I can hear everything

How I learned to stop worrying and love Girls Gone Wild

Written by Jesse Hicks

?Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as ?dog,? thirty times? By the thirtieth it has become a word like ?snark? or ?pobble.? It does not become tame, it becomes wild by repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitane.?

GK Chesterton

You ever see the back of a twenty dollar bill... on weed? Oh, there's some crazy shit, man. There's a dude in the bushes. Has he got a gun? I dunno! RED TEAM GO, RED TEAM GO.?

Enhancement Smoker (Jon Stewart), Half-Baked

For the trip I had a video camera, notebook, tape recorder, and sketch pad. Anything that couldn?t be captured somewhere among those was probably untranslatable anyway. In the end, the video camera, sketchbook and tape recorder proved useless ? incoherent gibberish and videotape of my forehead: ?Can you see inside my mind yet?? The notebook was only slightly more useful: page after page of relative nonsense like ?DEAD EYES? scrawled in inch-high letters.

At this point, a message for the children: Kids, don?t do drugs. And for God?s sake, stay in school.

It started with College Spring Break. The audio is a dubbed loop of crowd noise that repeats about every thirty seconds. Somewhere in the middle is a guy saying, ?They?ve gone wild!? Every thirty seconds I hear this. Luckily the acid was just kicking in, so it only made my blood boil instead of driving me out of my fucking gourd.

One surprising thing about these girls, who have indeed gone wild, is their shrewd negotiating skills. Don?t expect a show without forking over at least a dollar?s worth of shiny beads. ?Beads for bush? may be the motto, but by law there?s a business major among every group of drunken co-eds. Her clients won?t just show you the goods ? that?d be slutty. If those Native Americans who sold Manhattan for a handful of trinkets had known a Dickinson girl?well, we?d be living in a different world. But the Golden Rule of GGS is this: whoever has the beads makes the rules. Which makes for long haggles over how many beads will let you ?see some kitty.?

Favorite moments: trying to cross-breed a woman?s breasts and a Reebok Pump shoe; the crowd noise sounding like the fascists at the end of Pink Floyd?s ?The Wall.? Direct from my notes:

?Her vagina is like, rolling its eyes.?

Then came College Girls Exposed. I can no longer tell who was drunk and who is Southern. It seems impossible, but every girl on these tapes is from Georgia. I used to find that accent attractive, but now, according to my notes, the ?Southern accent makes me want to put a gun in my mouth.? Only an hour in and I am feeling the pull of the abyss.

Favorite moment: Girl says, ?You can?t see below (female problems)? and the cameraman replies, ?That?s ok.? Which begs the question: How many beads to see my bleeding vagina?

Sexy Sorority Sweethearts: Blank spot. I must have zoned out.

Sometime during GGW: On Campus I lose the ability to tell one girl from another; it?s all a muddle of jump cuts and flesh. I have gone beyond the tepid, shallow reality of ?breasts? and ascended to the Perfect Form of Breasts. They are everywhere ? the wood pattern in my door a pendulous bosom. Round shapes = good.

Favorite moment: when I lay back and feel my body float away on a cushion of light, beyond all care or reason, every synapse firing with the spectacular profundity of the universe. Returned to earth by the cameraman (or maybe God) saying, ?Classy girls have breasts too.?

On to Dormroom Fantasies #2.

Thomas Merton: ?Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God?s eyes. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem is that we would fall down and worship each other.?

Or, as the lesbians onscreen put it, ?Mmm, God you taste good.?

Favorite moment: Tiffany is lying on the bed and can?t get her pants off. Do you know how much she wants to get her pants off? Do you know how much I want to help her? Tiffany and I are one in that moment; I would give my soul to help her out of those pants, because she is beautiful and I am beautiful and we are all one under the life-giving sun. (Crying, ecstasy.)

I live a thousand lifetimes watching Dormroom Fantasies #2. I watch the earth form in molten fury, see it cool and congeal, turn myself into a primitive protein and spawn the first beginnings of life. Words are fucking in my head. Then I watch Dormroom Fantasies #4.

I try to draw you a picture of silence, but something gets lost in the lines. It isn?t the perfection I want you to have. Despair. But something gives me hope, and that something is Natasha, a blonde co-ed taking time out from studying to explore her taut young body. The dumbass interviewer keeps bothering her, trying to get her to say she likes smart guys, but I forgive him. She says, ?Ya, I like smart guys, but they just talk too much.? Natasha, I know what you mean! Yes! I want to tell you how much I agree, but I am floating away, so very far away. I want to float towards you, Natasha.

