"But I don't want comfort.
I want God, I want poetry, I want
real danger, I want freedom, I
want goodness. I want sin...
Not to mention the right to grow
old and ugly and impotent; the
right to have syphilis and cancer;
the right to have too little to
eat; the right to be lousy; the
right to live in constant apprehension
of what may happen tomorrow;
the right to catch typhoid; the
right to be tortured by unspeakable
pains of every kind... I claim
them all."
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
For Evelyn, who knows
CHAPTER ONE
The first time he noticed Ruth was on the water-taxi going from the Piazza San Marco to the Lido. Typical American tourist, he thought, not unlike the camera and guidebook-festooned hordes he had seen and occasionally rubbed shoulders with during his twelve months spent as a soldier in America's satrapy of Italy.
But there was a difference about her, a difference he could almost smell across the width of the fast ferry. She was somewhere in her late 30's, but without the usually concomitant signs of approaching inevitable senescence so common in her fellow countrywomen. No crows' feet around the eyes, the skin on her neck still firm and supple, her sun tan enhancing the smooth quality of her skin rather than mottling it. She had taken extremely good care of herself, and it showed, even across the launch crowded with sunbathing, sightseeing, sight-seeking, searching souls whose destination was the immaculately kept Lido beach.
It puzzled him that such a handsome woman seemed to be by herself (another anomaly) and not with a balding, sunglassed, cigar-smoking, sport-shirted, pot-bellied husband and entourage of no-neck children. And if these products of his fantasy were not her travelling companions, than why wasn't some suave, swarthy, ten-years-her-junior local talent? A mystery woman? Runaway wife of a Texas oilman? Israeli counterintelligence gent?
Fuck her, who cares? He stopped his musings short, quickly remembering who he was and where he was going. He gave her a last look and turned his head around to gaze at the bubbling wake the water-taxi left as it neared its mooring at the Lido.
Ruth had seen him looking at her, appraising her, assessing her, so cool in his nonchalance for an American of his relative youth. His close-cropped black hair told her immediately that he was a soldier (even in mufti a GI wore his occupation as conspicuously as if he were in full battle uniform) and he seemed to have even more than the usual frustration, engendered by the knowledge that his attempts to appear inconspicuous were doomed to failure from the start due to (as Ruth thought) the horrendously uniform haircuts the military required of its young men. Yet he appeared to be trying to pass off his ridiculously short hair as the result of treating a scalp condition or something else equally civilian. Perhaps this was his first weekend pass, and he had yet to realize the futility of his masquerade, or maybe he really did have some sort of scalp condition. An interesting divertissement in any event, she thought, as out of the corner of her eye she saw his gaze drift away.
The boat glided in to its mooring as the passengers, sensing their destination close at hand, grew impatient during the last few feet of the trip and, wave-like, leaned and half-stepped towards the still closed exit gates.
He caught another glimpse of her before she became obscured by the surging crowd, anxious to disembark, and saw that the years had done no damage to a still voluptuous figure generous in its proportions. Then he himself became engulfed in the rush off the boat amidst vagrant cries of "Scusi" and "Permesso" which, he had noted ironically, were the Italian words used to neutralize any inconvenience or offense offered by close body contact in a crowd, from an inadvertent elbow in the kidney to a full-fledged bone-crushing stampede over a fallen body. What the hell, he wanted to be in a crowd, his anonymity precariously preserved for one more crucial hour until he made his contact on the beach. No sweat, he thought, I'm going to make it.
He walked briskly off the pier, keeping pace with the people who formed a protective phalanx around him, giving him casual glances of curiosity mixed with disinterest, past the eucalyptus and mimosa trees caressed lazily by the sea breezes, on to the wide boulevard which traversed the width of the island and led to the beach. A glance at his watch told him he had a half-hour or so to kill before his scheduled rendezvous, and he eased his pace to a leisurely stroll, stopping to window-shop in front of the souvenir stands with their colorful displays of post cards, sunglasses, ashtrays, sun visors, magazines, sun tan oils, and 1001 other sun-sand-fun accessories and non-essentials.
Ruth had stopped at one of the ubiquitous sidewalk cafes which lined the promenade and was sipping an absinthe when she saw the soldier again, fingering a rack of sunglasses across the street. Her dioristic eyes swallowed him anonymously through her dark glasses, taking in everything: his wide stance, his faded black levis worn low around his hips without a belt, his casual behavior which she was now sure belied an intensity of purpose he had not entirely succeeded in masking, his well-developed back which tapered into a narrow, athletic waist, and, as he shifted his feet, the half of his chest which was not obscured by the rack. A singularly handsome young man, she decided, at least at this distance.
The sound of a car horn in the lane of traffic on the other side of the wide grassy center strip made him turn away from the sunglasses (much too quickly, he corrected himself immediately; be cool!) and he recognized the familiar face and figure of the woman he had watched for a few moments on the water-taxi. The hairs on the back of his neck tingled a little, and he realized that she had been digging him while he was playing Joe Inconspicuous. A sudden panic seized him, and he dismissed it quickly. If she were tailing him, she certainly wouldn't have maintained a constant vigil from the boat to fucking here. He knew that those bastards worked in teams, playing tag with him always "it," leap-frogging their surveillance procedures with one picking him up as another dropped him, only to have the first one catch him again farther on up the line.
So she was almost certainly for real, an idle, earthy female, taking her afternoon pleasure in her scoop-necked minidress which framed the black bikini-top straps tied around the back of her neck. Her shoulder-length hair, chestnut with random sun-streaks of blonde, bobbed slightly as she bent her head momentarily to light a cigarette. She inhaled and let the smoke out desultorily, no longer looking his way.
Ruth wasn't surprised when she heard a flat, midwestern voice coming from immediately over her left shoulder. "May I sit down?"
"Please do."
"Thank you," he said, sitting in the chair to her left, which afforded him an unobstructed view of the early afternoon parade of beachgoers and returnees.
"Would you like a drink?"
"Absinthe, please."
"An absinthe for the gentleman," she said to the waiter standing two tables away.
"Si, Signora." He acknowledged her order with a practiced, almost imperceptible bow and turned to the bar to get it.
"I'm Ruth," she said, looking the soldier squarely in the face, noting with satisfaction that he was undressing her with his eyes, much the same way, she assumed, that she had done to him while he was across the street. Returning the compliment, as it were.
He said nothing until the waiter returned with his drink, passing the time by alternately fantasizing making love to this unusually lovely woman and deciding that escorting her to the beach would provide him with more protection from snooping eyes than his former lonely stroll.
He lifted his glass in a silent toast and took a sip of the uniquely flavored liqueur, letting its warmth soothe his throat and stomach.
"Not too talkative, are you?" Ruth said matter-of-factly, with a nuance of amusement.
"Sorry, I'm a little preoccupied," the soldier said with a sheepish smile.
"Christ," she laughed, showing him a set of perfect teeth, "I knew that back on the boat." He appeared embarrassed at this revelation, and she leaned over and whispered in his ear, "You do have a name, don't you, or am I to call you 'Soldier?' "
This last remark seemed to stun him, and Ruth patted his hand reassuringly, adding, "If you're not in the Army, you must be recuperating from a scalp infection."
Her touch mitigated his rising paranoia, but only somewhat. Part of him wanted to reach out and grab her, run his hands through her hair, over her lush body, wrap her luxurious thighs around his waist as he jammed his prick into her wet, throbbing cunt; and another part of him quivered in fear at the knowledge that she had been able to discern his identity so easily, and wasn't even trying hard. The conflicting pressures continued to build up in his mind until he blurted out what he knew deep down inside the secret recesses of his soul was the basis of an irrevocable decision.
"Listen," he started hesitantly, and then let the rest of his words gush out in an emotional release which Ruth could see was a life-and-death matter with him.
"I was in the Army until this morning, and about two hours ago I quit, resigned, dropped out, deserted. I won't be AWOL, that means missing-" She nodded her familiarity with the most common military acronym. "-until Monday morning at six, but because of what's been going on in my outfit I have a feeling they might be following me."
His fright subsided as he talked, as Ruth's impassive yet understanding expression gave him confidence to go on. She had taken her sunglasses off and he saw her eyes for the first time; they were green and seemed to exude sympathy, trust, and, he was eager to notice, thinly-veiled lust.
"So, through a contact I had made in Genoa, I got a Venice phone number to call as the first link in the underground railroad to get me to Sweden and asylum."
He paused for a moment before laying bare his ultimate secret, and then went on as Ruth reinforced her reassurance by stroking his arm lightly, letting her sharp, well-manicured nails play along the rows of dark hair between his elbow and wrist.
"I'm supposed to meet a girl in a red one-piece bathing suit outside bathhouse number two at two o'clock, twenty minutes from now," he finished, glancing down at his watch.
"And what happens if she doesn't show?" Ruth asked, seeing immediately from his forlorn face that this possibility had not occurred to him.
"I don't know," he stuttered. "Call the number back, I guess."
"Bullshit," Ruth said. "You have no idea what you'll do. You'll be too damn scared to call the number back, you'll figure that the line is tapped and that she was intercepted and your only prayer is that the girl, or whoever sent her, hasn't talked and given them time to anticipate your next move. We are on an island, I'm sure you know, and the only way on is also the only way off. So, here you are, or I should say here we are."
The soldier was taken aback by the clarity of her analysis of his plight, but his apprehension was waning at the same time. He let her continue.
"If you're smart, soldier, you'll stay away from bathhouse number two at two or five past two or five to two. Objectively, do you think you were followed? Are we being watched now?"
He turned his head casually, scanning the environment, from the bar behind them around the handful of customers at the cafe to the street, and then around the other side, completing the circle back at the bar. "No, it looks cool."
"Fine," Ruth said, signaling the waiter for the check. The soldier reached in his pocket for money, but she restrained his hand gently but firmly and pulled a thousand-lire note out of the purse on the empty seat next to her and placed it on the table almost simultaneously with the check the waiter had lain there.
"Grazie, Signora," he said, picking up the money and the check as Ruth and the soldier stood up to leave, and then melting into the background.
"You need a hat," Ruth said, taking the soldier's arm in her own, holding it firmly against her breast as they crossed the street. She felt it jiggle against her flesh (not accidentally, she thought), as a rush of desire emanated from the point of contact, where his hard forearm muscle lilted against her rhythmically like wavelets on a peaceful shore, and spread throughout her body. "Something inconspicuously garish and floppy to hide that head."
When they reached the other side of the street and headed into the store where the soldier had been browsing, she disengaged his arm discreetly. He knew that she had done it so as not to cause any unnecessary attention to themselves.
"Pick out something you like," she said as they entered the store.
His choice was a straw sombrero, which Ruth said suited him perfectly, and they strolled back to the mooring to get the next water-taxi to San Marco.
On the ride back, which was about one-third as crowded as the ride over, the soldier pondered his unconscionable luck in having met this beautiful, intelligent woman. Nothing more had been said since leaving the gift shop, but he felt the good vibrations passing back and forth between them grow stronger and more affirmative as they neared the San Marco terminal.
"Why must I call you 'Soldier'?" Ruth asked him as they walked across the famous square.
"Because I have shed my old identity, left it at the barracks. My given name is irrelevant now, and until I find a new one, I'm 'Soldier'. Who I was is dead. Who I'm going to be has yet to be born."
"And I'm the midwife." Ruth said, chuckling at her own metaphor.
When they entered her hotel room Soldier whistled admiringly at the opulence of his new surroundings. He had no idea how much her palatial accommodations cost but was willing to bet that few, if any, in Venice were dearer.
"Nice, isn't it?" Ruth said, pulling her dress over her head and throwing it on a nearby chair. Soldier's gaze switched sharply from the room's furnishings to Ruth's body, now encumbered only by the black bikini she wore. He hadn't realized how lush and full her breasts really were until he watched them rise and fall with her breathing, threatening to burst out of the seemingly inadequate constraints of her top. He stood transfixed as she pirouetted slowly, luxuriating in his disbelieving stare, feeling its intensity run up and down her body like a benign laser, penetrating, concentrating, boring at her innards.
As she completed her circle, Ruth returned his hungry stare and licked her lips, her pink tongue relishing their sensual fullness. She blew Soldier a kiss and turned towards the bathroom, undoing her top as she went and tossing it on the chair where her dress had landed.
"A quick shower, Soldier," she called out to him from inside as he heard the water start running. "Don't get lost."
She emerged from her shower a few minutes later and saw Soldier lying on his back on the oversize bed, naked, his hands behind his head, his legs spread slightly apart, his cock hard and erect.
Ruth threw the towel with which she had been drying herself on the same chair with her dress and top and climbed on the bed, crawling over to Soldier's tall soldier and easing it into her mouth, taking it all in, down to the base. Soldier let out a deep breath as Ruth's mucous membranes enclosed his prick in their soft, wet embrace. She took it out completely after a few moments and moved her body between his legs, placing them on her shoulders and raising them so that his ass and genitalia were lifted off the bed itself, leaving enough daylight for her to grab a pillow and place it underneath him, putting his sex on a pedestal (no, an altar, she thought) for her to pay it oral homage and respect.
She began to lick him on the no-man's-land under his scrotum and adjacent to his asshole, making increasingly larger concentric circles until her tongue found his quivering anus. She opened it with her thumb and index finger and plunged her tongue in as far as it would go in one smooth motion.
Soldier's hips bucked as if administered an electric shock when Ruth's tongue hit home, and he said breathlessly, "Eat me, bitch. Oh eat me!"
Ruth proceeded to do just that, bathing him from mid-thigh to balls with her saliva, her tongue rotating slowly, then quickening like a hummingbird, her erratic changes in tempo making their own rhythmical non-rhythms.
Soldier watched her work on him, his senses marveling at her enthusiasm and expertise as her mouth continued to ravish him, arousing every nerve ending in his erogenously sensitive areas. Ruth never looked up at him, putting his scrotum in her mouth, attacking his balls, which she held prisoner, with light, then heavy caresses of the tip of her tongue. He grabbed the sheets with clenched fists, his body wracked with miraculous ecstasies, and whispered her name softly as, with his sac still her divine prisoner, she started to hum, the sonic waves gradually rising in pitch and intensity.
"Suck me off, please, oh god please, SUCK ME OFF!" Soldier yelled, his voice rising as Ruth's humming made his balls feel numb with joy and he started gasping for breath.
She let his sac go and took the head of his prick between her fingers, opening the hole and running the tip of her tongue in and out, in and out, in and out, and Soldier, with a cry of sweet desperation, leaned forward and taking her head in his hands, pushed it down on his cock, feeling the stirrings of an orgasm start in his bowels as Ruth obediently sucked the length of him, slowly at first, then building with rapid, piston-like strokes to a wild frenzy, her hair flying, her eyes closed, muted animal sounds coming from her mouth, full with his manhood.
Soldier came in a sudden spurt, jutting his ass forward and allowing Ruth to take her index finger from her pussy, where she had been lubricating it, and jam the wet digit its full length into Soldier's ass. He shrieked when it found his prostate, and continued to shoot hot wads of semen in Ruth's thirsty orifice.
"Now you make me scream, motherfucker," she panted as she swallowed the last drop of his monster ejaculation, holding his still erect prick in her hand.
Wordlessly, Soldier got up and turned Ruth over on her back, raising her left leg until it was almost perpendicular to the bed, which caused her to roll halfway to her right and open her cunt almost as wide as it would have been had she been able to spread her legs straight out, forming a line.
Ruth panted with anticipation as she saw Soldier prepare to mount her this way, a manic look of glee on his face as his prick penetrated her sopping wet pussy. Soldier was on his knees, straddling her dormant right leg and supporting her raised left leg with his shoulder and embracing it for leverage as he started to prong her, putting only the head of his dick in at first and liberating his right hand from her upright leg to grab his prick and rotate the head around her vestibulum with tantalizing slowness. Each time his invader passed languorously across her clitoris on its (maddeningly slow, Ruth thought) circular path, she gasped, her eyes closed, wondering how much more of this divine punishment she could take. Soldier felt her writhing, gasping body convulse as he continued his stroke, and then without warning he took his hand away from his tool and drove it all the way into her, grabbing her upright leg with both hands for maximum leverage and he hit bottom.
Ruth let out an unearthly shriek as Soldier's cock collided with her cervix, feeling like she was about to be split in two by his rampaging lunge. His hard, steady banging was turning her into a whimpering, moaning animal, as with every forward thrust his prick felt like it was making new inroads, forging a path of pleasure in her which brought her to the threshold of orgasm, and then over. She began to come slowly, the climactic wave picking up new energy from each additional thrust and probe, culminating in a brain-shattering, escalating surge of passion, which threatened to divorce her from her senses. She threw her hands out wildly to grab Soldier anywhere: his hair, his shoulder, his arm, anything which she could hold on to-and pull him even further into her. And she couldn't stop coming.
Soldier knew she was making it, and making it with almost legendary intensity; her thrashing movements, her sometimes mewling, sometimes shrill groans, her apparent other-worldly expressions which contorted her face into masks, indicated the subtle refinements and levels of pleasure and pain, by now virtually indistinguishable.
"Keep coming, Ruth, keep coming. Make it, baby," he panted, redoubling the intensity of his attack.
She felt herself falling, nearing a state of non-consciousness where the lines (if they exist, she thought) between reality, unreality and surreality become blurred and eventually vanish, leaving the mind to function without restrictions or guidelines. Soldier's cock continued to violate every inch of her vaginal walls and cul-de-sac, and by this time Ruth was only vaguely aware of what was happening. She knew that she was being fucked by an iron man with a prick which was worth its girth and length in gold, but she had somehow transcended orgasm and seemed to be floating at times in a state of pre-consciousness.
Her transcendental state did not go unnoticed by her lover, who had seen her turbulence rise to astronomical heights of furious, orgiastic activity, and then seem to pass over into something removed from the incessant cock she still received but somehow didn't seem to feel, at least with any of the five senses. Soldier suddenly realized that Ruth was responding to something other than what he was giving her, and he knew he was giving her good and well, yet her vocal sounds, which came at irregular intervals unrelated to his pile-driving prick, seemed more like nervous spasms than expressions of pleasurable sensations.
Soldier freed his left hand and smacked her across the face smartly, and then dropped it immediately to grasp her right breast, fleshly pliable and at the same time firm, caressing her large brown nipple gently with his thumb and forefinger.
Ruth came alive suddenly, and her scope of reality burst out of its non-restrictive shell with the brightness of the sun, though paradoxically it narrowed to Soldier's prick wreaking ecstatic havoc inside her cunt and his manipulation of her breast. As if nothing had happened before, she came afresh, pulling Soldier's head down to hers and sinking her teeth into his left shoulder, drawing blood.
"Fuck me, Soldier, fuck me good, you son of an unholy bitch," Ruth wailed, a few drops of his blood staining her upper lip.
Soldier felt his cock get hard as tempered steel as Ruth clamped her vaginal walls around his tool and held it in her merciless vise-like grip, stopping his forceful, long piston strokes cold, then easing her grasp a little and tightening it again after her brief relaxation. The next time Ruth lessened the pressure Soldier made his move, pulling his member out of her completely, only to drive it back in all the way to the hilt, and coming, shooting his load against her cervix, coming with the ultimate climax, born in his extremities, matured by travelling towards his humping cock which had been ravaging her relentlessly. The pressure had started to build during his teasing phallic convolutions and continued to mount all through her vaginal, clitoral, and a pres-orgasmic climaxes, finally exploding with atom-smashing, cosmic force at the end of his last, deep, bottom-scraping thrust.
For no more than a milli-microsecond Soldier felt that he had seen God, that he had been as one with the cosmos, that his brain had imploded, sending all his psycho-sexual energy careening into the epicenter of his soul, which glowed with a divine aura from the impact.
When his prick was making its final lunge into her depths, it rubbed its full length against her already much battered and punished clitoris; Soldier's sudden out-and-in maneuver caught Ruth by surprise, suddenly making her tender appendage an energy source which radiated orgasmic stimuli to all points of her body. She shuddered convulsively, barely having time to savor her screeching clitoral climax or cry out in its celebration, because Soldier's prick hit absolute bottom and ejaculated, interrupting her feverish pleasures with the more extravagant intoxication of coming with him. Ruth felt stunned, as if by an electric shock, and her back arched in involuntary response. She remained that way, impaled on his miraculous prick, feeling purged and fulfilled with his fullness in her, her mind flitting from arrogance (he should never be allowed to take it out) to absurdity (does it ever get limp?) to the macabre (I would love to cut it off and preserve it in wax).
Soldier took it out, finally, and let her leg down, not surprised that she wasn't favoring it after it had been in a relatively awkward position for a long time. This meant that the woman was in as good physical shape as her outward appearance indicated. It all went together with the sumptuous hotel room, her straightforward sexuality and the very air about her. He knew she had and was accustomed to having a lot of money, and this made him giggle.
"What's the joke?" Ruth asked, getting up from the bed to get cigarettes.
Soldier waited until she returned, put one in his mouth and lit it for him before he answered her.
"A lot of guys I've known, both in the Army and out, talk about finding rich, beautiful older women who will fuck them half to death. More often than not it's bullshit, and I never gave it much thought myself. But here I am, and that's why I'm giggling."
"I guess it's a good thing that you're not going back to the barracks to regale all your horny buddies with stories about us; after all, I do have a reputation to protect," she said, reaching down and grabbing his limp prick.
"If you have a reputation for giving a really fine blowjob, I agree you should protect it."
Ruth had been studying Soldier while they smoked, and complimented herself on her good judgment. He was good-looking, of course. But she had known more than her share of handsome men who were pricks to waste herself on any pretty face mounted on a good physique. No, there was much more to him than his looks, which intrigued her, and she felt pleased that she could plan to conduct an unhurried exploration of him, the total him. After all, in the space of a few hours he had become totally dependent on her. He was a fugitive, which was exciting if one were fond of melodrama, but for now was a nuisance. She would get him a passport, that was no problem. And clothes; all he had was what was in a little pile on the floor next to the bed.
But more vital than anything else, she suddenly realized, was his identity, or more precisely his current lack of an identity. Calling him 'Soldier' may have been quaintly romantic, but had now become sort of a nuisance.
Ruth put out her cigarette and said, "You'll need a passport, which I can arrange. Have you any preference as to your new name?"
"I really hadn't thought about it. I guess I'll take whatever comes."
He started to muse about his new name, rejecting Charlie Chan, Boris Gudenov, or Dick Tracy as possibilities. Chance would take care of it. He met Ruth by chance, and his new identity would also be left to random chance. He had much confidence in coincidence now.
Ruth had gotten up and was getting dressed for the street. Soldier had lit another cigarette and though he felt sated sexually, his attention became fixed on watching Ruth; watching her magnificent breasts hang menacingly over her knees as she bent over to put on her sandals, watching her dress herself from the bottom up, sandals, panties, half-slip, skirt, bra and blouse. Her movements were sure, confident, female more than feminine. Ostensibly she ignored his presence, and he wondered if she were having misgivings about taking him on, as a protector. But the intrinsic sensuality in the way she dressed seemed to make her even more fuckable than she had been when naked, and desire began to stir within him.
Ruth went to the closet and walked back to the bed holding a Polaroid camera. Her blouse and bra were both loose and only hinted at the opulent flesh beneath. Soldier undressed her all over again with his eyes as she focused the camera at his face.
"Get that come-fuck-me look off your face for a minute, you idiot," Ruth said, interrupting his reverie and causing him to look up and be blinded for a second by the flashbulb.
Less than a minute later he was looking at the picture of himself, cropped at the neck, a slightly bemused expression touching his face.
"For your passport," Ruth said, putting the picture in her purse. "I'll be back in about an hour, so amuse yourself with something while I'm gone."
CHAPTER TWO
And she was out the door, like a slight though not subtle breeze.
Soldier got up and went to the bathroom, taking his time in noticing the opulence of his surroundings in more detail; he had always been alternately repelled and fascinated by the lifestyles of the ultra rich, though his sources bore the biases of the news media and were thus at best third-hand. He had never actually been there, nor with them, and certainly not sexually; this last, however, being a not unfavorite former fantasy. And it was real, for chrissakes, it was for fucking real!
He ran the shower, marveling at the luxurious plumbing; more anomalous than usual in this part of the world, he thought. When he stepped in and slid the frosted glass door shut, the hot needle spray pounded against his body, mixing with the juices of their two-backed beast and opening his pores.
It had certainly been a delightful afternoon, but he was having difficulty in believing that this rich, desirable chick was going to set him up with a new, phony passport, clothes and a ticket to anywhere, with a taste of pocket money on the side. OK, she was a bona fide member-in-good-standing of the clich'd Jet Set, a rich international lady hobo indulging her hedonism in well-appointed settings. And he was the son of nobody, scion of nothing, and currently between positions (he smirked at his unintentional pun) having just resigned from government service.
He thought he heard the door to the suite opening and closing above the noise of the shower, but it could also have been his imagination, so he did nothing, figuring that he would be no less vulnerable out of the shower, naked and soapy, than where he stood. In other words, he marveled at his crackpot reasoning, he would rather be murdered where he stood than suffer the inconvenience of interruption. He remembered the film Psycho, and laughed nervously, opening the stall door a crack and seeing nothing. Since Ruth bore a much closer resemblance than he did to Janet Leigh, he felt safe and pulled the door shut, continuing his shower.
When he thought he heard the door again as he was rinsing off he ignored it completely, writing it off to nerves, the incipient paranoia which he assumed went along with his brand new role of fugitive.
He adjusted the shower head so it aimed at his crotch, probing the area surrounding his dick for reluctant pieces of soap. Got to keep the old meal ticket in shape, he said to himself absent-mindedly, fondling the dangling meat affectionately.
The room appeared to be exactly as he had left it before the shower, and he kidded himself about the possibility of someone having entered and left while he was in the bathroom. How could anyone know he was here? They would have had to have been following him when he met Ruth and then have tailed them back here. And why run the risk of having him emerge from the bathroom while they were ransacking the room (for what?) and become suspicious, or panic. These people were professionals and didn't make such (at least to him) basic errors.
But his mind, once embarked upon this line of thought, would not let it drop, and he found himself seated on the bed, naked, pursuing arguments for and against the mysterious intruder's existence.
Having weighed the evidence available and found against the possibility of an intruder, he took the next logical step. Suppose whoever they were were after her and not him? Who and why? If he were the target the who and why were obvious. But who the fuck was she? Should he broach the subject when she returned? He found a corollary dilemma to the one which had amused him in the shower: would she think him silly for asking something so banal or forcing her to lie to him to protect herself? But he was trying to protect her. The hell with it. He had taken a chance in coming here, his mere existence right now was chancy, and wasn't his thinking there might be an intruder, and getting hung up over the possibility, sufficient evidence of it being so?
They were really pricks, his people. Guilt was one of the most effective and thus frequently used weapons in their sophisticated arsenal. Wasn't the stockade referred to as the "Do-right Hotel?" For the first time in his life Soldier became aware of the true meaning of power and its impersonal, pervasive application.
As the importance of the revelation sunk in, he found it had colored everything in his mind. He had an enemy who could no longer be personalized in the form of a singularly ignorant sergeant or the turgid prose of Army Regulations. The sense of guilt which had been nurtured in him during his childhood and come to full bloom along with his physique in his adolescence had turned on him, making himself at once prisoner and jailer.
"I am mine own executioner," he said to an empty room.
Ruth returned sometime later and dropped some paper bags on the bed next to him.
"Go ahead, open them, they're for you," she said, sitting on a chair to watch him.
He got up and dumped the contents of the parcels on the bed, smiling at her generosity and thoughtfulness. She had bought him a dozen sets of underwear, two silk sport shirts, and two pairs of slacks.
"I hope they're the right size," Ruth started to say, when he cut her off by kissing her. She wanted him again, but fought off the desire, responding to his kiss for a few moments and then pushing him away gently.
