If you think that's a combination which must be seen to be believed, you're right. After all, a good-looking broad doing the Twist is a pretty sexy sight all by itself; and nobody has to be reminded what an exciting eyeful the naked body of a beautiful girl can be.
Either of these things are designed to set a man off.
Together, they're irresistible.
Watching a gal who's dressed in nothing but her skin cut loose with the sort of wild uninhibited twisting that gave the dance its reputation is a sight calculated .to make any male with blood in his veins start snorting and pawing the ground and readying himself for action. That's what was happening to me, which was a pity, since there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it. I just sat there and watched her fling it around, and tried to survive the sky-rockets going off inside me.
She was blonde, as I said.
She was all blonde.
Her hair was long, and hung clear to her shoulders. Her torso was long, and seemed almost as flexible as her hair. Her legs were also long, sweeping into shapely muscular columns to her feet, and her only bit of clothing: black high-heeled shoes. They made a hell of a contrast with the cornsilk blondeness of her hair and the milk and honey color of her skin.
Those black shoes were planted solidly on the floor, and from where I sat there seemed to be enough space between them to drive an MG through.
Twisting, in spite of what some bluenoses might think, is quite an art. It isn't every gal, or guy either, who can really do that dance the way it was meant to be done. When the Twist is performed properly, it's just about the Second Most Exciting Thing In The World; and once it gets going, it stops being a dance altogether, and becomes an invitation to the First Most Exciting Thing In The World.
This blonde knew exactly how it should be done, and that's the way she was doing it.
The motion started in her shoulders, a shaking and swaying that made all the soft-looking cords in her throat stand out. She held her face still, aiming it right at me, and her long blonde hair swirled and danced around an expression that was pure come-and-get-it.
Also dancing, at about the same rhythm as her hair, was a pair of the ripest breasts I have ever had the privilege of seeing. Those melons hung just underneath the little hollows of her collarbone, and swelled out into almost perfect spheres. The light was above her, making the globes look like half-moons-brilliant white on top, deep shadow below. In the twilight zone, the tiny peaks of her nipples jutted from the centers of rough pink aureoles which were the same pale color as her lips.
In spite of the way those tasty fruits moved-and take it from me, they moved-there wasn't a trace of sag in them anywhere. No matter how much they bounced around, the globe-shapes of them never changed, and the twin little buttons at the tips pointed straight at me as if they were trying to imitate the staring of her eyes.
Underneath that whopping bosom, she had one of the most muscular torsos I've ever seen on a woman. Don't get me wrong; she didn't look like a lady wrestler, or anything. Her muscle was pure female, molded under her skin in ways that enhanced her curves without blunting them. The flexing of that torso kept reminding me of jungle cats, as if the girl were some sort of blonde panther, and poor suffering me was her prey.
When the motion of the dance carried her body forward, her breasts would cast long shadows all the way down to the tops of her thighs. Then, as she arched her body backward, the silhouettes of those pendulous honeys would glide from her thighs and crawl up across her round belly, like a curtain raising to reveal the absolute proof of several interesting facts: that she was a real blonde, that she was a real woman, that she was really one hell of a Twister.
Her hips were pumping along with the rest of her, and in three directions at once. They rocked from side to side, like the swinging of a clock pendulum; they twisted back and forth, in opposite directions from her shoulders; and the whole framework of her lovely hips swung at me, the way a store sign swings in a high wind. And all the while, the flexing of those great muscles did things to the shape of her, making ridges inside her thighs that pointed like shadowy fingers up at her blonde-based belly, making the trim roundnesses of her calves alternately flatten and bulge, making every inch of that firm sweet meat jitter and tremble. And beckon.
That's what she looked like-a sex-machine operating at full power, with all its parts bared for the eye to see. The shoulders went one way, the big swaying breasts went another, the hips went a third, the thighs went scissor-scissor, and I went out of my mind. And all the while, in spite of the agitated dance of that nude flesh, my attention kept being drawn back to her face, back to the hot circles of her eyes, which glared at me like twin portholes into a roaring furnace of lust.
Like I said, there wasn't a thing I could do about it.
I just sat there and watched her go, watched her fling everything she had right at me, watched this gorgeous hunk of naked blonde open up and just beg for it right there in front of me, and I couldn't oblige.
It was a hell of a moment, and by the time she finished her dance I was sweating like a longdistance runner.
Her finale was just as fantastic as the rest. With one final thrust of her hips, one voluptuous heave of all her assets, she dropped back onto her hands, arching her body like a bridge with only her palms and high-heeled feet on the floor. Her tensed thighs opened wide, and those eyes of hers shot me a look of molten passion right through the rifle-sight V of her thrusting breasts.
Then the screen went dark.
For a couple of seconds, I couldn't do a thing but learn how to breathe normally again. I heard the click as Roy shut off the projector, heard the slap-slap of the film as the takeup reel spun to a halt, heard the tinny sound of the reel being replaced in its can, but none of it really meant anything to me.
The blonde was gone.
Of course, she had never been there in the first place. All the while I had been watching her, sweating and twitching and groaning over the sight of that ripe nakedness and aching to grab hold of some of it with my hands, she had been only a combination of dyes on a strip of color film.
Somewhere, I kept thinking, that blonde existed. Somewhere that lustful body was real, had shape and substance and was available for the kind of fun and games her performance had promised. Somewhere those rich breasts were within reach of a man's hand, and those solid thighs were waiting to clamp onto a man's driving hips.
Somewhere.
But not here.
Here, unfortunately, was the back room of my camera store, and there wasn't a thing in that room except myself, my friend Roy Beal, an empty screen, a cooling 16 mil. projector, and the aching lech of two well-teased males.
Roy had seen the film before-in fact, he owned it-so he was the first to recover. He snapped the lights on, and I snapped myself back to reality. When I looked around, I kept seeing the image of that blonde dancing in front of my eyes. I had the feeling she would be there for some time to come.
"Well?" Roy was grinning at me. "How about that, Charlie?"
I thought that question over for a few seconds, and boiled my reaction down to a single word. "Wow."
He laughed. "Isn't she something? How'd you like to come home some cold night and find that keeping your sack warm? Honest, Charlie-every time I show this flick and watch that broad fling it around, I want to just jump up there on that screen and grab myself a couple handfulls of all that nice, big, solid-"
"Enough," I said. "Stop talking about it. Shut up for a while and let me recover."
Roy laughed again. "Oh, sure, pal. Take your time. I remember when I first showed this thing, it took me an hour to get back to normal. And you know what I thought of as soon as I could think straight again? Tail, Charlie. This flick got to me so bad, I had to run right out and hunt me down some tail. So that's what I did, and I found it, too-connected with no sweat at all. She was a blonde-oh, nothing like the one in the picture, but pretty nice just the same. Had this big fat set on the front of her, and a butt-say, did I ever tell you the crazy tricks she could do with that butt? Well, sir...."
I listened with half an ear as Roy told me the story about the blonde with the fat set and the tricky butt. His story wasn't making my recovery any easier, but I had to listen to it anyway. That's how Roy was. He could no more stop talking about sex than he could quit breathing; to him, oxygen and sex were both absolutely necessary for survival.
Roy was a nut. He was almost a sex-fiend, but he fell short of that goal because he was basically a nice guy. What he lacked in fiendishness, though, he made up in a single-minded concentration on sex.
Roy was a nut. But he was also a champ.
I've known a lot of guys in my time, and I've heard a lot of stories. I've met men who claimed to have the technique of Casanova, the staying-power of Superman, and the reach of Excalibur. The majority of them were just snow-artists, but every once in a while I'd run across somebody who was everything he claimed to be.
Roy was one of those.
I met him in the Army, while I was stationed at Bliss. The night before I'd had a throw from an obliging nurse at Beaumont General, and I woke up that morning happy and sore and satisfied. Most mornings are hot in Texas, and that one was no exception, so the first thing I did was head for the showers. That's where I saw Roy for the first time, and vice versa.
Remember Sherlock Holmes? According to the stories, he could look at a man and tell where he worked, how much change was in his pockets, what brand he smoked, and so forth.
Well, Sherlock had nothing on Roy. That morning when I got into the shower, he took one look at me and asked how the redheaded nurse had been.
I came pretty close to belting him in the mouth, because I figured the only way he could know about it was by having watched us. Rut he calmed me down and explained the whole thing, while I stood there with a dumber expression on my face than old Dr. Watson ever wore.
The first clue, he told me, were the marks on my back. Scratches like that were the kind left only by a woman's fingernails, and they were fresh. That's how he knew I had gotten bagged.
Second, he said, I smelled of that lousy antiseptic soap they have in hospitals, and I had to admit that I'd washed up afterwards in the surgeon's sink-room. So that was how he knew the gal who left those nail marks was a nurse.
And how had he known she was a redhead?
That was easiest of all. He pointed it out, and I looked for myself, and found a long glossy red hair stuck to me.
Just like Sherlock Holmes-his methods were simple once he'd explained them, but they were still impressive.
With all the detective work out of the way, he got back to his original question-which had actually been a question, and not just a way to get the conversation rolling. He really wanted to know how that nurse had been. He wanted to know which way, or ways, we'd made it. He wanted to know if she had any special tricks he should know about. He wanted to know if she drew the line anywhere. He wanted to know all the little gory details.
And, strangely enough, I told him. One look at that freckled face of his assured me he wasn't a queer or any other kind of pervert. The interest in his eyes was genuine and healthy and irresistible.
I told him the whole thing, right from the first grab to the last gasp, and he took it all in like a microfilm camera, making a permanent record and storing it away in that sex-crazy brain of his. He acted so fascinated with my story that I really felt like quite a big man by the time I finished telling it.
Then he started telling me some stories of his own, and I shrunk back to size again.
I didn't believe everything he said at first-in fact, I didn't believe anything he said. But Roy's not the sort who makes things up. For one thing, he lacks the imagination. For another, it's not necessary.
I found this out the first time we hit Juarez together, which is this little Spanish border town just over the river from El Paso. It's wide open and wild and filled with strip shows that would make Minsky's eyes pop. It's also filled with hookers as bouncy as Macy's Thanksgiving balloons, and as tasty as tortillas fried in tequila.
I'd been in Juarez before, but going there with Roy made the whole town new. That guy was on a first-name basis with every Mexican hooker in the entire burg, as well as every bartender, waiter, dirty-picture peddler, and shoeshine boy. Before that evening was over, Roy and I had been bagged four times each by four different broads, with the last round on the house.
From then on, we were buddies.
Roy and I stuck together through the rest of my hitch, sharing everything we could lay our hands on. I got the better of the deal, because Roy was a lot more skillful at getting a gal to lie down, but once in a while I would make a contact all by myself. When I did, I always made sure the gal would go for the both of us, and Roy returned the favor, with the result that he and I packed quite a bit of living into those two Army years.
It sounds funny, I guess, but we both felt kind of sorry when our hitches were up. I was heading back to New York, and Roy was bound for Chicago, and that meant we wouldn't be seeing anything of each other from then on. Rut, in a way, it was a bit of a relief to get rid of the guy; the pace he was forcing me to keep up with was pretty rough, and I was looking forward to getting some rest.
So we shook hands, got on our separate buses, and went home.
In the five years or so since then, I had forgotten completely about Roy Real. Through pure luck, I'd gotten a job at one of Manhattan's biggest photo supply stores, and had turned an old hobby of mine into my line of work. All my energy was spent either stashing dough in the bank, or making an occasional broad Uptown or in the Village, and I had no time to think about old friends or my Army days.
Eventually, this concentration paid off, and I found myself with enough loot in the bank to swing a camera store of my own, which had been my old dream. I rented a front on Avenue Z in Brooklyn, hung up a sign that said Charlie's Camera Corner, conned a local bank into putting up enough cash to pay for an inventory, and was in business for myself.
It was great. My shop was located in the section called Sheepshead Bay, which is only a couple of miles from Brighton Beach and Coney Island, both big shutterbug attractions. Business was faster in the summer than in the winter, because of all the round-bottomed little Lolitas in the neighborhood who used film at the local beaches every day like it was toilet paper, taking pictures of each other's just-born boobs and their boy friends' too-tight briefs. When the fall finally drove the kids back to school, things settled down into a pleasant routine until the Christmas rush, after which I could really sit back and enjoy the pleasure of working at my own pace.
Like I said, I had forgotten about Roy Beal completely.
But he hadn't forgotten me.
The ghost of Sherlock Holmes was still kicking inside that sex-nutty head of his, and he tracked me down as surely as if I was the Hound of the Baskervilles.
The first I knew about it was when I heard the bell ring over the door of my shop and looked up from this Argus C-3 I was repairing. I didn't recognize Roy immediately. Not that he had changed-he could live to be a thousand years old and never change-but part of the process by which you recognize a person is the setting in which you see them, and Roy Beal was the last person in the world I ever expected to see in the doorway of my shop. Besides, he was wearing civvies, and I had never seen him dressed in anything but GI.
He looked at me and I looked at him, and I guess my mouth was hanging open because he made this very dirty remark about it. As soon as I heard that voice and the relish he packed into those four-letter words, I knew it couldn't be anybody but Roy.
How had he found me? Easy. He had looked me up in the telephone book. That guy had come to New York all the way from Chi, and had found me listed under G for Garner in the Brooklyn telephone book. He told me something I hadn't known: that I was the only Charles Garner in all Brooklyn. And he remembered what a camera bug I was-we'd talked photography together in the Army, when we weren't talking about sex-so finding my name listed right over an establishment called Charlie's Camera Corner had cinched it.
Old Sherlock didn't even bother to call. He just took the BMT out to Sheepshead Bay and walked right in.
To say I was flabbergasted would be putting it mildly. After all, I hadn't seen or heard from the guy for a good five years, and when somebody drops out of sight that long, you start thinking of them as if they're dead.
To say I was a bit unhappy about his sudden reappearance would be putting it pretty accurately. Oh, sure-I was happy to see him; because he was an old buddy, and because we'd shared so many good times together. But those days were part of the past for me, and I preferred them to remain just memories. In the years since I had graduated from the Army, I had managed to get my life into a nice steady routine, making enough money to keep me happy, getting enough entertainment to keep me loose, and growing up enough to start thinking about maybe getting married one of these years. Roy changed all that.
The minute I recognized him, I knew all my plans were shot. Routine was a dirty word to him. So was Steadiness, and Reliability, and Peace, and Quiet. Anything that didn't sound like sex was a thing Roy could do without.
And I also knew that, whatever he had on his mind, I was going to be dragged into it. Along with Sherlock Holmes and Casanova, Roy's personality also included a few drops of Daniel Webster.
He could talk anybody into anything.
Rather than run the risk of having someone wander into the shop and hear one of Roy's anecdotes about the difference between Swedish and Eskimo whores, I locked up for the day and pulled all the shades. It was past five anyway, so my closing wouldn't attract any undue attention. All the while I listened to Roy babbling away, I nursed the hope that maybe he was just passing through, on hii way west, maybe, to see what the girls were like in Mill Basin.
No such luck, of course.
We went into the backroom together, and I fired up the pot of coffee I keep on the electric burner. We drank a couple of cups and let the conversation ramble for about half an hour before he started working on me. As soon as he opened his mouth, I knew my worst fears were coming true. He had something on his mind, and that something was not part of the pattern of life in Sheepshead Bay.
He took this can of film out of his pocket and had me set up the only 16 mil. projector in the shop-an antique B & H, with one speed and no speaker. That didn't make any difference, he said, because the reel was silent.
So I swiped a screen out of stock, threaded the machine,-switched out the lights, and rolled the film I just told you about.
Now the show was over, and I was still sitting like a lump in my chair, so helpless that Roy had been forced to shut the projector off and turn the lights back on.
He was still talking, but the train of his words had shifted from blondes to films. I shook my head, and tried to listen to what he was saying.
"This flick is the real stuff, Charlie-but then again, it isn't. I mean, it gives you quite an eyefull of some real hot blonde; let's face it, you couldn't see any more of that blonde if you were her doctor. But the trouble is that she's all alone up there. She can shake it around and hold it out toward you and go off like a big nude blonde bomb, but it still isn't action."
"Action?" I said. "If that's not action, what is?"
"You don't follow me, Charlie. I don't mean action the way you think. Action is a special term."
"For what?"
"Pictures of people doing it," Roy said.
There was a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I couldn't see any reason for it to be there, but that didn't make it any less real. Roy was grinning at me in a way I remembered well from our hitch together, and that particular grin always meant he had something big lined up. In this case, all I could think of was that he had access to the blonde who had danced in the film, and that he was going to offer me seconds on her, just like the old days.
I wasn't too sure I liked the idea. That blonde was a hell of a lot of woman for a clod like me, and I doubted I could handle her properly without making a fool of myself.
Roy was talking in his Daniel Webster voice again, and I knew he was building up to his point, whatever it was.
"Action, Charlie-movies of the real thing. A guy and a gal going at it, or maybe a few guys and a gal, or a few gals-you know what I'm talking about. Pictures of bare people doing it to each other-that's what they call action."
"Pornography, you mean?"
He nodded. "Yeah. One kind of pornography. After all, the flick you just saw was pornography."
I had to admit he was right about that. "Okay, I get the drift, Roy. What about it?"
"All I'm saying is that action is more in demand than plain nudie flicks like this one. Movies of real action go for double the price, sometimes even more. And the film you just looked at cost fifty bucks, so figure the difference out for yourself."
I looked at him. "Fifty bucks? Oh, man-you were took. That thing's only a hundred feet of 16 mil. reversal-even with dealer's mark-up, it wouldn't go for more than fifteen or twenty."
Roy spread his hands. "There you are," he said.
"You know from photography, so you can really appreciate the point I'm trying to make."
"The mark-up on dirty movies?"
"The profit on dirty movies."
"Roy," I said, speaking very slowly. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?"
"Well, sure." He grinned at me. "After all, we've got everything we need but the cast."
CHAPTER TWO
So that's how I got started in the dirty picture business.
Oh, I tried to worm my way out of it, but there wasn't a hope of that. Once old Roy got a bug up his tail, nothing could stand in his way, and this particular bug was a genuine gold-bug the way he saw it.
I argued with him, tried to explain how illegal it was, and how nasty the New York police could be, and what a very damp and chilly and aptly-named prison The Tombs was, but not a word of it made any impression on him. He answered every argument I could devise with the same two statements:
"Think of the money, Charlie. Think of the fun."
After a while, I stopped arguing and started thinking of the money and the fun.
From that point on, Roy had me hooked.
I locked up for the night, and Roy and I went down to a little Italian restaurant on Emmons Avenue by the water. As we split a pizza and a few bottles of beer, the memory of the old days began working in me stronger than ever, and in no time at all I was starting to agree with everything he said.
"It's no sweat, Charlie. All right-so pornography's illegal. So's getting laid, if she isn't your wife, and how many times have you broken that law? So's smoking on the subway, and I bet you've done that, too. Look, Charlie, if you're going to worry about every stinking little law in the book, you might as well just curl up and die."
I nodded. "I guess you're right."
"Damn right I'm right," he said. "The way I figure it, we got a chance to start a real fine business together, one that'll pay off in real loot and be a hell of a lot more fun to operate than some cruddy camera store. Why, if we work things right and come into a little luck, we can make a fortune with this idea."
"Roy, wait a minute." There were a couple of questions bothering me, and I had to shut him up and snort the beer fumes out of my skull before I could put them into words. "I agree that making and selling dirty pictures would be fun, and probably be profitable, too. I can see that."
"Who couldn't?"
"But what I'm wondering about is how we're supposed to get started in this great business. Where do you begin?"
He laughed at me. "Charlie, my friend, you haven't changed a bit. You're a swell guy-don't get me wrong-but you don't have any imagination at all."
I got a bit annoyed at his tone. "All right, so I don't have any imagination. Would you mind telling me what I have got that makes you think I'd be a success in the dirty picture business?"
"A camera store," he said. "Oh."
"It's as simple as that, Charlie. With making and selling dirty pictures, the biggest problem is equipment. Models are easier to come by than you think, and any old apartment or hotel room or basement or garage can be fixed up into a studio. The only catch is the price of cameras and lights and film. Being in the photo line yourself, I'm sure you can appreciate what a hunk of change the right kind of setup can cost."
"I appreciate it a hundred per cent," I said. "Now, let me ask you something. Are you expecting me to donate film and lights and cameras out of my inventory?"
"Not donate," he said, making a face. "Lend, Charlie. Just lend the supplies until the operation can afford to spring for his own equipment.'"
"Roy, it's impossible to lend film and lights. Exposed film and burnt-out floods aren't worth a pen-ny.
"I'm not talking about film and lights. The big expense is cameras, and that's where you can really help. Don't try to tell me that you couldn't sell a movie camera after it has been used a few times, Charlie."
"I suppose so," I said. "If the unit wasn't banged up, I don't guess a customer would ever notice."
"Right." He jabbed me lightly in the arm. "Now you're talking, old buddy. Just loan out a camera or two from your stock, and this operation will be in business. Of course-" He hesitated a second, and scratched his nose, "-you'll have to extend a little credit for the film and the flood lights, or whatever you call them."
"Credit," I said. "To a man who runs his own business, that's a very dirty word."
"But only in the beginning, Charlie. Just until we get it off the ground. Don't worry about the money, because anything you lay out will be paid back in no time at all, with interest. I promise it."
