Thirty - Jill Emerson [59]
This one today, it was more ordinary. I whipped him with his leather belt across the behind. Maybe because I wasn’t touching him and he was just whimpering quietly I was able to trip way out on my own private thoughts and associations, and I got into various similar experiences I had had, things with Susan and Eric, and it got to me, and surprise! I came.
It’s funny when that happens when you didn’t expect it.
August 25
The weather has been really impossible lately. It’s just too hot to breathe. Of course the apartment is air-conditioned and so is Liz’s place but even so the heat has to get to you. You take one step out of doors and you literally wilt.
You would think, or at least I would think, that the men would wait for cooler weather. Who wants to screw in weather like this?
But nothing stops them.
August 29
I can almost pay Liz back already. Not for the kindness, that will take a long, long while to pay back, but for the actual cash.
It constantly amazes me how much money there is in this line of work. There is really a tremendous amount of money involved. I keep thinking about those jobs I once considered, five days a week of nine to five for a hundred and ten dollars a week.
Girls prettier than I am have jobs like that, and for what? Self-esteem?
September 1
Still no break in the heat.
I keep thinking, when I’m with one man or another, that here’s one I’ll want to write about in my diary. A couple of times I find myself sitting down determined to write about one of them and then I change my mind and don’t write anything at all, I close the book and go out or go upstairs and talk with Liz or something.
Evidently I don’t want to write about them.
I guess what it amounts to is they cease to have anything going for them, any aura, that has sufficient impact upon me to leave me with something I have to get rid of by getting it all down in pen and ink. I mean getting it down in black and white. Pen and ink is what I use to get it down in black and white. (Except that the pen and ink are sort of a stable entry, this being a ball-point pen, so that when you’re out of ink you’re out of pen. And the ink is more blue than black. Technology kills clichés.)
Today is the day I’m officially delinquent in my rent down in the Village, which is nothing to worry about since I moved out of there two weeks ago. I wonder what happens now. Is the sculptor hung for the dough because it was a sublet? Well, if he’s in Bolivia or wherever the hell he went to, I don’t see how they can bug him for it. Let them worry.
You know what I miss most about the place? That there were a few dozen cheap restaurants close by that you could go to without worrying how you were dressed. Little Chinese and Italian and Spanish places you could go to in slacks. Here it’s either plastic coffee shops (home of the dollar eighty-five hamburger!) or class restaurants where you have to be dressed and you wind up spending ten dollars, and you feel awkward going there alone anyway.
All in all, though, I like it better here.
September 4
I had a nice high last night. I had a John during the afternoon, an advertising man who decided that he would rather bitch than screw. Mainly about his wife and his ingrate kids and life on Long Island, the whole suburban trap. By the time he got around to balling I was very depressed.
Why, I wonder. I guess there were just too many echoes, it was as if he was Howard talking to me, or even a male version of me talking to me. I don’t know. He brought me down very badly and I didn’t see anyone else that afternoon and didn’t go to the bars that evening.
Around ten the phone rang. It was Liz asking me to come on up if I had nothing better to do. What I had plenty of was nothing better to