A friend from Athens who used to host True Blood screening parties wishes me a happy 30th. When I correct her that I am 31 she realises she’s been lying about her age for so long that she’s been cutting a year out of everyone else’s life too.
On the night of my 15th birthday, Stefan and I ride around town on his moped in nothing but underwear and helmets. We’re beeped the entire way by passing cars, the waterfront bustling with the protracted sound of wolf whistling bouncing off the high tide. “Nice helmets,” says the lad at the kiosk when we stop to buy Lucky Strikes as he nods our way. It’s a warm spring afternoon but Stefan speeds through traffic and I can feel the breeze on my skin. Shivering, I hold onto him arms wrapped around his waist and clasped at my elbows. “Slow down,” I shout but he keeps speeding up.
When we return to his we fuck helmets still on. I feel feverish, I’m sweating so profusely I can feel my chest protruding, breathing in sweat and the scent of our bodies colliding. I can’t even see so I push up the visors breathing in even more heavily than before. He removes my helmet when we finish, bringing a glass of water to my lips. We take turns showering and watch The Virgin Suicides for the tenth time in his bed.
I’ve been obsessed with beginnings in recent weeks, reworking things that remain half complete, reordering things that I considered complete but I am no longer convinced by and writing things I discard into the never ending list of fragments I rummage through daily in search of a thread to my disordered mind. “At 15 I had 15 boyfriends” opens one piece. “He sucked me like a Capri Sun” was briefly the opener of book #2. An Elias Tezapsidis-inspired essay begins with “I live with two skaters and an aspiring actress.”
Stefan joked it’d be us who’d kill ourselves and girls infatuated and haunted by our deaths forever. Teen desire in the suburbs, it was all too close to home but we enjoyed how similar we were to them in our rooms of blue and white and grey contrasting our black and red underwear. Alex wrote the names of everyone he slept with on his skin. His chest and hands were covered as if he had undertaken an arduous tattoo project. None of us killed ourselves in the end. We wanted to be vessels of desire forever.
It’s Friday night and the May air is thick. I’m dressed in all black, sweating under my black mask as I enter Sodo Pizza to pick up my and Norman’s order. “Dirty boy for the dirty boy,” shouts one of the pizzaiolos. I always say I’m an open book but you’d do too had you posed naked at 15 for your friends practice. “You’re not good looking enough but you have the most dangerous eyes,” Anna said.
Here I was, at 15, an angel in his boxers, being propped up as some sort of weird performance art and literary reading hybrid. I wish I had gone ahead with it, I wish this video was out there making the rounds online as some sort of signifier of my devotion to what I want to do. Instead, I had sex with Stefan, the creaking of the bed blending with the voices carried over from the living room.
Obsessed with beginnings but keep deferring things, some serious (learn French to read Rimbaud and Radiguet in the original language), some not so much (create a buzz cut club). “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.”1 I had an idea for a public book club hosted at Blondies. People go on stage and read the sex stuff from Henry Miller and Anais Nin only to have drinks thrown at them - the literary version of a wet t-shirt contest. “Maybe I can invite Pam Anderson,” I tell Norman, “reckon she’d be up for it?”
“I’m gonna suck him off now,” says Stefan, “Wanna watch?”
That same evening Anna took a photograph of us smiling with our eyes closed, capturing all of our mutual appetite overlaid with an air of childishness. We looked more like unformed lost boys than erection-bearing teenagers anticipating sex at every turn.
If Quinn Roberts’ debut on Substack is to be taken as writing advice, you should stop short of writing the orgy scene. I aim to go in the opposite direction, bidding to beat Rob Doyle to winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The groupie in me hopes he wins, so I, along with whatever slut brigade I’ve created, can follow him on a tour to shut up his detractors.
We watched The Dreamers all summer long, lounging on sofas and on the floor, our legs intermingling, hands falling over shoulders onto chests hermetically. White hot forever. Were we absorbed by the film or mesmerised and worn out from fucking prior to watching it?
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
What Anna said about your eyes—do you have any Scorpio placements?