Laura Meets Jeffrey (32 page)

We keep the ball in the air most of the time, no stumbles, just a few awkward courting pauses that signal we fancy each other. The talk volley is whimsical, not competitive. She says she really must be going. She had a great time, would love to see me again if I were so inclined and would I walk her to the subway. And would I like to smoke a doobie on the way there. Okay, good. Yes. Of course. And for sure.

Evening has cooled off the autumn day just enough to make us button up our jackets.

We take a left on Charles to get off Seventh Avenue. Although we are in the Open-minded Free Turf of the West Village in the Liberated Zone that is New York City, smoking a joint in front of cops—and there are always cops near the subway in Sheridan Square—could get us in trouble—for hubris if not specifically for breaking the law. And to cops in New York, middle-class hubris, especially middle-class Jewish hubris, is a worse crime than smoking pot.

It is some tasty shit she is smoking. Very expensive. Good quality like her leather coat. Zaps me right away. Like Vietnamese killer weed that makes it nearly impossible to finish a joint.

The conversation drops away as we pay attention to the machine-rolled joint with an English-style cardboard filter. Lots of oows and ahhhs and a few wows and then we just saunter along the street like it is an amusement park ride. At one point she holds firmly onto my sleeve, our first post-hug physical contact. Usually I'm more aggressive, but I let her make the first move. It seems natural, like the way a lioness in oestrus parades her stuff to get the males going.

I'd made sure to have sex with my friend Erika The Cum Junkie that afternoon so I wouldn't be particularly horny. I had decided to play it cool and lay way back. The worst thing a horny man can do is wear it on his sleeve. Most women hate that on a first date.

Also, I take her No-Sex-On-The-First-Date literally. I'm looking for a wife, not an easy lay. We hold hands and rub against each other in a kind of walking cuddle. Then at the corner of Charles and Hudson without a word we turn around to go back to the subway and in mid-pivot when our eyes meet, we kiss.

Haimisha fireworks. Instant Jewish karma.

We kiss too long and gropey for a first kiss. In a pause she falls half limp into my arms like al dente pasta. Whatever her number is, I have it.

We duck into a basement stairwell and dry fuck standing up. I feel her small soft breasts. I put my hand under her skirt and feel the wet on the front of her pantyhose. There are no panties beneath them. I lift up her skirt and feel her ass. It is heavenly. I hold her hand on my jeans just over my hard-on and she dances with it.

“Let's go back to my place in Brooklyn.”

“What about the no-sex-on-the-first-date rule?”

“I lied. Sometimes I sleep with guys I like on the first date. Let's go get the subway.”

“Fuck the subway. Let's catch a cab.”

“The subway is faster.”

“Yeah, but we can make out better in a cab.”

I hadn't used the term “make out” in ten years.

We grab a cab and kiss and fondle our way south toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Hands travel underneath clothing. Her nails are sharp, and she cat digs them into the skin on my back just a little. Just enough to let me know she's hot as well as warm.

Over the East River I ask her if she would like me to rip a hole in her pantyhose. She says yes. I stick my finger in her. Fabulous vagina! Very wet. Nice contractions. Excellent viscosity. The Pakistani cab driver is watching the rear view mirror as much as the road. On the Brooklyn side of the bridge one of us, I'm not sure who, I think it was me, helps my penis emerge. She goes down to greet it. She gives great head! I knew it! I smile at the cabby who is watching my face and her head bob up and down and he gives me one of those grins that says, “Yes, I am knowing you are lucky man.”

Her apartment building in Brooklyn Heights looks vaguely familiar. I think ten years before Andrea and I had gone to some orgies there given by a nice Jewish couple named Ken and Matty. We button up enough to keep clothed and get out of the cab. Helene unlocks the front door and guides me to the elevator. We take a long, civil, handholding, silent ride up with an older man and his smiling doggie going to a higher floor.

Her one-bedroom flat is large and fastidious, with a spectacular view that is ninety-eight percent Brooklyn and only a slight slice of the river and Manhattan. It's furnished like she dresses, tasteful, expensive and mostly black with lots of leather. The only thing I can smell is more Ivory soap and Chanel No. 5. The bedroom and living room are theatrically lit with half a dozen low-wattage hidden floodlight floor spots shining up the walls in an unconscious tribute to Albert Speer. Either she expected she might bring me back, or she lives like this and pays lots of attention to lighting. Either way is OK with me.

Helene pulls me into the bedroom and onto a giant slippery duvet on her queen-size bed so quickly that if I'd been a thief I couldn't have taken inventory of what was worth stealing.

