Chapter 6: The Salient

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, who knew 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.

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, 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 described in Chapters 1 and 2, 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 bored and at loose ends at City College. 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 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 you. 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 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 me. 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 Bettie 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 student activity fee funds.”

“I didn’t say that; I said you yourselves should buy it.”

Jeff, another guy starved for pussy, 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.

Now 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 offered 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-numbingly 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.

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.