She gasped slightly and spoke again in the near whisper. “I’m thinking that I’m not welcome, much, to use my friend’s room.”
Beyond the obvious, I felt a crucial decision being made, slipping between us like the passing of a spirit. At that moment,
I could have no clue as to the consequences.
No problem, I lived alone, just the dog and me. We left the bar and descended some stairs off the lobby to a glass door that
opened on San Antonio’s famous Riverwalk. We passed a couple of the young people from her group and she pointedly drew my
arm around her, but they barely looked at us as we went by.
I was reminded of a time, back in “the day,” when I had thrown my books at the principal and dropped out of high school. On
my way out, defiantly lighting a cigarette, I had paused to cuss out some old antagonists. As they had comprehended the situation,
their eyes sort of glazed over and they’d walked away. I had been no longer a part of their reality; I’d ceased to exist in
their world. I remembered wishing that someone had told me that it could be that easy! While my parents had shortly pressed
me into entering another school to finish up, the small bit of bravado had constituted a rite of passage. I wondered whether
Justine might be feeling something of the same nature.
We paused on the Riverwalk, regarded as highly romantic by tourists, though less so to locals. Until an evening such as this,
one which seemed “the goal in sight again.” I could almost believe the proposition that we are able to choose among our possible
futures, that I had somehow found my way to that moment. Yes, I was indeed basking in the envious glances of men, as well
as those of outright hatred from some women—we all have our little agendas. But I did feel that I had to exorcise one last
demon of sanity before giving myself over, altogether, to midlife crisis.
I used to joke with my late wife about her “Three Faces of Linda”: the exotic dancer seen on the stage, the flirtatious courtesan
who was her clubroom persona, and, of course, the “real” Linda, predictably a bit shy and withdrawn. Those personalities had
generally occupied discrete blocs of time. This creature, on the other hand… I had watched the tough young punker waver into
something indefinable within spans of seconds, then morph into a being as kittenish as Seabrook had drawn her “composite”
predecessor. I looked down into those pale green panther’s eyes, which again seemed as primordial as her Arabian jewelry.
“Who are you, really?” I wondered rhetorically then, in all hopeless honesty, just blurted out, “And what in the world do
you want with me?”
The enigmatic eyes moistened, as they seemed to divine all my shades of meaning. “Where is it written that same is good?”
Thus dismissing ages, acculturations, et cetera, she snuggled tighter under my arm. “Something wonderful is happening,” and
that was all
she would say as we drove to my house—in a neighborhood where it’s best not to be after dark unless both the cops
and
the gangs know you.
In my defense, I will tell you that the childlike joy in that expression resonated with a
hope
long absent from my heart. I do possess some sense of responsibility, beyond simply not wanting to deal with the guilt later,
but this was of a different order. If I had banished the demon from one shoulder, an angel on the other was still being troublesome.
The old folks would have said it was warning me,
If you don’t live up to that, if you let her down, it’s the sort of thing for which you will surely be damned.
Please don’t laugh at me; I’m as serious as death.
Still, I gave myself over—what did you really expect? Uncharted territory it would be, then. In my experience, when you notice
something magical, something the poets would sing as evidence a union is meant to be, it’s best not to tell Girlfriend about
it. Women generally don’t appreciate anything that far outside their control, inclusive even of acts of God Almighty. So here
was one who just seemed to say to go with it? I had no more questions. Right then at least. Questions would soon multiply
like a mutated virus.
————————
I
T WOULD BE ABSURDLY COY
to refrain from the most intimate details of what was happening to me. From what I was to learn of the viewpoint of Justine’s
exhibitionistic little soul, it would be flatly disingenuous.
Someone wanting you that bad can raise the dead. While I had not yet been disposed to just go on out to the cemetery and lie
down, I’d been emotionally and sexually shut off for a long time. Even my bedroom had certain tomblike qualities. Due to curiosities
of old house construction and expansion, it was a fully enclosed inside room, without outside walls. No sound or vibration
disturbed its silence. Hidden away in decaying south San Antonio, the place must have seemed to her like the dark side of
the moon.
