Laura Meets Jeffrey

by Jeffrey Michelson

  “So I came with every guy,” Laura sums up, “I came multiple times with every guy. And then Jeffrey fucked me...”

  31

  Relationships and drugs

  There is a progression in relationships. It’s like the high jump. The bar keeps getting raised. Couples keep getting eliminated. As Norman Mailer said: “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”

  Here’s how it goes: Three hours are all you can endure on a nowhere date. Two dates are all you can manage with someone you don’t fancy. Lots of new couplings split up at three weeks—what I call The First Hump—when the new glory can no longer survive on the glow of its own raw energy. This is when the light shines on each other’s less obvious flaws.

  At about three weeks, if the bond is to last, the “YOU,” “YOU,” “YOU” that your heart has been singing has to become an “US,” and it takes more than hot sex to do that.

  The Second Hump at three months is also where lots of couples split up. By this time every little interpersonal annoyance is no longer cute. It is here at The Second Hump where something has to exist between the two of you that is stronger than simply hot sex, superficial connections, and a few mutual interests. The road to The Third Hump, one year in, is littered with the carrion of ex-couples.

  Laura and I have been together for about ten months, that point where stuff really starts to get annoying. I am bothered by her drug intake, her not calling on time, her showing up late, her flaky answers to serious questions, and her dirty feet leaving their trail on our sheets.

  She is beginning to get annoyed by my strong dominant personality that she loves in bed but that rankles her in other parts of our relationship. She begins calling me “Mr. Push.”

  In the first six months we had nary a fight except for the few about her giving her money to her husband, Sandy. Now we let off steam daily. We find one reason or another to have a minor spat or a bickering spasm. For about ten minutes. Usually in the afternoon. Then our love impels us to work it out. Then we fuck and have terrific makeup sex, sometimes even if it means pulling the car off the road. We are aware of our ten-minute glitches, and sometimes just pointing them out and laughing defuses them. Sometimes it is more difficult. Sometimes we stumble and just make it over the high bar. But generally we keep the unpleasantness trapped in those ten minutes per day.

  More telling than the quantity of time couples spend bickering, arguing or fighting is the quality of the civility exhibited at the lowest point of the clash. During this period and well into our relationship, Laura and I both keep a polite tone when arguing and never require police intervention. Most of the arguments we have are about her coke habit.

  Too many people I knew were doing too much coke. One friend burnt out the cartilage in his nose and needed surgery. Another friend suffered a heart attack attributed to his overuse of the drug. I was in the middle of a love affair with pot and I was not a drug prude. I had tried nearly every drug that didn’t involve shooting or suppositories. Well, to be honest, I did shoot demerol twice and morphine once with an anaesthesiologist and his nurse girlfriend, but a needle full of anti-anaphylactic shock medication at the ready and their white uniforms made it seem acceptable and safe.

  And to be completely honest I did do an opium suppository once and was high for two days. But I was never into drugs so much I needed to say, “Hi, my name is Jeffrey and I’m an addict.” I just didn’t love coke. It’s not a matter of having good ethics or a refined recreational drug palate. It’s just biology, like being horny, liking or not liking Brussels spouts (I like), cilantro (I don’t), or being tall or short.

  Some people I knew were already smoking coke. First there was high-end bourgeois “freebase” and then came its cheaper less pure proletarian cousin “crack.” One night, sitting in a car by the Delaware River near New Hope with one of Laura’s friends, we smoked freebase. It was apocalyptic. I felt like I was talking one on one with God. Laura was so taken by her first hit tears filled her eyes.

  Then, in a few minutes it wore off and the second hit wasn’t so elevated. The third and fourth also missed the mark, although they were certainly pleasant and airy. I stopped there while Laura and her friend kept going till it was all gone.

  I had, thank God, an immediate revelation. I knew right off the bat what was evil about smoking coke. You can never get back to the feeling of the first hit. Insidious if you think about it. The ultimate intracranial cock tease. Who would have guessed then that freebase/crack would soon change the worst parts of society and make them even worse?

