“He looks kind of sinister but youthful,” I responded. “In his late fifties, I’d guess, but with no wrinkles. Maybe he’s a boxer. Watch how his buddies hang on his every word as though he were their king.” Laura made a disapproving face in his direction.
“Any hot new relationships? What about that Journalism Professor from NYU?” prodded Laura, ardent for steamy details, ready to enjoy a vicarious thrill.
“A dead end,” I groaned. “Things got over-intellectualized as a post-doctorate thesis. My social life’s at a nadir. Nothing’s working out. Maybe I should hook up with someone more exciting like that guy over there?” I gestured to the Italian show-off who was treating his cronies to rounds of drinks.
“He reminds me of a jungle beast,” sneered Laura. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he thumped his chest in a primitive, ape-like way.”
“Some women would relish such a specimen. Bet he’s got plenty of Jane’s hankering after his stiff spear.” I smirked mischievously.
Laura slammed her cup on the table. “Are you crazy? Let’s go—now!” Laura paid the check, then dashed out of the Lucca. In flight to the East Sixties, she left me standing on the street while she hopped into a cab.
At the Barrow Street Fair, Danny’s imposing presence was in my face—not to mention other parts. He was visually devouring my rear end protruding from a clinging jersey dress. The band played a swing tune, and a young man asked me to jitterbug. Meanwhile, Danny’s eyes bored into my hind quarters.
After the dance, Danny followed me around the fair, begging to buy me things from the stands. Finally, I rewarded the neighborhood Romeo with my phone number. The very next night he called and rebutted my objections as cannily as a snake swallows a frog.
“C’mon baby, let Danny treat you like a princess, like you deserve. I’m a big, friendly sheep dog. Give me a chance, please!” Although wheedling, his voice commanded attention.
“Whoever you’re datin,’ give ’im the gate. Would you like one of the new condos on West Street? Danny would be honored to buy you a whole, entire floor.”
Hmmm, big promises, I thought to myself. My boyfriend before the NYU professor had been a poor law student with neither time nor money for recreation. As Danny rhapsodized about our “going out on the town” to “hit the high spots,” his proposition grew more enticing. That he lived so close added another incentive.
Bizarre that my derriere was such an object of adoration, that it heated Danny’s libido sufficiently to pursue a left-wing librarian culture-vulture. I was the opposite of the blonde Barbies I would have expected him to date. Danny even bragged about reading the New York Times daily. Out of the blue, he also referred to obscure Italian authors.
Danny realized that a hyper-educated, Greenwich Village floozy required more high-toned seduction than the usual playmates he wore on his arm. To say that Danny wined and dined me is an understatement. Methodically, we sampled all the best downtown restaurants, although nouvelle cuisine gave him indigestion. Obligingly, he accompanied me to theaters, museums and modern dance events, where he squirmed.
My bohemian style tickled Danny. That I was a card-carrying intellectual, a challenge to most men, only ratcheted up my appeal in his eyes. Sneakily, he read copies of my poems that I left in his apartment. First, he insisted that I read my poetry aloud, which led to further requests to hear other modern poets. Some months later, I found prominent on a side table the collected poems of John Keats and several works of Charles Bukowski—purchases he had made in the local bookstore where he had established an account.
Conversation other than “butt lore” was not Danny’s forte. Over a sizzling steak in the Perry Street Bistro, he elaborated on his favorite subject while meat juice oozed from his mouth. “Forget all the baloney ’bout big breasts, Bella! Butts are IT. Women with small ones should get implants. Maybe I oughta’ move to South America where they got invented. Would ya’ miss me, huh?” Danny gave me an imploring look to emphasize my importance in his life, then continued emphatically: “Butts should be round, firm but not muscular... Not loose and floating like a breast, ugh!” he groaned rolling his eyes. “Worse, is jiggling and sagging down to a woman’s knees.” Danny smacked his lips derisively.
“Pretty soon,” he insisted, “Women are gonna’ wear padded underpants, maybe a old-fashioned bustle even. Easier to get ’em lifted or extended permanently by plastic surgeons. Did you know butt-plumping is a nine billion dollar racket annually?” An impish grin lit up Danny’s face.
