IN MEMORIUM: LEEE BLACK CHILDERS

Iggy Pop & Leee Childers, 1972

 The world lost a treasure when iconic rock ‘n’ roll photographer Leee Black Childers passed away at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles on the afternoon of April 6, 2014.

 Leee was in town for a huge retrospective of his work titled  Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rock Stars And Punks,  on March 22 at Lethal Amounts in downtown Los Angeles. The opening was spectacular and crowded. After this last overwhelming success, he fell ill that night, barely hanging on until he made his final exit yesterday.

Though the younger set would probably have to Google his name, they’d  undoubtedly recognize the extraordinary images he captured of   David Bowie, Blondie’s Deborah Harry, Iggy Pop, The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, The Sex Pistols, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol and the living-out-loud- Superstars of his Factory scene plus many, many more.

Debbie Harry by Lee Black Childers

 Leee was truly legendary; the incredible body of work he left behind is to the world of rock and roll  (and various other relevant subcultures) what the Time/Life images of Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Alfred Eisenstaedt were to the world at large.

Leee’s incredible shots of people who themselves would become legends- whether the onstage, in the studio, backstage or out at play in the wee hours-were equal parts Irving Penn and Diane Arbus. But unlike them, Lee wasn’t just a passive lens man or historical documentarian, he was an integral figure in the varied underground movements and scenes he actually helped to create, and was personally involved in the lives of his subjects.

 Though probably best known as a photographer, with his stunning images appearing on album covers and in publications such as Creem, Rock Scene, Circus, NME and Sounds, Leee’s reach was farther and wider.  It encompassed band management,  road tours, film (as an interview subject as well as filmmaker) writing, painting and sewing. He worked tirelessly and creatively in many mediums, not the least of which was human relations. An amazing raconteur, he knew everyone, from High Society matrons and minor royalty  to  Lower East Side street hustlers, from record company execs to rock stars, models and wannabes, to a high-school pal who'd become a  world-class con woman,  he was close friends  and confidants with them and knew all their inside secrets. 

Bowie  by Leee Black Childers

He knew all the dirt on  everyone who was anyone...  gossip which consistently involved copious amounts of drugs, sex, ludicrous incidents and fortuitous chance meetings. He’d dish it out judiciously and with cackling glee in the Southern drawl he never lost. He called everyone Darlin’, his sentences often ended in shrieking laughter, and were always peppered with his favorite word,
 “Fa-a-a-a-abulous!” which he drew out long and luxuriously.

 Born and raised in Kentucky, Leee arrived in New York City in 1966. By the next year, he’d become one of Andy Warhol’s assistants  at The Factory, and took to hanging out at the notorious Back Room of mythical Manhattan club Max’s Kansas City, which was the underground scene’s artistic   hub.

Warhol  Superstar Jackie Curtis by Leee

In August of 1971, Leee, Jayne County and Cherry Vanilla, along with other Factory denizens went to London to appear in Warhol’s stage play Pork at The Roundhouse.  It was there he met David and Angela Bowie, and Tony DeFries, whose MainMan company was managing the up –and- coming Bowie. In no time at all, Leee and Cherry began working for MainMan as Bowie’s road manager and publicist  on The Ziggy Stardust  tour. This lead to Leee’s  working with other artists like Iggy Pop and Mott The Hoople, whom he toured with. In fact, the Hoople song “All The Way From Memphis” was dedicated to Leee and his MainMan cohort Tony Zanetta.

 By 1974, Leee was a fixture at CBGB’s, the nascent hub of American punk rock, and home to bands like Ramones, The Deadboys, Television, The Cramps and Talking Heads.  Leee took many photos and worked  constantly. By  1975 Leee was managing Johnny Thunders’ post-Dolls band The Heartbreakers, whom he brought to London the next year, just in time to experience the raucous rise of English punk with The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Clash, Damned, and Siouxie and the Banshees.

Levi Dexter & Leee, late '70's

He spent the next few years migrating between London, New York and Los Angeles, working with The Heartbreakers, Jayne County, and managing Levi Dexter and The Rockats, who singlehandedly spawned the Rockabilly Revival, which is still going strong decades later.

