Memoirs of a beatnik

by Di Prima, Diane

  Our feasts and festivals had been hearty peasant affairs, at which, ever since I was twelve, I had found myself dodging the amorous advances of a portly uncle, who was ostensibly teaching me the tango; at which I had had to stand for inspection while my grandmother and my mother's older sisters felt of my budding breasts, drawing them out with their fingers, or spanned my bottom with their hands, while commenting in Italian on my good and bad points as a future breeding animal. All this was done in a spirit of utter kindness and delight. No one of my thirty-four aunts or uncles had ever been heard to complain of their sex life or marriage—it would have been an inconceivable breach of etiquette—except for unfortunate Aunt Zelda, whose husband had simply left her, and who therefore could no longer pretend to be happy whether she was or not.

  And so it was with total amazement that, on my first visit to Tomi in her home, I heard a drunk Serge list the accumulated woes of his home and marriage. This first astonishment was followed by a second even greater one when, on opening my eyes the next morning on an Army cot in the living room, I found myself accepting from Serge a rather large martini, complete with olive. Everyone was flitting about in their nightclothes, everyone was drinking. I drank one martini, and then two. I was more than slightly tipsy and very hungry when Serge handed me a third.

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  "Oh, dear," I exclaimed, more or less involuntarily, "such a chore, swallowing them, one after the other!" This ingenuous remark endeared me to the entire company. I was "in."

  However, no one mentioned breakfast. After a while people dispersed to sketch, or fish, or sew; Serge settled down to some serious drinking; no one ate at all. And so the day went by.

  As many days had since. I had by now become used to the ways of the household, and thoroughly enjoyed my visits, as one might enjoy visiting the household of a family of fantastically well-bred Venusians. With the added complication that I was, had been, and (I was convinced) evermore would be, in love with one of the aforementioned girl-Venutians.

  So much in love that, sitting with her and O'Reilley in Arthur's Tavern in the West Village a few months before, I had willingly agreed to leave school and join them in getting an apartment, although I knew that they were currently in love with each other. So much in love that, at Tomi's request, I had broken off with Ivan without a word to him. Well, here I was, I had found an apartment, I would tell Tomi about it tomorrow, and a new scene, our scene, would start: bamboo and burlap, white walls, black furniture. Drawing tables for Tomi's commercial art, which was, theoretically at least, going to support us. Russel Wright dishes. Pep-peridge Farm bread and lambchops.

  So here indeed I definitely was, I reflected with as much gravity as I could muster after four drinks. I sat down to the dinner table with the entire Klebert crew, hearing the phonograph slow down and speed up, and watching the floor tilt in its accustomed fashion.

  Martha passed the burnt pot roast, one of her culinary feats, and we each took one thin slice. William, Tomi's fourteen-year-old brother ("Sweet William" they usually called him) passed the instant mashed potatoes. Serge poured everyone some bourbon on the rocks, and "Aunt Helen," Serge's sister, stuck a rhinestone hatpin into her chignon.

  It was all I could do to keep from bursting into shouts of delight. I stepped on Tomi's foot under the table and got an "I love you" poke in the shins in response, while she choked on her salad.

  "What are we doing tomorrow?" asked Sweet William, through a thick blob of potato.

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  "I thought we might take the boat out," said Serge, "and have a picnic on the island."

  Martha groaned and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, but said nothing.

  Aunt Helen fairly chortled with joy: "Wonderful! I heard the weather report, and there are storm warnings for Long Island Sound. It should be a marvelous trip!" Her bridgework gleamed in the indirect lighting and her chignon bobbed with excitement.

  After supper Helen, who was some kind of a witch, offered to read the Tarot for me. Martha had gone back to her knitting and Serge, having finished the bourbon, had switched to cognac. I cut the cards and Tomi and William and I watched while she laid them out with some ceremony.

  "Martha," said Tomi, on whom the occult weighed heavily, and who was, therefore, desirous of breaking the spell, "can we afford to get me another basic black at Bonwit's?"

  There it was again, the New Yorker, complete with alliteration. A quick glance at Tomi told me she was perfectly serious.