I shook my head. "How can you promise what kind of business we'll do, Roy? What experience have you ever had in the dirty picture line?"
"More than you think," he said.
I looked at him, surprised. "Wait a minute-you mean to say you've already worked...."
"I sure have, Charlie. In Chi, for the past couple years. That's how I got my know how-in fact, that's what gave me the idea of setting up on my own."
"You worked for somebody else, is that it?"
"Yeah. Guy name of Steuben. He has some operation, Charlie, and he makes some pile of loot out of
"What did you do for him?" I asked. "You shoot it, or sell it, or-" I stopped, my whole mind run aground on the notion that maybe Roy had posed for it.
If he noticed my thoughts, he didn't let on. "I did a little of everything; selling, helping photograph stills and movies; in fact, I even did some processing. This guy had his own lab-would you believe it?"
"Uh-huh," I said. "How come you pulled out?" I asked the question casually, but the answer was something I really wanted to hear.
"Charlie," he said, laughing. "Will you stop worrying? The only reason I quit was because I was sick of working for somebody else. Nobody chased me, nobody pinned anything on me-I'm clean as a whistle, and Steuben is still going strong last I heard."
I let myself relax a little. "Okay-but I had to ask it Roy."
"Sure, you did. I kid you a lot, Charlie, but I can understand how crazy this idea looks to you. And please believe me when I say that it works out just the way I told it-the only worry connected with it is where to put all your money."
That was a pleasant thought, and we ordered another round of beer on it. We toasted the future, slopped up some suds, and then got down to details.
"First of all," Roy said, "we need a place to work."
"You said hotel rooms before. What about one of them?"
"Well, a hotel's all right in a pinch, but it's not ideal. Hotels are a little too public, for one thing; besides, you have house-dicks to contend with, and people passing by in the hall and noticing the sound of the cameras or the light of the floods shining under the door. It'd be best to avoid hotels if possible."
"Where, then? An apartment?"
"That's not so hot, either," Roy said. "Same problems, in a way. The noise and light could attract attention, and that's the last thing anybody in this business wants."
I knew the answer already, but I asked the question anyway. "Where did you have in mind, Roy?"
"Well-I figured the back of your store would be a first-class spot for us to setup in."
"The back of my store." I took a long pull at my beer.
"Where else? It's perfect, isn't it? Nobody's going to think anything if they see lights or hear cameras running inside a photo store, even if it is in the middle of the night. Besides which, that equipment you were so worried about would never have to leave your premises, so it would stand less chance of getting banged up. And you have your own processing setup back there, so we could shoot a film, develop it right on the spot, and have prints ready for sale before the posers even had a chance to get dressed. That store of yours is just perfect, Charlie."
"But-" I kept trying to figure out what was wrong with the idea, and couldn't think of a thing.
"Fine," Roy said. "We've got that settled. Now, there's the business of the bed."
"The bed?"
"Well, sure. You can't shoot pictures of people balling without having a bed for them to ball in."
"A bed? In the back room of my store?"
"Why not? Who's going to know about it, except us and the people we get to pose? What's wrong with a bed?"
"I don't know." I scratched my head. "Where's it supposed to come from?"
"We'll buy one. There are places Uptown-Salvation Army Stores, and others like it-sell furniture cheap. You could buy a bed for maybe ten bucks, or so. We'll work that out." I guess.
He glanced at his watch. "Speaking of Uptown, it's getting kind of late. You and I better get a move on."
"A move on where?"
"Uptown," he said. "Are we going Uptown?"
"Certainly. Where did you think we were going?"
"Roy-up until a couple hours ago, I didn't think I was going anywhere tonight but home. Now that you've turned up, I wouldn't even try to guess where we were going."
He laughed. "Same old Charlie," he said. "But I guess I didn't tell you before, or maybe you just weren't listening."
I smiled sheepishly. "Could be. I missed a lot of what you said after that film. All I could think about was the blonde."
"Sure, I don't blame you. In fact, that's why we're going Uptown."
I blinked. "What's why we're going Uptown?"
"The blonde."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. The idea that came into my mind was too staggering, too impossible, too beautiful to be real.
"You hear me, Charlie?" he asked.
"I'm not sure," I said. "Tell me again."
"We're going Uptown to the blonde who was in that flick you saw-the one who did the Twist."
"I know what blonde you mean, Roy."
"Fine. Let's settle the tab and get out of this place."
"Now, just a goddammed minute," I said loudly. He looked at me in puzzlement. "Are you telling me that broad in that Twist film is somebody you know?"
"Of course," he said. "What the hell did you think?"
There wasn't any answer to that. I suppose I should have guessed that any woman who would put on the kind of performance I had seen would have to be one of Roy's personal acquaintances. Nothing as tasty as that could ever have gone un-tasted by that maniac.
I still couldn't get used to the idea that the blonde was real. "Where is she?" I asked.
"Waiting at the hotel," he said, i "What hotel?"
"The one I'm staying at. Look, Charlie-we can talk about all this on the train. Right now, let's get a move on."
"No, no," I said, waving my hands around. "I'll go crazy if you don't spell this out. Who is she? Where did she come from? What's her name?"
"Hey," he said, raising his eyebrows. "She really got to you, didn't she?"
"Roy, cut the crap and answer me."
"Okay, okay-just simmer down, old buddy. Her name's Cherry, believe it or not. Cherry Sims."
"Cherry Sims," I said. In a way, it was just about the most inappropriate name she could have. "Where do you know her from? Chicago?"
"That's right," he said. "She was one of Steuben's star performers. When I cut out, I talked her into coming along with me."
"But-I don't get it, Roy. She came with you? Are you supporting her, or what?"
He stared at me, then burst out laughing. "Hell, no. I don't have to support old Cherry. She can take perfectly fine care of herself. New York, Chicago-Timbuktu, even. Wherever there's a man, Cherry's in business."
I knew the answer to this one, too, but once again I had to ask. "What kind of business is she in?"
"Why, she's a whore, of course."
"Of course," I said.
"We paid up and left the Italian place together, and strolled along Sheepshead Bay Road, with Roy still talking and me listening. The BMT is elevated in that section of Brooklyn, so we had to climb two flights of stairs to get to the platform. Usually, that climb annoyed me, but this night I never even noticed it. Nor did I notice the fact that there was an express waiting for us, although that's pretty unusual on the lousy Brighton Line.
We settled down side by side in a seat and spent the whole ride on questions, with me asking and Roy answering. By the time the train quit the elevated tracks and rolled underground, I had learned that Roy and Cherry were old friends, and that it had been Cherry who had first interested Roy in the dirty picture business. She was a whore, he explained, but a first-class one, and she charged first-class, rates. After the flesh she had displayed on that screen earlier, not to mention the sensuous oomph she had thrown into her dance, it wouldn't have surprised me if she charged ten thousand dollars a night.
She was a success at her trade, he told me, but that didn't prevent her from scratching for some extra loot on the side, which was why she had hooked up with this Steuben character. A few of the films she had made for him were of the sort I had seen-dances or strips of varying kinds. But more often the films would be what Roy had called action; that is, they would feature big bare blonde Cherry with a man.
Or two.
Or three.
The pictures his description made inside my head were hard to take calmly, but I managed to keep my face frozen so that no one on the train with us would guess what we were talking about.
The film he had shown me, Roy said, had been given to him originally by a guy who owed him money, and who decided to pay off in a stag reel instead of cash. Roy had really been bombed by the flick, as he had told me in the store, but his reaction to it was nothing compared to his reaction when, a few weeks later, he wandered into a bar in Chicago's Loop section and saw that same blonde sitting on a stool right in front of him.
Make-out artist that he was, he made-out with no particular sweat; in fact, she got such a charge out of his nutty line she even cut the price for him. In return for this favor, he had given her the sort of ride which was his specialty-a ride like a cowboy might give a wild Brahma bull.
Cherry had been impressed, and few men had ever managed to impress her. Roy's performance got her interested, and from there it was only a few steps into the crazy underground of high-priced whores and the manufacture and sale of pornography.
For a year or so, Roy was living the life he'd always wanted. He was making money, he was making Cherry, he was making whoopie. But after a while, all this stopped making him happy. He couldn't get his mind off the film in which he had first seen Cherry Sims. And it wasn't the memory of her bare Twisting that got to him, either-she had, he explained, done that several times for him in the flesh. The one thought he couldn't shake off was that Cherry's little hundred-foot color film was worth fifty dollars. And, after working for Steuben for a while, he found out that films of Cherry in action sold for as much as two hundred dollars.
The longer he lived with these facts, the more appealing his big idea became to him. Finally, he couldn't stand it any more. He simply had to set up in business for himself.
Chicago was out, because Steuben already had most of the market sewn up and didn't take very kindly to competition. So Roy decided to come to New York. He remembered my interest in photography and figured I would be a natural to go into partnership with him and Cherry.
That's right. Cherry was going to be part of the corporation. She had listened to Roy's big plans about the dough they could make in New York, about the fun they could have, about fancy apartments and nights on the town and playing the stock market while they played with each other.
And, naturally, Cherry had fallen for it.
Maybe, I thought, as the train wheezed over the Manhattan Bridge and down toward Canal Street, this Cherry was a pretty stupid broad. Then again, maybe not.
A lot depended on which of these ideas was correct.
It was almost nine o'clock when we hit Fifty-Ninth Street. Roy led me up out of the ground and south a ways on Seventh Avenue, then east on Fifty-Seventh. He kept talking the whole time in his own personal mixture of jokes, anecdotes, speculations on the future, and four-letter words.
The hotel was called The Consort. It wasn't exactly a fancy place, but it wasn't cheap, either. The carpeting was ritzy, but worn, and the wood paneling in the elevator was dulled by time.
We hit the eighth floor, and I followed Roy, who was still jabbering, down the corridor to Room 87. I watched him fumble into his pockets and draw out a key, but it wasn't until he stuck it in the lock that I realized what was behind that door.
"Wait a minute," I said.
He left his hand on the key and looked at me. "For what?"
I fumbled for words. The same feeling I had after seeing the film-the feeling that an ordinary guy like myself wasn't enough for a hunk like that blonde-came flooding back to me now. I was getting nervous over the idea that I'd walk through the door, take one look at her, and either freeze up or faint.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not that bad with women. As I said before, I've bagged my share; good, bad, and indifferent. And while I have no illusions about what a great lover I am, I'd say that I'm as good as the next guy, and maybe a little better than some.
But I have drawn blanks in my time, and for the same reason a lot of men have failed to connect.
There is a kind of girl you meet every so often who's too much.
She's too good-looking, or her body is too round and soft and inviting, or her legs are too perfect, or her mouth is too wet, or her eyes are too hot, or maybe all of these things at once. Females like that are few and far between, and most men get to see them only in Hollywood movies where nature's good points can be blown bigger than life by trick photography.
But now and then, a man will actually run across a woman who is just too damned much. Most men run.
If you've never had the experience, the whole idea probably sounds ridiculous; but let me tell you, it really happens. There's a big difference between seeing a gal in a movie, or maybe seeing her nude in the pages of a magazine, and seeing her in the ever-loving flesh. Let's take your favorite movie actress, for instance, whoever she might be. Suppose you were sitting at home one evening, minding your own business, reading a book or picking your nose or something, when all of a sudden the door opened, and there she was.
Fanny Flick, Queen of Sunset Boulevard.
What would you do?
Would you jump up and say hello? Would you offer her a seat? Would you offer her a cigarette or a drink?
Or would you just grab her and fling her on her back and yank up her skirt and down her panties and off her bra, and go at it, just the way you always dreamed of doing while you watched her parading around in the movies?
Would you do any of these things?
Not a chance, friend.
Because Fanny Flick, and all the dream girls like her, are just too much for the average man to handle. There are men in the world who can take care of Fanny, of course, but you're not one of them. To give Fanny what she wants-what she deserves-you have to be her kind of person.
You have to be a dream man, because that's the only sort of man Fanny will have anything to do with.
You follow me? There are girls in the world who are too perfect to be used, whose beauty and body demand more than a guy can possibly give. And when you run across a girl like that, the only thing for you to do is move your tail right out of there.
Don't try to take her on, because you don't have the knowhow or the endurance or the reach she's used to. If you attempt it, you'll just make a fool of yourself, and old Fanny will he there laughing at you, and there's nothing that can cut a man deeper than a woman's laugh.
I had thought all this out years ago, but fortunately I had never been in a position where I had to act on my thoughts. Never, that is, until now.
Now, standing in the hall, looking at Roy's hand on the key which opened Room 87, I realized I was about to come face to face with a live Fanny Flick. Worse than that, this wasn't just a girl I had seen in some movie house-this was a girl I had seen naked, and the image of her body was still very big in my mind. Talking sensibly with a girl like Cherry Sims would not be easy under any circumstances, but it would be downright impossible with the memory of her lush nudity hanging behind my eyes.
Maybe I was just being cowardly-or maybe my reluctance was a warning voice yelling from one corner of my confused brain.
But I didn't want to go through that door.
"Well?" said Roy. "What's the problem, old buddy?"
"There are-er-a couple questions I wanted to ask you. I still don't have some of this straight."
He waved a hand. "Oh, the hell with questions. You know all the important facts about the setup-well go over the details later, when I get back."
"It's happening so fast, though, that I can't quite-" I came to a dead halt as his last words penetrated. "Get back? Get back from where?"
"I have a few things to take care of, pal. Probably take me about two hours or so. Think that'll be time enough?" He grinned a very dirty grin.
"You mean-" I choked, swallowed, and tried again. "You mean you're leaving me alone with' this-"
"Why, sure," he said, sounding very surprised. "What else did you expect? Like the old days, Charlie-share and share alike. Remember? Did you think I'd try to keep something like Cherry to myself? Not on your life, Charlie-you're a buddy, and I always split with my buddies."
His hand turned the key. The lock went snick. The door swung Open about five inches. He pulled the key from the lock, dropped it in his pocket and looked at his watch. "Nine o'clock, on the nose. I'll see you at eleven, Charlie."
Before I could say a damned thing, he turned and went off down the hall, leaving me standing like an idiot in front of that open door.
CHAPTER THREE
I guess I stopped thinking for a couple of minutes, because I don't have any recollection of pushing that door open, taking a few steps into the room, and pushing the door shut behind me. But that's what I did.
I heard the sound of the lock clicking-it sounded a little like a door on a prison cell-and the noise brought be back to reality.
The room was a fairly ordinary hotel room. To my left was a bureau with a big mirror over it. To my right was the door to the bathroom. Straight ahead were two windows, a couple of chairs, an end table, and one of those stands hotels provide to hold your luggage while you unpack.
It looked like every other hotel room I'd ever seen, except for one detail.
Cherry Sims.
She was lying on the bed, which was to the right and concealed behind the angle of the bathroom wall. But I could see a portion of her body reflected in the mirror to my left.
The portion consisted of long bare legs and the round pink hills of two neat buttocks.
I didn't need to see any more to know it was Cherry. No two women in the world could have legs like that. The same soft tricky muscles gave shape to the calves, and the thighs were open just enough for me to see the shadowy hollows inside them. And although I hadn't gotten a look at her butt in the film-she'd been facing the camera the whole time-one look at those pretty globes convinced me they belonged to the same girl as those other pretty globes; the ones on the front of her that had added so much to her dance by dancing around on their own.
It was Cherry Sims on that bed. Cherry Sims in the-as the saying goes-flesh.
And that flesh was nude as it could get.
I waited for her to say something. While I waited, I wondered why I was waiting. Roy had explained the situation to me, and I knew him well enough to know he wouldn't have sent me in here without telling Cherry to expect me. Roy never left anything half done; if he'd decided to let me share a piece of his fancy blonde movie-star, then he had surely cleared the way for me beforehand.
So now it was up to me. And there were two courses open. I either took a couple more steps into the room and got a look at the rest of that bare woman on the bed, or I turned around and ran like hell out the door.
One or the other. Waiting around for something to happen was pointless. I either had the nerve or I didn't, and no amount of waiting was going to change that fact.
The last flicker of logic and reason inside my sweating skull told me the wisest course was to scoot, get out of this room before I did something stupid. But it was far too late for wisdom, or reason, or logic, or anything at all but instinct. My mind was shutting down but my glands were perking, and they told me where I had to go and what I had to do in terms I just couldn't ignore. I did what I was told.
Four steps carried me past the door to the John. Four more carried me even with the angle of the wall. A simple twist of my head aimed my eyes down at the bare blonde below.
She was lying on her side with her face toward the wall. Her palms were together and under her cheek, as if she were asleep. Her elbows were pointing in the same direction as her face, so I could see the swollen melon of one breast jutting lushly just below her armpit. I couldn't see the tip of it from where I stood, but I didn't have to. I remembered what it looked like as well as I remembered my own face.
Thinking of those lovely little red buttons made me wonder if that was why they called her Cherry.
But wondering involves thinking, and thinking was impossible at that particular moment. My eyes had left the bulge of that pretty boob and were traveling along the liquid curve of her torso. Her skin, which was the same honey and cream color it had been in the film, was delicately ridged where it overlay her ribs, and there was a smooth scoop in her where the ribcage ended. From there, the skin swept down to her tight waist, then up over this fantastic mound of hip as flawless and round and tasty-looking as a serving of butterscotch pudding.
My eyes slid south, following the line of her firm fanny. It swelled outward almost as flamboyantly as her hips, then tucked under suddenly like little double chins. When her creamy skin appeared again, it had already begun its trip down the lengths of her thighs.
I stood there staring at her, just as I had stared at the film, and the same things began happening to me.
Only this time I was in a position to do something about it.
That thought made very pretty pictures in my head, and I was enjoying them so much it took me forever to wake up and notice that she wasn't paying any attention to me.
She really seemed to be asleep. I couldn't understand how that might be, but the evidence was right before my eyes. The breast I could see rose and fell in a regular rhythm, and all the muscles in that superb body were completely relaxed.
She was asleep.
So I had to wake her up.
That made perfect sense, but I still couldn't bring myself to do it. Since I had stepped through the door of this room my brain had been so occupied with the sight of her that I hadn't had time to remember my original fear. But I was remembering it now, and it was twice as big as it had been in the hall.
Run, run, shouted the little voice of sense; run before you make a damned fool of yourself.
My feet were rooted to the spot.
Feel, feel, shouted my glands; there it is, all spread out and waiting for you. Put out a hand, and it's yours.
I tested to see if my hands were working any better than my feet. They were.
They lifted up slowly from my sides, and I watched them go toward the ripe blonde body on that bed. It seemed to me at that moment that I'd never really looked at my hands before. They were veined and covered with hair, and they looked as different from the smooth flesh they were approaching as black from white.
Looking at those hands made me realize they were the hands of a man, just as surely as that body was the body of a woman. And that was the way things I should be, wasn't it? As nervous as I felt, as worried about my technique and-let's face it-my virility, none of my sweating changed the fact that I was a male.
And the broad lying there, even if she were Fanny Flick herself, was still basically only a female.
Male and female went together. A female could he around and look beautiful and sexy and inviting all she wanted, but she wouldn't get a thing for her troubles unless there was a male in her life.
It was one of the most basic facts in the world, and it made all my fears just seem silly.
So I touched her shoulder.
At first, nothing happened. I was considering tapping her shoulder again, or maybe some other part of her anatomy, when I heard her sigh. That long blonde hair was hanging partially over her face, and her exhalation made a few spidery strands of it blow outward. That exhalation also made the meat of her breast shiver in a way that made me shiver myself.
She stirred and rolled over.
As crazy as this might sound, it was her face I looked at first. After all, it's hardly polite to look at a nude woman's body until you've seen what kind of expression she's wearing for you. Women use their faces like stop lights, and can shift from halt to proceed with caution to go with no difficulty at all. Any man who's had experience with women knows about this, so there's no point in describing it.
At any rate, she wasn't wearing any one of those expressions. The mask of her beautiful face was as calm and relaxed as the rest of her. The eyes were closed. The mouth was slightly open. The nostrils flared slowly with the measured rhythm of her breathing.
She was still asleep.
Seeing her there like that, lying on her back with all her goodies bared for me to see, with the soft mountains of her breasts pointing at the ceiling, with the round hillock of her belly drawing the eye down to the blonde arrowhead at her loins, with the whole gold-and-ivory expanse of her feline thighs spread out on the white sheets-well, it did a strange thing to me.
All of a sudden, my clothes began to feel uncomfortable.
The blonde was nude, and her nudity was so perfect it made me want to be nude, too. The thought in my mind at that moment wasn't exactly sex, but more like an urge to get back to nature, to strip the last silly bit of civilization off myself and return to the basics which no amount of civilization could ever change.
I stripped off my clothes and let them fall where they wanted to, not caring about such worthless notions as the crease in my pants or the press in my jacket or the bill I would get from the cleaner's when I took this stuff in to be spruced up.
I got myself as nude as she was, then leaned over the bed, took a very deep breath, and put my hand over her near breast.
I had about two seconds to feel the shape of that lovely mound. My fingers tested the resiliancy of it and my palm moved in a small circle against the smaller circle of the tip. I felt that tip go hard as a rock, and I would have wondered about that if there had been time to wonder.
But there was no time for anything.
