The Gentle Degenerates (The Vassi Collection) Page 5

  And so I continued to laugh. And Isabel was quite puzzled by my reaction. “By all means, call him,” I said. “I think it’s a perfect gesture.” But there was no malice in my cynicism, and for a fleeting moment I wished Regina were there to share the humor of the situation with me, for above all, she has a mind sharp enough to see the ludicrous.

  In a while I left, with Isabel vainly making phone calls trying to track Harry down. Since I am involved with both of them in several business and personal enterprises, I knew I would be seeing them again, together and separately. I wondered whether she would tell him, and what his response would be. Life was very interesting the minute one understood it as theatre, and one’s overriding value became one of style and integrity.

  I slept badly, and in the morning, before breakfast, there was a letter from Regina waiting for me, the first one since her return to the Coast.

  four.

  THE MUNUTE I saw her handwriting, my heart melted. In the middle of the most tortuous changes and seeming resolutions not to have anything to do with her again, a simple sheet of paper from California reduced me to jelly. I had been walking down the street a few days earlier, thinking of nothing in particular, when I suddenly saw Regina’s naked body in bed. She was lying on her side, and moving into a man’s arms. I could see her ass tighten as she brought her thighs up to his, and then her arms moved round his shoulders in order to bring his face to her lips. I froze on the spot, standing stock still on the sidewalk. A spasm of jealousy seized me like a foot cramp and I felt my face screw up in rage while my hands began to shake. Luckily, I was on Avenue A and 4th Street, where such behavior doesn’t seem odd to anyone.

  I probed deeper to find out who she was with, and then realized that the man of the fantasy had to be a man that I put there. And I wondered why I was picturing her with someone else and not myself. Was I on a secret unworthiness trip, or working out yet another kink of the bi-sexual scene; or was it that I was afraid to let myself know how much I wanted to be with her? So long as I was jealous, I couldn’t feel longing or loss or love. So I put up the screen of suspicion to keep me from coming to terms with my actual feelings. And the minute I felt that, pang after pang of desolation shot through me, and I found myself calling out “Regina” on the street.

  The letter had some chitchat about the state of the garden and the bell-clear days that were now visiting Mendocino, and lines speaking about her love for me and faith in my actually getting a relationship with her that had some permanence. I swung from elation to depression. Again I felt that hand of responsibility creeping toward my throat, the feeling that there was something I “ought” to be doing or feeling. I realized that this was at least half in my head, and that there were millions of people the world over who lived in complete solitude and lovelessness; and here I was complaining because this women wanted to make a life with me.

  I looked around my apartment. Theoretically, I had everything I wanted. A big enough place of my own in the East Village, enough money to live on without having to work for a year, friends and women all close to hand, and the chance to work at what I am good at and receive pay and recognition for what I do. And yet it was empty. Only in those manic moments when I was “on” did the whole scene mean anything. Somehow, without a woman who was special, without a mate, I was incomplete, and no amount of social gloss could fill the gap. This much was clear; the question then became, was Regina that woman? And how does one go about making such a judgement? How could I think in terms of measurement?

  My mind sped back to the scenes we’d been in, and all the bummers lined up in one ledger while all the good trips lined up in another. I couldn’t begin to give them values in order to weigh them. I remembered the time I met her. It was at a big registration day meeting at the Berkeley Free University. I was teaching a workshop in relaxation and breathing, and she was doing a dance number. I had heard her name as someone to see, and I found where she was sitting. At first I was disappointed. I had expected a very young, blonde chick with slow knowing eyes; Regina was clearly close to thirty, and very nervous, with eyes that came across like a self-conscious cash register. She was married at the time, and she introduced me to her old man. I saw at once that they weren’t making it, a flash that was substantiated later. I went about to do some things and then somebody threw a long piece of rock on the stereo and I began dancing. I saw Regina across the way and beckoned to her. We danced toward each other, and for about twenty minutes worked everything out with our bodies. It got to be pure fucking, although most people don’t know how to look at dance so they missed the scene, except for the Communications Company, who came up after the record ended and gave me a pornographic magazine, with comic-book drawings of Antony and Cleopatra.

