Miraculously they stopped, got up, and stood away from the bed. "Michael is tired of cock," said Tocco. "Let's give him some more cunt." To my own surprise, I found myself yelling "No" to the very thing I had spent my life pursuing. But the girls came over and clambered onto the bed. "Give him some poppers," said Tocco in an oily voice. The inhalator was thrust into my nostril. It was a tribute to my state of exhaustion that I barely felt any effect.
Then I was smothered in cunt. Two of the girls climbed up and sat facing each other, their cunts touching and both over my mouth. But by this time what had been a sensual musky smell had become rancid. I felt myself gag, as both cunts and assholes jockeyed to press into my mouth. The other two went to work on my cock, which was almost without sensation but, incredibly, hard. They rode on me for what seemed an eternity, changing positions so that cunt after cunt impaled itself on my cock and then joined the line which came to force itself between my lips. They kept putting inhalators in my nostrils until I began coughing and came close to passing out. Then the boys joined in and once again I was awash in flesh, but this time they tore at me savagely, biting me all over, thrusting into my ass and mouth, spitting, pinching. At one point a finger went deep inside me and began massaging the prostate again; I screamed in agony, but there was no relief. The finger kept working until I felt a searing jolt of pain and the sperm ran out once more and dribbled into my pubic hair.
To my horror, I began to sob. I felt like a piece of rotten meat with ants crawling over it. I stank with dried secretions, and every inch of my flesh ached. The cocks and cunts which had seemed so beautiful were now ugly, hurtful things, hateful and disgusting. I knew I could bear no more, when a warm wet sensation around my lips convinced me otherwise. They were kneeling around me, squatting on me, and from their sex, thick streams of urine splashed on my body.
They finished, and wiped their cocks and cunts on my mouth and chest. And then Tocco leaned over, his mouth filled with bits of cheese and onions and hard-boiled eggs, and pressing his lips to mine, forced his tongue into my mouth. I gagged and retched. "What's the matter, Michael?" he asked, "don't you want a little kiss?"
He stepped back and clapped his hands. The door opened, and suddenly the room filled with dozens of naked people, old and young, beautiful and brutal. They filled the floors and walls. They began to perform obscene dances, shouting a stream of disgusting suggestions. They exposed their cunts and cocks and asses. They licked the air with their tongues.
My mind reeled, and I fled to the edge of a precipice where sex would never seem good again, where it would be permanently burned into my brain as something hideous. Tocco's voice boomed out, "Here it is, Michael. The human body. The human farce. Do you want to get laid? Take any number of them you want, any sex, any size." He leaned forward and slashed my bands loose with a razor. "Sexual paradise on earth," he roared. "It's all yours!"
Part of me realized that this entire scene was just another lesson, and that I had to remain objective. But I was overcome by the ugliness that had been perpetrated. The sexual apparatus and the sexual act suddenly seemed a mindless groaning and slavering, a stupid sucking and licking, an endless thrusting and struggle. A war. The war between the sexes and among the sexes. There was nothing but slimy secretion and sheer idiocy. It all welled up in me, the fatigue and disgust and emptiness, and right in the middle of the academy, I threw up on the bed.
A rough hand grabbed my neck and thrust my face into the vomit. "Lick it up," said Tocco's voice. I retched. "Lick it!" I gagged. "No!" I said, "You can kill me. I won't do that. I won't." The hand rubbed my face back and forth in the vomit several times and let me fall.
As I lay there, covered with sperm and cunt juice and urine and vomit, sick at heart and confused in mind, Tocco's voice drifted down! "The next time you feel like a
man
, and want to rape a young girl to show her how sterling you are, or the next time you lie in a woman's arms and compliment yourself on what a great lover you are, remember this. Spent, puking, fucked out."
"I wouldn't eat the vomit," I sobbed. "I wouldn't eat it!"
There was a long pause. Tocco spoke slowly and reflectively. "That's true. That's something. It's a very small thing to go on, but at least there's something to build a foundation. Now go clean up, and don't let me see you for a few days. Big man."
