Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

“You're a fifty-one-year-old widower. A middle manager. You got this meager, settled life. No foreseeable prospects.

“Maybe your wife's ass keeps getting fatter and her breasts are sagging toward the floor. She's looking more and more like a tub of lard, and you're no bargain, either, but hey, why shouldn't you be able to look at young pretty bodies?”

Jabba paused, caught his breath. Now he offered Ponyboy the beer.

“Viewing pornography is NOT a crime,” he said. “Every member of the male species who whacks off to an explicit prompt is not necessarily going to rape the little girl next door. A seventeen-year-old clicks onto an adult website, he's not gonna stalk your sister or instigate an abusive relationship. It's horseshit. Why not say every person who's ever told an offensive joke is a racist? Anyone whose lips touch beer is alcoholic?”

Pushing off the desk, Jabba rose. “We got all these political opportunists, all the right-wing God squadders, bunch of tight-ass virgins. Throw in a bunch of hairy-lip feminist dissertation grad school dogshit. Now the terms get skewed. Anyone who willingly makes a living from their body is exploited. Who cares if the girls sign papers? If they choose this life? If they make good money. God forbid they actually enjoy sex.”

Ponyboy relaxed, kicked back. He'd seen the Pacing Defense Attorney routine before, heard the arguments more than a few times. The rants were a relief, actually; their familiarity gave Ponyboy a path to follow. He listened, allowing himself to get caught up in Jabba's excitement, to remember how fascinating this shit was.

“A rational mind, a thinking mind — you and me, brah — we accept masturbation as universal, as natural. You keep too much inside, you bust. Cleopatra, she used to have slaves rub their semen into her skin as beauty ointment. Didn't know that, didja? I collect shit and you bet I'm gonna whip it out. I got a Sears catalogue from the 1890s. They got a listing for clitoral stimulators. Know what it says? ‘Relieves tension. Allows a woman to concentrate on her housework.’ ”

Ponyboy chuckled along.

“Here's the nut,” Jabba said. “All these years later people are the same, only now the world's different. Women got the pill and vibrators now, they want their orgasm just like men. I got all these lezzies, more than happy to yell how their films ‘reclaim pornography for the clit.’ I got fags, they luuuv their fag porn and don't care who knows it. I say God bless them. Because porn's not just a guilty pleasure for the raincoat crowd, not no more. These days you got teenagers flipping Mommy and Daddy the bird, buying a Porn Star brand T-shirt from the clothing company that Mommy and Daddy own stock in. You got porn jokes in talk show monologues. Paris designers using adult stars in fashion shows. You got professional power women heading to the gym after work, taking classes in aerobic pole dancing.”

Jabba took a moment, caught his breath, his face alive now.

“Now. Does this necessarily mean porn should be celebrated?

“That there's no exploitation? No objectification?

“Does it mean that prolonged, sustained viewing of this shit has no long-term effects?”

