Judy Weinberg was pondering her life one afternoon. She was sitting in a lounge at Finley Hall, the student center building for the City College of New York. It was near the end of a cold and bright day in December 1974, just before the winter break. She had one more exam in two days, and then she faced about two weeks of unstructured time for herself.
I should get a job, she thought; even when classes were in session there were plenty of hours during the week for something like that. At the very least, she thought she should do something like join one of the student newspapers. There was no pay involved, but at least it would give her some sense of purpose beyond simply schlepping up to the campus on the subway and back again to her parents' apartment on the Upper West Side.
Her best friend Michelle Hanley, another sophomore, had managed to do both: a paid job plus the extracurricular activity on a student paper, The Salient. Her job downtown dovetailed nicely with her work on the paper. She was a typographer and paste-up artist at the same shop which produced the paper.
Michelle had put together enough money in the past eight months to rent an apartment in Long Island City, Queens, plus buy a used Dodge Coronet. Judy tried to grasp Michelle’s seemingly effortless ambition. She never seemed strained by all she was doing over the course of a busy week. Judy often felt taxed by merely attending the classes she needed in her quest for a B.A. in history, a degree to be awarded her, assuming she stayed on schedule, about two and a half years in the future. The Class of ’77 would be her class, but that seemed to her young self to be a long way off.
There was something else that Michelle had that Judy coveted: a boyfriend. In fact, Michelle was on her third one. Her first was somebody she started with in her last few weeks at Bayside High School in eastern Queens. By the time Judy had met her in their first weeks at college, this guy was already gone. The details of the breakup seemed like the usual story of young love gone wrong, something about him deciding on somebody else and quickly dumping Michelle.
Michelle seemed to bounce back from romantic setbacks and found a freshman love affair with someone named Hank. Judy had strongly disliked him; he often went far beyond confidence into utter arrogance. His treatment of Judy ran from disagreeable to rude. He took to nicknaming her “Pudding,” which seemed to be a reference to her plumpness. At one drunken party he said to her, “Hey Judy, I bet your pussy tastes like butterscotch pudding. You know, all creamy on the inside and, I don’t know, something on the outside.”
He giggled and hiccupped, and Judy retorted - she had consumed quite a bit herself - “Hank, not only are you a jerk, you’re not even an interesting jerk. Even your insults don’t make any sense.”
He tried to defend himself by getting extra nasty, “You little twat, why don’t you suck on this?” He began to unzip his pants but Judy just left the room. Later she wished she had stayed so she could mock whatever state of limpness he probably was in. There was some satisfaction to be had the next day when she heard what had happened when he and Michelle were taking the train back downtown. Hank had puked copiously in the middle of the subway car, and the half-dozen other passengers had fled in disgust.
Michelle had put up with him for about six months when Hank himself decided to pull the trigger. He left no explanation for the breakup, but Michelle handled it with her usual sangfroid. He was seen with a couple of other girls on campus during the remainder of 1974.
The summer of ‘74 was pleasant because Judy could get away from her parents and hang out at Michelle’s new place in Queens. It was on the ground floor of an old wooden house with a factory on one side and a scrap yard on the other. The interior was plain but pleasant, and several subway lines provided fast access into Manhattan. On days when Michelle had to be at work, Judy could have the place for herself. And yet she sometimes felt out of sorts there, at loose ends. She read at times and listened to Michelle's record collection. Twice her friend left joints behind for her to smoke and she sat on the couch wearing headphones and tried to decipher more meanings from song lyrics than were actually there.
The neighborhood for about a mile in any direction was disappointing to her. It was a vast staging area for Manhattan, with rail yards, bridge overpasses, taxi garages and other facilities feeding the needs of more glamorous places across the river. Sometimes she would go to the coffee shop at Court Square just to have a destination and to be around other people.
The truth was that she was feeling quite lonely. For one thing, she believed it would be nice to share this summer with a boyfriend, but she had never had one. From what she had seen of her friend’s experiences in the last year, going out with guys had some downsides. But, she reasoned, there had to be decent ones around - say, among the 5,000 men at City College.
She got some new information to consider when Michelle picked up her third boyfriend – she actually did pick him up in the grungy Finley Hall cafeteria. Judy thought to herself, How does she pull off these things? It was notable that this latest catch seemed to be polite and actually spoke to Judy as if she had something interesting to say. This became more galling than the Hank situation. Why can’t I have somebody like that for myself?
There was one somewhat anomalous fact about this Paul, Michelle’s new beau. Michelle told her one day, “He’s actually been dating another girl - he met her only a couple of weeks earlier.”
