Mario Mangione (ROUND 20)
Let us workshop this narrative about a man who, bullied and victimized by double standards in the crosshairs of contemporary sexual politics, is gearing up to flip out like Milton in Office Space
scent of the day: Rien Intense Incense, by Etat Libre d'Orange.—Musty attic (loosely like Amouage’s Opus II) meets mossy castoreum and labdanum (distantly like Nishane’s Unutamam) meets purple-floral animalic leather (solidly like Orto Parisi’s Cuoium) meets gasoline-metal-soap urinal cake in a truck-stop bathroom suffused with nag champa or some other sandalwood-plus-indolic-floral incense (exactly like One Man Show Oud Edition by Jacques Bogart), Rien Intense Incense—which can be summarized as a cumin-tarmac spin on its Bogart twin—is to my nose more desert dieselpunk (think: some scrapyard out of the retro-futuristic dystopia of Mad Max) and more sandstorm grunge sci-fi (think: some metal-and-leather outlaw cantina on Tatooine) and even more space junkpunk (think: a ship like Serenity in the show Firefly) than the satanic church several reviewers (in light of it being an incense that goes in the dark creosotic direction of incense rather than the bright terpene direction of incense) have made it out to be—the ultimate result being a deliberate concoction of various elements found in market surveys to be the most unpleasing to the lowest common denominator (aldehydes, animalic leather, sharp spices, heavy incense), a good statement of refusal to conform to industry expectations by a house whose name (taken from the Orange Free State, a state in southern Africa that declared its independence from British colonial rule) reflects a defiant ethos of resistance to the anti-style pull to make everything mass appealing.
Mario Mangione
How could it be avoided? Outward appearance is the first thing we notice. If that makes us objectifiers, so be it. Our flesh—billboard of evolution’s unrepentant advertising, every curve and bulge sculpted by a rutting chain of endless payloads—hums with inborn desire. Our souls—perhaps no more than epiphenomenal vapors (if not mere phlogiston)—find themselves bound up in this panting flesh, their taproots corkscrewed into the rank depths of the groin. Millennia of Darwinian chiseling (granular, pitiless) have etched libido into the deepest strata of our style. And as our mushrooming brains folded in on themselves for processing speed, our techniques for stoking that libido reached headcase heights: from the hot-for-teacher daydreams that have textbooks tented over our hard-ons up at the chalkboard, to the taboos—and the ecclesiastical infrastructures to enforce those taboos—that sharpen our don’t-press-the-red-button ache (increasing our drive, and the carnal calculations to fulfill that drive, to Diddy forbidden fruits to hymenal shreds). It would be no surprise to learn that imagination (our crown-jewel power to form internal pictures) came on the scene, let alone grew to the Asimovian vividness we take for granted, as a sex toy aiding and abetting the horniness at our core—the primordial itch that drove perhaps every technological leap: the be-kind-rewind VHS cassette to jack off to, the cryptocurrency to launder our whoremastery, the cyberspace of high-speed haptics to bypass the calorific cost and herpetic risk of flesh-on-flesh transactions. Pick the example. Even the aqueduct, long before enabling bathhouses steamed in HIV-slicked sleaze, hydrated our health, our stamina—ultimately, to fuck. We are not just horny. We are engineers of horniness.
What help is there for it, really? Let congregations clasp clammy hands and whisper benedictions, praying away the human nature as they might the gay. Even if performed in full saccharine sincerity, the theater deconstructs into a self-parody straight out of Derrida. The mingled musk within the well-wisher huddle, vulvic tang screaming for cream, betrays the futility of the endeavor—an endeavor so obviously self-defeating, every “amen” a moan of foreplay, that even mockers of tinfoil conspiracy might suspect design, an ecclesiastical edging game: its ultimate purpose, beneath the anti-fire hoopla, precisely to stoke the fire (sort of like all those #breastisbest breastfeeding videos on Instagram, tea-saucer areolas studded with Montgomery tubercles as latch-worthy as the nipples themselves, that have us imagining, less and less merely in the vinegar strokes, nutting gooey pearlescence over the throbbing fontanelles of innocence, and now—with all the footage from Cuba and Papa New Guinea and Brazil and Guyana—over the faces of piglets and possums and deer and monkeys). Shock therapy, lobotomy, the guillotine—short of such extremes (electrodes crackling temples, ice picks scrambling frontal lobes, steel whistling toward the neck), man’s marrow refuses to yield.
And now in the hyper-mediated West where moans taunt from every digital dimple of cellulite (“Beat it up nigga!”) like a cultural death knell, hope’s thread—already delicate (since, after all, we cannot bud like hydra or divide like flatworms)—seems to have snapped. Behold the Hotlanta spin, a no-hands twirl around the strip pole, we have put on that tired tale of civilization’s twilight. The flapping and clapping of gelatinous meats, slow-motion reverberations, clear enough to catch sight of an ingrown pube or that one anal stray, clear enough even to smell (if only the FOMO scroll did not banish us from the inner core of monastic tranquility needed to reconstruct the pissy hyrax and the shitty indolics of it all)—such an avalanche of gyrating visuals (so much twerking, baby-oiled to the gleam of supermarket poultry, that the question should actually be “Why didn’t Diddy, rich as he is, have more bottles?”) serves as visual garnish for the nastiest verbal apocalypse of hypersexuality: psyche-burrowing lyrics (as fuck-tomorrow as coal-burning), mainlined right into the earbuds, oontz-oontzing down to prepubescent perineal nerves already creamy from the diesel rumble of the school bus. Wet ass pussy (extreme mop-bucket sloshing, as extreme as the alien mouths and gravity-defying tits of even just “regular” podcast thots), tossed-salad anuses fizzing with half-dissolved Percocet tabs—the global parade of such verbalized imagery, outcompeting counterbalancing values (if only sublimations of libido themselves), staggers the mind: infecting even loincloth jungle enclaves and far-flung rice paddies (almost as if some Bilderberg cabal had something to gain with everyone having their snouts buried in pussy like truffle-hunting warthogs). The taunting edge cutting deeper than the nymphomaniacal depravity (“Beat it up nigga, catch a charge / Extra large, and extra hard”), and clearly reflecting the mental-scape of at least two generations of young people weaned on unadulterated access to incognito-tab rape porn—we all know the lyrics, pop lyrics one could only wish merely amounted to soda pop for the soul. And we all know that, like it or not, these lyrics do not merely present a whore ideal. Dripping with the nihilism of a TikTok age desperate to dildo and squirt away the traumatic impacts of Camusian scenes proliferated with an abandon reflective of parenting inattentive to the need for atmospheric buffers of delusion against the indifferent void that gobbles prayer and orgasm alike (thank you, NASA livestream, for that 24/7 feed of our you-are-here marble pirouetting in the vacuum), these lyrics—now the world’s lingua franca—celebrate the whore ideal with gaudy flourishes that make Trump Tower look Amish.
A few snippets from just the bruised-cervix side of the aisle, where the demand for pussies to be “beaten up like Pacquiao” passes the smell test of sincerity with too many feral colors to be written off even as mere Stockholm, should suffice to showcase our nosedive into self-radicalized neon. But who really needs examples? For whereas once it was a requisite for a political candidate to proclaim belief in God to have any chance at election, now they must—often taking on cringey blaccent (“no cap frfr”)—seek the public endorsement of whore rappers. Who could be so deep in a bunker that these baselines, as root-chakra vibrating as a Hitachi bent on rug-burn demolition, fail at least to tickle?
“You can block my number, but he still gon eat my ass / He just paid for my titties, that's why you bitches mad / I suck dick like a champion when he put the Perc in my ass. . . ./ Rachet ho, but I feel like Kim Kardashian / My pussy good, that's why a bitch stay pregnant / I swallow nut, I really feel like a elephant.”
“If your ass a broke nigga, hell nah, I can't meet ya / If your ass a rich nigga, I'ma fuck ya 'til you ain't one.”
“My pussy is the most expensive meal.”
“Oh, you like big butts, well I like big bucks.”
“Put your hands all in yo pockets / Then you pull out that wallet / Tell that nigga stop flossin, you know this pussy costly / Want it dripping like a faucet? You got to make deposits.”
“Spank me, slap me, choke me, bite me. . . . / Give a fuck bout what your wifey's sayin. . . . / I just want to fuck all night.”
“If you got the sense that God gave you / don't leave me round your man. . . . / I drop the Perc in his drink / and I don't give a damn.”
“Lick between my booty crack / I'm a hoochie mama, slash hoodrat / Hoes hate on me cuz my coochie fat / Put a Perc-30 in my asshole / Yo' bitch boring, she a lame ho. . . . / Nigga, put that dick / balls deep in my liver (sex, sex) / If you got the sense that God gave you / don't leave me round your nigga (sex, sex) / He finna eat this ass / I made him spend them bands (sex, sex) / Went through the pussy-nigga pocket / cuz he was too high off the Xans.”
“My son need a new pappy / Too many bitches, where the niggas at? / I'm tryna get my coochie scratched / I'm tryna get my coochie stretched. . . . / I can't say his name cuz he be cheatin (I love you, baby) / Yeah, and I'm the reason.”
“I'm faithful to a nigga that's married / Steal niggas, I'm the Grinch, Jim Carrey / I wanna choke right now / Put the dick in my throat right now. . . . I'ma fuck your baby daddy and I'ma fuck him again / I'ma suck his dick, without no hands / Spend his bread then fuck yo' man / You heard what I said, what the fuck I said / I'll beat yo' ass then fuck yo' man. . . . / I take yo' nigga, put this pussy on his tongue / Deep-throatin dick, I got cum all in my lungs.”
“Yo' main dude wanna feel on my body / And if I take him, bitch, I won't say I'm sorry. . . . / A bad bitch with no morals, I'm sinning).”
“My rent due, nigga, let me suck on it / Put that dick in my throat, I wanna lick on it . . . . / Big dick in my stomach, I wanna feel it / Bitch, I eat the cock like a Hot Pocket / Dance on that dick, pop, lock, and drop it / Before a nigga fuck, I need a big deposit. . . . / We ain't got no morals, we some fuckin hoes.”
“I’m sexin raw dog without protection, disease infested."
“Double-hand hand twist the pipe but I ain't even plumbing / He like em nasty-nasty, bitch, I'm Mrs. Put That Thumb In.”
