by Robert Klein
In a desperation move, Mr. Grunwald, the owner of the hotel, dispatched his sister-in-law Myrna, the famed public address announcer, to find a lover for the valued guest. Choice number one was Shelly, the dark curly-haired trumpet player, a favorite of the ladies at the hotel. Myrna offered him fifty dollars to make old Lil happy. He was appalled. She offered a hundred, and he was twice as appalled. In his eyes, Myrna, a religiously observant homemaker and mother of three, had become a pimp. She didn’t see it that way. “Come on, Shelly. A good-lookin’ boy like you, what do you have to lose? A little toss in the hay. I hear you do your fair share of that for free. Why not make a nice woman happy and satisfy our best customer?” She pressed Diamond Lil’s room key into his palm. He replied, “I’ll keep this under my pillow for the next time I feel like shtupping my aunt. Let me ask you something, Myrna. Would you like this offer to be made to your son when he’s a little older?” Myrna gave him a “why are you busting my balls” look, but she had no answer for that one. She swept the ethical concerns effortlessly under the rug and proceeded on her way to proposition some other mother’s son.
I had a particular fondness for Shelly. The house musicians were all pretty good guys, older than I by two to six years, which was a lot back then. Two were graduate students, and Shelly was a Korean War veteran. No Dizzy Gillespie, he had fair chops on the trumpet, but his calm maturity, and the sense that he had been there and back, set him apart from the rest of the flakes in the band. He was a mensch through and through: an ethical mensch, a real person. The band was extremely cordial and occasionally invited me to sing a tune or shake the maracas during their set. Maybe my latent aspirations drew me to them, the closest thing to show business at the Fieldston Hotel. In my eyes, their job had the most panache of all, and of course I loved music.
They also seemed to attract the most girls and not a few women. With few exceptions, they kept their sexual escapades to themselves out of discretion and a fear of embarrassing any guests and thereby incurring the wrath of management. However, Shelly couldn’t resist telling a few of us about Myrna’s offer and how repulsed he was by it. He considered the proposition an insult to both him and Diamond Lil. Nonetheless, my inexperience, not to mention a 0.00 batting average for the summer, made the story exciting and inflamed my imagination. The idea of a woman who was such a sure thing that another woman was offering money to any willing person with a penis to have sex with her—that was my kind of offer. The money seemed strangely unimportant.
“I’d do it,” I blurted out.
“You’d do what?”
“I’d shtup her,” I said.
“Have you seen her? She’s old enough to be your grandmother. You must be a gerontophile,” said the erudite Shelly.
“A what?” I said.
“Someone who likes old people.”
“Of course I like old people,” I said.
“No, someone who likes to have sex with old people,” he said to general laughter. Shelly tossed Lil’s room key to me. “Here you go, sport. Good luck.” Suddenly, I was surrounded by assorted kibbitzers egging me on. “Yeah, Bobby Klein, stud extraordinaire.” “He’s gonna make it all the way with the famous temptress Diamond Lil.” “Let’s hope she doesn’t have a heart attack while he’s humping her.” “Next he’s gonna make a play for my tonta Bessie and my bubbe.”
These taunts notwithstanding, the fact was that my earliest sexual fantasies were about the adult women who lived in my crowded apartment building on Decatur Avenue. They were elaborate if naive fantasies, based, among other things, on my observations of these women in very close quarters. Even as a very small boy, I noticed the way their housedresses clung to their bodies; I noticed their lips, their breasts, their perfume—natural and not—their clothes, their shoes. As I grew older, they never could have imagined how often I thrilled to them secretly in my bed, during my nightly date with myself. All of this preoccupation with adult women was no doubt a safe, acceptable Oedipal expression—I hope. True, these women were younger than Miss Pincus, who was on the edge of being downright old, but it turned me on that this normal-looking middle-aged grown-up woman could be so naughty.
