by Marco Vassi
The joy of fucking lies only secondarily in ejaculation orgasm. Rather it is in the beauty of the woman’s face when it melts and becomes unfamiliar, when she ceases to have a feature, and becomes the embodiment of mystery, the edge of knowing. In that space, she shows her single purest gesture, the actual curve of her soul, and one can see her in the totality of her shining complex self, radiant in admission of all that she is.
Essential human intelligence lies for me in the gleam of awareness in the eyes of one who is at the point of surrendering to a flow of passion. It has nothing to do with the patriarchal insanity over achievement. It is the slightest of pressures, the most delicate of textures.
All day long a single peace pervaded the house. Francis and Bertha were resting on the sand; Donna was off on one of her baroque cruises, tracking down the most blatant oddities of the Island’s social fare. Thoughts swept in and out of my mind like the waves whose voice never ceased, not even for a second. Released from the need to use thought for any technological activity, I saw the substance of thought as light and airy. Great shimmering castles of fantasy proliferated before my inner eye. I was, then, master of all thought forms. Architecture flowed freely. Entire universes of discourse were caught and understood and dispensed in microseconds of chronological time. The computer sang.
I stepped into the land of the ideal, without for a moment losing the reality of the physical world of which I knew myself to be but a brief manifestation, me and all my fancy thoughts. The elusive face of ultimate reality smiled at me from behind the veils of the last few words still sawing wood in my brain. And then, at a stroke, I was cut loose. Past all conceptual boundaries, past all modes and moods, and into the embrace of pure being.
Francis and Bertha walked in. “Hey man, you look stoned,” he said.
“You know, whenever I think I’ve got it, that’s when I don’t.”
“It’s a long way to Tipperary,” he said.
I went down to the beach. It occurred to me that the thing which made Francis so valuable a friend was that he knew that any given state is that state, and only a fool wonders which label to apply to it. Enlightened or stoned? You can tell by the degree to which the person is trying to figure it out.
As I stepped onto the sand, paranoia closed over me like a giant clam shell. The people on the shore were all alien. Something was wrong with them, unspeakably wrong. I could find no rationalization. To my horror, someone smiled at me. I smiled back. And then I was giggling uncontrollably. The hilarity of it was overwhelming. “They’ll think I’m crazy,” I thought.
I went back to the house. Some people had arrived, and as I walked in the door they began speaking to me, making noises with their mouths, hitting me with their words. With a great tearing of gears I shifted levels and entered the world of question and answer. I found myself holding my mind in a knot, wishing over and over again that Lucinda would return early.
V
She came in on the eight o’clock ferry. We embraced and held on to one another for a long while. Our needs this time were in absolute synchrony.
The house was in pandemonium. All of the groupers had arrived for the weekend, and with guests, some thirteen people plus dogs were milling around the living room and kitchen. Everyone was smiling and polite, but the level of irritation was high. Donna was at the phone in the corner of the room, watching the crowd with calculating eyes.
“That bastard is having a party tonight,” she shouted at me as Lucinda and I walked in.
“Who?” I said, exaggerating the word with my lips so she could see what I was saying from across the noisy room.
“That millionaire bastard on the corner. And the fucker hasn’t invited me.” She spoke into the phone and hung up. “I was over there this afternoon,” she said, walking toward us. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “In that scummy swimming pool of his. And I was coming up the ladder when he swam past and grabbed my ass. I turned around. ‘I sure would like to eat you,’ he said. So I told him to open his mouth, I had to take a shit anyway.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t invite you to the party either.”
“The summer’s not over yet,” she said. “I’ll fix him.”
Donna was one of the few consciously realized paranoids I had ever met. Her entire approach toward other people was based on a meter which registered somewhere around her solar plexus. It had three indications on it: friend, neutral, and enemy. “You have to trust your instinct,” she said at least five times a day. “You know when you can’t trust someone. You can tell it in the first flash. Always go by that. Get him before he gets you.”
