4 comments/ 9393 views/ 3 favorites Cock-Sucker: The Artist's Tale By: tristantrotsky WARNING: This story includes extreme images intended not to shock, but as satire on the Brit-Art scene. ***** Art for Art's Sake? Sex for Sex's Sake! How did it ever get to this? It wasn't meant to be this way. There was so much more I was going to do, so much more I was going to achieve. Shooting stars they never stop. Even when they reach the top. But for me, it's ended up all so different. How did I get to this? I started at Art College. Dates? Totally fuzzy. What do you expect after the lives I've led. Anyway, it must have been some time around seeing that old queen Caravaggio in the Derek Jarman movie that I decided I wanted into art. I studied at St Martin's College. That's where I, and a guy called Byron Hamilton, hook up almost immediately. We share a room. Sketch each other. At first mutually. Casual profiles, cartoon-caricatures, free-handing art with a Bic biro, etching it onto the back of a beer-mat while enduring the tedious chat-lines of boring Beatnik art-poseurs. Progressing to full studies of each other for our own amusement, or for assessment. Often nude. I guess, even then, I knew he was better than me. So it gets he does the painting, while my talent is to be more passive. I assume poses, furnish curves, light, contours, shapes for him to replicate in oils. Were we lovers too? No, not exactly. But we do a bit of this, try a bit of that. Experimenting as awareness dictates, body piercing, nail varnish, distressed hair, part of what we imagine to be the bohemian libertine milieu. Embracing the bravado of virtually any kind of weirdness just to show how liberated we are. We explore physical limits. We take what they used to call 'carnal knowledge' of each other. And naturally that involves some jittery below-the-belt lip-action, mutual tongue-tingling body-games. Tasting spurting fluids. It's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? It was expected. And we fit together good. We function well. And Edgar Stromberg? When I first meet him, when we first meet, it's a student-art event, and he's present as guest of honour, to pass critical judgement on our student exhibition. I fix my gaze on his back, willing him to turn. He, unaware of the compulsion - conscious only that he has turned, turns towards me. He expresses interest. I'm flattered. He's a star, a legend. Who would not be flattered? And I feel that same sense of bewilderment the Pevensie children must feel on their first step through the wardrobe into Narnia. With me as 'Edmund', the precocious betrayer, more sensitive, vulnerable, and self-centred than the others. He knows how to charm. Practiced in the art of deception. You know it's deliberate. A routine. While at the same time, when it's aimed at you, you're fascinated. At his invitation we share a cab back to his apartment. I'm both fascinated and repelled, so I scarcely notice him reaching across to run his hand over the front of my pants, tracing the shape of my cock gently. "I'd like to get to you better" he said softly. "You" and his fingers circling my cock, gauging its size, squeezing "and you." As soon as we're inside he unfastens the belt on his trousers and shoves them down. His shirt covering his thighs leaving just a hint of pubence and the dark shape of his testicles hung beneath the material. Then he shucks his left leg free of the pants, raising his right leg to remove the discarded garments, and his semi-erect cock lolls into view. Large, circumcised. He smiles, turns his back on me and walks through into the next room, his arse wobbling beneath the flapping shirt. Leaving me the option of following, or not. I follow meekly to find him sat on the edge of the bed, masturbating lazily. Surely, if I want to make a good impression - which I do, if I want to guarantee acquiring the benefits of his art-patronage - which I do, it would be tantamount to crime to leave so promising a hard-on orally unmolested, to allow those imminent spurts to go undigested? I have no real choice in the matter. My next move is obvious. What the hell? Squatting, with it quivering an inch from my nose, I glance hesitantly upwards and catch his eyes, calmly observing me as I go in to swallow its not-inconsiderable length gulp by gulp. His hands fold in around my head, holding me there as it nudges insistently at the back of my throat. I make a strangulated gurgling noise, and begin sucking, it goes on for some considerably slurpy time, until I'm rewarded by the trembling warm spurt of semen-gush. It always seems so discourteous to spit out so intimately personal - and so copious a gift. So I never do. As I eventually draw back from its glistening droop, he's smiling his approval. After that first night, within a week I've moved in with him. I live with Edgar for five weeks, naively believing