She scampers into the kitchen and returns with a bottle of Asti Spumonti and two flutes. She pulls out another perfect pre-rolled joint and lights it as I open the Asti and pour. We pass the smoke, clink our glasses, smile and drink. We both undress to entertain each other. Not two dozen words have been spoken since we left Manhattan.

Helene rolls onto the middle of the bed and I get my first glimpse of her completely naked. She's slender with a magnificent ass, a pleasing combination of muscle and fat and firm and soft. Helene has a body I can adore.

She moves up toward the wooden headboard and spreads her legs and beckons me with her entire self. “Put it in me,” she says. I like her more and more. Her skin is lovely. I feel empowered by my ancestors. I am hard as a rock. And with a hot Jewish Girl! Destiny calls!

I enter her and feel like Judah Maccabee after a successful day killing Philistines. We find our rhythm, slow exaggerated deep and round. Her fingers first dig gently into my back and then come around to my chest and caress my nipples. This girl is fun.

In a variety of positions for the next fifteen minutes I can tell she comes at least twice. Once when I fuck her from behind. Once when we are eating sixty-nine. Then I'm back on top of her. I can feel myself getting close to coming and exercise restraint. I slow the pace down. We are diagonal across the bed with her head near stage-left bottom corner.

“Harder! I want it harder,” she orders.

I speed up. I slam into her a dozen times and we slide slightly on the duvet. I'm getting close to the point of no return.

“More hard!” she yells and each thrust takes me one step closer.

“Bang Me! BANG ME!
”

She's writhing in her eleventeenth orgasm. I pull back, just ready to come, and hit my midsection against hers with enough force to move a professional football tackling practice dummy. We slide off the bed and she hits the floor headfirst with me still in her. Her neck makes a cracking sound you never want to hear. It's the crunch of a 300-pound defensive lineman who misses the sideline tackle and helmet-first hits the skull of a one-hundred-thirty-pound photographer.

Her head is bent over sideways.

Not breathing.

Eyes open.

Lifeless. I'm about to come.

I think I killed her.

My penis doesn't care.

It starts shooting.

What the fuck do I do? I've accidentally killed a girl. In mid-orgasm. I'm not a necrophile. How does one abort an orgasm that's achieved liftoff? The bottom half of me keeps moving like a headless chicken.

Two-hundred-and-forty-seven different thoughts collide.

What do I tell the police? I don't even know the exact address. Do I hunt around for some envelope with her address on it? Do I run naked through the halls screaming for help? Do I stay and wait for the cops or split? Will I go to jail? Does this say something about my future with Jewish women? Will I go to jail?

She doesn't move.

The devilpenis says she's already dead so just keep pumping.

Penis wins although I can't say it was one of my better orgasms.

I pull out on the second to last squirt with my what-to-do-next questions still unanswered.

I hover over dead Helene. I gather my wits. My mind aches. My body is still in afterglow.

CRACK! Helene straightens her head back to where it belongs. She moans. Cries. Screams. It's a good sign. She's not dead.

I'm glad I didn't kill her.

I didn't want to explain this to my mother. The police. Go to jail. End up as some giant tattooed biker's prison bitch.

“Can you move Helene? Are you all right?”

She's not screaming anymore. She's just crying.

Maybe she's paralyzed. Will that carry less jail time than killing her? Will I be spending every Sunday for the rest of my life visiting her in some hospital? How will I explain this to her parents? How will I tell
my
parents?

I promise to believe in God for the rest of my life if he makes her well again.

She moves. Maybe I won't go to jail.

“What happened?” she asks.

She blessedly sits up and rubs her neck.

“We slipped off the bed and your head hit the floor and your neck went sideways and you went out like a light for a moment. Should I call you a doctor?”

I thought it best not to tell her I thought she died.

“No. I think I'm okay. It's just that my neck is sore.”

“You sure you don't want to go to the hospital or see a doctor?”

“No, I just want to go to bed. I've got a bad headache.”

I'll bet she does.

I get dressed and for certain the mood is different. Somewhere deep inside her she knows I fucked her when she was dead.

We kiss perfunctorily.

I take the lift down, walk outside, and get a fix on where I am. I catch the subway to Port Authority in time for the last bus out to the country. It's a long fucking bus ride as questions ricochet around inside my skull looking for answers.

I thought that whatever potential Helene and I may have had was poisoned. Over. History. This would prove true with the lifeless phone conversation we have when I call the next day. She was polite but I could tell she wanted to get off the phone. Maybe by that time she knew I fucked her when she was dead. That could put a damper on any relationship.

