by Marco Vassi
And the sermon almost brought me to my feet cheering. As though working out the charade in its most meticulous detail, the priest began with announcements about church business and the formation of a new theatre group. “We are doing two morality plays for Christmas,” he said, and totally missed the irony of his condition. He launched into an inspired rap on the essential worth and dignity of the human being, and included a loving condemnation of the other so-called Christian churches which have no room for their gay brethren. “We must accept our own beauty,” he said. “We must realize that being the way we are is part of God’s plan for the world. So we do His bidding by being most ourselves. We must stop being ashamed!”
I wanted to jump up and shout, “Right on brother!” but everything in the church militated against that sort of spontaneous expression. They may have been gay, but Lord, were they proper! They took their rejection by the monsters of Western civilization seriously. And now they were resorting to the quintessential form of that civilization in an attempt to come to terms with their right to exist fully.
Where the militant gay groups were strident, these people whined. It struck me again that the history of mankind is the history of repression, and that large groups of people can be so mocked and threatened from birth that they carry scars of inferiority and fear all their lives. I felt a fine flush of anger, and as has been accompanying that feeling lately, my hand itched for a gun. It seemed that an awful lot of killing would have to take place before the species came to terms with certain basic problems. I felt a strong and animal bond with all the poor bastards in that church who hadn’t been allowed to grow into their own kind of people. But as soon as I began thinking about the problem in practical terms, weariness overtook me. Who to kill? How? The enemy was internal as well as external. One couldn’t go after a virus with an axe. And I smiled to think of the revolutionaries who would answer my despair by the cry ORGANIZE. Organize whom? We are the enemy. And the natural inclination of any group is sooner or later to form an army. War leads to war leads to war. There is no hope.
I received communion, and went back to my pew with my head bowed and hands folded. The taste of the wafer sent me into Proustian ecstasies.
Afterwards there was a social hour, with coffee and cookies. I had to keep a strong check on my cynicism, for within minutes after the mass all the celebrants were standing around cruising like crazy. But it was such a guarded and effete flurry of flirtation as to make it almost laughable, except that it made one sad. What were these human beings doing, pretending to plod their way through the fatuousness of organized worship and then coming on with all their self-pity hanging out? It takes great style to pretend not to know what one is doing and make that seem charming.
One tall and lithe black cat came up to me and began a standard rap, neither original or despicable, like a Ruy Lopez opening.
“My name’s Ken. What’s yours?” And then. “I’m a musician, what do you do?” And on the eleventh exchange, a surprise move. “Is there any place in the building we can go?” I looked down. His cock was making a bulge in his pants. He wanted a fast blow job.
I left the scene and went out onto Eighth Avenue. Across the street was a familiar building, the City Clinic for Venereal Disease. I wondered whether anyone in the congregation had a sufficient sense of irony to appreciate the juxtaposition of functions.
I called Lucinda but there was no answer, then walked up to John and Janet’s and found Jessica. I sank into fucking the way an alcoholic sinks into his bottle.
I did all the required things. I pushed her face with my hand, mashing her mouth and nose out of shape. I slammed into her cunt with full force. I tore at her lips with my teeth. I heard myself grunting and growling.
“Please, please hurt me,” she said.
I was tired and keenly aware of the presence of other people in the house. I couldn’t get it together enough to really do it to her, for her, to let her have the full hurt. I hooked her knees over my elbows and brought her thighs to either side of her breasts.
“If I don’t do it for her, she’ll find someone else,” I thought, and the threat of jealousy spurred me on. But as I slashed at her, listening to her cries, and felt my cock grow hotter and her cunt become slack and wet, I felt my anger rise. It was almost always the same with a woman. We begin together and then she sinks into a swoon of rapture, thinking that the depth of her mindlessness is all she ever had to do to please me. I fucked her until four in the morning, changing position, alternately erect and soft, until I could go no further.
“Christ, this is boring,” I thought.
I was suddenly tired of using my cock and caress as a tool to help other people work out the kinks in their sexual fantasies. Stripped of all its therapeutic dynamics, sex was an odd activity. I plunked the sperm into her and collapsed in her arms. She was trembling, seemed frightened. She called my name softly and drew herself closer to me. She said my name again and nestled my face against her chest. I was unsettled by the fragility of her, and waves of tenderness flowed from me to comfort her, to, in some very simple way, know her at this moment.
“I’m getting tired,” I thought.
We lay there for a while and soon a current of electricity pulled us together. I began to love her body with my fingers and mouth. She rolled onto her belly, and arched her ass up. I stroked her cunt, and balled my hand into a fist to crush it between her cheeks. Once again she began that high-pitched keening. I inserted one finger, then two, then three. I pushed my hand in past the knuckles and slid the fingers around one another, pummeling the deep inner walls of her cunt.
I slid down so that my face was level with her crotch, and like a mechanic trying to reach some almost inaccessible part of an engine, I probed insistently until I had found all the spots which revved her up to her optimum vibration. She went through one grasping convulsion, and then lay still.
