Photo after photo of the most depraved sex acts the cameraman could capture. Every crevice, every orifice exploited with each shuttered frame; greased-up bodies glistening, piled upon one another, copulating like beasts, for savage pleasure, each thrust a closer step to ejaculation, aiming between thighs, into mouths, onto backs. Shaved smooth bodies, all but blemish and scar free, there but for the grace of god, a hundred nearly broken shells. Could these creatures even be considered human beings anymore after grinding through these carnal ordeals? Vaginas and rectums violated, destroyed with blunt dicks and thick fingers, Vaseline smeared dildos, all in the holy name of sexual gratification, the Big Cum.
Most of the pictures tended not to focus on the coked-out faces, if only to capture an occasional grimace or silent moan, a passing aside. Up close and personal plumbing shots and raw penetrations dominated this particular sequence, a few short paragraphs of text luridly breaking up the churning sea of skin, setting up a brief scenario to describe the Fuck one was viewing. Slimy bodies wringing out every drop of sexuality from the once-fresh, once-vital actors and actresses. It's all flesh now; flesh and ooze and frozen-in-time gyration, all for the ghost god pornography.
This was Taylor's favorite magazine, enduringly titled Fucked Raw. Taylor liked to sneak into his parent's bedroom when they were away, to pore through his dad's immense library of porn. It was stashed away in a metal footlocker in the bottom of the closet, key half-assed hidden in his dad's sock drawer (and what teen-aged boy doesn't begin his pubescent search for jerkoff material in there?). There were loose photographs, Taylor assumed amateur shots, lots of sagging breasts and bald spots. Mainly magazines, though, aside from three or four videotapes. Every version, every form that fucking could potentially take on, was momentarily captured here, in this footlocker, in all its vile glory. A few odd vibrators and an oversized double dildo laid alongside a ball gag at the bottom.
Taylor often wondered, in-between hand jobs, how much involvement his mother had in his father's libertine sexual exploits.
Wednesday was the day his parents would not return home until later in the evening. They would leave him dinner provisions in the fridge, and verbal warnings not to have any of his friends over when they weren't home. Of course, Taylor never told them they needn't issue any ban on company, for he wasn't interested in sharing the contents of the footlocker with his buddies. This was his secret garden.
He'd be home from school by three, gobble down the microwavable meal, then rush upstairs to his stockpile.
He would pretend his tightly curled-up fist was a depicted woman's mouth or ass, projecting himself into the skin parade with aplomb; furious rapid-fire masturbation filled wad after wad of rumpled toilet paper with hot heavy ejaculate, resting only for brief moments to recapture his senses and achieve a semi-erection to continue to satisfy himself. He'd start off with the pictures and magazines, rifling through the stacks of images, each more explicit than the next; facials, distended sphincters, rubbed-raw genitals battered at his libido.
To finish the session he would pop a tape into the VCR, carefully resetting the clock timer as to return the tape to its original frame (as to not arouse his father's suspicions). A half-hour before his parent's arrival, he stacked the porn carefully into the positions he'd memorized beforehand, back the way he found it, rearranging an odd disturbed pair of slippers he'd kicked earlier. Taylor collected up his spent loads and flushed them all down the toilet, each one spinning down the commode's swirling undertow. Turned out the light, pulled the door till it latched. His mind began to forget about all that stimulus, pushed aside until his next opportunity to plunder its riches, to view his treasures. He felt sore and empty down in his crotch, the same way in his skull. Limped his way into his own bedroom.