For months, Danny merely pecked me on the cheek goodnight. When is he going to jump on me, I wondered. The sexual pressure absent, I started to think of him as the brother I never had, to take his princely attentions for granted. His apartment became a refuge from the slings and arrows of academia.
Danny’s ninety-year-old mother lived with her slightly younger sister on a nearby street. They urged Danny to invite me over for a pasta dinner including a proprietary clam sauce reserved only for special occasions. Since I am an only child with deceased parents, Danny’s family filled a void. A neighborhood fixture, he grew as familiar to me as Pompeii Church or the Figaro cafe. Danny’s relatives were remnants of a pre-yuppie Greenwich Village, where apartments were dirt cheap and doors were kept unlocked to facilitate gossiping from floor to floor. Then every few blocks had an exclusively male “social club” where the “boys” could talk macho away from their overworked wives.
One night, several months into our relationship, Danny announced that he wanted to show me a “special” video. Doing a pirouette, he opened a floor to ceiling wooden cabinet in his living room that was stuffed with carefully labeled porn: from awkward “loops,” which ran for ten minutes, to the classic Deep Throat, to feminist-oriented Candida Royale, Ron Jeremy, and Harry Reems, plus nymphets breaking into the business. According to Danny, top stars had round, high butts with indentations that looked good on camera.
Danny had accumulated a porn Library of Congress, nearly everything America had filmed over the decades, with European examples liberally sprinkled throughout. Two shelves were devoted to amateur suburban Jane and John Does—many with butts that should have been kept hidden under the covers—doing for free what porn stars did for pay.
In the past, I’d watched films of male actors poking their fired-up poles into female hotties convulsed in pseudo-orgasmic ecstasy—synthetic porno clichés put on for the camera. That particular evening, the topic turned out to be naked babes in Las Vegas frolicking on gambling tables. Perhaps hound dogs were baying at a full moon because the heavy breathing antics on the tube aroused my ardor. After the Las Vegas cuties had finished, we followed suit. The transition from telly-sex voyeurs to partners in our own hot ’n heavy-breathing scenario felt natural, inevitable. Thus began our sexual phase, in which my Mound of Venus played a minor role.
Formerly, I had owned a shelf of sexy panties and bras. Now, my lingerie collection mushroomed to include fancy garter belts and black fishnet stockings. The panty connoisseur showed me how to wear a garter belt with straps beneath my underpants so I could easily pull them down. Costumed exactly like hotties in porn videos, I played myself in a naughty masquerade. Before long, I owned enough titillating lingerie to fill two large drawers.
Like someone who cannot sleep without pajamas, I needed my turn-on “uniform” to fully savor our games. Danny thought black sent the ultimate sexual message and he always wore it. Out of bed, he could have cared less whether I showed up at his apartment in spiked stilettos or wrapped in a burlap bag.
For “pussy,” front or back entry, Danny would have roamed to the ends of the earth. In earlier years, he had traveled to the Five Towns on Long Island to satisfy ravenous Orthodox Jewish housewives, who were scrupulous about keeping their meat and milk dishes separate. With hubby’s nose to the grindstone, these bewigged house Fraus passed him from one to the other—a mitzvah he appreciated.
Danny chuckled at their insistence of fixing him lunch, including the ubiquitous gefilte f
ish. He prided himself on “fucking their brains out.” I wondered if their brains fell with a thump on to the bedroom floor. Reminiscing about these afternoon trysts, Danny became sentimental—a rarity. From boyhood, the “skin game” had provided Danny with his escape from the linoleum- and checkered table cloth-world that deprecated flights of fancy. Danny claimed to be the greatest “ass master” on the planet. Dunking his cock “into the candy jar” he had crossed a forbidden boundary. This sexual preference had evolved into Danny’s fine art, his raison d’etre. I imagined that Danny concentrated on the “back door” with the same passion that had inspired talents such as Da Vinci to produce masterpieces or climbers to scale Mt. Everest. In the doggie position, he made contact with a blissful heaven of beckoning backside.
How, I puzzled, could Danny’s “tree trunk” fit into the small opening between my cheeks? By the time I met Danny, he had served a lengthy apprenticeship introducing his long, thick rod into female behinds. Hard-earned expertise, and a lubricant purchased at the health food store, allowed Danny to enter my dark pathway with fineness.
