by Marco Vassi
“What do you get out of it?” a woman once asked after he had fucked her for four hours and taken her to exotic realms.
“The pleasure of knowing that I can do it to you,” he had replied spontaneously and then been amazed at his own answer.
“It seems like pretty thin gruel to sustain you for all that exertion,” she noted.
This night he wanted no pretences. He wanted to buy flesh because only in that way could he control what went on. It was his gratification he was interested in, not Constance’s at this point, and he was struck by seeing that he bore her no little resentment for what he called creeping entropy in their relationship, even though the responsibility for softheadedness was just as much his. He was tired of making love to a person, he wanted to fuck a thing.
The street caught at him as he stepped out of the cab. It was a raw spring night, the smell of the new season an elusive scent beneath the heavy curtain of engine exhaust. No climactic, meteorological, or seasonal nuances survived the city with any significant success. The sky threatened rain, but the sky was an invisible presence behind the midtown glare reflected on the unnaturally low ceiling of inversion.
He walked to Forty-sixth Street and then down to Broadway, savoring the subtle shifts in ambience that occurred each block as the neighborhood went from sleazy to pretentious to gaudy. The side streets boasted the legitimate theatres, fossils still capable of stirring their bones, while the Great White Way was a slash of movie houses, cut-rate junk shops, dingy restaurants, and traffic. When he turned up Forty-second Street again, going west, the very air became charged with soft violence. The dozen or fifteen movie theatres showed hardcore porn or obscure adventure films, kung fu melodramas or new-wave black gangster thrillers. The block held sporting goods stores, which prominently displayed knives, a shooting gallery and amusement parlor, quick-food shops, which made the Broadway restaurants seem centers of high cuisine by comparison, and a moiling stream of drunks, deadbeats, pimps, hustlers, hookers, and boy prostitutes. It was an avenue of pure tawdry experience, and Chet walked through the scene as though he were in a museum.
Back on Eighth Avenue, the ambience shifted downward into a serious business. Chet eyed twenty or thirty women, mostly black, mostly ugly and scarred, mostly tending toward bulkiness. One caught his attention and he veered toward her. She might have been nineteen or twenty, tall and thin, with an outrageously high and lean ass. She wore a skirt that came almost to her crotch, and a red sweater that outlined pear-sized breasts. Her face was round and her lips full and soft. She was highly appealing and Chet was already picturing her bent over a hotel room bed, the dark crevice of her buttocks opening onto a moist pink cunt.
But when he was several feet away, he stopped. She looked at him with the way that street whores have, a mixture of defense and invitation, a hint that what the man thinks he’s buying and what she’s selling are probably two different things, and the faint prospect of her actually, in the heat of the embrace, giving herself to him in some dimensional manner. At the very corner of her mouth there was a small, open sore, no larger than a fly, but unmistakably oozing. It could have been a fever blister that just broke, an innocent infection, or the mark of some virulent venereal disease. He teetered for an instant on the brink of asking her outright, but the sheer shamefulness of the entire situation suddenly stripped him of momentum, and he turned abruptly and walked away.
The whore looked after him for a few seconds. Her feet hurt, she had a toothache, and the four men she’d had that evening were all somewhat repulsive. The chance at a good-looking young man had come as a small but real flutter of pleasure, and his brusque flight was felt as a personal rejection.
Chet flagged down another cab and rode to the Village. For someone in his mood, it was definitely not a place to hunt for women. He was impatient, pugnaciously introspective, and horny, and all three traits did not recommend a man to the ordinary female of that area for whom a certain sophisticated pacing was an essential ingredient of the transaction preceding their taking their clothes off and wailing with guttural abandon on the slippery cock of some grunting stranger. Yet, the Village suited another aspect of his mood, for it provided a perfect cruising ground both in the homosexual and nautical senses of the term. It was possible to float through the streets and swim in the stares of those who were on similar errands of ambiguity. Each eye contact was its own form of erotic exchange which did not have to lead anywhere. The glances were like salvos hurled from soul to soul, and one could return fire, or withhold it, surrender, or sail in for the kill.
He found himself drawn down Christopher Street, that sluice of gay eroticism down which are swept the mincing, strutting, shuffling, and simply walking random population of the homosexual world. Dressed in Levi’s, leathers, or elegant rags, they provide a unique current of energy, which manifests a buoyancy in sharp contrast to the usual sluggish movements of the city’s millions. It is the closest thing to a tribal consciousness visibly available to a casual observer.
Chet was a closet queen. His homosexual encounters were known to no one, not even his therapist. He preferred it that way; it wasn’t a question of guilt. The appeal of the scene was less in the act itself than in the absolute privacy, forbiddenness, and squalor of its context. He thought that people who preached gay liberation were stark raving mad. The idea of a sanctioned homosexuality seemed to exhibit the essence of the banal sensibility. What more flaccid, hairy, angular, foolish, and distasteful scene could one imagine than the sight of two men in a licit and legal sixty-nine? The demythification of sex through the upsurge of organizations and magazines and movies had already gone a long way toward destroying the fires of eroticism in the land. If homosexuality fell from its privileged perch and became the common property of the masses, there would be almost nothing left for a man of discretion to amuse himself with.
