He didn’t exactly look like a faggot, but then neither does Arnold. But when you saw them both together it was not hard to believe it of them. Maybe this is simply because one is conditioned to believe it of any two men seen together, especially if they look any more sensitive than total clods.
I was all prepared to be very uptight at the first meeting. Surprise — everything is very cool and easy. They come to the door, I invite them in for a drink. We each have glass of wine, then across town to a Korean restaurant that David likes. Ginseng cocktails before dinner. Fried seaweed, other weird things. Everything tasted so great it didn’t bother me to think about what I was eating. We had a second round of ginseng cocktails. They were like daiquiris but with an aftertaste. Of ginseng, one would assume. They’re supposed to be very yang, which means something if you understand the macrobiotic diet, which I don’t. They’re also supposed to be aphrodisiacal, which they may be, and then again they may not be. Who could tell?
We went from the restaurant to David’s apartment, which was mildly slummy but a much better proposition than Arnold’s, much less depressing and better furnished and not all those fucking flights of stairs to climb. We were really beautifully relaxed with one another. You could actually feel a three-way love thing developing, a bond uniting me with David, me with Arnold, and Arnold with David.
Not love.
What, then? Call it a moral equivalent for love.
(Not my phrase. David used it.)
We talked. I don’t remember what about. Not about things, really, but just loose bubbling talk. We were already high, a little from what we had had to drink, and more from being high on each other. Arnold and I sat on the floor on pillows while David got the grass ready. There was music playing. Mozart. David likes only classical music, has no interest whatsoever in the new sounds. Mozart played. Arnold kissed me. I sucked his tongue, put my hand on his leg. David came back, holding a little brass water pipe, Indian or Ceylonese, I forget. There was a discussion about that at some point, whether the water pipe was Indian or Ceylonese, and we established tentatively that it was one or the other.
David sat on the floor with us. He touched Arnold’s cheek, twirled Arnold’s moustache. David is clean shaven with a schoolgirl complexion. He leaned across Arnold and kissed me. I reached around so that I could hug them both at once. “I love you both,” I said. “Oh, I love you both.”
The grass was a mixture of Panama Red and hashish. Panama Red is a particular kind of marijuana which is supposed to be particularly good, I guess. No one explained, just announced the composition as if stating a premium brand name. Panama Red. Gee, Dad, a Wurlitzer.
I hid my ignorance under a bushel.
The little water pipe passes from hand to hand. I suck gently on the mouthpiece, take the smoke directly into my lungs. (At least I remember that much.) The smell is of course familiar, not only from college days but because you smell grass all over New. York, constantly. People smoke in the streets, not hiding in closets as we just about did in college. But the taste is also familiar. I remember it from that far back.
It is very mild in my throat and lungs. I remembered it as being harsh and hot but this is milder than a cigarette. Very much so. And the pipe passes, with no urgency, no need to get high too quickly, and we talk.
I remember none of the conversation. Or maybe it’s that what I remember isn’t worth recording. It was all in and of that particular moment but doesn’t wear well.
The truth is that I was high before I realized it. At one point I was sitting there, not at all conscious that I was high yet, and I got up and started to move to the music, and it came to me that I wanted to be naked, that my clothes were confining me, choking me. I stood there swaying to Mozart — and why had I never before realized that Mozart could be danced to, that Mozart did everything but demand to be danced to? And in time to Mozart I removed every stitch of clothing, brandishing each piece gaily before me, then tossing it away like a stripper flipping garments into the wings.
Somewhere in the course of this performance I realized, with a cheerful little giggle, that I was absolutely stoned out of my head.
David pulled his turtleneck over his head. Arnold unbuttoned his shirt. Time and space were all grass-distorted. They undressed all the way and glided smiling toward me. I kissed one and then the other. I closed my eyes and went back and forth, from one to the other, kissing them, and I didn’t even know who I was kissing. David was clean shaven and had no hair on his chest but I was stoned and seemed to be simultaneously kissing a man with a moustache and pressing my breasts against a hairless chest.
I singsonged, “Georgie, Porgie, we’re gonna have an orgy!”
And we fell down laughing.
I sat on the floor and they sat on either side of me and we necked. I took David’s cock in one hand and Arnold’s in the other. They were both nice and hard. I leaned one way to kiss the tip of one, leaned the other way to kiss the other.
Everything felt so clean.
They carried me to the bed. Lifted me and carried me, one at my head and one at my feet, swinging me gaily as they walked. They put me on the bed and got on the bed with me. I lay with my eyes closed and I floated. Off in space, spaced out, weird, I don’t know all the words for where I was, so stoned, so utterly stoned on grass and hash, and I don’t have the experience or the vocabulary to convey the state I was in.
And they began to make love to me.
The foreplay must have gone on for an hour. Both of them busy at once, and me the apex of the triangle, all their attentions focused entirely upon me. Kisses here and there, hands ever busy, two mouths and four hands and the special perception of grass and hash making me feel everything separately and yet everything together.
Interesting, this. I had thought that group sex would be, well, confusing. Hard to follow.
Strange.
How to put it?
Well, I had thought that it would be complicated by the difficulty of relating to more than one person at a time. And on a more physical level, by the difficulty of paying physical attention to more than one set of caresses. If you were really enjoying having your breast sucked, how to contend with the simultaneous assault of another tongue upon your clitoris?
Hah!
Take my word for it, Mirror Girl. If you tried it, you would find a way to enjoy it.
Oh, wow!
I think the grass makes a tremendous difference. Although since that first time I’ve seen them again and we haven’t always smoked although we usually do, and you can get almost the same effect without the grass. Not as strong but you can do it. David says that the grass is abeacon, it shows you the way, and then you can make the same trip later or in the darkness once you know the route. I think it’s a particularly good metaphor, it says it all.
I wonder if there isn’t a major connection, though, between grass and group sex. The big use of the one and the big new thing for the other. They all come out of the same new openness, I know that, but maybe there’s more. Group sex is psychedelic, I guess.
The first time, on David’s bed, everything was for me, everything. They did not touch each other at all. It was not really three-way sex but a woman being loved by two men. And it was, oh—
After those subjective hours of foreplay, after an endless coming, hours of coming, after taking them in turn into my mouth and hands, after feeling all of them everywhere, they put me on my side. Arnold’s long slender penis skewered me from behind, shishkebabed my bottom (The pain that had been there when Eric did this was not present now. I had learned — from Eric’s teaching — to relax the sphincter and enjoy it. And Arnold was somewhat slimmer, and I think used a lubricant in the bargain.) And then, while my bottom held Arnold nicely in place, David came at me from the front and touched my breasts and kissed my mouth and slid his own nicely curved penis into my cunt.