Winners Submissions FAQ The Fish Tank Contact Us

Desdmona's Erotic Story Contests
2007 Sixties Erotica Contest
Third Prize

When Camel met Allen

“Mixing in naked passion,/Those who naked new life fashion

Are themselves reborn in naked grace.”

– Stephen Spender

“Time is not the main thought from under the rain wrought from roots that brought us coots to hoot and haul us all back to the prime ordeal.”

– Van Dyke Parks


Everyone knows much about Camel Jeremy Eros, Memphis poet, provocateur, heiromonk and bon vivant, who once upon a ghost-drenched highway gave a ride to Jack Kerouac (maybe); who once faced down the ghastly ghoul of the banana purveying Piggly Wiggly; who once was part of a nefarious plot to explode the Doughboy Statue in Overton Park in protest against the Vietnam, you know, War; and who once boarded a celestial microbus with compatriot Richard Brautigan, boo-enlivened sights set upon The Garden, being, as it were, rebuilt on Farmer Yasgur’s Land in Upstate New Mesopotamia.

But few know the story of how Camel and Allen met. Allen, his paramour, of the impossibly slim waist. Allen of the Callipygian tabernacle. And Allen of the poems. Their romance is the stuff of romance and myth, Eurydice and Orpheus, Adam and Lilith, Ulysses and Penelope, Isis and Osiris, Patti and George, Patti and Eric. Camel and Allen.

Now, at this time, Allen was witchy and willowy, an art student at the U of M; she had yet to achieve fame as a sculptress. She was boy-chested and winsomely hipped, with a cheerful face, which reminded some of the Cat in the Hat. There was something feline about her, the way she moved, her legs insinuating a slithery theology.

At this time also, children, Camel was already celebrated, both for his singular, surrealistic-goofball poems and his righteous revolutionary activities, alongside his potent partisans, Johnny Niagara, Three Hushpuppy Brown (so-named because he always carried an extra shoe), Sweetness Enlight (the ecdysiast) and Memphis’ answer to Jimi Hendrix, the young guitar god, Buddy “Slipshod” Gardner. Their tales were (mostly) told and told (mostly) truly in that seminal underground text, We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon. Yet, in that cryptic codex, there is no mention of how Camel met Allen, how the two became One, one might say. Hence, here we redress, as if formerly we were naked, or poorly clad.

The fated encounter took place at the Overton Park Shell Epiphenomenal Be-in and Aquarian Bazaar and Free Market, circa 1967, the Summer of, you know, Love. This event, already the stuff of legend, was in favor of the godhead descending, Southern style. The Shell was enveloped in violet light, either from the approaching gloaming or from reflections off the nimbi thereabouts. Everyone was there. Buddy played; Sid and Jim played. Dick Delisi sat in with The Expanding Head Band. Jojo Self, the poet and filmmaker, read her singular verse and showed her short film, Some Identity Problems, for the first time. Abbie was there, and one or two Beatles, a couple Stones, Grace and Janis and Booker T. Joan and David, Andy and Edie, Leonard and Suzanne, Boyce and Hart. Wavy, Kesey, Sly, Tuli, Vonnegut, Tim Leary, Emmet Grogan and Isaac Hayes. Neil Cassady, who, for all intents and purposes was dead dead, so it was rumored, still managed to sit in on conga when Santana played—Jorge Santana, that is, el hermano. And, even off stage, in the audience, which expanded like a gas as the weekend went on, until it flowed into the surrounding park and woodlands, there were pilgrims and seekers and seers, all intermixed like a cosmological experiment in human interaction and estrus. It was the time of Free Love, children, and it was never more evident—the concept, the happening happening – than during that weekend in the park.

Now, Camel knew of Allen and Allen certainly knew of Camel, before these august proceedings in August in Memphis. Camel had had her eye on the laconic, slow-mouthed poet for months, ever since her friend, College Herpes, pointed him out at a reading at the Bitter Lemon, coffee shop and revolutionary hermatocrit. Allen had sort of set her beret for him, for Camel, yes.

