The Erotic Comedies

for bruce, dolores, evelyn,

gerard, and timothy,

for joining me in the lab

with special thanks

to betty and ted for bears in Vermont;

to john, louisa, albert, and bruce

for their loving care in converting

three of the fables into wondrous theatre;

to al, jack, lige, and gay

for courage in publishing

what others were afraid to touch;

and to richard

for keeping the faith

and an astral toast

to the ghost of james fenimore cooper

who haunts the steam room

at the st. mark's baths

Acknowledgments

To the following publications, for permission to reprint pieces which first appeared in their pages: Penthouse, Circus of Jade, Thy Kingdom of Come, The Metasexual Manifesto; Oui, The Dying Gynecologist, Bluebeard's Instant Grecian Urn, Subway Dick; Gallery, Yesterday's Iago; Gay, The Trucks; Screw, Beyond Bisexuality; Bisexuality, Therapy, and Revolution.

Introduction

by Martin Shepard, M.D.

I first met Marco Vassi in a somewhat fashionable Chinese restaurant on Manhattan's upper west side in the fall of 1968. It was evening, and a mutual friend had decided to introduce us. It was a case of love at first sight. No. Take that back. It was a case of intrigue at first sight.

What I saw was a slim, swarthy man in his early thirties, of moderate height, unshaven, full sensual lips posed in a mischievous smile, and a sense of great anguish pouring from dark, deep-set eyes. His costume for the evening? Oversized, stained, grey overalls. He looked like a cross between an Italian street urchin and a young Karl Marx.

Love grew as soon as he began to speak. It was as if I discovered the brother I had always sought, a man whose curiosities, playfulness, reflections on mortality, and sexual hungers mirrored my own. Nothing that he said or did seemed accidental, and I left that encounter realizing that even his stained dress was purposeful. If there was schmutz, it was holy schmutz, for he was trying to understand his natural response to dirt free of cultural conditioning.

We saw one another frequently over the next two years. Outfront and outrageous, Marco had a way of posing questions to which he knew there were no answers. As a Zen Buddhist, his deepest aspiration was enlightenment. As an ex-Catholic, his way of attaining it was through sexual yoga. With raw courage sustained by the most tenuous conviction that sex is smiled upon by the Atman, he plunged into the world of eroticism. In the words of one of his characters (laying gender prejudice aside), "it was impossible for her to remember how many men, women, children, animals and dildoes had been inside her, how many gallons of sperm she had swallowed, which perverse actions she had not attempted or catered to.

We met infrequently during the next several years. Other commitments, other adventures, and other friendships occupied both of us. I would, on occasion, pick up a national magazine that contained an article of his or purchase some new soft cover title. It amazed me that given his prolific output and his enormous literary talent, critical acclaim seemed to avoid him. He was certainly the best erotic writer I had ever read. Perhaps that was the problem, for neither The New York Times Book Review nor any other major reviewer seemed to acknowledge the presence of this class of literature. Such are the intellectual pretensions and anti-sensual biases of our age.

Why don't you write something that has less of a sexual emphasis? I once asked him. You use sex as a vehicle to talk about larger issues anyway. Can't you find a different context in which to discuss these things?

I'd like to, he answered, ever the pragmatist, but this is sure money.

Rumor had it, recently, that he was no longer interested in writing what is commonly referred to as pornographic literature. Good, I thought. Something will replace it that will be reviewed more widely and that will gain Marco the success he so richly deserves. So when he phoned and asked me to write the introduction to his new book, I felt both honored and curious to see what he had come up with.

What's it about? I asked.

Beyond bisexuality, he answered, which also happens to be a tentative title.

Oh, I said, my hopes for his career fading. Then what do you need my introduction for? You're a far better writer on that topic than I am.

But you're a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, he candidly countered. A preface by you might lend the book a certain legitimacy and help sales. Besides which, you can write whatever you want to. Make it personal, clinical, whatever.

Flattered, I did not bother to inform him that my name on six previous books had not resulted in any best sellers. Instead, I accepted his offer, picked up the manuscript several days later, brought it home, and started reading. I soon realized that my solicitous concern for his career was unnecessary, for while this may be his last sex book, it is so different in scope and concept from his previous gothic novels that it simply has to be appreciated by a wider audience than is constituted by the usual stroke-book devotees.

I could, wearing my psychiatrist's hat, make a valid case for both the therapeutic and redeeming social value of a book that explores the areas beyond bisexuality. In that event I would confine my remarks to the collection of essays that comprise the second half of this work. I'd attempt to convince you that Doctor Vassi had advanced the work of Drs. Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich to its logical conclusion. If the Great Repression we, as a society, suffer from is sexual, and if individual neurosis consists of the failure of libidinous energy to find its natural outlets, what more logical treatment is there than one which insists upon plunging into the phobicly a-voided arena of eroticism? The fact that psychoanalysts have not urged such a straightforward and common sense approach bespeaks their own lack of daring and their own fear of social and professional ostracism. This timidity ought not to surprise anyone, for therapists are as mortal as the rest of us and very much the products and the tools of the conventional society that they serve. It takes an unusual person—be he sage or madman—to open our eyes to what is right before them. And Marco Vassi, though he has occasionally been thought so, is certainly no madman.

