SECTION FIVE
sm
COLUMN
FIFTY-SIX, FEBRUARY 1, 2001
KISSING COUSINS
WARNING! FOR ADULTS ONLY! PERSONS UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO READ THIS STORY.
[Tsaurah Litzky
is a poet and writer of fiction, non fiction and erotica. Her work has appeared
in Best American Erotica 95, 97, 99 and will be included in BAE 2001.
She has also been published in Penthouse, LONGSHOT, The Unbearables, Crimes
of the Beats, Appearances, Downtown Poets, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,
Pink Pages, Beet and many other books and periodicals. Her poetry books
include Kamikaze Lover (Appearances 1999) and the just published Good
Bye Beautiful Mother (Low Tech Press 2001). Formerly a columnist for the now
defunct New York arts weekly Downtown, she now teaches erotic writing and
literature at the New School University.
I started to think about doing it with
Bruce when I heard him doing it with Marybeth. Peter would be sleeping at my
side. The little rill of his outgoing breath was a steady counterpoint to the
sexy moans and joyous sighs I could hear through the wall tht separated our
rooms. Peter would smile in his sleep; sometimes he’d even hum, maybe in his
pot-primed inner ear he heard their mating sounds as a pair of violins.
I don’t know where Peter is now. He may
have a pot farm in British Colombia or a video store in Tampa or maybe he is a
handful of dirt, but back then he always smoked a thick joint before we retired
for the night. Sitting in bed, naked under the covers, he would savor it down to
a tiny roach. He’d put the roach in the ash tray on the bedside table for his
morning hit. Then he would yell into the bathroom across the hall from our room,
usually just as I was putting in my diaphragm, “Hey babe, get your sweet ass
in here. I’ve got something for you.”
What he had was a small, sturdy cock
commendable for its thickness, having about the same five inch circumference as
my wrist but he was not very imaginative as to how he used it, he did the same
things every time we fucked. He did have a good heart and he was crazy for me. I
was his olive-skinned exotic jewess with a thick black pubic bush like a wooly
rug. He loved to rub his face in it. He loved my chocolate-colored nipples so
much that when he sucked on my tits the look of pure pleasure on his face was so
intense it frightened me. His ardent devotion was beginning to bore me and his
jokes no longer amused me and he didn’t have the prankster imagination or
pirate heart to hold me. I had begun to put extra Koromex jelly in my diaphragm
so I’d be even wetter and slicker and he would get very excited and come right
away. He’d pull out, murmur, “I love you, babe,” and fall asleep
I knew I had to leave him. I’d lie
awake beside him plotting my escape. No matter what or how I told him it would
be the same kick in the balls. He would be devastated. I thought about just
walking down through the Mission over Russian Hill to US 1 and sticking out my
thumb. It was the coward’s way but maybe it would be for the best.
While
I tossed and turned, unable to sleep, I’d hear Bruce and Marybeth going at it.
At the end she’d always let out a big shreik. I’d hear some rustling sounds
as if they were nesting against each other and settling in for the night but
within a few minutes, they would start again. I’d get excited, put my hand
inside my crotch, match my rhythm to their moans. Sometimes they’d do it three
or four times and I’d enjoy a vicarious night of
love. I wonder how much my excitement was increased by the fact Bruce was
my cousin.
My mother’s sister Mildred had taken up
with a petty hood named Cappy who ditched her when Bruce was two. She married a
plumber and she and Bruce moved upstate to Buffalo.
When I was thirteen and he twenty, Bruce
moved back to New York where he got a mechanics job out at Lockheed on Long
Island. On Sundays he would visit us, driving up on his Harley, bringing candy
and comics for me and my little brother. He was six foot, three inches tall, the
tallest man in our family. He had his father’s size and my aunt’s black hair
and startling blue eyes. I thought he looked like a giant Warren Beatty in Splendor
in the Grass. My mother would let him ride me around the block on his
motorcycle. The nipples on my new little breasts hardened when I put my arms
around his waist and leaned my chest against his long back.