All of a sudden, she was awake. Her arms came up and clamped onto my shoulders, pulling me down onto the bed savagely. I felt the strength of her thighs as she flung them around my hips, then the softness of her belly thrust up against my own. Her breasts went squash under my chest, but they didn't feel as if their shape or thrust had altered. They pushed upward so firmly I could swear the hard buttons at the tips were boring holes in me.
I looked at her face, and her eyes were open. I guess she had been awake all along. This business of lying there nude and waiting for me to do something about it was apparently her way of teasing a male.
For one, I didn't mind being teased.
"Hello, you," she said, in this voice as husky and sweet as wild honey.
"Hello," I said.
"You're Charlie, right?" Her ripe lips drew back into a pearly smile, and I got a glimpse of a red tongue-tip flicking between her teeth.
"That's right. I'm Charlie. And you're Cherry." It wasn't easy to talk, considering all the other things I had to think about.
"Well," she said. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Charlie. I think you and I are going to be very good friends." She said this teasingly, filling the innocent words with meanings you'll never find in Webster.
"I hope so," I said.
"Why don't we get started right now, Charlie? Let's be friends right now." Then she was on top of me.
Don't ask me how it happened, because I still don't know. But she was really a muscular female, and one big thrust from that fantastic body flipped me onto my back.
I had to blink my eyes a few times before I could see straight. She was kneeling beside me and her face was a little above the level of my eyes so that I had to look up to see her. When I looked straight ahead, all I could see were her breasts.
Her hands were planted on either side of my neck, and she shook her shoulders the way she had done in the film. Her dangling breasts knocked together like big fleshy bells. My hands came up to grab them before they settled.
Now I was really finding out what they felt like, and I'll tell you something: it's a pretty unusual girl who has even a butt as round and firm and perfect as that. Cherry's breasts were the answer to every man's dream of breasts-so lush you'd swear they couldn't be anything but rubber, so yielding and warm you knew they couldn't be anything but flesh.
I ran my hands all over those beauties, feeling the sensuous glide of the roughened tips against my palms, pushing them up against her then letting them fall back again into my waiting fingers. Once in a while, I glanced up at her face.
She was really enjoying it. Her eyes were half-closed, and glittered behind her lashes. Her lips were parted and moist. The flaring of her nostrils had taken on a different rhythm, the rhythm of passion.
She was really excited, and that only made the moment better for me. It was quite a tribute to my malesness to be exploring the most beautiful pair of boobies in the history of womanhood, and to feel the owner of that pair responding with such fervor.
Then, with no advance warning, she moved.
The weights of her bulbous front slipped out of my grasp, and I spread my hands just in time to slide them around her sides. She bent her elbows and let her torso down toward me; she also shifted her legs from beneath her, and I felt the solid columns of her thighs coming into position on top of my own.
Her belly was against my waist. Her chin was even with my hair-line. Her breasts were dangling only an inch from my face. One light pull on her torso closed that gap, and I welcomed the rocky little tip into my mouth.
She tasted salty and musky, the way a woman should taste, and my tongue sensed the excitement in her. It certainly felt genuine, but all the while I kissed at that sweet mound, I kept wondering why she was getting so aroused. All I was doing was mouthing her breast, and while that usually gets a woman excited it's really only a preliminary. Furthermore, she was a professional, and a high-classed one-she had been taken by every kind of man there was, including old Roy himself, and what chance could I have to impress her against competition like that?
It was a strange question, and I couldn't figure out any answer to it. Then she moved again, and I stopped wondering.
Her thighs shifted, and she straddled my hips. Her bust swung free of my mouth and bounced all over the front of her as she straightened her torso. When I looked up, I saw the same expression in her eyes I had seen in that film-the furnace look, as if there was a fire raging inside her head.
She leaned her body backward. Her hands closed on my thighs behind her. And then, with one juicy pivot of those round hips, she dropped herself onto me, and I was had.
It was a hell of a moment. Having the girl above had never been a position I particularly favored, because it took the edge over my masculine domination of the moment. I had always preferred to be on top, and in control.
But with Cherry, the whole thing seemed perfectly natural. Like I said, she was too much woman for a clod such as myself to really do right by, so having her above me and working it at her own pace enabled me to relax and stop worrying about it. For the time being, my endurance or prowess or technique weren't being tested. All that was required of me was that I stay excited.
And believe me, that was the easiest thing in the world.
Because right at that moment, sitting there on my loins with the whole front of her magnificent body naked and glowing, leaning back on her hands and arching her spine in a way that made her breasts tighten and lift and pulled the softness of her belly taut as a drumhead-sitting on me just like that, she started to do the Twist.
It was fantastic. Every inch of her went jiggle-jiggle in response to some inner rhythm, some dark sexy music inside her that I couldn't hear. Her fleshy cheeks slapped against my thighs, her big fruits heaved all over her chest, her blonde hair whirled around her passionate face as she Twisted like no one in history had ever Twisted before. She gave that dance a whole new dimension, made sense out of every thrust and motion and quiver it required.
All I had to do was just he there and watch her go, he there and let it happen.
So that's what I did.
And I don't think I'll ever forget the feeling of that blonde's body pounding on me, or the way her thrusting and wrenching and Twisting drew pleasures out of me that were almost too fierce to endure. She was a prize winner, and no doubt about it. She knew her business backwards and forwards and every other wards, and she used her knowledge with an abandon that would have made a Roman orgy-master blush. There wasn't a method of getting enjoyment from the male body that she didn't use; a few of them, as a matter-of-fact, were new to me, and I thought I knew everything important about my own anatomy.
She taught me different, and in no uncertain terms.
Slowly but surely, the rhythm of her dance began to increase. I could feel it happening, and I could also see it; the quivering spheres of her bosom told the story at a glance.
They told something else as well, something about as fantastic as the sexual Twist party she was treating me to.
Cherry Sims was as excited as a woman could get. The coral tips of her breasts had spread and firmed, and were now almost as dark as bloodstains. Even the globes themselves had grown larger, which is something pretty rare in a woman, no matter how excited she might be. This fancy blonde hooker was driving and lurching all over me, and going straight into orbit.
I just couldn't understand what was turning her on so.
I decided I'd worry about it tomorrow.
Her Twist was reaching its finale now, and she was going like a piston in an airplane engine. The result of this for me was exactly what you'd expect. Wave after wave of sheer pleasure tore at my guts, making all my nerves sing and the blood boil in my veins. As the big wave, the last wave, started to break, I reached up and grabbed hold of those furiously swinging knockers, clamping them in my fingers as tightly as I could.
Then the wave broke right over me, and all I could feel was an onslaught of pleasure more incredible than any I had ever known, and the weights of her breasts slowly settling to a halt against my palms.
I didn't know where I was for a few seconds. I could sense my whole body twitching in reaction to what had just happened, and I suppose I must have looked pretty silly. But at a time like that, a man doesn't worry how he looks.
I was pulled back into reality by the sensation of her lifting off me. The twin handfulls bounced out of my grip, and the solid thighs left their position astride my hips.
When I opened my eyes, she was getting off the bed. She stood and stared at herself in the mirror over the dresser for a few seconds, then turned to me.
"How was that, Charlie?" she asked. Her voice wasn't nearly as sweet as it had been. "Can't you tell?" I said.
Her face was blank as she swept her gaze over me from head to toe. All at once, I became aware of just how naked I was, and how unimpressive I must look after having been pumped dry of all my manhood.
If the sight of me disappointed her, she didn't let it show in her face. She gave me the once-over as calmly as if I were a side of beef, then swung her eyes back to my face.
"That was fun," she said. "We'll do that again."
"Fine."
"We'll do it a different way next time. That all right with you?"
"Any way at all is fine," I said.
"Good." She turned back to the dresser and picked a small wristwatch from the top of it. "It's half-past ten, Charlie. You'd better go down to the lobby and wait for Roy to come back."
I was puzzled by the cold and business-like tone of her voice, but I did what she told me. I was too weak to fight her bossy attitude.
It took me several tries before I could swing my legs clear of the bed, and several more before I could stand up. Halfway through my contortions, I heard her say, "See you, Charlie." By the time I looked up, she had passed me by and shut the door of the bathroom behind her.
I stumbled over to where my clothes were piled, and got dressed. I looked like a slob, but that couldn't be helped. The way I felt, I would have looked like a slob even in a fresh suit.
When I was finally dressed again, I went to the door of the bathroom and listened. Water was running, but that was the only sound I could hear.
"Cherry?"
There wasn't any answer.
Well, I thought, that was that.
I went to the door and let myself out quietly, making sure the lock clicked behind me. The corridor was empty, and so was the elevator when it arrived.
As I rode downstairs, I began to wonder just what the hell had happened in Room 87. I knew I had gotten something pretty rare, but how rare could a broad be without being some kind of nut?
I had no trouble recalling the excitement I had felt and seen and even tasted in her, and I had enough experience to know I hadn't been mistaken about it. Cherry Sims had been nearly out of her mind with passion. Her response to my hands and my mouth had been instantaneous, and had grown into a drive of lust that bordered on insanity.
All that was true, and I had seen it with my own eyes. Rut I had also seen her afterwards; after the big blast had come and gone and left me limp. I had seen her then, and she hadn't been the same woman.
Had I failed to satisfy her? That could certainly explain the way she'd shut off her passion back there, but the idea didn't make much sense. She'd been in charge, she'd been in a position to get exactly what she wanted from me, and under circumstances like that she was responsible for her own satisfaction. The way I'd been pinned under her hips prevented me from doing a thing for her, and that had been her idea to begin with.
There wasn't any reason I could see for her sudden coldness, but I knew without question it had happened. Something had turned her off, had drained all the fire out of her, right at the moment she was draining all the fire out of me.
I felt cheated. I had been given the use of that wild blonde body, but that had been all. Nowhere in the proceedings had I penetrated any deeper than her flesh, and I knew I wouldn't be satisfied until I'd gotten into her mind.
She had left me with an invitation to come again, and I decided to take her up on it as soon as possible. Next time I was going to be prepared to perform to the limit of my ability. Next time I was going to be on top.
Next time would be different.
CHAPTER FOUR
I sat in the hotel lobby for a half-hour, thinking things over and not coming any closer to an answer. At eleven o'clock exactly, Roy came through the doors and spotted me.
If he was surprised to find me in the lobby instead of upstairs, he didn't let on. He just plopped down beside me and asked me how she'd been.
That was another thing about him which hadn't changed. In spite of the fact that he'd bagged Cherry himself countless times, he was still fascinated in all the juicy details of my experience with her. I'm sure I didn't tell him anything new, but he listened as intently as a male virgin, nodding his head and licking his lips and smiling wet appreciative smiles.
I gave him the facts, but left out the part about how Cherry had shut it off afterwards. Until I figured that out, I didn't want anyone to know about it, not even an old friend like Roy.
When I finished, he punched me in the arm and asked me if I agreed that Cherry was some rare piece.
I agreed.
Then he suggested that the two of us head for a bar and soak up some more beer while we talked out the minor details of our plan.
I rejected that notion, explaining that I had been up early and had worked hard all day, not to mention the work I had done in the two hours just passed. I needed some rest.
Roy grinned some more, and said he understood.
We shook hands, and he told me to expect a call from him next morning. Then he headed toward the elevator. I watched the indicator climb to Eight and stop there. Then I went to the subway and caught a Brighton Local back to Sheepshead Bay.
All during the ride home, I wondered what was going on back in Room 87. Had Cherry come out of the bathroom by now? Was she still naked? Was she spreading herself out on the bed at this very moment, like a big blonde welcome mat? Was Roy getting on board her, or vice versa?
Or had the chill I'd felt been a signal that her sex-drive was shut down for the night?
I hoped my last idea was the correct one; because if Roy was up there making out, if she had thawed for him and opened up again, then that meant the big ice she'd thrown me had been aimed at me personally, not at sex in general. And that, in turn, meant that I hadn't performed well enough to suit her, hadn't given her what she'd been expecting.
That meant I'd failed, and it wasn't a very pleasant idea.
I got off the train at Sheepshead Bay and went down the steps to the street. There was a candy and magazine store under the trestle, and I stopped in to buy some cigarettes. While I waited for the little baldheaded guy behind the counter to serve me, I glanced at the magazine racks.
This was one candy store which knew how to display magazines. Above the standard racks of Digests and Posts and Journals was a long row of men's magazines, with crazy suggestive titles and half naked broads on the covers. These were arranged face out so they would catch the eye.
Usually, I enjoyed looking at the covers of those books, but tonight there was no pleasure in it at all. I went over to the rack and pulled one down, flipping through it slowly from one picture-spread to the next. The girls in the photos were very beautiful and very naked, and they were posed within an ace of pornography, but those pictures didn't do anything more to me than the covers. I went through the whole magazine without even getting a twitch.
I put it back where it belonged, bought my cigarettes, and walked over to Avenue B. My apartment, consisting of two and a half small rooms, was right over the shop, but it had a separate entrance. Most nights I checked the door to the store on my way upstairs, but this time I couldn't be bothered. If some toughs from Coney Island had decided to rifle my place, let them. I was too tired to worry about it.
I undressed again, took a long hot shower, and crawled nude to bed. I was so tired I could hardly lift my arm to turn out the lamp. In spite of my fatigue, though, it took quite a while for me to get to sleep. My muscles and bones were completely out of action, but my mind was still going strong.
Thoughts of Cherry kept spinning around in my head. I couldn't kill the image of her fruity breasts dancing before me, nor could I shake the memory of her firm-meated bottom pounding down on me. I wondered if she and Roy had ever done it that way. I wondered if she and Roy were doing it right now.
There was another question, too; a small one that was somehow connected with the larger question. Why hadn't the nude photos in that magazine done anything to me? Pictures of bare girls are always good for a kick, even only a minor one, and this was the first time I could remember looking at nude photos and getting nothing out of it.
I tried to recall what the females in that book had looked like, but I couldn't. If I thought of breasts, they were Cherry's. If I thought of hips, they were Cherry's. If I thought of long strong legs and round thighs and rounder bottoms, or even of hands and feet and faces, they all belonged to Cherry. I couldn't think of the idea woman without thinking of Cherry.
I tried to tell myself it wasn't so. What the hell was I, a young man coming home after his first lay? I'd bagged plenty of dames in my time, and I'd never met one who was basically any better than another. Women were like grapefruit-some were plumper than average, some were riper, some were juicier, but to anyone with a taste for grapefruit they all tasted about the same.
Cherry Sims was quite a hunk of blonde, but no more than that. She was a four-star rouser in the sack because that was her line of work. I should consider myself lucky to have had a crack at her without paying for it, and luckier yet that she was going to be part of the business Roy and I were forming. A jiggly meaty uninhibited blonde like her was a real asset to any pornographer, and the fact that we'd be working in close association meant that I'd probably have plenty more chances to sample her goodies.
All these things were true, and they didn't add up to any reason for me to be in a tailspin over Cherry Sims.
But that didn't mean I wasn't.
When I finally did fall asleep, I dreamed of her. She was in a cage, pacing back and forth naked, and sinuous as a jungle cat. In the dream, my hands ached to reach out and grab her, to take possession of those mounds and scoops and moldings of flesh, to fling her down on the floor of that cage and nail her to it with all the power I owned. But the bars were in the way. No matter how much I reached, how far I stretched my arms, her body always remained just beyond my clutching fingers.
The frustration of it became too much to stand, and I began pacing myself, trying to find an entrance into that cage. That's when I discovered she wasn't in a cage at all. She was outside.
I was in the cage.
She stood there and laughed at me, her eyes sparkling, her flesh dancing, while I beat my head against the bars.
In the morning, I woke up covered with sweat. It was later than usual because I had forgotten to set the alarm the night before, and I had just time enough to shave and take another shower if I wanted the store to open on schedule. After some thought, I decided the hell with the store.
I showered off the night's sweat and changed into crisp new underwear. I shaved carefully, and didn't nick myself once. Then I went into the small kitchen and made a breakfast of bacon and eggs, along with a pot of coffee.
The food, plus a few cigarettes, did wonders for me, and when I left the table I felt like a new man. All the problems of the night before had blown away, and I came downstairs onto a street that was bright with sunshine. Even the store didn't smell as musty as usual when I opened it up.
It was going to be a good day.
I broke some fresh rolls of change into the register, set up the receipt pad with a new sheet of carbon, then went back to work on that C-3 I had been repairing when Roy had interrupted me the day before. In no time at all I was lost in the perfectly-machined interior of the camera, and I was concentrating on it so thoroughly I never heard the girl come into the store.
"You open, mister?"
I looked up. She was one of the local kids, about sixteen or maybe even younger, and dressed like a New Orleans hooker. All the high school girls in that neighborhood dressed that way, with blouses too tight and shorts too clinging and brassieres which made their little apples ride up at an angle Mother Nature had never intended.
This particular one was wearing a tight jersey blouse with broad horizontal strips that accented the-thrusts of her two young mounds. Those thrusts were unbelievable, but they were fun to look at just the same.
She was also wearing white toreador pants about two sizes too small for her. Her belly made a surprisingly mature little mound above her thighs, although that mound was going to turn into blubber in a few years if she didn't watch the pizza and orange drink. On her feet were Cleopatra-type sandals, and her toe nails were painted red.
Her face was also standard-issue for the neighborhood-thin lips painted to look bigger than they were, a nose which tilted at the same angle as her breasts, and eyes fringed with so much make-up they looked like holes burned in a sheet. Her expression was pouty and spoiled, but she probably thought it was sexy.
"What can I do for you-Miss." I almost called her little girl, but stopped myself in time. If there's anything these nymphets hate, it's being taken for their true age.
"I need a roll for my Brownie," she said.
It's a funny line, considering the source, but I'd heard it many times. "What size? 120? 620?"
I told you her face was already pouting; now she managed a scowl on top of that. "I don't know," she said.
I sighed. None of these kids ever knew the size of their Brownies, no matter how often they bought film. And not a one of them ever had sense enough to bring the camera with them.
"How big is your Brownie?" I asked.
"Like this," she said, making a vague cube in the air with her hands. "Just a little one. There's a black cord on top-you know, for around your neck."
I nodded. "620," I said.
"Is that what you call it?" she asked stupidly.
I gave her a roll of Panchromatic, took her money, and watched her plump little butt tick-tock out the door and down the couple of steps to the street. That was another thing about these kids-they all had hind ends on them that made a man's fingers itch to start grabbing.
I went back to work on the C-3, ashamed of myself. After all, the neighborhood Lolitas were out of bounds for a man my age, and it was wrong to let my thoughts run in such directions. There probably wasn't a non-virgin in the crowd of them; in fact, I was willing to bet most of them screamed like hell when their boyfriends tried to grab their breasts. The kids of Sheepshead Bay liked to dress like whores, but I couldn't believe any of them actually put out.
Thinking about the nymphets cheered me up, though, because I could recall feeling a legitimate twitch as I watched that little kid's behind bounce out of my store. And that meant that I had recovered from the weird bind I had been in last night. It was a pleasure to think about women in general, even half-formed women like the Lolitas, without thinking of Cherry Sims.
I finished the repair on the C-3, wrote up a bill on it, and put it on the Will-Call shelf. My next project was a German-made 8 mil. movie camera, and I was anxious to see what it looked like inside. But before I could even start loosening screws, the phone rang.
I knew who it was before I even picked up the receiver, and all of a sudden it wasn't such a nice day any more.
"Hi, buddy," Roy said. His voice was bright and friendly. He didn't sound like a man who'd spent the night sacking with a gal like Cherry, but that didn't mean anything. His powers of recovery were terrific.
"What say, Roy?" I tried to make my voice as light as his.
"I got us a bed," he said. "Oh?"
"Yeah. Twelve dollars it cost. Bought it on the Bowery-some puking drunk probably died in it. But, what the hell, it's a bed and that's what counts."
"Sure," I said.
"I hired a van to bring it out, by the way. That's going to cost us another ten."
"A van?" I said. "Wait a minute-I don't want any vans pulling up to this place in broad daylight and unloading beds. How's that going to look?"
"Oh." He paused. "I didn't think of that. Well, suppose they come after dark?"
"Do it this way," I said. "Tell the driver to come down East Fourteenth and park near the corner. There's an alley leads to the back of my place, and you and I can carry it in ourselves."
"Check," Roy said. "That sounds fine."
"Better make it after nine-it's Daylight Saving Time, you know."
"Will do. And I'll see you in about an hour. Take it slow."
He hung up before I could ask him why he was coming out, or even whether he was coming out alone.
The day went sour as a delicatessen pickle barrel.
I didn't get any work done on the German camera at all. There was no point in trying. My calmness and good cheer this morning had been nothing but an illusion, and it went like a soap bubble. I found all the problems and questions of the evening before waiting inside my head, big as ever.
The owner of the C-3 showed up to claim it, and grumbled over the repair bill. I was too preoccupied to argue with him, which is something I ordinarily enjoy, so I knocked a dollar off the total and he went away satisfied.
I also had another nymphet who needed film fof her Brownie, and I went through the same stupid routine with her. This time, however, the bulges inside her tight sports clothes didn't do a thing to me. The kid might as well have been a wax dummy for all I cared. I think the girl went away mad because I hadn't stared at her boobs the way she wanted me too, but my mind was on other things.
Almost two hours passed before Roy finally showed up. He had these big packages under his arm, and looked just as chipper as he'd sounded over the phone.
"Sheets," he explained, setting the packages down on the counter. "And a couple pillows. For the bed."
