The dominant psychological experience of all people is that of psychosis. The messages surrounding us are meaningful only in a persecutory sense, as capitalism grinds into its final gear. Everyone struggles to find their own place to stand in the maelstrom, their own imaginary self to stave off the deconstructing forces all around. Those that succeed relatively well stay ’sane’.
Gottschalk, Escape from insanity
The extraordinary wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity, but must form a part of what passes as the normal condition.
Freud, On Sexulity
The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.
Borges, Funes the Memorious
Iago Coakes woke from a most beautiful dream. In this hypnagogia, he and Doris Fray, a girl he’d known in high school, had been sailing. Coakes’ first thought on waking was that the fresh mist of salt, and by inference, his whole dream, had come from ferrous iron, the gingivitic seep which caked in sticky horizontal ridges on his teeth.
Coakes had dozens of such minor physical impairments. His eyes periodically leaked from chronic conjunctivitis. His wide mouth held the furred tongue of constipation, panting halitotic reeks. He had flat feet, and atruamatic patellar instability. He sprouted thinning hair, and a short, fat and sharply curved penis. Coakes’ body was a temple to chaotic Eris. A hefty yet weak, high machine, with angry fish-hook fingers.
Coakes suspected, deep down, that the infirmity which afflicted his cock was related somehow, to a habit of frottage he had nurtured as an adolescent. This was one of eight secrets about himself that he had never, and would never, tell anyone.
One hand, hooked like a naked muppet, had jammed between Coakes and the seat back. He held it still, aware that when moved, it would realise a grim premonition of arthritis. He had passed out in front of the TV again. Coakes’ television, his muse, was no ordinary seventeen inch cathode ray tube. It was a behemoth. Thin and flat as Coakes himself, sixty inches from one sleek, injection molded corner to the next, it had two hundred channels and a built in hard drive. It projected 1080p and absorbed HDMI. It could connect remotely to Coakes’ ludicrously expensive Macintosh computer, and played music and high definition films he had downloaded from the internet. When Coakes switched it on each morning, virtual curtains swept back in faux elegance across its reflection absorbent surface. When he left it on at night, as he had done again, drooling to sleep in his Target suede lounger, an AI motion sensor recognised the difference in his squirming, and gradually eased the sleek machine to dark and silence.
To Coakes, the television was not an entertainer. It was not a window to the world. It was not a rainy day companion. To Coakes, the television was a great hideous idol, a Cuthulu emerging from some non space behind his wall no, inside it, to drain him, to leave him puffy and sated, like a reluctant organ donor, drunk on morphine in an ice bath with a purple scar and cellphone glued to his paling hand. For Coakes was a television critic.
As he steadfastly ignored it’s allure, piling dishes in the sink, and brushing his crooked teeth, Coakes wondered idly if he were a character in a clever literary novel. Characters in postmodern American novels often had litanies of physical decrepitudes. Then too they tended to have alienated adolescent offspring, and malicious ex wives who stubbornly subsisted on their weekly alimony. Ridiculous, thought Coakes, as he masturbated fruitlessly in the shower. Protagonists he told himself, slipping a gel cacked finger into his arse to find the prostate, were never television critics. Not enough potential for action, too little Joie de Vivre.
As he ate a breakfast of steak and cheese hot pockets, and tossed back abortion strength espresso, Coakes’ slow and bitter thoughts turned to his daughter Melody. She had a little league game later that afternoon, or was it earlier? Coakes’ mental clock had been replaced almost entirely by the subtly anti-aliased Helvetica chronometer, that could be conjured by remote control from his television’s screen. In it’s absence his time sense was muddied to a vague fugue. Coakes awareness of the weather was similarly blurred. He maintained a persistent delusion that the slick coiffured man in his television could sense directly, looking through him, and through the walls of his apartment, into the street beyond. Could see what he could not, and then refocus, stare down at him with a smirk, a cheeky mid-afternoon, mid-Atlantic grin, and acclaim with smug and absolute certitude, that it was raining.
Coakes hoped earnestly that Melody’s team, a repugnantly successful group of gender liberated tweens, who all attended soccer, swimming, and yes baseball, would lose, had lost, whatever. He was unsettled by her braided, laced, braced, and well postured composure. His daughter was a bi-lingual, honour roll student, whose class projects won prizes like ‘most innovative use of renewable energy’, or ‘best critique of non parametric statistics’.
