Saline Solution (11 page)

I began to feel oppressed, and this was the prelude to introducing violence into sex. I found I could no longer share my fantasies with her, and their energy emerged in ugly forms. Perhaps she had her own guilt concerning what she was doing, but she readily fell into the masochistic posture necessary to complement my rage. It was with her, for the first time, that I saw myself slapping a woman.

I was only twenty-four, and although she became the victim physically, I suffered immense psychic damage. One fuck had me pouncing on her again and again as she tried to crawl away from me across the floor and over the furniture. I finally pinned her to the couch and fucked her in the arse, growling in the cavern of her soundproof studio. I bit her neck and became the leopard killing the deer. I gnawed on her skull and became the caveman cannibal. Her eyes filled with a watery pleading which oscillated between wanting to let go and wanting to be totally brutalised. Her whimpers inflamed me. I wanted not only to kill her, but to eat her, to tear her flesh and swallow it, the blood running down the corners of my mouth.

'Do you want coffee?'

Lucinda was standing over me. Francis looked at me with an expression of puzzled amusement.

'What's happening in your head?' he said.

Lucinda seemed tired. I put my arms around her waist and rested my cheek against her belly. I felt her stiffen, and then relax. She stroked my hair. I held her arse in my hands.

We cleared the breakfast dishes and went into town, to make the rounds of post office, newspaper, supermarket, and coffee shop. The simplicity and ease of the routine always charmed me. Warm weather, lack of automobiles, and limited population were all it took to keep civilisation pleasant.

'They are destroying the world,' said Francis.

I looked up. He and Bertha were a few steps in front of us, hand in hand. Lucinda and I walked in steps, but not touching. For once the arrangement did not anger me. I found myself enjoying the pattern we formed, each male and female mated, and the couples forming a loose nucleus.

'Nobody seems to mind,' I said.

The four of us stopped at once. The sun was behind a bank of clouds and its ray fell in a perfect fan over the entire bay. The edges of the clouds were silver, and the dense middle sections black from their own shadow. Several sailboats chased a capricious breeze, and the whole earth was vibrant with the thunder of light.

'Classic!' said Francis.

'A
New Yorker
cover,' I said.

'That's a decadent association,' said Lucinda.

A lively tune played in her eyes, and her mouth was still raw from the dreams of the night before. She wore a long cotton dress which gave her the appearance of long walks in the pine forest. Some slight chemical transformation changed our levels of energy, and all at once I found myself digging her quite openly and frankly, delighting in her presence, in her person. She smiled, and then became embarrassed. She took my hand and looked away, then looked back, saw my eyes still on her, and threw her arms around my neck.

I let myself accept the possibility of union. I thought of Dante G. swimming lazily in his private pool, and an unexpected explosion of joy staggered me. The miracle of love and birth became real right before me. It seemed that I had only to say yes, and all of it would be possible.

'But like the
New Yorker
cover,' Francis said, 'it's illusory. Fire Island is where the Wizard of Oz lives. Over in Cherryless Grove. They've gone too far. It's nuclear weapons, or nerve gas, or a simple accumulation of poison. Give it, say, fifty years.'

We reached the edge of town. Outside the several bars were scores of boxes with empty booze bottles and beer cans. Cigarette butts made a mosaic on the paths. The police launch and the supply ferry were idling in the dock, farting black and blue clouds of exhaust in the air. The stores kept a brisk trade going in and out of their doors. I went to buy some cigars. 'Fifty-five cents,' the clerk said. 'But they're only thirty-three cents in the city,' I said. 'This ain't the city,' he said.

'Those fucking thieves,' I complained to the others.

'I bought a book the other day,' said Bertha. 'A seventy-five cent book. And he charged me ninety cents. What's the other fifteen cents for? I asked him. And he said, Ten cents is the charge because it's Fire Island, and the other five cents is because we can get it.'

'Did you pay?' asked Lucinda.

