Other Voices - Michelle

I'm originally from Bettendorf, the smallest of the Quad Cities in Iowa. My father was a druggist and my mother tried to make a living as a piano teacher. I was six when they divorced and for some reason I found myself living with my paternal grandparents. It wasn't until years later that I discovered the events that led to that, but by the time I did, it was irrelevant.
I was my parent's only child that I know of, but when you hear my story I'm sure you'll understand why I might be hedging on that topic. As a young teen I was very shy and introverted and didn't have many friends. My interests were in books and art. As a result, when what friends I had were having fun, I was absorbed in my studies. For sure, all work and no play made Michelle a dull girl, but it did make me the class valedictorian, and as a result, I was offered a full four year scholarship to attend DePaul University in Chicago.
Before I go there, let me tell you what I found out about my parents. Apparently I was a love child. I learned that my parents' wedding anniversary was in February of 1955, but I was born the following June and I didn't think I was five months premature. I learned my mother was an inveterate alcoholic and had left my father, and ran off with another man just about the time he got busted for selling amphetamines without a prescription. I guess the fact that he was serving time at Ft. Madison was one reason he couldn't take care of me. My grandparents were wonderful people and I owe them a great deal of gratitude. Unfortunately, both have now passed and I feel like I had no family left.
I enrolled in DePaul intending to study art. It was both a passion and an aptitude. While there, I continued to do well academically, but I was still too shy to attract much in the way of male interest. My body was developing into womanhood, but I had received precious little guidance in how to cope with the changes that were taking place.
What tends to be true of artists is doubly true of art students; we are doomed to starve. In order to eke out enough money to cover the things my scholarship didn't, I needed a job and the most common calling for women in my situation was to become a waitress. I was first employed part-time at the age of nineteen by a restaurant on Western Avenue. It wasn't the nicest section of Chicago, but it wasn't far from the University and truthfully it wasn't as bad as some people said it was.
While not germane to my story, a hundred years ago this very street was considered the edge of what was called the American Frontier. If you were east of Western Avenue, you were in Chicago. On the other side, Indian Country.
In my new employment, I honestly didn't know what to expect, but I found that I loved it. People actually came in and talked to me, just like I was a normal person. Soon, I recognized who the regulars were and we developed a familiar banter that I enjoyed immensely. Most of the time, the restaurant was your typical family eatery; except at lunchtime on Wednesdays.
We were located in a district where our lunchtime clientele were mostly men drawn from the small offices, factories and shops that abounded on Western Avenue. A special draw for these people was the "Wednesday Fashion Show." As you might expect the "fashion show," was simply a euphemism for a bunch of twentysomething young women to parade around in skimpy lingerie which did little to cover their naked tits underneath. Apparently, bras we're not "in fashion."
I had been told about the "fashion show," but the first time I actually witnessed it, my eyes dropped out of my sockets and rolled down my cheeks. By and large, the women were beautiful and they seemed to enjoy the effect that their semi-naked bodies were having on the customers. There was a strict 'no touch' rule and Jeff, the bartender, who was a former tackle for the Bears was there to make sure it was observed.
After the exposure of some number of weeks, I gradually became accustomed to the near nudity and my mind began to fantasize. Could I ever show my own body so provocatively to hundreds of strangers as the half dozen women who were recruited every Wednesday? My rational brain screamed no, but at night with one hand pinching my nipples and my other between my legs diddling my clit, I wasn't so sure. Sometimes I would talk to the girls and I found that they weren't so different from me. Many were students at Northwestern or Loyola of Chicago and a couple from my own DePaul. They told me that they made $250 for the two hours they worked and when I compared that to the $4 an hour that I was making, it didn't seem crazy after all.
When I turned twenty-one, I was allowed to work behind the bar, and soon Jeff was teaching me the fine art of mixology. I was a quick study, so in no time I became a full time bartender and was making three times the money I made as a simple waitress. If anything, the regulars talked more to the barkeep and over several months I lost almost all of the shyness that had plagued my social life for as long as I could remember.
It etimesgut escort was about this time that Tom walked into my life. I hadn't seen him before he showed up and ordered a beer. He was as shy as I had been and it took him three visits to say anything to me other than his drink order. One afternoon he was my only customer and we fell into an actual conversation. It turned out that he was doing something with computers at a nearby company. He had just moved to Chicago from Milwaukee and had originally had a scholarship to the University of Chicago, but had dropped out after one semester. His excuse? He said he knew more than the professors that were teaching Computer Science there, so rather than waste his time, he decided to get a job.
The company he worked for was engaged in a big project with IBM to rewrite one of the basic computer programming languages, FORTRAN. Tom was writing most of the code for what would be called FORTRAN 77 when it was released next year. As an art major, what I knew about computers and languages was absolutely zero, but I'd nod my head like I understood what Tom was talking about. This is an acquired skill of all bartenders. Eventually after his sixth visit, and after fifty hints from me, he finally built up the courage to ask me out on a date.
