Laura Meets Jeffrey (30 page)

45

The final chapter

Spring 1983

From that height the year gets worse.

Laura and I are spending less and less time with each other. With three residences it is easy to be somewhere else. I am spending more time alone in the country and enjoying it. When we are together I hardly ever see Laura sleep for long. She naps and then gets up and snorts. She hardly eats food anymore. She's become a jittery coke whore and is now anorexic thin. I've always been turned on by svelte and thin, even skinny, but Laura is emaciated.

Many in the crowd we hang out with are out of control. More people we know have nasal surgery because they've burnt out the center of their nose. I wonder how long it will take for Laura to burn out hers.

She is smoking freebase more frequently, often with George, the video producer I am working for. He is more strung out than she is and doesn't like to get high alone. He even goes to her house in New Hope when she is there without me. He provides the drugs.

George was a perfect example of a nice person losing his life to cocaine. Every film and video shoot he did, from car commercials and rock concerts to MTV music videos—including music videos for Aldo Nova, and Blue Oyster Cult's pyrotechnic laden “Burnin' For You”—had drugs covertly written into the budget. It was where all the per diems, art supplies, and several other categories of money went and, as time progressed, most or all of the profit.

It finally got so bad that Jeannie, George's long-suffering partner and the rock of the company, plus many employees and a half dozen friends got together with George in an attempt at intervention. We all cried. George cried. We all promised to stop all drugs and go “Straight for George.” He made all the worthless empty dope head promises that dope heads make. I think his rehab lasted two days. Then he was back on the grand slide.

George was so talented that his work, even a grade below his best clear-headed effort, was still brilliant. Along with the coke, he was drinking a fifth of vodka a day. And even stoned on coke, George could eat. Unlike Laura, who kept getting skinnier, George was a fat cokehead getting fatter. Not many people could be so hedonistic as to gain weight while nurturing a severe coke habit. Much of it was junk food, but a fair amount was lavish dinners at Cafe Un Deux Trois, where the video company and an entire hip entertainment subculture of New York City hung out. George always picked up the check. He was that kind of gracious, larger-than-life, super-talented, charismatic, suicidal man.

Every time I see Laura she is out of her head stoned. I still do coke occasionally, not often but in a group of people passing it around it's hard to say no. There is still something about the first twelve minutes of being stoned on coke that I like. I love the part about not wanting to eat. I just don't like doing coke for hours and hours. And I don't have the physiology that can withstand doing it for two days in a row unlike other physiologies that want more and more every day. This isn't a choice, it's biology.

Laura has gone from the optimistic cheerful princess whom I saw as releasing a damaged underside to being all damaged underside. Part of me wants to save the relationship and save Laura, and part of me wants out. This goes on for months, with our fights about her coke habit taking up half of our conversations. Sometimes Laura promises to quit. But it never lasts longer than a few days.

“Tough shit if you don't like it,” she shouts at me. “You love me and it's the price you have to pay for my pussy. All pussy has a price.”

That gives me something to think about. I do love her. That is a fact. All pussy does have a price. That is a fact. I am arrogant enough to believe I can get her off drugs. Maybe it is hubris or just naïveté´, but I keep thinking I can make the difference. I still love her enough to not want to love any other woman. Fuck another one, yes; be emotionally involved with another one, no.

We still have heat sometimes and still have warmth sometimes but in general we move to a lower temperature. There is less stuff traveling between us emotionally. We are wilting.

Outside in the real world it is the opposite. The buds are on the trees. It is unseasonably warm and after the hard winter it feels magical. I have spring fever. I am randy. I don't bring up the drug thing and try to concentrate on just having fun and sex with Laura. It is Friday night. I do coke with Laura.

We start off the evening with me hand-cuffing Laura's hands behind her back. I give her directions. Suck my asshole. Lick my feet. Suck my dick. When she begs for the whip I give her enough to bring her to a frenzy and conclude with a hot fuck.

