The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [67]
“I know I feel that way. I know I think that might be so. But I’ll be damned if I’ll take my word for it. People think a lot of screwy things.”
ASTRAL SEX. What can I tell you about astral sex? There was a lot of it and a little goes a long way. I remember thinking at the time that if nothing remotely sexual ever happened to me again I’d have no grounds for complaint.
Like lots of what I ran into in my strange journey, it seemed like compensation. For one reason or another sex as I had known it was no longer possible. For the best for all concerned, men and women weren’t going to be allowed to see each other any more. I had some cosmic clap that had to be quarantined. I was going backward in time and didn’t have a body any more. I couldn’t be unfaithful to Virginia or she’d kill herself. I couldn’t make love to Virginia or the world would end. So for compensation, severance pay, or whatever, I got astral sex.
Like all the other compensations for the various disabilities I suffered, it was more than a fair deal. I wondered how I had ever worked up much enthusiasm about regular sex.
I was electric with sexuality. Breathing gave me orgasm upon orgasm. I can’t begin to describe what dancing with angels was like. Occasionally the puritan in me would try to worry about having to pay for this some day, but the pleasure was so all-engulfing there was very little room for second thoughts.
I had earthly sexuality too, but like the rest of my earthly life it had become twisted, disjointed, and horrifying. My penis would seem monstrously huge. I’d get hard-ons that wouldn’t go away. I’d try to masturbate to defuse my earthly sexuality but couldn’t come. I feared that something was trying to turn me into a homosexual. I feared that I was turning Simon into a homosexual and teasing him horribly. There were no nice warm sex feelings, just fear and exploitation.
It’s possible that these feeling represented the breakthrough of repressed homosexuality that’s terribly clinically significant, but I have my doubts. Heterosexuality was no less threatening to me than homosexuality. I remember telling a voice that seemed to be Virginia, “Sure I can see how it would be frightening being a woman. Penetration, violation, invasion. It would terrify the hell out of me. But to tell you the truth, every time I put it in I was never all that sure I’d get it back. That was scary as hell too.”
While I had never had homosexual relations, I had felt physical attraction to men and recognized as much without getting upset about it. I was also attracted to a lot of women I never slept with. My sex life with Virginia was hardly the greatest and represented a general sexual repression, but I can’t help thinking that those who blame sexual problems for mental illness are putting the cart before the horse. It would be foolish to deny that sex affects frame of mind but even more foolish to overlook that one’s sex life is also, if not more, a consequence of one’s frame of mind. Food was horrible to me too, but I have yet to hear anyone say that schizophrenia is a repressed fear of food.
HEADLINES. “California Earthquake.”
The voices. “It’s all right, Mark. Just don’t do it again.”
“I don’t know if I can help it!” I cried. “It’s such a bitch.”
“It’s the only way. Only someone like you could do it. Only someone who wanted so badly to never hurt anyone would ever find the key. It’s poetry. If you don’t understand it now, maybe you will later. Maybe it’s the way to hurt the least number of people.”
“Sometimes you voices sound a lot like Nixon. I promised I’d never hurt anyone. Please put me somewhere where I can’t hurt anyone. Please.”
Simon was perfect. The farm was perfect. Virginia was perfect. My mother was perfect. My father was perfect. I was perfect. Lucky Strikes were perfect. The switch to MacDonald’s Export and then settling in on Sunkist and Sportsman tobacco was perfect.