Felicity and I were hanging out in Ginger’s room like little sisters watching their big sister get ready for a date. Ginger was dressing for Kenyon, her fiancé, who was picking her up for dinner and the theater. Her room across the way mirrored Felicity’s; it was the same kind of prosperous young matron’s boudoir with its canopied bed and curved and draped dressing table. Except, unlike Felicity’s bedroom, there were mountains of clutter: papers and books piled everywhere, clothes hanging out of drawers.
Ginger was seated at her dressing table, while Felicity and I were sprawled on top of her rumpled quilt on the king-sized bed.
“I guess I gotta go with understated. Oh, God, a whole bland life of understated ahead of me,” Ginger said. She was always complaining about her impending marriage.
“Lots of tennis, though, and golf,” Felicity said.
“Yeah, and fuck you, too. Listen, Janet, honey, would you do me a huge favor and look through that pile on the chair for the black silk dress and lay it out for me? I’m running so late,” Ginger asked.
The phone rang and Felicity picked it up. She talked into it softly, as if she didn’t want the two of us to hear.
“Who was that—Lionel?” Ginger asked.
Lionel was the horn player from the party. Felicity and he had been seeing a lot of each other lately.
“No, that was Gunther. You know Gunther, don’t you, Janet?”
I knew Gunther all right. He was handsome—honey-blond hair down to his shoulders, deep-set hazel eyes, about six-two, and Aryan to the hilt, with the possible exception of his wide mouth. He had a slight overbite, a parrot mouth. One of the house’s chief connections, he dealt everything: coke, hash, pot, pills, even my old-time favorite, crystal methedrine. Sometimes Gunther would hang out with us upstairs for an hour or so, but that was it; he never took anyone downstairs.
“Gunther must be having problems with his girlfriend, because he actually wants to do a trade—drugs for sex. What do you think of that? Here was one guy I figured couldn’t be had...Wants to know if anyone is working late tonight. I told him I was going out, but that you’d be around, Janet, and I’d ask you,” Felicity said.
“That man is going to pay me to fuck him?” I asked, practically reeling from my own good luck.
“So, it’s on, then? I didn’t think you’d object. I’ll call him back,” she said.
Kenyon and Gunther arrived at the same time. Felicity went downstairs to let them in, and they stood like two gentlemen callers in the parlor, waiting.
“How do I look?” Ginger asked me, primping in the mirror.
“You look all grown up, you look glamorous,” I said.
When we came down, the two men were exchanging a few polite remarks about the weather. Kenyon held a bunch of long-stemmed roses in one hand. He was tall, with a shock of white hair, and he was impeccably dressed in a dark blue pin-striped suit. In spite of that name, Kenyon, and what Ginger had told me, I still expected a swinging, greasy kind of operator wearing gold chains, the kind who would think nothing of marrying a whore. But Kenyon Edwards was what his name suggested: a distinguished-looking WASP.
Once again, I found myself measuring this reality against everything I had ever been taught. Adults lied, I decided. While she was braiding my hair Josephine used to chant, “Whistling girls and cackling hens always come to no good ends.”
Genuinely frightened, I stopped whistling.
Now here was a supremely eligible man choosing Ginger, who may have been an award-winning whore, but who was a whore nonetheless, and not even a particularly young or beautiful one at that. No doubt about it, when the grown-ups told me to “be quiet,” “let him win,” and “he won’t respect you after,” they had all lied.
Right next to Kenyon stood Gunther. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a pair of worn-out jeans, his long legs disappearing into engineer boots. His thick dark blond hair just grazed his broad shoulders. A perfect icon of a man. His eyes kept following me across the room; he was glaring at me like he was angry.
“Want a drink?” Ginger asked both of them.
“Thank you, yes,” Gunther said.
“Bourbon and branch,” Ginger said, nodding at Kenyon, and then she turned to Gunther. “What’ll you have tonight?” she asked, going over to the wet bar.
“Vodka on the rocks, please,” Gunther said.
