Ladies' Man Read online

  The metal plate immediately reversed itself. “Now, don’ you wanna suck my pussy? You don’ wanna suck my pussy?”

  The old guy laughed, looking away.

  “Ah ast you, you don’ wanna suck mah pussy?”

  He put his hand in front of his mouth and jerked his head forward as if he were going to puke, then pulled out his dentures, holding them to the glass as they clacked in his hand. His mouth caved in without them, and the chick with the microphone looked up to White Sparrow and they laughed.

  My booth lit up and I quickly slipped in another quarter to recover the darkness.

  “Who wants to fuck me in the ass?” She whirled around with the mike. “Who wants to fuck me in the ass?”

  “Ah do!” I heard some big dumb spade in the adjoining booth shout through the partition. He must have caught her eye because she bopped saucily toward my neighborhood.

  “You wanna fuck me in the ass?”

  She stood in front of my booth staring at me and my gut turned to iced slush. I leaned forward, my chest pressing against the bottom of the glass so she couldn’t see my cock. I wouldn’t meet her face. I was on fire with shame.

  “What you hidin’, huh?” Her voice sounded heavy and everywhere.

  Go away. Go afuckin’way. I was dying. I stared blankly past her arm until she lost interest and moved to the next booth. As soon as she was gone I started pumping my meat again. I wanted her to watch. To come back and see me come. My knees were quivering and my hand raced at the speed of light. After getting nowhere with the guy next door, she came back my way. I stepped back, widening my eyes to catch her glance. She looked down into my booth again.

  “Ow! That’s a giant! A giant, yeah! Let her go! In my ass! In my ass!” I stood spread-legged like I was playing a sax, shaking like a bastard, pulling frantically on my cock.

  “C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon. Yeah! Yeah!” she hissed.

  I shot all over the coin slot and almost fell to my knees with nervous exhaustion.

  “Aw yeah, yeah.” She trailed off and moved down the line.

  I couldn’t control my hands. They fluttered to my legs and to my face like they’d never heard of gravity. When the light came on I struggled putting in another quarter to buy back the darkness. I just stood there breathing heavily, staring at nothing. I staggered from the booth. The chicks were still visible because the time hadn’t run out on my quarter. A blond kid in a ski jacket slipped inside and bolted the door. I walked past the change booth out into the street. I felt stoned, like I lost all sense of time and place. And it hit me; I didn’t feel anything anymore. I didn’t feel anything. Nothing got to me anymore. I had to do that for anything to get to me. I was dying.

  I still had a half-hour to catch the movie. I was in desperate need of some clean beauty. Across the street from the Carnegie was a big Bookmasters. It had the same harsh lighting as Come-a-Rama but it had books. On a long table were stacks of picture books, remainders. I made a major production of not looking at the ones that featured studies of nudes, pin-ups or the history of burlesque and thumbed through a thirty-pound edition of the history of the Olympics.

  The Carnegie Cinema was a nice little movie house built into the ass end of Carnegie Hall. It had the most unique food concession lounge in the world. It was more or less an art theater and the crowds they got there were more intellectually hip on the whole than, say, Times Square joints and I guess they figured if the subject was movies then anything French was right on, so they set up the entire lobby to make you feel like you were in a French sidewalk café. You walked down a long flight of stairs from the street level into a room where an entire wall was painted up as a row of French stores, boulangeries, patisseries, etc., etc., with little painted breads in the little painted windows. There was a blue sky over the storetops too. Along the back wall there was an espresso bar where you could get cappuccino, orzata, tamarind, croissants and assorted pastries from a girl in a striped blouse and a beret. You could sit at little cafe tables, your ass squatting on delicate heart-shaped wire-framed chairs and groove on the make-believe French street. Actually it was very nice and I was sure for a lot of people slurping their espresso there it stirred up either heavy memories or heavy fantasies. I sat thereat one of the little tables drinking cappuccino. The more I sat there, the more I grooved on it. Paris. I remembered a photo-essay autobiography of Henry Miller’s I once read. Paris in the thirties. Kenny in his thirties. Down, down, down. Then up! I could go to Europe! Start over. Leap the maze, don’t go through it. I could, I would! I was young and healthy, the world could be my oyster. I could bust the rut!

  I strode to a phone booth by the candy machine. New York! New York! What a wonderful town! Call La Donna, tell the news! Spread the word! I figured she was staying at her sister’s. She didn’t know anyone else. I hated talking to her sister, but this was big doings.

  Halfway through dialing I hung up. I was sure her sister knew about the vibrator thing by then. I didn’t want to talk to her, listen to her smirk at me. over the phone. Tell me La Donna wasn’t there when La Donna was four feet away pantomiming “I’m not here.” Stupid bitch. Bitches. I’ll go to Europe without her. Send her a post card from the Eiffel Tower. At that moment, wherever they were, I was sure the two of them were laughing at me. I felt a deep shame. I was flushing with humiliation. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone?