Drawing a deep breath, she stepped to the center of the room and stood looking at the bed, as though caressing the image of
what we were about to do on it. She then loosened her skirt and let it fall to reveal that she had worn nothing beneath it.
Turning about slowly, displaying herself for me, she shed her jacket and lifted a questioning eyebrow. Wearing only her body
jewelry and heels, she was easily as sensational as any showgirl I’d ever had a lech on. Still, I responded that I wanted
her to be as naked as possible. Dropping her eyes, she breathed a soft, “I understand,” unwinding the heavy chain and taking
off her bracelets. She also relinquished a tiny chain that draped about her hips. Her nipples were unpierced, as I’d learned
when I caressed them at the bar. But, as she lifted her leg to remove the painful thong band, I saw the glint of metal below
her reddish pelt of pubic hair.
“No tattoos?” I wondered, as she kicked off her shoes and moved to the bed. She sprawled across it on her belly and propped
herself up on her elbows with her chin held by her fingers, regarding herself in the full-length mirrors on my closet. Fixing
me with her eyes in the reflection, she pointedly spread her thighs.
“The only dead-on work is done in Europe,” she explained, assessing me in return. “I’d have to get
way
up on something, to let it be put on me.” I took off my coat and moved around the bed to mute the lights, hoping to give
myself every possible edge in comparison to her hard young body. As I reached for the lamp on the nightstand, she grabbed
my butt with both hands, pulling herself to her knees. She loosened my belt and aggressively shoved down my trousers. Pressing
my hands behind my back, she began to demonstrate the utility of the ornament on her pierced tongue.
I was erect in a matter of seconds and, not wanting to risk losing it, hastily pinned her back against the bed, losing more
clothes as I could. I cursed under my breath as I remembered to reach for the condom, which, hope springing eternal, I kept
on the nightstand. But she seized my wrist and nipped at my pectoral with her teeth. “Nay, please! I don’t want that,” she
hissed.
While I hated the thought of trying to keep it up to get the damned thing on, I felt obliged to protest, “Unfortunately, I
know that it’s perfectly safe, Justine, but you don’t know me, now do you?” God, I felt so responsible, it made me sick.
“A good time at a party? Not. This is some kinda real, and I wanna feel you come inside me,” she breathed, smothering any
further discussion with her mouth. I didn’t recall ever being kissed quite like that before. She was a starving succubus,
gnawing and sucking on sustenance long denied, squirming against me, as if trying to claw open and crawl inside my skin.
Handling Justine’s sweet, firm flesh alone would have impacted, not to mention the way she held the rungs on the headboard
in a facsimile of bondage. She moaned and writhed as I ate her pussy, lapping up her abundant lubrication. This was perhaps
less a product of any expertise on my part, than of her labial ring’s configuration. A thick protrusion on one side was designed
to remain in more or less constant contact with her clitoris.
When I did grab some neckties, strategically left (like the condom) on the headboard since I rarely wear them, and bound her
hands, she gasped in the semblance of innocent anticipation, “Are you gonna hurt me now?” This set me on fire and, when I
told her no, not then, she teasingly purred, “But you will, sometime? Tell!”
As I whispered to her fantasies of sufferings to come, she rolled over on her belly again, flexing her buttocks irresistibly.
When I spread her and touched the tender flesh, she whimpered and involuntarily flinched away, but I seized her hips and dragged
her back. The long muscles in her back quivered and she sobbed uncontrollably into the pillow as I penetrated her anus.
“Dead right! Make me feel it, make me feel every motherfuckin’ second of it!” She screamed and cried and cursed, bucking furiously
as I reached under her to manipulate the cunning little ring against her clit. She came repeatedly and violently and I was
astonished to sense at least two of the “Faces of Justine,” the tough punker and the playlike victim, momentarily merge.
It was like having two women simultaneously, superimposed on one another. Her spasms subsiding, she turned on her back, easing
me out of her before I could come and looked up at me, eyes wet and lips parted in an expression of absolute surrender. In
that moment, I knew I could do anything whatsoever to her. She looped her bound wrists around my neck and sought my mouth,
lifting her hips for me to enter her vaginally.
