Chapter 5
It took a long time to drink myself unconscious, and then I only slept a couple of hours. After Connie walked out the door I poured myself a stiff belt and lay back to think about what had set her off. She'd been about to tell me of all the men she'd been to bed with, and when she was finished with a complete and detailed list she was going to tell me it had been better with me than with all the others put together. But I didn't want to hear that story and when I stopped her she became angry and cold toward me. She'd said I was talking about something besides sex.
I drank and pondered, carefully reviewing every word I'd said. Of course! That was it! She thought I was talking about love. Impossible! Love with a girl I knew for a total of two hours? Out of the question! It was all a simple misunderstanding. I would explain it tomorrow and collect the debt she owed me.
And then another thought pushed its way through the soggy tissue of my brain. Why hadn't I wanted her to talk about all her old lovers? If this was only a quick boff, a roll in the hay for laughs, why did I object to hearing about all the other men she'd laid? What possible difference could it make to me?
But it did make a difference. And it made a difference for the same reason it was so different when I was kissing her and touching her. I'd been so involved in giving her pleasure that I forgot all about myself. That had never happened to me before. Not even with Juney had I been able to control my own desires for so long a time. Juney had been the instrument of my own desire. The giving of pleasure had increased my own excitement. But with Connie it was as if the giving of pleasure was an end in itself.
Only now, long afterward, did my own needs rumble and roll within me. Suddenly I felt like I was sixteen again. It was the same as it had been when some little fourteen-year old tease had gotten me all worked up on the back seat of the car and then called a halt to the whole thing just when it was getting interesting.
I poured myself another drink and pushed Connie, Juney, the divorce and the trucking business out of my mind. I'd begun this afternoon with the intention to get really smashed. By God, I was going to do it. But it would be easier and nicer with pleasant things on my mind.
So, I pushed the unpleasant things away and turned back the clock in my brain. Behind my closed lids I saw a file drawer in my brain slide open. The drawer was labeled Pleasant Memories and the file folder was labeled Sixteen.
The file folder opened and there I was, sixteen years old and standing in the crowded corridor of my high school. It was the ten-minute intermission and I was headed for my next class. This was to be the last class of the day. Then would come football practice, and after practice I had a date with Marcella.
I thought about skipping practice and meeting Marcella a couple of hours early. That would give us more time before her mother came home. But if I skipped practice the coach might throw me off the team. He would anyway if he knew I was breaking training every afternoon with Marcella. At least I thought I was. Does having sex violate football training rules for a high school player? Anyway, if the coach threw me off the team I would lose Marcella too. The only reason for my popularity was that I was big enough and mean enough to play pretty good right tackle. By the middle of the season I was top defensive man in the league.
The next fifty minutes dragged by. I kept looking out of the window and at the clock on the wall behind the teacher's head, and at the sweatered breasts of the girl sitting next to me. When she saw where I was looking she took a deep breath, arched her back to make them look bigger and gave me a wide smile. I grinned back and looked away. There was better stuff waiting for me.
Finally the bell rang and I scrambled out of the classroom just ahead of two other hurrying students. The girl with the breasts got lost somewhere in the shuffle. I stopped at my locker to dump my books and grab my jacket, and was off to the locker room. One of the coaching assistants had the equipment cage opened and was handing out pads and uniforms.
I stripped and hung my clothes on a hook over the bench. First came the athletic supporter with its solid plastic shield to prevent crushed testicles in the wild scrambles after the ball was hiked. Then shoulder pads, hard surfaces clacking as I slipped them on and laced them down tight. Next hip and kidney pads, and finally the shin guards. Over ah this padding and protection I drew on my pants and faded practice jersey, finally put on the heavy sweat socks and cleated boots. My helmet under my arm, I clacked out of the dressing room and onto the playing field.
Some of the other guys were already out there, running and jumping, rolling on the ground to loosen up their muscles and get the blood circulating. Since this was Friday and we had a game tomorrow it would be a light practice-a run through all the play patterns and very little body contact.
The coach came out, blew his whistle, and practice began. I had my blocking assignments down pat for all-the plays and loafed through offensive maneuvers, half my mind looking forward to Marcella and the two hours before her mother came home from work. When we switched to defense I pulled away from the tackles at the last minute. The coach would decide if the tackles would have been effective.
