[Judy is the same girl described in the story
A College Tryst
; Michelle is the one in the
Role Playing with Michelle
series.
The Monkey's Paw café was a real place that existed in the now-demolished Finley Hall.]
Prologue
During the 1974-75 academic year there was another sophomore at the City College of New York named Judith, or simply Judy. She was a modern European history major like I was, and she lived with her parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
I met her because she was a friend of Michelle, one of my girlfriends at the time. Judy made some moves on me and I, being a callow youth - or maybe just a cad - responded to her. Judy had said then, "We're both making up for lost time," referring our completely dateless freshman years and the endless dry spells of high school before that. I was her first boyfriend and she was eager to catch up on missed experiences.
Michelle shared our youthful fecklessness and we wound up being a threesome on several occasions in mid-1975. On one hot Sunday afternoon the two of them had me photograph them in compromising positions up in Bear Mountain State Park. (I still have some of those pictures but I rarely look at them now.) Of course the situation was unstable and it didn't last beyond the end of the year, but that's a story for another time.
Judy didn't look like the wild lady she really was. She was short and a bit plump and had frizzy reddish-brown hair. However I thought she was very sexy and I was enthralled with her during the time we were together.
She could, in her own low-key way, be very funny. One day when we sitting in a student lounge she took out a copy of Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead. She had bookmarked a spot and she said, "He's got this character in here named Natalie Roth, and as he says about her, 'nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life.' "
I guessed she probably found this passage both amusing and irksome. I said, "Well Mailer was Jewish himself and so was his first wife I think; he married her before the book came out."
"I think I've heard that. I can imagine her saying, 'Norman, is this Natalie person really me?' and he goes, 'No, baby, it's all fiction.' "
"Anyway Judy, you really are a nice girl - you're especially nice when you've flinging your ass around in bed or some such place."
She smiled at me, "You're trying to butter me up, I know that's your idea of a compliment. But really, I wish I could approach him - like maybe at a book reading - and say, 'Hey Mailer - I mean, Mr. Mailer - you don't know what you're talking about."
"You should know he tried to kill his second wife. He almost stabbed her to death at a party, in front of other people."
"Really? Maybe he's a guy I should stay clear of then."
The Role-Play
Judy had been inspired by yet another girlfriend of mine (the '70s really were crazy when it came to sex) to play something we called the "pickup game." Two people would pretend they didn't know each other and one would try to pick up the other in some public venue like a bar.
It sounds straightforward because the participants were supposedly playing themselves. However I knew from experience how far off course things could get.
(There was a variation of this where the two people would play characters different from themselves. I would eventually try that too.)
We decided not to use a bar but rather the café called The Monkey's Paw in the basement of Finley Hall, the student center. Judy would arrive there first and then I would come in and approach her. I had Michelle's car available for use, a green Dodge Coronet which I had parked outside on St. Nicholas Terrace. If we did get in the car, wherever we'd go and whatever we'd do was going to be improvised. However, as the "leader" in the game I had some options planned out.
It was an early evening at the beginning of October 1975 when I walked into the cafe in Finley. Before she noticed me I got to check her out. She had been going for the "Joanie Co-ed" look for a while since Michelle had introduced it to her in the spring. She had a white pullover blouse, a dark skirt, and black knee socks. I had loved knee socks since my days back at P.S. 82. I admired them for a moment; they may have been cotton but they were definitely thinner than the ones she had worn at other times. The weather that week was still quite warm.
Overall, Judy had a nice combination of sexy and innocent going on. I thought that I would have noticed her even if hadn't already known her.
She hadn't noticed me yet; she was looking through some papers (a course syllabus?) as she had her coffee. I felt more comfortable approaching her than I had with that other girl in the bar those times. I brought my soda over.
"Hi, do you mind if I sit here?"
She feigned surprise, "Oh sure, go ahead." The place wasn't that crowded so she must have understood that she was the reason I picked that spot. By this point in my life I knew not to over-explain things when making an approach.
I was opposite her at the table, "I'm Paul by the way."
"I'm Judith, or just Judy is fine." Before I could respond she seemed to have her own lines ready. "I've seen you around here. Aren't you on that newspaper?"
"Yeah, that's me."
"I've read your stuff; it's pretty good."
I thought of asking her to join (of course she'd already been there for months) but she got another one in. "I've seen that girl there; her name is Michelle I think."
"Oh, yeah, she just became assistant features editor."
"She's also a good writer. Is she your girlfriend, perhaps?"
