The Gentle Degenerates (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  I listened to her prattle for over an hour, being alternately bored and horrified, titillated and repulsed. Finally I could take no more, and I just moved forward brusquely to cover her mouth with mine. Instantaneously, she changed. All the warmth and richness of her came to the fore. With a small moan, she put her tongue into my mouth, and threw her arms around my neck. Now she was little girl, needing to be held, needing comfort. And I gave that to her, holding her very tightly, crushing my chest against her breasts, squeezing the hurt out of her, and giving her the solidity of my presence. We lay a long time in one another’s arms, letting each other be a poultice for our shared pain. I flashed that we were like two walking open wounds, vulnerable to all the shit in life, and yet ready to soar into great depths of realization and meaning.

  I put my hand down between her legs and felt the fine pubic hair. Her cunt was surprisingly small, and not very wet. The mood switched from solace to sexuality. I pulled back and looked down at her. Her eyes were unfocused and swimming, her mouth open and wet. I leaned down and put my mouth over one of her breasts, gently licking the taut flesh, biting the nipple between my teeth. She groaned and rocked her pelvis back and forth. I inserted one finger into her cunt, and felt the inner walls give way. She massaged my finger with her box, and I felt the great rolling of the inner lips and the deep passage leading to the vacuum of her vagina. For a moment I sank into the wonder of the sensation and the beauty of the woman, but then I immediately remembered that she could be this way with any man, that her reactions were reflexes, that her fucking was stereotypic. And lust and heartbreak arose side by side. I wanted desperately to love her, and all I could do was fuck her. And what else could she accept right now? “Love is not enough,” said Bettelheim, and I knew what he meant. The kind of deprivation she knew could not be filled by any man giving her his all. She would have to painfully retrace her life to its roots and rework all the traumas through. That would be hard work, and required a great degree of seriousness; but she was merely giddy.

  I let my other hand roam over her, feeling the lush fulness of her breasts, letting her suck at my fingers with her mouth, and all the while inserting my other hand deeper into her, provoking the heat and juice that welled up in her cunt. Then the thoughts abruptly ended, and we were all over one another. I let all other considerations vanish as I sank into her. Impulse sent me scurrying down her body, and I buried my face between her legs. The rich aroma of her pussy assailed my nostrils, and I burrowed deep to taste the juices that edged around her cunt lips. She was luscious, fleshy and sticky. I probed her with my hand and licked her with my tongue. Her ass squirmed on the bed, and she cried out again and again, unintelligible sounds and moans.

  She groped for me and I turned my body around so that my cock was at her mouth. She took it inside her at once, and the warm wet of her lips covered the tender head. She licked gently and with great awareness. Then we rolled over, and I was on top of her, grabbing her ass with both hands, and kissing and lapping at her cunt with a wild frenzy, while I ground my pelvis into her face. She took my cock deep in her throat and gagged on it. I pulled out and she kissed at it with her lips as it slithered from her mouth, and then she pulled my ass down again, so that my cock plunged once more into her throat.

  The trouble with sixty-nine is that what is being done to one distracts from what one is doing, and vice versa. We didn’t know each other well enough to be able to do a complete dance, so we alternated, my eating her and her sucking me, until that entire energy had been expended. And then it was time to fuck.

  Entering a woman for the first time is always an adventure. Each cunt is different, even though all cunts are the same. I turned around again and ranged my body over her. She looked up at me with intelligent longing, conscious of her role, conscious of our strangeness. There was absolute communication between us. Soul spoke to soul. And I loved her at once, as she did me. There was no time to think, or to ponder why such a thing was impossible and couldn’t work. There was only the moment, and I knew that I had found my mate. In a flash, all the hesitancies and rationalizations I had about Regina disappeared, and I knew why I had suffered so much ambivalence. Despite all the seeming feelings to the contrary, I didn’t love her, not like this, not with this total letting-go and ecstasy.

