The Gentle Degenerates (11 page)

I turned her around and had her bend over the kitchen table. Her knees shook as she bent to let her torso lie flat on the wooden surface. Her cunt gaped at me and the cheeks of her ass spread wide. Between them the tiny hairs were wet and sticky, and formed a web with globules shining, reflecting the overhead light. Still cool, still balanced, I laid my cock into her. She groaned out loud. “Oh God,” she said, “Please do it. Fuck me good. Fuck me the way I like it. Fuck me the way you know how.”

“Keep your head, Diana,” I said. “Stay awake.”

“If I go under,” she said, “come get me.”

“Right,” I said, as I began to fuck her. And it was just that. It wasn’t us fucking, it was me doing it to her, doing it in her, doing it for her. She had to do nothing but lie there, letting her cunt be open. And I began to dance. It was the total dance, the dance of Shiva, the cosmic movement which sustains all movement. I went through all the animal and spirit forms, became everything from a dog to a demon. I growled and hissed, sang and prayed, words poured out like sap from a tree. And everything I was I poured on her, sank into her.

She was silent, but it was a silence that spoke of immense feeling, of deep concentration. Her whole life was in her cunt, while her mind remained alert, aware of the kitchen, of the city, of time, of space, of eternity. She was taking the male role in the Tantric act, while I played the female, and the fact that she had the cunt and I the cock made no difference. Her cunt grew rank with pleasure and meaning. I touched every inch of it, every crevice got penetrated, every wrinkle was straightened. I was every man who had ever fucked any woman, who ever could. Her ass rose higher, the globes gleaming like dew-covered crystal. Her asshole opened and a thin stream of gas escaped. Her cunt bubbled over. I moved inside her for what seemed an endless time. There was nothing to stop me, nothing to make her want me to stop. We were home, where we wanted and needed to be, where each of us in this poor bedraggled species wants to be living, but instead we march around like silly suited zombies and exchange money, and shuffle papers, and make wars.

But fucking is God, fucking is how it begins, fucking is what it is all about while we are here. In fucking everything is contained, all the opposites meet, and there is anger and humor, love and hate, agression and tenderness. Fucking is where consciousness begins, in that fatal separation of the sexes. In fucking we are whole once more, and out of that wholeness (oh, divine ironic paradox!) another child is born, another fragment, another splinter who will in his or her turn strive to be completed. The history of the world spun from our cock and cunt, and everything that was within the power of the mind to know, we knew then, all mathematics all ethics all poetry all feeling all thought all sensation all the ages of man and all the changes of woman. And then, when we had soared to the outermost reaches of knowledge, we burst through that thin skin and dove into the unknown, the mysterious, the that for which there is no concept, no symbol . . . the simple blinding awareness of Being.

And in that state, at that timeless moment, I heard a great cry rising up, and a tremendous shout as if it were a huge choir of praising voices or a field of bodies in torment, and the me who was the animal fucking the Diana who was the animal, was leaping in great spastic jumps, my cock tearing and ramming into her gashlike hole, while she wailed at the top of her lungs, and bucking like goats, we came and came, pumping our juices and heat and yearning and understanding into one another, into the void which joined us, until a great joyful peace rose up our legs and into our groins and through our chests and arms and heads, and we sank slowly to the floor.

We lay there for five minutes, and the only sound was our breathing and the water boiling on the stove. Finally Diana took a deep breath and said, “You sure can fuck.” I smiled. “Too bad it’s for such a limited audience; just you, me, and God.”

“The only trouble with it,” she said, putting her head on my chest, “is that it’s so overwhelming, so impersonal, so fucking cosmic, that I can’t even relish it afterwards. It’s like sunrise in the Grand Canyon.”

I looked at her. “My God, another romantic. You want memories yet.”

“I suppose I’m still a bit old-fashioned,” she said. “I’d like my ego to participate a bit more. Just my luck to get caught up in an Oriental Renaissance.”

“Let’s have some coffee,” I said.

“That’s very Zen,” she said, kissing me and getting to her feet.

We had coffee and I stayed the night. She had things to do, some sewing and other affairs, so I amused myself by getting stoned on some old hash she had lying around and watching Johnnie Carson in color with the sound off. I hallucinated that he was the most enlightened man of our time, being able as he was to control the minds of fifty million people each night. I watched him do his mime, never stopping, never letting his attention waver, always in command. And once, when his eyes swept from right to left, as his gaze passed the television camera, I peered right into his soul, and saw fierce fires of intelligence. I couldn’t tell whether I was projecting, going mad, or discovering a truth which would shock America. I called Diana over and told her about it, but she just patted my head and said, “I think that hash was a little moldy. Maybe you shouldn’t smoke any more of it.”

