In the Hip Room there wasn't even elbow room, but no one seemed to mind. There were many other attractions. There was noise, confusion, smoke (not all of it from tobacco) and the pungent smells of unwashed bodies, stale beer, cheap wine and vomit. There was long, unkempt hair, beards, bare bellies above hip-huggers and bare thighs below abbreviated miniskirts. There were many dirty feet, both bare and sandaled, and many grimy hands.
In one corner, where it squatted like the insane, plastic monster it was, a jukebox taxed its mechanical lungs and electric vocal cords to the utmost, bellowing out the frenzied beat of a rock group to make itself heard above the witless, jabbering din that rose in a mad cacophony from the crowd.
The final touch to this man-made inferno was supplied by multicolored, wildly unsynchronized strobe lights that were strung along the low ceiling.
No torture chamber devised for the specific purpose of driving its hapless victims to madness could have compared in devilish ingenuity of the Hip Room.
To Ellen Canfield, however, it was all very exciting. It was her first experience in a place if its kind and, although she felt both out of place and somewhat frightened, she was enjoying herself immensely. She turned to convey this information to her escort, only to discover that he had managed to slip away from her unnoticed. She thought she could see the back of his blond head through the haze of smoke and was temporarily reassured. She supposed he was trying to squirm his way through the densely packed crowd to get drinks from the bar. Vaguely she worried about where he would sit when he returned. The space he had occupied on the bench at the long table beside her was now taken by another person; whether man or woman she could not be sure, for all she could see was the back of a head with its shoulder-length, brown hair. He solved the matter of his sex by turning toward her, revealing a bearded jaw and dull, glazed eyes of pale blue on either side of a jutting, fleshy nose.
"Here," he said, "take a hit." He offered her an inch of crudely rolled cigarette, the end soggy from many lips.
"What is it?" she asked, drawing away and wrinkling her nose at the acrid smoke. She thought she knew but couldn't be sure. She had never before seen marijuana. At least she was certain it did not resemble the neat, filter-tipped cigarettes she smoked.
"Whadaya mean, what is it?" the man demanded indignantly. "It's a joint. Whatcha think it is, hashish?"
She hesitated, revolted by the thought of that sodden butt between her lips, yet afraid of offending the one making the offer. She shifted uncomfortably when he took his first good look at her, and his eyes widened, then narrowed.
"Well, I'll be dipped in shit!" he exclaimed. "Damned if it ain't Miss Uptown herself. Whatcha doing down here, baby doll… little slumming trip?"
Ellen blushed. Under the flashing strobes it probably was not noticeable, but she felt her flesh become hot, as though a blowtorch had been turned on her. The intensity of the hot flash rendered her speechless and made her a little sick. There was a terrible moment in which the noise, the stench and her own fear hit her like a blow to the solar plexus. She wondered if she would faint.
The bearded man sneered knowingly. "You fucking squares are a pain in the ass," he said disdainfully. "Come down here to see how the weirdos live… like going to the zoo to look at the apes. Then you get all shook if one of us speaks to you. Whatsa matter, baby, you figure I got leprosy or something?"
"I'm sorry," Ellen stammered drawing as far away from him as she could, trying not to show her disgust or fear. "I… I didn't mean any harm. I've never been to a place like this before, and I've never smoked marijuana. My boy friend brought me here. He's gone for drinks… I think," she ended lamely.
The bearded man grinned, but it was not a friendly grin. His eyes, sparking now with interest, started at her feet and moved with slow and calculated insolence up her nylon-sheathed legs to rounded thighs visible below the hem of her miniskirt. They rose to the slight curve of her stomach and the contours of a sweetly crafted torso, revealed in abundant detail by the form-hugging fabric of her knit dress. They lingered appraisingly on the twin bulges of her breasts, then rose to her face, baby-round beneath the heaped meringue of her champagne-blonde hair. He read the unmistakable fear in her blue eyes and in the nervous trembling of her soft, red lips. "Whenever I see a chick like you," he said with toneless menace, "all starched and ironed and strapped into place, I get the damnedest urge to mess her up. So you dreamed you went slumming in your Maidenhead bra and in your Playsex girdle, did you? I gotta notion to pull them to hell off of you and see what you look like with your titties flopping and your bare cunt hanging out."
