Chapter 5

It was a week where concentration was impossible. Filled with interruptions my studies became a jumble of misplaced facts. Jerry insisted that I have lunch with him on Monday. “Marcia’s all fucked up, Toby,” he told me, “What the hell did you do to her?” I filled him in on what had gone on at dinner at the Hotel Cleveland and how she had left for over an hour.

“Yeah,” he commiserated, “There are two sides of Marcia that you’ll see if you spend enough time with her. When she is up she can be on top of the world and when she’s down there is no depression low enough for her. You’ve already seen that the morning after the party—referring to the gangbang. Then she’ll head back up. At the moment she is on her way to one of her monthly highs—it’s almost like a menstrual cycle—that’ll come to an abrupt end after her next gangbang.”

“NEXT gangbang,” I asked?

“Uh, huh,” Jerry answered, “happens every month when the moon is full.”

I didn’t understand what he was talking about. It sounded like some kind of Halloween story, with werewolves and vampires. I couldn’t get my mind wrapped around “ANOTHER” one like it was routine. When I pressed Jerry about it he answered, “Something happened to Marcia over there.” He looked at me like I hadn’t been paying attention. “She told you that she had been raped didn’t she?”

“Repeatedly gang raped by a whole company of Vietnamese soldiers,” I clarified.

“Right,” he said then talked about it like it was routine information. But he did say, “Just before the full moon each month Marcia starts getting horny to the point where she almost goes nuts. That’s when the gangbangs are scheduled. As you know from the one you were involved in that she goes crazy while she is doing it, then feels like shit afterward and goes into a real funk.”

“A FUNK,” I said, she goes into a fucking DEPRESSION Jerry.”

“Yeah, something like that,” he agreed. But it was reviewing old information. It sounded to me like Jerry was getting tired of being Marcia’s keeper and was ready to pass the job on to someone else. Like me.

“I thought she was the reincarnation of your twin, Lareen.”

“She was,” Jerry said, but that was before I realized it would become a monthly exercise.”

I was beside myself. I had gotten attached to Marcia and was torn about excusing myself from the whole mess. And that was exactly what it was, a mess. Then he almost blew me away when he said, “If it wasn’t for the money I’d just say the hell with it. But it’s a TON of fucking money and I don’t want to give that up.”

I vaguely remembered that Jerry said that he and Marcia were in some kind of business together. But I didn’t think it was this. “Jesus Jerry, you’re PROSTITUTING her.”

“Get off your high horse, Toby. I told you that we’re in business together.”

“But I didn’t realize that it was THAT.”

“You didn’t care what it was, Toby; all you wanted to do at the time was stick your dick in her.”

Realizing that I didn’t have a leg to stand on, I have been thinking with my dick. But that was before I knew Marcia as a person.

“Don’t look so glum kiddo,” Jerry said with a smirk. “It’s not as bad as you think. Had it not been for the fact that she moved in next door to me, and she reminded me of Lareen, I probably would have never become involved myself. It’s a complicated situation but the money makes up for it.” He went on to give me more details of what the “situation” was about.

“She was horny as hell to start; she was my first lay. And she wanted to do my friends which made me very popular ... we had a couple of threesomes then a foursome. One night after a football game when I had seven friends over for a beer party she sneaked over and did us all. She later told me that she was doing other guys at the same time: an older neighbor guy, the janitor at the church, and even a couple of strangers. But she told me she only got these uncontrollable urges when there was a full moon. I thought it was wacky, but it turned out to be true.

The regular gang bangs started after I asked her to do the football team after we won the state championship. I talked with a man I knew who was in the local Eagle’s Club and told him about Marcia. I knew that he put together regular events at the club where they showed skin flicks. He told me that once and a while he would hire a hooker that would do a bunch of guys. I told Marcia and we set up a date that coincided with a full moon. We charged thirty dollars a head for twenty-four guys. I thought it was too many but Marcia said there was no such thing as too many as long as she could get them all in before the night was over. So we ended up getting seven hundred and twenty dollars. We gave the guy a hundred bucks and Marcia and I split three hundred and ten bucks apiece ... in CASH.

