F/Stop
2
Shut Down
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, welcome to the Orion Room. Put your hands together for her first Chicago hometown performance, comedienne and part-time ballerina, Starr!”
The announcer’s voice was dramatic, and the applause was polite. The auditorium was about two-thirds full and people were still entering, hoping they weren’t late for the real headliner, Danny Carlisle. Starr entered in her tutu and bowler hat with her trademark paint under her left eye.
Hello Chicago! It’s so good to be back home! I’m Starr and Chicago is where I was born, raised, and wore my first tutu. It’s the only thing that stuck from my year of dance lessons. I love my tutu!
Girls all go through a period in life when they want to be a ballerina. Little one-year-old me who could only barely walk would stand with my hand on Grandma’s knee and wiggle my shoulders and torso in a dance. That’s approximately the same way I dance today. At three, I was spinning in my dances until I fell over and couldn’t stand up. Sometimes I still dance like that, too.
Then I was told I couldn’t be a dancer unless I took dance lessons. I hated dance lessons. They wanted us to do all kinds of ridiculous moves and stand in stupid positions. I hated it. But I loved my tutu! To me, what I needed to be a dancer was not to plié, but to wear a tutu. I quit dance lessons. I kept the tutu.
I know three girls from my first dance class who are now professional dancers. One is with the Metropolitan Ballet, and two are in a strip club in Las Vegas. And here I am standing on a stage in Chicago making fun of them!
You know what we have in common? We’re all still wearing our tutus! You can’t be depressed when you’re wearing a tutu. Well, maybe if you’re a guy you can be. I’m not being judgmental, but you should try it. Get out your tutu and wear it to the office. Wear it to the grocery store. Wear it to your kid’s little league game. You’ll feel much better.
The tutu is only one reason I’ve had a great 1969. I got recruited to open for Danny Carlisle while I was visiting Las Vegas this summer. Wow! What a ride! You’re going to love him. We’ve been on the road for twenty-two weeks in twenty-one cities. No wonder I’m horny!
I have really missed my family. I have a boyfriend and three sister girlfriends. I see you down there, clutching your boyfriend’s arm, laying claim to him. Don’t worry. I don’t want your boyfriend. But if you dump him, I might be interested in adding you to our family. You’re cute. Yeah. Four girlfriends are not enough. We should have a fifth in our little clutch. And not one you drink.
You are projecting the questions in your head so loudly, I can hear them in mine. That’s because you have the same questions everyone has. I talk to other women. They all have the same questions.
“Starr, don’t you get jealous when one of the other girlfriends is, like, with him? You know, doing it?”
No. Let’s put an end to that previous generation bullshit. I don’t get jealous. I get relieved. My boyfriend loves me. Some nights while I was on the road, we talked on the telephone for a couple of hours, even though I’d come off a show and it was near midnight in Las Vegas, which makes it two in the morning for him, and he had class at seven-thirty in the morning. By the time we’re done talking, the best he can hope for is three hours of sleep before he has to get up and try to keep his eyes open through a day of college classes. That’s not even because he was up late. Everyone has to struggle to keep their eyes open through seven-thirty a.m. classes. Even the professor.
But the important thing is that I got to talk to him and let him talk me down from my post-performance high and fall asleep with his voice in my ear, and I didn’t even have to fuck him! One of the other girlfriends already took care of that! And when I’m home, I’ll take the hit for them and it will be fun and I love it! We’ve never managed to all live together in the same place at the same time for more than a few weeks. We all have lives. We’re on the go. We’re in college or on the road or raising a kid.
Yeah. Among the four of us, we have one child. And we all love her like crazy, man. She is the sweetest, cutest, smartest, lovingest little girl in the world. And I didn’t have to push an entire human being through my vagina!
I love my sister girlfriend for going through that and giving us a baby to love, but not have to take home at night.
This year, though. I tell you. It’s been crazy. We got tired of being lied to by Democrats, so we chose to be lied to by Republicans for a while. Same war. Same escalation. The president says we’re going to bring all the soldiers home from Vietnam, but first we need a million more to send over there. So, what we’re going to do is make the selection process of who to send into the death machine fairer. We’ll have a lottery.
