“You have come a long way, and it has been a difficult journey. Life has been a search through many lands, and now you have come home.”
Her words entrance the crowd. They are beautiful words, but Robin — burned out forever on sermons — tunes her out. It is not for her, this mass prayer, this journey with a thousand others.
Sex and sex alone is her salvation. When she falls on her knees, she worships Priapus.
Since childhood, during sermons she has masturbated without touching herself. Simply by contracting her pubococcygeus muscle she can pleasure herself without anyone knowing. Between her vagina and her anus she bears down and squeezes. The erotic intensity of the sensation between her legs can bring her to orgasm. This private act of subversion has kept her sane through years of Sunday School, sermons and crusades.
So sex has become entwined with religious ceremony for her. But what in the past had been a method of avoiding a religion of pain is transformed tonight into a way of accepting a spiritual movement that respects the earth and its gifts. The Christianity her father preached sanctioned the rape of the earth because his flock would all ascend to heaven.
So Robin wriggles her pelvis imperceptibly as she sits cross-legged, paying no attention to the meditation that so absorbs her fellow pagans. She wonders if they are listening or if they too are masturbating. She wonders if this isn’t how most people — women at least — endured church: each secretly playing with herself, pressing the pleasure button. Perhaps masturbation was the true secret of worship.
After all, it would be the most wonderful hypocrisy — and she had become a connoisseur of hypocrisy by watching her father tend his flock. The simulation of virtue is the tribute Eros pays normality, but Robin’s motto since college has been ‘kill normality before it kills you’.
The long meditation ends. People stand and stretch, feeling at one with each other. They have raised some magic together while peering through the veil. Robin feels it moving around the people near her. Then the music starts up and the communicant pagans are told to form a giant circle around the outer perimeter of the great space and join hands with people on each side.
This is not to be done lightly, Robin knows. She looks for a man and a woman who interest her. By her secret use of it, she has made her vagina the centre of her being: they must be sexy.
Most of them look too nice. Nice is a look Robin fears because it’s the look of the self-deluded. Her father’s mask when he wasn’t being stern. The women are earth mothers, even the leather dykes; the men for the most part wear compassionate, caring looks. They bore her. Their sincerity scares her.
Her eye is caught by a tall middle-aged blonde woman with a knowing smile and something — Defiance? Mischief? — in her green eyes that Robin responds to. She is wearing a denim shirt open to display her brown breasts, and a short black leather skirt with black stockings on strong, youthful legs. A necklace of claws circles her throat. When she smiles, which she does often, Robin sees that her fangs have been filed into points. A diamond glistens on one of them.
Yes, this one can teach me something, Robin thinks to herself. Standing next to her is an equally tall man with a fringe of black beard, no moustache, who balances precariously on his only leg. He seems amused by his problems with balance. He is striking in the way young men can be who have survived something more trying than college.
Robin slips between them and takes their hands. They accept her easily, as an unanticipated gift.
“I’m Robin. Can I dance with you?”
The tall blonde smiles. “Join us, Robin. I’m Laura. And this is Stump.”
“Captain Stump,” the tall man corrects. “If I start to fall, I’ll have to rely on your strength. Are you strong?”
“Strong enough,” Robin replies.
The line starts to move, the pressure of linked hands pulling and stretching it.
“It’s my first celebration,” Robin confides to Laura. “What kind of dance is this?”
“I think of it as the dance of the DNA. We move around in a double helix. You’ll see.”
The line surges, and Robin feels the electricity of the crowd passing through her hands, from Laura’s slender ringed feminine hands with long nails like talons, and the strong smooth hands of the man with one leg. She feels supported, part of the strand of rhythmic, celebratory life.
The beauty of the Spiral Dance is that everyone in the line passes before Robin’s eyes. She sees every single smiling face. Some are in tears at the experience. The varieties of people and their sexualities as they flow around the room is like watching the past, present and future at the same moment.
Stump’s grip tightens and loosens as he deftly balances himself, but his dependency is not demanding.
“My leg was stolen by some evil trickster,” he explains to her during a pause in the dance. “I left it standing against a chair in the movie last night.”
Was he crazy? He laughs at her puzzlement.
“I took off my prosthesis because my stump ached. I usually take it off at the movies, and then if I have to go to the bathroom I just hop there with my cane. I’ve gotten good at that. Well, last night I got back to my seat — right on the aisle — and it was gone. My leg! Who would steal a leg but some coyote? An artificial leg!” He chuckles, as if losing a prosthetic limb was to be expected in a life where you could lose a leg so easily.
As the pagans dance, they sing a pagan anthem:
“We are a circle, with no beginning and never ending....”
Their faces are open, and the clean sexual light shines through them — unlike the church faces Robin had grown up with, sombre and closed. Despite her reserve, she is seduced into imagining that she is one of them. The faster the line moves — until it is like playing crack-the-whip — the more Robin feels her resistance leaving her. Her face is flushed and she is singing. There was nothing like the freedom of this whirling connection with the life force.
Laura yells to her to be heard over the crowd: “It’s high energy, isn’t it? Like sex with angels.”