"Oh," I said.
"Hey, Charlie, how come you didn't tell me about all the tail you've got in this section? Holding out on an old buddy, is that it?"
"What tail?"
"The little kids with the big ideas-you know the ones I mean. That street under the elevated tracks is swarming with them."
"The high school girls, you mean?"
He laughed. "Maybe that's what you call them, Charlie, but take it from me they never learned to swing it around like that in airy high school. Those tasty little dolls are available.
"Oh, come on-they're only kids, Roy."
"Nuts to that," he said. "They're old enough to know what they're doing. You think they wear those tight blouses and pants just because they want to be uncomfortable? They like to show it off, Charlie, and they know who's in the market for it, too."
I couldn't believe it. "Teenagers, Roy?"
"Down south," he said, "they marry that young."
I gave up and admitted he was probably right, although I still didn't see it. We took the stuff into the backroom and opened it up. Roy had bought two pillows, four pillowcases, and eight sheets.
"How come all this linen?" I asked. "How many beds are we going to have back here?"
"Only one," he said. "But these sheets will get dirty fast."
We piled the bedding on a shelf, then went to work on the room. After surveying the placement of the electric outlets-a detail I had never worried about since I moved into the place-we decided where the floodlights should go. I took a dozen clamp-on brackets out of stock and set them up on the molding near the ceiling, so that they were arrayed in a semi-circle aimed at one corner of the room.
Next, we moved my table and chairs out of the way and back against the wall. We had to unplug the hotplate, and that made me kind of sad, because the pot of simmering coffee I always kept there had become part of my daily routine.
But I didn't have a daily routine any more, did I? The routine had changed along with my business. Of course, as far as the world was concerned I was still a camera and film salesman, but that wasn't actually my fine any more.
I had stopped working in photography and started in pornography.
It was the rearranging of the back room that really brought it home to me, I think. Up until then, I had just drifted with the idea, letting my mind revolve around vague ideas of dirty pictures and lots of money and baffling beautiful Cherry Sims. But I hadn't really believed it until Roy and I started setting the stage.
The stage was set, and it was perfect.
My back room was deep enough to hold quite a few people, and provided plenty of area for camera placement. I could visualize how much space the bed would take, and I knew there wouldn't be any problem getting appropriate camera angles. There wasn't a thing could happen on the bed that the camera wouldn't catch.
But I couldn't dwell on these ideas, because there was still work to be done. Along with the sheets and pillows, Roy had also bought a dozen yards of cheap curtain material, and he directed me while I nailed the stuff around the walls where the bed would stand. Draping the room served a double purpose, he explained. It helped deaden the sound, and there was often a lot of gasping and giggling and heavy breathing at these filming sessions, not to mention the sound of the bedsprings. And the curtains also concealed the walls, preventing any identifying cracks or paint streaks from being recorded on the film, which was a sensible precaution in case any of our products fell into the hands of the police and they came looking for the place where it had been shot. This way, all we'd have to do is tear down the curtains and get rid of the bed, and the room would be clean.
I had to admit that Roy had all the angles down cold.
With the floor cleared, the curtains hung, and the flood brackets in place, I went out front and took a 16 mil. camera and a tripod out of stock. The camera was an expensive beast, and I didn't really mind using it in this new enterprise, because it was far too fancy for the shutterbugs of Sheepshead Bay. I probably never would have sold it anyway.
We set the thing up on the tripod, and I checked the various angles of view. The camera was a three-lens turret job, and I found the wide-angle lens was best for this small room. The normal lens brought the corner right into your lap, and the telephoto was going to show pores if we ever decided to use it.
I explained the use of the three lenses to Roy. He told me that Steuben, his old employer, used zoom lenses on all his cameras, and Roy thought we should have one for our operation. When I explained how much they cost, he changed his mind.
He wanted to put lamps in all the brackets and test out the arrangement, but I vetoed that. Besides eating up electricity for no reason, those floods would shorten the life of the lamps, which was only about fifteen or twenty hours at best. Once they started to grow dim, they had to be replaced, or they would throw off all your exposure settings. He agreed to wait until after the bed had come.
Roy knew his business and I knew mine, and gradually the idea of our partnership became less fantastic to me. As he had pointed out, there wasn't a reason in the world why we shouldn't make some money with dirty pictures. It was illegal, but no more than a lot of things, and we wouldn't be hurting anybody. In fact, we'd probably be entertaining quite a few horny men, or helping them entertain horny ladies they knew.
If ever there were ever two people equipped to make a success out of the pornography business, they were Roy and myself.
Then I remembered Cherry, remembered that there was a third party to the partnership, and the idea began sounding silly again.
We knocked off a little after three and went down to the diner under the El tracks for a late lunch. Over coffee, I asked Roy about Cherry, making my voice as casual as I could.
"Oh, she's just fine," Roy said.
"That's good." I ached like hell to ask if he'd bagged her the night before, but I was too afraid of what he might answer. So I said, "When is she going to drop around?"
"Tomorrow night, probably," he said. "Depends on how much luck she has fining up the girls."
"The girls?"
"Yeah. She's spending today scouting the Uptown hookers for some posers. If she can find a couple of good ones, she'll bring them out tomorrow night, and we'll get this project rolling."
I half choked on my coffee. "Whores? She's bringing whores out here?"
"Sure," he said. "As soon as that bed arrives, we're all ready to go, aren't we? What's the point of waiting?"
I had no answer for that. "Where's she going to get the men?" I asked, my mind filled with pictures of Cherry rolling on a bed with some stranger.
"She's got two men already," he said.
"She has?"
"Of course. All you have to do is show me what button operates that camera, and you and I can take turns. Just think of it, Charlie-Cherry and a couple more hookers, all bare and bouncy and ready to go, lying there waiting for the leading men to arrive. Doesn't that sound pretty?"
I walked back to my store in a daze over the whole idea, with Roy at my side making unprintable comments about all the young juicy tail in Sheepshead Bay. I closed the shop early, and sat around listening to his chatter until nine o'clock when the bed arrived. We paid the driver and carried the thing into the back room, setting it up in front of the curtains.
Then I put lamps in all the brackets, and lit up our studio for the first time. No bed anywhere had ever looked so promising.
CHAPTER FIVE
Roy and I ended up in a bar that evening, and got slightly blasted. When he finally said goodnight and took the train back to Manhattan, I was staggering, and not entirely from drink. I went straight home, hit the sack, and went out like a light.
The next morning, I still couldn't believe it. I had to hurry down to the store and take a look at that back room before I could convince myself I was really in the dirty-movie business, and that Cherry and a couple of pros like her were coming over that evening for the express purpose of letting Roy and me bag them.
I spent the whole day trying to make some sense out of it all.
Too much was happening in too short a time; my life was changing so rapidly that I didn't have any chance to examine anything. Also, there seemed to be something wrong with my mind, almost as if I was under the influence of a subtle drug.
That drug could only be Cherry Sims.
Was I looking forward to her visit that evening? You bet your life I was.
Of course, I knew it was supposed to be purely a business session, but it was still a chance to work on her, and maybe this time I'd do a little better. I wanted a second opportunity so badly I could taste it; and it tasted of excitement, just like her big hot breasts.
Why was it so important to me to make an impression on that woman? I didn't know. I was being drawn toward her, the way a moth is drawn toward the flame of a candle, and it was possible I might end up burned to a crisp on the sex-hot griddle of her body.
But I didn't care about that.
Every time I thought of her, I thought of that cold expression, that look which had said so plainly that I wasn't interesting to her. If she had turned such a look on me beforehand, I would have followed my natural instincts and run like hell. But the look had come afterwards, and by then it was far too late.T had tasted her, in more ways than one, and I was aching for another taste.
I also thought now and again of Roy, and of the fact that he was sharing a hotel room with that sex-bomb. The idea annoyed me. Oh, sure-he was entitled to bed with her; after all, she was his friend, not mine. But that didn't prevent me from being jealous of his luck, and it didn't stop me from wanting more of her for myself.
Or maybe what I really wanted was all of her for myself.
Could that be possible?
At noon I went to the diner and ate lunch. Afterwards, I crossed the street and took another look at the girlie magazines in the candy store.
Some of those broads were really hot stuff, but they didn't do a thing for me. I stared at their breasts and bellies and legs and at their behinds when they showed, and I examined the sexy expressions on their faces. Girls like the ones in those photos were a pretty rare commodity, and it wasn't often a man got a chance at anything that great. They were Fanny Flicks-they were dream women-and they knew it. You could tell by their expressions and by the way they held their bared bodies. They knew what they had, and they knew how much a man would want a chance at it; and behind their sexy eyes there was a little adding machine chicking away, deciding the price they would ask.
I left the candy store and walked back toward my shop, looking over the nymphets thronged around the subway station. They were the same kind of females that were in the magazines, even if they hadn't formed completely. A few of the older ones were already hung as big as they could ever get, but most of them just looked as if they had apples inside their blouses. Big or small, though, they held out what they had in unmistakable invitation.
And underneath their crazy hairdos, inside the sooty circles of their over-decorated eyelashes, the same eyes as those of the magazine beauties stared out at the world of men. The same challange was there, the same promise, the same calculation.
Maybe Roy was right about those little broads. Maybe they did go. But that didn't concern me at all, because I wasn't interested in nymphets, or even in the full-blown nude beauties in those magazines.
All I wanted was Cherry Sims.
She had everything. The challange was there in her eyes, and also in the tempting meat of her body, and it was a bigger challange than any man could resist. It screamed to be met; every inch of her vibrated at you, calling you into action, driving you to put forth every ounce of manhood you possessed.
And the promise was there, too, just as big as the challenge. Her body promised excitement and pleasure and satisfaction; it promised lust so hot and huge that a man might have trouble surviving it.
Was the calculation there as well? No question about it. Cherry knew what she, wanted, and she knew she was equipped to get it. As Roy had remarked, wherever there were males with eyes, Cherry was in like Flynn.
The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that I didn't have a chance with someone like her. But that wasn't going to keep me from trying. I knew I wouldn't be satisfied until I brought her out of that cold shell she was in, made her tremble and sweat and moan underneath me, made her acknowledge the fact that I was a man, and that man was her master.
A crazy idea-a fool's notion. The kind of thing a young man might dream about over a copy of one of those nudie magazines.
But I didn't care. I was going to make Cherry Sims feel it if I killed myself in the process.
The rest of the day passed slowly. Customers came and went, and I paid little attention to them, except for one blonde Lolita who wanted film for her Ansco instead of her Brownie.
She was quite a hunk for a young kid, with huge headlights in front and soft bumpers in back. She was wearing shorts that were really short, and her thighs were as round as a grown woman's. At one point, she admired a photo on the wall behind the counter, and stood on tip-toe for a better look at it. The motion flexed the muscles in her legs and showed off the firm lines very effectively. She dropped back onto her heels heavily enough to make her breasts jiggle at me.
Like all the others-the challange, the promise, the calculation. If I grabbed her right then and there, took her into the back room, stripped those shorts off her pretty butt and raped her, she'd probably love every minute of it, then blackmail me afterwards for free film.
At six o'clock, I closed the shop and drew all the shades, then went to the diner for supper. It was still fairly light out, and I knew Roy wouldn't bring the girls around until after dark, so I ate a leisurely meal, building up my strength for the evening to come.
I figured I was going to need it.
The clock in my store said seven-fifteen when I got back. It said eight-thirty when I heard the knock at the back door.
I had been expecting Roy to arrive in front, but the minute I heard the knock I realized his good sense had led him around back. When I opened the door and let them in, I wondered how he had ever made it from the station without a parade forming behind him.
Cherry was dressed in a light summer thing, which showed off every line of her excessive body and left little to the imagination. It was cut low enough to reveal almost four inches of cleavage, and one look at the way her breasts hung against the material told you she wasn't wearing a bra. She wasn't wearing stockings either, and her shoes were the same gold color as her hair, high-heeled and backless.
She was quite a sight. I couldn't help wondering if it were legal for a woman like that to even walk the streets.
"Hello, Charlie," she said. The sexy honey was in her voice again, just as it had been when we got started two nights before.
"Hi, Cherry," I said. Now that she was standing right in front of me, now that I had a chance to look at her again, I knew my original estimation of her hadn't been exaggerated. One way or another, I was going to make a fool of myself over this woman.
Roy cut into my train of thought. "All clear, Charlie? Customers gone for the night?"
"Of course," I said. "The shop's locked up."
"Fine. I had to make sure." He stepped past me to the still-open back door and stuck his head out into the darkness. "All clear, kids," he said.
I heard a rustle of skirts.
Cherry had lined up three posers for the evening's work. She had done her job damned well.
The first one through the door was a small girl, hardly as high as my chest. But her size hadn't hindered the development of her body, which was just this side of fantastic. With a few more pounds on her, she might have been fat, but at her present weight she was perfect.
She looked me up and down, especially down, then cocked her little round body at me brazenly. "You Charlie?" she asked.
"That's right." I found myself smiling at her. She was such a load of woman concentrated into so small a space that she was really fun to look at. I began itching to see what those watermelon breasts of hers would look like bare.
"I'm Irma," she said. She lifted her head and peered around critically. "This ain't much of a place."
"We're just getting started," I said. "You're getting in on the ground floor."
She smirked and started to say something, but another voice interrupted her, a voice with a strong Spanish accent. I turned and saw a Puerto Rican girl come through the door.
She was as different from Irma as two woman could be. For one thing, she was tall and slim. For another, she carried her body with an unconscious grace, not at all like Irma's sexy posing. For a third, she had one of the most cheerful open faces I had ever seen, with large black eyes and a wide smiling mouth.
"Thees th' place?" she said. "Hey, man-you mus' be Charlee."
I was smiling at this one, too, and began to relax a little. Unlike Cherry, these were women who belonged in the real world, women I could handle.
"That's me," I said.
Her smile grew even broader and more dazzling. "My name Chequita, but you jus' call me Chickie, like ever'body else."
I glanced at Roy, and he grinned back at me. We knew each other well enough to read expressions, and he was seeing the same look of anticipation on my face I was seeing on his. The back room was filling with tail, and there was a bed waiting only a few feet away. What more could a man ask?
The door closed and I turned to see who had closed it. The third and last of the posers had come in, and she was the strangest woman I had ever seen.
Her hair was black and cut in a shaggy fringe around her head, Continental style. She wasn't wearing any make-up, but her skin was pure and flawless as a baby's, very pale in contrast to her hair.
She was startlingly slim, with small hard-looking breasts pushing at the front of her dress and very narrow hips and thighs, but she wasn't bony by any means. In a way, she was the exact opposite of little Irma-she was the least amount of woman which could be packed into a given space and still be attractive.
She stood there by the door without smiling or speaking, and I was about to say something when I felt Cherry brush past my arm. The blonde jiggled over to the girl and took her hand.
I couldn't be sure, but I could almost swear an expression of fear crossed the girl's blank face as Cherry led her over to me. "This is Charlie," she said. "Charlie, this is Lee."
"Hello, Lee," I said, trying to sound as casual as I had with the others, and failing. The girl was looking at me with her huge eyes as if I was the most terrible thing she'd ever seen. She made me feel like a rapist even though I didn't have a hand on her. "Lee's a pretty name," I said, smiling at her.
She just nodded, without changing her expression. "Lee can't talk," Cherry said. "She can't?"
"No."
I guess Cherry figured that explained everything because she didn't elaborate, but the expression on the girl's face continued to bother me. The fact that she couldn't talk, if it was a fact, didn't account for the strange fear in her eyes.
Roy interrupted my thoughts with his cheerful voice. "Well, gang? What are we waiting for?"
"Nothing," Cherry said. "Let's go."
She walked Lee past me and all four girls went over to the bed. They started to undress.
The sight of four beautiful whores undressing simultaneously was almost too much for me, and I stood there like a jerk until Roy tapped me on the shoulder. "Come on, Charlie. You too."
He already had his shirt off and was unzipping his pants as he spoke.
"But-who's going to run the camera?"
"We'll take turns, like I said. You can run a movie machine just as well nude as with clothes on, can't you?"
So I undressed. We both did, Roy and I, stripping quickly down to our skins as we had done so many times together in the Army. It was a familiar routine, even if the last time had been years ago, and it made me forget all the questions so I could concentrate on having fun.
I put my clothes on the table against the wall, and Roy did the same. He was facing the bed, and his eyes were very excited. I knew what he was seeing, but I didn't want to look myself until the floods were switched on. When I got my first sight of those four broads naked, I wanted to see every little detail.
I went over to the door, picked up the switch of the extension cord which operated the floods, then turned off the room lights. The darkness seemed to surprise everybody.
"Hey," Irma's voice yelled. "What the hell is this?"
I hit the extension switch, and the floods came on in a glare.
It was a sight to make strong men weep. All four of the girls had removed their dresses, and Cherry and Irma had taken off their bras as well. I was surprised to notice that Irma's breasts were almost as big as Cherry's, which was a hell of a thing considering the differences in their heights.
Chickie, the Puerto Rican one, squinted up at the lights and laughed. "Hey, we gonna get a tan from all thees bulbs." She was still looking at the floods while she opened the snap of her brassiere and bared her breasts. They weren't very large, but they hung very high on her and looked tight as small rubber balls. Her nipples were no bigger than Life Savers.
My eyes were so occupied with the sight of the three girls stripping off their panties that I didn't notice Lee right away. The girl was still wearing her bra and panties, and she wasn't making any move to peel herself. She was staring up at the floodlights like a convict caught trying to escape prison.
Roy tapped me on the arm then, and I turned to see him with fake sideburns and a moustache painted on his face. "Here," he said, handing me a jar of some black muck. "Put a beard or something on your puss. You don't want to be recognized when they show this flick around, now do you?"
"Buddy, you think of everything," I said.
With his help I painted on sideburns, a mustache, and, for good measure, a beard. He told me I looked like a real French unprintable, and I laughed.
By this time, Cherry had gone over to Lee and talked her into stripping. The girl's body wasn't bony at all; it was tight, as if all the skin on it had been drawn flat and smooth as a drum. Her breasts were the size of champagne glasses turned against her chest, with the stems broken off short to form the the little pink thrusts of her nipples. Her whole body was slim and smooth and muscular, the way a dancer's body sometimes looks, but she seemed too frail to be a dancer. In fact, she seemed too frail to even be a whore. One mistake with the wrong kind of customer could tear that slender frame apart.
Her eyes never changed expression as Roy left my side and walked over to the bed.
The first time around he took charge while I operated the camera. I was grateful for that, because I wanted to see just how far these four girls would go with a man before I tried to go there myself.
He even worked out a sort of scenario for the film, making the story up as he went along. It looked like this:
Chickie is lying on the bed. She is alone, she is asleep, she is completely naked. There's a smile on her face. Her thighs, which face the camera, open and close in spasms against the sheets.
She is dreaming of a lover.
Her hands come up to her breasts and she begins squeezing and molding the flesh in her palms, teasing the hard discs of her nipples into excitement. Every touch of her fingers seems to increase the passion of her dream, and her hips start to rotate on the bed. She lifts her knees, sets her feet wide apart, and raises her hips in a wild thrust toward her imaginary lover. She clutches at her breasts furiously.
Then she subsides, drops her body flat again, but her thighs are still twitching.
From the left of the screen, Irma enters. She is also naked, and the spheres of her huge breasts bounce gaily with each step she takes, along with the flesh of her generous bottom. Behind her comes Roy, who seems to be entering the scene against his will.
She is pulling him, but not by the hand.
Irma reaches the bed with Roy behind her, and looks down at Chickie's still-writhing figure. Chickie stops moving when she feels one of Irma's fingers press down on an aroused bosom, like a doorbell. She opens her eyes and looks hungrily at Roy.
Irma pulls Roy around where Chickie can see him better. Obviously, he is just what the two girls have been waiting for.
While Roy protests feebly, Irma flings him down on the bed and pins his face under her gigantic bust. Chickie, meanwhile, is running her slim hands all over his bare torso, caressing him wantonly with skilled fingers. His reaction is unmistakable.
The girls switch places. Irma slides down the bed to take possession of Roy's body. Chickie kneels beside his head and hangs her breasts invitingly over his face. She lifts a hand and caresses the outer edge of one breast as he kisses it. Irma is also kissing.
Roy's fear seems to leave him, and his hands come up around Chickie's slim body. He strokes her sides, then runs his palms down to her hips and around until he is cupping her trim bottom. She wriggles in his grasp, and the motion makes her breasts shift away from his mouth. She grabs one, squeezes it tightly with her hand, and presents the swollen tip to his mouth once more.
Irma is still kissing and fondling him.
Roy's passion has grown now to the point where all inhibitions seem to leave him. Clutching furiously at Chickie's buttocks, he heaves upward and flings her on her back beside him. The movement interrupts Irma's caresses, and Roy's body is now pinning Chickie to the bed. He is palming her breasts frantically, and one of his knees raises to force her thighs open.
Obediently, Chickie lifts her knees, and her long shapely legs stick straight up in the air to form a wide angle. Roy drives for the apex, and Chickie rises to meet him.
While Irma watches, she plays idly with her breasts and thighs, hardly seeming aware of her hands as she concentrates on the couple beside her. Roy and Chickie are heaving together madly, making the bed dance beneath their rhythmic pounding. The quivering of the bed makes Irma's heavy flesh jiggle under her hands.
