The Gentle Degenerates (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  I got up and hung over her, supported by one hand, balancing on my toes, and brought my cock up to her cunt. I placed it right next to the finger still moving inside her, and as I pulled my finger out, I slipped my cock in. To use the vernacular, it was all peaches and cream. Sweet salvation of pussy! Creamy deliciousness of soulful cunt! Oh beautiful ladychild of the eternal randiness! I cupped her cheeks in my hands, and then the changes began.

  The first thought that came to mind was Carol’s story that she had been a hooker for a night, and on another occasion had been used and beaten up by a pimp. I noticed now, as she fucked, that she had only put her right leg around my left leg, and was pushing her other hip up and down. It became obvious that she was not only a hooker, but that she hooked to the right! I let the political implications of that pass, and concentrated on the sociology of the phenomenon.

  It gave her great control over her movements. One leg was braced against the wall, while the other served as a lever. The weight being lifted was her right hip, and the fulcrum was her cunt. But it was not a stationary fulcrum; it moved and surged, it pleased and demanded. She was able to move her cunt onto my cock from an infinity of directions, and then have it penetrate as deeply or lightly as she wanted. She could ripple the inside of her vagina, and would shift the angle of her pelvis to send me thrusting into different levels of heat at the core of her cunt.

  I began to indulge in the prostitute fantasy, treating her as an object, as a person who had no essential worth except in terms of her masochism and passion. I plied both sides of that psychic street. And of course, she went wild behind it. In acting the way I was, I allowed her to take her own trip fully. There was no way of knowing whether her fantasy reciprocated mine, for that happens quite often. But our bodies moved in perfect harmony, and that’s what seemed of most importance.

  Then, she surged up, brought her entire cunt up off the bed, and offered it wholly to my penetrating, ravaging cock. I fucked straight into her. And she began to writhe, to grip my cock with that churning tunnel, and demand the sperm from it. She was sucking me off with her pussy, insisting that I come in her symbolic mouth (or is a mouth a symbolic cunt?). At just that moment, my faithful tool went soft. The pressure was too much for even its brave heart, and it collapsed into half its erect size. Carol didn’t seem to notice. At this point, as long as there was minimal penetration, the feeling of pubic bone hitting clitoris, and the thrashing of a male body above her, she could climb her own stairs to orgasm. But as she grew in heat and intensity, I shrank from her need. I went from being the dominant thrusting force to a shrinking and meek failure. Impotence had struck again!

  Paradoxically, at that moment I went into Reichian spasms, the vegetative energy making my spine ripple and my pelvis shudder rapidly. I went with the flow and felt myself bucking in her arms and fucking her cunt with spontaneous movements. She did something very rare for her; she threw her legs into the air and let me have the full view of her upturned exposed pink twat, begging me to penetrate it right to the pit. And I had nothing to effect the penetration with.

  I cursed myself and just sank into her arms, spent. She went through rapid changes and then relaxed, letting me drift into her. If I had had any sense at that point, I would have just slipped into sleep. But I felt as though I had some kind of debt to pay, some obscure bond I had to meet. And so I got off her, lay by her side, and began fondling her breasts. My action was so contrived, so mechanical and unfeeling, that she was immediately turned off to it. I hit the panic button; the one thing I had been able to count on with Carol was the fact that I could turn her on at will, any time. And now even that was failing. It should be clear that by this time perspective had fled over the horizon of anxiety.

  I lay back, and silently begged her to go down on me. But I suppose the astral plane was socked in with fog and she didn’t respond. So I subsided, and we lay there a long time. Slowly she began massaging my thighs, working her hand up to my hips, across my belly, and down into my pubic hair. She worked all the way to the base of my cock, stopped, and removed her hand. She repeated the cycle a dozen times, each time grabbing the cock for longer periods of time. It was maddening. She was toying with me and my head was in a place where I could see it was real. I didn’t have the energy to direct her in any way. I could only lie there and hope she would be good to me. After the last time around, there was a long, long silence, and then, decisively, she moved her mouth down to my cock. I smiled with relief, and awaited the blow job with tingling anticipation. The wet warm engulfment took the head of my cock into itself, and I felt myself melting into the sensations. She worked as though her mouth were filled with glue. It was a slowly, sticky kind of cocksucking, and totally delicious.

  I let her suck me like that for what seemed almost a half hour, enjoying the sight of her lips stretched over the hard flesh pole, and the way her ass moved as she sucked, and the tickling of her fingers at my balls. Finally, when I sensed her tiring of it, I brought her up to me, turned her over, and penetrated again into her cunt.

  This time she was cold to me. She turned her face to the side. And her cunt moved mechanically, ruthlessly. I let her vent her rage, riding out the rough storm, and when she began to become exhausted, I picked up her rhythm and carried it for her. This set off the spark which triggered the explosion. We exchanged roles back and forth a number of times, and then I began kissing her cheeks, pulling at them with my lips to bring her mouth around. She resisted, and suddenly I remembered the story that whores would never let you kiss them on the lips. My experience had been almost exclusively with Japanese whores, so I didn’t know whether the story was statistically correct or an apocryphal myth. But my imagination cared not at all for such sophistries. What would it be like to have a whore give up her mouth? I wondered. It would be a kind of offering of virginity.