"Don't make it any harder for me than it already is, you gorgeous piece of ass. Put something on before I change my mind," she said with mock reproval. "Besides I want to order dinner. I assume you're hungry."
Soldier had put on a T-shirt, shorts, shirt and trousers, and they all fit. He examined his new appearance in the full-length mirror hanging on the inside panel of her closet door, more than satisfied with everything he saw, save for the haircut.
"They're great," he said, "I don't know how to thank you."
"Don't worry," Ruth said, leering at him, "I'm sure you'll come up with something satisfactory. Incidentally, I've chosen a new name for you."
"A new name?"
"Darling, it's absolutely ludicrous to go on calling you 'Soldier'. Besides, your passport and some other pieces of identification will be ready tomorrow, and we have chosen the name Waldo Smith for you. Do you think you could learn to be Waldo Smith? Your name isn't Waldo Smith, is it?"
"No, it's not. You said that we chose, who is we?"
"A friend of mine who is getting all this for me, and at a handsome cost too. Don't worry, he's completely trustworthy. How old are you anyway? About twenty-five?"
"Yeah, about that." He was getting a queasy feeling again and decided to tell her about his fantasy.
"Ruth, I want to ask you something."
"Of course, Waldo. Waldo, Waldo," she said, letting the name roll off her tongue and ricochet off him. It seemed to fit.
"Do you have any enemies?"
"What kind of enemies?"
"The kind who might search your room while you were out, the kind who might be keeping you under some sort of surveillance."
"I hope not. Did someone do that while I was gone?"
He told her the whole story about what he thought he might have heard while showering. She listened thoughtfully, and then said, "It's your imagination. I told you you'd be safe here. Please trust me."
He was transfixed by the intensity of her eyes as she asked him to trust her. He really wanted to believe her; it would be so very groovy if she really were what she purported to be, the vibrations emanating from her were good, he wished he had some smoke with him. Getting high with her would dispel any lingering doubts he harbored about her honesty and good intentions, but there was none around and he hesitated to ask her to cop for him.
"It's not that I don't trust you, Ruth, it's just that, well, I mean you're asking me to accept all this on faith, and my faith has taken a pretty good battering recently."
"We'll talk about it after dinner, OK?"
"OK, I guess."
Dinner was served about an hour later by a waiter, a busboy, and a wine steward all under the strict supervision of an expressionless maitre d', who hustled his crew along, pausing occasionally to ask Ruth if each of the meal's components were satisfactory. Waldo (he was already starting to refer to himself by his new name, though at first it had not been without some difficulty) ate heartily, though he was a little nervous at having this precision drill team hovering at his elbow to anticipate and cater to his every wish.
Ruth had ordered two dozen oysters for him, and he plowed through the tasty mollusks, dabbing each with either fresh lemon juice or cocktail sauce, and washing them all down with tomato juice.
The entree was filet mignon, caesar salad, and wild rice, each prepared, Waldo thought, to perfection. The wine steward had presented the bottle for his inspection and he nodded approvingly, completing the time-honored charade, though he knew full well that he could have been approving grape juice as well as the light, unobtrusive wine which the steward poured for his final affirmation.
When the coffee and pastries were served, Ruth signed the check and ordered them all out. The maitre d' snapped his fingers and his crew disappeared out the door. He gave an almost imperceptible bow, said, "Grazie, Signora," and completed his exit.
"Alone at last, my dearest," Waldo said, miming the clich' and extending his arms towards Ruth.
"Save your energy for later, darling," she answered coquettishly. "You will need it," assuring him of this certainty by emphasizing "will."
Seriously now: "What are your plans, Ruth?"
"What are your plans, Waldo? I may call you Waldo, mayn't I?"
"OK, you've arranged to outfit me with this mess of cards so I can be Waldo Smith, and a beautiful wallet to put them in-"
"And don't forget clothes, you'll be getting some more clothes tomorrow," she interrupted.
"-and clothes too, and Christ knows what all else. I'd like to ask why, but T think I better hadn't."
"Excellent thinking. Don't ask why, ask what, unless you like surprises."
"How about where? Is where an acceptable question?"
"Oh yes, where is acceptable."
"Where are we going?"
"To bed in a little while, as soon as our dear flunkies clear all this away," she said, gesturing to the dirty dishes in front of them.
"Are we going anywhere tomorrow?"
"Is there somewhere you'd like to go tomorrow?"
Waldo had to laugh. He realized that he had been looking his gift horse down the throat, let alone in the mouth.
Ruth found his laughter contagious, and began to guffaw uncontrollably, this in turn infecting Waldo. Their laughter bred hysteria, and soon the two of them had rolled off their chairs and were sitting on the floor, gasping and crying, overcome by the absurdity of what they were doing.
Waldo stopped first, and crawled over to Ruth, watching her breasts dance under her blouse. He put both hands under the blouse and felt her bra-less tits, warm and luxurious, still shaking from the end of her hysterics. Ruth turned towards him, tears in her eyes, and said, "Yes, yes, Waldo. Absolutely yes," smothering her last giggle on his lips, kissing him hungrily, running her long, well-manicured nails along the back of his neck, teasing his ear lobes, and then drawing him down on top of her.
She opened her mouth wider to accept his rampaging tongue as it explored her mouth as thoroughly as it had her pussy earlier, and, she thought, still a little silly, that they had not necked before. Thrill, thrill! Thrill truly because Waldo (it suits him well, she thought, he makes a fine Waldo) had opened her terry cloth bathrobe which he had worn to dinner and was poking his erect prick under her skirt and would discover that she had nothing on underneath it.
Waldo let go of her tits and shrugged out of the robe, reaching down when his arms were free and ripping Ruth's skirt and blouse off. She lay on the rug, naked, her knees up and apart, her fingers massaging her pussy as she awaited him. He pushed her hands aside and replaced them with his own, caressing her mons like it was a love object, planting gentle kisses on the labia below, whose blood vessels dilated with the excitement of his touch.
His fingers slid under her ass and he opened her lips with his thumbs and started to lick their interior, gently at first, letting his tongue explore leisurely, dallying in one pleasant spot for a while before moving on, never hurrying, hearing her slow, heavy breathing punctuated occasionally by short gasps of delight, teasing her purposely, postponing his inevitable arrival at her man-in-the-boat as long as possible, knowing full well that his arrival was inevitable (as did she) as avoiding it would have been very cruel and highly unusual.
Ruth had lain back and was immensely enjoying being eaten. Her visceral judgment in having allowed herself to have been picked up at the Lido earlier was being further vindicated. She wondered if he were exceptional, or if he were merely representative of a young generation of cunt lappers which had grown up and matured along with her own daughter. How odd, Ruth thought, to be thinking about her daughter while Waldo's tongue ravished her open box.
His tongue finally found her clitoris, and he toyed with it, feeling it rise to greet him as he lapped around it, favoring it with a delicious lick now and then, ignoring its pleas for attention and then over-compensating for the slight by smothering it with thrill-inducing strokes of cunnilingual creativity. He felt her body start to tense and heard her breathing get deeper, indicating that she was approaching an orgasm, though there seemed to be a subtle rein she was using to hold herself in check-an insight which proved to be accurate.
"Your cock, Waldo, do it with your cock," Ruth moaned, strongly implying that there was little time left before his mouth would have gotten her off, in spite of her self-control.
Waldo turned her over on her stomach, raising her ass in the air so she had to kneel to keep it up, and rooted his cock under and between her globular cheeks, finding her pussy and penetrating it. He slid in easily, as the path had been almost over lubricated by his just having finished eating her. Ruth sighed as it went into her, and Waldo reached forward and cupped her breasts in his hands, holding on to them for support while he worked his ass in a screwing motion, pushing his prick in deeper.
He placed his index fingers on her nipples, massaging them with a circular motion, and he saw her shoulders quiver, independent of the intense fucking the lower portion of her body was sustaining. His prick worked in and out, in and out, and she exhaled sharply, nine times, each with a pitch higher than the last until the ninth brought the relief of climax. As he brought her over the top, he let go of her breasts and grabbed her shoulders, pulling his prick in even deeper, helping her to scale the forbidding heights of her ecstasy, until he gave his member a final thrust which opened the floodgates for him too, spilling his semen and prolonging her getting off to agonizing lengths.
They relaxed, and he pulled it out, noticing the contrast between the wet, limp piece of meat he saw and his usually erect, ready-for-business hard-on.
Ruth got up and went to the bathroom, coming back with a wet washcloth, which she used to wipe away the accumulation of love juices from around his pubis.
"This is better service than you'll get in most whorehouses," she said as she finished her wiping and anointed the tip of his prick with a kiss, as if pronouncing it clean again.
"Would you know?" Waldo asked with genuine interest. He trusted Ruth, but had found that his trust was really faith, as there was nothing substantive that he knew about her which would form a basis for trust. Maybe she had made all her money off a string of whorehouses. Or maybe she had worked her way up the ladder from being one of the girls to super-madam-in-chief. Or maybe she was putting him on.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" she countered, blinking her eyes with that studied coquettishness again. "Have you been with many whores?"
"A few, all in Europe," he said unguardedly, realizing that he had given her another piece of information about himself. It was trivial and inconsequential perhaps, yet it was another thin layer of opacity which she had removed from him skillfully and nonchalantly, while his clumsy attempts at unmasking her were shunted aside with the utmost facility and turned back on him, to ferret out more about himself.
Well let her be cute, he decided. I'll just ask her straightforwardly who she is and what she is and why she is and where am I. Besides, he thought, I am tired and all this can wait for another day.
He left his preoccupations for the time and yawned. From the other side of the room, Ruth said, "If you're tired, Waldo, go to bed. I have a few things to do, and I'll join you as soon as I'm done."
Waldo got up and stretched, feeling the ache in every muscle. He pulled back the covers and slipped in between the sheets, luxuriating in their crisp freshness, and dropping into slumber almost at once.
The last thing he heard before losing consciousness was Ruth on the phone, speaking softly and rapidly in Italian.
CHAPTER THREE
Ruth was awakened by the phone. She picked it up and acknowledged the call she had ordered for nine, seeing Waldo sleeping peacefully next to her.
"Get up, Waldo," she whispered in his ear, leaning over him and brushing her nipples against his cheek.
He stirred momentarily and rolled over, slapping at the fly he imagined had landed on his face.
She pulled the covers off him and began to lick the length of his back from the base of his spine up to his neck, then changed direction, licking him down.
Waldo opened his eyes suddenly, his body recoiling away from her in momentary fright, and relaxed quickly as he took in the familiar environment.
"Get up, you lazy bastard," Ruth told him, seeing that he was conscious. "The tailor will be here at nine-thirty to take your measurements. You're getting some clothes today."
"I got clothes," he mumbled, "lotsa pretty clothes."
"Up, idiot, up, up, up," Ruth said, feigning exasperation and trying to suppress a laugh as she pulled at him.
He sat up on the bed and dangled his legs over the side, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
"What time is it?" he said.
"What time do they usually get you up in the barracks?"
"Five-thirty, six."
"I promise you it's later than that, so get up," she said, adding in an offhand manner to no one in particular, "Five-thirty, six, mercy me; that's before sunrise most of the time."
Then turning to him again with a variation of the intense stare which he had started to become accustomed to, this one leaning decidedly toward mock, or perhaps not-so-mock, lust, "How you were mistreated, Waldo darling, what a drag that must have been."
It hit his ear like a cleanly resonating gong; she was good people, or at worst had been around good people. It had been the most together waking in a life not noted for many together wakings.
Ruth saw the smile light up his face and knew that she had finally gotten through to him. She began to lust for him again and cursed the tailor who was by now somewhere on his way up and whom it was impossible to deter or detain. However, her face showed nothing more than a warm acknowledgment of his smile.
"Come on, man, get your ass on up. He will be here before too damn much longer. Please."
Waldo got up and trudged to the bathroom, suppressing his own horniness and damning the tailor with his own silent malevolence's. He was not surprised to see a new toothbrush, still wrapped, laying casually on the edge of the sink. By now he was taking everything for granted. The verdict was just about in.
Boss chick.
The tailor was a wizened little gnome who spoke no English. Ruth and he spoke very rapidly in Italian, and Waldo made out the old man saying, "Si, signora, grazie, signora," a few times, but that was it.
She pulled a chair over to him from the corner for the tailor to stand on while measuring him. The old man seemed to spring to life suddenly as he stood on the chair and measured Waldo's shoulders, arms, neck with authority, barking out the numbers to Ruth, who stood nearby with pad and pencil. He was a master craftsman, as had been his father and his father's fathers all the way back to Caligula, no doubt, and it was a near-certainty that there was at least one son ready to take the old man's place once he retired.
"He's beautiful," Waldo said to Ruth as the tailor climbed down from the chair to take Waldo's lower specifications, still bristling like a field marshal, doing his thing.
She nodded knowingly, and brought over the tailor's sample book for Waldo to choose materials. He thumbed through the first half-dozen samples and then closed the book sharply and with obvious disgust.
"Don't you like anything?" Ruth asked, incredulously.
"No, it's not that," he said, feeling slightly embarrassed to continue, and then doing so hesitantly, like a little boy. "Well, it's just that they're all so fantastic, and like, well I've never had any experience doing this, and, here, you choose," thrusting the book towards Ruth.
"Sure," she said softly, "I consider it a compliment."
While Ruth went about the business of selecting with the eager old man, Waldo sat down, feeling exhausted even though he had just gotten out of bed. Perhaps it was the last residue of suspicion which was being dispelled, or it could have been that he was resisting her financial, emotional and sexual pampering. He would analyze it more fully later, if at all; he wanted nothing to compromise his new-found and ruggedly fought-for-freedom, especially the freedom to think freely.
After the tailor had bowed and scraped his way out of the room with a comic attempt at 18th century formality, Ruth sat down in a chair opposite Waldo and lit a cigarette.
"What would you like for breakfast?" she asked, reaching for the phone.
* * *
"If you hold me prisoner too much longer I'm going to develop a pallor," Waldo was saying after the breakfast dishes had been cleared away. "And if I weren't on the lam, Ruth, I know I would be digging all this much more than I am anyway. Am I making sense?"
"Enough," she said. "Go on."
"You see, before I was drafted I was tending bar in New York and living a pretty good life. When you're twenty-four, single, been on your own since you were seventeen, you really don't want your life messed with. Have you ever smoked any pot?"
"Yes," she said, smiling.
"Then you must know what I mean. Dig it. I'm living on the Lower East Side, tending bar five days a week, noon to eight, high most of the time, dealing a little on occasion, lots of women around, though most of them not too together, and all of a sudden I'm on a bus for Fort Dix with a bunch of other cats and when we get there these low-grade morons start sounding off at us like maniacs.
"It was more of more of a shock than I even thought it would be. Can you picture it? Naturally they thought I was a piss-poor soldier and I guess I was. And the more I refused to shape up, the more oppressive it got. A few times some well-meaning officer would take me aside and wonder aloud why I didn't make it easier on myself and bend a little.
" 'And be like you?' I would answer him and then the shit would really hit the fan. One of these punks tried to get me court-martialed for insubordination and some bullshit about unsoldierly conduct or something, but they had no case because there were no corroborating witnesses. Still and all, they pegged me for a Bolshevik and busted my balls whenever they could get away with it; I must have set the Fort Dix world's record for drawing shit details in the time I was there."
"How did you manage to keep your sanity?"
"I figured out a method real early, and it worked most of the time. Let's say I was cleaning a latrine, not an uncommon thing for me to be doing. If I focused all my attention on what I was actually doing, I would go nuts. However, if I let my mind wander, fantasize, transport me somewhere else, anywhere else, from where I actually was and what I was actually doing, I found that I could make it through the day without cracking up and get the job done at the same time. It's probably the same syndrome as when driving long distances you find that a portion of your mind starts to wander, although you're quite conscious of the road and traffic around you. Your foot will hit the brake when it has to, though you are not fully conscious of your mind giving the command to your right foot to move. Anyway, it worked."
"What made you run away?"
"When I got my orders to go to Europe I was happy, unbelievably happy. One of the things they used to hold over my head was that if I didn't shape up, my young ass was going to go to Vietnam and get shot up. If you are a Private no-class fuckup, this is their ultimate weapon. I decided that if orders were ever cut sending me there, I would get lost before the boat left and take my chances getting to Canada or South America, or maybe even Cuba. So, when I find out that I'm going to Europe, it's beautiful. I'd always wanted to see Europe, and there was no fighting going on over here, so I'd have it made.
"But the Army is the Army. In Vietnam they are able to act out all their violent fantasies, and they do so, you can be sure of that. In a peaceful, routinized garrison situation, though, the fantasies remain but have no legitimate outlet. So all their pent-up killer, inhuman enthusiasms turn inward and strike out at anything or anybody in their own midst which is pro-life and therefore anti-death. Which was me.
"If you think the New York Daily News catchall category, NewYorkJewCommieDopeFiendNiggerloverPervert, is a joke, you'll choke on your laughter quickly enough upon finding people, a whole gang of people, who take it seriously. And I'm not even Jewish, though a few of my good friends were."
"Why were?"
"I'm headed for Stockholm, Ruth, the old me has died. I want to live out the rest of my life in peace, not in fear, and I certainly can't do it in the United States. There's nothing there for me anymore. I do not like what my country has become, so I do not choose to live there. Simple as that."
"But why did you pick this particular weekend to desert? Any reason?"
"The best," he said, smiling for the first time since he had started talking. "I've been stationed here almost a year and this is the fifth time I've been out on a pass. Usually they find some reason or other to restrict me to the post, or even the barracks, on a weekend, but this past week I managed to stay clean, so here I am."
Ruth reflected for a while on all this and then said, "Are there a lot of you, or did you find yourself really isolated in your persecutions?"
"There are a lot of us. I'm not the first person to do this, you know, and I imagine a lot will follow me. I'm no kind of hero, lady, no kind of hero at all. But I've managed over the years to develop a pretty good sense of what's right and what's wrong, and no amount of sweet words can hide the stench of wrongness when it exists. A lot of my buddies thought the same way, but doing what I've done is a very personal decision to have to make. Some of them have people at home whom they would have to see again. Others figured that each day that went by was one less that they would be in the Army and one more closer to their ETS, that's the day you get out.
"But I am not a killer, and if I had been sent to Vietnam I would have been put in a kill-or-be-killed situation. We have no business being there. You see, we, us, our country, yours and mine, the United States of America is the bad guys. The NLF is the good guys. The whole fucking world, Ruth, the big, wide, entire motherfucking world knows this, and nobody does or says anything because they're aware of how we respond to criticism. Guns, planes, death. You don't like The American Way of Doing Things? You must be a Commie. Bang, bang, Commie, you're dead. Any more of you Commies out there got anything to say? Anybody at all? Nothing? Good. Mr. President, our allies are behind us, God is with us, we cannot but succeed.
"A lot of GI's are hip to this, Ruth, and the Army is beginning to get scared. And when they're scared they kick ass first and worry about the consequences later. Now I would have had less than six months to do, but if I did any time in the stockade it would be added on to my hitch; and that would have given them more time to use me as a target. Ever feel like a target? I have for a year and a half. Motherfuck those faggot cocksuckers where they breathe, Jim, you got it, baby. That's all she wrote?'
Waldo was not breathless, nor, he found, had he raised the timbre of his voice many decibels while he spoke. This had been the first time in many months that he had been able to attempt to recreate what his existence in the uniform of his country had been like to a person not intimately involved with the Army, and apparently something in his mind kept his voice dispassionate towards his decidedly sympathetic, though not empathetic, audience.
This subtlety was not lost on Ruth. She waited a long time before breaking the silence which had ensued by saying, "You're a romantic idealist. I believe you really mean everything you said. It's refreshing, though at the same time saddening."
"Saddening?"
"Saddening. You have discovered something you consider to be the quintessence of evil, and you may be right, and you refuse to accept it. So you run away, again probably the right move for you to make, and the evil old Army rolls along as inefficiently as ever without you. However, you realize the extent of their absolute power and their lack of inhibitions about using it, and respect same. But you also should know that in the end they will get you, one way or the other. They must, Waldo, they just have to. They hold all the cards. So I am saddened when I think of your ultimate disillusionment when they win, though your spirit is refreshing."
He had prepared his answer long before she finished, and was on the verge of interrupting her when she finally did.
"But you don't understand, Ruth. I know it's a long shot, but the risks are well worth it. And neither of us knows how many people have escaped and are living out their lives now, secure in the knowledge that they won. History is full of upset victories, chance occurrences, it's what makes life worth living. Look at how we met, for chrissakes."
His face softened as he mentally relived the past twenty-four hours and he stopped talking, as if to savor them. But his mien became serious again as spoke.
"Maybe they will find me, who the fuck knows? But being a fugitive gives me something to do, I joined the Army and learned a useful trade. A very useful trade. Everybody should have some experience being a fugitive. It's good for you, it-"
"Builds character?"
"Right, it builds character and makes a man out of you."
"It certainly has made quite a man out of you, darling," Ruth said, staring at his crotch and running her tongue lightly over her slightly opened lips.
"Exactly my point," he said, bubbling over with enthusiasm. "Since I have become a fugitive my life has taken a definite upward turn. Great pussy, elegant surroundings, fine clothes, gourmet food, you know it's been so good I think I'll make a career of being a fugitive. It sure beats soldiering."
Ruth had begun to be swept away on the tide of his exuberance, though her innate caution restrained her from drowning therein. "I hate to puncture your balloon, but suppose they get you, then what?"
But his flight was not to be denied. "Then they get me. That's all, they get me. But before they get me, ah, that is another matter entirely. Picture Scotland Yard or somebody busting James Mason in the midst of his ill-gotten glitter. The camera pans in on him slowly as they take him away laughing, his laughter rising to the point of hysteria. They got him, but so fucking what?"
"And that's the way you want to go?"
"That's the way I'm going to go, that is if I go. No question about it. It can't be any other way."
"I'd like to share your confidence, but I can't help feeling-"
"Later for that feeling," he exploded, vaulting from his chair and bridging the distance between them in an instant. He leaned over her chair, supporting himself on the arms, and bent over to kiss her, his mouth partially open and his tongue at the ready before their lips met. As he approached her she arose to meet his eager body and they melted in a standing embrace, Ruth feeling his hard cock rubbing against her as he thrust his tongue in and out of her mouth with piston-like strokes. She pressed him even closer to her and their merged bodies swayed together in an erotic dance.
Waldo broke away roughly as she sunk her teeth into his lower lip, drawing blood. He was breathing hard as he loosened her bathrobe cord and pulled the robe open over her shoulders; he shrugged it off and it fell to the floor in a heap around her feet, revealing her tanned, voluptuous body, real, natural, no artificial flavoring or coloring added. Her breasts rose and fell with her breathing and he riveted his gaze on them, moving back three steps to appreciate the fine work of art before him.
Her hair hung straight down, just below her shoulders, and it framed a heart-shaped face, somewhat aquiline nose, and full, wet lips. Her eyes were green, almost like a cat's, and they were at once deep, piercing, soft, seductive, fiery, gentle, teasing, playful, and completely female. Her tits seemed to sag just comfortably, giving them a hint of down-and-out movement which in no way detracted from their lushly firm fullness. She was naked woman to him, Eve, Lilith, Bathsheba, Salome, Lucretia Borgia, Marilyn Monroe, CUNT!
He undressed quickly and came to her once more, placing his right hand between her legs, burying his fingers in her ample hair. His left hand reached over her right shoulder, enmeshing his fingers tightly in her longer hair, pulling her head back slightly.
"Aha, my pretty, you have allowed yourself to fall into the clutches of my infamous double-hair lock. What say ye to that?"
"Oh no, evil fiend, is it thy desire to have thy way with me, robbing me of that which is more precious than life itself? What's a girl to do?" she said, grasping his hard-on at the base and pulling at it gently, feeling it throb with ardor.
"Just keep that up and everything will be fine," he said, lowering his voice to a growl, and then suddenly releasing her from the double-hair lock to pick her up over his shoulder and carry her, kicking and squealing, to the bed, where she was unceremoniously dumped.
She bounced once upon impact and before her ass finally came to rest he was pulling her by her legs to the edge of the bed, where he stood over her, his cock erect and pointing up and away from its hairy base. Ruth lifted her legs and dug her heels into his back to help him draw her open snatch closer to his tool, while he raised her ass and squatted somewhat in order to lower her onto him.
As he penetrated her she wrapped her raised legs around him more tightly, drawing him deeper into her until he virtually supported the bulk of her weight on his stiff prong, save for the varying degrees of support she got from her legs around him and his hands, which cupped her ass. Waldo saw that by manipulating her ass to effect subtle shifts in weight, he could direct varying amounts of pressure on the walls of her cunt-which were gripping his prick as if their continued existence depended on it-by letting gravity work for him. Ruth felt as if her cunt were a musical instrument, being improvised upon and giving forth divine music behind the virtuosity of his dick, blowing riffs and changes on the walls, charges of pleasure appearing, disappearing, reappearing, then all changing direction; a dominant theme, some bass counterpoint, a mean rim shot by the drummer-ta-tataCRACK-and then a piercing solo, building to a climax, higher, higher, and the penultimate gasp before she brought herself over the top, arching her back and thrusting her raised pelvis forward to consume even more, if she were able, of his pleasure machine.
Waldo withdrew about two inches and Ruth inhaled deeply, trying as it were to translate the sucking energy from her lungs to her pussy to get it back in. She got it, but at his direction as he lazed it in and out, his prick recoiling, kicking like a rifle as each few hard strokes, then returning to them as casually as he had left them. Her orgasms were sporadic now, varying wildly in both intensity and duration as he fucked her hard and sweet and soft and up and down and in and out until the pressure moved from his guts along the erotic ganglia to his prick and then shot out, his prick recoiling, kicking like a rifle as each spurt of gism left him, and he roared, shoving it into her as far as it would go.
Her ass bucked as he came in her, and she tightened her legs' grip on his waist, trying to fill herself with more of his ejaculating cock.
And then they were both spent, the tidal waves had burst upon the shore and the waters began to recede and re-group for the next attack. He pulled out of her and she relaxed her legs, letting them dangle over the edge of the bed with freshly fucked satisfaction.
"You've made your point," she said, "and it was well taken."
Ruth got up and was getting dressed.
"Where are you going?" he asked, sprawled on the bed and smoking a cigarette.
"Out for a while. You'll just have to play fugitive by yourself until I get back. Do you think you can handle it?"
"I'll manage."
"Wonderful," she said, kissing him lightly on the cheek and then heading for the door. "See you soon."
CHAPTER FOUR
Waldo remained on the bed, absorbed in his thoughts. Discipline, he mused, discipline is the behavioral keystone of the successful fugitive. Remaining cooped up in this hotel room for the past twenty-four hours has required much discipline. And spending another night here with all the attendant comforts will require even more discipline.
And not getting busted will require dynamite discipline.
He realized he could probably stay with Ruth indefinitely, or for as long as either of their existential lives could proscribe the limits of indefinitely. But they both knew he was too hot to stay in Venice, and though she might ball him morning, noon and night, he would become stir crazy or otherwise deranged if they fell into that kind of scene.
No, he would leave in the morning. But where to, and how?
Discipline; if I examine it rationally it will come to me.
He sat up with a start. The chick in the red bathing suit. And as he leaped off the bed and made for the phone, he knew that if he couldn't get through- or maybe they were pissed off because he stood them up yesterday afternoon-he would find another way. That, he thought triumphantly as he dialed, was discipline.
It rang four times on the other end before it was answered.
"Pronto?"
"Is Sam there?"
"Aspett'," the voice said, and he heard the phone being put down and rapid Italian spoken in the background. Then a girl came on the line.
"Yes," she said, in a liltingly accented English.
"Sam?"
"Yes, this is Sam. To whom am I speaking?"
"Sam, I'm sorry about yesterday afternoon, but I got hung up and couldn't make it. I hope you weren't waiting long."
