The Gentle Degenerates (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  I threw the I Ching, and it came up with Preponderance of the Great, changing to The Joyous, Lake. The Ching is a psychic Rorschach. It begins with basic dualities and ramifies them, so that a complete system of applications to practical situations is presented in language that is at once abstract and concrete. The gist of the oracle was that there was a danger of too much concentration in the center without enough support for the weight. This indicated to me that I had to be careful not to saturate myself in the experience of Carol past my ability to assimilate what was happening. The changing line read: “The ridgepole sags to the breaking point. Misfortune. This indicates the type of man who in times of the preponderance of the great insists on pushing ahead. He accepts no advice from others, and therefore they in turn are not willing to lend him support. Because of this the burden grows, until the structure of things bends or breaks. Plunging wilfully ahead in times of danger only hastens the catastrophe.”

  One of the things I love about The Book of Changes is its steadfast refusal to get fancy or esoteric. It describes the human condition in the most mundane terms, and through that achieves universality. It seemed that I was being advised to be cautious, not to get carried away by the enthusiasm engendered during the Preponderance of the Great. I turned to the second hexagram and read: “True joy, therefore, rests on firmness and strength within, manifesting itself outwardly as yielding and gentle.” And again, “Lakes resting one on the other: the image of the Joyous. Thus the Superior Man joins with his friends for discussion and practice.” The explanation of the Image ran: “A lake evaporates upward and thus gradually dries up; but when two lakes are joined they do not dry up so readily, for one replenishes the other. It is the same in the field of knowledge. Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force. It becomes so only through stimulating intercourse with congenial friends with whom one holds discussion and practices application of the truths of life. In this way learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness, whereas there is always something ponderous and one-sided about the learning of the self-taught.”

  It isn’t wise to try to wrest too literal interpretations from the oracle. Rather, its words should be allowed to sink into the mind, there to suggest openings to the truth of a situation. The I Ching is not, as S.I. Hayakawa construed it, “A Chinese fortune-telling book.” Still, the temptation is strong to make practical applications, and what the text seemed to be saying was, that Carol’s and my relationship would succeed to the degree that we hung loose in the beginning, and then moved into a mutuality which fed and supported us in our life together. And this sharing had to be based on a reverence for learning. It was very Confucian in its overtones, and I marvelled again at the almost seamless blend between that and the older Taoist mode of appreciating reality which permeates the book.

  The immediate problem now was disposing of Regina, and when I put it to myself in those terms, I felt brutal about it. Yet I could put no more accurate face on it. The woman was an encumbrance in her demand for permanence, and while I had been as guilty as she in sharing the desire, I had found another person with whom to try the experiment. That was simply the way of things.

  Perhaps the most accurate description of love/marriage affairs was given by Reich when he spoke of “serial monogamy.” His notion is that there occurs a bio-energetic flow between human beings which expresses itself most fully in the sexual act, where the energies are exchanged, reinforce themselves, and culminate in orgasm. So long as this flow is full, the “marriage” is successful. But when it fails, for whatever reason, in one or the other or both, the bond is broken. But instead of separating cleanly, the people concerned get embroiled in recriminations, problems of responsibility and support, and, if there are children, in guilt. But the dead cannot be revived, and so much of what is pathetic in human relationship is the attempt to rekindle a flame that has gone out. The alternative is to be sophisticated, to keep the marriage as a shell of convenience, to hold the home and hearth together, and then both swing freely in and out of that contest, taking lovers and reducing the bond to a mere social arrangement. It was a mode I privately referred to as “the French solution.”

  So the letter to Regina was composed, candidly, even harshly. It contained several hundred words, but the single message was NO. This time there was no hesitation or second-thought phone calls. I simply mailed it, and with that action, erased Regina from my life. She was now one of many partners of the past, with whom I had shared part of my life, and from whom I derived much, as well as giving much. I felt an incredible lightness and clarity of purpose, as though some inner purpose had been set. I recalled Wittgenstein’s words, “I am resolved, but I do not know to what.”

