Memoirs of a beatnik Read online

  I remembered that a young sailor had suddenly sat down beside me in the booth. He was all eyes for Susan. He had been drinking and was very sad. Had we ever been, he wanted to know, to Springfield, Illinois? We had never been out of New York City, except for our brief escapades at college, and Springfield could have been the moon. We told him no. He told us how he had been in love with Peggy Lee all through high school. How he had cried when he discovered she was on junk-heroin, he called it. He nearly cried again, telling us about it. Strawberry blonde hair and pink, too-chubby cheeks. Milk-fed and dumb and on his way to Korea. We were all three playing kneesies casually under the table when Stevie Martini came by and asked Susan to dance. She got up immediately and I was left with Mr. Middle West.

  He looked after Susan sadly. "She likes girls," he announced profoundly, half to himself. Then he turned to me and repeated, "She likes girls." I said nothing about it, having nothing to say.

  "Do you like girls?" he asked, trying to look deep into my eyes without falling over.

  "Sometimes," I answered him.

  "I like girls," he informed me drunkenly, leaning across the table. You could see he was ready to have his heart broken again, the way Peggy Lee had broken it. Then he brightened. "Let's go find three girls." He lurched to his feet and headed toward the men's room.

  12

  February Continued

  Frankie, an Italian racketeer of about thirty, checked in for a minute. "Honey," he said, with his thick New York accent, "is dat guy bothering you? Should I get ridda him?"

  "It's OK, Frankie," I told him. "I think I can handle him OK."

  Frankie went back to his post of hooker-watching. He had two little girls working for him, and one of them was currently on the dance floor. I looked after him, grateful as always for his gruff solicitude—sort of like having an extra-tough big brother.

  Dreamily now, I remembered the night we had met Frankie, Susan and I. We had been walking through the Village, not exactly sure where we wanted to be, or how to get there, when he loomed in front of us, ferret face, straight black hair, and peg pants, studying us with shrewd, heroin-glazed eyes. "Don't be embarrassed, and don't be afraid," he had pronounced slowly, as if the words had some profound, cosmic meaning, as if they were some kind of oracle. "Don't be embarrassed and don't be afraid," he had repeated, blocking our path. When he told us to come with him, we had followed him without question, and he had led us to this bar which had become haven and home to us.

  Susan had just sat down again when the younger of the two boys I had been watching in the doorway—Robin, I remembered—appeared suddenly at our table and spoke to me.

  "My friend wants to talk to you. He asked me to ask you to come outside."

  I wasn't sure whether I liked or disliked the mixture of egotism and shyness that sent this message—was it a request or an order?—into my dark, warm world. The young man standing before me was full of light. I recalled the austere beauty of his friend-the dark Tartar eyes and the narrow face-and I stood up to leave.

  "I'll see you," I said to Susan. "You'll be OK?"

  She took a drag on her cigarette with practiced, seventeen-year-old toughness. "I'm fine," she said. "You go ahead."

  I had a few misgivings, but I squelched them. Turned back for a moment at the archway, to see Robin sitting in my seat talking to Susan, holding both her hands in his. I pushed my way through the crowd at the bar, opened the door, and stepped into the cool, fresh night air.

  February Continued

  Wind, a sprinkling of rain. And a young man who looked like a mischievous pirate waiting for me at the bottom of a flight of wrought-iron steps.

  All he said was "Hi" as he took my hand and slipped it inside his jacket pocket with his own, but his face showed relief and delight, and I was glad I hadn't quibbled over protocol. We walked through the streets and alleys in silence at first, the wet grime of the city covering our feet in their sandals. Cobblestones underfoot, slippy and slidy. Alleys with dark loading platforms, where we stopped occasionally to kiss. Foolish jokes and giddy talk, which sparkled like the rain. And in one place, a coffin standing simply, grimly, on the sidewalk outside a tenement, urging us home to warmth and love. If we had needed any urging.

