Annie cruised the streets and the bars in the most sordid and dirty parts of the city. Her pimp was always there. Right behind her to make sure that she did her job and she did it well.
There she was again. Another John came her way.
He was big and brutish but she knew that she had to service him too. If she didn't, the pimp would make her life a living hell.
"How much?" the man asked.
Annie told him.
He nodded and she led the way to the hotel room. He closed the door behind him and ordered her to undress.
"Spread," he ordered.
The shame burned her cheeks as she lay on the bed and spread her creamy smooth thighs. She could see the man staring at the dark triangle of her cunt.
As she looked at him, he came to her and lowered himself over her spread and inviting legs.
She became impaled on his giant cock and she hoped that he would come soon and get it over with.
CHAPTER ONE
The pimp is a man of many faces. He is hated by the society that does not endeavor to understand him; adored by the women in his stable who are currently in his good favor; revered by satisfied clients who at the same time speak of him contemptuously among themselves. He is a savior to so-called perverts who cannot easily find expression for their appetites; a devil to the whores he has ousted.
All in all, he is an unknown quantity. A career man. A businessman. An artist of the human psyche. When he does well, he does very, very well but when he does badly, he is dead. To be a pimp is to be a pirate of human hearts. An adventurer in unknown waters. A swimmer against the tides of modern day civilization.
I have been a pimp for twenty years. In my collection of memories are some strange tales of human need.
There are amusing stories, too. The pimp sees everything because all is told to him. Clients open up their hearts. The girls who feed on him and on whom he feeds reveal their deepest yearnings. If he is a good pimp, he is not casual. He tries to satisfy his clients and his women. He is concerned.
Of course there are the rotters, pimps who suck blood selfishly without thought for the minds or bodies of people who may become his victims. Enough of this classic type has been described elsewhere. What I am interested in setting down is not the story of that lunatic fringe but the very personal diary of my own struggles and eventual rise to what I, with all due modesty, must recognize as the top of the ladder. I have been fortunate in my women and I want to tell of them. Obviously, I will have to use pseudonyms for them because many have risen to fame in other, very different professions-and some are married to men of world famous reputation. The few who have failed, I will speak of, too, because I loved them as well as the others.
If truth is to be told, I must say here that I have loved all my women with a profound and abiding passion.
The girls who were with me in the beginning are not less clear in my mind's eye than the ones who are with me now. In fact, the first girl who worked for me is, perhaps, clearer than all the rest. But she was a special case. She was my wife.
In the beginning, before I came to this city, I had no idea of the road my life was to take. If I dreamed of doing anything in life, I dreamed of becoming a research biologist specializing in aeronautics. My family had sufficient funds to send me to school and for the first fifteen years, my life was a neat package tied up in suburban living, studies and the usual struggles that come upon a boy in the process of developing into adulthood.
At the end of my fifteenth year, however, everything changed. Changed because of Annie. Changed because of my relationship to Annie, that is-our impulsive, ardent relationship of such intense pleasure that even now, looking backward, I know I wouldn't erase a single day. A single night.
By the time I had known Annie a month I knew myself to be the luckiest person on this planet.
We had met at one of the social dances given in the high school. Looking at her that first time, I could hardly have suspected that the depth of passion that boiled within her unassuming appearance. She was good to look at but there were many girls prettier. She was easy to speak with but there were many girls more charming, certainly more open; apparently more available.
What did I have in mind when I went up to Annie and asked her to dance? What was I thinking of? Dreaming of? She was a small, dark-haired creature standing with a paper cup of punch in her left hand and with the other tapping out the rhumba rhythm on the buffet table behind her. She wore a pale yellow dress. It was summer and the dress had no sleeves so that I could easily see the sturdy formation of her sunburned arms.
The dress also had a deep scoop neckline and the veriest, topmost bit of cleavage peeked out from time to time as she moved.
I liked her immediately and I thought that here was a girl who probably would dance well.
Yes, that was all I thought. Nothing more serious. Nothing more devastating.
I went up to Annie and introduced myself in that casual way that school kids have.
"Ben Brown?" she said, repeating my name as though she had heard of it before.
She might very well have heard of me. I'd had some small doings on the basketball team and, in school circles word gets around fast.
But I didn't want to talk. I certainly didn't want to talk about the boring subject of myself.
"Will you put down that cup and dance with me?" I said lightly.
"I sure will."
Immediately, I liked her directness. It was easy to see that she was -pleased with what she saw and heard; that she was enthusiastic to get to know me better. I slipped my arm around her waist and guided her out onto the floor polished slippery for the occasion.
As we danced, I saw other girls watching us from the sidelines but I wasn't looking to line any of them up for the next round. Something in me felt peculiarly satisfied and attentive to the girl in my arms. I liked the way she danced. I had been correct in my judgment of her potential. She was light on her feet and easy to lead.
She was feminine in a way that is out of style now. I inhaled the perfume of her hair knowing that I was going to get to know Annie Conlon better than I had known any girl thus far in my life.
We talked a bit between dances. She told me the usual, small things that small-town girls have to say. I listened with one ear to her and with the other I heard my inner voice saying that I should end the evening early. Get her out of the gym and someplace quiet where we could really talk and be alone with each other.
At eleven o'clock I judged it time to make the break out. "How about it, Annie," I said casually. "Want to go for a walk into town?"
"Love to," she said without ceremony or pretense or hesitation. "It's getting too hot in here, anyway."
"Yes, it'll be much cooler outside."
And it was.
We walked down the school steps and into the dark air that smelled of rose bushes. A light breeze was blowing up from the river. Overhead the trees rustled heavily with their burden of midsummer foliage. I took Annie's hand.
Her fingers were as cool as the air and dry. There seemed no sense of sweat about her even though we had been dancing hard.
"You must be in good shape," I commented, meaning athletically.
Annie laughed at the way I put it, but she understood my meaning. "Yes," she said, "I'm on the swimming team."
"Are you?"
I was interstate and we talked about swimming for a couple of blocks. Talked about physical training in general and about breath in particular. She wanted to go in for long distance swimming. Maybe cross the Channel one day in break-record time.
Everything I heard from Annie I liked and I cheered her on about the swimming, too.
"Gee, it's good to hear somebody saying something positive on that subject," she sighed.
"Why? Don't they want you to go in for sports?"
"No. Not my family, anyway."
"But why not?"
"Oh, you know how it is, Ben. I'm a girl, I should be looking for the picket fence and roses-" I had a sister and I understood. My folks gave her the same hard way to go practically every day of her life and I told this to Annie.
"Well, what does your sister think of all that?" Annie asked with interest.
"Oh, her. You know how she is. She goes along with it all. She wants to get married, you see."
We both laughed, then. I had told a story intending to console Annie and my tale had backfired. But I had made the attempt and Annie realized this. She took my hand in hers and squeezed my fingers, confiding that she appreciated the effort I had made.
As her hand tightened, I felt my chest tighten with it. Unexpectedly. I had no real idea why. All I knew was that this girl, this simple, straight-forward girl, was opening certain doors inside me that I would never have connected with her.
I wasn't exactly innocent about sex. Only Annie and sex didn't seem to go together. Having done my fair share of petting, I knew how to spot a likely prospect. It would be a girl with much more makeup and bigger tits. Tits that thrust forward brazenly at a guy. And she'd wear a tight skirt, pegged in the rear to show off the ample shape of her ass. She would be aggressive. I wouldn't have to do anything much except be available and let her make the first offer.
Annie didn't fit any of this description in any way. Yet here I was with the first stirring of sex growing alive inside my pants. I didn't like the idea. In fact I was annoyed with myself for reacting so inappropriately. If I gave myself a hard-on, what was I going to do with it this night? Drop Annie home and return to the gym? Or go home and stroke off in my bed for the whole night?
I didn't like either of those ideas much. The thought of poking my fingers into another girl was somehow all wrong for this occasion. Jerking off in bed was a nuisance, too. I had to be too damned careful about staining the bedsheets. It didn't always work to drop my load into a tissue. The damned thing would get soggy and the ooze would come through eventually, anyway. If I tossed the rumpled tissues on the floor, there would lie all the evidence in the morning.
So I felt damned trapped.
I had no intention, of course, of letting Annie know my feeling. I expected that if she saw that I was getting hot, she would run from me as conventional girls are taught to run from sexual pleasure and sexual danger.
So I kept talking about nothing in particular, my mind far from the words I was reeling off.
It wasn't far to town, but because of the hour, all the stores on Main Street were closed except the soda shop next to the movie. Its bright marquee was like a set of grinning teeth that glinted through the darkness.
I was feeling weird and everything around me reflected this.
I slowed in front of the coffee shop and asked Annie if she wanted to stop in for soda or coffee or something.
She shrugged her shoulders and hesitated and said, "If you want to, Ben."
I heard loud and clear that she didn't really want to.
"It's nice outside, it really is," I said then. "Would you like to just walk on for a while?
She nodded.
We passed the movie house and moved on into the trail of light made by the street lamps. Not much of a light, but enough for us to see each other's faces.
It was Annie who turned off Main Street onto Fourth, which led off toward the seamier side of town.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
She glanced at me with a mischievous little grin.
"Ben, you know I've never been down here at night. I've always wanted to see what goes on."
"Nothing goes on," I said sternly. "Let's get out of here."
I tugged at her hand but she wouldn't concede. "Just a couple of blocks," she said lightly, as though I were a prudish father who needed to be reassured.
She looked so alive and fun-loving that I really couldn't argue with her. Besides that, I felt protective in a way that I had never really felt before with a girl. I didn't know it at the time but I was charmed.
I let her lead me along the next couple of blocks which were dark but which led into the district of ramshackle bars from which came the noise of jukeboxes for the kind of strip tease acts that went on impromptu by local whores trying to make some extra cash on a slow night.
Because Annie and I were both under age, I didn't think she would make an effort to talk me into going inside any of those places so I guess I felt reasonably safe about indulging her curiosity.
I stood back and enjoyed watching her standing at a glass window, peering inside like a curious kid looking at forbidden candy. I came up behind her and looked over her head to see what she was seeing.
I was pretty green then, too, and the frizzy-haired broad hanging around with the guys inside stimulated me even further than I already was. She had the brightest, reddest hair that glowed orange in the dim neon lighting, and the biggest tits in the world. Melons. With two, hard, poking nipples that stretched the thin knit material of her blouse.
She walked along the bar, shoving those tits into every guy's face. Those who were too drunk to turn around, she jabbed with them, or she would pinch the guy's behind and laugh raucously in his ear.
Most of the guys were pawing her as she went among them. There were hands all over her, moving like roaches over honey. Watching it, I felt hot and nauseated all at the same time, and embarrassed for Annie.
Annie said, "Do you suppose she enjoys it?" in a curious whisper.
I didn't know, but I said, "Sure she does," because it sounded better to think that the dame was having a good time.
"And she gets paid for it too, then."
"Not much."
"How do you know how much, Ben?"
I shrugged. I didn't know, I just couldn't imagine why she should get a lot, a broad like that in a place like that. "Who has the money to pay her more?" I said, logically.
"I suppose you're right."
It amused me that Annie's voice had a downcast tone in her concession. It didn't occur to me to wonder what she was thinking, I said, "Had enough yet?" Sliding my arm around her waist, I tried to push her away from her vantage point of view.
Annie wasn't to be pushed. Her body, rigid, resisted my direction. I could see that she was fascinated to the marrow of her bones.
"Look," I said, uneasily, "a big time swimmer has to get enough sleep every night. It's after one o'clock, Annie."
She hardly heard me. My good sense didn't make any impression, even if she had. She said, "And even if they don't pay her, look at all the attention she gets."
"Some attention," I said acidly.
"Well, it must make her feel good."
"I doubt it."
"Oh, Ben, you're such a male egotist."
I had no answer for that. Maybe it was true. All I knew was that my uneasiness was beginning to get the better of me, and so was the stiff prick straining against my pants pocket. I didn't want Annie to see it and I tried to hold my trousers out' to camouflage the telltale bulge in case she happened to glance down that way.
Only she didn't and I took it in the course of things that Susan couldn't have cared less about the actual sexual implications of what she was looking at. What interested her was the whore, not the men.
I had to drag her away.
The walk back to Annie's house took thirty minutes and we spent the whole time talking about prostitutes.
Neither of us knew anything much. The conversation was all conjecture. Even then I could see that Annie's idea was glamorized and childish. She persisted in seeing the situation as a way of living dangerously, a way that provided both fun and ready cash. I tried to tell her about heartbreak and disease and disillusion with which I, myself, had been brainwashed by my father, but Annie's ears were deaf to my view of things.
I said goodnight to her on the front doorstep, after arranging to meet her again on the following Friday night.
As I walked down the street alone, I felt my brain spinning with all kinds of mixed feelings. The greatest one was my own immediate state of desire. I had purposely avoided kissing Annie goodnight for fear that I might do so too passionately. There was no doubt about it now. I had to have a woman right away. My guts felt that if I didn't drop a load, my balls would explode like a bomb.
Well, it was easy to figure out what to do about that, inevitable, I guess, now that I look back upon that night.
My feet took me right back in the direction from which I had come.
When I reached the bar and looked in, the redheaded whore was still there. She must have had a lot to drink. She was standing in front of the jukebox, holding onto the top of it and knocking her hips around as though she were screwing the loudspeaker. Her hair swayed between her shoulder blades. Her ass jiggled like a tub of soft butter on a train. I could feel my prick throbbing. I forgot about how old I was. All I knew was what I needed.
I walked into the bar and right up to the broad.
Youth has the advantage of directness. I looked at her from maybe six inches away from her face without swerving or grinning. I just stood there and stared, with my hot pants showing in my eyes.
She knew what it was about better than I, much better. I saw her flabby, sallow face become amused.
"You're a new one," she said. "What are you doing here, sonny?"
