BRIAN AKA “BEAR” SHORT STORY DENNIS COOPER Contents Acknowled gments iv Begin Reading 1 About the Author Other Books by Dennis Cooper Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “Jerk” previously appeared in the book Jerk (Artspace Books, 1993). “Ugly Man” and “The Boy on the Far Left” previously appeared in Scott Treleaven’s art catalog Some Boys Wander by Mistake (Kavi Gupta Gallery, John Connelly Pres- ents, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 2007) and in Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge (Sussex Academic Press, 2008). “Graduate Seminar,” “Santa Claus vs. Johnny Crawford,” “The Worst (1960– 1971),” and “Three Boys Who Thought Experimental Fiction Was for Puss- ies” previously appeared in Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge (Sussex Academic Press, 2008). “Knife/Tape/Rope” was originally the text of a performance art work of the same name created and di- rected by Ishmael Houston-Jones in 1985. “One Night in 1979 ...” previously appeared in the anthology Thrills, Pills, Chills, and Heartache: Ad- ventures in the First Person (Alyson Press, 2004). v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS BRIAN AKA “BEAR” I spent the summer of 1969 vacationing with my family on the island of Maui. I was sixteen, and Bear was fi fteen. He lived very near the beachfront hotel where we were staying and spent most of his mornings surfi ng the smallish, reliable waves that died on the sand a few yards below our balcony. Watching him became my daily routine, not because I liked surfi ng itself, much less his rather klutzy if patient style. He was the kind of boy I used to close my eyes, reach into my un- derwear, and build from scratch. To see Bear, track down a photo of the legendary skateboarding wunderkind Jay Adams when he was in his early teens. Take away Adams’s grace, and Bear could have been his twin. One morning early in our va- cation, my favorite surfer noticed the pale, slightly older boy studying him from a perch on the hotel and yelled for me to come down and share a joint. By the time he’d lit the second joint, Bear, who was as confi dent and blunt as I was shy and circuitous, had forced me to admit I was into him, and we were walking back to his place. Bear was a jokey, class clown type who seemed lazily asex- ual in public, but, when alone and stoned, he was a sex ma- niac with the wildest imagination I’d ever encountered to that point. Nowadays there are labels for guys like him—“hungry, insatiable bottom” might begin to do the trick—but back then he seemed indescribable. I’d read about boys like him in nov- els, but the novels in question had been written by de Sade, and the characters in question were only slutty thanks to other characters’ death threats. With Bear, it was almost nonstop sex the whole two months we spent together, both one-on- one and with a wide array of other young locals and tourists, quite a few of them otherwise straight guys disarmed by drugs and Bear’s lean, persuasive body. We even had several incestu- ous S&M-ish three-ways with his thuggish older brother. He taught me a lot, instigated my lifelong fascination with rim- ming, and, even more than that, with young male asses in gen- eral, scarring my fantasies and fi ction forever. When I returned to LA at the end of summer, Bear and I ex- changed pornographic letters for a while. There was even some 4 ■■■■■ UGLY MAN