Laura Meets Jeffrey

by Jeffrey Michelson

  I can’t stop looking in the mirror. I’m spellbound. I notice every little line in my face, how big my nose is and my receding hairline. I don’t know what it’s like to be beautiful, like a model and enjoy your reflection, but sometimes I see enough character in the mirror to please myself. At this moment I’ve never looked uglier. Plus there is sadness in my eyes.

  I hear Laura begging for more whipping from the bedroom. I look in the mirror. Now at the whip in my hand. I shake my head back and forth slightly and purse my lips. I look like my father for a moment, looking at me when I’ve done something stupid. Full of love tinged with disappointment. I stare at the face, and my eyes fill with water. Just looking. Really looking into me. I look at the coke dripping from my nose and the whip in my hand and say to myself with none of the humor with which you might expect the line to be read, “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?”

  I swear that is the line verbatim.

  I cry. To say it was an epiphany is to give it too much religious significance. It was more like a drunk hitting bottom.

  It isn’t about Laura anymore. It’s about me. At that moment I know I have gone too far down the wrong road. I don’t blame Laura. It just has to end.

  I go back to Laura and untie her and tell her I’m tired and need to sleep. She goes into the kitchen to do some more coke. I don’t care. I go to sleep and sleep for a long time. I wake up and Laura is in my arms, naked and hot from her welts. I don’t feel desire, but I do still love her.

  I am scared about not being with Laura and I’m scared about staying with her. I am sick to my stomach. Like so many others who played with drugs or sex or gambling or food, I thought I could keep it as a preference and not an addiction and like most of them I was wrong.

  I go out for a walk with Necort. It is still warmer than usual for early April. I feel sad, but the day is sunny. I walk to Washington Square Park and watch the chess games and roller skaters. I walk to John’s Pizza and order a veggie with anchovies and eat a slice on the way home. Laura is awake when I enter and she’s hungry and eats.

  No one says anything.

  I speak first. “I think it’s time we take a break from each other.”

  “You’re right,“ she says without surprise. “We’re not so much fun anymore. And I’m tired of fighting about coke.”

  “I’m tired of fighting about coke, too.”

  In her sober, humorless voice she continues, “Maybe I can’t quit and maybe I don’t want to quit but I know I don’t want to fight about it with you anymore.”

  It’s that quick. The team is splitting up. There is sad resignation in the knowledge that things will be different forever.

  I move out of the apartment that day and Necort and I go back to the country. I cry more than once, but I never have second thoughts.

  We were over. That’s just the way it was. We talked a few times in the next few days and then stopped calling for a few weeks.

  About six weeks after we split up, Laura and I bumped into each other at a mutual friend’s townhouse on the Upper East Side. She looked great. She’d been off coke for a few days and had been eating. She said she was trying to get a handle on the coke thing and was only using when she was in the city. I’d heard it all before.

  We decided to spend the night together there in our friend’s guest bedroom. We made sweet love like old friends. We talked. We said we missed each other. We cried. We cuddled. We held each other tight. We ended like a tight band jamming, not on a pre-set cue, but where, in synch, together, we felt the end belonged.

  The breakup with Laura wasn’t like any I’d gone through before. There were no theatrics, no pleading and no mortal pain. I missed her, I suppose she missed me, but we knew we did the right thing.

  “From the beginning,” concludes Laura, ”I never thought of us as being in a long-term relationship. It was definitely a fuck experience. I was in this decadent period of sex and drugs, mostly coke, and Jeffrey joined me in the middle of it. It was going on before him and it went on after him but all the time I knew this part of my personality was not going to go on and on forever.

  “I remember toward the end, when we first started not getting along so good anymore, Jeffrey telling me his friend Jimmy said to him, ‘You know this isn’t a permanent thing; she’s just with you while she’s in this stage of her life. Soon she’s going to change into another personality and she’ll be gone.’ And I remember Jeffrey telling me, in total shock, ‘Can you believe he said that?’

