by Marco Vassi
I glowed with exhilaration. I was free to prowl in the richest, most powerful, most decadent city in the country which was my jungle. I throbbed with pure perversion, the sense of singeing evil which the metropolis spawned like a culture in a test tube. I went to Lucinda’s pad, one of those architectural whorehouses which squat over Central Park West, and paid my emotional dues to get past the doorman. He seemed instinctively to hate me, perhaps because of my hair and dress. The man was over sixty, decrepit, and so bored with standing in front of a revolving door for forty years that he had completely forgotten he was born free.
I began to feel sick to my psyche and remembered Francis’s words as I had got on the ferry: “You’d better bring alone an extra set of filters for your mind.” After half an hour in New York, all of one’s antennae are clogged with confusion and hatred, and in short time you have joined the other seven million zombies in their sense-less stumblings about the streets.
From the edge of hostility I receive from the man who sells me a newspaper, to the war in Vietnam is simply a matter of quantity. The conflict is internal with each individual as well as external in the world. The war my myriad selves carry out is mingled with the power syndrome inherent in authoritarian government structure, and neurotic anxiety translates to global conflict via the power of technology.
I reached the deepest understanding of myself when I saw that I was a clever killer ape, one of a species whose ferocity is destroying an entire planet. And while the liberal in me was horrified at the spectacular atrocities committed by the military, the observer in me pointed out that not a day went by in which I didn’t kill with a thought or a gesture. The reality of hatred and violence in the simplest human relations was clear.
Being a thoroughly conditioned and civilized monkey, I refused for a long time to admit the truth of my perception. On the one hand there were the police monkeys with weapons and prisons to ensure that I behaved; on the other was the imprint of so-called Christian conscience which had been burned into me from infancy.
But I couldn’t for long escape the fact that the really cunning monkeys, the apes who run the machinery of the social world, the bankers, the statesmen, the generals, the religious leaders, the finance barons, stay where they are through brute force, via their armies and their systems of law, via their institutionalized religions, via the power of their hypnotists, the advertisers, and via the submissive nature of the vast majority of human monkeys who perform the countless daily deadening routines which keep everything going. In a flash I saw all of our history as a parade of concentration camps, regulating the lives of the inmates, and periodically warring against each other.
I showered and smoked a joint, and found myself enjoying the solitude and silence of the apartment. I remembered that I hadn’t spent any time alone for months, and I decided to pass the evening by myself, getting my head straight. I took out a shoe box filled with photographs that ranged back to when I was two months old. It had pictures of me and my family, neighborhood friends, scenes, women. As usual I began to float back into the levels of historical awareness I had about myself, remembering at what points in my life certain influences entered and how they shaped me. I was working up a pretty good memory when I came to the nude photo of Miriam. It was the first such shot I’d taken after discovering the miracle of Polaroid. Instant Grecian Urn! For she still lay there, her lips parted, her eyes unmasked, her cunt wet and dripping from the fuck we’d just finished.
I was twenty-five when I met her. I held an oppressive job as a junior editor on a two-man literary newspaper, and she was an apple-cheeked, sensitive-nippled, brilliant young girl from Sarah Lawrence. I was underpaid and worked long hours, but I was still in a career bag and took this as a step in what seemed to be the right direction. She came to work part time and we began a pleasant enough little soap opera, featuring the starry-eyed student and the esoteric businessman.
She was under five feet tall, a mouth barely large enough to get a medium-sized cock into, and an enormous globular ass. She radiated an aura of innocence which was electrifyingly erotic when I had her sprawled across the bed, her skirt hiked past the tops other school-girl stockings and her fists clenching and unclenching with desire. When we fucked her eyes lost their air of childhood and became concentric rings of pure Aries power. She would do anything sexual as long as it was coated with a palatable literary jacket.
Our first few months were perfect. We could meet only on weekends, she lying to her parents about her location and coming to my pad in Brooklyn Heights where we embarked on forty-eight hour fuck marathons. Occasionally I visited her at the school, sleeping illegally in her room, snatching delicious sex from under the prowlings and pa-trollings of the campus guards, and becoming dizzy with the sweet stench of so much young articulate cunt in one place.
But at that moment in every relationship when one must decide whether to stay or go, I let lust cloud my judgement and started to have thoughts of a permanent union. Since neither of us really wanted that, but did not know how to cut loose, we began to hate each other secretly. And we began to feel the pressure from her parents. Her father was a Ph.D. historian who now worked as an assistant principal in a junior high school; her mother was a librarian. Both were, on the surface, pleasant and intelligent people, second-generation Jews who had moved to one of the Protestant-style swimming-pool ghettoes of New Jersey. As Miriam and I became “serious”, it became obvious that I would have to meet them.
They didn’t like me at all. I was a gentile, I had no solid financial prospects, and I smelled like an adventurer. But they were civil.
I put on, as I was wont to do then, the costume and mask I thought would least threaten them. I made all the necessary placatory gestures, and left their home with all of us feeling that we wouldn’t have to go through that again. But we had no way of knowing how naive we were.