“Lay on my stomach, toot it up, do the crybaby (Crybaby)/ Look back, hold it open, now he annihilated (Yeah)/ Moaning like a bitch when he hit this pussy/ Damn, he probably wanna wear my hoodie (Ah)/ Choke me, spank me, look at me, thank me (Thank me)/ If I give it to another n—, he’ll hate me (He’ll hate me)/ Spit, slurp, give him that work/ Fell too fast for me, now the n— hurt/ Deeper, deeper, I need a reaper/ Thought I was in trouble how he tearin’ them cheeks up.”
“Thinkin he's a player, he's a member on the team / He put in all that work, he wanna be the MVP / I told him ain't no taming me, I love my niggas equally.”
“And when you get it, don't be telling where you get it from / I know you young but you know I like that young money. . . . / See, little boy, I can be your little teacher / And if you ball, then meet me behind the bleacher.”
“What your girl don't know won't hurt her / Anything to make this love go further. . . . So what's my chance / I'm willing to do anything to get in your pants / You don't have to worry, I won't say a thing / And if she finds out, I don't know nothing.”
“If he knew the things I did, he couldn't handle it / And I choose to keep him protected / So I creep, yeah, just keep it on the down low.”
“How about I cum all on your dick and then I lick it off?”
Enter a man named Mario, shell-shocked veteran in the crosshairs of the contemporary sex craze. He breathes the recirculated smog of unguent nymphomania like the rest of us, only it has him nauseous. Whenever enough is enough (and enough-is-enough comes much sooner than it used to, now that the bukkake wads are just too much for the cerebrospinal fluid of deep sleep to hose away in preparation for another day)—whenever enough is enough and he finally reacts outwardly to their bass-thumping singalongs (“All she wanna do is pop a Perc and get her pussy beat (ba-ba-ba) / Take this dick, bitch, stop pushin me / Face in the pillow, bitch, don't look at me”), the response he often receives from his fiancé and friends and siblings is the standard “I don’t pay attention to the words. I just like the beat.” Whatever the truth might be in their case (although it should be said that the ambient-noise interpretation is somewhat curious given the way they stress the “dick” and the “bitch” and the like, stresses (and not to mention the well-timed bites of the bottom lip and sometimes even demonic tongue teases) that cannot help but suggest their at-least momentary empathy with the rapper), Mario does pay attention to the words. He deconstructs every vulgar syllable, every prolapsing metaphor—a perpetual strip-mining motion, the very motion that earned him his doctorate and the honorific on which only his students ever insisted (“Dr. Mario”), barring him now from any layers of sleep deeper than night-sweat purgatory.
Knuckles white in the involuntary intensity of steering-wheel grip, blood vessels threading his sclera like crimson lighting—above the dashboard on his mumbling way to a menial parttime (in what should be his fifteen-minute sanctuary from the unmooring barrage) what nonsurprise does he behold? A cluster of school girls, baby-fat cheeks dimpled with childhood (childhood more titillating perhaps than ever, more even than when the norm was a man in his thirties marrying a girl of twelve), stick middle fingers up to the doddering crossing guard, one morning chanting “Rich nigga eight figure that’s my type / Eight inch big ooh that’s my pipe / Bad bitch I’ma ride that dick all night” and another morning—all of it blurring really—chanting “Yo' dick brick hard like a medal (uhh) / I got three holes for it, like a pretzel (uhmm).” He wishes he could jam the signal. An artist type, hypersensitive antenna picking up even faint frequencies, the cosmic background radiation enters his overeducated brain in 4k resolution no matter how loud he might shout his transcendental-meditation mantra or otherwise try to redirect his mind with thoughts or memories—thoughts or memories never vivacious enough to keep the dark at bay. He is no puritanical prude. He wishes neither to conceal nor to extinguish the sexual-fire that animates humanity. His quarrel, so at least goes the elevator speech, is with the relentless amplification, the stripping away of alternatives, the suffocating omnipresence—sex, as if we have been reduced to gonads with credit cards, no longer one among many facets of human experience but the only one worth tuning into.
We are pack animals. No one can fully resist the pull of the norm. Mario he is a writer. So how can his own horniness in the head, a birthright of Darwinian selection, not show through his prose in such times of sex saturnalia? We are communal creatures, less atomistic than we might imagine. More sleepless nights we have spent huddled for warmth and protection on tree branches and in caves than we have spent as humans. How can we expect his poems, the artifacts of his relentless processing, not to skew toward sexual themes, enveloped as he is by the equivalent of cupcake-gorging mukbang for the akratic dieter: this sex-mania music, bacchanalic in the background of every car ride (even if just to the not to the “clurb”) and often involving everyone singing along like possessed cultists? The singalong is always the knife twist—or, to put it in the cyber-speak of today, “It’s the singalong for me.” “They say she’s young, I should waited. But she’s a big girl dawg when she’s stimulated.” Too often he feels like the jailbait in this indicative ditty. It seems like no matter how hard he tries to resist, the fingers of culture—greased with the gooiest of hawk tuas—always pin his still-baby-pink bean. Indeed, each squirm seems to leave him more perfectly positioned, as if—and, especially in our never-blame-the-victim era, he really does try to prevent activism from closing down the possibility—he was deep down asking for it (like one might say even of the little girl fully, almost too fully, into the role of being mommy to her baby doll).
Writing, although less now than a decade ago, serves as rite of exorcism. It helps him purge the intense emotions around the sex-sex-sex, the brown bootyhole of the cultural ass-eating contest slurping at his spirit like a relentless car alarm outside his window as he is trying to think and write and achieve something more fitting to the human as envisioned by Aristotle rather than to the human as envisioned by Sexxy Redd. Other times, now more than ever, his pages read like surrender (a sad giving into the logic of “If you can’t beat em, join em”), each sentence a dash of accelerant upon the inferno. Joining in on what pisses him off (twice as loud, three times as filthy), just like when he point the alarm of his bullhorn (“WOOO-OOO WOOO-OOO”)—one he bought from Amazon, yes, for precisely this reason—back toward the offending car, is straight from childhood’s desperate playbook: a style of response ingrained from before double digits.
Mario knows he has this self-defeating tendency. He reflects on it often. And like a true addict, the reflection process often converges with the poison’s ingestion. He believes he knows the exact night when that tendency—having transitioned, likely over years before this point, from infestation to possession—took root, the exact night when he welcomed it in. After a decade of realizing that nagging did nothing to stop his dad’s drinking (if anything, it only made the old man thirstier), one night—when the mumbling bitterness shifted to the reliable apneic rattles of death rehearsal—the guardrail broke and he made that sad pivot of too many kids in his neighborhood. He glugged down what remained of the bottle on the table, making sure to leave just enough for his dad’s breakfast—only, after enough nights of this, compassion curdled into calculation. For without at least a morning glug (“♪ the best part of waking up ♪,” just like the Folger’s jingle), there was risk that his dad might sleep away the day instead of scoring a fresh bottle to keep the torch bright.
Despite the other-oriented spin he often puts on it (“what prolapsing damage—as much psychic as physical—is done to our children, when their visions are narrowed to no more than the grimiest forms of fucking?”), despite his rewatching of C. Delores Tucker’s 1993 speech on how the “pornographic filth” of rap music (boy, she had no idea of what sort of “psychological genocide” was to come only a few years later) threatens black youth (“[we must stop] continuously exposing our youth to . . . the lyrics of rappers who display no respect for women, no respect for families, and little respect for themselves. . . : no one has a right to poison our children's mind and destroy our African cultural heritage”), the radix of the hatred is his unfair exclusion from participation in the orgy. He cannot stand being singled out. Beaten for jaywalking by a cop while everyone continues to skip across traffic, he receives extreme heat simply for doing like everyone else. The better way to put it, in that case, is that the fellow jaywalkers themselves are beating him for jaywalking—their self-righteousness swelling with each blow they land, as if they regarded jaywalking as the worst of sins and for that reason (in the style of the faggot megachurch pastor who leads “God Hates Fags” campaigns) needed some other toward which to funnel their communal anger: some fall guy to hurt as a way to find purpose and belonging; some scapegoat to punish as a way to cleanse their own guilt and preserve their self-image. The unjust exile from the very orgy the culture mandates, the hypocritical targeting, the “p” for “pervert” branding —that abuse, mental more than anything, is really what has made it triggering.
The micro-aggressions are endless. Right in home and hearth he gets side-eyes of accusation whenever he looks at Megan the Stallion, or merely tries—the trying itself a tell—not to look (a head-scratching duck or a “Did you hear something outside?”, the whole nine of misdirection) at Megan the Stallion, spread out for the trillionth time on the screen (even though he has the common courtesy to suppress moans and tongue slithers, let alone race to polish off a spit shine before the Amazon commercial ends). Let one grunt of “Hmm” or “Yum” slip past his guard (little more helped than a rape orgasm, asking for it or not), and the inquisition begins: “Why do you objectify women?” “Why do you focus on looks?” The judgments, questions only in look, rain down with televangelist conviction—spat out in fullest sincerity (as much sincerity as every “Yass queen” every time Megan’s does that camel-toe-revealing lift of her right ass cheek), spat and spat even as both he and the judger swim in same plastic stream of BBLs and mega alien lips. (Those lips, by the way, are the same inflated specimens that show up on the TV-static succubae of sleep-paralysis nightmare. Dare he hold up a mirror to this funhouse-mirror reality by pointing out the lip connection, or dare he—God forbid—mourn the extinction of unfiltered and unscalpeled beauty (because, yes, his hatred and disgust for the plastic-surgery-look norm has only increased as more and more of those that judge him for focusing only on looks celebrate such looks and even engorge their own looks to the cannot-not-look extremes of baboon vulva in heat), and the verdict comes swift: he is just another make-America-great-again bigot, perhaps even Dark MAGA.)