  I spent some time appraising my situation, both in itself and in relation to Carol. Metaphysically, I was on a here-and-now trip, paying no attention to yesterday and treating tomorrow as a sketchy outline within which I would maneuver. I had no absolutes, merely working hypotheses, and these were of a nature that to formulate them was to destroy them. I also realized that Sartre was right: one defines oneself by the act, not by the thought about the act. So, before anything could be understood in terms of Carol’s and my relationship, I would have to make an inner commitment to our scene. And it would have to be as open as possible while containing parameters to define it.

  I sat at the typewriter and drew up a contract of marriage, one which would contain, mostly by implication, all the “rules” I felt were important. It ran as follows:

  CONTRACT OF MARRIAGE

  I am on a mysterious trip somewhere in the unknown. I walk lightly between the pit of sterility and the quagmire of insanity. My only means to health is to maintain order within myself, and let the externals find their own form.

  The only necessary relation to the Absolute is simple recognition. You may be my mate for so long as you wish to stay with me, me as I am at any given point in spacetime or otherwise.

  I signed it and delivered it to Carol. Her reaction was quite odd. She simultaneously appreciated it warmly, and was sarcastic about it. I realized with a start that I was beginning to see her very acutely, coming to, as the common phrase has it, “understand her.” It astonished me to see our relationship in this manner. I was observing myself observe myself in relationship to another entity, this woman. I got an immediate schizophrenic high, and the words of my Gurdjieff guru came thundering home: “You must be serious about the Work. If you fuck with it, it will chew you up.”

  Carol read it, went through her changes, and said to me: “What’s the scene?” I said: “Dig it. I’m a male lesbian and you’re a dyke, a butch, not a femme. But we dig mostly the other sex. What we need to complete this is a mature femme. I could get from her the softness I miss in you. You could get from her the chance to assert authority, which you can’t do with me. From me, she would receive a masculinity sensitive and gentle enough not to frighten her, and we would make beautiful love together. From you she would get the support for her image, a support she truly needs. And the two of you would make beautiful love to each other. And you and I would receive the benefit of having given ourselves a gist for one another. And on rare brilliant moments, the three of us would understand ourselves as one.”

  “That’s a nice picture.” she said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” I said, “because those who wish to enter that state are not willing to do the hard work necessary to live there. Make no mistake; it is not easy. But the question is, ‘how do you choose to lead your life?’ “

  We looked at one another in a moment such as the Tibetans describe when they say, “to come face to face with the Nakedness.” There was a shock of recognition which bordered on horror, and sheer terror gripped us. We dis-located. There was, for that instant, no parameter within which to understand the moment. Total strangeness ensued. The universe got nauseous.

  And then the attack subsided. She seemed frightened. I remem
bered the words of Steve Gaskin, and they entered my heart to sustain me. He said: “On the astral plane, I share the weather with everybody else.” Of course, that’s all that was happening: an astral storm brewing. And the two of us were in the same boat. So the things for us to do was to hold on to each other, and help each other to weather the blast. We moved into one another’s arms, and at the touch of her flesh on mine, a sweet warmth flooded me. Now let the winds blow, we are safe in one another’s arms.

  Tears came to my eyes. It was so beautiful to trust this human being, to let myself be totally vulnerable in my need for her, recognizing that she is wracked by the very same need. We held each other. That is, neither of us had anything to hold onto except the other. And I remembered the Doré drawing of Paolo and Francesca in the Fifth Circle of the Inferno, how they tenderly touched one another, and were born aloft on a white diaphanous cloud. And when she told her story, she wept in such a manner that all the strength of Paolo could not comfort her. And that was their punishment. In the face of that, Sartre’s No Exit is a gross and flatulent conception.