Judy asked her, "What do you mean, dating her? How do you define that?" Judy already knew the answer, but she wanted to hear her friend confirm it.
Michelle said, “All right, he’s screwing her. But he admitted it within two minutes of meeting me. I was the one who decided to push ahead, to see what happened.”
“And what do you expect to get out of this? You expect him to dump her for you?”
“Anything’s possible, but I wouldn’t count on that any time soon. Right now, I’m just going to have some fun; this makes me feel like a femme fatale. Besides, haven’t you heard of open relationships?”
Judy thought to say, I would never accept that, but she didn’t. She assumed her virginity didn’t give her the credibility to voice an opinion about these matters. So during the fall of 1974, she watched what happened with the people around her. Michelle was invited to join one of the student papers by Paul, who already had the other girlfriend on staff there. Judy expected some kind of soap-operatic event to happen because of this, but it never did. Harmony seemed to be the order there. Judy had secretly anticipated the schadenfreude of seeing her friend pay a romantic price for her fecklessness. Instead, Michelle’s life seemed to in balance for the moment.
Judy thought about being into her sophomore year and her own lack of progress. Or sometimes she didn’t want to think about it because it was too painful. All right, she thought, hardly anybody actually got laid back in high school (although she had little data to prove that). Hunter College High School, a specialized school, was sort of a nerdy place anyway. But now she was past her nineteenth birthday, and she had never been kissed, felt up, or even been on an afternoon coffee date. She was beginning to understand that she was going have to be more proactive, that she had to rely on herself if she was going to make any headway on this. What exactly the specifics were, eluded her.
She was aware of the physical side of her frustration, the sexual desire that was intruding on her thoughts. If she was alone and had the opportunity, her fingers would often be between her legs, or she would be straddling a pillow, or she would have the handle of a hairbrush inserted into her cunt. She was able to decisively prove the reality of female multiple orgasms by inducing them in herself almost at will. At least I’m not frigid, she thought.
Judy’s masturbation fantasies could be quite elaborate. For a while, she was fascinated with Bonnie and Clyde, but more with the real ones rather than the movie versions. She definitely couldn’t identify with Faye Dunaway, that was for sure. The real Bonnie had been short and red-haired, although she was also thin and wiry which Judy was not.
Nevertheless, she was excited by her own version of the story. Somehow a girl from the West Side of Manhattan could be a gun moll. She would wear a beret, she would have a garter belt and straps holding up her stockings, and those old-fashioned underpants called step-ins. She would drive fast all over Oklahoma and Texas and Missouri (she’d have to learn to use a stick-shift) with a hot wind blowing through the windows. Whenever she got the urge, she would fuck her bad-boy gangster lover, screwing him every which way in a stolen Ford sedan.
*********
Michelle was the only person she could confide in. One day at the Long Island City apartment Judy said to her, “I’m wondering, is this normal, I guess? I just can’t keep myself out of my own pants. I feel like the female Portnoy.”
Michelle laughed at that, “I’ve read that book too. Those poor guys, boo-hoo, they think they’re the only ones who get horny. They don’t want to consider what women are capable of, probably because they couldn’t keep up.”
“But when you’ve had boyfriends, you haven’t had to, you know, do that to yourself.”
“Judy honey, you’re a bit naive. It just ain’t so. I’ve had mornings when I've been banged thoroughly and two hours later, when whoever has left . . .” She wiggled her fingers in the air. “My hills come alive, with the sound of music. I bet that’s why those nuns threw Maria out of the convent. If they didn’t tie mittens on her hands, she’d whack off every night. No, then she’d just whack off with the mittens. How do you solve a problem like Maria, indeed?”
Judy said, “Come on, it’s a Julie Andrews movie; there’s no sexual subtext.”
“Of course there’s one; how do you think she stole that Captain guy away from the Baroness?”
“Because she was really nice and good with his kids.”
Michelle replied, “That was part of it, but also – maybe she’d show him her knickers and say, ‘Sir, I know I’ve been a naughty governess. Please spank my bottom; I know I deserve it.’”
Michelle continued, “We should invest in a vibrator, have one we can share. Well, maybe not that, we should each have our own.”
Judy thought but didn’t say, I don’t want a vibrator; I want a lover.
Michelle had warmed to this topic, “Andrea was telling me about the one she has.”
Judy was a bit taken aback; Andrea Cartselos was Paul’s other girlfriend. She thought, I’m not a prude, but there’s something about it - talking to Andrea – that just seems wrong. She expressed her view, “You actually talk to her about stuff like that?”
“Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Okay, in a fair world we’d experiment with polyandry. I’d try my own harem - like, ‘Todd, get me some grapes and feed me by hand, Jason, please give me a pedicure, and tonight I'll decide which one of you schlubs is allowed into the empress’s boudoir.’”
“You’d like to be an empress?”
“Why not, like Theodora of Byzantium, or Cleopatra? I’d be queen of the Nile and also Newton Creek.” The latter was the industry-clogged waterway between Queens and Brooklyn. “That will fly. I was the Princess of Bayside, now I’m the Queen of Queens. What an aptly named place.”
Judy thought all this was typical of her friend: make jokes about everything but miss the tougher issues. She would have liked to ask her for some specific advice, some information about handling 1970s style dating - or maybe just screwing - but a combination of uneasiness and pride held her back.
That semester Judy found herself having some very explicit feelings for Michelle. She thought, No big deal, it’s just a girl-crush. But she suspected it went beyond that. As an experiment, she masturbated while imagining Michelle licking her. Michelle would know exactly what to do with her lips and tongue on Judy’s clitoris. The experiment was successful, and then Judy lay in her bed considering the results.
I guess I’m not a lesbian, but maybe I’m somewhat bisexual. Didn’t Kinsey say that most people are to some degree? Perhaps some female lovers could be worked into her life. Yet she knew that wouldn’t be enough. There’s no way around it; I’d like to be fucked hard by a man.
The only man she knew beyond her classroom acquaintances was Michelle’s boyfriend Paul. He did seem like someone she could deal with. Almost inevitably she speculated about how she could get him for herself. Would that destroy her friendship with Michelle? Probably, but then Paul had worked out a deal with two girls at once. Maybe it would be possible to secretly work herself in as the third one. Maybe she could join the paper and have some room for romantic maneuvering while there. It wasn’t the ideal that she wanted, of course, but maybe it would be okay for a while. After all, this was only college, and she was still young. As Michelle had stated, have fun and worry about the future later.
Judy knew, or perhaps feared, that this wasn’t a real plan or even an aspiration but merely a fantasy. The logistics of it seemed daunting. Then in November came the news that an old flame of Andrea’s - an ex-fiancé, if that could be believed - had won her back and she had abruptly dumped Paul. Judy wondered how this would change whatever her own prospects were for the coming year.
******
That was the condition of Judy’s life as she sat in the student center on that December afternoon. She was listless and at loose ends, but she didn’t want to go home just yet. Michelle and Paul were not on campus, but she had not received an invitation to go to Long Island City. Those two are probably out there now having some exam-period sex in her bed or on her living room couch. She tried to imagine the scene and felt a sense of resentment and excitement at the same time. Maybe I should get off my slothful ass and get a job and an apartment for myself. An effort in that direction might give her some new leverage in getting her life going.
On an impulse, she got up, got her possessions together and went across the way to Wagner Hall, a classroom building that was very quiet right now. She went up to the ladies’ room on the third floor and stood in front of a mirror assessing herself. She thought of something she had blurted out to Michelle a few weeks earlier, “I wish I was as pretty as you are.”
Michelle had scoffed, “Okay, I don’t stop clocks, but I’m just your basic Irish-Polish mutt.”
Michelle perhaps had been going for some false modesty, what is now called humble-bragging. She was taller, about five-seven to Judy’s five-three. Her straight brown hair was always cut neatly down to her shoulders, and she usually had bangs. Judy's reddish-brown hair always seemed to be unruly, and she never could figure out the best way to style what she had.
Still looking in the mirror, she opened her coat and considered her own body as it appeared under her sweater and skirt. Well, I’m definitely not slender and willowy - very round is a phrase that would be appropriate. Did guys notice her as she went about on campus? Sometimes she tried to keep track of that, and she didn’t notice any heads turning in her direction.
Michelle’s body looked athletic; she ice skated in the winter and played tennis in the summer. Judy had no aptitude for those activities, but she could ride a bicycle and she was considering getting her first one since junior high school.
Michelle also had steel-rimmed glasses, and in imitation of her, Judy had traded her plastic ones for steel-rims of her own. Perhaps that looked more cool? She put her hands on her hips and pondered that what she most envied about her friend was her confidence. There were guys in the cafeterias and lounges every day; how did she manage to approach one and then snag him with a few minutes of talking? Getting sex quickly into the conversation definitely helped.