I was listening to the delicate clip of his accent. Just another client, I kept telling myself, but I felt that my obstinately eager face was probably betraying me. I tried to act cool. We all sat down there in the big, empty room. Gunther and I had not exchanged one word. Felicity, Ginger, and Kenyon were doing the talking. Finally Felicity said, “Well, go on, you two.”
“Which room?” I asked.
“The first one on the right—our best—nothing but the best for an old friend like you, Gunther,” Felicity said.
I poured myself a highball glass full of scotch and led my john up the stairs. Inside the room, he went over to the windows and looked out on the street.
“How do you want to get paid, all blow—I’ve got Peruvian flake—or maybe you are into something else?” he said, not looking at me.
After a long deliberate abstinence, I surprised myself by asking without hesitation, “Do you have any crystal?”
“Oh, yeah, I thought so. You like crank. I knew that. So do I. Want to do a few lines now? This stuff is pure. I had to cut it myself to keep it from melting,” he said.
“How did you know I like speed?” I asked. After all, I didn’t look very much like a speed freak anymore.
“Because I know you. I’ve known who you are for years.”
“Years?”
“You are a friend of Michael’s from the Traveling Medicine Show.”
“Yes, do you know Michael?”
“Who do you think sold him the methedrine that made you crazy? I am the one,” Gunther said with obvious pride. “I etherized that batch in my bathtub.”
I couldn’t believe it. This gorgeous Aryan was the wizard who’d cooked up that stuff that drove me mad! It was meant to be.
“All this time...How come we never ran into each other back then?”
“Listen, I keep a low profile. But I’ve observed you over the years. You never noticed me. I was just another customer sitting at the table,” Gunther said, his slight German accent making him sound like a cross between a modern-day drug dealer and a man who should be wearing a monocle.
While he talked, Gunther tapped out long lines of that same gooey white crystal I recognized. We snorted up the lines with a short straw. Bam, I got a rush. My teeth started to chatter. “This time I can handle it,” I kept telling myself. We were staring at each other now with our big black pupils like two ghouls from hell. I sucked down my scotch. He polished off his vodka. Still no action.
“I don’t go with whores, you know that,” he said.
“What happened to change your mind?”
“I always wanted to sleep with you, a long time before you turned pro...And then I just caught my girlfriend in bed with my partner, Gabe, Michael’s dealer,” he said.
I knew Gabe and I couldn’t understand why she would do that. Gunther was a lot better looking.
“Well, I can make you forget for a little while anyway,” I said.
“Yes, how are you going to do that?”
“Let me show you how,” I said.
He poured a couple of grams of methedrine into a glycine envelope and handed it to me.
“Come here,” I said.
“No, you come here,” he said.
I went over to him. He started to kiss me, and I let him, soul kisses, while he ran his rough hands over my body. He was angry. He held on to me and looked me in the eye.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said.
A few afternoons later, Gunther dropped by. Joey and I were working that day. Without any banter, without so much as a nod at Felicity, he said to me, “C’mon, then,” and we were back in the same bedroom. This time was different. At first his stroke seemed almost tentative, like a blind man feeling my face. I remember thinking when he was inside, ‘This one fits. I have to have him. I want to marry him.’ But I had said that kind of thing to myself before, whenever I got carried away, and I tried to ignore it. In spite of all my efforts, good sex and marriage—sex and true love—were still inextricably linked somewhere in a hermetic recess of my mind.
Back Gunther came on Friday, and the following Monday, and he kept on coming. Felicity just chuckled and let us use a room. By this time she was madly in love herself with Lionel the horn player, so she was in the mood.
“I guess I’m running a matchmaking outfit,” she said.
