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  Contours Of Darkness

  The Vassi Collection: Volume V

  Marco Vassi

  Contents

  1

  Trapeze

  2

  In The Middle Of A Middle

  3

  Little Signs In Lava Flow

  4

  Blind Vision

  5

  The Driven

  6

  Comrade Cunt

  7

  Sweet Satori Blues

  8

  The Frigid Orgasm

  9

  Klein Worms

  10

  Dejà Vu

  The relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. From the quality of that relationship, the whole level of development of the species can be assessed.

  -Karl Marx

  But he never had this chance to be alone. His body was in the service of others. There was no pause in life. A man was picked up in the tempo of this life, and couldn’t get off it. The body had no time to reflect. It spent its energies working for other bodies. It developed co-operative reflexes instead of expressive ones.

  -Alan Harrington

  Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

  -Rainer Maria Rilke

  Introduction

  Were the Sixties put on earth so that Marco Vassi could happen? Or was Marco Vassi put on earth so that the Sixties could happen? To read his classic works of erotic fiction and his masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, THE STONED APOCALYPSE, is to realize that the man and the era were created out of the same fire and primordial elements. It is not, however, enough to say that Marco Vassi was a child of his age. It could just as accurately be said that the age was Marco Vassi’s fantasy, a fantasy so intense and compelling that it is impossible to read any of his books in one sitting: one must either jump into a cold shower, relieve oneself sexually, or go for a long contemplative walk to reflect on the profundity of his insights into human behavior.

  Vassi had done many things before he became a writer, but writing was not one of them except for some translations from Chinese and critiques of manuscripts submitted to a literary agency where he was employed for a few years. He had also tried numerous identities on for size as he acted out and lived out the experiences that were to pour from his mind like water raging over the spillway of a dam. When in the late 1960’s “Fred” Vassi announced that he was embarking on a journey, his friends knew that it was not to a place but to a state of mind.

  The state of mind was what came to be known as The Sixties, and anyone seeking to live in that state must enter it through the vision of the author of these works. In cartographic terms it was a journey from the East Coast to California, a trip that resonates with meaning for every student of The American Experience. Speaking metaphorically, however, it was a trip into the heart of life, love, laughter, horror, and sweet pain. Fred Vassi came back Marco Vassi, having recreated himself in the name of the intrepid voyager to the ends of the known world hundreds of years ago.

  Heart fecund with all that had happened to him, he started writing the work that was eventually to become THE STONED APOCALYPSE, a book that captured in coruscating words what others of his generation were capturing so brilliantly in music.

  With no source of regular income he tried his hand at what were then popularly known as sex novels, a genre of tame pornography that pandered to the fantasies of repressed males still mired in postwar inhibition. With the wide-eyed innocence and self-deprecating humor that characterized every venture he undertook, he showed them to me, his friend and a fledgling literary agent. He merely hoped to raise a few dollars with them. I told him that they were the most incredibly arousing works of erotic literature since Henry Miller, and arranged for them to be brought out by Olympia Press, Miller’s publisher. Critics and reviewers confirmed my assessment. What distinguished his books from the rest of the pack was the application of Vassi’s intelligence. He knew that the mind is the most erotic organ of all. He termed this fusion of mind and sex organs “Metasex.”

  For Marco Vassi, the liberation of sexual emotions, paralleling the liberation of so many others in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, promised a new age of beauty, love, and honesty, and he lived his vision to the hilt—quite literally. For a long while it seemed to him impossible that this vision did not rest on the bedrock of reality.

  But, in the words of Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay. The bloody hand of Vietnam and the corrupt fist of the Nixon presidency crushed the fragile beauty of the flower generation. The unbridled commercialism that became the 1980’s captured and exploited the butterflies of Woodstock, enriching half of them and killing the other half with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Finally, the horror of a new scourge, AIDS, visited death upon the bodies of those who had dreamed of eternal love, irresponsible fun, and self-realization. It was then that Marco Vassi awoke from his dream of The Sixties. When he did, the virus had entered his blood. The first malady of any consequence to come along, in this case pneumonia, conquered his defenseless immune system and made short work of him.

  Marco Vassi’s body died, but not the body of his work, which lives again in these new editions. Like a rainbow over a bleak landscape, his dream of The Sixties shimmers above the depressing, sordid, and tragic decades that succeeded his. And ultimately, it triumphs over them.

  Richard Curtis

  1

  Trapeze

  They had their words and their deeds; and the relationship between the two functions of their being formed the pattern of their lives. They sought the eternal through the passage of time, and searched for love in the rubric of sex. They huddled beneath their private solutions to the vast problems of their age until they saw that history was a director that used them ruthlessly and without asking permission to include them in its play.

  She lay across his lap, her head and feet dangling, her housedress pulled up over her waist. She squirmed and clenched her buttocks, revelling in the position of exposure to his silent gaze. There was an air of febrile expectation in the room, a kind of sophisticated sniggering which spiced the simple structure of the act with intimations of the wicked. She arched her back and offered her ass for his use.

