Chapter 4
Peter Frenum found his mind wandering to the Negress and her cock-swelling hermaphroditic beauty. He discovered himself dreaming of her shaven cunt; he saw the smooth mound with its sprinkle of short black stubble, and he dreamed of letting his eyes follow that dark mound's curve to the indentation of her rich outer lips.
But those lips were more than an indentation; between her thighs they hung like loosely drawn velvet drapes, heavy and full, curtains which, when her legs were spread, failed to conceal the delights that lay within. He could imagine her inner labia, and above them the sheath of her clitoris, which swelled as he gave it a mental caress.
Could this beauty have been a hermaphrodite? He began to wonder. Surely the scar tissue of surgery couldn't display such delightful prickles of pubic whiskers; certainly no physician could duplicate nature in creating vaginal lips where a scrotum had existed previously. And he couldn't imagine such a voluptuous vagina being the product of a surgeon's scalpel, gynecological dilators or a bandage full of grafted skin.
Surely she'd been putting him on. Indeed, she had said so herself, in the end. And yet it was almost fun to wonder; he found himself intrigued by the possibilities of hermaphroditism. What if she had been born not with a clit and scrotum, but rather with a vagina and cock? He could visualize it easily, and it excited him to think of what such a defect could mean. He could see himself fucking her, wallowing in the juices of her vagina with his cock battering against her cervix while her own cock slid back and forth against his lower belly, dribbling and finally ejaculating on his abdomen and, on his withdrawal, leaving a syrupy trail in his pubic hair. He could see the two of them performing fellatio; her mouth sucking his prick while his lips grasped her member, his fingers all the while buried in the moist cave of her cunt. He could imagine crying, Go fuck yourself! in a moment of anger, and then watching her try to do just that. He could imagine fucking her in the vagina, then rolling over and feeling her prick stabbing into his ass-hole.
It was exciting; deeply so, in fact, and it prompted him to scrape up his week's saving for a pair of new models.
New York, a summer festival, Peter Frenum told himself. It hardly mattered that it was still spring. In his apartment there existed an artistic festival; a carnival of cavorting models, of the slapdash application of paint, of the thrilling madness of turning human bodies into living Sistine Chapels which would change back to normal, Cinderella-style, with the first strokes of a bar of soap.
Peter was, in his way, a liberal; he believed in equal rights for all, and in integration, and in the necessity for people to love one another and treat each other in the kindest possible way. And so, liberal that he was, he would often pose pairs of children, with each child of a different race and often of a different sex as well. Today he had chosen as King and Queen of his festival two youngsters in the third grade-a flabby-fat Puerto Rican boy of nine, and a pretty little black girl who was eight. He gave each of them a dollar and told them that if they would continue to visit him and reap such benefits, it would be necessary for them to keep their mouths shut. The children, dollars clenched in their little fists, were not inclined to argue with him, so Peter proceeded to undress them.
First he undressed the girl, working from the feet up. He took off her shoes, and pullover dress. She wore nothing else but panties. "Keep them on," he told her, and then he proceeded to work on the embarrassed and blushing boy.
He did the job slowly. Again, he starting by removing shoes and socks; this time, however, he tarried before moving to the next item of clothing, spending a few minutes caressing the boy's feet. "Jesus washed the feet of his disciples," Peter said. "I'm going to paint yours, but the effect will be the same."
He patted the boy's right ankle, then reached up to unbutton the child's shirt. Next came the tattered jeans, and soon the boy, like the girl, was clad in nothing but underpants. Peter stared at the shorts for a moment, noting the small bulge of the genitals, and the damp spot where a dribble of urine had worked its way out of the boy's bladder and through the penis onto the cotton cloth. "Don't be afraid," he said in a kind voice. "I'm not going to hurt you."
At this point he took the two children in his arms and pressed each of them to his hips. "I'm going to paint you," he said. "I'm going to show you how art is an expression and an extension of human emotions."
He then instructed the children to face one another and remove their underpants; they did so, and Peter smiled as he watched the Negro girl, without a trace of self-consciousness at her nakedness, beginning to tickle the flabby body of the blushing, giggling boy.
Peter spotted a slight swelling of the boy's minuscule cock. In a nine-year-old child, no less! "Come here," he said, and the boy broke away from the girl and did as he was told. Peter knelt before the child and gently, almost shyly, placed three fingers of his right hand beneath the boy's undeveloped scrotum and his thumb against the top of the small penis. The prick swelled slightly more, and stood halferect against his thumb.
"That's very good," he told the boy. "You're growing up into a little man."
Then he began to paint the children. On the fat boy he painted a phallus twelve inches long and four inches wide; it was topped by a machine-gun flash-deflector, and next to it Peter painted a daffodil, and the legend, FLOWER POWER, NOT BULLETS IN VIETNAM. The boy thought it funny, but Peter stopped his giggling with an icy stare; art was meant to be appreciated, not ridiculed
-especially when the art had such a serious message.
"It's like a gun," the boy said.
"It's a social commentary painting," Peter explained as he painted a hand grenade on the boy's lower abdomen. "Politics is a part of Life, so politics must be incorporated into art which intends to accurately portray Life."
'Oh." The boy's incomprehension was obvious.
"Forget it." Perhaps as the boy grew older, he would come to understand; in the meantime, his belly would serve as a useful canvas, even if his mind didn't make him a particularly appreciative audience. Peter turned away from the boy, and sighed.
On the girl, he painted breasts, each one was a spiral of black and white, and he told her that she could pride herself on being the first eight-year old girl with op mammaries. She didn't understand him any better than the boy had, so Peter just smiled wanly and tickled her vulva, and didn't bother explaining the thought behind the painting-the idea of black and white being brought together, drawn out of the swirling forces of a mad society and forced into union, feeding together on the spiritual nipples of Life, and ... Well, the metaphor was a bit extreme, perhaps, but the idea was a clever one.
