Laura Meets Jeffrey (7 page)

10

The hooker, her husband, her sugar daddy, her lovers and me

Six o'clock on a Friday night in June 1980

It's around sixty-five degrees with clear sky, sun shining and a clean slight breeze. I am waiting downstairs from Eureka at 54th and Madison. Laura walks out in jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, and no makeup, looking exactly like a hippie and nothing like a whore. Her eyes are greener in daylight and I can smell her before we touch. She still smells like a sweet fuck even though she showered and her hair is still wet.

First thing, she gives me $85. We walk hand in hand toward the East Side. She starts talking. “I don't know how I'm going to do it but I want to be with you. We'll have to figure it out.

“I want to spend the weekend with you so I told my husband I won't be home. Sometimes I stay in the city and make extra money. It was a really good week but I'll tell my husband it was only mediocre, and I'll have to earn about $350-$400 more in tricks by Sunday.”

My pace falters.

“Oh, no,” she says, “Not from you, Jeffrey, but you've got to understand that sometime over the weekend I've got to hustle $400 in tricks. It won't be a problem.”

Laura speaks in staccato bursts. She's coked up. “If I can reach him, I'll see my best regular, Walter and tell him the truth. And about you. He'll understand and give me the bread. We have that sort of relationship. He's married and a megabuck oil man. I always tell him the truth.

“Or, if I can't get to Walter, I'll call some other johns I know. I've got a list. Guys give me their numbers. It's against the rules, but sometimes I take them. Plus one of my Eureka girlfriends turns tricks and she'll include me in a double or turn some business over to me. Anyway, it won't be a hassle. I just want you to know what's going on.”

I don't know what's going on. I hope she's being straight with me. I think she is and I'll follow her lead.

We continue toward my flat hand in hand, like children whose mother told them to hold hands the whole way and only cross with the lights. Even in the real world her hand is warm to the touch. Laura is hungry; the day's drugs are wearing off. She doesn't want to eat out. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow we could go for sushi, she suggests. She sometimes eats “animal flesh,” mainly fish, but most days she eats fruits and vegetables and avoids supermarkets, which she calls “straight stores.”

We stop at one of the five million Korean groceries in Manhattan. She buys salad veggies and fresh bread and tofu. She says iceberg lettuce is the vegetable equivalent of junk food and buys greens I don't recognize. She finds some ginseng pop for me and holds the bottle up close to her face in a TV commercial parody and says in a low, slow, male voice, “Ginseng. It's a man's drink.”

Far out, she does shtick. This is a good sign. I know so little about her that every minute reveals something. I buy several more ginseng pops, figuring I can use all the help I can get. As we walk we chit chat about nothing in particular. She doesn't watch much TV. She likes to read. She points out good-looking sexy women to make sure I won't miss them. When I ask why, she says it's not that she's that turned on by them, although she's a bit bi, it's just that they are more visually interesting than men. She tells me she's twenty-seven years old and her name is Laura Bradley. In the elevator we smile at each other with the sly anticipation of randy kids out on a first date.

Once in the flat we avoid touching each other as Laura prepares her healthy fuel. She is chopping carrots when I finally put my arms around her and nibble her neck.

Every part of her is sweet musk fragrant. The wispy soft hairs on her neck tickle my nose. We explore with our hands and our lips and our tongues. We canoodle, we rub against each other, frisson overtakes us and in jump-cut-to-the-chase fashion we are in the bedroom on the white iron and brass bed, naked, fucking.

She seems taller and leaner in bed than when she is standing. She's fit but not overly muscular. She's strong but there is nothing about her body that isn't soft and feminine. Her face is classic Anglo-Saxon beautiful, as un-Jewish as any face ever in my bed. She has a high, wide forehead, a fine, long, aristocratic nose and bright hazel-green eyes, more jade than emerald and an eye color, maybe even a color, I never saw before.

