The Slimy Side of my Nature
People said Warhol was a freak. He admitted to being a freak, that’s the word in his diary. I’M JUST A FREAK it reads but lowercase: page 460. A freak like Kafka, too, was in his way. He asked Felice in one letter to record every conversation she had with her workmates, to describe every bit of clothing she wore. Then there’s Joyce, another holy freak, in his way. He told Frank Budgen how he's turned-on by women's knickers. In fact one of his self-portraits the character Heinz Consumes Everything is arrested for an unspecified sex crime in Phoenix Park with a hint it connects to a lust for lingerie. So Joyce and Kafka and Warhol you could say were freaks who celebrated it as cosmic sadness transformed into art. And while I’m in this electric feedback game, while I’m droning a drone with this text, I could easily type thousands of words about why I’m a freak, in my way: masked like the claw they sense in you, unspoken.
A little worming confession then, I said. Let’s do it, let’s make them doubt, let’s return to my first maggoty performance.
For this slimy side of my nature appeared when I was fourteen. This kind of smutty trait, it displayed itself as a little kink, a little sniff I tasted inquisitively and then lost control. This slime lurked in me thru and beyond early adulthood. Fourteen, though, was the age I discovered ejaculation which feels late but it’s where this story begins and yet I tried tugging off at nine as well (nine-years-old) after watching uncle Thingy down bluebell wood tug himself. Seeing his sperm shoot fat over a dock leaf. The same way my uncle fiddled with himself I went home and fiddled with myself but of course the seed (as in my balls, as in I was too young) the seed was unseeded. Then I forgot about masturbation until a few months before my fourteenth birthday I found that if I now caressed vigorously it would soon feel damn good, to produce my own yolk, to spurt over my belly, to chuck it up the wallpaper, crusting like a snail my bedsheets. In fact I was cautious about where I threw it initially. I used loo-roll. That first week. I then found a rag in the cupboard and used that. But once I’d recovered from the initial body-horror and the fear of my parents knowing I was mucking about, I was AT IT three times a day. Betwaddling it. Erupting into the perfect splodge.
Sorry for the drips: this is the maths of despair.
But it was Easter off school when lo: pottering about the house I found in my dad’s bedside locker a pile of magazines, Mayfair, Razzle, Escort, your bog-standard porn. Naked ladies are nice, I thought once I’d sneaked a copy into my bedroom, getting a closer look and I’d never seen the inside of a vagina before and there was the inside of a vagina, I was amazed by the shape of the lips. There were so many photos of them. Of readers’ wives. (My mum was in a porn mag once, my brother was in prison and an inmate gave him a publication in which he saw our naked mum, the poor kid: imagine that.) The stories captivated me too, reading about a plumber ferreting his way into a housewife’s knickers which he rolled down her legs and then sniffed. He inhaled a secret musk, it said. And I was like: wow, men actually get pleasure out of female underwear? The heavily stylised descriptions, in-actual-fact, made it seem like gussets smelled beautiful: a mixture of winter blossom and frying saltfish perhaps. I don’t know. These crude texts sounded fascinating at my age of slime, anyway.
Michelle lived over the road. She had a kid Lee and when they moved into Hoo View his dad, her partner, a skinheaded runt called Charlie Hunter lived there too. My only picture of him is down the library carpark we found a stray dog, my brother and I and this dog a Labrador followed us all afternoon at one point started humping my kid brother in the village and Hunter walked by with three lads who saw the dog attempting to bone Max’s short body and just as I kicked its ribs Hunter grinned and said: Look! All of them laughed. Then time changed things. One Sunday morning, mid-1980s, I lay asleep while Michelle was in her house, they lived on the end of the terrace and Hunter had a big survival knife or rifle and he was in a berserk mood that led to Michelle phoning the police and about five of their vans parked in our street while Hunter held her hostage: it was reported in the Herald. Front page I think. Splashed. For a few hours he kept her prisoner while the coppers negotiated. Then I dunno what happened but Hunter was jailed. And again, time changed things. Michelle lived eventually with Sean and started coming round our house, she not Sean, to chat and smoke, to drink tea with my mum.
