The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (17 page)

Several answers presented themselves in rapid order: I was working out some childhood trauma, I was following the call of an obsession, I was hungry for sensation, I was balancing the yin of living with a woman with enough yang to keep me in sexual perspective. I turned my attention to the central focus of the act: the cock sliding in and out of the asshole. Those who have not been anally fucked will have only words to guide them, and those who have may not have entered into introspection while it was going on. In either case, the difficulty of describing the thing is immense, for it stimulates associative areas of the brain which bring to life a terribly complex and intensely personal web of memories and insights.

There is a burning sweetness (remember the enemas my mother used to give), a feeling of fullness (remember the first time I was fucked, at fifteen, in the cellar, and when his cock went into me I couldn't catch my breath), a tenderness deep inside (recall the mornings lying in bed thinking of the scene in the movie Tom Sawyer where one boy rescues another from drowning and they lie on the bank, wet, spent, lolling in one another's arms), a melting and a running (the overwhelming sense of relief when you race the attack of diarrhea to the john and get there just in time to let the brown fluid spurt into the bowl).

My cheeks nestled into the hollows of his thighs, our legs kicked and intertwined, and overall was the giving of myself, the offering of my ass on the altar of fucking. The fantasies and images, with which Lou had me as a dirty teenage girl, now showed me as a rugged woman in the arms of her man. I felt possessive of my lover at that moment, and sucked him into me. It was my body giving him pleasure, it was my body that supported him. And through him, I gained an identity of loving.

He fucked me until he came, and his orgasm was full and rippling, a pulsating shooting into my flesh, a throbbing and a dribbling into my bowels. And when it was over, he lay on me a long time, letting his breathing return to normal. This was a
man
above me, and I was a
man
. And yet all my sense of self cried out that I was a woman. We shared a cigarette and the poignant awareness that we would probably never meet again, for there was a tacit understanding that neither of us would pursue an attempt at repetition. In the baths, the quality of fleetingness, sometimes as delicate as the nuance in a Japanese watercolor, permeates all meetings and suffuses them with intimations of the human tragedy.

Perhaps then I should have quit and returned home. Yet, I was not surprised that while I had got what I came for, that wasn't the end of the story. I no longer
needed
to get fucked; now I
wanted
to get fucked. And that introduced a new element into my condition.

Is it only a man getting fucked in the ass who wants more? Shouldn't this be even more the case with a woman being fucked in the cunt, the organ that was specifically evolved for that activity? How many times had I lain in the arms of a woman after several hours of fucking, feeling her still churning under me, the fires of her passion only just beginning to burn, and I with a limp cock, depleted after two or three ejaculations? Usually they had been properly conditioned, and smothered their frustration, especially in the light of the fact that I had performed far and beyond any reasonable expectation. I am not now speaking of emotional satisfaction, but of physiological completion, and of psychic yearning for ever higher planes of ecstasy. Isn't it at just such a moment that the next shift, so to speak, should take over and proceed with her to the subsequent peak?

Six more men came in during the next hour and each fucked me according to his merit. The experiences ranged from the insignificant to the profound. There came a point at which my perimeters melted and I became pure malleable flesh. I wore many masks during that time, both in physical positions and in inner attitudes. And knew that I was entering a deep flow of energy when I began to feel cold liquid flashes up my spine, the surest sign that my deepest muscular tensions were melting.

The tender tissues of the anus, however, began to protest, and once again pain gained ascendancy over pleasure. This triggered a new train of images. Now I was the eternal victim, suffering for the gratification of others, an erotic Christ giving myself up to satisfy the single-pointed need of the hungry men who passed by my door. I entered the space of the holy degenerate, the kingdom of Genet, and was transmogrified into the person whose very disintegration and degradation liberates the energy to raise others up. The scene assumed dimensions of depravity, a sadomasochistic peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with each increasingly excruciating penetration of cock giving rise to notions of saintliness. The wicked and the sublime were at one another's throats, and as I let out growls of animal power, as I lifted my ass higher and higher, coming at last to my knees to offer the rounded and vulnerable rump to the marauding cock, I was as blessed as any believer receiving a communion wafer on his tongue. Only instead of the mumbo jumbo of some sleepy habitualized priest, I had the song of my own awareness to transform my carnal desires into hosannas of praise, my flesh into spirit.

