Erotica Artist Ch. 08: Crack-up

I stumble for miles in the rain and wind, trying to damp down a sense of outrage, and what is even harder, trying to stifle my self-loathing. I've paused twice in the first half hour to vomit in the bushes. And now I notice my shirt-front, blood-stained from my still draining nostrils. What a night.

But I have to keep moving: if I stop I think I'll go mad. I don't want to think anymore about anything. I don't want to feel anything. All I have is my old stand-by therapy: strenuous exercise into exhaustion. Run then walk. Run some more and walk some more.

Once I stumble off the curb and fall into the flooded gutter. I lie there in the deserted street, letting the water stream under me. I listen to my ragged panting and feel some comfort as it subsides.

I'm suddenly aware of the heavy symbolism of the scene. If I'd read it in some fiction I would have found it too farfetched, too self-conscious, too unbelievable. And yet here I am, supine in the gushing gutter, and I'm almost able to smile at the picture I must present.

Maybe I pass out for a while, right there in the street: I can't account for several long periods in this wild, catastrophic night. I begin to run again but soon stop. A dizziness comes over me and I have to sit on the curb. It occurs to me that I haven't eaten anything in sixteen hours, but food doesn't interest me. I doubt I could sleep either: my ultimate soothing, life-restoring therapy stolen from me as well. But suddenly I have the urge to try.

I cannot stagger my way through the city indefinitely. Sooner or later I have to pause and get on with something resembling a life, even if it means facing agony and humiliation head-on for a while. But where to go? My own bed is occupied by a rutting female and her current stud. I don't want to bother Connie or go to a hotel.

So where do I go instead? Which haven in this storm-tossed night? If the lunatic scene in the gutter wasn't unbelievable enough, how about this: in less than an hour I find myself in the bleak lane behind Dana's apartment!

Her car isn't in its usual space and the lights are out. She's obviously still entertaining her new friend at my place, so why shouldn't I avail myself of her facilities in exchange? Brilliant thinking, Mason, the ultimate in rationality. You've outdone yourself this time.

I clamber up the rotting woodwork of the garage for the second time in less than a week. I cross the roof and haul myself up onto the rain-slick deck. Her floor-length glass doors are open only three inches on a screw bolt but I know the trick of opening them: she has demonstrated several times her foolproof way of never locking herself out.

In seconds I'm standing in the half-light of her bedroom, gazing at her unmade bed and a flashing red light on her bedside answering machine. The blood is pounding in my ears and my heart is lurching. The sound of my breathing fills the room.

It occurs to me suddenly that this is madness, that this is the behavior of a lunatic. But I make no move to leave. I stand in the center of the room trembling and panting and dripping. I can't take my eyes off the bed. I reach down to touch the coverlet but withdraw my hand as if from a flame.

Instead I snatch a half-slip from the floor and hold it to my face. With my free hand I press the playback on the answering machine and a series of voices begins. Most of them are male and several don't identify themselves by name. The only one I recognize is Glen.

"Dana I need to see you. Call me."

Before the next message is over I remove the slip from my cheek and begin tearing it apart. The shredding sound triggers something in me and I step to the closet and pull out items at random. I shred a blouse, a shirt, another blouse. A dress gives me trouble so I toss it aside and grab something lacy and delicate. I rip it apart and let it fall to the floor with the rest.

I realize that I'm making strange whimpering sounds. I continue in desperate silence, selecting items of lightness and delicacy: all the lovely feminine pieces that she wears so alluringly. I discard all the sturdier fabrics and find the low-cut top she wore the night she left the concert with her tattooed friend, and this I take special pleasure in destroying.

But the very next piece I take hold of is the simple, girlish dress she had on the night she and I had dinner together for the first time, and at once I am undone. Something weakens in me and I sink to the floor midst all the debris. I run the garment through my fingers in the dark. My trembling has stopped and my breathing is almost regular.

The senselessness and futility of what I'm doing suddenly overwhelms me. I sense the depth and power of my feeling for this woman, intact still, immovable for the foreseeable future. Once again - how many times is this now? - I know beyond a doubt that a relationship has ended almost before it's begun. Yet once again I have to face the fact that months will pass before my emotions catch up: months and months of raw misery and longing.

