by Marco Vassi
Desperately Seeking Adventure
STEAM HEAT
By Eva Girard
As an artist, I am used to unusual situations. But nothing had ever prepared me for my bizarre encounter with Jonathan. Paula, a mutual friend and fellow photographer, hired us to help her photograph a fund-raising party for the new aviary at the city zoo. We were assigned to take Polaroids and present them to the guests as mementos. Paula decided that the job definitely called for us to dress up as birds.
Paula's boyfriend Daniel joined us. A makeup artist and designer, he had fashioned outfits with wing-like sleeves and a peacock tail. He was decorating my face with feathers and sequins when Jonathan arrived. Only a pair of fishnet stockings kept me from being naked.
“Your costume is in the corner, Jonathan,” Paula ordered. “Put it on and Daniel will do your makeup next.”
I watched Jonathan undress. He was long, lean and nicely muscled, like a swimmer. As he dropped each garment to the floor, he continued to stare at my breasts and hips. I found his blatantness arousing and stared back.
At the zoo pavilion we paired off. Jonathan and I wandered around taking Polaroids and giving them to the guests. Many asked to be photographed with one of us. Jonathan enjoyed posing me. While positioning me he would whisper in my ear, “Eva, you have very shapely legs,” and surreptitiously run his hand over my ass. Or he would straighten the straps of my bodice and smooth the pleats over my hips. I found his caresses exciting. Once he cornered me as I was reloading my camera. He slid his hand through the open back of my dress and fondled my breasts.
“I have to see your face,” he murmured, squeezing my nipples. “I like what I've seen so far.” I searched through the folds of his costume, found his cock and fondled back. For the remainder of the job, I thought only about how it had hardened in my hands.
Afterward we went back to Daniel's studio. Paula and Daniel disappeared into the bedroom. As I leaned over to take off my shoes, I felt Jonathan embrace me from behind.
“Let me help you with your dress,” he said.
Peeling off the bodice, he ran his hands over my breasts. We began to kiss passionately. Nearby was a table covered with soft fabrics. Jonathan lifted me onto it. Placing his cock at the opening of my vagina, he gently pushed in half an inch and paused, then advanced the entire tip of his cock and stopped again. He entered me a half-inch at a time, occasionally pulling out and starting over again. This sweet torture made me desperate. I tugged at his hips, but he resisted penetrating me all the way.
So I knelt down before him and with my tongue circled the tip of his cock. I took him into my mouth slowly, a little at a time, sucked and stopped. He grew excited and wanted to thrust deeply into my mouth, but I resisted.
“Come inside me again,” I urged. He thrust into me again and again until the deep waves of pleasure rippled through us.
Later we dressed each other in street clothes and left the studio. The streets were surreally lit by the star-filled March sky. We walked, holding hands, in the direction of my house.
“This is one of my favorite streets,” Jonathan told me. “A city heat pipe runs under it, so almost every block has a sidewalk steam vent. Look.” He pointed to one ahead of us that was spewing large white clouds. “Would you let me photograph you in that one night?” I laughed, amused at the idea. Many artists had asked me to pose before, and I always declined. But imagining myself in one of Jonathan's strange photographs was appealing.
“Yes,” I replied, turning to him. “I might be able to help you.”
Jonathan phoned a few nights later. “Wear something you can easily slip in and out of,” he instructed me, “and I'll pick you up at midnight.”
I put on my kimono and a long blue cape. Half an hour later I found myself naked, along with Paula and Daniel, in an alley in a deserted part of the city. In the middle of the block, a street vent emitted a steady mass of steam. We huddled around it, trying to find warmth in the near freezing night. Jonathan mounted his strobe on the camera. Then he wordlessly slid his hands down my neck and shoulders, peeling back my cape and kimono.
“Stay near the vent and you'll be warm,” he advised. He moved several feet away and began to view the scene through the camera.
For a crazy instant I thought of the hundreds of times my mother asked if I dressed warmly enough. Then, leaving my clothes where they fell, I stepped to the edge of the vent. To my surprise, I had entered a warm, wet world not unlike a steambath. And as I glided around in the hissing vapor, I began to enjoy the alternating gusts of cold and hot air.