His chamber was dark and cluttered. Heavy blankets hung over the windows, blotting out all of the sunlight that struggled to enter there. He sat down at his desk and picked up a notebook. Taylor's hand began scribbling quickly, sore from all the beating off, but still moving fast, as a mess of a typical teen-aged boy's chicken scratch scrawlings filled the page. He heard every word in his head before it slipped out of the pen's tip and onto the page. His face was slack like a death gaze as he wrote:
Do you know how to clean it up? Does it get your hands dirty when you drag your rag across that fucked-up floor? How do you feel to see that mess, splattered for your amusement, your amazement, a figment of your attention? You have all you need here. What was once covered with grime and sin is now antiseptic and holy, an altar where once was fierce carnage. You've torn handfuls of blankets off of my naked freezing body I'm so cold, so fucking cold my teeth chatter against themselves, chipping the corners, making faces to keep alive. I can't feel your touch anymore. It's vanishing, all I got left, all you left me was an echo, a scrape I'll have to listen to forever. Change the chant, my god, we're not looking through the keyholes anymore what were they think- ing bringing you here? We always thought things could be better. I was giving us a chance. I told everyone how you held your fistfuls, low on luck but full of dreams every picture I took of you back then glowed. There were rare presents full of electricity and copper wire smiles and twisted old sustainers a thousand stars all shone hidden somewhere in your mouth coming out when you smiled. A gift or two the few chances we got to stare back and forth to and fro I never knew which way to go, a thousand directions you pulled me. I need to talk to God or someone else who cares maybe I'm OK but could be better
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" He stared down at the cryptic message, unsure of its purpose, unsure of his own purpose. He threw the notebook down on the desk, bored. Nothing to do, homework's for retards, no one to talk to, nothing to do but jerk off, too tired to even do that. Taylor looked down, pulled open the middle drawer of the beaten-up desk.
Finally, a distraction. He removed the modified dental gas mask he'd acquired from a root canal three years ago, newly suited for this special hobby. Along with the mask came a plastic baggie and a tube of industrial strength adhesive, the warning on the wrinkled label giving grave warning of the toxic properties of the fumes contained therein. Inside of the bag filled with the pungent mucilage, thick and sluggish like molasses, deep yellow, Taylor punctured the plastic with a handy near-by safety pin ten or so times, the proper ventilation requirement. Taylor slid the bag into the front of the face piece, then strapped it on over his nose and mouth, snug secure fit, not slipping off his face, settling back into the chair, eyes transfixed upon the mirror in front of him. He sucked in deeply at first, slowly, then gradually worked his huffing into a rapid hyperventilating pace. In and out, in and out, faster still, hands poised at the corners of his cheeks ready to rip off the mask when he's had enough, waiting to feel the blank-out, the heavy haze approaching, one last bottom-heavy gasp, held it in, take off the mask NOW but can't, fingers won't work, take it off, Taylor, take that shit off now wanted to but couldn't, the robot's failing him. I'm leaving I'm leaving, he thought he saw his body frantically clawing at his face a hundred miles away...
A warm hand gently stroked his cheek.
"Honey? Are you awake? Baby?" He felt his mother's presence close to him, her lopsided weight throwing off the balance of the bed, making his sore body lean to the side. This was not his bed, he could deduce, smells too clean. Eyelids eased up the orbs, didn't recognize the room around him. So bright, so full of disinfectant and disease and death. Must be a hospital room.
"Oh Taylor, please say something so I know you're okay. Please Taylor." She squeezed his hands. His eyes gradually focused on her, could see the fresh tears running down her cheeks.
"Hi mom," he said weakly. His frail frame moved slightly under the stiff sheets.
"Jesus Christ, Taylor," she cried. "I thought you were dead when we found you, all shriveled up with that thing on your face. The doctor said you were sniffing glue! What were you thinking! What the hell is the matter with you! My god!" He just looked at her. Taylor didn't know what to say to his mom. He hadn't even realized he still existed until a few moments prior.
She continued to ask him a thousand questions, rapid fire, not giving him a chance to respond. Not that he had anything to tell her. If that's what death feels like, he thought, I want to go back.
