One day in early September, the time came for Nora to join The Salient newspaper at City College. She was going to attend the first staff meeting of the new semester with me.
I had joined nearly a year earlier in the fall of my freshman year. In October they ran a tongue-in-cheek help-wanted ad. Jeff Kimmel and I – we had met each other in high school – discussed joining. One line in the ad caught my attention: “If you like working with weird people, The Salient is for you.” I thought I was a bit weird, or maybe unconventional, so I decided to join.
It styled itself as the “counter-cultural” (however that was defined) publication of the five college papers. It seemed like it might be more fun than the stodgy Campus, which had been around since 1907 or some such antique date. Besides, compared to high school, I found that college had a lot of unstructured time between classes to fill up.
The final factor was that The Salient seemed to be the place where I would finally meet some pliable girls who were willing to drop their panties for me. It turned out that there were no such girls there. There were only about a half-dozen female staffers at any one time, and they were either hooked up with other guys or completely indifferent to me.
The wild girl I was looking for was Nora Meara, the part-time campus hooker who sat right next to me in my European history course while mostly ignoring me. Then, as I described earlier, through a series of unexpected events we wound up together at the end of our freshman year.
We were an unlikely couple, perhaps, but for the first time I felt satisfied with my romantic situation. She gave me all the sex I wanted and, as a bonus, she was quite kinky too. She was willing to join The Salient because she was also now bored and at loose ends at the college. Now that her hooking career was over, she could get serious about her studies. She had a temp job at an office downtown, but that still left her with free time to fill.
I was looking forward to surprising everyone and showing her off to the rest of the staff. Hey guys, look at who I met at the beginning of the summer. Nora was willing to go along with my little game.
I hadn’t asked her to wear anything in particular for the staff meeting, but when I met her on that day on the first floor of Finley Hall I saw that she had dressed up for the occasion. For the first time, she was wearing her business outfit: dark gray suit, nylon stockings, black high heels, the whole bit. Her skirt was tight enough so that it showed off her slender but shapely ass. For a bit of color, she had a pink hairband across the front of her head. The only item I had seen before were her steel-rimmed glasses.
“I look great, don’t I?”
I didn’t want to compliment her too much and have it go to her head. She already had more than a touch of vanity.
“It certainly is different.”
“Just different?”
I said, “You’re going to drag a compliment out of me if it kills me. All right, it’s intriguing.” I decided to give her a couple of taps on her behind to demonstrate my approval in a nonverbal way.
“So, you like patting my fanny?”
“I’ve done a lot more than pat it at times.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely true!”
Then I said, “Nora, would you hold my arm as we go into the office?”
“Sure, of course, I’ll do that for you.”
On the third floor, we went through the open office door just as I had always imagined it. As I expected, everyone looked at us. It was mostly males in there, but four of the five female staffers were present too. It had been nearly a year since I had joined myself, and no one had seen me with a girl and I had never even talked about dating one. Now I was arriving with this well-dressed, sexy girl holding my arm. We had caught them off-guard.
I said, “Remember how I said I had found a new staff member? Well, meet Nora.”
She raised a hand, “Hi guys!”
Of course, everyone had assumed I would bring in some dude. I think what went through everyone’s mind was, is he actually balling her?
Yes, people, I definitely am, sometimes in this very room. However, no one said anything.
She broke away from me and looked around the office as if she had never seen it before. I was reminded of Bette Davis examining some seedy dive bar. I was standing near the back of the room, enjoying her show. She was in her confident, even brash mode. Her heels made her five-foot-seven height seem even taller.
Nora sashayed over to the windows, swaying her hips inside her tight skirt. She didn’t have the widest ass in the world, but it looked very good then.
The windows were completely bare, and she put her arms akimbo and examined them. “Guys, you should think about putting some shades and curtains up here.” One could see all the way to the State office building on 125th Street. There were still no responses from my fellow journalists. Then she went over to the worn-out red couch. We had had our first screw on that piece of furniture, and several more since then.
“You should also all chip in and get a new sofa.”
Then Frank, one of our professional virgins (well, I had been one too), said, “I’m Frank, and I’m the business manager here . . .”
“Hi, Frank, nice to meet you.”
“Anyway, we do have to rely on the student activity fee funds.”
“I didn’t say that; I meant you yourselves should buy it.”
Jeff, another guy starved for sex, offered, “Sofas are pretty expensive.”
“Then maybe you should check a Salvation Army store.”
I was impressed by Nora’s display of attitude. If some guy had tried that on the first day, he never would have gotten away with it.
I noticed the expressions of the people looking at her. One of them was Lilith, a senior. She had been assistant news editor during the previous semester, and now she was a full editor. I had gotten a lot of grief from her when I had failed to write a particularly boring news story.
Lilith was glaring at Nora. She was a very intense, almost humorless, dark-haired woman. Her stare seemed to say, who is this arrogant bitch? Nora smiled back at her; I’ve got your number, sweetie.
