Jack Sullivan

DEPRIVATION EXERCISES

1.

He holds my head under water for as long as I can take.

When we’re finished, he spits in my mouth.

This is what we do on the days we don’t have sex, usually because I haven’t had time to clean, but also because we agreed to try something different.

I suppose some people would be scared, yet I find this exciting.

The feel of one hand on the back of my head, the other around my neck.

I struggled at first, afraid he might drown me; now I go limp whenever I enter the tub.

There’s something about how your mind races and your chest feels heavy.

I cum hands-free, my head still underwater.

He’s annoyed though when he sees this (I’d been directed to wait until I could breathe.)

I guess the spitting is my punishment.

2.

We met on one of those sites for people who have different ideas about connection.

I was looking for a friend, one who wouldn’t be afraid to hurt me.

I don’t have many people in my life who would do so.

People try to hurt me occasionally, but they do so in a deceptive manner, pretending their actions are in my interest.

Ever since I became famous, others have been making me pay for it.

But I never wanted to become known, at least not in the way where I can’t recognize my own image.

Do you remember that time we saw my face on a billboard?

They airbrushed the acne off my face and changed my eye color to match the ad copy.

I had never been so humiliated, not even when those two guys in high school tried to tag team me but couldn’t get it up.

I know you think I’m being vain -- I find the situation frightening, however.

I feel I’ve become a ghost.

3.

His profile said he was looking for a submissive, someone he could bend towards his will.

I liked this phrasing.

His pictures were artfully framed, without being artificial.

I was especially fond of the one where he was standing over a tattooed twenty-something bound and gagged on his bed.

He appeared to have a good sense of himself.

After some initial messaging, the usual exchange of likes, dislikes, and limits, we agreed to meet once a week at his apartment in Crown Heights.

He called these sessions ‘deprivation exercises.’

(I don’t think I have to mention I made him sign an NDA.)

He was eager to remind me I was nothing but a body for him to use.

As soon as I entered, I was supposed to strip, blindfold myself, wait on all fours by the door.

He would put a collar around my neck, before leading me to the bedroom.

At first, our sex was routine, all sucking and fucking.

He was much better crafting an erotic atmosphere than the actual mechanics of the act.

He would struggle to guide his cock in, and -- since I was often indisposed – we contorted ourselves into different positions, trying to, in his words, ‘hit the target.’

When we finished, there was always a brief, awkward moment in which we settled back into ourselves, unsure of who the other person was, what we had been doing.

It became clear over time he wanted to know more about me.

He would stand and stare and smile, glistening member swiftly retreating, as I toweled myself off in bed.

Once he even managed to say he had seen one of my movies.

4.

As time went by, I became bored with this routine.

I was willing to submit to some conversation, but he grew bold, withholding sex, peppering me with questions as I crouched nude and patient by the door.

How was your day?

Were you on set?

For what?

Cool – did you see what happened on the train?

I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some anticipation that came with these dialogues.

I wanted him to sit back on the couch, put his feet on me.

Except he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say, so much so I was forced to plead with him finally to shut up and fuck me.

So, when he went on a work trip (some conference in Edinburgh, I was half-listening when he told me) I took the opportunity to buy some toys – clamps, ball gags, candle wax, as well as a strange machine which read your horoscope and decided a fitting sexual punishment.

I sent them to his apartment, for some stupid reason including a note saying they were a gift.

The next time I went to see him, he opened the door, furious.

Grabbing me by the hair, he yanked me towards the bathroom.

He told me I was a presumptuous bitch.

Do I really think I was an equal partner in this exchange?

That was the first time he tried to drown me.

5.

I kept my distance for a while after that.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the reason for his outburst.

If it was because I had been the one to buy the toys – well, that wouldn’t be fair.

The whole shipment cost quite a bit of money.

There was little time to care, though: a few days after the incident, I started rehearsals for that production of Hamlet with Shakespeare in the Park.

Throughout the rehearsal period, I abandoned myself to the text, not so much becoming Hamlet as the words on the page, the curve and arc of each letter of script.

Later I’d wait in the wings before each performance, reciting lines under my breath, nerves steadying, calling myself into existence.

Yet as soon as I stepped on stage, I didn’t remember a thing.

I would come-to during curtain call, aware that the play had happened, unable to describe

what in it I had done.

I just was.

6.

My performance was well regarded by some, despised by others, and, because of that, I was nominated for an award.

A party was held in my honor, a black-tie soiree on some investor’s yacht as we circled Manhattan.

That was when I saw him for the first time “in the wild” (as you like to say.)

I was standing with a group of rich society women, their tanned, gargoyle faces like cubist effigies, when I saw him standing against the bar.

