Lingua

The Porn Peddler

2009-05-01T18:07:23Z

A story about art and what it all means.

"Lex" woke up on the floor. Her mouth was dry, her boxer-briefs felt crusty and gross. She was still wearing her sweatshirt, and like five layers of clothing under that. She had been awakened by the heat and stench of her own body.

The room was dim, but she could see through the window that it was reasonably late in the day. The window had Venetian blinds. The carpet was brown. Next to her was a backpack, a bus schedule, a copy of The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that she had been trying to read, and a porn magazine with instructions for making burritos written on the back.

It was the house from the party she went to yesterday. She had smoked marijuana and fallen asleep on the floor. She could hear someone banging shit around in the kitchen. She wondered if she could get to the bathroom without being seen by whoever it was.

Lex wrestled with her unconscious will to death. She got up. As a result, she could see over the counter. Sure enough, there was a dude in the kitchen. He appeared to be putting dishes away. He left the many plates, bowls, and paper towels with food already on them well enough alone, however. A clock on the microwave said it was almost three.

"Hey, uh, good morning or something," said Lex to the guy.

The guy turned around. He was just a late-twenties white guy with glasses and a beard.

"Uh, hey there," said Lex. "I was gonna ask if there was a bathroom here I could use, but I guess I don't need to, right? I'd better get going if I'm gonna start looking for a job today. I got fired from my old job like a month ago," she explained.

The guy picked at his beard.

"Do what you want," he said.

"Oh," said Lex, flustered.

Lex noticed he actually had nice European features under that stupid sloppy beard. A lot of people did, Lex realized. Maybe that's what Rousseau looked like, she thought, except with no beard and a wig probably. Lex wondered about other people's personalities the way a layperson might read astrology, and wonder about the stars.

The guy went back to the shuffling around in the kitchen.

"Well, then I'm off," Lex told him. She put the bus schedule and the copy of Confessions into her backpack. She looked at the porn magazine. With bemused dismay, she remembered the events of last night.

At a certain point in the evening, they had gone to either Eric or Jeffy's room to smoke marijuana. Among all the crap on the floor, Lex's eye had been drawn instinctively--as would anyone's--to the bright lurid cover with the unreadable name, obscured by two topless women with prominent, shiny, gumdrop-shaped breasts that leaped right off the page and into your face. It was Club magazine. Whoever's room this was had two or three issues lying around.

"Hey, look at that!" Lex had said, after clearing a place for herself close to the door. She picked up one of the issues of Club.

Lex looked at Maureen. Maureen had cleared a place for herself against the bed, next to Eric, some guy who lived here. She was a full-figured young woman with red, glossy shoulder-length hair and dull, pale skin that probably had to have lotion applied to it on a regular basis.

"My god, just look at this incredible--artifact!" Lex continued excitedly. She was encouraged by the look of lively interest in Maureen's Prussian blue eyes, directed at her. Lex pointed at the two thong-clad models on the cover.

"Ha, ha," said Maureen.

"Heh, heh," said Jeffy's girlfriend, Katie or something. She was sitting on Jeffy's legs the bed.

"The girl on the right looks like Maureen," said Eric. "She has the same hair."

"God! Shut up!" laughed Maureen, flipping her hair.

Jeffy didn't say anything because he was smoking from the pipe. Jeffy was the younger manager (not the one who fired her) of the coffee shop where Lex used to work.

Lex struggled to express what she meant.

"No," Lex cried. "Well, I mean--yes--maybe she kind of does have the same hair," she admitted, looking at the magazine again and at Maureen. "But that is only because her hair actually has the same degree of unreality as this image. I mean, I used to think porn was so forbidden and exciting, but now? Well, let me tell you, I'm a pretty decent judge of female sexual attractiveness"--she looked at Maureen--"but I find this image to be pretty much the opposite of sexual, just because of how stridently it refers to sex. Maybe that's why I find porn so fascinating, artistically―precisely because of its remoteness from physical desire! Contemporary porn is Platonic, ascetic--pure."

"Wow, I know what you mean," laughed Maureen. "Does anyone find these women attractive?"

She prodded Eric in the ribs--a tall, thin, sporty, leathery sort of dude with cutoff shorts and a good smile.

"It's not about the women," said Jeffy, above her. "It's about lusting after what you can't have." He looked lazily under his girlfriend's shirt.

"Hey!" said the girlfriend. She passed Eric the pipe.

Eric laughed.

"Well, I don't know about that," he countered. "I mean, yeah, I used to jack off to porn all the time. What can I say? I was a deprived young man."

Everyone laughed.

"Then I discovered most porn can't even fucking begin to compare to the real thing," Eric expostulated triumphantly. "Fucking, that is."

Anticipating objections from the girls, Eric quickly explained: "Note that I say 'fucking' to connote all sex acts, not some stupid-ass euphemism. 'Making love'? Please. Fucking is dirty. But it's a good dirty. It doesn't have to be degrading, that's what people who don't really enjoy--well, fucking--don't understand."

"Uh, that's a valid concern," said Lex. "But what about the neutral, descriptive term "having sex'?"

"'Having sex,'" Eric mocked. "OK. I am having sex, you are having sex, we are having sex. Come on"--he looked at Lex--"are you a lesbian, or are you asexual?"

"I'm like Rousseau," Lex said.

"What?" said Eric.

"Fucking," said Jeffy's girlfriend, smiling lewdly.

"Fucking," said Maureen, smiling thoughtfully.

Maureen took a drag from the pipe.

Watching her, Lex thought about riding the bus every day when she lived in Los Angeles. There was a billboard for "Law and Order" she used to see all the time that always made her wish that she had a girlfriend. One of those girls who used to have major family/emotional problems in adolescence but then got her act together, went to college, and got a good job. A girlfriend who would buy entire seasons of "Law and Order" for them to watch in a high-quality format, and talk to Lex about how "addicted" she was to its hard-hitting, impartial accounts of hardworking city officials. She would make Lex watch the episodes with her after work under a big puffy blanket that smelled like girly shampoo, in a house or apartment that had hardwood floors, and a refrigerator full of good groceries. Now that was pornography, Lex thought. She smiled to herself at this irony.

Unfortunately, as she was smiling, she saw Eric start to massage Maureen, the object of Lex's pornographic desire. At the same time, Maureen passed the pipe to Lex. Not knowing what else to do, Lex proceeded to take a huge hit, inhaling somewhat more than the others. She coughed and coughed. She was something of a "pot lightweight."

All too quickly, Lex felt herself becoming distant from what was happening. She started having trouble following conversations. The complex, witty sentences she would have liked to use to describe her strange, subtle point of view to the others fell apart just as she was about to say them. Inwardly, Lex compared her situation to that of a brain-damaged servant, trying to impress his masters by cooking an elaborate meal whose preparation went far beyond his meager abilities to read, remember, and follow directions. She wondered what would happen if she actually cooked a meal for everyone right now.

"Uh, is there a computer here I can use real quick," she asked.

"Huh? Uh, what for?"

"I believe that I have 'the munchies.'" Lex made quotation marks with her fingers. "I need to look up burrito recipes on the internet and prepare them right in your kitchen."

"Ha, ha--you don't need a recipe to make burritos."

However, Lex did. After a trying period of figuring out the internet connection, she finally found a site of simple recipes for people under the influence of marijuana. With cheeky, knowing humor, the site boasted that all of the meals it listed could be prepared within minutes "right in your dorm kitchen."

Using the back of the same issue of Club magazine that she still held in her hand, Lex wrote down the instructions for how to make vegetarian burritos. She wasn't a vegetarian but she thought it would be easier. She went into the deserted kitchen. Most people were still drinking outside. Many hours later, hours that included a trip to a nearby 7/11, issue of Club in hand, Lex managed to create five or six enormous, more-or-less intact, perfectly edible burritos that contained beans, rice, vegetables, sour cream, and cheese.

Feeling somewhat more coherent, and accomplished, Lex returned to the room with her burritos piled high on a plate. She stepped inside, however, only to find that Jeffy and his girlfriend were gone; Eric and Maureen were having sex on the bed with the lights were still on. Their bodies had that sordid, rough, realistic look of European porn. Lex quickly exited the room. When she'd been talking about the abstractness and asceticism of contemporary porn, she had forgotten about the phenomenon of European porn.

Lex had fallen asleep on the floor of the abandoned living room, trying to summon the energy to discreetly masturbate to Club. Now, as she was getting ready to leave, she was debating whether or not to put the magazine into her backpack. Would the dude in the kitchen notice if she just took it? She thought she could use those burritos instructions, if nothing else.