Another person viewing her carefully was one of our two Bobbies. Jewish Bobby wrote the pornography (“erotic writing”) we published, and Italian Bobby supplied the smutty illustrations. Neither one of them was particularly talented. The illustrator-Bobby fancied himself as the next R. Crumb, but he didn’t have Crumb’s wit or drawing ability. Thus he sometimes lifted Crumb’s cartoons and re-published them without permission.
I don’t know where artist-Bobby was, but the writer one was there now. He was usually quiet, even morose, but he was obviously carefully appraising Nora. I thought, I have to keep an eye on him in the coming weeks.
Then it was time to start the meeting. The two of us sat together at the big table in the middle of the room. Nora wasn’t ready yet to quit her show. She draped her jacket on the back of her chair. She found an excuse to put her hands behind her back and do some stretching. Of course, that thrust her breasts forward.
When the moment came, she presented her writing idea and it was accepted. She was going to describe what it was like to work at Burger King. That was exactly the kind of lame feature story we went for.
But I was going to do something similar; I offered to write how it was to work as a foot messenger over the summer. It was going to be my first attempt at “creative” writing, as opposed to handling something assigned to me. It was also accepted and ultimately published under a headline written by me: “A Summer’s Day on the Queen of Avenues.”
We used to do some political commentaries, but now that the Vietnam War had ended and Nixon had resigned in disgrace, that was starting to fade. Most of our news stories about college events were mind-numbing boring, but we still had the two Bobbies to supply us with their stuff. Sometimes I thought that the only reason the students picked up our issues was to peruse their materials.
Afterwards, Nora and I didn’t hang around for a post-meeting chat with the other staffers. That was for some other time. On the way out, she held her jacket on her arm and shook her ass at the people in the room. Then she smiled back at them one more time. I wondered how many of the guys were going to masturbate thinking of her that night. Probably most of them.
Overall, I was quite pleased with my new girlfriend.
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We went down to the horrible Finley snack bar for sodas. The city ran our university system, and the food and décor of that place were good examples of government-issued incompetence.
I was going to ask her if any of the male staffers had ever been one of her customers. That seemed like a bad idea. Instead, I said, “That Bobby guy, he was noticing you. I mean they all were, but him in particular. I’ve got to watch out for him.”
“He’s the one who does the Weird Section?”
That was him; I had shown the section to her.
She said, “That thing about cockroaches, it was disgusting.”
The previous semester he had talked a now-departed girl named Carol into writing about the mating habits of roaches. Somehow she knew her stuff. In a cute touch, she had given the two bugs names: Mona and Stanley.
Nora asked me, “So what was she like?”
“She was a tall and big, I mean really big, redhead. She would wear tight jeans and she had the largest, most spectacular ass I have ever seen.”
“So why didn’t you make a play for her and have some fun?”
“First of all, we would have made a strange-looking couple. Second, I didn’t know how to approach her.”
She smirked at me. “I guess I cured you of that problem.”
Then we talked about artist-Bobby. He had created quite a stir the previous spring by publishing his own drawing of a masturbating nun. That was not well-received by the college or the various government officials who funded our school, but we got away with it. It was actually the students who paid for the newspapers with their “activity fees” and most of them didn’t protest what he had done. Then Bobby topped himself by publishing the nun cartoon again, this time with a “Censored” sign covering her crotch.
I said, “I argued against printing it the second time, which made me unpopular with some people there.”
“Did it offend you?”
“No, I just didn’t want us to get suspended or shut down. Then I’d have nothing to do here except go to class.”
“That would be quite a setback for you.”
I commented, “Lilith obviously doesn’t like you.”
“Fuck her; she looks like a mean, tight-assed little twat. You told me about the difficulties she gave you.”
“I don’t like her either.”
“But you wouldn’t mind fucking her, even if it was just a hate fuck.”
I was impressed with her insight, “How did you know that?”
She tapped her head, “You should realize this by now, I know how guys think. I definitely know how you think.”
“Frankly, I wouldn’t mind taking her over my lap and giving her a good bare-ass spanking.”
Nora pondered that for a moment, “The main problem you two have is that she thinks you are someone sexually inconsequential, and she makes no attempt to hide it. Thus, you enjoyed parading me around in front of her.”
“I admit, I enjoyed doing that with all of them. They all had the same basic opinion of me.”
“Sweetie, I didn’t mind doing it for you. That’s why I dressed up today and shook my ass at them so much.”
“I had a weird fantasy about Lilith when she was so mad at me when I wasn’t able to write that story last semester. She and two other girls from the staff took me to a secret room in the basement of this building. They tied me to a spanking bench and caned me on the bare behind.”
“This building is so old it does look like it could have a dungeon. So what made you agree to this?”
“It was just a fantasy, but they said that I would be expelled from the paper if I didn’t submit to the punishment. It gets even stranger.”
“Knowing you, I’m not surprised. You look so mild on the outside but that isn’t the real you.”
