Don Juan in Helsinki: 5

Hey to all again, I am Donho Likkanen. Today I am trying to remember when I first moved to New York City. Was it 1980? 1981? It was before the Internet was invented, so I really have no clear memory. First I moved to Stockholm to study design, then to Paris. That was in 1976. So, perhaps I bought the loft in 1981? I have refinanced it so many times, there must surely be bank records somewhere. It was after that I first met Cricket and she began obsessively phoning me (there was no texting then) and following me around everywhere. I cannot blame her for this behaviour, of course. or for being boring at sex. Perhaps I should have kept a complete photographic record of it, though, like Jim Haynes.

Damn you, Donho, you are saying now, just who the devil is this Jim Haynes? Why do you keep introducing new people into this story all the time?? We are getting bloody confused! Stick to the old peeps, LOL! OK, here is a link showing Jim with some of his collection of famous people he has videotaped over the years having sex: http://www.ivyparis.com/blogger/2005/08/atelier-a2-rue-de-la-tombe-issoire.html . Or you can Google him at his own website. I knew him in Paris through a former lover I met outside the Thomas Cook's office in Paris, just down the street from L'Opera and American Express. This was an English girl with the most beautiful skin I had ever seen, just like fresh buttermilk. She was also very fair, almost like a Finnish girl in the whiteness of her hair, and had the large eyes, long nose and chinlessness that one often finds in large-breasted women. Why is that, I wonder? Well, whatever, her name was that of some sort of flower, 'Rose' or 'Violet' perhaps; you can see from all these details that I remember her very well indeed. In fact, she must have meant a lot to me, because I know I was feeling very vulnerable at that time in my life. My father, who was a retired physician in Helsinki, had just died and left me a nice inheritance of money.

I took it into my head to nickname this English girl 'Princess Michael of Kent' for two reasons. First, because she was tall and very fair just like the royal relation on the Monty Python Show sketch, and second, because 'Michael' is an easy name for any Finnish person to remember. 'The Adventures of Michael the Finn' is the most famous novel of our great national writer, Mika Waltari. But thirdly, because 'Princess' is a very romantic word in any language, and my feelings for her were very similar to falling in love. One afternoon after some fine hot squishy squirrel sex we were having, or perhaps in the middle of it, she said she had to go interview this fellow Jim Haynes, who was 'the most famous American in Paris'. He was professor of Sexual Strategies at the Sorbonne and the editor of 'Suck Magazine'; she showed me a book of his which on the cover had a photograph of his hairy naked bum humping some other person at an orgy. You will probably think I am very oldfashioned because I don't like orgies, but I admit it is the truth. To me, having hot naked kinky sex together is very intimate and magical indeed, like the harmony of an orchestral symphony, and should be like a sacred act between two or, at most, three people. Any more than that and you have chaos, with many conductors running around waving their batons and too many clashing instruments. It does not create beautiful music. I am a Finn, from the land of Sibelius and Eppu Normaali--I cannot appreciate any music that is not normally beautiful.

So I took a sort of prejudice against this fellow. And that was unfair, because he was really rather charming and friendly to us when we went to visit him. First he made the both of us sign his guest-book. Then he took Polaroid photographs of us with himself and made us autograph them on the back, 'in case we became famous someday'. He spoke with a strange American accent I found difficult to understand, a little like a Country-Western singer, and had a long droopy walrus moustache. Apparently he had spent his teen-aged years visiting brothels in Venezuela; he told me that he was only really comfortable living in a brothel because he didn't belief in 'sexual possessions'. He viewed himself a goodwill ambassador, bringing the social values and the political structure of the brothel to the bourgeoisie, and that French culture was the most sympathetic to his crusade. He would like to give an interview to us, but alas tonight he unexpectedly had to conduct an interview with a television reporter from Australia instead. In the meantime, we were welcome to have supper with his wife and his mistress, who we found in the kitchen. His wife was an older, chain-smoking, dark-haired woman whose name and nationality I never discovered, but his mistress, whose nickname was 'Gogo', was from Stockholm, and so was far more welcoming to people of her own age. The meal, however, was not a pleasant one. Throughout it was the sounds of hot squishy skin-smacking moaning groaning sex from upstairs. First came the creaking of the floorboards, then the squealing of the bed-springs, then the long sobbing screams of the Australian TV reporter lady. As these noises became louder and louder, the wife and the mistress, who up until that time had not spoken to each other or even seemed to notice that the other was in the same room, began to fidget and glare, grinding their teeth and clattering their food around. Finally, they both slammed down their forks and knives and lit cigarettes. Worst of all, however, was Princess Michael of Kent, who was now bright red with fury. 'What a sad old wanker!' she exclaimed and insisted that we leave before dessert. To be totally honest, his 'philosophy of the brothel' was very repellent to me. I have never paid for sex in my whole life! Except of course for the antibiotics.

