the evolutionary necessity of the avoidance of I

Strange hearing the youths on the bus talk, in aggressive slurs, profane declarations, and how little has changed since my own youth – now, what, more than 20 years since I was their age. “Right here, right now,” they said, emptily alluding to fisticuffs, the same pointless phrasing that echoed around the school corridors in rural Sussex c. 1995. They’ll learn, I suppose, with time, that their considered oafishness betrays a fearsome ignorance. At least some will, the stick thin wimps who promise violent retribution in their enormous trainers whole handfuls of sizes too large who couldn’t even possibly hurt themselves, the enormous, brutish klutzes aged 16 but looking 30, thickly stubbled, frighteningly muscular, voices so deep they sound like transplants from some other, more primitive species. There were always those anomalous kids at school, the boys dumped prematurely in men’s bodies. I remember being taunted cruelly by other children for failing to shave off my first wispy moustache in the requisite timeframe, its very presence a point of offense, an affront both to youth and our future adulthood, and not even realizing that such interventions would be necessary. Such acts were the acts of men, which I surely wasn’t. It took a decade, more even, of being referred to as a man by children, in shops or other public spaces, for me to realize they were talking about me. When I refer to my daughter it sounds like I’m joking, the shapes of the words alien to my tongue and lips and the interaction between them, the awkward tones of my voice hijacked by inexplicable artifice for no doubt nefarious ends. Vomiting on a coach once, at the end of sixth form, some black tie monstrosity of shuffling to dated beats, hopelessly drunk, the lads in the seats around me chanted the names of high-cholesterol foodstuffs in an attempt to further my discomfort, “bacon sandwich”, “fried egg”, “Kentucky”, each barked out like celebrants as I swooned in the discomfort of a prolonged period of retroperistalsis, the patter of the expelled content providing a dim white noise to the disgusted vehicle. I remember two slobs punching each other’s faces as they crossed the stepping stones on the ornamental lawn beneath the staff quarters. Even during sixth form I spent free periods friendless, alone, reading in the same chair of the public library, comic fantasy, dystopian sci-fi, the existentialists, buying mugs of filter coffee, yum yum’s, greasy pastry stuff from the bakery. There was a single bus back to my village one day a week. I waited for it beneath the clock tower with a pocket full of coins, hoping that the compressed-faced girl – herself with certain traits of dwarfism, though a gentle soul – who resembled an unspecified creature of non-human origin and who I had loved for some months would ride the same bus to her own village, and we could awkwardly converse in fragments that I would hungrily dissect for days afterwards for measly scraps of onanistic fodder. I would be horrified to hear of her sexual conduct, mainly because of the continued non-existence of my own. At some point I became consciously aware of the fact that I was practicing conversation with a girl in a head brace with whom I shared a desk during a modern language class. The eloquence and fluidity with which we spoke was profoundly absent from any other interaction I made, particularly with females. At the instigation of my sobbing acquaintances, who had blackmailed me into action one lunchtime in a particularly unjust way, I asked one heavy beauty if she would go out with me, whatever that was supposed to mean, aflame with the absolute shame of unrequited desire, and God only knows what I might possibly have done with her assent, and felt immense relief when she flatly, coldly told me no, that she had a boyfriend, which of course I didn’t believe and to this day don’t, though felt relief regardless, and she looked unsure of whether to laugh or to completely strip me of dignity, and I could hear my acquaintances behind me stifling great ripped snorts of mirth like crudely torn material. Even the fluorescent green boomerang I had received as a gift from an ‘uncle’, a depressed Jewish homosexual friend of my parents from deep in their pasts, they had no contemporary friends, even the boomerang wouldn’t come back to me, would defy its very nature, its essence, only to avoid me, as though the brute fundament of things, whatever slight reason they might have for being, would be replaced by the evolutionary necessity of the avoidance of I – snubbed by even games for one, too alone for even loneliness! I used to get terrible headaches when I spoke at length to anyone, would get home feeling spent and abused, a single eye watering, paralyzed by inadequacy. I would lay on my bed and listen to the creak of the tubular metal frame. Didn’t have a decent mattress until adulthood. Are such facts tantamount to abuse? I recall one lad, as popular as he was retarded, a disruptive presence, pierced ear, hair flayed into a sheer step of medieval absurdity, a small and rude little devil who inexplicably