There was nothing deprecating in the way she called me sonny. In fact, I rather liked it. It was like having an incognito attitude. I knew a guy named Sonny. Sort of a short, tubby kid with good marks and no muscle. I thought of what a laugh it would be if it got around school that Sonny had been out screwing whores. No one would have believed it.
"Should I buy you a drink first?" I said to her, just like that, not thinking, not editing what I wanted to say.
She put a hand on my chest. "Oh, you're a nice one," she said,, her voice lilting low. "If you want to buy me a drink, that'll be nice." The bartender leaned across the counter on his elbows. "Look, kid, you better get out of here," he said.
"Come on, leave him alone," the broad said. "He wants to buy me a drink."
The bartender shook his head with conviction.
She said, "What do you wanna do, spoil my business?"
"Better yours than mine," he replied, unshakeable.
She stroked her hair and shot a glance up at me and said, as she put her fingers around my elbow, "Come on, son, I know a better place. A much better place."
I went with her willingly, inhaling the combination smell of sweat and Woolworth's body powder that rose from her as though she were a- bush of exotic flowers. I couldn't see straight, knowing what I would be getting soon. I followed her dumbly, obediently, out the door and into the night.
She chattered a bit as she took me across the street, down two blocks, and around the corner to a small wooden house with a rickety flight of wooden stairs that led up the side to a one-room apartment.
Obviously she lived alone. The bed was a narrow one, not at all what I expected, and smelled of the same sweat-powder combination that came from her. It was a peculiar room, not at all cluttered, but with lots of magazine pictures thumb-tacked all over the pine-panelled walls. Pictures of cute monkeys and close-ups of kittens, some panorama shots of winding rivers through mountain country. The' woman had dreams of getting away, maybe, but I didn't ask about it. I didn't really much care, couldn't care, not with that pressure shooting up through my testicles. I was a madman.
As I stood looking at the pictures, she came behind me and pressed her cunt against my behind, slid her hands around my waist and reached down to grab my prick, right through the material of my pants.
"Oh, you're a big, healthy boy," she said with appreciation. "I'm gonna work on you all over and make it nice."
She was as good as her word. Her hands stroked me vertically the full length of my erection. I was rooted to the floor like a tree with a sticking-out branch. The sensation of her cunt profile going in circles across my behind and the backs of my thighs turned me icy and perspiring simultaneously. My breath struck against my chest as I inhaled the smell of her and felt the breath of her words against the back of my neck. Those melon tits rubbed along my back and I could feel each nipple jabbing through my flesh, pouring electricity into my bloodstream. I closed my eyes as her hands moved down the zipper of my fly.
She took out my prick and began to massage it just behind the head, that most sensitive of places. Her fingers seemed to have eyes in them, certainly enough know-how for ten women. Her grasp moved slowly, too slowly to make me come, but just fast enough to put another inch on the length of it, or so it felt. My balls seemed to tighten and the two nuts rise with the tension of needing to come.
"You wanna take my clothes off?" she cooed against the side of my neck. "I bet you'd like to do that, wouldn't you, son? Come on, turn around. Play with me a little. It's all for you." I did as she said. I turned around and put my palms to those heavy, heavy breasts and pressed, feeling my hands sink into the hot, yielding flesh. She wore a wife belt that cinched tightly along a small row of flab that surrounded her rib cage. I remember thinking that she wasn't in such good shape for sports, except maybe the one sport she knew how to play. With trembling fingers I undid the patent leather belt which she took from me and tossed aside in a careless gesture. It didn't much matter to her where the belt landed.
Then she took my hands and put them on the side zipper of her skirt, helped me undo the hook and pull down the tab. The skirt came away, fell to the floor.
She had nothing on beneath. Not a damn thing.
I stared at her bush of black pubic hair.
It was a shock and I couldn't take my eyes off that curly dark mound, all fluffy and thick.
I heard her beginning to laugh low in her throat in response to my amazement.
"Come on, sonny," she said gently, but not too gently. "Touch it. Go on." She reached for my hand, placing it there.
The lips were thick and spongy as she squeezed my fingers closed. A pungent aroma came to my nostrils, very different from the smell of the rest of her body. It was a special pubic smell of heat and lots of sex all mixed together. I was fascinated and forgot to be dizzy. I poked a finger into the slit and into the slime, going deep, up to the second knuckle joint into what seemed to be an endless cave.
"Don't be so sissy," she said. "Touch it harder, if you want. It won't break."
As she spoke, she stepped in closer and guided my prick into the bed of pubic hair, replacing my hand with my stem.
I knew that if I just stood there and touched her a couple of seconds longer, I would shoot, which wasn't what I had in mind at all. I wanted to get way the hell inside of her with my prick and I wished the hell I had a condom in case the VD bugs decided to jump. Not that I thought she had anything contagious, really, it just seemed like a good idea, in case.
But I wasn't in control.
I thrust my hips forward, shut my eyes, felt my prick sliding in where my fingers had been. The hole was so large there seemed no way to miss it, and right there, standing up, I slipped in all the way to the hilt with my arms wrapped around her neck.
Only after a few moments did I look to see what was going on. She had one leg up on a chair, which I hadn't noticed before. That's how come I could get inside her so easily and so quick. She knew what she was doing. She knew how to make a fast come happen when the customer needed it. She grabbed hold of either side of my buttocks and worked her hips like a dervish, up and down and in circles and around. I could hardly keep track of anything except the sensation flooding and engulfing me.
I'd hardly had time to touch her before I was ejaculating in hard, spasmodic clenches that drained my bag of every drop I had in me, I thought.
The second I finished, she pulled away and stood back, surveying me where I was beginning to grow flaccid.
"Well, I'm glad you liked it, Sonny. Then you won't mind giving me your allowance."
I didn't look in her face. I was too absorbed in watching the pattern of dimples that pockmarked the flabby flesh of her thighs as she walked away from me, found a cigarette and lit it with a wooden match against the side of a large box.
"I've got five dollars," I said.
She came back over to me and put out her hand. "That'll do."
I fumbled in my wallet, got out the bill, watched it disappear into her cleavage and realized that I hadn't even gotten all her clothes off. Only the bottom half of her was naked, and I never even knew it.
"You got your money's worth," she said, reading my thoughts. "You're not going to say you didn't."
I didn't say anything at all. How could I know whether I'd gotten my money's worth or not? All I knew was that the cream was off and I could begin to think a little more clearly. I tucked my prick back into my pants and made myself once again presentable.
"Come again soon," she said, inhaling deeply on the cigarette as I turned and went out the door.
I thought I was thinking clearly but I wasn't thinking at all. My head was a cave of sensations that seemed to be flying around like bats getting ready to take off into space. It had cost her about ten minutes of her time to earn five bucks, the same five bucks that was supposed to do me for the whole week. I couldn't help wondering how many guys she skimmed that way each night, or how many nights she went without anything. That was probably it, I told myself, or what was she doing in the bar fiddling around with the jukebox if not waiting for a customer, a customer like me?
Not that I was making sense or drawing conclusions from any of these ideas. I wasn't even much thinking about money. Only about how strange it was, how pleasantly simple to buy an orgasm. How convenient.
How neat. How manly. Yeah, that's what I told myself. It was manly. A damn sight better for my ego than the thought of jerking off.
CHAPTER TWO
By the time Friday night came around and I was supposed to see Annie, I had been to the redheaded prostitute three more times, using the money I had put away for a certain car that was going to cost three hundred fifty bucks when I had finished saving for it. Not that I thought the car was any less important. But at that time of my life, particularly with Annie around, about whom I wanted to keep a level head, it seemed that the whore was a special gift dropped down to me from friendly skies.
I took Annie to the movies and held her hand, did and said all the right things, but somehow felt listless. I was interested, yet without that edge of enthusiasm I'd expected to feel for her since I'd been looking forward to being in her company again.
She must have sensed it. I guess that wasn't difficult, anyway. She took my hand and squeezed my fingers in the dark. It was a pleasant sensation but you couldn't exactly call it charged, not after what I'd been getting on the other side of town. I know Annie didn't know what to make of it, I mean my aloofness or objectivity or whatever you want to call it. She became restless in her seat. I got her some chocolate bars and soda which, though no good for an athlete's diet, I hoped would nevertheless placate her with fond showings of my interest. Except I wasn't interested, not really, not where it counted. And these expressions of a hollow love were easily recognized by someone who could know the difference.
During the intermission when the lights were up, she gazed at me with steady appraisal.
"You're not yourself tonight, Ben."
She spoke to me as though we'd known each other years instead of this being actually our first date together. It was her concerned tone that reached to me. Only I didn't know what to tell her. It was true. I wasn't myself. I was a new man, a real one now, a man getting used to getting his.
I smiled and tried to change the topic but no matter what I talked about, the words seemed to be coming out slow motion. I was drained, drained, and drained again. It was a shadow of me talking to Annie. In the back of my head I kept thinking, well, I'll take her home early and then go back down to Fourth Street where I felt I belonged.
Only Annie wasn't going to let me get away with that. I didn't know it at the time. All I knew was that she kept snuggling closer and closer until, toward the end of the second feature, I could feel the side of her breast against my arm.
I assumed that, for her, this was an open, daring gesture of offering, as though she must have sensed that she was up against some unknown competition. It touched me that Annie had decided to play the game, at least part of the way, for she could not know against whom she was competing, against what experienced force. As one athlete to another, I respected her guts to take on such a nebulous job as trying to draw my attention away from someone else, unknown, immeasurable.
I didn't feel ashamed of myself for having been to the whore, but I could see Annie's point of view about things. I wasn't playing fair. It was one matter getting the rocks off, another getting them off so often that I didn't have anything left for her.
So even before the show was over, I decided that I wasn't going to see this girl again, that I was making a mistake leading her astray and she deserved something better. I wanted too much, anyway, wanted what I had no right to ask, and which, in fact, I didn't really want Annie to give.
She had other ideas on the subject, however, and didn't passively accept my attempt at gradual withdrawal.
After the film we walked to the park, a manicured place with lots of light and a pond in the middle with ducks and a swan hovering at the edge of the water, protected by high grasses.
I remember the moon was full that night and everything touched by that silver spill took on an unreal and affecting beauty. Annie," herself, in a flaring dirndl dress, small, sprightly, her hair free-flowing like something out of a fairy tale. She would skip ahead of me and turn back, reach out for my hand, pull me to her, laugh, then skip away again. It was a pretty game, but the other one I was playing on Fourth Street was a better game. I felt myself indulging Annie and hoping that she would soon tire of this, what seemed to me, childishness.
I had underestimated her.
The less I responded the closer Annie came to me, touching my arm, my shoulder, my cheek, brushing against me occasionally with her body, lightly, with that hint of promised intimacy which I knew better than to believe. She was a girl, after all, who could not know as yet those deep meanings I had myself only recently discovered.
At one o'clock I decided it was time to take her home. When I said this, she gave me a long look with a flash of hurt feelings through it and something else, too, that moved too quickly for me to catch.
"Oh, not yet, Ben," she sighed. "It's so beautiful out."
"I'll get in Dutch with your folks," I laughed, looking for a reasonable reason.
"Oh, no," she shook her head, laughing, too. "They like me to go out-and stay out." She clasped her hands in front of her and stretched her arms until her elbows were stiff, as though trying to get rid of a certain bone weariness.
"They want me to fall in love and if I stay out late with a boy, it could lead to something, you see?
Or so they'd like to think."
What was she telling me?
"Come on, Annie, you know your parents don't want you to get into trouble."
"Oh, yes, they do. They'd like it very much." Her voice was tight now. "In fact, they'd love it."
I didn't believe for a moment that any mother or father would want a daughter knocked up just so she'd be forced to get married. Particularly not a girl of Annie's age. It seemed grotesque. I couldn't understand how come she had reached such a conclusion.
"Well, you'll get into trouble next week," I said, trying to keep things light. "It's getting past my bedtime too, and I'm in training besides that."
Her eyes narrowed and her face, in shadow, lifted to mine. "You don't look like you're in training," she said, running a finger up beneath one of my eyes.
There must have been some strain showing, I guess, from the recent activities that were draining all my energies.
I took her hand in mine and brought it down away from my face. Why did I feel I had to placate her? It was none of Annie's business, really, where I spent my time, or with whom. And yet, I felt almost guilty with my secret.
And the guilt made me angry. Holding Annie firmly by the wrist, I crossed diagonally through the park with her and started up the hilly stretch toward where she lived, wanting to get her home and to get away without further conversation that seemed to be threatening to lead to argument.
Annie had her own ideas, however. When we reached the big wooden house, she paused at the front fence.
I followed her gaze and noticed that all the windows were dark.
"Want to come in for some coffee?" she said, pushing the gate back.
I didn't want to. I knew too well her high school conventions and thought that what Annie had in mind was to find a corner of the parlor into which we would tiptoe, spend a half hour or two necking, and that would be all. " .
Before my experience with the whore, I might have accepted, and gladly. But I knew myself now. I'd gone much too far for these child-games. I knew I would not have been able to stop at necking once I got started.
"I think I'll go on home," I said, backing away from her.
Her hopeful look and small, inviting grin turned into a droop of disappointment. "Don't you want to come in with me?"
What I didn't want was to hurt her feelings. But there seemed no way out of it as my thoughts cast around for an excuse that would be reasonable.
"I think you ought to go home, then, if you really want to," she said, snappishly, but without malice.
I had nothing to say and I stood there, looking at her, wishing I could explain. I guess my face looked as troubled to her as hers did to me.
"Ben, I don't understand you." Her voice was soft again.
"I'm in training," I answered clumsily, feeling that something was better than nothing in the way of explanation.
"Oh, I know, I know," she said from a tight throat. "You have to get up early."
It was easy to see that Annie didn't believe me, but she felt I was disappointed with her, didn't like her. This conclusion was such a mistake that I knew I had to do something to try to change her mind.