As foreplay, Danny performed perfunctory oral sex. Moving toward the main event, he twirled my malleable cheeks the way a pastry chef might spread cream in an éclair. Tenderly, Danny placed his hands in between my globes, spreading them to massage the inner, sensitive area. His cock explored different angles: forward, upward, sideways and back, up against my cervix. Like a magnet, the center of my asshole gravitated toward the pressure.
Thrusting and pumping his hips in rhythm to country western music on the radio, Danny heightened my pleasure. After several strong contractions, my control panel went haywire. My arms and legs flailed. I whimpered and groaned. A big bang blasted off from the depths of my bowels, and I entered a blissful zone where we blended into two grinding animals rediscovering their primordial nature.
If Havana before the Revolution had its “superman,” Carmine Street produced its own homegrown, indefatigable phallus able to perform all night with hardly a pause. Danny married technique with an ant-like determination. Strangely enough, I trusted my disreputable partner—the sine qua non of anal sex without pain. I justified my unfeminist submission in the “doggie position” by invoking a fantasy: leaning on all fours, I became the Roman she-wolf on her pedestal receiving the consecrated offering of her devoted priest.
The word “easy” described Danny’s attitude in and out of bed. He often used the word after retiring from New York City’s civil service. When Danny left his job—which must have delighted his bosses—he became the Don of Carmine Street, not that the lazy creature had ever done an honest day’s work. Looking for mischief, he sometimes drove around Manhattan with Sal, a neighborhood guy he helped get the job. On so called “official visits,” they were supposed to inspect restaurants and other businesses to make sure they were up to code. As a sideline, Danny appropriated hush money from proprietors with violations.
Falling down on the sidewalk in front of corporate establishments, followed up by lawsuits, brought in supplemental income. The self-appointed Robin Hood never bothered little mom and pop stores. Three murders—he reluctantly admitted to having committed—he said were of bad guys who had welched on deals. Now penitent, he seldom referred to that part of his past.
Danny pleaded with me to have sex with his partner Sal so that he could watch. “We’re family, sweetie,” argued Danny. “The three of us together would be cozy as bugs in a rug. Don’t refuse my buddy I been to Hell and back with.” The Philadelphia girl in me suddenly snapped, “Since when are you such a Communist, sharing the wealth!” Danny apologized; however, Sal began showing up to join us for a nightcap at the Lucca cafe. In Danny’s company, Sal became a nonstop blabbermouth. Obviously, he yearned for the “old days,” for the danger that added excitement to his humdrum routine.
“You shoudda’ seen Sal, slinkin’ up fire escapes to enter the apartments of rich people on Commerce Street,” recalled Danny. “He robbed their stuff while they slept like babies. Nobody in the neighborhood ever moved as fast as him. Now my boy’s retired. Stays home watching TV or hangs out in Bay Ridge where his uncle owns a barber shop.” I usually sat bored stiff, a smile stuck on my face, listening to their chatter. Little did I know then how I would benefit from their friendship.
One night, thirsty for a coke, I opened Danny’s fridge. Empty except for a few soft drinks, stacks of icy hundred dollar bills took up several shelves. I’d heard of cold cash but not in the literal sense. Danny explained that his bank accounts could not accommodate this overflow. If the IRS ever found out his actual income, the sources of which he dared not admit, they would hit him with a stiff penalty or worse.
Large contributions to charities, a lot given to neighborhood people with sob stories, hardly made a dent. Tips he tossed to waiters were enough to buy them a winter coat. When the subject of money came up, whatever the amount, Danny waved his hand disdainfully, then scoffed, “chump change.” Since I was his current “squeeze,” he bought me expensive presents, which though somewhat embarrassed, I accepted in the generous spirit he gave them.
Danny could have decorated his apartment with Mafioso modern—chrome, plastic and pseudo-marble, which were fashionable with Italian families on Staten Island. Instead, his dilapidated third story walk-up had venetian blinds covered with greasy black soot. Proudly, he boasted of mopping the bare floors himself. His workout area, the repository of athletic weights that he used religiously to keep his hairless, brawny body in shape, was spotless.
