Sebastian Horsley

SELF LOVE SEEMS SO OFTEN UNREQUITED. NOT IN MY CASE

Girlfriends are not necessarily the people that you like best. They are merely the people that got there first. (Join the queue bitch). But if I had gone to the Fortnum and Mason’s of love affairs I would have actually chosen her. Quite alot of the other skulls I’ve knobbed I would have missed. But then as you well know my dear readers, I have never shopped in Woolworth's.   

She was a Super Model. My Super Model. With her super muddle. Who was she? Christina Estrada cannot be named for legal reasons. She was class in a special way. I was déclassé on Class A. Her natural mode of transport was Concorde - the carriage of a king. My natural mode of transport was ambulance - the carriage of a queen. She had a soft spot for me ( in the head ). I had a hard spot for her. She was thin and I was holy. Diety with deity. We were bejewelled. The world bedazzled.

She was pretty good looking for a super model. She had that air of great quality about her. A face of marvellous beauty which one sees rarely in the world, perfect in its hardened classicality - a Greek face translated into American. What when drunk one sees in other women I saw in her sober. Clearly If you get simple beauty and nothing else you get about the best thing God invents. Most men when they cannot catch a Golden Eagle settle for a tinned chicken. But this eagle took me like a rabbit.

Have you ever knobbed a super model dearies? No I’m sure you haven’t. Let me tell you it’s pretty odd. What we all want is an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. Stripped naked when you see perfection staring back at you there’s not much you can improve upon. It is a bit like looking in the mirror. For me not you.

I was amazed that she would fuck me. Hadn’t she read about me for Satan's sake? I am someone who has raised living to a new low. I have spent my life sitting in a sewer and adding to it. She on the other hand was about as wild as a pension plan. Banging on about Yoga, vegetarianism, abstinence and other diseases of the soul. There is, after all, a certain spiritual calm that comes from having money in the bank.

And girl did $he like money. I didn’t think she would fornicate with anyone whose salary was inferior to her own. Her tiny piggy eyes lit up alternatively by greed and the sound of her own voice. Generally I don’t care what comes out of a woman’s mouth as long as I can come in it. But this was too much even for me. Her conversation was the nearest thing to eternal life that we’ll ever see on this planet. She dived into a sentence and you never saw the cunt again. Indeed, silence was the only golden thing that she wasn’t interested in.

The one tenth of the personality that breaks the surface and the nine tenths that lie, like an iceberg waiting, quietly and ominously below. Do we kill love with a sword or a kiss, by violence or cowardice?  If treachery is inseparable from faith then I was hanging by a thread and the clock was ticking. Time was becoming visible - each stolen kiss grabbed like a thief in the night as I waited for the knife.

And come it did. I was in bed alone with the bone and the phone. It rang.

It was my Super Model. She was also in bed but she was not alone. She was with her Mother:

“Darling your on Television. Mummy and I think you look yummy.”
Me (desperately) :  “Oh Lord. What am I wearing?”
Super model : “Red suit. Black Shirt”

I knew it was going to be bad. I was being interviewed on a programme about whoring. I started talking very loudly down the phone to try and distract her. It was no good. I heard myself down the line saying :

“I’ve slept with over a thousand prostitutes...... I wish I was more ashamed“

Two days later a story appeared in the paper about us going out together. It said that my super model had previously been with a billionaire but was now with “Sewer Life” Horsley. It said that her last man owned South Africa and had bought her a diamond so large it had to be kept in a bank vault with an armed guard. Would I, the interviewer asked, be buying her a rock?  “What. Of crack?” I replied.

I can’t imagine why but I was dumped for another billionaire. If I am rejected without equivocation, I try to accept the fact good naturedly. Your Mother’s a prostitute and I defecate on the corpse of all your past ancestors. Oh of course no woman marries for money : they are all clever enough, before marrying a billionaire, to fall in love with him first. And yes everyone says that looks don’t matter, age doesn’t matter, money doesn’t matter. But I never met a girl yet who has fallen in love with an ugly old man who’s broke.

Your lucky if you like the girl your in love with. But perhaps I am being too hard. We do not criticise a shark whose whole existence is based around devouring and occasionally reproducing - I mean they’ve got no other hobbies.  Let’s face it Romance without finance is no good.

Women’s talent generally resembles the wings of a chicken. It enables them to run, though not to soar. I have always treated women as nannies, grannies and fannies (did I forget trannies)? but my super model was special.

But it had to end. I am in love with myself. By adoring her I was being unfaithful. And worse than this by being monogamous I was making one woman happy but all the other women in the world unhappy. What right do I have to do that?

