Chapter 5: A Pony for Two

The following interview tells a tragic story. I have had it in my files for two years awaiting the accumulation of enough similar material to make up a book.

As is so often the case, I was guided to the woman by a "bird dog" friend who had met her and gleaned the substance of her story.

We'll call her Louisa. She was an alcoholic. Was. I learned a few weeks ago that she had died of poisoning--she drank (probably) something that may have looked and smelled alcoholic, but wasn't.

Louisa, as I knew her, didn't care. She was trying to kill herself by drinking. She was trying to atone for a horrible (to her) sin which her strict conscience would not permit to go unpunished.

She was forty years old when I taped this interview with her. We met in a lower-class bar, talked in a booth for an hour, and arranged for a meeting at her room. It was agreed that I would bring along a fifth of vodka to "further the cause".

There were six taping sessions, each about an hour long, each paid for with a bottle. Her mind was rotting away in a swamp of alcohol-destroyed brain cells. She repeated herself too often. She was antagonistic, suddenly erotic, suddenly in tears, suddenly calm, suddenly shaking in an agony of remorse as we dredged through that critical, terrible period in her life that was killing her.

But Louisa was able to speak with a kind of power that originated in her emotional agony and in her native talent. She had been to a small religious college and was interested in poetry. She told me she used to read great quantities of books. She even tried writing religious poetry.

Her husband was an electrical engineer and small contractor. He often had to be away on jobs for weeks at a time.

Listening to her and seeing her, during the taping sessions, when she literally ripped open her soul, was often almost physically painful. I often left her room shaken.

She was, in every sense of the word, tormented. She spoke with a fierceness and intensity that was sometimes frightening. Most of the time her eyes were dull, but once in a while they were like coals from that hell she was so eager to go to.

The question will automatically come to mind as you read this transcription: Why did this woman's daughter cross the line to lesbianism and into bestiality. And why did the mother follow?

A December, 1968, article in Newsweek suggests part of the answer: "Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo found that women patients in mental hospitals are much more likely to swear than men. The psychological controls we put on women are so tight, ' he says, 'that when they break through they really let go.'"

Now listen to Alfred Ellison in his Sex Between Humans and Animals: "An individual whose natural sexual urge has been severely stunted by early parental or religious conditioning, may, following a first accidental contact, turn to the practice of bestiality as a secret outlet for sexual desires and energies which have long been deprived of any other outlet. And in the final analysis, it is perhaps within this latter factor--severe repressive moral training--that one may find the real seeds of not only bestiality, but indeed of all so-called abnormal sex behavior."

In the case of Louisa and Barby it is obvious that tremendous forces, bottled up too long, burst through the most rigid anti- sexual dogma possible. Louisa's deep, puritanical religious attitudes and her personal revulsion to sex with her husband were responsible for her daughter's "sexual psychosis" and for her own helpless fall into that extreme orgiastic and above all masochistic sexual reaction.

My interviews with Louisa follow.

The transcript of those tapes is over a hundred thousand words. It is a shambles to read.

I have edited it, cut it, rearranged it, and written, some transitional material. Where possible I have taken out my questioning--and let her answers and erratic monologue tell the story. Bear in mind that she was always drunk during the tapings.

How It Started

"My Barby was a nice clean girl. I brought her up to be a nice girl. But something got into her when she turned sixteen' that awful winter on the farm when we were... we were all alone for almost four months. The snow was terrible."

"No man can know the dreadful pleasures a woman can know. The terrible lusts we are liable to!"

"I spent days of hours in bed with my daughter, swooning in filthy rapture as she did things to me... horribly shameful things... with her hands and with her mouth and with... with things... and in the other room, in my room, with that animal... with that animal!"

"And I did things to her, too, to satisfy her lusts, to repay her... to make life better for her in her sickness. We lied! We lied to each other and to ourselves..."

"The Devil arranged it. I know that now. He took my husband away to work for the winter in another state and brought the blizzards and made her sick... and seduced us."

"She was so healthy. A healthy baby, a healthy child... never ill... never a hint of the perverted lusts that seized her."

