Now I had a great secret in my life. It was beyond exciting. Ah, yes…I had him. The real games began.
The pattern of our affair began to emerge.
By day, I was the ever eager little worker bee. Now, even more desperate, to please my mighty employer. Working late took on new meaning. I would manage to know his schedule and I had reason to be around the office when he returned from his late afternoon squash games when I knew he had not plans for the evening. The second invitation came and then the third. I was not nearly as surprised anymore, but now wanting to be reassured of his desires. I did not dared to think of where it all would lead as it could go nowhere, but I was bound and determined to enjoy it all for what it was worth.
I can’t remember the timeline now, but it always ended in a cab on the way back to his apartment, rushing to be alone.
Sex, yes, but the first time is a blur. Course, I always still tend to hate the first fully sexual experience with a new lover. It is always so awkward and uncomfortable. Too much worrying and hesitation to really enjoy it. I still liken it to a roadblock that one must get by, a speed bump of caution before the open road of freewheeling desire and passion. It happened sometime in the early days of the true affair and then continued to be the thread that inspired it all.
Sex with him was more of a marathon. I swear that man could go on all night. I use to have to beg to be able to sleep. It amazed me. At 18, I was used to selfish boy lovers who loved you once and then wanted to watch music videos whether or not you we satisfied. Or, the goal was to get you to come so they could have their way. Seeing for fact, that a man of 45, sooo much older in my book, could put any of them to shame was incredible. And this was way before the invention of Viagra!! Maybe he was truly perverted or a sex addict because I can’t think it was all my influence or mere presence in his bed. It still makes me shake my head in dismay. Clearly his motivation was to get me into to bed and then never let me out until I was so broken and raw that all the next day I was aware of him with every step I took. I enjoyed it, but it was often just too much. Hold me afterwards until I fall asleep quietly speaking romantic thoughts or, now, let me roll over since I am really exhausted, but I really have no need to do it again..and again..and again.
But I did it. I preformed like a trouper. Met with his never ending desire until I really could not do anything more but pass out from lack of strength. Because he had me you see. The act of seduction was so key. The foreplay was so enticing. I wanted what was in it before the cab ride home.
It was for the beautiful New York City life dream that I became a whore.
He took me out to an audience interactive play on the lower East side where the theater patrons stood in the center of the room and “played” the crowd. Never did anything like that before or since. As a child, we did not frequent Broadway, but the yearly trip to Ringling and Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. I saw a Rodeo, I saw a Basketball game, we went to the Bronx Zoo, but real theater was of a dream. Being part of the crowd who interacted with the true arts was intoxicating.
Dinner afterwards at another fine restaurant. How I loved to be dressed to my nines. My attempts to look the part of money and sophistication, but so obviously raw. Imagining the other diners looking at me and wondering who I was, as if they couldn’t see the obvious, but then again, I did like to shock. Always in black, have I mentioned my addiction to tons of black eyeliner when Punk was still shocking? Still dewy, young and very much with the powerful man, I must have had a great many women look at me with open hate and distain, but I didn’t care. Were the other men envious? Did they wonder what he saw in me or did they inheritantly know what he was after? I was immune to it all.
We would frequent a place called “The Ballroom “. They served tapas when tapas were unheard of. It was right by F.I.T. which gave me great joy. I would go to Laura’s dorm room after work and change. Then, I could just run around the corner and be sitting at the bar, drinking the red wine that I had discovered the taste for, when he arrived. I wanted people I knew to see me going in there. I wanted to be fabulous and exotic. I think it was all in my mind, but it was too much fun.
I ate octopus and sweetbreads there. I can still remember the consistency of that meal. They looked like brains should look and felt like brains should feel, but they tasted so good and I so wanted to be experienced.
One time, I had ordered pheasant without really knowing how darn small the bird really is. I could not eat that thing with a fork and knife. I couldn’t cut off the meat, the knife kept on slipping and banging on the plate. It was a terrible embarrassing racket. So I gave up and sat there graciously pulling the flesh off with my fingers and joyfully popping it into my mouth thinking I could pull it off.
