by Marco Vassi
“No,” she told herself, “I mustn’t let myself feel defeated before I even begin. Lou’s an old man on the way out. He’s describing his trip. It’s up to me to make my own.”
Lou returned and put the glass of hot brew on the table next to her. “I have something I want to show you,” he said in a semiconspiratorial tone.
She looked up at him, his balding crown, his suit which was never pressed, and she smiled. “Lou, you’re incorrigible,” she said.
“Well, sometimes it’s good to relax and enjoy this stuff we make a living out of,” he told her. “Otherwise there’s no pleasure at all anywhere in life.” He flicked a switch and the lights dimmed; another switch and the screen slid down over the far wall; a third switch and the projector began to roll.
On the square of canvas, five figures jumped into life. Two men were standing over a trio of women who knelt in front of them, their heads covered with black masks which left only their mouths exposed. They seemed young, and the sight of their firm bodies with naked breasts and tight asses, the triple triangle of pubic bushes, contrasted against the implied bondage of the masks, with their mouths open and moist, not knowing what was to be done with them, was a blend of what Lou considered aesthetic content with erotic appeal. The men wore black chaps cut away at the crotch, showing their big, dangling cocks and their rough, muscular buttocks. They were bare-chested, and their hairy pectoral muscles bulged with the evidence of weight lifting.
“Oh Lou, this is all old stuff,” she said.
“Give them a chance,” he replied, “they haven’t even begun yet.”
“But what’s the point?” she persisted. “The girls are anonymous, the men are standard types. Of what conceivable interest can their activities be to anyone, much less me? What are they going to do, whippings and water games? That’s all regressive acting-out.”
Lou frowned. “That analyst you’re seeing is going to rob you of your capacity for sexual enjoyment,” he said. “You keep labeling perfectly lovely activities with those negative terms, and before you know it you’ll start thinking that sex is beneath your dignity.”
“That kind of sex is beneath my dignity,” she said.
“Oh really,” he intoned drily. “I have a few films in my archives that suggest quite the opposite.”
“I didn’t say I was against doing it,” she retorted. “I just don’t find any particular point in watching it. Not unless I can find something in the people I’m watching that I can sympathize with. As it is, those people aren’t actually people for me, they’re just fleshy robots.”
As they spoke, the quintet on the screen was rearranging itself. One of the girls had been made to lie down, the second started licking her cunt, while the third sat on her face. One of the men put his cock in the mouth of the girl who was sitting on the first girl’s face, while the second man fucked the ass of the girl who was eating the first girl’s cunt. The five of them moved with slow awkward rhythms, testing the viability of the configuration before letting themselves swing more freely. There was little sound. Only a few moans and the barely audible swish of skin against skin.
“You have good microphones,” Margaret commented.
“The trouble with you,” Lou said to her, not taking his eyes off the screen, “is that you’re still in the romantic era. Pornography is in an abstract phase right now. Those people up there aren’t to be probed or dissected for their life histories. They are bodies, beautiful bodies in suggestive costumes and interesting poses. And they are doing something quite splendid with their hands and mouths and cocks and cunts and asses. They are giving themselves up to a shared experience. We are witnessing a delicate and charming communion. And there is nothing to identify with except the thing itself. I mean, of what possible concern can it be to anyone that that man now sliding his fist into that girl’s cunt is a motorcycle mechanic, or that the girl who is accepting his offering works as a clerk at a McDonald’s hamburger stand? What do you want to know, their opinions about the war? Or what religion they were raised in?”
Margaret, her eyes also watching the screen, listened to the slightly caustic edge in Lou’s voice, and heard the validity of his argument. But she was not ready to let it lie there. “The act itself is lovely, Lou,” she said after a few moments. “I don’t argue with that. But it’s cold, alienated. I agree that sociology and history are dull, but psychology isn’t. This is the century of psychology, and that’s where the true art is being formed. What about these people’s motives, their thoughts, their fears, their loathings, their passions?”
“Wait,” Lou urged. “Wait until they get warmed up. Then you’ll see it all. You’ll see it on their faces, hear it in their voices, discern it in every gesture and movement of their bodies.”
“But they aren’t real.” Margaret protested.
“Well, what the fuck is real?” Lou asked. He pointed at the screen with his eyes. “Look at that girl in the middle. Think of what she’s experiencing. That huge cock reaming her ass alone is enough to send her into spasms of self-forgetfulness. Look at it sliding in and out between her cheeks. See her hands pulling her ass apart? She wants it to go on endlessly. She is at the point of fulfillment, and inside her she is living out all her dramas. And that’s only the one orifice. That’s just what most women settle for, if they can get even that much—women who need to put sex in the context of daily life, of what is called ‘relationship’…as though everything in life weren’t already a relationship. This woman has left all that tedium behind. She is, to use your terms, ‘alienated, unreal.’ And yet listen to her as she begs for that cock to split her wider, to dig into her more deeply. And that’s only the first cock. The second one is jammed into her cunt. The man under her is catching all her movements on his rod as she rolls her ass around to fuck the cock that’s plowing her from behind. If you look closely you can see her pussy juices running down the shaft and onto his balls. In a minute she’ll switch her attention from her ass to her cunt and start to come. And then, as she comes, she will bunch her ass and feel that first cock even more sharply, and go crazy switching back and forth, until the crack between her legs is on fire, and she almost disjoints herself trying to impale herself more and more fully on those two engines of fulfillment. Well? What sort of context would you want to put that into? She doesn’t even know the names of the men who are fucking her. She’s just an ordinary girl, twenty-two, wanting to explore her body. And I gave her the opportunity—the set, the actors, the script, the audience. And what do you think would happen if a prospective husband saw this film a year from now? He would grow purple with jealousy and green with rage. Why? Because he sees her as a ‘person,’ and that idiotic bit of sentimentality would prevent that beautiful female animal from touching such heights and depths of experience that she would cease flowing with life and become another automation, able only to read about what she isn’t doing herself.
