TWO
D’Arcy first connected with a female under a large, dishevelled tree in the province of R—, a delightful, slightly archaic area which lies in the circumference of the quaint city of Q—. It was only in the aftermath of the experience that his attitude toward masturbation underwent severe changes; all extant documents show that while in the actual act of conjoinment, D’Arcy was under the impression that his partner was teaching him a new way in which to flagellate himself, lending her body’s assistance, and that her function—that is to say, her relation—was entirely neutral. Ah Youth, youth, youth! How swift its passing, how unmourned its memories, until the frame itself begins to disintegrate; by which time memory can be trusted least of all....
D’Arcy recollected his experiences to me in his comfortable rooms on an August evening a long time ago. This particular reminiscence came in the first blush, so to speak, of our acquaintanceship; at this time we had not known each other long, and it was with considerable shyness that D’Arcy broached to me the possibility of an oral sexual autobiography. When I assented to this with vigorous nods, heavy twitching of my beard and a certain clouting gesture of my eyes which indicates the most forceful compliance, he leaned toward me, balancing his wine glass between his thumbs and said:
“Well, then, I must tell you of the first time I ever had sex with a female; this was at the age of 17 many years ago in a delightful local province and do you know that it took me several weeks to realize exactly what had happened to me that goldish afternoon in the orchard?”
“You are implying to me, are you, that you did not even realize at the time that you were having sex?” I responded, gripping my own glass and leaning forward with my jaws clamped firmly shut, an attitude which has always imparted great masculinity to my appearance. I was anxious, then, to gain D’Arcy’s good opinion and, although almost frantic with eagerness to hear what he would reveal, I did not betray myself with a flicker of anticipation; our friendship already well-launched by a profound mutuality of outlook and insight—but not of experience; an emotional castrato, I had never had carnal knowledge of either sex and had confessed this at the outset of our relationship to save future embarrassments—worked sheerly in terms of its masculine restraint and decorum, and would not have been well served by tempestuousness. “Well,” I added, “this is most entirely interesting, you must tell me about that, in full.”
“I am 35 years old,” D’Arcy said, “and have, perhaps, experienced the ravages of orgasm in one fashion or the other some 20,000 times or more; these explosions, for all their momentary exhilaration, moving retrospectively to the dull level of gloom always verified by the aftersex, but this, I must admit, was something unusual. Would you like to hear it, my friend? I seem to be constituted for rhetoric this afternoon.”
“Oh, yes!” I cried, “I surely would.” Then more circumspectly (even cunningly) I added, “Of course, it isn’t that important, you know. Only talk about it if you want to.”
“I do want to talk about it, I believe. I am weary, weary; I am 35 years old. Yes, I believe I have told you that, no?” he said with a delightful toss of his well-rounded head, “And having moved well past the half-life of carnality and finding so little to show for the experience, I have been longing, with increasing poignancy, for someone with whom I can really talk; an auditor—if you will—who will share my recollections with me and by his quiet assimilation of those memories, help me to achieve a final kind of sense. For I am truly past accomplishment now; you understand that, don’t you? There is very little left within the realm of sexual knowledge or activity which is worth doing.”
I had found his rhetoric rather tortuous and I told him so. I added that what he was saying was, for me, however, a thrust of the first magnitude and that I could only seek to honor it. “I too have been looking for someone I can trust,” I said quietly. “Someone for whom I could be, so to speak, a witness, a friend, a kind of auditor.”
“Then you wish to hear the story of my first entrance at the age of 17 in an orchard full of apples and diverse fruits and the sounds which were made under me as slowly I felt myself drawn past the folds of earth’s tent into the carnival itself?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Permit me,” said D’Arcy.
I was (D’Arcy said, then) a normal product of adolescence in the country of my origins. My awareness of sex, nil until the age of 12, exploded at pubescence much like a complex mold kept in dark places under the right conditions will evince no life at all for a long time and will suddenly teem with it: wild, aimless, disoriented. Such was I. One evening I was a schoolboy immersed in a schoolboy’s concerns and obsessions, cajoled by the media, cajoled by my own restlessness; but in the morning—alas!—I was something else entirely. It was as if an unearthly secret which had been kept from me all of my life was suddenly sprung without preparation of any sort. I was not ready for it.
