The Anal-Retentive Line Editor Read online

  “I talk too much,” Blondie said suddenly, his knee struggling feebly to free itself from mine. [For the record, if it really were my knee, it would be returning the massage.]

  “Why don’t you take a little trip to the bathroom or somewhere so I can see your pretty ass,” I said, giving him his freedom. [My question is: Would the blond character have done your character’s bidding? I would say yes because he would indeed be hoping to “score” with you, and while I’m hardly the gay community’s favorite cup of tea, no one’s ever slipped a note into the complaint box of my “pretty” ass, as your protagonist just accurately phrased it, so, considering your main character’s mixed review of “my” face and personality, a little show of strength would seem to be in order.]

  “So we’re entering the swimwear portion of the competition?” Blondie asked in his gayest voice yet, pushing the chair back and rising to his feet.

  “More like the test drive,” I said.

  [Not to make myself completely transparent, but if, let’s say, you had shown up at the coffeehouse as planned, and I’d ordered a drink or two instead of, oh, a latte—the vodka tonic is my nemesis, FYI—you literally could have had me on the table a la your idle fantasy of a paragraph or two back with that line. Remind me to tell you about certain tragedies that have resulted when the demon vodka tonic, myself, and a cocktail party full of gay men with nothing better to do have come in too close a proximity. In my darkest moments, I sometimes believe I have sought out a future as a writer, intellectual, and academic entirely to evade my true calling as the kind of fading, once pretty blond alcoholic you sometimes see taking on all comers in the blackest corners of establishments with names like the Cock Ring or the Eagle. Excuse this bout of unsexiness on my part, but something about you brings out the sad slut who whispers in my inner ear: “The only ivory tower you’re suited for is waiting in some smoky room between two hairy muscular legs.” Perhaps tonight, my love.]

  If I’d been God, [as opposed to someone who thinks he is?;-) ] I would have slowed Blondie’s fifteen-second walk to the bathroom door into a three-hour epic. His ass could have been shrink wrapped and sold in any sex shop in the world and not left a loaded wallet or dry urethra in the place. It was small and plump with two delicious fender-bender dents, soft enough to crown a sundae, as pert as the tip of a Norwegian kid’s nose, packed so tight in designer jeans I would have awarded his asscrack the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor on the spot. I could have sold those jeans on eBay to scratch-and-sniff collectors and never worked another day in my life. If asses could talk, he would have whispered, “Spread me on a piece of toast.” I’m no scat queen, but I would have gobbled down his shit then licked his asshole so clean they could have turned it into an ER and used it to do brain surgery on my mom. While Blondie fixed his hair or took a leak or whatever queens do in bathrooms for what feels like forever, my imagination filled his pussy hole with the biggest load of cum in recorded history, filched it out, drooled it into his open, panting mouth, made him swish it around then feed me every teeming drop, blew it back up his hole, and fistfucked our soupy masterpiece so deep it dissolved into his bloodstream like an Alka-Seltzer.

  [Speaking as your editor, this is perfect. Speaking as your hopeful date for this evening, and this might be stating the obvious, but, as far as I’m concerned, I’m happy if we hang around Maximal’s just long enough to get a vodka tonic or two down my throat then high-speed cab it back to your place. I will add one forewarning: In the course of my exceedingly rare past relationships, one significant other wanted very much to fistfuck me. I was game, but, try as we both did, he was unsuccessful. My personal opinion is that our lack of success was due to his impatience rather than any physical deterrent on my part. But my asshole is rather tight at the moment due to prolonged lack of use, so patience might be the word should things between us progress to such a point. Also, should there be any question that the “scat” reference above is other than a metaphor, you should know that I would need to be very, very drunk.]

  “You should have seen my ass before it was stuck at a computer ten hours a day, six days a week,” Blondie said, taking his seat once again. [Something I actually might have said. Touché.]

  “Bitch, your ass is so fucking sweet I’m gonna stab it with a drinking straw, throw you in a sling, and pretend I’m in my local malt shop,” I said. [Idle thought here: Do you actually talk like this? If so, it’s effective, I don’t mind telling you.]

  “So where do you stand on the issue of safe sex?” Blondie asked. It was a sneak attack I hadn’t expected. [Those are awkward moments, aren’t they? Real penis softeners. And yet it’s an issue I personally believe more pornography should address directly, giving therein what I realize is a rather politically correct opinion. I’m complicated.]