Two days later my telephone rings. It is Gogo.

'Hey, what can I do you for?' I say.

'You must come over here right away!' she tells me. 'Your girlfriend is upstairs bonking with him now. And he's talking of moving her in.' Of course she said this in Swedish, so the words she was using were much nastier. Naturally when I got off the phone I was very upset, and my heart was racing. To be totally honest, I hadn't even realized it was there before, this emotion. You know how it is--when you are young, you cannot admit to feeling jealous, and when you are old, it is simply too late. So after I smashed up my flat a bit and had a dignified tantrum, I decided not to allow myself any feelings to get in the way of our relationship. After all, why should they anyway when sex is involved? In the end, I swallowed my manhood and went to many orgies at the 'House of Haynes' with Princess Michael of Kent that winter, though things were no longer quite so romantic between us.

Now you must know something important about me, I have never had a gay bone in my body. I do not discriminate against the gay blades, of course, that would be illegal, but I am no 'Tom of Finland' for sure, LOL! (http://www.tomoffinlandfoundation.org/foundation/N_Home.html) I am also excluded from incest or wife-swapping, which are the other two most famous types of sex in Finland, since I am an only child and have never married. In fact, I had to emigrate to pursue my career at all. When Jim Haynes saw I was no gay blade or bisexual, he stopped trying to get into my baby-blue thong 'cache-sex' (which is French for very brief underpants) and seemed happy for me to provide company for Gogo. But of course, the poor girl was of no interest to Likkanen. The whole time we would be bonking, we would have our thoughts other places, on the mattress on the other side of the floor, perhaps, or the bed in the next room. So we would stop making monkeys and just smoke cigarettes together. Filling the air with smoke and complaining was our revenge. One time, being very careful not to see what Princess Michael was doing with three disgusting university professors from Edinburgh on the day-bed near the window, I got up from orgying with Gogo to use the bathroom, but tripped on the carpet on the way out. Underneath it I noticed a strip of wiring, which I tracked to a closet on the landing. My background at university was in theatre, and later with stage design and lighting, hence I am expert in such things and could see at once that the whole house was wired for sound. Later I also discovered that certain rooms had hidden cameras and were connected to videotape recorders as well. When I asked Jim Haynes about this he was very honest with me. 'Oh yes,' he said, 'Often my friends and I enjoying watching movies of ourselves balling. It is a big turn-on, man.' (This was before the invention of the word 'dude'.) Then perhaps he noticed a look of a certain Nordic coolness on my face, because he gave me his most famous charming laugh and said, 'Don't worry, Donho, I'm not planning to blackmail you. For one thing, you are never going to be famous enough.' But he was wrong about that, of course.

Before I moved to New York I asked Gogo what was the secret of this man's success with women, because naturally, I was anxious to imitate it. 'I think it is because underneath all the cynical sex talk he is really like a lost little boy,' she told me. 'It touches a woman in her deepest feelings of motherhood, because unlike men, women have sensitive hearts and want to heal and nurture. He says he just wants sex, but that is because he has been hurt; deep down, I know I can change him. And also, you know, he owns his own home. In the world of the arts, that is very rare.' This was excellent advice, and once I moved to New York City, I was careful to do two things. First, I stayed lost most of the time. And second, I bought my own loft.

Next time: The Vomit Comet.