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  for Digsy

  1.

  My lover, the rabbi, his cock smaller than mine, we weren’t measuring, we weren’t in competition, when he came his fluid got caught in his pubic hair and created a sunset effect, a cloud, a confusion, not unlike Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, but inverted.

  2.

  My lover, the rabbi, still mourning the deaths of his parents and brother, was unusually distracted when we had sex—no proper way to phrase our congress, call it sex or habit, habituation or a grievance procedure, a catastrophe that never concluded.

  3.

  My lover, the rabbi, friendly with a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian novelist, flew back and forth from Charlottesville to New York to Vienna, in search of orgasms, phrases, close readings, psychological lacunae, places where he could go blank inside and forget his troubled origins, and I was no help, in my apron, in the kitchen, not my kitchen, mine was too small, but in his roomier kitchen, where I did my best to secure his affections with a galette, a flan, a coulis, a brisket.

  4.

  My lover, an unconventional rabbi, had loved his late brother more than he would ever love me, though only I had the equipment to “fill his holes,” as he phrased it at the orientation barbecue held last week at the friendship center (a buddy-oriented building adjacent to the synagogue), where men of our persuasion (and not only men) congregate in search of basic nourishment, no fancy sauces, just regular mature meat.

  5.

  My lover, the rabbi, remained in shock over the grotesque deaths of his brother and his parents—first the brother died, of a harrowing illness, and then the mother and father, a few months later, not in a situation of torture or persecution, but on a cruise, suddenly, septic shock, while eating in the ship’s canteen, witnesses present to photograph the event, the blood and pallor and the husband’s and wife’s simultaneous collapse, a pool of refuse under them as they lay on the grand concourse floor, my lover, the rabbi, telling me again and again this horrific story, which gripped me in a peculiar, kinky, amoral web of uncouth fascination.

  6.

  My lover, the rabbi, adopted his nephew, upon the death of the rabbi’s brother, and I developed an intense, unhealthy friendship with this nephew, now eighteen and in love with Messiaen, the young man a devotee of birdsong and of Christian religious culture of the most refined kinds, perhaps in an attempt (half-conscious? malicious?) to exact revenge on my lover, the rabbi, who espoused intolerant and xenophobic views about absolute, essential differences between adherents to various religious traditions.

  7.

  Could I ever tell the rabbi, my lover, that I had “tricked” with his Charlottesville husband long before I’d met the rabbi—that I’d let the Charlottesville husband penetrate me, an act I’d never permit the rabbi to commit on my supposedly anally-virgin person?

  8.

  Why did I refuse the rabbi the use of my back hole, when his Charlottesville husband had availed himself of its lubed forecourts and antechambers, murky and unnarrated as they were?

  9.

  My antechambers—anal backwaters—had no stories attached to them, so I, without a prehistory, became the rabbi’s forbidden, verklempt possession, more of a Mopsy doll than a man, despite my receptivity to the thrusts of the Charlottesville financier.

  10.

  Had the rabbi temporarily given up on me because he’d discovered that I’d allowed the Charlottesville financier to make use of the rear entrance I’d announced was verboten to the rabbi, the man to whom I’d professed a primary, commanding love, never to be overshadowed or threatened by any other fleshly attachment?

  11.

  To the rabbi I’d promised a loyalty so primal and regressive it almost qualified as a throwback to a totalitarian, fascistic style of erotic attachment, a mode whereby I agreed to forfeit my autonomy should the lover request my annihilation or at least my humiliated subordination.

  12.

  My lover, the rabbi, looked like a cross between Ernest Borgnine and Antonin Artaud—at once plump and emaciated, cleft-chinned and angular, haunted and leaden, priestly and profane—like a man who had wandered forty days in the desert but who had also been an understudy for Robert Preston in The Music Man—unfathomable and frankly heretical contradictions!

  13.

  I told the rabbi not to be ashamed of his body, even though at times I seemed to convey an unkind level of disgust when I took his modest member into my mouth and made noises I hoped would convey—or simulate—a degree of self-abnegating rapture worthy of Lily Bart at her most abject in The House of Mirth, a book my mother read aloud to me when I was an adolescent to teach me not only the elements of style but the rudiments of a suicidal lifestyle, a sycophantic relation to social status—though we, as a household, my mother and father and I, did not disdain the realm of appearances, we were not idealists or ghost-hunting fools.

  14.

  “I need variety,” I told the rabbi, my lover, when he said, “What species of ennui makes you want to moonlight with me?”—and I protested, “I’m not moonlighting, you’re the man I’ve been seeking ever since I pricked my thumb on a Grace Kelly rose when I was seven years old, and I realized that my penis and its directionality—its quest to rush forward—were the perverse inverse of the horticultural and olfactory values embodied in a Grace Kelly rose—unless I’m misremembering, and it was a Sonja Henie rose.”

  15.

