I (Lust)
Shut up kiss me hold me tight
C was from Montreal and she was married to a pretty famous UFC fighter who was training at a big gym in San Jose for an important fight in Vegas. We met on a kink app used mainly by radical queers (or at least queers who like weird sex) and vampiric married couples at the very end of their rope, looking to stave off the apocalypse of the bourgeoisie, or at least to eroticize it. She was in a D/s relationship with her husband but they didn’t have sex anymore. Sexually, like most men in his sport, he was tortured and confused. He lived under the carcinogenic cloud of incessant cuckold fantasies, sadomasochistic homoeroticism, racial terror, and the permanent threat of annihilation. I know his fear: those haunted pheromones, the perpetual and shameful bottoming of masculinity (though ultimately masculinity is a black hole with no bottom, no end, where time doesn’t exist). But on her Instagram I saw a different side of him: a man with sweet, sad eyes, the eyes of a child who never consented to life. Early on she sent me a video of her sucking his dick, which was big and girthy. I thought maybe it would be nice to go down on him with her, but then I thought no, it wouldn’t work out. I’d have to top him, I could see that. But anyway they didn’t fuck and the only sex she was having was with rich old men for money. But not really for money, for something else. Not for pleasure either. For something ineffable and degrading. For something like ego death, but not quite. I understood why she did it (Bataille understood, too). When she came she had to say the name of her biological father. I told her about all those years he spent in the next room, fucking her mother with his big dick but thinking of her. Why didn’t he have the courage to come fuck me?, she asked. Thomas, why didn’t you fuck me with your big dick, you piece of shit? She’d been raised in a Baha’i cult, she said. Every woman I’ve ever known who was raised in a cult and escaped has an uncanny intelligence and a deep gentleness, as if they know that every world is a floating island, half mirage, held together by the centripetal forces of love and violence, by incest and coercion, but threatened always by entropy, by the outside, by the bigger love and the bigger violence, and by death, of course. Her need to say her dad’s name when she came reminded me of an older woman I slept with just once, a sober former punk, who needed to say the name of her rapist when she came. And C’s husband’s fear of annihilation reminded me of something else: that for me, annihilation is no longer personal, it’s Tarkovsky’s annihilation, it’s that point at which you can no longer bargain with God, where you realize it was the bargaining itself that was the problem all along.
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What even is Canada? A dream image of the United States, an alternate history in which psychopathy yields to blindness, a country in which the cigarettes taste like shit on purpose.
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She wasn’t actually from Montreal, originally. She was born in a trailer park on Prince Edward Island. She descended from the French settlers who resisted the Anglo deportations from the maritime provinces. They spoke a creole called joual. She made me laugh when she spoke it as we sat getting high by Lake Merritt. A language of coarse hicks, she said, working-class and fucked up, a subaltern language hated by society whose speakers hate society even more. But I speak English like a California Valley girl, she said, which was true, more or less. She’d lived in Vancouver, and on Vancouver Island, which I didn’t know were two different places. Her parents lived in the Northwest Territories, a land that seemed fantastical and brutal to me at the same time, like something out of Iñárritu’s The Revenant. She told me about the tragic Louis Riel and about the Jewish gangsters of Montreal, the most cultured gangsters in the world, supposedly: fun-loving patrons of the arts. We talked about the sabotaging of pipelines and the perennial conflicts between the white left and the indigenous liberation struggle. We need a white left in a settler society, I said, but the white left is always fucked. I told her about the ridiculous Canadian Maoists of the 1970s who considered Canada a colonized country, underdeveloped like the Third World. I told her about the ecocidal evils of Canadian mining companies in Latin America, and their death squads, and about the nice progressive Canadian girl I met in Argentina working for some NGO who had faith in the NDP (C snickered) and about the right-wing psychotic cokehead former oil worker who lived in the same compound as me in a Oaxacan beachtown who had to scream and punch the walls in order to achieve an erection, or maybe he was screaming and punching the walls, gnashing his teeth, over his failure to achieve an erection, I could never tell. I told her about how R and I, early in our relationship, drove from Montreal to Prince Edward Island and about the inexplicable sadness of that trip, a kind of