  After admiring Leee’s photos from afar for years in the rock ‘n’roll publications I devoured as an aspiring pre-teen  groupie, I finally met him 1978.  An errant seventeen-year-old,  I was on the loose in New York with my roommate and constant partner-in-crime Kid Congo, who was soon to become a member of The Gun Club and later the Cramps. We were living on The Bowery, in a gigantic loft that was a mere stone’s throw from CBGB’s, which belonged to Kristian Hoffman of The Mumps and his boyfriend, drummer Bradley Field of Teenage Jesus And The Jerks.   Kid and I were obsessed with punk, going crazy every time we spotted Sid Vicious on St. Mark’s Place. We’d panhandle on the streets on our way up to Max’s, so we could afford the Happy Hour drinks that came with hellish bar food- and guaranteed you a spot at their rock shows upstairs. After seeing Levi And The Rockats play there, I’d fallen in love with Levi Dexter, who would become my first husband.  The fact that Leee was managing Levi only made the romance sweeter.

I began to know the real Leee, the man behind the legend. Always intense and constantly on the go, Leee was a non-stop whirlwind of craziness.  He told stories so insane there were absolutely no doubt they’d actually occurred.  He was a walking catalogue of Old School Fag Knowledge; he knew about art, cinema, literature and would quote Talluhah Bankhead and Mae West, rolling his eyes and snickering at the irony of the raucous scenes of rock ‘n’ roll debauchery that were rampant in those days. 

In 1979, he moved The Rockats into room 100 A at The Tropicana Motel, Hollywood’s equivalent of The Chelsea in New York.  Party central, The Tropicana was home to Tom Waits, Chuck E. Weiss, Ricky Lee Jones, and for a time, The Mumps and The Cramps, as well as every other band from London or New York who happened to be passing through. Conveniently, I lived just down the street, and it was there that our friendship began in earnest.  Because I was headstrong and outspoken, we sometimes butted heads over Levi’s career, but that time period laid the groundwork for a friendship that lasted decades.

 I admired Leee’s style, it was magnificent. To me, he was a punk rock version of Sergei Diagelev of The Ballets Russes, and Levi was his Nijinsky. Leee orchestrated crazy schemes with finesse…and always managed to pull them off.  He’d be on two landline phones at the same time, playing record company executives against each other. He'd do business like this every morning, standing on the porch overlooking The Tropicana’s coffee shop Duke’s, dressed in a Fifties bathrobe and Ebenezer Scrooge stocking cap, clutching a vintage flask with “CATNIP” engraved on it, swigging gin. 

 He’d hold court and  describe  the  outrageous antics of  Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn  in minute detail, stuff that’d make all  the contestants on Ru Paul’s Drag Race pale in comparison.  He’d always find the best stuff at thriftstores and was an extremely natty dresser- loud Forties and Fifties shirts  were a  perennial favorite.

 Leee  would  host  wild midnight pool parties at The Trop, inviting everyone from super models, Ron and Russell Mael from Sparks, waitresses from Duke's, Ahmet Ertegun and Rodney Bingenheimer to the elderly bull dykes who hung out at The Palms bar directly across the street. At one of these parties, an extremely high Marianne Faithfull was trying to bum a cigarette. Leee egged me on as I offered her a smoke that I’d filled with cigarette loads that I’d purchased at a Hollywood Boulevard magic store, and we watched in silent hysterics and she lay nodding on chaise lounge, startling into consciousness as each pellet exploded.

Jayne County by Leee Childers

Leee once showed up at a garage sale  at Disgraceland, the  infamous punk crash I lived at with Iris Berry.  He had Jayne County and Angela Bowie in tow, and if it hadn't been  for the makeshift bar  we'd set up in the yard, offering our patrons  stiff margaritas made with Plain Wrap Tequila, Iris and I probably both would've  fainted  from  sheer disbelief.  Oblivious  to how starstruck we were,  Leee, Jayne and Angie just grabbed drinks and joined in the festivities.  As Jayne tried to cram her feet into my vintage gold Spring-O-Lators, Angie and I  

 drunkenly rolled on my bed in a pile of petticoats, and I finally made the slurred  confession that it had been my dream to meet her since I was twelve.

The next morning, Iris, who hadn't met Leee until he came to our sale, sighed and said,

"Leee is amazing! He's one of those people that you just fall in love with immediately, because he makes you feel as though you've known each other for ages..." 

The last time I actually saw Leee was in 2008  in New York. I was in town  doing Maragert Cho's Sensuous Woman show. When Leee came backstage  after a performance, he  enchanted the entire cast and invited us to a birthday party for   rock photographer Bob Gruen. At the party, Leee kept telling me I needed to meet Suzi,   wife of  late  incredible guitarist Mick Ronson. 

"You two will adore  each other!" Leee declared,     

Backstage at The Sensuous Woman

 "I can't wait for you to meet!"