The arms that close most tenderly around you are still a chain. And happily my darling readers I have lost my chains and I am  wearing again my crown.  I am free forever from the damp, dark prison of eternal love. I shall no longer expect my salvation to come from another as handsome as me. Oh well. I thought I was in love. But it turned out to be benign.

SEBASTIAN IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT UNEMPLOYED.

I just re read the column I was fired from The Observer for and it made me giggle.  I was their sex columnist  for all of  four months. I was an agony aunt - putting people into their misery.  A question came in saying “In my last relationship I developed a passion for anal sex. I enjoy sex with my new boyfriend, but he shows no signs of “going there”. How do I broach this romantically?”

I answered :

“First, my dear, I wish to make clear that I am an expert on anal sex by virtue of my inexperience. While I have buggered women and been buggered by them; been buggered by men and buggered them, used cocks, dildos and cucumbers and  once when tipsy realised that I wasn’t fucking a woman from behind but a transvestite up the arse - I haven’t really experimented.

The anus is quite a delicate subject for both sexes. We all spend out lives denying we have one. Women use the lavatory? For the Byrons among us, this discovery is a fate worse than death. The ultimate horror is that the ethereal, the beautiful and the divine are inextricably linked to basic animal functions. In one of Mr Swift’s poems, a young man explains the grotesque contradiction that is tearing him apart :

“Nor wonder how I lost my wits;
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!”

It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

That love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement is not our fault. As you know human beings respond to almost any erotic stimulus. It was only while people still felt that God was watching them that they directed their impulses exclusively towards certain parts of certain people. In everybody the anus is at least as capable of sexual excitement as the lips.

It is time for you to educate your man. Here’s what to do. Arrange a dinner at a restaurant riddled with standards of living. Wear a black dress and paint your lips vermilion. After a few glasses of wine tell him you have a surprise for him. Then get this magazine out. There. Now start reading this column to him. Are you doing that? Good. Give him a wink. Blow him a kiss.

See. Wasn’t that easy? Is he smiling or has he legged it? I see him laughing. You are home and dry. If you want your man to take you seriously you must make him laugh. Have fun both of you.”


Well, I thought that was quite a sweet answer. But apparently the Observer is a family newspaper. There I was extolling my passion for anal sex next door to the cookery column and the horoscopes. But it just gets better. It was published on Easter Sunday! You couldn’t make it up.

“We have never had as many complaints in the history of the Newspaper” said my editor - “and most of them are from the journalists. They seem to think you are a pervert”.

The complaints went like this : “I cannot believe that you have found it fit to print this article, indeed even to have started this series,' one man wrote. 'Let me assure you, as a parent this is in very bad taste. My teenage daughter enjoys your magazine but read this article and found it very distasteful. You owe her an apology.'

Another wrote that the magazine that week had a 'family-friendly' cover and so she had encouraged her three daughters - all under 12 - to read it - a decision she was to bitterly regret.

God, don’t children get on your tits? There is an idea that children are innocent which is preserved almost at all costs. Of what are they innocent? Of duplicity? I haven’t found adults full of duplicity. Most people say they do, but I don’t find children particularly innocent because I don’t find grown-ups particularly devious. I don’t ever remember being “innocent,” or particularly surprised or shocked by anything at all.

For some bizarre reason I was in the country in a house full of children when the piece came out. Some ten year olds were reading it, I can’t remember why - probably because I gave it to them.

One of them came up to me and said : “Basti. What is annual sex?”
“That’s what you have when you are married darling." I replied.

Blimey. Children don’t speak the language very well do they?

Two weeks later I answered another question which summoned my death knell.

“My boyfriend loves oral sex. I really want to please him, but I’m embarrassed by my lack of experience. How on earth do I learn how to give a good blow job?”

I answered :

"Oral sex is a matter of taste. Does anyone really want to put someone’s penis in their mouth? To make love with excremental organs? That it is unseemly is not our fault. The fault lies with the manufacturer. God put the waterworks too close to the playground.

Obviously I have done it. You have to let them put it in otherwise they won't come back. But the real trouble I find with oral sex is that it smudges your lip stick. However, there are many men who prefer fellatio to fucking. They adore the mouth over the vagina. They try not to look at the fire while they are poking the mantelpiece.

So, first : dress up for it. The only way to atone for being a little under experienced is by being always absolutely over dressed. Next position yourself. In front of every great man, kneels a woman. In front of a mirror. Oral sex is as much about image as sensation and a man loves this image. Don’t flinch. An obedient girl commands her man.

