The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (16 page)

For sexual freedom is not a political movement, not an idea, not a new life style, not an organization. It is the moment-to-moment sensitivity to the fluctuations of the sexual state. And anyone human enough to brave the imprinted taboos, the repressive influences of all society including one's friends, and the very real police danger, ought to understand that the desperation which surrounds sex is due to the times we live in, and does not inhere in the act itself. One wonders how often this must be repeated until one realizes that it is possible to get hooked on guilt, the way a junkie comes to enjoy the penetration of the needle quite independently from the stuff he shoots from it into his arm.

I walked back to the street feeling very high and very solid. The vibration behind me had all the power of a group of men chanting Om. The nature of the small group in front of the car had not changed, although some of the individuals were different. I thought of the difference between these men and those whose rigid hyperheterosexuality results in the misery of a world, and I saw cocksucking from a new perspective.

Getting on our knees is just the way we pray.

Bisexuality, Therapy, and Revolution

These thoughts crystalized during a four-hour period of fucking-meditation at the St. Mark's Baths, a place I visit on the average of once or twice a week for steam and cold plunges, sex, honest conversation, and a species of rumination I find possible in few other environments. I prefer the St. Mark's to the newer, more fashionable baths, partially out of nostalgia, partially out of its historic designation as the birthplace of James Fenimore Cooper, whose ghost haunts the steam room, but also because I have, as a friend once pointed out, "a taste for the seedy."

I went in at eight in the evening holding a single need: to be fucked. I cared for little more than to lie face down on a cot, to stretch out at full length, a pillow under my thighs raising naked buttocks to complete view, and be entered by anywhere from one to twenty men, whose faces I might not even see. I wouldn't leave until I was sated. Nor was I the only man there with such a program in mind. I showered, went to my room, applied a liberal amount of Vaseline to my anus, and flung myself down on the creaky bed, leaving the door open and wondering whether this would be a good night for studs.

Within a few minutes, Lou, one of the attendants, came in. He shut the door behind him and the atmosphere of the room changed immediately. Lou is old school, a fat homely man in his late forties who still refers to gay men as "fags" in a tone not heard since schoolyard days. But I am not prejudiced, especially when my central concern is cock. Also, there is no reason why homosexual encounters must dispense with all elements of perversity. I am not at all certain that the gay militants, in their historically necessary role of changing homosexuals' consciousness, have not insinuated an idealized wholesomeness into the homophile mystique. For myself, I still have a sweet tooth for certain kinds of depravity.

"I'm going to rape you," said Lou, launching into his macho monologue. Since I have discovered that when I assume an overtly passive role it is best to let the active partner set the mood of the intercourse, I complied with his fantasy and allowed myself to imagine myself as a young girl being assaulted by a burly construction worker. I knew enough about Lou and about that kind of mentality in general to realize that his pleasure was dependent on a more complex interaction than simple rape. He needed to imagine that I was at first protesting and then, overwhelmed by his brute masculinity, giving in despite myself. That I was hating myself for enjoying what he was doing to me.

He tied my wrists to the metal headboard with a slip chain and bound my ankles with a strap. He gloated over me for a few minutes. I raised my buttocks and he slapped the cheeks once, very hard. The stinging sensation coupled with the flashing images it provoked ricocheted down the mirrored hallways of my mind, providing a rich and delicious amalgam of annotated feelings. To a large extent, we had become extraneous to one another, for each was fully engrossed in a private scenario which was only incidentally complementary to the other's script.

"I'm going to shove my cock up your ass," he hissed, "and stuff a popper in your nose."

"Good," I thought.

If he had spoken these words in a purely matter-of-fact manner, they would have been categorized as description, but there was a note of accusation in his voice. He at once indicated that what was about to happen was dirty and nasty, and that I was sluttish for wanting it. I thereupon let myself be a slut, an open hole craving penetration. I squirmed on the sheet and tightened my buttocks. It was interesting to play this role of wanton. I knew that if my actions matched his fantasy, he would fuck me with greater force, and to be fucked, you will remember, was my single goal for the evening.