  We had made it up the one flight of stairs in the clean, well-painted hallway, and into the strange yellow and black apartment I was lying in now. Good, warming brandy, and Ivan slipped off my sandals and washed the city grime off my feet and his own with a hot towel. Slipped off my clothes with an awkwardness that made me trust him. Only slightly more sure of himself than I was, as I undid belt and buttons, uncovering that slim, olive-skinned body. My own whiteness gleamed in the light of that big candle, and the twenty-odd smaller candles placed here and there about the room.

  The brandy set the lights to spinning around me. The brandy and his touch on my breasts. His mouth on mine as he undid my hair. I was kneeling on the straw rug, his cock in my mouth. My mouth was exploring the long smooth lines of his legs. The point of my tongue was tickling his balls, my hair fell over his feet as I nipped and fondled his ankles. He lay on the straw mat with me; we somehow got onto the bed. The world was a carousel, an amusement park full of spinning lights and loving noises. I had forgotten human speech, it stuck in my throat. I had forgotten the name of the man whose hand was in my cunt. I tugged at the hand. "Take off your ring," I said hoarsely. My voice came from Saturn and floated into the room.

  He was on me now, bucking and straining like an animal. A faun. But it was too much. My small tight cunt couldn't take in his huge cock. His urgency, demanding, threw me off. I struggled against it. He buried his face in my hair. "Lie still," he said in my ear. "Lie still and listen to the rain."

  February Continued

  I went limp, I floated in a soft, grey mist. The room dissolved, had the candles gone out? I saw nothing. His long beautiful hands under my buttocks drew me closer to him. I embraced him with my thighs, locked my ankles around his back. I knew I was drowning, I could taste the sea. I could hear my own voice crying out as he pierced the membrane that protected my virginity, but I was unaware that I had spoken. The grey mist exploded in light and color around me. I could hear myself moaning, I could hear Ivan gasp. Over and over again he whispered my name, and then there was nothing left but pleasure I had never imagined surging through me in wave after wave.

  Afterward there was blood on his cock, and when I could move again I licked it off, swallowing my childhood, entering the world of the living.

  February Continued

  February Concluded

  "Hey," I said gently, "hey." I touched the side of his face with my hand. I slid my hand under his neck and drew him closer to me. I kissed him again, longer and more thoroughly, showing him how, a hundred hows he had forgotten, or never known.

  His hand slipped under the sheet and examined my breast shyly. Then drew away and slid over my ribs, down my back. Played for a long time with my buttocks, really liked them. Their smoothness. Traced curves from hip to navel, then back again, searching gently the dark crease between the two mounds of my ass. He drew his hand away, sticky with half-dried come that had flowed there from my morning of lovemaking. He threw the sheet back and made marks on my hips with the wetness. Ivan's wetness, I could feel him thinking. I said nothing, but I had a thousand questions in my head.

  Robin bent his head to my bared body, and took one of my breasts into his mouth. Deliberately. Trying it out. I curled my fingers in his hair, pressing him to me, half in pleasure, half in a vague attempt to comfort him for I knew not what.

  As I held him so, I thought of the many strange, half-finished scenes I had found myself in during the past two years, since I had first allowed myself to be picked up at the age of fifteen on the way home from a modern dance class. Many were the experiments I had engaged in and abruptly stopped, many the love scenes I had witnessed or aided, but I had always been put off by the blase, professional quality of my partners, and had not been willing to "go all
the way" till last night, when Ivan's beauty and awkwardness had completely won me over. All odds and ends of sexual skill which my seventeen-year-old self had accumulated, and which last night had been completely blasted out of my grasp by the intensity of our coming together, now returned, demanding to be tried and tested. This boy, more frightened and hungry than I had ever been, called them out of me.

  It was strange to feel his clothing against me, buttons pressed into my belly and groin. I longed to undress him, to see his white, almost hairless torso, but I didn't know what he wanted, how much or how little, and somehow hesitated for fear I might frighten him off. This was, I reflected, a little sleepily, his shot. My fingers stroked the nape of his neck and under his collar. He withdrew his

  February Concluded

  lips from my nipple and, cupping both my breasts in his hands, buried his head between them, slowly working his way down the length of my torso.

