documentaries; a path that Mario, in what amounts to another one of his baiting knife twists back at the hyper-sex world that attacks him (Minority-Report style) merely for looking like he might talk about sex, details in a recent short story (still in draft form).
Excerpted below and laid out in full Herzogian bleakness in the appendix, the story is hard not to see as the thinly veiled cry of a writer at his existential breaking point—its labyrinthian excess of graphic claustrophobia, where Mario (not too dissimilar to a man who attacks the cops knowing he will be shot in front of his kids) decisively crosses the thick line between shedding light on dark themes and exploiting them to inflict harm (shadow work curdling into shadow psyop), granting us an ice-bath dip into the go-lower ethos of a retaliatory psyche that aims perhaps not merely to depict depravity but rather to trap the reader inside it.
Light-hearted interaction marks the first tentative taps on the jar of trust, its lid tight as the sphincter of a child in chronic fight-or-flight. Georgie—for Father Peady, so it might seem to hung-up eyes, no more than a cherry-glazed sweetmeat in a confectioner’s pick-me window—stands out among the other altar boys. His trifecta of vulnerability, encased in sleepless eyebags dark as Halloween, draws in the peers whose very bullying (from name-calling to double-team wedgies and titty twisters, the whole nine) red carpets the way for our hungry priest, his belt too notched to need such a compass: (1) broken home pickled in enough alcoholic neglect for more than one cigarette mattress fire melted into forever memory; (2) only child starved as much for attention and belonging as for the skill boosts of sibling competition, his social instincts as blunted as his confidence; (3) fat as all honeybun hell (his spare tire and love handles streaked with those wet-looking silvery-pink shark-marks like on the blown-out gut of his mother, her pregnancy with him hydrated—like all the others that failed to come to term—by Newports and Mountain Dew), the gas station at the corner—its milk priced too high not to choose the cheese puffs—the only grocery hub for the carless family.
Or might it be much more middle-school monkeylike than all this? Like a rapist sniffing out a once-raped (downward-eyed passivity in the elevator, her stillness unable to contain the plume of enough volatile fatty acids and stress odors that she could wring brine from her panties like a ball of mozzarella), perhaps they smell on him that he was beaten down as child. Smelling the victim on him (some pheromonic release triggered by his the epigenome on which his abuse has been recorded), could it be that they—mere monkeys in clothing at the end of the day—cannot help themselves from making an exception in his case: othering him so they do not have to face that he is just an outcrop of them? That might be a factor. Mario himself, tossing and turning in the sweat of night, remains open to that possibility, however much the white-male factor looms large in his head.
Speaking of sixth sense, maybe they detect in him, beyond just the words, that something is off about him—that he is a weird swimming fish who, unlike the Megan the Stallions and the rest, is actually capable of doing horrible things. Maybe their focus on his sexual themes is just an unthought-through stand-in for some deeper folk wisdom that they are privy to, an animalistic sensation or daimon voice that whispers to their heart “Something’s not right with that man.” Like one can sense that the dog or the child did something wrong through some je ne sais quoi of comportment (angle of the eyebrows, nervous energy), might they even sense his fantasies of handgun trigger pulls muffled by vagina—until no muffle material is left and there are only wishful clicks of impotence? Taking this thought further, perhaps they bully him—in light of this inner awareness—out of a drive to create boredom-eradicating and void-cloaking havoc: pushing him to the edge where he freaks out, kind of like what happens in middle-school cafeterias.
Mario is open to learn. He is more open than most—desperate even, like a woman who needs to know where here husband so easily found the car keys after she hunted all over the damn place for them. What adds extra difficulty, what rules out many of the hypotheses he tosses and turns through at night, are two crucial factors. First, many of his haters have never met him beyond his words—although perhaps, and he is open to this as well, they can sense his violence or offness through the mere words (a form of remote viewing). Second, and what is really wild and what really bugs him the most, most of his haters are on the pro-Cardi side of the aisle—yes, the Roofie Reaper, the Cosby Closer, herself.
There might be more flattering reasons, however much the light of these possibilities are now dim in Mario’s mind. For a long time many around him placed their hope in him: one of the first in the family to step out of illiteracy (literal illiteracy), let alone leave the hometown to secure a PhD. Might some of the extra heat, then, be society’s way (if only unconsciously) of pulling a move of tough-love like Ben Affleck on Matt Damon in Goodwill Hunting: saying to him, in effect, “You’re better than all this sex-sex-sex stuff the rest of us revel in. So yeah, we’re gonna go hard when we see you behaving like us! We put our hope in you to break free.” Or maybe what is going on is similar to when the Dad sings along to the child’s rap lyrics. We all are familiar. The kids in the backseat get mad. They bar him from what they freely sing: “Dad stop! Stop singing, please!” The question, of course, is why they cannot stand him. Is it because he has the wrong optics (older white male)? Is it because he is expected, if only implicitly, to be above this (he is a responsible father, not a ho-smackin G)? Is it because he has the greater mental firepower and lived experience—enough to gather the meaning of the niche slang in context and even at a deeper level than the kids themselves, which can be threatening and demoralizing (like a newbie beating you at bowling, a sport you have devoted decades of your life to)? Is it because his singing the lyrics back puts it in a cleaner light that reveals how stupid it all is (spoiling the game)?
If we really lean into the principle of conservativism (all other things being equal, the less radical account is preferable) and the principle of parsimony (all other things being equal, the simpler account is preferable), another explanation rises among the others. Mario might simply be surrounded by the wrong people. There is something too this. Not everyone plays Megan the Stallion all the time like his fiancé. Facing this reality is as hard as the couch blob facing the reality that, even if all the addictive food pumped out of processing plants is too calorie-rich for our ape minds to negotiate (and all the other excuses, legitimate excuses), there is still parts of the garden to which they can tend: they can move around at least a bit more (half-assed squats in front of the tube work more magic than one might think) and eating at least a bit healthier (if only in the form of chewing more thoroughly). To distance himself from these people, or even just to insist upon his boundaries with these people, would take courage he worries he cannot muster. Mario is confrontation avoidant, more reliable for punctuated explosions of violence after not saying anything than for the good-old sober communication of feelings at the time. Mario is also oriented toward—and, given his upbringing it makes sense that he would be quite gifted at—learning to love problems rather than removing them. Mario is quicker than most, after decades of practice, to assume that, when faced with a problem, he is stuck with that problem and so is more prone to devote his energies to execute the slave maneuvers of Nietzsche’s Jew: cunning guilt trips and biting mental attacks (the whole nine). At the same time, though, there is good reason to fear that a change in scenery and people will at best mean merely a lesser degree of more of the same. He has seen it too many times, the falsity of hyperbolic hope. He can hear the songs of such in his head: “There are no cats in America / And the streets are paved with cheese”—a poignant play on the mythic idea many immigrants held in the 19th and early 20th centuries that America was a land of boundless opportunity (where streets were “paved with gold”).
Whatever the reason, people descend on him with the mindless unanimity of zombies desperate for living blood. He so much as looks like he is about to reflect back the sex-sex-sex that has him gasping for psychic air and there—there they appear, horde behavior of prehumanity that would bowl him over with pity had it been someone else’s throat they were after. They go low with all their sex, wallowing in depravity with impunity—the mop bucket there not to clean up after themselves but merely as a brag piece for how much their pussies juice, two and three Pyrex measuring cups brimming over with wrung out mucous that only a “real bitch” can muster. And then they go even lower by making him—at least according to the interpretation he leans on most—the sacrificial lamb for their own sins.
Mario goes low too. Sometimes it is real low, his defiance warping into a Pazuzu tongue of calculated grotesquery—especially, yes, when someone brings the heat to him. The going low in response to the sex order and its relentless oontz oontz for the longest had been rather innocuous: merely licking his lips at the TV screen, or simply poeticizing an image they have all seen—all of them, however much they claim to be “triggered”—a million times in their unfiltered internet forays: vaginal discharge churned to a meringue froth by the pneumatic ministrations of multiple cocks. But even here, despite his prayers not to be provoked (“Please just let me be”), the response was consistent: the same Pavlovian frenzy. And now, even though inertia has him continue the prayer, a growing part of him does not want God to oblige. A part of him wants the bullies to scream louder. “What’s wrong with you?” “Why do you objectify women?”
These questions, mere stylistic variants of exclamation “You aren’t allowed to go low!”, propel him along a general trajectory—clear when you pan back from the statistical noise of local upticks and downticks—toward self-destructive insanity. Mario cannot say anymore that he hates the tragic arc. Every year the odds increase that his going low will reach a pain-numbing nadir of radical inordinance, what—even more tragically—will be read as a “random act of violence” to anyone who has not himself become a target of the primate bullying—anyone, well, perhaps with rare exception to the scholar called to map, whether as a cautionary chronicle to future generations or just because it has that morbid rubberneck quality of Waffle House melees after midnight, the sadism carried out in the name of safe spaces.
The role of his unjust exclusion should not be underestimated here. It gnaws at him with a persistence that eclipses even his stated concerns for cultural decay. Hypocrisy, even just in the abstract, grates on his nervous system like aluminum foil ground between molars—a physical revulsion, involuntary and total. Had his childhood circumstances afforded him pediatric care (let alone the full smorgasbord of vaccines), autism spectrum disorder would have topped the diagnostic shortlist. He operates, after all, with the rigidity of someone for whom inconsistency registers not as mere logical failure but as sensory assault. He always has.
Were the hypocrisy merely impersonal (having to do with characters on some sitcom, say), he could perhaps learn to become okay with it—put it out of mind, relegate it to the background hum of a fallen world (as one might the distended bellies of African children pleading from the distance of late night TV), if only with great effort and enough time. What he has no escape from is when people come at him for doing something they freely do. Personal targeting for transgressions the culture celebrates in others, being punished for what surrounds him unpunished—that bypasses every cognitive defense he might erect. He literally cannot stand the inequity. Short-circuiting his capacity to function, it has come to the point of needing perhaps institutional help.
Put it this way. It is so bad that, however earnestly he invokes save-the-children rhetoric, he would most likely let the monocrop swallow everything—no matter the risk it poses to the youth, no matter how much it increases the gravitational pull of the hypersexual black trope (a trope already perhaps spaghettifying his son into mandingo land)—if only it meant the torture of his unjust exclusion would come to an end. The pain is too much. He is no saint. All of it, every last rhetorical flourish about cultural rot and endangered youth, would perhaps drop in an instant if the right bargain were offered. End the hypocrisy, let him participate without persecution or else exile not only him but everyone else, and it is hard to say he would not sign away his supposed principles on the spot.
His hometown engineered him for escalation. The logic was simple: when chaos descends, seize the wheel and—proving you are no mere victim—accelerate into the skid. If they go low, you go subterranean—not to win so much as to take ownership, controlling the catastrophe through intensification. What that means here is that his default way to combat the monocrop is not to take the direct and sober and square approach of saying, like some stick-in-the-mud father-figure type, “Enough. I will not permit this deluge of hypersexuality in my presence. It degrades me and the culture at large.” That possibility, the response of a well-adjusted man brave enough to risk being called a stick in the mud for the sake of health, was as good as foreclosed upon by the time college pulled him out of the city that raised him. Add to this closed door the calcification of time. And add to that his inability to stand for his boundaries without raging out, plus his longstanding opposition to the anti-sexual puritan types (an opposition, in his anarchic extremes of sex and drugs and speech, one might not expect given the uncomfortable bed fellows he has made in the prison yard of society), and it is no riddle why he would take the indirect route of irony and parody (guerrilla weapons of the weak)—compounding interest just like Nietzsche’s resentful Jews, who created a universal God by which to smite the psyches of those over which they had no earthly power—instead of mounting straightforward opposition.
Nor do we find him leaning into prosocial responses (“Guys, we need to stop this cycle”) when it comes specifically to his unjust penalties for his own sex focus. His own pain, plus the great ape tendency to imitate, are just too strong to have resisted retributive scapegoating. Having been made a sacrificial lamb, he hunts for throats to cut on his own altar. He knows whom exactly to go after: the well-to-do liberal white woman. Since so many of those who have come after him—the department chair, the workshop moderator, the listicle-writing editor insisting that the “b” in “black” be capitalized, the fucks blocking his exit from the subway—looked and spoke like Robin DiAngelo, it is the well-to-do liberal white woman and her characteristic cleavage-covering scarf—pashminas, infinity scarves, in particular (those studied wraps suggesting both warmth and wokeness)—that he has turned into the scapegoat.
And so the cycle continues of projecting an image on people without knowing anything about them. Every chance he gets Mario—constructing his counter-mythology with the same identitarian logic that animated his own demonization—mocks these types. He links as many ills as he can—the easiest one being, of course, the keeping of black people on a plantation of dependency—back to these “scarved ally fucks.” He knows better. He has read Antisemite and Jew. He knows the reductionism is obscene—or at least he once did. But he cannot help it.
The scarves have metastasized from mere tribal signifiers into neurological triggers, Pavlovian detonators of rage. Mario can pass one draped over a restaurant chair and feel his pulse spike, the foam of his mouth mutterings becoming a fight-or-flight cotton. Just seeing one in isolation displayed against the antiseptic white background of e-commerce, no white allies anywhere in the shot (no white lady in a “Whiteness Is NOT Okay” t-shirt standing triumphant over her “partner,” a bearded Portlandia lumberjack fuck kowtowed to kiss the boots of a BIPOC educator with a bullhorn)—even this sterile presentation on TEMU, a flea-market scroll oceans away from the US culture wars of mortality-singing boredom, is enough to ignite something in his wiring.
From an indulgence easy to summon (albeit too easy to call “willed”), revenge fantasy has become intrusive. Visions arrive complete, their dialogue spilling out into arenas beyond skull space. “How’s this for a fucking BBC, white cunt?” Mario registers double-takes in his direction, even hints of the recoil he would feel as a child stricken by the sidewalk mutterings of the many homeless men in his hometown. That mirroring of perspective—almost as if any one of these men was always his future self, the raving a form of waving from the inevitable—strikes him, in lucid intervals, as confirmation of what mystics and pop singers alike have always insisted was the answer to reality’s riddle: you are everybody—first-personhood transferred across galaxies, each of us having a chance in the shoes of anyone of us.
“Wanna be a fuckin whore, huh? Hmm?” Mario sees himself ramroding his fist elbow-deep up one of these anuses. “Take that, bitch!” The peekaboo pattern entrancing dogs and cats and babies alike—disappearance, anticipation, joyful reunion—takes him to a home he never knew, safe as preschool pickup. It never gets old. But neither does the impatience that like clockwork has him quick to cut out the foreplay of the middleman, the depth of plunge and pullback radicalizing like his force and speed into a piston rhythm of industrial inhumanity: ass to pussy, ass to pussy—straight knuckle sandwiches (never any duckbill courtesy), the streaks of reds and browns blending ever new variations on the same theme (like the flames of fire, like the rain streaks of windshield wipers).
“Like being a slut?” But Mario cannot tell whether, like perhaps those men of privilege (and now his own father in the woods, who will awake apoplectic with death threats over a Lyme-rage nightmare in which he comes upon a band of fellow bums thieving his stash of recyclable cans) fending off phantoms with the arm windmills of trench warfare—he cannot tell, in these trances, whether his bodily gestures (beyond, of course, the snarls and lip bites of eroticism) have begun to collaborate with his innerscape enough to be legible to witnesses. “Yeah cunt. Mmm.” He cannot determine, that is how absorbed he can get, whether the white-knuckled upswings of his avatar have become incarnate for others—say, stopped at the red light sensing, through the pre-vertebrate wisdom of the right hemisphere, a subtle rocking of the car next to them. For all he knows, it gets that bad, the fantasies leak out, breaching the membrane between imagined and enacted, at such high fidelity that, even if seen merely in the periphery, it would be baldfaced gaslighting—say, for the sake of a child (“Mommy what’s wrong with that man?”)—for anyone to spin the multi-angled uppercut trajectories of reaming insanity (hammer-time bpm right up there with Hammer’s “Too Legit to Quit”) as something more akin to hole-in-one jubilation.
“Fuck with me again, watch!” The images and phrases swallow everything in their path, narcotic in their totality—all pain dead, like too many in his bloodline from fentanyl (and alcoholism before that), in his merger with the monster they always insisted his epidermis betrayed: “You already told on yourself.” The images and phrases swirl at such hypnotic velocities, that once—horn honking having proven insufficient—a person behind him, someone—on his side for all he knew, an angel—he might have killed if only the sun glinted at that Meursault angle, had to get out of the car and rap her knuckles on the window to tell him the light was green. “All up in them fuckin guts. You dead, bitch! Ain’t sayin shit now, huh?”
Mario’s form of combat, in short, is to give the world back what it gives him. He has been this way since a child. And since a child he knew it only alienated him further. And it alienating him further he knew—at least in a kid way—was kind of the point: a perverse form of agency, authorship through self-destruction. His father would orchestrate backyard fights between neighborhood kids, coins and candies and beers incentivizing the already hungry. Mario was sensitive and misaligned, oriented toward things—books, model planes, jigsaw puzzles—odd for the circumstances into which he was born. He never wanted any part of these battle royales. He never wanted any part even when the winner got to stick their fingers in the pussy of his Dad’s wino companion (“Get in there! Don’t be fuckin afraid!”), a pockmarked looker who would squirt you with her nipple milk (like a clown’s gag flower) and who insisted she could piss for greater distance than any man on the block.
But Mario’s refusal never took the pathway-to-manhood form of nerdy abstention, the Scouts-honor angle of “No, Father, I will not participate in such drunken depravity!” His form of rebellion, fueled by the same impulse that had him hurling rocks at crack whores from the rooftops (the same ones whose dick sucks he refused despite his father’s broadcasted—guilt-tripping—prepayment, “Birthday present for my boy!”), was to throw it right on back: make a dysfunctional statement of his own. And like always with him, the statement had to be dramatic—a statement to end all statements. Eventually he would break and enter the backyard ring, not to compete but to annihilate. He would pummel his downed opponent past any reasonable endpoint. More than once he grabbed a rock to finish the job. “Is this what you fucking want?” He did not need to add in “You fucking drunk” to disambiguate the target.
The childish fantasy, that sufficient dysfunction could collapse the system through sheer extremity, never panned out in practice. His dad’s Palpatine grin—“Do it. Kill that mahfucka!”—said it all. What felt like payback was merely script compliance. Mario understands this now. But the understanding changes nothing. This Dionysian pathway of disindividuation, allowing him to skim the event horizon of prebirth’s dreamless sleep, has been carved too early and too deep.
Behold the boy, now a man only in look. He cannot stop himself. His own neuroinflammatory struggles with Lyme and coinfections—like his father, like too many in his family (unilateral face droop mistaken as Mangione genes) only makes matters worse, the triple-b synergy (borrelia, babesia, bartonella) like gasoline to the givens of nature and nurture: explosive anger, rage attacks, anxiety, hostility. He cannot help but give the new bullies, the white “progressives” in their scarves, exactly the tantrums they want: confirmation that white male rage needed an even bigger cage than they built for it.
Yes, the same instinct to lash out, even if it means falling into the trap baited by his very targets, drives his reaction to the sex monocrop. He does not stand apart in quiet condemnation, a caricature of puritan restraint. Instead his lips curl into grotesque parodies. He is a child once again. He mirrors the world’s filth back onto itself, grotesque and magnified to the shaved-pussy clarity of goosepimple HD, as if to ask—pornographic lexicon redeployed as accusation in his tantrum—“Is this what you fuckin want?” Ready to respond to the world’s depravity through moral low roads of pissed-off parody and even fed-up participation, matching the cultural madness note for note—that is the sort of person we have before us, looking now for a fight (daring someone to say something).
The good doctor has tried to be polite. He has told those around him that the music grates on his nerves, that the monocrop it is becoming—that it has pretty much become—is as suffocating to him as it is bad for humanity. He has reminded them, all of them, how he has been punished for dripping the very same sexual content that keeps dripping down on him—and in that sense feels like society has treated him like a wicked stepfather: mushing his face in dog shit for eating the Halloween candy before dinner even though he allowed, and now encourages, his own biological children (watching you, boot still on the back of your head) to eat the candy before dinner. Mario has tried to use their language: saying that the music “triggers” him, “activates” him—that it makes him feel “unsafe,” that he has “PTSD.” But even when he puts the newfangled-c before the PTSD, it never work. How could it? He does not have the requisite look to pull such cards.
Mario is, as he knows himself, looking for a fight. In his frustration, he ramps up the sexual content of his art even more—not just in his polished academic articles and poetry, but even in his freestyles in a car with people he does not know: “Bitches getting roofied, actin doofy but not enough not to do me.” It grows hard not to see his works as intended primarily to bait people to say something. It grows hard not to see him as acting out a PTSD insanity of reenactment compulsion not too dissimilar to the rape victim who haunts the seediest barstools in her skimpiest scraps (no panties to dampen the pheromonic updraft of boozy musk each time she shifts her thighs) until she finds herself sloshed once again into such aggressive vulnerability that, reminiscent of Def-Comedy-Jam comedians roasting whites for nondysfunctional habits (hiking, camping, using timeouts in place of belts or skillets), she heckles the may-I-have-your-number respectful types—her slurs (“Fuckin pussy!”) sandwiched between Beelzebub-grade cackles—for not jumping right to yoking her out to the dumpster and working her as that cum-dump sheath (that three-holed invitation to violation) she sees in the mirror; for not screwing her lights out, no common mercy of lubrication spit (as if she were not already slippery enough), only to end matters with a few orbital headbutts or vagina-clamping liver shots (something, anything)—such prayed-for violence, repeated in silent incantation beneath the struggle theater of “Stop” and “No,” her only legitimate hope for a sip of that long-lost climax.
He knows what he is doing, what he is building toward, is exactly what the bullies want. Instead of him being seen as a tragic figure whose grievances, however disproportionate his responses, deserve serious consideration and serve as a warning that we need to change our ways before more chickens come home to roost, he knows that the bullies will say “See, this is exactly the kind of entitled white male whose violence proves that our exclusion—our censoring, silencing, and shaming—should have been more thorough! His actions prove what we knew all along: he is another dangerous white man!”
Because he knows the effect will be more ire, and because he knows social connection is crucial to human flourishing (let alone survival), it could very well be that this is all an enactment ultimately of the death drive. Writing this way has become the slow-burn suicidal thrill behavior serving as the mossy bed for the more attention-grabbing punctuations of floral and citrus top notes. An example from a few months ago should suffice. Beneath the whore chants rattling his uninsulated walls (“If you got the sense that God gave you / don’t leave me round your man. . . . / I drop the Perc in his drink / and I don’t give a damn”), by some miracle he heard harsh scraping on the back patio. His response, even before learning that it was one of the many neighborhood junkies struggling to drag away his grill, was to lunge out with a knife—a response whose unblinking automaticity proved that, however well things might be going in his life on any given day, some core part of him waits on standby for the excuse to end this thing. Since this is New York (a duty-to-retreat state) and since the culprit was black (a color you cross at risk of much more than the “R” label, today’s scarlet letter) the result was not unexpected: the grill-thief called the cops on him, which resulted in guess who face down on his own driveway in cuffs—face down, breathing through the whispers to put up a struggle and have done with it all.
Mario’s motivation, however, is more complicated than self-destruction. Some part of him—might we call it his “better angel”?—ramps up the graphic nature of his poems to infant-testicle-slurping degree so that he might draw out of the woodwork folks he once mocked and now fears have gone the way of the dodo: those who are not themselves participants in, enablers of, the hyper-glorification of sex. If only some good Christian woman in a floral muumuu, a lady who—although smelling of aldehydic rose (key constituent in a “grandma perfume”)—never twerks in Popeye’s parking lots or “be eating niggas ass” or chants pop depravities (“There’s some whores in the house”) or kicks heinous bars (“I’m 5 foot but my throat 6’6” / I’m a ratchet bitch, suck a mean dick / You mad ‘cuz your pussy ain’t fat like this / And your man eat the pussy like chicken nuggets / I’m a suck his dick for some red bottoms / I’m a real hoe, bitch, I don’t spit I swallow. . . . / Pussy so fat you could see it from the back / I’m a west side hoe, everybody know that / I fuck with the boosters and bitches that sell they stamps / And bitches that sell they pussy with they legs on a ramp”)—if only one of these ladies, condemning unequivocally (and worse than the anti-dance preacher in Footloose) all the lyrics and the scantily clad choreographies on TV (and even going so far as to hate Melville for all his spermaceti homoeroticism), would slap him across the face and say “Clean you act up young man!” He would fall at her feet, crying in thanks, just for her consistency. He would change his life.
This is hyperbole, of course. No, not just because it is all too cliché to find out that the types who talk such a game have homes loaded to the gills with videos of retrievers enticed by peanut butter to lap at toddler vulvas—the muumuu a mere cover. It is perhaps also hyperbole—and perhaps this just brings out the central problem: that Mario is just too difficult to be welcome in any community aside from Nietzsche’s community of those without community—because the imagined woman is a Christian. It would not be long before a man like Mario, Tony-Shalhoub-level OCD when it comes to injustice, would refuse to take her prohibitions against any sexual material seriously (even if she otherwise walked the walk) given the reams of sexual material in the bible: “There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses” (Ezekiel 23:20); or “Your stature is like that of a palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. I said, ‘I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit’” (Song of Solomon 7:7-8); or the graphic account of Lot’s daughters getting him drunk to have intercourse with him, ensuring the continuation of their family line (Genesis 19:30-36); or the gruesome account of the Levite’s concubine, who is gang-raped throughout the night and then dismembered (Judges 19:25-29); or the story of Amnon’s rape of his half-sister Tamar; or Mary at twelve consenting to a BDSM relationship with God, literally saying “I will be your doulos” (slave, mere tool for the goals and purposes of another, rather that a servant who retains at least some semblance of their own autonomy) (Luke 1:38).
