Memoirs of a beatnik (11 page)

The roar of the waves slowly receded, leaving me high and dry on a white beach, in a blinding white light. I opened my eyes and met Luke's slanting green ones, glazed and distant. I watched for a long time while the glint of human consciousness slowly returned to them. His lips moved dimly. "God," he said hoarsely, in his indistinct undertone. "God, I think I love you."

"Hush," I said, "hush," pulling his head against my breast. For to name it was to make it less than it was.

We lay together for a long time without moving again. In vain did the sunshine pour into the sordid little room, insisting that it was day, that this was the dusty, cluttered back room of a Village bookstore, that we were, in fact, two rather young, rather vulnerable human creatures on an uncomfortable army cot. We two were

Summer

one seed form, one kernel, nested in darkness, in hard shell, dark and smooth inside, whose downy exterior cushioned us from sound and motion. We two, one seed form, nestled closed and together in our own germinating warmth till the long fingers of light and wind should find us and coax us hack into being.

"Pre-matter energy," I thought dreamily, thinking of Reich, and realized I had been touched at last, had been truly entered, that there was a dark core of mystery in our coming together that I would never penetrate.

We lay there together as long as we could, at first oblivious to everything but each other, and then later trying not to be moved by the noises of the traffic, the bustle of the outside, the increasingly warm sun that was pouring in through the back window of the shop. We were hungry and we had to go to the bathroom, but every time one of us moved an experimental limb the other would clasp him (or her) tighter and nestle closer.

Finally hunger won the day, and with one quick movement I slid out of Luke's arms, stood up, and made for the refrigerator with its stash of goodies. I put up a pot of coffee, and was just opening the package of frozen potato pancakes, cutting into the brightly colored plastic wrapper with the point of a paring knife, when Luke came up behind me and put his arms around my waist, and I could feel his hard, full cock jabbing at my buttocks. He said nothing, just pulled me close and hard up against him with those lean tense arms of his, and tried to get his cock in between the two mounds of my ass, into my asshole.

I went limp at his touch, melted up against him, fitting my body to his, and when I sensed what he wanted I bent at the waist, leaning over the table to help him get in. But I was too tight, and he drew me away from the table, and the next thing I knew I was lying face down on the floor, spread-eagled with Luke straddling me. He must have reached the cooking oil down from the table, for his hands, covered with oil, were all over my ass and into my asshole. As he lean, powerful fingers entered my anus, I cried out, I nearly fainted with a pleasure that was at the same time an unappeasable longing, an aching desire that I felt somehow could never be satisfied. Then his hands tugged at me, raising my haunches as his big, full cock entered me. He lay full length on me,

Summer

his hand on my cunt, pressing into the hard, gritty floor, his thin mouth sucking and nipping at my shoulders.

When I first hit the ground I had put my hands under my head to cushion my face, protect it from the dirty floorboards, but my desire to touch him, to caress him any way I could, was too much for me, and, even as I was pounded, ground into the worn linoleum by the rapidly increasing rhythms of his lust, my hands came around and stroked and caressed his sides, his buttocks, and my feet came up to stroke his thin, muscular legs.

There was a blindness to his passion that set up a momentary resistance in me. I was being used as I had never been used, and I was not sure that I liked it, could rise to meet this demand; but the tremulous insistence of his hand in my cunt—through the wall of which, I knew, he could feel his cock pulsing and lunging in my ass—and the blind force of his passion, breaking through his flesh and tangling with his mouth in my hair, cut through all thought, and I heard myself crying out that he should never stop, and then crying again and again in a wordless rage of pain and pleasure that was a hymn of praise to the light of ecstasy exploding in us both.