Consulting the mirror was not Judy’s only purpose in coming up to this room. She looked around to confirm that all of the stalls behind her were empty. Then she went to the one at the end furthest from the door and hung her coat on the hook. She took off her boots and her green tights and then put the boots back on - the floor in there was too cold for bare feet. For a moment she admired her new brown leather, knee-high footwear, a pair her mother had paid for just a couple of weeks ago.
Okay, so it’s nice to get new stuff for this winter, but I’m old enough that I should be paying for some of it myself. Then she sighed and sat for a moment considering her intention to masturbate in there. Doing this again? Well, why not? By using the right combination of explicit thoughts and nimble fingers - and she had talent with both - one of life’s most intense experiences could be had in this utilitarian restroom.
She pulled her skirt up over her hips and deliberated about her panties. Her decision was to just take them off and toss them aside. I have no need for underpants, I’m burning with love. The seat had no lid and wasn’t the most comfortable place to sit, but Judy had been in such places before, including this very room. Then she got her hairbrush out of her purse and stuck it behind the toilet paper roll where it would be handy.
Now all she needed was a scenario to follow to a satisfying conclusion. She made a decision. What would it be like to fuck Paul on Michelle’s couch when her friend wasn’t around? Stealing somebody else’s boyfriend wasn’t the nicest way to behave, but it certainly seemed exciting.
The fantasy started far into a steamy make-out session. Her blouse was open and his hands were rubbing her breasts. In the Wagner bathroom, she decided to undress herself a bit more for her self-pleasuring. She reached into her sweater and unhooked her bra. Then she rubbed both her nipples for a few moments. Sex with a real person would have the advantage of an extra pair of hands to touch her various sensitive places. With masturbation, one took care of these matters by oneself as best as could be done.
She imagined what she would say, I’ve been thinking about you for a while now.
He’d admit, I’ve been thinking about you too, Judy.
That was a delicious thought, that he was her secret admirer. Was she still a virgin in the scene? Somehow that wouldn’t do; she had been with other guys who had fucked her before. The details didn’t matter; it was her fantasy and she could direct it as she pleased.
Now she imagined him sucking on her nipples as his hand went down to her crotch.
What would Michelle think of us now?
He’d say, Well, what she doesn’t know won't hurt her.
She pictured herself wearing a skirt but no stockings, and high-heeled sandals. Judy didn’t actually own such sandals, but they would be easy enough to obtain if she wanted them. In a few moments, he had lowered her panties and he was rubbing her pussy in a delightful way.
Her own hands followed the mental images and she spread her legs to get better access. She was impressed by her own ability to get wet quickly. It was great to be so slick and primed to take in a man’s shaft. She imagined undoing Paul's zipper and taking his erect cock out. Oh, it’s such a nice one. That wouldn’t be the most original thing to say, but it would get the job done.
Judy did know from secondary sources what an erect penis looked like. The now-departed Hank had obtained hard-core porno magazines from somewhere, and he would show them to the girls in order to appear cool or whatever he imagined about himself. One photoset depicted a Danish schoolgirl getting seduced by her teacher. In true porno style, it showed her getting penetrated from front, rear and with her on top. Judy wasn’t sure if people changed positions that much in real life, but it gave her a good look at the logistics of the various acts.
For her own scene, it would be a basic missionary position with most of their clothes still on. That and the use of Michelle’s couch made it seem more abrupt, dirtier somehow. It was as if they couldn’t wait to fully undress and go into the bedroom. He simply entered her after a few moments of her hand stroking his cock from top to bottom and back again.
What she couldn’t know for sure was what an erect cock would feel like in her. She retrieved her hairbrush and inserted the handle into herself. From experience, she knew that with one of her hands rubbing her clitoris and the other working the brush an orgasm could be reliably obtained. To get better traction she put her feet up on the seat and spread her legs even further.
The imaginary part of it was important too. Probably they would praise each other's attributes.
Paul, you have such a big, hard cock.
And you have such a hot, sweet cunt.
During this, her mind was almost gone from the restroom in upper Manhattan and was mostly in the little wooden house a few miles away. A stray thought came to her about how fast a car could take her across the Triborough Bridge and then to Michelle’s parlor.
No one else had yet come into the room, so she felt unrestrained about moaning as she handled herself. She wasn’t that loud, but vocalizing intensified her pleasure. If the outside door opened she would hear it as a warning. She hoped that wouldn’t happen because this session was cresting at such a good pace that it would be a pity to have to start over.
She remembered from the Danish porn photos that when the girl was on the bottom she had spread her legs up and out about as far as they would go. By deduction it was easy to figure out the point of that; there would be a more intimate collision between the male’s hips and the female’s crotch. Judy had never felt that but she guessed it must be very intense indeed.
