The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (15 page)

I moved into the circle of men the way a dog might, tentatively approaching, sniffing, psychically touching noses, proceeding to genitals and assholes. If a dog finds other dogs and a sense of community is established, the pack romps together. If there isn't, they part without a backward glance. As monkeys, we are not far removed from such a straightforward biological program, except that our civilization has robbed us of the chance to perceive one another in such direct ways.

Here, it was different. One of the men asked me for the time. I asked for a cigarette. A few pleasantries were exchanged. We all looked quite openly at one another's bodies. And suddenly, I was absorbed. With hardly a word exchanged, with no rationalizations, I simply became part of the circle, and then there were six men standing idly on the sidewalk.

Although I didn't articulate it as such at the time, the group was an energy vortex. The men were doing nothing but
being-there
. And in a period of time, their vibrations blended and formed a lazy current into which anyone passing might easily be pulled, to add his own energy to the scene. We were simply enjoying the fact of our existence and giving one another the recognition of presence. There was no need to exchange names, personal histories, opinions. The gestalt found its own pulse, and that was the pertinent reality. For there was nowhere to go, nothing to do, and we didn't have to have a reason for living. We were alive on the earth, digging the fabulous quality of the mundane, sharing intimations of eternity.

Behind us, some ten yards away, four trucks were parked in a huge empty lot, surrounded on two sides by high brick walls and on the third by ribbed metal doors which, during the day, opened into a storehouse. It was very dark and I couldn't make out any detail. But every once in a while a man would emerge from behind a truck and walk off, or someone would come strolling down the street and drift in, almost as though to fill the slot just left empty. Obviously, something was happening and I disengaged from the circle, as easily as I had entered it, and went to see.

There were some fifty men in the concrete corral, an area some forty by fifteen feet. The scene resembled nothing so much as a small herd of steer breathing in place. There was no sense of movement anywhere; everyone was just standing. Again, I marvelled that I felt no apprehension at walking into a dark spot on a dangerous street amidst a group of strange men.

The nucleus was in one corner and most of the men formed several loose concentric circles around some activity which I couldn't see. Inside the clump of bodies at the core there was some stirring. Men drifted out toward the periphery and back in toward the center in random patterns. Four or five men were at the opposite end of the lot, waiting for something to develop in their vicinity.

I worked my way through the wall of bodies until I came to the focus of all the energy. A short thin wiry man of about twenty-five, with curly black hair and bushy sideburns, was kneeling in front of a blond giant with a body like an Olympic swimmer and a face like a Hitler Youth. The young god looked unblinkingly into the distance, his face a mask of stern composure, as the man before him worked feverishly, sucking his erect cock in and out of his mouth.

Sex itself is not sexy. Once one is actually into the contact of skin and skin, once that secret pact of silent penetration has taken place, and two human beings are totally engaged in the powerful simplicity of the act, then all thoughts of sex disappear before the thing itself. That is the state of sex, and it is an intensely private place, even when it appears in public. I wondered at the spectacle. To explain it in terms of exhibitionism and voyeurism would be to oversimplify the phenomenon to the point of destroying the astounding wealth of harmonics and overtones being produced. The ambience at that instant was such that I had difficulty catching my breath. Something stronger than cocksucking was going on there. Important and entrenched taboos were being violated. Laws were being broken. The thing that society stridently abhors was being perpetrated, and the ensuing vibration was volatile.

There was no jostling, no anxiety. The men stood quite calmly. Yet each was cunningly focussed on the balance of the mood. They were watching the cocksucker, but there was no prurient interest. Rather, the sense was that of a kind of liberation, a throwing off of shackles. The fact that this was going on in the street overwhelmed all other considerations, and pointed up the factors which keep us all from spontaneous expression of sexual affection: our own conditioned inhibitions, social censure, and legal stricture.

