Laura Meets Jeffrey

by Jeffrey Michelson

  And the better news was that I wasn’t going to jail and I wouldn’t have to be some big, gamy skinhead Neo-Nazi’s anal slave. At least not now.

  Afterword

  Since then

  About a year after we split up and a few months after George died, Laura changed her life and gave up coke. The next year she gave up whoring and studied interior design. The year after that she was not only clean and sober, but, get this, celibate. She said she had to do that to prepare herself for the love of her life she knew would come. Then she met him.

  Today, twenty-seven years later, she’s a healthy happily married, drug-free mother of three with a successful business and a beautiful country home. Her husband knows much of her history, including my part, and sees her past as a step she had to take to meet him. Whenever we’ve been in each other’s company he’s been warm and at ease.

  Laura and I went through some kind of sexual healing that although bizarre, did lead each of us to external positive results and an inner therapeutic equanimity. Her submission to me, a beautiful sex slave princess adoring me, offering her pain as a sign of her devotion, forever erased some parts of my insecurities and raised my confidence level and not just with women. Laura, having divested herself of a physical manifestation of her psychic pain, evolved to the end of punishing herself and drug abuse, and forever gave herself a lighter load to carry and paved the way to her place in marriage, motherhood and as a successful businesswoman.

  Laura is one of those people who can do whatever she sets out to do. She wanted coke and whipping and gangbangs and had that. Before that she wanted to be a Sufi vegetarian celibate acid freak and she did that. She was a great girlfriend for three and a half years. She was sweet and entertaining which is why Norman and Norris and Legs and my parents and all my friends loved her.

  She was a great whore and now is a great mother and wife and cook and housekeeper and she’ll be a great grandmother when she gets there. Her design business varies with the jobs and seasons but sometimes she has twenty-two people on her payroll. She is a winner.

  A few years after AIDS made the headlines Laura and I both got tested several times and passed. Laura took her first test just after she became pregnant with her first child. She called me when she got her cherished negative. “I guess we got it all in under the wire, didn’t we Jeffrey?” she said. “Yes,” I said, “We did.”

  * * *

  I was one of the horniest men I ever met. I’m not anymore. All the stuff in this book happened twenty-five to forty years ago. Today I’m just average for my age. Maybe a little bit higher. Hormone levels fluctuate with age and since hormones often reveal themselves as thoughts, there are some thoughts I don’t have any more and many I have much less often.

  For all my high hormone years, the real power behind the curtain, Testosterone Rex, turned me into its amoral endocrinological bitch and forced me to hunt for orgasms every day. It wasn’t something I chose or that could be turned off. Lots of times, especially when I was alone and horny and had jerked off three or four times and the monkey was still on my back I daydreamed that there was an off switch I could throw.

  There were, however, magic golden periods, like the apogee of my testosterone when I collided with Laura, an erotic outlier whose libido matched mine. I never once looked for the off switch.

  Neither Laura nor I were involved with heavy S&M before we met each other and neither of us ever got into it with anyone else after we split. Neither of us have any residual shame or regrets or guilt. We are grateful we got to live our fantasies and make it out alive.

  I suppose if Laura had died or ended up with mental or physical incapacitation, or we were shooting drugs and one or both of us got Hep C, if we had perished in a libidinous Gotterdammerung, then my retrospection would be different. But we both landed on our feet, we thrived and we earned the luxury of nostalgia.

  After Laura, my life went in other directions with the same maniacal intensity. At thirty-seven, in 1984, I replaced Laura with a bass guitar and taught myself how to play. Badly.

  I published a high-end hard-core erotic photography book shot in London, Paris and Los Angeles and got arrested for pandering while in L.A. The police were trying to skirt around the First Amendment and arrest pornographers under a Draconian anti-pimping law that carried a minimum of three years incarceration.

