The Gentle Degenerates (The Vassi Collection) Read online

  It was as though she didn’t think we would survive until tomorrow and wanted to squeeze in all sexual experience tonight. She sucked me and forced my mouth to her cunt and spread the lips apart with her fingers so my tongue could penetrate deeper into the twat. She tore at me with her nails and cried in glee when I turned her over and spanked her fat ass. Then I sent her for some vaseline, and had her lubricate her asshole. I took her on her back, throwing back her legs so that her ankles were at her ears, and plunged into the tight waiting hole. She said she had only done this once before and it hadn’t gone well, but now she was all ass, quivering, sucking me in to her, and letting out groans that rose from her bowels, that hung halfway between pain and pleasure. I pulled out and plunged into her cunt, and we rode for a very long time, neither of us even thinking of coming, since the heat flashes and head trips and the delicious texture of flesh in our hands was so good that we didn’t want it to end.

  Meanwhile Regina was living the life of a semi-recuse, struggling along on a small welfare check, taking care of a four-year-old kid twenty-four hours a day, going to school, teaching dance classes, and keeping a house in order. For weeks she went through the daily grind, each night collasping into an exhausted sleep. I received letters from her telling me that her life was hard these days, and I wrote back short notes indicating what a wild good time I was having. Finally, after a month of this, she visited with some friends and met a boy of seventeen who had been her neighbor some time back. He was one of those California model youth who spokes a lot of dope, smiles most of the time, says very little, and seems always to have a guitar in the immediate vicinity. She was tired and lonely and horny, and he was passively agreeable to anything. So they rapped, and he took her to a teen-age discotheque, where she had a chance to get into what it was to be a teen-ager again, and had a delightful time. Then he took her home and of course they rapped a bit more, and turned on, and soon they were fucking. They fucked two or three times over the next few weeks and then they stopped, because there was nothing else to sustain the relationship, he being so young and all.

  In any court of law, of course, Regina would be acquitted. It would be absurd to call what she did infidelity, especially in light of my behavior. Yet, when I asked her about what she had been doing sexually, and she told me about the adventure, I flew into a towering rage. I called her names. I demanded to know details. It was a dark stormy night, and four times I slammed out of the house into the rain, returning dripping wet, only to begin another round. Luckily I had enough perspective to see the absurdity of the scene, and told her that she should take none of this seriously, because I was simply acting out a fantasy near and dear to me. The actual dynamic was that I could feel the jealousy as long as Regina’s body was nearby and accessible, and not have the jealousy overwhelm my basically warm feelings toward her. But now that she was back in California, the recall of the same scene brought up a cold rage, and in my heart I killed her again and again for the foul deed of letting another man fuck her.

  She, of course, had her own game, for she never tells me about her sexual affairs right out. The stories always either slip out, or she formulates them in this way, “Oh, there was another man I forgot to tell you about,” and does that two or three times for each absence we have from one another. In part I think I am being extremely childish, but in another sense I am putting myself through a very special kind of school. Because all of this is pain. Although I am not being fair, although my feelings clash with my intellect, and my body is a blind referee, there is a definite path to my behavior, a general sense of learning very important lessons about life. I don’t know why I should have the university metaphor concerning living or for what cosmic report card I am trying to get good grades, but that is where it is at.

  One night, for example, just two weeks after Regina’s departure, I spent the evening with a woman I had been eyeing for some time. Ironically, she is in a relationship with a man that perfectly parallels mine with Regina. Only she is playing me to Harry, while Harry is playing Regina to her. Harry, like most men, wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants Isabel to sit at home and be purringly ready for his pleasure whenever he wants her, and yet to be able to go and come as he pleases, and fuck whom and when he pleases. She, like most women, has no objection to his tomcatting, provided he makes a basic commitment to hearth, home and baby. “If he would just give me the feeling that I was his woman, then it would be much easier for me to overlook his fucking other chicks,” she said.

