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I had the dream again. The dream I have every night. And maybe this really was the last time. That's what he said: it would be the last. But, God, I hope not. Not after last night. The dream always begins with utter darkness. Not just the dark of night in some huge city where the buildings blot out the stars. Not just the dark of the earth above this basement in a basement where I always awaken. No, it is the dark that is without light, a dark so dark it is no longer dark. It is the void… Until, as always, someone lets there be light. In this case, lights. Two caged lightbulbs. As my eyes wobble into focus, I'm sure I've died and gone to paradise. I'm in the secret VIP playroom of the Mineshaft—Valhalla to a race of warrior gods who will never walk the face of the earth again. God, just thinking about it now and my dick is as tall and hard as the World Tree. I guess, before this dream gets any weirder, I should use this moment of clarity to contextualize this story's dreamer, i.e., me. I'm afraid I can't use my real name in case anyone on my thesis committee reads this. I can't even describe myself. Sorry. I'd never get lucky again at another MLA conference if I did. What I can say is that I'm working on my doctorate in comparative literature. And that I rather cleverly used both my BAs in Religion and Philosophy and all my field research at rest stops throughout the tri-state area of Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky to write my master's thesis on the queerly coded semiotics within the Odin saga. I know what you're thinking: Norse mythology is pretty out there for a thesis in English. Still, here I am at Columbia. Here I am in New York. In my dream, however, I'm in the New York I've always longed to visit. The New York that has almost been eaten away, not by the city's billions of rats, mind you, but by a single mouse. The billionaire mouse that ate Times Square. In my dream, it will always be 1977. The bunker smells of beery urine mixed with Crisco mixed with poppers mixed with the thick, snuffed-out candle smell of spunk. It is one vast crotch, bathed in all these unguents and unwashed for a week and a day, overripe and ready to fall. I pretend that the enormous rectangle of glistening black leather I'm manacled to is the top sheet from Mr. Benson's bed and I'm his newest slave. I've run away and wait for him to find me here. 'Please, Sir,' I whisper as my asshole gasps and gasps from the removal of the latest fist attached to the latest forearm the size of Popeye's. 'I am so unworthy, Sir. Please come and reclaim your property. Don't let that square-jawed, steely-eyed neo-Nazi abduct me and sell me to your age's wicked stereotype of sex-crazed Arab sheiks. I long only to be a white slave to you, Sir.' I stop, swallowing my next words. I sense, somehow, a new presence. I crane my neck up. My head aches from the poppers which only makes the music—once again they're playing KC and the Sunshine Band's "I'm Your Boogie Man"—louder and louder. I look towards the only other light in the room besides the one above, highlighting my body. It spotlights the doorway. In it, there stands a tall, thin man in a very odd leather outfit. He wears an black leather replica of a herringbone-patterned tweed suit and a white leather turtleneck. His eyes are two squares of light. Glasses. On his head, the standard issue leather bike cap. He takes it off as he enters the room. It seems the gentleman handballer has arrived. As he moves closer, I realize he's also wearing a black leather toupee. How odd, I think. He doffs the wig and then the silver-studded black leather scales fall from my eyes. It's Him! Foucault. Michel, ma belle. He steps to the edge of the sling. My asshole and I shudder. He speaks. Something is wrong. I know he is speaking French and I know, up until this moment, I have been fluent in French. But he's speaking now and I can't understand a word. I strain to listen as if my ears are plugged thick with wax. I try to crane my neck even further so I'm closer to his mouth. I hear nothing except the blood gurgling along the veins in my temple. That and Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night." I must appear very bewildered for he stops and looks into my eyes for the first time, looks over my entire body for the first time. He commences anew and this time I know I look like a stait-jacketed inmate in a cell at Bedlam rather than an academic bound to a sling in the Mineshaft's cellar. For this time when he speaks, words—honest-to-God words—appear, like subtitles, before him. They spell themselves out across his chest and I read them. And, as I read them, they break into a smoke of letters that encircles Foucault's head and then trail off, broken, around the room, bumping against the ceiling and into the corners. I squint my eyes. Despite the ringing bells the poppers have set off in my skull, despite the off-key voices singing along to "Don't Leave Me This Way," I concentrate. I see only the words and, finally, I hear them. Monsieur Foucault has come tonight to plead with me. He is pleading with me. It is urgent, he begs, that I stop the endless references to him in every discourse, every journal article, every personal ad, every phone message. It is imperative that I stop the endless troubling of his shade with phallocentric masturbatory reveries like this one. I look up at his face. His mouth is a thick line. A vein, like a small garden snake, wriggles beneath the skin of his forehead. His cheeks are red and sunken like the hollow of a brightly painted bowl. I say I am sorry. Truly, I am very sorry. The ends of his mouth slump. He sighs. He pities me, he says, but tonight it is I who must pity him. I have no idea, he chastens me without even having to wag a finger, what my Foucault-centric obsession is doing to his death. Here he had planned to enjoy several decentered, yet industrious centuries, as a professor in the Academie de l'Elysée. Yes, he reads my eyes now as I've been reading his chest, it is that Elysium, the true Champs Elysée.
