The Gentle Degenerates (13 page)

Finally she too stopped, and the four of us lay quiet and breathing hard. Just then Carol came rushing through the room, headed for the door and went tittering out into the hall and downstairs. Joyce looked up, startled. “What’s that?” she said. “What’s wrong with her?” demanded Connie. I smiled. “Oh, she’s just tripping on her own tonight,” I said. “She’s all right.”

We rearranged ourselves and lit some more joints. The first round had been powerful but short, and we needed to digest what had happened before we’d be ready for second helpings. I put on some music and we sat in silence, smoking, listening to it. Connie and I got into an eye dance, with all the glimmerings and half-meanings being suggested in our glances and facial gestures. She began to breathe harder and leaned toward me, her breasts hanging forward. I dropped my reefer and bent down under her breasts, turned my face up, and took one of the swaying orbs totally into my mouth. She gasped and pulled my head harder against her. Simultaneously, Al reached from behind and held her other breast in his hand. She let out a low moan and simply sank back, totally passive. I moved onto her, sucking at her nipple, while Al pummeled her breast and brought his mouth down on hers. Gradually her movements became more frantic, and something was happening with her which seemed more than what Al and I were providing. Then I looked down and saw Joyce, lying long between Connie’s legs, her mouth glued to her cunt, sucking greedily and noisily.

Connie seemed to have forgotten about us and was centering all her concentration on her crotch. I stopped what I was doing and sat back to watch. Joyce was nuzzling and burrowing into the cunt, licking and slurping as though the thing could actually be eaten. Then she grabbed the cunt lips with her teeth, and began gnawing on them. Connie began to scream, not a yell of pain but a kind of cry of joyous anguish, as though what was happening to her were too much to bear. Joyce put both her hands between the cunt lips and pried them open, and then dove into the exposed center, again thrusting her tongue in and out, cupping it to lap up the juices. Connie was letting out gasping moans when suddenly Joyce covered the entire cunt with her lips and began sucking her breath in. She was creating a vacuum in Connie’s cunt, sucking out the air, making the walls collapse. Connie grabbed my arm with one hand and dug her nails into the flesh, all the while grunting “Ungh, ungh, ungh,” and rolling her head from side to side. Then, with a startling swiftness, Joyce pulled a lungful of air through her nostrils and blew it forcibly into Connie’s pussy. Connie seemed to explode. The cry which came from her didn’t sound human, and her arms and legs flailed out like a sky diver’s during free fall. Joyce reversed the action and sucked all the air out of her cunt again, and again blew in, doing it again and again until Connie became a mass of quivering protoplasm, babbling mindlessly, drooling, hiccuping.

Suddenly Al moved. He snaked quickly down next to Joyce and pulled her back roughly by the shoulder, and sank his face between Connie’s legs. He went at it with a will, but when he used his teeth he really bit, coming down hard on the sensitive cunt lips. Connie began pounding the floor with her fists, and thrusting her cunt into his face, urging him to ravish her more. I moved up and dropped my cock into her mouth. She sucked at it like a baby on a rubber nipple. When it was hard I pulled out and hurled myself toward Joyce, who was kneeling over watching Al eat Connie’s cunt. I took her from behind and fucked her for a long time, watching the cunt lips pull in and push out as my cock slid back and forth along the slimy track.

Then there was a kind of pause, and Al came up from his feast and I pulled out of Joyce. He looked at us, and I turned Joyce around, offering him her ass and cunt. He didn’t hesitate a moment, and shoved his large tool into the steaming crack. Joyce took it without seeming to notice that it was a different man inside her now; she just leaned back into him and let him fuck her. I moved onto Connie and thrust into her defenseless cunt. She had no resistance, no tension. I drove all the way up past her cervix the first time, and lodged there. Her legs came up, and the tip of my cock snuggled even deeper into the back folds of her box. Then, bracing my feet on the floor, I began rooting and scooping into her, using my cock like a drill, as though I were trying to break through the back wall of the vagina. Her mouth opened and she froze. The sensation seemed to have reached a level where she could no longer move, but just hang in there and let it happen. The heat inside her was astonishing; I felt as though my cock were being fried.

Then Joyce crept forward, Al coming behind her, walking on his knees, keeping his cock inside her. She moved up level with Connie’s body, and lowered her mouth onto Connie’s stretched lips. Her tongue slithered out and completely filled Connie’s mouth. She ground into her, mashing her lips against the other lips, thrusting her tongue again and again into Connie’s throat, until Connie began to respond, climbing slowly out of her stupor to give back the kisses she was receiving. Then the two of them began a dance of lips and tongues, wetly covering each other’s mouth and chin, sucking and licking. At the same time Al began to drive harder into Joyce’s cunt, which hung wetly under her upturned ass. I started to feel the heat rising in my groin.