She nods and smiles back at Laura, whose fangs seem improbably sharp to Robin. She imagines them in her neck and feels a rush of desire. The frisson of fear that follows adds to the sensation, as do her memories of old movies in which vampires bend exaggeratedly over their pale victims, mouths buried in virginal necks.
The music stops and so do the dancers, although the dance goes on echoing in their minds. Robin braces herself against Stump’s strong tug as he lowers himself to the floor — he sprawls, leg akimbo, head thrown back, ecstatic. Laura hugs Robin and they stand together belly to belly, breathing hard. They are sisters in that moment. Laura’s breath in Robin’s nostrils dizzies her, but she does not pull away as she normally would.
Then Laura grinds her pubic bone against Robin’s hip and gasps with pleasure. Around them the crowd of pagans is separating into individuals who see that it’s getting late. They make preparations to leave, many exchanging phone numbers and hugging like Laura and Robin.
“I want you,” Laura murmurs in Robin’s ear. Robin feels the older woman’s warm breath on her neck and anticipates what doesn’t come.
“You want my blood, Laura? Or is it my soul you want?”
“I want to see blood trickling over your nipples. You’re too young to have a soul.”
“Where can we go?” The heat is spreading from Robin’s centre and creating an urgency of need.
“Not here, not tonight. But come to see me.” She slips a card into Robin’s pocket. They cling together until Laura kisses Robin on the lips and they step apart. No tongue; not yet.
Robin feels a hand on her leg. It is Stump asking to be helped up. The two of them pull him to a standing position and he puts his arm around Laura’s neck and smiles sweetly.
“I’d do anything if you’d touch me like that,” he says to both of them. Laura reaches into his shirt and pinches his nipples.
He smiles impishly at first but then she uses her long n
ails and he screws up his face in pleasure-pain and groans happily.
“I’d do anything,” he says pleadingly to Robin, who feels generous and slaps him hard. “I worship you,” he says self-mockingly, hand to his cheek.
“Tomorrow?” Robin says to Laura, then remembers, “No, I can’t come tomorrow. I’m going to have a tattoo done on my back. Star is finishing a design.”
“I can’t wait to see it.”
“You’ll be the first,” Robin promises, feeling flirtatious and frustrated at the same time. They kiss again, like sisters, but wicked sisters: the points of their tongues touch.
“Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again,” Stump says to Robin as he and Laura move away from her towards the exit. Robin remains where she is while around her the stilt walkers, the dancers and the acrobats, their bodies glistening, don street clothes and straggle towards the exit. Acrobats descend down ropes from the girders high above and land near her.
They are like angels visiting earth, Robin thinks. One bounces to the concrete floor before Robin. He is a muscular Chinese man with a long thin black moustache and glossy black hair worn back in a pony tail. His chest is flat and there is a bird unlike any Robin has seen tattooed between his nipples.
“Hello,” he says to Robin, who stares back at him, hypnotised. He is handsome, this angel with the watchful eyes of an animal.
“I watched you,” he tells her, “from up there.”
“I don’t think I like that.”
“I was getting into you, that’s all. When I’m swinging up there I pick one person to look at so I don’t get dizzy when I look down.”
“What’s it like to be up there?”
“What’s it like to be in heaven? It’s wonderful. I want to stay up there all the time. Want to come up with me?”
“I can’t climb like you.”
“Don’t worry. I have a friend. Come.”
He leads her by the hand to the thick rope he descended on.
“Just hold onto my waist.” At his signal they are in the air.
His muscular arms enfold her and they are lifted from the shed floor to the girders, high, high over the heads of the departing crowd. The rope swings with their combined weight.
Looking down sends a tingle through every cell in her body. She is helpless. Her body is in the keeping of a god, who has manifested himself in the form of a Chinese acrobat. There is nothing she can do but realise the fantasy she brought to the Spiral Dance. His hard body pressed against hers has caused her every nerve ending to throb, her nipples to harden, the muscles in her thighs to flutter. She wants him, to suck and bite and fuck.
“I want you,” he said, as Laura had. But there is a hard male urgency in his voice that will not wait for another day. The temple prostitute has been chosen. His strong hands touch her everywhere, squeezing her breasts, cupping her buttocks and pulling her into him as he thrusts against her.
He lowers her carefully onto the steel girder, which is just wide enough for her to lie back on as he tugs off her vinyl pants and then plunges his head between her slender thighs.
He licks her bare pubic mound, running his tongue in little circles around her wet slit before pulling it open with delicate fingers so he can take her clitoris in his lips and gently suck it, while one finger explores her contracting vagina. She feels his little finger in her anus, pressing up against the finger stabbing now into her vagina, while his other hand moves up her body to caress first her breasts and then stroke her mouth, demanding that she suck on his fingers, that she surrender to his power.
She cannot move for fear of falling from the girder. She is a helpless sacrifice to his lust, and she wouldn’t have it any other way; but she wants to see his penis. She needs him to move up on her so she can feel its hardness on her body, but he won’t stop sucking her and teasing her, making her lick his hard fingers. He won’t give his maleness until he has torn an orgasm from her throat, until he hears her cry out, “Fuck me! Fuck me!” and he rises on his knees to show her the gift he brings her. His liquid black eyes bulge with the strength of his desire. His penis is not long but it is thick and purple with engorged blood. His face is shiny with her juices and on his mouth is the stamp of the satyr.
