Last Words: Manuel Ramos Otero, "The Exemplary Life of the Slave and the Master"

Last Words is a feature about the last words of a given work: story, novel, poem, essay, instruction manual. I find we often favor excerpting the beginning of a piece of writing; Great First Sentences, etc. Why not excerpt the ends, too (and not just the most well-known ends, Ulysses, I’m looking at you)? I am not really the sort of reader who always jumps to the end of a book, but neither am I the sort of reader who can’t stand for stories to be “ruined” (rather the opposite, it seems to me I read almost exclusively ruined writing).

My only motivation is that I like last words. I like the ends (and non-ends) of things, just as I’m often intrigued by, and favor, the last book of an author. Writing from extremity—-writing written just before death, writing written in prison, writing written in exile, writing written in deep sickness. Writing left unfinished, writing pulled from fire, writing covered in mold, failure. Writing nearest to silence; writing when it is almost, almost, almost over. With over as adjective, preposition and adverb all in one: over as the place “across a barrier or intervening space.” Last words being, then, that intervening space.

In any case, gentle reader: SPOILER ALERT!

(Since today is Friday, maybe this could also be called Pank’s G.O.O.D. Fridays, à la Kanye.)

The first Last Words feature is taken from a short story by Manuel Ramos Otero. The story can be found in High Risk: An Anthology Of Forbidden Writings, edited by Amy Scholder and Ira Silverberg. It’s a very short piece; I considered transcribing the whole thing, but don’t want to get PANK in trouble. (You can email me if you want it.)

It is also, of course, a nod to October’s Queer Issue, guest-edited by bona fide (boner fide?) National Treasure, Tim Jones-Yelvington.

Also, a tribute to Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, who was found decapitated, dismembered, and burned almost exactly one year ago, the first murder to be classified as a hate crime in Puerto Rico.

Manuel Ramos Otero, “The Exemplary Life of the Slave and the Master,” trans. Gregory Kolovakos.

“suck on me the way I tell you to or don’t suck on me at all. suck on my body face up. suck on my body face down. suck on my damp asshole. swampy. plunge your pointed tongue into the abyss that I am. I am the master’s slave. I am the slave’s master. The paintbrushes of our dicks are painting us a round prison cell. enters. and. exits. the tongue. sucking on my anxieties about the nothing that I am. If the telephone hadn’t rung, I had to put down the novel (long distance), over there the snake under the sheets and between them both the rim of the asshole of the bottle that permits the slave to protect the dream or the master to dream of his slave (it seems as if he has died), but he wasn’t listening to the voice on the telephone (they found the body in the sugarcane field where they burned Correa Cotto), the master didn’t even awaken with the noise (how many pools of cum did they find inside him?) (they shot the pistol in his deepest throat), I closed the novel and the master opened his eyes (later they broke a Coke bottle in his asshole), the master’s hand on his sweaty dick had to move I suppose (later they cut off his dick with a barber’s razor and shoved it in his mouth so that he could continue sucking in the afterlife), the odorous leather belt for punishment the whip with metal points the immobile ropes the knife sharpened on stone flesh and the Smith Wesson .32, he had to jerk off hanging from the bars—because I wasn’t sitting on him but his cream reached as far as the telephone after having inundated the room and the rose-colored Venetian blinds, the record of the “Military Polonaise” and the record player, the ceiling fan and the police siren, the uniforms of indigo blue, the wooden clubs, the open eyes of the cadaver, the novel (Exemplary Life of the Slave and the Master), and nothing, besides.”