“That's it,” said Jonathan, “keep on moving in and out of the steam.”
“This must be New York's version of Old Faithful,” laughed Paula. She and Daniel soon joined me. The three of us danced in slow motion around the vent.
“Eva, keep dancing,” Jonathan cried. “I want Paula and Daniel to kiss.” I moved around them as they embraced, thinking of Jonathan and me.
“Now the three of you together,” Jonathan directed. Paula drew me into their embrace so that I was sandwiched between them. Her hands stroked my thighs, then glided up my waist and cupped my breasts. Daniel lifted my face to his and gave me a long kiss, his tongue probing deeply. When he rubbed his erection on my thigh, I gasped with pleasure.
“Eva, put on your cape and come here,” Jonathan said. “I want you to watch them.” He photographed Paula and Daniel's love-making while I looked on with frustration and envy. Then he put down his camera, opened my cape, knelt before me and began to suck and lick my clitoris. His tongue, then his fingers, pushed me to the edge of orgasm. I began to unzip his pants, but he drew away and began packing up his camera equipment.
I assumed he was shy about making love in front of Paula and Daniel. This thought mitigated my sense of rejection. When he dropped me off at my house, I began to caress his cock through his pants. But again he stopped me. I felt acutely disappointed, but said nothing.
“Stay with me,” he whispered cryptically before driving away.
A few days later Jonathan called to say the photographs were fantastic. He asked if I would pose again, this time with André, a French sculptor and friend of his. I agreed.
“Nice secluded spot,” mocked André when we arrived at the location Jonathan had chosen. The only thing that obscured us from the traffic that whizzed by was a row of shabby forsythia.
“It's an excellent vent,” Jonathan exclaimed, admiring the clouds that escaped from the street grille.
André and I shed our clothes and stepped close to the vent. He was blond, uncircumcised and well built. As he moved around me, striking various poses, he looked like a statue.
“The Rape of the Sabine Woman,” he called out, lifting me up.
“That's good,” Jonathan said. “Now let's see the Rape of the Sabine Man.” André and I laughed, amused at the idea that I could overpower him. “And Eva,” Jonathan added, “can you make the pose less metaphorical and more specific?”
Then I understood. Certainly André did, because he became instantly erect. Before I could decide if I wanted to pursue this latest development, André embraced me. I submitted, closing my eyes and pretending that it was Jonathan's cock I was sucking. When André groaned with pleasure I looked up. Jonathan had stopped photographing and was watching us. But we did not make love that night either.
Over the next several weeks I posed with painters, writers, an Ethiopian who sold Arabian horses, an editor at the city newspaper and other photographers. Sometimes there were as many as seven or eight of us gathered around a vent.
Several times the police came. Only one officer was outraged enough to threaten us with arrest. Two showed us steam vents where we could photograph with more privacy. Almost all of them wanted to watch us work, but none accepted our invitation to be part of the group.
The mood of the evenings varied. Everyone involved took the project seriously, but there was also much hilarity among us. What many of the sessions had in common was sex. All
the nakedness and touching was hard to control, and sometimes people would begin to make love.
Jonathan liked to direct people toward or away from me, manipulating events so that by the end of every session I was always aroused but never satisfied. When he dropped me off at home we would often begin to have sex. He slowly unbuttoned my blouse and sucked my breasts until the sweet tension between my legs turned to a sharp ache. But he would not allow us to make love.
I increasingly resisted Jonathan's scenario. At first I assumed each time we went out that we would spend the night together. But as the “next times” began to accumulate, discomfiture and confusion overwhelmed me. Paula's appraisal of Jonathan as a neurotic ceased to be an amusing comment. I began to see him as a brilliant sadist. But when he kissed me good night I sensed his fervor. We were playing the game of continence to its farthest limit.
When spring arrived, Jonathan decided to have an end-of-the-season venting session. He invited Paula, two German filmmakers and me. Afterwards Jonathan brought out two bottles of champagne. We stood around the vent toasting one another.