  "We can afford," Martha grated with more asperity than usual, her eyes on the depleted cognac bottle, "to get you a basic black loincloth. That's all."

  Charles Addams, I thought, that's what it all reminds me of. I turned back to Helen. She was gazing at the cards in horror. Even her eyeglasses quivered.

  "Don't ask me to read this, darling!" she cried, laying a pitying hand on my arm, and fixing awestruck eyes on me. "I cannot tell you what I see."

  "OK," I said, suspecting a shuck.

  Serge was lying on the rug at Martha's feet next to the dog.

  "Martha, Martha, lovely Martha. Lovely Martha, Martha, Martha," he intoned again and again. Martha merely pursed her lips and went on knitting.

  He got up unsteadily and bent over her, reeking no doubt of alcohol, and made as if to kiss her. She eluded him with practiced skill and got up to poke the fire. Suddenly he straightened, a gleam came into his eyes, and he rushed out of the house, picking up the shotgun that stood by the door on his way.

  Dead silence settled on the house. Martha sat down and went on with her knitting. Helen continued to pick up the Tarot cards

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  and put them back in the deck. Tomi sat still and very white, watching her.

  A sharp retort and then another. The gun had been fired. The dog stood up and made for the door, growling low in his throat. Martha put down her knitting.

  Tomi rushed to her. "Don't go out there!" she cried.

  Martha looked horrified. The idea of going out there had never occurred to her.

  Helen went instead, and a moment later Serge lurched back into the room, putting his hand through a glass doorpane as he did so. His only injury. He had "missed" twice with the gun—probably fired it into the air.

  And then at last, Martha stirred. She stood up. She moved with flat, funereal step into the kitchen. She emerged with a sponge and began to follow Serge as he wandered and ranted, mopping up the blood that dripped from his cut hand. She did not look once at Serge, or at any of the rest of us, but simply at her floor, and she followed him, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, from room to room.

  "Something should be done about that cut," said Helen, turning to me as presumably the only other sane one in the house. (Sweet William had by then disappeared. He was probably hiding under his bed—his favorite refuge in times of stress. And Tomi still sat at the card table, immobile and white as a sheet.)

  "It is bleeding rather heavily," I replied as tritely as possible. I was fighting a desire to giggle.

  "Do you think you could-?"

  I shook my head gravely, trying to seem heavy with responsibility.

  "He'll never hold still for it," I answered. "Better wait till he quiets down."

  Serge was spouting some rhetoric about how badly he was wounded, but how he would give his life for "lovely Martha." He flung his arms about as he shouted, spattering blood on the walls.

  At last he wandered into the kitchen, tripped over the ironing board, and fell on the floor beside the dishwasher. I seized the opportunity and with one flying leap landed on his chest, where I sat firmly.

  "Yes, Serge," I said, as I seized the injured hand and held it aloft for Helen to bandage, "you certainly are very brave. No one

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  could ask for more. But you must rest. Lovely Martha is crying to see how you've worn yourself out."

  Martha made a grimace and studied her dirty sponge.

  "You must rest, Serge," I continued, while Helen cut ad
hesive tape efficiently, "because tomorrow. . . " but he was by then snoring on the floor.

  Martha contemplated him coldly for a moment, then stepped over him and rinsed out her sponge at the kitchen sink.

  I got off him gingerly, a little disappointed that my performance had been so abruptly curtailed. I felt tired.

  Helen pour four cognacs thoughtfully. "Well," she said, "well, well, well. I'm certainly glad he didn't hurt himself."

  Tomi wasn't in the living room. I took my cognac in one hand and hers in the other and went off in search of her.

  She wasn't in her room either, but as I started back down the hall I heard low but unmistakably amorous sounds coming from William's room. I put my ear to the door.

  "Slow now, ohhh, slow, Sweet William, yes, like that. . . Oh, god."

  Tomi had no doubt gone in search of her upset brother and was even now restoring his composure of mind. I wondered if she had managed to lure him out from under the bed, or if they were at that very moment sandwiched between floor and bedspring.

  Overcoming a momentary scruple, I put my eye to the keyhole.

