Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2002 02:43:51 -0800 From: Tim Stillman Subject: Fender Bender "Fender Bender" by Timothy Stillman Fender was stoked and stoned and sledged and dusted and wasted. Being in short or long, himself. Fevers pearled over his naked body and made his very nipples laff. For the tall rocker, for the stone soul picnic that was his wastrel body in the middle of wasteland stew, they, on him supped, the boys did, and Fender appended himself part and parcel of the menu of music that was his muscles gut kicking. And his lads frolicking round him on the great round rockin' bed, surging and spirals and stairways leading Fender to themselves, and Fender grinding his cock against the salty air of sexual rampancy that was little more than a Gulliver in the land of giants, all tangy and savory, and incensed air. All likelihood's linked to the go courses that he took every sweaty night with flicks of ocean toweled off him by his lads of the fourth course meal. And Fender there in his hotel room, all of the gills of him opened, all of the amps of his fossilized fire water and words of insect buzzing and stinging little flesh pots just so, all his steals and thefts from artists who had something in their soul besides the next easy as cake success, shot up with speed, like God intended. Artists who were in short or long, far superior to him. Somewhere on the ladder that they did not intend to climb, and so looking down dizzily, fell screaming and kicking. The ones who made it there at all. As Fender felt this and sucked that and was fucked here and yon, and all of the blazes of nocturnal emissions were the folk with him and in that candle in the handle lit auditorium and football stadium and coliseum and fields of wonder, and he was nothing but a gyroscope which had gone so terribly wrong and had been so terribly right at the same time. For the boys, which Fender preferred, were pouring out themselves to him, and he, like a huge pump, like a huge hose, was sucking in their life and their sex and their little sturdy asses under his fingers fake red raw from those guitar strings that he tumbled them over time and again, not knowing the first skillet about what composed something more than the skeleton rip offs of what had come before. Things these little duodenums never knew came before, for all they knew was Fender was hot and Fender could blow all night and rock all day and the essence of him was that he was A STAR, for nobody knew how he had gotten that way and nobody cared. For he was Billboard's darling and nothing would topple him until another Fender wanna be started ripping off Fender's rip offs, but now was Fender who dared perform to masses of hundreds and sometimes thousands, by being buck naked, and hard and horny and pushing his indefatigable crotch audience-ward. As the crowds cheered and stripped for him and pushed their own young crotches stage-ward. And it was all a sexual rush. A sexual bonanza that opened pores the boys didn't know they had had before and perhaps had not, but a riff, but an off key salute to someone or other back in prehistoric times circa 1972 was a rush to instant blood loss to the brain as the liquid nitro ran to the penises, his and theirs, and edged the arpeggio up a certain class scale that made everything like dicks pouring out of every single pore of his and their bodies. For it was all the liquid crimson rush, and it was the high that poppers worked on them, handed out at the door or the gate, or the rush of field hands popping up the neon and the psychedelic schisms that would link hands with old golden feelers that made the audiences dancy and legerdemain verbs coming out of them as though their bodies had developed Braille underpinnings. And they needed, they waited for Fender to stroke them, to pick the prize fifteen for the night of sexuality that was the fourth of July extras that dazed into the smoking lights and the hurt eyes brightness of the klieg lights shooting them off in to a crowd of Madrid and Spanish febrilities that lost a country, that took a world of a toke and then inhaled and the world blew huge and crashed deeply into the throat harsh and acrid and into the lungs and there to hold in clouds of mayhem and sharpest razor blades that could be formulated. And then expelled again, blood cuts again. To be a country unknown, to be a universe uncharted, to be in the entourage with Fender, to know the man, to feel his powerful indulgent grasping greedy fingers on them and their naked bodies, to have him stroke them hard and deep and hurtful, to know that the man with his eyes closed knew what it was to be young, knew the cat gut scream and claw scratch fever of it. Knew what it was to be scared and alone and at odds with everyone, to be a nodule that no one got at the least excitement out of unless the person in question on the opposite side of the Quaalude was himself fifteen or thereabouts and wasted and blitzed as they, and being thereabouts meaning no where at all. But Fender. Put life in him put life in them. And he put music in his veins of his shaft that boys went onto and saw each other onto and tickled the balls of the main man my man Fender. Hear the sweets and taste the colors of the loud lewd CDs of his work playing full yonking blast; his work that broke the backs of the ones who wrote it and wrote it some more, but did not have to take time off to endorse those huge grungy mungy checks for millions of smackers that Fender did. Other scribes and boys who laved him and loved him and washed him and bathed him and sat on all the various parts of his machine tooled, if you so prefer, hot humpy sleek still body that was forever salvation, made that happen in little vanilla pop Teen Beat styles. In the only