After a half hour of defense the coach sent us on a four lap run around the field and we called it a day. I'd worked up a pretty good sweat out on the field, but was in too much of a hurry to take a shower. I scrambled out of my uniform and into my clothes, was the first one out of the locker room.
Marcella lived four blocks from school. I walked to her house and went around to the back door. The bell rang inside and a moment later she let me into the kitchen. As soon as the door closed behind me she was in my arms, her wet open mouth pressed to mine. I kissed her and felt the spark of desire leap to flame.
She broke the kiss and put her lips to my ear. "Hi handsome," she whispered.
"Hi yourself," I said, pushing her away. "What have you got to eat? I'm hungry."
"You're always hungry," she chided.
And she was right. Every bit of food I could scrounge free meant I would be a little less hungry after dinner. It wasn't that my folks were cheap and didn't spend enough money for food, it was just that we were damned poor and lived on a very tight budget. My mother put dinner on the table and we would eat, and that's all there would be or we wouldn't have lunch the next day. I got enough to keep me alive and healthy, but never enough to fill my stomach completely. Besides the excitement of her body, Marcella represented a source of food.
"I've got a couple of sandwiches ready for you," she said opening the refrigerator and taking out a plate. "And we've got an extra quart of milk."
She set the plate on the table and I fell to with a will. The sandwiches were thick slices of rye bread with slabs of cold roast beef. I filled my mouth, chewed, swallowed half the mouthful, and washed the rest down with half a glass of good cold milk. Then I repeated the whole thing until the two sandwiches and the quart of milk had gone, disappeared into my stomach.
Just as I finished the last of the milk I looked at the clock to see how much time we had before Marcella's mother was due home from work. Her father had been killed in a bad automobile accident a couple of years ago, so her mother earned the bread for the small family. Her mother was a lawyer, as her father had been, and they had a damned good income. The clock said four o'clock, which meant we had maybe an hour; an hour and a quarter would stretch it.
When I was a hungry sixteen, and there was food in front of me, I didn't think of anything else until I finished eating. Now that I was through I was surprised to find myself alone in the kitchen. I stood up and looked around.
"Marcie!" I yelled good and loud.
"Upstairs, in the bedroom," came her muffled reply.
I walked through the quiet dim house and up the carpeted stairs to her bedroom. The door was closed and I wondered if I should knock. The hell with it. I pushed the door opened and walked into the room.
She was standing in front of an open closet and my eye caught the flash of her white body as she slipped into a robe. I sat down on the bed, kicked off my shoes before stretching out. She held the front of the robe closed and came across the room toward me. When she was two steps from the bed she let go and the halves of the robe fell open, revealing a white vertical stretch of skin and nipples and shadowed navel, with a sparse patch of light blonde hair at the groin.
I looked until she was too close, and then she was in my arms, the heat from her flesh warming me even through the layers of my own clothing.
Marcella was one step above the girls I'd been dating for over a year. With other girls a session in the movie balcony or on the back seat of a borrowed car always ended too soon. They would always call a halt to the proceedings just when I wanted to go on to the end. And they had peculiar attitudes toward petting. They allowed almost any intimacy, I could touch and pet and stroke them anywhere, but they refused to reciprocate. It was all right for me to arouse and satisfy them with my hands, but they considered it nasty of me to ask that they do the same for me.
When I met Marcella I thought she was going to be another in a long line of frustrating females. I found out different the first time I took her to a movie. We were in the last row of the balcony and all alone in the dark. When I slid my hand up over the mound of her burgeoning breast she gasped and let her hand drop to my lap. I was so startled I almost pulled away.
But even Marcella set limits to her sexual endeavors, and I was still-technically at least-a virgin, so was she. Of course I was a lot better off than before, but there was still a certain amount of frustration and longing for the ultimate sensation. I felt sure that after enough wild petting sessions with her I could convince her to go all the way.
Marcella drew the line at actual intercourse. Anything less than that was okay. We began with mutual stimulation and experimented until we discovered she had a fondness for a particular type of caress. I agreed to do her this personal favor and in her gratitude she performed the same favor for me. Sometimes we took turns, and sometimes we twisted around and did it at the same time.
