I thought about Bill's offer, weighing it against the relationship. The fact was I had no relationship. I was the victim of a compulsion that I almost wanted to escape. Call it chance, the werewolf phenomenon by which man is turned momentarily into beast; we'd managed to sniff each other out like hounds. The whole thing was a great wet dream which I hadn't yet dealt with as a reality in my life. And with the exception of avoiding the boyfriend (the one area where reason magically came into play), the temporary amnesia that afflicted me before and after each event, making it impossible to remember how I'd come or gone from her bed, only increased the air of unreality. In addition, I wasn't plagued by any work commitments, which is one of the reasons I had the time to indulge my compulsion to be with her in the first place. I'm a set designer for the road productions of Broadway musicals, but my next assignment, Annie in Des Moines, was weeks away. I accepted Bill's offer and found myself on a flight to Key West.
Bill warned me that when he and his buddy got going, they could talk about food all night. The chit-chat about fritters, cornmeal, jalapeno pepper stew, and Kentucky boar was a refreshing break from the obsession that had begun to rule my life. The food talk was almost meditative. As the conversations proceeded, my mind was temporarily freed from thoughts of her. Our first night we actually had dinner in the kitchen of the Casa Marina, where Bill's friend, Sam, cooked. We sat on stools by the counter, giggling like a pair of schoolboys. As Sam created dishes, he made hors d'oeuvre-sized samples for us. There was cockle lasagna and steamed calamari jambalaya, smoked prime ribs and lamb innards.
When Sam suggested we hit one of Key West's many strip clubs when he was done with work, I worried about the embarrassing accident that was likely to occur if some beauty sat on my lap. The dancers would reawaken the hyper-sexuality that had been tempered by conversation. Sam's mother was French, and though he'd been raised in Cleveland, he was an avid student of Derrida, Baudrillard, and the French deconstructionists. We'd no sooner entered the dance establishment than the discussion about erotics started. The dancers were all culturally bound representations. Naked breasts and even cunts have absolutely no significance in shamanistic societies. In fact, nudity as a concept only existed in proto-capitalist trade and barter societies, where the taking off of one's clothes was a source of power or humiliation depending on how it was perceived. Sexuality has nothing to do with the body as an image. Biologically, sexual intercourse occurs without any ideation. The sexuality of animals is free from any concepts of masculinity or femininity. The discussion continued as a tall brunette sat on my lap. When 1 told her 1 was on a vacation from an intense sexual relationship which had left me in an abnormally stimulated state, she gently lifted herself off me before our relationship got off the ground.
There was a black dancer wearing nothing but thigh-high boots with stiletto heels. She wrapped her arms around a bleached blonde with small breasts and purple pubic hair. They started kissing. The black dancer, who had large pendulous breasts, sat down and lowered her partner into her lap, laying the nipple of her breast on the blonde's mouth. Thereafter followed a scene that reminded me of a Giotto fresco of Jesus in the Virgin Mary's arms. How different this was from the ecstasies of my recent fucking! It had obviously been all choreographed in advance. I'd never realized how much thinking could go into sex. 1 turned to Sam.
"Sex is actually one of the great intellectual activities, yet everyone mistakenly thinks it's physical. It actually has little to do with instinct. It's all about mind and imagination. And yes, I would agree with you, it's culture bound."
"But the whole Eurocentric critic, the dead white males stuff is passe even with the French," Sam pointed out. He was about to continue when the black girl pulled her head out of the blonde's crotch and leaned backwards, arching her body up in the air and supporting herself by her hands. She was staring at Sam's face. She licked her lips and then flicked her tongue suggestively.
"How much for the VIP room?"
Our was not going to end so soon, as Sam insisted we all accompany him. I was reminded of the U.N., which often sends so-called "observers," who sit by impotently as the local population is slaughtered by the latest self styled "liberation movement."
Sam disputed my characterization of sex as an intellectual activity.
"Everything is subjective, intellectual or not, but intellectual implies the Sisyphean attempt at ratiocination, and sexuality is a succumbing to man's animal nature. Once I let go of the slim tethers that tie me to so-called reality and I'm in that VIP room, I'll be preconscious. That is to say, I'll be at the mercy of both the primitive demiurge and hallucinatory ecstasies. So therefore I'm urging the two of you to accompany me so I don't end up doing something foolish. Anyway, for scientific, sociological, and historical reasons, I'd like you to document my descent or ascent-whichever way you choose to describe turning over reason to instinct. Schopenhauer said that reason was the only way we could resist the demands of the will. I disagree. There is no way. But let's see."
We followed Sam as the black dancer said, "Okay, honey." Her frame was narrow for the explosive sensuality of her buttocks and her large breasts, and her back was totally smooth and unmarked. In fact, the skin had a curiously lighter color that made it look like she was covered by some large white birthmark from her coccyx to the nape of her neck.
Her name was Giselle. Her mother had been Haitian and her father German-the son of a convicted officer at Treblinka who was still held in high esteem amongst right-wing German politicians. Sam was more interested in having her pose than in engaging in any of the offerings-fellatio at $150, fuck $250, with $275 buying "around the world." Bill said he had some questions to ask about her past. That, Giselle replied, would be $100 for a half an hour. Bill asked Giselle to assume the doggy sex position with her ass raised high in the air. Giselle lowered herself down to the carpeted floor of the VIP room and we pulled up chairs behind her. She'd been an architecture student in Dusseldorf, but had dropped out to study dance and then classic French theater in Paris. She had studied at the ComedicFrancaise and had gotten so far as being an understudy for one of the supernumeraries in a production of Corneille's Le Cid, but the esthetic rewards of the classical stage didn't justify the near-poverty conditions. She was happier as a lap dancer in Key West.
"I feel I'm helping people," she said. She had the flexibility of a yogi and talked confidently despite what might have been an awkward posture for others.
At Bill's urging, Giselle recited a short scene from Le Cid on all fours. As she spoke Corneille's words, she stared back at us. The recitation stimulated a discussion of Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked, which continued on as we were walking out of the VIP room.