All night long I sat at the blackjack tables, feeling guiltier by the minute. I had never taken Frank’s coke without asking him first. Now I felt like a junkie, desperate for a fix, who would even steal from a friend or lover. Hours later Frank suddenly pulled me off the stool with a face red more from hurt than anger. It was then that he realized I liked his cocaine more than him. I was surprised. Did he think that I loved him all this time?
We drove back to California at a furious pace, never stopping once for a drink or some coke. Frank had calmed down by the time we got home and almost seemed his good-natured self when he dropped me off at my apartment. He never even mentioned the coke that I stole. Perhaps he had reconciled himself to the fact that I regarded him not as a lover but my drug supplier.
But I seldom saw him after that weekend. Nor were we ever lovers again—for a simple reason. He never offered me any more cocaine.
I SLEPT WITH A GANGSTER
All through my adolescence I entertained fantasies of sleeping with bad guys and making them good. It must have been my Catholic upbringing, with the extra emphasis on the value of the sinner. Or maybe it was a book I read—by a Jesuit, I think—called You Can Change the World. By my mid-twenties I had begun to live my fantasies. The time coincided with the opening of The Godfather, and the most fashionable bad guys in town had Mafia connections. I, being au courant, found myself lying naked next to a gangster one wicked winter evening. His mother-of-pearl pistol sat in its holster next to the bed. He was young and Italian and healthy and virile, and I combined the erotic primitivism of a nubile Sicilian with the external good looks of the classic blue-eyed blonde. But nothing was happening. What could be wrong? How had I gotten there? Would I get out unharmed? It had all started about five hours earlier, on a snowy Saturday night in New York City. I was high on some wonderful Thai stick and had just stopped at a deli for a roast-beef-on-rye. As I stepped back out onto the pavement on East Seventy-second Street, I heard wheels spinning futilely on top of the ice. One man, cursing and grunting, was pushing a creamy Eldorado; a second man climbed out of the car and stood with his hands in his pockets by the first one. Both had on identical camel-hair coats, both wore Gucci loafers, but there the similarities stopped. The driver was tall and thin and extremely good-looking. His friend, thick and flat-faced, looked like a thug. I’m a good reporter and a beautiful woman and I use both these attributes to get around town. Of course it doesn’t hurt that I have a sprinter’s body—long, muscular legs, broad shoulders and a chest that doesn’t weigh me down in the dash. But that night I was dressed for the weather, and my face and body were cloaked in a parka. My legs were lost in overalls and my feet ensconced in hiking boots. Maybe because I felt protected by my outfit and emboldened by the grass, when the thug said, “Goddamn weather,” I came to the defense of the weather.
“What’s so bad about the weather?” I asked, looking at him.
“It’s a fuckin’ mess, what else?” He spoke with a very broad, almost flat native Brooklyn accent.
“I think of it as quite lovely,” I said in my very finest English.
“And what’s so lovely about it?”
I kept on walking until the tall handsome one stopped me.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “How would you like to have dinner with me?”
“I’ve got a sandwich in my bag,” I informed him.
“Eat it tomorrow,” he said convincingly. I, anyway, was convinced, and so I climbed into the front of the creamy Eldorado, where I sat in between the two of them. I looked to the left at the lovely features of the driver. His brown, curly hair, brown eyes, beautiful mouth and jutting chin. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, which made me think he must be smart.
Then I looked to my right, at the flat nose of the other one. The heavy breath, the unappealing, heavy jowls, the thick fingers that were constantly twitching.
“Are you two gentlemen with the Mafia?” I asked. In my business you learn that the best way to get an answer is to come right out and ask. They both laughed.
“What makes you ask that?” said the burly one, whose name was Ron. He looked straight at the other, whose first name happened to be Michael.
“Instinct,” I said. “Where are we going for dinner?”
“Where would you like to go?” Michael inquired.
I looked out the window and saw Daly’s and said, “Daly’s.” He swerved over and pulled into a tow-away zone, and I knew that he had connections when he didn’t bother to lock the car. I thought about grabbing my sandwich and running, but I didn’t think I’d get too far. Besides, I felt like having a medium-rare cheeseburger just then.
It’s disconcerting to sit down at a restaurant table with a couple of hoodlums you met on the street. It was a decent restaurant, but the male waiters were too pretty and seemed to be snickering about our trio behind their pads.
I ignored them and focused instead on Michael. Though his conversation had been as banal as singles’ bar shoptalk, his mouth was as eloquent as a Rhodes scholar’s. He had full lips colored in a deep rose flush. As I fantasized being grazed upon by these two gates to heaven, he put his drink down and blew a kiss through the air. Suddenly my own lips began to tremble. Fortunately, the medium-rare cheeseburgers arrived, giving me something to do with my mouth.
At the end of the meal, Michael paid the check. I was glad to see that it was he who had the money. He asked me if I’d like to go with them to a discotheque. I always try to take advantage of unusual opportunities. After a moment, I accepted the offer.