Chickie's legs are still pointed straight up. Now the muscles in those legs begin to flex and strain, and her feet start to point in the same direction. Even her toes wiggle as Roy drives against her, his hands filled with her excited breasts, his hips bruising her spread thighs.
Irma's hands move more rapidly on her body as she sees Chickie's excitement grow. Chickie's face is choked with passion. Her eyes are clenched shut, her mouth is twisted into a grimace of lust that bares her teeth clear up to the gums. She curls her fingers into claws and rakes at Roy's back as the slim lengths of her legs lock in a spasm of delight.
With one final heave, it is done.
Her face relaxes. Her features go limp. Her legs hold their V for a moment, then fall heavily to the bed, still spread wide open.
Irma is now demanding her turn, but Roy is protesting that it is impossible. He indicates to her with crystal-clear gestures that he needs time to recover before he can perform again.
Irma attempts to bring about his recovery, but fails. Annoyed, she climbs from the bed and leaves the scene with all her flesh swinging.
She returns a moment later with Cherry, who is also naked.
Cherry sizes up the situation at once, and a feline look of lust grows across her face. With one movement of her strong arms, she tumbles the limp form of Chickie off the bed onto the floor. Then she pushes Irma aside and falls insanely onto Roy's body, like an animal about to devour her prey.
For a while, it is impossible to tell where Roy stops and Cherry begins. Their limbs and bodies tangle in such a fury that details cannot be seen.
Now and then, Cherry's mouth will appear, poised in a lustful sneer over some portion of Roy's body. Then the mouth will strike, cobra-fashion, and the bodies will lock and roll again.
When it ends, Cherry is on top with Roy pinned helpless under her belly. Her long fingernails rake at him while her mouth nips at his body.
He has recovered.
Cherry climbs from the bed, and Irma hurries forward greedily, her eyes fixed on Roy's excited body. But Cherry bars her with an arm across her huge breasts. With gestures, she orders Irma not to touch the man on the bed until she has returned. Irma meekly agrees, and Cherry leaves the scene.
With the blonde gone, Irma's greed floods back on her face, and she inches forward until she is standing beside the bed. Roy's eyes are closed. She leans forward, causing her breasts to brush across his loins, and he stirs.
Before he can open his eyes, she brings her hands to the pendulous globes and squeezes them together, trapping him. She wriggles her shoulders, causing her flesh to shift against his delightfully.
When she straightens up, the enormous tips of her boobs have grown tense with passion. She kneels on the bed and flings a thigh over him, mounting his hips expertly.
She begins to ride him, going quickly from a trot to a canter to a full gallop. Her flesh heaves madly with every movement and her face turns soft and formless as marshmallow as her passion builds.
It is over quickly. Irma's heavy body shudders with delight, then falls across Roy's. She snuggles her bosom against his chest while her hips play out the last few spasms.
At that moment, Cherry returns to the scene leading Lee by the hand. When she sees the couple on the bed, her face goes dark with anger. She drops Lee's hand, steps forward quickly, and hauls Irma from the bed. Irma comes to her senses and darts away in fear as Cherry's hands reach out to punish her. She bounces out of the scene, leaving Cherry and Lee alone with Roy's limp body.
After a moment, Cherry steps forward and flips Roy off the bed as deftly as she did Chickie. He vanishes from sight over the edge.
Cherry directs Lee to he down. The girl obeys, sliding her slender limbs across the sheets until she is reclining as stiffly as a corpse. Her expression is apprehensive and Cherry pats her on the cheek, as if to reassure her. As her palm leaves Lee's cheek, it brushes lightly over the girl's round little bust, but neither of them seems to notice it.
Then, Cherry turns and leaves the scene.
Cut.
That was how it looked through the viewfinder, and one hell of a show it was. Even after Roy's voice called at me to halt, I couldn't take my eyes from that finder. It was so much like watching a terrifically exciting dirty movie that I had the crazy fear I'd miss something if I looked away.
When Roy tapped me on the shoulder, I snapped out of it and looked up at him. "Brother," I said. "That was some performance."
"Yeah," he replied. "Is this here the button you push to operate this thing?" He poked a finger at the camera.
"Yes-that's right. Just push it down."
"Okay," he said. "Let's go." I stared at him. "Is there more?" He stared at me. "More? Of course, there's more." He laughed and gave me a shove toward the bed. 'Take Two, Charlie. You're on."
CHAPTER SIX
Somebody was watching me.
It was the funniest feeling. I knew it could be nothing but shyness at going into an unfamiliar sexual situation, but I couldn't shake it. There were eyes watching me, and it made my skin crawl.
Of course, there were ten eyes in the room with me, but they weren't the ones that bothered me. I had made women with Roy watching several times, and had gotten used to it. I had also made women while other women watched, since Roy and I had often gone for several broads at a time during our Army years. The fact that people were in the room, waiting to see me perform-that wasn't the point.
The somebody who was watching me was the camera.
I knew there wasn't really anybody behind that lens. It was a movie camera, designed to record images on light-sensitive film, and it didn't have a mind or a heart, it didn't care who I was or how I performed.
But it really seemed to me that people were watching-all the people who were going to buy and show the film we were making, all the men and women who would sit in darkened rooms and stare at a flickering screen and watch me taking care of a girl.
I could swear they were all inside the camera, staring at me. Here I was," naked as a jaybird, about to perform one of the most private and important acts in any man's life; about to perform it, in fact, with a girl I didn't even particularly want-and all these bloody strangers were watching. Every move I made was being recorded for the ages. It seemed that my privacy was being violated permanently.
Thinking these things made the anticipation of sex less exciting than it should be, and strangely cold-blooded.
Cherry helped make the cold-blooded atmosphere grow.
I had watched her both on and off camera during the trio scene, and I had noticed distinctly the way she could turn it on and off. When she was outside camera range waiting for her cues to enter, she would simply stand there, her superb body naked and glowing, her eyes watching the tangling people on the bed, her beautiful face void of all expression. There wouldn't be even a spark of interest in her eyes. She would just stare at nude and frantic sex as bored as a Rock-n-Roll fan at a concert.
But as soon as her cue came up, her expression would change. The animal look would flood into her eyes, the lines of her body would tense up, even her breasts seemed to lift an inch or so. In a single instant, she would turn from a bored spectator to an excited participant. And when she stepped in front of the camera, the viewer would swear she had been horny for at least an hour.
Then, when the camera stopped rolling, the switch would click it off again, and you would swear it never happened.
At the moment, Cherry and I were standing only a foot or two from each other, while Roy called out instructions from behind the camera. I glanced now and then at her face, but I couldn't find a thing in it. She paid absolutely no attention to me.
"Okay," Roy said. "Now here's what's happened. Chickie's satisfied and Irma's been tossed out, but I'm all used up. So you-Cherry-have to find another man to take care of Lee and yourself. And you found Charlie. Get it?"
She nodded without speaking. I did the same thing.
"Fine. Now when I roll this camera, I just want a few seconds worth of film of Lee lying alone there on the bed. I'll give you two the signal when you should come in. And, Cherry-I want you to lead him in the same way Irma did to me."
She nodded again, and I felt a little chill go up my spine at the thought of her holding me in such a fashion.
"And remember, Charlie-you're supposed to be frightened in the beginning. She's pulling you into it against your will. Think you can look like that?"
"I'll try," I said. "Listen, Roy-is there anything special I'm supposed to do? I mean, do I take care of just Lee or both girls at the same time, or what?"
"Don't worry about that," Cherry said, and I turned to her, surprised that she'd finally spoken. Rut her face was as cold and emotionless as ever. "I'll lead you, Charlie. You just follow through."
I smiled at her, then felt stupid and let the smile fall. "Okay," I said.
"Everybody ready?" Roy called. "Here goes."
He hit the button and the whir of the camera began. It was an electric job-ran on batteries-and had a six-hundred foot magazine hooked to it, so there was no need to interrupt the action for rewinding or changing film. Once Cherry and I stepped into range of that lens, there wouldn't be any reason for us to stop until we got the word from Roy.
"Okay, Cherry-Charlie. Move in and get to it."
She grabbed me. It felt just as electrifying as I expected, and I didn't have an easy time following her because of a weakness in my knees. But I had no trouble at all acting scared and apprehensive for the camera.
As I was pulled into the glare of the floods, I caught a glimpse of Irma and Chickie on the sidelines. The short one seemed bored with the scene. Apparently her job was through for the evening, because she had put her bra and panties back on. But Chickie was still naked, and seemed quite fascinated with it all. As she watched us, in fact, I noticed her fondling herself several times just as she had done for the camera, without trying to hide it, without any em-harassment, and smiling her big pearly smile.
Then I was in the movies, and was forced to concentrate on that.
Lee was still lying on the bed as Cherry pulled me up beside it. The girl's eyes were open, but she didn't look at us until Cherry bent over her. I watched the blonde's luscious breasts swing out over Lee's stony face, and the sight made me oddly excited. I didn't know why a woman's breasts hanging over another woman's face should be arousing to me, but it was.
Lee saw the breasts first, then looked up at Cherry's face. The blonde touched her cheek again, but didn't say a word. Nevertheless, I could swear some kind of message passed between them.
Cherry gave me a tug. "Lie down with her," she said.
She stepped out of my way. As I started to climb onto the bed, I caught a look at her features, and discovered she had turned it on again. That look of flaming lust was lighting her eyes, and her rich lips were twisted into a sensual leer. Once again, even the flesh of her nude body had firmed up, as if sexual excitement had the power to harden her.
But none of this fire was in her voice.
I slid into position beside Lee, and felt the girl's smooth hip graze along my thigh as I lay back. But I didn't look at her, because she didn't much interest me. As far as I was concerned, Cherry was still the only woman in the room I wanted, and I kept my eyes on her.
Cherry's face glowed with passion as she ran her hands up her torso and clutched the rich globes of her front, but her voice remained as flat as ever when she spoke.
"Touch her breasts," she said.
It was a command. I didn't want to turn away from the lovely sight of Cherry squeezing her melons at me, but I had promised to follow her lead while we were on camera, so I did as she said. An odd thought hit me, and I wandered if playing along with her and doing exactly as she told me would make her warm up to me a little. It was a very unmasculine notion, and I was shaken by the fact that I was actually willing to crawl a little to win that blonde whore's attention. But I did it anyway.
I rolled away from Cherry and lifted up on one elbow next to Lee. The girl was prettier close up, and looked even more delicate. I let my eyes roam from her round eyes and dead face down the ivory of her throat, past her breasts, all the way down along the length of her body. Her skin was cold-looking as marble, and just as smooth. Her hips, as I said, were narrow, but the frame of her pelvis was very feminine and attractive. The belly was flat, the thighs were so slender there was an inch of space between them, even though her knees were together. A pale whispy triangle marked the place where her belly turned under.
She wasn't my idea of an exciting woman, but there was something arousing about her anyway. She looked so damned helpless and fragile lying there, and that impression added spice to the moment. Once again, she was making me feel like a rapist, but now I was beginning to see the charm in rape. Really giving it to a girl as small and defenseless as Lee might be quite a kick after all.
Besides, Cherry had told me to do it.
So I started in on Lee, obeying Cherry's orders, concentrating all my passion on the slender creature next to me in order to win the favor of the lush-fleshed one behind me.
I cupped a palm over Lee's right breast. It was a small mound, soft and hard at the same time, and it felt as young and tender as she looked. There was excitement in caressing something as soft as that dainty mound, but it wasn't any excitement I was familiar with.
As I warmed her small roundness in my hand, I watched her face for a reaction. There wasn't any. Her eyes, which were still wide open, stared at the ceiling fixedly, and there was no trace of expression behind their liquid blackness. I moved the breast-mound with my fingers, shifting it gently against her tight torso, waiting for the sensation to have some effect. I could just feel the tiny coin of her nipple, but only because it was softer and more yielding than the flesh around it. If that circle of flesh started rising in response to my hand, I would know she was feeling it.
But nothing happened. The nipple remained as lax and soft as if Lee was asleep. Her breathing stayed regular, her eyes never changed the angle of their gaze, and nothing at all happened.
It made me feel rather silly. Holding her little breast was fun for me, sure, but unless it was fun for her as well there didn't seem any point in continuing.
"Now the other one," said Cherry.
The last sight I had of the big blonde was when she'd started caressing her own bust, and the thought of those ripe beauties only made me that much more dissatisfied with the ones I had to play with. But orders were orders, so I reached up my other hand and took possession of both Lee's breasts.
So soft and small, nothing like any breasts I'd ever handled-those mounds fitted my palms perfectly. If her flesh ever started to react, I would probably begin to enjoy it. All I needed was the little electric thrust of a nipple into my hand, and things would be fine.
But try as I might, I just couldn't make it happen. For all the reaction I got, for all the pleasure she was getting, those soft little breasts might as well have belonged to another woman. I was feeling Lee, but she wasn't feeling it at all.
It made me mad. I didn't like the way she ignored my presence, and my caress. When I play with a woman's front I expect to see her get something out of it. I personally enjoy playing with breasts, of course, but I want the owner of the bust to get a bit of a charge herself.
Most women do respond to such fondling-that is, if they are really women, and not little frigid baby dolls like the one under me.
Lee's coldness was more subtle than Cherry's but just as irritating. Cherry at least could turn it on and off, but Lee seemed incapable of even pretending. It was too soon after my last icing-up for me to take another one gracefully, and I started getting very mad.
A man can stand being ignored for just so long, especially by a woman. Getting the invisible-man treatment from two of them at once was more than any male could endure, and it wasn't something I would take lying down. I wanted to jump off the bed and give it violently to Cherry right there on the floor, but I wasn't angry enough yet to do anything like that; a part of my brain reminded me that she would probably get very annoyed if I followed my instincts. But the voices of reason weren't going to stop me from taking out my frustrations on this frail soft-breasted waxworks beneath me.
I heard Cherry say, "Kiss her breasts now."
But I was way ahead of her.
I slid my hand from Lee's mound, grabbed it fiercely, making the flesh of it bulge up between my thumb and forefinger, then dropped my open mouth onto the limp circle of the nipple.
I gave it to her. It wasn't a kiss, really-it was an attack on her breast. I drew at her tender flesh with everything I had, not caring if my kiss hurt, not worrying about any marks I might leave. I was going to make that tip respond. I was determined to feel it rise into my mouth, taste the thrust of it answering the thrust of my tongue.
I got nowhere.
I could lift my head just enough to see Lee's face without removing my lips from her, and I searched her features for some kind of expression.
Nothing.
I had been squeezing her other breast all this time, but now I let go and shot my free hand down across her belly, forcing her thighs open with my knuckles. I grabbed her violently while my mouth pulled on her bust.
Still nothing.
I was going crazy. Another few minutes of this, I was convinced, would crack me up. If Lee didn't say or do something pretty soon, I would sail past the point of no return, and just heave onto her and tear her to pieces with all the manhood I could muster. If I couldn't make her thrill, then I was going to make her suffer.
Something happened.
Lee's head turned against the sheets and her eyes stared past me. As far as I knew, Cherry was still standing back there, so Lee must have been looking at her.
Then, with no warning, I felt Lee's nipple go hard as a rock between my lips. At the same instant, her hips rose from the bed and her thighs tensed as she ground her pelvis wildly into my cupped palm. Her whole body went from limp boredom to vibrant passion, and in less than it takes to say a four-letter word.
Something Cherry was doing behind me had turned Lee on. But what could it be? What the hell was going on back there? I strained my ears, listening for a sound that might clue me, but heard nothing except the faint whir of the camera.
I wanted like mad to turn around and look, but I couldn't do that without taking my mouth from Lee, which was against orders. Besides, I liked my hand and mouth where they were at the moment. I was getting a response at last, and I wanted to take advantage of it for as long as it lasted. Maybe Lee wasn't as desirable as Cherry, but she was a woman, and I had broken through her ice armor at last.
I kept at it, enjoying myself as I shifted my mouth from one meaty softness to another, and matched Lee's spasmic hip-thrusts with brutal pressures of my hand and fingers. I was going great guns, in fact, until I heard Cherry's voice again.
She told me in the vilest most unprintable language what she wanted me to do with Lee. She sounded as if she were getting hot herself, and the thought of that drove me wild. So I did it.
Lee took it like a nymphomaniac, winding her slim legs around my hips and pulling me down between her thighs with more muscle than I would have given her credit for. Up came her hips, weaving and searching for my touch; when she found me, those hips gave a lurch and came up flush against me in as wanton a joining as I had ever experienced.
The wax doll was gone, and in its place suddenly there was a sex-starved wildcat. I let my body fall on her, pinning the small mounds of her breasts flat against me, driving her loins into the sagging bed furiously. All my weight was on her, and I didn't care whether she could breathe or not, because this left my hands free to explore her body, stroke her sides and hips, even to slip around and grab hard into the yielding meat of her bottom. I clutched at her, I drove at her, I bit her shoulder, I pounded my body against her tender breasts, and she went crazy.
But not for me.
She was going crazy for what was happening behind me.
All the time we were throbbing together, Lee never once looked at me. Her arms stayed at her sides, her legs held me in position and flexed to maintain the rhythm she wanted, but none of her excitement was for me. I could feel her nipples like tiny stones against my chest, smell the musk of female passion in her hoarse breathing, feel the moisture of lust's sweat oiling my hips where they rode against her thighs.
But none of it was for me. All her arousement was being generated by the sight of Cherry, and what Cherry was doing.
Something snapped. I'd been mad before many times in my life, but never as mad as I was at that moment. I was angry enough to kill and the only weapon handy was my manhood, so I took out all that anger in the most brutal bedroom ride I had ever given a girl.
I raped Lee. I violated her, I pierced her, I speared her and crushed her savagely. I poured out all my hate for women who wouldn't give themselves freely to a man, all the damn females in the work! who teased, who held back, who got their kicks from dangling it in front of you, then snatching it away before you could even enjoy it-all the rotten-ones who loved to make a man squirm and crawl and beg for the one thing that was rightfully his.
I gave up trying to be civilized, and took a caveman's revenge. I think I shouted and yelled, but I'm not sure.
When it ended, it was with a wrench that was more pain than enjoyment. I let myself go, grinding my teeth and hammering at Lee's loins in one final spasm of frustration.
Then it was over, and I sprawled on her, limp and spent beyond endurance.
It was a while before I had enough strength to raise my head, and by that time the whir of the camera had stopped. Roy's voice was saying something, but I couldn't hear it with the blood pounding in my ears. "Go away," I said.
"Now, now," Roy said cheerfully. "Time to rise and shine. The show's over, old buddy. Don't fight me.
I ignored him. I was looking at Lee's face, which was only inches from my own. The passion was gone. She had shut it off completely. All my effort hadn't succeeded in thrilling her, or even hurting her.
It just left her right back where she started.
But Cherry had done something to excite this frigid little broad. Cherry had been up to something back there, and the sight of it had switched Lee on.
Switches, I thought-all these damn women have switches. But Cherry has the greatest switch of them all. Not only could she turn herself hot or cold with no effort, she could even do it to other girls by remote control.
"Let's go," Roy said, his voice less friendly than before. "We're finished with this scene, Charlie."
I was still looking at Lee's blank face, and our bodies were still joined. For all the pleasure I felt, I might as well have been lying on a robot.
"Go to hell," I said, aiming the words at Lee and Roy both.
There was silence for a few moments, and then another voice spoke. "Get off her," Cherry said. "You go to hell, too."
Her words were as cold as a January wind. "Get off her-right now. Do as I say, or you'll never have another chance at me, not as long as you five."
Her words hit me like a club against the back of my head. For just an instant, I really saw red, and my body tensed to leap from that bed and the robot broad I had just made. I wanted to face Cherry Sims and belt her right in the nose, knock her senseless, beat every pearly tooth out of that sneering mouth, reduce those beautiful features to a bloody pulp under my fists, then fling her to the floor and give it to her, give her such a pounding that she'd wake up the next morning with her butt full of splinters.
I was a man, wasn't I? And men don't take orders from women.
Men take women.
I thought all this in the space of a heartbeat. Mentally, I planned my revenge on Cherry's rotten conniving female egotism.
Then, I did what I was told.
I lifted myself from Lee's inert body and climbed slowly off the bed.
Irma and Chickie were dressed. Cherry's dress was on only as far as her waist. The bodice of it hung down over her belly and her arms were crossed on her naked body, making her breasts bulge upward and out. She looked like a creature halfway between a Greek goddess and a Nazi storm trooper.
I stood facing her. I don't know whether my anger showed or not; if it did, she gave no sign of seeing it.
"Don't do that again," she said. It was a simple statement, but I didn't miss the larger meaning behind it. She wasn't referring to not stopping when the camera stopped, or staying on top of a girl longer than necessary.
She was telling me never to disobey her again.
It was as simple as that.
I could have done a hundred different things at that moment, could have regained my manhood with just a few well-chosen words. But I did nothing. I just stood there and watched Cherry uncross her arms, letting the weights of her breasts settle into place on her front, then slip her bodice up to contain those magnificent teardrops.
She stepped past me without a word, as haughty and cool as a society matron, and gave Lee a hand getting off the bed. The girl acted weak as a kitten, but her face was as dead as ever. Her body was covered with bruises and I saw my teeth had left marks all over her tender breasts.
