my colleague

That despicable fellow is my colleague. He is a gutless fool, an abject tinker, a violator. He makes my skin slip and my buttock (or buttocks) clench inwards. I have no respect for that fellow and I find him repulsive across the spectrum. I yearn for the day when he isn’t – of voice, of earth, extant, etc. The days start with dread and worsen with the knowledge of his continuance, and in the dark mornings so black and cold I intellectually construct his demise. This demise always begins in the same manner and climaxes with incredible pain either physical or emotional or both as is my wont. The constructed demise affords me a warmth otherwise lacking in my personal and professional lives both.

He is in every way a grotesque, and if any person – even the most trusted – had related to me the traits of his personality and manner in a complete and truthful way I would likely dismiss them as nonsense, so very grotesque were they, like elements from a checklist of grotesquery so thorough that they have become almost parodic. He wanders the offices and corridors of our shared building like a giggling child, his oily greying hair glistening beneath the strip lights, his forehead a great tall beacon as smooth and white as a shell, and he gestures endlessly with nail-bitten fingers, towards equipment, people, paperwork and similar, gestures incomprehensibly. He sidles up and urges himself upon flanks and forearms and buttock-curves in ways so imperceptible that few, if any, perceive these urges, but they are there and I perceive them upon my own person and others. He inhales deeply the passing hair of the reception girl – whose firm perfectly bowed legs and profound shape filled her trousers as though the flesh itself yearned for release into waiting hands or mouths, the sinking between her two buttocks like the grassy declivity of a precious valley protected by government writ or other legislation, some site of specific interest – which is intensely fragrant with shampoo products and long and dark, an inhalation both creepy and idiotic in some balance; he revels in the heady incense and pictures beds creaking under their shared usage as she passes, and though she hears his sniff – his nose ever stuffy, unblown – like an aural marker of her passage (she moves so faintly: her shoes a whisper on the coarse mucky carpet! her tiny feet!) she either welcomes the purported harmlessness of his attentions as flattery or office good-humour or else presumes – and fairly – the sound to be symptomatic of some ailment or illness it would be insensitive or discriminatory or in bad taste of her to mention. He draws deeply through flaring nostrils and leans in slightly to the long dark hair, the intensely fragrant shampoo products, the firm perfectly bowed legs and profound shape etc., then groans aloud in reverie long after the clattering of her washed teacup has ceased and the girl has conscientiously returned to her post.

I once heard a preposterous story about my colleague and his past, a story suggesting innumerable facets of particular relevance to a dissection of his character, or what little character there was in evidence. The story related to his “collections”, myriad groupings of thematically linked items which were prevalent throughout his childhood and formative years and which took varied and differential forms each meticulously catalogued and stored. He collected anything, he said, it was within his personality, he couldn’t help himself. If he possessed even two of a thematically linked item he would begin collecting further exemplars of that item forthwith, until hundreds were in his possession. He collected rubbers, like most, figurines, pencils, stickers, egg boxes, bottle tops, dreams, also nails clippings (his own, finger and toe, the sum of some ten years clipping a good couple of centimetres deep and stored within a Ben Sherman tin that stank of feet), pirated VHS copies of banned videos (his collections reached a zenith in the mid 90s, when many horror or adult films now considered classics of the genre(s) had still not been granted release by the increasingly relaxed/culturally pliable BBFC; my colleague would respond to advertisements placed in the rear sections of underground publications, and then furtively receive printed lists on orange paper of the strange and wonderful films available to order, send postal orders to PO boxes, the incredible thrill of illegality, waiting for the letterbox to flap), hairs, almost used lipsticks (he inhaled the odour and was dizzy with lust), soiled underwear. His most unusual collection, however, was the focus of this story. According to the legend detailed at some length in the story as told – that had followed him in whispers for half a generation like a retarded youth – and that I had heard regarding my colleague’s most unusual collection, the items in question and of which there were between thirty and forty in number were what looked too all intent and purposes like pelts of some description, the attached fur or hair of varied colouring and the skin below still either slightly tacky from, one presumed, the freshness of the bloody flesh of its undercarriage or else dried and brittle and somewhat curled at its edges like the rind upon fried bacon rashers. The story made clear that these pelts were of human rather than animal origin and were in fact the scalps of children that my colleague had in some way accrued through unspecified means (perhaps through associates within the hospital portering service, student doctors, mortuary assistants and so on, if not through violent murder perpetrated by he himself). It was reported that he tended to this pelts with loving devotion, brushing and even styling the hair, carefully washing the clumps of blood and gore from them, storing them neatly rolled and fastened with lengths of ribbon of appropriate colouring for the shades in question, draping the pelts or scalps across the cupola of his own head like a ritualistic fancy dress, inhaling their varied and complex odours, tessellating them atop his pillow and sleeping against them. Although my colleague refused to indulge in details pertaining to these pelts and how they came to his possession, the story details how in his personal notebooks there were extensive and lifelike illustrations of between thirty and forty children, each adorned with what appeared to be “incision marks”, as well as gruesome and anatomically valid illustrations of the same children following the forcible removal of these pelts from their person(s). There is of course little if any evidence of these pelts today, or the incidents surrounding their origin; the story, however, persists, and beyond that is as credible (if not more so) than it has ever been, given the extensive catalogue of grotesque and socially anomalous traits and habits in which my colleague routinely engaged. Whilst a more patient person could investigate the veracity of this story in more depth, cross-referencing the claims and chronology with dead or missing children in the area at that time and the like, I do not consider this a necessary use of my time; the formal “truth” of the story is of little relevance, and as an allegory it remains especially potent and a more than sufficient indictment of my colleague’s character, should such an indictment be required. In the permanence of its legacy, fiction is often truer than truth, superseding the happened with the terror of possibility.

His ever moist palms are very warm and reek of flatus and their rank moisture and odour can be detected from several feet away in the relatively enclosed spaces of the office. On the thankfully rare but nonetheless real instances on which I have occasion to visit his personal office – archaically, small rooms and doorways rather than open plan spaces were the preferred format for this particular workplace – the smell was unbelievably repulsive, stagnant breath and captured flatus, and I caught sight of an eaten tub of barley or couscous or bulgur wheat salad in the wastepaper basket at the foot of his desk, crisp crumbs and streaked coffee cups also, and the olfactory cocktail made me woozy, pressed into awareness and higher function only by his happening voice. The tundra of his milky skin and beetroot lips was broken by feeble pointillist beard growth in troubled pinpricks, and as I listened to his instruction his face became a simple palette of the rain-soaked brush strokes and glooping oils of a moron, an entirely alien representation of some incomprehensible notion of human anatomy. I nodded at intervals throughout his soliloquy and left as soon as I could assume to be appropriate, expecting him to call me back or to admonish me, neither of which were the case. I gagged then swallowed a small amount of dreadful acid into and out of my mouth when I considered his hands, their digits, their singular stench.

After around six months of our working together my colleague was seriously injured in a car accident but a stone’s throw from our office. He was struck by a vehicle as he crossed the road and for reasons unknown the vehicle had failed to stop or assist him. I watched him struggling in the road as I approached the scene and thought about his hands and his gestures and the hair of reception girl, and I cycled past him as he lay sobbing at the edge of the roadway. He reached one hand out towards my wheels in a way that struck me as cinematic and pitiful. His pleas for assistance faded as I rode around the corner and towards my home.

the small child

There was a small child lived about the bridge area, took great solace in the passing water. His parents were long dead and he was only a child, but had built some life for himself from out of the troubles. He sheltered in places various and embraced their dissonance and the idiosyncrasies of each and every night, and sometimes woke with the sun and at other times was kicked awake by drunks or drenched in their falling urine or stunned by their bayed insults or sometimes by the rain or other elements, for the climate about the bridge area could be cruel as most things could. He survived on scraps found or sometimes stolen, pizza crusts, the spilt salad from kebabs hastily necked, wilted lettuce, tomatoes of ferocious blandness, thick circles of raw onion, ends of banana shed with their skin, single chips trampled flat at one end, a ramshackle diet of the unwanted or the dropped. He adhered to a strict code of personal ethics which prohibited theft, a code to which he tried hard to adhere, his diet built exclusively of the wares of the street, but sometimes basic physical need would overtake him and supersede the efficacy of the code, and he would creep invisible into the larger shops and pocket very small items and apologise under his breath as he did it, and later sob himself dry as he chewed them slowly, the products cloying and unbearable as they wove their guilt around his mouth like cobwebs. He bathed in the waters of the river longing for the holy, and shivered naked on the bank waiting for the air to dry his skin. He watched other children walk with parents through the daffodils and blooming crocuses and felt some scorn but he would not blame them or wish their happiness absent. The world would gain little should his misery be shared. He waited patiently for the day the water would rise to take him up.

smiling I blame TV

You can now purchase a copy of my second story collection smiling I blame TV in paperback here and as an ebook here.