  The rabbi wore clear glasses, I mean clear frames, which “read,” against his always semi-bearded face, as snow queens, transparent icicles, divinity ambassadors of nothingness—his hirsute face striking a Satanic (or chthonic) chord that the clear frames offered a contrast to, as if indicating (to an unbiased beholder, one awake to the allegories lurking in daily life) that the almost fecal (yet worship-worthy) characteristics of his stubbly face could be cleaned (or turned inside out) by the purifying, flushing action of the frames, acetate engines of rehabilitation—for it is a fact that the jewels and accessories with which we ornament our paltry bodies can have a spiritual and physiological effect (purgative and balance-affirming, like a compass asserting the divine right of kings) on our suppurating, flaccid, wobbly bodies, our fat thighs and sagging breasts and cellulite-dimpled buttocks, the skin above our elbows hanging loose like pendant sunflowers or hydrangeas after a massive rainfall catalyzed by global warming.

  16.

  “What will happen when my fevered passion for you—right now at a peak that threatens to damage my health—subsides, and I grow to dislike you, or find despicable or depressing the fact that you are two inches shorter than me, that you have never played volleyball or cricket, that you don’t know Latin or Ladino—O, the list of your lapses extends like a tape measure onward to an infinity encompassed, perversely enough, by my testicles and also my superior command of exegetical fine points I daren’t mention to you now, while I’m lying on top of you at a Super 8 motel in New Paltz, our belly-button lints converging like the obviousness of Schubert reiterating the C major chord in a jejune sonata already tediously governed by C major”—thus I said to the rabbi; and does that mean that our filth, my filth and the rabbi’s, together add up to a harmonic tautology, an abundance of same-same relations, my stinky lint canceling out his stinky lint?

  17.

  To my lover, the rabbi, I said, at a crucial juncture in our up-and-down, roller-coaster relationship, “To whatever configuration suits your libido I will conform my body, and I will forfeit the postures that my fantasies and heritage hardwire me into desiring—I will forfeit those preconscious preferences in an attempt to wrest you back from a purgatory I thrust you into”—all of this sentimental and manipulative palaver I mumbled in his ear while uncharacteristically opening my every orifice to his slow, fastidious inspection, so he could scour and survey my body for any unwanted signs of filth or ambivalence—toward him I know I must express unswerving loyalty as well as clean, scrubbed, perfumed surfaces and interiors, lest he gag while inserting a tongue or any other organic or inorganic devices into cavities that should be shelved under “trash receptacles” at Home Depot or the Library of Congress rather than “sacred texts” or “religious and ritual practices of an ancient nomadic people governed by their love of cattle, sheep, goats, and other vulnerable receptacles of holy awe.”

  18.

  The rabbi, my lover, said he pitied me for sitting alone in the car in his garage while contemplating turning on the engine to destroy myself with toxic fumes, all because of my regressive wish for oblivion, a surcease I nearly accomplished in his arms when we made out and then blew each other in the Pontiac parked on the hill above the hurricane-destroyed beach community where his first wife had lived; before their marriage, and before the hurricane vanquished the beachfront houses and decimated the local economy, Carla, the first wife of my lover, the rabbi, made earrings, which she sold on Sundays at the craft fair to tourists and members of the wealthy set who dwelled in the grotesque, pylon-elevated houses skirting the water.

  19.

  The earrings made by Carla, the first wife of my lover,
the rabbi, disgusted me when I discovered them (he kept them, a treasured yet feared bequest, in a locked case in his bedroom closet), because I saw in them the answer—a depressing answer—to the riddle of why I suddenly and permanently had become an object of disgust to the rabbi, whose salt-and-pepper hair, the hairline not receding, represented a peevish invincibility, a distaste for my petty seductions, those ornately worded equivocations I tried to pierce him with, like a shingles shot; all medical procedures interested the rabbi, ever since his failed year as a premed student at a forsaken liberal arts school in the Adirondacks, a school without a proper premed curriculum.

  20.

  His unctuousness, the rabbi’s, my lover’s, pretending not to wound me when in fact his flattery aimed to decimate my so-called ego, a tattered bladder, pierced and flayed and obviated—his unctuousness entailed never saying, “I’m sick of you, stay away from me with your sticky need”—instead of rejecting me outright, he pretended that we’d see each other after the holidays, but the holidays were followed by more holidays, an endless series of deferrals, excuses to wound me.

  21.

  When my lover, the rabbi, fell down in the stairwell—collapsed, from fatigue or a heart condition or else as a statement of noncompliance—I realized that I had lost my cell phone and that his house lacked a landline and that I couldn’t call 911 to get an ambulance, so I sat on the stair below him and thanked him for how kindly he’d treated me in Bremen when we’d visited the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum; spittle and what looked like clumps of bile (half-chewed breakfast cereal?) oozed or leaked out of his mouth, and his eyelids fluttered—was his pulse erratic, subsiding, racing?—as I tried to conjure for him that halcyon moment of our Bremen trip, the schnitzel we ate at the brasserie after touring the museum, my heartburn afterward, his insistence that a glass of schnapps would soothe my system, and in truth the schnapps worked its magic and my heartburn subsided and we could postpone the destruction of each other’s self-sureness for a few weeks more.

