Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

Our generation doesn’t have to hide anything under the bed, to secrete the forbidden in the closet, behind the shoes, behind the socks smelling like semen, the socks smelling like shoes. Instead ours is a practical pornography, with no awkward visits to newsstands or subscriptions to renew — there are no secrets, the entirety is acceptable. The computer sits proudly on the desk in plain day. There to help with the spreadsheets, with directions. We can just press a button and, naked lady. Press another button, another lady, nude. Point, click, penetration, it penetrates, it rewires your brain. You come to expect that all women take it up the pooper, take goop on their faces and into their mouths and, swallowing, that they all do so voluntarily, with nary a complaint in rooms like this one: unlived-in-looking, filthily-linened, plywood-doored.

You—

You are not always a reader, you are occasionally a human. You are, often enough, a human who is not masturbating. There are other things to do with your hands.

Write. Type, type.

Write, I want to be a writer.

Write, I am a writer now.

As a human, ask yourself — would you describe, publicly, losing your virginity? Would you, Mom, freely detail the first time you ever had sex in love or how exactly your husband or boyfriend moans, what they say during sex in the throes, would you tell that to a stranger, would you make report, could you bring yourself to recall and divulge that night you faltered or conceived, that sensation — and here we’re asking Dad now — of being inside someone for the first time bare, unsheathed, how that felt so wet and hotly illicit without protection?

If you know how difficult that is, to describe such feelings and to do so unabashedly, without scruple, then you know how difficult it would be for us to describe this — this vid, her sex in it.

We will not describe it, we cannot — describe her hair, her dense brownblack hair and thickly furred furtive eyebrows of same, the brownblack but also yellowish eyes their flicking lids, sorry, we won’t describe them either. We will not describe her interview — brief because ashamed of accent and, he suspected, a deceiver in her answers — cannot describe her undressing, how slow it was and how methodical her removal of clothing to bare skin like a cashier she was meticulously smoothing one item at a time, folding each garment like a bill at the edge of that fantastic bed we won’t describe that gave such horrid creaks when she threw herself upon it flat and splayed for his ravage, apologies, it sounded like— it sounded like —

We won’t narrate the foreplay, what of it there was, first kiss the last, the same as the last. Won’t detail the oral, cannot in fact put into words the oral eyes that flickered in and out of contact. With him, with the camera. That first push into her, through her, stop. The jointed sighing, sighing. Won’t describe the swirl of breasts like clapping hands, as he — the man — pushed in and out, in and out and in. The two positions requisite then the third — missionary, her atop, reverse cowgirl leveraged canine from behind — the old bed’s collapsing rattle. Couldn’t hear her voice. Couldn’t hear his own. Won’t describe the sound as wrenching, a car crash of woods and metals. Then him, “You like it you like it, what a pussy, say cum for me baby,” and her, “Come for me baby, tastes too big, feels so salty”—two lines shot across the breasts we won’t describe not even one, that dab on her tongue, collected in a dimple of her cheek.

The broken bed widelimbed, a dead huge hairball spider — we won’t describe any of it.

That’s the problem with the screen, you can’t. You’re always one step, but the crucial step, removed.

_________________

Hello my name is Mocand today I have make my first sex on camera. Just for you @ 1stsexoncamera.com

Let’s try that again, he said, just read the card he’s holding.

The card? she asked.

Read it.

Hello my name is Moc and today I make my first sex on camera. Just for you @ first-sexy-on-camera.com

Try it again.

Hello my name is Moc and today I make sex with cameras. Just for you @ first-sexy-cameras.com

Say it com, not cum —do you know what that means?

Hello my name is Moc.

Can you stop? I asked you a question. Cum —don’t you know what that means?

Com?

Yes.

No.

Cum means open your mouth and take what I give you. Cum means open your fucking mouth and take it.

Fuck?

Good. Do you know what the redlight means?

Redlight?

It means fuck. Means fuck till I cum.

Fuck means cum?

Very good.

Money?

How much I say?

You said 5000 much.

That’s what I said?

You said.

3000.

That was their exchange — and, Cut! — unfilmed. But later they’d pretend they’d just met each other, when they began filming, when the redlight lit red.

O fancy pantsing you here, what’s your name, beautiful? do you want to go back to your house and get better— ak-vaynt-ed was their pronunciation?

ON, we’re rolling…

Moc, “the friend,” his pardner holding the camera — having dealt with the lights and mic — holding the cuecards too, because the girls could never be trusted to remember: Say the website’s address at the beginning, repeat it at the end, www., with shotwad slopping from your face.

They were just passing through.

Who are you? the girls would ask him, would ask the pardner, Who is he?

He’d answer, I’m just passing through. Hanging out. Hanging. As if a gunslinger from a Western, a drifting private eye. Doing the circuit, the stations, making passes. The tiny villages off the highway. Little tiny townlets far enough from the capital’s allures. He could’ve been a bonafide desperado, a bonded dick — none of these women, these girls, had met an American before.

Have you ever met an American before?

She shook her head, they shook her head into smoky curls, into corkscrews — Say, No.

And though it was the same script every time, each fall was as unique as its fallen:

In each Location — as they called every town where they porned — the first thing they’d do would be to identify the raggiest regional newspaper, where were sold birds not yet caught and deceased grandmothers’ furniture and preowned cats, the paper most people used to wrap fish in, to wrap trapped Rodentia for placement outdoors and severed limbs too, in the hope of reattachment — their ideal a paper that informed on local gossip while providing annual photos of the mayor in a goofy folkloristic helmet slaying a marionette dragon at Carnivaltime, this being the news most preferred. With papers like that rates were cheap for double columns in inksmudged color and half or even full page spreads, but they always requested something small so as to seem special, unobtrusive — a small box relegated to the crossword’s classifieds, a clue.

He and not his pardner, who’d always ask to place it himself, would place this advertisement and the ad would say: We want girls 18 to 25. Must be nice.

But it said all this in the wrong language, in this language—“the friend” didn’t know the right language, he never would, the language things were in over here. That was the problem that was, at the same time, an asset — that he only knew how to speak what was not spoken too well by must be nice girls 18 to 25.

He was from — I don’t know where he was from — Ohio, where his mother lived, say. He was big, broad and jangly in big fat stretched college sweats, always sweatshirts, always sweatpants (he didn’t like zippers, he didn’t like teeth). A whole wardrobe of that mottled blackswirled collegiate gray — a color that exists nowhere in nature. He was a beerdrinker with a beergut like he’d swallowed a keg but also swollen all around — beerwrists, beerneck, beerknees. Eight countries’ worth of change in his pockets. He wore sandals, never socks.