Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

wanted to comment. He wanted to make some sophisticated, highly intellectual observation, but it all felt suddenly sucked out of his head. He could not assess a collision of opposites so diverse. The charm, the silver penis, dangled at her throat like a finger waving. He could think of no reply. When he looked back at her, he realized the only obvious truth: She was beautiful.

Then, oddly, she continued, “But even truth has a price.”

Change the subject! his thoughts commanded. Say something, you ass! Anything! “We used to come here every now and then in college. You know, have a few beers, take a look at the…speculative dancers.”

“Boys will be boys,” she returned. “Don’t be timid in admitting that you’ve been here. Christ, I work here.”

“When did they start this live sex stuff?”

“About a year ago. Washington’s always been one step behind New York and LA. It’s a free country, right? Besides, every night is packed.”

Smith barely heard her. Her face seemed as puzzling as the night, an inexplicable perfection. A decade ago he’d dreamed of it, but what now? Where was the truth of it now?

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“Everyone is. If you look closely enough.”

He was shivering. He couldn’t believe what he’d just said. Sitting with her, talking to her and merely seeing her was like trying to decode a cipher. Her smile never wavered. She squeezed his hand. “I would’ve gone out with you, you know, in school.”

“Oh, yeah?”

The smile turned sad. “But you never asked.”

The whole thing was too depressing. Smith knew he should leave, get out, go somewhere else for his sorry plight. But then the aura popped. The Anvil’s din rose to a wild roar. Some huge young man had stepped onto the stage, grinning and taking bows as the audience whooped. The guy looked like a body builder, all shining skin and corded, flexing muscles. He probably weighed 220 without an ounce of fat. He was completely naked but for a studded black-leather collar and wrist bands. That and the mustache and shoulder-length hair gave him the appearance of a Barbarian. But Smith could only gawk at what everyone else in the place was surely gawking at. The guy’s penis, though limp, was huge. It dangled between his legs like a flap of steak.

“Excess is the name of the game at The Anvil,” Lisa commented. “How’s that for a donkey-rig?”

Smith gulped. He’d never felt right talking to girls about sexual details, much less penises of extraordinary size, but even he had to half-chuckle. “It looks like something that should hang in a smokehouse. I hope his partner has a good health plan.”

“His name’s Do-Horse. A real scream. We didn’t hesitate to hire him once he showed us his qualifications.”

Smith had always believed that morality was relative. He was not a Christian, yet he knew travesty when he saw it. He stared at Do-Horse. The dense, pumped-up muscles and brash grin made him not a man but a caricature, a personification of moral desertion.

Lisa let out a long, uneasy sigh. “You always were a gentleman. Aren’t you going to ask me what I do here? Aren’t you even wondering?”

“I’m wondering,” Smith admitted, spewing smoke.

“Pay attention and you’ll see.”

With Smiths’ low groan came images of beauty defiled, like dropping fresh-picked flowers into pits of excrement, like pissing into spring water. The applause grew deafening as Lisa wended toward the stage. She stepped up and shed the plastic overcoat; her sudden nudity glowed in the stagelight. She turned and bowed, raised her arms, giving the crowd its visual appetizer. She was a caricature herself — of desire unbridled, a living object of men’s lust. Her body was long, willowy, very slender, but with large, high breasts and sharp contours. Her hips turned to highlight her pubis, which was hairless and smooth, a protuberant cleft. Do-Horse strode the stage a last time, flexing softball-sized biceps and tensing the rippled musculature of his back. Then he sat spread-legged in the chair. Lisa knelt at once and took hold of his cock. It drooped like a fat, lazy snake.

Smith felt paralyzed, hands flat on the table, eyelids glued open. This was awful, a passion play from the abyss. Do-Horse had come erect instantly. The glans, large as a baby apple, seemed to pop into Lisa’s mouth. She blew him in long, suffocating strokes, while applause surged like machine gun fire.

