Free Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox Page A

the massages that made me famous:
    Full Swedish treatment including muscle pulverization. Phil cried
like a little boy.
    Inches cover, June 1999. Phil convinces Lower East Side photog Richard Kern that there is more to erotic photography than anorexic junkie girls with track marks on their cooch. We hop the fence to an abandoned amphitheatre in Riverside Park that’s covered in graffiti. I hang rat traps from my foreskin for full extension.
    Fan letter to Inches , July 1999:
    Dear Inches ,
    Thank you for finally printing a picture of a guy I can keep in my wallet. What a hunk! Can you tell him that I just want to hold his dick against my face when it’s soft and kiss his foreskin? Better yet, can you pack him and his big beautiful dick up in a suitcase and post him to Brighton? We English lads will treat him right (as if!) and we’ll make sure to send him back in one piece. Every time I look into his deep blue eyes I get this feeling of total surrender.
    And I’m already stocking up on rat traps!
    Bill in Brighton, England

    As a person who is often photographed, I will now posit an interpretation of selected quotes from Susan Sontag’s On Photography , a book I stole from some trick’s shitter:
    â€œTo collect photographs is to collect the world ... To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
    Wow. Bang on. Sometimes I wonder if Susan Sontag was a hustler boy in a previous life. For aging Manhattan art fags, the next best
thing to a night with me is a picture of me. They want to own me, take me home with them, imprison me behind glass, and then jerk off carefully. Putting something behind glass speeds up the disidentification process. You can only fetishize somebody you can’t relate to, and the best way to make that happen is to dehumanize them, turn them into a two-dimensional copy. Drain the fluids, and suck out the person-hood so it doesn’t stink up the display case.
    â€œPhotographic images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it.”
    When photographers ask me to sign prints of myself, I understand what this is about. Personalization. A DNA imprint. What is called “realia” in academic circles. So I lick the corner, gob it up with snot, leave a smudge of pre-cum or a bloody fingerprint. Do they want a piece of me or not?
    â€œPhotographs furnish evidence.”
    Evidence of me.
    I was here.
    I existed.
    I was totally hot.
    People felt things when I fucked them.
    I made people cum.
    I made people happy.
    I was ignored.
    My brain was never validated.
    I’m too beautiful to write something deep.
    I’m too naked to be a writer.
    I’m too exposed to be published.
    I’m a raving ADD case, if you haven’t already noticed. I have a hell of a time recording dates and places and situating myself in a
timeline of events that may or may not have happened. Sometimes the only way to know what I’ve done and where I’ve been is to flip to HX magazine’s Who’s Who society pages to find my drunken face laughing off the page, stumbling out of a club I can recognize from the décor and the tricks holding me up.
    â€œThe camera record incriminates.”
    You said it, philosophy sister. This is a partial list of things I’ve been caught doing on camera:
    Swiping photo equipment for easy resale (never from Richard), sliding a broken condom out of a model’s ass and smiling at the goo, blowing my meth dealer in a bathroom stall (the stuff is hard to find), posing with an intense pile of trash (hour forty-seven of a dumpster-diving adventure), punching out the photographer.
    That’s why it’s useless to have a pseudonym. Slap whatever name you want on the picture, it’s still me.
    â€œThere is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”
    Susan has obviously never met Richard Rorschach.

    No, I don’t talk about crystal meth a lot. Would you? The world is full of