In Touch (The Vassi Collection) Read online

  In Touch

  The Vassi Collection: Volume VII

  Marco Vassi

  In Memory Of

  Bill Clark

  In order to make a revolution,

  we must have time to dream.

  – Rick Shoblad

  Contents

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  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

  “How unhappy do you have to be to kill yourself?”

  “What makes you think she’s unhappy?”

  “Why else would she be committing suicide?” The two policemen spoke in whispers, but their sergeant heard them and shot a glance over his shoulder to silence them. The offenders did their best to look chastened until their superior turned his head again, and then winked at one another.

  They were among a dozen policemen, two doctors, a building attendant and four reporters who were crouched and standing some fifty feet from the edge of the still unfinished helicopter ramp on top of one of the World Trade Center buildings. They had been summoned because of a report that a woman had smuggled herself into the huge glass mausoleum and made her way to the roof. A Port Authority helicopter pilot had spotted her and sent out the alarm.

  She stood perfectly still and was stark naked, her opalescent skin glowing dimly against the black sky. She faced west, looking out over the Hudson River to the plains of New Jersey, now a vast smoldering conglomerate of ugly cities, sterile suburbs, and mile upon mile of oil refineries, dying marshes and garbage dumps.

  A fifth of a mile directly below her, New York gave its nighttime show. A hundred million lights. Cars winding among streetlamps. And a panorama of windows. Here and there the flashings of fire trucks and ambulances, their sirens barely audible. The whole an incredibly dense heap and spread of gaudy display made somehow terrifying by its underlying pattern, the notion that the awesomely unnatural creation was not the product of an insane demonic force but the result of intelligence.

  The woman trembled slightly in the chill breeze, her long hair stirring about her shoulders. Her dancer’s body was a sculptor’s dream. Not yet thirty, she seemed to arch up from her calves into deeply muscled thighs which flared into hard buttocks and thinly padded hips. Her breasts were small, like champagne cups. She stared straight ahead of her, and what the men behind her could not see was that a soaring sweep of sparkling awareness had captured her eyes.

  It was a bizarre tableau: the nude and superbly balanced woman at the edge of that shattering precipice and the heavily clothed and armed men unable to get near her. Each attempt on the part of the latter to inch closer was met by a minute but intimidating tensing in her leg muscles. One of the doctors had been talking to her for almost an hour, using most of the standard approaches he had been taught were effective in such instances. But the thing he wanted to say most and, who knows, which might have been most successful, caught in his chest.

  Tom Madden, M.D., twenty-eight years old and starting to taste the first disillusionment with his chosen profession, had been fighting the stirring of an erection from the moment he laid eyes on the woman who seemed intent on killing herself. The combination of the extraordinary danger of her situation, coupled with his own fascination-fear of heights, joined his male lust that found tremendous potential in such a beautifully formed and trained body. These m
ixed with an idealistic desire to save-the-damsel-in-distress and, perhaps, then marry her and take her to his laboratory where she would keep him endlessly delighted with arcane erotic uses of bunsen burners and beakers whenever he was not preoccupied with alleviating the sufferings of humanity.

  “Please don’t jump,” he was saying. “Whatever’s bothering you can be worked out. You have a whole wonderful life ahead of you.”

  “Don’t jump,” he wanted to say, “Don’t smash that tentative body on hard concrete. Let me caress those upturned breasts, lick those taut thighs, press myself into the hot hole that opens into your belly.”

  For Marsha Seligson, however the voice of the man behind her, the silent appeal of those behind him, and the totality of everything she had been taught, been made to feel and understand, had passed into the realm of illusion. The sheer scintillating drop that fell off just three inches from her toes, and the throb of the city upon the pinnacle of which she stood, were aspects of a dream. They had imposed upon her once too often, and she made the simple decision not to accept the world of common reality any longer, the domain where each kiss was paid for by a cut of loneliness, each kindness by a twist of forgetfulness . . . the world of hard edges and raucous sounds. She was moving into a space where nothing existed except her secret wishes, her most private perceptions, unchallenged by the brute interference of others whose sensitivity had been so blunted that they could no longer distinguish hunger from food. She had sprung into an alternate universe, one of light and fragile wonder, the realm of dance.

  She’d come to the city eight years earlier, filled with a humming hopefulness that here, the dance center of the world, would be where her latent talent would blossom into its violet flowering. At first she ran from class to class, sampling each approach, each idiosyncratic idea. But in the near decade that followed, she discovered only one true teacher who, unfortunately was himself so tortured that his tiny studio on West Seventy-second street became more often the scene of his acting out his inner anguish than a place where he helped his students find their own centers. With a mane of silver hair, bristling eyebrows, and eyes like those on a blind man, he spoke with such certainty and exuded so powerful an animal vitality that Marsha had been mesmerized for three years. The rest of the men and women she worked with were either trying to build their own careers, using young dancers as material to work out their choreography, or phonies who had picked up some technique and were attempting to make a few dollars instructing those who were too naive to see through them.

  The city had taken its toll in other ways, with the strident tone of living, the noise, the dirt, the struggle to pay the rent, the affairs which were stamped in a single mold of expectation and futility, the string of dingy apartments. Marsha had finally taken to seeing a therapist to cure the ills which flourished only because she lived in a place which made the existence of therapists possible and necessary. That too proved to be little more than another straitjacket, one more pair of alien spectacles through which to view herself.

  And then something in her had snapped. She looked backward over her life and saw that there was no returning to innocence and the studied peculiarities of small town survival, for that had been scoured out of her. Looking into the future, she saw nothing but a continuation of the current dreariness and frustration. She had wanted only one thing in life—to dance, and now it appeared that everything in creation conspired to keep her from that single, simply joy.

