It was in one of those badly lit, bureaucrat-filled, crime-crowned, cum-reeking joints that offer Calzada Independencia its distinct flavor of decadence where Leobardo’s brother, having suffered celibacy for thirty-one years owing to a middling height and protruding hump, understood at last that his body could be something more than a prison. Penelope was always on his lips, manifesting as a deeply caring and thoughtful figure who asked for little; that is, for her pay and nothing else. Everyone knew, especially Leobardo, that a maternal disposition in one of Ishtar’s daughters cannot obtain if you fail to go beyond protocol. Mere pay yields tried-and-true craftsmanship: some handiwork and a tightening of the cunt. Verily, Penelope made a Pindar of Heriberto, and soon brought out his lavish tendencies, insofar as minimum wage and family loans permitted.

Leobardo determined Penelope was a coping mechanism that Heriberto had excogitated in an instant of despair, and therefore derided the artless Pygmalion. Although the case for brotherly love was hard to argue, Leobardo certainly imagined, consistent with his devious loyalty to time-worn masculinity, that only through his aggressive deflation of illusions he would open his brother’s eyes. But words are words, penurious stabs at passing air, and even Leobardo’s hebephrenic humor could not debark in Heriberto’s inner haven, truculent as it now was to all material which brought no memory of viscous hydromancy. Indeed, our erstwhile eunuch acquired the bearings of a satrap, bid adieu to nosocomial self-consciousness, and dared to call Leobardo an equal. The relationship was heating. Words had to be relinquished.

Step where you may, there are prerogatives for regulars. No exception in Lipsdick: a minute of intense grinding after your underwear were as wet as a viene viene’s rag, ribald tattle designed to cement your insider status, an improbable hand job among your clueless pals, some coquettish slaps to harmonize with the allotted spanking. It is easy to notice that all these concoctions, however intimate in execution, were simple charades. Leobardo, in his hubristic spell, asked for truth. Who tended to his brother? Correct, correct, the sly Heriberto had anticipated an intervention and so gave a false name. Lipsdick housed no Penelopes. Furthermore, he soliloquized as if she were a soul unbounded by matter, a visitation that tickled his cock with the effectiveness of a pagan goddess. In this civitas diaboli, you would have been fortunate to remember humanity had interests beyond the haptic. Leobardo tried, spent, and folded. Plotinian Penelope eluded his coarse sensibility. How could she not? Why would such a cock-slanted being find within the whorizon the exquisite Phryne, beloved of Apelles, Praxiteles, and Hypereides? Why would the lowly devotee of some nameless satyr detect among the pornae the sophisticated Leontion, Zoilus of Aristotelians? Perhaps a capricious Lais would have made herself known. Perhaps. Against Larentina, however, he had to approach me.

I hasten to add that my involvement sprang from a need for dallying, not from any genuine interest in the fraternal tug-of-war. A tyrannical older brother who lords it over an embryonic anchorite teases us with mythic undertones, yes, but the eventual rebellion that is ignited through a growing self-worth surely evokes another trinket for Americana aficionados. Therefore I set aside the speculative leisure in which it is my custom to hibernate. Did not Machiavelli forge his shrewd Discorsi in the amiable and aimless atmosphere of the Orti Oricellari, where conspirators, poets, and philosophers alike reveled in the hidden harmonies of the vernacular? What of Ficino and his Neoplatonic Florentine Academy, so debonair as to outspread and fill each member’s heart? Or Boucicaut’s Order of the Green Shield with the White Lady, dedicated to something other than the “honor, estate, reputation and praise of all women and damsels of noble lineage”? Let us found our Cours d’Amour whenever possible, and trust that the spoken word will engrave within once and for all the fleeting experience. But we must gather first.

Cunning though Heriberto was, he ultimately fixated on traits that betrayed a slender silhouette. On the basis of this seemingly meager datum, four-fifths of Lipsdick was discounted. Your gluttonous civil servant has always had a predilection for continual reminders of his daily feasts: nothing will do short of callipygian damsels with enough rack for the sudden erotomastia. What is more, upstanding members of society that they are, they would not think of stuffing their triple-chinned faces into their steaks; at night, nevertheless, they can stuff them for minutes on end into a handsomely paid ass. And let us keep in mind their rebellious counterparts, those cap-wearing gentlemen who, peanut-shaped though they be, must have tributes to their impetuous manhood throughout the day. These proud bearers of our animal past favor defenseless cries for help and pleading eyes, but they can manage to sleep if a zaftig dancer growls smutty nonsense about their cocks almost puncturing their insides. Lipsdick cared for these abliguritious customers. The stray students who giggled at the sight of nudity and whispered “tits” with bated breaths, the hoodied bachelor who looked askance in fear of finding his equally lonely colleagues, the reluctant drunks who had an innocent time at the karaoke bar yet felt there must be more to a night of fun were all merely tolerated. The five exceptions to contemporary standards of lust were at their disposal. I turned to them.

