The Gentle Degenerates (8 page)

I began to pump into her slowly but with a steady rhythm. My now adorned cock slammed into her, the head of it prodding into the deepest part of the hole, and the breadth of it, now several inches wide with the snake wrapped around it, slamming at the sides of the cunt. Lisa began to cry, weeping and sobbing, and then pounding at the mattress with her fists. “Oh God,” she wailed, “Daddy fuck me, mommy, yes, God, please, oh Karl, no Karl, not with the bottle, oh please, yes, fuck me, oh daddy, daddy, why, why why . . . “ Cold sweat broke out on my forehead. Here I was, a snake coiled around my prick, fucking a crazy woman who was reliving all the Nazi and family horror of her childhood. All of mankind, in one blinding vision, was immediately reduced to a transparent, pathetic disease. And yet, and yet, the maniacal glory of it! The texture of its passion! The ineluctability of its failure! Suddenly my heart swelled with love. I accepted all that was happening, and despised all the labels which clung to it. “Lisa,” I cried, “Lisa, let’s do it together!” And through all of her litany her clear voice rang out, the voice of the consciousness that was always awake in her. She sang to me, “Yes, baby, I’m here. Let’s do it.”

And then we fucked. Lisa and I and the animal that joined us at our genitals, the snake whose symbol we are. I grabbed her ass and drove home. She lowered her shoulders and backed her haunches into me. Her hands grabbed the sheet and she put a pillow between her teeth. And I rode her for a long time, neither of us once losing the thread, each of us aware of ourselves, of each other, of all the ramifications of the condition and situation, loving it, fearing it, digging it. The climax built long and slow. It came from every muscle of my body and every fibre of my brain. It was a gradual welling of warmth, a spurting of juices. I felt it in me and in her. And each of us knew exactly where the other was.

“Do it,” she muttered into the pillow. “Fuck me hard, fuck me good, fuck me all the way. Take my cunt, baby, just take it and take it. Oh, God, let it be open, fuck it all the way in, love me, oh love me now, let it be now, always be now. Oh mother, open your cunt, let it all in. Oh, oh, oh,” and she moaned again, tossing her head from side to side. If it were possible, we would have gladly died at that moment. There was nothing more for a human being to know and be than what we were right then. Because there was not the slightest hint of dishonesty anywhere to be found. We both knew exactly what we were doing.

And then our rhythms become one. There was no longer any difference between us. It ceased to be me fucking her and her being fucked by me. We were simply the act. And the act found its own form. And the form was the crescendo of sound and movement and energy and joy, as we mounted and mounted. And then the tremors began, deep in our legs, shooting up from the ground and in our heads, blowing in from the sky, and between heaven and earth, we merged into one another until nothing was left except the sheer dream dance of freedom beyond all words or power of person to comprehend.

We came together in a final shower of passion and then subsided; she sank onto the bed and I came down heavily on top of her. We lay for a long time, between wakefulness and sleep, and then began to stir. I drew back and pulled my now limp cock out of her dribbling cunt. The snake must have slipped off when my erection went down. She stretched and then rolled over. She lay on her back and looked at me. There was nothing but wordless tenderness between us. She looked between her legs, and together we brought our hands to her pussy. We spread the lips and I poked my finger into the tiny cunt hole. I immediately felt the snake. I hooked my finger around his body and pulled out. He began to emerge, bent in two. The double width made him very thick, and Lisa’s cunt had to spread very wide to let him be pulled out. She let out a delicious groan as I dragged the animal into the open. It came out and lay limply over my finger. I wondered whether it was dead, but then saw its tongue flicking out. I put it back into the box, glistening with cunt juice and not moving at all. It lay on the bottom of the box quite inert, and although I was sure I was anthropomorphizing, it seemed totally pissed off.

I lay back on the bed, and we shared the silence for a while. There was nothing to say. Time passed, and then Lisa began to giggle. “It’s all very simple,” she said. “Of course,” I answered. Another time passed. “Do you think . . . ?” I began to ask. “There’s no such thing as a question,” she said. “Well, then, how . . . ?” I started to say. But she put a finger on my lips and added, “Difficult to tell.”

Then we began giggling again. And what we giggled at had no name or form. It was just the realization of Being, the movement of existence, and the awareness of self. It was the kind of moment that could bring on a rapturous ecstasy, or a painful despair, or, when stoned with a fucking buddy, a volley of giggles. Finally we subsided. “Ain’t Absolute Truth a gas?” she said.

We embraced then, and I got up. “Want some tea?” I asked. “Why don’t you spend the night,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. “Sure,” I agreed. I made tea, enjoying the physical solitude of the kitchen, and then went back to find Lisa sitting on the bed, smoking, and looking through a book. I put the cups down and sat next to her. It was, of all things, a pictorial essay on snails. She looked up. “Snails are fantastic,” she said. “The way they move and fuck and get into things.” She paused. “Did you know that some species of snails have as many as twenty-one thousand teeth?”

