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Category: Erotica
Description: Marco Vassi was possibly the greatest erotic writer of his generation. His first publisher at Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, compares his talent for prose to Henry Miller's writing. His sexual explorations and literary talent are the foundations of nine novels written between 1970 and 1976. Although his life was cut short, his memory lives on with the release of The Vassi Collection. The collection includes nine fiction titles and his autobiographical memoir, THE STONED APOCALYPSE, which follows his sexual liberation while on a trip he took in the sixties. Join Vassi in his exploration of the human sexual and spiritual experience.
eBook Publisher: E-Reads/E-Reads, 1993
E-Reads Store Release Date: September 2009

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [235 KB], ePub (EPUB) [238 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [205 KB], Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [915 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [238 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [232 KB], Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [255 KB], hiebook (KML) [503 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [283 KB], iSilo (PDB) [195 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [243 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [304 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [332 KB]
Words: 71806
Reading time: 205-287 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

One

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.

Rousing herself from the posture of fixation, she put the plug back in and turned the spigot to let more hot water into the pool that had become her life raft. She was tripping freely, the push given by the marijuana continuing to swing her loose from the moorings of any fixed viewpoint, so that considerations about her job, memories of her husband, and the tingling recall of the morning's groper could not claim her attention for more than a brief cycle of development. She let the water run until the bath was almost scalding, turning her skin pink. In the rising steam, she saw Gail's face.

Gail was her oldest New York friend, and Eliot's lover for more than a year. Their relationship had quickly assumed that cinematic intimacy which marks closeness in our time, a way of being together which combines conversation about the most intimate matters with a brassiness of style, resulting in a tinny authenticity. Gail was coming over for drinks at eight and Julia was going to have to tell her what had happened or not tell her, two equally unpleasant possibilities.

"I can't deal with that now," she said to herself, and closed her eyes and slid back into the water, letting the heat take her away, away from all linear thought and concern for three-dimensional realities. She drifted gently, by degrees, into a soothing trance. Her senses disconnected from the associative centers of her brain. She still saw and heard and felt, but none of it registered, none of it meant. Her state went beyond even pleasure, for experience itself would have been too active, too brutal a process.

Thus, when a deep and familiar throbbing began in her belly, it carried no more import than the faint sound of traffic from ten stories below. And when the movement infiltrated her loins and crept past the walls of her cunt, slithering inside like guerrillas taking command of a forest while remaining invisible to the enemy army, she did not stir. Only a fantasy formed in her mind and she rose from her oceanic oblivion at random moments to watch the screen, much as a couple might catch glimpses of a movie between prolonged spasms of necking.

It was an astral masturbation, and its manifestations reached with measured slowness toward the physical. At first, her body made no gross movements at all. Her hand did not ease between her thighs nor did her fingers slide into folded moist places. Even at her most frustrated, Julia rarely masturbated, for she found erotic tension much too interesting to discharge in a bit of theatrics which had no audience. She knew that the modern liberated woman was supposed to masturbate and to find ideal pleasure, even identity, in the act, but Julia had always considered it a petty satisfaction, bereft of imagination, humor, and conversation. One had to be stupid to masturbate, she thought, unless it were done with someone else there. Her last attempt, two years earlier, had ended when, at the point of orgasm, she opened her eyes and saw herself reflected in the mirror which backed a closet door next to the bed. She looked like an arthritic acrobat trying to do a backbend as she pumped her hips spastically at the ceiling while rubbing her clitoris vigorously with the middle finger of her left hand. The grotesque visual once and for all imprinted its message of silliness on the act and two subsequent attempts had never got past the squirming stage. Of course, Martin's almost daily assault left little energy for languor, and so the whole issue had faded out of awareness. But now her two months without sex made more keen by the morning's groper and the previous night's appetizer with Eliot inclined her toward perceiving the value of something she had been too ready to dismiss.

She became formless, pure breath, and her subconscious perked like coffee on a hot stove. A boy, who had pulled her panties down when she was six and put his finger as far inside her as anatomy and bravery would allow. Sitting on her grandfather's lap eating an apple and feeling a hot tingling in her bottom. Her father glancing at her one night as she passed him in the hallway on the way to the bathroom; she was wearing a gauzy nightgown and nothing underneath, and when his eyes locked on her breasts her stomach clenched. The professor of anthropology who had been the first to take her anally, and then had free-associated in her ear throughout the entire time so that she had trouble paying attention to what went on between her buttocks. The first time she tasted sperm, sucking Martin a month after they had been married and suddenly seized by the hunger to have him fill her mouth.

