Laura Meets Jeffrey (2 page)

F
oreword

Norman Mailer

B
etween the appearance of the Pill in the late '60s and the first onspread of AIDS in the '80s, there was an opening—call it a broad highway—into a wide-open world of sexual experiment and laissez-faire promiscuity.

A great many Americans went off on a non-stop gymkhana of libido exercises and group excursions. Jeffrey Michelson's book captures the heart of that fifteen-year period with a directness and candor that lifts his work above the directly pornographic.

The result is most readable and, considering his own involvement, surprisingly objective and funny.

A subtle pathos mixes with an unquenching optimism and the result—no matter what a plethora of the salacious we have here—is perversely—dare I say it?—Uplifting!

The difference between writing and literature is agreeable style and irony. This book has both.

I
ntroduction

Legs M
c
Neil

Jeffrey Michelson has achieved the impossible—he has written about extreme sex in an objective, factual and funny way—with a raging hard-on—yet he's neither bragging nor a jerk about it, and writing about sex is one of the hardest things in the world to get right and not sound like an asshole.

Michelson's articulate style, like a veteran sportscaster enthusiastically calling out the play-by-plays with candor, humor and an unerring eye for all the details, invites the readers to stand over the bed and observe all these debaucheries, smell the sheets after the deed is done and not have to get any of the mess on themselves.

Be warned: This is a dirty book, an odd romantic S&M love story bathed in bodily fluids.

And be invited: This is one of the best-written nonfiction works I've ever read.

As Norman Mailer pointed out in his foreword, there was a very short window in world history when it was safe most of the time to have indiscriminate sex with anonymous partners without having to worry about unwanted pregnancies, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, or AIDS.

Penicillin was the first breakthrough; before the invention of penicillin, people died or went insane from “social diseases.” And with the advent of the Pill in the early '60s—the first modern form of birth control—this duo created, for about twenty years, true sexual freedom for anyone daring enough to experiment. Then came herpes and AIDS in the '80s and the window closed.

Thank the Lord someone finally had the balls to write down those swinging times, because I don't think future generations would ever believe the stuff that happened in those good old days. It came and it went just like that and I'm not sure that window will ever open again, at least not while my dick is still working.

LAURA MEETS JEFFREY traps that era's Zeitgeist and though other books document that time, none are as sexy and make you wish you were part of it more than this one. It took Michelson over thirty years of separation from that period to look back at a man he no longer was and have the comfort of neutral insight to write about it.

Laura—Jeffrey's object of desire, lust and obsession—was truly the woman of most men's dreams. The only complaint from her lips was the demand for “More!” I knew her and like most men, and many women, I wanted her. I knew Jeffrey and Laura socially but didn't know Laura was a hooker. If I had known, that would have been money I would have spent.

Surrounding our unknown libertines are some of the era's biggest icons: John & Yoko—who kick-started Jeffrey's design career; Jeffrey's boxing nemesis Ryan O'Neal; plus Jerzy Kosinski, Al Goldstein, Tim Leary, and Norman and Norris Mailer... a sprinkling of famous porn stars; cameos by Steve Van Zandt, Little Richard and Bruce Springsteen; and a Whitehouse speechwriter or two. 

Reading about Laura is like watching one of those incredibly beautiful porn stars getting gang-banged, and thinking, “My God this woman is sooo beautiful; she doesn't have to be doing this!!!!”

Then it hits like a lightening bolt! The reason is even more sinful—she's doing it because she enjoys it!

Norman Mailer's suggestions to have Laura read Jeffrey's manuscript and add her side of the story is a wonderful literary, marketing and fact-checking device, a great parting gift from the old master to his friend. Laura completes the pictures and makes this book a richer history. She wrote some of her commentary, and most she gave as candid monologues of oral history. It was my pleasure to interview her several times and record her shameless well-aged reflections.

So enjoy the ride. Take a trip with Jeffrey Michelson and Laura Bradley, who had as much sex, drugs, and rock & roll as any two people who aren't Keith Richards!

It was sexual liberation primetime in New York City.

1

The world before Laura, part one

October 1979

The Legend of Laura Bradley starts with Sherry, and Sherry deserves a few minutes if just for her skin.

Sherry was a fiery blonde with thrilling-to-the-touch white buttermilk flesh and a rattlesnake disposition. We'd been seeing each other for about half a year, spending several days a week together, some in her apartment in New York City and some at my cabin in the foothills of the Poconos, even though we shared nothing except thermonuclear chemistry.

She was a former Texan—proud, loud and stubborn. But you can't really be a former Texan. You can only move out of Texas. To be a former Texan would be like growing up in Italy, moving out, and being formerly Italian.

Sherry's father had abandoned her mother and her when she was a baby, and Sherry was going to make sure all men received payback. At first I tried to understand her hostility, but I developed compassion fatigue.

I met Sherry one autumn night in 1979 in Manhattan when Freddy, my whoring buddy and I were driving around, smoking pot and deciding which whores to visit. I was between main squeezes, dating a lot, none of it great, and
garnishing
my sex life with the occasional hooker.

I saw a sparkling blonde vision in high heels and a white fur coat unsuccessfully hailing a cab at 23rd and Lexington. From one hundred yards away I wanted her. I pointed her out to Freddy and he said, “Wow! Let's offer her a ride.”