He was hammered: his face was red; flecks of spittle clung to the corners of his mouth.

He was talking to some intern, obviously attempting a sort of seduction, rubbing the young man’s well-developed arms, poking him in the chest.

The intern had an embarrassed, condescending smile on his face.

The society ladies laughed when they saw what was happening, their sandpaper hoots sending shivers down my spine.

Do you know him? they said.

No, I replied.

Because the man I saw in front of me was pathetic.

I wanted to gouge his eyes out.

I wanted to rip the intern’s tongue out, choke him with it.

I never knew I could feel such hate.

7.

The next time we met, I knew our relationship had changed.

I was unable to recapture the cold frisson of fear that accompanied the steps up to his apartment, the way my cock shriveled yet also dripped with anticipation.

I felt as though I was on my way to an appointment, another box to tick so I could get to the end of the day.

I noticed details I had missed before: photos of who I assumed were his family (all ugly in a banal Midwestern way); tacky Chagall prints on the walls.

As well as the unfortunate fact of his body, which wasn’t terrible (at least, not as terrible as some of the men I let degrade me), but nothing to write home about either, which is perhaps why I haven’t described it for you yet.

How do you think he would describe me?

Would he tell you about my sandy buzz-shorn hair, how my crooked polack nose bisects my already asymmetrical face?

The way I whimpered when he entered me, closing my eyes, imagining we were fucking on a moonlit beach?

Or would he simply tell you I was using him as he was using me: as a brief respite from the intangible hydra-headed morass of our lives?

When I entered his apartment that day, I begged him to increase my drownings.

I already had enough adoration.

Along with that, I requested he buy a cage to lock me in.

When he asked why, I told him it was my rightful place.

I wanted to wait there throughout the night, ass up, ready.

However, on the night I arrived ready to fit myself inside, I saw the cage was not to my specifications.

There were a pillow and blanket, along with a towel, and several bottles of water.

What’s this?! I cried, tossing these amenities at him. Do you hate me?!

No, he replied, stunned by my outburst; I wanted you to feel comfortable.

Comfortable?!

I already knew about comfortable, I told him.

I had been raised with everything a child could ever want.

I went to the best schools, skyrocketed to the top of my profession, had enough family,

friends, and sycophants to keep me entertained.

How could I tell him it was about control, or its lack, one of the few spaces left in my life where I could decide what I wanted, and how I wanted it?

His home was filled with signs of love, real love, the kind which makes you more than just an image.

What did he get from my offering himself to him?

He looked at me, then slowly began picking up the scattered objects from the floor.

I felt ashamed.

What did you see in me, what do I see in you, why do we do these things to each other, is it something in our childhoods’, did something hit us on the head, how can we continue, can we continue, I

Once the floor was clean, he led me by hand to the couch.

Why do you want me to hurt you?

I explained I could no longer give myself to him freely.

He laughed when I said this.

I grew more upset.

I threatened to kill him if he didn’t take me seriously.

Oh, he said, suddenly pleased, I do take you seriously.

This made my anger worse – while also, strangely, giving me an erection.

You’re not nothing, he said, grinning at the shaft rising from my shorts; you have a name, a job, people who love you, value, worth–

I started to cry, as much from pleasure as from pain.

As he unzipped my pants, revealing that which he had expressed no interest in before, he repeated his admonishment:

You are not nothing

slurp

You have a name

slurp

a face

slurp

a job

people who love you

sluuuurrrrpppp

value

uh!

worth…

8.

This could be one of our exercises, we decided.

When we grew tired of the blindfolding, the various forms of fucking, the duck-taping my mouth while he pissed on my face, the toys and strange machine which we read my horoscope – and of course, the drowning.

Would it surprise you when I say that was the moment I fell in love with him?

Not in the sense wanted to know too much about his job (architect, ‘public works,’ whatever that means), or where he comes from (a suburb outside of Chicago, staunchly Republican.)

But not in the way I didn’t want to know about those things, either.

We would pace out these revelations sparingly.

One day I’d tell him about my mother, about my ideas for a production of Chekov set in an actual mansion, my failed suicide attempts, or about you, if you’re still around, and consider myself enough of a friend to maintain some interest.

When I said we were seeking a different kind of connection, perhaps what I meant was one which would let us exist as both bodies and names, part of the world around us, and part of a world we made and kept for ourselves.

We don’t live together, he and I, but I think we’ve found some modicum of happiness.

I won’t tell you anymore about him, except to say I hoped to have enticed you to want to meet someone like him, someone who makes you understand the slippery, savage worm of a self, a self that desires what feeds it, in the future.

zoe tribley

Joseph Randolph