First of all, you might have guessed I’m against the war and against the draft. But my reasons aren’t the usual ones. My reason is because of what it’s done to college. Guys who would never have considered college if there was no war are taking out huge loans to finance an education they didn’t need or want, but the only way to stay out of the army is with a college deferment.
It really brings the quality of prospective college boyfriends down a few notches. One guy came up to me after class and asked me out. Nice guy. Pretty good looking, in an “I just got out of high school” way. He’d even asked me for some help studying. I knew this guy was struggling to pass his classes and stay deferred.
Okay, lots of us struggle with tough college academics. But failing basket-weaving? Come on. All he ever really wanted to do was drive a tractor on his daddy’s farm. And that’s what he should be allowed to do without struggling to make grades in classes he doesn’t want to take.
But we’re going to make the draft fairer. Did you know that the first day of this month, just a few days ago, they drew capsules out of a giant mayonnaise jar in Washington, DC, and decided that every male born on September 14, between 1944 and 1950 would be the first ones drafted and sent to Vietnam.
Now, let’s simplify this so that everyone here understands what the draft lottery actually is. I’m going to randomly select a month of the year from a glass jar and find it’s July. Yeah, that was random. I made up the decision at the last second. Now how many of you here in this room were born in July? I don’t care what year. July wins the lottery.
Look at all of them! Statistically, it should be about 1/12th of the people in the room. Now, don’t move from your seat or suddenly become compliant and follow all my instructions. This is just an illustration. We’ll ask all the people—no, we’ll order all the people—born in July to go over there and stand against the wall. Then I’m going to be blindfolded and will be given a gun. I don’t know what kind of gun. An army gun, bitch. And it’s loaded. Let’s say with a thousand bullets.
Once I’m armed and dangerous, I’ll just start shooting randomly toward that wall. You can duck. You can move around. You can hide behind the person next to you. But I’m going to shoot a thousand bullets in the direction of that wall.
I’m sorry to say that the law of randomness that I just made up, says I’m going to kill some of you. I don’t know how many. It’s all according to chance. I might shoot twice in the same place, so hiding behind someone else didn’t help. I got both of you. I might point at the ground, just as you dove for it. Sorry.
Oh, you might get hit and not die. You could just have a flesh wound. You could have a punctured lung. You could have a broken back. Worst of all, you might lose your pecker. But a whole bunch of you who weren’t killed outright are going to be wounded and possibly maimed.
The rest of you get to go home. You’ll be better people for having served and survived, right? Oh, you’ll still have nightmares about a crazy girl in a tutu shooting at you. People will think you’re stupid for ever having obeyed her order to stand against the wall. You’ll wake up screaming in the middle of the night to stay away from the Orion Room forever. You’ll still flinch every time a car backfires. But you’re a survivor. You’ll be better for it.
Once the smoke dies down and the wounded are carted off and those who survived are seated and laughing about the whole experience, we’re going to draw another month and say, “Everyone born in February, up against the wall!”
I admit that the lottery is a “fairer” way of deciding who gets a chance at dodging the bullet than simply saying, “If you’re black, stand up against the wall.” There’s a draft board in this state that did exactly that. Every minority male who became eligible in Hunter County and didn’t have an educational deferment and wasn’t physically unable to serve in the military was drafted over the past three years. This lottery thing had better put a stop to that unless by some miracle, every black baby is born on September 14.
If you were born on September 14, 1944-1950, you are 1,000,000 times more likely to be killed in Vietnam in the next two years than if your birth date had been June 6.
“Starr, that was dark,” you say. “We came here to be entertained and to laugh.”
Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry.
I thought it would be a really funny bit, because if it was really horrible, we’d do something insane, like end the war in Vietnam and withdraw all our troops before another single life is sacrificed there.
Or else we’d hold a lottery among those serving in Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon, and the Oval Office and the first third of those drawn would be the first ones sent to Vietnam to fight for the profit margins of RMK-BRJ, Caterpillar, McDonnell Douglas, the President’s Club, the entire military-industrial complex, and Nixon’s re-election campaign.