charmed our peers with a complete absence of decency, brawling ineffectually in heavily branded clothing, resigned to and prepared for and even looking forward to his certain adulthood of low-level manufacturing operative on one of the many industrial estates in the surrounding villages, whose whispered promises of small brown wage envelopes stuffed with dirty tenners proved too alluring for the short sighted idiots who formed the majority of their male population, hungry only for pints in the local and footie in the local and a chance to empty one’s seed out on occasion in bursts of brief lust that edged toward desecration, his brand of cruel humour and disproportional aggression and access to his mother’s bulk packets of Rothman’s proved a desirous cocktails for many of the teen girls who shared our classrooms. I felt a great sense of mourning on discovering the loss of his virginity some time around our thirteenth birthdays, to a leathery-looking local girl two years his senior with a tremendous body, and who he had humped in the play tunnels in the recreation ground and elsewhere. Enshrouded in awful clothing that alluded to a drug culture of which I had no knowledge whatsoever, grasping at off-the-peg identities in the increasingly frenzied hope that one might stick, I could not understand how such wanton anti-intellectualism could be greeted with anything but derision, least of all the firsthand genital experiences of a fully sexual nature that he described in purely animalistic terms while we and others waited for lessons to commence. He could scarcely conceal the sum of his pleasure, and reasonably so – the rest of us sexless nerds wouldn’t have known where to slip our parts, even with explicit invitation. I remember him scaling the wall bars in the smaller of the two gymnasiums and seeing two enormously distended testicles bobbing under the ballooning fabric of his sports shorts, adjoining a standard sized if shockingly hirsute penile assembly, testicles so distended that I wondered if they were not, in fact, the product of some ague or disease, or else if it was they and they alone that proved so anatomically irresistible to the two-years-older local girls that it was all they could do to immediately copulate with him on or around children’s play equipment, the measure of a man or boy operating in direct correlation to the longitudinal circumference of his sexual hemispheres. He had pleaded once for me to punch him in the face, to rile me into passion amidst the vandalized science benches, but despite longing to do so, to accept his offer wholeheartedly and to pound his vacant crest, the shit, I felt a temporary paralysis, a limbic stasis, and much to his scornful amusement began to visibly tremor. Such tremors have proven a common point of ridicule throughout my life, no more so than during the infrequent games of Subbuteo I would play with my father as a younger, purportedly more carefree minor, where my fingers would lock into rictus as my hand crouched lamely in the flicking position at the edge of the eighteen yard box, so beset by performance anxiety as to be incapable of facilitating more than the barest of contact and of course total my total failure – the same performance anxiety that sees me staring into dry urinals for sometimes minutes, unable to urinate for as long as the sound of the tap or conversation or even the silent presence of another male behind me in the confines of a public convenience continues. From where did this self-consciousness materialize? Certainly fat, in hand-me-down denims, the very cheapest of trainers, plus sized t-shirts, I relished the posturing of over-staged photo ops: boy holding his favourite VHS tape; boy wearing a fancy dress cowboy hat and holding a Count Duckula cuddly toy; boy doing a thumbs up in front of White Hart Lane; boy wearing a toweling head band and blowing a whistle; boy smothered in impetigo and modelling a homemade Snowman hat; boy in a Campri jacket under a tree in Greenwich park with the part-completed Canary Wharf development a building site across the river in the distance; the photos – long before digital, before every event no matter how trivial warranted twenty or more identical snaps that one will absolutely fail to choose between – all overexposed or underexposed or blurred or spoiled by fingers, or else overly, agonizingly, minutely planned, to instill as much possible value and context and merit in such limited opportunities for permanence as was feasible to do, or else without viewfinders, without the capacity for immediate self-editing or aesthetic selectivity or filtering that contemporary life demands, finding only vast catalogues of photographs of absolutely nothing: walls, aerial wires, unrecognisable landscapes consumed by their own ill-framed scale. Photography once existed alongside life, occasionally even captured it; now life exists alongside photography, forms one part of the narrative of ourselves that daily we present to ourselves for the approval of the strangers of our pasts. Early experience as a subject saw me relish the gaze, despite my numerous physical deficits. Now