TEDDY,
THE BOHEMIAN KING,
Or
Why I Lived Out the Sexual Revolution in a Basement
by
Nancy Ava Miller, M.Ed.
The following article is an excerpt from For Love and Money: Why I
Dominate Men, the autobiography of Nancy Ava Miller. Nancy leads support
groups for men and women interested in dominant-submissive erotica.
From my earliest high school days, even then I hung-out along New York
Avenue in DC, and at the beatnik coffee shop at 10th and K, N.W.
The coffee house went by several different names at various times:
Coffee and Confusion
The White Way
Lute and Lyre
The Crow's Toe
The Blue Sparrow
The place was rumored to be an opium haven or a marijuana den (back
before drugs were fashionable—in white middle class society, at any rate). But I patronized the Crow's
Toe—as it was then labeled—because of its
eccentric atmosphere: the bearded
men who peered from beyond sunglasses to read Edgar Allen Poe while perched on
some high stool; the eerie flow of jazz that emanated from the lopsided stage
cramped with piano, bass, vibes, and drums; the lithe and long-haired women
hunched in corners, studying papers by candlelight, looking unapproachable and
anorexic.
"The Crow's Toe is the place to go," the menu declared,
"and your host: Teddy Porterchinko, the Bohemian King!"
The owner of the coffee house always occupied a long table near the
kitchen door. Teddy Porterchinko—fat
and unsmiling, face as inscrutable as a round, black Buddha. No one joined him as he gazed straight ahead, unmoving,
yet—I suspect—keeping a keen eye upon the establishment. His establishment.
It was uncommon! Uncanny! Unpopular! A Negro
Proprietor? It was almost unheard
of back then, prior to the Civil Rights Act of '64. But, indeed, Teddy
Porterchinko—circa 1963—owned and operated the
Crow's Toe (a.k.a. Coffee and Confusion, The White Way, Lute and Lyre, and The
Blue Sparrow).
Later, when he changed the name of the place to Blue Sparrow, I
waitressed for Teddy, had an affair with him, in fact. I discovered then that all those acclaims smeared on the Ladies' Room
wall were, in fact, penciled there or painted there or lipsticked there by Teddy
himself:
"Teddy is the best!"
"Teddy knows how..."
"I love Teddy's tongue."
But circa 1963, that big black Buddha Teddy did not captivate my
attention, although I sometimes wished he'd throw me a curt nod of recognition,
the way he did with certain others. Surely
that would elevate my status at the coffee house...? Surely that would raise my own self-image...? Teddy
Porterchinko, however, showed no interest in
me—a chubby, pimply,
17-year-old girl who, each Saturday night, ordered hot chocolate and sipped it
slowly at a coffee house table, elbow-to-elbow with other kids beneath a too low
ceiling where smoke gathered near murky bulbs.
Then it was 1968—five years later. I was waitressing at the coffee house and had just dropped all that
weight, plummeting from 200 lbs. into a skinny creature who everyone agreed had
"great legs!" The mini
skirt era had struck, and I wore dresses an inch or two below my crotch. For the first time, men whistled my way, men flirted,
men—in droves—wanted me. Teddy wanted me,
too.
I resisted for a while. After
all, Teddy lived with another woman. He
even had a little baby—his and Lilly's. But
Teddy insisted. He promised love,
devotion. The term "sexual
harassment" had not yet sprung into everyday jargon then. Finally, Lilly—an unstable, fly-off-the-handle
sort—landed in a mental
institution. Attempted suicide. And thus began my fling with Teddy
Porterchinko.
The first night of our affair, he led me to the basement, down a rickety
staircase—steep and skinny, almost like a ladder. He took off all my clothing, and situated me on an upholstered table; it
resembled a doctor's examination table.
"Spread your legs," he said, and then aimed a floodlight at my
cunt. It was the only light in the
basement. My cunt was spotlighted, highlighted—the most important cunt in the world, the most important thing in
"Do we have to have that lamp on, Teddy?" I asked.
He didn't answer, but shed his jeans and a dashiki, no doubt handcrafted
in Mexico. His black skin glistened in the eerie glow of the floodlamp. His dick sprouted like a nubby pencil beneath his round Buddha belly. I thought: "Aren't
black men supposed to have huge schlongs?" I averted my eyes, shut them tight. Was this really happening?
