Under Embargo Until 30.08.21 00:30: Devils in Sunburned Flesh
Like a groupie incognito posing as a real reader
Everyone in Greece has a sore throat. By everyone I mean gay guys and guys and girls who have sex with gay guys. “I don’t have it,” a friend who has spent three weeks in the Cyclades tells me over WhatsApp. He’s sunburnt and seems too out of it, not so coherent when we speak, stopping midway through a thought and gazing at the screen waiting for me to respond to something he hasn’t vocalised yet. “I just sucked a bunch of guys off.”
Another friend is infatuated with two Patmos fishermen, neither of whom swing his way. Everyone’s testing negative for the plague, the verdict being tonsillitis or a common cold. The Greek islands have become a playground again and I find myself jealous for not being ill from having too much fun.
A guy I used to flirt with is ill in the height of summer, stuck in the worst of Thessaloniki’s heatwave with nothing to do but post IG thirst traps. A friend from Athens I text occasionally has found herself in Halkidiki for lack of money to escape to the islands and asks me where it is I went skinny dipping, where is it that I had sex. “That’s hot,” she tells me when I answer her questions about what transpired when I was jailbait.
Stefan kicked the volleyball between me and Phillip, sending sand flying everywhere, jolting us awake. We were pretty quiet on beach days, lullabied by the sea, the sound of the waves hugging and drawing in the sand drifting us to a daze. The second someone brought out a ball we were wide awake again, so I guess it’s true, men do only want one thing and it’s displaying athletic prowess, a dick size contest of sorts played out in front of whoever’s interested enough to pay attention.
Earphones would come off, books would be slammed shut, tees would fly off shoulders. We’d jump so high it felt we were no longer bound to the ground. Our voices tended to deepen as we sent the ball flying over the net. Teams didn’t matter by the end, we’d aggress over our own teammates.
One day halfway through the summer, I served the ball so hard it hit Phillip straight in the face, leaving behind an apple red imprint on his nose before a torrent of blood flew down his chin and chest. Stefan took a photo of both of us smiling, arms around each others shoulders, Phillip’s teeth reddened. He spent the afternoon with tissues stuffed up his nostrils, breathing through his mouth and drinking alcohol to soothe the pain. Later that day, once the bleeding had stopped and his pain had dissipated, I gave him head in the toilets of a cafe bar where we’d stop for ice cream on most days. We were wearing Adidas swimming trunks, mine red, his black.
“It’s gonna be a hot dick summer,” according to Matthew Schneier’s The Return of FOMO story in The Cut. Sales for teeth whiteners, deodorant, sunblock and condoms spiked in the aftermath of lockdowns, he reported. The condom aisle at the Liverpool Street Station store had been emptied, I noticed after the story dropped. They had also run out of my deodorant, so I went French for the week. “It’s international fuck and find out season,” an acquaintance DMed me. Everyone insists they’ve had no formative experiences over the summer, nothing remarkable happened in this time they’ll reflect back on to years from now. Life’s speeding up again and everyone’s ready for summer 2022, “when we’ll really go off the rails,” as a trader I used to drink with noted when I ran into him at Cafe Boheme.
Twitter Fleets never took off but let it be said that they went out on a high. On August 3rd, with hours to go before they were to disappear forever, rendered to nothing but a faint memory in the minds of digital addicts, they were flooded with nudes. Everyone, it seemed, felt compelled to show themselves without inhibition or fear. By everyone I mean gay guys. And guys or girls who have or want to have sex with gay guys. I found myself scrolling through them for the first time ever, captivated by the endless succession of dick pics. No one even bothered to crop their faces out. Even people I hadn’t seen on Twitter for months returned to show their cocks. In their final hours, Fleets offered everyone a chance to be their true selves online: exhibitionists desiring to be perceived, desired. “I feel like this will make it to your newsletter,” one acquaintance who posted no less than three photos of themselves said in a DM. In between sending pitches out to media offering interviews with a famous British artist, I found myself wondering if I should join in on the action. Unless you happened to scroll through that afternoon you’ll never know for certain if I did.
Like everyone else, I’ve returned to the world, drinking in bars and going to the cinema and dancing at a club with stripper poles erected in the middle and smoking on rooftops. By everyone I mean gay guys and guys and girls who are questioning whether they want to have sex with gay guys. Catching up and falling behind all at once, feeling more connected but a little empty, exhausted but energised. “I wish I could quit my job to dance for money.”
I dragged my ass back to the gym to fight off the effects of too much vodka and opted for boxing as a way of reliving the past and embodying certain fantasies. The trainer, a beefed up Peter Pan with a cockney accent, has all the women lining up at the end of each class ostensibly to say thank you for a chance to have a closer, better look at his sculpted figure. I struggle to keep up with him the first time until he mentions something about twisting your leg as you land the punch like you’re putting out a cigarette. If all training drew parallels to smoking, then I’d be more invested.
At another class, another trainer seems displeased when I look out of breath and respond “no” when he asks if we’re ready for another round of push ups. “Don’t give me that look,” he says. “You know what you signed up for. For the next hour, I own you.” I think inside I should just jump him right then and there, forgoing any decency in favour of the Dionysian. “I didn’t realise I’m entering a Faustian bargain,” I say panting and we both laugh.
Sixteen years ago at another gym in another country a classmate blew me in the showers. We never spoke again, remaining on nodding terms for the rest of our time in school.