“Do you want to eat?” Lucinda asked.
“Why don’t you throw in with us?” This from Donna who had no trouble with any change of subject. “It’ll be in about an hour. We have shrimp.”
“Then let’s go fuck first,” I said to Lucinda.
She smiled. Her eyes were clear and warm. The purple bruise on the spot where I had hit her had faded, and she looked like a cover for a Billie Holiday album.
“You have a good time with the kids?” I asked.
“It was all right. They said that if I had a boy friend they wouldn’t want to talk to him.”
“Terrific,” I said.
“I went to visit an old friend, and talked to her about us. She’s forty-five and very wise. She said that you’ll have to kill me. That either I’ll get out of your space or you’ll kill me.”
“Go join Women’s Lib,” I said. “Not the bra corps agitating for higher pay. But the ones who are trying to find out what psychological dependence is all about. Get free.”
But, as almost always, my words were the prelude to a seduction. And soon we were on the bed, kissing and holding. Our clothes got shrugged and tugged off. And for a while we fucked very tenderly, remembering each other, being gentle with one another. Then it was as though some trigger were pulled. Her legs shot up and I plunged deep into her cunt, and we were grunting and groaning like drunken wrestlers. She wrapped her calves around my thighs and rode hard and fast until she came. Her orgasm had the abrupt quality of the way in which a man will flick a cigarette butt into the street. I waited until her vibrations fell off, and then continued my movement inside her until I reached a climax.
“We’ve never come together,” she said.
“Well, we’re living in a fascist country. What can you expect?”
We lay quiet for a while, enjoying the silence which stretched for great distances around the room. “I got arrested earlier tonight,” I said. “For riding a bicycle in Ocean Beach. It cost me fifteen dollars to bail out the bike and I have to go for a hearing tomorrow. It was the old cop. The sergeant. He came scooting down the path on his three-wheel scooter and nabbed me just as I crossed the line into Seaview. It was ridiculous. You should have seen him, old enough to be a grandfather, dressed in that silly blue suit, chasing people on bicycles.”
“Where were you going?”
“I was coming bacK from buying some grass. So he escorted me all the way back to the station, and I waited right next to the fucking jail for an hour while some automaton got ready to make out a ticket, and all the while I’ve got two ounces in my pocket.”
I lit a cigarette. I was now feeling the anger I had laughed off earlier in the day. “I really wanted to kick his teeth in.”
“But he had a gun,” Lucinda said.
“Right. He had a gun.” I let the scene come together in my mind. “And when I came out of that cracker box they use for a station, a lady came up to me and started laying a rap on my head. ‘Isn’t it a shame?’ she kept saying. And another guy came up and before I knew it we had a political rally going, denouncing the police and the courts, fists waving in the air. A pack of frightened middle-class wage slaves and one crazy on Fire Island shouting against rule by authority. It was incredibly trivial and glorious all at once. And people think they’ll rec
ognize fascism when the cops start talking German. It’s here. America is a reform school.”
“What are you going to do at the trial?” she asked.
“Make a speech questioning the foundation of American law and the premises of western civilization.”
Lucinda yawned. “Let’s see if Donna has dinner ready,” she said.
She went toward the closet to get a dress. “You’ll see,” I said. “One day you’ll wake up and discover that you haven’t had an original thought, or an unconditioned emotion, or a spontaneous action for a long time. You will have become a robot, a walking typewriter ribbon for government and industry and the military to use in any fucking way they want. And they will smile as they dig our graves. And the worst part is that they won’t be any more intelligent than the billions of people they control; merely more crucial.
“Do you think we’re having such a hard time just because we’re maladjusted individuals? The whole culture is sick at its core. So distorted that there is no way to even remember what a healthy human being is like. No wonder our fucking is so mechanical. The ultimate American sexual scene will come when jailors give acid to chicks in concentration camps, and watch them go down in a final burst of masochistic self-degradation to suck their cocks, while they hold a pistol barrel to their temples and watch the tears of relief spring from their eyes.”
