MAKING FRIENDS ON THE INTERNET

I was 13 when I got addicted to gore.

We were having a sleepover at Bobby Robinson’s beach house watching Newgrounds videos when John Porter yawned and declared them “gay.”
“Do you wanna see something real twisted and fucked up?” he said. “I found this on 4chan.”
We gathered around the old Dell desktop. In what barely qualified as “low resolution,” two men tied ropes around their penises and testicles to create tourniquets, picked up a knife and a hatchet, respectively, and then repeatedly and vociferously hacked, stabbed, and slashed at their exposed genitals until the chunks fell off and left stumps that torrented blood. It was all set to the song “Crazy Bitch” by Buckcherry.
Our howls were involuntary — you try watching that without making noise — but John wore his lack of reaction like a trophy, smirking to let us know he was too cool for pain.
“You guys are so lame,” he said. “You know it’s fake, right?”
“I don’t know, man. It looked pretty real to me,” I said. Bobby was throwing up in the bathroom.

The video looped and started again. I leaned in, at first to see if John was right and I could find the seams, and then, as it went on, in quiet fascination, hoping it could be real. 
“Of course it’s not,” John said. “You can’t do that stuff to yourself. Like, your body would just shut it down if you tried to hurt yourself like that.”
“Well, maybe you’re just a pussy,” I said. John looked back at the computer. The paunchy midwestern man was raising the hatchet.
“Maybe I just think it’s stupid to cut your fucking dick off for no reason. Dumbass.”
He closed the browser window. I wanted to watch longer, but for him I guess the fun diminished as the video’s shock wore into meditative violence.
“This shit sucks,” he said. “I’m gonna go get on ranked.”
John was right, of course. Some light googling proved the video was fake. But its reality wasn’t what mattered to me. It was the prospect of someone, somewhere in the vast soup of anonymity and perversion on the internet, who saw it, had the same conversation with a friend, and said, “Yeah, but what if?”

But this was a time of all sorts of what ifs. We were thirteen and free on the internet. Everything became pornography. What if we could touch that way, kiss that way, feel that way, be handled that way. Looking at the curves of the people in the halls at school and working our own what ifs onto them, wondering what if the things in our minds could become things for our bodies. There’s something powerful about being a desirous being, like all your fingers are filled with electricity and ready to combust. 

They called me “bitch tits” and “shrimp dick” in the gym locker room. When I got crammed into the corners and lockers by soccer and lacrosse bodies, the bruises made me feel even softer, like overripe fruit. I saw myself as their competition, as a fellow person who could want and touch like them, and to them, this was offensive. I needed to be tossed back into my place among the women, children, and victims.

But there was one thing I could do that they couldn’t.

There’s something powerful about being a desirous being, like all your fingers are filled with electricity and ready to combust. 

I graduated high school somehow. I kicked around community college for a couple years before dropping out. Spent the summers doing landscaping work for Bobby Robinson’s dad. Finally grew a little sturdier. Bobby himself had gotten into some aeronautics program or something on the west coast. John was on a D2 swimming scholarship at a school in South Carolina I had never heard of.
My parents were kind enough to give me a place to stay that whole time, but there was a cloud of unease about them whenever I would come home and skulk around the house. I was old enough to be polite and even kind to my parents, but there was still that invisible barrier up between us.

But I was past the worst of my obsession. Having to save money to move out and buy a car had given me real, concrete things to desire, and I found myself able to sublimate my cravings for pain. After a certain amount of time working for Bobby’s dad I stopped thinking about sticking my hand in the lawnmower blades. That was progress. The only time I watched the videos was as a comfort when I couldn’t sleep, where I could be lulled by the familiar noises.
It was good. It was life. But I couldn’t help but think about the kind of person I could become if I gripped myself.

It’s never night in the suburbs. All the little cul-de-sacs are always lit up with high-voltage streetlights and porch lights and floodlights for the lawn, keeping things pretty and safe, even in the middle of the night. But tonight it was pitch dark, like there was something sucking the life out the streetlamps.
I couldn’t sleep. The air in my room felt heavy. I needed it to be silent. I clicked off the playlist of videos. I even turned off the fan in my room. I made everything quiet, everything dark, everything empty, until all I could hear was us breathing in the night air.

