The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  “‘Life was a bountiful, boundless joy,’ he proclaims on his deathbed, ‘for all its sorrows and terrors and horrors—which must have some purpose, after all, or at least they’re worth putting up with to get to what lies beyond them—and now I’m going to experience something even grander!’ …And they both die.

  “Now...does it really matter one fucking iota who was right and who was wrong? I ask you, who blew it while he was here and who didn’t? That’s the cosmic joke...and that’s why I say, if the second guy was living a delusion his whole life, then by God it was divine, not ‘wrong’ or ignorant or irrational.”

  Chapter 35

  Catherine was nursing the beer Eugene had handed her in the midst of his oration. She liked the unusual honesty in his words. They came out raw and uncensored—even too frank, and clumsily so, at times—but with a rough precision that told her how much he cared about what he was saying...and, by extension, what he thought of her as listener. Like her, he obviously disliked small talk and conversation for its own sake; yet as sparing as he was of words, he would use as many as necessary to communicate a particular thought or idea when he got going like this. Content was definitely more important to him than form. And though he tended to take himself and his thoughts awfully seriously at times, he seemed to become aware about the same time she did of when he was beginning to sound that way—or else he was sensitive enough to read her reactions. In either case she felt talked to not at.

  “What did you mean earlier,” she asked, “when you said your anger had come between us? Aside from today, what have you had to be angry about?”

  “I can get angry at the drop of a hat so don’t take it too personally. I can hold onto it a lot longer than’s good for me too.”

  “Well congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

  “You really want to know? I feel like we’ve cleared most of that up.”

  “If you tend to hold grudges, I wonder if we have.”

  “Okay—maybe you’re right. Maybe it would be good to discuss it. If I can figure out where to begin.”

  “Christ, how many things are there?”

  “Oh no, it’s not that. It’s just...my mind doesn’t want to engage. Well, here goes anyway: You remember that first night, after the rain?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “There was stuff that came up for me that didn’t have anything at all to do with you. I just found myself totally unable to feel. Anything. I suppose I could’ve played along and gone through the motions, waiting for that to go away—it might have and it might not. But...I don’t know, it would’ve felt too weird. I’m not sure I’m that good an actor anyway.”

  “I can guarantee you you’re not that good an actor.”

  “There was a more important reason besides. I sensed that you were...you might be someone really special in my life. I wanted to feel everything, every nuance right from the start. And I wanted it all to be real. I didn’t want to try to fake it until the rest of me caught up somewhere along the line, and experience you from that point on—with some big blank spot back at the beginning. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “I don’t know...maybe. What do you mean, ‘the rest of you’ would catch up?”

  “Well...shit—I just wasn’t all there at first. I told you, there was some part of me that didn’t wanta come to the party. Some part that didn’t want to get hurt, I guess—that just closed off automatically, that I didn’t have any control over at all.

  “And then your reactions just made the situation worse. I started to think all you wanted was to make love, right then and there. I just wasn’t ready.”

  “So are you saying it was my fault that you...that you weren’t able to ‘feel’ or whatever?”

  “Oh no, Catherine—goddamnit I’m not saying that at all. Don’t be so damn defensive. Please. You were the one who wanted to hear all this. I already told you, I feel like I’ve worked it out for myself.”

  “How? By blaming me?”

  “Come on. I said right at the beginning that it was me who couldn’t feel. Didn’t I? You were given a handicap you weren’t able to compensate for immediately—or didn’t choose to, or whatever. And then I reacted badly to your reaction. So what? So it took us a few days to get it together. I sure like where we are now.”

  “Okay—you’re right; I’m sorry....You’re right about what I was feeling then too; I did want you to make love to me. You were this big bad biker—a lot more interesting than any others I’d ever seen, but a biker nonetheless—and I was horny as hell. I could’ve chewed nails when it was obvious it wasn’t going to happen. Not fingernails either!”

