Chapter One

I have been searching for many years now for a context in which I might place what is really a rather weak, even if passably erudite, play on words. Specifically, I’ve been looking for a situation in which Freud’s phrase “the economic problem of masochism” might be applied in a manner which doesn’t require the term “economic” to bear the special meaning that it bears within the theory of psychoanalysis.  That long-sought situation is now provided by the juncture at which I have arrived in my own life. I have not paid the rent on my small apartment in Berlin for over two months now, but this morning I transferred several hundred Euros – enough to cover one month’s rent at least – to a bank account in California. Experience teaches me that I am not going to receive, in return for this payment, anything belonging to the category of tangible, nor even anything belonging to that of intangible goods. What I will “receive”, I know, will be nothing that extends substantially beyond the act of paying the money itself. By paying it, I will gain the knowledge – and even that will be an uncertain, unconfirmed and possibly merely fantasized knowledge – that a twenty-one-year-old girl named Stephanie Turner is lying in the arms of her lover laughing at me for having paid it. Since I know this and pay the money anyway, I can hardly claim that Stephanie is committing any act of fraud upon me. What I get – that is, what I am refused –is pretty much exactly what I want – that is, what I want to be refused me. If I would have anything at all different from the way it is, it would perhaps be a greater sureness, vividness and proven-ness of the knowledge that Stephanie is mocking me, and that she is doing it specifically naked, in the arms of her virile young boyfriend. In these circumstances, however, it must indeed be said that the deeply masochistic sexuality which dictates that I should desire such things has become a serious economic problem for me. I appear to be reaching a point where I can no longer, as I could throughout my relationship with her up till now, maintain the damage that I feel impelled to inflict on myself for Stephanie’s sake within limits that allow me to “reproduce my labour-power” and inflict the same damage on myself, deriving the same perverse pleasure from it, over and over again. In a month or two, I could well be homeless, and thereby no longer in any position to engage in these rituals of quid without quo any more at all.

It has become, over the two years and more that I have known her, an essential part of my relationship with Stephanie that I should be denied even an abstract, purely verbal knowledge of Stephanie’s actions, thoughts and feelings. For this reason, I cannot say with any certainty how she herself feels about this remarkable circumstance of the total insubstantiality, the literal non-existence, of what she gives me in exchange for my money. I would speculate, though, that she would entirely concur in the view that, even though she gives nothing at all in exchange for what she receives, the transaction is not in any way a fraudulent one. Moreover, I’m sure that she would also be of the view – whether it is really compatible with the other view just mentioned is not an issue we can go into here – that, precisely because she gives absolutely nothing in exchange for the money that she receives from me, the business that she is engaged in is not properly to be described as the business of prostitution.  

Be that as it may, it is at least the case that the needs which Stephanie currently satisfies in my life – precisely (as I will specify for the last time) by refusing to satisfy them – are needs which, for decades before I met her, were indeed satisfied by prostitutes. It is a somewhat archaic circumstance that the sexual needs – even the perverse and deviant sexual needs – of a man growing into adulthood in Western Europe in the 1970’s and 1980’s should have been fulfilled so rarely by free consensual sex and so predominantly by sex sold for cash. I’m far, it’s true, from lending unconditional credence to the familiar opinion that to fail to find freely consenting lovers in our “permissive” post-Victorian society is somehow by definition to live “outside one’s time”. If that’s the case, then, speaking for my own person, I’ve lived in a society so “non-contemporaneous” that the term “contemporary” almost loses its meaning. Of the ten or so close friends I’ve had in my life, half at least, I would estimate, enjoyed pretty close to no “sex-life” throughout all their twenties and thirties and now enjoy none at all as they pass, in the new millennium, on into middle age. (The novels of Michel Houellebecq came along in the 1990’s to confirm the objective reality of this persistent “Victorian” sexual desolation within our “post-Victorian” society – a persistence in which, throughout the 70’s and 80’s and despite the evidence of my own senses, I had found it hard to believe.) But not even those of my contemporaries who shared with me this enduring sexual desolation relieved it – or at least, none of them ever admitted to me that they relieved it – by recourse to paid sexual favours with anything like the regularity that I did from the age of eighteen or nineteen onward.

Besides whores, the other key motif in my life has been literature. The two motifs have been interwoven. Very early on I acquired the conviction that the furtive, joyless sex-life that I was living already at the age of twenty or twenty-one was affording me a deeper and more direct understanding of the literary masterpieces of modernism (products of the first quarter of the century in whose last quarter my youth and early manhood fell) than that which was generally enjoyed by my contemporaries. For most educated twenty-year-olds in London in 1980, the words entered by Kafka in his diary for the year 1910: “I pass the whorehouse as one might pass the house of a beloved” were surely just another piece of turn-of-the-century Prague exotica. Like bowler hats and tuberculosis, the concentration of sexual hopes and fears in some few widely-known but seldom-mentioned locations within certain narrowly-bounded districts of one’s native city was, for most, a “period detail” which acted to cover Kafka’s pain and passion with a patina of quaintness, to make it a “period pain” never quite commensurable or communicating with the real lived pain of his readers. For me, though, there was a commensuration and a communication since, though a thousand miles and almost a hundred years removed from Kafka’s Prague, I too tended to pass certain familiar doorways in Frith Street and Little Windmill Street with a tremor of remorse over the last occasion I had entered them and a tremor of anticipation of the night I would be able to afford to do so again.

It is clear, I hope, already to the reader that I do not report this of myself in anything that is intended even distantly to resemble a roistering Rabelaisian spirit. It’s true that I’ve acquired, at one time or another, unusual familiarity with the so-called “fleshpots” of several cities on several different continents. I spent whole days and nights, almost every week, in London’s Soho in those years around 1980 when the vice industry had a vast and very public presence there, before the sudden “clean-up” that occurred almost overnight around the middle of that decade.  Like Tannhäuser in the Venusberg, I have spent nauseous, narcotized, timeless stretches of time in the Wohnzimmerbordelle and “swinger clubs” of Berlin. I have even spent nights in search of venal sex in the odorous labyrinths of Kowloon, learning slowly to decipher the Cantonese equivalents of the euphemisms and circumlocutions familiar to me from European cities. (At that time, I remember – perhaps still today – a man looking for a prostitute in the Chinese districts of Hong Kong was well advised to seek out the services of a “Japanese telephone operator”). The solitary and fundamentally joyless nature of these debauches, however, always prevented me from deluding myself that I was some sort of roué, some romantic Byronic libertine indulging primitive priapic urges in defiance of bourgeois society. If I had ever so deluded myself, the self-delusion would have been rudely shattered one evening in London when my friend of these years, Richard Lipski, began to boast, to a stranger in Brewer Street , that I was surely a well-known face in the area, a genuine local “character”. It was a habit of Richard’s to engage total strangers in conversation in this way. He was fully aware that the stranger’s response would, in most cases, be one of violent defensiveness or contemptuous levity and he saw to it that it was usually others, rather than himself, who paid the price for his garrulousness. On this occasion, he prodded and prodded at his reluctant interlocutor with invitations to admire my Lawrentian disregard for social conventions until the stranger – a handsome young fellow with a cool and arrogant manner who doubtless belonged to the milieu of young professionals who were going, in the years that followed, to displace almost entirely the milieu of pimps, whores, johns and small tradesmen who dominated Soho up until the 1970’s – was stung into throwing out the contemptuous remark: “Yeah, I’ve seen him around. I don’t think it’s cool. I think it’s kind of sad, actually.”

I was deeply hurt and humiliated by his words, and even Richard and our other companions that day felt the dampening chill of the cloud of despicability that they caused to settle vaguely around me and even around anyone in my company. But the young man spoke only the truth about a world that had indeed changed since Maupassant’s and Joyce’s and even Kafka’s literary commemorations of the universe of venal love. The latter had already had their part of “sadness” in the pitiless American sense in which the young man used the word. But it was a shared “sadness” and therefore only abstractly and mitigatedly contemptible. The “whoremonger” of a hundred years on was alone in a way that Joyce’s medical students and Maupassant’s young clerks had not been. His failure was an individual failure, in a world where most managed somehow to succeed.

Nothing, then, of what I found and paid for in any of these places contained even the tiniest element of robust Rabelaisian joy. It barely even contained an element of release or relief. This was true to such a point that, very early on, I began to see and to seek this release and relief elsewhere than in that consummated act of coitus that would appear prima facie self-evidently to be the aim and purpose behind all the efforts and expenditures, behind the protracted complex self-humiliation, of the “john”. I began, that is, to seek and to find my “release” in the action itself of being a “john”.  The need – which we may call a need for sex – recurred constantly and inevitably, at irregular intervals of several weeks or several months. But it was as if the need which recurred here were not, after all, a need for sexual satisfaction at all, but rather a need for all that was associated with seeking sexual satisfaction through these venal public channels. It was as if the need were a need for anxiety and sweat and exhaustion and self-disgust; a need to be bled of money that I could ill afford to lose, and for which I received as good as nothing in exchange.

In any case, the simple fact was that, within two or three years of my first visits, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, to the tiny overheated prostitutes’ apartments that filled whole three- and four-storey buildings in Berwick Street and Wardour Street and the narrow alleyways between, I had ceased to avail myself of the simplest and most basic of the services offered by these women.  I began to prefer to patronize establishments which provided the opportunity for coitus only after completion of a relatively prolonged and elaborate series of preliminaries: massage parlours, for example, or “peep shows” in which the dancer would wait until the punter had put several pound coins into the slot of the cubicle from which he was viewing her before suggesting a “private show” in some adjoining “back room”.  

This preference that I soon developed for an experience in which satisfaction was systematically deferred is actually a much less psycho-sexually interesting fact than it appears to be. One does not, in fact, need to suffer from any abstruse and fascinating perversion in order to prefer a restricted – even an extremely restricted – physical contact to an unrestricted one under the circumstances that here applied. The women who sold the simple brief act of coitus in the hundreds of tiny flats that were stacked, in those days, one on top of the other on dozens of streets in the district bounded by Oxford Street and the Charing Cross Road got through, I would estimate, an average of  thirty or forty customers a day. After a few weeks of such traffic, there was certainly – even in those rare cases where we might assume, for the sake of argument, that there might once potentially have been – no longer any question of these women’s responding in any way, be it physical or mental, to the insertion of a “john”’s penis into their bodies. In other words, if we define “sex” as a sexual relation, the one place in which one was guaranteed to find absolutely no trace of sex was on the beds of the women purportedly “selling sex” in the red light districts.

I suppose there were punters to whom that didn’t matter. I mean men who really had quite lucidly and deliberately entered into a transaction consisting in the exchange of cash for five minute’s free disposal over an artificially lubricated vagina, and nothing more. I can only say that the psychology of such men is and remains completely incomprehensible to me. I make no claim, indeed, to any moral superiority over those who were content to pay their money just for a fixed period of access to some mucous membrane. My interest in the “personality” of the women I paid for sexual services was, after all, in the last analysis, just as coldly partial and selective as was theirs. I certainly had no serious interest in relating to a “whole human being”. But to me it made sense only to pay for what masturbation or fantasization could never give me:  some kind of real interpersonal tension, some kind of real affective kinesis, however rudimentary, passing between desirer and desired.

This was completely impossible in situations where the commodity on sale was full and immediate coitus, but possible, to a degree, in situations where the woman selling sexual services retained partial or total disposition over her own body.  And commercial sexual transactions in London’s red-light districts happened, in fact, in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, to begin to be structured more and more frequently in just this way.  These years saw, in particular, the emergence in Soho and elsewhere of the institution of the “nude encounter parlour”. After the crackdown on the vice industry of the mid-1980’s, these “nude encounter parlours” lingered on for years in the compromised and improvised form of peep-shows in which the girls would offer to almost every punter who viewed them for more than a brief moment, through the slot in his cubicle, an adjournment to a nearby private room where she would perform for him, for a high price, individually and face-to-face. Around 1980 and 1981, however, in those few years in which London vice appeared to flourish almost without regulation, the numerous “nude encounter parlours” along Old Compton and Wardour Street were organized along much more formalized, elaborate and characteristic lines.

 The punter, when he had paid his admission, was ushered directly from the “box office” to the single, specially-prepared room where all further transactions took place. It was a room split in half by a large plexiglass screen, with a separate entrance for each half. The girl sat in one half of the room, the punter in the other. According to the declared “house rules”, the physical separation was to be maintained throughout the entire transaction. (I remember listening with intense bitterness, as I gathered the courage to enter my favourite such “parlour”, situated halfway along Old Compton Street ,  to the loud hilarity provoked in  the middle-class married couples emerging from the Lloyd-Webber musical “Evita”, playing throughout most of the 80s at the theatre next door , by the operators’ pathetically transparent pretence of providing a merely “therapeutic service”:  “Come inside and discuss your sexual problems with one of our trained hostesses.”)   But in practice, of course, a large enough tip could bring the girl around into the punter’s half of the room. The very fact, however, that physical contact of any sort was treated, in these “nude encounter parlours”, as something exceptional and supererogatory permitted and promoted the emergence of a sexual dynamic between girl  and punter of a sort that was unthinkable between a prostitute and the john who sought her out for simple, immediate coitus. The girl’s awareness that she herself controlled the degree to which she relinquished her bodily integrity made it at least possible for her to derive a degree of real erotic pleasure from the transaction, and this made, or could sometimes make, the latter a sexual experience, in the proper sense of the term, for the punter as well. There were certainly, of course, other factors involved in the emergence, around 1980, of “nude encounter parlours” in Soho besides the concern to offer a service of a more genuinely potently sexual nature than the joyless and endlessly repeated couplings that went on just a house or just a wall away. The treating of physical sexual contact as something which lay, strictly speaking, outside of the ambit of what was offered by the establishment was doubtless in part a first pre-emptive measure against the legislation that would, within four or five years, shut down the Soho vice industry almost in its entirety, while the indefinite deferral of this contact’s consummation also had the effect of considerably driving up its price. But the greatly increased price was more than compensated for, in my experience, by the element of reality and intensity that was introduced into the sale of sexual services by this improvised framework of obstacle and ritual.

 To explain, then, my growing predilection, from around 1980 onward, for “nude encounters”, and for other specifically deflected and compromised forms of sexual contact, one need really, I think, look no further than the generally comprehensible needs of a basically normal sexuality. And yet when I recall the thrilling intensity with which I experienced certain moments in those hermetically bisected basement rooms I must myself admit to suspecting that the pleasure I derived from such situations did communicate, somehow, with a deeper, older strain of truly deviant and perverse sensibility that lay hidden in me.

My very earliest sexual fantasies and memories –fantasies and memories belonging to what the Freudians call the “latency period” – are indeed fantasies and memories of refusal, restriction, and subjugation. From the cornucopia of lightly ciphered images of sexual perversity provided by the “Batman” TV series, which had its first run both in the US and in England during my early boyhood, I retain, above all, the images, from one episode of the second series, of Batman’s sexual  enslavement to the Catwoman – induced, if I remember rightly, by that same insouciantly non-naturalistic device of the ”love-potion”  as would endear to me, twenty-five years later, the operas of Richard Wagner.  Already at the age of eight or nine, I was deeply stirred by the sight of the stiffly formal super-hero played by Adam West seemingly instantaneously and totally transformed, in his most interior and intimate being, by a completely external force.

Lodged more firmly still in my mind, though, is a memory from the threshold of puberty. I am twelve or thirteen, sitting alone on a winter’s night in one of the flimsy, pre-fabricated classrooms from the 1950’s or 1960’s that tended to straggle off as unsightly, unstable peninsulas from the Georgian or Victorian country houses forming the central body of each of the several Home Counties boarding schools I attended between the ages of eight and sixteen. This particular classroom, I remember, was one on whose neglected bookshelf there appeared somehow to have settled copies of all those works through which the inquisitive child – with a mixture, initially, of boredom and deep disgust – first begins to suspect how potent and perilous a thing a literature that is not just a literature of childish distraction can  be. I remember, for example, that it was here – alone again, on some other quiet winter night – that I had first begun to leaf through Orwell’s “Inside the Whale”, misled by the title into expecting some such story of the fantastic and the adventurous as had formed the staple of my reading until then. A phrase borrowed by him from Whitman – “the sick, gray faces of onanists” – baffled me completely at first and then, after consultation of the dictionary and the Bible, cast me into a condition of anxiety and depression that lasted for months.

On the particular night that stays so clear in my mind even forty years on, however, the book that I stumbled on on this worthy but neglected bookshelf is one whose title and author I have long since forgotten – or perhaps didn’t bother to take note of even at the time. The impression that still remains with me of what I read that night resembles, indeed, my impression of the place where I read it: a shocking and shamefully vulnerable patch of vivid light in a surrounding sea of darkness. I remember a situation, but no longer know, and maybe never knew, what led to this situation or what followed from it. Neither did I know the names of the characters involved in it, or anything about them beyond their interaction in that one described or imagined moment. A woman (who is perhaps fully-clothed, perhaps only partially so, but certainly not entirely naked) is taunting or mocking a man (who is somehow bound or disabled, perhaps physically or materially, perhaps only by an intense, as-yet-unsatisfied need and longing). She taunts him with words that seem, forty years later, weirdly sexually anachronistic: “Do you want to see the hair?” There is a second, watching male presence, I think:  a gloating, malevolent male presence that can take an idle, malicious pleasure (perhaps because his own identical needs have been satisfied, perhaps because he does not share these needs at all) in the tortured need of the first male – or perhaps this is only my projection, into the memory, of my own remembered  excitement at the knowledge that, as I  yielded to the compulsion of my arousal and opened my trousers there in the brightly-lit, isolated classroom and masturbated to the thought of the woman’s taunting whisper: “do you want to see the hair?”, I could myself be seen by any pair of a hundred pairs of eyes that would themselves remain invisible in the enfolding darkness of the rural winter night.

Certain details, as I say, of this memory signal the remembered scene’s enormous distance from the time and the place in which I am writing these notes. That I have been obliged, all my life, to seek sexual satisfaction again and again in public forums has meant that my sexual sensibilities have never settled into fixed channels and patterns typical of men of my own generation. This in turn means that I myself, as I relate this memory, am faintly aware of how odd a thing it is that pubic hair really could, at one time, divert onto itself all the energy of sexual desire, and that “the hair” could stand, as it does here, metonymically for the vagina (which, in terms of the way of feeling and thinking that predominates today, this hair only obscures and disfigures).  The gesture and the situation itself, though – the taunting woman, addressing the man in terms that brutally unearth the buried, insatiate child in him – still stir me as deeply now, at the age of fifty, as they did at the age of twelve or thirteen.

And in this light I ask myself whether my more and more definite option, in my contact with whores as a young man of twenty or twenty-one, for a deferred, a restricted, an all-but-refused sexual interaction really is to be explained, after all, by the inadequacy even to the demands of a normal sexuality of the more direct and immediate contact that could be purchased just a door away. My morbid, hypnotized delight in the partial or total refusal of sexual satisfaction clearly had roots that stretched back far before the years in which I first learned how lifeless and joyless a thing sex accorded and submitted to could be, when the woman according it had accorded the same to a dozen other men in the course of the same afternoon.  The question, though, is this: Would this tendency to an inverted, masochistic sexuality – which psychoanalysis tells us is present in many, perhaps in all of us – have ever been anything more, in my life, than a latent and barely practically operative tendency if the misfortunes of my personal biography had not carried me, at so unusually early an age, into the cruel and desolate world of the red-light districts? Or could it be that these “misfortunes of my personal biography” were themselves only the forms and masks of this very tendency?

One of the strangest and profoundest passages in the work of William Burroughs is to be found in the early text Junkie, which he wrote some years before those more notoriously “strange” works beginning with The Naked Lunch. In the passage that I am thinking of, Burroughs describes the mood of poignant, distracted nostalgia that tended to visit him as the very first and faintest symptom of heroin withdrawal, just before the onset of the agonies of genuine junk sickness. In this mood, he regained a sort of contact with the lost impressions and emotions of childhood, and he throws out casually, in passing, the supremely abstruse and improbable idea that this fleeting, intangible, almost inexpressible condition of a day or an hour might have been, all along, the secretly foreordained purpose and justification of all that preceded it and all that followed it: the prolonged, dramatic ecstasies of heroin addiction and the equally prolonged and dramatic agonies of withdrawal from heroin. All that, in all its noise and violence, may exist, he suggests, only in order to bring briefly into existence a thing so infinitely, so almost nugatorily, quiet and gentle as this ephemeral sense of half-recovered childhood.

There occurs to me sometimes – for example, when I think back on the morbid, drowning exaltation that I felt long ago on that winter night in a classroom that seemed to move on the darkness of the Sussex countryside like a tiny boat on a vast and shoreless sea – the sad and terrible idea that the same crazily disproportionate relation might obtain between my life and this single compelling emotion as Burroughs half-playfully suggests could obtain between the slight, brief nostalgia that he describes and the whole intense and protracted drama of the life of the junky. My life, where it is judged by any reasonable human standard, has been a long debacle and disaster. As a young man, I showed considerable promise at least in intellectual and academic matters – but at the age of fifty, I scrape a living by the application, for paltry reward, of skills acquired at university to objects to which my teachers would doubtless never have imagined these skills would ever be applied. I have neither career, nor friends, nor family – nor a home, in any meaningful sense, since I quit, many years ago, the country where I was born, and have settled, in the meantime, nowhere else. It will be clear, though, to the reader at this point, what I might be said to have gained through all this loss. If there is something in me that is fascinated and attracted by repudiation and deprivation, by the experience of need unfulfilled, then my life has drawn me much closer to this secret goal than most more normal lives draw those living them to the more normal goals they set themselves. Could it really be that the strange joyless joy that I felt on that winter night towards the end of my childhood remained and worked on in me, with tremendous secret force and ingenuity, through forty years – worked to frustrate and forbid any spontaneously-emerging social contact with my peers, to turn me aside from the practice of any profession – so as to bring me to that position of boundless trembling esurience in which I found myself two years ago, when I first encountered Stephanie?

