Laura Meets Jeffrey (6 page)

7

Anal sex

Anal sex in all its forms is either the most disgusting thing you can imagine, and the anus is a place used only for elimination and to be avoided for all and any other purposes—or anal sex has a rightful place in the realm of pleasure, is way out there erotically and is a source of prodigious hedonistic euphoria.

I'm in the prodigious hedonistic euphoria club.

Some people, male or female, like the anus touched gently, some like it rough, some not at all. Some like it entered, some like to enter. Some like to lick or suck and some like to be licked and/or sucked. Just choosing one activity doesn't mean you can't play another.

On purpose I skipped a lot of anal antics, the ones with just men, all of them that have to do with cucumbers, zucchinis, fists, and anything with batteries or any that can only be done with a forklift.

Like oral sex, anal sex is pure sex, total recreational sex. The only thing it has to do with procreation is avoiding it. Many heterosexuals go through their entire lives without doing it or wanting it or thinking about it, and that's perfectly all right. For them.

Sodomy is a biblically proscribed act. It's still illegal—even for husbands and wives—in a dozen states. (Is there a marketing opportunity selling packaged tours to those states to married couples for the purpose of turning their sex into criminal activity they get away with?)

Anal sex is fundamental because, at the risk of committing a tautology, it's the fundament. (Fundament means “the anus,” as well as “the founding principle,” “the foundation.”) It's raw, lascivious, carnal, licentious, lewd, coarse, profane, bawdy, provocative, and wanton.

For health reasons I suggest you wash thoroughly, use mouthwash or vodka as an antiseptic, go slow in whatever direction you are heading into or is heading into you and avoid anything that smells bad and is obvious hygienic suicide.

Anal sex is as much about power as it is about sex. All the aphorisms about it show a demarcation of supremacy: “kiss my ass,” “he's an assfuck,” “he's an asshole,” “bugger you” (and all its buggerful variations), “I'm not going to bend over and take it up the ass,” “brownnose,” “eat shit,” and “don't drop the soap.”

The act physically necessitates submission on the part of the female or male bottom. The bottom has to let go and relax, open up and be taken. It's a power tool trip—and—here's the closing pitch for you boys—it is very tight, usually much tighter than a pussy and it feels—if not better than a pussy—then at least different enough to deserve its own brand name. It's a whole other place to explore when you want to go someplace else on the weekend.

Many women don't like it—that's a fact. On the other hand, most horny sluts come pre-packaged with anal “interest” bundled on their hard drives, and I have always been attracted to horny sluts.

A few select female gems actually prefer it. They are not only diamonds; they are D-color internally flawless. I have only met a few in my life. The one I remember most, Rochelle, would hustle me through all the preliminaries to get me to her back door as soon as possible. She was a California Jewish Princess, which is either ironic or obvious and I don't know which.

As far as rimming, licking and sucking assholes: Where else can you go farther if you want to give or get adoration? In the world of wild sex a prude is anyone who never sucked an asshole because that's the dividing line between aficionado and the truly committed.

Most really slutty females that go crazy on you in bed like to lick your ass. Almost all of them. Like they can't do enough. They suck your cock, they lick your balls, they make grunting noises and speed things up and lick and touch and kiss everywhere but especially your asshole. It's the center that the whole thing rotates around.

It's great as horny foreplay, treading transitions between orgasms, or after fucking as mellow down time.

The most amazing data point about assholes comes from an ex-girlfriend of mine who was Korean. She was taught by her mother that cleaning and then sucking a man's asshole was the key to having power over him in a society where women had no power. And also by letting him fuck you in the ass or better yet by begging him to fuck you in the ass. I really don't know whether it was just my girlfriend's mother or a Korean cultural norm, but I liked that she taught her daughter that anal sex was how to control a man.

After three trips back to Korea and several thousand hours of negotiating with her father and mother she went back to marry some guy her family wanted her to marry to bring their families closer together. She knew the guy and thought he was sexy and didn't mind the arrangement. She's probably sucking his asshole as you're reading this.

A mellow version of anal sex, suited to all ages but fitting in well with senior citizens, is anal massage, preferably while watching a football game but any favorite TV program will do. Have your lover get a warm wet towel and wash your face and hands and package and crack, and then oil your junk and butthole. Weed enhances this by a factor of ten and falling asleep for short naps and waking up to this has a kinship with the euphoric rush of opiates.

Anal sex is a staple of porn films and usually comes at the end just before the cum shot. It's penultimate—the dirtiest part of a dirty movie before the climax. I always thought there should be T-shirts for men who really like it that say: “I Fast Forward To The Anal.”

8

The return of Laura

A Friday afternoon in June 1980

Exactly three weeks after our last meeting, Laura calls my service and leaves a message asking me to please get in touch with her.