  Of course, with these thoughts, the paranoia returned. Was I indeed stepping into my projected romantic hell, that delightful Shavian Underworld? The warmth of her belly burning into mine dispelled all that. And I felt her pubic hair brush mine, as she moved her cunt into me. She held it at a barely touching distance for a long time, letting the dance of her pubic hair on mine feed our genitals and asses and bowels with sensation, and the beginning of a glowing heat. I took her breasts in my hands, those beautiful, warm, life-sustaining, pendulous, sensitive and holy breasts, which at the same time were so lascivious, so inviting of plunder, so defenseless and so central to that which is a woman. I have often thought that a woman’s sex life is in her cunt, but where she lives is what’s hanging from her chest.

  Then, as I rubbed her nipples and bent down to bite them, more than a little hard, she buckled at the waist and moaned. She fell into my arms. I savaged at her breast, biting and giving high intensity pleasure/pain, keeping it always at the edge while escalating the charge up to its very limit before exploding. I thought, upon thinking this, that I should be in command of the army in Vietnam. I suddenly flashed myself as a Five-Star General, and all the fascist fantasies, all those marvelous Triumph of the Will manifestos, surged in me. For a moment I became Hitler.

  Carol crushed her pubic bone into mine. Fiercely, we rubbed them together, generating the spark, or, to use the Freudian model, priming the pump. She brought the bone down to the top of my cock, right at the place where it hangs suspended from the skin of my belly. It is the spot where manual massage will get even the laziest cock hard. Now, with that pressure, and the heat coming from her cunt, my cock stiffened, and positioned itself between her thighs. We gasped at the experience.

  Now, I’m the kind of guy that gets downright Tibetan at times. Suddenly the entire universe became manifest in terms of this moment. CLONG! it went in my head. This moment . . . this moment . . . THIS MOMENT. It was always this moment, and this moment was always the same, but different; the same, but wider; the same, but now. And the now flowed, creating a river of time in eternity.

  I stepped back, we looked into one another’s eyes. What happened is inexpressible, but immense amounts of meaning suddenly fell into place. I remembered Bob Fishman, Fish we used to call him, who was the most beautiful dealer the world has ever seen, and he died at thirty-three of something wrong in his brain, just six months after he was saying to me, out of a twenty-day acid jag, “You know, I feel as though I’m headed toward some involuntary sacrifice of myself.”

  I had looked at him, the Jewish intellectual head hero from Minnesota, with a family of acid farmers, living pure communism in Oregon, and realized that he had spent four years with Starling, the woman I had spent eleven months with, Aquarius to Scorpio, and that she was a Christian, and poor Bob was living out the Christ story. Ah, but how many people he turned on, and in such a beautiful, sweet way! I remembered him sitting in a car in the Fillmore, his contact going into one of the buildings in the black neighborhood to pick up a few pounds of hash, and all around us in hallways are real mean-looking fuckers, and coolness must prevail. Across the street was a cop’s car, its roof light flashing. And we tried to appear nonchalant. And Fish and I shared a buzzing electrical moment of existential criminality. Then he turned to me and said, “Yeah, I like to be where the action is.” And later, after we had successfully scored, saying: “I’ve reduced it all to three things: dope, chicks, and meaning.”

  I blessed him in my heart, for he was still alive in me. And I stood with this young, giving, smart, beautiful woman, and wondered whether I dare make a commitment to myself concerning her.

  O what a life this was! The same fucking eternal enigmas always returned at precisely this moment, just when everything had seem so clear. It was the necessity of choice that made the problem acute, and not merely academic. I remembered the words of Engels: Freedom is the recognition of necessity. And those of Krishnamurti: What is necessary is choiceless awareness, that’s all.

  At such moments of turmoil, the first thing I reach for is chronological time. I looked at the clock. It was five-fifteen. It was afternoon. It was Spring. I was in New York City. On the planet Earth. I remembered my name.

  I stepped back, and looked at Carol while remembering myself. I could no longer con myself. The truth was manifest, and I had to cop to it. I would always be living in this moment, making this decision, understanding this mystery. It was like the Sufi story of The Eternal Return. Only, the Sufis knew something the existentialists don’t. They refer to that which returns as: The Friend.

  thirteen.

