I Live To Spite Others; I live To Spite Myself
As I left the Georgian town house that doubled as my psychoanalyst’s practice, overcome with exhaustion from the gruelling hour-long session, I had already decided where I would go to pick up cock. My appointment card fell from my pocket as I pulled out a packet of cigarettes, my lighter’s flame powerless against the violent gusts of wind dragging the black clouds along like a shackled harem trailing behind the Grand Vizier, their pregnant bellies swollen with rain. The sun hadn’t shined all week; I hadn’t felt its nurturing warmth, or seen its golden corona dispelling the lifeless gloom for what felt like eternity.
But that didn’t matter -
In the underground toilets to where I was eagerly heading, we made our own light, our eyes glowing with lechery as we furiously masturbated at the blocked urinals, the gnarled hands of the old queens reaching out for our tumescent genitals.
In the underground toilets, we produced our own heat, slipping into a cubicle, its walls covered with glory holes like Swiss cheese, where, naked, writhing against a stranger’s bare body, our red skin would blaze with the rocketing temperature of our blood.
Despite my rampant thirst, my cells screaming out for their constant fix of alcohol, I marched on relentlessly through the narrow streets, my mind occupied only with the thought of sex. In the public lavatory, there the dicks would be hard; in the WC, the men would be waiting, their scrotums plump with sperm begging to be purged, to be swallowed, and the briny taste to be savoured, sliding down my throat like an oyster wallowing in its slime.
The toilet, hidden in a labyrinth of forgotten side tunnels by a neglected tube station, is infamous for the hordes of gay men that infest it, congregating like a flock of bacchanites amongst its dank, dripping walls as they worship the beauty of cock, rising with arousal until its pink tip nuzzles against the overhanging belly above. Though its notoriety always ensures that at least a handful of cottage queens will be lurking inside, its sordid reputation, whispered about in squalid back bars, and promoted on internet cruising sites often results in sudden police raids during the crowded evenings.
In their sleek black uniforms, like Nazis hunting for vice in the decadent clubs of Weimar, the officers methodically inspect each cubicle in turn, looking under the doors for two pairs of feet, making notes of the telephone numbers scrawled in desperation on the grey tiles, and questioning the petrified men, searching their jackets and trousers for jars of Vaseline and bottles of Amyl whilst threatening to inform their wives and employers. Such heavy-handed techniques have had little effect, deterring at best a few; we are not so easily intimidated, for our need is too great as it fills our veins with fire, the atavistic passion that addles our brains relentless as we slink inside the gents, stripping off layers of evolution as we remove our shirts, peeling away sophistication and
civility as we slide our trousers down, till we babble and howl like primates -
A man was leaning beside the door as I approached, his eyes glancing all around. Something about his demeanour made me stop, and whilst I pretended to consult a tube map, the coloured lines spread out across the wall like a page from an anatomy book detailing the circulatory system, I surreptitiously studied him. He wore his bland, drab clothes almost like camouflage, the plain shirt and dark jeans devoid of all individuality, as if he had deliberately chosen them in an attempt to look as inconspicuous as possible. Even his colourless, forgettable face, perfectly symmetrical without a single flaw or feature to mark him out seemed suspicious. He was blatantly working undercover, probably C.I.D., keeping watch on the stream of men flowing in and out of the gents. I suddenly remembered there was a gram of coke stored in my wallet; I couldn’t risk getting searched in the toilets, only to be arrested and then charged with possession. Even the anger and frustration rising within me like the tide pulled by the moon could not dispel the cruel symptoms of withdrawal as I craved to feel the hairy, heaving bodies of the men waiting to be enjoyed inside.
Drumming my fingers impatiently against the cracked plastic of my watch, I considered my options.
I could stay there, hidden in the dark recesses of the tunnel like a spider hanging in a dew-speckled web for its next twitching victim until the copper finally moved on.
I could jump on the train that had screamed into the empty station where it now sat, ready for the blast of the guard’s whistle.
In its shaking carriage I could head to Covent Garden, where the carnival-like colours and vibrant, flamboyant street life would be pitched in battle against the sodden dismalness of the cold afternoon, and score some crack from the dealers working the area.