that he's working hard to promote my art, in reciprocation for the more intimate attentions I eagerly bestow upon him. I meet former flatmate Byron in Starbucks to talk over the new situation. He has doubts. There's work to do, surely that must come first? "Why work when you can party? My life will be my art." He says he'll dedicate a piece to me in his first one-man show. He'll title it... um, let me think, yeah, 'Miss Slutty Spunkbucket Regrets'. I laugh. It's a joke, yeah...? I watch him drink coffee, thinking 'I've come in that mouth, now - the parting of the ways, I'm going places, and he's lost the plot.' With Edgar, soon, it gets... strange. He's... supposedly, drawn to my art. That's the point of contact, isn't it? I'd assumed it was my technique, my expression, my brushwork, he admires. The economy of line. But no. Fool that I am. It's the subject-matter. It's voluptuous contours of nude flesh. My body as displayed in Byron's paintings. The long curve of my cock, the smooth curves of my bum that he's sketched. That realisation only comes later. Gradually. Meanwhile, wasn't it David Hockney who said there are three Gay men who control every aspect of New York art... or was it ten Gay men? - I forget, anyway, these guys control the art-world, and he knows each one of them. Edgar is sexually undemanding, taking the initiative infrequently - as little as four or five times a week, on which occasion I'm compliantly naked for him, crouched as he takes me from behind. But I'm anxious to please, I need to prove myself, and strive even when he doesn't respond or can't even sustain an erection. What's the point of offering yourself up as a sex-toy if you're being insufficiently toyed with? I'm beginning to feel neglected, underused, under-appreciated, more than a little bored and hence insecure in my new role. Eventually he takes me to a party somewhere in a big house out Hampstead way, and it's here I meet Max Beardsley. At first there are no words. We have eye-conversation, nothing more, although - of course, I know and worship at the shrine of his work. When we do talk he's openly contemptuous about Edgar, he's also handsome and so arrogant it hurts. Edgar is a time-waster, he says, I'd do better to ditch him, hook up with the real power in the London art-world - and only he, Max, can furnish such introductions. While he's saying it his hand is in my groin, caressing and squeezing firmly and without hesitation. I'm both flattered and a little scared of him. When he indicates I should follow him I have no choice but to obey, upstairs the bedrooms are all in use with heaving bodies strewn untidily everywhere, so he leads me into the toilet, locks the door, eases me unresistingly to my knees, and unbuckles his pants. He's intimidatingly hung and he fucks my face roughly without consideration for my comfort. There's no other way to describe it. I've never been treated so peremptorily or so brutally, and he rams it clear into my throat when the fierce hail of jism begins, so I near choke. Such an oral-tutorial is an incredible turn-on, one that fiercely perks me up below the belt until I'm so fired-raw my groin is painfully tense, and when he smiles approval, and concedes 'not bad', like a fool I blush up through the silver shimmer of gag-induced tears and thank him. As we re-emerge Edgar's expression assumes a kind of injured dignity. "These creative types, they're so temperamental!" he hisses at me. But soon Edgar's engaged elsewhere. I don't think he really cares. And this night I go home with Max. Acting out roles. Inside his curtained rooms it's like there's no air, I'm breathless with heart-stopping anticipation. I know what I'm here to do. And I do it. Inviting him 'you be De Sade, and I'll be innocence personified.' Moments later we're both naked and I'm spread-eagled on the bed, penetrated first here, then there, passing the next hours in mutually intense neural stimulation. Until my body is an abstract expressionist canvas spattered with black candle-wax, glistening with perfumed oils, and streaked with white trails of glistening spunk. His, and mine. Edgar Stromberg's forgotten. He's Art History. I'm with Max now. And I stay naked at his beck and call for the best part of the next months. Besotted with him. He's charismatic, full of dark depressions and huge roaring joys, lean looks and fierce silences, with half-closed eyes giving a perpetually sleepy expression, a confirmed somnambulist air, a highly effective mask for one of the keenest minds in art. I watch him work in the studio. Waiting for my moment to be his muse. Then he lies on his back as I eagerly move in to fellate him, sucking for what seems like hours, so close I'm welded to the soft down of his body-hair, to the warm rise and fall of his belly-undulations, trying it in every way possible to please him. Then I lie on my back so he can face-fuck me so hard, sitting on my chest, his balls beating up against my upturned chin, impaling so deep I'm close to crying out in fear and panic of suffocation, but too scared to protest, too in awe of him to risk his disapproval. Making throaty drunken noises, until I'm sobbing and whimpering as he cums deep in my throat. 