NY Tyrant: Robert Glück Makes You Blow Him

Check this story real quick. It is super short and has maybe one of the best lines I have ever come across in it. You might be able to tell which one. Maybe not. You heard of Robert Glück? You should have. He basically started this thing called the "New Narrative" which started in the late 70s and is not so easily defined. Some say it's gossipy but I think they miss the point with that word. It definitely is locked to sex and to the body and establishing a relationship with the reader. Of course, all books must establish a relationship with the reader in order to succeed,but maybe think of New Narrative as if the writing wants to establish a sexual relationship with the reader. This writing wants to fuck you and then tell all of its friends about what it was like fucking you. So, this is Robert Glück's thing and this is what is going on below. The story below has its tits in your face and it's rubbing its dick. You horny at all? Experimental Writer Gets Sucked Off in a Field Homage to Straight to Hell, for Kevin Killian By Robert Glück I was just about to graduate from Berkeley. It was 1969. I’d had plenty of experience rioting, but I had no news about Stonewall, let alone an inkling of what Stonewall would come to mean. I had not come out yet. I sort of planted myself in the way of known fags, hoping and fearing to be seduced. One day I hitchhiked a few hours north just to get away from my hippie commune and out of Berkeley. I took my shirt off and became flesh on the freeway. I was quickly offered a ride in a green Buick by a pudgy check-and-plaid middle-aged (perhaps he was thirty) optometrist’s receptionist. Even with the windows open my underarms smelled up the car. My B.O. felt like a hot blush on my cheeks. He put his hand on my knee and it was just that easy⎯in an instant we were parked in a dry field under a hot sun. So here is a homosexual, I informed myself. Bad body, dreary life, no friends, isolation, aging alone, poor, no cultural interests. What the hell, I was just a straight young guy letting some old fag blow me. How well I remember that bleached weedy field and stupid sky⎯twenty years later I would have thought, “shallow grave.” He went down on me and produced orgasms again and again like it was his work to do, that is, single-minded, intent as a mole. “Can you do that?” he asked. “Just trigger yourself as often as you want?” I had no attraction to him whatsoever, and I felt no cultural allegiance at all. I was a hippie and twenty-one years old. I wondered why people over thirty bothered to buy new clothes. Every time I came, he opened the car door and spit my cum into the weeds. That unlovely gesture and my picture of his stifled, small-town life seemed so hopeless, that I thought rather grandly, “I am getting blown by the misery of the world.” I was an English major and that’s the way we thought. It was just before the time when the meaning of life would migrate to second sources. But then he wanted me to blow him and I balked. Blowing the misery of the world was something else. He grabbed my balls to threaten me, but seemed to cave in on his own, as though I’d put up a fight. He tried a second approach: He took a pair of sunglasses out of his glove compartment⎯ thick black frames and extra-dark lenses ⎯ that were exactly the same as the ones I was wearing. He was showing me that we were united, we had accessorized as sisters. He said, “Do you come here often?” Here? I looked out at the discouraging universe. He asked if he could see me again. Pervert glasses! I thought in self-horror, I could recognize them for what they were, and the next day I threw my pair away. I wish I hadn’t ⎯ they’d be right in style now. Robert Glück is the author of the novels Margery Kempe (Serpent's Tail Publishing, 1994), Jack the Modernist (Serpent's Tail Publishing, 1995), and three collections of prose and poetry: Reader (Lapis Press, 1989), Elements of a Coffee Service (Four Seasons Foundation, 1983), and Denny Smith (Clear Cut Press, 2004). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University, where he is an editor of the online journal Narrativity.