Let me explain. The emissio nocturnis, relegated to the status of a footnote in most journals of sexual behavior, discarded by even the fatal Kinsey as the least prevalent and significant of all initiations into sex, was the trigger which launched me past apprehension into the ecstasy and danger of the pit itself. In my sleep that night I dreamed that there was pressure; an even, slow, sinuous pressure up and down my body as, fishlike, I poked at sonorous depths; as fishlike, I ducked small obstacles to find a kind of homing. Happy little ontologist recapitulating all phylogeny I swam and swam in the bowl of self, feeling the fluid pour into my open gills with increasing facility, feeling my gills beating back at the waters, feeling the rising all within and without and then, with a series of dull, tearing explosions, my fishlike form had surrendered its integrity, scales and substance, and had imploded in several small, rapid jerks over the bottom of the aquaria, disintegrating as it did so, becoming fragments of purple, iris and aquamarine which went at cross-purposes, finally drifting to the ceiling of the aquaria and for all I know, into the piscatorian equivalent of Gehenna. This remained spread out through the water in wavelets which ever lightened and finally blurred into the background of indistinguishability. I awoke out of this to find that it was full dawn, that my undergarments clung to me with uncustomary enthusiasm, and that my limbs were possessed of a fainting weakness which could only be equated with energy.
I do not mind saying that the day that passed held little interest for me. All that mattered—and how easily I admitted it, even at the beginning!—was to get back to the bed, hopefully as early as possible, and give the horror a chance to repeat itself. It was exactly as if something which had happened completely on its own terms had reduced me to the status of audience; never before and since have I confronted my body: my pale, familiar body, with the admixture of woe and poignancy with which I examined it that evening. Everything seemed the same but was ineffably changed. With several encouraging pats administered to myself hither and yon, I placed myself between the sheets and willed myself to sleep.
It would be pleasant to say that the experience not only repeated itself that night, but awakened me as it did so, allowing me to make certain necessary connections between sensation and phenomenon, and inciting me to take matters further into my own hands ... But such was not to be; it was almost three full weeks until the sensations repeated themselves, and then I was not a fish but a bird: a gigantic eagle, to be precise, suspended at a condor’s height above a distant city, and as I leaned down toward it, my claws seemed to fold in upon one another and the already familiar wrenching, the tearing, began at the very center of my feathers, spreading outward until my beak itself seemed to be caught in the rapid convulsion and then I, a male giant eagle, found himself laying eggs one by one in the air, centered in flight, calmly swooping as the circles of life came pouring from that center of congestion, uttering mingled cries of woe and delight as my spawn fell heedless on the reaches of the continent below. The question of fertilization never occurred to me. I imagine that they must have made a pretty smash in the cities; but my recollection, instead, was of their landing in some haystack in the countryside, a haystack patrolled by louts and hired hands who would look at these droppings from the sky in gentle amazement and then, fingering their ears, step forward to examine them more closely.
As you can see, my earliest intimations of sexuality were tied into a rather natural or rural imagery; happy enough, no doubt, and doubtless recapitulatory of that fashion in which our ancestors themselves had enacted their troubles and joys but I regret to say that not then, and not for a good quantity of time, did I link my dreams with that peculiar source nor did I, in any way, link the source with the idea of mingling with members of the opposite sex. I have read studies and texts, sooner and later, which include the case histories of farm boys and urban inhabitants alike, male and female, who come to sex as merely the most exquisite of all the refined sensations available to them but who, until further notice, seemed unable to accept the orgasm as anything more than an independent phenomenon visited upon the flesh by sheets, tree bark or vigorously wandering hands, having absolutely nothing to do with population, or some of the more flamboyant romantic abstractions of our time. Indeed, and much later, I met a seventeen-year-old beauty, well-cleaved from head to toe, with a ripeness of her core of such viscosity as to surpass even my most aimless fantasies, who seemed utterly unable to understand—until with fingers and the lower cunning I brought it to her attention—that those sensations she had been inducing in herself for half a decade had anything whatsoever to do with what she had, presumably, been reading about or seeing in the television for at least that much time. My own case, then, without interference, might have proceeded very much in that direction; the occasional covert spasms in my thighs under cover of quasi-delirium merely a welcome relief from the schoolboy tensions of existence; it might have gone on and on that way until, at the age of 25 or 36, say, a chance nightly spasm undergone while coincidentally juxtaposed to a female (just a house guest or someone I had taken to my bed to comfort), would have brought knowledge to me with an explosion of embarrassment so wrenching in its dire implications as to abate the emotional losses of all these years; it might have happened in exactly this fashion or in some other more dreadful (perhaps I would have taken a male friend to my rooms for some respite with the same results), but I was saved from all of this. I want to say that I was saved. I came across The Magazine.