religion worth a damn. And coming to his hotel room, the crowd, all naked, all illegal, all scandalized, but money does the talking, as horror struck stands and trussed up, watches; and the boycheering, the amplification of his name shouted all the decibels loud and free and knife wounds in the psyches of those who knew what he was doing but could do nothing about it, so remained mute, who knew his being a leech did not stop only with boy groupies, as naked feet ran across rich carpeting, and to the elevator to be whisked up to the penthouse suite sweet sweat ready for action. All the cattle songs and all the Bar T singalongs, he could have stolen these if this had been the forties or the fifties, and he could have turned Roy Rogers on his head and have become Roy spelled backwards out of the ass end of the horse. And no one would have known. For old Fender, his magic was timeless ye lord. Because Fender had something that was nothing, and the ripples that went along his legs as two boys licked between them, and he stroked his toke of two incher in his mouth and with his fingers and he played them badly, he played them clunkily. He played them like he played his purloined music, from the loin, from the depth of his recessed rungs of sexuality and not for nothing was he laughingly referred to, behind his back, from time to time, but never by his fans, as the Spelunker's Delight, because one boy one time fell in and never hit bottom yet, to this very day, drive a Mack truck through it you could, and it keeps on traveling. Because Fender was wrecks of tattoos and Fender was boys' butts he craved so much, and he could get slobberingly droolingly drunk and they would not see him as a quaint series of cliches, but an enigma. As someone who took a world and upended it to the canted left or right just a bit, and made everything clown house fun, made the creases in his stomach so lickable and so penis rubbable that anyone would have been out of their clothes the minute he gave any impromptu harem the word, go fer it dude. The world of Spain was Fender, for this week at least, then on to Me-he-co, and the world of Spain became the world in which he was now with these olive skinned boys who did not know a word of English anymore than he did their world of Spanish. All he knew were they were gorgeously olive colored and their bold puppy dog breathtaking bodies seemed made of crushed velvet, and their penises were as sweet as the winds up a culvert where Fender always lived inside himself, somewhere caticornered to his intestines. Sitting there deep inside his body. Watching the world watch him. Watching the world play Fender Says, and buying tickets and CDs and T shirts and Fender condoms and Fender's own brand of Fender guitars, hang the copyright infringements. Some people just had a damn right to copy whatever and whoever they pleased and that's all there was to it. All of it netting a nice hunk of change, making him a millionaire more times over than most TV evangelists. He took comfort in that irony. The olive boys were all over Fender and some pink boys who had followed from the USofA. And they were making it with each other and they were making it with a giant scab that was the sole reason they could attain such a morbid curiously saddled with sad topplings high they felt with the man who provided the jewels of Opar that of course were his own and theirs were always lacking, always toking up to try to find his approval. That could never be found. For he was their everything as the old song went, what the hell--Fender wrote that too--and they were the flanges, the extensions, the poke outs for him and from him, and the posters of him that plastered their bedroom walls. In the dark night of time. That was any night without Fender and his magical calves and his magical lambs that crawled all over those magical calves, their nerves like his bursting almost. Their dreams lathered with his sperm and his spunk and his sweat and their bodies squirming like seal pups over and around him and feeling him feeling them while they felt each other and it was a huge mud pile of childhood effluvia It was expensive and it was costly and it was consuming emotions and some would make it and some would not. To His next venue. To His next hotel room. To His next bed. While others were chattel laid beside the roadway, never more to be heard from again no how no where. He was starlet. He was stud. He was muscular. He was thin and wan. He was Dad and big brother and he was little kid brother always getting into crap and getting in trouble while little boys grown into giants had to get him off the griddle with the hotcakes one more time. All was salvation and all was negation, all was taking the prizes won and the Grammy awards he blitzed time after time, all of it was the bed round that he made sure every hotel installed just for him and his compadres. All laughs and all the brain cells trying to fry for one good high. For one good high and all. Silver cakes and jack off smokes, and tilting into a kind of connubial bliss that is the death of something inching up like silverfish in dreams that spark and spoke and wheel around, and get their nipples sucked, the dreamers do. By the man himself. Or by the boy who has just sucked the nipples of the MAN HISOWNDAMNSELF All flighty and floaty and hot and sticky and the moon outside the steamy windows easy and lustful, easy and white and bright balloon of bone. All the suggestions and all the boys ass whipped and the boys who got on their knees and let Fender watch them have at it, little caverns that would hopefully shortly before the night was through entertain the wang of the dervish of all the aerobics that were dust furred. And alcohol soaked. And weed induced. And coughs like