Inés in her inglenook, gratifier of nikhedonia, angled her eyes and opened them out of pot-induced engrossment, for she knew the prevailing addiction to minima and disbelieved of cuntcentration. A grin, a slow dance, and a remote spread. I could see those gentlemen on repeat skeptical of their luck. Here you had a long pair of legs attached to a comatose stunner: the crude dream implied in countless jokes. Inés did not talk, legs swinging and trembling as bait. Inés waited and stuck to her inner life. No, no, she would certainly not allow anomalies. Thus I sat and made no further inference. She slept. Susana, antipode at order, hurried toward my cock, mumbling donkey horse tripod impaler, stripping with violence her outmoded lingerie, baroque pleaser to eye and ear. I had to act the tease. She played with her nipples, licked and bit her lip, stared with consuming ardor. Blistering lust as sedative was the strategy. So again I would not hear a meaningful word. In point of fact, I masturbated out of politeness, but impatience grew. A makeover, she insisted. Noticing the cumulative bitterness, I went with that beloved defilement of porn-glutted teenagers and dog-natured hunks. I was then hurried out. Melanie succumbed to the garishness of her lair. The walls were covered with posters of Rafael Inclán, Alfonso Zayas, Jorge Rivero, Chatanuga, and Tun Tun; two bedside tables had small lamps in the shape of ficheras; the bed aspired to roundness. She was the youngest yet. Perhaps nineteen? Submission, aggression, and now regression. Giddy and grumpy, resolutely inarticulate, she came and went enthralled by the echoes of her screeching laughs and curses. Taunts to toil and triumph. Like in the movies. Cut. Why follow in the footsteps of curmudgeons who link lust and lewd literacy, who sweat for a nostalgic hard-on? Heriberto, as was customary in those crass productions, would have been lampooned and offered a last-minute pity fuck—the origins of a Weininger, not of a bard. Dalia began with a story. In her freelance days, a certain vigorous youth from Providencia (the type who enjoys his Neronian escapades into the famously marginal localities, where he is greeted like the royal rake he feels himself to be and repasts on the dubious choices aroused by romantic delusions of ascent in our perilous social scale) contacted her. Since her clientele lived off pills and handouts, she was delirious. A lifetime of full-blooded fucks sprinkled with many-colored wads passed through her eyes. Her circle had its legends, and Providencia figured prominently as a place of miracles (the rich there were modelled after the sweet, compassionate Luis Fernando de la Vega Montenegro). They met at his apartment, and he stated the terms of their engagement: Mondays she would arrive, make herself at home, enter his room, and fuck him while he pretended to be asleep; Sundays she would pretend to be asleep. Odd but all-around comfy. She then understood the euphemism. On Sundays, he was brusque whenever she moved and quickly stopped her. She once opened her eyes, and he lost his erection. Doubtless our Periander preferred cold ovens. But for her own sake she defaulted to the more charitable interpretation; she defaulted, that is, until the little Catholic upbringing her wastrel parents managed to spit out between bouts of turpentine inhalation possessed her body in primeval spasmodic chills that evolved into a refined and abject guilt, which soon required expiation through violence. Although I am a man of great poetic fancy, I never shun the protocols of reason: the bleak turn that followed struck me as mythmaking of an erotic cast. She apparently got hold of some blood bags through a friend and bathed the would-be embalmer in the liquid of his dreams. She went on and on and on. Was there a moral here? Some sort of warning? I couldn’t tell. But I could tell the red lighting was meant to match the plot. Heriberto would have resented the intimations of any paraphilia. So on Tatiana I set hopes that immediately caught fire. Tatiana, the incandescence of your nondescript professionalism burned through the layers of impersonal method and marked the insularity easily traced in the contours of my being.

Yet I am of Pericles’ strain and would convince whoever witnessed my fall of a failure of perception. As occurred presently, I convinced myself. Improvident despite austerity, desperate through lack of revelations, I had to choose an adequate temper for Leobardo’s imagination. Tatiana too bland, Dalia too off, Melanie too wry, Susana too crass. Inés, she of the hazy mood, dislocate, was ideal, for her tenuous existence, hard to delimit, would be lumped by Leobardo in the deviate realities of introversion. Certainly, this spurious distinction, which has served to shackle moody tempers to a caricature that highlights only the worst in themselves, was a favorite of his.

