Marco Vassi (1937–1989)

I searched out this book after reading The Gentle Degenerates intrigued that a porn novel has some interesting undercurrents. Well, after reading this book, it turns out he included some semi-biographical elements in that work.
This memoir tracks the author’s adventures as he bounced around “searching” between San Francisco and New York City at the height of Age of Aquarius idealism. He spent time as a professor/guru, frequented the gay bathhouses of Frisco (my first thought when reading this section of the book was: well, he died of AIDS – he did btw), was a searcher of spiritual experience, a drug experimenter, orgiast, cult member, everything that he termed being a “head”. According to this autobiographical work, it seems that he touched every aspect of the 1960’s, even being immediately adjacent to a violent protest although he was seemingly not involved in that part of the era. In fact, he seemed very bitter towards and rejecting of “political types”. He was busy cruising the cosmos via drugs, sex, and exploring belief.
After all, cosmic consciousness is just a part [of the human condition] and is no more or less real than a fart. [p.23]
Looking at this work from a current perspective, he does come off as a user, selfish, often compulsive, and unable to control being whipped around by his own overflowing of emotion whether fueled by sheer momentary knee-jerk or firmly held personal opinion. He also tended towards utter selfishness by using others, especially during his guru phase, particularly for sex. According to his Wiki, just like the central character of The Gentle Degenerates, he was unable to ever form and maintain a long-term relationship. After reading this is not that surprising sadly. He never seemed, as presented in this book, to get beyond pure sexual want and cohabitation out of necessity.
He did have interesting takes on religion especially when he converted to Christianity. However, while banging an associate’s wife:
That night, while coming, she spread her arms wide and shouted, “Oh fuck me, Jesus!” And with Jesus backing me up, so to speak, I sailed into an orgasm that I had never attained on the purely material plane. [pg.63]
When interrupted by her husband (I had to laugh at this): Mutilation was close when, with a brilliant inspiration, I snatched up a Bible, brandished it before me, and yelled, “In Jesus’ name, I ask you to consider. [pg.63] This encapsulates my view of the man, he used others’ spiritual beliefs to get what he wanted from them, typically sex. He used it as a shield when it blew up in his face. And he seemed very adept at this though he might have been (hopefully) fooling himself thinking it was (or under the guise of) a sincere self-held sort of spirituality.
He did have some insights that are still unfortunately relevant today.
The sins of this nation have gone too long unpunished. And since we are the strongest military power in the world, retribution cannot come from outside. We are condemned by destiny to be our own torturers, judges, and executioners. We are doomed, like so many civilizations before us, to commit a ghastly suicide. And the only pity is that we may take the rest of life on earth with us. [pg.68]
Although, I think he may be referencing nuclear war there.
Another quote that I think sums up the first half of the book, and really the book in its entirety is this, which comes at about the halfway point of the book.
With the scene at the pad, spending long, amorphous afternoons smoking grass, swimming in people who were always strangers and always immediately inmates, moving in an ambience of religious vibrations and political confusion, I began once more to go mad. [pg.86]
He goes a little crazy in several parts of the book especially when he goes to work in an asylum. He goes into the project with such an idealistic fervor only to come crashing hard to earth when he realizes the reality of the thing. I did find this portion of the book powerful.
Another bit I enjoyed was:
I am given the creeps by people who think, somehow, that death isn’t real. It indicates that they think life isn’t real. [pg.106]
I’m reminded of several religious debates I had in my youth.
Then there are things for which I actually read similar works of hippy or martial spiritually, hokum like this: I took every bit of heaviness that was wracking my being, spewed it out of my third eye, and laid it right on them. They passed out immediately, and were depressed for three days afterward. [pg.157]
When the book covers his involvement with the homosexual bathhouse culture in which he both frequented and later worked, he had what I feel are genuine insights.
