New York Echoes 2

by Warren Adler

  “She something?” Ziggy asked.

  We all agreed just to be polite. She might not have been my choice, but she was, after all, a girl and that was something. Ziggy winked at us and squeezed one of her tits.

  “Biggest tits in Long Beach,” Ziggy said with a phony air of pride. Then he kissed her on the cheek. All Big Judy did was smile, but she never took Ziggy’s hand off her tit.

  We covered up our surprise with winks.

  “Bet you’d all like to see what they look like?” Ziggy said. Again he kissed Big Judy. It was a kind of kiss of reassurance. The fact was that I was a bit embarrassed to be watching. Maybe the rest of us felt that, too, but not one turned his eyes away.

  “These are my friends, doll. My best friends,” Ziggy said with his usual sincerity. “One for all and all for one. Right, guys?”

  We must have grunted assent, for he was unbuttoning Big Judy’s blouse and she was saying nothing in protest, not even trying to stop him.

  “This is going to be one big treat for my friends, isn’t it, Judy? Ain’t she the most beautiful thing you ever saw?”

  “The best,” Heshy said. Like the rest of us, he was bug-eyed, watching Ziggy open the girl’s blouse and show us her tits encased in a big pink brassiere.

  “Just look at this one,” Ziggy said, maneuvering her left breast outside the cup. No question about its size with a big luscious nipple in a pinkish circle. It didn’t hang either but stood straight out, big and fat, the kind we dreamed about.

  There in front of us, Ziggy sucked the nipple of her left breast until it stood out like a big red finger. We were all struck dumb, of course. No question but that we had all grown hard-ons. If Big Judy was embarrassed, she showed no signs. She hadn’t even blushed. Nor did I get the impression that she did this often. She just seemed too ordinary to be a whore.

  “Show them both, doll,” Ziggy said. He winked at us and sure enough Big Judy, who had been sitting down in a chair next to Ziggy, stood up, unhooked her brassiere, and stuck them out. Two beauties. No question about it. She could have been no more than nineteen and the tits were still firm and white and without networks of veins running just beneath the surface.

  “God damn,” Jackie said.

  “The best,” Hesh said, mesmerized with the sight.

  “They’re the real thing, aren’t they, Judy?” Judy nodded slightly, although she seemed neutral about the matter. It was Ziggy who showed the pride.

  “Go on guys, feel ’em,” Ziggy said. “Judy’s a great sport and you’re all my friends.” He stood up and kissed her full on the mouth, teasing one of her nipples with his fingers. “And any friend of mine is automatically a friend of Judy’s.”

  I know one thing. I loved looking at those big tits. When she came my way, I reached out and fondled them, but I hadn’t the guts, as Heshy had shown, to take one of them in my mouth.

  Everyone got their feel and when Big Judy had made her rounds, Ziggy kissed her once again and addressed the group.

  “Look, you guys deal me out the first few hands,” he said. “Judy and I are going to go over to the other room and discuss some very major subjects.” Again he winked as he led the bare-breasted woman to the bedroom.

  Hesh dealt the cards for seven-card stud, but I can tell you that none of us really had our mind on the game. Besides, there was no door between where we were playing and the bedroom, although the double bed wasn’t totally visible. In order to see what was going on you had to get up and walk toward the middle of the room.

  Hesh dealt and during that first hand, I can assure you that we all got up at least once to get a gander at what was happening in the bedroom. It was very distracting. We managed to get through three hands when Ziggy came out of the bedroom alone.

  He sat down on one of the chairs and, in all seriousness, announced:

  “Now here’s the way we’re going to do this,” he began. “You go in to see Judy after you deal. Stay as long as you want but not so you miss your next deal.”

  “You’re kidding?” Hesh said, speaking for all of us. We knew he wasn’t kidding. We also knew that there would be no hassle. Judy knew what she had to do.

  “For free?” one of the other guys asked.