Her demeanor neutralized any residual performance anxiety, and I discovered with delight that another labial ring, located
farther down, performed for me the same function as the clit ring did for her. The contractions of her vaginal muscles gently
nursed me toward climax. She kept her eyes open, their pale green fire burning into my soul as her slow undulations became
unendurable. When she brought me off, she stretched all her muscles and came again with a long luxuriant moan.
Directly she was drifting off, oblivious to the tickle and stickiness of the fluids we had generated. The sequence of choice
left me more bemused at her apparent indifference to hygiene, but it was not something I was going to struggle with. As I
pulled her on top of me, so that she might go to sleep without the burden of my weight on her, something happened that went
beyond sex. Some more etheric fluid filled my heart.
Holding her, just holding her was like… like coming home after a long trip. Yes, like coming home is all I can call it. I
don’t mean that she was like my wife, or JJ, or others I’ve been with. The piercing and her other exotica, her morphing personas,
all made her far different. But the greatest difference was the quiet conviction: Yes, this is what I’m used to. This is familiar,
and safe, and… home.
W
RAPPED IN
J
USTINE’S ARMS AND LEGS, MY
thoughts
did
finally drift back to JJ, nonetheless. Unworthy as it might be seen, I’m afraid that it was rather along the lines of gloating
at her probable disbelief, could she but have seen me then! I’m talking serious disbelief here, hard-core denial. JJ’s truths,
her sense of reality, seemed to reside in whatever notions were most comfortable and convenient for the parochial minds of
the moment. Truthfully, she had turned out to be not so different from the way I’d previously remembered her—from the portentous
year of 1963, that single long storm of synchronicity, in personal lives as much as world affairs.
In our later era, I first became uneasy when dragged to view a popular film that left the screen awash with passivity. My
perception was that the male lead wussied out after claiming cosmic certainty that comes only once. What was supposed to be
attractive about failure to embrace his lover’s confession of compliance?
Not me, surely, but my JJ was careful to make no such confession. It became obvious that she would not leave her husband.
Her basic conservatism reasserted itself, her discomfort with stirring things up, a pastime in which I take positive delight.
To my credit, I refrained from making the acquaintance of more bartenders over these issues. For the first time in my life,
I caved and sought counseling. Those of us, and this is not at all gender-specific, who spend our lives pretending to be tough
guys may ultimately determine that we have maintained our image at a terrible price.
The counselor, a Pakistani Sufi woman skilled in regression techniques, taught me much about the frailties of memory. Unexpectedly,
I discovered a dark arc into which I could never see to resolve its contents. I’d not denied the reality of repression for
other people, but finding its trail within myself was disconcerting.
In deep hypnosis, I discovered how I’d “consolidated” some temporal facts. If asked before how many times, as a teen, I’d
run over to JJ’s house on foot, I’d have answered maybe a dozen. Standing on her lawn in the hypnotic re-creation of the breakup,
her dropping her chin when I tried to kiss her, I realized that I had been there scores of times not including all the lonely
“drive-bys” of later years. However, when the counselor gave me an exercise of writing a chronology of my early romance with
JJ, I found that some sequences and juxtapositions made no sense at all.
There was a lucid recollection of sitting at a downtown shoeshine stand—Fort Worth, Texas, having no “uptown.” Built into
an unused doorway no larger than a closet, it was wallpapered with an eclectic collection of scripture, joke-shop obscenities,
and magazine cheesecake. It was situated in a zone of derelict hotels, which would later be abolished when it was deemed that
the emotional stability of the city’s middle class demanded prettification.
My mission had been to pay the outrageous sum of two whole dollars for a shine. Included in the fee would be directions to
any contraband about which I might inquire, specifically, more persuasive identification than my doctored driver’s license.
All this had all been preparatory to a proposed venture in underage marriage with JJ. I had been in a delinquent frame of
mind, mild by today’s standards—the proverbial teenager in leather jacket… although, in my defense, I did have an old HarleyDavidson
to go with it! When she became pregnant late in 1963, presumably by my successor, who briefly balked at marriage, a grand
gesture had seemed indicated.