Freddy coached me while he hung a big U-turn on 23rd. “Take a deep breath and let it out before you start,” he said, “like snipers do.”

Freddy, forty-five, and twelve years older than me, was married and not looking for any relationship with a woman who wasn't his wife except those that lasted less than two hours, cost more than $50 but less than $200, involved women who were about half his age and were already wearing lingerie. As we pulled up he said, “Relax. We're two nice-looking middle-class Jewish guys in a big new Mercedes. We don't look like trouble. Just put on your game face.”

Game face. Not so easy. My heart had been broken less than a year before when my fiancé, after a three-and-a-half-year relationship, left me for another guy. I was past being a mess, just getting past missing her every moment but not even halfway out of the pain from rejection, so I was not oozing confidence.

I didn't do as well as many guys getting girls but I did okay. I wouldn't classify myself as good-looking: I'm too Semitic, my nose is big and my forehead is a little too caveman. But I did have some decent attributes for a bright Jewish kid from Boston with lots of energy: I was just under six feet tall with broad shoulders, I had a healthy curly dark brown Jewfro, and even though I carried five, ten pounds too many, I was in decent shape. I was an amateur boxer, very amateur, but a real weekend warrior.

In the Penis Department, I was a notch bigger than average according to
Cosmopolitan
and
Playboy
but only half a notch larger than what I saw as average in the gym showers, a notch or two smaller than some of the guys, and three to four notches smaller than the salamis you see in porn films. There were some women who liked my hippie/biker/rabbi look, but most of the women who would get naked with me did so for other reasons.

It's said that men fall in love with what they see and women fall in love with what they hear. Thank God, since I wasn't blessed with the gift of handsome, at least I got the gift of gab. And once in bed, if a girl is into talking dirty, I'm DJ Eros with sex rap, play-by-play, color commentary, and fantasy scenarios. I love a dirty audio track. Plus I love to direct in bed. I love telling women what to do sexually and many crave to be told. I am a natural dominant and submissives need that.

Another gift—and one that only shows up after the deal has been at least opened and on the road to closing—is that it takes me forever to climax. As far as orgasms go I was an ugly duckling. In my late teens I suffered from an affliction: I was horny enough for three guys and I got hard as a rock, would fuck, stay hard forever, and not achieve a climax. I couldn't come fucking. I couldn't come being sucked. I would have to stop fucking and have the girl touch me or suck my balls while I jerked off. Maybe I jerked off too well and that's the reason why I had the problem.

This condition was hell to me but a gift to the many girls with boyfriends cursed oppositely with premature ejaculation. Some times I'd be passed around from a girlfriend to her girlfriend as if I was something between a miracle cure and a circus act. By my mid-twenties this problem worked itself out but it was still difficult for me to climax fucking. It took a long time, sometimes thirty or forty-five minutes of concerted effort, sometimes longer. I was also, and not to my choosing, the horniest man I ever met, read about or heard of. I didn't sign up for it: it was just the way my hormones lined up.

The main reason I pulled women is that I truly love women. There's the old sexist saw that if girls didn't have vaginas there would be a bounty on their heads. I disagree. Even if you couldn't fuck them, I would still wander over to their caves occasionally just to smell them, look at their bodies, and listen to them talk. They don't work the same way men do, and I find that a constant source of amusement. Often exasperating but seldom boring.

Okay. Game face. Overrule my emotions with my intellect. Ready to bring it. If self-confidence has its own pheromones, for the first time in a long time mine were turned on. If you're not afraid to lose, you are more likely to win. I was ready to win.

I'm starboard, nearest her, as she continues to wave her arm although there were no cabs in sight. I lean out the window and say with a blend of warmth and confidence, “Where are you going? Can we give you a lift?”

She bends over, cautiously looks all over inside Freddy's Mercedes, checks us out like a seasoned detective, pauses, then smiles. Up close I want her even more. She is thirty-something with an air of sophistication and big blue eyes, high forehead, striking blonde locks, and a cheerleader smile. She is a dish.

“OK. I'm going to the UN Plaza Hotel. Can you do that?” Her Texan accent completes the package. She's more than a dish; she's a peach.

“Sure,” I said. I jump out, open the back door and when she settles into the back seat, I ask what she's doing tonight.

“Going out on a date with a diplomat.”

“Is he your boyfriend?” I ask.

“Just someone I see from time to time.”

I ask her lots of questions about herself, the most seductive tack a man can take. She's a nurse. She loves her dog. She lives in a small studio in a fancy building on Lexington near Gramercy Park. She was a beauty queen in Beaumont, Texas. At the hotel I walk her into the lobby. I ask for her number and to my great surprise she gives it to me.

Freddy and I continued on to the Upper West Side where we were entertained by two lovely co-eds he knew who were earning next semester's tuition. We both contributed $100 to furthering their education, a decent sum in 1979 when street hookers were $10 to $25.

I called Sherry the following week and on that phone call we had our very first argument. She wanted to go hear country music. I wanted to go dancing. How much more of a warning sign do two people need? I wanted to get into her skirt but what was her reason for staying on the phone? We compromised. If I got a limo she'd disco.