The Gentle Degenerates (15 page)

“That’s absurd,” I said. “No, it’s Jewish,” she answered, and in a stroke the entire psychic history of the Jews came glaring home in utter clarity. I looked at her again, this broken human being of twenty-one, scarred by her parents’ private traumas and carrying the collective guilt of over four thousand years; this child with her stubborn ways and winning wiles; this woman who let herself be beaten and degraded, and yet through it all showed a heartbreaking warmth and delightful intelligence. She was at once a whore and a mother, a sprite and a fool, a lover and a murderer. She was, in short, a typical woman. The only difference was that she lived all her contradictions fully, accepted the irony of a dualistic version and learning to live in living paradox.

We ran into the East Village scene, that melange of pitiful humanity and engrossing metatheatre. At one spot we ran across an old man who had signs pinned to his shirt, reading: “It’s not Marxism, Christianity, or Astrology. Woman dominates.” On his ass he had a sign which said: “Master of women.” Next to him was one of those faded, bearded, young-old men who prowl the streets of the Village digging everything with a sweet sadness and insight. The old man was saying, “There’s seven levels of women. Most men marry those from one to four. The seventh level has the real dominators. The movie actresses.” His example seemed misplaced, but the metaphysics interested me. I decided to question his acuity. “What would you say she is?” I asked, pointing to Carol. He appraised her with a glance and said, “Oh, she’s a five or six.” Instantly I knew he was right. “Thanks,” I said. “That’s right on.” And I shook his hand and left.

We walked down second avenue, past Ratner’s, that symbol of decaying Jewish gentility, still gallantly serving Old World food with European waiters to a new army of longhairs and odd types, all with perfect nonchalance and sophistication laced with a mammoth world-weariness. The black cats and Puerto Ricans watched Carol as she passed, her bare legs flashing under her short skirt. Her bra-less breasts jiggled as she walked, and her face had that vacant nodding look of the junkie. I remembered once before fucking she had said, “Roll a joint. Give me a fix first, and then fuck me.” I flashed her five years from now, syphilitic and mindless, prey to whatever brutality wished to pluck her from her Opheliaesque trance to ravish her. I was witnessing the beginning stages of the total degradation of a human being.

I tried to talk to her, to make her see her life from this viewpoint, this very real possibility. But interpretations given too soon are not heard; their truth may be realized years later, but only when the person is ready for them. The rap went on despite all my intuition. We had moved from an acid high to a speed trip.

Rap rap rap rap rap. It sounds like someone knocking at the door, and that is what it is . . . words being machine-gunned at the door of the mind, attempting to splinter the wood and penetrate to the inside. But their own rapidity, and their blocking of all feedback, are the very reasons they do not register.

We ate at the Odessa, walked through Tompkins Square Park, and dug on the vivacity of the city, the mixing races and nationalities and ages. Raving tattered madmen standing next to dealers standing next to cops standing next to Ukrainian grandfathers who are watching innocent children playing in the grass. Oh, what a spectacle mankind was at that moment; its entire drama lay etched in the scene before my eyes.

We got back, still tied to each other, wanting to rip away, but we were on a strange energy level, and we talked for the next thirty-six hours. We read to one another from our favorite books; we played music from all ages and nations; we made mobiles from telephone wire; we took baths; we fucked; we began putting our cigarettes out on the floor; forgetting to eat, forgetting to look or listen, just caught up in the kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of our turbulent inner lives.

At the end of that time, I seemed suddenly to snap to. I looked up with all the surprise of a man coming out of unconsciousness and waking up in a strange room. I saw this nude body across the floor, and it was attached to a strange face. It was Carol, but stripped of all the images I had plastered on her during two weeks. I saw her as fresh as on the first night I met her, but now I saw with the eyes of experience made rich with the suffering of sharing her pain and joy. Tears rolled down my eyes, for I knew in an instant that I would have to leave her. I could not sustain what would be necessary to help her out of her morass. She would drag me into her youthful insanity.

