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.