"She was sixteen and we couldn't get into town to do anything, we couldn't have a party for her with her friends from around."

"She got that awful cough that terrible wet cough and the doctor said she couldn't go to school at all, probably until spring when it warmed up. She had to stay in bed so much."

"We didn't sleep in the same room at first. I trusted her at first. But I caught her doing things to herself. Dirty things between her legs."

"I heard her one night. It was terribly cold and the snow was almost to the roof on the wind side. I'll never live in snow country again! I'll never live north again!"

"I heard her moaning soft and quiet, muffled--like she was hiding it. I thought she was getting sicker. I thought she was having pain. But I'd never heard her make sounds like that before. I went to the door to her room and stood there in the bitter cold and listened."

"No, the sounds--like she was breathing hard and was trying to keep the moans inside herself. So I wouldn't hear."

"And I heard the bed creaking, too. That regular creaking is what made me think. She had to be moving up and down regular on that bed to make it--sound like that."

That was a dirty, sex kind of creaking. I know sex sounds in the night--and that moaning, and that breathing fast."

"I know it from my own life, with my own husband when he forced himself on me. Putting his big dirty thing in me. I hated him doing that."

"Yes, but it was different with my Barby. I was doing it for her sake, not mine. Sometimes it made my skin crawl to do the things we did together and with Diablo."

"I didn't know what Diablo meant--it was Spanish and I didn't know any Spanish--Diablo was just a word she thought up to name him. But it means 'devil' and he was; he was possessed by the Devil to do the things he did to us. The Devil took that pony over and seduced us! I know that to be true. It wouldn't have happened but the Devil got into Barby and that animal and he even got into me. With his whispering at night in my bed, with his burning and lusting in my body."

"No, no, I resisted. I resisted till I was biting my cheeks and rubbing snow on my naked body. I even filled myself down there with snow--icy snow, but the burning wouldn't go away."

"He seduced me through her--through my own daughter and through that terrible animal he possessed! I resisted but he beat me down, slimy and cunning; he slipped into me with a desire to help her, to soothe her burning, and he used my own mother love!"

"I think I beat him. I won. I'm winning. He's still in me. Once the Devil gets in you he never leaves. He's always whispering. And once he gets you to do horrible things to yourself that give you that feeling--that feeling--then you're never free. He makes your body want that feeling again and again, more and more, until you are a slave to it. Filthy, sensual, lascivious rolling and grunting in the vise of the body's lusts."

"The first night... yes, when I heard Barby in her bed, doing that to herself I knew what she was doing. I stood listening and I knew. I closed my eyes and I could see through the door, right through the blankets to her body and I could see her fingers going in and out, in and out, in and out, to make the burning more powerful and stronger, until the wave of it comes into you like a moving mountain and takes your breath away and makes you go out of your mind."

"I felt sick. I opened her door and the sound stopped. Like a knife had cut it off clean as a whistle. She stopped. She was holding her breath."

"I went in and got into bed with her. It was too cold to sit out in the air. I had to talk to her. I had to make her understand."

"Barby confessed to me. She pressed herself--her hot young body pressed against me--and she was trembling with what the Devil was doing in her."

"She cried against me... We huddled under the blankets and her hot body... her flesh was so heated by her lust... her hot body burned against me, It was--our nightgowns were nothing--and her lust came over to my body. The Devil crept through to me then... that moment when her breasts were uncovered by her turning and twisting and she pressed them innocently against me."

"Barby--yes, Barby... Barby had large, well-shaped breasts. She was a big, healthy, vital girl at the start of that winter, until the cold and that terrible cough took her. She wasted away, she burned away with the fever and that lust... that dirty lust that... that made her blue eyes bright and glittering. It was the Devil looking out of her eyes."

"But it seemed... I remember, how gaunt she became, but her breasts were still big and sleek and full. And she always had energy for satisfying her lusts. Her woman's parts were always hot to the touch. She was always eager to do things. She was always slippery to the touch between her legs."

"She was possessed, and she possessed me. She made me do horrible things! I didn't resist. I couldn't resist. My faith was weak!"