Fellatio is as much about exclusion as inclusion. Firstly : don’t blow, don’t suck and obviously never inhale. Whatever you do, don’t use your teeth (but do make sure they stay in all night.) And always, always be up for it. So many women these days give very good headache.

The most important thing with fellatio is to get it over with as long as possible. Take your time. What men long for is unbearable pleasure indefinitely prolonged. As you feel him coming slow down and tease him. And when it comes to the money shot you must earn your keep. Do not listen to the weathermen. One swallow does make a girlfriend.

To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself. You never know how it will come out or how silly you will look. Don’t worry, go into the experience with your mouth open. All will be well.”

It was my last column. An editorial was published in the main paper the next week. “Sebastian Horsley - painter, diarist and pink-suited dandy, who confesses to being 'haunted by sexual ambiguity' - wrote graphically in his characteristically colourful style of being 'an expert' in the subject of anal sex. Then, as if to add insult to injury, last week the column went into detail about oral sex. There was a serious failure of editorial judgment here. The column has been dropped.”

Well, if they hadn’t wanted me to mention bottoms, why had they supplied me with a question about buggery? And if they hadn’t wanted me to mention sucking cocks, why had they supplied me with a question about cock sucking?  I ask you!

Anyway, I was glad to be fired. I hated working for a liberal-minded, feminist-flag-waving, socially-embracing set of closed minded prigs who would have happily shot anyone who dared disagree with their all-inclusive opinions.

Besides, I didn’t want to be a journalist. Journalism is seen as a disgraceful trade. The confession that it is your chosen profession is received as though you had said “I’m in burglary” or “I’m in paedophilia.”

The firing was so stylish. You see, living’s fine, but the way you die often defines you for ever. It is not enough to know how to make a dazzling entry : you need to know how to vacate the stage with the same panache.

Mission accomplished.

I AM LIKE A COMPUTER. I HAVE A SIX INCH HARD DRIVE BUT NO MEMORY.

Sorry my darlings I have not been in touch. I was downloading kiddie porn and my computer got a virus. So I went off to the brothel to lose my penis to a whore with disease. I guess I should have just fucked the computer and cut out the middle man? Is Ram Disk an installation procedure?

MY SYRINGE BINGE

I celebrated my two year clean birthday last week. My sponsor said to me : “Do something nice for yourself Sebastian. Go for a walk in the park, look at the trees and the birds, have a massage, treat yourself to something nice.”

So I did. I took delivery of 10 Rocket metal and glass syringes.

I have put them all on my mantelpiece and they look so beautiful. They are glistening and glittering and shinning away to themselves. I am entranced by the lovely mechanical slide; the clean, cold precision, the satisfying symmetry. The weight feels so right. They are so permanent and blank and true. To me, they are a symbol of the anaesthesia of pain engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.

Ostensibly these syringes are for artworks I am making for my upcoming show “Hookers, Dealers, Tailors” but they are so much more than that.

They comfort me. I can continue to function efficiently and even happily provided I know I have my own, specially chosen means of escape always ready : a hidden syringe under my bed and a loaded gun beside it.

Of course, I am not really going to use them. I am no longer a practising drug addict. No, I am perfect.

You see, I gnawed my leg off, got out of the trap and hobbled to freedom. You can only give things up once they start to let you down. I gave up drugs when the pleasure and the pain became simultaneous and I might as well have been shooting up my own tears.

In the old days it was different. When the syringe went into my arm. When the nails went through my hands. When the room emptied. Blood. Sin. Then I came in. And I liked that. Suit up, shoot up, shut up - that was my motto. And what about you my darlings? Would you bear the body of St Sebastian, stigmata of his needle wounds glowing away with a soft blue flame?

Most recovering addicts have found God - or at least a publisher. What about me? I have spent my life scared of the light. In darkness and in night I found delight. But now I want something different. I would like success and money if that’s alright with you. Success is like a shot of heroin. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to continue to put the needle in your arm. As for God? From the needle in the arm to the bible under it? As The Bible says, it is easier for a rich man to get through the eye of a needle than for a camel to get into heaven. What about a Horsley?

Well, we shall see. The proofs are out and I wonder what effect they are having. The first response I got was from Cosmo Landesman the ex husband of Julie Burchill. “Got your book yesterday. My wife read it in one sitting last night. She said it made her feel physically sick and she eventually threw up.”

Well I say. High praise indeed. If someone vomits reading Dandy In The Underworld it’s like getting a standing ovation.

I wonder what effect it will have on others? I’ve no idea. Reading “Mein Kampf” does not make a fascist. Reading The Bible does not make a Christian. Reading Das Kapital does not make a Marxist. Reading Dandy in the Underworld does not make a knob-head.