Chapter Two

There is so much that I want to tell here that simply cannot be told in the authoritative tone of arduously but securely acquired self-knowledge  that is alone capable of mitigating the painful indignity of the facts that I have to relate. This applies to a large part of what I want to tell regarding Stephanie, of course. A key constituent element of my relationship to her – indeed, a key constituent element of her sexual appeal  itself – has been, as I have already mentioned above, her hiding or withholding from me of important information about herself, and I cannot be sure that even the minimal information that I do have about her will not, at some point soon, be thrown into an entirely different pattern of significance by the addition of some further small fact, or by the confirmation of what are as yet only vague suspicions about the meaning of some fact that I already possess.  But it also applies to much that I want to tell regarding myself. Even with forty years’ hindsight, I still cannot claim to possess any firm and stable self-knowledge in respect of the “chicken-or-egg” question that I have just posed: did my sexual life take the lonely, defeated course that it did take initially as a consequence of mere “bad luck” and did the erotic pleasure in defeat arise only as a response to or defence against defeat’s persistent fact? or was there, somewhere deep inside me, an erotic pleasure in defeat that long preceded its factual reality, and perhaps even subtly but inexorably saw to it that this reality of defeat came to pass, so that my life reflected and satisfied this deeply-buried masochistic desire?

Perhaps as good a touchstone as any other for the likely truth of an idea is how hard the idea in question is to bear. Often, the more painful an idea is, the more likely it is to be true. And today, at age fifty, it is certainly the idea that the long defeat and disaster of my life was merely contingent – that everything might have been different if a few small fortuitous details had been just slightly other than they were – that I find most painful to consider.  The evident contingency of my decades-long sexual misery is one of the several reasons why I cannot quite embrace a novel like Houellebecq’s admirable  Particules Élémentaires as a work in which an author, in telling his own story, also tells mine. The simple socio-biological fatality that Houellebecq evokes is not something that I feel to have been present, to quite this absolute degree, in my life. It would almost be a comfort to me if I did feel that, if I shared the simple bitter certainty that, in taking my place in the whorehouses and porno-movie theatres and peep-shows and massage-parlours, and later on the Internet cam-whore sites, I was settling into the role and identity assigned by a kind of natural selection, in our society, to those who are not “beaux animaux”.  But I remember too clearly too many junctures at which the effective and decisive obstacle to consensual sexual contact was not the unalterable inadequacy of my physique but rather something that it certainly lay within my power to alter: a satanic pride or a foolishly crude and inflexible idea of what it meant to “be honest with someone”.

And indeed, even the inadequacy of the physique was nothing unalterable. I was tall and basically well-formed. There existed, it is true, in fact no real possibility at all of my finding my way to being accepted as a lover by a girl of my age at sixteen, or at twenty, or at twenty-five; there was an invisible wall between me and these girls that was, in practical effect, as impenetrable and insurmountable as the wall between the healthy and the grievously physically deformed. And yet my deformities were not physical. My sexual failure would certainly not have been anywhere near so total if it had not been for certain other, less easily circumscribable failures and omissions in my life.

It would not have been so total If I had not fallen, for example, at the age of seven or eight, into the hands of the educational authorities and their child psychologists, If this had not happened, I might have grown up as a boy among the boys and girls of my West London neighbourhood, gradually learning, by trial and error, what is required to win the trust and the affectionate interest of the opposite sex. But instead, my boyhood was spent at a long series of different boarding schools dotted around the southern counties of England, some of them intended to nurture the unusual potential that the educational psychologists believed they had ascertained to exist in me, others to provide therapy for the infirmities and abnormalities that the manner of this “nurturing” had itself largely gone to create. There were no girls at any of these schools, and the period I spent at each of them was so short that I would have had no chance of developing an easy relationship with them even if they had been there. Inexpressibly tired and disgusted with my schooling, I terminated it gladly as early as I possibly could and returned, at age sixteen, to the West London neighbourhood where I had lived the first eight years of my life – but where I was now  as much a stranger as if I were setting foot in it for the very first time.

I might possibly have broken out of even so extreme an isolation, young and physically attractive as I was in those years, if the “guinea-pig” existence I had led during my childhood and early adolescence had not meant that I failed to acquire also certain basic skills and habits which, though not exactly social skills in themselves, form the indispensable precondition of any social contact. I had, for example, at sixteen, and continued to have right on into my later twenties, no idea or awareness of basic standards of personal hygiene. The ideas I received on this subject from my parents – poor Irish immigrants of an age rather with the grandparents of most of my schoolmates – were already the ideas of a past and particularly wretched generation: the accepted regimen in our household was one bath per person per week. But I fell away gradually even from this inadequate regimen in my years at boarding school, where I was often subject to cruel and unexpected beatings from the other children and was loath to disrobe, since, naked, I felt less able to defend myself, or to escape, than when I was clothed. In my fourteenth and fifteenth years, I got used to going weeks or even months, sometimes, without a bath, simply from fear of exposure to physical attack, and it was only very gradually, after this fear of attack had been removed through my leaving school, that I began to rethink this almost total eschewal of daily hygiene and feel the need to wash at more reasonable intervals.

I am astonished and moved, when I think back now on my later teens and early twenties, to recognize that there were somehow moments – even if they were only rare and abortive moments – of   rapprochement between me and girls of my age in those years. The basic genetically-programmed imagoi  of my slim young body and regular, intelligent features asserted themselves, it seems, again and again, at least initially and incipiently, against my palpable, paralysing incapacity to conduct anything even resembling a casual conversation with a girl of my age and against the stench of old dried sweat, reinforced on each occasion of contact or conversation by a layer of new sweat secreted under the impulse of panic at the presence of an attractive girl, that must have hung on this body on every day of the year except that one in thirty or sixty on which I took my monthly or bi-monthly bath.  But the appeal of these basic imagoi could indeed never be more than a merely initial and incipient appeal. The few girls whom I managed to meet in those years – in the menial jobs that I took at seventeen and eighteen and nineteen as van-boy or messenger or postman or hotel porter, or just in the streets and parks of the city – tended to become, after a week or a month, all the more deeply estranged from me for having once been briefly attracted. As it emerged that I was simply incapable of taking the few simple steps that would have been required in order for romantic contact to become a real possibility between us, a positive antipathy settled into the place of what might have been, if there had been no initial attraction, mere indifference, and these girls began studiously to avoid speaking to me or even looking at me ever again. A removal from the sphere of possible human sexual contact is the same effective and unappealable removal from it, regardless of whether one is removed a mile or just an inch from the point where one can begin to be accepted as a potential sexual partner for another human being. One is either outside or inside – and I was outside. In the last and decisive analysis, I was outside.

After more than twenty years, I still think back with sadness and wonder on something a girl said to me in bed once. (“In bed”, because it was in the years around 1990 when I was approaching thirty and had finally begun to acquire those rudiments of a halfway-normal mentality and comportment which enabled me to sleep, now and again – for a few years at least, until approaching middle age began to become the obstacle to consensual sexual contact that, in my youth, extreme maladjustment had been – with a girl or a woman who did not demand money in exchange.) She confessed to me that she had hesitated a very long time before deciding to give me any clear indication of her sexual interest in me. She had been almost certain of a rejection, or at least of a humiliating absence of response. “The way you dress and act,” she said, “no one would ever guess that you were interested in sex at all.” I shook my head in wonderment – and shake it still over twenty years later – at how far I had somehow, at some point, strayed from any paths trodden by those whom I otherwise thought of as my “fellow human beings”. I desired sex constantly, of course, and continue to desire it constantly even now. But somehow, I could never quite bring myself to believe that access to something so utterly extraordinary as the bliss of sexual congress is gained through such very ordinary portals as the common art of paying of an empty compliment or choosing an appropriate shirt or appropriate after-shave.  And yet it is so, of course – and so I must live with the dull ache of knowing that, if this almost indispensably precious part of life has passed me by, it wasn’t my “destiny” that it should do so. The fingers that clutched at it and missed it might have caught it, if any one of a hundred tiny circumstances had been just slightly other than they were.

But this, like almost everything that I have to say here, is once again true only in part. There was also a kind of destiny involved in – to use another phrase from Kafka’s diaries – “the gift of sex’s having been a failure” in my life. I am thinking here now not of any personal destiny but rather of the destiny of a nation and a race. The former, of course, is enfolded by the latter. I still carry with me, thirty years on, the little exercise book where I scribbled down, in the summer of 1981, a poem on the theme of this “enfoldedness” of an individual destiny with a national and a racial one. (I actually entitled it “Embarassment”, as an allusion both to the way that this “enfoldedness” hampers the individual’s freedom of choice and action and to the song by the British ska-pop band Madness, that had been high in the charts the year before and that told the story of a family’s reaction to a white girl’s pregnancy with a black man’s child). It is written in the naive and archaic style that was my personal “poetic idiom” before I began the academic study of literature in the autumn of the following year.

It is Saturday morning and grey skies are bent

On my waking and tell of my country’s extent

Subjectivity’s dome over cities and fields

Unmolested by history hangs.

Unobstructed the street seems, unhampered the youth,

Laughing Leroy with Karen and Winston with Ruth

But they’re bound just the same to two histories each

One of which is my history too

And the past and the future we cannot but share

The slow breakings of nations in Nod and Kildare

Have made theirs what I thought unassaillably mine

And a stone of my cherished child’s heart

Knowing bodies by pain with intelligent hand

To be formed in the wombs of the white girls who stand

By themselves by the college in Acton in proof

That to England God’s order extends.

This piece of historic-philosophically ambitious doggerel is the work of a self which, though indeed my own self, seems, once again, to be something insurmountably distant and separate from the person I am today. Writing it out here again brings to mind both this distance and a second distance, related to yet different from the first. It was only a little over a year ago that Stephanie asked me to describe to her my life when I was only as old as she is today, and to send her a photograph of myself not as I am now but as I was back then. I can already hardly any longer believe – as I think back today from a situation in which almost all verbal, let alone visual contact with her has ceased – that there was a time when she really did urge me to scan the old photographs from the midst of which I have just extracted the exercise book that contains this poem and to send one of those old photographs to her, or hold one up to the web-camera so that she would be able to see her “stalker” as he was when he had only those twenty or twenty-one years behind him that she herself has today. When she asked me to do this around the Christmas of 2008, I was afraid and shy to do it for her. But I will do it – do it in a way, at least – now. Before I begin to write about the experiences that form the real topic of these notes – all that I suffered and felt with and through Stephanie in the course of the years 2008 and 2009, as a man approaching fifty years of age – I will write something about a time when I was myself no older than Stephanie is now. Stephanie is twenty-one in the towns of Northern California at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I was twenty-one in the western suburbs of London at the end of the eighth decade of the twentieth.

At that age, I was gradually returning to the formal studies that I had given up in weariness and disgust some five or six years before, when I had left the last of my boarding schools in the very month of my sixteenth birthday. The casual drifting from menial job to menial job that I had indulged in in my later teens was, in any case, hardly any longer even a material possibility, as England began to slip deeper and deeper into the condition of austerity, mass unemployment and class conflict that produced and was presided over by the Thatcher administration. In 1980 I retreated, along with millions of others, into the meagre shelter of long-term social security benefits and began to study, at a “sixth-form college” far out in the semi-rural suburbs of the West of London, for the high-school graduation examinations that I had chosen not to take those four or five years before.

Once again, I am astonished and moved and deeply saddened, when I look back, to see how close I was in those days to being that “high school kid among high school kids” whose life might have taken a different and much happier course than my life actually did, and at the same time how impossibly far I was from being that. The other young people in the classes I attended had, of course, indeed almost all come directly from the secondary schools of the area, having opted to complete their “A” levels at a sixth-form college for no other reason than that such an arrangement allowed them to dispense with school uniform and other formalities. They had mostly enjoyed the very socialization that I lacked, and this made the three or four years that separated me in age from these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds seem vastly significant to me, and somehow shaming and handicapping. Across the unbridgeable gulf, however, that I felt or imagined to exist between myself and the young people that I sat in class with there did, after all, exist a kind of bridge. This bridge consisted simply in what we learned, in the books that we studied together.

The long painful fiasco of my own schooling up to the age sixteen meant that I never would, nor ever could, lose the awareness of how little genuine existential weight such a bridge can be counted on to bear. At the age of fifteen the divorce, for me, between the name of culture and its reality was so absolute that, during the final months at the last of my secondary schools, I left off attending English and French and German classes altogether, while discovering for myself, with intense delight and excitement, alone, unguided and untutored in the library or in the woods around the school, the books of Salinger and Kerouac and Celine and Kafka.  At the age of twenty my conviction that nothing learnt collectively, within formal pedagogic structures, could ever be worth learning had hardly weakened at all. The very fact that their works were prescribed on the English syllabus at the sixth-form college I attended lowered still further my already-low opinion of Hardy, Wells and Waugh. And yet I found myself succumbing irresistibly and almost unconsciously, in those years, to an influence and a pressure that – when I note its effects, today, in those who are the age, or less than the age, that I was then – I recognize to be a comfort and a kind of salvation.

During the long nights that I spent many years later, in the weeks immediately before I first encountered Stephanie, browsing obsessively and insatiably through the profiles of American high-school girls on Stickam and other similar websites , I often felt surfeited and sick from my own cold, inhuman excitements over the tone of a young girl’s flesh in one of her photographs, or over some tantalizing half-confession she had included in her “About Me” section. I always seized eagerly, almost desperately, then, on anything at all in these girls’ profiles that touched me – or that  I could credibly convince myself had touched me – in a less immediately and crudely erotic, in a somehow more “human” way. In this respect, I was never so happy as when I found, among the list of some achingly beautiful sixteen- or seventeen-year-old’s “favourite books”, the name of some text – “To Kill A Mockingbird” or “Animal Farm”, or “The Great Gatsby” – the acquaintance of which she had obviously first made in English class as a piece of “required reading”, perhaps a year or two before. At fifty, it is a profound relief and comfort to me to be able to discover, here and there, at least some modest particle of evidence that the institutions of the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation are not – as, for years, I had experienced and believed them to be – entirely and unadulteratedly a  travesty and a lie. It seems that one high-school English class in a hundred, or perhaps even in a dozen, really does fulfil, for one pupil in a hundred or in a dozen, something like the purpose it declares itself to exist for: a book that is announced and taught to be a thing of existential significance really does become, for some small number of those who are taught about it in school, a thing of such significance, a “favourite book”. The ritual of the collective, institutionalized experience of culture proves, in some rare cases, to be more than just a ritual.

 The poem that I have reproduced above is full of evidence – embarrassing and moving for me, today, in roughly equal proportions – that I was, in fact, myself less impervious to this experience of collective, institutionalized learning than I hoped and believed myself to be at the time. The image of the heart’s becoming a stone was certainly one which was present in my poetic vocabulary only due to the inclusion of Yeats’s “Easter 1916” in the textbook of modern poetry being used in my English class. And the phrase “the breakings of nations” is a testimony to how impressed I had been after all, against my will, by a poem of Thomas Hardy’s included in the same book. I was applying the biblical image, however, in a way quite different from the way Hardy had applied it, and to an entirely different stage in European history. This earnest piece of versification from my twentieth year clumsily addresses a transformation in British society that I had been watching unfold around me since the mid-1970’s – first with equanimity and uninvolved, benevolent curiosity (this equanimity and uninvolved curiosity were what I meant by the “cherished child’s heart” referred to in the third verse) and later with a growing sense of existential terror and desperation.

In the mid-to-late 1970’s the children of the Jamaican immigrants who had settled, in their hundreds of thousands, in London and other British cities around the time of my own birth were just reaching their majority.  As I entered adulthood, there entered it along with me the first numerically significant generation of British-born blacks. I don’t know if it’s any easier to speak plainly and truthfully today, thirty years later, about what this circumstance meant, existentially,  for a young white Englishman like myself than it was at the time  - and at the time it was pretty much impossible to speak plainly and truthfully about it. It may be, however, that the experiences of the last three decades have shaken, or loosened, or somehow complicated the liberal humanist consensus in which I was raised sufficiently for it no longer to sound risibly delusional or cunningly malevolent if I say that this introduction, for the first time, of thousands of young negroes into the delicate and complex equation of local sexual interaction and competition made West London in the late 1970’s one of the least conducive environments imaginable to a successful coming-to-terms with the sort of sexual anxieties that my life of lonely orgiastic reading, punctuated by periodic compulsive descents into the different but equal loneliness of the brothels and the “nude encounter parlours”, had given rise to in me.

A young man leading such a life might have been, for example, inclined in those years, as one way of maintaining his dignity and his sense of self-worth, to avail himself of the ideas about a masculinity in flux and in radical question that were very much in circulation.  Again, to recall it is to become keenly aware that those were almost incomprehensibly different times, but the shelves of London’s better bookshops were, I remember, full around 1980 of the works of writers like Andrea Dworkin: books that proceeded, as if upon a self-evidence, upon the assumption that traditional, self-asserting, penetrating  masculinity was a pathology, a disease, a form of insanity. And many less overtly ideological cultural artefacts of the late 1970s and early 1980s likewise emerged from a background of just such unspoken assumptions. Less raucously but no less unequivocally than Dworkin’s rhetorical tirades, the cinematography of Scorsese in a movie like “Raging Bull” signalled to the viewer that traditional masculinity was a sickness, a kind of permanent hallucination. For the young man whose sexual persona deviated so far and fell so short, in every respect, of what an older tradition taught “manhood” and “masculinity” to be, these denigrations and dismissals of the older tradition could be an enormous comfort.

On the streets around him in the London of those years, however, the same young man was inevitably confronted by the fact that such a traditional masculinity was nowhere near so easily dismissed as it appeared to be in much of the literature and cinema of the day. The language and body-language –the powerful, agile bodies themselves – of the black boys who took, in these years, their place for the first time as British teenagers among other British teenagers reasserted this traditional masculinity at a time when it was already a visibly diminishing phenomenon among their white contemporaries. And equally striking was the response from an evidently no less persistently vital traditional femininity. The oblique perspective of an exceptional writer like Colin MacInnes had allowed him to foresee, already at the end of the 1950’s, what would eventually ensue, sexually, from the introduction of blacks into British society. The “Crepe Suzette” whom MacInnes made the heroine of his 1958 novel “Absolute Beginners” – a working-class English “dream girl” who stands out by force of will and intelligence as much as by the force of her beauty, and who proudly owns to an exclusive sexual predilection for black men – had as good as no real model or counterpart in British society at the time that MacInnes invented her. Christine Keeler, indeed, and the life she was leading during just these very years, might have been a model for “Crepe Suzette”. But Keeler’s life was a life, in the 1950’s, lived at the unspeakable and unthinkable margins of British society, until the Profumo scandal  thrust her into a horrified but fascinated public eye.

At MacInnes’s time of writing in 1958 – and right on, indeed, throughout the 1960’s – a sexual negrophilia like Keeler’s remained, in England, a mystery celebrated only in the “half-world” of the Soho vice industry, to which Keeler herself had migrated, already at the age of fifteen, from the suburban home counties where she’d been raised. The millions of hardly less beautiful and sensual girls who stayed in their suburbs, though, also stayed true there, throughout the following decade and even on into the start of the next, to the white English boys who stayed on with them. Before they crumbled and vanished at the end of my childhood, I caught, myself, a brief glimpse, from afar, of the older sexual hierarchies of Shepherds Bush and Acton, Ealing and Hanwell, and of all the quiet, park-dotted districts where London, in those days, gradually dissolved into Middlesex and the other western counties that lay beyond. At the top of those hierarchies stood boys like Tony, the older brother of one of my few local friends, Bobby Graham.  When I was seven or eight, Tony Graham led the little “gang” – his brothers Bobby and David, myself and some others – that built its corrugated-iron camps and defended its self-appointed turf along the still-half-rural railway embankments on each side of the railway line running out from Paddington, through suburban West London, toward Oxford. By around 1970, however, Tony was too old to hang around with us and the members of our gang caught sight of him only briefly and occasionally, in the company of the other fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, boys and girls, in those secluded corners of the neighbourhood that were set aside for a life we could not be part of. All we vaguely knew, or sensed, about Tony in those years was that he had either somehow all along innately possessed, or had recently acquired, the qualities that admitted him into the alien world of girls, and their ways, and their secrets. Such a right of admission seemed to have something to do with cigarettes, or motor cycles, or certain indefinable skills of the hands or fingers – skills identical or analogous with those that had been possessed by Tony’s father, by Tony’s father’s father, and so on identically and reliably back through a dozen or a hundred English generations.