  With our eyes locked, with our bodies poised, I slowly entered her, and oh! what a joining that was! Physical perfection in an instant, a cunt that snugly grabbed my cock and held it lovingly, a warmth that penetrated throughout my entire groin, a sweetness that drenched my body and which I could taste in my mouth. With a sigh we melted into one another.

  The rest was all dance. Her ass moving in slow undulations, her breasts two mounds of softness nestling into my chest, her hands a loving caress up and down my spine. I could not feel or touch or taste her enough all at once. All the hunger that had been in me, all the need that I hadn’t even been aware of, bubbled up and demanded to be fed. And with great gulping thrusts I brought my cock like a snout into the trough of her cunt, there to gorge myself on the entirety of it, the beauty and mystery, the ugliness and betrayal. In a stroke I wiped out all the men she had known, and she drained from me the memory and desire for all women.

  Our heads were in perfect tune. There were no thoughts in our minds, simply the flow of abstract patterns of energy shuttling between us and forming a coherent tapestry of our consciousness. Our bodies blended and joined. And then, with a cry, I experienced what I had not known since I was nineteen, when for the first, and almost last, time I fucked a woman with whom I had no reservations, whom I trusted totally, and who later betrayed me. I felt my heart burst, and wave after wave of sadness and joy flowed from my deepest part and bathed her and buoyed us up.

  In a stroke I saw the shallowness and childishness of all the fucking I had ever done, how I had played the games of cosmic consciousness and pretended to be a debauchee. This was different in its reality. It was people, it was on the planet Earth, it was dirt and sweat, it was mortality and limitation. And it was glorious.

  Her legs went up slowly and languorously. Like two supple arms they embraced my waist, and her cunt opened like some mammoth cave. Deep deep and deep, black and violent and soft, tender and eternal and home. I cried out her name again and again, pouring all I had into myself and into her, and she received and reverberated. We became the amplification of one another. And from a great distance, yet from very close, a long sighing slide began, down a great snow slope, fast and powdery, clean and light, and we sank plunging down the incline to a great edge, where in each other’s arms we hurtled free into space.

  At the summit of our glide, I was suddenly and immediately in her arms, on my bed, with all the fears and suspicions, the memories and inhibitions, the realization that she was a stranger to me, and with a full breath I swallowed the totality of the moment and felt the scalding heat coursing through my veins, my limbs trembling. I was totally free of all control, and the energy which coursed through me was the total life force which lay bottled in my tenseness. Now it was flapping and flying, and as I let myself go, she began to cry, a great yearning “yes” which filled my ears and thundered through the room. It rose in volume and intensity until it sounded like the primeval OM. And in a sustained burst, I let loose the full load of sperm churning up from inside me, into her incredible cunt, which like a sensitive and conscious mouth, kissed and held and sucked all the fluid from my cock, and swallowed it deep into her vagina and even symbolically into her womb.

  We clung to each other for a long, long time, and then slid into a peaceful oneness, male and female undifferentiated, simple humanity breathing and throbbing in a delicious afterglow. Slowly we parted, and I rolled to her side. And after a few minutes I opened my eyes to look at her. I couldn’t believe her vast beauty, the sheer thereness of her. And at that instant, Regina died inside me.

  eleven.

  Carol stayed with me for two weeks. It was the most hectic, confused, an
d glorious period of time I have ever spent with a woman. Her madness increased in proportion to the degree she trusted me. And I lost all perspective on what we were doing with one another. In the evening she would walk past where I was sitting, her ass a provocative outline against her jeans, her breasts hanging inside a shirt always opened at the front, and no matter what I was doing, I would reach for her. At times she was mocking, laughing at me all the while she pulled me in; and again, she could be unbelievably hot, suddenly falling into my lap and rubbing my face with her breasts, grabbing my cock with her hands and massaging it until I squirmed with pleasure.