The last time he came to visit he arrived
with Marybeth on the back of his motorcycle. She was dressed in black sweater,
black miniskirt, black tights. I was already reading
Bruce and Marybeth opened their home to us when Peter and I arrived in San Francisco in our Ford pick-up truck. When I called from a phone booth in North Beach a block from
She
found herself staring
at the curve of Bruce’s
tight ass in his jeans
their place, Bruce’s first words to me
were, “Cousin, I wondered when you’d show, come right over.” They put us
in their spare room. Bruce got Peter a job at the garage he worked in. I spent
my days panhandling in Golden Gate Park. We had almost enough saved up for our
own place but everyday I felt more and more like running away. I found myself
staring at the curve of Bruce’s tight ass in his jeans or watching his mouth
move as he talked.
One morning Bruce and I were the first
ones awake. I was making coffee and he was seated at the kitchen table rolling a
J. The sunlight filtered through the leaves of Elizabeth’s plants on
the windowsill and made a lacy pattern on the pine top of
the kitchen table. Bruce lit up. The rich, resiny pot smell floated out
into the sunny room as the smoke mingled with the clear morning light.
I brought Bruce his coffee and set the
cup down on the table in front of him. He lifted the J. to his lips again, then
he took his hand down and left it. dangling from his mouth. With one swift
movement he put that hand up under the oversized T-shirt that was all that I had
on. He put his palm against my vulva and his middle finger up inside me. I was
surprised at how wet I was. My womb contracted around his finger as naturally as
if his finger was what it was made for. I could not look at him and instead
looked down at the leaf pattern on the table top. Outside in the street an
impatient driver leaned against his horn. Then we heard Marybeth’s light
footsteps coming down the hall. Bruce pulled his hand out and I took a few steps
back towards the sink.
“You two early bird cousins, what birds
of a feather,” Marybeth said, smiling fondly at us as she entered the room.
Later that day a friend of
Marybeth’s called. He was leaving a two room apartment on Potrero Hill.
Peter and I decided to take it. Within a week we were in our new pad on
Wisconsin and Twenty-Fourth. The window above the kitchen sink looked out across
the harbor. I could watch the big ships take off for China while I did the
dishes. Peter’s Louisiana drawl, which I used to find charming, now constantly
annoyed me. I found myself snapping at him, “I’ll be old and gray before you
finish this story,” or, “I have to go to the can, tell me later.” I was
spending a lot of time in the bathroom when he was home, just sitting on the
commode.
One morning after Peter had left for
work, I was dusting our window seat when I realized that it was actually a
built-in chest. Inside I found a bunch of S&M
magazines. They were filled with photos of nude or scantily clad women in chains
being whipped by men in hoods and obese women licking the boots of men in
business suits or policemen’s uniforms. There
was even a picture of a woman clad only in a diaper giving a man a blow job with
what looked like shit smeared all over her face. Some of the men were grinning
but all the women looked sad. They were trapped on the pages of the magazine and
I was trapped with a man I didn’t love. I felt sad and angry. I wanted some
comfort so I took the picture of the shit-faced woman to the bed . I fingered
myself as I pressed my tongue to the woman’s paper cheek. I pretended I had a
fat cock in my mouth. I was so excited I came in less than a minute but my
unhappiness was undiminished.
I got up, gathered the magazines
together, threw them back in the window box and slammed the top down. I had to
leave or I’d go crazy. I called Bruce at the garage where he and Peter worked.
When Robby, the boss, answered the phone, I disguised my voice and said,
"Please get Bruce, this is Marybeth." Bruce got on the phone and I
said, "Don't look surprised, it's me, I have to split on Peter. I'm so
unhappy with him. Can you lend me two hundred for the bus back East?" He paused for a second then said, “Yeah, sure.” He said
he would phone Marybeth right away and tell her to give it to me out of the cash
she kept at her vintage clothing store on Grant Street.
When I got to Marybeth's shop she gave me
the money in a twenties' Whiting and Davis gold mesh cocktail wallet. "Good
luck," she said and kissed me. I felt so guilty for coveting Bruce. She 'd
always been a pal.
When I told Peter, at first he didn't
believe me. "But you seemed so happy Babe," he said. He kept asking me
what he had done wrong. He even got down on his knees and begged me to stay. We
spent a terrible night curled away from each other on the bed, neither of us
able to sleep. In the morning he begged me again. I ran into the bathroom and
locked the door. When I heard him leave for work. I put on my tie-dyed orange
dress, purple suede jacket and my cowboy boots. I gathered up the rest of my
things, put them in shopping bags outside by the garbage. I put my journal in my
knapsack and headed for the bus station.