Her ass is a bit warmer than the rest of her, maybe because it carries the only fat on her body other than her tits. She's twenty-seven so everything is still where it belongs. Her breasts are the minimum requirement for a B-cup, but her nipples, Jesus, her nipples are huge, they protrude, they belong to a woman with much larger breasts; maybe there was an accidental nipple switch in the hospital when she was in the nursery. Or maybe they belong to a female of another species, maybe another genus.

“One of my favorite things was to have my nipples played with,” Laura remembers. “But for hours, I mean,
days.
And I wouldn't want him to stop playing with them. So he wouldn't stop. Sometimes Jeffrey played with my nipples to help me fall asleep when I was coked up.”

When I touch her giant nipples she whimpers and leans into me. I get a little firmer with them and she gets hotter. I squeeze them just a little too hard and she says, “Thank you.”

She is dripping wet as I go inside her. Maybe it's from the other men at the whorehouse. I ask her and she says no, she showered and douched before she left. “That's just the way I am. Aren't all girls like that?” If only.

She comes more easily than any woman I ever met. Sometimes her orgasms blend together for minutes. And she comes again with me every time I climax.

“The most amount of orgasms I ever had with Jeffrey was thirty-four in one day!” Laura grins. “That was definitely the most I ever had. I think that's the exact number—thirty-four. It's probably not that accurate. Lots of times we would fuck twenty-four hours a day. When you get into that space, you kind of lose it. I remember it was hard to tell the difference between twenty-four and twenty-five—they kind of blended together. But it was at least thirty-four; though it might have been forty-three!”

My orgasms are different with her. Not just different, but new. They are very strong but that's not the most significant quality. They're more primitive. They start down deeper.

She looks up at me when I fuck her in some spaced-out overwhelmed simple way, the way women looked at men 50,000 years ago when they got fucked by someone they weren't afraid of being killed and eaten by. Or maybe just how they looked when they got fucked. Something vestigial is going on. We are sexual anachronisms. I hear myself making noises I never made before, primordial yawps to accompany my ur-orgasms.

Around midnight we finally take a break and eat salad and bread. I get my first taste of arugula—which I like and think tastes vaguely like meat. I also discover Boston Bibb lettuce, which is as delicate and as soft as her skin.

Saturday morning we sleep late after making love once during the night. We sleep close. She loves being held tight, which is my natural instinct. That morning is the first time I ever see Laura straight. I like it. She is less scattered, looks younger, healthier and prettier. There is a relaxation to her face that drugs steal.

When she pees she doesn't sit on the toilet but rather squats on it with her feet on the toilet seat. She's like a Stone Age aborigine who doesn't know how to use it.

“Squatting is the way a lot of people sit and go to the bathroom. I lived in a van for so long with Sandy—for so many years we camped and lived in a van—squatting to go to the bathroom was just the way. I still do,” Laura smiles. “I'd rather go behind a tree than go into the house and use the bathroom.”

I want to know what happened the last time we were together when it went from love to hustle. I don't ask right away but curiosity gets the best of me while we're drinking coffee and eating bagels, so I ask.

She explains how she ran back to the dressing room where all the ladies hang out between sessions. As they always did, one of them asked how much of a tip Laura got. She told them how excited she was to see me, how she loved to fuck me, and that she paid for the session. They all razzed her and got on her case, especially Tanya, an ex-street whore I'd fucked many happy times who said, “Sure, Jeffrey can fuck. I even like to fuck him and I don't like fucking many johns. But business is business, honey and he ain't your man. You stoned, baby. Don't get lost. Jeffrey is just playing you. Go get the money.” Laura caved in.

“They were right,” Laura confesses, “I loved fucking Jeffrey right away, but it couldn't interfere with my money goal. There's nothing wrong with doing business with friends. I am a sucker for an amazing kiss and Jeffrey was an amazing kisser but I was still paying back a big debt and fucking was my job. But by this point my body didn't care about the money anymore. Now I begged Jeffrey to love me, to
do me
, to
manipulate
me
into him
…”

She says she's sorry. I forgive her. We move on.

