Davey Davis's Blog, page 14

David Davis 42, part 5

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4

(I can sort of gloss over Ottessa Moshfegh’s OCD lit without getting carried away, right? Right.)

In 2018, when my friend Tyler Ford gave me an ARC of Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, its premise provoked a nostalgia that, while painful, was so specific it was almost cozy. I have, let’s say, little in common with the book’s nameless narrator, a beautiful, orphaned, post-grad WASP working in a Manhattan art gallery in 2001, save her desire to put herself in chemical hibernation for a year in hopes of becoming “a person who lives in the world instead of constantly fantasizing about removing herself from it,” as Jia Tolentino writes in her New Yorker review.

While I never pulled off my own fantasy, which I won’t describe here in order to preserve my dignity1, Moshfegh’s narrator does. Without spoiling any more than is warranted, My Year’s ending isn’t exactly a happy one, but its protagonist’s goals are more or less attained. To use Bush 2’s phrasing, which went what we would now call viral two years after the events of My Year: Mission Accomplished.

When I pivot to less-than-magical language to nutshell My Year’s narrative—that our WASP has self-diagnosed and then healed her own adrenal fatigue, albeit in a way that is most generously described as experimental—I don’t do so to undermine her fantasy, or the relief that it brings her. Like many of Moshfegh’s protagonists, our narrator takes a ruthlessly practical approach to an old existential problem, “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to,” as the Bard says.

Tranquil though the surface may be, the flat water of emptiness all but disappears the submarine boil of rage, sadness, and grief. With her magical pills, our narratrix improves upon the methods of her mother (OD by suicide) with this simple innovation: why die when you can sleep?

Subscribe now

When I write about fantasy, my focus is often on sex and (sexual) desire. This is because I’m interested in these things, and because you are, and because so much of our notion of the sensual is sexualized. I have no doubt that we’ve the capacity for sensuality without sexuality (and vice versa), but because former is so rarely legible except through the latter (and vice versa), even I sometimes miss the forest for the trees. I guess this is my way of saying that this post is the result of my having made a point of writing at least one installment of this series on a fantasy that’s not explicitly or primarily sexual.

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote, “we’re not looking at mere fantasy, here, but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted.” In keeping with this theme, I’ll admit that my own private year of rest and relaxation never came to pass. As a sort of inversion of My Year’s plot, that redacted yearning was just death drive, man. Now that I have a reason to live, my fantasies have been appropriately downsized. “My week of rest and relaxation, where no one dies and healthcare is free,” has insanely delicious vibes, doesn’t it?

help me get out of debt :)

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

1

Lol

David Davis

When I suffer, my panic shapes itself like this: Fuck, that hurts! This must mean that my pain tolerance is gone! Fuck! What will I do without it? If I can’t manage pain, then I will be in pain—and what’s worse than that? In those moments, my suffering is primarily derived from a pain that doesn’t yet exist. Suffering is time travel, the opposite of mindfulness. (Craving some takeout? We have perfectly good pain at home!)

The other night, my first-ever UTI knocked me so hard on my ass I was daydreaming about 10g needles. 25 of them, hell, even 50, couldn’t be as bad as this. What I would do to trade one discomfort for another! Funny how my brain goes, We prefer this pain and not, We prefer no pain.

It doesn’t hurt, I said to Jade, who was driving me for emergency antibiotics. But it’s still unbearable.

That’s pain, she said decisively. I wondered if she said that because she knew it would make me feel better.

After one sleepless, excruciating night, the antibiotics have basically fixed everything, and now the pain—or whatever it was—is not even a memory. It’s just gone. But while it was here, I tolerated it. What other choice did I have?

I’ve clung to a certain idea of pain tolerance for a long time, associating it with power, endurance, and self-control; in my mind, it’s something that can be enhanced with conditioning, and weakened with neglect (that is, going too long without getting your ass kicked). But this isn’t true, or at least, that which promotes a higher pain tolerance is still up for debate, scientifically speaking. To speak anecdotally, some of my experiences have made me less tolerant of certain sensations; and while over the years, the needles have gotten bigger, the scenes more varied, the risks more risky, I’m also less likely to take just any kind of punishment just because I can. It turns out that I was wrong: pain tolerance is not unidirectional, linear, or static, and it is situational, circumstantial, and subjective. Once again, I’ve mixed up my moralizing with my biopsychosocial processes, and to my own detriment.

