FULL PENETRATION
Performance, maleness, illness, exposure
Look away, mother.
A POKED BOY’S COMPLAINT
I’VE THIS NEEDLE-COMFORT, having come to know them, being often poked and drained or pumped with goop, my glinting bristling piercing life. Every week it feels like I get another call from another nurse booking me in for another stabsesh, for some test or procedure or just for fun or practice. I am South East London’s favourite pincushion. Most recently I’ve had comprehensive bloodwork and imminently I’m to get the pneumococcal and shingles vaccines. All this in prep for a long-overdue six-hour belly-drip infusion of ocrelizumab, a disease-modifying drug for Multiple Sclerosis which microtargets for deactivation the particular problematic immune cells that attack my nerves and make my brain go all funny. This I’m to get every six months, forever.
A big part of loving me is turning out to be that you accompany me to these sessions. It’s an easy job: you’re just supposed to sit there, with folded hands and sympathetic face, while they extract the needed substances. My last proper girlfriend, The Librarian, accompanied me to two big ones.
First was the spinal tap, a draining of cerebrospinal fluid from my lower back to be frozen and flown overseas and tested for telltale signs of MS. The Librarian walked me up the corridors of King’s College Hospital, my regular haunt. We chatted, laughed, did silly voices. At this time, I adored her; it was all so easy. We went into a yellow room where a nice administering physician lay me on my side and swabbed and anaesthetised my spine. He asked if I had any last requests.
‘Yeah,’ I said, and looked at The Librarian. ‘Would you mind waiting outside?’
She nodded, muttered yep, hurried out of there.
‘Oh,’ said the doc. ‘That has literally never happened before.’
I find this hard to figure, though I’m sure he wasn’t lying. I hadn’t expected it myself! But I’d simply realised, exactly as I made the request, that I wanted nothing less than to be observed in so vulnerable a position. The humiliation! The total exposure! I don’t know what I worried about – that this woman, who’d seen me shit and rut and sob and struggle, might find watching me get my spine pierced to be the final ick? Might realise that under my shapely exterior I’m really a sack of fluids, coursing rushing seeping ready to pop? Maybe I’m unusually sensitive to humiliation, having experienced more than my share. Even after nigh-on a decade of weakness wobbling shambling stumbling – as Portnoy puts it, “it’s practically miraculous that I’m ambulatory” – I still nurture this fantasy of myself as a striding certain momentous type. The proper place for this is prose, in staccato rhythms and solid constructions and excessive alliteration, but the doctor’s office has become a bit of an ego battleground. There I like to laugh, to gently mock, to describe my maladies with winning exactitude. But flat on the bed, awaiting penetration, there’s no pretending. So stop looking!
Anyway, in less than the time it took for you to read that paragraph, the doctor drove the needle in and sucked out the stuff he wanted. Anaesthetised, I didn’t even notice. We waited five minutes for safety then he packed me off no problem. I found The Librarian and we went giggling out the hospital. Tiny bit of backache the next day but that was it. Easy as that.
OUTWARD-LOOKING INTERLUDE
I REALLY DO NOT WANT TO MAKE MY MALADIES the prime subject of my literary output. Ditto my lovelife, ditto my soul. How small! How individual! How meaningless! There are more important things to write about. Exactly as I type, we appear to be on the verge (if not in the first stages) of World War 3: the demented Trump and the demon Netanyahu sending rockets screaming across the sky to smash Iran, contra intl. law and human morality but supported by much of Europe including, ultimately, the coward Starmer, who’s half-cocking it, refusing to fully involve us but permitting the use of our regional bases, still earning zero thanks from the Donald. The upshot, of course, is horror. Beeb News tells me over 1,000 dead since Saturday. The regime decapitated, citizens – children! – cowering or crippled or killed, made limbless or headless in demolished cafes, razed schools and struck hospitals. Meanwhile Iran scrambles to regionalise the conflict, launching drones at bases in Qatar and Bahrain and Cyprus and, deliciously, Dubai.1 Horror, unthinkable horror. And I’m writing about penetration!