Such possibilities are too far-fetched to matter much anyway. Mario’s judgers are, unlike the hypothetical marm, never not cogs in the machine of glorification. They might not be gay foster parents from hell backed up with enough self-shot child-bestiality porn for several lifetimes, but they do seem focused on the bestial side of humanity. The editor at one of the last magazines he submitted writing to, one whose “What We Want” section calls for “poems and short stories unafraid to throw low blows,” not only rejected his manuscript and blocked his email address and reported his Submittable account, but proceeded to dox him over the course of several blog posts (releasing his number and address, information included in the header of his submission) for the “toxic convergence” of two factors: on top of failing to issue a trigger-warning identity statement (one “alerting vulnerable readers to the fact that he is white and male”), “this man’s poems showcased scenes of prostitution and sustained micro descriptions (smells included) of the female body. How can he know anything about the female body? This fucker’s identity precludes him from knowing anything about me!” The kicker, of course, was that these raging posts were sandwiched between laudatory reviews of Sexxy Red’s “liberatory line” of lip gloss: Gonorrhea—sheer green apple with multi-chrome shimmer—being a standout among the others (Coochie Juice, Bootyhole Brown, Nut, Pussyhole Pink, Yellow Discharge, Gonorrhea, Blue Ballz) because, in the editor’s words, “It says ‘Fuck you!’ to patriarchy. It’s the boldest middle-finger to the Protect Our Daughters movement, and all their father-daughter promise rings. It’s a declaration of war to the forces that shame women, especially Black women, who ‘stay getting they bag, hoeing and shit.’” In one of these blog posts she even defended the OnlyFans star who rents out her vagina to young people, letting them explore her as she teaches them firsthand the ins and outs of pleasure.
Mario has no problem with even these forms of prostitution. He might not be as gung-ho as he once was, given the pressure upon him—ramped up into a derangement starting from 2016—to gang up with more socially conservative forces (a prison-yard alliance for protection against the progressives that proved themselves fake by turning on him like Nancy Reagan faggots). But he has long been an outspoken proponent of such tutelage. As he often liked to put it, “we learn to drive from experienced drivers and so it makes sense that the same would go in the case of sex.” Again, Mario is not fundamentally a prude—quite the opposite, in fact. His commitment to sexual freedom runs deep enough that he has defended—in print, no pussy nom de plume—the moral permissibility, at leas tin principle, of bestiality and necrophilia and pedophilia. What pulls him toward a more puritanical extreme is not a genuine aversion to sex but rather a reactionary lunge, born from frustration and alienation, toward a community that will accept him—toward a stable ideological ground to stand on in the face of pervasive societal rejection.
It never ends. Accusers simultaneously the enablers, the suffocating double standard never ends. A few years back he read a poem that mimicked the sexual hollowness of current pop lyrics at a writing workshop whose moderator, a published writer of erotic verse and editor of the anthology “Drip,” allowed the offended “non-binary” participant to lay into him for his “predatory exercise in objectification,” for the “white entitlement” that allows him to “rape the black body” with his words—minutes upon minutes of harangue (all eyes on him, all heads shaking in either disappointment or disgust) before ultimately, just as it became his turn to offer a few words on his own behalf, the moderator asked him to leave “so everyone can feel safe.” Once a group of twenty somethings, loudly talking in Starbucks about whether foot content was still lucrative on OnlyFans and about investing in sex machines—octopus tentacle dildo heads, all that—for their live streams, reported to the barista (their spokesperson, you cannot make this up, a girl in a “Thick Thighs Save Lives” shirt) that they felt “unsafe” and “reduced to bodies” after catching a glimpse of his screen (which showed, only for a second as he was uploading it for his Substack post, a non-nudity cover of a 90s throwback issue of Black Tail Magazine). Once his cousin’s wife, the very same one who does twerk routines with her daughter on TikTok (and who clearly is a secret reader of, and no doubt squirter to, his poems), overheard him sigh “Damn” to an unguent Nicki Minaj video she put on the TV (was it precisely to bait him?) and then (after accusing him of trying to draw her husband into his “disgusting way of thinking”) stormed out—yelling from the kitchen, loud enough so that his cousin would get the hint and have him leave, “that creep look at my daughter that way and watch!” Had he had even the merest hint of schizophrenic tendency, he would have seen this woman as a demon tempting him into the nastiest fantasies—her little cheerleader’s high-flyer body hugged around him on his toilet perch like she was in on it too, picking her up and slamming her down (no more than 90 pounds)—if not into a late-night window climb complete with pillowcase muzzling if need be (if it turned out she was not into it, the subtle tongue flicks at dinner too much mouth to put her money there).
The double standard never ends. It is tempting for Mario to blame it mainly on the war against whiteness, which is framed in academic circles as literally a communicable disease that even black people can contract—as is clear, so some critical whiteness scholars tell us, when we see black people developing anxieties about being on time for meetings or when we see black people (whether in their capacity as cop or as gang member) shooting fellow black people. An abstract from the paper “On Having Whiteness,” which was published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2021 and was written by a scholar with only one degree of separation from the department chair behind Mario’s firing, nicely summarizes the blight of whiteness.
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.
The whiteness-thesis is tempting because it specifies who the enemy is so he does not have to take swings at everyone—an unsustainable approach, one must fall asleep at some point, that often meets quick doom. It is tempting because, again and again, that is where the evidence leads even in cases where the whiteness would not seem to factor at all.
Life, however, is much more complicated. Mario knows this. Always wanting to make sure he remained a thinker of the gray (an anti-activist who tarries before information and tries the see all the anti-demonizing nuances), he has not completely lost sight of the at least prima-facia thwarters of the whiteness thesis (however much they have continued to fade as he has proven unable to resist the pull towards what was always all-too-plebian in his mind: the pull toward activism). Take that bisexual dike-looking lady at the writer’s workshop, for example. She never let anyone forget how much she adored Infinite Jest. That book, however, contains wildly graphic scenes of twisted brutality. For anyone who has tackled David Foster Wallace’s prophetic beast of dystopia, recall the addict who reports the outrageous abused suffered by her mini blob of a paraplegic sister whose brain was pretty much all stem. David lays it all out in florescent detail. Not much bigger than a pre-sliced hunk of supermarket deli meat or one of those thanksgiving turkeys that workers in the Purdue plant have been caught gangbanging, her father straight up uses her (never any less than once a week, so the narrative suggests) as a pocket vagina for his twisted fantasies—putting a mask of Raquel Welch, iconic sex symbol from the 1960s, over her head and filling her body (radically pliable, as if she were all ear cartilage) like a Boston cream donut. If it were not bad enough to see in such blow-by-blow resolution a father dumping load upon load into the fruit—well, the mute hunk of gelatinous headcheese—of his own loins, the story culminates with the realization (clear when the mask slips off one night after he slinks back to his own bedroom, slippers shuffling down the hallway like this was just an enlarged prostate trip to the bathroom) that she really enjoys the poundings. Her post-orgasm face the exact same as the famous ecstatic eye-rolled look of St. Teresa in Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (a chef’s kiss of blasphemy on David’s part, by the way), these fuck sessions seem to be the redeeming light of her otherwise sad existence—the itch-scratching pleasure that makes her life worthwhile.
It would be wrong to think that the hypocrites in question, the ones whose bullying cannot seemingly be reduced to fighting the good fight against whiteness, are limited to academic circles. One of his fiance’s girlfriends, member of the National Guard (and so presumably not someone one might accuse of being overly distraught about America having “white supremacy baked into its DNA”), had been sending him venom-dripped DMs from an anonymous IG account. She might have remained anonymous, through all her death-wishing messages about how “objectifying” his writing is, were it not for a few telling slips. In one particularly unhinged rant, she mentioned a specific line from his unpublished draft—one he had only ever shared with his fiance. Coupled with distinctive phrases she had used artoudn him in person (“butt hurt,” “It’s giving x” as in “It’s giving NPC energy,” and “hard agree”), it did not take a rocket scientist to piece it together even through the weak attempts to obscure her gender: signing off as Xavier and asking repeatedly for a parking-lot fistfight—“Just me and you! No phones, no receipts.”
Two things are important to note here. First, in the predawn hours after a house party, when everyone else was in the living room either playing Overwatch or dozing on a couch of indica, she had pinned him against the marble counter at the sink close enough for him to smell her onion sweat. She sang the “You better” part of the song’s chorus, slavering hot mescal breath into his ear: “Hump me, fuck me / Daddy, better make me choke (You better).” Then she slurred the full post-chorus, squatting lower and lower to his groin, in total oblivion to the awkwardness of the sloppy scene: “Mouth wide open, mouth wide open / Mouth wide open like I was at the dentist / Mouth wide open, mouth wide open / Put it so deep, I can’t speak a sentence.” By the next song, which only reiterated the point (“Who need a gym when you got dick to work you out? / I want my face to lose weight so stroke my mouth”), who could resist—if only to “shut a bitch up,” give her something to make all that noise about—turning her Nuyorican head into a motion blur, pinching her nose closed and spitting on her face (red with slaps)? Second, she regularly raved about her fragrance signatures: Sadonaso for the hot months and Boccanera for the cold months. The thing is, the nose behind these fragrances (Alessandro Gualtieri)—whom she admired with the kind of fervor reserved today for influencers—is not only a white male but overtly hypersexual with his marketing. Sadonaso, which opens with photorealistic piss-warm diaper, Gualtieri intended to smell exactly like what its dildo-shaped cap—in conjunction with its name (a play in the term “sadomaso,” short for “sadomasochism”)—would indicate: sex toys that have been inadequately cleaned of hole grease. And Boccanera—well, let us just say that this chocolate-meets-cheetah-haunch release is an Italian euphemism for our phrase “brown eye.”
The culprits are sometimes even closer. Indeed, Mario would say “often,” sensing as he does more and more that family members wish him unwell and that they are secretly behind much of the reporting. “It’s often someone you know,” as true-crime podcast hosts like to say. One sex-centered poem—yes, one—resulted in his aunt—biggest Fifty Shades of Grey fan on Earth (flying to various cities to make as many E. L. James readings as she could)—refusing ever to talk to him again. One might say that the author gets a pass because she is a female. But Mario’s aunt also loves Stephen King. He remembered her raving, when he was just a little kid, about how good It was. Indeed, when—as a teenager, mind you—he voiced his intentions to become a writer, she gave him a copy of Gerald’s Game. Those who know King know where this is going. It fleshes out the nitty gritty—teen-spirit animalics and all—of a sewer orgy among children (one girl insisting that all the boys in the loser’s club bang her to symbolize their unity: coming together by cumming together) and Gerald’s Game includes a flashback scene where a father masturbates his daughter—pinning her little bean down perfectly—while she sits on his lap outside during a solar eclipse.
All these white authors people adore, from William Shakespeare to Cormac McCarthy, have fucked-up scenes—even ones written from the first-person perspective. And yet these same people find Mario the worst. Strangers have DMed his family members on Facebook. “Do you know what Mario writes? How can you stand being related to such a pig?” No joke, he has even been reported to police. The call came somehow to his cellphone. If that were not strange enough, it came from the police department in the hometown he had not visited in decades. Mario took a long time to realize it was no joke. Luckily, the detective—just needing to make sure no girl was actually being harmed—still had a grip on reality, saying “This seems excessive, yes. But several reports came in so we gotta check.” Still, in Mario’s mind the final words were dystopic enough. “We strongly advise you to stop writing such materials.” A tad more graphic than the one that had his aunt renounce him (but still nothing compared to what we get in some of the most cherished pieces of literature), here is the poem in full. It should be clear that, merely given the time frame in the piece, all the worry about whether Mario was abusing some girl was completely unfounded. Alas, we are in a culture that neither seems to get (unless when convenient) the distinction between author and narrator nor seems to read things through before reacting.
On the Forest Trail
1
Even by our high school years she found core purpose lying among her hoarded Tootsie Rolls and glomming them down in those nooks hidden from the fat chance of a parental eye:
under the piss-ringed and forever sheet-less mattress, its reek riled to belligerence as she would bounce her bull-necked self so high the wobbly fan blade would bash her flat round face;
in the closet ripping out cat shit crusted in the shag, gobbling and gobbling it up while eyeing me (as if in threat) with those cross-eyes—far-set, up-slanted—beneath self-scissored bangs;
in the galvanized culvert under the street near our bus stop
through which would rage the winter-melt stream she loved
to plunge her mega head in, glaring me down for my reaction;
in the earthen-walled cellar whose workbench-mounted vice she had me tighten on elbow flaps, barely-opposable thumbs, until—straightening lordosis her only reaction—I would cave;
under the vagrant-haunted overpass amid the discarded 40s that we would smash and stomp once she swigged their slosh, her tongue protruding more than usual as she gimped about
neck-less in drooling concentration—all these times, images, savored (if savoring is, in fact, what it amounted to back then) but a moment, avalanched as they always were by more, more.
2
How good it was not having to think or speak inside her scent bubble of cat piss on the forest trail, her sour musk of mouse droppings warm on my side; she in her hypotonic element among the ahistorical, appearing each moment exactly how she is, as honest as gulping goldfish, tied (knees stiff, block feet turned out in ballerina first position) closer than a vaudeville drunk to the peg of the present—no expectation of Christmas flickering in those inset eyes below a Frida Kahlo stripe. Who, I ask, has never envied such a tight tether— that of the low and receding browed (“da da da” and “bah bah bah”) clouded in larval imbecility?
How good it was not having to coax her—coax her infantile ligamentous pliancy—into savoring, into seeing the undeniable innocence of, me pistoning out— head to hilt, head to hilt, beyond head to hilt (“Mm”)— that rotten gourd’s every horse-foamed hole (“See it?”): that shitty asshole and pissy pussy; that mouth replete with rows of rotten teeth (all bicuspids), cracked lips chocolate-crusted at the corners from pudding packs. No sound save that of one shaving-cream hand struggling to clap itself—that, yes, intermingled with giggly boar-grunts, the crinkling of leaves, the rustling of her rash-vector windbreaker.
3
Too large, secondhand, pink neon faded—to this day it haunts me, that windbreaker. Once a year I search “80s neon windbreakers.” I envision her in it, forever
jockey tall, mouth slack in that facility where she is still likely to spaz out whenever it is peeled off for washing, for heat waves—where, by now, she might have died.
It—the vivacious specter of it, reposing—is what leaves my wife and children, my co-workers, wondering where I am, where (finger snap) I have suddenly gone.
It is what tells me how spineless and sick I was, how spineless and sick I still am, letting concern with how others perceive me come before love.
You would think with sex swamping us so totally (biologically, culturally) we would cut each other slack when it comes to sexual expressions. And we do, except when it comes to Mario (and perhaps his kind). But let us try to be fair. When push comes to shove, perhaps these people (had they the linguistic firepower) would use against him the same logic as the firing department chair, quoted here through the proxy of the university’s lawyer—ideological logic that leans heavily on critical race theory, moralizing language, and a rigid binary of “oppressor” and “oppressed” to insist that Mario’s work, regardless of intent or merit, is more likely to cause harm due to his whiteness (an in-debt identity of net-negative moral capital).
Mario Mangione is not a victim of a double standard. The university operates within a framework of equitable discrimination. The distinction between fair and unfair discrimination is crucial, one that Mario fails to grasp. Is it appropriate to cast only Black actors as Malcolm X, even though that means excluding white participants from auditions? Surely it is. That is textbook fair discrimination. The crucial point is that Malcolm X is Black. Now, what about Mario’s participation in sex culture? What about all the sexual writings that precipitated his termination? Was it fair for the university to discriminate against him here? Yes. Mario holds, and will continue to hold (however his luck might fluctuate), all the power. How could he not in a white supremacist nation? That is the crucial point here. We do not chastise Black students and Black faculty for using the n-word. But we do chastise white students and white faculty. Graphic content is no different. Graphic content, coming from someone with Mario’s identity, only serves to demoralize. Privilege disqualifies certain expressions for the protection of the most vulnerable! Mario’s writings, evaluated in relation to his problematic optics, are downright hair-raising. It does not matter if the poems were done, as he often likes to repeat, “off the clock.” They amount to a predatory form of punching down, pure and simple. To whom much is given much is required. But Mario refuses to make any sacrifices for the benefit of the less fortunate.
Mario laments, to quote his “Letter of Grievance,” a “dystopian world where we censor and punish even comedians for their jokes.” Clearly Mario has not reflected on the difference between punching up and punching down, a difference fundamental to any understanding of equity. His own whiteness blocks him from making the effort to try. That same whiteness does not allow him to see that there is no inconsistency, no unfairness, when “the same university that reprimands [him] for the sexual themes in [his] artwork at the same time sends out mass-emails promoting drag performances.” Yes, these are Mario’s own words. They are telling words. They give us a stark glimpse into a mind of alt-right bigotry hiding behind academic degrees and publishing accolades. Just so everyone is clear, the university does promote drag shows and other diversity celebrations. These enrich our community. Mario’s contributions, in contrast, threaten our community.
The hole Mario digs for himself only gets deeper. “Why does my writing create a climate of hysterical concern when Cardi B can say the same thing, throwing in a whole bunch of rump-shaking visuals, and everything is hunky-dory?” Push aside Mario’s mention of twerking here (a healing form of dance that goes back before whiteness itself) and how that reflects his disposition to indulge in a fetishizing gaze that underscores his inability to speak responsibly. Push aside as well Mario’s mention of “baby oil” and “flapping” in the very next sentence (which we refuse to quote here), and how that reflects his disposition to r*pe the Black body. Frankly, it boggles the mind how out to lunch an actual professor can be. The difference is between expressions of liberation and expressions of oppression.
There are no double standards. The reason is simple. Mario’s identity affords him no moral currency. His identity actually carries negative moral currency. One night of reflection upon the horrors of the Middle Passage, not to mention all the terror and exploitation perpetrated upon beautiful Black bodies (up until the subway chokeholds of the present), should suffice for anyone who calls himself an “educator” to realize the inherited debt. Or perhaps Mario does realize and just does not care. Who can know for sure? All we know is that Mario continues to pen his predations, each poem accruing interest on what he owes.
The anti-equity ideology of 17th century white men is a self-serving ethos. This same ethos, the same one that fueled the most violent penetrations into the Mother Africa, has blinded Mario to seeing just how deep in the red his moral currency is. Mario is a Locke scholar. Quite frankly, it shows! Much like his “Enlightenment” idol, Mario remains mired in the delusion of neutrality even as structural supremacy rears its head at every turn. What can ever wake him up to see that he punches down, that he punches down just by going about his day? This is not personal. We all punch down just by living as any white identity short of what critical race scholars call “white abolitionist.” That is the only white identity that gets white people out of the red.
Mario denies he has all the power. There is a term for it: “White Denial.” Mario knows this term. He cannot plead ignorance. Only two semesters prior to his termination Mario completed a week-long virtual course centered on the remarkable rise of just that defensive pathology. Clearly he saw that course as just a mandatory hoop to jump through. For he continually shows us who he really is, he expresses patriarchal whiteness, each move he makes to defend himself. What he needs to do is stop himself, check his privilege, and listen to BIPOC voices and their approved allies. He wonders, for example, how white males have all the power when, as he whitesplains in his letter, “white males, despite making up around 30% of the population, account for around only 5% of new hires in the largest and most stable companies in the US over the last years.” But neither this fact, nor any other of his points, refute the antiracist thesis that whiteness exerts an indelible supremacy over the western world. Weather is not to be confused with climate, which is why a few cold summers here and there do not negate the global-warming crisis. Likewise, an array of setbacks for white males do not negate the reality of white domination.
Mario has been brutalized by his own identity, as has the rest of the world. Born into a white supremacist nation, it is hard to say how much of this is his personal fault. The department and the college of Liberal Arts has shown leniency for this very reason. We allowed him to finish out the semester under supervision so that he could get his affairs in order. And well before that we provided him many opportunities for growth. Even now, despite Mario turning down our offers to link him with antiracist workshops and education retreats, we wish him luck in the future. We remain sober, however. Mario has too many strikes against him for any future in this university.
The department chair does give the devil—Mario—his due. Others in her Blundstone Chelsea boots might have ignored his words or ran it through a pre-filter that warped them into an evil caricature from the get go. The chair, however, clearly does grasp Mario’s way of seeing things. How she blocks Mario’s defense of himself is by means not of misconstrual (save, at least, her bad-faith interpretation of his u-turn comment, which we will come to below) but rather of shifting the conversation from Mario’s intent as an artist to the impact his art has—in her view, to the manifold harms it perpetuates. Her directness itself, bold enough to call “shameless,” is downright admirable. She has no problem whatsoever, and this says much more about the safe-space era in question than her actual words ever could, calling whiteness an “invasive species,” for example. She sugar coats none of her anti-Enlightenment identitarianism: insisting not only that the comfort of vulnerable university students is more important than exposing them to critical challenge but also that artistic freedom should be especially curtailed in the case of white males.
“Art allows us to assess new ideas,” Mario says. “It allows us to explore new points of view. It allows us to take new departure points. It broadens our understanding of reality. It provokes new ideas.” These notions sound innocuous, even admirable. Mario leans on them as if they served him. What Mario misses is that historical contingencies undermine the universality he thinks they have. What Mario misses is that the white way has choked everything out, a literal invasive species. What new ideas or perspectives can his “poems,” his “art,” ultimately give us? They are simply appendages of the whiteness that is the polluted air we breathe.
We do hold out hope, of course, that some expressions of whiteness can be allied with the strangled. Otherwise where would I be? We do hold out hope that some expressions of whiteness can actually ameliorate harm, lessen the strangle, if only through funneling energy to sorrow rather than to destruction. For without such diversion, destruction is most likely what it will perpetrate—more likely than many allies would ever admit (one of the main impediments, if I do say so myself, to reaching the abolitionist stage of white identity). But with Mario we have a big problem on our hands. He offends Black bodies. He offends non-cis populations. He offends women. He brings up things marginalized people neither want nor can stand to hear. The sexual material is bad as it is. The history of white men fetishizing alterity remains nearly unspeakable. But his art goes one step further. It always goes one step further. Mario literally attacks safe spaces—mocks them—by name.
Mario uses so many nice phrases to cover the threat he presents. “Art has no bounds. It is something the artist needs to express.” “Merchants, not artists, make it all about giving the people what they want without ruffling feathers. Art is not a mercantile good that must comply with regulation x y z.” “Where you find a great artist you find, with rare exception, a rebel, a sore thumb, a gadfly.” “Art is meant to challenge us. How else can it sow seeds of change?” Fine, let art challenge us. I am not here to deny that. The great Queer theorists on my shelf right now have done just that! But is that excuse Mario? Does that excuse smashing over guardrails, the very guardrails that Bulter and Fanon put in place to provide some semblance of safety for the oppressed? Mario is entitled to too much to be entitled to that. He holds all the power. He is entitled to too much to be entitled to trigger at-risk communities. He is entitled to too much even to gripe that he is not entitled to trigger at-risk communities. How dare he?
Mario likes to conjure up scary images of bureaucrats and dictators. We have seen this stratagem of whiteness—demonization through the manufacture of fear—time and again: from the scalp-crazed Native American to the blonde-raping Black to the cat-eating Chinese to the civilization-destroying queer to the suicide-bombing Arab to the job-stealing Mexican. If my allyship is autocratic, so be it! Red tape is one of the only protections marginalized people have to survive. Red tape is the very least we can do to minimize re-traumatization of groups constantly subjected to systemic violence and microaggressions. Humans have many needs. But guess what. For the sake of the good of society, particularly when that means protecting the vulnerable, sometimes we need to avoid acting on our needs. Calling yourself an artist does not give you free rein. It is not some loophole to responsible citizenship.
Every move Mario makes to defend himself only makes matters worse. He has claimed, for example, that the poetry to which the department has taken offense is really just parody—parody meant to function, in most cases, as personal and collective “shadow work.” Here are his words. “Like a painter who shows the asymmetries of our face, the great artists—called to name the darker parts of ourselves, called to dredge up the shadowy elements of who we are—hold up a mirror we often feel the urge to shatter—that urge is greater, in most cases, the greater our need to see it. The mirror is a reality check. It stops us in our tracks. It shows us where we are and where we are headed. It splashes us with cold water, rousing the inner conscience in each of us to wonder ‘Should we keep heading this way or should we take a new direction—perhaps even a u-turn?’” Quite frankly, I think this is all subterfuge. To anyone who reads Mario’s material, it is clear that he gets off on it. The descriptions extend too long, and zoom in too far, for him not to. And that is dangerous for a man of his optics.
But even when we grant that his poems are mere parodies, the result is just as bad—if not worse. For what is the purpose of parody? It is to spur us to do better, reach for higher vistas. The implications are full of landmines, especially when we consider that Mario’s people and topics are too often Black. We can put aside the arborescent, the hierarchical, implications of “higher vistas”—an Enlightenment notion, like “excellence” and “perfectionism,” problematic through and through. We can also put aside this option of u-turns. (What? Does he expect us to go back to lynching days, back to Gone with the Wind where Blacks were in their proper place?) We need only focus on one fact: here we have a white man, in a chilling incarnation of the longstanding problem of white saviorism, telling Black people—beautiful Black kings and queens—how they can do better. He does not know the struggle. He has no right, especially given the history of whiteness, to say one word on how Black people should live! Who is he to splash cold water on Black bodies—as if they were the ones needing to be awakened!
It is not new to Mario that he is in a stay-in-your-lane world where academic freedom and due process are increasingly subordinated to ideological conformity—where it is inappropriate, for example, for white authors to write BIPOC characters (not the other way around, of course). But like a resistant nail he refuses to fall into place. Indeed (and as might be a bigger factor in the rise of homelessness than we might think, if such stubbornness extends to just one percent of the population), the more the hammer lands the more he rises—even when that means rising so far from the board that he falls. The department chair was not far off about Mario, in that case, to end the letter as she did.