Ellen gasped in shocked horror. "You wouldn't! You wouldn't dare! This is a public place! My escort will be back. He'll… he'll…"
The bearded man laughed unpleasantly. "You just said the wrong word, you Goddamned phony, antiseptic, perfumed bitch. Nobody dares Max Kern. Hey, look what I got here," he said to the others at the table. "Smart-assed cunt needs a lesson. Watch for that blond square she was with while I show this chick how we do it on Cool Street."
"No! No!" Ellen screamed as Max Kern's long-fingered dirty hands reached for her. "Help me!" she appealed to a hard-faced girl her own age who sat across from her. The girl curled a pale upper lip and, to Kern, said: "Why doncha take her down under the table and fuck her, Maxy? We'll cover for you. When her boy friend comes back, we'll tell him she split on him."
Ellen screamed again. Not a head turned in her direction. Screaming was the normal method of communication in the Hip Room. She tried to fight, but her efforts were futile. Not only was Max several times stronger than she, but by this time she was so nearly paralyzed with terror that all power had deserted her arms and legs. He easily held her arms pinned to her sides while his free hand went under the hem of her dress to claw at her panties. She felt the elastic give and then he had drawn them down to act as a hobble around her kicking ankles. Despite the fact that she held her legs clamped as tightly together as possible, he thrust hard fingers into the tender flesh of her inner thighs, violating for the first time the sacrosanct cleft of her crotch, roughly parting the hair-shrouded lips of her vagina.
She continued to scream, even though she knew it was useless. Those around the table were laughing and leering at her. Those in the rest of the place ignored her. As she felt Max Kern begin to slide under the table and drag her with him, her sanity left her; she was bludgeoned temporarily numb by the impossibility of what was happening to her. She was from a small town, and certainly no smarter than the average of her sex and she knew – just as she knew that there is a President of the United States, that the sun rises in every morning, and that Walter Cronkite comes on every evening – that one does not get raped in a public place among seventy or more people. She knew that, but it was happening anyway. Her mind, therefore unable to cope with the impossible, withdrew from the nightmare that was taking place, leaving her only enough awareness to feel pain, shame and horror.
They were on the floor under the table. Bare, willing feet found her arms and held them with cruel pressure against the cement floor. Her resistance was instinctive but feeble and futile as her dress was tugged and pulled until it was bunched under her armpits. Her bra surrendered to a savage jerk that tore the snaps loose and her panties were snatched the rest of the way off of her weakly thrashing legs. The cement was cold and hard against her bare back and buttocks. She had stopped screaming and only cried in a continuous, sobbing bleat of mindless terror.
"How is it, Max?" A bearded face appeared upside down under the edge of the tablecloth.
"Don't know," Ellen's attacker grunted. "I ain't fucked her yet. But, man, she's got one hell of a body. Dig them big boobies."
"Yeah," the upside down one agreed. "You gonna suck her cunt, too?"
"Naw, not now. She ain't in no condition to appreciate the finer things. Maybe after I've broken her in I'll take her up to my pad and give her the full treatment. Depends on how she acts."
"How about me taking seconds on her when you're through?"
"Sure. She'll need a lot of screwing to tame her down. We got all afternoon. Tell the rest of the guys, too. Pussy just ain't much good unless it's been gang-banged. Keep a watch out for the guy she was with." As he talked, Max had been dropping his trousers. He wore no underwear. He held his long, hard cock in his hand, fondling it lovingly as he knelt between her legs and studied her hair-fringed slit.