  “Not a chance,” I said. “If a boy won’t let me shoot in him, plunge my fingers in his sloppy, gaping hole, and rub my juice into his membranes like it was suntan lotion, I’m outta there. I get boys pregnant. That’s who I am. But if it makes you feel better, I’d swallow a gallon of your cum with a sore throat and die shriveled up in a hospice five years from now with a Mona Lisa smile on my face.”

  [A bit confusing. I’m assuming your logic is as follows: Since the blond is a bottom and hence quite at-risk, drinking his sperm is more dangerous than were your main character to subject his ass to what I believe is termed “heavy cum edge play,” because your main character is a statistically less likely to be infected total top. The question then becomes: Do you in fact intend as well as desire to swallow my cum at some point tonight, assuming my earlier invitation is accepted? I think that under the circumstances, that would relieve a potentially disruptive strain of AIDS paranoia that I seem to be struggling against regarding this unsafe business. Due to an impactful incident in my youth that I would be willing to elaborate upon when I am in closer proximity to your warm shoulder, I have come to equate the imbibing of sperm as a kind of stand-in for the words “I love you.” Hence, such an act would truly float my boat. That goes for myself imbibing your sperm as well, particularly—I’m shivering—if it had been “filched” from my ass. Am I a narcissist therefore? Perhaps. Am I an excellent judge of a nice ass? It seems you main character would agree I am in theory. Being someone forced to have sex in a solitary manner more often than I might like, I have learned to simulate a certain objectivity about my own posterior, and thus I have come to the conclusion that its pleasures are numerous. Perhaps it would interest you were I to demonstrate some of my tricks.]

  “Can I ask you for a few hours to reconcile this ‘unsafe’ issue in my head before I most likely say yes?” Blondie asked with a gutsiness that made me want to rape him with an AK-47 on top of everything else. [Goodness, that sounds so much like me I almost checked my desk for listening devices.]

  “Take your chances,” I said. “But you’d better hope my neighbor’s son doesn’t come home from school with one of his itches to use my PlayStation 3.” [I like this in the story—although “school” is going to have to be “college.” I certainly would not have liked it had you met me as planned at the coffeehouse yesterday and thrown it in my face. Anyway, I think you’re lying. I don’t think there is a neighbor’s son. That’s what I think.]

  “Listen, I’m eight-five percent sure,” Blondie said nervously. “Be nice. I don’t sleep with people lightly. [There’s the respect I was asking for in my last edit. Thank you.] These days, fucking is a life or death decision. [A bit didactic.] Picking you could be cherry-picking my style and date of death. But I’m ninety percent sure. Ninety-five percent even. Will you call me later?” [Sadly, I can be the kind of tedious bore you’re imagining. Still, let’s leave that characterization in the story. Pornography needs more of what real tops and bottoms go through just to get a little nookie in the current climate. The truth is, were this a documentary, you could have told me you were so compromised by HIV that just lighting my cigarette—if I smoked, which I do not. Do you?—would be enough to
“poz” me, and I would have thought if not outright said, “Please, sir, can you rip me a new one in the closest toilet stall?” Here’s a piece of good advice about dealing with me from someone who’s become quite an expert over the years. For all my intelligence and, to hear my professors at Yale, my promise as a literary talent, I’m slumming as a low-paid line editor at a gay pornographic magazine because I cannot seem to live for fifteen minutes without seeking suitable inspiration to achieve an erection. They call my condition a “mind-body disconnect,” and, based on the research I’ve done, those thusly afflicted usually wind up in psychiatric hospitals before the age of thirty if they’re fortunate. In other words, the voice you’re reading now and will hopefully hear more than you want to hear tonight is to be taken with a grain of salt always. I am yours. Maybe you can give me your rewrite on a disk when I see you? In any case, I’ll be at Maximal’s, 7:30 tonight. I’m going with some of the boys from the office, a few of whom claim to have met you, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find me. I’ll be the sitting duck.;-) ]