I caught the suggestion in her voice and looked down at her cunt. Her eyes followed mine, and then we looked up at one another. “Lisa,” I said, “not snails.” She got serious. “Why not?” she asked. “Are you prejudiced?”

I began to speak, then realized that I was about to say, “You have to draw the line somewhere,” and I was ashamed of the thought. This was a woman who had had all the lines erased when she was a child, and had learned how to live with that, keeping her intelligence and humor and passion in the face of her despair and horror, maintaining a blooming dignity in the light of all her perversions. Suddenly I felt timid and conventional. She caught my mood.

“You know,” she said, “that there are no rules. There’s just us. Ain’t no God to tell us ‘no’ about anything. We do what we want and we pay the dues. That’s all there is. Are you still looking for something? You think there’s something else besides what’s here right now?”

“You know I don’t,” I said. “Well then?” she answered. “What do you dig?” She paused, and I remained silent. “Whatever it is, do it.”

I smiled. “O.K.,” I said, “snails.”

I moved over to her side and together we read the book, filled with the most sensual photographs of the most incredible life form. “I really want to fuck a snail,” said Lisa. I put my arm around her shoulder. “Call me when you do,” I said.

“O.K.,” she said.

We looked into one another’s eyes. I felt the need to say something, although I knew whatever it was would sound foolish. The words bubbled up into my mouth. “If you need me . . . I mean . . . you can . . . “ I stopped. “I love you, Lisa,” I said. Her eyes grew moist. “You’re a complete bastard,” she said. “But because you love me, it’s easier for me to live.” I embraced her, and for no reason I could name, found myself crying. She put her arms around me and cradled my head between her breasts. “It’s all right,” she said, “I’m here.”

I wept myself out, and then lay quietly in her lap. She stroked my hair and then, in a very strange voice said, “Thank you. You make me feel like a woman.”

We fell asleep later in one another’s arms, and the next morning we had a cup of coffee, spoke almost not at all, and I left, both of us feeling friendly, and quite distant.

Meaning is simply a question of finding the correspondences between different-sized infinities. The trouble with Aristotle’s notion of identity is that he had no understanding of scale. One line can be longer than another, but they contain the same number of points.

I am struck by the uncanny resemblence between words and life. When a description is accurate, it configures the past, confirms the present, and outlines the future, all in one stroke. There is nothing more damaging than badly-used language. This is what make writing so difficult. The line of prose or poetry, if it is to be true, must capture the energy of the moment, no matter what the ideational content of the words. But when that happens, there is no discernible difference between the fiction and the reality. Symbol blends with stuff, and all is clear. As a friend of mind once remarked, “Yin and yang—what a terribly complex way to look at things.”

On the floor lay the letter from Regina. I took out the sheet and stared at the words on the page. Two nights ago it had been a living experience; now the typewritten letters seemed oddly stilted, and I was unable to read a word. On the envelope was scrawled a telephone number. I realized with a mild shock that it was Roy’s number. The orgy swam into my memory with all the psychic distance of a movie. Unreal, everything was unreal. Abruptly, I walked over to the typewriter, rolled in a sheet of paper, and began writing.

“Regina: For whatever reasons, the way I approach the problem of living is through defining my own reality as it occurs to me, without pressure from any other human being to meet any standards whatsoever. I am here, now, as close as I can be to that energy which seems to pervade all life at its most honest and peaceful moments. I have only a vague notion of the form my life will take.

“As far as I can see marriage is a death sentence to the soul. Which doesn’t mean that living without marriage is any more real or facile. For me to uproot myself to come live in Lotusland by the ironic Pacific would be a masterstroke of idiocy. There is no impulse at all in me to come there, so I am staying here.

“The question of our relationship is again wide open. I will be in touch with you, and you will know where I’m at. If at any time it seems that you want to come join me, you will know who it is you are coming to be with. I am not going to change myself in the slightest to accomodate any of your needs, and I don’t expect you to accomodate yourself to me.

“When I am in your area, I will come be with you. Until then, I think of the words in the Baez song you had me listen to, and the stars that shine in your sky are the same that shine in mine.”

I signed it, put it in an envelope, addressed and stamped it, and put it by the door so I would remember to mail it. I had a sudden ferocious sense of liberation. I was my own man again. The thought of Regina shot through me like a pang, and I clutched at my chest, and then it passed. I would miss her sharply. But I felt that never before had we had a better chance of succeeding.