The policeman had begun walking towards me; as I pretended to play with my mobile, his stride quickened into a run, the panic consuming me soon subsiding as he raced past in pursuit of two teenagers stumbling up a flight of steps.
Cautiously, I crept into the toilet.
My tedious fortnightly session with the psychoanalyst earlier in the day had started in the usual, predictable manner, as, straining to sound jovial and chatty, she asked how my week had gone, her feigned interest and concern for me a cheap imitation of true friendship, a clumsy forgery of sincerity and amicability. I merely shrugged in response; I wasn’t in the mood for playing along with her meaningless pretence. Holding an outstretched finger against her nose, its towering sides marked with blackheads as if she’d been pinned down under a stuttering dot matrix printer, she scanned my notes, pondering where to resume my treatment.
The ludicrously expensive therapy was totally gratuitous and unnecessary; after each appointment, I still left as a stranger to myself, remaining oblivious to my true hidden nature, and unsure if I even had one at all, the possibility that I was as vacuous and insubstantial as the thousands of office drones barely conscious of their cardboard insipidness filling me frightening self-doubt. Yet still I came, still I parted with my cheque, and still I trusted her with the most intimate details of my past, if only because the psychoanalysis appealed to my raging egotism and bloated sense of importance, each lengthy assessment centred solely on my character, revolving around my personality and concerned with dissecting every idiosyncrasy, belief and attitude that formed my flawed being.
Forgotten memories would surface in my mind like bubbles in champagne, distracting me with their fleeting impressions and evanescent details, before being once again assimilated into the compound structure of my existence.
Her first question was blunt and direct, in sharp contrast to her ephemeral one-sided banter at the beginning.
Did I resent my parents?
Did I resent that they were no longer here?
My lip dribbled blood as I aggressively bit through its scabby crust.
The acne-pitted skin of the teenager’s narrow face cracked like a food-smeared dinner plate as he smiled at me, rubbing his hands over and over beneath the drier as if he were a miser counting his gleaming piles of gold. I didn’t respond; instead, crossing purposefully to the urinals, I readied myself for the wait. Still he continued to grin like a ventriloquist’s doll, his over-sized green-coloured teeth spilling from his misshapen mouth as if they were giant peas peaking from out their pod.
He’d been cottaging for years now, precociously establishing himself as a favourite amongst the decrepit pensioners fawning to feel his under-age flesh.
Each time I visited the toilets, his blue school bag would be without fail jutting out from underneath a cubicle door, behind which he furiously jacked off, the flood of hormones coursing through his blood as he neared orgasm swamping his tingling senses, shattering their relay-link back to his brain till his straining soul was trapped in blackness.
We cottage queens all carry the same smell, a heady mix of dry tobacco, sweat, and acidic saliva, as it constantly trickles from our slavering maws in Pavlovian anticipation of the sweet relief found in the WC.
It helps us distinguish our brothers, allows us to recognise fellow disciples of our crazed corybantic cult, as we trail them through the market stalls to a restroom in the bowels of a shopping centre.
It enables us to identify other members of our secret society, to detect their presence close at hand amongst the mirrored aisles of bleeping slot machines in an amusement arcade, poised to follow them down to the basement toilets as the security guard turns his mammoth-sized back.
Maybe you yourself have smelt it as you innocently urinated at the rusting trough, the young son at your side standing on tip-toe in a bid to reach it.
Maybe it unearthed a long-buried memory of the old men in the park, who’d hover like starving vultures on the grassy bank as you played a game of football with your childhood friends, unaware of the relentless hunger in their cataract-clouded eyes.
Maybe, as you flicked the last drips from your penis, guiding your child to the wash basin, you looked about to determine the smell’s source, glimpsing two shadowy figures disappearing into the lock-up, like ghosts hovering between realities.
They are the brethren of our twilight order.
We cottage queens, for the most part, carry the same smell; the teenager however, was different.
His gasping breath, pummelling the stubble-scored cheeks of middle-aged builders over which his furred tongue writhed stunk of midnight’s loneliness, of hours spent pining in a small, cluttered bedroom waiting for his life to begin.
His overpowering aftershave, a stall-sold imitation of a famous brand that hovered around him like a smoky haze reeked of a desperate desire to impress, to leave a mark on each man he met.