I came forward toward her again, pushed the gate wider and went inside.
She was too smart to say anything then, to question or challenge my change of mind. She ran ahead of me up the steps to the front door, which was unlocked, and opened it gently.
The dark house smelled of cinnamon. She took my hand and led me into the living room, exactly as I had expected her to do, and exactly as I had myself done so many times with other girls.
And then we were on a three-seated divan facing the windows overlooking the front porch. Only the faintest light came in from the street lamps, enough for me to see the outline of Annie's arm as she reached for me.
I leaned toward her. Her body was like an undertow in its pull. The current beneath her young gentleness startled me in its strength and certainty. She felt no hesitation, I knew, and that bothered me all the more. It bothered me that Annie trusted me not to hurt her.
Our lips did not meet directly but my kiss landed at the side of her mouth. She moved her head until our lips touched. As my arms went around her waist, I could sense the pounding of her heart. It was as though I had caught a young, frightened bird. And suddenly I was afraid of crushing it.
I knew if I didn't break it up and get away, I would do everything to her that I was so accustomed to doing with the whore. My loins pounded with the ache to get inside her, but at the same time I couldn't bear the thought of crushing this creature, so innocent and well-meaning, really. I knew in a flash that I had made a mistake, that I should have left her at the gate. The reality of this knowledge gave me strength. I tore myself away from her embrace, turned and stumbled toward the front door.
I got outside, somehow.
And I ran.
By the time I got down to Fourth Street my lungs were bursting? A sharp pain stabbed my ribs. I could hardly see straight from the pressure behind my eyeballs.
I knocked once and pushed the door open. The whore was expecting me. She stood with a hand mirror, raking her fingers through her frizzed hair. She had nothing on but a skirt. Her full breasts swung as she turned to me. I saw the spray of blueish veins radiating from the taut nipples.
"What happened to you, honey?" she asked, with mild curiosity.
I didn't bother to answer. I went directly to her and put each of my hands on those tits, squeezed them hard as I could. With her I didn't have to restrain anything.
She reached for my pants.
"I see you're ready." Her voice was a gentle laugh, as though my erection were paying her a compliment.
I shoved forward at her, rubbing against her cunt through the material of both my trousers and her skirt.
She undid her skirt herself and let it fall.
She wore nothing beneath. I put my fingers into her public hair and squeezed those full lips between her thighs.
"You need to fuck me, sonny. Good."
There was nothing in the way of prelude. She zipped down my pants with that professional directness of hers, bent down and put her mouth to the head of my prick, began to suck it with firm, straight strokes.
On the third thrust, I began to come, shooting into her mouth, sensing how my sperm banged against her palate.
And then it was over. I looked down at her face, smeared with make-up, and all I could see was Annie looking at me with puzzlement and half-hurt.
"You got something on your mind, sonny? You wanna talk?"
I shook my head. What was there to say to her? It was none of her business.
I took out the required bill, put it on the table near an empty, dirty coffee cup, zipped up my pants and walked out.
"Hey! Stay awhile!" she called after me.
But I couldn't.
My loins were eased, but I was as tense, if not more so, than I'd been before. The whole damn thing was wrong. I felt caught between two incompatible situations. A hot anger raged through my skin as I realized that the last orgasm hadn't satisfied me, really. It had relieved the load, but only that. I was still hot. Hot in my head, and I knew what I wanted was to have Annie.
I stayed away from both women for a week, thinking sometimes of one, sometimes of the other, trying to make sense out of the dilemma in which I found myself.
There was a summer course in organic chemistry which I signed up for, but when I went to the laboratory for classes, I couldn't think about test tubes and liquids changing color. My mind was unshakably fixed upon my sex life, and soon I began not coming to classes at all rather than be there as though I were in somebody else's dream.
I began to hang around the park, eating peanuts on the bench, watching the ducks glide through the lily pads.
My mind made no sense out of anything and at home it was no better, probably worse. It was the kind of situation that I had to handle alone. I had nobody to talk to. Certainly not my folks, and none of the fellows I knew had the kind of experience which might be of help.
For the first time in my life I began to feel like an outsider.
What I didn't realize was that I was growing up.
In a small town such as ours one can't avoid people forever. It was inevitable that I would pass Annie in a book store or on the street. Sometimes I would see her with a group of girls when she didn't see me in return. I would stand across the street and watch her and feel a clench of fingers around my heart, both for what I had done to her and what I didn't do. It was the most peculiar sensation to know that I had had just the smallest brush with this girl and at the same time feel that we had known each other and had been friends for years, and that I was betraying her by not being in her company in an honest way.
I started seeing the whore again, especially after I had seen Annie in the street.
I went to the whore the way a man rushes to whiskey when he doesn't know what else to do with himself.
And she knew it. I guess I was transparent. I guess, too, she felt a friendly interest in me, probably because of my age and because I wasn't hard to satisfy.
One night when I was particularly distracted by Annie, I had fucked the whore hard as I could, as though she were Annie, and I began to think about leaving town.
My thoughts must have made a loud noise in the room. The whore said to me, "What's the matter, sonny?
You wanna talk?"
I shook my head no, reluctant to speak to one woman about another.
"Oh, come on." She ruffled her fingers through my hair. "I listen to all kinds of stories. What's on your mind?
Come on, tell me, and you'll feel better."
I didn't really need much coaxing. The pressure of my problem was right there behind my lips and, suddenly, hardly realizing it, I let go, telling her about how it is when you want to screw a girl and you can't.
It was an old tale to her. She didn't seem concerned or ruffled. She lay back on the bed, naked, unselfconscious, smoking and blowing clouds of it, squinting at me through the smoke and listening with careful attention but in a casual way, while I paced the room, picking up and putting down her lipstick case, her mascara brush, the half-emptied glass of somebody else's booze. When I had finished pouring out and the pressure was somewhat eased, I fell silent. Waited for her great words of wisdom.
She said. "So, all right. So you can't have her? Well, it's summer time, isn't it? So why don't you take the rest of the month off and go on vacation? You'll find other girls, sonny, pretty ones, nice ones. There are lots of nice girls in the world," she sighed. "I was a nice girl once, myself."
I was so damned eager to be hopeful that I believed that I could help myself by going away, that by the time I came back in September, I'd have forgotten about Annie and she about me.
The situation felt so desperate that I knew I had to go immediately. The next day I withdrew the money I had saved, whatever remained of it, and bought a bus ticket for the city, hoping to lose myself in all kinds of new experiences there.
My folks let me go. They really couldn't stop me. I had an uncle in New York and I was supposed to get in touch with him the minute I landed in town. I promised my folks I would do that-and they gave me a couple more dollars to add to my roll.
I sat on that damned bus, trying to make a list of everything I would do in New York. But I couldn't really visualize being that far away from Annie. I knew somehow that she would have enjoyed coming with me, that we could have had a damned good time together. Then I laughed at myself as I realized that I wouldn't be getting away from her at all unless I resolved right then and there to turn her off in my head and never let her in again, not for a second.
Well, I don't have to tell you, New York was a nightmare of crowds and heat. I went to lots of movies but it wasn't any different from movies at home. I saw my uncle once and escaped from him as fast as I could.
When night came, I walked down Broadway, because that was all I knew, and found myself standing in front of a topless bar, watching the almost naked women dancing on the bar. I stood in the crowd, looking in at those jiggling breasts and flabby behinds. Soon it got to be two in the morning, then three, and the streets emptied out a little bit, enough for me to notice girls walking casually and trying to strike up conversations with strange men.
I understood immediately the business they were in and felt relived to find an outlet so close at hand. I didn't think twice. I went up to a tall, blonde woman who looked to me to be around thirty, but I couldn't really tell.
I said, "You wanna go for a walk?"
She flashed me one of those professional smiles that I have come to know so well.
She put her arm through mine. I smelled her flesh somehow through the barrier of heavy perfume.
"You're not from hereabouts," she said.
I wondered how she knew. "I'm on vacation," I said, meaninglessly.
"Enjoyin' yourself?"
"Sort of."
It was a hot, sticky night. How could anyone enjoy himself? My open shirt felt limp and pasted to my back.
The lightweight material of my pants hung heavy, laden as though it had been soaked in soup. Enjoying myself. I grinned. Sure I was enjoying myself.
She laughed at the semi-desperate tone in my reply. "If you want to come back to my place," she said easily, "there's air conditioning."
Even the thought of air conditioning relieved me. I couldn't wait.
She had a room in an old apartment house near Time Square, and the air conditioning turned out to be a big fan propped up in the window that made a lot of noise and blew hot air into the room so that I felt like I was caught in a wind tunnel in a baker's oven.
She had a small, yellow refrigerator plugged into the wall, and she took out a large bottle of coke and filled two glasses, added some gin or vodka to each one, handing me mine.
It tasted enough like plain coke for me to swallow it down and thank her. I drank the stuff fast, not realizing that it could slam into my head sooner than I knew. While I sat there, starting to get high, she started undressing. Her slender body floated in front of my gaze. It was a nice sort of body with full hips and a small, protruding belly with a scar across it, I remember, probably from an appendicitis operation.
I was sitting on a straight-back chair. She came over and pulled me out of it, took me over to a more comfortable club-style chair, into which I flopped because my legs were unsteady. She sat down on my lap.
Her nakedness felt hot and oppressive and the faint, acrid smell of her perspiration made my nostrils twitch.
"How do you like New York?" she asked, stroking my face.
"It's okay," I said, without enthusiasm, wishing the rattling brains in my head would stop. I didn't like being on the edge of dizziness. I was too accustomed to feeling fit.
The sex routine progressed in a way that was familiar to me. There was a certain directness about this girl which reminded me of my redhead and reminded me, also, somehow of Susan, although at the time I couldn't say why. The only difference was that this girl with her aquiline nose and thin lips seemed somehow hard and businesslike in a way that had no connection with sex at all. She looked to me more like a secretary temporarily out of work earning a few dollars until she could get a daytime job elsewhere. I couldn't help thinking that if she wanted customers for her bed, she'd better straighten up and fly right, or differently, anyway.
But I was desolate, basically, and so eager to forget my personal problems that I successfully struggled over the hurdle of her efficient attitude and managed to get an erection when she began to fondle my prick. I kept looking across her to the rumpled 'cot which wasn't particularly inviting. I could imagine that another guy had climbed out of that bed maybe ten minutes before she had gone out and come back with me, so that I felt like somebody on an assembly line and that wasn't conducive to feelings of sex, either. I don't know why it was that I felt stimulated to think of ways in which she could improve her approach. Maybe the booze loosened me up enough so that my natural inclination for efficiency came to the surface.
"You wanna go to bed." she said.
It was apropos of nothing, no conversation before it, just a question like 'How many pounds of pears do you want?' I bounced her off my lap and stood up. It was crazy but I said, "Look, I don't know you."
She burst out laughing raucously. "You sure don't, sonny," she said, "but don't you want to?"
I began to sway and got over to the cot and fell down on it. Not because I wanted to get laid now, but because I was losing my battle with the alcohol.
I don't know whether she knew or mistook my action but, as I lay on my stomach, she began to unlace my shoes, pull off my socks, and take down my trousers.
I was lying there on my belly in my shirt tails and I felt her hand going up and down on my. behind in a firm but stroking gesture that told me that she wanted to please me. I closed my eyes and put my head into the crook of my arm, pressed my forehead down and waited for the dizziness to pass. All the while she was feeling up my behind. I felt her hands moving over my hips and her fingers work around front until their tips touched my balls. She began to stroke them, too, now, and squeeze them.
"You're hung nice," she said. "You know that."
I knew what she meant but I didn't know whether I was or not, as far as women were concerned. You think about that as a kid, whether you're going to be large enough, good enough, but until enough women tell you that you're okay, you really don't know. So what she said to me had some kind of meaning and I guess the words sank in to that deep well of information that keeps a person running.
She crawled up onto the cot between my stretched out legs and stayed there on her knees. I felt the pressure of her cheek against my back and wished she would get off me so I could breathe better. It was hard enough to breathe, anyway, way, in all that weight of summer air.
At last she patted my behind and said. "Do you want to turn over?"
I didn't know whether I wanted to turn over or not. I thought I would just like to stay where I was and maybe.
sleep a while. I felt hot enough but there wasn't anything pressing about it at the moment. I seemed to be separate from my own sensations and watching them rather than experiencing them. I felt both nonchalant and lost about it at the same time.
Rather than make any more conversation I just did that. I turned over and passively let her play with me with my eyes still closed.
She understood.
She stretched out beside me and began to stroke her hands up the sides of my thighs and finally she grabbed my prick and began to massage it slowly, rubbing her breasts along my arm. They were small breasts but soft and they seemed somehow to dissolve and become shapeless with pressure.
"You want me to climb on top of you?" she said, matter of factly.
"Yeah," I said. It was the easiest answer.
She did. She rolled over on top of me but she wasn't very heavy and it seemed to be all right, even in that hot room. Her thighs spread wide and she wriggled them down to where she was holding my prick and got it inside of her.
For a slender girl she seemed to have a pretty big hole there between her legs, and I went in easily. She came down on me with a slow motion and it was exciting as I felt my genital coming awake now to where it was, at last.
I began to pump but not briskly or hard. The bed seemed somehow uncertain. Not exactly rickety but I thought I felt it sway beneath me, or maybe it was just the gin. Anyway, I took it easy at first, thinking that if I rushed matters, the whole world would cave in and collapse, most of all myself. But she didn't seem to share this opinion.
She began to work her hips harder, plunging down upon me with strength, in that same businesslike say that I had noted earlier as she sat on my lap in the chair. It was a mechanical passion. It didn't take much feeling to realize that she wanted me to come as fast as possible. And I shared that intention. There was nothing in me that cared for this person. I didn't even think of her as an individual so much as a funnel into which I would eventually shoot my load.