The moment we walked into the party, I lost track of Leee, who was exclaiming "Darlin'!" across the room, seemingly to three quarters of the guests. At the bar, I met a lovely older woman, whom I clicked with immediately.  Next thing I knew, we were howling with laughter, swapping stories and  buying each other rounds. Over an hour later, Leee found me again, raised an eyebrow in his inimitable way and said,

"Oh  fa-a-a-abulous!   I see you and Suzi have already met!" 

I could continue with the Leee stories… they came back to me in waves last night, as my emotions swung wildly from with disbelief, grief, shock and waves of laughter.  I could tell or write so many stories about him, it would go on for pages. Leee’s life was so full, there are many people who could do the same. Of all his incredible talents, it was his social  skills that made him standout among those who knew him. He was a handful for sure... but his friendship was always worth it.

Leee lived life to the fullest, with imagination, creativity and panache. 

  He’s probably up in Heaven right now, having cocktails with  Mickey Rooney... and berating him mercilessly for attempting to steal his thunder.

 Rest in peace, my dear friend.

# 

Read more on Leee and  his amazing stories:

http://ffanzeen.blogspot.com/2010/02/portrait-leee-black-childers.html

http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-films/extended-interview-with-leee-black-childers-on-warhol-bowie-the-summer-of-love/

 

Leee in recent years

THE MINX

Welcome to my new blog! 

The story you are about to read is an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir, "Showgirl Confidential: My Life Onstage, Backstage And On The Road" which will be published Fall 2013 by Punk Hostage Press...enjoy!

 In the late Seventies, The Palomino was the nerve center of country music in Los Angeles. The famed San Fernando Valley roadhouse had hosted Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, Jerry Lee Lewis and, like, and every other country star whose name meant anything. “The Pal”, as regulars affectionately called it, might as well have been the West Coast wing of The Grand Ole Opry or Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, that’s jes’ how country it was. The air was so thick with a haze of cigarette smoke and clouds of cheap perfume that it seemed like a gardenia-scented bomb had recently gone off. It was the type of place where the patrons really did sit at the bar drinkin’ doubles and feelin’ single.

The cocktail waitresses, all genuine Honky Tonk Angels and Buckle Bunnies who’d moved to LA from places like Bakersfield, Needles, and Lone Pine all had aspirations of being the next Crystal Gayle.  Their faces were uniformly hard-lined and overly made-up, and instead of Farrah-do’s, they had big Nashville hair, teased and sprayed. Stealthy and discreet, with the finesse of thieves, they’d sidle up to tables on the pretense of clearing empty glasses, while surreptitiously slipping their demo cassettes into the suit pockets of their Music Biz clientele.

As a  rockabilly blonde, photo by Gary Leonard 

 I frequented The Pal but never really fit in, even though my boyfriend was the lead singer of the hugely popular neo-rockabilly group, Levi & The Rockats.  Whenever I was there, it always felt like I was on a Black Ops mission, or as though I doing anthropological research. I was a stranger in a strange land- a clandestine punk rock refugee, living a make-believe life, trying to pass as an urban cowgirl.In reality, even attired in my vintage 1950’s Western wear, I was only fooling myself.  With my bleached white, greased Elvis pomp and chipped metallic blue nail polish, I stuck out like a sore thumb amidst all the embroidered Nudie’s rodeo duds and the tight Spandex, Tanya Tucker-iffic jumpsuits.

 At least had company-I was usually with my all-time favorite partner in crime, The Minx. Not only was her guy the drummer in my boyfriend’s band, The Minx shared my secret punk rock past. In her rockabilly phase, she looked like a miniature Italian movie star, circa 1959. 

But I knew better: it wasn’t always that way.

 The Minx swears I was the first punk rocker she’d ever met; that I changed her life. We’d first bumped into each other two years previously in 1976, at Granny Takes A Trip. The trendy, world-famous glitter-rock-gone-punk boutique had become famous on King’s Road in London, clothing everyone from Marc Bolan of T-Rex to The Sweet and Roxy Music.  They had had just opened an offshoot store on Sunset Strip. Teenagers on leave from Suburbia, The Minx and I arrived there at the same time, both trying to sell T-shirts we’d made. Mine had dirty words stenciled in spray paint all over; hers had two zippers down the front which, when opened, would reveal the breasts. Initially, I looked upon her as my competition, but her lurid blue eye shadow, breathy voice and tiny hands immediately enchanted me.