  I was with her at a time when their relationship was going through one of its endless redefinitions. We smoked some dope and listened to music and talked about only those things which would keep the evening flowing at its fullest and richest. This night I was playing a twentieth-century version of The Purple Mask, “Secret Agent from the Void Patrol”. I took her precipice-hanging, seeing how close we could get to insanity and social disaster and still maintain perfect control of the situation. Of course, it was a turn-on. It is the city boy’s version of taking a chick on a motorcycle. She sits spread-legged on the back, holding on to you for total support, and you open it up very slowly, letting her get used to it, doing fifty, then seventy, then ninety, until you’re wide open a hundred and fifteen down the highway and suddenly she realizes how fast she’s going and it’s too late to be scared but still she’s terrified and she’s holding on so tight she doesn’t even realize that her legs are locked and all sensations has been reduced to a great burning in her belly. And when you stop and she gets off, her thighs are trembling and her cunt is wet and her breasts are tender, and it doesn’t take anything just to lay her down on the grass and pull her jeans off, and fuck her like she’s never known she could have it before.

  But then the phone rang. It was Harry. He was tripping and down. He had spent the entire day having a fine old time with some friends, but now the energy was running down and he was feeling like a lost little boy, and he wanted Isabel to comfort him. But Isabel was now out on a trip through the cosmos with me, and didn’t really want to get all involved in personality games at the level he suggested. Yet she couldn’t hang up. So this incredibly long tedious conversation went on, in which she kept telling him over and over again that she had said everything she wanted to say, and had heard everything she wanted to hear, and then would get sucked in to another round of his trip, and it would be followed by a long series of “Yes, buts”. I got disgusted after five minutes and went to take a shower. I wondered whether he could hear the water running, and how that made him feel. Probably the way I would feel in such a circumstance. Then I thought, “The way I have felt in such circumstances.” Anger rose up in me. “Fuck,” I said to myself, “I’ve paid my dues in this area. If he is still shmucking around out there in the sexual boondocks, that is no skin off my ass. I can have compassion, but I can’t save his soul for him.” I thought of the theatre of cruelty, and it occurred to me that he too was learning, learning from his pain, learning from my indifference and from the coolness of his chick.

  I dressed and went out. The Christian part of my personality made one last attempt. I said to her, “Should I leave? If he wants to come over . . . “ But she shook her head and waved her hand for me to sit next to her. I sat down and she put her hand right on my thigh and began stroking up and down the length of it. Like good old Pontius Pilate, I washed my hands of the matter.

  Then an odd thing happened. I suddenly realized that there were three of us in the room. The fact that Harry was on the telephone and not literally physically present made no real difference. His consciousness was as immediate as hers and mine. But he couldn’t see what was happening! I reached over and kissed her throat very gently. I could hear, from a distance, Harry’s insistent voice over the phone. I began nibbling at her neck and moved up to her ear, where I started to breathe and tongue and kiss the lobes and shell, and right into the center of the opening. It was strange, because in one ear she was getting the verbal communication from Harry
through the phone, and in the other ear she was receiving my tactile messages. It was impossible to tell how she reacting to each element. It was all a mix. Inwardly, I hoped Harry would have the breadth and humor to appreciate this if he ever found out. And I said a prayer for myself, that when I found myself in his shoes, especially with Regina, I too could maintain the necessary perspective.

  I moved my hands down and started to massage her neck. I didn’t know what the limits on the game were, so I decided to see how far it all went. I reached under her blouse and cupped a full breast in my hand. She slumped forward and then jerked back and said into the receiver, “No, no, I’m still here, I’m just listening.” Incredible! He had picked up on her shift in attention over the phone. I leaned forward and sucked one pink nipple into my mouth, licking under it to take the full weight of her breast on my tongue. She began to writhe and pushed me away. I looked up at her and her eyes told me that she couldn’t keep the phone conversation going if I really began to touch her.

