Review of The Mouth Seducers

Onions and Diamonds: Id and Earthly Delights in The Mouth Seducers

We popularly think of the human mind as a layered thing, something like an onion. There is not a dominating scientific theory, but in our folk psychology we intuit that an outermost, easily accessible layer of socially acceptable habit overlies a darker nature that is dreamlike and sexual in quality, and we assume that there are probably darker, maybe murderous, layers of raging, terrifying animal fury beneath that. Oh, and somewhere below that: the inner sun of enlightenment. This tacit and fundamental understanding of mental structure follows from the one-two impact of Freud and Jung, blended with Theosophy and filtered through a twentieth century typified by a sexual revolution, world wars, existentialism, and A Course in Miracles.

(I realize that the preached-in-church model has enlightenment floating ethereally in the disembodied space above the onion. Let's allow that that schema prevails one day per week, or part of one day, the part where we're dressed up. Weekdays and Saturdays we work off the Descent Into The Underworld model of spiritual illumination.)

If we understand it this way, then we note that sometimes content from one layer breaks into the next, and even into conscious awareness, and so we are reassured by professional experts that everyone has fantasies, and that many fantasies are about things we might not want to act on or tell others about. Sometimes it is frightening to become aware of our own thoughts -- we scare ourselves, and how do you escape that? Everyone is haunted by devils; one way or another we make a deal.

I have no excuse for reading The Mouth Seducers. I downloaded a bundle of bootleg scanned vintage PDF porn novels from the Internet, and amused myself reading them on my Android tablet during my commute. I guess I was just a little nostalgic for the comfort of some old school mindlessness.

This bundle of a couple dozen titles seems to date from the nineteen fifties through the seventies, though you can't really tell because they were only borderline legal when they came out, and there is not much today in the way of records. Nobody has come forward and claimed to have written any of these. This pulp pocketbook genre is the illegitimate nephew on the alcoholic father's side who is being left off the family tree of literature as history is written.

The Mouth Seducers might have been written by Fred Tracy and published in 1981, or it might have been written by Geoffrey Kyle, published in 1971, and maybe there are two different pornographic novels, written a decade apart, with that same improbable title. In any case it is certain that the author did not use his or her real name. My poorly OCR'ed file has the former information on it, conveyed in a blurry picture of the original cover. These adult pulp novels comprised a form of underground folk art, the expression of a sexuality that officially did not exist in the Leave It To Beaver era; these things were tucked away in a dresser drawer behind Dad's handkerchiefs, up and down the streets of ticky-tacky postwar neighborhoods. They were common in their day, quietly thrown out when they buried the old man, mostly forgotten now. Free on the Internet.

I started The Mouth Seducers with the expectation that I would put it down after the first scene, and I almost did. The story starts with the protagonist, Pete, stealing a car in New York City. He checks it out, decides to hotwire it, and just as he steps out of the shadows to make his move an attractive young lady gets into the car. So he knocks her out and rapes her.

As he drives away, leaving her on the curb, he cheerfully speculates that she seemed to have had an orgasm, which is a cliche and a stupid one, a myth from the dying days of the Late Male Superiority Era, and the scene lowered my expectation of finishing this book. I will come back to the topic of rape in a while -- this novel has bookend rape scenes that initially introduce the reader to an unearthly fantasy world, and in the end help dispel the fog, making the reader glad again to return to the visible world of constrained, decent reality.

The nonchalance of the introductory rape sets the stage, it opens the door into a weird, unreal world where amoral libido is like air, it's everywhere, within and between every character. The protagonist does not seek consent, it does not even occur to him, and his victim is more upset about him driving off in her car than about being raped. There is some question in his mind and thus in ours about whether she wants him to do it again, but he is in a hurry to sell the car for fifty bucks. So as a Western novel has to talk about horses and remote cabins to set the frame, a science-fiction story mentions space-ships or the presence of two suns, The Mouth Seducers starts right out with a nonconsensual sex scene that is treated by both perpetrator and victim as something commonplace.

