for pleasure

I am surprised, a lot of the time, when I think about happiness. And what it means to be happy. I find myself thinking about what brings me happiness, the context, the circumstances, for example, under which I get to be happy; under which you get to be happy. Think about an occurrence in your life that brought you a tremendous amount of joy. And try and reminisce as much as possible about what the experience meant to you at the time. Does it mean the same to you today? Do you feel any different? Do you feel once-removed, or far-removed in any way? Perhaps your present dictates the interpretation of your past experiences; or maybe it doesn't. But what brought pleasure to me during my childhood years, my boyhood and labor-intensive teenage rarely give me pleasure anymore. It is a contradiction that really surprises me.

A lot has changed, for sure. Things that were once exciting and important seem trivial and silly today. Its immediacy removed, its urgency vacuumed away and its influence questioned. It embarrasses me, even though it shouldn't and it makes me wonder if my queerness has anything to do with it, with a concerted welding of whim and reason or an outcome of my solitude. When people live in solitude, they have the option of pleasing themselves, with the use of their hands, their tongues, their shadows, their thoughts, ideas and imaginations. Self-serving they call it; and it boggles minds. It only lasts for a period of time, though -long or short depends on the person -after which the excitement of self slips away. The body becomes a wasteland of provocation, the hull of repetition, and a metaphysical trough of mindless routine. One of the ways in which some overcome this condition of stagnancy is through the investigation of sexuality -a facet of human life, popularly filigreed with holiness. There is the aspect of primacy, the animal life, the mammalian living that they polish and present, to add gravity, meaning and culture. The transition, the body's exploratory desires, the gradualness of sexual curiosity is really quite baffling, if you put some time and think about it. From Lego-lions to jump ropes to genital play, the advent of maturity, age and body triggers is like a timely ritual, a sort of coming of age, like a ripening fruit cracking its skin. Or think about it like a Sunday circus, with its acrobats and medleys choreographed to a point of mechanical precision, and compare it to a child's timeline of development; as if readying for a circumstantial transition to which there is no undoing. Nothing left but the footsteps of time gnarling at existence.

The simplicity with which pleasure installs itself in one's day-to-day life in a gridded city of phenomenal squalor, is worth pondering. That was home, for me. A city of millions losing the battle of inequity and lawlessness. We clapped through the storm of helium balloons, in the event of a political victory, and returned to the fair grounds secure in our faith. We found joy in the squalor, even when the infrastructure of our intermittent luxuries fell apart; trampled down by capitalists and crushed to powder by the insidious government. We swam in the lakes, night and day, played carom at dusk and read to the homeless on Middleton Row. And we discussed literature and philosophy in coffee shops on Allenby and inched around the cobble stones, on alternate Tuesdays, taking photographs of the moon, jaws of clouds and the spouting cones of mustard sunshine. For years and years, we rolled in the mud, flew kites on the terrace and stole coconuts from neighbors, held hands of the homeless and rescued orphans and survivors of infanticide.

Can you believe that, desirous of boys, of heirs to estate, they would take their girls, the one-day olds, and drop them from window sills of the tenth floor bathroom? They did so, often; the ungrateful parents or sometimes the in-laws, and you could stand at a distance and see it happen. You could see a white bundled object, an epileptic spool, a miniature spindle, kicking through cloth, purring and wailing, till it came crashing down on the ground in a resounding thud. Blood would smudge the entrance to the wards, diffuse like ink through pores of terrycloth, and people would gather around, cry, be surprised and leave. That would be it. We would read about the police reports in tabloids or watch them on the news. But nothing ever happened, and no one ever got arrested because the law protectors were just the same -hungry for boys, the "cheaper of the two," the ones who would eventually "protect and take care" in old age. I would ask A sometimes, feeling exasperated and defeated, "Why do people do this? Does it give them some sort of pleasure?" And we would both sit in silence, at the south corner of a mahogany bakery, sipping coffee, positioning our frames while the voices of traffic horns bugled in the street, like an applause at a theater, raucous and boisterous, and fade away into the dizzying darkness of the evening. 