I call back and catch her on her way into a session. She is near to crying. “I can't stop thinking about you. I'm sorry about what happened. I need you. Can you please come by after work and meet me?”

“You bet!”

“Can I spend the weekend with you?”

“Yes,” I tell her, “but you buy dinner.”

“You're on.”

Of all the whorehouses in all the towns in all the world, I walked into hers.

9

Emblematic mojos rising

My mojo was working again! The shock of winning, then losing Laura had knocked me down. Now this extra-innings, sudden-death, come-from-behind score refurbished my pride.

In addition to the normal ups and downs of life, I've been the beneficiary of flukes. When I was nineteen, I worked as a pool boy at Sydney Hills Country Club in Newton, Massachusetts. It was the summer of 1966 and most of what was great was English. Nearly all the music I listened to was English except for Elvis, Bobby Vee, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, The Beau Brummels, and Gene Pitney. The clothes I wanted were English and the women I wanted were English. I had to get to England. I decided not to go back to the University of Bridgeport for my junior year but to move to London instead.

I worked every day that summer and saved every cent. I bought a round-trip ticket to London and had enough money left over to live there frugally for a year. (This was $1,250, or about £10 or $25 a week—all you needed in those days.).

I packed up my camp trunk, a large duffel bag, plus a large and small suitcase with clothes, books, and my favorite blanket, even my favorite pillow. I said goodbye to my family and girlfriend and boarded the plane one late September night in 1966 at 10:10 p.m.

I was too excited to sleep all night and landed at Heathrow the next morning. I wrestled through customs with my abundance of baggage, cashed about $100 into English pounds and found the London bus. It dropped me off at Victoria Station, where I checked all my stuff in Left Luggage except one small suitcase with a few days' clothes. I was sweaty and beat.

Then I stood in a long line to get a cab. When my cabby pulled up he asked, “Where to Guv'nor?” Only at that moment did it occur to me that I had no idea where I was going.

I left the line and sat on my small suitcase next to the cab queue and thought about his question. Where the fuck was I going? I had no plans. I guess I operated on a need-to-know basis with myself. I was totally astounded at my short-sightedness. I put all that drive and effort into getting to London but I never gave a second thought to what I would do once I got here.

It was a wake-up call. For the first time in my life, I suspected I just might be missing a few socks in my dryer. From then on, I knew I had to pay better attention to what I was doing.

As it happened, everything worked out fine. The only places I knew of were Carnaby Street and Piccadilly Circus so I took a cab to Piccadilly and by the end of the day, I met some English students who put me up, and by the next night I was in their neighbor Emma's bed. Within a month I had a Triumph motorcycle, a circle of chums, a grant to study journalism at the Regent St. Polytechnic, and a smart, foxy, aristocratic girlfriend, Tisha.

As a coda to this fluke, Tisha and I came back to the U.S. and spent the Summer of Love 1967 working for Norman and Beverly Mailer in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I'd first met Norman the year before when I was a roadie for the rock band Charlie Brown's Generation, and Charlie, the lead singer, was Beverly's half-brother. When the band played in Provincetown for the summer, I briefly met Norman and Beverly, who had a house there. Norman might have said three words to me.

I took Tisha to Provincetown because in the summer, P-town is the most beautiful place on earth. We got jobs working in a souvenir shop, but Tisha hated it, so when I heard the Mailers were looking for a housekeeper, Tisha and I knocked on their door. Norman and Beverly liked Tisha, a proper aristocrat, and she went to work for them.

I used picking her up as an excuse to see Norman and one afternoon he invited me to his deck overlooking the ocean and made us gin and tonics. He told me he learned to make the perfect gin and tonic from his South African father. He put ice cubes in the glass, ran the lemon around the rim, squeezed in the lemon, added the gin, which came from the freezer, and then the tonic. He gave a short dissertation on the difference between good machines and bad machines and why electric can openers were bad machines because they sucked electricity, took a worthwhile physical exercise away and were not necessarily faster or more efficient.

One day Norman asked me if I would like to come to work for him, too. He had two young sons—Michael, three, and Stephen, about a year and a half—and a house filled with women: his wife, two daughters who were visiting for the summer, his secretary, a mother's helper or two, an occasional visiting ex-wife or two, and Tisha. He told me he wanted another man around to do heavy work and fix things when he was out of town but mostly so his sons had another male to relate to.

He suggested Tisha and I clear out the garage and turn it into a bedroom so we could move in. He'd also feed us and pay us $100 a week. He asked if I boxed. I didn't. Would I be interested in learning and becoming his sparring partner? You bet. We were a decent match boxing. I was twenty and he was forty-four. I was taller and he was broader. He was skilled and I was optimistic.