“I don't really have any steamy photographs of myself,” Jonathan announced. As he undressed he looked at me.
“Eva, you should be part of this,” he asked. Weeks of repression had inured me. I pretended not to have heard him. He began to move in and out of the steam.
“Eva, I want you in these photographs,” he murmured, staring at me.
I took off my clothes slowly to hide my eagerness. But as I approached him my heart was pounding furiously. His cock was already large and hard. A current of intense joy ran through me when his slender, naked body embraced mine.
“Finally,” I whispered, and we began to kiss passionately. He slipped his hand between my legs and the sensation was so acute that I started to come.
He spread his legs. My hands glided down his waist and massaged his groin. When I crouched before him and slipped him into my mouth, he groaned with pleasure. I was oblivious to the clicks of the camera and thought only of his hard cock.
Steam swirled around us. Jonathan pulled me up, grabbed my leg and put it around his waist. I lifted myself up, locking my legs behind him. The head of his cock found my vagina. When he penetrated me I thought I would faint. He moved in and out, pushing and thrusting, bending his knees for better leverage. A gust of steam swept us like a warm hand caressing our bodies. I reached down and fondled his balls. He began to thrust more quickly and I felt myself exploding.
“Come with me,” I pleaded. I was contracting deeply, furiously. “Eva,” he cried with a violent shudder.
Jonathan and I have made love many times since that night. I realize now that the period of celibacy he put us through was his peculiar way of bonding us together. Neither of us has ever forgotten the trauma of intensely wanting but not having the other.
The steam vent series created a controversy when the photographs were exhibited. Several critics denounced them as indecent, others hailed them as highly original. I find the photographs, like their author, beautifully eccentric. A favorite is one the art world will never see. It shows the ashen, shocked faces of the two Germans watching as I mounted Jonathan.
I WAS A COKE WHORE
By Jodi Jettson
Until recently I was a coke whore, trading sex for cocaine. A man named Carl introduced me to the drug. He asked for nothing in return. Yet it was inconceivable to snort with him all evening and then not sleep with him. Later I met Ted, an acne-faced fellow from St. Louis, who told me outright that he expected to fuck me at the end of a long, hot, coke-snorting night on the banks of the Mississippi.
Many more men and a lot more cocaine followed. The pattern never varied: I snorted their lines of white powder, drank their booze and then went home with them. The coke made me feel uninhibited and giddy. I usually wanted to have sex after being high. When I closed my eyes and lay down, I could surrender completely to the sensations of my body. And it made no difference whether I was attracted to the man or not, since it was his cocaine that I lusted after. Then I met Frank.
I had moved to northern California from Chicago to attend college. During the first few weeks I found small-town life lonesome. One Saturday, hoping to find companionship, I went to a local hangout popular with the students. A reggae band was playing. I ignored stares from the fellows at the bar and took an empty seat at the end. A tall man stood next to me, watching the musicians. I paid no attention to him until he asked me to watch his drink for a moment.
“Sure,” I said. “What's it going to do?”
I stared at the glass as though waiting for it to perform a trick. The man laughed and walked away.
A few minutes later he returned, sniffing and wiping his nose and wearing the telltale grin of someone who has just snorted a line. I was envious. I had not done any cocaine since leaving Illinois and I shivered at the thought of those sensuous crystals crawling up my nose.
“Your glass hasn't done anything yet,” I told him, motioning toward his drink on the bar. He looked surprised, then bent over his drink and yelled, “Goddamn it, I'm tired of this dead-beat act of yours. Now stand up and dance!” Then he looked at me, shrugged and asked me to dance. Afterward he invited me out to his car for a line, just as I had hoped.
We sat in the front seat for hours, talking and snorting. Finally I went to retrieve our coats at the bar. Without saying a word, both of us knew I would be going home with him. That is how things are between a man and a woman who share cocaine all night. The attraction is not mutual desire but a need to keep the party going.