It contains a total thirty-seven items (stories, sundries, ephemera, miscellany) and is an attractively rendered and formatted package.

The text dates in places from as far back as - I believe - 2002 and continues right up to the present, but weeks old (though with a sizeable gap during which much of the stuff from so long! godspeed! so long! was written), and I would consider parts of it (which is to say: smiling I blame TV) to be amongst by best and most complete work.

So you might as well. Buy the fucking thing.

love letter

Besides, the document lost none of its emotional heft from his accidental inclusion of the file name – “love letter example” – pasted into the header of each printed page, and if anything actually gained the same (emotional heft), although whether tragedy or futility were the specifically intended emotional responses to so personal a document is unclear though doubtful.

She was not unattractive by any commonly accepted definition, and yet there was – he knew – something carnally unappealing about her face. The only way he could justify it to himself was to say that, should she have a brother, she looked precisely as he (which is to say her brother) would. Indistinguishable. Not a manly face, he assured her by florid letter, definitively non-masculine, but a face identical in shape, angle and unspecified physiognomy to the brother she may or may not have. Somewhat hard, he offered, unsoftened by the straight blonde bangs that were themselves the only thing that might plausibly differentiate her from the hypothetical immediate male relative of shared parentage but as yet unconfirmed existence. It wasn’t to say he wouldn’t do it, of course he would, simply that things might not feel... “right”. As he did. It. Hers was a noble face, he was at pains to point out, but nonetheless the face of a tennis partner (male) with whom he might have forged a moderately decent doubles career at school, comforting and encouraging to the same degrees as the symbolic team that face had come to represent, and as taut with nostalgia and the semi-homosexual undercurrents and gestures that competitive sportsmanship so often nurtures in its most determined practitioners, with passion (for the game), relief (for the game) and uncontrolled endorphins (from the game) blurring in a melting pot of tangible, physical pleasures that were then mentally rerouted into eroticism, the only viable and comprehensible explanation for the wayward frenzy and delirium of excess arousal they left in their wake post-match. Lithe muscle glistening, devotional trust, showers shared &c. A mountainous face, not in scale or proportion but in gravity and permanence, in geological import. Ruffle the bangs and pop on a baseball cap and visualize a light mottle of stubble and the face easily, very easily became of male character. The space between trousered legs bore exactly what genital fruit, on short commutes of bus then walk?

The composition of the document itself took him considerable weeks to complete as he soon found the best sentences and most charged or memorable turns of phrase were those he penned while half-heartedly (which is to say vaguely) masturbating, and while this onanistic attention began as literarily productive mild caresses of his own primary area, a tease of sorts that maintained his focus, it soon escalated into full-throttle, full-length, full-tank milking gestures that were inevitably, hastily followed by climax, the typing required for successful letter writing superseded by rough self-stimulation and the easy flow of romantic confessional by the vague guilt and helplessness that accompanies ejaculate on self or surrounding furniture or worse. Inevitably the mood, some would say the impetus, would be gone, shed like his spilt seed coagulating beneath the angle-poise, and he would not return to it for some further days, until bus journeys and their associated and convoluted carnal categorisations would rejuvenate the spirit within him.

I decided to write for I’m not much of a speaker. Facial tics, hand gestures, slight alterations in body language are more my thing. A little says a lot when it comes to the body. It’s beyond language really, something altogether more primal. I can’t seem to find the words in spontaneous vocal interaction, they simply don’t come, and I come across as somehow deficient. Besides which, I find it useful to have a paper trail in my personal life as I’m expected to in my professional life, for cross-referencing and future clarifications. Conversational certainty is a conduit for romance.

Did you ever play Did I Ever? The unfulfilling parlour game where every comparison is prefixed with the phrase “did I ever tell you”? I find it fits neatly with my passion for three-part lists and is a great ice breaker at work functions. Did I ever tell you that I like my coffee like I like my women – bitter, strong, (very) serious. Did I ever tell you that I like my tea like I like my women – limp, milky, comforting. Did I ever tell you that I like my bacon like I like my women – crispy, burnt, salty. Did I ever tell you that I like my apples like I like my women – hard, tart, pink. Did I ever tell you that I like my TV like I like my women – mindless, colourful, artificial. Did I ever tell you that I like my movies like I like my women – long, confrontational, rich in metaphoric subtext. Did I ever tell you that I like my rescue dogs like I like my women – doting, grateful, cautious. I could go on but can’t bear the typing.

Thing is, there are in all our lives really but several instances that make us. Make us us. As a kid I was fat. Fattish. Fatter. As a fat kid I was into Meatloaf, rock singer not dish, obsessively so. I have a propensity to obsession, me and everyone. Good, or maybe bad news for the obsesessee. Bought all the tapes I could, it was the mid 90s, even the ones with awful shit-grade low res cover art, the close-up facials, the sheer fleshiness of the thing, the accidental hair (like short hair given remarkable length overnight, unexpectedly). Weird that a male vocalist of such minimal or unorthodox attractiveness levels though impressive vocal range (cf. I’m Gonna Love Her For Both of Us climax) would forever bind – some might say hamper – his recorded output with these kinds of celebration of his own face and nothing but (such covers were not framed within a bigger more intriguing scene, specks of humanity within a wider occurrence, instead the face was the scene itself, each more porcine and absurd than the last, mere inches away from Meat pulling a thumbs up and yelping uncontrollable laughter), but bind – some might say hamper – it he did. The covers have aged poorly but the music, some of it, still today stokes the same fire in my belly as it had through the 2 x 1.5w speakers of my youth’s tape deck. I bought all the tapes as a fat kid, videos too – remember the brute physical majesty of those ‘old’ media formats? You could strangle yourself on the unwound reams of tape chewed and spat within your walkman, run your fingers through it like an ocean of the black magnetic hair of your most tender lover. I yearn for media forms that accommodate feeling, that accommodate even the potential of death within their very structure, not the vacuous hyper clean emptiness of the digital era – and played them religiously, entirely absorbed in Meatloaf’s gluttonous excesses (of musical style, theatrical and – almost certainly – gastronomic appetite) and profoundly sweaty delivery, like some heavyset bastard genuinely on the edge of an immeasurable danger or physical collapse. Belched every line like his last and let’s face it, it could have been, if you saw the size of the fucker, face strained sunset red with every long note and hair plastered to the sides of it, half-drowned in his own gravy. I listened to those tapes and watched those videos, a fat – fatter – kid, and felt the vitality and frank arousal of the kind of gothic-tinged love of which Meatloaf was a key advocate for every single (semi-attractive) one of the flat-chested micro-skirt wearing female classmates whose names filled the pages of my A5 journals in neat graded columns punctuated by carefully drawn scenes of future marriages – I have always been a traditionalist at heart – in the game show format, each a raucous celebration of lust (entirely alien to me at the time of course and – to my lifelong shame – for some number of years following [a concept alien no longer, I would hasten to clarify at this juncture, as the quality of my penmanship will no doubt testify; the pen is as one with the genitals, as it were and is]). They gave me hope where none had previously taken root, and I found solace in the successes and sexual conquests of the everyman, the fattest man that Meatloaf represented, found solace in a weird filthy world where even a sweating unfortunate could do his business and reap the rewards both feminine and financial; they were reason enough for life to proceed. I had my first self-induced orgasm to a Meatloaf tape, standing up and singing with the kind of abandon that a parentally ill-considered lock on one’s teenage bedroom door affords; I was incredibly surprised by the outcome, the emission, terrified really (you’ll recall that heavy pornography was once less ubiquitous than it is today, leaving my sexual education during teenage years inadequate and strictly Hollywood-sanitary).