I guess the sperm was sitting there on top of the bottle and a few minutes later F felt it go.
We hadn't said a word to each other during the whole process but, when it came, she started to mutter, "It's good, baby. It feels good, don't it feel good?"
They were sounds without meaning, those words, and I wished she'd shut up. Yet it didn't interfere with my climax and in a little while I was lying back again, ready to fall asleep and forget the whole night.
"All right," she said, climbing off me, "you had your good time?"
I sighed, my tongue feeling dry, and wishing I had another coke. I didn't answer her. I didn't know if I'd had a good time in that way. - "I came," I said. That was the only true thing I knew for sure.
"Yeah, you did."
Her words hung in the air expectantly. I didn't know what she wanted.
"Okay, you can get dressed," she said.
I wasn't exactly ready to get dressed. A great lassitude overwhelmed me. All I wanted to do was sleep and sleep some more.
She touched -my shoulder and shook it gently at first. But it wasn't really gentle. It was irritating.
"Hey," she said, "open your eyes, will you?"
I didn't. I made a small sound of agreement but didn't follow through.
"Look, you can't sleep here." She sounded concerned. "Unless you-want to pay for it."
"Pay for what?" I mumbled.
"My time, what do you think?"
Time. I didn't know the difference between day and night just then. I was on vacation. Time had no meaning, but I tried to understand. This girl was on her own schedule and I had no business interfering. Only hearing about it, that I had to get up and get out after a certain allotted period of time was given to me, made me feel pretty damn low. "You're not much of a whore," I said.
"I'm not what?" Her voice was shrill.
I struggled to sit up. "Just what I said. You run a rotten business."
"You have your goddamn nerve," she said, each word coming out clear and sharp.
"Oh, relax," I said, "relax." I still felt limp, even though I was sitting up. I put my hands one on either knee and looked down at my naked feet, letting the blood- rush to my head. It felt good, gave me a little feeling of equilibrium. "How much are you charging?"
"For you, mister," she said, "there ain't enough money in the world to pay me."
She had meant to insult me, I guess, but I didn't feel insulted. I felt that she'd done a rotten job, and that was the truth. If she wanted to have hurt feelings about it, okay, but that wasn't my fault. She should have been-I don't know what she should have been, only different.
I struggled back into my pants, took out some money and put it into her palm. She counted it and said, "You're five bucks short."
Rather than argue, I reached into my pocket for the extra money. Then I realized that I had paid the redhead so much less and the redhead had given me so much more and I became suddenly stubborn.
"I paid you enough."
"You tight-fisted bastard," she said. Her hand went back and she slapped me hard across the face.
The sting felt good. I wasn't sober, but I was soberer. I smiled and said, "You know, girl, I could beat you up without thinking twice about it. Better lay off me."
Beat her up without thinking about it twice. What a strange notion. I'd never thought about laying a finger on a girl in all my life. Yet here came these words stumbling out of my mouth. I didn't know myself.
"You lay a finger on me, buster, and you've had it."
The hard words, the experience of violence in her life, the certainty that she knew what she was about in handling me, somehow made me feel sad at the same time that I was angry. Only I didn't have much time to feel my feelings through.
She came at me again, lunging without seeing, coming at me like a mass of flame distilled from the room's heat. I wasn't ready to be knocked around. I caught her by her forearms and though she was strong, of course she was no match for me. Knowing that she couldn't pull out of my grip unless I released her, she bent her head over and bit down onto the back- of my hand. The hard, sharp incision caught me on a tendon or a nerve and pain seared through me, making me release my hold. I caught a glimpse of her face, the wild eyes simmering with rage. She didn't really know what she was doing or how far to go. She was more like a wild animal cornered and fighting for its life.
I guess I must have known instinctively that she wanted to be beaten up, subdued, and in some way made to know that she couldn't have her way with me, that she didn't really want it. I caught her around the waist and lifted her up, tightening my bear-hug as I swung her around. She was kicking at my shins all the while and pulling my hair.
I threw her down on the bed and jumped down on top of her, pinning her to the mattress with my weight, holding her legs down with my knees and her arms over her head.
I stared into her face which was all contorted with fury, red and perspiring, the eyes staring and the teeth bared.
I said, "Shut up or I'll break your bones." There was something-in my voice that meant it, though I would not have known myself capable of such a deed.
She spat up. I ducked my head sideways, let go of one of her hands and slapped her back and forth across the face half a dozen times, flicking my wrist, hitting her hard, but not too hard, just enough to show her I was ready to carry through my word.
I climbed off of her then, fixed my clothes and walked out without a backward glance.
CHAPTER THREE
I walked the streets for a long while, feeling that something in me had changed. I had walked through a door, the door shut behind me, and I'd heard the click loud and clear. I had escaped from some nameless dungeon. I was a different person. A person, in fact. And though I could make no immediate connections with the reasons why, I knew suddenly that I was never going back to live at my folks place or in that small town. I had no idea what lay ahead, or the direction in which I would move. I knew only that I had some mysterious, magnetic pull which I had to follow, regardless of where it might take me.
The craziest thing about it, however, was my overwhelming urge to phone Annie long distance. I suddenly knew, as though a nut had been cracked open and I saw the meat inside for the first time, what I wanted, and, more importantly, that she wanted me as much. I had been denying her womanhood, trying to protect her from the rightful physical manifestations of love that every human being must experience fully. I had been afraid to touch her, but I was no longer in fear.
I went info a large drug store on Broadway, got a handful of quarters and went into a booth.
When I finally got her, she said, "Oh, it's you."
It was a clear connection and I could hear deeper than the words, deeper than the effort she made to be casual. I knew it was an extra special effort, too. I doubted that many people called her long distance.
I wanted to say everything and nothing. I didn't know what I wanted to say.
"How about seeing me Friday night, if you aren't busy?"
I listened to my own voice. I hadn't realized that I would go back for her, yet there it was. My real feelings coming up.
"All right," she said.
There was a silence and I suppose she was restraining herself from asking a million questions.
I cradled the receiver and stood for a long while in the booth, wondering what the hell I was up to. Suddenly, Friday seemed a long time away and I didn't have a single idea as to how to spend the time in between now and then. Three days.
There was no stopping whatever it was that had begun to stir inside me. I wound up at the bus terminal, buying a ticket and riding home that very night.
It was about four in the morning when I got into town. The quiet, deserted streets surprised me as though I had taken on the pattern of big city living already. I still had plenty of money in my pocket and I took a cab to the one good hotel on the far side of the park. I wasn't going to walk into my own home at that time of night.
In fact, I wasn't going to' go back at all, I knew. I wanted my own room, and I knew why.
The next two days were strange. I felt like an invisible man walking around the town without anyone I had known well being aware of my presence. That sense of invisibility gave me a new perspective on all the things I saw, and it came home to me with full strength how narrow had been my life, how conventional and unquestioning. Now I was asking a million questions of myself, and the answers that came up all pointed in one direction: the desire to live, see as much, do as much as I could pack into any given hour. Sports and aeronautics seemed somehow so tame and even the pushups that I was accustomed to doing every night didn't seem to please me.
Friday came at last. I changed into my one clean suit and went to get Annie.
She was dressed and ready, standing on the front porch. I saw her from a distance and a smile started up inside of me. I had come a long way for a reward I could not really predict, and I felt like a gambler, sure of himself, yet aware that it was foolish to be sure of the cards.
She bounced down the stairs and came running to the gate. The casual attitude of her telephone voice was gone.
"When did you get back?" she said, before saying hello.
"How'd you know I was gone?" I grinned.
In the paling light of dusk her flush seemed strangely pretty I bent over and kissed her on one cheek, not expecting her to answer, but telling her instead that I was glad that she had known.
We walked down the street hand in hand, the affection between us breaking through now that I no longer felt hesitant about treating her as a full-blown woman.
"How about dinner?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Not unless you're hungry."
I wasn't, even though I hadn't eaten since around noon. A nervous clench of anticipation gripped my stomach. I was seeing Annie clearly, clear and free from the romantic blur of childhood and my response to her was overwhelming.
"Where do you Want to go?" she said to me.
Even her voice was a warm wave penetrating my flesh.
"I took a room in the Lucerne."
Her head swiveled around. "The hotel?"
I nodded.
It seemed to - take her a few minutes to absorb my meaning but, when she did, her face reddened with a welcoming glow, exactly the look I had expected. Instinctively I had been right. Annie was mine. I thought so, and she thought so, too.
We were both great walkers and I suppose we needed the time as a preliminary to be with each other and to sense each other again-without distractions of convention or fear. Neither of us seemed to be in a rush, and I knew Annie was enjoying the sensation of our proximity every bit as much as I.
It took us an hour, to reach the hotel, yet that time seemed like a few minutes.
We passed through the lobby and waited for the elevator, our eyes upon each other, either of us caring who saw or what the grapevine would do with that information. I was aware of this lack of concern on her part and it brought home to me even harder how deeply Annie trusted herself to be with me.
My room was a small one, neat, with light-colored furniture. I had left the two bedside lamps on and we entered a cozy, welcoming atmosphere.
I closed the door and turned the latch over.
Annie wandered over to the dressing table and looked at herself in the mirror with a serious expression. I watched her, wondering what she saw there within herself, what she was realizing and considering about the step she was on the threshold of taking. As I observed her, I saw that she wasn't quite as calm as I had imagined, not quite so sure, perhaps, of the consequences of her act. Her high, firm bosom moved rapidly in response to her shallow breathing, and I knew the pulse must be throbbing in her temples just as mine was doing. We were both on the verge of something big that would change our lives forever.
I stood there, quite still and enthralled, as Susan began to take the clips out of her hair. There were only two for she wore her hair quite simply. The dark tresses loosened and fell softly about her face, framing its impassioned innocence. She lifted her arms and reached for the back of her dress, unhooked the fastenings and, turning to me so that I could see every movement, she lowered the dress from her shoulders.
I stood quite still, enthralled, as her firm, young body became revealed. She wore a pale yellow bra of lace and satin, obviously brand new. The sheen of the satin glowed against the finer mat texture of her dark skin.
Her breasts were larger than I had expected. I gazed from one to the other of the rosy nipples, peeking through the lace.
She was so beautiful. I could not bring myself to move toward her, almost as though, if I reached to touch, she would transform into something else, perhaps a whore.
Of course Annie could not know my thoughts, nor did I have any inkling that I had become so involved with the idea of prostitutes that I was really unable to separate sexual intercourse from them.
She opened her bra now and slid the straps down. Her freed breasts seemed to heave with pleasure at their release. They were beautiful globes, much whiter than the surrounding suntanned skin, and the nipples I saw now were a very deep red, like fruit at the end of summer.
I looked at them and sensed her looking at me, waiting for me to say something.
My throat was dry and tight. I knew I should find words to encourage her but none came and I think because I didn't speak, she paused, unable to disrobe further.
I forced myself, finally, to move, to go to her. I looked down into her face, the periphery of my vision taking in her nakedness that thrust forward, waiting for my touch and kisses.
Her wide eyes were searching my face hungrily.
"I've never done this before," she whispered.
She didn't have to tell me. I don't know why she said it. Maybe she thought that I was wondering how come she could take off her clothes so fast, but I knew, I understood. She had committed herself to me and, as she did everything else, she did this directly, without hesitation or delay.
I put my hands on either side of her arms and stroked her down to the elbow, then moved my hands over to her back, letting my-fingers play into the graceful indentations of her arms. She felt warm and willing and leaned against me with what felt like an all-consuming trust that I could not hurt her.
She was only half undressed. I felt a great rushing need to have her completely naked before me and to be naked myself. I was accustomed to the whores and how they went about it, fast and to the point. I had not learned how to be patient or gradual. Annie looked up at me with that delicate, open , expression of complete faith. It drew from me a great, almost overwhelming need to grab her into my arms and give it to her hard immediately.
I knew this was wrong. I struggled with the urge to jab my prick inside her right away and hard: The pulse throbbed in my throat, pounded in my head. My hands started clutching her body all over, more roughly than I intended. I felt her body stiffen with surprise.
She murmured my name. Her tone told me that I was rushing things. But she didn't have to tell me, I knew it.
Only I was powerless to slow down. I had no control. I grabbed her. Forced my mouth to her half-parted lips.
Pressed my tongue between her teeth.
She stepped back from me, or rather, strained backward.
"Something wrong?" I said, my voice trembling.
She was confused, really, by my attitude and approach. She shook her head no, that' there was nothing.
wrong, but there was no conviction in the gesture.
I felt wordless,' reached out, touched her hair, her soft, loose-falling frame about her face which emphasized how young she was and at the same time how voluptuous.
"It's all right," I said. "It'll be all right."
She wanted to believe me. I knew it. Her willingness was. like a vibration around her. Yet somehow she could not come to me. I knew what it was. She was waiting for me to give her confidence by my actions. She needed for me to show her that . I would be considerate and that I loved her.
I knew what she wanted, needed. And even as I told myself that I had to be good to her, that I wanted to, I grabbed for her and began tearing off the rest of her clothes.
She stretched out her arm against me, stiffened her elbows. "Ben, no. Please."
I heard her but her voice seemed to come from a great distance. "It's okay. It's okay," I kept muttering.
She wrenched out from the grasp of my fingers. I lunged for her, caught her by her panties, tore them downwards. I was an animal, my eyes blinded by memories of that whore in New York.
I remember how the underwear clung to my fingers, the pale yellow nylon material yielding to my strength.
"How can you do this?" her voice raw, puzzled, hurt.
I didn't know but I didn't stop. I dragged her to the bed, flung her down on it, leaped on top of her.
She began to cry and beat my face and shoulders wildly, yet somehow without hope. Everything she did, every effort she made, pathetic though it was, to ward me off, inflamed my lust. I didn't know myself, could never have predicted that this mad desire would overtake me with Annie.
