a mapplethorpe fiction, part 2

I'm not, as one might say, feeling well today. Hung-over is the least of it. Jimmy left me last night, angry, accusing, irrational as fuck, and I'm supposed to teach today, fucking freshmen or something, college is one big ugly joke and their poor parents, bless them, coughing up 25 grand a year and for what? Frat parties and boys who kiss badly, slobbery fuckers, and girls always inches away from making a mistake with those same slobbery fuckers, and grades, grades that won't matter a fuck once they get out...

What do I care? A splitting headache, that's about as much as I have to offer today. Jimmy, oh my stupid boy. Lover, you have no idea how to take care of yourself. You're too young for me, everyone knows that, but your mouth, your body, oh the liquid of it, how you dance like nothing else alive, how it was at the lake where I met you, swimming your laps, beating the water with your beautiful winged fists.

Not ready today for this class. Freshmen, freshmen, what does one do with freshmen? A cigarette, that's what I need, right here, right now, before I enter this room of virginal virgins - they have no idea what's it's like out there, and I don't want to be the one to tell them art is the least of it, art is easy, it's like the best accident waiting to happen, it is staring us in the face all the time.

I can already tell you what they look like, that they will look the part or what they think it means to look the part and there'll be someone there - no doubt in my mind - thinking that tattoos will make their work mean something different, something better, or a mohawk, or a fucking addiction, or some boyfriend who plays guitar, they'll think that they've got it, and they'll blow their fucking cover the second they take that first picture.

The studio - Jesus, if I'd only had it this good when I was their age. Brighter than my hangover can manage, and yeah, I was right on the money about that tattoo and mohawk thing - no less than five tweaky boys in the room, all jittery on probably no more than a cup of coffee and the No-Doz tablet they snorted last night so they could stay up to write bad, bad poetry. Girls, too, goth girls, looking like they bought out Macy's entire inventory of eyeliner. I love these girls, they're easy to work with. Thinking they're so angry and then realizing they've got nothing to be angry about and they'll probably finish the semester with some snapshots of daisies and call it a career. Oh, and a couple of jocks, too, inevitably, probably on a dare from their buddies `cause it's a nudie photo class and they'll see some tit, but they're pushovers. No one but me knows how after practice these two run like fuck to the bathroom on the other side of the school and jerk each other off. No one but me knows that they won't make it past the age of thirty.

There is someone there, though, the vanilla in the lot...or so she thinks. These are my favorite, the self-exiled vanillas. They learn the most, is my opinion, feel the blank slateness of themselves and can't help but take the epiphanies once they come barreling at them from all sides, can't help it, the surrender, they yearn for it, really, you'll see, she'll yearn for it, too. She will open up like the fucking jaws of life rip apart the door of a trapped passenger reaching a bloody hand out from a shattered windshield, she will stretch herself in the same please-get-me-I'm-here, here-I-am, here-I-am sort of way, even though right now she is somewhere else, somewhere tame and fastened and local-area-code, plain enough, wearing a polo shirt like pure innocence, no lipstick, no eyeshadow, none of that god-awful eyeliner...Let me tell you about her.

She is young. So young. And wanting so much, that's written all over her even though of course she prides herself on her containment, on how okay she is, absent of a visibly or even invisibly difficult past and she gets good grades, she does, always with the grades, it's her way of staying afloat, keeping the peace, gathering her familiars. And the thing is, she's moving so slowly, moving ever so slowly, no desire to ruffle any feathers, tell anybody how she really feels when the day ends or begins with that tight greyness in her chest, that feeling of nameless want, one big ball of ache, whatever it is, and instead she pirouettes around the rock in the road threatening puncture, downs glasses of lemonade, learns lyrics to forgettable radio songs, and she waits until it passes, waits for a month sometimes aching in her bedroom, not the day but at night with a notebook and a scratch pad, or a crossword puzzle, just pen and clues, pen and clues, and ink when she can get it.

She thinks she's getting away easy, actually, or easier, a hum, an equilibrium, a party favor kind of life, really, the same humorous, inopportune acne like everybody else, the same awkward first dates, the same fumble with the first kiss, she takes as part of part of the whole, what she owes, in order one day, to make her own kind of history.

She is patient as a turtle, as a clam, as a cactus, as bedrock, and one might pass her over, it happens, she is part of the landscape, a vanilla, and so it is possible to miss her standing there, despite her height, despite her penchant for orange, it is easy to miss her standing there, yearning.

She's probably an English major, reading Bronte and Austen and Shakespeare and taking away nothing but a lot of language, proper as all fuck, that's all, just language. Oh, she can write a good paper, she can. She probably likes the closure of papers, actually, the linking of thesis to body paragraph back to thesis, likes the knot of it, the figure eight, the double helix, the sense of words coming back to words. There is usually a struggle with that opening sentence, I would guess, but once she gets going it just rolls out mostly, she feels competent, sometimes even confident, finds a thread, picks it up, makes latticework of the rest and then the whole thing's over in a single night if she doesn't stop for television, or sorbet, or the phone.

But there's no...no thrill. All that literature, those crosswords, vanilla, vanilla, there's not enough thrill. When was the last time she had that flayed open kind of sex, where there was nowhere else to go but out of herself? When was the last time she fell, skinned her knee, got locked out of the house, lost her temper, lost a game of tennis, said something dangerous, attempted disobedience, did not forgive an oversight? What would she do with a piano without a songbook? Has she tried to grow orchids? Does anyone know about that place near her right hip, the crook between thigh and torso, that gives her such otherworldly pleasure?

All that literature, all those crosswords, all that and there's nothing to show for it, or not enough in my opinion, it's not fleshy enough, not sexy enough, not sinful enough, and where would I be if it were not for one glorious fucking sin after another? Where would I be without cock and breast and bone, without stamen and petal and scent and scandal? Where would I be without touch, don't care how inappropriate, because fuck, so necessary, a reaching in into the ventricles of my heart, a squeeze of my aorta, the deer-in-headlights inhale, an oh-my-God moment, a carton of oh-my-God moments, a spinning, whirring life of hangovers and too many cigarettes, yeah, but a life of now, now, here, take this, it's yours, take it, take this now, it won't be here the same way again, a flash, brief flash, skin lustrous and giving for the split second before it cools, breath breathy and unsure, a pants down, cock out kind of life, that's what, and where would I be without that?

Poor vanilla girl, she doesn't know what's coming. But I could do this in my sleep, I could, headache or no. She is a fingertip away from genesis, I know it. I know it like lipstick, like frat boys, like sloppy seconds, I know it, and I'm going to ruin her, I am. I'm going to ruin her.