For the generation that followed Tony’s, however – the generation I would have been part of, if my later childhood had not placed me hopelessly outside of any generation – all that was shattered. By 1975, a million white girls and black boys had passed through primary and secondary school together, and “Crepe Suzette” was suddenly no longer a figure belonging exclusively to the hidden “half-world”. She appeared in her hundreds and then in her thousands on the streets of the neighbourhoods of every large British town. (The most telling testimony to the – still in 1981 and doubtless still today – viscerally troubling fact that white women in search of masculinity turn preferably to non-white men was that, when MacInnes’s “Absolute Beginners” was filmed, five years later, by Julien Temple this absolutely central quality of the Crepe Suzette character was quietly eliminated, leaving the heroine a vacuous generic “it girl” well within the thespian capabilities of Patsy Kensit).  The “dream girls” that would, a generation earlier, have been the girlfriends of tall, pale youths like Tony Graham were drawn away from them toward something newer and more exotic and more potent. The old delicate indefinable skills fell back before something definable. The places where Tony and his girlfriend and their friends had liked to gather were now gathering-places for heavily racially-mixed groups of young people – or more often, the black boys took their white girlfriends away from the old places and initiated them, in new environments, into practices that were also entirely new.

I will not try beyond endurance the already sorely-tried patience of the liberal humanist by recounting every one of my thoughts and fears and fantasies as I watched the old sexual hierarchies of West London crumble and those suburban “dream girls” who might, ten years before, have been the girlfriends of guys like Tony Graham, become the girlfriends of young men with names like Leroy and Winston. Among these fears and fantasies were, of course – there would be no point in denying it – those crudest and most risibly familiar white fantasies of negritude: the thought that the black boys’ power over the suburban “dream girls” lay generally, perhaps, in the force and vigour of all their black bodies but most particularly in the size and power of their black cocks. I certainly did not consider such thoughts, at the time, to be fantasies spun arbitrarily or under the unconscious influence of a centuries- long tradition of racist projection. The pimps in the brothels and “nude encounter parlours” that I continued to visit all through these years were almost invariably black and, in the latter establishments, it soon became part of my accustomed ritual of masochistic self-degradation to beg the girl on the other side of the glass to recount to me the details of her periodical “servicing” by the Jamaican pimp who ran or managed the establishment. Her descriptions, true or invented, of the dimensions of the genitalia of the blacks who operated these establishments belonging to the “red-light” world of Soho fed my fantasies about the intimacies of my neighbourhood girls with their black boyfriends. The masochistic fantasies of huge black cocks, though, were, it must be admitted, something secondary and ancillary to the simple fact, defined and investigated no further, that these black boys could possess what I could not possess. Very probably, it was no single physical characteristic, but a whole diffuse web of personal qualities – superior “masculinity” in all its composite complexity – that was decisive here.

No, I won’t try to maintain, against the outrage and the scorn of the liberal humanist, that the masochistic racist fantasies that I would wallow in, in the years around 1980, night after night in the tiny back bedroom of my parents’ house – the visions of the gentle, subtle girls that I had sat in class with that day allowing themselves to be mounted like animals, in the warm dark of the summer night, by negroes with penises the size of small dogs – were the only possible valid interpretation of the new sexual realities around me. For young men of nineteen or twenty who had lived lives that girls had always been a natural and casual part of, the sexual and racial realignment of those years surely was a phenomenon that could be responded to with grace and humour and sympathy, and with a consoling certainty  that the story of each interracial couple on the streets of West London was, much more than it was an inexorable, vegetable expression of a bio-historical “tide in the affairs of men”,  the story of two individuals’ complex human interaction with one another.  The case was quite different, however, for someone like myself, who had never established a relationship to women as human beings at all. Me the shift in the old sexual hierarchy struck head on, giving me a sense that I had been shut out, once and for all, from any possible participation in the joys of desiring and being desired.

This sense of a condemnation against which there could be no appeal would never have crystallized and taken effective form, of course, if my longing had not settled – as it had no doubt inevitably, at one or another point in these most intensely lived and suffered years of my life, to settle – on one particular girl who personified just these qualities and attitudes. This girl was Karen Monaghan, with whom I shared both an English and a French class at the suburban sixth-form college that I attended in 1980. For years, I was unable quite to explain even to myself my reasons for fastening all the weight of my emotions on Karen in particular among the several attractive seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls who were enrolled with me on one or the other of these courses. Karen was far from standing out amongst these girls as especially beautiful. She had, indeed, intelligent, attractive facial features, the almost boyish clarity and angularity of which may not have appealed to every taste but certainly appealed to mine.  She affected, though, in those days a certain “hard-boiled” plebeian dress and manner that gave no clue to the actual social status of her family (she came, in fact, from a good middle-class home on the southern, Chiswick side of the Uxbridge Road in Acton). Even the pretty, maternal teacher of our English class, Mrs. Cawse, who guided me that year through every aspect of the Oxford entrance examination, had visible difficulty in controlling her annoyance with Karen’s insolently emphasized indifference to all that she was trying to teach us.

But Mrs. Cawse’s antipathy to Karen was, as I realize now, itself, in great part, a measure of the intensity of the feelings for this strange, stubborn girl that were visibly, unmistakably developing in me . As I had fallen in love with Karen, so had Mrs. Cawse, I think, fallen a little in love with me – though my utter inability to respond to the obvious affection of this cultured and beautiful woman in her mid-thirties was typical of my crippling dissociation, in those years, from all the normal structures of human behaviour. Quite possibly indeed, the most decisive factor in my declaring my love for Karen, and in my persisting in pursuing her long past the point where the pursuit had proven hopeless, was an instinctual awareness in me, right from the start, that this love would not be one that would ever draw me out of this condition of dissociation, that it was a love that had not the slightest chance of being requited.

The obstacle to this requital – monolithic, inexplicable and absolutely irremovable by any amount of words or of wordless tenderness - was, yes, the simple brutal fact of Karen’s being sexually attracted solely and exclusively to blacks. She declared as much to me – although visible circumstances were already such as to make a verbal declaration quite unnecessary – first in a tone of casual hilarity and then, under the pressure of my infantile insistence, in tones of greater and greater earnestness and anger. The spring and summer of my twenty-second year were blighted and made ashen by these progressively bitterer and more issueless colloquies with Karen, in bus stations, in bedsits, in the college refectory gradually filled and unfilled, as we wrangled on, by shifting  groups of our fellow pupils. As I take up again the old exercise book from 1981 that contains the poem I’ve copied out above, I see from the entries that stand before and after it – written in the third person on the over-optimistic assumption that, at twenty-one, I was in the final stages of laying the textual groundwork for my first novel – what crazily disproportionate romantic hopes something in me had led me to place in Karen:

“’What a beautiful evening,’ he heard her say to herself. It was beautiful.  She saw that, welcoming experience, his sister in spirit, as strong and as sad as he. The deep blue sky, the incredible efficacy of the buds and leaves, were lolling beckoningly open there for her and for the black boy. Their inevitable rebirth – ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ – was the force of their love, what drove her through the makeshift rooms in search of him, scanning in vain the huddled laughers at the card-tables, and carved the vicious beauty of their embrace, her gentle laying of her head on his heedless shoulder, proud and modest under the pervasive sky.

No tears, however, came to his eyes. He sighed, grimaced, leaned briefly on the walls, but no tears came. The face creased dramatically, but always fell immediately back again into a flat mask of observation, a knobbly photographic plate. In the chill security of the mid-May night to carry on seemed easy, indeed inevitable. Only the abundant blossoms of the tree outside the window of his bed-sitting room, life squandered on darkness, gave him pause. He was entangled in the thousand admissions and confessions he had made, all hope of ever recovering his dignity buried under a long and comical self-effacement. When he had tried to talk to her about the one thing that mattered, her face had always lapsed into an ugly immobility. She was not cruel. She was, in fact, almost the only person he had ever known who had the strength to bend her ego most often to gentle ends, and to remain unbowed before all but the very holiest of inevitabilities. Why did the memory no longer hurt? What did he wish now from the memory? Why had he been thrust into this world, the last yield of exhausted bodies, given propensities without abilities? The world was so prodigal with its flowers, in May.”

Again, though, what causes me most pain to remember, after thirty years, is not what a hopeless, unbridgeable distance there was between Karen and I, but rather how, if I had been able to act just slightly differently than I did, we might have been close. Even here, even in the face of the monolithic, inexplicable, irremovable fact of her sexual responsiveness to blacks and blacks alone, I cannot help feeling – and could not help feeling even then, even in the midst of my panic and my fury and my despair – that a human soul was on the point, sometimes, of reaching out, and offering some comfort that really mattered, to another human soul.

For other reasons, I’m sure, in addition to just her stormy amours with some of the “rudest” of the neighbourhood “rude boys”, Karen was quarrelling badly with her mother and father that year, and in June- she was just approaching her eighteenth birthday, as I was approaching my twenty-second – she left her parents’ house and moved into a rented room and kitchen on the other, northern side of the Uxbridge Road. This sunny, first-floor room above a newsagents in East Acton is the scene of some of my bitterest memories from that period of nine months or a year in which, although I was preparing at the time for one of the most rigorous university entrance examinations in the world, there was barely a moment in which my mind was not filled and dominated by thoughts of Karen. Our conversations would begin gently and enjoyably. But under my clumsy, infantile insistence on always steering them around to the question of a “decision” on the matter that I was convinced my happiness and even my life depended on – a decision that had in fact long since been irrevocably taken, had been taken, indeed, before Karen and I first met – they became bitter and exhausting wars of verbal attrition. On those mild English summer mornings Karen pounded into me, in the final minutes of each conversation before her endurance failed her and she turned me out of the house, truths – or perhaps only desperate, defensive caricatures of the truth – that were, first, like aching ulcers in my body that stopped me from reading or sleeping or thinking about anything but them and their implications but, with time, came to form the nuclei of masochistic sexual fantasies which proved the only viable refuge from the pain of the very thoughts they fed on. “Because he’s got a big cock, is that what you want to hear?” she would finally scream under the pressure of my untiring child-like “whys?”, “Because he fucks me and I like it! He threw me down on this bed last night and fucked me in my arse, and I loved it. Are you happy now?”

The haze of suicidal despair and incipient masochistic excitement that I lived in all that summer meant that I hardly asked myself, at the time, why Karen, after throwing me out of her tiny flat for the tenth time, still admitted me again the eleventh. It is only with the hindsight of thirty years that I perceive, with a regret as deep as my despair and as my secret arousal all those years ago, the gentle, almost sibling intimacy that must have been there, or beginning to be there, between us after all. Like all that is best and purest in human emotions, of course, the need for me that survived in Karen, despite all the pain and stress that I was causing her, was, in part, a thing of circumstances. Again, I could not recognize it clearly at the time, but that summer must have been for her a time of deepest disorientation and anxiety. I can see her very clearly now – now that the hope of closeness to and communication with her has been abandoned for thirty years – as she must have waited anxiously at the window of that bed-sitting room on one of those mornings when, after my visits had already become an expected daily routine, some chance event happened to keep me away.  I am sure it was so, and a great empire of regret expands and extends around me as I allow myself to think that, yes, if I had not been so utterly bereft of all tuition in human matters, things might have gone differently, the “impossible” might have been possible after all.

But unrealized possibility is a bitter thing after the passage of so many lonely years. I lost her. The last I have of her is a letter from late 1982 or early 1983, in which she tells me about the birth of her daughter (one of the dozen scattered children, inevitably, of a London-Jamaican “baby father” who left, as is the way with such “baby-fathers”,  Karen to raise their baby on her own). This letter too evokes, as did my poem of three or four years before, the circumstance – a circumstance so unbearably poignant to me now – that what had drawn Karen and I together at the first was the only apparently entirely empty ritual of the handing on of culture. “Her name is Thea Rose,” wrote Karen all those years ago about her new-born daughter, “and, as Mauriac would say, elle est très beau.” It touched me then- as I am touched today when I see To Kill A Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby on the “favourite books” lists of Texan sixteen-year-olds – to see that the hours that we had spent together in a suburban London classroom listening to each other read clumsily aloud from Francois Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux had marked, had maybe entered and altered, Karen’s life as they had entered and altered mine.  

Chapter Three

The entering and altering might seem, indeed, on the evidence of this old, faded letter that I hold once again in my hand this evening after the elapse of thirty years to have been incomparably different in our two cases, and the ritual of culture to have been indeed after all, in Karen’s case, an empty one. On the morning I received that letter, I was preparing for a tutorial with one of the world’s leading experts on Romance languages, while seven or eight years of French had evidently left Karen unable to correctly match the gender of a French adjective to that of a pronoun. I might have found solace and a kind of triumph, I suppose, in the external circumstances of both our lives in that autumn of 1982, when Karen, heavily pregnant with a child she knew would be raised without a father, was settling into a council flat on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise a few hundred yards from her parents’ home in Acton, while I settled into students’ halls at Hertford College, Oxford.

But I felt neither consoled nor vindicated. Perhaps because I sensed that my humiliating defeat at Karen’s hands was only in part the familiar case of a noble soul’s defeat in the low and ignoble matter of sex. My failure, I suspected even then, pointed also to a genuine inadequacy and instability that Karen had recognized in me – recognized, perhaps, only reluctantly, and after sincerely searching in herself for the courage to act on the affection and half-attraction that she may have felt for me. It was an inadequacy and inability to fit into the world that went far, far beyond the awkwardness of an extended adolescence.  Already the years that directly followed brought further confirmation of this profound and enduring abnormality. The brilliant future that had seemed to lie before me in that autumn of my twenty-third year never became a present reality. The depth of my maladjustment made my years at university in fact the loneliest and most desperate of my life. I proved as little able to learn, in the way that I was required to learn, as I was able to form relationships with the many people of more or less my age with whom I now suddenly found myself surrounded. As youth ended, ten or twelve years later, I was living once again in London in an isolation and a poverty as deep as if I had enjoyed no university education at all.  

Ironically, it is rather now that I feel a sense of having been vindicated. Because, although the intervening years have proven the narrow limits of my own capacities, they have also proven that, if I was wrong in almost everything else, I had not been wrong in sensing and loving a calm, deep strength and worth in Karen.  The decade that brought stagnation and gradual downfall for me saw Karen rise slowly and steadily from the apparently hopelessly wretched position in which I had left her – a single mother of a fatherless half-caste child on a run-down council estate in London – when  I went up to university. While raising her daughter, she studied for a law degree at the local polytechnic and by the age of forty she had become one of the leading civil rights lawyers in Britain, employed in the well-known Grays Inn chambers run by the wife of the Prime Minister, where, by the turn of the new millennium, her colleagues and close friends were often members of a generation of Oxford graduates who may have been witnesses (though surely inattentive ones who had years before forgotten being such) to  the obscure scenes of conflict and petty drama that made my time at university a time of fruitless humiliation and despair.

From this humiliation and despair of university life I sought the same refuge as I had sought from the less densely populated despair of my life in the years before university. Indeed, since I now enjoyed a modest but regular income, the years of my middle twenties were the years of my deepest and most unbridled indulgences in prostitution. Oxford provided me with much of what I needed in this respect. There too, there were black pimps and young white whores available by the dozens in the town. But I returned to London whenever I could, and to the “nude encounter parlours” of Soho. Not only because too regular a use of the local prostitutes might possibly have made my uncomfortable situation at Oxford even more uncomfortable, but also because the Cockney girls that I found in the whorehouses of London’s West End – this was still some years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the massive influx of Eastern European girls into the vice industries of all the Western European capitals – had a special, an almost indispensable attraction for me. With these Londoners I could relive almost exactly, right down to the vocal intonations and sometimes even to the details of localities at which some rendezvous or some animal act of coupling had taken place, the engrossing agony of those mornings with Karen in her bedsit a year or two years before.  I sought out girls with the closest possible physical resemblance to Karen – skinny, athletic gamines with an air of aggressive pride about them that bordered on naked contempt for those whom they observed to admire them – and, kneeling on strips of threadbare, filthy carpet with the finger- and sperm-stained barrier of the plexiglass always between them and me, I experienced, whenever I succeeded in eliciting from them by cash and subtle verbal prompting some sentence that approximately or exactly reproduced a sentence that Karen had spoken to me in that summer of my twenty-second year, an orgasm so powerful that I collapsed for a moment, unconscious, into my own and a hundred other men’s vainly ejaculated seed.

As with every such addiction, of course, the longer the habit endured the more intense a stimulation I needed to achieve this perverse satisfaction. It goes without saying that the intensification was not, in this case, an intensification of “merely” verbal into any sort of physical interaction.  The maintaining of the hard plexiglass barrier between me and the girls I visited was an absolutely essential element of the experience I sought. But what went on verbally between me and these “hostesses” led on naturally and inevitably into the request that I be allowed to actually watch them engage in the sexual acts I begged them to describe. In the endemically fraudulent environment of the red-light district of a large city like London the chances, of course, of such a request’s being fulfilled in any but a laughably and contemptuously nominal manner were close to zero. I must have paid over two or three thousand pounds, in total, in the middle years of the 1980’s, for the service of having acted out in front of me that sexual penetration of one of these cruel gamines by her virile black pimp that I had already paid her to describe to me in precise physical and psychological detail. On not one single occasion, though, the money having once changed hands, did I receive in return anything but a travesty of the desired act. Always, the sexual partner who joined the girl in question was patently not her actual lover – nine times out of ten, he was clearly a male prostitute, and six or seven out of these nine times unmistakably homosexual – or, on the rare occasions when such a relation might indeed, just conceivably, have existed between the man who arrived and the girl in question, the virility which I don’t doubt was his when he was alone with her failed him, partially or completely, in my presence.

For all that, though, the intense and recurring need, at least, to watch a girl whom I desired making love in front of me – and making love, specifically, with a man who was visibly much more virile than myself – became in those years an absolutely central element in the strange, lonely sexuality that would be mine now for the rest of my life. This need, once again, is a phenomenon that lends itself to being misunderstood on the one hand as something simpler, and on the other hand as something more complicated and paradoxical, than it actually is.

On the one hand, it should not be understood to be a simpler and more easily classifiable sexual deviation than it actually was. Although the desires that developed in those years made indispensably necessary to my sex-life an external male principle side by side with a female one – an “external” male principle because I had drifted, of course, by now very far away from being able to look on myself as the “male principle” I required – I don’t believe that these desires can be explained in terms of anything so simple as a bisexual or homosexual tendency. Fundamentally, my desire remained focussed exclusively on the girl. My sexual concern with the man who fucked her was really only a concern with those otherwise invisible aspects of the girl that physical contact with a man – and, as I have said, I considered myself to be neither a “man” in any relevant sense here, nor even capable of such physical contact – could bring to light.

Here too, a fetishism of the word was closely interwoven with the directly sexual fetishism of the practices I paid to engage in in the basements of the West End of London. I clearly remember how, during that summer of 1981, one of the more marginal and trivial of my fears about the possible consequences of the state of profound depression and self-disgust that the hopeless struggle with Karen had cast me into was that the association of this mental and emotional state with the rudiments of the German language – which I was just trying to acquire, to all practical intents and purposes for the first time, in those months spent in daily contact with Karen – might instil in me a repulsion from and resistance to this language that would make it impossible for me ever to become a genuine scholar of German literature.  It seems, however, that, besides the morbid “compulsion to repeat” that prompted me to ruminate and to relive, through all my years at university, the agonies of those six or nine months with Karen, there was also a kind of healthy, forward-looking impulse in me. Because in my first year at Oxford I found myself throwing myself, after all, with a manic energy into the study of a language whose most elementary structures – the rules governing genitive and dative, the almost-English forms of declination of certain irregular verbs – did indeed remain somehow saturated for me, deep in the bones and muscles of their morphology, with the paralyzing, poisoning lethargy of those days and weeks and months spent wrangling with, and morbidly fantasizing over, Karen. As if I were mounting a campaign to bury and overwhelm just these most rudimentary and most polluted strata of my own knowledge of the German language, in my intense, obsessive reading as an undergraduate – a week in which I yielded totally to the urge to sexual self-degradation and spent night after night trailing numbly from brothel to porno cinema and back again would often be followed by a week in which I read without stopping even for sleep or nourishment, wolfing down thousands of pages in the space of a few days – I chose to concentrate particularly on those authors who were known for having drawn on the more abstruse grammatical and semantic resources of this language. I became, for example, a particularly obsessive reader of the texts of the author who, perhaps more consciously and massively than any other, practiced the writing of German as if it were a religious discipline and cultivated the language as a supreme and solitary end in itself:  Karl Kraus.

In the basements of Soho, or at least on my way to and from them, I often meditated on one particularly impressive aphorism of Kraus’s:

The voyeur withstands the test of natural sensibility. He proves himself able to endure the sight of the man with the woman, so as to secure for himself the sight of the woman with the man.

Looked at from one angle, this is an insight into the practices that I engaged in in those years that can preserve us from the opposite error to the over-simplifying error of seeing them as an expression of a latent homosexuality: namely, the error of “over-complicating” these practices, of seeing in them some utterly irrational and imponderable perversity that cannot be considered to serve any natural need at all. Kraus’s remark might be read as removing the impression of paradox and psychological mystery from the behaviour of the man who willingly and eagerly embraces the experience which Shakespeare has his cunning Iago propose to the Moor Othello, knowing that he will recoil from it in natural horror and disgust:

Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on, behold her topped?