At any rate, pain tolerance isn’t a very useful concept for nonconsensual suffering, is it? Whether or not you can tolerate the pain doesn’t dictate whether you will encounter it (and of course you will, for you are alive in a body). Your pain tolerance may have something to say about how long your life will be, of course, and pain management—a facet of emotional regulation—is a useful skill, indeed. But I have long thought of pain tolerance as a kind of strength-training for a consensual event, assuming that the sufferer in question (me) has the power to end the sensation. And yet we almost never do.

Share DAVID

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

"Ponyboy": Eliot Duncan in conversation with Davey Davis

On June 24, I will be in conversation, as they say, with Eliot Duncan, the author of Ponyboy: A Novel, “an evocative debut novel of trans-masculinity, addiction, and the pain and joy of becoming.” Register here to listen in. It’s free! Hot dog!

I love talking with other novelists about their work, especially when said conversation comes with that little frisson of performance anxiety. Eliot and I have been like ships in the night for a while now1, so we’re well past due. Plus, we look cute together.

Learn more about Eliot and preorder Ponyboy here. Learn more about my friends at the lovely Charis Books here. Learn more about moi by becoming a paid subscriber of DAVID, which gives you access to my posts about huge needles, biohacking, hot tubs, and more.

Pay For DAVID

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

1

Almost literally: after plans to meet in person fell through while he was visiting New York last year, we stomped past each other while transferring at the Metropolitan/Lorimer L/G.

David Davis 42, part 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

I almost didn't choose M. There was another man I was talking to, a hot older daddy in town on business. Nice dick, big shoulders, hosting in Times Square. I couldn’t tell if he was gay or what. M was much younger than the daddy—late twenties, probably—and definitively homosexual. A hung vers bottom, according to his profile and confirmed, at least in part, by his pics. He’d been texting me here and there for weeks; his gentle insistence suggested stamina, among other qualities. I wanted to see the daddy more, but when M cleared his afternoon for me, I headed to Bushwick.

I dressed with care. I made sure that everything I needed—poppers, condoms, ear pods, gum—was in my little bag. When the G train arrived, I stepped through the sliding doors and found a wall to put my back against. Book neglected, I spent the ride deliberating. The train is my favorite place to be uncertain, and I was still uncertain about M.

There were, of course, the risks of fucking another bottom. Then there was the possibility that M wasn’t even properly cute (in the single blurred face pic I’d seen, he was wearing sunglasses). But I’d been wanting to hook up with more gay men around my age. Not that I avoid them, but I do shy away sometimes, a disinclination that I noticed didn’t have anything to do with desire. Doing this thing that I didn’t strictly want to do, but that I believed would be good for me, had begun to feel important. Can you do that? I wondered as I walked the long transfer at Metropolitan/Lorimer. Take a man like a vitamin?

The apartment door was already open when I reached the landing. M surprised me with his handsomeness. Dark, curly hair. A deep voice, with something of a lisp. Tall, lithe, polite. His apartment, which I surveyed while he got me the glass of water I wasn’t going to drink, was clean and well-organized (hot). His book collection told me that told me we likely had friends in common. On his bed, we dithered over his doorstop biography of Robert Moses, finding reasons to touch each other.

It mostly felt good: uncut, layered with delicate petals of skin that periscope in your hands, the glans bright like a star. When it didn’t feel good, I kept it to myself. For a long time, we moved our bodies around, mostly at his signal, talking very little. I could feel our wordless negotiation for submission, waiting for the other to take control before taking new initiative. Please don't cum inside me, I said. It’s usually a command. Of course, M said. All over my belly and chest, a little on my face. Mind if I smoke? He had Marlboros. I didn’t ask for one. We chatted. I got up to find my clothes before he finished the cigarette.

What’s under desire? I imagine a skeleton, picked clean by passion. Now that we were finished, and I was dressing, did M feel there was something wrong with him for wanting me? Do I1? (I'll never pass. Is that sad2?) If he doesn’t ask to see me again, will it be because I was a bad lay, or because the box had been ticked? (But hadn’t I been ticking a box, conducting this exposure therapy on myself?)

M pulled on his pants, walked me to the door, and kissed me goodbye. It was crisp outside, the end of spring. I was still uncertain, but even uncertainty yields information. For example: what I sometimes feel is different from what I always know, which is that desire is not an ethics. For another example: uncertainty is part of desire, its shield and core and residue. Unfortunately, despite having enjoyed someone’s body and company, sometimes you don’t fuck again for no reason at all.

Share DAVID

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

1

I do, sometimes.

2

I think so, sometimes.

