by Gwen Hilton
I've always had this sick obsession with older men. Not just any kind of older guy. It has to be an older man who can take me to the outer limits, or maybe just has a history of doing it to other people. I want the danger. I love the edge. I don't like how excited I get when I'm with a guy like that, but denying it will only make the feeling harder to tolerate. I can dip my toe in a bit of sin.
Ted Kaczynski, O.J. Simpson, Lee Harvey Oswald, and now John Hinckley Junior. Done being locked up. A true outlaw country musician. I can't fuck Merle Haggard. Cash died of a broken heart. When I hear crisp Nashville studio lap steel and slide guitar in Hinckley compositions, I think about how he holds his pistol, how he holds his guitar, and if given one chance, how he'd hold me.
I know in your voice when you say you've got a lot to give and you've done your time, it's true. Everyone needs forgiveness. It's not fair when people who sit on the sidelines of their life crack jokes about what you've done. They'd never get the courage to shoot a president. They don't even dare to tell their boss to fuck off. The sweetest country has to come from three chords and the truth. Otherwise, inauthenticity shines bright through, and while that music serves its purpose, it is not the same.
John Hinckley Jr. is a complex man. All men are complex, and it isn't my place to devalue individuals I've never met. With that said, John Hinckley Jr. is exceedingly so. He's punished for dogged conviction and his commitment to social change. Now the stigma of an event he's paid his time for will follow him forever. Even the reason I want to fuck him is tied to that shooting. What's it like to live with a brand? Bodies are malleable, and time erodes all sense of difference in the end. Being an iconoclast is nearly impossible in a world where time accumulates instead of flows, and each repetition gets recognized as such, with less and less feeling honorable.
Even among legends, a lot of people are just some guy. For a number of men, that's the charm, and for many, it deflates the work. I know so and so, the kid of so and so. Oh yeah? Well, here's x, y, zed, one, and thirty-two. It puts a bad taste in the mouth. You hit a certain level, and many of the people you talk to have done a very similar thing to you. It's amazing, and every one of you could be making something that'll shape culture for decades, but to brag about that shit while you're alive brings a lot of hubris to the table. We're whole people. We do a lot of different things. Well, some of us are just the job and some shell of a person with depravity swimming under the skin.
John Hinckley Jr. exists at so many intersections and peripheries that he becomes an ever-spiraling fractal of a human being. He becomes a god unto himself, shaped by each new caricature of an interpretation as he trudges forward in life against existential constraints endlessly becoming. John Hinckley Jr. is an artist making cowboy music as one of the actual last remaining outlaws. After the concrete jungle was built up, and after the heat death of everything, John Hinckely Jr. is a lone rider. A soothsayer. A warrior healer who took an opportunity.
I imagine the callouses from his guitar playing against my tender and lazy fingers. He is a man from a lost time, etched in stone and built by a world of even wilder individual myth and false dreams. I'm no Jodie Foster, but I think I can relate to the man. I went mad trying to impress lesbians at one point in my life, and who knows, he may become one after me.
When I imagine myself fucking John Hinckley Jr., we're in an orange pickup truck. We've been talking at a bar in Moab. We've got a little food in us. You can't drink without an appetizer in front of you. You can't have more than one drink at a time. I'm glad about that. It forces you to talk. It guarantees he won't fuck up his cock.
We chat about our favorite bands. John talks about Lou Reed, and I always wanted to fuck Lou Reed for the same reasons I'm sitting right across from John. Lou's dead. Lou fucked girls like me. Lou even loved girls like me. Not in a good way. He really did love, though—no pussyfooting. Girls like me can't afford copies of Lulu, made just for us; mocked for its brilliance. I talk about Pixies and Black Francis or Frank Black or every band who knows how to pick a cover singing about being on a first date and wanting to be a singer like Lou Reed. I know I've got breasts like clusters of grapes, and I would be grateful if you could talk to me about how they spill through your rough hands.
We have apps. You buy me a scotch, and you drink the same. You want to share something. You want to have what is being had right now. Not many people are of the moment enough to take a step so firm it leaves an imprint. Ten songs, ten fingers, ten toes, and ten thousand hours I want to hear the timbre of your age wrap me up and lie me down. You leapt out of time and space into this wooden outpost in the desert dripping in a red light reflecting the skulls of long-dead animals.
I ask you to drive me out to Canyonlands. I want to be fucked in the red sand. I know a dune that climbs so high you never forget you climbed it. That'll be my third time up. I want to cake my clothes in red sand, I want to dust my skin intertwined in your body. Canyonlands makes you feel the impermanence of everything. Each visit is just a little different as the sand carves new patterns in the rock. I need you on this dune because it's just close enough to the park and to Moab to be familiar, but just far enough away to be a place highway patrol never goes. Parts of the midwest have highway signs saying 48 miles to the next Rest Stop, but there are still towns along the way. In the desert, there's nothing. You can find a place to be the only two people within 100 miles and just for right now be a civilization all our own together. Edward Abbey liked the isolation of Canyonlands. There are few things left to discover in the SEO-optimized world, only rare moments that can never be replicated again in the Great places. Out in the desert, we can be the only two bodies of water making something beautiful. There are cacti and concrete and red dirt, and body heat.
I want to feel John in my mouth. I want to wrap my arms from under his legs and pull him closer with my hands gripping his quads. I lay between his legs on the slope of sand. I want to suck one of the last remaining loads in his aging body down like oasis nourishment. When we mosey on back down to the rusting sunburst vehicle, he'll pop in his CD of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and I'll scream I love you, Hinckley Christ as he fucks me in the back of his pickup. I want to take all of John Hinckley if just for a moment in his wisdom and impermanence. I want to bask in his glory. I want to spread myself wide open for his greatness. When I want John Hinckley Jr., I want to want like I am a child all over again.
about the author
Gwen Hilton is a writer and musician in Chicago.
Her book Sent to the Silkworm House will be out at Expat Press later this summer.