The Sensual Mirror
The Vassi Collection: Volume IX
Marco Vassi
To Sheryl who made it possible
If they see
breasts and long hair coming
they call it woman
if beard and whiskers
they call it man:
but, look, the self that hovers
in between
is neither man
nor woman
O Ramanatha.
Dasimayya
What we need is a mixed diction.
Aristotle
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
For Julia Gordis evening had always been the most beautiful part of the day. She still remembered the long hours of twilight when she had sat on the back porch of her home in the small Missouri town where she’d been raised. She cherished an image of her grandmother in a rocker, usually shelling peas or knitting or doing something else useful with her hands. The family dog lay mournfully on the grass, peering into the encroaching shadows, whining at the spirits which moved among the nearby trees. When she was a teenager and responsible for household duties, the time was spent in the kitchen with her mother, preparing the evening meal. The two women circled each with random purpose, like acolytes at a loosely organized sacrifice, performing a ritual of food. By then her grandmother had died and her father fallen into his terminal silence, his only communication a sourly mocking glance out from the depths of whatever pact he’d made with his soul. The dog, his coat now mangy, his eyes rheumy, slept in the corner next to the potato bin. The sadness of the hour and the intense loneliness of the house screwed Julia to an almost insupportable anguish. As the day died, she died, and when the meal was finished and the dishes washed, she ran to her room to surrender to an orgy of unhappiness, detailing the process in her diary between the bouts of weeping and attempting to calm herself by swimming in the cool white indifference of the ceiling. At twenty, her attachment to dusk had reached such levels of romantic meaning that she arranged to lose her virginity at precisely the moment when the light sighed and embraced the darkness, when the earth acknowledged the vastness of the universe in which it was nothing more than a mote. Afterwards, while the boy attempted endearments and reassurances, she gazed with abstract moodiness at the quality of the color of the blood on her thigh, feeling as though it were the night which had been her true lover.
Her marriage to Martin at first obscured and then exacerbated her need for her evening mood. During the first year they had been so busy adjusting and romping in erotic exploration that she forgot to be melancholy at all. There had followed the year in Europe, eleven months of nonstop excitement, movement, change. But when they settled in New York and she began her job, the old pattern of daily seasons reasserted itself. Except that now she never seemed to have any time alone. She arrived home at five-thirty or six and usually wasn’t out of the shower five minutes before Martin came back. Punctilious in his responsibility, he always helped to make dinner. For a long while their life was so nicely tuned, so perfectly regulated, that she felt awkward suggesting to herself that she was growing more and more unhappy.
When they reached the Period of the Deadly Bicker, as she later referred to it, she complained about her lack of solitude and Martin, obliging as ever, made it a point to come home an hour later each night. She found it impossible to explain that it was as foolish to structure a time within which one might indulge a certain sensibility as it was to put a fence around a forest and call the area a wilderness. Other factors entered in, of course, other pressures, other tendencies. And when the breakup finally took place, through all the depression and relief, through all the catalogued changes of failure, the one signal clarity in Julia’s consciousness was that muted trumpet of twilight, the liberty to lock the door and be ravished by the cosmic poignancy of loss, loss without an object, without a name.
Now she lay in her tub, awake and dreaming. The bathroom itself had undergone a transformation since Martin had left. The place was more casually disordered, more strewn with bits and pieces. A huge poster showing a closeup of Bob Dylan’s face was tacked to the ceiling. The paper had been wrinkled by the heat of showers and baths and that made the face look old, like a drugged lecher leering at the naked woman beneath. Incense sticks burned in a holder on the windowsill. The floor was littered with clothes in the disarray that occurs when one lives alone and can let the environment totally reflect the state of one’s mind. On the hamper next to the tub sat a squat bottle of wine and a joint. Julia had already drunk a glass of wine and was preparing to get stoned. It wasn’t unusual for her, since she was alone again, to spend one or two hours in the bath each evening, drinking, smoking, reading, drowsing, periodically letting half the water out and replenishing the rest with hot.
