The Saline Solution Read online

  The Saline Solution

  The Vassi Collection: Volume IV

  Marco Vassi

  This book is dedicated to the Sun

  You should know that I destroy nothing:

  I record, I record the imminent,

  the thirst of a world which is

  canceling itself out and which,

  upon the wreck of its appearances,

  races toward the unknown and the immeasurable,

  toward a spasmodic style.

  E. M. Cioran

  It is that which you see before you—

  begin to reason about it

  and you at once fall into error.

  Huang Po

  Contents

  Introduction

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  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

  I

  We didn’t know whether we wanted the baby, so we drifted in indecision until Lucinda passed the third month of pregnancy. And then it became a question of murder.

  It was to have been a casual affair of impersonal intensity. We played at all the slick chic city games that New York tosses to its corroded citizens as it attempts to raise the final pockmarked erection on the deathbed of western civilization. We began with boredom and openly oblique glances at one another’s bodies, estimating the size of the cock and the texture of the breasts as we brought the tips of our tongues to our teeth and hummed reflectively. We both had had an unencumbered summer before us, and were thinking what a pleasure it would be to have a bed-mate for the season, someone sophisticated, someone who would curl up and fall away easily when the leaves began to turn in the autumn. With decadent delicacy we mounted a scene which we could play like real life on an actual planet in a universe that had the brass balls to exist and manifest itself in utterly arbitrary format. We decided to spend the summer on Fire Island.

  But she was empty, and still sought to be fulfilled. And I overflowed with conflict, and had fantasies of peace. Thus the second time we fucked I entered her from behind and drove so compactly into her need that I dislodged the diaphragm and sent my sperm scurrying into her womb.

  Our bodies froze, her ass raised and tilted, her cunt glued to my cock, and there was not a tremor anywhere inside us, only the consciousness of that single messenger braving its way through fallopian mazes and immeasurable canyons to liberate the living awareness of another human entity from its protein meditation. The child was conceived.

  And then the hatred began, for Lucinda and I had become implicated in birth, and were half in love with death, because we could both hear the siren song to the species.

  Suicide had become our collective destiny, and those who honored life would be left like erratic lunatics to wonder at their choice while the rest of manwomankind marched in its mindless progress toward destruction. As the autumn approached, our decision became clearer. Abortion had just become legal, and we wondered whether it had also become admirable.

  Lucinda opened the door of the apartment. We were spending a weekend in the city, away from the heavy presence of the ocean with its constant vast indifference to the arrogant creature which had begun in the scummy film on
its surface and now littered its shores with all forms of waste. I lay back on the bed, the taste of sperm still stinging my tongue. In the thrilling semi-concealment of a clump of bushes in Central Park, I had knelt with the rough corduroy against my cheeks, the cold white zipper catching at my lips, and the hard intimate cock romping in my mouth like a porpoise at play. The man who had stood over me was a stranger, someone whose eyes had met mine in that unmistakable glance which passes between men who desire one another’s bodies. There was no passion or personality in my behavior, merely a muted impulse which I had long ago ceased to question and which led me again and again into this classic pose of cocksucker. His legs trembled as he began to come, and I held his ass in my hands, drawing him more deeply into my mouth. He sucked the breath through his teeth, grabbed my shoulders, and came without any stinginess or reserve, his ejaculation squirting into my throat.

  While I cruised among the benches and the bushes, Lucinda went to visit her mother. I didn’t tell her about these adventures of mine because we had made an agreement not to test one another’s limits of acceptance or jealousy. But when I returned to the apartment, I was horny; I wanted to have done to me what I had just done for another.

  She threw off her cape and dropped her handbag on the floor. It was a yellow leather pouch, richly embroidered with violet wool and bits of glass, made in Portugal. It was expensive enough to transform its gaudiness into good taste. She looked at me from across the room, and without a word we exchanged descriptions of our moods. We both wanted to fuck; we both wanted privacy. She went into the bathroom to undress, leaving the door half open. As she removed her bra, her dark breasts sagged with a pendulous grace that never ceased to be seductive. I was no longer excited just seeing her body, as I am the first few times with a woman. Gross visual curiosity is very quickly satisfied. Now I had to couple what I saw with an eagerness to touch in order to be aroused.

