The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz Read Online Free PDF Page B

the shivers that used to shoot down my spine when I looked at her. I know that everybody looks back at their first love with rose-colored glasses. But on some days, it still seems unreal, like something that I just imagined but never really experienced. Sex has never been so innocent for me since. It’s odd to think that there was a time when one girl might’ve been enough to make me happy, when all I wanted was to sit on the cold floor of a dark and abandoned school and count the pretend stars on the ceiling tiles.

My very first performance as the talking Statue of Liberty.

CATSKILLS-A-GO-GO
    Ken was giggling so loudly he was about to blow our cover.
    “Oh my God,” he sniggered. “I can’t believe we’re actually doing this.”
    “Will you shut up? They’re going to hear us.”
    Ken and I were hiding behind the desk in his office, peering over it like hunters on the prowl for a cartoon rabbit. We’d been waiting there for almost ten minutes, and there was still no sign of our dates.
    “Why are they taking so long?” Ken muttered. “The suspense is killing me.”
    “They’ll be here,” I assured him. “Just be patient.”
    The dates we were awaiting so eagerly were hardly our girlfriends. They were a pair of Borscht Bunnies whom we’d bedded the night before. “Borscht Bunnies” or “Bungalow Bunnies” were terms coined in the Catskills, meaning, “married women who love boinking younger guys.”
    Allow me to explain.
    Every summer, rich couples from Manhattan would drive up to the Catskills for the weekend, wining and dining at the best resorts that money could buy. On Monday, the husbands would return to the city (and, one could only assume, to their mistresses) while their wives stayed behind. They were lonely, armed with their husband’s credit cards, and ready to play. By “play” I mean, of course, have as much sex as possible with as many hot young boys as possible, which usually meant the resort’s staff of easily seduced waiters and busboys.
    Well, as luck would have it, on this particular summer in 1975, I just so happened to be a maître d’ at one of the poshest resorts in the Catskills: Gasthalter’s Paramount Hotel. The moment I spotted these two Borscht Bunnies in the Paramount dining room, flirting and drinking wine, I knew it was going to be a good night.
    I called my friend Ken, and we met up with the ladies for a few drinks after my shift. Several cocktails later, we invited them back to our room at the Flagler Hotel. There was just one thing we forgot to mention to them. It wasn’t actually the Flagler Hotel anymore. The Flagler had gone out of business years ago. It was now the Crystal Run School for the Mentally Challenged.
    A small technicality, really.
    Ken and I both worked at Crystal Run. Ken was the in-house psychologist, and I was teaching part time while I finished my master’s degree in special education at Queens College. * During the week, I taught Academics of Daily Living to children with learning and emotional disabilities. No, really. I showed them the proper way to brush their teeth. I took them to the local fire station and taught them about fighting fires. I took them on field trips to the bank and gave them each a quarter to open an account. I was actually pretty good at my job. There was a time when I believed it might be what I was destined to do with my life.
    Ken and I lived in the staff quarters on the top floor, which had many of the same furnishings from when it had been the Flagler Hotel. There were elegant rooms, an Olympic-size swimming pool, the works. So anyone visiting might reasonably think that it was a hotel.
    At three A . M ., the building was completely empty, so we had the entire grounds to ourselves. We took a dip in the pool before splitting off into pairs and retiring back to our respective rooms. Though my Borscht Bunny couldn’t have been more than forty-five, I’d never been with an older woman before, so it was a novelty to