  They were both laughing now at what seemed to have happened a long time ago. “I knew how you felt,” he said, “but I couldn’t do a fuckin’ thing about it—literally. I was as frustrated as you were, I’m sure. I couldn’t figure out how I could have this beautiful, sexy woman wanting to get laid—someone I was really attracted to—and not be able to feel anything.”

  He heaved a big sigh. Damn, it was good to have that whole situation over with. Maybe Catherine was right. Maybe it was better to ventilate this stuff, get it out where they could both see and talk about it. “Well, anyway—after that...”

  “There’s more?” She rolled her eyes but the gesture seemed forced to him; it wouldn’t deter him from completing this. “Continue,” she said, portraying the Long-Suffering Woman.

  “I felt that if you’d been a little more patient or understanding or something, you’d have got what you wanted...and I would have too—even though I wasn’t sure what that was.”

  “I’d say you were a little confused.”

  “Very. I felt about as free and open and spontaneous as those rocks over there.” Even just discussing this brought up the same emotions he’d experienced at the time—weaker and more manageable, but uncomfortable nonetheless.

  “I’m judgmental,” he continued. “ You didn’t know what you were getting into did you.”

  “No, but neither did you. We still don’t.”

  “But we’re learning.”

  “We’re learning. Continue.” She’d made a game of it by now and said this with a regal hauteur just a shade lighter than, “Off with his head!”

  “...Well, I started seeing you—you understand now, I’m taking full responsibility for all this; I created these images of you...” She waved him on impatiently. “I started seeing in you a little—emphasize “little”—of what I see as being wrong with our whole society. We’re so fucking greedy and hungry—everything for the present moment with no thought of the future. As far as I’m concerned, the pendulum’s swung way too far from Victorian, and I suppose you could call it ‘Eisenhower’, repression to the kind of shallow and empty sexuality that kids growing up today must think is all there is. TV, movies, radio—magazines: you can’t get away from it. Everywhere you look you have some cold-eyed bitch with her mouth hanging open or some bare-chested stud who looks like he fucks with a .357 magnum or something. Christ, the only feeling you see portrayed anymore is the most primitive, soulless kind of passion. Without even the heat of good old-fashioned lust it seems to me—more like that quick, cold antiseptic fuck of Faye Dunaway’s in ‘Network’.

  “But I’m gettin’ off the track here, because although occasional lust might be preferable to this constant state of being in heat people seem to be in today, it sure as hell isn’t the answer to what I feel is missing between people—and what’s wrong with the world. Roberta said we need to go from the head to the heart. Hell, we’ve gotta get there from wherever we are, in whatever direction.”

  “Why are you so concerned with other people’s sexuality?”

  “...I guess I am starting to sound kind of obnoxious aren’t I?”

  “The Reverend Hell-fire and Damnation himself.”

  He laughed. “I’m just trying to express my opinion here; I’m not saying anyone else has to share it. Bu
t, on the other hand, I have as much right to be concerned about what I see as being wrong with society as anyone else does. I have the responsibility, the same as we all do, to speak out about what I think’s wrong....Do you agree with that?”

  “Well, I guess if you feel strongly enough about it. And if you’re sure it’s not really just feelings or sexual problems of your own that you’re projecting onto ‘society’.”

  “You don’t mince words do you.”

  “Not when the other guy’s not.”

  “How can you be sure where your feelings stem from? I doubt that you can ever completely separate your own problems from what you see as those of the society you’re part of. But that shouldn’t stop you from taking a stand. We can’t wait to be perfect to criticize what we think is wrong.”

  “Of course not. But there’s a difference between finding fault with someone, or something, and becoming judgmental about it.”

  “Touché. You’re absolutely right. A shortcoming I hope to get rid of.”

  “I have the feeling you’ll be successful.” She was smiling and her smile extended through her whole body.

  “So do I.”

  ...Suddenly she stiffened against him and screamed.