Another time, it was a fabulous French place with an open terrace at street level right by Scrap Bar where all us crazy kids hung out. I don’t know if I was happier to eat these amazing mussels in red wine vinegar with shallots or to see a bunch of my Goth pals from the bar pass by and recognize me eating them. Years later, I don’t recall who the friends were, but I finally had mussels prepared like them again and I did experience the same renewed joy at their consumption.
It was the Opera on a crazy raining night and I couldn’t get a cab. My hair was freshly dyed Poppy Red with Manic Panic. The black silk scarf did nothing to shield it from the rain drops and by time I got to the Met, pink rivulets ran down my face. I had to take the subway and run to beat the opening curtain, but I was late anyway and had to sit and watch from the side until intermission. He found me with a glass of wine and laughed at my story and state of disarray.
It was a life, an experience, that was of a dream. I told my friends and they were jealous.
It was magic and no one cautioned me away. Grab it, take it, do what you must. No future..who cares..live for now! . I can still look back on that part of it fondly. I had that life once. The one of movies and the rich. The one of the social pages of the Daily News. The one that we dream about having when the miracles of adulthood fall upon us. It is seeing that I basically prostituted myself for that life that doesn’t feel too good now and if I had dared to see it, I would, maybe, not have liked it then.
But the romance. Ah. I could have loved him. I almost did.
I knew I dared not to. I knew I was not allowed to. I knew he would not love me. It was sex and that’s all and I had to accept it to reap what I wanted.
He would sneak over to where I worked in the office, an open public area, and whisper to me where to met and what time. Sometimes, he called me into his office and locked the door behind me and took me in his arms. Stolen looks by the coffee machine spoke of trysts to come. Walking to the bathroom at the same time in the deserted hallway resulting in fast kisses and the need to fix one’s makeup. He beckoned and I followed. I learned some measure of how to control him. If I wore my black fishnet stockings, it seemed he could not resist and the call would come soon after, but basically I was his toy.
Alone together, he would ask me if I loved him.
And I would answer that I did, but I never would return the question nor him the favor. I also knew that I could not for I was bound to be either disappointed or lied to. He would tease me about “all my other boyfriends” to which there was none. I think he liked to know that he was the only one for me, but I do not think that I was the only one for him. Maybe he didn’t believe me. I know that by the end he was convinced otherwise and maybe it was a real concern of his.
Maybe he did really think that I was just a slut.
I didn’t give him any real reason to suspect one way or another. I behaved like one, but only for him. It confuses me now, it confused me then, but I don’t think I thought much about it or if I did I didn’t share these thoughts with a soul. Fabulous enough replays to interest my friends, but hide all the doubts and unpleasentries at all costs.
It is called denial and was soon to be my constant companion.
Can you understand it? Is it possible to see how I could have fallen so easily in such a situation? Because that is necessary, so necessary, to begin to understand the rest. It is not a simple story of a torrid little affair, but gets much more far reaching than that. You see, this one little complication occurred early on in the relationship.
Remember, it started on January 16th and just a little more than one month later, on February 22, in his apartment, we conceived a child.
Do you recall the episode of “Seinfeld” where Elaine goes crazy because the Sponge was being taken off the market as a contraceptive? There is a reason that handy little thing was removed from public usage.
It didn’t work or at least, not very well.
Figures that the form of birth control favored by me was greatly flawed by not doing the very thing it was designed to do: prevent pregnancy. Again, these were the days before the condom became the protection of choice. Condoms were still considered gross and nasty, not that the sponge was anything lovely to remove post use, but still, a higher form than the lowly condom. So I was being a smart cookie by readily having available protection for myself. Wisely, I employed use of the sponge when in his embrace even though he never mentioned any concern about such matters. It’s actually pretty interesting that he just seemed to assume that I had such things covered for never was the topic approached. Perhaps he was just use to mature woman who took matters in their own hands, or perhaps he just assumed that every sexual chick in the 80’s had her fertility under control or maybe he just didn’t give a darn, in any case it was a talk that never transpired. Not that it really should have mattered because to my knowledge, I had it covered.
