king messianic book alongside my family’s whole Israel Operation Saviour Fantasy thread.
My girlfriend for the past two years had worked really hard with me to exorcise Barbra’s elemental presence from my thinking. I knew that elemental was a way better concept than bitch. Elemental trumped molester. Elemental was it. Ariane said that I had a lot of anger during sex. She said she thought I pounded to get at what I thought I’d been denied. In truth, Ariane only knew about a third of the story of me and Barbra, but she insisted that I had to get rid of this feeling that I wanted to subdue or somehow overpower a woman.
Ariane said: There is nothing inside a woman that is denying you something.
Ariane said: I’m not a trap door. I’m meeting you.
Ariane worked with me during sex to change my ‘bad thinking.’ She actually called it ‘traumatized thinking’ – a need to smother all my bad thoughts with sex. Ariane said I had textbook sex addiction, that my shame from Barbra and the failed way it ended meant, in fact, that I hated myself.
For two years, okay, this is what me and Ariane talked about. I mean, this is what we worked on during sex. I didn’t tell Ariane that it was not always therapeutic. In fact, sometimes it even made me feel worse. Like, Ariane would tell me in sex to go slower and why, and then harder and why, how to lick her, how to suck her and why and why. I secretly did not always subscribe to her method, even though I did like that we had a lot of sex.
What Ariane fixated mostly on about my relationship with Barbra was that she thought that I thought that Barbra wanted to be submissive because Barbra explicitly told me to hurt her.
‘I was mistaken about that,’ Ariane deduced. ‘Barbra was obviously not a submissive.’ Ariane said that what we did was S/M 101. She said what Barbra did is called ‘topping from the bottom.’
Uh, does ‘topping from the bottom’ mean you make up all the rules? I wanted to ask her. Does ‘topping from the bottom’ mean that the knife is always truly yours?
I did not tell Ariane about our specific scripts. I did not tell Ariane about what truly happened at the ending. I told her my scar was from surgery when I was fourteen after I broke my collarbone. I told her, in general, that Barbra asked me to do something and I did it. I told her that we didn’t really have to say yes or no. It was a system, I explained, of complicit synchronicity.
Ariane scoffed. She continually tried to school me. In sex, she said, the woman must lead.
‘This is ancient knowledge. Stuff the Tantrics believed.’
Did the Tantrics believe that a turned-on and traumatized woman could be actually violent? Tantric is outdated, I thought. What did they know about consent?
Ariane assured me that my true self was not chauvinistic. She said that all real men worshipped cunt.
Ariane said, ‘If you love cunt, you actually have to know how to treat it. If you love cunt, you have to know your way around its complex abyss.’
Sometimes I thought Ariane only liked me because I made her feel worshipped. I loved Ariane’s body. She was longarmed, big-nippled, bluish-skinned. When we had sex, I usually licked her pussy for an hour. Between Barbra and Ariane, I’d practised cunt-licking. Girls always said that they loved my way of licking. I always signed my name on their thighs. I licked them and tricked them, massaged them and slapped them. Pussy foam, pussy oil. I liked period pains. I got off being smothered. I liked to see girls get really wild. Licked-open cunts liked to get really wild.
I told the cunt to sit on my face.
I said to the cunt, please hump my whole head.
I loved cunts lodged with matter. I loved a maw full of cunt on my pillowcase.
Ariane said she thought that I needed female camaraderie. She said she thought that I still needed to work on seeing girls as truly equals. She said it was good that I ended my friendship with Joel during high school. She said that Joel was an entitled little prick. Ariane said that chauvinists needed to affirm themselves in groups. She said, that’s the meaning of brotherhood.
Barbra called me bruh. She anointed me Jew-boy and bruh.
The shyster offered me a drag of his South American pipe. It had a carved face on the bowl of a squat man wearing a hat. The pipe tasted like it had been soaked in cologne.
I tried to smoke and to focus on the situation at hand. I tried to focus on the fact that my elemental molester was back, that she brought this treacherous Frenchman with her. I could not focus. Ariane was going to be here soon. God, Ariane and Barbra were going to meet. I smoked and I hedged. I smoked and I hedged. I imagined her slithering upstairs in our fungalscum bathtub. Why’d she ignore me for seven fucking years?
‘Did you know that Leila Khaled hijacked those planes because she needed her father’s attention?’
I was speaking too quickly.
The shyster laughed. ‘She told me you often got angry like this.’
‘And did you know that Leila Khaled had plastic surgery before her second hijacking without an anaesthetic,’ I went on, ‘because she said she could subordinate her personal pain in service of the liberation of her people?’
The shyster smirked. ‘So what does that have to do with Papa?’
I passed back his pipe. I wanted to pitch it. ‘Leila said, and I quote, “I’ve always wanted to know people who love others more than themselves.”’
The shyster made an ah sound that reminded me of my mom.