You ladies who are out there dating and trying to find Mr. Right… Let’s hear it if you’re out there. No more gross illustrations about killing you if you raise your hands. Give a shout. Understand that guys our age are getting killed at a higher rate than at any time since World War II. We need to learn to share the ones who are left. Here’s the secret. You should consider your girlfriend’s boyfriend and suggest—to her, not to him—that you share him. Because here’s a little known fact. Guys have just three conversations in them.
The first date, “Oh, he’s so funny and charming.” The second date, “He’s really smart.” The third date, “He’s such a caring and sensitive person.”
But if you aren’t sleeping with him by the fourth date, he’s repeating himself. He’s used up all his date conversation. At that point, he has three things to fall back on: Sports, politics, and the great recipe his mother has for macaroni and cheese. You’ve heard everything else.
But if you have sex, and don’t want to get pregnant, you’d better be protected. I’m talking about illegal birth control. Did you know contraceptives are illegal? It might even be illegal for me to stand up here and talk about them.
“Yeah, Starr, but what about rubbers. You can buy them at the drugstore.”
Only for the prevention of disease! You can’t buy prophylactics for the prevention of pregnancy.
It’s the law.
You know, it’s weird. Lots of things are backward. The Supreme Court ruled in 1965 that married women have the right to contraceptives. Well, in general, the supreme Court is a hundred years behind the times. It was only two-and-a-half years ago, on June 12, that the Court got around to saying, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”
Well, thank you very much for giving me control over whom I marry. Only three years after the Civil rights Act of 1964, and two years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. What we need now is a constitutional amendment that changes the legal voting age to eighteen—along with granting other fundamental rights accorded to adults—to eighteen-year-olds.
But where was I. Not on a political campaign. You didn’t come here to listen to that crap. You’re still trying to understand exactly what my tits are saying.
What I was trying to say is that the court, as usual when they’re dealing with new issues, got this one backwards. It’s not married women who need birth control! It’s unmarried women! The way I read that ruling is that the Supreme Court believes it’s better for single women to be pregnant than married women.
This is almost 1970. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, baby! We can get everything except the drugs that make sex and rock and roll not end up in a baby. Do you really think that at twenty years of age, living on my own, with a boyfriend who loves me, that I am not going to have sex? With this body? You’ve got to be kidding.
But I’m so afraid of getting pregnant! I had to come up with my own solution. I sewed a latex glove over my vagina. And I still make my boyfriend use a rubber. If the kid gets out of that combination, we’ll name him after Harry Houdini.
Really, I’m so susceptible to drugs that I could probably get along on half a pill. What’s the worst that could happen? I get half pregnant?
I’m such a lightweight that if I walk into a room where someone smoked a joint within the last, say, six months… I get high! If I was high, I would have finished my routine out here and be back in the dressing room fucking my boyfriend by now. You’d have to record me and play me back at half speed in order to understand my jokes. I know, that wouldn’t help some of you.
I had surgery a while back. No, I’m not going to tell you what I got operated on. I’m not sixty! And my boobs are my business. I was laid out on the table ready for the doctor and I met the anesthesiologist. He was so nice. He had a soft comforting voice. He held a mask above my face and said, “Now, Starr, I’m going to put this mask over your nose and mouth. Just breathe normally and count backward from… Never mind.” In the time it took him to give me the instructions, I was already asleep.
I see you are, too, so I’d better boogie. You’ve all been so nice. I’m Starr. That’s with two Rs and a big ass. Ess! Does this tutu make my ess look big?
When we all finally got home Friday night, Beth was psyched up and rolling about her big opening in Chicago. Patricia had stayed home and got Toni to bed, so we tried not to be too raucous. Ronda and Anna joined Patricia in bed and I stayed up with Beth, eating chips and drinking tea. I didn’t think that was a particularly good combination, but eventually Beth started to wind down and we went to bed. She cuddled up to me and went straight to sleep without any loving.