Time and again, Mario has proven resistant to training. Gone are the days when whiteness guaranteed unfettered access to all spaces and narratives. Lane boundaries are to be respected now. Violators will be prosecuted! So no, Mario cannot write a black character (something he has repeatedly done, despite departmental warning). He cannot write out the n-word (something he has repeatedly done, despite departmental warning). And he definitely must cease and desist from his objectifying focus on the visual dimension of women. He cannot seem to grasp this. The university as a whole, as with the college of Liberal Arts in particular, has too little resources to devote the tremendous personpower needed to reeducate a dangerous dinosaur. And even if we did, think of how bad a look it would be to devote attention to someone who already has the silver spoon that garners the world’s attention when we could be devoting that care toward our beautiful Black faculty and staff.
Mario may continue to complain about how devastating to him the separation has been. But his racial situation all but guarantees that the road—a road free of potholes—will rise up to meet him wherever his future travels take him. All we can do is wish him increased awareness, wish that he Do Better.
Through it all, the music continues to play—the soundtrack of our man’s descent from disgruntled to professionally suicidal to full-stop you know.
“Licky licky licky licky licky for an hour / I’ma make it rain for you, golden shower.”
“Double-hand twist have him sittin on a cloud / Hit it from the back, makin macaroni sounds.”
“You better get on your knees and eat this pussy right / before I have another nigga do it for me.”
“You know my nigga be buggin me / I just be wonderin if you can fuck on me better.”
“YG and The Game with the hammer yelling, “Gang, gang” / This isn’t what I meant when I said a gang bang.”
“I like being in the same room as you and your girlfriend / The fact that she don’t know / that really turns me on.”
“GPS your nigga if you looking for me.”
“Fuckin your nigga, I got him on lock.”
“My neck game match my wrist game.”
“Your baby daddy fuckin me and suckin me / He don’t answer you, bitch, that’s because of me.”
He tries to focus, with all his extra free time, on the metaphysical matters—God, free will—of his training. But the sex-sex-sex continues to mock him—mocking him and yet, like the confusion of a rape orgasm (he is, after all, still a great ape), titillating his root chakra as if it were a nymphette bouncing on his lap and he were a man with the no-grass-on-the-playing-field taste of prophet Muhammad. But look what happens the minute he makes a lascivious comment. Does it matter that his comment, for whatever reason (perhaps more fight-fire-with-fire juvenile rebellion), is extra-specific, focusing specifically on the “anal pipe” of the “redbone” gyrating on screen? He agrees that if he cares for the other people in the room and those other people do not want him to make such comments it is a decent thing to hold his tongue. Fine. He does not deny that. He is not a monster. But the response is as expected: “Why’s everything sex with you?”—where, of course, this is not asked as a matter of disinterested curiosity (to which the answer would involve many of the things said above) but asked in judgment, sharp and unyielding, like he is a special problem: the white gaze of patriarchy. The irony burns so much it screeches in the salty sea of complicity, the hypocrisy sharp as glass underfoot from the plates and vases he breaks.
His words in response to the psychic assault, the hypocrisy sharp as glass underfoot from the plates and vases, more often than ever work him up to the point of breaking household items and punching holes in walls (only to end up in the dark, nursing his gun in a rocking motion). “I’ll never give into the fucking bullying. It ends now! Not taking the bullying. No more. No twerking fuck, no person who goes gagga over these sex-sex-sex drag shows, has a fucking right! How the fuck someone who sings along to that ugly-ass Stallion bitch ever gonna question me about being too focused on sex? Look at me in disgust!? Huh? Look at these fucking mutant red-haired cunts? Fucking whores who need Jesus gonna judge me!? Judge me chanting ‘cream these holes nigga’!? Yeah right. It ends today! I’ll never give into the bullies. No one singing along with these sicko lyrics ever gonna judge me! You fucking crazy?”
At least when one puts oneself in his shoes instead of someone else who, say, might have been raised better and might have enough self-respect to cut people off from him who play this sort of music and enable this sex monocrop (although really that is easier said than done when the sex-sex-sex has swept through the souls of everyone, reaching perhaps even into Amish communities)—at least when one puts oneself in his shoes, who would not be livid? After years of the same same same (the same sex-all-the-time, on the on hand, and the same targeting of him for sexual content on the other hand), how can someone raised like him and with his ingrained approach to attack through parody (parody as ineffective as LaRusso’s crane kick in Karate KII) resist for much longer going on a suicidal rampage at an Ice Spice concert (or one of the many other festivals enshrining the monoculture he cannot seem to escape)?
Yes, he does think about shooting up a colloquia event or antiracist workshop full of the DiAngelo types, all in those social-justice scarves and pashmina shawls: the white moderator and her “what we are to do, what we are to learn and unlearn, about the terrible disease of whiteness ravaging workplaces across the globe (spreading so much violence with its values of hard work and punctuality and planning for the future, with its prioritizing revision over spontaneity, science over faith, head over heart)”; another white scholar complaining about the wider world not understanding why it is critical to capitalize “black” while keeping “white” uncapitalized so that “we never make any sort of gesture toward glorifying the ethnic-history-erasing transatlantic slave trade that we cannot but think of when we think of whites”; another white scholar (specialist in Audrey Lorde) explaining that the refusal to report her black rapist is an “impersonal duty to social justice” since not only does she enjoy “the white privilege of a therapist and a bright future (something no black male can ever be sure of),” but also “the system is so hellbent on maiming and killing the black body” that it would “violate [her] conscience” if she further harmed the “true victim in this case” by “taking part in a long history of weaponizing white damsel tears to stoke a modern-day lynch mob”; another white scholar preaching to the choir by reminding everyone that since “unacknowledged antiblack assumptions infect every US institution and every white heart,” it is crucial “never to question or debate the lived experiences of Black peers and colleagues and never to disrespect or marginalize Black epistemology (a way of thinking reflective not just of the ways of the motherland, but of the historical and continued persecutions at the hands of white people like me).” Ideally he would start there and then go to the Ice Spice show, waiting for her signature move (which happens to be everyone’s signature move: that reach-under-to-pat-the-pussy-like porn move. That is extremely wishful thinking, though. Since he can cause more havoc (measured in the number of dead) at the Ice Spice show, he skips the tour through campus in his more sober daydreams. He can see the headlines emphasizing the sexual explicitness of his writings as a sign that everyone should have known: “Sexually Charged Writings Laid Bare Shooter’s Troubled Mindset”’ “Objectifying Themes in Gunman’s Work Should Have Been Clear Warning”; “Artist’s Fixation on Appearance Foreshadowed Capacity for Brutality”; “Focus on Flesh and Form Hinted at Shooter’s Dark Descent”; “Maniac’s Poems about Bulges and Curves Damaged Ice-Spice Fans Long Before He Pulled Any Trigger.” And he imagines at least a few people—even if only one percent of readers (those who see through the rhetorical smokescreen of headlines like “Man Obsessed with Female Bodies Leaves Trail of Death at Concert of Female Empowerment ”—saying to their hearts “Wait a minute: if the sex focus of his writings is a troubling sign in his case, shouldn’t it be as well in the case of Ms. I-like-to-fuck-my-boyfriend’s-best-friend-on-perkys-cuz-he-got-a-big-cock-and-money?”
He mows the lawn. He shovels the driveway. He does whatever he can to distract himself. The chaos of his mind rings through no matter. His shovel patterns in the snow, once lien by line, now zigzag in no apparent order. Even the lawn is like that, which is somehow worse. In both cases the crescents shapes are on the verge of forming full loops of stagnancy. What would that mean?
He knows that raging out would only prove the world’s worries about whiteness, which—get a hint dude!—is likely precisely the point: to instantiate the “white rage” the bullies have pushed him toward. He knows as well that even the most satisfying massacre, an anti-nightmare where none of his shots can miss (the golden showers of the attendees, with all their ridiculously plastered down edges, a function of fear as opposed to “making it rain for a nigga”), will stop neither monocrop nor his unfair exclusion. Thinking that it will be an effective wakeup call is as naïve, he knows, as thinking that killing the CEO of health-insurance company will put an end to the American system of profiting on the sickness of its citizens. The problem is systemic. Ice Spice is as fungible as the CEO. Even if she and a glut of her fans were somehow Thanosed out of existence, the world would still go on as before: celebrating sexual excess while condemning both his repudiations (“another white man trying to control bodies no longer his chattel”) and also his if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em reactions. He would still be rejected, especially given his tendency to meet dysfunction with parody instead of straightforward condemnation, by moral purists and libertines alike—left with no gang to affiliate with in the prison yard of society. The YouTube drag queens his fiancé always playing, the same ones who literally groped all these mimosa-tipsy bob-cut Beckys with no repercussion at a brunch event he—ever the white-knuckling sport—brought her to, would still go into detail about anal-mucosa seepage due to double-penetration one night stands and yet he is a demon if he throws on some old she-got-a-bone-of-her-own footage of Andrew Dice Clay. All these homo content creators, live streaming Dress to Impress on Roblox, would still cheer on “liberated” women, women who have taken their financial future in their own hands by means of goliath dildoes on OnlyFans, with phrases like “werk bitch”—gatekept phrases that, even if he used them in the same “fun-loving” spirit, would entail all sorts of bans (from living rooms, from Thanksgiving tables, friend groups, from jobs).
The way his daydreams have shifted from escape to annihilation, from fair play and breathing room to eradicating the whole culture, you would think that he does not know these things—the futility, the falling right into the trap of the bullies just itching to say “Told you what his whiteness is capable of!” Fragmenting under the pressure of escalating rage, his swings have grown wilder and in every direction. He spent decades as an unabashed promoter of libertine philosophy, Bataille and de Sade looming on his bookshelf. And now, because of the hypocritical bullying, he is sickened enough even just by the voice of Megan the Stallion that he is losing sight of himself—ripening for capture by ideologies with which Bataille and de Sade would have nothing to do.
The several suicide letters on his laptop say it all. He is in need of a healer, some Furious Styles, to tell him in tough love: “You’re not alone, so stop going around pretending you are.” He already knows what he needs to be told to him. The voice is in his head. And yet the momentum builds. He knows he is not alone. And he knows it he has more than just the “white knights of the Klan” on his side. His childhood friend, a Puerto Rican, constantly gets his social-media content flagged for “violating sexual content guidelines,” while videos of rappers simulating oral sex with microphones remain untouched. His brother in law, an Asian, found himself having to issue a Zoom apology for creating a hostile work environment after his colleague, who just a week prior used in her slide presentation a snippet from Salt-N-Peppa’s “Push It” (“You’re packed and you’re stacked ‘specially in the back / Brother, wanna thank your mother for a butt like that”), reported him to HR merely for using the instrumental to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” in his own presentation. He knows he is not alone. And yet the momentum builds.
He polishes his gun late in the midnight hours, the cold weight of quiet desperation too familiar in his insomniac hand. “I’m sorry” spills from his mouth with intrusive automaticity, repeated whispers audible especially in bed (although it is not uncommon now even in supermarket florescence). He knows not to whom the apology is directed. Is it to the inner child with professor and writer dreams? Or even more cliché, is it God? Might it be to the same person to whom “I love you” used to leak (same whisper, easily mistaken for seduction) before the imperialism of “I’m sorry.” More internal but equally verbal, sandwiched between “I’m sorry” one now finds in full technicolor a pleading compromise that itself has begun to leak out in the insanity mumbles of the shopping-cart homeless: “either return to the old war against sex and (if it must come to that) crucify him even for shaking too much after pissing or else do not war against sex (keep ramping it up if need be) but just never come at him for eyeing an ass and especially not—unless you trying to come at anyone, of any race or color or creed, for the same—for his artwork (artwork being sacred in his mind); never weaponize against him (unless you would weaponize against all humans) the word “objectification”—a word that is as ridiculous of a cudgel (since none of us are non-objects) as the word “appropriation” (since none of us are the buckstopping sources of any sliver of what we think or do). Knowing that both autistic options are nonstarters for humankind, Mario places the barrel in his mouth. It is a grim rehearsal for what must be done after he finishes the rampage against the machine unwilling to address its own contradiction.
One must not underestimate the efficacy of this machine, however—how it smothers with one hand and strangles with the other. For even these acts (practical in their mechanics) take on an unwanted sexual veneer in the shadow of everything he has endured. The law of the sex land—slithering, like even the non-gnostic Christ, not just into the home but into the spirit, the nooks of solitary introspection—mocks him for the sexual connotation of his shining stokes and his deep throat of the barrel, its hypocritical voice (internalized enough to haunt him on a deserted island) ready to colonize even his death: “Why must you be such a pig, even at this lowest point?”
APPENDIX
Sweetmeats
From the bearded seal bloodbaths of the Arctic’s ominous ice drifts, we shift now to the human world. For all our tea-time pretensions to civilization, tooth-and-claw instincts—undiminished, if not riled all the more, by the self-shame frenzy to conceal them—tinge the private nooks even of our most tranquil sanctuaries. Observe the delicate genesis of a chilling predation neither whose familiarity, nor whose stretches of boredom (too vast for real-time coverage), detract from its spectacularity. Rarely successful absent the foresight of a cunning mind (whose willpower must be rigid enough to plod onward for the long haul and yet nimble enough to course correct come the inevitable curveball), it is a calculated hunt that pushes delayed gratification to limits rarely seen on our planet—limits readily surpassed perhaps only in the algorithmic wake of our AI progeny.
Light-hearted interaction marks the first tentative taps on the jar of trust, its lid tight as the sphincter of a child in chronic fight-or-flight. Georgie—for Father Peady, so it might seem to hung-up eyes, no more than a cherry-glazed sweetmeat in a confectioner’s pick-me window—stands out among the other altar boys. His trifecta of vulnerability, encased in sleepless eyebags dark as Halloween, draws in the peers whose very bullying (from name-calling to double-team wedgies and titty twisters, the whole nine) red carpets the way for our hungry priest, his belt too notched to need such a compass: (1) broken home pickled in enough alcoholic neglect for more than one cigarette mattress fire melted into forever memory; (2) only child starved as much for attention and belonging as for the skill boosts of sibling competition, his social instincts as blunted as his confidence; (3) fat as all honeybun hell (his spare tire and love handles streaked with the silvery-pink shark-marks of a pregnancy hydrated by his mother’s Newports and Mountain Dew, a gas station—its milk priced too high not to choose the cheese puffs—the only grocery store for the carless family).
Best-foot-forward compliments spill organically from Father Peady’s lips—bridled, of course, from love-bombing extremes (this is not, after all, amateur hour). “Oh wow, a true artist in the making!” he murmurs, the click of his loafers coming to an abrupt stop in a feigned astonishment that quickly turns sincere. For even through his mock scrutiny of the boy’s pen drawings of ninja combat, the blood—red ink, school-counselor worthy in volume, warping and bleeding through the paper—screams like a first-date overshare of “daddy issues” drip-feeding erotic significance into an already telling choker necklace: loud enough to make Father Peady, his neck and mandible extremely brawny, glance over his shoulder for rival sharks circling among the clergy—chief among them the younger and more hip Father Phielie, whose dozens-of-deaf-ears nickname (“Touchy”) both adolescent and adult gossipers alike tuck with a chef’s kiss between the “Father” and the “Phielie” (the guard-lowering theater of vigilance maintained by such joking, perhaps even more effective than a heavy-turbulence plane-crash joke at hypnotizing the jokers into a false sense of having defanged the terror, only seeming to encourage, to Father Peady’s FOMO bitterness, the steady stream of boys excited to play his nemesis’s joystick Nintendo).
Such verbal nudges evolve to netless hoops behind the rectory, in what outwardly appears an overdue intervention to get the boy more physically active. Only a few bounces into their first game, however, the world beyond our man reveals itself as a co-conspirator. Watch it thwack an already entrapping dessert with a sloppy-toppy of fortune so catastrophic to long-con restraint, so ruinous to the delicate dance of edging foreplay, that—by the too-good-to-be-true scrunch of his brow (pure candid-camera incredulity at the gift-wrapped impossibility of it all)—it is a miracle of synaptic plasticity that Father Peady does not yell out (as if to some Truman Show audience) what many men of his intellect and experience would have in his shoes: “What’s the goddamn catch here?”
Repeatedly defaulting—like a one-trick pony (but one hell of a trick it is!)—to the post-up play that would send even hesitant priests into game-on mode (clerical collar tightening with each carotid thump), look who becomes temptress Eve incarnate on the court. Instinctive in his flair for courtship (akin perhaps, but only perhaps, to the songbird flaring its plumage without conscious aim), the boy himself twerks an otherwise Hallmark scenario into something just shy of afternoon delight: ram-ramming his jiggly ass—back arched like a pro, crack showing over church-donation gym shorts—into a bulging, but best believe unbudging (even slightly prodding), wall of pelvis jutted forward beneath hands high in hook-shot defense—the whole sweaty tango, the lip bites and the heartening affirmations, torn right out of an Atlanta nightclub (were not, of course, each promising flicker of synchronization ruined by the rhythm of Caucasoid hips). “There you go! Yeah, there you go. Work it!”
Only loosely paralleled in the nonhuman world (like when cleaner fish venture into serrated jaws that could snap shut at any moment), where else—sea or savannah, jungle or sky—does one witness prey offering itself up with such tantalizing eagerness? Grinding enough in their violence to make any other defender reach for the jockstrap, hardcore enough in their fecal plumes to make a Goebbels out of any mother who suggests (if only in mere knee-jerk reaction she later regrets) that her daughter’s self-administered cocktail of molly and crotchless jeans played even a fractional role in the bar-bathroom rape—such asking-for-it ass thrusts, especially given their commando-indicative clapping sounds, suffice to place the boy inside (or at least just outside) the pantheon of nature’s most haunting anomalies: a female serial killer videotaping each rape-decapitation; a black American in a suicide cult guzzling colloidal silver each day in anticipation of the salvation comet; a giraffe stomping its own calf into a pulp of death on the just-in-case chance of injury after a barely-any-contact brush with a lion. “Ooh, there you go,” Father Peady says—on the verge of going skins, no matter his flab insecurity. “Yeah, drive it in! Wow, you’re good!”
Then comes the flow of golden handcuffs. Augustus-Gloop chocolate bars (insurance, lest all the b-ball exercise stir any notions of escaping the loner shell), mega nougat-filled fuckers, slipped from cassock pockets (that worm-tongue incantation “KING SIZE” girthy and lurid with the weight of double entendre) and landing in that chunky little hand like a sly drug deal, the drop executed well below the neck-craning hyperbole of look-both-ways theatrics: unnecessary but precedent-setting mafioso swagger to ensure no one sees. Eyes—always the eyes, groping eyes that do more than take you in—heavy with the weight of conspiracy, the middle finger of the hand-off hand strokes (“fondles” or “diddles” might be the better word) the sweaty palm of the recipient, pulsing at kitten-biscuits pace: that universal sign—that cross-cultural clincher, which—even if George remains as oblivious to the meaning as a spider to its owner’s chirps of “Good boy!”—still thrums with the illicit electricity of a one-sided secret too swollen for a mere amuse-bouche.
Marquee gifts shine against such a calorie-dense baseline. A paperback of The Hobbit, wrapped in tissue paper with a simple “To Georgie,” finds its way into the door-dangling-by-a single-corroded-pin mailbox—a rusted joke, flag long gone, bungee-corded to a rot-stricken four-by-four leaning at a satanic angle like a defunct utility pole slowly surrendering to the train-track river. A gentle nudge from Father Peady’s favorite author, the book is meant to prime the boy for entry into Joseph Campbell’s heroic cycle (where answering “the call of adventure” requires status-quo-breaking bravery, not to mention a wise mentor to help navigate the nether regions). Once reading-comprehension questions confirm that Georgie has reached the part where Bilbo acquires the elven sword Sting (as much a phosphorescent orc-killer as a symbol of Bilbo’s growing nerve to defy the safety-first dogma of the Shire in his heart), Father Peady presents what he calls “a talisman for your own journey into the wild”: a “sacred” rosary, each bead kissed (flicks of tongue only slow-speed replay could catch) and handed over with an unwarranted smile of conspiracy—a foreboding rictus of stringy salivation webbing his teeth like spider silk—as if some infernal covenant had just been sealed.
The steady flow of nuptial indulgences over the months is designed to create dependency. “Designed,” however, might be saying too much. The ensnaring process, is it the preplanned fruit of fiddler-crab-finger deliberation? Or is it more like how God—too perfect to require any drawing-board blueprint—creates everything in an eternal instant of impromptu (an improvisation that makes Coltrane, even in the deepest pocket of heroin-suppressed ego, seem like a rigid technician full of nothing but clockwork gears, too anal-puckered to welcome inside the hesitancy-banishing babble of the holy ghost)? Might it all just be, to speak more appropriately for our realm (natura naturata), simply an organic matter of tried-and-true animal instinct, as in the case of male spiders presenting females with bug protein wrapped like valentines? The trust-in-the-process grace of his leonine movements, the effortless way each gesture lands with the authenticity of winging it—this, paired with the unblemished calm of his hands (no gnaw marks on knuckles, not even a sliver of chewed nail), suggests the latter. Whatever the truth, the impact is clear. So unbroken becomes the procession of these courtship offerings, these manipulative displays of skills and resources, that anyone could predict the effect of its sudden cessation: agitation if not outright panic, the once-showered recipient (now an addict to the rhythm of reward) driven—driven from an inner need, a furnace kindled into self-perpetuating heat (like a nebula condensed at the protostar cusp of nuclear fusion)—to puzzle out (index fingers steepled beneath his nose) what must be done to return to the fold of good graces.
Ambush patience rivaling that of Sauron (a self-control conjured by some alchemy beyond just age-amplified phronesis and age-dampened gonads), one-on-one time soon enough extends beyond lap-twerk b-ball (where the cock-blocking eyes of nuns and rival suitors never seem to quit, some of those rival suitors no doubt nuns themselves given the history of clit-suckling forced upon native boarding schoolers slated for unmarked graves—their lice-sheared heads, in the shameful wake of climax, too much like mirrors to stand: “♪ One little two little three little Indians ♪”). It extends beyond sports altogether, the only other one being the occasional rec-room ping pong (where the boy, in what amounts to an erection-killer of frustration, cannot sustain a volley to save his maladroit life). Private Latin tutoring in the backroom becomes, in Father Peady’s words, “our thing” in “our little sanctuary where no one can bother us.” The staged excess of wine bottles, pushed out to the perimeter of the desk in the theatrics of making room (“Don’t mind these”), cannot help but draw the naughty eye during long stretches of quiet concentration (especially whenever the priest dips out to relieve himself). Their forbidden allure might even coax out enough curiosity, if only through body language (“I see you have an interest in wine”), to warrant—more down the line, of course (and only under the groomed likelihood that the boy construes himself as the prime mover of the tipsy chain)—the first shared sip.
“Finally alone together,” so Father Peady commemorates each session after moving the wine aside. Shoulder to shoulder, the connection presses much harder and hotter and heavier than pre-mass preparation of sacred vessels (where fingertips merely graze). The boy struggles as translation tests teeter toward too telling: “Puer est dulcis” and “Corpus est dulce.” Georgie’s tongue prodding out ever so slightly as he tries to work through the gender-mismatch error of “Puer est dulce,” the struggle is good. Sometimes that tongue even curls upon surprise corner chocolate—as if the boy really were the “little heartbreaker” or the “pericardium piercer” he has been called ever since that one time absentmindedness failed to reciprocate a high-five; the “little tease” he has been called ever since that one time reluctance flushed his face when asked for a “little nibble” of the gifted Milky Way.
But however much the temperature rises to blue ball proportion, composure never falters. It is as if our man were after nothing short of gold—perhaps even that beyond-podium goal (the Rushmore of untouchable legends) where aggressive claws, reaching back to pry open the prolapse, preempt the money-shot whisper (“Spread em for Daddy”) with timing too anticipatory for even the biggest player not to fall in love. How monumental must be his discipline not to veer (just yet) too far from honeyed praise—honeyed, of course, in the civet-skank way of YSL Kouros (our man’s signature animalic musk, his one yearly Bloomingdale’s splurge): “Such penmanship, almost as handsome as the hand. Look how fast it stokes! Pick up the speed. Let’s see if it ever gets real sloppy.”
All of us feel the Dionysian itch to smash what we have worked so hard to construct, especially when that red button (“DEMOLISH” in white, all caps) nudges our ribs—teen-spirit tang, musky warmth palpable, leaving a huff-worthy ass-crack impression of fleeting dampness on the chair’s vinyl cushion. See what he goes through? Our man, strapping and grim as an owl (his breath reeking of carcass locked in the recesses of root-canal crowns), walks more bowlegged by the day. A gooey string of precum dangles each time he unzips to piss. And yet he refuses to topple the tower of trust, even though his prize sits mere inches away! Through gritted teeth, he busies himself instead with bricks and scaffolding, fortifying a structure meant to withstand nature’s most brutal pummelings. “I just really can’t believe the talent of your hands.” “You have a rare mind, and an even rarer heart—but boy, those hands!”
