The
lady named May writhes sideways on the St. Regis sheets, her sixty-five-year-old
thighs abrading my face like weathered parchment, and asks me to call her
princess. "Princess," she sings, "like my Daddy
used to do . . . "
May's vagina looms millimeters from my eyes. It smells
faintly of vinegar and Johnson's Wax and smiles maliciously. I feel mocked.
Diminished. And when her labia, a-glisten with lust and Vaseline, begins to
move, to form words — slowly at first, then with mounting articulation
— I'm less surprised than resigned to whatever message her septuagenarian
sex feels compelled to impart. You little prick, hisses her old-lady pussy,
why won't you kiss your Mommy!
By now even the walls are whispering. The sheets
thunder like shifting tectonic plates. I can hear the whoosh of blood through
her veins, blue as feathered neon beneath papery flesh that, even now, chafes
the fuzz from my cheeks. At seventeen, I still only shave twice a week. But
the LSD I've dropped this afternoon renders my senses razor sharp. I watch
with some sort of detached wonder, but no surprise, as her ancient love-lips
spew their angry commands. Put your tongue in . . . Lick it, little boy.
Lick it! You want your money, you'll put your tongue in Mommy!
May's vagina, in my throbbing brain, has a voice
not unlike Jean Stapleton, on All in the Family, though May, herself,
is genteel as the Queen of England. I met her in the St. Regis lobby, when
I floated in with Waldo, my roommate from Columbia. Waldo told me old ladies
liked to pick up boys there. He said you could make good money if you dressed
preppy and cleaned under your nails.
Waldo is as broke as I am, but once I meet May, he
seems to disappear. Before I know whether I'm hallucinating or actually moving
through space, I find myself in a metal box — the elevator — under
the gaze of this tall and elegant white-haired lady, who introduces herself
as May. She wears a black suit and silver stole with one of those fox faces
that still have the eyes in it, so that it looks like the creature might leap
from her frail shoulders and bite.
The entire ride, I can't tear my eyes from that vulpine
glare. I decide, in the way that acid renders you capable of cosmically deciding,
that in another life I was a fox, and I'm probably gazing at my own dead brother.
Somehow I killed him, or let him die, and he's arranged to find me now —
this afternoon — to torture me in ways I can only dimly imagine in that
watery elevator light, face-to-face with a high-tone matron who looks like
she should be heading to tea with Mamie Eisenhower, not soliciting sex with
a seventeen year old in a suite at the St. Regis. It's all too much.
A thousand years later, we're in
the hotel room, and I'm gripped by the thought, We all live in little boxes.
The room's a hushed cube dominated by a double bed with flowered bedspread
and a nightstand on which fresh roses, in a vase, wink at me as if they know
a secret they have no intention of sharing.
"What's your name?" she asks when we step in from the seemingly endless hall.
I thought I'd told her in the lobby, when she told me hers. Apparently not.
It's hard to keep track of what's happening. The carpet leaks eyeballs. My
hair hurts. My penis feels pipsqueak-tiny, then huge as a pillar. Plus, the
St. Regis has butlers, smart young men in uniforms like the Philip Morris
cigarette boy, not much older than me. I think I see one smirk as he pushes
past with a cart of gleaming dishes. Maybe he knows. Maybe everybody
does. Maybe, as I'm beginning to suspect, there's an entire, parallel universe
of sex and money and old ladies who lick their scarlet lips when they catch
your eye to let you know they're interested. All of it, until this day, was
only a suspicion.
"I'm, uh . . . Nicholas," I say, blurting the phony
name without planning to. Driven by a sense that something non-Jewy, something
vaguely old money sounding, is what's required. I want to come off like a
blueblood. Like a boy with a trust fund. The insanity of that eludes me. I
am, by any accounting, virtually penniless: a Columbia freshman working weekends
at a copy shop on Amsterdam Ave., selling pot to pick up food and book money.
Not to mention the niggling fact that, were I, as "Nicholas," actually part
of a prosperous bloodline, I wouldn't be selling my scrawny, faux-prep body
to the first old lady who wanted to buy it. I've heard of fetishes. But I
don't believe that any seventeen-year-old kid would voluntarily get into bed
with a woman old enough to have spanked his father when he was ten.
Up in the room, suddenly
dizzy, I decompress on the flowered bedspread and watch the lady named May
unbutton her tailored black jacket. This done, she goes to work on the starched
white blouse beneath it. Then she pulls the pins from her hair, so that it
falls, in girlish waves, halfway down her back. When she sits in a chair,
and bends to remove her shoes, I think, Just like the Land O' Lakes butter
girl. As a child, I gazed for hours at the pretty squaw on the label.
I loved her from earliest memory. The Butter Maiden formed the basis of my
first, faltering, masturbatory fantasies. Now here she is, grown ancient,
but magically available. Slowly, with that wife-of-a-senator smile, May eases
the zipper down the snug right hip of her skirt. I see her garter belt, the
top of one black stocking. I want to spray my brain with Raid.
