Oedipus Wrecks

NEW GPP THEME: OEDIPUS WRECKS

Taking inspiration from Sigmund Freud and Woody Allen, both great believers in the ‘family affair’ between children and their parents, the latest theme for submissions should be suitably perverse.

DEADLINE: JUNE 30th 2012

Over to you, Siggy and Woody:

‘Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis… This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity: a legend whose profound and universal power to move can only be understood if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of children has an equally universal validity. What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ drama which bears his name.’ — Sigmund Freud

‘I’m 50 years old, I’m a partner in a big law firm, you know, I’m very successful, and I still haven’t resolved my relationship with my mother!’ – Woody Allen in Oedipus Wrecks

DIRT

This is the fourth edition of Games Perverts Play.

Dirt.

I was a bit anxious about this one, because it is such an obvious concept in a way. Isn’t all ‘perverted’ sex and sexuality dirty? I thought it might be a bit ‘weak’ as a theme. But thanks to some talented writers with very dirty minds, it’s amazing.

Dirt includes some aspects of sex that have been considered ‘dirty’ for centuries. The inimitable Mark Simpson  reminds us of the dirty connotations of  anal sex. Whilst  Jonathan Kemp  and  Slava Mogutin link homosexuality to sadomasochism and uncover the complex dirt within.

Some of the writers have taken the word quite literally:Sarah Clare Conlon ‘s ‘Dirty Books’ are actually in need of a good clean. And the extract I chose from  Richard Dyer ’s book White, looks at how whiteness is presented as ‘pure’ in society.

 

Regular brilliant contributors to GPP,   Penny Goring and Marc Nash   do dirty things with words. Language is the focus of their perversion in many ways.

Magda Sullivan and Dan Holloway leave us wondering if dirt is actually sinister.

And finally I am delighted to introduce a new writer to GPP, Betty Herbert. She shows how dirty talk can be quite romantic.

 

Photos by Bruce La Bruce, Robert Mapplethorpe,  Pippilotti Rist, Fenner Pearson, @Thewinepoet,  and a mystery photographer (and others).

Your puritanical editor, Quiet Riot Girl (It’s a Dirty Job, but somebody’s got to do it ).

Paradise Fossils Are Free

*

knows a girl red fog rose

butter dishy spider sweet

when she smile long bunch wilt

when she dance peach leaf streak

when she ride narcissus fly

spider wishy butter treat

leaves a trail of tulip fire

*

*

I love flowers and flames and insect blight

that’s what she said on her last night

is that what dirt feels like

egg worm belly frog drop

spread her stubby little legs

pull tubers and stones from her belly

with the crown of the lily exposed

belly-white dirt in the dark

*

*

What I don’t understand is in reality how I’m no longer actually much more appreciated than I might be right now, I am so, I am so, elegant, you know

*

I am the only lover you can fuck in hell

*

I am bringing a silver teapot to your loaded table. You are sat alone, looking up from your newspaper as I swoosh-swish my silk-encased thighs. Standing by your elbow, I pour, leaning forwards acceptably to you. Shifting to a low slouch, you slide your left hand beneath my skirt, lingering on my stocking-tops, the cold bloodstone ring glancing my skin, and the starched bow of my apron, tied tight around my tiny waist, trembles.

*

lover you can fuck

*

Your heavy gold cuff-link upsets the sugar bowl. Cascades of finest sparkle sugar rush hissing to the floor. Holding the feather duster, lifting the white damask, I go crawling under the table.

*

you can fuck me

*

It is dark and cramped down there. Your knee nudges my head. I twist my upper body to face your splayed crotch, place my hand on the bulge area. You immediately get harder. I carefully lower your chrome zip, lift the thick of your cock, tight circle my fingers, tease the bare dome with my feathers. To remind ourselves of why we are here. To keep ourselves on the up. To not fall asleep, face first in the marmalade, over breakfast. My kiss slips wetly when I slide my lips over your cock, licking it with my tongue, firm or sloppy, hand squeezing up-down the stiffness, my fingertips gentling to cup your soft balls, almost helpless.

*

I hear the stirring of your teaspoon and the buzzing of your mobile ‘phone.

*

I open wider, and take the whole length of your cock to the back of my throat, to attraction your heart and soul. We go in-out-in-out in the thrusting position, until you are lurching ecstatic, spurting your frozen spunk in my mouth. I swirl it and swallow, tastes like angry afternoons, and I tuck you away, wiping my lips on your slacks with the knife-sharp creases.

*

fuck me in hell

*

When I get out from below, I stance my waif-legs either side of your chair. All this time and you haven’t really moved much. I swing you backwards and lower my chuff to your mouth. You look silly wearing my old-style fuzz as a tash-piece, I’m smirking as I look down, and meeting your eyes, we are laughing. Holding me by the waist, you tumble me onto the carpet, and we roll over and over in each others arms, like we used to.

*

fuck me in your own hell

*

I am picking myself up, brushing the silverware and porcelain aside, and bending across the width of the table. Standing close behind me, you spread my legs. I am luscious, with the crown of the lily exposed.

*

All I can hear is the breathing. All I can smell is me. All I can see is the fog.

*

Lay your index finger the lengthwise along my swollen red lips, keep it still for 2 minutes – that is a long time – now flex the tip, slip it in.