malaise that wouldn’t leave us alone, how R used to disappear for days at a time back then into an almost catatonic depression, how she didn’t eat anything the entire time, would go hours without speaking, how she sucked my dick as I drove 110 through New Brunswick, in order to get the fuck out of that place that resembled boredom itself, about running out of gas in the middle of nowhere on the island in the middle of the night, about the wolf who stalked us then, about how R was seeking some phantasm from her childhood that had to do with Anne of Green Gables, and when she found it, she showed no sign of recognition or disappointment. There’s a kind of melancholy that clings to places and people, to childhoods and countries. A kind of sickness and a kind of despair, too. But with C it felt like we were souls in flight and only half-born. We didn’t belong anywhere and had never gone anywhere and when we found each other it was like there was a breeze, a road, a space, a void, a sadness, a loss, a death, a joke, a nothing, colors, others, between us. And desire, but a strange kind of desire. The intense sexual desire of posthumous souls, or souls stuck in the Bardo. And in fact the first thing we talked about after we fucked for the first time was reincarnation, in which we both believed. I told her about the Druze villages in which the newly incarnated souls are invited to the birthdays and weddings of dead loved ones. Hold me, she said. Hold me tight, as if her soul might escape prematurely or fade away like the frescos in forgotten monasteries.
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My marriage is ending, she told me right away.
I’m sentimental, she said. I’m a gluttonous pig. I’m too loud. I’m bad with money. I fall in love constantly. I’m addicted to sex. I’m devoted to art. I can’t keep a regular job. I hate having a boss. I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m an architecture school dropout. I fall in love with extraordinary people and extreme emotions, but also with dogs, trees, books, and certain streets at certain times of day. I like how everywhere I go in the world the light is different, and the clouds too. I’m wild, dreamy, a storyteller. I’m a storyteller, too, I said. Except all my stories are stolen from sex workers and from dreams. One day I strive to be both. Both? Pure sex, pure dream. Pure story, which is the true substance of the world. The first time we talked on the phone she was telling me about a new word she’d learned from a bell hooks book she was reading, which I didn’t understand at first: cathexis.
She got sober when she got with her husband and she fell in love with him because they were both outcasts, both misunderstood. Just because he has big muscles and I have big tits and a skinny waist, she said. Society’s pornographic trash: the eternal lumpenproletariat of sex and violence (but is it really eternal?). Fuck society. I fell in love with his sadness and the way he was embarrassed about his lack of education, but how he lit up when I took him to see art, how far he’d come from a childhood that should have killed him. Sometimes, I said, women fall in love with men simply because they survived, and kept their souls intact, because they can still respond to the changes in the wind and the stars.
She said their marriage was over but I wasn’t so sure. She still cooked all his meals and adopted a sweet, submissive voice when he walked into the room when we were on the phone. In a sense what kept the marriage together was kink, I thought. She got off on playing the housewife/whore, and for him that binary was more than erotic but a kind of primordial psychic split. He confessed to her eventually that he couldn’t stay attracted to a girl after fucking her more than once or twice. He was open, to an extent, to sexual exploration. She would bring out the black dildo to fuck him with but he couldn’t communicate his desire, he ended up getting frustrated, pissed off, or torpid. But still she was devoted to his career and to his Vegas fight, about which she talked constantly. On our first date we talked about driving to Vegas together. The craziness of the idea appealed to me. Driving to Vegas with the wife of a semi-famous UFC fighter and cucking him in hotel rooms, in the car by the side of the road. He loses his mind, he loses the fight. An American epic of rage and emasculation, a story as old and cliched as this shitty country. It ends in homicide, in schizophrenia, or in reconciliation. I’ll be like Nick Cage, I told her. Nick Cage is a dick, she said. I worked with him at an event once, the biggest baby I’ve ever met.