The guy became our agent and we have done most of the Eagle’s clubs in the state and some in Pennsylvania. We started raising the price: first to forty bucks, then fifty, seventy-five, and have finally settled on a hundred. There’s too much resistance after that. We now have a limit of thirty guys, and they can only do her once that night. But figure it out Toby, that’s three grand; our agent gets three hundred, and Marcia and I split twenty-seven hundred dollars and it’s all in cash.” (Minimum wage was 1.05 an hour at the time)

I asked, “What does Marcia’s father think of all of this?

“He hates it,” Jerry said. “But he’s beside himself. He’s been paying for shrinks who haven’t been able to figure it out. He’s afraid that if they can’t get some kind of answer Marcia might go nuts and he’ll have to commit her to an institution. Her friend committed suicide; you know?”

Before Jerry and I left each other that day I was stunned, horny, and appalled. I couldn’t deny how attracted I was to Marcia. But given the problems she had, I knew I was in over my head. At the same time, it felt like Jerry was pulling on my arm trying to keep me involved. I felt sure the best thing for me was to walk away and not get stuck in the morass. But it was like I’d been hooked by a strange kind of addiction. I felt like going to the closest phone and calling Marcia at work and apologizing for acting like an asshole. Deciding against it I went to the fraternity house to do some of my pledge duties only to find a note pinned to the bulletin board that some girl had called me. It was Marcia’s work number. My stomach dropped like I was pulling daisy petals saying, “She loves me, she loves me not...”

“Hi Toby,” she answered, “I just had to call you to apologize for the way I acted when I left you off at work.”

When I said, “I’m the one who owes you the apology I heard a sniffle. Shit, I thought here we are again. I agreed to meet her the next evening (Tuesday) for dinner in Hudson at Ted and Mary’s, a small family restaurant about ten miles from the campus.

The next day was a waste; I couldn’t concentrate at all in class or keep my mind clear enough to study in between classes. As I drove to Hudson I kept arguing with myself that I was an asshole or a wimp, or both. I pulled into the slant-in parking next to Marcia’s silver 57 Gull Wing, Mercedes sports car. As I looked at the classy car I thought about what Jerry had told me about the business he and Marcia were in. I thought about her fucking a bunch of guys and splitting $2700 with Jerry each month. $16500 was a hell of a lot of money in 1958. She also had a job where she was making over five grand, plus whatever her father was giving her. I was making $1.05 an hour at the gas station. I knew Marcia’s story and Jerry was a friend of my brother’s. I didn’t know what my brother knew about Marcia, or what he would think of me for being involved in this way. But I wasn’t in on the business which at least gave me a clear conscience.

When I walked into Ted and Mary’s I was surprised to see Marcia sitting with another attractive young woman. Must be someone from work I thought, but why would Marcia bring her here to have supper with me? The girl was even more attractive than Marcia. She was about the same height and looked quite curvy even though she was sitting at a booth. She had a strangely pale complexion that reminded me of something. But I didn’t put my finger on it. As I walked up to the booth Marcia slid out of her seat, stood up, and gave me a welcoming hug. We kissed and though brief, it was a passionate tongue job. “I’m so glad you came,” she said with a smile. “And I have a surprise guest with me.” There was a look on her face and in her eyes that I couldn’t decipher: anxious, hesitant, sorry yet excited. She looked quickly from me to the girl sitting on the other side of the booth and said, “Toby Wakefield I would like to introduce Mary Francis McGovern.”

As the attractive girl smiled at me and said, “I’m glad to meet you, Toby Wakefield, Marcia has told me so much about you,” I had one of those brain explosions where everything goes red, and you have difficulty not keeling over and falling on the floor. When I hesitantly returned her greeting I could see her face become sober and flushed. She knew that I knew more about her than most people she knew. Marcia’s voice seemed to be coming out of a fog, “We were in Vietnam together...”

The girls were both drinking coffee. I ordered a glass of wine ... too much was going on and I had to have something to quiet my brain and settle myself. Mary Francis was one of the girls with Marcia when they were kidnapped and raped. On returning to the US and going through drug rehab she became a nun, which explained the complexion issue. Sandy, the other girl had taken her own life. Marcia and Mary Francis had been keeping in touch. It was a deep past but a shallow relationship that seemed necessary. The escaped nun had taken a bus from the convent and had simply shown up at the laboratory where Marcia worked. They had been bonding all day.

Sister Teresa as she was known in the order had shocked everybody at the convent that morning by donning civilian clothes and walking out. Her embarrassment upon meeting me was because Marcia told her that I knew the entire story and that she had become a bride of Christ as a result. I still hadn’t told Marcia about my involvement with the convent at St. Bartholomew’s and the nuns I had known in such a familiar way.