But apart from these, combined with his deodorant and hair gel, there was something else, something that seeped from his very core; it always brought to my mind the compost heap that once steamed at the foot of my grandparents’ garden, the dead flowers, plucked from their swan-necked vases left to slowly decay, to rot, turning to a thick brown sludge on which the greedy worms would gorge.
It was the stench of premature death, his young being that should have been filled with vitality and joy suffocated by the force of his desire for love, his want to love, and his frantic need to be loved.
It was the charnel stench of murdered hope, of a stillborn soul poisoned with rejection and unending defeat, floating in the womb of some celestial creator through a starry sea of amniotic fluid.
Forever searching, but never finding.
Out of the toilets he’d trail each man, to whose hunger he had willingly sacrificed the remaining vestiges of innocence, clutching in his spindly hands a sheet of neatly-folded paper on which his number was carefully written. I’d watch through the fog of my cigarette’s bitter smoke the bemused cottage queen reluctantly accept it, and then, as the teenager turned triumphantly away with a parting wave, his lover for the five minutes of meaningless sex at the urinals would screw it up, and callously toss it to the floor.
The wind sweeping from off the street, rolling down the tunnel like a boulder would lift it up, only then to let it drop like a dove with broken wings.
And that night, the boy would be perched expectantly by his phone, dreaming of a date, of a date that would lead to a grand affair, blessing his life with purpose.
The call never comes.
Forever craving, but never sated.
Smugly I’d listen to his faltering attempts to spark a conversation with some pinstriped business man by the tissue-blocked sinks, who would dismissively answer each of the teenager’s questions with only a grunt of annoyance. Still undeterred, the boy would then valiantly launch into a well-rehearsed spiel, sounding like a salesman eager to off-load his stock of useless merchandise. I would laugh to myself, amused by his dumb persistence as he humiliated himself, grovelling at the feet of a thousand men who didn’t care what he was called, who didn’t give a shit how old he was or where he lived, who were only interested in shaking off his irritating presence as they swiftly headed to the door.
I found the whole scene hysterical, my heart devoid of compassion as the tears glistened in his eyes, and my mind empty of all empathy as he looked in the mirror, glaring at his ugly reflection with hate, his self-loathing born from constant dismissals, and his inner pain hatched from years of wintery isolation. He’d leave with head hung low, as if his spine had been snapped on a gibbet, his shoulders shaking as he struggled to control the violent sobs welling from within whilst I, cruel, savage, would howl with delight as I stamped on the broken pieces of his heart laying on the toilet floor.
And then I remembered -
Remembered with both shame and shock that I was once just like him a mere four years before, when I still possessed some dignity, still contained some pride, when I still clung onto a failing hope of finding both love and redemption, my virtue and integrity waiting to be crucified in coked-up nights cruising darkrooms and basement clubs.
Like a heretic dragged before the Inquisition, begging for his barbaric captors to show him mercy, I flinched in the leather-padded chair as the psychoanalyst continued with her aggressive hunt to identify the cause of my alleged problems, and to isolate the seed from which my rage grew, its poisonous, blood-coloured blooms casting a cold shadow across my heart. She fired off each question like a bullet, exploding against my steel armour with devastating precision, but still it wouldn’t break, and still I wouldn’t crack, determined not to reveal any of my long-suppressed feelings towards my parents, neither to her, nor most importantly, to myself.
Like a fairy grotto, its piles of glittering treasure guarded by a ferocious dragon, my heart was defended against all intrusion, its doors barricaded and its stone-hewn passageways booby-trapped.
My withdrawal from the bustling world of friendship, family life and work was driven by an urgent need for self-preservation; my retreat from responsibility or any form of social interaction was a self-imposed exile, my soul a hermit, dwelling in the black cave of my body, shunning all companionship, its eyesight fading from years wasting away in the darkness, during which it had never once glimpsed the dazzling sun outside.
Reloading her gun, the next round clattered harmlessly against my metal suit. I smirked as my attention that for the last five minutes had been straying through boredom suddenly refocused.
Did I feel loved as a child?