That gets us to the deeper issue. For the exclusion is not all micro. What has made the sex-sex-sex world most infuriating, what has turned his knife into something serrated for bleed-out pullback, is that his professorship was terminated over sexual content in his poetry. You cannot make this stuff up. The clinical sentence, as final as a guillotine blade, was signed and delivered by the same left-leaning mouths that gargle along to “Pound Town” between faculty meetings—the spokesperson of the kangaroo tribunal, the chair of Mario’s department, a former prostitute who introduces herself as an “out-and-proud whore” (before going into requisite barrage of pronouns and attire descriptors for the visually impaired) and whose latest academic articles had been titled “Whoring as an Antidote to Whiteness” and “My Pussy Pink, My Bootyhole Brown: The Emancipatory Potential of (Raw) Fuck Work in the Postcolonial Black Experience.” The biggest problem lies here, and he sees it writ large: a society that mainlines sexual excess in every artery—music, media, politics—while crucifying individuals like him who reflect it back. Funny enough, most of that poetry labeled “inappropriately sexual” fell toward the Onion extreme on the spectrum between parody and complicity! The irony of it all would be delicious if it were not strangling him.
Why him? His every twitch magnified while others revel freely in the carnival of writhing flesh, why is he the target of this collective contradiction? Life is as capriciously unfair as it is impermanent, of course. So in one sense it would be ridiculous and pathetic, deeply ignorant of the casino nature of the card game, for him to ask “Why me?”—just as it is in the case of the teen who asks “Why me?” when it comes to her cancer diagnosis. He knows this. But he does not mean “Why me?” in the world-revolves-around-me sense of “woe is me.” He literally wants to know why, at least some of the how-oriented factors that make up the why. And there is something to know, some mechanism, even in the cancer case: was it all the years swimming in the superfund creek downstream from IBM?
Is it his height, his tone of voice? Whatever the full calculus of his damnation might be, surely his “problematic optics” (white and not just male but cis male) do not help—an understatement of the century in an identity-based circus of the most insane double speak: where “progressive” translates to “Nancy-Reagan-style censorship to ensure non-white non-cis safety” and “diversity” translates to “lockstep adherence to the sanctioned (safe-space) ideology” and “empowerment” translates to “terminal victimhood” and “equity” translates to “the public execution of excellence.” Just look around. We are in a world where people who look a certain way risk career loss for refusing to stay away from campus on a designated day, or come to the first showing of Disney’s Black Panther, so that BIPOC populations “can have one damn day, just one, to breathe unoppressive air.” We are in a world where people who look a certain way lose their jobs just for saying phonemes that merely sound close to what others with different optics say freely on every city bus and Dunkin line.
No doubt there is more to it. Perhaps the sex-order's guardians (mostly unconscious in their stewardship) sense—especially when his poems carry out Onion-level parody—that he is holding up a sex-party-spoiling mirror to all their grotesqueries, a mirror as mood-killing as would be Jay-Z receiving a phone call from his sick mom in the middle of his beating up some preteen pussy alongside a high-fiving Diddy while some woman in the shadows—dear God, not our beloved Beyoncé!—sucks his balls for extra engorgement, engorgement the child (IN THE NAME OF JESUS) surely does not need. So perhaps these furious culture-keepers are more like Trump than they would like to admit: all-too-ready to murder Alec Baldwin, if only they could get away with it, for nailing the impression. Unlike these artists who simply glorify kinky excess, Mario often frames his writing as a form of “shadow work” meant to force confrontation with string-pullers hidden in each of our depths. So might it be, to make the point in a different way, that the Jungian shadows—chthonian forces desperate to run wild (slavering even for incest, and for turkey gangbangs during lunchbreaks at the Purdue plant)—writhe in Pazuzu rage when Mario names them directly? The non-othering nature of the naming, an exposure process whose demystifying implication is that these shadows are literally us and so—in what amounts to the best hope at taming them—must be embraced if we really love ourselves, only provokes deeper fury. Like a rage-filled man growing more violent when met with that calm compassion that thwarts each lunge toward the catharsis of chaos (“I hear how deeply this is affecting you and, especially because I have similar emotions on the topic, I believe we can move forward together”), the empathetic softness of Mario’s spelunking headlamp (which exposes even the moldiest cave-creatures with non-demonizing grace) threatens their preferred ecosystem of denial and shame in way that an exorcist’s scream (“Vile demon, begone!”) never could. Denial and shame are, after all, what has the altar boy looking irresistibly sweet to the priest, sweet enough to risk so much on that tried-and-true path toward anal creampie drippings collected in Christ’s own blood chalice for collective sipping between predator and prey—a path banal and predictable enough to be the stuff of nature documentaries; a path that Mario, in what amounts to another one of his knife twists back at the hyper-sex world who attacks him for talking about sex, has laid out in a new prose poem (still in draft form) laid out in full below.
Sweetmeats
Light-hearted interaction marks the first gentle taps on the tight—irresistibly tight—jar lid of trust, the boy—as if no more than a sweetmeat in a confectioner’s display window—selected for his trifecta of vulnerability: (1) broken home pickled in alcoholic neglect, (2) only child starved as much for attention as for the confidence and skill boosts of sibling competition, (3) fat as all hell. Small compliments on sports achievements evolve to shooting netless hoops behind the rectory, the boy—temptress Eve incarnate—repeatedly defaulting to the post-up play that would send even hesitant priests into game-on mode (clerical collar tightening with each carotid thump): driving his jiggly ass into an ever-bulging but ever-unbudging wall of hands-high pelvis (“There you go!”). Then comes a steady flow of gifts: candy bars (king-sized on double-entendre purpose) slipped from cassock pockets after a technically unnecessary but precedent-setting show to make sure no one sees, a special rosary (kissed and handed over with a mysterious, because unwarranted, wet smile of conspiracy—a foreboding smile).
Soon enough, ambush patience perhaps helped by age-dampened gonad production, deeper one-on-one time becomes a thing: private Latin tutoring (thick with praise when it comes to penmanship and memorized declensions), laying out—shoulder to shoulder, hands touching—the sacred vessels before mass. Proving that the praise is not all talk, the priest then starts to give the boy duties reserved only for the most special: assisting with blessing the holy oils, helping count weekly donations in the back room (where the boy once innocently thought they burned all the money), and various other “well-earned privileges” straight out of the groomer’s playbook. Rougher knife taps of foreplay escalate through love-bombing compliments on how well these duties are being carried out, how the boy has “defied expectations.” Whispered praises of chosenness—praises no doubt coupled, if only we could take a peek behind the priest’s skull (especially with the benefit of hindsight), with the filthiest fantasies—slide like communion wine down the throat of a drunk desperate for salvation: “Such natural grace must make the archangels blush”; “God himself must have guided such a pure servant's heart to our parish.”
Ingratiation with the boy’s family is a chore, but a must: suffering through meals of dry meatloaf hit with a cold line of generic ketchup on top, offering help when the furnace dies or rent runs short, showering the single-mother with applause for her “remarkable parenting of this special boy.” The payout proves well worth the investment, though. Extra-ecclesiastical one-on-one time—bowling and pizza, even movie nights stretching past midnight—soon raises no eyebrows. At the very worst, any family members—what family members really, aside from the mom (who, even if her intuition has not been smothered by gratitude, definitely does not want to bite the hand that feeds her)?—will feel weird enough about finding it weird that they will never open their mouths.
So much depends (just like that red wheelbarrow glazed with rain) on the priest’s finesse, of course. But provided we are dealing with a talented hunter, the wedge of isolation can be hammered down after enough of these special outings (these, so the priest more and more starts to call them, “date nights”): a glut of duties and even manufactured emergencies, like altar preparation and cleanup before morning mass because of “overnight vandalism” (vandalism conveniently sexual in orientation, like penises painted on saints statues)—demands on time that keep the prey distant from the already thin flocks of family and friends.
And what would a good grooming story be without the encouragement of secret-keeping activities, each shared transgression a thread in the spider's web: sneaking an extra slice of pizza, watching a movie few parents would allow, whispered jokes lacing scripture with innuendo? Sips of sacramental zinfandel shared behind the drawn blinds of private chambers is the paradigm example, a maneuver tried-and-true—the locking of the door beforehand, one bolt two bolt, carried out with loud theatrics to test where the boy is at in regards to fight or flight (as if testing were even needed, the way the boy has only gotten more aggressive with his posting up in the paint).
And speaking of testing, the physical boundaries must be tested: hands lingering too long under the pretense of adjusting altar robes, extra hugs (and of lifting proportion), roughhousing that only gets rougher (and that culminates in tickle sadism and even a few nipple twists), shoulder massages, compliments shifting more toward physical features—and also, the best priests taking care not to let the direction of touch become too lopsided, lubing the boy’s hands with blessing oil (a breaking point for young lions still clumsy with their game, but not for our man) and then guiding those hands over the priest’s fantasy-wrinkled forehead until the boy gets the hint (reciprocation becoming self-driven) and the priest can let go to grip the boy’s shoulders in false prayer (tightening just enough to make resistance feel unholy).
Backing off from physical contact (“I’m sorry Georgie, but Father Peady’s just too busy for basketball”) has long proven a solid tactic at this point to keep the boy squirming in hunger for redemptive contact: combing through memories to discern what sin might have cost him his special status, wondering what other boy might have the man’s attention, until perhaps—granted sufficient drawing out of touch denial—the desperation to put and end to the withdrawal himself becomes too much. During this calculated distance, the priest—if there is anything to nominative determinism (and assuming, of course, he has the courage to pursue his prize beyond fantasy)—will be adding even stickier threads to the web of dependency. Confidant for every locker room anxiety, every struggle at home, every—you can bet your bottom dollar—pubescent dream, the priest will position himself—with the help of double-entendre endcaps on each confession (“I’ll always try to get you, Georgie” and “You’re safe with me, no matter how dirty it gets” and “You can always open yourself for me, even if it hurts”)—as (and soon Georgie will be saying the line himself) “the only one who truly understands.”
All the while the sexual undertow will strengthen: bawdy jokes ramped up in graphic detail, the most pornographic parts of the Bible taking centerstage, the most graphic Latin epigrams from Catullus and Martial becoming the material to translate, film nudity dipping beyond nip-slips into bush and shaft—and then suddenly deep into heady and emotionally confusing territories (like Monica Bellucci’s ten-minute anal rape scene in Irreversible, which would have the response needle on any penile plethysmograph jammed at the upper limits of red.
