Cobra woman, p.1
Cobra Woman, page 1
COBRA WOMAN
a tale of sexual obsession
by Len Levinson
Cobra Woman
Copyright© 2019 Len Levinson
Cover Design Livia Reasoner
Rough Edges Press
www.roughedgespress.com
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
To Francesca, Diana, Deborah, Ruben and Lizzie
and especially to Nirania
with thanks to Bill and Elizabeth
I couldn’t have done it without you
Can a man take fire to his bosom
and his clothes not be burned?
Proverbs 6:27
CHAPTER ONE
New York City
October 19, 1984
7:18pm
Long, lanky Sam Wishnefsky age 26 strolled up Broadway in the Seventies, on his way to a TGIF party. He'd been invited by a Costa Rican-American lawyer named Roberto whom Sam had met in a midtown bar, who said it would be a "blast" with lots of "far out women”, but Sam expected nothing more than the usual dizzy West Side scene, which was fine with him.
Clad in black, double-breasted, worsted wool topcoat, white silk scarf and polished Florsheims, he cruised past sparkling eateries recommended by New York magazine, quaint bookstores offering extensive poetry sections, Beluga Caviar on sale at Zabar's, and numerous other urbanized gentlefolk like himself navigating amid ever-present underclass individuals illuminated by streetlamps and store lights gleaming through plate glass windows.
In 1984 no Manhattanite could escape the utterly wretched underclass limping, imploring, urinating against buildings, sleeping on sidewalks, reminding Sam of his worst nightmare, sinking back to the lower depths from which he'd sprung.
Although Sam looked like a hip, sophisticated New Yorker, possibly raised on West End Avenue or Forest Hills, scion of a middle-class Jewish family, his father perhaps a distinguished dentist, his mother possibly a high school English teacher, in reality Sam grew up in a rackety wooden tenement near the polluted Acushnet River in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the old whaling city of Moby Dick fame.
His Jewish mother had sold ladies clothes at a department store, and died when he was four. His still-living Jewish father happened to be an aging, alcoholic, disabled World War Two veteran and retired park policeman for the commonwealth, now residing in the psychiatric ward of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Providence Rhode Island, an item studiously omitted by Sam in conversations with colleagues and acquaintances. Since arriving in the Big Apple four years ago, Sam had retailed a variety of distortions concerning his origins, even confusing himself at times.
How could a poor motherless kid raised by a certified public lunatic in a decaying lopsided tenement two blocks from rusting fishing boats moored in the smelly Acushnet River—end up on glittering Broadway?
Thanks to mountainous, still-unpaid student loans and part-time employment as campus janitor, ambitious young Sam Wishnefsky acquired a B.A. in Social Science from Southeastern Massachusetts University. Recruited by his present Manhattan-based employer while in college, he now, four years after graduation, was a direct-mail advertising copywriter residing in a rent-stabilized basement pad in the West Village, having blended smoothly into the vast miasma of neurotic New Yorkers.
On 83rd Street near Riverside Drive he entered a Gothic Revival lobby reminiscent of a chapel in Saint John the Divine cathedral. An ornately-carved wooden elevator carried him to the penthouse suite. Sliding doors opened on a carpeted, chandeliered hall.
Hardpounding Latin jazz struck him like palpable force. Through an open door, crowds of ladies and gentlemen representing all possible races and sexual orientations could be seen, attired like Sam in corporate uniforms, talking, laughing, kissing and becoming totally wasted together.
Sam entered the capacious high-ceilinged apartment. Gigantic abstract oils adorned all walls, reminding him of sublime incomprehensibility at the current Whitney Museum Biennial. He located the designated coat room, added his to the pile on the brass bed, then checked himself in the mirror atop the art deco dresser.
Again he disapproved of his nose which he considered much too huge. Again he contemplated a nose job. And he could use a shave. Most distressingly, his short black hair parted on the left appeared thinner every day. But his tailor-altered knockoff Brooks Brothers suit from Lurkey's of Orchard Street contributed a touch of elegance to his slim, ascetic figure.