It was the sort of text-book question I’d always imagined was put to a psychopath or homicidal maniac in court, after they’d delighted in a killing spree, running amok through a crowded shopping centre wielding a sawn-off shotgun. She always asked that with monotonous predictability, and not once during the eight months in which I’d been attending her practice had I ever deigned to answer it. I think she had given up any hope of getting a reply, but having reeled it off for so long to so many different clients, it had become engrained, a standard tool she routinely employed to examine and probe the past’s decaying cadaver, becoming blunted through over-use.
I don’t know why I had never responded to it; perhaps I genuinely didn’t know or perhaps I simply couldn’t think of witty retort. Certainly I resisted the idea that my entire personality could have been shaped by the attitudes of my parents, as if I were nothing more than putty pulled and pummelled about by their beliefs, by their philosophies and their opinions, deprived of all independence and without any form of critical control, until, their work done, I resembled the man that now sat before the psychoanalyst, a man without autonomy who had been moulded and re-formed like an art project.
Blaming my family for all my flaws, for all my faults and character defects would have been too easy; though it might have justified the rage and hatred that I perpetually carried around like a rabid dog with an infestation of fleas, the responsibility for what I was like, what I was, and what I wasn’t belonged to me alone.
Man, I once read, is made of myriad dreams and memories, spiralling out like the Crab Nebula from one single source. Maybe it was a philosopher, or a poet, drunk on absinthe; I can’t remember. But as I listened to her, fidgeting uncomfortably in my seat, an image, inspired by the quote reared up from the abyss that hewed my mind in two. Nothing so grandiose or stellar for me; my being was formed like a pearl, starting as a lump of grit in the oyster’s shell, the oozing mucus secreted by the irritated flesh of the twitching creature accumulating around it in layers. I saw that my essence was like the grit -
Saw that I was like the dirt staining the white robes of the saints -
More -
More -
I fantasised that I was the spear of Destiny puncturing the Messiah’s bare side, my bones composed of his scabs and my skin made from his blood, coloured by the lymphatic juices pouring from his pouting wound -
I pictured myself conceived in the fevered wet dreams of a paedophile, my name whispered through his short-circuiting network of dendrites and synapses. I visualised his destructive desires tainting my foetal flesh, seeping like toxic waste into the buds that will soon become my hands and legs and then -
Then the pain, the agony of my birth as I burst from out of his twisted skull, mirroring the suffering and hurt of his broken victims -
And then I realised -
I was just another one of her clients, wearing my symptoms like a badge of honour to distinguish me from the faceless crowds, my story not even fit enough to be used as a case study in a psychiatrist’s dry, laboured thesis, my barren, empty life barely meriting a cursory mention in the unread footnotes of some dusty, forgotten book.
The queens burst excitedly out of the cubicles, turning their immaculately tonsured heads in anticipation as the toilet door opened, their hearts full of the hope that the newcomer would be the one, the ultimate kick, an unsurpassable hit, hung like a porn star with the dazzling looks of a matinee idol. They sighed in unison at the sight of the shuffling bespectacled man blushing in the spotlight of their interrogatory stares, returning to their lock-ups whilst complaining in lilting voices at the depressing lack of quality trade.
He seemed unsure what to do, hesitating by the broken condom machine, his inexperience manifesting in a nervous twitch that caused his eyebrows to flutter like moths on the night breeze.
He was merely a fleeting visitor to our wild kingdom, a day-tripper keen to witness the unfettered hedonism of our licentious citizens. His guide books were the hardcore magazines hidden behind the dripping mass of pipes, his luggage the sealed condoms he’d optimistically packed in his pocket, and his collection of cameras, poised to capture each moment, were his furiously-blinking eyes, widening with a mixture of shock and fascinated delight as he watched a junky swallow two pensioners in turn, both only too happy to pay for the addict’s fix if it meant they could consume his young, pale body as it pressed against their parchment skin.
I could almost see the inner struggle on the new arrival’s face, as propriety fought with his voyeuristic urges, the infantile pleasure-seeking impulses of his Id pitched in battle against his repressive Ego, the testosterone and endorphins raging through his blood like deadly chemical weapons, poisoning the weakening resistance.
I could almost hear him cast off the chains of convention, shaking off the constricting fetters of social norms and niceties, as the dark, primitive desire that had so long been caged by his need to conform was freed at last.