"Are you all right, are you safe?" she asked excitedly.
"Yes, I'm fine, I'm safe."
"Oh, that is good for me to hear. We were all very worried that something had happened to you, that the fascisti had busted you."
Waldo smiled when he heard the word "busted" used in the otherwise incongruous context of her formally correct, learned English.
"No," he said, "they haven't gotten to me yet, but I want to split Venice tomorrow. Can you help me?"
"It will most likely be very early in the morning, is that OK?"
"That's perfect. What do I do?"
"Call me in one hour exactly. It is now eleven-fifty."
"OK, speak to you then. And Sam?"
"Yes?"
"Thank you, you're beautiful."
"You are much too kind. Ciao."
"Ciao, Sam."
He hung up and reached over for his watch and put it on. If Ruth came back before his call, well tough titty; no, that was too harsh. He would tell her anyway, regardless. She had played no games with him, other than being evasive about who she really was, where she came from, what she was doing in Venice in mid-August-a time, when the heat hung over the ancient city like a wet blanket and the small canals smelled of organic refuse. But that was her business, so there was no sense in his getting hung up over it. If she was into a Dragon Lady bag, that was her thing. A fugitive should be suspicious, he reflected, though it was unwise to err in being over-suspicious. There was no need this side of perversity in withholding anything from her. If her plan was to do him in somehow, it was too late to do anything about it, and, he went on, worrying about some phantom plot served only to constipate his thinking.
Not only does it accumulate a lot of shit in my head but it is also certainly counter-productive to self-indulgence, he continued. The threads of a hypothesis began to knit together in a still unproven weave: is the amount of shit in one's head a negative function of one's ability to indulge himself in his favorite hedonisms? The empirical evidence would indicate that it was so.
Sheeeeeeeit, man, he smiled outwardly, yesterday it was the world that had me by the nuts, and today I have it by the nuts. Nice, very nice.
He flopped back on the bed, cupping his hands beneath his head and crossing his feet, like a man who was holding the world by the nuts, and waited for the rest of the hour to pass.
At ten to one he placed a call to Sam again. She picked it up after the first ring.
"Yes?"
"It's me again, Sam."
"Thank you for being punctual," she said, very businesslike. "Tomorrow morning at six exactly, you will start to walk diagonally across San Marco towards the bell tower."
"That's it?"
"That is it."
"Will I see you in the morning, Sam?"
"Perhaps. Ciao."
"Ciao," he said, but it was into a dead phone.
Now he started to grow impatient, waiting for Ruth to return, and lacking anything better to do he went to the bathroom to wash his hands. On nothing more than an impulse he opened the medicine chest and found it empty, except for a small bottle full of green spansules. Dexedrine, he thought.
The label told him that they were to be taken daily, one each upon arising, her name was Ruth Lowe, her doctor's name was Smith, and she bought them in a pharmacy on East 73rd Street in New York. They looked to him like 10's; he didn't think she needed the added jolt that 15's provided.
"Hi, spy," she said, standing in the bathroom doorway.
"I've discovered your stash," he said, taken by surprise but not feeling at all guilty over it.
"Take one, if you like," she said, "though it'll spoil dinner for you."
"What are they, 10's?"
"That's right."
"Maybe later," he said, putting them back in the cabinet and closing the door.
"Come on out of there and see what I got for you," she said, turning away from the doorway and beckoning him into the larger room.
On the desk was a manila envelope, which she picked up and handed to him.
"What's this?" he asked, weighing it in his hand.
"Open it up, silly."
He ripped one end open and dumped the contents on the piece of plate glass covering the desk's wooden surface. Out fell an American passport, social security card, driver's license, draft card, voter's registration card, and a New York City Public Library Card, all made out to Waldo Smith. The passport photo was the one Ruth had taken the afternoon before, and it was professionally affixed in the space provided and stamped officially. He examined the rest of the lot and they seemed to be equally genuine. He was impressed.
"Very impressive," he said. "I guess I'm supposed to say thank you, but it seems hardly adequate, especially in light of what these things must have cost."
"I see you have an eye for quality," she said.
"Ruth, I-"
She cut him off with a kiss, extending her tongue longingly into his mouth, promising delights of the flesh which he knew full well she would and could deliver.
"Enjoy yourself, fugitive," she said breathlessly. "You'd better sign them and put them away."
He pulled a piece of paper out of the desk and practiced his signature as Waldo Smith a few times before putting it on his new identification. When he finished, he put them back in the envelope.
"Not there, here," Ruth said, handing him a black leather billfold.
"Too much, you're too much," he muttered, taking the cards out of the envelope and putting them in the appropriate places in the wallet.
"Open it up, explore it," she whispered in his ear, licking the lobes with a darting, sensual motion.
Waldo was giggling as he thumbed past the various cards he had just put in the wallet, looking for secret compartments, and when he found five ten-thousand-lire notes tucked away almost shyly in a compartment he broke up into a sidesplitting guffaw.
"It figures, it certainly fucking figures," he roared, almost falling over backwards in his chair, but Ruth caught him.
"An empty wallet is so depressing, don't you think?" she said with a mock pout. "So I just couldn't resist fattening it a little.
"Especially since you're going to be on your way soon," she tossed out matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought.
He regained his composure at once. "You know?"
"Why, were you planning to surprise me? Please, Waldo, you seem to be too hip to go through any of these bullshit changes. The most sensible thing for you to do now would be to leave Venice as quickly as possible, and a piece of tail, regardless of how appealing, is no reason to postpone your departure. Being a fugitive, you asshole, means acting like a fugitive, not Andy Hardy. Besides, Andy Hardy never would have seduced me, so don't be a boy scout, darling, it becomes you poorly."
"Quite a speech," Waldo replied, trying to look and sound as un-boy scout-like as possible.
"You're OK, Waldo Smith, you're just fine, you'll be a magnificent fugitive."
"With a little help from my friends."
"Thank you," she said in acknowledgment. "Would you like to take a walk? It's a beautiful day, and you've been cooped up in here for a long time now."
"Do you think it's cool?"
"Come on," she said, with a little girl's plaintive expression turning down the corners of her mouth. "You're not exactly Dillinger at this point."
"I'll put on my shades, and I'm as good as anyone. I am Waldo Smith, American tourist, and I am doing my tourist thing this afternoon in the charming company of my good and great American tourist friend."
"Don't overdo it, baby."
"Overdo it? Me? Ratshit, I say. Nothing overdone here, my good woman, it's all medium rare," he chortled, patting her on the ass in his best dirty-old-man manner.
She pulled away instinctively, shocked at his forwardness.
"How dare you, you depraved monster," she ranted at him like a hysterical fishwife.
"Waldo Smith of Kankakee, Illinois, at your service, m'dear, I'm in ladies' lingerie-a lot of the time. Get it? A lot of the time!"
"You're quite mad, you know," she said, wiping the tears which the laughter had brought from her eyes.
"Aye, and if it be madness there's method in't," he went on, undaunted by her having dropped out, though sounding more like Boris Karloff than Polonius.
"Stop it, you maniac, stop it before I, I..."
"You what? Hush, for the ultimate threat approaches. Speak to us, mighty ultimate threat, we await you-"
"I'LL PISS IN MY PANTS IF YOU DON'T STOP!"
His voice trailed off into limbo and he giggled as he watched her screaming through her new tears.
"Come, Gwendolyn," he said, with manic sobriety, "the afternoon awaits our pleasure."
They went out to the streets and played all afternoon. There was a gondola ride, a tour through the Doge's Palace, some drinks at one of the plaza side restaurants. The stares accorded them during their leisurely travels would have been a prime source of paranoia for Waldo, had he not chosen to disregard them. He knew quite well that Ruth, though a very beautiful woman, still looked older than he, and he knew further that this would elicit a variety of morality-motivated stares from people who were accustomed to doing that type of thing. There was nothing he could do to stop it, so he didn't try. Rather, he would try and stare them down, which would invariably bring a flurry of muted whispering from their thin mouths.
"They are constipated cockroaches, look at them scurry and hide like the vermin they are. Back to beneath your rocks, you carriers of plague," he admonished a fat, middle-aged American woman in orthopedic brogans, clutching the arm of her fatter husband, as they strolled by out of earshot.
"What was she doing for all that?" Ruth asked, sipping on a frozen daiquiri.
"The old cow was staring at us, I mean she actually had those two obscene udders of hers pointed directly at us."
"But you fixed her ass, didn't you?"
"You heard it all here, kid, live and in color from Venezia, Italia. I'm going to whip the curse of the Mafia on the next snoop I catch."
"Is that a real bad one?"
"The worst, and in Italy, it's even more worse than that, if you follow my meaning."
"Alas, yes."
"Excellent. I see another one now, sitting in the '.corner. When I count three, stare at him just over your left shoulder, we'll give him a double. One, two, three. Now together with me: The curse of the Mafia on your no-good ass."
They repeated it in unison, looking forbiddingly at the man who had been staring. He finished his drink quickly, put some money on the table and left.
They both turned around and laughed at the retreating figure, then with each other. A postcoital silence followed as their laughter dissipated into the late afternoon breeze; they stared at their empty drinks for what seemed to be a long time, possibly remembering other afternoons or even a time when either of them felt like remembering afternoons. Ruth broke the silence and the mood.
"Do you think there is a Mafia in Italy, Waldo, I mean like the one we're familiar with in the States?"
"Certainly, it's the center. It's where all the orders come from."
"No, I'm serious."
"You mean the old Maf right here? Are you putting me on?"
"No, dammit, I'm serious."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why are you serious about something like that?"
"What you said a while ago, what we said to that poor slob who was staring at us."
"Do you think he was a local Mafioso?"
"No, he wouldn't have been so overt."
"Then what's the point?"
"No point, Waldo, it's just that I'm unaccustomed to being stared at with the frequency and intensity of this afternoon's offerings, and it's made me a little jumpy. And that jumpiness juxtaposed with your Mafia curse, well, I guess I overreacted is all."
For the first time since they had met Waldo saw Ruth outside of the tough-hip-sexy shell in which she had been dwelling, and the added dimension made her even more appealing. He knew factually that this was their last night together, though he wondered whether a fugitive had the right to indulge in the luxury of concepts such as "last night together." And of course not only did they both know it, but each knew that the other knew too and on and on into the infinity of opposing mirrors. But all this was a luxury he knew that neither of them could presently afford; he was sure that he could form a passable dialectic about humanity being denied from all this, but it would have to wait. So he stepped back into his madman bag.
"Naw, we got him, tiger. Shot his lame ass down from the sky. He overreacted, for chrissakes. The civilized thing would have been to have joined us for a drink. Obvious lack of class, a peasant. Begone, peasant," he said, turning his head.
"Thanks, Waldo, I guess I needed that."
Warm appreciation gushed from her eyes and engulfed him. He became serious again.
"You know you're making it very difficult for me to do my insane thing. You know that, don't you."
"I'll not apologize for it."
"None sought, none granted."
"Poetry too, remarkable."
"Y'all ain't seen shit yet, ma'm."
"Uh uh. You," pointing her finger, "ain't seen shit yet."
"OK, lady, I'll go quietly."
"Waldo?"
"Yes, my precious."
"Do you know the time?"
"Yes."
"What time is it?"
"Six-thirty."
"Are you hungry?"
"Famished. I imagine you know a place or two."
"I do indeed."
"Then guide me, good woman, guide me," he said, getting up and leaving a bill on the table for their drinks.
Ruth guided him off San Marco, through 15th-century streets decorated with 20th-century neon, across a bridge and around two corners to a small restaurant half-filled with diners and dinner chatter.
A maitre d' greeted them at the door and discreetly led them to a corner table.
"So good to see you again, Signora," he said quite formally to Ruth after she and Waldo had been seated.
"Thank you, Antonio, it's nice to be back. And you can take these menus away. We leave the ordering to your good judgment."
"Thank you, Signora, you are most kind," Antonio said, removing the menus and heading towards the kitchen.
Antonio's judgment was very good, Waldo thought, as he ate his way through innumerable courses of meats, cheeses, pasta, and the omnipresent garlic. He had been hungry for a meal and was confronted with a feast, though this was not at all inconsistent with Ruth Lowe and her way of doing things, and therefore was not really surprising. Excess, immoderation, not at all applicable here. Having money and having the ability to spend it tastefully were an art form, and Ruth was, if nothing else, an artist. He finished the last delicious morsel of food in his plate and sat back, happily content, gazing at her.
"Why I do believe you're staring at me," she said, looking up at his face as she sipped her wine.
"That I am."
"May one inquire why?"
"One may."
"OK, you exasperating fool. Why?"
"There are few things more pleasantly civilized than having dinner with a beautiful woman."
"I see. Flattery, you know, will get you everywhere."
"I know."
Coffee and dessert were served, and Waldo insisted on paying the bill with one of the new, crisp banknotes. They both thanked Antonio and strolled out into the evening.
The sun had set and the moon had come up, cooling the air appreciably, and Ruth wanted to go back to the hotel to get a sweater. Waldo waited for her downstairs in the bar, nursing a fine, mellow, yet robust French brandy.
The bar was pretty much deserted except for two florid-faced, fat German tourists and their Brunhilde-built wives, drinking beer and talking loudly. A middle-aged man was seated at the other end of the bar toying with a martini; he peered into the glass as if it were a crystal ball which held the secrets of his future. Waldo remained with his own thoughts and his drink until the man at the end of the bar spoke, noticeably drunk, though still coherent.
"You an American, boy?"
Waldo flinched, though not perceptibly he hoped, when he heard the familiar Southern accent of his country directed towards his person. Too often, much too often, in the recent past a voice with that accent had embodied the cruel, capricious authority of his government's military establishment directed against him. It seared his flesh, like strong acid; it was the voice of the cop, the man, the sound of the universal fuzz network summoning him to the docket for non-payment of dues. (But I paid them already, your honor. Sheeit, boy, mah hound dog got more sense than that!)
"Uh-huh," Waldo replied, aloof though not hostile.
"Another round fo' me an' mah fren'," the man said to the bartender as he got up and maneuvered his way to the stool next to Waldo and sat down. "Ah'm Ray Culpepper, Dothan, Alabama," he said, extending his hand to Waldo after sitting down.
"Waldo Smith, New York."
"Knew you was a Yankee the minute I laid eyes on y'all, no offense though," he smiled, revealing a gold tooth and gin-fumed breath. "But ah've known me fahn, fahn Yankees in mah time, yessir, some fahn ones."
Waldo wondered what was keeping Ruth, as he had no desire to alienate this drunk and could think of no way to step out of this situation graciously until she rescued him. Also, he didn't know what to say, and finally decided to thank Culpepper for the drink, which he didn't want but which sat there on the bar in front of him anyway.
"Thanks for the drink."
"Mah pleasure, Mr. Smith, mah pleasure."
There followed an awkward silence which became even more pronounced because of the two German couples' guttural chatter in the background. Culpepper broke it; mercifully, Waldo thought.
"Don't that really git to you?"
"What?"
Culpepper lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Them fuckin' loudmouth Krauts carrying on lak they owned the fuckin' place. Ah dunno, we whupped their ass back in '45, ah was in the big one. you know, and now here they are, bigger'n shit, makin' it hard for a couple of good Americans lak us to enjoy a little quiet drinkin'."
"I guess they are a little loud."
"Y'all sure are kahnd, Mr. Smith. Ah guess havin' gone to war with the sonsahitches kahnd of sours a man on seein' 'em pop up fat and sassy lak nothin' ever happened. We been here two days now, me and the wife, and there ain't no place a man can go without them Krauts spoilin' it. Who won the fuckin' war anyway?"
"I guess we did."
"That's just mah point, just mah point indeed. Ah'm glad ah ran into y'all, Mr. Smith. Young people toady-not countin' present company of course-young people just don't wanna lissen to their elders, don't respect them, think they know everything." Culpepper paused dramatically, "and they don't know shit." He uttered these last words with the emphasis and articulation of one of the world's deepest and most profound truths.
"Times change, Mr. Culpepper, the world changes."
"Ah, know, Mr. Smith, y'all think ah'm some old fogey who's got hisself a skinful to boot, but lemme tell y'all something, jus' one li'l thing. If it wasn't for me and maybe your own daddy too and all the rest of us who put our asses on the line and got them shot at, this here country and the whole rest of the world would be suckin' hind titty to them Krauts and Japs." Culpepper downed his drink in one gulp and ordered another. "Sheeit, jus' lissen to them yammerin' away back there, like they was the cock of the walk, like they won the fuckin' war, Kraut bastards, probably Comminists too..."
Ruth entered the bar as Culpepper's voice trailed off in an alcoholic fog, and the two German couples stopped talking loudly. Waldo breathed a sigh of relief and finished his drink. The one Culpepper had bought for him remained untouched, as he got up off the bar stool and walked towards her. Culpepper was still talking, but he was unintelligible and took no notice of Waldo's leaving, the word "nigra" having now replaced Kraut in his monologue.
Waldo took Ruth's arm and guided her firmly but gently out the door into the street.
"Who was that man you were talking to?" she asked as they strolled towards the Grand Canal.
"Mr. Ray Culpepper of Dothan, Alabama, who was telling me all about the bad old days and the bad new days with tales of horror about Krauts and Comminists and nigras. And he was talking to me. Jesus, I thought you'd never come."
"Can't a girl powder her nose?" she said, petulantly. "And besides, you looked like you were holding your own with Stonewall Jackson and his gallery of villains."
Waldo became the fugitive again for a moment. "What did he look like to you?"
"Stonewall?"
"Yeh, Stonewall."
She thought for a few seconds before answering. "I don't know, like any other middle-aged drunk, I guess."
"Did he look like a cop, or an agent, anything like that?"
"Absolutely not," she laughed. "Waldo, dear, let's take a gondola ride, please. It's frightfully expensive, but it will do wonders for your head. And besides," she added, taking a firmer hold on his arm and pressing it against her breast as they walked on, "I dislike making love on a full stomach. It tends to sap one's vigor, don't you agree?"
"Not entirely," he said, grinning, and feeling her up with his free hand as they continued their stroll.
Ruth stopped walking and turned to kiss him, lightly and tenderly, pulling away before she became carried away. "We're going anyway, you bastard," she said, taking his arm again, "you sneaky, feel-copping bastard."
They hired a gondola for a half-hour and reclined on the soft, cracking leather cushions which had supported countless thousands of tourists in their time. Waldo relaxed completely, pushing Culpepper (who he had now started to call Stonewall in his mind) out of his conscious thoughts to an irrelevant limbo. The present was too choice, too lush, too fucking happy to be cluttered with silly Stonewall Culpepper's. And Ruth knew this, of course. Maybe she was being simply selfish in lying in the comfort of his arms while their gondola eased its way along the mid-evening tranquility of the serpentine canals. But she was not unaware of his needs, physical, emotional, even financial, and like the good doctor she was, her prescription for ridding his system of acute Culpepper was effective, effective as hell.
He bent over and kissed her hard, holding her warm vibrant body against him. She responded fiercely, thrusting her whole self against him, nibbling, licking, mini-biting, rubbing. They continued this strenuous necking until Waldo broke loose, exclaiming breathlessly, "We're going to capsize if we keep this up."
"Oh no we won't," Ruth said, still holding him tight and putting his hand up her dress.
She was not wearing stockings and as Waldo moved his hand up her legs he discovered she was not wearing panties either.
"With your fingers, love, with your fingers," she whispered in his ear, licking the lobes with short, darting thrusts of her tongue.
Waldo inserted his index finger in her pussy, found it unsurprisingly wet, and jerked her off, pinching, caressing, stroking, using his thumb, two, even three fingers at a time. She came repeatedly, sighing almost inaudibly with each orgasm, and belching between the two final ones. He withdrew his finger and licked it, tasting her musty funk.
"Honeyfinger," he said.
"You're going to get it tonight," Ruth said in a curious, sing-song voice, kissing him on the forehead.
It was peaceful for the rest of the ride; she lay comfortably nestled on his shoulder, hearing only his breathing juxtaposed with the water of the canal lapping against the sides of the gondola. Ruth couldn't remember the last time she wanted any man as badly as she wanted him now. What an exciting time for him to be young, she thought. It would be a while before another like him came along.
The gondolier returned them to a mooring near the hotel, and Ruth paid him, insisting that it was her idea to go and that Waldo had bought dinner already.
They walked the short block to the hotel in silence, holding hands as uninhibitedly as a couple of junior high school students on their first date. Waldo knew that it was going to be something quite special, that the way she had been looking at him all evening-especially of late-presaged delights which would be on a level consistent with her beauty and creativity. She opened the door to the room and closed it behind them. The full moon shone through the windows, bathing the room in its muted, bluish light. Taking a deep breath, Waldo went over to the bed and sat down, hyperventilating the intoxicating air in and out of his lungs. Ruth had gone to the desk out of direct moonlight, and he heard her fumbling with one of the drawers. Then there was the rustling of material as she undid her dress and shrugged it to the floor. Waldo felt himself being aroused as he stared in her direction, catching no more than hints of movement which his mind's eye filled in to complete the tableau.
And then, wearing only a bra, Ruth stepped into the moonlight, letting its otherworldly light play hide-and-seek along the sensuous curves of her body. She stood there for a few moments, looking at the moon, arms outstretched as if in a plea to Diana the Huntress. Then her arms lowered and she reached behind her back and unhooked her bra, wriggling her shoulders in a slow, deliberate rhythm, her ripe breasts quivering to be free of the bra's constraint. She danced out of it in this way and then stepped into the darkness, toward Waldo and the bed.
He thought he had seen something in her hand while she had been dancing to the light of the moon, and when she sat down beside him and wordlessly handed him a hand-rolled cigarette, he felt mildly elated at his coup of perception. But this was nothing to compare with feeling of anticipatory pleasure which exploded inside him when he immediately pinned the cigarette to be a joint.
She struck a match, its light a rude intruder in their sanctuary of moonlight once-removed, and lit his joint and her own. The familiar smoke filled his lungs, and he inhaled sharply in short bursts, forcing more and more air into his lungs so that the precious smoke would be completely absorbed by his system when inevitably he would have to exhale. By the time the joints had been smoked down to tiny roaches, Waldo was wasted. It was probably great grass, but it seemed as if it had been an eternity (though in reality a week was closer to it) since he had gotten high, and his tolerance as a result was quite low.
"How's your head?" Ruth asked, her voice throaty and an octave lower than usual.
"Together," he answered, feeling constricted and stuffy in his clothes and slowly removing them, concentrating very hard on each item, off sock, over the heel and on the floor, now the other one the same way, feeling like each had taken ten minutes to get off. Laboriously he rid his body of his shirt, then his T shirt, his pants and shorts down the legs and over the feet and off. He was naked at last, and he felt a strong, magnetic field of vibrations emanating from her, sending messages to his own nervous system, drawing him closer and closer to her until their selves were merged.
Contact was made in many places at once. As one of her tits, appearing bluish in the shadows approached him and he eased himself slowly to meet it, it loomed large in his senses and after an indeterminate length of time he found himself wallowing and cavorting in the quintessential tit, nipples, flesh, muscles, sounding like tit, feeling like tit, smelling like tit, looking like tit, tasting like tit. Tit was attacking him and he surrendered to it without even a whimper, embarking on a tit trip, making the tit scene, running through fields of tit barefoot, washing himself with tit, eating it, digesting it, excreting it, secreting it, breathing tit in and blowing tit out. Waldo, the tit king, crowned with a tit seated on a throne of tits, titular head of the realm of tit.
And then it slowly began to fade away, like a ferry inching out from its moorings into a foggy harbor, the Good Ship Tit on its way.
A whisper of hair running down his legs, Ruth's face and hair inundating his feet, kissing, rubbing, licking, hard breathing, warming them with herself. Waldo felt as if he had just wet his feet in a bath of divine nectar, and he shuddered, deliriously anticipating his eventual complete immersion in this erotic lavabo.
Ruth continued to take him around the world, very, very slowly, concentrating on each area for an eternity before returning to her creeping ascent up his legs, worshipping between the pillars of the temple of cock, cleansing his body with her tongue the washcloth, her hair the softest of towels. She was at his knees, and raised her hands above her, touching his stomach in the posture of a supplicant.
Waldo was engrossed in watching her do him, studying her artistic endeavors in his behalf, thoroughly enjoying the dual role of spectator and medium. She had pulled herself up on him to mid-thigh, and her pace seemed to be even slower, maddeningly slower, as she approached his balls, so carefully, so very carefully; and then she avoided them.
As she worked her way up his back, after she had rolled him over on his side, she reached around and held him, doing her thing on his lower spine, making him ache for her pussy, driving him to fits of giggling ecstasy, and she was moving up his back now, turning his waist loose and holding her breasts, brushing her large, erect nipples against the territory her tongue had just vacated, maintaining erratic rhythms entirely independent of her sweet and sour licking. Reaching his shoulders, she fell over full on top of him, driving her rampaging tongue deep and full into his mouth, choking off a burgeoning scream of frustration and forcing him to take in a massive gulp of air through his nose. He threw his arms around her, locking his fingers in her hair and then pulling her head down even closer to his own, locking their mouths together.
Ruth felt his prick, hard as a rock, pressing into her stomach and raised her ass until her cunt was directly over his balls, then grabbed it, holding it erect, and descended on it easily, her cunt well-lubricated.
Waldo came almost immediately, violently, explosively, uncontrollably, his gism doing impossible nerve things as it was spurting out of him, but there was no release. Ruth squeezed him with her cunt, wringing every last drop out of him before relaxing her grip and letting him pull out, and as part of a continuous movement resumed the last leg of her circumnavigation, breathing heavily now, on a pre-climactic plateau, sucking his nipples, letting her breasts hang over him and brush across his stomach.
Down, down, down, down down down she went, around him, encircling this majestic cock, bloodied with the slime of their mixed love juices yet unbowed in its tumescence, moving in increasingly smaller concentric circles, driving him up the wall to a frenzy of waiting, unfulfilled and negligibly sated from the first fuck-it was no more than heavy foreplay. She held his cock upright once more, her hair flowing down forming a curtain around his crotch, and he felt her licking it slowly, up from the base to the head and then down again on the other side, cleaning the old juices off and replacing them with her own.
When she finally put it in her mouth, gliding it in smoothly, Waldo jerked involuntarily, his last gasp before descending into a reverie of cocksucking, blowjobs, dicklicking, petereating, downonme, doing it to me, taking him to the brink of orgasm, and then easing him back. He opened his eyes and sat up, pushing her hair back and letting it hang in a thick mass around her neck and over her shoulder, then watched her suck him in the subtle shadows of the moonlight, fascinated by the concurrent visual and tactile stimuli, mixing them in his brain until they achieved erotic unity.
"I want to eat your pussy," he said in a flat monotone, belying the desire implicit in the words. She moved herself around, using her mouth, full of his tool, as a pivot, and he met her cunt mouth-on, opening the lips slightly with his fingers and initiating his own music on her complex organ, handling the valves and stops with the skill of a venerable Kapellmeister, while she came very quickly, electrically, before moving on to a long-sustained climactic condition, performing prodigies of fellatio on his throbbing prick.
Waldo came long and hard, grinding his pelvis, fucking her mouth as her mouth fucked back; pressures, positions, and then the bed shook with their writhing, arms, legs, skin, hair, and they had sucked each other off.
It ended like that, a 69ing embrace in which they found themselves down from the pot and tired, though not yet ready for sleep. They huddled together under the covers, exchanging body warmth, as the night turned cold.
CHAPTER FIVE
"I'm leaving in the morning," Waldo said. They lay in bed, smoking cigarettes.
"I know."
"Very early."
Ruth said nothing. She got out of bed and went to the bathroom, returning with a dexedrine spansule. "Here," she said, handing it to him, "you'll probably need it."
"What about you?" he asked, swallowing it without water, feeling it slide down his throat and disappear from his conscious senses into his stomach.