  We must have fucked about three times a day. I had no sense of time or duration. All the switches were open and both engineers were asleep at the throttle. The train was plummeting at high speed straight ahead, and neither of us cared about destination or result. This was some thing that I had been starved for. A woman who, despite all her hangups and weirdness, was totally open and gave of herself without hassle and without strings attached.

  During that time I let all my affairs go, not doing any writing, not seeing too many friends. Once Regina called and she sounded like a total stranger. She began talking about the house we would live in and the glorious weather on the Coast, and it sounded like a dreary article from a gardening magazine. I remembered now, all the fights, all the spitefulness, all the meanness of our relationship, and whatever had been good about it faded from view. I was extremely cold and curt and told her I didn’t feel like talking, that I would call her back. To my surprise, she simply acquiesced, taking my words at face value. Ordinarily she would have whined about the shortness of the conversation, and tried to interest me in another round of talk. My antenna quivered. “Is anybody there?” I said. “Only Michael,” she answered. “Who’s Michael?” I wanted to know. “Oh, he lives a few houses down. We were just sitting around getting stoned, and we were going to do some nude sunbathing in the back when you called.”

  Hot lava ran down my chest. I couldn’t believe my ears, nor could I accept my own reaction. Just seconds earlier I was rollicking with Carol, all thoughts of Regina relegated to the distant past. And I was ready to dismiss Regina on the phone without a spark of warmth. And now, suddenly, I was seething with jealousy. I saw the two of them lying in the grass, the hot sun baking their bodies, sweat forming pools in her navel. I could feel the heaviness of the air, hear the droning flies, and sense the overwhelming sensuality of the moment. Perhaps her arm would move and her hand touch his. She might begin to pull back, and then decide to leave it there. The electricity would flow sharp and detailed between their fingers. There would be a long low moment while decision hung in the air, and then slowly, deliberately, he would roll over, covering her body with his own, and bring his mouth down on her trembling lips.

  “Are you making it with him?” I asked.

  “Nothing’s happened,” she said. “We’re just friends.” She paused. “Do you want me to make it with him?”

  Two currents ran through my mind. If I said “yes” I would sever her in one stroke. But then I would have to live with that fantasy. And if I said “no” I would be lying, because all I cared about was putting down the phone and getting back to Carol, and didn’t really care what Regina did.

  “Do what you want,” I said.

  “All right,” she said. And then we hung up.

  Conflicting emotions stormed beside me. How could it be possible to be jealous when there was no love, nor even any desire? It was not Regina as a person that bothered me, but the idea of Regina, Regina as a symbol. But a symbol of what?

  The day passed in a jumble. And that night I went to one of those encounter groups which have become all the rage. I usually fled them like the pox, but I had run into Marsha, an old girl friend, the week before and she convinced me that her group was hip enough to be worth going to.

  I had seen enough of the Esalen technique to be suspicious of anything having to do with programmed exposure. These workshops invariably involved the use of “leaders”, whose task it was to structure the physical and psychic environment in such a way as to predispose certain kinds of events. And within that, there was a forced unanimity of experience and expression that I could only honestly label as fascism. There was no doubt that the groups could turn people on, and even served as a medium for therapeutic insights. On occasion, as in the case of Fritz Perls, the individual was actually given a mirror in which to see himself more clearly. But hanging over all of these so-called growth centers was the spectre of Grossinger’s, the suspicion that these were really fancy cruising grounds for the discontented middle class, and that for a stiff fee, people could come to feel and be felt, play head games, experience emotional catharsis, and in general indulge in a kind of open theatre. My major objection was that not one of these places had the honesty, humor, and historical perspective to see those aspects of their scene which were ludicrous, or dangerous, or merely degenerate partial residues of what once had simply been good living. Ultimately, it was the vulgarity of their instant intimacy and their putting a price on emotion which repelled me.