Kraus describes, it might be said, the action of the voyeur as an entirely, mundanely rational action. The idea that to be given abstract verbal knowledge of a sexual act without its sensual experience, or to be given sensual experience of it in a manner limited to the single sense of sight or of hearing, is always only torment and mockery; the idea that to be given such verbal or visual or aural access alone is actually to have less than one would have if one were given neither the experience nor any form of knowledge of it – these are crude materialist prejudices and errors. No experience is total experience, even where it involves all five senses, each operating at the very limit of its capacity and receptivity. The pleasure of a woman remains, in part, something beyond the perception even of the lover whose body is in her body, the lover every inch of whose flesh is pressed to every inch of her flesh. It is therefore impossible to put one’s finger on any point of absolute qualitative discontinuity on the long quantitative continuum that runs between, on the one hand, the man who merely hears the woman recount to him the story of her sexual pleasure with another man, or who watches, from a distance, as she takes her pleasure with this other man, and, on the other hand, “the man himself”, the man who feels with his own body how sexual excitement and satisfaction convulse the warm and wettened mucous membrane of the woman’s mouth and cunt and anus. It can and must be admitted that the distance of the latter from a total and real experience of the woman’s pleasure is less enormous than that of the former. But the distance is (more or less) enormous in the one case as in the other. The voyeur merely uses the relatively richer experience being enjoyed by the actual lover – doing his best to put from his mind his natural feelings of envy over this greater richness, and of disgust at the exposure of male sexual organs that excite no interest in him – in order to win for himself a relatively poorer experience which, relatively poor though it may be, is nonetheless better than no experience of the woman at all.

If I had never discovered or suspected in Kraus’s words here any more far-reaching or complicated insight than just this sober insight into the arithmetic rationality of an apparently irrational act, my masochism would maybe never have become the consuming sickness that it did become in my later youth and in the middle years of my life. Already in these years, however, when Kraus’s words first accompanied me down into the basements of Frith and Old Compton Street, I could sense a deeper, stranger implication in this thought that the experience of watching “the man with the woman” can be a means to securing for oneself the experience of “the woman with the man”. Though neither the logical nor the syntactical form of Kraus’s proposition positively impose this reading, the aphorism nonetheless allows itself to be read as suggesting that there is an experience of “the woman with the man” which can never be acquired by the man who really is “with” the woman – “with” her to the full physical and psychological limit of any human being’s ability to be “with” another human being – and which is reserved entirely and exclusively for the man who stands off, or is made to stand off, from this “being-with” of two human bodies and minds. The merely “arithmetical” significance of Kraus’s insight, then, is here eclipsed, after all, by a metaphysical, a mystical significance. The essential thing is not that the (comparatively greater) distance moved along a common quantitative continuum by the real and present lover allows the “unreal” lover, watching from a distance, to acquire a (comparatively lesser) share in the experience of sexual contact.  It is that the very action by which the real lover renders the unreal lover’s participation less of a participation, the very act by which he displaces, blocks and excludes the “unreal” lover from the sensual reality of sex, opens up a dimension of “supra-sensuality” which is structured, by definition, in such a way that the real and present lover can have no part in it and it belongs, as his solitary sovereign realm, to the “unreal” lover, the excluded voyeur and masochist, alone.

This expression “supra-sensuality”, used by Sacher-Masoch himself in “Venus In Furs” and in several more of the texts with which he founded that modern tradition of masochistic sexual fantasy which bears his name, in fact points here to an idea of far, far broader psychological and philosophical ramifications than anything that Sacher-Masoch ever suspected. It is where the masochistic attitude begins to present, to he who adopts it, this form of an opening-up of vast new planes and dimensions, extending obliquely and invisibly outward from the planes of common sensual experience, that this attitude can become an abyss into which a whole life sinks. Experienced in this way, masochism is the most potent of all temptations and seductions, a terrible mystery, a thing of genuinely religious force. The best allegory I know of masochism under this aspect is Jack Arnold’s film of Richard Matheson’s novel, “The Incredible Shrinking Man”.

I probably watched this American B-movie made in 1957, two years before the year of my birth, six or seven times on late-night television between the late 1960’s and the early 1980’s. Like Roger Corman’s “The Man With X-Ray Eyes”, made a few years later, it belongs to that class or era of US B-movies in which concern with character seemed to pass into a sort of recession and the figures occupying positions otherwise describable as those of “protagonists” took on, in fact, the quality more of allegorical ciphers, while the role of true protagonist passed to impersonal cosmic forces. This is most striking, in the cases of both films, in their respective concluding scenes. The metaphysical horror of the final scene of Corman’s film – the simultaneously blind and all-seeing Ray Milland’s haunted evocation of a “great eye at the centre of the universe” and the final biblical savagery of the “Pluck it out!” – is a traumatic, indelible memory for any child who watched it at the age of ten or twelve. The sense of horrified awe inspired by the final scene of Arnold’s film, on the other hand, is something subtler and more diffuse.  In contrast to the dark note of bloody self-mutilation on which Corman’s movie ends, the tone of the conclusion of “The Incredible Shrinking Man” is unmistakably one intended to convey the idea of life triumphant over the most extreme adversity. It will also be clear to any viewer of this final scene of Arnold’s film that the triumph here depends on a development like the one I have just evoked with reference to Kraus’s aphorism on voyeurism: the opening-up of hitherto invisible perspectives that extend obliquely outward from the planes and perspectives of normal experience. The mystic awfulness of the scene, however – as well as its deeper affinity with Kraus’s insight as I have construed it – consists in the fact that triumph here is one in both form and substance with the most abject defeat.

The victory here is one that is achieved “transcendentally”, in the strictest Kantian sense that it is due to absolutely nothing that occurs or might occur in the world but only and purely to a change in the conditions that determine what may and may not count as a world. The “human factor”, in particular, is one that plays no essential role at all here. The triumph is so far from being one brought about through the hero’s own overcoming of his condition that, had he succeeded in overcoming it, he would have cheated himself precisely of the triumph celebrated in the film’s closing monologue. He is saved solely and exclusively by the fact that there comes a point in the inexorable process of the shrinking of his body when all the ways in which he had hitherto related to his physical environment become obsolete and even meaningless for him, and he in turn becomes meaningless to all that had hitherto been his physical environment. A certain incremental step in the shrinking process transforms him utterly at a stroke: from a minuscule component element of the “atomic” world into something that bestraddles the “sub-atomic” world like a giant or a god.

This aspect of the film is obscured, of course, by Hollywood conventions, and particularly by the imperatives involved in the marketing of this B-movie as a movie in competition with other “creature features” of the day, such as Arnold’s own “Tarantula” of two years earlier. “The Shrinking Man”, like this earlier film, contains scenes of a struggle with a gigantic spider, and these are so prolonged and emphasized that the non-analytical viewer naturally assumes that the atmosphere of exaltation and salvation that pervades the film’s final scene must stand in some genetic relation to the hard-won victory in this struggle. Considered closely, however, the episode of the struggle with the spider is an irrelevance, or at best a kind of allegory for the decisive, impersonal struggle going on between cosmic forces on the transcendental plane. The hero does not eat the food that the ostensibly life-and-death struggle had ostensibly been fought for the sake of. He senses that he is about to experience what is alone the true victory: a passing into a sphere where nothing that has hitherto had meaning for him has meaning any longer. If the battle with the spider has had a function at all, this function has been to create that atmosphere of absolute exhaustion – of having descended, in the world that has hitherto been his, to the absolute depths of horror – which lends the scene of the hero’s egress into the garden its special hallucinatory quality. Although he has survived the battle, the hero has, in this final scene, much more the air of a man defeated than a man who has found the resources in himself to gain a decisive victory. The closing monologue opens with a clear enunciation of the fact that he is continuing to shrink, continuing to become smaller and weaker, and all that falls to him in this final scene – the egress from the basement of his house into the garden, for example, which had been a physical impossibility for the tiny man but becomes an action performed with distracted ease by the still tinier one – falls to him as to a man given over entirely, helplessly and powerlessly, into the hands of impersonal cosmic forces. The hero feels how there is torn from his minuscule, powerless fingers the last forlorn hope and possibility of measuring himself against the world as he has hitherto known it. And in the moment of his being forced to relinquish this last human hope, there unfold in every direction and dimension around him planes and surfaces of a world that he had never perceived or suspected, a vast secret universe of “sub-atomic” reality enclosed within what, from the “atomic” point of view of his previous experience, had been the small patch of suburban garden surrounding his house.

The sub-text of a specifically sexual inadequacy does not lie very far beneath the surface of Arnold’s film, and even less far beneath the surface the novel by Richard Matheson on which it is based. The typical period banter between man and wife in the film’s opening scene marks the position of effortless masculine dominance from which everything that follows is an inexorable, humiliating falling-away. The film spoke profoundly to me, on my third or fourth viewing of it at the age of eighteen or nineteen, as a reflection of the inner experience of a man becoming progressively more aware of his physical incapability of measuring up to what would be expected of him in the sexual world (and this, in light of the whole days and nights I sometimes spent, in those years, in the stalls of London’s old blue movie cinemas, in the simplest and crudest possible sense of knowing that I was simply “not big enough” to awaken any female response to my desire) Even before Karen, femininity had been, to my radically wanting masculinity, a monstrous devouring spider with which I remained locked in struggle day and night. Like the Shrinking Man in the final scenes of Arnold’s film, I had the air about me of a man who, if he had emerged “victorious” in the minimal sense of not having been destroyed in this struggle, had been preserved with no purpose other than to endlessly repeat and relive his defeat by a foe for whom he was really no sort of match. My own defeat in the battle with the spider-thing “woman” would, I knew, be repeated endlessly, like the punishment of some transgressor in a Greek or Dantean Hell, with the monster throwing me down again and again and tearing my guts from me, but my somehow always rising again and again as well, gathering my scattered innards to me, and being compelled to return to the hopeless assault.

But that same agony of the consciousness of inadequacy – the consciousness of powerlessness and “smallness” – that casts, first, the Shrinking Man into the horror of the struggle with the spider also casts him, as we have seen, subsequently into a realm where this horror no longer has meaning or existence – or where, at least, if the initial horror persists, it is made negligible by the opening-up of other meanings and planes of existence that cut across it and transform it. A similar transformation occurred in my life in the years immediately subsequent to the awful struggle with Karen. I learnt the alchemistic art of utterly transforming the meaning and being of an “atomic” world by contemplating it and experiencing it from the viewpoint of a “sub-atomic” one. It was an art which I taught myself first in those Soho “nude encounter parlours”, where the very same looks and phrases, down to each accent and intonation, that had forced tears from my eyes in Karen’s bedsitting room became looks and phrases that left my heart and mind unscathed but seized and shook my body with a possessing, compelling pleasure that blotted out all memory of tears.  But I applied this art, in subsequent years, to that vast, rich, pitiless world that spread outward in every direction from these cramped and dirty basements: the streets and the parks and the libraries and the clubs and the places of leisure and pleasure where friends and lovers met.

I could take no part, I had found, in any of the joys of this “garden of earthly delights”. But I could discover in each individual joy that was refused me a secret obverse that was given me in and by the very act of refusal. Where all these secret obverses of the simple joys of normal sexual life were taken together, they went to form a “secret garden” unknown to anyone but me and those – I did not, and do not, know how many or how few they may be – who are like me. The beautiful undergraduate the shadow of whose inner thigh I gazed at, sweating and trembling, as she shared a table with me in the college library could refuse to me, indeed, this little voluptuous detail of the “atomic” world by getting up and moving to another table.  Her act of refusing one voluptuousness, however, was – little as she wanted or consented to this – the granting of another, far more absorbing and compelling one.  From the “sub-atomic” perspective from which I now observed and felt the “atomic” world of sex and sexual desire, the whip-stroke of deprivation became a caress; the glow of her soft young skin became, as something withdrawn from and refused to me, a thing much more intensely present to me, “supra-sensually”, than it could ever have been had I been given it, be it to see or even to caress and to lick and to kiss. The virile lover who led such a girl away from the spot where I could surreptitiously observe their pleasure and lacerate myself with the exciting torturing knowledge that this observation brought neither succeeded thereby in acquiring for himself the experience of “the woman with the man” – even in utter privacy, his possession of the girl would block him off from any knowledge of what she was before and outside of her possession – nor even succeed in depriving me of my own strange inalienable share in this experience. The withholding of sight and sound is clearly a movement in the same direction as the withholding of touch and smell that already defines the masochistic pleasure in “only seeing”, “only hearing”, so that the subtraction of yet further dimensions of sense and perceptibility from the experience of “the woman with the man” leaves this experience burning still more brightly and intensely in its “supra-sensuality”. At the centre of the “secret garden” which opens to whoever accepts, definitively and absolutely, that he will never have any share in the common “garden of earthly delights”, there burns the mystical void of a sensuality from which all sense has been subtracted, and which offers an ecstasy that no material human love can ever hope to provide.

 Such is the seductive, inebriating power of the masochistic sexual attitude into which I retreated during these years of my early manhood, and from which, since then, I have never emerged.  Its dominion over my life today is almost total. As the two or three people with whom I still stand on a halfway friendly footing insist on reminding and assuring me, it would not, even now, necessarily be too late for me to marry, or to begin a relationship of long-term companionship with a woman more or less of my age. My income is modest but I make a living of sorts, and I am not chronically ill nor in any unusually advanced state of physical decay. But the impulse to do so – the seemingly so natural and comprehensible impulse to try to provide for my simple physical needs some degree of simple physical satisfaction, and to try to avert an old age of absolute solitude – appears simply not to be present in my case. The indispensable solace and satisfaction which most men in my position are inclined to seek in whatever real romance or real sexual adventure their age will still permit them I find, it seems, in unreal experiences like the one related below, which would surely appear to most to provide precious little that could be called satisfaction.  There are few things that disgust and terrify me more than the idea of settling into the miserable ease of an arrangement whereby some woman would comfort me in my inadequacies and my uglinesses in the righteous and complacent expectation that I will do the same for her. I see a hundred such couples in restaurants on and station platforms every day – people growing old together in an atmosphere of daily understanding and forgiveness, and in the wretched comfort of the knowledge that there will, with the years, always be more to forgive and thus more to bind these patient forgivers together. A thousand times more miserable as it may be after its fashion, I choose over this the unreal supra-sensual satisfaction of the alchemical transformation of a beauty that is utterly refused to me into a beauty that is utterly given, under some mystical aspect of itself that it cannot itself understand.  

I have written, however, that the dominion of this masochistic, “sub-atomic” perspective over my life today is almost total. Perhaps it is necessary to the full understanding of the story that I want to tell below to mention briefly the reason why I cannot say that the dominion in question here has been a total dominion.  It is because all that I have just said is true only of my waking life. My dreams are quite a different matter.  In my dreams, I find no pleasure in refusal – and in any case, in my dreams nothing is refused. The solace of warm lips and flesh is offered without hesitancy or complication and I, in my turn, am able to receive and embrace this solace unhesitatingly and uncomplicatedly. Kisses and caresses are given and accepted with open, smiling eyes.  I learnt this already, years ago, about my dream world and the dream self that I am in it – and yet again and again I am given pause, lying in the dark or light of early morning during the few moments between waking and entering on my day, by the thought and the question of how my life goes on, as it has gone on now for years and for decades, with this simple sensual heart of it torn out and cast away.

I am surely not the only one who lies struggling with such thoughts in those most vulnerable seconds of everyone’s day when we are just passing across the border that separates the nocturnal realm of wishes from the diurnal realm of hard reality. Nor, surely, is it the sexual pervert alone who must face such an inward struggle every day of his or her life. The world we all share is haunted by the dream of another sex than anyone in this world is likely ever to know. For all of us, I think, the blossoming flowers and the abundant sunlight of a garden in spring have something heartbreaking about them, a sorrow that Wordsworth evokes in his famous “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”. This sorrow is the shade of the Garden in every garden. It is not so much the ghostly presence of Adam and Eve there, embracing in nakedness and innocence before the Fall, as the sense of how very long it has been, how very many years in the life of every individual and how many centuries and millennia in the life of the generations of Man, since we have ceased to feel or expect such a presence.

Chapter Four

The last time that I glanced at it, the “Encyclopaedia Dramatica” article composed for the topic “Cam-Whore” featured a still from the worthy 1999 movie “American Beauty” that showed the beautiful Thora Birch standing naked at her bedroom window and looking out into the night. It was captioned: “Before there were web-cams, there were windows.” The point is a rather profound one. There really is a sort of temptation to believe that the essentially masochistic experience of voyeurism attained its adequate, pre-determined form and medium only with the emergence of the Internet and that all voyeuristic scenarios prior to the date of this emergence were, as it were, attempts to cobble together, by inadequate means, an approximate functional equivalent for something that did not exist in the world until the eve of the third millennium.

It goes without saying, given my age, that the Internet did not become a part of my life until I was in my forties – although I probably owed it to the strongly humanistic bent of my education, which had left me diffident and awkward in the face of all technology, that I began to spend time online only toward the middle (and not, as I might easily have, right from the very start) of my fifth decade in the world. It was only after settling in Berlin, around 2005, that I began to make any substantial use of the Internet.

Because retarded too, in my case, had been the typically youthful impulse to explore the wider world.  Small as the satisfaction had been that life as a student had brought me, I anticipated deriving even less satisfaction from any other walk of life open to me, and I prolonged my studies as long as I possibly could, enrolling on post-graduate course after post-graduate course until I was well into my thirties. By the age of thirty-five, I was the holder of a Ph. D. – but living, nonetheless, on welfare in a minuscule, rundown apartment back in one of the poorer districts of my native city. There, I lived a life pretty much without event or human encounter for the greater part of the 1990’s. It was only toward the end of this decade, when I was already approaching forty, that I finally mustered the courage to break out of this situation of utter stagnation. In April 1998, I abandoned my tiny, one-roomed flat on Brixton Hill and, without baggage or a fixed destination, took the boat-train to the continent. My hope was that the struggle to find work and accommodation in various mainland European cities would at least be more effective in distracting me from my persisting loneliness and melancholia than had been the eventless and almost motionless existence that I had been leading for several years in the country of my birth. I was not proven entirely wrong in my expectations. My life in the three or four large towns in France and Western Germany where I settled for brief periods in the years around the turn of the millennium was indeed a wretched and undignified one for a man my age, being sustained largely by menial, humiliating and precarious work in telephone call-centres where most of my colleagues were twenty years my juniors. But the very material precariousness of my situation allowed me indeed, just as I had hoped, little or no time for introspection and the depression that inevitably ensued from it.

Only when I moved on eastward to Berlin did I find myself faced with the situation of not being able to find sufficient work to cover even the costs of my very modest needs in the way of food and lodging. What could have been a real catastrophe was averted by the suggestion of an acquaintance made at one of the few Berlin call centres where I did succeed in finding a couple of days’ work that I might try to earn some money as a freelance translator. Equipping myself with a barely Internet-capable computer and a mobile telephone, I seized on what seemed to me initially to be a far from promising idea as my last forlorn hope of remaining in the city. But the skills in five or six languages which I had acquired under much more leisured circumstances twenty years earlier proved commercially marketable to a degree that I had not expected. Within three months, I was earning a tolerably good living as a freelance translator. My business was conducted entirely via the Internet, largely through websites on which translators who had reached the limit of their capacities posted requests for help in handling commissions they had already received from clients.

Up until 2006 or 2007 perhaps, work was pretty much the only purpose for which I used the Internet. My inexperience in these areas, even so late on in the “Internet Age”, was such that it simply did not occur to me at first that the Internet could be used to satisfy my sexual needs. Berlin, in any case, I had discovered to be a city that satisfied these needs to a greater degree, in its simple extra-virtual reality, than did any of the other cities that I had lived in. Berlin’s red light districts – the lurid nocturnal prostitutes’ beats of the Oranienburgerstrasse in the East and the Kurfuerstenstrasse in the West, and the somnolent cluster of brothels and pole-dancing bars around Charlottenburg S-Bahn station – appeared indeed to offer little in the way of those sexual services which would alone have been of any interest to me: namely, those situated obliquely to the basic service of penetrative sexual intercourse. The voyeuristic and masochistic need in me, however, could be met, I’d found, in Berlin in several ways that involved no contact with the local vice industry at all.

Even twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the housing stock of the low-rent student and bohemian districts in which I lived in my first few years in the city still consisted largely of four- and five-storey Altbauhäuser containing, when one counted all the wings that were set at irregular angles around the central courtyard, some sixty or even eighty one-bedroom flats. These overcrowded, rundown houses, with their toilets on the landing and their coal-fuelled ovens requiring daily or twice-daily trips to the cellar, were as sexually porous as cheap hotels.  I was able to creep, at night, from floor to floor and from door to door , listening and masturbating to the only partly muffled groans and sighs that the fingers and lips and cocks of their young lovers were forcing, in the darknesses behind the doors, from the lips of pretty student girls – girls who would chirrup a greeting at me next day, as we met on the stairs carrying coal to our respective apartments, in voices that one would never have imagined capable of producing sounds so sensual or so guttural as those I had heard them produce in the night.  On the nights when the houses themselves were silent, the same young couples were often gathered in one of the vast and variegated parks that invariably occupied the central portion of such student districts.  Through these parks too I would creep, on summer nights, for hours on end. I would distinguish in the dark with difficulty the melded silhouette of a couple lying a little way apart from the rest and I would crawl, or stroll with pretended nonchalance, as close to them as I dared, then stay there transfixed, with heart beating, and wait for a faint languid shift in some portion of that indistinct mass of melded shadow to sieve out from all the hundred possible intimacies I might have projected into that confused silhouette one single actual attitude, more exciting in its objective external reality than any projected pornographic fantasy of mutual sensual pleasure.  