  Mothers sold themselves or the use of their kids’ orifices for a hit. Mothers sold their children outright for a hit. When I heard these stories I remembered my first hit and how close to God I felt, how nearly equal, and in retrospect how singularly megalomaniacal that feeling was. I know that if the devil has a tool belt, its pockets are filled with crack.

  But this was before coke got the bad rep it deserved and when recreational drugs (something most of us, some way too late, came to understand is almost always an oxymoron) were still considered hip. Just as now you would be shocked to see anyone, even at the hippest parties, doing coke openly on a Saturday night, in the early ’80s it was not only acceptable it was the fashion.

  32

  Two tricks

  October 1981

  Laura asks me if I would like to watch her turn a trick.

  “Right in front of me? And the guy won’t mind?!”

  “Two of them, actually. One after another. One is not just a trick, it’s Walter, and he pays me, but he’s my friend. I asked them if I could bring you to watch and they both said yes.”

  “I’d love it.” There is nothing not to like about watching Laura have sex.

  “I’m seeing Murray after work at his office in the garment district and then Walter this evening. Walter wants to meet you. He wants to know if you’re available to come for dinner. Nothing fancy, just bistro or sushi.”

  “Sure. All of it.”

  Laura pulls out some coke and offers it to me.

  “No. Not for me. Don’t you think you’re doing too much of that shit?”

  “No. I like it. And it’s my business.”

  We are going through that period in a relationship coming up to the first year, when the newness peels off. The question is, what’s next? The savory pleasure of deeper emotions and the tummy-filling security of tender routine, or the souring of compatibility, the bad taste of stale sex and the hunger of alienation? Time will tell.

  I walk Necort; Laura goes off to meet a friend. After walking Necort I am so excited about our upcoming threesomes that I go to the gym and work out.

  I get back to our apartment around four and find Laura getting ready. She is in the bathroom perched on the sink, cave girl style, in front of the mirror, once again in the position of a baseball catcher. If she wants to talk seriously with you, she will either get on the floor in that position and expect you to join her or she’ll crouch like that on the seat of a chair.

  She is in one of the world’s most sophisticated cities playing at the world’s oldest profession yet there is something fresh and innocent about her. She’s like the country cousin in the big city or the Stone Age child who comes out of the rain forest and learns to adapt to the concrete and steel jungle.

  I watch her on her haunches, a feral child playing with civilized make-up toys and ask, “What should I wear? What does one wear to watch his girlfriend turn a trick?”

  “Wear your black leather jacket and jeans, that’s what I’m going to wear, too.”

  “Okay.” I wonder what these men will think of me. Who is this guy that Laura fell in love with who lets her continue to be a whore and is so bent as to want to watch her work?

  We arrive at Murray’s office around 6:00 p.m. He greets us politely, eyeing me hard until he sees my sweet Jewish smile. He looks like the faux-hip character in a Woody Allen movie and talks in that “I grew
up tough” cadence of male Mafia groupies. He is about 5'7" but I can tell he is wearing Cuban heel boots so he must be about 5'5". His silk shirt is open too wide and he wears too much gold around his neck. He is balding but his comb-over says he hasn’t come to terms with it.

  He shows us around the factory, takes us to the shipping room and points out that we are looking at $250,000 worth of shirts. He asks me my size and brings out half a dozen lovely all-cotton long-sleeve 15.5/34, fall and winter shirts in wide plaids and small checks that are exactly my taste. So far this is fun.

  Murray is one of the quickie blowjob big-tip tricks Laura kept when she left Eureka. Laura breaks the ice by telling Murray to take his pants down right there in the shipping room, that she wants his cock in her mouth. Murray looks at me with a polite “Is this okay?” tilt to his head and I respond with an agreeing nod. We could have been two guys at a Bar Mitzvah, one silently questioning the other whether it was okay to have the last knish off the hors d’oeuvre tray.

  Laura unzips Murray’s pants, slides out of much of her clothing and takes out his average size-cock, which is nearly hard. I stand there with my shirts in my arms and move in closer for a better look. She bends over to put him in her mouth and then squats down. She tells him, “I want you to talk to me the way you always do. Jeffrey will love it. Don’t be shy.”