After dropping off the car Pete returns to his apartment and his girlfriend Lilli, who is obsessed with giving oral sex. She smells the other woman on him and he says, oh yeah, there was a girl in the car. Lilli doesn't flinch, they continue the conversation. The woman he raped turns out to be a cop's daughter and when Lilli turns on the radio they hear the story on the news, so they light out. The rest of the book is about their travels westward toward "the coast."

I figured I would stay with it to the end of the chapter, and then I became a little intrigued by Lilli's reaction. So I continued reading tentatively for a few more pages, and a few more, till I came to the end. I was relieved to realize it was not one long rape fantasy. Rape is part of this fictional world, it is the reader's doorway in and the doorway out.

Pete and Lilli get a ride out of town with another couple, and now the author, whoever it was, begins to knit together a social world that is at once bizarrely alien and completely believable in the same way as yellow-brick roads and red and blue pills. The protagonists switch traveling partners at various points, and we meet a diverse ménage of characters. We drift across the country with this young couple in a kind of vividly ambiguous, crystal-clear sexual haze.

Everyone in the story is in on it. When a man meets a woman he introduces himself and then playfully pinches her breasts, or he'll say, "Wow, you really give a guy a hard-on," which she takes as a compliment. Women casually reach under the tablecloth to unzip the trousers of an acquaintance or stranger in a restaurant. There is a kind of way they talk, where women are called "cutie," whether they are an intimate long-time lover or somebody a guy has just met. Narrator and characters speak in a sexual slang that is understandable even when it is something the reader has never heard before. We aren't told what special words mean, but are assumed to know. Some of the slang is familiar talk from the day, but some of it is language I never heard, possibly invented for this story, interwoven with the more familiar wordage. You just can't tell, and that is part of the magic of it, part of the haze.

There is no jealousy in this story -- oh, there are a couple of jealous people but they are bad guys and problems. Everyone feels comfortable having sex in front of the others, and it is common to help a couple out by stroking, licking, poking, or even to push one of them out the way to get one's own turn. Internal monologues distinguish between the motive of wanting something that somebody else has -- which, of course, who wouldn't? -- and wanting something so that somebody else can't have it. Nobody owns anybody.

Pete has a huge penis and no refractory period, which is a cliche good for the story. Women love having sex with him and he loves them more or less indiscriminately -- it is not unusual for him to be thinking about someone while he's having sex in the here and now with someone else. Lilli can orgasm from performing fellatio, not so much during intercourse, and can hardly stop herself from impulsively dropping to her knees and getting to work. So they are by default the perfect porn-hero couple of the day, an everhard John Holmes and ravenous Linda Lovelace unleashed on a horny world. For part of the trip it is Pete and Lilli and two other women in the car, and the women take turns going at it together in pairs in the back seat while the third entertains herself with Pete as he drives. At other times there are more men or more women, nobody worries much about keeping it equal.

The title "The Mouth Seducers," by the way, doesn't have anything to do with anything. No one seduces a mouth. You get the feeling that the publisher needed to fill out their oral catalogue and slapped this title on, randomly, without reading the manuscript. It is just the kind of title you wouldn't want to be seen reading in public, which is why God invented e-readers. Am I right, ladies?

Given that this was written at a time when the closet was a real and serious necessity for gay people, it is somewhat surprising when Pete wakes up after an exhausting night of orgying:

During the night Pete awoke, finding himself on his belly between the two girls. He was very much surprised to find that Casey was moulded to his back, and that the boy's surging cock was in his anus. It had been a long time since anyone had buggered him. He had done it a few times for dough, and had fucked a few in the ass. It didn't hurt, so he let Casey go on ... and after a long time, Casey stopped pumping and slid off him.

In the morning he seemed not to know it had happened.

This little encounter could have been punishable as a crime in those days and was certainly viewed as horrifyingly perverse by most readers of a book like this, yet I have just quoted to you the entire mention of it. There is no judgment or trauma, "it didn't hurt" so he let the other guy continue. There is also nothing in any dialogue or narrative that implies that Casey is gay, and he engages in no other acts with men.