I touched upon Inés and her reticence. Let it be known that I am no imp who lives to saddle the wretched with additional weights. No, that is not the course of my instinctual drives. Were it so, doubt not I would follow it with great dignity and flair, and thus I would have seduced Inés in order to thrust three outsiders further to the margins just for the thrill. To be clear, I am an imp who unsettles the stupor-scented, with qualification—I should be unsettled as well, I should feel the moderate shock that compels pause. The swashbuckling immoralist must crash. There is no place for him; he belongs to the interstices. “All luxury ends in slavery: even luxuriation in the purest love to the most sacred being.” I would leave Inés intact and barely involved.

Three more visits and a rough-hewn reconstruction of the brotherly feud (a simple use of epithets: cunt-crazy Leobardo against spirit-loving Heriberto) exacted enough sympathy for Inés to agree to a benign intervention, which would consist in nothing more than standing on guard while Leobardo assailed her with preposterously doltish questions (why are you fucking him, why do you keep going, do you like it, don’t you feel sorry) and perhaps some commandments (stop fucking my brother, stop answering, stop coddling). Having put all my trust in this infatuating jade, I enlightened Leobardo on the evancalous nature of his brother’s deipnosophist and blessed him on his charette. He did not seem as eager as before. I suppose that of his kaleidoscopic impulses there was only left at this point a combination of saving face and the need for revenge. A natural development in one who suckled on the factual. Not quite the climax I expected for my sleuthing, yet fitting: was it not mostly a tour in which I honored chastity?

Now, one’s genius is not easily fooled. Hickey, with constrained heart, saw his father’s tears and heard his earnest words; he even resolved to seek a path hostile to his dissolute inclinations. Do you remember the amount of time he managed? Never more than a week. Then you had him toasting with criminals, crashing a boat in a drunken rapture, and mounting the lover of a supercilious noble. And there was no alternative. The world is a cutthroat mass of possibilities, but all are not open; au contraire, most are adamantine bolted doors. It matters little. We are perfectly aware of our desires, though reluctant. We can cross and instantiate. The silly geese who stand awestruck before the myriad lives that are lived intensely and have no unruly urge to carve their own must be destined for spectatorship. There are crowds upon crowds without soul-searing impulses. Rejoice, then, if your genitalia have plans other than the adjustments called for by your hesitating mind, which, listen not to the dualists, is no separate substance. Now, one’s genius is persistent. And its enablers are always there. Leobardo was unconvinced, aggrieved. He spoke of masculine intuitions, but really. One’s genius is also perceptive.

A last postprandial visit, alas! I looked into the neocratic regime and witnessed its subtle yet iron rule. From the glistening, half-corroded central pole, where a dissociated middle-aged blonde vied to outdo the twenty-year-old money-machine that preceded her, down to the cornered comessation of adolescents, where a mildly bored thirty-year-old slammed her cheeks against the birthday boy, I saw it all; for, except the wizened bartender, no person kept aloof of the alluring petrichor that promised discharge. Hyperactive, bloody-eyed traffickers weaseled their way to their sole piss-glazed territories: there, adding a layer of sumptuous accent, rolled in the capacious wallet and its sycophantic cortege; here, smog-showered and sooty-limbed, a beggar stumbled in his stupor against the sweaty bouncer, too much a prey of inaccessible perceptions to ask for alms: hundreds of bodies, kinetic and worn-out, came tumbling in with bulging peduncles, and went tumbling out again with doused languid flowers. Do you know whether this incessant immunditia, macula, turpitudo, ignominia will ever cease its thrust? From violence, onwards to violence! This is humanity stripped to its mercenary core. Are they all not potential foot soldiers prowling the streets in search of the weary and crushed so as to debase them further and gain some short-lived energy? Lipsdick, the very tabernacle that preserves callousness in times of skittish peace. Here one sees a living link to the brutalities which ever trail over our march. Laughable, certainly, that generic chastisement of bygone periods in which battalions pillaged everything in sight and as recreation stuck a linstock through half a village’s ass, or in which a common thug forced Palioly’s Pear into an unsuspecting civilian’s mouth while having no recollection of its key ever existing, or in which tyrants ordered their devoted servants into brazen bulls simply to kick-start the anguished bellows. The permutations of pain increase in sophistication, and we are unwilling and unable to go back. Ah, but you had me there! Regal in my detachment, scanning the caliginous sublime, erect, meeting filth with dispassion, I let the surplus approach. And then, abrupt, Inés and the anagnorisis in her dazed smile. She knew. The finagler duped. Done. Riot cried aloud. Just as there abound quacks, skinners, wetworkers, burglars, embezzlers, backyard breeders, double-crossers, impersonators, flim-flams, money mules, mochileros, pornographers, poachers, pimps, so too martyrs and saints bloom. Here, again, resounded the basso continuo of my life: the lost with the lost; the upright with the rest. All zealotry of conversion as transient as our nocturnal emissions.