NEO CAMPARI
There was a certain accumulative aspect to Victor’s art. It seemed to combine across such a vivid expanse of different things, media and subjects that Mona had a hard time seeing it as something unified at all. It refused to be gathered under a stylistics like, for example, the work of say Picasso (whose paintings Mona also found to be of questionable artistic merit, although she did own one of his prints, representing a bull that looked like a bunch of umbrellas). Victor’s work was simply irreducible. Some of his paintings, if you could call them that, might perhaps be said to share a formal theme, if you counted what looked like the scribblings of a demented child as a «theme» (which Mona did not). There also seemed to be a lot of xeroxing, lending his work a visceral continuity of sorts, but it hardly suppressed the fact that what one was dealing with upon inspecting his oeuvre, was a heap of stuff thrown together with no heed for convention, consistency or intelligibility. Reducing everything to xerox-quality didn't really help. His last show in Paris... My God, what a mess, Mona thought. Actual dim sum, a bucket of noodles, a statue with a plate glued to its face, a makeshift fountain with beer cans thrown in, large prints of low resolution photos lifted off the net and glued to the wall, the tricouleur, party decorations etc.. There was absolutely no coherence; everything had just been jacked together, incomprehensibly, carelessly, arbitrarily – amounting to, in the end, little more than the kind of creative destruction that hurricanes brought.
Victor had left his keys for her in the reception, so she had been waiting in his room, like they had agreed. Victor was overly cautious about certain things. Almost half an hour had passed, she had tried to call him but only got a busy signal. She had also considered leaving, but she couldn't bring herself to waive a meeting with Victor, so she had lingered, splayed on his crumpled bed sheets with her heels on, flicking through some printed material she found on his nightstand – including Victor's latest book, «The Institute of Social Hypocrisy». Even if she didn't much care about his art, she found his animal-like appetites very attractive. Her phone rang. She answered. It was Victor. - I'm sorry, he said, got held up. - You are an asshole, Mona said. She knew he wasn't sorry. - I'll be there in half an hour, he said. - Why didn't you call? - I was too busy. - Too busy to text me? - Jesus, Mona, don't work yourself up over this, just order some room service. (Pause.) What are you wearing by the way. - A dress. She didn't really want to play. - Describe it. - It's ...black, Mona replied with forced innuendo. - More adjectives, I need more adjectives... - It's also short and tight, you can see my ass through the fabric. She felt swayed by his insistence. Her fingers trailed the edges around the cut out chest neckline, which she imagined Victor would like, grazing lightly the skin on her breasts. - What kind of fabric? - hmm, a very thin and delicate cotton. - I like it, what else? - You mean what else I'm wearing? - Yes.... Victor sounded impatient. - You're making me hard, Mona. - Well, I've got on a pair of high heels that I haven't taken off yet, currently burried in your bed sheets, I might keep them on. - Oh shit, that's too much Mona, you're going to make me come. I'll be there in half an hour. Victor hung up. Mona returned to Victor's book, but was immediately interrupted by a beep from her Blackberry. It was a message from Victor – a video of him stroking his bulging crotch. Mona called the reception and ordered a bottle of champagne.