DAVID: Members Only

You may have read that Lauren Oyler took a Goop cruise, which she wrote about for the May issue of Harper’s. I don’t know that I have an opinion about the piece overall, though I do think that the self-awareness isn’t self-awareing like it used to. If, for example, one thinks that cruises should be illegal, as Oyler says she does, one might own the hypocrisy of going on one for a paycheck just a mite more strenuously.

But I can’t begrudge Oyler that paycheck, especially these days. Anyhow, the part where she and her fellow cruisers encounter Gwyneth in the flesh approaches captivating, as do the details from the author’s interrupted personal life “engaging in polyamory and doing unanticipated quantities of drugs”—said details being why she was primed for a luxury cruise in the first place:

Read more

David Davis

The first time I was catcalled, as people like to put it, I was about 13. It was the middle of the afternoon on a fiery summer day in the bone-dry Northern California town where I grew up. My dad’s apartment wasn’t in a nice neighborhood, but nor was it anywhere that was thought to be unsafe; unless I could catch a ride with my parents, I walked, biked, and ran everywhere I wanted to go.

Despite the heat, I was running. A few blocks from home, a group of men began to tail me in their car. One of them was recording me with something1. Because I was ugly, I believed, not yet aware that what I looked like didn’t matter, beyond my gender and age. I was afraid, which was the point. The men laughed at me together.

We all have our little stories. Most men harass us in public with the modest goal of frightening or angering us, though many of course are more ambitious2. Our fear and fury derive from the humiliation of being so exposed, and so meaninglessly so.

As I got older and uglier, the various mainstream catcalling discourses, most of which I encountered online in places like Tumblr, the feminist blogosphere, and Gawker media, felt almost as humiliating. Street harassment was still happening to me, but because it didn’t usually resemble what happened to normal women, with its Nixon mask of what we call desire—a thing that we pretend is interchangeable with love, affection, good intent—it didn’t seem to exist for other people. Normative desirability as a prerequisite for gendered violence is a sensational mindfuck: if you’re normal you deserved it, and if you’re not normal you should consider yourself lucky, and also you deserved it.

As the weather warms, said mindfuck is on my mind. Not passing is funny, because when men talk to me in the street now, it’s usually with such a lack of hostility that I can’t even get angry. Sometimes I even smile at them—heretofore a violation of policy. It feels cowardly to admit that there’s relief in being sexually harassed in a gentle way. It feels unfair to have become something that often appears less vulnerable, turning what was once a potential assault into a mere proposition between two people who acknowledge each other as such. It feels sexy to know that an exchange could become an encounter just as easily as it could become violent if the man in question has any revelations about who, or what, he is talking to.

Get Exclusive DAVID Content

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

1

I think I’m too old for it to have been a phone.

2

This post focuses on gendered harassment, which is not a unidimensional thing! I want to avoid shrinking down the idea of street harassment to the limits of catcalling and similar. Let’s keep in mind that public interpersonal violence happens in bathrooms, places of business, and subways, is perpetrated by people of all genders (especially white, cis, and housed ones), and is often empowered or reinforced by people who have been de facto deputized by the state.

David Davis 42, part 3

Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

It happens, I say. It’s fine. Some men recoil. Some ask if they can touch me, to reassure me, while we wait it out. Some exhibit an endearing confidence they can talk my body out of its panic. There’s one man that can keep fucking me through the tears and hyperventilation; somehow he knows when I can take it and when he needs to stop. Just a moment, I say. Not a big deal.

I don’t know why it happens, though I have my suspicions about certain environments and sensations. No need to reveal them here. But even just being close to someone, in some state of undress, under dimmed lights, is dangerous. I can tell by the way your breathing changes, Jade told me once, as my heart raced under her acrylics.

Since I started sleeping with men again, none have ever been unkind to me when it happens. I used to think this was pure luck. Until recently, when it occurred to me that maybe it only happens when I know I’m safe.

Subscribe to DAVID

Worrying is like praying for things you don’t want is a bumperstickerism for the ages, the dreck of embroidered pillows and Kohl’s discount racks, the neurotic’s cruel reminder that fearing your fears is not only unpleasant and ineffectual, but perhaps even self-fulfilling.

From fridge magnets to small talk, the platitude, like the meme, gains its charge from repetition. But in the war of attrition against nuance, the cliche is not an infallible enemy. In fact, we can turn its power back on itself: if worrying and praying are indeed the same mechanism, is it possible that fears and fantasies are more similar than we might think?

