The Devil's Sperm Is Cold (2 page)

The third issue is human dignity, a phrase which seems almost to have lost all meaning, and which is even being denied referential reality by one of America’s most prominent psychologists and perhaps millions who are persuaded along the lines he proposes. It is clear that the concept of human dignity, if understood merely as an ideal to be strived for, is nothing more than another image by which people hypnotize themselves. But if we understand it as a quality of being, then we are talking about something which, like the peaks of distant mountains, is usually attained by only by a few. Along erotic lines and in its bluntest terms, the question might be asked: is eating shit consistent with human dignity? In The Devil’s Sperm Is Cold, when Margaret is allowing Al Leeds to debase her, she notes that from one viewpoint, lying naked on a rug while an odious man shoves his shoe into her cunt is terribly degrading, but “existentially, it’s no more or less peculiar than anything else.”

It is precisely what might be called an existentialist-nihilist attitude which states, “the earth is an insignificant speck of dust dancing preciously around a mediocre star in a medium-sized galaxy. Life on this planet is a cosmic accident. Human life is a lawyer trying to collect insurance on the accident. We are trivial, transient, and ridiculous. In the face of that, does it matter whether one is pope or pauper, lives on sunshine or eats shit?”

The opposing viewpoint might be called the we-are-created-in-the-image-of-God metaphor. This imposes an ideal, and insists that we live by it. Through it we attempt to lift ourselves by our own shoestrings. And from a psychological/political standpoint, the notion is intended to protect us from our own excesses.

The middle of the road is the role of good-guy-agnostic, which holds that we don’t know what’s going on but that we should strive to be good for its own sake. Good, according to this model, is what makes you feel good, throughout your entire being, and so constitutes its own reward. But along these lines, I’ve been tied to a bed and been whipped while having poppers put in front of my nose and found that the result of the entire process was to cure my cold.

I think the way to deal with this issue of human dignity is to remain with the question and not seek an answer. The point is to use the question as a magnifying glass through which to examine ourselves and all of creation. If in each thing I do I ask, “Is this consistent with my deepest understanding of human dignity?,” then when we have our erotic spells, everything we do serves as a means of learning who we are. Then, everything is allowed.

Yet, there is a catch. For as we become smarter, as we become more acute observers and questioners, then not everything is equally valuable. We find that the very process of examining alters our perception, our feeling, our behavior. In this way, each of us learns what constitutes human dignity for us, we learn what we enjoy, what makes us intrinsically harmonious. In Buddhist terms, “we resume our original nature.”

At that point, there isn’t very much more to say. The true expression of eroticism then takes place in the erotic act, and all commentary on that, all photographs, films, sculpture, dance, and theater, is reduced to the incidental. For if one is discovering the source of energy oneself, one isn’t all that very interested in someone else’s experience of the same phenomenon. It is only because so many of us are so impoverished in our own lives that we look to others to tell us “how it was, will be, or can be.”

Except for an occasional small piece, I don’t do any more erotic writing. I’ve said pretty much all I can say about what I have tried, and am now much more interested in integrating my experiences. My only possible words of comfort at this time would be: Don’t settle for secondhand experience. Find out for yourself. Don’t get caught up in the rigidity of traditionalism nor get swept away by the latest fad. Somewhere inside you is a voice, a feeling, a sense, which knows, knows beyond all doubt, what is fitting for you. And if you follow that, then it doesn’t matter whether externally you take the role of a piss-drinking transvestite or a model of marital fidelity. Because you will be true to yourself, and all the opinions of the experts and sexperts, of the gurus and scientists, of the hallowed texts and modem treatises, the magazine articles and preachments of erotic revolutionaries, will sound like so much empty chatter in your ears. And as with an annoying radio station that keeps breaking in with advertisements while you are trying to listen to music, you will simply and finally turn the dial and switch off all the self-styled pundits in order to pay attention to the reality of the erotic truth with which the living moment lovingly embraces you.

