Laura Meets Jeffrey

by Jeffrey Michelson

  “I do,” I say truthfully. “We are erotic bookends.”

  “What do we hold together?”

  “Maybe neurosis? Maybe psychosis?”

  “I don’t want to know,” she says. “I’m not finished with it. I want more.”

  “I want more, too.”

  But I’m exhausted now. Laura, still buzzing, sits next to me and rubs me to sleep. I awake the next morning and she is curled in my arms. Her body is warmer some places than others. I pull back the blankets and look at her welts, the embossed ridges from lashes. There are a lot of them, some on her back and sides, but mostly on her ass. She looks as though she was beat up or fell from a moving car. I touch them. She moans. I can’t tell exactly what the moan is expressing so I press firmer and she moans louder. There is no ouch, only a pleasant sigh. It is pleasure, not pain she is feeling.

  Laura is a masochist even in her sleep.

  39

  The art of war

  The two main factors to getting along in a relationship are annoyance and tolerance.

  If one person is not so annoying, it doesn’t matter whether the other person is very or not so very tolerant. If one person is very tolerant, it doesn’t matter if the other person is slightly or very annoying. However, if one person is very annoying and the other isn’t very tolerant, life can suck.

  The level of one’s annoying behavior doesn’t appear to be easily lowered except by long-term psychotherapy, a near-death experience, or actual death, or occasionally, by mellowing with age. The general tendency is to retain your annoyance level or to become even more annoying over time. My mother says she never met a person who got less annoying as they got older.

  Tolerance is variable under only two conditions. Men can be more tolerant of women who take good care their penises, and rumor has it that women will be more forgiving of men who are great lovers. Also, it appears that either party can be more tolerant if the other person has lots of money.

  With Laura and I taking superb care of each other’s genitals, and both of us having enough money, our initial tolerance levels are elevated. This paradigm works for only so long, however, because of our natural tendency to become ever more annoying.

  Sometime after our first year together our annoyance/tolerance ratio begins to suck. What had been ten-minute-a-day civilized intrapersonal annoyance reports progressively metastasize into full chapters, loud screaming rows worthy of hot Latin lovers. Laura and I never fight about the things that most couples do, like money, family and sex. Our fights are more mundane. I’d tell Laura, “You’re driving too fast/that looks too slutty to wear in public/you didn’t put the scissors back where they belong/and you do too much coke.”

  Laura would answer, “That’s the wrong direction/you eat like a pig/how come you get to pick all the movies/stop telling me what to do/fuck you my coke doesn’t cost you money and I’ll do as much as I want!”

  Sometimes our fights are short stories and last a few hours, punctuated by Laura breaking things and me waving my fists. Lots of plates go into the trash in pieces. She throws punches sometimes and I am rough in defending myself more than once but never flat out hit her. I never strike her with my sword but I bang her more than once with my shield.

  Then one time, during the swelling crescendo of a loud screaming match, she calls me “Jew bastard,” and I slap her face, not so hard but hard enough. It is the first time I hit her that isn’t sexual.

  Being called a “Jew bastard” is the reason I slap her, but it isn’t an excuse. I am wrong. At this point in my life I don’t have the ability to walk away when another person is intentionally pushing my buttons.

  Laura’s sweet and demure personality is shifting toward confrontation and hostility. Long-term coke abuse makes users more irritable, not just when they are doing coke but during all the spaces in between. My low-level selfish acts—the new Newsweek comes and I glom it, I finish the ice cream without offering her any, I am thirty minutes late—small infractions that deserve warnings or citations or at most light misdemeanor sentences—get magnified by coke paranoia and are treated as felonies.

  If relationships can be judged by how fair the fighting is, we are becoming unsportsmanlike. As our sex grows more violent so does our fighting. I am aware of it—I suspect a direct correlation—but I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t discuss it because tacit agreements are binary. They are on or off. You cannot un-speak words or un-ring a bell. It’s a no-way-back concept like virgin, monogamous or dead. I don’t want to spook the magic.