  “I must not succumb,” she thought. “I must remember to stay conscious.”

  Aaron stroked the damp groove between her cheeks with a limp right hand, watching her tremble as his fingers trailed the entire length of the valley. No expression showed on his face. He operated her body with the bored ease of a locomotive engineer holding the throttle full open across a moonlit prairie. His hand moved insolently back and forth, and with each pass she grew more excited, like a child jumping up and down in anticipation of a treat. It was his greatest pleasure to rouse her to a frenzy of wild thrashing while he maintained his distance and control.

  Suddenly he lifted his arm and brought it down sharply, the palm of his hand striking across the center of her buttocks. She cried out once, a sound of relief, as though a splinter had been pulled out of her skin. The shock was like a slap delivered during an attack of hysteria. It underscored her sexual cycle by punctuating it. Again his hand flew up, and again slammed down, stinging the full firm globes of flesh. He began to hit her in earnest, until her skin grew pink and her legs kicked up and down, and the noises she made were tinged with desperation. He hurt her to the point where she had to scream.

  “Do you like that?” he said. He hit her with all his strength. “Do you like it?” he repeated.

  In reply she cocked her pelvis back and shook her head from side to side, acting out the ambivalence of her condition. She hated the pain, especially as each blow fell upon progressively
more tender flesh and became excruciating to bear. But being spanked thrilled her; her cunt moistened at the very thought of being upended and handled so rudely. Also, there was a kind of liberation to be found in the intense stimulation of her rear, more so as she yelled loudly each time he hit her. It had been many months before they were confident enough with one another to attempt other forms of quasi-sexual contact; the first time Aaron had slapped her buttocks with any force was when she was straddling his cock, pumping her pelvis into him with sustained fury, and he began to beat a tattoo on her cheeks. The step to spanking as an activity related but not integral to fucking was a short one; and at that it had taken several more months before he could wade into her unabashedly while she wailed in response.

  Now, each time they did it, she discovered emotions that she was not ordinarily in touch with, bubbling from her chest as each slap added heat, released energy in her body. It was one of the few times she was able to feel and express her anger.

  When she raised her rump toward him, he stopped, and looked down at the form before him. The woman lay in an attitude of utter abandon. Her ass glowed a dull red. The proud deepdark asshole held only the smallest pucker of tension. Her cunt gave off heavy odors of secretion. She never seemed so desirable to him as at moments like this.

  “Beauty is a bawd,” he said. He bent forward and kissed her on the base of the spine. “Cynthia, how wanton you are.”

  She wiggled around and smiled to herself. Aaron spread her cheeks apart with the fingers of his left hand, and with his right began to spank her vertically, slapping the whole length of the crack. A higher-pitched moan escaped her lips, an expression from a different area of her need. Each whack produced a hollow sound until he had opened her buttocks fully and could hit her cunt and asshole cleanly. She parted her legs to expose herself even further, and again he increased the force of his blows, bruising the tender center between her thighs.

  She began to lose her breath, her self-consciousness, and dove into the waters of ecstatic surrender. She knew he might hurt her but would not damage her, so she could give herself up to the structure of their act, letting him control its content. She struggled against swooning altogether, for in a mindless state she had a tendency to grovel, and afterwards she would have trouble realigning herself with her sense of dignity. She needed to remember that what they did was a mutually agreed upon involvement, and her role as object of punishment was purely arbitrary. She had a vision of his balling his hand into a fist and punching her cunt, and she melted as the image was reinforced by the increased tempo of his slapping. Her mouth fell open and saliva dripped from her tongue onto the floor. She grabbed his ankle and licked his foot. She hovered at the brink of total acceptance, filling up on the energy released by his power.

  “This is what I want,” she thought, “this is what I really want.”

  Abruptly, he stopped. A gasp of disappointment escaped her lips. She wanted it to go on forever. She had fallen out of time into the continuum of endless gratification.

  “Do you want more?” he said.

  The question was not a real one. It was part of their ritual, their tacit agreement to pander to one another’s inner agendas. If she wanted him to continue, she would have to beg. He spoke again, his voice low and insistent, suggestive of things that were vile and base, forcing her, through her own greed for sensation, to listen and assent to everything he said. His need to reduce her to a twitching anonymity was only partially motivated by his unconscious fear of women; more cogently, it was the only method he had of transcending the level of ego.

  “You don’t care, do you?” he said. “You’re just an open hole.”

  “Only for you, Aaron,” she told him, which was not at all what he wanted to hear.