Marco Vassi

New York City

December, 1975

The conference was staggering on into its third hour. Joan was bored. Almost unable to stifle her yawns, she screamed inside herself as the voices droned on. As always, when meetings reached this point, she began to look around for a sympathetic eye, a reassuring smile, to tell her that all hope for humanity had not been abandoned to the necessities of the business machine. But most of the people there were men she barely knew, salesmen who had traveled to New York City for a week of gatherings just like this one.

She glanced over the faces. Lou Morris, president of Centaur Publishing, was listening to a complicated report from the Midwest representative. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands folded over his chest, and staring at the ceiling. She would find no support there. Jack, Centaur’s top salesman, and one of the few of that breed that Joan could relate to, was drawing elaborate doodles on his scratch pad. Joan continued to scan the room, and was brought up short when she found herself staring into the eyes of Margaret Hayes, Lou’s executive secretary, a tall, cool career woman who rarely spoke except by way of giving orders. Now, surprisingly, she narrowed her eyes and insinuated her gaze into Joan’s, indicating not only that she knew what Joan had been feeling, but that she empathized with her.

Joan looked away hurriedly. It was perhaps the sixth or seventh time within the past month that she had been captured by the other’s awareness. Something about the experience frightened her, although Margaret had not done or said a thing which could in any way be considered threatening. Rather, it was some sense within herself that responded peculiarly to Margaret’s attentions. She had thought about it, but had not been able to come to any conclusions about the matter.

She raised her eyes from the table top, and glanced back in Margaret’s direction. The eyes were still there, looking back at her. This time they held a glint of amusement, as though the two of them were partners in some naughty secret. As Joan felt herself pulled into Margaret’s gaze, getting lost in the other’s grey-green eyes, fascinated by the highlights in her golden hair which was swept back severely and wrapped in a tight bun, Margaret slowly and deliberately ran the tip of her tongue along the entire length of her full lower lip, moistening the soft maroon flesh in such a way that it glowed. Then, to Joan’s astonishment, she wrinkled her nose impishly and smiled.

It was one of those moments of exquisite uncertainty. On one level, Joan took the gesture as an extension of the comment on the sterility of the proceedings; but on another it seemed to contain a provocation that had Joan’s breath sticking in her chest. Joan let her gaze fall from Margaret’s face to her body. Margaret was dressed in a black knit turtleneck shirt that gripped every square inch of her torso. Her high, aggressive breasts bulged shamelessly forward, climaxing in half-dollar nipples that seemed blatant on such a sophisticated woman. Seeing Joan examining her breasts, Margaret twisted in her seat so that the twin mounds shifted dramatically, jiggling slightly with the movement. The movement was an unmistakable sexual signal, but for a few seconds, Joan couldn’t understand why it was being sent to her. And when it did become clear, she looked away in confusion.

“And that’s it, Lou,” the representative from Chicago was saying. “We’re doing so badly that we wouldn’t be operating now if we didn’t have support from Zenith.”

The company had been in a decline for over a year. For a long time prior to that, it had succeeded as one of the few sources of literate pornography in the nation. But with the sudden upsurge of smut since the late 1960s, it was being squeezed out on two ends. On one side were the West Coast sex factories, run mostly by young people who knew how to circumvent the guilt-and-dirt syndrome which had permeated all erotic writing in America since the first copies of Fanny Hill had been secretly printed a century earlier. The California atmosphere provided a natural base for orgiastic attitudes, and books, magazines, and movies had been pouring out from Los Angeles in tidal-wave proportions. On the other side was the constant pressure from federal and state authorities, forcing Centaur to tone down its output. Since Lou didn’t have the volume or exuberance or the shoestring budgets of his California competitors, he had been pushed out of the market until now his back was to the wall and Zenith, the distributing company which owned Centaur, among a score of other properties, was demanding a radical change.

Lou shifted his weight and his chair came back to the upright; he leaned forward with his elbows on the table. His face was drawn. It was obvious he would have preferred being anywhere else but at that spot at that time. Joan, who was fond of him, looked away; she could see the mortality in his eyes and it disturbed her. She glanced at Margaret again, but the other woman was staring out the window, at the thin, grey New York sky. Across the street, in a building almost exactly like the one they sat in, a hundred windows exhibited scenes not unlike the one now, going on at Centaur.