  “I said I thought Jimmy was right. It was so completely obvious to me that I was playing a role. I was just playing out one facet of who I was, and I couldn’t be that part of myself forever. I could only play that one facet for a while. Jeffrey said he understood what I was saying and he could accept that but he hoped Jimmy and I were wrong. I think he was happy to settle for the incredible hot sex, and this bizarre, 90-mile-an-hour lifestyle, but I guess in his heart he hung on to a more long-term romantic dream of us until he didn’t.”

  One morning I arrived at our friend’s town house and discovered that Laura had spent the night there and just left. I went to the guest room, sank into the bed’s fragrance and jerked off. I’d broken up with her but my pheromones hadn’t.

  She and I talked and met and continued to have sex occasionally. It was as though we were ex-lovers who still fancied each other, who’d spent three or five years after they split up resolving their turmoil and had become friends again, with benefits. Except we cut right to the benefits.

  Our sex was more like our early days. Dominant and submissive, yes, S&M, no. We would look into each other’s eyes and smile knowingly. We still thrilled each other’s body but we both knew that the love that made orgasm spiritual was gone.

  With Laura seeing different men all the time for money it was hard to tell if she was dating. I was somewhere north of curious and south of jealous. It wasn’t uncomfortable and I never asked. In a few months Laura had a new boyfriend, a nouveau riche, Jewish, hippie-entrepreneur cokehead who had made a fortune in drug paraphernalia. He was a bit pompous, but seemed to love Laura and wanted to take care of her so he was okay with me. Every time I saw them they were zonked.

  Laura recalls, “George came to see me one night, in New Hope. All of a sudden he showed up at my house. I was like, ‘What’s up?’

  “George said, ‘I just thought we might hang out.’

  “I said, ‘Okay, okay…’

  “He said, ‘Let’s go get cocaine.’

  “I didn’t know he’d just escaped from detox so I said, ‘All right, let’s go into town, and see if we can find some cocaine.’

  “We went into town and couldn’t find any cocaine.

  “George said, ‘Let’s go up to the city…’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll drive.’

  “So I drove him to New York City, where he was dealing cocaine by the way, and he knew there was an ounce of cocaine, and he and I did an ounce of cocaine, in one night, and that’s the most cocaine I’ve ever done in my life. And we freebased it at his apartment through the whole night. Then I got up, drove home back to New Hope and went to an acupuncture appointment, which was fucking insane because I was on cocaine and I hadn’t slept.”

  The last time I saw Laura was six months after we split up at George’s funeral. George’s friend Sue, a madam who owned a big brothel, had gone on vacation for two weeks and left him in charge. At the end of each day, George was supposed to check in with her well-trained and reliable staff and collect the receipts. George collected and then spent every dime of the receipts on cocaine, which he boiled down to freebase and smoked. He inhaled close to $20,000 in ten days. The madam was understandably pissed. I think she threatened to have him whacked. She didn’t need to. A week later George died of a cocaine-induced misadventure. At his wake, Laura was stoned on coke. I wondered how long she would be alive.

  “George was dead. He was sitting back on a chair and threw up and suffocated on his own vomit. I took that persona
lly, because I was the one who took him from the detox—that he had escaped from—and I took him to get cocaine in the city, which totally hooked him in again.

  “It was horrible—it is one of the worst memories of my life.

  “I’m such an idiot that I went to his funeral high on cocaine. I weighed ninety-nine pounds. There I was at my friend’s funeral who died from doing cocaine, and this guy standing next to me, said, ‘You know, you’re next, you’re going to die next.’

  “I was like, ‘Fuck no, man, I’m not going to die, I’m not going to die.’

  “The guy standing next to me was part of George’s film crew, and he said it again, ‘You know it, you’re next....’

  “The second time that guy said to me that I was the next to die, it hit me. He was right. I could feel it. George was dead and I was next. I went back and told my therapist, ‘I have to stop doing cocaine.’

