[Follows from Lightless Eye]
Back in the Apple I went into a limbo of impotence that I have no memory of the duration of. Maybe this next story happened that same evening. Maybe it happened a week or more later. I go to a party.
Wait. I'd better explain. I'm not much for parties. I don't lose myself in groups. The groups sense me as alien to their groupness and have a zillion ways to get me to want to leave before they have to throw me out. In high school I went to the beer bashes, was part of their forming, evolving the way they did. But then the parties took one path, I took another.
Come to think of it, sex had more than a little something to do with it. I brought a "Village" girl I'd met on Fire Island to a Rockville Centre Party. "God! Trees!" she said, "I feel so ... normal." She said it as though normal were some kind of disease. That was her joke: said to me: before she met any local denizens. (I'll have to tell more about her later.)
We'd never had a girl at a party, not ever. She wore tight toreador pants and no bra. She didn't blink or blush when Dick started gravely to intone obscenities under a transparent mask of belches. For some time after Al would come up when he saw me, peer into my shirt: "Where ya hiding the Village girls?" My old gang ... my ex-gang, rather started including females at parties after that, but I was already more of a Martian than ever.
Also: parties changed. In high school, we drank beer. In college, my friends (jazz musicians, don't forget) smoked dope, popped pills, tried an assortment of opiate-based medications ... They didn't have girls around either. Or, if they did, they were just whores. And I realized: jazz isn't their interest: that's just a cover, a pretext: they're there for the drugs: only the drugs are important. They all stopped playing: they all kept shooting the H.
I never went near the drugs, I'm sorry I didn't give up the beer too. Already I was giving up all the best ways to meet women: church, first and foremost. I've never seen either bar or drug den that was more of a dating service than church and things church-related. Had I not been already me, I would have stopped meeting women totally once past eighteen. Church brings you pussy but fucks up your mind, your character: compromises your integrity. Beer can bring you pussy: but fucks up your mind but good. Drugs? but totally.
College: go to a men's college. Only in appearance have the girls been taken away. They're soon trucked back in with vengeance. Very convenient that they're kept out of your hair while you supposed to be reading. Eventually, college fucks up your mind as badly as any of the others. No society that valued clear minds would ever send talent into cities.
But you know what? Pussy is natural. You don't need church, school, college, beer, drugs ... You just need to be male or female. I was. A little of both, I think. And the pussy came to me.
Unfortunately, Trudy's pussy assaulted me, taking no effort to disguise it's close companion. Eat my pussy, she said, and showed me her asshole.
So I go to this party afterwards. Oh, another detail about parties: at college, I'd get drunk; few of the others did. I'd met normal society for the first time: alcohol really was for moderation, not for abuse. Wholly alien to my background. For me, parties were to get drunk. After the party was for regretting that you couldn't get it up, had puked your wallet ... and so forth. Who do I see at the party but Sam Riffler. If I had any peers as an ass man at Columbia, if I had any superiors, it was Sam (real name). Sam and I never compared notes so I doubt if he knows either which of us made better pussy-paper. Girls just came and stuck to us.
Sam is sitting on a chair. Rocking on his lap and grinning mischievously is the best looking girl at the party. "Alice, this is SybaRight. SybaRight, Alice." Alice has both her arms around Sam's neck. Alice had a light in her dark eyes that was neurotic edging toward psychotic. I'm a sucker for just such light in women. Sam says he'll be back and dumps Alice's own butt onto the cushion. That chair was like an arm chair; not a chair that foldes, in a row of other such. I camped on my haunches nearby and tried to say nice things about Sam. I was looking but I was not bird-dogging. That conversation faltered fast. "So, how long have you and Sam ... I ... er ..."
"I hardly know Sam," Alice said. "I'm not with Sam. I'm here alone." Alice touched me for the first time. "Or," she said, "I'm with you."
Sam never returned to that chair. I saw him across the apartment, smiling bemusedly, and waving from that distance. Maybe Sam know something that I should also have known. Maybe Sam was trying to communicate something to me. Maybe Sam was just glad he palmed a lurking disease onto this goyim before it could infect him.
Alice it turned out had graduated from Barnard at least a year before I graduated from Columbia. I didn't keep track of Barnard girls. Just because I'd never seen her doesn't prove she hadn't been daily on the front page of the paper. Alice says she has to go home to Scarsdale. First she has to get something from her place in the Village. Do I want to come? Sure.