We all tried to be quiet in the morning to let her sleep. I danced with Toni and then took her out to the park to push in a swing. She loved that and if I could have stood it, she’d have stayed in that swing seat for hours. As it was, she was almost ready for her nap by the time I got her back to the apartment.
By that time, Beth was up and moving and getting ready to leave for the theatre.
“Why do you need to go over so early?” I asked.
“We’ll get together and talk about last night’s performance. If I need to make any adjustments, I’ll need to rehearse a little. They’ll probably want me to cut the whole lottery thing—or at least to figure a way to shorten it. They make a lot of allowances for me, because I’m still experimenting. But I’ll need to decide if I’m going to do biting political satire or if I’m going to do the laugh-a-second repartee. These are my last two performances before I’m off indefinitely and I want to leave them all with a good impression,” Beth said.
“Wow! I just didn’t have any idea of how much goes into a show like that. You make it look so easy and natural on stage.”
“Are you coming tonight? You know it will be different.”
“Yes. Someone had to stay home with Toni, so tonight it’s Ronda and Anna and I’m bringing Patricia,” I said.
“It’s always like that, isn’t it? I guess we were kind of spoiled in Las Vegas by having her grandmother stay with her so we could all party. Do you think I’ll be okay when it’s my turn to babysit?” Beth asked.
“Oh, yeah. We won’t throw you into it with no practice or backup. After you’ve been back for a while, it will just be part of the natural flow of things,” I laughed. “Do you want me to take you to the theatre?”
“Thanks, but I already called a cab reservation. He should be here in a few minutes. I didn’t want to make it hard on anyone to ferry me around. You know, I could have just called home and Deke would have come to get me. Mom and Dad are coming to the show tonight. And probably that Adele woman.”
“Adele’s not all bad. I had to speak sharply to her once when she tried to put the moves on Patricia. But the last time I had lunch with your family, she was fine.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to find out your own mother is the lowest in the pecking order and that your father orders your mother’s slave master around.”
“I have to admit, that sounds really weird. Did she try anything with you?” I asked.
“No. I guess Papa gave her strict orders that she was to keep her hands off Val and me. If she tried something, I think I would lose my membership in the pacifist community.”
“I don’t think there’s a membership. Oh, is that your taxi?”
“Yeah. I’ll see you after the show tonight, love.”
“Love you. Break a leg.”
She was off.
She did make some changes to the lottery section of her routine, tightening it up and making it shorter. It actually got a couple of laughs. Patricia, unfortunately, had hold of my arm in a death grip. She didn’t consider it all that funny.
We slipped out after Starr’s performance and met her at the stage door. She wasn’t staying for the final performance of Danny’s tour. The three of us went out and had a late dinner at an International House of Pancakes that was open twenty-four hours. If you want pancakes at ten o’clock at night, that’s the place to go.
Beth had changed clothes, but she still had her eye makeup on. Patricia mentioned it.
“Yeah. I guess I’m hanging onto Starr for as long as I can tonight. I’ll be putting her on a shelf for a while and going back to school. It’s going to be so different,” Beth said.
“What do you need to make the transition easier,” I asked. I’d been practicing being supportive and not just telling her what she should do next. Ronda had told me I had a tendency to do that.
“Hmm. Maybe provide a hundred or two enthusiastic people to applaud me at least once a week? That might help,” she said.
“That’s probably possible,” Patricia said. “We could probably get that many to applaud you just for wearing a tutu in public. You know Toni’s going to want one soon.”
“Oh, I hope so. Aunt Beth will have fulfilled her role,” Beth laughed. “Seriously, you know, the whole applause thing is addictive. I didn’t start out being funny to get approval or applause. I started out to make people laugh. I think my stuff turned kind of dark over the summer and I want to figure out how to get back to just being someone who makes people laugh. I need to break the addiction to approval.”
“Isn’t laughter a kind of approval in itself?” I asked. “I mean, when I sell a really good art print, I feel affirmed. Like my art is worth something. That’s a kind of approval.”
“Okay. Maybe I could get along without the laughter if someone just paid me ten or fifteen thousand dollars every couple of months for a joke I wrote. I don’t know, though. How would I know that they actually thought the joke was funny unless I heard them laugh?”
