Shuck (12 page)

Inches
cover, June 1999. Phil convinces Lower East Side photog Richard Kern that there is more to erotic photography than anorexic junkie girls with track marks on their cooch. We hop the fence to an abandoned amphitheatre in Riverside Park that's covered in graffiti. I hang rat traps from my foreskin for full extension.

Fan letter to
Inches
, July 1999:

As a person who is often photographed, I will now posit an interpretation of selected quotes from Susan Sontag's
On Photography
, a book I stole from some trick's shitter:

“To collect photographs is to collect the world ... To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”

Wow. Bang on. Sometimes I wonder if Susan Sontag was a hustler boy in a previous life. For aging Manhattan art fags, the next best
thing to a night with me is a picture of me. They want to own me, take me home with them, imprison me behind glass, and then jerk off carefully. Putting something behind glass speeds up the disidentification process. You can only fetishize somebody you can't relate to, and the best way to make that happen is to dehumanize them, turn them into a two-dimensional copy. Drain the fluids, and suck out the person-hood so it doesn't stink up the display case.

“Photographic images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it.”

When photographers ask me to sign prints of myself, I understand what this is about. Personalization. A DNA imprint. What is called “realia” in academic circles. So I lick the corner, gob it up with snot, leave a smudge of pre-cum or a bloody fingerprint. Do they want a piece of me or not?

“Photographs furnish evidence.”

Evidence of me.

I was here.

I existed.

I was totally hot.

People felt things when I fucked them.

I made people cum.

I made people happy.

I was ignored.

My brain was never validated.

I'm too beautiful to write something deep.

I'm too naked to be a writer.

I'm too exposed to be published.

I'm a raving ADD case, if you haven't already noticed. I have a hell of a time recording dates and places and situating myself in a
timeline of events that may or may not have happened. Sometimes the only way to know what I've done and where I've been is to flip to
HX
magazine's Who's Who society pages to find my drunken face laughing off the page, stumbling out of a club I can recognize from the décor and the tricks holding me up.

“The camera record incriminates.”

You said it, philosophy sister. This is a partial list of things I've been caught doing on camera:

Swiping photo equipment for easy resale (never from Richard), sliding a broken condom out of a model's ass and smiling at the goo, blowing my meth dealer in a bathroom stall (the stuff is hard to find), posing with an intense pile of trash (hour forty-seven of a dumpster-diving adventure), punching out the photographer.

That's why it's useless to have a pseudonym. Slap whatever name you want on the picture, it's still me.

“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”

Susan has obviously never met Richard Rorschach.

No, I don't talk about crystal meth a lot. Would you? The world is full of judgmental people ready to label you an addict, conveniently forgetting the substances they funnel into their own bodies, and the reasons they do it. Maybe you're one of them.

Like you've never loaded up on sugar to keep depression from dragging you down. You have never saturated your bloodstream with caffeine to give yourself just one more hour, frantically wasting another sixty minutes of your life. You have never been swimming in so much alcohol that drowning sounded like a fun proposition.

You have never worshipped a little cylindrical god packed with nicotine, pausing before you lit it to make sure you had at least one more left.

You have never used another person as a tool to hit that orgasmic sweet spot.

In the words of my friend Richard: yeah, right.

Another reason I don't talk about it is because it's impossible to describe how tweaking feels. I can say that when I shovel a thumb of meth into a can of Red Bull for midnight breakfast, it coasts into me like it's riding in a limousine, but you won't understand unless you've done it. I can say that there's a little animal that tickles me with its furry hooves, but it would be meaningless. You won't understand the high of staying up for three days straight and rooting through trash cans for fun things to take apart, like inferior shoes held together with glue. You won't understand the thrill of watching the city from a distance—the morning coffee scramble, the screams and fights and sales pitches, the squeals and crashes and depressed laughing, the scrape of shoes and tires, the drunken yawns and stumbling home—and being immune to it all.

It's impossible to explain what being a vampire feels like.

The main reason I don't talk about it, though, is because I'm not addicted. There's a difference between a user and an abuser. I know better than to let a drug take over my life.

Guys I'd like to fuck:

Lower East Side nihilists, twenty-four, twenty-five. Subdermal implants
and other body modification that fucks with the social order one patch of skin at a time. Pants slung low on the hips, and truck mud flaps sewn on the ass, dragging down six inches of crack as a statement. Trucker hats are their only nod to pop culture. They stomp around with this sexy look on their face like they would rather you committed suicide. Inexplicable yet pleasingly macho fascination with trucks.

Computer geeks, nineteen, twenty. Tall, lanky, hunching around with laptops underarm. The sexy rings under their eyes attest to long nights trawling for Internet porn. Don't get enough sunlight to grow their patchy facial hair more evenly. You can see their dangly cocks flopping commando-style in their pants, cocks as long as their nailbitten typing fingers. They stink gloriously of B.O. and semen.

Queer-as-fuck goth boys. They hurt too beautifully.

I'm also a boyeurist and a bona fide homeless-sexual. The more scruffy and out-of-pocket, the better.

Shiatsu rub with circulatory something.

Honcho
cover, July 1999. Gay life partners Kim and Rick shoot me in front of a giant American flag, combing my pubic hair, doting over me like I was their prize poodle. I'm wearing an army jacket that's so big it's falling off. I wrap myself in the flag and give them my toughest sneers. It's not military enough, so I have to wave around this black plastic revolver. After the shoot, they insist that I watch them have sex. Weird.

Fan letter to
Honcho
, August 1999:

There are times when the money comes so easily that I want to flush it down the toilet, just for the hell of it. See old Ben Franklin drown. I swear.

But I never get the chance, because the money disappears all by itself.