Laura Meets Jeffrey

by Jeffrey Michelson

  I had already scored against him and could have—should have—probably been more forgiving, especially in front of Farrah. He half smiled around his mouthpiece then stormed at me with a bombardment, two three-punch combos one after another. I backed up and defended without sustaining any real damage. I thought I saw an opening as he was moving back and then, “Fwapp! Fwapp!!” He hit me with two in a row, killer force, straight lefts to my head, then neck, connecting so hard I could barely breathe. I back-pedaled and fended off his blows as best I could, caught in the slow motion twilight zone of every second taking at least half a minute.

  I could tell something was wrong with my neck but I didn’t want to stop the fight. I hid behind my fists to protect my face and neck and took half a dozen bruising explosions to my body. Then an uppercut to my chest just between my elbows lifted me and made me wheeze. I was in pain all over. Finally the fucking bell rang.

  Ryan was awesome, relentless, and I was beaten badly. I was spent. I was hurt and talking funny—like speaking through a gravel filter. If I had been alone, I would have been crying. Even in such a macho environment I couldn’t hold back a few tears. It was obvious I needed medical attention. José looked scared. Ryan looked scared. Norman looked scared. Farrah look horrified. I left, hailed a cab and went directly to the hospital. I cried all the way.

  The doctor said I had a bruised larynx and a broken blood vessel in my neck that might need surgery. He said we could wait a day and see whether the swelling went down, but that he wasn’t hopeful. Then, right in front of me, he made a call and booked the O.R. for Sunday. I left the hospital thinking that I was a schmuck for misjudging Ryan and for not having the sense to pull that second punch in front of his girlfriend. Lots of guys would have killed for Farrah Fawcett who weren’t even sleeping with her!

  When I saw the doctor the next morning he said he saw some improvement, that my injuries looked slightly more promising and that we could put off surgery for another day. God knows where the improvement was because I was puffed up, in agony, and could barely speak or swallow.

  Next day felt even worse for me but I was a bit less swollen and I looked much better to the doctor. He said I was coming along nicely, and that my voice would come back to near normal even if the one injured larynx didn’t heal. He said that mysteriously one larynx compensates tonally for the other and in most cases the regular voice comes back. I never knew that larynxes were such devoted and clever friends to each other.

  A few days later the swelling was down fifty percent. The doctor said I’d be good as new in two to three weeks. Four weeks later I went back to boxing and the week after that Ryan came to the gym. I ventured into the ring with him for two rounds of light contact. Whether he was gentler, which I believe he was, or I was less infuriating, or because we adhered to the rules of lighter contact, it went well. We had a good time and traded some decent blows without blood or injury.

  The next week I went two rounds of full contact with him, held my own pretty much and gave nearly as good as I got. I hit him really hard in the middle of the second round with a right hand lead that split his lip. A tiny trickle of blood appeared. I felt vindicated. Then scared. He licked the blood and smiled at me without that pissed-glare. He came back and hurt me with a series of body punches but didn’t go head hunting. Neither of us pulled a punch, but neither of us went for a kill. I would say I lost by a close decision.

  One Saturday morning five months later when I am living with Laura, I decide to bring her down to the gym to watch. She, being a peace-loving, mostly vegetarian, hippie-hooker cokehead masochist, doesn’t like fighting and in her own warped jealous way, admits that she doesn’t want to watch me hurt someone who isn’t her.

  Ryan, whom I hoped wouldn’t be there, is. He flirts with Laura as he does with every pretty girl. Laura is not a big fan of his and is not too impressed. She doesn’t send much back to him. It annoys him slightly. Great. Just what I need. Ryan O’Neal with a prickly edge.

  “Fighting’s not my cup of tea,” says Laura. “I don’t get it. I don’t really understand why two people would want to throw punches at each other. Norman used to say, ‘It’s about courage. You never know what you are going to do until you’re standing there and someone’s throwing a punch right at your face. It gives you a certain kind of strength and courage that there’s really no other way to get; you never know what you would do unless it’s happening.’