Lucinda turned and there were tears in her eyes. “And what about the baby?” she said.
I rocked with the emotion that hurtled between us. I hung my head. “That’s the real question, isn’t it? Not whether we get our rocks off together.”
It was to be a boy. We had both flashed on that simultaneously one night. And we were going to call him Dante G. He could fill in the middle initial with any number of names he wanted at different times in his life, a mobile nomenclature. I desired to see him born, yet would take no responsibility for his upbringing. He would need food and shelter and fondling; he would need a certain stability to keep from being swept away by the winds of thought and circumstance. But I could barely manage such essentials for myself, and Lucinda resented the impositions introduced by a helpless infant. She most certainly did not want to be burdened with its care if I were not going to be around to help. We did not have a means in our culture by which a child could grow up without being a drag much of the time, and so it might be better to spare everyone concerned the hassle of dealing with an odious situation.
Except that such reasoning shrivelled before the fact of the foetus who by then had both overall shape and fingernails.
There is the classic scene in which the fond parents are lying in bed reading. Suddenly, the wife turns to the husband and says, “It’s kicking, here, feel it,” and she places his hand on her belly. But to have felt that child moving in Lucinda’s stomach would have driven me mad.
I wondered whether I would ever break through the walls of ego involvement without losing my individuality? And why did I hold this individuality in such high esteem anyway? It became an academic question when I realized that I had no power to shape my life in any meaningful sense. I could only remain alert and attempt to stay out of the way of my natural unfolding. And if that happened to be in the direction of fey expectations, what was I to do? I found myself taking refuge in habit, or decadence. The sexual act itself was becoming a chore from which I could not free myself. I had begun to lose my passion, and was beginning to stoke the fires of hatred in myself in order to feel something strongly enough to have a sense of being alive. But hate leads to fear, which merges into self-pity. And to expiate, once again I would use my cock as a club to punish Lucinda’s cunt for daring to introduce new life into the world, and she would allow herself to sink deep into guilt.
The one advantage homosexual sex seemed to have over all this was that it took place between people who had a more precise understanding of one another’s desperation. 1 have punished women, and meant it; I have punished men, but never forgotten that it was theatre. For me, the man who slaps my face is helping me to get my scene together; the woman who rakes my back wants literally to destroy me.
Desire turns appreciation into exploitation, which destroys the sensitivity of perception. And desire lives in a cave, and rarely sees the stars.
When Lucinda and I began living together, she closed off all the other avenues of her life. She stopped doing her photography (“I dig you so much that I don’t even want to look at my cameras anymore.”) and gave up all her lovers (“You’re all I need, baby.”) and in general acted as though all the problems of her life had neatly been solved by my arrival. I understood that she was, as we all are, the victim of historical conditioning, but that didn’t make her any easier to live with. In order to have my own freedom, it was imperative that she have hers, even to the point of fucking other men. I was willing to accept the pain of jealousy in order to escape the grey suffocation of exclusivity.
But I was not as strong as my word either. For every time she lapped my cock with her half-open mouth or subtly invited me to fuck her in the ass, I betrayed my position for another go-round on the sensation carousel. When I fucked her, I gave her everything I could muster at the moment, and in my head was the single vibration of possession: “This is mine.” I stayed with her through all her changes; I took everything, inhaling her through my pores. I installed myself with my cock and fingers and tongue. I blew her mind and blasted her body and she became so absorbed in the process that she forgot who she was.
I knew what was happening and I played the game. For what man doesn’t like to have a woman melt into him after orgasm and say, “There has never been a man like you”? I accepted her adulation each time I fucked her well, and then would complain because my intensity robbed her other center.
With me, after the initial period of infatuation, a good fuck with the woman I’m living with becomes just that. It’s no different, in its way, from a fine meal or a stunning sunset. But with her, whoever she happens to be, fucking gets all entangled with emotions. And, of course, the practical result of fucking: children.