The sight hardly cheered me up at all.
I looked for Roy and spotted him on the other side of the room. He was dressed. He didn't look at me. He didn't seem to be looking at anything.
When Lee was dressed, Cherry walked her around the bed and went to the back door. She pulled it open, then turned. Her eyes swept the room, but ignored my existence altogether.
"Girls?" she said. "Roy?"
Her troop followed her voice obediently across the room, and the whole crowd of them stepped into the night. Roy walked right past me without saying a word, without even a nod.
Cherry slammed the door.
For a long while I just remained where I was, standing nude and sweating in the empty glare of the floodlights. Finally, I crossed to the extension cord and flicked the lights off.
The sudden darkness was fantastic, but I managed to get back to the bed without tripping over anything. I stretched myself out on it, trying to ignore the wild smell of sex which rose from its rumpled sheets.
Cherry had defeated me, and that moment of defeat was quite a turning point in my life.
I wouldn't know until later just how big a turning point it had been.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When I woke up the next morning, I was a new man.
A new man-people use that expression to describe those rare times when they really feel good, when they wake up and discover the sun shining and the birds singing and everything right with the world. When somebody says he's a new man, all he's saying is that, for a change, he doesn't feel as cruddy as he usually feels.
I woke up feeling cruddier than I had ever felt in my life.
But I was a new man just the same.
The new man had my old name, Charlie Garner. And he owned my old camera shop. He also owned all my old memories and hopes and aspirations. When I looked in the mirror that morning, I discovered he also owned my face.
This new man was all inside me, and he was wearing me like a disguise.
Have you ever looked at yourself in a mirror, and I mean really looked, stared for a while at your reflection, made faces so you could examine the play of expressions across your features? Have you ever done that?
If you stare at yourself long enough that way, something peculiar begins to happen. One minute, the face in that mirror is just the same old reflection you've beenn seeing for years; the next, it turns into the face of a stranger. All of a sudden the features aren't so familiar any more. The face begins to look like someone who resembles you, and not like you yourself at all. The longer you stare, the more this strangeness grows, until after a while you begin to wonder just who the hell is this guy you're staring at.
A second later, you start wondering why he's staring at you.
Because that's what he's doing. Those eyes-which aren't your eyes any more-are looking right out of that strange and familiar face, and it's impossible to read the expression in them. Maybe those eyes are laughing at you, or maybe they're full of sadness or even pity. You can't tell. For all you know, the eyes of that stranger are simply watching, interested and emotionless like the eyes of a guard in a mental institution waiting to see what a loony patient will do next.
There's nothing to do at this point but turn away. Don't try to stare the stranger down, because he can last just as long as you can. And don't try to sneak a look at him, hoping to catch him off guard with some tell-tale expression on his face, because the instant you do that you'll see he's trying to catch you the same way.
Maybe this is something that's never happened to you, in which case you probably don't know what I'm talking about. If so, don't go looking for a mirror to try it. You'll be better off just forgetting about the whole thing.
That morning when I looked at my reflection, I discovered I was a new man.
I knew it instantly. This time there was no need to stare and wait until the reflection became unfamiliar; my very first look convinced me there was a stranger behind that glass, a stranger wearing a me costume that didn't fit him very well.
The whole story was in the eyes, which, as the poets say, are the windows into the soul.
Those eyes were the eyes of a defeated man. Of a weakling, a coward, a crawler, a worm, a failure. Those eyes were so empty and void it was an embarrassment to look at them. It was like staring at a Bowery bum, which is cruel and impolite because you know if he catches you at it he's going to see all the pity and revulsion in your face.
They were the eyes of a drained man, and they had been my eyes once. But, then, so had this body once belonged to me, and so had the face and the name and the store and the twenty-six year deep file of experience. It had all been mine when I had gone to sleep the night before, but when I woke up I was a new man, and he had taken over the works.
The new man showered that morning, just the way I always did, and he shaved himself with my razor. After that, he ate a breakfast of my food at my table, smoked a few of my cigarettes over a cup of my coffee, then dressed himself in my clothes and left my apartment.
At that point, his newness really began to show.
Instead of throwing the shop open for the morning, instead of lifting the shades and turning on the lights and setting up the register and the receipt book, the new man went into the store and locked the door behind him. He wrote a sign on a piece of cardboard-the bastard even had my handwriting-and Scotch taped the sign to the front window.
It said: Closed because of death in the family.
He thought that was very funny, and he laughed my laugh at it.
Then he raided the inventory for an assortment of chemicals, a thousand-foot capacity 16 mil. developing tank, a drying rack, and all the other apparatus needed to process a reel of movie film.
When the doors to both the front of the store and the back rooms were closed, the place was pitch black. The curtains behind the bed covered the room's only windows. There was no outlet handy for a red darkroom bulb, but this new man, this stranger, had all my experience with photography along with everything else I had once owned, so he had no trouble opening the film magazine and spooling the six hundred feet into the development tank purely by touch.
Once the film was in the tank it was safe from light, so the new man turned on the room lights. Then he mixed the powders carefully with distilled water, checked the temperatures with a darkroom thermometer, noted the time on his watch, and poured the developer into the tank.
He was a real pro, this guy; I had to admit it. He processed that reel as if he had been doing such work for years. He stopped the developer at exactly the right moment, gave the stop-bath a few seconds to sit, then emptied the tank and poured in the fixer. It hardly took any time at all.
Between baths, this new man just sat and waited, with no expression on his face-my face-and smoked another of my cigarettes with apparent enjoyment.
When the print had been fixed, he emptied the hypo from the tank and poured in a rapid-drying bath. He knew the film was reversal stock, which produced a positive image rather than a negative, so it wouldn't be necessary to print it. Once the drying bath had done its work, the film would be ready to screen.
While he waited, he found an unused outlet, plugged in my old hot plate, and brewed himself a pot of coffee. By the time he'd finished the first cup, the film was ready to roll.
He went out front and dragged in the old B & H on which I'd first seen Cherry Sims do her Twist. He also set up a screen, and framed the image as neatly as I ever could.
Then he threaded the film, ran it once through the projector with the port closed, using the heat of the lamp to dry the print completely. With that done, he rewound, rethreaded, flipped open the port, and rolled it.
Chickie was on the screen, feeling herself. The print was a little grainy and the lighting was very harsh, and it all somehow managed to make the Puerto Rican girl look very cheap. It also made what she was doing to her body seem very exciting.
The new man felt the stirring of my arousement.
When Irma appeared dragging an old friend of mine, the man's interest quickened. He really got a charge out of the way those two girls went to work on the guy, falling all over him with such utter abandon. He could understand perfectly why the fellow on the bed trembled and heaved so much while the girls were crawling on him.
The new man loved it when the fellow rolled onto Chickie and bagged her furiously.
He laughed when he saw chubby big-boobed Irma draw a blank with her efforts to get the guy ready for another.
He was still laughing when Irma bounced angrily out of camera-range.
Then this blonde entered from the left-this naked blonde, with a body like a goddess and a face like sin and a look of lust radiating from her flesh with intensity enough to burn the film.
Cherry Sims walked herself on camera, and the new man stopped laughing.
At that moment, the new man and I realized we were the same person.
I had seen it all before, of course-last night, through the viewfinder. But I watched it anyway, fascinated. I watched the pantomime as Irma told Cherry what she wanted, then saw that look of insane erotic greed light up in Cherry's face as she pounced on Roy's limp body. I watched her romp all over him, her body dancing in weights of lush flesh, her mouth leeching onto Roy wherever she could find an opportunity. I watched their legs and arms tangle, their bodies slap and slide together.
It looked different on film, just the way it had with Chickie in the opening scene. It seemed much dirtier and much more arousing to see those male and female bodies tangling in grainy black and white. As I stared at the screen, I realized dimly that last night's session had produced a first-class pornographic film.
Cherry finished with Roy and climbed off him, leaving him in a state of colossal excitement. She gave her orders to Irma and left the scene. I didn't pay much attention to the short girl's disobedience of the blonde's orders, even though the sight of her body bounding astride Roy's hips was a pretty arousing one.
I knew what was coming next, and the knowledge scared me a little.
Cherry returned holding Lee by the hand, saw what had happened, and drove Irma from the scene. She pushed Roy from the bed, then made Lee recline, and I saw again that curious caress of hers which first brushed the girl's cheek, then fluttered subtly down across her breasts. It was so quick you hardly had a chance to see it, but it added a strange new dimension to the film.
Cherry left. She came back dragging a man behind her with her hand.
That man was me.
So now I was three people: the old Charlie, the New Man, and that guy up there on the screen.
I don't suppose you've ever watched yourself in a dirty picture, or even seen photos of any of your sexual performances. You ought to, if you ever get the chance, because it's a very illuminating experience.
Watching movies of yourself making it is a lot like hearing your voice on a tape recorder for the first time. The act of speaking and the act of loving are things you can't really evaluate from inside yourself, and the sight of your own body going at it is just as strange as the first time your words ever sounded from the speaker of a recording machine.
You listen-or look-for just a second, and then you decide that it couldn't possibly be you.
But it is.
The man on the screen in front of me looked like an idiot. I had never given any thought to the expressions I wore while I was busy with a woman, but now I was watching myself arranging and rearranging my features into the face of a certifiable moron. The figure on the screen had reclined beside Lee's stony nudity, and was scanning the body with his eyes, and I could remember doing that last night, I could remember what I had seen and how I had felt.
But I didn't remember looking at that tight bare flesh with such a drooling and stupid anticipation in my eyes. I hadn't even particularly wanted Lee at that point, but a viewer would never have guessed it from the way my eyes devoured her nudity.
I watched my technique as I palmed her breasts, and remembered how angry I had become at her for not responding. Seeing it there on the screen in black and white, I wondered why any woman in the world ever responded to such a caress. My hands were clumsy and foolish, and I worked at Lee's soft little mounds the way a child might play with modeling clay. There was no grace or electricity in it at all; it was just pawing. Looking at it, I could see how a female might actually find bust-feeling annoying, or even irritating.
It was just the same when my anger got the best of me and I rolled onto the girl, forming my mouth around her lax nipple. I looked like a baby going for its feed, greedy and stupid and harsh. Even when my hand plunged between her thighs, which is certainly an adult enough gesture, I still looked like a child.
Technique? You couldn't call grabbing and slobbering technique. It was nothing but instinct, and not a very well-developed instinct at that.
I was so preoccupied with the appalling sight of my own groveling that I didn't notice Cherry until after she'd started. When it caught my eye, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My hand came out and hit the projector switch, and the screen flickered into darkness.
I sat there for a moment beside the machine, wondering whether I really wanted to see the rest of the film. The scene coming up was going to answer the question which had plagued me last night-what Cherry had done to turn Lee on like that. But did I really want to know any more?
I was a new man, sure-but I was also a falling man. The events of the past few days had toppled me out of my old life, pushed me off my comfortable routine as easily as if it had been a tightrope instead of a well-worn rut. It had taken me until this morning to realize I was falling, and to start wondering whether I could ever get back where I'd been.
Now I was seeing that my fall wasn't over.
Where was the bottom of this thing? How far did I have to plunge before I landed somewhere? The farther I fell, the farther away my old world became, dwindling above me like the mouth of a well, slowly closing into a pinpoint. If I dropped far enough into that well, eventually I wouldn't be able to see the sky at all, and I'd just be swallowed up by all that damp lustful darkness.
I was a falling man. If I switched on the projector and watched the rest of this film, wouldn't that just hasten my fall?
I had to decide between satisfying my burning curiosity and losing the sight of the sun forever, or stopping right there and then and trying to claw my way back up into the light.
It didn't take much time to decide. The changes in my life had robbed me of many things, and among them was my strength. I didn't feel energetic enough to exert myself against the force pulling me.
Falling is a whole hell of a lot easier than climbing.
I had been holding onto a sort of ledge for the past few minutes, so I let go of it and began falling again. And that left my hands free to work the projector.
I ran the film back a ways, not wanting to miss even a second of Cherry's big secret, then set the control to forward-run and hit the switch. The film sprang to life on the screen.
I was there on the bed. I was kissing Lee's breasts furiously, and palming her tenderest flesh with my brutal hand. Behind me, Cherry stood calmly, her hands at her sides, her body relaxed. Then she lifted her arm.
Lee saw the motion and turned her head to watch.
This was the moment, I thought, leaning forward intently. This was the moment when Lee had suddenly switched it on, when her body had begun to respond under my kisses and touches. Cherry was about to perform some act which would do for Lee what all my efforts had failed to do.
Cherry started playing with herself.
But not like Chickie-not at all like Chickie. The Puerto Rican gal had just reclined on the bed and fondled her own flesh idly, dreamily, languorously, enjoying the gentle stimulation, lost in a slow drifting illusion of erotic pleasure.
Chickie had just caressed herself.
Cherry was attacking herself.
Her hands grabbed fiercely at the splendid weights of her breasts, and even on the black and white film I could see the paleness of her flesh around those clutching fingers as the pressure of the grasp drove the blood from her breasts. That blood seemed to suddenly well into the areas of her nipples, because the pebbled aureoles went dark and hard, and tiny fingers rose from the centers of them.
Those fingers pointed straight at Lee.
I saw Lee's body stiffen with delight, saw the damnedest lascivious expression invade her face, and remembered how her breasts had started to answer my kiss at that moment. My image on the screen began to heave and pant wildly on Lee's slender anatomy while the subject of my labors stared glassy-eyed at the blonde beauty of naked Cherry.
Cherry was manipulating her breasts all over her front, smashing them flat against herself, then pulling them away as if they were two blobs of dough pasted to her chest. The shapes of those pendulous lovelies shifted and changed in her hands. I could still remember their firmness from the first time I had felt her, so I had a pretty accurate idea of just how furiously she was handling herself. The pressure of fingers required to affect the shape of such a firm front would have to be damned brutal, and painful as well.
In the film, I had climbed onto Lee and she had lurched upward to connect us. As my image and the image of that suddenly excited girl began to heave against each other, Cherry took her hands from her breasts.
Once again, color film wasn't necessary to record the damage she had done with her fingers. All around the peripheries of her breasts were pale pressure marks which turned into bruises almost as dark as her nipples an instant later.
She put her hands flat under her breasts, fingers pointing downward, pinching and squeezing the flesh of her torso. Her face was slack, her open mouth glimmered with moisture in the harsh light of the floods, her breathing became furious enough to shake the bruised globes of her front. Slowly but surely her hand worked down, across her waist, around the little pucker of her naval, down across the throbbing hill of her belly.
I saw where her hands were going, and couldn't believe she intended to continue the brutal pinching of her fingers. But that was exactly what she intended.
On the screen, Lee saw it, too-and the sight made her body arch with a passion that was incredible to watch. One of the girl's hands-which, I remembered, had never lifted a finger to touch me-reached out from the bed toward Cherry, trembling with a desire I simply couldn't fathom. But the blonde was not within reach of Lee's hand.
She was in reach of only her own hands.
Just as in the finale of that Twist film-the film in which I had first seen her lustful nudity-Cherry bent her body backward, forcing her breasts to lift sensuously, and spread her tensed thighs in a voluptuous quiver.
Her invading fingers found their ultimate target.
I watched all the way through to the end of the film, not really believing what I saw. I wonder if this new man I had turned into was a lunatic; it was hard to find any other explanation. My logic told me that no woman would ever use herself in such a fiendish manner, ever torment her body the way Cherry was doing on that screen-unless maybe she was a lunatic herself.
When the film ended, I was ready to believe she was.
It happened there on the screen for myself and Lee; you could see it happening. The muscles of both our bodies drained and locked as we were mutually devoured by lust.
And I think, although I'm not sure, it happened for Cherry, too. If it did, it was a gift she gave herself.
Then the screen went brilliant white and the tail of the film began to slap against the takeup reel. I hit the switch, and the machine clattered to a stop.
After a minute or so, I got up and went to the front of the store. I called The Consort, and asked to be connected with Roy Beal. I wanted to tell him I had processed the film and that it had come out well, but I also wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to know if he could still talk after having spent the night with a woman who was capable of the things I had just seen.
The phone rang several times before it was answered. And it was Cherry who answered it.
"Hello?"
Her voice was as rich with passion's syrup as when I'd first heard it. The sound made her image flood into my mind-the image of her astride my hips that first night, the image of her leading me to the bed just last night, and the unforgettable image of what I had just seen her doing in the film-all these images formed something I recognized.
They formed the bottom of the wall into which I was f ailing.
"This is Charlie," I said.
"Hello, Charlie." There was no trace of anger in her words. She seemed to have forgiven me for my transgressions.
"I processed the film," I said. "I just showed it."
"That's fine," she said evenly. "Did it turn out well?"
"Yes. Everything is fine." I paused for a moment, then added, "Especially that last scene-that scene where I was on top of Lee and you were standing behind us."
"Good," she said, her voice as even as before. "That scene is going to be a good selling point."
I couldn't think of any answer for such a bland statement. She made her vile self-fondling sound like nothing more than a piece of stage business.
"Is that all you called about?" she asked.
"No. I want to see you." The words came out of my mouth before I even knew I was going to say them. "I want to see you now, Cherry."
"That's impossible," she replied. "Perhaps later."
"Now," I said. "I want you now."
"No." There was expression in her voice. The word was a command.
I didn't try to plead with her, but not because of pride. I simply knew it wouldn't do any good. "All right. When?"
"Soon," she said.
"All right."
"I'll send Roy out to pick up the film. I've arranged to have duplicates made. Also, there is an idea he wants to discuss with you."
"What sort of idea?"
"He'll explain when he arrives. Goodbye, Charlie." Click.
Just like that, my audience with the Queen of Lust was ended.
The Queen of Lust-who had a simple-minded little jester named Charlie.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Roy showed up late that afternoon.
The problems, the questions, the changes I had been going through didn't seem to affect him at all. I may have been a new man, but Roy was his old self again.
"You shouldn't have done that," he said to me, after we'd gone into the back room together.
"Shouldn't have done what?"
"Stayed on top of Lee last night. You should have gotten off when I told you to."
I shrugged. "I was worn out. I didn't feel like moving."
"Yeah, I know," Roy said. "But that's just the point. You shouldn't have worn yourself out that way."
"What kind of remark is that? I was getting laid, wasn't I?"
"No," he said seriously. "You weren't. You were making a film."
"All right. I was making a film of myself getting laid."
"Sure. But the film was the important part. The fun was purely secondary. The only reason any of us were here was to make that film. Don't you see it, Charlie?"
"No," I said. His attitude was a bit annoying. "Maybe you'd better explain it to me."
"Look, Charlie-this thing we're in is a business. We all got together here last night to produce a film, a salable product. The quicker we made that film, and the better it was, the more money it would earn for us. It was in our own interests to knock it off and start turning it out with as little delay as possible."
"So? I developed it this morning, and Cherry tells me she's got somebody to make prints. There wasn't any delay, was there?"
"No, there wasn't," he replied. "But you still don't see what I'm driving at. Last night on that bed you bagged a woman for the camera, right?"
"Right."
"Did you want to make that particular gal?"
I stared at him. "Hell, no. The only reason I went near her is because you told me to. If I'd had any choice, I would have gone for Cherry, or even Chickie. I like a woman with some meat on her."
"That's what I thought," Roy said. "So the only reason you dug her was to get the film made. You climbed onto her and play-acted like she was the greatest thing in the world just so it would look good for the camera."
"Sure," I said.
"Then why didn't you get off when the camera stopped?"
"I already told you-I was worn out."
"Worn out why? If you were just acting, what the hell was there to get worn out about?"
"Well-" I thought for a second. "I didn't really want that broad-but once I got on her-"
"You stopped acting," he said.
"Yeah. That's right."
"That's wrong," he said. "That's what you did wrong."
"How could I help it?" I asked. "You start digging a gal, and nature just takes its course. I don't have any control over that."
"Oh, the hell you don't. Everybody can control it. Just because you're flopped on a nude female doesn't mean you lose your mind. You've bagged enough women by now to take it more casually than that."
"There wasn't a thing I could do about it," I said.
"Well, you'd better find a way to do something about it. Charlie, when we make these films, we're just like a Hollywood studio-we have our cameras and our sets and our actors. How would it be if two actors in a regular movie went into a clinch according to the script, and then got the hots for each other and started making it? Something like that would ruin the whole take. And anything that costs film costs money."
I thought of Cherry's switch, the one marked hot and cold, and how easy it was for her to flip from one extreme to the other. "I can't turn it off like that, Roy."
He shook his head and frowned. "You have to learn. We're going to be making a lot of films here, and if those films are to pay off, they've got to be the best product we can turn out. Pictures of couples jazzing are always good for a sale, sure; but the ones that really make the money are the flicks with some kind of story-line."
"You should know," I said.
"Absolutely. So, look-from now on, pay attention to the director. Okay? I'm not just trying to boss you around when I tell you what I want-I'm only trying to make a good flick, one that'll command a good price. You can see the sense in that, can't you?"
"You want me to hold back, is that it? You don't want me to get excited."
"Just excited enough to make it look good, Charlie. You can't let yourself forget the camera's watching you all the time. It wasn't so bad last night, because the flick was finished when you pooped out; but things would have been a lot stickier if we had been planning to use you again."
"I couldn't have gone again," I said.
"That's what I mean."
We were silent for a moment. Then I said, "How come you just walked out last night without saying anything? What the hell was the idea of that?"