  He brought the middle finger of his right hand against her outer cunt lips, holding enough pressure just to intimate penetration. He knew that the desire to be entered, to be filled, grew voracious as it was teased, as a hungry animal grows frantic when food is held just beyond its reach. Over the years he had come to understand woman’s brute capacity for fulfillment, and he toyed with that propensity as she inched upward, straining to touch the finger with her cunt. Again and again he allowed her to think she was going to have it, and then pulled back a quarter of an inch, listened to her moan in exasperation, and then watched her lift her ass once more to reach for him. She clenched and tightened the muscles in her vagina so that her cunt opened and contracted as it sought to capture its prize, like a goldfish mouthing the surface of the water for food. And when she had raised herself as high as was physically possible, he lifted his hand and with no warning slapped her quivering cunt.

  She shouted out in shock and sorrow, and then burst into deep sobbing, the immediate pain of the blow reviving in her all the suppressed pain of a lifetime, breaking through the muscular blocks of resistance, calling up memories whose engrams were covered over with the gray pall of repression. He held himself aloof from her tears, letting her enjoy the fullness of her experience without interference. And when her crying subsided, and she had had enough time to integrate her reactions, he slowly began to arouse her once again, touching lightly, holding out promise of entering her cunt, and then drawing her out, seducing her into baring her shamelessness once more. He hit her again, and repeated the cycle a half dozen times until she lay limp from exhaustion.

  She was heavy across his thighs, cutting off circulation to his knees and calves. His cock was crushed against his belly and his back was sore from the strain of holding her. His pleasure was abstract, a blend of visual, tactile, and olfactory impressions which merged to shape an entity in his mind, a form he admired for its utter uniqueness. For him, woman was a perennial source of beauty, but in a way that would have astonished any woman he spoke to about it. The female body was a palette from which he derived the colors to create the intensely personal paintings in his soul. He lacked the conceptual means to articulate that to himself.

  Cynthia wondered what he would do next. She was having a strangely enjoyable time. With each wave of abuse she discovered deeper layers of truth. She had paid therapists as much as thirty dollars an hour to help her delve into areas of self-perception she was now learning to explore with more directness and thoroughness through sexual encounter. And none of the psychologists had ever fucked her afterward, as Aaron always did. She was becoming capable of linking her apparent degradation with powers of surrender that subsumed the whole petty world of conquest.

  She felt herself sliding off his legs and she twisted her body in order to land on her knees. She stared with twirling eyes at the picture before her: the insides of a man’s thighs, black coarse hair, two wrinkled pouches of roughly textured flesh, and the sleek tender tube dominating the entire montage. For an instant the tableau went dark, and a bolt of terror shot through her. At the speed of thought she recalled an incident from when she was two, lying on a rug, her grandfather kneeling over her, dripping his flaccid penis toward her face, and she reaching for it as she would for a toy, and then holding it, putting it in her mouth, sucking the paradoxically dry succulent skin. The image blended with the reality in front of her. Part of her was still that infant, wanting the intimate kiss that bore such enormous connotations of guilt; and part of Aaron was throbbing with the same indiscriminate sexuality that had possessed her grandfather.

  When she focused again, Aaron had grabbed his cock and was gently milking it, prodding it to swell. She watched like a person being hypnotized, and when the shaft was three-quarters hard, the thick vein bulging from its belly, the head beginning to expand with purple majesty, she found herself swooning into it, her jaw opening in perfect time to be exactly the right size to take his cock inside as she touched it with her lips. He took his fingers away as she swept forward, and looked down in awe as the stiff organ disappeared into her mouth. He felt her tongue and then the clutching of her throat as the pulsating base of the seven-inch cock was covered by her lips and she buried her face in his pubic hair.
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  “She’s swallowed it,” he thought, the idea exciting him more than the reality.

  She did not move for a long time, holding her breath, relaxing so she wouldn’t gag. He bunched in the middle, slowly folding in half, covering her with his shadow. He looked like a man who had just been punched in the solar plexus, stunned and helpless. She had struck at the center of his sexual vulnerability: his need to subjugate. By voluntarily assuming the character he would have liked to force her into, she robbed him of his power to enslave her. As any woman in a struggle of wills with a man, her best weapon was agility, for she would almost surely lose in any open contest of strength. The cock lodged in her throat, she made sucking sounds with her lips, as though to pull him in even further and in imitation of someone eating a particularly delicious food.

  With great delicacy she brought her teeth together until they at first rested on, and then lightly bit into the rigid cock. She treated herself to a few moments of fantasying what it would be like to bite it off. For that space of time she trembled with the actuality of her ability to destroy Aaron at his core. She tasted the possibility of tearing the immense hunk of meat out by the root, bathing in the shower of blood spurting from the jagged hole, and the severed erection sliding down her gullet and into her stomach.

  Aaron felt a tremor of fear course through him. He did not for an instant associate his feeling with the real danger that the woman on her knees in front of him might castrate him with a single bite. It never occurred to him that putting his cock in someone’s mouth was an act of the highest trust. Instead he ran through the catalogue of things which usually roused fear in him: old age, illness, and death. He was catapulted into a brief intense meditation on the nature of life, while Cynthia grew giddy at the thoughts which flitted through her brain.