She had turned twenty-nine the week before, and on midnight of the day itself had burst into tears because Martin had not called. She knew he wouldn’t and really didn’t want him to, but part of her still clung to certain primitive sentiments, or what used to be called girlish ways. Now she smiled wryly at the memory, wondering how long it would take to forget him completely, simultaneously sad at the realization that such a time might indeed come. The long black hair, which usually hung down between her shoulder blades, floated around her shoulders like a web of seaweed. Her breasts also floated, the nipples like the tips of icebergs, signposts of the hidden mass beneath the surface. She was a trim woman, a few inches shorter than Martin, her weight never going above a hundred and ten pounds. One of the things that had attracted him to her from the first was his admiration of her natural physique. She never exercised formally, and yet her skin tone was flawless, her muscles firm, her posture easily erect. In all, she maintained the lithe sophistication of a dancer.
She lit the marijuana cigarette and inhaled deeply, her eyes closed. Her classic beauty was never more powerfully apparent than at moments like these, when she was relaxed and inward, not projecting the glamor which she herself usually mistook for her true style. Her lips especially, combining the fullness of sensuality with the tension of intelligence, caused men to stop and smolder. It was a pornographic mouth, lush with lewd suggestion yet vulnerable with perpetual innocence.
She smoked again, and sighed. The narcotic effect of the herb began to work its magic on her nervous system. Synapses calmed down, circuits closed their switchboards, stereotyped stimulus-response engrams grew sleepy at the wheel and pulled off the highway to nap. And with the domino dalliance in domination of her brain, the sharp concerns of social consciousness drifted apart, like friends saying goodnight as they hied off to different trains going to different towns.
Julia sucked at the cigarette until it was a tiny ember at the tip of a blackened stub so small she had to to hold it with the very edges of her fingernails, at which point she tossed it into the toilet bowl. She had reached a very high level of toxicity very quickly and was ready to let the ensuing psychophysical chaos overwhelm her. It was clearly a process of losing control, but it is only in that loss of control that the chronic spasm and contraction called personality or character can be undone and the formless life force find expression.
With Julia, the falling apart was manifested primarily in two places; the brain and the cunt. She felt the usual gross changes, the increased heartbeat, the dryness in the mouth, the slight lowering of temperature in the hands and feet, the contraction of tiny blood vessels in the eyes. But through all this, two throbbing realizations claimed her attention. Her point of view, her ego, was becoming more and more diffuse. And she was randy.
The events of the day, just a few moments ago so neatly ordered along the lines of chronological sequence and personal importance, now tumbled around in her memory like a basketful of clothes in a dryer. Her seven hours at the office covered the center of the porthole through which she idly gazed at her thoughts, much as a large sheet will dwarf and swallow up shirts, socks, towels and panties. The other dramas flashed intermittently.
The face of Eliot Dawson, her boss, appeared. A short beefy man with thick fingers and rough skin, the latter the product of inbred genes and many years of gin, he was, when Julia first met him, the most unattractive man she’d ever sat at dinner with. He had turned up in an obscure village along the coast of Yugoslavia, having dinner in the same restaurant that she and Martin had found simply by virtue of its being the place that was there when it was time to eat. They had parked their van and, with the help of a phrase book and the fact that the owner knew several words in English, had settled at their table when Eliot walked in. They could see the gleam of his Mercedes as the door swung out behind him. It wasn’t too long before it became obvious that they were all Americans, and Martin’s invitation for the other man to join them was practically obligatory.
What Eliot Dawson lacked in looks and surface appeal he more than made up for in power. Personally worth between ten and fifteen million dollars, he ran a small company, virtually unknown outside the narrow field in which it operated, that bought and sold used coal mines. A property might be considered played out and be selling for very little. Eliot’s engineers, either finding a new vein or in touch with a new process of extraction, would recommend a purchase. But the final decision was not made on the basis of technical reports alone, for Eliot flew to each site and walked over it and through it, his nose literally twitching, as acute as a dowsing rod. He bought more on the basis of hunch than of science, and he wasn’t wrong more than one time in ten. When he sold, then, his profit was counted in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and his labor had involved nothing more complicated than the movement of a few men and the typing of a number of sheets of paper. He owned his own small jet, a helicopter, and suites of offices and apartments in New York, Paris, and Houston.
The three of them had got quite drunk and Eliot was not at all subtle in his alcoholically ponderous desire for Julia. She was both flattered and disgusted and might have been moved to respond if he had been less physically unattractive. Martin, sensing that there was no threat, cajoled and egged the other man on. This was something that Eliot, despite his drunkenness, understood the reason for and resented deeply. Later, when Julia went to work for him, he began a serious and ultimately successful campaign to get her into bed.
