The Saline Solution

by Marco Vassi

  “Your mother is a loser, kid, and your father is a pervert. Your species is suicidal, and the first breath of air you breathe will be polluted, the first drink of water, impure. You will be born under the canopy of restless nuclear bombers prowling the skies, and in the shadow of great phallic missiles. Your birthdate will coincide with the beginning of the rape of Alaska and the destruction of the Amazon. You will grow up in a period of mass starvation. And before you reach maturity, you may be presented with the final spectacle, the end of life on earth. Hoorah, for on the year you were born, we dumped tons of poison gas into the sea. Hoorah, for in the decade you were born, genocide was data-processed for computers.

  “With this legacy you can sink to great depths, perhaps write the Comedy of our time, Aquarius child who has all the odds against ever seeing the light of day.”

  X

  What I need, no woman can give. What I want, no man can understand. And yet it seems so simple. It lies in that wordless place, that silent place, that place where everything is small and fragile and clear. I remember moments as a child, when quiet miracles happened, and I gulped and said nothing, because to talk about them was to revoke them, to make them jangling and loud, like the feet of the people who stepped on caterpillars and didn’t even notice. Perhaps I seek to return to that crystalline oneness of a child, the hidden joy of a madman.

  Or is it merely that the species has passed some point of ecological balance, and is now dying, and one of its manifestations is my inability to say yes to the child of my loins? The mammals have been in decline for five millions years, the naturalists say. No wonder I’m depressed. Perhaps the urge to procreate is atrophied among those of us most sensitive to the vibrations of doom. For me, now, “us” is always ad hoc. There is no sense of biological loyalty to my murderous kind. The question has become: Who’s ready to play, how fast, how high for what stakes?

  Degeneracy is the only freedom fascism allows.

  It is as though masturbation has become the highest form of sexual gratification. But in these sophisticated times, one generally uses three-dimensional humans to play out the several aspects of the private fantasy. It is a mixed bag. From most people, non-interference is the most I can expect, with some, I am grateful if they play their parts with flair; and rarely, someone comes along who can improvise and teach me something about the workings of my own movie. I imagine that could be considered decadent.

  But when my cock is the button and her cunt is the finger pressing it, I ride such a thin line between the grotesque and the sublime that it takes my breath away and I forget to come. For, after all, to come is to beget, and if one will not or cannot beget, there is no point in coming. Without the result of the child, sex is an exercise, a charade, a yoga, a drama, a model for the full panoply of human relations. It is only an art.

  In expression, there comes temporary relief from knowing, but it is bought at the price of imposing that knowledge on others. When we fuck, we are always master and slave interchanged, guru and traveller, teacher and student. And if we are going to destroy ourselves and are sickened by the mere thought of bringing children into this world, then let’s forget all the Casablanca Bogart you-and-me-forever-baby bullshit. I dig you because you’re you, but I dig her because she’s her. Just because you’re unique doesn’t make you special. That goes for me too.

  So let’s get it on, if we are going to do it, and stop diddling in our pants and private boudoirs and and all the icky sniffly little domestic fucks which raise such a loud simper over the whole patriarchal world.

  Listen darling, you and I know, or ought to know, that getting fucked controls ever so much more space than the act of fucking. The man is a tool, his cock is a hoe, to be used for weeding and planting. And sometimes his conversation can be amusing. But when he is not performing his proper duty as stud, let him go chase butterflies or tell loud stories about the big buffalo he killed, darling child, while you and I, mother, crawl deeper into the crevices of our violet velour and murmur the real understandings to one another, the sounds that can only be made once, the touches that are symbolic only of themselves.

  Suffocating from loneliness, I continued. Back to the house, where the human beings seemed to begin their day. They spoke, they smiled, they enacted the rituals of food. I attempted to peer into the subtleties of their behavior, to pry into the radiating centers of their astral minds. But I stared at lead walls. All I could receive was the surface. At another time I might be comforted by that superficiality, absorbing it as a welcome change from my own gothic swings from inside to outside. But that day I was embittered.

  Francis and Bertha were bickering. There was no subject, no definable point of contention, simply a tension chatter, blowing off the vibrational tangles which had accumulated during the night. In the same way that forest monkeys pick lice from one another’s fur, they were engaged in an astral grooming; but not knowledgeable enough to comb auras, they bantered words, as though they could help one another through friction.

  Their basic contention was classic: “He wants her when he wants her, and would prefer that she lose herself the rest of the time, but is willing to play girl friend games with her to placate her mood. She wants his time, the kind of time he uses when painting or doing heavy rapping, and he seems willing to give her that only when he wants to fuck. The rest of each day finds him oddly preoccupied. They have a potentially good trade: she gives pussy, food, continuity, and momma’s tit when he needs it; he gives his nerve endings, via his cock or mouth or eyes or mind. But they have not the slightest hint that they are doing business. She is in the toils of the myth of relationship, and he conspires to support that lie; it is his security as well as hers.”

