Sep. 06, 2006 - Issue #568: Sex in the City

Dispatch

09-05-2006--Delta Edmonton

Writing with someone looking over your shoulder can be a crazy-making experience; as much as the down-to-deadline habits that leave no time for revision and rethink have made my work basically a performance art, spectators are generally unwelcome. But when what you’re working on is an ass-licking, panty-sniffing, blow-jobbing dirty fuck scene in a frat-house, and your work is being projected onto a ten-foot screen in the middle of the city’s biggest bookstore, and the spectators are television cameramen, Starbucking bibliophiles and 10-year-old kids ...

Well. You’ve just gotta cope, don’t you? The option is failure and humiliation, those fundamental forfeits of reality TV —of which BookTelevision’s 3-Day Novel Contest, a Labour Day classic that gathered 12 writers from across Canada into the arid airconditioning of Chapters’ massive south-side hangar for 72 hours of living, learning and cranking out tachygraphic cris de coeur. I’d really rather not get into my experiences as a contestant this soon—there’s a lot yet to process, and, besides, it has been and will be all on TV but to keep theme with this steamy-hot Collector’s Edition of Vue Weekly, I’m reprioritizing my psychic inbox to provide an inside scene report from last weekend’s weirdest boy-girl party.

Straightline gender parity, three nights of co-ed slumber party and a soul-bonding shared trauma— you’d think it’d be something of a hothouse, but ... Well, first of all, wild-eyed, stumbling zombies with coffeebreath, aching backs and heads full of performance anxiety and crippling self-doubt aren’t known to be all that attractive to all but the most far-gone of crisis junkies.

Second, who had the time, the opportunity? Between the on-camera interviews, the thrice-daily challenges, the limitless distractions of the venue and the time required to satisfy basic human needs, every possible instant of productive time became precious. If you haven’t participated, you have no fucking idea what this challenge puts you through.

Of course, there was sexual tension in the air; none of us were physically unattractive, and the act of novel-writing is essentially erotic in even the most laid-back and casual of circumstances. But most of it was being plowed back into the works; we all had to do time on under that big public monitor I mentioned, and from what I and anybody in reading distance could tell we were a pretty dirty dozen.

Not all of it could be so channeled, of course; the pipe connecting Microsoft Word and the id isn’t hermetically sealed, and when it’s called on to carry its UL-rated peak capacity there’s going to be a measurable amount of free-floating orgonic energy leaking out into the atmosphere. In this, my cock served to detect toxic levels of orgone like a reverse canary-in-the mine, sitting pretty and chirping when I’d merely typed the word “pornography.” Of necessity, given my situation, I’d gone two days without spankin’ it; now, in the interests of workplace safety, steps had to be taken.

It was six in the morning, and 10 of our dozen still sleeping; what crew was around were busy getting ready to make the day’s magic happen, there were no staff or customers. It was a golden opportunity to kick back uninterrupted in the handicapped-sized luxury of the single men’s room stall (aka Fonzie’s Office) and take a load off. I even snuck in a store copy of Penthouse Letters to get the ball rolling.

No luck. I could get it up but couldn’t get it done; I knew it was a lost cause by stroke four or five. There’s your summation of the rigours of the 3-Day Novel Contest—you get so tired, wired, undernourished, freaked-out, dehydrated, terrified and erotically keyed up that even the best of “Dear Sirs: I never thought this would happen to me” from the swingin’ ’70s isn’t enough to untangle the network. Only writing will do that; you need to come all over the page.

It’s over, now, my 11 000 words inadequately bulky to have a chance at winning, but comprising prose I can share, be proud of, and work with—a more important victory. It’s going to take me a while to sort, sift, process and derive utility from the shit that’s been going down in my head ... but I’m making a good start on it, here in the former contest hospitality suite, renewed for the day as a decompression chamber. Waiting for the bootleg valium to kick in so I can sleep for the first time in days without grinding my teeth to powder, my body’s sending me a message, a homeostatic thumbs-up: I’ve got a boner like a goddamn moonrocket. V

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