I pressed my knee between her thighs, up hard against her pubic mound. The lips were small and closed, unlike the saggy, used one I had known. She straightened her legs, squeezed her knees together, trying to lock me out. But she couldn't do it. She writhed on the bed, bouncing her hips, bracing her stomach rigid, making every attempt she knew to protect herself from my onslaught.
God, how I hated myself. Only I knew that I had to get in. The pulsing need had turned my prick into a cannon loaded with ammunition, already fired.
I jabbed it at her and met the wall of her closed lips, prevented from entry by the tight muscled thighs that wouldn't give way, no matter what.
I dropped down on top of her like a log. Her breasts were smashed out of her ribs. I moved for an instant. In a flash she raised one leg, brought her knee into my groin. Searing pain consumed me.
In that instant I was helpless, letting go of her as I doubled up. She took that moment's reprieve and rolled over onto her side, bringing both her knees to her stomach, ducking her head down, making a ball of herself.
My eyeballs burned. The bull in me panted.
"God, you mustn't. You mustn't" Her terrified voice was tight.
"You wanted it," I said, "you came here. You asked for it. I'm going to give it to you."
I wasn't making sense, not really.
"Not like this, Ben. Please, please, let me go. I made a mistake."
"You're going nowhere." I grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her back again. Not that the pain was wearing off inside me, I redoubled my efforts. It came into my head that I was raping her, that I wanted to take her by force. Something in me needed that sense of ravishment. It was a streak in my nature that I would not have suspected was there.
And in the back of my brain I knew that she could not go on fighting me forever, that her strength would have to give out long before mine did.
I pressed both my hands flat to either of her breasts and began to beat her body with my own. My inflamed erection knocked against her belly, jabbed into the soft mass of pubic hair, seeking the tight, forbidden entry below.
I had never taken a virgin, had no idea that it could be so closed, so unwilling, so unavailable. What I knew of cunts I had learned from a very narrow point of view. But my good sense should have told me that I would tear her apart if I forced my way in.
What good sense? What sense at all? Only selfish pleasure, need, to conquer, to take what I believed was rightfully mine. She had come here. She had given herself to me. She had to accept the consequences.
Still she fought on, twisting this way and that, beating hard, crying, her face contorted and smeared with tears, her hair tangled, the sweat coming' up all over her flesh that was already showing red bruise marks from where I had handled her roughly.
But I was the victor. I had her pinned to the bed. There was no escape for Annie. I smelled the acrid stench of my own sweat as her legs finally gave way and spread.
Pain tore from her lips small animal sounds as I forced my tool up inside her, inch after inch. I wanted to move fast but I couldn't. There just was no getting inside her. She could no longer fight me with physical strength but the physiology of her sex still fought me off, clamped shut, dry, unwilling. She hardly moved now but lay there stretched out like a dead starfish flung up upon a beach. Only her groans spoke of life remaining.
I got half way inside her and had to stop for I felt the rend of her flesh, the tearing of that hymen tissue and I knew the ooze that I felt was droplets of blood.
Only I didn't stop for long. I was crazed with only one drive, one target possible. I began to move backward and forward it that narrow canal. And with each thrust, with each withdrawal, she gasped sharp intakes of breath. It was horrible and, in the midst of that horror, I began to come.
When it was over, I pulled out of her slowly, my natural good sense beginning to flood back into me, filling me with tortured shame. I did not know why I had done what I had done. I sat back on my haunches but I couldn't look at her, couldn't take in the sight of that empty-looking face with large eyes that stared unseeingly at the walls, lips open, cracked with dryness. She put one finger to the wall and drew an invisible picture upon it.
What was there to say? What could I do? I had destroyed something that I had traveled miles to enhance. I thought now that this girl could never love me, that she must hate me, that her humiliation and pain would block any apology, any action on my part to make up for that mania that had temporarily taken possession of my being.
I sat on the bed with my back to her, looked down at my flaccid penis, the commander-in-chief that had led its troops to both conquest and ultimate defeat.
Suddenly I felt afraid of myself.
"Annie, are you okay?"
No answer.
I didn't deserve any answer. I deserved that she should get up and pull her clothes together, walk out and never see me again as long as we both lived.
For a long while she lay still. I sensed, gathering not her clothes but her insides, her integrity, her feelings, back into the semblance of the person she had been. Only now she could never be that person again. The innocent girl was gone. I had destroyed it. In a moment of immeasurable time Annie had been. transformed into a woman. But what kind of woman? This I could not yet begin to know.
After a while, a very long while, she stirred, got up from the bed, took a few steps. I saw that she walked in a slightly hunched over position with her hand pressed to her belly below the navel.
"Does it hurt in there?" I said weakly.
She shook her head no, but I knew it wasn't true. I knew that her insides felt shredded.
"It's like I have a poison inside me," she said. But she wasn't talking to me, she was simply describing her feelings.
"Don't worry. You're not going to get pregnant," I said, believing that was what worried her.
"I don't supposed so," she sighed.
I waited for her to put on her clothes and leave me but she made no move to do that. Instead, she walked naked to the mirror and stood in front of it, looking at herself, inspecting every detail of her body, the fingerprints upon her flesh, the still half-puckered condition of her nipples, the welts across her thighs beginning to swell, raw and red.
"What are you thinking?" I asked.
She ignored me as though she hadn't heard. Maybe she hadn't heard, maybe her mind was too far away, maybe she was in a state of shock, which seemed likely.
Miserably, I stood up and came behind her, looked at both of us in the mirror.
"God, Annie, I didn't mean it," I said and bent to kiss her shoulder.
Her shoulder twitched with a reflex action away from me.
"I really didn't," I repeated, "I don't know what to say to you. I don't know what happened. I must be crazy."
"You're not crazy, Ben," she sighed.
I disagreed with her. There seemed to be a compartment inside my brain like a cage that held an unnamed force in check. Only the cage door had opened and the force had come out, done its rotten work, then crawled back inside, pulling the door closed behind it.
"How can I make this up to you?" I said.
"Can you?"
"I want to, Annie. I really, really want to. You must believe that I had no intention of doing what I did when I brought you here."
"Then why did you do it?"
I shook my head. What answer could I give her when I had none for myself.
"Well," she said, "what's going to happen to us now?"
I looked at her face in the mirror, startled by that question. She had said "us" - a lumping together of two individuals.
"I don't suppose you ever want to see me again."
She shook her head. "You don't understand anything, do you?"
"Why should you want to see me again?"
"Ben. Ben, don't you know anything?"
"I guess not."
"Ben, I hate you for what you did to me," she said to my reflection. "I hate you like I never hated anything in this whole world. I never knew I could hate." She was speaking slowly, each word observed by herself as though it were a stranger to her own recognition. "I hate you like I didn't know I could hate. I didn't think I had it in me, Ben, to hate, to feel this." She clenched her fist and pressed it to her bosom, "This thing here inside me."
I waited for the rest, knowing that she had a lot to say, that it was all going to bubble up now that she'd begun.
"So you think I'm just going to let you walk out on me, Ben? You think I can turn my back on you and forget this hate? You think I can go back to being the Annie I was, return to school and my friends, look my family in the face or be alone with myself in my room at night? No. No. Wherever I go I'll see you the way you were over me with those tight lips and those teeth that looked like they wanted to tear my flesh apart. Ben, I'm going to stay with you for all the rest of the days of my life because that's how long it's going to take for me to get you out of my system."
It was the most peculiar moment I had ever spent. Because even as Annie said this, word after word, there was not hate in her voice, not the smallest conviction of it. There was something else that quivered and trembled like sunlight on water. I don't know how I knew it but I understood that Annie loved me with everything she had to love, which was a lot.
I let go of myself somehow at that moment. I let go of the shadow of integrity and identity which had been Ben Brown. In its place I felt an amazing, incomprehensible power. A lightning streak of insight opened up my skull, it seemed. I knew that I possessed a weird secret, a secret that had to do with the psychology of female nature.
Annie dressed slowly. She seemed to move with an effort. The spritely girlishness had been annihilated and in its place was a woman with a burden.
"I'll take you home now," I said, when Annie had finished combing her hair.
She was looking at her reflection in the mirror again, poised with an open tube of lipstick in one hand, her face pale beneath its tan, the lipstick very red. She moved the color slowly over her lips but it did not bring life to her face. It seemed only to emphasize the withdrawn quality of her dark eyes which neither, flashed nor glittered but remained steadily fixed in a gaze upon some inner revelation.
"No. I don't want to go home, Ben."
I wasn't surprised by her reply. "What do you want to do, then?" I said, trying to be agreeable.
"I'd like to go back to New York with you," she said.
I flicked her a questioning glance. "What's in New York?"
"You seemed to like it there."
"It's okay," I shrugged. "Nothing great. You wouldn't have any fun."
"I'd like to go anyhow."
"What about your folks? Would they let you?" I asked, looking for an out.
"They don't have to let me."
I couldn't imagine what she was doing but I had an inkling of the thought beginning to form in her head, out of desperation, probably, out of sadness.
"All right." My voice was suddenly chipper. "I guess you deserve a couple of good times."
"I guess I do."
It was like living in a dream suddenly. The thought of Annie taking off the way I had, cutting loose from her folks, from the pattern of school and small town living. I thought I'd been the only one who'd felt the reins, not in my mouth only, but around my neck. And here was Annie, sharing that need for freedom. For the moment I forgot to look deep and see what Annie was really after by going with me to New York. I saw what I wanted to see, knew what I wanted to know, that I had satisfied myself upon her body and that she was staying with me because of it.
It was an adventure. I felt a release of energy along with the thought of good times. I wanted to show Annie, the world, I thought. I wanted her to know that there was something in me besides what was rotten.
"Let's go tonight," I said.
"We might as well."
For Annie, too, it was like moving in a dream.
We went downstairs and I paid for the room. It wasn't all that late. What had seemed like ages of time had been just a couple of hours. There were to taxis in front of the lobby entrance and we went down to the bus station where we had to wait another hour and a half for the next bus out.
CHAPTER FOUR
I bought Annie a magazine and a chocolate malted for myself, after she had declined a desire for anything to eat. I didn't have to exert much effort not to concentrate on why she wasn't hungry. It seemed so damned easy just to put it all out of my mind and think about the good things, the positive things that we were going toward. I didn't even stop to think that Annie hadn't said a word to her folks about her leaving or that I could get into trouble with them for going with her. There was something in me confident, too confident, perhaps, that regardless of what happened, I could handle it.
Annie wanted the seat near the window. The. bus was empty and we had our choice of places. She walked back to the seat and slid in, settling her dress around her with what seemed to me a last prim little gesture.
As the bus pulled out, she gave one longing glance backward at the town and turned her eyes forward to watch the shadowed road that was beginning to pick up speed as it rolled away underneath the wheels.
I adjusted the back of the high chair, stretched out my legs and tried to catch a snooze though I didn't really feel sleepy at all. Yet my body felt drained in a different way from what I had experienced with the whores. I felt easy and, somehow, satisfied with myself. I didn't begin to look for the reasons why.
Coming into New York for the second time was like coming home, oddly, as though I had taken a temporary vacation from the city rather than vice versa. Annie followed after me without asking questions. I assumed that she was leaving everything in my hands because, of the two of us, I had the familiarity. It didn't even strike me as strange that she looked around her with only the briefest of glances, but concentrated most of her energies and attentiveness to keeping an eye on me.
I had no intention of calling my uncle for a place to stay. The time I had spent in the city had given me some idea as to where I could find cheap accommodations and, since the city was still alive even at that late hour, I had no trepidations about taking Annie over to the West Side where there were transient hotels in number.
I suppose part of the reason I had no trouble in getting a place was that I looked older than my age, or maybe nobody gave a damn. At the time, anyway, I thought nobody gave a damn. That's how it felt in New York, like I could do anything and nobody would try to stop me.
For the first couple of days we did have a ball, Annie and I. We went everywhere. I took her sightseeing, to movies and restaurants, as though we could live forever on the money that I had in my pocket. And the troubled look seemed to disappear from her face, not dissolved exactly, but as though it were at rest, in shadow, lurking behind the high grasses of her recent experience. She wasn't anything at all of a drag however. Willing to have a good time, she flung herself into whatever I suggested that we do. And at night, when we came back to the room, she would give herself to me without complaint.
It was the oddest sensation making love to Annie, now. I expected that any day she would tell me that she was pregnant because neither of us took the trouble to prevent that. I couldn't imagine what was going on in her head to allow this kind of carelessness. Well, if she didn't want to take any precaution, I figured that it was none of my business and that Annie must know what she was doing. She wasn't of age, but she was a big girl. She must have been educated.
What impressed me more than anything was the gradual rise and development of her passion for making love. It seemed to come slowly to her, as though she were dragging it out from a deep well. But I saw it rise, felt the increasing intensity of her response to our love-making. I congratulated myself on that. Maybe I had been a son of a bitch that first night, but here I was, making up for it by making lots of love to her.
I told myself that the vagina is a resilient place and how badly could I have hurt her that first time, after all? I thought of the vagina as a birth canal, a place that stretched wide for babies to come out of. Certainly wider, for something much larger than what I was putting in there. I told myself that if it had been all that terrible for her, all that traumatic, she couldn't get over it so soon, as she seemed to be doing.
The bed was near the window. There was a small air conditioning unit that blew some air, not very cold, just enough to make it almost pleasant right there where the draft came in.
Annie stretched out. She looked hot and cool at the same time. I don't know how to describe it. I mean, her flesh looked hot but her face had a kind of impassive serenity when we would first get started.
Her arms and legs were outstretched, spreadeagled, relaxing after a day outside. I stood at the foot of the bed gazing at that beautiful young body waiting for me.
"Ben, you must know a lot about love-making. I want you to teach me. I want you to teach me everything I ought to know."