  “Of course, for free,” Ziggy said. “Judy’s no whore. She just likes to be friendly.” He smiled and held down a laugh with a hand over his mouth. When he had calmed down he said: “The most important thing to remember is to always treat her with respect.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Jackie said.

  “You can’t deny the evidence,” Ziggy said.

  “I just dealt,” Hesh said.

  “Be my guest,” Ziggy said with a half-bow from the table and a flourish of his arm, which pointed in the direction of the bedroom.

  “Do I use a rubber?” Hesh asked. I could tell he was a little nervous. Who wouldn’t be? I was nervous as hell.

  “Your call,” Ziggy said. “Depends on your control.” He shrugged and chuckled.

  Hesh left the table and I deliberately folded a fairly good hand so that I could fake going to the bathroom. But my real reason was to see what Hesh was up to. He was up to it, all right, a little guy climbing up that big young woman.

  When he came out he looked like the cat that swallowed the canary.

  “That’s one nice girl,” he said, taking his place at the table.

  By the time the deal fell to me, the others had already taken their turns. It seemed like part of the routine of the game. After they had done Judy, the others seemed unusually relaxed and immediately got their heads into the game. As for me, I was still nervous. I wasn’t sure what to expect and there was, after all, something sleazy about a gangbang, especially if you were at the tail end. I frankly admit that I had been to a whorehouse once in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but that was different. You weren’t so blatantly confronted by the fact that you were just one of a gang of men that had been there before you.

  My mind also was not on the game. I was down about twenty bucks, which in those days, made a difference. My salary at the paper was only sixty bucks a week.

  “Your turn, Willy,” Hesh said. From his tone I knew he was impatient and ready for seconds and I got up from the table and handed over the deck to Ziggy who had not dealt yet.

  To tell you the truth, the idea of doing Judy in sequence like this was not to my liking. I suppose I could have declined. No one was twisting my arm. Maybe I was afraid that my not going would somehow diminish me in the eyes of my friends. But I doubted it.

  There was a serious side to my relationship with Jackie and Hesh. We really weren’t afraid to share our dreams for the future and often as we three lay in bed in that bedroom in the Den of Iniquity, we would often exchange confidences about what we wanted to do with our lives and how we saw the future.

  All three of us were sons of immigrant families, although all of us were born in the States. We knew about keeping our eye on the ball and getting ahead and becoming a success. But I swear to you underlying all this was still that thing that I spoke about at the beginning, falling in love. It wasn’t manly, I suppose, to talk about it and, frankly, we skirted around the subject. But it was the God’s truth. We all wanted to find someone to love and love us and have kids and that was as much a part of being successful as making money and realizing whatever other secret dreams we had.

  I’m not saying that any of this was going through my mind when I went to the bedroom to see Judy. I don’t know what was going through it. She was lying there, naked as the day she was born, staring up at the ceiling, her big tits like giant sunny side up eggs on her chest, her black pearly triangle of hair all shiny against the smooth white of her naked thighs.

  When I came in she looked at me and smiled. She had good teeth and brown eyes and although her hair was mussed, it picked up a kind of halo from the way the sun peeked through the window behind her
head.

  “Hi, Judy,” I whispered shyly.

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Larry.”

  She held out her hand.

  “Nice to meet you, Larry.”

  I smiled. I was more than a bit flustered and not a little hesitant. She must have sensed this, for she winked at me and hoisted herself up on the bed and reached out with both hands to undo my belt buckle. I was ready, no doubt about it.

  “You want to wear a rubber?” she asked.

  That puzzled me a little bit. Was she really willing to risk pregnancy or was I supposed to pull out just beforehand? What women did to protect themselves in those days was a bit of a mystery to me. But the thing I didn’t want to happen was for her to become pregnant with my child. To be honest, it wasn’t because I was worried about the consequences to her. I was more worried about having my sperm make a baby with someone whom I did not love, nor did I, frankly, feel was worthy of my love.