  “I finally could see that cocaine was fucking up my life. That was the main thing. I was fucking up my life and I was making choices to be with people who also did cocaine. I was choosing my friends for their drugs. I was not into getting off coke when I went into therapy; I just was going because of my bad relationships with men, and to figure out why I wanted to get hurt all the time.

  “My therapist had me look deep into myself, because I was the one hurting myself and the answer would be inside me. And if I didn’t want to be hurt anymore, then I had to start with myself. You see, I discovered during therapy, with my mother’s help, that when I was about one year old and my sister was five years old, this two-year-old boy came to live with us. And my parents said that I was in love with him. I followed him around and he ignored me completely. He was only into my older sister.

  “Anyway, this boy lived with us for two years, so by the time he left I was almost three years old. For the two years that he lived there, I was in love with him—and he always loved somebody else. It was constant rejection and I guess I became hooked on rejection.

  “Every man I ever lived with wanted to have sex with other women. My first husband always wanted to have sex with other women. He went to a whorehouse regularly in Manhattan. Jeffrey was always having sex with other women. He loved me but he ended up hurting me. Well, Jeffrey didn’t reject me sexually, but he hurt me even if he only left over my doing cocaine. I think that kind of, well, it made up for my need to satisfy rejection, but I didn’t recognize it until I went into therapy.

  “So I established a pattern for my whole life of being attracted to people who rejected me. Or giving them a reason to reject me. It was ridiculous but I was stuck in it. And then I went from Jeffrey to another guy who wanted me and also other women. He wanted to be with whores, and me and whores, and whatever—and I finally realized that I had to break the pattern.

  “So I went into therapy not meaning to get off cocaine,” Laura laughs again, “and immediately I got off cocaine. Therapy was all about me getting healthy. And I was absolutely determined to get healthy. So I worked on it. It was hard to stop doing cocaine, but not all that hard. Not really. I’ve always given up things like that. When I gave up smoking, I gave it up fast. First I was smoking and then I wasn’t smoking. So I gave up cocaine fast. I never got whipped by anybody after Jeffrey. It was just something I did because of what we were together. I still wanted real men, strong men, who were dominant. But I didn’t need to get rid of any more pain. I got rid of enough.

  “I remember that I just said to myself, ‘I’m not going to do these things anymore. Never again.’

  “And I was off cocaine. And I was done with being whipped. That was it. No more. Except in my mind when I masturbate.”

  Epilogue: Only the dead know Brooklyn

  Early autumn 1983

  A few months after Laura, I got inspired to change my life and find a nice girl, preferably Jewish, and maybe get married or at least achieve some kind of Certified Normality. I needed the absolution that only I could give myself by leading a less perverted life.

  I wouldn’t find a nice Jewish girl in Goyimville where I lived way out in the country so I had to figure out another way. I’d heard that the Village Voice personals were a great place to find romance. I even knew a couple that met that way. It seemed pretty easy. I wrote ads for a living. I’d take myself on as the client. I was determined to meet some regular women. Not crazies. Not hookers. Not cokeheads. I wanted to prove to myself I could enjoy healthy sex again. Well, at least moderately healthy sex. Maybe not vanilla but cherry vanilla.

  And where was the line? Having a whip in my hand was across the line. Was a playful spank over the edge? Too many women liked to be spanked for me to go on the spanking wagon. I was a sinner looking for redemption faced with the common question every addict faces: How do I make a new life? How do I make a life without drugs? How do I make a life without gambling? How do I live without alcohol? And for me, how do I live without the adrenaline rush of S&M?

  Would I need to be the alcoholic who has to completely give up alcohol? The heroin junkie who can’t even smoke a joint once a year? Gambling, alcohol, and heroin are best left completely alone. I was more like the obese person who still needs to eat, just not to excess. I don’t want to give up sex; I just want to take the violence out of it.

  My parents raised me to marry a nice Jewish girl and deep inside me I had that notion, too. But this always worked better as a concept than a reality. Not many Jewish women were tall, thin and cheekboned unless their fathers had already married and converted a gentile with dominant genes or their great-great-grandmother had been raped by a Cossack.