“Hi, hello brother,” he said in that fat, nasal accent.
Even in the dark room I could see the multitude of scars lining his face. Faded white lines. They had been cared for well but still marked his skull, his hands and arms, every piece of visible flesh, in a deliberate way. The jagged edges of multiple pulls, tears, rips, and assaults, his own fingers acting on his own face, interrupted by the white shine of his smiling teeth.
“Hey,” I said, shaking. He took a step towards me.
“You are nervous?”
“A little.” He got closer, until he was there, at the edge of the bed. My covers were pulled around me like a kid who’d had a bad dream. I looked at him and he looked at me. He hesitated with his hand above mine, then finally let it rest on top, softly.
“It’s OK. We do it together.”
Serik leaned in and put his hands, fingertips facing each other, on his forehead.
“Like this, brother.”
Entranced, on autopilot almost, I did as he said. The covers dropped around me.
“Deep breath,” he said. “You OK?”
“Yeah,” I said. I wanted nothing but the calm exhilaration he displayed, but my ears got hot and my heart raced no matter what I wanted.
“Be calm,” he said. “It’s OK. We do it together. Whenever you ready.”
He sat on the bed and put his arm around me. I looked and saw the hundreds — no, thousands — of white scars lining his body, torquing around the flesh, and then into his eyes, calm, kind and passionate.
My hands couldn’t stop shaking. But I wanted to be him. I wanted to be his. I wanted us to rip ourselves and run out into the blank dark of suburbia, two flayed bodies, honest and stripped, dancing in the moonlight and redder than red.
I took a breath.
“Ok,” I said. “Here we go.”

🖥️🩸

I became obsessed with watching the most extreme things I could find. First, I worked through the classics: Mister Hands, the Jar Guy, Three Men One Hammer. Then real death, found on Reddit and LiveLeak: people in West Africa electrocuted by downed power lines, Russian dash cam footage of bloody car accidents, the grainy, real-life gore of cartel executions and ISIS beheadings. Livestreamed suicides, the awkward collapse of bodies.  The more I watched, the more specific my interests became, until I found myself navigating message boards for links to private servers, sorting through troves of malware-ridden links in German and Japanese and watching the terabytes of data unspool into the thrill of new violence and viscera. My tastes refined as I watched. Satiation wasn’t about gore or physical pain, but the people who administered these things themselves, pushing every “no” signal out of their mind and going beyond. 

It was getting harder to socialize. Not that I needed it. I still ambiently associated with friends I’d had since I was a kid — flat-faced, unambitious guys like John and Bobby — but while they had paths and aspirations, first relationships and drinks and fights, I just found it so hard to give a shit. Everything was pale compared to the flayed heart online.
Every night I fell asleep to the sounds of self-torture, my favorite videos on a loop. Like the Irish university student who was slowly cutting pieces off her leg. Or the reedy, tiny-eyed German man who let botfly larvae grow in his chest. Or the salaryman who posted ten weekly serialized videos where he pulled each fingernail out at the root with pliers, crying stoically the whole time.
But they were wearing masks, and eventually, I saw under every one. As my eye for prosthetics and frame splices grew, it became clear the vast majority was simply content, staged pornography to satisfy the sickos who needed violence to get off. This wasn’t enough for me. I wasn’t some dopamine-sick addict. I was there to see something real, something honest. A person conquering their body.

It was a grainy video taken with a laptop camera, exposing a filthy wooden-walled room with a single dangling bulb. Seated in front of the computer, wearing a pair of jeans and a white tank top, was a stout, hairy man with thick eyebrows and a heavy forehead. He clicked his mouse and spoke casually in an accent I couldn’t place.
“OK, he said. “Here we go.”
He backed up so his whole body was in frame. Then he placed his hands on top of his head, his fingertips digging into the scalp beneath his thinning hair. He took a deep breath in and began to pull, his face an expression of intense concentration. He leaned down into the camera so we could see it. On the top of his head the skin had split, a small, bleeding tear right down the middle.
He leaned away, made eye contact with the camera, and then leaned in again. He put his hands on his head and pulled. His skin split farther, and with a little extra effort, it ripped fully, from crown to brow, and wrinkled under his fingers.
He stood up again and looked at the camera, smiling, then grabbed the hair on either side of his head and pulled himself up like a marionette, laughing. Blood beaded down his head and he grabbed a dirty towel from offscreen.
“OK, that’s it,” he said. Then he leaned in, his eyes lost focus, and the video ended.
I watched it again. It took me a minute to get it, the simplicity of the whole thing. It was so flawless it was underwhelming. No hesitation, no complication. No incredible moment of anagnorisis or self-gratification. He just grabbed his head and pulled.