  Tomi was lying flat on her back, her feet planted firmly on the rug, her buttocks slightly raised, her knees wide apart so as to spring the opening between her legs. William had raised himself slightly on his arms and was working away earnestly, a frown of concentration steadily creasing his forehead. He looked like an overgrown and perturbed kewpie doll. As I watched, his movements became short and jerky, his habitually sleepy eyes opened wide as if with shock, and he came in a series of harsh, spastic thrusts.

  Tomi almost literally melted into the rug, moaning in that deep tone I knew so well, which she tried ineffectually to choke off for fear of being overheard, while her hands clawed at the olive-drab wall-to-wall carpet. Then her eyes rolled up, her back arched off the carpet, a sound like a growl escaped her; she shuddered and lay still.

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  I drank her cognac and then my own. I could hear Martha and Helen chattering away in the living room. Then I heard Tomi's voice saying, "You dumb little freak!" and bent to take another look at the Elizabethan drama which was playing itself out in proper Darien.

  Sweet William had his sister by the ankles, and as I looked he pulled her, face downwards, toward him across the rug, spreading her legs on either side of his as he did so, and forcing his short, thick cock into her asshole. He held her pinned by the shoulders while she ground her face against the rug to keep from screaming with pain.

  The muscles in his skinny arms stood out like cords as he held her pinned to the floor, pumping savagely and soundlessly, with a kind of grim determination while she writhed in agony. His orgasm was mercifully as quick as it was violent. He lay against her briefly, then stood up, leaving her lying on the rug.

  I could hear the creak of the bed as he sat down on it, could hear him say, "I am a freak. That's what it's all about. Three years we've been doing it your way." (Three years! I thought. William was just fifteen last month.) "I never fucked you in the ass before, but that's what I like and when you come in here again that's what we're doing. Only let me tell you"—sneering now—"Uncle Horace sure does it better."

  Tomi didn't answer. She was simply lying, very white and very still, on the olive-drab carpet.

  My sight was blurry, and all I wanted to do was sleep; I figured I was probably drunk. I went back to the living room and let myself be put to bed by Martha, who saw to it that I had the guest bedroom next to her, on the other side of the house from Tomi and Sweet William.

  April Concluded

  I remembered the warm, sleepy days of last Spring: Spring on a college campus just a year ago, where all of us had been gathered together, working out the various entanglements we had invented in order to elude the great grinning demon of boredom. I had slowly introduced the people of my adolescent New York City world to the Pennsylvania college scene: plump, dark, beautiful Eva from the West Indies, with her knowing smile and her cryptic oracular statements; pale, angular Susan O'Reilley, with her sudden accesses of moodiness, her beautiful voice, her pouting, cynical mouth and innocent baby-blue eyes; and the incredibly vital, electrifying Martine, known to her friends as Petra—a veritable gold mine of the surreal and astounding in action. Petra and Tomi had become buddies at once; the bizarre in Tomi's life appealing to Petra's Spanish desire for the dramatic, the vividly colored. Eva had joined in our highly complex love-dance with her accustomed ironic grace—and Tomi and O'Reilley had fallen in love.

  I recalled the week last summer spent in a cabin on the Massachusetts coast that belonged to Lee's family. We had taken the all-night "milk train" from New York to Boston, arriving in South Station at dawn, eating English muffins and coffee at the Hayes-Bickford cafeteria in the dull pink light, and then catching a bus to the coast. We got there about nine, left our suitcases in the cabin, and went immediately to the beach, eager as one always is to experience the sea.

  The sea was slow and sullen, with low, grey sand dunes and no surf. The tide was out and there were mussels on the rocks, and after a halfhearted attempt to trudge across the muddy flats to the water, we gave up and turned to the more profitable business of gathering mussels. We piled a great stack of them onto a blanket and, the beach being deserted, stripped to the skin and stretched out on the sand to get as much as we could from the lukewarm New England sun. I looked over all of us with some appreciation before I lay down, taking in the muted picture we made: the curves of our bodies fitting into the lines of the dunes, the varied pinks and browns of our flesh warm against the dull sand.