In this light, what was happening behind the trucks was precisely a neat bit of leaderless behavioral engineering. Anyone with any sexual sophistication understands that the crucial variables in sex, as in tripping, are set and setting. If one puts oneself in a situation in which desire can flourish into overt intercourse, then, given the proper vibration between the parties involved, if one is blessed by an erotic stirring and finds in reciprocated, it should be possible to get right into it.

Here, fifty men gathered together for no other reason than to see whether any or all of them would, in one way or another, share a moment of sexual surrender. And they were braving the demons of repression by being open enough to suck cock in public. The mood of that meeting was as exalted as any I have ever been to. Although I was probably the only one there interested in the politics of the thing. I repeat, there was as much real revolution taking place in that open crypt as in any other activity going on anywhere among the forces of life on this earth. What happened there transcended the notion of homosexuality.

The man next to me was six feet tall, black, round, and horny. It was both easy and excruciatingly difficult to do what I wanted to do just then. For all my metaphysical meandering, the idea of sinking to my knees and acknowledging my desire so openly made me hesitate. I tested my responses, and concluded that if I were alone with the man, I would not hesitate to suck the cock which was already bulging in his jeans. I felt the familiar pressure in my chest, the slight tug at the corners of my mouth. I have blown many men, in beds, in hallways, in the baths. There is nothing more I need know about the act itself, or about my motivations in performing it. It is nothing more than a taste I own, as I do for hot buttered croissants at Sutter's. It is likely that I have known all the variations to the act. Then why there? Why then?

I think as much to prove the point to myself as it was for any purpose of sensual gratification. I would not have been at peace with myself had I not done the thing which I felt I must do in order to plumb the circumstance to its depths. And as a hundred eyes watched, I began the timeless ritual of falling slowly and consciously to my knees, letting my jaw drop open, letting my lips be full and my tongue be easy, and awaiting the pleasure of the man who stood over me.

As I entered the dance whose details have been known and described countless times by gay writers through the centuries, I entered a space of reverie. The cocksucking was not relegated to the mechanical, but to the peripheral. After all, I had a relatively large and attentive audience; I had no worry that I would not be appreciated. It was clear that at that moment. I was the focus of energy, and I didn't need to strain. The man attached to the cock in my mouth was presumed to be in command of his own decisions. If what I did ceased to interest him, he could pull out without bad feelings on anyone's part.

It was this very dissociation which gave rise to an interesting insight, which is that excitement is generally an affectation. It is the product of the sexual energy crashing against more or less aesthetic, but always negative, internal and external resistances. The ideal sexual act has no friction, and therefore no heat. It is the form taken by pure vibrant energy within and between the b dies. And so it was with perfect
sang froid
that I charted the course of his orgasm through the tactile faculties of my lips, tongue, and mouth. When he came, my only feeling was delight, and his sperm was delicious.

My only complete homosexual experience as a teenager had been with Ralph. We had gone to Randall's Island to play "chance apiece," a game in which each of us got to dry-hump the other for sixty seconds. Ralph had caught my eye during a circle-jerk among the younger boys he oversaw; we were thirteen and he was sixteen and presided over our antics with feigned boredom, pretending to attend merely out of anthropological necessity. But when he asked me to bicycle to the island with him, I knew he had chosen me as "his" and was blushingly flattered.

Of course, the code of the neighborhood insisted that I maintain a pose of gruffness, or else be thought, "queer." Odd that the honest enjoyment of a perfectly beautiful interchange between men should be branded as sinful by society at large and a model of hypocrisy planted in its place. Yet such is the culture that we live in. Of all of us, only Joey was brave, and when his mother was at her job, he would invite the gang to stand around the bed and masturbate over him as he fingered himself and brought himself to a frantic climax with a thick broomstick. The simple urge to couple, forbidden by his culture, forced him into such grotesqueries. I often wonder what became of him (I wouldn't recognize him now if I saw him) and pay him belated homage.

Ralph and I pretended to wrestle until it became quite obvious to both of us that we were interested in his fucking me, and were ready to cast off the formalities of the neighborhood code which required equal time from both partners in both directions. He lay on his back and I squatted over him, wondering whether anyone was watching and could see that we were not really wrestling, until he pushed me off him, pulled his cock out, and spilled the semen on the grass. Then—and this picture is indelibly inscribed in my memory—he wiped the tip of his cock against a tree, an action I found, and still find, absolutely startling.