I let my fingers slip out and then began to work with my mouth, licking up the length of her cunt and dipping into her asshole, rimming her gently and insolently. I buried my face totally between her cheeks and she brought her cunt up, gyrating at her pelvis, rubbing the sticky lips over my forehead and nose and eyes and chin. I took a facial bath in her box.
Then the doorbell rang. I started with fright. It rang again. I became paranoid; I was convinced it was Lucinda. I heard Janet wake John up in the next room. He grumbled and came stumbling past as we lay there in a high-art cunt-eating posture. He disappeared into the hallway and soon strode past us again on his way to bed. I half sat up, peering into the darkness. I began hallucinating on the shadows. It was Lucinda, carrying a knife, waiting for the right moment to strike.
Jessica turned over and squirmed against me. My cock was numb, but she wanted more. I remembered when Masters and Johnson were asked, “What is the sexual nature of woman?” they answered, “Insatiable.” She brought her knees to her chest and lay there, cunt agape, waiting for me to put my prick in. I took that absurd appendage in my hand and pulled on its stiffening length. It got hard and I brought it to her cunt, but on meeting that hungry hole, it softened once more. I tried three or four times, once actually rubbing the head of it against her cunt lips. And finally, I gave up.
“It’s impossible,” I said, and lay down to go to sleep. Jessica immediately collapsed and curled against me. We fell unconscious breathing into one another’s mouths.
I woke up once. John and Janet were fucking. The sound of a slap rang out, and then another. And then eight or ten, very hard, in rapid succession. I could picture her face whipping from side to side as he crashed the weight and speed of his hand across her cheeks and mouth, WHAP WHAP WHAP.
“Oh God,” she moaned. And then more thrashing noises. He emitted the kind of grunt a person might make upon having a painful splinter pulled out. It was an orgasm of relief.
The next morning Jessica and I fucked once more. It was a grey day as I walked her to the su
bway. We talked about her former lover, for whom she still had a sense of openness. And about Lucinda, my charge and my sustenance.
“We can stand here after a night of hassle and pleasure and dig one another because we don’t live together,” I said. “It doesn’t seem that that kind of love is possible any longer. We seem doomed to strip one another very quickly of all our structural necessities, to burn the defensive postures so the energy can flow. But all we accomplish is rubbing one another raw, and destroying what we most admired in one another.”
She looked at me. “You sure are grim.”
“Just factual,” I said.
I watched the traffic pass. Some four or five million people were beginning another daily round of their fiscal dance, swelling the office buildings and subways and sidewalks with their ordered activity, a vast army of automatons, as conditioned as any nest of worker ants. Freedom was a joke in such circumstances, and love a fairytale. I looked at the pretty girl standing in front of me. There was no way to make her understand my vision.
“The door is shut, locked for a long time, perhaps forever,” I said. “We’re locked in a race between murder and ultimate orgasm. Relationship between a man and a woman is possible only at a distance, even when they are glued to one another’s bodies.”
There was a moment of awkwardness. One of our agreements was never to talk in terms of the future. I hedged a bit. “You’ll be at the office every day?” I said. “One to six every day,” she said. A wordless message flitted between our eyes.
I walked the seven blocks back to Lucinda’s house.
XVI
The day begins with light stirring and dreams dispersing. Several moments of stunning clarity rush through the entire body and the morning’s first tears form as consciousness climbs back into the tractor seat to begin another cycle of work. There are flashes of sun-drenched islands and brooding desert plains, whispers of a state of being which transcends the stiffness of the lower back. But plans crop up, and the day’s duties present themselves. Then one remembers that one wants to leave the woman one is sleeping next to, or that death is unavoidable, or that the morning paper will provide yet another record of manwomankind’s mammoth stupidity. Fantasy crystallizes and from its vacuum core a cloud of ambient charges radiate to suffuse all reality with a sense of heightened significance. Then she wakes up, and the first adjustment to another is made, a change that will happen so many times in the crowded city that within an hour one will cease to react to the other humans on the street; they will have no more importance than street signs. Breakfast next, and the necessities perform. Food is ingested, digested, evacuated. Breath continues. The radio, the first look out the window into the poison air, the sound of car horns, the vibrations of mindless commerce. And through all the growing Grand Guignol of life, the leitmotif of sex. Who have I fucked, who am I fucking, who will I fuck? Which cunt? Which cock? Which new spin on the carousel of sensation?
The day descends like a backdrop, a grey gritty lull between the poles of healing unconsciousness. And one by one the persona appear, each to do his or her dance of mortality.
LUCINDA: Her belly began to show the flush of pregnancy. She was to go into the hospital in three days. We both dealt with it as a non-fact, approaching it obliquely, averting our faces.
“Do you want me to drive you to the hospital?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
“I’m not worrying,” I said, my anger flashing. “I just asked a simple question.” We were doing the kind of manwoman fighting that had been largely absent during the early months of our living together: the woman speaks in terms of her feeling; the man objects to the words she uses; each resents the insensitivity of the other; lines of recalcitrance are drawn; both settle into a lightly venomous silence.
The war will never end.
“It’ll be better when it’s over,” she said, making the first overture to neutralize the friction. “You’re only guilty before you’ve committed the crime. Once it’s done, you are free of it.”
“That’s very Jewish,” I said.
