off.”
“Sheldon, I’ll go home without them. Really, it’s okay. If you find them, you can just throw them out.”
His breathing was shallow and rapid, and his tongue kept darting back and forth. “I can’t have your underpants here.”
“Maybe you’ll find them in the morning, Sheldon. They’d just be here overnight,” I pleaded. I had put on my coat after a half hour of searching proved fruitless, and I felt dirty and sticky from perspiration and the residue of Glantz semen. “Maybe if you shake out the sheets.” I glanced at his tousled single bed.
“Oh, my God.” And then he wheeled around to glare at me, his Black Watch plaid bathrobe pulled tight around his lumpy body. “What kind of person loses their underpants?” he hissed.
Like Charlie, like Sheldon, my men were all government subsidized. This shtup has been made possible by a grant from the Department of the Interior. I was never forced into singles bars, into reliance on cousins to fix me up with their friend Harvey who had just gotten a divorce which wasn’t his fault. I met many men. Politics made bedfellows.
Barry and I separated in 1968, and after that, after having known nearly every whim and crevice of one man all my sexual life, I found myself ricocheting all over Washington, from bed to bed, then shooting up to New York, where I thought I’d find a comfortable, familiar world. Instead, there were more beds, more men. In one week, I slept with three different men named Norman. All were inept.
I exited marriage into a very different world from which I entered. In 1968, I found out, women were no longer wooed or seduced or flirted with or even whispered to suggestively. They were asked: You wanna? I suppose I did, for I often found my legs wrapped around a pair of meaty hips before I even had time to conjure up a compensating fantasy. You wanna? I guess so, for I became the easiest of lays, kissing and licking and stroking men so homely or boorish or dull that I would never have introduced them to even my most distant relative.
Some of the men, mainly the older ones, still observed the amenities. They would pledge a love that would last till eternity but which usually succumbed on the first Wednesday in November. “I know I said I loved you, Marcia, and I did—do—but I have to go back to my (1) family (2) law firm (3) old mistress who’s been threatening suicide and would leave a note. Look, you know I don’t want to hurt you,” explained (1) Vinnie Pinello (2) Bob Figueroa (3) Hal Moskowitz (4) Timothy Francis Xavier Driscoll.
A few saw little reason for even superficial gentility. Post fellatio, an assistant district attorney called me “Marion” several times and seemed annoyed when I insisted my name was Marcia. A vice-president of the Health and Hospitals Corporation said, “Boy, kiddo, do you ever got pudgy legs!” the first time I undressed. Oliver Murray, studying hunger in Manhattan on a luscious H.E.W. grant, began our evening by informing me how fortunate I was to be on the brink of a shattering sexual experience with a black man at the height of Afro-American Consciousness Season. In bed, though, he merely played piston to my cylinder, in-out, in-out. “I’m really not attracted to white girls.” Five more minutes of friction elapsed. “If I do go for white girls, it’s not for little blonds. But you looked so sad. You depressed or something?” In-out.
No one wanted to go to the movies anymore. Gentlemen callers no longer dined you, although they might wine you or offer a joint of marijuana as a kind of pregame warm-up. Hardly anyone told me I was cute, and few asked where I had gone to college.
I sensed a more comfortable, conventional world existed, but I didn’t know how to break into it. Cut off, alone, I saw men and women strolling through Georgetown, holding hands or carrying home a pizza made for two. But none of the men I met at work had time for these indulgences. Together, we would race
“Sheldon, I’ll go home without them. Really, it’s okay. If you find them, you can just throw them out.”
His breathing was shallow and rapid, and his tongue kept darting back and forth. “I can’t have your underpants here.”
“Maybe you’ll find them in the morning, Sheldon. They’d just be here overnight,” I pleaded. I had put on my coat after a half hour of searching proved fruitless, and I felt dirty and sticky from perspiration and the residue of Glantz semen. “Maybe if you shake out the sheets.” I glanced at his tousled single bed.
“Oh, my God.” And then he wheeled around to glare at me, his Black Watch plaid bathrobe pulled tight around his lumpy body. “What kind of person loses their underpants?” he hissed.
Like Charlie, like Sheldon, my men were all government subsidized. This shtup has been made possible by a grant from the Department of the Interior. I was never forced into singles bars, into reliance on cousins to fix me up with their friend Harvey who had just gotten a divorce which wasn’t his fault. I met many men. Politics made bedfellows.
Barry and I separated in 1968, and after that, after having known nearly every whim and crevice of one man all my sexual life, I found myself ricocheting all over Washington, from bed to bed, then shooting up to New York, where I thought I’d find a comfortable, familiar world. Instead, there were more beds, more men. In one week, I slept with three different men named Norman. All were inept.
I exited marriage into a very different world from which I entered. In 1968, I found out, women were no longer wooed or seduced or flirted with or even whispered to suggestively. They were asked: You wanna? I suppose I did, for I often found my legs wrapped around a pair of meaty hips before I even had time to conjure up a compensating fantasy. You wanna? I guess so, for I became the easiest of lays, kissing and licking and stroking men so homely or boorish or dull that I would never have introduced them to even my most distant relative.
Some of the men, mainly the older ones, still observed the amenities. They would pledge a love that would last till eternity but which usually succumbed on the first Wednesday in November. “I know I said I loved you, Marcia, and I did—do—but I have to go back to my (1) family (2) law firm (3) old mistress who’s been threatening suicide and would leave a note. Look, you know I don’t want to hurt you,” explained (1) Vinnie Pinello (2) Bob Figueroa (3) Hal Moskowitz (4) Timothy Francis Xavier Driscoll.
A few saw little reason for even superficial gentility. Post fellatio, an assistant district attorney called me “Marion” several times and seemed annoyed when I insisted my name was Marcia. A vice-president of the Health and Hospitals Corporation said, “Boy, kiddo, do you ever got pudgy legs!” the first time I undressed. Oliver Murray, studying hunger in Manhattan on a luscious H.E.W. grant, began our evening by informing me how fortunate I was to be on the brink of a shattering sexual experience with a black man at the height of Afro-American Consciousness Season. In bed, though, he merely played piston to my cylinder, in-out, in-out. “I’m really not attracted to white girls.” Five more minutes of friction elapsed. “If I do go for white girls, it’s not for little blonds. But you looked so sad. You depressed or something?” In-out.
No one wanted to go to the movies anymore. Gentlemen callers no longer dined you, although they might wine you or offer a joint of marijuana as a kind of pregame warm-up. Hardly anyone told me I was cute, and few asked where I had gone to college.
I sensed a more comfortable, conventional world existed, but I didn’t know how to break into it. Cut off, alone, I saw men and women strolling through Georgetown, holding hands or carrying home a pizza made for two. But none of the men I met at work had time for these indulgences. Together, we would race
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