  I moved her face to face mine. She squeezed her eyes shut and refused to let her lips get soft. I lowered my mouth to hers and began kissing her gently. At first, she did not respond, but then began to acknowledge the kisses, and then to return them. Her lips parted and she moaned, a short gasping sound. Then I brought my cock into focus, screwing it into her in a helical swirl. Her cunt and entire pelvis shifted around the motion, like water in a balloon which is jiggled from below.

  The action at our mouths and the action at our groins conjoined, and suddenly we were fucking in both places at once. What happened in her cunt was reflected by her tongue, and what happened to her lips found an echo in her cunt. Soon we were exchanging deep, passionate kisses, groaning and slobbering over one another, and then pulling back to let our mouths barely touch so that our breaths could commingle.

  She moved her body faster, now really hitting her cunt into me. Her mouth was totally wanton, holding nothing back, letting itself take its full trip. We blended, and we headed toward climax. There was no hesitation now, no fear. This was the home stretch and we were running neck and neck, running well. Oddly, it was as though we could already see the finish line we were heading toward. And while this robbed the act of its mystery, it infused it with an equally powerful intelligence.

  I recalled Jim Morrison’s words, “This is the end, beautiful friend . . . no safety or surprise, the end . . . I’ll never look into your eyes again.” Orgasm was simply that point on the matrix where our curves crossed and we died to ourselves and one another. It was a phase to be gone through and, phenomenologically, it was merely of a different texture from other experiences, but not more significant. I had pushed objectivity to the point where even orgasm paled beneath my glance. Or was I being merely pathological? I remembered Rudhyar’s description of the fully evolved Scorpio, who is able “even when the flame burns most intensely, to remember that he is merely the keeper of that flame, and is not to be consumed by it.” With a groan, romanticism died within me, and I felt an infinite pang at its demise through exposure.

  The climax was, so to speak, anticlimactic.

&nb
sp; And immediately afterwards I was disgusted with myself. I had done something wrong, following Hemingway’s dictum that a moral act is one you feel good after. Then the despair hit, and I let everything go. For a brief instant I felt peacefully dead. At last and of course, this was what I had been dreading all my life, and desperately seeking: the quietness of the grave. And then I came out of it to the game-world, but refreshed, stronger, and clearer.

  Then the trip began. It was as though we were tied to each other. We had no obvious reason to be with one another physically, but neither of us could stand to have the other out of sight for more than a few minutes. We couldn’t sleep, for fear we would lose one another. When I had to leave to buy cigarettes, she came with me. We went for a walk through the East Village, where I kept a complete control over her, refusing to let her camp it up on the street. “You’re walking with me now,” I said, “and you’d better behave. You’re acting like you’re doped. That’s merely an affectation.” She looked at me with resentful admiration. Then I began to see her clearly, perceiving her essence and how her personality manifested itself around it. I saw all the history of her life and of her people. Once, when I had asked her why she felt doomed to self-destruction, she said: “I made up my mind to make myself as happy as possible wherever I am, and I just let myself go where fate takes me. I am the Fates.”

  “That’s absurd,” I said. “No, it’s Jewish,” she answered, and in a stroke the entire psychic history of the Jews came glaring home in utter clarity. I looked at her again, this broken human being of twenty-one, scarred by her parents’ private traumas and carrying the collective guilt of over four thousand years; this child with her stubborn ways and winning wiles; this woman who let herself be beaten and degraded, and yet through it all showed a heartbreaking warmth and delightful intelligence. She was at once a whore and a mother, a sprite and a fool, a lover and a murderer. She was, in short, a typical woman. The only difference was that she lived all her contradictions fully, accepted the irony of a dualistic version and learning to live in living paradox.

  We ran into the East Village scene, that melange of pitiful humanity and engrossing metatheatre. At one spot we ran across an old man who had signs pinned to his shirt, reading: “It’s not Marxism, Christianity, or Astrology. Woman dominates.” On his ass he had a sign which said: “Master of women.” Next to him was one of those faded, bearded, young-old men who prowl the streets of the Village digging everything with a sweet sadness and insight. The old man was saying, “There’s seven levels of women. Most men marry those from one to four. The seventh level has the real dominators. The movie actresses.” His example seemed misplaced, but the metaphysics interested me. I decided to question his acuity. “What would you say she is?” I asked, pointing to Carol. He appraised her with a glance and said, “Oh, she’s a five or six.” Instantly I knew he was right. “Thanks,” I said. “That’s right on.” And I shook his hand and left.

  We walked down second avenue, past Ratner’s, that symbol of decaying Jewish gentility, still gallantly serving Old World food with European waiters to a new army of longhairs and odd types, all with perfect nonchalance and sophistication laced with a mammoth world-weariness. The black cats and Puerto Ricans watched Carol as she passed, her bare legs flashing under her short skirt. Her bra-less breasts jiggled as she walked, and her face had that vacant nodding look of the junkie. I remembered once before fucking she had said, “Roll a joint. Give me a fix first, and then fuck me.” I flashed her five years from now, syphilitic and mindless, prey to whatever brutality wished to pluck her from her Opheliaesque trance to ravish her. I was witnessing the beginning stages of the total degradation of a human being.