  “I ran into Albert today,” she said, her back to me. “He’s let his hair grow and is wearing clear polish on his nails. I think he’s finally admitting to people that he’s gay.”

  “It’s about time,” I said. “He’s almost fifty.”

  “He said that Tiny Tim is really William F. Buckley in drag.”

  I laughed, but I could feel the energy flowing out of me and into that silent pit of depression which formed the core of her being. I felt my cock stir. The quality of eternal suffering, of bottomless helplessness, was the essential aspect of her erotic appeal. To fuck her was to take final revenge for the evil which existed in the world. I bridled at my desire. Part of me wanted to yield, to drown in the black numbness of her center. And some of me fought desperately against the pull, attempting to retain what thin thread of moral sensibility still ran through my calculations.

  “This is playing games with personality constructs,” I thought. “Just fuck her, use her as she needs to be used. There is no abstract decency, there is only the pulse of survival, and it knows no other dictate than cruelty. There is only what we are, not what we think we should be.”

  I split internally into warring ideological camps, the many identities battling for supremacy. All the conflicting conditionings of my entire life clamored in contradiction. “What does it mean anymore, to be human?” I wondered.

  Two nights earlier I had lain next to her, my hand on her belly, feeling the life force swell and diminish with each breath. “We are transformers,” I thought, “just oxygen pumps, one rusted link in the chain of sentient beings. All of our ideas and visions and speculations on the matter are only illusion.”

  I had felt totally alone, caught in the ineluctability of my own death. “It won’t be any big deal,” I thought. “No extra added significance. My heart will stop. And I won’t be.”

  On the level of ego, the realization had horrified me. But as I found myself rising to terms with the fact of non-existence as an objective reality which constantly mocks all that is, I retreated into a state of warm irony.

  Lucinda came out of the bathroom. She was naked. For an instant her body seemed to glow and surge forward, her nipples radiating and cunt gaping like the mouth of a landed fish. The conflict between the simple animal urge to plunge my cock into her cunt, and the storm of thought thundering in my head, paralyzed me, and I made no sign for her to join me on the bed.

  “Are you hungry?” she said. I nodded.

  She made one of those deceptively simple meals that belie the years of experience in cooking that most women accumulate from childhood. It had rice and vegetables and came with pieces of home-baked bread and tea. It was coherent, and made a single impression as a dish, an effect I could never achieve when I cooked. We gossiped as we ate, finding in that particular form of tender maliciousness the proper quality of energy to aid in digestion of food. Lucinda was thirty-five. I was two years younger.

  We had good fucking, good food, and a non-intrusive intellectual rapport. But our emotions died from lack of air. The very bonds which form the ground in which the relationship grows can petrify and strangle all future development. And then the couple disbands or continues in some empty reflexive dance with all the essential questions entombed forever. I had seen it so many times, the smug couples who have made all their secret agreements and then use their compromise as a shield. They achieve a deft pseudo-solution to their problems by building and maintaining their life rafts, totally ignoring the holocaust they paddle in.

  We fell into silence over tea; we lit cigarettes. I knew that she was locked inside her thoughts, as I was in mine. I thought of the Zen precept, that the only transmission of Mind can be from mind to mind. In the secret movie theatre of my thoughts, the Self appeared, dressed as the last gun-fighter in town, looking for a duel to reassure himself of his existence. “Is anybody else here?” he shouted. Only the ghosts showed their faces from behind the cracked windows which lined the deserted street of the old town. I was nothing but a cacophony of memories, and the thought of real human relationship seemed to have only the dimensions of a daydream.