  40

  The beast comes out of the bedroom

  Early November 1982

  While driving on a winding country road in Bucks County one early November night in 1982 on our way to our favorite restaurant, we have an argument.

  After being high for days, Laura is now straight but crashing and irritable. Sometimes worse than cokeheads high on coke are cokeheads between binges. Either way it’s lose-lose. The more drugs she abuses the unhappier I am and the more we fight. She is screaming at me that I am driving too fast and I do not respond. This infuriates her and she grabs the wheel. This scares the shit out of me and I push her away and slow down. She grabs the wheel again. With a strong right backhand I more than firmly slam her back into her seat and hold her there like the safety bar on a roller coaster.

  Something is wrong. She’s trying to catch her breath and wheezing. She’s crying. My first instinct is that she’s faking it but I know I slammed her too hard. She’s not acting. I pull over. Several minutes pass as her breath slows and regulates. She’s feeling her chest and wincing. We turn around, drive back to her house then knock on her neighbor’s door, a doctor. Laura tells him, without my urging, that she tripped and fell onto her bed’s footboard. His quick diagnosis is that her ribs, two of them, are slightly cracked and that there is nothing to do about them but wait for them to heal.

  That night we comfort each other. She isn’t mad and says it’s her fault as much as mine. But I’m wrong and I know it. I can’t take it back. I swear to her never to lift a hand to her in anger, and I swear to myself the same thing. But another Rubicon has been crossed.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d gone over the line. I’d pushed or slapped previous girlfriends, but never more than once, and I never punched them, so I never felt I was a physical abuser. Then there was Dian, my girlfriend, and then fiancé, before Sherry. During one argument, I pushed her. Dian was taller than me and quite tough, and immediately kneed me in the balls and dropped me right where I stood. I didn’t get mad. I knew I’d bought it. I felt more humiliated than angry.

  It was easy enough to blame my lack of control on my parents, who were old school and quick with corporal punishment, or the rough-and-tumble street society I grew up with in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where fighting was a way of life. But none of that mattered. I wanted to be above that. Why I hurt Laura was less important than learning not to ever do it again.

  I didn’t want to spend years with a psychoanalyst figuring out why. I found a behaviorist to teach me how to not behave like that. The first thing he did was to make me see the entire spectrum of violence, from a light push to a beating, as all the same thing. I had to start by admitting to myself that whether I beat a woman with fists or push her, even just once, I have crossed the line. Unacceptable behavior is not only violence but also the threat of violence. Any use of the size differential is abuse. Shaking a fist is out, so is screaming in her face.

  I had never thought of myself as a woman batterer, but I was one. I had an impulse disorder and I needed to identify the impulse and the triggers, and substitute other actions. I started counting to ten, walking away, and screaming (after I walked away, not in her face).

  That was the last time I ever hit a woman in anger.

  41

  Getting stale

  Late 1982

  In late 1982, Laura and I moved out of our Manhattan apartment because we were spending more time in the country, less in the city. The
impetus came when the monthly rent on our car garage was raised to more than the monthly mortgage payment on my cabin.

  Serendipitously, a rich, gentle, male cokehead friend of Laura’s who kept a pied-a-terre in the West Village gave us keys. He was seldom there; we paid the modest stabilized rent, so it was a good deal all around. It was a lovely, first-floor garden apartment on quaint and beautiful West 11th Street. It was also a perfect place for Necort to live in New York.

  The first night we were there my car was stolen. It was a brand-new Datsun Maxima diesel that was probably worth three times as much chopped into parts. I’m sure that two hours after it was stolen it was hanging on walls in pieces. We had unloaded all the valuables, clothes and electronics. But my Alvin Dark model baseball glove that I had since I was a kid was in the trunk. That hurt. It was a bad omen.

