CHAPTER 20
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of the Ending Year—‘69.
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of My Lai—“Waste ‘em!”
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of the Pope’s encyclical—“Humanae Vitae.”
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of Woodstock—“Yippee!”
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of “Oh! Calcutta!”—Oh!
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of “Midnight Cowboy”—Homo Queer Fag Gimp Cinderella!
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of Neil Armstrong—Mooning.
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of Hairy Legs & Combat Boots—Not Barbarella’s Boobs!
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of Wilt—“The Stilt.”
Maybe it was the sexual entendre of Bertha—“Fuck only you?!”
Maybe.
It was the “only you.”
This which upended Frank’s erotic universe. Ended, somewhat forever, a comforting meaning to the possessive mine.
“I’m not saying you’re not pretty.…” La la la lalalalalalala.
She had come to live here: in the house. Jack knew this, for he was out—not bunking there a solitary night of the Ying-Yang year. Sure, lots of parties, “The girl certainly can party!” And lots of smoke. He making a ton of money as the metro area’s leading Mary Jane and hashish dealer.
How was he to have anticipated the latent, slumbering organizational leadership power which laid lazily and hazily in his smoke-house genes? When he gave it a half-thought, Jack saw his old man—“Occupation: Chemist”—as one source. But it was his Mom he knew as dynamo: she who ran every volunteer community group, taskforce, committee and ad hoc this-and-that ever since Jack could remember.
“A cool million.” He made sure he said this stone cold sober. He liked the reaction he got. More from the guys than from the gals.
“A cool million.” Pause. He’d watch their jaws drop. Watch their little dicks get tinnier. Feel the electric surge pulsate throughout his being—“Better than being socked and rocked!” once said to Frank...Frank remembers.
A third: “A cool million.” Coated: “With more to come. Believe me. Believe Ole Smoky Tokey Jack Tollefsen!”
There were doubters, but it got Jack “the chicks.”
Bertha closed the door. Not shut it, not as with a noise, but sealed it as with a softly sighed breathed sound, somewhat like a sweet kissing sound. Just her action made Frank’s heart sing...flutter...it was a veritable Cause and Effect event: she closed the door and opened his heart.
Bertha had come to live with Frank. It was a full year. Came for the kickoff of ‘69 and stayed. For Frank she was 69—in every meaning of the word: nuance, subtlety, shade—induction and deduction.
‘69—women asserted their nakedness, publicly, privately; some wearing bits of jewelry, mostly fake but alluring; a scarlet, yearning teddy or some betraying lingerie: pleadingly virginal with whimpers of Sugar Daddy pearls; bras of boink!ing, flaunting colors in this braless, burning bra day—suppliant bras offering more than they exposed as they assaulted and exalted his delirious ravaging eyeballs...transfixed by postures—posing like the nymphs in Playboy: posing shy, posing shockingly unveiled, posing Girl Next Door sweetness...some swallowing him, sperm and all...others exploring holes in his head, his ass, his mouth, his brain!
Bertha was the hole in his soul—what she was, was what every other woman was not...she displayed her own appetites: inner and outer—decked herself with so much gold and pearl and beads of the rainbow that he could not control himself...blindly he digs at her, throwing away her external treasures—provoked, knowing them as sham, as diversions, as trompe d’oeil…colors: her so pale, white, not peachy, like fluid ivory flesh, now, one night all blue: nothing he can see but blue—no eyelids, no hairlines, no lips, all melting into blue...stains, she stains him, stains the sheets, stains the air, stains him: rubbing herself off on him—he knows himself as canvas—she artist, painter, creator: turning him into dots and stripes and telltale kisses as she rubs herself against him, draws her backhand and leaves a long singular strip of blue down from his forehead to his cock…red: calling him to “Douse me! I’m burning up!”—and she flees him...not that he doesn’t catch her, hold her, but as he probes her, pokes her, slips into her, invades her, ravages her, she he cannot hold, “Rape me!” infuriates him, baffles him, only to find himself ravaged, raped, burned-out, stubble, embers…yellow: “I am the Sun!” and it is she upon him, sitting upon him, riding him—all fours and he can feel her cock, feel her long penis as she grips his and magically implants it into herself...it is he who is pussy tonight, “Fuck you bitch!” she screams...she cocks him...she fucks him...she spurts all over him; dripping yellow…upside-down—what else is “sixty nine”?
It wasn’t just the sex. Yeah, it was the sex! Not sex as he had known it, that’s what Frank means, saying this to himself as if talking to someone else, “She changed the definition. Shit, she changed the smell!”
For that whole year: the scent. Like hound and fox. Like bee and flower. Like fragrant hallucinations of other worlds, spheres, specters, dimensions—other bodies. “Like smelling other bodies.” One day, resting next to her, after having had her for several hours: Having me…Frank realizes: she has me.
“Lick me.” Not a command. No longer even an invitation. Like a doper who had lit up a thousand pipes, taken a thousand trips, it was a making present, more akin to the joyous incendiary: “Light my fire!” and so he did: wickedly.
Knowing with her that his tongue was not just that flick which took things into himself like the toad snapping flies. Not just “Frenching” as kids do—everything with Bertha made everything before seem kiddish—not just the spitting of fluids, the savaging battling of tongues (“Does it really turn you on?”)—not the peck and parry, not even the teat tugging, boob bending, nipple gnawing slurp and suck and all that.
No. Bertha was tongue which was hands which was cunny which was full flesh against full flesh…which was beholding: “Just look at me.” And it came not to be looking but to be licking with his eyes: hungering…until he became drool: she’d be just there, fully clothed, sharply stylish, in counterculture flare, a real Cool Chick...then with a drop which was not by her own movement but by the gravity of his absolute lust turned to craving turned to belly aching, muscle twitching, mind-numbing longing: a jacket, she twists and turns within their shared sound of silence: a blouse, a skirt, socks, sandals, panties, bra—all to just begin the licking.
