Laura Meets Jeffrey (26 page)

37

The cocaine Ponzi scheme

Coke was everywhere and everybody was doing more and more of it and acting crazier and more paranoid, and no one spoke out against it, other than the anti-drug forces that seasoned dopers were programmed not to believe. Very few members of the hip community saw that the Emperor was naked. Few things are more dangerous than a hard drug with a good reputation.

It was in more and more places and more overtly displayed. It was one of the biggest fads to hit the baby boomers since the Hula Hoop, the Twist and bell bottoms. It even gave pot a run for the money. And speaking of money, dope dealers loved coke. A shoebox full of grass, which can't be cut, might be worth in 1981/82 a thousand dollars; a shoe box full of uncut coke, which will definitely get cut, is worth tens and tens of thousands.

It's hard to conceive of it now but in the early '80s, business meetings would often start with lines on the table. And I don't mean just record and movie business meetings. Lawyers and Wall Street traders were fuelling their overtime-driven careers on it. Most of the players were self-deluding themselves that it was not only safe, it was good for you. Cocaine led to mass hypnosis.

Middle-class and upper-class parties would often have a bowl of it for guests. The only difference was the size of the bowl. I saw it handed out to adults at bar mitzvahs and at Irish wakes.

Coke was so expensive that half of us were dealing to the other half just to make our stash, like some Colombian-backed psychotropic Amway multi-level marketing scheme gone mad. If I could have invested in Bolivian Agriculture Futures or Colombian Processing I would have.

Coke was so much more expensive than the previous highs of pot, alcohol and speed that cocaine altered the very fabric of hipster finances. Great pot in 1981 was maybe $50 an ounce, which would take two normal potheads at least a few days to consume. Alcohol as always, except during Prohibition, was legal and cheap. And speed, at maybe $2, $3, $5 or even $10 a hit or a snort would last for more hours than nighttime, even on the winter solstice.

But coke had the shortest half-life of them all. A $100 gram could be used up by a couple just getting dressed on the way to a disco. One-hundred-dollar-a-week pot or speed habits became $200-a-day coke habits. And freebase was the Hoover cash vacuum of all drugs—$1,000 up in smoke in just a few hours. People developed five-figure-a-week drug habits. Heroin dealers were eating their heartless hearts out.

I knew several people who went through $10,000 to $20,000 worth of freebase in a week. Inheritances went up in smoke—as did paychecks, savings accounts, children's college funds, businesses' cash flows and lawyers' clients' escrow accounts. Then they started stealing from strangers.

I knew enough from indulging in speed a bit too frequently earlier in my life that you can't keep borrowing from the future. You can't cheat life, but in the early '80s a whole segment of the hip middle-class thought they could. Coke pulled the wool over our eyes for half a decade. The courts were being lenient on middle-class coke busts that didn't involve big weight, so there was no bogeyman under the bed, only the one coke paranoia made you think was there. Hipsters, not being so hip, were in mass delusion.

With our conspicuous consumption and Laura's drug habit expanding, she started dealing more than hooking. First for her habit, which I protested against funding, and then for the money itself, which was easier and faster to make than by turning tricks.

Most often she sold both to the same people—a horizontal marketing expansion, a hooker with an upsell.

Lots of rich clients would buy a gram of coke from her for $100 and then give most or all of it back while fucking her. Others would order larger amounts and share some. She had a few clients, nice middle-class guys who had become biggish dealers, who would trade coke for sex or sell it to Laura at wholesale, or both.

Soon we had a scale and a grinder and little gram bottles with coke spoons and a thriving cottage industry just like many of our friends. Just like tens of thousands of other user-dealers obliviously on the payroll of Pablo Escobar. The one part I liked was the grinding, weighing, and cutting because it was like being a kid with a chemistry set. It was all a bit like alchemy—with coke instead of lead. You mixed coke with mannitol and turned it into gold.

