Baby, you’ve got to go through the mill

Innocent and Open…

I was 17, living on my own for the first time. I had spent two years in the nut house but that wasn’t really on my own, just away from home. Now I was a beatnik and I was going to taste that crazy thing called LIFE. My first real sexual experience was deeply heavy, traumatic and somehow also precious to me. Here is the unvarnished story:

Tom was a fat man with a full beard which inspired my friends and me to call him “Jesus Christ before his diet.” I knew him from the nut house and we were sort of hanging together for the time being although I didn’t really like him.

I was on my way to Philadelphia to meet with a beatnik of godlike beauty. Tall, blonde with a full beard and a guitar. But, before I could go, Tom said he had a new drug for me to try. I always love to try new drugs so I was game. This was a white powder called “methamphetamine.” Once I tried it, I got so euphoric that I didn’t care about my appointment in Philadelphia. I was happy where I was. After another desultory effort at sex (sex with Tom was largely dysfunctional), Tom said there were some people he wanted me to meet.

We entered a building a few blocks away, still in the East Village. The lobby looked like a cathedral. We were welcomed by a man named Turk who had a lot of tattoos and a plump, dark-haired girl named Paulette. Turk was holding forth on the virtues of drugs when Tom tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned around and looked into the face of Jim Kolb. He had very intelligent eyes that somehow reminded me of O’Brien in 1984. I didn’t want to look away from him and spent the entire night in a heavy rap and painting pictures together. He gave me shots of meth and I found it humiliating that he shot me in the ass instead of the arm. It made me feel like a baby. At one point, Jim looked into my eyes and said, “Baby, you’ve got to go through the mill.” “I know,” I replied, not really understanding what he meant or what I meant, for that matter. In the morning, I announced I had to go to work but everyone said, “Ah, no. What for?” Jim said a pretty girl would never have to worry about making a living which lit up a red light. But I didn’t go to work. Jim led me into the kitchen and we had sex on the floor. I was a very naive girl at the time. I thought Tom’s feelings would be hurt if he knew I had fucked Jim. Later, I figured out that Jim had probably paid Tom in meth to bring me.We learn by our mistakes.

Tom let me know it was “alright” with him that I was fucking Jim. Good. We fucked all day long. Around evening, Jim handed me a pill which he told me was a “goofball.” I had read about them so I had no hesitation. Jim said, “You’re gonna feel that right in your clitoris.” We went on fucking and the last coherent memory I have of that night was Jim saying not to move so much.

I have the following fragmentary memories. Jim said, in a challenging voice, “Now I’m gonna kiss your eye.” I wondered why he would expect an argument from me about that and I said, “Go ahead,” in a sexy voice. Then just static. I am walking across a dark room and bumping into furniture. The pain I feel is much more than one would feel bumping into furniture. I heard a wild, animal scream which I knew somewhere was coming from me but I didn’t experience screaming. I am lying nude while people fully dressed sit around talking. A girl in tight curls keeps calling Jim, “Jive Motherfucker.” She seems to together and comfortable. I wonder what is the difference between her and me.

*****Much later, I woke up and resumed normal sequential consciousness. I noticed my eye was bloodshot and I had a rash on my scalp.Jim said something that made me feel I had blown it some way. He said I was saying all kinds of “Freudian things like fuck me.” When I questioned him more closely on what I had said, he brushed it aside. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. Then he smirked and said, “I had to spank you last night. You were moving around so much I had to fuck you to just keep you in one place. Then you started getting sexy, saying ‘Hit me! Hit me!'” I was shocked by his words, no knowing whether to believe them.

I was far from the euphoria of the night before. I felt confused, fragmented. I wanted to feel the way I felt before. I asked for a shot and Jim gave it grudgingly. But I was still determined to stay there. So Tom suggested we go to my apartment to get my clothes. When we got there, a group of friends was there. They gave me a bath and I began to feel myself. “I don’t think I’m going back,” I said. There was an audible sigh of relief. It seems this was some kind of rescue.

Later, Tom and I went for a walk and he said, “I hope you realize what was happening. You were a toy.” He told me that they thought I was going to die and suggested taking me on a “subway ride,” in other words, dumping me on the subway and leaving me there but Tom refused to go along with it. “You saved my life,” I exclaimed! “Then they all went out and I noticed you were choking on something. I had to clean you out. It was sperm. Someone had jacked-off into your mouth.” I was horrified beyond words. Then Tom said, “I gave them your address but I don’t think they’ll come. If they do, I’ll protect you.” Naturally, I wouldn’t go home. We spent the night at a neighbor’s house. It was a very long night. I couldn’t close my eyes for fear I would see images of someone jacking-off into my mouth. The hours crept by. In the morning, we were going to his friend’s house in Long Island. Tom slept while I agonized.