I don't know how many others, men or women, have experienced the desire so cleanly, so simply. The entire social and psychological matrix within which the fucking took place was unimportant; it was the act itself which called me. I strained to raise my buttocks as high as I could and was surprised to hear a whimper of desire escape my lips. I wallowed in voluptuous surrender to the moment.

The question occurred to me: to whom am I surrendering? On the face of it, I was giving myself to him, but a second look revealed that it was to myself that I was yielding. I was giving myself to my own expression. That it emerged as an imitation of a classic image of a lascivious woman was colorful enough, but incidental in terms of meaning. In the midst of my pondering, he mounted me abruptly, having dropped his pants to his knees and not even having bothered to remove his shoes and socks. Added to the other elements, I now had the picture of the partially undressed man lying heavily on the naked body beneath him. It was gloriously whorish.

He raised his pelvis, slid his cock between my thighs, and brought the tip of it to my asshole. With no warning, he burst inside me rudely, I gasped with shock, and my entire body froze, as though I had been impaled on a hook. He gave me no time to relax the sphincter muscle, but began pumping at once, with extreme vigor. Pleasure and pain fought their usual battle, and for perhaps half a minute I disengaged my attention from my feelings and turned to analysis of the sensations between my buttocks. For that space of time I ceased being a voluptuary being fucked and became a psychologist working in the laboratory of lust, registering impressions, cataloguing, structuring.

This had the ancillary effect of allowing enough distraction for my muscles to relax, and I observed that pleasure and pain lost all their connotations and became nothing more than conceptual markers along the total spectrum of undifferentiated sensation. Having accomplished my aim in that area of research, I put aside my charts and switched back to a mode of non-critical appreciation of what was happening.

What Lou lacked in subtlety he made up for in strength. I felt his thighs thrashing against the backs of my legs, his arms wrapped tightly around my chest, his cock hard and imperative, charging the tender tissues of my analogue cunt. I dove into a mindless state, relinquishing all control, all responsibility, and experienced the lazy enjoyment of voluntary bondage. I needed to do nothing but let him use me as a pillow for his ride. He cared only that I act as victim, and that freed me to have my feelings in private. I wondered how many women waste so much time blaming a man for what he doesn't give them instead of learning to enjoy what he is capable of?

His chatter was criminally inane. "You like that, don't you?" he kept saying. At first I heard the bravado, the necessity of the male to assert himself. But after a bit I could detect the whine of insecurity that hummed beneath it. It is a commonplace observation that to the degree a person pushes the ambience of a scene, to that degree he is uncertain of himself within that scene. I became aware that Lou's breathing was shallow, that he was holding himself rigidly against me. I momentarily despaired at being in the arms of such an uptight lover, but I dipped beneath that to find a hint of compassion. So often in the past, when I had struggled with myself in the embrace of a woman, I had been met with contempt. And I contrasted that to the times when a woman continued to give of herself, despite my fears and clumsiness, and how much I came to care for the simple human warmth involved in that.

Realizing that it was senseless to condemn, I pushed back and pressed my buttocks into him, splitting myself apart on his cock, hanging my fleshy weight on that insistent pole. Only those who have experienced that particular sensation will know the breath-stopping wonder of it. I ground my hips around, contracted my cheeks, and pushed my anus out. This was the second part of the scenario: the rapist's victim contacts her own desire and begins to respond.

At that point he snapped the ampule of amyl nitrate and held it to my nostrils. The sixty seconds of whirring began, the amplification of contact, the giddy descent into sensitized helplessness.

"Oh you fuck, you little bitch, you cunt!" he said, and climaxed inside me, his whole torso clenched in a single orgasmic spasm. There were none of the flowing melting rippling feelings which mark the orgasm of a relaxed man. This was a sniggering come, a lonely guilt-ridden ejaculation. I accepted it and then sagged onto the bed.