I took it as a compliment and thought that she was right, that I did know a lot, that I knew everything from my measly experience with those two whores. God, was I young and ignorant about sex, but I thought I knew everything because I had Annie in love and trailing after me like a puppy that couldn't exist without its master.
"Well, you're doing just fine," I said, with a small, crooked grin. "I guess all you have to do, Annie, is what comes naturally. I guess it's instinctive."
"No. There must be more to it than just my feelings," she said. "There must be techniques, oriental styles."
I laughed loud. "You've been reading too many dirty books," I said.
She shook her head. "No, I mean it. All you do is put it into me. Aren't there things I'm supposed to do, too?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know," her voice lifting upward with musing curiosity. "Something."
I thought she might be talking about mouth to genital contact, which we hadn't explored yet. I was having too much of a good time, just slipping it up her and ramming it home, enjoying the way her body had eased and stretched to accommodate my penis. And I really wasn't interested in rushing things. I had an instinctive feel that I ought to withhold certain knowledge from Annie, but I didn't know why.
Yet she kept badgering me night after night, even after we had made - love and she lay with one foot on top of the jutting out portion of the air-conditioner, massaging herself absently with one hand as though she were taking the cramp out of her cunt.
I got impatient with her questions and resorted to drinking coke with gin in it, the combination I had discovered all by myself one night. My stomach had learned to absorb alcohol. My head no longer grew suddenly dizzy. The liquor only went so far as to relax me from thinking irrelevant thoughts upon the subject of my life. Yes, that peeked out from time to time from behind high bushes. The question of my future. It seemed an empty place. Whenever I asked myself about what I was going to do, I drew a blank.
"Come on, Ben, don't tell me all you want to do is get screwed," Annie said.
"Why?" I said, draining my second drink. "Isn't that enough for you?
"I'm not thinking about myself."
"Sure you, are, Annie. Maybe you aren't satisfied. Maybe you want more. Is that it? Do you want more?"
I walked over to the foot of the bed and stared down at the curly-headed little cunt that had relaxed enough so that I could look between the outer lips and see the pink flesh no longer protected by a mat of hair. Her clitoris stuck up now, obvious, as though looking around for someone. I wondered, then about Annie's orgasms, whether she was really having them the way I thought she was. Maybe she was kidding me. I had heard of that. I had heard of girls pretending to come just to please the boys they were with. It dawned on me that Annie might be going along for the ride, hoping to find a way of being satisfied. I thought, well, she's trying to pull a fast one on me and I didn't like it, I didn't like it a bit.
"Come clean, Annie," I said, rattling the last melting ice cube in my glass. "Aren't you having a good time?"
"Oh, yes, I am."
"Aren't I good enough for you?"
"You are, Ben."
"Then why all the questions?"
"I just want to know. Can't a girl want to know?"
"You must have a reason."
"I tell you I haven't."
"I don't believe it."
"Okay, so don't believe it, Ben. It's the truth."
"Then don't ask me any more questions."
"Okay, I won't."
She turned on her side and looked out through the dirty window pane to the roof across the street. I followed her gaze. We both saw some pigeons up there walking around, their heads bobbing. It couldn't have been later than about six o'clock and night hadn't even begun to come on yet. I realized that we had been making love through the afternoon. I realized, further, that we were going out less and less, staying in this room making love more and more. It was all right with me. It was fine. Just great, and I gathered then that it was just great for Annie, too. We were both concentrating on sex as though it were the very core of life itself.
My hand went down to my genital where it hung quietly over my balls. I began to stroke it, as though I was dealing with an old friend.
It was good to be out of the rat race of having the hots and no place to get rid of the load. I had a permanent vessel to receive my rocks. Annie, the girl I had once thought of protecting, had become for me a convenience. I had managed somehow to lump her into the same pile as the redhead and the blonde. I didn't even feel peculiar that I no longer sensed the difference between her and them.
"You're a funny kid, Annie," I said. But I wasn't talking to her, I was talking to myself. I was a funny kid. In what way was I funny?
"In what way am I funny?" she said, echoing my own thoughts.
I couldn't rightly tell her. I just felt it, felt myself being peculiar, off the beaten track, cut loose, cut free, roaming, flying, searching, restless, hungry, very, very hungry in the pit of my stomach as though I were yearning for some unnameable, immeasurable conquest that I had not yet come upon.
"What would you like to do tonight?" I said, trying to change the subject, hoping my mind would drop it.
"I don't care, Ben. Anything you say."
It made me nervous to hear her say that. Anything I say. Why couldn't she have a thought or two on the subject? What was this beaten dog quality in her?
Yet, even though I liked it, I couldn't admit to myself that I liked it. I had to say that Annie was a person separate from myself, that she had a right to her opinions and feelings. These were words that I voiced aloud inside my skull yet they seemed to be coming from somebody else's brain, not my own. I knew that I was wallowing in Annie's agreeableness.
But what was there to do? I poured more gin into the glass. I had had movies up to my ears. We had gone to the Empire State building, taken bus rides around the city, seen some shows, even ridden out to one of the local beaches for a day. I was bored with it all. I wanted something else. If only I could find out what it was that I wanted.
"You're quiet," she said.
"So I'm quiet," I answered, hearing the echo of irritability behind my words.
"Be quiet then, I don't care."
She rolled over onto her stomach and I looked at Annie's behind. It seemed somehow more mature than I remembered it. Or was she taking on a little weight? In so short a time that didn't seem possible. I tried to change the subject and think of what we were supposed to do that would be entertaining for the evening.
Another couple of days dragged on like this and pretty soon it occurred to me that I was going to run out of money, that I already was beginning to run out of money.
I had twenty-five dollars in my pocket the night I said to Annie that I thought it was about time we thought about doing something to get more.
That night was no different than all the others we had spent in the hotel room. I had made love to her, come a couple of times, tried to figure out if she, too, had come, and been unsuccessful in making a firm decision on the matter.
What happened was that I picked up the bottle of gin and saw that there was maybe half an inch of liquid left in the bottom. A bottle cost a few bucks and suddenly I didn't want to spend what I had on booze. I wanted to conserve the cash. Not for anything in particular, just as a backlog against some impending necessity. I didn't want to spend money on gin and I didn't want to be without the gin.
"You know, Annie," I said, tipping the bottle over and pouring the last of it into my empty glass. "This is no way to live."
She turned her head on the pillow and burst out laughing in my face. There was something in her laugh that reminded me of the way the whore had spat in my face.
I jerked my head to stare at her. "What the hell's so funny?"
"You are."
"How so?"
"I was wondering," she said, sitting up and rubbing her arms, "how long it was going to take you to come to the end of the line." She shook her hair out, raked her fingers through it, stretched her legs, wiggled her toes, bent over, rubbed her hands down from her knees to her ankles along the front of her shins. "So I guess we're there now, aren't we?"
"Not quite yet," I said.
"Sure we are, Ben. We're at the end of the line."
There was something in her tone that irritated me as though she were trying to get my temper up.
"What if we are?" I challenged. "What the hell are you going to do about it?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, nothing, Just watch."
"Okay, so I'll do something. I'll get money."
"Sure you will."
"You don't think so?"
I didn't exactly go for Annie's lack of confidence in me. It wasn't what I needed at that moment when I couldn't figure out what to do to get money. There was no such thing as a job, not in my books, anyway.
Besides which, how could I work and leave her all alone during the day? What kind of a job could I get? I didn't have a high school diploma. The thought of pushing those carts of dresses along Seventh Avenue the way I had seen them do, wasn't my idea of a job. I didn't know anybody who might give me a hand. I wasn't going to go to my uncle, who would certainly have spilled the beans to my folks.
"I know what you're thinking, Ben," she said, standing up and stretching herself at the waist.
"What am I thinking, smartie?"
"You're thinking that when we run down to our last quarters I'm going to get scared and call my folks for some more."
"I wasn't thinking that at all, as a matter of fact," I said with triumph and truth. "I wasn't thinking anything of the sort."
She looked at me, disappointed.
."You mean, Ben, you weren't going to ask me to help out at all?"
"Why should I?"
"Oh, I don't know." She gazed at her cuticles and pushed one back, paying attention to it as though there was something important about the fingernail.
"Annie, you're fishing. Better say right out what you mean."
"All right, I will," she said abruptly.
"Please do." I swallowed the last swallow of gin without any coke in it. , But there was a pause and she didn't fill the silence with words. She just waited, as though expecting me to catch the vibrations of her thoughts.
"Well?" I said, after a while.
"Okay, Ben. I'll tell you what I expected. I expected you to put me to work for you."
"Put you to work for me?" I repeated dumbly.
"Sure."
"How?"
She smiled a funny little quirking smirk that I didn't quite catch the meaning of.
"You look so innocent," she said.
"I am."
"Okay, I'll put the thought in your head since you tell me it's not there yet." She came over to me, took the glass out of my hand and herself swallowed the few watery drops of booze left.
"I honestly thought," she said, "that you would have an instinct for the flesh business and tell me that I ought to go out and earn my keep."
Nothing clicked inside my head. I didn't make the right connections, couldn't figure out what Annie was suggesting to me, and I told her so.
She let the subject drop and I didn't pursue it because my stomach was queasy with premonitions of all kinds of possibilities. But, as a matter of fact, Annie had started the wheels turning in my head. Maybe I had myself already oiled them and gotten them ready to run. I couldn't say. What I do know is that we spent the next day without talking about it at all, yet with both of us on the verge of saying things to each other which, once said, would be put into action and which would change again the nature of our relation ship to each other.
On the third day the twenty-five dollars had dwindled to ten and we were watching very carefully where we ate and how much. I had bought a bottle of gin, a small size, and that I emptied too quickly for comfort.
It was the next day that I awoke and found Annie missing from my bed.
I wasn't surprised Or worried. I wasn't even curious. I figured that Annie had dressed and gone out to get some cheese whiz and a loaf of bread, something cheap for us to eat while we were pondering the question of money. I thought, well, maybe she'd relented and had gone to call home to get some cash. I thought any number of things which would be logical and I rolled over to get some more sleep, for my bones had begun to ache and my muscles felt stiff as though I had caught a cold in my system and couldn't pinpoint the place where the infection lay festering.
I slept until noon, woke up, felt the bed with my foot, discovered emptiness. I opened my eyes and squinted around the room, saw that it was empty. I called Annie's name to make sure. Silence was my answer.
I still wasn't worried. I thought, well, she's waiting around the Western Union office for an answer. I thought, she wants to come back with the money in her fist to prove to me that she could do it since she had sounded off like such a big shot. I turned over on my back and stared at the ceiling, feeling aggravated at Susan's lack of faith that I could take care of getting us money when the time actually came for it.
Well, the time had actually come for it, I realized, and what had I done? I had slept.
So Annie would be the practical one between us this day. So what?
I was irritated and feeling acid run through the marrow of my bones, like I was being bathed in the stuff.
Anger was distilled from that acid, a growing, pervasive anger which rerouted my thoughts from the problems of money to my relationship with Annie. I had been the boss up until this day. Now, suddenly, she was taking the reins and the whip in her hand? Oh, no. No again.
I took a couple of turns around the room, looked out the window and looked at my watch again. I thought, well, if worse comes to worse, I can always pawn this for a day or two until I can think of something better than just thinking, thinking and standing there. I really didn't want to either. I wanted action.
I was standing at the window and looking down across the street to where a number of girls were sitting and standing around the stoop of a brownstone. They looked like they were having a good time laughing, joking and looking up and down the street from time to time. Watching them gave me pleasure. They wore tight fitting blouses and tight slacks which showed off their ample bodies. All of them looked like they ate very well and they seemed to be unaware of their physical appeal.
There was something about these girls that took my mind of Annie. I dressed and went downstairs.
For a few minutes I stood on my own stoop, watching them, until one of them noticed me watching and waved as though we knew each other.
She had on a black turtleneck without sleeves and a slant of sun moved across her chest and into her armpits, which I found peculiarly exciting in a way that reminded me of the redhead. It was the directness, I think, the open, ready smile, the lack of fear, the utter casualness of her invitation for me to come over and make friends.
I ambled across the street, feeling the eyes of two of them upon me, sizing me up. The third one sitting on the steps had her elbows on her knees and her chin in one palm, ignoring me. She gazed down the street and into the passing cars.
"Hi," I said, as I approached.
Two of them said hi in return, but the third didn't bother to say anything, as though I weren't there. I ignored her, too.
"You living across the street now?" said the one who waved.
"Yeah, but I'm looking to get out," I said, just for the sake of talking.
"Well, you'll find a place. There lots of rooms on this block."
"Guess so."
"Got a girl friend with you?"
She must have seen Annie and added one and one to make a couple.
"Sort of." Instinctively I didn't want to commit myself.
"That's a nice looking chick."
I was amazed. I had felt anonymous but apparently there had been these eyes curious about my comings and goings. I guess they knew everybody on the block and kept track just for something to do.
We exchanged names. The one that had waved at me was Caroline and she remained the friendliest of the group. I got to looking at her and found her attractive in an abandoned sort of way. She had lots of thick hair barely held in place by a loose rubber band, and there was lots of meat on her shoulders and naked arms.
Her heavy breasts hung a bit in a loose brassiere so that when she moved, those breasts swung about and kept my attention on them. When I looked lower, I saw the beginning of a row of flab, nothing much yet, but in five years she was going to be a heavy, heavy woman. Just now, however, she was distinctly touchable and seemed proud of it, for she moved about in such a way that kept my eyes upon her. I judged her to be in her twenties and looked for a wedding band but saw none. After that I surveyed the roundness of her lips and belly emphasized by the tight striped slacks that pulled taut into her crotch. The vee there seemed as though she wore no panties beneath and I could make out where the seam of the slacks indented slightly into the slit of her cunt. She had nice tight thighs and full calves that narrowed sharply down to her feet encased in cheap rubber sandals. Spots of an orange colored nail polish glinted on her toes. Immediately, I judged her to be worth maybe ten dollars a day.