"If I could just take this, uh, porn mag with me," she said.

She walked in the blinding sunlight, thinking about how she would make burritos for herself tonight. She thought maybe she could also stop by the laundromat on the way home, the one with the cheap Galaga machine.

Upon emerging from the residential neighborhood onto the vast, smog-covered plane of Burnet Road, however, Lex realized she didn't have the money for Galaga, burritos, or really, anything other than rent. She couldn't even take the bus. She'd spent it all at the 7/11 last night, on burrito ingredients.

Lex stood on a strip of dead grass at the intersection of Burnet and Romeria Drive. There was nothing but the blue sky above, pavement and stores and fields of dead grass below. To her surprise, for the first time that day, Lex actually felt relaxed. She thought about what she should do.

She could walk home. She could go back to the house and ask for her partially eaten burritos back. She could reply to romantic classified ads. She could ask her parents for money.

Lex rolled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt. It was a hot, sunny day. She was no one's servant now. She wasn't going to do any of those things.

Lex stared at the field of dead grass on the other side of the busy thoroughfare. Suddenly, she saw groups of children start to appear on the grass. There were many small clusters of fat, homely children in oversized white t-shirts and blue jeans. There were a couple of bigger groups of athletic, handsome children in black skater clothes (on the boys) and revealing tank tops (on the girls).

The girls in tank tops moved like they were part of a good, busy world of homework and friends. The boys in skater clothes moved with such underlying energy and power in their perpetually flexed backs and slightly too-large limbs, that it took Lex's breath away.

Lex realized that she was standing in front of a middle school, and that classes had just ended for the day.

Lex thought about her own middle school days. They were terrible. She didn't have her name back then. She didn't have her personality. The only thing she had was the internet, which had still been new at the time. Lex's mom had shown her daughter how to make a web page, and Lex used to pretend to be a normal middle school girl to kids in England, or at least people who claimed to be kids in England.

Then, the whole internet porn controversy came out, and Lex's mom started monitoring her daughter's internet use. There'd been a huge fight. Lex remembered how badly she'd wanted to look at porn, how badly she wanted the knowledge that would have, for once, put her above her peers.

In middle school, Lex would have paid anything for porn. She would have paid anything for just one photograph or obscene story. It was depressing how little that stuff was worth to her now.

Suddenly, Lex struck her own forehead at the obviousness of the idea.

She looked in her backpack. The issue of Club was still there. She took it out, ripping off the back cover with the burrito instructions. Soon, she'd have more than enough money for those burritos, she thought. Lex sat on the strip of dead grass and tore page after page from the magazine. She worked quickly yet carefully, trying not to tear into any images or text. When she was done, Lex had a sheaf of loose pornographic pages in her hand.

Lex looked across the street at the school. The clusters of children had diffused and moved closer, as though cooperating with her plan. A group of homely children were standing around at the bus stop, not twenty feet from her, playing with portable electronics or staring into space or something. Just behind them, on the edge of school property, a group of handsome children were throwing a ball aggressively.

Lex strode past the homely children. She walked through the gate in the chanlink fence separating the school from the street. She narrowly avoided a strapping boy who had been racing to throw a backpack at one of his friends.

Standing there, Lex put the hood of her sweatshirt up. She had the idea that this look was more likely to intimidate or impress the kids. Maybe they would mistake her for an older boy, she thought, or part of a gang. She tried not to overthink it. She didn't want to give herself time to succumb to "stage fright."

"Porn for sale!" Lex cried at last, lifting her sheaf of porn pages. "That's right--I have a stack of genuine adult publications for sale, right here in my hands! Come one, come all, to purchase some of this fantastic porn!"

The kids looked up from their game of sex and aggression.

"What the fuck," said a boy with big horsey teeth and the ugly, long surfer/emo hair that seemingly every suburban 8th grade boy had that year.

"Pornographic images and stories!" Lex yelled in explanation. "Scenes of hardcore fucking! None of this 'making love' bullshit." She addressed the boy with horsey teeth specifically: "You can see girls with enormous tits, who have no shame."

"Gross," said a dark, slim girl, and made a disgusted face.

"What the fuck, is that actual porn?" said the blond boy who was holding her hand.

"A page is only two dollars," Lex told the kids starting to gather around her. "Think about that! How much did your parents have to give you for that new Playstation, huh?!"

She waved the sheaf in front of individual kids' faces to show them it was actual porn.

"Ugh."

"Fucking gross!"

"It's actual porn!"

"He doesn't go to this school!"

"I can't tell if it's a boy or girl!"

"Give me that!" yelled the first boy, finally, the one with the horsey teeth. He was another version of Eric from last night. "We can show this to Mr. Celeste," he crowed. He grabbed at the sheaf of porn with a swift, athletic, football-throwing arm.

Lex pulled the porn towards her body in alarm. Just in time: the kid only managed to tear off the top of the first page.

"Don't, uh--don't touch the merchandise," cried Lex. This wasn't what she expected at all.

"I'm serious!" yelled the boy with the horsey teeth. "I'm getting Mr. Celeste!" He started to trot across the field on his slim, powerful legs, clutching at the senseless pastiche of faces and breasts in his hands.

"You guys tackle him," he yelled when he was halfway across. "Just fucking bring him down!"

The kids closed in on Lex. A few of them kept glancing uncertainly towards where their leader had run off to. Mostly they kept their eyes on Lex, who clutched her sheaf of porn. Lex wondered what was wrong with kids these days.

"Uh, is Mr. Celeste your principal?" she asked, stupidly.

No one answered.

"Come on," she tried to reason with them. "I remember being your age. I fucking hated authority. I didn't even care what it was, if the adults didn't want me to have it, I wanted it."

"This pervert's gonna get in trouble," the blond boy observed to his girlfriend.

Lex began to feel humiliated and angry. The situation was forcing her to recall parts of her past that she would rather have forgotten. And if adults came, she might be arrested or, worse, have to pay a fine. Her parents would have to be told. Lex did not want this.

Lex instinctively ran towards the blond boy's girlfriend--the dark, slim girl who had before so easily contorted her face into such a delicate, unselfconscious expression of disgust. The girl fell swiftly when Lex slammed into her with the full weight of her body. Strategically, this was an effective move. The girl had been the weakest link in the chain of middle schoolers surrounding Lex, and she was able to run away in the ensuing tumult.

Lex ran through the gate in the chainlink fence, past the kids waiting for the bus. Cars honked at her as she ran across Burnet Road. She kept running in the direction she'd come from, towards the house where her unfinished burritos were, where Maureen was quite possibly having sex again at this very moment.

Yet, within a few blocks, Lex had to stop in the shade on someone's lawn. She'd been handicapped by her backpack, her heavy, weather-inappropriate clothing, and her relatively out-of-shape physical condition. Lex leaned against a tree and prepared for the worst: jail, financial ruin, humiliation. When no one came, she sat down.

As she rested from her exertions, Lex reflected on how her life had led up to this moment. She thought about failing college. She thought about pornography and emotional pornography, and whether there was any artistic merit in either. She thought maybe she should give Confessions another try. It was so hard to concentrate on anything. She daydreamed about what it would be like to lie in the shade with a girl in the Speech Language Pathology graduate program at UT. Insects crawled under her clothes.

She was lying on the grass when one of the unfortunate kids from the middle school approached her. She knew he was from the middle school because he towered over her and asked, "Excuse me? Are you the porn peddler?"

"What?" said Lex. She scrambled to her feet.

"I believe," said the kid, "I heard you shouting to my peers. You said, quote unquote, that you had genuine adult publications for sale?" The kid made quotation marks with his fingers.

Lex looked at the kid. Puberty had not been kind to him. He had an oily, sort of fat face, unmemorable except for its partial mustache. He wasn't fat himself, but he wasn't thin either. There was a picture of a dog in sunglasses on his t-shirt.

"Oh!" said Lex, returned at once to reality. "Um, yes, I do have them."

She had actually been lying on top of her little collection, and now it was scattered on the grass. She bent to gather the individual pages.

"They're uh, two dollars--one dollar--a page," she said.

"They're only one dollar?" asked the kid, incredulously. "Why, I'll take them all!"

Lex was embarrassed at how grateful she felt. She counted out twenty-five pages of bland, stylized nudity and sex. The kid took out a wallet decorated with orange flames, and gave Lex a twenty and a ten.

"Keep the change," he said. He was trying to be jaunty. "You know, I pay top dollar for this stuff."

"Um, thanks," said Lex. "I didn't know."

Lex did her trick of trying to imagine people in 18th century settings. She tried to imagine the kid as a young Rousseau. It was difficult. He just looked like some arbitrary kid, strictly of his time.