He stood up quickly, wiping his cock on the edge of the sheet, pulled up his pants, and untied me. We did not exchange another word. After he left, I lay back, throbbing, and thought about what had just happened in relation to what was taking place between myself and two women who had served as focal points for my emotional existence during the previous year and a half. The energy coursing through me had gone first and foremost to my brain.

Maureen was twenty-four, extremely sensual, with a keen analytic mind. She could lie for hours and let herself be stroked and licked. Her fucking was of two basic kinds: shallow, leading to orgasm, and deep, without orgasm. Seventy percent of our sex involved the second type, in which she would lie on her back, kick her legs to the ceiling, clutch her ankles in her hands, and let her cunt go slack, allowing me to prod, caress, slosh, shake, penetrate, and in general do anything I wished in relation to that gaping organ. At such times her experience was so intense that she uttered not a sound. When she wanted to come, on the other hand, she would lie with her legs fairly close together, her eyes closed, her forehead furrowed, while I moved steadily, in and out, pausing at certain cyclical check points, varying pitch, angle, and intensity. Her climb to climax was as obvious as the line of a fever chart, and she kept absolute control over her excitement, holding the thread, until the very last moment when, with deep moans and twitches, she reached some kind of physiological convulsion. There was never any blending of the two modes.

Elaine was the counterpart. Thirty-five, gently cynical, she cared little for preliminaries and liked to get right down to the coupling of cock and cunt. Once inside her, a current connected us, and I didn't have to do anything except follow its directives. Neither of us moved very much externally; all the flow was within. We could lie quite still and feel the mountain wave seize us both, and only had to remain sensitive to its curl, like surf riders, to have it bring us to climax. With her I reached many orgasms of feeling before ejaculating, and usually she would have come five or six times by then. The fucking was oddly cerebral without being intellectual, animal without being brutal.

The scene I had with them went through three stages: living with Elaine, living with Maureen, and then living with Elaine again while still seeing Maureen. I thought the third would be ideal, but found that it required immense energy to sustain both relationships, especially since neither of them wanted to have anything to do with the other. Maureen was involved in some women's liberation coven and was forever talking about her "sisters" and the need for women to help one another. But when I asked her to call Elaine, so that the two of them might close the circuit of the triangle and relieve me of the burden of trying to lead two distinct lives, she welled with hostility and jealousy. I was torn between two women, each of whom said she cared for me, but who were unwilling to translate that affection into an effort to ease the split I felt within me. It was simply another example of how people get involved in the rigamarole of political organizations, digest the rhetoric, and yet, when it comes time to apply their ideology to the problems of everyday life—which is, after all, the only life we have—revert to atavistic patterns. I was backed by their intransigence into a hateful role, having to articulate preference and make a choice.

The next man walked into my room. He was black, soft, tall, with luminous eyes and deep lips. His cock was almost eight inches long. He entered me from in front, his mouth covering mine as he did, and I opened to him easily, sensing that his approach was one of tenderness. A nice contrast to what had gone before. It is only at the baths that such chiaroscuro is possible. I was pleased that I was able to accommodate such a large cock so easily, and mused that Lou's power tactics had served a useful purpose besides having their own value.

"This is so good, so good," said my new lover. "Your pussy is so open, so wide, this is so good." And indeed it was. I rose to him and stretched my legs to receive him more deeply. I let him have me utterly, without reservation. Even when he prodded the sensitive prostate gland, it was softly, and I knew he wouldn't hurt me, so I could let him have even that intimacy, the sensations of which drove me to a fenzy of moaning. I nuzzled his throat and ran my hands over his hard shoulders, down his slender back, over his firm buttocks. This was the fucking I had come for. I felt lucky that I had scored so soon.

The question which arose at this point was: what was my motivation for leaving my apartment late in the evening to trek the wasteland of Eighth Street and climb the salty stairs of the crusty St. Mark's Baths in order to have a stranger split my buttocks with his anonymous erection?