I had learned much from her, and she from me. We had not abused one another. And the pain of seeing a dream disappear was compensated for by the warmth of remembering the life we had so intimately shared for a few brief weeks. I looked at her. “I don’t want to live with you,” I said. She began to say something, and then stopped herself. “All right,” she said. And a light went out somewhere in the universe, and love covered its face in the veils of sorrow.

All up and down Third Avenue the casualties of our civilization hobbled through their days, the pimps and whores, the bums and drunks, the violent blacks seeking prey, and the police who prowl the streets like game wardens in a preserve for dangerous animals. I looked down at them from my window and for a moment saw the entire thing as a scene from some grotesque drama. In one of the hallways a beautiful girl with a trim but full body stood waiting a score. I felt a great distance from her, removed in time and space and affinity.

Then the thought of Carol disrupted my mind. She had left two days earlier, to crash with some friends who were part of the international gang of students and academic drifters which covers the globe like a thin web. I felt a great sorrow as she went, glad to have her troubles out of my immediate vicinity, but wondering whether she would be all right in this life. I wondered what it would be like to be passing Third Avenue one day and see Carol standing in a hallway like the girl across the street. The woman standing there now must have a man somewhere for whom she is special, for whom her body is sacred. Or maybe because she never knew such a man (or woman), she was able to treat her flesh as an item for the marketplace. I shuddered. In a flash the mask of whore dropped from her face and she was simply a person, like myself, like anyone, but now leaning against a building and ready to expose the deepest part of her body, the spot where love meets lust to produce life, to any gawking, leering, hard-staring creep who might pass by.

And what was there to be done? Children died daily of starvation and napalm. Entire peoples were enslaved. War machinery polluted the earth and a cloud of poison gas was accumulating over the entire planet. In some places, outright slavery still flourished, while everywhere one or another form of imperialism reduced most of mankind to mindless servitors. In the face of that, of what significance was a young whore peddling her pussy on Third Avenue?

In a flash, embodied in that girl, the whole of the pain of the species manifested itself. Unnatural, the human race had, as an organism, gone collectively insane. Trillions of dollars had been spent on armaments to protect us from one another, when all we need to do is to share what is available. The scene had become so bad that people were already splitting for the moon, bringing, of course, their poisons and filth with them.

It was very difficult to see Carol leave. In a very short time I had grown very close to her. Yet, as so often happens, the rush of intimacy moved too quickly and reversed itself, at which point we were left to confront one another as strangers. The last time we fucked summed up the complete relationship. In the dark moaning movement of our bodies and eyes, in the touch and dance of that most deep wordless communion, everything was clear. Yet when she walked out the door, her face flushed, her knit dress outlining the curves of her buttocks and the pert bulge of her nipples, the woman I had been with in bed seemed like a totally different creature. I saw myself as one of the thousands of men who might look at Carol as she walked down the street. I too would be captivated by the inviting ass, the lush breasts, the slightly sluttish gleam of her eyes. She would make a momentary impression, and I would pass by, forgetting her immediately.

How many thousands of women had I so coolly appraised, forgetting that each of them has all the potential for the deep groaning passion where all meaning lies? And what did it take to transform a woman from a visual object and focus of a sex fantasy to an actual woman, with all her pain and complexity and singing need? The first night I fucked Carol she was simply a piece of ass, and I revelled in the discoveries I made about her body. When I cupped my hand over her cunt and felt how wet and hot it was, my first thought was, “Wow, I’ve got a live one!” And now, what would I think of any man who took Carol to bed and thought the same thing? The very idea of it makes me sick, and the contradiction clangs in my mind. Do I then despise myself? Given my obsessive nature, it would be awful to link up to it the need to suffer, and end with a compulsive masochism, a continual throwing of oneself into real and fantasy situations where it always comes up with blood in the teeth.

Now the jealousy began, and I prepared to do my penance, to pay for the sin of having enjoyed another human being sexually for two weeks. I began to imagine all the men she would fuck, the gang bangs, the rapes, the scenes of degradation. And in all of them, it was never the picture of her that bothered me, but the fact that her yielding, loving, wanting, and ultimately pure center was being filthied by this army of superficial bandits, plundering her cunt for their mean pleasure. Again and again I tried to insert myself into their place, but I couldn’t get away from the fact that by sending her away, I was condemning her to her fate, and I viewed with a brooding premonition what that fate might be.