  “Jeffrey was always kind of macho. I don’t think he ever showed any kind of fear or hesitation in any situation. He had this machismo thing, where if somebody came up against him, he would always kind of be ready to meet them more than half way. He would always be in their face with, like, ‘Oh yeah?’ It was an important thing for him to always show strength. Boxing was where he could prove it and his personality was looking for a place like that.

  “Boxing is nauseating to me. It’s so not where we are going as the human race evolves. But it fit in with Jeffrey’s Chinese zodiac birth symbol, the dog. He was like an alpha dog. Alpha dogs are like right up there ready to fight if necessary. And it works in dangerous situations, like some of the clubs we would go into could really be quite dangerous. But it made me feel comfortable because Jeffrey’s vibe was ‘Be nice and I’ll be nice. Try to fucking mess with this and you’ll be sorry.’ Jeffrey wasn’t looking for trouble but he wouldn’t put up with any bad vibes toward him or me.”

  My first round that morning is with Norman’s son Michael. We fight as we often do to a damaging dead-on draw.

  Then I box a practice round with José Torres. Boxing with José is a blessing. He is so good he nails your every opening with a little signal tap. He never hurts you. He never hurts anyone on Saturday morning. He just points out your vulnerability and then tells you how to correct it. You can come after him with all your heat because it is impossible to touch him. It’s like racing across the Atlantic, me in a single engine prop plane and him at Mach 2 in the Concorde. He hadn’t fought in the ring in two decades but still is in possession of all the reasons he was World Champion. Boxing with José is better than slow-motion videotape and computer-enhanced training devices. He is a genial litmus test for everything you do wrong.

  After sparring with The Master, I stupidly accept Ryan’s challenge of two rounds of medium contact. Right away I can tell we have two different ideas of medium contact. Ryan is throwing really hard stuff and rather than wuss out in front of Laura and ask him to back off, I crank up the volume. He comes at me. I move in on him. We are both on fire. It is full contact. I know after one minute into the first round that this will be a real chore. That is okay. I’m up for it.

  Next, I’m looking up at the ceiling. I never see the punch. I never feel the fall but I am on my back. I lose a moment in time. Jose´ tells me to relax and breathe. I didn’t get knocked out but I sure did get knocked down for the first time in my life. It’s just like the scene in movies with the circle of people over you and the light in the middle. I notice how filthy the ceiling is. Laura is crying. Ryan looks down with real concern. José is half-laughing, the proud rodeo dad smiling over his kid who just got bucked off his first Brahma bull. I start to get up and Jose laughs and says, “Stay down. This isn’t fighting for money.”

  Ryan O’Neal, my nemesis, had struck again!

  I get up glad knowing I don’t need to fight him another round. I feel fine. No pain. No swelling. He just hit some knock-down button on me I never knew I had. José says that it’s often the punch you don’t see that shuts out your lights.

  Laura stops crying when she sees I’m all right. We go back to our apartment. I take a shower and then a nap. I awake, eat, and without any S&M weirdness Laura and I make love. She is very tender, submissive as usual. I am the wounded gladiator being cared for by his loving slave girl. In boxing, even coming up short in front of your woman has its own charm.

  * * *

  In 2009 just after I started the rewrite and edit for this book, Mike Lennon, Norman’s friend, archivis
t and now biographer told me about a piece Norman wrote for Esquire magazine in 1993 that I didn’t know existed. It’s an account of my battle with Ryan O’Neal, the one witnessed by Laura. As Norman recounted:

  “Getting in the ring with Ryan O’Neal became not only the focus of each Saturday but the point to what some of us had been half looking to do for years, that is, get extended a little in the ring. Ryan could be mean as cat piss. Even when he was carrying a man, he would punish him, and when he had dislikes, he liked to take them out on the opponent. In spite of every love affair in his private life, public fodder for more than a decade to the gossip columns, Ryan had his dry spot—the Puritanism of the Irish. He took a secret dislike to the bearded editor of the porny magazine.