“It’s extraordinary,” Joan thought, “there must be a million meetings like this going on in the city alone. And millions more in the nation, and all over the world. What an enormous waste of time.”

“Joan.” It was Lou’s voice. She turned back to him. Her presence at the meeting was purely formal. As a copy editor she had nothing to do with policy, but Lou had wanted her there. “Maybe you can add something from a fresh perspective,” he had told her.

“Would you get us some coffee?” he asked.

She suppressed the impulse to make a face at him. She resented doing what she considered maid duty, but there was no gracious way to refuse. Besides, her relationship with Lou was more complex than a simple employer-employee bond. Almost a year earlier, ragged and unhappy, her savings gone, working as a night waitress in Bickford’s, her dream of becoming an actress mocked by the realities of the theater scene in the city, she had decided to find a regular office job and pull her life together. She couldn’t even consider going back to Arkansas, which she had left, a diploma in hand certifying that she had graduated college as a drama major, to conquer Broadway. She grimaced now when she thought of how naive she had been. Two years of workshops and making the rounds had taught her much about life and what went on behind the productions. She had done the customary things, getting odd jobs, having an affair, dabbling in promiscuity, seeing a therapist, and gradually come to love New York. Then, sadly aware that she would not make her way on the stage, she was forced to consider ways of earning a living. Through a friend of a friend, she got an interview with Lou, who was looking for a copy editor.

She remembered the afternoon clearly, one of those false spring days in March when the city seems in the throes of rebirth. She was then almost twenty-four and had forgotten how attractive she was, since she had had her ego badly bruised by the refusals at off-Broadway and Broadway tryouts. She was five-and-a-half feet tall, thin, and with a look of intensity that sometimes flared into rich beauty. Her features were standard American, that is to say, she was pretty enough to have served as a model in a Pepsi ad, with a long straight nose, a wide generous mouth, and deep black eyes. Her auburn hair, with glints of red, came down almost to her hips in a shimmering shower of silky invitation. Ordinarily, she wore it in a pony tail, and let it hang loose only when she went to bed. Her legs were slightly longer than was strictly proportional, two tapering stems that were lost beneath the short, loose skirts she generally wore. Unable to make the full step into clothing ease, she still kept her breasts encased in a brassiere, complementing the panty girdle she sometimes wore as a shield over her arched buttocks.

Lou had been gracious and demanding, confronting her with complete honesty and yet not trying to force her. It hadn’t taken more than five minutes for him to understand exactly what Joan’s situation was. And after a quarter of an hour of formal interview, he had leaned forward over his desk and said, “Look, without experience, you really aren’t qualified for this job. But you seem intelligent and quick, and I’m sure you can learn as you go, and within a month should be doing fine. It’s a pretty good job, not bad pay, and nice people to work with.”

Her mouth went dry. From one standpoint, the job wasn’t much, but from another, it was like salvation. She could get out of the hectic restaurant where she rushed about for eight hours each night, find a decent apartment, start to involve herself in studying again. In her state of confusion and fatigue, the job seemed heaven-sent, and Lou like an angel. He watched her carefully.

“Frankly,” he went on, “at this point it’s a buyer’s market.” That was a lie; he was desperate for help. “And if you want to sell your talent and time, you must be aware I’m interested in more than your literary skills.” He had paused for a long moment and then added, “Perhaps we can continue this interview at my apartment later.”

Her face flushed. Not only because of the openness of his request, but because she felt a strange tingle of excitement at the idea of prostituting herself in that way. She had slept with men several times on the off-chance they might be able to help her, but she had never given her body in direct exchange for a solid offer. A slow warmth filled her breasts and made her nipples sweat, and her thighs squirmed ever so slightly on the chair.

Now Lou looked around the table. “Coffee for everyone?” he asked.

Joan stood up, pad and pencil in hand, to write down their preferences. To her amazement, Margaret got up also, and walked around behind her and went to the door.

