Someone used the word “autoeroticism” today instead of “masturbation” and I just immediately imagined autoerotic asphyxiation (AA). Maybe because my mind always goes to the dark side but also because you just don’t hear autoerotic… without the asphyxiation. At least I don’t.
So Michael Hutchence brought AA into most folks lexicon and imaginations, I figure but it hit me the summer of 1992 when an Ann Arbor homeless celebrity was found hanging from a beam in a detached garage.
I found myself thinking of that fella and wondering if he was real or imagined. This is what and how I remember that story:
The guy was skinny with saggy older skin but probably wasn’t more than in his 50s. His hair was cut into a bob just below his chin and it was thin and stringy that he kept out of his face with a head band. He wore jersey knit everything and I seem to recall it was shiny but I’m suspect of that memory. He rode around town on an old bike pulling behind him a cart covered with a tarp. He was very protective of that cart and would only pull up enough tarp to extract what he needed without ever showing the world what else lay beneath.
If he wasn’t on his bike, I would see him in sitting in a corner of the below-ground Burger King. He was either reading a book or playing with some sort of electronic gadget. The local kids would hassle him and taunt him. They call him spaceman or something equally silly and ask him if he was trying to talk to aliens. If he replied at all it was usually a hiss.
So when buzz started circulating that he was found hanging nude, I suspected the worst – some kids went too far in the harassment. But soon autoerotic asphyxiation was being bandied about. I think it was Casey who explained to me what that was. We all learned more about that man in his death then we ever knew in his life. He was a former Professor at the U of M and have thousands of dollars in fines from the local library – books were apparently what he was fiercely protecting under the tarp. He had grown children and wasn’t homeless at all. And most stark in that portrait was he was a man who marched to his own drummer and fulfilled his own fetishes.
I wish I knew his name. I wish I could be sure I remembered the details correctly.