  Eugene jumped as if she’d just dug her elbows into his ribs. “What is it?!”

  Pulling up the skin at the outer corners of her eyes, she asked in a singsong tone of voice: “Did you attain...enrightenment...my son?”

  “You...!” He dissolved into laughter as their conversation turned into a wrestling match...which in short order became something else again. “Enrightenment?! You bet I’m ‘enrightened’, my dear—about you!” His fingers forced their way between her legs. “You are the temptress a poor monk must be aware of! You’re the assassin of lust, sent to kill the Buddha by seducing him! You’re Maya Breckenridge!” He laughed uproariously, his fingers thrusting themselves into her crotch with each indictment, making her arch like an inchworm.

  “Stop! Quit that! Eu-gene!” Laughing as hard as she was fighting back, Catherine managed to extricate an arm which she immediately put to the same use that his was engaged in.

  “Hey!”

  “See? How it feels?” He had tried to be somewhat gentle; she made no such attempt and for a moment he was taken by surprise. Then he managed to roll away from her and made a pass at unzipping her jeans. “Oh no you don’t!” He thought she’d been lively before; right now she could have given lessons to a Brahma bull. But he was able to hold her around the waist with his left arm while grabbing for the snap and zipper of her jeans with the right.

  He wasn’t having much success until her flailing hand found his cock, which she was able to clutch even through the heavy denim supposed to conceal such things. He wasn’t about to resist; she could hold onto that as long as she damn well pleased. Nor was Catherine still so intent on demonstrating her strength and agility. He took hold of her between his thumb and fingers and felt her grow slippery inside her jeans.

  Then he grasped the back of her neck with the other hand and a current arced through him as surely as if he were bridging electrodes at both ends of her body. She felt the same thing: her body arched involuntarily, and when he pulled her mouth to his they both tasted a scarlet heat like electricity. Her hair and skin had a feral cinnamon scent. Bestial sounds began to claw their way from her throat.

  Eugene felt as if he were losing consciousness and for all practical purposes Catherine already had. Somehow their clothes were coming off; his hands were tearing at them like giant ravenous moths and kept colliding with hers. He was laughing, he suddenly realized, with a sort of contained hysteria—they both were. Then the shock of her flesh against his thighs and belly, as if it possessed a remarkable difference in skin temperature. Hot or cold, it defined the limber planes of her body pressing against his the way flowing water liquefies a streambed.

  He became aware of an ache, a longing, that had materialized within himself and which now, with his attention on it, began to intensify. The sensation had begun as a fiery point in his gut, his solar plexus perhaps, and then radiated outward; by now it was a crescent of fire from his heart to his cock. Unlike anything he had ever experienced before, or remembered.

  If it had arisen from passion and desire, it had gone beyond them—in fact seemed even to conflict with them in some way. Because this deep, intense yearning went beyond sex, as he knew it. It was sexual—it called forth an extreme physical tenderness for Catherine that made him want to fill and enfold her within himself, to speak to her through hands arms hips and penis with an eloquence transcending speech—but that was just the beginning, not the end. Sex seemed somehow a way of getting there.

  Yet what this next level of surrender, or transcendence, was he couldn’t even imagine; he simply felt it crying out to him, the way a starving man knows hunger. In a few heartbeats he went from ecstasy to anxiety. The very core, the source and center of himself had become a whirlpool of overwhelming need or longing and the fear that it would go unfulfilled. One fed the other. How could he satisfactorily perform the male role in the sexual act while abandoning himself to this greater need as utterly as he longed to? How could he possibly satisfy both Catherine and himself? Could such profound yearning be fulfilled at all? What did it matter if moments earlier he hadn’t even known such hunger existed? Some part of him must have known not only the hunger but the promise of extending himself through it; after all, what is hunger in a healthy individual but a vehicle for growth?

