Un’erezione, un’erezione, un’erezione, un’erezione triste/Per un coito molesto, per un coito modesto, per un coito molesto/Spermi, spermi, spermi, spermi indifferenti/Per ingoi indigesti, per ingoi indigesti, per ingoi indigesti
-C.C.C.P. Fedeli alla linea
I
My flight to L.A. was delayed so I stopped by a bar in downtown Oakland to have a drink with Maria, who told me the following story (the drink turned into several drinks, and the flight was made at the last minute, because flights, more and more, never leave on time, and increasingly never arrive at their destination) (over the course of a long, intermittent friendship, we’d settled on a style of mutually confessional, pornographic but ultimately asexual conversation: it actually wasn’t mutual, she talked and I listened, she exposed herself and I let her do it, or forced her to do it, by virtue of a kind of auditory and carceral voyeurism, as if life, hers and mine, had become not much more than a last-ditch gloryhole dug into a paranoiac panopticon):
She was living in Berlin at the time (I never knew how old she was in her stories, since they often started in the same places, the same cities–Naples, Brescia, London, Paris, Tijuana, Mombassa, etc.: but the girl who ran away, and the girl who never came back, who never believed that a city or a mood could exist more than once, if that, was always a different girl). Her boyfriend kept her chained and naked in an apartment: he was controlling. She hated him, wanted to kill him, but he had total control over her: since her adolescence she tended to involve herself with drug dealers, traffickers, and petty gangsters, though you would never guess it from the pacifist vegan petsitter persona she had settled into when she got U.S. citizenship, by a stroke of luck that arrived periodically for her and up to this point just in time (ever since I met her, I was struck by her independence, from money and men, though inevitably they came back into her life: when I first met her, this short curly-haired Semitic-looking girl, who to be perfectly honest looked like my twin sister, older in her existential admonishments and intimacy with dying but younger in her constantly dazed and lost sense of being, was married to a blond northern Italian rich-boy surfer/Viking, who was at least 6’5”, who doted on her, whom she bossed around and cuckolded because, after all, he deserved it: she knew the value of even the most corrupt and omnipotent citizenship, having traversed every border in her desire for sweetness and peace, since the day she was raped at eight, since the day she was born into a family that gave her the desire to escape, and never look back). One day her friend Matteo, who was the gay playboy scion of a prominent Italian capitalist, and was working for Alitalia at the time, proposed that they go to Milan for the day, since he had a free flight with a return ticket. They took the flight but then Matteo disappeared. He told her to stay at the Milan Hilton, where “we have a room.” What do you mean, WE have a room? Just go into our room, give them our name. Maria spends the day and the early evening at the bar, not daring to show up to the front desk. Drinking, waiting. Finally, tired, she works up the courage to go to the front desk. She gives the name of the prominent Italian capitalist family. They let her in. She’s still concussed from the beatings her boyfriend’s given her in Berlin, from the years of survival, of degrees in various European universities, but mostly of dull “trauma,” which she doesn’t recognize as trauma because the kind of life, the kind of pleasure, she wants to talk about is inscrutable to others, right now (later, another day, she’ll talk about it as a desire to escape the pressure of sex, there should be quick violent apathic intermittences, and the moment you feel something you should leave, fuck very quickly and very abruptly, never in your bed, which is a place for rest, for serenity). She lies down in this bed, this oasis of a bed in a desert of Schengen Zone horror, at the Milan Hilton, and for the first time in years she is alone, there’s no one here, touching and groping her or asking her for something. Her father ended up in the north for complicated personal and geopolitical reasons, he used to force her to sell communist newspapers as a girl, she was constantly bullied for her southern heritage and in the south on holidays by her hick family, now he votes for Five Star and by association for the Liga, but mostly he smokes in bed in the dark and reads, he was a child genius with no prospects, the entire multigenerational story of her Naples family sounds like a Ferrante novel, down to the rapes and first televisions and micro-regional politics and sapphic post-genital understandings shaping unalterable destinies, though she’s never read Ferrante, who incidentally is not from Naples in any way and is a kind of minstrel act (so she must have been part of the gloryhole too, I think). She falls asleep and has those erotic and tumultuous but ultimately peaceful nightmares you have when the cortical lost highway is free to finally be driven on by (a random and ultimately meaningless) memory, by the worst fucking memories of this life whose only sense is its constant cruelty. But before she can really relax, Matteo bursts in with his dad. They have coke, alcohol, etc. They’re loud and fucked up. Oh hey, there you are. We’ve called over prostitutes: his dad is a macho multimillionaire but he’s enlightened in that Pasolinian way that’s comfortable not only with homosexuality, but with incest and rampant libidinal exploitation of the lower