“Except for the baby,” she said. “Do you ever think of it in there? What it will look like? How it will smile? That’s a human being, don’t you understand!” Suddenly her eyes were wild and her hair sprang out. She had leapt from calmness to fury without even touching hysteria.
“Bravo,” I said.
“Why are you being so hateful?” she said. We were back at it again.
It was necessary, then, to fuck her in the ass. The tension between us had reached critical levels, and would have to be discharged. We could either stand there and lacerate one another with words, or we could throw the switch to route the tracks into the sexual realm. I walked up to her and grabbed her sharply by the shoulders. I twisted her torso so that she was simultaneously turned away from me and brought to her knees. I pushed her down onto the floor.
“Don’t move,” I said.
I got the K-Y, pulled her housecoat up to reveal her bare ass, and lubricated the hole. The coldness of the act was thrilling, and her submission to it excited me terribly. Of course, it was her excitement also, for she lay there in catatonic bliss waiting to be had.
I fucked her as though she were a corpse, still warm. No life in her, dead, gone beyond any possible recall. Nonexistent. Finished. And I fucked her body, grinding the last rub of pleasure ever to be had from her, and with ignominy.
The time until the baby’s execution could be counted in hours.
JESSICA: I saw her at the loft where she works as a go-go girl for the city’s newest arm of Esalen. We went up to the roof and looked ten floors down to the street of trucks and laboring men. She sat on the ledge.
“I’m afraid of the edge,” I said.
“So am I,” she said, and let one leg dangle into space. My stomach lurched. She leaned over to peer straight down and then turned to me. “I like you because I can let you be, I have no program for you in my mind. And so you constantly surprise me.”
She looked healthy and neat, and her eyes were filled with a liquid vivacity. I flashed the night before, and remembered how it felt to rub the back of my hand over her entire crotch, beginning between her buttocks and coming up the fur of her cunt to her pubic bone.
“It can’t be death you’re afraid of,” she said. “Death is the end, absolutely, you know. How can you fear that?”
“When is your vacation?” I asked.
“Except in America,” she said. “Here, death is a smiling mortician.”
“We can try Canada,” I said, “or Morocco.” I frowned. “You see, the problem is that we have forgotten even what it is like to tell the truth. And sooner or later, we lapse into total ignorance. And then we live our lives by reflex, simple reaction to external stimuli. What if I pushed you,now?”
Her eyes shone. “Can you imagine the fall? That glorious rush, the knowledge, the knowledge of it? And the split-second before hitting. Fully alive, fully alert, never more conscious, and realizing the actuality of the end. And then. Nothing?”
Unaccountably I became quite frightened. “I have to go,” I said.
As we descended I began to wallow in a growing pool of tenderness. I was close to experiencing something like an emotion. I found that I was saying to myself, “Be careful,” over and over again as I maneuvered my way down the iron ladder to the fire escape.
“Have you seen Performance yet?” I asked.
“No.” she said.
“It’s about the best film ever made,” I said. “It eclipses the truth entirely. And in the darkness it brings about, the unknown is illuminated.”
“What’s it about?” she said.
“It’s a love story,” I said.
FRANCIS AND BERTHA: I dropped by their place. They reeked of intimacy. As soon as I stepped inside, the vibrations became sharp-edged, pointed, triangular. Their new
obsession was a trip to the coast in a few months. “The four of us can go together,” Francis said, sliding down the wave of his emotional opacity.
“She doesn’t like me,” I said, pointing at Bertha. “Can’t you fucking understand that yet?” He was silent. “And I don’t want to have any pressure from anyone concerning the scope and variety of my sex life. If you two want to one-to-one it between the sheets, you have my encouragement, but not my recommendation.”
Bertha came up and stood abreast of us. “You’d better make up your mind whether you want to go with him or not. Because if he goes, I don’t.”
Francis looked at us in blinking amazement. “You two can’t be serious,” he said.
“Oh, it’s real,” I said. “This is who we are and there’s no point in trying to be reasonable about it.”
“But this is insane,” he said.
“Well, it’s not like the nuns described it, that’s for sure,” said Bertha. The reference to our common nemesis broke the tension and we smiled at one another all around.
“This is the way of it,” I continued. “It’s the same with three as with two, only more complex, with heavier energies. We’re only charges of electricity. We repel one another; we attract one another. We buzz, we flash, we hum, we crackle. And then our ridiculous minds attempt to find some significance in the random patterns we effect. And there is none. We do what we must do by virtue of our structure, and we form our opinions about it in the process. So, go to California with the chick. I’ll probably meet you there.”
There was a long moment of silence during which Francis struggled with his heartbeat.
DONALD AND FELIX: Some of the fullest moments of conscious ecstasy have come as I was imbedded between their twin needs, sinking into a violet-black felt passageway and soaring down toward a golden door which opened into an ageless eye which has seen all light.
After our Central Park encounter, Felix had suggested a farewell party for Donald and now we met to begin the evening. It was the first time I had been with them on the street, and they were both dressed in their straight-world clothes, while I hung between them in tight jeans and t-shirt. “I feel like a trick,” I said, and we all laughed.