Michelle had told her that reaching behind a man and gripping his ass might inspire him to come faster - assuming that was what was wanted. Judy wanted it now.
My God, I'm going to come in you, I'm going to put my hot load into you.
Oh please do it, please shoot into me.
Straightforward dialogue, perhaps, but again it got the job done. As Judy climaxed she actually said things like, “Fuck, fuck my pussy . . . ah God, ah, ah.” This was rather loud, but fortunately no one walked in now because she was beyond stopping. Her fingers slid along the hairbrush and she felt herself clamp down on that hand. “Oh, yeah, fuck that, fuck my cunt!”
She was often surprised by how out of breath she was at the end of these events. Michelle’s living room faded from her mind, and she leaned back and rested while staring at the gray stall door. Well, that was one of the better ones, and pretty fast too.
She remembered that this very building had once been a dormitory for girls of the Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. That had ended around 1952 when the city bought the South Campus. The youngest cohort of those women would be in their forties now. What had her long-gone Catholic sisters thought about and done while living in this place?
It was time to leave. She noted how wet her brush was. Man, did all that come out of me? It was for lubrication; pussy juice, one could call it. Plus that stuff from men, pre-cum was the name; it all made intercourse possible.
Judy, you’ve got to stop thinking about this or you’re going to do it again, right now. Jesus, I’m becoming a sex maniac. She wiped off the brush and put it into her purse. Then she decided on something else. I’m not going to put my tights and panties back on; I’m just going to walk around bare under my skirt. Even though it was December, she had an urge to try it for the first time. I’m a hot sexy woman, as well as being a woman of heart and mind as Joni Mitchell put it. Sexy women experiment with sexy behaviors.
For a moment she had that bittersweet feeling that often came after masturbation, the realization that the person imagined in the scene wasn’t really there. She was alone in this room in this mostly deserted building. Well, let’s get out of here, it’s depressing. Then she stuffed her unneeded garments into her bookbag and she admired her boots. Guys like girls with boots, don’t they? She remembered Gene Hackman picking up a boot-wearing woman in The French Connection. I wonder what it would be like to have sex while wearing these?
Outside she considered going to the security office across the way and having a guard drive her through the dusk to one of the subway stations. Instead, she walked the two blocks to Amsterdam Avenue to hail a livery cab. Along the way, she felt the cold air around her thighs, hips and crotch. It was a bit uncomfortable, yet there was also a pleasant tingling sensation. It gave her a feeling of power. Hah, maybe I’m getting goosebumps around my pussy.
She was able to a quickly hail a car and she was down to her corner in fifteen minutes. Before going home she stopped at a deli to pick up a few items. The checkout clerk was a college-aged guy she had seen before. She had never said anything to him beyond thanking him for returning her change.
I’m not going to start with guys in stores; there are thousands of them at the school I actually go to. Nevertheless, Michelle sometimes flirted just for the fun of it. It would be simple enough to just say hello, ask for his name, and then say, I’ve seen you here before. She smiled to herself imagining a follow-up. By the way, I’m not wearing any panties under my skirt. What do you think of that?
That would be way too much to start with. Some guys would be sort of shocked rather than intrigued. But the minority who could handle it - those might be interesting to know.
Michelle had said to her once, “Sometimes you have to be coy, but sometimes you have to approach a man like a fighter plane coming in out of the sun; attack and strafe him from end to end.”
Judy had just gaped at that. Michelle had continued, “Wow, where did I get such a violent image from?”
Anyway, Judy had had enough for this day. The clerk had been at the store for months, and he could always be added to the agenda later if that seemed worth it. She paid as usual and said, “Thank you” as usual. He offered no expression indicating that she was anything to him beyond a customer. Now it was time to go home and study for that last exam of the year.
She had been invited to Michelle’s New Year’s Eve party. The previous year they had been at someone’s place in Queens and the annoying Hank had still been around. This time Paul would surely be there.
Judy was ambivalent about big parties; she was uncomfortable with large numbers of people she barely knew, and she usually wound up being more wasted at the end than she had originally intended. What did serious drinkers call New Year’s Eve, Amateur Night?
Resolutions for 1975? Talk to some guys; just see what happens. Talk to Paul, just to get some practice. I’m not going to seduce him; I’m not that kind of person.
Then she thought of a scene in an old cartoon with Elmer Fudd or maybe Daffy Duck. A little Judy-like devil sat on her shoulder and said into her ear, go ahead, make a play for him; it would be so easy.