I sank blissfully into my chair, thinking how nice it was to have a level-headed woman around, and the thought occurred to me that I could make it with Diana very easily, and have the entire pie, great sex and humor, and cosmic perspective, and no hassle about moving to California. I looked at her over my shoulder, and in an instant I realized that if I were to enter that special relationship called “bonded” or “mated” or “married” with her, then all the joy and lightness and real respect for each other’s identity would fly right out the window.

No, solving the problem went deeper than who I was with. The problems I faced with Regina were as much universal as specific, and it was with my own indecision that I had to come to terms. I felt somehow that I was near to some understanding which would cast things in an entirely new light, that in a stroke I would know why I clung to Regina as a symbol, and how I would extricate myself from the pattern of clinging and rejection which marked my so-called serious relations with women.

I sank back in my chair and watched Johnnie Carson again, who now looked a lot like Howdie Doodie, do his number on the heads of the population. I tried to look into tomorrow, but it was all trackless desert. And while I had enough food and water to sustain me, I had no direction at all.

The next day, Carol walked into my life.

To say I was swept off my feet would be to undervalue my experience. She grabbed me up like a whirlwind, and swept me into a strange land which had all the uncanny familiarity of a dream bordering on nightmare. She was young, only twenty-one, with red hair, and a body like a ripe pear. The usual adjectives don’t do her justice for it wasn’t in any particular physical characteristic that she shone, but with a sense of presence, a kind of openness and readiness for life that radiated from her.

She was one of that new generation of women who have been raised on probabilities of atomic annihilation and a great deal of dope. Among other things she was extremely brilliant, not in any bookish fashion, but with a razor-sharp mind that cut immediately through any artifice. Her lack of culture made her at once devastating and boring, for her insights were as superficially understood by her as they were potent in their suggestion to me. Her parents had done the concentration camp scene in Germany, had miraculously escaped with their lives, and were now settled in a mild haze of constant anxiety on a chicken farm in Jersey. She was raised in an atmosphere of retroactive fear, and the quickness of her life style was due in large part to her unconscious need to keep moving, to escape whatever nameless dread her parents had inculcated in her when she was a child.

She had been on the road since she was sixteen, living with a wide range of men, including a rising figure in English politics. They had met in England and he set her up as his mistress in a Portuguese villa. Sporadically she had attended college, snaking in and out of the academic scene with ridiculous ease, using her cunt where her wile failed. Her entire orientation was to the moment, and any relationship, any situation, was merely another stop along the route. She had no sense of destination, merely an air of travel. Without being self-conscious about it, she ran a cosmic trip.

Of course, the other aspects of her personality were suppressed. The frightened little girl, the self-destructive woman, the bitch, the mother . . . none of these showed as she put on her act for the world. She covered all her uncertainty with bravado.

She was staying at a friend’s house, and was in a strange condition. She had been crashing frantically for months, and no one, not even her oldest friends, could put up with her for more than a week. She was so theatrical, so bent on making an effect without any consideration for other realities, that ultimately she became tedious. I had gone up to visit Ray, and found Jan, a faded forty-year-old who just wanted to sleep for a long, long time, and Carol, who immediately charmed me out of my privacy. Within an hour our rap had become so heady that I invited her to come stay with me for a week or so. All the warning bells in the back of my head were muffled by the excitement I felt at the thought of all that energy and intelligence in bed, and what would be uncovered when the mask dropped away and the woman came forth.

It is a beautiful thing about women, that no matter how ugly or shallow they are in their social lives, the minute they begin to be fucked really well, they become deep, sensual, moaning animals, capable of great subtlety and passion, able to enter into deep communication and even communion on profound levels of their being. And with a woman like Carol, I foresaw a great revelation.

On the way to my place she began some of her usual tricks. At one point she hit a cop on the back with her walking stick, and he, with the doltishness of the insecure male who feels he is being mocked, turned all of his malevolence on me. I smiled my way out of the scene and we continued downtown. On the subway she was outrageous, mixing honest good humor and friendliness with a coy attempt at flair, so that more than half of her routine failed. I had no other interest than to get safely to my pad, where an evening of dope and sex waited.