Complicity Meets God

2009-01-17T00:32:06Z

A story where being unpopular in Hebrew school has theological implications.

Hebrew School was basically a constant holiday. They were always filing into the Lower Sequoia Jewish Community Center's Multipurpose Room, or going to the blue picnic tables in the middle of the North Wing. Their day was divided into "secular" and "Jewish" halves, but it was 100% limned with spiritual meaning.

Right now they were in the Multipurpose Room for Simchat Torah. They were reading from the last book of the Torah and then starting up again with the first one, to show that Torah study is a circle that never ends. The Lower Sequoia Jewish Community Day School interpreted the traditions from a respectful, modern point of view, so that everyone got to read--and not just males over 13--despite the obstacles of age and gender.

Almost all the fifth-graders took the Torah reading seriously. They wanted to get good grades. More importantly, they actually wanted to be good citizens. That's why their parents had sent them to Hebrew school. The students gargled out the ancient Hebrew syllables the way a nerdy kid would say black metal lyrics to himself, while riding a bike, alone. Sean Whalen was loud, Milton Frogman was theatrical, Julia Shapiro was crisp, and Complicity S___ was intense.

Indeed, the only student who didn't seem to be trying hard was Ferdinand Eisenberg. Ferdinand read the way he always talked: in a casual, mellifluous, sing-song tone of voice, like it was all a big joke, stumbling over words, no attempt to get the accent right. Actually, his account of God's creation of Heaven and Earth sounded like song lyrics too, if the song were not black metal, but some acoustic folk ballad from the 1960s that called for nonsense sounds during the chorus.

Complicity listened to the mispronounced Hebrew. Complicity wished she looked as nice as Ferdinand. Although one of the worst Hebrew students, Ferdinand Eisenberg had the best Semitic looks in the class. Complicity wished she didn't have to wear the stiff, ugly "formal" skirt that went to her knees. She tried not to pay attention to the way this supposedly "modest," supposedly "dignified" feminine attire, in fact, subtly robbed one of dignity, by leaving a huge gap between the outside world and one's tights-encased crotch.

"And God made the beasts of the earth in their kind, and cattle in their kind, and all the crawlers on the ground in their kind..."

As Ferdinand tried to read, Complicity translated in her head the words she already knew by heart.

When it ended, they lined up and filed towards the front of the Multipurpose Room to hang up their white-and-blue prayer scarves. Complicity went last. She listened enviously to the loud remarks of the boys just ahead of her. Along with their fringed prayer scarves, they seemed to have shrugged off the pious mood of the Torah service. However, a deeper piety underlay all they said.

"My dad says we're going to have pizza after practice today," said Matthew Ruff.

"I just got GT shocks on my bike," said Sean Whalen.

"Ooooh, someone is swearing," said Milton Frogman.

"I bet I can still do the highest 'wheelie'," said Luke Powers.

"That's nothing," said Ferdinand Eisenberg suddenly. He had been back here all this time, having attached himself to the main group of boys. "I can change into the female of any species at will."

"Huh?"

"What?"

They crowded in to see what he was doing. In no time, the line broke down. The class was in a state of commotion, and, once again, Ferdinand was at the center of it all.

"That's really wrong," commented Rachel Pierce.

"What is he doing!" exclaimed Sean Whalen.

"More like, 'what is he'," amended an unknown wag. It was Milton Frogman, Annas to his Caiaphas.

"Oh my gosh, would someone please tell me what's going on?" Complicity asked, struggling to see past her classmates.

"Geveret Adi, Ferdinand is misusing his tallit!" yelled Julia Shapiro from the cacophony of outraged and excited voices.

And indeed, he was. They parted to make room for the teacher, and Complicity saw that Ferdinand had wrapped his blue-and-white fringed prayer shawl around his waist, as though it were a sexy miniskirt. He gazed at them all demurely, from between long, glossy curls of black hair. He looked surprisingly convincing as a girl. Maybe even better than an actual girl, Complicity thought. Not that she was a good judge of this.

But the tallit! Everyone got silent. Everyone looked at the Ferdinand and the teacher. Another moral crisis, out of the blue--and a big one. It was like watching a huge killer whale jump out of the water. The front row was about to get splashed.

"Ferdinand! Do you grasp the meaning of the word RESPECT," said the teacher, not as a question. Her eyes flashed with righteous anger. The teacher was from Israel, and still relatively young.

"Um, yes," said Ferdinand. He batted his long eyelashes.

"No," said the teacher. "You do not grasp the meaning of the word RESPECT," she said.

"You say that you do, that's true," she continued. "Yes, your lips are moving up and down--oh but your actions"--her voice got deeper, richer--"your actions, in their own way, they say something else, don't they?" she mused rhetorically.

"Um," said Ferdinand. "Maybe I'm not in control of my actions?" he asked hopefully. He took the prayer scarf off his waist and began to wring it casually in his hands.

Obviously, that was the exact wrong thing to say. Ferdinand always misunderstood the seriousness of the situation--or seemed to. It was hard to figure out what Ferdinand was thinking. That was why they all feared and disliked him. That is, except for Complicity.

The teacher actually yanked the ceremonial garment out from between Ferdinand's fingers, in anger and alarm.

"WRONG answer," she cried. She was so angry that rhetoric almost failed her. "Let me tell you something," she eventually managed. "NOBODY in this classroom is allowed to evade responsibility for their actions!"

The teacher let out a grim chuckle. She tried to channel her anger away from the particular student and into an impromptu lecture.

"Whether your action is wrong or right, whether you're 'in control' of it or not," she said, "every action means something--so you'd better make sure it's intentional."

She paused.

"So, for example, with this!" She pointed at Ferdinand's blue-and-white scarf, which she was now holding. "Do you know how many boys and girls--children not much older than you are--perished precisely for the right to wear this three times a day?" she asked. "Yes, perished--in firestorms, in wars--in in Germany, in Syria, in Lebanon--"

She trailed off regretfully.

She told them a story about someone--a long-ago friend--who was shot at the age of nineteen, wearing the same very same blue-and-white scarf as Ferdinand had been wearing. Did Ferdinand see what a terrifying responsibility it was for him to be able to wear the tallit at all, after that? Was it still an action over which he dared to relinquish control?

She concluded in a new, sober tone, calmer but even grimmer: "And for the rest of you--for the rest of your lives, you'd better remember to keep your actions intentional. Because no matter what, Death will take you in the end."

Complete silence. Everyone stood in place.

Complicity looked at Ferdinand. He was literally twiddling his thumbs. He reminded her of Billy Joe Armstrong from Green Day, except with wavy long hair and more of a tan. Ferdinand Eisenberg was the second-least popular person in the class, after Complicity herself. What Complicity felt towards him could be described as a mix of condescension and admiration that made her vaguely excited whenever she thought about it. That was what it meant to be in love with someone, she thought.

Complicity's heart started to beat faster. She tried to stand so as not to feel the fabric of her ugly tights, or hear them scrape along her legs. How could someone like herself--a lame loser, a "crawler on the ground," as that Torah quote put it--experience such a soaring emotion?

The Christians said "God is love," Complicity knew. Could being in love actually change a person? Could it make them closer to God? Then, once you were closer to God, wouldn't God give you a sign, like by making you not as much of a loser anymore?

One brave hand shot out, in the stunned Multipurpose Room.

"Excuse me, Geveret Adi?"

"What is it, Complicity," said the teacher, wearily. She regretted having said that stuff about Death.

"Well," said Complicity slowly, "Maybe what you said to Ferdinand wasn't completely fair. I mean, maybe he wasn't being disrespectful."

The teacher didn't look amused. She didn't have that interested, tolerant look she usually had when Complicity was contributing to the class. At that point, Complicity didn't care, though. Saying his name gave her confidence. She wondered if that friend who was killed looked like Ferdinand.

"I mean, it only says in the Torah that we Jews need to wear fringes on the four corners of our garments, right?" Complicity explained. "But modern clothing doesn't have four corners. That's why we have the tallit in the first place, right? It's a ceremonial garment that has four corners."

"What's your point, Complicity?" asked the teacher, trying to get the students to make a line again, trying to get them back to class without incident.

"Well, my point is, according to the law, it shouldn't matter how the tallit is worn--as long as it is worn," said Complicity, resuming her position at the end of the line. "So, why was Ferdinand being less respectful when he wore it like a skirt? Is it because a skirt is something females wear? Isn't saying that--disrespectful to women?"

She thought of the demeaning skirt she was wearing.