'Unnatural practices' they used to call this, I love that term. Yes, it's so right. The more he uses and humiliates me the more I love him. A dreamy-eyed stupefied forlorn fucked-up kind of love. He values physical sensation. The physical above the spiritual. Above all else. And physicality is so important in creating art. There must be touch. Pigment beneath broken nails. I watch him pushing paint around. While he creates, the world is on fire. Cities in flame all around us. There must be terrible and repellent images in his head, hard-wired to the moon. And when they come out, he blasts them across canvas. Creativity, creation, re-creation, procreation, it's all the same. His most extreme karmic pharmaceutical reactions taking improvisational flight. He has paintings called "Dreaming & Silent Breeze". "Fuck The World" and "White Noise". Then there's the installations. Sculptural shapes suspended in formaldehyde in large fluid-filled vitrine tanks. Cobalt and crimson illuminations that wash the walls like some high-tech lamination. Glints of hard aquarium-green light, all detail lost until they become... Shapes? Hallucinations? until there's only a twisting forest submerged in the unnatural luminance of alien atmospheres. "Feed Your Head" and "Preternatural Hermaphrodites". A dissolving morass of tentacles and copper weed. Fuzzy fronds filtering purple light, spreading in widening ripples of colour. And something else. Something important. Something significant. Something rearing against the density of air. And it's like I'm reading screeds of hallucinatory prose, seeing snapshots of the unconscious, the dreams and nightmares of this impossible place. I feel my inadequacy by comparison. Gradually - as he promised, he introduces me to the Gay Art underworld, and I grow to think of myself as a part of this delightfully debauched society. A demimonde of beautifully narcissistic male models with long black curls of hair, outrageously glamorous transvestites, wealthy and witty patrons of the galleries, cultured and sophisticated, and the bohemian artists themselves. I can scarcely believe my luck, these are artists I'd queue to see exhibit at the Serpentine, the Tate Modern or the Cube. The stars of conceptual BritArt installations that outrage the tabloids and win awards. I'm hanging out with the gimpface critics I've seen discussing the new Monet show or the latest Tracey Emin on the late-night TV-review, or read their pontificating in the arts publications. Or rather, Max is hanging out with them, and I'm here because I'm a totally-owned subsidiary of Max. Normally you'd pay big buck to even see them lecture. What could I do to deserve their attention? except - of course, the delicious naughtiness I'm more than qualified to bestow. And I imagine myself to be desired by them all. Enlivened by the flame of wine, and other pleasing substances. I tease and tantalise them, encourage and manipulate them. I'm young - aren't I? good-looking, highly sexed. Later, of course, I realise that it was I who was being used, passed from lover to lover, used and abandoned by them in turn, but in my inflated egoist self-image I'm using them to scale the social ladder. Like, how screwed up is that? I live on pills that keep me awake for days on end, razoring my senses to the edge. He takes tablets too, a heart-murmur or some-such, an occasional breath-shortage which might curtail a work session, or a peak moment of erotic exertion. But it doesn't slow him. We spend time at decadent parties, with me competing for the attention of men - or being competed for. Always - in my mind, the centre of attention, in a pantheon of depravity. I never wear underwear so as not to impede a new lover's fingers. We are the degenerate spawn of the night, the depraved of the fin de siécle, the universal brotherhood of forbidden vice, the walkers in sodomite perversity, the favourites of the dark gods lost in this eternally sunless realm. The host sets out feathers, bottles of aromatics, slippery and tasty lotions, some twine, assorted and beautifully coloured thongs, and big plumed masks. Often I'll take two or three men to bedrooms in succession, I prefer to give blow-jobs, but if they want anal then that's fine too, I accept this tainted love with equal enthusiasm. I remember, as the parties disintegrate into lazy disreputable sprawls of stoned bodies I don't even bother to dress, but parade naked, kissing and carousing casually as the mood takes me. I've always loved sex, and always had an exhibitionist