But here, the words of my therapist intruded. She is a bioenergeticist in the line of Lowen and Pierrakos, although her basic tool is sensitivity to the condition of the other through the reverberations she receives in herself. We had been dealing with the question of pain, using her observation that I seemed to possess some sort of psychic switch which, at high levels of interaction, throws the tracks toward the area of self-destruction. "A propensity for negativity" she called it, and once it had been named, I could see quite clearly how it operated. Her way of working involved less interest in the historical roots of trauma than in their actual immediate structure and functioning, and we did not go deeply into the possible events which might have brought about my current state of affairs. It was obvious that masochism could be translated into psychological terms as a need to be punished, an expiation of guilt, a repetition compulsion, and so forth. But none of that would help me to locate, in my present psychophysiological structure, the nature and location of the switch. She went, therefore, directly into the musculature, into the breathing, and into the feelings.

I wondered, as the man above me rode my rump, whether I could learn something about why I seemed to swing toward the pain portion of the spectrum. I put my attention of the hurt that assailed my asshole. I asked myself what I was doing to hurt myself. I found that I was subtly constricting the sphincter muscles. What would happen if I let go? Immediately the sensation of shitting arose. The cock became a turd. Could I expel it? I pushed out. The cock slid back. I relaxed. The cock slid in. It was like loading a rifle.

At once I was taken with a realization of my morbid fear of letting anyone see me shit. "Ah Freud!" I thought, "thou art with us yet." The whole question of the way body functions are sectioned off in our culture stung me with full force. And in a breathtaking leap, I saw that the one thing which probably bound the entire political spectrum together, from right to left, was a feces phobia that marked everyone a closet anal retentive. I had rediscovered the lowest common denominator of American civilization.

I remembered the first time I had been rimmed and the man under me had asked me to shit in his mouth. I was shocked to the point of being sickened. Over the years, however, especially since I had come to terms with my own urge to have that done to me, I saw that coprophiliacs, while suffering from an abysmally low self-esteem, were probably the only people who had the courage to face, in total depth, the primitive taboo that binds us all and which, once broken, is revealed as little more than a function of communication and curiosity. It was one of the first clues to the formulation I later made: that what is called perversion is the most useful map for understanding the true nature of fascism and
the most potent means to unlocking its hold upon us
.

I hold firmly with Reich that the political and military aspects of fascism are the superstructural manifestations of the rigidity of the character formation of the individuals who live in, that is to say, constitute, a fascist state. The enemy is within our own bodies. This is not to deny the economic brutality of the corporate state and the effect it has of perpetuating the crime of civilizing babies. It is only to state that the person who blows up the bank must also be able to eat shit. For if the entire capitalist/imperialist complex of industry, military, education, and government which is our official America were to be wiped out by masses of radicals, unless those radicals had previously freed themselves of their internal armor they would be absolutely unable to form any sort of society which was not repressive. For they themselves would be repressed, and repressed people cannot live together in freedom.

The Vaseline melted from the heat of friction, the feces ran out of the hole, spilling down my buttocks, over my thighs. The room filled with a sour smell. I spread my legs. I let myself shit freely.

"Oh beautiful, baby," said the man above me. "Make it like that, just make it like that."

His cock soared like a great bird in fight, swooping in from all angles, plunging easily, rising softly. His pelvis whipped about on oiled hinges as the energy coursed through him, and I lay at his pleasure, no longer afraid of what might pour out of me. I rejoiced in his joy. Who he was, what his name or personal history were, did not matter. He was man, he was human, he was me. It was the working out of the process that was important, not the personalities involved. I wondered what was going on in his mind, whether he too was in the throes of some great realization, or whether his brain had become a seething center of formless symbols.