Of course I had no reason to think of her in the category of prostitution. But my mind seemed automatically to go there, particularly, I suppose, since I was so hard up for cash.
I smiled inwardly thinking that this girl was probably out to make a few bucks from me and she could hardly know that I was looking at the same time to make some money from someone else.
I hardly realized it myself. What I had in mind was still vague, unformed. I sensed only her interest and that I knew I could take advantage of that interest in some way. But I didn't yet realize exactly how.
My thoughts on the subject ended there for I saw Annie coming down the street and I left my new acquaintances abruptly.
I crossed and went to Annie, hoping for good news, for she was walking with a swinging step that indicated that she Had accomplished something. And I knew it would have had to do with money?- "Well, you've been gone long enough," I said to her, more irritably than I had expected from my voice.
"Accomplish anything?"
She had a smile I'd never seen on her face before. It was happy yet somehow hollow, smirking and confident, yet somehow hard. She looked into my eyes but looked right through me I felt. There was something in those eyes that reminded me of how she looked the night that I had raped her. I felt annoyed and became rapidly even more snappish.
"Yes, I have something for you," she said, her voice strangely soft, low, almost laughing, almost bitter.
I became distinctly uneasy in her presence and wished she could have that same casual attitude as the girls across the street who, I knew, were watching me, watching us.
"We'll go upstairs and you can tell me about it there," I said.
"Okay."
She went ahead of me, flouncing as she walked. There was a certain swing to her hips, a sideways wiggle that was uncharacteristic of Annie's usual walk. The straightforward, athletic bounce had been softened and elaborated by a more conventional feminine undulation. I watched her walk and thought that she really should have a straight-pegged skirt to emphasize what she was trying to show off to me now.
We didn't say another word to each other until we got inside the room. I didn't know what to expect. I closed the door and locked it with a premonition.
"Okay, so what did you do?" I asked, leaning against the door.
She had been carrying a large cloth purse which she opened now and took out a small bottle of gin which she set on the table with a slight slap.
"Here," she said, "Have yourself a good time, Ben."
"Is that all you did?"_______ She chuckled low in her throat-"No."
"Come on, Annie, what's your secret?
She continued rummaging in her purse, not looking at me, finally dug out her wallet, pulled out two fives and slipped them under the bottle. "There you are," she said. "That ought to hold us another day."
I squinted at the bills and grimaced, feeling a definite distaste on my tongue, the distaste of disappointment.
"Is that all they sent you?" My voice was a sneer.
"Who?"
"Come off it, Annie. You didn't tell me you had stingy parents."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
She couldn't have meant it yet her voice was sincere enough. I felt puzzled and hesitated to ask further questions. After all, I really wasn't interested where she got the money. Her family's problems were her business and I wanted no part of them. Just because I didn't feel exactly comfortable when I thought about Annie's family.
I didn't say anything further but took the money and put it in my pocket, wondering how come she felt so good about a measly ten dollars.
"You'll have more tomorrow," she said.
I glanced at her, into those eyes which were narrowing as they met my gaze. There was something level in those eyes.
"How come?" I said. "Why should there be more tomorrow? Why wasn't there more today?"
She burst out laughing. "God, you ask a lot."
We were playing a game of hide and seek that didn't appeal to me at all. I had no intention of prying her secrets free and I told her so.
"No secrets," she said. "You want to know where I got the money?"
"No."
"Well, I'll tell you anyway."
"That's your business."
"It's yours, Ben."
"Oh, for chrissake." I was disgusted. It seemed like a hell of a lot of fuss and feathers for ten bucks.
"Okay, Annie," I said, scratching the sticker off the gin bottle pap and untwisting the cover. "Get it off your chest."
"You'll be proud of me." Her voice was like a twisting snake as she walked about the room, as though looking for a place for herself and not finding one.
"So I'll be proud of you."
I wasn't listening, not really. I was more interested right now in the gin and coke than in the thought that a great distance had sprung up between Annie and myself. It was terrible to me that my affection for her had become infected with problems about money and that it was she who had brought home the bacon instead of myself. On the other hand, I couldn't help but notice that she was somehow proud to have been able to accomplish whatever it was she had done to get this money and she really didn't have to tell me that the two fives had not come from home. I wasn't smart but I wasn't that stupid and my ears seemed to want to close off before she confided in me that she'd been doing that morning.
She took the bottle of gin and poured some for herself into a coffee cup and drank it down without adding coke.
"We're going to have a nice life," she said, looking into the cup bottom. "You wait and see, Ben. Everything is going to be just fine and you can lay around this room all you want, except you have to let me have it free for a couple of hours at night."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
She went to the bed with her cup and sat down, pushed her shoes off, wiggled her feet, stretched her toes.
"Remember Fourth Street?" she said.
How could I forget? I waited.
"Remember how that woman was making all the guys look at her? How they were looking at her with that certain... "
"Oh, shut up," I said. "I don't remember any of it and you don't have to remind me."
"Okay."
She was too damned agreeable and it annoyed me further. I went to her, took the cup out of her hand, put my fingers to her chin and lifted her face so that she was looking directly into my eyes.
"Annie, what are you telling me?"
"I'm having a good time, Ben. That's what I'm telling you. For the first time in my life I'm having a good time.
You know, my folks would be proud of me," she said. "They always wanted me to like boys and I was always fighting with them about how I wanted to make a career in swimming. They laughed at me, said I should have a husband, said it was a woman's place on earth to make a home for some good man."
She was looking at me but she wasn't seeing me. She was seeing her past and her eyelids lowered a little bit in a sleepy sort of way, as though she were getting a perspective on all that had transpired back home.
"Annie," I said suddenly, "are you telling me what I think you're telling me?"
"What do you think I'm telling you?"
"I hope you're making it up, Annie."
She returned to the present with a sudden devilish little smirk. "I'm not making anything up, Ben. I'm just telling you that everything's gonna be all right."
"Yeah, I heard you. So go ahead and tell me," I said, turning away from her. "Tell me you were sleeping with some guy and he paid you for the use of your cunt."
"Well, why not?"
"No reason why not." I forced myself to be casual. "You like to screw. You're so damn curious about men.
You have been since the first night I met you."
"Not about men, Ben, but about women and the place of women in this world. My place."
"So what's your place, Annie?"
"I can earn a living, Ben. That's my place. I have a built-in profession, you see. I carry it between my legs and it's nice."
I was too young to comprehend that Annie had probably been predisposed all her life to doing something exactly like what she was telling me.
CHAPTER FIVE
The way she said it, I couldn't even react. I couldn't tell her that it was stupid, preposterous, that she was a hopeless dreamer, that it wouldn't always be fun, that sleeping with guys at random wasn't going to make her boss over me, either. I couldn't tell her anything because I didn't know. And so I said the first thing that came into my mind. I said, "Well, if that's the kind of job you like, I hope you can do better than ten dollars a day."
Then I swung around and began to slap her silly out of rage and relief and the need to show her that I didn't give a goddamn what she did with her body, just so long as she always came back to me.
That was my version of love.
This time she let me hit her. She became stony underneath my blows. I sensed that the pain was bouncing off her as though she were made out of some fossilized flesh.
And when I got finished slapping her around, she said, "You son of a bitch, bastard."
The words were alien to her lips, yet somehow natural, too. And thus it began, a routine of Annie going out, sometimes in the evening, sometimes earlier in the day, and always returning with ten dollars, twenty, whatever the market would bear in that neighborhood. She never asked me for a penny of it but what I had left over, I used to buy her new clothing and makeup, perfumes, whatever she saw that delighted her. She didn't know the difference between expensive and cheap, or didn't much care, and we set up housekeeping in that room for real, with towels and a radio that I listened to while I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling during the hours that she was outside.
Sometimes I thought about how she made her contacts, but it didn't take much intelligence to figure that any guy would be glad to get his hands on a piece of ass that was still so young and comparatively uncorrupted.
She didn't yet look like the redhead or the blonde, or the girl across the street. She still looked like Annie, somehow, life a fresh kid in from the sticks. So I lay on my back and stared at the triangle of light bulbs in the ceiling fixture and wondered how long it would be until my investment in Annie's flesh would wear thin.
This wasn't exactly the way I had pictured love but, then, I wasn't the same guy who had been thinking about it just a couple of months ago. I was telling myself the truth now, that I had gotten smart and gotten lucky, but that I had better not let a good thing ride without something to back it up - and my mind wandered across the street again to the girl who had waved at me.
It was a question of simple arithmetic. If Annie brought me in ten dollars a day, Annie plus somebody else would bring twenty at least. And on twenty dollars a day I could live a little, get myself some clothes, too, which I badly needed, and maybe move out of the dump in which I was now ensconced.
As I look back on it now, I see that a deep dissatisfaction with life was at the root of my interest in having girls work for me. Some people have accused me of hating women but that's not so. I have never had any cause to hate them. In fact, quite the opposite. It was the women who hated themselves and they just wanted to see a reflection of their sense of worthlessness. Somehow I gave it to them, gave them, also, a certain indefinable sense of acceptance which, in a way, is a form of true love.
Anyhow, even though I thought about increasing my income, I didn't do much about it right away. And what was burning up my thoughts, too, was what Annie and I would do at the end of the summer when it was time, or should have been time, to go back home.
On that score it seemed to me the best idea was to jump the gun. I had to figure out a way so that Annie and I could stay in New York without either of our families trying to make trouble and get us home again.
The only thing I could think of was to get married. I didn't know whether we could pull this off in the States or anywhere else for that matter. Going back home would be like going to the beginning of a maze. If there was an exit, it should be ahead somewhere.
I lay for a long while, watching Annie sleep, with no desire to waken her. I wasn't thinking about marriage, just about moving on, out of the room, out of the West Side. I yearned for a change, any kind of change.
At last I saw that first flutter of her eyelids, the prelude to wakefulness. She stared, sighed, licked her lips, flung an arm in sleep which landed across my chest, a pretty arm. More deeply tanned now and with a pale fuzz that reminded me of a bruised peach.
I got out of bed and put up some water for instant coffee, thinking it would be a good idea to have some breakfast and put some food in our stomachs for a change instead of gin. My eating habits had become quite erratic and as a result I seldom felt as energetic as had been my Custom. I looked inside the refrigerator and saw three eggs lying there close to each other and a half empty carton or orange juice that Annie sometimes used to mix with her gin. There was no butter, so I put the eggs into the same water that I had set up to boil. When they were cooked, I broke them into two cups, made some black coffee and went to stand over Annie.
Because she was on the verge of waking, I suppose she felt me looking at her and opened her eyes.
I said, "Good morning," which was something I did not usually say anymore.
"Good morning, Ben." Her voice was a drawl, sandpapery with sleep.
She sniffed the aroma of food and coffee and looked at me with pleased curiosity. "Breakfast is served," I said.
Her face broke out into instant delight. No hesitation, no wise comments, a shadow of the Annie I had known.
"Oh, that's lovely," she said and sat up, shaking her hair out and raking her fingers through it. "I could use the coffee."
"You can use the eggs, too."
"Oh, you really meant it. Breakfast."
"I certainly meant it. I mean everything I say."
My annoyance was inappropriate but I was quick and short-tempered lately. Anything could set me off that had nothing to do with anything. Annie apparently was used to it and ignored my brusque retort.
"I'll just go brush my teeth, dear," she said. 'Dear,' what a word. Yet Annie could use it without a blush and I thought she must have learned a lot in all her brushes with men. I thought she must have picked up all kinds of ways of dealing with unhappy males that she was quick to take advantage of her new knowledge and use it on me.
She went to the sink, brushed her teeth, quickly rinsed her face and, ignoring the fact of her nakedness, came to the rickety table and sat down in front of one of the place settings, for I had put a fork on top of a folded napkin.
"All that's missing is the newspaper," she said with a smile and drank the coffee down.
We had a pleasant few minutes while we ate, chatting like two people instead of like whore and pimp. And I think it was this reflection of what might have been between us that magnetized all the thoughts which had been roiling about in the back of my head and brought them up to the surface.
"Annie," I said, "how would you like to get out of here? Out of New York?" .
She didn't have to think. "I'd love it," she said. "Where are we going?"
It was just like her, ready, eager. I recalled how she had pressed her nose to the windowpane on Fourth Street and devoured the life she had seen inside. She was doing the same thing now, reaching to devour another angle of living.
"I was thinking about Mexico," I said, which I hadn't been thinking of at all but which sprang to my lips.
"That sounds great" ^ "Well, what sounds great about it?" I said.
Annie shrugged. "I don't know. It's somewhere else. They speak Spanish."
I laughed. "Do you?"
"I have a couple of years of it."
"So it would amuse you to practice, eh?"
"Yes. And maybe we'll go to a bullfight."
"And maybe we'll get married," I added. That brought a silent, startled explosion of puzzlement to her face.
"What's so strange," I said.
"Do you mean it?"
"I said it, didn't I?."
"Sure you said it."
"Well, I mean it, then."
"Okay. Okay."
And so it was settled. We both had another cup of coffee and our big decision became part of another day.
No romance, no thrills, chills and spills, no protestations of undying love forever, no talk of practical matters of income or where we would live. Nothing. Just 'okay' on both our sides. No more important, perhaps than the decision to have Chinese food for dinner instead of hamburgers.
And yet there was something exhilarating in the air now that touched each of us. I realized that Annie was as glad as I to be getting out of this rut we had dug for ourselves.
In the middle of nowhere she said, "Let's pack, Ben. Let's go now. Right away."
I laughed. What was there to pack, and in what?
"Let's go without anything," I said.
"Okay. Without anything," she echoed. "I'll get dressed.