I got off the floor, dirty, disheveled and bruised, and with oil on my ass, and went on with the business of preparing breakfast. Or whatever meal it was. The sun, it seemed, was going down. The store hadn't been opened. Some semblance of responsibility led me now to throw a trench coat around myself and tape a scribbled note to the front door: "Sorry, Closed Today. Will Open Tomorrow As Usual." I puttered a while, straightening up the store, and went back again to the back room in the dusk now, and found Luke nodding out at the table, a towel around his waist, having turned on in the hall John, and my heart sank a little, but I said nothing; instead I put the "Carmina Burana" on the hi-fi, but soft, and sat down with Hesse's Demian to read a little. In those days Hesse had not been reprinted, was in English only in an early, out-of-print edition, and was eagerly seized upon whenever it turned up. It got dark. I switched on a lamp, brewed a pot of coffee, and switched from Carl Orff to the Modern Jazz Quartet, "Django."

After a while Luke stirred, and I gave him some coffee without saying anything, not knowing where he was at, or if he wanted to talk, and he drank it, watching me over the cup while I sat reading,

Summer

or pretending to read, till I heard his gruff, half-pleading "Come here," and went to him immediately, kneeling by his chair, my head in his lap, while he stroked my hair, wordless, and I finally turned my head and untied his silly little towel and found his cock with my lips. And slowly, slowly, under the long, gentle ministrations of my mouth and tongue it grew hard, and in the slow, hot, summer night with all the noises of August backyards and August streets exploding around us, I made love to that thick, strong, uncircumcised cock, made love indeed, called love into being, coaxed it into fullness and feeling with my mouth—I was young enough and had magic enough to do that. In love, I MADE love, and love flowered like a aureole around us both, and my mouth moved slowly, endlessly, tirelessly, slipping and plunging on that thick, full member, till it began to buck and press against my palate like some wild and eager bird seeking freedom, and I moved faster and faster, and a great sigh that was the lifebreath itself escaped from Luke, and I drank in his seed, drank in his bitter, crystal seed in great eager gulps, as if to bring us together finally and for all time, so that no change, nothing and no one, could put us apart again. My hands were on his fine, thin waist as he came, I could feel his back arch, the electricity in his flesh, and my head between his strong, golden-haired thighs was clasped tightly, I could hear his blood—or my own—exploding in my ears, and knew this seed I swallowed for the sacrament—the holy and illimitable essence that drove the stars.

Then he bent and kissed my mouth to taste himself, and we sat for a long time in the summer night, my hair tumbled over his lap, his hands cupping my shoulders. When at last we groped our way back to our cot and slept, it was the wondering and joyous sleep of children on Christmas eve; we kept waking up and touching each other, simply to taste the magic.

The Pad — I

no electricity in him, didn't break barriers, or we didn't hear it then—though he changed in the sixties, or I did—and we would wander outside while Mingus played, get some air, and duck back in to hear Miles' driving horn bringing it home again and again.

Later the jazzmen were followed by the painters, a big, hulking breed of hard-drinking men who spoke in oils and came on very paternal and sexy. They got their hands on a lot of loot and threw it around, and set a certain style for the late fifties, more moneyed and faster-moving. Proud.

But that was later. Just then Luke said "New Orleans" and I really heard him. Saw the wrought-iron balconies and the haze of heat and dust. Saw the slow-moving smiling people getting high in the sun, drinking black coffee down in the French market, the big boats unloading fruit and fish, large healthy gulls screaming and turning, and nearly said "I'm going with you." We both could hear the words hanging silent in the dusty room, the room waited, but I didn't speak.

Two things held me back. One was our code, our eternal, tiresome rule of Cool, that would have made it impossible for me to say those words without blowing our entire scene, retrospectively even, blowing what had gone before, so that if I had indeed gone with Luke all the magic would have gone out of our coming together-or so it seemed to us then. The other was my total, unutterable fascination with Manhattan, a love affair with the city that I was in the midst of, caught up in, it turned out, for many years. An overwhelming love of the alleys and warehouses, of the strange cemetery downtown at Trinity Church, of Wall Street in the dead of night, Cathedral Parkway on Sunday afternoons, of the Chrysler building gleaming like fabled towers in the October sun, the incredible prana and energy in the air, stirring a creativity that seemed to spring from the fiery core of the planet and burst like a thousand boiling volcanoes in the music and painting, the dancing and the poetry of this magic city. So, instead of speaking, I took his hand.

"When are you going?" I asked him.

"This morning," he said. "I thought I'd get on the road when it got light."

