LIVELEAK SUMMER

CHARLIE ZACKS // STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 006

Welcome back to the STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER. This is your only source for credible information regarding anything.

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CHARLIE ZACKS “LIVELEAK SUMMER”

2013:

It’s a couple years before LiveLeak summer. Picture this. You’re in a gym locker room, it’s middle school, so you’re like eleven maybe twelve years old. You have this hair under your armpits but the other guys don’t so, yea, you feel pretty weird. The other guys are starting to look at you now like you are kind of half alien half human; normal and everything else too. You have this one friend Sammy who you spend all day everyday with and his dad is a pastor, so you draw that Christian fish logo thing on your hand with a Sharpie and tell Sammy “yea I converted” and he tells his pastor dad who’s so proud of him for converting a Jew or whatever you are to him. You walk down the halls together and, picture this, you sometimes even hug and one time he kisses your cheek and you get chills. No, it’s not because he’s cute, it’s because you have this new-found fear of hell and the kiss sends these chills as a message: oh my god run so fast. So you starve yourself, spend a few years on your laptop, write everyday into this sketchbook your perfect mother got you to express yourself. Turn the page, “ART WILL SAVE YOU”. Yes, you really did write that when you were eleven-ish in your sketchbook and you know what?

Nevermind.

2020:

At some point you have sex with this guy, but really it wasn’t sex, and he tells you to put it in so you do and, fuck man, he is so scary. You pump for a bit and feel so grossed out because he had way more teeth in his profile pic, but you cum inside because he kind of makes you do it. You shower together and he worships your barely eighteen year old body until you are crying under the hot stream wondering why your dreams are so consistent: you’re drafted to die in a war in a hot forest, maybe like your grandpa, but he survived, yes, otherwise you surely wouldn’t be crying under the stream of this hot shower with this really shockingly old guy licking every part of your body. At some point in the long term aftermath you read this book Johnny Got His Gun which makes you hate the government and now you know for a fact you will never ever pay taxes.

2019:

You meet this tattoo artist when you are maybe seventeen and just kind of become his canvas. Your body is populated by these random sketches, similar to the shit you used to scrawl in your textbooks in high school thinking about your English teacher and just how far you could go before he knew that, yes, you wanted him so bad. The point is this: you fucked and cried a lot for a few years and at some point did some kratom. You met Dennis Cooper on email and he told you to keep it up kid, so these days you’re writing everyday.

2024:

Everyone keeps saying we’re going to war.

2014:

(It’s my story, of course.)

I remember watching movies everyday in middle school. I told my mom I’m sick and I’m not going to class. She knew I was lying, but what was she supposed to do? She loved me more than anything, of course, and so I’d spend hours in bed on my laptop watching every science fiction movie known to man. At one point I’d seen every movie on the IMDb list “Indie Sci-Fi”. I liked indie because it more often had sex and romance than the mainstream stuff and I liked sci-fi because it showed me all these cool places way cooler than Atlanta, way way cooler than my Christian prep school, and way way way cooler than my bedroom. My favorite I think was this one I Origins which had the greatest romance ever until the girl is cut in half by an elevator slipping down the shaft. I remember watching the life drained from her eyes and then crying probably because I was maybe a year from LiveLeak, a few months from Reddit, and just a couple weeks from ISIS beheadings (this is what remains of coming of age rituals for young men).

2013:

The jock kids who could run really fast (Sammy and I would mostly walk the mile together and chat) found out Sammy tried to kiss me and one of them called me a faggot before I really even knew what that meant. Before I knew it, yea, there were locks thrown at me. Like the heavy MasterLock ones and I had a black eye for a week-ish and a huge bump on my head. My mom asked me what happened and I told her the truth which was rare for me and she started writing a long email to my phys ed coach. I begged her to stop and I can’t remember the rest.

At some point, Sammy ended up on my bed. We watched YouTube videos and then hentai and eventually we were both naked and jerking off. His hips were turned away from mine because it would have been too gay if I could see his tiny penis (which I could, for the record) and he could see mine (medium). We jerked off for a while until we both came probably on our stomachs and my mom called us downstairs for dinner. We never talked about it, we just kept on being eleven-ish.

