The Blonde Wig

They say you can't turn a friend into a lover or a lover into a friend, but after making Law Review I didn't have time for lovers or friends. During seven months of writing editing and arguing round-the-clock in the little clapboard house off the Common where all the law review editors lived, my earning potential had tripled but my Nordic skin had turned a paler shade of herring. Over this period I had been laid a total of five times: twice with Elizabeth the psycho 3L and once each with Naomi Fischfleisch, Bekka the barmaid at the Pizza Trowel, and Assistant Prof. Jennifer Weinglass.

That last encounter reached its climax with the this renowned legal expert on women's objectification begging her partner, banshee-style, to "Fuck the shit out of me, fuck the fucking bliththliflshhblifssshhh fuck shitfuck out of me." I had no choice but to turn the good teacher's face into the sheets, flip her over on her belly, and plow with superhuman concentration on the task of finding a golden money-shot memory. I was saved from ignoble failure only by recalling a college summer spent stripping at bachelorette parties in California. I managed to cream my professor's asscheeks by dwelling on one particular hot night in Oakland when, surrounded by cheering sisters, I reverse gangbanged the bride, the bride's mother and three of her tawny bridesmaids. Fuck that white boy fuck him girlfriend LORD that's a thick cock, he fucks just like a brotha, FUCKTHATWHITEBOY WOO WOO WOO WOO!!

As I type, sweet musk-filled memories cloud my thought, the blood surges, my balls swell, and I must again to the men's room by a route that avoids the knowing stares from the paralegals' pool.

Drained and better for it, I return to my tale. The arrival of April, that time when every young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of lust, I resolved to get my skin tanned and my dick wet—and not with psychotics or postmodern banshees or pizza Trowelettes. On a trip to New York for my final interview with Judge Abner Schlagbaum—a formality, really; he too had been Notes editor of the Law Review (Class of '74)-- I bought a copy of the Voice, circled five roommate ads, put on some 501s that nicely hugged my ass and set out beneath the apple blossoms of the East Village to find myself a down and dirty fuckpad.

Three days of inspecting roach and roachclip motels and more than my share of unwelcome glances from the Village's bikershort season Lance Lancestrongs made me rethink my strategy. A Law Review colleague suggested Hoboken, home to wiseguys, junior bond traders and hard-drinking wall street women, also only two stops away from SoHo bars by PATH and subway. I circled five more ads and went a-knocking.

At the first house, a three story brick walkup on a block where size 16 stretch pants and Miguelito baby clothes fluttered from backyard clotheslines, a short, very handsome and heavily pomaded thirty-ish man appeared and told me that the apartment was no longer available. "De owner has decided to sell hees condom," he said in a lilting accent I recognized as from the Aegean.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand?" I said.

"Hees condom, he's going to put it on the market. De real estate agent will be here in few minutes eef you wanna buy eet." He laughed. "Yeah, my ex-wife she never understood me neither. Come on in, you wanna beer?"

The entry room was immaculate. Stacked very neatly and rising to the ceiling were some 300 CDs, mainly techno compilations with titles like "IBIZA DANCE PARTY 1997" , "TECHNOMANIA vol VII". A black metal bookshelf held pictures of a Turkish house with relatives sitting stiffly on a little balcony overlooking the Sea of Marmora. On the top shelf were photos of my host with a petite and very beautiful black woman, smiling broadly and standing on tiptoe. He returned with two open Carlsbergs. He said his name was Arkan; he was from Istanbul. "I come here four years ago, meet Barbra, marry her, have 18 months happiness then we get divorced. American marriage, you know? Ha ha."

The doorbell rang. Arkan left and I picked up a photo of Arkan and Barbra standing before an ocean. She was unusually black, with large luminescent eyes like a cat in darkness, and exceptionally long fingers. In every photo her hair was obscured by a variety of baseball caps. Having let in in the real estate agent Arkan said to me, "Hey you know my ex-wife she lives in Hoboken she looking for roommate. If you interested I give you her number." I was. I gave thanks for the Carlsberg and bid farewell to the Turkish techno fiend.

When I called the number that evening I got a recorded message in a clipped, odd Old South accent that sounded like it came from another century. Thank you fer callin ... yer perfitly welcome to leave yer name and number. I hung up without leaving a message. That evening I went to the house, a prim Queen Anne about a mile from Arkan's. As I was about to knock a twenty-ish couple left and passed me on the steps, speaking German. I rang the bell and saw the same pretty, very dark little woman in Arkan's photos, wearing shorts and with the same white baseball cap I'd seen, come to the door. I told her my business and she let me in, stiffly, to a room that could have been decorated for a meeting of the junior league of some suburb in the Old South. Lace, candles, floral pillows, cobalt glass and chintz everywhere. Leaded windows. Oaken doors with skeleton keyholes.