There is also a scene where a "queen" named Poodle fellates Pete, and he finds it to be an excellent experience but when Poodle invites him to take his number and call him sometime he shrugs and expresses no interest. He's got nothing against it, it's just not his thing. The plot includes sex between almost every possible pair of women, as well, there are a couple of them who prefer females as partners but the word "lesbian" appears only once in the text; nobody dwells on sexual orientation. Mostly these characters are moving around in an erotic force-field where the potential for pleasure is the chief attractor. They occasionally have to judge one another in terms of trustworthiness, otherwise the only concern is whether a person presents an opportunity for sexual reward.

To develop that idea of the erotic force-field, let's imagine that the next-layer-down sexual spook or consciousness sees the world as if it were a prelinguistic, unlabeled region of translucent gas, like a cloud, the world is a layer of glowing fog where nothing is distinct, clear, or separate. And in that fog there are densities, perhaps you can imagine them as lights diffused in the fog, some of them bright, others not so much. These densities are people and erotically charged objects and thoughts -- the fog overlays the physical world but also stretches to accommodate dreams and fantasies and memories with equivalent tangibility. Objects approaching are preceded by looming and valenced foreshadowing, and objects -- people, thoughts -- moving away trail a short but turbulent wake of memory and regret or joy. Paying attention to an object brings it into sharp focus, otherwise all is haze. Objects may be encountered and engaged, in an accelerating vortex that collapses into a nucleus of pleasure and eventually climax and satiation, if you're lucky.

Objects including people in the fog-world do not necessarily have much to notice in the way of personality, as far as the sexual spook is concerned. Language is a low-dimensional form of music that is more or less inviting, expressing more or less arousal, where the meanings of words only indicate degrees of attraction, and fantasies about people are often not separate from the people themselves. If you have imagined having sex with someone then the next time you see them you will fully expect them to want to have sex again, and will behave accordingly. If they have also been imagining sex with you, as is typically the case in The Mouth Seducers, then the outcome will flow easily and naturally and happily.

I am getting away from the text, trying to explain it, trying to describe an extensive libidinous field as perceived by the sexual sense; this is the kind of environment within which the characters of The Mouth Seducers act, though the author never explains as much. There ain't a lot of two-dollar words in here, if you know what I mean. Each individual you pass in the real world elicits a perceptual response beneath the threshold of awareness, like a blurred sensation, I am suggesting, of diffused light. Some bodies barely glow, and some radiate bright, attractive sexual energy, swaying you off your intended path; you are probably not usually conscious of this, directly.

As socialized citizens of the community, we may be aware of a head-turner here or there, we may feel an urge to meet a stranger or even flirt a little. But it does not occur to most of us, upon seeing someone we don't know, to reach out and begin stroking their bottom while unzipping our pants with the free hand. There may be an immediate sexual awareness but the suggested behavior is damped by well-learned decency and for the best-trained among us the vulgar thought is successfully suppressed altogether.

A well-adjusted individual who detects a bright patch of fog thinks consciously of a rationalization for moving toward it, maybe a reason they should work with that person on a project or sit next to them on the train. As we get to know someone who is perceived by the sexual sense as a radiant center, we react with friendliness, we see their good points and reasons to spend more time with them. The collegial work that needs to be done, the empty seat beside them -- physical realities, in other words -- comprise a scaffolding that fate has provided us for consummating the fog's objective. Language, culture, personality, these are tools that enable the flow of love, by offering the means to build a road toward orgasm. From a perspective down in the onion, physical reality is nothing more than a background loaded with props that support sexual opportunities.