Discussion of sexual topics, disguised as guidance, is crucial here. It feeds right into the priest taking that leap (relatively small if he put in that work) of getting the boy to expose his genitals and, as a show of good faith (if there is reluctance), pulling his out first in what is packaged as a “return to the shamelessness of Eden, the way God intended us.” “Look,” the priest (Father Peady) will say, “wet dreams are completely normal. Liquid comes out even in daytime. The process is automatic. It’s nothing to feel shame about.” He will then at that point take the boy’s hand to his balls. “I want you to feel how it all just spasms. Watch.” And then as Father Peady reaches the edge (quickly, no doubt, after all these months of foreplay”), he will convey—in a tone that ever so sightly crosses the line (from clinical distance into oohing-aahing surrender)—one hell of a command in the form of a question: “How you gonna feel it if you don’t squeeze? Really get in there. There we go. Squeeze. Ooh, here’s where you squeeze hard”—his tone here, restrained by nothing but whisper, shifting momentarily deep into oohing-aahing surrender—“hard as can be.” And in the wake of the wild eruptions, whose correlated moans and taunting mumbles he holds back with a composure meant to show that this is just as normal as eating, he will say “See how you helped Father Peady? You got it all out. That’s a big big help. It helps me focus—.” He will give a post-cum exhale: “pfhhhhhooo,” savoring what he just received. “It helps me focus,” he will point up at the crucifix, “on what matters. . . . Just as we have to eat to focus on our studies, we gotta get this all out. Otherwise we find ourselves distracted. . . . So now you’re gonna let Father Peady help you. . . . No, watch. Just a few kisses should be good enough. I don’t think you’re ready for any of that squeezing! Here take the oil and go back and forth and I’ll just kiss down here. Right here, see?”
It cannot be all “See, how we can help each other?” In an ideal world maybe, but not here. Guilt and fear need to be instilled: from the old “We’re both sinners but we at least have each other” and “You wouldn’t want to disappoint God or me, would you?” to the equally old “No one would believe you over me anyway” and “I’ll make sure your family knows just how dirty their little boy can be”). Every case is different just like every child: some require drugs, others just a lot of camaraderie and heartfelt discussion. Regardless, it is often good to intersperse confusing counternarrative—saying something like: “In a way, as long as we ask to be forgiven, it can’t be so wrong. It’s love in the end, right?” The procedure is not fully linear. The priest often needs to circle back to earlier steps. He does so expertly, for example, by asking the boy “right?” at this point. Who would not feel special when an ordained priest looks to you for answers?
But however much the path might involve loop-de-loops, the jar—in what seems, depending on one’s perspective, no time—is fully pried open if the hunt is successful. We find Father Peady on his back, lit by flickering votive candles, demanding another baby arm be driven up the pipe (“Ooh yeah, little piggy gonna play in that slop”) and demanding (on threat of violence implied by the snarl of teeth) that there be no disruption in the sadistic rhythm of hard headbutts and stretchy slurps of the shitty scrotum—headbutt to slurp, headbutt to slurp (“Fuck those bad balls up good, little pig”). Closing in on the point of no return, he clutches the boy’s hair—the scalp-locked stuff of dark-web rape porn—and uses the little mouth as a headbanging stroker. “Stretch it boy. Stretch it way the fuck out.” The command here, hissed with the rare curse from Father Peady’s mouth (indicative of serious business, of go time), is for the boy to drive his palms and forearms outward, his fingers pressed together inside for fulcrum leverage, against the various contractile and puckering and speculum-fighting structures from the anus on up. This half-a-minute fury—and all the priestly taunts (“Ooh you’re going to fucking hell for this, pig”)—we can assume, at the point, the boy is already well familiar with. The bar of depravity does, however, tend to recede. And on this particular occasion, so we might assume, those peach-fuzz lips are smooshed in the final stroke so deep into middle-aged mons pubis hair and unguent fatty tissue that Father Peady’s love effluvia—over a week in the building, we can also assume given the tremendous patience show hitherto—burst from the boy’s nostrils. Held down without breath, a surprise chucks up and out as well from those same gasping nostrils: the mandarin oranges and grade-B beef of Taco Tuesday.
Such an ecstatic crescendo, cleaned up with low-capillary-action chalice linen by the boy himself (ashamed for losing his stomach), will likely have—for a tango team that has gone this far already—two big downstream implications. First, the pinching closed of those nostrils—that will be a thing from here on: “I want my love swallowed, pig!” Second, the dawning of a new kink expectation: vomit-filled grand finales of chef’s-kiss throat convulsion (the same penis-milking panic contractions that, to cite the old Parisian brothel move, come from the cloaca of the neck-wrung hen)—that will also be a thing. And guess what? The non-appearance of vomit, once an aberration and now a norm, will be framed by Father Peady as disloyalty and so as grounds for ramping everything way up: forcing the shattered relic of a boy to keep a Mary figurine up his ass throughout the school day (a sort of modern twist on hairshirt asceticism), or holding the boys face in the bird bath of bubbling holy water while Father Peady pumps out anal vinegar strokes that on one occurrence, so let us assume, draw out so on and on that the boy needs CPR rescue breaths—Father Peady becoming more of an earthly savior than ever before!
And yes, all of it will be caught on video: starting from the first mutual masturbation session, which almost seems sweet in comparison to the wood-creaking shit and blood fuck sessions to come (where Father Peady, like clockwork whenever “that fat back” is arched just right, will start mumble-singing in sync with his rhythm (as sweat drips from his forehead) “♪Something tells me I’m into something good♪” from the Harmans Hermits’s classic hit “I'm into Something Good")—all of it. In the grand impermanence (and now that footage is no longer grainy), who could resist? Father Peady, this way, gets later spank-bank material that doubles as blackmail material: “What would mom think, what would your buddies think, seeing this little cum-drinking, shit-eating, piggy?”
Or might it be much more middle-school monkeylike than all this? Like a rapist sniffing out a once-raped, perhaps they smell on him that he was beaten down as child. Smelling the victim on him (some pheromonic release triggered by his the epigenome on which his abuse has been recorded), could it be that they (mere monkeys in clothing at the end of the day) cannot help themselves from making an exception in his case: othering him so they do not have to face that he is just an outcrop of them? That might be a factor. Mario himself, tossing and turning in the sweat of night, remains open to that possibility, however much the white-male factor looms large in his head.
Speaking of sixth sense, maybe they detect in him, beyond just the words, that something is off about him—that he is a weird swimming fish who, unlike the Megan the Stallions and the rest, is actually capable of doing horrible things. Maybe their focus on his sexual themes is just an unthought-through stand-in for some deeper folk wisdom that they are privy to, an animalistic sensation or daimon voice that whispers to their heart: “Something’s not right with that man.” Like one can sense that the dog or the child did something wrong through some je ne sais quoi of comportment (angle of the eyebrows, nervous energy), might they even sense his fantasies of handgun trigger pulls muffled by vagina? Taking this though further, perhaps they bully him in light of this inner awareness out of a drive to create boredom-eradicating and void-cloaking havoc: pushing him to the edge where he freaks out, kind of like what happens in middle-school cafeterias. Mario is open to the account at hand. But he knows, scrolling through all these whys at night, that it does not jive well with at least two other facts: (1) many of his haters have never met him beyond his words (although he is open to the possibility that maybe they can sense his violence or offness through the mere words); (2) most of his haters are on the pro-Cardi side of the aisle—yes, the Roofie Reaper, the Cosby Closer, herself.
There might even be more flattering reasons, however much the light of these possibilities are now dim in Mario’s mind. For a long time many around him placed their hope in him: one of the first in the family to read, let alone leave the hometown to secure a PhD. Might some of the extra heat, then, be society’s way (if only unconsciously) of pulling a tough-love Ben Affleck on Matt Damon in Goodwill Hunting: saying to him, in effect, “You’re better than all this sex-sex-sex stuff the rest of us revel in—so yeah, we’re gonna go hard when we see you behaving like us!” Or maybe what is going on is similar to when the Dad sings along to the child’s rap lyrics the kids gets mad, barring him from what they freely sing—perhaps because (a) he has the wrong optics (older white male) and (b) he is expected, if only implicitly, to be above this (he is a responsible father, not a G) and (c) he has the greater mental firepower and lived experience (enough even to gather the meaning of the niche slang in context) to understand at a deeper level what the lyrics are saying and that in some way is offensive (plunging into the child’s territory deeper than the child) and (d) his singing the lyrics back sort of shows them a mirror of themselves, spotlighting how stupid it all it (spoiling the game).
If we really lean into the principle of conservativism (all other things being equal, the less radical account is preferable) and the principle of parsimony (all other things being equal, the simpler account is preferable), another explanation rises among the others. Perhaps Mario is simply surrounded by the wrong people. Perhaps he lacks the courage either to distance himself from these people or at least to insist upon his boundaries with these people. There is something too this. Not everyone plays Megan the Stallion all the time like his fiancé. And not everyone is so confrontation avoidant as Mario, more reliable for punctuated explosions of violence after not saying anything than for the good-old sober communication of feelings at the time. It makes sense, given Mario’s upbringing, that he would be oriented toward, and developed skills around, learning to love will problems rather than removing them—and now perhaps he is quick to assume, when faced with a problem, that he is stuck with hat problem and devotes his energies to executive the slave maneuvers of Nietzsche’s Jew: cunning guilt trips and biting mental attacks, the whole nine. At the same time, there is good reason to fear that a change in scenery and people will at best mean merely a lesser degree of more of the same. He has seen it too many times, the falsity of hyperbolic hope. He can here the songs of such in his head: “There are no cats in America / And the streets are paved with cheese”—a poignant play on the mythic idea many immigrants held in the 19th and early 20th centuries that America was a land of boundless opportunity (where streets were “paved with gold").
Whatever the reason, people zoom for him (like zombies who catch a whiff of blood) when he throws back to the world the very sex-sex-sex that the world has swamped him with to claustrophobic extremes. They go low with all their sex. And they go lower by making him the sacrificial lamb for their own sins. So he goes low too. Sometimes it is real low, his defiance taking on a Pazuzu tongue of grotesquery—especially, yes, if someone brought the heat to him. Most of the time, however, the going low in response to the sex order and its maddingly relentless oontz oontz was rather innocuous: merely licking his lips at the TV screen or simply poeticizing an image they have all seen—all of them, however much they claim to be “triggered!”—a million times in their unfiltered internet access: vaginal discharge worked up to a creamy horse foam (spumante) by a cock pummeling. But even here the response was consistent. The bullies around him would say—through their “What is wrong with you?” “Why do you objectify?” “There’s more to women than pussy”—“you aren’t allowed to go low!”