A week later I called Beth. She loved my photos! I was much better looking and sexier than she expected, but—a big but—she'd met a man on “hols” and they were already half an item. His description matched her ex—short, rich New York City Jew. He was a lawyer and from her description he was as malleable as her previous wimp.

A few more replies came in over the next month but no one I found attractive.

Whatever was going to happen to me after Laura wouldn't be fast or easy. There wouldn't be a quick fix. But the good news was that just before I killed Helene, I was outside the fog of perversion and completely absorbed in a good old fashioned fuck.

And the better news was that I wasn't going to jail and I wouldn't have to be some big, gamy skinhead Neo-Nazi's anal slave. At least not now.

Afterword

Since then

About a year after we split up and a few months after George died, Laura changed her life and gave up coke. The next year she gave up whoring and studied interior design. The year after that she was not only clean and sober, but, get this, celibate. She said she had to do that to prepare herself for the love of her life she knew would come. Then she met him.

Today, twenty-seven years later, she's a healthy happily married, drug-free mother of three with a successful business and a beautiful country home. Her husband knows much of her history, including my part, and sees her past as a step she had to take to meet him. Whenever we've been in each other's company he's been warm and at ease.

Laura and I went through some kind of sexual healing that although bizarre, did lead each of us to external positive results and an inner therapeutic equanimity. Her submission to me, a beautiful sex slave princess adoring me, offering her pain as a sign of her devotion, forever erased some parts of my insecurities and raised my confidence level and not just with women. Laura, having divested herself of a physical manifestation of her psychic pain, evolved to the end of punishing herself and drug abuse, and forever gave herself a lighter load to carry and paved the way to her place in marriage, motherhood and as a successful businesswoman.

Laura is one of those people who can do whatever she sets out to do. She wanted coke and whipping and gangbangs and had that. Before that she wanted to be a Sufi vegetarian celibate acid freak and she did that. She was a great girlfriend for three and a half years. She was sweet and entertaining which is why Norman and Norris and Legs and my parents and all my friends loved her.

She was a great whore and now is a great mother and wife and cook and housekeeper and she'll be a great grandmother when she gets there. Her design business varies with the jobs and seasons but sometimes she has twenty-two people on her payroll. She is a winner.

A few years after AIDS made the headlines Laura and I both got tested several times and passed. Laura took her first test just after she became pregnant with her first child. She called me when she got her cherished negative. “I guess we got it all in under the wire, didn't we Jeffrey?” she said. “Yes,” I said, “We did.”

* * *

I was one of the horniest men I ever met. I'm not anymore. All the stuff in this book happened twenty-five to forty years ago. Today I'm just average for my age. Maybe a little bit higher. Hormone levels fluctuate with age and since hormones often reveal themselves as thoughts, there are some thoughts I don't have any more and many I have much less often.

For all my high hormone years, the real power behind the curtain, Testosterone Rex, turned me into its amoral endocrinological bitch and forced me to hunt for orgasms every day. It wasn't something I chose or that could be turned off. Lots of times, especially when I was alone and horny and had jerked off three or four times and the monkey was still on my back I daydreamed that there was an off switch I could throw.

There were, however, magic golden periods, like the apogee of my testosterone when I collided with Laura, an erotic outlier whose libido matched mine. I never once looked for the off switch.

Neither Laura nor I were involved with heavy S&M before we met each other and neither of us ever got into it with anyone else after we split. Neither of us have any residual shame or regrets or guilt. We are grateful we got to live our fantasies and make it out alive.

I suppose if Laura had died or ended up with mental or physical incapacitation, or we were shooting drugs and one or both of us got Hep C, if we had perished in a libidinous Gotterdammerung, then my retrospection would be different. But we both landed on our feet, we thrived and we earned the luxury of nostalgia.

After Laura, my life went in other directions with the same maniacal intensity. At thirty-seven, in 1984, I replaced Laura with a bass guitar and taught myself how to play. Badly.

I published a high-end hard-core erotic photography book shot in London, Paris and Los Angeles and got arrested for pandering while in L.A. The police were trying to skirt around the First Amendment and arrest pornographers under a Draconian anti-pimping law that carried a minimum of three years incarceration.

In London I looked up my ex-wife Tisha whom I hadn't seen in sixteen years and we fell in love again. Sometimes you just need a decade or two of space to work things out. I took the music I was writing and put together a band in London. I invented a publicity prone character, Max Gelt, Miami Beach deli owner. In my alter ego story Max invested with a group of English friends in a London rock band and was touring around with them when the lead singer broke his leg and Max filled in and the band loved him and he left the deli and his wife and two kids to become the lead singer of Max and The Broadway Metal Choir. (Google it. I found one of my albums for sale on Amazon UK for £8!) It was musical guerrilla theatre performance art and I was Max.