The characters in The Mouth Seducers live in full awareness of the libidinous field, with little appreciation for the things like civility, modesty, or restraint that normally bound it -- the author is describing a world that coexists with orderly society in the closed darkness of a subcutaneous layer of Pandora's boxes. The environment is differentiated into people you would like to have sex with more and people you would like to have sex with less. Sexual orientation is assumed to be innate and mostly fixed but it does not dictate or limit sexual practice. The world of The Mouth Seducers is not without norms or social awareness; characters may recognize that a behavior is unusual, they are even aware of who might disapprove, but if there is a bright region they happily gravitate toward it regardless of social expectations.

The interesting thing here is the phenomenology of a sexual being in an environment of erotic possibilities. What is it like, subjectively, to walk around in a world of sexually attractive others? The question is not about what is practical or moral, or socially desirable -- this wretched little book cheerfully, naively jettisons all that and imagines a world where libido pushes other realities aside.

In one understated humorous passage, Pete is traveling with two women and when he is out doing an errand they begin an intense sexual relationship, which they keep from him at first, not sure how he would react. Through the next several days' travels, Pete notices that they are getting along better, and attributes this to his own lovemaking keeping each of them mellow. He figures out what is happening when his threesomes with the women become more egalitarian:

The snickering and kissing got very heated, to the point where all three were kissing in a tongue-lashing spree, so that it was almost impossible to tell who was who.

Pete was amused to see that the girls were kissing each other almost as much as kissing him. Especially Edna, she seemed to go after Lilli's mouth.

After he figures it out the women confess and they all get a laugh out of it. Again, there is no hint anywhere in the story that Edna is a lesbian or has any real preference in that direction, and no especially noteworthy romance emerges between her and Lilli.

The narrative boils over into slang and grammatical inventiveness as it needs. There is a curious use of underscores and hyphens and ellipses to indicate hesitations and emphases and catching one's breath. There are lots of contractions, apostrophes sprinkled like pepper on every page, "I d'wanna" for instance, and these conventions give the narrative an informal and fast quality. If Kerouac's style reflected the speedy, evasively jagged melodies of bebop, these characters talk in the earthbound rhythms of primitive rock and roll, fast, and heavy on the backbeat. Still, though radios occasionally play in the background, there is never any focus on music, and it does not play a role in their lives. They pull into one place: "There was a three-car garage in the back with a station wagon in one stall. It had a gaudy sign painted on the side, 'Jumbo Conners, Music Specialist.'" But there is no mention of what a "music specialist" is, or what kind of music Jumbo specializes in. There is mention of dancing throughout the book but nothing to indicate what kind of music was playing, which, as demonstrated by Kerouac, can be an easy and effective icon signaling a subculture or demographic. The ethnicities of characters, their ages, are mostly absent from the telling.

In fact, there is an oddity late in the novel, where some of the characters suddenly appear to be speaking with stereotypical African-American accents: "Edna said, 'Dis must be de joint.'" This is striking, and the effect is to suddenly stop and wonder if, after more than a hundred pages, the reader is just finding out that the main characters are black. That is almost certainly not the intent, though, as there are blondes and Italian names, and other hints of a white subculture. About the most you get in terms of description is the first paragraph:

Pete Stringer slouched down the alleyway, hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans. It was a cool night, not cold, but with a touch of rain in the air. He had the thin jacket zipped to his neck. He looked very much like the dozens of bums who scavaged nightly in the downtown area.

It does not say he's white.

It is also interesting that the first paragraph of the book uses a word, scavaged, that is more or less invented for the occasion, as perhaps a slightly roughed-up form of "scavenged." I didn't notice this phenomenon anywhere else in the text -- the prose is fast and informal but not ignorant. In writing, the first paragraph gets looked at and edited more than any. If this was an accident then its survival to publication is a meta-statement about the writing process and improvisational nature of the text. If it was an intentional invention you have to wonder why -- it doesn't make the story any better. It serves to loosen the sphincters of the reader's imagination and critical thought, perhaps, for the incoming assault of language. I am guessing it was probably not intentional, and if that is the case then we have to regard the entire text as a freely tumbling, improvised first-draft stream. Which, actually, is impressive.