I often write here at DAVID about my interest in denaturalizing desire, a thing so overdetermined that most of us can’t even recognize that which we want most in all the world. When I find myself preoccupied with one of my standard anxieties—like knocking out all my teeth, or chopping off my pinky along with the cabbage—I find it helpful to remember that these are fantasies, too, albeit unpleasant ones. In choosing to allow desire to encompass the unpleasant, the negative, and the taboo, I’m not admitting that deep down I actually want to amputate my own finger. Rather, I’m giving myself permission: to worry without struggle, to want what I shouldn’t, to suffer when there is no alternative. To do my best to, as the Bhagavad Gita recommends, meet this transient world with neither grasping nor fear.1 It’s not possible to be ready for it every time it happens. Fighting to do so only makes it more painful.

My journal tells me that a few years ago I wondered, How can I want something so bad that scares me so much? Liz looked up from her book about Lysander the Spartan. That’s everything, she said.

Get Exclusive DAVID Content

Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

1

For some reason, I’m reminded of the recent viral video of the man furiously destroying a Walmart display of beer cans because the company that produced them partnered with a trans woman for an ad campaign.

DAVID: Members Only

I’m always thinking of my older sister, C, or I’m used to thinking of myself as always thinking of her. Somebody has to. But since going back to California last September, it makes me angry. Too angry. I can’t bear how angry it makes me.

It’s worse when we talk. There’s a script, which she wrote1 and which I can’t stray from if I want to communicate with her. But I’m not communicating with her anyway, because she’s not calling to share new information or to find out how I’m feeling. She’s calling to run the script, which I know well, but not perfectly—no one but she can know it perfectly—and emotional spontaneity isn’t easily tolerated. If she says, How are you feeling today, brother? and I say, I’m feeling kind of sad, she will absently respond, I’m glad you’re feeling better now, brother. The loose ends are tidied with rote and ruthless efficiency. Feeling over. Next subject.

Read more

David Davis 42, part 2

Read Part 1

When I worked in a dungeon a thousand years ago, there was this client that all the girls called Pony Brad. Pony Brad was weird, even by our standards.

At first, everything seemed normal. When booking, Pony Brad would request what seemed to be a regular incest roleplay (usually with two providers, though he often had walk-ons, too). Pony Brad was back-of-house, of course. When booking, this client used the simple, whitewashed Brad, which of course was not his real name. Pretty workaday stuff, pretty unremarkable. Since I was, and still am, compelled by incest fantasies, Pony Brad could select me from among the girls who included this activity on their yes list.

When Pony Brad arrived for our first session, the other girl and I took care of business, then brought him to the Green Room. Pony Brad pointed at me and said, “You’re my aunt,” and at the other girl and said, “and you’re my sister.” Straightforward enough. So far, so good. Time to put on the old razzle-dazzle and make out with a bitch I lowkey despised while pretending that we were all related.

Share DAVID

But not three minutes passed before Pony Brad suddenly made a Martin Luther-worthy volte-face. “Now I’m the dad! And you’re the daughter! And you’re the mom!” (Avengers, reassemble!) He did this over and over again, without allowing for any time to inhabit the characters he’d given us, preventing any fidelity to the fantasy as we understood it. All the other girl and I could do was giggle and try to keep up. Pony Brad was an improv exercise—a stone-cold sober one, at that—which meant Yes, anding our way through a series of scenarios that soon led the reason why everyone called him Pony Brad.

Sometimes when the pony entered the chat, it manifested as Brad himself. Sometimes it was assigned to you and/or your coworker. Sometimes everyone was the pony, all three (or more) of us. Other than decreeing pony as your (or his) new identity, Brad did not offer any other explanation as to the creature’s function, or character, or origins. Pony play? Sorry, that would be too legible. Other than a little winnying, Brad’s pony was as divorced from kinky conceptions of the equine as it was from reality. It could speak. It could walk on two feet. It sucked on Brad’s nipples. It sucked on the other girl’s nipples. It snuck into Brad’s house through the window late at night (to suck his nipples). It often rode Brad like a pony (no one knows why Brad didn’t ride the pony, as nature intended). The pony seemed capable of everything that was not ponylike, especially breaking and entering. It was like Lassie or Flipper or, yes, Mr. Ed, an outrage against god repackaged as the normal, delivered to us as providers with the expectation of coherence that would have made us feel gaslit if we didn’t also get the feeling that Brad really did think that everyone else followed his erotic logic. I was desperate to find out what he would do if he encountered a real pony1.