The returns were phenomenal. You would buy an eight-ball—an eighth of an ounce or three and a half grams—of really high quality coke (coke's one saving grace was that it taught a lot of us the metric system) for say $200 to $300 and cut it in half or more with mannitol and sell seven or eight grams for a hundred apiece and make $400 to $500 profit and do it twice a week or twice a day depending on the width of your customer base and the depth of their habits.

It was, looking back, a mass insanity that ultimately did none of us any good. Even before AIDS, it spelled the end of an era.

38

Mr. Tall and the world's ugliest swing club

October 1982

From 1981 into 1982, Laura slides from fucking with some S&M into S&M with some fucking. Laura is black and blue by choice much of the time. She likes it. She wears bruises like jewelry.

Less and less she talks about sex or orgasm or pleasure. It's now about taking pain, being used and completely being owned by me and being used and whipped by men she doesn't know and will never see again.

The politics are weird. The power in an S&M relationship is more fluid than static. It's hard to tell where it is at any given moment. Does the slave need the master more than the master needs the slave? The reason why these bizarre relationships work, sometimes for a while, sometimes for a lifetime, is because that question's answer is situational and not etched in granite. The sliding power differential is the attraction. She is my preternatural sex Goddess. She is my slave, but I worship her and need her.

Watching her in sexual ecstasy is freebase for my penis, except unlike the drug the emotional payoff keeps getting better instead of progressively falling short. We come home from some sordid public display and I am steel rod insatiable for the rest of the night, shooting come every hour or three in one hole after another. It is, at the time, my idea of heaven.

One of the reasons I tolerate her coke habit is that coke makes her horny and slutty, and I enjoy fucking her into a more mellow state. Usually.

The first time I notice a quantum change in Laura's attitude, the beginning of the S&M slide, is one blustery Sunday in late October 1982. During the day Laura has two tricks that are well paying but are sexually boring. By sundown she has fucked me out. By Sunday night, she's coked up and jittery and even a decent whipping doesn't settle her down.

I slap her face, which is one of her new favorite perversions. Slapping someone you love across the face is even more counterintuitive than spanking. I slap her face gently and she complains. I hit her harder and she says it's not hard enough. I slap her with force and she thanks me and my dick gets harder. I am Pavlov's Dog. That's how easy it is for a sex maniac to fall into something. She tells me that when I hit her, spank her, slap her, it doesn't hurt as much as it feels good to her. She gets pleasure out of acts that would give me pain. I have no idea why she has this perverted sensual interpretation or what it means but I know it turns me on. And it comes with free absolution, an ecclesiastical declaration of forgiveness of sins complete with free indulgences.

Laura wants it hotter, but it's Sunday night. Almost every place we know is closed. We find an ad in
Screw
for a 24/7 on-premise swing club so we get dressed and head there. On the cab ride over she whispers to me her anticipation of being used by strangers.

“I want you to look into my eyes. I want to be hurt in front of you. I want you to slap my face hard while another man whips me.”

The club is just off Broadway around 49th Street. We are let in for free by the man at the door who looks at Laura and lights up with a smile. Lots of swingers clubs during this period are fronts for whorehouses. Single men are the rule rather than the forbidden or the exception. Couples or women get in for free or next to nothing and single guys pay $75. The owner hires shills, sometimes classy hookers, most often street hookers so single guys can get sex. The whorehouses use the semi-legal permissiveness allowed at swingers clubs to their advantage.

Nearly all true swingers clubs are couples-only except on rare nights when single men are allowed. A normal Joe needs to find a girl or at least hire a decent-smelling hooker. Real clubs are open only at night, with one or two dark nights. The fake clubs, set up for single men, are open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, like whorehouses, which is what they are.

We go up the stairs and enter a large loft. It's mostly empty. The floor is dirty. There is an area with gym mats covering the floor surrounded by folding metal chairs; the kind you would rent for a funeral except they wouldn't be this rusty. It's set up like a boxing ring without the ropes. The lighting is gloomy and dim, not moody and sexy. The place reeks of stale sperm, body odors, old piss, two or more warring camps of cheap institutional air freshener plus an undercurrent of ammonia. The ammonia is the friendliest aroma.