  I got up to walk around and came back again, only to start another round of the game. This time I moved my hands over her thighs and belly, and then pulled one leg to the side so that she sat with her knees out, her cunt a provocative bulge through the pants. I stroked the outline of the lips through the cloth and slid my other hand under her so that her ass rested on it.

  Harry said something and she laughed. The sound startled me, and I looked over to her. I couldn’t tell what she was responding to, and then realized it didn’t matter. Throwing all caution to the sky I brought my hand up hard around her cunt and covered her breast with my mouth again. This time she went slack and I felt all over her body, stroking and kneading, kissing and holding, while she listened and talked into the receiver. The scene became very Fellini and finally she hung up.

  “He may come over,” she said to me.

  Now there was a problem, for if we fucked, there was the chance he would walk in at any moment. And how could we enjoy it fully with our ears attuned for any slight sound on the stairs? The best way to deal with any problem is to sail into the face of it, ready to alter course on the spot, but not making any major navigational changes because of fear.

  I drew her to me and we lay down on the couch, fully dressed, in one another’s arms. It was like teen-ager days, and a flash of Regina and her young man went through my mind. At that moment, with Isabel breathing on my face, pressing her delicious young body against me, there was no jealousy toward Regina for anything she had done. It amazed me that so long as I felt I was being wanted and loved, I had no fear about anything Regina did. Was jealousy then a fear of loss, a sense of being left out?

  We kissed, and it was one of those long, involved kisses like a dance. We lay in perfect attention, fully aware of what our lips and tongues were doing, aware of the taste of saliva and the promise of opening. I bit at her gently, and she took my tongue between her teeth and squeezed it. Yet, for all the concentration at our mouths, we remained aware of the rest of the room, and of the fact that Harry might walk in at any minute. We were abyss-slumming again, litterbugging in the void.

  We seemed to have matched rhythms perfectly for the evening, probably because both of us were completely up for pleasing one another. After the long kiss, we pulled back and spent another long time looking into each other’s eyes. It was that exquisite time when inner consciousness and outer reality are felt as one and the same thing.

  There was no difference between me and her, merely distinctions. Her thoughts flowed as mine did, but we were unconcerned with content, only with structure. Our heads merged and we merged with everything around us, and slowly our bodies found their own movement, an easy pumping ride of pelvis rocking into pelvis.

  Never had the moment been so right for fucking. The thought hit both of us simultaneously, and as one, our minds reached for the space outside the door where Harry might burst in at any moment. Ambivalence reached the level of pain. And then in a blinding flash of insight, I had the solution. It was, to be sure, a cop-out, since true bravery—or stupidity—would have involved taking the scene to whatever conclusion it dictated. But since turning thirty I am sometimes content with a symbolic victory over circumstances, bringing matters to a rational conclusion. “A blow job would meet the situation perfectly,” I said.

  She looked at me for a long time, and then a smile began playing at the corner of her mouth. “We would both be dressed,” I continued. “And if Harry didn’t come, we could go right on with it, and if he did, we could pull it together fast enough so it would seem that we were just sitting together on the couch.” It was preposterous, of course. As jealous as he would be at the moment if he came in, he would know immediately what had been going on. But it was a clever enough rationalization to allow us to do what we wanted to do anyway.

  I closed my eyes and felt her hands begin to roam over my chest. She was really good. Her tongue found my face and then moved to my ear. She came close to driving me mad with lust, working delicately and consciously, varying her breath and the movement of her lips, tantalizing, drawing me out, and then plunging her tongue home. I cried out and felt my pelvis moving involuntarily. She whispered to me, “Everything we do from now on is a prelude to me sucking you off.” This was her way of telling me to let go and relax, that she was in control. I gladly relinquished all power into her hands.

