by Marco Vassi
I had tried to deal with the problem through the “work it out” approach, but at certain points only solitude heals. This was one of them. And yet I didn’t want to be physically alone, merely to be with people who allowed me to come out of myself as much as I wanted, and demanded
no more. I felt a paradoxical mixture of excitement and withdrawal within myself, a sort of turned-on passivity. It was the mood of homosexual fucking, which was coming to seem less an end in itself than a corrective for the impossible tensions of male-female relationship. Even the purity of the homosexual act had been corrupted.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said. And as I strode away I saw the look of hurt in Lucinda’s eyes. But there was nothing to say.
VIII
As I knelt in the sand, the sun sprinkling through the bay leaves, the two men in front of me pulled their cocks from the tops of their bathing suits and dangled them in front of my mouth. They embraced and began kissing, deeply, wetly. I took a deep snort of the popper and opened my lips wide to let both organs in. One of them was dark and thin, perhaps some five inches long, while the other was practically chalk white with an orange head, the kind of cock that flushes thick and full from the base eight inches to the tip. The silken heads rubbed against the top of my mouth and the inside of my cheeks, while I slipped my tongue sideways between them, making a cushion for their thrusts. Another man came up behind me and slipped off my bathing suit, then fucked me with one of those seven-eighths erections which are so tantalizing.
I had returned to the house, picked up the remains of a box of amyl nitrate, some hash, a towel, and walked to the meat rack, the stretch of woods between Cherry Grove and the Pines. Cruising in the woods provided a keen pleasure that freshened the senses and elevated the soul. Here the crucial element of the hunt came into focus, and sex became largely secondary, the eating of the food which has already been killed. But it was the chase and the kill which captured the imagination of the body.
Barely discernible paths winding through thirty acres of thick brush and small trees, with unexpected clearings, and openings onto the dunes. Behind a tree, one man leaning against the bark, the rough wood scratching his back, as another performed the time-hallowed rite of cocksucking. In a hollow behind a tuft of grass, five men in tableau, their limbs and heads in an intricate and artificial tangle. Leather boys lurking in the bushes, and bikinied queens peddling their asses behind the poison ivy.
For now, there was the silent struggle and sensation of four men in a spontaneous but oddly well-rehearsed sexual act: the two men above me in communion through their kisses and deriving energy from the heat of my mouth on their cocks; the man behind me sopping up the pleasure of cock-in-ass and the sweet voyeuristic delight of the churning flesh in front of him. It was more of a dance than a fuck. For one thing, most of the people cruising did not have ejaculation as a primary goal, but wanted as many physical contacts as possible. So there was no passion here, no sense of intimacy or warmth, although we went through the paces of the closest act possible.
We moved together until we seemed to reach some sort of consensus. No one had a physical climax, there was no ejaculation, but rather a sense of accomplishment, of completion. The two men in front of me pulled up their suits and walked away, while the man behind me pulled out abruptly. I turned to my left and saw that three more men were standing there; they had been quietly watching the action. I was surrounded by a row of cocks. My knees were weak and I was breathing hard. I felt giddy. “Well, why not?” I thought, and took another hit from the inhalator. The drug loosened me up even more and I went for the black cock in the middle. It was already throbbing and the length of it slid easily down my throat. The man to whom it was attached began sucking air through his teeth and his legs buckled.
Then, “Take it baby,” he said, and pushed the head of his cock against the roof of my mouth. And splashed his sperm against it, causing the fluid to run straight down my throat and drip on the back of my tongue. I put all my attention on the taste, texture, and symbolism of the moment, for this, theoretically, was the point of my endeavors. I swallowed without closing my lips, and got a flash on the suggestive picture my face must have presented just then, the gulping open mouth, the closed eyelids, the straining upward posture, and the glistening black cock sliding out past the lips, leaving a thin trail of pearly fluid.
He too turned quickly and left, and one of the others moved in on me. There was something about his vibration that made me look up, and I saw the closed brutal face of a man without humor or intelligence. He totally lacked the understanding that everything happening in the woods was a game, and like any game, depended on delicacy for its success. Even degradation was possible, so long as each actor understood that the essential dignity of the other had to be respected. The glorious thing about the meat rack was that much of the finding and losing took place on the basis of mental projections. I stood up and brushed past the man. He grabbed my wrist. I could read the hurting lust in his eyes and for an instant almost felt sorry enough for him to go down again. But I was tired of the sport, and I left.
Smoking hash along an empty stretch of beach, I played back the past few hours. Why was it that the sense memory of baby was so often associated with the sharpest moments of sex? When I am ranged over a moaning woman and at the height of ecstasy she cries, “Oh baby,” and when I am on my back and a great cock is sending shivers of cunt through my cheeks and bowels, the man above me shouts, “Oh baby,” I wonder at the implications of the word. Certainly, when sucking a cock and gagging on its head I often feel like a baby being force-fed. In fact, the more I whimper and try to push it away, the more exciting the deed becomes for the man who is doing it to me. Perhaps much of fucking is a vain attempt to revive patterns left incomplete since childhood.