*

the only lover you can fuck in hell

*

You slice the edge of your hand down my soaking hot gash, all I can feel is the thrilling. You shove four cold fingers in to my mouth, all I can taste is the losing. You thrust your cold cock deep inside my hot stash, your eyes pop all shiny like your shoes do, the way you fuck suffocates time. You are in me right up to my nipples, if I were intact you would break me, my clit is almost too sweetly, sweat ready skin slush careens. I am slick engorged flesh pulsing throb red, the size of a planet in orbit. I am the actual solar flare of the moment, possessing the hot red fog, in case God truly exists -

*

I go up in flames on the end of your cock

*

You are fucking a pile of hot ashes

*

That’s how you like it

*

Heaped and weeping

*

*

foxes turn to stone in the alley

how does real love happen

pigeons drop from the sky

how does real love happen

oiled in irrational circles

all the time, care for it, up

*

*

The stars are opening their mouths really wide and they’re screaming out loud

he can see their teeth shining white light

the sky rips in half, right down the middle, and an avalanche of dirt pours out

dirt clouds gather, the stars move closer, screaming dirty words

*

she opens her mouth really wide, she wants you to climb inside

*

all he can see is dirt

this dirt survived the largest air-raids and most terrible plagues

he walks on the dirt, unhampered by history

dirt past, dirt future, it’s all the same fucking dirt

*

she rolls over and shows you her arsehole, she wants you to squeeze yourself out

*

he works in the dirt, heaving the dirt over his head, blinking when the dirt rains down on him. He shovels the dirt and he mutters and then he crawls all over the dirt, panting like a dog

*

climb to the top of that dirt mountain

egg worm belly frog drop

spread your stubby little legs

pull tubers and stones from your belly

your dirt is her dirt and her dirt is yours

show her the promise of dirt

*

he scoops a handful of dirt and he massages himself generously, seeking the release he likes

he rolls over, mooing and bleating, until dirt spills, belly-white dirt in the dark

*

The stars hang from their tin trapezes, twirling upside down, baring shiny teeth, leaking belly-white tears – 50 years, 50,000 years – the tears shed over dirt

*

he claws at the bosom of the dirt, burrowing the bulk of his whole body inside and under her soft damp dirt – head down, determined, tunnelling to her heavy core

*

her face is the dirt and her tongue is a pendulous dirt song

*

he carves out a hollow with his bare hands and he snuffles and snuggles, a rootling runt, blind in her bowels of dirt

there is no light in the dirt, only glory, and no space, only heat

and the soothing in-out of her breathing

buried alive, he thinks about types of dirt:

bible dirt . dumb dirt . dog dirt

shame dirt . soul dirt . brain dirt

dead . disturbing . dirt

proportions of dirt, dirt perspective

dirt in its manifestations

dirt dimension, dirt girl

*

she keeps eel worms in her hillocks, that’s why she moves so jelly flesh dirt

*

he discovers catacombs in the deepest dirt down inside the dirt girl, and he uncovers 9 trap-doors, where he can peek out, throwing dirty looks – when a dirt dude stumbles past he coerces him by the goolies, drags him to her dark domain, and she entertains and consoles them with dirt

*

this community of dirt dudes thrive in her mountains of dirt

they believe that if you are feeling unhappy dirt will help make you glad again

the dudes of dirt ride big dirt bikes, tell dirty jokes, die dirty deaths

kissing dirt

dirt to dirt

under the dangerous stars

dig it

*

*

leave your layered long cold charms

show her how you growth spurt

any time after petals fall

show her the promise of dirt

on blasted fruit

on killing grass

on pink grubs, waxing

*

*

It  might be said    slug belly hates embrace

here and there were      wiggle juice loves caress

let me remember      maggot bug jelly hates warm

let it go on      cold eel belly loves suck

tell your children      bad storm poppy hates stink

he formed wild theories      egg bruised bug loves small

here she began      maggot juice sticky hates late

behind the circle      egg worm slug loves free

he never understood      eel bug jelly hates taste

but she wanted it show me the dirt

he grew to believe some kind of dirt

*

*

You are soft and young and your teeth rival the shiny white teeth of the stars

but one night they will swoop down from the sky and bite off your head

the dirt of you will shoot from your neck stump to explode in the dark

and you’ll fail

like fireworks

KAPOW

*

*

flesh flame flowers

flesh flame flowers

paradise fossils are free

*

*

Story Of A Betrayal

 

Oh, if only I were the son of a regiment, a little Soviet partisan with a protruding little ass and a moist, crimson orifice! I would give all my tiresome regimental lovers with their stinky cigarettes and shit-stained underwear for a single whiff of a fascist cock! And then, being filled up to my throat with German sperm like a miraculous elixir of youth, I would spend the rest of my days fucking the brains of retarded Soviet schoolboys, moaning in front of them with a runny nose: WHERE ARE YOU NOW, MY FELLOW SOLDIERS, MY FUCKING BATTLEMATES?! Where-where — in pussy hair! Knowing what true male comradery is about. Knowing that my war-time lovers slaughtered one another at my beckoning. Knowing that this terrible military secret will irrevocably die with me. There were no witnesses, and this unheard-of villainy will leave my hands like all the other shit I’ve committed in my life. Remembering to the end of my days the groaning and moaning, the spasms and convulsions, the suffocating bitter smell, the dull hardness filling my zeal-numbed mouth, the tight fiery streams and drops settling in my ever-hungry throat…

Hey, I just remembered a funny thing! Our guys used to curse at me: WHAT ARE YOU DOING, ASSHOLE! THAT’S NOT A HANDKERCHIEF, IT’S YOUR RED FUCKING ARMY TIE! But what else was there left to do? During the war, where was I to find a handkerchief or toilet paper? So, I was obliged to use my tie – for hygienic purposes, so to speak. I re-tied my tie and went on my way, sucking soldiers’ cocks, chewing the cheese off from under their unwashed callused foreskins.

Sometimes the buffoons would get drunk on moonshine, wake me up in the middle of the night, fondle me, push me around – getting ready to have fun on top of me. They would position me doggy style and ram their filthy peckers in one after another till my intestines swell up. They wouldn’t let me peek, I couldn’t even see who’s turn it was to plug me. I would only get yelled at: ALL RIGHT, BITCH, GUESS WHOSE DICK IS IN YOUR PUSSY NOW! If I guessed wrong, they would force me to blow them, filling my mouth with the taste of my own shit [CHOCOLATE WAFFLE]. I’d almost throw up. Back then I got a generous helping of my own shit – there was enough to feed a party of ten! Then they’d piss in my mouth and mock me: ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS!

