Saline Solution (17 page)

The basic human emotion is terror, which sometimes softens to poignancy. All but the tiniest percentage of our business each day is a millennia-bound routine to mask that state. We keep busy so we have no time to perceive the truth of our cosmic condition. And leaders, the boss monkeys, of any circle, exploit the blindness and fear of the millions, the sleep-walkers, sending them into carnage and bondage, buying them with paper and promises of paradise.

The night after returning to the city, I received an invitation to Jessica's birthday party. She was one of a group that had come together to launch one of the new growth centers which are rapidly replacing revival meetings as America's number one religion. Since they were New Yorkers, however, they had accrued enough layers of cynicism concerning the entire process of cash-on-the-line help-for-your-soul scene to make interesting company. They were fairly unsophisticated game players, and their success in manipulating groups of people came largely from the hunger of their customers to be had. Lucinda was doing battle with nausea from the pregnancy and opted to stay home.

Jessica was twenty-four that night, a tall, flaxen-haired Virgo who had very early tripped over the problem of discerning illusion from reality, and had not yet tired of the guessing game to settle into the final understanding that what
is
subsumes all dualities in an inexorable present tense. Dan and Jean hosted, and provided the context for the evening with the solid vibrations of their two-year marriage. Dan had been heavily into politics and had to come to the conclusion that the only meaningful political statement left was dynamite, and not wanting to take that route, had lapsed into the sensitivity syndrome, and was planning to open a place 'in the country'. John was there, a true innocent from Minnesota all caught up in the complexities of his genius, and his old lady Janet, who could still blow everyone's mind by idly reaching over to John while he was rapping with someone, to take his prick out of his pants, and nonchalantly suck him off. Hal rounded out the company, going on endlessly about the play he was writing which concerned his vision for an encounter Utopia. We smoked parsley flakes sprayed with PCP.

'Everyone's two-dimensional,' I said.

'No, you're projecting,' Jean said.

After that, chaos seized the time.

John put on a reel of eight millimetre pornography, seemingly shot sometime during the 30's. It showed a heavily made-up woman being fucked by two men. They went through the routine with frozen expressions. He swung the projector over to show the film on Janet's belly and thighs.

I faded again, blinking into invisibility, letting the thereness of the others spring into fullness of focus.

'What odd animals they are,' I said to the silence. 'How they bruit about and sweat all over their skins and make noises with their mouths. They live in a perpetual excitement, an inability to lie down except to become unconscious. I see them in their shuffling nakedness, and in the stench of their decomposition.' I jumped up. 'Giddy fucking bacchanalia!' I shouted. 'Overripe and rotten fruit. Sweet decay.' I took my shirt off and staggered into the bedroom. The synthetic cannabis had stunned my body into numbness and no censor guarded my tongue. I fell across the bed and watched myself in the mirror nailed to the ceiling. My body sprawled, not belonging to me, the sensuality of the tripping decadence of drugs and dying city life make my cock tingle with a thousand pinpoints of disgust. The stench of existence exploded in my nostrils. I was ready to be the corpse served, still twitching, to the fat baron.

'I'm trapped in illusion again,' said Jessica as she stalked into the room, her eyes wide with horror. Behind her the ragged laughter of demented people.

'Stop that,' I said.

'I'm at the edge,' she said, and licked her lips. Her cunt poked its way through the air as she walked towards me. The din swamped my mind. All control was lost. The focus of my eyes unscrewed and the impressions flew in unstructured. Her face kept changing. Innocence peaked and crashed into nostrils of a leper. Flawless skin, prodding me, torturing my balance, my precarious equilibrium in the nothingness.

'Where's Lucinda?' she said.

For a moment the words rasped across my eyes in a loathsome ugliness. I snapped back to the surface. It was Jessica, twenty-four years old; this was her birthday party; we had fucked three times over the past year; in the context of consciousness, I knew her. 'Is Lucinda coming?' she said.

The searing guilt of the impending abortion and my inability to feel anything about it except impatience cut at me. I began to sob. I curled inside myself and brought my knees to my chest.