At that time, discotheques were exclusive dancing clubs on the East Side of Manhattan where the rich and famous hung out. The place was exclusive, all right. The sort of fancy defined by understatement and the newest fashions in black and white. We were met at the door by the manager, who did not look twice at my jacket or once at my boots. Instead he looked me straight in the eye and introduced himself as Roger.
The dance floor was small. Half-naked women and glamorous men dodged the flying squares of light that spun the room around the dancers. The wonderful thing about narcissists is that they pay no attention to what anyone else wears or how anyone else dances, so when Michael and Roger sat down in the corner, I accepted Big Ron’s offer to take a spin on the floor. I stood right out there in the center of the music, feeling quite groovy and not the slightest underdressed. My giant shoes grounded me securely to the floor and the joint I had smoked earlier added a nice sway to my hips.
Ron, however, was easily distracted. He kept leaping aside with undue exaggeration every time one of my clodhoppers landed on his dainty loafer. I had the unmistakable feeling that he thought I was the oaf, and after a couple of spins we returned to the table.
There, he and Michael left me alone with Roger while they retreated to the inner room.
“What are you doing hanging out with these guys?” Roger asked. It was a brotherly question; he was Irish, so was I.
“Should I get out while I can?” I wanted to know.
“If you stick with the younger guy you’ll be okay. But stay away from the other one. I think he’s bad news.”
“Who are they?”
“Michael’s the son of a Godfather.”
“Which Godfather?”
“A big don from Brooklyn.”
“And Ron?”
“I don’t know who he is. I’m not too interested in finding out.”
The information on Michael made him more appealing than ever. I thought intently about what I might say or do to arouse his attention and insure future contact. When he returned from the inner room and slid into the booth next to me, my thigh pushed against his; the seams of our pants kissed right down the line.
“Come here often?” I asked very casually.
“Couple times a week.”
“Seems pretty exclusive.”
“It is.”
“And expensive.”
“I don’t pay.”
“How come?”
“A lot of places ar
e like that. If a guy’s young and handsome he’ll attract pretty women. If a place has pretty women, it will draw the rich men.”
“What’s my function?”
“You can be my bodyguard,” he said.
“What’s wrong with the one you already have?”
“He’s gone.”
“Lucky me.”
“Let’s go home.”
“Where’s that?”
“By the ocean.”
We had crossed the Brooklyn Bridge before I asked where we were going. He told me to be patient, that I’d see soon enough. I had visions of a Tudor mansion looking out onto a vast lawn, ending at a sea wall overlooking the ocean. But he pulled onto an ordinary neighborhood street and parked in front of a small split-level home.
Inside, the carpeting was red. The French provincial furniture was new. There was a crystal chandelier over the dining room table. On a smaller table under a mirror in the entrance hall sat several color photographs of a wedding in white frames.
“Who got married?”
“My sister.”
I thought it was strange that he would keep pictures of his sister’s wedding in the entrance hall of his bachelor pad. Until I found out that it was his mother’s house. His mother was in Miami.
“You live with your mother?”
“No. I sometimes stay here when she’s out of town.”
I had mixed feelings about being seduced in his mother’s bed, but it seemed that seduction was not exactly what he had in mind. Michael probably wasn’t used to going to all that trouble. He was the type who stepped out of his trousers and women begged for the rest.
He stepped out of his trousers while I sat on the bed pressing the soles of my combat boots together. Then he took off his jacket. A lovely ivory-handled pistol sat snugly in his shoulder holster. He slowly removed the holster, keeping his eyes on me all the time, and laid it on a small, delicate end table in front of a goldframed picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
The unbuttoned buttons at the bottom of his shirt were the next stage of his conscientious undressing. When the two front panels of his shirt fell apart, I admired the neatness with which his briefs cradled his cock. It’s a neatness I’ve admired in magazine ads and on street posters, but I had never had the pleasure to see it so enchantingly duplicated in real life.
He stepped closer. His stockinged feet covered the toes of my boots. There was nothing to look at but the enlarging in front of me. Without thinking twice, I cradled his nuts through his bulging nylon briefs.
He backed up a few steps.
“Kneel,” he said.
“No,” I answered.
“I could put a gun to your head,” he warned.
“I know, but you won’t.”
He stood there a little longer, then took off his shirt and his drawers and tossed them both on his bed. Then he walked into the bathroom and put on the shower. Michael had left the door to the bathroom open, and the full-length mirror on the back reflected the full length of him. He had a high-jutting ass. I wanted to take a bite from the back and nuzzle up to the front. “Do it,” demanded my body beneath the multiple layers of clothing. I kicked off my boots; I shed my parka and overalls, my sweater, my panties and even my argyle socks.
Michael’s body, exquisite when dry, hard, lean, angular and tan, was irresistible when glistening with water. He was soaping his armpits when I joined him in the shower and took the washcloth from him. I went right to work on tightening his loose genitals, which showed their appreciation by jabbing me firmly in the belly. I reached around with both hands to the rear, where my fingers enveloped the full curves of both spheres. I noted that he, like a woman, enjoyed having his pubic mound rubbed.