The role of his unjust exclusion should not be underestimated here. The inconsistency is like nails on the chalkboard, molar chomps of aluminum foil. Had he been the type to have a pediatrician (let alone get all his vaccines), the diagnosis surely what have been autism. Inconsistency, like starving African children, can be put out of mind. What he has no escape from—his Achilles heal—is when people come at him for doing something they freely do. He literally cannot stand it—to the point of needing perhaps institutional help. Put it this way. It is so bad that, although he might talk a save-the-children game, he would most likely let the monocrop swallow everything—no matter the risk it poses to the youth, no matter how much it increases the gravitational pull of the hypersexual black trope (a trope already perhaps spaghettifying his son)—if only it meant the torture of his unjust exclusion would come to an end.
His hometown reinforced a go-low-if-they-go-low person—an amplify-the-chaos person, taking control in an out-of-control nightmare by instigating it further. What that means here is that his default way to combat the monocrop is not to take the direct and sober and square approach of saying, like some square stick-in-the-mud father-figure type, “This’s getting way out of hand, all this sex sex sex. I refuse to have this playing around me. It’s a bad influence on me and on the world.” Instead of taking the direct route (and it is understandable that he would not since he equally opposes the anti-sexual purist types and is all about sex-drugs-speech freedom to libertarian extremes), his style is to take the indirect route of irony and parody. And when it comes specifically to his unjust penalties for his own sex focus, he finds himself more and more moving away from the sober response of “Guys, we need to stop this cycle of scapegoating.” His own pain and the great ape tendency to imitate are just too strong to have resisted retributive scapegoating. Since so many of those who have come after him (like the department chair) looked and spoke like Robin DiAngelo, it is the well-to-do liberal white woman and her characteristic cleavage-covering scarf that he has turned into a scapegoat. And so the cycle continues of projecting an image on people without knowing anything about them. Every chance he gets he mocks these types and, like Hitler with the Jew, links as many ills as he can (especially the keeping of black people on a plantation of dependency) back to these “scarved fucks.” Seeing just one of those scarves hanging on a rack or even in isolation displayed against the antiseptic white background of e-commerce is enough to send him into foaming mutters. Visions of forcing his fist to the elbow up one of these anuses (“How’s this for a fucking BBC, cunt?”) swallow his focus to such a degree that once—honking having proven insufficient—the person behind him had to get out of the car and knock on his window to tell him the light was green.
Mario’s form of combat, in short, is to give the world back what it gives him. He has been this way since a child. And since a child he knew it only alienated him further, which he knew—at least in a kid way—was kind of the point. His father would orchestrate backyard fights between neighborhood kids, money and candies and beers the incentive. Mario was always sensitive and misaligned, oriented toward things at odds with the circumstances in which he was born. He never wanted any part of these battle royales. But instead of taking the David-Foster-Wallace approved angle, the Boy-Scouts-honorable angle, of “No Father, I will not participate in this drunken dysfunction,” his form of rebellion—just as it was when he would throw rocks at crack whores from the rooftops (the same ones whose dick sucks he refused despite his father’s guilt-tripping prepayment), was to throw it back: make a dysfunctional statement of his own. And like always with him, the statement had to be the drama of someone enraptured in the fantasy of having power enough to make a statement that would end all statements—a finality, while never playing out in the robust sense (since the dysfunction would inevitably continue, if not in amplified fashion), that could only play out in the thin sense of ending the cycle as far as the statement-maker is concerned (as in when, for example, the statement-maker dies in the process). His form of rebellion was to amplify the dysfunction under the erotic overestimation of his power to collapse the dysfunction by means of dysfunction: pummeling his downed opponent, even grabbing a rock to bash its head, so as to say to his Dad “Is this what you fucking want?” The same guilt-tripping instinct toward psychological and emotional manipulation (the skill that bloomed well in his hometown conditions) drives his reaction to the sex monocrop. He does not stand apart in quiet condemnation, a caricature of puritan restraint. Instead his lips curl into grotesque parodies. He is a child once again. He mirrors the world’s filth back onto itself, grotesque and magnified to the shaved-pussy clarity of goosepimple HD, as if to ask: “Is this what you fucking want?” Ready to respond to the world’s depravity through moral low roads of pissed-off parody and even fed-up participation, matching the cultural madness note for note—that is the sort of man we have before us.
The good doctor has tried to be polite. He has repeatedly told the people around him that the music grates on his nerves, that the monocrop it is becoming is as suffocating to him as it is bad for humanity. He has reminded them how he has been punished for the very same sexual content that keeps raining down on him (and in that sense feels like society has treated him like a wicked stepfather: mushing his face in dog shit for eating the Halloween candy before dinner like all the other kids and then, still before dinner mind you, giving all the other kids more candy (peppering the scene with a good dose of psychological torment). He has even tried to use their language: saying that the music “triggers” him—that it makes him feel “unsafe,” that he has “PTSD.” How could this ever work, however? He does not have the right look to pull such cards.
In his frustration, he ramps up the sexual content of his art even more. He writes rhymes too: “Bitches getting roofied, actin doofy but not enough not to do me.” Because he knows the effect will be more ire, and because he knows social connection is crucial to human flourishing (let alone survival), it could very well be that this is all an enactment of the death drive. Writing this way has become the slow-burn suicidal thrill behavior serving as the mossy bed for the more attention-grabbing punctuations of floral and citrus top notes. An example from a few months ago should suffice. Beneath the whore chants rattling his uninsulated walls (“If you got the sense that God gave you / don't leave me round your man. . . . / I drop the Perc in his drink / and I don't give a damn”), by some miracle he heard harsh scraping on the back patio. His response, even before learning that it was one of the many neighborhood junkies struggling to drag away his grill, was to lunge out with a knife—a response whose unblinking automaticity proved that, however well things might be going in his life on any given day, some core part of him waits on standby for the excuse to end this thing. Since this is New York (a duty-to-retreat state) and since the culprit was black (a color that you cross at great risk of the “R” label, today’s scarlet letter) the result was not unexpected: the grill-thief called the cops on him, which resulted in guess who face down on his own driveway in cuffs (tempted to put up a struggle to have done with it all: suicide by cop).
Mario’s motivation, however, is more complicated than self-destruction. Some part of him—might we call it his “better angel”?—ramps up the graphic nature of his poems to infant-testicle-slurping degree so that he might draw out of the woodwork folks he once mocked and now fears have gone the way of the dodo: those who are not themselves participants in, or at least enablers of, the hyper-glorification of sex. If only some good Christian woman in a floral muumuu, a lady who—although smelling of aldehydic rose (key constituent in a “grandma perfume”)—never twerks or “be eating niggas ass” or chants pop depravities (“There’s some whores in the house”) or kicks heinous bars (“I'm 5 foot but my throat 6'6" / I'm a ratchet bitch, suck a mean dick / You mad 'cuz your pussy ain't fat like this / And your man eat the pussy like chicken nuggets / I'ma suck his dick for some red bottoms / I'm a real hoe, bitch, I don't spit I swallow. . . . / Pussy so fat you could see it from the back / I'm a west side hoe, everybody know that / I fuck with the boosters and bitches that sell they stamps / And bitches that sell they pussy with they legs on a ramp)—if only one of these ladies, condemning unequivocally (and worse than the anti-dance preacher in Footloose) all the lyrics and the scantily clad choreographies on TV (and even going so far as to hate Melville for all his spermaceti homoeroticism), would slap him across the face and say “Clean you act up young man!” He would fall at her feet, crying in thanks, just for her consistency. He would change his life.
This is hyperbole, of course. No, not just because it is all too cliché to find out that the types who talk such a game have homes loaded to the gills with videos of retrievers enticed by peanut butter to lap at toddler vulvas. It is perhaps also hyperbole—and perhaps this just brings out the central problem: that Mario is just too difficult to be welcome in any community aside from Nietzsche’s community of those without community—because the imagined woman is a Christian. It would not be long before a man like Mario, Tony-Shalhoub-level OCD when it comes to injustice, would refuse to take her prohibitions against any sexual material seriously (even if she otherwise walked the walk) given the reams of sexual material in the bible: “There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses” (Ezekiel 23:20); or “Your stature is like that of a palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. I said, ‘I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit’” (Song of Solomon 7:7-8); or the graphic account of Lot’s daughters getting him drunk to have intercourse with him, ensuring the continuation of their family line (Genesis 19:30-36); or the gruesome account of the Levite's concubine, who is gang-raped throughout the night and then dismembered (Judges 19:25-29); or the story of Amnon’s rape of his half-sister Tamar; or Mary at twelve consenting to a BDSM relationship with God, literally saying “I will be your doulos” (slave or mere tool for the goals and purposes of another, rather that a servant who retains at least some semblance of their own autonomy) (Luke 1:38).
Such possibilities are too farfetched to matter much anyway. Mario’s judgers are, unlike the hypothetical marm, never not cogs in the machine of glorification. They might not be gay foster parents from hell backed up with enough self-shot child-bestiality porn for several lifetimes, but they do seem focused on the bestial side of humanity. The editor at one of the last magazines he submitted writing to, one whose “What We Want” section calls for “poems and short stories unafraid to throw low blows,” not only rejected his manuscript and blocked his email address and reported his Submittable account, but proceeded to dox him over the course of several blog posts (releasing his number and address, information included in the header of his submission) for the “toxic convergence” of two factors: on top of failing to issue a trigger-warning identity statement (one “alerting vulnerable readers to the fact that he is white and male”), “this man’s poems showcased scenes of prostitution and sustained micro descriptions (smells included) of the female body. How can he know anything about the female body? This fuck’s identity precludes him from knowing anything about me!” The kicker, of course, was that these raging posts were sandwiched between laudatory reviews of Sexxy Red’s “liberatory line” of lip gloss: Gonorrhea (sheer green apple with multi-chrome shimmer) being a standout among the others (Coochie Juice, Bootyhole Brown, Nut, Pussyhole Pink, Yellow Discharge, Gonorrhea, Blue Ballz) because, in the editor’s words, “it’s the boldest middle-finger to the Protect Our Daughters movement and all the other patriarchal forces (and all their father-daughter promise rings) that shame women, especially Black women, who ‘stay getting they bag, hoeing and shit.’” In one of these blog posts she even defended the OnlyFans star who rents out her vagina to young people, letting them explore her as she teaches them firsthand the ins and outs of pleasure. Although after he has become a target (starting especially in 2016) his feelings are at risk of becoming quite confused on the matter (as society forces him to gang up if only for prison-yard-style protection), Mario “is” actually an outspoken proponent of such tutelage. As he often (liked to) put it, “we learn to drive from experienced drivers and so it makes sense that the same would go in the case of sex.” Again, Mario is not fundamentally a prude. He is deeply libertarian in spirit and remains committed to sexual freedom on principle, defending the moral permissibility of bestiality and necrophilia and pedophilia (so long at least as certain parameters are met). What pulls him toward a more puritanical extreme is not a genuine aversion to sex but rather a reactionary lunge, born from frustration and alienation, toward a community that will accept him or a stable ideological ground to stand on in the face of pervasive societal rejection. The crucial point here is, how can an editor like this try to get at him, and so severely, for his sex focus? Make it make sense.