"And like," added Complicity, inspired, "Isn't that why we have to read the Torah over and over again, in a never-ending circle? To learn not to impose our prejudices on its laws?"

The other kids looked at Complicity with mild interest. Would there be another whale?

The teacher raised her eyebrows. A wry smile had managed to lift the gloom from her strong features.

"Well," she said. "Now I see. Complicity--you would make a good professor one day. Feminism and critical theory and Jewish Studies--ha, ha, yes, I can certainly see it now."

She ruefully shook her head.

"What you have just said is known in the academic field as 'sophistry'," she continued. "Definition? It's the deliberate misuse of your critical thinking abilities to argue against the truth you see with your eyes."

The teacher paused a moment to enjoy her definition of "sophistry."

"But really, Complicity" she continued, "There's one reason you've cheered me up, and that's because you've shown that your motives are as fundamentally good as your methods were poor. The desire to defend your colleague is the best impulse a person can have. Ferdinand, you are very lucky to have a friend like Complicity."

She motioned for everyone to move along. Complicity felt like she was walking on air. In the hallway, she was so overwhelmed with emotion that, instead of staying at the back, she ran way ahead of everyone else. She marveled at everything, saw everything in a new light. This was how she sometimes felt after a really intense Torah recitation, except better. Like God was right there. The cracks in the asphalt outside their classroom were like the cracks that her own true personality made as it broke out of its flawed, ugly, and cowardly shell. Wordless music of joy and praise burst from her soul.

"Hey, uh, Complicity," she suddenly heard a mellow, surfer-accented voice say behind her.

Surprised, Complicity turned around. It was Ferdinand!

"You're like not supposed to run in the halls ahead of everyone else," Ferdinand said.

Ferdinand had run up to catch up with here, and these were the first words he'd ever addressed to her directly. For the moment, they were alone. Everyone else was about two building lengths away. At first Complicity didn't know what to say, but then wit and words came flowing out.

"I think that YOU are the one who is not supposed to be running in the halls," she said.

"Huh?" replied Ferdinand, seeming not to see Complicity at first. "No way," he said finally. "I don't care about mortal constraints. I can run so fast that it will seem like I'm teleporting."

Once again, Complicity was taken aback at first. Then it occurred to her that other people--kids her age, anyway--were always saying things like this. Things that didn't make any sense, things that were like an unfunny joke she didn't get. Ferdinand made everyone else feel the way that everyone else made her feel, she realized.

So she said, "That is physically impossible. People can only run like that in cartoons, and even then they usually show you that something is moving, like a blur or something."

That was the right answer, Complicity guessed, because next Ferdinand said, "Hey, I like you, Complicity."

Complicity probably blushed or something.

"I mean, you're fun to talk to," Ferdinand said.

Unfortunately, before they could finish their conversation, the rest of the class caught up with them. The other kids were deep in their pious talk again, and the teacher was trying to usher them into the classroom.

Sean Whalen was repeating a joke he had heard. "Frogman, your mom is so fat that when she sits around the house she sits around the house," he said.

Milton Frogman said, "Sure, but at least she's not as ugly as your own mother. Or those two over there--the two ugliest girls in the class, ha, ha."

He motioned to Ferdinand and Complicity.

"That's dumb. What an unoriginal comeback," said Sean Whalen.

But, for Complicity, it was too late. During lunch, later that day, she tried to enjoy playing imaginative games with Ferdinand and a bunch of second-graders, but she found that it was too embarrassing. The absence of rules in his games, their disturbing focus on female domestic life, and--most importantly--their lack of clear "winners" and "losers" made her confused and uncomfortable. Weren't these exactly the kinds of games the two ugliest girls in the class would play?

So she soon stopped talking to Ferdinand. God departed from her life forever.

She somehow ended up marrying Sean Whalen, the kid who had GT shocks on his bike.

One day, she talked to him about Hebrew school. "It's funny," she said. "We all believed so intensely back then. In God, I mean. It's like when you're on hallucinogens, and you start thinking, 'Oh no, what if the walls of this room are BURSTING WITH BUGS.' And then you think that, because you can imagine exactly what the bugs will look like in totally scary ultra-precise concrete detail, that, 'oh, the bugs MUST be real, why else would I see them so vividly.' You think that the intensity of your feelings means there's something outside of you that's causing them."

"The fallacy of Descartes, I believe," said Sean Whalen.

This is such an honor

2008-07-09T03:35:46Z

I've been published. I've helped a valuable new manuscript see the light of day.

"A Father's Love," a strange new work by Harper Lee (she wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird" and was friends with "Breakfast at Tiffany's" author Truman Capote).

http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=165&mode=one

Animal Squad

2007-06-07T10:17:50Z

A story about a person coming to terms with their sexuality.

I

I have never seen the point of conventional pornography. In this respect, I realize I am somewhat outside the range of what is normal for males. Seeing certain body parts we’re told to interpret as “sexual,” served up standardized, homogenized, and de-contextualized in the typical, crude Hollywood manner just doesn’t do… anything for me. It feels… like nothing. Christians and other moralists preach about how it’s so harmful, it’s so bad, but personally I find most porn to be a woefully ineffectual incentive to the “sin” of lust. Ah, well.

In some ways, I wish I had the Christians’ ability to believe, unquestioningly, in moral absolutes. There is a certain attraction in that kind of purity: like a sword or a cut jewel. The inner strength that must result from the belief that truth exists is, perhaps, enviable. Ignorance may, indeed, be bliss; alas, that I cannot go that road. But, I digress. My point is, I surely needed the full strength of my convictions the other afternoon in my dorm room. For that is when I saw that the number one download at a certain website I frequent, as an alternative to the sterile monotony of mainstream porn, was a video of my ex-girlfriend and myself, engaged in stilted, awkward sex.

Here’s what happened. See, the only prurient media I can enjoy at all is the amateur stuff, or at least stuff that looks like it’s got real people in it. It’s so much saner to prefer real girls and/or women to an over-stylized, commercialized ideal. I’m not saying I don’t want them to be attractive. I guess it’s just that I’ve got a different idea of what’s attractive than, apparently, a lot of men my age. I like a certain almost… elfish litheness, a certain degree of physical fitness, good health (I don’t like anorexics; I don’t get why anyone would do that). But, more than that, I tend to take a sort of overall, holistic view of a person to deem them physically beautiful. I look at the eyes, the shape of the face, the collarbone. Studying governments and societies, I’ve found that how the individual parts relate to one another and the whole is often more important than the individual parts.

So, I had a few hours to kill after my Humanities seminar. We had been talking about oppression, and I had said that all great societies were built on a slave class and they’ve produced most of the important achievements of what we know to be civilization so people should just get over it, a statement that upset everyone… fucking sheep. It was basic Nietzsche. Anyway, I thought it was time to balance the Apollonian side of my mind with a… traditional Dionysian activity :). Yet, my hand remained inert, paralyzed, when I loaded up the main page of my favorite amateur porn site and saw those familiar wide, bony hips, that well-known bushy-haired head and pubis, so much like the curly tops of two alert poodles.

I followed the link. Sure enough, a fully nude Jennifer Wimbush seated herself on her sloppy, sagging bed and pouted at the camera. We had parted ways over two months ago, the end of a rather trying and fundamentally flawed three-year relationship. On screen, her lanky form propped itself up into an attempt at defiant eroticism, her arms and head thrown back, medium-sized breasts thrust out. There were toys and clothes enmeshed in the folds of her huge purple bedspread, like grasping hands in a nineteenth century painting of a shipwreck. She had an impressive collection of figurines from a variety of badly dubbed animated children’s shows. By far the majority were from “Animal Squad” (that is the awful American title), a series about kids who summon, and turn into, various animals during the course of magical battles against sympathetic, yet inane, villains.

Before I go any further, don’t get me wrong: I like a lot of anime. Generally, it possesses more depth than US shows, especially in its depiction of morally conflicted, suffering and isolated characters. Its treatment of philosophical themes such as the duality of what we call logic and emotion, nature and technology, good and evil, can verge on the sublime. And, if nothing else, it is often aesthetically very beautiful. However, some of the material can be… frankly pointless and childish, and I am afraid that the clichéd, pastoralist fare Jennifer has historically preferred, full of big-eyed animals, magical transformations, and simple dramas of social acceptance versus rejection, is an example of the latter. I think that her enthusiasm for these shows resulted from a pathological need to leave reality in favor of a simpler world. Her “unhealthy obsession,” as she put it, with imaginary romances between the series’ prepubescent male leads certainly indicated an inability to deal with real men…

Anyway, for the first few seconds, after the initial shock, my reaction to her self-display was one of rueful, knowing unconcern. However, I did not have time to expand upon my cogitations over her propensity to disregard the meaning and consequences of her actions. For, in what she no doubt imagined to be a majestic and sensual manner, Jennifer moved from her original seated position and laid her angular, large-limbed body on the bed, so that it was profile to the camera. Then, to my great disbelief, my own head emerged from off-screen and paused approximately one head-length above a recumbent, blurry, hirsute crotch.