She lay on top of me and as she kissed me her hands opened the buttons of my shirt. She pushed the shirt out of the way and moved her lips to the naked skin of my chest, her hardening nipples drilling holes in me just above my belt line.
Her teeth nipped and her tongue flashed and I slipped my hands under the loose edges of her robe to her body. She was warm against my palms, then hot and damp with perspiration. I filled my hands with her taut young buttocks and squeezed. She groaned and her hands crawled crab-like across my body to my belt.
She opened my trousers and pushed my shorts out of the way, her mouth moved lower on my body-ever my navel and across my hard belly. I thrilled to her hot lashing tongue and slipped one hand between her hard thighs. She was already ready her muscles quivered when my fingers touched her.
We played for a long while, my hand teasing her and her mouth kissing all over me. When I could stand the teasing no longer I pushed her away. "It's getting late," I said hoarsely. "We better hurry."
She stood up and let the robe drop from her shoulders. Than she bent, grabbed the cuffs of my trousers and pulled. The pants slid down over my hips and I arched myself up off the bed to make it easier. In a moment I was as naked as she, and the whole hot length of her body was pressed against me.
I rolled over, she lay on her back and I kneeled beside her. The cherry tips of her young half-formed breasts were sweet tidbits in my mouth, she sighed and writhed her body as I kissed her breasts. She put her hands against the top of my head, pushed my mouth down along her body. I paused to flutter my lips over her flat little belly, let the pressure of her hands drive my lips lower.
Her feet were in the air and her thighs spread in a lustful vee. I-kissed the inside of each of her knees and then trailed my tongue down along the flesh of her thighs to the apex of her body. She groaned in anticipation, but I stopped short of the mark. I kissed the backs of her thighs and the inner sides of her thighs and the trembling hollow of her belly between her jutting pelvic bones....
"Please," she whispered plaintively. "Don't tease me any more. Do it now."
Instead I put my hand to her again and my finger slipped into her body. My thumb slid down into the groove between her buttocks.
"Oooooh," she groaned, her hips twitching spasmodically, "what are you doing?"
My mouth was busy on her belly and I couldn't answer. I don't think she expected a reply.
The place my thumb went gave me an idea. I pulled away from her and turned her over .with a quick flipping motion. She flopped onto her belly and before she could protest I was kissing the jut of her buttocks, my lips and teeth fully exploring those round hard spheres.
I kissed and touched her until she lost all control of herself and her body was a twitching, groaning, trembling mass of flesh. Then I slid my hands under her hips and lifted her until she was supported by her knees. Her face and shoulders still rested on the bed.
I moved behind her, my hands on the globes of her buttocks. The fire raged in my loins as I moved closer until I was touching her in the furrow between her buttocks. She tried to move away from me, but I held her still and forced myself against her body. The heat of her flesh sent bolts of pure pleasure up through my body and I began the steady rhythm of love. After a few seconds she stopped trying to get away from me and began to move her hips in time with my rhythm....
I was riding the crest of a warm whipping wave as it roared toward some far off beach. The wave moved faster and faster, its crest foaming and bubbling and whipping. There was a roaring in my ears and suddenly I could see the hard sand rushing toward me.
The wave unleashed its awesome power and I was Hung tumbling from the crest, my body wracked with strange sensations as the waves and sand beat at me.
I missed her mother by about two minutes that night. And the next day in school, during our lunch hour, Marcella told me how great it had been for her. It had been great for me too, we had discovered a new form of pleasure. About a month later, again in the afternoon after school, I. convinced her to try actual copulation. From then on everything else was mere preliminary. After her initial fear passed she began to really enjoy making love with me, and from then until graduation I was the most un-frustrated kid in school.
The file drawer in my mind closed again and I was back in my hotel room. The air in the room was stuffy with cigarette smoke and my mouth was dry. I didn't know I was drunk until I tried to stand up. Then my knees wobbled and the room seemed to spin around me. The ashtray on the bed was overflowing with butts and the liquor bottle was empty. No wonder my mouth tasted so bad.
I dumped the ashtray and liquor bottle in the waste basket and stumbled into the bathroom. This time I took a cold shower. I hate cold showers, but I wanted to be sober. It was after nine o'clock in the evening and I had plans. Plans which included the blonde dancer from the back row of the chorus line.
