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By Root 408 0

was less important to me, however, than something else: every night after the performance, there would be seven or eight girls waiting in my dressing room. I looked them over and chose one for the night. For a twenty-four-year-old who was eager to follow his penis wherever it could go, it was wonderful. It was more than that; to be able to get just about any woman I wanted into bed was intoxicating. I loved parties, danced, played the congas, and I loved to fuck women—any woman, anybody’s wife. Sometimes I did insane things. When I lived on the eleventh floor of an apartment building on Seventy-second Street, I gave a party one night where just about everyone, including me, was smashed or close to it, and I went over to a window, opened it and shouted to my guests: “I’m sick of this world and everything in it. I can’t stand you people, I’m sick of this life.” I stepped out the window and disappeared. I stood on a ledge about six inches wide beneath the window, ducked and lay flat against the wall, and clung to the windowsill with my hands. Then I held onto a cement balustrade on the side of the building with one hand and let go of the windowsill. My guests screamed. They thought I’d become a blotter on Seventy-second Street. I hid under the window giggling, then looked down, saw the street and gulped. Everyone was still screaming, and one girl finally ran over to the window and looked up and down Seventy-second Street, searching for my body before spotting me. Then she said, “Go ahead, drop. See if I care.” I crawled back up, laughing. Everybody was red in the face. Their veins were popping out of their foreheads, and everyone shook their fists at me. It was nuts; I was fearless after two or three drinks.

We did a lot of crazy things in that apartment. Sometimes my friends and I took boxes of old-fashioned kitchen matches and emptied them out the window. When they hit the street, they would all ignite at once and create a spectacular show. Several times we tore the New York City telephone book to shreds and threw it out the window, or we’d rip The New York Times apart and fling the pieces out the window. I had many adventures when I lived in that apartment. One night a friend called and said, “I’ve got a couple of great groovy broads. They’re driving around in a black Cadillac, they’re well-heeled and lookin’ good. You can have either one you want, but I think they’ve both ‘got eyes.’ ” (In those days that was jargon for accommodating women.) The girls picked us up and I agreed with my friend Freddie that he was right. They were black, very attractive and wore sweet-smelling perfume that almost made me dizzy.

“Where should we go?” one of the girls asked, and I answered, “I don’t know. I’m happy as a pig where I am.” I was already starting to fool around with the girl in the backseat.

“How about going to our pad?” she said, and I said, “That’s cool. Where is it?”

“Harlem.”

A red light went off somewhere in my head, but I said, “Let’s go, what the hell.”

Her apartment was a third-floor walk-up. After we finished what we’d come there to do, I started playing cards with one of the girls in the kitchen while my friend and her friend returned to the bedroom. Suddenly I heard something outside that sounded like the footsteps of a raging dinosaur. I thought it was my imagination, but the dinosaur got closer and louder, then stopped in front of the door and started pounding, making me wonder fleetingly if dinosaurs had fists. The attractive woman sitting opposite me in her underwear suddenly looked at me with enormous eyes, her mouth forming a huge O. We heard louder and louder pounding on the door, and each time it caved in another inch.

“Who’s that?” I asked, trying to seem calm.

“That’s my daddy,” she answered.

I said, “Your father?”

“Baby, that’s my daddy.”

I had never heard the phrase; I didn’t know that some women referred to their boyfriends as their “daddies” or “my old man,” but I got the drift. I looked at her as calmly as I could and said, “Do you have a fire escape in this building?”

She glanced in the direction