Chapter 1
He came home one night, laden with cans of paint that he had purchased downtown, to find a startlingly sensual Negress lying on the bed in the sleeping alcove of his tiny flat, a cigarette in one corner of her mouth.
"Are you sure you're in the right apartment?" A silly question, perhaps, but he asked it just the same.
She ignored the question; she just lay there, staring at him, her eyes boring directly into his until at last she spoke. "I hear that you paint," she said, twisting her lips into a mocking smile.
"Yes. I do some painting, sometimes. How did you know?"
"My little sister told me," she said with a grin as she ground her cigarette out against the wall. "My sister's seven years old, mister. Don't you think that's a bit young to start out as an artist's model?"
Peter Frenum had really never thought of himself as being an artist, but it was always fun to pretend. He felt more secure, somehow, when he told himself that he was a priest of the palette. After all, he was a man with little else to do, now that he was no longer an Army chaplain's assistant. With his V.A. check-the fringe benefit of a medical discharge-and his simple tastes, he had little need of a full-time job.
Frenum painted anything, and indeed, it sometimes seemed that he painted everything. He painted on canvas, of course, but on occasion he would also venture forth from his poorly furnished East Village New York apartment to paint breasts on sidewalks in front of churches, or phalluses on the sides of mailboxes, or perhaps an occasional cunt, in full close-up beauty, on the rear windshield of an automobile. He had to carry out most of these projects at night, when there were few if any observers about, but he didn't mind the inconvenience; in fact, he found the hours complementary to his insomnia.
And then there was the time he'd painted the little girl.
She was six or so, very small and light-boned, with dark hair and a delicious olive complexion. He had beckoned to her one evening as she played hopscotch by herself in front of her building; when she came over to him, he asked if she'd like some chocolate candy. She came with him to his apartment, where he stuffed her with Hershey bars, and painted her.
Ah, how he had painted her! He painted breasts where as yet she had no breasts; he painted pubic hair where as yet there was not the tiniest hint of fuzz. He painted snakes which curled around her calves and crawled up between her thighs, and he painted spiders which crept about her shoulders and down to her undeveloped nipples. Ah, how he had painted! She was Life, and as he painted her, he was painting Life itself. And when he bathed the child later on, washing the still-wet poster paints from her tender skin, he had marveled at the wonder of actually illustrating Life; he had vowed to devote more of his future time to this new art form, this kind of painting so often practiced by hippies and others who regarded it as a game, and not as a way of improving on that which God had so graciously placed on Earth.
And so it was that Peter had embarked on his life's most ambitious venture. He began to spend his food budget on Negro and Puerto Rican prostitutes, asking them for nothing but the canvases of their skins, which he would paint with organs and animals and sexual scenes of every imaginable sort. He would go into alleys at night and capture cats, which he would bring to his apartment and silence with chloroform, then cover with blobs and stripes of bright paint before releasing them with the dried paints still matting their fur and making stiff sculptures of their tails.
Painting was all he lived for; for months, his money had gone for his work. He became undernourished, to be sure; but could man live on bread alone? There was no real outside world to intrude on his happiness; he cared little and read little, and spoke little to others in his self-imposed isolation.
He caught himself musing. The Negress' question still hung in the air. Then a reassuring thought came into his head.
"No, I don't think she's too young." He hesitated for a second, then went on. "Look at all the Madonnas one sees in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Haven't you seen them, with the naked babies and cherubs sitting in the Virgin Mary's lap or flying around?"
"Yes. But the children are in the pictures; the pictures aren't on the children."
"That's true."
The girl smiled and sat up on his bed, then reached out and patted him on the leg. "That's all right," she said. "As long as it's strictly cultural. I inspected my little sister fairly carefully, and she seems to be intact." A chuckle.
He said nothing, but fidgeted with embarrassment.
"You can paint me if you want," she said. "That is, if you'll let me tell the girls at NYU about it. I won't give them your name, of course."