“And that’s only two out of four who are working on her. Look at what the women are doing. One very expertly licking and sucking her nipples, sending maddening sensations throughout her entire body, feeding her frenzy. And the other woman is covering her mouth with her pungent cunt, smothering the girl in juice and aroma and vibration. What an extraordinary treat! To be filled and covered with all that flesh and warmth. And as the lucky girl humps herself wild on two cocks, thrashes about under the ministrations of a tongue on her nipples, she is curling her own tongue into a juicy cunt, sucking it greedily, exhausting herself in a crescendo of lust.”
On the screen, the girl was now lying on her back, the men fucking her mouth. They took turns filling her lips with their cocks. She took first one prick and then the other, alternating more and more frequently, until both cocks were lodged in her mouth at once. She stretched her lips to their breaking point to accommodate the two huge rods of flesh, and her tongue worked furiously to lick the space where they touched. The men pulled on their cocks, working toward climax. The second girl was still nibbling at her tits, while
the third was sliding a sculpted dildo in and out of her pussy. The girl’s legs were bent at the hips and knees, spread wide, so that her cunt was completely open for the giant tool to ram her twat.
The men jerked their cocks more vigorously, until they had timed themselves to have simultaneous orgasms. The girl beneath them curled her tongue out and licked the two cocks at once, lapping the red crowns vigorously. She started to whimper, begging them to come all over her. The men shuddered, cried out, and each sent copious jets of marble-white sperm into her mouth. It splashed on her tongue, and slid down into her throat. Their discharges were phenomenally large, and filled her mouth to the brim until some of the sticky jism spilled out over her lips and down her cheeks. The dildo in her pussy whipped in and out with greater and greater speed and force, while the girl sucking her tits worked her clitoris with one hand. The girl who was at the center of it all convulsed with a sigh, her pelvis trembling with a long fluttery orgasm as she swallowed the mouthful of thick sperm, her throat working seven or eight times to get the whole tangy, pungent load down into her belly.
The screen went black.
Lou reached over, flicked a switch, and the lights in the living room went back on.
He sat back in his chair, and looked over at Margaret. She smiled at him sheepishly. “Disgusting,” she said. But her cheeks were flushed, her breasts rose and fell with heavy breathing, and her thighs had fallen apart and were stretching the fabric of her dress, causing thin parallel wrinkles to stand out over the space which led to her cunt. Beneath her dress, her panties were gooey with secretion.
“So?” he said. “Point made? Smut is its own context.”
She shook her head. “I can’t help but think how much more powerful that would be if it were real.”
“Real!” he exclaimed. “That was a real situation. Those are real people. What more do you want?” He lit a cigarette and crossed one leg over the other, mashing the remains of the erection that had accompanied his watching the film. “It was well done, it got you excited, it didn’t offend your aesthetic sensibilities. What more can pornography do?”
“It can show feeling,” she replied, lighting her own cigarette, and draining her glass of the rest of its toddy, now merely warm. “Yes, this is a minor masterpiece. I’ll admit it. I’ve always liked your stuff. But it still looks like a bunch of sex machines choreographed for a specific program. There’s no spontaneity, there’s no gut reactions. And worst of all, there’s no thought.”
Lou sighed, reached over, and took her hand. They had had this argument a hundred times, but this was the first time he wasn’t speaking as her boss, and so he was shorter in how he spoke. Also, this was the first time she hadn’t been afraid to pursue the point to its very end. She was on an equal footing with Lou now, and could hold her own entirely.
“Maggie,” he said, “do you know the root meaning of the word pornography? Originally it designated a description of prostitution. Porne means prostitute in Greek, and graphy is, of course, from the word meaning writing. Now, there are many kinds of prostitution, and so there are many lands of pornography. Sexual pornography gets all the press, but it’s only one of many. There’s a pornography of the emotions: soap operas, true romances, a whole genre of novels; there’s a pornography of power, a pornography of violence; the latter is as big as sex in the country right now; advertising is pornography; and there is intellectual pornography, and religious pornography. Pornography is just another name for what gets people off. And the only reason sexual porn has been given so much prominence is that we have always been such an incredibly repressed civilization. I mean, our inhibitions are at least six thousand years old.”