“Speaking of which, Adrienne will be here in a couple of weeks,” Patricia said. “She’s coming for a visit.”
“Adrienne? The model in that photo that sold for so much?” Beth asked. “Does she want another photo session?”
“I’m sure she’ll want photos, too,” I said. “Adrienne wants to be a kind of satellite to the family. Not exactly a part of it, but accepted by it.”
“You might have to explain that a little more thoroughly.”
“Adrienne wants to be our mistress,” Patricia said. “She put it best when she said she’s not the marrying kind. She’s the kind you go to when you can’t get what you want from your wife. Or husband, for that matter.”
“Nate, you have four girlfriends. Can’t you get what you want from them?”
“I’m not sure I could explain myself all that well. In fact, I’m not sure I want the relationship that Adrienne says she wants. I have two girlfriends sitting with me and two more in the apartment who are just as beautiful as Adrienne. I sort of have the feeling I could ask anything of you and you’d do it.”
“Which of us are you going to ask to fuck in the butt?” Patricia asked.
“I don’t really need to do that,” I said.
“I think I see,” Beth said. “There might be something that none of us want to do but she’s willing to. And she doesn’t want to take our place. She’ll just get down and dirty in ways you probably wouldn’t even ask one of us to do.”
“It goes a little beyond that,” Patricia said. “If I wanted to tie her up and spank her because I can’t do that to my own child, she’d let me. And she’d get off on it.”
“Wow! If I wanted to have a woman eat me, I wouldn’t ask one of you to do it, but I could ask her?” Beth said.
“Well, we haven’t mentioned it, honey, but you could ask any of us for that,” Patricia said, touching Beth’s hand.
Beth just stared at her.
Sunday was Anna’s day. I slipped out of bed with Patricia and Beth early Sunday morning and when I arrived where Ronda and Anna were sleeping, Ronda got up to make coffee and breakfast. I kissed Anna.
“Mmm. Kisses,” she moaned without opening her eyes. “Kisses make me horny.”
“Good,” I whispered. “I plan to start your day with your first birthday orgasm.”
“I get orgasms for my birthday? But my birthday isn’t until tomorrow.”
“We have to take what opportunities we have,” I said, kissing her some more.
“Okay.”
It wasn’t dramatic dialog, but it got us started. By the time Anna was completely awake, I was petting her boobs and stimulating her nipples. I moved down to play with them with my tongue as my hand drifted down to her wet center.
“Hmm. Someone has already been playing down here,” I whispered.
“That girlfriend Ronda said I needed to be ready for my boyfriend. She got me really ready.”
“I thought she smelled familiar when I kissed her.”
“Yeah, I kissed her, too. I never thought I’d do that.”
“I don’t want to waste all her preparations,” I said.
I moved on top of Anna and she spread her legs to make my entrance to her pussy easy. I slid inside and we just slowly moved together, enjoying the feeling of being connected.
“I love you, Anna. I think I’ve loved you since you introduced me in speech class. I never imagined how wonderful it would be.”
“Oh, I love you, Nate. I was such a mixed up and confused girl back then. I’m just so glad you let me back into your life.”
“You were never out of my life. Even when we were broken up, we were still together. You never really gave up. I love you for everything you do and have done. I love you for loving our girlfriends. I love you for loving our goddaughter. I love you for loving me.”
“Show me, Nate. Make me feel your love!”
Our motions sped up and we both climbed to the peak again. I flooded her pussy with my come and she clamped down on my cock as her pussy fluttered around it. We were one.
Unfortunately, Anna and Patricia had to head back west that evening. Ronda, whose classes were now out for the term, decided to go with them and spend some time in Tenbrook with her family. That left Beth and me together in Chicago. I still had a week of finals left.
“I might sleep all day,” Beth said as I kissed her goodbye in the morning. “I’m so tired after spending the past months on the road. I don’t have to catch a bus today, do I?”
“No buses today, love. I’ll bring Chinese carry-out for dinner tonight. Spend your day recovering.”