The Germans were more refined, they smelled of cologne, changed their underwear and took sex more seriously… They would gang-bang me and then feed me Belgian chocolate. After the fifth or sixth fascist cock I wouldn’t care anymore. The pain would go away and I’d simply watch the bloody sperm dripping out of my torn bunghole – Nazi German sperm mixed into a fucked-up cocktail with my Communist Russian blood. Watching the goings-on from outside of my tortured flesh, thinking of millions of microscopic swastikas inseminating me, I’d feel intolerably calm – my evil soul and my fucked-up spirit – calm through my awareness that this is indeed my destiny… my preordainment…

People will tell me, of course: YOU FASCIST BEDSPREAD! WHERE’S YOUR GODDAMN PRIDE?! WHERE’S YOUR FUCKING PATRIOTISM!!! A military tribunal is crying over me, and I’m crying with joy, smearing tears, sperm and snot across my face with my sticky hands. Oh, sweet treason! Oh, disgraceful infidelity!

GET YOUR VILE TENTACLES AWAY FROM ME! – I whispered, surrounded by cretins and fuckheads. — I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!!! I AM TREASON!!! INFIDELITY IS MINE!!!!

I treacherize like God. I betray like Satan.

1997, New York City
Translated from the Russian by Dmitry Gelfand and Slava Mogutin

All rights reserved © Slava Mogutin, 2012

“P”

He walks in the door and falls straight to the floor, belly pressed against the boards, and begins slurping from the dog bowl of piss you have placed there. He breaks off to look up at you and ask, ‘Does sir want me to drink it all?’

‘Yes.’

You marvel at his submission, his desire to be degraded. It fascinates and disgusts you. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process.

You pull down your football shorts and pull aside your jockstrap, releasing your semi-hard cock, and then you watch him kneel at your feet and hold the bowl up to his mouth so he can drain it – with a delicacy that belies the moment – in tiny bird sips.

‘Good boy,’ you say when he has finished and placed the bowl back down.

You push your cock into his mouth, right down to the root, making him gag and choke, which makes you harder. You withdraw and slap your prick against his face, and he groans. You turn around, and present your rump to his face. He buries his foraging tongue, as if he could crawl inside and sleep on the moss there, die there.

The veneration I feel for that part of the body and the great tenderness that I have bestowed on the men who have allowed me to enter it, the grace and sweetness of their gift, oblige me to speak of all this with respect. It is not profaning the most beloved of the dead to speak, in the guise of a poem whose tone is still unknowable, of the happiness he offered me when my face was buried in a fleece that was damp with my sweat and saliva and that stuck together in little locks of hair which dried after love-making and remained stiff.

You turn around and hold out your cock, uttering the single word, ‘Toilet.’

He holds his mouth open for the steady jet of warm, clear liquid, which arcs from your body to his, from inside you to inside him, this circuit of pleasure and waste that constructs its own economy within this blasted region of the soul.

By the time he leaves, he has choked so much on your cock that bile stains are visible on his shirt and trousers, you can see the black curls of his chest hair through the damp fabric; he has drunk your piss and swallowed your cum, and thanked you for the privilege. He will measure the success of a night by the amount of piss and seed consumed.

Something has been released, some demon fed; the walls fall away and spaces yawn around you; unfathomable, unknowable spaces. And although it is still daylight, all you can see is darkness, the many shades of darkness, patterning your vision of yourself and this world, yourself in this world. And you see him, getting into his car, renegotiating his way back into his life, as you must renegotiate your way back into yours. One cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside.

This is an extract from 26 by Jonathan Kemp (quote in italics by Jean Genet)

White

What is absent from white is any thing; in other words, material reality. Cleanliness is the absence of dirt, spiritually the absence of flesh, virtue the absence of sin, chastity the absence of sex and so on. The cleansing  metaphor of baptism is central. Sin is seen as a stain which water washes away. Baptism unites cleanliness and goodness. A more recent, sinister and racially explicit appropriation of the metaphor is to be found in the ‘ethnic-cleansing’ of Bosnia Herzegovina.

Joel Kovel, in his study, White Racism, first published in 1970, makes dirt central to his account of white attitudes towards non-white people, from which we may extrapolate attitudes towards whiteness itself. ‘Dirt’, he argues, ‘is the fate of the sensuousness lost to the world’ in the regime of whiteness (kovel, 1998).  Kovel argues that by the late Middle Ages, the Church, as both the mediator between the individual and God and the source of moral authority and order in Europe, was increasingly fragmented and corrupt; Luther stood against the Church by insisting on the individual’s direct relation to God. ‘His central insight was that a principle of God was within man himself’ (ibid), something involving both abstraction, God as a symbol not a being, and an accentuation of the mind: body split. If God, and all that is of worth, is abstract, then everything that is concrete, and a fortiori the body, is worthless and worse. Kovel stresses the importance of images of dirt in Luther’s work and suggests that out of this emerges a disdain and disgust for the body and everything bodily: ‘the body is dirty; what comes out of the body is especially dirty; the material world corresponds to what comes out of the body, and hence it is also especially dirty (ibid).

It is in this context that Kovel makes his most vivid argument about race. Non-white people are associated in various ways with the dirt that comes out of the body, notably in the repeated racist  perception that they smell (but also, notably in the British context that their food smells,  that they eat dirty foods – offal, dogs, snakes –and that they slaughter it in direct and bloody forms). Obsessive control of faeces and  identification of them as the nadir of human dirt both characterise  Western culture: to be white is to be well potty-trained.

‘the central symbol of dirt throughout the world is faeces, known by that profane word with which the emotion of disgust is expressed: shit… when contrasted with the light colour of the body of the Caucasian person, the dark colour of faeces reinforces, from the infancy of the individual in the culture of the West, the connotation of blackness with badness’ (ibid).