"Okay, baby doll," he muttered as he lowered himself to her, "here's where you get it… right up to the balls!" He addressed the dripping, throbbing head to her opening and settled himself, his bearded lips quivering with lust and his pale eyes glowing in anticipation as he hesitated one last second to savor the creamy expanse of her beautifully molded torso and the swelling mounds of her breasts with their pink and brown nipples, the softly rounded contours tremulous with the agitation of her sob-shaken body. He pushed the broad, purplish bead of his prick into her until it was lost to sight. Then, with a long, almost anguished "ahhh" of pleasure, he thrust down with all his strength, driving the bone-hard instrument into her, relishing the exquisite sensation of her flesh parting or tearing as it was shouldered aside by his ruthlessly rapacious root.
Ellen screamed again, but the hard-eyed girl who had been across the table from her was bending down so that she could watch. Expecting the scream, she effectively muffled it by putting a bare, dirty foot in Ellen's open mouth. She kept her foot there for a while, then transferred it to one of the exposed breasts, roughly massaging it and sometimes pinching the nipple with a prehensile big toe. As she peered under the uplifted edge of the tablecloth, her face was flushed; and her eyes shining, her breath coming in convulsive gasps. One hand was under her skirt, her fingers frantically manipulating her clitoris.
Had Ellen looked about her, she would have seen not only the shapely limbs of the hard-eyed girl, trembling to one self-induced orgasm after another, but that the men at the table, inflamed by the vicarious thrill of what they knew to be taking place right under their feet, had unzipped themselves and were stroking their cocks. They also cried encouragement to Max.
"Fuck her, man!"
"Stick it to her, Maxy!"
"Ram it clear up into her Goddamn fucking guts!"
But Ellen was not aware. She knew only pain and, dimly, that she was naked on the floor while a man raped her, that the virginity she had cherished for nineteen years was being ravaged and destroyed, and that her oneness with herself as an entity distinct from all others was being annihilated. Mostly she was aware of the plunging, piston-like prick and the ruthlessness in which it battered her inner body, each thrust as agonizing as though performed by a hot poker. But even pain must finally reach a plateau, must suffer a surfeit of itself until it fails from overproduction. It lessened. She opened her eyes to the forest of legs, feet and dripping pricks as seen through the fringe of Max's rancid-smelling beard. As a child she had had nightmares, but none to compare with this atrocious and impossible scene. She had two choices… either go completely insane with fear, or withdraw in a kind of stunned indifference and patiently await the moment when this Phantasmagoria would end.
Too tough-minded to go crazy, she lapsed into state of semi-catatonia in which what was being done to her body became a dim, unreal and distant thing. Her mind, detached from both pain and the shame of involvement, was free to consider her surroundings with curiosity. She saw the foot that massaged one of her breasts and followed up the slim, unclean limbs to parted thighs and gaping vulva where busy fingers agitated the clitoris hidden beneath the moist, pink flesh. She could even see the hair-shrouded, brown eye that was the girl's anus; it winked in time with the gasping of her pulsating vagina.
Ellen was familiar with masturbation. She had experimented with it during her twelfth year, but it had been her favorite sport only until she learned to play tennis. She tore her eyes from the performance of this rite to look from one to another of the men who were playing with the pricks under the table. Only once before in her life had she seen a man's prick, and that had been just before leaving home. She had walked in on her brother while he was in the bathroom. He had been busy urinating, and she had stared at his exposed organ for a second in both dismay and fascination before blushing violently and fleeing from room. That night she had dreamed that he carried a large snake coiled between his legs and was chasing her with it.
She next looked down to see Max's white buttocks bobbing above her hips and realized with astonishment that he had a cock just like those other men and that he was industriously sloshing it in and out of her. He was no longer hurting her. Her body, having turned numb, had rejected the pain.
Ellen did not know when her boy friend came back from the bar, a bottle of beer in either hand. The ones at the table informed him seriously and sympathetically that his girl had gotten sick, had said she was going home. The closely pressed bodies about the table prevented him from seeing what took place beneath it and Ellen had stopped screaming. She was no longer even crying. The young man's face turned red and he cursed. As he put the bottles on the table and began elbowing his way toward the door, the conspirators laughed, nudging and clapping each other on the back as they congratulated themselves on the success their deception.