the flint of sex was growing fine and full inside their stomachs and it would grow a sex tree out of their mouths, the all of which would fit into Fender's massive mighty armor of lotions and herbs and spices and spells and tropical exotic dreams of malady read as suggestion alone. All they had to do was make up their own minds, and all they had to do was keep a false god done up like paper maiche, done up like an El Morte, day of death, and pretend the puppet master was not the puppet himself, like they all were puppets, there in the deep crimson lines of fatigue even the drug numb bangs would not keep out. The bodies getting tired and sluggish, no matter the brains slam ram electric storm lightning bolts from Olympus itself. All stars and all the boys with their crimson pain bodies in the midst of their night time apogees. Where anything sexual is nothing in the raw but razor blade mountains made to climb onto and push upward on, on their naked bleedy elbows and knees. While Fender wielded the guitar, the skin guitar was one thing, but the electric guitar was another, atonal, tedious, not an ounce of worthwhile sound, amateur night in the pizza restaurant, but some how both had made it all possible. And dangled future, gwangs, and twangs, and electric Kool Aid ice blue, in front of them, for they were too young to know was based irrefutably in past. On their stomachs, the boys were, as they began to feel Fender assembling them, and rearranging them and using them as conjure sticks. Lost tribes of ancients and the play huts of bodies became clay huts of a distant anciently shared past, so far ago as to be amenable to first run now. Amenable to what could pass for the moment of ginger snap glory that was resurrected into second fervor or body piling, naked boy on naked boy, in pyramid power awe and scope, and Fender climbing on top of them. Till they all fell into a giggle pile of limbs and faces and chests and dicks of varying hardness and butts of varying girlishness or boyishness and Fender hopping in a bed made of boys. All of it enhanced by the words of the world that were like paper chains round the wrists of Fender, the bender of all time, and the pills of rainbow colors, all hail PFL:AG, long may it bore everyone to tears, that they tossed in their mouths on the way to the great brain works gearing up for one last push and one last high before the bones collapsed for good and all, the boys not knowing the mission of the nanocomputers in these pills and not caring any at all, for any high at all was a high Atilla. That boys ensconced in the act of coming fifteen or more times in a night with this human dynamo, such a high was to die for fer sure. Not knowing or caring the none to bright jackass in their midst, for star dust was star dusted and star was STAR WHOEVER THE RIGHT PEOPLE SAID WAS A STAR AND YO MAMA IS SHAKIN' TOO BY DAMNNNNN. All Q and all talentless and all grungy sex and all the mania of slipping slippy hands on slippy flesh and two boys fucking Fender and another boy trying to get throbbo member in Fender's left ear socket, all the stats, all the struts, all the stables of boys that he had had for millions of sex partners and who knows maybe one or two million or more too All intelligenced and all distillated and all stoked to the guttifoils with sexual and bottles and capsules and lost and limbered and falling through all the feathers that are this earth tonight, and a man who had led them the way. A man who had found the little children who needed something more than a Miltown every afternoon after lunch at school, just to jerk them along and joke them into private little dreamy happys and knew they had to have the sound, the Sound, the music in their bones. Like he had the music in his bones, when in actuality all the music he had in his bones was powdered fear that someone would catch him at, not screwing and screwing over his fans, not using these boys and them losing them, who cares?, but something else, something unnamable when he was awake and at himself completely. Which was almost never. Mostly though he kept it stowed deep until such nights as this.. Something etched around his soul, what he still had remaining, when the acid etched into him and through him and from the inside out to the him of the outside, and these boys who collected skin and hair and sperm samples in little glassine cases he always provided them for an extra five dollars each, did not see the fear snake coiled in him at times like these, fearing being skinned alive when he would be found out as a thief and graverobber, and he would no longer be blissed into extreme erect-itude. Instead, cornered and gamboled with no more and his scam cover blown, because he was as electric as one of Lovecraft's eldritch gods who had bent the arthritic Old Ones around his waist and legs and stomach and thought that mere osmosis would let the levers of what they had once into him. As he cheated on life as he cheated on a test, and someday no matter everyone in the world was told lay off him, cause God decreed he can rip off what he likes; someday someone would face him not with the point of a boycock, but at the point of a 38. At that point of delivery that was nothing even close to boys rushing the stage and pushing him and his guitar over and the electric sparks go swishing and swinging and bluing everyone in the place it seemed, almost, as the boys, not caring, couldn't wait to get to his oddments. To his sweetmeats and devoured him up a storm and the boys who could not make it in the crowd rush crush diddled each other and offered it all up as a sacrificial gift of lambs to THE GREAT GOD FENDER LONG MAY HE ROCK. And as Fender and the boys lay not in lachrymose daze. As Fender and the boys felt the groove glued