He approached my open legs—which apparently were not open enough, since
he spread them wider still—and bent and nibbled at my hole and clit and ass. I tried to draw my knees
together—embarrassed as I was by the spotlight—but he spread me even further, so I stopped struggling and when he
lifted his fat little hands to my breasts and squeezed the hardening nipples, I
suddenly found myself involuntarily opening my cunt further and further and
moving rhythmically against his mouth.
"Yeah, baby," Teddy moaned. "Do it. Move that ass
baby. You love it, don't you baby? You love Teddy."
"Oh, yes!" I agreed. "I
love Teddy!"
He removed a hand from my tit and started caressing my ass crack as he
continued to nibble my pussy. My
crotch was slimy—wet with goo that leaked upon the upholstery. Cunt smells floated in the humid basement air. Teddy's fingers massaged my asshole and then entered and moved in and
out, in and out. I rocked to get
his fingers deeper up my rectum, rocked against his flittering tongue.
"Go, baby! Go!"
Teddy urged.
At some point, however, he stepped away from the table, leaving me
panting, eager. I heard him
rummaging in the dark, beyond the hoop of light. Finally he returned. Finally! He inserted himself inside me. But
it seemed his dick had grown—longer, thicker, harder, and even blacker, if the
quick glimpse I just caught could be trusted. What
happened to the shriveled pencil-like appendage? He now pumped away with a cock too cold, too unbending. Periodically, he stopped to adjust something at his
waist—a belt or
harness, it looked like. Jesus, my
insides felt split apart by some giant...what? A giant dildo. Suddenly it
hit: Shit! It was a dildo!!!
The sexual revolution was just dawning. Make love, not war. Free
love. Love child. Open love. Open marriage. Open cunt.
Film footage from Woodstock revealed young people romping nude through
high weeds and splashing nude in cool ponds. John and Yoko appeared nude—frontal views and clinging to one
another—on the cover of the "Two Virgins" LP. (The album with its controversial photo was quickly banned and pulled off
store shelves.) Nude encounter
groups were springing up everywhere, though mostly, of course, in California.
The world was changing, but I had yet to don my peace sign or a necklace
made of daisies. I was still
encumbered by a 50's mentality: "Nice
girls don't..." Bad enough I
was stretched upon a vinyl table with a 500 watt bulb aimed at my cunt. Bad enough my boss, some sweaty black guy I hardly
knew—Teddy, the
Bohemian King—now hovered above me with his nose still wet from pussy juice and
his fingers sticky with whatever substance lined my asshole. Bad enough. But a dildo? Things definitely had gone too far.
Nevertheless, the affair with Teddy continued. He claimed love, talked marriage.
"Baby, we'll run off to Mexico," he fantasized, a touch of
accent in his voice. He always
emphasized he was not American Negro, but from somewhere like Jamaica, as
if Jamaica placed him a step or two above his Afro-American brethren. "We'll make lots of babies," he said.
Over and over, I assured Teddy of my love. Yet as I waitressed, short-ordered, or took the money from the customers
to punch into the cash register, I never thought of Teddy the human being—the
inner man, the spiritual self, his intellectual side. I only waited for closing time, when he would grab me by the hand and
pull me towards the cellar. He'd
strip me, lift me to the table. If
he planned to fuck, he'd separate my legs and squirt Emko contraceptive foam up
my hole—two doses for good measure: no
babies! (Apparently, the baby
scenario applied only to Mexico.) The
foam burned and felt hot under the glow of flood light. But usually he'd skip the foam. Instead, he preferred to lick me, to insert fingers into my various
orifices, to suck and bite my breasts and nipples while toying with my clit.
He called me his "woman," his "ol’ lady.” He spoke to only a few people in the coffee house, mostly to the
"spade cats" or "spade chicks." (For Teddy, all Blacks fit
into one category or the other). To
those he did address, he made it clear: My
cunt belonged to Teddy; my cunt dripped for Teddy; I twitched each night on a
tabletop for Teddy—naked and open. Indeed,
every moment at the coffee house ticked towards the basement where once again, I
would lie beneath the spotlight. Nothing else seemed important. Till then, till the basement, the hours droned on in a languid haze. I was reminded of the beginning of a poem I once scratched out during a
dull biology class in high school:
Here I sit and here I wait
And yet I'll never know
Why while waiting it always seems
The hours pass so slow.