"No thanks," she said, sliding in next to him under the covers, passing her hand casually over his body, "I'm going to need some sleep. Knock yourself out."
"You're a good woman, Ruth."
"Is that your verdict?"
"Yes it is," he said, putting his arm around her shoulder and cradling her to him. "You are a good woman," repeating himself for emphasis.
"One does what one can," she said, modestly.
"I'll try to keep in touch, but I may be moving around a lot."
"I understand there is a sizable colony of people like yourself in Stockholm, so I'm going to send your clothes to American Express there as soon as they're ready."
"I expected nothing less," he lied, having forgotten about the gnomish tailor in his concentration on the next few hours and what they would bring.
"It's about two-twenty," she said after a pause, matter-of-factly, though Waldo believed for a moment that she could read his mind. He embraced her, kissing her tenderly at first, and they lay there, necking in each other's arms, not for arousal per se but for the sheer joy of the act.
It took about an hour for him to feel the dex start to lift him up from his drowsiness, there being no real beginning to the high, and he realized that his relaxed playfulness had evolved into a renewed lust. Ruth felt it through him, a contact high achieved from his more deliberate activity as he sought to arouse her again. She felt his heart pounding as he held her body against him, and she responded, vigorously, drawing strength from him, feeding off his speeded-up persona.
They fondled each other's genitalia, a purity of lust surrounding their actions, the teenage joy of mutual masturbation purging them for the moment of their adult transgressions, and Ruth, jerking him off with the verve and dedication she had shown some high-school lover a dark generation ago as his fingers whipped her snatch into frothing agitation, said in a curiously high-pitched voice, "Am I getting you hot, baby?"
His prick became hard, and he wanted her again, badly. He separated her legs, lifting them to his shoulders, and drove his cock home, penetrating her fiery, wet cunt as she exhaled in a grand whoosh. She lowered her legs and wrapped them around his middle, securing him inside of her, and began pumping with him, working with him, grooving with him, cleanly, directly, non-ambiguously, muttering encouragement to him.
"Yeah, that's it, oh do it harder, fuck me, fuck me, oh fuck me, yes, yes, like that, oh it's so good, [ Waldo, don't stop for anything, now faster and faster and faster-Christ, yes that's so fucking good, such good fucking, more, keep giving more, oh you're going to make me come, oh, oh, you dirty motherfucker, yes, now, come with me, do it with me now, oh right now, yes, you're going to make it, a little more, harder, like a rock, rock rock rock, oh yes, Waldo, I know you're coming, you're killing me, I need your come, give it to me, you're almost there, yes I know I feel it, oh now, please now, Waldo, it's too good, motherfucker it's much too good, God, good, I'll suck you off again later, just don't stoop and come in me, come in my pussy now, I want it now, I want it now, I WANT IT NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW NOW!!"
Waldo fucked her harder, harder, harder; the dex was starting to peak and he worked his prong into her until it hurt, the agony of ecstasy catching his breath short until his second wind appeared and he plowed on, perspiring freely from their combined heat, his sweat joining hers and dampening the bedclothes beneath them. And still he fucked her, feeling at long last the birth of an orgasm, reluctant to rush out and defying him to work it up to consummation. Ruth had already come more times than two or three and he drove at her and in her with demonic turbulence, pushing himself higher, higher, and at last free, free, a fusion of shock waves bursting upon them with Roman candle frequency and then dying out to nothingness, peace, serenity.
Ruth had fallen asleep in his arms by the time the luminous dial on his watch read 5:30 though the pill had made him wide awake. He disengaged himself from her and got out of bed, pulling the covers back over her as she stirred a little in her sleep. In fifteen minutes he was washed and dressed, gathering his things from around the room, by the dawn's early light, he thought, grinning at his own touch of irony.
He took another pill and put 'X in his cigarette pack, for insurance, and kissed her sleeping ear goodbye, taking a last look at his temporary fugitive quarters and love nest before opening the door quietly and slipping out.
The brisk morning air hit his nostrils like a tonic as he walked the few empty blocks between the hotel and the corner of the piazza from which he had been told to start his early-morning stroll. He got there at 5:53, and stood in the corner, leaning against a pillar, his brain going a mile a minute, the seconds to six o'clock pounding a cadence. He lit a cigarette and realized that a cup of hot coffee would be really groovy right then. But it was 5:57 and he would start to cross in less than three minutes.
The piazza was empty, save for a few stray pigeons fluttering around the turned-up chairs and cold stone floor, searching for a crumb of food not already consumed by one of their brethren. Waldo examined it closely and found no one there. What the fuck, he thought, it was six ayem and he started to walk.
His footfalls seemed to reverberate off the sides of the piazza and he felt very much alone and vulnerable. When he was about halfway across, a man, dressed in a trench coat, collar turned up, appeared from nowhere, it seemed, the nowhere to his right, and walked towards the bell tower, meeting Waldo a few feet from it.
"Keep walking straight," he said, as their paths crossed and he moved quickly out of Waldo's field of vision to the left. His English had been heavily accented and the rest of him was hypnotically nondescript.
Waldo was heavily freaked by the man. He was wearing a trench coat, he mused as he followed directions and kept walking, straight. And shades too, Joe Average, but even smelling furtive. The dex was just about peaking and his head was a computer boxed in a juke box running at full volume. Whew, these people were right out of the fucking Late Show. He was fully expecting Sam to be Raquel Welch in a ripped blouse.
The second man stepped out of a darkened doorway and fell in step with Waldo, who was feverishly constructing a scenario full of anonymous men in trench coats, microfilm, skullduggery in high and low places, and breathlessly gorgeous and equally amoral female double-agents-The Sons of Sappho a possible name-all enmeshed in an incredibly complex plot to Overthrow And Take Over Everything. Waldo saw the second man and rewrote him into the screenplay immediately, and then spoke to him.
"Good morning."
The man grunted, more than likely because his feet hurt.
"Bon giorno." Waldo tried again.
The same response.
They walked in silence for the rest of the way away from the piazza, and stopped at a double wooden door large enough to allow a locomotive passage. The second man, who was also wearing a trench coat, knocked three times, two short and one long, and a small door in the middle of the two massive ones opened, admitting them. Waldo was not particularly surprised to see that it had been the first trench coat who opened the door and was now helping to escort him to the end of a courtyard and into a cellar beneath it.
He was in a room which had much in common with other basement apartments the world over (or at least as much of it as he had seen): low ceilings, a lot of stone or concrete, almost constant twilight, and Salvation Army modern furniture. A girl sat in a ridiculously baroque overstuffed chair in one corner beneath a naked 40-watt bulb. She was definitely not Raquel Welch, and as if to bring his entire fantasy crashing down with a resonant thud around him, the brothers trench coat turned and left abruptly, as silently as they had entered.
"Sam?" Waldo asked, making his way gingerly amidst the junk cluttering the floor to the lighted corner.
"I am Sam," the girl said, getting up to greet him. "Who are you?"
She was no more than nineteen, he guessed, long, straight black hair, slender, sort of ugly pretty, and dressed in a bleached khaki shirt many sizes too big for her, and levis. She was barefoot.
"I'm Waldo Smith."
"Welcome, Waldo," she said, making a gesture of expansiveness with her arm.
"Sam," Waldo began, sitting down on an unmade bed in the same corner, his head roaring high, "are those trench coat twins for real? I'd call them the Marx Brothers, but they're one shy. They are too fucking much!"
"They are brothers," she said, amused at his typically American lack of reticence, "and they are quite mad."
"I'm hip, and their tailor is pretty far out too."
"Are you hip to what's happening in Czechoslovakia right now?" she said, changing the subject. Waldo sensed a feeling of urgency in her tone.
"No, baby, I'm not. Hey, where'd you learn such good English? You from around here?"
"You are very bourgeois for a revolutionary, my Waldo," she said wearily, as if confronted with a slow child.
"Uh-uh," he said, shaking his head vigorously. "I'm not that cat, I'm simply a plain, ordinary, garden variety fugitive. Revolution? That's pretty heavy shit, Sam."
"A contradiction in terms, you are merely confused."
"Sweetheart, I don't want to cut you off," he said, cutting her off, "but my decision to go over the hill was a personal one. I heard that you people, whoever you are, help people like me get away, sort of like an underground railroad like we had in the Civil War for runaway slaves. Believe me I appreciate what you're doing, but I really don't want to rap about politics."
"I see," she said, wearily again, not knowing how else to handle this very intensely naive young man. "Do you not agree that what you are doing is a very definite political act?"
"Only if I so choose. Come on, Sam, it's six o'fuckingclock in the goddam morning."
"You seem wide awake."
"You wouldn't believe where I've come from and what I've been doing over the weekend."
"You've been shacked up with the beautiful American lady, and I imagine you and she have been making love."
Waldo felt more crushed than threatened, though shock was registering on his face plainly.
"We may not have the money and equipment of your CIA or the Russians' KGB," she explained with obvious pride. "They would never have to use the mad Scarpi brothers, but we do what must be done. A couple of our people work in the hotel where the lady is staying, room 417, I believe, and you were seen coming and going."
"Do you know anything about her?" Waldo asked trying to appear nonchalant.
Sam laughed a patronizing little laugh which Europeans reserve for children and Americans. "I should imagine you would be able to tell me, rather than the other way around, or would that be ungallant? She is no one, a rich American tourist, no more, no less."
"Look at these," Waldo said, pulling out his new wallet and passport and handing them to her.
"Impressive," Sam said, though not visibly impressed. "They are fakes and the woman procured them for you. All the gigolos in San Marco will cheer your imminent departure, I am certain."
"How can you tell?"
"I can't tell, Waldo. I said they were fakes because I assumed they were, though they are excellent fakes, to be sure." She handed them back to him, adding, "They would not give any frontier guard reason for a second glance, and therein lies their usefulness. You make my job easier, and I thank your lady friend."
Waldo was too high to question Sam's apparent revolutionary expertise, but her command of English, something of a hybrid of British proper and American hip, managed to intrigue him.
"Where did you learn your English, Sam?"
"In school, from tourists, from your soldiers," she said, sighing, resigned to letting him lead the conversation.
"Are you from Venice?"
"No, I am from a small village about thirty kilometers from here."
"How did you get into the revolution business? Nice girl from a small town, did you get seduced and dishonored by some travelling pizza salesman?"
Sam was laughing now, obviously enjoying Waldo's manic wit. "Yes, something like that."
Now he was really wound up and cooking. "And your parents suffered all sorts of shame and shit and tried to make you feel guilty, but you dug it, and went off to the big, wicked city and fell in with bad company and here you are, cynical spy mistress, manipulator of men's bodies and souls, planning to destroy the world from this dingy dungeon."
"Yes, that's right," she laughed. "You are a poet, Waldo. They have never sent me a poet before."
"Are you fond of poetry?"
"Yes and no, but I do not wish to talk of poetry now. There is much to be done before you leave."
"When is that, incidentally?"
"This afternoon. I must leave you for a while, but I will return with some food."
"I'm not very hungry. Coffee will be fine."
"Que pazz'," Sam said, shrugging a Mediterranean shrug which excused the whole spectrum of human folly. She headed for the door. "Try and get some rest, I shall be back soon. Ciao, Waldo."
"Ciao, Sam."
He tried to relax on the bed after she left, but couldn't, the dex was working too hard, and he noticed somewhat obliquely that here he was again, alone in a strange room waiting for a strange woman to return. Ah, the life of a fugitive, he mused, nothing in the world like it, especially when one finds the nicest things in the places one tends to frequent.
His attention became fixed on a joint, or what certainly looked like a joint, laying on a table. Mmm, dis look like de devil weed marijuana. Mmmmmmmm, it even smell like de devil weed, and it unquestionably tasted like it.
Waldo sat on the floor getting blissfully zonked, and waited for Sam to return.
CHAPTER SIX
Janet and Brian sat on the bed, passing a hand-rolled cigarette back and forth between them, forcing the harsh smoke into their lungs, getting high.
She was a blonde, blue-eyed, full busted, narrow-waisted wide-hipped long-legged piece of ass, and she wore a black leotard which covered her like a second skin, contrasting with the tawny flow of hair which fell over and around her soft shoulders.
Brian's favorite comprehensive adjective for her was soft, she exuded softness to all with whom she came in contact, from a nimbus surrounding her with a constant emission of soft vibrations. He leaned over and put his head on her breast, thrilling to its comfort, its lushness, its softness. She touched his chin, tenderly and protectively, murmuring, "Dear Brian, my very own dear Brian. How good you are to me."
"No better than you are to me, baby," he said, smiling up at her through green eyes heavy yet open, shaded yet piercing, with cannabis. She ran her hand up to the back of his head, framed with his kinky, Afro cut black hair, and drew his face up to her lips, kissing him positively though gently, then releasing him as two widely-spaced sharp knocks sounded on the door.
Brian got up, stretching his muscular, mahogany-colored legs and tugging at his faded blue levis. He went to the door and looked through the peephole, satisfying himself on having recognized the person on the other side, and pushed the police lock's heavy rod to the right.
The connection entered the room. He was of medium height, dressed in a conventional business suit and tie, and, Brian thought, too conspicuous for the Lower East Side of Manhattan, unless he was the man ... He smiled, nodding at Janet and then Brian, waiting for somebody to say something.
"You Donny's friend, man?" Brian broke the silence.
"Yes, that's right, I'm-"
"Never mind, forget it, man," Brian interrupted. "I don't want to know and the chick doesn't either. You got the bricks?"
"Yes, I have them," he said, walking over to their kitchen and putting his black attach' case on the table.
"Get the scale, baby," Brian called back to the big room.
"It's all there," the connection said, not irritably. "Beautiful. Are you in a hurry at four in the morning?"
Janet brought the scale in and watched Brian take the five rectangular packages out of the attach' case and weigh each of them, marking the weight in ounces, subtracting an ounce for the weight of the wrapping paper and tape; then he weighed all five at once, checking the total with his previous figures.
"Solid, it weighs out to about 175 ounces, which is right on time. Good count. This the same shit Donny has?"
"Take a look," the connection said, expansively, relieved that the half-naked spade was going to cop.
Brian took a knife and cut one of the packages open, picking up the yellowish-green weed which spilled out and examining it, appraising it for color, texture, smell, taste, and passing it on for Janet to inspect. She nodded, handing it back to him, and he returned it to the table.
"Stick around for a taste, man," Brian said, offering him a chair and taking a packet of cigarette papers out of the drawer under the table.
"Thanks, but I really have to be going," the connection said, somewhat uneasily, wondering when he was going to see some money.
"Then wait around while we taste it, man," Brian said. "You don't mind if we taste it, do you?"
Brian's tone of voice indicated that the question was rhetorical, so he sat down and watched them perform the ritual which was an integral part of the American Tea Ceremony.
Brian took a small pinch of the plant and crushed it through a strainer, leaving the harsher-smoking twigs and seeds in the strainer while the fine, almost powdery dope filtered through into a little mound on the table. It was from this little mound that he sprinkled a large pinch on the cigarette paper. He rolled it carefully and licked the gummed edge to cement the seam. Then he put the freshly rolled joint in his mouth and pulled it out slowly between his lips, wetting it so it would smoke slowly.
Then he was ready. A match to light it, and a deep inhale filling his lungs with the smoke, more air in, gasps of fresh air forcing the smoke into his bloodstream and to the tiny capillaries in his brain, and then an exhale.
"Nice," Brian said, "very nice," and he passed the joint to Janet.
The connection was growing weary. The block had a reputation of being one of the worst in Manhattan-he had even heard that its residents referred to it as "Saigon," and in the harsh light of the street-lamps he had seen why. Buildings had been abandoned and gutted. Cars stripped of everything that could be resold, and then burned, occupied the choicest parking spaces, leaving their charred metal hulks as mute testament to the destructiveness of the very air around them. Garbage was everywhere, as if the block had been battered by a massive shit storm and the people had grown tired of trying to dig out from under. Street cats, fat and vicious from feeding on and fighting equally fat and vicious rats, patrolled the gutters and trash cans, each a prince of his realm. The smell of gratuitous violence covered the block with a shroud of fear, and it permeated even to the seemingly benign kitchen where he sat, waiting for his money.
Brian and Janet had finished the joint and were stoned, pleasantly wasted; irrationally (he knew how good it was) the connection was relieved. He spoke, now unabashedly anxious to conclude his business and flee.
"The money?"
Brian pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and started counting. When $800 in 50's and 20's were on the table, he got up, saying, "One sixty per, as arranged," and took Janet's arm to lead her into the bedroom.
The connection stuffed the money into his coat pocket and left, now worrying that his car had been stolen or stripped or set afire while he had wasted his time. He got in and turned the key, sighing with audible relief when the engine turned over normally and he hadn't been blown up or confronted with the absence of his battery. He shifted into drive and pulled away, further relieved when he got to the light on the corner alone, without the car which had been parked across the street from him in which two men had been sitting. The light turned green and he continued on his way uptown.
Brian and Janet lay in bed, sharing a joint and rapping.
"Funny cat," Brian said.
"Yeah, Donny knows some very strange people."
"Is he Donny's man?"
"No, I think he knows the man the same way Donny does, and since Donny was clean..."
Brian took a deep drag off the joint, held the smoke in, and then exhaled very slowly. "It sure is good bush, baby, whoever that silly motherfucker was."
"A celebration," Janet said, taking a final toke and swallowing the roach, "a celebration of another victory over the powers of darkness."
"Come on, baby, I don't want to hear any of that shit now."
"When do you want to hear it, Brian? Is there a time, I mean if there is one you should pull my coat, man, because I will run it down to you fully, and in much detail."
"In glorious black and white?"
"It's not funny, goddammit," she said, jumping up out of bed. "Dig it, Brian, we are fucking targets right here, all the heat in the country is concentrated here, every time I go out in the street I can feel it, and you lie there making jokes."
"At least we're moving targets."
"You bastard, you want to make me scream, how can I get through to you? I am up tight and I think we should cool it; and if you looked at it objectively you'd see I was right."
Brian looked at her, obviously annoyed. "You know you've brought me down with all your hollering and carrying on. Why don't you just cool your own self out, baby, this is my last number, I'm hip to it, you're hip to it, so get the fuck up off of my ass. Just dig yourself, bitch!"
He got up out of bed and extended his arms to her, but she stood her ground, blonde hair hanging every which way, and was not buying anything conciliatory for the moment.
"You can keep your fly zipped, baby, cocksmanship is not going to-"
But he cut her off, grabbing her to him and kissing her mouth, that lovely young mouth, that shit-talking, dick-licking mouth, the mouth he knew so well, which burned with fire when he kissed it. Janet responded hungrily, grinding her body against him and breaking the kiss to bite him on the neck. And then she pushed him back, shaking her head, her voice much calmer.
"Brian, this being the way we are, it's gotten me pretty paranoid. Let's down what we're going to down, keep what we're going to keep and split as soon as we can. Please, baby, it's really hanging me up, this target feeling."
"Oh yeah? I've been feeling like a fucking target ever since I can remember. You get used to it, you accept it, and you do not think about it, because to think about it is to realize how really shitting it is and carrying that load around for too long will wig a man out. But you're right; of course I know there's something better than this bullshit, and all I'm doing, and you too baby, is paying dues. Now come on with me to the kitchen and help me bag this shit up."
Janet gave up. He was right and she was tired. "It's almost five, man, I want to fall out."
"After work, baby, after work," he said, wrapping her hair around his fist, not pulling it so much as touching it. She walked with him to the kitchen. She was his woman and she followed him.
She opened up some sheets of newspaper and spread them on the table. Brian located the scale and positioned it in the center, bringing a heavy scissors and some paper bags up for support. Janet gave him a roll of plastic bags and they began.
Earlier that afternoon Brian had drawn up a list of how the grass would be broken down and bagged, and now he was revising it, making larger bags for fewer sales and, as a consequence, less money.
"Okay, here's what we've got now. I've dropped the price a little and made- a couple of adjustments. Eight off the top is for us to smoke. We'll do eight single pounds at one twenty-five, two halves at seventy-five, three quarters at forty-five, and eleven cans at fifteen. That leaves us fourteen fifty and a half a pound to smoke or do an occasional nickel from. It's less bread, baby, but it should all go in a week and then we're quits."
"You're beautiful," Janet murmured. "What should I do first?"
"Cut four of them in half. Then take each half and prune it down to an even sixteen ounces. Leave the pruning's in a pile on the table, and put the pound bricks in their own brown bag."
While she did this, Brian unwrapped the fifth package and loosened the tightly compressed weed from its brick to form a large, green hillock. It was fairly clean, perhaps 20% seeds and branches, but for someone working on his relatively low profit margin, this meant that at least one of his kilos became garbage if they were properly manicured. Hence the shears, cutting and chopping these drags into smokable pieces, perhaps not small enough to pass through a fine mesh strainer for the connoisseur's taste (his for example) yet adding a greater visual respectability to the count. In a world full of blatant swindlers and hypocrites which he had had no part in creating, Brian felt morally pure in his small, subtle homage to greed. And at these prices, he thought as his shears chopped away unmercifully, he would clean his own stash thoroughly and add the impurities to the general pile, making it weightier with worthless weight, passing the savings on to the exploited consumer. Feeling his patriotism well up inside him, Brian broke into song.
"America, America, God shed his grace on theeeeeee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea."
"Son of a bitch," Janet exclaimed, "you never told me you were a patriot. Brian, if I had only known."
But Brian was off on his own private trip. "Doing my American thing," he sang. "Doing it, doing it, doing it, doing IT!" as the shears attacked the twigs with purposeful ferocity, bordering on sadism.
Janet had finished her task and was rolling a joint from the mountain of smoke in front of her. It seemed sort of unreal. She had been with him for about eight months now, ever since dropping out of school after her father had died in a plane crash. They had lived together on 11th Street in this small, three-room apartment, staying high most of the time, doing odd jobs and dealing for their money, until they were able to get this $800 together to cop for one last money-making fling before retiring somewhere-somewhere warm, she hoped-and living. And all that remained now was to get rid of this mountain, quickly and safely. Many people they knew had been busted over the months, and each time this happened they gathered the details from as many sources as they could and analyzed the dynamics of the bust. And one characteristic fact was present in all cases: they had been setup by persons known and sometimes unknown.
From this had come a theory. A dealer, taking usual, common sense precautions, was only as safe as his connection(s) or customers. Which was why she had felt uptight about the stranger from whom they had just copped. Donny had been a high school buddy of Brian's, but they had only Donny's word as to the stranger's reliability. The recommendation had no doubt been given in good faith-yet this guy was an intruder from another concentric circle with his own varied associations, all of them unknown. They had both read Burroughs' words on dealing, that it tended to become an addiction as dangerous and noxious as an opium addiction, and referred to them often as self-reminding restraints on their own behavior.
But this was the end, she thought, as she licked the freshly rolled joint, the blessed end. She lit it and took two deep drags before putting it between Brian's lips. He had won his battle with the garbage and was sifting through the mountain in front of him for an oversized piece which if uncovered would feel the wrath of his terribly swift shears, At last satisfied with his job, he pulled back from the table and filled his lungs with smoke, handing the joint back to Janet.
"The pounds all set?" he asked, surveying his little empire, high again.
"Waiting for you."
"Groovy. Now we want a clean half for ourselves. Get a big jar, baby, and put something hip on the box on the way back."
Janet got up and dropped a record on the turntable, returning with the jar. She was happy now. Brian was like a little boy playing in a sandbox, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Aretha Franklin singing "Dr. Feelgood" greeted her ears as she sat down again and was given two large handfuls of uncleaned grass to put through the strainer onto a separate sheet of newspaper. The mound below the strainer grew as she agitated the cleaning process. When the last of the leaves had fallen, Brian emptied them into the jar, which he had already weighed, and put it on the scale. "Don't send me no doctor, filling me up with all them pills, I got me a man named Dr. Feelgood," Aretha wailed, filling the early morning air with soul.
"More," he said, handing her the half-filled jar and dumping the garbage back into the general pile and mixing it in easily. She cleaned another handful and gave it to the jar, which now weighed out to a half-pound.
"It's beautiful," she said, holding the jar at arms' length and regarding it with awe. "I've never seen so much grass before at one time. I feel like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin."
"Yeah," Brian grunted. "Let's bag up the rest of this shit. The fucking sun is coming up."
They were making up the second half pound when Aretha Franklin sang, "I was born by the river, in a little tent, and just like that river I've been running ever since, it's been a long time comin', but I know a change is going to come, oh yes it will."
"Me, too," he said, "I was born by a river, the mighty, polluted Harlem River," and he left unsaid the rest of the lyrics which he knew were equally applicable. He had indeed been born in Harlem Hospital; growing up on West 119th Street had first gotten him on the A train at age 14 to run downtown to the Village, Greenwich Village, 1958, center of the culture of the Beats, marijuana, jazz, poetry, black coffee, cats who rapped about the scene on the Coast, in Tangier, Chicago, even one or two who had made a pilgrimage to India and returned with tales of holy men, black ganga smoke with legendary properties, The Figaro, the Rienzi, Bleeker and MacDougal, Washington Square, and on a warm spring night a chick named Lona.
Lona, Lona, Lona the loner, sitting on a bench in the easternmost extremity of Washington Square Park, reading a thin book of poems (one which he would get to know so well and which he still had a few feet away in his small library), looking at him with her eyes in the same way he had been looking at girls for so long; the agonizing decision bravely arrived at to sit down.
"Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass," she said, reading from her book and then looking at him quizzically. "Do you have a patch on your ass?"
"My name ain't Johnny Nolan," he blurted out, worried that he did happen to have a patch on his ass.
She nodded and returned to her recitative reading. "Kids chase him thru screen door summers." She looked up hopefully, but he shook his head. He wasn't sure what a screen door summer was, but he knew he had never been chased through one. "Thru the back streets-" She paused as he was nodding his head vigorously, smiling, and she gave poignance to the phrase which followed.
"-of all my memories," and she stared at him through deep dark eyes, black as his own flesh, penetrating under his skin, focusing on his crotch, giving his young cock power, filling its vessels with blood, making him come close to passing out from the overwhelming urge he had to fuck her, to ram his prick into her, to feel her tits, to get him a taste of some white meat (did it change his luck?). She finished reading the short poem, but Brian didn't hear her. He knew that as soon as she was through reading he was going to ask her to go to bed with him. He tried to run through all the possibilities, but the seeming enormity of what he was about to undertake had rendered his mind numb and his tongue temporarily dumb. He was a virgin, having spent his early adolescence feeling up the chicks on the block in hallways, on the roofs; but this was different. This chick was white, and she was probably about twenty. Brian felt torn asunder between the clutches of desire and embarrassment. He took a deep breath and then, trying not to run his words together, said, "My name is Brian Thomas, it isn't Johnny Nolan, and I'd like to fuck you."
He waited for the shock, the laugh, the put down, the rejection, but none was forthcoming. Lona closed her book and put it in her floppy leather shoulder bag and stood up, extending her hand downward to his.
"Come on, Brian Thomas, unless you want to do it here."
He got up and took her hand, holding it tightly as they walked through the park like the countless lovers he had watched with raw envy on other days and evenings. By the time they got to her place he had learned that her name was Lona, that she was a waitress in a coffee house on Bleeker Street, and that she had to be at work at nine. She didn't look like any whore to him, leastways not like the ones he saw on Eighth Avenue, uptown. Nosirree, this was one long-legged, long-haired, high-assed, big-titted fox who was going to lay some of her fine squeeze on him, daddy, you dig it? on him because that's who he was, Brian Thomas, from 119th Street, and this sweet momma was going to whup that thang on him.
Her apartment was on the second floor rear, away from the street noises, an island of silence in the din of a spring evening in the Village. She had put an old Miles Davis side on the box, he remembered it was "Walkin'," and turned to him.
"Do you like my body?" she asked, hands on hips, pirouetting slowly for him to drink in the lushness of her curves melting into the lean readiness of her limbs.