  Laura was still turning tricks and doing even more cocaine. Now she was smoking it, not with me, but she did it any chance she got with tricks or friends who were freebasing.

  There was a dichotomy to Laura. She was a cigarette-smoking cokehead city hooker who transmogrified into a whole earth hippie holistic vegetarian health nut organic gardener. That summer she dug up part of my cabin’s large front yard and made a vegetable garden. She knew exactly what to do and organized the rototilling and the truckload of cow manure and the exact amount of materials for fencing and a gate.

  She planted onions and peas early and everything else in its time and kept the twenty-by-thirty-foot patch flowing with tomatoes, peppers, beans, zucchini, red beets, carrots, basil, broccoli and so on, that not only fed us that summer but also filled our freezer for the winter. Sometimes I’d drive home to my secluded cabin and find her working naked in the garden. She looked like the Earth Princess, even though sometimes she’d be stoned on coke.

  I loved her passion and loved her perversion but the more coke she did, and the longer she kept at whoring, the less she was a hippie-hooker and the more she was just a cokehead whore. In the first few years of being together we fucked virtually every time we saw each other, then on the way to sleep and also first thing every morning. Each time it was a fresh discovery and the most wonderful experience of my lifetime. The audio track was filled with pronouncements of love for each other, of love for the acts performed, and declarations of how this thing between us was not only the best thing going on in our lives, but also the best thing that ever happened in our lives.

  Our sex became more ritualistic and less frequent. Some of the drop in frequency was just because the newness had worn off; it happens to most every couple. Now when we did have sex, it was as much about tying up and whipping as it was about fucking and sucking. She bought several whips, riding crops, short multi-stranded lashes that had no reason to exist except for S&M, and a cane with a knotted strand swinging from the end. She would get one out every time we had sex. She, me, and the whip became a ménage a trois.

  Our sex rap had been about Laura pleasuring another man or groups of men; now it was about Laura being whipped by other men. Her fantasy of being tied up on the wall and being a “whipping ornament at an orgy” was the central theme. I loved it the first 300 times. As Norman Mailer said, “Repetition kills the soul.” I understood and accepted as weird but not diseased the fact that I got off on giving Laura to strange guys who knew full well that this was the most striking sexual creature they would ever penetrate. I loved being the Angel of the Sacred Mercy Fuck.

  I was Pro Bono Pimp Saint Jeffrey. The more ordinary the man, the more I liked giving her to him. The more that his experience was a once-in-a-lifetime dream-come-true, the better. The hornier and more sexually unfulfilled he appeared, the more the kick in fulfilling his hottest masturbation dream. I loved watching his face as much as I loved watching hers. I was the all-powerful Zeus. I was the genie in the bottle. I knew how he felt because I knew how I would have felt.

  I loved owning this woman, being brave enough to have her fuck other guys, knowing she would come back to me. Laura was the proverbial bird you let go and watch fly back. Laura was every dirty, slut-whore, porn film fantasy, the hot babe who takes on two or three or twenty guys. But Laura was real.

  Incrementally, I found myself drawing away from Laura emotionally. I saw her crossing Seventh Avenue in the Village one day and she looked too skinny and too coked up. I didn’t like looking at her. She didn’t see me and I walked away from her instead of greeting her. It was the first time I ever did that. I loved her, but I was losing her to drugs.

  When we first started dating and living with each other, there had been times when I really thought we might make it long term. Her sweet hippie side, the way my friends and family accepted and loved her, plus her beauty, wit, grace and my total sexual satisfaction with her added up to the possibility of us doing rocking chairs together. I didn’t see that anymore.

  In the way that recreational drug use crosses some very hard-to-see line and becomes a habit, playing at S&M becomes not a game or a preference but an addiction.

  The sweet lovable hippie who liked drugs and rough sex—and, I thought, herself—had turned into a progressively negative person who hid behind more and more drugs and elective pain.