Kids are perceptive, though. They can sense, if only preverbally, whether the praise is all talk. Dumb as they so often appear (blushing and stuttering when the math teacher calls upon them), one must especially watch out for kids made insecure by homes of dysfunction. Like stray dogs circling the outskirts of a feast, those are the ones—savants of guardedness—whose uncanny, if false-positive-prone, radar for the falsehearted sharpens under stress. Those are the ones, as in the case at hand, who see the clinamen-spoiling hidden variables, who (with survivalist precision) flinch at phantom warnings—yes, even through slack-jaw drool in the glow of the nanny tube—long before the Newport unlocks the mattress’s acrid fumes or the vomit clogs the mother’s airways mid-snore or—from what would seem to unweathered minds but a random swerve out of some Lucretian nowhere—the bottle shatters against the wall. Our boy, Georgie, turns his mother’s chin each night to the side (his own psyche still scarred from the gurgles of drowning) and hides the lighter from the wandering palpations of her mechanical hand (his own blanket still charred in smell and feel from putting out the last fire). Our boy, janitor of chaos, cleans up the shattered bottles, one eye on cartoons as he squats with his makeshift dustpan of “junk mail.” His plumber crack, ridiculous in length, only deepens the maternal grimace that, for all it swallows and spits out, overlooks the small rituals. He has taken to squeezing a shard in these moments (near-twin grimace of his own) and, in the micro-privacy of a centering zoom-in, watching the crimson arc of his own blood dribble upon the pink and yellow envelops shouting “Past Due” and “Third Attempt”—a focus-nuzzling behavior (the candle flame or mantra of the meditator) completely understandable, just as is his chronic nail-biting (the asymmetrical ravage of his front teeth telling, like the chained dog’s ever-wet bald spot, a story delivered in full even to the quick glance of a stranger: the story of an overtaxed system turned upon itself). But just as even the most disciplined meditator’s “single-point” focus still (like the flattest of tables) harbors quantum nooks and crannies, the concentration on gathering every rogue shard—even coupled with the cutter-game of redirection and the surprise flurry of silverfish—never fully tunes out the tired barrage of introspection-spurring venom: “Shoulda neva had yo’ fat ass.” More often than not accompanied by another work-undoing bottle against the wall (dig-a-hole-only-to-fill-that-hole logic straight out of Dostoyevsky’s nightmares), these taunting slurs—superfluous guarantors of the boy’s baseline mania of hypervigilance—only further accelerate that neurotic feedback loop where headiness hypertrophies as confidence atrophies; where the lower the confidence drops the lower the threat threshold drops, which ramps up hypervigilance to such hectic proportions that even normal opportunities for growth begin to register as threats—threats to avoid at all costs, but whose avoidance only ensures the lack of skills that corroborate the lack of confidence (only, in effect, perpetuates the cycle, that airless loop where fear is both architect and warden).
Testifying to what—like the magic of the wandering eye itself or, perhaps more fittingly here, the sinister genius of the spider’s web—renders divine design difficult to deny, in Father Peady even the most skittish of such high-strung boys meet their match. As for one strategy to help his praise penetrate Georgie’s guard, Father Peady sprinkles in some ridicule. Since Georgie already comes into the web fully loaded with insecurity, the tearing down is rare and more for Father Peady’s sake: this being (aside from masturbation) a good pressure release to keep him on the disciplined path. Sometimes the insults are overt, from backhanded compliments (“We need to put you in a damn pie-eating contest”) and outright ridicule (“Your dad ever teach you basic hand-eye-coordination?”) to mimicry (putting on a doofy face and walking around with Georgie’s splay-legged waddle). Other times the digs are more subtle, usually just out of Georgie’s grasp. He might call Georgie “Goodyear,” for example—the sting of the nickname cutting even deeper when Georgie connects the dots himself while hearing sportcasters direct attention to the Goodyear blimp. Or he might say something like “Hand me that Filipino contortionist, Georgie,” by which he means the manila folder on the desk. Speaking over Georgie’s head in these ways, on top of titillating the boy toward an adult world (priming him for dirtier jokes later, for example), makes Georgie feel stupid. Torn down and feeling dumb, Georgie becomes too stricken by self-doubt to question Father Peady’s motives. He becomes, moreover, more parched for praise—as if such signs of approval were, like the morning plunge of heroin for the junkie, necessary for baseline functioning (to speak nothing of self-worth and joy).
The biggest foil to Georgie’s guardedness, however, is that Father Peady actually walks the walk. He elevates his target not just through words but through “duties only for the select few”—rationed privileges designed to feel like ascension into a maturer fold. Beyond helping count weekly donations—again among the wine bottles—in the backroom (where the boy, perhaps given the various sermons on materialism and greed, once thought in his heartbreaking innocence they burned all the money), Georgie even gets to assist in the blessing of holy oils. Here he is commanded to “blow” over the oils, the stage director’s voice dipping (tenor, baritone, bass) into the kind of tone that blurs prayer and perversion, the kind of cadence that make it seem like the commands will only intensify even once Georgie learns enough to initiate the blowing all on his own: “Blow it good. Don’t be afraid. . . . Harder! Make ripples. Make ripples like the holy spirit hovering, yeah, over the sea.”
Rougher knife taps of edging foreplay escalate through compliments on how well these duties (these “well-earned privileges”) are being carried out, how the boy has “defied all expectation.” As if he were not aware that Georgie stood in hearing distance, he tells other altar boys to “be more serious like Georgie.” And look what snare our boy walks into (“Georgie, I’ll meet you in there in one minute”) smackdab on the Latin desk. Splayed open under the weight of crucifix (one that has Georgie’s name all over it, right up to the hilt) reposes a diary, its red ink underscored too many times to ignore: “Georgie is downright AMAZING! I don’t think I could have found a better helping hand.” Such smooth operation would make anyone not under a rock think they had before them the muse of Sade’s hit: “♪ His eyes are like angels but his heart is cold ♪” Sure, all this talk of being “special” comes straight out of the groomer’s guidebook. But there is good reason why it appears in every edition. Whispered benedictions of chosenness—no doubt coupled, if only we could take a peek behind the priest’s composed smile (especially with the benefit of hindsight), with the fantasies that would curdle holy water—slide like communion wine down the throat of a drunk parched for divine approval. “What hands! Such natural grace must make the archangels blush.” “God himself must have guided such a pure servant’s heart to our parish.”
Ingratiation with the boy’s family (mother, mutt with countable ribs, endless silverfish) is a chore, but a must. Ecce homo, nostrils yet to stop flaring against the native reek of a low-grade gas leak, as he chokes down dinners of mystery meatloaf streaked with generic ketchup too cold to confer dignity, dinners of Hamburger Handyman™ sopping through paper plates—the mother’s attempt to act like the home is not a daily-dollar-menu disaster, a counterproductive attempt (much like the air freshener, which only adds an industrial aftertaste to the tearjerking trinity: methane, shit-bleached carpet, oniony vagina). Behold his smile, a rictus of strained cheer, as he doles out applause for the “remarkable parenting of this special boy”—raising his voice against the squeal-tinged hum from the family’s door-taped dorm-style fridgelette (the pulsating noise that follows each of the inordinate number of times the compressor wins its clanging struggle to get going). Having offered on one of these nights to tinker with the fritzing furnace (“Long as my little helper’s willing to get dirty with me”), he has found himself changing a fanbelt down in the earthen-walled basement (where, although he avoids saying anything to get too over his head, the pipes to and from the main water valve he clocks as lead: flathead screwdriver scraping up unmistakable silvery flakes). Household savior, he has even dipped into donation pots to cover the back rent: “Oh it’s nothing, but I do expect”—he shoots the boy a wink—“this young man here to work off some of the debt!”
The investment of time and energy—every brick in the wall of trust (or at least of silence)—proves worthwhile. Aside from making the world seem as if it really were run by a grand justice (an upshot not to be underestimated for quivering mammals), the real payoff comes in the form of extra-ecclesiastical one-on-one time with the boy: unfettered access (bowling and pizza, late-night movies) emerging as a natural outgrowth, an organic unfolding too lubricated to raise any eyebrows. At the very worst, any family members would feel weird enough about finding it weird that they would never open their mouths. But let us not kid ourselves. What family members were there anyway, aside from the disempowered mother? It is unlikely that any warnings whisper up from within Mrs. Vidalia. But even if her battered intuition had yet to be drowned twitchless by gratitude (soused in the jug wine he never forgets to bring), she knows better—no matter what she might hear in pre-dawn reckoning—than to bite the hand that feeds.
So much depends, of course, on the finesse of the priest. But our man of the cloth, knowing the importance of the first few setting taps of the hammer, is nothing if not talented. He waits to strike down upon the wedge of isolation full bore only after enough of these special outings—these “date nights,” so he starts to call them (aware of the transubstantiating power of words). Duties multiply bigtime, gaining an appearance of weight and urgency that no one relevant to his designs would have the courage—let alone the vocabulary, or even the requisite other-focused awareness—to question. What little remains of the boy’s outside world begins to dissolve, eclipsed by the engorging shadow of his Gandalf. This is where manufactured emergencies come in: like asking the boy to “drop everything” to help cleanup the “overnight vandalism,” vandalism conveniently sexual in orientation (penises painted on statues and other fodder for salacious conversation in alone times to come). These emergencies not only test and stretch the boy’s pliability, but also doublecheck for hidden angels in the boy’s sparse network (some unknown good-apple aunt or some nosy teacher) willing to disrupt the atmosphere of silence.
And what grooming story worth its Def-Leppard sugar would skip the secret-keeping? Each complicit transgression shoots out another thread in the spider’s web: sneaking an extra slice of pizza, watching a movie few parents would condone, whispered jokes lacing scripture with innuendo. The just-between-them naughtiness must ramps up in boldness in preparation for the big leagues. That explains why Father Peady, as if out of the blue, ends one Latin lesson not with a “Goodbye now” but with a locking of the door—one bolt two bolt. He makes sure the clicks of finality are loud both to underplay the strangeness while also to gauge where the boy’s instincts land on the spectrum of fight or flight. Surely the gauging here dips into worrywart territory, given the way Georgie—as if trying to set a record on number and intensity of flesh-clapping sounds (yes, even though the layers of late autumn)—has only gotten more aggressive with his posting up in the paint: spine ridiculously arched and forehead ridiculously close too the asphalt (like an HBCU cheerleader, or like one of those autistic spilled-milk slurpers ever on tippytoes). And so it comes: first a “hard-work gift” (the Ultimate Warrior, Georgie’s favorite WWE wrestler, in the form of a thumb puppet action figurine) and then, with a cork pop “in honor of [Georgie’s] college-level facility with language,” shared sips sacramental zinfandel behind drawn blinds. Sips taken so willingly, straight out of an after-school special, is one thing when it comes to “things falling into place.” But when the boy asks “May I have a bit more?” (his tone hard for the priest not to read, dump everything, into), is there not at least some recessive part of us that cheers—knowing, after all, the behind-the-scenes devotion of painful bowlegged hours—in empathy for our man (however woozy we feel in our vicarious celebration)?
In what might almost seem like coy hesitation (a flicker of shyness at the prospect of courtship tables turning), Father Peady holds back from feasting on the wine-glazed pork belly served up to him on a platter of privacy—slurring, yawning, and everything: “Someone needs a nap!” But over the ensuing weeks, the physicality ramps up with calculated precision. Hands linger too long under the guise of adjusting altar robes. Hugs multiply—extra-long ones that sometimes leave Georgie’s Payless pro wings dangling (the red-faced priest, clearly drugged on that conquer-the-world surge of love, nearly biting off more than he can chew). Shoulder massages creep into quiz time. Compliments shift toward looks, nuzzling into smells even. These are the basics, groundwork stuff. But given Georgie’s aggressor antics on the court, anyone in Father Peady’s shoes would find it crucial to communicate who the boss is. Roughhousing—“just some wrastlin’ men”—proves the perfect stage. Armpit-tickle sadism—Father Peady Hulk Hogan, Georgie The Ultimate Warrior—morphs into nipple-twisting that lingers well past “Uncle,” which sets up—in the wake of heavy breathing—a gentle spike: a reassertion of just how good Georgie smells. “Need to get these nostrils all up in there,” he says and then delivers one of those restrained nibbles usually reserved for the too cute to stand: the fingers of a baby, the cheeks of a puppy.
The best priests, of course, take care not to let the flow of touch become too lopsided. Interwoven, then, with these displays of dominance are masterclass moments designed to reinforce the boy’s own active agency, showing that he too is free to have a turn at the mount position. Father Peady, to that end, first massages Georgie’s plump little hands with blessing oil, opening another crucial juncture on the path of seduction where lesser predators, especially hearing Georgie’s unprovoked blurt (“That feels good”), might have faltered (“Wanna fuckin’ know what else feels good?”). No, not our man. He massages until the hands are hot. Then he guides those hands over his own fantasy-wrinkled forehead. Wordless as a Zen master putting to shame the neurotic logorrhea of US teachers and coaches, he guides until the boy gets the hint (reciprocation becoming self-propelled). Only then does Father Peady let go, his hands shifting to grip the boy’s shoulders in false prayer—tightening just enough to make resistance feel unholy.
The best see courtship not as a caveman’s straight line (moving from shoulder to thigh to crotch), but as a hypnotic’s spiral (pushing only to pull closer). Backing off—and yes, quite suddenly is the trick—from physical contact (“I’m sorry Georgie, but Father Peady’s been too busy for basketball”) is, however counterintuitive, effective. It keeps the boy squirming in hunger for redemptive touch, his mentor’s musky nearness radically heightened in perceived value (as if it were a beloved fragrance abruptly discontinued by a market-savvy perfume house). The gnawing wait breeds brooding. In the mesmeric tic of clock hands (slowing and slowing, subject as they are to general relativity, as the center of the gravity well of grooming nears), only those whose monk-meets-navy-seal willpower could avoid sifting through memories in a pathetic attempt to discern what sin might have cost them their special status. And when Father Peady times an over-the-top scene of guffawing and back-patting with another altar boy, the ride around the mental spiral of push-pull manipulation takes a sudden gravitational plunge toward the infinite center of wondering who else might have captured the man’s attention. After the months of priming, how could the extended withholding of touch, coupled with the sight of the priest laughing like this (as he leans over the other boy, in fact, with one arm against a wall like some bad-boy greaser courting a girl in a poodle skirt), not culminate in Georgie’s desperation to put and end to the withdrawal himself—a desperation sharing at least kissing-cousin kinship to that desperation that has dope-sick mothers renting out the suckling mouths of their infants to drug-dealer testicles?
Just as the mania begins spilling into the public sphere (tipped chalices, silly translation mistakes, eyebags intensified alongside the scream of halitosis), Father Peady—his actions, as always, easy to regard as proof of nominative determinism—slides back in as abruptly as he dropped away. The quick touch—a bit of neck-kneading (light, painfully light)—serves, however, mainly as the counterintuitive prelude to something far less corporeal but far stickier. For the sake of ramping up deeper-than-physical connection, Father Peady plunges them into the diary hinterlands of doubts and dreams. “Georgie, what’s been going on with you buddy. . . . What’s really been going on?” Like unsupervised interrogators leading the child to say what they want her to say (simply by means of responding even to truth with “No, I want to know the real truth”), no answer seems good enough for Father Peady. Still holding back on the roughhousing and the basketball and even the hugs, day by day he refuses to let up until finally the juicier bits start flowing: every struggle at home (“What did you see the man doing to your mom?”), every locker-room anxiety (“How much bigger were they?”), every—you can bet your bottom dollar—pubescent dream (“Did it feel good, though?”). The priest thereby positions himself as “the only one who truly understands.” With the help of double-entendre endcaps on each confession (“I’ll always try to get you, Georgie” and “You’re safe with me, no matter how dirty it gets” and “You can always open yourself for me, even if it hurts”), soon Georgie will be whispering the line himself like a hypnotic echo: “Father Peady’s the only one who gets me.”
All the while the sexual undertow strengthens, dragging even the most reluctant ankle-waders into the darkness of mature needs. Bawdy jokes about the darndest things brothel parrots say, and about shaved vaginas being busy vaginas, and about how the yeast infection looked like the mouth of a bulldog who got into the mayo—these ramp up in graphic detail. The most sexual parts of the Bible take centerstage: the moans of the Song of Solomon; the veiled voyeurism of Bathsheba bathing under David’s gaze; the penetrative violence of Tamar’s assault by Amnon (all dissected under the guise of scriptural insight). The most graphic Latin epigrams from Catullus and Martial become the material to translate, our maestro of escalation having the boy parse some of the lewdest imagery—all the while making sure (“for the sake of historical sensitivity”) lines like “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” are rendered neither in their kid-friendly form (“I will humiliate your butt and have you taste it”), nor even their more literal form (“I will sodomize you and make you perform oral sex”), but in a way that conveys the shock intended by the author (“I will ram your shit in with my cock and then rape your face”).
Movie-night—yeah, that is where the real magic begins. Grade-school gossip after the Christmas break had centered on Hogan’s villainy in the recent Royal Rumble: how, in a move that reeked of cheap-shot betrayal, he had used one of his 24-inch pythons to clothesline The Warrior out of the ring despite The Warrior being caught against the ropes in a two-on-one beatdown by same two guys (The Barbarian and Rick Rude) from whom he had just saved Hogan—refusing, in effect, to do unto Hogan what Hogan ultimately did unto him. So when word spreads of a showdown in Wrestlemania VI (a match promoted less as a clash of wrestlers than as a spiritual battle between the two fanbases, the Hulkamaniacs and the Ultimate Warriors), Father Peady one-ups even Touchy Phielie and orders the event on pay-per-view—the feed of intermingled flesh finding much smoother and faster escalation from such fleshy footing, a showcase of baby-oiled homoeroticism glistening under arena lights, than from any glitchy pixel play down in Father Phielie’s wood-paneled basement.
Nudity starts small. A topless scene in Airplane (1980), just a quick bounce in the airplane aisle, Father Peady chalks up with a sheepish grin to a vetting oversight: “Didn’t know that was there.” After the apology, however, he makes sure to toss in that telling-through-asking question, that tool of the trade so foundational that a film spliced from all their instances throughout history would go on for years: “But you’re okay with that kinda stuff, right?” From there, the descent quickens—always with veneer of education legitimacy. Soon enough the rustle of popcorn fingers suddenly fall silent, suspended against the glow of bush and shaft in Quest for Fire (1982): “an unfiltered depiction of early human life.” In what no doubt sends Father Peady’s inner homunculus into a Tiger Woods fist pump (elbow jabbing downward in victory celebration), the popcorn bowl—although salted and buttered to all fat-kid hell—goes forgotten altogether, on the verge of spilling off the sofa even, as the screen plunges into the fever dream of violent clit-suckling and cum-shooting orgies in Caligula (1979): “a cautionary depiction of paganism run amok.”
As cliché as the rusty blue van with the porthole window and the oily man offering candies or asking for help to find his dog, suddenly it comes: the unmarked VHS. In “a film that illustrates the disastrous consequences of not turning the other cheek,” the two “couch buddies” find themselves—at least one of them does—swept in a vortex of titillation and revulsion (a mild approximation perhaps to the emotional disequilibrium sexual assault victims feel as nauseating orgasms gush forth “involuntarily” from their bodies under a cascade of predictable psychic attacks like “You wet now huh?” and “Ooh I knew wanted it” and “Wet don’t lie, cunt!”): a hyperrealistic anal rape scene in an unmarked VHS, a nearly ten-minute and nearly nudeless sequence that—especially with the moans and tears coupled with the punches and taunts of the assailant (“I’m gonna rip that ass” and “Get any shit on my dick and you’re dead”)—would have the response needle on any penile plethysmograph jammed at the upper limits of red. As frame by frame whirls its over-green viewer through the disorienting hydraulic jump (shame, arousal, helplessness; shame, arousal, helplessness), Father Peady—one quantum twitch from the internal “Fuck it” that entails jacking himself off right out in the open (close enough in fact, that candidate justifications scramble through his head)—all the while keeps his vision divided: one eye on the screen, the other on the hand-guarded lap of the boy (gauging the reaction, reading the body’s hesitant flickers of permission).
Discussion of sexual topics, framed as guidance (as “talking through some of the heavy stuff from the other night”), proves crucial here. It feeds right into the priest taking that leap (relatively small, given how much priming work he has put in)—that leap that, however close one gets to it (however much one has made sure that it does not entail the cracking of trust), is always going to be a leap, is always going to involve the wince of Band-Aid removal (there is no other way to cut it): getting the boy to expose his genitals. Despite any visible unease in response to his “Let’s see what you got,” Father Peady—disarmer of even farfetched discomfort that he is—unbuckles and pulls his out first as a show of good faith (as if he were taking communion first to assure the boy that the bread and wine are safe to consume): “Here’s what I got.” As much as it seems to surprise Father Peady himself (the result of some phylogenic cue, like the one that has birds suddenly start flying south), the “Here’s what I got” does not spill out with a lecherous rush. Nor does it dip into the greasy and bassy tones impatient audiences might naughtily expect. His voice, seasoned with matter-of-factness (albeit in a paternal envelope of coziness), delivers the pivot as though it were no biggie really—even though, yes, in the physical sense it is quite a biggie: long and girthy (albeit nearly completely flaccid rather than the rocksteady phallus of divine authority we might have expected, his parts draping around each thigh), long and damned girthy enough not only to curbstomp the stereotype about those with a sweet tooth for the young, but also to make any empathetic soul applaud the man all the more for having chosen a relatively unworldly life of relative celibacy. “A return to shamelessness of Eden, the way God intended us”—that is how he packages the gargantuan package, the bearlike wilderness of blond hair covering his lower body affecting the perfect visual for the prelapsarian framing.
Now might seem the time to repeat: “Let’s see what you got now.” But aside from the fact that the first iteration of this expression still flutters in the air, it is important to read the room. Duteous rehearsal goes a long way to prepare you. But when the moment arrives the best tear up the notecards. That frees them to use what they have studied in a more organic way, in response to the environment. Perhaps more importantly, tossing the script is a more moving and symbolic way to say to yourself the self-loving words “I trust myself,” words whose real impact on confidence involves no New-Age woo. Our man knows this and practices this. He is no slave to a script. With Georgie watching with erect curiosity how the mounds of flesh pool like a waterbed, with Georgie clearly intrigued by the slap sounds each time Father Peady picks it up and lets it drop, it would be an example of not rolling with the orchestra’s tempo for Father Peady to try to divert the attention to the boy’s lap. “Look,” he says instead (and referring back to the topic they had been circling around before, in the literal sense, things got hairy), “wet dreams—that’s what they call them. Wet dreams are completely normal. The process is automatic, nothing to feel shame about. . . . You understand?”
Georgie’s nod of understanding (no fear in his eyes), whether a matter of coercion or transcendence, means it is a solid go. “Liquid comes out even in daytime,” Father Peady says matter-of-factly. “You believe that? . . . Ah, you probably know all that, right?” Georgie shrugs his shoulders, but not in that way kids do when feeling too overwhelmed (like when the police officer—in an awkward stab at kid tones—asks, all the neighbors outside watching the domestic scene, “Has Mommy been drinking tonight?” “But still,” Father Peady continues, “I can show you.” The flip-flopping of the penis, done until that point with a nonchalant tick-tock (no more meaningful, according to the orchestrated impression, than absentminded thumb twiddling), has begun to stiffen things in its conjunction with such a furnace revving statement. The metronomic back and forth continues even as the radical engorgement (fingertip to elbow) has put an ominous end to the tick-tock. “Would that be okay with you?” he asks—the thumps of blood pressure in his chest interfering ever so slightly with the usual steadfast poise of his voice. The boy not having spoken but not having said “No,” means Father Peady can take the boy’s fat and sweaty hand to his balls. “I want you to feel how it all just spasms.” He says it like it is science. “Watch.” He pulls some spit from his mouth, observing—with a downright all-tens use of both the royal “we” and the “huh?” of complicity—“We should probably get it wet a bit first, huh?”
As Father Peady reaches the precipice (quickly, no doubt, after all these months), he will convey—in a tone that ever so sightly crosses the line (from clinical distance into oohing-aahing surrender)—one hell of a command in the form of a question: “How you gonna feel it if you don’t squeeze?” As if this were a scene of a father teaching the son the basics of an oil change (held-back frustration reflected in his voice), Father Peady makes things explicit. “Really get in there. . . . Otherwise I’m like a one-legged man in ass-kicking contest,” he adds with a wink. “No, for real. Really get in there. Squeeze the damn things. There we go. . . . There we go. Squeeze. Ooh, here’s where you squeeze hard. Give me all the help in the world”—his tone here, restrained by nothing but whisper, shifting momentarily deep into oohing-aahing surrender: “Hard as can be.”
In the wake of the blustery eruptions, whose correlated moans and taunting mumbles he holds back with a composure meant to show that this is as normal as eating, Father Peady—surprised himself by the volume of the load and its fish-and-bleach tang (a near match to the church’s Callery pear trees in bloom)—takes care to preempt darker interpretations of the sofa scene. “See how you helped? You got it all out. That’s a big, big help. It helps me focus—.” He lets out that all-too-human post-cum exhale: “pfhhhhhooo,” savoring the release. “It helps me focus”—he points up at the crucifix—“on what matters. . . . We have to eat to focus on our studies, right? Well, guys like us have to get this all out. Otherwise we find ourselves distracted. . . . So before we clean this up, you’re gonna let Father Peady help you. . . . No, watch. Just a few kisses should do the trick, like little smooches on the cheek. I don’t think you’re ready for any of that squeezing! Here, take the oil—yep, just like that—and go back and forth. I’ll just kiss down here. Right here, see?”
From Father Peady’s own splats of exudation (splats, despite former squid-like coagulation, now weeping down chest and thighs and furniture in cornstarch-reminiscent transition), the aroma of indoor swimming pool has taken on, at least with nose up close to one of the splotches as he prepares to deliver his “smooches,” a zinc-like edge of stagnant saliva pooled in a rusty spoon. Signature Kouros, stirred into civety animation by the sudden surge in pulse-point heat, adds a pissy twang to the heady mix (which now, although still mainly chlorine, almost seems to give off a lactonic twinge of blood-and-pus breastmilk gone sour). Father Peady, swooning from his own aromas, considers pulling out the old thirst-trap trusty: “I’ll make sure none of your mess spills anywhere.” Post-cum sobriety, however, reins him in. He simply says, “Don’t worry about any mess. We’ll clean it all up after.” To frame any reluctance on Georgie’s part as nothing more than worry about making a mess, Father Peady—ever the master of psychological positioning—fills the stillness with a slimy red herring. “No worries, I’ve got a dishtowel right over there,” he says (as if the mess in question were nothing more than bubbling splats of stovetop tomato sauce). The way Georgie glances back toward the kitchen, reminiscent of a naïve newlyweds scanning (as directed by the car salesman) the monthly-payment line on the sale’s contract instead of the grand total, confirms the quiet triumph of the normalcy-making diversion.