To be white is to have expunged all dirt, faecial or otherwise, from oneself: to look white is to look clean.

Extract from White by  Richard Dyer Photo by Bruce La Bruce

FOUR DIRT TRAILS

MARTA MARTYR STIGMATA

Marta was born with a Port-wine stain birthmark on her face. Though disfiguring of her features, it was held as an auspicious talisman by her bucolic community who were wine-brewing folk, fortified by their faith in god. (Not for them any Bacchanalia honouring the intoxication of the grape. They tirelessly trod it under foot as if it were the spawn of the very Devil himself they were charged with purging). They took Marta’s blotch to be a sign that their grape would always fructify on the vine, since the hue of her blemish was exactly that of the infant grapes they grew.

However, the sons and daughters of the farmers were far less permissive towards Marta. They teased and mocked her for her ultramontane pigmentation. Some brazenly tripped her over so she fell head first into the soil, “dust to dust, grub to grub”. Then they blotted her face in the loam, trying to scour it off against the grain of the earth, or just interring it beneath the grime. Marta couldn’t reconcile their reactions towards her with the awe and indulgence shown to her by grown-ups. The adults refused to take their children in hand and remonstrate with them which further confused her. In this village it seemed as though the children wielded the power and the adults remained helpless bystanders.

So Marta’s skin flared and raged by way of response and warning. She developed the colouration skills of a chameleon, though it rendered her no security of camouflage. In the presence of children the rest of her face and exposed skin of arms and legs reddened to match that of the original imprimatur. That only made things worse for her of course, but it was something she had no control over. It was intimately attached to the guilt and shame these children made her feel. In the presence of adults however, the rest of her skin would remain normal, though the Port-stain itself would darken during the season as it matched the ripening and maturing of the grape. This naturally made her seem even more divinely portentous to these simple peasants, though a few secretly wondered whether she was a witch, toying and aping and scoffing at what was most their most precious value after god himself.  But none dared bring their fears out into the open.

And so the village spun on through the cycles of the harvest. When Marta’s first period struck, her skin chemistry moved on apace once again. Now in the presence of adults too, her whole face could darken to the hue of the stain, for no seeming reason. She no longer mirrored the darkening spectrum of the blossoming grape, rather she blazoned a livid purple-red, augmented into further ugliness by a puckering of her skin at the forehead. Her poor mother and father lay in their marital bed discussing the forlorn prospects of their daughter ever having suitors, though they were cheered at the prospect of not having to provide a dowry. They resolved to discuss it with the village priest, though they were sly enough to dress up their concerns behind the question of whether their blessed daughter was actually elected too divine to marry a mere farmer’s son.

Yet Marta’s skin resolved the issue in its own animated way. With her first period had also come fantasies. Thoughts about men (not the hideous, persecutory boys). Fancies about some of the farmers, working with sweated bodies out in the vineyards. She had no one she could confide these feelings in. No one to console her whether they were as natural as the ripening of grapes. But her treacherous skin told her. And thereby informed the rest of her village. Every time such a lascivious thought entered her head, her Port-stain would tumesce and throb. Radiating her thoughts like a balefire. The villagers didn’t catch on at first. they were just initially perplexed by this new encrypted development. They feared it might actually portend a contagion striking their vines. or a pestilence settling upon them and sucking the lifeblood from the precious fruit. But when their vines persisted unmolested, they peered harder at what Marta’s own blight might be signalling.

Of course it came about that it was their children who provided the first key. For they were in the habit of staring at her fixedly in a manner that the adults could not afford, seeing as they had wholly to succumb to the pulses demanded by Nature. The children however discerned that when Marta’s affliction struck, she was pointedly looking at some adult or other. And not just any adult, but always a male, usually pigmented himself by the exertion of his labours out in the field under the hot sun. They could not believe their findings and for once were careful not to shoot any premature bolt without rigorous evidence.

And in time they came to be certain of the empiricism of their senses. The mechanism of their discovery disseminating throughout the whole village wasn’t clear, but leak it did. Soon every inhabitant knew what her darkening shading portended. “Dirty thoughts”. “Immorality”. “Unclean and impure”. “Rude, lewd and disgusting”, even though they themselves  had their own similar thoughts, merely they were able to keep them hidden under their skin. They proceeded to subject Marta to check her hymen to ensure she hadn’t acted on her impulses. Women hurled invective every time their paths crossed, or they spat at her. While the men recoiled at the thought of her maculated face coming anywhere near them. Though contrary beasts that they were, they also felt slighted if they weren’t one of the objects of her desire beaconed across her flesh.

Less and less could Marta walk the village for the opprobrium cast upon her. The childish goading of her peers was nothing to that of the adults. “Polluted”. “Foul-minded”.  “Filthy, sordid mind always in the gutter”. “Indecent and sinful, her mother must be so ashamed”. “Profane and corrupt, her parents ought to be chastised for creating such an obscene creature”. “Don’t even look at her children, or you could be infected by the taint of her disease”. “She is the work of the devil”.

And so they hung her from a tree as a witch. Some said her Port-Wine stain throbbed and pulsed as she twitched and writhed in the noose, with pleasure. Their grapes blossomed on, though their colour was never quite as rich as previous generations.

 

HOAR MOUTH

Where two (or more) bodies are not gathered into sufficiently proximate space whereby they can fasten upon one another, then oral communication can imaginatively bridge the divide and generate the required mental friction. The brain is exquisitely tickled with a feather, by the stimulus of the words. Be it spoken down a phone, or typed into its text function (note to practitioners, do not abbreviate and self-bowdlerise txt sex words in order for their full effect to be realised. Everywhere else, such words are pockmarked & buboed by asterisks, therefore text sex must preserve the full impact).