The Minx herself

 Dainty and adorable, The Minx was- and still is- one of those girls who’ll never look like a woman. With unusually large doe-eyes, a perfect tiny nose and close-cropped hair, she’s the ultimate gamine. If you dressed her in a toga and put a wreath of flowers in her hair, or maybe added a set of gossamer wings, she could be reclining in a Maxfield Parish print.

Compared to her stature, her personality is over-the-top; she’s smart, brash and vibrant, more like an idealized Japanimation character than a real person. She was FUN in big, fat primary-colored Fisher-Price letters, letters with googly eyes and little cartoon smiles. Fun like a tawdry carnival sideshow, Fun like an old-time whorehouse, it’s hallways filled with drunken conventioneers in boxer shorts and Fez hats. Fun like a dimly lit back-stage of a run-down cabaret in Weimar Republic Berlin. The Minx was always up for anything.

 We became fast friends, seeing each other regularly at The Whisky A Go-Go for Ramones and Blondie shows, at The Masque for Germs gigs, and at many a drunken party at The Canterbury Arms, a run-down apartment building on Cherokee, just off Hollywood Boulevard. Many punks took up residence there, because the place was cheap… they rented to anybody, it was full of junkies and hookers, the manager was running scams with the landlord, and probably running drugs.  The elevators were full of   graffiti; constantly out of service. Rigs and beer cans were discarded on the shredded carpet in the hallways, which probably hadn’t been replaced since the McCarthy era. The apartments themselves were great- or had once been.  Big starlet singles from Hollywood’s Golden Age, they had built-in vanities and Murphy Beds.

 There was typically a lot of Mickey’s Big Mouth beer involved in the Canterbury shindigs.  The stereo would be blasting latest The Clash or   Adverts import 45 while people who were too young to drink legally locked themselves in the bathroom to do drugs. The walls in the Canterbury’s kitchenettes were splattered from food-fights with day- old Top Ramen or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese; people were always passed out on ratty sofas salvaged from the trash. Inevitably, a lot of drunken pogo dancing took place, and usually, a Murphy bed would come loose from it’s hinges and slam off the wall and onto some hapless kid’s head.

  None of us had jobs, because you couldn’t get hired if you had pink- or even dyed black hair. Our clothes came from dumpster-diving Salvation Army donation boxes, and we were always on the guest list for shows. As long as you had enough cash for cigarettes and beer, you were dandy.  Nobody wanted a regular job, anyway.  It would interfere with our parties.

 We were wanna-be musicians who were also painters, photographers, performance artists, clothing designers, writers, dancers, actors and smart -though disenfranchised- teenagers. There was also a bunch of older, off-the-wall types, refugees from the Midwest and New York, ex-hippies from Haight Ashbury, ex-Beats from North Beach and Greenwich Village, and former Superstars from Andy Warhol’s Factory.

  Lots of us had come from the glitter rock scene, and so were comfortable with multiple partners and bisexuality. There were openly gay folks, but also people who were into experimentation, people who didn’t really believe in labels or conventional lives.  For a while, at the Canterbury, there was even a frisky, all-female club- or gang (a la West Side Story) called the Piranhas. They were rumored to be a bunch of dykes, but were more like raunchy party girls, out for a good time and outrageous fun…. and sex with anyone cute who presented themselves. All of us were infinitely unemployable, and we had to do something with our time, so we drank a lot, had tons of casual sex, formed bands, made Xeroxed fanzines, and drank and fucked some more. 

Everything trendy in New York or especially in London had a huge influence on us, so when English punks started getting into Teddy Boy culture, listening to American roots music, wearing drape coats, suede Brothel Creeper shoes and voluminous poodle skirts, we all followed suit. It was only a matter of time until it was de rigueur to have a rockabilly paramour.

 Always a step ahead of the crowd, The Minx and I swooped in and got the pick of the litter before any other punkettes got hip to the scene. Our boyfriends had migrated from London, via New York’s Lower East Side, and were in the hottest- and at that point, only   rockabilly band to hit the US, making all the girls in the audience swoon the way the chicks did in those ancient newsreels about “The Devil’s Music”.

 It was a novelty to stand at the mouth of the stage and see handsome guys in suits and string ties crooning love songs. Much better that standing safely away from a roiling mosh pit full of boozed-up jocks slam dancing, or watching pasty-skinned, pimply guys covered in spit and beer screaming out one-chord songs about war and The Government … with fake English accents. Rockabilly was sexy. It was about being horny, not being on The Dole.   Punk chicks by the dozen were abandoning their Converse high tops in favor of saddle shoes, trading in their Dead Kennedys' T-shirts for bullet bras and tight cashmere sweaters, all to catch the eye of these cool hepcats.