Brian thought it was the most radiantly beautiful thing he had ever seen. His prick was harder than ever in anticipation of the delights awaiting him, and he was again speechless, managing only a nervous nod to answer her question. All of a sudden he knew what she was about to do. It was as if he could read her mind, he just knew that she was going to do a strip for him. He swallowed, hard, waiting for the show to begin.
And what a show it was. The details had become blurred over the passage of time, but he remembered when she removed her brassiere and his gaze was welded solidly to the wondrousness of her ample breasts, jiggling freely as she moved, their dark brown, large nipples appearing so funky to his 14-year-old eyes, so that when she had lowered and stepped out of her panties and stood naked before him, he could manage no better than a furtive glance down to her bushy cunt. Then she had come to him and undressed him, slowly, planting a few kisses on each part of his body she had just unclothed, until he too was naked and she grasped his throbbing cock and led him to her bedroom, to her bed, and guided his hand to her cunt, bidding him to play stinkfinger like he did on the block, and as he played with her she kept up a light rhythm on his prick in time to the music, which still played on.
When he put it in her it was like heaven, it was even better than he had dared think it could be. Excusably, he came, shooting a magnificent load into her, his body exploding with pleasure, and he realized that he had eaten, partaken of the forbidden fruit, and that he had lost a lot more than his mythical cherry. He fucked her twice more before she had to split for work, making him promise to stay until she got back, pleading with him not to leave.
He didn't leave, not that night nor many nights following. It was Lona who initiated him in the rites of sex, Lona who sucked his cock, sucked him off and swallowed his gism, Lona who taught him how to fuck, helped him invent positions on rainy afternoons, got him high with her downtown smoke, and gave him Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind to read. It was the book she had read from that first evening in the park, and he got to know the poetry as well as her marvelous body.
And then Lona left, in the late winter almost a year later, and Brian moved in with another Village chick, and then another, and the time machine speeded up to the table in the kitchen and he and Janet were bagging up the third quarter-pound.
"Save the ounces for later," he said, getting up from the table, "let's go to bed."
* * *
Janet woke up first, bathed in perspiration. It was the middle of the afternoon and it was hot in the apartment. Brian stirred slightly as she kicked the covers off the bed and turned to him, caressing his body with her lips and hair, and then boldly going down on his prick, hard from the warmth of their bed, sucking it like a lollipop, and straddling his supine body so that her cunt was over his face.
"Mmmm, do it," he said, awakening slowly. "Ain't nothin' that cuts breakfast in bed." He pulled her pussy down on his face and anchored the wiry black hair of his goatee in her light brown fine bush, opening her crack with his tongue and lapping at the juice which had started to appear on the red lips. Janet went all the way down on him, finding room in her mouth for his hard black tool, all ten inches of the dark meat, holding it prisoner, tight in there, not moving at all save to plant staccato kisses on the hairs standing sentry-like around his one-eyed missile.
In one swift fluid motion Brian worked his index finger in and out of her snatch, lubricating his digit so that when it penetrated the tight, puckered rose which was her asshole it slid in with negligible difficulty. Janet's hips bucked from this very deep goose and brought additional inadvertent pleasure pressure to herself, complimenting the slow rotating motion of his finger. Her screams were muted mewlings, filtered and dampened by her phallic mouthful, and she grabbed his thighs for ballast and rolled to her side, taking him with her, and held his head closer to her with her thighs, flattening her sweating torso against his, feeling her own envelope of body heat steam open and merge with his in a bacchanalia of musty, funky love juices admixed with their sweet and salty sweat in a humid sauce.
She released her oral grip on his prick and eased it out of her mouth to the head, grasping the lower inches and forming a fist around them, sucking the head up and down, up and down, up and down, meeting her own thumb on each deliberate down stroke. Brian bit her clitoris gently and Janet came, taking his cock out of her mouth for a few moments, alternating grunts and shrieks as Brian maintained his varied violations of her hooded clit.
Temporarily spent, Janet was about to resume eating him, but found herself suddenly flat on her back with her legs in the air and Brian's prick pushing into her cunt. Brian locked his arms behind her knees, kneeling almost upright himself, and burrowed his long, hard prick into her pussy, Janet gasping with delight as he penetrated deeper and deeper and deeper until she wanted to cry out; "No more!" she would scream were it not for the feeling of fullness his cock engendered, pushing beyond her preconceived concepts of satiety, driving her further and further, inching its way home, feeling like it would in fact reach her lungs when it finally settled, fully encased in her vaginal pocket. Janet's head began to spin as she reached a pre-orgasmic plateau, short of breath, crawling the remaining distance to the summit solely on nervous energy and instinct.
Brian forced his pelvis forward, driving his huge prick home, hitting her tender bottom, carrying her over the top, making her put her hands to her ears in a vain attempt to stifle the deafening roar coming from some gnarled knot of cerebral nerve endings spanning the millennia of anthropology and then finding vent for this energy vocally, screaming climactically, coming, hard and total.
Her vaginal walls tightened imperceptibly around Brian's cock, full in her, holding him in as he tried to pull out a little, so that her body moved in concert as if cemented to him, their rivulets of perspiration gluing her cervix and its environs. He shot it into her, cock trying to break loose from her clasp until on a backstroke Brian released the first spurt of gism into her, a heat hotter than her heat tickling and tantalizing her cervix and its environs. He shot it into her, grunting hard with each spasm, and she came with him, finally and fully, drinking, sucking in his freshly spent pool of milky syrup.
They relaxed and he took it out, breaking the lock on her legs and plopping down on top of her, his limp cock tracing a sticky trail on her legs, kissing her full on the mouth.
Janet responded to his kiss hungrily and then broke away from it, wrinkling up her nose. "I love you, baby, but you have bad, bad breath."
Brian grinned and kissed her again. "Yours ain't exactly no bed of fucking roses either, blondie. Enough sugar for now, gotta go to work," he said, vaulting out of bed.
As Brian finished brushing his teeth, using the bathtub in the kitchen, there was a knock on the door.
"Yeah?" he answered.
"Wanda, maricon, abre la puerta, puneta," a girl's voice yelled nasally from the other side.
"Hey, querida, que pasa?" Brian said, letting Wanda in. She was their neighbor from across the hall.
"Tu madre, puto," Wanda said defiantly, sticking her tongue out at him and making him chuckle.
"What's so funny, man?" Janet called out from the bedroom.
"Old Wanda's talkin' nasty again, calling me all kinds of bad names."
Wanda, meanwhile, saw the pile of loose pot on the table and went over to examine this treasure trove more carefully. "Wow, that's a whole mess of smoke," she said admiringly, "looks like you copped last night."
"Your brother want to do some?" Brian asked. "I'm into this in weight"
"Is it good, man?" Wanda asked, smelling a pinch of it. "My brother says there's been nothing but garbage around, shit that the fucking Mafia cuts with honey and sand."
"Take a taste for him," Brian said. "He'll dig it, and I'll do as much for him as he and his people can handle."
Wanda put about a nickel bag's worth in a plastic bag and sat down to roll a joint from the pile. While she rolled Janet came into the kitchen, dressed, and went over to Wanda and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
"You always get high this early in the morning?" Janet said, going to the stove to make coffee.
"Cono, it's two in the afternoon, vaguita," Wanda said with mock scorn, lighting the joint and taking two heavy tokes before passing it to Brian. "Yerba buena," she said approvingly, as she exhaled.
"You high already?" Brian asked.
"Listen to this maricon," Wanda said, turning to Janet, "Brian, you know tu hablas mucha mierda."
"Tu comes mucha mierda, hija de la gran puta," Brian said, smiling, accepting the challenge of playing the dozens in Spanish and passing the joint back to her.
"Yo me cago en la chocha de tu madre, ella es la gran puta," Wanda said, smoking more of the joint and thinking of more outrageous insults to top his.
Janet's Spanish was restricted to a year of it in high school and Puerto Rican street insults were never on any of her vocabulary lists, so she interrupted for a translation.
"She called me a faggot and said I talked a lot of shit," Brian answered, "and I told her she ate a lot of shit and called her mother the ultimate whore, whereupon she said that she shits on my momma's twat and that she is really the ultimate whore."
Brian had trouble finishing the translation because all three of them were laughing, laughing hard at the short riff which had just gone down and because two of them were high after having shared the joint. Janet moved the grass and the packaging apparatus over to one side of the table and served orange juice and coffee.
"Did you people watch TV last night?" Wanda asked.
"No," Janet said, "what was on?"
"The Democratic convention, in Chicago, it was really horrible."
"What the fuck difference does it make?" Brian said. "All those motherfuckers are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, don't you know where the country's at? Sheeeit."
"Yeah, but they had pictures of the kids in the street and the Chicago pigs were kicking much ass. I never saw anything like that before on TV."
"But you've dug it in person," Janet said, "what's the big thing about seeing it on TV?"
"A lot of other people were seeing this for the first time, though," Wanda persisted. "It ought to wake them up."
"Sure it ought to," Brian added, "but it won't. They know what they're doing. I bet the South Side was quiet."
"Yes, it was," Wanda said acknowledgingly.
"Dig it," Brian said, chuckling bitterly, "the brothers are cooling it. Let the pigs do their thing, beat up on all those white kids; they'll get a taste of how much black ass has been kicked in this country for the last three hundred and fifty fucking years. And do you know how fucking obscenely racist this place is? Let the flower of its youth get bloodied, and they'll scream police brutality this, gestapo that. But this same shit that goes down every day of every year in the black community nobody ever screams about. It's only a bunch of niggers, anyway."
"But it looked last night like they might try to break the convention up tonight, it's the night that they're going to pick the presidential candidate," Wanda said. "If the South Side gets into the streets and they get together with the kids-"
"Not today, Wanda, not tomorrow either. The brothers know where the muscle is. Some asshole would get an itchy trigger finger and then there would be a massacre, a real live massacre. And things would move on just like it never happened. It would be a big strategic mistake, and I'm no fucking genius to figure that out either. And besides I'm a dope pusher, I'm no candy-assed politician. When one of them says I can smoke a reefer in the street without some pig coming upside my head, then maybe, just maybe, I'll pick up on what the man has to say. Bobby Kennedy might have been that man, and they got to him. Fuck 'em all where they breathe."
Looking at her watch, Wanda said, "Thanks for the taste, I'll catch you later, I've got to get out of here. Adios, muchachos."
"Later," they said as she left.
Janet cleared the table and set it up for the end of the bagging operation, and they started in on the single ounces.
"I really dig Wanda," Janet said after a while.
"Yeah, the chick's got a lot of soul," Brian added in agreement.
"You know," Janet went on almost absent-mindedly, "I really think I'd like to make it with her."
"Ah hah, I never knew you swung that way."
"Well, I don't, man, but somehow I have this feeling that Wanda and I could have a groovy thing, just the two of us together. It hasn't anything to do with us, it's something entirely different. Do you know what I mean?"
"Sure, I can dig it," he said understandingly. "You don't want me to be around when it happens, I imagine."
"Yeah, that's it," Janet said, fantasies of how she would seduce Wanda flashing through her mind's eye. "It'll happen when it's ready to happen, tonight, tomorrow, quien sabe?"
"Quien sabe?" he answered, as the phone rang and he got up to pick it up.
"Hello?"
"Hey, my man, Wanda just came by and I want to see you," said Jose, Wanda's brother on 12th Street.
"Now is cool," Brian said.
"Solid," Jose said and hung up.
"That was Jose, he'll be over in a minute," Brian said.
"Did he say how much he wanted?"
"No, but be cool," Brian said, feeling the adrenalin going through his body in anticipation of his first sale. The market had opened.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jose was there in ten minutes, coming in breathlessly.
"Slow down," Brian told him. "Want some fresh coffee?"
"No time," Jose said, sitting down. "My people are at my place, waiting. That's some good reefer, brother."
"And it's all for sale baby, all for sale. How much can you handle?"
"How much is a pound?"
"One and a quarter."
"For one, or more?"
"For one or for all of them. Halves are seventy-five, quarters forty-five, lids fifteen. Good counts, not too dirty."
Jose pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and counted out $250 in tens and twenties. "I'll take two pounds for now, and if they go well, maybe we'll talk," he said guardedly.
"Talk?" Brian said. "Cash talks, motherfucker, bullshit walks. Sheeit."
"OK, man, OK. I'm only jiving. Lay a taste on my sister, will you?"
"She's covered," Brian said, as Janet brought two pound bags in, emptying one into the other and giving it to Jose, who judged its weight in his hands.
"Nice count," he said admiringly, "very fine count."
"You bet your Puerto Rican ass it's a good count," Brian said, as Jose got up to leave. "Later, man."
"Later," Jose said, going out the door, and then as an afterthought adding, "You know your old lady gets finer and finer every time I see her."
"You hear that shit, baby?" Brian said. "This horny spic is coming on to you in front of me and in my house. My, my."
Jose gave Brian an upright middle finger, laughingly, and was gone.
"The super wants an ounce," Janet said. "He told me yesterday to score for him if I could, so I'll see you in a little while." She kissed him lightly on the mouth and left.
Brian took out his personal phone book and started dialing numbers of people he knew uptown, setting up business for that evening, and was still on the phone when Janet returned a few minutes later with a newspaper, two quarts of milk and a frown. Seeing he was on the phone, she put the milk in the refrigerator and sat down to read the paper, her expression staying serious as she read.
"I'll be heading uptown in a little bit," he said, getting off the phone and folding a piece of paper and putting it in his pocket. "It should move like a sonofabitch up there. Everyone says that there's only garbage around there too."
"Groovy," Janet muttered, her gaze fixed on the newspaper.
"What's in there that's got you so hot and bothered?"
"In Czechoslovakia," she said, "Russian troops are still in Prague, it's really tense over there. I hope my mother's all right."
"Is she there?"
"No telling where she is," Janet said gloomily.
"She's still your momma, ain't she?" Brian said, trying to soothe her. "You two fight and carry on but when it gets to the gritty, she's still your momma and you're still her little girl. Right?"
"Right," Janet conceded. "If only I knew where she was I could send her a cable or something."
"What for? If she's in jail she won't get it, and if she isn't you got nothing to worry about. You think she's worried about you? Sheeit, from what you told me about her it's her ass first and everything else second; she sounds like she can handle herself if push really comes to shove."
"Yeah, I guess so. Also, Wanda wasn't exaggerating about the shit in Chicago, it's all over the paper, pictures, the whole thing. Brian, it's scary."
"Then turn on the TV later and get scared some more. And if Wanda's around, she'll watch it with you, keep you company, you know?" he said, leering evilly at this last suggestion.
"Yeah," Janet said, starting to smile. "And I almost forgot. Here's the $15 from the super."
"Uh-uh, hold on to it and this too," he said, giving her the $250 he had just received from Jose. "Some of the brothers uptown are mean, and if they do come upside my head, they'll get as little bread as possible." He said this neither bitterly nor with any rancor. Brian had had his share of street encounters and always managed to acquit himself well, but he knew that times were bad and getting taken off had become even more common now than it had been when he was growing up; and he knew his own blackness was no longer (even if it ever had been except in myth) immunity from personal violence in Harlem. This was a fact of life, albeit unpleasant, which he had been conditioned to accept over the years. Brian's cynicism extended far beyond his twenty-four years. He had even coined an epigram which Janet had hand-lettered one day while she was tripping on some exceptionally good acid from California and which hung, mounted and framed, over their bed. It was simply: I always expect the worst from my fellow man and am seldom disappointed. This was Brian's basic credo, and it served him well.
"You be back later?" Janet asked, trying to make the question sound innocent, but with both of them knowing that she was planning to seduce Wanda later.
"Probably not," he said, going along with her little game. Even if she hadn't had any plans he knew this answer would have been accepted without question. Every three or four weeks Brian would go home to Harlem and usually stay there for at least a day, sometimes two, and once even three. Janet never asked him what he did there, and he never volunteered the information. Once in a while he might say something about having to go uptown to get a taste of soul, but it was treated as a joke and then dropped. She guessed that he probably was fucking some chick there, but that was his business, just like Wanda would have been her business had she not verbalized her yen ingenuously while a little high.
"Be careful, now," she said, getting up and kissing him goodbye passionately at the door.
"You too, baby, later." And he was gone.
Janet took the steel cover off the bathtub and drew the water for a bath. While it was filling up, she undressed and examined her body in the full-length mirror hanging on the bedroom wall. Her breasts were full and high, she wore a 36C bra, and the nipples were small nubs in proportion to the large, brown areolas surrounding them. Her small waist tapered smoothly into her wide pelvic structure and round high ass. Brian told her the first time he saw her naked that she had a "nigger ass" and that it made her a little less blonde. It was a compliment, and she took it as such. Her legs were long and well shaped from her ample thighs down to her well-turned ankles. She shivered a little, imagining being loved and licked by Wanda, Wanda, Wanda, beautiful exotic Wanda.
Janet turned off the water and stepped into the tub, luxuriating in the warmth as she lowered herself into the water. She lay there, motionless, letting the heat penetrate, providing a needed balm for her body, and tried to imagine Wanda naked. They were both about the same height, but the resemblance ended there. Wanda was the color of coffee with one cream, her hair was black and short, her bone structure was smaller than Janet's, and her breasts and behind were proportionately smaller. Wanda had high cheekbones and a slightly Indian look about her eyes, whereas Janet's good looks were strictly All-American blonde. It could have been said, and probably was by not a few men who saw them regularly on the block, that Wanda was built for speed, Janet endurance.
Finishing her bath and drying herself off, Janet felt thrilled, more so than any time since she was in high school; nervous, as she must have been the first time she fucked, and in a way like a little girl. She put on a simple shift over her clean and powdered body, no underwear, and knocked on Wanda's door.
"Hi querida, que pasa?" Wanda said when she opened the door.
"You doing anything?" Janet asked casually, though she could feel her heart beating, thundering in her chest.
"Nada. Nothing important."
"Then come on over and have a taste. Brian split uptown and I'd like to rap."
"Beautiful," Wanda said with genuine enthusiasm. "I be over as soon as I turn off the radio." She let the door close gently.
Janet came back into her kitchen and sat at the table, rolling joints and trying to keep her fingers from trembling. Wanda came in a moment later and closed the police lock, wearing only a slip and wiping her brow and forearms with a small towel.
"Ay Dios mio, que color, it is hot!" she said, sitting across the table from Janet. "You know those clothes I had on before when I was here? Forget it, man, I'm home, I'm comfortable. Whew, you look cool."
"I just took a bath, it's very refreshing," Janet said, feeling every muscle, every nerve ending hanging loose and in readiness.
"I was going to take one later, but I don't know if I can wait."
A pause, not too long, not too short, just right for Janet to say, "You can take one here if you like, I'll even wash your back."
"Estd bien, good enough, I appreciate this, Janet."
"Nada," Janet said, lighting a joint and taking two heavy tokes before giving it to Wanda, feeling an electric shock when their touches met and jumping from it. Wanda simply smiled her sweet smile and smoked, passing it back to Janet after a few healthy tokes, and then got up and went to the bathtub, turning on the water. Then, completely unselfconsciously, she reached down and pulled her slip up over her head and her body was revealed to Janet's hungry eyes.
It was slim, yet not at all lacking in curves. Wanda's tits were smaller than her own, Janet thought, though they were high and firm like small brown cantaloupes; nipples extraordinarily large and almost black, pointed straight ahead, like expressionless all-seeing eyes. Her waist was slim, her hips taut and lean, and Janet noticed that her pubic hair was black and bushy, making it appear dangerous, mysterious and forbidden. Even though she had been well fucked no more than a couple of hours before, Janet felt overcome with lust, though a much different lust than that which she normally felt for Brian or had felt for anyone before him. Her pussy was wet, soaking her dress and the chair beneath, and she wanted Wanda, wanted to caress Wanda, kiss Wanda, bury her tongue in Wanda's beautiful black cunt hair.
Wanda had become aware of Janet's piercing stare, and she was not uncomfortable, she found. When she first walked into the apartment she had noticed that Janet was not wearing any underwear and gave it no more than the usual female passing glance. Cono, all she had on was a slip, right? And it was hotter than three motherfuckers outside, right? But when Janet started really digging her body, Wanda found that she wanted Janet to take her dress off. She had never made it with a chick before either, and this was Janet, man, Janet whom she loved as much as a sister, and she wanted her.
"You better take off your dress if you're going to give me a bath," Wanda said, turning off the water and stepping into the tub.
"Oh wow, it's so great, Wanda, isn't it, I'm so fucking happy," Janet said. "I've never swung with any chicks before, but I really dig you, honey, no shit, my pussy is soaked from sitting there. Here, look," and she shrugged her dress off and brought the fresh funky stain over for Wanda to feel.
"Ay, bellacona linda, you beautiful bitch," Wanda said, lifting her wet arms out of the tub and pressing the stained dress to her face, smelling the musk and funk of Janet's cunt, tasting it, wanting to go swimming in it. "Now bathe me, puta," she said, tossing the dress aside. "I want to smell pretty for you."
Obediently, Janet picked up the soap and knelt by the tub, washing Wanda's back, softly, gently, then her shoulders and down to her breasts, which hovered just above the water line. Wanda stood up, making it easier for Janet to wash the rest of her, the flat stomach and the black forest of cunt, wet and matted, frothing with the lather, impatiently awaiting Jane's love. Janet slipped her index finger into the soapy bush and found Wanda's sweet slit, sliding her finger inside and rotating it, making Wanda emit small shrieks of pleasure as her box was thoroughly washed.
"Ay, maricona, good, good, it's so good. Mira, mi amor, I'll get rinsed off and then we can play some more," Wanda panted, feeling that any more of Janet's foreplay would force her to drag Janet into the tub with her, making a mess of the place. She slid back down into the water and rinsed all the soap off, pulled the plug and stepped out to where Janet had a clean, fluffy towel waiting to dry her off.
As Janet dried her, Wanda reached out and pulled Janet's head to her own, carefully, kissing her eyes, her nose, her cheeks, her chin, then pouncing like a young tigress on Janet's mouth, smothering it with her own, her tongue a torch blasting between Janet's full wet lips and into the inviting cavern beyond. Janet dropped the towel and embraced Wanda, kissing her back, giving tongue as good as she was getting, running her hand down Wanda's back and grabbing the firm cheeks of her ass, grinding cunt against cunt.
They staggered into the bedroom, kissing rubbing exploring each other, and fell on the bed, laughing and crying with the joy of what they were doing and wanted to do further.
Janet locked Wanda's head between her legs, opening her still juicy pussy and thrusting it on Wanda's face, while at the same time finding Wanda's wonderful snatch and buying her own face in it, licking and biting, nipping and blowing, bringing Wanda to a climax quickly but eating her out through and beyond it, as Wanda wailed on her, sucking her pussy with a virtuosity which exceeded her fondest, wettest expectations. There had been no seduction here; it was simply a mutual transmittal of joy, the joy of giving blessed with the joy of receiving, instantly, simultaneously, hot and wet and hairy and fine.
They lay in each other's cunty embrace for the rest of that afternoon, as the sun became a red fireball at the west end of the canyon which was 11th Street, bathing the blocks from the Hudson River end to the East River in its muted rays. It had become dark in the apartment, and Janet was sucking lazily on Wanda's tit, wetting the nipple's blackness, bringing it to a final erection and then plunging two fingers into Wanda's pussy and thrashing her to a final orgasm, what seemed like her fiftieth of their time together, Wanda's lusty voice reduced to fatigued gasps as she hit the top again, dying a little.
The phone rang, and Janet broke away from Wanda to reach across the bed and answer it. It was Brian.
"How you doin', baby?" he asked, after they had exchanged hellos, sounding happy above the din of party sounds in the background.
"Fine and mellow, man, very fine and very mellow," she said. "It's been a beautiful afternoon."
"You took care of that little business, then."
"Uh-huh!"
Brian was cackling now, really laughing his ass off, and he said, "And sounds like that little business been taking care of you too, ain't that right now? Sheeit, she's probably down on you now while you're talking to me, gobbling up that thing, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble."
Janet was laughing too, though she couldn't decide whether it was because she was happy or because he was funny, or was she happy when he was funny, or did her happiness make him funny?
"You OK up there? Sounds like you're at a party. They do start early up there, don't they?" she managed to say between laughs.
"Sheeit, you talk about me partying and carrying on, ain't nobody up here been into your scene all this time I've been gone. You were probably banging on that poor chick's door before I hit the sidewalk. 'C'mon over, sweetie, ol' Janet's gonna put somethin' on your fine young ass!' I bet a hundred dollars that's what went down!"
"Fuck you, baby."
"No, no, not me, not now, you girls go on and do your thing," he said; then, getting serious for a moment, "I'll be tied up here until tomorrow. It looks good. Give Wanda my love and tell her take good care of you tonight."
"OK, be careful, man, please."
"I got it covered, baby, I'm on top of it. Later."
Wanda had gotten up and gone to the kitchen, turning on the light, while Janet was still on the phone. "Was that Brian?" she yelled into the bedroom as Janet hung up the phone.
"Yeah, he sends his love. You looking for something to eat in there?" Janet said, joining Wanda in the kitchen, two naked nymphs dancing on the dirty linoleum.
"Si, querida, eating you has made me hungry, strange, isn't it?"
They made salami sandwiches and brought them, some leftover potato salad and milk into the bedroom and turned on the television. It was Thursday, August 29, 1968, and in Chicago, Illinois, the Democratic party was going to nominate a man to run for President of the United States in the forthcoming November elections. As the girls ate their makeshift meal, Wanda went into greater detail about what she had seen the night before and anticipated on this night.
"They got it all out in front now, the shit is in the fan to stay. No more pussyfooting, uh-uh, if you think they got it jammed in your ass now, forget it, that's only a warm-up for what they getting ready to do. You and Brian, for one thing, that can't happen, they'll get to you."
"Why?" Janet asked, feeling threatened by something not tangible, like another female, yet still very real and menacing. And as Wanda Went on, Janet felt fear in the pit of her stomach, the same kind of fear she imagined animals felt when a mortal enemy was in the vicinity-out of sight but nonetheless very much there.
"Honey, Brian is very black and you are very white, and while this may not mean shit to you or him or me, dig these motherfuckers here on the TV; seeing you and him together drives them up the wall, they are a gang of tight-assed hipocritas, lono. And their man is going to win, and they will round up everyone with long hair, everyone who smokes dope, anybody who doesn't love their dirty war, la guerra sucia," and she spit, "and it'll be up against the wall all of us motherfuckers. Dig it."
And as the evening wore on, they lay back in bed and watched the drama of the evening unfold, faltering at times, allowing them to fondle each other to escape the tediousness which marked the proceedings towards the middle; and then settled back to smoke another joint, keeping it all in proper perspective.
"It's funny," Janet noted during a commercial, "but being high and watching this somehow makes it less formidable than if we were straight. I guess I'd really be paranoid if we didn't have all this grass."
"Si, querida," Wanda said, her head resting on Janet's full, firm tits, her fingers playing lightly with Janet's clit, keeping up a medium level of arousal.
Hubert Humphrey was nominated by the Democratic Party to run for the Office of President of the United States in the forthcoming November elections amid the chaotic clatter which seemed to Janet and Wanda, watching in bed and playing with each other on East 11th Street in New York City, to symbolize the country coming apart at the seams; large rifts and fissures opening up to give off noxious, nausea-producing, volcanic fumes, baring the most secret nightmares of all who participated in the act, both immediately and vicariously, loosening the leashes of the dogs of war. The violence in the streets of Chicago, which was later to be called by a commission with a sonorous, ponderous name a police riot, had been mentioned all evening long by delegates and newsmen alike, whetting the appetites of the millions upon millions of viewers for the carnage only mentioned, not actually seen.
