Ah! The real world!
It’s that same world, too, that Harding’s fiction seeks to delineate in a manner unique unto itself. Some of the stories in this book make notorious writers like, say, Peter Sotos and celebrated madmen as, say, Jeffery Dahmer look like “the veriest tyros,” (to steal a cool simile from Lovecraft). There are times as well when they make, say, Edward Lee, look like, say, a baby in a high chair and making ga-ga noises. Likewise, some of the imagery herein is more disturbing, despair-summoning, and stomach-upheaving than any I’ve read anywhere.
Allow me to make an abstraction—granted, a goofy one probably—or perhaps a “figurative representation” is a better way to put it. As a reader of Harding’s work, I’d like you to imagine that your psyche is a vagina.
That’s right. A vagina.
What Harding’s work provides for you is a raucous, down and dirty, butt-stinky gang-bang with a multitude of demented and very horny participants. You are humped and humped and humped by Harding’s fiction; you are prodded, poked, skewered, and penetrated time and time again; you are stuffed like a turkey, pounded like sod, and plungered like a gas station toilet. (Man, oh, man! You sure got more than you bargained for in this gang-bang, huh? Ho!) Your suitors, I’ll add, don’t like you at all; in fact, they hate you, they hate you for no reason at all. They don’t give two diddlies about you, nor two shits. You’re not a person, you’re not an individual consciousness. What you are to this miscreant crew is nothing more than a hot hole for their penises to have a party in. And there are many such penises, and some come back for a double-dip. Ah, but it’s not typical sperm that you’re being filled like a cannoli with. See, each ejaculation comes possessed of an exclusive constituent, and those constituents are as follows:
Psychosis. Misogyny. Misanthropy. Nihilism. Sadism. Necrophily. Erotopathy. Profanation. Alienation. Blasphemy. And every manner of irreverence, aberrant impulse, and outright satanism conceivable and inconceivable.
Yes.
Now the gang-bang is over. Your suitors are gone, leaving you sore, stupefied, and full of evil sperm. When you get home, you douche at once, intent to flush it all out, but the more you douche, the more you seem to push all that devilish slop deeper. Will you ever get it all out? But at least the nightmare is over, right?
Wrong. Five weeks later you find out you’re pregnant.
That’s what Harding’s work will do to you. It will turn you into a tramp. It will transfigure you into an object for use—a receptacle for all the animus, loathe, and maleficence the human mind has generated, a drain-can for the filth of all the abominations of the earth, and then? It will knock you up.
These are my introspective impressions of Harding’s fiction. He means business. He’s not simply trying to gross us out—he’s trying to make us see. (And I suppose any of us who happen to see ourselves . . . well, then, such persons are in a heap of trouble!)
So enjoy the tour, friends. Enjoy the gang-bang. You may need psych drugs afterwards, you may need an air-sick bag and a steam shower, but I feel confident that you will be provocatively moved by this book.
No . . . mother never said there’d be days like this.
On the surface it’s not a bad set-up. I’m in bed with a blonde who has exemplary tits, D-cups if they were a day. I’ve always liked women with very long hair and hers is perfect, bright vines which have grown almost to the middle of her back. The face too is pleasant, replete with sparkling diamond eyes.
So far, so good, but here’s where this tryst starts to fall short of the glory of Penthouse Forum—like the Godzilla movie posters said, size does matter. From two blocks away you could look at her and immediately know she shops at the Big and Tall stores (she’s 5’2; you do the math). I’d almost finished with her by imagining I was actually with Sherilyn Fenn (and Sheryl Lee), but then she wanted to get on top. I was charitable (simply translated: drunk) and agreed, and was soon thinking less about Sherilyn and Sheryl, and more about asthma attacks.
I consented to the aforementioned atrocities, and accept full responsibility, but the crowning touch was beyond my control—a factor substantially worse than merely being here.
This blonde with a satisfying bra size but a slow metabolism is dead, and she’s still on top of me. I think it happened at 3:36 a.m., the time on her digital clock which I saw when I craned my head to the right. This is the extent of my mobility, that and being able to move my right arm. The left is pinned by . . . damn, I don’t remember her name. Did she even tell me? I probably wasn’t listening. Clubs and bars are loud. Great places to meet new people, but introductions are about as far as it goes. What they’re drinking and might they be out on the town for—or at least susceptible to—the ol’ “F-close,” that’s all that matters (I’ve read The Game . . . I know what’s up).
Whoever she is, she has my legs and torso welded to the mattress. I can’t turn my head to the left because her elbow finished between my ear and shoulder.
On a scale of one to ten this hits the upper echelons of embarrassment, a nine at least. To achieve a perfect ten, let me add my pathetic confession—I’m still hard. No one has to know about this, so I’m telling myself the frantic gyration beneath her is merely a desperate attempt to squirm away.
Only that and nothing more.
Sherilyn and Sheryl . . . Laura (or Madeline) and Audrey . . . the stoplight . . . Sherilyn dancing to Badalamenti’s score . . . a secret scene never shown, Laura and Audrey experimenting . . .
Mission accomplished. Coherent thought is once more possible.
The first thing to remember is not to kick myself in the ass too much for going home with . . . whatever her name is (was). I hit the bars too late, so all the eye candy had been taken—wept off their feet or clandestinely slipped that magnificent invention the date rape drug (the only true barometer of human progress, if you ask me . . . the rubber a close runner-up with the morning-after pill a not-so-distant cousin). All that was left when I saddled up to the bar were the bottom feeders, and knowing that anyone I went home with come sun-up would be as good for me as a flesh-eating virus, I started doing shots in a hurry. Ego abuse and a hangover are a bad combination, but at the time I thought it was better to go home with an undesirable than go home alone. When the nausea kicked in and driving home would probably mean killing an innocent family in a station wagon coming home late from Disney Land, I started doling out the pick-up lines. It took two before I struck gold—such as it was—with my big date. My face was stinging on both sides by that point because one proposition thought my line was too crude for just one slap. She had been wearing a shirt which said BUILT TO LAST, and I had inquired if that was a bedroom invitation for “alllllll night looooooong” in the same sentence where I introduced myself. Should’ve at least bought her a drink first, I suppose, but no big loss . . . figuratively speaking, anyway.