He went to the back room and began stuffing his few things into a beat-up old rucksack. I followed after him and turned on the

The Pad — I

hi-fi. Vivaldi's "Gloria Mass." I put some lambchops in the broiler and started cutting up lettuce with a vengeance. He might as well eat, I figured, before he split.

Then Luke came over and touched the back of my hand, and I looked up at him and he saw that there were tears in my eyes.

"Hey," he said softly to me. "Hey, girl."

His arms were around me, and I was clinging to his mouth as if I would never stop, and his hands were loosing my hair, and we were somehow naked and lying wrapped desperately close on the floor mattress that had replaced the army cot. He drew my two legs over his shoulders, pausing to kiss them from ankle to ass, biting with short sharp bites on the cheeks of my ass, and I felt his cock in my cunt, like coming home, like the most natural and only complete state of being, and felt it leave and, covered with my juice, enter my asshole, tearing in, not carefully now, but with a kind of desperation, while he sucked and bit at my arms and breasts. I was crying now, and I thought to go completely mad, for my longing was for some fulfillment more than the human body has devised, and at last his mouth closed over mine, and he lay full length on top of me, his cock in my wet, pulsing cunt, and we moved together grinding and pumping, moved together through time and eternity, and out, beyond space, where galaxies exploded and began, and watched the worlds as they slowly, harmoniously began to move again. When we came to I was lying on his chest, kissing his eyelids again and again, drinking his silent tears while my own dropped unheeded.

It was light. The lambchops were hopelessly burned, the room full of smoke. I ran about, opening windows and cursing, while Luke got himself together. Then we both got into our clothes and went out to an all-night place on Sixth Avenue, the old Waldorf Cafeteria where we had occasionally gone together to watch Max Bodenheim cavort, and ate lamb stew and pickles and rolls and drank coffee after coffee, and at last Luke picked up his pack and slung it on, and I walked him to the bus which would take him to a favored hitchhiking spot near the Lincoln Tunnel, and waited till he got on. We said goodbye without touching, our eyes barely meeting in the dusty August wind.

The Pad — I

And then, within two weeks Norm and Gypsy came back from their camping trip and the warm comfort of the bookstore was gone. It was too hectic by now to be on the streets and the dawns were chilly sometimes, so I took the money I had saved and rented a pad that Dirty John was leaving: a cold-water flat uptown on 60th Street, where Tenth Avenue becomes Amsterdam Avenue, at the north end of Hell's Kitchen. It was a good big pad with high ceilings and a fireplace in the large front room, two middle rooms of fair size, and a real hole of a kitchen with the bathtub next to the sink—the tub had a cover you used to drain the dishes—an antique stove decorated in green enamel with a high oven and three burners, and a small greasy window looking out on an airs haft. It was a good pad because of the size of the front room, because the fireplace worked, and because it cost thirty-three dollars a month.

The John was in the hall, was unspeakably dirty, and could not be cleaned no matter what, because it was only one flight up and therefore used by every bum in the neighborhood who was sober enough to make it up the stairs. On cold mornings we would often find a body or two asleep there. Impossible to lock, the only thing that ever happened when we tried to lock it was the lock got stolen, ripped out of the rotten wood. Impossible to keep toilet paper, or even light bulb, in there: such was the poverty of the place that both were copped immediately. When you went to the John you took toilet paper and light bulb in with you. Or, if no spare bulb was handy, you took the flashlight which was kept on top of the refrigerator.

It was a lovely pad, one of the best I ever had, and I look back on it with great fondness to this day. The life I lived in it was the simplest, kindest, and most devoted life I have ever managed to live, the friends were fine, the goals were clear and set.

When we first moved in there was j ust me and Susan O' Reilley. We made a real living room of the front room, with an old studio couch that had been left behind by a former tenant, roommate of Dirty John's; an ancient drawing table; a desk and chair from my parent's house; and a few long benches of weathered, unpainted wood which we had stolen off the construction lots of newly-fashionable high-rise apartment buildings. The benches we were especially fond of, because when we ran out of firewood we burned them without compunction and simply went out for more as they