Psychoboys is set in the cities of Moscow and Berlin. It tells the story of Rez, a rent boy living on the streets, and his fight for survival in a world of bizarre strangers. He meets a riot of characters – Ms Thing, a transvestite sugar mummy who educates him in the art of coprophilia and barbituate abuse and leads him into sex and death trips; Countess Handover, a drag-queen genetic engineer who offers Rez the “gift” of a lifetime; and The Lost Sailor, Rez’s nemesis, who delivers an apocalyptic warning.
Psychoboys is about shifting geographical boundaries and identities. The novel is an exploration of the nature of the individual and the belief in the power of fantasy as a means of survival. Following in the tradition of experimental writing, this text assembles such icons as Nico, Patti Smith, the Marquis de Sade, pulp novelist Jaqueline Susann and the film-maker Pasolini.
For more about Psychoboys, read Spike’s exclusive interview with Bertie Marshall
Bertie Marshall has subsequently written his punk memoir Berlin, Bromley
Warning: the following is not for the faint-hearted.
The Sugar Mummy
What’s a bird too big for its nest? Six letters.” Rez asks Ms Thing who looks utterly nonplussed, and answers “Emu”.
“No, that’s only three letters.” Rez counts on his fingers. “It could be Thrush,” he muses – Ms Thing looks down at her lap. She interjects with an inspired, “F-L-A-M-I-N-G-O.”
“No,” Rez grumbles. “Natasha digs a ditch, three letters then six?”
Rez is confused and irritable, doing the daily crossword in the Moscow Tribune, one of the many daily rituals he and Ms Thing do together. They had come to an arrangement since that first night three months ago. It was a simple one, sex and companionship in exchange for pocket money and a roof over his head – Ms Thing, the sugar mummy. Rez’s mad mother had been committed to a Psyberian insane asylum but it was only a rumour. The rumour blew in through an open window in a shallow whisper that froze his ears, the angelic trumpets of his imagination.
So they had set up a ‘relationship’ without my permission. They lived by that maxim that Madonna spoke of in one of her songs. ‘The pursuit of pleasure should not depend on the permission of another’. HUMPF! Surely it’s more a case of ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’
Rez and Ms Thing created their own realm. Ms Thing focused all her waking attention on him, so the place was pretty sordid. Funny smells like boot polish and rotting eggs emanated from under the bed. The bed where their strange and intimate couplings took place – I don’t know if I can bring myself to describe in detail their… sex life…
Although ‘it’ repulsed him the fuck would go something like this:
Ms Thing in the doggie position, her orange mane and face pushed into red velveteen pillows, her geriatric anus pointing to the ceiling, like a Pantomine Horse or Surrealist chair. Rez would close his beautiful violet eyes and enter the realm of his imagination, conjuring up all sorts of horrors and perversions to get a hard-on.
At nearly sixteen he was indeed a ‘Big Boy’, in truth his cock was approximately nine inches by six – extremely solid and powerful, it rose majestically – a Dinosaur waking. His eyes closed tight and his jeans wrapped around his ankles. He shuffled towards Ms Thing’s ancient arsehole whose lips, once puckered, now wilted like a dying flower (without wishing to be too cruel) it now looked something akin to the mouth of a headless pig, with all the accompanying odours.
It would be easy to pity Rez at this moment but, to be frank, this boy had a wayward side, he saw the act of fucking Ms Thing as investigative work, he used his magnificent tool – the tool of his trade – as an instrument of excavation. In entering Ms Thing, he was entering another world, dank, slushy, fathomless. He was in some way fucking death.
Ms Thing was nearer to death, she was on a slow suicide into death. The act of fucking her represented a dark destiny for Rez.
His cock penetrated Ms Thing’s cavern, filling it up, extinguishing all light, he never held her love handles, he let his tool find its own way in. It was a good job his tool was so large, if not it would have felt as though he was falling into teeming bilge.
Once inside, Ms Thing gave a gruff little whimper – then they were locked, her face eclipsed by the red velveteen pillows.
Her vision became microscopic, so that particles of dust took on the appearance of valleys of weird creatures. What I mean is, micro became macro and macro became micro… Her perception, due to Rez’s fucking, became god-like. He plugged her into hypereality, pushed her into a new space. Their coupling at once hideous and transgressive.
I think some light relief, some image of beauty should be interposed here. Perhaps moonlight flooding through stained glass windows, casting kaleidoscopic colours across their fucking. Rez kneeling behind Ms Thing, his perfectly smooth white body defined by shadows, every muscle highlighted by the moonlight. His flat nipples like glowing mandalas, body arched back, a Brancusi curve… and that cock – eel in a cave – blond crop haloed by candlelight, eyes closed so tight, lips bitten and swollen on the periphery of pleasure?
About twenty or so brutal rammings inside of Ms Thing and Rez would get the pre-climax shudders, the feeling of piercing membrane, his helmet the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. He puffs up as Ms Thing thrashes about braying like a donkey.
The inside of Ms Thing’s baggy butt impregnated by Rez’s blinding, celestial white light, his jissom, the milky way, giving birth to new planets. Rez has, as they say, put some life back in the old thing. Ms Thing, the cosmic sex vampire feeding on his youthful fluids and energies, lies prostrate on the bed like rotting fruit.
Rez looked down at his wilting cock as it once more curled and shrunk back to sleep until the next time…
Psycho Eyes
If we could see inside of Ms Thing’s bowels, they would look like this… glittering phospherescent dome, a cave where man first found fire. A gurgling, swirling mess of infinite illuminations… squelchy inundations.
Ms Thing cleared her throat and farted an unmentionable substance onto the bed. “There are several things that draw us together, most terribly our silence.” She was regurgitating, practically word for word, what the writer Anais Nin had said to French loony Antonin Artaud. Rez looked at the beached whale aloft the bed, then gazed down at his deflowered proboscis and mumbled…
“I want a pet, a dog, cat, bird, pig.”
Ms Thing, in a good but weird mood, replied,
“Anything your startling heart desires, my dear, what sort of pet do you want?”
“Something queer, something odd,” he said pouting.
“I think I know just the place,” she said.
They took a cab.
About The Author
Bertie Marshall was born in Greenwich, London 1960. At fifteen he changed his name to “Berlin” and became part of a group of people known as The Bromley Contingent – the first group of Sex Pistols fans.
He is the author of seven plays and three chapbooks; Schwul, The Palace Of Faux Pas and Master Bitch. His many jobs have included; rent boy, drag queen, shoplifter and psychic. Having completed a second novel Author, Fag, Gutter, he is currently working on a third.