Whoever gave the name “gay” to the homosexual world had a cruel sense of irony. For the gaiety was all superficial, all hysterical. Mostly, there was pain. [pg.170]
And…
[T]here is no difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals. They have the same range of problems, from impotence to promiscuity, struggles with fidelity, guilt. They have the same joys, the same fears. And they completely share the general sexual sickness of the nation. [pg.171]
He was also at least half aware of his own self-centeredness apparent in what others were venting at him.
…Donna unleashed a vicious attack.
“You’re a pig,” she said, “…You’re arrogant, You’re always looking for a handout, You have no decency.” [pg.196]
And a few pages later:
“You’re selfish,” he said to me. “You are the single most selfish human being in the world.”
And I knew it was true. I examined my conscience and realized that I had never done a single thing which didn’t take as its starting point the benefit it would bring me. [pg.202]
He then immediately follows that up with philosophizing about the myth of altruism “with which we are inundated with since we are small”. Waving away the accusations of selfishness with the statement that we all are born alone, and we die alone as if he has since discovered a secret truth that justifies his self-centeredness. He does this a lot throughout the book when confronted with his own shortcomings.
Overall, I really enjoyed the book. It gave me a glimpse into the “head” lifestyle of the 1960’s at its height. The text can seemingly get a little dense in places due to the mass of people he met and the activities he indulges in with them which tend to become a blur. Then again, it drives home how much this guy doped, bounced around, and fucked across the country. I would recommend this one if anything in my review caught your attention. I would definitely advise you though, to read this one first before you delve into any of his other works. It is a trip to be taken with this free spirit as it were, though I found his destination (in the book) somewhat dispiriting.
My favorite quote:
There was no doubt about it; the civilization was coming apart at the seams and to be involved with it at all ran the risk of total contamination. Yet, what was the alternative? [pg.219]… (meer)

This is the second book in my foray into erotic/pornographic fiction. So far, I’m not sure I’m going to prioritize this endeavor over my regular reading habits. However, there was more going on under the surface of this porn story. Let’s start with the plot, it’s simplistic being this is a pornographic work.
The plot concerns the protagonist, our unnamed narrator, living in New York City with his current girlfriend, Regina, who has just left for California with whom he has a volatile relationship, but the sex is transcendent. He then goes on a sexual rampage with random people & acquaintances with jealousy seemingly fueling his behavior unconsciously even though he attempts self-analysis through the lens of new ageism. He meets another girl, Carol, who is just as “crazy” but younger than his Cali-girl and so he dumps her over the phone in a mutually ineffectual manner and then spends two weeks with his new girl marrying her metaphorically through intense sex then realizes their connection is illusory then dumps her leaving himself to wallow in unanswered questions. The sex scenes are the meat of this work and secondary there is the constant philosophizing and attempted psychological observations of the main character. The plot is very loose, very simple. So, the author fulfills the porn/erotic pledge here. The story revels in graphic sex scenes in excruciating detail. It is some of the earlier scenes that are, in my opinion, erotic.
The themes that I find here as delivered through the spare plot, the behavior, and thoughts of the narrator especially during the act are the yearning for a genuine connection through the act and the dissolution of the self/ego through intense sexual pleasure and orgasm. For the narrator, these themes do conflict with each other as one requires the opening of one’s emotions and becoming vulnerable to and with someone else and being able to reciprocate this while the second theme bypasses emotional vulnerability via the melting away of the individual consciousness into the cosmic. Thus, the narrator suffers his inner conflict which may also be the root of his perceived Jealously concerning his California-bound partner having just as much sex as he does without her without him. This submerged conflict is the only real conflict in the book and more than likely also fuels the anger and arguments between him and his traveled partner. On page 120 is what feels like a thesis statement around which the work is built:
“You know,” she said, “that there are no rules. There’s just us. Ain’t no God to tell us ‘no’ about anything. We do what we want and we pay the dues. That’s all there is. Are you still looking for something? You think there’s something else besides what’s here right now?”