  He then performs two opposite functions simultaneously that are so compelling that during the entire blowjob I pay more attention to him than my Laura. He caresses her face and hair in the most profoundly gentle manner, more fatherly than sexually as he whispers the most degrading vile commands.

  “Suck my cock, you filthy slut.”

  “Take it from me, you trollop.”

  “Eat my come, you unclean bitch.”

  He utters one phase after another non-stop, each with exactly a second-and-a-half pause, each one different than the last, even if just slightly.

  “Suck my jism, you low harlot.”

  “Take it down your throat, you dirty whorebitch.”

  Now here is a man the thesaurus was invented for. I can see him sitting in his office, practicing, with his Roget’s in one hand while he jerks off with the other.

  Murray continues this naughty phrase-mongering until I hear what sounds like a duplication and then he comes with gasping breaths like he’s drowning followed by a protracted sigh. Laura moans and makes a big deal out of his orgasm, opens her mouth to show him her mouth full of his come, and then swallows with exaggeration.

  After Murray finishes, without changing his gentle whisper, he changes his words to the dearest praise.

  “That was wonderful, you sweet, sweet princess.”

  “Thank you, angel face.”

  “God bless you, shana madela.”

  “That was a blessed gift, lovely lady.”

  I wonder if he is going to go on just as long as he had with the vile stuff as some sort of matter/anti-matter psychic cleansing, but thankfully he stops after about six blessings.

  He asks me whether I liked watching and I say it was fascinating. Laura gets dressed and Murray hands Laura two one hundred dollar bills and goes on and on about what a beauty Laura is and how she gives the best head he ever got and how his wife won’t put his penis in her mouth and how Laura is the reason he doesn’t divorce his wife.

  Laura and I say goodbye and leave. Going down in the elevator, she says, “You were so quiet. Was that all right with you?”

  “Sure. I like him and I love the shirts. I applaud his vocabulary. Plus you are saving him a fortune in marriage counseling. What’s next?”

  I’d been hearing about Walter since Laura and I spent our first weekend together. An oilman and banker in his early fifties, he was a self-made man, a big man who fought his way out of the Bronx, went to college on a football scholarship as a linebacker, all the while making a tidy sum playing pool and cards to pay for business school and to seed his stock market investing. He then parlayed his small stake into a small fortune by investing while simultaneously learning French, Arabic, and Japanese. By the time he got his master’s degree he was already a millionaire and an intimate of several children of Arab sheiks and princes whose families were neck deep in petrol and petrodollars. He was constantly just off to or just back from Dallas, London, Paris, Tokyo, Kuwait, or Riyadh.

  He was married and had grown-up kids; his wife, a cool and obviously tolerant and/or oblivious Swedish beauty was usually at their farm in Sweden raising Swedish Warmbloods, among the most prized jumping horses in the world. He had several other homes and owned a few apartments in Manhattan, one of which was on the East River near the UN that he used just for guests and sex, and I guess sometimes sex with guests.

  He smoked very expensive, very smelly Cuban cigars, which left their stench in Laura’s hair whenever she’d been with him. He was fond of over-ordering sushi and always sent home a doggie bag for me that also smelled of Havana. And now I’m on my way to meet this cross between Jesse Ventura and Sam Walton who smells like Fidel Castro.

  We get out of the cab in front of a huge building set far back from the street behind some precious Manhattan land used for nothing more than flowers and trees. This gives me an idea of how expensive the apartments here are. We pass through security and the guard smiles, greets Laura by name and tells her that Walter will be a few minutes late. He hands her a key and we take the elevator up to the thirty-first floor, walk down a long hall and open a door that leads into a gigantic foyer, as big as a one-bedroom apartment. Beyond the foyer, and two steps up, is an even bigger living room nearly as large as a basketball court, with a huge glass wall overlooking the river and Queens.

