The Marbled Swarm (15 page)

Nowadays, these books are only valued for their frilly raunch by boys too nice to hack the monitoring software off their pantywaist computers, and when the books are spoken of with multisyllables, it usually involves a backward compliment about their porn’s off-putting gussiness, which certain brainiacs find interestingly camp.

Obviously, when I discuss these shallow novels, it’s a roundabout self-portrait, and when I parse their readership, I speak obliquely of the Swedes as well as every ex for whom I’ve seemed to guarantee an orgasm so rash they might have gotten pregnant through their hands had I not been there to swallow it.

These invading and intersecting thoughts or insecurities or revisions or what have you, and how they gnarl and loop my thinking, and how that coarsens my appearance, and how this worries me, are what I have instead of sex when guys are having sex with how I look, and that’s all I have to show you in return, which is largely why I haven’t.

This is why I crawl in beds mythologized, and why I’m forcibly removed from them, then slump in taxis crumpling paper scraps not scribbled with new boyfriends’ numbers and addresses but inscribed with book titles like
Outliving Your Depression
or referrals to their friends who also happen to be psychiatrists.

So, once the Swedes had fucked and eaten out and squatted on my face until its ornaments were worn away and my responses seemed as automated as a cuckoo clock’s . . . when the standard English praise I had elicited gave way to Swedish terms I didn’t understand and which they shouted so consistently it almost seemed like they were beating me to death . . . once the expression in my eyes lost its parenthetical mystique and started giving updates on the current level of my general agreement . . . once I wasn’t worth the extra effort to distinguish from the other sluts and bitches they’d called sluts and bitches . . . when I was just the hands and knees on which a quote-unquote tight ass was placed at a convenient height and, to hear them, thanks to them . . . when they closed their eyes and started snoring more than breathing, and caromed off me like sleepwalkers who were bumping into walls . . .

Suddenly, their bed was mine, and I was someone they’d seen freaking out beneath the Eiffel Tower and safeguarded home out of guilt or decency. When my tears and howls were willing, I could barely see them, hastily half dressed, glassy-eyed, and nodding to the violent rhythm of my outburst.

What I confessed, to no avail since, between their erstwhile grasp of English and the tyrannical French accent that scrawls my erstwhile grasp of English, I might as well have been a suicide bomber using beatbox vocal tricks to imitate the sound of an explosion, was the horrifyingly uncomplicated truth.

It was a truth so honest and completely unironic that even I, who presumably believed myself, didn’t understand its point, or why this authenticity had shown up now when I felt least in need of rescuing, or how it wound up in my mouth, or why my mouth was such a bullhorn, or where it had been hiding from the words I’d always used to talk my way around it.

I’ve failed the marbled swarm as I semi-understand its rules and premise, and, although you’ll never know the difference, barring errors that weren’t meant as an insidious direction, there is nowhere deeper or more intricately stifled by my story than this hotel room, and I’m out of means to keep you waiting for the secret that involved my sleight of hand unless you think a very frightened thirteen-year-old boy who looks vaguely like Pierre Clémenti seems magical or promising enough.

Acknowledgments

Dennis Cooper is very grateful to Yury Smirnov, Gisele Vienne, Joel Westendorf, Ira Silverberg, Michael Signorelli, Carrie Kania, Justin Dodd, Paul Otachovsky-Laurens, Emmelene Landon, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, and Chrystel Dozias.

Also by Dennis Cooper

Closer

Frisk

Wrong

Try

The Dream Police

Guide

Period

My Loose Thread

The Sluts

God Jr.

The Weaklings

Ugly Man

Smothered in Hugs

About the Author

Dennis Cooper
is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels:
Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide,
and
Period
. His other works include
My Loose Thread
;
The Sluts
, winner of France's Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award;
God Jr.
;
Wrong
;
The Dream Police
; and
Ugly Man
. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris.

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