When I read Richard Gessner’s Voyeur Rising I imagined the story as an adult cartoon with liminal existential qualities. Voyeur Rising reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov’s use of an unreliable narrator who is found in most current social media video and reels. This collective trick usually deceives the viewer with a decoy. This is the place where Gessner’s work lurks, to induce the peripheral mind while feeding the predatory eye. Here we see the ultimate conflict and fantasy of the Freudian id haunting the masculine mind. A pleasure principle with an intrusive desire to poach voluptuous women without any commitment- but to squirt sperm, to clone more succulent women so they are everywhere. The fantasy has boundaries in Gessner’s character who is aware of his masculine delusion, that every women he find’s attractive isn’t a possession but an unfulfilled wish. All this takes place by the primordial ocean, a surface alive with waves.
-Mitchell Pluto
Strategically positioning his beach chair, pretending to be reading a daily newspaper, Joey Genauski, nonchalant, invisible, just by chance, settles in a tight rectangle of sand bordering the burgundy beach towels of two 19 year old college girls the age of his granddaughter.
The girls, an ash blonde, and a brunette with auburn highlights, have soft buttery skin, shapely, wide hipped—all curvaceous splendor—
Perfect brown bodies striped with pale tan lines sharply outlining pale pink asses and naturally large breasts jiggling slightly in the warm breeze of early summer.
The tan lines form a pale faded triangle V of panty line extending upwards. From butt crack to lower back, panty lines curving around thighs to below belly buttons—traces of cast of bikini no longer worn.
Gradations of pale pink skin merging to olive, cinnamon, golden brown, pale breasts encircled with D cup outlines of frilly brassieres. Burnt Sienna areoles and nipples a darker shade of brown than their overall tans.
Crisp yellow and gold designer bikinis, light summer dresses, brassieres. And panties are strewn across towels covered with tubes of sun screen, Purses, car keys, fruit, sandwiches cold drinks, a paperback of classic 19th century literature and a current glossy fashion magazine glistening in the sun.
Furtively, through dark sunglasses, Joey Genauski gazes longingly towards the girls’ spread open legs. Their Smoothly shaven vaginas, A reddish salmon pink, are soothed with cooling aloe vera. Blue and white beach umbrellas with a swordfish logo line the beach Landscape. Its a Saturday afternoon in early June, the weekend crowds work to Joey’s advantage, giving him an excuse to sit close to single women without being obvious about it. The crowds camouflaging his true intentions, allowing him to move frequently, unnoticed by the morally reproving beach patrol seeking to squelch his habit of constantly wandering the beach in quest of a perfect view.
Other voyeurs, Joey’s competition, watch the beach entrance from a distance, waiting for the arrival of young ladies, single or in groups. Approaching the ladies after they have gotten naked under their beach umbrellas.
Most women strip naked, but some keep their bikini bottoms on. Some wear Brazilian string bikinis, flesh toned thongs, almost nude, but not quite. Pale maidens wiggle out of floral print summer dresses, shorts, and candy striped one piece bathing suits.
Voluptuous brown girls peel off demure, white see-through-when-wet suits, revealing all to bulging male eyes, looking, gawking, looking away— Diaphanous mesh panties slide down svelte hips, falling to sand. Brightly colored, fancy brassieres pop off as delicate fingers reach behind unhooking clasps shining in the sun, catching the eye of a seagull flying in blue skies above.
Secret cameramen get up in the nooks and crannies of spread eagled women half asleep in the sun. Joey leaves the two girls, vanishing into thick masses of beach regulars, middle aged, tanned and leathery, marking their territory with windscreens, coolers and little plastic flags poked in the sand.
In Joey’s absence, competing beach voyeurs, some bold, well hung, smooth talkers, will succeed in engaging the ash blonde and brunette with auburn highlights in a lively conversation. Mastering bare body language a virile stud will advance to slow massage, rubbing baby oil of their perfect bodies glistening in the sun.
Slick voyeurs who remain at the top of the food chain will return to the beach, summer after summer, appearing like clockwork as in the legendary return of swallows to Mission San Juan Capistrano—
Their pick up routines with the ladies will remain similar and predictable year after year, decade after decade. Enticing the girls with superficial big talk of financial conquest, fancy cookies and little airplane bottles of alcohol.
In the tidal pools of voyeur nursery school, untested new generations of voyeurs emerge like baby sea turtle hatchlings making a mad dash seaward—
climbing the slippery slope of a succulent female ass just over the horizon,
Joey Genauski wanders into a gaggle of girls taking it all off for the first time-
In the distance, randy couples frolic in the surf, avoiding the June Jellyfish in the waves, out at sea, fishing boats come in close to shore, catching a panoramic eyeful of skin.
“Voyeur Rising” (C) 2022 Richard Gessner
Richard Gessner’s fiction has been published in Air Fish: an anthology of speculative work, Rampike, Ice River, Coe Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Happy, The Act, Sein und Werden, Skidrow Penthouse, The Pannus Index, Fiction International and many other magazines. A collection, Excerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante & The Man in the Couch was published by Bomb Shelter Props. Gessner’s drawings and paintings have appeared in Raw Vision, Courier News, Asbury Park Press, Rampike, Skidrow Penthouse, and exhibited at Pleiades Gallery, Hamilton Street Gallery, Cry Baby Gallery, The Court Gallery and the Donald B. Palmer Museum. Richard wrote The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing Whimsy. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing Whimsy Audible
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT