No 4: ORAL FIXATION V. SELF ACTUALIZATION
PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH
REBECCA KOPLEMAN
I once loved a girl who took photos of every dead animal she saw. She was a sculptor, and said she was interested in the aesthetics of death–the flattened bird, the rat’s organs spilling out. Once a piece of my tooth chipped off, and she took it home with her. A souvenir, she’d said, for a love potion.
I think of that paralysis, that ritual of belonging to somebody else with something resembling fondness. The same way I think of the drug-rituals I participated in at that time: the bowed head. The bloody nose. The credit card dollar bill dirty key Parliament cigarette. The gums. The numb teeth jazz club spaceout. The gone and back and gone again.
“I love you.” I love you. Let me cut you a line. Let me light you a cigarette. Let me hold you in my strung-out arms.
That was god, I think.
But the comedown was brutal. I remember sitting in the mud at riverside park, snorting ketamine off the monogrammed house keys I was given by my parents at eleven. I remember the grown man crying next to me about how he couldn’t even eat anymore since his girlfriend left him last year. The man, Gardner, was twenty-six, and had attended and long since graduated from the high school of which my grandfather had been principal. Only hours before, he had hit me for the first time. Or rather, the first time outside of sex–he habitually slapped me around a bit, but normally under the guise of domination. And even though I knew I was too smart to call this love, even though I knew he might’ve killed me (or could have if he wanted to), I stuck around until I was pissing in his parents’ bathroom and the lightbulb shattered when I tried to turn it on.
“You’re such a fucking loser,” I’d called out to him, still naked, still pissing, crying only a little bit.
I mean, I say that was the end, but it wasn’t. He still had a gram of my ketamine, and I didn’t want to keep it at home where my mother could find it.
When I finally did reach the actual end, I asked for my drugs back.
“Do you still want me to fuck you?” he asked.
“Not especially. You want to fuck me still, right?” I said.
“I mean of course. But whatever, I respect you enough to leave it be.”
My organs were icy, and not just because of the horse tranquilizer coursing through me. I felt like a flattened animal in the crosswalk. I just kissed his forehead, and let him grab my waist for a second.