  My masochism level had been running pretty low, so I dropped by the benefit weekend that Esalen held in New York City, where they raised over a hundred thousand dollars in two days by holding mass meetings of more than two thousand people at a time, leading them in ritualistic encounters. It was there I met Marsha, where she told me about her own group.

  The two of us went out to smoke some grass, and then went back in to prowl the halls and dig the scenes. We watched Esalen’s chief guru arrive, unshaven, booze on his breath, and a cigarette hanging from his lips. In the great hall, some fifteen hundred people were told to “close your eyes and go inside,” and then “open your eyes and drink, drink in the face of your partner.” In another place a huge woman in a tent dress led a small army of people in group shouting. They all raised their arms in the air and chanted, “I take responsibility for myself, I take responsibility for myself.” Then she read, and had them repeat, the Gestalt Prayer, which begins, “You do your thing and I do mine.” The mixture of political form and pseudo-religious sentiment was making the air too thick to breathe. It was like watching a rally of psychic storm troopers, and I realized in a flash that Esalen was the Tibetan hierarchy of our time. They were setting the tone for the nation, and that no matter what kind of a revolution took place, no matter whether the right or the let took over, Esalen would remain privileged, giving massages and hot baths to the elite of whoever was in power.

  We went into the lobby where several hundred people were smiling like crazy and embracing like socialist commissars of agriculture. Every now and then a real spark of sexuality would flare up, and the couple involved would jump back with a start, as though they suddenly realized that the touch-feely games they were playing had an actual basis in reality. These were the sensual counterparts of academic intellectuals. They liked to play with the notion of things, but ran like squirrels when the things themselves were made manifest. I had no real anger for the rubes who were spending seventy-five dollars each for a weekend of being processed through the superficial mill, hoping desperately for some magic to be rubbed off on them; but I was furious at the Esalen hucksters who blew into town to mop up a wad of money, promising visions of sensorial paradise and giving little more than two teenagers would find with each other on a date in the park. Lonely men, lonely women, husbands who no longer wanted to fuck their wives and wives with dried-up cunts, all of them milling around with bright gazes and leaning postures, wanting to be picked up, wanting to be plugged in, preying on the vibrations—this was the emotional cul-de-sac of a dying civilization. And it fit the proper historical ironic mode that as Americans, they didn’t even have the style and passion to make real orgies. Even decadence had become plastic.

  I left in disgust, a thousand “groovies” ringing in my ears, and made a date to go to Marsha’s group. The night I arrived there, I was pleasantly surprise
d to find that all the people were sitting around as though they lived there. There were four women and five men, including myself and the leader. It is odd to use the word to describe Larry, because he didn’t “run” the group; he simply served as its focus and let the energy find its own forms.

  Nothing spectacular happened. We rapped a bit, and a few of us told our stories. At one point we got into a massage thing, and just enjoyed solid physical contact with one another. I flashed on two of the chicks, and the three of us got into one of those circles, with arms around each other’s shoulders, heads touching, and each of us moaning Om to dig the group vibration. I realized that I was playing the Esalen games, but this was something we came upon easily and spontaneously. There was no social director telling us where to put our hands when, and suggesting what we should feel. It was just people getting into each other.

  When the group ended, Al offered to drive the three of us downtown, since he was on his way to Brooklyn. Joyce and Connie and I piled in, and halfway there, I asked them over. They agreed, and in a short while we were spilling into my apartment, with a surprised Carol greeting us at the door.

  Carol was in an odd mood that night and immediately split to the kitchen, where she began typing and yelling to herself. The others, not knowing her, were uncomfortable with this particular expression of insanity. We smoked some dope and put on some music, and settled into an easy rhythm. The talk turned to sex, and the mood turned to sex. And suddenly the proposition was hanging palpably in the air, and no one could pretend not to see it. Connie looked at the rest of us and said, “Are we all going to ball together, is that it?” We nodded quiet assent, and while the three of them began taking their clothes off, I went into the bedroom to bring out a mattress.