There was something extremely literary about the moment. I had disposed of a human being through a letter, as though she were a character in a novel. And to my astonishment, I realized that that was how I felt to myself. I suddenly saw my entire life as a more or less absurd odyssey of a cunning cocksman being ensnared by numberless adventures and almost going to ruin between the rocks of lust and metaphysics. But who was the faithful wife to whom I was trying to return? Was Regina Penelope? Again the literary myth! My head started to dance.

There was nothing for it. I went to the phone and called California. I had to talk to her, at least to her voice, so that some palpable reality would intrude onto this diabolical trampoline which had me in thrall. I didn’t mind the bouncing up and down, but I couldn’t abide the notion that I was doing my act in an empty theatre on a deserted world. The phone rang twice and she answered. I realized at once, as my heart gladdened, that what I loved her for most was that she was always right there when I needed her. “Hello,” I said. There was the usual pause, and then she whispered, warmly, “Hi.”

“I called for two reasons,” I said. “One is to make sure that you are real, and I suppose, by that, to make sure that I am real. And the other is to give you a brush-off. I’m not coming to California.”

A silence. Then, “Ever?” “Not for a while,” I said. “At least not the next four months.” I heard her exhale deeply. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, “but I was afraid for a minute that you weren’t coming at all.” The thought went through my mind, “Maybe I’m not,” but I blanked it out before it registered. “I wrote you a letter,” I said. “You want to hear it?” She said yes and I got the letter and read it to her. She didn’t say anything for a while, and then, “I’m all confused again.”

“It’s pretty clear,” I said. “Coming to live with you is not important enough to me to take me away from what I am doing here right now. And I won’t make any promises about the future.” She began to counter what I said in that subtle way she has which makes it seem as though we are arguing some negotiable point instead of talking about a decision which has been made. She seemed so vulnerable at that moment that my heart went out to her. For a brief second my resolve wavered, but I snapped back into a firm posture. I pictured her standing there nude, her ass a panorama of shifting tints and textures, her eyes doing a seductive dance, her sweet curly cunt hair peeking at me from between her legs. And I realized I was closing access to all that.

But not to her! Then I saw the difference. All of my problems concerning my feelings about Regina centered around sexual access, and jealousy, and fear that she would find a groovier cock. But as far as the woman, the person, was concerned, I felt an easy affection and warmth; I cared for her, suffered with her, shared joy with her. And the fact that I couldn’t fuck her and somebody else would, had nothing to do with whether I loved her or not. Fucking was a form of loving, but no more so than talking, or holding, or working with, or sharing silence with. The twin emotions of sadness and release sloshed around in my chest like green water in a bottle. If I were with Regina right now, I should laugh with her, and take her in my arms, and while I told her all of the joyous bubbling insanity in my mind, I would fuck her tenderly and roughly with my body.

Yet she was not with me physically, and the words had become a substitute for touch instead of just another part of the dance. I told her that I didn’t want to talk any more because any further conversation would just make us muddled and resentful. She agreed, and promising to write and call one another soon, we hung up.

I was very excited. She had spent most of her time telling me how much I turned her on when I was this way, but being this way meant our separation. We seemed caught in that not uncommon trap of desiring in proportion to distance. Sharing the same bed was too close; three thousand miles was too far. I wondered what the ideal geographic space was for a sane marriage between man and woman. Paradoxically, I felt that our marriage was stronger than it had been before I told her I wouldn’t be joining her, and before she acknowledged that she would probably now be fucking some of the men she’d flashed over the past few weeks.

Just then the phone rang. It was Michael, inviting me to spend a few days in the country with his wife and children. It seemed perfect timing, so I accepted at once and made preparations to meet him at the bus station. I showered, dressed, and headed for Port Authority Bus Terminal. Within an hour, he was driving up to greet me.

Michael is a psychiatrist about thirty-five years old. He is successful, handsome, hip, and very intelligent. But like all of us, his brightness doesn’t extend to those areas where he has a vested interest in not looking. He is married to a statuesque European, and after seven years they have three children on an acre of ground in a solid, graceful, three-story wood house. Whereas some men allow the child and teen-ager to predominate to the detriment of the adult in them, Michael is almost one-hundred-percent adult all the time, which becomes overpowering. She is as heavy in the head as he is, and they look as though they fuck magnificently. He is well over six feet and has a kind of bullish physique which is still delicate; she is a few inches shorter, with breasts that would each fill a large hand, and the kind of trim, functional ass which seems as though it knows exactly how to move. A mordant mouth provides the cherry on top of the sexual pie. Each time I saw her, I itched to see her cunt.

He and I have a friendship that started from the moment we saw one another. Total mutual respect and liking have been its unfailing characteristics. His problems with Ina are classic. His passion is his work and the people who constitute that work. She is burdened by her housework and children, and her sense of being left out of the mainstream of his life. She can’t share his scene, or won’t. So they stay together for the sake of comfort, and play incredible games with one another with the full arsenal of spitefulness and seduction. They have tried swinging and threesomes and various forms of sexual escapades, but none of them worked because their basic bond is shattered. The energy doesn’t flow fully between them any longer.