Likewise I recall with a clarity startling alongside my otherwise absent memory being kicked as I lay upon my family’s bathroom floor – which for some reason I was wont to do after baths and showers, my skin scalded in great red patches by the heat of the water as I like it to be – as a child maybe twelve by my exhausted father; he grilled me about some trivial annoyance or minor behavioural anomaly and I had laughed in the kind jerking uncontrolled snorts that dreadful fear incites, my two hands clasped across my mouth and face in a pointless attempt to conceal my anxious mirth, and as each of his questions or commands escalated in volume and severity both, my laughter became to my father’s ears not a symptom of the fear I felt at a vital family moment of such abject helplessness but ever more raucous and mocking and disrespectful. Coherent answers silenced by laughter he kicked me weirdly in quickening toe-punts and I squirmed beneath him, and I remember the point at which he lost it for a second or so and saw red in his life that totalled three bloody kids gone awry and the waste of bloody time it all was and drew his leg a little further back than was justifiable to kick me very hard in one side and I doubled over and cried and he watched horrified and apologised gently and helped me to my feet, apologised further and left the room hurriedly, his face scarlet with remorse of such ferocity as to conversely make me feel irredeemably guilty for whatever I hadn’t done. Kicked into guilt. Such instances of this type of low-level domestic abuse were equally foundational to the construction of me the man; the disappointment in my father’s vacant tan eyes as the shoe came down scorched inside me like sweat marks on an old pillow, the realisation that me myself and the things I did made him yearn for more of all. It remains a heavy burden to bear, the aspects of I that make me nothing.

Some significant portion of the document was devoted to a rigorous self-assessment of his own character profile, focussing primarily and at length on a quite repetitive list section detailing perceived strengths and weaknesses of disposition, a list which he referred to several times as evidence of “a demonstrable humility”, a reference which itself undermined any semblance of same and which was also one of his higher documented strengths. Too tedious to detail, the list nonetheless represented self-reflection on the most minute – and therefore entirely uninteresting to all those but self – Proustian scale. Attentive temperament. Arms “satisfactory” (unanimous). Starched penchant (meaning unclear). &c.

I suppose what I’m – he offered weakly, towards the end (relatively speaking; the letter was perfect bound for fuck’s sake), spent, depleted – trying to verbalise is fundamentally this: I’m attracted to you as is man to his synonymously-gendered sports partner, in short and at once both not and desperately. Only sexually also, as in I would and want to. Have a sexual undertaking with your direct involvement. Exacerbate your genitals into high function.

You put me in the mind of a distant acquaintance of mine, though without the beard, a proficient drummer but flawed conversationalist (I imagine you as the opposite but can verify neither assumption); or of a particular TV detective from the box sets, whose name and especial ability has always escaped me – awash in the consonants of all the others – in a way that his arousing taste for institutionalised violence, misogyny and misogynistic violence hasn’t (which, incidentally and importantly, with you as female, does not make me a misogynist myself, simply an audience or rather: one who can ‘enjoy’ the artistic representation of the misogyny of others as an effective and politically disengaged aesthetic tool); or of many other faces and persons prevalent within my interior, such fond and tender memories birthed in the limitations of your – our – UK genetic tendencies. I acknowledge the apparent bias towards male points of reference, and the plausible disparity between my own purported heterosexuality (as I believe is demonstrated by this document) and my near-painful desire to entertain your intimate bit in the fullest possible way irrespective of the already-referenced slightly male physiological elements on which some part of your attractiveness hinges, and yet I would like to reiterate for absolute clarity that despite the rather comforting presence of those more male characteristics that defy categorisation and are really more of an unspecific essence within your persona, it is very much the woman within you and your clothes that I want to teach to love me.

Its not me it’s you. Or rather. My error. A Freudian… thing, if ever there was. Slip. A proficient slipper, by J. Sainsbury et al. I am. The Proficient Slipper, produced by St. Michael (who was St. Michael? In the retail – which is to say non-biblical – context the name stuck in honour of the Belarusian Jew founder [one of two] of Marks and Spencer; what greater honour than the manufacture of decent quality clothing and foodstuffs under [one of] one’s name[s], or a variant on it [and self-canonization to boot!]). Before your time, probably before mine too, but I have a memory for branding, logos, jingles. Verbally speaking, orally, I am a hell of a mistake. Of course I meant, it’s not you it’s me. Clichés pertinent for a reason, because they’re right, or can be. The way I was formed. It is me.

This bus is a grim microcosm. Absolute Christ. It’s a bad climate on wheels, moving death at unnoticeable speeds through city streets ill-equipped for it. Hot, cold, wet, sad. These silent faces are little silent enough, yours a beacon in the morning and to a lesser extent the afternoon. I watch your hand clasp the holding rails provided and imagine perhaps my genitals in its place gripped between your long fingers. I heard your voice when you spoke to a friend on the telephone when I followed you from the bus one night in secrecy; it was dark and you wore a hooded red coat and your face was like a perfect charcoal sketch. I was surprised by its pitch, your voice, high and abrasive, blurted out like an error message from the mouth your face held, and it made me think of the determined sobbing of the young, and was interestingly all the more attractive because of it. I followed you for some streets and bathed in its discrepancies before I didn’t.

Ah Sally – can I call you Sally? It’s my mother’s name, which breaches nearly all of my internet security options; I trust you Sally (but will update my internet security options) – the fit of your trousers is bad – can you see it? full length mirrors can be hard to find; I should know, my jeans fall from my body like an infant’s soiled nappy – but also fine; the black office-smart fabric sinks as it should and rises too over your amorphous parts. I perceive you through windows across the barren commercialism of the business park, outside the bus, possibly elsewhere, perceive your telephone manner and confident receiver technique, the easy way disdain twists your features simian and tight. I perceive you working me well like a piece of ancient machinery, and I know or feel sure that in this perception I must love this person, must and can, that she must and could love me, given the pertinent facts or information which can accommodate fully reasoned decision-making. Love feels so much like indifference – I can hardly be bothered to talk about it but do religiously.

There were a great many pages of text. They grew from nothing from the simplest thought, which instead of being dismissed or left to flounder was elevated by bus travel into immense significance. His erratic leaps between oppressive inanity, focus and casual psychosis, as well as passages of great tenderness, would make for necessary reading around the department and of course later the office. It would become a talisman for the singular cruelty on which the office thrived, printed affirmation that although things could be better they could and would be much worse.

I best sign off, Sally. Endings are my second weakness, right after beginnings. I prefer the middle but so rarely get there, and never get past it. That’s a promise.

Could I please drool my junk like weary rivers through the canyons of your chin? Your tired bus eyes scream bed like a declaration that fells the structure.

All the very best.

crows

The world was and frail. The crows circled with authority, as if they alone were privy to some terrible truth. The tree groaned beneath the staggering weight of hundreds, who immersed its branches and its leaves beneath the creeping shadow of their cumulative feathers, beaks, their unified call that like mockery overpowered and drowned the setting sun as fingery tendrils of incomprehensible void. Through the mist of the afternoon the fenlands belched and gargled geriatrically, soil slurped in digestive inevitability by the encroaching waters and the struggling weirs and pumping stations that peppered the peaty earth like explicit admissions of human failure. The moving crows formed perfect spectral shapes as one, their bodies swallowing the trees they had selected, circling the branches in immense murders, the air heaving and itself alive with the life of their taut bodies. Their call bled the earth singularly with breathtaking precision. For many months the crows had been gathering, the place chosen in cawed consensus.

