The journey of a sex-obsessed little boy in Northland to an author of sex-obsessed fiction
I would’ve been nine or 10 when Ms Barnes contacted my parents with the disheartening news. Up to that point I had matriculated as a model student, a brown-nosing if slightly obsessive-neurotic book-worm with a very telling penchant for cross-dressing (since kindergarten my preferred costume for gala days was either witch or evil fairy—and honestly abuses of power and a nice dress are still draws for me as an adult). Despite having parented a young faggot my Protestant parents were proud and supportive, a support felt even through the evictions and brief stints of homelessness and a domestic environment resembling Once Were Warriors crossed with a better-written episode of Malcolm in the Middle. You know, classic Kiwi stuff.
The year my parents were to have that uncomfortable meeting with my teacher Ms Barnes was also the year I’d started watching ‘adult shows’, which by any functioning adult’s standards were fucking trash but which made nine-year-old me feel very mature. Shows like Nip Tuck (actually a great show if you can ignore the transphobia), Boston Legal (just generically pretty bad), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (long may it live!) and my then favourite which I really can’t stand now, Sex and the City (ugh). When I tried explaining these shows to my friends of the time and they showed disinterest or just ‘didn’t get it’ I’d absurdly use this as leverage, as if I was somehow light years ahead of them and their peasant tastes. From year one I’ve been very comfortable on a high-horse—the whiter the better (I love besting Caucasians at their own game of meritorious preferences).
Sex and the City being my then-favourite, sex-talk naturally followed as my favourite recess activity. I would talk the ears off anyone who‘d lend them, often regretfully. But more frequently I’d play this for laughs, and all of us would laugh, hiding our earnest and slightly confusing curiosities behind ribald mirth. Which would’ve been fine, except my compulsive sex-talk (in hindsight so fucking natural) also fell on the ears of Ms Barnes—who looking back I wouldn’t peg as conservative (I remember her being very cool, actually) but still had certain classroom standards to uphold. She was young too, so I guess she was anxious not to establish herself as the school’s trail-blazing Jezebel or something. Anyway, it was because of my very performative (and disruptive) fixation on cocks that she called my parents.
I’ve always been both pretentious and horny
I have to mention that the path leading to this event was also paved with a collection of explicit sketches I’d stashed discretely enough in my room, but evidence of which my mum found when going through my trash (just the discards then; she never got her mitts on my best work). I think she was looking for smoking paraphernalia (a smoking 10-year-old? Keep in mind this is Northland), but after finding a horrifyingly detailed drawing of hog-tied Goku being double-penetrated by knock-off Vegetas, I can only assume she wished she’d found the durries instead. Having already had their suspicions confirmed it was with heavy hearts my parents agreed to meet with Ms Barnes, and together come up with strategies to defer me from fast-tracking to a lifestyle of unfettered cock-worship. Just kidding—the gay thing wasn’t an issue yet. They were just concerned my sex obsession was four years too early, and I suppose wanted to keep an eye on it before I showed signs of becoming Whangarei’s own Jeffrey Dhamer (not gonna lie, still feels like a viable option).
I don’t know what I’m trying to say with this anecdote—that even then the gears of my present interests were turning, that I’ve always been both pretentious and horny, that this moment from childhood somehow captures the essence of my writerly compulsions now (two parts pornography, one part escapist). I just know it sticks out in my head, and that ever since I recalled it with clarity (which would only have been a few years ago) it’s acted like a cipher, cohering a lot of other things around it.
Everybody tends to wax lyrical on the benefits of therapy but I’d rather spend my money on clothes and ketamine
But actually the more I think about it the more I feel like this notion of childhood moments holding keys to adulthood is a Freudian falsity, a convention of memoir writing itself which probably distorts more than it reveals. If there‘s anything worth remembering from my past it’s that a 20-pack of cigarettes used to hover around $10 —and I once saw David Beddingfield in a head brace at a Christian music festival. Everything else I can take or leave.
I know that’s not a popular opinion right now because mental health this and trauma that (*vomit sounds), and everybody I talk to tends to wax lyrical on the benefits of therapy. Which is totally chill. But I feel like lockdown’s been all the navel gazing I need for another 10 years, and I’d rather spend my money on clothes and ketamine. Amirite ladies (*barrels into psychosis and joins a cult).
