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Pulling Taffy
by Matt Bernstein Sycamore
Suspect Thoughts Press
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Pulling Taffy, by Matt Bernstein Sycamore (Suspect Thoughts Press, $16.95)

I'm pulling on his cockhead, squeezing with one hand and then the other. He starts this high-pitched moan, sounds like he's going to die but I know he's loving it. He says oh could you touch my balls a but, not too much. I touch his balls, and then move back to his cockhead, spit on my hand again and squeeze, slide. He's not touching me anymore, eyes closed, just squealing and moaning. I'm watching him like some strange creature-- it's amazing and not quite funny, almost hot, and he grabs my hands, says just squeeze gently now. I hold his dick and squeeze the head. He sits up, says oh that was wonderful, just right. Do you think we could make it a once-a-week thing? When someone learns those techniques, I feel like its an investment."

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This is how the hustler narrator of Pulling Taffy learns how to, well, pull taffy-- which is what his client (who has had his prostate removed and cannot get a hard on) describes as the method for getting him off. This jazzy excerpt from Matt Bernstein Sycamore's debut novel-- which, as the cover copy tells us "inhabits the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and truth"-- pretty much conveys his startlingly and ferocious world view: sex is wonderful and frightening and always connected to some sort of economy.

It would be easy to think that this economy is simply about money-- the narrator here is a working hustler, and much of the book is concerned with the mercantile details of the trade. But in Pulling Taffy, the idea of "economy" is much broader, far more complicated.

Like the john who wants to see our narrator once a week because "when someone learns those techniques, I feel like its an investment," Sycamore lures us into a world in which sex and pleasure, eroticism and fear, take on whole new meanings: they become necessary means of exchange for survival.

As a work of literature-- and Pulling Taffy is terrific literature-- this book transverses a series of expected genres. It's a cross between Kerouac's On the Road and John Rechy's City of Night, except that it isn't as repetitious as the former or as sentimental as the latter. Sycamore has a unique voice-- reminiscent of Frank O'Hara's "and-then-I-did-this-and-then-I-did-that " school of poetry-- that hints at drugged-out-drag patois but is firmly located in an urban vernacular that is familiar to everyone, but still surprising in its lilt and cadences. The book skits about America from Boston to Seattle to New York never settling down long enough to develop the roots that would locate or gentrify its narrator, thus depriving him of his distinctive eloquence.

But if Sycamore has the perfect voice for this picaresque, he also has the intellectual stamina to give it resonance and meaning. Sycamore has the ability, rare in any writer, to mix the seedy and the glamorous and the ecstatic with the depressing: in other words, he is able to capture and replicate the perfectly normal emotional swings that we all experience every day and make them seem, as they are, normal and horrifying.

It is true that much of what happens in Pulling Taffy is outside of the alleged experience of "normal" people-- crazed tricks, too much cocaine at the wrong times, a sexually abusive father.

But to dwell on that is to miss the power and the glory of Sycamore's story. While the book's plot careers along like a (good) Gus van Sant movie, hopping from tricks to drugs, possible love to potentially devastating loss, the emotional underpinnings of the book remain constant and complex. Reading Pulling Taffy is an exhilarating experience because once you get past the "this is a scary trip through a fucked up culture" plot, it's impossible not to be moved by the narrator's emotional forthrightness and honesty.

Not only are we always aware of what he is feeling, there is never a false move to avoid or obfuscate the emotions that drive the book along.

The emotional power here is quite rare. Sycamore understands not only what makes his narrator tick-- and laugh, and cry, and get turned on, and get fucked-up and have unprotected sex-- but he manages to convey that in such a way that we know he understands it in us as well.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com