Vincent was there too, to lead a weekend group in MASSAGE AND MEDITATION, along with his current partner, Brenda, a divorcée with child, who was now two months into nurturing Vincent’s seed, while the two of them gloomily pondered on whether or not he was ready “to assume the responsibilities of a relationship” or whether she should have an abortion. It was obvious that Vincent was in a bad way, so exquisitely does his appearance mirror his psyche. The clean-shaven, freshly laundered presence he had had at our house was replaced once more by a week’s beard, stained clothing, and a faintly unwashed smell.
He was even reluctant to work this weekend, being into one of his superhumble “how can I claim to lead groups when I’m not even fit to tie my own shoelaces?” moods. Also, he had led a MASSAGE AND MEDITATION WEEKEND two weeks before and told me that, while it went all right, “everyone complained that there was not enough encountering. It seems that feeling good is not enough. People aren’t happy unless they’re shouting at and criticizing one another. Otherwise it isn’t ‘Therapy.’ And they all wanted their therapeutic pound of flesh.”
“Well, why don’t we combine both groups together just for this evening. I can lead them through some encounter-game exercises and you can then lay your relaxation trip on them. Besides which, it will give me a chance to see all of the women in your group and give them the once-over.”
“Cool. Great idea,” he answered.
At nine o’clock I explained the evening’s format to the two dozen or so men and women assembled in the living room.
“What we’re going to do tonight are some warm-up exercises designed to help you get to know one another quickly and to get you in touch with your fears, shames, and hang-ups. And I want to start it off by having everybody stand up, mill about the room, and silently get to know the others. After you’ve done that, pick out someone you’d like to know better and sit down on the floor facing him.”
I had not intended to join anyone, but given the even number of people in the room, when Vincent paired with a young boy, the odd man out chose me.
The first exercise I suggested when everyone was paired was to have one member ask the other “Who are you?” After each response—or any wandering irrelevancies—the phrase was to be repeated, perhaps twenty times in the five minutes allotted. Then the other partner was to pose the same question back.
“Next, I’d like each pair to stand up, move about the room together, and nonverbally pick another pair you’d like to know. Then settle down again in your foursome and switch off partners.”
Vincent and his seventeen-year-old adolescent and I and my married gentleman friend were unchosen by others and so formed, by default, a foursome. Since I knew Vincent, I paired with the youngster.
“Same procedure now, but this time keep repeating another stock question—namely, ‘Tell me about your sex life.’”
The boy started first. I told him that I liked fucking, that it felt good, and then in response to his repeated question recalled one entertainingly ribald adventure after another. When I posed the same question to him, it turned out that he wondered if he was “gay,” found himself repeatedly attracted to men, and wanted to experience a homosexual encounter. However, because of his youth and shame, he had never gotten around to it.
Next, back as a, foursome, we sat around and discussed our experiences up to that point.
I tried to lessen the boy’s (Danny was his name) sense of shame concerning his homosexual curiosity by sharing with him my experiences with Tom Boyle, concluding with, “So I think that such curiosity is a natural thing.” I tried it once to see what it was like. After all, how will you ever know what the trip is about unless you take it?”
“He’s a rank amateur,” Vincent playfully cut in. “I’ve sucked hundreds. But of course it’s true. You’ll only know if it’s your ‘thing’ after the experience.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Danny, “my therapist has been telling me the same thing for quite a while. It was something I thought I might get into some more this weekend.”
“Your therapist must be crazy,” said my married ‘Who are you?’ friend. Who would ever suggest such a perverse thing otherwise? I think that instead of listening to that advice, you ought to get yourself a new therapist.”
“What an absurd, narrow, and unimaginative attitude,” I contested. “You’ve never met Danny’s therapist. All you know is a second-hand story the boy’s fed you.” My voice rose in righteous defensiveness. “What’s wrong with such a suggestion? It may be unconventional, but it certainly makes direct sense. I’ve sucked cock and I haven’t felt that it perverted me or weakened my strong heterosexual interest. And besides, how can anyone know if he is fond of Chinese food unless he first actually samples the menu?”
Danny then confessed to having picked Vincent out on the first pairing in the hope that Vincent might be into homosexuality.
“If you want to know what it’s like, whether you like it or not, I’d be perfectly willing to meet you after the encounter is over and we can suck each other, fuck each other, or whatever you like,” said Vincent, with the utmost seriousness.
Danny smiled softly and nodded his head. His dream come true?
My married friend winced, masking his opinion, I suppose, of what bizarre and crazy therapists we were. And yet, why should Danny waste years on the couch, pondering and worrying about the question of his basic sexual likings, when he could find out directly, in an instant with Vincent, what they were?
The groups of four then coalesced to form groups of eight, and I had each person tell the others of the thing they were most ashamed of. That over, we formed a large circle that included everybody, to exchange last remarks, questions, and feelings about one another. I threw flirtatious glances at two women registered for Vincent’s group, which seemed not to be picked up at all. Then Vincent led us outside to lock arms and stare at the heavens.