My hair was loosed from its traditional ponytail and pushed behind my ears (since I grew them out, the long, platinum-blond locks have always been sort of a mark of pride with me, sort of an outward symbol of the principles of inner nobility that I try to live by; and besides, it is practical, and I enjoy toying with people’s expectations, defying cultural memes regarding conventional expressions of masculinity). I bore, I must admit, a rather ridiculous expression of extreme concentration. I must have taken off my glasses in anticipation of the task ahead (for the record, I wore black-framed, old-fashioned glasses long before it was “emo”), because eventually I gathered my bearings and dipped forward and downward. Footage of the back of my head in vague, repetitive motion over slightly rashy, pale-pink thighs continued, unchanging, for what seemed like eternity.

I did not, by contrast, take long to recall the occasion being so crassly commemorated. Over a year ago she had insisted on using the webcam she’d received for her birthday, assuring me with her braying laugh that, “Haw, haw, gaad, it’s not like I’m showing it anywhere!!!” At the time, that had not been a concern. I just did not understand why she couldn’t let go of… whatever it was that held her back from experiencing sexuality as the purely physical, natural phenomenon it was. Why she had to bring all these other things into it: costumes, exhibitionism, gross, inappropriate references to her period. And, during the last days, characters from her favorite fucking anime series, “Animal Squad.”

However, I supported her because I strove to comprehend, to celebrate, her difference from me. I wanted to enjoy, as C.S. Lewis put it, “the rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness.” Yet, this phrase acquired indecorous, secondary meaning over the course of the sixteen-minute video, which in the end featured: (1) a laborious shift of position so that Jennifer’s poodle-mane loomed, in its turn, above my own nervous pelvic region; (2) clumsy editing; and, (3) a nigh-interminable session of “sixty-nine,” the longest segment of all.

I must have, uncharacteristically, lost my ironic, detached attitude towards life, because my one immediate desire was to confront the party I had assumed responsible for what I saw. And after that – I didn’t know what I intended to do after that.

II

“Peter, what are you doing here???”

As every afternoon, she was in her room, chatting away on the internet, a big cup of vinegar tea by her side.

“You know exactly why I am here, Jen.”

The drive from campus had taken no longer than forty-five minutes. I am calm by nature, yet when a particularly flagrant injustice penetrates the steely outer shield of my intellectual indifference, I feel myself to be ruthless, swift, and implacable. There is no mercy, when there is justice.

Jennifer looked vulnerable and angry.

“What, you’ve come back to beg, like a dog? Well, I guess you are capable of emotion, as long as it’s cowardly and pathetic.”

Her latter remark was a reference to a long-standing issue between us. She often made comparisons between her life and the media she loved, and had claimed before to associate me with the self-centered and vainglorious wolf in “Animal Squad” – the only member of the Squad not to intervene after some kind of clockwork beast had kidnapped the orca-girl’s adoptive parents.

I replied, “I would think ‘dog’ a more apt descriptor of your behavior lately, Jen. But, I warn you, it takes more than second-rate exhibitionism to harm my reputation.”

I waited for the hysteric yawping that was her inevitable response whenever I called her on her bullshit.

“Exhibitionism? You just started avoiding me two months ago. You’ve pretended you didn’t know me since then, so you’re right, I don’t see how what I do can affect your ‘reputation.’ Gaad, Peter, for years I’ve had nothing from you except put-downs and verbal abuse and now you can’t leave me alone, not if it means letting me have my friends and my hobbies and actually have a good life.”

How could I even respond to that? As always, what she was saying was emphatic and self-righteous enough, but bore no relationship to what I was saying. I was angry, and it was strange to experience such intensity of emotion first-hand, unprecedented that she could affect me so directly.

“If your idea of ‘having a good life’ is acting like the lowest kind of slut, fine. But did it ever occur to you that I may object to being involved? Or is debasing yourself the only thing on your mind these days?”

Toys spilled out from the tops of bookshelves onto the desk and dresser. Several action figures and dolls were attached to the computer monitor by some sort of pink, gummy substance. The dresser, I knew from many sleepless, arm-cramping nights with Jennifer, contained her vibrator, shaped to approximate a friendly raccoon, a battery compartment in its pert little rear. That dresser contained little else, for, her clothes, a chaos of denim and purple, were strewn along most of the room’s available surfaces. From the walls simplified, child-like faces, human and animal, gazed at me out of large eyes.

Among the posters, I noticed the work of one of Jennifer’s closest friends, Charity Boyle, whose favorite member of the “Animal Squad” was clearly the brainy orca-girl. Her somewhat stiff depictions of this character could be found all over the walls, in a variety of emotional states and clothing, including painters’ coveralls, one-piece swimsuits and formal dresses strangely superimposed on a plump, cetacean form.

As with so many unpopular girls, I suspected their friendship was one of circumstance more than choice.

“I am not involving you in anything!,” Jennifer cried. “What me and Richard did at AFurMation what we do – has nothing, nothing to do with you – ”

For a moment I felt bad. After all, as a highly articulate and verbal person, I have an unfair advantage over most. Then I thought about the video. And Richard. I thought about shame.

“You’ve been with that fat fuck ever since the Con. I can smell him in here! You gave him the video didn’t you? To ‘get back’ at me for your own problems.”

She seemed genuinely upset.

“Like I said, if you want to open up your heart, and cunt, to The Bear, be my guest. Just keep my likeness the hell away from it, okay?”

“God!!! I don’t know what you’re talking about!! Okay so I am seeing Richard Bjorn I guess that is not a secret anymore!!”

I wondered why I was somehow enjoying this confrontation. Her crazed expression made it impossible to identify with her; it made her look fundamentally different from myself, and I think that I was relieved to see that difference. In its oversized sweatshirt and cutoff shorts, her body heaved and strained with failed effort to control emotion.

III

I left her house through the backyard, the same way I’d entered. The property, though extremely neglected, was located in an old and highly desirable part of the prosperous California suburb where we grew up. The animal foetor pervading the place, apart from the separate, toxic, sex and incense smells of Jennifer’s room, was due in some measure to the bowls of soggy pet food, situated throughout the living room, parlor, and kitchen; in some measure to the termite-ridden wood and trapped rodents rotting beneath the house; and in some measure to two cats, plus Goldeen, the family’s aged golden retriever; but, mostly, it was due to the goats, which had been purchased years ago at the insistence of Jennifer’s younger sister. Unfortunately, for over a year Kristin has spent the majority of her time in her room, refusing to attend school, let alone take care of the animals. Thus, goats roamed the darkened house and shady backyard, grown up, shaggy, and unchecked, eating everything in sight, defecating in unwelcome, unexpected places.

Taking the freeway to Richard’s house, I became meditative. Years of put-downs and verbal abuse? My intentions had always been strictly pedagogic. I had only wanted to make the baseness of her actions evident to her. I wondered at this fundamental desire on my part to better other lives in the only way I feel I am qualified to do so… that is, through knowledge.

Ironically, knowledge was something that Jennifer had denied to me. She had kept insisting that it could not have been her who publicized the one erotic video she had made of us. I suppose I believed her: after all, it was unlike her to resist the opportunity for a climactic, meaningful confession.

I have always striven to give what I could to the world. And, now, the world has responded as it has always responded, that is, absurdly. I know how Socrates felt, I suppose. Or, irony of ironies, I quote from a source to which I am vehemently opposed: “forgive them… for they know not what they do.”

Maybe this total lack of interest in theoretical knowledge was what I found compelling about Jennifer in the first place: I was fascinated by how self-contained she was. Talkative, ever-present and not “out of my league,” she had been a natural choice three years ago, my first and, so far, only, serious girlfriend. And, after the two morose, overweight girls from her little group of friends, whom I’d attempted to woo earlier in the year, she seemed psychologically healthy and improbably beautiful. She was certainly pretty without being aware of it, thin, large-boned, long-legged, a long but otherwise unremarkable, symmetrical face.