Tom's idea of a date was to just walk around Navy pier and get a couple of hot dogs. For sure, it was perhaps one of the more underwhelming dates in history, but there was something that made it impossible to stay mad at him. I got my first kiss on the second date and he built up his courage to cup my breast through a sweater on the third. Actually, if I was honest with myself, I had no room to complain. What girl waits until she's twenty one to go out on her first date?
With time, Tom began to lose some of his awkward shyness and we began to kiss passionately and his hands became a lot more curious. The breakthrough occurred in his apartment one evening when I assisted him in removing our clothes. I don't know if he'd ever seen a completely naked girl before, but I sure hadn't seen a completely naked man. I was pleasantly surprised. For a computer geek, Tom had a nice body and a very attractive penis that I was anxious to inspect. We made fumbling love that night and I lost my virginity and his as well. It was painful when he broke my hymen, and when I cried out in pain, he became so upset that he'd hurt me that I ended up consoling him as much as he was me. He didn't cum and neither did I, but it was a start.
About the time that our sputtering romance was beginning to turn serious, I got some bad medical news. After a routine pelvic exam, I learned that I had a tubo-ovarian abscess. It wasn't life threatening to me, but it was serious enough that a pregnancy had a better than fifty percent chance of resulting in birth defects. Every female, even if she vehemently denies it, is programmed by nature to want to have children, and I was no different. But with my own awkward childhood not very far in my rearview mirror, the prospect of raising a child with serious birth defects was too daunting for me to consider. I did discuss it with Tom, and even though no mention had been made by either of us about marriage, I wanted his input. We jointly agreed that I should have the surgery. Even though it was intrauterine, I was administered a general anesthetic. The procedure didn't prevent the production of eggs, so I would continue to have periods, but the eggs themselves would be infertile. Short of adoption, there would be no children in my future.
Even though it hadn't consciously crossed my mind, the fact that I was now unable to become pregnant resulted in a new found freedom from worry, and sex with Tom improved dramatically. I had my first orgasm and began to relish our time together. We experimented with oral sex and I found it, much to my surprise, immensely enjoyable. Tom improved as a lover by leaps and bounds and with it, he grew in confidence, not only in our bedroom, but in general.
Five weeks after I graduated from DePaul, we were married in a small ceremony in Milwaukee, but we decided to forego a honeymoon until we could afford one. I moved into his apartment off Madison and we were as happy as pigs in mud. I got a new job as a night bartender at the Gaslight Club on Rush Street and doubled my pay. The Gaslight Club was essentially an upscale piano bar that catered to businessmen and out of town visitors.The club was beautiful, in a gilded whorehouse sort of way, with long handsome bars and carved polished woodwork of dark mahogany. There was a plush cigar den and a wood-paneled dining room called The Library. Portraits hung in heavy gold frames on the red-flocked wallpapered walls. It billed itself as a "key club." What that meant was, if you didn't have a "key," you couldn't enter until you bought one for $50. In effect, it was a fancy one-time cover charge. Waitresses were scantily clad in a 1920's sort of way and each night they took part in the Gaslight Revue. etlik escort It was a dramatic change from the family atmosphere of the Western Ave. restaurant, but I liked it and it seemed to fit the new me.
A year later three events occurred that changed my life forever. The first was that I got a mysterious call about a potential job opportunity that was billed as exclusive with the potential of a dramatic increase in my salary. The second was that Tom was approached about working for the Department of Defense, but it would require a relocation to Washington D.C. but the last was the biggest of all; Tom told me that he had an incredible urge to watch me make love with other men.
Let's look at that. Tom cried when he told me and he wailed that he didn't understand it himself, but every time he fucked me, what really got him off was imagining that it was someone else between my legs and he was actually watching from afar. He was desperate to assure me that he loved me with all of his heart, and it would never be something he'd ask me to do if I didn't want it too. Of course I didn't want it. I loved my husband and I would never consider cheating. Tom never pushed, but his confession preyed on my mind.
As a woman, I knew that I could never totally understand why a man would be aroused by another man fucking his wife while he watched impotently. I pretended it was just a phase and that if I strived to be a better wife, it would pass. It didn't, and six months after he first bridged the subject, I told him if it was so important, that as an expression of my love for him, I would try to accede to his wish. We spent weeks discussing the ground rules, the most important of which was that the selection of a sexual partner would be mine alone.
The most obvious group from which I might choose was, of course, the patrons of the Gaslight Club where I worked. Every night I saw men that I knew were from out of town and I had already mentally decided that I wanted it to be someone that I'd likely never see again. Soon, I began to look at the men I served through a different prism. Would they be good in bed? I had a few criteria; My prospective partner needed to be married, from out of town, self confident without being a braggart, and desirably, handsome and in good shape. The last thing I considered was the size of his manhood, it simply didn't matter to me. I wasn't exactly sure how to bridge the subject, but I guessed I'd figure it out when the time came.

Two weeks later Craig sat down at the bar and ordered a Rum