  Fatigue! My eyes burned in marble-eyed staring. I had lost all sense of my body as a biological organism. I had been up for fifty-two hours, and all of that time spent locked in the house with Carol. One night, after getting very stoned and fucking, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of total despair. Yet it brought with it a peace, a kind of quietude which was like a balm. I understood my total worthlessness in a stroke, and for the first time was able to take a total breath without the feeling that I had to prove something by breathing.

  It was two weeks after Carol moved in, and this brings the story to a close. After our night of mutual revelation, we honeymooned for five days. There was not a word, a gesture, an idea that either of us could create which the other could find fault with. Every smile, every roll of her hips, her quirks, even her farts, were precious to me. And time and time again we would find ourselves looking deep into one another’s eyes, until we became aware of what was happening, and became embarrassed.

  The head tripping we did was phenomenal. And the fucking became phantasmagorical. It was like pure acid, but mostly we were stoned on grass and truth, a winning combination every time. The house seemed to be filled with people every afternoon and evening, while we had the nights and mornings to ourselves. How dear this little madwoman became. I pictured us a George Burns and Grade Alien. It was a vacation, I didn’t care what happened. It was all dizzying and glorious. I stopped doing hatha yoga in the mornings, I went up to almost three packs of cigarettes a day, I became skinny. I slept no more than five hours a night. And I hadn’t felt so healthy, alive, and clear-headed in a very long time.

  Then the dam burst, and the energies which had been whirling through the cyclotron of my consciousness brimmed and spilled over, and suddenly it was as though the atomic pile had been activated, and the whole reactor was about to explode. It is difficult to describe such moments to those who have not experienced them. It is as though the mind becomes a vacuum and the entire universe, real and conceptual, comes roaring in in a single rush. It often results in unconsciousness, or panic; but sometimes it turns into a speed satori. All elements of fantasy and reality are kept in a constant dizzying rapid dance like swords flung in the air by a juggler. The situation becomes so complex, and the rate of events and their realization
s is so fast, that one must forget all about attempting to use skill to keep everything from crashing down; one goes into no-mind overdrive, and follows the Tao which, a pleasant stream a while back, had suddenly become a thundering cascade of white whipping water.

  The fucking we did the night the double all-nighter began was very bad. I couldn’t scrape up enough sperm to satisfy an artificial insemination bank. My cock was so sore that it hurt to get a full erection. The hole in the tip was red and chafed. But lust still bubbled in my belly, and I attempted to rouse my cock to yet another round.

  But, for about the twentieth time in my life, the organ rebelled. It said, “Fuck fucking, I’ve had enough.” Carol was ready to be turned on, but wasn’t really hot yet. We played a few desultory foreplay games and subsided. In all honesty, I wanted to sleep, but I saw Carol’s breasts lolling around on her chest, and her cunt making very small motions, and I began again. This time, as she lay, legs spread apart, knees up, I began trailing my fingers up and down the insides of her thighs, causing little shudders to run over her skin. I traced a meandering path to her cunt area, and tickled and teased all around the lips, especially in the most sensitive spot between the cunt lips and the crack which separates crotch from thigh, the place where the pubic hair is thinner and finer, where a kiss is felt reverberating through the entire body.

  Then gently and with increasing speed, I began spanking her cunt, tapping against it with my fingertips and cupping it with the palm of my hand, letting it fall out and into me. I pressed my knuckles against the tender blades of flesh and slowly inserted one finger into the opening. I kept it at the very bud, the pink closed door to the inner delights. Her cunt began sucking at my finger. I don’t know how she did it, but there was a definite engorging taking place, as though she were a fish gaping at food. I could feel the grainy passage contract, pull my finger inside, and then relax and open again. Each time she did it my finger was drawn in further, until I was reaching into her deepest part and riding out the small convulsions taking place in her pussy. She became very wet, and my finger made sloshing sounds as I brought it back and forth, in and out of that enchanting lower mouth.