  Chapter 36

  Feeling Eugene’s abrupt change of mood, Catherine’s first impulse was to try to make up the difference herself. When the ineffectiveness of this quickly became apparent, she made a mental effort to relax and lose herself again in her lovemaking.

  Eugene’s hard muscular body with its masculine texture of fine hair and smooth taut skin was inseparable from her memory of him beside her on his bike this afternoon, surrounded by an aura of mastery and power. She created a truly heroic mental image. There were overtones of Norse mythology in her theatrical, backlit composition with its halo effect around a proud, arrogant head wildly resplendent with hair...some Brando of course from The Wild One...John Lennon and Beethoven...even a little Elvis perhaps...My God—a hint of storm trooper. Where the hell had that come from? She shudderingly edited the offending character from her erotic movie.

  With Eugene beside her today she had been invincible. For now that easily made up for any temporary disruption of physical expression. She twined her bare legs over his and locked her pelvis against him. But he’d already lost his erection and, if anything, her ardor only shriveled his penis further. It was as soft as a woman’s breast against her. For some reason she found this ironically amusing rather than frustrating at the moment. “Do you think we hurt his feelings?” she asked when it had become obvious that nothing was going to happen.

  Eugene grunted, anything but amused: “I don’t know. The little fucker’s too sensitive for his own good.”

  “Well maybe that’s ‘cause his daddy is.”

  “His ‘daddy’s’ about to wring his fucking neck,” he said, rolling off of her.

  “Don’t you dare!...Mind if I have a word with him?”

  “Not at all. I’m not sure how much good it’ll do.”

  “Hey, don’t be so negative, mister.” She slapped his butt. “Okay?”

  He smiled in spite of himself. “Okay.”

  She slithered down beside him, placing both hands on his waist and sticking the tip of her tongue into the nest of hair in his navel. It felt as though she’d touched him with a pin there. Only now did he realize how tense he’d become. He felt himself beginning to relax with a delicious warmth as Catherine’s dark hair draped across his stomach. Closing his eyes, he reached down and stroked it back and forth across his skin, as her warm breath and the faint wetness of her tongue circled in a whisper around his pubic hair to his inner thigh. To the sensitive skin here, her tongue was wetter and her breath was hot. His hand relaxed
in the soft tangle of her hair.

  Catherine felt her heart beating. It was a primeval forest down here: that exciting combination of clean, musky, pungent odors. Strange and dangerous animals lurked about. She let herself go infantile, sucking lightly on the fragrant warm hair and skin of his thigh. Gently lifting the testicle nearest her, she flicked her tongue up beneath it to the base of his scrotum. It furrowed a warm, wet meandering trail through the pendulous flesh until finally she took the whole ball lovingly into her mouth, then the other...and then she moved on. By now he was showing signs of life; she was surprised he hadn’t begun to get really hard, but then she was far from through.

  “Penis”—that’s what a cock was in its Clark Kent incarnation. It looked so helpless lying there. But it had felt wonderful inside her last night; it hadn’t needed any coaxing then. She wondered momentarily what was going on with Eugene but then quickly returned to the matter at hand. There was a challenge here. It was easy to get excited by an erect penis—a hard-on. Christ, the human race had been getting off on that since long before it was human. A cock that was hard and swollen with desire addressed her in mankind’s primal, most persuasive language. When she was really moved, she spoke in tongues, wanting to be fucked in every opening in her body at once—to be entered, ravished, and set free.

  Somehow a limp dick hardly inspired the same reverence. Under these circumstances, it was the witch doctor caught with his pants, or his loincloth, down...the medicine man discovered to be mortally fallible...the golden calf melted down into butter. It was the omnipotent and mighty Oz revealed as a short, bald-headed, one-eyed little man with delusions of grandeur. If the fertility god wasn’t dead, he sure as hell wasn’t omnipotent. It was not only rather pathetic, it could be insulting as hell. Fortunately, Catherine felt needed rather than rejected right now.