It never ends. Accusers simultaneously the enablers, the suffocating double standard never ends. A few years back he read a poem that mimicked the sexual hollowness of current pop lyrics at a writing workshop whose moderator, a published writer of erotic verse and editor of the anthology “Drip,” allowed the offended “non-binary” participant to lay into him for his “predatory exercise in objectification,” for the “white entitlement” that allows him to “rape the black body” with his words—minutes upon minutes of harangue (all eyes on him, all heads shaking in either disappointment or disgust), before ultimately the moderator asked him to leave “so everyone can feel safe.” Once a group of twenty somethings, loudly talking in Starbucks about whether foot content was still lucrative on OnlyFans and about investing in sex machines for their live streams, reported to the barista (their spokesperson, you cannot make this up, a girl in a “Thick Thighs Save Lives” shirt) that they felt “unsafe” and “reduced to bodies” after catching a glimpse of his screen (which showed, only for a second as he was uploading it for his Substack post, a non-nudity cover of a 90s throwback issue of Black Tail Magazine). Once his cousin’s wife, the very same one who does twerk routines with her daughter on TikTok (and who clearly is a secret reader of, and perhaps squirter to, his poems), overheard him sigh “Damn” to an unguent Nicki Minaj video she put on the TV (was it precisely to bait him?) and then (after accused him of trying to draw her husband into his “disgusting way of thinking”) stormed out—yelling from the kitchen, loud enough so that his cousin would get the hint and have him leave, “that creep look at my daughter that way and watch!”
The double standard never ends. It is tempting for Mario to blame it mainly on the war against whiteness, which is framed in academic circles as literally a communicable disease that even black people can contract—as is clear, so some critical whiteness scholars tell us, when we see black people developing anxieties about being on time for meetings or when we see black people (whether in their capacity as cop or as gang member) shooting fellow black people. An abstract from the paper “On Having Whiteness,” which was published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2021 and was written by a scholar with only one degree of separation from the department chair behind Mario’s firing, nicely summarizes the blight of whiteness.
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.
The whiteness-thesis is tempting because it specifies who the enemy is so he does not have to take swings at everyone—an unsustainable approach, one must fall asleep at some point, that often meets quick doom. It is tempting because, again and again, that is where the evidence leads even in cases where the whiteness would not seem to factor at all.
Life, however, is much more complicated. Mario knows this. Always wanting to make sure he remained a thinker of the gray (an anti-activist who tarries before information and tries the see all the anti-demonizing nuances), he has not completely lost sight of the at least prima-facia thwarters of the whiteness thesis (however much they have continued to fade as he has proven unable to resist the pull towards what was always all-too-plebian in his mind: the pull toward activism). Take that bisexual dike-looking lady at the writer's workshop, for example. She never let anyone forget how much she adored Infinite Jest. That book, however, contains wildly graphic scenes of twisted brutality. For anyone who has tackled David Foster Wallace’s prophetic beast of dystopia, recall the addict who reports the outrageous abused suffered by her mini blob of a paraplegic sister whose brain was pretty much all stem. David lays it all out in florescent detail. Not much bigger than a pre-sliced hunk of supermarket deli meat or one of those thanksgiving turkeys that workers in the Purdue plant have been caught gangbanging, her father straight up uses her (never any less than once a week, so the narrative suggests) as a pocket vagina for his twisted fantasies—putting a mask of Raquel Welch, iconic sex symbol from the 1960s, over her head and filling her body (radically pliable, as if she were all ear cartilage) like a Boston cream donut. If it were not bad enough to see in such blow-by-blow resolution a father dumping load upon load into the fruit—well, the mute hunk of gelatinous headcheese—of his own loins, the story culminates with the realization (clear when the mask slips off one night after he slinks back to his own bedroom, slippers shuffling down the hallway like this was just an enlarged prostate trip to the bathroom) that she really enjoys the poundings. Her post-orgasm face the exact same as the famous ecstatic eye-rolled look of St. Teresa in Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (a chef’s kiss of blasphemy on David’s part, by the way), these fuck sessions seem to be the redeeming light of her otherwise sad existence—the itch-scratching pleasure that makes her life worthwhile.
It would be wrong to think that the hypocrites in question, the ones whose bullying cannot seemingly be reduced to fighting the good fight against whiteness, are limited to academic circles. One of his fiancée’s girlfriends, member of the National Guard and so presumably not someone one might accuse of being overly distraught about America having “white supremacy baked into its DNA,” had been sending him venom-dripped DMs from an anonymous IG account. She might have remained anonymous, through all her death-wishing messages about how “objectifying” his writing is, were it not for a few telling slips. In one particularly unhinged rant, she mentioned a specific line from his unpublished draft—one he had only ever shared with his fiancée. Coupled with her distinctive phrasing (using not the typical “PTSD” but rather “C-PTSD,” a phrasing she had used around him before (like during one post-beer pong discussion about gender roles), it did not take a rocket scientist to piece it together even through the weak attempts to obscure her gender: signing off as Xavier and asking repeatedly for a parking lot fight. Two things are important to note here. First, in the predawn hours after a house party, when everyone else was in the living room either playing Overwatch or dozing on a couch of indica, she had pinned him against the marble counter at the sink close enough for him to smell her onion sweat, slavering hot mescal breath into his ear the “You better” part of the song’s chorus “Hump me, fuck me / Daddy, better make me choke (You better)” and then slurring the full post-chorus—in total oblivion to the awkwardness of the sloppy scene—as she kept squatting down to his groin. “Mouth wide open, mouth wide open / Mouth wide open like I was at the dentist / Mouth wide open, mouth wide open / Put it so deep, I can't speak a sentence.” By the next song, which only reiterated the point (“Who need a gym when you got dick to work you out? / I want my face to lose weight so stroke my mouth”), who could resist making a motion blur of her Nuyorican head while pinching her nose closed and spitting on her face? Second, she regularly raved about her signature scents: Sadonaso for the hot months and Boccanera for the cold months. The thing is, the nose behind these fragrances (Alessandro Gualtieri)—whom she admired with the kind of fervor reserved today for influencers—is both white and hypersexual with his marketing. Sadonaso, which opens with photorealistic piss-warm diaper, Gualtieri intended to smell exactly like what its dildo-shaped cap—in conjunction with its name (a play in the term “sadomaso,” short for “sadomasochism”)—would indicate: sex toys that have been inadequately cleaned of hole grease. And Boccanera—well, let us just say that this chocolate-meets-cheetah-haunch release is an Italian euphemism for our phrase “brown eye.”
The culprits are sometimes even closer. Indeed, Mario would say “often,” sensing as he does more and more that family members wish him unwell and that they are secretly behind much of the reporting: “It’s often someone you know,” as true-crime podcast hosts like to say. One sex-centered poem—yes, one—resulted in his aunt—biggest Fifty Shades of Grey fan on Earth (flying to various cities to make as many E. L. James readings as she could)—refusing ever to talk to him again. One might say that the author gets a pass because she is a female. But Mario’s aunt also loves Stephen King. He remembered her raving, when he was just a little kid, about how good It was. Indeed, when—as a teenager, mind you—he voiced his intentions to become a writer, she gave him a copy of Gerald’s Game. The thing is, It fleshes out the nitty gritty (teen-spirit animalics and all) of a sewer orgy among children (one girl insisting that all the boys in the loser’s club bang her to symbolize their unity: coming together by cumming together) and Gerald’s Game includes a flashback scene where a father masturbates his daughter—pinning her little bean down perfectly—while she sits on his lap outside during a solar eclipse.
All these white authors people adore, from Shakespeare to Cormac McCarthy, have fucked up scenes—even ones written from first person. And yet these same people find Mario the worst. Strangers have DMed his family members on Facebook: “Do you know what Mario writes?” and “How can you stand being related to such a pig?” No joke, he has even been reported to police. The call came somehow to his cellphone. If that were not strange enough, it came from the police department in the hometown he had not visited in decades. Mario took a long time to realize it was no joke. Luckily, the detective—just needing to make sure no girl was actually being harmed—still had a grip on reality, saying “This seems excessive, but several reports came in so we gotta check.” Still, in Mario’s mind the final words were dystopic enough. “We strongly advise you to stop writing such materials.” A tad more graphic than the one that had his aunt renounce him (but still nothing compared to what we get in some of the most cherished pieces of literature), here is the poem in full. It should be clear that, merely given the timeframe in the piece, that all the worry about whether Mario was abusing some girl was completely unfounded. Alas, we are in a culture that neither seems to get (unless when convenient) the distinction between author and narrator nor seems to read things through before reacting.