  Beach Red was horrifying. I never could understand why I went to war movies. They never failed to terrify me. It was two hours of soldiers confronting their fears of death. Many of them resolved the fear by dying. My going to a movie about dying was like my bringing my own bread to a bakery. As each guy snuffed it on the screen I could almost feel myself slipping into his new infinite blackness. Even for the young healthy guys who survived—I figured that movie was World War II, over thirty-some-odd years ago—that meant most of them were dead now. Somewhere I knew it was just a mid-sixties movie with actors but I started tripping out on the arithmetic of mortality and by halfway through the flick I felt like jumping up and doing sit-ups in the aisle.

  There was a girl sitting behind me. She was Chinese, with a puffy nose and pushed-in face, but she was young; long; hair and dungarees. Even though we were in the movies and she sitting directly in back of me, I could tell she was the silent type. I slid dawn slightly and leaned back, resting my head so that my hair came over the top of my seat. I wanted her to slide a hand through my hair, brush my cheek and come to rest on my forehead. Up front, half the screen actors’ guild was being blown to Jell-O. I closed my eyes and waited.

  La Donna and I met in a movie theater. It was similar to the Carnegie too. An art theater in Los Angeles. I was in Los Angeles on vacation. I had never been to the West Coast. La Donna was there visiting some aunt. It was a rainy, shitty afternoon, the movies the only place to go. I saw her in the lobby, gave her the eye, but couldn’t get it together to go over and say anything. I sat in the same row about ten seats over; the theater was pretty deserted. For two hours I alternated staring at her and staring at the screen. When I stared at the screen the message I was trying to convey was “Who needs you?” She never looked at me once. The movie was called A Page of Madness, a silent Japanese film about a nuthouse. When the audience filed out of the theater I followed her down two blocks into a big old bookstore. As she dawdled and traipsed through the aisles, me always one aisle over, I was wigging to the point of urinating on myself. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to her. I could never do that. If a girl gives me any kind of high sign I’ll take it from there, but I could never make a move without some kind of sign. I knew she knew I was there, why I was there, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t… I was blindly thumbing through Robert’s Rules of Order when she started strolling down my aisle. She said “Excuse me.” and smiled as she slid past me. Thank you. I got it from there. Within thirty seconds of conversation we discovered we were both from New York and the connection we made was like Stanley bumping into Livingston. To make a long story s
hort, I took her to dinner that night. To make it even shorter, we went back to my motel and I would like to say sex was ecstatic, etc., but the fact of the matter was I don’t think I was ever so paranoid in bed with anybody in my whole life, before or since. I wanted her so bad I couldn’t enjoy myself. I know what I’m doing when I rack, but that night I was so hungry, so needy, I felt like a high school senior. I came right away and then I kept balling because I was embarrassed to shoot so soon. I balled in a panic for thirty minutes after I came. She didn’t come. She was quiet. When I finally came up for air, rolling over to her side, she was still quiet. She started hugging and kissing me. I’m not a kisser, but I got into kissing like it was a new freak drag.

  Her silence was driving me crazy. She kept them long-lashed baby grays downcast and the few times she did look up at me she had the most subtle smirk on her face. Then she would hug me more and kiss me more, rest her head on my chest, her face toward my feet I went nuts. I started apologizing for coming so soon, I started telling her how nervous I was, how she turned me on. I apologized for everything but the rain and every time I apologized I flinched. It was so stupid, it made things worse, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to show her how human I was and I felt like I was making a Jerk out of myself. I was in a panic. That shy smirk was driving me berserk. What was it, contempt? Contentment? Modesty? Self-consciousness? Those silent hugs and kisses. The notion that she would be thinking I was a lousy lay had me climbing the walls, drove me to more false chuckling, panicking confessions and apologies. Finally, I felt like I had to ball again, to set the record straight. As I tried to move her on her back she pushed into me on her side, hugging me powerfully, her nose in my chest—she didn’t want to ball. Fuck, that’s what the hugging was all about—to keep me from hopping on her again. But the hugs were so deep, so burrowing—they were wonderful.

  She couldn’t stay—she told her aunt she’d be back at ten-thirty to see her cousin or someone. I turned away as she dressed. Fuck love, infatuation, crushes and all related emotions. I jumped out of bed, slipped on my dungarees to be less vulnerable, more in control.

  “Maybe I’ll call you later tonight?” she mumbled, giving me that smirk…

  My first thought was, why? It was a strange thing to do. Then I figured, yeah, I’ll take anything; I resisted one more apology, she kissed my chest, gave me a last over-the-shoulder smirk and was gone.-

  I lay on the bed for two hours, sniffing my fingers and trying to remember the license plate of the truck that hit me. Every time I flashed on how lousy a lay I was and how I tried to apologize I twitched in embar-rassment and agony. Finally, I couldn’t stay in that room any longer. It was twelve-thirty. She wasn’t going to call and why would she want to anyhow? I left to drive around the Sunset Strip, but I asked the receptionist to take any phone messages for me. The guy said he would only be on duty another hour but if I wasn’t back by then he would phi anything he got for me on my door. I drove around, had coffee in three different places, got lost in the hills somewhere and started driving back to the motel. The closer I got the more I knew there was going to be a message for me—I felt it. I even wished I had asked the receptionist what color his message paper was so I could have a clearer mental image of what my door would look like with a note pinned on.

