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On the Unspeakable [The Capri Theater, Times Square, 1987] the positioning of desire that always draws us to "The Unspeakable " in the first place. It is an area, a topic, a trope impossible to speak of outside (it is at once evil and extralinguistic) that range, equally difficult to describe, to define: "The Everyday." (It is at once banal and representationally difficult.) Both are terribly localized . Both are wholly and socially bounded. The division between everyday and unspeakable, difficult and extralinguistic, banal and evil may just be the prototype for all social division. We need something from the everyday, then, of a 45-year-old black, gay male who cruises the commercial porn theaters along Eighth Avenue above 43rd Street in New York City (the "Author") in the middle and late ig8os: Why not this? Rose is a pudgy, white,working class prostitute, maybe twenty-six, from Upstate New York; she's also a cracker—which means that for to clear away the pre-cum leakage, raise his thumb to his mouth, and suck it clean. After three minutes, his hips began to lift in little twitches. He had both hands on his cock now. He shot in a couple or three four-inch spurts that fell, shiny as snot from a November sneeze, down the knucklesof both hands. He raised one and thrust the backs of three fingers into his mouth, turned them over, and sucked away the cum. Then he lifted the other, to lick more off, this time delicately. His tongue reached out pointed, but became broader, slugging slowly between one and the next knuckle, bright with saliva and semen in the video's flicker he still stared at. That's when the old P.R. beside him woke up long enough to give him a frown. The white kid jumped a little, rearing to the side, in a hyperbolic moment of fear. (Hyperbole is the figure of the everyday;euphemism is the figure of the unspeakable.) 3 On the Unspeakable 59 the last few months she's seldom gone for more than ten dollars a trick, since her interests have dwindled pretty much to the next bottle of rocks—a hyperbole if there ever wasone: the "bottle," a plastic capsule a shy centimeter long, stoppered at one end with something like they put in the top of Bic pens; the "rocks," about half a crystal of rock salt's worth of cooked-down coke broken up into smaller bits. Cost per bottle anywhere from six to ten dollars. Eight is average. The long-time professional hookers working the winter Strip outside have lost all patience with the new breed of "ten dollar whore" crack has created— many of them only fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years old. (The meaning of the following exterior urban portrait is entirely in terms of what it tells us of this momentary travesty of theatrical inferiority.) The last three years have seen a radical atmospheric and economic shift along the Strip from the fallout of the cocaine trade—crack, base, eightballs. It's part of the slowly gathering economic devastation of the entire neighborhood, which is presumably preparing the way for the brave new rebuilding as a large shopping mall, with afew theaters and business towers, scheduled to begin next year: grocery stores, comic-book stores, shoe repair shops, drugstores, barbershops , bookstores, theatrical lighting and make-up stores, the magic But he gave the guy a look that said, "Say something to me, motherfucker , and I'll bust you!" There was a wholly macho aspect to his exhibitionism. The old guy shook his head, leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes again. The kid went back to licking, moved to the inside of his wrist. With the edge of one thumb he squeegeed up some clam of cum that had fallen on his denim thigh, ate that, and examined his lap and green workshirt for any he'd missed. With a few more tugs he milked his cock of its final freight; then, with the hugely circular tongue maneuverfive-year-oldsreserve for dripping cones, he lapped the last from hisfirst. (The above, observed purely as information—his actions and his dress and his bearing, from politeness to belligerence—tell only of what is exterior to this tightly conventionalized and wholly contained commercial, public space.) Watching him, I found it easy to see the entire non-white audience around him—macho, male, a scattering of prostitutes, of transsexuals , of faggots, and...

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