1. There was a statue by the Moscow Metro stop called Kitai-Gorod where men would gather. There was a basement-level toilet nearby where they would fuck. I went on a June evening, when the sun was still strong in the sky, but the toilet was closed. The stairs leading down to it were accessible, and right in front of the door was a pool of piss—when the toilet closed men would just piss against the door, and it would gather at their heels. At the far end of the underground stairwell was a young boy, pants down to his hips, and an older man in a cheap suit, cock out, staring at me. They stood in the piss; the boy held his arms to the wall, so as not to fall over, as the man slowly pushed his cock in, no condom, no spit, just dry.
2. I took a boy home once—he was probably 18, but he used a fake ID. I awoke early in the morning to see him climb out of bed. When I rose again, he was still gone. The front door to my apartment hung open. I’d left some money out on a table, and of course that was gone too. I needed a walk—I looked everywhere for my keys, but the 18-year-old had stolen them. I called my landlord, made a transparent excuse about having lost the keys in a taxi. He agreed to change the locks. For weeks after, the boy stayed in my fantasies—images of him in the shower before we fucked, him on his back, his skinny body slipping out of my room. One night I heard keys scraping against my door—it might have been him, it might have been someone he’d sold the keys to. I ran to the peephole, but saw no one; I didn’t dare open the door to look down the hall. Even after that, even now, thoughts of him still get me hard.
Sex makes things. Depending on the act, it makes heat, or babies, or fantasies, or viruses, or movies, or love, or fear, or legislature. When it’s expected and overdone, it makes cliché. When it’s moving, or real, or new, it makes copies of itself. It brings more sex, as we try to find again the beauty we saw. When we succeed, sex feels unprecedented, even if it is the same legs and arms, the same toilet, the same back seat, the same dirty phrases, the same hour of night. And when your desires frighten you, sometimes sex unmakes things too. I never want to be that boy fucked dry against the wall; I never want to be the callous man behind him. I never want a trick to rob me again. But in fantasy, I find that making needs unmaking in order to feel real. I must tear up the treasured world, I must force my old safe dignity down on its knees into the piss, and then, in the empty space that remains, I can build a new pleasure of my own.
Ian Sherman writes stories and lives in Seattle. His work has previously been published in “Blithe House Quarterly” and “Velvet Mafia”; he is currently working on a novel-length piece entitled “Speak With New Mouths.” He may be reached at iansage@yahoo.com. The essay above relies heavily on the work of Elaine Scarry, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze.
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