Are we comfy in the tent? I trust my hawker did not exaggerate our side show—the woman still having the same orgasm two years after seeing Paul Newman as the shirtless, sweating Sioux Indian in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Lawsuits are pending.
In my latest recent post, I shocked readers will the story of buying my first vibrator. Now, I top that experience by recounting my first strip-poker game. Well, not my first strip poker game; I spent those two years in college with the Dekes, who for heaven's sake could see my tits, pussy, ass, and smoldering brown eyes ANY morning in the shower. But they NEVER tired of trying to win away my 32-B black bikini bra, and, if possible, the matching lace panties. Boys are weird.
I've got to pick up the pace, here, or none of us will be sober when I finish.
All grown up, or, at least, older, I arrived in Manhattan, found a starter apartment on East 78th Street, and landed a job. No more Academy, no more women's co-ordinate college. All out of runway; take off, now, or get strained through the chain-link fence.
Prepare, here, for brutal compression. For example, I would love to tell you about my cool apartment, which, at the back, faced other high-rise buildings on 77th Street. I was so close that on clear New York evenings, as it got dark, I could stand at my window, gazing across, and see who did "privacy" and who did "exhibitionism." I always knew when 77th Street Mary had a big date. Through the picture window, I could see her sweep into her lighted bedroom naked—from the shower, I guess. She would stand at her closet, ample butt toward me, lovely lean back sort of swaying with indecision, and go through every one of her dresses to pick one for the evening. Did she have any idea that she had a potential audience of hundreds on 78th Street who gathered at their windows with wine, popcorn, and a comfortable chair for the latest show—maybe to check her for any recent weight gains?
I expected any day a story in the Times: "Woman in high-rise on Seventy-Seventh Street draws record audience Saturday night to nude dress-selection ceremony."
I SO much wanted to meet her in a local coffee shop, but I could not identify her facial features well enough. No, Ellen Pierce Melville did NOT bring the binoculars to Vaudeville. Some primate I actually thought I might like, and invited over for a civilized chardonnay and Brie cheese on home-baked pita chips, got hooked instantly on 77th Street Mary. Next time I invited him he came with binoculars.
Hello there, What's-Your-Name, thanks for inviting me, again. May I turn off the lights, now? Almost show time. Ah, thank you, most comfortable. Bring me a chardonnay, will you?
This slime trailer actually opened the window to get a sharper view. What an opportunity. I could have heaved up his sedate carcass and booted it out of the 14th story window, binoculars and all. Maybe first grab away the chardonnay glass.
Ellen, are you mindful that this has NOTHING to do with your story? Strip poker? Remember?
Readers who don't know Manhattan may fail to realize that it beckons on every side with ocean beaches, primal forests, and enchanting mountains. A little short on deserts and glaciers. In the name of the Most Merciful, Ellen, cut to the fucking chase, will you?
One summer I rented a "share" in a beach house on Fire Island. Fire Island is not an island; it is a barrier reef running for miles and miles along the southern shore of Long Island, separated from the mainland by a mile or so of "Great South Bay." Among the world's longest wide-open stretches of sandy beach and surf is Fire Island's southern exposure to the Atlantic. Essentially, there are no automobiles on much of the Island; people arrive by ferry from the mainland and walk. This works well because there is nowhere to go. On much of Fire Island there are no commercial establishments-in some communities, only a telephone booth, now gone with advent of cell phones.
And so, houses cluster ta few steps from the beach along "roads" of weathered gray boardwalks, landscaped by whatever vegetation survives life in sand. The midget deer of the island are everywhere. The bay side of the Island facing the mainland is filled with bluefish and sea bass and clams; the ocean to the south with endlessly rolling surf filled with happy bathers by day, lulling you to sleep at night. Except when there is a hurricane, then everyone dies. Well, not so much, these days.
You will sense, and appreciate, my brutal discipline, here. I discovered Fire Island, never mind how. I decide to invest in a "share" of a beach house—the right to one room, Friday through Sunday, for July and August. Bring your own food. Cook it. If you don't organize the house yourself, it's a crap shoot who you get for roommates.
Ellen Pierce Melville, slender, stylish, well-educated is not seeking summer love with the hordes on Long Island. She does not want to meet "guys." She wants alone time on the beach, her own food lugged on the train and ferry from Manhattan, her own headphones and music, her own books, a few roommates like fellow tourists in a high-end boutique hotel in Tuscany—friendly, but busy with their own plans, remote.
Have I lost you?
My ambitions are to tan my long, pale, slender legs right up to my fur line, toast my smallish elegant breasts in the sun; and shape-up in the crisp, salt-spiked air. I do not hope to meet My Man, the one who has failed to show up, so far, among the 1.6 million people in Manhattan every day. Okay, sure, if I happen not to be looking where I am going and walk right onto a stiff dick, I may wiggle my hips. I am a normal woman.
This house, sides weather-beaten, nestles in the sand, floating in scrub vegetation. It has two separate sections: the big kitchen-living room-deck and, across a covered breezeway, four equal-sized bedrooms with bare cedar walls, board doors, bare floors. Share one bathroom, no tub, just a shower.
You approach the house on a raised boardwalk. All walkways here rest on sand or are raised a few feet to connect with a house or span a shallow gully. If you fall off the boardwalk, let's say fumbling home plastered after dark, you will crawl out nicely brushed with poison oak for tomorrow's hideously itching rash, and with tick bites for Lyme disease in your golden years.
My outpost cluster, Bay Berry Dunes, is intensely civilized. Groups assemble voluntarily, deal with money issues, get along with whoever else shows up, arrange to lug food and wine and beer—not to mention toilet paper, soap, sponges, matches, potholders, and toothpicks—by train from Manhattan, by ferry across the Bay from Patchogue, and by foot from the ferry to the house.