I knew I’d found something extraordinary. Someone extraordinary.

High school is the hardest time to have a body. I saw John grow long, taut arms and legs from swimming and saw Bobby’s under-beard grow out until they were as strong and real as the guys who would shove me down in the showers. I was still soft and fragile compared to them. But this video offered something tantalizing — an opportunity to reverse things, to shock them back into childhood as they watched the man who made my mouth water. 

Bobby gave the video a thumbs down.
“This shit’s lame,” John replied.
“Watch it again.”
“It’s the same shit, dude. I’ve seen way weirder stuff before.”
“You don’t get it. It’s not fake.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just gay.”
He didn’t get it. Of course he didn’t. Because this wasn’t about the hand-over-the-mouth moment of terror the way that the beheading videos or genital mutilation or bestiality clips were. It was about the pure casual effort by which this man did this to himself. I couldn’t expect anyone else to understand this. It was between the two of us: him and me.
I watched through each of the videos he had published on his page. All followed the same rhythm: the unsure checking of how he looked in frame, the awkward standing, the quiet inauguration of “OK. Here we go.”
He would tear the skin in various places until it sheaved apart and splayed the muscle below. He would grip his nose or his fingers and quietly, forcefully snap them. In one video he struck himself in the face with his fist several times, right below his top mandible, then opened his mouth and revealed the blood on his gums, around his right incisor. He wiggled the tooth to show it was loose, then gripped with thumb and middle finger and pulled. His thumbnail turned white with force as he finally twisted his tooth out. That was a rare time he smiled at the camera afterwards, a blurry 240p grin as he held the tooth aloft like a prize.
GuroKazakh82’s most recent video had been uploaded six years ago. His account was dead. But I had to find him. I spent long, sleepless nights trawling forums for any evidence, some hint of him somewhere.
As much as I appreciated the community of masochists, most of my forum-mates were too focused on the big, showy, sexual acts of violence to care about something as poetically beautiful as my muse. It was no use. The trail ran cold. 

But I couldn’t get him out of my head. I would find myself constantly fantasizing about him, about us. I would find myself wandering town alone, hands in my pockets, just thinking and walking and not speaking.

I would feel his presence around corners, hanging heavy in the air. I would catch glimpses in mirrors, and warm, wet breath on my neck when I was alone at night. 

One night, months later, I got a message on a dating site for masochists.
It was a blank profile. No information, no picture. It only had one thing tagged under “interests” pain.
“I heard you looking for me,” the message said. My heart jumped into my mouth. I couldn’t believe it.
“Is it really you?”
There was no response for a moment, and then a grainy webcam picture appeared. It was the top of his head. His hair was almost gone now, but I would recognize that scalp and its scar anywhere. “I am Serik,” he said.
I leapt into the air and squealed with excitement, then, pulse racing, typed out a gushing message.
“Hey man, it’s such an honor to meet you. I’m the biggest fan of your videos. You’re truly different. Why do you do it? How do you do it? How do I become like you?”
Almost immediately, the screen said Serik is typing… It hung there for a long, pregnant minute before the response came.
“Hello brother. Sorry for English, am using translate. Thank you for kind words, glad somebody appreciates my mission. Why? I found out at young age that you could do anything you like if you care not about hurting yourself? How? It is inside anyone. Human body is breakable, if you can do deadlift at bodyweight you can break most of your body. You just have to decide. And once you do, you can do anything.”
You just have to decide. You just have to decide. Once I decided I would reach my full potential.

“But how?” I asked, finally.
“I can show you. But it is better if in person.”
“In person? Why not just over skype or smthing?”
Serik is typing.
Then nothing.
Serik is typing.
Then, at last: “You have already seen video and have not done it yet. Maybe it is different in person.”
And then, in a separate message: “But it is up to you. Only if you want.”
My fingers hovered over my keyboard, but I stopped short of pressing down. He was right. No matter how much I meditated on the thought of putting myself through willful agony, no matter how many times I watched the videos, watched him rip himself up and then grow together again, I had still never done it. And maybe that was part of the appeal, the tantalizing edge of anticipation. Of always having something to look forward to, some version of myself that could be perfect if only I broke that barrier and found my full potential. Maybe the second it became real, I would discover that it doesn’t make me bigger or stronger or smarter or more real to rip myself. All it makes me is broken and then scarred over.
And so I never hit that enter button. From Serik’s side, I imagine the screen says, even now, Evan is typing…and he’s waiting there for me to finally say yes.

A person conquering their body.