Still gives me neck-tingles, to remember. Michelle on our couch, sat with my parents, they gossiped about other neighbours as I lay on a sheepskin rug. Her right leg stretched out and I think she was unaware her toes started stroking up and down, then in circles, against the waist of my top: a sweater: whatev. Slightly brushing my lower back, anyway, it felt amazing. Her toenails rubbing against me while they chatted about prowlers and eventually my dad noticed or he kept looking towards the carpet I think jealous that Michelle was caressing me, not him. I knew he wanted to have sex with her. Yeah. Those tingles felt non-sexual, though, more like them you get with ASMR. Yeah. With her toe or toes gliding against my right flank, I wanted the moment to go on and on and. Is this before or after the slimy side of my nature’s rise? I can’t recall. Despite it feeling both weird and good, I rarely revisited the memory. Told no one.
After she and my mum got pally, Michelle asked me to babysit. She’d give us a fiver to sit and watch telly, looking after Lee who was about five-years-old while she went down Adderstone and the first time, I remember, the images in my brain are simple brown patches, Michelle opened the front door and led me into the living-room where by the hearth her boyfriend Sean stood, welcoming and reeking of that HAI KARATE aftershave, as he referred us to the VHS player and a pile of videotapes on top he said are porn.
Have a watch if you want youth, he said. It’s hardcore.
Alright I might, I said and felt Michelle’s gaze.
Sunlight came thru a gap in the front curtains. She and Sean went out and I watched Coronation Street and a bit of Brookside and like every house around Hoo View in which I’d been, this room had a unique smell and it was of briny sweat and beef gravy. Lee came down and showed me his barnyard, a plastic farmhouse and tiny cows and pigs and sheep and shirehorses and we sat on the carpet in front of the telly when he knelt before the VHS saying let’s watch this and he inserted a videotape and the screen crackled into a naked woman with her thick legs splayed and her clitoris throbbing really huge. I had never seen this meat-of-the-worm before. Instantly I hit stop and eject and yet Lee had seemed captivated, he said let’s watch more. I said no. (Funny tales I heard about him as he grew into a lad. Like he’d be with a few girls in a cornfield and he’d take his clothes off, I heard and laughed thinking there’s a freak like us.)
Next time Michelle asked me to babysit, Lee was in bed. It was just us two in the living-room while she waited for a taxi and I settled on the brown couch. Wearing a red silken dress, she leaned over an armchair and parted the net-curtain an inch to look for the cab and this gave me an opp to look at her hips and buttocks and the curves gliding inside of them I thought as my neck turned and she heard the click of my vertebrae. She knew I ogled. And this was a weekday. I say that because the slime emerged on a Saturday, summer, the sun setting when I babysat and Michelle went to Adderstone: a smallish town with loads of pubs, deep in the midland countryside. Each pancake day since the 12th Century all the shops on Long Street, they shutter their windows and board up doorways for the Ball Game when hundreds of mainly men collect on the road and the mayor alongside a local celebrity like Eddie the Eagle Edwards or Edwin Starr, two Eds who during the late-1980s-early-90s lived in the area, the mayor and a media person lean out of a high window in the town’s main thoroughfare each year since the age of the Green Man and they drop a massive leather like a medicine ball but lighter and bigger for the crowd below to catch and over the next few hours they tussle for it, mobs of men, fiery jacks, skuttles of them younger, hundreds try to touch as it flies from one muscular arm to another. They pile into tangles just to hold this Shrovetide Ball. The only rules are you’re forbidden to kill and whoever holds the ancient-fucking-orb at 5pm, when time’s up, they’re declared the winner.
