Saline Solution (22 page)

He sat down and the three of us stared glumly into space. I was horny. I sat up. 'Well, Donald came, and Felix can't come, and that leaves me.' The two of them looked at me with surprise and then smiled. 'I get to be the director then.' I said. I set the blocking. 'Donald, you go down there and suck my cock. Felix, you can continue trying to come in my mouth, and also supply me with a hit of the popper from time to time. We'll keep doing that until I come, and if you, Felix, come, that's a bonus, but essentially this is my orgasm?'

It was very difficult to keep track of both of them, of my physical state and the state of my fantasies, as well as the general concensus of vibrations in the room, and I kept flashing in and out of one or another aspect of the scene.

The single most troublesome awareness during the act was seeing that I wasn't really enjoying the proceedings. I felt as though I were performing a subtle and complex task and that somewhere I was being graded as I would be on a test.

I found myself attempting to get into the consciousness of the other actors. It occurred to me that each of us had come to this point on the basis of some image of expectation of pleasure; this was not an organically spontaneous scene, but rather the reaching after sensation by three jaded sensualists.

This was the final end to Narcissus: finding himself to make love to, and then finding that lovemaking to be unsatisfactory.

And then I came in Donald's mouth.

We lay down for a while and let the jagged vibrations settle.

'What happened?' I said.

'I don't know,' said Donald, 'but I feel like somebody's been stomping me a couple of hours. My mind is sore.'

'I don't know what you two are talking about,' said Felix. He was the only one who hadn't come yet.

'Do you think,' I said to Donald, 'that I can get him to hit me across the buttocks with that gorgeous black belt of his?

Felix started. 'Do you really want me to hit you?' he asked worriedly.

I lay face down and took another whiff of the popper. Donald straddled my thighs and played with his cock until it got hard again and then sank it between my buttocks and into my hole. It was a relief to be fucked again. He grabbed my hips and pulled my cheeks into his groin. I let myself go slack inside and let him sizzle with all the sensations our friction produced. He came again, moaning. Then Felix crawled onto me and fucked me for fifteen minutes, his cock staying pole-hard but reaching no climax. Unreasonable, I got angry at him and pulled away, leaving him dangling. I was desperately randy. I slid down and took Felix's cock into my mouth, catching him up short just as he was about to begin pouting again. I began to suck him as I never before done in my life. My mouth was a living conscious experience on his flesh. He grabbed his cock and squeezed it. I heard him gasp and just opened my mouth wide. Instantly a wetness of sperm hit my tongue and I swallowed hard. 'I like to swallow it,' I thought, assuming the posture of the wanton who was brought up here to be fucked and used by these two men.

I rolled over and felt the lushness of my body as it touched each of theirs. Donald got on me again, and this time he took me from in front, bringing my knees to my chest. Felix bit very hard into my nipple. I flinched and moaned and drew his head closer to my breast. I sank deeper on Donald's cock and loved every minute of the entire thing. Felix nibbled my cheek. I whispered in his ear.'You do it,' I said. 'I want the belt.' Donald heard me and his excitement mounted. 'I want the strap on me,' I said, and with that Donald cried out and came inside me for the third time that night.

Felix turned me over. He got off the bed and returned with the belt of leather. I took a pull on a popper and let myself sink into my own sensations.

He began by hitting lightly, and then with sharper strokes. I took both a kinaesthetic and cinematic fix on my condition. As I felt the burning and tingling of the mounting line between tenderness and brutality, I saw the picture from the outside, the thin dark drugged man woman stretched across the bed as a thick-chested man brought a whip down on the curved buttocks again and again while the third watched with hot-eyed fascination.

The belt came down harder and more frequently. Donald reached down from underneath and began to run his fingers up the crack between the cheeks. His touch was very gentle and I strained to reach it. But as I lifted my buttocks, the strap came down harder. It was exquisite. I had to offer my arse to be beaten harder in order to achieve the delicacy of the caress.

The hand took greater and greater liberties with the exposure of my desire and finally one finger insinuated itself into the hole. I gasped for breath. Felix began to hit me with steady rhythm. I sang in pain and the release of the moment. I searched for any Freudian demons and laughed at what I found. Of what interest could any rationalisation be before the overwhelming reality of the strap, the swish and the thwack, the quiet fierceness of Felix's determination, and the depraved dabbling and dallying of Donald's hand?

'At last,' I thought, 'the belt at last.' And I wondered whether I would take the final step one day, lying somewhere, handcuffed and gagged, while an artist of torture brought my body to its highest tuning.

When I came to, all the activity had stopped. I felt stiff and sated. The two of them were dozing, one on either side of me. I got up.

'I really must go,' I said.

'Look me up if you're on the coast,' Donald said.

'Call me,' Felix said.

I got dressed and they walked me to the door.

Out in the street sullen men sat on stoops and drank beer from cans. Crazies talked to themselves as they walked down the sidewalks. Police cars glowed on every other corner.

JOHN AND JANET:Two parasites attempting to suck one another dry.

'If you loved me, you would come with me,' he said.

'I just want a day by myself,' she said.

'Well, we made this appointment three weeks ago,' he said.

'Oh, all right, I'll go,' she said.

'Oh don't bother to come if you don't want to,' he said.

'But you know I love you,' she said. And then I had to leave.

XVII

That aspect of the persona, that T, which is most repressed comes, through an ironic transmogrification, to seem our 'deepest' or 'truest' self, that to which we aspire, even though we are unconscious of it. Thus, when we find that we have achieved exactly what we have been striving for, we discover that we have nothing but shit and ashes in our hands.