  It was most difficult to probe into the structure of the life they had with each other and light up the basic weaknesses without doing damage to their optimism. But my objectivity ended where my erection began.

  “Would you rather die in the arms of the woman you love or in the expansion of your most cherished thoughts?” I asked Francis.

  He shot a glance at Bertha.

  “You can plead the psychic Fifth,” I said.

  He winced at the sarcasm in my voice. With the woman there, he would have to fight with one arm tied behind him. But that fact was exactly what I wanted to attack.

  Bertha sat at the other end of the round table, drawing obscure multicolored patterns with a felt-tip pen. Her mouth tightened around a wide smile. “I’ll let that one pass,” he said. “Your point.”

  “Well, then, what’s the point?” I countered. “You’re a paradigm maven. I offer you a superior model, or at least demonstrate the obsolescence of your current one, and we can sit and rap about it for hours, but when bedtime comes you take the chick upstairs and I pile into bed alone.”

  “Where’s Lucinda?” Bertha asked, not raising her eyes.

  “I hope she’s in the city getting fucked,” I said. “She was beginning to act as though I were the only man in the world. And you know how much of a drag that can be, don’t you dear?”

  Francis lit a small cigar. “I’m not bored with monogamy,” he said.

  I refrained from adding, “So long as you have your women on the side, the ones you never mention to Emily Trueheart here.”

  He picked the thought from my brain. “I’ve made that scene, I’ve had as many as three women at once.”

  Bertha looked up sharply. “Where was that? Who were they?” she said rapidly.

  “Don’t tell her,” I said. “She’ll use it against you.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He hesitated, uncertain. “It was at Antioch, and it lasted for eight days. It was all I could do to keep the three of them in equilibrium.”

  “Was one of them special?” Bertha asked.

  Francis looked like a cat with a firecracker up its ass. “Yeah . . . well, there was Amy, and then she had two friends. I’ve mentioned
Amy to you,” he said to her.

  “You didn’t tell me this,” she said.

  “Well,” I purred, “look how you react.”

  She hated me for a brief second and then turned to Francis. “Amy’s in Mexico now, isn’t she?”

  “I haven’t heard from her for a few months,” he said. “I think she’s living with some cat down there.” Bertha relaxed, and returned to her drawing.

  “Three at once?” I said. “What was that like? I’ve been with three, but only when there were other men. I’ve never had more than two to myself.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.”

  “Why don’t the two of you go down to the locker room or something?” Bertha shot up at us.

  I whirled toward her. “Look, my friend and I are continuing a conversation that’s been going on for eight or nine years. Now, you’ve been on the scene a few months. Where the fuck do you thing you get the right to act as a roadblock in the work that he and I do together? This kind of conversation only gets salacious when you inject your sniping jealousy. Now you can take him upstairs and gobble him with your greedy little snatch any time you want. I’m not going to give you any substance by pretending to be your rival. I only get naked among friends.”

  Francis looked out the window.

  “All right,” I said to him, “I’ll see you later, or maybe I won’t.”

  Bertha got frightened. “Wait,” she said, “I don’t mean you should stop being friends. I just can’t compete with the energy you two generate. I just cook and sit in the corner. I don’t get to talk. You’re too strong for me. I feel left out.”

  “Oh baby, don’t bring tears to my eyes. What do you want? You won’t allow me into that sticky small circle you’ve drawn around you and him; you disqualify an entire range of communication that can happen between us; you won’t fuck me; you won’t let him come out with me to go hunting for other women; you have set up a totally inhibitory life style; and now you complain that I am seducing your man away from you.”

  She began to squirm. I had her pinned. But I didn’t have anything to do with her. I knew what she was suffering, and I was willing to confirm her experience verbally, but I would not bend over backwards to help her out of her plight.

  I bracketed both of them with my gaze, helping to cover her nakedness. “The two of you are as yet unwilling to come to terms with the passion which takes place between men. And you, Bertha, will not let yourself be physically loved by women. You exclude one another from intimate contact with the rest of the human race. My God, that’s unnatural, that’s a perversion of such magnitude that only in an utterly depraved civilization such as our own could it not only go unnoticed but be considered the norm.”

  Francis nodded and said glumly, “Polymorphous perverse. I’ve read Brown too.”

  “Reading means nothing!” I was shouting. “You must live the ideas if they are to mean anything. The point of being familiar with all the life styles is being able to choose which one suits, change modes of living as easily as mathematicians change models.

  “But you”—I turned to Bertha—”won’t allow it. You keep him shackled to the prim variations on your tiny theme. I know where that’s at. I’ve been fucked fifty times more often than you have, and by five hundred more different men. I’ve fucked thousands of women. I know what you dig and how you dig it. There isn’t a secret in your cunt, or in your entire body, that I don’t know. There isn’t an emotion I am not familiar with. You can’t make a sound, or an expression, or a movement, that I haven’t become a connoissuer of.”

  She stared at me hard. “That’s so cold,” she said. “You completely leave out love.”