The next night in the casino, I got a perfect observation spot at the bar and watched Lil doing the mambo, an impeccable pachanga, and her specialty, the cha-cha. She flung her arms about and moved her generous hips back and forth gaily and gracefully, like someone who knew she was the best dancer in the room. Of course, to be truthful, most of her competition on the dance floor was, shall we say, uninsurable. Yet the Arthur Murray Dance Studio would have been proud of her this night. I watched from the relative darkness of the bar, with a mouth-breathing grin from three Scotch and sodas, which provided the rose-colored glasses for everything I saw and heard. The musicians were riffing better than ever, with those intoxicating, surging Latin rhythms. The casino, the bane of my existence, with its noisy wooden floors above where I slept, actually looked elegant, enhanced by theatrical spinning glass reflecting lights.
As I watched Diamond Lil from the anonymous darkness, I thought of her thrilling proclivities. “She loves to fuck young boys,” I repeated to myself several times, and oh that Scotch whiskey. I began to get secretly excited. She was dancing with such passion, well at least for the Fieldston Hotel. Damned if she didn’t look hot to me. Nice big breasts. She was wearing a kelly-green chiffon dress cinched at her waist; it spread into a wide hoop skirt, favored by fashionable women in the fifties, designed to hide a fairly ample tuchas. She wore matching satin five-inch heels. She wasn’t young and couldn’t be mistaken for a teenager, yet . . . I took a hefty sip of whiskey and focused on the feminine way her feet melded into the strappy, high heels. During the mambo, she grabbed the dress with her right hand and raised her left hand into the air, thrusting her head back in the Latin style like a regular Carmen Miranda, without the fruit-bowl hat.
I dared not ask her to dance; I would have been much too embarrassed, and subject to ridicule from the guys. I told them all that I had been kidding about making a play for Lil, but the more I watched her, with the Scotch whiskey pumping through my bloodstream, the better she looked, and the prospect of realizing my long-held fantasy of making it with an older woman took hold of me. She was there for the taking, wasn’t she? She may have been a little nuts, but she was still that rarest of women who never said no.
The evening wore down, the band packed up, and there were good nights all around as a few of us drifted to the coffee shop. I noticed that Diamond Lil had left the casino alone and gone up to her second-floor rooms in the main building, just above the lobby and the coffee shop. After about a half hour, the bullshit session broke up, and I pretended to use the men’s room off the lobby, waiting until everyone was gone. I was shaking a little, because at that moment, I knew I was going to do it. I had no plan as I ascended the staircase to the second floor. It was quiet. Most of the guests were asleep, it being midnight on a weeknight. I could hear snoring through the thin wood walls of the old building, and a mother soothing a crying baby. How sweet: an innocent mother and an innocent baby, and here I skulked, drunk no less, in pursuit of debauchery.
When I got to the second floor, I sat down on the step to think this through. What the hell was I doing? Could I really go through with this? Strange scenarios began creeping into my head, paranoid and improbable. What if this was an elaborate practical joke being played on me by the guys? What if Diamond Lil was actually just plain old Dora Pincus, an aunt or a grandmother, who served dried fruit and nuts? What if I made a play for her and she smacked my face and scolded me like the buxom women I fantasized about on Decatur Avenue probably would have? Shelly and the boys would have a good laugh on me. Worse, what if she screamed and called the police? My family . . . disgrace. Headlines in the New York Post: GERONTOPHILE RAPIST ARRESTED. But these were unlikely contingencies, as the hotel, according to Shelly, was offering money. And ooh, how she danced that mambo in those high-heeled shoes, and she was right down the hall. Now wha
t was I going to do, knock on her door? I was not used to drinking, and the whiskey was beginning to take its toll, giving me the intermittent feeling that the hallway was spinning. I was afraid I might puke, which would be the ultimate capper to my attempted sexual adventure. I decided to walk down the hall and see if I had the nerve to knock on her door. I passed it, and it was wide open, and she saw me. I kept walking down the hall, pretending to be looking for another room. As I returned the way I came, she was at the door wearing a bathrobe with a newspaper under her arm and a highball in her hand.
“You looking for someone, darling?”
“Uh, yeah. I think I’m on the wrong floor, though,” I said.
“I’m just reading the paper. Come on in,” she said. I stood there like a sphinx. “Come in, come in, I won’t bite you,” she said gently, seductively, as if she would like to bite me.