But Felicity only knew the half of it; that is, she only knew about my daytime love life. At night, after a short nap, I headed down to Slim’s Wide Missouri. There I stopped at the bar on the first floor just to check out that still iridescent, outrageous scene. Slim had hung his by now (more often than not) famous patrons’ work, most of it huge canvases, all over the long, narrow room with its high ceilings. The paintings represented his profits, because Slim could never resist running a tab for the artists who hung out at his bar, both before and after they made it. As a result, he was driving his business into the ground. And he could not bear to sell those paintings, even though it would have saved Slim’s if he had. He looked to me like an underground freedom fighter with his hooked nose and fierce eyes partially obscured by a shock of hair. He had a way of stooping over (he was tall) to listen to whoever was talking, as if he were really interested, which betrayed his naturally kind nature. In the petty, mean-spirited, nickel-and-dime world that is the restaurant business, Slim’s largesse stood out. He seemed to have banished the very notion of lunacy, treating his most psychotic regulars with the same respect Sardi showed for his Broadway stage luminaries. Like his customers, Slim lived for posterity. He wanted to be remembered as a patron, not as a saloon proprietor. His real dream had been to attract the writers away from Irene’s uptown, but instead, he drew artists and then rock ‘n’ roll stars, and that was the end of it. The bourgeois literati were not about to mix with imbecilic rock ‘n’ rollers.
So Slim resigned himself and hired Michael to turn the upstairs into a showcase for new music, what would come to be known as “New Wave,” later renamed “punk” by the mainstream press. It began right there at Slim’s, with a band of heterosexual cross-dressers who called themselves the Starlets; with Letty Jones, the brilliant poet-turned–rock ’n’ roll musician, and her backup band, Channel Eleven; and the Dumb Generation, a wonderful dysfunctional group that heralded the nihilism to come. Michael booked them all regularly.
But the pièce de résistance of Slim’s was the crowd with a penchant for fame that had put the saloon on the map. It gathered every night in a room downstairs at the back. The habitués there belonged to the most celebrated cadre of gay men and fag hags since Oscar Wilde: this was Andy Warhol’s crowd. They yelled across the room at each other, calling each other every kind of fanciful, obscene name, and gave each other blow jobs underneath the large, cafeteria-style tables. Once in a while, someone who also hung out upstairs would invite me into the back room. I had always felt sad and rejected by handsome young gay men. My impulse was to try to seduce them, but knowing I could never convert them, it hardly seemed worth it. What was wrong with vaginas? I longed to ask. Admittedly, heterosexuality seemed tame by comparison, and this troubled me. I couldn’t really defend it. I would have loved to attach myself to such a theatrical scene, but I felt like an insignificant, dull-feathered heterosexual in their midst.
After the occasional obligatory look at the downstairs, I went up to be with Michael. Recently, the East Village chapter of the Lucifers had become regulars. The Lucifers was a motorcycle gang whose local leader had dropped acid with Allen Ginsberg and then disarmed his followers, turning them into peace-loving outlaws. In the process, this leader, Hank was his name, had taught the other gang members to be archaically polite. They were gallant, pulling out chairs and opening doors for the ladies. Hank was about to marry one of Slim’s more illustrious painters’ daughter. The approaching wedding inspired so much speculation, it sounded more like the Junior League some nights.
The rest of the upstairs crowd comprised the local tattoo artist; a few downtown drug dealers; a whole array of stoned musicians and the hangers-on who wrote about them; very often music-industry moguls and their scouts; bartender friends of Michael’s, and a larger-than-ever coterie of waiting women. The energy of the music and the serenity of the surroundings made it feel as though we were flying at thirty thousand feet.
In spite of all that was going on, Michael was loyal to me. Except on those dreaded nights when he went home to Roseanna and the baby (but really, I used to tell myself, that was only to crash), he stayed close. The Lucifers with their own supply of methedrine; the musicians and the rich record company moguls with lots of good Peruvian flake, not to mention the dealers themselves: all of these factions cut severely into Michael’s draw. But a few of the more marginal types still responded to his waning charisma. I served as his hostess whenever he did condescend to invite a Starlet groupie or a rejected dealer’s moll to go home with him. On these occasions, he loved to take the young woman back to my sumptuous apartment, which he showed off as if it were his. Usually, though, when we were together, it was just the two of us. We spent many early mornings by ourselves, feeling as if we were the only two people left awake on the island of Manhattan. Michael took turns settling (naked) into one or the other of Whitney’s mother’s chintz-covered club chairs, or sometimes he would just lie on my thick pile carpet with his back against the bed and stroke the pile around him with admiration.