I opened my eyes and found myself staring into Susan's eyes. Her face screwed up in utter disdain, and she coolly and calmly spit right into my face. And then turned and walked out of the room.
Suddenly everyone released me, and I fell back. I waited for what would happen next, but there was silence, and when I looked, everyone was filing out. In a moment, the room was empty. And I sat, in the deepest and fullest despair I have ever known in my life, robbed of the one thing that had remained the single passion that made living worthwhile. Tocco had destroyed sex, and there seemed nothing left.
TWELVE
IT TOOK ME a very long time to leave the room. All the spirit had drained out of me, and there was absolutely nothing I wanted to do. Or, to be more accurate, there was no one I wanted to see. It seemed that I had fallen into a very deep pit, and there was no way out. The present was intolerable, and yet I could not find anything in the past to cheer me, and the future stretched before me like a great bleak highway leading nowhere.
I was beyond all emotions such as self-pity or even despair. There was simply emptiness and I knew fully that no one could fill the void in myself but myself. I realized now that all my contacts with people in the past had had a sexual undertone to them, that no matter whether I was on the make or not, the thing that brought people alive was the sexual energy which ran through them. It didn't matter whether they were young or old, thin or fat. They had potential for ecstasy, and it was to that potential that I addressed myself. In my less ego-infested moments, I seemed to be able to bring out the sexiness in everyone, and so brighten the lives of people who had forgotten what profundity lay very close to them, right between their own legs. When I was on ego trips, of course, I played sexual guru, a role I blushed to think about now that I had seen a real guru in action.
I wondered whether I should ever find the spark again, and even in the wondering, I realized that at that moment I didn't care. I was beaten to the core.
Finally I dragged myself off the bed and stumbled to my room. I went to the bathroom and took a long look at myself in the mirror. The face that stared back seemed scarred and devoid of life. For a long time I peered at myself, and decided that I had come to the end of the road. I shook myself to break the spell, and began the painful business of peeling the bandages off. I looked down and examined my body, covered with caked urine and scarred by Sylvia's whip. I couldn't believe that this was the same person who, just two weeks ago, had bounded into the brownstone with such arrogance and optimism.
I showered, flinching as the soap bit into the cuts, shampooed my hair, and shaved. There was something marvellously therapeutic in washing off the day's accumulation, as though I were ridding myself of all the harm that had collected during the experience. Clean, I rubbed oil over my entire body, and when it had been absorbed by my skin, I put on a pair of clean pajamas, and dove between the sheets of the soft double bed to sink immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.
For a week I kept pretty much to myself. It was out of no special motivation, just that I had no real interest in saying anything. My mind was beautifully clear of thoughts, and the weather and the scenery combined to restore a certain glow of health. If nothing else, I needed to come down from the heavy drug scene that had been part of the sex encounters. I walked in the woods, carefully staying away from the stream, and spent hours watching clouds sail by. In a very passive way, I was not unhappy.
But, by the middle of the second week, I felt a change. It was, at first, no more than a quickening, a gathering of pulse. I noticed that I looked at things more sharply, and I didn't avoid other people as much. And when, after dinner one night, I caught myself looking at Joan's ass as she walked past, I realized that the sexual juices were running again. The fact brought a quiet joy and a sense of panic. For I couldn't begin to even think about fucking someone without the whole scene of that afternoon spilling into my head.
That night I lay in bed with sleep far away. I was staring at the ceiling, watching the shadows thrown by the candle next to my bed. Absent-mindedly, I reached down and put my fingers around my cock. There was nothing immediately erotic about it, just the general kind of playing around that men do, which has been referred to on occasion as "pocket billiards". One of the things I had always liked about the gay world, was that with the sexual tension gone, I had no need to feel embarrassed about tooling around in the presence of others. The action seemed to be basically a kind of self-reassurance, a putting of one's hand on one's manhood.
This time, as I fingered and stretched my cock, the mildly pleasant sensation very slowly began to change itself into an actual tingling, and for the first time in ten days, I felt the first faint sexual stirrings in my loins. It might have been a cause for rejoicing and getting up to find someone to play with, but a heavy lethargy overcame me, and it was far more enjoyable to just lie there and feel myself.
