by James Jones
Harry was always quite a swearer, using all the four-letter words with great freedom, even in mixed company, and right now he was not worrying about niceties. And, I was well aware that in the past few years it had become chic to use them liberally in conversation, particularly in front of women. I was publishing them in great quantities in my Review. But my primitive upbringing never allowed me to feel comfortable around them, even when females were not present. I never used them myself. I was aware this was a fault, but there was nothing I could do about it. Besides, there was no more point in interrupting Harry than there would have been in trying to interrupt that bursting dam in Fréjus several years ago.
I have always been a low-keyed man sexually; female bodies interest me less than female minds, so to speak. Sex, while undeniably pleasant, and not something to be avoided, always seemed to me something that the pursuit of cost one a great deal more energy than the final results achieved were worth. So I don’t think I ever did really understand that part of Harry well. It was almost as if there were some actual basic biologic difference between us.
Cunt-struck, Harry was continuing, incognizant of my red ears, cunt-oriented: those were the key words to remember. When the true history of his generation came to be written, it might well go down to posterity as the Cunt-struck Generation. By extension they could then be called Cuntniks, as Kerouac, Ginsberg and company, a few years younger, were Beatniks. Harry laughed suddenly, ha-ha-ha, in a kind of crazy way. But the very first memory of his life was of sex. It was of lying in bed on a sunny summer morning jacking off. He couldn’t have been more than five: too young even to know what coming was, in any normal way; but lying there jacking his cock just the same. And what was in his mind? What were his thoughts, his fantasy, at the time? Cunt! The little girl next door! The little girl next door, when he was too young even to know what a cunt was, or looked like.
He had been a dedicated pussy-eater since the very first time he had indulged the pastime. Had been one before, even; since first learning such a technique existed via the pornography shown him by older boys. His own young porno collection had swung more and more toward pictures, stories, drawings, any material having to do with cunt-lapping. But the girls of his generation, at least while young, were backward in this respect. His first real opportunity did not come till he was 17, when he took out in his father’s big Studebaker a younger girl noted for going out with all the boys, and had gone down on her before he fucked her. She had not been at all surprised. All the boys liked to eat her pussy that way she said, and she herself loved it. She was his first blow job, and his first real fuck. He would never forget her. Wherever she was, he wished her well. But she was quite a contrast to the rest of them, who all seemed to feel that licking their cunts was dirty and immoral, a perversion; which of course only excited him all the more. Perhaps it frightened them because its intensity was so great, and made them find they were sexual creatures after all. Whatever, it gave him some anxious moments about his “perversion”. And as it was with sucking, so it was with fucking. There are other things in life besides sex, Harry, spoken in a high, protesting highschool—or college—soprano, was a sentence that would remain in his head the rest of his life. Later, of course, as he moved on from Boston to New York, and then to Hollywood, and then into the Service, and back to Hollywood, he realized that what he had found and taken unto himself; what he could, indeed, almost be said to have totally and alone created for himself, i.e., this preoccupation with and adoration of female cunt—was after all not really all that much of a singular experience at all.
His entire generation, or at least (here he nodded at me, allowing me existence, too, alongside himself), at least one element of his generation, had it, and suffered from it and enjoyed it.
He had analyzed it and analyzed it and, if you took away all the commercialization of it (cunt; and the adoration of cunt) in the advertising world; all the promulgation of it in films and magazines and radio and TV; if you took all that away—it was still there; still there, and existing in and of itself, by itself, antedating all the rest of it, all the media saturation. He thought maybe it had to do with some brand-new element of male masochism, introduced by whatever matriarchal environmental factor he had never been able to isolate. Masochism in the distorted male pleasure principle: the pleasure of giving pleasure to the woman. That, of course, was unnatural. Imagine a male dog or cat or lion concerning himself with giving pleasure to the female! Ridiculous! But men did it. And it had to be masochistic. There was something perversely pleasurable in making a woman enjoy sex. For example: You take a woman and, by whatever means, bring her on toward coming—toward her orgasm—and before long, you reached a point where you ceased to exist as you for her. You ceased to be Harry Gallagher for her and became just a man, any man, who is giving her excitation and stimulation. Carry it a while further and you ceased to be even a man, and became just some object, some thing which is causing her to have pleasure. Carry it on all the way to where she comes and you ceased even to be an object. Because in the midst of her come nothing exists except herself and what she’s feeling. So that, through her, what you’ve done is “stimulate” yourself right out of existence. What you’ve really been doing is to be present at and assist in your own cuckolding. In reality— . . . you have been cuckolding yourself! . . . Man, we’re masochists, man! he cried at me, his eyes jewelly in the light. All us cunt-lovers!