Taylor was admitted from the Mercer County Memorial three days later, lungs still achy, slight chemical burns leaving a mockery of a beard on the lower half of his pubescent face. His dad told him that he would have to start seeing a therapist, every Wednesday. "I'm gonna have to get your mother to take off work now, to take you to that goddamn shrink. Can't trust you to go by yourself," he told him on the way home. "Keep quiet about this, okay boy? Wouldn't be sending you if those asshole doctors didn't say we had to send you. Bad enough I gotta tell the goddamn insurance company by son's seeing a psychiatrist, just don't blab about it to all your buddies. I don't want anyone else to know how much of a fuckin' wacko you are." The windshield wipers swiped away the lightly falling rain that splattered the glass. "Godamn glue sniffer for a son. Kindergarten way to get high, if you ask me. When I was your age, I was snorting fucking coke off of hookers' tits, for Christ's sake." His old man stared ahead at the road, seemingly lost in his own past exploits, Taylor to him far away now, just the road ahead and his memories.
Taylor didn't have anything to say to his dad either. He had wanted to inquire about all that porn, how he'd gotten it, what he did when he looked at it, he wanted to bond with his dad over all the images they'd mutually masturbated to, spanned over time and moments, handjob and handjob, nothing in common with the man sitting next to him but a footlocker full of pornography. Each individual raindrop made its own suicide leap onto the windshield, the remains of each one denied a proper burial, only to be sliced away, into nothingness. Taylor liked the rhythmic pulse of the blades, the way they filled the silence of the car.
His room looked ransacked. His parents spared no subtlety as they scoured the bedroom for clues to their son's aberrant behavior. Drawers had been yanked out, contents rifled and spilled onto the floor, no nook or cranny not unturned for an explanation. How futilely they must've pried into his personal belongings, searching for a key to that self-destructive act their flesh and blood had committed. He could see them in his mind ripping the room apart. Taylor slid his hand under the mattress. Not to his surprise, they had taken his only item of porn, an old issue of Hustler that was missing the cover and a few other pages. He hadn't stroked off to it in months, ever since he found his old man's stash. Now it was gone, like a neglected lover. He sat down on the bed, tired, sore, alone.
That's funny, he thought as he looked over at his desk. They hadn't even touched the notebook he left on it that day. It still lay open to the passage he had scribbled down, looking up at him. Still didn't make sense, to him. How is anything supposed to make sense anymore?
The week went by in its usual mind-numbing blur, school, dinners, sleep, dreams about drowning, the peacefulness that always overcame him right before he would awaken. His appointment for the counselor came around way too quickly, his mother picking him up outside of school in the station wagon, to take him there. He got in the car, could easily smell her worry.
"Hi there, Taylor, how was school?" She grimaced over at him, not really interested in a response, relieved he didn't offer one. "Now Taylor, your father and I have been talking about this, and we want this man to help you, because we want you to be better, but, please Taylor, don't say anything that might, you know, make us appear in an unfavorable light. I mean, it wasn't the way we raised you that made you do what you did, was it, Taylor?" She arched her tone of voice, praying to herself that it wasn't her fault, running over in her mind the million or so things she had done to her son that could've made him turn out fucked-up. She hoped it wasn't all her fault.
"Mom, I don't know--"
"Please now, Taylor, for your parent's sake, don't tell this, this shrink all our personal family business. We are a private people, Taylor, and there's a few things I don't want the world to know about, like like--"
"Like what, Mom? What don't you want him to know?" He began to enjoy watching his mother squirm, the way she nervously pushed her hair back off of her forehead as they pulled up to the front of the counselor's office, housed in a utilitarian complex, a medical/psychological stonghold of the community. They walked in silence up the two flights of stairs, until they reached the door labeled Doctor Monroe, Youth Counselor. She shook a finger at his face one last time before she opened the door to the waiting room. He walked, tentatively, into the office first.
Taylor's first impression of the shrink was the heavy cologne he wore, filling the room with a ripe stench that barely covered the tang of heavy BO under the perfume. "So tell me, Taylor, right? OK Taylor, can I get you anything to drink or something?" He rocked back in his chair, his stout body balancing on the two back legs. Taylor wondered from across the desk how it could support the fat man's weight.
"Uh, no thanks."
"All right then, how about you sit on that couch over there, get comfortable," he directed him to the furniture, Taylor facing away from the doctor. "OK then, all situated? Perfect. Now, let me get my tape recorder rolling, OK here we go, now how old are you Taylor?"