So, that afternoon, already empurpling into evening, she bee-lined to him and danced around him the way fairies dance around a dolmen. She was wearing a caftan made of butterfly-wings, as see-through as the Warren Report. Camel was dressed as a sagittary, a costume rigged up for him by puppeteer Jimmy Crosswaith, a visage both comic and fearsome. So it goes. Allen began a mating dance heretofore unknown in courting rituals. She danced like Delilah. She danced like Sadie Hawkins. She danced like Sweetness Enlight. She danced like an enchanted nautch, all sinuous deadman curves and limbs like a willow’s. Her dance wove a spell around rooted Camel; it whistled through his short hairs.

Camel smiled and that smile, even from the depths of his centaur costume, said, I will follow you anywhere. Allen held out a pretty hand. In its soft-as-a-petal palm, the size of a small oasis, was a hit of windowpane. Camel licked her palm, slowly, like a drinking faun. He allowed his tongue to linger there.

When he stood back erect Allen was already dancing away, was already many yards away as if by sorcery, and she was looking back over her shoulder with the glint in her eye, like the light off Joni Mitchell’s hair. Her glint said, yes, follow me. Anywhere.

She danced into the woods. Camel trailed her, a tattered train. The music began to fade behind them. The last song they heard was “Enos is Enough,” Buddy Gardner’s guitar ringing like Eden’s last bell. The woods were dark, like the ragged end of mystery. Camel could just make out the dancing white form in front of him. Meanwhile, a psychedelia was ablooming in his brain, half-acid and half cacoethes. He shed some of the heavier accouterments of his costume as he tripped along.

When he caught up to Allen she was standing in a small clearing. They were deep in the Old Forest, so deep they might as well have been in Birnam Wood. They were far away, their tethers severed, yet they feared not. It was 60s abracadabra, children. They were held in spectral suspension.

As Camel’s eyes began to focus he realized that they were not alone. Standing in front of Allen was a small, indistinct figure, impish, seemingly made of matted fur and glop. And Camel realized that the silence of the Forest Primeval had been replaced by the soft soughing of sincere sobbing. Allen turned her lovely Cheshire face toward Camel and there were tears there, too. But it was not Allen’s crying which Camel heard, like music from melodic sprites, it was the squonk’s. It was the squonk crying, standing there in the pine-sweet opening in the Old Forest. Its sorrow was infectious for Camel felt like crying, suddenly, also.

Then – and this is important, children, for it presages much of the future relationship of Camel and Allen – then, with a grace and earthmother tenderness born as natural as Mama Cass’s appetite, Allen knelt on the soft earth and put her arms around the squonk, who continued to sob, though now with a syncopation that seemed almost dulcet and agreeable. Its cheerless, furry face peered at Camel over Allen’s consoling shoulder. After a while Allen rose and the squonk wiped its cheeks, not quite smiling, and Allen dug deep into her Felix-the-Cat Bag, and handed the squonk her last Thai stick. The squonk, on this evening anyway, would not, as Brother Ray so eloquently put it, drown in its own tears. Not this evening. Instead it slowly backpedaled, keeping its glistening eyes on the couple, and then—poof! – it evanesced like smoke. It became, simply, part of the shadows of the wood.

“That was a lovely thing you did,” Camel said.

Allen wiped dry her own cheeks. “I didn’t know they were so sad,” she said.

Camel pondered this for a while.

“You know the way of squonks?” he asked.

“I do now,” she said. “A little better.” And that was the last word they said about the squonk. This is not the story of How Allen Saved the Squonk, except tangentially, you dig?

Allen looked her pursuer over as if he had just arrived at the pearly gates with a resume that seemed too good to be true.

“You wrote ‘The Plot to Kidnap Stonehenge’,” Allen said, naming one of Camel’s more obscure poems.

“I did,” he said, and he dropped one more leaden piece of costuming. He was almost returned as a man.