We did not speak or exchange glances and rode with muted excitement back to the neighborhood and went down to the cellar where we had our clubhouse. The vibrations were thick. Up to that moment, even our indiscretions had been within ethical bounds, but what was being suggested by our mood took us into very dangerous territory For a trembling teenager born and raised in an Italian neo-feudalism, the ramifications of my desire were immense. What we were about to do was
worse than sin
, it was
disgusting.

Yet, the thin troubled teenager that I was could find no reason in my body or heart or mind to deny what so strongly called to me. This was the problem of sexual freedom in its sharpest outline. Both of us were too unlettered even to know the word homosexual. Our knowledge of sex was rudimentary, and in a sense, quite healthy. Pole went into hole, that was all we knew. And now, after decades of sexual libertinism, I find that after all there is little more to it than that. The richness lies in the depth of experience and awareness of the moment, not in physiological flourishes.

No one else was in the cellar. My breathing became shallow. What we wanted was incapable of justification by any of the understandings which had been passed on by our priests, parents, and teachers. If we did it, it would have to be a totally secret act, for punishment would be equally heavy if we were caught. It would be, not because we wanted it so but because it was so given to us, an act of liberation, a blow for freedom of expression.

We mumbled a few words, I don't even remember what we said, and found our way unthinkingly to a dark corner at the very rear of the cellar, where the coal was stored. Rats scuttled in the gloom. I could feel the power of my desire, and the shame which encased it. I pulled my pants down and bent over, putting my palms against the wall. To this day I can remember the texture of the moist crumbling plaster. I closed my eyes and did not know what was going to happen, how it would feel. My knees grew weak with anticipation.

And then the pressure between my buttocks. A sliding sense, a burgeoning warmth, fullness. Something clicked in my mind and I felt pain. Had either of us been more at ease we would have waited a moment until I stretched to accommodate him, and then gone on. But I tensed and panicked, and pulled away. Neither of us moved. I could feel his lust laced with embarrassment. A moment passed.

"I want to fuck you again," he whispered.

My stomach dropped. Often, in reliving the memory, I picture myself whirling about and murmuring "Yes" with my arms curled about him. But I was far from the ability to act so spontaneously. His cock went into me again, and almost before I could adjust to his presence, he came, and pulled out at once.

I sought him out later, wanting to do it again, but he was distant and angry. He had undoubtedly experienced the disgust that those of us raised as Catholics associate with orgasm after so many years of being told how sinful and damaging sex is, how it is an affront to God, and how even touching oneself would land one in the eternal fires of hell. He pushed me away and told me never to bother him again. He was older, bigger, stronger. I was confused and hurt. And my masturbatory fantasies for years were attempts to recapture the moment and bring it to fruition.

The man behind the trucks scratched my head, as one would do to a friendly dog, then zipped up, and sidled off. I stood up and found that all eyes had turned away from me. It was either the height of delicacy or an instantaneous mass attack of indifference in my further behavior.

For the rest of the time I remained there, some five or ten minutes, there was no more "sex." Occasionally one man might rub against another, and a hand would go to someone's genitals, some fondling took place. I thought of the Subud circle, in which no one does anything until the "spirit" is felt. Only, in this case, the thing most often done was a simple physical contact, man touching man. These people were there not merely for sex, but for the freedom to be in a space where sex could take place without unnecessarily elaborate social game playing.

I am aware of the viewpoint which will lament the sadness of men who have to huddle in urine-soaked stone caves to make some brief contact. But surely that perspective has been overdone to the point of tedium. It is time to see even the smallest, most seemingly pitiful action in a new light, the light of human beings who will go to such lengths to maintain
any contact at all
. We have reached the state of repression in this society where we are afraid to touch or be touched, suffocating on our needs and strangling in our inhibitions.