In a moment, a strange transformation took place. We all knew that we were approaching orgasm, and we all knew that we knew. It was one of those dangerously self-conscious moments when you know everything is going perfectly and will continue to do so unless the thought-machine begins producing distractions in the mind. We hung on the balance of our awareness, and kept free of all fantasies. Al and I drove harder and the two women kissed more passionately. The tension grew, and the quotient of release increased. I now felt as though I were driving right into Connie’s belly, and Al hit at Joyce’s cheeks like a pile-driver. We rode and rode, higher and heavier, until all four of us stiffened at once, and then let the floodgates burst open, as Al and I shot our loads into our respective women, and the women bucked under us, coming, and moaning into one another’s mouths.

There was a general collapse and we all lay there, still and quiet. Suddenly the door opened and Carol came in again. She had five ice cream cones and breezed into the room like the zany wife in the TV situation comedies. “Ooh,” she said, “I hope our guests are having a good time.” For all the corniness of it, the humor was genuine, and we all began laughing. Carol bustled among us, handing out the cones, and we gradually sat up, one by one, like children at a picnic.

Carol went back into the kitchen and in a few seconds we heard the typewriter clacking again. “Ooh, what a story I’m writing about you,” she called out.

Suddenly, I realized what was happening. We had come in as a group, the orgy having been forming for some time in our minds. Carol greeted us without a context, and was thrown into confusion. She didn’t feel she could join us, and yet didn’t know how to be delicately unobtrusive. So, consciously or not, she hit upon the brilliant notion of acting totally zany, figuring that a featherhead would be the least threatening to the vibrations. My admiration and liking for her went up immensely, and I couldn’t help comparing her to Regina, for whom this kind of scene would have been a crushing trauma, and who would either have asked everyone to leave, or gone off to sulk very loudly.

It seemed that a part of mind slid open and I saw my entire relationship with Regina in a new light, and now I couldn’t even remember what it was about her that had attracted me so violently for so long. I pictured her face in my mind, and like a lightning streak I remembered a picture of my mother when she was thirty. Of course, she and Regina could have been twins. I didn’t see it because my mother has grown so much older and heavier, with grey hair.

I began to laugh. The simplicity of it almost reduced it to the banal. Like all modern men, I had become an Oedipus who could only deal with the reality symbolically. Instead of fucking my mother, I chose a woman who reminded me of her when she was young and most beautiful, and when I was at an age to be imprinted with her looks and my feelings for her at the time. The mists burned away from my eyes and I felt as I do in therapy when some revelation comes crashing home and a great load of confusion and anxiety is removed.

I got up and went into the kitchen. Carol stopped her typing and looked up at me. Her face was split into the opposing feelings of doubt and warmth. I looked deep into her eyes and the communication that passed between us erased all her doubts.

I went over to her and took her in my arms. What I was feeling right then couldn’t be called love. Rather it was a sort of friendship and intimacy that transcended all attempts to describe or explain it. We both knew, and knew that we knew, and there was no “what” to confuse the pure act of knowing.

When I went back in, the others were dressing. I offered to have them spend the night, but they all wanted to leave. There was a polite exchange of farewells and they went off. I turned from the door to see Carol standing there, now naked. She came up and took me by the hand and led me to the bedroom. I let myself be led in, and lay on top of her when she threw herself on the bed.

I held her tightly in my arms and felt the familiar curves of her. I felt my cock begin to stir, painful though it was. Carol looked at me, smiled a warning smile, and said, “You’d better have enough left for me.”

My heart filled with affection for her. She was able to take in the entire evening, handle it magnificently, assimilate it, and then come back to me without any of her feelings diminished or distorted. All she wanted was me, but in a very clean, open way. There was no hidden clause concerning my sexual fidelity or any exclusiveness with her.

Then I understood what I could never get clear with Regina, that specialness between two human beings is always an ad hoc contract. It is made on pure impulse, and has no justification other than its own existence. When either or both of the parties feel it disappear or drive it away, then it no longer exists, and there can be no recriminations. Also, it has nothing to say about sexual activity with others. Somehow, between two people, a special kind of flow is possible, and when that is there, there are no rules about anything else. All is clear.