Back to why they were taken off the market. Apparently, even if you thought you had it covered, with the Sponge, you really weren’t covered and like many things like this, you don’t know that until it is too late. My luck, I fell into that percentage where they didn’t do the job that they should have.
And that means that I at the ripe old age of 18 became pregnant with my 45 year old bosses child.
Not exactly the kind of complication one would like to insert into the boundaries of the wondrous secret affair. It just doesn’t fit.
To be completely truthful, I did not feel all that concerned at first. In my world then, babies were not options and if you happen to find yourself pregnant then you carefully arranged for an abortion. I had gone through it the year before myself.
Right before high school graduation, I came up late. That pregnancy was the result of one of Darrin’s and mine continuation of puppy love turned into a dead dog, but no one dared to take the darn puppy out back and put it out of its misery. Now days, one would say it was a booty call. I suppose that is an accurate description of what we sort of were by that time thought there was a continuation of friendship and loyalty to each other that did mask as possible love for many years. In any case, I think he was still going out with the Cow as we called her. Her name really was Pam and what she lacked in my eyes as pretty, she made up to him by being old enough to accompany him to the local cool clubs. At least that was my understanding.
Darrin was my first love and my first lover. I met him when I was 14 and going out with one of the first “cool guys” in my school, Kenny D. They were in a band together and two of the maybe eight kids in my suburban Long Island school who dare to be different. Once Kenny and I broke up, it only made sense to like the only other cool single guy and that was Darrin. I did pursue him terribly with notes left in shared classes and giggles in the hall, but it did all work out and somehow love did bloom. I still affectionately call Darrin the Corruptor as I was drug free and virgin when we met, but that changed soon enough. Sex was wanted and the natural progression that happens when one is sixteen and “in love”. My resistance to smoking pot as drugs “were bad” went south when my constant nagging turned to philosophy I could not resists. I had been bugging him to cease and Darrin turned it around with the “can’t knock it till you try it” line. I guess that would be peer pressure and it worked. It was all bound to happen sooner or later and I am glad that it all happened with him.
As these things do, though, our age difference became an issue. He was two years older and when, at eighteen and out of the protective land of high school, I was left behind. Unable to get into Spize to drink and smoke to all hours, unable to drive, unable to be free still of the parental units, he wandered off to Pam who could do the things I could not. It did break my poor little heart and I was frequently desperate. Desperate enough to do all kinds of stupid things thinking any sign of interest was a sign that he would come back to me and make me whole again. So, naturally, when he called me late one night and explained how he was working close by and needed some company, I found a way to sneak out of my house.
He was the night security guard in some office building. He guarded it enough to leave, come pick me up, smoke a joint, have sex, and bring me home. He must have forgotten that I was not Pam and not on the pill. I didn’t forget, but in desperation I did not care.
So, in some office building in the next suburban town over, right next door to a Burger King, I became pregnant for the first time.
I knew it the second it happened. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. When my period did not come two weeks later, I was horrified, but not surprised. I had one of those early home pregnancy tests. Let me tell you, technology on those things has really improved. I had to pee in one cup and only first morning urine would do. Then take three drops of pee and place it in a glass vial, then carefully swish it about and let it sit for something like 20 minutes. Then you have to check for a red donut of indicator dye that was suspended at the bottom of the vial. I had a red donut.
I told my friends. Laura, of course, Diane, and some others. It was viewed as a catastrophe. The one thing I remember so clearly was telling our friend Liz.