At that time, Stranger in a Strange Land was making its first big impact on the American consciousness, and Miriam and I were infected with the notion of group love, although neither of us had any sense of what a complex and dangerous ground that is for us who have been sexually crippled by our civilization. We were at the stage where we were channeling all the frustrations and dishonesties of the relationship into sex, with the result that our sex was reaching frantic levels. We mistook that for ecstasy.
One night, as I was sitting on the john and Miriam was crouched in front of me, sucking my cock, I looked in the mirror behind her and saw her cunt contracting spasmodically between her spread ass cheeks. Each time she got the head of my cock into her throat and gagged, her cunt clenched. As her tongue worked the length of the shaft and her head bobbed up and down and I felt the stretch of her lips to encompass the meat in her mouth, I imagined what it would be like if another man were to come up and fuck her from behind. It seemed to me that the excitement engendered in her cunt would ripple up her spine and feed the activity of her mouth, and vice versa. The image other as a warm pulsating series of sensual apertures being fucked from many angles sent me into paroxysms of sharp pleasure, and I reached over to thrust my fingers into the moist space between cunt and asshole, words of aggression pouring from my lips. I came volubly into her waiting mouth.
“We have to get another man,” I said afterwards.
“I don’t want anybody else,” she said.
Heinlein’s jargon came to the rescue. “A water-brother,” I said, “to expand the nest.”
Her eyes misted over. “Oh, yes,” she said, “that would be beautiful.”
But when we went over the names of all the men we knew, she found one reason or another to reject all of them. I grew exasperated, then angry, and we ended the discussion with her insisting that I was the only man she wanted. And then we fucked. It was one of the first times I tasted the sweet and guilty pleasure of fucking a woman who was in tears.
A few days later, however, she told me that a man had tried to pick her up on the s
treet, and she had rapped with him. “He seemed nice,” she said. “Maybe we can do it with him.”
My jealousy flared. “You must really dig him,” I said.
“Well, you’re the one who wants to bring another man in,” she said with one of her rare flashes of independent emotion.
I wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to know the difference between active and passive manipulation, so I agreed to meet him, feeling as though I bore complete responsibility for the scene we were mounting. And the following Friday he came over.
He was a chubby black man with a soft and unobtrusive manner. His entire persona seemed to suggest that he wanted nothing from anyone, and would simply be mutely grateful for whatever crumbs fell his way. I was disarmed, and conned, although I wasn’t aware of the latter. We talked for a bit, but all of my energy was involved with the sexual tensions in the room and we might as well not have been speaking English. Harry sat on a pillow, leaning against one wall, while I sat a dozen feet away, my back against the opposite wall. Miriam sat next to me, reclining against my side, her head on my shoulder.
I took a deep breath and let one hand drop on her left breast. His eyes flicked to the movement and flicked back again to a spot somewhere around the bridge of my nose. We talked some more, unintelligible sounds. My feet were sweating, and I began to rub her nipple between my thumb and forefinger. She flinched, relaxed, and let out a soft sigh. I shifted my weight under her and she slid down, simultaneously turning toward me, burying her face in my chest. With my other hand I pulled her skirt up, revealing her heavy chalk-white legs; up past her thighs to her hips, her pale blue panties causing an abrupt change in tone. Miriam made a tiny sound that might have been a “No”, but I swept past it and slipped my hand under the elastic and down the crack between her cheeks.
Harry watched, unmoving, and only when I slid one finger into her cunt did he come across the floor on all fours. He looked at her, and seemed to be sniffing, like a dog at a strange object, and then suddenly his hand was alongside mine, abruptly digging into her flesh, knuckling his fingers into the wet warm crevice between her legs.
For several minutes we were lost in a silent frenzy. Miriam lay on her back, showing no response to what we were doing to her. Perhaps it was because we were doing it to her, using her body as fuel for our sexual intensity. We worked, oddly enough, as a team, without words, without a preconceived plan. In short order we took off her panties, her blouse, her bra, until she lay there, eyes closed and mouth pursed in apprehension, waiting. But Harry and I were fixated on breasts and cunt and ass. We didn’t notice Miriam’s total state. Amateurs that we were, we had no sense of the complexity of rhythm involved in a threesome, nor of how to keep the tension-relaxation cycle flowing smoothly. If we had simply stopped to find out where we were with each other, to check what we were feeling and how we were blocked, something lovely might have happened. But we pressed on, and Harry and I threw ourselves on Miriam’s body, massaging, caressing, kissing, licking, sucking.
Suddenly my energy dropped, and I lost interest in what we were doing. I continued my activity, but inside myself a second level of awareness crystallized; I began to watch myself watching myself. I noticed that Harry was grabbing her cunt very hard, and I knew that that turned her off, being hurt before she was properly softened up. I got angry with him not only for mistreating her, but for destroying the delicacy of the operation. I put my hand under his and felt her cunt. She was dry. Everything was wrong. She should have been sopping at this point, writhing in unfulfilled desire, taking his cock in her mouth, twisting her pelvis in a silent supplication to be fucked. All the stereotypes were demanding to be recognized and I couldn’t even manage an erection.