The four boys watched the crows from some hundred feet away, felt safe within their pocked dirty denim and once-white trainers, felt the safety of numbers and of distance both although they were but tokens as empty as everything in truth. Hermanus, Grünther, Knid, Petron. Hermanus was the ugliest of the four by some unspoken measure, the leader also, his aesthetic shortcomings compensated handsomely in territory and power. He embraced his end, invited it, but the three were fearful when the intent of the birds became manifest; at that point things were already too late as machinations were underway like maniac graffiti daubed crudely on surfaces in the drying blood of the boys themselves. Hermanus had planned the excursion for some weeks, since shortly after the crows had settled. They were all he saw, their black feathers as spilt ink outside his windows as though the glass bore carrion behind its structure and he were it, their shapes stuttering into certainty when he pressed the palms of his hand flat into his eyes for seconds until visions came. The crows became a preoccupation, an obsession. He had been in psychic conversation with them since their unexpected arrival in the earlier months of the year and heard their voices guiding him, sowing the seed – so it seemed – of their imminent destruction. He heard them clear as a radio in the very centre of his mind. He was the chosen vessel for their ends, they said. He alone would understand the need, they said. He himself was of crow, though he wouldn’t know that and wouldn’t hope to know the implications of what it meant to be so, they said. They said infinite amounts. They were forceful and kind and they explained to him just how it would and had to be. He received their wisdom hungrily, a receptive host. We are foremost, they said. Your scraps form our feast, your forgotten boxed riches our idols. In his ignorance Hermanus laughed, thought the crows in their scavenging inferior somehow, failed to see the permanence of their adaptability. The birds chided him. Our immortality now depends upon a sacrifice of both our own and yours, they said. The tropes would be familiar, they said. Well-peddled dogma, hackneyed creed: from death cometh life or similar. The bloods of bird and man – boy – must assemble as one plasmatic whole. Hermanus expressed his incomprehension and the crows chided him further. They instructed him to bring three sacrifices to their roost, for the sacrifice of their own demanded likewise. His spiritual reimbursement was, they said, obvious, and resultant in the privilege of his communications with the crows, and his financial reimbursement would take form from the huge stockpile of silver items that the crows had collected by illicit means during their short tenure in the tree outside the village, small unnoticed items of significant cumulative worth, reimbursements both that should more than compensate for any moral quandary that might otherwise have been associated with their very specific requests. The birds had spoken and with it the concept of the birds must be destroyed. It was their behest. He drew schematics under the guidance of the crows, felt in his arms and hands their wings and dreams, tried to turn pages of notes and vivid diagrams into meaningful narrative explication but it was an impossible task. He alone would comprehend, this was the way the birds intended it. The visions were very clear. The roosting birds would fall as prey to the air rifle, the pop of its action the catalyst of change.

Hermanus had selected Petron for his father’s history as scoutmaster, a role of some significance in villages such as the one the four boys inhabited with others. Petron’s father had used his short appointment – and his long-term psychiatric depression and the episodes it induced within his person – to skilfully construct his own death liberated of culpability. He led the scouts under his supervision into the tying of a perfect noose knot from the same heavy rope with which they practised basic knotting works, and to then assembling a simplistic gallows by threading the rope around the branches of aged trees as necessary and demanded by the task. The scouts relished the challenge of assembling a machinery of death, although at the time had failed to realise the purpose or intent of their scoutmaster’s challenge, which they had considered a purely hypothetical structure – albeit one whose function lay solely with cessation – whose danger existed only as abstraction. After the scouts had retired to their tents Petron’s father proudly examined the viability of the gallows and deemed it highly viable, ascended the tree and tightened the noose around his neck, then stepped from the branch and into great silence. The scouts retrieved his rigid slightly swinging body at first light and carried it back to the village in shifts, rousing each other with sung songs and the recitation of local fenland shanties now all but forgotten. They remained detached throughout the walk, as men far older than their years, thrust into placidity by the demands of trauma, but the veneer of function decayed as soon as the body had been set down in the doctor’s office, and the boys were destroyed as only youth can be, the smell of the dead man seeming to linger on their fingers and uniforms for months after. Regardless of this tragedy or perhaps because of it, Petron was still permitted access to the arsenal of low-impact weaponry adopted by the scouts as part of their rituals, as though somehow a substitute for a self-dead father. Hermanus had aggressively specified the necessity of Petron’s firearm as related by the crows, and Petron carried the weapon part dismantled in his school backpack. It was the catalyst of change, Hermanus urged. The plastic cylinder of accompanying pellets rattled percussively with their footsteps.

Of Knid were expected accidents; his propensity towards harm of the unintentional type was famed throughout the whispers of his small fenland village, and this expectation had itself become indistinguishable from whatever disparate traits could be considered to conform to a personality. As a younger child he had fallen from an old iron railway bridge while hastily fooling around among the secrets of its arrangement and was found bleeding from one ear and hysterical many hours later, the source of the blood “inconclusive” and “of no medical concern”, although for many of the village’s inhabitants it was representative of either a notable decline in Knid’s already highly questionable intellectual faculties or, for the more superstitious individuals, who still formed a majority of belief in fenland villages such as theirs, the beginning of something far more unnatural. Some months after this he had been dodging the handful of cars that crawled his residential street over the period of one day – a game whose fatal slowness made it unlike any other, and for which the absolute and dedicated level of patience it required of its players was meditative in intensity – and in the apathetic light of afternoon had been struck at a speed greater than the dimensions of the road permitted. The driver had fled, and Knid was located by his mother after twenty or so minutes had passed, lying between two parked cars and seriously injured, his pelvis all but destroyed. After exhaustive surgical reconstruction of the bone he spent weeks convalescing with a pelvic brace that jutted its metal framework from his flesh, itself puckered around it, doughy and youthful and ever so white and futile and flawed. There were others too numerous to recount; one such occasion – though not an accident in the strictest sense, the unplanned, unnecessary and wholly avoidable nature of the occasion permitted such status – saw a male friend angrily pursue Knid across the landscaped stepping stones that formed a footpath across their headmaster’s lawn, and as their mutual feet transferred their bodies across the path Knid’s friend had to the school’s jubilation punched Knid in the front of the face once with every step, some nine or ten punches, while Knid’s arms remained resolutely at his sides, his focus remaining on walking safely backwards away from the raining blows and highly personal vocal abuse, the gruelling finale of some petty short-lived feud that had driven their friendship to its close. Though the punches had been ineffective as violence, as psychically damaging instances they were of profound value, and Knid himself felt broken by the accumulation of instances, as though his entire life had been crystallised and as such rendered worthless by one fundamentally tepid if persistent beating, and he wept peacefully in the immersive loneliness of the school car park, cowering behind teachers’ estate cars and yearning for change.

Grünther was of orthodox upbringing and spoke prayer as he walked, and both he and his family were of some considerable mystery to the village. Little was known of the intricacies of their home life and no other of the village’s several hundred inhabitants had ever been granted invite into their home. The house itself had reputation as an unsavoury place, but the logical inconsistency of such a far-fetched belief held in correspondence with the very public knowledge of the religious commitments Grünther’s family chose to observe (such observances being of no secret and representing in fact the one certainty the village did hold pertaining to the family) left the inhabitants uncomfortable with their own assumptions and generally silent on the topic as a result, fallen prey as they did to an incompatibility of duelling superstitions. What little clues were glimpsed between cracks in the thick curtains that Grünther’s family hung at their windows provided no insight of value as the decor appeared normal if austere. Grünther was noted to be a boy of some intelligence. It was of little surprise that the crows’ presence in the trees outside the village and its associated symbolism took on a biblical significance for him in ways he found impossible to articulate.

The son of tender teachers, Hermanus had the most conventional upbringing of the four, which is why – he thought – the crows came, psychic conversations being the privilege and indulgence of the normal and the sane. His mealtimes were opulent and his needs more than met, but it was for these facts and others that he longed for something greater than the offerings of his parents’ middle class values, than the sacrifices they had made for his benefit could allow them to comprehend. Comfort spawns discomfort was an aphorism he wrote carefully onto his bedroom wallpaper with neat ballpoint script, and amidst the complex love he felt for his parents he resented the same and actively sought the struggle he believed would give meaning to his at the very least occurring life, and with him Hermanus selected three as vacant and as racked with longing as he himself was.