Although I was forty-five years old when I began to lead that life, I really do look back on it now, from five or six years’ distance, as if I were as young, when I was living it, as those nineteen- and twenty-year-olds on whom I spied and eavesdropped from the inner or from the outer dark. I really was living, after all, in the same conditions of romantic poverty as these still-young people, and the energy of my perversion – the energy that kept me moving, in a fever of voyeuristic arousal and in constant fear of being exposed, humiliated and beaten, around and around the vast expanses of the Friedrichshainer Volkspark in the hours long past midnight until all but a few last drunken figures gathered around their barbecue fires had moved on to other pleasures, or to sleep – really did match and keep pace somehow with the energy of their youthful passion. Even if, however, the dreaded moment of exposure and public beating never, thank God, arrived, the fact of my belonging to quite a different generation from those among whom I was living was enough in itself to ensure that no day went by without at least one small humiliation. As my work as a translator, then, continued in 2006 and 2007 to secure me an income considerably in excess of the income needed to pay the rent of one of these tiny, coal-heated flats, I gradually allowed, in my third or fourth year in Berlin, this anomaly of the residency of a middle-aged man in the city’s student districts to correct itself and took a more spacious, centrally-heated apartment in the city’s well-to-do West End.

Since I could do the work that I now did without ever having to leave the apartment, moving out of the student districts meant for me a retreat, once again, into almost total isolation. Along with the social proximity to much younger people, I also forfeited the means by which, in my first years in the city, I had satisfied my sexual needs and it was now, consequently, that I first began to explore the Internet as an alternative means to this end. Not having been raised in the medium, I could not, at first, as others tended to do, find my bearings in it by means of the Net’s own internal points of orientation. The sites that I sought out online in the vague hope of using them to satisfy my sexual needs were at first, as a rule, sites that I had learnt about through media with which I was much more familiar, such as newspapers. The reports that appeared in the press of several countries during 2006 and 2007 on older men’s increasing misuse of myspace to make sexual contact with teenage girls was the first that I ever heard of that website – and drew me to it, of course, immediately, in the hope that I could myself become one of these “predatory” older men.

The sexual stimulation that myspace provided really was, for several months, the limit of what was imaginable for me in the way of “Internet sex”. Browsing through thousands of profiles, I allowed my masturbatory fantasies to settle on three or four teenage girls of especial charm and poured out my desire to them in messages that seemed to me relatively brief and to-the-point but were perceived by the recipients – as they explained to me in the replies that, in a surprisingly large number of cases, I did receive - as prodigiously, disturbingly, intriguingly long. Being now, however, almost entirely dependent on the Internet for satisfaction of my sexual needs, I felt increasingly impelled to seek out sites that would satisfy these needs in a less slow and cumbersome way than did the message system on myspace. Specifically, I felt an understandable desire to see more than just individual still photographs of the girls whom I chose as means of exciting in myself the feeling that I needed to excite: namely, the feeling of painful, inexhaustible longing for a forever unreachable beauty.

My choice of a site with webcamming facilities was initially as uninformed and random as had been my choice of Internet sites in general. After some brief and clumsy research, I opened an account at a site which went under the name of Meetcam and seemed to be used in roughly equal proportion by British and Americans, with only occasional (and implicitly discouraged) intrusions by speakers of languages other than English. The primary advantage that Meetcam seemed to me, initially, to offer was the advantage of making only the most perfunctory of attempts to veil the primarily sexual agenda of its participants under talk of “making friends” and “social networking”.  This admirable frankness about the nature of the activities engaged in there turned out, however, to be, from my point of view, rather a disadvantage. Since “cyber-sex” entered into by mutual consent was the acknowledged central purpose of the site, my own obsessions with situations of coercion, deprivation and exclusion seemed as “deviant” within this community of would-be “happy deviants” as they might have seemed in an environment hostile to any and every form of deferred or diverted sexuality. Toward the “swinger” women of roughly my own age who appeared to want to encourage on the site an ethos of healthy, jocose camaraderie in the practice of cyber-sexual flirtation and “perv-ing” I felt only an embarrassed antipathy that intensified, on occasion, into actual physical disgust. My energies were focussed much rather on the few exceptional cases that one encountered on Meetcam  of women – usually younger women not yet associated with any kind of “swinger” community – who  visited the site with feelings of deep ambivalence about the openly proclaimed “perv-ing” that constituted its raison d’être. Jocosity, one sensed, did not count among the responses that an expressed interest in watching them undress on camera was likely to elicit from these young women. They were unclear themselves as to whether what they felt in the face of such a prospect was disgust or intense sexual arousal, and it was this lack of clarity – the intention of dispelling it or indulging it – not  the intention of joining in “camaraderie” of any description, that had drawn them to the site.

To these latter women I could eagerly and passionately relate. If a part, at least, of what had drawn a woman of this type to Meetcam was the wish to experience what it was like to be the obsessively scrutinized object of the desire of some sick and repulsive individual who knelt trembling and masturbating in his distant darkness fantasizing acts of desecration and violation that he would like to commit upon her person, the desire that had drawn me there, for my part, was precisely the desire to be or become this sick and repulsive individual. (A further element, of course, of the basis for potential understanding between myself and such a woman was the fact that I was no more in fact this sick and repulsive individual – or at least no more this sick and repulsive individual alone – than she was, in fact and alone, a compulsive sexual exhibitionist). At Meetcam, however, a dozen factors disrupted and frustrated any attempt on my part to explore the possibility that my enduring sexual needs and the doubtless only temporary sexual needs of such a woman might be able to “dovetail” in a coldly, impersonally executed game of need and repudiation. The Meetcam moderators consisted, almost without exception, of members of that class of middle-aged “swingers” who were dogmatically and passionately committed to their collective “site philosophy” that the one workable foundation for any such sexual pleasure as could be derived from web-camming and cyber-sexual “perv-ing” was an open and uncomplicated camaraderie distinct in no essential respect from that which might be found at a bowling tournament. For my attempts to appeal to precisely that side of the “newbie” women which hated themselves for being on a site like Meetcam ,and to set in motion with these women that complex dialectic of sexual rejection and acceptance which has obsessed me all my life, these moderators had neither understanding nor sympathy – and the measures they took to “enlighten” me about how to use the site to my advantage were a dozen times more irksome to me than their punitive measures when I would not leave off these attempts.

It was once again, I believe, a newspaper article on “Internet predators” that drew my attention to a site which looked like it might, conceivably, be a more appropriate milieu than Meetcam for my carrying through of my “dialectical” sexual agenda. I say only “might conceivably”, because frankly, I was apprehensive at first about visiting a site as emphatically oriented  as Stickam was to users thirty or thirty-five years my juniors. And indeed, with my impressions from the first site and its oppressive camaraderie of middle-aged “swingers” still fresh in my mind, my initial impression of Stickam was of a cold, harsh place in which human contact of any kind looked unlikely to develop or to flourish. Such contact looked unlikely to develop or flourish for anyone of any age, let alone for me at mine. But almost any conceivable disadvantage that might be presented by Stickam was instantly outweighed by the enormous advantage of the presence there of several thousand girls aged between fifteen and twenty. The beauty of many of these teenage girls on camera struck me like a blow.

The presence on Stickam, in massive numbers, not only of these teenage girls but also, and consequently, of middle-aged voyeurs like myself was not only a topic of discussion in the press but the very open-est of open secrets among the Stickam users themselves. Every girl who appeared on web-camera on Stickam had surely come inwardly to a personal decision about what, if anything, she wanted from this massive “sexual black economy” which existed on the site, and which really determined its atmosphere and character to a far greater degree than did the “white economy” of Stickam as “a place for friends”. Some, who genuinely wanted nothing from this “sexual black economy”, ceased, I would suppose, very soon to frequent the site and made use, instead, of one of the dozens of facilities available on the Internet which offered them the chance of seeing and being seen by their friends on webcam without being simultaneously observed and sexually fantasized about by potentially hundreds of total  strangers.  Others, though using the site for much the same primary purpose of keeping in touch with their friends as did the first group, visibly (and audibly) experienced a certain frisson from the awareness of being watched by scopophilic strangers as they did this. While for yet others, perhaps, the web-cam contact with friends was the merely ancillary purpose, and the primary motivation behind their presence on the site was indeed a morbid compulsion to sexually-charged self-exhibition.

All this, admittedly, hardly applied only to a negligible degree to certain of that relatively wide range of facilities which the site offered to its users. In the large group chat-rooms, in which there were sometimes assembled up to two or three hundred users, there was no very perceptible atmosphere of voyeuristic excitement. The Stickam facility which “illegitimate” users of the site tended to fasten on was the opportunity offered to individual users to “go live”. A girl’s “going live” on camera involved the opening of a kind of personal “room” around her camera-image. Except where she expressly adjusted her settings to prevent this,  all other Stickam users could enter this room and communicate with her either “in the room”, by typing out text that was publicly displayed beneath the girl’s cam-image, or by “instant messages” sent directly to her alone. She could also – again, except where expressly otherwise specified – be observed on camera by users and even non-users of the site without their having to enter her “room” at all, since her camera-image was visible on her profile page. Especially attractive girls, or girls who were engaging on camera in any sort of activity even distantly associable with sex, would often acquire non-participating viewers – “lurkers”, as they were called in the parlance of the site – whose numbers ran into the high hundreds.

As in the salons of fin-de-siècle Paris, the atmosphere reigning in a particular Stickam “live” tended to be a reflection – flattering or unflattering – of the personality of its hostess. A vulgar and shallow girl would inevitably gather around herself a crowd of squabbling young machos who displayed no trace of mutual sympathy or any semblance of camaraderie amongst themselves. And the prettier such a girl happened to be, the more desolate and depressing would be the general egotistical mêlée that raged around her. Such “lives” invariably dragged and stumbled on amidst a heavy hail of temporary ejections  – “kickings” – and permanent expulsions – “bannings” – from the room, executed either by the girl in question herself or by those boys who had succeeded so far in gaining her fickle favour as to have been appointed “moderators” of her “live”. The “lives”, on the other hand, of other, more humanly sympathetic and more intelligent girls really could, on occasion, acquire something of that atmosphere of a party, or other genuine social occasion, that all such “lives” tended to profess to aspire to acquiring.

Given the inarguable fact, of course, that I formed a constituent part of the massive submerged iceberg of Stickam users who could make no plausible claim, in any case, to having a “social” interest in the site at all, I was seldom able to derive any benefit even from the small number of genuinely humanly congenial “lives”. Habituated as I was to masochistic rituals of verbal confession, “lurking” brought me as good as no satisfaction. As soon as I found a girl who excited me I felt compelled, after masturbating to her image on camera and to whatever indications of her personality I was able to glean from observing her interaction with the people in her room, to actually enter her “live” and to begin cautiously to impart to her, via the IM system, the desires and fantasies that she had awoken in me.

Meetcam had shown me a sexual kindness that I could not accept, on terms that I could not accept. Stickam showed me no such kindness. For the first two or three weeks at least, I think, I experienced not one single contact that did not end, within minutes, in contemptuous ejection from whatever teenage company I had dared to join. Yet before the spring of 2008 was very far advanced, I had given up visiting Meetcam altogether and was spending inordinate, unhealthy amounts of time drifting back and forth between the thousands of concurrent “lives” on Stickam. Often, to soothe the smart of having been held up to ridicule before a particularly numerous and vocal audience of sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds, I justified to myself my swapping of Meetcam for Stickam with the sentiment that Homer puts in the heart and mouth of the dead Achilles: there had been less happiness for me in the prospect of respect and of a kind of honour among the middle-aged “swingers” of the former site than there was in my position as  the lowest of the low, the most reviled of the reviled, among the teenage boys and girls of the latter; this for the simple and sufficient reason that the former was a realm of death to me, the latter alone one of life.

Will the reader who has already worked his way through thirty pages of description of the forms and mechanisms of my particular sexual perversion feel there to stand in need of answer at this point the question of why “life”, for me, was a quality that seemed to belong exclusively to females thirty or more years younger than me, and not at all to women my age? My initial impulse is indeed to dismiss this question with a reply that will seem to most people of a similar education to my own to be the very epitome of bad faith, and of a lazy compliance in a patently false and self-defeating worldview. A woman, I am inclined to say, really and simply is never so beautiful again as she is in the first bloom of her beauty at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years of age. She will never again make the breath catch in the throat, the tear start to the eye, of the man who sees her and knows that there is something here vaster and more potent than his desire, as deep and as wide as it may be, can ever hope to embrace. If I’m inclined, though, to say that this is the truth for me, I’m not thereby inclined to argue against the charge that it is a puerile and wastefully narrow “truth”. As I conceded earlier on that the white man’s fear of white women’s negrophilia – the fear of the invincible fascination of the “big black cock” – is a fear that, for a man who is well-adjusted enough to enjoy an easy, human relationship to the women he sees around him, will be a manageable and ultimately negligible anxiety, I will concede here that ephebophilia too is a mark of the maladjusted, the isolated personality. It is only where the capacity for perception of, and communication with, all the more complex and slowly-developing elements of a female human being’s personality has, for one reason or another, atrophied that the brutal physical blow of the sight of nubility at its brief, early biological apex is needed to “kick-start” the emotions of desire and romantic love. It is true that, still at fifty, “life” for me was a quality that could be touched and grasped only in the jolting, scalding vivacity of a girl not yet out of her teens. But this, I will freely admit, was only because, in fifty years, I had established no relation with “life” as it exists in the complex, difficult natures of my fellow human beings.

All that once said, however, I must also say that, when I think back on those days of my obsessive, day- and night-long use of Stickam, it is, after all, an atmosphere of death, and not of life, that I recall most clearly.  Or if not of death, then of what we find, also in Homer, described as “death’s brother”: sleep. The state into which I was drawn by those hours and hours on Stickam – sometimes, at the beginning, it was twelve or eighteen hours at a stretch – spent masturbating, fantasizing, and pouring out, whenever and for so long as it was possible, the details of these fantasies, via IMs, to their sixteen- or seventeen-year-old objects, resembled nothing so much as a blissful sensual sleep, descending on me at last after a morbid insomnia that had lasted thirty years. When I finally had to break off, exhausted, and usually still smarting from some girl’s brusque termination of my confessions of desire, I would often recite slowly over and over, to comfort myself, the beautiful sad song from Beaumont and Fletcher’s “The Woman-Hater”:

Come, sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving

Lock me in delight a while;

Let some pleasing dream beguile all my fancy,

That from thence I may feel an influence

All my powers of care bereaving

Though but a shadow, but a sliding,

Let me know some little joy.

We that suffer long annoy

Are contented with a thought

Of an idle fancy wrought.

Oh, let my joy have some abiding.

All my experience of those nights, running into days, on Stickam is there in these lines from the beginning of the seventeenth century. There was nothing there, I knew, that was more than just  a “shadow”, a “sliding”, yet these shadows and slidings brought me a delight, a “little joy” that locked me for a while in an ecstasy that made me oblivious to thirty years of pain.

The shocking harshness of the initial few weeks seemed to be attenuated, for some reason, after a month or so’s frequentation of the site. In April and May, I proved able after all to win, for short periods, the interest and even something like the sympathy of one or two among these teenage girls who had seemed, in my first nights on the site, to belong to too different a species of humanity altogether for me to hope that they would find time for me. Still true, in my fashion, after thirty years, to the sexual neurosis that had been implanted in my by Karen in that distant summer of 1982, my first relatively enduring voyeuristic fixation among the Stickam girls was one on a seventeen-year-old Goth from some dire post-industrial corner of West Virginia whom I gleaned, after only an hour or so of excited eavesdropping, to be having sex with a black. Her profile was one of a type surprisingly common on Stickam: namely, the type that tends to defeat its purpose by making wildly disproportionate allowance for the surely only marginal possibility that someone may want to make mischievous or malicious use of the public accessibility to which a girl who sets up a Stickam profile consents. This particular girl devoted twenty-eight of the thirty lines of her “About Me” section to warnings, in huge upper-case letters, that “If you fuck with me you will fucking regret it; try it; I WANT you to; fuck with me, bitch, and I will FUCK YOU UP; I can be a real bitch when I want to and I don’t let ANYONE fuck with me; pull ANY shit in my lives and I will fucking BAN you; I do NOT take shit from ANYONE; try it and you are fucking DEAD”, before appending, as if as an afterthought, the information that, in her own opinion, she was a “cool, friendly person that you ought to get to know”.

All this did not bode well for a long-term relationship, but in the ten or so days that she permitted me to IM her, or to crouch in uncommunicative masochistic ecstasy in her (understandably somewhat sparsely-attended) “lives”, she did provide me with moments of intense excitement such as I had not experienced since the days of the London “nude encounter parlours”. In the small hours of her West-Virginian night, she would lie, on camera, on the bed in her crimson-and-black-painted bedroom and discuss, softly but audibly, with her boyfriend on her cell-phone, the details of the hours they had just spent in bed together. There can be few things more intensely sexually arousing than such a tacitly tolerated eavesdropping on a girl on her cell-phone: the total complicity combined with the appearance of total indifference. These nocturnal moods of deep erotic complicity were, however, no sort of guarantee against a sudden mood-swing in the opposite direction, and I was banned and execrated, before a fortnight was past, for reasons that were never even partly clear to me.

There followed, however, in the course of the early months of 2008 several other equally intense, and equally suddenly arbitrarily terminated, voyeuristic fixations on several other teenage Stickam girls.  The “sexual sweet-shop” aspect of Stickam, however  – the uncommitted drifting from “live” to “live” in search of the concrete, quantifiable “win” of an exposed breast or exposed vagina that seemed to be the central appeal of the site for many of that class of illegitimate and undesirable users to which I belonged – had no appeal at all for me. I seldom visited a girl’s “live” a second time if I had not got the feeling, the first time, that I was going to come back a dozen or a hundred times, repeatedly, compulsively, obsessively. For me, there was no pleasure except where there was a palpable sense of the fixing of desire enduringly on one specific individual – and of its fixing on this individual not by any conscious or considered choice, but under the impulsion of something that overrode the consciousness and the choosing will.

The intensity of the contact between myself and certain of these girls – for so long, at least, as this contact lasted – suggests that this sense of being the object of a very specific fixation had a certain appeal also for them. Indeed, while it is entirely possible that the reason for all the contacts of the early weeks on Stickam’s being so soon and so suddenly terminated was that an understandable panic seized these girls at the thought that they were becoming part of the fantasy-world of a genuine obsessive, it is also possible that their mood and attitude changed when they began to sense that my preoccupation with them fell, in each case, some way short of being indeed a genuine obsession. And it was perfectly true, of course, that the sudden, unexplained termination of a contact that I was beginning to become accustomed to, if it annoyed and depressed me for an hour or two or even for a day or two, was forgotten by the start of the following week. In the last analysis, I experienced all of these girls as pretty much functionally interchangeable with one another. This all changed, however, when I entered into regular contact with Stephanie Turner.

 Chapter Five

From the point of view of the specific sexual needs and rituals that are the real topic of this piece of writing, it was only in the early months of 2009 that I got to know Stephanie. This inasmuch as it was only then that she began to present to me, openly and extensively, the side of herself that possesses a sort of instinctual, infallible genius for such rituals, and only then, consequently, that she became the girl who is today so close to destroying me.  But Stephanie’s power to destroy me as she is destroying me now is premised not just on her instinctual, unerring skill in speaking to and manipulating that masochistic, “sub-atomic” part of me that has been dwelling for decades in the strange humid solitude of my “secret garden”. It is premised also on Stephanie’s seeming to belong, in part, to that fresher, more distant Garden of my dreams. I mean my dreams of a love that could somehow after all be consummated and satisfied: my nightly dreams of a simple, gentle, natural, human love. What has gripped me and drawn me on, since my first meeting with Stephanie, a hundred or a thousand times further in this direction than I have been drawn by any other girl is that I cannot help but see in her, besides the Dominatrix who responds, by not responding, to my deep masochistic needs, also this Girl of the Garden : the shining, simple image of an Eve to whom I might have been an Adam at the dawning of some world that was maybe never this one at all.

In the first image I ever saw of Stephanie, she was in a garden or a park of some sort, somewhere in the abundant blooming outdoors of her Californian home. Her Stickam profile’s “default photo” was a picture of a slim, pretty, auburn-haired girl standing in front of a hedge or bush dotted with little snow-white buds. She looked perhaps a year or two younger than the almost nineteen years that were indicated on the profile and, although her features were finely-cut and delicate, something about her gave her an almost “tomboyish” look. Perhaps it was the broad smile that she was smiling in the photograph. Though orthodontically impeccable, that smile had an air of mischievousness, or sarcastic knowingness, about it that went just a little way beyond the limits of the “girlish”. (I thought, of course, on first seeing this photograph, of Proust’s Giberte, the “fillette d’un blond roux devant une haie d’aubépines” of “Du Côté de Chez Swann” – particularly as the ambiguous provocation of Stephanie’s smile seemed to repeat, in attenuated form, that ambiguous gesture of Gilberte’s which convinces the young Marcel that she must feel nothing for him but contempt).

