Jean-Lorin Sterian is a writer, playwright, director and performer. He has published books of fiction and anthropology. In 2008 he created the lorgean theatre – “a theatre of intimate spaces” in his own flat, an open place for actors and dancers, which became a trade mark for alternative culture of Bucharest.
MEAT
I don’t like fat.
Only skim repels me more. I never understood how someone can eat something so gross. Except for parents. As if, when they reach adulthood, people become stupid and try to convince their offsprings that they have to swallow something they themselves couldn’t stand back in the day. When I was a little girl I spent whole days in the kitchen, watching loathingly as a piece of meat was jellying on a plate. Just the two of us. My parents would go to the TV, leaving the door open so that they could watch me. I couldn’t leave the room unless one of us disappeared.
So now I know: if I ever have a boy, I’ll never boil him milk. If I’ll have a girl, I’ll keep her away from dead animals that could continue their existence in her small belly.
I can hear Oakenfold from a terrace and PolinaMisailidou from another.
I lie on my back, with my mind broken into thousands of pieces.
I only move my neck, to the left or to the right, everytime Giorgio tries to kiss me.
Once to the left, once to the right.
I’ve never thrown up during sex. But it’s getting harder to stand a tongue that helped a chunk of greasy meat be chewed to invade my mouth. When he bends over, squeezing my breasts with his left hand, I feel how big, black bats slap me in the face with their wings.
I shake my head spastically until he gives up touching our tongues and comes back to his initial position. His frozen grimace should express pleasure. We slam our pelvises and the only thing alive inside me is his penis.
You’re kind of strange, says Giorgio after the mounting has been consummated. I can hear the only hit of the Babybird band from the beach. I would hum the chorus, but I can’t pronounce « You’re Gorgeous ». I can’t see his face in the darkness of the room, but I know that his skin is sunburned. A Rudolf nose is twinkling on his face.
But I can smell him. A stench as if he had varnished himself at length with multiple sweat layers.
If I have a sense that still works at all endpoints, that’s the smell. Every morning I throw up as soon as I put toothpaste in my mouth. Throwing up is a part of my life, as well as crying in the office bathroom and fucking with zet males.
I don’t like the way he smells, I don’t like his parched nose, I don’t like how he scanned my body as soon as we ran into each other. Staring is the first way to make love. I didn’t like his leather jacket, that he wore on his bare chest, the cheap pickup lines, the clichepunchlines said with a strained nonchalance. But that didn’t stop me from ending up in the room where all the trapped fruit flies end up in. He probably keeps his name list in the drawer, under the condom boxes and gets a lot of pleasure out of updating it. More than from the act itself.
But what I hate the most is that we have something in common.
Despair.
He’s an eternal acting student, whose corny performances only get applause from the girls that can barely stand up. He patiently lurks his prays, until the small hours of the night, when self respect takes a break and bathes in alcohol. He meets new people every night. He drinks beer and smokes joints with them and gives them tips on traditional restaurants, the clubs with the hottest DJs and the hotel where Jean-Paul Gaultier stays at. He gets drunk on their money, dances, throws up, fucks. They exchange phone numbers, but no one ever calls him again. If, by accident, they meet again the next summer, no one signals that they recognize him. And he starts all over again.
He spins invisibly among tourists, with a crushed smile and damp palms, waiting for a tourist with a little hat to ask him « How are you ?».
He needs to pronounce his name and for someone else to pronounce his name so that he can carry out his repertoire.
Night after night he haunts the clubs in Psaouru, fucking whoever is around.
With drunk women who, on their seventh glass of Sex On The Beach, think they’ve met Adonis.
With fat and unattractive campers that will finally tell their work colleagues that they have a sex life.
With saggy old bags at their last or second to last fuck.
With junkies that can’t remember the second day if they played pool all night long, slept or fucked someone.
With me, drifting in an anxiety pool even when I fuck.
You’re weird, says Giorgio after he dismounted my body.
I AM.
I look like roadkill. If I could extract from the depths of me that little box where my sense of humour is hiding, shaking in a fetal position, I could laugh looking at the scene.
A corpse in which a guy with big pecs just came. I should be proud that, despite the smell in the tent, despite the greasy jaw and the loneliness that connects us more than the act that just finished, I managed to carry out this fuck.
The first in more than a year, since any attempt to make love to Elias has a lame ending.
in tears and humiliation and sadness and pain and silence
Once during a dinner I was asked why I don’t eat my schnitzel. I answered that I don’t trust something that’s hiding behind a flour and egg shell.
From the club terraces you can hear a musical salad in which there have been thrown A Girl Like You – Edwin Collins, Roger Sanchez and, somewhere in the distance, Hotel California in the hideous version of the Gipsy Kings. I pull up my briefs and, without going to the bathroom, I mutter something unintelligibly and I slip outside. Giorgio stays inert in bed, too used to not matter in order to have a reaction. He folds between the clothes, resigned, waiting for that great day when he’ll become material.
It’s starting to get cold in Psarou. I have an empty tent, left by a friend whose girlfriend came and for a while they are indulging in a five star hotel. He told me that he’ll let me know when the deal won’t apply anymore. But he hasn’t called me until now, meaning I still have a place to sleep tonight.
Waves crushrhythmically at the shore and tens of bodies follow suit.
Like me and Giorgio.
The camping area is more than two kilometers from the beach, midway to Chora. Until there I have to walk through a dark and empty area, but there’s no reason to be afraid.
I was already fucked tonight.
The moon went to sleep before I did.
I trip over curbs, trash cans and chained bodies. Some swear, others just shriek.
I crumble in front of the tent. Only now do the leftovers from diner pour from my stomach.
Somewhere in the distance there’s laughter and a long holler.
I stick my hand inside the tent, randomly take a cloth and wipe my face of tears and snot and food traces.
Around this time we would have been in bed. He would have worn that seedy Metallica t-shirt that he boasts he’s had for 16 years and that’s part of his identity. We would have touched our lips, then we would have both turned our backs against each other. It would have taken me a long time to decide to touch his hot skin and I would have been almost grateful had I felt he was asleep.
The music is so far away that I don’t know if what I hear is Rammstein or ABBA. I zip up the tent wishing that during the night it will rain with big rocks and that I never have to zip it up back again.