“How soon do you need it?”
“Yesterday, man. Everything in this business is yesterday.”
“How about by Monday?” It was Friday afternoon, fading into evening. I thought I’d give myself the weekend, and sit at the typewriter until the damned thing was finished. Considering the money he was offering, it was a lousy deal, but I knew I had to see Bliss again. If I did the script, I could invent a thousand reasons why I had to drop by the loft. So we talked money, I accepted a very small check as advance payment, and Parker explained what he wanted me to write. He was an idea man, he said; it was up to me to fill in the details. While he talked, I watched Bliss. She listened to him like she was hearing her Master’s voice.
Like most survivors of the sixties, I’m wary of sentiment, but even if I didn’t know that what was happening to me when I looked at Bliss used to be called love by movie heroes in the forties, I knew something unusual was going on in my head: I felt protective toward her. Parker obviously didn’t give a shit for her – why else would he have let her blow me? – but my motives were pure. They would allow me to take her away from Parker without a second thought.
It didn’t occur to me that she might not want to leave Parker. The Lone Ranger, savior of beautiful ginch, had made up his mind, and to hell with reality.
I went to work on the script for Parker’s Angels that evening, after borrowing the air-conditioned apartment of a friend who was off to the country for the weekend and hauling my electric typewriter to his living-room outlet. I cashed Parker’s check at the bar, paid off part of the tab, bought two six-packs of beer, and hallucinated about Bliss while I filled in the salacious details of the script outline Parker had given me.
I worked late and slept till noon the next day. Sunday in New York in the summer: when I left the borrowed air conditioning and stepped onto the sidewalk, two scenes under my arm and a desire to see Bliss so strong I only paused for coffee and a donut on my way to Parker’s loft, the city seemed as hot and dry as the Sahara.
I had to see her alone – to find out what made her tick, I told myself – when all along I knew that what I really wanted was to find the button in her back that made her Parker’s possession. I lusted after that button.
Luck was with me; I found Bliss washing her hair when I entered the loft. She was wearing blue nylon panties and her long blonde hair was full of soap. She told me that Parker had gone out with some friends to get an egg cream and the Sunday papers, seeming neither surprised nor interested that I was standing six feet away from her, my eyes glued to her amazingly firm breasts. Shampoo ran in a thin trickle of liquid gold across one erect roseate nipple.
“I brought part of the script,” I explained while she wrapped a red towel around her wet hair and cleaned out the big double sink. “I made your part a little bigger than Parker asked for.”
In order to appreciate her response, you have to consider that I had never heard her talk. As Parker said, he didn’t encourage it.
Her tones were warm and chocolaty, but the words she spoke were delivered with all the sincerity of a long distance operator placing a call.
“I just love the men Parker finds for his films. They’re so friendly. You know what I mean?”
You can see why I wondered if she was for real. Why, I threw down the manuscript I’d brought and reached for her tits, mashing my mouth down on hers while my hands moved down her body to her ass, pushing the panties down her thighs. She put her arms around me automatically, but otherwise she didn’t respond, even when I dug one finger into her small, tight cunt, even when I cupped her ass with one hand and stroked her clitoris with the other. I was like a kid set loose in a goddamned candy store, reaching for the gum and the Tootsie Rolls, the licorice, and the chocolate kisses at the same time, with extra arms and dozens of hands.
It didn’t matter what I did; she wouldn’t respond. My hands moved over her body desperately searching for the magic button that would turn her on. Apparently only Parker knew where it was.
Not that she resisted. I pushed her across the room to the couch and plunged between her legs, groaning when my cock pushed itself into her warm juices, into that wet groove that the Parker Colemans and Johnny Holmeses of the porno world took for granted. Her long legs wrapped themselves around my hips with all the intimacy of a seat belt, and she settled in for the ride. Her eyes were closed when I looked at her, but small pleading sounds were issuing from the corners of her mouth. (Or so I thought; maybe that was my imagination getting overheated.)
I held onto her ass and her tits like some crazed rapist frustratedly trying to cram all the experience of once-in-a-life-time sex with a desirable blonde into three minutes, but even then I was experiencing that guilt so special to mine and Parker’s generation, the guilt which said, You shall not treat a woman like a sexual plaything.
These thoughts didn’t prevent me from having one of the most memorable orgasms in a wasted life spent paying lip service to feminism while my cock twitched unheeded by the Gloria Steinem clones of my acquaintance. I mean, I came like a flood bursting through the Grand Coolee Dam. I even screamed a little bit at the end.
When I returned to my senses it was still a hot Sunday afternoon in New York, and Bliss was regarding me like a mannequin in a store window who’s just noticed a fly crawling on her expensive clothes.
My guilt returned, a homing pigeon with a fine regard to post-ejaculation blues.
“That was nice,” Bliss volunteered.
“Nice?”
“It was okay.”
“Don’t you feel used doing this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Parker calls you ginch. You do anything he tells you to do. Anything anybody tells you to do.”
“Didn’t you enjoy it?”
“Sure I enjoyed it. You bet your ass I enjoyed it.”
“Then…”
“But women just don’t act like you. None of them.”
“I’m happy. I like to screw. It makes me feel good.”
I lifted my weight from her and she slid to a corner of the couch, a wide-eyed look of carnal innocence on her face that I’d last seen on the screen in a Times Square porno house. I was in the throes of the usual neurotic male reaction to a woman who likes to fuck: I felt threatened. Having come in so glorious a fashion, I could afford to nitpick. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d wanted to: I still couldn’t figure her out.
She was so vague, so blissed-out, I wanted to shake her.
“Don’t you care who you fuck?”
“Sure. I like men who know how to take care of me.”
“Does Parker?”
“Let’s do a joint, okay? I have a hard time with questions. I think they suck.”
She shook her wet hair as if my questions were taxing her brain.
She dug into a fringed leather bag on the floor and produced a joint wrapped in red, white and blue. We smoked in silence while I tried to decide on the best ploy to use to get her away from Parker. Hoping that the grass would make her more suggestible, I let her smoke most of the joint.
“What kind of hold does Parker have on you?”
“I like the dude. He understands me.”
“Do you think I could understand you?”
“You?” She was inhaling when she answered; the rest of it was lost in a sudden coughing fit.
Being laughed at by a woman – even when she tried to cover it up, as Bliss was doing behind her coughing – is calculated to make even the best of men wonder if somehow he hasn’t failed at life’s ultimate test: getting laid with a certain pleasant regularity. Since I am painfully aware that I am more of an average guy than the best of men, I exploded.
“What the hell’s wrong with me? I’ll treat you a lot better than Parker does. You won’t be ginch to me. You cunt.”