Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis)

FRISK

ALSO BY DENNIS COOPER

Guide

Try

Wrong

Closer

He Cried

Safe

The Missing Men

The Tenderness of the Wolves

Idols

Tiger Beat

FRISK

Dennis Cooper

for Mark Ewert

Contents

00
3

WILD
5

TENSE
24

TORN
41

SPACED
65

NUMB
89

WILDER
108

00
127

Put all the images in language in a place of safety and make use of them, for they are in the desert, and it's in the desert we must go and look for them.

-JEAN GENET

FRISK

He lies naked on a bed with his wrists bound, legs splayed, ankles secured to the corners. Striped sheet, tangled blanket. In the first shot his long, straight black hair's fallen over his face, covering everything but a greasy chin, which juts through the strands. He seems thirteen, fourteen. The genitals look like a weirdly shaped stone. His necktie is made out of a long piece of rope.

Two. Another medium shot. His hair curves sharply down either temple, sweeps back, and hooks over his ears like raised theater curtains. Longish face, pert nose. Dark eyes, glazed. Big mouth, too open. Otherwise he hasn't changed, I don't think. Same spindly legs, big feet tilting away from each other. Same crude necktie, bracelets, anklets.

Third shot's a close-up. His face, neck, tie, shoulders, armpits. His tongue's crumpled up in his mouth like a melted candle. His eyes could be parts of a doll. Each reflects the front of a camera. His necktie's tied too tight; the rope is the kind that hoists anchors. If his eyes weren't such clouds, he'd appear to find something or someone hilarious.

Four's a medium shot. He's facedown, wrists and ankles undone. His arms are bent into neat, mirror L's. His ass sports a squarish blotch, resembling ones that hide hard-core sexual acts, but more sloppily drawn. His back, hips, and legs are pale and forgettable by contrast. His haircut's a shambles. His shoulders are dotted with zits.

Five. Close-up. The blotch is actually the mouth of a shallow cave, like the sort ocean waves carve in cliffs. The uneven frame of ass skin is impeccably smooth. The inside of the cave is gray, chopped-up, mushy. At its center's a pit, or a small tunnel entrance, too out-of-focus to actually explore with one's eyes, but too mysterious not to want to try.

WILD

1974

"Wild." Henry knew it. His feelings, thoughts, etc., were the work of people around him. Men particularly. The first made a weirdly detached person out of his body and mind when he was thirteen or something. The next man corrected his predecessor's mistakes. The next changed other stuff. The last few had only tinkered because Henry was perfect, aside from some bad habits.

He raised his glass, sipped, and tried to think about one particular "ex."

He threw the empty glass into the cold black fireplace.

The other young guy in the room seemed unbelievably stoned, drunk ... something. He sat all the way across an ugly Indian rug, staring out or at a set of sliding glass doors. It sounded like it was raining. Henry couldn't see anything out there, even the rain.

"I'm so cold I'm a fucking ice sculpture, right?" Henry asked loudly. The guy had said so, Henry was virtually sure. Still, it was hours ago, if ever. They'd squealed at the time, but the sentence was bullshit. It made Henry sound arrogant, which he probably wasn't.

The guy just stared off at the rain, glass, hallucination, daydream, whatever.

"I'm splitting," Henry said, stood.

The guy swiveled his head. Crack. "Don't ... ouch." His head must have swiveled too quickly or something, because it started trembling like what's-her-name's ... Katharine Hepburn's. He had to grab it with both hands to get it to stop.

This part's a blur.

"You know, it's wild," Henry said. He was fondling his way down a hall behind what's-his-name. "... but I don't even remember where we met tonight. I keep thinking `party.' That's about it. Are you as totaled as I am?"

"Probably." The guy glared over his shoulder. He still looked cute enough to justify what was starting to happen, whatever that was. "Keep your hands down," he added. "I mean if you need to keep your balance, use the walls, not my father's African art collection."

"I am." Henry focused on the door at the end of the hall. He supposed they were aimed there, because it was open. No matter how low he reached on the walls he kept touching the limbs of wooden statues, so he gave up and clutched at the guy's untucked shirt.

"Don't fucking rip it."

"I'm not."

Henry flopped on the bed. It bounced around and squeaked for five, six seconds. The guy stripped. He had tiny red genitals, spider-webby blond pubic hair. Not that Henry cared about defects like that. He himself was a big waste of time from the neck down at this point, thanks to uncountable drugs.

"Get that stuff off," the guy mumbled.

"Oh, am I still dressed?" Henry toyed with a shirt button, twirling this way, that. Within a second or two he was spaced out. "Mm." He felt something sharp, fingernails, a hand, the guy's. It was yanking his underwear down. The pair got snagged around his feet. The guy left them dangling there. Henry's feet were huge. He raised up, peered down his chest. But blurry. "So, uh, I don't really know ... what you, like ... expect ... to, like, get out of that." He pointed at his cock and said "that" again, sort of ironically.

"We'll ... see ..." The guy's face made a rocky landing on Henry's crotch.

"Oh, okay, go ahead." Henry let his head drop.

The guy started painting the cock with his tongue. The room felt cozy. Or the pills Henry took that afternoon left him cozy, and the room was just there, a movie set. He shut his eyes, tried to restart a favorite porn daydream. "Shi-i-i-it." His history had been reduced to a simplistic blur, like the trails in the air left by people on fire.