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Bob Flanagan
Pain Journal

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May

I had a great hard-on, but now it's gone, and now that I'm writing and not masturbating, it's coming back. That fucker. I was sound asleep, several times. Sheree and I went to bed early, tuckered out after Mother's Day lunch at Barney's in Beverly Hills. A worm crawling along the rim of my plate after an incredible dish of sturgeon got everyone grossed out and me a free lunch. Came home and fell asleep watching "X-Files" with Sheree, but I woke up just in time to catch her video taping me as I lay naked and snoring. I made my penis talk for the camera. Drunken bar penis: "All right, all right, I'm comin' goddamn you, you prick." Then it was sleep, cough, wake up; sleep, cough, wake up, until now, where it's 2:30 am, Sheree's snoring and I can't stop her, even if I shake her, even if I pinch her nose. So it's ear plugs in, which makes it impossible to hear "Perry Mason" on TV. Before Sheree plunged into the sawmill, earlier on, after my little penis show, she wanted me to suck her nipple while she masturbated with the vibrator. Not that I didn't want to, but I was still tired and ready to go back to sleep, and it usually takes her such a long time to come (we Paxil pals), that I just didn't want to get involved, but it would have been awful to deny her, so I went forth and commenced my sucking. I felt just like I did earlier this afternoon when I went out to the car to wait for her while she shopped at Barney's after lunch. I was too out of breath to walk around and shop with her, so I sat in the car listening to the radio and waited for her to finish, knowing full well it could take forever. But lo and behold she came out relatively quickly, and what do you know, she came fast too, here in bed, with a nice little shudder of completion, and before we knew it were both fast asleep, until now, for me anyway. Some weird dream I just had, too. I had a pet parakeet, maybe two of them. I kept trying to play with it in its cage: giving it food, toys, playing with it with my hand. But somehow I was fucking it up. Suddenly the cage was a plastic bag, and I tried to shift the bird around so it could breathe. At some point the cage was like an oven, and I could see the parakeet getting singed and burnt, but it was too hot to put my hand in. Finally I managed to coax him out. He was alive still, but kind of crispy. One of his feet was melted. When I put him back in his cage I could see that he wasn't going to live. He was tiny and stiff. I felt guilty. I thought, since this was the second bird in one day that I had killed, did I do it on purpose, under the guise of "play?" Then I woke up and wrote all this stuff. Now it's back to sleep, and maybe a hard-on if I'm lucky. And look, another "Perry Mason" episode that I won't be able to hear.

*

Saw Dr. Riker today. He said I looked good. "Must be the haircut," he said. I tried to tell him that I was slowly starting downhill again. Feeling like shit whenever I try to do anything, but there's not much to do about it. It's CF. I've got several strains of pseudomonis, but what am I going to do about it unless I want to go back into the hospital and start the IV's again. Not ready for that. Too much to do, or try to do, on the outside. Sheree's depressed again, first time in a long time, mostly about art. I tell her it's not unusual to have doubts about your work, it's part of the process. I think something else is going on. Menopause. She's all sweaty and clammy and tossing and turning in bed all night. Whining and moaning. I like squeezing her big butt. I should go down on her or something. But any kind of sex is too much of an effort, especially where I have to lie down and go down and not come up for air. I panic when I think of it. It's not sex I'm afraid of, it's breathing. I think of sex the way I think of walking up the stairs: I go out of my way to avoid it. Except that I don't miss walking up the stairs.

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