But she couldn’t stay with him. I need to be seen, to appear as I am, she said. We talked about her moving in with me, taking classes at Berkeley. But then she talked about how she would be following him on to his next fights: St. Louis, Newark, Cambridge, etc. Breaking up a marriage is a surrealist act, I thought, like the way Breton talked about the simplest surrealist act consisting of dashing down the street and firing blindly into the crowd.
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She takes to me fast. She wants to drive up from San Jose during 880 rush hour the evening of our first conversation. Women (people) always take to me right away or not at all. I suppose that’s normal. I’ve been on dates where I could tell the girl found me disgusting from the very first moment, or from another planet, or psychosexually deranged (a flashback to some proto-fascist gushing to me over the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink on a beach in Delaware during the second term of George W. Bush). But she doesn’t come up that night. We wait until the next day. She wants to go on a date, a real date. I never go on real dates. She needs that sweetness right now, with her failing marriage and a fiasco that’s occurring in Montreal, where her subletter is in cahoots with her mafiosi landlords to get her evicted. So we decide to get ice cream. I never eat ice cream, in fact it makes me (metaphysically) ill. I tell her we can meet at my place and then walk to the ice cream place, which is only a short distance away. But she doesn’t want that. It could be because she knows if she comes to my house we’ll go straight to bed. Or that her husband’s dropping her off and she doesn’t want him to know where I live, in case things go south (she’s not cheating on her husband, they have an open relationship of sorts, the kind that is usually a prelude to divorce or disaster). When she arrives I’m sitting on the steps of the Catholic Church across the street on Piedmont Ave. drinking one of those Moscow Mules they sell by the can. She laughs. I told you I’m sober right? Yeah, I say, but you also said you didn’t mind if other people drank around you. On our first date? I can’t stand to be on this bougie street eating ice cream unless I’m a little tipsy, I said. I take the can with me to the line and I start talking a mile a minute, I’m in different countries, different theories, different absurdisms. But she has as much energy as me, more actually. When we get into the ice cream parlor (a place famous for its insufferable tweeness) there’s a morbidly obese man wearing suspenders and a top hat. C laughs loudly. There’s something about the hyper-infantilization about the bourgeoisie in its death throes, especially after the pandemic cut off its access to the phantasmagoria of consumption, that’s hilarious. I remember a story my mom told me about how she had a Democratic Party fundraiser attended by over one hundred people (mostly geriatrics) as the Delta variant started to surge in which she served “gourmet versions of children’s food.” I couldn’t think of a better metaphor for the Democratic Party: a death cult like the Republican Party, but one of regression and not the death drive itself. We walk with our ice creams down MacArthur Ave. to the lake and by the time we arrive I think we’re in love, though of course I could be wrong. I’m half-drunk. She’s been living in the antiseptic environment of San Jose and Oakland is a sensory feast for her. Finally a place that reminds me of home, she says: the music, the street vendors, the graffiti, the neurodivergence, or neuroanarchy, that smell of flowers and food mixed with the pungent odor of urine. We see the kid who plays the drums at the northern edge of the lake every weekend and she says hasn’t seen a Black person in months. I can’t tell if she’s joking. We sit on the east side of the lake and smoke cigarettes. She gets high and I drink another Moscow Mule. She lets me know when I’m talking too much or interrupting her. By this point I’ve realized she’s a genuinely happy person, though she has borderline personality disorder, like most of the girls I’m into. Her happiness terrifies me, but it enthralls me, too. We walk back to my place. She takes a shit and we talk through the bathroom door. We sit on the front stoop for awhile, smoking more cigarettes. It’s getting towards evening and the conversation turns more dream-like, less manic: that premonition of sex that’s almost better than sex, to me at any rate. I tell her I want to become a woman and start taking hormones. But look at you, she says, you’re already a woman. And you’re sexy as hell. You don’t need hormones. She says in Montreal you have to live as your “chosen identity” for two years before you’re allowed to medically transition. I tell her I have a Zoom appointment next week with a hot Russian doctor who will write me a prescription in thirty minutes. I take her hand. Is this ok? I’m surprised by my gentleness. Yes, she says, it’s ok.