When I got back to New York, I stayed
with my friend Harriet, got a job at Max's Kansas City waiting tables and saved
my money. I found a small, funky apartment in Brooklyn on the East River with a
view of the Statue of Liberty. As soon as I got a phone I called Bruce and told
him I was doing OK , would be sending the money I owed him. He told me to have
fun and hang tough.
I settled into my new apartment and
started to write bad poetry about the ambiguity of love. I went on the pill, had
a few not enjoyable fucks with a very abstract expressionist, met a struggling
actor named Axel who loved to give me head. One night Bruce called to tell me he
and Marybeth were splitting up. She had turned her store into a coffee shop and
was spending so much time there he never saw her. He said he was getting
involved with a French ballerina he met when she lost control of her car on the
Golden Gate bridge and skidded into his van. I wished him good luck, told him
I'd send him some of my poems.
Across the country people were gathering
in protest of the Vietnamese war. I went to peace marches, embroidered Make
Love not War on the back of my dungaree jacket. I broke up with Axel,
despite his miraculous tongue, because he thought art should have nothing to do
with politics. Another war broke out between the Arabs and the Israelis, then
the riots started in Watts. I met a black poet named Nat at a poetry reading.
After we had sex he liked to read to me from Ralph Ellision's "Invisible
Man". He would get angry when I fell asleep while he was reading.
Bruce called to say his sister Sarah was getting married to her dentist in New Jersey. He
She spent a week cleaning her apartment, scrubbing the floors, washing the windows
would be coming East for the wedding and
he asked if he could he stay at my place. I said sure, great, of course.
I spent the week before his visit
cleaning my apartment. I scrubbed the floors, washed the windows till the glass
sparkled. I was looking out the
window and when I saw his van pull up. He had painted it striped black and
yellow because he was born in the Year of the Tiger. I watched him park and pull
a big duffel out of the trunk.
I was so happy to see him. I ran down the
stairs and flung open the door. He filled the door frame. I had forgotten the
size of him. He put down the duffel, grabbed me up and whirled me around. I was
shaking from joy and fear combined.
"Show me your new estate," he
said. He picked up the duffel and I led him upstairs to my two rooms.
He looked around. "Neat," he said.
"Put your stuff in the other
room," I told him, " I got you a sleeping bag I borrowed from my
neighbors." My voice suddenly semed to have gotten three octaves higher.
"I'm making tea," I heard
myself say in my new, squeaky voice as he put his bag in the bedroom. He came
back and sat down at my kitchen table. He was watching me as I put up the water.
"You still got it, kid" he
said, "you look great in that red dress." I felt intensely pleased. I
didn't tell him I had combed every thrift shop in Brooklyn to find that dress. I
suddenly realized that I had been acting as if Bruce was my lover back from
three months at sea or a little business trip to Mexico. That thought
embarrassed me and I felt myself blushning. To divert attention from myself
I asked him, "What happened with you and Marybeth and where is this
French ballerina?"
He took his Marlboro pack and his lighter
out of his shirt pocket. From the pack he extracted a thick joint. He lit it,
took a drag and passed it to me. "Why is your face so red?” he said,
"but you know, you always looked so pretty to me". Then he told me he
didn't really know why it went bad with Marybeth. Maybe it was all the time she
spent at her shop or maybe they had just learned all they needed to know from
each other. As for the French
ballerina, her name was Minette. Their romance had lasted three weeks. She was
treating him to dinner at a fancy, restaurant on Nob Hill.
"I was wearing my blue zoot suit,
you know, the silk suit Marybeth got me,”he said. “Everything was going O.K.
She ordered champagne and made a toast to me. ‘I am excited by the big men,’
was what she said. When the waiter came for our order, she ordered boeuf
bourgogne. When I said I would
have the filet mignon she said, ‘But cheri, I thought you do not eat the red
meat, you are a partial vegetarian, no?’