He grinned. "Hey, old buddy-you mad at me?"
"I just want to know what happened."
"Relax," he said, waving a hand. "That wasn't anything. I was just humoring Cherry."
"You mean-because she was mad, you had to get mad, too?"
"I had to pretend I was mad, yes. When she gets like that, the only thing to do is humor her."
"That's not the only thing to do," I said. "You could always punch her in the mouth."
"Oh, come on," Roy said. "What would be the point of that? After all, she's a pretty valuable asset to an operation like this-she's a hell of a hunk herself, and she has the connections we need for getting other hunks. Considering all that, I think she's entitled to her whims."
"Well, maybe," I said doubtfully. "But I don't like taking orders from a woman."
"Who does?" Roy said cheerfully. "But most men do, just the same-that is, if the woman is worth enough to them."
"Yeah," I said.
"That's life, Charlie. You can't fight it." He looked over toward the hot plate. "Say, pal-how about a cup of that rotten coffee of yours?"
We drank coffee and chatted for a while longer, and I began to feel a bit more cheerful. Maybe my fall wasn't quite as final as I figured. I hadn't realized it before, but the hold Cherry had on me was probably only a temporary one. I had ached with the hots for other women in my time, and I had bowed to their wishes willingly to get what I wanted from them. Many was the time I had seen movies or plays I wasn't interested in, or spent the evening in restaurants I didn't like, just to satisfy some broad. It was worth bending a little, as long as the gal would agree to bend for you afterwards.
I offered to run the film for Roy, but he said he didn't have the time. "I got a lot to do today, pal. Big schedule."
"Hey, wait a minute-Cherry told me on the phone this morning that you had some idea to tell me about."
"Oh, that's right. I forgot. Actually, it's not my idea at all. It's hers."
"Let's hear it," I said.
"Well, the other night I was talking to her, and I mentioned all the young tail around here-you know, the sexy little high school kids."
"The Lolitas," I said.
"Right. Boy, that hits it on the nose. So I told her how I figured they all put out, and she got this great idea. She wants us to make a nymphet flick."
I stared at him. "Little kids? In dirty movies?"
"Why not? After all, aren't high school boys good customers for dirty pictures? And can you think of anything they would like better than a look at gals their own age? It's perfect, Charlie."
"But kids like that don't have the equipment to show 16 mil, " I said. , "That's nothing. We'll just make the prints in 8. Any kid who doesn't already have a cheap 8 millimeter projector knows somebody he can borrow one from. It's a whole new area to sell in, Charlie, and I think we're going to make some real money out of it."
"Where are you going to find kids that young who'll go that far?"
"Who knows? I'll scout around, and so will Cherry. I bet there are more teenage sex-pots in this town than you'd ever suspect."
"By this time," I said smiling, "nothing would surprise me."
He took the film with him when he left, and I decided to open up the shop. I guess nobody had noticed the sign in the window, because not a single customer asked me who died. And if anyone thought it was peculiar for me to be opening so late in the day, they didn't mention it.
I had quite a few customers in the few hours before dark, and most of them were Lolitas. For some reason the streets outside were crawling with these kids, and practically all of them wanted film. The cash register jangled so often it began to get on my nerves, but the sight of the money drawer filling up helped calm them again.
I thought about what Roy had said. If turning passion on and off was one of the qualifications of being a successful pornographer, then I'd just have to learn the trick. I could see his point, of course-from a business angle, the ability to look hot when you weren't was quite important. This nymphet idea of Cherry's, for instance, would probably require that sort of acting on my part.
I watched the unfl-edged tail come and go, examined the blatantly displayed breasts and the exaggerated little butts, looked at the bird's nest mops of hair and the silly Cleopatra eyes they all wore, and I wondered if I could ever really get excited over such little children. Suppose Roy brought a pack of those kids into the back room and directed me to give it to them while he rolled the camera-would I be able to do that?
I wasn't sure. There was no doubt in my mind that the sight of those bodies would probably excite me; as little as they were, they were hung with damned fine replicas of an adult female's most interesting points. But getting excited and staying excited were two different things.
Was there any moral question involved? Would I feel guilty if I bagged a girl ten years younger than myself? Would I feel like a rapist, or a pervert?
No; I didn't think I would.
A few days before, I might have had some qualms, but I had been in a different line of work then. I had been a camera and film salesman by day, and an ordinary guy by night.
Now I was a pornographer, by night or day or any other time that might prove convenient. And the rest of the time?
Well, what do you call somebody whose whole life is based on the single simple fact of sex?
I spent the rest of the day and evening watching the nymphets come and go. After closing, I went down to the diner under the train trestle and ate dinner. From my seat by the window, I could see the little girls swarming around the candy store and the pizza stand across the way.
They were looking better and better to me. But, of course, they weren't what I really wanted.
When I got back to my place, I called The Consort and asked for Cherry. The phone rang forever, but no one answered it. I was disappointed, but it was nice to know that she was at least out somewhere, and not underneath Roy. If I wasn't getting any, I didn't want him to get any, either.
I watched television until about eleven o'clock, then went to bed. I was still pretty fagged out from all the effort of the previous night, and I fell asleep with no trouble.
This time around, I didn't dream at all.
The next day began calmly, following the old routine patterns. I got up at the usual time, did all the usual things in the bathroom, ate the usual breakfast, dressed in the usual clothes, and went down to the same old camera store. It wasn't really the same store, of course, because there was a dirty film studio in the back of it. But that was all right, because I wasn't the same man.
People are a little like plaster of paris, I think-at least as far as their personalities are concerned. If you make any really big change in a guy's skull, you've got to give it time to set before you try to use it. In the beginning, the lump of new thinking is soft and mushy, and can't be used without getting twisted out of shape. But give it a little time-just a couple of days-and it hardens into its new form.
And that's what had happened to me. The new ideas and thought patterns which had been poured into my head the day Roy had stepped through the door of my shop had been shifting and washing all over the place, as unformed as pablum. That was probably the reason why I had been in such a spin over Cherry and dirty pictures and the new me.
But now, the blob had hardened up and taken its final shape. I could almost feel it there inside my skull, sitting like a rock on top of all the old ideas, squashing them down where nobody would ever see them again. Not even myself.
I didn't blink an eye that afternoon when Roy called to tell me he was bringing out a bunch of Lolitas for a film session.
And it turned out to be a much wilder evening than I expected.
Roy arrived at the back door at eight-thirty, with six of these females in tow. I call them females because there isn't any other word that really describes them. Not a one of them had been alive any longer than fifteen or sixteen years, so from the standpoint of the calendar they were children. But no children in the world ever looked at a man with eyes so full of knowledge, ever angled their bodies in such provocative ways, as those kids did. So from that standpoint, and it was a pretty important standpoint, they were women.
All of them were dressed in standard issue costume, like they were members of the same club. Tight jersey blouses, which showed off the breasts by clinging like a lover's hands-sausage-tense buttocks and thighs stuffed into thin cloth shorts and toreador pants-sandals with sexy straps and buckles to accentuate the bareness of their ankles and calves-and, of course, the crazy piles of hair in which a man could lose his hands.
In the midst of all this, as the topping on the cake so to speak, six pairs of knowing lascivious eyes stared out of six pouting childish faces.
I felt a real quickening of desire as those gals undressed. Roy handled the preliminaries like an expert, telling them what they should do and how they should do it, and what they could expect from the men in their lives-Roy and myself. The girls didn't look either pleased or displeased at the prospect. The six pouting masks never changed expression.
While Roy and I stripped down to the skin, I asked him where Cherry was. I was disappointed at not seeing her again, even if she wasn't going to be a participant in this sexual and cinematic revel.
"Cherry's busy with something," Roy said.
I frowned at him. "What does that mean? That you don't know, or that I'm not supposed to?"
"Charlie, I swear to you I don't know a thing about it myself. All she said was that she had another great idea, and that she was going to see Lee."
"Lee? You mean, that same little mute iceberg I made?"
"That's the one. She said Lee could be very valuable to us."
I snorted. "I wonder how?"
"Listen," Roy said. "When Cherry's got an idea in that crazy brain of hers, don't even try to figure it out. Once she's got it all straight for herself, you can understand it; but I don't think even Sigmund Freud could make sense from one of Cherry's half-formed notions."
We laughed at that, and I regretfully wiped thoughts of the blonde from my mind. It was time to get to work, and I had to devote my attention to putting on the big act.
When I switched on the floods and looked over toward the bed, I decided that maybe the act wouldn't be so hard after all.
They were really something, those kids-when they grew up completely, they would be genuine sex-bombs. Two of them were as well developed as they would ever get, unless Mother Nature had some surprises in store for them. If they grew any bigger in the front or the back, or anywhere, they would probably end up in a Coney Island freak show.
Three of them looked more like the youngsters they were. Their breasts were small and saucy, and their hips were feminine without being woman-wide. They had the same potential as the other two, though-it was unmistakable. Their development was taking a little longer, but it was heading in the same marvelous direction.
Two blown-up ones, and three still-inflating ones.
And then there was the sixth.
She was blonde, but not like Cherry was blonde. This kid's hair was more the color of milk after it's been poured over cornflakes. She wore it cut in bangs over her forehead, and it hung down just past her ears on either side, pageboy style.
She wasn't full-blown, but she didn't seem to be inflating either. As far as I could tell, nature had done everything for her it was going to do. But in a strange way, that was plenty.
The little blonde was coltish. She was lithe and slim and just a bit bony, but that boniness made her body very exciting. At the base of her long slim neck, the hollows of her collarbones looked deep enough to hold a shot of liquor. Beneath these depressions, a pair of neat little breasts pushed outward, as firmly as the cheeks of a baby's butt. The tips of the hemispheres were tight and hard, but not with excitement; the hardness I saw was simply their natural state. I couldn't help wondering what would happen to those tiny buttons when she began to heat up.
Her ribs were prominent, but not too much so, and her torso flared delicately just above her small waist. And while her hips had a solid padding of flesh on them, you could still see the bones of her pelvis making little bumps on either side. Her thighs were very slender and formed of soft sweet-looking meat. Her calves had the same coltish look as the rest of her-lithe and firm without really being muscular, slim without being skinny or bony. She was an exciting female, and I got excited over
"Where did you get these kids?" I asked Roy.
'I'll tell you the whole story later," he answered. "We have to shoot this film, or we'll keep the girls up past their bedtimes."
I laughed. "I was wondering about that little blonde," I said.
Roy smiled at me knowingly. "Interested?"
"You bet," I said, returning his smile. .
"All right, then. We'll save her for you. That's the least I can do for an old pal."
The film began.
This time, the story was supposed to be taking place in a girl's school. This was the dormitory, as Roy explained it, and the kids were preparing for bed. But there was a problem.
They were in the mood for some sex; all six of them.
I hadn't noticed it before, but Roy had brought a prop with him-an old shaggy mop of the sort you scrub floors with. It wasn't until he made his entrance that I began to follow the story-line. Once again, watching the action unfold through the viewfinder was just like being in an audience at a world premiere.
To start with, the girls fondled themselves, and one another. They worked very hard at it, giving the camera the distinct impression that there were six cases of hot pants sprawled on that bed, even though there weren't any pants in sight. The big-fronted ones took charge of this phase; the extra meat they wore seemed to give them seniority, or something. They provided the lead and the other Four followed.
It was an odd feeling to watch such young girls cavorting sexually, and I was a bit ashamed of my excitement over it. There was a hint of perversion in the air-a well-known old perversion called lesbianism-and perversion of any kind was something I wasn't used to.
The girls caressed each other, and their abandon apparently began to get to them. The pouting disinterested looks thawed from their faces, and the lust showed plainly. The only one of the six who didn't throw herself into it was my little blonde. She fondled breasts and thighs-her own and those of the others-but she never seemed to ignite.
Seeing that made me happy for some reason.
After this had gone on for a while, Roy made his entrance. He was carrying the mop and he walked with his shoulders rounded. One look at him explained the prop and the walk-that's how good his acting was.
If the scene in the viewfinder was a girl's school, then he could only be the janitor. The girls saw him and leaped off the bed in a flurry of bare legs and round little bottoms. They surrounded him, and he was forced to give up his mop.
With three of them pushing and three of them pulling, Roy didn't have a chance. He was on the bed in no time, and in even less time had been pinned there, spread-eagled and helpless as Gulliver at the hands of the Lilliputians. Two of the girls pinned his hands to the bed under their trim butts, and I envied him for what he had. Two others sat astride his legs and held his thighs open; one of them was my blonde, and I was glad Roy wasn't getting anything out of her. I hoped he'd keep his promise, and save her completely for my entrance.
The two remaining girls went to work on Roy.
I watched the whole thing, sometimes through the viewfinder, sometimes with the naked eye, and I didn't believe anything I saw. It seemed impossible to me that such young kids could possess the know-how they displayed. Those teenage girls had it all down pat, as surely as a five-hundred-dollar-a-night Oriental whore; they knew where the pleasure was, and they also knew where to find the pain. Most important of all, and most surprising, they understood how to make pain and pleasure mingle, how to keep pain at a minimum while they used it to build excitement.
That's pretty exotic knowledge, and not one woman in a hundred really knows how it works. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of females in my life who'd even heard of it.
By the time they'd finished with Roy, he looked ready to lose control. I think he was reaching the point I'd hit last night; and wouldn't it be a laugh if he forgot the camera and stopped acting after the talking-to he'd given me that afternoon?
It didn't happen, though. Roy was too much of a trooper for that. And, in a way, I was glad. If he had gone berserk and started really laying into all that tender meat around him, he might have gobbled up the slice I wanted him to save for me.
Man, she was exciting! I couldn't understand why she was turning me on so. Just a young girl; so thin and delicate-looking-and yet she had the power to set me groaning. I watched her dance around, flaunting her little breasts and pumping her shapely legs and buttocks, while Roy took care of three of the kids, one after another.
I watched very carefully how Roy managed it, and discovered that not a one of the three was a virgin. I guess none of them were, which just bore out Roy's original opinion of the teenage Lolitas.
The plot of this film reached the same turning point as the other one had. Roy did all he could, but it wasn't quite enough, and he collapsed completely after servicing the third girl. The other three began pouting again, and looked very disappointed, especially the blonde.
Roy rolled his head away from the camera as if faUing asleep, and I heard him say cut. I stopped the camera.
When that camera was rolling again, Roy was behind it.
There were two of them to take care of before I got to the little blonde, and I was glad to work on them first. I did it the way Roy recommended, letting my excitement build just enough to convince the camera of my sincerity, but never allowing it to spill over into the real thing. The focus of my lust was something I was saving for that blonde.
I finished with a half-grown one first, and there was pleasure in fondling her young pears and feeling the clenching of her smooth thighs around my hips. She took it very calmly, and although she put on a big show for the camera her eyes told me that taking care of a man was something she was familiar with.
I got her out of the way, and started in on a full-blown one. And that's a very good word to describe her. The shape of the girl was as mature as possible, but the feel of her was anything but mature. It was as if her flesh had been puffed up with air, as if she were a girl-shaped balloon filled with soft foam rubber. When nature finished with her and firmed up all that meat, she would be a lot of fun in the rack, but at present she was nothing more than amusing.
I amused myself with her until she had been amused right out of her head. Unlike the first one, this little girl liked it. She told me so in public-toilet language, whispering ripe foulness into my ear the whole time I was digging her.
I enjoyed that. It really put me in the mood for my last duty.
The blonde.
I took her hand and pulled her down onto the bed beside me. Her eyes were very large and dark, and her body looked even more tempting close up. There was something oddly familiar about her, but I couldn't place it, and there was no time to think about such things.
I took hold of her breasts. They were small and soft, but seemed firm at the same time. Now what did that remind me of?
I slipped my hand between her slim thighs and cupped upward. That also reminded me of something. What?
I kissed her body, and the little nipples buttoned into my mouth delightfully. I felt her tremble and quiver under my caresses, and my excitement got bigger and bigger until I thought it would tear me apart.
In spite of everything Roy had told me, everything I had promised myself, I knew I would lose control in another minute, and take this palpitating little child as brutally and completely as I had taken-
And then it hit me.
I stopped what I was going for an instant, and lifted up over her, kneeling between her raised and waiting thighs, leaning my palms against her tender breasts.
Her body was almost the same-the small breasts, the angular hips, the slender limbs and delicate boning of the torso.
It was a smaller edition of Lee's body.
And her face? Well, time hadn't quite finished shaping that face, but I could see exactly what the mature finished product would look like.
Cherry stared up at me from those young eyes.
I remembered the camera, and I did the best I could, but it was too late. It might not have shown on the film, but I lost all my desire right there on top of that blonde. It was a good act, but nothing more, and I think the girl was a bit disappointed in me. I know she had a right to be.
But all I could think of were Cherry and Lee, and the way those two women fitted together in my mind drove all appreciation of passion right out of it. Why did I think of them as a team? Why did that idea seem so logical?
I never guessed how close I was to the answer at that moment.
CHAPTER NINE
The next morning, I called Cherry.
I'd had it. I was through aching for something out of reach, finished with all this frustration, sick of reaching through the bars of my cage and never laying hold of what I really wanted. My single fling with that blonde sexpot had ruined me, had spoiled my enjoyment of sex with any other woman, and the only way to set that part of me straight again was to have Cherry where I wanted her.
Every woman on earth teases, of course. Usually they do it in subtle ways-by acting sexy, but never allowing you to lay a hand on them; by letting you enjoy the feeling of their breasts but not the pleasure of their loins; by promising you everything, and then giving you only a piece of it. This attitude is basic to the nature of a woman. It's the trick she's learned to get the things she wants.
But Cherry had refined the technique to its highest point. She had taken this simple feminine edge and honed it into a blade which could cut the guts out of a man. She had elevated a trick to a science, and maybe even a weapon.
She gave you her body, but held back her mind, her emotions, her personality. She gave you everything on the outside, and nothing from the inside. And one try at her convinced you that the things she withheld were the only things worth having.
So I called her, determined that this time I wasn't taking no for an answer. Either she agreed to let me see her, let me give it to her, let me tear her off her pedestal and drag her down to my level, or the whole deal was finished. I could live a hell of a lot more comfortably with her out of my life altogether. Having Cherry's image hanging in front of my eyes all the time was more torture than I could endure.
If I'd gotten to speak to Cherry at that particular moment, I might have made things come out differently for me.
But Roy was the one who answered the phone.
"Hi, Charlie," he said. "Hey, that was some blast last night, wasn't it? Didn't I tell you those kids really had the stuff?"
"Sure, Roy. Listen-"
"I said it once, and I'll say it again," he went on, ignoring me and concentrating on his favorite subject. "It's the young ones who really have the stuff, and the younger the better. Get 'em before they're used up, get 'em before a hundred other guys wear all the fun out of them. Get 'em while they're fresh. Get em while they're ripe. Like frankfurters, Char-he."
"Frankfurters?"
"Get 'em while they're hot" He laughed like an idiot at his own joke.
"That's very funny," I said.
His laughter died. "Say, you don't sound so good this morning. Something bothering you, old chum?"
"It's got nothing to do with you. Put Cherry on."
"Can't," he said.
"Why not, dammit?" I smelled another stall, and it made me furious.
"She's not here at the moment. In fact, she hasn't been here the whole night."
"Huh?"
"Scout's honor, Charlie. When I cut out of your place, I went straight back to the hotel, and she wasn't anywhere around. This morning when I woke up, there still wasn't any sign of her."
"Where was she all night?"
"How in hell should I know?" he said. "She comes and goes as she pleases. If you've got the idea she consults me about anything, forget it. She's her own woman."
That was certainly the understatement of the year, I thought. Roy's cheerful attitude was bugging me, so I said, "That's rough on you, isn't it?"
"What is?" he asked.
"Having her stay out all night. That meant you had to sleep alone for a change?"
"Sleep alone?" He sounded baffled. "Rut I always sleep alone."
"What crap are you handing me, Roy?" I raised my voice. "You share a room with her, don't you? And that room's got only one bed, right?"
"Yes," he said slowly. "That's right."
"So if you don't sleep with Cherry, where in hell do you sleep?"
"In the chair, Charlie."
I sat and stared at the little holes in the phone's mouthpiece for a second. "In the chair?"
"Of course," he replied. "You didn't think-Char-He, do you mean to tell me you thought I tore off a hunk of that on a regular basis?"
"You bastard," I yelled. "I'll believe you sleep in a damn chair when I start believing in Santa Claus again."
He laughed, but not very enthusiastically. "Charlie, you give me credit for more than I'm worth. In all the time I've known her, I don't think I've dug Cherry more than half a dozen times."
"Cut it out, Roy-I'm sick of being snowed."
"It's the truth, pal. Honest. I don't swing any weight with Cherry at all. Oh, she lets me have her once in a while, and she'll do the same for you by and by. But never anything steady with one particular guy-she doesn't think that way."
He sounded sincere, but I still didn't trust him. "I can't see you in the same room with a hunk like that available, and not doing anything about it."
"Neither can I," he said. "But that's just the point, Charlie. She's not available."
"What does that mean?"
"You can have her only when she's in the mood, and that's the only time. There have been men in the past who tried to get her when she wasn't interested, and she just cut them off. If a man goes for her without her consent, he ends up getting nothing. Believe me, pal-I've seen it happen."