Subscribe now

The climax of Pony Brad’s scenes was not his orgasm, but rather the moment when the pony revealed itself2. Its entrance was the heart of the fantasy that brought him to the dungeon where me and my friends fried eggs, smoked weed, and did homework between sessions. He wasn’t trying to destabilize us, to find our weak spots, as clients often did. Pony Brad was just a genuine weirdo with a mutilated attention span.

After our sessions, every girl was expected to fill out a 3x5 with notes about their client, all of which were stored in a card catalog in the office (a mechanism you’ll recognize if you’re a Millennial or older)3. On the card, you’d list the client’s interests, usually in acronym form (r/p for roleplay, s/o for strapon, etc.), how long he booked, what room you used. Now you or another girl could pull the card the next time the client tried to book and get the CliffsNotes on what he liked, what he didn’t, if he tipped, whether he knew how to clean his asshole. You could learn if a guy was annoying, or the type who only went for new girls because he was a predator, and a cheap one at that, or even 86’d, as they sometimes were.

Pony Brad had a lot of cards. I wish I could go back and read what I wrote about him.

Share DAVID

“We’re not looking at mere fantasy, here,” I wrote in Part 1 of this series, “but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted…The memory of a fantasy, after all, its own fantasy.”

If we were to attempt to understand the desires of Pony Brad with only the acronyms written on his 3x5 card—and without the rest of the card for context—we would fail. His fantasy would be incommunicable, a hermetic vision that couldn’t be shared and enjoyed with (or profited on by) other people. Even having heard rumors from girls who’d seen him before, I walked into my first session with Pony Brad with a specific idea of what an incest fantasy should be. The problem was that it looked and felt and manifested differently for Pony Brad than it did for most other people.

Is this a problem, as I’ve just put it? Well, no, not among adults communicating their desires to each other freely, whether as a recreational pursuit or a transactional one. But it becomes problem when fantasies like Pony Brad’s need to be expressed in ways that evade censure on certain platforms or in certain spaces, where it has been decided—by the state, the church, the family, the pigs, the credit card company—that some desires are inherently unsafe or obscene, even when being shared by and among consenting adults. Pony Brad’s pony (and what a beautifully protean pony it is!) illuminates the difference between fantasy as our own unique yet shareable pleasure engines and fantasy as an avenue for disciplining, regulating, and ultimately capitalizing on the individual’s desires—natural healthy normal beautiful sensations of which all have been blessed, but so many are deprived4.

In leather and its subcultures, we refer to the action of BDSM as play, and Pony Brad’s (only some of which was actively sexual) really did remind me of a hyperactive kid at recess, tyrannizing the make-believe of his friends with a game that no one else understood. His play was not to my taste, but I don’t remember him as a difficult client. He certainly wasn’t dangerous, though he was annoying; following the session, he did what a lot of tricks inexplicably do and pulled out his phone to show us photos of his parents, who were back in India arranging a marriage for him that he didn’t want.

I worried for the future Mrs. Pony Brad, less because of her husband’s fantasies than for his refusal to cope with the real life. Like many clients—like many straight men—he was a victim of his own magical thinking: maybe, someday, one of us hookers would take him away from his dreadful obligations, saving him from the middle-class family life that rejected us without a second thought.

Get Exclusive DAVID Content

Since Twitter began restricting Substack links, it’s now a little more difficult for DAVID to get around—so if you’d like to share, please do. Consider it a personal favor 💋

As always, find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.

1

Why a pony and not a horse??

2

He may have cum and he may not have, I can’t recall. This was a thousand years ago, remember?

3

Tina Horn, a fellow alumnus of the dungeon in question, has written or podcasted about this card catalog somewhere before…

4

I’m not making the claim that all of these are sexual, though they very often are!

DAVID: Members Only

After hooking up, we laid on my bed together, chatting and sharing a j. He told me about his upcoming plans to visit family in a distant country, where the women are known to be particularly beautiful. He had been relaxed and speaking with some excitement, but as he said this, he abruptly cut himself off: forgetting himself, he had talked to me as a straight man talks to another straight man. This put us at risk of doing something homosocial, which put our very recent past at risk of being something homosexual. 

That cis men of all orientations lie to themselves in order to have sex with me is nothing new. I used to think I could predict the nature of these lies based on the liar telling them: some straight men think of me as a girl, some gay men think of me as a boy, and some bi men think of me as the best of both worlds, as they’re inclined to put it. What I’ve learned since going on hormones is that not only are these lies unpredictable, they’re often not even internally consistent. 

Read more