The night air was cool, the sky cloudless and intensely black. The empty vastness above was mirrored by the solitude of the surrounding earth. Not a sound but the rhythm of the crickets’ chirp. The highways were far away. No engine from car or plane to break the rhythm of the insects’ sound. Dewy grass underfoot. Cool night air on the face without a breeze to break the uniformity of the sensation. No other houses and no other lights to detract from the stars in the firmament.
I had walked outside concerned and excited, my own mind spinning about the “rightness” of the Anthos experiment—an experiment that provided a stage where people could act out and test out all of the roles they both longed for and feared playing in the outside world.
Yet being swallowed up by the vastness around me, all things—this very question, the “personal problems” that each group member took so seriously, indeed my very life itself—shrank to insignificance. I recalled something I had read about those misguided souls who sought heaven on earth. We are in heaven now. Existing on a rock called earth, spinning freely in the heavens about a minor star called the sun, one star in a modestly sized galaxy known as the Milky Way that was probably linked up with other galaxies floating in other measured relationships one to another. And within me, within every cell of my body, every atom in each cell contained a universe of its own, with planet electrons floating about a nucleus sun. And even these particles were capable of being broken down still further—forever and forever and forever.
And I saw that I was locked into this whole system; forever changing, forever in motion. Energy at play. This stuff that I consisted of was capable of being transfigured, but never destroyed, for all eternity. And the I—the ME—is no more than the universe watching itself.
I am here as an eye—a window—an opening in the vastness of the universe that beholds itself everywhere and is bedazzled.
Then the terror hit. Not only the awesome simplicity of it all, but the fact that this particular miracle known as ME should exist at all, and would some day exist no longer. Weak-kneed and gasping now, I became aware of this small human circle
I was part of, and that I was touching and being touched by other living centers of energy, other scared, ego-identified beings, and that the warmth of their bodies felt good.
Would that I could have felt close enough to one of them to share the universal shivers through the darkness of this night.
Saturday, July 25
The morning session was productive enough, working on the problems that some people brought with them, exploring and intensifying feelings that others had and were not in touch with, and in general having people give one another feedback as to how they came across.
There was one addition to my group and one subtraction. Celia, a twenty-seven-year-old secretary who had initially registered for MASSAGE AND MEDITATION, decided to switch over to my standard encounter group. While she was one of the two women I had visually undressed the day before, I had no reason to believe her switchover happened on my account. Indeed, in spite of her very attractive features—red-haired and milky-complexioned, long-legged and large-breasted—she carried herself in a way that spelled U-P-T-I-G-H-T-N-E-S-S. She pulled her head down into her chest—much like a frightened turtle—sat with her arms huddled protectively around her updrawn knees, and when she walked, moved with a spastic uncertainty and brittleness.
I presumed her to be one of those lonely people who come to encounter groups more in the hope of finding a husband or a wife than to seek enlightenment or a more spontaneous way of living. As Vincent once remarked, “Esalen, for many, is nothing more than a psychedelic Grossinger’s.” And what was true for Esalen was certainly true for Anthos. Indeed, there have been groups in which I wondered whether I was a therapist or a social director. “No,” I thought. “If Celia came to my group it was not to make whoopee with me, but rather because of some adolescent crush on someone she must have encountered last night.”
The subtraction was Danny, who was nowhere to be found. Somebody had seen him go off with Vincent last night. The married man related their dialogue. Someone else thought he was just sleeping late in his room.
I was, however, becoming increasingly concerned. Might something catastrophic have happened? Was the simple logic of their intimacy unreasonable after all?
I knew that every psychological sect had a theory about the workings of the mind and the necessity of specific psychotherapeutic techniques. And I knew what professional opinion would be if Vincent and Danny’s meeting backfired. After all, had I not spent six years in psychoanalytic training myself?
If a latent homosexual walks into an analyst’s office, is asked a few questions, and then goes psychotic, no one will fault the analyst, because he was following standard operating procedure. But if you do something as unconventional as offering him a blow job to find out, and then he goes psychotic, you can be sure of being crucified on the cross of shocking unconventionality—regardless of the logic of your position. For conventional psychological wisdom insists that any involvements with patients are not in the patients’ best interests and come about only because of a manipulative therapist. And while I took issue with the first part of that axiom, I did, to an extent, accept the second. For even though I’d come to believe that self-fulfillment is obtained by living out—as opposed to talking out—one’s dreams, and even though I thought it was acceptable for a therapist to live and share in his patient’s dream space—provided that he knew what he was doing—still, no regular patient I have ever had in on-going treatment has ever actually slept with me or seriously tried to talk me into it. This in spite of their knowing that I am open to almost any suggestion.
And in those exceptional moments when I have gotten together with someone in a weekend encounter group, no one has ever apparently suffered.
Yet, where was Danny.
The issue resolved itself clearly enough when Danny returned for the afternoon’s session. After an initial silence, the curiosity of the group members got the best of them.
“What happened?”
“How did you find it?”
“Where were you this morning?”
“How do you feel now?”