“When I answered,” Bruce said,
"’Why, isn't filet mignon a fish?’ she got all upset. ‘I thought you
were sophisticated, un homme cultivée,’ she said.
While he was telling me this, Bruce
started to laugh. "Un homme cultivée, not me" he said and I
laughed too. We passed the joint around some more and then I told him about Nat
reading aloud from The Invisible Man. Then
as naturally as if we had always been together Bruce's hand was on my knee. I
moved to sit across his lap, my arms went around his neck. We kissed and it was
sweet and light and hot all at once.
Nothing
needed to be said. He carried me into the other room and placed me on the bed.
He took off his shirt, kicked off his sandals, pulled down his jeans and
stepped out of them. He wore no underwear. In my imagination I had given him a
giant, fat cock, but his cock was long and thin, a veiny rope reaching half way
to his knees. His balls were huge and covered with hair. I put my head up and
licked them, cupped one with my tongue, sucked at it, tried to swallow it down.
Bruce sighed with pleasure, my woolly bear. I worked his balls while I teased
his cock with my hands until it grew so big I thought it might explode but then
he stepped back from me.
He
ripped my dress off over my head, then he lowered himself on top of me. We were
skin to skin, my breasts crushed flat beneath him. He put his big hand between
us and started to tug at my nipple, his cock hot against my belly. Even though I
had washed that morning, I could smell myself. I smelled pungent and rank as
though I had not wiped my bum. This excited me even more. I wanted him to get
dirty with me and he must have read my mind because then he put his hand under
my bottom and his fingers found my ass crack and started to play there. I
thought of the magazines I had found under the window seat, the picture of the
woman with the shit on her face. I wanted Bruce to put his hand up my asshole
and then mark my face with what he found there, but before I could tell
him he reached between my legs. He put his big thumb up my ass and the other
fingers into me.
He wore me like a glove. He raised his
head from mine and, watching my face, fucked me hard with his hand. I had never
been so hot or felt such galloping pleasure. This must be ecstasy, I thought,
but then something strange happened.
Bruce's handsome face, smiling above me,
became softer. His jaw shortened, his fine, straight nose became smaller and
more delicate. His thick, black eyebrows thinned out into two graceful arches
and his eyelashes grew longer, thick and curly. In the space of a minute, he had
become feminized. He looked exactly like his mother, my Aunt Mildred.
He took his hand out of me and held it
up. It glistened with my juices. He licked his fingers, his palm and smiled down
at me looking exactly like my Aunt when she was about to give me a present. The
waves of pleasure between my legs began to ebb away. As he entered me I closed
my eyes. I tried to visualize his big, snaky cock sliding in and out of my
snatch but all I could see was my Aunt's beautiful smile. I moved my body up to
meet his, gripped him inside me hard. I tried jerking him off with my pussy so
he'd come quickly and, to my surprise, he did.
I felt him shoot into me but somehow his orgasm did not have much
stregnth and then without a sound he pulled out. He rolled over on his back, put
a hand out to rest on my breast. After
a while I opened my eyes to find him looking at me. He was Bruce again but he
looked perplexed, sad and unhappy
"What's the matter?" I asked
him.
"You know, "he said," when
I making love to you, when I was inside you, you looked so much like your mother
I didn't know if I could go through with it. I had to close my eyes and imagine
Raquel Welsh was sucking me off".
"I
kept seeing your mother’s face," I told him, “You looked exactly like
her.”
“Thanks
a lot,” Bruce said. He reached into the pocket of his shirt which was piled on
the floor, took out his cigarette pack and extracted another J.
We smoked in companionable silence, then we drifted off to sleep.
Bruce stayed a week. We visited my
friends. We went to Coney Island, rode the cyclone, ate hot dogs and knishes. At
night we slept together in my bed. Sometimes in the mornings we woke up hugging
but we never took it further.
At the end of the week we drove to
Sarah's wedding in New Jersey in the tiger-striped van.
We danced several dances together. When we did the cha-cha, the other
dancers stopped dancing and stood around us and clapped. When the band quit for
a break, we went back to our table and sat down. My mother, who considered
herself the wit in the family, said, "You two looked so good dancing, maybe
you should get married."
Everyone at the table laughed but Bruce and I did not join in.
##
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