In Praise of Older Women has been open on one of my tabs for three weeks, but I haven’t gotten around to rewatching it. Always making plans to watch certain films and read certain books only to not follow through and choose whatever feels right in the moment. I started a Pasolini marathon instead and have been reading a book of skater erotica addressed to gay guys and guys and girls who fantasise about gay guys. You talk about wanting to write sex enough and people will gift you books that tell you how they see you. Descriptions of sex (and skating) verge on instruction manual rather than the erotic, with the sublimation of the tension of wanting to impress other skaters left unexplored. Every story feels like it’s been written by a voyeur too afraid to join in, opting to observe from afar.
We wanted pecks like Tom Berenger’s in In Praise of Older Women. We watched the film with the air-con on full blast and the shutters closed to keep the sun out. Handfuls of cherries, we took turns spitting the stones out but missed the bowl on most tries, the remains of cherry flesh staining Phillip’s bedroom floor. Whistles echoed across the living room as the women in the film inexplicably moaned during the sex scenes [either too soon or too loud for what was happening]. “Looks like fun, maybe I should join you,” we’d laugh days later. “I’ll be your good boy,” Alex mumbled at the screen breathing out the last bit of a Marlboro after Maya caught Andras fucking someone else.
A Mubi list titled OLDER WOMAN/YOUNGER MAN makes me realise some of my favourite films fall under the category. “Some of my best friends sleep exclusively with older women,” I type out on Twitter before a call takes me away and the sentiment falls trapped in the drafts.
The copy of Dazed & Aroused on my desk seems to pique everyone’s interest. Serena and I talk about our favourite writers over coffee when I realise I’m full of shit. I call myself a Rob Doyle groupie but haven’t read either of the collections he’s edited. I babble on about Henry Miller but the works of his I haven’t read outnumber those I have. Even people who don’t rate him all that much have read Quiet Days in Clichy which till recent weeks I knew of in name only. I told myself I’d start as soon as I got home from work, lying shirtless in the retreating sun, but instead read about Bruce Benderson and Allen Barnett, names I jotted down on Notes when another writer I love posted about them weeks before. “I’d read more if I was on furlough indefinitely,” I tell Serena the next day as we send out our press releases. “Employment is getting in the way.”
Shredded guys on IG place themselves in more homosexual scenarios than actual homosexuals, joking about blowing each other post workout, the difference between them and me and my friends back in the day being we joked about its inevitability.
We lay on rocks at the remotest part of the beach posing like we were in a Rohmer flick, the waves crashing not that far from our feet and the cars passing by close enough to our heads to smell the exhaustions for a moment, our only soundtrack. We jumped in the sea when we got too hot and climbed back out with no poise, losing our balance as the rocks, rough and wet, pierced our soles. We lay back down, palms open under our heads, and shut our eyes from the sun. When some time had past and we were hot again, one by one, we slipped off our trunks, rubbing sunblock on ourselves and threw our tees over our eyes, the sun too strong even as it shifted. We finished a packet of Marlboros, our collarbones popping out as we took each drag. We reentered the sea and washed our sweat away then walked back out, put our trunks back on looking at each other as we concealed ourselves and walked to a tavern for lunch. Under the shade, we seemed red. We rubbed more sunblock on ourselves, each other, hands falling to our abs and the sides of our waists all devilish smiles.
On the drive back we were spent, we fell silent, the smell of watermelon lotion soothing us to sleep, four of us at the back all dreaming separate dreams together. After we showered we took to the balcony floor, too small to fit us unless we sat on each other, and talked about Devil in the Flesh, which we had watched a few evenings prior without subtitles, a strange experience leaving us to guess what was being talked about by the actors’ movements, expressions. We bit into huge slices of watermelon, the sugary pink liquid dripping on our bare chests.
Phillip’s hot, older neighbour came out to the next door balcony and sat down with a glass of wine and a cigarette. Our loudness melted away into the air. Stefan, Alex and Andreas moved to our side, the six of us unable to look away. We looked at her the way we watched on during the film, not knowing what’s happening or what may happen next. Phillip stood up in his red briefs that matched his skin now and asked for a lighter. “All of ours have run out.” We were waiting on her to crack a smile and say something. She held her lighter out but did not so much as shift an inch from her seat. Phillip reached over, his torso almost flat across the two railings, giving us a full view of the muscles on his thighs, his calves. “I wonder if she spotted my boner.” We lit up and spent the rest of the evening talking almost at a whisper, throwing glances her way. Andreas wrapped an arm around me drawing me closer to tell me how he wanted to fuck her, the typical hair pulling and scratching that was in vogue at the time. “I’m hard,” he said in my ear and Andreas, lying in between his legs, whispered in turn “true, I can feel him pushing on my spine.” We lit cigarettes before the ones we had been smoking went out again and again till she went back in. Heads resting on laps and chests, legs over legs, we contaminated each other with our own scent.
One that stands out from the drafts folder:
This summer we’re wearing tennis outfits but not playing, we’re watching films and going to 3rd in cinemas, we’re listening to Azealia Banks, we’re dancing on bars again, we’re rejoining the gym, we’re recreating the locker room atmosphere in our bedrooms, we’re doing coke, we’re skating in traffic, we’re not crying in the club but we’re covered in bruises (sex or skating).
By “we” I mean gay guys and guys and girls who want to fuck gay guys. But even if you don’t, you’re welcome to join in.