Ceaseless Humiliation

HypIreStition

art is ‘Plaque in Repose,’ Harrison Morall. Used with permission.
Find Harrison’s prints and originals on Etsy, here.

2008. Dripping water drops all-ticklish on his neck, The Man wakes up cold, slips cock crassly behind fly, nicking the tip slightly. Eyes up. Train tracks, mush mouth, brain fluid heavy. Some sentient railroad rubbish discarded - squeezed out of so many tubes, by so many hands…

Kilometres of disused railway. The Man had laid all night at awkward angles, his body now tout and stiff, awakening in that copper-wired crypt. To his left, rails crawl to the horizon. To his sides, poorly contained fields threatened to encroach. Sallow grass, stagnant water, yellowed-grey carat-gold embedded above this ditch, like crown regalia staring into an infinitesimally small valley of subjects.
He had been sleeping rough for a week. Three months in a car before that.

Wiser now. Sleeping bag, unzipped, head free. Free air – as clean as the smog would allow. He’d been assaulted before while he slept. New province, new town, new territories. Stumbled blindly, head down, caused trouble. Sleep a certain way, speak a certain way, beaten a specific way. A warning.

The Man was an Irishman living in the aftermath of the Good Friday agreement. Irishmen who found themselves with holes in hearts, cocks in hands, cumming into oblivion. A thousand years of identity and struggle, left with nowt to struggle against. An identity that had vanished, a language that didn’t exist. Neoliberal capitalism replacing good taste, latching onto the ideal of Europe, never to be taken seriously. Runt.

The air was thick, a pronounced fog to everything. The Man pushed his hands against pebbles and tarmac – sharply digging on blistered skin - attempting to push himself upwards. Abandoned the effort after feeling stones slit a callus below his finger.

The streetlights, distant as they were from the tracks, scorched his eyes - evenly distributed solar flares burning their insignia in back of his skull.

Bereft of comradery, robbed of contact. Needed a goal, needed an ideal, needed a replacement. Any paradise, any shithole, any eutopia would do - socialist, feudal, despotic. Anything to quell the thumping of times end on his skull.

Rising to his feet, slumped against discarded wheelbarrow, The Man checked his pockets. Wallet, phone, empty, chargeless. Watch read 11pm, just past – he absently walked towards the town.

Made way to retail park, following the tracks past the station and adjoining hostel. The park was a flat, concrete, mile long parking centre - 16 big jewelled shops adorning a concrete crown. Most closed down in wake of recession. Writing on wall – weatherworn spray-can lettered phone number “082” followed by faded, unclear numbers. Below it read “Ibinit Isle College – Bumfuckers, decision merchants.” A parody of a college’s insignia was scrawled next to it, a coat of arms depicting a bundle of wheat and a magpie – depicted with a comically erect penis - in diagonally opposite corners of a shield. More writing below –

The Solar Rectum. Old memories. It began to rain.

The Man left the retail park, journeying further into town. Emaciated, well-trodden condoms were strewn intermittently on the uneven cobble of the footpath. Strongbow cans flitting with the intermittent breeze. Ducking through an alley, he spied a compact and huddling lump inside a sleeping bag – completely still, its outline rigid and stiff, statuesque in the sharp night cold. Zipped up almost completely – like an orange body-bag – save for a small air-hole at near the head.

Crouching down, he noticed his fellow Transient was lying next to a small cap, inverted inside-out to collect coins. Pennies interspersed with occasional, shimmering euro coins – glistening in the cap like a diadem of stars. The Man shocked himself with how sudden and careless his hand shot out to gather the changed. He stopped himself, physically grabbing his outstretched hand. Pangs of some stillborn regret sloshed in his stomach – as if he’d transgressed some indomitable taboo by even unconsciously or instinctively considering fleecing this poor creature, someone transparently worse-off than he.

No breath came from the opening of the Transient’s sleeping bag. No rising chest betrayed his stiff, corpselike posture. The alley was filthy – the grime of a filthy, cum-encrusted town condensed visually into an alley whose waterlogged muck and damp rubbish soaked into your retinas like so many rancid juices in so many flooded coffins.

“What use is money to The Dead Transient?”

And yet The Man stayed hunkered down over the cap for several minutes before deciding to take the coinage, one by one.

The light drizzle irritated his nose and itchy, unwashed scalp. The sheer coldness of the night had been so incessant that the conscious discomfort of the brisk wind no longer registered as a conscious observation in The Man’s mind, the only outward indication of discomfort being a pair of ceaselessly shivering hands.

During the collection, The Man’s shaking hands dropped a coin – two euro, considerable tenure. Tails-down at the bottom of the Transient’s orange sleeping bag. The Man’s scabbed, bitten fingernails struggled to grip the edges of the coin before sharply halting as he felt a warmth pooling round his callused fingertips. Pouring from a damp spot halfway down the orange sleeping bag. A foul scent of ammonia attacked his nostrils as he noticed a pair of green, shockingly bloodshot eyes peering terrified from out a now opened face hole of the bag.

