Impossible Vacation (15 page)

It was broken by some grasping analytic mind in me that leaped on it like a tiger, ripping and tearing. This beast of analysis leaped upon this precious moment and tore it to bits: “What was that? How do I name that? How do I explain it to Meg or to anyone? How do I tell its story?” And then,
poof
, the Big Mind moment was gone, gone into a new memory, the memory of it blended now with other memories from my past, which blended with the porn films on the wall. I sat there for the next three days longing for what I thought was Big Mind to come again. I felt so very sad; I had looked through a window into a landscape that seemed larger than me, and yet a part of me. I’d experienced it and it might never come again. I felt so very, very sad that I sat there with tears flowing down and dripping onto my perpetual erection which poked up under my Zen robes.

At the end of seven days of silence I was popping to talk. I was bursting at the mouth, and what amazed me was that no one else at the Zendo seemed to have the same need as I did. I came into the men’s dorm room just after we were allowed to speak again and a fellow meditator was making his bed. As soon as I saw him I burst into a vivid description of all I’d seen, felt, and heard over the past six days. He would not even turn from what he was doing. I told him about Big
Mind and the hot-buttered-corn cocks with wings and the butterfly cunts, and he just turned to me very directly and said, “There are things to be done.”

All I wanted to do was talk. It was as though the meditation experience had simply fed more into my storytelling library rather than bringing me the power of insight and value of focused silence.

It was the same driving home. All the people in the car seemed more interested in maintaining the silence they had cultivated than talking about what happened to them there. They just sat there and looked out the window, while I babbled on and on about the butterfly cunts and flying cocks and Big Mind versus small mind. All that silence had made me sad and a little crazy. The silence allowed the great and always present sadness behind words to rise up in me, and I didn’t like it one bit. It covered me like a great gray web. For the rest of the trip I rode in silence thinking about Grandpa Benton, and I realized for the first time that I’d never known him beyond his style of control and order. That upright, uptight pillar of the community. That steady-as-she-goes man. And for one dark moment I wondered if Mom had gotten beyond that in him. Had they ever touched hearts? I wondered.

Meg was happy to see me and I was happy to see her and to be back in our nest again. Our apartment looked completely new and vivid compared to that empty wall I’d been looking at for so long. Well, not exactly empty, but certainly black-and-white. Our apartment seemed to shimmer with light and color. I was immediately struck by another reason I loved Meg so much. She instinctively knew how to make a neat, comfortable little place to get centered in. She could make a home anywhere. This is why she stayed in New York City, I was sure. She had settled in here for better or worse and realized that one place was no different from another once you made your nest in it. I was happy to be home in a place with colors, shapes, and forms and lots of small mind. It was as though now that Meg had given up doing her charcoal drawing, she had put her creativity into making the apartment perfect, like a work of art we could live in with our cat, Phil.

In a nonstop gush I told Meg all that had happened at the Zendo over the past seven days. She listened with rapt attention. She smiled, she laughed, and at times she laughed so hard I thought that, like Mom,
she would wet her pants. I could tell she was happy to have her old storyteller back, and for a while I was happy to be telling stories, to be opening and pouring beers again after not having one for so long. And that old welcome fuzzy feeling returned, that beery fuzz that clouded all thoughts of mortality and creeping time.

B
EFORE I WENT
to the Zendo it had never occurred to me to pay money to see people have sex. It had never occurred to me to go to a porn film, although they were beginning to be more and more popular at the time.
Deep Throat
was the rage, and
Behind the Green Door
—things like that. I simply wasn’t interested. But now that I was out of work, I was back on the streets walking again, and I found that I had become obsessed with women’s bodies. Most specifically, I was focused on asses, particularly asses that filled out faded jeans. I could follow a dungaree ass for blocks and blocks until I’d find myself lost in neighborhoods I’d never seen before. Then the dungaree ass would disappear into a doorway and I’d just stand there totally frustrated, looking for another dungaree ass to follow out of that neighborhood to another one.

This was a major change in my life. I’d never experienced anything like this before, never; and I wasn’t sure if it was a sign that I was becoming a man or if it was a symptom of some sort of growing obsessive-compulsive condition.

When I first moved to New York City in 1967 I had spent some time with a friend who had lived in the city for a long time. I considered him a pretty normal, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. By that I mean he was married and watched a lot of baseball on TV. He drank a few beers when he watched it. The rest of the time, when he wasn’t working as an actor, or wasn’t with his wife, or watching a ball game on TV, he was girl watching. It was impossible to take a walk with him without him stopping every few feet to ooh and aah and ogle some new woman. “Oh, my fuckin’ word, look at that piece,” he’d say. And here I’d been trying to talk to him about philosophical
issues, the meaninglessness of life, the shortness of time. It never occurred to me to ogle women on the street. I don’t mean I was ignoring them or not noticing them so much as I was just taking them in as a part of the whole picture, along with men, children, trees, dogs, cars, and buildings; I rarely selected a fragment to fetishize in those days. And now I found myself in that boat, and I had no idea how I got into it, how to get out of it, or if I even wanted out. I was just walking around like a dog with his tongue hanging out. That was the way of the world for me then, and I tried not to judge it. I tried to be open.

Asses led to more asses. I’d follow them anywhere. I felt biologically determined, like those cocks on the wall, the way they flew from cunt to cunt like bees flying from flower to flower. I was a walking penis with no mind. I would spy a young woman in dungarees on the subway and just lock onto her rear with my eyes. When she’d get off the subway at her stop, I would get off and follow her. I would follow that ass again until some door slammed in my face, leaving me standing there on the street looking for another one. Eventually I would find an ass that would lead me home to Meg.