«The Institute of Social Hypocrisy» was an impromptu archive chronicling some exhibition space cum publishing business that Victor had artfully dubbed a performance and used as a screen so he could exploit other artists and writers; at least that's what it represented to Mona's mind. The book consisted mostly of black and white shots of events and exhibitions with obnoxious email-correspondance pasted in between. Under the heading «Brooding Parasite Feeding Week», Victor had shut a curator inside the gallery space for a week and fed him only variations of whale meat. «Screw the Ethics» could have been a fitting caption for Victor's entire artistic venture, but was in fact the title of a show of footage of a man with a hole in his face, who Victor had filmed in secret after the man had expressedly requested not to be photographed. Charming. Mona paused at the section were Victor apparently had stalked Anselm Kiefer for a week in Paris. There was a picture of his mansion with some envious sounding remarks underneath. She had been to Kiefer's house once, a dinner party together with Lionel. He had been very nice and attentive. Poor Kiefer, stalked through the streets of Paris by a bored sociopath. Speaking of sociopaths and people she had met, there was also included a facsimile of a fanzine by Bjarne Melgaard, the only other name she recognised. Finally some nudity, she thought, inspecting the well endowed black man depicted with his erected cock in his hand. Mona didn't know if she cared much for Melgaard's cheesy juxtaposition of pornography and vintage footage of the Black Panthers. Could they really have taken themselves seriously back then, with that feline epithet, or was it all just some elaborate historical joke? Mona pictured a club formed by twelve year olds, arguing over who wielded what super power. She preferred the picture of the penis and found it only annoying that it was superimposed over the Black Panthers, which did little except steal from its pornographic allure. She didn't particularly care to acknowledge this as an artistic achievement on Melgaard’s part. She herself had persuaded numerous men to drop their pants, but a black man only once, and it had been a disappointment. Nevertheless, she fervently enjoyed pornos starring Olu the Black Bastard, a black englishman in his forties who did Mature films, where he verbally condescended women her own age for their signs of ageing and treated them to a rather rough brand of sex, bordering on what looked like rape. She and Lionel would sometimes re-enact Olu-scenes that they had found especially arousing. Lionel would smack her around a little and speak to her in a thick and slurred East- London accent about what a filthy old slag she was. Then he would cuff her to the piping underneath the bathroom sink and leave her there for a couple of hours, occasionally dropping in to smear his dick in her face and abuse her some more about how she hadn't done the laundry properly and that her cooking skills were below par. Lionel, who was 63, was a good impersonator, even if his stamina, unlike Olu's, where on the wane. With Lionel she enjoyed the foreplay more than the actual sex, which was always, despite her state of arousal, a fairly disappointing affair, due in part to Lionel's inability to see the intercourse through without at least one bathroom break, which sort of killed off the dominant vibe he was trying to project. “Vibe”, Mona tasted the word. It tasted like funk music, afros and ball sacks cut in half by impossibly tight, flair-legged jeans. She looked at the video of Victor's bulging groin again, slid her hand under her dress and started masturbating. Before her mind's eye she imagined being on her knees with her hands tied behind her back and Victor's throbbing boner dangling over her face, teasingly depositing little traces of pre-cum on her cheeks and chin as she tried to catch it with her mouth, while Victor tugged at her hair and violently jerked her head back. Just as the moist penis head was pushed past her lips and teeth and into her eager mouth, a knock on the door woke her from her fantasy. She ran to open it, all flushed and excited. The moment she had opened the door, thinking it was Victor, she turned swiftly around without looking, and started walking seductively towards the bed. When she cast a glance over her shoulder, midfloor, to make sure that Victor was following suit, she shockingly realised that her daring “vibe” had been irredeemebly misplaced. In stead of Victor, a young (black) man was standing in the doorway with a cart with a bowl of ice and a champagne bottle next to him. - Your champagne Miss, he said to his feet, eager to leave. Mona didn't really know what to do with herself, so smiled, and said, attempting to come off as unfazed, - Oh, wonderful. The room service attendant left before she had a chance to tip him. She felt mildly insulted and found it hard to regain the state of excitement she had felt prior to the unfortunate incident. Returning to Melgaard's black cock, it being the only pornographic material available, seemed unavoidable.
Lionel was a porn connaisseur, and his collection spanned thousands of titles, all neatly shelved in a private viewing room adjacent to his bedroom – now that was an archive more to Mona's liking. While Melgaard’s pictures only succeeded in suggesting a very general and rehashed connection between sex and politics, and fetishising the too gay, leather get-up that the Black Panthers wore - real porn, porn that wasn't mitigated by artistic agendas and cerebral detours, triggered actual hormonal responses instead of just begging her to try to connect the dots. Mona had never cared much for that game, not even as a child. She could always make out the figure in her head before she started drawing anyway. It was never a secret waiting to be exposed that the animal balancing a ball on the tip of its snout was a circus seal – as if the stupid, pre-drawn disney-smile enveloped in a seal-shaped shroud of numbers didn't give it away. This was what interpreting art works seemed like to her: a game of connect the dots, where one could already tell what the final picture would look like at the outset. She had to hand it to Victor, though, that the coordinates of his project yielded no pre-drawn disney-smile to give a hint to the shape of the overall outline of his scheme. This lack of a clear direction did however not make her any more eager to try to make sense of it. It was garbage washed up on a beach by the singularly unconscious movements of the ocean, and Melgaard's black cock superimposed over The Black Panthers was the equivalent of a half dissolved porn rag amidst all the other plastic bags and rusted tin cans.