As The Transient tried to get up, raising his voice in indignation and fear, The Man dumped his chargeless phone, along with what coins he had in his hand into the cap, turning it into a rudimentary soap-flail – smacking the transient in the side of head, making him emit a distorted howl - squeezing the stomach of a voice-box teddybear. The Transient laid moaning on his knees. The Man ran down the alley, slipping in the muck and caking his knees in dog shit, limping away.

He limped further into town, uneven in speed and form, like a clay-animation set to an awkward speed.
Freezing, panting, a pair of tension-balled fists cracking upon release, a familiar sickness creeping into his stomach-pit. The Man decided to visit to the Solar Rectum.

A two-storey Connaught based hovel-cum-club. Once an exclusive hideout, it attracted high-end clientele during its peak years of prosperity – businessmen, entrepreneurs, local figures of note in the province’s once-active gay scene. Invites were obtained via email, something that felt novel and futuristic at the turn of the millennium.

Old friends. Old acquaintances. The Man walked with a deliberateness to his step, poorly hiding his limp, the focused steadying of his stride distracting from conscious thought. Heel-toe. Heel-toe. Old liaisons. Old, indomitable figures dragging sweat-drenched palms full-force across his temple, into his skull.

Heel-toe, heel-toe.

The Man reached the Solar Rectum. In more prosperous times, a velvet rope led a bustling, undulating mass of clientele towards an eager bouncer. Its now-barren exterior – sat snuggly between disused retail outlets – was adorned with partly-torn posters limply flapping in the stiff intermittence of the night breeze.

The club was dirty and dank inside. Sparsely crowded, poorly lit. A dozen middle-aged men, mostly standing alone. No DJ, just a PA speaker meekly parping out the seepage of decade-old club tracks. The Manager – once enamoured with an indifatiguable curiosity for music – had grown tasteless and complacent, standing near the bathroom, thinning-hair, lonely eyes emitting an incommunicable bleat. The Man had known him before. Both of them slimmer, both of them hopeful. Nothing about him was desirable anymore. Only memories.

They made eye contact. Began cordial and friendly discussion. Disparaged the music. Ordered drinks. Enthused about other music. A pregnant pause ensued. Drink arrived. A vague comment, obliquely a come-on, a sly walk to the bathroom. The Man didn’t immediately follow. Sore head, out-of-sorts, potentially misinterpreted some come-hither-as-politeness routines. Given his position, given the establishment – it made sense. He knew the awkward, inevitable scenes too well. And still…

The Man followed him into the bathroom, turning sharply as he rounded the corner. To the bathroom. To the narrow cubicle.

Sweat, stupid gesticulations and mutterings, course hands, hairy bodies, hot breath. The Manager attempted to bring The Man off with his hand, all as he wordlessly emitted a sibilant gibberish, clumsy dirty-talk disguised by loud breaths. The Man feigned stimulation with sharp exhalations, but remained flaccid.

Six weeks before his eviction, he had grown unbearably fatigued with pornography – weeks upon weeks of ceaseless, unending ejaculation occupied the interminable waits between rejected applications. His penis – long since frayed and senseless – had rejected his obsessive cam-site perusal, betraying him, limp beyond measure.

Nothing spoke to him. Nothing amused him. Food – tasteless. Music – shrill. Sex – tepid.

The Man had laid bedbound for days – robbed of ejaculation, robbed of seemingly everything. A week passed before sensation returned to his cock. Sorting through old photos, he saw a photo of himself steamed at a house warming party of an old partner. Thrown around his shoulders was a sequined denim jacket, tacky and gauche, filled with memories – he became instantly turgid. He came in twenty seconds, his eyes never leaving the jacket.

His eyes closed, he thought of the jacket now – the designer label, the torn cuff, the missing button. Removed from the bathroom. Removed from time.

Ejaculate splattered on the wall, limp and depressing as it often was. His heavy panting turned to a dejected sigh. The Man sat on the lidless toilet. The Manager, in a awkwardly-feigned act of ice-breaking, offers The Man a breath mint. The Man considered it rude given the circumstances but nonetheless accepted.

The cum had hit the cubicle wall. The Man watched it tepidly drip down before The Manager’s errant arm brushed it sideways, leaving a slug-trail of ejaculate that – before it continued its downward trajectory – had a vague similarity to the gallows drawn on a game of hangman. Hangman. A graph, with a shorter bottom axis.

An L.

He thought very briefly of Loughran Industrial Estate. An almost imperceptive briefness. A failed and abandoned industrial outpost. Tech companies, lured by tax breaks and an ample workforce. A swift start-up, a sudden retreat. Within two years, they had all withdrawn. A thousand layoffs crashed through his mind every nanosecond of that brief moment. He thought of the grand font that Loughran’s “L” had been written in. He thought of the now-rusted sign that had once stood proud in front of the complex. He thought of Ireland, the end of Ireland, of dead end Ireland.

The Manager, spying his suddenly sullen face, assuming he’d done something wrong, offered The Man a faux-reconciliatory cigarette. The Man didn’t reply. He looked at the ground, where a discarded, torn bit of tissue paper caught the droplets of now-lukewarm ejaculate as they fell.

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