Soon it was not enough to see the asses clad in dungarees; I had to see them naked. Yes, nude. I had to see the way they were put together, the way they shook. I had to feel them. I was too shy, too embarrassed, too considerate really, to just stop women and ask them if they would, you know, take me inside and pull down their pants. Instead I discovered pornographic movies. I was not interested in the plot; I was interested only in the bare asses. I was just interested in seeing women naked. And as many as I possibly could see; so I’d go to the cheap porn films. I’d go to a theater on Eighth Avenue. It was called Eros II, and you could see four or five porn movies in the afternoon for a dollar ninety-nine.

Like any drug, it decreased in its effect over time. At first I was instantly mesmerized and turned on by the sight of all those naked bodies doing all those crazy naked things. I would just stand there in the aisle of the theater with my mouth hanging open and my eyes glazed and transfixed. This hypnotic condition was not unfamiliar to me. I had read about it in
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
. The book instructs that as you die and leave your body, you must keep your eyes
on the clear white light and must not look away, lest you see the image of a copulating couple and get drawn back, sucked back into the womb, trapped and reborn in yet another life. But I could not understand how a clear white light could be more attractive than an open womb.

After my eyes adjusted to the movie theater and to those naked strangers doing it on a twenty-foot screen, I’d try to find a seat down front and away from everyone else. I preferred not to have other people’s heads in front of me, so that I could imagine it was all being shown just for me, not for the obsessive-compulsive businessmen on lunch breaks and bums and street people catching up on their sleep. I didn’t want to see them and I didn’t want to be seen.

I was more than a little nervous about sitting down in the theater because I was sure that the businessmen were always slowly and silently working themselves off under their coats. As for me, I never masturbated in a porn theater. In fact I rarely even got an erection. I was all in my eyes. That’s where the stimulation was going on. I was in my eyes, memorizing the images that I was seeing so that I could replay them while I was having sex with Meg. It may have been lack of imagination on my part, a need to collect other people’s erotic images.

Meg had no idea why I’d come in off the streets of New York so horny, but she didn’t question it. She had an absolutely fantastic ass, and she would leave her boots on for me. That was the only thing she didn’t take off, her brown Italian boots, her high boots with the zippers on the side.

I’d never seen that in a movie. I saw this: Mother addressing daughter, “Gloria, your new flute teacher is just about to arrive. I’m going out for lunch with friends, then I’m going bowling, then I’m going shopping, and I won’t, and I mean will
not
, be back for hours and hours and hours, so don’t you get into any trouble, Gloria. You hear me? Don’t you get into any trouble while I’m gone. You have a nice flute lesson, you hear? Give me a kiss now. Goodbye, dear.” Mother exits; flute teacher arrives; then, “Hi, Mr. Flute Teacher, blah, blah, blah.” Two or three scales are played on the flute; then, “Let’s fuck.”

After a while it got boring. You know, back shot of an asshole and tight scrotum pumping, pumping, so you got a chance to compare
the size of your balls with his; a side shot of his long flesh shaft going in and out, in and out, accompanied by a generic sound track of moans and groans and a few select words like “Do it to me,” “Oh, it feels so good,” or “Don’t stop now.” Finally, there was the horrible perfunctory cum shot in which the man had to pull out and bring himself off on the woman’s belly, she pretending to love it and rub it into her flesh as though just feeling his warm cum was making her come.

I could not break through. I could not feel it. I could not get to the other side of the screen and be in it—and that’s what I wanted. I wanted to feel what the sex I was seeing was like. I felt lonely, so lonely and outside. When I felt that way I’d flee the theater and try to fill myself with some other more wholesome images, if I could find them. That was rare, so I’d walk all the way home until I was exhausted and then would come on to Meg. I couldn’t believe that all of this, this obsession for porn films, had come from Zen meditation in the Poconos.

Again, I longed for a way out and found it one afternoon at the Eros II. I don’t remember the plot. I’d really given up on plots at that point. What I remember is that extraordinary close-up of a very tanned long-legged woman with a fantastic manipulatable ass. She was being fucked by two very long-donged guys, and I’d never seen anything like that, not even on the walls of the Poconos Zendo. It was like a sexual circus act. She was totally filled up. One cock was all the way up into her ass, just wedged there pumping, and the other was pumping away in the more traditional place, and still to this day I don’t understand how their bodies were arranged, because it was such a close-up, all you were seeing was two pumping cocks and one sucking cunt. I don’t know how they timed it or what the director said to them or what the cue was, but both men pulled out and came at the same time, and the extraordinary thing was that she not only had her period but she also had a very bad case of diarrhea. So as the dicks unplugged from her and shot their white loads, an ocean of menstrual blood and hot brown watery shit mixed with semen gushed with such force that it actually sprayed the lens of the camera and turned the whole thing into an abstract Chinese landscape painting. The audience groaned. The bums woke up and moaned. I’d never seen such a responsive audience. They choked, they gasped, they got up and fled from the theater with
more energy than they ever had coming in. For the first time the place was alive with vibrant energy. I stayed. I was mesmerized. If the smell was there I too would have retched and run. But I’d never seen such a beautiful work of art.

I never went back to the porn films after that. I felt like something inside of me had been completed.