Alone a lot, and possibly a little bored, we turned ever more playful. Our format evolved. Michael discovered he liked to watch. We were explorers, marveling over the mysteries of the vagina. In particular, its elasticity impressed us. We experimented by seeing how many vibrators I could comfortably stick up there, along with his penis, which took its place next to the hard plastic versions inside me like an unspoiled little brother shoved to the edge of the bed. I can still see his face bathed in reverence as, squatting and stuffed with hardware, I smugly held the pose. But in spite of our best efforts, our sex life, burdened with all its paraphernalia—the dildos, vibrators, and recent addition of handcuffs and ropes—was getting perfunctory. Michael, so accessible now, with his potbelly, his gripes about his job, the hair that was beginning to peek out of his nose, had become too real.
In public I was peaking, enjoying a little fuss upstairs at Slim’s because, partly thanks to my speed-fueled lectures on the subject, hooking had achieved stature in that circle. Right after New Year’s, Felicity and Ginger had declared 1974 to be the Year of the Whore. They were planning a big gala in the spring, and I had given Michael one of their posters, which was a drawing of an elegant forefinger on a clitoris. Below it a caption read, “Ball in the Year of the Whore: We Want Everybody to Come.” Michael hung it proudly next to the bar. But in the midst of the hoopla, this brave cultural scene, I often found myself feeling despondent, because my obsession was losing its hold. Brute reality was busting my old dream, and I felt like a fool. I felt deflated, particularly on those nights when Michael chose to go home to Roseanna.
On a weekend afternoon around Valentine’s Day, Michael and I decided to celebrate by taking in one of those classic underground blue movies that were being made in the seventies. We thought several of these were pure art. We cabbed it to the Universe, the theater that featured all the most intelligent porn films. This one was called The Opening of Misty Beethoven, and as good art is supposed to do, it triggered an important revelation. The movie turned out to be cathartic. A takeoff on the Pygmalion story, it featured a world-class sexologist (played by a future legit movie actor) and a Pigalle whore. The story went like this: One night, the sexologist and a friend, dressed in tuxes, are sailing through the Pigalle district in their limo when the hero makes a wager that he can turn any one of the mangy streetwalkers outside the tinted window into a high-class call girl. The friend takes the bet, and they pull some poor, unwitting slut out of the gutter into their magnificent car. The sexologist teaches her not only how to talk, walk, and dress, as in the more pallid version, but also how to fuck, suck, and cater to, in one memorable scene, four men at once. All the while, the whore has been in love with her mentor, who continues to ignore her, until the last scene, when both are dressed for a ball and suddenly he realizes how beautiful she is. Then he gently undresses her and they make love.
The catharsis comes when we see the stark contrast between the irrelevant jerk-off sex that has preceded it and the tender, intimate lovemaking itself, which is the opposite of performance. In fact, the man barely seems to move inside the woman. A private connection, so private even the camera could not invade it, was happening before our eyes. Besides being intensely romantic, the movie delivered a powerful message, especially to me that day. I sat there in the dark next to Michael, surrounded by the other men with their hats on their laps, and I recognized in that final scene Gunther and myself.
“Oh, so that’s lovemaking,” I thought at the time, quite overcome with the realization. I was recalling how much Gunther thrilled to be inside of me, how much my every quiver reverberated through him. It was love then. Unlike what I felt for Michael, my attachment to Gunther seemed to spring from a different chakra, from the heart rather than the head. With Michael, things were loose. Our partnership had come to be characterized in those days by an absence of feeling, a painlessness, which suited us both. And I still felt the lingering presence of the mystic whenever we were together. I thought maybe he felt it, too. But Gunther’s passion was the lure of the earth. His warmth made me hungry and it fed me, filled me up. I was curious to see where this mortal thrall would lead.