He joined me at the urinals; as I opened his trousers, I noticed him wrench the wedding ring off his finger, accidently dropping it as he reeled with excitement, my hands tightening around his thick shaft as if I were an attacker, squeezing the breath from my victim’s throat.
He bent down, reaching for the gold band shining like a virtuous heart in the jaundiced light, but suddenly stopped -
He’d tasted our cannibal feast, had danced at our voodoo rites, and had marvelled at the strange, twisted beauty of our small paradise, our tiny island, its narrow borders the WC’s four brown-coloured walls, and now he never wanted to leave, never wanted to return to his wife, to his children, to his dead-end job or his dead-end life.
He was ours.
He tore his passport into pieces as I bit the fleshy ridges of his neck, making a garland for the village elder from the shreds. He tossed his plane ticket and boarding pass into the crackling flames as an offering to our demented god, pulling me on top of him as he masturbated on the tiled shore, our entwined bodies lit by the ceremonial fire rapaciously eating through the paper.
There was no pain in his eyes as our leader carved the tribe’s sacred symbols into his willing flesh; there was nothing in his eyes at all.
The wedding ring lay there ignored for months after, eventually swept up by the cleaner’s broom.
I could tell the psychoanalyst was getting frustrated by my monosyllabic responses. Normally I kept nothing back, revealing every sordid detail of my life as if I were some rentboy selling his kiss-and-tell story to a tawdry newspaper, all the while scanning the therapist’s emotionless face in the vain hope of seeing a trace of shock or at least a hint of disapproval at my dissolute lifestyle. Yet today I clutched onto my secrets like an eagle grasping a fish between its hooked talons.
It was not so much that I didn’t want her help - if anything, I was desperate to understand the sudden changes that had irrevocably altered my mindscape beyond recognition, but before I could share it with her, I first had to know myself both its cause and the effects that such drastic destabilisation would have on my behaviour and my life.
My soul was stuck between two seasons.
The summer of my teenage years, when I bloomed with quiet confidence and blossomed with the determination to reach the glorious destiny that I was convinced would soon be mine had given way to autumn, the frost sealing my heart beneath ice and my mind becoming bare of any thought or idea, like a tree stripped of its leaves.
Because of that emptiness, because of the sterility afflicting my imagination, I clung onto those dependable habits and reliable vices that always left me feeling at least something. Yet even they were now failing me; the drugs, the drink, the sex, they no longer held the same potency as when I first experienced them, almost as if I had developed a tolerance, not just to the alcohol or to the cocaine, but to the permissiveness and profligacy too.
I had realised from an early age that emotions and feelings brought pain. I would watch the fish aimlessly swim about the enormous tank in my father’s office, and envy them. They thought nothing, and they felt nothing, their pointless lives ruled only by the instinct to breed and eat. Evolution had been kind to fish, refusing to cripple them with consciousness and reluctant to maim them with self-awareness, leaving them instead in an underdeveloped state of blissful stupidity and serene oneness with the void.
Mankind, on the other hand, it had cruelly turned upon like some vengeful witch, cursing us with porcelain sensitivity, marking each of us out with a frantic need for permanence, forever searching for meaning, in religion, in each other, in ourselves, only to be cowed by mortality, by death and its unending nothingness.
I had learnt quickly how to extract such feelings and emotions from my being, as if they were merely splinters to be plucked out by tweezers. Like antibodies laying in wait to smother and envelop the invading bacteria, I was always on my guard, ready to combat any sadness, sorrow or hurt that might penetrate the elaborate defences I had constructed around my heart.
Only pleasure, pure and unsullied, was allowed to know the password, the code to bypass the security systems and gain unrestricted access inside.
My fixation on sensory gratification alone was devastatingly effective; where others would have fallen, where many would have been overwhelmed, I remained strong, resilient against all difficulty, and steadfast against any blow. But now, like an unfaithful lover distracted by thoughts of their new play-thing, my sole obsession had become inconstant.
Occasionally, with the ketamine acting like a magnet, drawing my mind from out of my body with its irresistible narcotic pull, to let my liberated consciousness fly through the rainbow spectrum of realities, I still manage to relive the fading glory of when I first snorted it years before.
