I used picking her up as an excuse to see Norman and one afternoon he invited me to his deck overlooking the ocean and made us gin and tonics. He told me he learned to make the perfect gin and tonic from his South African father. He put ice cubes in the glass, ran the lemon around the rim, squeezed in the lemon, added the gin, which came from the freezer, and then the tonic. He gave a short dissertation on the difference between good machines and bad machines and why electric can openers were bad machines because they sucked electricity, took a worthwhile physical exercise away and were not necessarily faster or more efficient.
One day Norman asked me if I would like to come to work for him, too. He had two young sons—Michael, three, and Stephen, about a year and a half—and a house filled with women: his wife, two daughters who were visiting for the summer, his secretary, a mother’s helper or two, an occasional visiting ex-wife or two, and Tisha. He told me he wanted another man around to do heavy work and fix things when he was out of town but mostly so his sons had another male to relate to.
He suggested Tisha and I clear out the garage and turn it into a bedroom so we could move in. He’d also feed us and pay us $100 a week. He asked if I boxed. I didn’t. Would I be interested in learning and becoming his sparring partner? You bet. We were a decent match boxing. I was twenty and he was forty-four. I was taller and he was broader. He was skilled and I was optimistic.
So I spent the Summer of Love living with my English girlfriend in Norman Mailer’s garage, fixing things, shopping for food, (sometimes cinematically by boat across the Provincetown harbor) chauffeuring him and guests to the airport either in his Corvette or Beverly’s larger Citroen, listening to “Light My Fire” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” smoking pot (never with or in front of the Mailers), and putting on the gloves in the afternoon and getting the chance to punch my boss in the face.
That fall, Tisha and I got our own place in Manhattan, got real jobs and got married. Three years later by the summer of 1970, a year after men walked on the moon, I was twenty-three. Gas was $.36 a gallon, the average income was under $10,000, a new home cost $23,000, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, Tina Fey and Kelly Ripa were born, and after a horrible third year of marriage my smart, foxy, aristocratic wife Tisha left me and went back home to England.
I was working as a journalist in the alternative underground poorly paid press. With Tisha and her paycheck gone, I took a job selling ads in the underground papers with a company owned by Concert Hall Advertising, the hippie ad agency. Ad salesmen made more money than alternative journalists and I was tired of being poor.
One day I was at Apple Records, the Beatles’ company, trying to sell them ads. The Beatles had split up and all were doing solo projects, and Apple had signed Mary Hopkins, James Taylor, and Badfinger and was making a run at being an actual record company.
Allan Steckler, the creative director I was pitching asked, “Do you know any good advertising agencies? We just fired ours this morning.” I mentioned that the company that owned the ad sales company I worked for was Concert Hall. He smiled, took a long pause and said, “Okay, Concert Hall is now the agency for Apple Records.” Overnight, I became the account executive for our new client, Apple Records. “I am the eggman/they are the eggmen/I work for Apple/Goo goo ga joob.”
After months of placing ads and begging for some creative work, I got my first assignment: the trade and consumer ads for the simultaneous release of John Lennon’s “Imagine” album and Yoko Ono’s “Fly.” While waiting for the art directors at my ad agency to work with me, I sat there doodling silly project-related stuff. I couldn’t draw, paint, or design, and at that moment if you had asked me what kind of artistic ability I had, I’d have said about seven on a scale of a hundred. I knew I could write ad copy, but art was an incomprehensible enigma to me.
The art directors didn’t much like my copy ideas. “Too simple,” was their response. They asked me to add more copy. I didn’t think it was necessary, but these were the pros, and my superiors, so I added more copy.
The art department came up with five nifty ideas that they translated into beautiful comps (comprehensive presentations), all mounted nicely on stiff cardboard with pretty tissue cover sheets. They looked professional.
I walked into Apple the next day to see Steckler, completely confident about my first creative presentation. Steckler looked at each beautiful, professionally packaged comp and said, “Boring! Boring! Boring! Boring! Boring!”