But where two bodies ARE consonant, then language acquires a different status. If one of the sexual agonists is able to compose coherent, prolix sex colloquy (or obloquy), then they are probably not fully committed in the moment of the physicality. At the other end of the speculum, lie the bland blandishments of ‘sex talk’. The limited expressiveness our parents always told us was the sign of a poor vocabulary and to go clean our mouth out with carbolic. Those words we learned from a fairly early age to be charged with a certain primordial power for the reaction they could provoke. But in the bedroom, such impact is somewhat denuded, since the context demands that very transgressive meaning and draws their sting. They become hoarily conventional words within the setting of the sex arena and hence their poverty and paucity becomes apparent through repetition. The dirty words are the safe words anchoring our primal aggression.

There is a certain necessity for directional words, “up, down, faster, slower”. Then there are those directing the action, either actor supposedly improvising instructions to prompt their antagonist, such as “Fuck me “, “Suck Me”, “Choke me”, “Bite me”. But such instructions don’t just pertain to plotting the topography of the bodies in motion. These phrases themselves barely matter, much like a dog is said to infer the master/mistresses’ intent from the tone, rather than any comprehension of the word’s meaning. Such words establish naked status and power within the relationship. Erecting the geometry of “I” and “you” almost irrespective of the bodies at play.

In truth, words are downgraded, oft displaced by quarried non-lingual sounds from the depths of the nether regions and stomach. Having surrendered to the unreflective arpeggio of pinched, squeezed and stretched membranes and paying only a cursory doffing of the hat as it is propelled through the vocal chords. The sonorous squalls rent from our deepest marrow, say so much more than either a perfectly formed phrase or an eructed expletive. Fluid, but not fluent. Talking dirty, really, properly covered in scurf and mucus and blood and jism, is talking in sheared syllables. In phonemes that are stripped from their comfortable word sheath. A self-expressiveness that communicates in spite of its solipsistic self. A unique resounding that somehow sets up a resonance within the other body mining its nuggets. Talking dirty is truly inventing a new pidgin. It is an unlearning. Avoiding the regressive transgressive of the child’s naughty words. Talking dirty violates language. Or at least it ought to.

 

NOUGHTY BY NATURE

Gertie’s rude. Or so everybody else says. For Gertie, her dirt penetrates her as per the grain does of stone. Indelibly marking her. She is slag, incarnate, yet not the slag you persist in dubbing her. She is scoria from the volcano. She is seething, molten magma. She exposes herself to fresh sensations every day. Sexual sensations. Or at least she essays to, oftentimes snagged and sunk on the rocks of crabbed imaginations and cramped creativity of her recumbent partners.

How many does it take before she is categorised as “dirty”? FIve? Seven, as in one each night for a week? (But often she takes a man during the day as well. It is this walk-up foot traffic resounding on the stairs like the clack of an abacus that so boils the blood of her neighbours. They presume her to be taking money, when in fact she is only trying to derive free pleasure, that adulterated and clipped currency). Perhaps seventy-five partners a year? A hundred and seventy-Five? Three hundred and sixty-five (or sixty-six in leap years)? A nice, firm, peachy round thousand? What number could possibly trigger the soubriquet “nymphomaniac”? That six point nine on the ich lieber dichter Scale. Axiomatic of an excessive or abnormal sexual appetite, with no hankering for developing any of them into a full-blown relationship.

But then what is excessive-? back to the number thing again. What is abnormal? Deviating from a norm that is mystically laid down and from which everyone would secretly if not openly themselves like to deviate from. A norm is a behavioural, statistical thing, not an ironclad law. It is only the self-repressive fear that perpetuates this norm in the first place. Moreover, there lacks any male equivalence (quelle surprise). Well there is, there’s satyriasis, behaving like the goat, a barely wielded epithet conferred favourably when it is conferred at all upon the male of the species. Don Juanism. Series, scale, the arithmetical and statistical, cardinal numbers cannot lend themselves to the cardinal virtues of indivisible morality.

Dirt is swept under the carpet if our hoover suckers aren’t sufficiently puissant or lithe enough to get at it in the nooks, crannies and folds. Dirt leads to disease, or so the folk wisdom decrees. In fact being exposed as a child to a begrimed upbringing may actually lay down a more efficacious immune system, fitter for fighting off the foul foe. If it were all out in the open. If we didn’t seek to bury it. Of course the entire spectrum of microbes mean that germs are not solely borne on dirt. Bacteria, possibly, but not viruses. Viruses, much like ourselves, are gobbets of DNA which look to reproduce themselves. They merely cuckoo bodies in order to do so. To compensate our moral guardians have of course smeared viruses that are passed by physical contact as ‘dirty’, due to moral turpitude. A numbers calculation again, based on the premise the more partners you have, the greater the probability. Thus repatriating them back into the bosom of dirt’s mucky terrain.

Gertie is not “dirty” in this contagious sense. Not even in her appetites, as her condemners look on longingly at such prodigious hunger. Food of course is one of the main workaday loci of dirt and disease taboos. Wash your hands and all surfaces. Don’t use the same knife for raw and cooked meats. But Gertie doesn’t really give a Fanny’s Craddock for all that. Her concern today is with food play in sex. Not insertions, since that’s not limited to foodstuffs and she’s really had her fill of them over the years. And certainly not food-flavoured condoms, cos that’s just risible. No, she’s meaning for today to be about licking food off one another’s bodies.

Now I towel myself down, with the grease inhabiting the cracks and wrinkles in my skin, with the smear of fats making me squirm while I await the shower water to heat up. Though in truth these are surface concerns, mere irritants that only impress upon me because I am forced to return to the world. For back then, she truly devoured me. Peeling me down to the bone, filleting me and spitting out my gristle. I felt so far removed from “dirty”. I no longer give thought to any notion of sloppy seconds, for this was a sex act made up on the hoof. The cloven hoof. I feel cleaned out and cast afresh. Revivified and reanimated. Like an all-over body irrigation. If there is any dirt involved, it is ours and Gertie takes it unto herself as she sanctifies our being and immerses us in future possibility. Only not with her. She sets us on our way back out into the world, of purity and danger. Of extended horizons and the ectopic. She is the slag of our clinker smeared on to her. If she is dirty, it is only that she has to wash herself clean of us.