It was quite an opportunity, needless to say. She was offering him the canvas of her flesh at no cost, and she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. And yet it seemed odd that she should have been waiting for him this way when he got home. Maybe she was some kind of cop.
"I don't know. I'll have to think about it." He was cautious.
"Oh, for Christ's sake! Look, man, you don't have to play games with me. I'm a professional model. Got that? An artist's model, baby. Four hours a day I sit naked in Alphonse du Buque's studio and show my tits and backside to pimply queers and silly middle-aged women who want to be artists. I sit on a stool, and I don't really do anything, I just sit there getting a sore ass and trying to keep a piece of purple cloth from slipping off my crotch so old Alphonse's middle-aged dykes don't get shocked-or aroused. It gets boring, you know? I never feel like a true participant. So come on, for God's sake! Paint me. Make me feel alive. Is it every day that a professional model offers to sit for you free of charge?"
"Well ... Get ready, then," he told her, almost shyly; and he turned his back to her so she could undress in privacy.
"Get your paints," she commanded. "And watch me undress; I'm not modest. Besides, it turns me on to have people watch me taking my clothes off. You don't mind, do you?"
He got his paints and mixed the poster paints as he watched her disrobe. He mixed the blue as she removed the dress; as she loosened her Afro-style headband, he prepared a little pink. As she slowly and provocatively lifted her slip from her body, he mixed a generous quantity of white, and when she took off her garter belt and stockings, he added black to his palette.
Then came the brassiere, and as he watched her unhook and remove the garment, he prepared a mixture of green, with trembling hands. As she turned away from him to remove her panties, he almost dropped the mixing container, barely managing to avoid spilling scarlet on the worn carpet beneath his feet.
"I'm ready," she said, facing him.
She was astoundingly female, with conical, upturned breasts-breasts tipped with nipples that somehow reminded him of sausage ends, and made him wonder how it would feel to touch them with the tip of his tongue and hold them gently between the outer edges of his lips, centering them in his mouth one at a time, as though to suckle like a timid child. As he stood staring at her, he felt a lightness in his belly, and a hardness not far below. Then he began to paint.
And how he painted! She was the most glorious human canvas ever to grace his humble studio. He covered his hands with scarlet paint, smearing it over her body as she pressed hard against him. He let his fingertips dip into different colors of paint and swirl down her back, smearing circles and spirals over her skin. He pushed her away for a moment to take a brush in one hand and paint bright scarlet rings around her nipples.
"Below," she breathed, her tone urgent. And with hands equally urgent, he lowered the brush to her navel, where he painted a snake swallowing a prick-a prick nine inches long.
"Go on," she said, digging her fingernails into his arms, and he moved his brush lower, now painting a deep blue triangle on the stubbly field of her close-shaven pubic mound.
"Below," she demanded again, breathing heavily. He placed the tip f the brush in the opening between her thighs, trying to put a dab of red on her clitoris as she went back and spread her legs for him; he followed it up with labial stripes of white and blue.
As she clung to him happily and hungrily, he put the brush on the table and placed his hands between her legs; when he drew it back it was covered with pigment, which he wiped off on her buttocks as she pressed her hips against his. He pushed her away then, and smeared his face with paint; kneeling before her, he covered her lower abdomen with green.
"Stop painting, for Christ's sake!" she murmured in a voice trembling with sexual need.
Obeying her command, he removed his clothing as he watched her pick up one of the paint brushes and wiggle it between her thighs. He stood there a moment later, completely bare, his eyes following the curves of her lovely body as if lay staining the sheets of his bed. He felt an even greater hardness at his loins.
"Cunt," he muttered, saying the word softly and with warmth.
"Mother fucker," she responded. It was the sweetest compliment a Negress could give.
He threw himself on the bed beside her; she reached out and grasped his cock. "It's a big one," she said. Her lips tickled the underside of the glans as she explored the head of it. Soon her tongue darted out and tickled the moat-like depression circling its knobby end. The cock grew stiffer then; stiffer and bigger than he had ever known it to grow, swelling till it stood eight and a half inches tall, throbbing in excitement and just beginning to dribble at the tip.