tendency so it comes naturally for me to flirt. I'm well-hung, and appear that way even when flaccid, which is important, so I've never been less than peacock-proud to be seen nude (and admired) in company. When I wake the following morning with a stranger, and we talk about incidents from the night before, they ask me "does Max object?" No, he doesn't. The famous artist says "We change, we grow, otherwise it means the end of sex for me... and what we do becomes nothing more than tandem masturbation." To me, we are figures in a Beardsley print. Sometimes when I return to Max's after a particularly debauched night I might feel used or momentarily ashamed - but the feeling seldom lasts. Once sober again, Max insists, and I agree, we are growing through artistic evolutions, and its most important aesthetic is to remain 'open to suggestions.' To influences. And there are compensations. We eat in Knightsbridge restaurants or queer Soho bistro's where they greet him by name. One weekend Max takes me to the Venice Biennale, another time to Florence. But those days have left visible scars. You want to see? You're here to survey the wreckage, after all. But there are invisible ones too. Those you can't see. A painting doesn't gain weight, or lose weight. It doesn't change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. It remains unchanged. But the way we see it - day to week, month to year, alters it anyway. It is the same. We see it differently. Sex stops you thinking of things like that. Each act of sex takes you through time, twenty minutes closer to death. When you are in sex it renders you incapable of thinking of anything other than sex. It's a pleasing numbness that suffuses and nullifies your intellect. An anaesthetic for a deeper ache. An easy distraction. So how does it all start to come apart? Max Beardsley and I go up to Manchester to arrange a gallery show, and we stay over with the gallery owner, Roland Blasco. At first he seems very intense, dauntingly so, rather austere, authoritarian, brooking no argument that contradicts his point of view. After checking out the gallery-space in the trendy St Paul's area, wiring DVD installations, setting up slide-projectors and lighting, we return to Blasco's house up on the edge of the high-ground towards Saddlesworth moor. It's a remote converted farmhouse overlooking the sprawling expanse of the city, so isolated anything could go on here and no-one'd ever know - other than those participating. And, as we get inside, it becomes apparent it's not so much converted as in the process of conversion, stepladders and bags of plaster, coils of wiring and plastic conduits in the musty upstairs rooms. A soft-furnished studio, bedroom and lounge below - "we're restoring the original stone hearth and fireplace, putting a range in through there." Once inside his studio we settle down for further drinks. Roland's boyfriend - Ian 'Brat', attentively assuming the waiter's role. He at first seems sullen and unfriendly, about eighteen, his head shaved to a mere shading, he wears an Aleister Crowley T-shirt with the eyes torn carefully out to reveal his rather prominent nipples. He wears tight black trouser with, I can't help but notice, a bulging crotch. He hardly speaks throughout the evening, with Max and Roland Blasco naturally dominating the conversation, but once darkness falls Max produced joints, the atmosphere begins to loosen up, and I find myself flirting a little. Soon we're all, I guess, a little high. Blaso pulls out a recent canvas, a violent jangle of discordant colours surrounding a naked figure in a tormented position, his rounded sensual buttocks painstakingly painted. Instantly recognisable as 'Brat'. There are more, all nude, all of Brat. My attention drawn to the fact that, in some of the pictures where the genitalia is visible, he's uncircumcised, large - and totally lacking pubic hair. At length, while Brat is serving him from a tray, Roland says "it's time for your party-piece, dear. Bring the specials." Ian colours visibly and hesitates, but Blasco clips him sharply on the bottom. "Come on, don't be awkward" and the youth leaves the room. Blasco leans over to me and shockingly lays his hand firmly on my crotch, squeezing insistently. I glance across at Max who just smiles his approval. "Watch this" smirks Blasco. "You'll enjoy it very much." When he reappears he's carrying a thick portfolio of prepatory sketches. I sit there as we thumb through them. And they're stunningly erotic. Brat nude, legs splayed and sexually erect, Brat with hands tied behind his back, gagged, legs splayed, Brat masturbating, Brat ejaculating, Brat's anus and testicles, Brat's face with an anonymous penis touching his nose, Brat tongue-kissing a nude boy in the mouth. Although undeniably well-executed they're all figurative line-drawing stuff, strictly representational