Will I never learn? Will this agonizing process never get any easier? The sense of outrage I feel doesn't make it any more bearable. I know I can shred Dana's wardrobe till there's nothing left intact and it won't alter a thing. I could trash her place, set it on fire, and it would do no good. The tenderness is still there and will be for a long time, in spite of everything.

And as I think this I crawl from the floor into her bed, dragging the pile of shredded clothes with me between the sheets. I lay my head on her pillow and breathe her in. The scent of her permeates the bed and I bask in it for an insane moment or two. My limbs are tense and ache from the long night of street prowling. I stretch and try to relax. So what if I fall asleep? Isn't oblivion what I need more than anything? So what if Dana and her paramour come home to find me sleeping in a pile of tattered clothing? What more can they do to me?

But of course I don't sleep. Instead I lie there smelling Dana and thinking of her and her men, in this bed. I think of Vince, and Glen, and maybe Philip and who knows who else. And I think what this particular obsession, this almost total preoccupation with things sexual has brought me to: my ultimate relationship, the best I can do, made up of lust and love, tenderness, adulation and desire, a relationship that seems to go beyond my usual obsession and into other realms entirely, and where do I end up?

Alone in a loveless bed with a tangle of shredded female attire while my heart's desire fucks a tattooed stud across town in my own loveless bed. What do I have to do for a truly balanced life? How many times can I make the worst possible decision while hoping I've made the absolute best? I didn't choose Dana really, though, did I? She chose me. But this is no comfort.

The awful truth is that even at this late stage, humiliated and yes, devastated by what she's put me through, and will continue to put me through, I would still give anything to change places with tattoo-boy, to be in my own bed with her again. Yes I admit it freely. How low can I go in my own estimation? Isn't the wet gutter enough? How can I need this woman so, after a night such as this? How can I ache for her physically and in every other way?

And yet I do, and to the point where I can wallow in profound humiliation alone in her bed, not even caring if she and her current beau discover me here wrapped in her tattered garments. My only consolation is that at least I didn't try on the damn clothes before I shredded them.

I can't move. I wonder if I'll ever move again. I'm paralyzed. But then a notebook on the other night stand catches my eye and I sit up and flick on a light. It appears at first glance to be just another college notebook but is in fact a day-to-day journal of Dana's most intimate thoughts and feelings, and it goes back for over a year. Not only that, but it contains pictures: a series of black and white photographs that slip from between the pages as I skim through them.

They are erotic shots of Dana in various stages of undress, culminating in a set wherein she's completely nude. She's posed on the bed and floor of this her bedroom, and in another bedroom I don't recognize. There are even several shots taken outdoors, some in a wooded area and others on a deserted street. She's attired at the start in various short skirts and low-cut tops. Then she is naked but for garter belt and stockings, draped across her bed in a series of erotic poses.

In several shots I can see her bookshelf in the background, with some titles in clear focus: Eliot's 'Four Quartets,' Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons,' a collection of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Softcore porn in a literary setting. Perfect.

I wonder if she's taken the photographs herself then discount the notion. It's unlikely she took the shots in the other bedroom. And what about the outdoor shots? Highly improbable she was alone when those were taken. They are posed on a deserted street somewhere in the city and show Dana in a long raincoat - how appropriate - with nothing underneath but the familiar garter belt and stockings. She's flashing for the camera and gazing into the lens with a fierce, challenging glare. And somehow in spite of the sleazy nature of the shots, she's radiant, stunning, beautiful.

In a fever I wonder who took these amazing pictures and then I glance at the notes on the pages from which the photographs fell. No agonized guesswork is necessary, for in her usual immaculate handwriting she has provided the text to accompany the pictures.

"Another photo session with Terry. We left the Ricochet Room around one and went straight to Drew's warehouse party. By the time we left it was dawn and we took the camera down the street and spent half an hour shooting. Terry wanted to take more shots indoors but by then I was so hot I just wanted to fuck his brains out. Which I proceeded to do."