After we fuck she says, I want us always to have open hearts with each other. And then: I’m so happy, I didn’t think Leila was going to fuck me. I had said by text message I was thinking of going by “Laila” which in my mind was pronounced like “Lila.” But she had read it differently. And when she said it I knew Leila was the right name. It made me think of Leila Khaled, of a pretty gamine Marxist-Leninist with a Kalashnikov, and later when I read more about the name I learned that in both Jewish and Islamic traditions Leila is a kind of goddess: the daughter of the night.
By nightfall she leaves and heads towards BART. She’s going to meet her husband in the city.
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The next week she has to take a red eye to Montreal to deal with her housing situation. She fights with her husband on the way to the airport. She spent the day before her flight cooking him a week’s worth of meals but somehow he still managed to be a dick. He seems to have lapsed into a solipsistic sulk. We talk on the phone as she waits for her flight. I tell her I’ll be thinking of her in the air as I fall into dreams.
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When she gets to Montreal she finds that the subletter has absconded with all of her stuff, from the bed and washing machine down to the last piece of cutlery, and even the fucking shower curtain. Who takes a scummy shower curtain with them?, I ask. A fucking crazy person is who. Some of her poetry, her jewelry, and her grandfather’s things were still in the basement. But she says she feels free, she feels unburdened. She’s happy to be alive, she says. I don’t know what will happen next between us. I don’t know what will happen next. She says she wants to apply to travel to Mars. We are all in transition. Life is transition and nothing else, I think. The same week she’s in Montreal I quit drinking and smoking and start taking estradiol and spironolactone.
II (When Things Go to Shit)
But all the roses in the world would only fuel my rage
When she came back from Montreal everything changed. Not for the better, not for the worse. I no longer believe that change has any moral value, though it has meaning, maybe. In the way a senseless or violent or painful death has meaning, or in the way the first time you fuck someone who has a secret or a sickness inside them has meaning. I’d been reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and dreamily masturbating to images of societal collapse, of pyromaniacs with shaved and painted heads and nothing to lose, of millenarian cults and the defunding of the police and of new life among the stars. C had been drinking again and crying and wandering around Montreal like a tramp or a saint, in a state of ecstasy, like the saintly whore she’d always wanted to be. She crashed with friends but mostly with one guy she called “bad sex Ben.” He was a beautiful man, and they fucked whenever they were together, but he was bad at sex. Not objectively bad, though maybe that, too. Just bad. Incapable of being the feral beast she needed to get off. He’s beautiful and he wants to be worshipped, she said. He doesn’t know I’m the
goddess.
She got home and warned me she was no longer the same. I’m a Phoenix, she said. It sounded like a threat. She had a thing for fire, for self-immolation. She was obsessed with Joan of Arc: an obsession I found quaint, funny and vaguely reactionary, like most things Quebecois.
When she got back to her apartment in San Jose, her husband had descended into a state of total spiritual collapse. The place was trashed. So she cleaned it up. Their fighting got worse. One night he came into her room and destroyed all her remaining possessions. She said he’d never hit her. He warned her that if he lost his fight because of her there would be consequences. He’s a wounded child who never learned to express his emotions, she said. She loved him absolutely. But that kind of love to me was indistinguishable from insanity, from stupidity, from suicide. Once when she was at my place and he refused to engage her pleas for tenderness or for mutual respect, I saw her close her eyes and begin to pray. Please God, make me a vessel for your will. I only want to be a vessel. And, honestly, I was repulsed. I can’t pray, I’ve tried. But if I were to pray it wouldn’t be like that, a kind of erotic-mystical mania.