I sweat during routine conversation, my glasses steam up with it; I look for routes to liberty and encourage sweating all the more through the terrible exertion of fantasy. I wait for a break of eye contact so I can mop my face with any available fabric, shirt cuff, shirt flap, paper towel. I have a shirt in a shade identical to the kind of standard green paper towel that is synonymous with the workplace. It had not been a conscious decision to purchase a shirt in this shade, and in fact had I been aware of the similarity I think it is fair to say that I wouldn’t have purchased it. Unfortunately it was only whilst drying my hands with one of the standard green paper towels in the workplace toilet and in fact seeing myself do so in the mirror of that toilet that I made the connection, chastised myself, ridiculed myself even, said aloud “why are you dressed as a paper towel?”, a humorous question to which I responded with laughter whilst at once sweating with the embarrassment of the ridicule I imagined encountering when my colleagues made that same connection. I find the ridicule that has not yet happened but that one can imagine might to be the worst of all. Such is the agony of hyperhidrosis, the sodden fool wearing ever more layers of garment to disguise the fact of his sweating that is exacerbated exponentially by his wearing of ever more layers of garment to disguise the fact of his sweating. I form complex patterns of pictorial damp across cotton, a simple diagram of the female reproductive system drawn by the particular curves of my belly and pectorals and the pooled sweat around them every time I cycle beyond a certain velocity. The first girl I fingered was done briskly by an old sink in a friend’s basement at a NYE party; I methodically jabbed in a couple of feeble digits without a clue of what to expect, arrhythmic plunges as though scolding a child, draped around her motionless body like a grotesque scaffold. The nervous sickness I felt was incredible – I feel the same sensation each time the telephone sounds. When on a settee I lapped her pearl white clitoris and the vertices of her very cunt and watched her thick thighs tremble with the almost pain of my heavy handed technique, which has scarcely improved, it was as though I had taken my absence from the functions of reality, could barely focus on the lusty gestures, on the damp earthen flesh both anchor and destroyer of worlds, an anticlimactic replicant of the two dimensional erotic idolatry that had been my formative education in matters such as these, a replicant complicated by consciousness and agency and anxieties her own. Even during the act itself, even in the midst of that scalloped miasma, that non-verbal conversation of working tongues, of flecks and slurps and shifting weights and secretions dried and treasured in nail beds, I found myself considering other, more interesting acts, bored by reality even as it happened to me and in thrall instead to pure theory. This is a fact of some pertinence to my adult life and something to which I have devoted quite considerable thought, is indeed, perhaps, the fact, which is to say that all facets of lived experience, even those that would appear the most engaging, are in fact the hopelessly tedious subjugates of the topography of the imagination. And so even during the act, the foremost of its ilk in my meagre pickings of experience, I agonized over how it might be improved, even during it, I drifted, the expectation being for more, for some devastation of the flesh, not this glub of dissent. All such future acts of love have been so tarnished by apathy, with even fantasy not impervious, ending as it does in remorse or apology expertly choreographed. I long in principal for the having of sex, long to feel myself consumed within the vagina’s machinations, but feel bereft at the anatomical limits with which such consumption is cursed. Could any one cunt consume me as I need to be consumed, away, off and away from the desire for it? I need to spill my sauce like any other but such needs are mechanical and can occur with or without investment. I do not fear investment but do fear results. Now I’ll be bored before I’ve even managed to visualize how they might look naked. I pique my interest with anomalies, the wistful older lady basted in regret; the slightly fat; the oddly simian; the apparently cruel; the single mothers who have not been penetrated or otherwise attended to in years; the grossly remedial – perchance dormant violence awaits ignition behind the many veils of disappointment that comprise their minor arsenal against this world or others. They may unfurl for me a brilliant bright future of erogenous structures so fulfilled that the brains firing is diverted into downright formlessness, untethered from the trifles of skin and bone, the scraps of self at the mercy, only, of exploding nerve endings and hot staggering union. But they, like all alike, leave me vacant, jettisoned on great black wretched oceans of woe. Of course, my self-consciousness would extend to my genitals on occasion. Whispered observations, spoken as the sun rose upon my narcotic failure