Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

The superb night was cold and crystalline, and made me think about his comment of the pilots who get so close to the stars and the blackness — and about Big Sur being a place where one cannot expect to be healed. Only one other person was in the tub; she got out and nodded to us in leavetaking, a cue to begin. Then she was gone.

I told you I wouldn’t hold back and I meant it. What I’m about to tell you may sound egregious or vulgar — TMI alert!

Here goes.

I think pretty much everyone knows that a hanged man gets a hard-on. Most of us have heard it before, somewhere or other. Wikipedia calls it “angel lust” but you never really know what’s a bullshit Wiki entry and what isn’t. Someone could have heard “angel lust” on Grey’s Anatomy , which means it may or may not have been made up by smartass Hollywood writers. So pretty soon you’ve got fake entries in there that look real and maybe even become real if they catch on. Somebody could have put “angel lust” in there and it’s bogus but the wikitectives haven’t caught it yet or maybe never will until it’s actually entered the vernacular. In which case, it’d stay on Wiki anyway. At any rate, it was true with my son. He got a hard-on. Or had one when I found him. The death erection, what they call a “terminal” erection. I’ve studied up on this a little — I mean, since. When a man is hanged, he gets hard and sometimes climaxes. Of course as his dad I saw his penis in every way, shape and form — you change the diapers and see an adorable stiffie, a confection , you want to take a bite! A terminal confection. Kelly and I would joke about it, I think that’s probably something most parents do, you could see the purple vein, he’d pee straight up, oh do all kinds of things. It seems to me that in the delirium of the moment, my son hanging from the rope and me lifting him, hefting the weight of him, that infernal dance of ours frozen in time, tadpole thickened to anemone-sized tentacle by the hanging trauma, its familiar now very unfamiliar purple vein not a rebuke but a wild reminder of God, that now Ryder wildly belonged to God— I wasn’t aroused, Lord no, never, more like a frightened boy myself, making up for my shyness by clutching a tall girl at a cotillion dance, holding on too tight — what a simple heartbreak scene drawn in my head forevermore! His little balls made a horizontal 8, the Infinity sign, I saw myself as a boy just his age, see myself now as we talk, skittish child-victim of the clergy cotillion — there’s my son , dead, hard — helplessly, incognizantly aroused by his yanked, roughshod transition to boodafield…

I’ve never told anyone that.

He wrapped himself in a towel and retrieved a cassette recorder from the backpack on a nearby bench. Back in the tub, taking care to hold it out of harm’s way, he played a tape of his wife reading a Ravidas poem to their son. Her voice was lovely, carefree.

It’s just a clay puppet, but how it can dance!

It looks here, looks there, listens and talks,

races off this way and that;

It comes on something and it swells with pride,

but if fortune fades it starts to cry.

It gets tangled in its lusts, in tastes

of mind, word, and deed,

and then it meets its end and takes some other form.

Brother, says Ravidas, the world’s a game, a magic show,

and I’m in love with the gamester,

the magician who makes it go.

He swathed the tape recorder in a towel and without getting up from the tub, set it on the ground. Then he resumed, with an enigmatic smile.

I was at a flea market in Sebastopol and came across an unusual item, the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. There’s a lot of volumes and the three I laid my hands on now make their home in the van. There was a story in there of a young student the police detained. I can’t remember why he was arrested, but I doubt if the punishment — injection of chemicals into his feet — fit the crime. After a few days, he was stripped naked and fitted with a hood so he couldn’t see. Imagine his fear as they began pouring liquid onto his body! It was only milk and the policemen tried not to laugh… they brought in a calf that sucked the milk on his penis. One of the priests used to do that to me with honey, sans blindfolds. And I’d do it to him. On camping trips, he’d smear honey on himself and ask me to lick it off. (For some reason, he was in the habit of asking politely. Being polite probably turned him on.) Do you know what the sonofabitch used to say? That I should imagine his bunghole as Christ’s wedding ring and the deeper I got my finger and tongue, the stronger was my marriage to the Savior. O, he was a great wit. He used to say, most impolitely , “It is easier for a little faggot to pass through the hole of a man of God than it is for a girl to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” When he went down on me, that hot mouth felt like the guts of some dying animal. Felt great . Awful to admit, but true. You could smell his dirty breath when he talked, right through his nostrils… hygiene was never a strong suit with the prelates. I have come to believe — no pun intended! — that the more flagrant the sacrilege, the greater the orgasm all around. I never let him know I was horny, always acted like he was hurting me. He knew I was putting on an act. He knew that I knew that he knew, which became our covenant. And that it felt good, his mouth, my mouth, our whatever, became a covenant between me and God, for how could there not be godliness in such a feeling? I remember so clearly the sound of the birds singing their indifferent song while he worked on me, I heard the scratchings of the leafless branches of courtyard trees as if the Lord Himself was at the door, impatiently waiting to be let in.

Now, my lust is wanderlust —I visit rocky coast and chaparral, hermitage and open road, to reacquaint myself with all things beautiful that they tried to destroy.

You know the story of Saturn, don’t you? Saturn castrated his father, oh yes, then married his sister. Talk about your dysfunctional family. It was foretold he’d be dethroned by one of his sons. So what did he do? What any self-respecting God would : ate ’em all up at birth, like bonbons. Eventually, Rhea — his sister-wife — got a little tired of the drama. When it came time to feed him Baby Boy No. 6—that would be Jupiter — she swaddled a rock in blankets and he swallowed that instead. I guess gods know pretty much everything but still have trouble when it comes to spotting the difference between newborns and wrapped-up rocks. So the sister hid Jupiter away. You know, those oracles never made bum predictions. The gods were really dumb that way too. They never seemed to catch on that the oracles were always right.

There’s a painting by Goya, part of what they call the “black paintings.” They were done directly on the walls of his house, kind of in secret. None were commissioned or even meant to be seen. The most famous is Saturn Devouring His Son . Goya didn’t name it that, someone else did. All the black paintings were untitled because they weren’t meant for the public, they were for his eyes only. Well, it’s an absolutely fiendish painting. He’s just laying into this — Saturn’s delightedly laying into this little man —taking big bites out of this — this torso with legs —the eyes are bulging in Daddy Dearest’s head, I am telling you, Bruce, it will make you shiver! Go online when you have a chance and take a look. By the time he did the black paintings, Goya was old and deaf. See, in the privacy of his own home he could just let it rip, God bless him. But here’s why I brought it up, this is what most people don’t know. You see, there were photographs taken before those paintings were transferred to canvas. Now remember, these murals were painted on plaster, on the plaster walls of his house and the experts took pictures before they moved them to the Prado. No one knows where the photographs are now , of course, but it’s fairly common knowledge the government destroyed them. The thing is, there’s still a few people living who wrote about what they saw — in the photos — and they say Saturn had an erection —Goya painted Saturn fully aroused as he ate his kid! Which makes perfect sense, at least to me. Which was totally suppressed, you know, for the “greater” good. Whitewashed. Literally. God knows how many hands those photos passed through. How many busybody committees, how many bourgeois arbiters of taste who ruled that such a thing would be too scandalous . Mustn’t threaten tourism with a scandale !