And the people who just left were not demeaned by it. They were part of the new international brotherhood and sisterhood of sexual journeymen, people who could enjoy the sexual act fully upon first meeting, because their heads were in a place that allows fulness without the intervening struggle. This was not to obviate the beautiful richness that grows between two people who are with each other a long time, but to suggest that there was an alternative between promiscuity and fidelity. It involved an ability to adapt to very rapid, very heavy changes, very quickly, and hang in for the ride without either getting unconscious or freaking out.

My now hard cock slipped into Carol’s cunt, and I was home. We fucked simply and warmly, without any special trips, just experiencing each other and letting all our need and fear and love hang out. We pumped steadily into one another, letting our climax build slowly and regularly, savoring the climb, kissing and caressing each other along the way. Her breasts crushed against my chest, her mouth on mine, her ass a soft engine moving her cunt into me, I felt myself in paradise. Not a sexual paradise, but a paradise of fucking, where that ultimate and terribly final act attained its total purity.

To fuck, this is all we know and all we derive from. The rest is food, clothing, and shelter. And all the accomplishments of our civilizations, every last work of religion or art or science, has been nothing but a frippery to pass the time away, to keep oneself busy while one was not doing the only thing in which human beings achieve totality: fucking.

Our breaths became as one, our moans mingled, our bodies yearned toward each other, and as the sperm rolled up the tube and spurted burningly into her, her cunt grabbed my cock and rippled again and again onto it, as she spent herself joyously and openly.

Unconsciousness followed soon after, and my last thought before sleep was a vision of a Buddhist Valhalla, a Nirvana of the Koran, where woman, eternal woman, lay in smiling understanding and possession of everything that poor scrambling man spends all his days searching for.

Yet the problem was merely more clearly defined. To change from Regina to Carol was no solution in and of itself. What had to be guarded against was falling into the same kinds of dynamics which had strangled me in the earlier relationship. I wondered what would happen if the scene of the night of the orgy was reversed, and Carol were to come home with some people and begin fucking on the living room floor. At this point, I wouldn’t mind, but if that kind of possessive clinging set in, I would once again be prey to jealousy. Yet the more I opened to Carol, the more vulnerable I became. Obviously the thing I was looking for lay in my attitude toward the relationship, for the relationship is always the same.

I threw the I Ching, and it came up with Preponderance of the Great, changing to The Joyous, Lake. The Ching is a psychic Rorschach. It begins with basic dualities and ramifies them, so that a complete system of applications to practical situations is presented in language that is at once abstract and concrete. The gist of the oracle was that there was a danger of too much concentration in the center without enough support for the weight. This indicated to me that I had to be careful not to saturate myself in the experience of Carol past my ability to assimilate what was happening. The changing line read: “The ridgepole sags to the breaking point. Misfortune. This indicates the type of man who in times of the preponderance of the great insists on pushing ahead. He accepts no advice from others, and therefore they in turn are not willing to lend him support. Because of this the burden grows, until the structure of things bends or breaks. Plunging wilfully ahead in times of danger only hastens the catastrophe.”

One of the things I love about The Book of Changes is its steadfast refusal to get fancy or esoteric. It describes the human condition in the most mundane terms, and through that achieves universality. It seemed that I was being advised to be cautious, not to get carried away by the enthusiasm engendered during the Preponderance of the Great. I turned to the second hexagram and read: “True joy, therefore, rests on firmness and strength within, manifesting itself outwardly as yielding and gentle.” And again, “Lakes resting one on the other: the image of the Joyous. Thus the Superior Man joins with his friends for discussion and practice.” The explanation of the Image ran: “A lake evaporates upward and thus gradually dries up; but when two lakes are joined they do not dry up so readily, for one replenishes the other. It is the same in the field of knowledge. Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force. It becomes so only through stimulating intercourse with congenial friends with whom one holds discussion and practices application of the truths of life. In this way learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness, whereas there is always something ponderous and one-sided about the learning of the self-taught.”

It isn’t wise to try to wrest too literal interpretations from the oracle. Rather, its words should be allowed to sink into the mind, there to suggest openings to the truth of a situation. The I Ching is not, as S.I. Hayakawa construed it, “A Chinese fortune-telling book.” Still, the temptation is strong to make practical applications, and what the text seemed to be saying was, that Carol’s and my relationship would succeed to the degree that we hung loose in the beginning, and then moved into a mutuality which fed and supported us in our life together. And this sharing had to be based on a reverence for learning. It was very Confucian in its overtones, and I marvelled again at the almost seamless blend between that and the older Taoist mode of appreciating reality which permeates the book.