I said, “They photographed the whole session, then they left me tied up there for a while. Then the girl who took the pictures came back and took pity on me. She knelt in front of me and gave me a blowjob.”
Nora assessed me for a few moments. “You know, I’ve done some dominatrix sessions and that is beyond anything my customers could dream up.”
“Did you enjoy it, I mean did you get turned on by spanking guys?”
“Oh yeah, I think most dominatrices have that reaction, at least the ones I’ve spoken to.”
“So, are you going to stay with our little publication?”
She smiled at me, “You bet; this is going to be a lot of fun.”
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Later that month we were in the snack bar again and we got to talking about sex. This time she was wearing her usual college girl clothes. It was hard to surprise Nora, but I managed to do it. Out of nowhere, I asked her, “Have you ever had anal sex?”
“Why did that occur to you?”
“Oh, at our first dinner that night, you sort of implied that you had. I mean with your customers.”
I could imagine the grinding of her mental gears. “All right, a few times. It wasn’t that uncomfortable or anything. It just didn’t do anything for me; I mean I didn’t get any pleasure out of it.”
I said brightly, “If you let me do it, I’ll rub your clit so that you do feel something.” She didn’t seem to be buying it. I tried to sweeten the deal. “I’ll also go down on your afterwards. I know how much you like that.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then, “Let’s put a rain-check on that. I’ll consider it, okay?”
“That’s very nice of you.”
She squinted at me. “Listen, buddy, don’t be a smart-ass or you’ll be masturbating in the restrooms again.” Why had I even told her about that? She was smiling, “I know, you would do it standing up with your sweater. That was pretty rich.”
I was briefly embarrassed, and she had gotten me on the defensive. “So this is payback time?” It didn’t seem that I had said anything that extreme.
“Yep, you’ve got to be pretty sharp if you’re going to tangle with me. Anyway, of the what – four thousand girls up here – who is the one who finally busted your cherry?” She pointed to herself, “It was yours truly.”
I decide to push back a bit, “Well, you can be can be high maintenance at times.”
“High maintenance? Honey, you don’t know what a real high maintenance chick is like. What have I really asked from you except that you talk to me and spend some time with me? Haven’t I given you all the sex you want and then some?”
Now I was beginning to enjoy her ragging on me. I tried a new topic, “You know what I would like? I’d like to borrow your car.” That was her 1970 Mustang convertible.
“So you can crash it on the Cross-Bronx Expressway? I’ve seen the way you drive.” She had been with me a few times in my father’s Pontiac Bonneville. “Frankly, you’re a bit wobbly. When was the first time you drove on an expressway, anyway?”
Actually, I did remember. It was when I had gone with my mother to Forest Hills for a job interview for a camp counselor job. I was so unsuited for the position that I knew in ten minutes that I didn’t even want it. This was right after the SLA shootout in Los Angeles, so it had to be in May.
I told Nora those details. I ended with, “So it was on the Whitestone Bridge and then the Cross-Island Parkway.”
“I can just imagine it.”
I argued, “But you must have gotten your license around the same time I did.”
“It’s not just a matter of experience. I just don’t want somebody else driving my car.”
But she had implied that she was a better driver than I was. I couldn’t help it; any guy would have been rankled by that. Perhaps she understood that because she changed the topic.
“Hey, I saw this weird thing in Cosmopolitan.”
“You actually read that thing?”
“Well, for shits and giggles, I look at it at newsstands. So it had this article that read, ‘50 Funny Questions to Ask Your Friends to Strengthen Your Bond.’ Of course, they meant female friends.”
“So I assume you came up with your own question?”
She was completely deadpan as she said, “Indeed I did. How about, ‘when you spread your legs, is your clitoris sticking out or is it hidden?’ ”
I laughed at that, but she kept a straight face and in fact she frowned a bit as if I wasn’t taking her seriously enough. But she couldn’t hold the pretense and she finally smiled at me.
Then she said, “I haven’t told you this yet, but I’m taking that course this semester about the Spanish Civil War.”
I should have hidden my surprise better, “Really?”
“Yes really. Over the summer, I finally read that term paper you wrote for me.” It had been a review of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. “It was pretty interesting, the International Brigades and such.”
“Too bad those guys lost.”
“What is amazing is that Franco is still in power.”
“Only the good die young.” Actually, he would die the following year.
She said, “So have you got anything in particular to do this afternoon?”
“Not really.”
“So be a gentleman and invite me someplace.”
I knew I should be decisive and not equivocate. “We’ll go to that place in the West Village, The Back Porch. They have pretty good French onion soup.”
“Sounds good to me. Let’s go.”
“Aren’t you going to finish your coffee?”
“This stuff? It tastes like used transmission fluid.”
I couldn’t imagine what that would be like, but it was still pretty funny anyway.
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The Salient is based on a real newspaper that existed at City College from the 1940s to the 1970s. The help-wanted ad, the masturbating nun cartoons, the story about the mating bugs, and the story about messenger work all appeared in it. (I wrote the latter piece.) Of course, there never was an article about working at Burger King.
