Friends with benefits is kind of a cool, detached term. When we talk about friends with benefits we're thinking of "Sex in the City" with hip and beautiful career women in a trendy and slick metropolis who don't need men for anything but sex. They're self contained and self absorbed and they need each other more than they'll ever need any man. Their friends with benefits are fit, well attired and well coiffed, sensitive to a woman's needs but never quite sensitive enough, and they're very successful in business or the arts. There's an underculture though, a hidden class, with little access to cash, who didn't go to expensive schools and don't have careers, and they fuck too. "Blue Velvet". They have friends with benefits too, and they and their kin have been doing it for generations. A "Walk on the Wild Side".
I first met Johnny in 1969. I'd seen her around before. She was quite slender and very pretty, too. She must have been fifteen or thereabouts when we met, but she already had a reputation as the neighborhood slut. I wasn't from that neighborhood, but she was beginning to branch out a bit, expanding her horizons. Her name was Juanita Robb but everyone called her Johnny.
I was just turned eighteen and had a room in an old boarding house in Johnny's part of town, where the factories were, and a third shift job in a wire mill. Reaching eighteen was a big deal then. It meant I could quit the small change minimum wage part time jobs I was stuck with and get that factory job, working eight hours a night for twice the money- about three bucks an hour. Men supported families on that wage in 1969. They didn't get rich, but they paid for the rent and the groceries with it, and had kids. So I clocked in at the wire plant at eleven every night and had to try every trick I could think of to keep my eyes open till morning, when I punched out again at seven. It was only eight or ten blocks to school from the mill and on the way was a mom and pop greasy spoon called the Dairy Bar. I began stopping there for breakfast every morning. I had over an hour to kill before my first class anyway and the hot meal refreshed me enough to make it til school began. Once I got to class I could sleep in nearly one hour shifts. I only had three classes and I only needed to pass one to graduate. I had made a deal with the Mass Media teacher that she'd pass me if I kept my mouth shut and didn't disrupt the class. She'd also agreed to sign me out to the men's room once a day so I could go outside and burn one. All I had to do was show up and shut up.
One morning, after I'd been stopping at the Dairy Bar for about a week, Johnny and her two brothers asked if I wanted some company at my table. I said sure- I could use the company. The Robb brothers were a couple of white trash jerks, but apparently they had scoped me out and figured I was OK. I was quiet in new surroundings and never gave anyone any shit unless they started something first, and then I was savvy enough to count heads before lipping off. Johnny on the other hand was pretty bright, and quite engaging, actually. I remember finding it hard to square her with her reputation. She seemed to be a pretty good kid to me, and we started having fun talking every morning. She kept a bit of a rein on her brothers- those two were a real brain trust. I tried to be polite and non committal with them for the most part. These weren't the first inbred goobers I'd met, and I knew they were just the kind of clannish clowns who'd take offense at the drop of a hat and then feud with you for life. They were careful to make certain I wasn't hitting on their sister. I reckon they were worried about competition. Wanted to mark their territory.
School ended- I just managed to graduate- and we drifted apart. I got kicked out of my room in the boarding house for having women in my room and had to move. It meant a five mile walk to work and another five home again, but it was summer and I was young. I used that time to think, and I used to cut across country, stomping through the woods and fields and staying out of sight of farmers. In the late summer I got a car, and I felt free. I drove that car to a community college in the fall after work, but I quickly dropped out. I had got myself a new girlfriend, a dancer with a fine big ass, and I had also discovered heroin. They were more compelling than creative writing and art.
I didn't bump into Johnny anymore, but word of her was around town anyway. She was using drugs by then too and I heard of her from time to time. She'd had a son in the late winter, Ralph, and no one was surprised. She'd been the entertainment at the local swimming hole for a long time and it was only a matter of time before she'd turn up pregnant and not know who the daddy was. But she did know. My mom was a case worker and Johnny was one of her cases. Ralph's daddy was Johnny's daddy- Norbert. Johnny was cagey about how long he'd been screwing her, but she'd admitted that it was him. Johnny was just another one of those hillbilly girls to become irresistible to her kin, and to Johnny, it worked out that if you fucked her, it meant you liked her.
I headed out west. I wanted to see San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean. Haight Ashbury was done by then and the Summer of Love was three years gone. The Haight was full of junkies and hookers. I got a fleabag hotel room over a strip joint, but I didn't stay long. There's urban decay nearly everywhere in the country, and finding it in San Fransisco was depressing. When the weather was good I landed at some rock festivals and otherwise just drifted. I eventually drifted back east again.
Johnny had started taking a succession of boyfriends, some of them nice enough guys, but she was one of those girls who couldn't say no, and all those pairings ended up badly, with hard feelings and recriminations. Johnny was fun, and funny. She was pretty and sexy and guys were bound to want to keep her, but she really couldn't be kept. It wasn't her fault. She'd learned early that she was all about sex, and she was good at sex. She liked it too. I had it on good authority that she did. A number of my friends had made it with Johnny.
We finally drifted into sight of one another again after a couple of years apart. Johnny was eighteen or twenty by then. She was always cagey about details. Once again it was a shitty job of mine that brought us together. I had got a job assembling brake adjusters- the screw mechanism that keeps brake shoes close enough to the drum to enable them to squeeze against the drum and stop your car, and it was mind numbingly boring. You were supposed to be able to screw six hundred of those things together in an hour. Why anyone would actually attempt that feat escaped me, when it would have been easy just to hang yourself instead. Just a few hundred feet from the factory, a friend of mine had started a drug abuse clinic, the first one in our town. My friend was a sociology major and had been a member of a task force investigating drug abuse sponsored by the state attorney general. He was rewarded with the clinic to run. I used to hang out at the clinic at dinner break, and as I had no place to stay yet my buddy told me I could crash there at night, but I had to wait til closing time at nine.