The First Thing I Ever Posted To This Blog

Fucking In The Streets (November 2007)

The Paris night is a textureless, dull incandescence spreading slowly over a centerless compound of warehouses. Buildings without faces hide boxes of children without faces. Every blank concrete edifice is perpendicular to lines crossing the side streets, cutting into the heart of the city and dragging filaments out across Europe. These sinews nit together special secret paces on the edges of cities—places where the torn seam of a forgotten dream opens holes into something deeper, something that existed before cars and planes and trains made their commercial trails through densely populated regions of our memories.

Two figures stand in an unmarked doorway. They have walked for an indefinite time, finding their drunken way from a remote bus stop.

For Jason it was another warm callus evening in the streets of his Paris.

For Steve the night was an exhilarating collage of darkness. The bus ride had been a narcotic crescendo, familiar in its haste, oppressive city aesthetic driving into the massive industrial blackness. Here, the old city is unrepresented, displaced by the thorough corporate planners.

“Can you believe there are people out there who want this to end?”

“What do you mean?” asked Steve.

“You know, the Puritans, the bureaucrats, the monotheists, the people who still watch broadcast television.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You’re totally baked.”

“Oh Steven. You don’t remember all those history classes. I was high but you were asleep, a much graver condition. I must tell you: there are still people out there who believe in all of this.”

“Yeah cockmuncher, I’m one of them.”

“You don’t believe in anything you can’t fuck.”

“Fuck you,” and Steven emphasized his point by stamping out a cigarette and punching Jason in the ribs in one fluid motion.

Finally someone opened the door. The light from the interior flashed across their faces. Inside there were fifty people in various states of deconstruction, dancing an unsettling rhythmless movement, talking around long foam lounges, or staring intently at A/V projectors.
Large, semi-permeable projections transpose themselves into the thick black warehouse depths. On a wall, two people are falling in love, silhouetted against a tropical moonscape. Tropical palms dance in what must be a cool tropical offshore flow.

Another screen shows a colony of ants. They consume a small cow that has become sick and fallen into their path.

In another square of light, a mountain range endures a heavy snowfall.

Nobody knows—nobody cares—if they perceive these things in the proper way. It’s a proper party where life becomes uncomplicated in a terrible, horrifying carnival of unfeeling, of antiseptic surfaces in the moonlight. The young men and women are wrapped in themselves: only together for the sex, only having sex so they can be together.

“Do you want to dance?” asked Dominique as she drugged Steve’s drink.

“I don’t want to see you alone.”

“It won’t be a problem for long, Luc is coming back from La Defense soon.”

“I would expect that. It’s his party.”

“He’s just making sure the party lasts.”

A giant World War One-era biplane floated across the back of the warehouse. Jason could hear pornography and two young nude Vietnamese boys lip-syncing to a song by Elvis.

***

Frank watched his grandparent’s ancient TV set. He stopped blinking. His eyes did not move, instead welling with tears that dried into a yellow paste. The corners of Frank’s eye became caked and his lashes were black grates of silvery liquid.

What was this filth he watched? He learned that the geriatric day includes a wide selection of boring television. Sitting against an orange colored couch, Frank had seen three talk shows, two nature programs, and an hour entirely devoted to the sale of walk-in bathtubs. What Frank would have traded for a sex tape, something on VHS that would work with the ancient media cabinet of wood-grain veneer and long panes of glass dyed burgundy.

He imagined a nubile pornographer sitting next to him and sizing up the room for its movie making potential. They might glance at the lacy curtains on the window, eye the chandelier, and laugh heartily about the shag carpet. The young woman would invite him to share in the modest profits of the video and then ask him to take his clothes off, in a firm if cheerful voice.