  In London I looked up my ex-wife Tisha whom I hadn’t seen in sixteen years and we fell in love again. Sometimes you just need a decade or two of space to work things out. I took the music I was writing and put together a band in London. I invented a publicity prone character, Max Gelt, Miami Beach deli owner. In my alter ego story Max invested with a group of English friends in a London rock band and was touring around with them when the lead singer broke his leg and Max filled in and the band loved him and he left the deli and his wife and two kids to become the lead singer of Max and The Broadway Metal Choir. (Google it. I found one of my albums for sale on Amazon UK for £8!) It was musical guerrilla theatre performance art and I was Max.

  I got adopted by some great musicians who loved the concept. I even hired a bass guitarist because I was writing parts I couldn’t play and I wanted to concentrate on being the lead singer. I didn’t have a great voice but I had some character.

  While I was Jeffrey in the USA, I was Max in England to the band, who all helped promote the fiction, and to the press, who never saw through it. I mean who would make up a lie about being a delicatessen owner? We got signed to a middle level indie label, Powerstation, and put out an album that went somewhere but not far enough for me to get a major deal and profitably continue.

  Tisha saved my erotic life. She made my transition from kinky S&M to regular alpha male sex easy. Her emotional warmth, refined aristocratic attitude and her enlightened aromatherapist alternative lifestyle smoothed my way to the hard edge of hot but not decadent sex.

  Tisha loved England and wouldn’t leave. I was an American who knew what real food and real weather were like. This intractability brought me back home alone again in 1987. Tish and I remain friends to this day and forever.

  The California Supremes overturned the pandering law as it related to pornography so I was off that hook. I needed a new gig, especially to pay off my lawyers (it cost me over $100,000 to be found not only “not guilty,” but as the court papers said, “factually innocent”). I fell into direct response TV commercials and infomercials, where I made a nice living and which grew because while direct response doesn’t get much respect in the production world, it’s the only place where directors get royalties if the product sells.

  A one-percent royalty doesn’t seem like much. It’s just $.75 on every $75 order for a steam iron or electric slicer or dicer or new design floor cleaner, but if a product sells $1,000,000 every quarter for a year or two, and some do, you get sent a check for $10,000 every three months for work you already did. A friend of mine, working on the first ab-exercise machine, a mammoth hit in the ’90s made one percent of $120,000,000 over two years. That’s eight checks averaging about $150,000 every three months. Sweet.

  A few months after I came back to my cabin, one of my best friends, a gorgeous, brilliant French artist and model, Juliette, came over to visit me for a month and we fell, if not into love, then at least way deep into friends and lovers. We lived with each other for four to seven months a year at my cabin, at her flat in Brighton and when either of us was working in Paris or L.A. One of Juliette’s most remarkable erotic traits was sucking bisexuality out of women who might have thought about it but never expressed it so I was the lucky recipient of lots of waking up to a female on each side. While not being “in love,” I didn’t lack for sex, which allowed me to concentrate on growing my business.

  In 1990 I married Bunny, a horsewoman, a tall, blonde shiksa goddess, and the chemistry of romance was back. I am sad to report that she was not bisexual and was very traditional about marriage and monogamy. But I really loved her, my hormones were cooling down, I was willing to tr
y monogamy and we had very compatible country lifestyles. Around the same time Juliette met a guy in France and moved there and we drifted apart.

  Bunny taught me to ride when I was forty-eight in 1994. Within three years of all-weather riding more days than not, Bunny and I became a noted cross-country team winning scores of ribbons and trophies at local Hunter/Pace and Paper Chase events riding our Tennessee Walking Horses. We bought a ranch for our five horses, which included a giant—an 18h2 2,000-pound Belgian that was going to be dogfood until I outbid the butcher by a penny at $.65 a pound. He was broke to ride and drive and soon I bought a cart and was doing both.

  Bunny and I stayed together for seventeen monogamous years until 2007 when we divorced. In one of the few amicable divorces I know, we split the ranch and kept the team together.