And yet, our relationship was unremarkable, in that it, too, possessed that unacknowledged, darker side, full of fears and hidden motives that I think is a part of all human affairs. I suppose I had “gone all the way,” for the first time, sexually, with a female, last year, just slightly over five months after entering the undergraduate program at the Tidal Bore College of Liberal Arts. However, from our earliest tentative attempts, to more involved bi-weekly sessions of recent times, our encounters of an intimate nature had always been surprisingly difficult and full of stress. The naiveté that I indulgently tolerated in her personality was somehow terrifying in a sexual context.

I was alarmed by her exaggerated posing, her use of the webcam for pornographic ends as though no one had ever thought of it before, her shameless insistence on oral sex like it was something impossibly wholesome, like it was some kind of… treat, to give to an animal. When animal outfits became involved, I was gripped a with profound dread possibly analogous to the Christians’ fear of hell (I do not know; I do not, of course, believe in the existence of a “soul”). Understand that “perversion,” per se, does not upset me: I am no Puritan. I merely find the whole mask-and-rubber crowd to be mostly irrelevant and sort of silly. But, as far as I can tell, an interest in “kink,” in sexual acting-out, is usually supposed to denote boredom with the ordinary – decadence, a surfeit of experience. Yet, with her, it was precisely the reverse. Her lack of awareness was what made me awkward, seeing her try so hard. The incongruity of her naïve imaginings with the reality of her tall, robust body bothered me more than it, perhaps, should have.

Thus, perhaps, sexual anxiety helped poison our relationship. For whatever reasons, I grew to resent those very qualities in her that once charmed me. Her passions began to seem appalling and juvenile, her self-containment depressing. She and her friends were living in an increasingly insular, insipid world. The “furry” convention only hastened the end of our prolonged and, ultimately, untenable union.

IV

Despite the not insubstantial presence of “Animal Squad” in our lives; despite the yearning fan fiction she wrote compulsively and uncritically, demanding – and usually receiving, from other “fans” – an equally uncritical response; despite her love of large, non-threatening groups of friends, and her disconcerting, ultimately unconvincing sexual bravado; despite all this, attending AFurMation had not been Jennifer’s idea. She was invited by Beth Whitehead, one of the fat, failed romances from senior year of high school that I mentioned earlier. Time, and the attentions of a new young man, had turned the extra pounds into assets, moroseness into spastic, manic sociability. Beth’s baleful silences transformed into the insincere twittering characteristic of so many belatedly sexual, deeply insecure girls.

Richard “The Bear” Bjorn was the individual responsible for this change. The nickname is redundant, since no one knew, or I certainly didn’t know, if “Bjorn” were in fact his real name, last or middle, or merely the name of his “fursona.” That’s right: in addition to taking the odd Aikido or Norse mythology class at Jennifer and Beth’s community college, where the pair had met maybe a year after he should have graduated; in addition to running a small computer repair business out of his squalid home; and in addition collecting bladed weapons for no apparent reason (being morally opposed to violence except in self-defense), Richard Bjorn led an alternate and, he would argue, more authentic, life as a spiritually inclined yet ultimately hedonistic anthropomorphized bear. Every year, like-minded individuals, and general fans of anthropomorphic animals in art and literature from all over the West Coast, met for a festive weekend at a local hotel.

“Conventions are a lot of fun,” Jennifer had said. “We should go.”

“Aw, come on – hanging out with a lot of obese losers dressed like sports mascots? That’s a low point in anyone’s life, even yours,” I retorted.

“Your comments about people’s size are really kind of rude – some of those ‘losers’ are my friends,” she digressed.

“I’m not afraid of calling things by their names, that’s all. Dishonesty of language in the name of ‘political correctness’ is the first step to totalitarianism, Jen, if you’ve ever read 1984. And I’m not going to your Lardass Convention.”

“We never go out anymore, even though we’re supposed to be, like, adults now,” she whined.

“Well, in fact, a bunch of us in philosophy club are going to a restaurant. So I can’t come,” I replied.

“You’d rather be with a school club than at a huge party full of good friends and people from all over, who won’t judge you cause they’re geeks too? And you can just watch good movies and cut loose and have fun – wear what you want, not worrying how you look?”

Days later, I was standing in line with foxes, meerkats, leashed deer, and sassy goth girls in cat ears, large flanks barely contained in their overstrained bodysuits.

The fact is, the Tidal Bore College philosophy club is too set its ways, having forgotten the original meaning of the very word “philosophy,” love of wisdom, and having abandoned the spirit of real inquiry that should accompany such an exalted love. They take a lot of stock in certain self-referential, contemporary philosophers of language, who utilize formal logic to obfuscate real issues. I think my fellow students have fallen prey to the dangers of excessive skepticism – understandable dangers, ones that I’ve overcome only through close reading of writers like Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand, generally lucid, logical thinkers (for the most part) who also know how to entertain. Three meetings ago, I had suggested man’s life as a standard of value on which to base a new, rational ethics, an alternative to the nihilism prevalent in so much modern thought. I guess they didn’t appreciate my outsider’s contribution to what should have been living, productive discourse. Since then, meetings have been, frankly, awkward, and I didn’t really want to deal with their dogmas through an entire restaurant meal. By contrast, the convention promised to hold some, at least, sociological or anthropologic interest.

The line near the reception desk, by itself, fulfilled this promise.

“The media portrays furry as a fetish, but the thing is, it isn’t even a fetish,” Richard Bjorn was saying, wagging his oversized stylized bear’s head, with its large, glazed eyes and permanent, suggestive leer. “Anthropomorphic animals are everywhere in our culture. They’re appealing because they let you reinvent – people. Except you don’t have to be tied down to the bullshit of so-called ‘real life.’ And sex is a part of that.”

Jennifer’s friend Charity Boyle peered at him from inside the black and white mouth of a killer whale. Although whales and dolphins did not, strictly speaking, possess “fur,” I had already seen several of their human fans here. Her face, all but her eyes, was concealed by the two halves of the orca mask. In middle school, I had called her Charity Case in an attempt to gain others’ respect.

“Yeah, sex is huge part of it. Essentially you become a child again. You can take pleasure in something that is… a natural part of your physical makeup. If you’re embarrassed about your body, you don’t have to be, anymore. You reinvent the body, without all the guilt heaped on by society and organized religion… because, you form your own society, of bears, and raccoons, and… and badgers. It’s very tolerant.”

Charity shuffled in place at the mention of organized religion, then gazed at the rotund bear with greater intensity. We had been in the same church group as children. Both of us had been sent there by single mothers, but whereas mine merely couldn’t afford daycare, hers was an intense, weeping Madonna of a woman. With her tall, slightly bulbous forehead and stocky, wide-hipped stance, the mother’s resemblance to one of the daughter’s crudely penned oceanic mammals was striking.

“Come on Bjorn,” yelped Beth as she ran to our line. “There is a giant Slip-n-slide!!!!” She was one of the cat women, black, orange and white paint smeared across her heavy, oval face.

“Hey,” she said upon seeing me, entitlement in her voice. “Um, I thought Jen was going to make you wear a costume.”

I was wearing slacks and a gray button-down shirt. “I am a gray wolf, obviously” I said.

“Ookay…,” she replied, the exaggerated emphasis on the first syllable a substitute for cleverness.

No said anything else, and after a while Beth repeated the words, “Giant Slip-n-slide!!!” She grabbed Richard by an outsized paw and pretended to try to drag him away while he stood in place.

“Mmnh,” grunted Madrigal Bloch in acknowledgment of the physical comedy transpiring before her. The nose and buck teeth of a mouse were affixed to her otherwise flat features by a rubber band. This was failed high school romance number two, who had, by this point, successfully made the transition from dour and overweight to bossy, matronly and obese.

“Ooooh,” said Jennifer. She, for her part, was “cross dressing” rather ineptly as her favorite “Animal Squad” character, a sexless-looking (but, in her fictions, capable of very tender, proto-sexual affections) red-haired little boy with an inner fox nature. She squealed with whimsy.

“I think you know what that means!”

Her voluminous, still-dark curls sprouted behind a plastic orange headband, topped by small, felt-textured, triangular ears. A bushy, upturned, wire-frame tail from the costume store completed the outfit. This tail rose above tight denim shorts of a respectable width, which, in turn, accented a long torso and legs, their juncture largely free of fat, yet contributing to an unmistakably pear-shaped form.

“What does it mean, Jen?” The bear leered at her.

“I get to take off my clothes!!!”

She was also wearing one of my old t-shirts, covered with the logos of local hi-tech companies, which she had requested for the “costume” because of its vomit-orange color. Jennifer pulled off the ill-fitting cotton to reveal a string bikini, on which, for the occasion, she had drawn two big paw prints cupping the breasts. She was rewarded with cat-calls and excited barking. She crept towards Richard and began to rub her exposed body against his matted, artificial pelt, closing her eyes in simulated contentment.