At that moment, Max had his orgasm. The cadence of his probing increased, and he grunted loudly, emitting other animal noises as Ellen felt his hot sperm shoot into her and slush out to roll down her thighs. She watched with mild interest as he withdrew, noting that his cock was smeared with his own semen and red from her blood where he had torn her hymen.
"You ain't a bad fuck," he admitted, panting, "only you got a lot to learn. I'll let some of the other guys help break you in and then maybe I'll take you to my pad tonight. You act right and I'll let you stay with me until I get tired of you, but you got to start dropping acid and smoking pot like the rest of us. Hey, Joe, give me a tab of 'L'."
He accepted something from an anonymous hand that appeared under the table and he told Ellen to open her mouth. She did and felt a small, white tablet being inserted by a grimy finger. She was instructed to let it melt on her tongue. "When that hits you, you'll be on a helluva trip," he promised. "I'm gonna let Benny screw you now. He's kinda queer, but he likes chicks, too. After Benny, some of the other cats will take a crack at you. How you dig getting fucked, hunh? Groovy, ain't it?"
She regarded him dumbly and didn't answer. She was in a state of shock, her body and mind no longer able to respond to either pain or fear. Had he told her she was free to get up and go home, she would not have stirred from her place on the floor. Only a part of her mind remained active, but her thoughts were remote, barely connected to body.
Max shrugged indifferently, pulled his pants into place and slid out of her range of vision as another bearded man, a somewhat younger one, took his place.
"Boy!" Benny exclaimed, viewing her with awe. "You're sure a lot prettier than the chicks we usually get around here." He bent to kiss her on the mouth, the soft, blond hairs of his beard woolly and somehow comforting against her face. He roughly pushed aside the girl's foot, which still rubbed Ellen's breast, and cupped the mound with his hand. Then he felt down over her ribs and hip to caress her white, rounded thighs and touch her semen-moist vulva.
"I'm gonna suck your cunt," he declared, his face twitching with excitement. "I'll bet you'll like that." He turned around so that his head was even with her hips, then reached back to adjust his cock so that it rested above her breasts.
"I guess you ain't used to sucking cocks," he told her, "but you can hold it and play with it for me while I'm going down on you. Hey, you cats, get your feet off of her arm." He knocked the dirty feet away and Ellen, for the first time, was able to relax from the awkward position she had been in. She made no protest when he took her hands and cupped them around his prick. Because he told her to, and because she had no will of her own, she continued to hold his member tightly as he lowered his mouth to her crotch. The lapping of his tongue was so mild a feeling compared to being punched and torn by Max's big cock that at first she was hardly aware of it when he began titillating her clitoris. His hips moved and his prick, already dripping and smeary, slid easily back and forth in her tight grip.
He took his time, and she didn't mind. Now that the feet no longer pummeled and imprisoned her, she was fairly comfortable and his licking and sucking at her vulva was soothing. Furthermore, something new was happening to her mind. She was beginning to be affected by the drug she had taken. It was like drunkenness and yet not like it. There was a dizziness and a lightness, almost as though she were floating, and a gradual increase of sharpness and clarity in her perception of everything about her. It was, she thought with dull curiosity, as though she had donned glasses that magnified everything. Her face was only a few inches from the young man's thighs, and she suddenly saw each hair and pore in vivid, microscopic detail. Her other senses were also greatly increased. The rich, mingled smells of semen and sweat assailed her nostrils, and his prick was like wet, slick satin to the touch of her hands.
As he continued to lick her clitoris, she felt the first, faint tingle of returning sensation to her lower body. She was sore from the brutal way in which Max had assaulted her, but the richness of feeling inspired by the eager tongue of her new lover was driving away remembrance of pain. Her mind still refused to tolerate the shame and humiliation of her position. It blocked it out as a thing too awful to bear and, as she began to derive pleasure from this new thing that was happening to her, she concentrated on that to keep from thinking about the fact that she was being raped in public. To save her sanity, she surrendered her body, the powerful dose of LSD she had taken helping her make this adjustment.