Those humid summer nights in DC—the air produced a steady stream of
sweat upon my skin. On Thursdays,
the coffee house was dead. The
musicians played anyway, but no one read poetry; the poetry freaks only showed
up weekends—if they appeared at all. The
year: 1968. Beatnicks—those ragged intellectuals, those rebellious souls—lovers of
Poe and the verse of Ginsberg or Corso—beatniks by now had faded into history
books, leaving behind hippies—the nuevo beat generation which cared not for
poetry.
One dull Thursday, a handful of "spade cats" blew jazz on the
wooden stage—a strain of flute and bass that streamed out the front door of the
coffee house and mingled with the ebb and flow of traffic on 10th Street—blended with the breath of accelerators and the honking horns, merged
with the whine of jets as they floated toward National Airport. I sat on the second step leading down into the coffee house. I smoked Marlboros and sipped lemonade. The
jazz—smoky, too, in its own way—filtered from the stage; it
feathered out into the night, music foggy and ethereal, hard to pinpoint, a
conversation between instruments that provided mood but not definition to the
moment. I watched the cars whoosh
softly southward on 10th Street. I
watched the sky canopied with haze or smog or clouds. And then I noticed: Two
feet away, a rat crouched motionless, looking directly at me. The creature was dark brown and battered, its coat unkempt, missing in
spots. It's eyes: red. Or where they? We remained, staring at one another—how long? Five minutes? Ten? I felt a
kinship, as if this rat and I were, say, cousins, unified physically and
spiritually. I knew it wouldn't
attack, fangs gleaming like some crazed remnant of the plague era, not this rat! I almost spoke a hundred times. But
what does one say to a rat? "Hello,
Rat..." "How are you,
Rat?" "What's it like to
be a rat on 10th Street? Do you
hide amongst the garbage cans?"
I stood up. The rodent
flinched slightly. I gave a gentle wave—the slightest hand flicker—hoping I was not observed by any human being;
then I pirouetted and bounced into the coffee house two steps at a time.
As usual, Teddy sat unsmiling by the kitchen door, face half-hidden by
lenses blacker even than his skin. I
checked the clock. An hour to go
until closing. But things were
slow. Maybe Teddy would lock up
early?
The memory of the rat was just that now—a memory, threading off towards
oblivion, like the low moan of a jazz bass. Reality—concrete and pulsating—would arrive in one hour on the table in
the basement. Sad to contemplate: For ten minutes of a summer night I felt greater camaraderie
with a rodent than I'd ever known with Teddy Porterchinko.
EPILOGUE
By the early 1970's, the whole flavor of DC had changed, an inevitable
process. The row of bars on New York Avenue west of Trail ways had gone
to sleaze; drunks slept (or peed) in archways along the strip, and young men
roamed in packs making loud comments to pedestrians or—worse—grabbing
pocketbooks. Fourteenth Street a
few blocks over—where my dad once managed the Trans Lux Book Shop (new books,
not used)—now boasted a line-up of girlie shows and "adult" arcades,
accompanied by the usual flickers of neon, gaudy lights of crimson and blue
reflecting dully in puddles when it rained. Further south on 14th, whores in hot pants strolled and beckoned, bright
make-up resembling something from "Masque of the Red Death." The famous tattoo artist, Carl Nightingale, had long since boarded up his
studio on 11th Street; as a kid I would drop-in and watch big-eyed from behind a
screen as Nightingale applied needles and dye to the arms and chests of young
men, wiping away blood as he worked.
And by the early 1970's, a gaping vacuity marked the corner of 10th and
K, N.W. Teddy Porterchinko, the Bohemian King, now short-ordered
uptown for minimum wage in someone else's restaurant. The beatnik coffee house had disappeared, demolished shortly after Dr.
King's death when black people rioted in Washington—and burned and looted—and
the National Guard barricaded the city like ancient East Berlin. Coffee and Confusion, The White Way, Lute and Lyre, The Crow's Toe, The
Blue Sparrow—gone for good. Torn
down and replaced by...nothing. By
an empty lot slivered with bottles, inhabited at night by rats scampering 'round
its borders.
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