The Slimy Side of my Nature

People said Warhol was a freak. He admitted to being a freak, that’s the word in his diary. I’M JUST A FREAK it reads but lowercase: page 460. A freak like Nabokov was too, in his way. He asked Vera in one letter to describe every conversation she had with her workmates, to describe every bit of clothing she wore. Then there’s Joyce, a holy freak, in his way. He told Budgen how he’s turned-on by women’s knickers. In fact one of his self-portraits the character Heinz Consumes Everything, he’s arrested for an unspecified sex crime in Phoenix Park with a hint it connects to a lust for lingerie. So Joyce and Nabokov and Warhola you could say were freaks who celebrated it as cosmic sadness and they transformed it into art. And while I’m in this electric feedback game, while I’m droning a drone with this text, I could easily type thousands of words about why I’m a freak, in my way: like the weird little jagged claws scuttling inside you, I thought.

A worming confession then, anyway. Let’s do it, make them doubt, let’s return to my first maggoty performance. I was a kid.

Fourteen, when this slimy side of my nature appeared. This kind of smutty trait displayed itself as a little kink, a little sniff tasted inquisitively at first and then I lost control. Only like everyone, like you I discovered ejaculation around fourteen and it’s that world where this essay begins. Although come to think of it, I tried onanism at nine as well (nine-years-old) after watching uncle redacted down bluebell wood try it. Tugging himself. Seeing him shoot over a dock leaf what looked like melted fat, it was grim but I didn’t realise at the time so the same way my uncle fiddled with himself I went home and fiddled with myself at that age when of course the seed (as in my balls, as in I was too young) it was unseeded. Then I forgot about masturbation until a few months before my fourteenth I thought: I’ll caress myself vigorously, in my room it was, on the bed and it felt really good, once I got going, to produce my own yolk, to spurt over my belly, to chuck it up the wallpaper, crusting the quilt-cover as you do. Or perhaps I’m getting carried away, cos yes I was cautious about where I threw it initially. I used loo-roll. Secretly. That first month. Then found a rag in the kitchen cupboard, an old tea-towel I spurted on and hid in the pillowcase. Then it was I didn’t care. After I’d recovered from the initial body-horror and the fear of my parents knowing I was mucking about, doing embarrassing sexual stuff, when I had gotten over the weirdness, I’d be at it twice daily. Twaddling it. Erupting into the perfect splodge. The language of teenage sperm.

Sorry for the indecorous drips: and I deleted a sentence about despair.

. . .

Easter off school it was when lo: pottering round the house I found in my dad’s bedside locker a pile of magazines, Mayfair, Razzle, Escort, your bog-standard porns. Naked ladies are nice, I thought when I snuck a copy into my bedroom, getting a closer look and I’d never seen the inside of a vagina before and there was almost the inside of a vagina, I was amazed by the lips. There were so many photos of them. Of readers’ wives. (My mum was in a porn mag once, and I found out cos she told me: my brother was in prison and an inmate gave him a pornmag in which there was a photo of our mother naked. Unsure if my bruv was aroused when he flipped to the page and saw her, I know he immediately got her on the phone: threatened to tell me: so she told me, on the phone: but my poor bruv, imagine that.) The stories captivated me as well. One was about a plumber ferreting his way into a housewife’s knickers that he rolls down her legs and sniffs. He inhaled a secret musk, it said and I was like: wow, men actually get pleasure out of female underwear? The heavily stylised descriptions, in-actual-fact, made it seem like gussets smelled beautiful: a mixture of Japanese winter blossom and frying saltfish. I don’t know but it was some kind of imagery. These crude texts sounded fascinating at my age of slime.

. . .

Michelle lived over the road. She had a kid Thomas and when they moved into Hoo View his dad, her partner, a skinheaded runt called Nigel lived there too. My only picture of him is down the library carpark we found a stray dog, my brother and I and this dog a Labrador followed us all afternoon at one point started humping my kid brother in the village and Nigel walked by with three lads who saw the dog attempting to bone Max’s short body and just as I kicked its ribs Nigel grinned and said: Look! All of them laughed. Then time changed things. One Sunday morning, about 3am, I lay asleep while Michelle was in her house, they lived on the end terrace and Nigel had a big survival knife or rifle and he was in a berserk mood that led to Michelle phoning the police so about five cop cars parked in our street while Nigel held her hostage: it was reported in the Herald. Front page I think. Splashed. For a few hours he kept her captive and it was left out of the newspaper but I remember hearing Nigel smeared lipstick over Michelle’s face to make her look like a clown, that night, while outside they were negotiating. Then I dunno what happened but Nigel was jailed. And again time changed things. Michelle lived eventually with Terry and started coming round our house, she not Terry, to chat and smoke, drink tea with my mum.