He returned to the parlor and searched for Roberto. A male partygoer confided that the lawyer and a certain blonde lady had disappeared into a bedroom earlier, locked the door, not seen since. Unfazed, Sam proceeded to the kitchen, added his quart of vodka to bottles beside the toaster, poured a double vodka-tonic, returned to the living room and assumed a pose that he hoped appeared interesting, while gazing at chicks dancing to salsa in the middle of the floor.
Barefooted, they bent knees, snapped fingers and wagged pretty fannies. They were clever young babes at the beginnings their careers, female mirror images of himself, stressed by corporate America daytime and pursuing urban delight in hyperdrive after sundown. They pranced before him like naughty little temptresses, and it troubled him to know they held such power over him.
It should be noted that Sam was no awkward Woody Allen nebbish constantly rejected by women. But he or his paramours always became disillusioned after a few days, weeks or months.
There'd been the Pan Am flight attendant who'd enjoyed reading Lady Chatterly's Lover during the act, and once performed fellatio upon him in a phone booth on Abington Square at three o'clock in the morning. But she suffered a major life crisis at least once per week, then ran off with a math teacher from Brooklyn.
There'd also been a certain ballerina who danced in the Joffrey troupe, and possessed an adorable, muscled body, perfect rhythm and two extremely paranoid, slobbering Afghan hounds who lived like convicts nearly twenty-four hours a day in her tiny, East Village studio. Sam had spent increasing time walking the unfortunate creatures, tired of dog drool on his clothes and ended the affair.
These and other amorous setbacks did not discourage or embitter him, or cause him to become hostile to women. His essential romantic nature never would permit such cowardly defensive mechanisms.
A psychologist might write into Sam's case record that he probably was more obsessed with females than the average Joe, having been traumatized at age four by mother's death. But he dealt with it rather well, or so he imagined. He didn't expect a magnificent beauty like Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Ali MacGraw or Faye Dunaway, just his own fairly good-lookin’ chick with a degree and a job who liked to dance and party it up.
Light-skinned women bopped with dark-skinned men and vice versa, faint cannabis vapors in the air, salsa music pulsating steadily. Certain snorts emanated from dark corners where tiny silver spoons dipped into white crystalline powder.
Sam scanned the crowd for a solitary female to hit upon, when someone handed him a doobie. Without hesitation he filled his lungs with cannabis smoke like any progressive New Yorker. Then he took a second big hit for good measure. Within 60 seconds, psychoactive alkaloids dripped into his bloodstream and invaded brain cells.
His high came on as a squad of caballeros in wide-shouldered suits spilled in his direction. He stepped backwards to make way, his eyes drawn to the stunning señorita they escorted. Her Moorish eyes gleamed in subdued lightning, lustrous coal black hair fell to leopard fur coat collar; she wore golden earrings and looked like a flamenco dancer on her night off.
Many fine chicks had been invited to the party but Sam couldn’t remove his stoned searchlights from this particular number, approximately five-feet-eight in heels, smooth coffee and cream complexion, slightly retroussé nose, enigmatically sensuous lips, around his age, possibly descended from Castilian nobility?
A caballero in possible Georgio Armani black suit helped remove her leopard coat, uncovering dancer anatomy in tight black minidress, gold chain necklace. She perused the room calmly, like a jungle cat searching for prey. Her twin lasers clicked on Sam, lingered momentarily, then passed on.
She sashayed toward another room, accompanied by gauchos jostling to catch her attention. They disappeared behind merrymakers gamboling tempestuously in the middle of the parlor, flinging their hands about.
Pursuing his flamenco objective, Secret Agent X-9 got passed another doobie. After toking deeply, he handed it to the nearest partygoer, a sloe-eyed, nineteen-ish, Nubian-looking chick. On another evening Sam definitely would attempt conversation, but was hot on the spoor of alternate eroticisms whose parameters he didn't yet comprehend.