From their vantage point the crows appeared as memories torched and flitting ever upwards with the movement of the winds, black specks of the charred present lost to history, seeking escape from the weighty earth. At Hermanus’s instruction Petron began to extract the components of the weapon from his backpack and pass them piece-by-piece to Knid, who assembled it with surprising authority and craftsmanship, carefully inspecting the action as he did so. He passed the completed weapon to Hermanus, who loaded it with a single pellet. Grünther watched the huge array of birds set against the dreadful sky and wept in silence. They walked slowly towards the roosting tree amidst the calling of the crows that grew in frenzy as they approached. Hermanus closed his eyes to better listen, to hear the crows, sought their myriad voices and asked their guidance, but for the first time in many months their conversation had fallen silent, dissolved in the open country that flanked the village without moral structure or spatial limit into mere sound. When they were close enough to the tree to smell its bark in the cool one of the crows landed several feet to the side of them and cocked its head to one side and then the other then looked at the sky and then inspected them intently and processed its findings with neither prejudice or expectation, its sharp black eyes blinking mechanically as it conducted its research. They watched it watch them, its fast movements felt strobe-like or demented in the then failing daylight. Grünther felt moved to reach for the bird. Its eyes seemed to widen at the cocking of the weapon and Hermanus fired; the pellet struck the bird in the flank and it keeled to one side, its wings flapping and trying wretchedly to struggle it back to its feet but somehow very still. Hermanus handed the rifle to Knid, who dismantled it wiped the pieces clean with a blackened handkerchief before returning them to Petron, who was openly crying and disgusted at the cowardice of his voyeuristic role. Hermanus stepped to the crow and waited for its wings to cease, watched its laboured breathing and waited for clarification or encouragement, which were not forthcoming. He recalled the clarity of their earlier conversations and tried to remain detached from the horror of the physical world. He peered into the terminal black depths of the dying bird’s eye and lowered his foot onto its head. In the soft ground the head found no traction or give and only sank beneath his sole, impressed into the peat like archaeology, the bird’s growing distress increasingly tangible. Hermanus instead stamped onto the head with a force that felt so vulgar until after five or six stamps the wings finally stilled though remained vertical, erect, their feathers caught in the breeze, the bird then dead, what little blood there might have been immersed in the quaggy mud.

Hermanus looked to the birds in the tree that gathered in their hundreds or even thousands and watched the four boys very closely. The eerie silence that had accompanied Hermanus’s act of violence had been replaced by the calling of the crows, an ominous chorus. Grünther thrust his gloved hands to his ears, his eyes wild and desperate like a near-dead creature, the assured truth of his own mortality suddenly explicit. Petron couldn’t bear to look and didn’t, yet felt the piercing shafts of the crows’ mutual glare tear through him like radiotherapy, his body left grated and hollow by his own tears and by the will of the crows. Knid methodically wiped his hands with the same streaked greasy handkerchief with which he had cleaned the requisite parts of the air rifle, each stroke further dirtying the skin beyond salvage. The beautiful plumage of the headless crow was spattered with mud. Hermanus felt dread throughout his body; he raised one hand and spoke to the crows.

“Is this not as we agreed? I said,” he said. “‘is this not as we agreed’?” The crows moved amongst their number, their branches, the tree exclaiming in anticipation, but said not a word. Perhaps a score or so of the birds took flight and encircled first the tree and then extended their orbit closer toward the four boys, cawing loudly as they did so. Others followed suit until the sky darkened further with the weight of the birds, the tree too still heaving black and alive. Although they didn’t come within some feet of the boys their presence was felt like eyes in an empty room. “I’ve done as you asked,” he said. “To the letter. Brought the sacrifices, initiated the sacrifice.” Knid, Petron and Grünther moved instinctively together. “You came to me. You said I was the vessel, the conduit. You led me here to this. Speak to me now, tell me what to do.” One of the circling birds dived upon Hermanus and scratched a talon deep into his cheek; another pecked the side of his neck, a third the other cheek. Hermanus screamed and flapped his two hands around his face trying to swat the birds like bugs. There was a dreadful smugness to the crows’ aerial acrobatics. Alone, as individual birds, they were nude, but as one murder their elegance was breathtaking, their arrogant nature entirely justified by the majesty of their movement. The sound of the working wings was oppressive nonetheless.

“You’re insane,” said Knid.

“The silence of the crows is palpable,” said Petron.

“No,” said Hermanus, smearing blood from his wounds in streaked avenues with the back of one hand. “The crows’ future is paramount. From death cometh life.”

He cupped the same hand to his ear as though to listen to distant whispers. He nodded, waited, consumed the silence that boiled but inches below the din of moving birds. The conversations always followed dire silence and would again.

Knid grasped his chest very quietly and fell to his knees, then forwards into the wet earth at his feet, his cheek pressed tenderly into the ground like a lover’s embrace. His peaceful face spoke of nothing. The shock of the certainty had finished him, his body unscathed by the work of beaks. Hermanus smiled broadly and gestured to the dead boy, pleased with his achievements as he hoped the birds would also be. Petron fell to his knees alongside the body and rested a hand around the shoulder, then felt for a pulse and felt none. He cursed the birds under his breath and Hermanus above it. Crows had begun to perch upon Knid’s body as though in its crude peaty grave its limbs and parts had themselves become extensions of their roost. A single crow flew at Petron and sank its beak into an eye, which pierced like soft cheese beneath the keratin blade; Petron attempted to grasp the bird, to forge death with his hands, but the beak twisted and delved further until there was little or nothing to feel and he sagged to the floor as empty clothes, the bird still clasped to his face like a failed prosthesis. The bird and others like it took their positions upon the fallen Petron, and they pecked lazily at the warm flesh. Their beaks wore moustache-streaks of still wet blood and carefully peeled Petron’s parted flesh in layers like the leaves of a book. The two bodies were drowned amidst scores of the cawing birds, the black sea of their flapping wings alive and roaring in celebration and in violence. His associates submerged beneath crows Hermanus clapped his hands.

“The sacrifice occurs,” he said. “As it would and must.” He turned to Grünther who had taken several steps away from the two dead and from Hermanus himself. The bible’s presence was of minimal comfort and the daylight drew short and left the grey smudge of evening like idiot brushstrokes across the landscape, their own skin aflame with an eerie whiteness, dying beacons immersed in shadow. All seemed burnt, he thought, and over, such was the light or lack of. His throat dry as onion skin he turned to Hermanus, whose face bled on.

“It must be three, Grünther,” Hermanus said. “You know this.” Grünther nodded. Things would happen, of that much he was certain. “We all of us have a role,” he continued. “But it must be three. So it was spoken, so it is.” Grünther nodded again and watched the crows, still now and silent, and waited for resolution. He heard a very remote motor engine and the water in the earth. The two living boys both stood, both waited at the whim of the crows; it was far too late to do anything but.

Perched atop Petron’s fingers one crow then cawed, and others followed. In the failing light the caws became motion, and they each took flight from their place upon branches and bodies and encircled Hermanus, who for an instant felt the might of the crows’ power behind him and felt invincible, a bastion of future. Grünther hastened backwards, away from the scene, the crows urged him to do so. He heard them clear as a radio in the very centre of his mind. His loyalty would be rewarded, they said, in both spiritual advance and riches should he wish. He was the chosen vessel for their ends. He edged back further and saw realisation strike Hermanus like apocalypse. The crows entered Hermanus’s mouth, his eyes and ear and little anus, first one-by-one then en masse, their huge muscular bodies contorting through paths into the strained boy, pushing themselves distorted through any and all distinguishable orifice, the taut and stretched-thin skin almost translucent against the woe-black feathers of the burrowing birds. He could not scream and would not. So it was spoken. He felt their comfort even as they devoured him, felt such peace. His body roared and rippled with them, with scores of consumed crows, that pulsed beneath his flesh like enlarged cancerous organs given life, and as he finally bulged mute with their distended presence they burst from his stomach in a frenzy of incomprehensible symbolism and soared to the skies with deafening grace, to the skies!, Hermanus’s spent face left vacant and aflame in the scarlet gore of his own giblets, his hollowed abdomen but a crater of scrap parts and soiled feathers.

Grünther spoke further silent prayer and turned from the three bodies and the swarming crows. The crows observed Grünther and bade him farewell noiselessly, and commenced their roosting ritual as he fled across the field and back towards the village alone. His silence would be respected there, the absent boys gradually forgotten. Three absences absorbed into the mythology of the village, into its mists and puddles, its perpetual damp. Life goes on. The wanton pursuit of information that had escalated with the passing years was a demand deemed improper by the village and actively discouraged, truth sunk unmarked beneath the swampy earth, community secrets. The quiet life goes on.