I take off the handcuffs and we rest. She tells me she loves me more than ever, but I know it's not true. We fuck some more and whatever primitive coding we share takes center stage. Laura climaxes several times and then I come again. It is explosive and lifts my spirit. I nap for a while. I wake to Laura rubbing me and begging me to do more drugs so I can fuck her more. I do a line in each nose. I am careful not to do too much and lose my ability to get hard.

We go back to sex games. I put Laura on her knees, tie her up with long pieces of rope, and began to whip her furiously, which is to her liking. She has a collection of welts from her neck to her thighs. I stop whipping her and with her hands still tied, I fuck her. Then I wet her anus with my spunk and fuck her in her ass. It takes me forever to come and it is intense in the way orgasms you really have to work for usually are.

I have to piss, and since piss isn't part of our sex scene, I go to the bathroom, leaving Laura tied up.

I'm standing in front of the mirror. I look at the face in the mirror. I've got coke juice dripping down my nostrils and into my moustache. I still have the whip in my hand. The whole world stops.

I can't stop looking in the mirror. I'm spellbound. I notice every little line in my face, how big my nose is and my receding hairline. I don't know what it's like to be beautiful, like a model and enjoy your reflection, but sometimes I see enough character in the mirror to please myself. At this moment I've never looked uglier. Plus there is sadness in my eyes.

I hear Laura begging for more whipping from the bedroom. I look in the mirror. Now at the whip in my hand. I shake my head back and forth slightly and purse my lips. I look like my father for a moment, looking at me when I've done something stupid. Full of love tinged with disappointment. I stare at the face, and my eyes fill with water. Just looking. Really looking into me. I look at the coke dripping from my nose and the whip in my hand and say to myself with none of the humor with which you might expect the line to be read, “What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?”

I swear that is the line verbatim.

I cry. To say it was an epiphany is to give it too much religious significance. It was more like a drunk hitting bottom.

It isn't about Laura anymore. It's about me. At that moment I know I have gone too far down the wrong road. I don't blame Laura. It just has to end.

I go back to Laura and untie her and tell her I'm tired and need to sleep. She goes into the kitchen to do some more coke. I don't care. I go to sleep and sleep for a long time. I wake up and Laura is in my arms, naked and hot from her welts. I don't feel desire, but I do still love her.

I am scared about not being with Laura and I'm scared about staying with her. I am sick to my stomach. Like so many others who played with drugs or sex or gambling or food, I thought I could keep it as a preference and not an addiction and like most of them I was wrong.

I go out for a walk with Necort. It is still warmer than usual for early April. I feel sad, but the day is sunny. I walk to Washington Square Park and watch the chess games and roller skaters. I walk to John's Pizza and order a veggie with anchovies and eat a slice on the way home. Laura is awake when I enter and she's hungry and eats.

No one says anything.

I speak first. “I think it's time we take a break from each other.”

“You're right,“ she says without surprise. “We're not so much fun anymore. And I'm tired of fighting about coke.”

“I'm tired of fighting about coke, too.”

In her sober, humorless voice she continues, “Maybe I can't quit and maybe I don't want to quit but I know I don't want to fight about it with you anymore.”

It's that quick. The team is splitting up. There is sad resignation in the knowledge that things will be different forever.

I move out of the apartment that day and Necort and I go back to the country. I cry more than once, but I never have second thoughts.

We were over. That's just the way it was. We talked a few times in the next few days and then stopped calling for a few weeks.

About six weeks after we split up, Laura and I bumped into each other at a mutual friend's townhouse on the Upper East Side. She looked great. She'd been off coke for a few days and had been eating. She said she was trying to get a handle on the coke thing and was only using when she was in the city. I'd heard it all before.

We decided to spend the night together there in our friend's guest bedroom. We made sweet love like old friends. We talked. We said we missed each other. We cried. We cuddled. We held each other tight. We ended like a tight band jamming, not on a pre-set cue, but where, in synch, together, we felt the end belonged.

