Tonight, Again Page 8

  I vaguely saw where this was going, but I knew I didn’t have to worry. Denny was going to cross every “t” and dot every “i” for me. “With a man, though, you don’t know do you? I mean, you could end up drilling his arse and spitting in his face—which I do love—or be flat on your back with your fanny doing an interpretation of a goldfish. I mean…it’s all on the cards, isn’t it? Well, I suppose it isn’t with you. You don’t like getting fucked, do you?”

  “I…I never tried it.”

  “I know,” he said, suddenly almost paternal, “it’s a primal thing. Shit. And you think at first, oh that’s disgusting. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “It is. But it’s wonderful. So you get over the disgusting part and you thank God that he put a hole down there.”

  “Is there anything you won’t do?”

  “Well, yes. I mean…children and the dead.”

  “Animals?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably yes or probably no.”

  “Probably probably.”

  But as I said, his gift, his genius perhaps, was this eroticizing capacity. When you’d been talking with Denny for a little while everything seemed to take on new meaning, and that’s a rare skill. To be able to make somebody think about the world in a completely different way; that’s very rare. Of course that wasn’t his intention. He was just looking for things that would stimulate him. Nowadays (this was twenty years ago) he’d probably be diagnosed with a case of sex addiction, and be in counseling and on medication. But back then people didn’t know what to do with him. He was simply, notoriously, himself. A force not of nature, but of glorious unnaturalness.

  His other great love was history, which he taught for a while at Oxford before being obliged to leave after an unfortunate incident in which he’d passed out while giving an address to an assembly of visiting professors, and was discovered when his tie was loosened and his shirt unbuttoned, to be wearing a rubber French maid’s outfit under his tweeds. It had been a little too tight, and he’d fainted. He never understood why the authorities at Oxford had made such a song and dance about it.

  “They’re all hypocrites,” he said, and would offer chapter and verse on the peccadilloes of some of his fellow lecturers, including a very leftist professor who, according to Denny, could not get an erection unless he was being beaten by a girl in an S.S. uniform. “And this man starts pontificating about my little experiment in rubber as though he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s not very much I find obscene, but that…that I find obscene.”

  “Why didn’t you blow the whistle on him?”

  “Because I’m not going to start that kind of mudslinging, it’s petty. Anyway, I’m glad I’m out. I’m going to Paris and write my book and to hell with Oxford.”

  He knew Foucault, a little; and admired him. Long before Foucault really came out, Denny was predicting it. “You’ve got to have the courage of your perversions,” he’d say. “Once you’ve made it all public—once everybody knows the worst you’ve ever done—they’ve got nothing over you. You’re free. You can get on with living. No shame. No apologies.”

  This was the closest he ever got to a philosophy. I often wonder how much influence he had on Foucault, who found so much inspiration in his journey into the light. All that stuff about the honesty of the bathhouse, the revelation of the sling and the ecstasies of the submissive; that sounds like it might have been seeded by Denny.

  Foucault, of course, died of the plague. Denny survived it, which is startling, given his prodigious appetite for experiment, but that’s what happened. He abandoned his book after eleven drafts, because he said the story kept changing, which may seem odd for a history book; but it was Denny’s history, and that, inevitably, was a law unto itself. Like Denny’s kitchen, like Denny’s world. It was a moveable feat.

  He moved to India in the early nineties, to study under a Tantric master. He was probably sixty when he went. We never heard from him again, which he told us all—his friends, I mean—we should take as a very good sign, if it happened.

  “It means I’ve achieved some kind of perfectly blissful continuous orgasm, and can’t remember who the hell I am.”

  There was one game he had that now and again I still remember, and when I do—whatever the circumstances—I invariably end up playing it. You don’t need another player. You don’t need to speak, or even move. You just sit and look at the room you’re in and wonder what you would do with the objects in that room to get sexual pleasure. The less promising the object, of course, the more satisfying it is when you work out some way to put it to erotic purpose. In this game, there are no limitations on the nature of the activity. It can be any shade of perversion: bondage, flagellation, old-fashioned masochism. Just as long as you’re a little more awake to the world when you finish than when you started, then you won. It’s even more fun if you say what you’re thinking out loud, but we can’t all be Denny Dan.