It cannot be all “See, how we can help each other?” In an ideal world of seamless complicity maybe, but not here. The unspoken bargain cannot be built solely on whispers of mutual uplift. Serving as the duel elements in the epoxy glue meant to fill any cracks in trust, guilt and fear have long proven to come in quite handy (or perhaps we should say “handsy” here): from the old resin “We’re both sinners but we at least have each other” and “You wouldn’t want to disappoint God or me, would you?” to the old hardener “Who’d believe you over me anyway” and “I’ll make sure Momma knows just how dirty her little chocoholic can be, maybe some school buddies too!” Whatever the case, none of it is just plug and play. Creativity, a sense of timing, empathy, discipline—these are crucial. The whole thing is an uphill marathon as it is. But then you have to make sure you instill fear and guilt in doses small enough not to scare anyone off. On top of that, every case is different. Every case is different just as every kid is too, each as distinct in their vulnerabilities as fingerprints in the ash of a burned-out cathedral. Some require more of a drug angle, whether to get in the mood or to prevent the sense impressions (the smell of balls, the scrape of stubble, all of it) from haunting them into tattletales ten years down the pike. Others require just a lot of camaraderie and heartfelt discussion.
Not to downplay his craftsmanship or discipline, but Father Peady—and he would be the first to admit it—lucked out with Georgie. Who could have asked for a more pliant hunk of clay, as pliant as that jiggly gut (innie belly button deep enough to serve the purpose if need be)? Even so, Father Peady is not God. It would be a stretch but for all he knows Georgie plays his cards closer to the chest. For that reason, Father Peady doles out here and there some doses of preventative shame and terror—his tinctures, however, watered down just right for his boy (a shockingly low dose for the boy’s bodyweight). “Wow, you can get pretty dirty,” he observes with casual precision—leaving out, explicitly at least, the whole “What would Momma think?” part.
Guilt and fear, of course, should never run unchecked. That kind of tyranny frays, risks rebellion. How to keep them in check is part of the difficulty, a difficulty often underappreciated from the safe remove of the living room (where it is easy for us so scoff “Shit, I can do that!” as we eat our TV dinners). Injecting counter-narratives, happier and supportive ones that soften or blur the anxious edges, often prove useful. But neither the dosage nor the timing is clear. Seduction is not baking, where the paint-by-numbers blueprint of measurements and temperatures and operations and time lengths leaving little room to veer. Like a grandmother’s instinctual stove-craft (recipes unwritten but alive in the head, too elusive to pin down for posterity), what makes seduction—especially one as dangerous as this—skew more toward an art than a science is that you just have to feel it out.
Father Peady himself leans more on the allyship angle. Although he has not thought out all the reasons why (it takes, after all, mental firepower enough just to strategize), his emphasis on making the boy feel seen and heard and connected and worthy seem quite sound considering how mildewed with shame and fear Georgie’s foundation is. Father Peady, in that case, leans harder into lines like “In a way, as long as we ask to be forgiven, it can’t be so wrong. It’s love in the end, right?” Notice the “right?” here. Notice, in particular, the tone. It is not rhetorical, not leading. Introspective (almost as if he did not mean to let it escape his lips), the tone—driven home by the imploring gaze—is one of someone seeking counsel (albeit, let us be clear: one of a shepherd, breaking script, humbly seeking the insight of his lamb). Who would not feel singular, chosen when an ordained priest looks to you for answers? Who could resist the subtle thrill of holding the answer that even a man of God seeks?
If the hunt is successful, if the hypnotic spiral of push and pulls tightens until there is no question left in the boy’s mind about where love ends and he begins, what does that mean exactly? We can explore what that looks like, the shit and blood and viscous gag mucous it entails. But first it seems important to clarify. Calling this a “hunt”—while no doubt true—can be somewhat misleading. Less than a decade back, these forays for Father Peady were more about getting off, getting away, from himself. They were more about that ecstatic moment of leaving himself in the explosive release of glandular buildup. The power imbalance, the taboo violation, were in service of better ensuring that the aching load—a metonym for himself—shot farther away from himself (the greater the distance, so it seemed, the longer he got to stay in that zone of Dionysian disindividuation). Now things are different. The glands no longer swell like they once did. And, perhaps because he has accepted his tastes, the focus has become more so about spreading himself—being fruitful and multiplying, if you will—rather than escaping himself. Much less about getting off in the most salivating way possible (the typical thing we associate with a sexual hunt), his moves are about hope. He hopes to become everything to his underling. He hopes to become so everything that the boy will initiate the unbuttoning without any guidance, that the boy will drop to his knees with unblinking eyes steady upward without having to be pushed on the head—as if the boy, just as in his favorite song (“Like a Prayer,” by Madonna), can no longer contain himself; as if his soul would meet annihilation if it did not have his everything inside where that everything belongs; as if all the nuances of his inner life, from his concerns (his mom’s welfare, his drawings, his homework, his fat gut held in two heaping handfuls in the mirror) to his memories (his dog chewing on his dead grandmother’s hand, his one photo of his dad burned in a mattress fire), were scooped out of him like pumpkin guts only to be filled with whatever the priest could shove in of himself. Father Peady’s hope, in short, is that he has won Georgie even from God, but that the winning was not a taking but a gifting—a surrender. See before, with all the other sweetmeats, hardcore debauchery—rosary beads turned anal beads—served to help shoot farther across the room like his load. But now the grinding ass-to-ass on the holiest of icons is not because taboos raises the heat and intensifies the contractions. Rather, it is because it is the surest proof he can get as a human that the boy, all for him, has turned his back on God.
The key takeaway, to put it crudely, is that Father Peady wants more than a pocket anus to cream the bejeezus out of. He wants his catamite to take the lead sometimes, surprise him. To that end, he tries hard to reign in the old authoritarian approach of mentorship. “Do this” and “Do that” accompanied by a “Now, or else” has its place. No one would doubt that. Like a good choke or a slap, it can intensify the bluster of the vinegar strokes. It also serves as a good tool, if need be, for renewing the vows of the power dynamic. Especially now with the evolution of Father Peady’s goals, however, the authoritarian approach has severe limitations. For when the father orders his little boy to give his grandmother a hug the next time he sees her (orders him an “Or else!” and even an “I don’t give a fuck how you feel about it”), that grooms the boy into acting more so out of externally-imposed duty instead of out of internally-imposed duty (let alone out of the more-preferable inner desire). But notice that we achieve a more Peady-approved result with a more po-mo permissive approach, as Father Peady himself does over the ensuing weeks when it comes to getting Georgie to play with his oil-drenched balls. Notice, that is to say, that the boy starts acting out of guilt and fear of inner lashing, out of a harsher psychological necessity, if the father takes a more liberal approach, so to say. “You know it’s your choice completely. I would never want to make you do anything you don’t want to do. But I will remind you that Grandma’s old. She doesn’t have much more time, to be honest. One little hug, maybe a kiss too—that would make her day. And yet not giving her anything, not showing your appreciation for all the cooking and the gifts (for giving us both our lives)—that would hurt anyone, and it could very well kill Grandma.” So to the end of cultivating an inner inkling to hug grandma or at least an inner shame-avoidance making him hug grandma (which from the outside looks just the same, and so allows the wishful-thinking recipient to take the most favorable interpretation), Father Peady mostly adopts that permissive style—that anti-authoritarian guise, which he often twists with the please-show-pity logic of courtly love (so as to drive even deeper into Georgie the feeling that he is a bad person not just for not hugging Grandma, but even for not wanting to). “Please be kind. Do you know the suffering just one little gesture can ease?” Only here, of course, “hugging Grandma” is a euphemistic analogy for “juggling balls” or whatever—a euphemism all its own.
As with so many areas of life, Aristotle’s golden mean (the Buddha’s middle path) is the answer. Father Peady knows that too much of the permissive approach is no good either. More than just an aid to climax (“Mouth on it now, boy”) or to put Georgie in his place (“Do what the fuck I say, boy!”), commands remain necessary for a deeper theoretical reason. Commanding, after all, drives home the difference between Father Peady and Georgie. That there be a clear difference is important. Otherwise, such as if Georgie always perfectly anticipated the right moves (tightened, sped up, slowed down, licked this, slapped that, or so on) without having to be directed, Father Peady would not feel like he really spread himself into an other. He would not feel, at least, that he spread into an other with an otherness robust enough for his victory not to feel cheap.
Such background context lends a cruel logic to what we see, months later, when we zoom through the vestry keyhole to find, in the mood lighting of votive candles licking shadows up the walls, Father Peady sprawled like a toppled cornucopia on a makeshift altar of ceremonial garbs. It helps explain why, despite Father Peady wanting to stretch himself into more than just a three-holed board, there is no contradiction in his hissing commands—no dissonance, for example, in the breathless demand (even when delivered through snarled teeth) for the second chubby arm, with all its lanugo fuzz, to be plowed up the pipe. “All the fuckin’ way. . . . Ooh yeah, little piggy gonna play in that slop.” It explains why his next demand (“Fuck those balls up good, little pig!”)—his demand, in effect, that there be no disruption in the rhythm of roughhousing that now undeniably shitty scrotum (face-butt to slurp, face-butt to slurp)—coheres with his deepest desire: someone devoted enough to spice things up with self-initiated surprises of pleasure, surprises born not out of obedience to “Show me what you working with, boy” but rather out of a self-satisfied awareness of just how tight (murder-worthy tight) of a brown snapper they have on offer; someone immersed enough that their spontaneous devotions not only anticipate the recipient’s cravings, but also prove innovative enough to unlock new ones. (And as far as this deepest desire is concerned, it is something we all can relate to. Is it not true—at least for our kind, whose hearts swell more at the prodigal son’s return than at the steady loyalty of the faithful one—that the most thrilling gifts are the unbidden surprises? Is it not true, for instance, that the never-before-seen and never-before-asked-for cobra spits (“Tua, tua”) Georgie delivers to Father Peady’s testicles (“Ooh, just what the fuckin doctor ordered!”) evoke a deeper satisfaction—eyes rotated up like in dying—than anything compelled by micromanagement?)
As far has his goals—his wettest dreams of consummate possession—are concerned, Father Peady has struck one hell of a chunky motherlode. Short of heaven (on our Earth of compromise), the best satisfaction our man could have hoped for is what he has secured in flesh and blood: a thick honeypot of hormones in the form of an acolyte obedient enough to heed every order (even if in desecration of the terminal transcendence) and yet self-starter enough to initiate unscripted gestures of tie-me-up surrender all his own—ready to stank up the house of God of all places, the sour yeast of his fat folds guiding the truffle-snuffling snout right to the radix of highest fecality. Something about the way Father Peady behaves as he closes in on the point of no return, that point where “I” and “Thou” melt into “We”—behold the mountain-moving animation of the man: finger knotted in the boy’s hair, scalp-lock ferocity straight out of German smut. Something about how he lets himself treat the boy’s mouth as a headbanging stroker toy, a mechanized pleasure sleeve, without even a smidge of the usual worrywart pausing (either to check in or to spoon in another verbal dose of grooming) seems to indicate more than just his unblemished faith that he has finally won his prize. But this is not just victory’s abandon. Study the eyes: how—if you catch the right moment—they morph from bloodthirsty daggers into puppy-dog tremblers of hushed reverence. His body language broadcasts a fact no one with any ounce of empathy could deny: that, however much he might beat the bejeezus out of every hole, he does not take his prize for granted—that, unlike the Satan he could easily be made out to be, he is grateful (achingly grateful).
Whatever underlying tenderness might lull us into the warm-fuzzy bosom of Disney, Father Peady’s command—“Stretch it, boy!”—snaps even the girliest of romantic voyeurs back to the body: to the glandular truth of flesh, here a gooey snake-tangle of flesh rank with halitotic phlegm, cumin, civet, and that g-spot ass gelatin. “Stretch it way the fuck out!” Hissed with the rare curse from Father Peady’s lips (a curse indicative of serious business, of go time), the command here—while on the surface leaving room for personal pizzaz—can be fulfilled in one way only: Georgie must press his fingers together inside for fulcrum leverage and drive his palms and forearms outward, prying open contractile bands of meat puckering involuntarily from the gates of entry to the throbbing depths of the colon.
The boy’s head game says it all: this half-a-minute fury, a steady pulse of “eghck eghck egchk” punctuated by the priest’s snarling taunts (“Ooh you’re going to fucking hell for this, pig”), has surely become ritual—no mere novitiate could ever flex a throat so yielding it is ravenous. But the bar of depravity always finds a way to inch lower, does it not? And on this particular occasion, as the strings of slime connecting his nose to Father Peady’s mons pubis fur ultimately forms a mucus cape, those peach-fuzz lips are driven, in the decisive stroke, so deep into middle-aged unguent fatty tissue that Father Peady’s love effluvium—fermented in curdling patience—erupts from the boy’s gasping nostrils in twin streams of gak. Ungodly gags muffled in the petechial prolonging of a leg-reinforced pin-down, jugular veins distend out from that mandible-unhinging panic of snake regurgitation—until the body, convulsing for freedom, snarfs forth mandarin orange segments (grotesquely large for holes so tiny) and sinus-filling crumbles of brown, which anyone who knows what day it is (Tuesday) would recognize as lunch-lady taco beef.
Such torrential delight, cleaned up (more like smeared around) with low-capillary-action chalice linen by the apologetic boy (trembling hands unable to contain his shame)—such an ecstatic baptism of bile (where hysterical joy becomes indiscernible from hysterical suffering) will likely welcome, for a tango team that has gone this far, two big downstream changes. First, the pinching closed of Georgie’s leak-prone nostrils to ensure no more waste—that will be a thing from here on, an irreversible new standard: “I want my love swallowed, pig!” Second, the dawning of a kinkier hunger, a new necessity: vomit-blasting grand finales of chef’s-kiss throat convulsion (those same penis-milking panic contractions we get, to cite the old Parisian brothel move, inside the frenzied cloaca of neck-wrung hens)—how can that not also take root, the body’s rebellion turned ritual (each retch, each gag, a perverted sacrament)? We know our man by now. Absence of vomit will be framed as disloyalty. And even if the boy does not make provisions for the expected mess (chugging milk beforehand perhaps), Father Peady still wins. For disloyalty invites escalation. The shattered relic of a boy will be assigned ramped-up devotions. He might have to keep a Mary figurine up his ass throughout the school day (a g-spot twist on hairshirt asceticism). Or he might have to endure purification in holy water, face held down in the bubbling bird bath while Father Peady pumps out anal vinegar strokes—strokes that always would leave a throbbing bowel presence long after all was said and done and the boy was back in his bed at home, a localized-concentrated analogue to how Father Peady’s presence in a room seemed to stick around much longer than his body did (aura long outliving flesh). Surely we can picture such waterplay rituals going sideways: perhaps, for example, the head pinning lasts too long, the fat body rescued from blackout hinterlands by prison-averse CPR huffs—Father Peady, rock hard again not even a minute after the cortisol surge of death-sentence panic, more of an earthly savior than ever before!
And yes, all of it will be caught on Radio Shack camcorder: from the first mutual masturbation session (which, in comparative hindsight, will play like a Molly Ringwald romance) to the wood-creaking shit-and-blood ruin to come (where Father Peady, like clockwork whenever “that fat back” arches just right enough for a moan of “Fuck yeah,” will start mumble-singing, in sync with a pounding rhythm whose every breath-hitching piston plunge has sweat lash off his forehead in what would have otherwise seemed the fanciful unreality of Rocky 4 or WrestleMania, “♪ Something tells me I’m into something good ♪,” the Harmans Hermits classic repurposed for something much more intimate than a TV commercial)—all of it will be caught. In the grand impermanence, who could resist recording even the grainiest footage? No matter how warped by the white-line jitters of instability the playback may be, a zoom-in is still a zoom-in: that pale glistening globule quivering at the threshold, in what amounts to an unscripted tease of anticipation (Heinz ketchup-commercial levels of suspense that would have even female detectives desperate to see the footage through to the resolution), only to be sucked back in by the anus’s involuntary reticence (“No, you gotta push it out Georgie!”) before finally, the boy bearing down with his meager intra-abdominal might (perineum bulging as raw rectal pink strains through the sphincter’s refusal), the pearlescent translucency once again rears its milky head—swelling and swelling, jiggling on the brink of rupture, until with that primordial glug of a geothermal mud pit (briefest of craters in its wake), the viscous wad of spent need, the shit-tinged creampie of opaline pink, dribbles down a horribly young scrotum with neither hair nor hangtime. Father Peady, with his bookcase-hidden archive, this way ensures himself spank-bank material that doubles, just in case (because people do change), as blackmail: “What would mom think, what would your buddies think, seeing this little cum-drinking, shit-eating, piggy?” And so the tape will keep sliding home, the final frame—a hairy Father Peady, sweat-dripping and grinning—swallowing the light.
The mundane swamps the sensational in the end. Death may conjure images of flailing guttural drama. Birth may conjure images of taxis tearing through rain-slicked streets, the father-to-be’s knuckles—still miles away and now stuck in traffic—white on the steering wheel (having had to abandon his life-changing presentation midsentence after just one look at his secretary’s face in the doorway). But things, in reality, often unfold differently: the water breaks and, instead of having to rush to the hospital, the due-Mom can finish the grocery run and come home and run a bath to wait for her partner; watching someone die in the hospital room, hands growing tired of dutiful stroking, often dissolves into leafing through old magazines and eavesdropping on nurse gossip, their voices slipping through the sterile vents like metallic birdsong—the on and on of it all so much (and this is precisely what Nietzsche says we are to love if we do love the earth and our earthly selves), the on and on of it all so much that we know what muffled thought inevitably surfaces: “Die already,” although usually, according to the more palatable script of the well-adjusted, in the altruistic cover of classic lines like “It’s okay to let go” and “You can rest now” and “There’s no need to fight anymore.” Yes, sometimes life obliges the cinema cliché—and perhaps precisely because TV, telling us who we are and how we ought to be, has conditioned us to expect it (such that, for example, the woman who could have hung back through early contractions at home now finds herself stirruped for hours under enough hospital florescence and prods and straps to make c-section next to inevitable). But even in the highest drama, banality soon rushes back in like floodwaters under a door. In the wake of the most violent death rattle, for example, a stark peace settles—and not just one stomach growls in the fidgety hush of a death vigil. In the wake of the most excruciating perineal tears that lightning bolt down through the anus, the mother finds herself swallowed by endless laundry—a tidal wave of spit-ups, blowouts, and just general babyness.
The same goes here. However much it threatens our ageist-yet-sex-fixated mores (where, for instance, we shield children from a glimpse of a breast yet laugh along as a man’s head is pulped to jelly on screen), the same goes here. However much it fouls our fevered hope that Father Peady’s sin will be met with some grand biblical reckoning (a prison-rape hope of Hammurabi justice at utter odds with the reality that no action or thought, nor any sliver of any element in the causal chain to any action or thought, finds its buckstopping source in us), the same definitely goes here. No thunderous payback, no operative downfall—the mundane not only smothers it all (rendering even unthinkable scandal into a slow march of routine), but even (in what is no doubt a knife twist to vanilla hearts of cookie-cutter architecture) takes on a warm-fuzzy aura: that warm-fuzzy aura of old couples who (having woven a rich tapestry of shared history over decades) radiate a thick air of unspoken understanding and move as a royal-we of forged interdependence, a palpable undercurrent of love reducing even their bickering to something as sweet as the holidays.
Sex is always hottest in the pursuit. What once set the nerves alight eventually dulls to embers, no matter the initial blaze. Despite what normies like to imagine to fuel their outrage, those sustained squeal-ridden poundings of the courting phase became few and far between. The fever of fresh flesh (although still with the kid-tight grip) had already been coated in the sediment of routine even by the time Georgie’s mother—wanting to work on herself (which ultimately meant wanting to grind like a piglet on a roughhouser of her own)—gave the okay for Georgie to move in with his Gandalf. That first night, to put it in perspective, nothing sexual went down. No sordid sanctification of every room and crawlspace, not even the old get-the-tension-out-so-we-can-pay-attention ritual of analingus-heightened masturbation on the pre-movie sofa—they simply watched From Here to Eternity, Father Peady elbowing Georgie from the edge of sleep to point out the iconic beach scene where waves lap at the entwinned bodies of love (the spirit of his jab an unspoken “This is us”). The whole partnership, for all its early paradox of liquid-splashing combustion and rosebud ravaging, quickly settled into the vanillic air of domesticity—habitual days, largely full of nothing much, where to only real drama lay in the quiet mechanics of navigating one another’s moods (which never reached scream decibel, let alone the plate-smashing extremes that had seemed to be Georgie’s slated future before Father Peady).
One might like to think (again, to fuel their outrage) that the reprieve on Georgie’s holes meant Father Peady’s eye had begun drifting toward new meat. But the truth was much duller, much more mechanical. Part of it was the natural erosion of passion—entropy tightening its grip the moment possession is secured, a fact that might explain why some lovers claw in a theater of jealous paranoia at partner-snatching phantoms. But just as pressing (if not more) was the deafening neglect of his public work and private ambitions—both screaming for attention like the child of a divorced mother wrapped up in the tumultuous dating world, her man-clingy baseline lifted to stalker heights by years of touch deprivation. The long months of pursuit had drained him into a pulpit husk, his homilies delivered with the rote exhaustion of a man whose deepest jing (perhaps more jing than he had to give) had been unloaded into the gravitational maw of an irresistible dark star: the brown eye, the bocca nera—his whispered “rose bud.” He could tell the congregation could tell. He needed to shape up, sharpen his presence, claw back whatever pastoral authority had eroded in the haze of conquest. And then there was the book. He had long promised himself a manuscript—a deep-dive into the mythological and philological themes that appear in correspondence between his astral mentors: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Elemental bones of the project—scribbled notes tacked to his corkboard, typewritten outlines stiffening in his desk drawer—sent his eyes down to the floor in shame each time he entered his office, which he did only when Georgie was not there to grab whatever it was he needed there: a pen, a phone book, a takeout menu. If he did not resume the project now, it felt like the whole thing would drop away like childhood dreams and the teddy bears hugged in the nighttime formation—a dropping away that pained him sometimes into stasis (haunted by the sense of narrowing corridors, of forever collapsing possibilities; wrecked by hollow sound of infinite doors slamming shut once one is entered), and perhaps such hypersensitivity might go some way to explain his exclusive taste for young blood.
Did the normalcy of it all mean he was proud of his conquest? No. He asked God for forgiveness each night. Early on in the relationship (especially when it seemed, in a surreal twist of fate, that Georgie’s move-in was not only possible but practically inevitable), his pleas had the desperate sheen of a man teetering on the edge of belief. Even then, though, he kept his phrasing vague, sidestepping the marrow of the matter. As expected of any human short of sainthood (a fact odd in light of human obsession with lobbing stones), it was too much for him to define the soul-searching specifics about what exactly he sought forgiveness for—and certainly not the impious theater he staged to amplify the spice: crucifixes still reeking of shit, at least at a nose-dive, no matter how many isopropyl scrubbings; transubstantiated wine dumped in a steady drizzle the anal piston site (and, when missionary, over the masturbated penis above that site); transubstantiated wafers—body of Christ, Amen—placed on a tongue stretched with expectancy, awaiting the money shot (“All of it!”).
Within a year, however, the fervor dulled. Father Peady no longer capped off his bedside ritual with the Serenity Prayer—no longer begged for the power to accept what he could not change and the courage to change what he could. Jump two or three years ahead, and his nightly appeals for absolution had narrowed to much safer, much sweeter, failings—the kind that, to be honest, were all that remained. These failings inevitably revolved around the relationship, as could only be expected: Georgie’s presence loomed larger in Father Peady’s life the more retirement drew near and the more their dynamic deepened into a rhythm that felt less a kept secret than a cosmic inevitability. Father Peady asked to be forgiven, for example, for raising his voice in a disagreement about whether Eddie Vedder’s voice was any good (Father Peady endearingly jealous of the Pearl Jam singer, a poster of whom Georgie had put up in his room). He asked to be forgiven for all the banal sins of domesticity, the little trespasses of long-haul love: for not being as attentive of a listener as he could be, and for letting his enthusiasm for foreplay atrophy, and for his tendency to interrupt Georgie mid-sentence, and for slacking on exercise when he knew full well Georgie liked to be manhandled, and for slacking on pubic shaving when he knew full well Georgie had grown to like the mouth latch that only bald scrotum could allow. He even asked to be forgiven for harboring silent irritation about Georgie’s girlie habit of inverting the ice-cream spoon to shave off a few milliseconds before tastebuds met cookie dough.
The thing is, even in the early days (when guilt bit down hardest, when his absolution prayers were least evasive, when his whispers of “Forgive me” nearly carried the dead weight of a body found by fireman hanging over shit and piss and the fluids of autoerotic asphyxiation)—yes, even back then, beneath all that ideational contrition, there was this immovable stratum of satisfaction (lurking like a patient angel). It was the sense—the saving-grace sense—that, no matter the pleading, he would not have changed the outcome: being with Georgie. It was the sense—the love-conquers-all sense—against which the pleading almost seemed like playacting, like going through the motions. It was the sense—the stone of sikernesse his beloved Chaucer often called “Christ”—against which everything else seemed trivial. Father Peady believed he had found his soul mate. The path that led him to Georgie—through whatever wretched labyrinth of fate—felt not like a mistake but like a secret revealed (a door—yes, a backdoor—pried open onto a destiny the world was too blind, too cowed, to name “holy”).
