What A Great Way To Turn Twenty-Five...!
Party Fears Too...
'You're in a strange mood tonight' Harriman says.
'Sorry. Just thinking.'
'Thinking? About what?'
'My birthday, coming up. Twenty-five. A quarter of my life is almost past. And all the sweet guys out there I'll never know. All the juicy sexy bodies I've not experienced. Hell, I should at least, have sucked one cock for each year I've been legal.'
He laughs, not unkindly, 'you can suck me,' his intense eyes narrowing.
'I've already done that more times than I could possibly count.'
'And that's a bad thing?'
'No, that's great. Every time I'm with you it's great. And when I'm with you tonight it'll be great again. You know that. You know the way I feel about you. It's just that, I can't help but wonder.'
'One guy? One guy for each year you've been legal. What's that...? like, seven guys?'
'That's not a lot, is it? Not in the great cosmic scheme things.'
'It can be arranged. A birthday treat...!' And we laugh. I think nothing more about it.
Some ten years older than me, Harriman -- Prof Harriman to his students, is always a generous benefactor, a firm and demanding lover. Yet sometimes I think he doesn't know me. For a low-esteem jerk like me, I can't believe my luck in belonging to him. It's a dream come true. I adore him, lust for him, and yet... fear him just a little too. Fear, I guess, losing him, losing all that comes with it. I know he's had live-in boyfriends before me.
He makes a joke of it for my benefit. 'Hey, I've used, and been used, like an Ancient Mariner I've been tossed and blown.'
And I guess -- although it's not something I care to think about, that he'll have live-in boyfriends after me. But for now, I'm content to simply enjoy the time we have, to share his life. It could be said that he's using me. Or that I'm using him. But -- as Kurt Vonnegut said, the worst thing in the world is not to be used by anyone for anything. So I enjoy his approval, and if he wants to use his camcorder to film us having sex, that's fine... 'a bit more. Smile for the camera as I come into your mouth, that's it.' Then we watch it back.
You don't know them, but you see them on internet sites, attractive guys having promiscuous guilt-free random sex with anonymous strangers. Sometimes it seems scary fun, partying with smooth attractive new bodies, but you think... what about cleanliness? how do you know where they've been sticking those cute dicks? For me, I like to feel I know there's a functioning intelligence behind the erection. One that at least responds to me as a thinking feeling human being. I'm ill-suited to promiscuity. I tend to form emotional attachments to my lovers.
That's not bad is it?
'No' says Harriman, 'it's not bad, it's good-bad but not evil, it's touchingly commendable. It's just that some time ago, a thousand years maybe, this grizzled old guy, Rene Descartes, defined what he called 'duality', dividing the mind and the body into two separate entities...' He talks some more about how the mind has its domain where the higher more spiritual aspirations reside and rule. It has its pleasures, its satisfactions. And the body has other, unrelated needs. Baser, shadow-darker, more to do with the instinctive, the intuitive. Both are equally valid. Human nature is contradictory. Sometimes you aspire to the higher things. Other times you just want to wallow in filth. And to achieve a healthy balance, neither impulse should be neglected. They can, and do, work together. But every now and then it's good to recognise that they also have independence. The sensual should not be neglected as an end in itself. Feed your head, sure, but indulge the senses too.
Walking out into the city of light there are luminous towers high into the starless black. Galaxies of artificial light, to urban infinity. Everything is solidly permanent, but shot through with a transitional air. Pulses of auto-traffic slithering displaced between glass cliffs, rivers of moving light. But beneath our feet there's a respiratory system of subways, a neural network of cables, and veins in a capillary-web of water-ducts and channels, all of which, what you can't see, are essential to the function of what you can. A synergy of the two, above and below, are necessary. The light, and the darkness. The intellect, and the carnality.