As I became more and more involved and obsessed with Stephanie, scouring through every record  that she had left of herself on the Internet, in the forms of blogs and photos and accounts and memberships on sites serving the most various social purposes, I got a stronger and stronger sense that both of these things were somehow true of her at once: that she was a girl of profound natural femininity, but also a girl who was somehow ill at ease with this femininity, who couldn’t help constantly looking a little askew at her own beauty and at her own sexual charm. In a sense, this was no paradox or contradiction, but the very definition of the “Girl of the Garden”, the very definition of the “girlfriend” that I had always dreamt of in the distant days when I was still young enough to dream with dignity of girlfriends (and yes, if I am honest, that I have never left off dreaming of, even after reaching an age when such a girl is no longer to be dreamt of, with any dignity, by a man). The girl whom we all have dreamt of – the girl who can offer us a gentle, human love that will be our salvation from the dialectic of repulsion by need and attraction to brutal needlessness that passes for sex and even for love as the world knows it – is always a girl who seems to carry – to carry easily, but to carry, for all that, nonetheless – a mild, vague burden of guilt about the fatality contained in her own beauty. In such a girl, there is a palpable reluctance to be what she is – which serves, of course, also to make her what she is still more consummately and more wonderfully.

This reluctance, it has to be said, is not always recognizable in Stephanie. In two hundred, perhaps, of the five or six hundred images of her that I have seen in the two years and more that my obsession with her has endured, she allows this fatality of her beauty to shine forth unmitigated by any reluctance or any pensive reflection. Even unmitigated, it is a beauty that shines forth in different photos in different ways.  I have seen photos of her in which her beauty is a beauty which touches so powerfully the mind and the heart that its stirring, at the same time, of the guts and the loins can almost be forgotten. In a photo on her blog from June 2010 she appears to me like some gentle, almost asexual, yet humblingly beautiful Mother Mary of the Internet. In my Irish Catholic childhood, I really did hold that belief about Mary Mother of God which the Mohammedans ascribe, with contemptible ignorance, to all Christian believers. To me, Mary was one and the same with the Third Person of the Trinity. She pervaded and hallowed, as the Holy Spirit, all the profane, material universe of the West London suburb where I was raised. The gentle lambent white of the spherical porch-light under which Tony Graham and his girl lingered kissing for hours in the summer night before she finally, reluctantly went in to join her parents was the white of Mary’s tunic; the azure blue of the panties that Tony’s fingers probed at as they kissed, being pushed away over and over again but returning to probe and caress and excite, was the blue of Mary’s mantle. The image of Stephanie I am thinking of now is the image – she herself playfully entitles it “Surfin Da Innanetz” – which shows her as a kind of spirit of feminine beauty that pervades and presides over the virtual universe of all our shared loneliness and sadness. Her lips are set in a smile, in this photograph, from which the usual edge of irony is blessedly absent: a benevolent, maternal smile formed, nonetheless, by lips so young and fresh that they draw on like a lover, not a mother. Her head is propped against the long, slim, delicate fingers of her right hand, supporting her gently at cheek- and chin-bone, and her blue eyes gaze with tender rapture at something on her screen – which we can dream to be us, even if it is most likely only herself.

In another photo from the same month of the same blog, the beauty Stephanie displays is a beauty that must, by its nature, be a step removed from Marian virginity but which imparts to the viewer a similar humbling impression of deep and sacred purity. The photo that I am thinking of belongs to a whole special genre of images of Stephanie which have occupied a position at the very heart of my masochistic obsession with her. These are the images of Stephanie lying on a bed, gazing into the camera, or rather, implicitly, into the eyes of someone who has shared that bed with her just the night before. These images stand at the very centre of my obsession because they epitomize the inextricable intertwinedness of corruption and innocence that captivates me in Stephanie, or in my idea of Stephanie.  In this particular photo, this intertwinedness of corruption and innocence is brought across to the male viewer with a force that brings tears of love and sorrow to his eyes. Although Stephanie’s hair, at the time this photograph was taken, was already dyed jet-black, the predominant colour is a white that seems to have fallen only very slightly away from the pure shining white of virginity. The pillow and sheets are white, the walls are white, and Stephanie wears a white t-shirt. There is a basis, perhaps, in the photograph for the reading of these soft, shadowed whites as merely setting off, and emphasizing, by their contrast, the darker fields of the image – Stephanie’s hair, the deep summer tan of her skin – which seem to evoke the turning-away from virginity that has occurred, in the night just past, on that white bed. The swell of her breasts under the white t-shirt, and her hand laid on her flat, trim belly below them, make the bedroom shown in the photograph a place of sex and passion. But the eyes of the viewer are drawn most centrally and essentially to Stephanie’s face. The expression is still, and on the very verge of sadness. It conveys an openness and vulnerability that it is almost physically painful to keep one’s gaze fixed on for long. Stephanie’s face seems to be pleading with whoever is watching her from the other pillow, or from a chair beside the bed, to be gentle and merciful with the person whom the night has just stripped bare in both body and soul and left bereft of all defences.

The deepest secret of Stephanie’s destructive, enslaving power over me doubtless lay, however, in the fact that the girl who could sometimes shine in this way with a still, almost disembodied beauty, a beauty that seemed to communicate directly from heart to heart, was also perfectly capable of recreating herself, at any moment, as a creature that held whatever man beheld her in the crudest and most brutal of ways, by our trembling guts and helplessly stiffening cocks. Long before I ever learnt anything about how far Stephanie had already ventured into corruption and cold sexual calculation, I could sense what skill was at her disposal in such matters should she only make the decision to make use of it.

Stephanie belonged to the heavily “nipponized” generation of American youth, born in the late 80s or early 90s, whose basic framework of communication and cultural orientation among themselves was drawn in very large part from Japanese cartoons, comics, and computer games. Again, I have no clear or certain knowledge of her life before 2008 – nor indeed any very clear or certain idea of it after this date – but I am sure that she had found her way to 4chan already at the age of fifteen or sixteen and had there become even more familiar with the sensibilities and imagery which enjoyed common currency among the US’s “Japanified” youth. When, early in 2009 at the age of twenty, she threw herself with serious effort into a modelling career, the “Japanese” sensibility which she had been acquiring throughout her teenage years was applied to good effect. In particular, she showed no inhibition about playing with the dangerously sexual elements of Japanese culture –the erotic fixation on pubescent and pre-pubescent schoolgirls and the whole lurid manga world of sublimated and unsublimated sexual violence – that had entered massively into Western culture during the twenty years that she had been in the world.      

In one set of photos in particular, which she had shot of herself in March or April 2009, she proved her astonishing intellectual and physical skill in manipulating this register of sexual images. One photo I am thinking of showed Stephanie seated on a sofa in a room decorated entirely in bright, intense colours such as would appeal, already in themselves, to a childish sensibility and taste. Her hair, again, is dyed black and her lips and eyelids heavily made-up. Her clothes, however, are the clothes of a ten- or twelve-year-old. On her upper body, she wears a bright red t-shirt stamped with the images of Pikachu and other Pokemon figures rushing dynamically out of the garment’s “picture plane” toward the viewer. Her hands are raised in front of her chest – holding a small mechanism which bears an image of Pierce Brosnan as 007 (I was later informed that it was the console for the “Golden Eye” computer game) down onto which she gazes with an expression of infantile delight and fascination – so that, even in this t-shirt of tight rather than loose fit, her breasts are barely evident. On her lower body she wears nothing at all except a pair of panties, covered by the hanging t-shirt except directly in the area of the crotch. The panties are neither cut sheer, nor of any material or colour that an adult might have selected with a view to arouse or entice. They appear, in fact, greyish or off-white, like a pair of plain cotton panties that have been mistakenly put in the wash with other garments. A piece of functional, children’s underwear, in any case, that seems to imply no thought or awareness of the sexual concerns of the adult world. This functional unawareness, however, actually makes the receding slope of the thin material over the barely-hidden vagina all the more provocative and exciting, particularly as Stephanie, in an especially child-like gesture, has folded her naked foot up onto the sofa, so that its toes are pressed rather awkwardly and messily against the equally naked skin of the inside of one of her thighs and the harder skin of the heel is almost touching the off-white gusset that is all that shields her cunt from our eyes. There is something obscene and intensely exciting about this proximity of the bone and muscle and relatively hard, horny skin of her foot to the soft recessive flesh – shaven of hair when one’s fantasy is dominated by the image of the twenty-year-old, pristinely hairless when it is the forbidden image of a twelve-year-old that dominates – hidden in those plain child’s panties.

The perversion of sexual masochism would seem, on superficial consideration, to place, by its very nature, those who suffer from it at a safe distance, at least, from the even more degrading and stigmatizing perversion of paedophilia. But in practice, the prematurely sexualized pre-adolescent is, potentially at least, the consummate dominatrix. A twelve-year-old girl can crucify and annihilate a man more really and totally in a second and with a single word than one of Sacher-Masoch’s matronly Amazons can do over months or years and with a whole houseful of ritualistic paraphernalia. I like, at least, to believe that it was no genuine tendency to paedophilia, but just the sudden intense awareness that they awoke in me of what utter and terrible power a Stephanie like the one presented in these photos – a Stephanie indeterminately twenty or twelve years old – would enjoy over me that made them photos that I masturbated more hours over than any other set of photos I had seen of her or was to see of her in future. I would let every detail of the image described sink into my brain through my open eyes, then close them and let the fantasy of an encounter with this compelling child-girl become my whole reality, curled in the darkness of my bed. I would masturbate to the thought of myself as an avuncular friend of her family, trusted to babysit her when her father and step-mother were away. I would imagine her slowly coming to an awareness of the effect that her body, though still in almost every detail the body of a child, could already have on certain older men. I would imagine her playing with the havoc that she was wreaking on me with the same innocent hungry delight as she played with the “Golden Eye” console in the photo. I would imagine myself yielding suddenly, completely to the force of forbidden, obscene desire and falling to my knees before her, pulling at my cock and begging her to let me draw aside the little off-white gusset of her panties, to slaver and suck in ecstasy and abjection at a long pink naked vulnerable slit of sweet flesh that might be the cunt of the twenty-year-old Stephanie shaven of its hair or might equally be the hairless cunt of the forbidden little girl of twelve. Finally, I would imagine her destroying me on a childish whim, speaking out before her family, in a clear child’s voice, and with open, innocent child’s eyes, that “Uncle Alex likes to kiss me where I go pee-pee” and watching, half-afraid, half-satisfied with the effect of her words, as her father beats me and as I am dragged away in handcuffs by the police.

Stephanie, then, as I learnt early on in my contact with her, could be a fantasy of both these types of feminine beauty:  the beauty, on the one hand, that struck from heart to heart and soul to soul and that, on the other, that struck from swelling breasts and hidden, enticing cunt to quaking guts and helplessly hardening cock. To actually experience Stephanie, though – and particularly to watch her on camera in her Stickam “lives” – as I did for perhaps a hundred hours in total all through the summer and autumn of 2008 – was to experience a girl whose thoughts and feelings about both these ways of being “beautiful” clearly went far beyond either of the types of beauty in themselves. From both of them – from her visceral, perverse sexiness and even from the luminous feminine loveliness that seemed to emanate naturally and inevitably from her in certain photographs – she stood a little back, seemingly troublingly aware of the element of unreality in each, of how each was indeed a “fantasy” projected into her by others and of how there was a “Stephanie” behind and beneath them both that neither really touched.

The name that my life and studies had taught me to give to this “standing back from herself” that was such a striking feature of Stephanie’s personality was “irony”, and it was the cool, dry irony of the girl, perhaps even more than her directly sexual appeal, that made her more and more the almost exclusive object of my fantasies. (As the summer wore on, I still sought cyber-sexual encounters with other girls on Stickam, but these girls were all poor substitutes for Stephanie now – who certainly often required “substitutes” because she would sometimes, after driving me into a positive sexual frenzy with some “live” in which all these aspects of her beauty – sexuality, gentle womanly loveliness, and dry, cool ironizing on both – had woven hypnotizingly, for an hour, into and out of one another, remain offline for as long as a week or ten days.) The thought, admittedly, often occurred to me that my perception of her as a genius of irony was a perception skewed and invalidated by the thirty years’ difference between our ages. It is well known what a massive upturn in the historical fortunes of the practice of irony has been brought by these last thirty years. The culture of the generations born in 1980 or 1990 is generally much more pervasively suffused with irony than was the culture of my generation of 1960. It is conceivable that Stephanie did not stand out at all in this respect from girls of around the same age as her but only seemed to me to do so due to my relatively limited familiarity with this generation.

And yet I do not think so. There is really no doubt in my mind that, although Stephanie shared with millions of girls an intense desire to be a model, her true vocation would have been as a comedienne and that, in this area, she possessed a natural gift that was rare in any generation. Her Stickam “lives”, indeed, had already spontaneously and effortlessly become, by the time that I became a silent, voyeuristic presence in them, the very thing that thousands of girls on Stickam applied, in vain, every effort, to turn their own “lives” into: a showcase for the hostess’s unique style of charm and beauty, with an audience who had developed a discerning and subtle taste for just this style of beauty above all others. The visitors to Stephanie’s “lives” were exclusively male, of course. She did, however, a much, much lower proportion of “passing trade” than did the average Stickam girl. More or less the same fifteen or twenty boys and men – many of them old habitués of 4chan and masters of the likewise acerbically ironical common culture of this well-known website – could be counted on to assemble around her every time she “went live” and, in that summer of 2008, she was clearly already a small-scale “cult” in certain select milieus.  

She was, for example, around this time an almost indispensable icon and point of (affectionate, I think, even if ironical and often scatological) reference for a website that had grown directly out of 4chan a couple of years before. This was “Crackyhouse”, a website dedicated to the cult of “stalking” and obsessive voyeuristic information-gathering that had grown up around Olivia Fields, a British schoolgirl who had posted a series of more or less erotic images of herself on the Internet in 2005 and 2006, had been drawn, as “Cracky-Chan”, into the volatile, chaotic world of 4chan’s “b/board”, and had subsequently, under pressure from the genuinely disturbing flood of attempts to penetrate every area of her private life, apparently ceased to engage in any sort of interaction over the Web.  Crackyhouse was operated by a young man called Jeff who was as unfailingly present as I was, all that summer, in Stephanie’s Stickam “lives”. Unlike myself, however, Jeff was a constant active contributor, both over microphone and by typing in the public room, to these “lives”’ conversation, which allowed me soon to form a picture of him as a highly intelligent, incisively witty, and deeply gentle person with a genuine affection for Stephanie. I do not know where he and Stephanie first met. Not on Stickam, I would imagine. Perhaps it was years earlier, through the 4chan b/board. Again, I can only surmise that Stephanie was drawn into the world of the Crackychan website initially just as one among the several girls whom Jeff persuaded to take on the role of ironic substitutes for the now-long-absent Olivia Fields (I later saw photographs of Stephanie grinning in “Cracky make-up” that reproduced certain of the best-known images of the British girl from the 4chan b/board two or three years before).  By the time I stumbled into this milieu through Stickam, however, the young men at Crackyhouse had clearly developed a deep appreciation of Stephanie’s personality in its own right. Among the facilities offered by the site that summer was the possibility of downloading videos of certain of Stephanie’s Stickam “lives” recorded, I would guess, just a few weeks or months before i first found my way to her profile page. I took, of course, the fullest possible advantage of this facility, and among the videos that I downloaded from Crackyhouse was one that is of key significance for the specifically sado-masochistic development of the relationship with Stephanie that I will describe below, since it allowed me my first - and indeed my one and only actual – sight of Stephanie and her boyfriend in a situation of intimacy. It was through another of these videos, however, as I remember, that I was first deeply impressed by how consummate a natural comedienne Stephanie was – how there was a trait of personality in her that inclined to sacrifice even the intoxicating pleasures of being sexy and being beautiful to the differently intoxicating delight of laughing about sex and beauty – and  it is this video that I want to describe first, here.  

Computer problems have long since destroyed my downloaded copy of the video but, as I remember, the scene recorded by it took place in the same cramped, messy San Jose bedroom as I had already become so familiar with through all the hours I’d spent myself in Stephanie’s “lives”. The background, likewise, of the little “story” told in it is hopelessly obscure to me: some affair, I gleaned from the video, of a car belonging to Stephanie that had been put up for sale, without her knowledge, on the Internet.  The aspects of Stephanie’s personality that come to expression in the video are powerfully affecting even when one really understands little or nothing of what is going on. The three or four minutes recorded show a friend arriving to visit Stephanie in her room at home – a slim, tall, handsome fellow whom I assumed (perhaps wrongly) to be gay, persuaded of this by his good looks and perhaps by the fact that relations of easy, friendly intimacy with heterosexual males tend to arise only rarely in the lives of girls as pretty and as sexually self-aware as Stephanie. The web-camera records the two of them performing various operations on her laptop, with Stephanie adopting that heart-melting attitude of obviously not-quite-genuine high-handedness and bossiness that I already knew so well from her “lives”. The thrill of comic delight, however – which, yes, now that I recall and relive it, surely was also a thrill of sexual delight, for all its positively “anti-sexual” violence and grotesqueness – comes when Stephanie suddenly comes on the site where her car has, without her permission, been advertised as “for sale”. The strong, slim body in its loose, West-Coast clothing suddenly springs into violent, unfeminine activity and begins to beat the young man, as Stephanie rains down on him all the vocabulary of insults and obscenities at the disposal of her “ghetto”-schooled generation. He retaliates, however, and, in a second, Stephanie is flung into the even more unfeminine position of being pressed down, under his larger and stronger body, on her bed, with her legs drawn up over her torso to protect her but her slim arms pinned easily back by his stronger arms. (Recorded along with the soundtrack of the video are the comments made on microphone during the “live” and, if the cries of “Rape her! Rape her!” are themselves, in the last analysis, instances of the black humour and irony of 4chan, there is also, here as in almost everything that has to do with Stephanie and her world, a sexually deadly earnest word spoken in jest; there surely did course a little thrill of animal excitement through the viewers of the “live” that day as Stephanie’s powerful, vigorous body was pinned down and made helpless to move or defend itself by an even more powerful and vigorous male body.)The charm of the video lies, however, in the way that Stephanie, her feminine grace and dignity once forfeited, still keeps returning, with comical determination to pit herself against a hopelessly superior force, to the attack. In the space of two or three minutes, she is thrown to the bed again, let up, takes up a pillow, is effortlessly disarmed of it, thrown down again, let up again, thrown down a fourth time – until, in a high sharp voice of placation and submission that clearly reveals what a consciously clownish self-staging the whole struggle has been for her, she suddenly proclaims: “I’m finished! I’m finished!”: a declaration of surrender without conditions other than (a final, heart-touching comic encore) an almost inaudibly murmured “Don’t sell my fucking car...” as she drags her bruised body back to the computer.

The parameters, as I have said, of my relationship with Stephanie as it later developed have meant that I do not know, nor will I probably ever know, very many details about Stephanie’s daily life. But the memory of this video, and of a hundred other moments that I witnessed myself, directly, in her Stickam “lives” in the course of 2008, convince me that Stephanie has probably fallen again and again in her life, with a deep secret joy and satisfaction, into this role of the “clown”, of the awkward unfeminine “funny girl”, in her interaction with boys and with other girls and even, more perilously, with men whom she hoped to make her lovers. An entry on her blog from the period of her highest excitement about a possible modelling career has prompted me to much meditation on this element of her personality. In the spring of 2009, Stephanie joined in the auditions for the TV show “America’s Next Top Model”. (The idea was perhaps not as banal and hopeless as it sounded to me when I first heard about it. That very year, Allison Harvard – a girl of an attractiveness quite as quirky and unorthodox as Stephanie’s who had emerged from a similar background of minor fame on 4chan and elsewhere – had introduced a new and highly contemporary type of charm and beauty into this otherwise hopelessly mainstream show, not only passing the initial auditions but gaining, to almost universal astonishment, the position of runner-up in the show’s twelfth cycle.) The photo she posted on her blog in March of that year shows her neighbours in the row of seats in which she waited for her audition: four black girls and a tanned blonde in a pink t-shirt who looks like the artificially-extracted quintessence of the Californian high-school cheerleader, all bending forward, with cheeks puffed out by half-suppressed laughter, toward the holder of the cell-phone camera. It is captioned: “Black girls said I was hilaaaaaaarious.”