"She wept in my arms and told me how she had to satisfy herself. The center of her, the core of her body was driving her crazy. She clutched me so tightly and begged me to tell her how to stop her from wanting."

"She whispered what she dreamed. She dreamed of men--of the private parts--of men that attacked her. Big men, big in every place... big with need for her. In her dreams they penetrated her. They were like animals--driving into her, always driving, plunging their... their big stiff things into her."

"I held her in my arms and listened and tried to calm her, but the fever--the lust fever--was in her. I knew I had stopped her too soon. She was burning."

"Some of her fever came into me. I had had dreams like hers long ago, when I was a girl, and I had done things to myself, but I had been able to resist after a while."

"Barby was alone in the house with me, for long cough-ravaged weeks, in that bed, left alone to do things with Devil-guided hands."

"She rubbed against me unknowing, innocently at first. She rubbed her firm young breasts against my own. I am--I was--look at my sagging front now--see my fat belly beer-belly--but then, that winter, I was like her, only older, I was big in the chest, too. I gave her my body."

"The fire, the slow fire came into my breasts, from the slow, innocent rubbing of her breasts. My flesh glowed and I felt my teats stiffen and burn for more."

"The evil thoughts came--the ways to give in and not know it, the sly, dirty, pretending schemes to fool yourself... at first. But the time comes when you cannot pretend. When you are panting like a winded horse with your legs spread and your child's hot mouth is on you and her Devil's tongue is entering you and driving you to time after time after time of that wild, hot pleasure that cannot end and you know will continue as long as you can stand it!"

"I schemed to myself without knowing, then. I told myself I had to let her have the dirty satisfaction she needed to be calm. I told my daughter to go ahead and do it to herself, just to soothe herself... one last time."

"But she was too embarrassed to do it with me in the bed, holding her. She was so ashamed and tortured. She could not do it. And so I sacrificed myself. I did it for her. I put my mother's knowing hand down there under her nightie... down there in the hot, wet, center of her body, in that damp furnace between her thighs, and I put my finger into her and I found the organ that needed touching, and it was like mine... my little tongue of flesh that stiffened sometimes with heat and lust... I knew how to touch hers."

"Barby oh, my Barby--what did we do? WHY? We gave in, we gave in so easily! Your lust kindled mine and we burned, we burned till we were ashes we burned and we slipped into hell!"

"She's there now--in hell--burning and screaming in pain, paying for her sins. And I'll be with her soon. I'll die soon and join her. The pain will be good. The agony will be good. I deserve everything. I should have saved my child... and I paved the way... I let her do the degraded things we did and I let her bring that animal into the house--and I let her experiment with him and I joined her--and I took it into me--ahhh... the size of it... and the hellish pleasure..."

"We were witches--we didn't know it--we were worshipping the Devil and we didn't know it. Not the goat--but the hoofed beast! He came to us cunningly, and possessed us. The monster entered us. The monster killed her--BARBY--raped her--ripped her insides- -up--up--up into her--SCREAMING--OH GOD THE BLOOD! I can't--I--I, no--go away... go away... leave me alone... you jackal, you leech, you parasite... I don't want your drink... I want to die..."

(But she called me when she needed a bottle and continued the story.)

"My child clutched me as I gave her that pleasure that first time, in her bed, with the heavy covers over us, over our heads, with cold slivers of air sometimes stabbing into our warm nest."

"She whispered my name and cried on my shoulder. But she opened her legs for my hand... and she moved so the bed started creaking again... she moved against my hand and tried to drive my fingers into her as she did to herself."

"I let her do it. I held my hand stiff and let her use it as if it were a man's thing."

"It shocked me and I wished she didn't do it that way, but I said nothing. I wanted her to have the pleasure and be released and calm and soothed."

"I told myself she had a woman's body, but she had been a child, a baby, such a little time before. She was only sixteen and she was pressing herself onto my fingers as if possessed! Moaning again. Disgustingly wet there. Sticky and hot. Inside she was large... it surprised me... and she wanted a man. She needed a big man. Her dreams were showing her. That knowledge made my throat tight and I thought we would have to get her married soon. Some girls are not made for waiting. I thought she was ready for carrying babies."