Ellen, this saga is right on the verge of becoming a sociological investigation of how white, educated, middle-class, aspiring-professional, urban, Judeo-Christian, Northeastern, 20-plus America spends its summers. You don't move on pronto and you are competing with The Theory of the Leisure Class, not The Story of O or I Was Whipped into Lesbian Love. Dear God, hit the fast forward button. NO ONE is still reading.
So one evening, a few weekends into summer, dinner done and dishes washed in the volunteer tradition that made America great—watch it, now, Ellen—the sun going down, casting lengthening shadows along the beach from West to East, I am thinking about the woods behind the Academy where I tormented Bruce Knickerbocker's dick.
I am in the living room relaxing in my white shorts, T-shirt, and a thick coating of sun-burn lotion. Two nice guys, Tom and Jerry, are doing something with cards on the coffee table. No macho. They are in nice clean shorts, shirts, sandals. We are decent, here.
Even Mignon Smith, a redhead with divinely apportioned baby fat, including unfairly ample white knockers that she CANNOT keep concealed, is behaving herself, tonight. Her pale Southern-belle legs below the tight little shorts now are medium broiled. She is about ready to eat if you like it rare. She still wears her bathing-suit top, the oceanic tide of soft flesh rising and overflowing the bra—a little jealousy, here, sorry.
Mignon is only 20. She has come to New York City from Georgia to find fame like in the great tradition of Southern writers like Tennessee Williams. She is broke, but her mother has sent money for her share of the summer rent. Other than the painfully obvious, I find her perfectly lovely, if shy, but she does leave her stuff all over the only shelf in the bathroom. She calls me "darling," "sweet cheeks," or, more formally, "Ellen Pierce."
Unfairness being potentially unlimited, Mignon is cute, too, her ever-so-slightly chubby face lightly freckled, framed in billowing auburn hair, her unnecessarily full lips moving as she bends over some script—I think it may be They Ripped Away Even My Bodice, So My Beasts Hung Exposed to Their Hungry Gaze.
Last weekend, July 4, was our first. Six of us that weekend, including one couple not back this weekend. It is quieter; we are all slightly acquainted. I already know, for example, that the guys are ordering Mignon for dessert. Well, gentlemen, we have some lovely selections, this evening. There is "Tasty Ellen," which is a slice of raw carrot with a little sugar on the end and there is "Orgasm a la Mignon," which is our hot Swiss chocolate parfait with whipped cream made from the breast milk of French starlets. Shall I give you a moment to decide? Oh, goodness...no? Already decided?
I was trying to lose my sunburn in some poems by Swinburne. No one was drinking yet, which says something—frankly, I didn't give a shit what, I was ready to hit the chardonnay. I had noticed that the guys were doing an awful lot of whispering and arguing sotto voce and not dealing many hands.
Swinburne was racy, but I was kind of overheated what with sunburned thighs, belly, breasts...you name it. There was a "let me out of here," feeling, not exactly sexual. Mignon looked as sedate as a cow. Sorry, unkind.
I glanced at my watch. 8:15 p.m. Not dark. Should I take a walk on the beach, see if any gang rapists are enjoying the salt air? Strip naked and drunkenly stagger into another house and fall flat on my back, legs splayed, black flag over my abandoned fortress? Better be all men; the girls might drag me by the ankles to the ferry dock and call the EM boat.
"Hey, Mignon? You ever play strip poker?"
What? WHAT? You can't ask her just like THAT? What is she supposed to say? Oh, goodness, guys, why delay? I'll strip for you right now?
My head came up, slowly, as though thoughtful about a line in the poem.
"Oh...oh, my—more like 'mah'—I—more like 'ah'—have heard of it, 'ah' think." Oh, that radiant hospitable smile of the Southern girl. "You boys don't 'mahnd' getting naked in front of a lady?"
I should have reviewed the house rules more carefully before I joined. Maybe I should drag the dinner garbage over to the dumpster at the ferry dock. Get some air. I'm sure I won't be missed, here. Sniff.
"No," says Jerry, with a healthy, well-tanned, white-toothed grin. "We want to be sure you have fun, this summer."
Well, she's still smiling. "Ah know the boys do PLAY..."
"Oh, girls play all the time," says Tom. My, what a big smile he has, too.
I'm going to drop the Southern accent; you've got the rhythm, by now. Mignon says, hesitating, "Down South, the white gals I know don't disrobe with the men."
I have closed Swinburne. I have straightened my shoulders, lifted my head. I have taken out a cigarette and lighted it. No smoking in the house. I start puffing, my long, elegant legs crossed. Tom and Jerry look for a moment, frowning; they are too busy to deal with me, right now.
"How do you feel about this, Ellen Pierce, darling? You are my New York City idol..."
Nice hand-off, Mignon.
The two guys turn to look at me, frowning, taking to grasp something. Oh, Ellen, we're so sorry. Are you a FEMALE, too? We had no idea. You aren't wearing your boobs, this evening?
I take a long drag on the filter-less Camel. Release a puff into the room. My pretty brown eyes are squinting in shrewd assessment or probably because the smoke is blowing back into them. Everyone is waiting, watching me. This is more like it.
"I've played, of course," I begin airily.
They nod. Mignon is gazing in rapt admiration, possibly disbelief, possibly an anxiety attack.
"I was a Deke."
"A DEKE?"
"Sure, initiated and all. Brown University. Two years. Tiny Bloker was president. I've played strip with Tiny."
Authentic awe from Jerry. "Tiny Bloker? Jeez... wasn't there something about Hell night...?"
"Yes, unfortunate," I say, dismissively. "Hell night can be rough."