And for our humble part, I like to think we each are her daily lifebuoys by which she can reach out and cling to moor her own tidal emotion.

DICK TURPITUDE

It’s getting harder and harder. The mental vault of grainy images has withered on the vine. Repetitive referencing has voided clarity and crispness. Familiarity defocused the verisimilitude of the two dimensional, flush flesh. Dog-eared pages of crinkled plasma have lost their sheen. Prompted jump cuts between the mental recollection of frames. Bongo mags, TV on slo-mo or freeze frame and internet streaming, any and every home entertainment has been consumed and husked. Endless replication has denuded the power of the image to spark the brain, fire the jaded palate. En/hard core pithed and deseeded, but not in any satisfactory way.

His curled fingers glance his glans listlessly. To stroke without an imagistic filter is a mechanical act. Axis and spindle lacking lubrication. Rasping skin against skin, he is only likely to chafe it sore. He flicks at his member, trying to picture a woman’s tongue in place of his digit. The image breaks up into a melange of multi-coloured pixels inside his head. The vertical hold of his imagination goes south and his cock just stings momentarily at the scourge of his calluses.

He’s thrown back to grasping at the flickering reproduction fabricated by his mind. Its function like that of a car’s spark plug. It just needs to get the motor going. Ticking over. Pump priming. Something to stir the sump. Just to convey him over the hump in the road. Somehow he happens upon a configuration on the web he hasn’t encountered before. Ridiculous, cheesy, but something paraphractical speaks to a teasable synapse of his that fortunately mainlines into the limbic trunkroad. Past the burned out shells of emotion and appetites. More desert storm than shock and awe, but victims of a turkey shoot all the same. Oh for chemical weapons. Or the report of the real flesh and blood mass of a woman to justify that very popping of a pill.

He shuts his eyes. As he begins to manipulate his outward sex, some tremulous scintillations pass on the inside of his eyelids. But he knows they have nothing to do with excitation. More with friction and the rheumatic cranking into gear of attenuated sex circuitry.

As the screen siren played out her desultory show reel, he could afford to break off his engagement with her celluloid eyes and cellulite skin. For his hand had picked up the rhythm. Antiphonal with her ill-dubbed moans, he moved to petting his snake with feathery touch. She receded from his senses, though she remained remotely portending a happy outcome by cats cradling the secretion exuded over her.

His localised blood transfusion was communing with its brethren corpuscles. The penile pulse calling forth a bubbling within his hand and wrist as they fell into metrical harmony. Tempo timpani juddering within his ears. A hormonal catechism. Succussion percussion. His quickening bearing calling forth a matching acceleration of his squeezing. Grazing passing over into tugs and jerks, beyond his localised motor control. Utterly in thrall to the rhythmic drumming of the throb. Febrile scraping of the skin, leaving islands of scalped flesh. The discomfort overridden by the mounting elation, the brain’s analgesic hormones fitfully deployed so as to preserve its meagre high.

Then the fatal crossing over. All scanty pleasures of the sensations, the sparking behind the eyes, any lingering residual visual images or fleeting flashbacks to real flesh and blood interactions, obliterated by the urgent press. The push-me, pull me of wanting to sustain the tension like an endless guitar solo, fighting against the desperate need to reach the summit. The tipping point, the critical mass these days was always asserting itself, pushing notions of sustained relish aside in the anxiety that he might not brush across the finishing tape.

And so the chrysalis cleaved apart its silky goo. But if any butterfly emerged, it plunged straight to its extinction. A sticky white impromptu inkblot test on the quilt. Feeling flat. Leaving behind the shivered puparium, its scaly hide contracting into itself. A failed metamorphosis that neglected to yield transformative, fresh life. But only delivers a stain on the quilt. Dirty beast.

By Marc Nash

Slime

One day this pal of mine realizes he’s lonely. He’s never been great with women, you know, just kinda fumbles around em, but he works at this convenience store and sees tons of people all day every day, men and women and kids and new faces and faces he sees twice during a shift, so he starts to practice conversation with the women who come in. Nothing weird, just, Hi, how are you, how’s it going, what are you up to today, nice blouse; sometimes if they’d been coming for awhile and smiled enough he’d tell them they looked pretty. Just the usual conversational subjects, never being too personal. He was always careful, real careful, to keep the girls from thinking he was some kind of freak because that was his place of work, after all, and he had to keep it pleasant—at least, so the manager didn’t fire him.

Day in and day out he’s practicing this stuff, you know, when one day this chick walks in and you can just tell she thinks she’s hot shit, and maybe for some bumfuck country town she was but this is the city, baby, and all that eyeshadow and tight clothing and fake eyelashes, you see that stuff on every woman, every street corner, and it’s nothing new. But she’s cute, so he tries to talk to her—and what does she do?

She sneers at him, calls him a creep, and all because he asked her how her day was going. She drops her money on the counter and leaves, and he’s shocked. Too shocked to be pissed off. He just watches her go, big round ass wiggling in her jeans the whole way out the door, and doesn’t think too much about it because who knows, maybe she’s having a bad day, right? Only then he gets home, and he has a beer to help him sleep and he’s feeling a little horny so he starts jerking it like normal, whatever. Just part of the routine. But out of the blue while one hand is around his cock and the other is around his bottle he remembers this bleach-blonde bitch in her jeans that were so tight it was like she was begging him to vault the counter and fuck her right on the fucking floor of the Circle K, and then that’s all he can think about. That ass, and the way her lips curled up past her teeth as she called him a creep, crooked teeth against the most perfect pink tongue he’d ever seen, and oh, fuck, he’d never come harder in his life. It was like fireworks going off in his stomach. For a minute he thought he was blind, I mean, it was that great.