The breakup with Laura wasn't like any I'd gone through before. There were no theatrics, no pleading and no mortal pain. I missed her, I suppose she missed me, but we knew we did the right thing.

“From the beginning,” concludes Laura, ”I never thought of us as being in a long-term relationship. It was definitely a fuck experience. I was in this decadent period of sex and drugs, mostly coke, and Jeffrey joined me in the middle of it. It was going on before him and it went on after him but all the time I knew this part of my personality was not going to go on and on forever.

“I remember toward the end, when we first started not getting along so good anymore, Jeffrey telling me his friend Jimmy said to him, ‘You know this isn't a permanent thing; she's just with you while she's in this stage of her life. Soon she's going to change into another personality and she'll be gone.' And I remember Jeffrey telling me, in total shock, ‘Can you believe he said that?'

“I said I thought Jimmy was right. It was so completely obvious to me that I was playing a role. I was just playing out one facet of who I was, and I couldn't be that part of myself forever. I could only play that one facet for a while. Jeffrey said he understood what I was saying and he could accept that but he hoped Jimmy and I were wrong. I think he was happy to settle for the incredible hot sex, and this bizarre, 90-mile-an-hour lifestyle, but I guess in his heart he hung on to a more long-term romantic dream of us until he didn't.”

One morning I arrived at our friend's town house and discovered that Laura had spent the night there and just left. I went to the guest room, sank into the bed's fragrance and jerked off. I'd broken up with her but my pheromones hadn't.

She and I talked and met and continued to have sex occasionally. It was as though we were ex-lovers who still fancied each other, who'd spent three or five years after they split up resolving their turmoil and had become friends again, with benefits. Except we cut right to the benefits.

Our sex was more like our early days. Dominant and submissive, yes, S&M, no. We would look into each other's eyes and smile knowingly. We still thrilled each other's body but we both knew that the love that made orgasm spiritual was gone.

With Laura seeing different men all the time for money it was hard to tell if she was dating. I was somewhere north of curious and south of jealous. It wasn't uncomfortable and I never asked. In a few months Laura had a new boyfriend, a nouveau riche, Jewish, hippie-entrepreneur cokehead who had made a fortune in drug paraphernalia. He was a bit pompous, but seemed to love Laura and wanted to take care of her so he was okay with me. Every time I saw them they were zonked.

Laura recalls, “George came to see me one night, in New Hope. All of a sudden he showed up at my house. I was like, ‘What's up?'

“George said, ‘I just thought we might hang out.'

“I said, ‘Okay, okay…'

“He said, ‘Let's go get cocaine.'

“I didn't know he'd just escaped from detox so I said, ‘All right, let's go into town, and see if we can find some cocaine.'

“We went into town and couldn't find any cocaine.

“George said, ‘Let's go up to the city…' I said, ‘Okay, I'll drive.'

“So I drove him to New York City, where he was dealing cocaine by the way, and he knew there was an ounce of cocaine, and he and I did an ounce of cocaine, in one night, and that's the most cocaine I've ever done in my life. And we freebased it at his apartment through the whole night. Then I got up, drove home back to New Hope and went to an acupuncture appointment, which was fucking insane because I was on cocaine and I hadn't slept.”

The last time I saw Laura was six months after we split up at George's funeral. George's friend Sue, a madam who owned a big brothel, had gone on vacation for two weeks and left him in charge. At the end of each day, George was supposed to check in with her well-trained and reliable staff and collect the receipts. George collected and then spent every dime of the receipts on cocaine, which he boiled down to freebase and smoked. He inhaled close to $20,000 in ten days. The madam was understandably pissed. I think she threatened to have him whacked. She didn't need to. A week later George died of a cocaine-induced misadventure. At his wake, Laura was stoned on coke. I wondered how long she would be alive.