  “Rubber,” I stammered. In those days the word condom actually seemed dirtier than the word rubber.

  She rolled it over me gently using busy little fingers that felt pretty good. Then she reached out with both her arms and drew me closer to her for a long soul kiss. She put her tongue deep in my mouth and I did the same with my tongue.

  I wasn’t thinking about the guys that went before me. Judy became for me a kind of sexual symbol for all women. She was gentle and giving and, despite what had gone on, she had a smell similar to the fresh ocean. With pants down to the ankles I climbed up on the bed and got comfortable at the right angle and she helped me head for home.

  “Feel good, Larry?” she asked. I was surprised she had remembered my name.

  “You?” I asked.

  “Ummm,” she said as she began to gyrate her hips.

  Then something happened that came to me as a surprise. I had put my lips on hers, one hand kneaded a nipple of one of her breasts and I was pumping slow and easy trying to make it last. I must have had it in my mind to make a good sexual impression. Something macho like that. After all, she had a good basis of comparison with my best friends.

  The damned thing melted away like chocolate on a hot day. I couldn’t imagine why. One minute it was up to the mark, ready for total action, the next it was gone.

  “Something wrong, Larry?” she whispered in my ear.

  “Maybe the damned rubber,” I muttered.

  “Then take it off,” she said gently.

  I did and she tried to get things moving again with her hand.

  “I can use my mouth,” she said. As I say there was nothing phony or inhibited about Big Judy. She was as nice and gentle as can be. But I could tell that nothing she could do would be of any use. Such abrupt calamities happened to me later on in life; not many times, but enough to know that nothing, but nothing on earth, can do any good at those moments. Nothing.

  “Never mind,” I told her. Perhaps she caught some hostility in my tone. It was then that she said:

  “I hope you’ll still love me.”

  I didn’t know what to say in response. But I got my pants on and zipped up pretty fast and without looking at her went back to the game.

  Nobody paid much attention when I returned. Banging Judy was becoming old hat. I did the best I could to hide my sense of failure or was it rage. I wasn’t sure. I tell you I was not happy with myself and not a little worried. Perhaps this experience would scar me for life, I thought, trigger a permanent impotence. My imagination ran rampant. A young man depends upon his cock to function on demand. I wanted a wife, kids. I was very depressed and it showed in my game.

  “I’ll pass,” Ziggy said when it came his turn again to pay Judy a visit. Hell, for Ziggy it rained pussy and this was no novelty.

  But Hesh wasn’t one to pass it up. Neither was Jackie, although one of the others in the game passed. Then it became my turn again.

  I was very frightened. I’ll admit it. Another failure could spell psychological ruin. Or so I thought. Yet, despite everything, a strange feeling had come over me as I played the game and watched those who still wanted to visit Judy. By then, the takers had evaporated. They were more intent on the game. All but me who was the big loser. I think I was down nearly forty bucks. But somehow I got it into my head that only Judy could truly save me from a life of impotency and failure.

  With some trepidation I went into the bedroom. Judy was waiting just as I had seen her before. Only the light in the room had changed, the setting sun giving her skin a pinkish glow. She moved over and patted the space beside her on the bed.

  Fully dressed, I sat down beside her.

  “I need you to love me, Larry,” Judy whispered. “I really do.” I think that’s what she said or words to that effect. I can’t remember my reaction, only that I wanted to react like a normal red-blooded American boy.

  I repressed a desire to say some pretty taunting things. Hell, she had been laid, relayed and parlayed, maybe a dozen times in the last few hours. That was just sex. Not love. She must have been some kind of a nympho to have no respect for herself and do this kind of thing. Or maybe she was some retard that Ziggy had stumbled over in his travels.

  As you can see I was getting very judgmental and nasty-minded. Notice I wasn’t judging myself or the others for taking advantage of this poor dumb woman, but blaming it on her.

