Authors: Kristina Shook
So I took a Facebook shot of myself in front of the engraved sign HARRISBURG STATE HOSPITAL. The best way to show my trip across America was by uploading photos to Facebook wherever I stopped, I’ll admit that Shadow was in the majority of them, but he’s a very photogenic dog. Before going to bed, I put on my all white Hollywood bikini and went swimming in the totally outstanding Comfort Inn pool—feeling a little like a half-sane Cinderella.
Shadow and I drove fast towards New York State, listening to Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits; it was time to get into the city and be off my movie-location-road-trip. Forget about the movies filmed in NYC; there are too many to list, and besides, home doesn’t count. Hello New York! I’m back!
Paloma’s place on the Upper East Side was my first stop. My dear, big apple—my beautiful, overcrowded, noisy city. With Paloma’s friendship, I have never had to worry about being ‘perfect’ or failing her, because, as she once told me, “Friendship is about connecting. When it’s thick, it’s thick, when it’s thin, it’s thin, but it don’t ever have to be broken.” I felt like crying when she said that, but I stopped myself. Sometimes I just stop myself from feeling things that are too multi-layered, mysterious and profound.
Paloma is 5’3”, curvy beyond curvy—and she has the ‘best’ Latin skin. I mean, it’s the best. If she ever had a pimple, I never saw it. She’s got thick, firm thighs, 32 B boobs, a shapely butt, and she likes clothes that stick to her figure; she hides nothing. Her hair is long and black, and the one time she cut it short, she sobbed for two whole weeks because she didn’t recognize herself. Paloma is pretty, with a capital P. Her father and mother have told her that, and, of course, guys and strangers on the street have, too. She’s just that pretty.
Paloma was the first one to set out to learn about sex and I tried to follow her. By thirteen, we were into bras; she needed one and I was just hoping. She was into makeup before me. I’ll admit it—I covered myself up in black turtlenecks and baggy jeans. Anyway, we liked boys and we had crushes 24/7. It was around this time that fate stepped into our lives (we’d just turned fourteen), and we were introduced to a ‘sex lady’, an educated older woman, who oozed sex appeal. It happened like this: we were in Macy’s, looking at beautiful, fancy lace bras and underwear in bright colors. Okay, so I wore black on the outside, but I loved color. Bras that aren’t white or black, but are dark purple, butter yellow, or lime green are what I like to buy. Only I wasn’t buying them at the time, because I was flat-chested with nipples only. Paloma found a pair of sheer underwear on a Macy’s hanger. It was so unusual, so different to us, that we couldn’t help but giggle.
“Why do women buy these, when they can just be naked?” Paloma asked. Remember she was fourteen.
“It’s the chase, the tantalizing lure of the smell of your vagina that intrigues males,” said the Sex Lady, who looked older than our mothers, but not as old as a Grandmother.
We both stared at her. She had un-brushed shoulder length brunette hair, tight jeans stuffed into brown knee-high leather boots, a sheer top showing her black bra. There were lines around her eyes, and her lips were glossy. She could have passed for a Broadway star. She was hauntingly beautiful and wild—we didn’t dare move.
“You know, don’t you?” Paloma asked. God, how I wished I had been the one to ask.
“Come on, we’ll have a drink and I’ll tell you girls some things. This is what I do. I help women understand their sexual joy,” she said.
“Sexual joy?” Paloma asked.
“Hmmm, yes,” she answered. She had been running a women’s sex group out of her cozy, West Village apartment for years. She taught women how to orgasm, how to free-up or maneuver their sexual power, even how to ask for pleasure. Oops—I’m jumping ahead.
We followed her, our arms linked as we headed over to Elaine’s, on the Upper East Side at 57th street. That was the restaurant Woody Allen used in his film
Manhattan
(my father’s other favorite, one of the few he still owns as video, rather than DVD). FYI, the restaurant is no longer around. She bought us tall iced teas, not cocktails. And we ate something, only I can’t remember what, because she was telling us about orgasms and how we had to have our own; that if we didn’t, we’d be forever caught up in pleasing men and not ourselves—she said, that was the true difference between a sex life lived and a sex life served. Oh God!