“Eliot,” she said out loud, slurring the name, using it to no end, without meaning, intonation, or implication. It was just that, from her stoned state, she suddenly saw him as a caricature in the cosmic theater. And then, like a soldier’s boot crushing a flower, the memory of the night before stomped on her mind. The darkness, the needle on the stereo stuck in a groove, she face down and sweating on her bed, and Eliot above her grinding his cock into her flesh.
A chill went through her and she shuddered, causing the hot water to ripple against the black porcelain of the tub. Her mind foundered and grasped at recollection to pull itself together again, and the first thing it grabbed was the encounter with the groper in the subway that morning. Having her ass and breasts felt by anonymous hands was one of the trivial ambiguities of life in the city. Occasionally she was sidled against by someone either so repulsive or intrusive that she grew angry. Once she made a scene, whirling about and shouting, “Take your hands off me, you creep!” causing the poor man, a portly business type in his fifties to close his eyes and pretend he had disappeared in a puff of smoke. But most mornings it was not unpleasant, all comfy amidst the bodies, the brain not yet fully awake, breakfast digesting in the belly, the lurching of the train providing a compulsory rhythm to which everyone in the cars was forced to dance. Then a whisper of knuckle or a bit of tactile insouciance from a fingertip were all part of the sensual stew. It rarely went further than that, but this morning had been a decided treat, a perfect parody of woman’s magazine fantasy of a perfect experience. He got on at 96th Street, and by the time they reached Times Square he was actually massaging the space between her buttocks while she tensed her muscles ever so slightly in response. His skill was admirable and she never did get to see his face.
That would feel good now, she thought.
She shifted her weight and slid down a few inches further into the water. Waves lapped around her shoulders and throat. Her breasts bobbed lazily. Small tight currents played beneath the surface, making Julia aware of her buttocks and thighs as sentient wholes. She took a deep breath and some complex tension in her diaphragm let go. For the first time all day she came in touch with her body, knowing herself as a body, sensitive, delicate, capable of pleasure. Her usual state was like that of everyone else in the civilization, continually covered, armored. In clothing, in the formal distance of social convention, and in the subtle defenses she maintained against psychic abrasion, all of that stood witness to the fear that had been implanted from earliest infancy on. She had come to feel about presences and glances the way she judged caresses: they were enjoyable and tolerable only if presented with the utmost finesse and awareness of the neurotic personality which guarded the gate to surrender.
That was the one real pleasure of marriage, she thought. At the end of a day there was someone to be naked with.
It had been almost two months since she’d know that kind of relief, the undressing, touching, fingering, licking, and sucking. The relaxation, in short, however momentary, from the relentless aggressive alienation of daily life. Even when her sex life with Martin had become utterly predictable, there was something thrilling about simply being naked with a man, kissing with open mouths and reflex tongues, and then actually doing it. No matter how mundane, it was always fresh. Her hole going wet and grainy, mewling, obscene, as blind as a black orchid sweating in a greenhouse, and the phallic stem stirring the juices with indifferent vigor while the two people attached to the process made sounds, bit and bucked, thrashed about and fell into swoons. There was something sublimely dirty about the thing; it was such a straightforward illicit delight, so ugly and so transcendent.
“It wasn’t wrong, it wasn’t wrong!” she said to herself all at once, thinking of the night before, of her raging need to have a man inside her, of Eliot’s raw strength, and then the phone call, Gall’s worried voice.
Julia roused herself and leaned forward to pull the plug, letting water out of the tub. As it drained, she shivered again, and thought she heard a sound in the next room. The apartment held its breath and peered in upon itself through her consciousness now as alert as that of a mouse in a room with a cat. The silence of inanimate presence pressed against the noisy consciousness of animal life. Julia shook her head. It was nothing, only her imagination or a stray noise from the street. The only actual sound now was that of the tiny whirlpool doing its dance of dissolution into the copper drain. Julia sat motionless, spectator and actress on the stage of her life. Martin’s absence had become palpable for a moment, and for a few seconds she feared breaking down into tears and self-pity. She was alone, a lively corpse taking a bath. And all the manifest universe, for that instant, served as little more than scrollwork around the mirror of self-absorption.