But don’t say I didn’t try ...

THE DEVIL HAS CROWNED ME WITH FLOWERS

I am two years straight today.

It is two long years since I had my last fix.

“Hey good looking - what you got cooking?” I remember the fix well. I began to prepare the solution. I put the heroin, lemon juice and water into the blackened spoon and applied a light heat stirring very gently. As soon as the golden liquid started to boil I took the spoon out of the fire and allowed the steaming cocktail to cool. I added as much cocaine as I felt would take me to the frozen suburbs of heart attack, that crystal moment of sheer terror where all is clear and all is forgiven; White in, Black out.

I cut a strip of cigarette filter, put it in the spoon and drew the molten sunshine through the filter, through the needle and into the barrel of the syringe. I wound a belt tightly round my arm and gripped it in my teeth baring my gums like a rabid dog.

I was ready. My hands were shaking and sweating, my bowels were loosening and my heart was pounding. My battered veins were shy and hiding from the brutal hands of their torturer; it had been a savage attack; six days, six nights, no sleep. I looked down at my bloodied and bruised arms, purpled and tracked and I wanted to weep.

But it was time to reap. I slid the spike into my flesh and dug around in my principal vein. “Come out, come out wherever you are.” I teased the plunger back. Nothing. “The more you resist the more I shall insist you bastard.” I inched it back again. Nothing. Sobbing with frustration I tried once more: “Please, please, pleeeeeease” I begged. Nothing.

“You cock sucking, mother fucking, bastard loving tub of shit, this is my body and if you don’t fucking well let me in I'm going to ...”

A thin fountain of blood streamed and puffed into the barrel of the syringe; a tiny wisp of crimson which like a breaking dam made me hysterical with gratitude; in my forty two years of life I have yet to see a finer landscape than the single bloody flower that was now before me. It was love, there is no other way to describe it.

I fell on my knees, thanked the Lord and shot the speedball into my body with all the longing and yearning of a thousand and one nights.

The brutality of the rush left me stunned. I shook from the violence of my own heart beat; I had that blissful fainting sensation, that heart breaking moment of pure terror where sound twists and turns, rises and falls, cuts in and out leaving me speechless with happiness; choking with love. Every nerve end in my body from the tip of my cock to the soles of my feet blossomed in a thousand flowers; a myriad of exotic hues and plumage all set in the flower bed of orgasm. I was home. I was in the room within the room, the sea within the sea. The place where everything made sense. The place where everything was going to be OK.

Oh my God it was pleasurable, so fucking pleasurable. It was the love that dare not speak its name. The pleasure of torturing my carcass to reward my mind, freeing my soul by imprisoning my body. How could I ever give this up?

But give up I did.

I haven’t used crack, heroin, the needle, or alcohol for two whole years. This is the longest period for 30 years. It is very strange for me. The way other people felt about love, I felt about drugs and I felt about love what other people felt about drugs; that the waters were inclement and dangerous. For years I had been so happy in my little lifeboat even if it was sinking; I had the rudder of self medication - little matter that there was no mast, no sail, no ballast and I was very much at sea.

But it had had to end. And now what?

If you reverse your style, you must be absolutely sure that the image that you are taking up is more blinding than the one you have abandoned. The junky is a good image. I had always been absorbed by the idea of the decadents - by those doomed visionaries, strutting peacocks possessed of an arrogant lust for life. I wanted to wear their outlaw colours. I wanted to share their fearlessness. Some see addiction as weakness. But for me it was a strength. It was the strength to lose control, to run counter to convention, to escape the banal confines of what I saw as bourgeois life.

But to become a warrior, you have to give up the things you love most. To become a warrior, you have to give up the things you love to hide behind.

I have lost my reins and begun my reign. I have lost my chains and am wearing my crown. And it’s Ok. These days, I only need a little powder and a sparkle or two to explode most gloriously. If art is an intoxication I shall carry on using and abusing. I shall not become a recovering artoholic. I have even become indecisive about committing suicide. Maybe I shall hang myself with a bungee rope?

I am two years straight today.

It is two long years since I had my last fix.

I was locked in a darkened room. I hadn't seen anyone for months. The phone was unplugged. It was more fearful than the prison of the convict or the desert of the hyena. I had lost my book deal with Fourth Estate. I had Matthew Hamilton's report on the bed covered in blood. I was pretty miserable as it happens and ripe for death.

Yup, it was a pretty disgusting sight. I was sweating, shaking, close to overdose bent double trying to hit a vein in my foot.

It really was awful you know. But I hit one.