We finally arrived, and immediately there was a huge awkwardness between us. The audience had disappeared, and we were like the players in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who suddenly find themselves playing a murder in the desert with the watchers gone. At once we were stripped of roles, and cast about to find some identity. We knew one another not at all, and both of us were too intelligent to pretend that what was happening wasn’t really happening. So a weird thing happened. We began playing to each other.

She went into a kind of falsetto voice and I assumed a gruff pose. We went through the paces of smoking dope and putting on some music. This was a scene I had done scores of times, as had she. The pick-up, the excitement, the desire for sex, and the awful gap between wanting and doing. We played with the ironic edge of the situation, pretending we were flirting so that we could flirt, pretending that we were growing close so that we could grow close. As the dope hit my brain and I began to spin off into fantasy-reality, I flashed that in a while we might be pretending we were fucking so that we really could fuck.

I was being warped by my own theory. For years I had preached metatheatre, the way of approaching life as a drama. And now it was all coming home, in the eyes of a mocking, bittersweet, heartbreaking, and lustful young stranger, who taunted me to be strong enough to sustain the tragedy of our condition. Part of me want to rip away the veil of staged distance, and simply let myself be exposed to her, with all my fears and insecurities and ambivalence. I wanted her to see me, to hold me, to let me be the totality of who I am. And yet I was locked in the role, and had to follow it through, putting on a cynicism that I honestly didn’t feel.

In a flash I saw myself stripped naked, all the games I play hanging out. It was a beautiful moment, but there was no one to share it with, for Carol stood there behind her own mask, unwilling to let herself be full. So, like mannequins, we played our roles, did our grotesque hip minuet around one another’s consciousness.

The time arrived, and no matter how close to the edge we pushed the drama, there was no way for an easy transition. So I stood up and said, “Let’s go to the bedroom.” She rolled her eyes in mock astonishment and said, “Ohhh, I’ll bet he wants to fuck me.” Part of me enjoyed the bravura of her style, and part of me cried out silently in disgust and loneliness. But only lust prevailed, and with great grimaces and mock bows, we escorted one another to the bed, took off our clothes, and lay down.

Immediately the mood changed. She became, all at once, mundane. Seemingly from nowhere, she began a chatter of inanities, a litany of names and experiences, recounting all her old lovers and casual fucks. She confessed that she might be pregnant, that she had gone to a bar a month ago and there met a sullen black cat to whom she confessed her loneliness and horniness. She asked him to accompany her to the loft where she lived with her current boyfriend, who wasn’t home at the time. Of course, the man took her up three flights of stairs, and then grabbed her. She tried to talk him out of raping her, but almost simultaneously began taking off her bell-bottoms.

He bent her over the railing, exposing her luscious ass to his greedy eyes. How many times has this scene been enacted? Leroi Jones has penned it to perfection with his line about “bagel babies and A-trainers.” The bored and animal black cat, and the nervous tittering white chick, acting out the penance they have to pay for three hundred years of slavery. He rammed his cock into her pussy, and fucked her violently. What feelings coursed through her, as with her conscious mind she put down the scene, and yet with all her neurotic need sucked the prick deep into her, expiating some hidden sin?

“He got pissed off,” she said, “because I wasn’t moving enough. But I didn’t want to give him everything.”

“And you got pregnant,” I said, my voice cold and my heart beating. I hadn’t even fucked her yet, and already I was jealous. Part of me thrilled at the sluttishness of her, and I realized in an instant that she was a total whore. I knew I could get her to do anything, to play any kind of perverse game, and make her like it. I could beat her, and piss on her, and arrange gang bangs. I could go down the entire route, shoving broomsticks up her ass, and grinding her face into the floor with my feet. I could use her like some scummy rag, and then, when I was finished, discard her, and have her beg and promise even greater debaucheries to allow her to come back. But at the same time I saw the fragility of her, the crying need, the broken person underneath the brazen chick. And as I looked down at the nakedness of her lush breasts, so young and vulnerable, and put my hand tremblingly on her nipples, I almost cried at the pain in her and in myself, and at the awful condition of mankind, that we should find ourselves in such stupidity and alienation.