Now, The Magazine that I found (actually, it was no chance encounter, I came upon it most deliberately and paid for it with my schoolboy’s lunch money) was no stranger to me; its cover with its pale backgrounds and restlessly juxtaposed foregrounds was at least as familiar to most of my contemporaries and myself during those years as other elements of the Shared Unconsciousness; I have yet to meet a male over the age of 12 and under that of 45 in this country who is not as familiar with The Magazine as he is attuned to his own muddled interior, somewhere at that shared level of recollection where dreams, loss, scatology and hope all mingle to produce what we call our “memory of youth.” The Magazine is embedded as firmly as first loss, first desire, first rage and defeat. While the circumstances of my juxtaposition with it were unusual, in short, its effect upon me and its presence were not.
The Magazine at issue—that is to say, the issue of The Magazine which launched me upon a different and better career far removed from the night-animals—was held loosely between the thumb and index finger of a small, almost miniscule man whose rump adjoined my own in the subway on that April morning when, late as always, I had piled my schoolbooks against my pubis and run wildly for the last express. Finding a seat as usual, I opened a physics primer to an innocuous page and began to confront myself with images of ball bearings, balanced weights and the extrapolations of energy in the universe, when from somewhere in the vicinity of my left eye, a picture of a naked female came slowly into view, passing over my scientific ruminations much as the eagles and denizens of the deep had infiltrated the quiet tenor of my dreams.
The female I saw was bare from nipple to nipple, with a series of garments which had apparently covered them originally now located somewhere in the vicinity of her waist, much as if they had been urgently torn by someone in search of two stray aureolae without the patience to be reasonable. As the page swam further into my view I became aware of the fact that this female was as fully clothed below the waist as she was unclothed above; she wore heavy leather boots which came to the center of the shiny black trousers, and a small whip—or perhaps it was merely a riding-crop—jutted from her left pocket.
I was astounded. I admit that freely. This was not the first picture of a naked woman I had ever seen nor the tenth for that matter, but a certain quality of juxtaposition—having to do with the proximity of the picture, its relations to the physics textbook, and the relation of that textbook to my genitals, leaning on them with some weight—produced a set of responses as mysterious as they were urgent.
What I did was begin to rub my textbook gently over the area of my genitals, the better, no doubt, to concentrate upon its essentials because I bent upon it a gaze of such fixated intensity that one would have thought that I was trying to apprehend the root nature, so to speak, of the study, all this time my left eye sliding gracelessly up and down the contours of the photograph while my elbows flopped and banged and the neighbor to my left—the possessor of that magazine—seemingly oblivious, flipped a page or two with the near thumb and then turned one over, concealing the picture from my view. I found this removal infuriating, almost a cheat and made frantic efforts at retrieval, giving anxious glances, that is to say, out of the corner of a clouded eye while I switched my books to even greater proximity on my lap and then, finally, closing my eyes entirely, began to work into a highly internalized state of visualization, picturing before me what I was able to remember of the departed picture while I breathed deeply of the odors of my own sweat. A rustle of pages on my left, becoming progressively insistent, forced me to open my eyes again and as I did so I found myself confronting the picture once again, my neighbor virtually proffering it toward me with shaking hands while his own gaze seemed turned somewhere distantly toward a window. He was doing me a favor but he was not going to make an exhibition of it. This sense of participation—kinship, really, and the slow apprehension of need—so touched me in the area of the groin that I found myself beginning to enter upon the first twitches and gloom of the sensations I had had during my night-journeys and then, with a gasp, I found myself plummeted toward the first and truest, the most valuable and meaningful, orgasm of my life.
“It must have been most intense,” I remarked to D’Arcy at this point in the recollection. “What with all the frustration and tension you’d built up and then not even knowing what was happening to you. It must have been a truly shattering experience.”