  I’d met a few full-blooded both-sides-for-generations tall slinky Jewish brunettes and even one blonde—a gorgeous, natural blue-eyed blonde Jewess who could have passed in Germany during World War II—but they were hardly ever demure and I like demure. The dictionary says demure means “disinclined to obtrude oneself.” And obtrude means “to take usually unwarranted advantage.” That says it for me. I always thought Jewish girls would make better business partners than wives. But throughout my life I intermittently kept up the search, and I was about to make another attempt.

  The Village Voice might introduce me to more bohemian, less materialistic Jewish girls. It was worth the try. I wrote:

  “Healthy fit brave & witty single Jewish male with riverbank cabin. 36, 6,' 175 lbs. In NYC weekly. Seeks tall trim Jewish female for passion, laughter & lasting relationship. Must send photo.”

  I filled out the form, sent in the ad, and waited anxiously till the issue came out. Then I bought a copy and read my ad maybe 240 times over the next three days. I liked it. It was tight and spoke of someone of serious intent with enough means for a country abode without mentioning money. The six feet, 175 pounds was a lie by half an inch and four pounds but I was close. The brave and witty part came from Norman Mailer, who wrote: “A hero exhibits a consecutive set of brave and witty self-creations.” If I have a credo, that’s it. Not that I always live up to it.

  A surprising total of forty-seven responses came the first week. I opened them up as they came in but made no judgments until my mailbox had its first empty day and I had a total of seventy-eight replies.

  Triage. Two piles. Potential and Fireplace.

  All the letters, twenty-two of them, without photos went first. I might have missed the Jewish Wife of the Millennium but I had asked for a photo so I mistrusted or deemed too timid, aesthetically challenged, or a Luddite those who didn’t have a photo or wouldn’t send one. All the replies with pictures that made me squirm or wince, seventeen of them, went into the fireplace pile. Then all that were more than two pages, both sides, went into the fireplace unless the photo was simply outstanding—and there was only one of these.

  One of the fireplace letters was only one page but I couldn’t make out a single word including her name or phone number. Another one with a decent-looking photo of a very thin girl had ketchup stains on it and I figured she might be bulimic.

  Then I threw out any (thirteen more) tha
t were not Jewish unless the photo especially caught my eye and none did. Any that telegraphed psychosis, or mentioned their shrink or their mother or Thorazine or Stellazine went next.

  I got down to about a dozen potentials. Three of them, who sent only head shots and said they were 5'3" or under and 140 pounds or over went next. Any woman who sends just a headshot and says she is 5'3" and 140 is at the most 5'2" and at least 150.

  Three more were burned just on strange vibes. One that went into the fireplace was an outstanding photo of a Jane Fonda look-a-like in a bikini that to my dismay was accompanied by a letter that sounded like it had been written by a man. Another went on way too long about guys who hurt her and used her and I thought she might be hungry for revenge. The third letter just smelled weird.

  I finished with five possibles. Two I spoke with briefly but we had nothing to say to each other. Fireplace.

  One who sent half a torn photograph looked both pretty and hot on her Bahamas vacation wearing a sexy one-piece bathing suit. Great tits, a real waist, longish legs, good muscle tone, warm smile. She wrote flirty elegant prose. I called and she was fun, and overtly sexual. But she had a high-pitched voice, not whiny, just torturous to listen to. Automatic disqualifier.

  With the last two I had decent flowing conversations punctuated with laughter. Beth claimed to be not only Jewish but bat mitzvahed. She sent two photos of herself, which I thought was quite thorough. Tall with a large Aryan forehead and what appeared to be natural blonde hair, she was all dressed up in one photo, I think for a summer wedding, in a flashy strapless with lots of healthy tanned flesh and lovely boobs. The other photo was one of her skiing which spoke of athletic prowess and muscle tone. In both photographs she looked terrific.

  I could tell from Beth’s photos that either her father was one of those men who had married and converted a gentile with dominant genes or her Jewish mother had married a concentration camp guard and converted him, or there was a Cossack somewhere up her family tree.