A spasm went through her body and she rolled over on her stomach. And the sight of her shining, white, immense buttocks overcame even the mechanicalness of our actions. Harry and I caught each other staring down at her with slavering lust. My cock got hard. I straddled her thighs and prodded my way between her legs until I could feel the heat from her cunt, and then pulled her hips up to make it easier for me to penetrate. I sank slowly into her, the dryness of her cunt making my entry almost excruciating. She bit her lips, but in a minute began to lubricate. For the first time that day I flushed with a solid genital connection, but just then became aware of the man sitting at our side. An absolute stranger, and ironically, I didn’t want him there. A sickening vibration swung through the room, and I felt my cock get soft. I was encrusted with confusion and I got off Miriam’s limp form and sat by her side.
And Harry jumped to, without ambivalence or conscience. He had a much larger cock than mine, and I almost collapsed from fears of inadequacy as I saw him mount her and ease his tool between her cheeks and into her now wet cunt. To my horror I saw her ass move. I suppressed what I saw and dove into my negative sexual flow. I moved forward until her face was at my crotch and brought my cock against her lips. And for a few sizzling minutes, the magic happened. She let herself open and respond to Harry’s fucking, and sucked at my cock with astonishing abandon. He rolled and bucked into her, making her shudder with a sort of tense pleasure while her head wobbled in response to his movement, making her mouth describe circles around my prick. The sight of black and white bodies churning into each other, the power of his male insistence and her wanton yielding, and the crushing beauty and energy of the eternal number three, whipped me into a thoughtless climax and I let the frantic sperm spill out of me and into her mouth.
And even as I saw her throat working to swallow the come, I was filled with dread. For Harry was still roaring. He pulled out and turned Miriam over and entered her from the front. He was past caring about my presence. He hooked his arms under her knees, spread her legs wide, and dove frothing into her cunt.
She cast her eyes toward me imploringly, asking for some kind of guidance. She didn’t know how to respond in relation to my possible jealousy and to the fact that I had allowed, encouraged, things to get this far. She reached her hand toward me and I held it while he ground his hips into her, his ass rocking, and his back glistening with sweat. Then, terribly, I felt her fingers twitch. I knew that her awareness was leaving the point of contact she was making with me. And her hand went dead and began to slip from my grasp.
Then he arched back, made one decisive movement, and she groaned with pleasure. He had her. Her hand left mine completely and went up around his back. She wrapped her legs around him. And they were fucking. And I was dead. He started grunting as she pumped her cunt against his cock, She began that long keening wail which signals the onset of her orgasm. And then she let it all hang out, writhing against him, her tits crushed to his chest, her fingers in his hair, her toes curling in the air. He shouted once and came inside her, and her pelvis jumped reflexively, three times, four times, five times, six times to his tune, and then she subsided, whispering, “Oh God,” into his throat.
They lay there, oblivious of their surroundings, like two lovers who had at last found one another, as indeed they were, but I was too sour to bless their pleasure. “Water brother!” I thought. “Shit!” I thought.
They separated and became aware of my presence again. I got up and went into the kitchen to put water on for a cup of tea. I was disgusted with both of them, with myself, with everything. He dressed, and once again seemed soft, apologetic, and awkward. I focussed on his blackness, and the very things which would ordinarily seem sensual and exciting now seemed alien and threatening. I faced the fact of my prejudice, and realized that it made no difference at all. Hatred was inside me, and it didn’t matter who the object of it was, whoever happened to be in my field of involvement when I felt it. He stood at the door. “Well, so long,” he said. I turned my back on him.
Miriam lay in the next room, frightened. I sent her vibrations reinforcing her fear. I drank my tea slowly, smoked two cigarettes, and after a long time in the bathroom, went in and lay down next to her. I waited in stony silence as she m
ade several attempts to say something. If she were a more centered woman she would either have gone to sleep or left and not worried about my private melodrama. But she was young and filled with Jewish upbringing, and was quite prepared to feel extremely guilty. The more I punished her, the more I touched her cultural cunt.
Finally she put one hand on my cock and began stroking it lightly. Finding no resistance, she began pulling on it until it was hard, and then she climbed on top of me. I let her fuck me for a very long time before I came, and immediately afterward I fell asleep.
We didn’t talk about the incident for an entire week. Harry called once and I was curt with him. I considered the matter closed and was somewhat pleased that I had seemingly suffered as little jealousy as I had. She went back to school for four days and returned on a Thursday. We fucked in the afternoon and at night went to see Rashomon.
When it came to the husband’s version, I began to get uncomfortable. And when the scene flashed showing him tied to a tree, looking down as the rapist fucked his wife, I began to sweat. The camera shifts to the rapist’s back, the wife’s hands beating against the rough cloth of his shirt. Gradually she hits him more softly, then stops. Her fist opens, and very very gently her fingers extend and just rest lightly on his back. The delicacy of the description took my breath away, and in a flash the awful feeling of abandonment I had felt when Miriam’s hand slipped from mine returned full force. I turned to her and saw her staring at me, wide-eyed. My face screwed up in anguish.