There’s a type of writer – you know the one – who, at a time like this, seems to feel a responsibility to address the situation. I’m not talking about the political writer, the proper thinker publishing penetrating nuanced analyses in the London Review of Books. I’m talking about the pedestrian bloodless scribbler of fiction or poetry who feels the need to register their basic opposition to What’s Going On, as if it might make a difference. In the face of all this destruction, the worldly humanist writer feels – if I could marshal the correct sequence of words, sentences as scalpels or sedatives, all this could be stopped. So they post their essays, their thinkpieces, their tweets notes stories. I am on some level one of these people; I’m literally doing it right now. I cannot bear the thought of being entirely narcissistically inward-looking when outside there’s such suffering. But it’s not out of humanism or empathy, not really. Really the ego is at work – that aforementioned fantasy of myself as striding and authoritative, with a gaze wide enough to take in the whole world and not just the pricks in my skin or the sins of my prick. Maybe I’m projecting but I imagine this drives a lot of writerly wailing about the world outside the window. I always find it a little vulgar. Even this. I mean at the end of the day it’s all just words, just prose. You shove your soul and the universe into the same medium and they become equal in scale, effectively flattened. You’re either enlarging yourself or shrinking the rest of us, even if you really deeply care. This is my misanthropic cynicism, my mistrust of the empathetic impulse in the first-world writer who is still ultimately sitting at a laptop marketing themselves. That’s what we’re all doing, right? Even the most heroic generous writer is still ultimately producing an image of themselves. Go anonymous if you wanna prove me wrong! Ditch the image! If you don’t, you’re in denial! You’re still performing! Playing with yourself! Outwardly writing the world while inwardly wanting to wank!
LA-Z BOY
SPEAKING OF A WIDE GAZE…
I have this lazy eye. I’ve never mentioned it in prose before, nor have I permitted any photos to circulate where it’s visible. It’s my one physical insecurity. I’m otherwise fine, with certain fortuitous qualities – great hair, full beard, good stature… Other solid qualities... I am generally a fairly goodlooking guy. Till you get to my left eye. This big dopey goofy orb right there on my fucking face. It’s a good thing eyes aren’t prominent or anything. By rights it ought to scupper the whole picture; it’s insane anyone fucks me or sustains conversation without collapsing into giggles. Friends and lovers tell me it’s not that bad; I’m sure they’re lying. I have seen my reflection, you know. I have seen the photos where it’s wandering, rambling, basically on the other side of the room. Me scrambling to catch it.
So I got Botox. Did you know they’ll do this? Seriously! The NHS will pay to fix what is really a cosmetic quibble. The eye works fine, basically: it’s a little fuzzy, sure, there’s a reason my brain favours the right, but it doesn’t impede my getting about or reading or anything. It’s not even connected to my MS! It literally just makes me feel bad, and to correct this the NHS are happy to pay to inject me with a purified protein to bolster the muscles that ought to be keeping leftie on track. The miracle of socialised medicine, of social democratic humanism, whose grand remit even in its dwindling days includes working to ameliorate the insecurities of a shambling egotist.
This was the second appointment The Librarian accompanied me to. I didn’t bring her in with me this time, having learned I’d send her out anyway. So she waited outside as I went in. But, cruel fate: this time, the room disguised as a medical office was really a miserable dungeon of torment and torture. The doctor, a kindly old Arab man I’d met before, transformed into a cackling Satan, watched as a duo of nurses pinned me down on the gurney, as I shivered and gulped while a third drove a needle into my eye muscle. The thing about local anaesthetic is that sometimes, while it doesn’t hurt, you do still feel it. I felt every millimetre of that steady savage pin as it inched closer and closer and then in, in, in. That cold steel penis shagging my socket! Thank God The Librarian wasn’t there to watch me get facially pegged. But if my ego could’ve bore it – it would’ve been good to have a hand to hold while they pumped in the neurotoxin. It would.
When I emerged from the office, pale and quiet, The Librarian led me out of the Ophthalmology Dept and down to street level. I made it to the pavement before I started sobbing, before she took me in her arms, while the rest of South East London’s pincushions swerved around us, averting their eyes.
And the Botox didn’t even work!
Really: amid the horror, don’t you relish that last one? Just a little? The image of terrified British influencers, with their stupid tans and skyscraper teeth, realising that their slavedriving taxfree paradise is still in fact in the Middle East, most unstable of regions; that if you warm your feet with the updraught from Hell it might occasionally splash sulphur, spit sparks that arc to singe your stupid sprayed skin. Good! Fuck them! At least in this whole mess someone’s getting what they deserve.