When he was eight years old, Coakes’ knee had popped it’s socket like a tin lidded man o’ war, and he’d spent a season in the dugout, ‘learning strategy’. Coakes was self aware enough to realise that he yearned for a similarly ‘educative experience’ to befall his daughter.
As he dressed, unenthusiastically observing the process in his bedroom wardrobe’s full length mirror, Coakes experienced one of those monstrous moments of self recognition. A moment in which the disconnect between the blanched untoned features in the mirror and the self he felt himself to be, led him to recognise with unholy certainty, that he was alive, and real, and had this face, and lived this life. He paused, examined his features with disapproval, smacked his flat thin lips together in self mockery, and looked away. He finished his dress in the existential dark.
While he watched Oprah and waited for Ricky, Coakes worked on his novel, jotting his soft curlicued notation in a hipply unlined Moleskine. The central character in his work in progress, Oakley, was also a divorcée, with an unfulfilling life and a large but incomplete collection of nineteen eighties action TV. He was not however, a television critic.
Coakes’ residence was a large, flat-roofed, ranch bungalow, with plenty of natural light, and a long shallow swimming pool in back. It had been his wife’s choice, and he disliked all of it, save the den, where his television hung. But there was no space in there for a massage table, so when Margarita arrived for his rubdown, they had to move into the rec room. Here his only window to the safe and warm fields of TV land, was a fourteen inch CRT that he was forced to watch side on, craning and twisting his neck.
By this point in the afternoon Coakes had usually mustered the sustenance to mount a worthy campaign of flatulence. He feasted vampiracally on Margaritas pause and whimper, as she felt him stiffen and realised what was to come. Once, still a little drunk on the previous evenings hostage Merlot, Coakes had offered her an extra forty bucks to give him head, as he lay in state on the padded table, and had particularly enjoyed the malodorous combination of suck and blow. On that occasion, Coakes had combined his flatulence with a technique he’d pioneered, which involved administering swift, hard, slaps to the back of the head at crucial moments. He spoke of this invention, when bantering with pump attendants and other minimum wagemen, as ‘The Humbler’. A malady for Melody, Coakes thought, recalling his earlier schadenfreude, and farted once again.
Dusk approaching, Coakes drove down from the hills, past the houses of his well to do neighbours, down Mullholland drive, past Beverly Hills and UCLA, and into the city. He avoided downtown LA as much as possible. With it’s human detritus, it’s chaos of bums, hustlers, tourists and hips, it was a bipolar prison. Too many bright lights, too much big city. This evening Coakes, however, needed a release. Something richer and darker and stronger than the television.
Coakes nestled the veined wooden pipe between his knees and filled it from a little plastic vial. He set the vial down, carefully on the coffee table, and pushed the mouth piece through a melted hole in the part-full water bottle. As he settled back into the leather Buddha bag, somewhere someone set a Doors song playing. Coakes brought the bottle to his lips and flamed the bowl, filling the bottles empty volume with slow twists of smoke. As he inhaled, keeping the flame steady, the black coals of Salvia glowed a crisp orange, and settled to ash. He shakily laid down his lighter, and the still full bottle bong, holding the hot toke in, and salivating. He felt nothing yet but a sudden torpid stone. The record player hit a peak, and he relaxed back into the bag, shutting his eyes. He became increasingly aware of a stuttering dizziness, a tug of motion, a merry-go-round whip twirl. He knew he was here, now, in this gritty nowhere club. But a part of him, no all of him, was elsewhere; a twirling kaleidescope, of which this world was just one frame in a film reel, one string in a vibration. A lollipop hedgerow landscape, where afro’d evergreen spectators watched, and shook their heads as he held his feet square in the frame, as he stuck, terrified, to the amber of the real.‘Iago! Iago, baby how are you? Are you paying attention babe?’
Coakes swung his blood shot eyes wildly round the room, over red and gold drapes, incense burners, murals in the impressionist style, cushioned sofa’s covered in Arabs, till they rested on the familiar face before him.
