Denise and Donna (everyone called them Dení, [pronounced de-Nee, as in “take a knee” in football] and Dawn) were achingly attractive young women, with whom I loved to smoke cocaine. I believed I loved them both. The dynamics of our relationships with one another changed almost weekly, but I had paid both Dení and Dawn for sexual provider services several times, and both were comfortable hanging out at my house.
Dawn was 27 and Dení was 30. I was sixty-three. Each of them had one child, both sons, both born to them in their early twenties. Dení’s son lived with her, Dawn’s son lived with his Dad. Dawn and Dení were quite similar physically, both about 5’5”, 125 pounds, light brown pony-tail length hair. Dení was more high-strung. Dawn was more down to earth. My BA was a decade older than either of them.
Dení was a courtier in training, a flaky geisha, maybe a professional fiancé. I admit to harboring deep but embarrassingly pedestrian fantasies, of standing in for her husband, becoming her bread-winner. How different was that from marriage after all? I was in love, so was she. I believed we were cynical enough to expect and enable such a counterfeit relationship to work. How could it not work? And how could our entanglement not be legit—for me to pick up the husband duties mid-stream, carry them awhile, relinquish them reluctantly, when it was time to settle some other obligations with some other crack ho in some other bland emergency, working some other narrative? Our commitments existed for as long as they were asserted by all parties. I guess, stating it baldly like this, I ought to have anticipated problems. At the time I was impaired. That’s my only excuse. I cared deeply about Dení. We adored one another. She wasn’t difficult to spend time with.
Dawn sometimes worked during the day driving a log skidder for her boyfriend’s logging operation; often at night, especially on weeknights when the club wasn’t too busy, she was a pole dancer, apparently quite talented, strong and graceful. She was occasionally called upon to be a reluctant, desultory, and unpopular lap dancer as well. She worked at the strip club on weeknights because that’s when the club was almost dead, with altogether fewer leering idiots trying to involve her in their sexual depredations.
In contrast, Dení was more of a classical dancer, poised like a watch-spring, arms up, wrists curled in over her head, toes én pôinte, a spinning music-box ballerina, where Dawn was a javelin hurler or hockey player. I’d been naked with each of them on several occasions, when they provided their fine services and company. They both said the same thing—they both hated their tits. This made me feel kind of bad, because while from some angles, their breasts weren’t dazzling and Playboy perfect, they were easily, hands down, without a doubt my favorite traits. Good Lord, I love tits; all of them. Tits squishy as Angel Cake, or dense as Play-Doh. Flat, floppy, muscular, perky, pneumatic, droopy, zaftig or bulimic, dignified, majestic. Enhanced is great. Natural is even better. Bread dough or silly putty, cottage cheese or Jell-O. I’ve been stimulated by and loved every size, every color, even breasts not there anymore, breasts that had undergone radical mastectomies. Like phantom limbs, phantom breasts turned me on as much as the originals. As if a woman’s ribs were the deeper object of my love—a love as pure as a nursing mother’s breathing ribcage. “God, this is Adam. I need my rib back. I’m going in. Thanks.”
Well, one busy night at my house, both Dawn and Dení were present. Dawn was in the far bathroom, changing clothes and putting on makeup in preparation for her late shift at the Strip Club. Dení and I were preparing to be locked later in prearranged sexual tussle. We talked a mile a minute, and she was upbeat, but then made some sad comment about her tits. It struck a nerve for me. I thought hard, frowned. I asked her, “Do you think Dawn is sexy?” “Mmmm… well yeah, right? My girl Dawni is sexy as fuck,” Dení replied in a gentle, laughing tribute (tossing out diminutives like a Tolstoy general), and I pulled my clothing together, hopped off the bed, and side-stepped out the bedroom door. “Be right back.”
I went to the other end of the apartment to find Dawn and offer her a puff of cocaine, something she never turned down. I told her Dení was hanging out in my room, asked if she was comfortable smoking with her. “Ooh, no problem. I’ve wanted to meet her anyways, but you always keep her to yourself,” Dawn nudged me with a sarcastic little grin. “She’s cute!”
“Mmmm, good golly Dawn, by all that is holy in this infinite universe, heaven or hell—you’re cute too,” I thought to myself silently, grinning aloud and gesturing with my forehead back toward my bedroom.
I brought Dawn back to see Dení, began fixing rock hits for all of us, and asked Dawn, as a favor—and I promised not to touch her—would she please, Please, PLEASE take off her shirt? She’ll understand in a minute. She smiled skeptically, and then moved to oblige. I turned to Dení on the bed and asked her to do the same. They became receptive simultaneously, and in seconds I had two lovely topless ladies in my bedroom.
Of course, because I am an idiot, I presumed to lecture them. About their tits. “Dení, you think Dawn is hot as fuck, but she hates her tits. And Dawn, you think Dení is a sex kitten, and yet she hates her tits too, and if you stand side by side in front of the mirror [they did, of course, because I’m an inveterate idiot who should be euthanized], you’ll see you’re freaking identical. And your tits are as freaking awesome as you are.” Both lovely women, both sexy beyond description, and both with adorable, more than adequate and eminently workable tits, smiled quizzically, indicating I guess that I still had some convincing to do. Dawn looked in the mirror as she squeezed hers between her downreaching arms, Dení looked down and lifted her breast absently. I grabbed each topless one of them around the waist, one in each arm, and leaned back onto the bed. They laughed and jumped away.
I loved my life right then, more than I remember ever loving anything comparable. Puff the Magic Dragon lived by the sea, and right here, right now, I frolicked in the autumn mist with my courtier proto-fiancé Dení and my tiny log-skidder pole-dancing Dawn, both bouncing on their glorious springy quads and calves, topless and dressed only in leggings and maybe a scarf, once earmuffs, once my hat, smiling skeptically, laughing at funny shit. And all three of us puffed the crack as if our lives depended on it, and perhaps by providing the only glue that can possibly hold our encounter together—render it rational, explain it, excuse it—in that way, maybe our lives did depend on it. We puffed and flirted and flew on angelic clouds.
Sadly, there would be no way to engage them both in a physical encounter simultaneously, and Dawn stretched her tank top back over her head, turned to exhale her last puff as she waved a good-humored back-of-the-hand on her way out the door, to return to her makeup duties in the other bathroom. I had just lectured two prime thirty-and-under bitchez, about their tits! My forty-year-old degree in Religious Philosophy had not prepared me for this. My scruples could not hold an argument in the blinding, white-hot, rapidly unfolding and always demanding present. I couldn’t tell whether I was in heaven or hell, but I admit—it felt like heaven, the music sounded like heaven, everything smelled like heaven. And it smelled like Paul Mitchell shampoo. I pulled my fragrant, chuckling Dení down to me on the bed, and we re-convened our interrupted tryst. The moonlit night unraveled and unwound, dark and rumbling, pregnant with possibilities.
Bitchez 