I got adopted by some great musicians who loved the concept. I even hired a bass guitarist because I was writing parts I couldn't play and I wanted to concentrate on being the lead singer. I didn't have a great voice but I had some character.

While I was Jeffrey in the USA, I was Max in England to the band, who all helped promote the fiction, and to the press, who never saw through it. I mean who would make up a lie about being a delicatessen owner? We got signed to a middle level indie label, Powerstation, and put out an album that went somewhere but not far enough for me to get a major deal and profitably continue.

Tisha saved my erotic life. She made my transition from kinky S&M to regular alpha male sex easy. Her emotional warmth, refined aristocratic attitude and her enlightened aromatherapist alternative lifestyle smoothed my way to the hard edge of hot but not decadent sex.

Tisha loved England and wouldn't leave. I was an American who knew what real food and real weather were like. This intractability brought me back home alone again in 1987. Tish and I remain friends to this day and forever.

The California Supremes overturned the pandering law as it related to pornography so I was off that hook. I needed a new gig, especially to pay off my lawyers (it cost me over $100,000 to be found not only “not guilty,” but as the court papers said, “factually innocent”). I fell into direct response TV commercials and infomercials, where I made a nice living and which grew because while direct response doesn't get much respect in the production world, it's the only place where directors get royalties if the product sells.

A one-percent royalty doesn't seem like much. It's just $.75 on every $75 order for a steam iron or electric slicer or dicer or new design floor cleaner, but if a product sells $1,000,000 every quarter for a year or two, and some do, you get sent a check for $10,000 every three months for work you already did. A friend of mine, working on the first ab-exercise machine, a mammoth hit in the '90s made one percent of $120,000,000 over two years. That's eight checks averaging about $150,000 every three months. Sweet.

A few months after I came back to my cabin, one of my best friends, a gorgeous, brilliant French artist and model, Juliette, came over to visit me for a month and we fell, if not into love, then at least way deep into friends and lovers. We lived with each other for four to seven months a year at my cabin, at her flat in Brighton and when either of us was working in Paris or L.A. One of Juliette's most remarkable erotic traits was sucking bisexuality out of women who might have thought about it but never expressed it so I was the lucky recipient of lots of waking up to a female on each side. While not being “in love,” I didn't lack for sex, which allowed me to concentrate on growing my business.

In 1990 I married Bunny, a horsewoman, a tall, blonde shiksa goddess, and the chemistry of romance was back. I am sad to report that she was not bisexual and was very traditional about marriage and monogamy. But I really loved her, my hormones were cooling down, I was willing to try monogamy and we had very compatible country lifestyles. Around the same time Juliette met a guy in France and moved there and we drifted apart.

Bunny taught me to ride when I was forty-eight in 1994. Within three years of all-weather riding more days than not, Bunny and I became a noted cross-country team winning scores of ribbons and trophies at local Hunter/Pace and Paper Chase events riding our Tennessee Walking Horses. We bought a ranch for our five horses, which included a giant—an 18h2 2,000-pound Belgian that was going to be dogfood until I outbid the butcher by a penny at $.65 a pound. He was broke to ride and drive and soon I bought a cart and was doing both.

Bunny and I stayed together for seventeen monogamous years until 2007 when we divorced. In one of the few amicable divorces I know, we split the ranch and kept the team together.

Then I got back with,
Tada!
Andrea. My partner of 300 orgies and I, now in late 2011, forty years after that night at my first orgy when we met while eating carrots at the snack table, are heading toward our sixth anniversary. Andrea and I built a house on the ranch and share the stables and pastures with Bunny, our friend and neighbor.

Juliette, single again, and with Andrea's liberal erotic blessing, visits us for a few weeks every couple of months. Polyamory, no surprise, suits ex-swingers.

Andrea enjoys continued relationships and occasional vacations with a few of her ex-lovers and sometimes I travel to Paris to hang out in fancy hotels with Juliette, who paints and lives in Normandy. My goal in Paris is to walk and fuck enough to burn off the cheeses and the croissants.

On occasion you hear of men who remarry or get back with the same women one or more times but having done this three times I am one of only a handful of registered serial recyclers of lovers. We are a small cult who believe you must be decent at all times, no matter the circumstances or stage of a relationship, and never burn a bridge with anybody you ever adored.