“I overslept, was up late, and I’m tired,” came Danny’s dour response. “I’m glad I did it, glad I found out, but frankly it was a disappointment. I didn’t particularly like the way he tasted and I never really got aroused by the acts themselves. My disappointment is that the excitement of the fantasy was not realized in reality. I guess homosexuality is just not my thing.”
Score one for Direct Therapy.
Sunday, July 26
Surprises are what really make life interesting. And it certainly surprised me that Celia and I wound up in bed together.
During Saturday evening’s session, it became increasingly clear that she had enormous difficulty asking for things. So I had her go around the room and ask everybody for something. This she did, asking for handshakes, respect, an embrace, or a candid opinion of herself. However, when she got to me, she stopped asking.
“I can’t think of anything I want to ask of you now,” she said.
Imagine my wonder, then, this morning. We had gathered in our bathing suits at the pond to hold our final session out of doors. The day was lovely, the sun shone brightly, and everyone was feeling that special type of elation, closeness, and freedom that so often accompanies a successful encounter weekend. At one point, someone suggested that we stand in the water, which we did.
“My only regret this weekend was that we didn’t have a nude session,” said one smiling middle-aged matron. “I’d heard so much about them.” Others nodded their assent.
“Well, there’s nothing to stop us from doing it right now,” I suggested, and removed my bottoms. Amidst scurrying and squealing everyone hurriedly pulled off tops and bottoms and threw them ashore. There were splashing and mud throwing, dunking and hugging. Celia swam up to me, wrapped her legs about my waist, locked her arms behind my neck, and gently pressed against me. At first I thought she was being playful. Except that she didn’t relax her grip. My prick sensed, even before I did, that she meant business.
“Do you remember yesterday when I said there was nothing I wanted from you? That was a lie. I was too embarrassed to ask you then but what I really wanted was to go to bed with you.”
I pulled my head back and looked at her. The nervous tension I had seen in her body was gone now. She was obviously still quite serious. But was I interested?
That first night, when she was in Vincent’s group, I had felt comfortable in mildly coming on to her. However, when she began to attend my workshop I felt a parental protectiveness toward her. Also, I was unprepared to deal with the stickiness of a conjugal relationship with one of my group members. And she had seemed so uptight. And hadn’t I presumed she wanted a husband?
So I decided against it. I said nothing, but merely smiled benevolently back at her. Some others were leaving the pond to lie on a float, which sat, un-nautically, on the grass. I moved to join them, and she disengaged.
Lying on my belly on the float, waiting for the lunch bell to ring, the sun warming me, circled by and touching other bodies, I began to feel one touch stand out above the others. Slowly and insistently it caressed my leg and my back and my arm. At first I accepted it as the absent-minded, idle, affectionate stroking that seemed to radiate from everywhere. But soon the warmth from the sun and from this particular hand evoked a warmth from me as well. My cock began to swell, and I raised my head to see whose touch was so special. Again it was Celia. She stared back at me and nodded when I told her how nice it felt.
There is an old Yiddish expression that “when the prick is up the brains go out the window.” Was that happening now to me? Damned if I didn’t suddenly want her. And badly too.
“Why not?” I told myself. She was certainly not crazy. She knew I was married and wasn’t “husband-bait.” And besides, perhaps I presumed too much. She did, after all, give other reasons for being here.
I rolled over on my back to face her. “If you still want me, I’m available.”
&nb
sp; Without a word, she slowly rose. I followed. We slipped our swimsuits back on and silently walked the few hundred yards from the pond to my room in the house.
I locked the door. She was half-sitting, half-lying on the bed. I slipped out of my trunks and joined her. She again began to touch and caress me. I kissed her. She moaned and swooned. I had never seen anything like it except in those pornographic comics that children first furtively read behind the pages of their arithmetic books in the schoolyards of America.
Yes, it really happened. Her eyeballs actually rolled back upward in her head, exposing nothing but white space.
My “Little Orphan Annie.”
She went limp with desire. Like butter. Like jelly. Soft and desirable despite the surrealism of it all. I unhooked her bra and removed her bottoms. The red cunt hair was as brilliant and as pretty as the hair on her head. And almost as soft. I bent down and kissed it. I ran my tongue along the inner aspect of her groin, along that crease where thigh meets trunk. A hair’s-breadth from her tender slit. Another moan, and, incredibly, she fell limper than limp.
I looked up. Her eyelids were fluttering. That and her breathing were the only motions she was capable of. She was like some great decorticate animal given over totally and mindlessly to the passionate surge of sensual oblivion.
It was infectious. I stretched upon her, covering her with my body. My chest slapped against, rubbed, and then settled against her cushiony, buttery breasts. My tongue slid into the unresisting mouth and down into her endless throat.
My prick, yearning, throbbing, burning, edged against her thigh. My hand moved down to separate the cunt lips of this sexually paralyzed and groaning beast. And my organ slid inside her moistened, jellied gape.
And when my cock had extended, unfolded, and settled fully into her, she suddenly sprang alive. Like Lord Śiva, as a four-armed goddess of love and destruction, she began her tāndava dance.
The Reluctant Exhibitionist Page 9
