Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (4 page)

I pulled Aidan out of the karaoke room, into the hall, the fluo- rescent lights flickering weakly in time to the generators’ strain. I pulled him down the hall. I pulled him to where the building broke away into darkness, the chaotic Floridian night beyond. Na- ture had torn human effort away, restoring the primacy of the swamp, the mosquito, everything that slithered at the bottom of the dark night.
Erica.
He dug the heels of his shitkickers into the threadbare carpet. Where many men before him had apparently dug their own heels, embarrassed to sing a song or fuck a whore.
It’s cool,
I insisted.
Come On. What Do You Care. You’ll Be Doing Worse Than This Soon.
Together we jumped from the hole in the building. The weeds rose cool and sharp up my legs. Before us might as well have been the void, so dark it was, like the storm had blown the very world away. Angela’s voice warbled out, sweet, the struggle in her throat.
I hope we live to tell the tale. I hope we live to tell the tale.
Aidan’s body was not the mystery. Nothing about a body was a mystery, a body was nothing if not blatant, ob- vious. My shorts were yanked down, a denim puddle in the weeds,

one sneakered foot free, lifted, making a path for Aidan to come in. I’m that girl, fucking the boy who is going off to war. What am I trying to give to him, my ass raw against the side of the karaoke shack? I’m that girl telling the boy,
Pull Out Okay, I Mean It,
like a rabbit-hole role play I fell into, turned inside out. In the role-play version,
I
would be that boy going off to war, and some robust bubble of girl wrapped around me would ask,
Pull Out Okay I Mean It,
her voice a teasy breeze in my ear. Aidan slammed into me, and I thought about the first dildo ever made, for a man whose cock got blown off in war. I reached down and felt the crepey weirdness of his balls. Weird, but not a mystery. Aidan’s head was buried in my hair, and he groaned and thrust back from me to come into the weeds.
Thank You.
I thought about the safe-sex talk I’d given to pregnant Angela. Did I think my life wasn’t real? What was it, then? A mystery, a bad idea. My cunt hummed like a generator. I knew that tonight I would jerk off to some fantasy version of what had just happened. In the fantasy version, Aidan would already have his uniform, have his rifle. In the fantasy ver- sion, Hank and Marcus would be there, too, and I’d reach out for a handful of Angela. I hated my brain. It was fine in San Francisco, delightfully perverted, but out here in Floridian America, I felt like just another creep. A stealth creep, a snob. I was afraid to bend down and lift my shorts from the weeds in case I touched a snake or Aidan’s sperm, but I couldn’t ask Aidan to do it for me and be that girl, afraid of snakes and sperm. I kicked my leg out and snagged my clothes, tugged them on. I put my hands on Aidan’s body. There was his chest, hard; there his ass, tucked back into the sag of his jeans. Could I make him sympathetic in a story? Was it enough that he had a body and it was not mysterious, and should

not be killed or kill another.
What Will You Miss?
I asked him as he dug in his pocket for a cigarette.
Music,
he answered.
I’ll Burn You CDs,
I said, wondering if this was even true. I would surely want to forget all about this the minute I returned to California. Aidan was looking at me, confused, then laughing.

I thought you meant if I died, what would I miss.
He laughed a cloud of smoke into the swampy air. His laugh was a mystery.
I thought about the music from earth, like there’d be a big karaoke parlor full of dead people in heaven, singing all their old favorite songs, and I’d sing Credence.

They had Credence in the laminated book inside the little room. Angela’s voice was silent. I was afraid of going back, that we’d find her having sex with Hank and Marcus or else the three of them dead from diesel fumes. Aidan crawled back up inside the broken building, the floor splintering out beneath his boot. He of- fered me his hand, that part of his body. I grabbed it.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BUSH
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ADMINISTRATION

MISTRESS MORGANA

Mistress Morgana Maye San Francisco, California

The Bush Administration 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Bush Administration:

My name is Morgana Maye, and I’m a small business owner living and working in San Francisco. I appreciate that your administration strives to “create an environment where entrepreneurs can flourish,” but I’m writing today because, despite the president’s assertion that small business is “the heart of the American economy,” your agenda has adversely affected my business as a professional dominatrix. I’ve examined my business plan, my advertising, and the trend toward neoconservative sex negativity, but I keep coming back to the same gut feeling: you’re doing my job better than I can.

If wartime is good for prostitutes and lap dancers, it’s hell on dominatrices. The professional dominant makes her money for the same reason disaster movies make millions: people love to be subjected to their greatest fears while remaining realistically safe. Production studios understand this. They will delay the release of movies about terrorist plots or natural disasters when such events have actually occurred. They know there is something in the consumer conscience that feels guilty about being entertained by misery and destruction.