“You’re really wonderful to all of us. I’ll be a good wife this week.”
“Just be who you are, love. I’ll see you tonight.”
My first final was in History of Photography. I found the whole process of wet plate photography to be fascinating and really wanted to try it out one day. It would strictly be a novelty as I wasn’t sure I could even get hold of a camera like William Henry Jackson, who used a really large format camera of roughly 10x16, using glass plates that had to be coated in a darkroom with colloid, dipped in silver emulsion, rushed to the camera and exposed, then rushed back to the darkroom to develop. Then the glass plate was shipped out east where a contact print was pulled. Photography really changed American history as well as recording it.
Anyway, I survived it just fine. My study group met and Leslie and I reviewed our notes for Black and White Photography. We felt pretty confident about that one. I reviewed my notes for Chemistry, too, since I’d have that exam on Tuesday as well.
When I got home from my exam on Photographic Practices on Wednesday, Beth was ready to go.
“Um… where are we going?” I asked.
Overall, the three nights of being alone in the apartment together had done wonders for Beth and me reconnecting. Usually, I got home to find her naked, just like any other girlfriend would be. We often made love before dinner and again at bedtime. Beth was still not much in the morning and was usually still asleep when I left for classes.
“Dinner with the fam,” she said brightly. “I’ve shirked my family duties, according to Mama. I’ve been in Chicago for six days and have not been home for dinner.”
“Oh. Well, okay. I won’t be able to stay late, though. I still have a Geometry exam tomorrow morning and I need to review my notes.”
“Oh, crap! I forgot you had another exam. I was just thinking about how we wouldn’t be able to go tomorrow because you’ll be headed back to Tenbrook. How about you bring your notes with you. We’ll spend the night and then you can go directly to your exam. If you feel the evening is dragging on too long, you can escape to my room to study. Will that work?” she asked.
“That will be fine,” I said.
I really liked Beth’s family. They’d reached out to me several times this fall, just to check in or to grab lunch together. Jordan had stood with me in my draft board hearing. They were really a second family to me. I got my things together and we headed to Beth’s home.
The evening with the Marshes was pleasant. Valerie was home as well and that made for some interesting conversations around her travels, kind of competing with Beth and her tour. Valerie was traveling internationally, but she’d been home about every other week. This was Beth’s first time back since June. At one point when Beth and Valerie were trying to one-up each other, Adele caught my eye and just smirked as she rolled her eyes toward the sisters. I tried not to choke, smothering my laughter.
“So, Adele,” I said, during a break, “you’re looking a little different these days. Let your hair grow out some?”
“How nice of you to notice,” Adele said. I thought even her voice was softer than it used to be.
“It’s nearly time to get a new portrait done of her, don’t you think, Nate?” Jordan asked. Elizabeth stiffened next to me and I think he noticed. “Maybe when her hair is a little longer. We don’t want to rush things,” he amended.
“When Adele wants another portrait, I’ll do my best to fit her in,” I said. I thought that gave me several outs and Elizabeth relaxed a bit.
After dinner, everyone retired to the lounge for drinks and I excused myself to go study for my final the next morning. I passed Adele in the hall on my way past the kitchen.
“When the time comes, you’ll find I’ve changed in other ways, too,” she whispered as she caught my hand.
She very deliberately pulled it up to cup her breast and squeeze it. When we’d had our first photo session together, Adele had been almost paranoid about having me touch her. She loosened up some in the darkroom, but she was still shaking when she asked if I wanted a blowjob, which I’d declined. She was obviously telling me she wasn’t so averse to my touch now. That was interesting.
I continued on up to Beth’s room and focused on studying.
I left Beth in bed in the morning after some gentle loving and a few kisses. I had to get to my exam in Geometry in the Arts. That had been a very interesting class.
I’d taken high school geometry, so I knew the basics of constructing a square and using the basic instruments of Euclid for plane geometry: a straight-edge and a collapsible compass. Like most curious boys, I suppose, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to trisect an angle using those tools and failing miserably. Well, they told us it was impossible, so why did we try to prove them wrong with elementary algebra and geometry?