The immediate problem now was disposing of Regina, and when I put it to myself in those terms, I felt brutal about it. Yet I could put no more accurate face on it. The woman was an encumbrance in her demand for permanence, and while I had been as guilty as she in sharing the desire, I had found another person with whom to try the experiment. That was simply the way of things.

Perhaps the most accurate description of love/marriage affairs was given by Reich when he spoke of “serial monogamy.” His notion is that there occurs a bio-energetic flow between human beings which expresses itself most fully in the sexual act, where the energies are exchanged, reinforce themselves, and culminate in orgasm. So long as this flow is full, the “marriage” is successful. But when it fails, for whatever reason, in one or the other or both, the bond is broken. But instead of separating cleanly, the people concerned get embroiled in recriminations, problems of responsibility and support, and, if there are children, in guilt. But the dead cannot be revived, and so much of what is pathetic in human relationship is the attempt to rekindle a flame that has gone out. The alternative is to be sophisticated, to keep the marriage as a shell of convenience, to hold the home and hearth together, and then both swing freely in and out of that contest, taking lovers and reducing the bond to a mere social arrangement. It was a mode I privately referred to as “the French solution.”

So the letter to Regina was composed, candidly, even harshly. It contained several hundred words, but the single message was NO. This time there was no hesitation or second-thought phone calls. I simply mailed it, and with that action, erased Regina from my life. She was now one of many partners of the past, with whom I had shared part of my life, and from whom I derived much, as well as giving much. I felt an incredible lightness and clarity of purpose, as though some inner purpose had been set. I recalled Wittgenstein’s words, “I am resolved, but I do not know to what.”

I spent some time appraising my situation, both in itself and in relation to Carol. Metaphysically, I was on a here-and-now trip, paying no attention to yesterday and treating tomorrow as a sketchy outline within which I would maneuver. I had no absolutes, merely working hypotheses, and these were of a nature that to formulate them was to destroy them. I also realized that Sartre was right: one defines oneself by the act, not by the thought about the act. So, before anything could be understood in terms of Carol’s and my relationship, I would have to make an inner commitment to our scene. And it would have to be as open as possible while containing parameters to define it.

I sat at the typewriter and drew up a contract of marriage, one which would contain, mostly by implication, all the “rules” I felt were important. It ran as follows:

CONTRACT OF MARRIAGE

I am on a mysterious trip somewhere in the unknown. I walk lightly between the pit of sterility and the quagmire of insanity. My only means to health is to maintain order within myself, and let the externals find their own form.

The only necessary relation to the Absolute is simple recognition. You may be my mate for so long as you wish to stay with me, me as I am at any given point in spacetime or otherwise.

I signed it and delivered it to Carol. Her reaction was quite odd. She simultaneously appreciated it warmly, and was sarcastic about it. I realized with a start that I was beginning to see her very acutely, coming to, as the common phrase has it, “understand her.” It astonished me to see our relationship in this manner. I was observing myself observe myself in relationship to another entity, this woman. I got an immediate schizophrenic high, and the words of my Gurdjieff guru came thundering home: “You must be serious about the Work. If you fuck with it, it will chew you up.”

Carol read it, went through her changes, and said to me: “What’s the scene?” I said: “Dig it. I’m a male lesbian and you’re a dyke, a butch, not a femme. But we dig mostly the other sex. What we need to complete this is a mature femme. I could get from her the softness I miss in you. You could get from her the chance to assert authority, which you can’t do with me. From me, she would receive a masculinity sensitive and gentle enough not to frighten her, and we would make beautiful love together. From you she would get the support for her image, a support she truly needs. And the two of you would make beautiful love to each other. And you and I would receive the benefit of having given ourselves a gist for one another. And on rare brilliant moments, the three of us would understand ourselves as one.”

“That’s a nice picture.” she said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” I said, “because those who wish to enter that state are not willing to do the hard work necessary to live there. Make no mistake; it is not easy. But the question is, ‘how do you choose to lead your life?’ “

We looked at one another in a moment such as the Tibetans describe when they say, “to come face to face with the Nakedness.” There was a shock of recognition which bordered on horror, and sheer terror gripped us. We dis-located. There was, for that instant, no parameter within which to understand the moment. Total strangeness ensued. The universe got nauseous.