I had nothing to lose, so I pulled out my little doodle, unwrinkled the tiny piece of paper, and handed it to him. He laughed in an indecipherable way that was either, “My God, what a pathetic asshole you are!” or “Hey, this is really amusing!”
I had been poking around in an art closet at Apple the day of the assignment and saw a striking photo of John Lennon wearing a white suit, playing a white piano in a white room. I loved it. It was so strong that I wanted to use the least amount of words, so I took the words “Imagine,” “John Lennon,” and “On Apple Records” and put them together to make a single imperative sentence. “Imagine John Lennon On Apple Records.” All I did was add the period. Plus I lifted some lyrics from “Gimmie Some Truth,” a Lennon song from the album, and put them in a cartoon balloon over John’s head—“No short-haired, yellow-bellied son-of-Tricky Dicky’s gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me.” I did the same for Yoko with “Fly Yoko Ono On Apple Records.” For Yoko I used a photograph of her face and drew a stick figure of a fly on it so it would make you want to cringe. Steckler said, “This is great! Let’s see what John thinks.”
I didn’t sleep much that night waiting for John Lennon to decide my fate. Next morning, early, thank God, Steckler called me and said John loved the doodles and sent a note back saying, “I like this. Let’s have this guy do all our ads from now on.”
Overnight I became the media designer for Apple Records. There had been some problem with billing through the agency I worked for, and Apple wanted me, not Concert Hall, and would help me set up my own little agency.
Because Apple Records was run by Allen Klein who had first managed The Rolling Stones, my little one-man ad agency would occasionally inherit work for the Stones including lots of ads, a radio commercial and even the album cover, “Hot Rocks.” My little one-man band company also did the album for the cult film, “El Topo,” and John Lennon’s “Sometime In New York City.” (For all three albums, which were far above my design ability, I hired my friend Michael Gross, who was then design director for National Lampoon.)
The net takeaway of these stories is: (1) I can speed off with direction but without a destination and (2) good flukes sometimes visit me.
10
The hooker, her husband, her sugar daddy, her lovers and me
Six o’clock on a Friday night in June 1980
It’s around sixty-five degrees with clear sky, sun shining and a clean slight breeze. I am waiting downstairs from Eureka at 54th and Madison. Laura walks out in jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, and no makeup, looking exactly like a hippie and nothing like a whore. Her eyes are greener in daylight and I can smell her before we touch. She still smells like a sweet fuck even though she showered and her hair is still wet.
First thing, she gives me $85. We walk hand in hand toward the East Side. She starts talking. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it but I want to be with you. We’ll have to figure it out.
“I want to spend the weekend with you so I told my husband I won’t be home. Sometimes I stay in the city and make extra money. It was a really good week but I’ll tell my husband it was only mediocre, and I’ll have to earn about $350-$400 more in tricks by Sunday.”
My pace falters.
“Oh, no,” she says, “Not from you, Jeffrey, but you’ve got to understand that sometime over the weekend I’ve got to hustle $400 in tricks. It won’t be a problem.”
Laura speaks in staccato bursts. She’s coked up. “If I can reach him, I’ll see my best regular, Walter and tell him the truth. And about
you. He’ll understand and give me the bread. We have that sort of relationship. He’s married and a megabuck oil man. I always tell him the truth.
“Or, if I can’t get to Walter, I’ll call some other johns I know. I’ve got a list. Guys give me their numbers. It’s against the rules, but sometimes I take them. Plus one of my Eureka girlfriends turns tricks and she’ll include me in a double or turn some business over to me. Anyway, it won’t be a hassle. I just want you to know what’s going on.”
I don’t know what’s going on. I hope she’s being straight with me. I think she is and I’ll follow her lead.
We continue toward my flat hand in hand, like children whose mother told them to hold hands the whole way and only cross with the lights. Even in the real world her hand is warm to the touch. Laura is hungry; the day’s drugs are wearing off. She doesn’t want to eat out. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow we could go for sushi, she suggests. She sometimes eats “animal flesh,” mainly fish, but most days she eats fruits and vegetables and avoids supermarkets, which she calls “straight stores.”