The girl pulled away from it and moved her head back up to his face, where she kissed his lips and drew him into an embrace. Their legs entwined, and they rolled together till both of them were smeared with a Pollock-like abstraction of colored paint. They fucked, then; like a palette knife dipping into a thick-mixed oil, his prick split her paint-slathered cunt until it was as far in as it could go. He kept pushing; pushed as hard as he could; pushed until she cried out with pain and begged him to take it easy. He pulled back then, following up with another forward thrust, but this time a gentle one, slow enough so that he could feel his prick being grasped again and again by her trembling cunt muscles. They fucked that way for several minutes, and then his hips began to fight with her, thrashing his body against and into her with furious strokes till she cried, at last, "Finish me!" and he bit down on her right nipple as he splashed her cervix with ivory-colored seed.
It was over, and he withdrew. He looked at her, and saw that she, too, was satisfied, and with his lips he began to lick off the paint surrounding her nipples and the perfectly formed navel which crowned her chestnut belly. He had painted her, painted Life; he had fucked her, and in a symbolic manner, created more Life. Gently, now, he licked off every smear of paint that he could remove with his tongue, spitting every so often onto the bedsheet and rinsing his tongue in the warm receptacle of her mouth.
Afterward, when he had recovered his strength, he went to the bathroom and returned with a wet washcloth. When he had finished cleaning her body with the cloth, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked into her eyes as he casually inserted three fingers in her cunt.
Then he noticed something. He bent over and kissed the thin black hairs growing along the edge of her upper lip.
"You've got a mustache," he whispered, with a chuckle.
She smiled. "That's because I used to be a man."
"What?" Surely she was kidding.
"Yes. I was born a hermaphrodite. I didn't have a cunt; just a scrotum with ovaries instead of testicles. They had to throw away the ovaries when they took off the rest of it to make me a cunt. They left the clit, though. I don't know how I'd ever have gotten along without the clit." She laughed, and guided his hand to the bud which topped the groove of her inner lips.
He still didn't believe her. "When did all this happen?" he asked, knowing she'd laugh and tell him it was all a joke. But she didn't.
"A little over a year ago," she explained. "Boy, did I look forward to that pussy! You can't imagine how bad it is to be stuck with neither a prick nor a cunt."
Suddenly he felt a surge of heavy fluid in his belly; he tried to hold it back, but he couldn't stop it when he retched, and it came up through his esophagus into his mouth. He tried to hold it there, but it began to dribble out at the corners, and he retched again, letting the vomit fall onto her belly and he heard her say, "Oh, God." He slapped her, suddenly; in a burst of anger, he slapped her hard, even as he was trying to control the spasms in his belly.
"I was only kidding," he heard her say.
He put his hand in the vomit then, and angrily smeared it down onto her pubic mound, taking some of it on the tips of his fingers and trying to paint the insides of her swollen labia with it. She let out a frightened gasp and struck his hand away with her fist. She grabbed him by the testicles before he could stop her, and she yanked. "Bastard!" she cried, pulling hard.
He bellowed with pain.
"You're some kind of deviate or something," she shouted. Then she spat in his face and pulled on his balls once more, and tried to jump off the bed as his hand came down on her face, striking blindly but nevertheless hitting her hard across the mouth. He attempted to tackle her as she dodged him and threw an easel in his path, and managed to grab her dress and escape out the door into the hall. "There's a pervert in there!" she sobbed as the young hippies and little old Social Security people cowered behind their doors, and she headed for the stairs.
Peter stopped just short of going out the door after her. He shut the door, and after a moment of cursing, he went into the bathroom. He ran water in the tub, meanwhile holding his scrotum in one hand.
He began to feel ashamed of himself after a while; he had treated the girl rather badly; his temper, like his sexual passions, had gotten out of control. Ex-hermaphrodite or not, she had been a good canvas, and his first real fuck.
A few minutes later, he felt his cock growing ramrod-straight as he sat in the bathtub, thinking of the chick and soaking his aching balls.