  I got to rapping to her old man and dug they were at a place where they could use a third to catalyze their mix. I knew it was tricky but as Jud once put it, “Threesomes are chic.” I made a mental note to visit them one night soon and see if we could get it off and get it on.

  But before that happened, two days later she called me. “Come over,” she said. And in her voice was a fucking summons, clear as a bell. I didn’t like being thrown off balance in this way, because I operate best when I move at my own rhythm. But I went, and as I suspected, her old man wasn’t home. She was pretty frantic and hopping all around the place and what I wanted to do most was to get her to sit down and relax before anything else happened. But she had a program in her head and marched us both through it in double-time. She put on a record, danced for three minutes, put her arms around my neck, and dragged me down to the mattress. I knew it was wrong as it happened, wrong timing, wrong vibrations. Then the bombshell. “I’ve never come with a man,” she said. “I know you can make me come.”

  Of course, the thing to have done was to rise up immediately and state, “I can’t make anybody do anything,” and split. But the old ego was at work, getting all puffed up. I had a small reputation around the school as a man who knew and understood what women’s bodies needed. And here I was being consulted on a special case!

  Off with our clothes! And before I knew it, I had an erection, was inside her, and came, all before I had a chance to catch my breath. Inside she was moving so fast that she literally speeded time up, and I felt like a man who steps into an elevator shaft expecting to find an elevator there but getting a nasty surprise. I lay on her in full shock, my cock shrinking quickly and my ego hightailing it out of sight. Regina’s face was as hard as stone and her eyes told me how much she despised me at the moment. I had been suckered into committing the crime, then was caught, tried, convicted and executed, all within half an hour. Somewhere inside me I took my hat off to the lady. Any woman who can cut my balls off without my even noticing until it was too late, deserves accolades. At last, I had found a bitch to match the bastard in me.

  Ah, but what a naive, inexperienced, self-conscious bitch she was. Nothing of the pirate about her; she did all her work in the make-believe dark of her supposed unconscious mind. I rolled off and lit a cigarette. For the first time I was able to look at her body. She was really exquisite, with an ass made to be worshipped, it was so full, so dense, so invitingly tough, made to be fucked and licked and spanked. Any woman with an ass like that couldn’t be all bad, reasoned my atavistic mind.

  We rapped about nothing at all, just to fill the space until my cock got hard again and we could fuck once more. Clearly, the guru was getting a second chance. I bade my time and let the juices fill up and recharge in my balls, and only when I knew I was ready for another assault did I reach over and cup her breast. A long shudder ran through her.

  She was on a heavy breast trip, and had nursed her kid for almost three years. She still had some milk left and as I went down on the luscious nipple, the warm fluid spurted into my mouth. She was moaning and kicking her legs and I put my hand down to her thighs and found that her cunt was really wet this time. Not so bad, I thought to myself, it’s just a m
atter of finding the right buttons to push. But then, a cry from the next room. It was her kid. Shit! What a time. I had heard that kids are jealous buggers and don’t miss a chance to fuck up the action when they can, and sure enough, in he came, no higher than my knees, rubbing his eyes, half smiling, and looking so beautiful and open that I dug him completely, no matter what he was doing to the scene.

  But she put her hands on the back of my head and pushed my mouth onto her tit again. She was really hot and not about to be interrupted. One part of me went with the sex vibrations while another part kept an antenna up to see what was happening with the boy. And in a minute, the boy made the scene. He climbed up on the bed and onto Regina’s other side. “I want to suck,” he said. I lifted my head up. “It’s all right with me, kid,” I said, “there’s enough tit for both of us.” He looked perplexed and watched his mother for cues, but she was into her own trip of trying to figure “what’s right to do at such moments.” He waited another second and then with a happy sigh, snuggled up to her side and planted his mouth right on her nipple.

  My mind exploded. I dove into the fleshy warm jiggling breast again, and glued my lips to her wrinkled tit. Only this time it was a different kind of sucking. I wanted milk. It was sexy but in an entirely different way. I brought the entire breast into my mouth and pulled on it for all I was worth, and to my squirming delight, mouthful after mouthful of milk spilled onto my tongue. I opened my eyes and found myself staring into the face of an angelic little boy, also feeding at the fount of all goodies, momma’s tit. He looked at me and I looked at him, and we looked at each other, and then, with a long, slow, impish smile, he winked at me.