It was not an intensity in the groin (he told me, lighting up another cigarette and leaning back in his chair, his toes pointed skyward, his hands dropped across the famous lap itself now quiescent, unstirred by memory) so much as one of the sensibility; I found myself being actually wrenched, eyeballs first, toward the source of my pleasure which I interpreted oddly enough as the picture rather than the conjoinment I had prepared on my lap and as, half-turning to confront it wholly, a small groan purred from my lips against the screech of the brakes, I realized that the train had jolted into a subway stop and that, laws of physics asserting themselves in and out of the textbook, intense inertia had catapulted me half out of my seat. The momentum, in fact, had placed me in almost instant juxtaposition with a large clump of passengers of both sexes who now eyed me incuriously, as with a series of slow, spasmodic gyrations I tried frantically to work my way to the door—for I could not afford to be late for class—at the same time desperately trying to maintain that fragile contact between textbook and genitalia which had already made my morning so spirited. As I did so—as I reached, that is to say, the door itself—I felt a wrenching and tumbling coming to force in the area of my groin and then, as I stood stricken before the slowly closing doors themselves, I entered upon the first true orgasm of my life, a feeling of spinning and convulsions, still trying through all of this to arc myself onto the platform and then, as the doors closed, the train started with a hiss and there I was, physics text still against my genitalia, squeezing out the last drops of moisture, while one passenger told me that I “ought to make up my mind what to do before giving everybody fits.”
I realized almost immediately what had happened to me. This knowledge was, to no small degree, abetted by my seatmate who rose and came to stand against me as the train continued its rocketing passage. The magazine, now jauntily seen to be emerging from a jacket-pocket, was still folded to the picture which had precipitated my fall from grace and as I stood now, quite drained, almost at ease, and wanting nothing but to be by myself and think about what had happened to me, he favored me with a small, slow wink and whispered into my ear:
“It’s better not to do it on trains; you can’t concentrate too good. If you don’t want to do it at home do it in the movies, that’s my advice.”
Fortunately, this rather horrid confidence was for my ear alone and did not transmit itself to other passengers. I was still trying to think of an appropriate reply—one which would show him that I had taken offense without in any way conceding the truth of his evaluation of what had happened—. When the train once again came to a stop and its unrolled doors permitted me to stagger onto the platform and into a small enclosure behind a gum-dispensing machine where I was able to stand limply until the station cleared. My partner in knowledge, now cheerfully slapping the unrolled magazine against his palm, was one of the passengers who exited as well but he had nothing further to say to me nor I to him—what, after all, could I have replied?—and after a while, in the almost-empty station, I arranged my books and other holdings into a fairly respectable package and went to the street. My groin felt limp, uncoiled; a new collaborant now with a certain chuckling knowledge, it seemed to be whispering: I’m through for the moment, but I’ll be coming back. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other now; you take good care of me and I’ll take the best care of you. Feeling like someone who had tried, almost successfully, to assassinate himself, I went into the street and on an extremely thoughtful journey to class. I still thought that it might have been some kind of an accident.
That afternoon, through careful trial and error, I was able to locate and purchase a copy of the magazine which had made my morning so lively. What I wish to point out is that this was the first copy of the magazine I had actually bought; although it had been passed around from hand to hand in school and although I had often looked at it covetously on newsstands, the actual act of purchase was one which had seemed far beyond me: the magazine seemed as inaccessible for private use as the other side of the moon. But since the question of use had never been previously defined—since I had not realized until that morning that the magazine had a function as precise and self-limiting as any other piece of schoolboy goods—it had been abstract; now it was a reality. I bought one copy of the magazine and one copy of a rival, either for purposes of comparison, or more extended study; I was not sure.
It would be easy to say that I proceeded from these purchases (they were made in a store some 18 blocks from the school and at least twice that distance from home and the proprietor, horrifyingly, had tried to strike up a relationship with me based upon the venality of his magazine distributor who, he said, insisted that he sell so many copies of these magazines per month or lose his business) immediately to my rooms and to an orgy of masturbation but this would overestimate my intelligence and its ability to make sense of what had happened to me that morning. Actually, I was not sure that the magazines would “work,” nor was I even sure that I wished to repeat the experience of the morning. All that I was doing at that time was recapitulating my history, an important gesture toward self-understanding. What I did was to put the magazine carefully away in my briefcase and I did not go into them until much later that evening, long after I had completed my studies, finished my necessary activities in the bathroom—with a plentiful washing of the hands—and wedged a chair under the knob of my door so that, for all intents and purposes, I felt impenetrable. Then, with hands that shook, perhaps, a bit more than I would have expected, I withdrew the magazines and, placing the rival under my bed, took The Magazine itself, opened it to the picture which I had glimpsed that morning, and looked for my physics textbook.
Finding it—I had placed it under a pile of other texts and was almost frantic with relief when it finally emerged—I pressed it to my lap in a repetition of the morning’s position and then repeated the gestures and gyrations I had made, at the same time casting my eyes leftward toward the magazine which I had propped next to me on the bed at eye-height, on a music stand.