Yes, that supposed paradise where he is now haunted by the virilizing dreams of the living. And, like ghosts here, you, he points to me, and your kind shadow me there. The reddening snake on his forehead has begun to dance. I am ruining his death, he shouts. De Sade, at the mere sight of him and his following flock of boyish ghosts, laughs so hard now that he can no longer enjoy a quiet night of whist and brandy cordials with the Marquis and the Borgias, Cesare and Lucrezia. And Bataille and Nietzsche, whenever they pass him on another of their peripatetic conversations, no longer stop to invite him to walk the gardens with them. Even the American, John Preston, he laments, refuses to fuck him because he feels it's demeaning to fist a man whose legend valorizes the desire-driven and genitalized jerk-off fantasies of so many twenty-something post-gay geekoids like me.
Suddenly the anger, the blood, the life drain from his face. I fear he will cry, perhaps even sob. Elton John is singing "Love Lies Bleeding." Instead, he raises himself up to his full height and asks, if he were to pleasure me once, would I swear never to dream of him again.
I nod so vigorously the leather sheet flaps beneath me and the chains twist as if they were holding up a child spinning in his swing.
He slips an arm from his jacket; hands pull it into the shadows. He removes his glasses; more hands take them. He raises his arms; even more hands gently tug the white leather turtleneck up his torso and across his sharp Gallic chin, cheeks, nose and over his large cranial dome, as smooth and milky white as china from Limoges.
I choke when I see the T-shirt he's wearing. It's a classical wife-beater. No sleeves. No collar. A reminder perhaps of his solidarity with the workers of the world. But in the center of his chest is emblazoned a child's drawing of a mustachioed man and the slogan: Hello Nietzsche. I pause and read it again. That's actually when I choke.
It's Nietzsche. It's Nietzsche with a shock of black hair, two black button eyes, a huge mustache that looks as if a black Pekingese crawled in under his nose and died, and, oddest of all, this cartoon Nietzsche is smiling, no beaming.
My choking finally dies down to several coughs and a sputter when a huge blue and white drum of Crisco on a dolly as red as any hanky in the room is wheeled in and placed just beneath Nietzsche's lips. The hands retreat. Now Foucault himself smiles.
He dips the tips of his fingers in the vat of vegetarian lard as if it were a fingerbowl. He dabs the Crisco onto his face with the cold calm of a drag queen preparing to remove her makeup and return to the drab world of strip malls and minivans. He grabs a fistful and then another. He lathers it on. In minutes, I no longer recognize my Michel. His head is an egg plastered with white cake frosting.
If he has done this to repulse me, he's failed. No matter what beastly form he assumes, I know what beauty lies below. For below the skin, the thick cartilage and muscle, the hard bone, there it will be: his brain, gray like a rainy April morning over the rue Champs Elysée, with synapses sparking, showering the dark crevices with brilliant colors, more magnificent than any nighttime spectacle of fireworks and lazers above the Arc de Triomphe on Bastille Day.
My swelling dick rolls back and forth on its warm rug of pubic hairs. It is a Thirties starlet writhing on a circle of black satin sheets, forever captured in the retina of the camera's eye. We luxuriate in our dreams, my dick and I, until my dick jumps. Now I jump. Warm, sticky hands pull at the lips of my still-gaping hole. I assume they're his hands until another pair pushes at the mouth of my ass then another pair and another pair. A final pair shoves itself up inside me like an enormous dildo.