Things got really bad and she made all his meals for the week and got in a $120 Uber and came to my place. We fucked for the second time, and again, she came three or four times in a few minutes. Do you want to cum?, she asked me. No, I don’t cum. You don’t cum? Almost never, as a rule. It has nothing to do with chakras or online right-wing cults of semen retention. It’s just that one, my life is a constant state of eroticism, I still believe Marcuse was right, even if he was possibly CIA, as the new generation of Instagram communists believe. And two, I know nothing about receiving pleasure, or receiving anything. My life proceeds from inwards to outwards, like a supernova, but also like a blackhole. I wrote it down in my journal: remember, you are nothing but a wandering shaman, poet, slut. Maybe I wasn’t touched right as a kid, or maybe I was touched in the wrong way. Who knows? But, I said, with the hormones something miraculous has happened to my dick. I can touch it soft and it sends rippling shivers of pleasure throughout my entire body, shivers that somehow became more intense as the touch recedes. I want to watch you cum one day, she said. One day I’ll show you, I said.
We went to get ramen on Telegraph and sat down next to a couple of queers and C struck up a conversation, which she did with everyone she came across. They were a couple. The more masc guy came from Maine and his very femme partner was a Tarot reader who’d never left California. But they were going to drive out to the desert to Nevada. C said she was going to drive to Vegas and wanted to go through Death Valley. Nevada is the future and the final destination of every Californian. Climactically. And it’s a good place to buy guns and to learn to shoot them. Maya told me her communist friend moved back to his dad’s compound in Nevada. His dad was in a far-right militia and had an arsenal that was sufficient for a small guerrilla army. But he had Alzheimers. And now the arsenal and the compound had passed into the hands of the proto-insurrectionary left. No one knows the future, really.
Later that evening we talked about all of our great loves, one by one. I said I don’t know if I’m forgetting someone and she said, if you’re forgetting them, then they don’t matter. The next day she cleaned and rearranged my entire apartment, brought beauty to it and cleansed all its bad energies. She even saved the plants I’d left outside because I thought they were a curse from the woman who gave them to me, a beautiful Iranian artist who talked to plants, who was suffused with an unbearable mysticism, and ended up becoming my stalker. I didn’t include her amongmy great loves.
I think the first sourness set in, for me, when we were in a bagel shop the next morning and she said, out of nowhere, there are three false gods: racism, nationalism, and communism. First of all I hate aphorisms, as a rule. Second, she had already said the exact same thing to me the first time we met. Third, I thought the sentiment was idiotic. It sounded like something out of The Whole Earth Catalogue or something a burner would say. I said, simply, I disagree. And she just repeated herself for the third time. There are three false gods: racism, nationalism, and communism. I don’t know what her politics were, truthfully. She mainly talked about “the patriarchy.” She seemed in favor of indigenous decolonization movements in Canada, but then again, every bien pensant liberal there pretends to be. She posted a meme on her Instagram celebrating Angela Merkel. So there was that. She claimed that money isn’t real. That Stalin was evil but Lenin was a great philosopher. She took great pride in living off the grid, as a kind of anarchist sex worker who spent no money. But she was supported by a UFC fighter who pulled in $150,000 per fight and she had the advantage of being a pretty white girl who could enter the worlds of sex work, art, the restaurant industry, etc, with ease. But all this is bitterness, and we all live entangled in evil systems and corrupted dreams. It’s possible I resented her happiness, her bravery, and her sensitivity to beauty. It’s possible she was right to say that I was struggling to be born. I felt I was a ghost who was wandering the earth in search of oblivion, in search of the real meaning of oblivion and the abyss. And that she was a sensual medieval mystic out of a Pasolini or Rossellini movie. We met in our love of the flesh and the absurd. We made each other laugh. I made her cum. I gave her a refuge and she gave me another egoic delusion, another false or coruscating glimpse of the goddess. When I told my friend Manny about her theories about false gods, besides the politics of it all, they said, Who is she to say what the nature of God is? A false god can be as real as a real god. You fuck the wrong people, they said. Manny wasn’t disposed to like C anyway because they were in love with me. I loved them but I could only fall for girls like C: torturous and tortured femmes, the spectral image of something I had seen on a psilocybin trip. A kind of embodiment of sex, the true nature of sex, and of beauty, not the shit we have here on earth.