Wanda explained that there was some sort of electricians' strike going on and that the networks hadn't been able to set up the facilities to broadcast live away from the convention site itself, but made it sound more sinister than that, intimating heavily that there was a plot afoot in high places to try and restrict the coverage, control it, manipulate it. Janet had started to feel that if such a plot existed it was successful until they were told by David Brinkley in his customary deadpan way that videotaped footage of what was happening in the streets had arrived and was going on, reminding the viewing hordes that what they were about to see had taken place more than three hours before.
The scenes of violence then played their weary time on the air and were over. Wanda and Janet had finally let go of each other, devoting their attention completely to the 19-inch screen before them. And when it was over, David Brinkley, visibly shaken by what he too had just seen, refused to comment on it beyond stating that it was unlike anything he had ever seen before or imagined could have happened.
"I'm hip," Janet said in response and turned the set off, then crawled back under the covers and snuggled next to Wanda.
"Suppose Brian comes back tonight," Wanda said. "I think I'd better go home."
"Don't worry, querida, it's cool, he knows."
"How?"
"I was thinking out loud about how groovy it would be to make it with you, and he encouraged it. And when he called before he asked me, and I told him. So he doesn't care. I imagine if he came in the door right now he'd crawl in here with both of us."
"And you wouldn't mind that?"
"No, would you?"
"No." Wanda thought for a few minutes before speaking again. "He must have pinga grande, a big prick, verdad?"
"Oh yes, oh good heavens yes, Wanda, it is so big and so fine, and you've given me an idea. He should be back tomorrow, and when he's here, come on over and the three of us will get into something."
"That's beautiful, Janet," Wanda said, curling up against Janet's tit and wrapping her legs around Janet's leg. "I shall dream about that novio of yours and his big dick."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Things sure have been breaking nicely, Waldo thought as he walked down a street in Stockholm with Helga on one arm and Inga on the other. It was his second day there, first night out, and he had had no difficulty in starting a conversation with these two sisters in a bar where he had stopped for a quick beer. A look, a smile, a few words, good vibrations, and they were off to spend the evening laying up someplace. Waldo Smith, fugitive at large, coming down the street with a blonde on each arm, fine foxy blondes, twins maybe, chattering and laughing away in Swedish, though he knew they both spoke good English.
"Come on," he said, "that's not fair."
"Yes, you are right, Waldo, it was kind of rude, so we'll speak English from now on, it's good practice," Inga said, but she was still laughing, as was Helga.
"OK," Waldo said, as they turned into a modern apartment house, "what's so funny?"
"We were discussing something," Helga said solemnly.
"What?"
"Who would be in the middle first," Inga said, opening the downstairs door with her key. "You ask a lot of questions, don't you? All Americans seem to be so curious. Shame on you, Waldo."
"Yes, shame on you," Helga added, squeezing his arm and rubbing it against her tit.
They got into an elevator and Inga pushed the button for the sixth floor. Waldo realized that the two days he had spent with Ruth in Venice had spoiled him, spoiled him rotten for a steady diet of good pussy. He tried to fuck Sam before she put him on the train for Milan, but she was more interested in talking politics and had not yet reached a level of understanding which would have permitted her to have treated balling him as a political act. He had managed to see the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune during the long train ride to Copenhagen and read accounts of both the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and the clashes between the Chicago fuzz and the demonstrators massing to protest the Democratic Party's convention, and he figured that that would take some heat off him for a while, allowing him to party for a while in neutral Stockholm.
So he pinned Inga against that wall of the elevator and kissed her, leaving one hand free to go under Helga's skirt and feel her firm pussy through her panties. Inga's tongue lashed into his open mouth as she opened her legs a little, pulling his left knee into her crotch, and Helga moved up on the arm which was goosing her and leaned her tits against it, licking his ear, and then whispering, "We're here."
They untangled themselves and went down the corridor to the last apartment on the right. Inga opened the door and turned on the lights, and they followed her in. Waldo saw that the place was airy, furnished in Swedish modern, with a little balcony running along one wall of the living room perpendicular to the floor-to-ceiling picture window. Inga and Helga went down the four steps from the balcony level into their sunken living room, taking their coats off and tossing them on the rug.
"Take your shoes off, if you like," Helga said, beckoning him down. The rug was shaggy white luxurious fur, and Waldo congratulated himself on his foresight in having removed his socks as well, as the fur caressed the soles of his feet and little sensations played over his toes. The girls had sat down on the floor and he joined them.
They undressed him, slowly, Inga removing his shirt and T shirt, Helga his trousers and shorts. Then, with almost the timing of a precision drill team, though more easily and smoothly, Inga was kissing his hair and Helga was kissing his toes, and they took him around the world, Helga getting to his cock first and going down on it, holding it all in her mouth, and then rising on it slowly like a big lollipop -up; and back on it again-down. Inga, meanwhile, had taken off her clothes and came back to squat on Waldo's face, opening her cunt with her fingers and pushing it down on his mouth. Waldo saw her pink-lipped snatch descending on him and he was ready for her, sticking his tongue out as far as it would go, giving her a slipping slippery target which her labia enclosed as she lowered her pussy on it and enveloped it in her wet grip.
This new turn of events blocked his view of Helga's blowjob, though it gave him a splendid one of Inga's round, firm tits, bouncing and jiggling with her body movements as she fucked his face, working her snatch on him and whipping it into an ecstatic froth of joy. Helga grabbed Waldo's balls and jammed the index finger of her other hand into his asshole while taking her mouth off his cock for a moment, then going down on it again, letting it slide into her mouth very slowly, savoring each inch. She hit the base and came up on it quickly, then took it in again slowly as before. Waldo and Inga came together, hard bucking violent orgasms, and then Inga lifted herself off his face abruptly and crawled over to eat Helga.
Helga sucked the last drop of gism from Waldo's cock, which was miraculously still hard and glistened with its slimy wetness. Inga had rolled her over on her back and was between her legs, licking and slobbering at her pussy with gusto, relishing the warm juices which flowed out of it, slaking her thirst with their tangy sweetness.
Inga's ass presented itself as a waiting target for Waldo's prong, and he crawled around and raised her cheeks with his hands, sliding his lubricated prick into her pussy from the rear, making her scarf Helga even more violently. Helga began to come in short, tight spasms which gradually drew out into one long sustained pleasure trek, egged on by Inga's feverish tongue. Waldo had his knees planted firmly on the rug, giving him maximum thrust leverage to grind his cock into Inga, making her come sometimes in concert with Helga, sometimes contrapuntally. Hump-ta, hump-ta, hump-ta, hump-ta he worked on her, his straining prick a pile driver, in and out in and out in and out in and out, reaching down to his balls for just a few drops more, working, working, working, harder, harder, harder, working like Sisyphus to GET THAT JUICE UP AND OUT AND IN HER!
It rose slowly, very slowly, and Waldo kept whipping it along, completely oblivious to everything but his cock and Inga's cunt, unaware that Helga, thoroughly sated for the moment, drops of his first load running out the side of her mouth, had disengaged herself from Inga and was watching him drive, drive, drive, don't stop, keep driving, breathing hard and grunting like a wounded bull, making it, feeling it rise, his nerve endings afire, out of control, waiting for the torrent of gism to give them balm on its passage out but getting an anguished trickle instead.
Waldo finally came, he shot his few drops, but his body fairly exploded with the cosmic energy required to push those few drops up and out, lifting him for a few seconds to another dimension as his prick throbbed and squeezed an empty canal.
"You must rest, now, Waldo," Helga said, giving him a hand up off the rug and leading him up the steps and around the balcony to the bedroom. The bed was the largest one he had ever seen, easily the size of two double beds and covered with a rug-size fur spread, the same fur as the living room rug.
"That is some fucking bed," he said admiringly, jumping and rolling around on it.
"Yes," Helga said, "we think it is quite nice, much room for us and sometimes our friends. When we invite people to stay with us they share our bed as well as our food and lodging. Don't you think that's more civilized?"
"Yes, very civilized," Waldo said, picturing the truly massive orgies which had undoubtedly taken place on this magnificent piece of furniture.
Inga came in and got on the bed with Waldo, inviting him under the covers with her. Helga joined them and as Waldo lay back with the girls nestled against him, one on each side, he still could not help marveling at the way the bed dwarfed them.
"You are a deserter, yes?" Inga asked him after they had settled back in comfort, treating his political status quite matter-of-factly, neither approving nor disapproving.
"Yes," he answered, not feeling obligated to explain or rationalize his actions. They apparently attached little moral importance to it, and he remembered that he had read somewhere that Sweden had fought her last war in either the 17th or 18th century, so that the moral imperatives he had grown up associating with his country's foreign adventures were probably considered an amusingly naive idiosyncrasy.
"There are many of you here," Helga added, "and you all are certainly a curious lot."
"How do you mean, curious?"
"Some are stupid, some are afraid, some are smart, some are fearless, a few are communists, some are black, some are white, some imagine themselves bold, romantic figures, others are simply hateful, mostly of themselves. Inga and I see them only when we are in Stockholm, which is about ten days each month, and you are the first one we have gotten to know.'"
"Are you two twins?"
"No," Inga said, "we are sisters, Helga is a year and a half older than I am. She used to accuse me of trying to steal her boyfriends when we were growing up, and we would have terrific fights over this. So when she got a job as a stewardess I did too as soon as I was old enough. The airline likes us to fly together, they seem to think it makes conversation for the passengers."
"And we fly to New York tomorrow morning," Helga said, "so before we go to sleep I must be in the middle. Enjoy your rest, Waldo, you and Inga owe me an entertainment."
Helga laughed as she said this and squeezed his limp cock playfully. "Get a treat for our guest, little sister," she said.
Inga made the journey from the middle of the gigantic bed to the night table on her side and came back with what was unmistakably a joint. "A friend of ours brought this back from Africa," she said, lighting it and taking in the first toke.
"It's really quite good," Helga added. "I think they call it bhang, which is a pun in English because it hits one's head with a bang."
Waldo had been hyperventilating since he saw it, so when it was passed to him his lungs were ready for the harsh smoke he sucked into them, and it hit his head almost immediately, giving him a brain-shattering rush. He was knocked half senseless by this one toke, but not so senseless as to be unaware that this was the shit from which legends were born. One night on Avenue C, centuries before his recent reincarnation as Waldo Smith, he had sat in a small apartment with two other people while the Latin boogaloo music wafted up from the humid street below, and was turned on to this same very strong, super dynamite grass which was reputed to be from Africa. Three heavy tokes and he had been wasted, he could even remember hallucinating a little behind this shit, it was so so fucking heavy. He had heard some Puerto Rican's with whom he had been discussing dope one night refer to it as chiba-chiba, and they too could boast of having smoked it but once. There was never any for sale in any quantity, one came by it only through a small taste which had been lain on a friend by a friend who knew someone who knew whoever held the bag. "Movie stars smoke this shit," someone else had said one night, and Waldo had wondered whether everything the rich and famous did was on a level always higher than that permitted the masses, regardless of the activity. In retrospect he realized that smoking this African bhang and whatever the Avenue C shit had been were both highly political acts. My God (if I had one) he thought, one good toke and I am this stoned? Too mucking fuch.
His lying between the two sisters had many advantages, he mused, some obvious and some not so obvious. He was the ham in a ham sandwich, on pussy bread naturally, and it seemed that in spite of what they had been doing on and in that insane living room rug these two were not yet satisfied, especially Helga, who, as announced, was certainly not going to miss her turn in the middle. They were going to play Lucky Helga, lucky Helga. And an added benefit of the middle position seemed to be that he got an extra toke from this bhangjoint as it was passed back and forth, giving him five tokes to each of their three, but when it had been smoked down to the tiniest roach and Helga swallowed it, the ratio which Waldo had been carefully working out just didn't seem to matter anymore. The three of them were unequivocally zonked out of their fragile skulls, regardless of who had consumed the lion's share.
It was quite a while before anyone could move or even consider moving, Helga and Inga huddled against Waldo, pressing their hot eager bodies to his, merging their animal warmth's, as if instinctively to stave off the cold Swedish night, though it was only late August.
Then Inga's head moved under the covers, finding Waldo's prick and licking around it lightly, darting her tongue around his balls.
"Inga will go down on you to make your prick hard for me," Helga told him, embracing him from the other side and kissing him warmly. "Then you and she will fuck me together, Waldo." Helga bit his lower lip hard, drawing blood and darting her tongue into the cut to enlarge it and lick more blood.
Waldo started laughing hysterically, higher than he had ever been before and being loved by two Viking goddesses, his worn out cock beginning to show new signs of life as Inga nibbled at it, fondled it, sucked it, blew around it, performing her own original composition on his organ. This was definitely movie star shit, wow, and this one is going to have me and her sister fuck her simultaneously. Meanwhile Helga let him go and moved up on him a little.
"Suck my tits, lick them, oh yes bite the nipple gently, not too hard, yes, yes, oh that's it, yes that's good," Helga moaned as Waldo found himself inundated with tit again. He thought of Ruth momentarily, but his mind was going too fast, too many things were happening all at once, and she floated back into the void of his unconscious. Now Helga had moved all the way up and was sitting on his face proudly, like a queen astride her royal mount, fucking his nose and mouth perhaps more than he was eating her, keeping up her litany of blow-by-blow stream of consciousness, a few instructions interspersed between the cries of limited delight.
Helga came once and moved off his face, pushing Inga, who was now sucking Waldo's hard cock with wild abandon, off his tool; then she sat down on the tool, letting its fullness charge into her all at once, wincing with pleasure-pain as she ground her pelvis all the way down on it, tightening her vaginal muscles to hold it clamped inside her, actually squeezing it.
Waldo felt like his cock was in some kind of divine vise, as Helga leaned over, using her grip on him for her fulcrum, and exposed her asshole to Inga, who crawled over to lick it. Now she was Lucky Helga.
He watched her facial contortions become a symphony of expressions as she held him with one hole and her sister rimmed the other.
"Now, Inga, stick it in now," she mewled, then clenched her teeth as Inga moved away to the night table and came back with a heavy red rubber dildo strapped to her pelvis. Helga raised Waldo up, actually lifting him by his prick; Inga piled pillows underneath his ass, lifting her sister's freshly rimmed bunghole, and pushed the dildo into it.
Helga caught her breath as the dildo penetrated her and then gasped as Inga gruntingly worked it all the way in until it filled her like some monstrous turd. Waldo could feel it working its way in through the thin skin which separated his own prick in her cunt from the rubber one in her ass.
"Now fuck me, both of you fuck me," Helga spit out through her teeth, which were clenched even tighter now, about as tight as her muscular grip on my tool, Waldo imagined, his mind still spewing forth a diarrhea of disjointed images-bhanghole-bunghole, bhang bang nelly, who hit nelly in the belly with a flounder and now she sucks your ass, if Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love, Stockholm is the city of sisterly love, love thy sister as thyself, there must be a way to cop some more of this supersmoke, I'm a ring ding daddy whom you should avoid 'cause I never read Marx and I can't stand Freud, come lucky Helga lucky Helga come come.
He found that he had been speaking as freely as Helga, shelving his inhibitions and providing his own verbal background to their cluster fuck: "Come Helga lucky come come Helga come lucky." And then, cutting like a knife through the cerebral fog: "Make me come Helga, make me come."
But Helga was beyond hearing him or herself. She was busy playing Lucky Helga and nothing could distract her. Inga had draped herself around her sister's back and was grabbing Helga's tits to anchor herself. And so Lucky Helga had herself covered, fore and aft. If any of the three of them made even the subtlest move something would be rubbing against her or in her. Waldo saw contentment begin to erode away the harsher lines in her face, which had been part of her teeth-clenching intensity in setting this thing up. No, more than contentment, it was true satisfaction, a feeling that all of one's erotic potential was being used and fulfilled. It was peace. This was Helga's answer to the world outside her door. Fill her holes good and tight and let her transcend her consciousness by meditating on them. Waldo became aware that his achieving an additional orgasm this night was of secondary or even tertiary importance in comparison to the supraorgasmic sex in which the three of them were participating.
The Swedes were not noted for their mysticism, yet Waldo believed that he and the sisters were on the verge of discovering some formerly overlooked great truth. It seemed like more of a mind thing than a head thing; their interlocked organs were the catalyst and not ends unto themselves. He seemed to be Waldo Smith no longer, nor was he his former self, and Inga and Helga were strangers, ships passing and bumping each other in the vast night of the universe.
And then Waldo blanked out, passing into a drugged limbo as the bhang peaked inside his system and led him into sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
In a month, Waldo's hair had grown out and he felt much more secure with his new growth, which while still a great deal shorter than fashionable no longer marked him as a soldier. Helga and Inga had invited him to move in with them after their first orgiastic night together, and when they were out of town (which was most of the time) he took it easy, taking long walks through Stockholm, reading everything that he could find printed in English, and occasionally stopping in at the bar where he had picked the two girls up.
It was on such a visit to this bar that Waldo Smith met John Smith.
He was the blackest black man Waldo had ever seen, with a full beard which was mostly grey. He was about fifty years old and his once athletic body had started to go to seed from too much beer and too much easy living. Yet in spite of his corporal deterioration he was an imposing, biblical figure of a man, the fire in his eyes only slightly softened by the passage of time, giving them a muted manic look.
"I'll have a beer," he said, sitting down at Waldo's table.
"Sure," Waldo said. "Any particular brand?"
"What you're drinking is fine."
Waldo ordered another beer and watched this imposing man consume half of it in two swallows. It was about three p.m. and it looked like the old juice-head was quaffing his first-the first of many more to come-beer of the day. Somehow Waldo found this a little depraved, though he himself had arisen only about an hour ago and was having the same bottle of beer for breakfast. The man belched and started speaking.
"Welcome to Stockholm, new talent," he said.
"Thanks," Waldo said, though obviously insincere.
"I guess you're wondering who I am and how I know you."
"You're a hip guesser."
The man laughed expansively, showing a full set of even teeth. "You're far too modest, man, your reputation has preceded you. It has been said that you are very popular with the ladies, and it would not be stretching the truth to describe you as a cocksman. It's those nympho stewardess sisters now, isn't it, and then there seems to have been some rich broad from the States who you did a thing with in Italy somewhere, lessee, Venice it was, yes, Venice."
"Who the fuck are you? The FBI?"
"Now that's really comical, yeah, a man with a sense of humor," the man said, but he wasn't smiling. "No, motherfucker, I am not the FBI."
"The CIA then? Charley Parker's ghost? I'm not the hip guesser you are, my friend."
"John Smith," he said, extending his hand.
"Waldo Smith," Waldo said, gripping it firmly. No offense taken, none given.
"Waldo Smith, huh?" John said quizzically, lifting an eyebrow and chuckling. "Don't shit me now, boy, 'cause I been shitted by experts, and lemme tell you you ain't no expert. Waldo Smith? Sheeeit."
"John Smith, huh?" Waldo said, right back at him.
John Smith broke out laughing, huge deep peals of laughter which shattered the relative tranquility of the nearly empty bar. He raised his right hand to slap down, and Waldo's upturned right hand caught the full force of the slap.
"Yeah, daddy," John said, "you cool and I'm cool, but you may not be as cool as you think you are cool, and ol' John Smith's going to pull your coat, hip you to your own scene, you dig it?"
"Beautiful, man, you be me and then answer my questions."
"No, no, young talent, can't let you peep all my hole cards. I can spot you cats comin' down the street, been doing just that for a lot of years, baby, and any time new talent makes the scene I make it my business to check this new talent out. And that's what I'm doing, young talent, just checking your ass out."
"Is this your gig?"
"No, baby, I'm retired. I do this to pass the time, see you dudes coming here and going through all your little paranoid changes-like you did when I sat down-and usually getting homesick for momma's apple pie and splitting. It's a syndrome, and if I weren't lazy I'd probably write about it for anybody who's interested in reading that shit."
"I take it then you've been here a while."
"Since '47, and that's not 1847, motherfucker."
"You went over the hill."
"Over and gone. Hid out in France until '47, but it got too heavy there and I made it here, been here ever since. You might say I'm the daddy of all you light-footed soldiers, though there were other cats who did the same thing and are still here, never been caught."
"Are you hot?"
John Smith laughed. "Probably, but not so hot as you, baby, not so hot as you. Twenty some years is a long time, a long time for a man to get his shit together, and besides I got me protective coloration, you dig it?"
"Well I'm getting mine together, too," Waldo said, a little defensively.
"How, by diddling Heckle and Jeckle on alternate Tuesdays? Dig it baby, you are a non-person. Don't show me the phony passport and ID and shit that you got fixed up with; I've seen too many of them and apparently the art work was good enough to get you in here."
"Are you going to lay some sound advice on me?" Waldo said after a minute's silence and allowed John's words to sink in.
"Listen, man, you are not the garden variety type of cat who shows up here with his hangups in his hand. I dig talking to you, and if only from a selfish viewpoint I have an interest in your welfare. Intelligence is a rare commodity today, and I would hate to see you go flippy before we had a chance to rap some more. I have no advice, not really. Just dig yourself, and where you're at, and use your good common sense."
"Is that what you've been doing for twenty years?"
"Sure, motherfucker, that's all, a little shuckin' and jivin' is all it takes." John smiled again, as if having just savored the pungency of a ripe fruit, and then switched the mood abruptly. "You drink wine, man?"
"I've been known to occasionally," Waldo said, not knowing what to make of John Smith and his shifting moods, feeling as if he were a novitiate undergoing the initiation ritual to a select order.
"Then come on to the house tonight for a good dinner, and after dinner we can drink some wine and rap some more. My old lady wails with the pots and pans, so come on by around seven."
He wrote the address on a napkin and got up to leave. "See you around seven, then, and thanks for the beer, man."
"My pleasure."
Waldo went back to his book but couldn't concentrate on it. John Smith was a character, he thought, and he was anxious to keep the dinner appointment. That seemed to be in keeping with the impression this wild, benign, bearded man had made on him. Sure he was a character, all right, but was that all he could say about him, that he was a character? Had Helga and Inga (somehow Heckle and Jeckle were unappealing appellations to him) fucked him so silly that his brains were rattling? And how had John Smith been able to find out so much about him, pick him out in that bar and talk to? Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Which way to men's furnishings? Who killed cock robin? Who killed cock? Is God dead? What's it all about, Waldo? These and other burning questions would be answered that evening, or at least he hoped so. Waldo returned to his book, a sadder man with his Budweiser.
At 6:55 he was ringing the bell outside an apartment door with the name Smith plainly lettered underneath. He could smell something really delicious cooking inside, a piquant barbecue sauce, perhaps. John Smith opened the door and welcomed him in.
"Welcome to the pad, man, good of you to come."
"Thanks for having me," he said. "Whatever that is cooking in there certainly smells delicious."
"Yeah, my old lady's fixing us a mess of ribs. You dig ribs, man, I mean down-home ribs?"
"Definitely."
"Like a beer before dinner?"
"Sure."
"Billie," John yelled to another part of the apartment, "fetch us a couple of beers and come on in and say hello to company." And then to Waldo, "You're not too talkative this evening, my man."
Waldo was about to answer when Billie came in with the beers. She was tall, long-legged, narrow-waisted, high-busted, snub-nosed, long-haired. She also appeared to be quite young, no more than eight-teen, Waldo figured.
"Billie, this is Waldo," John said. "Waldo, my little girl."
"Hi," Waldo said, undressing Billie with his eyes, something which was not lost on either her or her father.
"Hi," she answered demurely. "I have to go back and help momma with dinner, see you all soon." And she left the room, a sandaled, miniskirted nymph, her ass swinging naturally as she walked. Waldo wanted to tackle her and fuck her right there on the living room floor, but he cooled himself out. He had no recollection of being invited to eat John Smith's food and his daughter. But she was tempting, succulently tempting, and she knew it too.
"Cute girl," Waldo said, casually.
"I'm hip she's cute, motherfucker," John said, making a toast of it by raising his beer glass. "You got big eyes to tighten her up, sheetit, think I'm blind or something?"
"Do you give a shit?"
"Hell, someone's going to do it sooner or later if it hasn't already been done. Might as well be you as anyone. How'd you like to be my son-in-law?"
"Are you putting me on?"
"No," John said with a straight face. "Stranger things have been known to happen."
"But not to me."
"Why not?"
"How the hell do you know we'll even like each other, get along?" Waldo said, getting a little exasperated.
"Simple, you've got what she wants and she's got what you want. You two'll probably hit it of! just fine," John said, now grinning.
"But," Waldo started to protest, "she's only a kid-"
"And you think you're so fucking old? What are you, anyway, man, about twenty-four, twenty-five?"
"Yeah, about that."
"Billie was eighteen last month. She's a fine chick, knows how to love a man too if he'll treat her right. Yessir, learned that from her momma, learned how to cook too, I'm telling you, son, you don't mind if I call you son, grab her quick before I change my mind."
"I'm a deserter," Waldo exploded. "A fugitive, man, a cat without a country, no bread, no gig, no past, no future, no nothing. I really need an eighteen-year-old wife now, that would make things just perfect. Is J. Edgar Hoover expected for dinner too? Or is he coming for a brandy afterwards? You may have been able to stay on the street for twenty years, man, but it must have been luck, it couldn't have been due to smarts. Why me, for Christ's sake? Aren't there enough young studs on the scene to straighten her out? Wow, John Smith you are out of sight, you are the original something else."
John remained expressionless during Waldo's diatribe, sitting in his easy chair like some great dark-bearded Buddha, filling a pipe from a tobacco pouch. When it was full, he zipped the pouch methodically, tamped the tobacco down, drew on the dead pipe a couple of times to check on the clarity of the draw, and then spoke.
"You smoke reefer, son?"
"Sure, you just shake the old bush a little, I'll smoke it," Waldo said, totally baffled at this point.
John struck a match and lit the pipe, inhaling deeply on what was certainly not tobacco, and then passed it to Waldo. They smoked the pipeful and were very pleasantly high, not a mind-and body-blowing bhang high, only a good, solid grass head.
"Are you sure you weren't putting me on before, man, really?" Waldo said, sinking back into the comfort of his chair.
"Well maybe just a little," John said, grinning, "but it's cool, baby, I was just checking you out a little more, you're together."
A great sinking sensation engulfed Waldo's stomach. He sat in his chair rigidly, very stoned, and realized that he had been had by a master.
"A mite slow on the uptake," John was saying, "but time will take care of that. You want another taste?" he said, reaching for the pipe and the pouch.
"No thanks, I'm cool."
"You see," John said, lowering his voice, "after dinner we'll be sitting around, smoking a little reefer, drinking a little wine, the women will join us, maybe not, and then it'll be time for me and the old lady to bed down. And all during this time you'll be figuring out how to get Billie alone and get into her pants and still be cool. Being young is a bitch, isn't that the truth? So like I was saying before, you want to hit on my sweet little girl, that's cool, son, you just knock your hot little self out."
"It's ready, you two," Billie's voice called out from the kitchen, and John and Waldo rose a little unsteadily and went to the table.
During dinner, which was needlessly enhanced by the marijuana, Waldo met Kristin, John's wife. She was in her early forties and looked at least ten years younger, blonde, handsome, and obviously very devoted to her husband and daughter. She taught English and history in the local high school, the one from which Billie had been graduated the past June. While they ate the ribs, corn bread, and spinach (collard greens, John complained, were impossible to get in Stockholm) and sipped beer, Billie and Kristin peppered Waldo with questions about the details surrounding his desertion, intelligent questions and not the stuff from which many women mindlessly formulate conversations. When dessert, a sweet-as-honey apple cobbler, was served, Waldo was envying John Smith. He lived a peaceful life surrounded by two beautiful, intelligent women. Someday, Waldo thought, someday I'll get all my dues paid too. Someday.
After the cobbler Waldo and John returned to the living room with a bottle of wine while Kristin and Billie cleared the dishes. John filled the pipe again and started it going.
"Great meal," Waldo said, pouring two glasses of wine.
"I'm hip," John coughed out, trying to hold the smoke in and giving Waldo the pipe.
They finished it in silence and were good and high again.