I think he was a little drunk by then. Anyway, it was certainly a new idea to me, and the logic seemed impeccable. I mainly kept my eyes down and nodded, pretending to peer reflectively into my by-now empty glass, in order to avoid being further embarrassed by exposing the embarrassment I already felt. At one point once, I thought fleetingly of asking to have my glass refilled. But before I could even do it, Harry had leaned forward with the bottle in his hand and poured whisky in the glass, his jaw continuing to wag and rotate at me, without even slowing.
I got very drunk. Things began to come and go in what film people call fast dissolves, and then would suddenly arrest themselves in those sudden stop-shots in which everything freezes and the man with the pointing finger remains fixed, frozen, in front of you for what seems an inordinate length of time. I began to see things in splintered images as if the mirror glass had broken; and I would find myself present at the beginning of something only to disappear and find myself, next, far into the middle part of something else without having been present at the ending of the first or the beginning of the second. So I am somewhat vague about the rest of what transpired.
I remember Harry talking about his pornography collection, which is famous in the American colony in Paris, and saying he would get some of it out to prove some point. Next I was sitting forward in my chair with my knees together, poring through a whole flock of precisely focused, glossy finish photographs in series of fives in my lap, all of which Harry apparently had said he’d bought in London, I remembered vaguely. Beside me on the low Louis Treize table was an even greater flock of them which I apparently had already been through; and beside these was a stack of Olympia Press and Ophelia Press books I must have looked at too. All of this is crystal clear. The photos were of varied subjects, but most of them were of two women making love in various ways. Some of them were of white girls committing fellatio upon young Negro males. The girls changed from series to series.
“That’s the trend it’s taking,” Harry was saying beside me from over my shoulder. “More and more. Lesbianism. Or not even true lesbianism. Just two women, two normal women, making love together. I don’t know why it turns me on so, but it does.”
Then I disappeared again. When I returned, Harry was locking up the pornography collection in its glass-doored shelves. I was aware dimly that he had been talking about “his Fantasy”. He himself had capitalized the word with his voice, and it had something to do with making love with two women at the same time, instead of the normal, usual one.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he growled over his shoulder,
as he turned the key on the last great batch of the pornography. “But it’s the God’s truth.” Apparently he had just been talking about something else, too. “If I didn’t lock them up, they’d disappear in a minute. That’s why I had the doors put on. Why, I’ve had producers and directors staying up here working on a script with me, big important men I mean, and making plenty of their own money. Well, by God, after they’d leave, I’d find one or two of my choicest items missing. Stolen.” He put the keys in his jacket pocket protectively. They were on a different ring from his other keys. All of this was crystal clear, too. “I don’t know why it is. But pornography just is considered fair game. By everybody. An honest man that you could leave all sorts of money lying around in front of, and just let him loose around your pornography!” Harry said.
Then he was suddenly sitting in the black chair talking again, without having walked there or sat down in it—just as if some film cutter in a studio working in front of a Moviola had expertly clipped that unnecessary footage out of the scene. Harry was talking about his Fantasy again.
“And that’s it. That’s what it is: Me and two women in the same bed together, as you may have surmised by now.”
Surmised? I peered at him owlishly. I was incapable of surmising anything. Harry was leaning forward pouring again, first his glass, then mine. This was clearly not the same bottle. Feebly I tried to stop him at my glass, and failed.