We stop at one of the five million Korean groceries in Manhattan. She buys salad veggies and fresh bread and tofu. She says iceberg lettuce is the vegetable equivalent of junk food and buys greens I don’t recognize. She finds some ginseng pop for me and holds the bottle up close to her face in a TV commercial parody and says in a low, slow, male voice, “Ginseng. It’s a man’s drink.”
Far out, she does shtick. This is a good sign. I know so little about her that every minute reveals something. I buy several more ginseng pops, figuring I can use all the help I can get. As we walk we chit chat about nothing in particular. She doesn’t watch much TV. She likes to read. She points out good-looking sexy women to make sure I won’t miss them. When I ask why, she says it’s not that she’s that turned on by them, although she’s a bit bi, it’s just that they are more visually interesting than men. She tells me she’s twenty-seven years old and her name is Laura Bradley. In the elevator we smile at each other with the sly anticipation of randy kids out on a first date.
Once in the flat we avoid touching each other as Laura prepares her healthy fuel. She is chopping carrots when I finally put my arms around her and nibble her neck.
Every part of her is sweet musk fragrant. The wispy soft hairs on her neck tickle my nose. We explore with our hands and our lips and our tongues. We canoodle, we rub against each other, frisson overtakes us and in jump-cut-to-the-chase fashion we are in the bedroom on the white iron and brass bed, naked, fucking.
She seems taller and leaner in bed than when she is standing. She’s fit but not overly muscular. She’s strong but there is nothing about her body that isn’t soft and feminine. Her face is classic Anglo-Saxon beautiful, as un-Jewish as any face ever in my bed. She has a high, wide forehead, a fine, long, aristocratic nose and bright hazel-green eyes, more jade than emerald and an eye color, maybe even a color, I never saw before.
Her ass is a bit warmer than the rest of her, maybe because it carries the only fat on her body other than her tits. She’s twenty-seven so everything is still where it belongs. Her breasts are the minimum requirement for a B-cup, but her nipples, Jesus, her nipples are huge, they protrude, they belong to a woman with much larger breasts; maybe there was an accidental nipple switch in the hospital when she was in the nursery. Or maybe they belong to a female of another species, maybe another genus.
“One of my favorite things was to have my nipples played with,” Laura remembers. “But for hours, I mean, days. And I wouldn’t want him to stop playing with them. So he wouldn’t stop. Sometimes Jeffrey played with my nipples to help me fall asleep when I was coked up.”
When I touch her giant nipples she whimpers and leans into me. I get a little firmer with them and she gets hotter. I squeeze them just a little too hard and she says, “Thank you.”
She is dripping wet as I go inside her. Maybe it’s from the other men at the whorehouse. I ask her and she says no, she showered and douched before she left. “That’s just the way I am. Aren’t all girls like that?” If only.
She comes more easily than any woman I ever met. Sometimes her orgasms blend together for minutes. And she comes again with me every time I climax.
“The most amount of orgasms I ever had with Jeffrey was thirty-four in one day!” Laura grins. “That was definitely the most I ever had. I think that’s the exact number—thirty-four. It’s probably not that accurate. Lots of times we would fuck twenty-four hours a day. When you get into that space, you kind of lose it. I remember it was hard to tell the difference between twenty-four and twenty-five—they kind of blended together. But it was at least thirty-four; though it might have been forty-three!”
My orgasms are different with her. Not just different, but new. They are very strong but that’s not the most significant quality. They’re more primitive. They start down deeper.
She looks up at me when I fuck her in some spaced-out overwhelmed simple way, the way women looked at men 50,000 years ago when they got fucked by someone they weren’t afraid of being killed and eaten by. Or maybe just how they looked when they got fucked. Something vestigial is going on. We are sexual anachronisms. I hear myself making noises I never made before, primordial yawps to accompany my ur-orgasms.
Around midnight we finally take a break and eat salad and bread. I get my first taste of arugula—which I like and think tastes vaguely like meat. I also discover Boston Bibb lettuce, which is as delicate and as soft as her skin.