After that, I lapse into a kind of hallucinogenic
fever. I let her undress me. May is my height, six feet even, despite her
stoop. And her breath, in the first, frantic moment when she leans in to grant
me a smooch, smells fresher than I might have imagined. Not natural fresh,
like a meadow, but chemical fresh, like the piss-cakes they put in men's room
urinals. She must, I think in my Owsley-fueled cerebellum, have gargled with
something manufactured by the same company.
But all that is nasal stuff. And right now,
I'm careening into more tactile reality. I can feel her fingers, like
talons, grasping the shaft of my cock. And to my surprise, my horror,
I find myself getting hard. I don't know what I expected. On acid you don't
perceive events so much as swim through them, charged and quivering on alternating
currents of paranoia and bliss. I know you, you little prick!
It's her vagina again, the maw of those pink grapefruit
lips making itself known. You thought you could make some easy money, didn't
you? But you're wrong. You're going to have to work. You're going to have
to work hard, or you're going to crawl out of here with your dick in a plastic
bag and blood coming out of your pants . . .
"WHAT?" I screech, rearing back from her feral bush.
(Disturbingly, she's dyed her pubes inky black, but left her head the color
of gun-metal.) The old woman rearranges herself on the bed, so that her face
aligns with mine.
"I said, 'I want you to take my honey . . . I want
to make it long.'"
Up close, if I squint, the Land O' Lakes fantasy
fades and, instead, miraculously, I'm in bed with Faye Dunaway. May has closed
the floor-to-ceiling curtains. The only light leaks from the bathroom. And
in the shadows, I'm suddenly Clyde and I'm kissing Bonnie. Which is fine.
Which is fantastic. If I could just steer the hallucinations, I'd be in heaven.
But my mind keeps veering off the rails. May has managed to roll me over on
top of her, her legs splayed beneath mine, and it feels like the two of us
are suspended, like sliced bananas, in some kind of toxic Jello. She slips
her hand once more around my cock, guiding me between those brush-burn thighs
and into what proves to be a surprisingly wet tunnel.
The whole time, May keeps up that nasty-sad patter.
"Call me Princess . . . Make me your little girl . . . "
I wish, at this moment, that I hadn't rifled her
wallet when she went to the bathroom. Wish I hadn't glanced the trio of puffy-jowled,
madras-clad bald men who raised their glasses in a faded Polaroid. Her sons.
(A banner over the table read "Happy Birthday Mom!") They are all older than
me and, on top of everything else, I am seized by a vision of the three of
them bursting into the hotel room, tearing off their matching madras and attacking
me with forks. I don't know where I got the fork thing — probably from
the photo, which shows the boys in a fancy restaurant. Worse, as May slips
my vaguely erect organ inside her, I can't help but turn away. I glance toward
the door. Big mistake. The leering visage from the other picture I'd glimpsed
— her husband, a porcine Gerald Ford lookalike — glowers at me with
eyes the color of melting naugahyde.
May doesn't seem to mind my passivity. With something
like tenderness, she arranges my hands on her breasts. They feel, in my desolation,
like matching banlon socks filled with sand. Until suddenly, when I close
my eyes, and she kisses me, the miracle begins to unfold. As though gagged,
her vagina pipes down when I penetrate her. A second earlier, it had been
calling me skink and chicken-chest. But now, though I can sense
its muffled insults, the slurs are smothered by my throbbing hard-on. May
begins to claw at my chest, pumping with a vigor that thrills and repels me
at the same time.
Maybe it was the acid, but three minutes in, I find
myself gazing into this seniorette's eyes, thinking, They could belong
to a sixteen year old. The rest of her — sagging chin, wrinkled mouth,
liver-spots — begins to fade away. All that remains is her gaze, her
essence, and in the floaty union of our eyeballs, that disembodied tangle,
I felt as if I had passed out of my flesh altogether, and that we'd connected
on some plane of LSD-fueled ether.
I watch myself, from the ceiling, lap beads of sweat
from her throat. I get deeply into tonguing her dewlaps, worrying the loose
flaps like a terrier with twin slabs of rawhide. I have no idea what the rest
of my body is doing, but my nerve ends feel singed with ecstasy.
We bounce and rock for hours — or maybe it's
minutes — until, in a kind of sudden conflagration, May's eyes go wide.
She grabs her throat and rolls to one side, clutching herself, and before
I know whether to scream or smile, a stream of vomit spews, Linda Blair-like,
out of her mouth. Insanely, the red-green spray hits my eyes like the fountains
of paradise. Then May manages to mutter, "I'm sorry . . . Chemo."
And in that instant, reeking and ecstatic,
I realize that I've just had sex with a dying woman. And, even scarier, that
it was the best I'd ever had . . . She gave me fifty dollars, and I gave her
a face to puke in. If I told you it was beautiful, you might not understand.
