Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

Now, thanks to the World Wide Web, a wondrous panoply of pornographic imagery is mere keystrokes away. It’s amazing, the stuff that’s out there: big tits and big cocks and big asses, Asian and Black and Latino, Lolita gangbangs, barnyard bestiality, pissing and shitting, fisting and spanking, catfighting and trampling, sites dedicated to corsets and chastity belts, to plush animals ( For those who truly love stuffed animals, in a PERSONAL way), to ballbusting (Hey, you Pencil-Necked Geek! Submit to Mistress Adrianna and she’ll crush your puny weakling SACK!), orthodontic braces, robots. Balloon Buddies features naked women astraddle giant sausage-shaped balloons; AquaGirl.com has smiling girls in scuba gear, diving bells, bathyspheres; She-Wolves of the SS pictures women dressed in Nazi regalia beating masked supplicants with riding crops; Santa’s Little Helpers caters to those who get off on pointy-shoed, striped-stockinged midgets satisfying women of Amazonian carriage.

Off in a corner of my parents’ unfinished basement, hooked to a spliced cable connection, I surf for hours. The flatscreen monitor reflects its jaundiced glow on my skin: slack and sallow, quivering rolls of fat girding my abdomen and overhanging the elasticized hem of my boxers. There’s a fold-out couch beside the computer desk, spread with an old sleeping bag; come early morning I switch off the computer and crawl into the bag, sleeping off the daylight hours. Jerk off five, six times a day. Friction splits the skin, makes it bleed; wrap yourself in a sock and it’s bearable.

My favorite site is Xtreme Valkyries, where musclebound women manhandle nebbish men. This one photo always gets me: a huge she-bear, muscled beyond all reason, hefting a skinny naked man above her head. And the guy’s smiling, nuts squashed in this big she-bear’s fist and he’s loving it.

Utterly helpless. Emasculated.

THE WORDS UNLIMBITED POTENTIAL scrawled on a sheet of pink bristol board taped to the door of the Port Dalhousie Lion’s Club, an arrow pointing down. Early June; first-birth mayflies buzz and circle the exposed lightbulb above the door. I park my motorcycle in the lot’s rough gravel and ensure my prosthetic leg’s snugly attached. The dynamic ankle squeaks: I’m supposed to lubricate it with silicone gel biweekly, but don’t. Clear skies, Big Dipper tilting over Main Street.

Pause in the doorway. Rising up the short flight of stairs: voices and intemperate laughter, underlaid by the scratchy rhythm of a familiar country-and-western song. Consider leaving, but my shrink suggests I go. She also happens to write my prescription for Effexor and Elavil, two wondrous pharmaceuticals that, following the first dose, I knew I could never again live without.

So. Unlimbited Potential.

The Lion’s Club is low-ceilinged with a warped parquet floor. A horseshoe of folding chairs rings a cheap plywood lectern. A folding table supports bowls of chips, a plate of macaroons, a metal coffee urn. All around are the hum of electric wheelchairs and the buzz of servo motors, the squeal of unoiled hinges, the thunk of false legs colliding with tables and chairs. I stare in stark horror at the fingerless, handless, armless, legless creatures shambling about. Those not resigned to wheelchairs have archaic prosthetics strapped to the truncated portions of their anatomy, fake limbs bent at perpetual angles. Others display their stumps with, by turns, a sense of downtrodden stoicism, strident pride, or weary indifference. Some are sunken and mottled around the eyes, the way tropical fruit goes bad and collapses. A great many strike me as hopelessly unsexed: with a few notable exceptions, I cannot distinguish men from women. This revelation fills me with a vague dread.

I sit beside a thickset middle-aged man with a peppery weekend beard. He wears chambray work pants, dark blue, a heavy sweater despite the weather. The sweater, faded greens and whites in a Christmas tree motif, is in the final stage of decomposition: I am reasonably certain that, were I to look closely, its basic molecular structure would present itself to the naked eye. He glances over as I sit down, nods. It’s entirely possible that he pities me as much as I do him, perhaps because I’ve elected to wear a shirt that was once form-flattering but now resembles a shiny black sausage casing stretched over the planetary bulk of my gut. Particularly revolting is the buttery belt of lard projecting between the bottom of my shirt and the hem of my sweatpants.

“First time?” A lemon-yellow prosthesis projects from the guy’s right sweater sleeve. Looks like he’s wearing a washglove except the fingers are melted at the tips. He’s got a cup of coffee clenched between his legs, stirring with his left hand. Whitener floats on the surface in pale lumps, milky scum clinging to the cup’s sides.

“First time,” I say. “What’s the deal?”

“Ah, a bunch of happy-crappy. Someone’s gonna step behind that podium and yak for a bit, we’re all gonna pretend to be interested, that person’s gonna cry, we’re gonna clap, drink our coffee, go home. Christ, most of us are only here on our shrinks’ say-so.”

“Same here.”

“Oh, yeah?” The guy perks up. “What’re you on?”

“Elavil and Effexor.”

“The good stuff. Lucky dog.”

“You?”

“Fuckin’ Prozac. Might as well give me Flintstone vitamins.”

We introduce ourselves. He’s Gil, a long-haul trucker from Stoney Creek. Twice-divorced, kids on the East and West Coasts. He tells me that between alimony and child support, he’s barely got two pennies to rub together.

“And just the other day some bastard stole my new prosthesis. I’m back to the old one.” He lifts his fake arm, which looks pretty trailworn. “Had a nice new unit—articulate digits, ribbed sili-skin, even little fake hairs. Guess I fell behind on the payments because a repo man crawled through my bedroom window and swiped it off the nightstand. Can you imagine—repo’ing an amputee’s arm? We’re talking ten shades of low, man. So,” he nods at my prosthesis, “how’d that happen?”

I suppose it’s standard protocol to discuss such matters, the same way AA members swap tales of epic benders. “That was you?” Gil says when I tell him. “I read about it in the papers. They ran that photo. Man, it was … gruesome .”

Taken by an opportunistic shutterbug, the photo graced the pages of the Toronto Star, the Standard, the Globe and Mail, a few syndicated dailies. An unfocused middle-distance snapshot, it conveys a sense of great activity—of frenzy . I’m laid out on the wet stage, sunlight reflecting off the show pool’s surface. Though parts of my body are obscured by the milling trainers, the stump is clearly visible. In the far left-hand corner, Niska’s shadow curves beneath the water.

I cut out every copy of the article I could find and taped them to my bedroom wall. While I was out at a doctor’s appointment, my mother tore them down.

“Same kind of thing happened to me.” Gil raises his yellow melted hand. “Shark, thirty yards off Indian Rocks Beach in Clearwater, Florida. I’m out past the break where the water’s calm, just paddling along. Then something’s rubbing up under my legs, thick and rough: felt like I’d been run by a power sander. I caught a brown flash a few feet down and knew I was in mucho trouble. Tiger shark, most likely. Vicious fuckers. Stripped flesh from the elbow down; gloved me, that being the technical term.”

A young woman sits beside him. Blond and strikingly beautiful, firm well-formed breasts straining against a white linen blouse. Looks about twenty, though she could be younger. The ghost of a harelip scar is visible when she smiles. She appears to have no arms.