Somehow it always returned to sex, the original sin, the means whereby we learn to differentiate good and evil and all the other dualities. Male and female face one another in eternal separation, striving to fuse, and dying in loneliness. Perhaps only those Japanese lovers who tie their bodies together and let themselves fall, embracing, from high cliffs onto a rocky shore: perhaps they know what ultimate union is. I have never trusted the mystics who claim to know unity with the Absolute as they sit on their asses in some posh cave, smiling to themselves. Union must be total, and that includes the flesh and blood and balls and cunt of the human being, not just his mind.

Now, after a lifetime of experience, after the bruising relationship with Regina, and the short, searing affair with Carol, I faced the same enigma. Why is it that the minute I begin having sex with someone, the quality of our relationship so radically changes as to make it a different kind of organism? Why, with sex, do freedom and respect and friendship so often go out the window? Why can I be happy for any woman’s sexual freedom, and have that same joy turn into jealousy the minute she becomes “my” woman? I had wracked my brain for years over this dilemma, and although I now had a wealth of experience to draw on, the problem was no closer to being solved. My only consolation was that I could now ask more acute questions.

Carol had come roaring into my life, a mixture of honest enthusiasm and a compulsion to run. Deflowered when she was four, subject to harsh beatings from her father, gifted with a joyous body and a sensitive clitoris, she had lived a Holly Golightly existence since she was sixteen. She could from moment to moment change from a hard, calculating bitch to a warm, efficient housewife to a near-nymphomaniac who had orgasms in her sleep as she lay there moaning and pressing her thighs together, working out in her body some fancy fleeting through her mind. On a few nights I lay next to her, my cock hard and my stomach in knots as I watched her gyrate and cry out, crushing her cunt into itself, yearning for some phantom lover, the one who would penetrate her once and for all, who would offer her the final humiliation . . . the man who would kill her. For she wanted to die, to be sacrificed. She was forever being ripped off, and letting herself be used by men who are little better than swine in their sense of scope and honor.

And I had loved her at once, a love laced with instantaneous fear of loss, for I sensed that she was a bird on the wing, following the wind to the north. For the first few days we fucked, I was still able to keep my center, to hold onto my perspective. I could keep track of all the many selves she was, and not get lost in any single one of them. To have done so would have been to reinforce one image at the expense of all the others, and perhaps substitute that bolstered persona for the actual human being, who was always mysterious, always changing.

But when the fucking got really intense, when I started to know her as a person and not as a source for sensation, it became impossible for me to maintain a purely phenomenological outlook. In the beginning I could look upon her love of animals, say, and her proclivities toward prostitution as equal manifestations in her personality. But after having tasted the sweet juices of her cunt, after having heard her gasp with pleasure/pain as I bit her nipple, having felt the burning need in her surge to me looking for completion, I could not remain partial any longer. I became defensive of certain aspects of her; I didn’t want her to go out into the street with her nipples showing; I didn’t want other men raping her with their eyes.

As with everything, there were two aspects to my change in attitude. On the one hand I became more attentive, more loving, more involved in her. But simultaneously, I lost the ability to observe her dispassionately, and slowly became embroiled in her inner drama. What was worse, I began to get tangled in my own metatheatre, losing sight of my own costume changes and sly use of masks. Soon a confused man was floundering with a confused woman, and we lost all ability to make simple contact, to enjoy the simple perception and presence of one another.

With that came a feeling of panic, for when communication gets muddy, the individual gets paranoid. We would go to bed at night, with everything superficially fine, and no sooner did the lights go out than the monsters started oozing from the walls. We heard noises, imagined men with razor blades climbing in through the windows, felt the clammy presence of ghosts. Perhaps a dozen times I would leap from bed to storm into the next room, there to confront emptiness and silence where I had expected some form of enemy. And return to bed, shaken, to seek comfort in her arms. And the step from comfort to sex is not a very long one.