“Me and two women, doing everything to each other, to the other two, and all of us watching it all with great relish and the greatest of pleasure.
“Are you listening to me?
“I remember the first time—First?—the only time I ever had it. One spring day I drove through the pass and over into the Burbank area. It was flat, for miles before you got to the actual city. There used to be lots of massage parlors over there, back then, where you could get laid for anything from ten dollars up to fifty dollars, depending upon what exactly you wanted. I was a pretty big shot then, and not married. I picked out this slender young girl with nice boobs, one of the three who worked there. Slim young thing. She had sneaky eyes and she looked me over closely, a real scrutiny, and then asked me privately if I’d like for her to bring her friend with us too. I was hot instantaneously. Well, we did just about everything three people can do together, I guess. I’ve never had another scene like it.
“I went back there later, and saw my girl again, but her friend had left. I asked her about our scene, and she said sure, and she got another girl. But it wasn’t the same. The two of them were just putting on an act for me, the second time. I suppose my girl didn’t want this other strange girl to find out she really liked it. I learned one thing. The women have to like it, or it’s no good.
“I’ve known women since then that I thought might like that kind of action. Some of them, when I was making it with them, I was sure had been making it with other girls. But I could never quite get my nerve up enough to ask them. And none of them ever asked me.
“So that’s the one time I ever really had it. Maybe that’s why it haunts me.
“I tell you, Jack, there’s nothing like lying there watching two women go down on each other while one of them is gently jacking your cock. Or one of them sucking the other, while you’re fucking the one.
“But I think it takes a special kind of woman. She has to like men too.
“Oh, I know it’s just a fantasy. For a man in my position now, married, and with a wife and all, and a family. It’s like one of those fantasies you have about taking your wife to one of those undressing orgy places, like Olga’s, where you take off all your clothes before you even go into the bar. You imagine it, but you would never do it. It would hurt too much. If it was your wife. You can’t do those things with a woman you really love,
“Oh, I know all about fantasy. Enough to know that when you try to put them into reality, you’re liable to cause mayhem. Or murder . . . —or else they’ll just be ridiculous.”
He moved then, and stretched his muscles stiffened by sitting immobile too tensely too long, and I realized in my befogged, dimly apprehending way, suddenly, that he had not moved at all in a long time.
“I don’t know what got me onto all of this. —? Oh, yes. See, I know it’s only a Fantasy. But it haunts me. Haunts me like some haunting melody. Maybe because I only had it that one time. But why should it affect me so? Well, see, I think it has something to do with that male masochism I was talking about earlier when we—.”
. . . It was exactly as if a black curtain had descended between us, cutting off the play in the middle of the second scene of the third act. I had departed again. Later I found myself out in the street, weaving along trying to find my way home.
I tried to stand up erect and straight, in case any police or youthful muggers after my gold wristwatch passed by. But when I stood straight, I found I had a tendency to lean too far over backwards. When I corrected for this and leaned forward again, I would almost fall on my face. The chill A.M. air tasted good, but did not aid me. I had only to make it from the end of the Island up past the darkened deserted Brasserie and the rue Jean-du-Bellay, past the rue Boutarel to the rue le Regrattier. That wasn’t far. I could remember dimly something about Harry offering me the big couch in his living room, but I had refused. I did not want McKenna, or even Hill, to see me there in the morning, when they got up to go to school. I kept one hand pressed firmly to the top of the stone parapet that lined the quai’s sidewalk to keep people like myself from falling to the lower level and cracking their skulls. I had my umbrella in my left hand and my winter overcoat, I’m sure, hunched up messily across the back of my neck. In the morning I found I had pressed the parapet so firmly that the skin of the fingertips of my one hand looked successfully sandpapered.
But mainly I was worried about Harry. I was terribly afraid he would never want to see me again, after all he’d said. I knew I wouldn’t, were I he. And after all, I was McKenna’s Godfather.