I have often wondered how aware Stephanie was of the immense difficulty of combining this identity of the “funny girl”, whom all the other girls find “hilaaaaaaarious”, with an identity that will be effective and successful in a world like that of (even the post-Allison-Harvard)  “America’s Next Top Model”. (In any case, whether for this or for another reason, she did not pass the audition.) I admit, with considerable shame, that I myself provide a good illustration of how, when a beautiful girl happens also to be intelligent, and finds it impossible, for this reason, to take her beauty quite as seriously and quite as “straight” as others tend to take it, this really can engender a certain idiotic blindness, in men who might have desired her, to the actual persisting reality of this beauty.  I paid Stephanie the deserved compliment, and did her the due justice, of falling a little in love with her humour and with her charmingly implied awareness that her beauty was after all only a human beauty and subject to the same accidents and collapses as any other human beauty. But in doing so I found myself, involuntarily and indeed more or less unconsciously, doing her the serious injustice of thinking and feeling in my heart that perhaps, then, there really were plenty of girls with a more inhuman, more invulnerable beauty then hers, and that Stephanie sometimes smiled about her own sexiness because there really was some inadequacy there, something merely second- or third-rate in the general order of sexual appeal and attraction, to smile about and look down on. This way of thinking about Stephanie that her irony and humour had given rise to in me expressed itself, indeed, not just as a way of thinking but even as a way of perceiving.  For almost two years – right up to the time when I finally got to actually see her naked body (a time when so much had changed between us that seeing it had an entirely different meaning from the one it might have had in these weeks of my earliest sexual fantasizations about her) – if anyone had asked me to describe Stephanie’s physique, I would have said, without really thinking about it, that she was a skinny, flat-chested girl, with a body more like a boy’s than a woman’s. It was an androgynous, “tomboyish” body of this sort that seemed to me naturally to “go with” the zany, self-satirizing personality that I had watched for so many hours on screen. Whenever I saw photographic evidence that seemed to contradict this assumption – and I saw it often enough; in dozens of the photographs of Stephanie that I sought out on her blogs and on her myspace and Stickam accounts in 2008 and 2009, a womanly fullness of breast or the voluptuous curve of an ass-cheek were unmistakably visible – I both registered the photograph and refused to register it. Stephanie’s womanly loveliness was an anomaly to me. I was too much in love with the clownish “funny girl” who appeared to vehemently deny that this womanly beauty existed.

If it worked to the detriment of my perception of her as the viscerally physically appealing young woman that she actually was, however, this slightly off-target fantasy of Stephanie served, as a whole, to turn attraction gradually into obsession. What grew up in me in the middle months of 2008 really was an aching, unrelenting condition of “being enamoured”. It clearly was much more dangerous for me to become enamoured of a girl whom I perceived – even unconsciously and fundamentally inaccurately – to be slightly awkward, slightly inadequate, and with a slight tendency to over-intellectualize in a way detrimental to her direct sexual appeal and attraction than it would have been for me to become enamoured of a girl whom I perceived as having none of these shortcomings. Armour-plated monsters of cold, pneumatic sensuality and absolute, robotic sexual self-confidence such as I had sometimes encountered on Stickam and elsewhere provided, indeed, very appropriate stimuli for my masochistic sensibility. Stephanie, however – the awkward, pretty, half-“babe”/half-“nerd” Stephanie that I constructed for myself, taking my cue from her on-camera clowning with her own image, in the course of 2008 – spoke not just to this deep layer of masochistic perversity in me but also to the still deeper layer – a layer that was buried so deep under the years and the decades that I would have forgotten it was there had it not regularly resurfaced in my dreams – of longing for someone whom I might love in the way that normal human beings love one another. The funny, self-deprecating, slightly “nerdy” Stephanie was the “girlfriend” that I had hoped to find, all those years ago, in Karen, before Karen’s inability to reciprocate my desire had churned up strata of masochistic perversity in me whose roots, yes, doubtless lay far, far back in childhood at a time when no real romantic relationship could ever possibly have come to spare me this lonely sexual fate. Stephanie’s deviations from, and fallings-short of, a perfect beauty and a perfect happiness were – whether merely mistaken perceptions or not – what made my desire for her something stronger than just a desire for a pretty girl on camera and turned it into something which approached the dangerous, potentially destructive intensity of genuine love.

And certainly, not all the sadnesses and awkwardnesses that I believed myself to perceive in Stephanie’s life were as mistakenly perceived as was the merely imaginary scrawniness of her body. There really was sorrow and failure enough in her young life, and in the dark, complex past out of which she had been born. And if there was something that set her off from other pretty girls, something that blessed her and cursed her with just the sardonic, self-reflective sense of humour which misled me into perceiving her body as a body that was really to be sardonically and condescendingly smiled about, perhaps it was to be traced to precisely this early sorrow and to this dark and complex past.

Again, none of this is anything that one might easily have guessed or gleaned just from her Stickam profile, with its brief, bald information on age, location and looks. I tended to shake, indeed, my own head at the beginning in bemused disbelief at the idea of my conceiving this enduring and growing passion for a girl from California of all places, the “El Dorado banal de tous les vieux garcons”. But the California that I began, as the months passed, to catch fleeting glimpses of through Stephanie and through the fragmentary news I received of her world – this California too, like this particular girl who lived in it, was something significantly different from the “golden country” swelling the expansive dreams of prosperity and easy sensuality dreamt in Warsaw high-rises, in Nanjing student dormitories and, yes, doubtless still on the cold eastern seaboard of the United States themselves.  The fortuitously and fragmentarily emerging details of Stephanie’s life began to remind me, after a while, that I was not, after all, myself entirely ignorant of this other California. I had encountered it as it had been seventy or eighty years ago, in the world of itinerant farm-labourers and fruit-pickers described in the novels of John Steinbeck. (Steinbeck’s books were surely also among those assembled on that seldom-used Sussex bookshelf where I had discovered, in 1972 or 1973, along with the earliest textual nourishment for some pre-existing masochistic hunger in me, also the first stories that would feed my hunger for a literature that was more than a literature of entertainment; at fourteen, I took a mystical delight in the fragile subterfuge of Lenny and George in “Of Mice and Men”, and observed with excited reverence, in “The Grapes of Wrath”, how the language that the world demanded it be described in was somehow a language both factual and lyrical). I also knew from Leonard Gardner’s novel “Fat City”, and from John Huston’s marvellous filming of this novel, that this “other California” had not changed such a very great deal at least in the forty years between Steinbeck’s 1930’s and Huston’s 1972.

The Northern Californian city of Stockton captured in the scenes of Huston’s movie appeared, in fact, not so very different from the poor Irish London of my youth: the same men and women confronting, in the same empty light of morning, the same vacant lots and dirty, idle streets; people drawn by hope, and held by the proud refusal to admit, to others or to themselves, that their hope had been disappointed and defeated.  It was there in Stockton, I learnt, that Stephanie had been born. Almost as many years intervened, of course, between the Stockton of Stephanie’s early childhood and the Stockton of Gardner and Huston as fell between this latter Stockton and the Northern California of Steinbeck. The bleak Stockton captured by Huston in 1972 had perhaps been a Stockton that Stephanie’s father had known. By all reports, however, the 1980’s and 1990’s had not changed the city for the better.

Stephanie, in any case, as far as I could piece together from information gathered directly or indirectly, had been raised not in that city but in various towns in California and elsewhere. The bedroom, as I have said, into which I looked through all those nights on Stickam was a bedroom in a house in San Jose. The end of my voyeuristic pleasure, however, in observing Stephanie in her bedroom – Stephanie, as I shall relate in the next chapter, more or less stopped appearing on Stickam from the end of 2008 on – coincided, however, with the end of the bedroom itself. In that year, Stephanie’s family found itself at the very epicentre of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that set off the world-wide recession of 2009. They were one of the one in twenty families in California who lost their home that year, and Stephanie’s future looked, for several months, frighteningly uncertain, until, early in 2009, she, her father, and her step-mother found temporary refuge on an alpaca ranch run by Stephanie’s step-mother’s family.

Although I am myself no child or wealth and privilege and have known vicissitudes like these in my own life – I still remember, forty years on, the seemingly countless desperate crossings  I made with my mother back and forth across the Irish Sea, and my terror of the huge moaning hull of the crowded ferry boat at Liverpool, while my father struggled alone in London to secure a house to shelter his wife and child – they shocked me a little when reported of a girl of Stephanie’s generation and nationality. What I learnt in the course of 2008 of the precariousness of her family’s economic situation, however, was, as it turned, just the faintest foreshadowing of what I was to discover shortly afterward about the degree of Stephanie’s intimacy, from earliest childhood on, with the dark and desperate underside of the Californian dream. Towards the end of that year I had been drawn, through my growing obsession with Stephanie, a little way into the affairs of the Crackyhouse site, where a modest cult of Stephanie was still being practiced by a few regular users. For a brief period, I maintained an e-mail correspondence with one such regular contributor to the site. I do not believe that he numbered among the particular fans of Stephanie. On the contrary, I think I detected in him a certain hostility toward her. Indeed, the tangled history of such hostilities, obsessions,, jealousies, betrayals and acts of vengeance among the continuators of the cult of Olivia Fields that he described to me in confusing detail soon made me seriously doubt whether a private correspondence in this connection was at all advisable or desirable, and I let the contact lapse. Before I did so, however, he had communicated to me, in one of his mails, two pieces of information about Stephanie which he felt I might appreciate. (Although I had already acquired, on Crackyhouse, the appellation “Stephanie’s stalker”, I felt, in fact, a certain fastidiousness about acquiring any information about Stephanie by such indirect and underhand means, and this fastidiousness, as well as the unmistakable undertone of hostility toward Stephanie with which the information was imparted, contributed to my decision not to reply to this e-mail). The first item of information – that she “had once stuck her finger up her boyfriend’s ass” – appeared, at the time, to be just a childishly derogatory and boundlessly irrelevant piece of gossip. (With the hindsight of the year that followed, I revised even this opinion somewhat. The deepening of my masochistic need for Stephanie took the form, as the reader will see, eventually of a submissive homosexual fixation on her boyfriend, and the news, presuming it were true, that this boyfriend was not himself entirely without a sense for the pleasures that might be derived from being penetrated as well as from penetrating might have given me hope, if I had known at the time what lay ahead of me, that such a homosexual fixation would be more easily tolerated by him than it would be by most heterosexual young men). The second item of information, however, shocked, intrigued and fascinated me. It was that Stephanie had been raised from infancy by her father and a series of step-mothers, and that her birth-mother was a prostitute, now in prison somewhere in the South of the USA.

I questioned Stephanie about this, cautiously but frankly, at the very next opportunity. (It seems very strange when I recall it now, but in those days – up until the early months of 2009 – direct, rational, human communication via AIM, for example, was still quite possible, and relatively frequent, between us). She confirmed it to be true, immediately and unapologetically. The woman who had given birth to her was, in fact, not only in prison for prostitution but also slowly dying of AIDS, “but I’m not mad or sad about it”, wrote Stephanie. She posted, in fact, in February of that year a photograph of her mother, flagrantly and unmistakably a convict, on her blog: a wild, beaten-looking woman in orange overalls, awkwardly manipulating two telephone receivers in a prison visiting booth, who nonetheless bears, perhaps, in her truculent, coarsened face the last ruined traces of what might once have been a beauty as seductive as her daughter’s.      

Knowing all this lent a special fascination to the experience of desiring this shining, vivacious, heart-achingly pretty young girl as she moved and chattered on camera. There was a special sensuality to desiring someone in the lissom symphony of whose teenage beauty there were to be heard these faint bass notes of an abysmal sadness. There were guilty reminders, indeed, enough for me in the information that I gathered daily about Stephanie that the sexual fixation that I was yielding to was a fixation on someone who was still almost a child, someone with whom a relation which I have already called “love” was, strictly speaking, just not possible. And yet the strange sorrows and disasters that she claimed had made her neither “sad nor bad” had, so I felt, given a depth and a complex human fascination that was unlikely to be encountered in any other girl not yet twenty. Again and again, things she wrote on her blog touched me more deeply even than I was touched by the sight of her living beauty on the Stickam camera, and made this living beauty, for me, a hundred times more exciting. In the August of 2009, when it seemed that the effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and her family’s loss of their home were going to force her to move to her sister’s house in St. Louis, she wrote: “I’ll see you again one day, California, and I’ll be able to conquer every part of your body when I get back.”

In my search for images of Stephanie and hints about her intimacies with her boyfriend that I could masturbate to, discoveries like this made the tide of voyeuristic, masochistic desire recede for many minutes, yielding the lonely strand of my mind to sad contemplation and amazed affection. How strange a voice this was, I thought, to issue from such a pretty teenage girl. The relation to the world that it suggested seemed to me to be a masculine one, one that recalled the great hopes of human history, the “American Dream” in a sense that reached back behind the long-accustomed easy cynicism about this dream to that “transitory enchanted moment” evoked by Fitzgerald in the last paragraphs of “Gatsby”.  To see this hope expressed by Stephanie in her blog inspired in me a love that became even deeper and more dangerous when I scrolled back and contemplated again the photograph she had posted there of her ruined, imprisoned mother. Stephanie’s young, fragile life, it seemed to me, already spanned such an ocean of hope and of the catastrophic failure of hope. I had already left behind me the stage of seeing in this girl another cold, perfect beauty on the rock of whose utter, unresponsive difference from me I could feel the masochistic ecstasy of beating myself bloody, and had begun to entertain dangerous dreams that she was not different from me, but similar as soul is to soul.

Chapter Six

The more I learnt about Stephanie that went beyond the sphere of the merely sexually arousing, the more exciting it became for me to pour out to her, through the little “instant message” boxes in her Stickam “lives”, all the details of the specifically sexual effect that she was having on me. My growing awareness of how intelligent, how complex, how humanly deep this nineteen-year-old girl really was lent a special intensity to the experience of confessing, in detail, my masochistic enslavement to the stimulation of her eyes, her lips, the form of her breasts faintly discernible under her t-shirt and that of her ass under her loose summer shorts or pants. I almost never ventured to type anything directly into the main “public room” of the “lives”. If discussion there was sexual at all, it was always, at most, only obliquely and ironically so. (The Stickam users who intruded into pretty girls’ open rooms with crudely sexual propositions, sometimes with merely aggressive and abusive, but sometimes with genuinely pathetically libidinous intent, found the soil of Stephanie’s “lives” so obviously unfertile in this respect that they invariably left the room almost as soon as they entered it.) My practice was to crouch silently in, as it were, a “corner” of the “live” and to listen out for themes thrown out by Stephanie – or by one of the group of fifteen or twenty witty, articulate young men who were present as regularly as I was – that could serve as the basis or starting point for some voyeuristic fantasy the developing details of which I would confess, in long improvised strings of endearing obscenities and obscene endearments,  to Stephanie, as to some beautiful nubile priestess who was both object and absolver of my sin, through the “instant message” boxes which (or so I hoped) would be seen by nobody but her.

The most apt of all such themes, of course, to serve as the basis for my self-degrading confessions to Stephanie in the little IM-boxes was the theme of her relations with the young man – two or three years older than Stephanie herself – whom she tended to refer to in her “lives” simply as “the boyfriend”. His name, as I gathered after a few weeks, was actually Matt, and Stephanie liked to amuse and tease the participants in her “lives” by giving us glimpses into the daily and nightly incidents involved in their (to all appearances, as yet far from stable) relationship. She would sometimes accept a cell-phone call from Matt on camera, and allow us all to eavesdrop at least on her half of the often very intimate conversation. Other times, she would directly describe to us the circumstances of some occasion on which he had fucked her, or on which she had given him head. As I have said, the implicitly generally accepted spirit and mood of the “live” was such that all this was, ostensibly at least, “played strictly for laughs”. The comments typed into the public room about what Stephanie reported to have gone on between her and Matt were all facetious and ironic. A public confession by anyone that they had actually become aroused by the image of Stephanie going down on her boyfriend in the stalls of a cinema during a movie they’d both been bored by would have been excruciatingly out of place.  I often asked myself back then, indeed, and still sometimes ask myself, such questions as: Were Jeff and the other 4chan guys who were present in these “lives” secretly much less coolly amused, and much more genuinely aroused, by these stories of Stephanie’s sex life than their dry, detached comments indicated? Was Stephanie aware of this, and was her own cool and playful manner itself a mask for a deep and dizzying exhibitionistic thrill? If I had been able to see the screen of her laptop during her “live” sessions on Stickam, would it have been crowded with dozens of IM boxes besides my own, and would all these boxes have been crammed with pleading obscenities not dissimilar to mine?

The answers to these questions – or to most of them – only Stephanie herself knew. For my own part, I can only say that I poured out, during these “lives”, a constant stream of private IMs to her whenever she had not deselected this facility. Although the first six or eight months of my contact with Stephanie were, as I have said, a time in which our relationship had certain warm and human elements to it, and might even have been described as a friendship, I can see very clearly now, with hindsight, how our intense, secret half-communication, through instant-message boxes, in these “lives” caused there gradually to arise between us the rudimentary forms of all the frankly sado-masochistic rituals that came to dominate and direct our entire interaction with one another from the following year on.

Stephanie proved herself here to be a born mistress, for example, of the art of communicating without perceptible communication. My IMs, of course, were profuse, relentless. I bombarded her with confessional sentence after confessional sentence, often writing much too rapidly for the little boxes, so that certain bursts of obscene fantasy were occasionally lost forever, before she could read them, when the IM box reached its limit of 200 or 300 words and automatically reloaded. Stephanie’s great erotic art, however, lay in reading and taking in so very great a proportion of the content of these fantasizing messages, while presenting on camera an air that instilled, somehow, in the viewer a total, unshakeable conviction that she was involved in no kind of sexual or intimate interaction and would have not the slightest interest in becoming involved in such an interaction. The jolt of shocking, juddering pleasure that went through me when, in response perhaps to one IM in thirty or forty, she sent a curt, cold, mostly monosyllabic reply, was the first precursor of the deep sexual-metaphysical experiences I went through with her – or at least experienced in relation to her –  in the following year. My faith had been sorely tried and tested through the twenty or thirty minutes that had passed without response. I had been almost on the point of ceasing to believe that there was communication, relation there at all. And then, a brief, cold word was suddenly given me that altered, like the sun emerging from behind a cloud, the whole bleak and barren landscape of the last half-hour. She had been hearing my long confession. The words that had welled out of me like the sweat of longing that her beauty forced from my flesh had been passing, every one of them, through those lovely cold grey-blue eyes into her brain, and from her brain down into all the dark sweet intimate inward chambers of her body, where they had engendered tiny changes and reactions, even if these were only reactions of repulsion and disgust. These long stretches of time when Stephanie compelled me to keep faith even though everything suggested that no cause for faith was present, prepared me for the much sorer and longer tests of faith that she was to put me through in the months ahead.    

Of all these electrifying monosyllables of sudden, unhoped-for response the most electrifying of all was surely that in which she confirmed, for the first time, as fact my crudest, most central and most fundamental fantasy about her boyfriend. Every time she had alluded to some sexual encounter between herself and Matt, I had begun, masturbating frantically as I did so, to fill out IM box after IM box with fantasized descriptions not only of her nakedness and of her feelings as she surrendered for his pleasure more and more intimate parts of her body but also of his arousal at her beauty, of his hardening, swelling cock. I confessed how I wanted him to be massively virile and well-endowed, how I imagined his penis swelling and growing between her sweet, still-smiling lips as she went down on him in the dark of the cinema until she could no longer fit all its length in her mouth, and until some middle-aged man like me, who had already been struck and captivated by her beauty and sensuality in the cinema lobby, was compelled to rub his own little cock in the half-darkness as he craned over the seats the one or two rows of seats that separated them and strained to make out every dimly-visible detail of Stephanie’s lovely head, moving sensuously up and down along a shaft of nine, ten inches of hard, muscular meat. One night, she finally, almost casually, confirmed, in response to perhaps the hundredth fantasized allusion that I’d made to his cock, that Matt was indeed remarkably well-hung. I was unable to type for a few seconds, just falling to my knees and masturbating, gasping and sobbing, in front of the screen, as she offered, there in the tiny IM box, a few small snippets of information that would keep me, from that point on, sleepless and constantly painfully masochistically aroused for months on end. She told me that he and his friends had compared the size of their penises and that Matt’s was the biggest by far; that she had been a little shocked and apprehensive when she first saw it and that he really did sometimes hurt her a little when he fucked her; but that it didn’t matter so much because, although she sometimes liked to make love gently, she also liked hard and brutal sex.

It is more than conceivable to me, today, that Stephanie said these things deliberately to tease and excite me and that little of this was entirely true. That she is capable, and even a consummate mistress, of such deceit has been amply confirmed by subsequent events. Just at this time, however, when the picture I was forming of her as an unusual, intelligent girl with a complex relation to her own beauty and sexuality was beginning to take firm shape in my mind, I felt a wild, desperate willingness in me to “suspend all disbelief” and to let the conviction that such a girl had instinctively chosen as her lover a well-hung, possibly somewhat cruel and brutal stud rampage through me and wreak its sweet havoc on all my psychological and physical metabolism. I suppose that it is another fundamental trait of my character to feel the same deep ambivalence toward intellectuality and spirituality perceived in others as I feel toward these things as I experience them in myself. I know so well the high, remote ice-plains of the life of the mind: how pure the air is there, but also how thin it is and what a wearying strain it is always to have to breathe it. The almost religiously beautiful images of Stephanie that had touched my heart while barely arousing my body, the entries on her blog that had seemed to open up great sad vistas on a personal and racial destiny of hope against the defeat of hope – all these things had raised Stephanie, in my eyes, up into this cold, sublime region of the ice-plains, and there was a desperate urge in me to remove her, at least in part, from this region again and to restore her to some earthlier, earthier place. Here is not the place to try to disentangle all the doubtless complex and composite impulses behind this urge. There was surely an element of envy there, a desire to have these “ice-regions” for myself alone, as well as a kind of pity, a desire to spare her the terrible cold and loneliness that I have known all my life. But whatever the composition of impulses that went to make it up, there was certainly strongly present in me too a sexual fantasy that is doubtless relatively common and banal among all those who have ever, by external or internal forces, been compelled to live in a close relation to culture. This was the fantasy of Stephanie as a girl whose life, day to day, was defined by relations and calibrations of almost infinite subtlety, delicacy and fragility – by irony and by the fine, slow, arduous labour of the creation of beauty – and who, for just this reason, felt, at regular or irregular intervals, the need awaken in her to become a being defined by responses that were neither fine, nor subtle, nor slow, nor arduous. That is, to become a being for whom the difference between melancholy numbness and ecstatic bliss lay in something as crudely and exactly quantifiable as two or three inches fewer, or two or three inches more, of hard-swollen muscle inside the moist and clutching muscle of her cunt.