life-studies lacking Max's quirky individualism, essentially sexed-up variations of the kind of life-class work I'd done at St Martins. Roland Blasco leers as he sits beside me. "See this one?" - Brat's lips forced apart by another penis, his eyes closed, Brat and another boy lying nude feeding on each other's erections. "They're beautiful" I admit huskily. "Perhaps you'd like to pose some time." Cock-Sucker: The Artist's Tale "Me?" "Sure, you and Brat, you'd look good together." "Sure you would" urges Max. "But of course, like Brat here, you'd have to be shaved" leers Blasco. "Is he really shaved?" laughs Max. "Here," Blasco beckons and Brat crosses to his side, draping his arm around the youth's waist so his fingers trail along the belt of his pants. "Shall we show 'em Brat?" He unhooks the belt open, flicks the zip down, and shrugs the pants aside. I'm looking at a sketch of a nude Brat tied on his back with someone fucking his arse. And looking up, I can see his crotch-bulging promisingly. With the slightest of tugs Blasco flips the tight black pants down, he doesn't even flinch as they fall to the floor, the lazy penis quivering free and hung there for all to see. As large as the sketches promise, just as hairless, with a black band around the bass of the shaft that I'm unable to identify. It is quite breathtakingly inviting. Now it's begun, without too much encouragement I undress quickly, despite myself, I'm jealous of the attention he's getting, and want some for myself. I slip my shorts down and off. The faint cool breath of an oscillating fan on my skin sensually arousing, the carpet-pile coarse and tickly on my bare feet. We pose together, playful, provocative. "Good, now let's see some gob-action to take our mind off business. Go to it Brat, it's all yours." He's kneeling down - what a strong supple tongue he's got, snaking up under my glans, tracing the groove dividing it, like he's trying to force that tongue-tip into its single flared eye. Move an inch, into his mouth. That's it, that's how it's meant to be, pursing his lips into a tight ring around me. Wait, we relocate. No more coquetry, all pretence of coyness and truculent reluctance dissolved. I lie on my back on the rumpled duvet, my cock achingly stiff, lolling lasciviously over my stomach. Ian throws away his T-shirt to be nude too, his cock thick and uncircumcised, hard and erect now stuck out before him impertinently. Now I can see it's a thin leather belt passed around the base of his penis and scrotum, locked tightly into place with a small padlock, so that it extrudes his genitals even more obscenely. He climbs over me, straddling my bare chest, his engorged cock bouncing and lolling in front of my face, to lie down beside me, head to toe. Now I can see there's a small disc attached to the padlock, inscribed 'property of Roland Blasco...' I grasp the black-banded cock, drawing the foreskin back to expose its glistening arrowhead as it invades my mouth, as it slides luxuriously deep into me, and self-indulgently begin sucking it. Soon we're sixty-nining on the bed for their entertainment. It's like the Earth has ceases to rotate. Time has stilled, its timelessness seeping into my flesh, crawling beneath my skin like addiction. His mouth is educated, elegant, rolling me around his palette. I reciprocate with undisguised enthusiasm, thirsty for it. Brat rocks his hips in and out, so his thick cock slides into me deeper, until he throbs and ejaculates. A moment later I'm spurting uncontrollably into his mouth too, to the applause of unseen laughter. "Now you must pleasure your master to seal our special bond." What have I to lose? I might as well see it through. I stand up slowly, unsteadily. Still semi-erect I squat down in front of where Max is sitting, kick away a drained wine bottle, and unzip him, fingers burrowing in his pants and hooking it out, that familiar solidity all hot and slithery, slipping into my mouth. "A very generous gesture" purrs Max evenly. "But you must consider the etiquette of common courtesy, Mr Blasco is our host." Brat is crouching beside me. He reaches out, fingers inserting between my lips and the base of the cock, pulling it free. "Thanks, I'll see to this now while you attend to Roland." I look around as Max's cock slithers inch-by-inch into Brat's devouring mouth. Blasco sits looking across towards me, his trousers gone. It looks fiercely blood-engorged, wormy with threading veins, ugly like something that belongs on a dog, or a horse. And I crawl towards it on all-fours like a grotesque submissive animal ravenous to feed on it. After that, things become blurred. We use each other, and are used in varying combinations. It gets a little confusing. I get memory flashbacks of Blasco taking me from behind while Max is pulsing somewhere deep in my throat, then fellating Ian while they both use him