One must admire those who teach by example, not merely words, for the work that they do on themselves serves as an inspirational beacon to the rest of us. Marco's erotic adventures can only be seen, again and again, as attempts to transcend the limitations on freedom that Culture has imposed upon one and all. The discovery that yesterday's taboos are invalid is also the wedge in the door of authoritarianism, for it leads one to question similar Social divens in the realms of politics, science and progress.

I'd prefer, however, to go past my psychiatric evaluations in discussing ideas beyond bisexuality. For that, I must don my multicap of writer and reader. Why? Because psychiatry deals with one worrisome yet limited aspect of existence known as Mental Health, while Vassi's book encompasses existence itself.

The sexual act, he wrote, in all its forms has many layers of motivation. And it is his microscopic attention to and analysis of sexual detail that gives this work its extraordinary range.

Marco is not chronicling pathology nor is he writing merely about sex. Instead, lust and perversity serve as starting points which magnify larger existential issues such as love, roles, ego, meaning, and death. And it is all done with an unusual admixture of gentle cynicism, universal truth, and great good humor. When his business tycoon (The Sicilians Revenge) makes speeches on political power while receiving a blow job, a looking glass is held up revealing the idiocy of our manners and desires. Nor are these actions and motivations diseased in any way, reflecting, instead, the all too human absurdity in each of us.

And what a cast of memorable characters he creates in his fables, characters who mock all those conventional trappings and images we hold so dear. Do you want the inside scoop on Law and Order? Then read about the perverse policewoman in Subway Dick. Medicine? Get to know the Dying Gynecologist who enters his field not to save lives but to savor pussy. Higher Consciousness? Meet God, an unpretentious Jolly Green Giant who is as unaware of the facts of creation as the autistic onanist who he visits on earth in order to fuck.

Nothing is sacrosanct. We are perpetually provoked to examine and acknowledge the base within the sublime. Love gets its due in Yesterday's lago. Sexuality itself is continuously poked fun at and nowhere as neatly as through the person of Butch Medusa—the sexual counterpart of Ian Fleming's Dr. No—who produces the ultimate power machine: a Sexual Cyclotron. Innocents and revolutionaries a like have their come-uppance in The Land of the Sperm King. The Mental Health profession is dealt with through a renowned therapist who traced all neurosis to the suppression of embarrassment people feel when farting, and consequently comes up with the most revolutionary treatment in the history of psychology: Enema Therapy.

I laughed myself silly at several points throughout these tales, for Marco has a way of making us aware of our stupidities by placing existing conventions in surreal contexts. Who will forget the Organic Coprophiliac, a pseudo-Gothic tale set in middle America and told in the best Mary Shelley/Vincent Price manner, wherein Mother informs Daughter of a curse visited upon all the females in the family line? The great questions which follow concern very real customs, such as: When should you let a man shit in your mouth? After the first date or after you're engaged? And will he lose respect for you if you do it too early? Similarly, the bankruptcy of our policy of industrial progress is personified by an Italian Mafioso, whose phallus was hard and gnarled like a De Nobili cigar.

Revolution through iconoclasm. That's what Marco Vassi is about. And gallows humor as he explores our ever-present human foibles.

One sees in Vassi Genet's Holy Degenerate, as he lovingly describes the grotesque. Or a sexual O'Henry in the twists and turns of his plots where lesbians are transformed into heterosexuals, killers into victims, and constables into perverts. Vidalesque playfulness emerges in No Woman of Man Born. And everywhere there is the mocking deliciousness of Rabelaisian grossness—peeing, farting, lapping, and shitting—which serves to underscore how our world of constructed manners still rests upon some basic animal functions. And all of this is brought together through a fine appreciation of the law of opposites; of the necessary juxtaposition of Yin and Yang.

Beyond bisexuality? Yes indeed. For Marco is not content with closing the distance between our male and female natures. It's something far broader than that he's after. He's out to heal the split between our sense of daring and our basic entropy, between our poetic visions and our gross bodily functions, between our existential awareness and our all too human limitations.

Marco Vassi, I thank you for letting me read and dedicate your book.

A CARCASS OF DREAMS

erotic fables for radical minds

There is no better way to know death

than to link it with some licentious image.

de Sade

The Dying Gynecologist

The dream of life was ending, and he was returning to the unformed state where consciousness could not follow. Having accepted the inevitability of this moment many years earlier, having made it a daily meditation, he was now without apprehension. If anything, he experienced a mild curiosity, faintly eager to experience the phenomenon of death.