Licking—upon his naked toes she’d begin, with what became an eventual route, as if she were following markers, milestones embedded in his flesh, hands rubbing and patting, petting with tenderness, licking with kiss and suck and tug of teeth, taking each part as if an only part, as if each part of him was filled with boundless lust...erotic blood for her to drink, lifting his arm, holding it, cradling it, sniffing and rubbing her cheeks upon his forearm, washing his biceps with her hair, long hair, blanketing it all in her deeply dark strands: slowly, swaying, swishing, steaming, savaging—a cadence of actions within and without of time…him: to his amazement, testament to her magic, so he believes, adjusted in quick time...although at first fiercely unable to accept, for it was all acceptance, accepting his own body—this he instinctively knew from the first that she was giving him his own body, licking him with his own tongue, coming to him with hers to bring him this ancient knowledge, this forgotten truth, this damned and forbidden insight, this blasphemy of licking...he feared that she did not have to describe herself as a mother licking her cub—an incestuous imagining which undid Frank without awareness or perception.
“Don’t!” cuts off her tongue; stabs her heart—he grabs her, mounts her...fucks her quickly.
Bertha persisted. Till the day Frank surrendered—the only pain he truly felt: replete with embarrassment, humiliation, the sense of belittlement. As he grits his teeth a strange courage overtakes him, fl
ushes him as the gagging fury of peyote has always grabbed his soul: “I want this!” screaming from within...a battlefield scream, shouted and hurled into the face of the Unknown, the Dreaded, the Sacred Shitless…she licked him; then she paused.
For him it had all been just the bravado of “going down.” Down under. Hiking South. A scary jaunt, but the sine qua non of proving yourself a “liberated male,” the boast which greased the slide into the bong group, let you rap with the radicals, stand tall with a fast talking, cock-cutting feminist beside you…it was the challenge of the times: “Seize the Day!” So, despite the forever-first revulsion which did tremble his virgin lips so had he kissed her, knowing that she wanted it, knowing that if he got it over with that she would be his to ride for the night...it was the barter he was willing to exchange: cunt licking for cock sucking, fellatio for cunnilingus: Whatever.
Licking—after hugging, after kissing, after fondling, after touching and stroking…he knew that he wanted to explore, admitted to himself that he wanted to swallow her, that he had less need now for the poke, the hot poling and the splattering smash of sperm—Yeah, great stuff!—but he wanted more of her treasures...he now knows that they are stashed in the cave on her southern shore…so he sails around, battling her as she is cold breeze, fierce sleet, rocking and smashing the foremast of his desire—he knows that he could stop, that she is pleasured, that she has come orgasmically like sudden storm and crackling lightning…but he ventures forward: into her dryness, the time of her deadness, when her body becomes the desert...he knows that she is easily annoyed, that the press of his tongue is like lumberjack boots stomping her dusty ground, that each kiss is like tearing her flesh out by the roots, but he kisses, hungrily, her dry rocks and her parched soul…venturing: conjuring up the darkness of her, sensing that she now wants him dead, cut at the throat, homicide, infanticide: child of her desire now sacrificed and buried in her cave…he hides from this darkness, covers himself from the evil wind, burrows deeper into her...tongue into her hole, tongue into long rope dropping: dangling, heedlessly down, sightless into her depthless cave, tongue which becomes alive, transformed, animated as serpent—at The Moment: a different moment, but all could only be marked as “Moment”—at the moment he becomes alive to her, again, but this time not as blade, not as lance but as pleasure pole: Maypole…raucous laughter: laughing crazily as they laugh...she is rousted as the echo of his laughing; it is the rhythm, it is their rhythm, the rhythm which defines this Moment—she swallows him as he swallows her...like tongue inside mouth, cock is she, cunny is he...he now the cave, she now the serpent sucking each so that it is a blowing: a breeze up and down their spines, spines now wrapping cords: lacing each other round: round into a ball: a sphere: a oneness only being because of twoness...yet a thirdness: another presence…pregnant!
“Jesus, B you were astounding.”
“We were, weren’t we.”
Satisfied. Fully pleasured. Spent. Energized in the heart but fatigued in the body. Hours. One of their best bouts, jousts, tumbles, explorations…amusements. If they had to agree upon a word it would have been “amusements”—for they were happy.
But she waits. Bertha waits.
Frank punches the pillow, wiggles his head to mold a comfortable niche. Too tired but then not sleepy. Half-awake but not groggy. Aware of her but then not overly conscious of her.
His mind is a fluttering, sputtering reel of hundreds of images of their Moment together—calling it a Moment when they “Just do everything. Jam it. Ram it. Cram it. Slam it. Roll it all up into a ball and bounce away, together.” This afternoon had been such a Moment.
If either could have explained it, few would have grasped it. She never sought explanation. He did but found it spoken only through his wordlessness.
It images itself only as the year was numbered.
It felt like those numbers, themselves, interlocking.
It rose like an energy neither sourced nor could contain.
It in a timeless slice and a spaceless slip was present.
She to he and he to she.
Down to feet, each kissing. Holding. Endearing. Hands embracing.
Each lying. Fully tongued. All flesh to all flesh. Layered. Like fog.
Sliding. Like tears down a cheek. Drops of desire into pools of fire.
They are fluid each to the other, each of the other.
Northern heads docked into southern ports. Like the compass needle swinging wildly, madly as their poles shift and all which had been plotted and mapped and assured them of position, of being, of existence: all longitude and all latitude, now they are spinning, twirling, a whirlpool: all the stars and planets and asteroids of their cosmic flesh sucks them down and through: veritably, they dance—69.