'What's wrong?'

'I don't know, I just came in to talk to him and he started crying.'

'Is he crazy?'

The voices of the people buzzed around and around. I spun more deeply into the sticky blackness of my pit and strained to make sense of the sounds.

'It's almost as though he can hear us,' said Jessica, and then I knew. She was in my head too. She saw, and she kept two levels going. She kept saying the words which had meaning. John sat on the bed. 'Sliding into the slough of despair again, eh?' he said, poking me in the ribs.

Groups splintered, conversations flowed and waned, dope made the circuit once more. I sucked greedily on the pipe, yearning desperately for the solace of madness to take me once more into the torment of certainty. It was a party, a birthday party. Jessica put her right hand on my crotch and began fondling my genitals. Swiftly, gently, she prodded and touched, she drew the concentration of pleasure to the tip. She seduced me from my jagged solitude and while I succumbed I hated her. She licked my nipples, she gave me promises with her lips. Her cunt grew enormous and threatened to swallow my entire body. I braced myself against the entrance to her womb.

She fell face forward and huddled there.
⁴
1 want you to come home with me tonight,' she said. 'You have a girl friend staying with you,' I said. She looked hurt.

I raked her face with my fingers and drove them into her mouth. She whimpered and licked at them with her tongue. I bent forward and chewed at her chin and neck, taking painful bites. I ground my knuckles into her nose, smashing it against her face.

'The next time I fuck you I want to hurt you,' I said. 'You know that. Having someone in the room who doesn't understand the game will prevent me. What's the point?'

'The Game,' she whispered, and her face went white. 'Yes,' I hissed into her ear, 'You want to play the Game too. More than anything else. Everything else is shallow, is stupid.'

In one stroke I had regained my autonomy. From deepest madness I sprang instantly to perfect reason. And with that, she capitulated. I grabbed her hard by the cunt, bunching the lips in my fingers. 'Don't hurt me,' she moaned. I twisted. 'Oh, please hurt me,' she whispered.

John and Janet came in. Confusion multiplied. Each of us looking to the others for a clue as to what to do next. We were the shock troops for a bloody orgy, but we had to get ourselves in sync.

'Everybody say what they want,'Janet said. 'I'll start.' She paused. 'I want to fuck,' she said. 'That's all I really

ever want to do.'

John nodded. 'I want to sleep and fuck, not necessarily in that order.'

They looked at me. 'I want to crash for the rest of the evening. I don't care where. If you all stay here, I'm going back up to Lucinda's pad. If you go to Jessica's, I'll ride with you.'

'Let's go to my place,' Jessica said.

We made our farewells and went out into the street. I felt as though I were covered with thick cotton gauze. Dan and Hal walked us to the car, since St. Marks Place at two in the morning had the ambience of a crazed speed freak slashing at the air with a razor. We drove to the West Village where the liberals and the homosexuals still kept the peace.

I entered into a state of powerlessness, a wood chip on a stream. I basked in the rare space of active willessness. We piled into the tiny room, Kay, the girl from California staying with Jessica, and in a few moments had the stereo working and more dope passing the periphery of the circle. All the threads of my psyche were becoming unravelled and I just wanted to lie down and pee in my pants. I was stoned on regression.

The sofa was opened into a bed and it took up almost all the available floor space, so the five of us piled onto it. We made some cosmic chitchat and listened to McCartney play
McCartney.
John sat at the edge of the bed, trying to get into Kay's cunt via eye twinklings and flat-palmed touches. I lay back, with Jessica on one side and Janet on the other. I lolled back and forth, from the tall clean girl on my left to the short rapacious witch on my right. I was the ridgepole delineating yin yang.

The three of us got into one another's breathing and body sense, and as we listened to the music that magic moment happened when we all knew we were hearing and responding in exactly the same way. Jessica moved over and lay on her back between my legs, her coccyx pressing into my pubic bone. She and Janet held hands.