He stalked the possible flamenco dancer to a den larger than his entire apartment, bookcases lining walls. Behind incense and cigarette smoke she sat on a white leather sofa, flanked by Latin American guardsmen with whom she conversed.
Blurred images exploded in deep recesses of Sam's drugged cerebellum. Jagged electrical impulses zanged across his occipital lobe. Wow—this smoke is more potent than I thought!
Foggy formations burbled from obscure cranial convolutions. A deep strata cracked like tectonic plates beneath the Mariana Trench. He hallucinated himself eight years old, sitting before the boob tube in New Bedford, gazing longingly at a red saronged movie star dancing before a row of palm trees on a tropical island.
Dulled synapses reconnected, the trapdoor of memory opened wide, and his ever-probing mind dredged up Cobra Woman, a Technicolor South Seas extravaganza filmed on a Hollywood back lot, starring 1940s movie star Maria Montez.
Now Sam understood why the seductress on the far side of the room affected him so profoundly. She resembled Maria Montez, his first great love. Little Sammy had seen all Maria Montez's movies on late nite tv, she'd haunted his youthful, eroticized dreams, but around age 14 he became attracted to real live chicks, allowing Maria Montez to subside into the slush pile of memory, along with arcane Red Sox statistics.
But now miraculously she just reincarnated on Manhattan's West Side!
He ran tongue over teeth, removing traces of vodka-tonic, then adjusted his necktie striped in the pattern of Her Majesty's Own 21st Light Dragoons, which enabled him to feel like Lord Portalington, commander of the 21st Light at Waterloo, who'd led the victory charge that crashed through Napoleon's 15th Legion Hussars, helping turn the tide of battle as Sam hoped to turn the head of Maria Montez.
Lord Portalington advanced steadfastly toward the movie star. Easily passing her Latino bodyguard, who courteously made way, he halted before her radiance, gazed into swirling magnetic orbs and spoke his carefully-formulated opening line. "Care to dance?"
Perhaps his pallid, Talmudic form, so divergent from her courtiers’ Latino certainties, quite disarmed her and his very unlikeliness broke through the mind of Maria Montez. Her lips parted slightly and he expected a smooth Spanish brushoff but instead she said whimsically, "Hokay."
A wave of tropical fragrance accompanied her as she arose. The hand of fate snapped a bolero into the tape deck. He touched the Cobra Woman’s fingers, placed an arm around her waist, felt shapely configuration beneath silky fabric, her bodice cut into a V; an artery hammered his throat.
They glided smoothly among the dancers, MGM cameras hummed, Klieg lights illuminated them, massive electrical cables formed their perimeter and he was starring with Maria Montez; his life had become a movie!
He asked, "What's your name?"
"Gabriella. You?"
"Sam."
"Where did you learn to dance so good, Sam?”
"Parties like this and discos and sometimes I bop around my apartment. It's a basic two-step that I use for everything."
She smiled, nearly paralyzing him. All he could think of was the old reliable, "You from around here?"
"I am from Miami but I have come to New York for a bacation. I was getting bored down there—you know how it is.”
Sam didn't know how it was or anything else about this woman or where she came from. She was totally new, more feline than human, with long, blood-colored claws. He held her more closely and she didn't resist as they swooped away, whirling across the floor.
How can this be? he asked himself. I came to a random TGIF party and here I am boleroing with my most intense childhood sexual hallucination! They swayed among the dancers, their cheeks touched; she was soft and warm as the tropics. Her movements sent thrills through him and his steps exceeded anything he'd attempted previously. When the song ended, he whispered into her ear, "Let's sit down."
Expressionless, she looked him over for five full seconds. “Hokay."
They found an unoccupied half of sofa. He had to say something, anything. All he could think of was, ”Are you from Spain?"
"No—Cooba, but I have live in Miami about four year."
"You're a dancer?"
