Dear reader, I make no apologies for the explicitness, the bizarreness, the disturbing nature of the following story. For all its excesses, it has one overriding virtue – it is all 100% true, in every humiliating detail. You would do well to pay attention, you who are fellow artisans in the subtle art of erotic fiction, for what I have to say is a matter of vital urgency to you. (You who merely read this stuff and don’t write it may count yourselves fortunate not to be one of us.)
I write this from my sickbed. Only last week, I was in excellent shape. I had just returned from my customary annual four weeks in Tuscany, and I was lean as a lath and never fitter, although my skin is pale, so that I can’t sunbathe. I woke up the morning after my return and, following my custom, I put together my frugal breakfast of All-Bran, peaches and semi-skimmed. Refreshed, I went to the shower.
I had soaped myself off and washed my cropped hair, and as the water ran down my naked body I was composing a scene in my mind, something involving that lusciously olive-skinned Italian media student I had been introduced to. My member stirred and I stroked it absently, but not with any serious intent. I always find that, when one is about to create erotica that will stir the loins of others, it’s better to refrain from emission beforehand. “There goes another novel,” as Balzac used to sigh, after emptying his load into the grateful womb of his mistress. The French master was seldom wrong. But I digress.
The image of whatever-her-name, the student, was still vivid in my mind; tall, sulky, broad-hipped, her breasts bulging inside her top, her jeans tight around her bottom. What a splendid creature she had been. My virility was standing well to attention, by now. I thought she might do very well for a short piece I had in mind, something about sweaty holiday sex in a stuffy hotel room during siesta time. I mentally cast her as the Girl on the Beach, and I had soon plucked her from her sun-lounger, whisked her indoors and and flung her face-down beneath me on the bed, her clothes off and her naked brown buttocks bumping against my pelvis, while she moaned deliriously from the sheer force of my –
The shower curtain was yanked back. I exclaimed aloud, in shock. Standing there, in my bathroom, was the Italian media student, the shower curtain in one hand, shower-water spraying onto her lime-green boob tube. She was glaring at me. I just had the presence of mind to put my hands over my excitement.
“You!” she barked. “You are a filthy disgusting man!” Her fine nostrils flared with outrage, and her full lips were scowling.
How in the world had she got here? How had she gained access to my apartment? Questions like these whirled through my mind.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, looking around desperately for a towel.
“A lot of us want to talk to you,” she said, and she grabbed me by the wrist and hauled me out of the shower. She was a strong girl, and I could not resist as she led me, wet, naked and stumbling, into my bedroom.
My first impression was that somebody was having a funeral reception in there. It seemed to be crammed with people having a bad time. I realised, as the Italian media student threw me onto my own bed, that they were all staring at me. I rolled onto my stomach to hide my shrinking manhood, and looked up at them.
They were strangely familiar. Most of them were in more or less of a state of undress.
With sinking horror, I realised that they were all my characters.
There were scores of them, possibly hundreds. How so many people managed to fit into my bedroom I don’t know, but they did. There was Trudi, the innocent pigtailed shepherdess heroine of my very first story, which had featured her as the focus of a three-way gang-bang with three strapping farm boys. (There, too, were the farm boys, bulging in their lederhosen.) I recognised the dripping, resentful face of Helene, the beautiful but cold and authoritarian young Army lieutenant whom I had made to be brutally fisted in the barracks shower by a mixed squad of mutinous soldiers. There, naked but for straps, buckles and ball-gag, was Jan, the thinly disguised portrait of my faithless ex-girlfriend. I had created Jan out of revenge, and made her the unwilling star of a highly invasive S&M scenario with a bunch of ruthless leather boys disguised as policemen. And, oh dear, standing next to Jan with a protective hand on her shoulder, was Jill the ex-girlfriend, her inspiration, wearing that light cotton print frock I’d always liked, twirling a strap-on in one hand and looking at me with a face of thunder.
Yes, the people I had used for inspiration, they were all there too: Aileen, the fine-boned arts administrator who had consistently refused to go out with me and who, as a result, I had made the protagonist of an especially dark and humiliating she-discovers-that-she-likes-being-dominated-by-other-women story; she was there, wearing only dungarees, her neck in a studded collar with a chain, the other end of which was held by a hefty, visibly indignant denim-clad bull-dyke. Standing nude, with her back to me, giving me dagger’s looks over her shoulder, was short-haired, bespectacled Christine, the first girl I had ever had anal sex with, and who (under various names) had been a regular source of material ever since because of the very memorable pitch and urgency of the moans she had emitted while I had been tunnelling into her sweet puckered anus. I realised with shame that I had played that scene so many times that I could no longer remember what the front of her body looked like, which was presumably why she was looking at me over her shoulder. I saw nineteen-year-old Lesley, the blonde and buxom piano student with whom I had, albeit only in my imagination, played so many games of strip chess. Now she was covering herself with two cushions and frowning at me. That voluptuous Northern girl who worked in the next office and wore tank tops that showed her tattoos; friendly, flirty Siobhan, the tall receptionist; that plump blonde girl I’d seen in the street that time and kept running into all day. They were all there, they had all been used to flesh out a character, and they were not best pleased about it.
And, sweet Jesus, there too were all the celebrities I had written all those fantasies about, now staring at me like I was a vile inhuman worm. There was Suzanne Vega, wrapped in a sheet, looking stern because I had made her explore different kinds of sexuality with Ani DiFranco, who was standing next to her, wearing only a guitar slung at crotch level and a fuck-you expression. Katerina Witt, the gorgeous figure-skater-turned-model from the former East Germany, was crouched naked beneath a small waterfall in the corner, her lovely face as hard as stone; I could hardly blame her for that, after I’d put together that story in which she’d gone skinny-dipping in a forest and been comprehensively ravished by the vegetation. Denise Lewis, the stunning British athlete, was standing naked and unashamed with her fists on her muscular hips, her ebony skin gleaming in the morning light; she probably wanted to get me back for that time I’d had the Williams sisters DP her in a changing room. Sure enough, the two tennis stars were close behind her, staring at me with loathing.
“What do you want?” I asked fearfully.
“You have a lot of nerve, pal,” said Ani DiFranco.
“I’m just a writer!” I protested. “They’re just stories!”
“Is that all we are to you?” Christine said coldly. “Just objects of fantasy? Look at me! You probably can’t even remember what my breasts look like, let alone anything about my personality. I’m just an ass and a moan to you.”
“Not just that,” I said. “Also the way the muscles moved in your back…” The Italian media student, who was standing next to the bed, slapped my naked bottom hard, and I yelped. I was acutely conscious of the fact that I was naked, and the focus of the angry attention of so many women and men. I tried to cover my arousal with my cupped hands.
“You’ve listened to my music,” said Suzanne Vega. “Haven’t my thoughtful, sensitive songs about love and longing taught you
anything?
You don’t imagine
I
sit around writing pornography all the time, do you?”
“I love your songs!” I said, pulling the sheet over my hips. The Italian student pulled it away, though. “I admire the plangent melancholy of ‘Gypsy’ as much as the next person, and I thought your album
99.9F°
was a really effective, more hard-edged departure from your previous style. But I was sitting around and I was horny, and what the hell, you go with what you get…”
Suzanne rolled her eyes. Ani DiFranco shook her dreadlocked head in disgust. There was a general clicking of tongues from everyone in the room.