Of Lovers

Annabel I met through a literacy street vendor whom I assisted from time to time in exchange for literature. There was no Internet back then and I was committed to reading the most significant books ever written up until then. Every writer I ever bothered reading had to both come universally acclaimed and catch my interest. Before owning my first television, I had a wall neatly packed with shelves of words. Annabel was the street vendor’s girlfriend’s sister. Naïve as you can only be at nineteen, I asked the guy to ask his girlfriend to ask her sister if she’d like to go out with me on a date.
Annabel was accommodating and complied. She was young that way. We met, went to see “Seven” at the movies, and I called her home and then she took me to a bar for the first time. I walked in and the bartender asked me what I wanted to drink. She asked for a pitcher, as if I wasn’t really there. We sat, drank and played music on the jukebox. That was all we did.
“We have good conversations” I told the befriended vendor, who had a sparkle of charisma. He said: “Well, you better fuck her. Because if you don’t, she’s going to have great conversations with you and sweet pillow talk with another.”
Maybe not as eloquently put as that, but he said something to that effect. I remember feeling a sense of urgency, like my manhood was at stake. And so, I called her and made plans to see her; took her by my sixty dollars a week room and began to fondle her, as we made out. She’d be on top and then she’d insist: “Listen, kid. I got a boyfriend.” She wouldn’t stop breathing heavily and softly moaning, tightly pressed, her sexual energy brighter than mine. She was hair and lips and whispers and bites; she was pagan poetry and lushly gut-wrenching bowel movements. I felt threatened and powerful, so full of life at my laid deathbed.
We began a turbulent relationship. I found the God-forsaken bliss of make-up sex. It was worth the wait, the virulent feelings, the intricate triangles we forged. She’d go out with a guy who left her close by her house, and I’d make a scene coming out of the bar. Then the next day, I’d appear with a girl friend of mine pretending to be a couple. After three pitchers of cheap beer, we weren’t pretending no more. I ended up going with my high school friend back to her home and quietly cuddle in the dark of her parents’ apartment. They knew me, and I must have been a sweetheart, because every single parent wanted me for their daughter and every daughter wanted me just as a friend. I was such a wimp, I didn’t work out and felt hormonal. Nothing is closer to the female condition than our teenage years. Like Woody Allen once said, “I don’t trust anyone who claims to have had a good adolescence.” My adolescence would have been the worst thing if it hadn’t been for my childhood. With no father figure and a neurotically sweet, smothering mother, I had only my looks to thank for coming out of my virginal state. Every woman has had a mercy fuck under their belt and I must to have been mercifully fucked by more than a dozen before I started to realize I needed to mature and evolve somehow. Sexually, I wasn’t inexperienced, but lacked the proper foundation for making intimacy as pleasurable to my partner as it was for me. Size wise, I held my own and then some, but no thanks to pornographic movies and literature, I was such a lousy lay. Luckily, there was alcohol which served as an aphrodisiac, the liquefied ideal amount of foreplay and the libido engine was up and running. Her juicy self spilled against a wall in the tiny hall of her house that, aside from hers, led to another residence. We could have been caught, but I was plowing away, holding her tight against the wall and fucking quietly, in public, in the wee hours of dawn. She’d slip her hand down my pants and find me hard and hold her side of the lively conversation unraveling at the table. Her sisters and other two friends who would later marry those two, me and her. She’d jump in a cab with me and it was a sex marathon from there on. Sexual stamina I could always count on except once I climaxed, the will to delay the inevitable vanished and I was sent back to the womb, the place I craved to go back to. I’d crawl down the side of her thighs, breathing deeply her scent, bitterly fighting one moment and fucking the next.
It was a psycho-roller coaster I wanted to climb, all the way to the top, and then feel like I was dropped. Fall hard unto a vacuum, pulled in one direction and the other, and always pulling some more. Push, relish, pan, sweat, breathe, replenish and start all over. We did it at the bar; we did it in her living room. Once I stayed over her house, without anyone knowing, and her father comes knocking on the bedroom’s door. I was petrified, immobilized, awaiting the worst possible scenario behind the door. She opened it halfway, smiled calmly his way and asked what happened. “Tell those guys not to call here so late at night. You hear me?”
“Yes, daddy,” she replied.
Then she sneaked in underneath her sheets, in between her legs, and there I found solace to my pain.
The sisters had their territorial riff going on. Apparently, she had taken me home to avenge her older sister’s audacity to bring her boyfriend home. Later on, I found she had also been with her sister’s boyfriend. It was all too raw and the emotions were already engaged, so we kept on fucking. We kept on fucking until we were no longer together. And that has marked my path, not always in the straightest direction.
Things died a slow death, and she got pregnant and lost the baby when she had already decided to conceive. A miscarriage, I explained to her, is not the same thing as an abortion. She blamed me, and the world, and we all suffered the consequences. I foolishly spent a weekend incarcerated, the case was inevitably dropped and she was hospitalized in a mental institution for a week or so.
Suddenly, I felt nothing. I heard the phone rang, answered, no voice on the other end.
Michael would come by to cheer me up, unemployed and increasingly pessimistic, I’d follow his lead. He’d buy my stereo, my television, my CD’s, and I’d sell my books and get by. And I did get by, until I met Gladys.


I met Gladys on the Queens bound 7 train on Times Square. She was with a traveler friend. They both made eye contact and I looked the other way. Then, I’d raise an eyebrow, and there they were, inviting eyes, consenting smiles. The girls were competing for my favor with one another. I decided to go for the one that stayed behind, as I saw no way possible the two of them at once.