A deep soothing warmth spread through my bowels, as though my colon had been given a Vicks rub. Had the imperative to fuck ultimately been issued from my intestines, I wondered, an order from my organic intelligence, which my conditioned mind had then to rationalize as best it could? Anything I could think about what I was doing paled to utter insignificance before the liberating effect of actually doing it. My body was speaking, demanding what it needed.

This returned me to another aspect of the bioenergetic therapy I was involved in, one in which the function of vomiting was explored. At times I would drink glasses of warm salty water and stick a finger down my throat until I threw up, the notion being to loosen the tension in my stomach and chest, and return me to the times when I was force-fed, either food or instruction or "mother love." On those nights I went into the baths not primarily to be fucked, but to suck cock, I often pushed the cock into my throat until I gagged and sometimes vomited. I would find that the cock had become a breast and the semen was the milk I was sucking for. The ambivalence was clear in the contradictory act of sucking for more, and then throwing up because I had had too much.

This is, by the way, not an attempt at reductionism, but a plea for understanding that the sexual act, in all its forms, has many layers of motivation. It was, for example, only when I realized and admitted that the cock in my mouth was also a substitute for the breast I had had as an infant, that I could truly accept the cock as a cock. After I said to myself, "All right, I am sucking cock to relive the days of breastfeeding," I was free to ask, "Given that, do I still want to suck cock or not?" For to understand the roots of a phenomenon is not necessarily to rob the phenomenon of its own integrity. This is why therapy does not "cure" homosexuality. And this is the error in Janov's erroneous contention that healthy people cannot be homosexuals. After all the symbolic, or neurotic, mainsprings of the homosexual act have been plumbed, and the person has attained to complete wholeness, the choice of homosexuality then becomes free and conscious, instead of based on unmet needs.

To suck a cock, and have it be a breast, a finger, a urine tube, an impregnator, and the sexual organ of another human being, to accept the experience on all its levels, is one of the most truly aesthetically and sensually pleasing activities there is. To be able to use the act as a therapeutic tool is an added dimension usually overlooked.

After the man who had willy-nilly witnessed the liberation of my fecal inhibitions left, I went to the bathroom to clean up a bit, and found that I was bleeding. Some tissue had been torn, and that seemed to end fucking for the night. I returned to my room, lay down again, on my back, and began to massage my cock. I did it in a way that might have looked, in the dark, like a woman fingering her cunt. I have explored, but not yet understood, this aspect of my homosexual behavior. The act is generally most satisfying when I work with the image of my being a woman, although when I am in a more involved relationship with a man, I discard all imagery altogether. In this case, the image is like a microscope, merely an instrument with which to examine the subject more minutely.

It had taken some time to distinguish between the male/female model as against the active/passive model. It was with Maureen that I had been able, for the first time, to be both male and passive, lying in total acceptance as she squatted over me and straddled my cock with her cunt. Prior to that, with a woman, I had always had to
do
something, pump my pelvis or fondle her breasts or be actively thinking. It was a delight to give it all up to her, my eyes closed, my breathing regular, almost as though I were napping, while she worked herself up to a frenzy over me. Her cunt moved in a score of ways, her ass jiggling, her hips grinding. It was then that my four basic functional images became clear: active male, passive male, active female, passive female.

Thus I could lie as a woman in the baths, prodding my cock to erection, all the while sending out vibrations of wanting to be aggressed upon. The combination seems to be irresistible. There is something about the sight of a woman-with-an-erection that draws men in by the dozens.

That night they began to come in as I pulled my cock and rolled my head from side to side and flicked my tongue around in my open mouth and kicked my legs on the bed. Independent of any relation to anyone else, I was transported with the power of expression. I let all the restrained gestures of a repressive civilization fall away, and exulted in letting my body find its own language of delight. I was blessed with legions of fantastic revelations, drawn from mythology and the jungle. I was rediscovering the difference between expression and communication, and finding the liberation in unfettered signalling, not caring who read the messages or how they were interpreted.