When all these recherché aspects of sex are neutralized, what is left, and why do we continue to fuck?
When fuck is intransitive, then the act becomes as routine as eating: I eat with you, I fuck with you. When it is used transitively, and the sense changes to “I fuck you”, the theatre of personality opens and the drama of our intercourse overshadows all the excitement of the actual sensations.
The human race may have moved to the status of homo promiscuans. What keeps me from any experience except the fear grown in the hotbed of conditioning? All values which have come to us from the past are worthless unless we rediscover the state which gave rise to them, and only then can we truly decide whether to maintain them as values. We must break all the commandments which are a priori laid on our heads.
When I went to court to pay the fine, I realized that this so-called civilization operates at the level of a dimwitted Protestant school teacher. We sat in chairs set up in rows. We were glowered into silence by a foot-tapping policeman. And when our names were called we had to walk up to the desk, lower our heads, and explain why we did such a naughty thing. It was interesting that the fines were lower in direct proportion to the tone of whining in the defendent’s voice. The more abject, the more sorry one was, the more magnanimous the judge became.
Fascism is nothing but the acculturation of self-deception.
“I’m not alienated,” Francis once said. “I’m just the latest model of a line in an evolutionary experiment. Consciousness is only a tool, part of the design. The whole Krishnamurti trip of anguished solitude is romantic horse-shit.” Yet I seem to wage an unrelenting war against encroachment on my individuality. One day Lucinda and I got on the ferry and she said, “Where shall we sit?” And I flashed paranoia and thought, “Why we? Who made this unconscious assumption of we?”
I walked down the beach, wondering at the stream of murky analysis churning through my mind. To my left lay a hundred and eighty degrees of ocean horizon, the sky a thousand shades of blue and grey, the green and violet and pink-tinged water, the almighty sun. Sandpipers and seagulls skirted the shore. And every five or ten minutes, another person passed. We wo
uld smile, and perhaps say a few words, show one another the rocks and shells we had picked up. Each time I was taken by how uncomplicated it was to relate to a stranger, and how dense ineractions became when expectation, the daughter of desire, entered the scene.
A model of three forces suggested itself to describe what happens between two people. At any time we are a function of distance, uncertainty, and complexity; and the fitness of a relationship depends on whether the product of these forces remains a constant. Thus, if there is a great distance between two people—including psychic or emotional or temperamental as well as physical distance—the degree of uncertainty and/or complexity would have to be low. If both distance and uncertainty were large, then complexity would have to be reduced almost to zero if the relationship were to continue successfully.
I wasn’t sure whether what I was thinking made sense, and yet I realized that it was as arbitrary to assign the label “electron” to an energy manifestation as to consider “complexity” a unit of relationship. It seemed that the proper psychology would turn out to be a poetry of structural appearances.
The problem with marriage, or any fixed long-term relationship, was that habit petrified uncertainty at a single point, distance was shrunk by fear and not allowed its healthy fluctuation, and as a result complexity proliferated past the ability of the people to keep up with the changes. The result was exhaustion, with its sniping, temporary truces, futile impulses to escape, and all the trappings of a long unpopular war.
The role of sex was usually to distort the true appraisal of the actual distance between the partners, so that two people could feel quite close when in fact their fucking had them flying apart at astonishing speeds.
Eric and Suzanne had had just that problem.
When I knew him he was working part-time in one of the millions of offices in downtown Manhattan while studying for his doctorate in political science. Suzanne was a secretary, a French-Jew with a tight mouth and a morbid fear of impropriety. Eric fell in love with her ass, which was subtly mounded and stood out nicely from her small compact body. Each day he waited for glimpses of Suzanne’s ass, watching her as she walked and sat and bent over to pick things up. On the evenings when I saw him, in the midst of a thick rap, he would say, “There’s this chick at the office, and she has the most beautiful ass.” All the while he maintained a civilized surface relationship, going through the mandatory gestures of polite intercourse.
After a few weeks, he asked her out to dinner and a movie, and found her a pleasant girl to be with. They found a number of tastes in common, and shortly he was embroiled in infatuation and romance. She reciprocated. They began to talk about living together. They fucked a dozen or so times, enough to be sure that there were no hideous sexual discrepancies. And in the process of all this, he forgot what it was that was driving him, the fixation on her ass. He ceased treating her ass as an object, and related to it as part of the body of the woman he was coming to care for.
She moved into his pad. They played out all the routines, the rearrangements, the fondlings. His mind began to wander, involved as he was in his studies and the exigencies of his job, and the paraphernalia of beginning a modern no-contract marriage. And one night, after long foreplay, he ran his finger between her buttocks and found the hole lubricated with the vaginal secretions which had run down from her cunt. Almost unthinkingly, he mounted her from behind, and slowly let his cock penetrate the puckered and only slightly resistant anus. He sank in, as they say, up to the hilt. She reciprocated. And they had a jolly ass-fuck.
But at the moment of orgasm, he said he felt as though the earth were shifting under him. As he put it, “I felt like my cock was sticking out in the void and I was coming right on God’s nose.”
