Shock-horror aficionado FourFour wrote recently about reaching the limits of his intestinal fortitude while reading a particularly gruesome passage from Chuck Palahniuk's "Haunted," and as I was in the process of posting a FAR GROSSER, FAR MORE PERVERTED, and MUCH BETTER WRITTEN passage from Stanley Elkin's classic novella "The Making of Ashenden," I thought I'd capitalize on the coincidence.
Now I've never read any Palahniuk, and it's possible the lines Rich quotes--they involve a rectal and subsequently INTESTINAL prolapse in a swimming pool, and so yeah, they're pretty gross--are even grosser and more shocking in context. But THERE IS NO WAY they are as gross or as shockingly vivid and funny as Elkin's description of what happens to listless playboy Brewster Ashenden--rich, handsome, urbane, irresistable to women, desperately in need of being brought down a peg--when he steps out one morning onto the grounds of his billionaire friend's wild game preserve and, after musing to himself about the natural beauty he encounters there, finds himself face-to-face with a massive female Kamchatkan Brown Bear...in heat.
After a lengthy standoff, the bear rears up against Ashenden and he gradually comes to realize the only way he's going to make it out of this situation alive is to FUCK THE BEAR.
"When the bear was inches away it threw itself up on its hind legs and the two embraced each other, the tall man and the slightly taller bear, and Brewster, surprised at how light the bear's paws seemed on his shoulders, forgot his fear and began to ruminate. See how strong I am, how easily I support the beast. Meanwhile they went round and round like partners in a slow dance...but then the bear leaned on him with all her weight and he began to buckle, his dreamy confidence deserting him. The bear whipped its paw behind Ashenden's back to keep him from falling, and it was like being dipped, supported in a dance, the she-bear leading and Brewster balanced against the huge beamy strength of her paw. With her free paw she snagged one sleeve of Ashenden's Harris tweed jacket and started to drag his hand toward her cunt."
Now I've never read any Palahniuk, and it's possible the lines Rich quotes--they involve a rectal and subsequently INTESTINAL prolapse in a swimming pool, and so yeah, they're pretty gross--are even grosser and more shocking in context. But THERE IS NO WAY they are as gross or as shockingly vivid and funny as Elkin's description of what happens to listless playboy Brewster Ashenden--rich, handsome, urbane, irresistable to women, desperately in need of being brought down a peg--when he steps out one morning onto the grounds of his billionaire friend's wild game preserve and, after musing to himself about the natural beauty he encounters there, finds himself face-to-face with a massive female Kamchatkan Brown Bear...in heat.
After a lengthy standoff, the bear rears up against Ashenden and he gradually comes to realize the only way he's going to make it out of this situation alive is to FUCK THE BEAR.
"When the bear was inches away it threw itself up on its hind legs and the two embraced each other, the tall man and the slightly taller bear, and Brewster, surprised at how light the bear's paws seemed on his shoulders, forgot his fear and began to ruminate. See how strong I am, how easily I support the beast. Meanwhile they went round and round like partners in a slow dance...but then the bear leaned on him with all her weight and he began to buckle, his dreamy confidence deserting him. The bear whipped its paw behind Ashenden's back to keep him from falling, and it was like being dipped, supported in a dance, the she-bear leading and Brewster balanced against the huge beamy strength of her paw. With her free paw she snagged one sleeve of Ashenden's Harris tweed jacket and started to drag his hand toward her cunt."
"He kneed her stomach and kicked at her crotch. "Arng." "Let go," he cried, "let go of me," but the bear, provoked by the pleasure of Ashenden's harmless, off-balance blows and homing in on itself, continued to pull at his arm caught in the sling of his sleeve, and in seconds he had plunged Brewster's hand into her wet nest. There was a quality of steamy mound, a transitional texture between skin and meat, as if the bear's twat were something butchered perhaps, a mysterious cut tumid with blood and the color of a strawberry ice-cream soda, a sexual steak. Those were its lips. He had grazed them with his knuckles going in, and the bear jerked forward, a shudder of flesh, a spasm, a bump, a grind. Frenzied, it drew his hand on. He made a fist but the bear groaned and tugged more fiercely at Ashenden's sleeve. He was inside. It was like being up to his wrist in dung, in a hot jello of baking brick fretted with awful straw. The bear's vaginal muscles contracted; the pressure was terrific, and the bones in his hand massively cramped. He tried to pull his fist out but it was welded to the bear's cunt. Then the bear's muscles relaxed and he forced his fist open inside her, his hand opening in a thick medium of mucoid strings, wet gutty filaments, moist pipes like the fingers for terrible gloves. Appalled, he pulled back with all his might and his wrist and hand, greased by bear, slid out, trailing a horrible suction, a concupiscent comet. He waved the hand in front of his face and the stink came off his fingertips like flames from a shaken candelabra, an odor of metal fruit, of something boiled years, of the center of the earth, filthy laundry, powerful as the stench of jewels and rare metals, of atoms and the waves of light. "Oh Jesus," he said, gagging, "oh Jesus, oh God." "U(r)m," the bear said, "wrenff." Brewster sank to his knees in a position of prayer and the bear abruptly sat, its stubby legs spread, her swollen cunt in her lap like a bouquet of flowers.
This goes on for about 15 pages, and however you feel about man-ladybear sex its an astonishingly vivid (and, in its way, astonishingly realistic) literary performance. It never fails to make me gag, but I've probably read and reread this sequence more times than any other in all of Western literature. I am just so honored to present it to all of you today!
Anyway, this may be the first and last time I beat FourFour at anything--and to be fair he never offered this challenge and hasn't even been offered a fair chance to agree or disagree to its terms--but still: WE WIN.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry or masturbate.
As a man, this excerpt proved extremely frustrating — is there anything in those 15 pages about Ashenden's pleasure? Your aversion to male money shots is understandable, but couldn't you make an exception for the literary kind?
Somewhere around, "powerful as the stench of jewels and rare metals, of atoms and the waves of light," I lost my boner.
And, for my money, there's still nothing in the world that beats, for sheer disgustingness, the 200 pages filled with relentless descriptions of rimming the filthy, mucusy asses of teenagers that makes up Dennis Cooper's "Try."