"Fourteen."
"OK, I remember what it was like to be that age--"
How long ago was that, Taylor thought.
"It can be pretty confusing, am I right? You know, a lot of things are going through your mind, you got your friends all leveling some heavy peer pressure on you, right, telling you to do things you might not normally do, huh?"
"Not really, I--" Taylor was cut off by the fat man's drone.
"Well yeah, every teenaged boy gets a little curious sometimes, maybe acts a little out of line, you know you got a lot of hormones pumping inside you right now, they make you feel pretty odd at times. Do you ever feel that way, Taylor, kinda different, you ever want to try something a little new. Maybe you feel like nobody else understands you?" Taylor lifted his head from the arm of the couch and caught the doctor scribbling quickly in his notebook. He realized he was being watched, stopped writing. "Now Taylor, just lay back down, relax. You have to talk to me, tell me how you feel. Is it too hot in here for you? You need to cool off or anything?" How is this guy supposed to help me?
"OK now where were we, um, sometimes Taylor, young men, you know, when they're hanging out with their friends, their guy friends, you know, some of the older guys talk about things the younger guys might not know a lot about. You know what I mean? Sometimes, there's some level of curiosity there, that a boy like yourself might not understand. Have you ever felt this way?"
"Are you talking about homos?" he asked, sitting up again. The doctor again ceased his writing.
"Now, Taylor, take it easy, I don't want to make you uncomfortable, I'm just trying to work you out of your shell, see you've built a shell up around yourself, and you're blocking everyone out, Taylor. Your parents, your friends, even me. I want to break through that shell, Taylor, I want to penetrate it, so we can be friends, can you see what I'm saying? I want to help you." Taylor could see the man was sweating, breathing slightly labored.
"I think I want something to drink now," Taylor said. The man got out of his chair, excused himself, went to fetch a Pepsi. "Be right back, Taylor," he called as he left the room. Quickly Taylor got up to look at the doctor's notebook. Mostly illegible, but he could make out, "...god I want to taste his cock, put it in my mouth, oh fucking Christ he's gorgeous tell his parents he needs serious counseling book him for three sessions a week, no four, I got to have him, all that tender young flesh, must jerk off, sniff the couch after he leaves...how long before I get what I want, that sweet ass, oh Christ I got to have it..."
He was pulled back, firmly, Doctor Monroe towering over him, soda can in hand, nervous, scared look on his face. "Now Taylor, those are my notes, that's none of your business what I've written, do you understand? I'm trying to help you, can't you see?" His voice raised to a pitch of terrified swine, knowing it's next to be slaughtered. Taylor took the can of soda from his clammy hands. Turned around, said nothing to the frantic doctor.
"Now Taylor, I want you back in here next Wednesday, OK, just see the receptionist on your way out, I think we've made some major leeway here, don't you think?" Taylor saw his mother in the sparse waiting room, reading an issue of Time, debated telling her that the shrink was a pedophile. She wouldn't fucking understand, just as long as I didn't say anything about her bad parenting.
"How'd it go, honey?" she asked him in the car.
"It was all right. It helped me a little."
"Well, good then, I glad someone's getting through to you." She paused, then nervously, "Did you say--"
"No, mom, I didn't tell him anything about you."
"Oh, you're such a wonderful son, Taylor. Your father and I are very lucky to have you."
He stared ahead at the road, vacantly, watching the broken yellow line speed ahead of him. He felt tired, worn-out. Are you supposed to feel this shitty when you're fourteen? He wondered how long it would take Doctor Monroe to make a move on him. One, two more sessions? He thought about bringing a knife to the next session, slicing his fat face open, spilling his organs and all that blubber he had contained under his skin. Maybe not, though, a guy like that could supply Taylor with things he needed, like drugs. More porn, especially now that his Wednesday sessions were out of the picture. Money, too, money'd be nice. It could be his way out of here, away from all this bullshit. A way out.
THE END
