Were I to attempt to decipher the chain of events leading me to Positive Wishing, I’d say I first gave power to it when my parents made it a habit to continually ground me. As I lay in bed seething, the walls of my room incessantly chuckled at me, and between their laughter and my tears I heard the carpet whisper that it was okay to be alone, and it was shortly after coming to terms with that the carpet could speak that I realized I could physically remain as my parents wished but EYE CAN FLY…
Positive Wishing has no qualm with convincing its practitioners to, not only conjure ridiculous fancies but to believe them possible. And the more ludicrous the vision, the more it seems Positive Wishing “relishes” in pushing its visionary toward the most impossible approach, given that practitioners temporal situation; revels in pushing the brain to expound all that it truly craves, that later it can place the practitioner in a reality so far from the mind's wish as a means of testing its ability to evolve.
My realization that Positive Wishing had powers more complex than its mere surface could evoke came with a client named Frederik. I had been haphazardly staring at my computer screen, my eyes caught in a habit of pretending they absorbed the content of the emails clients had sent. In actuality, Positive Wishing had me spellbound in a lime green apron with embroidered pink unicorns leaping from star-ray to star-ray as I baked weed brownies for Lugh. We'd come home from his tour the day before and I was finally allowed to wear my cropped silver wig again, as Lugh wouldn’t let me be extravagant on tour, this was because of the fanboys: he worried they’d think I wasn’t a “boy,” and we both adored threeways,—albeit that my favorite sexual moment always came after tour, the moment we once again were home and our lives reclined into quiet routine and again I became the focus of his energy which opened a latch to hours and hours of intensely emotional sex, of body spasm after body spasm as every pore opened to ejaculate. And after all that, as I baked, Lugh looked me straight in the eyes as he sang the lyrics of his latest song, inspired by my curly rectal hairs caught in his teeth.
My woo dream-state dissolved into an email from Frederik asking if I was okay with someone overweight; I replied, then whisked myself away to his front door, eager to flip a buck. Easily three hundred and fifty pounds, he stood in the doorway wheezing; his right hand gripped a cane that bowed under his weight as he shifted his mass. True I had agreed to see him, but couldn’t help myself knowing, the next hour of my life would be spent in his loving arms that gave me the collywobbles, so that I wanted to vomit across his lard and run to Lugh’s dimension. Instead he caught his breath and patted my head and he told me I was a beautiful boy, but I carried on. As he chattered and chattered, Positive Wishing dissipated, left my “overactive imagination” to fend for itself, and I forced myself to breathe deeply and relax every muscle of my body, daring not display a single true emotion. A life form bright enough to acquire so much excess and partake could not be human, I thought, Frederik was something else, something like a tapeworm at the heart of consumption.
I entered his home, who, handed me money as he cumbersomely crossed the living room floor to sit on his couch. I thought of my father as I looked at all the food scattered across the floor, my father loved junk food and often spoke of compassion as a virtue one must incorporate into life and it was a funny thing to be reminded of him as I was being tested by Frederik. My dad believed religious thought always inspired empathy and sympathy, he often said humans were imperfect, and if asked about homosexuality he’d respond, that it was a sin that he thought was disgusting, but “God would want me to love the person and hate the sin, so I would do my best to love the person and hate the sin. But if I failed, it is because I am human and humans are imperfect.” He recounted stories in which he gay bashed young queer men in West Hollywood, as he told them he’d wink at and nudge me, mocking compassion. As Frederik casually blathered about his life he I imagined myself as a parasitic princess chained to the lard of Jabba the Hut – “In his belly you’ll find a new definition of pain and suffering.”
I couldn’t look him in the eye; for some reason my memory again decided to hit play on the looped audio track of my father casually announcing homosexuality to be a sin “That I think is disgusting!” I didn’t want to admit to myself I was there. Not “there” but there, in my mind, because there is no there, there. I desperately needed Positive Wishing to escape the present, so I could leave the body but Positive Wishing remained silent: and for a moment everything went s t a t i c.
I bet Frederik never said no to more. Fredrik’s pudgy face might have masked a shell of beauty; golden hair, straight teeth, bluish green eyes, most likely a Scandinavian descendant that dove into American opulence. But it’s important to remember that Fredrik wore a mask because by never saying no to more, he had given himself up in exchange for artifice. As I could never fathom what financial security could (or would) do for (or to) a person, I have no proof that any articulation of my ideas on the subject would be anything more than words shoved together, nor do I feel I could ever know how severely deranged I’ve become due to the constant pressure of needing money. It’s in my DNA. A long line of have-nots, by which it seems the universe always wants to ensure the stricken know how painful is their pain.