My cock stirred and then began to swell. I felt its hardening, but as though from afar, and when I grasped it full in my hand there was no conscious intent to do anything.
Gently I began pulling the skin back and forth, and my cock now swelled quickly and in a moment lay fully hard in my hand. I massaged it and rubbed back and forth, feeling the hardness grow even more firm, until it stood like an iron rod filled with juice sensate, and throbbing gently. I moved my hand up and lightly rubbed the head. Pinpoints of flashing sensation ran through it, and I began stroking the entire length of the cock, from base to tip, in easy rhythmic motion. The head grew violet in color and the warm pleasure eddies began to extend into my thighs and belly. I moved my hand faster and then, with a start, realized that I was highly aroused.
I raised up on one elbow and looked down. I saw the fully erect cock twitching with readiness. And yet I had no desire to fuck or be even vaguely involved with anyone else right then. I stared at the member with fresh eyes, as though I had never seen it before. It was a beautiful thing, majestically tapered, veined with blue lines running its entire length, jutting up from a tangle of curly black pubic hair and sloped up to the head, which flared out in a serrated rim, now darkly purple. The head itself, soft and velvety, was superb in its curve and texture, and led to the slightly open mouth of the cock where, miraculously, both sperm and urine flowed. The old Latin phrase came to mind, that we are born between shit and piss, and I wondered at nature's aims in putting the source of our life and the pipeline of elimination in a single functioning member.
It seemed that I had never understood things so clearly, and then I realized that there was not a single fantasy in my head, not one concept or theory to muddle me. There was simply the fact of the thing itself. How many hundreds of times had I stuck that cock into assholes and cunts and mouths, and never really sensed the richness and fullness of the action? Because I had never really seen my cock so simply before.
Suddenly the separation ended, the viewpoint which had me thinking in terms of "me" and "my cock."
Me
was everything about me, my body, my talk, my thoughts, my emotions, my ideas. The cock was not a separate entity, to live its own life irrespective of what the rest of me needed and wanted. And yet, for so many years, it was the cock that, like a divining rod, led me to dig into things that I might not have otherwise bothered with. It was both a curse and a blessing, for it simultaneously opened worlds that no other part of me could get into, and for that very reason closed off worlds that other parts of me were starved for.
I lay back again and went inside my body; that is, I felt myself as a single organism, an entity, a unit. And I felt not with just my mind, but with each bit of me, that every part was totally related to every other part, and that as I stroked myself now, it was not my hands doing something to my cock, but hands and cock in a relationship together. And what hands and cock did affected everything else, the rate of my heartbeat and the speed of the blood in my veins and the thoughts in my head and the way my skin felt. I was an entire orchestra, and I had to play in harmony or lose the chance to be a total human being.
I let myself slide into the awareness of my body as my hands and cock continued their dance. The fingers stroked lightly along the bottom of the shaft and twirled around the head. I drew my knees up and felt my head begin to roll from side to side. As the stroking continued, more of me went into motion. My pelvis began a slow undulating beat, thrusting up and back. I felt my face flush and my ears grow hot. I ran my other hand down and it began massaging my stomach, poking into the navel, coming up to pinch the nipples, and then running down again to cup the cheeks of my ass, and finally to run one finger into the asshole.
Now I was moving quickly. Ripples of pleasure sent my legs to trembling, and I felt my spine begin to shoot energy from the coccyx to my neck and back down again. I heard sounds and then realized that it was myself moaning. I began to go into a tailspin, when all the lessons I had learned so far asserted themselves, and I let the growing concentration disperse, in order to allow myself to stay in a state of pure attention, so that I remained conscious of everything else; of where I was, and the shadows on the ceiling, and the fact of Being. At all levels of consciousness, I was awake. And in that state I could see the structure of my mind in perfect clarity, where the fantasies come from, how the thoughts are formed. And seeing all that, I was instantaneously free of it.