"I used to be—sort of. I was a showgirl in the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach. Ever hear of it?"
"Everyone's heard of the Fontainebleau. Sounds like a fun job."
“Doing the same show night after night was not fun, but it was hokay sometimes, I guess."
"What d'ya do now?"
"My hosband send me money. We are spleet up now. I have two beautiful daughters. They are weeth my mother in Miami. Are you a lawyer like Roberto?"
"No, I'm in direct-mail advertising."
She appeared confused. "What is that?
"The advertisements that arrive in your mailbox? Well, I write the copy. How'd you get out of Cuba?"
She gesticulated with swanlike hands. ”My seester, mother, me and some other people builded a raft with wood from somebody's house, and the mast was somebody's tree, and the sail was somebody's sheet, but no one ever was a sailor and the mast broke off after about one hour and I do not know to this day how we was made it, I was never so ascared, but we was found by the Americano Coast Guard and end up in Miami."
This woman fought the very ocean itself, not knowing if she'd live or die, while the bravest thing I ever did was ride the subway at one a.m.. He scanned Asian eyes, Andalusian cheekbones, raspberry lips. "Why'd you leave Cuba? Was life really that bad there?"
She stared at him in astonishment that someone could ask such a stupid question. Then she sighed in resignation as if accepting widespread gringo ignorance. "It was worse than bad because the government wants to control your whole life. On every street there is somebody in charge. If you want to go to an especial school or get a better jop, you go through him. If he is your friend, you are all right but if not you are in big trouble. Well, we did not get along with the song-of-a-beetch so we jointed together with friends who also did not like the government and builded that raft."
This woman grew up in a Communist dictatorship while I talked politically-correct jive in college. She's an authentic person and I'm only a half-baked intellectual. “Have you become an American citizen yet?"
Again she appeared amazed by his question. “O’ course. You are a Jew?"
“Yes, but I don’t go to synagogues or anything like that. You’re Catholic?”
“Yes, but I don’t go to church anymores. You know—they say that Jews and Coobans are very similar.”
Sam couldn't visualize gefulte fish and comidas criollas resting comfortably side-by-side on a platter, but a great flowering of Jewish culture supposedly had occurred in pre-Inquisition Spain.
The Latin-American heavy brigade hovered in the background, hoping to catch her attention. Sam decided to make his main move before some other hound pounced. He enacted his best Clint Eastwood shrug. "It's kind of noisy here. Why don't we go someplace where we can talk?"
She studied him thoughtfully, lioness eyes seemingly penetrating his knockoff suit, even to the pockets of his knockoff Brooks Brothers soul. "I do not know you."
"We seem to have an affinity. What've you got to lose?"
She pointed a forefinger at him. "You better not get fresh."
"Of course not."
Opalescent almond diodes narrowed; she deliberated awhile longer. “Hokay."
They dug their coats out of the pile on the bed as moans and sighs emanated from the closet. After a few goodbyes the enchanted couple stepped blithely together into the vast unknown.
On the street, stately apartment towers basked in the effulgence of lamplight, casting sheens on puddles from recent brief rain. The pair headed toward Columbus Avenue, chilly Hudson River breezes whistling down alleys, blowing them into a mirrored cocktail lounge reflecting dramatic, noirish perspectives.
They sat at a small, circular table. He said, "You have fabulous eyes."
"Sometimes I dream I was a Chinese princessa." Then she became ill at ease as if realizing she'd said something foolish or ignorant.
He replied quickly, ”Perhaps you really were a Chinese princess. Our past lives speak to us in dreams according to Carl Jung."
"Who?"
"A Swiss psychiatrist who believed that dreams always tell the truth, but you've got to figure them out."
“My dreams are so loco—sometimes I think I am a little loco too."
"Who isn't a little loco? I'm probably the most loco person you’ll ever meet although I might seem normal at times."
She smiled again, revealing white even teeth almost certainly capped by a meticulous dentist. Then she asked, ”Are you from here in New York?"