  22.

  You mock-strangled me at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, and I almost passed out (though I was hard and you were hard, too, during this quasi-strangulation simulation that suddenly grew real), but we never brought it up in conversation, we pretended the dangerous scene had never transpired, just as we expunged from conversation any mention of the time you put your fingers in my nostrils and covered my mouth with your other hand while I was screwing the trick you’d brought home from the Bremen brasserie to our hotel—and yet the next day we pretended, all three of us, that nothing potentially murderous had happened: you and I and Karl, a twenty-year-old music student, took a day trip to the rhododendron park and argued about the worth of Brahms’s first piano sonata in C, never mentioning that you’d tried to suffocate me.

  23.

  Karl became part of the brooding, Bremen-dark consciousness of my lover, the rabbi, even after he dropped Karl; Karl became a point of reference, a tool that the rabbi employed to resolve the haunting question of what steps he might logically next take to destroy me, though he pretended to be a spiritual guide to his confused, cowed congregation, those poor delirious sheep, trusting a fraud.

  24.

  I couldn’t find my lover’s nipples, they lay so buried in a carpet of dense hair, and I was repulsed by their invisibility, but also awakened by the clarion call of their disappearance, as the fog of Tristan and Isolde’s narcotic romance is pierced by the warning cry of Brangäne, the cautious biddy’s voice of reason and prudence trying to cut through the murk of erotic illusion.

  25.

  My lover, the rabbi, had a child, Rockland, who died at three years old, a catastrophe, the rabbi couldn’t tell me more and I couldn’t ask; a Bluebeard’s-castle silence surrounded the dead Rockland, and I was entrusted with the task of becoming a second Rockland, a tangible bulwark against painful questionings and self-eviscerating explanations.

  26.

  I took so seriously the task of reembodying the dead Rockland that I considered getting his name tattooed on my chest, right above my heart, but when I mentioned this fond notion to my lover, he lashed out at me with a torrent of insults secretly lined with more unctuousness, candied words of false praise, so though he called me “melodramatic whore” and “psychotic desecrator” and “baby-destroyer,” he larded the recrimination with words like “sweet sexy manlover mine” and “visionary redeemer” and “profound renegotiator of my ravished heartland.”

  27.

  The rabbi, my lover, wanted to read all the Harry Potter books aloud to me, but I told him that I couldn’t abide trash, and he replied that I was a coward and a snob and that my dick wasn’t as unique and gripping a spectacle as I’d always insisted, touting my dick as the anatomical equivalent of Jean Simmons and Richard Burton making out in The Robe—a CinemaScopic, historic dick, in period costumes, in bad taste. Or was it Victor Mature making out with Jean Simmons? Was my dick an overblown spectacle like Mature and Simmons? The questioning went on, ad infinitum, into the night.

  28.

  I suggested to my lover, the rabbi, that I get my nipples pierced, and he said, “Faggot,” but as a joke—or he wished me to think it a joke. His nephew was in the room with us when my lover called me “faggot.” The nephew said, “Uncle, stop being homophobic,” and my lover slapped his nephew, but gently, mockingly, as if making light of the gesture, as if relegating it to the category of movements we might call “pantomime” if we were in the mood to minimize the harm that words can do to our experiences.

  29.

  For a week after the “faggot” incident, the nephew and I huddled together at night in the rec room of the rabbi’s house, to console each other for the ritualized angers and lashings-out that afflicted the rabbi, my lover—rages that might subside only if we invented a new ceremony to extinguish, temporarily, the rabbi’s nightmarish memories of the death of Rockland, his three-year-old son.

  30.

  My lover, the rabbi, considered his jaw to be among his most handsome features, but in certain lights, notably on winter afternoons, his jaw seemed to recede—and on these cold occasions of chin diminishment I pitied my lover, for I could see that by the time he became an old man, his chin would disappear, and his neck and face would become one hirsute column, without the differentiation that happens, in a regular human being, between the face and the neck; but even as I contemplate the words “normal human being,” I understand how justified the rabbi had been to call me once, in a fit of concupiscent clarity, when he was hovering nude above me, a “surplus of received wisdoms tied up in a bundle like faggots in a chimney sweep’s rucksack.” Though my dick was a feature he considered “worth a detour,” in the parlance of the Michelin Guide, my overall moral and intellectual constitution was a ragbag of soiled panties, brown and yellow marks desecrating the fabric like spots on the puppies in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, a film I preferred, as a child, to the more canonical Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Come to think of it, the rabbi, my lover, looked like one of the dwarfs, a drooping, phantasmatic thing, no more real than an oven mitt or a can of bug spray. Or did I seem to him the unreal, stunted party, the aerosol dispenser of orange-breeze-scented Raid?