He let himself out of me slowly and reached for a cigarette. I felt a keen sense of loss. Maybe if I had really come, put my hand down there and really got off, I thought, I wouldn’t feel so bereft now. But no, probably even that wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I would have felt deprived anyway, at least wistful. The better it was, the tougher it was when it ended. I could never get enough when it was that good. I remembered now why I used to think he was indispensable. I sighed out loud. Everything was missing; I was manless once again.
But he kept close. I could be thankful for that at least. I knew there would be more; I could tell and felt relief. Michael would never leave a woman hanging. He was strangely devoid of ego in that area. If I weren’t satisfied, he didn’t make me feel like I was hard to please. Like me, Michael had come to believe it was absolutely crucial that everyone have an orgasm one way or the other. He had read all about Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Box, and he knew that sexual frustration caused most of the misery between people.
He was lying now to my right, on the outside of one of the single beds. He reached for my pack of Newports and handed me a cigarette, lighting both of ours with his Bic. We lay there in the faint glow of the pin light. Then, without warning, he switched his Camel to his left hand, turned over, and grabbed my face with his right hand. His left arm now dangled off the narrow bed. He lay half on his side with his face up against mine and proceeded to turn my head in both directions, back and forth, while he conned my face as if he were looking for clues.
“I can’t get a handle on what you look like.” He was staring into my eyes now. “What do you look like? I’ve never been able to figure it out. All year, while you were gone, I tried to picture your face, but it always came up different.”
He continued to maneuver my head in the tiny glare of the pin light now as if my eyes didn’t exist, as if my face were a many-sided crystal he was trying to make sparkle. Then he thrust my head away.
“Too many planes in that face or something,” he said.
After which he collapsed on his stomach and lay there for a minute with his own face buried in his hands. Finally, when I was about to throw my arms around him, he jumped up, full of pep, a shining tribute to the regenerative power of speed, and made us both another drink.
Now I was back at the Traveling Medicine Show, waiting for the opportunity to boast to Michael about turning my first trick. I was armed with solid evidence of my intention to stay. Trading sex for money was the only way I could think of to get Michael to take me seriously.
I watched Tommy Shelter, an old friend of Michael’s from their Village days, climb on the tiny stage at the back of the room for a second set. He started thumping chords on his acoustic guitar with so much urgency you thought the strings might break, and singing his signature brand of delta blues with a driving rock ‘n’ roll beat, preaching to the converted. The story went that Tommy had learned how to play guitar on the stage of the Black Box around the same time Bob Dylan was still passing the kitty around. This would explain why Tommy strummed and hammered with such poignant frustration. His voice, majestic and raspy at once, shot through with soulful passion, catapulted him to the top. The fact that Tommy was missing his upper front teeth didn’t hurt either. The way he slid over his f’s and dropped his t’s made him sound like a very old, wise sharecropper. Really, he was only a year or two past thirty, with a Nubian cameo of a face. He was one of a dozen or so luminaries in the music business who still showed up periodically to try out new material.
The bar crowd was so blasé, so hard-boiled, so wired on speed and booze, it did not make a fuss over these musicians, who would otherwise get mobbed by groupies in the more fashionable clubs downtown. As a matter of fact, the regulars at the Traveling Medicine Show made a point of paying attention to the music but turned their backs on the performers themselves once they stepped off the stage. When two of the Beatles and their latest Uriah Heep manager showed up in the late sixties (at the height of their careers), Michael put them at a table in the corner, where they sat pointedly ignored by everyone until, perhaps deflated, they slunk back out into the night.
The real stars were the bartenders. These Irish Americans were big, handsome, and profligate with their drugs. They free-poured the booze and made generous love, drawing young women like me who, released by the Pill, would rather hang around getting smashed until last call in the hope that we might go home with one or the other of them than wait idly backstage at the ready for some stuck-up musician, or, God forbid, sit demurely by the phone, silently praying.
And here was Jimmy the bartender, still wiping the bar with the same dirty rag. A company man he was, devoted to Michael in this case, but Jimmy would have to have been devoted to someone. He was that kind of guy. Jimmy was a refugee from a big football school in Indiana. The army wouldn’t take him for some reason; he’d tried to enlist. He was a large and, unfortunately for him, open-faced strawberry blond who blushed for no reason at all. Rather than play against type, Jimmy hung on to his midwestern guilelessness, oblivious to the mores of the scene in which he now found himself. Michael adored Jimmy—“4-H Jimmy,” he called him—and took every personal kind of pain to drag him down into the muck with the rest of us. Right away, he had turned his hick buddy onto speed, derailing Jimmy off his career track. (Armed with a degree for it, Jimmy had once longed to go into the hotel business, but all hopes for that were gone now.)
Michael sat with his feet up on a second chair (he’d become more sedentary once he hit thirty) at his big, long table reserved for him to the left of the room against the wall. He had on a pair of giant earphones, which were not attached to anything; it simply meant he did not wish to be disturbed. He was polishing his cracked moccasins with a paper napkin as if they were Guccis, leaning forward to get a good look at them in the overhanging light. He kept pushing a lock of his long black hair off his face as he did so, until exasperated, he pulled his hair back in the fat rubber band he had been wearing around his fuzzy wrist. Michael seemed completely preoccupied with these self-appointed tasks, completely uninterested in his old friend Tommy, who was singing a mournful refrain about freedom on the tiny stage at the far end of the saloon.
And as always, Michael also seemed not to have noticed that I had just walked through the door. But 4-H Jimmy beamed and scooted over to where I was now standing at the bar.
“Janet, you sweet fox you—here again. I guess you really are back. And you do look fine tonight in that little black number...Dewar’s,” he said, pouring a glass with a few chips of ice in it full of scotch, spritzing the top with a little soda.
Then Bruno spotted me and broke out from a small crowd of regulars that hung wedged together in the corner. He sidled along the bar sideways like a crab, pushing his drink as he went, until he was standing next to me. He leaned over to Jimmy and whispered loudly in his ear, “She’s a feminist now.”
Bruno had cut one album about three years earlier that had produced one hit, the kind of upbeat pop tune lounge singers love to cover, and he’d been drinking in a steady, quiet way ever since, like an old railroad worker on a pension.
“A feminist? Nah. I never would have figured you for a feminist, Janet,” Jimmy said.
“It’s a fact. I saw an article she wrote for Gutter last year. That was you, am I right?” Bruno asked me, like a cop on the case.
Jimmy picked up the sticky bar rag and started pushing it around. “Is that true, or is he making it up?”
“It’s true, it’s true,” I said.
“No, no,” Bruno said, waving his hand and leaning over slightly as if to gather a thought from the sawdust on the barroom floor. Tommy Shelter was grinding away at his guitar. The rest of the customers were quiet.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Bruno said, pulling himself up. “She wrote about how men objectify women. How we use them