(somber pensive music)
(voices whispering indistinctly)
- [Tarik] "Meet me on the street
where it's dark," he writes,
"away from the lights,
the carpark is too bright."
I pull in and see cameras
and it occurs to me that he's avoiding these too.
Instead I enter and write, "Meet me inside,
I can barely fit my hand with the money under the glass.
Past the double door entry,
we meet by the lockers,
and in every sense he's larger than I expect,
taller, broader, heavier,
with features that evade being memorized somehow.
But I note the propulsion in his bearing,
as though he found himself out of scale
in a miniature world,
constantly having to buffer his movements.
His eyes are restless. I'm still curious.
We pass the bar, the dry dairy and solvents only bar,
and an older man who doesn't pay us attention.
The sister at the bar is the only one who watches us.
My eyes fix on hers and I wonder if she would know
if I needed help.
Up the stairs, and he's fixated on going to the top floor.
I'm guessing as it's the furthest
from the sparse attendance downstairs,
but the upper stories are closed
and we go back down to the first floor.
But then again, this insistence for a room
at the furthest point, the very end of the hall.
Close the door, eyes adjust to the darkness.
A pale stretch of flesh comes into focus,
damp and plastic like clay,
easy to grab by the fist but not stroke.
There's only one feature he's particularly proud of anyway,
where he wants the focus to pull.
I'm mostly a simulation by this point,
solely turned on by my own performance, and so is he,
or at least it's good enough for him to think I'm captivated
because he whispers, "It's just like McDonald's."
Then pausing for a beat,
"Because you're McLovin it."
I wait taking a long time to realize that was it.
That was the fucking punchline.
My curiosity shifts to why he wanted to meet in the dark.
He doesn't want anyone to recognize him
because he's an ambulance driver.
At least he climaxes soon,
and as I'd rather leave and have mine alone,
I start dressing but still I have to know
why the top floor, why this furthest room.
Someone overdosed recently
and their friend was too high to know what to do,
so we were at the furthest point possible
from where they had died on the first floor.
The ambulance crew arriving too late.
I think of the fire doors cracking apart
to admit the gurneys.
Flooding in daylight, this club was made to trap outside.
He writes, "Wanting to meet again."
I reply affirmative but non committal.
I return a year later on a public holiday
meeting someone else.
The corridors are packed.
I find him downstairs leaning into a locker
where he's getting high.
He's working tonight,
and the client wants to be used, used completely,
so he takes him to the first floor and asks me to follow.
He sets him up in a web of chains
and when his legs are stirruped,
the men start to gather, forming a horseshoe
to start taking turns on the naked form
with its head arched back watching the room upside down.
He wanted to be used,
used and admonished.
So he's turned around with his back to the men,
harnessed upright, his young diagonal form leaning,
equine, poised, leaping as if to escape.
Then I realize how young he looks.
I'm aware peripherally of one man
who's been staring at me for a while,
of his stillness and intent,
a cap shadowing his brow, my excuse for not meeting his gaze
but he's smiling now,
a kind of grimace as he leans in and whispers,
"You were fucking loving it last time."
A tight lipped smile is my reply
as I turn to look for the worker
who's leaning in the doorway
watching a young man's wishes being fulfilled.
Our eyes fix,
he turns and I follow to a dark corridor.
He folds down on a plastic mattress,
an inverted sphinx with his arse at the apex.
He's the one I'm here for.
I eat the cleft and enter him downwards steeply
to dig at his prostate,
and his lower back absorbs me,
a perfect creature's indented flank,
which I dig my thumbs into and grip,
so I can fuck him with himself,
fuck him onto me.
This is why I'm here.
My senses contract
and though I'm aware of the men gathering,
I can't hear them,
my ears are full of rhythm and blood,
thighs burning for oxygen and radiating a clear message
to watch by all means, but don't fucking touch me.
We're both very occupied,
me inside him.
A hand moves down my back
and with two fingers tries to penetrate me.
I clench and rotate but still it persists,
throwing off my rhythm,
so with less subtlety now I grab that wrist
and wrench it back,
and while doing so see another hand slide under my man,
groping for his tit
the way a drunk turns on a light,
and I note the faint but polite acknowledgment,
the briefest pause and charming deflection
before he closes his eyes and resumes his moaning.
Do you want me to fuck you like that?
The intimacy presumed too close, too loud,
and delivered on dry and sweetened breath
kicks in a full spinal recoil.
"You fucking loved it last time."
The ambulance driver reclines
down on the mattress and stares.
My man head down between us,
the casual lounging pose, a sheer gauze,
his anger visible beneath.
I'm grateful now my man is up,
he has to see how things are going
since we left the other room,
and as I leave with him under pretext of concern,
the ambulance driver doesn't take his eyes off me.
The crowd had dispersed from the room of chains,
only a single limpid man is still standing
fingering the younger one who's restless now,
who wants to leave,
and bring me back to their hotel.