Sometimes, with my naked skin blistering in the sauna’s scorching heat, and a stranger’s head buried in my groin, I am blinded by the sight of fantastical worlds, created by the surging powers released by my orgasm, and as I trek across their glittering surfaces, communing with the newly-conceived angelic beings, I at last recapture some of the wonder and excitement of when I first discovered my sexuality.
But now my attainment of such nirvana is becoming infrequent, my ascension to such heights of perfection now rare as I flounder in mediocrity, caught in the tenacious grip of ennui’s putrid swamps.
My ties to this plastic life of surfaces and blunted edges are growing tighter; my escape capsule, shaped like an ecstasy pill and coloured light brown like heroin, can no longer escape gravity’s force weighing oppressively on the Earth.
If I can no longer fly -
If I will never again break through the stratosphere -
Then instead of going up, I will descend, drilling through the planet’s crust, penetrating beyond the mantle, to the black core inside where obsidian fires burn, in my quest to replace one extreme with another.
I will plummet to the darkest depths, where even despair and misery are too scared to dwell; I will sink through the most polluted seas, my hunger to feel my heart bursting with new sights and experiences like a brick chained to my feet, pulling me down further and further through the dismal murk.
There, the most hideous creatures swim; there the grotesque monsters of Lovercraft’s malignant imagination prowl the underwater ravines, scouring the ocean’s bone-strewn floor for food.
As my therapist glanced at the clock, her thoughts racing ahead to her next client waiting in reception to unload their issues and difficulties upon her like a truck groaning beneath its heavy cargo, I finally reached a decisive understanding of the changes within me, the fractured halves of my unconscious mind gabbling in agreement at last.
It was hardly a revelation or dazzling epiphany; merely a realisation of what had unknowingly driven me these last few days to visit the rentboy’s murder scene and so ruthlessly abuse the tramp. I no longer wanted to see the love shining from the caring eyes of a god, of a partner, or even just a friend; instead, I wanted to steal their sight, leaving them blind and lost in an eternal night, through which all my life I had scrambled.
I would clip my wings, and rip them from off my back, surrendering the gift of flight for claws to burrow through the soil; I would sell my last traces of goodness for steel-strong nails to scrape through the dirt, digging through the loam in which my thousand ancestors were buried, to discover that at our world’s molten heart there is no hell, no devil, just I, cackling with delight at my inevitable self-destruction, my laughter like an earthquake, toppling the cities and societies above.
My name would live on like De Sade’s, my reputation would be as hateful as Sutcliffe’s, and my sickening actions, my corrupt deeds would taint generations to come, like Chernobyl’s descendants, forever carrying the radioactive mutation in their genes.
I will embrace the hate; I will court the violence and kiss the rage that is the degenerative defect in my DNA; my Hiroshima, my Nagasaki, the ground zero that has destroyed the harmonic perfection of my chromosomes simply the comprehension of the joy waiting to be claimed at another’s sorrow, the pleasure to be gained from inflicting their pain, and the driving force of the hunger as I gorge upon their decency. My conscience will not dare put up resistance; instead, it will volunteer itself as my first victim, to be butchered, to be slaughtered, a sacrificial lamb offered in appeasement as I deify myself with loathing, bile and spleen.
I let all of my past fade away, from the faltering freshness of my childhood to the overwrought navel-gazing of my teens, loading each memory upon a burning boat, and casting it out across the still, misty waters of the Lethe where it silently sinks without even a ripple.
I imprison the outdated moral values that I had been indoctrinated with by my parents and teachers in the furthest recesses of my brain, severing all synaptic links to its lice-infested cell as I restructure my neural network with a toxic dose of venom, as if they were demented paupers locked up in the howling dungeons of Bedlam for claiming to have conversed with God.
I at last am renewed, regenerated, reborn, an aborted foetus that refuses to die, supping at the hook that has ripped through my mushrooming skull as if it were the breast of my perfidious mother, the scarlet umbilical cord hanging from my distended belly stretching beyond the tinsel stars to the edges of a collapsing universe, where the starving forces of entropy glut themselves on galactic empires and alien civilisations, the yawning mouths of the watching black holes whispering them a mocking goodbye.
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