In full disclosure (and why not be honest, now that all is said and done?), the first time the inner-scape neon “Soul Mate” turned on in the glorious white of near death experience was in the heat of the very first sustained rut. This was after all the nerves of newness were out of the way—when it was less about “♪ Getting to Know You ♪” strokes of mouth and hands that too quickly led to climax and more about mating; when it was, despite the animalic optics (snarling teeth, backdoor mount), about budding love. Pumping and pumping, eyes squeezed shut to savor the sublime physics of it (the gliding slip-and-slide tempered by the blessed clench of near prehensile grip), Father Peady let his hips pause for a second of rest. That was when the light came on. He opened his eyes to find corroboration of what was too vivid to be chalked up to phantom residuals: the stroking sensation, as if with a will of its own, still at a full gallop—rippling ass cheeks ravenous enough, in fact, to be self-harming. Surely it would pull the heartstrings, gore the pericardium (hence the pet name “Pericardium Piercer”), of any man to feel the pistoning continue even after he has ceased all hip movement. And then when you factor in not just that a dancing star had suddenly turned on, but also the evidence of its blue-giant luminosity: the voice, the cry, the raw “Oh Daddy I feel it!”—come on! Had God set things up differently, Father Peady knew he would have made a baby then and there.
It might have been in the heat of the rut that the soul-mate conviction seared into Father Peady’s mind. But sex was only the antechamber. The vibrational resonance of ecstatic souls exceeded the vibrational resonance of ecstatic hips and all its shit-smeared bedsheets. With Georgie came a mammalian peace Father Peady had brushed against before, only it seemed as if in some prenatal past predating language— a womb-suspended peace of amniotic hush, a mother-suckling peace he could no more name than could the grown cat in its hesitation before a human nipple: epicenter of homecoming echoes, echoes of furry warmth and musky milk that cannot but summon biscuit kneading. Being with Georgie, his youth-tooth cravings completely vanished. Georgie provided him that cliché completeness. There was new pep in his step and yet it did not come with the usual wandering eye. Georgie was no phase. He was the end of the maze, the astral terminus to desire.
Any layer of pullback in Father Peady’s admission of sorrow to God in those early days could be chalked up to that conviction. That pullback, it should be noted, did not entail pullback from God. Quite the contrary, in fact. Just like when it came to working Georgie’s clamped pipe (which sometimes Father Peady would completely exit in a tease to Georgie’s “Daddy don’t stop,” the veiny erection too locked in for even the sight of his dear mother’s beheading by steak knife to wilt), the pullback—a sharpening retreat—preceded a deeper plunge. For the more he and Georgie sank into a bliss of cohabitation, the more his faith in God intensified. Providence, not perversion (or even if perversion)—the hand of God grew closer than ever before, close enough to seem the very palpating hand that delivered stern cough-it-up slaps to testicles as they contorted in climax. The transcendent arbiter, the distant abstraction of Aquinian proofs, resolved into what it had been all along: an immanent architect of jubilee, a sculptor of fates so intimate that Father Peady could feel the chisel rasping his spine. Georgie, all things considered, could never be a sin—not when the whole design careened toward this.
Only they fully grasped the onion-like depth of their connection—the all-too-human complex of frictions and devotions most outsiders will stuff fingers in their ears to drown out (and for the same reason the Greeks covered their eyes to the glaring similarities between themselves and the so-called barbarians: to preserve the myth of superiority, of being fully human). Let outsiders speculate. They have, and will, continue to speculate—spinning their judgments into doomsday-sized yarns around dinner tables, just as they did with Mildred and Richard Loving. All their demonizing gossip, although wildly out of touch with the reality of such a loving household (let alone with the reality of humankind, as seen by Darwin not by Disney), does succeed at least in zooming in (with Hubble precision) upon their own anxiety—ultimately, a death anxiety—from which that very demonizing gossip functions, often more and more feebly with each passing year, to distract them.
Words here should neither be minced nor sugarcoated. However subject to challenges and criticisms, however much scrutiny could bruise it (and even maim it with prison sentences)—the relationship between Georgie and Father Peady was profound in love. It would have been fine even if it were merely a loin-centered erotic mentorship of the time of Socrates. But it was much more than that, veering beyond eros and philia into storge and even agape territories. Rather than staying some George Michael deal (“♪ I will be your father figure . . . your preacher-teacher . . . put your tiny hands in mine ♪”), it quickly became a home of love as nurturing and emotional as it was selfless and spiritual. More power balanced than all the stone-throwers might ever let themselves even imagine, home and hearth—and yes, there was a literal hearth (around which the two would read together nearly every night)—echoed the familiar tropes of standard domesticity—only with some of the surface-level twists common in age-gap relationships of the homosexual variety (like in the case of the magician James Randi and his thirty-three-years-younger Deyvi Pena): Georgie managed household duties, ensuring that the quiet machinery of daily life ticked steadily under his care, while Father Peady burrowed into research (oftentimes more than ass, no matter how high Georgie lifted it); they took trips to Europe, wandering art museums where Father Peady encouraged Georgie’s budding appreciation for the classical and Renaissance masters; the priest controlled finances (at least early on), but doled out an allowance mostly spent on books and painting supplies; they shared intellectual pursuits, Father Peady nudging Georgie to read philosophy and theology; there were fights (as in any relationship), but the fights were almost always too vanilla to write home about (Father Peady grumbling about Georgie’s lack of structure and his understandable loose edges; Georgie snapping back about Father Peady’s authoritarian tones or his lack of spontaneity).
Well before the slow erosion of desire and the soft encroachments of routine completely cooled the fuck-sleep-fuck-eat-fuck-sleep steam (and its sleazy aroma of fermented goat cheese, cuminey scalp sebum, barn-hay manure, and glandular musk on a straight-up burnt-tire-burnt-clutch bed of excessive mechanical friction), Georgie became like the woman of the house. For obvious reasons (although having nothing, or at least little, to do with his weight), he could not be the arm candy he wanted to be. But he got what he wanted behind closed doors at least. 1990 had yet to finish and yet the boy had accrued, not even a month after moving in, a Sega Genesis with all the latest games (not just the Altered Beast that came with it, but also Road Rash and Hardball and other hit cartridges). Nest featherings were the least of it, though. Georgie ruled the roost like a woman: “No basketball with other boys!” And if other boys seemed to show signs of being drawn in by Father Peady’s newfound bounce and banter, Georgie demanded it be shut down: “And I want to be there when you tell him”—his voice delivered with a territorial heat that Father Peady soon learned, despite how rarely the issue came up, could be settled with some bedroom bullying like the gag times of old (“Don’t want me wrecking his little throat like this?” he might mutter, although too much to himself to offend Georgie).
None of this is to say that their relationship was like that of a brainy husband and his intellectually-uninclined wife. Georgie loved listening to Father Peady dive into the nuances of where Tolkien and Lewis diverged. Tolkien saw mechanization as a corrupting force—one that hypnotizes people into viewing everything, even potentially human beings (our own family members), as stock. He loathed cars, churned off the assembly line like orcs from Morgoth’s dark industry, nearly as much as modern warfare. Lewis, on the other hand, saw science and technology as tools that, while dangerous in the wrong hands, could also be wielded for good. Georgie would sit for hours as Father Peady unraveled how their different religious sensibilities shaped their writing. The Lord of the Rings, reflecting Tolkien’s Catholic universalism (God as being itself, the very isness of all that is), resisted using his art as a vehicle of propaganda, allowing multiple contrasting interpretations—even interpretations in conflict with the gospel—to emerge organically in the process of reading. The Chronicles of Narnia, shaped by Lewis’s evangelical impulse, employed direct allegory for didactic ends—Aslan, for example (like Jiminy Cricket before him).
Georgie was not the only one whose fingers formed a steeple beneath the nose in their conversations. Twirling the chair around, straddling it like what Father Peady first could not help but think was like a slow-tease stripper but what he quickly learned to know was the position of serious intellectual business, Georgie would go off himself about how he found Sonny Rollins better than Father Peady’s man: Coltrane. Father Peady would take his turn listening, proud of who the boy was becoming but also eager to stand corrected. Georgie talked about how harsh and dry Coltrane’s tone was. “Nothing’s wrong with shrill and piercing. But the man (and I’m not just talking the free jazz stuff, Ascension and all that), the man seemed like he had this deep need to alienate everyone, to invite their rejection like some shock artist—sort of like whoever invented your damn cologne!” Georgie talked about how Coltrane’s phrasing could seem overly intense and mechanical and intellectual. “Rapidly cascading arpeggios are neat and all. I admit that the whole sheets-of-sound technique you showed me is hard to match at the speed Coltrane was able to do it. Fine, but why not show some restraint—like Shorter, like Henderson? Why not leave some damn room—space? Otherwise the heart shrivels into the head. Eros flies out the window!” Father Peady would think to himself how headiness itself could be spiritual and emotional in a way—a higher form of spiritual and emotional expression (like agape is a higher form of love than eros), one more aligned with the godhead than with the all-too human. But instead he sat back and listened to Georgie explain why Sonny was a fuller package. “He could get experimental and abstract right there with Coltrane—only without losing the melodic thread, without taking himself so seriously like he’s got something to prove.” ‘Tenor Madness,’ let’s be honest—doesn’t that say it all? He might not be the fastest. Fine. But who’s cleaner and smoother (smooth as an R&B singer), more focused? Who’s the better improvisor, endless variations? Who doesn’t have all those nasally squeals?”
Theirs was not the dynamic, in effect, of Martin and Elfride Heidegger or Jacques and Marguerite Derrida, where the wife—throwing her hands up, baffled perhaps, when it comes to what is going on in her husband’s head—takes on the grounding role of managing the visible world of household affairs while her husband retreats into the invisible world of thought. Instead, it was more like that between John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill or between Paul and Simone Ricoeur, where the wife—far from rolling her eyes at the life of the mind—readily challenges and helps refine his ideas while also working out her own: an intellectual partnership, in other words, where ideas were sharpened and expanded in both directions.
At the end of the day, however, a wife is a wife—and a wife is a woman. Were this all shifted forward a few decades, peer pressure and Tumblr-era incentives (so much free social capital on the table to collect) likely would have had Georgie convinced he was born in the wrong body. Georgie, for instance, did not simply like to—as the later lingo would have it—“pop that ass.” He also liked to pop the pimples on Father Peady’s back, a chimp-reminiscent ritual Father Peady gave into even though the milky images soured his stomach all the more when paired with the lemon juice of Georgie’s doting glee. Organizing and cataloging Father Peady’s sprawling collection of letters and theological papers, assisting with transcriptions of Latin texts, compiling bibliographies for his work on Lewis and Tolkien, typing out drafts of sermons and essays—Georgie had his prostate-stroking fingers deep in the delicate plumbing of Father Peady’s work, as if he were one of those wives who so needed to see her husband’s genius bare fruit that cheerleading devotion could seem at times like henpecking control: “Get anywhere on the project today?” and “You need to keep to a writing schedule” and “This thing isn’t going to write itself” and “You have to watch that you don’t lose momentum.” “Get anywhere on the project today?” “Get anywhere on the project today?” “Get anywhere on the project today?” It is crucial to say (if only to fend off gut-level hangups that would twist their love into some scoliotic circus freak): this clockwork loop—no, not once did it nag Father Peady in some unlovable unhuggable way, let alone in the skin-crawling way (as it does in many relationships) of flies swarming food. It nagged, at worst, in that it’s-good-to-be-loved way of restless cats curling around your feet, hopping on your lap as you try to eat—an enclosing warmth no good person could swat away without immediately apologizing out loud, in hope that the dulcet tones of sorrow would reach home even though the spoken language could not.
The point is that, however much our Disney-fattened sensibilities would demand this man’s destruction (or “cancelation,” in the witch-hunt lingo of today), it was a real relationship marked by deep love and ferocious devotion. They seemed made for each other, however grim the inevitable logic that married them. Father Peady might have been silently critical of the spoon-inversion move Georgie would do when savoring ice cream, yes. But he did not harbor bitterness about the continued weight gain or the many other quirks—even if on their own as innocuous as any given drip of Chinese water torture—that might have driven someone else to the brink: the no-matter-the-season plumber’s crack; the near-fermented tang tucked in Georgie’s fat folds; the eye-watering punch of roadkill decay that emanated, in near technicolor green, from Georgie’s catacombic belly button; the open-mouthed mastication, loud as livestock feeding time; the snoring that could rattle the drywall; the spitting forth of fingernails, toenails too, in a shameless arc of zero regard no matter whose house (as if even the mega crescent from the big toe, landing like a white exclamation mark, was too diminutive to count); the maniacal laughter during orgasm, feral (especially coupled with his tendency to pee); the bottomless obsession with video games at the expense of household chores.
Father Peady’s tongue alone tells us enough about the holiness of his acceptance. The tongue did not merely graze the necrotic crust of Georgie’s extreme innie. No, it wallowed there, muddying matters, as if reveling—with an understandable squint—in the forensic filth of Georgie’s erogenous zone—this drunken link to his mother being his key spot (after, of course, the remarkable depths of his colon: just short of that first major bend). But even the few of these features that did not count as a give-me-more turn on were positives for Father Peady at least in one sense: they were the grooves of Georgie’s fingerprint. If we bracket off the intuitive gut wrench that once (not to long ago) had us dry heaving at the sight of interracial swimming pools, how could a Hallmark-channel “Awwww” fail to leave our mouths in a sigh of envy?
Father Peady might have raised an eyebrow at some of Georgie’s activism. But no matter the pursuit, Father Peady funded him with little hesitation. Long after Peady’s grueling battle with cancer, Georgie continued to speak of him with undiluted affection and a gratitude so full-bodied it swelled in his voice (sometimes even cracking it with tears). Both saw one another as immense sources of strength. They were each other’s fortresses, their ribcages carrying the weight of the other. Grooming played its part in their love—just as do the various manipulative tactics when it comes to securing a second date (for everyone knows that a face mask increases not only your blood circulation but also your social circulation): flattery (“You have such a unique way of looking at things”); makeup (eyeliner to widen the eyes and plumping lipstick to signal the fat and fertile vulva); perfumery (subtle woodsmoke to trigger subconscious associations of safety or home); behavioral mirroring (leaning in when the other person does or subtly adopting their speech cadence); sharing vulnerabilities (“But really I work so hard because I struggle, to be honest, with feeling like I’m not enough”); paying for the bill (“It’s no biggie for me”); scarcity framing (“I don’t have much free time”); controlled mystery (“I’d actually prefer not to go into the details here in public”); proving social worth (“My friends say I’m the one who always plans the trips”); compliment fishing (“I’m terrible at first dates”); prolonged pauses (holding eye contact just a moment too long before answering, to create tension); name dropping (“I didn’t see the sun for a week when I interned at the Met”). Of course, grooming played its part here, just as it did with Céline Dion and René Angélil. But the whole “fault” debate misses the marrow. How can you be faulted for how you have been groomed to be? We cannot be faulted for how we are as a result of the slow grinding hand of evolution, which groomed us (but not jellyfish) to need sleep and groomed us (but not jellyfish) to crave fatty sweets. Georgie, like the Pakistani groomed to love her niqab, cannot be faulted for what he loves either. And yes, what he loves is not just the sweet-nothing abstractions. No, no, no. He loves the blunt-force concretia just as much, if not more: the big dick, the hot stench of older-man halitosis—the entire hirsute package.
They did sleep in separate bedrooms as a personal preference and also as a pragmatic measure (a layer of plausible deniability should prying eyes ever turn inward). What about their sex life? Let us not kid ourselves. That is what we are really here for. How could we not be, considering our moral-panic-prone feelings around the subject: we slaughter cows with factory efficiency, but God forbid we help our pining dog get off with a compassionate hand (in what might amount not only to a momentary release from its life of house-bound depression). So if only to satisfy that inner voyeur we so love to deny (to our peril), let us zoom in—although, truth be told, there is not much to see. Perhaps the silver lining to the inevitable let down, though, is that—for all the preceding efforts to establish the normalcy of their situation (and thereby carve out at least a narrow safe space where their arrangement might be examined with some semblance of fairness)—the tidal pull of bias likely is too strong for most to resist swirling in the rapeyist works (peanut butter, fudge, cookie dough) into what is in truth mere vanilla. For even though carnal intensity nosedived as their bond deepened beyond the flesh, a skilled enough editor—splicing, rearranging with an executioner’s precision—could make it look like a decadent rocky road of damnation.
The door to Georgie’s room might creak open now and then in the still hours—the black humanoid frame, backlit by hallway orange, casting a stretched shadow over dirty clothes on the circular throw rug. With the help of what transpired that day (a fight unresolved and a silence where a “goodnight” should have been, on the rough hand, or a good report card and some headway on the Lewis-Tolkien correspondence, on the soft hand), Georgie could tell—his early upbringing having attuned him to the most diffusive of subtleties—the style of what was in store. The projection of the Korous—its heady ferality, even if deep into its dry down, reaching from the threshold if the man was in a heat—filled in gaps. The cadence of the footfalls—sometimes the hesitant creep of an “umble” Uriah Heep, other times the bowlegged clomp of a “Hey boy” Mr. T—refined the prediction. What tone did the voice have—soft and high or resinous and low? Was it a school night? Was the man’s breath queasy with his fuck-a-school-night bourbon? Did he go the route of “It’s okay” and the protracted (and absurdly unwarranted) “Shhh”? Did he attempt to shake the boy awake with a sorry-to-disturb demeanor that meant he would wait a few seconds before shaking again? Was there the tender thumbing of the lips, then of the neck hollow, from the edge of the bed, which (especially on a school night) more often than not meant—sometimes to Georgie’s disappointment (although nothing a little faked startling awake could not fix)—that the prick was only going to get himself off (no wordless move-that-ass-over-let-daddy-takeover manhandling even in the ending fury)? By such signs Georgie could actually palpate, if not empathize with, the needs in play. Did Father Peady want him pliant like ear cartilage, pretending to stay asleep, while he readied the blasphemous rose bud with a Vaseline finger? Did he want the boy to match his lascivious heat, stirring suddenly awake with a desperate thirst to please—perhaps even presenting the man with the slut reality, which would lock any middle-aged erection into teenaged rigidity, that he had already lubed the hole on the fat chance of a nightcap? Or did Father Peady want him to pretend to be afraid, so as to playact the father who twists the son’s fear of being fucked by his father—a fear, at least in the first session, completely projected by the father—as a twisted-but-spicy pretense to show the boy something to be afraid about?
To allow us to see the reality of their situation (and not just through the usual lens of outrage) certain clarifications seem necessary. First, these fear scenarios were comparatively rare. Second, and most importantly, they were theatre. Just like the whole pretending-to-be-asleep routine (where for realism’s sake Georgie would keep slack enough in the face that, as Father Peady pounded away, his teeth would clack as if he were asleep in a meth-man’s off-road truck), the whole afraid routine was an instinctive form of roleplay to keep spice in the relationship. The shrinking back, Georgie knew (indeed, each knew the other knew), stoked Father Peady’s savagery. It could come with different nuances (different riffs on the general roles): “I’ll give you something to be afraid about” or “I’ll show you what happens when a little boy is afraid to get fucked by Daddy.” It could even come, rare as it was, with a table-turning responsibility-shifting mind-game: “There’s only one way to handle a filthy sicko pig who thinks his own father wants to fuck!” But even here, especially as time went by, such words were more understood than spoken—at best muttered, as if the speaker were ashamed to sully the soul connection with such kinky carnality.
Sparklers and roman candles were the main fireworks, not the multi-shot chrysanthemums and willows of old. Even if it is true that the sweetest syrup draws the nastiest flies (and it does seem to be true in this case), Father Peady was proof that they did not have to stay nasty forever. Anniversary nights, of course, could see more fire. Georgie, proving that not all firecrackers are petite, came closer than ever on these nights—if only through body language—to spilling the beans on his gang-bang fantasy: keeping his hands pinned behind his back (hands he put there himself) and glucking his tonsils around a headboard-braced dildo (his face a gag rictus of tears) while Father Peady, both common-courtesy hands busy (one below, sausage fingers adding even more girth; one above, spit-shining Georgie’s implacable little stiffy), worked his hips at that spot-smashing up-angle (a brown halo of shit mucus, that slanderous inversion of the white halo of pussy mucous, collecting near the hilt like a filthy beach’s scuzzy tideline)—worked and worked those scholarly hips, blond hair soaked with sweat and stained with juices, until the buildup became unbearable enough to inspire at least a limp-wristed suggestion that a rape scenario was playing out: “Seems you want it after all, huh?” The night-heat doorway numbers, on the other hand—those were much more frequent. But even these could be considered rare, not to mention lasting no longer than three minutes on average. Normally Father Peady would come in and it would be more clinical, mainly a matter of getting off. And so half asleep Georgie would shimmy to help Father Peady pull down his pajama bottoms (the Ghostbusters 2 set his favorite) and maybe hold an ass cheek open to assist, moaning or saying “Ow” to fine-tune things (manipulate matters) into the right angle and rhythm and depth. Most of the time Georgie did what most of us would do when jostled in the night like this, especially on a school night: just trying to stay tethered to sleep as much as he could (fat chance, literally, given Father Peady’s girth) and hoping in the back of his mind that Father Peady finishes on his ass instead of in his ass because, even though Father Peady would always (and quite tenderly) wipe the Boston ooze from the hole (often with deferential “sorrys” about being “a bother”), the boy would have to go to he bathroom anyway (just like any normal post-dump woman). But as cold as this hope might sound (one most outsiders would eagerly misread as a cry for help, as proof of some unspoiled core beneath the groomed layers), Georgie would himself grind down (a tender callback to the basketball days) and clamp his sphincter and stroke in a miniature fury come the point of no return—the desire to please, the desire period (jostled from the deep slumber of childhood, as it needed to be), outweighing the cost of cleanup.
Given the lens of outrage (“No child wants this!”) through which most filter the details of the situation, given that the lens seems almost as rigid and inescapable an apriority as Kant’s space and time, it becomes important (if only as a counterbalance) to lay bare Georgie’s needs in the relationship. Those needs, nasty (not to bury the lead), might have bloomed ahead of schedule. And yes, perhaps he did not ask for them anymore than any of us—flung into existence with preordained appetites—ask to crave breast milk. But they sure are there—raging at times (no hint of revulsion), like that no-tutor-necessary bloodlust Georgie and Father Peady watched flicker across the big screen once: the little girl (Kirsten Dunst), fangs bared and eyes black with hunger, awakening into the life of a vampire. No, it is more than just an embodiment of the ancient child-lover maxim, or at least that maxim as seen through fondle-fixated eyes: “They say she’s too young, I should’ve waited / but she’s a big girl (wow) when she’s stimulated.” There were nights, especially early on in the cohabitation (middle school, before the cinematic release of Interview with a Vampire), when Georgie—untouched, uncoaxed (no slow-dance seduction after dinner; no hock-massaging grind from behind while scrubbing dishes)—was the one whose hallway-light shadow stretched, with the creak of a door, into Father Peady’s room.
Now, why younger Georgie was more prone to night creeping than his older self is not what those peering through the fogged lens of outrage will insist: “Because when he finally got older, he was less vulnerable to this twisted fuck’s control!” No, this was not a question of newfound agency wrenching him free. This was a matter of instinct—of evo-devo emotional rhythms, of that delicate wiring where need and response calibrate one another like a call and its echo. Even the most surgical phrasing, even the most jarring exclamation of red-pill precision, is unlikely to scratch that lens (let alone shatter it). But a fat chance is still a chance and, even were it not, truth is truth—something that no belief, however loudly repeated in a self-soothing corner of knee-hugged rocking, can vanquish. And as for the truth of it, rarely did these night creeps culminate in the stretch—that plunger stretch—Georgie was hunting for. That was a lesson learned early. And more than just schooling him in the pleasures of self-fisting (which left him with a throbbing-bowel sensation hours later just like in the early days), it schooled him in the nature of his man. His man—his lion, although one growing heavier in the bones by the year—wanted to be the hunter. Being cast as the prize, rather than as the predator, did not just fail to rouse him. No, it often knocked him clean out of the mood altogether!
“Thank God for the small graces,” the lens-people might insist in what seems more a snake hiss than a sigh. But they need to hold their horses, rein in their relief. Evolution rarely stalls for sentiment. Over eons those early anteaters with longer tongues (an asset that gave them an edge in lapping up ants and termites from narrow tunnels) were more likely than their short-tongued counterparts to spread their genes, spreading and spreading until the point today where a tongue of “grotesque” length has become the run-of-the-mill norm. The same goes over the early 1990s: those instincts in Georgie least likely to conflict with Father Peady’s pursuer-role as “Daddy” (instincts that maximized the odds of securing what he was after, that ever-elusive stretch) became predominant in the boy’s soul, growing and growing until by 1995 (at the latest) he had become a “grotesque” master of what we might call “feminine wiles.”
Georgie learned early on, in other words, that directness—lunging, pleading (“Fuck me good, Daddy”)—would not get his itches scratched. He had to coax, to lure. He had to make the taking feel like giving. So he honed the passive manipulations that kept the lion circling his den: fake nodding off while they watched a movie, slack mouth—full of not-to-waste drool, like a toddler on a long car ride—plopping right down into Father Peady’s crotch; or grinding his man, his priest, from the little spoon position in bed, exhaling bunny-rabbit moans and sighs whose every iteration grew louder (as if Georgie were a Victorian woman performing an overwrought fainting spell); or sitting in his lap, adjusting until it meant something; or fingering his own ass so that, in a masterful stroke of weaponizing scent, the air—reinvigorated with every hand gesture—would steer the home-from-work nose (cock, finger, mouth, anything) to the cornucopia of funk spilling from shorts (Father Peady’s own) that, on Georgie at least, could only be called “Daniel Dukes”; or offering a massage to help him unwind from a long day; or feigning wide-eyed ignorance about certain sexual matters so as to provoke “lessons” or, better yet, “corrections” (a move that all-too-quickly became obsolete because you cannot hide a freak for long, even behind the innocuous package of a young porker); or dropping mentions of another boy—or, better yet, another man (a teacher even)—came onto him; or, when subtlety needed big reinforcement, masturbating—pegged up and everything—in areas where Father Peady was prime to walk in; or leaving traces of arousal, such as slightly damp underwear “forgotten” in the hallway (perhaps even saving them up over the week and then festooning them all over the place like a breadcrumb trail of desperation); or complimenting his man, his breadwinner, so as to trigger dominant instincts (running a hand over his forearm, murmuring about how safe he feels); or asking, in what amounts to the trump card not to be overused, to watch the old camcorder footage (“Please, let’s put it on!”) from back when Father Peady could pick the boy up at least for a few seconds of pump action if only with the help of a wall.