The shower helped, and by the time I was standing in front of the mirror with my razor in my hand the chance of slitting my own throat was much reduced. My hands trembled slightly and my head was a little light, but my legs were steady and my stomach was rumbling with hunger.
I got my other suit out of the closet and made a mental note to have the first one cleaned and pressed the next day. I'm not a fancy dresser, but I have a taste for expensive clothes. These two suits had set me back almost three hundred. They were of good material and I got plenty of wear out of them, but if I wore one more than two days it always needed pressing.
The damned dining room was closed again by the time I got down there and I was hesitant about going into the coffee shop, but there was no other place to get food. I was already dressed so it was too late to order something from room service. Besides, what the hell was I afraid of in that lousy coffee shop? She was only a lousy waitress, a quick one-night stand. If I bothered her that much she didn't have to make with the conversation.
Into the coffee shop I went, and as luck would have it another waitress was on duty. I ordered two hamburgers and a side of french-fried. That was the second time in one day I'd had hamburger. For dessert I had two cups of black coffee, terribly bad coffee, and about half a pint of vanilla ice cream. The coffee and ice cream were protection against a hangover and getting too smashed later on in the evening. My plans included a lot of drinking, but I wanted to remain in full control of my faculties.
I found the night club, and in return for a crumpled dollar bill the headwaiter obliged me with a good table. He must have mistaken the denomination of the bill, I'm sure he thought a dollar sufficient for only the .poorest table.
It was a large room, about half full, and there were seventy-five or maybe a hundred people sitting at the tables. The women were bareshouldered and sparkled with jewelry, and the men were properly dark-suited. The hum of conversation was just loud enough to drown out the girl singer. She was terrible anyway.
After the singer the chorus line came out on stage to kick its heels at the audience. I spotted Laurie immediately. It wasn't hard, her breasts were bouncing so wildly I was afraid they were going to come right off. She saw me too, threw me a grin and a wink. I watched the twelve girls parade around for a couple of minutes and then the next act was ready to come on. If anyone had bothered to look past Laurie's magnificent body they would have seen a pretty good dancer, but then I don't suppose too many people ever looked beyond the flesh.
The next act was a comedian who switched to blue material when he couldn't get much of a reaction from the audience. The blue gags didn't get any more laughs than the straight routine.
I listened for a couple of minutes and then summoned the waiter with a raised hand. I almost expected him to give me permission to go to the men's room. He supplied me with paper and pencil and I sent a note backstage.
"How about a glass of wine instead of beer?" The note said.
The waiter took a dollar bill and the note and disappeared through some curtains at the side of the room. He came back a moment later, gave me a broad smile and a wink, and went off to serve some thirsty people.
Laurie came out a moment later. She was wearing an evening dress, and her blonde hair hung down to her shoulders. Somehow her shoulders looked barer than even the barest woman's shoulders in the room. Maybe it was because of the hair, and maybe it was because she had more shoulder and more chest than any woman in the room. Her dress also left most of her chest bare.
She came to the table, smiled at me and sat down.
"I'll take the wine," she said. "But you still owe me a drink."
"It's a deal," I told her.
The waiter took her order and came back a moment later with a tiny glass of red wine. She sipped half of it in one swallow and set the glass down on the white table cloth.
"I have half an hour before I go on again," she told me.
"What about your date for tonight?"
"What about him?"
"I was sort of hoping he'd changed his mind,-or been called away on business."
"No, he's still around. What did you have in mind?"
"I'm in the mood to celebrate," I told her. "I've got a pocket full of cash and it's burning a hole. I thought if I had somebody like you with me, somebody who knows the right spots in this area, we might go out and really paint the town."
She smiled and her eyes sparkled with interest. At the mention of money she brightened towards me. "What kind of fun are you looking for?"
"Whatever we can find. A little gambling, if it's available; champagne, the best night clubs we can find."
"Celebrating your divorce?"
"Yes," I lied. "But don't get your hopes up. They told me I couldn't legally remarry for twenty-four hours. That's not until after three o'clock tomorrow afternoon."