“Um, we need our badges first,” I said. I tried to direct her to the front of the line.

I admit that I felt disconcerted just then, by the sight of Jennifer in her shoddy outfit. It wasn’t just her show of promiscuity. At the science fiction convention last year, I had watched her strut and preen and bare the tops of her compacted breasts as a slutty Princess Leia, and was not only not upset, but even misguided enough to take pride in having access to one of the event’s more attractive females. She’s got flaws, but I could have done much worse, I thought, balancing my innate idealistic thinking with realism.

But no, this time, it was specifically the animal aspect that disturbed me. The paw prints, that absurd, canine tail. It was not only that she was dressed strangely, but that an ordinary-seeming twenty-year-old girl apparently thought it was okay to dress that way, that she expected, demanded to be liked for it. Thus, the “Animal Squad” outfit was disturbing for the same reason as her previous sexual posing, though perhaps to an even greater degree: her inappropriate obliviousness, an obliviousness that was somehow like hysteria. However, unlike then, there was no suggestion or implication that I become a participant. I would later have this feeling in her room, as well, accusing her, seeing her displays of emotion. There was a suggestion of some obscene vulnerability, which bothered me, but also, crossed the line, to the point where I sort of, almost, liked it.

It was like the one time when, during a particularly unhappy period of my adolescence, I was made late to school by the sight of real animals having sex. The squirrels were running after each other in an intense, clacking frenzy. One of them actually fell from the branch it had been running on and landed right in front of me, briefly regarding me with its compressed, terrifying face. I don’t think I’d ever been that close to a wild animal before. Unconsciously accustomed to the slick anthropomorphic beings in television and advertising, I was surprised to find something so unfamiliar and vulnerable.

One often hears that sex disables reason, but here it had momentarily disabled an animal's basic instincts of self-preservation. I was afraid yet for some reason filled with shameful, vague pleasure.

“You’re holding everyone up,” I said to Jennifer. “Let’s… detach ourselves from that bear.”

Everyone was pleased by this inane, pointlessly “ironic” remark, which affirmed group identity by referring to the idea that outsiders would be confused by – would, in fact, be forced to speak in simple, pause-strewn language about – something that they, the attendees of AFurMation, considered to be an ordinary part of life.

Afterwards, during the screening of the animated “Robin Hood,” with its all-animal cast, Jennifer leaned against Richard’s massive, fur-covered legs like they were a beanbag couch. She gyrated and growled at him at the big fur suit masquerade ball, still wet from the Slip-n-slide, hot tub, and pool. Later, sat between him and Beth Whitehead for a three-way massage in the lobby, The Bear manipulating his fingers expertly behind the thick paws. Eventually they ran to one of the hotel rooms, the girls animatedly exchanging “inside jokes” about the finer points of their sexualized perceptions of the youths of “Animal Squad.”

That was around the point at which I simply left. I am aware that I should have stood by my “significant other,” or whatever trope you wish to employ, that as her significant other I should have tried to prevent her from sleeping with a random, lecherous talking-animal fetishist. Most of the time, I succeed in my efforts to combine the intellectual integrity in which I take such pride with a certain amount of ethical integrity. But, suddenly, Jennifer was too much: an irrational, tempestuous, sexual force that I didn’t want deal with just then or maybe ever. I wanted nothing more than to get back to my dorm room, or, better yet, my mom’s house, where I could read philosophical speculative fiction and watch pornography late into the night.

The relationship dragged on for another month or so after convention. Conforming to negative stereotypes about “fur” enthusiasts, she took to wearing her “Animal Squad” tail in sexual situations. Often, she would visit Richard, driving to the tract houses by the freeway south of our neighborhood in her sensible, parent-provided car. In applauding one another’s petty dramas and poorly conceived ideas, he and the other tolerant fur-suiters seemed to have provided her with her fondest wish – drastically lowered standards and infinite emotional support.

Eventually I just stopped calling her, stopped returning her increasingly infrequent calls, and, in due time, stopped returning to our suburb altogether for fear of running into her or her moronic friends loudly socializing in one of the small downtowns, enacting their caricature-like memories of popular classmates from years past. We were like a pair of trains going in opposite directions, with me moving towards adulthood, independence, growth, some, perhaps, small stab at wisdom; while she appeared to be charging full reverse, to a kind of emotional infancy. The physical and mental rewards of intimacy were simply no longer worth having to listen to her.

V

Before I had left her house, Jennifer had been compliant enough to give me The Bear’s phone number. “The matter I am concerned with is too awkward to discuss over the phone,” I had said after introducing myself to the rich baritone on the other end. Richard, to my surprise, complied with my demand to visit him at his residence and gave pedantic, unnecessarily detailed directions.

After failing to get any answers from Jennifer, I had become increasingly fixated on confronting my phantom malefactor, and Richard’s perverse sexual relationship with my ex-girlfriend made him, in my mind, the next likely suspect. Additionally, the mixed emotions resulting from my unproductive visit to Jennifer left me in need of a resolution and justification of the day’s events.

I heard someone shout, “We’re in here!,” after several unsuccessful knocks, on my part, at the front door of the boxy, aborted-looking ranch-style house.

The house was aborted-looking in the sense that the few architectural features that interrupted the flat, undifferentiated surface of its façade looked vestigial or extremely underdeveloped in the same way as the face of a three-month-old fetus. The only real protrusion was a set of three cement steps leading to the front door, giving the impression of a stairway into nothing. The voice, however, was coming from the garage, which was flush with the rest of the dwelling and to my right.

“Just go ‘round the other side!,” I was energetically instructed.

Inside, the garage had been converted into a sort of recreation room, furnished with several two-person seats that must have come from the passenger compartment of a car. A new television and stereo system/entertainment center hugged the rear wall, contrasting with the rest of the shabby interior. The lopsided card table blocking the main entranceway was dominated by reddish shape, like a malignant tumor... the costume Richard had worn to the convention.

Richard himself was sitting on the large piece of tan carpeting that covered a portion of the concrete floor. He was leaning against one of the car seats, his legs spread to accommodate Beth Whitehead, who sat between them. She was wearing, it looked like, some sort of yellow bed sheet or sarong with nothing underneath, the cloth tied loosely above her breasts and pooling around her thighs. She was receiving a massage.

Richard, shockingly, had on another bear costume, sans head, revealing a bearded, sanguine slightly fleshy face. This costume was a natural warm brown color, its fur fine-textured enough to resemble that of a live bear. I could not believe that I was rejected in favor of this promiscuous dweeb.

“Come in!,” he said. “It’s good to see you again. As you can see, we’re not doing very much at the moment – ha, ha.”

“Look, I don’t know what kind of duplicitous shit is going on here,” I said. “But I don’t like it that you’re involving me.”

“Mmm, what duplicitous shit? If you mean… this” – he kneaded the acne-scarred shoulders in front of his broad, furry chest – “well, Beth and I have made the decision to let Jennifer into our lives. We’re officially part of a stable, polyamorous triad now. I have to admit, Jen was pretty upset when you just, you know, stopped talking to her.”

“Yes, so you helped her cope, by trying to ‘harm’ my reputation, by illicitly publicizing personal materials that belonged to her, and me,” I said, disgusted by his ability to rationalize his wanton lusts.

Richard appeared troubled.

“Peter, you must be mistaken. That kind of vindictiveness is abhorrent to me.”

He bore an expression of deep, sympathetic anxiety about my, and by extension all of humanity’s, moral future, about the misfortune that would have ostensibly driven me to direct these appalling accusations at him, about the very world in which such accusations were possible.

I lost it completely. “That’s a very easy thing to say for a vapid sensualist like yourself. You utopians… communism, the Crusades, it’s all the same thing. You can’t make men love one another by fiat, and you certainly can’t do it by wearing a goddamn animal suit. You think I can’t see that it’s just rhetoric to justify doing whatever you want, to whomever? Why are you lying? You had the motive, you had ample fucking opportunity. Did you or didn’t you upload a video of me and Jennifer having sex onto a major pornographic site?”

He was still sitting on the ground with his legs splayed, looking up at me like a pajama-clad infant in a greeting card photograph. That is, except for the half-naked girl between his splayed legs. She listened to our exchange with her mouth open, no doubt woozy from the sensual pleasure of massage.

Richard’s diffuse, blue eyes were wide-open and distraught.

“Some of what you say is unfortunately very true. But, you must learn something about me… all my friends eventually do. It is that I take privacy very seriously. And, I never lie.”