to harden, condolences. “No, it’s a nice size”. Such addenda to her pudenda – it was like rubbing two raw steaks together. I had lunged for her in a Brixton establishment of the night, not through any real or desperate sense of attraction but as some demonstrative point to myself, to know I could. We kissed like idiots with uncontrollable mouths. Minutes earlier I had been asleep across three chairs. I awoke wanting to be for an instant a forger of destiny and for a terrific moment as I gripped her cheeks the certainty of our coupling as a module of that night became clear, those rare instances of inevitability when the outcome of any one act is set but prior to both its happening and its having happened. There can be little sexier than the knowledge of certain sex; while working for it renders one exhausted at the whims of evolution, and having it is akin to the mockery of reality (this is it?); knowing it to be of imminent discharge is a pinnacle, indeed. As it was, before we had even boarded the night bus with friends I was bored. By the time we were welcomed by my mattress, that derisive jury, knowledge had swerved into experience; I fought for erectile stability throughout the night hours to hopeless effect. When eventually through the concerted efforts of the two of us we succeeded in eking me into her reticent fundament the associated frictions bore grotesque results of singular gloom. Did I feign orgasm? I do not recall, though have on occasion, as a means of drawing the expectation prevalent in such interludes to a close. Although please do not misunderstand me – the traits of my mean performance are typically characterized by an immeasurably swift plunge-to-completion ratio. I spent an entire sexual relationship spanning a period of some three months deliberately failing to germinate, as I made committed inroads into the cavity of a dear friend without the protective coating of a prophylactic, a luxury I had scarcely been able to afford at the time as now. She urged me categorically during the sessions to not, a pressure sufficient to have my mind wander to personal administrative tasks or other issues of the day, even as I charted the terrain and bore samples of its fruits, and I went about it with the standard cues until after a time my key indicator would wilt and emerge shyly from the shadows and permit us rest. During the entirety of our recurring tryst there was a single application in which spillage was permitted, for we had gathered a single sheath through undiscussed means, and we set about our duties as though under some unspecified menace in the attic room in her father’s premises. Whilst fearing a discharge of lightning productivity, after many weeks of conscious incompletion, I attended in slow stabs, clenching of the anal sphincter and tested distraction techniques, in an attempt to prolong the inevitable remorse and clean up, and in the room the daylight had been stark; minutes in, no more, we heard tyres through gravel from the open Velux, her father, she said, shit, she said, and then come on, quickly, come on, she shouted this, and began almost standing from the bed while still entangled, and I committed myself with increased almost psychopathic erraticism until fractious delivery offered scant relief to all. I believe the only real fight to which I ever bore witness during the pedagogical years, that exceeded the comparatively workaday shoving and grunts and possibly headlocks – I myself cherished the headlock, an assaultive ritual as close to stopping time as was possible to achieve in the viscous testosterone that was the encircled brawlspace, a dance, broaching tenderness and violence both in some sublime synchrony – took place, perfectly, in one of several changing room facilities on site, this wine adjoining the smaller gymnasium which had been superseded some years earlier by the larger gymnasium, and both of which doubled as exam rooms at the relevant times of year. It was a semi-organized encounter, as such encounters tended to be, preceded by weeks of threatened retribution for unspecified acts, until a date was set as though the encounter was a wedding or pleasure cruise and not the premeditated pasting it was in fact to be. I found the need for structured planning amongst the rogues and swine who partook in this public brutality to be a curiosity, directly at odds with all other aspects of their lives as were apparent, and with the spontaneous impulsivity that, at least as I reckoned, facilitated fury enough to bear fists and, by extension, generate pain. Which is to say, I would find it close to impossible to stoke and sustain sufficient ire to then clash with any efficacy at a set future point, and I believe the ability of those who can, who can nurture violent hatred like a secret infant and deploy it at will, to be amongst the hallmarks of the utter sociopath. When the moment came my ears rang with anticipation as the years largest boy swaggered through the peg racks and socked a puny herbert who professed to fearsome fighting skills a good handful of times on the forehead and cheeks and skull. He attempted lamely to block the