Then one Sunday I sent her off to one of her “Daddies” who paid for her Uber, of course. Finally I was the pimp I’d always dreamed of being. A wandering “two-spirited” pimp and poet. C and I agreed we were both two-spirited but we couldn’t say it because it was appropriation (though she had Black and indigenous ancestry) but the entire gender binary emerged from processes akin to colonialism, just in the remote past, like a distant star, and nothing is ever dead, everything lives within us.
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I was wrong. She was not a happy person. She was a deeply unhappy person, though she wasn’t alone in this. She wanted to be seen as a happy person. That was important to her. But no happy person would behave the way she behaved. I’m not sure how happy people behave. Her romanticism was a kind of mania. She had her moments of bliss: around dogs, during orgasms,looking at the houses in Oakland, in her memories. People like us, K said, by which he meant dissidents or those who reject the fundamental premises of this world (“this brutal simulacrum of a world” he called it), tend to be attracted to people who are disenchanted to the point of quasi-madness, hurt to the point of sadomasochism, alienated to the point of despair. Wandering ghosts, I said. You either end up a drone or La Llorona.
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Every feminist outside the United States has a little TERF in them, even the ones who deliriously admire trans women for defecting from the patriarchy, fucking the patriarchy, etc. Valerie Solanas wasn’t a TERF incidentally: she was the patron saint of gender Kaczynskites. But for C it was clear that she was a woman, and I was a neophyte or, sometimes, a penitent (at times even a pretender). But I never laid claim to the experiences of people who were socialized as women and I never had any interest in being a woman in the first place. I wanted to take hormones and be hot and vibe and be left alone. I wanted to communicate with my nightmares, like Frida. Though she said she didn’t paint her nightmares. I didn’t even give a shit about communicating with the ancestors. I talk to them sometimes, but I’m more interested in myself. Or rather, in my reality. Psilocybin/estrogen are nothing but doorways into other worlds.
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We began to argue about everything. We argued about the equinox (she said I had no right to harvest anything, since I hadn’t planted anything: an attack that struck me not so much as vicious as out-of-the-blue). We argued about metaphor. We argued about the sea. We argued about the meaning of love. We argued over the future, which was strange, since neither of us believed in the future. One night I missed her call because I fell asleep early. She left me a message saying she was in Oakland with a Daddy and wanted to come give me a kiss goodnight.
Once she said she was coming to Oakland but drove to Santa Cruz instead, to be alone with the wind and the bellowing of the sea lions from beneath the boardwalk. I never told her that when I was a kid I used to spend my summers with my grandparents in La Jolla and that I fell in love with sea lions to the point of rapture, that I would swim out as far as I could hoping to drown and be reborn as a sea lion. I never told her the Spanish word for sea lion, lobo de mar, the wolf of the sea, though maybe she already knew that word. To be both a lion and a wolf in the vast universe of the ocean. Though no doubt one day soon the sea lions too will choke or starve to death along with the rest of the sea. One swam up to Lake Merritt once. It’s hard to hate someone when you remember the ocean is dying. It’s hard to care about loving someone either. In a romantic way, at least. I suppose I’m adding endocrine disrupters to the sea, too. I have hope for a female planet and for Mother Earth. There are people you’re attracted to instantly and then spend the rest of your life trying to flee karmically, fleeing even in the next lives, forgetting that we all share the same stars, the same destiny. Once she asked me not only to love her but to love her husband, someone I’d never met and had only heard stories about that mingled grotesque humor with a kind of ethical horror. But I suppose I could love him since I’m capable of loving anyone. Even if they did use me as a dildo in their sordid and failing marriage. I dream about him sometimes, alone in the octagon, in the dark, not knowing what to do, what to say. He has no mouth, no eyes. C was convinced he would win his fight in Vegas. She manifested his victory. He was fighting some Brazilian, probably a Bolsonaro supporting evangelical psycho. Part of me wanted him to win, another part to lose. I want everyone to lose in some sense, because I loathe victory, or the illusion of victory. I want everyone to lose because I sense that it’s necessary for all of us to lose everything before we can finally open our eyes in the dark, in the midst of all this dying, all this death, on our last evening on earth.