Geometry in the Arts took the idea of geometry to a different level. We’d seen examples dating from the incredible accuracy and stability of various ancient structures like the Pyramids and the Parthenon to modern constructions of the Golden Rectangle and Fibonacci sequence. We saw how this and other mathematical constructions affected everything from the proportions of a newspaper page, to the size of the Gutenberg Bible, to the architecture of Le Corbusier, and even to the sizes of our film and prints. I found the whole subject fascinating and it was the topic of many doodles in my notebooks. The final exam was no problem.
I stopped by the apartment when I was finished and made sure everything was turned off that should be. I carted out a bunch of leftovers from the refrigerator and packed my bag into the microbus. By one in the afternoon, I was off. By two-thirty, Anna and I were in the back of the bus making love.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said as I filled her pussy with my cock. “Ever since I turned twenty, I’ve been horny. You wouldn’t believe what Patricia and Ronda did to me Sunday night after we got Toni to sleep.”
“They stayed with you Sunday night?” I asked as I moved in her slippery passage.
“Yes! They said it wasn’t right for me to wake up on my birthday without my loved ones with me. It was a little crowded. We made a nest for Toni on the floor and then all three got in my bed. My bed is a lot smaller than yours in Chicago, but we kind of slept in layers. Those two licked my pussy until I was crying for mercy. Then they rode my face through a few more. Oh, Nate, I love our girlfriends as much as I love you.”
“You can’t even imagine how happy that makes me. Anna, I love making love with you. I love being in you here in the back of the bus. I love that I’m about to fill your pussy to overflowing with my come.”
“Yes! I feel it starting. I’m with you!”
We got to Tenbrook by dinnertime and I had dinner with Anna’s family. Then I headed to the hotel, where I found Ronda waiting in my bed. It was a very satisfactory night.
On Friday, Ronda and Anna took Toni for a girls’ outing in Huntertown while Patricia came to my hotel room and we made love for a couple of hours.
When the girls got back from their little trip, I took Patricia and Toni down to Sage to spend the weekend with Mom and Dad and Kat. It was really sweet to see Toni get down and go running to Dad, yelling, “Gappy!” He picked our little girl up and swung her around and around while she giggled. Eventually, Dad got around to giving me a hug and we all sat around getting caught up on what was happening. My fourteen-year-old sister was quite a young lady as a freshman in high school. While I was one of the oldest in my class with a birthday in late September, Kat was one of the youngest in hers with a birthday in mid-August. She didn’t let that stop her from becoming a leader in her new school.
“They had the same stupid dress code rule that we had to wear skirts and they had to be at least knee-length that Tenbrook had,” Kat said. “We decided the rule had to go and all came to school one day wearing slacks. It was cold out and we were tired of freezing our legs. The school threatened to have us all suspended from school until I walked up to Principal Mackenzie and slapped a copy of the Supreme Court Ruling of Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent School District. In February, they ruled that the school could not infringe our right to freedom of speech or expression and that school dress codes that did so were unconstitutional. That settled that. I haven’t worn a skirt to school since.”
“How on earth did you even find out about that Supreme Court Ruling?” I asked. I hadn’t even heard about it. Girls at Columbia wore skirts unless it interfered with their activities, like operating a pottery wheel. But nearly all the women I saw in Chicago were wearing skirts except in high school.
“Miss Ludwig happened to mention it when I was visiting this summer. Um… She might have mentioned that the girls in Tenbrook were planning a protest over the dress code, too,” Kat giggled. “Oh. The dress code was thrown out at Tenbrook this year, too.”
“Well, if you ask me, it makes a lot of sense,” I said. “I’m as fond of miniskirts as the next guy, but the whole skirt touching the floor when kneeling was kind of demeaning.”
“The dress code isn’t gone entirely,” Mom said. “Thank heavens. Clothing that disrupts the learning environment or infringes on the rights of others is still not allowed.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Clothing that suggests a relationship to a gang, like wearing the colors or logos,” Mom said. “Slogans on T-shirts that are lewd or suggestive. Clothing that exposes the underwear, breasts, or genitals. They are really only restrictions that any decent human would be following anyway.”