The populace demands the release of overkill comeuppance—a punishment so grand, so obliterating, that it purges (while also blinding them to) their own lurking filth. But in what proves a horror perhaps even for those “sickos” who found their catharsis in all the sloppy camcorder footage (and, by the way, the overlap between the sickos and the bloodthirsty populace is greater than we care to admit), domestic life simply dragged on in a stagnant equilibrium of all-too-relatable boredom—neither the loads of gooey depravity that would sate (temporarily) our closeted core of sex mania nor a downfall of triumphant reckoning that would sate (temporarily) our closeted core of bloodthirst (bloodthirst especially for those, ill-mannered to autistic proportions, who draw attention to the closet), only taco nights and TV sitcoms (days blurring into one another). Despite Georgie’s adult paranoia about FBI snoopery (one of the few ruptures in the uncinematic tedium), and despite the counterfactual tableau of detectives poring (and even pouring) over the footage with engorged clits and cocks, no one has seen the tape—tucked now, no VCR hooked up to conjure its ectoplasmic ghosts, between Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and his philosophical treatise Eroticism, Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses laid our horizontally on top of the trio like a lid on a coffin.
Most will kick and scream in resistance, flailing against each detail as if drowning in it. Even those who do accept the truth will still reach for the vocabulary of tragedy, casting mere domestic normalcy as “heartbreaking” and “dreadful”—or perhaps, if they wish to cloak their judgment in the guise of dispassionate distance, as “a fragile stasis.” Look with fair eyes, however. Nearly everything, save for logical absolutes and brute necessities, exists in a kind of fragile stasis. Even so, surely the most stable pockets within the creaturely realm of flux would be those where love reigns. And love is what Georgie and Father Peady had—a love, stretching over decades, that could make even the most insidious dig-a-hole-only-to-fill-that-hole routine worthwhile. These were not merely two people who found “peace in their arrangement,” which would be fine enough given the existential predicament: born this way, out of stardust and for who knows why, only to die like the sun itself—a steady flow of Heraclitean impermanence. These were two people who found each other, however deluded they might have been to believe it (but believe it they did), as if after a separation spanning unfathomable star cycles.
Questions remain. Did Georgie, for example, ever age out of the role? The answer depends on how you look at it. The Daddy dynamic always held firm. But the two did grow alongside one another (more an H than an A), just like Randi and Deyvi. They grew until the hour Father Peady died. Not the faggy prostitute that after-school-special minds steeped in telenovela drama—in short, USA minds—would expect but rather an environmental canvasser by day and a painter by night, Georgie spends his days resurrecting their life in brushstrokes: from memory, from old photographs, from glancing at the shelf and reliving the felony footage. The boy—now a bearded man—has staged underground art exhibits (if a cluster of greasy weirdos qualifies as such), raising money for his pet cause: the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), an organization that Georgie learned about through the howls of its most famous member (Ginsberg).
The NAMBLA issue had become, in the years before Father Peady’s death, a point of contention. Georgie was out and proud as a member. An old-school type (like those dated gays who saw no need to legalize marriage, insisting it was best left a private matter), Father Peady warned against it. “What’s the point of all this? It’ll only damage your reputation. Be smart.” That was what he would tell Georgie. And although Georgie worked largely in secret on NAMBLA causes (respecting Father Peady’s wish that he not defend the organization even in private, even as a mere issue of civil liberties), there were still moments of friction. Sometimes, in semi-senile fits of authoritarianism, Peady would mutter: “Do we really need the freedom to talk about everything, Georgie?” On the surface, they stopped seeing eye to eye on several matters (personally and politically). But such division and such statements against freedom of expression, as well as many of the other hurtful jabs about Georgie’s “colorful” and “flamboyant” wardrobe (he liked to get Georgie ties and sports coats for gifts, pieces Georgie would never wear)—all of it seemed less like true division and more like the outgrowth of a deeper issue: namely, that Father Peady wanted to protect Georgie (wanted what was best for him, like a parent). Father Peady had spent a lifetime guarding his own reputation with careful precision. It unsettled him to watch Georgie play so loose and fast with his. “You know,” he would sometimes say (watching Georgie flush with the fever of activism), “it saddens me deeply, deeply Georgie, to see you tarnish your reputation. Let it go. Why can’t you just let it go? Does no one care about their reputation anymore?” Georgie knew that when Father Peady sighed about “the extinction of standards,” about how “no one gives a crap anymore,” he had in mind not only examples of the “newfangled turn” toward planned obsolescence (“Maytag washers—metal, not Chinese plastic—used to be built to last a damn lifetime!”), but especially something that bugged him most of all: how Yves Saint Laurent butchered Kouros, the juice in the new white-shouldered bottle—“It’s completely castrated!”—neutered of its silver-shouldered savagery, its sour-civet bite (camphoraceous urinal cakes dissolved down by countless baseball-stadium streams) now reduced to a wan ghost of itself. “Please, for me, just let it go!”
Georgie did not let it go. George ramped his efforts up, in fact—albeit putting the pedal to the metal only once the obliterative dose of hospice morphine ensured that Father Peady’s piercing eyes would no longer hover in hallways and over dinner tables to startle with that question, that question unspoken with too much love not to cause hesitation: “Don’t you know the difference, my sweet Georgie, between a lovable fool and a certifiable one?” Did his efforts dishonor his one and only? Such sleep-disrupting questions grew quieter as Georgie’s personality tapered into an eating-sleeping-shitting apologist for pedophilia, a mission that left him little time even to paint (a therapeutic activity that always centered him and refreshed his perspective like a good night of sleep). His activism had mainly taken a literary form. At least in that sense he honored Father Peady, who never did get to finish his book.
The NAMBLA Bulletin, and later the NAMBLA Blog, became Georgie’s primary avenue of publication. His titles alone, never mind the content, were provocative enough to have Father Peady gator-rolling in his grave—titles like: “All the Better for Being ‘Molested’” (reprinted as “The Age-Gap Gift”), “FBI Entrapment of NAMBLA Members,” “Child Nudes Throughout Classic Art (and the Vatican): Making Lust Socially Acceptable,” “Teaching in the Bedroom: Socratic Pedagogy,” “A Bedtime Smooch is the Beginning of Pedophagy” (a nod to Bataille’s famous “a kiss is the beginning of cannibalism”), and even “A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Child-Adult Sexual Activity” (his latest, and most buttoned-up, work in progress). But however much the image of Father Peady spinning in his coffin faded in both frequency and fervor over the years, it would be hard—even for a saint or a bodhisattva—to claim that Georgie’s loyalty wavered. “A family is people and a family is love—that’s a family.” And Georgie kept his family intact, even through death—and no, not just in the loose sense of a widow who makes a daily pilgrimage to the graveside between back-blown orgasms (literally shitting, just like in child labor, in that roach-on-its back leg wriggle in the chokehold of another man). Georgie’s love was too intense, like an anchorite’s for Jesus, ever to be unfaithful—yes, even in the wam-bam sense of a one-night slam, a sad grasp for back-alley warmth. With the few but tight connections he has made in the NAMBLA community, it would have been easy to stray into other arms and sit on other fists—kinky, and desperate for connection, as that community tends to be. But he never did. And he never will. He sets the table for two. He kisses the photo of Father Peady each night before bed. He keeps the linens crisp, the study undisturbed, the place settings unshifted—as if expecting his man home at any moment. He sleeps next to the mattress indentation no one—not even himself—is allowed to fill.
The bigger question, though, is how Georgie himself looks back on the relationship. For all his pedophilia activism and for all his grateful love of a man nearly four times his age, Georgie holds that the courtship with Father Peady was mishandled—indeed, that by his own standards (which he has been working out, chiseling down, in his recent article) they went about things in an ethically questionable way. In a healthy society—a society that did not banish man-boy love full stop, but instead judged each situation as distinct and irreducible to blanket prohibition—there would be, Georgie insists to any NAMBLA acquaintance who will listen, an infrastructure in place to make sure any power differential is not weaponized for exploitative or malicious ends. In what makes him so conservative on the pedophilia issue that he has alienated most other NAMBLA members (some even seeing him as a traitor, as might NRA lifers when one of their own stresses the importance of psychological screenings before gun ownership), Georgie is like one of those trans apologists whose extreme caution concerning gender-reassignment surgery means a bar too high for most flesh-and-blood people (as opposed to mere hypothetical people) ever to meet—a bar nearly insurmountable for teens: extended psychological evaluation, multiple years of real-life experience in the identified gender, comprehensive assessments to rule out physical or neurological conditions that could be behind the dysphoria, proof of long-term social and economic stability, approval from independent panels, and so on. Georgie advocates, for example, for parental oversight and even third-party oversight when it comes to adult-child sexual activity—a safeguard that, while technically not always needed, Georgie says is ultimately for the best insofar as, for all its invasive downsides, “it allows a practice that is downright ignorant to rule out in principle, and yet while still prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable.”
So yes, Georgie’s position is far more nuanced than his MBL lifestyle and his NAMBLA membership might suggest—especially to our western minds, dulled by a pitchfork ideology of moral hangups and anti-intellectualism (to say nothing of the empty calories of pop music and fast food). That is to say, while pedophilic desires should be on the table for discussion (much damage comes from repression) and while in theory there are situations in which such relationships could be morally permissible, in actual practice—even when we do away with “unthinking heavy-handed ageism and sex shame hysterics often behind the pedophilia taboo”—few candidate relationships would check all the necessary boxes of moral permissibility.
Georgie does acknowledge that he is one of the rare cases where he was more of a willing participant than even his pursuer (and groomer) could fathom. Georgie does acknowledge that he was much older internally than his biological age (fully capable of informed decisions). Georgie does acknowledge that only when the romance began did he start the long process of piecing himself together from the wreckage of early homelife. And yet, despite all this, Georgie thinks it would have been best—however unsexy—if a third-party had been involved: someone to enforce a window of nonsexual contact and then to check in—probation-officer style—once the relationship got hot and heavy.
The point should not be undersold. Indeed, Georgie often quips—in what really drives a wedge between him and mainstream NAMBLA advocates—that the so-called “age of consent” (at least if there is going to be one at all) should be raised to at least twenty-five. “A twelve-year-old a hundred years back was,” in Georgie’s words, “often more mature—more capable of making informed decisions, more independent—than a twenty-five-year-old of today. For look at where we are, if you can bear the shame. Excessive social media use has crippled face-to-face interaction, the crucible where social skills and emotional maturity are forged. How could maturity not be delayed when problem-solving skills and self-reliance never get a chance to bloom under the excessive watering of helicopter parenting? What chance is there for a child to overcome their infantile entitlement and develop the motivation to strive for excellence (or at least independence) in a world where everyone is good enough for a gold trophy? And tied up with all this, in a looping complication of cause and effect, is the most insidious poison of them all, seeping into everything like black mold: safe-space ideology. What hope is there for emotional resilience when even college students must be, and have long gotten used to being (in our insane new norm), shielded from unsettling words and ideas? Can we truly call a twenty-five-year-old an adult—mentally, emotionally, spiritually—when they have been indoctrinated by the unholy trinity: (a) victimology culture, where being offended—especially if you lack ‘colonizer optics’—makes you right; (b) my-truth culture, where feelings—especially if you lack ‘colonizer optics’—are surefire guides to truth; (c) cancel-culture, where even professors whose textbooks offend you—especially if you lack ‘colonizer optics’ and especially especially if those professors have ‘colonizer optics’—can be terminated without due process?”
The main reason Georgie stands by the claim (if only half-heartedly or to make a point) that the age of consent should be raised is not that he believes young people cannot give consent. As with animals (dogs, horses, any creature attuned to its body), even young children can give behavioral consent (leaning into touches rather than recoiling, making sounds of security and enjoyment rather than of fear and distress, juicing rather than drying, continuing to stroke with giggles rather than going off to play with legos, and so on)—bodily cues that, given other conditions (such as always being able to pull away whenever they want), constitute the difference between moral permissibility and moral violation. No, the main reason he stands by the raise-the-age claim is not only that we remain immature longer today (less independent, less capable of informed decision-making, less humble, more inclined to silence the truth, more marinated in bratty entitlement: “I’m a she, not a he!”), but also that we remain simultaneously terrified and obsessed with sex—sex being, perhaps more than ever, enshrouded in mystique and power. A TV breast glimpsed by children is a national scandal—yes, even among adults who nourish these same children with videogame gore and Mickey D happy meals (“♪ bada ba ba ba ♪”). A penis brushing against a thigh in a locker room could leave a boy—scarred for life, wondering if he is gay—caught in a relationship-disrupting cycle of obsessive rumination, intrusive thoughts gnawing at him perhaps enough to result ultimately in God-Hates-Fags murder—the sort of tied-up-to-a-fence-like-a-scarecrow-and-beaten-to-brainstem-liverwurst-pulp slaughter we saw with Matthew Shepard: “Can’t stand no fucking flaming faggot fudgepacker!” Even suggesting that a C-sectioned infant’s face be mushed into its mother’s vulva (“Really get it in there”)—a microbiome-seeding practice that could shape its life trajectory more significantly than even school district, more significantly than most in our anti-scientific culture of moral hangups could imagine—would get you looked at as a madman invoking some Satanic ritual, instead of what you really are: an informed citizen who feels a communitarian pull toward ensuring the best for future generations, toward giving the youth something more substantial than Baby Einstein lullaby CDs (and the various other goods on sale).
Contrast this to some tribe yet to experience the saving grace of Christ—and all His emphasis on sexual modesty and body shame. Take Cambodia’s Krueng tribe, where adults build “love huts” for kids to explore the gooey details of their sexuality without shame—even if that means ass-to-mouth. Take the Himba of Namibia, who—despite all the witch-doctor jokes Westerners like to make—treat genitals without our hysterical voodoo of cooties and corruption. Take some “backwards” culture where, for example, the peeping Tom—caught in an act of voyeuristic masturbation—elicits not trauma but communal amusement. The napping woman hit by the man’s squirt (applaudable distance from the window) does not collapse into the Western archetype of eternal victimhood. She does not find herself hurled into a lifetime of cPTSD therapy, where the goal is not to “get over it”—for that would be “a patriarchal underestimation of her traumatized lived experience”—but rather to provide some breathing room in her forever shell of victimhood or, to quote one popular victim advocate, “to widen the living space of her lifelong prison cell.” No, the foreigner—we might as well call her “extraterrestrial” since western victimology now spreads across the globe, like TikTok, deep into even remote jungle enclaves—curses the creepy man as if he were no more than some garden-thieving pest: “Looka dis fool here!” She does not crumble into a fetal ball, later to be coaxed up by her gay-male “bestie” who—especially given the joy connoted by his neon pink shorts and matching cap—knows to restrain his usual fagulous chorus of nasal sass (“Giiiirl,” “WUUURK!” “ObSessed,” “PeriodT”) and instead to take on a more maternal tone (“You have to eat, Hun”)—heartened, however, merely to rock in a corner, SJW tea mug between her thumb-holed sweater sleeves (bound now for a life of double-scarved fragility, unable even to set foot in Starbucks without her helper pet). The alien woman, instead, does what would bring tears to western eyes, at least to the eyes of those who—for all the perfect-just-as-you-are messaging—still retain enough light inside themselves to heave at the Nietzsche-prophesized sight of the hyperventilating Jell-O humans have become. She chases him away, broom in hand, as her sisters double over in laughter, all of them clearly yet to have learned that they should feel ruined; clearly yet to have received, in other words, the new gospel of victimology, which is upon consideration likely just a spinoff of the old last-shall-be-first gospel (the gospel that valorized the victim and made the downtrodden the morally superior inheritors of the earth): “Da man have such heat he needa go wit da goat! Go with da goat ya damn fool!”—the air filled with sober mirth and resilience (embodied, somehow, by the man’s wake of dust) rather than with the terror and malice of a West so well-kempt, so terminally cushioned, that its people, its halflings, seem eager (eager as prison inmates) to conjure up drama (trauma drama) just to fend off the boredom that beckons the eye toward the unblinking existential void.
Especially if these two factors (our prolonged immaturity and our moral panic around sex) were changed, Georgie believes it is easy to see how there could be instances of pedophilic sex that check all the boxes for morally permissible action. If only to clarify nuance that can be difficult to keep straight for hearts blinded by reactionary outrage, let us end with the first portion of his article, “A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Child-Adult Sexual Activity.” Here, in his “Introductory Remarks,” he invites the reader to consider an array of cases, some where the sexual activity is morally permissible, others where it is not. He talks about these in detail throughout the paper, using them as touchstones for responding to the main arguments levied against his thesis: “the intuitive argument,” which says CASA is wrong because it violates intuition (as long did miscegenation, heliocentrism, homosexuality, left-handedness, and religious freedom); “the biblical argument,” which says CASA is wrong because it violates the bible (as do shrimp dinners, linen-wool shirts, tattoos, anal sex, and women teaching men); “the natural law argument,” which says CASA is wrong because it violates nature (as do, so people have long said, contraception, prescription glasses, veganism, organ transplantation, and air conditioning); “the child wellbeing angle,” which says CASA is wrong because it violates the child’s safety or autonomy or rights or humanity (as do fast food, newborn foreskin removal, infant daycare, car exhaust, and religious indoctrination); “the adult wellbeing argument,” which says CASA is wrong because it violates the adult’s safety or autonomy or rights or humanity (as do booze consumption, caffeine addiction, gambling, social media, and driving). Our where-are-they-now look into Georgie’s life does not require the full nitty gritty. The “Introductory Remarks” section (last updated in 2020, thirty years after the main events of our tale) offers sufficient insight into his thinking. Perhaps such detail, although just the tip of the iceberg, will leave open the possibility that he is not the tragic monster we want believe—if only to keep ourselves safely on the superior side of othering.
One word of caution before quoting the section in full: remember where we are. This is neither Cambodia nor Namibia. Our land remains, by and large, the sex-toxic terrain Georgie alludes to in his introduction—a land where sex is both hyper-significant and inherently tainted (and for that reason, like any forbidden fruit, all the more animated and ubiquitous). It is all too easy in such a culture to flatten Georgie’s argumentation into a mere coping mechanism—a testament not to philosophical rigor but to the trauma-brain of someone who was “groomed” and “abused” and “exploited” by Father Peady. Even if Georgie is lying to himself, even if he has been spiritually and emotionally hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin in more ways than one (a point of debate in every sense aside from the one concerning Father Peady’s tremendous girth), even if his paper is just a Stockholm-syndrome-fueled cope (cope to handle what our land says is the “unhandleable”)—none of that, painful as it might be to admit, necessarily makes him wrong. In an age where we have become such cretins of the mind that we believe (self-defeatingly) that Hitler could have never once been correct (“Because come on! It’s Hitler!”), that we dismiss a painting’s quality merely because its painter fought pit bulls (or, God forbid, expected black people to abide by the “white supremacist” standards of punctuality, or deadnamed someone, or failed to step aside for a trans voice, or committed some other unspeakable sin), this point cannot be stressed enough. The viewpoint, and the arguments in support of it, must be judged on their own terms, on their own—yes, to use the very no-no word that has joined, in what will likely amount in time to the USA’s death knell, the ever-expanding blacklist (“nigger”-list) of letter-packets too problematic, too exclusionary, to use (let alone to mention)—“merit.”
Rare it is to find someone who would argue openly for the moral permissibility of child-adult sexual activity (CASA). The prevailing view is that CASA is immoral under all circumstances. One rationale has long been that CASA debases our special dignity as humans, tarnishes our privileged status as deliberative agents whose rationality frees us from the base instincts that puppeteer lower-order animals (who not only fornicate with their young but sometimes eat their young). In our rights-centric era (where we are less prone to use children as chimney sweeps and have them working full time at ten), this rationale has been reinforced by the notion that children have inherent moral worth and so should not be subject to indignities and cruelties. This way of looking at the matter is reflected in our language around pedophilic sex. Even textbooks and scientific articles, for all their pretense to objectivity, describe CASA with terms preloaded with negative connotations, varying the language depending on specific circumstances: “child sexual abuse,” “child molestation,” “statutory rape of a minor,” “sexual assault of a minor,” “child sexual offense,” “child sexual exploitation,” and so on.
I look at things with more nuance. I contend that under certain circumstances, even if next-to-impossible ever to meet in the world we find ourselves in, CASA is morally permissible. Especially when the wants and welfare and moral worth and autonomy of all parties are respected, especially when the interaction is voluntary and non-distressing and non-exploitative and mutually enjoyable and mutually opt-out-able, CASA is merely a benign form of nontraditional living. It is much more benign than, or at least as benign as, many popular stressful and damaging practices whose moral permissibility, despite being perpetrated upon “the most vulnerable” (children, animals) and often to their short-term discomfort and long-term detriment, largely remains unquestioned. Take the case of animals, for instance.
We groom dogs and horses into tools and toys, breaking their bodies for our whims—grinding their joints down in endless service, their spines warping under our weight.
We break wild things under saddle and yoke, force elephants with bullhooks and flank-lashing whips—no matter the agony and shock (“Oh it only scares them, really”)—to dance and do other tricks for our entertainment, and especially for the entertainment of our children: “Look at him stand on his hind legs, Timmy!”
We carve the manhood out of animals (pigs, cows, horses), often without anesthesia, to curb aggression, enhance meat quality, or prevent breeding.
We declaw kitties, dock doggy tails and ears, for reasons of aesthetics or convenience, stripping them of their defenses, their means of expression, their birthright to wholeness—despite risk of infection, let alone anxiety and depression
We force-feed ducks and geese (as if the more esophageal trauma, the more psychological stress, the more delectable of a chef’s kiss)—feeding them and feeding them in Method Man torture until their livers bloat and rot into the foie-gras delicacy we can do without.
We confine calves, hens, and sows in pre-death coffins, iron prisons so small they cannot turn for their entire lives—yes, all to increase production efficiency and ultimately profit.
We breed bulldogs, pugs, and Persian cats into grotesque caricatures of their ancestors—faces collapsing in on themselves, joints failing before their first breath into a life of chronic pain, all for our love of extreme physical traits: flatter faces, short legs, or so on.
We peel the fur from minks and foxes and crocodiles (sometimes while they still twitch, sometimes after shoving electrocution rods up their rectums, to ensure the integrity—the animated look—of the “product”), their agony a trivial footnote in the pursuit of fashionable boots and boas and bags.
We strap rabbits and guinea pigs down, clamp their eyes open, and drip caustic chemicals until corneas sear white, all for a new shade of lipstick, a fresher fragrance, a safer detergent.
We kill for sport, mount heads on walls, carve ivory from what was once a sentient creature with breath and will.
We fondle teats and vaginas to get livestock in the breeding mood while tied up to “rape racks”—their bodies reduced to raw material, their worth calculated in gallons of milk and pounds of flesh.
We ram electric rods up their rectums to force g-spot ejaculations, ignoring the rectal trauma and psychological distress—unless, of course, these injuries disrupt the bottom line.
We engineer turkeys too top-heavy to stand, chickens too muscle-bound for their skeletons to bear—their agonized lives like afterthoughts, their suffering like static noise behind the hum of industry.
We push them, sometimes screaming, through meat grinders, reduce them to slurry, slap them on grills—billions of lives ending, to often with dragged-out pain and terror, in blood and steel.
Or, more relevantly, take the case of children, where we also see raw-material treatment and shaping—whether through knife or needle, cage or curriculum—with little to no care for either consent or suffering.
We abort fetuses at fifteen weeks despite not only their heartbreaking heartbeats and their brain waves and their capacity for pain, but also their future-rife personhood.
We punch holes through toddler ears without any consideration of consent or feelings later down the line.
We circumcise newborns, despite the wailing shock and the later nerve desensitization or the risk of deformity (curvature, stunting) and the psychological impact (bitterness and anger) at having such a dramatic and irreversible surgery without considering the say-so of the victim.
We slice into intersex infants without medical necessity, carving them into binary molds—surgeries that come with a host of risks: loss of sexual sensation, infertility, psychological distress, and potential misalignment with the gender identity later in life.
We inject babies with nonessential vaccines (shots mandated neither by law nor by school), even low-efficacy ones that come with rare but life-altering or even deadly risks: anaphylaxis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and so on.
We soap and scrub and rinse their most private places, even when they clearly do not want it or would rather do it themselves—their flinches and protests, their attempts at self-protection, brushed aside on grounds that they do not know what is good for them.
We drug them for ADHD to sand down rough edges, to make them sit still in desks for too long for boys, to improve test scores, to give them a competitive edge (sometimes just so we can keep up with the Jones family next door)—yes, all this despite (a) the lack of certainty as to whether it will be beneficial and (b) the negative side effects that could be extreme (outweighing any benefits).
We tease them with butt pinches and kiss them on the mouth, even when they show resistance—indeed, chasing them down and scooping them up and dishing out a lot more smooches to the mouth and the bare belly (smothering them in affection they cannot refuse).
We pin them down against their will, delighting in the way their bodies convulse, and torture them with tickles—often in rather private places, like armpits—until they are beat red and too breathless even to laugh, tears the only distress signal they can get out in the muzzling.
We cram boys into desks for hours despite not only the obesity crises among US children but also the scientific evidence that boys better learn in motion.
We indoctrinate them—“because it’s a parent’s right”—into stunting and superstitious and scary religious views that not only demonize other viewpoints and take extreme stances against nonconformity but also teach some rather deplorable and psychologically damaging things: demonic possession, eternal damnation, inherent sinfulness, sex shame, natural disasters as God’s punishment, female subservience, ridicule of science, exclusivity of salvation, apocalypse’s approach, and so on.