The following morning began in some miasmal pit. I lay with my eyes closed, awake, for almost an hour after regaining consciousness. I wasn't sleepy, but I could discover no reason to move. My mind was like one of the sixteen-foot pipes that spew garbage into the East River. And I wallowed in the slime and discomfort of it. Then Lucinda got up and went to the bathroom. When she came back I opened my eyes and a look of dense dislike smouldered between us.

'I wonder whether it's a boy or a girl,' she said. 'After the abortion, should I have them look and tell me?'

'I don't want to know,' I said.

'Well, I do,' she said. 'I don't have to tell you.'

She dressed without preparing breakfast. 'I'm going to

eat out,' she said, 'do you want to come?'

We found one of those Broadway coffee shops that seem to attract truck drivers and policemen. The eggs tasted as though the chicken that laid them had been fed radioactive dust all their lives. I read the
Times
, a grisly comic book, looking at the photos and snorting at the headlines, then to the bridge column, skipped the book review, and worked up a thin nausea over the insipid commentary of the editorial.

'What did you do last night?' Lucinda asked.

'I had a mini-orgy with a couple of fags I used to know in the Village.'

She smiled with understanding and actual humour. It was the sort of expression which had helped endear her to me. We had become so embroiled in the convolutions of our private drama that we had forgotten to appreciate one another as people. The flash was fleeting but served to illuminate to what degree humanity has lost its ability to exist simply. The earth forms a complete circle about the sun, and to us the importance seems to lie in designating the cycle and calling it a year, while we miss the extraordinary fact of the accomplishment. In that year we wage wars, count profit and loss, persist in our tawdry enterprise, and lose all sight of the awesome breadth of being.

'Why couldn't she have remained independent?' I wondered watching her lips move as she spoke. 'She fell into the role of wife, and I acquiesced out of ignorance and helplessness. I couldn't remain a single man in the arms of a needful woman. And only in those moments when I was again somewhat clear of her, of our scene, could I begin to appreciate her, to enjoy her, to see her as an entity in her own right.' And to step clear involved starting an affair with another woman, a sex marathon with two men, and the possible loss of my friendship with Francis.

Somehow it seems there should be a higher nobility, a greater scope to life than this: diddle around the edges of my frayed and decadent desires.

Back at the apartment we smoked some grass and turned on the television. Nixon was making a speech at Kansas State University as part of the Alf Landon lecture series. There was a great deal of cheering and squealing, the President stomping around the stage with his arms held aloft, a wide-mouthed smile hanging from his ruthless face.

'Thank you, thank you.' He formed the words with his lips but the roar of the crowd drowned his voice. He made downward motions with his hands, indicating that the applause was to stop, and in a few seconds, it did. He came up to the microphone happy. He looked and acted for a moment like Johnny Carson.

'He looks like Johnny Carson,' Lucinda said.

'Johnny Carson can't blow up the world,' I sai
d.'He
can.'

We both returned our eyes to the screen to look with deadly interest upon this strange man who had become a quasi-dictator in the most powerful nation in the world. A wave of fear washed over us. He told a few jokes. He made a remark about the tie he was wearing. Everyone laughed. Applause broke out again.

'Can it be as infantile as it appears? Are they all really such retarded children?'

Nixon praised Landon, he spoke a few words about how he perceived life ('I've won, and I've lost, and I can tell you this; it feels much better to win.' - cheers), paid off several obscure debts to himself, and went into a rap on democracy.

'In a free society, no one can win all the time, no one can have his way all the time, and no one is right all the time.' And then. 'We cannot respect the rule of law abroad unless we respect the rule of law at home in the United States.'

A three-minute ovation. 'What does that mean?' said

Lucinda.

'It means that the war will continue in Asia and radicals will be totally suppressed here.'

A raucous scream of pain rose from the orderly mob. It was a dissenter. The words were inaudible. Only the tone of the voice, the fear, the confusion, the anger. There is nothing for it. The war will never end.

'Does anyone else understand what is going on? I mean, do they
see?
The
senselessness
of our condition? The mindlessness of the masses and their leaders? Does anyone else realise to what a low estate we've fallen?'

'We must feel nothing but contempt for these radicals, and for anyone who sympathises with them,' the President said.

'Jesus,' said Lucinda, 'Let's get out of the country.'

'Where to, Lucinda? You think it's better anywhere else? Freedom is dead everywhere. The world is dying. You keep forgetting that.'

She screamed once, loud and full. 'No. I don't want to know that,' she yelled, 'I just want to have my baby and live in peace. I don't want much, I really don't want much. Just someplace where there is some peace.' She began sobbing.

XVIII

I lay on my back, sniffing popper's, masturbating. I had no sexual energy left. My cock was bone dry and sore. Yet I had to grab it, to pull at it, to tear the semen from my body. It was a pure act of self-abuse, and I remembered that that was how masturbation used to be called.

I moved from fantasy to fantasy, finding myself close to ejaculation as my images approached degradation. I became a thin sluttish blonde girl addicted to black bodies. I was the personal slave of a sullen brute of a man who used my cunt as a receptacle for all his poison. A friend of his visited the house and as my master left he said, 'You want to use her?' to the other. He turned to look at me, his eyes gleaming. I felt my knees turn to water. I was going to be fucked.

Lucinda slept in the next room. I wondered whether she might hear the sound of my movement, and then didn't care. 'I'm becoming a degenerate,' I thought. And then I wondered by what criteria I was judging myself. Why should this particular bit of behaviour bother me? What were my alternatives? Perhaps I could be dropping fire bombs from an aeroplane. Or reading. Or taking up a hobby. Why not lie back and whack off? As an activity, it ranks close to being the most harmless, and as our Buddhist brethren tell us, harmlessness is the highest virtue.