Even so, I refrained from admitting to myself that Gunther was eclipsing Michael. It would be like admitting Michael wasn’t really my other half, or like choosing Dionysus over Apollo. And yet by this time Gunther had won the supreme place in my thoughts with no more than the uncomplicated power of kisses and hugs. After the first strained encounter, Gunther and I began to open up to each other and were talking and laughing. Before long, our meetings took on the intensity of rapture: with openmouthed kisses we sucked in the breath of our mutual adoration and exhaled it into the rarified air fragrant with sex. Our feelings were in charge, and we both knew it, although as yet no words to that effect had been spoken. Gunther turned out to be exactly the opposite of the icy Aryan I had thought he was—generous with his affection and warmth—hugging me, covering me with kisses, and spooning me in bed afterward. This was unfamiliar behavior—it did not feel at all like that groove of pain I thought of as love but I managed to withstand it. Felicity wanted to know why our affair hadn’t progressed to my house. I gave him my home number, but still, Gunther resisted. The whorehouse served as a kind of shelter for him.
On a slow Monday afternoon, Gunther swung me in his arms around the disheveled whorehouse bedroom to the strains of violins emanating from his favorite Moody Blues album. When the heartrending operatic chorus came on, “But I love you...oh, how I love you!” he dipped me back as if I were the most precious bit of cargo and cover my bared neck with kisses. Ecstasy.
On Tuesday, I proposed.
“Gunther, do you need a green card?”
It was snowing outside, the last snowfall of the year. The street was dead quiet. The house was empty—no customers. He lay there on his back staring at the ceiling without answering me. I had the eerie sensation of not knowing where I was or what I was doing there, in this strange big room, not my home, with this strange man, not even my man. We were players on a stage. Nothing mattered.
“Gunther, I asked you: Do you need a green card?”
“I heard you. Why are you asking?”
“Because if you did, then I’d be more than willing to marry you for nothing. I’d do it for nothing,” I said.
“My mother is American. I don’t need a green card,” he said.
I turned on my side and faced him as he lay there, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling.
“Oh, well, how about this. In less than four years, I’m coming into around forty thousand dollars from a trust fund. Will you marry me?” I asked.
Nothing.
“Think about it, OK?”
Ever since Corinne told me no decent man ever marries a whore, I had been plotting, on a subterranean level, to get married. I didn’t at all like other people assigning me a permanent place outside the pale. I refused to be branded. I was a nice girl no matter what, and it was my birthright to marry a nice boy if I wanted and settle down—any time I wanted. Nothing bothered me more than the idea that society still defines a woman by experience. Once she sins, there is no redemption. In other words, I was supposed to submit to being condemned and ostracized for life. No different from biblical times, was it? I did not have the same freedom to change, to rise above my past, to learn from experience as a man did. Only if I were willing to disown it, keep silent, live a lie, perhaps then I could reenter society. This is what Corinne meant by “no decent man would ever marry me.” I detested that notion.
But also, I asked Gunther to marry me because I had fallen in love. The gravity of what I had done impressed me. I had never proposed to anybody before.
“So, just think about it,” I said.
“Hello, Janet?”
“Gunther, is that you? You’re calling me at home. This is my house, you know that?”
“Yes, yes, I know that. Are you alone?”
“I was on my way out, but I’m alone now.”
“Please, I’ve got to come over. The DEA is on my case. They busted everybody, my partner, everybody. They are coming after me. I need someplace to go for a little while where they can’t call me anymore. I’m sick to death of the calling, calling. May I come?”
“Of course,” I said.
When he got there, Gunther found me changed into an oyster-colored satin negligee, an item of clothing I have never been able to afford since, but there I was in it, smelling of Chanel No. 19. He took one look around my fancy digs, at the glittering bridge outside my window, and then at me, and he did a classic double take.
“Janet, what a woman you are,” Gunther said, closing in on me.
We didn’t get out of bed for three days, except to go to the door when food was delivered. In the middle of it somewhere he said, “The answer to your question is yes.”