Still gives me neck-tingles to recollect. Michelle on our couch, with my parents, they sat gossiping about the neighbours (the Bakers and their poltergeist) as I lay on a sheepskin rug. It started when Michelle’s right leg stretched across the carpet and I think she was unaware her toes began stroking up and down, then in circles, against the waist of my top: a sweater: whatever. Slightly brushing my lower back, it felt amazing, the tips of her toes rubbing against while she and my parents chatted about poltergeist or prowlers and eventually my dad noticed or he kept looking towards the floor I believe jealous that Michelle was caressing not him. I knew he wanted to have sex with her. It’s normal. Those tingles felt non-erotic, though, more like the sensations you get with ASMR. With her toes gliding against my right flank, I wanted the moment to go on and on and. Is this before or after the slimy side of my nature? Thinking about it, I think before and although Michelle’s stroking toes felt weird and good, I rarely revisited the memory. Told no one.

After she and my mum got pally, Michelle asked me to babysit. She’d give us a fiver to go round and watch telly, looking after Thomas who was about five-years-old while she went down Adderstone and the first time, I remember, the images in my brain are simple brown patches, Michelle opened the front door and led me into the living-room where in front of they had a hearth made of old bricks her boyfriend Terry stood. He was butch, you could tell he could look after himself. But still welcoming, reeking of that HAI KARATE aftershave as he referred me to the VHS player and a pile of videotapes.

Have a ganders if you want, he said. It’s hardcore, I get me porn from Holland.

Alright I might, I said and felt Michelle’s needling gaze.

Sunlight came thru a gap in the front curtains. They went boozing and I watched Coronation Street and a bit of Brookside perhaps and like every house around Hoo View in which I’d been, this had a unique smell and it was of briny sweat and beef gravy. Thomas came downstairs. He couldn’t sleep he said and showed me his barnyard, a plastic farmhouse and tiny cows and pigs and sheep and we sat on the carpet in front of the telly when he knelt before the VHS saying let’s watch this tape and he inserted a cassette and the screen crackled into a naked woman with thick splayed thighs and a clitoris throbbing really huge. I had never seen this meat-of-the-worm before, I thought and instantly hit stop and eject yet Thomas had seemed captivated, he said let’s watch more. I said no. (Funny tales I heard about him as he grew into a lad. Like he’d be with a few girls in a cornfield and he’d take his clothes off, I heard and laughed thinking there’s a freak I like.)

Next time Michelle asked me to babysit, Thomas was in bed. It was just us two, Michelle, me, in the living-room while she waited for a taxi and I settled on the brown couch. Wearing a red silken dress, she leaned over an armchair and parted the net-curtain an inch to look for the cab and this gave me an opp to look at her hips and buttocks and the curves gliding inside of them as my neck turned and my vertebrae clicked. She heard. She sensed me ogling. And this was a weekday. I know because the slime emerged on a Saturday, the setting sun when I babysat and Michelle went to Adderstone: a market town with loads of pubs, deep in the midland countryside. Each pancake day since the 12th Century all the shops on Long Street, they shutter their windows and board up the doorways for the Ball Game when hundreds of mainly men collect on the road and the mayor alongside a local celebrity like Eddie the Eagle Edwards or Edwin Starr, two Eds who during the late-80s-early-90s lived in the area, the mayor and a media person lean out of a high window in the town’s thoroughfare and this is each year since the age of the Green Man, they drop a massive leather like medicine ball but lighter and bigger for the crowd below to catch and over the following hours they tussle for it, mobs of men, fiery jacks, skuttles of them younger, hundreds try to touch the Shrovetide Ball as it flies from one muscular arm to another. They pile into tangles and you can punch-bite-kick. The only rule is you’re forbidden to kill. Whoever holds the old leather orb at 5pm, when time’s up, they’re declared the winner.