That was strange fucking, the fucking for reassurance. Neither of us would be especially turned on, but the newness of one another’s bodies had not yet worn off, and the simple nearness and heat kicked off enough excitement to stir us. We would begin stroking one another lightly, with no more pressure than a feather might give. It was as though each of us were defining the outline of the other’s body by coming only so close as to let the electrical fields around the bodies mingle. It was like combining auras.

There was no desire in this, except perhaps a desire for desire. We wanted and needed to fuck, but it was an intellectual concern, something to be done to satisfy one of the the imperatives of the mind. The heart was not involved, and the body was indifferent. Soon the stroking would have its inevitable effect: her cunt got wet and my cock got hard. She would slide her ass across the sheet toward me, in what is perhaps the sexiest gesture I have ever seen. The sight of her young white body, stirred and hesitatant, coming toward me in order to make it easier to fuck her, is one that shall never leave the area of instant recall in my memory.

At that point it became a simple mechanico-chemical process. Her left leg goes up bringing the knee to her breast, her right leg stays extended, and her cunt opens in a maddening slant caused by the stretch of her legs in opposite directions. My cock goes for it like a kingfisher dives into a river for its victim. At first there is no great sensation, for she is not very excited. But the cock soon works its unfailing magic, and in a while she responds. The difference now is that she is not responding to me, but to the fucking that I am doing. We become quite impersonal, sealing our minds so as to keep our fantasies private from one another. There is no attempt to blend our minds and bodies into a double two-level synthesis which must take place if the hearts are to open. This kind of fucking is just her grunting her way through the levels of her tension to a cramped inverted orgasm, and me sailing blindly on the curve of my long-awaited ejaculation until the sperm in my balls grudgingly stirs itself to shoot up my cock, out, and into the grasping cunt.

At one point she got tangled in the blankets, and I pulled them back, involuntarily covering her face and torso with them. The ensuing sight inflamed me, and I continued fucking her like that, with just her legs exposed, thrusting into the anonymous cunt, picturing her as the archetypal slut accepting whatever meat was flung at her. Then she threw the blankets off and turned her back to me. I fucked her from behind as we both lay on our sides, and when that didn’t get to the place I wanted to be, I turned her over on her belly. Immediately the act changed. She lifted her ass and I plunged very deep inside her. I brought my knees to the backs of her knees and urged her legs forward. She crawled up and then came to a kneeling position, her ass high and cunt hanging down totally open and exposed Her shoulders were hunched and her head lay at an angle to the horizontal of her torso. Her eyes were open and vacant, and with one hand she gently stroked my hand as it pressed onto the mattress, supporting my arm and my entire torso. The delicate movements of her fingers were like those of a child stroking a baby rabbit. I saw the child that was still alive in her, that aspect which only emerges as a kind of stubborness in her social role, but which blossoms in all its fragility when she is being fucked. And right upon that came the notion of her as a whore, lying in her bed, waiting for the stranger to enter. I am the stranger. I find this young and fleshy woman-child lying there, nude and uninterested. I begin to fuck her and she dutifully offers me her cunt. But halfway through, the flame stirs inside her, and she begins to give parts of herself that she would want to be seen by, want to share with, only those men that she knows long and well, who will be able to appreciate the deep, rich beauty other. But I, as the client, am brutal, and all I can do is to take a gleeful excitement in the fact that this whore is enjoying being fucked, indeed, wants only to be fucked, and can lie there exposing not only her hole but her inner life, as her tender cunt is blasted again and again by a demented cock.

I came up off my knees and supported myself only on my toes. This made it harder to bear the weight, but it gave me a very strong spring to my legs, so I was really able to launch myself into her. She felt the difference at once, and her mouth dropped open. It was as though she became rigid outside in order not to let any movement of hers distract from the hot deep penetration inside her. This was not fucking, this was civilized brutality. This was the male discharging all his hatred, using his strength to punish, to humiliate. This was woman in her role of vessel, accepting and nullifying the blast by using herself as a cushion, as a sponge, and while at it feeling those sensations and emotions which are only possible when one relaxes even in the face of sadism, and takes what comes.