For a long time, nothing happened. My groin remained static, the wild elf who had tenanted it this morning seemingly out on probation or perhaps asleep. I tried to imagine screeching and huddling to further recapitulate the morning’s sensations, even toyed with my visions of night-metamorphoses, but since I was confusing results with causation, I was on the verge of total failure. At last, however, I hit upon the key. I cannot sufficiently impress upon you the importance of this insight. I began to imagine to myself that I was being discovered.
I conjured images of parents and relatives, grown to enormous size, bursting into the bedroom to confront me poised at the moment of entrance into the rolled-up magazine: conceived to myself the possibility of a gigantic renunciation scene parting me forever from my history as, helpless to detach myself from my aching organ, my strokes formed rhythmic counterpoint to monomaniacal insistences; I imagined this and much more, images of the sea and flying creatures somewhere toward the rear of my skull, and as I put all of this together—as all of it began to coalesce my aching, frenzied skull, the rapidly beating butterfly of a hand which was only an extension of my skull, I felt it truly beginning to work.
How can I describe to you what happened to me then? Men have, for centuries, annotated the raptures of first love, first entrance, first connection, but I think that all of them are liars, what they are really talking about is first masturbation upon which they have superimposed the heterosexual or homosexual connections for politeness’ sake, but what they are really recollecting are the earliest, almost archetypal memories of orgasm which begin in the winging joint, the open, gasping, sobbing mouth. There is nothing in this world but masturbation, everything comes out of it; that is all I have to tell you. The rest is fakery, trumped up around the core. I was trying to say that I felt myself storming from the very center of my being.
No sea-creature now, no bird either, no animal of play or relative ontologist but only a desperate adolescent concentrating on first fruition, I frantically manipulated myself the more, the magazine now ignored other than to perform its secondary function of becoming a rolled-up tube near the offending organ. Strange groans and cries came from my throat: they were replies to the accuser that stood just beyond my door, the huge, overbearing accuser that could, at any moment, burst through and catch me in that microcosm of destiny: I raved and screamed, fomented and justified, moving closer and closer all the time and then finally, past ecstasy, past movement, past even necessity’s quiver I felt the rotten fruit of me being split open, lush with corruption and I came forth.
I came forth.
I came, squealing into the bedjoints, whimpering a whimper somewhere between pain and joy, as suspended between those absolutes as my dangling, pulsing prick was suspended by text on the one side and a distended, distorted aspect of female flesh on the other, came until I thought indeed that I had been experimenting not with the prick but with the aorta or some ominous, lurking cells of the intestine, came until my release had edged down into a kind of panic and finally I stopped and it was all out of me, all the fluid that is to say, none of the memory and there was no one standing beside the door and there was no one examining me in the room, and there were no oceans or aviaries beside my bed but only my tired, dying genitals clamped stickily in dripping newsprint and with a sigh, I withdrew myself—that is to say, more properly, that I withdrew the enclosure from them—and collapsed panting on the bed. I had not had a single thought of a woman.
I lay there for a long time. Tinkling at the edge of my consciousness, almost a bell or summons, was an intimation: an intimation or insight so enormous that my juvenescent mind could not possibly have grasped it, did not see it for many years: all that it could do in its wandering was to make a metaphor and the metaphor became a feeling and that feeling was of irreplacable woe under which lay a layer of whimsy—for it had been so ridiculous what had happened to me—and underneath all of that a feeling of being cheated so profound that my young, healthy, inexhaustible limbs began to quiver froglike in the silence and stayed so for a long, long time.
“So that,” I said, “was your first direct sexual experience, the first one which was self-induced. How well you tell it! What rhetoric, what insight, what imagery! D’Arcy, my dear and becoming-dearer friend, you should have become a writer.”
“I doubt it very much,” he said, removing a sock and examining, with a rather crestfallen expression, a severely indented toe (we were in his rooms at that time, sipping our inevitable port and now fully relaxed, in a highly unbuttoned state, the end of the evening have coalesced with the beginning of dawn, leaving us in a unique and rather wistful state of suspension), “I have no ability for structure, no long-range novelist’s gift for molding, I can see only in fits and starts rather than through to the end of a highly transmuted vision.”
“But we are not talking about novels,” I reminded him. “Autobiography or the personal essay would suit just as well. Or you could write a series of reminiscences. There is no need for fictionalization.”