When the drum-and-breathing solo came on, I flipped out into a non-verbal awareness and began to wail, flailing my thighs and running my hands over Jessica's body. She pressed herself into me, but stilled my fingers. I let my arms drop and immediately became quiet. With that, she let a series of small shudders go down her spine, and I felt myself closing around her. For an instant it seemed that she was a man lying face down on me, fucking me, and I was responding with the most delicate of pressures. Meanwhile, Janet and I had got into perfect head contact, matching the astral velocities as we skiied downhill at faster and more reckless speeds. The two women welded the triangle shut, and the three of us sailed into a superb dance, with the energy flowing physically between me and Jessica, emotionally between Jessica and Janet, and cerebrally between Janet and me. We rode together to the end of the cut, and rose to a three-way climax that was split-second perfect.

We all let out a sigh at the same time. Janet turned and said, 'Wow, four orgasms in my head.' And Jessica twisted around, moved up, brushed her mouth lightly against mine, and said, 'You are beginning to understand.'

I got up and went to piss. When I returned, Jessica and Janet were sitting cross-legged facing one another, doing a dance with their arms. Kay was nodding out in a rocking chair in the corner, and John was snapping his fingers into the non-operational fireplace. I stood next to him for a moment, and suddenly spasm of aching longing seized my groins.

'So this is what it is like to be a woman,' I thought. I groaned out loud and leaned halfway over. John turned to the girls and said, in a cockney accent, 'Hey, me mate 'ere got a case of 'ard nuts. Now you females 'ave been fussin' and fondlin', but you've left this poor chap all

knotted up.Now, oo's gonna take care of him?'

The night lost its boundaries. We were committed to total purgation, but I was the only one in the room who understood that. To them, it was just a flippy night out, an extension of the party, while down my veins whistled the winds which rocked the trees where witches howled at the stars. We were moving, and moving. Through the sky, through the system, through the galaxy, through the universe, through time, through space, through the mocking smile of eternity. And we were always crumbling, always at the edge of extinction, like frantic candles doomed from the moment they are lit.

I stared into the swirl of flesh with eyes that saw too much.

And Jessica slipped inside my mind. For a raging instant of sheer fury I attempted to crush her body with the massive doors which guarded my palace of perception. She answered with the tiniest and most ineffable of questions. I crashed down the gates of pain.

'If you want me, you have to swim the moat,' I said. The others blinked their eyes. I turned to them. 'Intimacy comes from release, not from practice,' I said in explanation.

Janet took John's clothes off. She organised an experience, having all of us slap and caress and rub his body. The sight of his cock inflamed me, and I caught myself from leaning forward and taking it into my mouth. Just that afternoon I had dipped into the Ansonia Baths for a quick steam, and spent a rapturous ten minutes sucking a ponderous eight-inch cock, revelling in the sheer sensuous joy of it, realising that I had ultimately erased all value as to the concavity or convexity of the sexual organ I put in my mouth.

I put on Josh White's
Prison Songs
and we did a number on John's back. But I soon grew bored with the endless titillation to no end.

'Listen darlings, I'm tired of all this Esalen nonsense. Are we going to get to it, or shall I go to sleep?'

Unreal,- unreal, reality reeling. I crawled up past Jessica and lay down against the backrest of the couch. She lay on top of me and Janet sprawled out beside John. Very soon, we were all nodding out. I got uncomfortable and went to get a drink of juice. Jessica stirred. 'What do you want?' she said. 'I want to piss, I want to drink, I want to smoke, I want to fuck, I want to sleep,' I said, 'in that order.'

Perhaps it was my act of impatience which short-circuited the festivities. But it didn't matter. Chronological time passed no matter what we did. The abortion of an orgy seemed of no more consequence than the abortion of a baby. Everything which begins must end. So why start anything in the first place? Now that my cock was quiescent, I had no regrets. I went into the john and sat down for a long time. I read
An Illustrated History of Love,
and when I went back into the bedroom, the four of them were asleep. I put two pillows on the floor and stretched out, prepared for a lengthy vigil.