Who the fuck is this Terry?

I skip ahead a page or two to avoid a rather detailed description of what she and Terry did in bed that particular morning, but then I find myself reading another analysis of Terry's sexual prowess, this one experienced the following day. This passage stresses the girth and 'exquisite beauty' of Terry's penis and I skip ahead some more, my heart racing.

I plunge straight into a discussion of a paper she's working on for her drama class, an analysis of Pirandello's 'Six Characters In Search Of An Author.' Again the literature as a counter-balance to the sex. Or is it the other way round?

I move down to the next entry at the bottom of the page and again she's off on a detailed sexual odyssey, this one involving the fantasies she's having about Philip her drama teacher.

"I imagine myself on my knees in front of him while he delivers his lecture. I'm inside the lectern, hidden from view, while he talks of Ionesco or Beckett. His fly is open and his hard cock is in my mouth... he spurts into my throat with barely a change in the tone of his voice as the lecture ends...."

And on it goes. Each day has an entry, some of them no more than a few lines, many of them quite mundane. Others go on for pages: analyses of her course projects, descriptions of concerts she's seen or restaurants she's visited, parties she's attended, in depth discussions of various people she knows. And always the sex, described sometimes in lengthy detail.

The blood is pounding in my skull by this point. I fear my head will explode if I continue reading. And yet I can't stop. I flip several pages and catch sight of my own name. I start to read, wondering dimly if a seizure of some kind is imminent. The pain at the base of my skull is tremendous. It curls over my scalp and down in back of my right eye.

"There's a part of him that's unreachable," she writes," a part of him I'm sure he'll never show to anyone, not to me, not even to those much closer to him than I am. This is what's interesting, this secret part of him. It's a challenge to try to break the barriers down, and I can't help but ask myself if it's worth the effort. He's so intense, so sincere, and of course this could mean big trouble down the line. For he's also so repressed, for all his porn-writing. I mean, I find the writing intriguing - I would really like to read some of his stuff - but I'm not sure I want to deal with what caused him to write porn in the first place: his repressed, fucked-up sexuality. All this is something he has to work out for himself, and I wonder if to get involved with him sexually would inevitably involve some kind of therapy with the guy. I have no desire to be his shrink, or to be some kind of sexual experiment for him.

Though I must confess I'm curious enough to go for it. Anyone who spends as much time as he does thinking about sex and writing about sex has to know a thing or two about how to please a woman. I just don't want him falling in love with me, and he's already begun to exhibit symptoms of this. I do find him interesting and I certainly would like to know more about the erotic writing. The question is simple: is it worth it? And do I have the time?"

The entry ends here and I have to skip over several more literary essays and a couple of graphic sexual descriptions before I again find my name.

"Of course what his porn-writing does is sublimate his sexuality," she goes on. "He's so repressed and so afraid to get involved that he lives out his sex life almost exclusively in fantasy and masturbation. Nothing wrong with either of these things, of course - I use them frequently myself - but with Mason there doesn't seem to be much else: there's nothing to balance the fantasy.

In a way the porn-writing is the symbol of his passivity, and this is his essential problem. He's passive to a fault. It's as if he's given up with real women, if indeed he's ever even tried, and withdrawn into himself almost completely.

Of course passivity can sometimes be a challenge, but again, do I want to get involved? Will it be worth it? As I say, the last thing I want is for him to fall in love with me. Though he certainly needs to fall in love with someone. What he needs is a reciprocal, long-term loving sexual relationship. And until he has that I doubt he'll write anything other than porn. He'll stay trapped, imprisoned by his sexual obsession."

The entry ends here and I re-read the last few sentences several times. Dana accusing me of sexual obsession, she who writes out her sex fantasies and poses nude but for garter belts out in the city streets!

But now, instead of rushing ahead to search for my name further along, I pause. Something inside me has been touched: a tender spot - as if there were any of those left! And while my head still pounds and my heart races and anger and resentment swill about inside me in a black tide, yet another feeling stirs, one I don't yet have a name for, one which I can't yet articulate.

I read the last passage again. And again. And yet again. Until the words start to lose their meaning. And I stare at the page for a long time after the sentences are out of focus.