  She took the dishes into the kitchen, and I lay back down on the bed. She came into the bedroom and lay down next to me, stretching full out on her stomach. Her hair covered her face, and only the nude impersonal expanse of flesh that now was her body spoke to me. I ran my hand from her shoulders to her ass, stroking lightly, feeling the fine prickle of electricity as skin excited skin. She opened her legs a bare inch, just enough to indicate her invitation.

  There was no pretence of affection.

  I lowered myself onto her. All the bulges down the front of me found hollows along her back to nestle in. My knees into the backs of her knees, her buttocks into my groin, my belly into the small other back, my chest on her spine. I reached under her and worked one breast into each of my hands, feeling the thick pleasure of the soft glandular pressure of her tits. I relaxed my full weight on her and we tacitly abandoned ourselves to the exclusivity of one another’s satisfaction. It was as though fucking were a truce, a spacetime in which we could allay alienation and find a temporary comfort in the union of our physical communication. In fucking, the language is basic, the dualities are clear: yes, no; brutal, tender; in, out; aggression, passivity; and on down the entire ontology of experience. In fucking, the play of mood captures at least the form, if not the essence, of an extended gesture, which subsumes music, incorporates dance, and attains to poetry.

  I let my limp cock fall past the lowest bulge of her buttocks. The tip of it nuzzled the edge other cunt lips. Her hair tickled my skin. I slid my hands down the front of her, over the cave of her ribcage and her vulnerable stomach, catching the bulge of her in my palms, and began to play at her cunt with my fingers, scratching and pressing at the sensitive folds. Then I slipped one finger into where the wetness began, and she gasped down the entire length of her body. My cock hardened.

  I put my fingers under the shaft and pressed it against the whole slit of cunt. My pelvis began to rock, forcin
g my prick to slide as it grew larger between my hands and the hot deep opening between her legs. So many times, when I was younger, I would be embarrassed at this moment because I hadn’t achieved an instant erection, and that feeling would short-circuit any chance of success. But I learned in time that there are few things more erotic for a woman than to feel the process whereby a man gets hard, and to have her cunt gently pried apart with one hand while a cock is guided in with the other.

  She moaned once and I felt myself become completely stiff. I was now pushing my cock against her clitoris, inflaming and teasing her. She started to move, trying to capture the head of my cock with her cunt. I became elusive, and the game was on. “Please,” she said, “please fuck me.” The poverty of the dialogue found its complement in the richness of the sensations we were feeling. Also, she knew that I frustrated her only in order to allow her to build to higher levels of energy. She moved her ass into me with shameless supplication, and I grew giddy with the waves of heat that coursed through me, melting all my postures and images. And when I could stand the tension no longer, her cunt found me and I sank into her with a loud cry of pleasurepain, and began to swim in the hot and thick and delicious recesses other body.

  She came up on her knees and stretched her torso out, her arms reaching ahead of her, offering her exposed center to me, to fuck at my own rhythm and speed. She was content to remain still and let the sensations wash over her. I rode her for almost an hour, going through dozens of changes, sometimes smashing brutally into her, and then just letting the tip of my cock gently nudge the edges of her inner lips; or swinging from side to side in erratic patterns, and then lying quietly, feeling my organ throb in her depths like a submarine in a grotto listening for echoes. I pumped into her with even strokes, like a carpenter sawing wood, and exploded into her like an epileptic having a fit; I rose up and hit into her at a sharp downward angle, and then sank down to slip my cock in from underneath and erupt to the roof of her cunt. I fucked the smell of her, and the sight of her, and the possibilities of her. I pushed her down so she lay with her legs together and extended, and sat on her thighs, my knees clasping her ass, and swung into her closed cunt, pulling her buttocks apart, putting my fingers into her asshole, between her thighs, and around my cock, so that my cock and hands and frenzy all fucked her at once. I put her on her right side and lifted one leg, watching my cock plunge into the great gap which was now all wet hair and trembling heat. She had four orgasms.