"And so I let her use my fingers... I heard her whisper in her lust, maybe not realizing she was speaking aloud, whispering for more... so I did for her with three... three fingers."

"This is what you want, isn't it? This awful, lascivious detail, isn't it? The filthy things we did, everything, everything... So your dirty-minded readers can enjoy--can enjoy the terrible things..."

"No, you're right, you're so right. It doesn't matter. Maybe there's a lesson for somebody in what happened to us. God forgive me, I hope so!"

"Barby clutched me so hard when she, when she reached her time--the pleasure. It surprised me. It shocked me how intensely she felt it. She was so frantic and so greedy for it. It frightened me her greed for that kind of pleasure... that terrible response and that need. It wasn't decent. No woman should lust to that extent. No decent woman. No girl should have a devil in her for physical satisfaction--like that!"

"Barby was out of her mind with lust in that moment. She touched me... me... she started to do it to me... she put her hand between my legs and her fingers pushed into me there."

"YES--I was that way--I was eager, my body was ready for a touch. And for a few seconds she mauled my organs and rubbed me inside and out in that shameful welter that the body provides."

"I was overwhelmed for a time. I was mad for it, too. My legs opened, too. I moaned, too."

"But Barby stopped when she came to her right mind. She snatched her hand away from me and wept like a child and sobbed for me to forgive her."

"I did. I patted her and soothed her and finally left her to return to my bed, but then I was still afire."

"I burned in my lonely bed and had evil thoughts of lust for my husband... not only him. I brought up my memory of boys from my youth... the one boy who had been bold and selfish with me. He had mauled me openly during a picnic and forced my hand to his pants to feel him there--a terrifying hardness. He even opened his pants and showed it to me. I was like a rabbit hypnotized by a snake--it poked up so white and long, with its red cap on top."

"He made me touch it--it was hot with blood and alive somehow... alive in my fingers like a bird wanting freedom."

"I put my hand on my privates in my bed and gave myself up to sensuous thoughts and fantasies. I satisfied myself as quickly as I could, taking care not to shake the bed. I rubbed the little, stiff bit of flesh that is so pleasurably sensitive for a woman."

"When it was over I promised God I would never do it again, and would keep Barby from abusing herself likewise again."

"But that poor girl--possessed--the next day! The next day when I was out in the barn, feeding that loathsome animal--that pony that became our... our lover! I had a premonition... a flash of inner knowledge that she was at herself again. I could see her in her bed--doing it--working her fingers into herself, gasping and panting in her madness, jerking her body in violent spasms..."

"I had been out of the house for a half an hour at least. I had to find out. I prayed I was wrong. I crept back to the house and was silent as sin as I went inside."

"My heart sank--I heard her, louder than before, thrashing in her bed."

"I went to her door and eased it open an inch, to see. Dear God--what she was doing to herself! My blood went cold, then prickly darts went up and down my spine."

"She was lying on her bed, the bedclothes kicked aside--it was warm, even hot, in the room because the doctor wanted her to sweat, to keep warm, so I always kept the oil furnace set high for her room during the day. She had rucked up her nightie, to her waist, and her nakedness was obscenely revealed, so stark in the cold white light from the window, and her legs were flung wide and her heels were dug into the mattress and she was hunched over and her right hand was working something in and out of herself. Not her finger--something terribly long and round and thick."

"I screamed, and she--her head turned like lightning to me and she had that wild-eyed look--that shameless glare in her eyes for an instant. Then she flung herself flat on her stomach on the bed and the thing she had been using was shown me clutched in her hand."

"It was a dried ear of corn. She must have gotten it from the silo--God knows when--and in her warped need, in her tormented mind, she had conceived the idea of using it for that filthy purpose."

"I flew across the room and seized it from her hand. For one awful moment I inspected it--she had trimmed it on the end and made it smooth. And she had taken one of her father's rubber things I insisted he use when he needed to do his dirty business with me--one of those skin things--and she had rolled it onto that ear of corn... and had used it on herself It was slimy wet from her body."