  I tried to talk to her, to make her see her life from this viewpoint, this very real possibility. But interpretations given too soon are not heard; their truth may be realized years later, but only when the person is ready for them. The rap went on despite all my intuition. We had moved from an acid high to a speed trip.

  Rap rap rap rap rap. It sounds like someone knocking at the door, and that is what it is . . . words being machine-gunned at the door of the mind, attempting to splinter the wood and penetrate to the inside. But their own rapidity, and their blocking of all feedback, are the very reasons they do not register.

  We ate at the Odessa, walked through Tompkins Square Park, and dug on the vivacity of the city, the mixing races and nationalities and ages. Raving tattered madmen standing next to dealers standing next to cops standing next to Ukrainian grandfathers who are watching innocent children playing in the grass. Oh, what a spectacle mankind was at that moment; its entire drama lay etched in the scene before my eyes.

  We got back, still tied to each other, wanting to rip away, but we were on a strange energy level, and we talked for the next thirty-six hours. We read to one another from our favorite books; we played music from all ages and nations; we made mobiles from telephone wire; we took baths; we fucked; we began putting our cigarettes out on the floor; forgetting to eat, forgetting to look or listen, just caught up in the kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of our turbulent inner lives.

  At the end of that time, I seemed suddenly to snap to. I looked up with all the surprise of a man coming out of unconsciousness and waking up in a strange room. I saw this nude body across the floor, and it was attached to a strange face. It was Carol, but stripped of all the images I had plastered on her during two weeks. I saw her as fresh as on the first night I met her, but now I saw with the eyes of experience made rich with the suffering of sharing her pain and joy. Tears rolled down my eyes, for I knew in an instant that I would have to leave her. I could not sustain what would be necessary to help her out of her morass. She would drag me into her youthful insanity.

  I had learned much from her, and she from me. We had not abused one another. And the pain of seeing a dream disappear was compensated for by the warmth of remembering the life we had so intimately shared for a few brief weeks. I looked at her. “I don’t want to live with you,” I said. She began to say something, and then stopped herself. “All right,” she said. And a light went out somewhere in the universe, and love covered its face in the veils of sorrow.

  fourteen.

  All up and down Third Avenue the casualties of our civilization hobbled through their days, the pimps and whores, the bums and drunks, the violent blacks seeking prey, and the police who prowl the streets like game wardens in a preserve for dangerous animals. I looked down at them from my window and for a moment saw the entire thing as a scene from some grotesque drama. In one of the hallways a beautiful girl with a trim but full body stood waiting a score. I felt a great distance from her, removed in time and space and affinity.

  Then the thought of Carol disrupted my mind. She had left two days earlier, to crash with some friends who were part of the international gang of students and academic drifters which covers the globe like a thin web. I felt a great sorrow as she went, glad to have her troubles out of my immediate vicinity, but wondering whether she would be all right in this life. I wondered what it would be like to be passing Third Avenue one day and see Carol standing in a hallway like the girl across the street. The woman standing there now must have a man somewhere for whom she is special, for whom her body is sacred. Or maybe because she never knew such a man (or woman), she was able to treat her flesh as an item for the marketplace. I shuddered. In a flash the mask of whore dropped from her face and she was simply a person, like myself, like anyone, but now leaning against a building and ready to expose the deepest part of her body, the spot where love meets lust to produce life, to any gawking, leering, hard-staring creep who might pass by.

  And what was there to be done? Children died daily of starvation and napalm. Entire peoples were enslaved. War machinery polluted the earth and a cloud of poison gas was accumulating over the entire planet. In some places, outright slavery still flourished, while everywhere one or another form of imperialism reduced most of mankind to mindless servitor
s. In the face of that, of what significance was a young whore peddling her pussy on Third Avenue?

  In a flash, embodied in that girl, the whole of the pain of the species manifested itself. Unnatural, the human race had, as an organism, gone collectively insane. Trillions of dollars had been spent on armaments to protect us from one another, when all we need to do is to share what is available. The scene had become so bad that people were already splitting for the moon, bringing, of course, their poisons and filth with them.

  It was very difficult to see Carol leave. In a very short time I had grown very close to her. Yet, as so often happens, the rush of intimacy moved too quickly and reversed itself, at which point we were left to confront one another as strangers. The last time we fucked summed up the complete relationship. In the dark moaning movement of our bodies and eyes, in the touch and dance of that most deep wordless communion, everything was clear. Yet when she walked out the door, her face flushed, her knit dress outlining the curves of her buttocks and the pert bulge of her nipples, the woman I had been with in bed seemed like a totally different creature. I saw myself as one of the thousands of men who might look at Carol as she walked down the street. I too would be captivated by the inviting ass, the lush breasts, the slightly sluttish gleam of her eyes. She would make a momentary impression, and I would pass by, forgetting her immediately.