in the same way, then me and Ian taking turns to mouth Roland, passing it from one to the other, vying for who can provoke the most exquisite response. Until Brat takes three messy facial ejaculations, licking each throbbing cock clean. Later I find myself sharing a bed with Blasco while Ian lies with Max. I coax him, and he manages one more anal before we sleep. Morning finds both 'masters' lying on their backs while we crouch between their splayed legs sucking luxuriously, me sucking Blasco, Brat sucking Max, glancing covetously at each other over our respective mouthfuls. It's then that Blasco suggests a swap for the rest of the weekend, that each man should have the other's boyfriend as a personal possession with full sex-rights. I'm not too keen on the idea, but as he's holding my head into his groin at the time, I'm unable to protest, not that our opinions seem of any importance. Later, in the lounge, as we prepare to return to the gallery, the transaction continues in a vague hypothetical game-playing way without consulting either of us. There are to be no physical limits placed on the servitude expected of the 'slaves', and Blasco insists, half-joking, that as a token to emphasise my new role as his possession I should be shaved. I protest half-heartedly, unsure if it's intended as a joke or not, until Blasco produces a laser-knife. The laughter stops, and I'm suddenly scared. "Hold him Brat." Despite my feeble play-struggles I'm seized and held down spread-eagled on the carpet. Brat is unexpectedly strong, pinioning my shoulders. Max holding my legs. Roughly Blasco seizes my T-shirt, slides the knife beneath it, and cuts it clean down the front until he's able to rip its tattered remnants free and throw it away into a corner. "Hey, my T-shirt, man!" "Quiet." His knee on my chest, the knife pricks my nipple. It is razor-sharp. It traces its way down to my navel, and on down. Under my belt, to sever it. "No" I laugh nervously, "enough, right?" At first I writhe and wriggle against their grip, really meaning it this time, pleading with them, but as the blade gets closer to my groin I freeze. The blade is cold as it slides beneath my shorts, as the fibre parts its way inexorably down. A tug, and it falls away in rags. He scoops it and bundles it away, and I'm nude. Helpless. Roland Blasco stirs my penis with the knife. "Nice, but the pubic fuzz has got to go." He seizes a handful and cuts it off with the knife, it tugs unpleasantly and I yell. "Get the gear Brat," from Blasco, and he reappears from the bathroom with razor and shaving foam. Roland begins squeezing the aerosol all over my genitals, seizing my cock in one hand and the razor in the other. Hands merge and fumble, working together on my now-glistening thighs, massaging the cream in. I cough and splutter miserably. "Keep still" Max hisses, "or they'll cut the bloody thing off by mistake." So I steel myself to lie still. While Ian carefully trims my pubic hair, then Blasco begins shaving the stubble that remains. I bite my lip, but I can feel Ian's cool fingers manipulating my cock first left than right, hear the laughter, and feel the sensation of the blade on my groin, testicles and around what Blasco refers to as my man-hole. Someone is shaving between my legs now, I feel the kiss of the blade, to grunts of approval. Someone else is sliding a foam-lubricated finger up my anus making me squirm like a virgin on his first fuck-date. The ordeal extends. At last, long moments later, my groin is sponged and towelled dry and they leave me alone. Swaying, brain throbbing with sensations, I find myself more nude than I've ever been, my thighs unbelievably bare and bizarre, my genitals seemingly bigger and more naked than I thought possible. Ian and Max are fumbling on the bed, ignoring me, while Blasco supervises, he stands back observing my new condition critically, moves to unfasten the thin black belt from Ian and manipulates it, passing it around the base of my penis and encircling my scrotum instead. I stand there and let him, what's the point of resisting? as he sets the small combination lock tightly into place with the padlock resting beside my testicles, forcing me out so it seems to induce a near-permanent erection. The small disc attached says 'property of Roland Blasco...' This is how it must have felt for Brat. "This, your pubic nudity and your clasp are the marks of your sexual servitude" says Max Beardsley softly. "You must obey your new master in every way until the hair has fully grown back. Only then will the clasp be removed, you accept the condition?" "This is a joke, right" I pout, acting surly. "This is no joke my spermy little friend. This is serious." So I nod dumbly. It's a game, isn't it? "No." Max's words. "You must say 'I accept these conditions'." I cover my face in my hands in mock shyness. "OK, OK, whatever, I