‘Iago sweetie, are you there?’ she asked, as her hand snaked towards his pocket, fingers hungry. At the last moment she saw his eyes, cold and vicious, if unfocused, and changed her fingers path down to his groin.
Perhaps he should have punched her. There was nothing like being blown by a winded chick. He rose shakily, padded across the thick but dirty carpet, and seated himself on a low leather sofa, lighting up one the fat foul European cigarettes he favoured in moments like this. The ceiling seemed lower from this seat, the basement a cavern, its whitewashed walls pulsing with dried and reliquified sweat. He breathed the smoke in deeply, to the bottom of his lungs, revelling in the Saliva bittering on his tongue. When he blew out of his nose, it billowed fatly, fleshy as an arse. It was, of course, illegal to smoke here, but then many of the things that went on in McDowells had crossed that line.
Coakes was suddenly very tired of the place. How many years had he been coming here since De Niro had introduced him to it? How much coke had he snorted? How much cum had he leaked weakly onto the sofas and into the mouths of Eastern European and Mexican whores? - who were always older than they looked, he hoped. It seemed so tired, its decadence hiding a greater malignant cancer. Bobby Dylan had told him once that money didn’t talk, it swore, but in this legendary basement, hidden and exposed, here it gave, and took, and broke, without a word.
He smiled as quivering lips closed around his fat, short, purpled cock, her dead eyes fixed on his bale of pubic hair. She baulked at his taste and made to move away but he clamped a thick paw on her auburn wig, brittle and dry, and pushed her mouth back down. He hadn’t washed his cock in nearly a week, in preparation. Dead white cheese had built up under his foreskin, a sheath, he thought with pride, which had thus far survived two attempts at circumcision - one gentle under a doctors knife, another less so, at the teeth of a disgruntled bitch. One must suffer for ones art. He felt a large flat fart crawl unwillingly from underneath, and mingle dangerously with a sweat pool to produce the sensation of a wetty, a shitblow. He smiled wildly, with too many teeth, and let it out.
Coakes, holding his breath and building another guff for later, thought of the column that had gone to press that morning, syndicated across the Americas and the Far East, a retouched photo from his college days in its top left hand corner. He’d looked thin. Suck suck, lick, gag, suck. It had been a good article, decrying the lack of blacks in principle roles on mainstream television, and the lack of talent coming from the South. He’d decorated it with quotes from William Blake and Aerosmith. He’d written it’s later half in a deconstructionist style, he’d cribbed from ‘The Pooh Perplex’. Superficially it was about the latest episode of Oprah, another all black cast of minor celebrities who had been badly sexually abused. Not badly as in excessively but badly as in poorly, from their descriptions of it. If you’re going to do something, do it right, Coakes thought, taking another deep drag of his smoke, and flicking ash on the back of the girls neck, making her flinch.
When he finished she spat his cum out on the carpet and stalked off. She still had some spirit, that was heart warming, it was what he wanted to bring out in them. What a good job they could do, when pushed, when he could make them real, when he could make them care.
Iago slapped down hard onto a vibrating recliner, a towel digging tight into his belt of flesh. His wet hair, shoulder length and piss yellow, slapped around naked, spotty shoulders. He sunk deeper into the Italian leather of the chair, its brown shininess sticking to his skin, as blood rouge digital curtains drew back on the screen, filling the room with the light of Oprah hugging a diminutive, closeted film star. Coakes rested one hand on his groin, moulding the damp warm towel around his nut sack, the other upon an absurdly large remote control, the means by which he communicated with the divine. He exhaled slowly and began to flick. After an aborted cop show and a new supernatural high school drama, that rose hot red flashes of guilt over his abject neglect, he settled on the new David Schwimmer vehicle, “Upside of Jew”. Perhaps Ben Stiller was busy. It was puerile drivel, but it provided plenty of fuel for an nice little review, which would declaim the excess influence of homosexual Hebrews, while at the same time condemning the show for its covert racism. ‘Where are all the blacks?’, he’d say, ‘Were the producers worried they’d rape the hot yiddy love interest?’ That’d set the coon amongst the virgins. Coakes laughed thinking of his trophy room, full of Pulitzers and other less medallions to his greatness, and went for another shower. He couldn’t get his face clean.
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