“What brought the case before the Supreme Court?” I asked. “Was someone trying to wear miniskirts to school?”
“The students were suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the war in Vietnam,” Kat said.
“No way!”
“This fall, when you were protesting the draft board, we all wore black armbands the entire week before the big demonstration in Washington. I can show you some sketches I did. I think I’ll do a whole series of paintings,” Kat said.
“I’m proud of you, girl!” I said. I think that was the right thing to say.
“By the way, my college deferment was reinstated the day after the draft lottery,” I said. Of course, I’d talked to my parents after the lottery, so everyone knew that my number was high enough to be unlikely to be called.
“Well, that’s good,” Dad said.
“Sort of,” I agreed. “The thing is, if they’d just left me classified I-A, I’d have served my year’s eligibility this year and would be done with it. Now, I’ll be class II-S until I graduate, and then I can be reclassified as I-A to serve my year’s eligibility. Our best hope is to vote him out of office and get the war ended.”
“You’ll get to vote in the next national election,” Dad said. “Exercise your right with care. We don’t want to end up with something even worse.”
“If Richard Daley runs as the Democratic nominee, I’ll vote for Trudeau,” I said. Of course, I’d need to become a Canadian in order to do that. “They say congress is going to amend the Voting Rights Act to allow eighteen-year-olds the right to vote,” I said. “Just too late for it to help me.”
“Nixon won’t sign that,” Patricia said. “What eighteen-year-old male would vote for him?”
“We’ll see,” I said.
There were enough bedrooms in Mom and Dad’s new house that one was already set up as a nursery for Toni. Another was supposed to be ‘my’ room, but the truth was that Patricia had decorated it and was in it more often than I was. Mom and Dad just turned a blind eye on my presence in the room with her.
Monday, I got Patricia and Toni back to Tenbrook in time for Patricia to go to work after dropping Toni at her mother’s house. I met Anna upstairs to take a look at the studio.
“We need to clean it out,” Anna said. “Whatever we can’t take with us to Chicago, needs to be moved up to the props closet upstairs. Any equipment you still have here, we need to pack up and take with us.
“And there’s something else I figured out this weekend. Or Dad figured it out. The company is going to be subject to significant tax this year if we don’t make some investments right now.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, stupidly.
“I was talking to Dad about needing to get the books together and figure out the taxes and he asked about the business income for the year. Nate, one customer gave you a total of $27,000! You personally were paid $20,000 for a month of work in Vegas and we raked in another $2,000 in sales to the models that month. Fortunately, everyone else was paid by Photosensitive Productions, so we don’t need to deal with taxes for all of them. But when you add in the rest of the income the company generated this year, we’ve got over $35,000 in business revenue and not nearly enough expenses to offset it.”
“Holy crap. That’s a lot of money.”
“It sure is. So, this would be an excellent time to invest in our Canadian branch by buying a top of the line darkroom setup for the Stratford business. You remember what a time we had getting everything set up to make the antique store a subsidiary of Attic Allure. We wisely set up the photo business at the same time. Since they are wholly owned subsidiaries, you can transfer money to them or equipment.”
I sat down hard. Then I patted the seat beside me and Anna sat next to me.
“I’d like to take this fainting couch with us to Chicago,” I said. “It’s really a versatile piece of furniture and we can cover it in a dozen different ways.”
“Are you listening?” she asked.
“Yes, lover. It’s overwhelming. We’ll call Levi tomorrow and get things ordered for the Canada studio. We’ll need to transfer construction funds, too. There’s no place suitable to just block off for a darkroom up there. We’ll need to build one. I’ll call Harold and ask him to get me some bids. I have plans for the room we put in here. It’s just, you know… so…”
“Yeah, it is,” she said, giving me a kiss and putting her arm around me. “Let’s do something we know how to do.”
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Take my picture. It will be the last one taken in the Tenbrook Studio. After you’ve taken my picture, we will officially de-sanctify this space and get ready to move out.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