  It was then that the anger that was growing inside of me suddenly seeped out of me, like air out of a big balloon that had taken all the air it was going to take. I looked at her, my eyes meeting hers. I was sure she was seeing something true in me and I was seeing something true in her. Call it a revelation, epiphany or whatever. But I knew then that Judy was just as scared as I was. Of the future, of failing, and, above all, of not being loved and loving someone else, missing out on love. When all the bullshit goes down, that was, I knew then and I know now, the number one thing in life.

  “And I need you to love me, Judy,” I whispered, turning my head, kissing her, deep with longing for something that I was scared of missing as much as she was. We held each other tightly for a long time and it soon became obvious that I had nothing to fear in the potency department. I didn’t wear a rubber either and I didn’t pull out.

  We loved each other in those brief moments, clinging, tangled together in a tight knot, feeling the kind of irrepressible joy in each other that came not only from the body but from somewhere deep inside us both. I’m not sure she felt exactly as I felt, but it sure seemed like it.

  “I love you,” I whispered in her ear.

  “And I love you,” she whispered in mine.

  I didn’t want it to end. I forgot about the game. I’m sure I stayed past my deal. It didn’t matter. I’m not sure I ever loved anyone as deeply or felt its return so keenly.

  “Hey, Larry, it’ll fall off,” Hesh called from the table. I remember I heard some laughter and the clink of money. It had stopped raining and was getting dark. The game, I knew, was over.

  Judy and I got dressed quickly, but before I went back to the boys, I held her in my arms one more time.

  “I’ll never forget you,” I told her.

  I never did.

  Peeling The Onion

  “Let’s peel the onion,” Myra Schwartz would suggest to her husband Harry with a wink, mostly on Fridays, after a couple of martinis had taken the edge off her frenetic, increasingly nightmarish week as principal of PS 109 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

  It was their very private, very personal, very sexy ritual of seduction. Both in their late forties, they had been married for nearly ten years. It was Myra’s second marriage and Harry’s first and they had no children. Their relationship was the principal priority of their lives. Their apartment on West 81st between Columbus and Broadway was their fortress and once inside, they raised the drawbridge and were quite content to spend all of their time together.

  Like many apa
rtments in New York, the living room faced the street and the bedroom faced a back alley that looked out on the rear windows of another apartment house. Such proximity was an acceptable standard of living in the stacked-up space of crowded Manhattan.

  The work week for Myra and Harry, who was an accountant, was tension-filled, time-consuming and required enormous concentration and discipline, and there was little room for light-hearted recreational adventures and seduction games until Friday evening rolled around, except in tax season when Harry worked weekends to get the job done for his tax-averse clients.

  For Myra, running an inner city school fighting to stay within the new educational standards set by the Board of Education required a superhuman effort to stay focused in a day filled with bureaucratic bickering and backbiting by frustrated teachers and numerous students from homes of indifferent parents. Still, Myra had retained the hard core of her original idealism to educate young people and generally devote herself to the betterment of young minds.

  She had started her career teaching first grade in the mean schools of Harlem, loving the challenge, and eventually working herself up to principal. She did miss the hands-on work as a teacher but had subjugated that skill to work on the larger stage, administering and inspiring other teachers to greater effort to educate their charges. She loved her work and was well respected by her colleagues and those in charge of the system.

  It was, she admitted to herself, getting harder and harder to do the job, but she soldiered on with optimism and good humor, encouraging, cajoling, persuading her staff and their wards to strive to meet the hard standards which she deemed necessary to set her students on the path to compete in the real world.

  With good cheer and cautious diplomacy, she had reached a level of respect and admiration and was careful to maintain her role with, above all, dignity and compassion. It was, of course, hard work, which she often likened to existing in a pressure cooker.

  But once inside their fortress, she and Harry could toss away the cares of the outside world and since they needed no one else but each other, they could revel in their private world, free spirits responsible only to themselves. Few activities gave them more pleasure than the sexual fantasy games they had devised which they called “peeling the onion.”