"I have scars. I earned them."

Ah, Usenet. Out from the ether this week comes a piece of what I assume is vintage Barrus-iana, an example of the Writer as Erotician. More or less.

It's a short story called "Another's Burning," and it is, in the words of the late Miss Dorothy Parker, a little love -- a kind of Backdraft, if, in the great tradition of such epics as Shaving Ryan's Privates, it were to be remade as Backdoor. If nothing else, it adds yet another category to the list of groups-to-which-he-does-not-belong that Barrus has fetishized in his writings; working-class Irish firefighters join his pantheon of heroes -- Navajos, leathermen, sick boys, Vietnam vets, migrant workers... can Fuller Brush men be too far off?

For those not offended by graphic -- if thoroughly unarousing -- descriptions of male-on-male action, the story is almost worth a read. It revisits (or, if it is old enough, I suppose, it helps crystallize) a remarkable array of the themes seen elsewhere in the author's published and online writing. It is written in the first-person, in a tone that almost begs for belief in its authenticity (it's set in a firehouse, so of course it has to mention the dog mascot). It portrays the narrator in a way both heroic and victimized. He submits to a fellow firefighter's Tough Love ("I love him. It’s not easy. Nothing good is ever easy.") and survives near-death while on the job (giving rise to the title quote above). The writing alternates between short, punchy sentences and lyrical, awkward, high-flown passages that are, especially in the context of stroke fiction, the very definition of "high-falutin'." It posits the existence of sub-rosa, late-night circlejerks in the firehouse. Most of all, I fear, it induces giggles. It's one thing to refer to a band of fellow recruits as hairy urchin lads (calling up, somehow, quaint images of a pornographic Horatio Alger novellette); it's another to do so within a few lines of alleging that Boston firemen are among the most dedicated and accomplished urophiliacs in the known world.

I'm grateful to the poster of the story (who accompanied it with a rather Durer-esque illustration on the same theme), if only because it is the first extended sample of the author's early work I've found. I can't say that it makes me want to rush out and find a copy of Mineshaft, but it does confirm to my satisfaction that while Barrus/Nasdijj has many names, he hasn't that I can find accomplished the rather more complex task of writing in different voices.

This makes it all the more perplexing that readers didn't question earlier, for example, why the writing Nasdijj posted that was supposedly by the prodigious young Bane Bianchi (one of the ghostly legion of afflicted ephebes he was claiming to care for as late as July) didn't sound just exactly like Nasdijj For Young Readers, or why any sane editor, presented (as at least one was) with by side-by-side samples of Barrus and Nasdijj didn't put, not even two and two, but one and one together.

And, for those readers not interested finding out more first-hand (as it were) about Tim Barrus's exceedingly scatological take on homosex, I can confirm that yes, in writing about tough-as-nail prole firefighters, he does manage to refer to fire as both a mistress and a whore.

(Oh, go ahead -- find it on Google Groups. Maybe it will appeal more to someone who doesn't immediately think about the poor man's wife. The more I think, the more she's really the heroine of this tale...)