  She had made no conscious plan, used no terms to define her decision. Somehow, she was guided to the spot where she sensed she might at last be free, and there eased herself into a state of feeling in which what she did had a logic without any consequences outside her personal reality, a reality which everyone else in the world would call fantasy.

  Now, she turned to the doctor who was still cajoling her and gave him an odd smile. Then, one hundred and ten stories above the earth, at the very brink of a soul-shrinking height, she raised her arms into the air, came up on her toes, and slowly, with radiant precision, began to dance.

  When the phone rang, Lydia Stone and Fred Fenwick had been discussing the nature of illusion and reality. They were standing on Lydia’s small terrace overlooking Central Park when Fred leapt up to the top of the three foot railing and balanced himself on the nine inch cement runner. Lydia caught her breath and looked away. The street lay twelve stories below them.

  “From this height,” Fred said, his arms spread wide, his torso jerking back and forth to maintain balance, “even the raw confusion of the city can appear to be a dream. Down there, a half million people are locked in their cars, negotiating the streets like robots, snarled in idiotic traffic. Each is a universe of frustrations and ambitions and needs. But from here, the combined effect is a web of dancing light.”

  He did a small turn on the balls of his feet and jumped lightly back onto the terrace floor. His tall, thin frame, perfectly set off by a pair of hand-made slacks and a silk sport shirt, vibrated with an electric vitality. Except for a certain fullness in the face, he might have passed for a double of his namesake, Fred Astaire, some thirty years earlier.

  “Illusion . . . reality . . . it all depends on the point of view, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “But whose point of view, that’s the question.”

  They were continuing a conversation that had been at the heart of their relationship since they had first met two years earlier. At that time, Lydia’s therapy practice had increased both in quantity and the amount she felt free to charge, and she had moved to her current location, a spacious six room apartment with a terrace over Central Park West. Fred Fenwick was a writer for one of the daytime television soap operas, and they were introduced at a cocktail party.

  “Fred, this is Lydia, your counterpart,” the host had said. “You make a living with fantasy and she peddles reality.”

  It was one of those gatherings which seems to have no point except to shuffle the karmic deck to see what sort of new hands might be dealt out to those bored or foolhardy or horny enough to plunge into the mix. Lydia had found the tall writer immediately fascinating. His blue eyes combined a frankness and openness with a hint of some obvious but very subtle joke. It had been almost two months since she’d been fucked, and all at once she suspected that the drought might be at an end.

  But Fred’s opening line made her wonder. “A therapist?” he said when she told him what she did for a living. “One of the misery merchants.”

  The phrase had rankled, and she found herself defending her work, something she hadn’t been guilty of since her graduate days. But as she went on for a full five minutes, tracing the history of therapy back into the practices of primitive tribes with their shamans, and bringing it up through religion with its ritual of confession, and into the scientific age, she noticed that he seemed to pay no attention to her words. Instead, his eyes roamed over her body, with that same intriguing combination of honesty and hidden humor, until he had taken a complete inventory of every inch of her. She sizzled in her black sheath dress, a small fury battling with a bristling lust.

  “Are you interested in any of this?” she finally exploded, trying to lace her tone with sarcasm. But being barely five feet tall she had difficulty in bringing about the desired effect.

  “Of course, I’m interested,” he told her, “but not in that stale rigmarole that’s pouring forth from your exquisitely shaped mouth.”

  For the first time in her adult life, she had actually blushed.

  “Look,” he went on, “the world’s a mystery. Every once in a while some ape who may be a bit more clever than those around him might pick up a clue as to what’s going on . . . “

  Then, to her amazement, he passed one hand in front of his eyes and mumbled, “But this isn’t at the highest level of understanding,” and then smiled to himself and added, “Oh, what the hell, it’s good enough for the occasion.”

  He re-focused his e
yes on her and continued, “Well, that’s no big deal, but if the ape wants to cash in on it, to make a living out of the fact that he or she has caught on to some trivial knack, such as being able to get people to talk about themselves, then the justification and jargon come in. Then come the degrees and official organizations. But intelligent people know that’s all a lot of crap. Just because you got a Ph.D. piling up bullshit, don’t expect me to fall for it.”

  She literally could not catch her breath. It was not what he said, although that was enough in itself to wind her, wiping out as it did in a single sweep every single rationalization she had ever formulated in her life. But more than that was his manner, a no-nonsense certainty which had such a ring of conviction that it left no room for argument. Even as she was being swept away, however, she made a small but deadly resolve that one day she would crumble this man’s infuriating and utterly irresistible sureness. For the moment, the slight dampening between her thighs took precedence over all ego considerations. She smiled her best social smile, straightened her back, and struck a pose intended to convey to anyone watching that she was having a polite conversation with a charming stranger, and not being slapped back and forth across the ideology with offhand wrist-flicks from a man who seemed to hold her and her entire profession in disdain.

  He reached through her posture and took her arm and whispered, “Come on, I know much better things to do with such beautiful lips than to listen to them spout platitudes.”

  He took her to his West Village duplex where, as though they had both memorized a script, they loped through an entire seduction, with a full complement of music, wine, grass, and long, delicate foreplay, until she was trembling with need and, to her astonishment, begging him to do whatever he wanted with her body.

  Their relationship had, as these things do, mellowed and taken refuge in pattern. All their subsequent talk was one or another variation on the first conversation they had had, with Lydia still trying to get him to admit that therapy had real and lasting effects on people’s lives, and Fred airily replying that he preferred his soap operas on television and not in some tedious psychological milieu.