accept the conditions." Only now am I allowed to pull on a pair of faded Levis (no briefs) and one of Brat's T-shirt's with holes targeting the nipples. He also produces a studded dog-collar, insisting I must wear that too. I feel oddly surreal, my groin crawling with strange sensations, I'm embarrassed and ashamed too, but also undeniably aroused and sluttish. With some misgivings I watch Max leave. He goes out the room without even a backward glance. Ian goes down to the car with him. But hey, it's just a game. It's La Ronde, an amusing body-roulette, isn't it? Yet I'm thinking, to have sex with a guy you respect, admire, or fancy is one thing. To have sex with a stranger you're unsure about just because the rules say you must is something else. Arguing back, but it's only a sophisticated role-play of sub/dom, all you do is play it out on it's own terms. That's all. Nothing more. How bad can it get? And I'm not here for me. I'm here as a pledge to Max. To do anything other than what he wants will be to betray him, to disappoint him. How can I bring that guilt down on myself? We spend the day at the gallery. Mostly he ignores me. Until around lunchtime. He indicates the toilets. I precede him into the cubicle, throat dry, unbuckle my pants, shrug them down to my knees. He waits expectantly, so - sensing what he wants of me, I crouch to unzip him. His cock is already stiff, its stale sweaty smell reaching me. There's the taint of disinfectant and the sound of dripping water. I can hear someone moving outside, the tap running, and feeling vulgar I crouch and cram the cock-head in my mouth, snaring the foul salty taste, licking and sucking it hard. "You can't get enough of that, right?" I nod, as best as I can. Be what he wants. "Right, when I thrust up your ass I want to hear you grunt and howl so loud he can hear outside and know exactly what I'm doing to you, right?" I mumble something around a mouthful of cock, reluctant to release it for fear of something worse. He pulls back and I hang onto it, sucking hard. Make him shoot quickly, get it over with. He grabs my hair brutally and extracts slowly until it slops free and hangs in my face. "No, I'm going to fuck you, right?" I stick my tongue out, force against his grip, lick it so it quivers, he twists me away and around, so I comply reluctantly, brace up against cistern, and relax as much as I can to make it easier. In a single thrust he's way into me and I'm grunting and mewling like some deranged animal as the pressure forces me forward and he fucks efficiently and emotionlessly until he comes, my own genitals bouncing and slapping with each anal thrust and the indescribable sensation of penetration as I orgasm too, shooting spasms of long gooey strands over the toilet seat. Hey, I'm human, your body reacts despite yourself, how could it be otherwise? Later, we cross to the car park and he pulls out into the fast lane. "How many lovers have you had?" "Lovers - or just partners, encounters...? More than some I guess, less than others." "Do you imagine yourself to be pathetically and hopelessly in love with Max Beardsley?" "Not love exactly. I love his creativity, his inventive originality, his art... his cock." "Is he sexually demanding?" "He can be." He guffaws wickedly. "What's he like you to do?" "Oral. He likes me to give him head." "And you get off on doing this?" "Whaddya think? I got natural healthy needs and appetites. Course I do." "How often? How frequently does he make you do these disgusting things...?" This interrogation - no, this inquisition, goes on for the full duration of the journey back until he's extracted every intimate detail of our life together. The evening is worse. Like I've died and gone to some special part of hell set aside for inverts. Details blur in nastiness. Only the rectal ache, the sour taste at the back of my throat. It's then I decide to get out. To hell with this. I don't need it. To hell with what Max wants. This is no fun. I've got no money, no cards. The clothes I'm stood up in, and they're not even mine. The next day begins the same. He ignores me in the gallery, but I know if I wait long enough, until he gets bored and he finds the time, it'll begin again. So what is it you resent more, the way he uses you, or the way he ignores you? After all, isn't that why you ditched poor Edgar, because of his essentially undemanding sexuality? Because he was insufficiently forceful? And that genital-shaving thing, you resented it - sure, you resented it, but you enjoyed being the focus of all that concentrated attention didn't you? You got off on having your groin the centre of scrutiny. Admit it. For long moments I'm alone at the merchandising counter. Postcard reproductions. Personalised pens. A leaflet from a previous exhibition - Edgar Stromberg, wonder what he's doing now? Art biographies. Max Beardsley this