Many years later Grünther would ordain himself Parson, a title long redundant in the fenland villages from which he primarily operated, but the memory of the crows would shadow even the scriptures when his eyes closed as they had to, their voices ever louder than the whispers of God, drowned as these were by the rustle of Bible pages, by the happening of life.

the mars bar party of everyman dreams

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

so long! godspeed! so long!

you can now buy a copy of my ebook so long! godspeed! so long! here

it contains fifteen stories and one novella and can easily be considered reasonable in pricing structure.

barry chuckle's experience projector

(taken from Herman Henschel Koprowsky's "Encyclopaedia of Imagined Objects")

This is too long to post on here, so here's a link to a PDF version.

fuckpillow

(taken from Herman Henschel Koprowsky's "Encyclopedia of Imagined Objects")

The 1980s was a hotbed of daring, innovative and unprecedented design standards, and this was no more apparent than in Mattel’s paradigm shattering Fuckpillow, a part of the global toy manufacturers – very – short-lived range of specifically male¹ adult-oriented (which is to say: erotically focused) amenity products, Mattel Gents (in fact it was the only product ever released in the range). Founded in 1945 by Harold “Matt” Matson and Elliot “El” Handler, by the 1980s Mattel had grown to be the world’s largest toy company, and rode the wave of the Masters of the Universe franchise throughout the decade with a phenomenal level of success instigated in no small part by shrewd marketing and reasonably effective action figures. Yet it was an underlying sense of moral vigour that the board of executives saw as fundamental to their commercial success, a sense demonstrated by the often clumsily delivered moral segment² that served as an epilogue to each episode of their flagship animated series He Man and the Masters of the Universe, which ran for from 1983 to 1985 and was developed in response to the line of readily available action figures, making it perhaps the longest (130 episodes at approx 23 min. running time per episode) advertisement in the history of the medium.

The success of the programme grew with public awareness of the AIDS virus, a link all too often unnoticed by the majority of analysts, and although by then a mostly silent, honorary figure within Mattel’s organisational structure, Elliot “Hot Wheels” Handler was one the early pioneers of AIDS awareness and AIDS-focused charity work, due in no small part to his furtive and usually commercially transacted homosexuality and long-term addiction to unspecified – many think prescription, although significant secretly assembled (by corporate lawyers, mostly) evidence would point to an elaborate opiate distribution channel embedded within Mattel’s logistical network – drugs, the undeniable impact on which, and on countless high profile friends and associates of Handler, was distinctly grave and had a profound effect of Handler’s outlook and priorities which in turn filtered through into much of Mattel’s 80s work and output. With immeasurable wealth and power (within the toy making field) and fuelled by moral duty Handler devoted himself and a team of Mattel payrolled vision development operatives into the creation of a functional response to the AIDS crisis that had befallen so many of his loved ones, a small contribution to the fight against that most terrifying of viruses in the medium of cutting edge toy and novelty design, the only way he had ever known, design positioned right at the very forefront of a new generation of self-aware and intensely sexualized adult practitioners who took the success and safety of their erogenous pleasure firmly within their own two hands.

Like so much of the best design of the era – the intensively rebranded Sodastream³ and the associated uncompromisingly singular command of its mighty strapline to “get busy with the fizzy” (the functioning Sodastream itself a staple design product within lower middle class kitchens, its yellowed plastic casing and slightly stained drinks containers and the prohibitive limitations and mostly crushing expense of its CO2 cylinders somehow forming a foundational touchstone of nostalgic memorial for an entire generation, symbolic as it has now become of some kind of golden age of liberating, pragmatic, everyday design ideology, despite the inconvenience, [gastronomic] disappointment and ultimate pointlessness of the product itself; Sodastream is proud to be its own greatest advocate and the most vehement defender of its own environmental policies, such as the reduction in the negative environmental impact of contemporary packaging resultant from the use of home carbonation systems, as well as the somewhat paltry donation of £1000 to a school in Devon, UK, to assist in the cleaning of a beach [although Sodastream is less vocal about the controversy surrounding its use of land in the West Bank, which the company insists transcends the political issue and is simply the result of markets and demographics {to wit: both Palestinian and Jewish consumers are passionate about home carbonation and as such according to the results of US/Israeli administered consumer surveys the Sodastream and its associated syrupy possibilities provide a sense of unity to the fractious existence of the West Bank}]); the Cabbage Patch Kids (later and temporarily bought by Mattel circa 1994) series of dolls created by the highly paranoiac but fundamentally well-managed schizophrenic entrepreneur Xavier Roberts, who by the end of the 1970s had become so terrified by what he considered to be the very real likelihood of a worldwide nuclear catastrophe that, firstly, he famously kept himself and his offices “prepared for suicidal interventions at all times”, with “all staff to be informed of mandatory deployment of such interventions by prior vocal announcement”, although precisely what this entailed remains unconfirmed, and, secondly, that he designed the Cabbage Patch Kids as a way of desensitizing the public to what he believed to be the inevitable physical and mental deformities of children born in the wake of nuclear war, whose over-broad faces, sunken eyes and terminal overbites were, he suggested, specifically designed to celebrate and even love abnormality, in a way that few other toy manufacturers of the time would have considered (somewhat unsettlingly, Roberts included himself as an integral part of the Cabbage Patch Kids mythic genesis as a ten-year-old boy [and not a twenty-three-year-old art student] called Xavier Roberts who aims to have all of the deformed infants adopted, thereby evading slavery and finding a semblance of happiness amongst the highly materialistic families of the late 20th century US, a back story which in turn provided some alleviation to the collective guilt felt by the average [halfway civilised] American for the nation’s atrocious record in both civil rights and foreign policy interventions throughout the preceding century or more. Perhaps weirder still, Roberts converted an old clinic in Cleveland, Georgia, into Babyland General Hospital, essentially the ‘birthplace’ [i.e.: manufacturer] of the Cabbage Patch Kids that is elaborately set up as a birthing, nursing and adoption centre and where the sales and manufacturing staff are dressed in medical uniforms as though they were indeed nurses [‘Licensed Patch Nurses’, or LPNs] or midwives or similar to the marginally deformed infants, and which the public can and do visit to witness the remarkable spectacle – miracle even – not of birth but of sheer unchecked marketing at work. The hospital was rocked by controversy in 2003 when six LPNs were arrested and later imprisoned after reports of systemic abuse of the [artificial] children under the care of the adoption centre was leaked to the press, along with several illegally acquired videos which horrifically depicted said staff members in inappropriate acts of aggressive violence, with one particular image of a male Cabbage Patch Kid being thrown into the air and struck with a baseball bat while his rigid face remained stoic and somehow trusting being voted image of the year for the volumes it spoke about contemporary US culture. Roberts himself was disgraced by the allegations as staff past and present accused him of overseeing the abuse and even demanding it, with claims that he liked to “slap nurses” and would frequently “indecently” assault the children himself. Traumatised staff presented harrowing televised testimonies still in uniform to the din of taken photographs: “I’ll never forget what [Roberts] made me do. He angrily, really mad, he madly took his pants down and started pulling at this... huge genital⁴ and told me to – commanded that I beat on the kids. Pull off their heads and kiss the soft neck stumps while he chanted what he said were the ever descending numbers of my “fucking joke salary”. It was the job I’d always dreamed of. I knew it was wrong but I did what he said.’ Roberts has since publically distanced himself from Babyland General, which is still open to the public, a chilling memorial to the perverse cruelty of man) – Fuckpillow emerged in response to a growing social crisis. Essentially straddling three marketable categories as sex aid, safe sex device and must-have adult amenity product it was a conceived as a mass-appeal product that proudly wore both its socio-medical and contemporary hedonist principles on its sleeve.

