The Devil's Sperm Is Cold (14 page)

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?”

Although she had asked the question rhetorically, Lou answered her. “I was thinking about that just last week as a matter of fact, and I tried to figure it out. As near as I can reckon, I’ve had my cock sucked more than four thousand times. Which doesn’t sound like too much until you consider that about two thousand of those were by different women.” He paused. “Can you imagine? I’ve had more than two thousand different pairs of lips on my cock, and two thousand lovely tongues lick my prick until I came, and two thousand young and open throats gulping my sperm down.” He leaned forward, slightly aroused now. “I’ll tell you something,” he went on. “I’ve grown tired of individual women, but I’ve never gotten bored with the experience. If it’s a woman I’ve never had before, getting blown by her is as exciting as my first time.”

“Well, then,” she drawled, “you couldn’t want me. I’ve eaten you…what is it now…must be all of six or seven times. Why, I can’t imagine your wanting this old mouth again.”

“Ah, what a fine cockteaser you are, Maggie,” he said expansively.

She looked at him a long time. “You know, Lou, I’m much more lonely than I am horny. I’ve done just about everything that we’ve ever published. And I don’t know how many cocks have been inside me, up my ass, in my cunt, down my throat. My body has been and is as hungry for sensation as anyone else’s. And I’ve done the whole route with women too, and found that I dig it more, everything being equal. If I were stranded on that desert island and had a choice of sharing it with a man or a woman, I wouldn’t hesitate to pick one of my own kind. But when all the cocks have come and all the cunts have throbbed, it just seems like a lot of empty experience shot off into the night. Because deep inside, I’m as empty as I ever was. And sometimes I think I’d rather have a warm talk with someone who is dear to me than the ultimate orgasm with someone who is only interested in sexual dramatics.”

Made slightly sentimental by the drinking and the emotionality of having learned that she was now the titular publisher of Centaur books, she began to speak words that revealed more of her soul than she might have been comfortable to expose had she been more self-conscious. The frailty, uncertainty, and tenderness were still intact inside her, protected by the wall of defensive armor that we all learn very early in life to construct against the harshness of the human world.

“I mean,” she continued, “I don’t care if people fuck their mothers, or eat shit, or go down on horses. And it doesn’t matter to me whether they’re homosexual or bisexual or omnisexual or transsexual. I don’t care how many there are or how they want to get it on. I’ve been whipped and stuck with pins and tried every other attempt to go past myself that’s listed in any of the books on perversion. But all of that is meaningless. Those things are hang-ups only for cowards. The real point is that even after you get over all the inhibitions and have worked out the entire glossary in Krafft-Ebbing, there’s still that ache inside, that awful void that nothing seems to fill. And if I’m going to publish books about sex, that’s what I want my writers to address themselves to, because that’s what is important to me. They can have their characters arrange their bodies any way they like, but they must go inside, into the feelings and thoughts, into the unending emptiness that gnaws at a woman’s belly and won’t be assuaged, not by a cock, not by a baby, not by anything. And even if they write fantasy, it has to be someone’s fantasy, and that someone has to bleed and cry out in the night and at least be trying to care for one other person or one other thing in the world. There must be the totality of life in their work, and if there is that, the sex will take care of itself.”