By now, my pelvis should have snapped like a wishbone. It doesn't. My hole, my ass, my cock, my thighs, my belly all grow warmer. Perhaps the Crisco is really a topical anesthetic or, in the evening's earlier flurry of fists, an epidural was administered that I have, contrary to all laws of nature, forgotten.
I don't know; I don't care. All I feel is the pulsing of my sphincters—two warm rubbery bands around the two forearms. Then, slowly, the clasped hands bud within me. A crack. I feel the shift and the wet heat of what I can only imagine to be the Crisco melting out of the blossoming hands.
I want to open my eyes. I want to see him, see all the others. But I can't move; the hands around my asshole, within my asshole, bind me to the sling. I only "see" the melting pad of butter-flavored Crisco that is the vibrating yellow of the light beyond my eyelids.
I am growing sickly dizzy. The theme from Star Wars is now being played for the third time. Its chemical equivalent, a smell like an exploding drug lab, punches me in the left and then right nostril. I try to guess how many pairs of hands are swinging the little vial of poppers under my nose. My sinuses rip open and then my brain.
My head is empty; my body is full…
My entrails are falling! I'm shitting all my intestines! I shriek, I think, out loud. Another pair of hands strokes my throbbing forehead and temples. I'm panting. I'm sobbing. I'm empty. The flower has been plucked; the arms have left me.
I gasp. Four, ten, twenty hands push at my hole. Another drug lab explodes in my face. The big ball pushes against whatever is left of my boyish pucker. I want to faint. To scream. To howl.
But I no longer think. I am remembering these words only now as I tell this. At that moment, I have no mind.
Yet, my decentered self knows that these are not hands. Too smooth. They lack the odd-shaped knobs of knuckles or bony points of fingers or the blunt knives of fingernails. I know it is his head. He is crowning within me.
I am breath. I breathe in and swallow more of his hard, warm, stinging skull. I breathe out and hold him in my ass's embrace. I breathe in and my bones break and my skin tears. I breathe out and my blood aches and my nerves weep. I breathe in. I breathe out. I breathe in…
I scream and I scream and I scream. The pride of every great French profile jabs the first, then the second, burning rings of fire that were once my sphincters. The nose, his nose, drags closer and closer to my prostate.
His head stops. I will my body to suck in more. More. More. No luck. But, some part of me knows, if I am patient, I will get lucky, more lucky than I have ever been or ever will be.
For Foucault has not finished with me. He presses his face deep into the walls of my rectum, until his beautiful big nose pokes into my prostate. He rubs his nose once. Every hair on my body gets hard. He rubs his nose again. I shudder. My spine is a wave of hot gelatin.
He rubs his nose one last time and I sing. An original aria to bring the opera queens in the stalls and troughs and slings several stories above us to their feet. Garbled bits of "La Marseillaise," the "Internationale," Rita Coolidge's "(Your Love is Lifting Me) Higher and Higher," an improvisational Gregorian chant, and Schiller's "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
And deep within, I hear something. No, it is someone. My Michel! He is speaking within me. There is discourse even in our intercourse! I draw in the air around me to sing my aria's final refrain and then I realize he is singing. He is singing with me. I swear I hear "…did I ever tell you I'm your hero? I am the subtext beneath your sling."
I bellow triumphantly, my alveoli bursting and my lungs tattering, "I am spread atop the cockhead of God!"
For the encore, there is only one thing left to do: I shoot. But not the usual spunk that looks like several strands of white Sillee-String™. No. This time I come words. His words. Some of my favorites of his favorites. I clench and spurt out panopticon. My balls throb. Then my whole dick sneezes out psychologico-medical armature and I'm grunting for breath. A final pop. The desexualization [i.e., the degenitalization] of pleasure. I pass out.
When I wake, his words are brittle and stuck to the hairs of my chest. I look into the shadows, into the light for him. He's gone…
Until tonight, I pray.
Forgive me, mon seigneur. I did not know how impossible last night's oath would be to keep. Please, Michel, come soon.
I'm sorry, my beloved brain, but now I only love you more.
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