  She moved down, tonguing my nipples and belly, and then taking a long time to rim my belly button, working into it hard. I pushed my belly out into her face, opening the symbolic cunt to her mouth. She bit into the soft flesh and brought a mouthful of skin into her mouth, nibbling and tearing, licking, sucking. I grabbed her hair and forced her face deeper into my soft center. She moaned and began to move her head up and down, covering the entire area with long flat strokes of her tongue, lapping like a deer at a salt lick. The movement got larger and soon she was licking into my pubic hair and over my thighs, running her now dry rasping tongue into the space between thighs and balls, the sensitive joint which is hardly ever touched. I brought my legs together and clamped her head between them. She hung there for a moment, pinned, and then dropped down, nuzzling between my legs and licking at the underpart of my balls.

  Already I felt myself coming, and I wanted to hold it back, to enjoy just the feeling of her working her mouth over me. Suddenly there was a creak outside the door and both of us sat bolt upright in sheer terror. A long instant passed and then we heard footsteps moving past. We looked at each other and giggled in relief. But the sexual thread was threatening to snap. I reached for her and roughly brought her chest to my mouth. I pulled up her shirt again and took her sharply-sloped tit into me. She buckled at once, and as I sucked hard at her nipple, feeling the velvety texture make love to my tongue, she reached down and grabbed my cock, this time pulling at it in long deep movements. I let her breast go and leaned back again, and now she went at it with a will. We knew that we couldn’t survive another shock like the one which had just happend. So she opened her mouth wide and brought it right over my now throbbing cock. With one hand at the base, pulling, jerking it off, she covered the shaft with loose lips and hot tongue, making slurping sounds all over me.

  I began to move. Without any control, my ass jerked up and forward, and I rode my cock into her luscious mouth, feeling the rising heat and pleasure. She sucked hard, with a will to bringing me off. She curled her body up and bunched herself over my legs. It was as though she were drawing herself up into the foetal position. She made small whimpering sounds, almost like a baby, and I felt the splash of tears on my belly. She seemed to be squeezing something out of herself and the focus for her act was drawing the sperm out of my cock. For an instant I flashed our mutual aloneness, each of us working out some inner drama and using the other as a tool to bring it off. But it didn’t matter, for already I could feel the scalding sperm bubbling in my balls; I could feel the waves of release coming from as far away as my toes and fingers. I was breathing deeply and
fully, and my body worked like a bellows, gathering all the energy into a mighty ball in my bowels. And then, as I began to buck and shout, and she moaned into my cock, frantically working her tongue and sucking so hard that her cheeks caved in, I let the sperm come spurting out, jet after jet, and like somebody who has been on the desert for a day and has just been presented with a juicy orange, she sucked and lapped and ate until there was absolutely nothing left, and then collapsed, her cheek on my thigh, my now limp cock still in her mouth.

  We lay together for a long while, and then she got up. I pulled my pants up and we sat and drank some juice. Small talk followed, and sleepiness. I felt very tender and fond toward Isabel, and, if truth must be told, just a little bit in love with her already. She was cold, so we took a blanket and I covered us with it while she snuggled into my arms. For a long time we just felt one another’s presence, the breathing, the basic body warmth. And then she stirred. “I wonder if I should call Harry back?” she said.

  And I laughed. For how many times in the past, after making it with someone, did I feel a real desire to be with my mate of the time? It was as though one purged oneself of the desire to assert one’s independence, one asserted one’s liberty, and then, having done so, wanted to make it back to the current partner. For an instant I thought how nice it would be if Regina were here and then I could go romp with Isabel while she did a thing with Harry. Maybe in the open exchange of partners, there might be a solution to the problem of freedom in mating. But then, if the foursome got tight enough, the people in it would want to be asserting their freedom from the group, and begin making it with yet others. My mind quickly raced to the logical extension and I thought, “What if everybody in the world were fucking everybody else, and we had no stupid distinctions as to ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, would the species then be totally one, or would it find yet more diabolical forms of infidelity? The problem, as always, returned to the basic question: “Is the human race basically fucked?” If so, then nothing we do can do anything but add to confusion and misery. In which case the only proper approach is laughter.