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But seriously, I’m not a fan of where we’re at regarding mental health and this obsession with making every semantic space a ‘safe’ one. Since when was safety something we came to expect from the world point blank, as if the concept of threat was a new and foreign one. More’s the point, how are we meant to prime ourselves for the world and it’s myriad possibilities—good and bad—if inevitable feelings of discomfort and dislike are presently coded with full-blown stress responses (they’re not the same thing). Being able to cut through the cognitive distortions of anxiety is crucial to having an effective adjustment to reality—one in which true threats can be discerned from imaginary, where confidence in oneself is counterbalanced by an awareness of contingencies that’s realistic and not debilitating.
But this dynamic is generally only achieved through learned responses to semi-regular stressors, which means an obsession with safety literally disrupts the evolutionary process of strength through exposure. Furthermore, making anxiety worse right now is this bogeyman-like fear of anxiety itself, as if any and all negative feelings needed to be eradicated as quickly as possible rather than sat with or re-contextualised. I’m not suggesting wallowing. I’m saying learn how to sit with bad feelings without flailing and doing something socially regrettable (virtue-signalling online, ringing your ex, taking a pipe-bomb to Xmas in the park etc). God forbid we should entertain a more integrative schema of mental health in which the word ‘trauma’ is diluted somewhere closer to it’s lived implication—which is that, like anxiety, the body processing what happens to it is another way of saying you’re alive. So if you’re not anxious, you’re probably dead.
I never considered myself a very attractive teenager, which in hindsight was a bona fide tragedy because looking back I was a premium snack and if I’d had a modicum of the ego I have now I’d have lead legion sons to ruin like a whore-piper. In the hormone saturated carnival of adolescence—where reality is big-bright-scary, a violent titillation seen without the gravitas of adult responsibility (and so through a glass darkly)—I practiced escapism with a pathological militancy, walling myself in from a town I was convinced had no sexual interest in me. My most prized possession was my library card.
I’m not advocating problematic or offensive material for it’s own sake (though who doesn’t love a bit of gratuity), just that fiction should trawl and mirror it’s landscape for what it is
There’s a divine trinity that ushered me into more invested fiction reading as a teenager—Iris Murdoch, JG Ballard, and Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis is of course something of a problem for the woke agenda, an object of derision for a recent lens —as if fiction were merely an appendage of reigning political views. I’m not advocating problematic or offensive material for it’s own sake (though who doesn’t love a bit of gratuity), just that fiction should trawl and mirror it’s landscape for what it is. Fearless dialogue is infinitely more valuable and rewarding than insistent, increasingly tribalistic censorship.
Iris Murdoch might seem less than an organic fit from the outside looking in—young brown fag cleaving to a traditional prose writer with philosophical pretentions. But I remember reading her and being submerged in worlds where adults were making horrifying decisions and still rationalising their kamikaze choices, cladding their bestial impulses in stiff British pomp which for me perfectly captures the fundamental hypocrisy of the post-colonial, post-Commonwealth, post-whatever moment we’re in. I’d go as far as saying Iris taught me not to fear adults growing up, because at the end of the day the fallibility and vulnerability of being a teenager never goes away. It just gets shrouded in more and more elaborate performances and props, stuffed down with desperate gestures at success and money and fucking love. There’s a lot of failed romance in Murdochs’ stuff.
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As I write this the city feels like a powder keg, feels like the energies which have been trapped and distorted from a plague-situation are cusping a cataclysmic release, a violent catharsis—a fire-ball summer. If you feel trepidation at the thought, this particular summer in the city might not be your cup of tea. By all means, leave the city for your sedate property in Piha or Raglan and let the kids play in an empty sandbox. But in all seriousness, these last few months have been a lesson in priorities. I’ve gone through several gradations with my own mortality and finally feel like I’m sitting with it as a good friend. In fact, she’s currently sitting there like that brutally honest friend whose own problems are painfully visible, but who won’t let this stop her from drunkenly suggesting courses of action she herself would probably benefit from. So in my opinion, the best kind. And the things she’s saying to me the loudest right now are "write more, get laid". So simple. So true. So here’s hoping my first collection of short stories goes down well, because I’m primed to splash so many more pages with illegal horniness before she finally comes for me.
The sexually explicit and wonderfully imaginative short story collection Please, Call Me Jesus by Samuel Te Kani (Dead Bird Books, $35) is available at selected bookstores.