It is a slick spear he holds and brings to the hunger between her thighs, slowly so she must beg for it, beg to be sacrificed to Cernunnos. When she is pricked by his spear she thrusts herself up so he can impale her up to the hilt of his pubic bone.
She is filled with the god, and he is moving inside her with the divine sexual energy of a god, his hands clasping now her waist, now her buttocks, so that there is no escape from the satisfying savagery of his attack.
Her need matches his and then surpasses it. She feels herself losing touch with any last remnant of reality. Above her, girders buttress the black roof, while far below mere mortals clear the floor of sound equipment and decorations. She is suspended in space and time while the god Cernunnos gives her the divine gift of the strongest orgasm she’s ever experienced. She’s coming and crying out “Hail, Cernunnos!” again and again until nothing comes from her throat but sighs, and she floats back into her consciousness, thinking:
I am such a slut.
II
Star the Skin Artist
“To find the right tattoo you have to know who you are.”
“I don’t know who I am, Star. Maybe the tattoo will tell me.”
“Sometimes it works that way. Mostly not.”
“I just feel like I don’t know anything — that I’m empty, like a cup. Just waiting to be filled up. It’s like when I look out at the stars at night I’m weightless, and I could be sucked right up to them. But maybe they’re empty, too. Do you ever think about that, Star?”
“Yeah, sure,” Star said, Brooklyn still in his voice like marbles rumbling. “You know, astronomers and physicists wonder the same thing. Now they think that maybe ninety percent of the universe we look up at is missing.”
“Who took it?”
“God knows. They call it dark matter. It’s these strange, invisible particles that haven’t ever been observed before, but now, because of the Hubble Telescope, they can. It’s obvious. Nobody really knows shit. The universe is incomprehensible — and empty.”
“It’s like it says in the beginning of Genesis: it’s chaos. ‘Tohubohu’ is the Hebrew word for it: the formless chaos of the primordial universe.”
“How’d you know that?”
“My father talked about it. He says the end is coming, when it all returns to tohubohu....”
L’heure bleue. They have been working all afternoon, with breaks for herbal tea and cigarettes. The studio is warm and the musk of her body hangs in the air.
Star the skin artist bends to his work with the fine concentration of a painter in love with his work and his canvas. His lips press together and he frowns. There is a faint sheen of perspiration on his forehead. He massages Robin’s back with sharp steel and sometimes she hums low in her throat because of the pleasure this pain gives her. It is utterly sexual but diffuse, without object, so that the tension slowly tightens as Star works.
Robin sits upright on a wooden chair, turned so she can straddle it, her arms resting on its back. She stares out at the street before Star’s storefront studio through a window that is a one-way mirror. She can look out, but no one can see her watching. When someone stops to admire himself in the mirror, to adjust his tie or comb his hair, he seems to be staring straight at her. Then she reflexively hides the puffy dark tips of her breasts, pressing them against the wooden chair back. Her nipple piercings make a soft sound against the wood.
This afternoon with Star is the fourth and final sitting before the canvas of her back is completely filled in. From her shoulder blades to her waist, the image is taking its final shape with each tiny stab of the outline needle, fifty stabs per minute. It is a vibrant, luxuriant garden with elaborate vine work in which danger lurks: serpents and dragons rise from the base of her spine and curv
e over the tops of her buttocks.
When it is finished her lovers can watch her sleep and study the intricate painting on her slender back, looking in it for clues to their fates with her. The great scar would be covered and her disfigurement transformed into art.
Star’s warm left hand holds his epidermal canvas stretched as he makes the next line, and the next. Each line flows from the gods into his hand, she hopes. The painting must be perfect. Star’s voice is reassuring, insinuatingly intimate. His rumbled words assume a lover’s intimacy, in fact. While he works Robin stares out the window at the street scene. It is 16th Street, in the Mission, not far from her apartment. The sign outside reads:
ASTERION STUDIO
FINE TATTOOING
By Appointment Only
“I’m sliding a little now, baby. Let me wipe you.”
Robin shivers when he stops, turns off the needle, and reaches for a sponge. He washes her back tenderly, his touch a caress magnified by the heightened sensitivity of her punctured skin.
“You comfortable?” he asks. She turns to smile at him.
His over-large dark eyes are intensified by shaggy eyebrows and there is a five-pointed star low on his forehead over his third eye. His body is bull-like, heavy, and covered with tattoos from his neck to his toes. He has been tattooed by the world’s masters.
She is open to him as she would not be with a lover, as if in creating the jungle on her back he has gained access to her insides beneath the skin. As if he could reach in and touch her heart if he chose to.
The needle whirs as he starts up again.
“This tigress will be your secret totem animal — I mean, it’s a lady tiger, a tigress — and where it is you’ll never know, but it will be there to protect you from the dragons and serpents. I believe in balance.”
Dark Matter (Modern Erotic Classics) Page 2