So he goes to bed after that, and then goes to work, and doesn’t think about her again. Goes home, jerks off, goes to bed,  goes to work, comes back, has a drink, takes care of business, goes to sleep, rolls into the store, drives back home, ends up draped over his toilet, looks after himself, bed. Same goddamn thing every fucking day, but one day when he’s at work here she is again, and this time it’s like she recognizes him because her green eyes get huge and then she won’t look at him, so maybe she was just having a bad day after all and was embarrassed about it, but two hours later this huge guy with gray hair like some kind of ex-marine bursts into the store like a motherfucking comet and shouts the whole time about, Why are you following my daughter, who do you think you are talking to my daughter or trying to look at my daughter; and,What the fuck is wrong with you, I’ll call the police next time I see your weedy ass, but I’ll pound your dick into the fucking dirt first. The whole time this guy’s face is just red as a whore’s lipstick.

Finally he leaves and my buddy’s manager comes up to him, saying, What the fuck was that; and my buddy can’t do anything but shrug and tell him, I don’t know, man, people are fucking crazy. So they talk about it, and finally both of them decide they won’t call the cops but they will if he comes back in there ever again, and they let it rest and the whole thing is forgotten the next day. Once or twice he sees her around town when he’s out driving but other than that, I mean, it’s not like he was stalking her, he didn’t know where she went to school or what she did for a part-time job, he didn’t care, he wasn’t interested. She was just some crazy bitch with nice tits and an overprotective Daddy, the same as a thousand other crazy bitches.

This is all well and good and my pal lives best he can working a shitty job with nothing to come home to but booze and his hand, but one day he’s taking a walk through suburbia after dark because he can’t sleep, and he can’t see in the dark, right, so he trips and falls right into a trashcan that some asshole left and the end of the driveway all night without thinking, and there’s all this old food and shit but there’s also some clothes, like some woman’s panties probably from some old bitch having one last fling with a pool boy before she’s got tumbleweeds rolling between her legs, and this is just too fucking much so he scribbles a note for them on the back of one of their receipts, all about how they need to secure their fucking garbage and keep it out of the street. This, he sticks to the underwear and then leaves on the doorstep. And hell, I can’t blame him. I like women as much as the next guy but goddamn. Nobody needs to find used underwear in anybody’s garbage, and I mean nobody.

For the next few weeks he does his usual thing, his sleep improves and he starts to shake the booze a little, and then one day after work he’s browsing around the Internet and my buddy finds one of those barely-legal teen porn sites, which, great. He starts admiring the pictures and he’s close to finished when there she is, Big Ass, the very same with the tight jeans and the creep and the mole on the inside of her thigh that he didn’t know about until he saw those pictures and that’s sure as fuck not the boyfriend he saw her walking with the past few weeks, the slut, and just then he comes so hard that it ends up all over his keyboard.

He’s kind of amazed, so after he cleans up he looks harder, and shit, he was right, look at that. Every picture, those big lips and too much eye makeup, even more than she had on when she came in to get her sodas. He still has to prove it to himself, though, so he prints the pictures out and keeps them in a stack, and the next time he sees her around town he keeps her face in mind, comes home, checks the pictures one last time and yeah, yeah it’s her.

Does he get excited? Of course not, he’s revolted. This bitch is barely eighteen with a crazy father, and besides this slut called him a creep and now she’s doing porn. So he couldn’t really think sex when he looked at her, he just thought how cute she was but how much of a bitch she was and what a cunt, she didn’t know anything about him, he was just a clerk to her and she was some whore doing porn, so he scribbled the word all over her photos like a note to himself, cock-sucking whore slut cunt bitch cum-guzzler on and on and on and—it’s not that he was attracted to her or anything, mind you—he ended up feeling that sting in his pants, so he took care of it and it just so happened he was sitting there with her picture in his hand; it had nothing to do with her, or the fact that the image was going to end up splattered when he was done. None of that had to do with anything, that was just what happened. All a matter of circumstance.

After he finds these porn pictures, he finds more pictures, maybe shit she’s posted on the Internet for friends, it’s not like he knows, though why she would post pictures from such distances and shitty angles of her getting out of cars and into pools and walking out of a house was beyond him, but this was the twenty-first century, people take photos of weird, sad shit because they want attention like this bitch did, but who the hell knows what type of person is out there and able to look at this stuff, so he does the thing any decent person would do and finds some profile of hers on the Internet and sends her a link to the pictures to make sure she knows that anybody can see this.

Finally this one night he’s getting off his shift at the store and on his way to the car, when there’s this noise. He looks, and he’s just—shocked. I mean, jaw-open-shocked because lo and behold, who’s standing there? Standing there and crying, no less? So she grabs him and says, please, just please stop, please don’t tell Dad about the photos, he’ll throw me out, I was just having fun and trying to earn money please don’t do this to me, do whatever you want with me but please just stop following me and digging through our garbage and taking pictures, please.

Of course he says, Okay. Because when some crazy bitch walks up to you saying shit like that, what the fuck else can you do? Not his fault she was such a slut, right? I mean, it’s not like he’s a creep or sick or weird or anything. That’s just what anybody would do. Hell, I know I would.

By Magda Sullivan

The ChippingCamdenVajazzling Collective

 

The women all noticed Jacqui’s smile. It was the kind of smile that made them nod inside and wink to each other like they were saying “we know what this is about and we know the men don’t even see it.” Like those random Facebook updates – colours, numbers, things that seem to make no sense but are answers to questions slipped under virtual desks between groups of virtual female friends. Questions like “what colour bra are you wearing? Post it and don’t tell any men what it means.”

In short, they all knew that Jacqui had started having more and better orgasms than she had been a couple of weeks ago but they had no idea as to the why and the how.

That would have to wait several more weeks till business trips and a child recovering from chicken pox and tickets going on sale for a talk by Ian McEwan on a book he might be writing that brought together the twin zeitgeists of banking and landfill coincided to plant Jacquie between Caroline and Samantha in the bookstore coffee shop.