  The living room furnishings are white leather and chrome, with big ultra-modern brass, bronze and chrome sculptures. On the non-glass walls are massive abstract paintings in sweeping slashes of bright colors, some fluorescent Day-Glo. One looks like an LSD hallucination of a fatal auto accident minus the bodies but with all the blood. It’s stark, powerful, cold, and looks expensive. Off this is a dining area done in smoky glass and black.

  I walk around for the grand tour. This is one of the biggest two-bedroom apartments I’ve ever seen, maybe 3,000 square feet. The oversize kitchen is diamond white and chrome. It has a center island, a breakfast nook and a fridge (I open it immediately) containing five kinds of beer, three bottles of Dom, a jar of olives and a platter of leftover sushi, the last food on earth you want to eat three days old.

  The counters hold one each of every kitchen appliance in the world and although Laura says Walter has owned this place for a few years I feel that most have never been touched, except the dishwasher and a new-fangled thing I’d heard of but never seen—a microwave—which is obviously used because the inside is dirty.

  Laura shows me how it works and I boil glass after glass of water and cook tiny pieces of aged fish and globs of rice. Several times I quick-open-the-door to feel the heat that isn’t there. I feel as if I am in Star Trek.

  Before I’m done trying to figure out where the heat comes from, Walter comes through the door and we walk over to meet him. He is a round bear of a man, maybe 6'3" weighing 250, with a dozen roses in one hand and a briefcase big enough for an airline navigator in the other. With his hands still full he hugs Laura, lifting her off the ground. They peck kisses like a father and daughter, then he puts her down, puts the flowers and flight case on the floor and kisses her slowly like a lover. Laura turns to me.

  “Walter, this is Jeffrey.”

  “Hello, Walter,” I say and extend my hand, which does not quite fill his. His is too wide and I can’t quite get the grip I need to give the firm macho handshake a man wants to put out at a moment like this.

  “So you’re the man who stole Laura’s heart!” he says as he pulls me to him and gives me a gentle bear hug and lifts my feet off the ground with the ease of picking up a kitchen waste basket.

  Though mildly overcome by his tobacco breath and still airborne I hug back with enough strength to ever so sligh
tly hinder his breathing, a manly signal that half makes up for my ineffective handshake. He smiles and puts me back on the floor. It’s a wonderful smile that makes me feel comfortable immediately, even in this lair of opulence. There is something special, an unrehearsed openness about this man that even a cynical Arab billionaire would fall for. He reeks of confidence and success and honesty and compassion as well as cigars. If he hadn’t been drawn to money, he would have made a great cop or priest, albeit with cheaper, even smellier stogies.

  “First the coke,” Walter says. “This is as good as any shit I ever snorted.”

  He goes to the glass table in the dining room and spreads out way too much white powder for three people for a week. He rolls up a hundred and snorts three lines in each nostril. Laura does the same. I do one each.

  “I want to fuck!” the Great Bear bellows.

  Laura giggles as he takes her hand and leads her into the master bedroom, the size of a handball court, decorated in black and red Chinese lacquer with an emperor-size bed covered with a huge, fluffy cream comforter stuffed with the feathers of several flocks of geese. Walter pauses at the dimmer control panel long enough to delight me with his sensitivity toward getting just the right lighting. Then he pulls back the comforter and undresses with the concentration and deliberate precision of Houdini taking off shackles under water.

  “Get undressed slowly,” he instructs Laura. She smiles and looks into his eyes with her big eyes wide open, like a Keane painting. With a teasing half-time tempo she slips out of her jeans, pries herself out of her too-tight T-shirt and in exaggerated slo-mo, removes her black lace bra and panties. Walter stands naked, a big bear wiggling in anticipation. He’s got big balls like me and a cock that’s larger than mine.

  Laura walks to the other side of the bed. Walter falls onto the bed on his hands and knees and lumbers toward her as she squeals and giggles like a child. Naked, Walter looks like a retired professional wrestler, flabby but powerful with a belly large enough to give birth to a forty-five-pound baby and arms that retain most of their shape if not definition, and a massive chest just turning from pecs to breasts.