Moreover, if there was still some small degree of scepticism in me concerning whether Stephanie was telling me the truth when she spoke of being a little frightened by Matt’s big cock and of sometimes liking it a little when his size caused her pain and discomfort, I had next to no doubts about the basic fact of Matt’s really being able to provide her, should she really desire them, with these two or three extra inches of swollen muscle. That is to say, I did not doubt that his penis really was a large and virile one. Another of the several video recordings of Stephanie’s Stickam “lives” that were available on the Crackyhouse site that year was the record of an occasion on which she had “gone live” not from her own bedroom but from Matt’s. For most of the duration of this fifteen- or twenty-minute video, all that was to be seen on camera was Stephanie’s pretty, mischievously smiling face. The excitement of seeing just this girlishly lovely face alone was, admittedly, intensified enormously by the sight of the rumpled bed behind her, and the consequent certain knowledge that, half or three quarters of an hour before, Stephanie and Matt had been fucking there on that bed. Stephanie, looking fresh and groomed, had plainly just finished showering after their sex, and four or five minutes into the video Matt too passes across the camera behind her, evidently himself just emerging from the shower, as he is dressed only in a towel tied around his hips. The moment in this video to which I returned and masturbated a hundred times over the next two years was one that might easily have been predicted. A few seconds after Matt has passed behind her, Stephanie’s mischievous smile broadens into a grin and she turns the web camera, for a few brief seconds, to capture Matt, who is standing, the towel now cast aside, on the other side of the room. His cock is flaccid but, even in its flaccid state, excitingly large, hanging down five or six inches between his slim, strong legs, a  small fifth limb of still-quiescent muscle, the head of which stands out as an even thicker knob of firm red flesh from the already thick, vein-embossed shaft.

I must have indulged in a thousand hours of fantasization, since I first saw this video sometime toward the end of 2008, about how that thick flaccid tube of muscle must swell and grow as it hardens under Stephanie’s fingers or lips, and about how frighteningly, fascinatingly big it must become when fully aroused and erect. At a much later point, when the sado-masochistic nature of my relationship to Stephanie had become much more marked than it was in that first year, I even paid Matt – paid Matt directly, not Stephanie –  several hundred dollars for a photograph that he promised he would send me of his cock in that state of full, stiff arousal that it must be in when Stephanie climbs onto him and takes all his virility up inside her, or when she kneels on all fours on their bed and lets him put it slowly into her from behind. The photograph was never sent, of course, because by that point all of us understood – Stephanie and Matt and above all I myself – that to give me anything that sense can grasp (even if this be only some teasing, unsatisfying object of the sense of hearing or of sight, and never even the distant prospect of the immersing, sating experience of immediate bodily touch that Stephanie and Matt enjoyed together) is to take me from me something of what I really, most profoundly desire: a “supra-sensuality” in which the burning longing remains while sense, of every type and every level, fades insubstantially away. Or very possibly, this was not at all the reason why the photograph was never sent. Very possibly, Matt neither knew nor cared about my compulsive aspiration to “supra-sensuality” but had simply noted that it was possible to extract large sums of money from me without actually providing anything at all in return – that, indeed, the less one provided the more urgent and abject became my pleas to be permitted to pay more and more. This radical impossibility of answering and deciding the question: “Were those who might have been imagined to be subtly complicit in my rituals of self-degradation and self-humiliation really always secretly only cynically calculating?” – or, alternatively, the question: “Were those who might have been imagined to be cynically calculating in permitting me my rituals of self-degradation and self-humiliation really always secretly subtly complicit?” – became, at a somewhat later point, essentially constitutive, in its very undecidability, of the specific eroticism (which was also the specific “mysticism”) of my relationship to Stephanie.

But to return to this year of 2008 in which I had only recently encountered Stephanie: I suppose it was hardly reasonably to be expected that a relationship which had already begun, in its few first weeks and months, to involve such elements of disorienting deviancy and perversity as these my hungry fantasies about the size of Matt’s cock could remain for very long a relationship that would include any element at all of mutual trust, respect, and affection. It is remarkable, indeed, that a degree, at least, of such trust, respect and affection appeared to grow up during the spring and summer of 2008, despite and side by side with the feverish masochistic rituals of the IMs sent during Stephanie’s Stickam “lives”, and to persist until the end of that year. Here too, when I remember how things were between Stephanie and I in the autumn and early winter of that year, it appears to me, in light of the present situation of utter coldness and distance between us, that the memories I seem to have of those days cannot really be memories but must be fantasies. Today, when a dozen pleading SMS’s containing offers of money and protestations of eternal adoration fail to elicit even the briefest and most dismissive of responses, it is hard to believe that on many Berlin mornings, only eighteen or twenty months ago, I would myself receive an unexpected and unsolicited SMS from Stephanie’s California midnight wishing me an affectionate “goodnight”.

And yet it was so. Stephanie really did show me, in the first six or nine months of our acquaintance, a direct and apparently genuine affection, and even went so far as to seek my advice regarding the troubles in her own life. As I have already indicated, these troubles were, in that year of 2008, considerable. Her family’s perilous housing situation was a source of consternation for Stephanie above all because a move away from San Jose – which appeared to be inevitable whatever turn things might take – would mean a physical separation from Matt, and Matt’s and Stephanie’s relationship, in 2008, looked nowhere near strong enough to survive being conducted over a distance of hundreds, or even only of ten of miles. From the fragmentary information that I could gather, indeed, her relationship with Matt was in such a parlous state towards the end of that year that the term “boyfriend”, to which Stephanie gave such an arch, ironical intonation every time she used it in one of her Stickam “lives”, ought perhaps to have been used here within “scare quotes” even more audible than those with which Stephanie tended to surround it. The couple appeared, in the period between August and December, to break up around once a fortnight on average. Stephanie mentioned in passing, either on Stickam or in the course of the several AIM and cell-phone conversations we had during these months, incidents in which she and Matt had actually physically fought with one another and each break-up, though followed again and again by a reconciliation, clearly felt, to Stephanie, like much more than just a lovers’ tiff. Each time, she was convinced that the relationship with Matt was definitively over and that she had been left alone.

Around New Year, I remember – a season of deep symbolic significance for any young person –  I discovered, in the course of a long telephone conversation with Stephanie, just what a deep state of depression she was in. That such a conversation even took place seems astonishing to me not only from the perspective of the present day. In the course of the preceding six months I had made to Stephanie, in writing, every imaginable sort of degrading, disgusting, and potentially frightening confession. I had, at one time or another, begged her to piss and to shit on me, related fantasies of smelling and licking her soiled underwear and of being beaten and fucked by her boyfriend while she lay on the bed and watched, and had confessed over and over again (until this one obscenity at least had surely forfeited all power to shock or disgust) that I was on my knees masturbating as I watched her and sent her my IMs. And yet this had apparently not had the effect that one might have had every reason to expect it would: namely, the effect of making her think of me as an obscenely older pervert driven solely by sick sexual obsessions who surely lacked the capacity to see in her, or in other girls her age, anything beyond arbitrarily interchangeable means to my weird sexual ends . Stephanie still felt able and willing to describe to me in this long conversation early on New Years Eve certain aspects of her life which she well knew added nothing to her appeal for someone who saw her purely and simply as an object of masturbatory fantasy. She spoke to me, that morning, very frankly and bravely about her constant fear of loneliness and fear of the possibility that she might end up living and dying alone and about her oppressive suspicion that the friends that she appeared to have were not really friends at all.

 I found myself struck, as she talked, with admiration once again for her wisdom, insight, and discernment, because everything she said clearly showed that she had early on recognized and understood that my ritualistic circling around certain caricatural masochistic fixations – the idea of the brutal stud with his ten-inch penis; the idea of the sensitive and gentle girl whose anatomy nonetheless dictates that she will always willingly submit her body to this brutality; the idea of my own ill-endowed, inadequately brutal self, who, in being excluded from this predestined coupling of pure virility with pure femininity, was thereby excluded from the realm of sexuality altogether – did not mean that there was no part of me that could see beyond these rituals and caricatures. Stephanie spoke to me that morning about the complex, nuanced, indeterminate and open world of real sexual relations between real human beings, clearly believing that it made sense to speak to me about this world and that there was no essential disability or damage in me that would block my understanding of what she was saying. She spoke about the ways in which even Matt had fallen short of the ideal of the girl-conquering stud, about his failures and his actually relatively limited sexual experience. She spoke about how her own desire would, in any case, not necessarily be a desire for such a “stud” even if there were one, somewhere, who really lived up to this invulnerably virile ideal. She spoke about how she had already often discovered in herself, even in those very few years that she had yet lived as a woman, an ability and indeed a strong desire to give her love to boys who had nothing at all of the “stud” about them. At certain points in the conversation, she seemed really to have accepted that she and Matt had broken up for good, and to be thinking aloud in my presence about whom she might love and be loved by instead of him. We spoke briefly of Jeff – the young man whose sad, sardonic wit I knew well from Stephanie’s Stickam “lives” and the testimonies to whose lonely, melancholy, maladjusted love for Olivia Fields I had often seen on Crackyhouse – and Stephanie significantly refused to concur with me that such a young man, for example, could never be her lover the way that Matt had been. We even turned finally to the topic of my own melancholy, maladjusted life, and, for the first time, Stephanie expressed a desire to see the man that had fed and lived, for so many nights, on the elusive sight of her. She asked me to send her a photograph of myself.  What made, somehow, this request both less perturbing and more perturbing at once was that she asked not for a photograph of me as I was then, at age forty-nine, but for a photograph of me at her age.  

I dearly wish that I could say that Stephanie had only done me justice in reaching out to me, that New Years Eve morning, as a human being who could break out of the narrow circle of his sexual fixations and obsessions and see another living and feeling person as indeed just another living and feeling person. But I fear that I have to accept and admit that she did me a little more than justice and gave me just a little more than my due. My inward reactions to our conversation that day, only some of which I openly confessed to her, proved to me what a terrible, decisive grip these fixations and obsessions still had on my life. I experienced, for example, a remarkably powerful inward shying-away from the idea, that Stephanie had casually alluded to, that a young man like Jeff could perhaps, under different circumstances, have become the lover to her that Matt was. There was a kind of horror for me in the idea of Stephanie spending long afternoons making tender and intelligent love with this obviously tender and intelligent young man whose life, I knew, had not been one without sorrow. I felt the same deep fastidiousness at the thought of seeing or knowing of a sexual relationship between Stephanie and a young man like Jeff as the normal man feels at the thought of seeing or knowing of any sexual relationship between a woman and a man other than himself – but that I, the masochistic pervert, did not feel at the thought of seeing and knowing of Stephanie’s willing surrender to a brutal animal violation by a cruel man with a swollen invading cock. I felt an even greater fastidiousness – a positive rising, choking panic – at the faint hints that Stephanie had appeared to give out that maybe even I – or at least some Alex who existed no longer but who had existed once – could be an acceptable object of her love and desire. I never sent her any photograph of myself at twenty or twenty-two. Not, I think, out of apprehension that my twenty-two-year-old self might disappoint her. I know that I was tall and slim and rather handsome at twenty-two, in that terrible summer spent wrangling with and weeping over Karen. My apprehension, I am sure, was, on the contrary, that Stephanie would not be disappointed in the image I would send her of myself at around her own age, that the heart of this beautiful, sad and lonely girl would reach out to me across the years and the oceans and, in offering to soothe my wounds, demand of me that I soothe and heal its own. I felt myself turn away from this prospect – divorced though it was, by the vast gap in space and time that lay between us, from any hope of material realization – with veritable fear and horror and disgust. What I wanted from Stephanie, what the deepest and most decisive part of me wanted from her, was not, it seemed, a healing, after all the long lost years, of the wounds inflicted by that distant summer with Karen, but rather the infliction of those wounds once again, a reliving of the rejection and the contempt and the despair.

We arrive here, indeed, at another juncture in this narrative where I cannot say with any certainty just why what happened now happened. The simple fact is indisputable that Stephanie and I never talked again in the frank and human way in which we talked that New Years Eve morning. From the beginning of January 2009 onward, communication between Stephanie and I took, more and more decidedly, that path of “communication by non-communication” that had been marked out in my Stickam IMs of the summer and in Stephanie’s strange manner of sustaining and encouraging them precisely by not responding or reacting to them, until today, over a year on from this point, the very idea of Stephanie’s communicating with me in any but the most utterly oblique and ciphered way is unimaginable. About just why and how this occurred, however, I can say nothing certain.

Possibly, Stephanie’s turning away from the path, which we seemed for a moment to be on the point of setting out on, of a human, intimate friendship with me was nothing that I could possibly have prevented or altered. Stephanie withdrew, in fact, in those weeks in which 2008 gave way to 2009, from very much that she had hitherto been deeply involved in. She ceased, from this point on, almost completely to be a visible presence either on Crackyhouse or on Stickam. The sufficient explanation that lies easiest to hand is that, in the new year, despite Stephanie’s having indeed to move out of San Jose onto her step-mother’s family’s alpaca ranch, her relationship with Matt appeared suddenly somehow after all to stabilize and deepen. And certainly, when, in the early months of the new year, I found myself having to wean myself painfully off the sexual practices that had become a habit with me in the course of 2008 – above all, the long trances of self-degrading adoration and confession that I had indulged in in Stephanie’s Stickam “lives” almost every European morning and Californian night – I explained this hard necessity to myself simply in terms of Stephanie’s now possessing, in a boyfriend whom she loved and who loved her, a single source of satisfaction for her all sexual needs which left men like me no role to play in her life. I often asked myself, though, in the months that followed, whether the definite emotional shying-away that I had detected in myself, in those few brief days or hours when Stephanie had seemed almost on the point of offering me, even at this grotesquely late hour, the simple, un-oblique and un-ciphered love and sex that anyone unaware of my fundamental masochism might well imagine my wooing of teenage girls was intended to gain me, might not also have played its part in turning Stephanie into what she became to me in the following months – and indeed to others in the months that followed these. Even after Stephanie’s withdrawal from any visible presence on the Crackyhouse site, she continued, sporadically, to be a theme of discussion there, and I – primarily for this reason – continued to be a regular contributor to it. At a point much, much further on in the story I am telling here, someone put to me, on this site, the question of whether I “had trouble sleeping” knowing that I was partly responsible for turning Stephanie into what she had by then, in the spring of 2010, become. Just what this was I shall turn to only in my final chapter, But I can say already here that the imputation – which, on first hearing it, had appeared to me ignorant and entirely ungrounded – did gradually act to cast my thoughts back to that sad New Year in which 2008 gave way to 2009, and to make me think again about whether there really existed then, between Stephanie and I, that extreme imbalance of power in her favour that it excited me to believe existed between us. Did I perhaps have much more power over this sad and struggling girl than it pleased my submissive sexual constitution to believe I had? Did she sense, after all, in our almost sole real human encounter on the telephone at the very end of 2008, how powerfully something in me was pushing her away from the role of caring, giving lover – and therefore toward an opposite, colder, darker role? Did I really play my part, after all, in directing and moulding the will of someone who, in the months to come, seemed to become for me the very embodiment of a cruel and absolute wilfulness?  

I say this because Stephanie’s withdrawal, in this new year of 2009, from all the modes in which she had formerly been accessible to me did not mean the end of our contact – and certainly did not mean the end of the kind of subtly sado-masochistic interaction that had begun to take shape in our IM exchanges in her Stickam “lives”. Stephanie’s new identity as a young woman in a firm and steady relationship, and as a young woman no longer accessible through public social forums in anything like the degree in which she had been accessible through them six months before, had the effect, in fact, of extending this atmosphere of a sado-masochistic disproportion in power across all the remaining forms of my contact with her. We still maintained – albeit much more irregularly – contact by the AIM messaging system, but the girl with whom I messaged now was no longer a girl who felt likely ever to turn to me with any sort of plea for emotional or personal support. The impression she conveyed from now on was of someone whose emotional and sexual needs were securely and entirely satisfied by the one important relationship in her life: that with Matt.

This meant that certain whole modes and forms of contact between us gradually became things that I ceased to think of even attempting to re-initiate. A telephone conversation of the sort that we might have held only two or three months before, for example, had become by February 2009 something inconceivable. In moments of especially extreme sexual arousal and especially urgent need to confess and degrade myself, I would leave long gasping, pleading messages in her cell-phone mailbox – but, after January, I knew that her actually picking up when I called her was a possibility no longer worth even thinking about. The months of February and March were above all months of SMS’s. These arduous, expensive, constricting little messages-in-bottles provided a kind of substitute for the Stickam IMs that I could no longer use, since Stephanie had ceased more or less entirely to “go live”. As in the case of the IMs, I received, I suppose, on average, one terse reply from Stephanie for every ten or twenty SMS’s that I sent her. It was not only the mechanical restriction of the new medium, however, that made these replies even terser and colder than the replies that I had received from her on Stickam. The interludes of humour and human affection which had often interrupted the stream of ritualised obscenities during our interaction on Stickam were much rarer now. All that late winter and spring, the image of Stephanie that came across to me through my cell-phone and my AIM account, as I lay in my bed in the drying sweat and cum of my night-long fantasies about her, was of a girl who sat stern and erect and utterly unmoved by the desperate degraded pleas that I sent out to her, occupied no doubt, as she distractedly, monosyllabically “fielded” these pleas, at the same time with some much more engaging and engrossing activity. She trained me as one would train a dog, in these months, to feel myself sweetly penetrated and gutted by the infinitely effortless and heedless grapheme with which she lazily, indifferently granted me permission to torture myself with any image I chose to let arise in my head:

“Oh God, did he fuck you last night, Stephanie?”

“Mhm.”

“Oh did he do it deep, did he hurt you?”

“Mhm.”

I seemed to sense contained in this lazy little cluster of vowel-less consonants all the supra-sensual bliss of the realm of sweet denial and refusal that Stephanie was leading me into. Her lips, when she made this sound, would be closed – and this compelled me to think of their sensual, beautiful openness as she took Matt’s cock in her mouth, as she gasped out his name while he opened and filled her body; the vibration that barely issued, in this “mhm”, from behind these closed lips came from deep down in her throat – and this compelled me to think of how even the farthest reddest tenderest recesses of that throat had surely been violated and used by the big brutal head of his cock, how every slightest syllable she uttered now somehow bore the mark and timbre of this violation.

These early months of 2009, then, saw the retreat and, to all appearances, the vanishing from my relations with Stephanie Turner of pretty much all that had been visibly or audibly humanly tender in these relations. I have described in earlier chapters, by reference to Karl Kraus, to Jack Arnold and to Richard Matheson, the sort of toolbox of low and high cultural reference points that I had assembled over the years in order to enable myself to maintain in my mind, even under conditions like those that existed between Stephanie and I in the early months of 2009, a distinction between, on the one hand, a “visible and audible” tenderness and, on the other, a tenderness that had receded and retreated into utter shadow and utter silence - but had not thereby vanished or even diminished, indeed had possibly (even if unknowably) become all the greater and deeper a tenderness through this very retreat. To someone whose sexual constitution is such that they simply have no perception or understanding for the specific sexual ecstasy of the masochist these cultural tools that I used to maintain this distinction in my mind will be nothing, of course, but tools of foolish self-delusion. The idea of a “foolishness” of just this sort, however, is far more deeply rooted in our culture than is indicated by any of the cultural reference points which I have yet adduced. The masochism which made me hold faithfully and firmly to Stephanie even in these months when she slowly ceased to speak even the tiniest tender word to me is much more profoundly affined than is normally recognized with that central, foundational foolishness of Christian European culture: the “foolishness to the Greeks” of messianic salvation.

Of all my experiences of reading between my thirteenth and my twentieth year – and I read, during my adolescence, with a voraciousness that is almost inconceivable to me now, a voraciousness far exceeding the still-considerable voraciousness with which I read in my university years – I think that I can only say of two such experiences that I still remember exactly every detail of their accompanying material circumstances. The first was the experience of reading the anonymous text containing the vague but galvanizing scenario of the taunting woman – the woman asking a somehow restrained or disabled man: “Do you want to see the hair?” – which I have described in Chapter One.  The second was an experience of reading from two or three years later

I have lived with the thought which  I first encountered in Borges’s “Three Versions of Judas” for almost as many years now as I have lived with the emotion which I first encountered in that anonymous description of masochistic sexual desire, and I have come to believe that, if these two encounters stand out together as by far the most vivid encounters of my reading life, this is because what I encountered in the one was profoundly similar in its essence to what I encountered in the other. This is true first in the very general sense that the thought encountered in the former text is a thought which inspires profound emotion, while the emotion encountered in the latter is an emotion which incites to lengthy thought. But it is true also in a much more precise sense. The messianic saviour and the dominatrix are affined with one another in precisely their most defining characteristics.