Liz was really cool. She was the same age as me, but her parents were not like everyone else’s’ “normal” parents. Liz and her sister, Angel, did not have to wage war at home to dye their hair or pierce their ears. They could stay out late and have parties. In any case, I remember so clearly passing Liz in the hallway at school and hissing to her of my condition. Her was response was joyous, “How cool! A baby!” I didn’t understand her natural reaction to such a horror. I look back now and understand her so much more than I ever could then. She was truly the rebel in all things and even dared to think differently than what society programmed us all to think.
The biggest issue with being pregnant was funding an abortion.
I made the calls from the yellow pages from the pay phone outside of the school auditorium. The first place was ruled out as too far and they didn’t speak English. The next place was close enough and it all sounded pretty simple. Make the appointment, come on in, you get it done there, leave in a few hours and rest. The cost $250.00. I made about $45.00 dollars a week working part time in a Chinese restaurant. I had nothing saved as I spent my cash on clothes, concerts, pot, and other junk. Going to my mother since Dad was recently gone again was not an option, so we had to put our collective heads together to get me un-pregnant.
It was decided by Laura and I, after a phone call to Darrin deemed him as not a good location for funding, that I would talk to my cousin who was five years older than me. Michael was the son of my Uncle Mike, my mother’s older brother and he lived at my grandfather’s house. His parents had a nasty divorce when he was 16 and when his mom shacked up with her boyfriend, he came to Grandpa’s where my uncle stayed on weekends. To Michael, I was able to tell the truth about my predicament, but he was not either able to help with money though he did offer to beat up Darrin for me. He was, however, surprisingly very kind an supportive. He and I had our ups and downs and this was to be the last time I would experience his kindness. What he did say to me proved to be very profound as I took it to heart:
“Do it once and it’s a mistake, do it twice and you’re an asshole.”
This might not be considered the height of kindness, but it was preempted by a good hug and cry and other loving verbiage. It was also what stayed with me.
Eventually, I went to Grandpa with some cockamamie tale of how I broke a Hummel figurine that belonged to my friend Christine’s mother and had to replace it. Grandpa forked over the $250.00 and I went to the clinic and did what I had to do.
On Long Island, in the 80’s, if you were pregnant and in need of an abortion, you went to the clinic on Hempstead Turnpike.
It was basically a millhouse for abortions. Clean, fast and simple, they didn’t mess about and they got the job done all too easily.You go in and wait a bit, fill out some forms, pay the fee, take a test and remove your clothes. Wait some more and then on to the room where you say hello to a doctor who asks you mindless questions about your day until you fall asleep from the medication. You wake up in a room with about 6 other girls, the nurses sit you up and you get a lollypop. You wait until you are no longer dizzy. Then you got to the bathroom and redress. Try not to be horrified by the amount of blood on the insides of your thighs and wash it off with a paper towel. They give you the run though of what signs of infection to look out for and then you are released. Your friends drive you home and you stop for a Big Mac because you are hungry. Make up some lie about how the movie was to your mom and take a nap. Problem solved, no more pregnancy and you bleed.
Done.
I figured that would be the case again, but without the issue of money. This time I was with a man who had oodles of it and I could easily tell him and do it again. Or so I thought.
Maybe it was the words of my cousin damning me to admit to being an asshole.
Maybe I just wasn’t ready to let go of all the glorious fun with him.
Maybe I was sure that he would think I was a stupid little idiot for getting knocked up.
Maybe I just could not do it again.
If I told him, he would write me out a check. He might even make the appointment to a nicer, more fancy clinic in NYC. He might even have taken me there to ensure that it was done.
What it would have done was burst the bubble. It would have been very clear that I was not some great passionate love to him. He would not have been happy and pleased and asked me to marry him after professing undying love and devotion. This I was convinced of. Though I knew that I had to do it. I had to tell him. I just kept pushing it off.
I knew I was pregnant early on, but it was thought to be only temporary, so I didn’t let it stop me.