  I could feel the zipper of his pants scratch my thigh, his hard cock under it. He began to lick my stomach, the hair of my pussy, stiff with my come and Ivan's, deliberately, hungrily, tasting and devouring, pausing to sniff and smell at my thighs. He parted my buttocks slightly and licked at the come that was caught in the hair there, drawing all my hairs through his lips till they became soft again and curling. Then he began to lick the bud of my clitoris, first taking from it, too, the dried juices of my earlier lovemaking, and then finally paying attention to it for its own sake, caught up at last in the^ict he was engaged in.

  His brusque tentativeness and my own sleepiness cut through defences I didn't know I still had, and, as he tongued my pink bud, I thrashed and moaned above him, throwing my hands above my head and clutching the top edge of the mattress while my body arched and shivered.

  At last he moved slightly and brought his mouth against the lips of my cunt, gently parting them with his tongue, and sucking long and deep of the juices gathered inside me. Ivan's come, I again sensed him thinking. I could feel his mounting excitement in his hands as, all unconscious, they raked my sides, leaving the marks of his nails in my flanks. His tongue felt warm and curiously comfortable against the slightly sore skin of my cunt as he stroked first one wall and then the other. My excitement, which had abated slightly when his tongue left my clitoris, began to mount again and, as his straining tongue passed deeper into my opening, I began to jerk and leap, grasping his head tightly between my thighs while I let flow into his mouth the juices of my reawakened pleasure.

  I lay still for some time, waiting for the soft shivering in my skin to stop, feeling the waves of chill that left my skin in goosebumps and my nipples hard and high, the drawing, subtle sweetness in my groin, while my fingers played idly in Robin's soft brown hair. The quality of this experience was completely different from anything that I had felt with Ivan-this time I had remained fully conscious and release had been gentle and prolonged. I wondered abstractly whether that would qualify as an orgasm, having been trained by

  February Concluded

  Wilhelm Reich to think in terms of the graphs in his illegal books, with their clear and well-drawn peaks. I was not yet acquainted with the infinite gradations and subtleties of pleasure. I gave it up, and withdrew into the misty sleepiness and vague music in my head.

  At last Robin raised his head and looked at me, full of the light I had longed to turn on in him. "You are a veil," he said, "through which we make love to each other."

  I did not ask how or who, I had already read his love for Ivan, and as I drew him up toward me with small urgent movements of my hands, I wondered merely if it was unfulfilled. If they were making it or not. So many questions.

  I didn't ask-the game was Cool, remember—but made as if to coax him gently to me, till his eyes were level with mine. We lay for a long time wordless, looking across the pillow at each other, my arm under his neck, my hand fondling his shoulder through the stuff of his shirt. After a while, by some slight sign, some imperceptible change in his breathing, I realized that his own desire was mounting. My free hand found his fly and, looking him lovingly in the eyes, I released his hard cock—smaller than Ivan's, but still the strong developed member of a man. It gave the lie to the angelic, childlike quality of his face and figure. I slid my hand in through the opening in his shorts and felt of his full balls, stroking and smoothing the wrinkled skin gently, and then drawing my fingers over the full length of his prick with the lightest of all possible touches, gentling him as I would a wild creature I wished to tame. Over and over I drew my hand down the length of his cock, as it became longer and began to buck in my grasp.

  Robin moaned. His eyes were shut, and his head, thrown back, showed his long, beautiful neck and the slight protuberance of his Adam's apple. I was spent, totally satisfied, and therefore fully in control of the situation. I moved my head deliberately across the pillow and sank my teeth into that white neck just above the collarbone, sucking and tonguing the place I had chosen. OK, I thought, I am vampire and you are my chosen victim, and I will drink your blood till you lie pale and still. Pleasure stirred in me again as I toyed with this fantasy, and my hand continued to fondle his balls. His moan turned into a gasp of anguish and pleasure, and

  February Concluded

  just as suddenly as I had begun I withdrew my mouth from his neck and my hand from his cock. I had decided to undress him.