  Then I got back with, Tada! Andrea. My partner of 300 orgies and I, now in late 2011, forty years after that night at my first orgy when we met while eating carrots at the snack table, are heading toward our sixth anniversary. Andrea and I built a house on the ranch and share the stables and pastures with Bunny, our friend and neighbor.

  Juliette, single again, and with Andrea’s liberal erotic blessing, visits us for a few weeks every couple of months. Polyamory, no surprise, suits ex-swingers.

  Andrea enjoys continued relationships and occasional vacations with a few of her ex-lovers and sometimes I travel to Paris to hang out in fancy hotels with Juliette, who paints and lives in Normandy. My goal in Paris is to walk and fuck enough to burn off the cheeses and the croissants.

  On occasion you hear of men who remarry or get back with the same women one or more times but having done this three times I am one of only a handful of registered serial recyclers of lovers. We are a small cult who believe you must be decent at all times, no matter the circumstances or stage of a relationship, and never burn a bridge with anybody you ever adored.

  The history of this book

  In the late 1990s, as my testosterone ebbed—which gave me some free time—I wrote the first draft of an erotic memoir. My ex-boss, sparring partner, and friend Norman Mailer loved it. His agent loved it. Most editors hated it. Some wanted it but couldn’t get their editorial boards to agree. Nobody bought it. I put the book away and returned to my life making infomercials and competing on my Tennessee Walkers in cross-country equestrian events.

  But two or three times every year, Norman would urge me to finish the book. He’d give me editorial advice: cut certain characters, develop the Laura arc, avoid adverbs, read it out loud and edit with a brutal knife. A month before he died he suggested two methods to make my book publishable and to have the opportunity of financial success.

  The first option was to change the word “Memoir” to “Novel.”

  Changing this one word, he hypothesized, would allow editors to do two things: separate my ego from the main character’s, and not need to question my veracity. Norman knew I was truthful, but cautioned that others, in particular, editors, might not believe me.

  The second option was to give the finished book to my ex-girlfriend Laura, the main character, and let her tell her side of the story.

  During my last visit with Norman, a week before he died in November of 2007, he made me promise to finish this book.

  I began rewriting when I retired in February of 2009. Norman’s widow and my late friend, author Norris Mailer suggested I expand on my relationship with Laura, whom she and all the Mailers loved.

  “Tell a love story,” she said. I took her advice.

  A year later when my part was done, I chose Norman’s second option, and Laura agreed to reveal her side of the story in a series of interviews with pop culture oral historian, Legs McNeil.

  Acknowledgments A

  Thanks to Norman Mailer’s family for permission to reprint parts of “The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst” from Esquire (1993) and his interview from Puritan (1981).

  Thanks to Joanna Poncavage for her editorial perseverance, expertise and love.

  Thanks to all the people who helped make this book better:

  Norris Church Mailer, John Lotte, Paul Willistein,

  Richard Luksin-Cross, Tony Cardillo, Annick Portal,

  Arthur Powers, Robert Hoffman, and Jimmy Haskett.

  Thanks to Professor J. Michael Lennon for his early help, his later advice, and his line-by-line copy edit.

  Thanks to Legs McNeil for having faith in this project, his slash and burn editing, his interviews with Laura, the huge amount of time he donated to this project, and for not smoking in my house.

  And thanks to Laura for the wild ride then

  and for her courage now. —JM

  Acknowledgments B

  Ten things I learned from Norman Mailer

  Norman Mailer’s 1959 book, Advertisements For Myself, shocked me. I read it when I was sixteen in 1963. It is a collection of essays, fiction, polemics and autobiography, unfiltered to allow him to be seen equally as genius and fool, champion and clown. It was a kind of journalism I had never encountered; a mix of objective and subjective, a search for the truth no matter where it took him. It was the first journalism I ever read where the writer was a character in the story.

  In the way the quick-cut editing of Miami Vice and MTV would later change television and movies, Mailer’s book changed journalism, and laid the groundwork for what would be called the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and all who followed.

