|
|
 |
 |
|
| John Gregory Dunne, novelist |
For God, Country and Yale |
|
|
The Coker sisters, Phyl and Norma, were dime-a-dance hostesses at the Lido in Times Square in New York and a number of the older Yale boys from New York claimed not only to have gone to the "Big L," as it was called, but actually to have laid either Phyl or Norma, if not both . . .
Phyl Coker was then twenty-one years in the prostitution game . . . From the moment I first heard her name in the monastic corridors of Portsmouth Priory [a Rhode Island prep school run by Benedictine monks] I knew that I would lose it to her and only to her . . .
Four days short of my majority, in an effort to preserve my sanity, I finally made contact with Phyl Coker. It was two thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, I had twenty-five dollars in my pocket and a cherry to be plucked. I called from a bar on 42nd Street . . .
Her apartment was on East 52nd Street, a walkup. The flat was on the top floor. I rang the bell and climbed the stairs. My feet were like concrete and there was not a drop of saliva in my mouth. Phyl was waiting in the landing. The Infanta looked like Anne of Cleves. She had a square stocky figure and a face like a gravel pit. I was ready to turn around and race back downstairs. She made virginity seem viable.
Phyl's hand found its way inside my pants. I tried to think cool thoughts . . . There was a tiny sway-backed bed in Phyl's room and over it, a square blue and white banner that said "For God, For Country and For Yale." Phyl took off her negligee. Her body was shaped like a fire hydrant and she had shaved off her public hair. "Don't worry about getting me pregnant," Phyl said. The thought had never crossed my mind.
"Ooooo."
"Ahhhh."
When I was briefly back in New York, a couple of wars and a few assassinations after that first coupling under "For God, For Country and For Yale," I called Phyl Coker to find out where the years had gone and what they had meant and she said, "But Jesus, darling, I'm sixty-two years old." (New York, early 1952)
from Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne (Random House, © 1974)
© 2000 Nerve.com, Inc.
|
|
|
|
|
