This is the first part of a four part story that chronicles events taking place in mid-1970s New York City when free-love, drugs, sex and Rock & Roll dominated the American youth culture. In this part an accidental meeting between Jordan and his former lover sets a chain of sexual events in motion. He introduces her to his current lover with startling results.
*****
Part 01: It Was All Mine!
"Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)?
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?"
The open window allowed more than just the warm summer breeze to enter my studio. The volume dopplered as the car approached, and in the mixture of pre-dawn and streetlight I could see the convertible with its top down and hear Labelle's voice echoing off the adjacent buildings.
"Gitchie, gitchie, ya ya da da.
Gitchie, gitchie, ya ya here.
Mocha Chocolata ya ya.
Creole Lady Marmalade. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)?
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?"
"Do you want to sleep with me (tonight)?
Do you want to sleep with me?"
Man, that one's a keeper, I thought, absently humming the tune. That struck me as odd because it really wasn't my kind of music. I'm more of a Herbie Hancock/Chick Corea/Stanley Clarke jazz-fusion kinda guy. Disco, as a genre, sucked. No matter, though - good music will always be just that - good music.
As the car moved up East 7th and crossed Second Avenue, the sound trailed off and eventually faded. Ronnie stirred under the thin cotton sheet and a long, elegantly tapered leg emerged, glowing in the ambient light. Her cocoa-hued skin still showed traces of the massage oils that we'd used with such incredible effect a few scant hours before. The supple curves of her feminine form coupled with the random drape of the sheet formed and re-formed like an undulating erotic sculpture as she turned in her sleep.
Seating myself in the butterfly canvas chair, I reached over and grabbed one of the joints we'd rolled earlier and flicked my Bic.
S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-t-t-t!
I held the pungent smoke in my lungs for as long as I could and then exhaled, watching the vapors dance in the first rays of morning sunshine. The thoughts raced and jumbled in my sleep-deprived mind as I tried to sort out the last 36 hours. I took another hit. Did all of this happen in just the last day and a half - or did it begin long before that?
Ronnie stirred again and mumbled something I could not decipher. Why her? Why now? And why did she have to bring up Cassie?
Glancing around my Spartan quarters I had no choice but to smile.
The move from the sub-let on 96th and West End to the top floor of this five-story walk-up in the East Village had been a good one. Located just across the avenue from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, it was a hell of a lot easier commute for a grad student (make that former grad student) than it was taking two trains back and forth every day. The studio was miniscule but it boasted a galley kitchen and a separate bath.
When I'd lived with Jenny on East 38th and Third Avenue I'd moved into her spacious apartment in a building owned by her folks. When Jen and family got back from their summer in Europe she announced simply (and finally) that our affair was over and I needed to "hit the bricks". After that the sub-let on the upper West Side lost all its charm when one night, without warning, my lover Cassandra failed to come home. So I moved.
Let's see - I had two king sized mattresses piled one on top of the other, a bookcase, a coffee table, a single four-drawer dresser, a 13" black & white analog TV, a stereo AM/FM table radio, the canvas butterfly chair I currently occupied, two kitchen tables made from a plywood 4X8 psychedelic painting I'd done several years earlier, a long-legged stool from my father's sewing machine factory, kitchen stuff I'd collected during my travels plus my books and clothes. That's all of it. Spartan - you better believe it - but for the first time in my young adult life it was all mine - and I loved it!
Part 02: Sherry's Seduction
S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-t-t-t!
Another long toke on the joint and my thoughts shifted to a point several months ago when I'd dropped out of grad school and wound up working for an insurance company in downtown Manhattan. Commuting home one evening I bumped into a former lover named Sheryl.