Excerpts From Frisk. Dennis Cooper. Grove Press 1991.

7. I wish I could just sort of temporarily die. Guys could move me around, whatever. I wouldn't have a first name, just a surface. Like pillows. They don't have individual names. They don't mean anything, but people sleep with them. I think I'd feel a lot happier, though I despise that word, 'happy.'

8. There was a Rorschach blot of sweat on the sheet where his crotch had been pressing. Henry looked down at it, thought he saw a satanic silhouette.

10. He slapped a hand over his mouth, opened his eyes so wide Julian had to think about the fact that they were balls. The balls sort of pleaded with Julian. "What?" he responded, not totally interested.

12. In the dirt below one was a puddle of purplish vomit, shaped exactly like Texas.

20. I splayed my hands on Henry's ass and pressed down, like he was lying in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater.

35. There were still some bruises and cuts on his face, but since punks wore their physical damage like fashion accessories, he didn't particularly stand out.

36. He said his name was Finn. I had him spell it. He said he got that nickname because when he was younger he'd either resembled or acted like Huckleberry Finn. I said it was obviously "acted like" since his namesake was just a character in a book. But Finn said his copy had illustrations.

40. I grew obsessed for a year, following it through the media, researching Joe's life via friends, filling in blanks with my own fantasies. I even spent several months trying to channel the info I'd gathered into an artsy murder-mystery novel, some salvageable fragments of which are interspersed through the following section.

53. Now I'm at that part of the fantasy that always fucks me over. I want him, specifically his skin, because skin's the only thing that's available. But I've had enough sex in my life with enough guys to recognize how little skin can explain about anyone. So I start getting into this rage about how stingy skin is. I mean, skin's biggest reward, which is sperm, I guess, is only great because it's a message from somewhere inside a great body. But it's totally primitive. Take gold. Would gold be worth anything if there were a more complex, beautiful, similar substance around? I've got a choice. Either I can pretend I'm a psychic or palm reader and tell myself I understand some cute guy if his sperm leaves his body when I'm in his presence, or, as I find myself doing more often these days, I can actually imagine myself inside the skins I admire. I'm pretty sure if I tore some guy open I'd know him as well as anyone could, because I'd have what he consists of right there in my hands, mouth, wherever. Not that I'd know what I'd do with that stuff. Probably something insane.

72. Sometimes the armpit hairs stand in a skinny brown stalk, with Terrence's lips as its flower. Then the hairs will come to a point and twist slightly at the tip like chocolate ice cream or smoke. They spread out to resemble a big, dirty dandelion. The troll mashes them down, they're wheat pasta steaming in a white bowl.

79. The latter, Heiner, smooths down his calf hairs, which are so dense his legs appear permanently filthy.

88. You can get used to anything. Then you stop feeling, you just respond, your brain reduces the world to . . . whatever . . .

94. What's weird is he didn't fight back. He just accepted death. Every single time I've killed a Dutch boy this happens. It must be part of the problem that makes them so cold and unknowable in general. They're like rabbits, at least in the sense that when a rabbit gets scared it freezes up. You can threaten to kick it, it won't move.

94. They kill guys because it's a kick, whereas for me it's religious or something.