'I wanted the book,' Bertha said.

This was about the longest conversation the two of them had ever had. I was depressed by the structure of the formation again, and I could see nothing but limitation coming from these straight, rational, polite people. Life is not like that. Life is confusion and anger and fear; life is danger, and the ecstasy of tasting forbidden fruit. And here we were, quietly being fleeced by the rapacious merchants of a corrupt summer resort, while a world destroyed itself, and made pretty conversation across the parameters of our self-imposed strictures. I was on the brink of beginning to blame the others for the discomfort I was feeling when I remembered I had reminded myself that when the environment became inhospitable, the best thing to do was leave.

I had tried to deal with the problem through the 'work it out' approach, but at certain points only solitude heals. This was one of them. And yet I didn't want to be physically alone, merely to be with people who allowed me to come out of myself as much as I wanted, and demanded no more. I felt a paradoxical mixture of excitement and withdrawal within myself, a sort of turned-on passivity. It was the mood of homosexual fucking, which was coming to seem less an end in itself than a corrective for the impossible tensions of male-female relationship. Even the purity of the homosexual act had been corrupted.

'I'm going for a walk,' I said. And as I strode away I saw the look of hurt in Lucinda's eyes. But there was nothing to say.

VIII

As I knelt in the sand, the sun sprinkling through the bay leaves, the two men in front of me pulled their cocks from the tops of their bathing suits and dangled them in front of my mouth. They embraced and began kissing, deeply, wetly. I took a deep snort of the popper and opened my lips wide to let both organs in. One of them was dark and thin, perhaps some five inches long, while the other was practically chalk white with an orange head, the kind of cock that flushes thick and full from the base eight inches to the tip. The silken heads rubbed against the top of my mouth and the inside of my cheeks, while I slipped my tongue sideways between them, making a cushion for their thrusts. Another man came up behind me and slipped off my bathing suit, then fucked me with one of those seven-eighths erections which are so tantalising.

I had returned to the house, picked up the remains of a box of amyl nitrate, some hash, a towel, and walked to the meat rack, the stretch of woods between Cherry Grove and the Pines. Cruising in the woods provided a keen pleasure that freshened the senses and elevated the soul. Here the crucial element of the hunt came into focus, and sex became largely secondary, the eating of the food which has already been killed. But it was the chase and the kill which captured the imagination of the body.

Barely discernible paths winding through thirty acres of thick brush and small trees, with unexpected clearings, and openings onto the dunes. Behind a tree, one man leaning against the bark, the rough wood scratching his back, as another performed the time-hallowed rite of cocksucking. In a hollow behind a tuft of grass, five men in tableau, their limbs and heads in an intricate and artificial tangle. Leather boys lurking in the bushes, and bikinied queens peddling their arses behind the poison ivy.

For now, there was the silent struggle and sensation of four men in a spontaneous but oddly well-rehearsed sexual act: the two men above me in communion through their kisses and deriving energy from the heat of my mouth on their cocks; the man behind me sopping up the pleasure of cock-in-arse and the sweet voyeuristic delight of the churning flesh in front of him. It was more of a dance than a fuck. For one thing, most of the people cruising did not have ejaculation as a primary goal, but wanted as many physical
contacts
as possible. So there was no passion here, no sense of intimacy or warmth, although we went through the paces of the closest act possible.

We moved together until we seemed to reach some sort of consensus. No one had a physical climax, there was no ejaculation, but rather a sense of accomplishment, of completion. The two men in front of me pulled up their suits and walked away, while the man behind me pulled out abruptly. I turned to my left and saw that three more men were standing there; they had been quietly watching the action. I was surrounded by a row of cocks. My knees were weak and I was breathing hard. I felt giddy. 'Well, why not?' I thought, and took another hit from the inhalator. The drug loosened me up even more and I went for the black in the middle. It was already throbbing and the length of it slid easily down my throat. The man to whom it was attached began sucking in air through his teeth and his legs buckled.