The product comprised a standard bed pillow in dimensions of 20 x 26 inches (plans to roll out a King and Queen sized luxury Fuckpillow never reached prototype), in the lower centre of which was rooted a soft silicone-lined ‘cock chute’ (pumping station, docking cylinder) – the base diameter of which could be adjusted with a hand operated suction pump to suit personal size or preference – and which the male user would engage in intercourse (or more specifically heightened masturbation) with, in ways easily imaginable and not necessary to dwell upon here. The rear of the product was equipped with access to a small 250ml reservoir that nestled beneath the synthetic plastic fibres that comprised the filler, and that could be pre-filled with water based lubricant which would be released during use as per a functioning, self-lubricating, organic orifice, but with the added hygiene benefits of accessible easy-wipe technology. For Handler, a proscriptive response to the sexual crisis of the 1980s was unrealistic; instead he believed that if he could provide a still pleasurable and affordable alternative to person-person sexual exchanges, perhaps even one that (out of convenience alone, for nights in &c.) only replaced twenty per cent of such exchanges with a Fuckpillow alternative, the amount of unsafe and high risk sexual acts being conducted would be drastically reduced, thereby similarly – although he did not claim to understand the science or the chance of infection per exposure source he guessed that by the very law of averages it would be safe to assume – cutting the exposure to and likelihood of transmitting the AIDS virus. In effect he wanted to create a valid alternative to intercourse not as permanent replacement but as sometime alternative⁵ with the proven health benefits that he felt were synonymous with the Mattel stamp of quality, a wealthy man compelled to social responsibility by the unorthodox nature of his own sexual preferences.

With a product as genuinely exciting as Fuckpillow, which so easily defied all public expectation of the company, shattering their ordinary demographic and garnering a foothold in a by no means new but certainly newly lucrative and, due to changing social perceptions of tolerable sexuality and adult erotic leisure, increasingly acceptable market, the key to its commercial success would lie in marketing. The late 1980s was a landscape permanently altered by home video, and by the ready availability of pornographic material. Far from being the taboo it had once been, Handler observed that unsimulated sex had moved some way to becoming the norm, something that both male and female enjoyed alike, and that young people would even watch together without shame or prejudice, and he firmly believed that Fuckpillow needed to make use of modern attitudes towards the sex act to successfully advertise it to the masses, constructing a campaign that was as bold and exciting as the product itself, TV adverts that would themselves be the main event, not the inconsequential dramas they punctuated. Initial attempts at marketing the product were marred by a kind of terminal unsexiness unsuited to it: early strapline “fuck a Fuckpillow, fellas” was dismissed as being like an earnestly good-willed suggestion from a fully clothed surrogate grandfather, while similarly “it’s safe, it’s clean, it’s fun!” made it sound, as Handler noted, “like a cocking baby bath”, the polar opposite both of the innovative contemporary sex aid the company were trying to sell and of the very three things it in fact claimed to be.

Mattel soon acknowledged that the most effective marketing for a product of its kind would be urgent and demonstrative and with an approach that flew in the face of their long-acquired conventional wisdom pertaining to the children’s market. Using a carefully assembled film crew – mostly Handler’s own close friends – and an (unseen [at least from the waist up]) adult film star for the key thrusting sequences, Mattel shot and edited a 60 second advertisement for Fuckpillow which featured at its core reasonably extended (i.e. beyond ten or fifteen seconds) scenes of unsimulated masturbation and/or solo coital motion for purposes they considered educational but which television executives considered gratuitous and with no higher moral or aesthetic value. Rich in the clichéd tropes of all adult oriented advertising, shot-for-shot it consisted of: [OST: pulsing synth emission⁶] (1) gently lit bedroom scene with thick down bedset oozing sensuality in the fold/curve interchange of its marshmallow peaks (2) Fuckpillow close up (3) visibly male hand slightly kneading Fuckpillow (4) carefully framed shot (heel to mid-upper thigh) of blue jeans falling, bare feet stepping out of the denim (5) hand kneading Fuckpillow, then repositioned (6) close-up of brandless prophylactic sheaths, plastic wrapper conspicuously unopened [OST: building synth work flecked with breathy but indistinct verbalisations] (7) rear shot of Fuckpillow usage, smoothly pumping white hairless buttocks that clench at the zenith (8) profile shot of Fuckpillow usage, extensive deep thrusts of erect penis into the pillow cavity (9) interior shot of Fuckpillow usage from within cavity, the somehow haunting sincerity of the moving meatus (10) rear shot (11) profile shot (12) interior shot (13) untouched prophylactic sheaths (14) empty jeans (15) increasingly frantic rear shot (16) increasingly frantic profile shot (17) increasingly frantic interior shot cuts to, as though ejaculated (18) on screen text, Fuckpillow, cuts to, (19) mainstream actor laying with head atop Fuckpillow, alongside the spent cock chute, cheeks slightly flushed, smile on face, cigarette ablaze, cuts to (20) Fuckpillow logo, Mattel logo, written strapline, “the adult amenity product of the – this – moment!”, v/o strapline, “fuck a Fuckpillow sometimes” (21) FIN. It was remarkable advertising for the time and was banned outright from television exhibition for what Handler had called its refreshing honesty, its touching exposure, but what executives of the major channels had called its graphic tastelessness. Even if they wanted to, they said, which they didn’t, they said, and even late at night, they said, they were not permitted to show unsimulated sexual acts – especially those involving the erect male penis – on television. Handler insisted that the advertisement, while clearly making use of unsimulated sexual gestures, did so with education in mind, with a staggeringly large social conscience, as a part of Mattel’s global attempt to help in the battle against the horrors of AIDS, but still not a single channel was prepared to broadcast, or even prepared to associate themselves with AIDS awareness, which in truth was more of a taboo than the inappropriate sexuality they were able to hide behind.

Handler was devastated, enraged by the absurd conservatism of his country, and eventually reached an agreement with a couple of NY adult pornographic cinemas to screen the advertisement before some of their features⁷, which although they were not themselves inclined to do, as an ethical solo use sex aid designed by the world’s largest toy manufacturer and shrouded in subliminal reminders to the potential dangers of uninhibited sexual appetites was a distinct turn-off, they nonetheless consented due to in part to Handler’s sizeable cash offering per exhibition, and also as part of their ongoing commitment as sex traders to the homogenization and mainstream acceptability of the pornographic industry which they believed that Mattel’s involvement must surely signify. Yet despite – not because of – the unsimulated nature of Handler’s advertisement it was quickly pulled from even highly specialized cinema screens, booed by audiences as tame and unsexy, and accused of forcing issues-based realism and unwanted moralising into what were expected to be the most unadulterated sexual fantasies. Added to this was the fact that, like most pornography, the advertisement depersonalised the sex act to such an extent, in this case literally removing one of the consenting adult human parties from an ostensibly coital union, that it ceased to be arousing and became instead just moving flesh, thrusting meat, entirely devoid of appealing sexuality. By the time the strapline reached the screen viewers were walking out, demanding refunds with the urgency of impotence or of unfulfilled potential. While a nation of TV executives had shunned it because of full sex and AIDS connotations, the consumer had done the same solely because of the weakness of the advertising and its singlehanded failure to pinpoint a particular demographic and target itself to it.

As a campaign its failure hinged on the tepidity of the strapline; it was marred beyond salvage by poor syntactical decisions, decisions which destroy otherwise partly reasonable products. “The adult amenity product of the – this – moment!” made Fuckpillow sound trivial and fatally transient, every bit the fad that Mattel needed it to not be, a product without future, existing entirely with the throes of the kind of two-three minute sexual abandon that would justify an adult male in his fucking – which is to say solo coitus or heightened masturbation – of a patently insentient modified bed pillow with precisely zero return incentive aside from a reasonably efficient (if otherwise indiscreet) form of manual relief and a wipe-clean silicone cock chute for maximum hygiene in the circumstances. This syntactically expressed impermanence did not instil a sense of confidence in the product, did not market it as the next or only essential, lasting, viable alternative to some potentially-harmful-if-excessively-careless-or-promiscuous sexual encounters, a serious contender or game-changer in the way Handler’s Hot Wheels had been in the late 1960s⁸. The gap in the market that Handler had hoped to fill was non-existent; as a sex aid the comparative complexity of Fuckpillow was problematic, as for many seasoned onanists the primary appeal of the masturbatory act is that it can be performed with no extraneous tools and with hands alone, quickly, effectively and without the need for storage, whilst as a preventative measure for STIs Mattel soon found that as a general rule anyone with sufficient awareness or anxiety pertaining to the sexual health crises that burdened the decade would already use adequate protection in the form of prophylactic sheaths, thereby rendering Fuckpillow something of a curio at best and entirely superfluous at worst, the prophylactic sheath being a far more successful product by virtue of the fact that it enables – even presupposes – the performance of a mostly safe two person sexual encounter, widely regarded as significantly more pleasurable than the solo alternative. Furthermore, “fuck a Fuckpillow” sounded to many critics less like a jovial moral-erotic encouragement or enthused suggestion and more like uncomfortably aggressive coercion even insistence, the corporate rape of a confused, commercially sexualised and market driven adult amenity industry.