For several hours he had lain in what appeared to be, to those gathered around his bed, a deep coma. But he was in fact fully awake. Having spent his entire career in the service of others, he gave himself permission to take these last few moments for himself, sinking lazily into his thoughts, savouring the voluptuous cadence of his breath, wandering down the corridors of memory to gaze upon the thing he had been, the infant, the boy, the man, and finally, the unencumbered organism coming to its predestined conclusion.

In the room sat his wife, his four children, his oldest friend. His favorite cactus plants had been moved in from his office so he might have the solace of their presence, reminiscent of the silences of the desert, the same silence he now prepared to enter. The six people waited, not speaking, wrapped in the wide calm that emanated from the man in front of them.

He felt no pain. The garment of flesh that had served him faithfully for so long had worn out and was ready to be discarded, to go back into the earth.

"I wonder what happens to the I in me, he said to himself, to the intelligence that is even now asking the question. Is there any chance it might continue after the body ceases to function?"

As though in response, some strange sensation seized him, held him for an instant, and then disappeared.

I'll know soon, he thought. Or perhaps I won't know anything at all.

The situation amused him, and he smiled. The sudden appearance of the seemingly incongruous expression startled the others, who were watching him closely, half ashamed of their subliminal desire to have the whole thing over with. His eldest daughter leaned over and whispered in her mother's ear, He must be a saint, to be able to smile on his deathbed.

Wouldn't it be peculiar to die and find myself face to face with old Jehovah, the man thought. Imagine all that nonsense turning out to be literally true. It's a mysterious universe, and anything is possible.

He chuckled, causing the hair to rise on the necks of the people around him.

The breath caught in his throat and his frame shuddered. There was no specific point at which he could grasp the unfamiliar process of passing away, but he knew that the moment of departure was very near.

This is really very odd, he mused. "I can feel it happening, but it seems so distant, as though it had nothing to do with me at all. I don't feel like I am dying. There is just death going on, and I am one of the people observing it. The only difference between me and the others is that when it happens, they will stand up and walk out and I will be left lying here."

Then abruptly, as though he had fallen from a great height, he felt everything drop away from him. Time underwent a cataclysmic change, and he was swept by a sensation of rocketing through space at an exponentially increasing speed, until he was going faster than light itself. And yet, the faster he moved, the more still everything became. Opposites lost their identity.

One by one, his faculties shut down. Hearing, touch, taste, smell, all disappeared. His thoughts blew off his mind like shingles from a roof in a high wind. He opened his eyes for the last time.

Sam, his wife said.

Goodbye Constance, he croaked and saw nothing more.

Relinquishing everything he had ever imagined he might lay claim to in the universe, he bade farewell to himself. In a microsecond of utter clarity, he saw what an ironic play life was, what a strange dance of fantastic reality. Beyond all ability to apprehend his experience, he gave himself up to death.

But it was not yet time.

He lost awareness of the external world, and his breathing stopped, but the vital force which had animated the inert elements of his body and sustained the cohesion called existence had not yet dispersed. A doctor would have pronounced him dead, for his heart had stopped beating. But beneath the measureable manifestations, in the core of his being, the finest thread of electricity still hummed. All that he had been was now reduced to that single throb of energy.

Subjectively, it was like falling asleep, and into a dream. First, a total loss of self-consciousness, then a sentient blackness, and finally a slow discernment of form. A blank screen lit up, and on it appeared the thin line of a far distant horizon, such as the edge of ocean seen from shore. It separated sea from sky, both the same shade of deep cobalt blue.

For an eternity, nothing moved. And then, faintly, a dot emerged from ground into figure, balanced delicately on the line. Subtly, slowly, it grew larger, obviously coming closer to the shore where the man stood. Without any landmarks, there was no way to estimate its size. As the relatives and friend began to look at one another, attempting to decide who should approach the body to find out whether the end had come, the man began to hear the first low ripple of trumpets which seemed to accompany the object.

Now, measuring the thing against his own height, he was able to assess its scale. As the music swelled, a jagged burst of golden light shattered the scene, and he gazed up at what thunderously swept toward him, a thing a thousand feet high and perhaps a third as wide, taking up his entire field of vision. It flew forward with majestic ease until it stopped suddenly, a few feet in front of him, and his knees buckled when he realized what it was.

He looked up into the face of a giant, encompassing, and perfectly formed cunt, quivering in purple radiance, a great mandala enveloping him in its aura. He gazed upon it reverently. In smell, in texture, in pulsating vividness, it was the quintessence of cunt, ideal in its every fold, its every hue.

My Lady, he whispered, and fell prostrate before it.

In the mind of the man within his mind, kneeling before his object of worship, he was twenty-five again, in his last year of medical school, wondering