Transportation was a VW bug. She drove it vibrating from cobblestone to cobblestone down the West Side Highway. My mind wasn't working too well. She was explaining something to me that I wasn't following. If we stayed at her place, we'd have to be up early. If we grabbed her stuff and went straight to Scarsdale, we could sleep as long as we wanted. If we slept at her place, I couldn't fuck her. If we slept in Scarsdale, I could. Or was it the other way around? I couldn't follow any of this. I couldn't believe I was with an attractive girl again, that things seemed normal more or less. Trudy's asshole kept staring at me from right under my nose.
And there was another thing wrong: I was rid of Tina but I still wasn't sure if I was choosing any of this.
"So?" Alice said expectantly.
"Huh?"
"Which do you want?"
Oh my God: I didn't know there was going to be a test! "Uh: you decide."
She gave me the same devilish smile I'd first seen playing around the corners of her mouth. "We'll stay at my place," she announced.
"Alice," I fumbled uncertainly, "There's something I'd better tell you." Wicked, wicked smile from Alice. "You said something about we'd sleep together one place but not the other?"
"Yes."
"Which have we chosen?"
"I won't make love on my mother's sheets without having to wash them immediately. My own sheets I don't worry about. I chose my sheets for us."
"Um ... Err ..."
"You're not gay," she said with certainty.
"Uh, ah ... I'm not sure ..." I was sorry I'd gone to the party.
"You're impotent!" she shrieked. "Ooo ... I thought so." As a triumph. Another notch on her young belt. Or rather she wouldn't have to tame me; something else had already emasculated me.
We bounce past Bethune Square. It's late. My wonderful Whitehorse Tavern, just over there, is closed. She cuts east: on Bleeker maybe. We get into the tangle where 4th crosses 10th. Old New York is as organic as any old city. Younger New York succumbed to French geometry, as though life should conform to graph paper. But the Village is NY giving French order the finger.
Lots of my college friends had money. Most of my high school friends had had money. Rockville Centre was every bit as bourgeois as Riverdale, Park Avenue, Saddle River, or Scarsdale. The first time I walked from my freshman warren to Anton's private room to find wall to wall carpeting and a pair of original Miro graphics I knew I was crossing a border I hadn't known existed locally. If Borny, my high school buddy, summered on his yacht, it was the bar that was carpeted, not any damn dorm room. Borny was given hot rod after hot rod, no matter how many he wrecked; no Miro graphics: not any.
Anton's family had a three story mansion hiding behind a three story hedge in New Rochelle. The private drive crunched gravel for a minute before nearing the house. There were no sidewalks on or off the property. Butlers or what-have-you answered the door. ... No high school friend of mine would have had a butler even if the father had just been awarded Texas as a fiefdom. Ah. But there were Jews aplenty in Rockville Center who did have butlers and chauffeurs, tall hedges and long drives. And Sam's parents house in Poughkeepsie was three stories, had servants, could easily loose a dozen people ... I could see Alice's parents house in Scarsdale from her Village digs. A garden in back. Maillol graphics on the wall. Original Maillols! I'd never dreamed I'd ever know anybody who ever owned anything with a Miro signature on it. But I would have assumed Miro a thousand times over before I'd have assumed Maillol. I flip through the record stack. Oh my God! Oh my God! she's got the whole Tristan with Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting Kirsten Flagstad!
I heated the hi fi, blew no dust from the diamond, and started the Prelude.
Barry Bonds just broke a bunch more records in 2001 because he can hold still and watch the pitch come longer than anybody. Doesn't give a twitch the pitcher can read. You'll find forty baseball players who can do that before you'll find another conductor who can stay still, hold the music, not tip his hand, longer than Furtwangler. Furtwangler makes Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron look nervous. With Furtwangler conducting, just the Liebestod seems to last an hour.
Lasting. That's SybaRight's business. I never said I ran fast: I just ran so that I never had to stop. I'd letter merely by being the last one running.
Ready for bed, I started again at the Prelude. Whether I used words or not, I communicated that foreplay was all we needed for most of the opera. My dick had shown up. There was no further thought of impotence. I intended to enter her at the Liebestod and stay in her through its climax. That I should climax at the climax was an idea too wonderful to have. That she too should climax at the climax was something I was too full of myself and of Wagner to even notice at the time. Once the music started, Alice was hardly even there for me: as finely sculpted as her breast was, as well tanned her skin, as clean, depilitated, finely scented her whole physical self ...
It was late when we started. It was dawn when we finished. Alice had said something about having to get up early to go to Scarsdale. We didn't. We slept on and on. At two or three in the afternoon I hear Alice's hushed voice on the phone. The following traces some essences.