The thing must’ve been a foot long, and Smith actually jolted when every inch of it slid quickly down her throat. “Deep throat, my ass!” someone shouted. “This is deep stomach!” Smith thought he saw hunger in her bulged eyes. Her cheeks looked stuffed, her stretched-open jaw made her face long and narrow. My God, Smith thought. My God, my God.

Do-Horse lifted her up, pulled her mouth off. Her ass spread against the leather strap when he placed her in the harness. Long slim legs hung loose; she looked levitated as she grasped the suspending cord. Do-Horse knelt to plow her sex with his tongue, which, like the rest of him, seemed inordinately large. The hot lights beat down; sweat shone on her flesh like lacquer. All the while, Lisa squirmed in the harness, her feet pedaling the course of this oral preludial. When Do-Horse stood up, the shadow of his erection played over her belly, a ghost-serpent ranging over white valleys. Lisa reached up and caressed the equally large testicles, then began to stroke the shaft. In time, she guided the dome to her sex. The dome disappeared. Do-Horse grinned, paused, then shoved it all into her at once.

A hush swept over the crowd. Lisa shuddered at the first thrusts, then slipped into the rhythm, more and more intent. That’s all Smith could see in her now, an intricacy of intentness, matrixes crossing — flesh and spirit. The clarity of details revolted him, the shine of sweat on skin, the motion of muscles, the moaning and the wet sounds in sudden pin-drop silence. It hurt just to watch. The girth of the penis stretched Lisa’s sex to a tight, bright-pink rim. With each thrust, Smith feared it might break.

Do-Horse was an iceman, his grin false, his arousal automatic and cold as slate. His ministrations progressed with no more passion than a derrick wheel pounding dirt. Yet Lisa reacted the opposite. Again it was her intentness, like light focused to diamond-points. Her nipples stood up stiff and pink. Her shiny breasts quivered with the blows. She moaned and whipped her head around and locked her ankles behind the broad, tapered back.

Perhaps intentness was contagious. The once cacophonous crowd had transposed to a room full of frozen, staring faces and unblinking eyes. Every attention held fast, in compounded silence, to the lighted stage. Smith felt himself shivering. Was this truth, this one-act play of copulation as spectator sport? These were human bodies submitted for mutual use, the act of love corrupted to parody. Or perhaps it was Smith’s misconceptions. Besides, every night is packed, Lisa had told him. Maybe Smith’s ideals had kept unadmitted attractions buried to his consciousness. If not, then why hadn’t he left? It was the same sensation he’d felt upon entering, a melting pot of revulsion and excitement. Everything was opposites here, negative poles being forced to touch.

Lisa seemed close to convulsions when Do-Horse took her out of the harness. He lay her on the floor and straddled her, sat right down on her belly. The wet penis pointed up, pulsing. Lisa looked at it as though it were more than a cock, as if it were an icon of vast complexity, the graven image of the cult of flesh. She grabbed it with both hands, stroked back and forth first slowly, then with vigor. Do-Horse’s grin looked like a knife-cut in clay. His buttocks constricted as his climax broke. The long spurts of his semen jumped out in flying lines which formed chaotic glyphs in the air, arcane messages or even epitaphs. They landed on Lisa’s breasts and face as she milked out the last. The finishing touch surprised no one; Do-Horse leaned over and licked it all off.

In the aftermath, a great empty space filled Smith’s gut. The crowd was roaring again, standing in demented ovation. Amid the rain of applause, Lisa and Do-Horse rose, their naked bodies gleaming under the lights. They stepped to the stage edge, exchanged grins, and bowed to the audience.

The act was over. Smoking, drinking, oblivious, Smith felt consigned to stare back into his own thoughts. Other acts followed, variations of the same crossed matrixes of flesh and bipolarity. More bodies for use. More sex as spectacle. The Anvil thundered after each performance, while Smith’s despair sunk to the lowest stratas. Sometime later, a shadow listed behind him. He was stupefied and drunk. Only the trace scents of clean hair and soap caused him to look up. Purity in the Hall of Filth, he thought. Everything is opposites.