"My heart was pounding like thunder in my ears. Barby lay there crying. I threw that thing from me to the floor."

"I hit her. I beat her. She howled and wept and I kept hitting her until my arms were tired."

"And then I was empty. I was drained of all rage and shock."

"I crept onto the bed and held her again and tried to understand her and to know why she had behaved--why she had done that to herself."

"She sobbed against me and said she was always ticklish with lust. She needed it... she needed relief... she had to do it... it drove her crazy if she didn't..."

"I didn't know how to answer her. It was Devil talk but I couldn't counter it. She had arguments that baffled me. I tried this and she countered me with that; I tried another way and she turned it back upon me... my own words, to make it seem right that she do things to herself."

"She kept after me, begging me: 'Let me have it back, mother, Please, please, please. I need it.' I should have thrown it away, into the garbage, out into the snow as far as I could throw it... or I should have burned it, that Devil's implement! The device of Satan!"

"But she kept arguing and pleading. She writhed and howled and kept using her hands every moment that I wasn't with her. She broke the cord when I tied her hands away from her body. She was supernaturally strong!"

"She seduced me with her telling how good it felt to use the thing. How satisfying it was to her, how it filled her aching body with joy and glory."

"I could not defeat her. In my deepest heart of hearts--I did not want to deny her. I see now, I know now--I wanted it, too. I wanted to use that terrible, big, imitation man thing on myself."

"How one terrible thing led to another. How easy it became. One perversion became right and so another degenerate practice became permissible, and another, and another, until... until..."

"I resisted her for three days. I prayed day and night for her and for myself. I asked for a sign, for a sign... to prove to me I was right."

"But the Devil prevailed. HE created a sign in the sky that brought a cry of joy and triumph from Barby. She called me to look... and there was a cloud obscenely shaped in the form of a man's organ, sailing overhead, shaped so perfectly... so detailed... that it brought a blush to my face."

"I could not fight after that. I believed somehow what Barby wanted was what she needed to become well."

"I gave in. I took the thing from the drawer and I washed it and I placed it in her hands."

"I had seen the Sign. They said in the hospital where they sent me after I went crazy after Barby died, they said the cloud was a hallucination--we imagined it. No. No. It was there, floating white and perfectly formed. We saw it.

"The doctor--the psychiatrist--said we were both extremely neurotic that winter and that her long illness and our being snowed in so long... I forgot all he said."

"That doctor wanted me to think that putting down the flesh and exalting the spirit is bad. He told me that splitting the body off from the mind was wrong. But they are separate! There must be mind over matter--spirit over flesh--or we are nothing but animals! That is what makes us God-like. That is what raises us above the beasts."

"He said the body and the mind were one I He said science and psychology show that we cannot deny our sexual nature. He said to keep down lust too far only resulted in its coming up stronger than ever, and coming up twisted. He said sex was a basic need. Like eating. But for thousands of years we have known that we must be pure! For thousands of years we have been uplifted by denying the fleshly desires."

"He said Barby went insane trying to be impossibly pure of mind and body. He said I had taught her to be too good and too clean."

"But it was only weakness. We were imperfect vessels for God's love. We let the Devil enter us."

"The doctors and scientists don't believe anymore. They're all so sure of themselves. They think they are all-powerful. But they still die. They all still die. Then they find out."

"YOU'LL FIND OUT!"

"I'll tell you, yes, everything you want. It can't hurt Barby. It can't hurt me."

"Did I tell you my husband cast me away? He put me aside. I get money from him now, but he does not want me. I do not want me, either."

"I don't know! How big it was? It was an ear of corn a big ear of corn... yes, thick and long. At least--yes, like that. We never measured it. That's disgusting. Only a man would want to know the inches..."

(At this point Louisa went into a kind of drunken trance. Her voice became intense and low and she seemed to forget I was present. She seemed to be speaking aloud to herself, and to be reliving in her mind what she described. She twisted and tensed in her chair. Her fingers intertwined in her lap and remained locked tight. Her eyes were vague and unfocused.)