Saturday morning we sleep late after making love once during the night. We sleep close. She loves being held tight, which is my natural instinct. That morning is the first time I ever see Laura straight. I like it. She is less scattered, looks younger, healthier and prettier. There is a relaxation to her face that drugs steal.
When she pees she doesn’t sit on the toilet but rather squats on it with her feet on the toilet seat. She’s like a Stone Age aborigine who doesn’t know how to use it.
“Squatting is the way a lot of people sit and go to the bathroom. I lived in a van for so long with Sandy—for so many years we camped and lived in a van—squatting to go to the bathroom was just the way. I still do,” Laura smiles. “I’d rather go behind a tree than go into the house and use the bathroom.”
I want to know what happened the last time we were together when it went from love to hustle. I don’t ask right away but curiosity gets the best of me while we’re drinking coffee and eating bagels, so I ask.
She explains how she ran back to the dressing room where all the ladies hang out between sessions. As they always did, one of them asked how much of a tip Laura got. She told them how excited she was to see me, how she loved to fuck me, and that she paid for the session. They all razzed her and got on her case, especially Tanya, an ex-street whore I’d fucked many happy times who said, “Sure, Jeffrey can fuck. I even like to fuck him and I don’t like fucking many johns. But business is business, honey and he ain’t your man. You stoned, baby. Don’t get lost. Jeffrey is just playing you. Go get the money.” Laura caved in.
“They were right,” Laura confesses, “I loved fucking Jeffrey right away, but it couldn’t interfere with my money goal. There’s nothing wrong with doing business with friends. I am a sucker for an amazing kiss and Jeffrey was an amazing kisser but I was still paying back a big debt and fucking was my job. But by this point my body didn’t care about the money anymore. Now I begged Jeffrey to love me, to do me, to manipulate me into him…”
She says she’s sorry. I forgive her. We move on.
She tries to get in touch with Walter, but can’t reach him. After a few more calls, she sets up some tricks. We nap until 2:00 p.m. When we wake, she goes into the bathroom, climbs up on the sink, again in a primitive squat, and moves close to the mirror to put on lipstick. As she leaves, she says she’ll be back before dark.
Laura returns around 7:00 p.m., $600 richer and carrying three men’s shirts in my size. She also gives me a gram of coke she got from Mark, her bo
yfriend who is a dealer. She said she fucked Mark and two tricks, one of whom was a shirt manufacturer. This is a lot of information to process.
We do two lines and get back between the sheets. I pin her arms down, forming gentle cuffs with my thumb and index finger around her delicate wrists, allowing them to move but restraining her hands from sliding through. She goes wild enjoying the struggle.
Laura moans, “Use me. Please use me. Tell me what you want. I’ll do anything for you.” She opens her eyes and looks straight into mine, “I want you to own me, all of me. My pussy is yours. My tits, my mouth. They’re yours. I want to be yours. I want to be your banquet of pleasure.”
When she says it, it’s poetry. Her submissive eloquence makes me come.
She dances from one paragraph to the next. Every move she makes is graceful. I am not graceful and look upon hers with respect and envy. When her “banquet of pleasure,” metaphor pops out, it touches me as unrehearsed. Her speech is a little hippie-dippy-groovy, but also lyrical, like a songwriter or poet who never stops working.
My instinct declares this is more than skin passion. This is something thick and soulful and complicated. Her scent ignites my testosterone and I feel more macho than ever before. This is love I never knew. It’s a quantum shift, a difference of kind, not just of degree. I had been living in black and white—and was happy—and now I discovered color. She is a movie. She is the star of every scene.
The downside is Laura does too much cocaine.
I never loved coke. I felt it was overrated weak speed. As they say, it’s God’s way of letting you know you’re making too much money. If offered, I’d do a little, and stop. But Laura loves it. And she loves giving it to me in small doses, not enough to make me lose my hard-on, but enough to keep me awake all night fucking her. I begin to re-examine my prejudice against the drug.
Laura Meets Jeffrey Page 5