The red dress
The dark clouds gathered over the month of November and finally the storm burst one night in one loud thunderclap. It wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of tearful apologies on one’s knees and pitiful whimpering. I’d never seen this before and temporarily fell for it.
What a strange dish of good and bad was served up to me by fate at this time, like a platter of exotic appetizers at a swank party, which I’d never seen before, presented to taste, some delicious and others poisonous. Some new hopes were realized beyond my wildest dreams of avarice. Other yearnings (of heart) were deep and devastating disappointments, as they seemed so close to attainment. But like the vision Aeneas sees of his dead wife Creusa in Hades, so life-like, it vanishes into thin air the moment he tries to embrace it.
I’d broken away from the party life of the last two years and which was headed for disaster if it continued. I helped build a cozy, little nest with Lindsey and Dave, away from the rest of the world, so far away that in the four months we lived there we had only one visitor from my set of old friends, John Seebach. He came by twice. One evening (Nov. 15th) he passed a few hours with the three of us, impressing Dave with his lively conversation and invited us for a night out on the town.
I did sneak out a few times to my old haunts, sometimes with Lindsey, sometimes alone. But I did settle down with her and Dave to a much healthier lifestyle, hardly doing any speed and eating and sleeping regularly.
Living for the first time close to downtown Oakland, I discovered a great, used bookstore (a relic of its former affluence), ‘Holmes’s’ and in it I found an eight-volume set of Chamber’s ‘Cyclopedia of English Lit.’. I bought it, brought it home and began reading voraciously, the same way I did everything in my life, with drugs, with friends, with solitude, and with love, intemperately.
We stayed in most days, except for small errands and Dave’s morning pilgrimage. Lindsey cooked and cleaned, did all our laundry, shopped for groceries and read romances beside me, snuggled up. Dave had his drug and T.V. routine. I read for hours and hours, right between them on the couch, the T.V. not bothering me at all and he enjoying our warm, surrogate presence. We were all happy.
The storm erupted when it came time to pay the December rent. Dave had money, (to put it mildly, a super-abundance of it). I had my share. But Lindsey was short. When we moved in Dave made it clear we each had to pay a third of all the expenses. He was paranoid of others taking advantage of him. We both swore and agreed, hands upheld, like a boy scout oath.
Without telling me (though I would have easily supplied the deficiency) Lindsey took it upon herself to get the amount she needed, in a way I never imagined she had the skill set and the connections to accomplish. But she did. It was prostitution.
I’d been out and about that afternoon, probably to a bookstore, so I didn’t see her primp and prep herself for the occasion. If I had I would surely have stopped her. I came home at dinner time with Dave telling me that Lindsey was out and might not be back till late. ‘Fine’, I thought. ‘I’ll just stay up and read my ‘cyclopedia’ in the living room till she gets home. Then we’ll go to bed and have sex’. Dave retired early. I enjoyed the long hours of reading that night, sometimes pausing and wondering why Lindsey wasn’t back yet. About two a.m. the door opened. She walked in and what a sight struck my eyes.
She was wearing the proverbial ‘red dress’, one I’d never seen her in, extremely tight and sexy. Her hair was done up differently. She was wearing black fishnet stockings and red high heels, with a shiny, black purse on her arm, fake gold jewelery on her neck and wrists, bright red lipstick, and an overpowering scent of perfume. She walked right up to me, pulled me up from the couch with both her arms and gave me a tight hug and a slippery, wet kiss.
Then she told me she’d just attended a special businessman’s party, a gang bang, giving eight blow jobs in the course of two hours, making over five hundred dollars, which she showed me, ripping the dirty wad from her purse.
There are a few times in everyone’s life, I suppose, when they received a piece of news that can only be described as ‘devastating’. The sudden death of a parent or sibling, some cataclysmic world event, some unforeseen financial ruin. But this night, this scene, fit the bill. I ran downstairs, slammed the door to our bedroom and jammed a chair under the doorknob so it couldn’t be opened. Lindsey quickly followed and was outside the door, sobbing and pleading, begging me to let her in. But I didn’t. I paced the floor, yelling back at her how she’d ruined everything, how we could never be together again, how it was all over. This went on for an hour. I wondered, with all this shouting that Dave kept to his bed in the room right next to ours. But sometimes it’s best not to interfere in other people’s matters, especially when raging emotions are involved.
Finally I gave in to her sobbing pleas, opened the door, accepted one hug, then went upstairs, alone, to write some ten pages in my notebook (which I tore out and tore up the next day, as they were filled with pure anger and no logic, the only time I ever did this) while she went to bed. Towards dawn I joined her in bed for a few hours of sleep. The episode was over, one pillow drenched in tears.