Barbra sat down and folded her legs in a preposterously theatrical manner. Her eyes were as wide as a cat's. If she'd had a tail it would have stood straight up. The conversation was brief. She occupied the first floor, there were two other tenants, the German couple upstairs and a single professional women on the top floor. Barbra said she managed a floral shop in the Village, she needed a roommate immediately, the room was $550 per month and she was a "fan-attic" about neatness. The room adjoined hers and was neat enough, with a nice view of a garden containing old roses and no size 16 stretch pants on clotheslines. We agreed on terms and I moved in the following week, continuing to submit papers without attending any lectures just as I did while living in Cambridge.

Through April and May I began wenching in earnest. I got to know every bartender from Spring Street to Canal and of course across Hoboken. Making up for lost time, I bedded a half dozen women and settled into a routine with an accountant from one of the large commercial banks who had a delicious ass and a cramped little apartment in the West Village. Coming home the next day from my sleepovers I would go to my room. I rarely saw Barbra and when I did, she was a kind of spectral presence, dusting her furniture or rearranging the pillows in her room. She had few friends and had, it appeared, no interest in men or sex.

Her habits were odd. She had almost no food in the house but did not go out to eat. She obsessed about cleanliness. One day she asked me, in a halting voice, if I could help her write a note to her customers. It turned out that she was barely literate. She smelled strange, like vanilla and juniper berries.

One May evening I entered the house and smelled candles. Barbra had lit up the house with jasmine-scented candles in the living room, kitchen and dining room. An open bottle of wine stood on the dining room table. As I passed to my room I heard singing coming from the bathroom. Barbra was shitfaced. I left my door open and opened my Commercial Paper law book. The singing moved from the bathroom to Barbra's room. She had a lovely voice, sweet and low, but was almost completely tone deaf. Almost against my will I leaned my ear to the door that separated our rooms. The keyhole had been stuffed with tissue. I took a tweezer from my valet case and gently but urgently set about extracting the tissue from the keyhole.

When I put my eye to it I could see Barbra sitting on the edge of her bed, back to me, naked except for an orange silk bandanna wrapped tightly around her head. She was rubbing oil into her left foot, the base of which was as pink as the back of my hand. Between the white towel spread next to her leg, the deep Hershey darkness of her skin and this flash of pinkness, I felt I was looking at a Neapolitan ice cream bar. My mouth was so wet I nearly gulped aloud. My cock had stiffened, escaped my boxers and was halfway down my pants leg.

Barbra got up from the bed and walked out of view. When she came back in view she had replaced the turban with a dirty blonde Carol Channing-style wig. She lay on her back on the bed. I could see only from the waist up. Exposed to my view were two lovely dark breasts with deep black circular aureoles, a deep jewel of a navel, and a face that was largely obscured by that strange and repulsive wig. It made her nose look twice as large. I pulled back from the keyhole. My hard-on beat a retreat back into the safety of my boxers. Pre-cum stained my jeans. I cautiously looked back into Barbra's room. She was still on her bed, sipping wine from a blue glass and looking at a book of floral decorations from Martha Stewart.

I moved slightly to my right so that I could not see the wig or her face, and concentrated on those deep black breasts, that fine slim waist. I slowly slid down my jeans, freed my thick cock and slathered my pre-cum halfway down the shaft. I got on my knee and stroked slowly as Barbra continued to sip. She arose from the bed. A few seconds later I heard her door click. I waited, breathless, for her to return or to hear her footsteps ini the hall. Two minutes passed, and then she returned to the bed, sans wig, her very short, nappy hair pulled back like Lil' Bow Wow's on a bad day. She was wearing a huge white terry-cloth robe. She turned out the light.

That night I quietly and furiously fucked my mattress, face down, and came in a white towel that Barbra had provided me. Lying on my bed, nude, my ass to the cool spring air and with the lycra thong from my stripper days firmly nestled beneath my swollen balls, I came a second time, and a third and a fourth.

When the curvy accountant called my cell the next day I didn't pick up. Neither did I return her call, or pick up her call for three days. I took to drinking. After a late night visiting ports of call on the upper west side I passed a ragged street vendor on Broadway who had spread out a gallery of magazines filched from neighbors trash bins. Newsweek, Sky and Telescope, Inches, Cheri, Swank... I bought four jack-off mags, stuffed them into the back of my trousers, Sandy Berger-style, and headed for the number nine train.

That night's subway creatures included the usual weirdos and perverts and one exquisite tall athletic black woman wearing a Nike body suit. Taller than me by at least an inch; full hips, full lips, long straight hair, sleepy big eyes. I stared, she stared back; I smiled, she smiled back. She left at 66th street. I continued home. Barbra was asleep. I spread out my J/O mags across the top of my bed and again furiously beat my cock as I looked at the glossy wonder-fuckdolls. But all I could see was Barbra.

PART TWO... coming...