Why wasn't Victor there yet? She checked her watch, forty five minutes had passed since they spoke on the phone. She tried calling him, but he didn't pick up. Was he just playing her and didn't intend to show up at all? Here she was, multimillionaire and a diva of Norwegian court rooms, waiting like a faithful dog in his bed – while he, that poor excuse for an artist, hoofed about Paris thinking she would wait for ever! She sensed she was flushing with anger, and got nervous that it would trigger a rash on her neck, which often was the result of these tantrums. Applying cold water from the bathroom sink eased it some, and would hopefully forestall the onset of flaming red skin. Her reflection in the mirror calmed her down. The cleavage that was subtly revealed through the cut out neckline of her dress was arresting. She zoomed in on it in the mirror with her phone and jumped a little to make her breasts bounce, recorded a video and sent it to Victor. Victor's reply came within fifteen seconds and read: «YOU are a sLut».
Mona smiled to herself. She would show him slut. She pulled her dress up over her hips and placed her foot on the edge of the sink, turning slightly away from the mirror to make sure the thong cutting into the soft flesh above her ass cheek was visible along with her heel. It was a straining position to be in and she barely managed to take a snap shot before she lost her balance and almost tumbled head first into the ceramic tiles opposite the mirror. She sent the photo to Victor with the caption, «You're about to miss your chance». «PleAse stay!!», was his immediate response. Mona liked the begging tone of it, and the two exclamation marks. She wrote back; «Ok, I might wait around a little longer». Mona, who'd been bored for the last hour, found herself drawn towards the prospect of an activity, which also had the semblance of foreplay. Now she had the upper hand. She looked around to see if there were other objects that would make for sassy photo ops. Over the next hour Mona sent Victor the following items from her cell: a video where she filmed herself under her dress while squeezing Victors toothbrush between her butt cheeks; a picture of his book «The Institute of Social Hypocrisy» with the caption «Spanking device #1»; a towel soaking in the bath tub, caption, «Spanking device #2» (Victor's reply: «Aouch!»); a self-portrait with one of his boxer shorts over her head, titled «The Executioner»; a selection of Victor's ties displayed on the bed, caption, «prisoner restraining aids»; a picture of the lamp post read «Prostate massage»; a video where she brushes her teeth with Victor's tooth brush – which was actually shot prior to squeezing it in her bum, but she consciously jumbled the chronology for effect (Victor: «eh...»).
Mona was having a ball, and the bottle of champagne she had ordered was near empty. She felt tipsy and wild. She wanted to push the envelope a little. Remembering a striptease she had been to once where the girl had served champagne from her vagina straight into someones mouth, Mona placed her Blackberry on the night stand, leaning it up against the pile of books to get a proper framing. She took off her underwear, stood with her back to the camera, hiked up her dress, bent forward with legs apart and placed the tip of the champagne bottle against her vulva. But, without giving her the chance to prepare properly, the cold glass tip, helped by the shear weight of the massive bottle and the odd angle of her hand, slid into her vulva. The sudden, unexpected sensation of cold glass against her labia minor made Mona jolt and abruptly pull the bottle out, spilling the remainder of its contents on the floor. Irritated she looked around the room. She didn't feel like calling room service for more champagne, lest they think her a drunk. There had to be some alcohol stashed somewhere, knowing Victor liked his drink. Mona searched the room. The mini bar was empty except for two cans of coke, but on the window sill she spotted a bottle of Campari, almost three quarters full, emanating an irresistible carmine hue. Soon after, Victor’s bedsheets were spotted with carmine red, as well as the carpet and five Eton shirts from his suit case, which Mona placed in a row from the bed to the door that Victor later would enter through - as a sort of makeshift runway, "bled" over with Mona's vaginal-deposits of Campari. She also made sure to give a generous tip to the attendant that brought up the ten shrimp cocktails she had ordered, in case he had caught a glimpse of her "decorations" and was prone to meddle. The shrimps all went in the bathtub with the soaking towel. She turned the hot water on and kept it running. Mona then made sure that all the windows were properly shut and that the ventilation shafts were stffed with Victor's undergarments. She backed out and hung the "do not disturb" sign on the knob before she clicked the door shut and swooped into the elevator, feeling elated despite a stinging sensation in her cunt, which would last for days.
written by Stian Gabrielsen
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