Half a dozen badly-shaped, mostly middle-aged men, naked or in their Jockeys, are seated around the ring, all playing with themselves, watching a lone plump black whore with bad teeth and a few massive body scars sucking off the semi-hard penis of a fat guy with a stomach so big that he probably hasn't seen his own dick without a mirror in a decade. Not one man ringside has a decent hard-on.

Laura never opens her lavender down coat and is already asking to leave. I am fascinated by the unrelenting ugliness. This is sex hell. Forget the sex, I tell her. Let's just stay a minute or two longer. I am in the middle of a once in a lifetime experience. It would be hard for a set designer to duplicate such a rancid mood. It is not simply unpleasant; it is spectacularly disgusting. I'm captivated, like a rubbernecker passing an automobile accident. (If someone showed you his infected pus boil, wouldn't it be hard not to look?)

I slowly pan around the room; not one spot isn't frayed or putrid. Of the five large, decade-old, huge, semi-nude girly posters on the wall, all are torn and surrounded by peeling paint. Two are falling down as if they were caught in an attempt to escape and were left hanging, wounded, as a warning to the other posters. If the devil were feeling generous, this is where he would send you for Christmas.

Finally, I've had enough and as we turn to leave we come face to face with a well-dressed, nicely handsome tall man who says, “If you're leaving, I'm leaving. If you're staying, I'll stay.”

Laura smiles at me, then at Mr. Tall. He is not yet forty, obviously an executive with his wingtips and Brooks Brothers suit. “I'll stay,” she says without looking for my approval, pulling off her beret and coat. The three of us head to a corner with lousy lighting and a sea of dead sofa cushions and padded chair seats, maybe twenty of them. The three of us take off our clothes and, showing good breeding, neatly fold them in little piles. A few of the crowd come over to watch as Laura drops to her knees and starts sucking the tall man's biggish cock.

It hardens fast and points straight up. Laura turns around, grabs his cock from between her legs and, leans forward balancing on two big cushions, while Mr. Tall guides his cock inside her as she, all slinky and thin and angular and young, rides it. Soon she is the only one moving, sliding in and out, and making guttural raspy noises like the sound of someone practicing German phonetics. In this sea of ugly she is an island of vivacious sex and beauty. The dichotomy makes her more impressive, magical.

The voyeur peanut gallery, everyone in the room including the fat man and the black whore, surrounds us. Every person, including the black whore, is doing some serious masturbating. Even the fat man now has a noteworthy erection. While fucking Mr. Tall, Laura begs me loudly to slap her face, and I do. The gallery responds with a gasp, masturbating faster and taking a step closer. I put out my hand to signal the herd to stay back. I hold Laura by her shoulders and like power-assisted steering, I help energize her moves.

Mr. Tall stands like a mannequin while Laura milks his cock. Then he reaches out with strong arms to help her ass move back and forth. The three of us look like a rudimentary machine.

He comes in Laura with great bull-fuck snorts. She starts singing her special moan, signaling the beginning of her climax.

“Slap me hard. Lots,” she begs. I oblige.

His snorts, her moans and my slaps ring out in the hollowness of the room's hard walls.

She continues her motion another half minute till he pulls out of her and she drops onto a large pillow. He leans down to caress her and whispers to us that if we would be more comfortable in his hotel, he'd love to take us there. Laura looks at me pleading yes, so we dress and leave. The pack follows our every move all the way to the door as we split the toxic pit and catch a cab.

Mr. Tall tells us he is in town for a business meeting. He's the speechwriter for the CEO of one of the big media conglomerates, and he's staying at the Waldorf-Astoria. He boasts that he's also written speeches for the White House and that President Reagan likes his work. He says it's a thrill watching the president read his words at a meeting and especially on TV. He says hearing his words on TV actually makes him hard. He doesn't look familiar but he definitely has a tall patrician private school Ivy League thing going on.

He pays the cabbie and we head up to his suite. He immediately orders half a dozen drinks from room service. Laura excavates the little bottle from her bag and does a few lines. Mr. Tall and I pass. We all start undressing again. Mr. Tall and I simultaneously ask Laura to get undressed slowly. She peels off her street clothes and takes a very long time with her black bra and knickers. Naked, she comes over and rubs up against our arms.