Then, 'Take it baby,' he said, and pushed the head of his cock against the roof of my mouth. And splashed his sperm against it, causing the fluid to run straight down my throat and drip on the back of my tongue. I put all my attention on the taste, texture, and symbolism of moment, for this, theoretically, was the point of my endeavours. I swallowed without closing my lips, and got a flash on the suggestive picture my face must have presented just then, the gulping open mouth, the closed eyelids, the straining upward posture, and the glistening black cock sliding out past the lips, leaving a thin trail of pearly fluid.

He too turned quickly and left, and one of the others moved in on me. There was something about this vibration that made me look up, and I saw the closed brutal face of a man without humour or intelligence. He totally lacked the understanding that everything happening in the woods was a game, and like any game, depended on delicacy for its success. Even degradation was possible, so long as each actor understood that the essential dignity of the other had to be respected. The glorious thing about the meat rack was that much of the finding and losing took place on the basis of mental projections. I stood up and brushed past the man. He grabbed my wrist. I could read the hurting lust in his eyes and for an instant almost felt sorry enough for him to go down again. But I was tired of the sport and left.

Smoking hash along an empty stretch of beach, I played back the past few hours. Why was it that the sense memory of baby was so often associated with the sharpest moments of sex? When I am ranged over a moaning woman and at the height of ecstasy she cries, 'Oh baby,' and when I am on my back and a great cock is sending shivers of cunt through my cheeks and bowels, the man above me shouts, 'Oh baby/ I wonder at the implications of the word. Certainly, when sucking a cock and gagging on its head I often felt like a baby being force-fed. In fact, the more I whimper and try to push it away, the more exciting the deed becomes for the man who is doing it to me. Perhaps much of fucking is a vain attempt to revive patterns left incomplete since childhood.

When all these
recherche
aspects of sex are neutralised, what is left, and why do we continue to fuck?

When fuck is intransitive, then the act becomes as routine as eating: I eat with you, I fuck with you. When it is used transitively, and the sense changes to 'I fuck you,' the theatre of personality opens and the drama of our intercourse overshadows all the excitement of the actual sensations.

The human race may have moved to the status of
homo promiscuans.
What keeps me from any experience except the fear grown in the hotbed of conditioning? All values which have come to us from the past are worthless unless we rediscover the state which gave rise to them, and only then can we truly decide whether to maintain them as values. We must break all the commandments which are a priori laid on our heads.

When I went to court to pay the fine, I realised that this so-called civilisation operates at the level of a dimwitted Protestant school teacher. We sat in chairs set up in rows. We were glowered into silence by a foot-tapping policeman. And when our names were called we had to walk up to the desk, lower our heads, and explain why we did such a naughty thing. It was interesting that the fines were lower in direct proportion to the tone of whining in the defendant's voice. The more abject, the more sorry one was, the more magnanimous the judge became.

Fascism is nothing but the acculturation of self-deception.

'I'm not alienated,' Francis once said. 'I'm just the latest model of a line in an evolutionary experiment. Consciousness is only a tool, part of the design. The whole Krishnamurti trip of anguished solitude is romantic horseshit.' Yet I seem to wage an unrelenting war against encroachment on my individuality. One day Lucinda and I got on the ferry and she said, 'Where shall we sit?' And I flashed paranoia and thought, 'Why
we?
Who made this unconscious assumption of
we?'

I walked down the beach, wondering at the stream of murky analysis churning through my mind. To my left lay a hundred and eighty degrees of ocean horizon, the sky a thousand shades of blue and grey, the green and violet and pink-tinged water, the almighty sun. Sandpipers and seagulls skirted the shore. And every five or ten minutes, another person passed. We would smile, and perhaps say a few words, show one another the rocks and shells we had picked up. Each time I was taken by how uncomplicated it was to relate to a stranger, and how dense interactions became when expectation, the daughter of desire, entered the scene.