I listened to her prattle for over an hour, being alternately bored and horrified, titillated and repulsed. Finally I could take no more, and I just moved forward brusquely to cover her mouth with mine. Instantaneously, she changed. All the warmth and richness of her came to the fore. With a small moan, she put her tongue into my mouth, and threw her arms around my neck. Now she was little girl, needing to be held, needing comfort. And I gave that to her, holding her very tightly, crushing my chest against her breasts, squeezing the hurt out of her, and giving her the solidity of my presence. We lay a long time in one another’s arms, letting each other be a poultice for our shared pain. I flashed that we were like two walking open wounds, vulnerable to all the shit in life, and yet ready to soar into great depths of realization and meaning.

I put my hand down between her legs and felt the fine pubic hair. Her cunt was surprisingly small, and not very wet. The mood switched from solace to sexuality. I pulled back and looked down at her. Her eyes were unfocused and swimming, her mouth open and wet. I leaned down and put my mouth over one of her breasts, gently licking the taut flesh, biting the nipple between my teeth. She groaned and rocked her pelvis back and forth. I inserted one finger into her cunt, and felt the inner walls give way. She massaged my finger with her box, and I felt the great rolling of the inner lips and the deep passage leading to the vacuum of her vagina. For a moment I sank into the wonder of the sensation and the beauty of the woman, but then I immediately remembered that she could be this way with any man, that her reactions were reflexes, that her fucking was stereotypic. And lust and heartbreak arose side by side. I wanted desperately to love her, and all I could do was fuck her. And what else could she accept right now? “Love is not enough,” said Bettelheim, and I knew what he meant. The kind of deprivation she knew could not be filled by any man giving her his all. She would have to painfully retrace her life to its roots and rework all the traumas through. That would be hard work, and required a great degree of seriousness; but she was merely giddy.

I let my other hand roam over her, feeling the lush fulness of her breasts, letting her suck at my fingers with her mouth, and all the while inserting my other hand deeper into her, provoking the heat and juice that welled up in her cunt. Then the thoughts abruptly ended, and we were all over one another. I let all other considerations vanish as I sank into her. Impulse sent me scurrying down her body, and I buried my face between her legs. The rich aroma of her pussy assailed my nostrils, and I burrowed deep to taste the juices that edged around her cunt lips. She was luscious, fleshy and sticky. I probed her with my hand and licked her with my tongue. Her ass squirmed on the bed, and she cried out again and again, unintelligible sounds and moans.

She groped for me and I turned my body around so that my cock was at her mouth. She took it inside her at once, and the warm wet of her lips covered the tender head. She licked gently and with great awareness. Then we rolled over, and I was on top of her, grabbing her ass with both hands, and kissing and lapping at her cunt with a wild frenzy, while I ground my pelvis into her face. She took my cock deep in her throat and gagged on it. I pulled out and she kissed at it with her lips as it slithered from her mouth, and then she pulled my ass down again, so that my cock plunged once more into her throat.

The trouble with sixty-nine is that what is being done to one distracts from what one is doing, and vice versa. We didn’t know each other well enough to be able to do a complete dance, so we alternated, my eating her and her sucking me, until that entire energy had been expended. And then it was time to fuck.

Entering a woman for the first time is always an adventure. Each cunt is different, even though all cunts are the same. I turned around again and ranged my body over her. She looked up at me with intelligent longing, conscious of her role, conscious of our strangeness. There was absolute communication between us. Soul spoke to soul. And I loved her at once, as she did me. There was no time to think, or to ponder why such a thing was impossible and couldn’t work. There was only the moment, and I knew that I had found my mate. In a flash, all the hesitancies and rationalizations I had about Regina disappeared, and I knew why I had suffered so much ambivalence. Despite all the seeming feelings to the contrary, I didn’t love her, not like this, not with this total letting-go and ecstasy.

With our eyes locked, with our bodies poised, I slowly entered her, and oh! what a joining that was! Physical perfection in an instant, a cunt that snugly grabbed my cock and held it lovingly, a warmth that penetrated throughout my entire groin, a sweetness that drenched my body and which I could taste in my mouth. With a sigh we melted into one another.

The rest was all dance. Her ass moving in slow undulations, her breasts two mounds of softness nestling into my chest, her hands a loving caress up and down my spine. I could not feel or touch or taste her enough all at once. All the hunger that had been in me, all the need that I hadn’t even been aware of, bubbled up and demanded to be fed. And with great gulping thrusts I brought my cock like a snout into the trough of her cunt, there to gorge myself on the entirety of it, the beauty and mystery, the ugliness and betrayal. In a stroke I wiped out all the men she had known, and she drained from me the memory and desire for all women.