“For that alone you deserve the last word in blowjobs,” Allen said, with a sly smile.

“We poets get so little in return,” Camel joshed back.

Allen slipped out of her clothes so smoothly it was as if the forest had absorbed them, like it had the crying creature. She stood before Camel as naked as a heron’s wing. Her body was lovely, slim shoulders sprinkled with an admixture of freckles and tiny pimples, breasts the size of sea-shells and the color of a conch’s pearl with attention-getting nipples, a waist Camel was sure he could engirdle with two hands, legs as shapely as a fountain’s spume, and a patch of pubic hair as mysterious as the Gordian knot. Camel wanted to try to untie it.

Instead he did encircle that waist with his two hands, which filled him with wonder.

“A perfect fit,” he said.

“Made for them,” Allen countered.

Now Allen reknelt in the leafrot and loam, her hands running down the front of him, hickorydickory. Camel noticed that the part in her hair resembled the Road to Jericho. She unbuckled Camel’s complex trousers and they fell from him like the wings of fallen angels. He wore no underwear so that his pizzle now sprang into Allen’s adroit and silky hands. She sighed as she pulled on it, using all eight fingers and both thumbs, and Camel’s sigh in return was the air escaping from his earthliness.

“For that poem,” Allen said, glancing upward briefly, before sliding her yearning mouth onto him. Her gracious, slick, Cheshire mouth. Her beautiful, lipsome, practiced, crackerjack mouth. She took him in, took him in.

“Oh, Gawd,” Camel said.

Allen’s eyes looked into Camel’s even as she kept that rigid dojigger enmouthed. Her eyes said, you can do better than that, Poet.

“Oh, Kirke! Oh, Ouranos! Oh, Ikkyu, oh, Buddy Holly!” Camel intoned, challenged.

Which excited Allen all the more. Her ministrations took on a noisy enthusiasm. Camel felt a surge building in him and the desire was great to let if fly into that place from whence Allen brought forth her sweet speech. But, another longing, older, more consecrated, cried within him, also. He wanted to enter her whole, to be within her. So he bade her stand.

She reluctantly gave up her all-day sucker.

And, first, he kissed her for a long time. Their first kiss. Their tongues entwined and made friends, their saliva mixed and formed a third substance, a cosmic goo. They kissed, children I repeat, for a long time.

Then, Allen understanding what was to come next, what must come next, turned and backed up against the tall, now stripped versifier. She ground herself against him. And, listen, I tell you this to make plain: the word above, the conjuring word for Allen, callipygian, means this: having a perfectly shaped bum. Her ass, let’s be clear, children, was the First Ass, the Primo Cast, as if God were a sculptor like Allen, and, on this day, he had done his finest work in human clay. Camel could only die a little inside to feel it pressed to his now insistent erection.

Allen took one step away and Camel felt the loss, though only temporary, of that warmth, that smooth fleshly impression. Allen took one step away and then bent slowly, oh slowly, from the waist, until her hands were on the ground. Her legs were parted. Her head lowered, so that the blood rushed there to see what all the commotion was about, her hash brown hair mingled with the earth’s smallest denizens. She resembled a triangle, such mink geometry for the first time germinated. Camel was mighty stirred.

Now it was Camel’s turn to kneel and worship. He reverently placed his tongue along the valley of her elegant hills, pulling the tongue downward like a soft-bladed plow. Till he found the two entrances below, both of which he slavered with the attention he normally reserved for a quatrain.

Allen said, “Ah, ah, ah.”

Camel re-stood. He took a moment—a human moment—to relish the sight, Allen’s perfect backside, now shimmering with lickspittle in the moonlight. And, as the clouds had just parted, Camel parted her cheeks, rested his prick there in its deep fold, felt it close around him like the sea rushing back, and then Camel took his prick on the journey his tongue had advance-scouted. For a second, for two seconds, he pushed it gently against the first opening. The smaller, tighter, more restricted.

Allen said, “Ah, ah, ah.”