Most of what she said floated over my fourteen-year-old head. I had only fooled around with a boy (Eugene) when I was eight, playing hide the skin stick in the hole (a silly game), but it wasn’t bona fide sex. We had even tried dry humping like his mother and her bearded boyfriend had done, but we didn’t know how to do ‘it’. I was just into kissing and wanting to be kissed, and, well, hoping a teenage boy wouldn’t be pissed off that I was flat chested. I was even doing ‘titty enlarging exercises’ that Paloma’s fifteen-year-old neighbor Cleo taught me. I’m not alone, millions of other teenage girls have done exercises to make their boobs grow—I think.
Paloma sat, elbows on the table, leaning towards the Sex Lady, trying to memorize all of ‘it’. I mean, she was the pupil with her teacher, while I played the part of the invisible teenage friend. So, it was natural that Paloma had an orgasm first, and fell for a guy in Washington Square Park and made him her first sex partner. Usually girls get their periods around twelve—not us. At sixteen she got her period, but I had to wait until I turned seventeen-and-a-half. By then my father had moved us to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I finished high school as an outsider, a New Yorker craving for her city and her best friend. So finally, I screwed a teenage boy (a nobody) in a closet at party, just to do it. I didn’t orgasm; that came later with another guy—and on a bed.
Paloma was in a ruby red dress, midnight black high heels, swinging a crimson leather bag and waiting in front of her Upper East Side building when I pulled up in the red BMW.
“What a shock, wow, look at you, best friend!” she shouted. Paloma can make anyone feel welcomed; especially me, that’s the way she is. We hugged and she gave Shadow a dog bone. Paloma has two tiny teacup dogs, Spoon and Plate, but she had left them in her mother’s apartment so that Shadow could be the only dog.
Paloma’s mother lives in the downstairs apartment. Her father left for five years, moved to Spanish Harlem and lived with two women, but one day he came back and no one said a thing. He still disappears, but only for three to four days a month. Paloma once said, “He’s probably got other kids,” but then she changed the subject, and I knew it was a closed topic. Before she passed away Paloma’s grandmother used to live in the apartment Paloma has now. When you get a rent controlled apartment in NYC, you keep it.
I remembered how the Sex Lady had invited us to drop by her West Village brownstone, if we ever wanted to learn more, but we’d have to pay a small ‘fee’; those workshops were how she supported herself. She told us that sex wasn’t ‘free,’ that it came with a price. That price was pleasure or pain.
“Like crying?” Paloma had asked.
“No, pleasure is about erotic joy, erotic stimulation. If you cry after sex, it has to be because you felt pleasure deeply. Negative emotions brought into sex will ruin the pleasure,” the Sex Lady had told us.
“I’m not going to be negative,” Paloma told her.
I don’t know why, but I couldn’t say anything. I guess I was too worried that I’d end up a failure in bed.
“Don’t become bitter or angry, no matter how bad a man treats you, just move on,” she said and those words hung over us, like a glass about to fall from a shelf.
“What about oral sex?” Paloma had asked.
“Make sure to have oral done to you, since men like their penis in your mouth, and they expect admiration.”
We both cracked up—I don’t remember what else, or if anything else was discussed because I was still laughing. At the time I had no penis envy. In fact, I thought the penis hanging with the scrotum sacs looked weird.
“Girls, you must know the lips of your vagina,” she had told us.
“How?” Paloma had asked.
“Masturbate every day,” she had answered with deep-seated conviction.
Masturbation? Was I ever naïve. See, I had thought only boys jerked off—that only boys had wet dreams, because they got to have ‘boners’ and we didn’t. “M.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e,” Paloma had repeated like she was learning a new foreign word and didn’t want to forget it. Paloma lived by that rule.
While I lumbered along tearfully, full of uncertainty and confusion, my body wanted so much sex. Penises flew through my dreams like obnoxious clouds and yet my mind told me that I couldn’t have a penis without love. When I gave in at that party in the closet, it wasn’t for pleasure, it was out of desperation—I wanted the sex to be hard and fast, and it was. Like I said, he was a nobody and I was, too.
Paloma had it better. I guess I have always envied her. She and the Washington Square Park guy—actually an NYU Freshman did ‘it’ the right way. He licked and kissed her everywhere for two weeks and then they had sex. She called me up and said, “I like sex. It’s as good as the West Village lady told us it would be.” Ugh, I wish had been more like her.
Anyway, New York City looked the same, filled with a mix of old and modern buildings, all fighting to be respected. The city’s color is light grey.