The complex flesh of a human being can support both parasites and bacteria, the essence of the human spirit is in its complexity; our genetic code is constantly morphing, our cellular interactions are never fixed. Though bacteria and parasites are often interchanged in popular culture, the two are vastly different: as, bacteria tend to work quickly, multiplying madly and in the process may cause diseases that can kill unless defeated by a hosts’ immune system; whereas parasites fluctuate between violent aggression and seemingly passive partnerships. Either way, the host is transformed. Bacteria are essentially bags of loose DNA and scattered proteins. Bacteria split themselves in two when the time seems right; clones reproduce quicker than sexual organisms, but a clone specialized in one niche can give birth to only one specific offspring; when the niche fragments, the clone cannot adapt. Sex allows the variation that allows for change. The idea of buying sex had been constructed for men like Frederik, with life comes mutations: I had never been with such an overweight man. Change keeps the parasite and host alive.
Finally, Frederik’s mandibles opened and asked if I wanted anything to drink and instantaneously, Positive Wishing blurted through me, “Vodka if you have it or wine;” he got up and lumbered to the kitchen, came back with a large wine glass filled to the brim. As I drank, the smell of cheap grapes filled my nose and again Positive Wishing seemingly laughed at me as again it fluttered beyond reach. Frederik watched quietly and attentively each movement of the glass to my mouth, which seemed to immediately be absorbed into his memory as though he were watching me in order to ensure he could get me to fulfill his needs. I reasoned, for Frederik the experience of seeing a young man drink just before he was about to get naked and do whatever Frederik wanted was part of Frederik’s thrill.
After a refill, the wine finally eased me out of my body’s anxiousness and for a moment I was free to live: my brain cells began to rapid fire an urgent message to my dick, to get up and fuck so you can run, and as my dick registered the message it seemingly shrank even smaller, as my imagination coiled like a spring ready to burst. Though Frederik didn’t seem to care, he didn’t seem to notice the state of me as he asked if I liked the wine, with a tone of voice that demanded I say, “yes.” And realizing I was not only saying “yes,” but that I was actually saying “yes” with a gleeful voice, jolted “me” ever more into my body in the most anxious of ways as I couldn’t understand why my brain had demanded my feet lead me to him nor could I dive back into the fantasy that first led me out of my parents’ home.
I stared at his feet with a sheepish grin as I asked, “What gets you off?” A big smile spread across Fredrick’s face as he continued to look, through me or past me: no, I couldn’t be sure what he saw as both his eyes seemed to move in their own way, like a chameleons. The repulsion I felt for him returned me to my father's inability to think beyond his own ideals, my ardent desire to truly encompass the values my birth-dad praised but by which he couldn't abide; my simultaneously equally fanatical need to reject the aspects of birth-dad's nature; that devout, ever-sureness…
I told Fredrick, “Suck my fucking cock!” And as he walked up to me, I gulped the glass of wine, thought, “If it ain't a quickie it’s gonna get icky,” then demanded he get on his knees. And as the demand flowed from my mouth it shocked me into a need to engage compassion as an act of protest, as I couldn’t allow myself suddenly to revert to violence. And with that I decided to very gently run the tips of my fingers through his hair and then lightly scratch the surface of his scalp, and as he sucked my cock I wondered if he were aroused by my demands, or if he thought solely of my cock or his cock or if his needs meant my cock was the source of his needs...
Parasite, here partially excerpted, is a novel by Stephen Boyer, having been pressed by Publication Studio, as a part of its Fellow Travelers series, and able to be purchased here.
"If you're looking for a raw and slightly surreal missive from the land of poetic hustlers (and, really, who isn't?) Parasite is your book. Josh, the protagonist, is a queer teen with tranny tendencies and a psychedelic sensibility." —Alvin Orloff
"Josh is the sort of boy who experiences nearly everything through his ass, so he's not your usual sort of narrator, but if you've ever sat on anything weird, or anything splendid, this book will get to you just as it got to me." —Kevin Killian
Stephen Boyer is the author of the novel Parasite (Publication Studios), GHOSTS (Bent Boy Books), The Form of Things (2nd Floor Projects). They curate the blog minorprogression.com; with the help of countless others they spearheaded the compiling of the Occupy Wall Street Poeftry Anthology; recently they exhibited an installation at the Center for Book Arts (Jan-March 2013) showcasing both the Anthology and the Peoples Free Library, of which Stephen is a member. Stephen is currently working on a play.
Parasite has been pressed by Publication Studio, as a part of its Fellow Travelers series, which carries on the pioneering work of Paris-based Olympia Press's Traveller's Companion series of the nineteen-fifties and '-sixties, which published texts that had been banned or censored through moralistic prohibition. To purchase Parasite, either in print form or as an eBook, and for more information regarding the novel, its author, Stephen Boyer, Publication Studio, or the Fellow Travelers series, please visit its page at Publication Studio's website: which is here.