And then the attack subsided. She seemed frightened. I remembered the words of Steve Gaskin, and they entered my heart to sustain me. He said: “On the astral plane, I share the weather with everybody else.” Of course, that’s all that was happening: an astral storm brewing. And the two of us were in the same boat. So the things for us to do was to hold on to each other, and help each other to weather the blast. We moved into one another’s arms, and at the touch of her flesh on mine, a sweet warmth flooded me. Now let the winds blow, we are safe in one another’s arms.

Tears came to my eyes. It was so beautiful to trust this human being, to let myself be totally vulnerable in my need for her, recognizing that she is wracked by the very same need. We held each other. That is, neither of us had anything to hold onto except the other. And I remembered the Doré drawing of Paolo and Francesca in the Fifth Circle of the Inferno, how they tenderly touched one another, and were born aloft on a white diaphanous cloud. And when she told her story, she wept in such a manner that all the strength of Paolo could not comfort her. And that was their punishment. In the face of that, Sartre’s No Exit is a gross and flatulent conception.

Of course, with these thoughts, the paranoia returned. Was I indeed stepping into my projected romantic hell, that delightful Shavian Underworld? The warmth of her belly burning into mine dispelled all that. And I felt her pubic hair brush mine, as she moved her cunt into me. She held it at a barely touching distance for a long time, letting the dance of her pubic hair on mine feed our genitals and asses and bowels with sensation, and the beginning of a glowing heat. I took her breasts in my hands, those beautiful, warm, life-sustaining, pendulous, sensitive and holy breasts, which at the same time were so lascivious, so inviting of plunder, so defenseless and so central to that which is a woman. I have often thought that a woman’s sex life is in her cunt, but where she lives is what’s hanging from her chest.

Then, as I rubbed her nipples and bent down to bite them, more than a little hard, she buckled at the waist and moaned. She fell into my arms. I savaged at her breast, biting and giving high intensity pleasure/pain, keeping it always at the edge while escalating the charge up to its very limit before exploding. I thought, upon thinking this, that I should be in command of the army in Vietnam. I suddenly flashed myself as a Five-Star General, and all the fascist fantasies, all those marvelous Triumph of the Will manifestos, surged in me. For a moment I became Hitler.

Carol crushed her pubic bone into mine. Fiercely, we rubbed them together, generating the spark, or, to use the Freudian model, priming the pump. She brought the bone down to the top of my cock, right at the place where it hangs suspended from the skin of my belly. It is the spot where manual massage will get even the laziest cock hard. Now, with that pressure, and the heat coming from her cunt, my cock stiffened, and positioned itself between her thighs. We gasped at the experience.

Now, I’m the kind of guy that gets downright Tibetan at times. Suddenly the entire universe became manifest in terms of this moment. CLONG! it went in my head. This moment . . . this moment . . . THIS MOMENT. It was always this moment, and this moment was always the same, but different; the same, but wider; the same, but now. And the now flowed, creating a river of time in eternity.

I stepped back, we looked into one another’s eyes. What happened is inexpressible, but immense amounts of meaning suddenly fell into place. I remembered Bob Fishman, Fish we used to call him, who was the most beautiful dealer the world has ever seen, and he died at thirty-three of something wrong in his brain, just six months after he was saying to me, out of a twenty-day acid jag, “You know, I feel as though I’m headed toward some involuntary sacrifice of myself.”

I had looked at him, the Jewish intellectual head hero from Minnesota, with a family of acid farmers, living pure communism in Oregon, and realized that he had spent four years with Starling, the woman I had spent eleven months with, Aquarius to Scorpio, and that she was a Christian, and poor Bob was living out the Christ story. Ah, but how many people he turned on, and in such a beautiful, sweet way! I remembered him sitting in a car in the Fillmore, his contact going into one of the buildings in the black neighborhood to pick up a few pounds of hash, and all around us in hallways are real mean-looking fuckers, and coolness must prevail. Across the street was a cop’s car, its roof light flashing. And we tried to appear nonchalant. And Fish and I shared a buzzing electrical moment of existential criminality. Then he turned to me and said, “Yeah, I like to be where the action is.” And later, after we had successfully scored, saying: “I’ve reduced it all to three things: dope, chicks, and meaning.”

I blessed him in my heart, for he was still alive in me. And I stood with this young, giving, smart, beautiful woman, and wondered whether I dare make a commitment to myself concerning her.

O what a life this was! The same fucking eternal enigmas always returned at precisely this moment, just when everything had seem so clear. It was the necessity of choice that made the problem acute, and not merely academic. I remembered the words of Engels: Freedom is the recognition of necessity. And those of Krishnamurti: What is necessary is choiceless awareness, that’s all.