On some weekends A and I would bike to the eastern tip of the city, to the sunflower field on Pelham Way. We would park our bikes, drink some water, and lay on the grass, all afternoon, listening to songs of Leonard Cohen, humming along and gazing at the sky. The sun would shine brilliantly through a lattice of clouds, white and spongy like pillowy marshmallows, and we would trace the outlines of sunflower peduncles, while reciting Suzanne, Winter Lady and Stories of the Street. We would play with shadows, follow their trajectories with broken compasses, and whiff the limbs of wild sunflowers. And on days without breeze, we would doff our shirts, drop them on the floor and bolt into the lapel of the rolling grassland, huffing and puffing, breathing heavier and deeper, faster and faster, wheezing almost, with buckets of wind splashing against our bodies, spouting out thimbles of briny sweat, bells of tears clapping against our faces, right hand in the air, then the left, then right again, left again, like Sicilian marionettes, like tin robots, melting into the nebulous horizon, where sparrows chirped, ravens cawed and woodpeckers pirouetted on bamboo leaves.

One Thursday afternoon, when I was eleven, I went back home and masturbated in the shower stall, when no one was around. Globs of semen came gushing out through the nozzle of my foreskin, and I was absolutely terrified. I thought I'd done something wrong, that I would never be able to urinate again, and that God would punish me. The gooey white clumps gave off a musty odor, and I was sure that my parents would find out and that I would be grounded. But the release brought with itself an intoxicating experience, a kind of loosening up, a gimmicky pleasure that I had never felt before. It felt like, what I'd imagine to be, releasing steam from a steam engine, letting go of a pressure build-up. It felt like a rubber suction, siphoning out aches and pains from every square inch of my skin. It was intense, it was fierce and it felt exceptionally good, like someone or something had flossed the inside of my body, polished every valve, and scrubbed every bend of my elastic blood vessels. I was overcome with drowsiness afterwards, a satisfied mellow state, the kind where you are snug and comfortable and a peculiar motionlessness consumes your body. And you don't want to move, or tap your fingers or even lift your eyelids and just stay the way you are, listening to the ticking of the wall clock, running water or commercials on television. The pleasure that came that day from the simple act of genital contact was completely unprecedented, and despite the momentary panicking and ignorant anguishing, it became an addiction. An addiction that grew and grew over the years, driving me mad with desire, dictating my moods, surrounding my day-to-day with sexual affectation.

When Marjorie asked, a few years ago, what do you think about when you play with yourself, I said, "An older man or perhaps an older woman, taking control and giving me pleasure." I added the part about the older woman because, at the time, it was a fetish fantasy that other boys my age had and I didn't want to admit to my queer train of thought, not just yet. The idea of a sexual father figure engaging in fierce role play, exchanging kisses, touching lasciviously, licking and groping and caressing every fork of my body, me in submission, being charged and controlled, a face full of hair nuzzling my chest, calloused hands fondling my legs, wrinkles of age folding over eyes, eyes that dazzle like agate marbles, burning with desire, scorching with lust, bubbling with anticipation, soaring with climax, titillating and tonguing every pellet of sweat, every dribble of body oil, aroma of pheromones, brushing and nudging in the swirl of activity, in the flick of an overturned power dynamic, electrified me in a way. And then there was the other side; the side of being used. I wanted to be used as a sex object. Being made to moan, being made to writhe and squirm from edge to edge across the perimeter of the bed. Being tied to a wooden bed frame with woven ropes, metal girdles and a leather harness. Treated with disrespect, total powerlessness and abject humiliation. How this was acceptable under the gamut of hormones, I really do not know. For someone who protested violence, domestic abuse and sexual agency, how I could justify my own desires, I have no idea. How I could reason out the spectrum of my pleasures, I have no answer. What we did for pleasure, what I did for pleasure still confuses me sometimes. I am not ashamed by any means, however; I have no hesitations in admitting to my desires. Because I acted on it, many many times. And it felt so damn good.