 My Cockney boyfriend Levi was a bona fide English Ted, and Dean, his drummer, whom The Minx was seeing, originally hailed from Kentucky, giving him even more rockabilly cred.  He had a bleached blonde pompadour and a sleepy, Eddie Cochran smile.  Our boys were in the band that was the toast of the town. We were madly in love with them, and the envy of every girl who hadn’t already been growing her spiky hair out long enough to make a ponytail.

 

Ray Campi & The Rockabilly Rebels, tearing it up at The Palomino

 So there The Minx and I were at The Pal, already tipsy and excited because our hepcat beaux were opening for Ray Campi And The Rockabilly Rebels. Stand-up bassist Ray Campi was a living legend, a Texan who’d been at it since the early Fifties. His singer, Colin Winski, was tall and loose-hipped, with big sideburns and a cool yelping wail. Jerry Sikorski, the lead guitarist, looked like a cross between slightly wall-eyed, bleached blond teddy bear and blank-faced Barney Rubble in the Flintstones… but he could do back-flips and summersaults with his axe strapped on, not missing a note. Our guys were duly impressed.

 Of course there was an after-party, and The Minx and I steeled ourselves for the inevitable: hours of the guys spinning rare 45’s and one-upmanship over who knew more facts about the obscure one-hit-wonders who were probably fat, old, John Deere cap-wearin’ rednecks pumping gas in rural Arkansas by now.  But, dutiful girlfriends that we were, we tagged along anyway.

The party was at Jerry Sikorski’s place, a neatly kept Post WWII ranch house in the depths of San Fernando Valley tract-house suburbia… where he still lived with his parents. They happened to be gone for the weekend, he said enthusiastically, so it would be possible for the guys to jam together. The Minx and I could barely help rolling our eyes. These post-gig after parties had become a monotonous routine for our punkette souls, even though we wanted to be “good” girlfriends. It was hard to tell what was a worse fate: standing around listening to the fraternity of drunken Sun Records wannabees warbling out Gene Vincent hits, or sitting there unable to get a word in edgewise while they played the entire collected works of Bill Haley and The Comets- or their offshoot band The Jodimars- on scratchy 78’s, while everyone argued passionately about the bass-line.

 The Sikorski house was comfy, homey and cluttered. Hand-crocheted afghans draped the couch; a pile of Family Circles was stacked neatly on the oversized television set. The super-sized fridge was full of beer, and things brightened up considerably when Colin passed a joint around while everyone plugged in mics and amps.

 Bored already, I wandered through the house, impressed by the rampant normalcy, so inviting after staying at series of punk crash pads where the main source of nutrition was ketchup and mustard stolen from fast food joints. In the bathroom, I admired the ceramic angelfish figurines floating up the wall with morbid fascination. The Minx sauntered in, her crinolines swishing. I took a sip of the cocktail she offered, while re-applying my Revlon “Cherries In The Snow” lipstick. It was the perfect sex-kitten shade - the ultimate in ‘50s glamour.  I had recently switched from using the punk lipstick of choice:  Artmatic’s Black Orchid, which was only forty-nine cents at Woolworth’s. It was a deep, matte burgundy…suitable for extras in Night Of The Living Dead, Puerto Rican drag queens or those endless Canterbury parties.

The Minx powdered her nose and feigned a yawn as I lit a cigarette. In the den, our boys were murdering The Johnny Burnette Trio’s “Butterfingers.”

Together we inspected the master bedroom. The double bed had a golden vinyl headboard and a quilted yellow-ochre satin spread. A pair of bifocal reading glasses and a dog-eared Reader’s Digest sat on the bedside table.  I flopped onto the bed to adjust the seams of my hose, and The Minx sat down next to me.

Glancing down at my black fishnets which would’ve been much more appropriate for The Rocky Horror Show or a spread in a late 1950’s pulp detective magazine, suddenly everything became clear to me: all this rockabilly stuff was wearing thin. While the music was great, the teen idol stuff only went so far. Sure, our guys sang about back-seat, drive-in-movie sex and burnin’ desires, but all they ever wanted to do in real life was have a couple of beers and boast about the rare records they’d found at swap meets and junk stores. The biggest drag was that they were constantly telling you not to mess up their hair, even during sex. Carefully coifed into brand new “Rebel Without A Cause” DA’s and sculpted with Murray’s Pomade, the rockabillies would spend hours hogging your bathroom mirror in displays of vanity that would’ve been off-putting even to Little Richard.