“I don’t know,” I said to Lucinda. “It’s as much your baby as it is mine. Why do you keep looking to me for a final decision on the matter? What do you want to do?”
“I won’t know until the last minute,” she said.
“The last minute!” I shouted. “It’s already past three months now. In a while they won’t even do an abortion. You’ll have the baby by default.”
She looked very sad.
“There’s a way,” she said. “It’s a thing they do with fluid. They can abort you even into the fifth month.”
She looked at me, waiting for me to say the words which would redeem the child, but I shivered inside myself.
“I’ll make reservations at the hospital,” she said.
She dressed and left the bedroom. I lit another cigarette and sat on the window ledge. The thoughts came succinctly, a collage of the day’s events.
“Am I a criminal if I refuse to assume the role which is necessary to give Lucinda the support she needs to have the baby? Not in any judicial sense, but existentially. If I knowingly commit the act, or omit the act, which leads to having the baby flushed out of her womb, I have ended the life of another human being.”
And then, “And if I follow that path, doesn’t a new door open for me in the corridors of action? For if I kill my own child, why should I hesitate at obliterating any of the monsters who strangle freedom in the name of authority?”
I thought of the arrest, and the next morning’s trial, and the condition of the species, and of Lucinda’s pain, and of Dante’s poor chances of survival, and murder formed in my heart.
“I have burst quietly past almost every boundary,” I thought. I was at a point where I could find no reference point for value, and was fast slipping into the stream of my own nameless becoming. From time to time I would leap like a salmon into the turbulent air and flash on the
delineation of my condition, and find that I had transmogrified into a revolutionary, or a homosexual, or a junkie, or a heretic, or any one of the thousand things my civilization said I should not be.
I thought of the reactions of the several people who had learned of the pregnancy. “Oh,” they said, “a baby! How wonderful.”
There must have been an age, perhaps only in fantasy, when the birth of a child was in the natural order of things and was as much a cause for joy as the first sprouting of the winter crop in the spring. But the crops were now heavily dosed with poison spray, and the imminent birth of a child only served to underscore the essential horror we had all done our best to make of this world.
VI
The ocean had become too heavy for us to bear. The days of listening to its restless, pitiless changes had taken their toll on our fragmented and shallow sensibilities. Also, I was detoxifying too quickly, and I found myself smoking a great deal, almost as though my body had adjusted to a certain level of atmospheric evil, and to drop too soon into an area of fresh air provided a shock to the system. I decided to go back to the city again, leaving the others to their own devices.
I rode back on the Expressway, zipping past the impacted ugliness of Long Island into the slate grey cloud in the distance. For more than thirty miles the great miasma over New York City dominated the horizon in a virulent evocation of decay. As I got closer, and the density of concrete and steel increased, the number of buildings per unit of space multiplied, and traffic built to the choked snarl where Bruckner Boulevard meets the Cross Bronx Expressway. On the West Side Highway I watched the curve of the Hudson shore fade abruptly in the black air over the infested waters of what had once been a beautiful river.
The city was in full decline. It merely needed its Hogarth to capture the idiosyncratic manner in which it festered. From day to day one wondered how it could survive another twenty-four hours: the filth in the streets, the constant screech of the cars and busses and trucks, the insane hustling from nowhere to nowhere of the grey-skinned people. The place was run by a hostile amalgam of racial power groups, construction companies, finance and transportation monopolies, and a laughable city government. It was like a speed-freak nightmare, and no one showed the slightest understanding of what was necessary to keep the deadly proliferation of new buildings, more cars, extra people, increased business from swamping every last vestige of humanity. And permeating everything, everywhere, the thick sulphurous air, the sickening water, the constant diet of dead food, in cans, in boxes, in frozen containers. What would come first? A plague? A war among the many furious factions? The destruction of the subways or bridges? Or just the continuation of a lifelessness that had become the style of life?