There is what feels like, at least to me, some truth in the book about the relations between men and women especially concerning sex. The protagonist’s bisexuality which allows him to participate in a gay orgy as its bottom appears to be included to contrast the relations between men-and-women to men-and-men. There is lesbian sex in here, but it is only included as part of threesomes (including the narrator) and group sex. A missed opportunity there. Relating to that missed angle, this book is of its time (ca. 1976) but as our protagonist is the narrator, all these questionable elements can be attributed solely to his character and its gaping flaws.
There are plenty of very graphic sex scenes which include one-on-one experiences, group sex, and a homosexual orgy where the protagonist is the willing pincushion, but they get tedious very quickly. In an effort to escalate the author included a scene where the woman inserts her pet snake into her vagina and the protagonist enjoys the feeling of it grappling his wang while having sex with her. It seemed that the author himself was feeling similarly to me at around the snake-insertion point as near the end the sex scenes were pared down to just passing mentions before a quick scene (as compared to the rest of the book) is put in near the end. There were also many more and longer instances of observing the city, its people, and philosophizing. The author seemed to want to go into other themes and issues that have been percolating in the main character from the beginning but in the end, he drowned in his own misogyny and lone wolf complex justified in new-age spiritualism (or in its misuse/misapplication to everyone around him and on every situation especially the act of sex). In the end, he refuses any meaningful connection aside from transcendent orgasm and sinks into a deep self-pitying nihilism.
There were positives here. I did enjoy a sequence where the narrator and his squeeze were caught in their fantasies while having sex although he was imagining himself as Satan (no problems there) while (he imagined) she imagined herself as a Jew in a concentration camp!
The stories of concentration camps she had heard as a child came to life in her mind, the whispered tales of how many Jews masochistically enjoyed the incredible sadism of the Germans. Tales of girls who came to want the men who brutalized them, who became willing slaves. And now she was one of those women, having been called in naked to the suite of the S.S. Colonel, lying amid dope and music and books and metaphysical dreams of world empire. And he was treating her like a rag to wipe himself on, degrading her, and to her amazement and horror, she was loving it, wanting him to be harder, crueler. (pg.34)
Later in the book, he has sex with his new girlfriend imagining her in the same light. However, this time the woman is Jewish and had lost her family to the Nazis! There are a few collar tuggers in here although I found the previous both exasperating and wrong but also shockingly hilarious. However, these shock moments don’t really play well here with what story the author is trying to tell (aside from pure porno).
Overall, I thought this book was just okay. Essentially, I’m not sure erotic fiction is for me at all at this point. As for the Gentle Degenerates, however, the porn got tedious; its undercurrents were much more enjoyable. The erotic elements were tied into these currents, but this connection was never fully realized in the text. I don’t think I’d recommend this book save as a lark. It’s dated, is populated by as much cringe as porn, and its undertones were the most exciting part after a couple of sex scenes.
My favorite quote (pg.120):
“I really want to fuck a snail,” said Lisa. I put my arm around her shoulder. “Call me when you do,” I said.… (meer)

Pese a las elogiosas opiniones de Norman Mailer y Saul Bellow, estas “Comedias eróticas” de Marco Vassi son más de lo mismo.
El libro se divide en dos secciones bien diferenciadas. La primera, “Un cadáver de sueños”, es un conjunto de relatos en los que alguna sorpresa en el planteamiento y acaso algún final poco previsible no son suficientes para dar brillo a historias harto conocidas por todos con los matices y variantes que se puedan imaginar.
La segunda parte, “Una colección de huesos”, es un elenco de ensayos y reflexiones basados en las supuestas experiencias sexuales del autor. Aquí Vassi sí da una vuelta de tuerca con propuestas valientes, provocadoras y, en algunos casos, perturbadoras. Imbuido de filosofía oriental, con el tamiz de la sociedad de la década de los años setenta que le tocó vivir, reflexiona sobre la relación hombre-naturaleza a través del sexo y el sentido que éste pueda tener como expresión plena de humanidad. Tampoco nada que el tantra de la mano izquierda no hubiese explorado hace ya cientos de años.… (meer)