But I needn’t have steamed up. Not with Harry. Not only did he call me at one the next afternoon, but he invited me to a late lunch at Lipp’s that same day. There we ran into both Mary McCarthy and Romain Gary, both looking too terribly bright and chipper, though at separate tables, of course. Harry said hello to them both.
4
I AM CONVINCED THAT had the weather not held good through most of May, there would have been no Revolution. There might have been a few flurries. But rain and cold cool the hot philosophy of the demonstrating Revolutionary more than just about any other thing. I know that sounds cynical. But I believe it’s true, and so did the Paris police believe it. I understand the officials at the Préfecture gathered every day at noon to study the daily weather projections.
But the weather did hold. Day after day the sweeter, less violent European sun rose to a nearly cloudless sky, pouring its unexpected bonus of warmth down upon cobblestone and leafing tree, demonstrator and cop alike, calling us all to come outdoors: warming even the gray Paris stone, which even in 1968 was still permeated with medieval damp and chill. Such weather was an almost phenomenal thing in Paris in May. And day after day officials scanned the reports, and the sky itself, for the rainclouds that ought to be coming along, but didn’t.
Hill Gallagher came by to see me on the Saturday of May 4th, the day after the closing of the Sorbonne by the Rector, one M. Roche. Beams of sun were streaming in my opened windows, and people strolling along the quai sent up a constant murmur of pleased voices. Hill had four of his student friends with him: three boys, and one girl.
The first thing I noticed about Hill was that he had a beauty of a black eye. The second thing I noticed was that he was—they all were—dressed in what was soon to become the uniform of the Revolution: blue jeans, flannel shirt, running shoes (i.e., tennis shoes), and a large bandanna knotted loosely around the throat.
There had been rioting into the night by the students the night before. And I had sat at my desk pretending to work, and watched the clouds of gas and smoke rising
in the glare of light from the Latin Quarter across the river, and had listened to the two-toned French sirens hooting across the night: and the dim shouts and chants of the students and the soft plops of the tear-gas grenades exploding. The morning papers had stated that 496 arrests had been made by the police, most of them students.
And now here they were, five of them, in my living room—one of them a girl. And I soon learned that that girl was not to be discounted. She would have made a saint angry.
Hill had come up first alone. In all my dealings with the students and their Revolution I have never known one of them not to be absolutely polite, thoughtful and respectful to me when I was with him. “Listen, I’ve got a couple of buddies with me,” he said when we had said hello and I had commented on his eye. “They’re waiting downstairs. Would you mind if I invited them up? And offered them a drink?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I’d like to meet them.”
“It’s perfectly all right if you do mind,” he smiled.
“No, no! Ask them up.”
We walked to a window and he leaned out and whistled down to what appeared to be four long-haired boys, dressed substantially like himself, lounging against, the white stone of the quai above the river. He waved down to them on the crowded sidewalk and motioned them up. It was not until they were inside my living room that I realized one was a girl. It was hard to tell at a distance, with them all dressed alike, because of the long hair. And she had almost no boobs at all. What little she had, along with the not-negligible swell of female hip in the tight jeans, was hidden by an imitation American Indian’s buckskin jacket complete with fringe, but made of suede.
They were absolutely handsome kids. Anyone should have been proud to be their parents. Since they were all French and had little English, we spoke mostly in French. Hill had let his own sideburns and hair grow out some, although he hadn’t grown a beard. But these boys’ hair hung literally to their shoulders. One of them was bearded. If anything, the girl’s bobbed hair was a little shorter than theirs. And one of the unbearded ones, the taller one, had the most beautiful head of hair I’ve ever seen on anyone. Any woman would have given her eyeteeth to have his hair. Parted in the center, it fell in tight natural waves all the way to his shirt shoulders. And below it was the most innocent, sweet, open, trusting face imaginable. I gathered his name was Terri. The bearded one, though perhaps less striking, was no less handsome: with his full, pointed black beard and the intelligent, sensitive eyes peering out at you from above it.