messrs. whipp, mitchell, et al.

Whipp was heir to the ice-cream fortune, to the Whippy good name. That shit scars the young, the burden of expectation, of destiny. The weight of history. What else for Whipp but ice cream? His short tenure in the halls of residence within the University Village has garnered him a reputation amongst his aggrieved flatmates for excess milk consumption, milk belonging to not only himself but they also, pints of the stuff, chugged from the jug morning, noon and night, duke of the dairy. Early start: milk! Long day: milk! Heavy night: milk! What else for Whipp but milk? There can be little more hopeless and yet also more liberating than an absence of agency, than a fate sealed by the annals of inherited nomenclature, where one might do anything and yet change nothing, inculpable, categorically free to make no difference at all, the great paradox of predetermination. Whipp, victim of his name. Scoop the life out. Few of his flatmates got him loaded and had him suck them off, filmed it, sent the vid to Whipp senior, to Mr “The Mr Whippy” Whippy, for laughs, blackmail maybe. Watched too much TV. Got scared off by a legal letter. Even that, even that – gobbing off a handful for vodka shots – couldn’t change the course. The path was set. “Do as you will as you must,” Mr Whippy wrote him. “But son, on the QT, as you will, as you must. Do not fuck, son, with the name of Whipp. Name is the measure of your life. Your every gesture is spelled out in Whipp. Do. Not. You understand? Fuck.” Yes, what else for Whipp?

He was a gentle soul, a simpleton at heart, with round glasses, thicko gawp, linguine locks, absolute ineptitude for propriety, expectation, the others. Positioned somewhere on the spectrum for the convenience. Made sense of his admirable senselessness. The world occurred about him, he but a passenger in its surge, the ripple that spread from its centre and to every minute facet of his life. When two slobs from his flat burnt a bifter on the balcony, flaunting the tip above the pedestrians passing below, the sickly whiff, the incremental liberation of such meagre illegality, he allowed it to happen to himself also, felt the loose roll and the gobbed paper and the soaked roach and the smoke too, orally, in scalding billows, then respiratorily, bronchioles elevated to pan-dimensional vortices, felt the eyes weaken and tear and blur, o the tremendous blur of the traffic headlights like comets on the freeway. Their bodies felt precious together, such proximity, even huge hunks of flesh like raw nerve endings, like a vast clitoral landscape. His transgressions bore no sense to him, even related – as they were – in the tones reserved for the denouncement of great evil; they had happened, just happened, in the absence of agency, culpability. As the smoke had sourced him it would source him again as demand might prove to warrant. Surely this should be mitigation enough? What are we, any of we, but victims of the circumstances of others?

She was led to his room in the residences and there found herself being undressed, his hands about her skin like burrowing insects. She had not wanted anything to happen but was drunk and slightly numb with it, and besides was young also and newly free and wanted to feel alive, and to kiss was okay, kissing, even groping to a point, and his hands felt okay if narcissistic on her breasts and darting across her pubis and down then to her cunt, deft like a shoplifter. I’m going to fuck you, he had said, and no you’re not, she had said, or thought, certainly, matter of fact I don’t want you to, you will not, and he held her arms by her sides and assured her of his intentions and attempted sodomy that spurned arousal and ended mercifully quickly, his wad shot around her anus, her buttocks, as she silently perished but didn’t and he became clothed as if by miracle and told her he did not want to see her again and left by the walkway, lured by the sound of his friends laughing in the road beneath, waiting for their champion, and for pingpong, and too for breakfast.

This gathering of swine has divested itself of morality, of social expectation. This lot, this lot. We’s the pissers and rapists, we’s the loud and perverse, we’s the drug slobs and tough, the milky, we’s the mad, the failed, the thick, the carnal. We’s the deviant youth’ll bust your futures as you’ve done our nows.

Spurn normalcy. Be free. Pleasure yourself. Do different.