American Gigolo Redux

Entering the Port Authority at night after a day spent making calls and watching the stock market go down starting from March 2000, trying to master the art of persuasion by force of character, I was instantly attracted to the figure of a woman on the escalator proceeding to the bus gate, staring at her figure never was I so certain that I would take this woman to bed with me that very night, I wanted her to turn around so I could see if she was sexy, as I got close to her I saw that she was as Asian - I introduced myself and she told me I could call her Sunny, she was a Korean woman and, while I was initially disappointed that she was not Japanese, as i was more interested in Japanese women than Koreans, however I soon got over my initial hesitation about Koreans as this one was really attractive, she reminded me of Hitoko, a Japanese student who wore art print scarves like a model at the community college i attended just after graduating from high school, and i was also stimulated to find myself following in the footsteps of my idol Henry Miller, whose late-life love letters to an Asian woman were collected in the volume "Dear, Dear Brenda", which i perused in the New City library several years previously, in fact just after i learned to drive there myself - Sunny and I boarded the #190 bus bound for Rutherford and she would wind up accompanying me to my place on Union Avenue - first she asked me to sing the song "Girl" by The Beatles, my voice accompanying John Lennon's as a played the compact disc of "Rubber Soul" on my stereo in my apartment. I drove her home later that night, but we had several dates and traveled back to New York City together by bus -- "You look so western," I said to her and she replied, "I am the most western-looking of all Koreans." ========================= After graduating from Wake Forest University with a Master's in English, I returned to my parent's house on Woodlake Drive in Thiells, New York, which is in Rockland County, I went on several interviews for jobs that were advertised in the New York Times, Wall Street computers, business brokers, but my mother insisted that I find a job that offered a starting salary and health insurance, until third times the charm, I found out about a job at a place called American Newswire which was in the Harborside Financial Center in Jersey City NJ - my eyes being fucked up so bad, for a year and a half i took the NJ Transit train from Suffern NY to Hoboken NJ which traveled through many NJ towns from Ho-Ho-Kus to Secaucus (list them) - NJ appealed to me, I wanted to make it my home and move to Bergen County which, to me, was the seat of wealth and privilege and gave me access to a more metropolitan class of people than I saw in Rockland County. Actually, the commute was a killer, as I had to wake up at 9 AM to get ready and drive to Suffern, where I could only take the 11 AM (local) train at that time of day (there was no 12 PM train that left from Suffern), which made all the stops in New Jersey from Ho-Ho-Kus to Hoboken. After taking the PATH train from Hoboken to Jersey City, I arrived at the Newswire by 12 PM, already exhausted and hungry and an hour early for work! My hours were from 1 PM until 11 PM as part of the Implementation team at the technical headquarters of the Newswire service. I caught the last train out of Hoboken at 11:30 PM and would not get back to my parent's house until after midnight. ========================= I actually moved to Rutherford based on my interest in a woman who got on the train at Rutherford station. Helen also wore long dark skirts, reminiscent of Debra Mandlebaum, but she was not Semitic-looking. After I moved to Rutherford I met her at the train station and learned her name was Helen. We actually went for coffee, I was afraid to tell her I actually moved to Rutherford with the idea I could meet her and in fact she made an advance to me, saying "How is your love life?" but I was shy and did not respond positively, as this was too forward for me and I was embarrassed at how little money I made, only $37,000 a year - on one level, I was only attracted to women who tended to be on the prudish side, shocked when their sexuality revealed itself - couldn't decide if i liked women inexperienced or else actual full-fledged prostitutes that i might rescue from lives of depravity - on another level, the perhaps deeper truth is that while i was attracted to this woman, who appealed to me, something within me personally frowned on beginning a relationship with her woman because i felt like I was committing --not the same crime once again -- but a similar crime with the same type of woman twice, as i had previously been involved with a woman who was a visiting student from Budapest on a Fulbright scholarship - "And I'm only half-bright" she laughingly derided herself - but the perhaps deepest truth is that I believe in heaven and that I will at some time in the future, re-encounter all these women who will be angels with me in heaven. I believe that the women I met in my early years will see to it that my deeds are rewarded here on earth - As Zola tells us at the end of his novel, "The Masterpiece," the story of the doomed, artistically tormented Claude Lantier, genius must be chaste - I was always fascinated by a woman's choice of loves in their lives, I perused Lacan seeking to discover the working of female sexuality without satisfaction, Freud was a little better..... ============================ Like I said, I had small escapes with women in the year of two that I was living in NJ and working for American Newswire, I had one lover who claimed to be a member of the Kennedy clan, she claimed her name was Jennifer, but I looked through her things when she was in the bathroom and she didn't even have an I.D. She even left an address for me, listing her place of residence as Kennebunkport Maine, but I was not so gullible as to fall for that. However limited my success with the opposite sex was at that time when I was a single man on the prowl for women, it was not until I joined an internet dating service where your profile would be skimmed by interested members of the opposite sex like personal ads in the newspapers, that I had more consistent luck meeting women. When I first joined this internet service of web-based personal advertisements, I positively salivated at the thought of meeting the women that were features on the website. I wrote to as many women as possible, I was a believer in love by chance. ========================= The first women who wrote back to me was Judy Frank. I remember as it were yesterday, she said, "Andrew, you're so mature for a 33 year-old!" We made plans to meet: I was to pick her up at her apartment near Columbia University. She was a Jewish woman who had just turned 50 and was as beautiful as only Jewish women of that age can be. She was an opera singer who loved her dog, Max, with a passion. He was a German Shepherd and Rottweiler mix and, frankly, he was a little bit too much for her to handle. One time he bit me and, examining my hand, she screamed at him, "YOU BROKE THE SKIN!" She glowered at the dog, continuing her conversation, more with Max than with me, who looked at me with disfavor. She wondered whether she would be able to survive a tsunami in Manhattan, one particularly devastating tsunami had just struck Indonesia recently and hundreds if not thousands were drowned and missing and this had prompted the creation of early warning systems around the world. ======================== One time Judy Frank, after she had lost Max, asked me if we get our pets back in the afterlife. "You've been to the other side," she said, looking at me, "YOU know." As she said this, she was staring directly at me. I told her it was so, that we did get our pets back in the afterlife, which appeared to comfort her. That gives you a good impression of how sweet she really was. I had told her about my close encounter with death, being given the last rites etc. and, now that I think about it, I wonder how frequently women have supposed me to be capable of vouchsafing metaphysical information I do not know (write it out) ======================== In the end I wound up setting Judy Frank up with George Goodwin, who ran an import/export business on 33rd St., but I did not tell him not to eat the veal parmigiana. At this point I was hopelessly in love with Judy, I was even in tears as I read as she typed out the message, "I'll fuck him after coffee" on the chat screen. ========================= An encounter with a woman named Helene in Princeton NJ left me wondering if I could be a father to a perspicacious child, like the one Tom Cruise's character encounters in Jerry McGuire - discrepancies in Piaget's theory of cognitive development, children want to understand everything, role-play, develop imaginary friends - with her, at least i could potentially have had conversations with John Nash regarding whether schizophrenia developed in the womb and transmitted to the child genetically, as she referred to him as "John."