  Far out! But I had a more complex trip going. because I could feel my cock beginning to sound its ancient call. “Cunt,” it cried, “Give me cunt.” And that was a ticklish question, because here we were, doing a kind of closet Botticelli, or Virgin and Child with Saint Joseph making the scene, and all of a sudden sex intrudes. Should we do it in front of the kid? All the psychoanalytic horror stories about the primal scene flooded my head, and then I saw through it at once. What trivia that all was, what garbage! Nothing but a sick scenario drawn up by a bunch of constipated hushed old men in Viennese drawing rooms. This was California and the sun was shining and we had every freedom we wanted.

  With that I mounted her like a cavalry man climbing aboard his steed. She looked at me with shock and surprise and admiration. With a blow I had slain the Freudian dragon, and her now hot cunt opened and welcomed me in with a great hurrah. The kid went on oblivious of the action below. At his point in the drama, he was only interested in what happened above the waist. We both looked at him, and in that glance I became his spiritual father and, I suppose, Regina and I were married, although there was nothing like that on our minds. I began to move slowly, feeling the sublime squishiness of her pussy sliding under me. It seemed like a box made of quicksand, rolling from side to side, bubbling up from the deep center and enveloping my cock, and then giving way to let me sink deep into her. She made almost no sound, but her mouth opened in a silent cry. It was as though her entire body went into a single prolonged spasm, and she held onto it, using it as a center around which she moved her legs and arms. Her head rolled from side to side, and her eyes closed.

  I looked down as though from a great height. “Regina!” I called, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

  I gazed at the boy, and he seemed to have dozed off. The nipple had come out of his mouth and he slept open-mouthed on her breast. Suddenly I felt all alone in the room. The kid was sleeping, Regina was tripping on some intense inner sexual drama, and I was left dutifully moving my cock in and out of her, feeling the sensations, but somehow not connected with anything. I thought it would be as good a time as any to see what I could find out about the mechanics of her cunt, and perhaps do something about making her come.

  I moved back and dropped my pelvis so I could bring my cock in from a lower angle. Immediately I felt the difference in heat and penetration. I flashed the connection and brought my cock to bear inside her. But no sooner had I found a beautiful inner niche to lodge the head of my prick, she bucked back and froze. Her eyes opened and I got the hate glance again. “It hurts there!” she said, almost spitting at me. “Excuse me,” I said, “no harm intended.” She stuck out her chin and turned her head to the side as though waiting for a blow, but I bowed out, and in a moment she relaxed and lay back down. I began moving again, slowly, and again she caught the rhythm of my rod and started to groove on it. Again I felt as though I was on the outside looking in and this time reached under her legs to bring them back to her chest. I raised them half a foot when she went rigid again. “I don’t want to put my legs that way,” she said.

  I got pissed. “Well, what the fuck do you want?” I screamed. “It hurts this way, you don’t want to do it that way. Why don’t you just go fuck yourself?!” To my surprise, she burst into tears. “That’s what I usually have to do,” she said. “All men are so insensitive and don’t know how to touch me and then they blame me for being frigid. I wind up having to masturbate.”

  Now, it’s a funny thing about sophistication. If anybody else had made that speech under any other circumstances, I would have properly sneered and made some inner gesture concerning the sorrow of sexual unhappiness in the world, and then quoting Dylan to the effect that “it’s not my problem,” split. But she had the Indian sign on me, and before I could catch myself, I had fallen into a pseudo women’s lib conversation concerning the plight of the female in male chauvinist America. Of course I understood. Of course I was not like all those other nasty men. Of course she could give herself totally to me, if I would just have patience. Wasn’t she a prize worth waiting for, worth cultivating? And when she was all mine, no other man would have what I have.

  Like an idiot, I fell for it. Partially, I suppose, because it was true. But truth merely indicates, it does not prescribe. Something in me needed to run this particular treadmill. We talked for a few minutes, and then she asked if I would get off her, because I was getting heavy. That snapped it. I reared back and laid my hands on her shoulders and then leaned forward, pinning her with my full weight. She tried to struggle but I had her at three points, and now brought my cock into equal pressure with my hands. “I don’t feel like fucking anymore,” she said. “That’s too bad,” I told her.