My work deals with the sexual fantasy of disempowerment. Fantasy is a tricky artifice. It relies, in part, on the assurance of impossibility. The same fantastical impulse that draws millions into movie theaters to watch zombies destroy the world brings men into my dungeon where they can enact a fantasy of their utter destruction without any real danger of being harmed. It’s cathartic, it’s entertaining, it cuts through all the bourgeois comfort of being white and male and landed, without actually subverting any of the comforts of being white and male and landed.

I explain all of this to you because over the past seven years your administration has successfully organized what has to be longest non-consensual public edge play scene in recent history. I look at your capacity to manufacture fear, degradation, torture, and absolute powerlessness, and I can’t top that. Your current

policy of world domination is so excessive, it dwarves any attempt by an independent contractor, like myself, to do so on a more person-by-person basis. I have a better international travel record than Mr. Bush, a stronger right arm than Mr. Rumsfeld, and a better rack than Ms. Rice, but I don’t have anything close to your operating budget, and I adhere to a code of ethics and social responsibility that prevents me from competing with you on any sort of real level. I was at the top of my field, a seasoned sadist and skilled edge player with more than a decade of experience, yet over the past seven years your campaign has rendered me a Pollyanna by comparison. You are bad for my corporate image, and are disenfranchizing me from the American Dream of profitable small business ownership.

It’s not just that you’re marketing yourself as a bigger, badder top. You’re taking the fantasy out of torture and domination and making it real, which is triggering that annoying consumer conscience and driving away my clients. The week the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke and pictures of naked, bound, hooded men were splashed on the cover of every magazine and on every newscast the world over, I had two extended sessions booked, consisting of twelve hours of heavy electro-genitorture, full sensory deprivation, and humiliating interrogation. One client canceled outright, saying it just didn’t feel right and that he was going to reexamine why he was “into all this stuff” anyway; the other asked if I could conduct the session in any room other than the dungeon, perhaps a kitchen were he could where a frilly dress and wash my floor, and just feel “safe” for a few hours.

Your policies have stripped the sexiness out of being inescapably imprisoned for no reason and with no due process. In fact, the only subgroup of my clientele that has increased over the past seven years have been adult babies. You’ve reduced the world to a place where people just want to cuddle and hear a bedtime story. This is hardly an apt use of my skills or equipment, and certainly not a broad enough clientele to make my house payment.

And if out-domming me and driving away my clients isn’t enough of a complaint, I’d like to point out that the professional dominant bases her sessions on the doctrine of preemptive strike. This whole policy of “I’m going to punish you before you’ve been bad” is so my shtick. I was employing preemptive strike before Mr. Bush’s daddy was in office the first time around, I have a published precedent. If shticks were copyright protected, I’d sue and retire to the Bahamas on my settlement.

I’m not asking for a lot, but as a taxpayer and an American, I have a couple of requests. You could stop advertising, for one thing. Previous administrations did a much better job of keeping their agenda for world domination on the downlow.

Besides, tops that tout themselves as ruthlessly as you do, especially in the face of bad reviews, always strike me as distastefully insecure. And since it’s doubtful in

this era of expanded federal power that you’d consider some measure of self- imposed antitrust policy, how about a subsidy, or federal grant to compensate me for profits lost due to unfair government competition? At last count, your administration was spending $255 million dollars a day in Iraq. That comes out to about $10.6 million dollars per hour, or $177,000 per minute. For the cost of about five minutes of your time in Iraq I could pay off my mortgage and have a nice little nest egg for myself. I’ll get out of the business and leave your number on my voicemail as a referral for my clients.

Respectfully yours,

TAMAR’S PRAYERS
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AVITAL GAD - CYKMAN

Tamar’s sighs are well known. From her home to the street
downstairs, the limits of her neighborhood, and to the country borders, men know it’s time for a prayer.

Every evening, Tamar tries another kind. She invents a new prayer. Whisky helps. She may stand up, sit down, or go down on all four. She does what seems fit, is here to serve her country. She would like to serve herself, her brothers, the others as well, but how, she is not sure.

This evening, Tamar goes down on all four. She prepares to pray for peace, for the safety of her household, for the stop of killing. The war has been declared once, twice, too many times. The new trick, a mutual suicide, is simpler than self-explosion or

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kamikaze. Preferences aside, War is so widespread among men, it’s probably popular. Tamar is afraid it may hurt.

She is on all four, reclining by the window, looking at the public downstairs. The soldiers on both sides hang out. Perhaps there is a truce. But the rivalry is old. They pretend they are whores. They expose their bodies: “Here is the flesh you desire,” they tease one another. “This is the heart you’d like to hang as a flag.” She can’t take her eyes from the whores buying and selling their bodies. They are mostly men, naked men with men, but some are naked women, so there are women with other women, and also men with women and women with men. Fresh flesh, young, soft and desired. She isn’t sure who are the Brothers and who are the Others.

Her brothers are a wild species. Brothers are born from many mothers and said to be the sons of one father. The others are said to be bastards. Others are sons of many men and one married woman.