to them and bodily fluids sapping their once former homes, fluids now stuck to them and the others and it, and Fender, there was this little nascent bloom of noxious flower in Fender's gut. In his intestines where he hid out and observed the world go rocketing by but now half as fast as he rocketed, and this little bailiwick of caution, if fear was too strong a word, was a capsule that whispered in all the hallucinogenic colors he could bite off and chew and then more and more electric currents and levels of them that he could not begin to devour, and that fell blazingly fired down his naked chest, that whispered your time may be up real soon. His hair matted, hair free, or buzz cut or Mohawked, whatever; his body a chameleon. He could be anyone you wanted, not because he did not have talent one, but because he was like a horoscope, like psychology, like sociology, like fortune telling, like psychic readings; it's all the same crap; it fits all one way or another, and everybody could and did read whatever they wanted into him. And thus he became what they saw, without any effort or most slim of attempts on his part, and now, he drifted into sleep, knowing he would have steel band nightmares tonight. He never knew when the really bad ones would come. As his boys pleased him all night long, as they pleased his body, having no idea how at that moment, how he warred with himself in a certain specific part of his brain that they could not touch, that was forever betrothed to something that occurred under an ether of a ghostly flick of a flap of shirttail known heretofore as consciousness and once upon a time long ago as conscience; not connected with the boys he shook off next morning like a dog does fleas, but something more instrumental, using appropriate terminology. That cast the runes that whispered what if they've run out, you hack, what if they've run out of material and you can't cadge anymore, even when you fool yourself into thinking it's all out of the deepest brine of your most original noodle? And then where will you be when those ungrateful bastards go and split to the seven winds, man, on you and you have to rely on yourself in the music and in the sex too? How damn dare they be so self centered and such users of great talent like himself! It would mean he have to rely on himself doing some of it, and not having it all being done to and for him. No more all handed to you on the unlined paper of their quivery druggy hands. And then--crash of symbols--then it's only you there that is getting its dick chewed, and you and it are objects, as you and guitar are objects, that mesh very badly, but still wired hot and hard together. And then the boys want to sex you and you don't know how like you don't know how to play however clunkily with whatever pedestrian death warmed over half hearted who gives a damn? interpretation of someone else's material, but all you do is produce nothing but the barest framework of the love, and the kids screaming all to hell and back again from the very beginning of the concert, so they don't hear a note you play, a word you warble anyway, so what's the diff? But as Fender drifted deep into his pit where even the most knowledgeable and heartiest of spelunkers could never climb down and find him, as Fender entered into tonight's purgatory:--- --there was the creepy sharp flint edged shadow image of a broken guitar, blazing white lights, and a bent over tired old man made up of faces, none of which were ever his, that are melting and running floor-ward, and they are like little waterfalls curling over the lip of the stage or over the green green grass, and Fender standing bent over like he's about to receive a spinal tap. And his guitar falling in pieces at his feet. Then Fender falling in pieces. Then the kids would stop screaming in sexual glee, and would scream for different reasons, and in time, in time there would be laughter, derision, in that scream, and they would know he had stolen music and words and life and boys and sex and souls and dreams and pain and joys and drugs and nightmares and daymares and childhood and adulthood and the birth canal and the grave at the end of things-- They--these boys making sex with each other and the sleeping man seeming so content, so buzzed to the world--maybe these very ones would rush the stage then and would take him apart, and would have little pieces of him in the crush of each other's twisting turning caked sweat sex nodes bodies, and he would be nothing but little pieces of a huge part that he was never of to begin with. He didn't even take the time to bother to understand the songs he stole. What worked worked after all. That was up to his agent. And maybe somehow these little pieces of soul of song of talent of imagination rung so dry by this corn husk of a man, pedaled so simply and with such dullness, counting one two three then losing count and counting one two three again--marching the rhythm into a chain gang and destroying and pillaging it as he did these boys all these years--would exact their vengeance on him. Since most of their creators could not do it for themselves. And maybe those final boys he would ever come in contact with again, could be the same boys here and now, and each time, the same boys over and again, never aging, in stasis, this entire decade of his flush success, since he was a rerun, then why could not they be?--and they sucked him and kneaded him and they lay on him and kissed his lips to their sweet ones --and the dreams swirled sickly onward, as the boys drifted to nod land, themselves, holding on tight, wishing, wishing, wishing this night need never end, and how oh please god how much they aped to ache to aspire to the Gulliver god known as Fender-- MAY HE ALWAYS PRAY BE PRAISED.