  It was like being in limbo: the sluggish sea and the flat light, and I think it weighed heavily on all of us, although at the time we were

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  unaware of it, determined as each of us was to "enjoy" the "beach." At any rate, early in the afternoon the wind came up and we seized the excuse to don our bathing suits and drag our blanket of mussels back to the cabin.

  It was while she was showering in the tiny bathroom off the kitchen that Mara discovered a tick on her shoulder. There had probably been ticks in the dunes we decided, and we all gathered in the large living room in front of the fireplace to examine each other. At first we stuck rather closely to the task at hand, our bodies and the moving shadows that the firelight threw making a series of impressionistic paintings of the room.

  I was examining Petra, passing my hands with great pleasure over the back of her neck and the skin behind her ears, then over her shoulders and back, feeling for the lumps that would indicate the presence of ticks. Mara was meanwhile going over my body. I had turned slightly toward her, and she, lifting one of my heavy breasts with one hand, was feeling under it with the other. As I turned I caught sight of Tomi and O'Reilley: Tomi's mouth was on one of Susan's small, pointed breasts, completely encompassing it, and her arms were around her waist, her hands clutching the two mounds of her ass. Susan's hands rested lightly on Tomi's shoulders, her head was thrown back in pleasure, her eyes shut and her mouth slightly open.

  Then a warm, full mouth closed over mine, cascades of red-gold hair surrounded me, I was buried in a cloud of soft, flowery perfume. Matilda was kissing me, her arms about both me and Petra, her large, white, perfumed body pressing against the two of us. She drew back for a moment, looking into my eyes with a radiant and irrepressible smile.

  "Little One," she whispered, "Oh, Little One!"-and we went down on the rug together, all three of us.

  I lay on my side, my hand between Matilda's large, beautiful thighs, playing with her big clit. It felt like a bud, a perfect, closed rosebud, as it got larger and harder under my fingers. Petra lay face downwards, her head on my thighs. She was nipping at the skin, the hollow place formed by the long muscles in my legs. I turned to look at Matilda who was curled around us both like a large crescent moon, while her mouth between Petra's legs licked

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  at cunt and asshole. Petra wrapped her legs around Mat
ilda's head. With my head turned to the side, I tongued and bit softly at Petra's flank, at Matilda's soft hands as they clawed her sides.

  My legs fell open like a sigh, and with a rush of pleasure and relief I felt Petra's strong mouth against my cunt, her warm wetness meeting my own in the gentlest and most subtle of caresses. Then her tongue came out and began playing with my clit, and I shivered and arched in pleasure as I bit down on her hips and plunged my hand deep into Matilda's moist cunt with its soft, finespun hair like red alchemic gold.

  She was crooning, a low, pulsing sound deep in her throat playing a subtle counterpoint to Petra's deep moans. I threw my legs wider apart and turned my pelvis slightly to one side to meet Petra's mouth. As I moved, I felt Susan's cool trembling flesh against my feet. I guessed that she was still in Tomi's arms. Above my head and cut off from my sight by the wall of Matilda's body, I could hear Eva gasping as Mara murmured her name over and over. There was a huge cloud of flesh and firelight, of loving sound and soft touch, and I was floating in it. I let go. I could feel myself melting.

  Explosions of lightning started in the small of my back, piercing my abdomen and shooting into my groin like liquid fire. Against my cheek Petra shuddered and came like a great, alien mammal, and my hand in Matilda's cunt ached as it was alternately squeezed by her thighs and ground by the frantic, circular movements of her pussy. The slow, heavy rhythm of Petra's orgasm cut me to the quick, and as the walls of my vagina trembled and let go in an exquisite flood of pleasure, I could hear Tomi's shout of ecstasy and her deep sobs.

  I did not move for a long time. The flickering light on the ceiling slowly came back into focus. Matilda's head was on my chest, she was sucking at my breast, I could smell Petra's shit in her hair. My hand on the small of her back was sticky with her juice. Petra, asleep or blacked out, had flung herself aside, the nipples of her large breasts puckered and pointing at the ceiling, her closed eyes accented with splotches of dark shadow and a bright red flush like rouge on her high cheekbones.