Now he entered her below. He sank deeply into her vaginal syrupiness. He pushed his weight against that perfect ass, his prick now bathed in heat, in wet heat. And he began to work her, to move in and out, side to side, round and round. He used his engorged prick to pleasure her, to make her move beyond inarticulacy. He wanted to hear her words of passion, for he was a word man, a lover of lingua franca (though Allen’s kinesics spoke volumes). Now, he fucked her, just like that, simple and firm, and with a dilution and depth he did not know he possessed.

Now Allen spoke.

She said, “Oh, Camel, my sweet Camel, do fuck me hard. Do. Fuck. Me. Hard. Your prick, your cock, your licorice stick, your Polyphemus, your popeye, your stiffness, your lovemeat, your probang, your shaft, your linga, your phallus, your willie, your rockoon, your hard dickdickdick!” She sang, she fairly sang the names that now drove Camel to furious feats, and to sing his own salty song.

“Oh my Allen,” Camel harmonized. “Push your ass against me. Never take your ass from me. Never. Take. Your. Ass. From. Me. Your ass, your fundament, your neat nates, your buttery butt. Your kerf, your pussy, your kaze, your beaver, your delubrum, your Lucy, your churn, your bush, your delta, your honey pot, your ringerrangerroo, your hot wet cuntcuntcunt!”

And this song, this daring, drooling duet, rose from the Forest Primeval, rose toward that pallid mirror in the sky, still yet unraped by mankind, and it spread like the stain of weak light emanating from above. It rose as Allen and Camel howled like wolf pups, and seeded the shredded clouds now regathering, and it brought forth upon them and the surrounding Be-in a silvery rain, a pizzle drizzle, bright and shining like mercury.

And, children, Camel exploded into Allen, pulling her so close to him that briefly, aflame, they were one flesh, literally, he entered her and she entered him and they were Camelallen. They were Allencamel. And he came and came and she came and came and then they collapsed onto the forest carpet and slept like Adam and Eve right after the rib-pilfering, before their sons invented murder. They slept innocent and blissful and hallowed and full of a new light that was all theirs. A light called Love.

And, it is said, that the rain that fell that night, silently and like a benevolence over the crowd at the Be-in, was a sortilege rain, a beatific, enchanted, mystic rain. It is said that anyone in attendance who was not pubic suddenly achieved puberty. It is said that men who had not had erections in years suddenly sprouted them, confident, cocky and full of life. It is said that women, who thought themselves frigid, suddenly discovered in themselves a new wanting, a hunger that both made them happy and tormented them. And it is said that childless couples who had longed for offspring that night were made pregnant. In the nearby zoo, it is said, chimps and emus and peafowl and bonobos and capybaras rutted. Cattle (and icebergs) calved. Dogs made it with cats.

All, all under the zestful and jazzy and argentiferous and munificent and amorous rain engendered by the forceful and ardent coupling and coming together, like Peace and Light and Eros, of Camel and Allen, deep in the squonk-haunted Old Forest, lovers now and forevermore. Lovers always, before time and after time.

And that, children, is the story of When Camel met Allen, which happened in a little fuscy corner of the Dayglo Overton Park Shell Epiphenomenal Be-in and Aquarian Bazaar and Free Market, in a small fiefdom called Memphis Tennessee, in an Overlord Empire called America, Before the Fall, in the appropriately monickered time period, the Summer of Love.

Again, say it with me, children. Of Love.


Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. His novel, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue, was released in 2002. His second novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, came out in January 2006. He has also published numerous chapbooks. He has been nominated for a Pushcart numerous times, and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN. He also claims to have written “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.


If you enjoyed the story, why not let the author know? Type your message below and we’ll send the author email. Leave the from box empty to be anonymous, but include your email address if you want a reply.

To: Corey Mesler <chmesler@earthlink.net>
From:
Subject:
Message:

Desdmona's Erotic Story Contests
2007 Sixties Erotica Contest
Third Prize