On the Forest Trail 1 Even by our high school years she found core purpose lying among her hoarded Tootsie Rolls and glomming them down in those nooks hidden from the fat chance of a parental eye: under the piss-ringed and forever sheet-less mattress, its reek riled to belligerence as she would bounce her bull-necked self so high the wobbly fan blade would bash her flat round face; in the closet ripping out cat shit crusted in the shag, gobbling and gobbling it up while eyeing me (as if in threat) with those cross-eyes—far-set, up-slanted—beneath self-scissored bangs; in the galvanized culvert under the street near our bus stop through which would rage the winter-melt stream she loved to plunge her mega head in, glaring me down for my reaction; in the earthen-walled cellar whose workbench-mounted vice she had me tighten on elbow flaps, barely-opposable thumbs, until—straightening lordosis her only reaction—I would cave; under the vagrant-haunted overpass amid the discarded 40s that we would smash and stomp once she swigged their slosh, her tongue protruding more than usual as she gimped about neck-less in drooling concentration—all these times, images, savored (if savoring is, in fact, what it amounted to back then) but a moment, avalanched as they always were by more, more. 2 How good it was not having to think or speak inside her cat-piss scent bubble on the forest trail, her sour musk of mouse droppings warm on my side; she in her hypotonic element among the ahistorical, appearing each moment exactly how she is, honest as gulping goldfish, tied (knees stiff, block feet outturned) closer than a vaudeville drunk to the peg of the present— no expectation of Christmas ever flickering to life in those deep inset eyes below a Frida Kahlo stripe. Who, I ask, has never envied such a tight tether— that of the low and receding browed (“da da da” and “bah bah bah”) clouded in larval imbecility? How good it was not having to coax her—coax her odd ligamentous pliancy—into enjoying, into seeing the undeniable innocence of, me pistoning out— head to hilt, head to hilt, beyond head to hilt— that rotten gourd’s every horse-foamy hole: that shitty asshole and pissy pussy; that mouth replete with rows of rotten teeth (all bicuspids), cracked lips chocolate-crusted at the corners from pudding. No sound save that of one shaving-cream hand struggling to clap itself—that, yes, intermingled with giggly boar-grunts, the crinkling of leaves, the rustling of her rash-vector windbreaker. 3 Too large, secondhand, pink neon faded—to this day it haunts me, that windbreaker. Once a year I search “80s neon windbreakers.” I envision her in it, forever jockey tall, mouth slack in that facility where she is still likely to spaz out whenever it is peeled off for washing, for heat waves—where, by now, she might have died. It—the vivacious specter of it, reposing—is what leaves my wife and children, my co-workers, wondering where I am, where (finger snap) I have suddenly gone. It is what tells me how spineless and sick I was, how spineless and sick I still am, letting concern with how others perceive me come before love.
You would think with sex swamping us so totally (biologically, culturally) we would cut each other slack when it comes to sexual expressions. And we do, except when it comes to Mario (and perhaps his kind). But let us try to be fair. When push comes to shove, perhaps these people (had they the linguistic firepower) would use against him the same logic as the firing department chair, quoted here through the proxy of the university’s lawyer.
Mario is not a victim of a double standard. We must distinguish between fair and unfair discrimination. Is it appropriate to reject all non-black actors for the role of Malcolm X? Surely it is. That is fair discrimination. The crucial point is that Malcolm X is black. Now, what about Mario’s participation in sex culture? Is it fair to discriminate against him here? Yes. Mario holds and continues to hold (yes, in spite of his termination) all the power in a white supremacist nation. That is the crucial point here. We do not chastise Black students and Black faculty members for using the n-word. But we do chastise white students and white faculty members. Graphic content is no different. Graphic content, coming from someone with Mario’s identity, only serves to demoralize. It does not matter if the poems were done, as he often likes to repeat, “off the clock.” It is a form of punching down, pure and simple.
Mario complains, to quote his “Letter of Grievance,” about a “dystopian world where we censor and punish even comedians for their jokes.” Clearly Mario has not reflected on the difference between punching up and punching down. His own whiteness bars him from such awareness. Whiteness does not allow him to see that there is no inconsistency, no unfairness, when the same university that reprimands him for the sexual themes in his artwork—and here we cite Mario’s own example from the letter, a very telling example (one that gives us quite a stark glimpse into a mind of alt-right bigotry)—at the same time sends out “mass-emails promoting drag performances” and other diversity events.
Mario, of course, resists the claim that he is punching down. He denies—and there is a term for it: “White Denial”—that he has all the power. Yet he continually shows us who he really is, he expresses patriarchal whiteness, each move he makes to defend himself instead of listening to BIPOC voices and their allies. He wonders, for example, how white males have all the power when, as he puts it in his letter, “white males, despite making up around 30% of the population, account for around only 5% of new hires in the largest and most stable companies in the US over the last years.” But neither this fact, nor any other of his points, refute the antiracist thesis that whiteness exerts an indelible supremacy over the western world. Just as weather is not to be confused with climate (which is why a few cold summers here and there does not mean we do not face a global-warming crisis), an array of setbacks for whites is not to be confused with the end of white domination.
Mario has been victimized, like the rest of the world has, by his own identity. Born into a white supremacist nation, it is hard to say that any of this is his fault. The department and the whole college of Liberal Arts has shown leniency for this very reason. We allowed him to finish out the semester under supervision so that he could get his affairs in order. Even now, despite Mario turning down our offers to link him with antiracist workshops and education retreats, we wish him luck in the future. We remain sober, however. Mario can have no future in this university. Time and again, Mario has proven resistant to training.
It is not new to Mario that he is in a stay-in-your-lane world where it is inappropriate, for example, for white authors to write BIPOC characters (not the other way around, of course). But like a resistant nail he refuses to fall into place. Indeed (and as perhaps is a bigger factor in the rise of homelessness than we might think), the more the hammer lands the more he rises—even if it means rising so far from the boar that he falls. The department chair was not far off about Mario, in that case, to end the letter as she did.
Mario has proven resistant to training. Gone are the days where whites have access to whatever they want. He cannot write a black character (something he has repeatedly done, despite departmental warning). He cannot write out the n-word (something he has repeatedly done, despite departmental warning). And also he cannot engage in objectifying focus on the visual dimension of women. He cannot seem to grasp this. All we can do is wish him increased awareness, wish that he Do Better.
Through it all, the music continues to play.
“Licky licky licky licky licky for an hour / I’ma make it rain for you, golden shower.”
“Double-hand twist have him sittin on a cloud / Hit it from the back, makin macaroni sounds.”
“You better get on your knees and eat this pussy right / before I have another nigga do it for me.”
“You know my nigga be buggin me / I just be wonderin if you can fuck on me better.”
“YG and The Game with the hammer yelling, “Gang, gang" / This isn't what I meant when I said a gang bang.”
“I like being in the same room as you and your girlfriend / The fact that she don't know / that really turns me on.”
“GPS your nigga if you looking for me.”
“Fuckin your nigga, I got him on lock.”
“My neck game match my wrist game.”
“Your baby daddy fuckin me and suckin me / He don't answer you, bitch, that's because of me.”
He tries to focus, with all his extra free time, on the metaphysical matters—God, free will—of his training. But the sex-sex-sex continues to mock him—mocking him and yet, like the confusion of a rape orgasm (he is, after all, still a great ape), titillating his root chakra as if it were a nymphette bouncing on his lap and he were a man with the no-grass-on-the-playing-field taste of prophet Muhammad. But look what happens the minute he makes a lascivious comment. Does it matter that his comment, for whatever reason (perhaps more fight-fire-with-fire juvenile rebellion), is extra-specific, focusing specifically on the “anal pipe” of the “redbone” gyrating on screen? He agrees that if he cares for the other people in the room and those other people do not want him to make such comments it is a decent thing to hold his tongue. Fine. He does not deny that. He is not a monster. But the response is as expected: “Why’s everything sex with you?”—where, of course, this is not asked as a matter of disinterested curiosity (to which the answer would involve many of the things said above) but asked in judgment, sharp and unyielding, like he is a special problem: the white gaze of patriarchy. The irony burns so much it screeches in the salty sea of complicity, the hypocrisy sharp as glass underfoot from the plates and vases he breaks.
His words in response to the psychic assault, the hypocrisy sharp as glass underfoot from the plates and vases, more often than ever work him up to the point of breaking household items and punching holes in walls (only to end up in the dark, nursing his gun in a rocking motion). “I’ll never give into the fucking bullying. It ends now! Not taking the bullying. No more. No twerking fuck, no person who goes gagga over these sex-sex-sex drag shows, has a fucking right! How the fuck someone who sings along to that ugly-ass Stallion bitch ever gonna question me about being too focused on sex? Look at me in disgust!? Huh? Look at these fucking mutant red-haired cunts? Fucking whores who need Jesus gonna judge me!? Judge me chanting ‘cream these holes nigga’!? Yeah right. It ends today! I’ll never give into the bullies. No one singing along with these sicko lyrics ever gonna judge me! You fucking crazy?”
At least when one puts oneself in his shoes instead of someone else who, say, might have been raised better and might have enough self-respect to cut people off from him who play this sort of music and enable this sex monocrop (although really that is easier said than done when the sex-sex-sex has swept through the souls of everyone, reaching perhaps even into Amish communities)—at least when one puts oneself in his shoes, who would not be livid? After years of the same same same (the same sex-all-the-time, on the on hand, and the same targeting of him for sexual content on the other hand), how can someone raised like him and with his ingrained approach to attack through parody (parody as ineffective as LaRusso’s crane kick in Karate KII) resist for much longer going on a suicidal rampage at an Ice Spice concert (or one of the many other festivals enshrining the monoculture he cannot seem to escape)?