I arrived and immediately began spreading good will all over the place, digging the kids in a special way, and laying non-threatening sex vibes on Ina, and getting the whole scene cool with Michael. We rapped, and did a settling down number, and had dinner, and then went to sit around the fireplace to smoke grass and talk. From experience in this kind of scene, I knew that nothing worthwhile would happen among us unless the totality of the drama was exposed. So I drew the scenario for them. Jealous but bored husband feeling guilty about his wife invites good friends up to make love to her, with or without him present, in the hopes of rejuvenating his scene with her. Bitchy wife refusing to even find out how she feels for fear that knowledge might force her to discard her mask of hatefulness. And the galloping guru trying to put all the angles together to find the proper-shaped triangle. Usually husband and wife make up about one hundred and fifty degrees between them, leaving the third in the menage to juggle with forty, a narrow margin. And no matter what happens, unless everyone understands his angle, and knows that the degree of the angle is always subject to change, there will be trouble among the concerned parties.

By the time I had brought my narrative up to the reality, which was the three of us sitting there in the middle of this insane suburban melodrama, they were ready to cop, and smiled at the absurdity of our condition. And for the first time a look of warmth passed between them. This too was familiar, but I was ready for that trap as well. I wasn’t about to become the sexual stimulant which turned them on to an evening of fucking without coming to terms with the basic questions. So I dove into the mix and laid out the reality that I saw. They dug its accuracy, and when I was finished Ina said, “That’s all true, but what do we do now?”

“Why, give me a massage, of course,” I said. The seeming irrelevancy of the answer was all the charm that was needed. “All right,” she said. I looked at Michael. “You too,” I said.

I lay down on the floor in front of the fire, face down, and let myself relax, not only my body, but all the strings I was pulling on the astral plane. Immediately I sank into the inner world, where all structures melt, and nothing is left but the movement of darkness and its flashes of light. Four hands touched me at once, Michael’s strong, heavy fingers going to my spine, and Ina’s delicate touch running up and down the backs of my legs. I felt simultaneously supported and tripped out. They began to work easily and methodically, touching and feeling different parts of me, and rubbing or caressing or stroking wherever it felt good for them to do so.

I floated a great distance from them, and their touch and voices came from afar. Ina’s fingers began to stroke the insides of my thighs from the backs of my knees to my buttocks. Small electric charges pulsed up into my balls. Simultaneously, Michael pressed deep into my back with his thumbs, and I felt the spine crack, and the deep muscles protest and then relax. My breathing became full. I felt like a baby in the bath, with its parents washing it. I could feel the warmth flow through me from one to the other, and there was nothing for me to do but lie passive and feel the pleasure which coursed up and down my limbs and into my belly. Ina’s hands moved to my ass and her fingers probed into the crack, prodding gently, forcing the muscles to let go. I found myself holding on, and to my surprise she spanked me lightly. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, and in a swoop brought her hand under my legs and cupped my cock and balls. “He is so pretty, Michael, isn’t he?” she crooned in that voice in which mothers cherish their children. Michael only grunted and grabbed my shoulders, pummeling them and drumming the tension out.

Deliciously, I felt her hands go around my waist and unbuckle my belt. The pants opened and she began to tug on them, drawing them toward my ankles. A cool breeze played over my bare legs and I trembled. “Let’s kidnap him, Michael,” she said, “and lock him up here. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a friend that we could keep for ever?” Part of me thrilled to her words and the intent behind them, while yet another part of me shuddered in fear. She suddenly seemed like a witch, casting some spell on my mind, and I was succumbing with ease and even gratitude. Michael’s hands grabbed me roughly and spun me around so that I lay on my back. And then they took my shirt off.

I was totally naked, lying there with my eyes closed, and I could sense them kneeling near me, Ina at my feet, Michael at my head, and they were breathing heavily. A thousand fantasies rushed through my head and I dug all the potential in the moment. It was what it was and all the things it could be, simultaneously.

Ina’s mouth put an end to all my speculations. First I felt her breath on my belly and, a long mimute later, her tongue gently curving into my navel. My belly quivered. She drew back and leaned forward again, this time dropping her breasts to my chest. I started up, not having been aware that she’d removed her blouse and bra. She touched my skin with her nipples, very lightly, and then moved her torso back and forth so that the pendulous breasts traced intricate patterns on me. I drew my breath in sharply and heard her suck the air in through her lips. Michael leaned heavily onto my chest with his hands, and he grabbed the skin all around my nipples and started to pull and pinch, and knead me as though he were a baker working with bread. I lost all ability to breathe and let his rhythm dictate the movement of my breath, as though I were receiving artificial respiration.