Favorite moments: I write, ?I CAN HEAR EVERYTHING.? Then I realize there is no ?is? ? judgments are merely linguistic constructs we mistake for the reality they represent. But the words are not the world. A British girl named Jessie makes a daisy chain with her two friends ? their bodies join, the Serpents mold, reunite. They devour each other in a holy Ouroboros of sensuality. The three, now one, say, ?We love America,? and my heart overflows.

GGW: Doggy Style. Contemplate masturbation. An interesting, even appealing idea, but one that is very far away. Maybe my body wants to masturbate. It?s right over there, you should go ask it. But right now the five knuckle shuffle would be too much; I would turn into a star, my eyes blazing upward to the heavens on twin pillars of light. I wonder if Snoop Dogg goes away when I close my eyes. I think he is like Santa Claus, or any stone-cold pimp: he exists only if you believe in him. If you laughed too seriously, he would vanish. He says, ?Shit a motherfucker will do for some beads!? Beads make the world go round. Girls with tongue rings are awesome. Everything is awesome.

Favorite moments: I realize that ?izzy? rhymes with itself, so anytime you?re freestyling and stuck for a rhyme, put some ?izzy? all up in there. I find this incredibly clever.

Dormroom Fantasies #8. My dormroom fantasy has never been, ?Hey, this girl?s too drunk to unzip her own pants, let?s put her in the shower and see if she can keep from throwing up on herself.? Excruciating sadness ? like watching your drunk sister try to be sexy. How quickly things go from sorta hot to really sad. Huxley: ?Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain.? I want to redeem the world. I want to save everybody. Huxley again: ?We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand and hand into the arena; they are crucified alone.?

Slowly now. Swirling loneliness gathering on the head of a pin.

Favorite moment: A girl named Sonya, from Minnesota, who is probably a little drunk, looks at me and I leap in through the mercury of her eyes, part the waters of her being and experience everything that she has been and ever will be.

In Uncensored and Beyond, a man on a bullhorn repeats the words, ?I think we need a breathalyzer right now!? over and over again. This must mean something. He is talking directly to me, but I cannot understand what he means. Someone, somewhere, needs a breathalyzer, urgently. How does God let things like this happen?

Falling?

There?s an almost subliminal crosschatter in the background noise; things are talking to me. I wonder if it?s Schumann?s Resonance, the pulse of the Earth. The world is saying something just beyond my hearing.

Close-up of a woman masturbating on a boat: I can see the flecks of skin on her ass. I can see the World in those flecks.

The zombies are chanting, ?Show us your tits!?

During a gangbang scene, a man says, ?I?m gonna jack off on her knee, OK Bruno?? I think this has to be another code. No way could that have really happened.

?down?

More girls from Georgia. That state must shut down during spring break.

Favorite moment: After seesawing between elation and despair, enduring hellish infinities of ?What am I doing with my life?? I fall back to Nietzsche?s defense of the world, ?Did you ever say yes to a pleasure? Oh my friends, then you have also said yes to all pain. All things are linked, entwined, in love with one another."

Falling?

Tumbling through Dormroom Fantasies #5. Two giggly naked girls (probably from Georgia) make sundaes out of each other. They head to a public park and slather one another with whip cream and chocolate. Which is sort of hot, in an abstract way. But it?s not really in a dormroom, is it?

...down?

Favorite moment: If you aren?t paying attention to the girls, look over their left shoulder, into the tree line just beyond the lake. See that brown blob? That?s Bigfoot. And that?s also the hottest GGW-cryptozoology crossover ever.

Momentum reaches an end. What goes up must come down, leaving behind the ash of experience, the things you are not allowed, not capable of bringing back. It is what happened between the ears, out there in the place I can never fully explain.

The womb is called Ultimate Spring Break and I am squeezed into a fetal position. Protect the soft underbelly. Protect Ashley and Amber, who, after a pretty hot make-out session, tell the cameras that they intended to go to California to become actresses.

Pause.

Then Ashley says, ?But I guess that wouldn?t be smart now.? And I am thrown into bone-crushing pathos. Maybe she doesn?t mean it, or without the implication that something, for Ashley and Amber and now for me, is over. Something is always ending. Fleeting moments are the only kind, pushing their way over and erasing one another, while all we ask for is persistence, to stay just a little while longer here, together, in a place without beginning or end, away from time and change and pain, together in a little quiet slice of forever. That?s all we ask for, but somehow the question comes out wrong and the only answer is not an answer at all, but a fade to black followed by rolling credits and a sinking back into the world.

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