“I’ll give you a hand,” the other woman said. “I’ll start the water boiling.”

“Shouldn’t you be in on this?” Lou called out to her, a ring of harshness in his voice.

“You know my feelings about all of this,” she told him.

The two of them had been arguing policy for six months. Margaret insisted that the only way for Centaur to get out of the hole was to inaugurate a radically new line of books. She had evolved a theory of pornography, which Lou refused to take seriously. His contention was that people who bought “dirty books” cared for nothing except their excitation value, and the thing to do was to increase the percentage of explicit sex per chapter and to run hotter covers and more suggestive titles. Margaret argued that pornography was a valid genre, like science fiction or gothic novels, and that its real audience was among the college crowd, and the generally literate public. She wanted to scrap the entire Centaur approach and work from a concept which would be revolutionary among publishers of pornography: to put out no more than twelve titles a year, and to invest all their money and distribution talent and advertising potential to sell those dozen to respectable bookstores and chains.

“Before anything else,” she said, “pornography is literature.”

“Before anything else,” Lou countered, “pornography is a way to get your cock hard.”

“And what if you don’t have a cock?” she had replied.

“Then go find one,” he had yelled, ending their discussion as their talks usually ended, in a flare of anger.

Finally, Margaret had taken matters into her own hands. She had been given the sales figures now being discussed a few weeks earlier by Jack, and fortified with the knowledge that Centaur could do no worse than it was doing, no matter how else they approached the problem, she had decided to see Al Leeds, the president of Zenith, the parent company. Thus, her attitude toward the present meeting was one of disdain.

She left the conference room, and Joan, after listing who wanted cream and who wanted sugar, followed. But as she turned to leave, she was seized with a bizarre psychic convulsion. Perhaps it was the fact that the eyes of every man in the room were riveted on the cleft of her ass, boring holes through the cloth and into the damp darkness beneath. She could feel the pressure of their gazes tugging at her panties which had worked their way up until they were jammed tightly in her crotch, causing her cunt to twitch. For an instant she imagined what it would be like if the conventions of civilization were suddenly suspended. She could feel the mass of male bodies rising behind her, surging over her, bearing her to the floor. She could feel the hot breath in her ears, the frantic lips seeking hers, the tongues over her face, in her mouth. Quick hands peeled the clothing from her body, from a body that was, despite herself, beginning to respond to the terrible excitement. Fingers probing, pulling, pushing. She, half-naked, her stark white thighs flailing about, half-protesting, half-desiring, as her legs are spread, and urgent flesh is thrust against her skin. Then, a hand reaches the curled lips of her cunt, pries apart the fragile defenders, and thrusts rudely in, to find a cavern that is already hot and wet and throbbing. Wanting. Needing. She opens her mouth to make a sound, and she is filled with a large anonymous cock, ingratiating itself with her tongue and invading her throat. She gags and her legs come up, her knees rising to her chest, exposing the long curves of her tender ass. Her bra is yanked off, and more hands and mouths descend on the tossing breasts. There is a long moment of indecision, and suddenly she is opening herself up, letting the channels into her body fall loose and inviting. The cocks in her mouth and ass and cunt multiply and interchange, there is the smell of sweat, of sperm, the sound of deep grunting, and before she is lost entirely she gets a glance at herself from the ceiling, a naked lustful woman sucking into herself a roomful of insatiable men.

A low whistle caressed the backs of her knees as she went through the door, and was followed by the sound of low laughter. The whole fantasy had gone through her in a split second. Her chest heaved with heavy breathing.

“Can they possibly know what I’ve just been thinking?” she wondered as the hallway tilted before her eyes.

But the moment passed, and ordinary reality returned. She went off toward the office kitchen, tailored, prim, and there was no trace of the drooling lapping animal that lurked just beneath the surface.

“I must be schizophrenic,” she thought, musing again on the fact that she was capable of diametrically opposed types of feeling and behavior within practically the same record. The idea returned her to her first meeting with Lou, in which that quality of her personality was most sharply underlined.