Lounging in his doorway in a tee shirt that showed off his muscles, Danny acted like the king of Greenwich Village. Neighbors, pencil thin women in black and men in expensive suits with corporate jobs, clucked their tongues as they rushed past this oddity. Must be the janitor, they decided. Little did these interlopers suspect that this hulking native congratulated himself on being the last rent-controlled tenant in his trendy upscale building.
To leave the neighborhood, Danny rented a chauffeured limousine. This PHD in porno clung to his apartment like a snail its shell. However, a girlfriend named Rita had once convinced him to take a cruise. Now married and living in a gated community on Long Island, Rita occupied a sanctified status in Danny’s memory. Rita reinforced Danny’s obsession with Jewish women. The high point of his erotic career occurred when Rita invited him to Sheepshead Bay for dinner. Bearing flowers and wine, he opened the door with the key she had given him. During their three-year relationship, they had always eaten out. For good reason: Rita loathed cooking. But Danny wasn’t thinking about his stomach.
Opening the door, he called Rita’s name: no answer! Wandering through her three room apartment, he heard a rustle in the dining room. Entering, he gasped. A perfumed Rita lay splayed on the dining room table, pussy shaved, wearing a lacy garter belt, black stockings and nothing else. Her parted lips were blazing red. Danny dropped the flowers and his pants.
Fruit, flowers and lit candles outlined her recumbent form. Plates of delicatessen appetizers—salami, smoked fish, and chopped liver—did not distract him from the main dish at the center. Gazing up at him, she whispered provocatively, “So you expected dinner, go ahead, eat me already!” After Rita, Danny met Dodie, a paramour whose tales of fucking her dog entranced him. Next came a “swinger” phase at Sunnyrest, a nudist camp set up for partner-swapping. Danny, a regular at the camp, spread his largesse among the guests. By the time I met him, the threat of AIDS had caused him to retire from the swinger circuit.
Danny, semi-retired from the rackets, remained preoccupied with police work. Via a short wave radio, Danny spied on the cops’ comings and goings. A technical genius and—being familiar with police signals and code language—to be devilish, he sometimes answered their calls. He would have loved riding in the squad car, flashing his badge, and putting handcuffs on people. Danny’s face lit up, a mischievous kid, when he muttered, “This is crazy stuff.” The local men in blue adored Danny, who returned the favor.
Danny also eavesd
ropped on his neighbors phone conversations, the sexier the better. One pretty blonde beautician with a shop round the corner had phone sex with her boyfriend in Brooklyn. Planning to rent an apartment, the couple was kept busy with business obligations. Their sexual fantasies made phone wires sizzle. Little did they know that a third party shared their rapture.
Intent on remaining a bachelor, Danny feared any restrictions on his freedom. That I had a husband suited him fine. Once, I offhandedly complained about my husband. Lochinvar to the rescue: Danny wanted to keep his skills polished and show me he cared. Danny proposed “offing” my husband in a car accident. Paid hit men would observe my husband’s walking habits till they saw a pattern, then strike him down. On a chosen day, a car would zoom down the street and remove my marital problem. When Danny suggested this expedient, I howled: “Don’t you dare! He’s the person I care about most in this world.” In addition to showing how much he cared, Danny wanted to keep his skills polished.
Would I become the longtime partner of this porno maven with mayhem, murder and money-laundering on his resume? Sucking Danny’s “big lollipop,” of which he was inordinately proud, I wondered how many other women had done the same. Were they still alive and kicking? Occasionally, I had nightmares of Danny beating me, cutting me up, and stuffing me into a garbage can! I pictured myself lying on a funeral pyre piled high with black fishnet stockings and cheap garter belts.
For two years, our meetings occurred twice a week: Wednesday and Saturday. “Find someone more sensitive or, at least, sane,” I lectured myself. When I considered leaving, I remembered Danny’s thoughtfulness—his fixing broken things in my apartment or paying a handyman for me. He coached me to lift weights safely. Once when I was sick he accompanied me on visits to a doctor. Every day the phone rang with a new request to help me or an inquiry about my well-being. If asked, he would have manicured my toenails. By being generous to me, I believe Danny hoped to atone for the harm he had inflicted on others. Telling stories of major and minor cruelties, Danny’s face became contrite. I felt like a priest delivering absolution or a therapist counseling a patient with an open-ended appointment.
Confessions of a Librarian Page 13