batter and slipped to his knees like a dropped glass, but the arms were whirling with incredible speed and the noise of the contact was dull and hard. To his credit the victor, one of those anomalous brutes who excelled at sport, academics and punch ups, appeared to take little pleasure in the performance, and mumbled words to the effect of “don’t do it again”, though none of us present and I suspected he too had any idea of what it is that he was reported to have done in the first place. I remember being shocked at the speed of life on display, incomprehensible speed. It would be forgotten by the end of volleyball regardless. Those extraordinary days of sanctioned violence that over years equate to a youth, the endless transgressions relished without consequence – let us sin, sin, sin, sin in the lawlessness of our own childhoods, immune to the regulation of our elders, the gravity of our acts ever disproportionate to the weakness of their penalties – as law permits children beaten at the whim of the father so it permits them beaten at the whims of the peer. In a world without rights, all is permitted. Violence is a language all its own. I watched a merciless deviant throw his rucksack at the running feet of a fat epileptic, who fell hard and went into seizure where he lay, tongue lolling and eyes white in the skeletal leaves and drifts of gathered buddleia seed, an act of singular cruelty met with cheers and laughter and not so much as a lunchtime detention. Throughout the decade specific learning difficulties remained incongruities to be ridiculed, sniggering as an increasingly panicked dyslexic in the lab stool next to mine failed to transcribe a chemistry dictation, his primitive written English quickly descending to unrelated letters and then symbols and eventually just lines, pure nonsense, as the passage continued, the teachers face a heavy slice of sadistic mirth as he observed and relished so complete a miscarriage of effort. When the same boy was reluctantly issued a note taker some years into his schooling, a rake thin waif in Dr. Martens and neohippy garments hardly older than we were ourselves, we flirted with her desperately, terribly, tried to will her tiny breasts to freedom, to the freedom of my trembling hands, rendered weak-kneed by the lines of her body, the seams of her jeans in perfect convergence at the event horizon of her intergluteal declivity, at the fact that she was in the school but not of it, and we fought like apes to convey a notional sophistication entirely impossible in an obese teenage boy wearing a school polo shirt. I used to fantasize about girls in school uniform when I pleasured myself in the bathtub with the shower head trained upon me, rich spunk pooled in my navel, but I was then at school myself and so did not consider it a perversion or anything like it, a failure of imagination if anything. When I see the uniformed girls today, on buses, in streets, gathered outside the usual clothiers, smearing thumbs across smartphone screens, I’m taken aback by the critical mass of my own age, as ancient to them as obsolete technology, too old for even their pack mockery, faded into the same anonymity as the upholstered bus seats, someone else’s old problem, someone else’s father. Perceptions adjust, they develop – beauty found once in the pristine and the unspoiled is found instead now in the weathered, the experienced, the pocks and scars of a subtly painful life. Attractive, conceivably, in the abstract, though desire will peak exponentially as hope is broken, as opportunities contract. Nullified possibilities – preempt dissatisfaction. Lust will wait to pounce when nil better is expected. Some dreadful friendless bloke-height tomboy with a hold all and tailored slacks in the year above slurred at me past great sheets of teeth, “you have big red ears”, as though with such austere anatomical descriptors we had reached the limits of playground goading, metaphor or literary styling or deeper insight instead superseded by stark declarations of observable fact (harsh but fairer, in its way, quantitatively unobjectionable reflections of experience that positioned all on some egalitarian continuum of physical asymmetry), a stretched and murderous wretch from the outskirts of my village, an archetypal bad seed, smudged with a dermis of freckles and a corvid bellow and incredibly straight ginger hair and – such delicious irony – two slapped cheeks of raw rosacea that oozed past the freckles like something molten or alive beneath the crust of her foul face. There was nothing to do but concur – the pair of facts abutted from my head like waymarkers leading on to some inbred backwater. I’d be pushed to call it a life. I emerged from the waters aged eighteen. I performed cunnilingus on the hills above Steyning in the moonlight. I fingered a girl on the floor of the airport and walked miles home. When would the respite come? These adolescent dramas, playing out throughout forever – they, like us all, will come to realize that nothing matters, nothing at all, and certainly not they, nor theirs, the hard facts of life, nothing. The waters would bear us all.