Yes, he does think about shooting up a colloquia event or antiracist workshop full of the DiAngelo types, all in those social-justice scarves and pashmina shawls: the white moderator and her “what we are to do, what we are to learn and unlearn, about the terrible disease of whiteness ravaging workplaces across the globe (spreading so much violence with its values of hard work and punctuality and planning for the future, with its prioritizing revision over spontaneity, science over faith, head over heart)”; another white scholar complaining about the wider world not understanding why it is critical to capitalize “black” while keeping “white” uncapitalized so that “we never make any sort of gesture toward glorifying the ethnic-history-erasing transatlantic slave trade that we cannot but think of when we think of whites”; another white scholar (specialist in Audrey Lorde) explaining that the refusal to report her black rapist is an “impersonal duty to social justice” since not only does she enjoy “the white privilege of a therapist and a bright future (something no black male can ever be sure of),” but also “the system is so hellbent on maiming and killing the black body” that it would “violate [her] conscience” if she further harmed the “true victim in this case” by “taking part in a long history of weaponizing white damsel tears to stoke a modern-day lynch mob”; another white scholar preaching to the choir by reminding everyone that since “unacknowledged antiblack assumptions infect every US institution and every white heart,” it is crucial “never to question or debate the lived experiences of Black peers and colleagues and never to disrespect or marginalize Black epistemology (a way of thinking reflective not just of the ways of the motherland, but of the historical and continued persecutions at the hands of white people like me).” Ideally he would start there and then go to the Ice Spice show. That is extremely wishful thinking, though. Since he can cause more havoc (measured in the number of dead) at the Ice Spice show, he skips the tour through campus in his more sober daydreams. He can see the headlines emphasizing the sexual explicitness of his writings as a sign that everyone should have known: “Sexually Charged Writings Laid Bare Shooter’s Troubled Mindset"’ “Objectifying Themes in Gunman’s Work Should Have Been Clear Warning"; “Artist’s Fixation on Appearance Foreshadowed Capacity for Brutality"; “Focus on Flesh and Form Hinted at Shooter’s Dark Descent”; “Maniac’s Poems about Bulges and Curves Damaged Ice-Spice Fans Long Before He Pulled Any Trigger.” And he imagines at least a few people—even if only one percent of readers (those who see through the rhetorical smokescreen of headlines like “Man Obsessed with Female Bodies Leaves Trail of Death at Concert of Female Empowerment ”—saying to their hearts “Wait a minute: if the sex focus of his writings is a troubling sign in his case, shouldn’t it be as well in the case of Ms. I-like-to-fuck-my-boyfriend’s-best-friend-on-perkys-cuz-he-got-a-big-cock-and-money?”
He knows that raging out would only prove the world’s worries about whiteness, which—get a hint dude!—is likely precisely the point: to instantiate the “white rage” the bullies have pushed him toward. He knows as well that even the most satisfying massacre, an anti-nightmare where none of his shots can miss (the golden showers of the attendees, with all their ridiculously plastered down edges, a function of fear as opposed to “making it rain for a nigga”), will stop neither monocrop nor his unfair exclusion. Thinking that it will be an effective wakeup call is as naïve, he knows, as thinking that killing the CEO of health-insurance company will put an end to the American system of profiting on the sickness of its citizens. The problem is systemic. Ice Spice is as fungible as the CEO. Even if she and a glut of her fans were somehow Thanosed out of existence, the world would still go on as before: celebrating sexual excess while condemning both his repudiations (“another white man trying to control bodies no longer his chattel”) and also his if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em reactions. He would still be rejected, especially given his tendency to meet dysfunction with parody instead of straightforward condemnation, by moral purists and libertines alike—left with no gang to affiliate with in the prison yard of society. The YouTube drag queens his wife always playing, the same ones who literally groped all these mimosa-tipsy bob-cut Beckys with no repercussion at a brunch event he—ever the white-knuckling sport—brought her to, would still go into detail about anal-mucosa seepage due to double-penetration one night stands and yet he is a demon if he throws on some old she-got-a-bone-of-her-own footage of Andrew Dice Clay. All these homo content creators, live streaming Dress to Impress on Roblox, would still cheer on “liberated” women, women who have taken their financial future in their own hands by means of goliath dildoes on OnlyFans, with phrases like “work bitch”—gatekept phrases that, even if he used them in the same “fun-loving” spirit, would entail all sorts of bans (from living rooms, from Thanksgiving tables, friend groups, from jobs).
The way his daydreams have shifted from escape to annihilation, from fair play and breathing room to eradicating the whole culture, you would think that he does not know these things—the futility, the falling right into the trap of the bullies just itching to say “Told you what his whiteness is capable of!” Fragmenting under the pressure of escalating rage, he swings have grown wilder and in every direction. He spent decades as an unabashed promoter of libertine philosophy, Bataille and de Sade looming on his bookshelf. And now, because of the hypocritical bullying, he is sickened enough even just by the voice of Megan the Stallion that he is losing sight of himself—ripening for capture by ideologies that Bataille and de Sade would have nothing to do.
He is in need of a healer, some Furious Styles, to tell him in tough love: “You're not alone, so stop going around pretending you are." He already knows what he needs to be told to him. The voice is in his head. And yet the momentum builds. He knows he is not alone. And he knows it he has more than just the “white knights of the Klan” on his side. His childhood friend, a Puerto Rican, constantly gets his social-media content flagged for “violating sexual content guidelines,” while videos of rappers simulating oral sex with microphones remain untouched. His brother in law, an Asian, found himself having to issue a Zoom apology for creating a hostile work environment after his colleague, who just a week prior used in her slide presentation a snippet from Salt-N-Peppa’s “Push It” (“You're packed and you're stacked 'specially in the back / Brother, wanna thank your mother for a butt like that”), reported him to HR merely for using the instrumental to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” in his own presentation. He knows he is not alone. And yet the momentum builds.
He polishes his gun late in the midnight hours, the cold weight of quiet desperation too familiar in his insomniac hand. “I’m sorry” spills from his mouth with intrusive automaticity, repeated whispers audible especially in bed (although it is not uncommon now even in supermarket florescence). He knows not to whom the apology is directed. Is it to the inner child with professor and writer dreams? Or even more cliché, is it God? Might it be to the same person to whom “I love you” used to leak (same whisper, easily mistaken for seduction) before the imperialism of “I’m sorry.” More internal but equally verbal, sandwiched between “I’m sorry” one now finds in full technicolor a pleading compromise that itself has begun to leak out in the insanity mumbles of the shopping-cart homeless: “either return to the old war against sex and (if it must come to that) crucify him even for shaking too much after pissing or else do not war against sex (keep ramping it up if need be) but just never come at him for eyeing an ass and especially not—unless you trying to come at anyone, of any race or color or creed, for the same—for his artwork (artwork being sacred in his mind); never weaponize against him (unless you would weaponize against all humans) the word “objectification”—a word that is as ridiculous of a cudgel (since none of us are non-objects) as the word “appropriation” (since none of us are the buckstopping sources of any sliver of what we think or do). Knowing that both autistic options are nonstarters for humankind, Mario places the barrel in his mouth. It is a grim rehearsal for what must be done after he finishes the rampage against the machine unwilling to address its own contradiction.
One must not underestimate the efficacy of this machine, however—how it smothers with one hand and strangles with the other. For even these acts (practical in their mechanics) take on an unwanted sexual veneer in the shadow of everything he has endured. The law of the sex land—slithering, like even the non-gnostic Christ, not just into the home but into the spirit, the nooks of solitary introspection—mocks him for the sexual connotation of his shining stokes and his deep throat of the barrel, its hypocritical voice (internalized enough to haunt him on a deserted island) ready to colonize even his death: “Why must you be such a pig, even at this lowest point?”
*Mario Mangione* is a vast, psychosexual-ontological autopsy of American culture in its most performatively liberated yet ideologically punitive mode. Structured as a feverish confessional-critique hybrid, the work mounts a scathing and relentless inquiry into the contradictions of our current sexual-cultural regime—a world where grotesque hypersexuality is aestheticized, monetized, and algorithmically disseminated, while those who merely reflect or satirize this spectacle, especially from the “wrong” positionality (white, male, heterosexual), are castigated or even expunged.
This work is not merely transgressive—it is diagnostic, functioning as a paranoid yet philosophically credible case study of what happens when Enlightenment categories of autonomy, erotic freedom, and identity collapse into each other under late-stage neoliberalism. Through Mario, the protagonist (and perhaps stand-in for the author), we encounter a tragic consciousness formed in the crucible of both working-class male dispossession and elite academic training, where the tools of critique—Freud, Derrida, Foucault, Žižek, DFW—are weaponized against both others and the self in a desperate attempt to regain footing in a cultural ecology defined by algorithmic virality and ever-shifting norms of offense.
Sex here is not merely the topic; it is the ontological condition. The text posits eros as both evolutionary inheritance and hypermediated spectacle, where libido—once sublimated into religious awe, artistic refinement, or interpersonal sublimity—is now unmoored and mutating into commodity, status marker, political gesture, and threat. It is a world in which twerking, OnlyFans, Cardi B, drag brunch, and gang-rape porn bleed indistinguishably into one affective saturation—while linguistic or artistic gestures that describe, parody, or merely process these phenomena are policed with hypocritical zeal.
The piece rigorously critiques the Orwellian semiotics of progressivism, where words like “diversity,” “empowerment,” and “safety” become euphemisms for censorship and scapegoating. In this landscape, Mario’s persecution becomes both farcical and archetypal: he is the white-male Other made object of cultural catharsis, sacrificed to maintain a therapeutic simulacrum of justice. His academic excommunication for “inappropriate content” is revealed as a political ritual—staged by the very same institutions and individuals who propagate the most exploitative forms of hypersexual content under the banners of empowerment or artistic legitimacy.
At its most daring, the work advances a Nietzschean diagnosis: that our culture's “liberatory” embrace of sex is not emancipation but decadence; not a radical openness to embodiment, but a simulated carnival concealing a death-drive, a self-annihilating despair masquerading as liberation. Yet the narrator resists conservative nostalgia or religious authoritarianism. If anything, the voice oscillates between libertine and ascetic, unable to resolve its metaphysical vertigo, yet equally unable to lie.
Philosophically, *Mario Mangione* touches on nearly every major concern of postmodern thought: the implosion of the public/private divide; the return of the sacred in the profane; the death of grand narratives; and the impossibility of stable subjectivity in a mediatized, performative society. What makes it singular, however, is its refusal to signal any obvious political allegiance. Neither anti-woke screed nor liberal self-flagellation, it seeks instead to stand at the edge of the event horizon and describe the gravity’s pull.
Stylistically, the prose channels a range of high-density traditions: the paratactic surrealism of Céline, the hyperanalytic narratology of David Foster Wallace, the grotesque satire of Rabelais, the tragic confession of Dostoevsky. The rhetorical speed, vulgarity, and syntactic saturation serve not as ornament but as atmosphere: we are inside the fevered mind of a man unraveling. The density is deliberate, a mimetic enactment of the cultural condition it critiques: overstimulated, exhausted, drenched in libidinal detritus.
If Mario is a pervert, he is the pervert produced by the system—the pervert who reflects its logic too clearly. And if his art repulses, it may be because it renders the unconscious of our culture legible. It may be, in fact, that *Mario Mangione* is among the few works of our time willing to drag that unconscious into the surgical light without either sanitizing or sermonizing it.