He poured another drink from his cocktail shaker, took a sip, and went on, “Intrinsically there’s no difference between reading Einstein and having a cerebral orgasm, and reading Tor Kung and creaming in your pants. And getting a heart throb reading devotional literature is no more noble than getting a cunt throb reading raunchy smut. People who erect hierarchies of nobility concerning what gets them off are the most tedious kind of snobs, pretending that the fineness of a feeling is contingent upon the social judgment of the stimulus which causes the feeling. Now, I’m a very democratic person. I think that everyone should be allowed to get it on in whatever way he or she can. If pictures of saints do it for you, fine; if you grow ecstatic over differential calculus, also fine; and if you are made most happy by watching movies which show women sucking the cocks of mules, I raise my glass to you too.
“My adult life has been little more than a study in sexual pornography. And in almost thirty years, I learned one principle which, no matter what else you do, must be followed. And I give it to you free. And it’s just this: ‘The name of the game is fantasy.’ People want to see and read about people doing things they don’t do themselves. They want to watch their private dreams acted out. And if you make the characters too dimensional, people can’t project onto them. In pornography, it is the act of sex that is wanted, not the justifications, motivations, results, and extenuating circumstances of the act.”
Margaret shook her head. “It’s not a matter of projection,” she said, “but of identification. I mean, there are probably two basic kinds of reader for erotic books. The first kind enjoys someone else doing it and pretends he or she is superior to anyone who would allow oneself to be exhibited in such a way. These people despise the actors and actresses on the screen, while secretly admiring them, and think of erotic writers as hack jerk-offs.”
“A lot of them are,” said Lou.
“There are hack jerk-offs in every field, and probably constitute the majority of any given profession, from garbage collecting to psychiatry. And for that kind of human being, the pornography you have been producing is fine. But what about the second category of reader or viewer? People who are sophisticated enough to realize that they have all possible desires within them, who have understood that a part of them wants to be whipped, to be humiliated, to be possessed? These people want a pornography which examines the sexual core of the human condition in all its ramifications.”
“Sounds very fancy,” Lou interjected.
“Not really. It’s a train of thought that began when I first read Gorki’s ideas on socialist realism.”
“Socialist realism?” Lou repeated, “in pornography?”
“Just so,” Margaret told him. “And if you think about it a minute, you’ll see that a socialist realist pornography will have to be the highest and most powerful literary art form of the century.”
“My God,” Lou said with exaggerated emphasis, “Centaur Publications is being taken over by a Commie.”
She smiled, and then bumped back into seriousness, expressing ideas she had been formulating but had never articulated with such consistency.
“Do you realize that there are probably a hundred pornographic novels written in the twentieth century alone that stand alongside of any other important literature that has been produced in the same time? And they aren’t on any college curriculum’s reading list, and they aren’t in bookstores, and hardly anyone but a handful of afficionados knows about them.”
“Well, the writers are as much to blame as anyone. They all use pseudonyms, and if an author is not proud enough of his or her work to sign it, then how can you expect anyone else to take it seriously?”
Margaret nodded. “There are only a handful who use their real names,” she said. “Barry Malzberg, Diane di Prima, Marco Vassi.”
“Marco Vassi,” Lou said suddenly. “Isn’t he the one who’s writing this book?”
“Why yes,” Margaret told him. “He’s creating us at this very instant.”
Lou drew himself up to his full height and puffed his chest out a bit, as though he were trying on a new jacket and looking into a mirror. “Well, I hope he draws me in my full complexity,” he said.
“It’s unlikely,” Margaret responded. “He’s not being paid very much and the book won’t get very wide distribution, so he’s not
likely to do more than two drafts. And I’m afraid you might emerge as something of a caricature.” She smiled to herself as she spoke.
“A caricature!” Lou exploded.
“This makes my point better than anything else I might say,” she went on. “If porn became a recognized genre, then serious writers could expect substantial advances and produce work with some dimension to it.” She paused, looking out over the balcony. “One of my first policy decisions is that writers use their real names on anything we publish.”
Lou leaned back in his chair and sighed. He was filled with that vague sense of defeat which comes as a corollary to realizing that one’s lifestyle has passed, inexorably, into the dustbin of history. It was not a question of who was right and who was wrong in the discussion, but of who was on the way in and who was on the way out. Subtly, he began to understand the deeper significance of the notion of resignation.
Then, with a gesture of good-natured comeback, he slapped one arm of the chair with an open palm, looked up at Margaret, smiled, and said, “Well, I just hope you don’t get so caught up with the big picture that you forget where your own money comes from to even do what you want to do.”
“And where is that?” she asked.
“From people who have a much less exalted concept of pornography, and who define a different purpose for smut.”
“Which is?”
Lou pointed with an exaggerated gesture to his cock. “It’s to get that thing hard,” he said, and then, pointing to her cunt, added, “And to get that thing wet.” He downed the rest of the drink that was in his glass, and poured another.
“Want some more?” he asked.
“Why not?” she replied. And he poured a large cocktail into the glass which had just held her toddy.
“What do you want, Lou?” Margaret asked wryly. “Do you want me to give you head? That can’t be the case. How many blow jobs have you had in your life?”