  And of course, she yielded, as a woman always does when a stiff cock starts churning inside her cunt. They may protest the circumstances, or the person, but if a man really has it hard and is really tuned in to what is happening, he can fuck any woman for hours. Put it in her and she’ll moo with contentment. And so it happened. But I wasn’t counting on the physiological trap, and this time there was no creamy secretion, only a thin spiteful dribble. And there was no heat, only a clammy blandness of temperature. And nothing I did helped. I sucked her breasts again and tried kissing her, and grabbed her ass to bring her cunt close up to my crotch. And she went with it all, seemingly digging it all, but not yielding up any of her juices. It was impossible to tell whether she was holding back with her mind, or whether the flow was beyond her control and wouldn’t come whether she wanted it or not. I was past figuring it out and past caring, and just slid my cock in and out of her, concentrating on my own sensations, using her like a hand to jerk off in, falling into the most sluttish fantasies to compensate for the thin reality. “She’s just a pig,” went the refrain in my mind. “Anyone can have her. She’s a frigid bitchy middle-aged-middle-class whore who doesn’t have enough sense to know what she is. She probably fucks for anyone who’ll open his zipper. She’s probably gone down on half the school, sucking off students ten years younger than she is in telephone booths at the back of the cafeteria. How many men has she dragged up here with the same plea: ‘make me come’?” And as the fantasy convoluted, I became excited. I looked down at her, at the woman’s body lying underneath me. The kid had rolled off and was now sleeping comfortably on the
far edge of the bed.

  Without planning it, I pulled out of her fast. She opened her eyes in surprise and dismay. I grabbed her thighs and pushed her to the side. She got the idea and rolled over. She lay on her belly, her ass forming a gorgeous mound for my eyes, her thick dancer’s thighs looking very vulnerable, and between them the cunt hair peeking out. I pulled her ass up to bring her to her knees. And then leaned forward to shove her shoulders down, so that her ass stuck up and exposed the pink slit of her pussy more fully. I knelt between her legs and pried the cheeks apart. Her clenched asshole warned me away from it, and the tension in her body almost made me forget the entire thing. But this was the last one, I thought. I’d never be making it again with this bitch, so I might as well get off as good a fuck as I could.

  I leaned forward and felt that delicious moment when the head of my cock slides past the feathery touch of the outer cunt lips, meets the massaging pressure of the inner lips, and then sloshes happily and warmly into the very cunt center, that wrinkled bud that is so tightly closed and stretches so tautly to embrace the entire shaft of the cock, from the sensitive head to the broad thick base. I heard her sigh. I moved in very slowly, angling up slightly, and aiming right at the cervix. But I was only three-quarters in when she tightened up. “You’re hurting me again,” she hissed. For an instant I wanted to just hit her as hard as I could, to punch her and knee her in the belly and kick her pussy and beat her ass and slap her face until she just, once and for all, stopped the whining, the inability to withstand just a little pain in order to find a greater pleasure. It was not the fact that she announced I was hurting her that bothered me, but the way she presented it, as though it were a non-negotiable demand for me to stop fucking her altogether. But either I didn’t have the energy or the time wasn’t right, and I pulled back. I brought my cock to the point where the tip of it was right at the opening to her cunt. I nudged in and opened her up gently, and then pulled back and watched the pink membrane close up right after me. I poked in again, and then out. She gasped and wiggled her ass. It was a kind of genital foreplay and ordinarily is just the prelude to deeper things, but I knew this was as much as she could take, so we did it that way. It was like getting a blow job where the lips never leave the head, and although I wanted time and again to shove it all the way up her hole, I contented myself to feeling the heat vibrations dance around the tip of my tool, and then, moving faster, felt the come beginning to stir at the shaft of my cock. I reached down and pried her buttocks apart. I could see the cunt, now wet, sloppily sloshing as it sucked at my prick. I reached lower and opened her cunt with my fingers. She shuddered a bit and grabbed the sheet with her fingers, clenching the fabric into a ball.