  “The editor was awkward in the ring, so it was not hard to play tricks on him. He had surprising stamina, however. Until Ryan came along, the pornographer had, in fact, the most notable stamina of any of us. Maybe Ryan equated that ability to sexual prowess and disapproved of its presence in so unworthy a vessel, maybe he just disliked hirsute New York lumpen intelligentsia, but in any case, he all but disemboweled the man, throwing a cruel left hook until the editor collapsed, still conscious, in the middle of the second round, wholly unable to go on. What made it worse was that the pornographer’s ladylove, a good-looking girl who worked in a massage parlor, was witnessing it all at ringside.

  “I happened to be next in the ring with Ryan, which proved to be my good luck. After every discharge of mean feelings, Ryan would turn angelic. A little ashamed, I expect, of what he had just done to the pornographer, he was not now boxing like a movie star—he certainly did not protect his face. Since the man he had hurt happened to be a sweet guy, extraordinarily optimistic about life (which is probably how he had gotten into pornography in the first place), I liked the editor. When I saw him take this beating, I recognized that I saw him as a friend. If this seems something of a digression, let me say that it helps to carry the auctorial voice around the embarrassment of declaring that I boxed better on that day than I ever did before, or since. I was in a rare mean mood myself, mean enough not to be afraid of Ryan, and—it is very hard to do any kind of good boxing against a superior without some premise to carry you—I was feeling like an avenger. And here was Ryan boxing with his face. It was hard not to hit him straight rights, and he reacted with all the happiness of seeing a beloved senior relative get up from a sickbed. In our first clinch, he whispered, ‘You punch sharper than anyone here.’

  “‘Go fuck yourself,’ I told him.”

  I fought Ryan several times after that, but always with more defenses, more respect. I haven’t seen him in years but every time I see Ryan in a movie and he’s in a fight scene, even if he’s the good guy, I always root for the guy hitting him.

  29

  Sex slavery at Club O

  March 1981

  One Thursday night in early March 1981, Laura suggests we visit another S&M club that one of her tricks told her about. She says it sounds less hard core and much more heterosexual than the Hellfire Club. I’m game. I’m a bit tired but I never want to disappoint Laura. Also I like to think of Laura and me as more M&S, Master and Slave, than S&M, Sadist and Masochist and this place sounds more M&S.

  I want to see what similarly bent couples are up to. I want to watch, probably participate a little, and then take Laura home and no doubt fuck the piss out of her while we replay the adventure. She suggests sarcastically, but with a smile, that if I am too tired, the least I could do, for the sake of our relationship, is watch another man whip her. We both do too many lines of coke and leave.

  It is a little after midnight when we arrive at Club O. Laura is wearing her all black “fuck me” ensemble that sometimes greets me as I open our apartment door: very high heels, black seamed stockings held up by garters on her tight lace Teddy with built-in push-up bra, a thong that rides high on her hips barely covering her wispy pubic hair and totally exposing her delicious backside, elbow-length fine lace fingerless gloves (that look great playing with my dick, or I’m sure anybody’s dick), and gold slave bands that wrap around her upper arm like a snake. Around her neck she wears a studded black leather slave collar I recently gave her. As we walk out the door she hands me a chain dog leash I never saw on Necort.

  I, in homage to the scene, wear black jeans and a black shirt.

  It is a chilly autumn night and in the cab Laura hides underneath her warm full-length lavender down coat. She wears her makeup in the severest manner I’ve ever seen on her and has wild teased hair. She is glamorous, totally divorced from her inner hippie. I can’t tell what is going on in her head but she is ready.

  We enter a ratty elevator in an unremarkable West-twenties commercial loft building. Laura pleads with me not to look at her saying, “Fluorescent elevator lighting is the last thing you want to be seen in tarted up like a slut on the way to a sex club.”

  “Imagine how disgusting people will look on the way down after a few hours of sweat and runny makeup,” I add.

  We go up to the eighth floor and the elevator door opens. A huge, fat, leather-and-chain-clad black bouncer as large as any NFL offensive tackle welcomes us and guides us to an unmarked door. Laura reaches into my coat pocket, takes out the leash, puts the leather handle in my hand and snaps the spring-loaded hook to the link on the front of her collar.