Unable as it was to successfully straddle the dichotomy of the mass market it aspired to and the niche adult – although increasingly popular still, then, widely unmarketable – market it was specifically designed for, Fuckpillow was a resounding failure. While Handler had personally commissioned 250,000 units for the first production run a devastating quantity of units (i.e. vague evidence suggests less than 100) were sold within the US in the first quarter, and with no commercial support – with TV and cinema out the printed press wouldn’t touch it, wouldn’t even contemplate it conceptually – American sales came to a complete standstill soon after that⁹ and it was axed from the Mattel range, along with the whole Mattel Gents model. Vast stocks of Fuckpillow’s were destroyed in immense industrial furnaces like a heavy-handed symbolic cremation of the final shreds of goodness at the bruised heart of Reagan’s American Dream.

Dogged by visions of an American economy crushed by a virus he was powerless to halt, Elliot Handler died in 2011, the visionary brilliance of his design career left forever incomplete, with only those monolithic fragments of the Fuckpillow project – pencil drawings, tattered prototypes – still held within the vaults of the Mattel headquarters in El Segundo, California, acting as a final lasting testament to the courage and single-mindedness of design itself, a footnote to an otherwise monotonous career and erased from memory, wiped clean from the very cock chute of the twentieth century.¹⁰

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1 A Mattel Ladies range had never progressed beyond the planning stages after the almost universal failure of Fuckpillow, despite extensive developmental plans being drawn up for at least one product called The Vox Pleasurer, an eight-inch silicone prosthesis of essentially phallic construction which along with the predictable array of vibrating and/or otherwise contorting motions was accompanied by a selection of twenty-four pre-recorded vocal messages of either romantically hackneyed, comforting, motivational or – both weirdly and inappropriately – sermonizing content that was fundamental to the Mattel brand’s sense of identity, triggered by agreed physiological responses within the allocated orifice (Mattel prided itself as a sexually conservative organisation, which is why The Vox Pleasurer could only operate at its functional intention [i.e. vocal] when used as part of a penetrative vaginal act and in no alternate corruption of it, specifically pertaining to the – for Mattel, a family company – horrifically superfluous sexualisation of the female anus, as it was the lubrication/mucus produced within the vaginal tract [Bartholin’s glands] that triggered the enhanced features that would make The Vox Pleasurer a market leader in the realm of innovative sexual safety synonymous with strictly individual pleasure) that tiny sensors within the tip of The Vox Pleasurer had been electronically programmed to identify. Compared to Fuckpillow the production costs alone were prohibitively high and only one prototype was ever constructed, now housed within the Mattel product museum at the company headquarters in El Segundo, California.^↩

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2 There are far too many morals to assess individually within the scope of this entry, although I have provided a more comprehensive analysis of the Mattel ethos as expressed through the character of Prince Adam of Eternia aka He-Man The Most Powerful Man in the Universe et al. within the appendices of this volume.^↩

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3 Whilst not technically a design of the 1980s (the original, prescient, almost dreamlike conceit of a home carbonation system having been originally conceived as early as 1903), it was this decade which saw the Sodastream’s striking return to prominence within the home beverage market, forever embedding it within the shared cultural heritage of the era.^↩

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4 The “footlong dong” of Xavier Roberts has become the stuff of legend amongst toy manufacturers, as mythical in its own way as the creation story of the Cabbage Patch Kids themselves, and Roberts’ own sometimes destructive sexuality was until 2003 tolerated if not entirely enjoyed, his significant member even affectionately and multiply dubbed: the subway, the sub, the ruler, the yardstick, the soda bottle, the hotdog, the quarter longsword, Big Ben, Empire State, brisket, Mount Cockmore, King Kong, Donkey Kong, Uncle Buck, the battleaxe, heavy artillery, heavy metal, fat boy (there is a decidedly militaristic twist to much of Roberts penile euphemism that is somewhat at odds with the gentle world he created for profit), Everest, machete, the child, etc., the joke it was acceptable to make even amongst children either stuffed or organic.^↩

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5 As per the company’s official presentational literature to shareholders in 1987: “Fuckpillow aspires to be the world’s best penetrable surrogate vaginal/anal tubular tract, as well as the world’s safest and most authentic adult amenity product”. The minutes of Mattel board meetings of the time express the horrified silence of attendees in increasingly inventive ways, and in wildly complex sub-numerical categories, as though the violent and fragmentary dissatisfaction of the largely Republican, entirely Christian board of directors itself formed a vitally marketable component of Fuckpillow’s business strategy. Screenings of dailies of the early – and only – commercials (see above) put together for the product themselves ended in walkouts and nausea, those eminently vendible responses, and in grunted and accurate prophecy of failure, a campaign of indefatigable and graphic boldness unsuited to the absurd political Puritanism that characterized the era, closeting as it did sexual expression of any kind as the kind of generalised depravity against which a moral panic could and would be targeted, and hiding the severity of the AIDS virus behind a ignorant veil of homophobic propaganda.^↩

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6 See Debbie Does Dallas soundtrack by Gerald Sampler, who also composed the Fuckpillow theme. Although Sampler referred to it as his masterpiece and his musical legacy, it was at the time heard by less than 500 people.^↩

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7 Amongst the most popular films, 1985s New Wave Hookers (minus the illegal Traci Lords scene) was still on almost constant circulation in adult theatres, the combination of hardcore sex and new wave music (and the Pavlovian correlation between the two, the central conceit of the Dark Bros. most impressive film) striking a pertinent chord with audiences of the time and remaining a perennial favourite amongst self-proclaimed aficionados of the classic genre.^↩

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8 The winning combination of die cast toy cars designed to car manufacturer’s blueprints and the force of gravity was a staggering success that dominated the decades (from the perspective of – child-aimed – automotive replicas).^↩

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9 Although Fuckpillow did find a short lived market in Japan, where Mattel continued to trade the product for some months in an attempt to recoup at least some of the extensive production costs, selling around 15,000 units throughout 1988-89 largely on the back of an incredibly popular TV advertisement reconceived for a Japanese audience (in fact an early, uncredited work by now acclaimed director Takashi Miike), the soft shades and considered, evocative thrusting of the US version replaced by a pretty vulgar palette, jarring editing and an intense punk soundtrack. By then called Screwjack (which along with the manufacturer’s heritage as toy maker made the ambiguity pertaining to the product’s demographic even more ambiguous, sounding – as Screwjack does – either like a pro-wrestler or all the more like a toy of some grotesquely competitive physicality for the 9-13 male group), and entirely removed from Handler’s influence, Fuckpillow-cum-Screwjack’s trademark blend of sex aid and social responsibility sat comfortably within the Japanese society of the late 1980s, unmoved as it must have been by the problem of uncertain target audiences. Although now long removed from sale it continues to be remembered with a palpable sense of nostalgia and with an immense regard for the subtly of the design at work, taking as it has as light-hearted a place in the Japanese national consciousness as whaling, or hideously theatrical sexual violence.^↩

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10 Editor’s note: I was shocked to find this article heralding a return to the majesty of Handler’s design, albeit an obscenely sanitized reappraisal, and without even a reference to Fuckpillow or to the man behind its cock chute. The Boyfriend and Girlfriend, Fuckpillow’s in all but name (and in the extent of their erotic potential), twist every aspect of the Handler classic that predated them by more than two decades and veil them in novelty and the purported originality of lies, while Handler’s forgotten contribution to sexual safety and comfortable home-based eroticism exists only within Koprowsky’s careful pages. When foaming with the injustice of the no-longer-young I showed the article to Koprowsky he barked out laughter and paraphrased Lynchian dialogue in a way too obvious to express, and with a hand rested gently on my shoulder he told me the world would always catch up in the end [NF, 2012].^↩