Tears began to fill Peter's eyes as he surveyed his creations; he faced the girl to the boy and thought of how the gun on the one could destroy the good on the other, of how bullets aimed at yellow foreigners could easily ricochet and kill black-white understanding, and ... Yes, the metaphor was a bit much, all right, but the tears continued to come into Peter's eyes, and he wished for a gallery, for a place to display the kind of living art which, with luck, would affect mankind far more than the fad-and-fashion stuff which was made, sold and bought by craze-crazy socialites and tax-deducting businessmen and faggy interior decorators and ... well, by all the people who claimed to love art but who seemed to avoid looking at or sharing in the blood-guts, machine-gun-cock paintings which characterized the art of Life.
"You're beautiful," Peter told the children, a sob in his voice. "You're lovely. You're real. You're ... You're Life." Suddenly he knelt and drew them to him, pressing their bellies against his cheeks and kissing them, one at a time, on their tiny genitalia. He first took the boy's penis in his mouth, ignoring the urine that dribbled onto his tongue, and then he parted the girl's thighs slightly, sliding the tip of his tongue between them and onto her hairless outer lips.
The children were frightened by this, and by Peter's sudden tearful intensity.
"I want to go home," the Negro girl said, bursting into tears.
"Me, too!" The Puerto Rican boy tried to escape from Peter's grasp, but was held by the artist's grip his arm.
There were sounds in the hallway, and Peter grew cautious. "Keep your mouths shut," he whispered nervously, the tears easing and presence of mind returning as he found himself forced to cope with the possibility of an unexpected situation.
"Open up!" came a Negro-accented woman's voice from the corridor.
"Mom-" The girl tried to call out, but Peter pressed his hand over her mouth to shut her up.
"You better open this door," the woman called from the hallway. "You open this damn door or so help me God I'm going to call the cops!"
Peter had no choice; he whispered to the children that if they didn't want to get in trouble they would have to keep quiet, and then he went over to the door, which he stood behind as he opened it several inches.
"My daughter's in there," the woman said in an accusing tone.
"There's no one in here," Peter countered. "Except me, of course."
"My little girl's friend said she saw Pearlie Mae come in here," the woman insisted.
"Well, your daughter's friend was wrong." He tried to close the door, but the woman had her foot in the jamb.
"I've heard about you," she said angrily. "I know about the kinds of things you do with innocent babies. I don't know why they didn't take you away yet, you.. .you white trash!"
"Oh, come on now!" Peter forced a laugh. "Let's watch the name-calling, all right?"
"Pearlie Mae! Are you in there, Pearlie Mae? Call out to me, honey! It's okay. I'm here to take you away from this bad man who wants to hurt you."
"Mommy!" The little girl's voice rang out loud and clear.
"You no-good bastard!" the woman hissed, pushing the door open with all her strength and running across the room to her child. "I'm here, Pearlie Mae. What did the man do to you, child?" She snatched up a palette knife with which she could defend them if the necessity arose.
"He painted me," Pearlie Mae told her mother. "And Paco, too," she added, pointing to where the naked boy cowered behind a low cabinet, his face crimson with shame.
"That's right," Peter said, his voice trembling. "I painted them. Two little babes, threatened by bombs not of their making, misled by a society which says that love and sex are evil ... I painted them, trying to draw on their innocence to create a new artistic experience, to-"
Peter found his momentary eloquence interrupted by the Negro woman. "Artistic experience! What kind of imagine talk's that? You go around smearin' paint on kids when they're naked as jaybirds and you call it art?"
"Jaybirds aren't naked," Peter protested. "They have feathers. And if you want I'll take your little girl and some blue paint and I'll show you how I can make her look just like a jaybird, if you like jaybirds. And-"
"You just shut up." The woman faced Peter and waved the palette knife menacingly as the two children dressed behind her. "You think I don't know nothin' about art? I read an article on it in Ebony magazine. There wasn't no painting naked children mentioned, either. Now you get out of the way or I'm going to cut you wide open!"
"That knife's not very sharp, I'm afraid. It's for spreading paint, not for cutting people up."
"Well, you just keep away from my child. And other people's kids, too, even if some of them are spicks. I've got a brother in the Panthers. We stick together, Mister. Us black folks stick together." She grabbed a child with each hand, and the three of them rushed out the door, Peter hesitated for a moment, then went to the doorway and called out after them, his voice somewhat choked, his emotions out of control as he shouted at the departing woman. "But I like black people!" he cried. "And I want you to like white people! And I want all of us to be brothers and sisters, and...."
But she didn't hear him, or if she did, she didn't answer. "You're not a liberal!" he finally shouted at the stairwell. Then, more softly, once again, "You're not a liberal!"
He closed the door and went into the sleeping alcove. Weeping now, he lay down on his bed and almost unconsciously began to jerk off. He held his pillow against his loins, pressing the feather-filled bag around his cock and rubbing it up and down till he could feel an erection swelling to full size. He thought of little boys and little girls, of tiny penises and hairless scrotums resting in his mouth; he imagined sucking them, sucking till piss flowed from the several organs and ran down his throat, and as he visualized this he moved the pillow faster and faster, and the semen began to dribble from the knob of his prick. And as the mini-cocks and scrotums disappeared, to be replaced in his mind by ten pink child-cunts moving up and down his fingers, the fantasy got lost in the burst of sexual heat which flowed through his body. His penis jerked and twitched and spewed semen onto the pillow, and as he squeezed the prick-tip to get the last of it out, on his fingertips as well.
Peter Frenum carefully removed the pillowcase and buried his face in it, anointing his cheeks and forehead with his come, and wishing he could share it with a friend.