She was out with pals in Adderstone, anyway, Michelle was, the night I went in her bathroom. Now I think of this upstairs room and I’m digressing again but you can skip to the next paragraph cos I want to say that when I recall this place my mind sees I’m six-years-old on Hoo View’s green, the patch of grass in the middle of the cul-de-sac with Marc Dixon and a dozen kids of an evening when Paul Mackumsky pointed to this bathroom window and he snorted, said there’s your granddad Marc look in the nud and everyone saw in Michelle’s future bathroom, Ron, Mark’s granddad, his body stood behind the rippled glass naked in the tub. All the kids went ha-ha-ha and Marc said nothing, I remember and surely he’s never forgot. Years went by and I was now myself inside the same bathroom where I peed, flushed the toilet. I zipped and mumbled something and washed my little claws and I never dry them on a towel I just wiped palms and fingers on each trouser leg while the cistern pipes were humming. I noticed a pile of worn clothes: a pink shirt, a pair of stonewash jeans, a baby sock, a bra and a pair of panties. When my eyes saw the latter, my heart pumped faster than normal.
The potency of the powers of the slime went wild. I changed into an eyeball and it was somehow attached to the ceiling, this eyeball, watching me hook a finger around the hem of these knickers. Red lace. After dangling them for a bit and noises going pop in my head I dropped them back on the pile, slyly tried to adjust them as found. From between two socks peeped another pair of white silk. Panties. I saw myself grub them. Saw myself stoop level with the window-sill and hold them up, pawing these ladies kecks as an urge boiled inside, I don’t know, a glow deep in my end while a voice from a fire told me that a woman has been living in this cotton gusset which you can see soiled in a waxy yellowy dried kind of goo. Suddenly the slime took hold, a shot thru my belly. Another I, another me, turned the lock in the bathroom door and put the toilet seat and lid down and then taking a sneaky glance at the window this other me unzipped my jeans, yanked them to my knees along with my boxers. So my dick was out and my arse was out. Then taking another sneaky glance at the rippled glass cos I heard a car engine, I sat on the loo. Perhaps my arsecheeks left a print on the lid, but anyway. Creep-of-creeps, I wrapped Michelle’s panties round my unholy penis. The material felt soft and smooth and languidly I jacked-off.
I was not myself. I was a new version of me when I unwrapped the pants from my end. Holding them up to my face I concentrated on the strip where the vagina had been, a double-layered kind of fluffy cotton, it was smeared in orange-brown pastels and for an instant a pang of shame flared in me saying this is wrong-wrong but then the voice controlling my penis told me to shut up and sniff. A kid in my class said the scent of a dirty gusset is called buckram. And that was a thought I had, I didn’t want it but it came to mind in the few seconds of my head fizzing as I smelled the cotton and it was as if the scent set off these wavy caresses to rise from the back of my legs into my fluttering balls. Then I came.
Dreamcore was about to have a renaissance. It was 1988. Early ravers were dancing that weekend while I was babysitting, saying hello to the slimy side of my nature. Lust is not a crime. Next morning, at home, I crept downstairs. Keeping well away from my mum and dad’s eyes, I hid behind the Sunday Mirror in the armchair for an hour going thru all of Saturday’s football, I read up on the games, transfer news, checking what teams stood at the top and bottom of all the divisions including the Scottish and while I turned the newspaper’s leaves, other parts of me were feeling very grim about what I’d done. My dad asked if I wanted a slice of toast with marmalade. Not hungry, I said. And even though I’d irritate him when I slurped them, he asked: How about a bowl of Coco Pops? When I was a bit snappy in the way I said no, he realised I was troubled. Around midday the top of Michelle’s head bobbed in our front window and I raised my head because I wanted to test if I could look her in the face without some message telling her: I invaded your most inner-privacy sorry, Michelle, I sniffed your panties. We had split-second eye contact and my mum and her spoke at the doorstep about swapping a glass coffee table, for what: I dunno.
The better to implicate oneself in highly dubious proceedings and bring the flow to life, I was a now a budding freak. Yet told nobody, until you, now.