and Max Beardsley that. He won't mind. I fist a handful of banknotes from the till, then step outside for a toke of fresh air. And keep walking. The street stretches away. There are traffic lights, red, amber green, red, amber, green. An ad hoarding for Audi. A newsagents. It's cold, I don't know where the hell I am, but I keep walking anyway and don't stop. All seasons have become winter. Everything is gone. Even the dream. Day is dead. All that's left is the twilight of this strange flat light. With a silence inside me, deep and unremitting. Confused and dirty I try to find my way back. Time has passed. A dark and confusing time. Byron Hamilton, my former flatmate, endured months of penury and focused squalor. And now, I read in the review-columns of a paper I pick up on the tube, he has his first one-man exhibition to show for it, works produced during the period of my debauchery. One of his pieces on display is called 'Miss Slutty Spunkbucket Regrets.' I laugh, it's a joke, yeah? Him, he's going places. Me, I've lost the plot, with nothing to show but pain and humiliation. Can't even get the cock-ring off, although I scrape it raw. After what seems like forever, I'm back at Max's. Nowhere else to go. No other direction home. The house is quiet. So quiet it's painful. Now I'm climbing narrow stairs that protest each step. Across a crimson landing washed by a single suspended bulb. And that's where I find him. Laid on his back like some hit-and-run victim, cold, his face twisted into some kind of pale mauve mask. I'm crouched beside his body. Heart-attack, with a narcotic element perhaps? Exertion, stress - with a sexual element, with Ian, maybe? Whatever, Brat's gone and left Max like this. So chill. Like marble. A sculpture. An art-work in his own right. The shock and horror is over. How did it ever get to this? It wasn't meant to be this way. There was so much more I was going to do, so much more I was going to achieve. Shooting stars they never stop. Even when they reach the top. But for me, it's ended up all so different. Instead it's like I'm just an extra in a real-life porn movie. How did I get to this? I was supposed to be the artist, wasn't I? But it's not too late. This event can mark a decisive move into a last, terminal art-phase. The final work. The culmination of what we had become together. The collaboration. I drag him into his studio. I've been here before, so many times. Know each Jackson Pollock scrawl and ripple of pigment ground into the floorboards. The mounds and dexion-shelving crammed with cans and brushes and found-art objects. Torn magazines and peacock feathers. Canvases propped up in the corner covered in drapes. A blow-torch for fusing plastics into new shapes. But now it's empty without his animating life-force. Stark. Totally empty. There's a straight-razor here. I know where it is. I straddle his chest. An erotic straddling, a razor like they used on me, to strip me bare. And delicately the artist begins slicing slivers of flesh from his face and arranging them into a halo on the floor around his head. Slice away pride. Slice away ego. Slice away self-worth. Shedding them one by one, laziness, self-delusion, contrariness, arrogance, vanity, intellectual snobbery, gullibility. There are two large fluid-filled vitrine tanks. Glass panels inner-lit by the skylight, and into these I peer. They act as multiple mirrors. I stare into them for a long time trying to decipher the expression on our faces as we work together, trying to memorize each detail for use in future works. The reflections seem roughly rounded, as if in anticipation of what they will soon contain, body-parts suspended in a viscous liquid, faintly orange, around a darker nucleus of many, uncountable numerous parts, with a transparent skin on which several thin hair-like things look to be whipping and wiggling. Max Beardsley took my life, moulded, reshaped it into new configurations. Now I'm reflecting that back on him. I blink. Look away. The artist. The slave. The strange weave of relationships binding us. He speaks in my head. Guides my blade. Telling me, this shall be our secret. The secret we are finally revealing to each other. His deadness is here for me. And only me. Formaldehyde. HCHO. Made by the oxidation of methanol. And his severed body-parts suspended within. Head, shoulders and torso go in first. Then thighs and legs. But transposed, arranged. Then rearranged. Added to. Subtracted from. Intestines spiral in protective coils. Internal organs wink and glisten. Ornamented. One eye watches from deep inside the navel. The other from the anus. The penis replaces the nose. Testicles fill the empty orbits of the eye-sockets. Feet replace hands, and hands feet...Max. This is our final work. I wait for them to arrive and discover it. I guess life goes on. But sometimes... it doesn't. BY TRISTAN TROTSKY