  Our game of light S&M had grown organically out of our natural love of dominance and submission. At first an ancillary sexual titillation, it had become the basis of our sex. Naturally, it was easier to see her faults than mine. And her coke habit made her an easy target to get a bead on. But if S&M was her psyche-administered self-punishment, what was I doing to myself? For the first time I doubted my sanity.

  In the middle of this bout of befuddlement and self-evaluation I saw a copy of Time magazine with a huge “Herpes” headline on its front cover. I felt the jig was up. I read the article and it shook me to my bones. Here was something you couldn’t get rid of. I felt like the Christopher Walken character in “The Deer Hunter” who was invincible at Russian roulette till that moment when through his heroin fog, he recognizes Robert DeNiro and says, “One more,” and, “BAM! SPLAT!” He’s dead! All day I carried that image with me. The next strange vagina had my bullet.

  I went from a less than statistically significant amount of worry to obsessed. The idea of getting something you couldn’t get rid of crumpled my immortality shield and scared the shit out of me.

  I was talking to Jerzy Kosinski, the writer and actor at a sex club one night. “Did you see the Time cover, Jerzy?”

  “Yes. It gave me pause,” he replied in his cultured mildly Polish accent.

  “I think my number is up,” I said. “I have never been touched by anything, so far. But I no longer think I’m immune.”

  “Then you are probably not immune anymore.”

  “And you?”

  “I had a similar thought today also after reading that story,” Jerzy said. “You may be right. It might be too dangerous to play some of these games.”

  I liked Jerzy. He, along with Vonnegut, Hemingway and Mailer, were among the few writers whose books I’d read one after another when I discovered them. In addition to being a great writer, Jerzy was a brilliant raconteur, maybe the best I ever met. He told stories about hanging out with the rich folk, one-on-one polo, life in Poland, and his friendship with Roman Polanski. Jerzy told about how TWA losing his luggage on a trip from Europe to New York to L.A. kept him in New York one extra day and saved his life by keeping him from being with Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and their friend Jay Sebring at the house on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon the night the Manson Family killed everyone. My favorite story, and the one I think about often although I have never acted upon it was his claim of sleeping eight hours a day, from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., the two four-hour periods he found the most boring.

  Other than running into him a few times at Café Un Deux Troi in midtown, the half dozen times I met Jerzy was at sex clubs or sex parties. He was a more bizarre partaker than me in these kinds of amusements. I was warned by porn star Jamie Gillis that Jerzy could be so sadist
ic he was scary.

  Jerzy loved Laura’s looks and often praised them when we would meet. One night, at a party at Plato’s Retreat for Screw magazine, just after she read The Painted Bird, I left them alone purposely so he would get a chance to feel her personality and intelligence and see beyond her physical allure. When I came back Jerzy tried to take control by telling Laura that he wanted to whip her without me being there and without a safety word for her to utter when she was past enjoyment, and I said no.

  “Jerzy was very intense but he wasn’t sexy,” Laura says. “He was sadistic, but without the sex part. Something else was going on in his head. I don’t think it was sexual. He was probably trying to get back at the Nazis for killing everybody. He must have been very angry. I could tell he was an angry guy. Jeffrey wasn’t an angry guy. He was just extremely sexual, like me. But Jerzy was out for blood. He definitely wanted blood. And when Jeffrey said no to Jerzy I knew he was doing the right thing. Jeffrey’s number-one job was my safety and his number-two job was my pleasure and sometimes in some situations number one ruled out number two. I trusted Jeffrey to make the right sexual decisions for me.”

  From that moment, after talking to Jerzy when herpes made the Time cover, I began carrying rubbers. And I told Laura that from that moment on she must double check each cock she encounters and search them for any kind of thing that shouldn’t be there and reject them as necessary. Also that she had to start using rubbers with tricks too, which I don’t think she did religiously. While I was telling her the new rules she added, “At least you can’t get herpes from being whipped.”

  42