classes. The prostitutes arrive: a North African woman (the dad doesn’t attend bunga bunga parties, because the ruling class everywhere is riven by sociopolitical conflict, except in the U.S., in a single conclave, on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet) and a boy. What do you mean a boy? Not a boy like that, Maria said, Matteo wasn’t pure evil, wasn’t a pedophile. An ephebophile? Yes, that (one thing about Maria, and I think about Italians in general, is that they’re generally familiar with classical languages in a way that only alt-right incels are, in this country). But a boy, nonetheless. They tell her to get out while they fuck their prostitutes. They fucked in the same room, side-by-side? No, they weren’t like that. They had their own wing at the Hilton, they had separate rooms, obviously. Maria waits in the hallway, desperate for the bed she’d been ripped from (from the parthenogenesis she never came from, indifferent to the womb). Why didn’t you go back to the bar? She didn’t know, not at the time, not now. There are certain gaps in every story, certain things we do or have done to us, that we can never account for. Maybe I was tired of that stupid fucking bar?, she said. We go out for a cigarette, talk about other shit for awhile (no story proceeds linearly). Anyway, she’s waiting outside in the Hilton hallway, she thinks about sleeping there but realizes she’ll be arrested as a vagrant, as she often has. So she sleeps standing up, awake, as she always has, from English maquiladoras to boring Berlin warehouse parties. Thinks about nothing for a bit. Then finally, she doesn’t know how much time has gone by, the boy runs out, in tears. In tears? Like sentimental tears? No, the tears are incidental, it’s as if he’s seen the devil, as if he’s crying blood and he probably is, for all I know, from his anus. Then Matteo comes running out, in his underwear. But Matteo’s also crying, though this time he’s actually crying sentimental tears, as if he’s fallen in love for the penultimate time. She says, what the fuck did you do to this boy, this hustler who’s seen everything, who’s been hurt in every possible way by every possible day of Sodom? And he just looks at her like a castrated Ahab, as if she could never understand in a million years, and runs away, after the boy (I try to think of explanations, I don’t know what Matteo, whose sadism never from her story seemed particularly developed, could have done: but these kinds of things are impossible to understand). Well, she thinks, I can go to sleep, at least. She goes back to the bed for a bit, but before she can even rest her eyes the dad comes in. He looks happy and well-fucked enough. Where’s Matteo? He’s gone. She tells the story. Let’s go look for him. He takes her into his car (it’s some kind of Italian luxury car, which she doesn’t remember, or I don’t). Where are we going? To find Matteo, my boy, my beloved faggot son, etc. They end up in the Milan red light district and the dad asks around for his son but he also starts propositioning prostitutes left and right, picks up a few in his car, lets them go, picks up more, gets a blowjob, Maria doesn’t remember. Eventually she runs away. You guys are fucking crazy, she says, maybe. I am leaving. She gets out of the car. Somehow, she doesn’t know how, since she has no money, she makes her way to the airport. She spends the night there, waiting for her flight back to Berlin. Just as it’s about to take off, Matteo shows up, beaming and smiling. What the fuck happened? He’s really sorry, he says, sheepishly. Let me buy you some expensive makeup, something you could never afford, some mascara, to make up for it. They go to the store and Matteo insists that she goes to the bathroom to put it on. When she gets back to her apartment in Berlin that evening, her boyfriend punches her in the head. I told you never to fucking wear makeup, he says, and Maria laughs…And that was my day off from my abusive boyfriend (I think we went outside to smoke again, I was getting nervous about my flight, though not too nervous). What happened to Matteo?, I asked. We stopped talking after that. I never forgave him. Though I saw him ten years later, in Barcelona. He had a Zapotec Mexican boyfriend dying of AIDS, who was one of the most talented artists I ever met, though Matteo treated him like shit most of the time. But maybe I did see him after that, or before, it’s hard to remember. We were back in Berlin. This was the nineties, maybe the 2000s, I don’t know. Before the Iraq war? Yes, definitely, after that everything changed, for everybody, not just politically. Matteo was living in a neo-Nazi compound or community in (she named one of the prominent neo-Nazi neighborhoods in northeast Berlin). He was studying them? Infiltrating? No, just studying. It might have been for a master’s thesis, he had a lot of degrees, his dad paid for them though back then that kind of thing was mostly free. But yes infiltrating in the sense that he didn’t reveal who he truly was. But who was he, left or right? Oh neither, he wasn’t left nor right, he was just Matteo. He liked to learn, I guess. He had an Israeli gay friend and we were involved in an illegal furniture business, we transported some stuff between Amsterdam and Berlin, but at some point he brought the truck and his Israeli friend to the neo-Nazi compound, just to see how they’d react. And how’d they react? Well they weren’t happy when they saw a Jew, naturally, and I won’t say what happened afterwards. But back then things were different, in Germany especially: the left was for Jews and the right was against them, now things are a bit more complicated. Did he ever publish his master’s thesis? I doubt it…The first time Maria felt empowered, not just the victim of fate, was in Kenya where she fell in love with a guy who worked as a prostitute usually with rich German and Austrian women. That was the second time she was in love, the first was in a much different context, when she was thirteen, with a much older guy. They were ready to get married and get him (her and the Kenyan guy) E.U. citizenship but when they traveled to his village his uncle wanted to marry her instead, and…She made compromises in life and she decided to flee on principle…