Eric is heavily leonine in appearance, with shaggy blond hair and powerful shoulders. He is a Plato freak, reading the old boy in Greek. He is one of the few people I know who speak in complete paragraphs, with footnotes. And he is extremely sensitive to nuance.
No sooner had the sperm left his cock than the entire schema became clear to him. He had no interest in living with this woman, pretending that their lives were intertwined. All he had ever wanted to do was what he had just done, to fuck her in the ass. But he had changed many of the major currents of his life just to accomplish this one small deed. The distance that lay between them, that had not been perceived because the sexual drive imparted a masked intimacy, now sprang forth. The complexity which had seemed so great was instantaneously reduced to a simple fact: he wanted to be alone. And the factor of uncertainty stayed maddeningly the same.
But he immediately suppressed all that he saw. And continued the farce of living with her.
They both quickly attained that look of thinly disguised unhappiness which is the mark of people who are living together out of fear instead of love. And they became a typical couple. She was still attractive and friendly; he still liked her. But the sense of we-ness imparted by the false appraisal of distance had disappeared. And was now supplanted by a fictional “us”.
For almost two years they continued in this guilty complicity. The longer they persisted, the more their apparent bond was reinforced by the social function. His friends began inviting “them” out, not just him. The same happened on her side. People began to think of Eric-and-Suzanne as an entity. To accommodate the lie, they decorated the apartment, served fine cheese at their parties, went to films and built up a private language based on their mutual appreciation of those art works. In short, they became an attractive hip couple.
The dues they paid for unhappiness was grief. After the historic night of the ass-fuck, he lost the edge of his desire for her. As his energy dropped, she retreated somewhat into her former characterological frigidity. While they enjoyed fucking, it no longer transported them to any but the most banal realms. He never fucked her in the ass again.
They settled into a middle-American sexual routine, and he entered more deeply into his studies. He became tediously fascinated with the machinations of Athenian grain merchants and their relation to Platonic thought. She grew bored, and got involved in the freedom rides which were just beginning to become chic among the New York liberal left. She spent her evenings mimeographing pronouncements and announcements.
As was to be expected, she met a black Marxist who had no illusions about what aspect of Suzanne was meant to be most directly appreciated. And one evening she offered no resistance as he pushed her back on a couch, lifted her skirt, and slid his cock into her very wet cunt. He turned his friends on to the phenomenon, and she shortly became the resident pincushion of SNCC’s One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street office.
It took Eric a few months to learn about it, not from any external evidence, but from sensing the internal changes in her. As she pulled further away from him, his emotional involvement with her heated up. He even regained his lust for her. But his heart wasn’t in it. His heart wasn’t in it. And when one morning she returned from a night of being steadily fucked by five of freedom’s young stalwarts, all Eric could manage was a convulsion of self-pity.
She left that afternoon, and two days later he snapped to, went to the Y for a steam bath and a swim, ate a steak dinner, and got soaringly drunk on cold tap beer. He was out of the bag he had sewn himself in. It had taken two years.
Is the hole more than the some of its hearts? A cunt and cock can interact, but can a man and woman relate? Two dykes walked along the beach, one soft and brown, like a soul sloop, the other thrusting and blonde, the sighted land. In the eyes of the second was a fierce pride, a lonely painful joy, and with such sure intelligent understanding of exactly what kind of thing the two of them were that I felt a pang of envy. But perhaps in a few hours they would be sniping at one another with well-adjusted missiles of hatred.
The couple is the insignia of civilization rampant, which has pulled war, exploitation, dense stupidity, and lies from its historical sleeve. The casual logic is
implacable. From some false concept of relationship, some erroneous notion of what a family is, have come the good citizens, the upright parishioners, the fodder for convents and armies, the grease for the gears of civil law. The marchers, the boosters, the flag-wavers, the voters, the workers in the factories of the rulers, who send their children to the regimented schools, who dress the same, eat the same, have no thoughts except the reflexes patterned by the concerted conditioning of millennia.
At the meeting, the militant homosexual stood up and demanded his right to serve in the army.
When fags want to go to war, the murder of the foetus achieves a new dimension. If it could survive, if it had a world to come into, there might be some cause for joy. But its mother is a tired and passive woman who knows no other form of relationship to a man than to sink into his shadow. And its father is embarked on some mad experiment to relive all the animal archetypal historical forms through the use of his organ and orifices.
While the four of us had performed our ritual, sucking and fucking in suspended silence, the only sounds being the sighs of slippage and suction, I became the essence of a pig, wallowing in dirt, eating what no one else will touch, looking with inward-turned eye at the foolishness of the two-legged ones who are forever shooting noises out of their mouths and indulging in stilted pantomimes of behavior they really don’t want to take part in. In utmost realism then, I saw that the world will ever be ruled by the stunned insensate, by the worthless and the petty and the mean. From Rameses to Nixon, a line of bestial mediocrity. And there is no chance that the species will change its ways. The governments of the world will continue to exemplify and magnify the violence, greed, ignorance, and unswerving hostility to all forms of sexual love which have proven the identifying marks of manwomankind throughout recorded time.