The slobbering attack on her sex organ was accomplished with ravenous hunger and much enthusiasm, but not without expertise. Benny Morely had practiced the art extensively on both men and women. At twenty-one he had achieved his ambition to become a complete degenerate, living only for sex… any kind of sex, and for dope… any kind of dope. Oddly enough, he was a sensitive and generous person who would eagerly share himself or anything he had with someone he liked. He liked Ellen, so he gave to her in the only way he knew how to give. He employed all of his cunning to the pleasurable task of sucking her clitoris and was childishly delighted when he felt her straining body begin to respond to his efforts. He would really have preferred sucking a man, but licking Ellen's semen-filled cunt was almost as good as sucking Max's cock and, of course, there was the fun of doing it with someone new.
The tingling sensation grew to a flooding warmth of passion that spread out from the one focal point to Ellen's entire body. She felt it in her thighs and in her groin, knew it in the hardness of her nipples and in the straining muscles of her back as she arched herself to his mouth. It wrapped her in a pink mist that shut out everything else, and she gave herself to it gratefully. She even enjoyed the sensuous feel of his cock sliding back and forth through her hands.
When her passion had reached a height she would not have thought possible, it suddenly soared beyond that and then her hips were jerking convulsively, her pretty, white legs thrashing madly and her body pulsing with a paroxysm of lust as she came to her orgasm.
At the same time, Benny's prick swelled, strained, and then began to spurt, the hot, sticky stuff squirting onto Ellen's lower face and neck. Their cries of pleasure, too intense to bear in silence, went unheard above the din of the Hip Room.
"Hey, get your nose out of it, you queer bastard!" another voice was saying and Benny was pulled roughly away from her as another man took his place.
Ellen, still in a daze of post-coital lassitude, made no resistance when her legs were spread and another cock was thrust into her body. It hardly hurt at all, and she accepted the burly, sweat-smelling weight on her chest and belly, wrapping her arms and legs around him and lifting her hips to meet his lunge, her whole being concentrated on trying to recapture the exquisite sensation she had just experienced with Benny.
They kept her there under the table all afternoon, taking turns with her until all of the men in the group had been with her at least twice. They let her rest only long enough to take frequent drags from marijuana cigarettes. By evening she had passed out, but they didn't mind, continuing to sate themselves with use of her inert body. She was not aware when the girl with the hard eyes slid under the table to make love to her just as Benny Morely had done.
Ellen awoke in the small hours of the morning. She was lying on the filthy mattress in a strange room beside Max Kern, who snored like the distant whine of a power saw into his beard. They were both naked. She sat up and saw a candle in the dim light of the room. She found matches and lit it, staring at the yellow spearhead of flames as she let memory invade her mind, bit by bit until all of the astonishing facts were present and accounted for.
The one thing she saw with absolute clarity was that her adventure had changed her life utterly and irrevocably. She knew there was nothing to prevent her from getting up, dressing and going home to her apartment. There she could bathe, have breakfast, put on clean clothes and report to work as usual. No one would ever know. Oh, but they would! She would know! Ellen Canfield would no longer – could no longer – be the Ellen Canfield who had smugly thought of herself as a nice, virtuous, nineteen-year-old girl from a respectable, small-town family. The only thing that amazed her was that she could find within herself not even the tiniest spark of regret for the demise of that other Ellen Canfield.
She looked at Max's thin, knobby-kneed body sprawled beside her in the steady light of the candle. She remembered again what he and all of his friends had done to her under the table in the Hip Room. Her hips moved and she felt the nipples of her breasts harden with returning excitement. She took his limp cock in her hand and began stroking it. When it was hard, she tugged on it to awaken him.
"Hey, Max," she said, jerking at him, "wake up and fuck me again."