I'm still gazing at the notes when I hear the clump of footsteps on the stairs. I freeze as I hear a key turn in the apartment door. Then I'm up and out of bed and halfway to the windows in one motion. I return to the bed just long enough to tear a dozen pages from the open notebook, then I'm out on the deck and down to the garage roof. One leg splinters and perforates the rotten wood and I groan as my calf is gouged and my balls are mashed against the sloped surface.

Half blind with discomfort I hobble up the rutted alley in the rain, my limbs stiff and aching. The pain over my skull is as potent as ever and with a sense of exhausted relief I realize that I can now go home, to a hot shower, some pain-killers, my own bed with clean sheets. For yes, sleep may at last be a possibility. I'm physically wrecked, bone weary, and I can't stop trembling. Now all I have to do is damp down my raging thoughts in the time it will take to stumble home. No mean task.

I feel violated. Not only has Dana found my books, tried to torture me with my books, she's probed deeper into my personality, with a few off-the-cuff remarks, than anyone has ever done before. And what rankles most, of course, is that much of what she has to say is pretty accurate. Much as I want to dismiss her as a heartless bimbo and superficial bitch, I know deep down she's a lot more than this, and that for all her failings she's capable of real perception.

She may not care to discern the obvious shortcomings of a Vince or a Glen, but her view of my own case was not without merit. I had my own acutely focused take on my situation. She was saying nothing I hadn't thought about myself in one form or another. Yes, I was repressed to some extent, though I wouldn't have gone so far as to say I possessed a 'fucked-up sexuality,' or that I 'sublimated' it in my writing. Yes I was passive to a fault, and maybe I was obsessed with sex. But there were mitigating circumstances for all this, weren't there? Weren't there?

Hadn't I been born in one of the most repressed countries on earth? And into one of that country's most backward areas, land of coal slags and cotton mills, the deep south of the UK, in effect, though on its bleak northern frontiers? And wasn't I the product of two of that areas most repressed and emotionally undemonstrative progenitors: a mother so shy and unsure of herself, so uneducated and self-conscious about it, that she could barely function, and a father even more disabled, unable to say or do anything but through his hapless yet endlessly accommodating wife?

Hadn't I spent my most precious formative years in a remote coastal backwater and entered the real world at last no better than an emotional basket-case? Yes I was repressed, yes I was passive to a fault: because I was in a state of petrifaction! Was it any wonder I'd failed miserably at any and all my pathetic attempts at 'normal' relationships with women? Was it any wonder I'd developed instead a rich and fulfilling inner life, a life of the imagination?

And the women in question weren't exactly the ideal choices, were they? Kirsten was just an immature, self-absorbed teenager. How was she to know she was dealing with a hyper-sensitive, delicate little flower whose imaginative life was so skewered at that point that my romantic and sexual fantasies were poles apart? I could yearn for her with all my heart, build elaborate romantic fantasies around her, without once having a single sexual thought about her. No, my sexual fantasies were directed at much more erotically alluring figures at that point. The notion of a nice West Vancouver co-ed actually having real sex in the year 1966 was beyond my powers of imagining. The idea of someone that beautiful having sex at any time at all was beyond me.

Yes I was passive with Kirsten. Passive with fear and awestruck at her loveliness. Under the circumstances, it was beyond belief I was able to speak to her at all. And little wonder I withdrew completely at the first mention of a boyfriend. So naive, so romantic, to be stunned and paralyzed by a lovely eighteen-year-old's ability to fancy more than one guy at the same time.

And all those years later, had I not been amazed still at this ability in Dana? Though, granted, she was not so much interested in one or two men as in a whole battalion.

And what about the women in between? Had I learned nothing from those total losers? If my sexuality had been in a state of repression when I met them, they sure as hell made sure it stayed there.

I had by then at least wanted sex with a real live woman, as well as romance. But just how 'live' were these two? Varina had conceded that something inside her, her sexuality, her very core, had died and could never be revived. The poor woman was so deeply embedded in self-pity that it was doubtful anyone could have been successful with her.