  “With a purpose,” I thundered. “Do you dare to use that word to describe what goes on between you and Francis? If there were love in you I would sit quietly at your feet. But you are as ruthless and cunning as I am. The only difference between us, baby, is that you play for small stakes, unwilling to gamble past the attainment of your dull linear orgasms.”

  I turned to Francis. “She’s right about one thing. You have to choose between us. I won’t stop being your friend, and I’ll know you long after she has become number fourteen on your list of ex-old ladies. But as for now, she wants primary hooks into your being. If I am with you, I will continue to be as eloquent as I can in living and describing my way of life, with all its shit and grandeur. And which runs absolutely antithetical to what she wants! Evan if you are swayed only in your head, that will be enough to make her uncertain and fearful. And she is right on in demanding that you don’t treat her in such a way as to make her live in fright. So I will step back and respect the walls of formality which must come between us.”

  “Don’t make me the villain,” she cried.

  “Listen, if you won’t play with me, and one and one and one isn’t three, then the chill is on the lettuce leaf. And it’s too bad, because it will be a resentment that will fester inside of him, whether he knows it or not, and just that will pop up at the crucial time in deciding, at some future date, whether you two still have a relationship or not. And maybe now you wish you’d never laid eyes on me.”

  She leaned forward in the chair. “I resent your male chauvinism and your insensitivity toward women.”

  I almost hit her. “Who’s been breaking his balls for the last four days to insure that all three voices get heard in this scene? Who has tried again and again to dissolve the false conditioned roles and bring you forth as a person in her own right? And haven’t you consistently retreated behind your image as ‘his woman’?”

  She nodded.

  “My feelings toward you are the same as toward all other women: benevolent non-recognition. I need cunt, I need tit, I need food. That’s woman. The rest is chitchat. I don’t know enough about women to form an attitude. As far as I am concerned, men and women are different species. I don’t put you up or down. My entire life is just an attempt to understand. Do you understand?”

  Francis lit another little cigar. “He’s Valerie Solanas in drag.”

  I tried to make sure she was really listening to this. “It’s like men and women are on different sides of a wall. And whenever I need one of the things a woman can give, I go to the wall and negotiate. I presume they do the same from their side. Whatever else you do on that other side of the wall is a mystery to me. Sometimes I put on woman’s eyes and take a walk in your world, and I faint from the richness of it. It’s gotten to the point where I prefer spending my time there more often. It’s such a relief from the cardboard theatrics that men indulge in.

  “Look, we fuck or we’re alone. When I need to be alone, I go off by myself. When I want other people, then I want to fuck. You understand? That includes touching and talking and sharing vibrations. But serious, and deep. It’s strange how you women don’t take sex seriously, and yet pretend to yourselves that it is terribly meaningful, whereas men treat it so lightly, but to them it is horribly necessary.”

  “You don’t think I’m a person,” she said. “To you I’m just a cunt.”

  “Jesus Christ, your cunt is what makes you a woman. Don’t you even know that yet? Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!” I yelled, punctuating each word by pounding my fist on the table.

  “Not all men think like that,” she said, and simpered at Francis.

  “Francis,” I said, “you been telling this little girl how much you admire her mind, man?” He coughed in embarrassment.

  “Don’t you think I have a mind?”

  “Sure you do, and it’s a fine mind I’m sure, and you’re a good artist, and a good cook, and you have a flair for clothing, and probably reek with marvelous attributes. But that’s got nothing to do with the essential reality of the condition that exists between men and women. It’s cock and cunt. Do you get that? I don’t know how to say it any more simply.” I paused, out of energy for the moment, wondering whether this w
ere all futile. “Look, there’s an easy way to find out just what I’m talking about. Have you ever made it with a woman?”

  “No,” she said, harshly.

  “Well, the next time you’re with one of your girl friends, and when the two of you are really deeply into your closest rap, kiss her on the mouth and fondle her nipples and then go down on her cunt.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” she said. “I’m not a lesbian.”

  There was a long silence, and she looked thoughtfully from Francis to me and back again. “What about you two?” she asked. “Have you been to bed together?”

  I looked down at the floor.

  “Then everything you’re telling me is a lot of shit,” she said.

  The courage had gone out of me, and suddenly I didn’t want to fight any more. It suddenly became very important to end the war.

  “There are no villains,” I said. “There is only action. I attack because I’m unhappy, that’s all. I don’t know how to solve it any more than you do. But please, let’s stop pretending that there’s no problem.”

  “What do you want from me?” she said.

  I felt the two of them as a unit, and flashed on my entire relationship with my father and mother. “I’m not even past the borders of my childhood yet,” I said. “All I have is my awareness.”

  A sweet glow suffused the space and I saw the three of us naked and laughing, rolling in high grass, holding and stroking each other, embracing with trembling sexuality. And a jet plane screeched overhead, shattering the web of possibility. There was no way to sidestep the actual, and the actual was brimming with failure.