  Our eyes adjust to dimmer lighting as we check our coats and I pay our $25 per couple fee to a large dyke, only one notch smaller than the offensive tackle, wearing denim and dozens and dozens of keys and key chains. There is an absurd amount of clattering. She smiles at Laura, keys clinking, jangling and rattling with every move. She gives me a stern glare, the same scary scowl I’ve seen from boxing opponents just before the bell of the first round rings.

  Laura walks in front of me, anxious to see what there is to see. She strains at the leash, and I growl comically at her to “heel” which she immediately obeys. We walk past an empty dance floor surrounded by medieval-looking racks and torture equipment, some of it in use. As we enter the bar area the room freezes, all eyes on Laura. At me they squint quizzically, trying to figure out why or how I’m with this exquisite female.

  Most of the people in the bar are half-dressed or completely undressed submissive men wearing chains, ropes, nipple clamps, and jockey shorts. Some are nerdy wimps but many are in great physical shape, with well-groomed hair and polished nails. These must be the doctors, judges, and Captains of Industry who I’d heard are the big spenders, the meat and potatoes of the commercial humiliation biz.

  Some are arranged in small herds of five or six male slaves, each little group milling around one or two mostly fattish dominant females who bulge out of ridiculous dancing-hippo-in-a-skimpy-tutu costumes, exposing lumpy parts of themselves.

  There are a few moderately unattractive and/or bruised submissive women in a variety of cheap lingerie, each too fat or too thin, paired randomly as to weight and size with men who also are too fat or too thin.

  The dominant men wear black leather or denim for their role of master, complete with studded belt and wristband. A few dominant men appear to be slaveless. Freelancers out looking for someone to hurt? There also are some straight looking single guys in civilian clothes and a few tourist couples with the unmistakable air of Queens or New Jersey.

  With her very high heels, teased hair and mildly muscular, well-proportioned leanness Laura appears about six feet tall. She is, as usual, the hottest looking, the most valuable woman in the room, she is the rare unicorn sighting. I lead her around. We whisper, trading observations, munching nuances like peanuts.

  She wonders why all the submissive women look so flabby, even the thin ones; so pale, depressed, unhealthy, and unathletic. She is not like the other female slaves. Laura’s slave side is a deviant addition, a cathartic sideshow to her day-in, day-out happy optimism. Her physical prowess, beauty, brightness, and energy put her in a different class from females I see here. For them, this evening is merely an ext
ension of their negative self-image. They don’t have another side; this is their only persona.

  Laura is one of life’s winners even when she is being tied up and whipped. Her demeanor is similar to the better-groomed slave men, strong and successful in the world, who are exploring their submissive “flip side.” Beyond that one thought there is no further analysis. I do not think about what she’s working out and neither does she. And I have no idea what I’m working out. I don’t even consider that there is anything to work out. During sex she is my slave; in all other facets of our life we are in the ballpark of equality.

  But as sure as she is knee deep into this bizarre sex trip, I am in just as deep. We are sharing the essence of existence: no precedence, no plan, no plan “B.” We are a second cousin of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: You can do something or analyze it but not both.

  People are magnetically drawn toward us. Two submissive men are already on their knees bowing down in front of Laura. One of them touches her foot and, out of character but adaptive to the moment, she spits on him. He thanks her profusely as I gently kick him out of our path.

  Harnessing our power, I lead Laura around on a tour of the premises after warning our entourage that they dare not touch her. I walk out onto the empty dance floor and observe the surrounding walls. Bodies, some male, some female, are tied to racks, chained to the wall, or on their knees sucking various cocks, anuses, pussies, and toes. The slight smell of disinfectant is broken occasionally by stale beer, sweat, urine, the musk of sex play, the pheromones of perverts and a variety of perfumes and aftershaves. A corridor leads off to rooms of different sizes—some small as closets, others as large as an average bedroom, some with their doors closed, some empty, some with doors open and filled with twos and threes and fours in the middle of their pain games.