I went to Florida and Disney World the first time that March for Spring Break. Laura and I decided at the last minute. Our friend Ashmi was going with her sister, Alicia. Alicia’s boyfriend and his friends had a hotel room down there. All we had to do was drive down and then we had vacation for free if we slept on the floor. I think the idea came up on a Thursday, I bought a bathing suit at Macy’s on Friday and we left on Saturday morning. Knowing me, I decided to put off until we returned. I’ll just have this fun time and then I will tell him.
The joy of a last minute road trip allowed me to squelch any concerns I might have regarding my condition. Always living in the minute, there were more important things to consider like what to pack, would we have enough money, could we find a cool club to go to in Florida, and what music to bring for the ride. Laura and I were to be mere passengers on this ride as for some weird reason neither one of us had bothered getting our driver’s licenses yet. We were taking Ashmi’s new car, some fancy black sports thing that made us feel very reckless and cool.
What was most significant about the trip down was my latent discovery of Led Zeppelin as a band worth listening to. Don’t ask me why, probably because I was and always will be a musical snob abet with a huge amount of stupidly, but I had, during high school, lumped, ahem, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy, Black Sabbath, and the Grateful Dead all in the same category. This was based not on actually knowing the music, but due to the fact that the “Dirtbags” in my school wore all those names on the back of their denim jackets and on their T-shirts.
Like any high school, mine was broken up into the requisite cliques. There was the jocks and the cheerleaders, the Preppies, the nerds, the Discos, and the Dirtbags. If it was now there would be the Freaks, broken up into Punks, Goths, and Death Metal; but in those days we were just out of category and no one really knew what to do with us besides throw green beans across the lunch room and be somewhat captivated. First generation Freaks did not embrace the name. The Dirtbags were really just a local name for the Metal heads and stoners. As a freak, one could cross the social lines, so I had true friends in all sub categories. In fact, I was closest to many a Dirtbag, as we shared the procurement and smoking of the marijuana, but I had never bothered to figure out the differences in the music. So in my head, it was just all yucky metal.
The stereotype of my brain was tested as Alicia was in a Deadhead phase. As her other three traveling companion, we ruled as a majority and outlawed the Grateful Dead for the 25 hour trip, she held out for Zeppelin. I am glad she won that battle. I wonder how many more years it would have taken me to discover how darn tooting good they were. By the time we reached the Georgia border, Both Laura and I were amazed at their new found, to us, coolness, and Alicia was begging us not to listen to IV again.
In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of what was important in my life was the quest for “coolness”.
Things were either cool or they weren’t. We strove, above all things, to be eternally cool.
Cool was wearing black, and having dyed hair.
Cool was many earrings and silver jewelry.
Cool was being super pale with lots of makeup.
Cool meant you listened to cool music, did cool things with cool people, and always looked very cool.
The longer you were cool the cooler you were, so we tried to achieve “old cool” which meant that you needed to have clothes that looked new a long time ago and were representative of things that were newly cool years ago. So while a Cure concert T-shirt for a tour last year might be kinda cool, having a holey, faded shirt from the second American tour was infinitely more cooler. Knowing that The Cult was a good cool band was important, but being able to speak of their early incarnation as Southern Death Cult gathered many more points. Get it?
Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale in March of “87 was not the Spring Break that we see now on “Girlz Gone Wild” videos. Like so many things, there was still such an innocence at that time. MTV had yet to capitalize on the masses of marketing groups converging for shenanigans. It was just a bunch of kids at the beach and crowed into hotel rooms drinking and smoking weed and trying to get lucky. It was not, in our world, something that was deemed “cool”, but we did it anyway. The beach, in the daytime, was not where we expected to hook up with a huge group of night loving Goths. Needless to say, Laura, sporting her cotton candy pink hair and myself, with the still fresh Pillar Box Red, stood out like fishes out of water and dying in the hot sun.