I avert my eyes from the ambulance driver
who stares as we pass him in the corridor.
The hotel sits on a hill
christened after the most English of flowers.
Their suite overlooking the race track,
the turf and air still freshly scarred
by the whips and drunken screaming.
They assemble a miniature buffet
of tiny blue bottles, soft drinks and a syringe.
They tell me to help myself and so I settle in
as they climb on the bed, the younger on all fours
being ridden from behind like a chariot.
And then I'm summoned. My turn is up.
The young man arches deeper,
rump airborne and chest right down,
his eyes roll back as I enter,
and the worker sits in the corner
praising my hip work, their circular motion,
and he squats down lower.
The director on set, pointing his phone
at the grinding junction.
The young man wants to carry all my weight,
so I bear him down in a vice between my forearm and sternum
and gripping the whole width of his slender hip in profile.
I dig in as deep as I can go
for him then to say,
"This is what it's like to be fucked by a real man."
At this moment his eyes
are milk white globes spinning backwards.
Equinox.
Solstice, equinox.
Solstice.
Equinox.
The day is greater than the night.
Equinox, solstice.
Equinox.
Solstice.
The night is equal to the day.
Solstice, equinox.
Solstice. Equinox.
Solstice.
The night is greater.
Solstice. Equinox.
Solstice.
The worker is gone.
Solstice.
He might have been looking at his phone.
He might have been filming.
But maybe he was holding his head.
Maybe he was holding his head in his hands.
Now he's gone.
And there's something on our thighs.
some kind of oil, a viscous emission shading our thighs.
The young man gets up.
He's not sure how this happened.
He hasn't eaten anything solid in two days
and can't explain the bilious metabolic essence
covering our thighs.
We wander to the bathroom.
We find the worker sitting in the tiled corner.
He's on his phone but his eyes can't focus.
The scrolling graphics set his head spinning.
He's trying to order something from McDonald's,
but his eyes can't focus on the screen.
Solstice.
The sun stands still.
She visited her old man in prison,
and through the screen told him,
"I haven't been sucking anyone's dick but yours.
But that was a while ago."
She recounts this with a laugh
while she visits with her new man.
He's a mechanic and young enough
for my mother to call son,
and old enough for us to call uncle.
He can only smile with half his face
since an accident that left him brain damaged.
But it's a beautiful smile, crooked and infectious,
full of pain and joy,
and it matches hers.
We could see how each was set alight
by the presence of the other.
And I wished that I had been raised in their warmth,
to have called them mother and father.
You were much older, the provider
of an endless supply that drew them all to you.
I noted that I first arrived as someone else was leaving.
You sat on the porcelain rim afraid of the smoke.
Your lungs already damaged,
so you choked your bicep and fixed yourself up,
as I knelt down and gave you head.
You said that you'd become afraid to leave your home,
afraid to go outside.
So you stocked up the unending bowl
that kept them all coming to you.
She screamed at him over and over to get off,
until I knocked on their door
and threatened him with the cops if he was hurting her.
She insisted all was fine,
that he and the police were a hazardous mix,
while he screamed, "Fuck off on your wog
way back to Lebanon.
Do you know where you are?
This is fucking housing commission."
None of the facts matter.
That we're not Lebanese.
That I've lived in housing most of my life,
and that I've never met anyone on the estates
as completely decayed as him.
After a few months I see the ambulance driver online.
He's screaming in all upper case
that Arabs are liars that lead you on.
I block him and he shows up again with a new profile,
and again after that as prolific as pollen,
and I suppress each emergence, until he disappears.
I was sitting with the others on the floor.
We were all the same age, looking up at the man on the couch
as he told us a story about what happens
to a certain kind of man in prison,
how he's penetrated with a PVC pipe
into which a piece of barbed wire is inserted.
A story only a cop could call a fable for children.
You open the door in a jockstrap,
a compact frantic Hercules with a truly mythic list of tasks
that we need to achieve before having sex,
somewhere between stuffing a chicken in the oven,
getting high and counting neat stacks of 50s
totalling 80K using scales.
You offer advice on laundering cash
by investing in Rolexes.
There are 20 hidden around your short stay apartment,
which you enlist me to find with you.
And on this maddening hunt through closets and under linen,
you tell me what your uncle did to you
and for how long,
and you tell me that you killed him.
And now the chicken is burning.
Things had been quiet for a while
and I hadn't seen him online
before I started receiving messages sent anonymously.
What was implied was that they knew me
and intended to degrade not just myself
but everyone he thought I resembled,
collected into a class of person.
And it made me think of his hygienic fascism,
how he'd refuse to kiss after I'd gone down on him.
I usually never reply to this genre of message,
but the anonymity struck me.
The tactic to install a fear so deep,
the curdled inverse of intimacy.
After my reply all messages stopped.
I know who you are.
(soft music)