Удушье (Choke)

Chapter 5

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Whatever lighting the photographer used

was harsh and made bad shadows on the cement-block wall behind them. Just a painted wall in somebody's basement. The mon­key looked tired and patchy with mange. The guy was in lousy shape, pale with rolls around his middle, but there he was, relaxed and bent over with his hands braced against his knees and his poochy gut hanging down, his face looking back over his shoulder at the camera, smil­ing away.

'Beatific' isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

What the little boy first loved about pornography wasn't the sex part. It wasn't the pictures of beautiful people dorking each other, their heads thrown back, making those fake orgasm faces. Not at first. He'd found all those pictures on the Internet even be­fore he knew what sex was. They had the Internet in every library. They had it at all the schools.

The way you can move from city to city and always find a Catholic church, the same Mass said everywhere, no matter what foster place the kid was sent, he could always find the Internet. The truth was, if Christ had laughed on the cross, or spat on the Romans, if he'd done anything more than just suffer, the kid would've liked church a lot more.

As it was, his favorite website was pretty much not sexy, at least not to him. You could just go there, and there would be about a dozen photographs of this one dumpy guy dressed as Tarzan with a goofy orangutan trained to poke what looked like roasted chest­nuts up the guy's ass.

The guy's leopard-print loincloth is tossed to one side, the elastic waistband sunk into his tubby waist.

The monkey's crouched there, ready with the next chestnut.

There's nothing sexy about it. Still, the counter showed more than a half million people had been to see it.

'Pilgrimage' isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

The monkey and the chestnuts wasn't anything the kid could understand, but he sort of admired the guy. The kid was stupid, but he knew this was something way beyond him. The truth was, most people wouldn't even want a monkey to see them naked. They'd be terrified about how their asshole might look, if it might look too red or baggy. There's no way most people would ever have the nerve to bend over in front of a monkey, much less a monkey and a camera and lights, and even then they'd have to do about a zillion sit-ups first and go to a tanning booth and get their hair cut. After that, they'd spend hours bent over in front of a mirror, trying to determine their best profile.

And then, even with just chestnuts, you'd have to stay some­what relaxed.

Just the thought of auditioning monkeys was terrifying, the possibility of being rejected by monkey after monkey. Sure, you can pay a person enough money and they'll stick stuff into you or they'll take pictures. But a monkey. A monkey's going to be honest.

Your only hope would be to book this same orangutan, since it obviously didn't look too picky. Either that or it was exception­ally well trained.

The point was, there'd be nothing to this if you were beautiful and sexy.

The point was, in a world where everybody had to look so pretty all the time, this guy wasn't. The monkey wasn't. What they were doing wasn't.

The point was, it's not the sex part of pornography that hooked the stupid little boy. It was the confidence. The courage. The complete lack of shame. The comfort and genuine honesty. The up-front-ness of being able to just stand there and tell the world: Yeah, this is how I chose to spend a free afternoon. Posing here with a monkey putting chestnuts up my ass.

And I really don't care how I look. Or what you think.

So deal with it.

He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

And even if the guy wasn't loving every moment, the ability to smile, to fake your way through this, that would be even more admirable.