So I spent the Summer of Love living with my English girlfriend in Norman Mailer's garage, fixing things, shopping for food, (sometimes cinematically by boat across the Provincetown harbor) chauffeuring him and guests to the airport either in his Corvette or Beverly's larger Citroen, listening to “Light My Fire” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” smoking pot (never with or in front of the Mailers), and putting on the gloves in the afternoon and getting the chance to punch my boss in the face.

That fall, Tisha and I got our own place in Manhattan, got real jobs and got married. Three years later by the summer of 1970, a year after men walked on the moon, I was twenty-three. Gas was $.36 a gallon, the average income was under $10,000, a new home cost $23,000, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, Tina Fey and Kelly Ripa were born, and after a horrible third year of marriage my smart, foxy, aristocratic wife Tisha left me and went back home to England.

I was working as a journalist in the alternative underground poorly paid press. With Tisha and her paycheck gone, I took a job selling ads in the underground papers with a company owned by Concert Hall Advertising, the hippie ad agency. Ad salesmen made more money than alternative journalists and I was tired of being poor.

One day I was at Apple Records, the Beatles' company, trying to sell them ads. The Beatles had split up and all were doing solo projects, and Apple had signed Mary Hopkins, James Taylor, and Badfinger and was making a run at being an actual record company.

Allan Steckler, the creative director I was pitching asked, “Do you know any good advertising agencies? We just fired ours this morning.” I mentioned that the company that owned the ad sales company I worked for was Concert Hall. He smiled, took a long pause and said, “Okay, Concert Hall is now the agency for Apple Records.” Overnight, I became the account executive for our new client, Apple Records. “I am the eggman/they are the eggmen/I work for Apple/Goo goo ga joob.”

After months of placing ads and begging for some creative work, I got my first assignment: the trade and consumer ads for the simultaneous release of John Lennon's “Imagine” album and Yoko Ono's “Fly.” While waiting for the art directors at my ad agency to work with me, I sat there doodling silly project-related stuff. I couldn't draw, paint, or design, and at that moment if you had asked me what kind of artistic ability I had, I'd have said about seven on a scale of a hundred. I knew I could write ad copy, but art was an incomprehensible enigma to me.

The art directors didn't much like my copy ideas. “Too simple,” was their response. They asked me to add more copy. I didn't think it was necessary, but these were the pros, and my superiors, so I added more copy.

The art department came up with five nifty ideas that they translated into beautiful comps (comprehensive presentations), all mounted nicely on stiff cardboard with pretty tissue cover sheets. They looked professional.

I walked into Apple the next day to see Steckler, completely confident about my first creative presentation. Steckler looked at each beautiful, professionally packaged comp and said, “Boring! Boring! Boring! Boring! Boring!”

I had nothing to lose, so I pulled out my little doodle, unwrinkled the tiny piece of paper, and handed it to him. He laughed in an indecipherable way that was either, “My God, what a pathetic asshole you are!” or “Hey, this is really amusing!”

I had been poking around in an art closet at Apple the day of the assignment and saw a striking photo of John Lennon wearing a white suit, playing a white piano in a white room. I loved it. It was so strong that I wanted to use the least amount of words, so I took the words “Imagine,” “John Lennon,” and “On Apple Records” and put them together to make a single imperative sentence. “Imagine John Lennon On Apple Records.” All I did was add the period. Plus I lifted some lyrics from “Gimmie Some Truth,” a Lennon song from the album, and put them in a cartoon balloon over John's head—“No short-haired, yellow-bellied son-of-Tricky Dicky's gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me.” I did the same for Yoko with “Fly Yoko Ono On Apple Records.” For Yoko I used a photograph of her face and drew a stick figure of a fly on it so it would make you want to cringe. Steckler said, “This is great! Let's see what John thinks.”

I didn't sleep much that night waiting for John Lennon to decide my fate. Next morning, early, thank God, Steckler called me and said John loved the doodles and sent a note back saying, “I like this. Let's have this guy do all our ads from now on.”

Overnight I became the media designer for Apple Records. There had been some problem with billing through the agency I worked for, and Apple wanted me, not Concert Hall, and would help me set up my own little agency.

Because Apple Records was run by Allen Klein who had first managed The Rolling Stones, my little one-man ad agency would occasionally inherit work for the Stones including lots of ads, a radio commercial and even the album cover, “Hot Rocks.” My little one-man band company also did the album for the cult film, “El Topo,” and John Lennon's “Sometime In New York City.” (For all three albums, which were far above my design ability, I hired my friend Michael Gross, who was then design director for
National Lampoon
.)

The net takeaway of these stories is: (1) I can speed off with direction but without a destination and (2) good flukes sometimes visit me.