I was shocked by the earnest tone in which he spoke these moralizing words. I was also shocked by his presumption that we were friends, especially since he had supposedly “stolen” my girlfriend. It was as though he saw no reason not to expect my uncritical acceptance, as though the fact that he had seen me at a convention three months ago, combined with my present appearance in his home, had guaranteed our permanent, mutual goodwill. How could anyone be so self-absorbed?

He added with an even more hushed voice, “Sex can be a very private part of life, and it’s very upsetting if someone interferes with that part of your life without your consent. I hope that you find out who did it.”

He paused, then quickly became hearty again.

“But hey! I think that you need a break from drama for a while, or at least you need to restrict it to the realm of fiction, heh, heh. In fact, we were just about to watch a movie. And, you should stay. How about a massage? You do seem tense, ha, ha.”

For the first time I realized that, not only could I not prove that he was lying, or that it hadn’t been someone else (for example, Beth Whitehead, who in this private setting displayed the passivity I remembered from our early times together; perhaps she had done it as an expression of some sort of ‘polyamorous’ resentment), but also that I didn’t know what I intended to if it were him or anyone else. I felt like a protagonist in a Kafka novel. Ha, ha, indeed. What is justice?

“Ha, ha, indeed,” I said.

We watched the movie.

It had been released during our childhoods and was senselessly nostalgic. In it, a bratty teenage girl very reminiscent of my ex-girlfriend, is transported into a world populated by talking puppets. She is forced to take on a supernatural quest, and during one of the movie’s many scenes of her running apprehensively through unfamiliar environments, Richard exclaimed:

“A sex video… well, that is fascinating to me. Did you know that you hadn’t initially struck me as the adventurous type at all?”

For emphasis, he twined his thick, furred legs around the bare, fleshy ones beside them.

VI

Eventually, I emerged from the damp garage into the orange, slanting light of the ending day. The suburban streets, with their exaggerated three-dimensional regularity, had the endless depth of a computer-generated landscape. The sudden self-pity I felt was as simple and sweet as the synthesizers in the work of certain of the more obscure art-rock bands, with which I occasionally choose to accompany some of my more strange, fey moods.

The meaningless camaraderie with the much-loathed Bear and the inert, preening Beth Whitehead and had felt surprisingly, and depressingly, natural. It seemed related the pervasive, irrevocable way in which I felt despoiled by existence of the internet video.

I wondered if this was reasonable. After all, these adult sites were moderated; it’s not like nobody had foreseen their potential for abuse. I could easily get the offending file removed. I wondered, in fact, why I hadn’t done this, why I instead immediately went out in person and spent the day calling on the kinds of sad, limited people I usually try to avoid. And, on the surface of it, hadn’t I been truthful with Jen? Shouldn’t it take more than her pitiful exhibitionism to harm my reputation?

I guess what bothered me was how absurdly petty the whole thing was. I shouldn’t mind as much if I were ruined by some grand scandal relating to something I cared for deeply or some important flaw of my personality, if I had been struck down with the terrible inevitability of Greek tragedy. But to have my likeness become publicly associated with something so common and clumsy, something so unrelated, in the final analysis, to who I truly am… it just… disturbed me that such a thing could be accomplished so easily. Whoever says that we are most ourselves nude is profoundly deluded.

I approached the hilly, wooded college campus still thinking about the tenuousness of the narratives we impose upon our lives, hiding their lack of focus. Perhaps, all of us secretly long for a “fursona”? The sleek, expressive, human-like appearance of a cartoon animal invites our identification, suggesting an entity that thinks and feels as we do, yet is free from the consequences of thought and feeling… from the tide of self-consciousness and helplessness present beneath all we do. I imagined myself as a wolf with preternaturally sharpened senses, melancholy but decisive and aware…

No, I thought. That is fucking gross. Then, I thought of my determined, silently licking figure onscreen, visible to all.

In the parking log, a short, sturdy girl wearing a backpack and a Tidal Bore collegiate sweatshirt bent over the windshield, interrupting my reverie. I was so distracted that I did not immediately recognize her face, with its far-apart gray eyes and large, unusually convex forehead. I quickly opened the door, shocked at this apparition from a recently visited past.

“Charity Boyle?”

She looked surprised as well, and upset, her mouth shaping itself into the theatrical “o” of concern one ordinarily sees only in television movies for women.

“Peter… I didn’t think I’d ever see you. I… knew you went to this school…”

“Well… heh… I didn’t know you went to this school.” I said, inanely. After a pause, I added, “Well, fuck me,” hoping that profanity would lend vigor to my remark.

“Yes, I transferred in the fall. I live in Quail Dorm way out in the woods – that’s probably why we don’t see a lot of each other,” she said, her far-apart eyes suspicious.

“That’s the drug-and-alcohol free dorm, isn’t it? Ha, ha, isn’t the whole point of college to get away from your parents’ domestic restrictions, regardless of if you’re going to use drugs or not?”

She did not reply. Instead, she quickly placed a bundle that she had been carrying in her hands into her backpack. As it was awkward to just leave, I continued, “So, anyway, what are you doing here?

“I mean, why are you staring into people’s cars? Uh, you probably conceive of me as ‘the villain’ in my dealings with Jennifer, who is your friend,” I added.

“I… am leaving flyers on these windshields,” she said crisply, yet with some strain. “You always see invasive and tacky advertising on there, so why not leave an advertisement for something positive?”

I thought, mistakenly, that I knew where this was going.

“Oh, what like the church?”

She looked conflicted.

“No, I have left the church. Christianity is… wondrous, noble and true. But I guess it just isn’t for me,” she said in a tone suggesting prior anguish. “These are flyers for a, um, fan site I made.”

“More furry bullshit,” I exclaimed almost involuntarily. If there is a god, surely he has, in the words of Depeche Mode, “a sick sense of humor.”

Her already troubled expression intensified to an unlikely, absurd degree. She looked constipated.

“Well, it’s not really just a fan site. It’s sort of a philosophy site, but it has some art, and stories.”

“Huh. You must have a lot of time on your hands,” I said, wishing only that I could put the senseless events of the day behind me.

“Um. Actually, you should see it,” she said. She quickly took her backpack off again, as though she had come to a decision. Reaching inside, she grabbed the bundle she’d deposited earlier. It was a stack of small squares of paper, one of which she thrust into my hand. “There is no reason you shouldn’t see it.”

The paper bore a photocopied drawing of a humanoid orca or dolphin, standing upright next to a canid girl with a large, fluffy and lovingly rendered tail. While the dog or fox girl appeared to be wearing little – the lumpy breasts and the mysterious intersection between the two legs and tail were modestly outlined, suggesting some sort of swim wear – the whale was covered in majestic robes, perhaps to convey a role in cetacean legislature or religion.

“Maybe because I have a life,” I mumbled without conviction. But, she was already attaching a flyer to a car several spaces away.

There was text on the other side of the paper:

Our lives have much indignity. Humans are dishonest, jealous, and disloyal, fighting amongst themselves out of fear. They are ‘like dogs,’ except that fighting is actually meaningful for dogs. What is the cause of this fear? The flesh. Our bodies. The human religions say to tame, to control our bodies. But the Animal Squad can transcend them, and these are the themes that the artworks and fan fiction on my site deal with.

- Ceti Orcan

At the bottom of the page, there was an internet address, picture of whale flukes breaching a line of symbolic, zigzagging waves, and a legend: DIGNIFIED FUR – DIGNIFIED FLESH.

.
VII

Shortly after I finally returned to my dorm, I received a long e-mail message from “Ceti Orcan,” confessing all. She had obtained the video without my or Jennifer's permission via a series of elaborate deceptions, even though Jennifer was her best friend; this had been too important. The public needed a demonstration of the dire consequences of fleshly acts unmediated by the soul’s symbolic identification with its “anima(l) nature.” She apologized for what she had done; she would take it down.

She also apologized because she thought that leaving me had been good for Jennifer, although she wasn’t certain about the ultimate viability of Jennifer's present arrangement either. She actually went on at some length about her friend’s emotional needs, which she felt sure she alone understood, a part of the letter in which I quickly lost interest.

Instead, I watched the video again. For some reason, it was still number one. To my surprise, I found myself masturbating, thinking about the tail she wore to the convention in conjunction with her lanky and tall golden retriever-like body.

Comics that I am feeling

2007-04-12T19:58:50Z

This is so real:
http://www.scenelanguage.com
http://www.scenelanguage.com/2007/04/12/sliding-into-home-9-of-15/

And this:
http://donferdinand.livejournal.com/121309.html#cutid1

I want this movie

2005-06-09T02:25:33Z

http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=6797808&style=ice&cart=519841949