  Two a.m. The desk was closed. I walked slowly down the corridor. My room was around the bend. The wallpaper was orange with a raised, pebble-grained texture. My room was out of vision, ten feet around the bend. I turned the corner and yes! Blue, robin’s-egg-blue paper push-pinned into my door. I turned the corner and yes! A million times since that moment I turned the corner and yes! Pebble-grained orange and then yes! Robin’s-egg blue. Yes! Da ba du dat dat yes! Yes! Doo ba do blue yes! Do ba do orange yes!

  An explosion on the screen sending palm fronds and body parts flying snapped me back. I slunk down low in my seat, not sure if I had been jerking my head in tune to my triumphant memories. I thought of the girl behind me, and mommies, I was very blue.

  After the movie I went back into the cafe section and had another cappuccino.

  I didn’t want to see The Loves of Isadora. I didn’t feel like sitting there through all her dance triumphs, waiting for that scarf to get snagged in a propeller and make a figure eight out of her neck. Besides, that movie would have been something La Donna would have dragged me to. As a matter of fact, half the solo girls sitting around me in the Café Carnegie reminded me of La Donna. Minor dancers living in body stockings, hair in a bun, shy, always giving and getting something ceramic and Chinese for presents.

  I started fantasizing about picking somebody up. Taking them home and blowing them away with tenderness and warmth. At first they would be distrustful. They had always been wary of men—their fathers were cold New England patriarchs; once they became twelve they weren’t even allowed to kiss him goodnight anymore; sex had always been a jump, jerk and squirt affair. All they lived for now was dance, they rarely spoke, they could only come if they masturbated, they got six-page letters from Mother which read like scripts from Medical Center. They kept Hesse novels and ballet photo books in a small brick and plank bookcase, had a cat named Gabriel or Damien. I would softly raise their chin to me and—bullshit I would. I would not. No more. No more La Donnas. No more laying low. No more hiding out with pretty, isolated, depressed loneliness moll.

  Get it together, Kenny.

  She never told me what she was smirking about or what her thoughts were that nigh. Just as well. If I could be cold had analytical about it I would say that the main intensity I felt with her in Los Angeles was a mixture of loneliness and specialness—mainly because we were both lonely and we were both three, thousand miles away from home—which made meeting somewhat special. But when we got back to New York and started dating among familiar faces and backgrounds that feeling of lonely specialness lingered. And we called it love. And as I sat there by myself drinking my cappuccino, still buzzing from Times Square brain-rape and two hours of Technicolor death, all the force of that special loneliness soaked through my bones and I hurt. I hurt bad because I still loved her. Or maybe what I really loved was that special loneliness. Now that was a thought;,

  Suddenly I felt as though my surroundings were mocking me, my travel plans—but it was a different type of embarrassment than the phone call shame—it was a sobering embarrassment. This was what Europe would be for me—Kenny the loner, slurping cappuccino, going to movies and debating whether to try to score or not. Europe. Wherever I could go, I would take my head with me. I felt like I was sitting there sipping my cappuccino under false pretenses, like I was on the lam, laying low from reality in that two-bit Parisian Disneyland. Like if the two pussies from the circle jerk place were reality cops and they were stalking Broadway and Seventh Avenue looking for me, I could have hid right where I was with all the other cinema fans.

  On the lam. On the double lam. If I ever ran into Jackie di Paris again I would be so much hamburger: The guy gets a call, gets dragged down to Times Square and then gets stood up. If that was me I’d turn head-hunter. On the lam. My whole life was lived on the lam. All I ever did was grab a chick and hide out, lay low. What the hell was I afraid of? Even when I wasn’t living with a chick, when I was living with those guys, all I ever did was try to figure out how not to be there. All I ever did was maneuver for an opening, a space away from them all. That was the reason I started working income tax with my uncle—so I could be in an earning position strong enough to move out, to live alone—to go into hiding. “I need my space, my privacy.” I had it in spades, my space. And I did right by calling up Jackie di Paris. I fucked it up for sure, but I was on the right track. I needed people. I didn’t even have senile pinochle partners to buddy with. Something told me it was going to be a bitch of a straggle because laying low sounded like a real fine idea most times, but there was more to be had, there was more to be had. And I wasn’t the only one. I looked around the room—at least half the people there looked like rejects from The Fugitive
. All the old ladies, the Lincoln Center dancers, bassoon players, Columbia University instructors, professional Communists, used-book-store owners. We were all on the fucking lam. Everybody there might not be biding from a nude twat with a microphone or an enraged postal clerk, but whatever they were hiding from, if those reality cops were going to pull tip front to raid that joint they had better bring with them some king-sized paddy wagons.

  I took a cab home. When I got to my door I couldn’t find my keys. Then I remembered putting them on the floor of the stroke booth so they wouldn’t jangle when I jerked off. After kicking the door for twenty minutes like an enraged baboon I called a locksmith. I could have gone back down to Times Square and found them, but I was afraid if I walked into that booth again I would never come out.