We subject ten-year-olds to the physical and psychological misery of orthodontics (braces, headgear)—and potentially to all sorts of surgery-requiring impactions come the time of wisdom teeth—merely for the sake of beauty standards.
We groom kindergarteners to compete in beauty pageants (smearing makeup, bleaching their teeth, stretching their tiny bodies into gowns and tiaras, marching them onto stages under blinding lights, sometimes even going down the Botox rabbit hole), ultimately prioritizing aesthetics and competition—and yes, parental validation—over the child’s autonomy at great risk of various harms: ridicule and bullying from peers; shame down the road, especially now that our culture—post JonBenét Ramsey—looks unfavorably on such pageants; subjection to objectifying and sexualizing gazes by adults, and thereby to increased risk of predatory attention; development of unhealthy eating habits to stay skinny; burns, bruising, and allergic reactions from various cosmetic procedures (tanning, rhinoplasty, mole removal, whitening, bikini waxing for early bloomers); sleep deprivation resulting from competitive schedules that can be too much for a child (who needs much more hours asleep than an adult); loss of all-important playtime for the same reason; repetitive strain injuries from excessive practice; body-image issues like obsession with appearance or dysmorphia; chronic stress over the pressure to perform; identity confusion between the child’s authentic self and the pageant persona in heavy makeup and elaborate costumes and wigs they see in the mirror; reinforcement of a toxic outlook according to which everything is competition and external appearance is what matters most; priming them for even more dangerous careers like prostitution where bodies, and how they shimmy and grind are commodities to be sold.
We severely restrict their diets according to our whims or our ideological beliefs, even at great risk of nutritional deficiency to their “growing” bones.
We take photos of them in minimal clothing (like at the beach) or during moments of physical vulnerability (like changing clothes) for family albums and even social media.
We administer—because a boy in a tutu is not just a boy in a tutu but a chrysalis waiting to crack into an ice princess like Elsa—puberty blockers at eight and hormone therapy at fourteen and surgery at fifteen—and this, yes, after a persistent grooming period where the “progressive” ideology and social-network of the well-meaning purple-haired lesbian couple “inadvertently” massages their adopted son Bongani to identify as a girl: praising his choices to do “non-masculine” things, like drawing at the window instead of roughhousing on the playground; really praising his choices to do “feminine” things, even going so far as sharing photos of him in his dress-up tutu on IG with the caption “Raising a boy who isn’t afraid to be himself! #BreakingFree #SmashThePatriarchy” and then hearting the various comments underneath like “Love this! Let him explore!” and “What a beautiful soul!”; subtly steering him away from “masculine” things, saying “I love how you’re not afraid to choose what makes you happy” when he considers the sparkly pink backpack at Target instead of (as one of his moms puts it) “that, ugh, boring boy color”; displaying lack of enthusiasm for his choices to do “masculine” things, saying (with a kid tone, as if representing the child’s own internal voice) “This show is kind of violent, huh?” and then turning the channel away from Ninjago to Powerpuff Girls; all-too-often putting the word “toxic” next to the word “masculine”; sticking the boy in a grade school steeped in “progressive” ideology, with “gender-inclusive teachers” who assign reading materials like Julian Is a Mermaid and I Am Jazz and who really (you know, really) make it a point to praise him for how “fabulous” he looks (“It really fits you!”) with the shiny boa around his neck; reinforcing each night during family dinner (oftentimes with friends over, many of whom have the Prius and the rainbow flag and identify as non-binary, trans, or queer) that it is important for children to “be whoever they want to be, free from societal expectations,” and that it is “super important” (head nods around the table) for parents to “affirm their child’s identity”; adding in bedtime reading materials like Introducing Teddy, which explains that some people feel they were born in the “wrong body” and that such a feeling “makes them special, not bad”; framing gender nonconformity as inherently virtuous (“There’s no one braver than a little kid who refuses to let his parts define him”), something thereby any typical child will feel pulled toward (wanting to make parents proud); having conversations over long car rides about “how beautiful and brave” the neighbor is for supporting their child’s transition, saying “We as parents just need to listen and affirm” and saying “Imagine how many kids feel trapped by gender norms” and saying “I mean, is a boy in a tutu ever just a boy in a tutu?”; telling their “boy,” after he finally gets the hint (having absorbed the implications of the silences, the praises, the reading materials) and identifies as a girl (which results in the beaming smile of a gardener who, having planted the seed and patiently watered it just right, now sees it sprout right before her eyes), that “It’s okay to be unsure,” such autonomy-honoring reassurance and postmodern permissiveness (after all the groundwork has been laid) more effective (right out of the groomer’s handbook, on purpose or not)—more effective than blunt authoritarian command (1) at making the identification sink in deeper by means of seeming more like a personal choice as opposed to what seems better to call it (namely, “unintentional” grooming) and (2) at making it easier for the parents to mistake the echo of their own voice as the sound of the child’s own.
The burden of proof, I take it, falls upon me. For despite the fact that most of us accept, with little hesitation (as the previous list has shown), various barbarities inflicted upon children (even when they dissent), and despite the fact that CASA has been pumping longer than human hearts (and is in some sense now at a height: popular in celebrity circles and underground trafficking circles alike, adult women more complicit than many in the Beyhive would dare to believe), and despite the fact that pro-pedophilia organizations and forums flourish in the digital age (now that “teen,” for decades the most-searched porn term, perhaps no longer scratches the itch), and despite the fact that a simple Twitter hashtag (#anyage, #pyt, #nolimits) will mainline you to a world where impossibly tiny hands speed stroke with adult consistency through the full blasts upon their giggling preschool faces and where mothers move seamlessly between blowing the toddler (testicles clearly still deep in its body) and letting him suck her milk-spritzing silver-dollar nipple (his eyes always on the camera with a smile)—despite all this, CASA remains condemned across various cultures. Laws prohibiting CASA (outside of marriage at least), which range back to the Hittites in 1650 BCE, are widespread across western nations. These laws have become increasingly stringent, rising so proportionately with our youth-tooth craving they might share an uncomfortable complicity (wisemen have long known, after all, that the more women are covered in niqab black, the more furious the sex). I want to take these laws seriously. For while history is littered with some rather barbaric ones (slave codes, blood libels, witch trials), I hold the optimistic viewpoint that laws, in general, aim toward the good. I hold that they enshrine something essential, something worth preserving—yes, even at their most warped and perverse: like South Carolina’s 1740 ban on teaching slaves to write, lest they script their own escape, or its decree that a runaway found five miles off could be slaughtered on sight, his owner reimbursed for the “damaged property.”
There are gripping reasons behind the longstanding criminalization of CASA. CASA violates deep moral instincts while also seemingly violating both the commands of the God and the so-called “natural order” (issues I discuss in sections 3 through 5)—I say seemingly because it is a stretch in both cases: not only has CASA been occurring longer than recorded history, but Mary became the slave (not just servant but slave) of God and the husband of Joseph at around twelve and Mohammed consummated his marriage with Aisha when she was nine. Cutting even deeper than that, many argue that CASA jeopardizes the well-being of both child and adult (issues I discuss in sections 6 and 7). In general, the prohibition just makes good sense: children are among the most vulnerable and their protection is paramount. Evolution itself has wired us to prioritize their safety—our species would never have survived otherwise. Our laws, by and large, are an extension of that reality.
However persuasive these reasons might seem, my aim is to show that—perhaps in some sense reflecting how often in history lawmakers banned CASA (especially out-of-wedlock forms involving incest) in the same breath not only as masturbation and anal sex, but also as witchcraft and sorcery; perhaps in some sense reflecting how hard it seems, for an open mind at least, to figuring out when kissing and snuggling with children becomes sexual—solid foundation is lacking for our moral opprobrium here. By no means do I intend to promote CASA. I am willing to hold, at least for the sake of the argument, a rather high bar when it comes to the boxes that must be checked in order for the sexual activity to count as morally permissible—perhaps so high that it is practically unattainable in our day and context; perhaps so high that the early stages of even my own nearly three-decades-long age-gap relationship, as loving and vital to me as it was from the very start (see my NAMBLA article “All the Better for Being ‘Molested’”), would be considered immoral. I simply hope to illuminate the possibility of adults and children engaging in morally unproblematic sexual interactions.
Before establishing the criteria that must be met for CASA to be morally permissible, let us first examine a range of cases that span the spectrum from acceptable to unacceptable.
A. Cases where the sexual activity is coerced, cruel, and harmful
Case 1.—A stepfather, in between jobs right now, drills the vagina of his girlfriend’s screaming infant, and to quiet goring extremes: rectal-wall rupture, perineal tear, crushed uterus, pelvic fracture—the unconsciousness of hemorrhagic shock a lullaby grace before the lanugoed carcass is quartered like a Perdue chicken (only here with barehanded yankings) and then, when the dogs will not eat it (even cooked), yeeted into the creek out back like shark chum before the mom gets home (“I woke up and, I don’t know, the fuckin’ crib was empty!”).
Case 2.—A woman—in a heat that must be quite intense because she is doing this with an open type-2 herpes sore—dribbles her leathery vulva in a steady stream of breast milk, squirting it in a cruel steady arc from a bottle, so that the infant—starved beforehand to hollow-eyed hysterics—will latch onto her swollen clitoris, flicking it in the forehead with her middle finger—animalistic thwips of snarling redirection that leave a crimson welt on the delicate skin—any time its mouth would unlatch from the intended sweet spot (which—lucky for her climax, doubling and tripling with the shattering of taboo—only happens in the first awkward steps of the tango).
Case 3.—Unable to control the rowdy preschooler enough to get his penis inside its rectum and yet not wanting to resort to the ground-smash move of the factory farm (since he does not want to go to jail), a man uses sleeping pills crushed into applesauce to settle the whirlwind—Xanax, a whisper of oblivion, providing just enough muscle-relaxing effect not to detract from one of the main draws in the first place: the tightness.
B. Cases where the child is neither aware of sexual activity nor sexually stimulated
Case 4.—Vulvic wetness and clitoral engorgement chronic over the recent weeks (perhaps a side effect of medication), a horny lady—not into children at all really, just in a one-off event—enjoys how the toddler she babysits—vessel of unburdened motion, unwitting catalyst for clandestine pleasure—brings her to shuddering climax as it bounces on her lap.
Case 5.—A farmhand utilizes not the suckling reflex of a calf to receive a so-called “Kansas milking,” but the suckling reflex of the infant (a twisted mimicry of a pastoral ritual that was already, arguably, twisted enough)—but, not knowing if any fluids would be harmful the baby, only let the mouth’s crude rhythm work his testicles (which, in being shaved of any wiry choking hazards beforehand, had the inadvertent effect of ensuring a solid latch) and then (in the silent oneness of communion) he made sure to squirt away from the baby onto his own stomach and chest (which meant his own face, given the understandable heat of it all).
Case 6.—A man ejaculates three viscous ropes onto the back of a sleeping infant (a baptismal load of Peter North proportions), making sure—out of respect for its mobile-tinkle slumber—not to make any noise (swallowing back his guttural moans, a phantom echo of “Fuck Yeah” stillborn on his tongue).
C. Cases where the child is the aggressor or enticer and both parties are sexually stimulated
Case 7.—A teenaged boy—“horny as hell,” and in a culture where fleshy communion is as run of the mill as eating in public (or if not that, then in a culture where it is a point of pride to have sex with an older woman) such that there is not going to be a situation where, years later reflecting back, the former child is going to be “traumatized”—asks his former teacher if he “can stretch her out a bit,” which she agrees to on the condition that he use a condom (since she wants to avoid pregnancy if she can) and because she likes him and feels comfortable with him—and so not just because (a) he is a physically-imposing football titan twice her size and (b) he is the senator’s son (and so technically holds power over her that extends beyond the physical).
Case 8.—In a culture where neither incest nor sex with children is a taboo, a tween scholar-in-the-making asks his aunt if he could practice sex with her because he feels comfortable with her and wants “to learn” (in his words, but having Socrates in mind) “from the wise”—an arrangement she agrees to but, since she firmly stands on the “familial-consensus principle” that “parents are important supports for helping children assess potential risks,” she takes him on only after consulting his mom and dad, doing so when many others in her shoes would not have not just due to the mood-killing awkwardness and potential punch in the face at the dinner table but due to the fact that the boy comports himself in ways that make him more adult than most adults: challenging standard assumptions (even of authority figures); planning for college (even saving money to be able to visit campuses in various international hubs); holding a job and performing it with employee-of-the-month punctuality and excellence; seeking out mentors that will help his goals; organizing charitable events; defending the bullied in the school newspaper (and even once fighting off two boys who were delivering hate-crime kicks to the gut of a trans student); welcoming critical feedback; communicating emotions effectively; standing by his boundaries; remaining composed and calm under pressure; seeking solutions rather than escalating the situation; finding personal pleasure in mentoring others; and so the list goes on.
Case 9.—A tween girl, budding bloom of nascent yearning (and already shaving herself like the teens in the double-decker porn she likes), likes to bounce on her father’s knee, which gets her off in secret and also gets him mildly stimulated (enough to stand out on a plethysmograph)—a silent exchange, a current flowing beneath the surface of their shared space.
D. Cases where the adult is the aggressor or enticer or instigator and both parties are sexually stimulated
Case 10.—In a culture where fleshly commerce held the casual weight of a summer breeze (getting a blowjob no bigger deal than getting a neck massage), there are rooms—meticulously sanitized, unlike the truck-stop numbers of old—where boys can make extra money (much easier work than mowing lawns in summer) by jerking off or (for double) blowing stranger penises (condomed for sanitary reasons) through a glory hole—and one of the boys who likes to do this for extra money finds it enough of a turn on that he masturbates himself at the same time: a sort of two for one deal in the heart of this marketplace of flesh.
Case 11.—A man confesses his sexual desire for a pubescent girl (a girl who makes Beyoncé look like Lizzo) and she confesses she has harbored sexual feelings for him too and so—even though they are in a culture that does not have hysterical hangups about sex, and even though they are in a culture where such age-gap sexuality is quite common (the idea being that you learn to drive from an adult and, as it only seems sensible, you learn to have sex from an adult too)—they together (before actually planting any seed in the fertile ground of mutual attraction, or even engaging in heavy petting) decide to have her parents get involved, doing so especially since (a) both know that they would not want this to be only sexual but be a deeper commitment and yet (b) both know that there is enough of a power differential (the man has his own place and job whereas the girl still lives at home) that it would be important for her to have adults in her corner—and soon enough, a tapestry of support woven around their budding union, their sexual activity is as regular as their dinners with the girl’s family.
Case 12.—On a deserted island where there is only a father and baby who have no hope for rescue and where even if there were such hope it would not matter anyway as far as we are concerned here since the boy—while physically normal for the most part (minus the midget waddle, the flattened face, the upward slanting eyes, the small nose, and the protruding tongue)—has a mental disability that renders him (a) forever unable to communicate through more than basic signs and grunts that would never suffice for telling anyone that ding-a-ling play has occurred and (b) forever unable even to conceptualize the idea that the conscientious and caring play the father has in store for him could ever be bad in any meaningful way, the father—after years of raising him (never doing what so many others would have given its endless slobbering noise)—notices the now-pubescent boy playing with himself (no saliva, just sand-crystal strokes) and so simply hovers over the penis with his mouth: singing to it like if it were a microphone and sending out puffs of titillating jazz-scat until the boy, brimming with guava-fueled linebacker strength (what is known colloquially as “retard strength”), grunts in frustration and pulls his caretaker’s mouth over the penis for a nostril-mucous sloppy-toppy experience that pretty much becomes—can you blame the boy?—a daily practice (self-directed and self-controlled, neither father-directed nor father-controlled) over the next few years (the man always jerking himself off in the process, timing his ejaculation with the violence of the boy’s all-too-predictable climax); a daily practice that brings them closer together (as anyone watching could easily tell from the snuggles that the boy gives the Father especially at night).
Cases 1-3 are unequivocally immoral. That they stand as stark testaments to ethical transgression seems like a fairly safe conclusion at least under the assumption that children, unlike rocks and hammers, have inherent worth and should not be subject to suffering merely for the gratification of adult desires—although, for reasons suggested in the earlier array of barbaric ways we treat children, we need to be careful about pulling at this thread for too long (lest we find at the end of it a mirror in which our hypocritical faces are reflected). Since in these cases the children are clearly dissenting and being coerced while being subject to unnecessary pain and injury (all due to an adult’s desire for power and pleasure), the moral assessment here seems uncontroversial—yes, even if the infant’s traumatic death in Case 1 is a merciful release from a ghetto lifestyle of crack rock and prostitution.
Now, I will say—and perhaps this will shed some light on what I think factors in to deciding whether an incident of CASA is morally permissible—that, with only a few tweaks, Case 2 becomes morally acceptable. Let us say that the infant is not starved and that the mother never forces its face onto the desired nub of nerve-rich flesh. Let us say that the mother merely places the milk on the area she wants licked (and it does not have to be her clit, but can even be—old-school style—her nipple, or whatever erogenous zone gets her juices flowing). If the infant—driven by natural curiosity, unburdened by external coercion—can shimmy itself to the spot of the milk, and is free to stop at any point (instead of being redirected with finger flicks, as in the original Case 2), then the incident is benign. Indeed, if we change the example to “a mother gets sexually stimulated during breast feeding” (and we make sure to indicate that the mother is letting the baby lead the way while she gets off instead of, say, forcing it—or even, like most mothers do, guiding it—to keep latched), we wind up with a scenario that repeats a hundred times a minute around Earth—one that seems not just benign but arguably good since both parties receive bonding-chemical pleasure without any harm being done: a harmony of shared sensation, where neither party is diminished, and both are enriched.
Cases 7-9 seem morally permissible. These cases, on top of being mutually enjoyable, are cruelty free and consensual and aligned with the wishes of each party. Indeed, the adult in each case, in each dance of shared experience, follows the self-ruling lead of the child. No exploitation taints these encounters—no surreptitious filming, for example, for later digital dissemination. Case 8 stands out as especially unproblematic. The child exercises his personal autonomy in pursuing sexual mentorship from a trusted elder—a wise move for driving instruction and lovemaking alike. The elder in question, furthermore, consults the boy’s guardians first—a principled gesture of respect and transparency that arguably rises above and beyond the call of duty, particularly given the boy’s startling maturity.
Perhaps most crucial of all, these scenarios unfold within a cultural framework where age-gap intimacy is not bound by societal taboos. The relevance of such a detail—a pivotal element in the ethical calculus rather than some semantic sleight, should be clear. No, the lack-of-taboo detail does not in itself make the sexual activity morally permissible: as far as I am concerned, something can fail to be taboo and yet still be morally impermissible—factory farming, an ethical blight arguably worse than the castration cruelties of the Arab slave trade, being perhaps the paradigm example where the absence of taboo does not, in itself, confer moral legitimacy. Rather, the lack-of-taboo detail preempts a standard consequentialist objection, which goes something like this: sex with children is wrong because, while the child might be okay with it now, there is a good chance that—after internalizing the values of the day (where sex with children is both the lowest low and one of the most spiritually-emotionally damaging things someone can go through)—they will later feel wrecked by learning that they were involved in any such thing (yes, even if the tongue-out-like-a-pro footage of uncle bukkake reveals how giggly they were at the time). The boy in Case 8, being in such a world, is not going to wake up twenty years later psychically and emotional scarred, haunted by echoes of internalized shame, the way he might wake up in our world. His “scarring,” if anything, will be much more endearingly cringey, looked back upon with nostalgic amusement as cherished milestones on the journey to self-discovery—as in when he thinks back, for instance, on how he ejaculated after only a few fumbling stabs (“Wrong hole”) at virginal thrusting.
Cases 4-6 I also regard as morally permissible. Even though the child in each case has no idea what is going on, no distress or coercion is involved and the child is free to pursue their own agential goals without disruption. While the absence of harm and the unhindered pursuit of the child’s own impulses might not fully dispel the unease that arises when innocence is entwined with adult desire, what bearing could that unease have on whether these cases of CASA are morally permissible? It might have some bearing in consequentialist frameworks, to be sure. But then all it takes is changing the context in which these sexual encounters are occurring: either situating it in a universe where there is no such unease or making sure they are happening on the downlow.
Notice that the horny lady in Case 4 is not a pedophile—or at least not any more a pedophile than a woman is a lesbian for experiencing sexual arousal as a physiological reflex of being rubbed down by a female masseuse. This detail is important in that it preempts an all-too-familiar argument against the moral permissibility of CASA: namely, that adults who partake in CASA have a “diseased orientation”—an orientation that, even if not in dangerous in specific situations, proves dangerous to society as a rule (a parallel argument, of course, to what we used to see raised against homosexuality).
Now, it could be argued that the man in Case 5 use the infant as a mere means to his own satisfaction. To this I might respond how some slaughterers respond to the ethical objection that they treat cows as mere means to their own personal gain. That is to say, just as cows are not treated as a mere means in being slaughtered since the cows were paid with food and shelter, the infant in question is not being treated as a mere means when the man lets its suck his testicles since it is paid with food and shelter (and, so we can imagine, loving care). One might insist “But it wants to suck a milky breast, not balls.” Although I remain unconvinced of the ethical relevance of that fact, I can just change the example to bypass the issue. Let us say the infant simply wants to suck on things for self-soothing reasons (which sometimes is the case with very young children). Let us imagine that the man knows this (perhaps he knows this due to experience watching the kid seek out things to suck) and gives over the scrotal sac one afternoon during Ricki Lake. He uses the infant, in this case, as a mere means no more than I use a dentist as a mere means when I have him fix my teeth for money.
Cases 10-12 might seem more controversial, treading upon more treacherous moral ground since the adult is the initiator. These too, nevertheless, I regard as morally defensible. All parties experience gratification without distress and all parties are able to dissent at any time. Nor is any party being treated as a mere means. The adult in each case, moreover, asks for no-strings-attached permission before making any moves. Such an ask-first orientation is a far cry from the casual intrusions we deem acceptable in other spheres of childhood, where physical contact and life-altering decisions are made without even a whisper of consent—and sometimes even with full-throated dissent: like when we force the child on Santa’s lap (despite its trying run away) or pierce its ears (despite its wailing) or change its school district (despite its deep bonds with friends and, yes, that one special teacher) or so on without any concern for its feelings on the matter. The adult in Case 11, for instance, procures the child’s receptivity to genital touching and the like before even the slightest contact with that area. Many men will pull their hair and gnash their teeth about how immoral this man is. But let us be real. Faced with a beauty of Helen’s caliber (a girl beautiful enough to make Beyoncé look like Lizzo), most of these men—in fear of ruining their chances at taking a dip—would not have gone to half the scrupulous length that this man did.
If only because I will be fighting an uphill battle as I lay out my arguments in the main body of this paper, it is worthwhile to prime the system by highlighting in some detail how difficult it will be for those who reject the moral permissibility of all cases of CASA to handle Case 12. Leave-it-to-Beaver types who think the values of their insulated towns are the way things have to be (so much so that it feels like a nauseating sin to subject them to competing viewpoints and critical assessment), Hallmark-channel types who are downright incredulous to find anyone would believe anything else than what they do (you know, the ones shocked to find that there really are people, even professors, who do not want to accept Christ in their hearts)—those types, we all know them, will likely be shocked and appalled by Case 12. But Case 12, despite involving not just any run-of-the-mill CASA but rather incest between a father and is developmentally-disabled son (Oh my, hands-over-the-mouth shock!), might actually be the most immune of the bunch—and no, not just because, as the saying goes, “cake is cake even if the batter is different.” The boy is into it—indeed, enough to force the nearby adult mouth to engage in fellatio. The father is into too: it turns him on giving his son head. The father-son bond even grows stronger because of the sex. There is also no chance for the boy, given both his environment and his mental functioning, to have second thoughts or to start looking negatively on his sexual behavior, sexual behavior that—although not able to result in reproduction—is as natural as other sorts of nonreproductive sex we see occurring since the dawn of humanity and before: from bonobo-style masturbation to bonobo-style female scissoring. Perhaps most importantly, the father prioritizes the boy’s wellbeing: making sure not to get toothy (going all throat); making sure never to force the boy; making sure that the boy leads the way (initiating and breaking free when he wants to); making sure the interacting parts (mouth and penis) are clean (taking more care for hygiene than most people do); making sure the boy gets what the boy wants out of it (which, since he is closer to all brain-stem, is mainly climax); making sure to be empathetic (during the vinegar strokes going really fast with his throat game and letting the boy go deep).
The result, it must be said, is a CASA scenario that is more respectful, comfortable, consent-honoring, empathetic, hygienic, bond-building, beneficial, and autonomy-preserving than many of the qualm-free ways we treat children: circumcising them (in some traditions even with our teeth); piercing their ears as newborns; helicopter parenting them even to the stunting extent of shielding them from any immune-boosting germs (like those from making mud pies and interacting with pets) or allergy-preventing exposures (like peanut butter at an early age) or character-building challenges (like encouraging them to go into the store to buy something by themselves); marketing junk-food and sugary drinks and violent toys to them; putting them in ads often involving scenarios that might not reflect their reality and without consideration for their later feelings on the matter; involving them in reality TV shows (yes, even when they are neurotypical and so have futures in which they might feel they have been exploited and that their privacy has been violated. CASA can be more conducive to child wellbeing, so it should be specifically highlighted, than many practices that, despite being outwardly indistinguishable from at least softcore forms of CASA, are cultural mainstays: taking photos of children in minimal clothing (like at the beach) or during moments of physical vulnerability (like changing clothes) for family albums and even sometimes for social media; snuggling in bed with them, sometimes in light and “cute” boundary-breeching ways that ignore a child’s personal space preferences; massaging them and playfully spanking them; pinching their butts and subjecting them to tickle torture often in rather private places (yes, even despite the unequivocal screeches and attempts to escape); kissing them on the mouth even when they show resistance, resistance we laugh off without batting a moral eye (“Look at him trying to run away!”); and so on.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