Chet stopped first at Ty’s, once a quiet and top-notch leather bar, but since its discovery by the action parasites it had quadrupled its clientele and been reduced to a tenth of its former quality. Now, as a result of the homosexual equivalent of bussing, a kind of subcultural miscegenation had set in and a degenerate breed had been born. Wall flowers with imitation leather jackets wearing the latest coded handkerchief-and-key-ring signals were piled like a day’s catch of clams onto the barroom floor, all waiting for someone to brush up against them and provide the first foetid flowering of the evening.
He had three beers, stayed long enough to let the music and vibrations settle into his bones, and having effected something of a transition from his straight identity by this brief run through the sheep dip, headed west to the bookstore.
With curtains on the windows and no sign to explain what happened inside, it was a pit stop for most of the men who cruised the area. The front was a medium-sized space devoted mostly to magazines and a few books. There was also a long glass counter displaying dildoes, vibrators, lubricants, inhalers, handcuffs, and assorted paraphernalia. If one knew the proper way to ask, one could buy poppers from the clerk who kept them in a refrigerator under the counter.
It was the back of the store, however, which provided its true raison d’etre. There, a truncated labyrinth wound about, dimly lit, with twenty-five-cent booths showing short film clips of men having sex flanking the aisle. The booths had sliding doors and were large enough to accommodate two and sometimes three men, depending on their positions. The most intricate arrangement Chet had seen had one man with his back against a wall fucking another man standing in front of him while a third man knelt sucking the cock of the man being fucked.
When there was a goodly number and the heat reached a certain level, quite often the booths were disdained and the antics took place in open view. When Chet went through the swinging doors, his eyes narrowed to adjust to the gloom. It took a few seconds to begin to make out the loungers leaning against the wall, the sperm vultures eyeing crotches hungrily, the impresarios, prima donnas, the one-screw
studs, the swooners, and all the types and archetypes of the homoerotic night.
He didn’t know quite what he wanted. His cock was tingling and his chest tight. Dropping to his knees and swinging on a lusty joint was often a cure for that kind of malaise. He prowled for a while. He saw one promising bulge but when his eyes skated up the sloping belly, past the chest and into the eyes of the owner, he saw pointed indifference. He moved on. A group of four or five men were clustered around a booth and Chet edged his way into it in order to watch the last minute of a man’s masturbating into the waiting mouth of a teenage boy whose eyes were closed in dramatic rapture and who seemed to be yearning less for the cock or the sperm than for the approbation of the audience that had gathered to watch his performance.
Suddenly, the place seemed pointless, and he turned abruptly and strode out, slowing down in the front section to look at the current crop of magazines. Aside from the standard issues showing sucking, fucking, threesomes, bondage, blacks, teenagers, men with unusually large cocks, there was a rash of publications specializing in piss. Photo after photo showed one man or another getting pissed on, and some showed swallowing and gulping. A favorite theme was that of a man being fucked by one man while being pissed on by another. The piss theme permeated all the other classic scenarios, so that there were teenagers pissing and blacks pissing and men with unusually large cocks pissing, pissing and bondage, pissing and threesomes, pissing and fucking, and of course, pissing and sucking.
“Piss is unquestionably in,” Chet said to himself as he put the last of the magazines down and strode out of the store, the idle gaze of the clerk frisking his thighs as he went.
He walked north and west, going up Greenwich Street past the warehouse section where the trucks were parked, huge vans and trailers like steer in a pen ranged over parking lots near the Hudson River. While he didn’t go in to any of the enclosures, he had been there often enough to know that hundreds of men were at that moment performing a wide variety of sexual acts in the deserted spaces. On warm nights during the summer, the deserted back of a trailer might contain forty or fifty men in a single orgiastic heap. He idly reflected that on all the occasions he had sucked cocks in the dark or licked assholes in anonymous groups, he had never worried about venereal disease. And yet the merest possibility of it had warned him violently away from the prostitute. It seemed as though it ought to have provided an insight into the difference in his attitudes toward men and women, but he was not inclined to pursue it. The years he spent attempting to analyze and understand just what homosexuality was, what heterosexuality was, appeared as fanciful time-wasting. One did what one did and made one’s peace with it. And if finding peace required attaining psychiatric approval, then that was all right too. But so much nonsense had been written and spoken over the simple act of putting a penis into one’s mouth that he couldn’t bear to add to the weight of the stupidity, even if he kept it in the realm of thought.
He finally arrived at The Chorus, a bar that was in imminent danger of being discovered by New York Magazine and the Village Voice, thus becoming a watering hole for the hordes of mediocre people who gain their information by having it spoon-fed by publications that serve no purpose but to keep air in the bubble of their own hype. As yet, its only contamination arrived in the form of chauffeured and bronzed, ruthless men with slender women wearing white gowns slit up the side. The wealthy, slumming.
The place had a show, which was the cause of its beginning to attract wide attention in the straight world. Chet walked in twenty minutes before it was scheduled to begin. He had to piss, and smiled as he made his way to the urinal. In this milieu, emptying one’s bladder was an act of extraordinary complexity, entailing a field of psychoerotic implications.