  A sound half hiss, half whimper escaped from between his teeth. "Please, don't stop now," he pleaded, and he drew my hand back to his organs. But I pulled away and continued to work on his shirt till I opened it, exposing his white, almost hairless chest—pale, paler than I was, but without the unholy magic of Ivan's sallow flesh. I set my teeth into the flesh of his right breast, just above the nipple, and left a small half-circle of purple tooth marks there, while my fingers undid his belt and tugged at his trousers.

  He raised his hips passively, and I drew his pants down over them and left them tangled about his thighs as I went back to stroking and pulling his cock, finally closing my fingers around it and moving my hand faster and faster while his body bucked and trembled. My other arm had by now slipped down around his waist and, as I felt him near a climax, I slipped the middle finger of that hand into his tight, dry asshole. With an exquisite, bewildered child-cry of mingled agony and pleasure, he came. I watched spurt after spurt of the hot, silver gism fall across my stomach and form a web on my pubic hair.

  It was some time before his gasping and shuddering had stopped, and we both floated for a while in a haze of satisfaction and peace that was very like napping in the afternoon light.

  I was the first to recover. I raised myself on one elbow and looked at him for a long time, toying with the idea of getting up, of more coffee, wondering what the outside world felt like, was it cold or not? The young man lay there with his eyes peacefully shut, his rumpled clothes still clinging to, and concealing, most of him. Suddenly, the aggressiveness I had felt when I thrust my finger into his asshole and felt his hot come on my groin rose in me again. I wanted to set his body trembling under my hands, to play it like an instrument. I was keenly aware of the absurdity of its half-clothed state, which roused me still more.

  I slid down in the bed and began to undo his shoes, slipping them off so that they fell softly to the floor. I slipped my fingers under his socks and played with the backs of his ankles-smooth and wondrously thin. I stripped off black nylon socks and took one extraordinarily white foot in my hands, feeling the smooth skin of instep, massaging it lightly with strong fingers before I bent and

  February Concluded

  drew my tongue along the ridge of the arch. Robin was not fully awake, and when I reached up to pull off his trousers he did not protest, but helped me by raising himself slightly on the bed. The hair on his legs was fine and calves supple and elongated like a dancer's. I traced their lines with my fingers, following along the hollows they made, raising the soft hair like fur and then smoothing it down again. I felt thoughtful, impersonal, as if I were making love in the abstract.<
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  The past day and night were blurred into one long flesh experience. I felt it had gone on eternally. I was weary, removed, light-headed, but still infinitely curious.

  I dropped the trousers on the floor beside the shoes and socks, and turned my attention to removing his shirt. He raised himself slightly and slipped out of it himself, flipping over in bed as he did so, with a gesture half shy, half coy, so that he lay face down, his head buried in the pillow. I knelt on the mattress, sitting back on my heels, and began to play the tips of my fingers over the smooth skin of his back and ass, watching the gooseflesh rise beneath my touch while he lay immobile.

  I traced every inch of back and side and flank with a touch as light as butterfly wings, slowly, deliberately. I gradually let my touch get rougher, till I was scraping the pale surface of his body with my fingernails, rousing and irritating every inch of his skin. Robin began to stir with pleasure, raising himself under my hands, purring like a cat. I played a long time with the nape of his neck, alternately smoothing and scratching it. At last I brought my mouth into play, leaving a series of marks down the back of his neck and his spine, then tonguing and licking all of his back. A trail of wetness, like the path of a snail, grew and curved over his skin, already marked with the long red parallel paths of my fingernails.

  I passed my lips lightly over his hairless hips, placing the side of one of my hands in the dark crease between his buttocks, as my mouth moved on down over the backs of his thighs and lingered for a long time at the skin at the back of his knees, while a weird sorry tenderness overtook me. He raised his ass against the side of my hand, so that it penetrated more deeply into that dark, hairy crease, and, as I realized where the focus of his pleasure lay, I turned my attention more fully to it, parting the two mounds of his buttocks till I found his small, round asshole.