I knelt down and pulled at his pubic hairs with my teeth, still holding out on taking his cock into my mouth. I wanted to make sure that his alpha was not my omega, so I waited for some indication that my lovemaking would be reciprocated before sucking him.
But none was forthcoming. He got out of the shower, dried himself with the only towel and left it crumpled on the floor in a puddle of water. I shook myself dry while using a tigerskin toothbrush, then hurried into the bedroom to be beside him under the covers.
He had his back to me. I stroked his neck and his shoulder blades and counted each vertebra with the tip of my finger, but I might just as well have been playing with a smooth piece of wood. I stopped and lay with my head on my elbow, refusing to believe this was happening to me. I didn’t understand the game he was playing. I certainly didn’t understand what I was supposed to do all alone. Did his icy detachment turn some women on? Fuck him, I thought. So I decided to turn over and at least pretend to fall asleep.
According to the bright red numerals on the digital clock, I had been playing possum for ten minutes when his fingers woke me. They were gliding down my sides, up and down my body, along the peripheries of my hot points, the outer curves of my breasts, the edge of my pubic hair, taunting me, teasing me. When his hand slipped into the tight, wet place between my thighs, I locked it there with my tightest grip, as if I’d been riding the slimmest of horses for thousands of years.
He stopped struggling. My legs fell open. His lips retraced his fingers’ path and landed, quivering, between my loose thighs. Or was I quivering? By then the mere radiation of his breath brought such an orgasm to my clitoris that it boomeranged along my body, bounding off the top of my head, the soles of my feet and back to my vagina, where it coiled hotly, finally settling down in anticipation of the next one.
His tongue outlined all intersections of my curves and, in an extremely complicated maneuver, he rotated my body in order to follow those intersections into deeper, darker chasms. My ass rose to meet each gliding kiss. He turned me over again and lifted my mound to within inches of his cock. My lips opened to lure him in, but he remained centimeters beyond my desire, kneeling, stroking himself, one hand on his cock, the other on his balls. I wanted him so badly, but he stayed just far enough away from my complete satisfaction. As I thrust up to meet him, he leaned back to avoid me; all the time watching me, all the time stroking himself, as he knelt between my legs, making inaudible statements through his trembling lips.
I threw myself around and began devouring his cock; he grabbed me by the hair, pumping my head, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, to intensify his pleasure, to prolong his excitement. But I was so angry that he had postponed my own pleasure that I had no desire to prolong his.
I overcame his slowing down with my own speeding up. Running my fingernail down the seam of his balls, I stroked the skin on his penis with the lightest trace of my teeth and teased his urethra with a heavy battering of my tongue. He screamed against the surging inevitability of his orgasm and I bit down hard with my lips at the base of his cock. He shot come down my throat, and I sat back on my haunches like a put-upon cat. Angrily he leaned forward and pulled my nipples to bring me closer. He brought me right up to his face, whose planes shifted from passion to cruelty, then released my nipples and shoved me back by my shoulders. In a matter of minutes he was stretched out and snoring soundly.
The next day Michael drove me into the city. When he dropped me off he surprised me by asking for my phone number. I made one up quickly, though I later regretted it. In fact, I thought of him fondly for several months after that strange winter night.
Unfortunately, the incident didn’t cure my propensity for danger. On the contrary, it made me hungrier than ever. I now felt that I was invincible and had Houdini-like powers with which to exit tight situations. I continued seeking out shady characters and ominous sets of circumstance. It wasn’t until that time in Alaska that I began to question my judgment. But that’s another story.
THE LESBIAN EXPRESS
We gotta get these Boy Scouts outta here!” Wanda muttered as she walked through the bottle-littered car of the “Gay Disco Party Train” to Montreal. Amtrak had positioned our group in front of the club car. A travelling Scout troop had just wound its way through
a carful of sixty-five gregarious lesbians.
Three business executives in pin-striped suits also sat in the club car. A Humpty Dumpty look-alike in man’s clothing, Wanda complained to the conductor, “This is a private party.” While she approached the Scoutmaster, the conductor asked the three businessmen to leave. They snickered, exchanging meaningful smiles. One of them said, “Well, we want to be with the women.”
“Not these women, you don’t,” the conductor replied.
I wondered if I liked being with them myself. Hearing of a trip to Montreal for gay women, I had envisioned numerous opportunities for a lesbian orgy. Though primarily heterosexual, I occasionally enjoy a fling with one of my “sisters.”
The ethnic make-up of the group surprised me. Of the sixty-five participants, about fifty were black and more than half in their forties and fifties. Most were nurses. The older black women played cards, smoked cigars, wore wigs, chomped on chicken wings and sat on each other’s hefty laps.
“Watch out, hot stuff is comin’ through!” one black woman yelled as she sashayed down the aisle.
“Hey, cutesie-poo!” a cigar-smoker called out mischievously when a gay man boarded the car.
Almost all of the older participants had children and grandchildren. A factory worker told me that she married to please a strict grandmother. Now her mother, aunts and uncles had come out of the closet, too. “Everyone in my family is gay,” she said proudly.
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