She gave a short harsh bark of laughter. "Don't look at me," she said. "I'm too young to get married. There are too many places I haven't seen and too many things I haven't done for me to tie myself down with a husband. There's a whole hell of a lot of fun in the world. I've got time to be unhappy when I'm an old woman."
"Good," I said. "What about it?"
She licked her lips and looked at me thoughtfully. "I haven't been on the town on a really wild wing-ding in a long time."
"We'll have nothing but laughs," I prodded.
"If I do go with you, I want you to understand it doesn't automatically mean we'll end up in bed. Whatever happens will happen, but I want to make the decisions as they come up."
"Who me?" I said innocently, burlesquing big eyes. "I'm as harmless...."
"Yeah, yeah, you gave me that routine before. There just isn't any such thing as a harmless man." She paused and thought for a minute, struggling with herself. Then, "Let me make a phone call. If I can still break this date we'll have a party."
She was up and gone, and while she was at the phone I ordered another glass of wine for her and a bottle of beer for myself. Hell, there was a two buck minimum in this joint and I might as well get something for my money, even if it was only beer and wine.
She came back to the table with a broad grin and threw down the remainder of her first drink before talking. "Lover," she said, "You've got yourself a girl guide for the night. But I'm warning you now, I'm an expensive companion."
I gave her a wink and a grin, tested to see just how eager she was about the whole thing. "Maybe I'd be better off with a call-girl. Might get away cheaper in the long run."
"If that's all you want you should have said so sooner," she snarled.
"Take it easy," I said. "I was just kidding."
Her face softened again. "Are you going to sit here until two o'clock?"
"Is the show worth seeing that many times?"
"Hell no. Tell you what, meet me in my room at two-thirty. Room five twenty two."
She went to her dressing room and I walked out into the lobby. I had over three hours to wait and I didn't feel like sitting in the bar. The lobby newsstand had an assortment of paperback novels. I bought the one with the prettiest and nakedest girl on the cover and went back to my room. But I couldn't concentrate on the thing so I called down to the desk and left a call for two o'clock just in case I fell asleep.
Then I took off my jacket and shoes and tie and stretched out on the bed with a cigarette. My mind wandered and I began to think it odd that I should consider my high school days as fond memories. Sure, that was the time of my emergence into the adult world, and of course I should fondly remember my first sexual encounters; but seen dispassionately no adult's adolescence is a good time of life.
It seemed I lived those years in a state of total confusion and anxiety. I was confused by my sudden attraction to females, and a little frightened by it; and I was always self-conscious of my worn and patched clothing. I wouldn't even have been able to play football if the coach hadn't given me his old pair of cleated boots. In the classrooms I managed to maintain an air of unconcern, while inwardly I was jealous of the ease with which some of the others seemed to grasp problems and answer questions.
My only area of adequacy was on the football field. Here I excelled, I was better than anybody else, and that made up for a lot. I suppose I was a lot better off than some of the guys. I could remember the fringe people, the hangers-on who were always there but never doing anything.
Maybe it was better to be one of those people. They led simple lives, uncomplicated, unmarred. They grew up, took jobs, married other people just like themselves. A little house in a development, a two-year-old car, a pension and a gold watch after thirty years with the same company, a television to supply ninety-nine percent of their entertainment, maybe one or two children, evenings with a couple of cold cans of beer and three or four hours of westerns on TV. Saturday afternoons it was more beer. In the Spring and Summer it was baseball, in the Fall football, during the Winter they watched basketball, running out to the kitchen during the commercials for more beer and pretzels.
A guy like that doesn't wind up at the age of almost forty sitting in an empty hotel room in a strange town. A guy like that has the warmth of his family around him. Maybe he helps his son rebuild an old wreck of a car, or carefully inspects the young men who come to date his daughter. In the darkness of the night he has the warm comfortable body of his wife beside him. He probably doesn't avail himself of the opportunity of that body too often, but it is there when he wants it.
On the other hand how many of those slobs could ever amass seventy-five thousand dollars? How many of them have anything more solid than the half-paid-up thirty-year mortgage, the car badly in need of tires and an engine overhaul? I was laying around feeling sorry for myself when I should have been pitying the men I was envying. What would any of these men leave behind them when they died?
If nothing else, they would leave lives behind them-the lives of the children they had spawned. Would I do that much?