5.2

Following Daphney's directions the girl slowly rotated the powder-filled spoon above the blue and orange sections of the cigarette lighter's flame. Her jitters and contrary instincts were like so many years of public service warnings, acknowledged for the precise reason of opposing, and the girl lifted the spoon to her nose, she closed her eyes and tilted her head backward. A long inhalation, a deep snort; the jagged edges and larger rocks aggravated her interior nasal passages, felt rough along the fleshy and sensitive tissues. There you go, Danger-Prone Daphney said. Nice and easy, right? The girl with the shaved head swayed, then stayed still, half-expecting butterflies that morphed into sky rockets, afraid of tentacles leaping out from the middle of a blue forehead, all that weird Goth zombie shit that the girl imagined came from taking hard drugs. Suddenly she did not want to open her eyes, was afraid to give in to what was waiting for her. She realized there was no turning back. She also thought how cool it would be if there were like a menu of hallucinations, like if she could order her hallucination from one of the fast-food places she abhorred and boycotted and yet sometimes still craved. The girl with the shaved head wanted to ride on a butterfly and kiss the stars. She opened her eyes and looked around and there weren't any butterflies, no stars, just Daphney squirming on the toilet seat, the mongrel dog licking up water from the floor. The girl did not feel the drug inside her lungs, she was not aware of her body's carbolic acids doing their assigned work— breaking down the different hallucinogens that were inside the basement-made methamphetamine, allowing each to make its way into her bloodstream. The girl's heart pumped with goodwill for all of the childhood friends whose names she no longer remembered — boys who used to catch lizards and frogs near the boat basin, a freckled happy girl with pigtails whose bladder problem had been in direct conflict with her affinity for playing jump rope at recess. Hydrochloride salt is the glue agent that holds together many inhaled drugs; it is used as glue specifically because the chloride is water soluble, and because blood is mostly water. The girl's heart beat generously, with each pulse helping to further separate the inhaled drug's essential ingredients. The drug's glue atoms further dissolved and the essential agents of each hallucinogen were further absorbed into and carried along the girl's bloodstream, and she was oblivious. Complained, in fact, wanting to know where her hallucination meal was. Said she might as well have been waiting in line behind some old lady. The girl with the shaved head said waiting for the drug to kick in was like having that old lady search through her purse for the nickels and quarters. It was like you waited and after all that waiting the old lady had counted out the exact amount for her gas, but then all of a sudden remembered that she needed to buy milk, too. Danger-Prone Daphney half-listened. Pulling some sort of vial out from her tampon applicator, Daphney laughed and snorted in a kind of knowing way that, to the girl, sounded like a walrus. Now Daphney uncorked the vial, and took a long hit, snorting that whole stash, and now lurching backward, slipping without warning, skidding backward, and there was some sort of significant and definite sound, splashing, something was going on, but it was impossible for the girl with the shaved head to know what, impossible for her to see, for the girl was occupied, she was being bathed in a celestial light, a brightness that was infinite and immaculate. The girl with the shaved head felt loose and limpid, her every pore simultaneously opening and being filled with the energy of truth, with the charge of young love in bloom, with all events turning into echoes of one singular and primordial event. Suddenly time was outside of the confines of linear temporality for the girl, substance existed outside of dimensions that defined all notions of substance. Every action, every event, every sound and energy and transference, they were ripples in the cosmic continuum, dust in the fucking wind; the high was the girl's end and the high was her means, the high was her word, and this word was good. And as for all of the other words, the girl was a part of them as well. Her esophagus was the source of Daphney's newest cry, the girl's ecstasy an extension of Daphney's sudden shock, Daphney now calling out, It's not funny, Daphney embarrassed, laughing at herself; wiggling in place some more and saying, Yeah, I guess it kinda is funny, isn't it? The girl with the shaved head laughed along, although she did not know why she was laughing, but at the same time, she could see it all: reality was this large lake of gravy, the girl was a buttermilk biscuit. The girl had to sop up all of reality, take it in and absorb everything she could, she had to savor each image — the sight of Daphney's hands on the toilet lip, the spectacle of Daphney pushing, making those splashing noises and stomping her feet, Daphney saying I'm stuck, and Can you believe this shit? And now the girl understood, and she celebrated, bending down, laughing and bleating, singsonging, Daphney got stuck in the toilet, Daphney got stuck in the toilet. The girl laughed harder, so hard that she had to stop singing, for she was suddenly aware of her own realization of this ridiculousness. The girl laughed because she had not been able to see the obvious sight of Daphney's ass lodged in the toilet, and she laughed because she had been laughing for so long. God, this is so funny. The universe is so absurd. And now, as if all this were not enough, now the girl caught a glimpse of something else: running between Daphney's thighs, Daphney's underwear strung like a washing line between tenements. What? Daphney wanted to know, rocking to the left, snorting herself, her giggles like the moans of an embarrassed walrus. Her face shining with tears, Daphney looked down, trying to see. What's so funny? I can't see around my belly. Tell me.