I entered the parlor of her suite, which, like the hallway, was spinning a little. I could see the bedroom adjacent to the parlor; there was a half-full bottle of Haig and Haig Pinch Scotch on the night table, right next to a bottle of Chanel No. 5. The room was suffused with it, which smelled wonderful and, of course, expensive. She seemed eager to have company as she closed and locked the door. “Have some candy, read the paper. You can learn a lot from the paper. I have the Post and the Mirror. I didn’t get the Times today. What college do you go to?”
“Me? Uh, Alfred University.”
“Oh my God, Alfred University. What a coincidence. My nephew just graduated. Of course you’ll plotz when I tell you who he is. You ready? My nephew is Bernie Pitkin.”
This news about Bernie Pitkin was less than the lightning rod Miss Pincus was counting on. I had never heard of Bernie Pitkin. “Uh . . . Bernie Pitkin? I don’t think I know him.”
“What? You must be kidding, he was president of Tau Delta. He was on the golf team, a sociology major. You really don’t know Bernie Pitkin?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
“He’s about five foot six, dark hair, very popular?”
This mundane discussion, this Jewish geography, was hardly good presex banter. “I can’t believe you don’t know him. He was such a big man on campus.” I decided to meet her halfway. “Wait a minute—Tau Delt? Golfer? Yeah, I remember him, but I didn’t know him well.”
Lil, in a fancy red bathrobe with a slit up the side, offered me a piece of candy from a Whitman’s sampler. She lit a Lucky Strike and took a sip of her drink. “The square ones have hard centers, and the light ones have soft centers. You like nougat?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You want a drink?”
“No, thank you.”
She took a seat in an easy chair. As she crossed her legs, the bathrobe rode up enough to reveal her leg and thigh and a complex pattern of varicose veins. They reminded me of a diagram of the jet stream on a weather map. The room was well lit. Too well lit. Lil had removed her makeup and eyelashes for bed, having contemplated sleeping alone once again. There were bags under her eyes and wrinkles around her mouth, and I could see that she had a slight mustache. God bless her, these were all quite normal for a woman of her age, but not for the prospective lover of a boy of seventeen. She looks so old, I thought. Gone was the flamboyant mambo dancer/nymphomaniac. I was in the presence of a nice, talkative old woman in a bathrobe and slippers who was an excellent hostess but not the slightest bit appealing to me sexually. I was feeling a surge of my old pal, guilt, for having entertained this whole notion to begin with. Suddenly, I wanted out of that room more than anything in the world. I would have been happier clearing two dozen plates of brisket or hearing the bone-jarring screams of the chef than sitting there with her.
She continued with her newspaper gambit, sounding like a yenta cliché at the mah-jongg table: “Did you read that they broke ground for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge? Two bam. That’s gonna fire up Staten Island real estate for sure. Three crack. I already bought twenty-five acres in New Dorp. That’s in Staten Island, you know.” She put her hand on my cheek and looked me over. “I don’t recognize you. Are you a waiter? A busboy?”
“I’m a busboy, station six. You know, I better be going. I have to work breakfast. It’s been nice chatting.”
“What’s your hurry? You’re young, you got plenty of energy.” She went into a sort of nostalgic reverie: just what I needed. “When I was your age, I never slept. I never got tired. There was plenty of time for sleep. Having a good time—that was the important thing. I find it very hard to sleep. The night the war in Europe was over, we had a party for three days and three nights.” Tears came to her eyes. “I had a sweetheart who was killed in the war . . . in Italy. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t. I’m very sorry. Look, I better go now. Thanks for the candy. I’ll see you around the hotel.”
“You’re a very nice, very sweet young man.” She reminded me of a Hebraic Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire, trying to seduce the newsboy. I went for the door. She arose quickly, blocking my way. “Are you sure you have to go? I have some dried apricots and pistachio nuts.”
I mean, did she actually think that offer would be the clincher to keep me there? That I would suddenly say: “Dried apricots and pistachio nuts? Wow! Well in that case of course I’ll stay a few minutes. Throw in some prunes and halvah, and I’ll stay all night.” A gigantic wave of nausea descended on me, mixed with shame. “I really have to go now,” I said.