We took the subway and a bus to where Tom’s friend lived. It was the same town my parents lived but I couldn’t go there. This made me sad. We got to a house and Tom knocked. A nervous woman answered the door and seemed reluctant to let Tom in. He stepped aside and she saw me and let us in. She was expecting a visit from her ex-husband so we had to stay upstairs and be quiet. Actually, I stayed and Tom went somewhere. There were True Confession type magazines which I started reading. The stories were shocking. I thought that I had an equally shocking story of my own. For the first time, this fact kind of pleased me.

Later, after the ex had left and her old man, Chuck, came home, we went downstairs. Chuck was kind of like a Dutch Uncle to me. Tough and disapproving. I must have seemed a mess, with the rash on my scalp and all the burns and bruises and having been up on speed so long. I don’t know how long I stayed there but I heard Fanny was trying to get in touch with me and I decided to go back to the city.

Back home, my head a bit clearer from the sleep I finally managed to get, I talked with Fanny who pursuaded me to see the role Tom was playing in this game. I started seeing him as someone who had been manipulating me, not a savior but someone who brought me to the place where all these things had happened to me. I told him to leave. “I never threw you out,” he said. Fanny laughed. What did Tom have to throw me out from?

My life went back to semi-normal. I went to work to find I had been fired. No huge surprise there. I talked with various people who knew of Jim Kolb or had opinions about him. Apparently, he had done things like that to other girls. I remembered when Tom offered to introduce him to one of my friends. I had called her and warned her. Sure enough, he tried to bring her to him but she declined to go. One man suggested he was a Satanist. “He got a book by Crowley,” he said. He was for organizing a vigilante committee to do something to him.This was kind of exciting but also very confusing as I felt like a secred ingrate for my mixed feelings about Jim.

I discovered that one of my friends actually knew Jim Kolb personally. She noticed one of the burns on my body was in the design of his drawings of bamboo. I started spending a lot of time with her just for the sake of these conversations.

*****My time of living on my own in New York City seemed to be drawing to a dead end. I told my mother what had happened to me and that I was coming home. I gave up my apartment and went back to being a school girl again. I was enrolled in the local high school as a Sophomore. It was a time of hibernation and deep introspection. I wanted to understand the meaning of it all. My parents got me a shrink but my suspicious could not be spoken out loud. I bought Theodore Reik’s Masochism in Modern Man along with a bunch of other psychology books to camoflage my interest. I tried masturbating for the first time, thinking about spanking. I had my first orgasm.

I began spending most of my free time at Chuck and Florence’s house. Chuck was an interesting guy. On his own since age 14, he had hitchhiked all over the country. He was arrested for vagrancy in the South and put on a chain gang. They dug roads from one place in the middle of nowhere to another place in the middle of nowhere. When his sentence was over, as he was walking away, the sheriff immediately came over and arrested him again. He acted as if he had never seen Chuck before. Chuck soon realized this was their game. There were old men on the gang who had been there since their youth, being re-arrested for vagrancy over and over. Chuck got away by cutting through the woods. Despite his hard times, he seemed romantically attached to the South.

He had an enormous record collection. One of his records, a Josh White album, included a song that grabbed me where I lived. It was called Mean Mistreater and went…

I got a copy of the record. I was reading The Fountainhead at the time and I just came to the part where Dominique meets Roark and feels a “sinking gasp” at the thought of being humiliated by him. When he raped her, I happened to be in a diner with my parents. Here I was reading this steamy stuff with everything outwardly dull and normal. It’s a good symbol of my life with my folks during this time.

When summer came, I went to the city and stayed with various friends. But I was really looking for him. I found him too. He wouldn’t talk about what had happened between us but we had lots of sex. I was really attracted to him. Sometimes, he couldn’t get in right away and he would say, “Open up, Bitch,” and I opened. That was the most overtly sado-masochistic thing that happened between us. He was very frustrating, tantalizing and hot. I wondered what my friends thought of my being with him. It was a big approach-avoidance thing. I would be with him and then run away and then go back. He was homeless, himself, at the time. We spent a lot of time walking around the streets to various places we might stay.

I came home in the Autumn as confused as ever. I told my shrink of my encounters with him. I went to school. I dreamed of going back to New York next Summer.