  Mailer’s 1965 novel, American Dream, also grabbed me. Flawed antihero Steven Rojack is a murderer, yet the reader cares about him. He’s a proto-Tony Soprano, and it’s no surprise that Norman not only liked The Sopranos but also considered it the television equivalent of The Great American Novel.

  Norman’s books alone would have only made me a fan.

  What raised him to hero was that he crossed over to celebrity. He was a two-fisted, bar-brawling tough guy Jewish intellectual, and the first to break the genteel mold of those like Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Norman Podhoretz and Isaac Singer. And while Arthur Miller, bless him, married Marilyn Monroe and helped to forever make Jewish intellectuals’ penises more attractive to beautiful gentile blondes, Norman gave young Jews like me pride in being physical as well cerebral.

  He was a cross between a longshoreman and a professor and as the military might of Israel’s self-defense force in 1948, 1956 and 1967 helped wipe away some of the stigma of my tribe as sheep walking into Nazi ovens, Norman gave Jewish boys license to be fighters and thinkers, poets and warriors at the same time. It may not have seemed much to non-Jews then or to Jews today, but it was big stuff and quite liberating to me over fifty years ago.

  I first met Norman when I was nineteen, in 1966.

  I came to understand that his intelligence wasn’t just a difference in quantity of brainpower: It was a difference in quality, a quantum change where a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind.

  To explain: Put a salad plate on top of a dinner plate. The circumference of the salad plate is the limits of mental abilities of a normal person, even a brilliant one.

  The larger dinner plate represents Norman. Now imagine a line running from twelve to six and another from nine to three. The twelve to six line represents kind and cruel and the nine to three line represents smart and stupid. Norman is bigger in every direction. Not only could he be smarter than you or I, he could be stupider; not only more kind but more cruel.

  Norman taught me how to box, sail and rock climb, as well as how to navigate though our language from the formal to the obscene. Norman was a great buddy to hang out with who happened to be an oracle.

  Here are ten things I took home from him in no particular order; some he’s told many people and some maybe just me:

  1. How to re-hydrate a stale bagel. Cut the bagel in half and finger paint the inside of the bagels with water and then toast normally. It works every time. I call it “Norman Mailerizing a bagel.”

  2. Be professional. Take your job seriously. No matter what mood N
orman was in, how drunk he got the night before (he stopped drinking to excess decades ago), whether he was fighting with a family member or someone else or even if he was feeling poorly, he dragged himself off to his studio and wrote if he wasn’t on vacation from writing. He always showed up.

  3. Do not allow self-pity. This is maybe the most useful thing he taught me. Self-pity can become an attractive melancholy comfort and you must avoid it. It’s one of the worst vices because it not only keeps you from altering a situation you need to change, it’s a magnet for other vices like gambling, alcohol and drugs. You can allow yourself sadness—with cause—for a certain time period but too long and/or too deep and it becomes self-pity.

  4. How to make an unkempt house look clean in ten minutes. One afternoon in the summer of 1967 Norman got a phone call that someone important was stopping by in ten minutes. Norman shouted to all of us to set everything we could at right angles. It works. Squaring everything off visually makes a place look neat.

  5. The best trick to making sure that what you write reads well is to speak the words out loud as you edit.

  6. The most important thing in a book or movie is mood and it has to flow like a river. This is maybe the second most important thing I learned from Norman.

  7. When writing, avoid adverbs, be scarce with adjectives, describe with nouns and verbs. Not so easy but I try.

  8. Good is the enemy of great. I love this one. Good is so near great it makes us settle. Don’t settle. Know the difference between good and great and if time and/or the money allow it—and it doesn’t always—go for great.

  9. How to get more comfortable in your own skin. When I was twenty-two and having a bad time after my first wife left me and went back to England I asked him how one gets more comfortable being alone. He said much of it can come from aiming for success and achieving success. You gain comfort doing the best you can.