She was out with pals in Adderstone, anyway, Michelle, the night I went in her bathroom. Now I think of this upstairs room and I’m digressing again but you can skip to the next paragraph cos I want to say that when I recall this place my mind sees six-years-old on the Hoo green, the patch of grass in the middle of the cul-de-sac with Ben Dixon and a dozen other kids of an evening when Ashley Mackumsky pointed to this bathroom window and he snorted, said there’s your granddad Ben look and everyone saw in Michelle’s future bathroom, Albert, Ben’s granddad, his body stood behind the rippled glass, pink and naked in the tub. All the kids went hah-ha and Ben said nothing, I remember and bet he can remember. Years went by and I was now myself inside the same bathroom as Albert where I peed, flushed the toilet. I zipped and washed my little claws and I never dry on a towel I just wipe palms and fingers on each trouser leg while the cistern pipes were humming. A wicker basket stood in a corner. Inside was a pile of worn clothes: a pink shirt, a pair of stonewash jeans, a baby sock, a bra and a pair of undies. When my eyes saw the latter, my heart pumped faster than normal.

The potency of the powers of the slime: I changed into an eyeball and it was somehow attached to the ceiling, this eyeball, watching me hook a finger around the hem of these knickers. Red lace. After dangling them for a bit and noises going pop in my head I dropped them back on the clothes pile, slyly tried to adjust them as found. From between two socks peeped another pair of white silk. Panties. I saw myself grub them. Saw myself stoop level with the window-sill and hold them up, pawing the smooth material as an urge boiled inside, I don’t know, a glow deep in my end while a voice from a fire told me that a woman has been living in this cotton gusset which you see is soiled in waxy yellowy dried kind of goo. I was repulsed. Suddenly though the slime took hold, a shot thru my belly. Another I, another me, turned the lock in the bathroom door and put the toilet seat and the lid down and taking a sneaky glance at the window this other me unzipped my jeans, yanked them to my knees along with my boxers. So, dick out and taking another sneaky glance at the rippled glass on hearing an engine, I sat on the loo. Perhaps my arsecheeks left a print on the lid, but anyway. Creep-of-creeps, I wrapped Michelle’s panties round my unholy penis. The material felt soft and smooth and languidly I erm.

I was not myself. I was a new version of me when I unwrapped the pants from my end. Holding them up to my face I concentrated on the strip where the vagina had been, a double-layered kind of fluffy cotton, it was smeared in orange-brown pastels and for an instant a pang of shame flared saying this is wrong-wrong but then the voice controlling my penis told me to shut up and sniff. A kid in my class said the scent of a dirty gusset is called buckram. And that was a thought I had, I didn’t want but it came to mind, buckram, in the few seconds when everything was bubbling as I smelled the cotton that had a sweet tang and it set off a few wavy caresses, they rose from the back of my legs into my fluttering balls. That’s kind of the truth. Then I came.

Noise was about to have a renaissance. It was 1988. Early ravers were dancing that weekend while I was babysitting, saying hello to the slimy side of my nature. Next morning, at home, I crept downstairs. Keeping well away from my mum and dad’s eyes, I hid behind the Sunday Mirror in the armchair for an hour going thru all of Saturday’s football, I read up on the games, transfer news, checking what teams stood at the top and bottom of all the divisions including the Scottish and while I turned the newspaper’s leaves, other parts of me were feeling very grim about what I’d done. My dad offered us a slice of toast with marmalade. Not hungry, I said. And even though I’d irritate him when I slurped them, he asked: How about a bowl of Coco Pops? No, I said snappily and he realised I was troubled. Around midday the top of Michelle’s head bobbed in our front window and I raised my head because I wanted to test if I could look into her face without some message telling her: I invaded your most inner-privacy sorry, Michelle, I sniffed your dirty underwear. We had split-second eye contact and she knew, she knew, she spoke at the doorstep with my mum about swapping a glass coffee-table: for what, I dunno.

. . .

The better to implicate yourself in highly dubious proceedings and bring the flow to life, I was now a budding little freak. Yet told nobody, until whoever reads this.