II
R and I are in another bar, a week or so after we were in L.A. We’re talking about text messages that come from each of our phones, jealous messages that in these case always arrive at their shitty destinations. About “lovers” we can’t leave alone and more importantly (for us) won’t leave us alone. You know S still texts me, she says. What kind of texts? Angry, misogynist texts, I guess, from the far-left. She shows me examples: “hey i think i saw you” “o lol you just look like evry other white bitch jk” “hey lets fuck” “bitch, ur use of spectacular violence and gentrification as an activist is full of shit” “get out of this fucking city bitch” “yo lets fuck” “hm i hate you” “yr white pussys nothing” “i wanna kill you”, “u activists fucked up at the border and should never have attracted media” etc. This guy loves you in a way I love others: weaponized, artificial, solipsistic, revolutionary, passionate, circular: and absolutely. He wants to fuck you again, I said, but he’s kind of full of shit. You said he’s the son of Sri Lankan revolutionaries? Yeah, she said, but he mostly watches ISIS recruitment videos and porn alone on his laptop, from the Maoist left. He’s kind of an asshole, I said, I guess. But I think he’s onto something…At any rate I send you similar text messages…Her ultimate point was that we both meet so-called crazy lumpen lovers in the so-called East Bay that lead us towards an almost absolute destruction, an abortive revolution–as if the Ghostship Fire were univeralized–and we all know that we’re here to die, but no one admits it.
III
R and I have just driven and hiked through everywhere near Joshua Tree and the Inland Empire, she’s fallen asleep through several night’s of trying to watch Lynch’s Inland Empire, a movie I associate with furious masturbations about my ex-girlfriend’s sexuality/grad school applications. When we get to the last bar open in Yucca Valley, a toweringly tall, wiry and a little elderly but still buff ex-IDF soldier who owns the bar, “Uki’s,” is listening to a short ex-U.S. Marine who’s come from Louisiana, trying to sell him outside security cameras but mostly just flattering him for killing “Hezbollah Ayrabs.” In the bar, I order drink after drink from the bartender, who’s watching the Oscars. I start to mouth off about Zionism, occupation, genocide, and death. R and the bartender gently argue about the costumes and the virtues of the Green Book , though I’m thinking of Gaddafi’s Green Book, which at this point I sincerely consider a social and a spiritual model. At first I zero in on the ex-IDF bar owner, out in this shitland for whatever reason, with murderous fantasies. But at least he listens. The shorter, squat white/Aryan Marine is stumbling drunk, and can’t even get his shit together, he’s talking about the long road trip he’s taken from Louisiana to Fallujah to L.A., the dead and gassed and raped Arabs, whom the IDF soldier must know about, and I’m thinking about Ilhan Omar, whose only fault was a single Larouchite fault, which was not to call out the death that radiates directly from the Inland Empire to Gaza, from the last military-industrial zone to the final zone of death, not to realize or pretend not to that the starvation and extermination of Palestinians extends all the way out here, into the L.A. hinterlands, into liberal and even leftist Zionist/anti-Zionist groups, that there’s no such thing as “dual loyalty,” whatever that slur is, because that dual loyalty is a sober Israeli murderer in a bar he owns in the middle of the Mojave desert talking to a drunk Marine trying to make a buck off their shared (hallucinatory, mercenary) past. And what is that past? The past, as that mediocre fucking CIA stooge Faulkner said, isn’t even past…
(Later I go to sleep and realize that in fact Ilhan is an anti-Semite, probably some kind of Mossad agent, I have really sophisticated things to say about her that don’t fucking matter, because what in the end was the result of this shitty Fox News nightmare, what kind of leftist actually sides with the idiotic spectacle that’s been created, during the Palestinian genocide, on the verge of the invasion of Venezuela…goodnight, leftists)…
(I had so many dreams about Ilhan, we were in various non-profit-industrial-complex tele-conferences, mostly she told me to be better: once she said I had “white privilege” because I wouldn’t participate in a confessional game, something about your favorite color or animal, but we winked at each other. I had dreams every night in 2019 mostly about Venezuela, I dreamed that a girl I loved’s friend–who looked a lot like her, almost in a porny way, but she was more of a bimbofied id–was watching a battle royale with me. The CIA and the chavistas had agreed to work out their differences in some kind of infernal gladiatorial pit that was mostly plagiarized from the second Indiana Jones movie. The two of us were watching it from my childhood bedroom, she had just gotten out of the shower, her tits were sudsy…