And then even the images disappeared and she became pure physiology, a smorgasbord of functions. Heartbeat, circulation, vegetative pulses, plasmatic oozings, neurological twitchings. From the depths of inwardness a spark of pure erotic awareness was struck and a flame begun. In the region of her chest, in the vital center near the heart, a fire started to burn. It was sexual and spiritual both, and yet neither, for it was at the source of all manifestation, the source from which all levels of creation spring. She felt an intimation of reality itself, void, resplendent, having come upon her unexpectedly, unbidden, and during a period of bathtub catatonia. Yet Julia could not identify the state, for all her education had trained her to view that thing commonly called God as a mythic figure or an abstract concept. All she now knew was that her whole body had become a single yearning, a scorching poignancy, a cry for return. The heat in her body and the heat around her body, the divine flame and the prosaic hot water, were one and the same, and had the momentary dissolution of ego state been other than the result of a temporary conflux of circumstances, she might have sipped longer at the sweet satori.

But her focus snapped back with the harsh abruptness of a door's being opened into a dark bedroom and glaring white light's falling upon half-closed eyes. Julia sat up in the tub, lifting gallons of water with her, like a ghost trailing mists as it rises from the grave. For a few seconds she was in a blind panic. Shreds of thoughts flapped through her mind like demented bats, her skin screeched its protest at the sudden contact with the air, her heart thudded like loose baggage banging against the hull of a heaving ship in a storm. The room seemed to spin wildly about and for a moment she was certain she would faint. The fear of splashing back into the water, sliding down, her mouth and nostrils filling up, a sputter and a gasp, and then the harsh drowning, filled her all the way into their fingertips and caused her to grasp the sides of the tub. She held on for a full minute until she had regained her inner balance and began to calm down.

"That's pretty strong grass," she said out loud, happy to hear her voice.

She reached forward and pulled out the plug again, then sat hunched over, her breasts against her thighs, her arms around her shins, until the tub was completely empty. For a long while she could not move, and it took no little effort to stand up, draw the curtain, and start the shower running. She soaped herself vigorously but when she came to washing between her legs she was surprised to notice the secretions that had oozed from her cunt. She parted the lips and a brief flow of viscous fluid, pearly white, seeped from the pink petals and edged toward her thigh, to be stormed upon and swept away in a turbulent stream of water. She caressed her clitoris experimentally and her knees wobbled. She had built a charge of erotic energy far more powerful than she had been aware of.

Suddenly she wanted to be lying on a rug, her back lacerated by bristly animal hair, her legs hung wide, while a strong man moved with inexorable slowness and majesty into her, screwing her to the floor and soaring with her off the edges of brilliant precipices.

"Fat chance," she muttered as she stepped out of the tub and stood drying herself in front of the full length mirror, viewing herself with exaggerated scrutiny, wondering by what alchemy she might become a seething volcano of lust erupting to the beat of a man's steady want. Once again she was troubled by the notion that an itching in her crotch could, amplified and ramified, transform her into a pornographic movie.

She stepped out of the bathroom and into the apartment proper, originally three medium-sized rooms that had been converted into a single space by tearing the inside walls down. It had seemed a good idea when they moved in, flushed as they were with togetherness and the prospect of more spacious living. The total lack of privacy had, however, over time, proved deadly, and they reached that point, known by so many couples, where the mere presence of the other felt like sand in the eye.

But with Martin gone, the place was quite impressive and more than adequate. Sixty feet long by twenty-five feet wide, with windows on three sides. It was on the tenth floor of a turn-of-the-century building in Washington Heights. The views were of the entire lower two-thirds of the island of Manhattan with its spires and smog, of the Hudson River and the Jersey miasma behind it, and of the George Washington Bridge, path to the open spaces to the north and west. When the sky was clear, the sun set right through the four main windows, as it was now doing, turning everything golden. Julia stood there for several minutes, transfixed.

It's worth it, she thought, the loneliness, the insecurity, even the randiness. All of it is worth it just to have this solitude.

She gazed over the expanse of the apartment, its uneventful features and sparse furnishings made magical by the extraordinary light. From the kitchen against the far wall to the bed and bureau against the other, with the middle space filled with floor pillows, some chairs, a television, stereo and odd pieces, the place had the air of a stage set on which a bit of off-Broadway theatre was about to be enacted.

Julia glanced at the clock. It was six-forty. Gail was due in an hour and twenty minutes. Julia went to the clothes closet, picked out a semi-transparent nightgown and shrugged into it. Then she fixed herself a vodka and tonic and sat down to try to figure out what she would tell her friend.