 The punk guys, I recalled with new-found nostalgia, would let you dye their hair green, dripping Krazy Kolor all over their leathers and the bathroom floor. They’d allow you put make-up on them and would dress up in your underwear, dancing around to Donna Summer disco songs.  They wanted to get wasted on hallucinogenics and have sex up against a dumpster in an alley…which might not have been the height of romance, but was far more exciting than listening to a bunch of guys in sharkskin suits jabbering away all night about Carl Perkins and Ersel Hickey.

 The Minx and I, it occurred to me, were just as trapped as real 1950’s women.

 It was only through obligation and loyalty that we found ourselves listening to endless sermons about the early days of Sun Records, dressed in our little Peter Pan-collared blouses, playing Suzi Homemaker, Donna Reed, and June Cleaver rolled into one. On the outside, we appeared to be Atomic Age arm-candy. Inside, we were both secretly pining away for some good old-fashioned debauchery.  We didn’t want to be prettyprettypretty Peggy Sue, or the virginal Deborah Padgett, Elvis’ love interest in the movie “Loving You”. 

 What we really wanted was to be was Priscilla Presley after Elvis turned her into a hooker-looking version of “The Bride Of Frankenstein”, with gobs of black eyeliner, wearing Bob Mackie gowns and drinking champagne while The King got wasted on Quaaludes and Dilaudid and shot out television sets in a Vegas penthouse suite.

For weeks, our old punk rock selves were coming back to re-claim our surrendered power and individuality. Slowly but surely, subversive black fishnet hose and garters started replacing our bobby sox. Ticking like teenage time bombs, our latent desire for something more decadent was coming to a head.

  The Minx reached up to my face and gently wiped away a lipstick smudge. The next thing I knew, we were kissing.

It was tentative for a moment, but got increasingly wild and passionate. Coming up for air, we shared a brief, charged glance. I reached across her to the lamp on the nightstand and switched it off; we resumed kissing. I gently pushed her down onto the bed, and, as they say in romance novels, she yielded to me. We writhed around, breathless. Her lips were pillowy; I tasted our recently applied lipstick. She kissed in a languid, leisurely way, like a courtesan in a harem. She tasted like a divine mixture of cinnamon gum, cigarettes and vodka. Running her hands through my hair, her  ‘50’s crystal  “grandma” necklace clattered against my teeth as I covered her neck with a flurry of love bites.  My head was spinning from a combination of cocktails and lust.

Suddenly The Minx sat up, grabbed my face, and whispered urgently,

 “I’ve fantasized about this for so long!”

Dumbfounded for a moment, almost expecting her to say she was joking, I stuttered,

“Me, too!”

“This has been a dream of mine,” she said, as she rolled over on top of me, started undressing me slowly.

 I felt goose bumps covering my entire body as her hands slid up my thighs, lightly snapping the elastic of my vintage garter belt.

 We fooled around for a long time, our purses, petticoats and pumps littering the floor. We squirmed our way through the guys doing Billy Lee Riley’s “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll”, Jack Scott’s  “The Way I Walk”, Warren Smith’s “Ubangi Stomp” and – how utterly appropriate- Buddy Holly’s nasty jump blues song about a cheating woman, “Annie’s Been Working On The Midnight Shift”.

 It was not only completely thrilling to be with her- we were both feeling an illicit, delicious charge- having sex on a pristine bed, our friend’s parent’s bed, in a suburban ranch house, knowing that our unsuspecting boyfriends were in the very next room, completely oblivious to what we were doing. It was fabulous, wanton, and dirty as can be.

Finally, we both felt that we’d been AWOL for too long. I could hear my boyfriend and Colin belting out “Wake Up, Little Susie” by the Everly Brothers, so we took that as a call for reveille. Giggling and conspiratorial, we buckled up our push-up, bullet-shaped brassieres and hit the bathroom to comb our hair and fix our smudged lipstick.

The guys barely noticed us as we waltzed into the living room, asking like perky Eisenhower-era housewives if anyone wanted a cocktail. It was as though during our secret encounter we’d slid into a private Twilight Zone of teenage lust… and our boyfriends had no idea they’d provided the soundtrack!

###

 Like this and want to read more?
 You can purchase "Escape From Houdini Mountain"  by Pleasant Gehman with 26 similar true stories
 here:  http://www.princessfarhana.com/book_houdini.htm