"Here's to great greasin'," John said, lifting his glass in a toast.
"I'll drink to that," Waldo said.
"You know, man," John began, getting comfortable again, "I've gotten nostalgic over the years about going back, just for a while mind you, only to see how things are getting along. Everything I hear is second-hand, it's not the same as being there. But when I took off at the end of the war, I never wanted to see the States again, I cursed it for a long time afterwards. And then the curses somehow got a lot weaker, and then they sort of died out. Bein' a nigger back there is rough, Jim, and I ain't jiving. And from what they tell me it's not getting any better. I never told this to anyone before, leastways not any white man. Pot and wine will get a man to talking, I suppose, and that's what I'm doing, just sitting back here and talking."
"Did you see the Democratic convention in Chicago last month on television?"
"Uh huh, I dug it."
"The country's gone crazy, man, stark stone raving infuckingsane, black against white, young against old, rich against poor. It's going to blow up soon, maybe a year or two at the outside, but the shit-storm's on its way. Now is not the time to go back, John."
"You right, man, but for the wrong-assed reasons. What did you see on that TV? Saw a bunch of kids gettin' their asses whupped for doing what they thought was right. But that ain't nothin new, man, not if you are black, that's what the country's all about. You learning' all right, but it's been taking a while. They got propaganda there that's as effective has anything the Germans or the Russians ever did. Dig it, they get to you when you're in school, fill your heads up with all this bullshit about how groovy the US is, about how moral it is, fair play, everybody's the same, all that noise. And you buy it too, the whole rotten package. And then one day something happens, or somebody says something, or maybe it's only a look, and it's right then and there that you know you've been a fool to have ever thought that any of that sanctimonious crap was for real.
"And in a war when you're trying like a motherfucker just to stay alive and in one piece, you begin to ask yourself just what the hell it is that you're supposed to be fighting for, your momma's apple pie or something. The Army fills you up to here with stories about how the Germans were fucking over everybody, and that we, the good guys, had to whup them, or they'd fuck over the whole world. It's at that point that any man with an ounce of sense realizes that whoever wins people are going to continue to be fucked over, and that if I, personally, had been fucked over in the past by the side I was fighting for, why in the name of sweet bleeding Jesus should I risk my ass for the man who for three hundred years messed with my people and for only twenty-some-odd years had been messing with me?
"And so," John concluded, "I split."
"So I guess I am your son, sort of," Waldo said.
"That's right, my man, my spiritual heir, another generation come the full circle. So I'd like you to stay healthy for a while. You got a gig?"
"No."
"Want my old one? Tending bar in that joint I saw you in earlier? You'll get by with it."
"But I can't speak Swedish."
"Most of the customers can speak English, and you'll pick up a little after a while, it's not hard."
"Groovy, I'll do it, but don't I need a work permit for this?"
"I can help you get one," Kristin said, as she and Billie came into the room and sat down.
"Good, then it's settled," John said. "You two like a taste?" pointing the pipe and pouch at the women.
The evening wore on with everyone very relaxed and very high. Waldo felt as if he had known these people very well over a long period of time, even Billie whom he was itching to know even better. She and her mother served coffee after a while, and it was all very casual and domestic.
Then, as if by a prearranged signal, John and Kristin got up and said goodnight. Waldo thanked them for the dinner and the company and they acknowledged his thanks warmly, and trundled off to bed.
Billie got up to fill Waldo's wine glass again. "Some more wine, Waldo?"
"Sure, baby," he answered, really whacked out of his skull. "Anything to see those long legs moving."
"You like my legs?" she asked, bringing his full glass to him and kneeling on the floor beside his chair.
"Very much," he said, sipping the wine. "Your legs are like wine because wine is so fine."
"You are very sweet, Waldo," she said, putting her head on his leg and embracing it tenderly, exciting him. He ran his fingers through her thick black hair, feeling very much at peace with himself and the world.
Billie pulled herself up on her knees and unzipped Waldo's fly, reaching inside his pants and bringing out his cock, already semi-erect. Then, still wordlessly, she opened his legs and put it in her mouth, sucking on it sensually, her eyes closed, holding it with her hands at the base.
Waldo was too high to be surprised, too high in fact to do anything but sit back and enjoy Billie's blowjob, excited by the voyeuristic delight of watching his own cock being sucked by this young goddess. He started to trip on the scene, climbing outside his corporeal structure and sitting on his shoulder, watching himself perform in his own home movie, titled "Billie's Blowjob." Meanwhile, he was still very conscious of her fevered licking and sucking action, and he really wanted to fuck this bitch in her young pussy.
"Drop your pants so I can fuck you," he said.
Billie took his tool out of her mouth and stayed kneeling over the chair as Waldo got up over her and started to drop his pants.
"Please, leave them on," she said breathlessly. "I like it that way."
"Always happy to oblige a lady," Waldo said, kneeling behind her and finding her panties around her ankles, her pussy wet and waiting, peering up at him with its wrinkled, mournful single eye from the junction of her smooth round cheeks. Holding his cock in one hand, Waldo introduced it to her, sliding it in, finding some resistance in her tight vaginal muscles, contesting him for the right to penetrate farther in but losing. Billie moaned, not softly, as more and more of his prick worked its way inside her, bringing her to the edge of orgasm.
"Shhh, you'll wake your folks," Waldo whispered, hearing her moans getting longer and louder as he inched his member deeper and deeper into her.
"I don't care, motherfucker, I don't care," she said, starting to come. "The rest of it, gimme the rest of it, ohhheeeee, YEAH, do it baby, do it to me."
With a hard lunge Waldo jammed his cock all the way in, reaching under her blouse and grabbing her tits and then rocking her back and forth, using his knees for leverage.
Billie kept coming and let go with an ear-piercing shriek when Waldo shot his load in her, dwarfing all her built-up climaxes with this one grand tremorous one.
In spite of what John had said before, and his and Kristin's implicit knowledge of what was going on in the living room, Waldo winced a little, not so much because of anything Billie was actually doing to him, but because of his modest reluctance to broadcast it. He pulled out of her and zipped his fly.
He felt badly about what he was going to do, but he felt a little uncomfortable here. Billie had pulled up her panties and was looking at him petulantly.
"Don't tell me you're going to go now," she said.
"Well, truthfully, I had thought about it."
"Damn it, Waldo, don't get up tight about them in here," she said, gesturing towards the bedroom and its closed door. "They damn near set this up for me, or don't you like me? Is that it?"
"No, that's not it at all," Waldo said, standing up and extending his hands to her to help her up and then holding her and looking down into her dark eyes. "It's really getting late, and I have to look for a job tomorrow. Don't worry honey, I'll be seeing you again, soon." He kissed her and she responded hungrily, as if she hadn't been fucked for months.
"OK," Billie said, breaking the kiss. "I'm sorry if I'm acting like a pig, but I've only been balling for a few months, and I just can't get enough of it."
"See you soon," Waldo said, kissing her goodnight at the door and leaving. He thought he might have heard John's characteristic laugh through the walls as he walked to the elevator, but it also could have been his imagination.
CHAPTER TEN
New York City
September 30, 1968
Dear Waldo,
I just this moment got in, completely exhausted; the traffic from the airport to the city is incredible, and after a hot bath I am writing you.
In one respect I imagine I've been worrying about you ever since that morning you stole away from my bed. For all I know this letter may never find its way to you wherever you are, but I hope it does and it finds you well.
Europe after you left me was quite dull, and if this bit of flattery swells your head, so be it. I was always honest with you and hopefully this was reciprocated. Anyway, it's good to be back in New York, dirty air and all. Really, darling, it's a drag with me here and you there, and on one singularly disappointing evening (I shan't bore you with the details) I actually toyed with the idea of flying to Stockholm to say hello. Now don't I sound all foolish and school-girly? That should swell your head, you hard-fucking bastard!
My daughter and her young man are coming up here later for a reconciliation I hope. She and I had some unpleasant words before I left, but it looks like time has closed that wound up.
And finally, your clothes are ready. I cabled the tailor in Venice and they should be on their way to you, c/o American Express, just like this letter.
If you find yourself passing through New York in the near future, I'd love to spend some time with you. My phone (unlisted) is Plaza 9-6120.
Be well, my Waldo, and godspeed.
Lovingly,
Ruth
The letter had come two days after his evening at John Smith's house. He had gone to the bar the following day and was hired on the condition that he obtain the needed work permit. He found Kristin that afternoon and she made a telephone call, telling him that it would be ready the next day and where to pick it up. And so, on his way to his first day's work, he passed by American Express and found the letter waiting.
He found that her letter had moved him more than he thought he was capable of being moved. There was Helga and Inga, and now Billie, but there was also Ruth. It was reassuring to know that she was in New York and would provide a safe haven for him if he ever got back, and the more he thought about it the more he considered returning. Yet all of John's and his own arguments against doing so shored up a decision to stay put quite firmly. After all, he had been here less than six weeks and was not hurting for anything, least of all sex. And there was a job, his job, one which had been secured for him through the efforts of people whom he truly liked. OK, cool yourself, mister, he thought, walking to work. You're certainly not splitting this evening or tomorrow, that is if you do split. Meanwhile there's plenty of business for you to take care of right here. Answer her letter later, but now was something else.
As the days became weeks and the weeks turned into months, he developed a routine between working, orgying with his two roommates and whomever they found to invite over, and time spent with John, Kristin and Billie. The clothes had come, and even John had been impressed with the tailoring and material. Waldo had it made. He had grown a beard and had put on weight; the excess poundage was his badge, his lapel button which read, "I am enjoying the good life." He was even saving a lot of money, eating most of his meals where he worked and paying no rent with Helga and Inga. Who could have asked for anything more?
Billie, that's who.
One night in December, she picked him up after work and they went back to his apartment. Helga and Inga were gone and not due back for three more days. They fucked, but it had been perfunctory, and when it was over they both knew that it had been out of deference to routine rather than lust.
"That was a drag," she said, crawling over to one side of the massive bed to get a cigarette.
"Why, you got a new boyfriend?"
"Yeah, you."
"I don't get it."
"That figures, you're as stupid as my father sometimes. As a matter of fact that's the whole point, right there."
"I still don't get it."
Billie sighed, seeing that she would have to explain it to him as one would a child, spoon-feeding him, step by step. "Waldo, I dig you, I think you know that. If I didn't I wouldn't give a shit."
"Give a shit about what, dammit, get to the fucking point!"
"OK, man, here's the point. In twenty years the only difference between you and my old man will be that he's black and you're white, and that won't really be any difference because he's not really black. Having phony soul food once in a while and talking like some 1940's hipster is not being black, baby. People back in your country, cats like the Panthers, these are black men. They are black and they are beautiful. Sitting on your ass and watching it get fat is not where it's at. You know why my father brought you home to dinner, why he's happy I'm sleeping with you sometimes, why he got you his old job? Because his life has been nothing, man, and so has he. The FBI has probably given him up for dead, and they're right, he is dead. Now he doesn't even have that silly-assed bartending job to go to anymore. He says he's retired. Bullshit. He retired when he went over the hill. You know something, man, my name is Billie Smith, and that's because his name is John Smith. But what the fuck is his real name?
"Who is he? And you," she said, pointing her finger at him accusingly, "who are you? I know your name isn't Waldo Smith anymore than my dad's is John Smith. Can't you see what's happened to you, man, and it's only been three months!"
She poked the roll of flab which was settling in comfortably around his middle. "This will get bigger and you'll get more comfortable, you'll be following in my old man's footsteps and when he dies you'll inherit his title. He saw this the minute he talked to you. He has talked to every GI here who deserted, just like he says he has, and all that time he was looking for a son, someone to take over the family business after he passed on, he is so middle class I went to scream sometimes. And what makes it worse is these hip pretensions of his. That's my point, Waldo."
"I see, I see," he whispered. And while she had been talking the wheels in his head had been turning, slowly at first, and then they picked up steam and were functioning at peak efficiency.
She was quite right, of course, about her father and about him, too. He could very easily slip into the comfort she had described, he was just about there now. Nothing taxed him anymore, nothing bothered him, he had withdrawn into himself like a turtle, only to come out for fucking. Stockholm was a lotus land for him. He knew that there had been elections at home a month ago and that Richard Nixon would be the new President, though neither Mr. Nixon nor his jolly opponent had stirred any enthusiasm in him. He had been something less than a success as an analyst of American politics during his evenings behind the bar, evenings when he was questioned about the electoral system, the Vietnam war, whom would he vote for if he were home. It really made no difference to him what happened, he was safe. What else mattered? But, of course in having achieved safety he had forfeited something. His independence, his soul, his identity, just about everything except his ever-ready prick. Sure he had envied John Smith that first night at dinner, and now his position vis-a-vis Mr. S had been polarized, from mentor to nemesis in three short months.
He even had figured out how he would get back home, yeah, it was his home, unsentimentally it was his home. Helga and Inga often flew with their friends coming aboard and appearing on the manifest as crew members on vacation. They had told him of sucking off the pilot and copilot at 40,000 feet over the Atlantic and persuading them to go along with their little game. The only way they could be caught, they had reasoned, would be for the plane to go down, in which case they'd all be dead anyway. And there was never any trouble with American customs. Waldo suspected that they were smuggling raw scag into the city along with their occasional playmates, but he never asked them. They maintained an extraordinarily high standard of living, higher, he estimated, than their combined salaries would cover. He knew that they could get $35 an ounce for the African bhang they always seemed to have around, and he would arrange to have them bring about two or three kilos of it back in with him. That would give him about $3000 to play around with in the city once he got settled.
And there would even be more fugitive paranoia, but he could cope with that now. Hell, he beat them getting into Stockholm unscathed and, presumably, unnoticed. He was still Waldo Smith, and he just had to be cool. Maybe he would get a house in the country, mind his own business. Farm a little, perhaps. Who knew?
He reached over and took Billie in his arms, kissing her very tenderly and yet passionately. She responded eagerly, and they lay there, necking, naked, on their gigantic playground.
"I'm going to split, you know," he said, breaking their kiss for a moment and pecking gingerly at her nose and eyes.
"I know," she said, smiling up at him. "I should cry, but I guess it's too great even for that. Shit, I don't know what I mean any more." And she broke away, bounding away from him and then turning herself upside down, with the fluid movements of a young gazelle, and going down on his prick while presenting her cunt to his face.
They 69'd at each other furiously, licking all the evidence of their recent union away, cleaning their tools for another round of fucking.
And then she was lying on her back, legs in the air, her pussy wide open, inviting him to intrude himself in it once more. He did, shoving it into her easily now, into this almost virgin (there had been two schoolmates before him, she had confessed one night, and he told her he didn't mind) cunt which he had first boffed that famous or infamous first night, and which now took him in, accommodated him as comfortably as a good leather vest.
His cock felt bigger and harder than ever before inside her and Billie grunted with the fullness of him as he poked it around, brushing the sensitive Skin on her cervix with his head, feeling larger than life. She tightened the walls of her pussy and they held him tight. This was something which she had been practicing for the last month, using a sausage, exercising, gaining control of them. She realized that one of the major reasons for her being pissed off at him before, aside from the one which seemed to be settled, was her not having been able to try her newly acquired talent. It had been wham bam, thank-you, ma'am, but this one was something she wanted to be very special.
Waldo read her thoughts-perhaps her pussy's clamping on and off him was transmitting in some primeval code, his cock the antenna drawing the signals into his nervous system-and he put his hands under her shoulders and pulled her up so she was sitting on his lap, facing him, impaled on his rod. They inched their way to the edge of the bed, locked together, their moving putting unusual stresses on their coupling, and once at the night table (Inga's) he found half a joint of bhang.
They spent the rest of the night that way, high, locked together, face to face, their bodies and, yes, even their souls merging. They recited the Hare Krishna together, they kissed for hours on end, it was supraorgasmic, transcending fucking, getting laid, getting straight, getting one's rocks off, ashes hauled, balled, diddled, boffed, hosed, shagged, jazzed. It was all of them and it was none of them, it was a few of them and it was many of them.
And it ended in a thunderous fuck, Waldo, still in her, getting off the bed and standing against it, his hands under her ass, driving his prick home hard, banging it into her cunt, in and out, the pressure of their all-night vigil building, mounting in a final climactic crescendo of come, come, come, come, COMING.
The earth shuddered imperceptibly and it was over. Waldo withdrew, finally, and helped Billie dress.
"See me before you split," she said, kissing him lightly on her way out.
He nodded affirmatively and she was gone into the darkness of the December morning.
He called John Smith at home later that afternoon.
"John?"
"Yeah, Waldo, what's happening?"
"I'm splitting, man."
There was no sound at the other end of the phone except for John's regular breathing.
"I said I was splitting, man."
"Fuck you," John said, hanging up on him.
Waldo looked at the dead phone and shrugged, started to call him back but changed his mind in the middle of the dialing. Piss on him, let him live on his fantasies in somebody else, I am not his fucking son, spiritual or otherwise.
Helga and Inga were able to arrange everything for him, just as he had hoped. The bhang cost him $30, $5 per kilo, and he would sell it in New York for $35 an ounce, 25,000% profit, as it cost him about 14' per ounce. They also got him on their next flight, which coincidentally enough was to New York. Inga said that the pilot who probably would be flying them had been to the house for an orgy at least once, but Waldo had had difficulty keeping track of the various women who from time to time showed up at these gatherings on the Big Bed, so recalling some random man, who probably had somebody sitting on his face most of the time anyway, was hopeless.
He tried calling John all that week, but after being hung up on twice more as soon as he made his identity known he got the message that John had nothing to say to him. Still, he made an appointment to see Kristin for an hour the day before he left. He met her in a small cafe near her school. She had ordered a cup of coffee and was drinking it when Waldo walked in and sat down.
Kristin looked very tired; he was sure John was putting her and Billie through some special sort of hell which he held in reserve for those he felt had betrayed him.
He ordered a coffee and then turned to her.
"It looks like it's been a little rough, and if it's my fault I'm truly sorry."
"Thank you, Waldo," she said, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke out quickly. "It's no one's fault, really, that's just the way my husband is. He'll get over it, he always does, so there is some consolation in knowing that it will not last forever."
"How is Billie?"
"Billie is fine. She stays out of his way as much as possible. She wants to see you, Waldo, before you go."
"Tell her to call me tonight."
"I shall. Don't feel badly about this. I can see on your honest American face that you are not listening to me. My husband is a fine man, we have had many happy years together and I love him very much, even when he plays crazy as he is doing now. He will forget you, Waldo, long before you forget him."
"And you, Kristin? I don't feel like his enemy, I feel no hostility to him at all, it's all one-sided."
"I am a good Swedish wife," she said, smiling. "I do as my husband asks. He is a weak man sometimes, but should that not be when a wife is needed most? He is above all else very human. Please order me a cognac, Waldo, I do not wish to make a spectacle of myself by crying in this pre-Christmas season when we are told to be joyous."
Waldo ordered two cognacs while Kristin excused herself to go to the ladies' room for facial repairs. She returned in a few minutes, seeming bright and cheerful.
"Well," she said, sitting down and lifting her glass, "I will propose a bon voyage toast for you."
"Thank you." Waldo said, joining her.
Kristin had regained her outward composure, but he could see the telltale signs of her inner turmoil flashing in her eyes. She was uncomfortable here, but she had too much class to whip some transparent excuse on him to split abruptly. John Smith had himself one fine lady, he thought, one truly fine lady. So he made some small talk about going home while they finished their drinks, and then Kristin picked up her pocket book from the empty seat between them.
"Thank you for the drink, Waldo," she said, getting up, "But I really must be getting home. I shall give Billie your message, and I am sure she will call you later."
Then she stood up and kissed him on the cheek and was gone. He paid the check and left, heading for the apartment to await Billie's call.
It came around 7:30 and he invited her over. Helga and Inga had made plans to go out, and they were finishing dressing when Billie arrived. Waldo made the introductions, and he could see that Billie liked them right away and they her, as the three of them chattered like magpies in Swedish.
"Good night, Waldo," the sisters said, kissing him very chastely, no doubt for Billie's benefit, as they left.
"My roommates," he said to Billie after the girls were out the door.
"Why they're lovely. After all that my father has said about them I really expected them to be horrible bitches, but they're nothing like that at all."
"They are very wild, Billie; that bed in there gets used an awful lot by an awful lot of people. They party when they fuck and vice versa, but they are basically good people."
"Oh, well, you'll be leaving them too."
"Billie, let's make this a pleasant night. I don't want to hassle anything. I had a naive half hour with your mother this afternoon, so please, honey, let's be cool tonight. What do you want to do? Get high? Ball? Rap?"
"Let's rap, that way it'll get less sticky later when I have to split."
"Hell, spend the night. The girls won't mind, they dig you, you could see that."
"Four of us in that bed?"
"It holds forty."
"Come on, Waldo," she said, laughing, "It's not funny."
"Then why are you laughing?"
"I've never made it with any chicks before, it seems kind of, well, funny, you know what I mean?"
"Can you stay, that is if you want to? Would it be cool at home?"
"Sure, I'm on vacation. They know where I am. OK, I'll stay, why not?"
"Sound thinking, girl. Sound thinking."
So they sat on the luxurious living room rug, playing records and talking. Waldo told her of his former life, the one he had had before becoming Waldo Smith. Billie sat there enthralled as he spun tales of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, and the U.S. Army.
And then the last record of the stack dropped on the turntable and Billie Holiday was singing, "I don't know why, but I'm feeling so sad, I long to try something I never had, never had no kissin', oh what I've been missin', lover man oh where can you be.
"The night is cold and I'm so all alone," the classic voice continued and was joined by a very live contemporary one, singing along with the record, getting each nuance of phrasing down, each mini-inflection. Then it came to Waldo. John had named her after Billie Holiday, and here was Billie Smith singing along with her namesake.
"I'd give my soul just to call you my own, got a moon above me, but no one to love me, lover man oh where can you be.
"I've heard it said that the thrill of romance can be like a heavenly dream, I go to bed, with the prayer that you'll make love to me, strange as it seems; Someday we'll meet then you'll dry all my tears, then whisper sweet little things in my ears, huggin' and a-kissin', oh what you've been missin', lover man oh where can you be."
The quality of his Billie's voice lacked the throaty, blues-infected torchiness of the original, reflecting Billie Holiday's hard life and times. Of course, the chick wasn't an American!
The word American gave him positive vibrations for the first time since he had been drafted.
"That was beautiful," he said, as she had finished singing and the next track was playing. "Old John named you after her, didn't he."
"Yeah, that's right, but I'll never be able to sing like that. She must have been something else."
"So she was," Waldo nodded, "So she was. She was a great American."
"That's the first time I've heard you use the word American not as a curse. Waldo, I believe you're homesick."
"I am that, I guess. It's stupid for me to try to be anything else. The rest of world regards me as an American, and if my country is corrupt, so is a part of me. If there's any goodness or beauty there, they too are part of me. It's not so much homesickness as, well, my nailing down my own identity good and tight. The Army really fucks with a man's head, and for a while I was kind of unsure as to who I really am. You understand?"
But half-Swedish Billie, the girl who sang "Lover Man" along with Billie Holiday, could not really understand, though she nodded her head affirmatively.
The tension broke as the door opened and Helga came in, followed closely by Inga, who closed the door behind her and breathed an audible sigh of relief.
"You two are home early," Waldo said, glancing at his watch and seeing that it was not even 10:30. "And alone," he added as an afterthought.
"They are such pigs, those Germans," Helga said, throwing her purse on the couch and collapsing beside it.
"I didn't want to go out with them," Inga started, "but you said they were OK. No more German businessmen, Helga, not even if it's old man Krupp himself. Thank heaven we are flying tomorrow, let them ring a phone which will not answer for a few days."
"Rough night?" Waldo said.
Helga launched into a near-hysterical diatribe in Swedish, aiming her remarks at Billie for both female and linguistic empathy, with Billie nodding appreciatively and giggling as Helga regaled her with the catalogue of horrors which had been perpetrated on her and her sister that evening. Inga interrupted occasionally to supplement her sister's account with what seemed to be especially foul details which Helga had omitted. And in the end the three of them were doubled over, laughing.
Waldo smiled wanly, feeling that this was the culmination of all the scattered feelings of alienation which had been gathering within him. Yes, of course, he had experienced many and varied sexual delights with all three of these women, and would doubtless do so again this night, his last night away from home; however, now they appeared distant. He recognized the paradox between their distance and accessibility and felt amused by the irony he had created, his own private irony, his native American irony.
"It's too bad you don't understand Swedish, Waldo," Inga said after the girls had laughed themselves out.
"Oh well, you can tell me in bed if you feel like it," he said, getting up and stretching. "It's getaway day tomorrow. Waldo needs his sleep."
No one got up to follow him, and as he climbed to the balcony and the bathroom Helga called up, "Go ahead, we're going to talk for a while," and then went back to the animated three-way conversation.
He took a shower and went to bed, closing the door to the bedroom behind him to separate himself from the light and sound coming from the living room below. He turned out the light and crawled into the huge bed, sprawling on a fraction of its vastness and falling off to sleep.
During the night something odd happened. Waldo could have been dreaming, or he could have awakened. In either event, he became aware of muted slurping sounds coming from somewhere on the bed. It appeared that Inga, Helga and Billie had formed an all-girl daisy chain, with Billie's head between Inga's legs, Helga's head in Billie's crotch, and Inga scarring Helga's cunt. He watched from an unmeasurable distance as the three bodies writhed like a many-limbed snake, the stillness of the night (dream?) disturbed only by an occasional little cry of pleasure signaling a little death.
And then the sisters were kissing Billie's body, the sides, the front, the back, sucking her tits, fingering her pussy ... blur into a juxtaposition of arms and legs, Helga had a cock (dildo) and had buried it in Inga's ass while Inga had buried her dildo (cock?) in Billie's twat ... Billie was sucking Inga off ... Helga was being fucked in the ass by Billie and the cunt by Inga ... his own prick (real) was hard and he mounted Inga ... Billie was eating him while being fucked by the sisters ... and on and on, deeper into his head, farther into the night.
He did awake at one time, perhaps to check on himself, and the three girls were sleeping soundly.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ruth answered the bell and admitted Brian and Janet to her apartment. The occasion was for decorating the Christmas tree, and a phone call earlier that evening had brought her daughter and Brian uptown in two hours.
She and Janet had patched up their differences very quickly upon her return to the city; maybe Brian had helped by seducing her and inviting Janet to join them for her first taste of more than two-way sex. They had joked about a girl's best friend being her mother, sensuality beginning in the home, and the family that lays together stays together; these dispelled very quickly any inhibitions Janet had had about doing it, doing it with her mother, doing it with Brian and her mother.
And Brian had downed all the grass he had set out to deal, which gave him and Janet enough money to live on for the next four or five months. However, frequent invitations uptown to Ruth's place made this money stretch even further than they had originally planned. Brian at one time was curious about where Ruth's money-and there seemed to be a never-ending supply of it-was coming from, but in the end he decided the source was unimportant. The broad had her thing together, and it would have been presumptuous of him to ask her to put her business in the streets just to satisfy some childish bit of curiosity which he temporarily entertained.
"Hi, kids," she said, helping them with their coats. "Isn't it a lovely tree?"
They both agreed, and Brian sported an inscrutable smile which Ruth picked up on immediately.
"What's the bit, man?"
"Bit, baby? What bit you talkin' about? I don't see no bit anywhere around."
"Come off that shit, Brian," she said a little impatiently, "or wipe that shit-eating grin off your sweet face and tell me what's happening." Then exasperated, though enjoying it, "Shit, why do I let you put me through these little adolescent changes, Brian, we both know this is a lot of garbage. So whatever it is, man, just run it on down to me, I'm ready."
"I'm hip, baby, you always ready, ain't that right, momma?" he said, putting his hand up her dress and feeling the soft hair around her pussy. "Aha, no drawers again, gotcha. My, my, you get nastier and nastier every time I see you."