Smiles and winks and eyebrows sped in Mexican standoffs and if Mexican standoffs can produce crossfire, Jacqui was caught in it until she ran out of grasshopper pie to chew to avoid talking and came out with it.

“I’ve started going to see this girl. I say girl but she must be twenty five.” And other qualifiers that stand in in such circumstances for um and er and general dithering.

“Girl!” said Caroline, blinking hard and rummaging tea round the inside of her mouth whilst she processed the word.

“Girl?” asked Samantha, leaning in for more.

“No, not like that.”

No dithering. The kind of thick silence that categorically places a prohibition on dithering.

“She.”

They both leaned in together.

“It’s like a beauty treatment.”

Closer.

“She waxes me. Down there.”

Closer. They’d heard about that. Rather, they’d read about it. In magazines their husbands thought only had features on handbags and curtains and the latest colours from Farrow and Ball. It was another of those things they all knew they all did but this was the first time they’d actually heard anyone say,

“A full Brazilian.”

The word was still plumping cushions and making itself at home when Jacqui continued,

“And then she sticks these little rhinestones on. In patterns. Tasteful patterns. Like William Morris patterns.”

A different silence this time. The kind of silence brains make when a new guest is taking up residence and they can’t decide whether the company is welcome or not.

Eventually Samantha chipped in, “What was the girl’s name?”

“So,” said Sveta.

“So,” said Samantha. “How does this work?”

“You tell me what you want, I do what you want,” said Sveta.

Another of those pauses. How to describe what she wanted. To have a full wax in her most intimate parts and be bejewelled with abstractly-arranged fake gemstones? To have David look at her the way he had done twenty years earlier. Had he actually looked at her like that? Was that just a lie she told herself to justify two decades of routine? The smile. That’s what she wanted. And whatever it meant.

“I’d like what you did for Jacqui.”

“Ah.” Sveta’s face opened into a smile and her body became expansive and loose. “Men, eh? Pussy this and pussy that but offer them a real cunt and they don’t want to know.”

Samantha felt herself blush instinctively. But behind the instinct a part of her was nodding along inside.

“So we open our box of tricks.”

This time the three looks that hovered over the three skinny lattes had a decidedly different dynamic. The question between Samantha and Jacqui had become tacit complicity.

Caroline looked between them. There’s something about shared secrets that builds envy quicker than a workforce on double time. And those smiles. The implications. Caroline could feel herself start to ache and twitch at the possibilities they implied. Thirty years of hurdles, the struts and joists of propriety she had been building since puberty, the clothes that enabled her to nestle snugly in any of Chipping Camden’s social strata, all of a sudden had become a fence keeping her out of where she wanted to be.

“Jacqui and Samantha.” Her first words.

“Ah,” said Sveta effusively. “I know exactly how to help you. Men. They want pussy. But they don’t want your pussy. They don’t want the cunt lying there in front of them. Throbbing for them. Wet for them. Hungry for them. They want the pussy they see on DVD. Nice clean shaved pussy. The cunt they see on internet, isn’t it?”

Three steaming double espressos gave up their heat and their smell to the bookshop air. Heat and scent. The three looks that passed around and around the table also spoke of heat and scent.

And so did the words.

Samantha and Caroline heard the news two days later. The night before Jacqui’s husband Bill had complained of chest pains. He had woken in the night, screaming, and minutes later he was dead. The three of them sat, holding each others’ hands, in a different kind of silence again. A sad but comfortable silence. Nothing needed saying because when you had what they had everything flowed without words.

It was like fate had decided their new solidarity should run its fullest course, Caroline thought as she watched her husband’s coffin lowered into the grave a month later, two weeks after they’d watched David go up in flames.

“I need coffee,” said Samantha.

“I need an orgasm,” said Caroline.

“Me too,” said Jacqui.

“Now that you mention it,” said Samantha.

They sat in black in the bookstore sipping Americanos with their eyes closed and their thoughts elsewhere.

Sveta pulled her Fiat 500 up outside the bookstore and watched the ladies through the window. She was all packed-up and it was time to move on. She had everything she needed right there with her. Everything she needed to give ladies anywhere exactly what they were looking for. Waxes and strips and ointments and glues and tubs filled with a whole spectrum of rhinestones. And the smaller pot in the glovebox. The one full of gemstones with the slow release membrane and the gel inside that was poisonous when regularly ingested orally.

By Dan Holloway

Dirty Books

 

After his wife chucked him out for shagging the waitress from the American-style diner, Bruce missed his books. He’d spent every night for the last twenty-odd years sitting among them, absorbing the smell of the ageing paper, casting admiring glances at the colourful spines he’d arranged like a Pantone flip chart, lifting them down off the shelf and gently rubbing his thumb over their gaudy covers, over the girls and guns.

 

When they first married, Angie didn’t mind his collection of sexy spy thrillers and smutty crime novels; she was just pleased he had a hobby, not like her friends’ boring husbands. By the point he was stood in the street with torn pages flapping around his feet, he realised her enchantment had waned somewhat. She couldn’t stand them in the house any more: Bruce or his books. They had to go. Bruce was first out, then the cheap paperbacks, which she started stacking in the porch one by one. There were a lot to pile up and it took a long time.

 

The books stood outside for weeks, getting wet, getting grubby, getting stolen. Eventually, Angie told Bruce to come and pick them up. She could barely open the front door without sending the towers toppling. It took him all day to load them into his cavernous family estate then all evening to unload them into his tiny bachelor flat. By the time they were installed in their new home, Bruce was exhausted. But having them near him again was exhilarating and, ecstatic to be reunited with his treasures, he saw in the dawn lovingly dusting them down and cleaning them up. Despite what Angie had yelled when she lobbed volumes and vitriol at him on the pavement, he’d never been a fan of dirty books.

by Sarah-Clare Conlon