He’s married to a woman now. I saw the ring on FaceBook. The diamond is maybe a 3/10 at best, but she looks happy. At some point my parents moved me to a new prep school. This one was Christian and less militant about what we wore. I’m so vague about it all because I was so confused for so many years.

2002:

And then I was born with everything in the world. My mom and dad raised me to be a gentleman and we lived with a Chilean au pair who spoke very little English. She taught me to pray to God and speak some Spanish and my parents taught me the rest. My brother taught me how to ride a bike and my sister taught me how to cry with the door closed. We’d watch Sex & the City (the show) and eat overpriced snacks and she’d tell me how not to wear my hair, what deodorant to use, and how to talk to girls. My brother, I think, was writing stories and playing golf until he wound up in New Jersey and my sister is marrying this guy now. So, I had this silver spoon super deep up my ass and that, I think, is where all of this comes from.

If I was more of a liar I’d tell you how rough I had it, all the hardships I went through, but the fact is, all of the issues I had in my life were caused by death or drugs or something in between. In the locker room, the boys would throw locks and I thought about killing myself in the courtyard. In high school, I had to visit the counselors every week so they could check in and make sure I wasn’t a threat to myself or others. My parents didn’t know because I had this weird buddy-ish relationship with one of the counselors and could convince him not to email them. It was funny though because I was super popular, had all these friends surrounding me like a little mob and honestly I was somewhat handsome for my age. I oscillated between straight relationships and gay porn and fucked up so many times they put me in group therapy with a few other kids who’d come dangerously close to ruining their lives. 

2016:

This guy sends me a link on Skype to a video of a man sawing off another man’s head. It’s amazing how long it takes to behead someone. The saw blade pulled back and forth like that. Metal and meat. It gives new meaning to the world. There’s a time when I’d fall asleep thinking about knives in necks. There’s a time when I’d fall asleep with images of dead moms, dead dads, floating corpses. LiveLeak jerk off epic fails Reddit 50/50, 100% chance of death, 100% chance of heart racing good old fashioned American fun. I think that is boyhood in America. Black Ops and LiveLeak in the summer. How far can you push yourself until your friend asks to jerk off to something else? It’s hot as fuck out. Your mom’s getting worried and beer still tastes like shit.¹

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STATE OF STIMULANT

Submissions for This Will Save You have officially closed. Our email / Google Drive is absolutely overflowing with fantastic work. All I can really say is thank you. We’ll open submissions for Stimulant Volume Two in the next few months, so be on the lookout for that and, of course, you can always send us your work. We read everything.

Get hip:

1. Read Johnny Carter’s new pieces “The Band of Adventurers” and “Quebec Breast Milk Conspiracy”. Johnny is a profound and deeply troubled man.

2. Order Dennis Cooper’s newest book Flunker from Amphetamine Sulphate. Also check out the interview AS just published with Dennis on Substack.

3. Peter Vack’s poem on Dana Dawud’s Pleasure Helmet.

4. Jillian Luft’s novel Scumbag Summer from House of Vlad.

5. Pre-order D.T. Robbins’ novel Leasing from House of Vlad.

6. spiderhouse’s newest album sanctuary. (Atlanta, GA. Indie rock.)

7. /hospitality/ ‘s new album And When I Close My Eyes, I’m Still Spinning. (Kennesaw, GA. Skramz.)

8. Yung Yazee (Montréal) has a new zine called “Time to Die” for sale at Drawn & Quarterly (211 Rue Bernard Ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada, Quebec).

9. Please support, if you can, families in Gaza by helping to get their voices heard and hopefully experience some amount of security. Here is a link to a spreadsheet from Operation Olive Branch which lists several ways you can support Palestinian families and individuals financially or otherwise.

Stimulant is in no way politically or religiously affiliated. (We have to say this for legal reasons.)

1. Edited by Amalia Mairet.