“You can’t destroy our spirit,” Paloma had said a few days after 9/11.
It’s always been that way; 9/11 just reinforced that belief for the whole country, or so I like to think.
In Los Angeles, the colors are white and neutral for fashion, with accessories in bright colors, but in New York City, even in the summertime, you wear black. Paloma prefers everything she wears to be bright, bold and clingy. We stood grinning at each other—we had been cell phone friends for too many years, and now that was over and I felt so relieved.
“You didn’t get killed by gunshot, I’m so damn happy. You know, I would have been destroyed if you had,” she said and we hugged. We had never really talked about my being held up at gunpoint in the Hancock Park section of LA.
“I gotta ‘heart’ plan for us,” Paloma announced after we dropped my suitcase and bags in her apartment and took Shadow to Central Park. It is one of the best parks in the world—even though I haven’t seen all of the parks. We plunked down in the middle of Strawberry Fields. We weren’t the only ones there, as usual. Paloma took out two Tiffany boxes from her crimson leather bag. In each was a thin, silver-chain with a delicate silver heart hanging from it. She gave one to me.
“This is for attracting ‘true’ love,” she said.
She put hers on and I held mine in my hands, and then we made a pact out loud to find ‘true’ love and to claim it forever. “We hereby say no more casual dating, no more yo-yo relationships. YES to true love that leads to getting engaged, getting married and having a family to love and cherish deeply forever and ever.”
Paloma had just dumped her on-again-off-again boyfriend for good. It might sound selfish and immature, but I was so glad we were both single at the same time, and that she had a love plan for us. She was the one who thought up my move out West, so I could have a thousand experiences, and I did. Of course, I had thought I was moving to Hollywood to be discovered, to become a big-name actress. Oh well, not every dream comes true.
Okay, so now it was time for me to prepare, I had three seriously important events coming up: 1.) Going to my father’s place. 2.) Seeing my Aunt Helen die. 3.) The ‘true’ love pact. That meant doing rituals. Thank God, I had gone to the Hollywood Y’s counseling center for those $25.00 an hour sessions, because that’s where I had learned about the power of rituals. Like I said before, that amazing counseling-girl-in-training had totally helped me. Well, she introduced me to mini-rituals, as well as putting an end to my bar hopping.
“Vivien, don’t give your mind that much time to worry or be sad. Limit it.” She had said, during one of my sessions.
“Limit it? Like, how?” I had asked—I know, I sounded like a ‘Valley Girl’ minus the ‘Like totally’.
She suggested that I buy glass jars with cork stoppers from the 99-Cent Store and fill them with my ‘worried’ or ‘sad’ thoughts. For twenty minutes every morning I scribbled as many worries as I had—and then stuffed them into the jars. Wow, I ended up filling five jars in two months. Good news, it worked!
She had said, “Whatever ritual you do, just believe it will work and never dis-believe.”
Now that I was in NYC I was going to stay at Paloma’s for a few days. So I had the chance to get my mind, body, spirit, and heart ready.
For my first ritual—I went and got my teeth cleaned at my old dentist, Dr. Underly’s office. I met him during my college years, and he had acted like my shrink, my priest, my go-to older platonic male confidant. Of course he kept my teeth healthy, while he listened to me with genuine interest and concern. Back then, I was overfilled with many worries, anxiety over guys and fear about whether I was going to make it ‘big’ as an actress.
Here I was, all these year later, coming to see him after not having made it ‘big’ in Hollywood. And I was ‘single’ again. Dr. Underly is a handsome, athletic man, who loves his wife and being a dentist. He once said, “Vivien, it must be hard to be you!” and I didn’t say a thing. I just nodded, and now I was ready to tell him—he was right—a hundred percent right. Go figure.
His office used to be in Bronxville, but he had relocated to another town, so I headed to Grand Central, my favorite train station in the whole wide world, and took a train out to see him. His face looked older, but he was still athletic and still handsome. I told him all about ‘failing’ in Hollywood, how I had nothing to show for my years there and all the time I spent when I could have been hanging out with my Aunt Helen. And I cried; I couldn’t help it. He just listened, and when I stopped crying, he said, “You didn’t fail. You just have to wait and see what happens now. Don’t be surprised if it’s better than what you imagined.” A few minutes later his hygienist came in and cleaned my teeth and my dental confession was done.