But Frank was different. As I soon discovered, he liked sex even more than coke. Both were my chief preferences in life, too, but in reverse order. Since he wanted to fuck and I wanted to snort, we made a tacit, subtle agreement, the way you automatically move closer to the fire when you're cold.
Frank was a voracious, insatiable lover. A tongue flick or touch of the hand on his crotch gave him a stubborn erection. He could literally make love all night, though I made sure we stopped frequently for cocaine. Those were the moments I liked best. Even though Frank was a thoughtful lover, he did not excite me. I achieved orgasm with him no more than once or twice. He seemed more like a drinking or snorting buddy than a sex partner.
After a month, I could not even look at Frank without tasting that acrid powder in my nostrils. If he visited me during the day and did not give me a few lines, I felt angry and resentful. So I decided to ensure a regular supply. The next time he came over, he sprawled out on my couch and started chatting. I walked over, unzipped his pants, and began giving him a blowjob. His cock immediately grew hard. He had an enormous penis and it gagged the back of my throat. Finally he moaned and his semen spurted out. I swallowed every drop.
“Whew,” he sighed, “what did you have for breakfast today?”
That night he returned with two grams of cocaine and a bottle of champagne.
We cruised the bars regularly, drinking and snorting coke in the restroom or outside in his car. Often, people who were strangers to me approached him. Then Frank would disappear for a few minutes to make another drug deal. Or we went to parties where people gave him money and he cut out the lines of cocaine on top of a coffee table.
Some nights we snorted so much cocaine that I felt too wired to make love to him. My body twitched and my mouth was dry. But Frank was never too stoned to screw. So I would force my jumpy body down onto the bed with him, letting my nervous tongue roll over his chest. Then I lay trembling and agitated while he penetrated and thrust into me. After he came, I always got up and snorted again. My desire for cocaine was becoming as unquenchable as his for sex.
Yet snorting did affect me sexually in different ways. Sometimes when I was high, my body yearned for physical sensations. Each touch was isolated and intense. Frank's fingers on my skin felt like static electricity. But at other times I was indifferent to his caresses. My body seemed to freeze up and I was unable to respond to him.
Frank eventually m
ade some money in a big drug deal and wanted to go to Reno for a couple of days. The allure of booze, gambling, decadence and, of course, cocaine was irresistible. We left for Reno on a Friday afternoon. But the six-hour drive took 10 hours because we stopped so often to snort a line or have a shot of whisky at a bar. Once at our hotel we collapsed onto the bed, scarcely able to see through the veil of drugs.
The next morning we hit the casinos. Frank got involved in a poker game, while I played the slot machines. Already I felt resentful at not having snorted any cocaine that morning. So I took out my anger on the machines and drank innumerable free screwdrivers served by waitresses in bunny costumes.
By late afternoon I was drunk. Frank rescued me from my stool by applying a few life-saving lines of coke up my nose. That enabled me to at least grab the drinks from the tray without falling off my chair. Time ceased to exist. Day and night merged into one. Frank went back to his poker game and I reentered the phantasmagoria of ringing slot machines, blinking red and white lights and bunnies offering me an endless supply of screwdrivers.
Finally, Frank wanted to go back to our hotel and sleep for a few hours. I would have preferred to stay at the casino, but I reluctantly accompanied him. In our room he tore off his clothes and fell into bed with a raging hard-on. I made love to him quickly, riding on top of him and coolly observing his face convulse when he climaxed. When he fell asleep I took a bath. All I could think of was cocaine and casinos. Frank was still asleep when I finished bathing. I dressed quietly, then rummaged through his pockets until I found the package of white powder. Guilt crept up my back like the first chill of coke in the morning. But I took it and left anyway, trying to comfort myself with the thought that there is no such thing as free cocaine.
All night long I sat at the blackjack tables, feeling guiltier by the minute. I had never taken Frank's coke without asking him first. Now I felt like a junkie, desperate for a fix, who would even steal from a friend or lover. Hours later Frank suddenly pulled me off the stool with a face red more from hurt than anger. It was then that he realized I liked his cocaine more than him. I was surprised. Did he think that I loved him all this time?