Oh, a dead end already. Was Judy - one of the versions of her - curious to see how I handled this? I didn't want to lie outright so I said, "Well, we go out sometimes." That really meant out to Long Island City where we wore out the couch, her bed and sometimes the kitchen table.
Judy went around the obstacle as if reading my mind, "I might be interesting in joining the paper myself."
This gave us a few minutes of conversation. She said had been a steady reader for the last two years and I described some of the behind the scenes events. I even had stories I had heard about the era before I was at CCNY.
I decided to make the next move, "Are you hungry? Because I have my car just outside; we could get something to eat."
She didn't have to think a long time, "Sure, that's fine. Where should we go?"
"There's Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, it's . . ."
"I've been there. But I live on the West Side."
"I'll drive you home afterwards, no big deal." That was pretty much expected here. Even if she was going to Staten Island I couldn't just leave her at South Ferry.
There was usually a fudge factor in every role-play game, a bit of business that was exaggerated and stretched plausibility. Here I doubted that the real Judy would get in a car with someone she barely knew. But she said, "That sounds great; let's go."
She was a little ahead of me as we walked out. Her skirt was tight enough to show the curve of her ass. I thought, my Judy is just such a ripe little girl.
Arthur Avenue was an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx known for its many restaurants and stores. Once in the car I wasn't sure of the route I would take. I drove across the 145th Street bridge and on a whim I turned south on the Major Deegan Expressway. Judy asked to play the radio and she came up with Carly Simon's "Attitude Dancing." I thought it wasn't Simon's best song. However every straight man in America loved the cover of
Playing Possum
- and some who weren't straight probably appreciated the aesthetics of it.
Judy seemed relaxed as we went crosstown on the lower Deegan and then uptown on the Bruckner Expressway. We talked about my family's roots in this part of the Bronx. A plan came to mind; before we ate, maybe we could park somewhere and see what happened. My disastrous attempt to do this with one of Michelle's characters came to mind. I would have to be more subtle about it this time.
I considered just going to Arthur Avenue, but I figured if we were sated with pizza and maybe beer we would both just want to go home. The Sheridan Expressway would have been the ideal route into that area but I stayed to the right and kept going along the Bruckner.
My idea was to get off around Zerega Avenue and find a spot among the warehouses and factories. However, I had no idea how to broach this topic with Judy. I just got off at Zerega and started north.
"Is this near Arthur Avenue?"
I wasn't going to confirm or deny that, "Ah, sort of."
Her next sentence tipped the balance, "You're looking for a place to park with me, aren't you?"
Instead of apologizing I knew to make light of it, "Ok, it did cross my mind."
"Then find a place and let's park." She was making this easy for me, but I liked her own input into the game.
It was fully night at this point. I knew there was an advantage here over suburban or rural lover's lanes. Those places were well-known to officious cops, peeping Toms and other nosy pests. In the city there were hundreds of thousands, probably millions of vehicles parked on the streets overnight. If one was discreet, there was no reason for any one car to be singled out for attention.
My times out with other girls had given me the experience to know what to look for. I found a commercial block with a lot of trucks along the curbs. In these cases trucks were your friends. I pulled up next to a tractor-trailer with a flat-front, cab-over design. Judy had a better view into the cab than I did. "I don't think anybody's in there." I hoped so; I didn't want some lounging guy in there to blow his air horn at a delicate moment for us.
There was another truck just in front of us; this was about the best we could hope for. Now I had this supposedly unknown Judy person to deal with. What kind of approach should I make and how far should I take it?
She helped a lot, "Let's get in the back seat. The steering wheel won't get in our way."
Had she done this before? Off course the real Judy had, many times, but who was I dealing with here? Pick-up games naturally drifted into fiction.
We got out to change seats. I glanced up and down the block but no one was around. Once in there I looked at her pale knees and I had an urge to pull them apart. The real Judy would have accepted such directness but I couldn't' do that with a girl I'd just met. I didn't want to ask about her past and she didn't ask about mine.
She solved the problem by coming over to me. His kisses were softer and friendlier than Michelle's. Michelle's style was more insistent, implying that these were hers to take and she took them as needed.
She asked me, "Why did you approach me in the first place?"
"Let me see - your knee socks certainly helped."
She laughed at that, "I get that. You know what I often say; look like a good girl but act like a bad one."
I asked her, "So why did you go with me?"
"You seemed sort of cute - but you're definitely a bad boy if you park on the first date."
"I'll take you home right now if you want, or we can get some pizza instead."
