405

Sitting on his couch and he brings me a beer.  He’s talking to someone on the telephone, the receiver cradled between his shoulder and ear.  He opens the twist-off bottle and hands it to me and I take a sip.  He sits next to me.  Whoever he’s talking to, it must be family (he’s going on about a birthday party for “Nan”).  He’s naked and I take another sip.

I flicks on the remote and the television comes on.  He hits another button and he mutes it, and sets the remote between us and I wonder if that means anything.  On the television screen is an orgy scene, one girl and half a dozen naked men.  The girl, on her knees, she looks like someone’s wife and isn’t attractive.  The men on the screen, inexplicably, are.  They queue to take turns fucking her ass and/or her mouth.  It’s about as titillating as it sounds, but with one hand on his cock and the other rubbing my shoulder, he’s still talking on the phone.

After every man on the screen has had a turn at the girl, he slides over, closer to me, listening to the other person speak through the phone, and he takes a hand under my shirt and begin pinching a nipple.  I set the beer bottle on the floor near my feet, and lean back.  His other hand comes to my belt and clumsily undoes it.  He mouths something to me I don’t understand but think he wants me to take off my shirt and I do.  He smiles and mouths the same thing.  He touches my bare chest and his hands aren’t rough.

He says into the phone things like, “Well, okay then…” and, “It’s getting late…” and maybe I don’t want him to stop his conversation.  I keep checking my watch; I told him I needed to be gone by five and it’s nearly four-thirty now. The woman on the television has been replaced by a very young looking boy and the men all smile to each other, each of them naked and hairy and their erections in their hands.  It’s like knowing a car accident is definitely going to happen and stopping to watch it unfold.  He grabs me by my jeans’ belt loops and stands me before him, his face flushed for some reason.

I’m having second thoughts when he’s pulling down my pants and boxers and begins fondling me.  Pinching here and there, planting kisses, sniffing me.  Her turns me over and says into the phone that he’s not going to make it tomorrow somewhere.  His hands aren’t rough but they’re not gentle when spreads my legs apart, my right begins to cramp immediately.  He says into the phone he has to go, can he call back in a few minutes.  For a moment, I think this will be everything.  My dick responds to his touch despite the distance between us.  I think how it is I’m here, right now, in this position, naked, a strange man’s hands all over me.  Not how I got here, not in the real sense of the words, but how the decision to be here passed my brain as a good idea.  These aren’t second thoughts.

He breathes deep and sighs and I hear the distinct click of the telephone.  On the television screen, the boy is being double penetrated and has come on his face.  He says, “Ready?”

During and after, he says all these things at various intervals:

“Fuck.”

“Just what I need.”

“You’re so tight.”

“Baby.”

He’s as bad as the porno still playing as I put on my sneakers and lace them up. 

He’s sweaty and his chest hair is matted to his slick skin and he looks oily.  Twenty minutes ago he hangs up the phone, now he’s picking up again, inviting me to some Chinese food.  “It’ll be here in a few minutes,” he says.  I say I have to go.  He smiles.  As he’s dialing, he wanders off into his bedroom.  On the television screen, the men from the orgy scenes from before are all jerking each other off and I wonder where they find the strength.  They’re someone’s sons, I think, and I feel guilty.  He comes back and sees me watching the screen.

I can come over again whenever I want, he says.  He says he’s sorry our time was cut so short.  He says he likes me.  He says maybe we can go away for a weekend.  His wallet is in his hands, the phone back on his shoulder.  He digs out a twenty and says into the phone, “Can I have the number three and number ten for delivery, please?” and I see a picture of his two kids and his wife in his wallet.  I say sure and glance back at the screen and two men come at the same time and everyone else just look disappointed.  I say thanks and leave him, walks out, close the door behind me, and I think this isn’t the worse way to begin hooking up with married men over the internet.

It’s 1999.

for tfjustin:

how i first learned of FIGHT CLUB was a friend at the time told me there was a new brad pitt flick coming out and he was >GASP!< shirtless in it!!  she asked me to come with her to see it and i said sure.

i was in college, about to start a fifth year because i’d done so badly the previous term.  i had a decent job and a decent car, and a pocketful of money weekly.  life was okay.  then tyler durden says that i could be doing more in life.

i discovered FIGHT CLUB is a book and searched it out, skipped class one day, and read it without stopping but for a pee break or three and coffee refills.

me, as a pedantic bore: FIGHT CLUB is about getting to the root of my problem as a young man living in america at the end of the 20th century, always obsessing about things and people and my body and your body and hair gel.  it made me think that everything i - at the time and possibly even now - thought i wanted was what the world at large said i ought to want.  having money in my wallet would make me happy; a family; a job i didn’t care for; friends to go with to movies; a car that looked nice; the environment; entertainment television; booze and etc.  it’s one of those pieces of work that made me question everything about myself at the time.  and all of because i went along to see a shirtless brad pitt.

i stopped watching television then. i read more.  did i have a transcendent experience? i doubt it, but certainly, FIGHT CLUB made me question more, not about the world, but about myself.  eliminating certain social indicators (do i need to work out more, get a haircut, climb up the career ladder, get a girlfriend) because thinking all of it would lead to happiness is frankly bullshit.  none of that would make me a MAN and none of that leads to bliss.

remember when ed norton says in the film, “I can’t get married. I’m a thirty-year old boy.”?  that’s in the book because we think even our parents are right with their life advice.  they’re not.  your parents and friends and family and television are wrong, and believing any of it knows what’s good for you - the individual YOU - is the quickest way to becoming the same as everyone else: “Sheep.  Insectile.”

curiously, it’s the violence in the film that riled up so many as opposed to tyler durden’s dogma.  and in the film as the book, the violence is not the point of the story.  what does the violence do? two things: one, it represents not the struggle against one another in any sense of contemporary life (jobs, promotions, getting to the green light first, etc) but how easily it really is to destroy caring what the assumptions of others about me are; and 2, it demonstrates how easily young men are trapped into becoming space monkeys, thinking you know what you’re doing but really, you have no idea. 

and, in the film, brad pitt IS ripped.