She cupped my chin and looked steadfastly into my eyes. “Yes, darling, I know you do. Good night.” She unlatched the chain and opened the door and gave me a tiny peck on the cheek. “You’re a sweet boy. Best of luck in college. I still can’t believe you don’t know him. Everybody knows Bernie Pitkin.”
So much for my foray into the land of older women. Much older women. I felt like shit. I returned to my quarters at the Waldorf and vomited vigorously for five minutes.
* * *
In lieu of the real thing, the majority of the sexual stimulation among the busboys was talk, fantasy and stories of sexual conquests from colleagues, dripping with braggadocio that was largely bullshit. One rainy August night I was in the musicians’ quarters, called the Taj, and listening intently as Herbert, the accordion-playing dental student, told a few of the busboys of his encounter with a girl named Sheila. She was not a guest at the hotel, but her family had a summer home nearby and paid a fee for the seasonal privilege of doing the cha-cha and enjoying the shows at the casino. Herbert was short, with tortoise-shell glasses, and looked like a well-read chipmunk. He certainly didn’t strike me as a cocksman, and despite my eager, vicarious interest in the story, I was simultaneously and, come to think of it, hypocritically put off by his telling it—his failure of discretion. He may have been kissing and telling, but I could tell that he was being truthful in his account, as he could never be that good at improvisation. In his high voice and meticulous diction, he told how the girl kept coming up to him at the bandstand to request various numbers, all the while dancing.
I knew who Sheila was, having seen her around the casino, but at nineteen or twenty, she was in my category of “older woman” and would not be interested in me. She was not pretty, more of the intellectual type from City College, but with huge “mammaries,” as Herbert called them. (He enjoyed demonstrating his knowledge of gross-anatomy terms learned in dental school.) Sheila’s favorite tunes were “Embraceable You” and “The Cuban Mambo,” which the band had played three times at her request. Herbert spoke to a captive audience of horny would-be-Casanova busboys: “She kept doing these wild gesticulations during the mambo, thrusting out her mammaries and grinding and wiggling her ass.”
Shelly, the oldest member of the band, interjected a question with mock solemnity: “But at what moment did you know she was coming on to you in particular? Was there a hint?”
“Fair question,” said Herbert pompously. “Every time she looked my way, her tongue would dart in and out, and she kept winking at me. How’s that for a
hint? I could tell she was hot to trot.” He recounted how they got to talking after the band was through, when the two of them had a few drinks at the bar. After all the salacious hinting, and much to Herbert’s surprise and disappointment, Sheila launched into a spirited discussion of philosophy and political theory. It took a while for him to plod through Voltaire and Thomas Hobbes and get her into talking about sex. He came up with Freud, which was the perfect segue, because it presented an opportunity for him to intellectualize the conversation right into what was on his mind.
Here was where Herbert’s story really started to percolate. I could swear we busboys moved closer so as not to miss a word. “We were sitting on bar stools, and our knees were touching. She was chatting on nonstop about Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Then she very deliberately maneuvered her knee right into my crotch and began to move it—very knowledgeably, I might add. I moved my stool closer. A few deep kisses, and I began stroking her knee and gyrating my pelvis against it. Slowly at first, then faster and faster and faster and faster until—Modesty prevents me from telling you the exciting conclusion of the evening.”
There was a chorus of “Oh shit” and “Oh no” and groans. I protested: “Come on, Herbert, don’t leave us hanging. Did you go all the way with her?”
“None of your business. I’ll tell you when you’re twenty-one.”
Then Mitch, the drummer/law student who always needed a haircut, spoke up: “Uh, Herbert, aren’t you forgetting something? Don’t forget to tell these kids the best part. You’re not going to leave it out, are you?”
Herbert glared at Mitch as if he had a strong desire to place the drummer’s head between his cymbals and play a Sousa march. Mitch continued, “Yes, it’s true, Herbert did invent a new position for lovemaking that night: sex on a bar stool. Then, in the middle of his hot and heavy intercourse with her knee, he got a little carried away and fell off the stool and banged his head. His glasses were bent like a Calder mobile.” We all broke out laughing.