There were five johns, and the doors were variously painted with large, gaudy letters. The first read, “Definitely Not.” The second, “Can be convinced,” the third, “Perhaps,” the fourth, “?,” and the fifth, “Ready!.” He went into the door with the question mark on it, that form of ambiguity suiting his mood best. Once inside the water closet, he turned to latch the door, but another question mark was drawn in over the lock. He appreciated the subtlety of the touch and left the door unlocked.
He had pissed and was washing his hands when the door opened and a large man walked in, two inches taller than Chet and much broader. He wore a Modified Truck Driver Outfit in Soiled Denim, the pants deliciously outfitted with genuine grease stains. The accessories were de rigueur, key ring hanging from the left side of the belt, a peaked leather cap, a fistful of coarse black chest hair struggling to free itself from the front of the partially unbuttoned flannel shirt. The man made no more than a split second’s eye contact with Chet, smiled, and slid the latch over, shutting the two of them in.
He wasted no time on dialogue but began running his hands over Chet’s ass at once. Chet’s knees weakened, his arms grew heavy, and his lids closed. The man pulled his own zipper down and then opened the belt of Chet’s pants and slid the pants down until they dropped from his fingers and fell into two piles around Chet’s ankles. From the right pocket of his denim jacket the man produced a small tube of K-Y jelly, squeezed some out, and lubricated Chet’s asshole. He put it back, fastidiously wiped his fingers on a piece of tissue, and leaned his weight forward.
Chet felt the erection slipping between his thighs and he opened his legs a bit to give the stranger more room. The man grabbed his cock with his right hand, prised Chet’s buttocks open by inserting his left hand into the cleft and spreading his fingers, and brought the blunt tip to the greased hole.
The entry was slow and smooth, Chet relaxing and pushing back as he was penetrated. It happened in a single stroke so that the opening movement of the fuck rose like a sustained chord which swells from the barely audible sweep of the string instruments to the full vibrating blast of the entire orchestra complete with booming bass drums bracketing the harmonic din. They rose together until Chet’s buttocks were nestled into the cloth-covered crotch of the man behind him and they were both standing on their toes.
The second movement was longer. A series of short, explosive thrusts which had Chet gasping for breath and bending as far forward as he could at the conclusion of the bursts. The man was holding his hip bones, and had his own knees bent so that his fucks came from below at the perfect angle to invade Chet’s colon straight on. In this section, Chet’s breath was forced from him and he sounded like a man in the last laps of a long distance race. The stranger sucked his breath in sharply between his teeth.
The third movement was timeless, that is to say, free-form. The man swayed and lunged, paused and humped, lunged hard and gentle. Chet pushed back or remained passive, he squeezed or went lax, he twitched his buttocks or used his hands to pull them apart. They fucked with precision abandon, making no sound except an occasional, involuntary gasp, and their movements wild within the bounds of the discipline imposed by the nature of the environment.
The final movement was classic. Chet hung in perfect balance while the man behind him started a slow, steady climb to orgasm, his penetrations beginning long and easy and gradually transforming into staccato ripples. Halfway through, however, Chet heard a familiar snapping sound and his heart skipped a beat. Even before the ampule was put in front of his nose, he could smell the sweet fumes. The man sniffed first, then held the broken yellow cylinder for Chet to inhale from. Within seconds the effect took hold, and Chet sailed into a storm cloud of intimate euphoria. Universes solved themselves in his mind, his chest was warm with yearning, and the cock in his ass was the primal manifestation of the godhead itself, sending almost unassimilable sensations throughout his entire body.
As the man came, spurting rhythmically inside him, Chet opened his lids halfway and looked at his face in the mirror. It was a mask of profound drugged debauchery, a study in instant dissipation, a portrait of wanton existentialism.
After a polite pause, the man pulled out. He c
aught Chet’s eyes in the mirror, winked, and smiled. Then he zipped himself up, bending the still turgid cock to fit inside his tight jeans, slid the latch back, and walked out into the crowd.
Chet stood there for a full minute, his legs trembling. He stared at himself in the mirror, watching himself come down, to return from the previous phantasmagoric flight to the world of consensual gestures, postures, perceptions, reactions. The fuck had been ideal, and Chet was left without a trace. His bowels felt empty and wanted to be filled, and if Chet followed his inclination he could easily get fucked twenty more times. But, if experience were any guide, as he would, after the third or fourth man, get caught in the web of probability, and end with a bell curve distribution of quality in relation to his fucks. The one just finished would almost certainly be among the top two or three, but then he had all the mediocre and unpleasant experiences to look forward to in addition. He decided to pull in the reins. He squeezed the sphincter muscles half a dozen times and pulled himself back together. He gathered up his pants and tied his belt. He ran a comb through his hair, and then turned to leave.
Just as he went to open the door someone pulled it from the outside. He found himself looking into the eyes of a heavy-set man of about forty dressed in well-worn leather. He looked like a serious practitioner, someone who was a master long before sadomasochism had become trendy. Chet nodded to the man and stepped to one side. But just then, he wondered why someone like that would be going into the Question-Mark Room. The man caught his expression.