There was no question that Mary Francis was a third wheel in our get-together. But she and Marcia kept holding hands across the table in such an intimate way. Maybe I was the third wheel. I completely understood the look on Marcia’s face when she greeted me. It was supposed to be OUR meeting. I knew we would be together in a hotel or motel where we would spend the night. What was she going to do with the surprising Sister Teresa, Ms. McGovern, or whatever she was to be called?

It was almost like Marcia read my mind when she said, “Mary Francis will be staying at our house (meaning her father’s) we’re all very well acquainted.”

For my benefit, we heard a litany from the former nun. Having been so tight with the nuns at St. Bart’s I knew full well that the sisters’ minds were constantly filled with well-disguised sexual thoughts. Having been involved with nuns who were clean spoken it felt strange hearing such blatant sex talk from one who had just that day left the order. Mary Francis was graphic in talking about horny priests that she had fucked so many times and randy altar boys that she had launched, boasting how she taught “those boys” how to get the most out of her “little man in the boat.” When her eyes lit up and she said, “Gangbangs are something I’m going to do,” she paused before asking, “How many men have you had in one night, Marcia?” Marcia told her thirty-one. “THIRTY-ONE, GOD, your pussy must be in heaven when you do it.” Both girls tittered. “Why, it’ sounds almost...” She didn’t carry the words forward but I knew she was referring to Vietnam. Looking at Marcia who looked back at her she let the stream of consciousness disappear. Both girls were quiet for a while before she asked, “Do you think about it all the time Marcia?”

We had been at Ted and Mary’s for almost two and a half hours when Mary Francis said, “Well Marcia I guess you want to go somewhere with Toby and let him fuck your brains out, you lucky girl. Maybe I should take your car and go to your house. I’m sure the good doctor (speaking of Marcia’s father) would like to know why I have chosen to come back into the world.”

I was surprised at how quickly Marcia’s hand grabbed Mary Francis’ and how Mary Francis’ free hand piled on top of both of Marcia’s hands. The phrase “Sisterly bond” raced through my mind when I remembered sisters at St. Bart’s doing the same thing when there was some kind of stress, sadness, or joy in the air. I saw Mary Francis’ head tacitly shaking “no.” But Marcia refused to be quelled. She turned to me and in a small, almost pleading voice asked, “Can’t Mary Francis come with us, Tobe?”

Two thoughts went through my mind as I glanced at Mary Francis who seemed like she would lick her chops. The first was the serious talk that Marcia and I should be having sometime before either she or I fucked the other’s brains out. The other was that having been the second male in a threesome with Ray and his sister, I had yet to be the one man with two women. Typically my Johnson won out when I blurted, “I would be more than happy Marcia if Mary Francis were to join us.”

The expressions on the two women’s faces were priceless. Mary Francis’s was one of total joy. While Marcia looked at me, shook her head, and laughed as she said, “There’ll come a time, Toby my love, when you will finally realize you are human and only have so much stamina.”

“You should talk,” I rejoined.

“But I don’t have to get hard each time sweetie,” she chuckled, “I just get slipperier.”

We took two cars to the Hudson Inn, just a couple of blocks from Ted and Mary’s. After hearing from Jerry about the kind of money he and Marcia had been making in their sex enterprise I no longer had a problem accepting her insistence on paying. She was anxiously willing, and I couldn’t afford it anyway. Mary Francis was a fish out of water; she’d been a ward of the Catholic Church for too long and had no money at all. Though the desk clerk looked us all over while we registered his attitude seemed blasé. All kinds of sexual hijinks took place at the Inn. When the elevator door closed I could see the hunger in both girls’ eyes as they gazed at one another.

I took the key from Marcia and opened the door for the girls. In the time it took me to walk through the door, they were already locked in a passionate, hard-breathing kiss that lasted for a good two minutes. I watched the two women bobbing up and down in their face-glued embrace while groping each other’s crotch. It reminded me of the nuns at St. Bartholomew’s convent, women who in such an isolated prison of mutual sacrifice and understanding lavished their private attention on each other to satisfy their human needs. Though it went on behind closed doors without my seeing the sisters in action, the knowledge that it was happening triggered my understanding of such same-sex magnetism.