  XRay,

  First I must make an embarrassing admission in the form of a quite awkward question: Did we meet last night? If so, I’ll imagine you can understand the confusion with which I view the previous, oh, ten or so hours. Between the initial vodka tonic I ordered, at which point I recall scanning the patrons of Maximal’s rather wildly for any sign of you, and the five (or last I checked, or rather could check) and presumably counting gift vodka tonics that my workmates seemed to find it so very amusing to hand and hand to the unquenchable me—a phase during which I will admit the identity of the person(s) under whom my greedy body longed to throw itself was sadly less important than general factors such as said persons’ gender and the stiffness or lack thereof of what existed between whomsoever’s legs—my night, which seemed to me to have lasted not much more than forty-five minutes, appears from the state of my surroundings and of myself to have in fact stretched until not so very long ago. Excuse me if this is rather predictable news, but I awoke perhaps an hour back to find myself unexpectedly seated at my desk in the office, or, more accurately, naked and arranged (by myself, it would seem, although I fear the handiwork of my coworkers is also somewhat in evidence) before my desk in a pose so melodramatic it deserved to be surrounded by students of a life drawing class. That, and the possibly irreparable shambles that was known until this morning as my workspace, and the taste of manly seed and, I fear, other less exalted fluids gone irretrievably southwards in my mouth, and the surprising discovery that my clothes appear to have been gathered together, rolled up like a small carpet, and used as a sex toy, then left half-protruding from my ass—something I could conceivably have done myself although it would be a first, let me tell you—clearly suggest the night did not conclude as my memory indicates with the happy sound of Prince’s “Kiss” crosscutting the normally rote playlist that Maximal’s employs and filtering down the club’s narrow flight of basement stairs into what I believe was a kind of storage room while the objectively quite unattractive gym queens with whom I work every day chiseled my lower extremities into their personal totem pole like a pack of extremely ambitious beavers. That I appear to have brightened the night—if not the past, present, and future—of this magazine’s managing editor, ad salesman, assistant designer, and at least two of the summer interns is rather humiliatingly not in question. The issue is who else may have come along for an amusement park ride on me, if anyone. If you were in fact here until not so long ago, I would appear to have enjoyed our first date immensely, and if the indiscriminate, uncontrolled me whom you could conceivably have taken great liberties with was so soused as to say otherwise, I’d like to correct that impression now. If, on the other hand, you were not in fact a participant in these undoubtedly raucous yet sadly erased activities, then let me assure you that, in spite of it having been close to a year since I last woke up to find this stinking, body-fluid-encrusted, pounding-headed, heavily tunneled-through Peter—or “Peter the peter eater” as one of my nicer tricks liked to refer to me—slumped in my usually dignified (in my own mind) place, it appears that I have lost neither the touch I’ve previously described to you at length in my meandering edits nor my vaunted gung ho spirit. For instance, I have such a nasty, splitting headache that they could stand me next to the Parliament building in London right now and nickname me Little Ben. Still, upon finding your final rewrite in my mailbox mere seconds ago, I opened it so quickly and grabbed my sore, exhausted crotch so automatically that, after a brief yelp of consequent agony, I cocked my throbbing head in wonder at the appearance of what I would gather to be…just say it, Peter…love, yes, love of a romantic nature from me to you. Of course I’d hoped to find an accompanying note from you of some lurid, grateful nature, but, needy me, I should have guessed you’d maintain the tougher-than-tough-guy stance that has so riveted my thoughts of you thus far. Still, if you were indeed there last night, I must wonder why I have not received a pleasant SMS. On second thought, scratch that, as I appear to have misplaced my cell phone at some point during last night’s festivities, unless it happened to join my clothing in the septic tank formerly known as my quote-unquote “steaming hot boy pussy,” though I suppose I would know were that the case. If my supposing is incorrect, let’s hope it’s set to vibrate mode. A terrible quip, I know. Before I try to tidy up and head home for a shower that should singlehandedly get the “no swimming” signs set up on Santa Monica Beach, I’ll use this strangely golden opportunity to lend what remains of my editing expertise to what I might boldly call our little collaborative XXX-rated masterpiece. Note that normally I would have read your draft up to eight times with great care and filled a second, corresponding Word document with copious notes before offering my suggestions, but, given the circumstances I’ve described plus the demands of an entirely sincere if beleaguered erection given me by the mere appearance of your name in my e-mail in-box, I think it best to preserve my waning energies and tackle the text at hand cold. So, let me see…

  About the Author

  DENNIS COOPER is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post–George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts, which won France’s Prix Sade and the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Fiction, and his most recent work, the highly acclaimed God, Jr. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris.

  WWW.DENNISCOOPER–THEWEAKLINGS.BLOGSPOT.COM

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  ALSO BY DENNIS COOPER

  Closer

  Frisk

  Wrong

  Try

  The Dream Police

  Guide

  Period

  My Loose Thread

  The Sluts

  God, Jr.

  The Weaklings

  Copyright

  THE ANAL-RETENTIVE LINE EDITOR. Copyright © 2009 by Dennis Cooper. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition April 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-192813-0

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