I'm not coming to Scarsdale this weekend after all, Mom.
I don't need to pick up that medication. My problem is solved.
Yes. Big flow. Big flood. Then normal.
Oh? No, I don't intend to tell you. Just say I found a new gynecologist.
Alice apparently hadn't had her period in months. Yet neither she nor her mother thought she was pregnant. Alice having been married and divorced twice already by her early twenties, obviated one of pregnancy's fears. Her story paralleled that of my Dyan so closely that I could get a detail reversed. This is close: Her first husband was a millionaire. Had her father not owned a fleet of trucks in Westchester, she still would have no problem with the rent. Her father loved to indulge her. Yet even her father would blanch at the bills Bloomingdales' would send him.
Alice may or may not have been actually married to her second "husband." He turned out to be the ex-Marine who had been the first person ever to offer aloud to beat me to a pulp: "fucking intellectual." It gets very incestuous. That commie organizer of Morningside Heights, Bruce, would latter "marry" the "wife" of my army best friend, Phil: years later: he'd been with Alice long before he'd ever met
René. No, it's more incestuous than that: Alice, later on, long after the legend of her beauty became merely unbelievable to those who hadn't known her then, lived with Ornette Coleman. The last time I saw Ornette, he was living with my first love, Jackie!
2005 11 02 It's five years now that I haven't returned to this file to continue the story. Maybe it's because this story is key to my telling how I met my wife. I gush the little stuff and procrastinate when it counts.
Originally I'd called this woman Dolores in this story, following my practice of protecting real girls' anonymity. I've changed it today: there's no reason I should want to protect Alice, and plenty of reason to want to harm her. Still, I don't supply her last name: of which she had several: maiden, married, remarried ...
giving the girls pseudonyms. Alice was this woman's real name. I'd called her
There may be another reason I've procrastinated with completing my Alice story: there's a sequel in which I slapped her. What made philosophically non-violent SybaRight, decide to make an exception needs its own module: and not in the Sex section. That needed module will also address other exceptions I've made since: not only actually smacking Hilary, a couple of times, actually trying to hurt her.
Notes
Ornette Coleman:
I don't know what you think of Ornette. I'm not sure what I think of him myself. I first saw him within a month or two of his first hitting New York: one of a series of memorable feats for the Five Spot. I bought his first record within months of its coming out. But I hadn't been standing on line for it to come off the press. I listened to it, but I never worshipped it. Don Cherry's exploding cheecks made me uncomfortable. I worried about him in a way I'd never worried about Dizzy puffing up like an adder. I remember Bobby Porcelli pronoucing him "the greatest genius of all time." But Bobby had made the same pronouncement about Bird, Bud, Monk, Trane ... all within the previous few months.
Whatever you think of him consider this: he's a famous innovator in his field. Whether or not he's on your short list for anything good, he's certainly on anybody's middle length list for jazz giants. Ornette won a Guggenheim. That's a first for jazz. Ornette broke longevity records at The Five Spot. Patrons there weren't drafted. They weren't there at gun point. They were there voluntarily and spent money to be there, spent money while there.
So how come he has to mooch from SybaRight's old girl friends? shouldn't a giant in any field have people lining up to slip him little loans?
In the same vein, how come SybaRight, author of the Model, inventor of inter-netting, inventor of Meta-oxymoron, of Macroinformation ... is followed only by people trying to get him evicted, defenestrated, hoping to turn up evidence of his being wanted somewhere: some long rap sheet?
I'll tell you this: Ornette should thank me. I introduced Alice to jazz. Took her to see Trane. Showed her how to concentrate on what Elvin was doing and still hear Trane and McCoy too.
My sex story about Jackie was told in the context of the police in the kleptocracy folder of my Social Pathologies directory. That predates my sex folder, predates my changing names to protect innocent girls. Just realize: that story was about cops. It was also about sex. It was also about neighbors. It was also about light. The above story is about sex. It's also about Wagner: about New York suburbs ...
Money & Art:
Any nouveau riche can wow his old buddies with a gold-hardwared bathroom, pussy around the pool ... Trouble is, you never know the effect you're having on someone not from your old neighboorhood. The Cabots wouldn't be likely to visit the mansion of the latest NBA sensation, but if they did, Rookie of the Year wouldn't even get the insults. Better hire me to advise your decoration. $1,000 spent on a little something can do more than $100,000 spent on something else.
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