The Queen of Lust, I thought again. The Queen and all her loyal subjects. And if a subject should get out of line, what's the worst punishment the Queen can hand him? Exile.
I drew in a deep breath, then blew it out. "You don't know when she'll be back?"
"I have no idea," Roy answered.
"If you tell her to call me when you see her-will she do it?"
"Who knows? Maybe."
"All right. Let me know if anything happens." I hung up.
Later in the day when the phone rang, I didn't really believe it until I heard her voice. "Hello, Charlie."
"Hello, Cherry." I tried to remember all the things I had intended to say to her, but the call had taken me off guard, and I couldn't think of a one of them.
"The prints of that first film are ready, Charlie. Shall I bring them out tonight?" Her tone was very sweet, but with a dark and sensuous undercurrent.
"Tonight?" I repeated stupidly.
"Yes," she said. "You're the man in charge of the technical end, aren't you? I think you should examine our product before we put it into distribution."
Tonight?" I said again.
"Yes, Charlie," she purred. "Tonight. I have an idea for another wonderful film-a film with only two people in it."
The way she said that simple phrase made the hair prickle on the back of my neck.
"I'd like to shoot that movie tonight, Charlie. It's something very special. Is that all right with you?"
I stumbled all over myself before I managed to say, "Yes."
"Good. I'll bring Roy along, just for fun. We might even need him. And after we shoot our latest effort, you can look over the prints I had made. How does that sound?"
"Fine," I said fervently.
"See you at nine," she said.
The phone went dead.
A new movie. Just two people. She was bringing Roy along, in case he was needed. Her voice was purring with lust and all her words were friendly.
As far as I could see, it all added up, to only one conclusion.
All right, then-if that was the way she wanted to play it, I'd go along with her. As long as I was sure nobody was having her on a regular basis, my own deprivation was easier to take. And if what Roy said was true, if she did start allowing me onto her every so often, that meant I had as good a chance as any other of the men in her life to thaw out and bring to life all the potential in that splendid blonde body.
I'd play the game her way, just like the gambler in the old story I'd heard:
How's poker around here, anyway?
Back of the saloon-but the stakes are low, the cards are old, and everybody cheats.
Then why the hell do you play?
Why, man-it's the only game in town!
The hours crawled snail-like around the clock. Before the sun finally sank into the Bay I was convinced night would never fall. A watched pot, they say, never boils; and a watched sun never sets.
I couldn't pay any attention to business, and I think I made a few customers mad at me over the way I ignored their needs. But I didn't give a damn. Who could care about customers with so many other delightful things to ponder on?
Only one other thought besides dreams of Cherry crossed my mind that afternoon. It happened when a local nymphet jiggled in to buy some film. Looking at her, I was reminded of the previous night and all the little teen hookers I had jazzed with. And that made me remember that Roy hadn't told me where he picked the girls up.
Oh, well-he'd probably just forgotten about it, same as I had. And while it was an interesting question, I could wait for an answer until after the immediate business of the evening was completed. Knowing where to find some tender teen tail when the mood was upon me might prove to be a handy bit of information in times to come.
As I watched the nymphet leave, I wondered if I'd ever really care about such young meat after having tasted the ripe and rounded magnificence of Cherry Sims.
At six o'clock, I closed the store for the day. At six forty-five, I ate supper in the diner, choking down food I didn't much want so I'd be assured of strength enough to perform that evening. At seven, I was back in the store, straightening up the studio, testing the equipment, fitting a fresh magazine to the camera, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and just plain going out of my mind with the waiting.
There actually was time enough for me to process the Lolita flick, which was still lying undeveloped in its original magazine; but I didn't trust myself to do that job well in my present frame of mind, so I left the film where it was.
I had no idea at that moment that my decision not to process that flick would mean I'd never see it.
But there were a lot of surprises in store for me that evening.
At exactly the moment the hands of my wall-clock touched eight, the knock sounded on the back door. I braced myself, trying to steel my nerves and look nonchalant. After all, Cherry probably had Roy with her, and I didn't want him to see the absolute drool of anticipation I was suffering.
When my face was arranged into the mask of a sensible human being, I went to the door and opened it.
Cherry stepped into the room. This time, she was wearing shorts and a blouse-shorts which hugged her lush rump like a second skin, and a blouse which cupped her heavy breasts tightly enough to reveal the twin bumps of the nipples through the material.
She wasn't wearing a bra because she was one woman who didn't need a bra. She wasn't wearing stockings, either; and for the same reason. No amount of nylons could ever improve upon the perfection of her legs. Nor was she wearing make-up, and her face seemed fresher and more beautiful than I remembered.
But the best of that great moment-the last great moment I was to have with her-was the look in her eyes.
The heat was there. The lust was there. The fiery furnace of passion was roaring in her head, and the flames of it were plainly visible behind her glowing eyes. And this time, it burned brighter and with more fury than it ever had before. The hotness of her gaze in the Twist film, where I'd first seen her; the hotness that night she'd initiated me into her fan club with the firm-fleshed delight of her ride; the hotness I'd seen in our first film while she stood behind me and drove herself crazy with pleasure-these were nothing at all compared to the way she looked now.
Unless I had gone completely out of my mind-and that was a possibility-the flaming arousement I saw when she stepped into the room was completely genuine. She had flicked her switch to hot, and locked it there.
But, as I said, it was the last great moment I ever had with Cherry Sims.
Because there were two people coming through the door behind her.
One was Roy.
The other was Lee.
The frail frightened little whore hadn't changed since I last saw her. She didn't act as if she recognized where she was, nor did she look at anyone in the room except Cherry. You'd think that after the job I'd done on her two nights ago she'd at least throw me a nod, but nothing like it. As far as she was concerned, she and Cherry were alone.
Again I had that crazy image of blonde bouncing Cherry and dark thin Lee fitting together, but I couldn't make any sense out of it.
"Hello, Charlie," she said. The ripeness of lust in her eyes transmitted its heat to her words, and she breathed the syllables on me the way a dragon might breathe fire. The intensity of it made my mind mushy, but did something quite the opposite to my body.
"I thought you said you were just bringing Roy."
She laughed. "I said I might bring Roy. I didn't tell you who I was bringing."
I was disappointed at having the nutty little mute around to spoil the fun, but I couldn't really get angry about it. Cherry was here, and that was what counted. And, for a change, her words didn't have any ring of command to them; I could sense a softening of iron will in the tone of her voice.
It took me a second to figure it out, and when I did the realization warmed me to the core.
Cherry was high on sexual excitement, the way other people get high on booze or dope. Her anticipation of the fun in store was so fierce it was working on her like a drug.
I could hardly wait to get started.
"The prints are there," Cherry said, nodding at Roy as he laid a pile of film cans on the table. "Maybe later you'll get a chance to look them over, Charlie."
"Maybe," I said, returning her lustful smile. I doubted it. The promise in her eyes made me wonder if I'd be good for anything after this night was through.
"Now," she said. "I think it's time to get started." She turned her back on me and walked toward the bed, pulling her blouse free of her shorts as she went. I was about to follow her with my tongue hanging out like a puppy dog's, when I saw something that made me pause.
Halfway to the bed, Cherry reached out and took hold of Lee's hand.
The two women went hand in hand to the bed.
In my mind, the image of Cherry and Lee as a pair grew stronger, but I refused to look at it. Instead, I turned to Roy, who had come up beside me. His face was happy, and a little tight with excitement. He looked as if he were anticipating a great deal of fun here this evening.
"Roy?"
He didn't act as if he'd heard me. "This one is going to make us," he said.
"What are you talking about?"
"This film. We're going to be able to sell prints of this for a fortune."
The expression of naked expectation he wore troubled me. Like Cherry herself, Roy also looked lit up way beyond anything I'd seen before.
"Roy? What's up?"
He ignored me again. "This land of flick really commands a price, old buddy. Even with cruddy-looking broads and cheap film and bad photography, you can really gouge a customer who has an itch for this stuff. And with the quality posers we got here and this great camera to record the whole bit nice and sharp-we can ask two or three hundred a print for this number."
I tugged his sleeve, trying to get his attention. "Roy-what kind of film? What are you telling me?"
He turned his head, and I saw that his eyes were almost as crazy as Cherry's. I'd seen him hot on sex plenty of times, but never as hot as at that moment.
"Look for yourself," he said, grinning like the fiend he'd always wanted to be.
Look for myself. He meant, look toward the bed. Look at the two women standing there. Something had happened over there, or was about to happen-and I didn't want to see it. I really didn't. I had spent the past minute or so staring at Roy and trying to analyze his expression and asking him questions, and all because I didn't want to turn my head and look at those two women.
But now I had to look. Whatever it was, it was going to begin, and I couldn't very well not watch it. After all, wasn't I the technical director of the operation, as Cherry had said? Wasn't I Cameraman-in-Charge? Wasn't I the Ace of the Lenses?
Or was I the Jerk of the Year?
I turned my head, and found out.
Cherry and Lee were still standing beside the bed. They were still holding hands. They still presented the same weird contrast-blonde and rounded, dark and flattened.
But now they were nude. Both of them.
Cherry was looking toward Roy and me and the camera, and the expression she wore indicated an impatience to get started. There was an awful lot of heat building up inside that rich body, and she was obviously aching to let it off.
And as for Lee-well, Lee wasn't looking at the camera at all. To her, just as before, neither the camera nor the two men were in the room with her, or even part of her world.
The only other person on earth for that thin black-haired little mute was Cherry Sims, and Lee stared up at the blonde's flushed face with a look of absolute and sickening devotion.
Finally, I saw it.
All right-so I'm stupid. So they'd been rubbing my face in it all this time, dangling the truth right in front of me where nobody but an imbecile could have missed it. All right, so I should have guessed it long ago, should have realized that first night when Cherry took charge, took everything I had on her own terms, and found no satisfaction in it. I should have seen it then, and I hadn't.
Of course, I should also have seen it when I watched that film, the one in which I appeared. I should have known what was passing between those two women while I was snorting and heaving on one of them. I should have been aware of the reason why Lee's hand reached out with such longing toward Cherry's nude body, and why the sight of the blonde brutally toying with herself had turned Lee on so.
All right-so I really was the Jerk of the Year, and maybe even of the entire damn century.
But who would ever have thought such a magnificent hunk of luscious feminine meat, such a ripe collection of lust-fruit, such a wild and firm and maddening piece of man-pleasing man-satisfying man-destroying loveliness-
Who would have suspected she was a lesbian?
CHAPTER TEN
A bed.
Two women. Nude.
The light is harsh, revealing every detail of their beautiful bodies; and both of them do have beautiful bodies, in their differing ways. But one is more beautiful than the other.
The blonde one.
She has the kind of body you dream about, the land you always wanted to touch, to taste, to use. She has the body of a genuine dream-girl, the body of Fanny Flick-the Hollywood goddess you could never lay your hands on, because she was only half real, the other half being equal parts trick photography and your own sweaty imagination.
And you can't lay your hands on this one either, because she's also half real. Half of her-the half you see-is one hundred per cent woman, all meat and a yard wide. But the other half-the half inside her-
That's not woman at all.
That's lesbian.
The two beautiful women are naked there on the bed, side by side, hand in hand, and the camera is making a permanent record of the whole thing. But watch closely if you're really interested, because the record might not be quite as permanent as you think.
The blonde's hand detaches itself from the other's hand, and she rolls her superb body over to face the girl. Her beautiful face is smiling in the rich gold frame of her hair, and she whispers a single word: Lee.
And the thin-boned black-haired one stares at her, trembling at the sound of her own name as it falls from her lover's lips. If she could, she'd whisper the blonde's name in return: Cherry.
But she can't, because she's mute. If she wants to tell the blonde anything at all, she has to do it with gestures. And touches. And caresses. And kisses.
Maybe she isn't as mute as we think, with such an elaborate language at her disposal.
The blonde touches the mute girl's breast-gently, tenderly, exploring the soft shape of it with her fingers, letting the tips of her nails draw slowly together as she lifts her palm until she is just holding the pale little thrust of the excited nipple.
It is excited, too-that's unmistakable. As small as the girl's breasts and nipples are, no one with eyes could possibly miss the straining arousement of those red tips.
The mute lifts her hand from the bed-the same hand the blonde was holding a moment ago-and touches one of the woman's luscious thighs. Her fingers are just touching the place where those pretty thighs meet.
The blonde shifts her lovely body on the bed, and the mute does the same, and you get the impression watching them that they're moving into an old familiar position. And so they are.
The blond's full-lipped mouth is poised over a beckoning nipple.
Then the coral button disappears between her lips.
The slender mute is still stroking the blonde's smooth flesh, but now she has something else to occupy her attention. All the while her breasts are being kissed, the heavy globes of her lover are hanging right above her face.
The breasts come within reach of the mute's lips. As you watch, the lips part, and a tongue-tip as small and pink as a nipple pokes slowly upward, until it has just barely tasted the pebbled flower hanging above it. Then, suddenly, the whole tongue comes out of the mouth, and you see a brief flash of breast-flesh bathed in moisture before the tongue and the mouth and even the face vanish between the dangling shapes.
They're really going now, aren't they? It's too bad this film doesn't have a soundtrack, because you really ought to hear the crazy sounds their mouths are making. But maybe you can imagine those sounds for yourseff.
See the way they heave? See how the careful and symmetrical arrangement of their bodies sHps and slides? They're reaching the point now where they don't give a damn about symmetry, or anything on earth except their bodies and their mutual passion.
You can tell that from the way the blonde's mouth nips the other's flesh, the way her tongue and lips leave tracks of moisture on the girl's body.
The dark-haired girl's busy, too. See the way she's gliding her hands along the blonde's sides, along the blonde's hips, up and around the blonde's lovely body? She's caressing the blonde like an old pro.
It's hard to believe these two girls have known each other for only a few days, isn't it? I guess lesbians must get acquainted pretty quickly.
There they go. See the wonderful greedy expressions of lust on those faces?
Now.
See that? See the way their hands drift and stroke and feel, leaving paths of tingling sensation all over those quivering bodies?
Isn't that something?
Of course, maybe you've seen all this before. Maybe you've watched two dykes going at it in a dirty movie. That's not really unusual-as an old friend of mine used to say, this sort of flick really commands a price ... You can really gouge a customer who has an itch for this stuff.
If people are willing to pay a lot of money for it, I guess it must be popular. I wonder if people ever give any thought to the women involved, or why it is they go for members of their own sex, or how many men are being cheated out of the scheme of things by this self-contained lesbian passion? Does anybody ever think of that when they're watching a dyke flick?
Well, maybe it's familiar to you, something you've seen many times. One dirty movie tends to be pretty much like another.
There you are. The machine's flat on the floor and it's still running. They really make those things well, don't they?
And we can still see what's going on over by the bed if we turn our heads a little sideways. So let's do that. Tip your head to one side and keep your eyes on the screen.
Because the most unusual thing of all is going to happen now.
The blonde is off the bed. She's raking at the angry man's face with her nails, and he's beating her arms away and trying to get a clear shot at her belly. Behind the two of them, the little mute brunette is sitting up on the bed, her eyes very wide with fear. She's holding her own small breasts as if to protect them.
Speaking of breasts, we're getting quite a good look at the blonde right now, aren't we? She's flinging her torso around in a way that really shows it off, and she's moving in circles like a prizefighter, giving us a look at her front and her back, and everything.
The man's also circling. Look at that poor bastard's face-he's mad enough to belong in a padded cell somewhere.
Oh-Oh-the blonde has stepped back from the bed, and she's gotten something from a shelf. It's a big bottle made of dark glass, like the kind of container a photographer might keep chemicals in. I wonder what she's going to do with that?
She's lifting her arm-now doesn't she have the meatiest pair you ever did see? Look at the way that pretty boob lifts up on her with the motion of her arm. Isn't it a pity she's a dyke? She throws the bottle.
The guy sees it in time, and ducks. The bottle whistles over his head, but the blonde aimed it a little high anyway.
In fact, if you'll watch closely, you'll see that bottle hit one of the floodlights up near the top of the wall.
There-see it? The bottle and the bulb have both shattered.
And that sudden light where they hit-that splash of brilliance-those rivulets of brightness cascading down onto the floor-
That's fire. The stuff inside that bottle was inflammable, and the flood has ignited it.
The guy and the blonde are grappling now. He's trying to grab her breasts and her butt, but there's no lust in his motives. All he wants to do is hurt her, hurt her as terribly as he can.
From the way he's acting, you'd think the blonde had really done something nasty to him-maybe teased him until he was going crazy, then withheld it at the last minute-or maybe even robbed him of something he wanted.
But what could she have taken that would make him this mad?
His manhood?
His life?
If you'll look closely, by the way, you'll see little rivers of that burning chemical inching across the floor. You see where they're going? That's right-the curtains. The curtains behind the bed.
The man and the two women don't notice it yet. But they will.
And there it goes. Just a touch of that flaming finger, and all of a sudden the whole corner of the room is in flames. Those curtains sure must be made of cheap material to go up as quickly as that.
The blonde sees it, and the fight's going out of her. There's a wall of fire right behind her head, and she wants to get away from it before she gets burned.
But the guy hasn't seen it. At the moment he has eyes only for the blonde. And when he feels her struggling muscles relax for a moment, he takes the opening and belts her viciously across the mouth.
She staggers back.
And there goes her hair.
In this film had a soundtrack, you could hear her screaming. You could hear the crackle of the flames as they begin to eat into the flesh of her, and the framework of the old walls as well. You could hear the yelling and the commotion as the blonde tries to beat away the pain, as the mute tears the sheets from the bed and tries to smother the flames with them.
But some of the chemical has splashed on the sheets, so now the blonde is just wrapped in flame. She's falling back toward the bed, which is also burning. The mute can't get out of the way; the burning body of the blonde pins her to the flaming bed.
There are a lot of things you could hear if this film had sound. For instance, you could hear the weird howl of a little lesbian who had never made a sound before in her life-and you could hear the animal fury of the blonde as flame engulfs and destroys her.
But there's no sound, so you can't hear any of that.
You'll have to settle for watching the madman's grin on the face of the guy as he just stands there and watches her burn.
Now, tell the truth-did you ever see a hot flick anything like this before? Of course not. This picture is one in a million. It's got perversion, it's got violence, it's got hatred and torture and horror.
And best of all, it's got lust and death all blended together.
Or didn't you know they made such a great team?
When I was sure she was dead, I left the store. I didn't go near Roy; I just left him lying there on the floor. If he woke up in time, fine. If he didn't-well, who cared?
I left the store the front way, and I've never seen it since.
The next day, all the papers carried the story about the big fire in Sheepshead Bay. It was of special interest because of the peculiar circumstances surrounding it.
Everybody in the area knew the guy who ran that store, and the description they gave convinced the police he hadn't been in the place when it burned down, which made the law only more anxious to find him.
They were really aching to know the identities of the three scorched bodies they found in those ashes-one male, and two females.
Two females-that's what the article said, and I had to laugh. That showed how much they knew about it. For all intents and purposes, there weren't any females in that room at all-Some girls in the neighborhood claimed to know a few facts about the fire, and the police questioned them at length. If their statements were ever released, I didn't read about it. But the papers did publish pictures of a couple of the girls.
I knew them. I had laid them both in front of the cameras the night of the Lolita movie. So that's why I can't go back. But I don't want to, so it doesn't make any difference.
You see, Cherry Sims had something of mine. She got it the first night we jazzed together, and she held onto it and added it to her collection. She had a lot of these things-she even had Roy's.
Cherry had my conscience.
And when she burned up, my conscience burned up right along with her.
I'm free now. All the evidence of my past has burned to ashes behind me, along with the films and the girls and my old Army buddy who always wanted to share everything with me. The only thing left to link me with those events is the story those teenage girls told the police, but I doubt if that story was believed.
When I say I'm free, I don't mean free from the law, or free from the guilt of my misdeeds, or free from my lousy memories.
I've been freed from my conscience.
And a man without a conscience doesn't have a thing to worry about. He has no one in the world to answer to, he has no emotions to cloud the orders from his glands, he has no fears or uncertainties or moral principles to fog up the basic instincts of his brain.
A man without a conscience is free to be anything he wishes-a fiend, a satyr, a criminal, or even an animal.
I should know.
There's money in my pocket at the moment. I got it from a whore on Times Square. She thought she was going to get money from me, poor girl, but it turned out the other way around. All she got was lumps.
I wonder if she were dead when I left her?
Well, that's not important. The important thing is that I have enough loot for plane fare to Chicago. There's a man out there I want to meet-a man named Steuben. I hear he runs a pretty big pornography business, and pornography is a field I know.
So I'll be saying goodbye now. Goodbye to Sheepshead Bay, and Brooklyn, and New York. And especially goodbye to Charlie Garner, and all the shallow tracks that poor slob left on the sands of time. Charlie was such a lightweight.
But he's dead, along with the rest of it, and Charles Garner, the guy who's taking the plane to Chicago tonight, is going to be leaving deeper tracks.
Goodbye, Cherry. There never was a woman in history who was satisfied with the man in her life, who didn't try to change him to suit herself.
And you sure did a job on me.
Goodbye, Lee. Too bad you died so young, but I'm glad you found your voice there at the end.
Goodbye, Roy. Thirty or forty years from now, maybe we can get together, just like old times, and share the same patch of coals in Hell.