It was fun, but other people were mean to us. They threw things and called us names. There was an incident where Laura got a lollypop stuck in her hair and Ashmi later threw her soda at some guy full in the face. We had to run screaming into the hotel with them chasing us until we got into the safety of our elevator. We got rained out of the big water park, but I did begin my lifelong love affair with Disney World. Apparently I had words with Tigger as he didn’t want to get his picture taken with us because we were freaks. In Laura’s retelling now, I call him and asshole and make him do it anyway. I’m glad, it’s a great photo. We took a one day cruise to the Bahamas where I got sun poisoning. I was too sick to go out to the cool club we found in Miami, but Laura and Ash didn’t get in anyway. I took cool baths in baking soda tubs and smoke tons of pot for the pain and nausea. Thank goodness all of Alicia’s boyfriends friends were generous with both the pot and the hotel accommodations. They let us stay there for free all week, annoying freeloaders on the floor, and not one of us were expected to put out in loo off rent.
We returned out of cash and without much of a tan. Sun poisoning does not come automatically with color attached. Ash’s ATM card didn’t work out of state being that this was when ATM’s were still new too. Imagine that! We got home on my American Express card having to eat in many a Red Lobster as they took AmEx. The card’s bill came in my mother’s name so I knew that would be an issue, but thank goodness we did have it. Gas was a necessity and we had to save what little cash was left for tolls.
New York was there when we returned. Laura went back to school at FIT, Ash back to her gig whatever that was, I went back to him and my life.
He was waiting as was the bigger unknown issue of the pregnancy, but procrastination proved to be a hard habit to break.
I cannot explain really why I never said anything to anyone about being pregnant this time. I guess I was embarrassed to be pregnant again and thought I could take care of it on my own. The year before, I had been much more secure in my group of friends and social standing. It was the last year of high school, I knew everyone, I felt I knew who I was and where I was going. I was the great Artist. I was going to School of Visual Arts in NYC and following my dreams. Nothing was going to stop me..not my dad pulling out all my college money, not getting pregnant by Darrin, not having a broken heart and soul, not having my portfolio filled with four years of artwork stolen at the zero hour, nothing.
Less than a year later, I was floundering.
Living in the city had proven to be a terrible ordeal. This is another case of what the hell was my mother thinking when she let me do it. The plan always was during high school that I would go to Art school in the city. I was always the Artist. Drawing was my most favorite past time form my most earliest memory. Despite being forced into honors course during junior high and being labeled “gifted and talented” with a 131 IQ, I systematically dropped all courses deemed “unnecessary” to concentrate on my art. I took almost every art class offered by the two teachers that made up our sad art department and some I took twice. My goal was either Cooper Union on a full scholarship, Parsons or SVA, or Pratt. Cooper didn’t happen and I had a tough time deciding between SVA and Parsons, but SVA won. Pratt was deemed not cool as it was in Brooklyn and I did not even entertain Chicago Art even though they were dying to get me. New York City had to be part of the deal.
I was actually quite driven filling out my portfolio with pieces made to get me through the interview processes. I had gone to SVA for their scholarship tests in early December or “85 and knowing that I would return in January for the regular interviews, I thought it wise to leave my portfolio at FIT at my friend Bari’s dorm room during the winter break. The darn thing weighed a ton and was so unwieldy during the train ride. As luck would have it, Bari went to Europe during the break and her apartment was broken into. Gone was my portfolio and all four years worth of work with my interviews just weeks away.
I went into a frenzy. After the initial hysterics brought on by a very apologetic phone call of Bari, I became a drawing machine. I got permission from most other classes to skip and just live in the art studio in school. I filled up two full sketch books in a matter of weeks and stayed up till the wee hours recreating my masterpieces. Driven I was to escape mundane suburbia and my house of control and head trips and I succeeded. The interviews went well and I was on my way. So busy was I on concentrating on how to get in, I never concerned myself on how it was all to be paid for. Like most self absorbed teens, I just assumed that the parental units, despite all their faults, would pony up the means to pay for it all. After all, I had been speaking of my plans and dreams for four years. I was unaware that parents also had the ability to be just as selfish and self absorbed.
Continued here:
Life as a Dysfunctional Teen