She tries to get in touch with Walter, but can't reach him. After a few more calls, she sets up some tricks. We nap until 2:00 p.m. When we wake, she goes into the bathroom, climbs up on the sink, again in a primitive squat, and moves close to the mirror to put on lipstick. As she leaves, she says she'll be back before dark.

Laura returns around 7:00 p.m., $600 richer and carrying three men's shirts in my size. She also gives me a gram of coke she got from Mark, her boyfriend who is a dealer. She said she fucked Mark and two tricks, one of whom was a shirt manufacturer. This is a lot of information to process.

We do two lines and get back between the sheets. I pin her arms down, forming gentle cuffs with my thumb and index finger around her delicate wrists, allowing them to move but restraining her hands from sliding through. She goes wild enjoying the struggle.

Laura moans, “Use me. Please use me. Tell me what you want. I'll do anything for you.” She opens her eyes and looks straight into mine, “I want you to own me, all of me. My pussy is yours. My tits, my mouth. They're yours. I want to be yours. I want to be your banquet of pleasure.”

When she says it, it's poetry. Her submissive eloquence makes me come.

She dances from one paragraph to the next. Every move she makes is graceful. I am not graceful and look upon hers with respect and envy. When her “banquet of pleasure,” metaphor pops out, it touches me as unrehearsed. Her speech is a little hippie-dippy-groovy, but also lyrical, like a songwriter or poet who never stops working.

My instinct declares this is more than skin passion. This is something thick and soulful and complicated. Her scent ignites my testosterone and I feel more macho than ever before. This is love I never knew. It's a quantum shift, a difference of kind, not just of degree. I had been living in black and white—and was happy—and now I discovered color. She is a movie. She is the star of every scene.

The downside is Laura does too much cocaine.

I never loved coke. I felt it was overrated weak speed. As they say, it's God's way of letting you know you're making too much money. If offered, I'd do a little, and stop. But Laura loves it. And she loves giving it to me in small doses, not enough to make me lose my hard-on, but enough to keep me awake all night fucking her. I begin to re-examine my prejudice against the drug.

Laura is sweet and polite in a way that signals she grew up with family warmth. During intermissions between fucks she gives me her life history. The Readers Digest version goes like this: She grew up in Idaho in an upper middle class family. She was a borderline acid-casualty hippie during high school, then a teenage runaway vagabond who hitchhiked to San Francisco. Her dad is VP of a national company and she's the middle one of three sisters. She speaks of her family with genuine love. She sees them once or twice a year and it's always a great Norman Rockwell-style reunion. She became a drug-free West-coast Sufi fruitarian, way to the right of a simple vegetarian. Her diet was so restrictive she developed TB, which you can only do if you work at dietary deficiency hard enough.

She met a guy, Sandy, and they became best friends, but with no benefits. They began making silver jewelry and selling it at Renaissance fairs and arts and crafts festivals. Their cottage industry thrived.

She didn't fancy Sandy sexually, but they did share a deep spiritual bond and they were on a spiritual quest. She loved travelling to the festivals to hear, in her opinion, what the most enlightened people in America had to say. She lived to chant, become one with God and Earth, eat healthy and purify herself. She'd been a vegetarian for ten years.

Pressured by his family to give his father joy on his deathbed, she married Sandy. They were monogamous, fucking only three or four times a year, sometimes less. After five years, whatever sex drive Laura had was repressed.

They decided to move from Marin, outside San Francisco, to artisan-friendly New Hope, Pennsylvania. Then, in a blinding storm of chance during a vacation in Reno she discovered he had a gambling problem. Then Laura discovered Sandy was fucking other women. This infidelity changed their odd and mostly sexless but semi-workable marriage. Sandy slid right into the joy of sex and Laura slid into focusing on her work. Their spiritual quest, made even more holy by their abstemiousness, was now shattered. Without both Laura and Sandy paying the right attention, their business suffered.