Then she climbs onto the bed on her hands and knees, her pussy wiggling as she begs the stranger for a spank. I sit down in a comfortable chair, which I move closer, just watching.

Whatever hormones she secretes in anticipation fill the room and overpower the cut flowers on the dresser. As soon as her sweet musk hits my nose, my penis, like so many times before and after, hardens and throbs.

“Yes. I'd like to spank you,” he replies and lays a tender slap, way too lightly for Laura's liking. She keeps begging him to hit harder but his escalating increments are too inconsequential. She orders, ‘“Jeffrey, spank me. Show him how hard.”

I spank her with the force of an angry but civilized father. Mr. Tall gasps, like the herd did an hour earlier.

“Like that,” she instructs Mr. Tall. “Spank me hard like that.”

He lets go with one that is hard enough to send her back a few inches and she says, “One. Yes. Like that. But harder, please.”

He pulls his hand back farther and cracks her ass again.

“Two. Yes, but harder, please.”

“Three.

“Four.”

At “Nine,” she turns to me and begs, “Please slap my face when he hits me. I need to be beaten by both of you.” I slap her face hard enough to freeze Mr. Tall with either excitement or disgust. A knock on the door signals the arrival of the drinks and releases him. He grabs a bathrobe and goes into the sitting room, closing the bedroom door behind him. Laura remains on the bed on hands and knees, smiling, repeating yet again another variation of her mantra. “I like the pain. I like doing it in front of you. I like taking the pain from both of you,” she whispers.

Mr. Tall re-enters the bedroom with a tray. Laura stands up and we all slug down doubles of twelve-year-old single-malt Scotch. Laura finds her bag and fixes up her nose again.

“Do the ten over again, please,” begs Laura as she gets back into position on the bed.

I stand in front of her and slap her face firmly, open-handed, carefully, but hard. Mr. Tall slaps her buttocks. The front and rear cracks are just a little out of sync and Laura is jolted in two directions and her face is red and her ass is very red and Mr. Tall's hand is sore.

And he is freaked out. We have crossed his line.

“I'm not comfortable with this,” he says. “I want to be with Laura alone.”

“No dice, not alone,” I say. “Get dressed, honey.”

Laura jumps up and we begin to collect our gear. Mr. Tall quickly folds.

“Okay, okay. Both of you please stay. Can I please be with Laura, and you can watch?”

“Sure.”

Mr. Tall sits on the bed and has Laura lie across his muscular thighs. He begins to spank her.

“Have you been naughty, little girl?

“Yes, I've been bad,” Laura says shyly. She looks directly into my eyes with anticipation and a pinch of fear. Mr. Tall spanks her harder and harder and she replies with a “Thank-you,” after each stroke.

“Slap me once Jeffrey. Please,” she implores. I get up, slap her face and return to my comfortable chair.

I watch this pain show take place in front of me and I cannot understand the reason I like it. But I do. Or why she likes it. And she does. There is something about her desire for pain and her reveling in it that is beyond erotic, way beyond a mere act of sex. There has been no sex, nothing about genitals, kissing, sensuality or warm squishy orifices since we arrived in this room. Only sadism and masochism.

“Let me suck your nice cock please,” she asks Mr. Tall. I am oddly relieved that she wants a penis included. He comes around in front of her and my Laura sucks him for a very long time until he comes, stifled, softer compared to his guttural grunting in the sex club—as if his parents were in the next room and he didn't want them to hear us.

She lets the come drip theatrically over her lips and recaptures it with her tongue, swallows, and smiles.

I get up and heave her on her back, mount her, and fuck her hard. Mr. Tall covers her mouth with a kiss until I nudge him aside and slap her face. She thanks me, moves her face toward me and asks for an encore. I rest on one hand and slap her again with the other. Mr. Tall joins in, holds her head up and braces it for my next slap. She cries from pain or delight or both and shouts, “Oh God! Yes! I need it!”