"Spit it out, goddamit, talk you blackassed lowlife pigfucking whoremongering scumbag cocksucker!" Ruth screamed, tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks.
"Shouldn't be talking all that trash in front of your own daughter, bitch, settin' a bad example for her and playing crazy and carrying on. Calm yourself, woman, be cool and Mrs. Thomas' boy Brian will tell all."
"OK," Ruth said, calmly, her composure all back, "I await your message."
"Put the message on your momma, honey," he said to Janet.
She took a small medicine vial out of her purse and gave it to Ruth. It contained three pills, white tablets necked with blue. Ruth examined them, took the cover off the vial and smelled them, replaced the cover and rattled them like dice.
"What is it?"
"That's acid, mother," Janet said quietly, almost religiously, "Lysergic acid diethylmide-25, 750 micrograms each, the key to bigger and better pleasure. Merry Christmas."
"Why thank you, both of you," Ruth said, gathering them both to her and hugging them. "I can't begin to tell you-"
"Then don't," Brian interrupted, not ungraciously. "I thought they'd be a nice thing to help us decorate the tree."
"Wait here," Ruth said, and went to the kitchen, coming back with three glasses of water. They each took a pill and washed them down with the water.
"I don't feel anything," Ruth said, mock-seriously. "I think you two got burned."
"In about an hour." Brian said, "in about an hour I want you to tell me that. And in four hours tell it to me again."
They went to the kitchen and had coffee and Danishes, joking, passing the time with inconsequential gossip, as if they had just dropped nothing more extraordinary than aspirin. Then Brian got up and went back to the living room and started putting the decorations on the tree by himself, leaving Ruth and Janet to second and third cups of coffee. He felt the acid start to come on as he was deciding what color ball to hang next and noticed he was getting quite hung up on the colors-not the choice of colors, but the colors themselves. Green balls? Blue balls? Were the green balls greener than the blue balls were blue? Then his head was cool again, only momentarily though as he heard a squeal of laughter coming from the kitchen-Janet, followed by Ruth bellowing like a great wounded cow, "Go ahead honey, if you think it's so fucking hot in here, I, your mother, will not be the one to stop you from removing your clothes."
Janet flew into the living room, long high ballerina leaps, her tits jiggling as she landed, then soared up in the air again; Ruth walked behind her sedately, giving Brian a wink which said that she was high, too, but not ever so silly as her naked leaping daughter, so it's your secret, champ, right? She sat down on the couch deliberately, as though if only one muscle had not been under complete control it would cause her body to disintegrate in autonomous pieces.
Brian's attention was diverted from the blue and green balls and became riveted on Ruth's erect posture as she watched Janet continue her dance around the room. The colors on her dress began to melt into each other like they were wax, and Brian was finding the room a little stuffy too. He walked over to her, feeling the carpet spring under his measured gait, throwing off his own clothes as he walked the seemingly interminable distance separating them. Ruth kept staring straight ahead, oblivious to what the other two people in the room were up to.
And then Brian pressed his face into the kaleidoscopically merging colors of her dress, Canute commanding them to stop with the application of his face, that part of him on the distorted patterns, though to no avail. Then her legs parted, slowly, like the gates to an ancient city, and revealed her hairy snatch to him, appearing like a dark rain forest of dense underbrush, her own cunty underbrush, reeking with prehistoric mustiness, inviting, no, daring him to enter at his own peril.
Enter it he did, nose, tongue, lips, filling his lungs with her smell, fresh pussy smell, as it beckoned him to enter further, deeper, more, climb in, pull your feet in afterwards, it said, to him, you'll find it cozy here, warm, intimate, come on in, the juices are fine.
Ruth pulled the zipper in front of her dress all the way down, and it parted. She shrugged it off and slipped out of her bra, then, pivoting on her ass, eased her legs with Brian's head between them onto the couth and lay back, opening her mouth for his hard black prick as he stood at the end of the couch, leaning over her.
He picked her up, her mouth still around his cock, and stood embracing her waist and holding her upside down against him, still slurping her pussy, carrying her into the bedroom and easing her down on the bed on top of him, neither coupling interrupted. He came in her mouth, hard vicious, viscous spurts, gigantic gobs of gism gorging her, and Janet bounded into the room.
"Oh there you two are," she said in a child's singsong voice and crawled onto the bed, opening Ruth's asshole with her tongue as Brian finished shooting his load in her mouth.
Ruth vaulted off Brian away from Janet, rolling around the bed with a private case of giggles. She played tag with them; they were "it" and had to trap her in some erotic embrace while she scampered around trying to elude them.
It was then that the doorbell rang. Brian seemed to be the only one who heard it; he stopped playing tag, though Ruth and Janet continued to cavort. High and naked as he was, he picked himself up and went to answer it, seeing that the two women were beyond hearing it and very much into their own thing.
"Jesus Christ," Waldo said, standing in the doorway with two suitcases and all his clothes on, seeing the familiar face and unfamiliar body of Brian Thomas standing before him, admitting him to Ruth Lowe's apartment. "Brian, what's happening? What the fuck are you doing here?"
"Friend of the family, man, what about yourself? Weren't you in the Army or something? Wow," he added, holding his head, "this acid is really out of sight."
"You're tripping?" Waldo said unbelievingly. "Where's Ruth?"
"You know old Ruth?"
"Yeah, from Europe. She told me to look her up if I was ever in the city. How do you know her?"
"Her daughter and I have a thing going, they're in the bedroom, playing tag I think. Dig it, man, excuse me if I'm not making a whole lot of sense, but, you know, oh shit, there I go again, yeah, there I go there I go, there, I go." He started singing King Pleasure's lyrics on Moody's "Mood for Love."
Waldo joined him, like old times downtown, parties on Avenue B, two and three-day sets, and a capella they took off:
There I go there I go there I go there, I go,
Pretty baby you are the soul that
Snaps my control, such a funny thing
That every time you're near me
I never can behave,
You give me a smile and then I'm
Wrapped up in your magic, there's
Music all around me, crazy music
Music that keeps calling me so very
Close to you, turns me your slave;
Come and do with me any little thing you
Want to, baby, just let me get
Next to you.
Am I insane or do I really see
Heaven in your eyes, bright as
Stars that shine up above you
In the clear blue sky, how I worry
'Bout you, just can't live my life
Without you,
Baby come here, don't
Have no fear, oh, is there wonder
Why, I'm really feeling in the
Mood for love.
So tell me why stop to think about
This weather, my dear, this little
Dream might fade away there I go
I'm talking out of my head again
Oh baby won't you come and put our
Two hearts together, that will make
Me strong and brave,
Oooo, when we are one,
I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid.
If there's a cloud up above us,
Come on and let it rain, I'm sure
Our love together will endure a
Hurricane, Oh my baby, please let me
Love you, and give me relief from
This awful misery...
And then they sang the next lines in falsetto:
What is all this talk about loving me, my sweet,
I am not afraid, not any more, not like before
Don't you understand me, now baby please
Pull yourself together, do it soon,
My soul's on fire, come on and take me
I'll be what you make me
My darling my sweet,
Finishing with normal voices:
Oh baby, you make me feel so good,
Let me take you by the hand,
Come let us visit out there,
In that new promised land.
Maybe there we can find a place to keep our
Lovely state of mind,
I'm so tired of being without
And never knowing what love's about,
James Moody, you can come on in man and you can blow now
If you want to,
We're through.
"Yeah," Waldo said, slapping Brian's upturned palm hard. "Dig it, man, my name is now Waldo Smith, in case you're asked or anything, remember, Waldo Smith."
"Waldo Smith?" Brian repeated. "WALDO SMITH?"
"That's right, Waldo Smith. I'll run the game down to you later, meanwhile what is going on here?"
"We all dropped about 750 mikes a while ago and it's a party. Take off your clothes and come on in."
Everything had been happening very fast for Waldo since he left Stockholm that morning. The flight across the Atlantic was uneventful, save for the hand job Inga gave him during the flight, jerking him off under the lap blanket which in her official capacity as stewardess she provided him with. American customs was a joke. Helga and Inga brought the bricks through with their own luggage and he made the transfer to his own in the terminal's men's room. They shared a cab back to the city and said goodbye on First Avenue somewhere in the 80's. And now Brian, naked and tripping, answering the door to Ruth's apartment in the middle of an orgy. Did I have to leave Sweden for this, for chrissakes, he asked himself bemusedly as he took off his clothes and followed Brian into the bedroom.
Janet was sucking Ruth's tit, looking more the child nursing than the lover licking, if one chose to ignore her index and middle fingers immersed in Ruth's cunt, masturbating her. Brian had lowered himself on Ruth's face, fucking her in the mouth once again, as Waldo entered and joined the crowd, lying down behind Janet and working the head of his dick around her labia, finally finding the hole and filling it.
Brian came first, pouring more of his come down her throat, and Ruth felt like she was enjoying her second vanilla milkshake of the night. He dismounted her and wandered out of the bedroom, laughing like a hyena. Janet let go of Ruth shortly thereafter and took Waldo out of her, then turned and faced him, seeing for the first time who that good stiff prick belonged to. She saw Ruth sort of fade away off the bed, giving Waldo as much of her attention as the drug was permitting.
"Wow, this is boss acid," she said, looking at and through Waldo. "Who are you, nice man with the big prick?"
"Waldo, and you?"
"My name is Janet and I'm pleased to meet you," she said in a singsong voice. "Would you like to meet my pussy? My pussy would like to meet you."
Waldo said nothing, putting his hand between her legs and burying his fingers in her bush, wetting them with her juice which was flowing freely and giving off a strong, musky, cunty odor. Janet threw one leg across him lazily and straddled his head, lowering her furry crotch on to his waiting mouth.
Waldo pulled a pillow under his head for support as she sat on his face, pulling the lips of her dripping snatch open so as to enjoy fully the predatory probing of his tongue. He reached around and grabbed her ass, pulling her down on his mouth until his nose too was buried in her vulva.
Janet came quickly, in short intense spurts of pleasure, and jumped off him, falling back and spreading her legs wide, her freshly eaten pussy offering itself now to his prick once more.
He fell on top of her, and Janet reached down and took his wondrous tool in her hand, marveling at its size and rigidity, while guiding it into her waiting labia. She further facilitated his entrance by raising her legs and locking them around his middle, drawing him into her deeper and deeper, grinding her pelvis in a circular motion as counterpoint to his burrowing cock.
Their separate and joint rhythms mounted in intensity as Janet's muscles varied the hold her vaginal walls presented to his prick as it rooted, throbbed, jerked and squirmed its way in and out of her. Waldo grabbed hold of her ass and plunged his tool into her farther than it had been going, as modifying their position gave him a previous extra inch which had until then been denied him. Janet felt the difference as his avenging phallus filled her completely at the end of his down strokes, and she strained to contain even more of his tumescence, drawing her wall muscles in against it, making herself tighter and squeezing him as he violated her, faster and faster and harder and faster; and their breathing became heavier and deeper, Janet coming first, longer bursts than before, each succeeding little death coming closer on the heels of its predecessor, her ass raised high off the bed in his firm grip, thrusting and gyrating around his prong until she brought him over and he unloaded his gism into her, roaring like a young bull at the spasmodic pulsations which forced the stocky gobs out of him until there was nothing left to force, though he continued to come.
Janet was moaning and mewling, guttural animal sounds, and Waldo relaxed his grip on her ass, lowering her off his cock which emerged from her cunt red and slimy with a mixture of their juices. He lay back on the bed to rest, but rest was not forthcoming as Janet, her eyes crazed and glazed with lust, bent over his side and started to lick his prick and balls clean, meticulously finding every last drop of cunt juice and semen and swallowing them.
Ruth appeared in the doorway then, surveying the scene of her daughter licking this stranger's balls. Janet of course could not and did not see or hear her and continued licking. Waldo raised himself up on his elbows without disturbing Janet and waved hello to Ruth, who finally recognized him through his beard and hair, both of which had grown much longer since their last meeting.
"Ahhh," Ruth said, "It's the Italian Mr. Smith, welcome to New York, Mr. Smith, I see you've met my daughter. Lovely girl, isn't she?"
So intense was Janet's concentration on giving Waldo head that she did not hear her mother's voice, nor did she see her go to the night table by the bed and take an electric, vibrating, battery-operated dildo from the drawer, strap it on, and approach her ass from the blind side, tiptoeing to it in an exaggerated burlesque of stealth. Janet never saw it coming at her, and when Ruth shoved it into her pussy from the rear Waldo held her head down on him, expecting to see at least momentary fright or surprise on her face at this new penetration, though her face registered only pleasure as the dildo filled her recently vacated hole.
Ruth humped the device into her hard, and Janet came again, going all the way down on Waldo's cock, then rising on it gradually, her mouthing getting it hard again, her fingers gripping his balls. Ruth put her hands on Janet's hips and thrust the dildo all the way home, making Janet come once more, and then, having secured it inside her daughter's box, she turned the current on.
Janet's ass bucked feverishly from the incessant vibrations and she sucked on Waldo harder and harder, feverishly attempting to get his rocks off again, but it was too soon. Ruth withdrew the dildo and dropped it on the bed beside them, and it continued to vibrate by itself as she climbed over the two bodies and brought her mouth to Janet's pussy, sucking out the droplets of Waldo's orgasm as they oozed their way out of the pink lips. Waldo leaned over on his side and went down on Ruth, tasting her familiarity-which greeted him like an old friend, as if to compensate for Ruth's acid-drenched welcome-completing the chain, as the three of them worked hard on each other's genitalia, sucking each other off, Janet continuing to blow Waldo who was eating Ruth who was eating Janet.
Waldo came again, but it was almost painful even though Janet was giving him great head, as he had been jerked off and fucked since arising that morning in Stockholm, and without the life-giving benefits of any drugs. So he had to break away from them, breathless and exhausted.
Ruth and Janet continued to eat each other; now one was on top of the other. Waldo had moved to a chair to regain at least a modicum of strength and composure; he watched each lick become part of a chain of mini-orgasms, leading to longer, more vibrant foreplay until they exploded together with muff-muffled roars and broke away from each other's embrace, panting and sighing with momentary satisfaction.
Brian returned to the bedroom with an opened bottle of wine and sat on the edge of the bed, inspecting the damage. Finding none, he opened Ruth's cunt and poured wine into it and then put the bottle aside and went down on her, drinking the wine as it poured out of her pussy. Janet did the same thing, and Ruth began to yell uncontrollably, the acid beginning to peak inside her system. "Why try to change me now? Don't try to change me, now, never, no change, more wine, stronger wine and madder music, do it to me, all of you fuck me everywhere, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck is truth, fuck is life, living is fucking, keep the fucking wine coming, keep me coming, fuck the wine and keep me, keep the wine and FUCK me, oh happy day with sunshine, MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!"
Waldo was the last in line for the wine ritual and was quaffing his last December wine when he saw Janet admiring the dildo which she had picked up from the bed and strapped on, turning off the juice. And as soon as his head left Ruth's cunt Janet mounted it and slipped the device all the way in and turned it on. Ruth wrapped her legs around Janet's waist, and Janet slapped at her mother's thighs as the dildo did its thing.
"It's Mother's Day, everybody, happy Mother's Day all you motherfuckers, and you too, Mother. Giddyap, cowboy, wheeeee!" Janet sang, to no tune save her own.
Brian pulled them apart after a few minutes and took Janet's place, fucking her pussy for a change, Ruth responding with ferocity reborn.
"It's gangbang time, gang, my gang is banging up on me for a gangbang, sweet gang, sweeter gangbang, sweetest what? What comes after sweetest, I need help, fuck me Brian, tell me what comes after sweetest, pay attention everybody, you're next Waldo Smith," Ruth said as the party went on.
Janet crawled over to where Waldo was sitting and went down on him to get him hard for Ruth, methodically and at the same time lovingly, so when he did take his turn he was ready and climbed into Ruth's saddle with a cock hard and eager. He fucked her for a good half hour, changing positions, putting it in her ass for a few dozen humps, and then came, exerting a maximum effort, shooting but a few vagrant drops into Ruth's much-abused snatch.
As on the night before in Sweden, he fell asleep first while his three companions continued to fuck and suck their way home from their extended trip.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"And so," Waldo was saying to Ruth the following afternoon, "that's how and why I'm here."
"You certainly couldn't have picked a better time to show up, Waldo, though after Helga and Inga I guess it probably gave you a strong feeling of deja vu."
"I really didn't think you noticed last night," he said. "Was that your first trip?"
"The very first."
"Groovy that it was such a good one. Say, where's Brian and Janet?"
"They had to go back downtown for some business. I take it you want to talk to Brian about dealing your imported goodies."
"Yeah, right."
"Then what?" She gave a little laugh. "It seems like I'm always asking you, 'then what?' "
"Whatever turns up, I guess. It's cool for me to stay here for a while, isn't it?"
"Sure, you idiot," she said, leaning across the table and kissing him.
Then the doorbell rang, though with more urgency than I'm-here-let-me-in practicality. Ruth got up to answer and Janet ran into the apartment, her eyes red from crying, the tears still running down her cheeks as she sobbed.
"What is it, baby?" Ruth asked, taking her in her arms, trying to soothe her little girl.
"Brian's been busted," she screamed.
Brian had taken the 2nd Avenue bus downtown with Janet and they walked home on 11th Street, paying no attention to the three men sitting in the battered Plymouth across the street. They went upstairs and Brian let himself in while Janet went next door to visit with Wanda.
He had put a pot of coffee on the stove and had sat down to wait for it to percolate, when he heard the bedroom window being opened and immediately thought that some junkie was coming in to take him off. As he jumped up and ran to the doorway two white men with guns forced him back into the kitchen, pushing the muzzles into his stomach.
"What is this?" he managed to say, as one of the pair covered him and the other went to the front door and opened it, admitting a third.
"Federal agents," the third one said, flashing a badge in a black leather case under his nose. Brian never got to see the badge; it could have been a Roy Rogers deputy sheriffs for all he knew.
"You got a warrant?" Brian asked asked. "Busting into my house like this, what's the charge?"
"Speak when you're spoken to, nigger," the third man barked, evidently the leader or crew chief or whatever he was called back at the office. He punched Brian in the stomach, hard, hurting him with the signet ring on his fist.
"Cuff this son of a bitch," the third man said to one of his partners, and Brian's arms were held behind his back and his wrists handcuffed, tight, cutting off the circulation.
"Hey man, lighten up on those cuffs, my hands are numb," he said, wincing with the pain.
"Tough shit," the second man said, kicking him in the balls, which were still tender from last night's activity, and dropping him to his knees, gasping for breath, doubled up with the hurt.
"Where's your stash, motherfucker?" the leader said, yanking his bowed head up by the hair. "You know we're going to find it, so make it easier for us and we make it easier for you. My boys work too hard as it is anyway. You understand?" He kicked Brian in the kidney, viciously, to emphasize the point.
"I'm clean, man, there's nothing here," Brian gasped, falling over on his side, having lost by now all feeling in his hands.
"Wise guy," the third one said, kicking him in the head, though not hard enough to make him unconscious, as relieving as that would have been. Brian feigned unconsciousness anyway, hoping that it would spare him more punishment. He saw out of the corner of his eye that the three of them were tearing the place apart, dumping the contents of all drawers, closets, and shelves on the floor and rummaging through them for his dope. The irony, of course, was that he knew he was clean. He felt they would give up after a while and leave him to nurse his wounds, but Janet, she was next door, she couldn't possibly help hear the commotion going on. Stay there, baby, he prayed, stay there, please stay there, don't let these pigs see you, keep out of sight until they are gone.
And then from the bedroom came the voice of number two. "Look what I found."
"Watcha got?" the leader said.
"Why don't we ask the owner?" said number two.
"Nah, he's out, has a bad headache." said number three. "Or maybe he's playing possum. Hey coon, you playing possum on us? Don't you like us?"
The leader pulled him up to a sitting position and slapped his face a few times, holding a small bag of white powder under his nose. "What's this?" he said, through his teeth. "This yours? What is it? Talk to me when I ask you something, jigaboo. What you got in there? Scag? Cocaine?"
"I never saw that before in my life," Brian said helplessly, knowing it was a plant, knowing he had been set up, but sticking to the truth regardless.
"He says he never saw this ounce of heroin before in his life," the leader said. "Come on, we've got enough, let's get this scumbag out of here, the niggerstink in this place is getting to me, I need fresh air."
Janet and Wanda had opened their front door a crack and saw the three men taking Brian downstairs. Janet opened her mouth to scream his name, but Wanda covered it with her hand, preventing it.
"Shhh," she said, "don't let the puercos hear you."
* * *
Waldo tried to calm Janet while Ruth went to the phone.
"Who are you calling?" he asked.
"My lawyer, he'll have Brian out in a couple of hours. Janet, you have any idea whether they were City or Federal?"
"No." No more than a sob.
"Let him find out," Ruth muttered, "that's how he earns his money."
She gave her lawyer all the information she had, agreeing that it was sparse but reminding him that the Federal and County courthouses were within a block of one another and that the walk would do him good.
"He'll try to bail him out at the arraignment," she told them after hanging up the phone. "Waldo, take care of my daughter while I'm gone, I have to get to the bank before three."
Waldo nodded, seeing Ruth in the take-charge role she had assumed that first afternoon they had met on the Lido. She was dressed for the street and out the door at 2:45, less than ten minutes after Janet had come stumbling in.
He took her into the kitchen and made some fresh coffee for her, and in a half-hour she was sufficiently calm to carry on a conversation.
"Was he holding anything?" he asked her.
"Only a couple of ounces of smoke which are stashed behind a loose brick in the kitchen wall. I checked it after they left and it was still there. Why, Waldo, why did this have to happen? What do they want with him?"
"It sounds like a setup," he said, pondering the problem. "They probably came in and planted the shit themselves, whatever it was, and charged him with possession."
"Can they do that?"
Waldo laughed, though he wasn't joking. "Not only can they do it, they do do it; if they want you badly enough they do it all up themselves. Why, is what troubles me. Is Brian at all involved in anything political?"
"Nothing, and if he were I'd know about it."
"Then we have a mystery, it seems." He paused for a moment and then went on, "Speaking of mysteries, who is your mother, anyway?"
Janet managed to smile a little. "I thought you knew her from Europe."
"I do, but I mean who is she, really? We never talked about our pasts."
"Well, I'm her only child. My father died last February, they said it was a heart attack but he had never had any heart trouble before the day he dropped dead. Anyway, he used to work for some businessmen and he made a lot of money from it. I learned when I was young never to pry into what he did, and it was only after he died that my mother told me that he worked for the Mafia, and that he maintained a safe deposit box down through the years, for a rainy day, I guess, his own insurance policy.
"After the funeral, I dropped out of NYU and moved in with Brian on 11th Street. You and Brian know each other from before, don't you?"
"Yeah, in another incarnation."
Janet ignored this metaphor and continued her narrative. "So my dropping out of school had as much to do with running as anything else. Mother was scared that Dad's former employers would kill one or both of us to get inside the box, so she moved and changed her name back to her maiden name."
"You have any idea what's in the box?"
"Only a lot of cash, otherwise I don't know. He kept it in another name so it wouldn't have to be opened after he died by the government tax people. Mother knows, and she took off to Europe right away."
"Now it figures," Waldo said, snapping his fingers once.
"What?"
"How she knew where to go in Venice to get me a passport and other ID. She and your father travelled a lot when he was alive?"
"Christ, everywhere. Waldo, what do you think will happen to Brian?"
"He'll get bailed out, and the lawyers will go to work on it. If it is a setup, a good lawyer might beat the rap for him. The big question still is who set him up?"
* * *
The man climbed the stairs of a loft building on Avenue A and entered the third floor. He walked past the dusty machines which hadn't been used in years to the end of the long room and took off his coat, hanging it on the rack behind the desk where the other man sat.
"Cold as a witch's tit out there," the first man said, warming himself next to the electric heater on the floor behind the desk.
"When I want a weather report I'll turn on the radio. What's going on?" the second man said brusquely.
"The nigger's on the street again, they set the bail for five thou and up steps this mouthpiece and springs him on the spot. I tailed them uptown and then came back here."
"You know where he is?"
"Yeah, I just told you-"
"Hit him," the second man said calmly, as if he were ordering a hamburger.
"Me?"
"Any fucking body, so long as he gets hit. That'll give those fucking hippies something to think about for a while."
The first man nodded and picked up the phone.
THIRTEEN
Ruth brought Brian back to the house, and when they came through the door Janet screamed his name and ran to him, throwing her arms around him and kissing his bruised and battered face.
"Those pigs, those pricks, those cocksuckers, those rat motherfuckers, oh my god, they really got to you, baby."
"It was rough," was all Brian could say, holding Janet close to him, feeling her warmth come through his coat, finding it hard to believe that he had left her only six hours ago.
"Why and how, man?" Waldo said. "You got any idea?"
"Somehow an ounce of smack got planted in the bedroom, maybe they brought it with them, maybe not. They worked me over, found their thing, and off we went to the slam. One two three, rehearsed, a classic setup."
Waldo was shocked at the difference in Brian's appearance since the night before, when he had seen him last. He had probably been fucking Janet in the ass then, and the figure in front of him now was worlds different from the happy buggerer of the night before. His speech was slower, it had a nervous crack in its otherwise robust timbre; all in all, a thoroughly traumatized man.
"Nigger," Brian muttered.
"What?" Ruth asked.
"Nigger was what they kept saying during the workout, nigger this, nigger that, all the time nigger, over and over."
"Brian, honey," Janet said, "you're not the only black cat dealing on the Lower East Side, it had to be more than that."
"She's right, man," Waldo said. "Look at us here, and everybody we know, we're all niggers as far as they're concerned."
"Yeah, but some of us niggers is a lot blacker than others," Brian said. "You dig that, baby? When did the man ever come upside your head and call you eight different kinds of blackassed motherfucker? Don't hand me that old liberal shit, that's pure jive, Jim, that's nowhere."
"Forget all this," Ruth interrupted, the peacemaker. "There's been enough violence today all around. We can talk about this later. Janet, is there any milk for the morning?"
"I'll see," Janet said, going to the kitchen. "Nope," she yelled back. "I'll go out and get some. Be back in a minute."
As Janet went through the door to the street, smiling at the doorman, she saw a man in a truck driver's uniform approach with a box of flowers and talk to the doorman. Kind of late for flowers, she thought, turning the corner on Second Avenue.
She bought a half-gallon of milk and a pint of fresh strawberries, whistling at the 89' price on the berries.
"That's sort of high, isn't it?" she asked the man who took her money.
"Lady," he said indulgently, making it sound like she was the 64th person to say that to him this day, "you want fresh strawberries in December, they gonna cost 89'."
Janet left with her bag and change and walked home, noticing that the flower truck had gone. He probably wants to go home, too, she thought, shivering a little as she quickened her pace toward the warmth of the building.
She rode the elevator to the sixth floor and rang the bell outside the apartment.
No answer.
She rang again, impatiently, dismissing the thought that the three of them were into another orgy so soon after she had left, with the tension being thick enough to slice and eat. And she rang again and again, calling their names.
Now desperate, she ran down the service stairs to the lobby and accosted the doorman, breathlessly.
"You've got to come quick," she said, tugging at his sleeve. "I can't get into my mother's apartment, and there were three people there when I left just now. Please, you've got to open the door for me."
"Sure, miss," the doorman said, and he followed her into the waiting elevator and up to the sixth floor.
He fumbled with his passkeys, talking to himself a little when he couldn't find the right one at first. Janet trembled at his elbow, her milk and strawberries sitting on the floor by the door like a casualty.
Then he opened the door and Janet bounded in and screamed with every bit of strength in her. Brian lay dead a few feet from the door, blood oozing from a small hole in his forehead between his eyes. He hadn't even taken his coat off.
Ruth and Waldo were sprawled on the floor in front of the couch, also shot through the head, the box of flowers beside them.