"She took it--there in the living room in broad daylight--and was shameless. She took off all her clothes. She stood naked and she fondled herself. She wanted me to touch her. She wanted me to use it on her.

"But I couldn't. Later... later I did. But then I could only sit and watch my child abuse her body with that thing."

"She stood by the heater and rubbed it over her breasts and teats. It was covered by that thin rubber skin, but the hard, dry kernels of corn made it bumpy and like a cobblestone surface."

"Barby was flushed and crazy-eyed. She rubbed that thing between her legs and then bent over slightly and put the end of it in her."

"It was horrible to watch her face as she twisted and turned it and pulled it up into herself. I was shaking as I watched."

"She pushed and pulled and got almost all of it up into herself. It came out wet and slippery. She sat on the rug and did it faster and faster. She made those sounds of pleasure. She forgot I was there at all. She squished it in and out of herself, so far in that she held only a bit of the thick end. She used one hand and then the other, then both hands. On and on and on."

"She was like an animal, sweating and grunting, that thing making awful wet sounds, and with her face not the face of my pure little Barby... a different creature I didn't recognize."

"She reached her pleasure. She was breathing so fast and so hard--her legs were thrashing, and she rolled onto her back on the carpet and her voice came out of her throat--horrible moans--like a pig wallowing in a mud sty. And her arms were steel, jerking that awful, big thing into herself--making it go in go terribly deep, taking it into herself so fast, so violently fast. So brutally."

"It affected me. Her pleasure was like a lure. If she could have it--why not me, too? I had all my life stifled my lusts. The burning was in me, too."

"In a dream, in a dream, I opened my clothes and fingered my teats. While my daughter wallowed on the floor in obscene spasms of pleasure, I plunged my hand to my core and found myself shamefully wet."

"I was dizzy. The room swirled. I heard a roaring. I was suddenly on the floor with her. She lay quiet and I took the thing from her. I pulled it out of her and pushed it into myself."

"Oh, God, it was big. It had been weeks and weeks since my husband had done his dirty act with my body."

"It was so thick. I couldn't understand how she could take it, so much of it. But I worked it and worried it into me, and it finally sank into my depths, into the Devil's pit in my belly."

"It burned in there like fire, stretching and awakening my secret places. I pulled and pulled and it rubbed somewhere very deep. It pressed my womb and a breathless thrill shot through me. My belly was suddenly hot. My legs got heavy. My breath was deep and fast. I could not keep from using the thing faster. The lightnings of pleasure were such that I had to feel them more and more, quicker and quicker, and I was plunging that thing into myself as Barby had deep, and so fast--and I was grunting as she had, and was groaning, wallowing in the pleasure, wanting more, wanting it to be stronger and sharper and wanting the hot bubble in my core to break. It had to break and spill a heavenly rapture through me. I knew it would... oh, it was coming true... oh, it was almost there... it was rupturing--OH YES..."

"I was addicted in that awful time. I cared for nothing... nothing but the golden pleasure that was driving me mad with delight."

"When it had faded I saw Barby beside me smiling--smiling with the mouth of Satan."

"We abandoned ourselves from then on. We gave up our souls for fleshly pleasures of all kinds."

"We made other things of a likeness to the thing she had created. Other ears of dried corn were altered... and we tried bottles... and we tried... I will not tell you the things we attempted."

"The floodgates were open for me. I found myself in bed with Barby that night, rubbing her chest with an oil that was cold and hot--menthol of some kind prescribed by the doctor."

"But where before I had let her apply it herself, because I was unwilling to touch her breasts with my hands, that night I did it willingly, with her eager permission. She suggested it, and I agreed."

"We were in my bed, the big bed my husband insisted on--king- sized because of his six-foot-three body and need to sprawl out and roll freely--and it was late. The wind was up again, howling, spattering snow against the window. I had the heater on. I all of a sudden didn't care about saving oil anymore. I wanted warmth all the time. I did not deny myself anything."