I wondered about such things as passports, vaccination certificates and all the rest of the garbage that was supposed to be required for such things as crossing borders. Annie didn't seem to know a thing about it. To her it was like taking a bus across to Jersey, but I wasn't quite so sure it would be that simple.
"So find out," she said.
"It's Sunday," I reminded her.
"Tomorrow morning, then, first thing."
The rest of Sunday became a holiday for us and Annie didn't go out to work. We walked over to the Hudson River where you can, look at it from the boat basin on Seventy-night Street. There was a cooling, dank breeze on the air, separate from the air as though it had blown in from another country. We leaned on the rail and looked at the small boats and the people on them, all comfortable in their dungarees and sneakers.
"They have a good life, don't they?" I said, not to Annie but to myself. .
"It's all a matter of money," Annie replied matter-of-factly.
I knew. At home both of us had enjoyed all kinds of comforts which we had taken for granted and which we scarcely missed now. But neither of us had ever mentioned it to each other how it felt to live in a grimy situation. It had been like being dropped into a pail of emptied garbage and I felt as though my skin were saturated with a sour stench. I'd never thought about money very seriously, but I was thinking about it now I'd been thinking about it for weeks. Man's best friend. Maybe his only friend. I knew only that things had to change, that Annie was doing, her best but that her best wasn't good enough. It was up to me.
On Monday I made a few phone calls and found out the necessary details so that we could get across the border into Mexico.
The receiver clicked down. As far as I was concerned, even if we couldn't get married there, we could manage, I felt sure, to stay long enough until we both came of age and could return to the States.
By the end of the week it was all settled. We had been to the Board of Health and a Mexican lawyer had done something about our birth certificates.
"Well, Ben, how are we going to get there?" Annie said.
I patted her cheek, kissing her impulsively, feeling an unaccustomed glow of warmth for this girl who would come with me to the ends of the earth, if I said the word.
"Hitchhike," I replied.
"Why not?" Annie grinned. "It'll be good exercise."
CHAPTER SIX
I don't know how we managed to keep Annie from getting pregnant but she avoided it for close to two years while we traveled about Mexico, picking up enough money here and there to just about barely exist most of the time. There were bonanzas from American tourists because Annie managed to keep her looks and a certain facade of innocence, I suppose. At least of spontaneity. During that time, however, I began to see the eyes and lust and yearning of human nature and I realized that neither Annie nor I were alone in our search for something to satisfy the nameless yearning restlessness that kept us on the move.
It was in Tijuana, just a couple of months before Annie turned eighteen, that I was approached by a tremendous, oily-looking, friendly, smiling man by the name of Paulo. He had long, curly black hair that disappeared into the limp collar of a pale, rose-colored shirt. The heat was immense and there were large blotches of stained sweat on his cream-colored jacket. His shiny face looked as though it were melting in fire.
I was standing outside of a striptease joint. It was just a little bit past noon and the cleaning people inside were making a tremendous noise pushing around tables and chairs, getting ready for the evening crowd. It must have been Decoration Day weekend, or some, holiday, for the shopkeepers were anticipating a flood of business and everything was a bustle of preparation.
I don't remember where Annie was at the time. I just know that I was standing against a wall with my foot up, chewing on the last remnants of an enchilada, when Paulo came up to me and put his arm around my shoulder, the weight of which might have caved in a weaker man than I was.
"Hello, friend," he said, with no particular accent. His eyes disappeared behind rolls of fat as he smiled. "You know, friend, I watch you five days now. I watch you and your girl."
I smelled instinctively that he didn't have much money but then, again, I might have been wrong so I was willing to listen, to hear the next proposition that was going to come from those wet lips that wiggled slightly beneath a black mustache.
He didn't say anymore for a while, just stood there with his arm weighing me down. And I didn't say anything and I didn't move but kept chewing on the bits of food stuck between two back molars.
"I have a nice girl, too," Paulo continued finally. "Her name is Ramona and she is beautiful, so beautiful." He made a gesture of Ramona's shape in the air, carving out lots of voluptuous space. "I love her very much but we are on hard time," he said sadly, staring off into the distance and sighing.
I still didn't say anything but I was growing less interested by the minute and pulled away maybe half an inch from his encircling embrace.
The smell of garlic, heavy on the air, made an appropriate incense for Paulo and his sad story. It also seemed to stimulate him to confide in me further.
"Well, 'I tell you about Ramona, friend. She is so eager to please me, so eager to make me happiest of all happy men, that I would like you to meet her and tell me if you do not think her a prize."
"Why me?" I said, not looking at him, and sounding as though I was listening with half an ear.
"Why not you? You are young and healthy."
"I have a girl."
"Oh, si, I know. I have seen her. And she is beautiful, too. Beautiful, almost as much as my Ramona, second only to her."
"Then you know I can't be interested in your girl," I continued, somewhat bored now.
"I don't ask you to be interested in her. I think only she needs some advice. Not from you, friend, but from your girl. You know how these women are. They need to talk between themselves sometimes. It makes life lighter."
I was not yet beginning to see the direction in which Paulo was edging the conversation, but I had some glimmer of possibilities beneath his long-widened prologue.
"Your girl," he continued, "she is full of life and the men like her. The men like my Ramona, too."
"So?"
"So the two ladies, they have something in common."
He didn't finish the sentence just then but let it hang for me to turn and twist whichever way I might desire.
I sighed and took his arm off my shoulder and put it gently back where it belonged beside one of his mountainous hips.
"It's hot out here," I said.
"Yes, come, we will go inside and I will buy you something to drink, friend."
Well, there was a deal coming. That much I knew for sure. And since I had nothing better to think about except how to get through the next couple of months until I could return home. I went with Paulo into the strip joint and we got some beer at the bar and sat there, hunching over the counter and looking absently at the enlarged photographs of naked women done in black and white except for the hand-painted of red which was almost a phosphorescent maroon.' I drank my beer slowly and looked at the pinky ring on his fat left finger without interest. It was an oval ruby color, no more convincing than the painted lips on the photograph.
"So you'll listen to me," Paulo said, wiping his upper lip with the tip of a wide tongue. "I tell you, two girls together are better than one. They held each other, they advise each other." He waved one chunky hand grandiosely. "Who knows what they may inspire to happen?"
The gist of his intention was beginning to trickle through to me but still I wasn't quite sure and I didn't want to jump the gun. I fingered the stubble which I had let grow on my chin the past couple of days and considered various possibilities.
"I tell you what I do," Paulo leaned over in confidence. "I lend you Ramona for a week. Is that not generous, my friend? I lend her to you, not sell her to you, not rent her. I ask not a penny for a whole week. I give her to you," he slapped the counter twice, "free of charge. Generous, no?"
"No," I said, for I had not seen Ramona and it was possible that she could be as much of a liability as a help, despite his glowing description of his one true lady love.
"What? You say no? That, my friend, is because you have not seen her. Wait until you see that gorgeous piece of female exquisiteness. Then you will say to me, "Ramona, you are crazy for lending her out." My friend, she will make you a gold mine."
The more he talked, the less confident I became of getting anything out of the deal at all. But I had nothing to do and I figured that I might as well play along with him until the beer was gone, anyway. As long as he was buying, I was drinking.
"I tell you how I can convince you," Paulo's face grew even oilier. "I take you to see her. I take you to where she is now, bathing herself like the lily, and you will gasp."
I could not imagine anywhere in that stinking hole of a town where anyone could be bathing herself like a lily.
More likely it would be more like a swamp cabbage.
"I think I'd rather stay here, Paulo, out of the sun."
"Oh, so you know my name."
His face was a vision of mock surprise. Those of us who had hung around Tijuana, and friendly in a subversive sort of way. One had the feeling that all kinds of deals were being made in the shadows but, when men came out of the shadows, they talked openly as though they had nothing to hide. It was a good way, to be, to live, and I was relaxing as much as I could. I had learned something of the art of relaxation. In the continuous hot weather of this country one moved faster by going slow and the pace agreed with my directionless attitude toward life.
"If you want me to see her," I said, "why don't you bring her down here tonight?"
"You will be here tonight, then, friend?"
"Most likely."
"You sure you do not wish to see her now, alone, untouched, unravished, beautiful?"
I shook my head.
"Oh, but you are missing a rare experience. You will be sorry." His eyes rolled in his head. "I tell you, you will be sorry." They rolled again to the heavens. "Very, very sorry."
I swigged down the rest of the beer and felt the watery bitterness congeal on my tongue. I might just as well have gone with Paulo as stayed, if there was some reason to go. But I knew that Ramona was going to be a burden and that I had best not show any interest whatsoever since I didn't feel an interest.
"All right, then," said Paulo, slapping the bar again and realizing, apparently, that I was not to be swayed from my intention of staying there where it was cool and comparatively comfortable. "I show you her tonight, but don't blame me, friend, if some other gentleman comes and steals her away, right from under your nose."
"I'll take my chances," I said, smiling. "Goodbye."
I hoped he was going to slide off the stool and go away and leave me alone but even my goodbye could not deter him.
"Change your mind," he said.
I turned halfway around away from him and inhaled the last breath of my rather feeble patience. "Tonight," I said, "not now. Tonight."
"Ah, so be it."
A pair of American tourists who had sauntered into the bar dropped change into the jukebox and loud, Spanish music-bullfight music-blasted into the room.
The day had begun.
Paulo squeezed my shoulders. "I leave you with my dearest love," he said. "Now you take good care of her."
Despite his weight, he slithered away and I let him go, for Paulo had judged me rightly. I was interested in Ramona. I felt positive that I could do something with her. Only it still niggled me about Paulo. I couldn't figure his reasons for handing over this prize of flesh. I decided that at the end of the week, he would extract quite a prize from me and the question was whether or not I was prepared to pay.
Ramona seemed hardly to notice Paulo's departure. She put her hands on her hips and looked steadily across at me. We were almost the same height.
"You have a girl friend," she said, with the barest hint of a rolling letter.
I nodded, jerking my head just little backward, so Ramona's gaze shifted past my shoulder to Annie, sitting with her beer and no doubt watching me intently.
"She's pretty," Ramona said with approval. "You love her?"
"I love her."
"Ah, that is good. I'm always glad to see love. It opens my heart."
I hadn't figured that Ramona possessed a heart so generous as to appreciate my love for another.
"I would like to meet her," she continued. "Would you take me over and introduce us?" Was she looking for trouble? Or didn't she believe me?
"Later," I said. "Come, let's go for a walk. We'll talk."
"No, no, I stay here. This is like my home. I am comfortable and it is out of the sun."
I had to agree with her about that. The bar was cool and business prospects were accumulating with every passing minute. I watched her look over the crowd but no one she saw seemed to satisfy her. I wondered what she wanted.
"You find me someone nice, Ben," she said. "Okay?"
Ramona was a quick one and I appreciated it. We had no sooner met than he expected me to hop to it and find her a high-paying prospect. I agreed with her efficient attitude but I didn't feel confident that any of the men around were good enough, rich enough, for what I had in mind. My head was clicking away like a cash register. With Ramona's exotic good looks, I figured that I could get her the best that came floating into Tijuana.
"Let's not rush it," I said softly. "I want you to be around when the big fish come in."
"That won't be until later."
My gaze found Annie, who was sitting quite still, taking it all in. I knew she had heard enough of our conversation to figure out what was happening. But she didn't make a move to come over to interrupt or act possessive, yet I sensed anxious feelings in her beginning to tighten by the way she sat, rigidly straight like a battered but still prim little miss.
I wondered how long Annie could hold out against her curiosity. Even as I conjectured, Ramona started walking in her direction.
I didn't feel eager for these two to meet just yet and I let Ramona go without following her, deciding that it was better for the two to have it out between them without my presence interfering. "Annie and I had a marriage certificate between us which I thought would probably aid her to feel that she had certain priorities concerning me. Yet even though we-were married, neither of us felt that romantic attachment to each other which she could hang onto with self - righteous security. We didn't even wear marriage rings.
I leaned against the door frame and crossed my arms over my chest and watched Ramona stand beside Annie and call the bartender for a whiskey.
They smiled at each other, close-mouthed, two cats circling. each other to see where the weakness might lie.
I smelled a sudden, jarring waft of after-shave lotion. A heavy-set man in a polka dot shirt that hung out over his pants had come to stand beside me.
"What's cooking in there?" he said to me, buddy to buddy. "Any good dames?"
I looked down at his shoes. They were polished brown leather with a thin layer of dust from walking the Tijuana streets. I judged that he had been out a couple of hours and was getting bored with the scenery.
"Looking for something special, Mister?" I asked.
"Something nice," he chuckled. "You know, round and willing. Got any ideas?"
He thought I was a comrade, and had no idea that I had something to sell.
"Well, do you see anything you like?" I pointed my finger in the direction of Annie and Ramona.
"That's okay," he said.
"Which?"
"I don't care, either. Just make it quick."
"You better make a choice, Mister. How about the blonde?"
"Okay. The blonde."
"You got fifty bucks that proves you want it?"
He looked at me, startled. "Fifty bucks! Shit!"
"Well, times are hard," I said, smiling. "It's usually a hundred."
He backed away from me and Out into the sunshine and disappeared.
I watched him go, laughing to myself at how easily the fish were scared away. But there would be others, I knew, later on in the day. Certainly at night.
The two girls were talking by the time I reached them. Their voices had the sound of an easy truce. It would have been too much for me to expect that they could be friends. I felt grateful that they were at least getting along civilly for the time being. I came up between them, touched either of their arms and said, "Come on, let's go for a walk. Let's see what's in this town."
Ramona reached her thumb into her bodice and hiked it up maybe half an inch, giving me a chance to catch sight of the mold of one breast. It looked damned good to me and I thought maybe I ought to try this chick out, just for the hell of it.
Annie said, "It's too early, Ben. Can't we just hang out here a while longer?"
I didn't like the fact that she sounded so tired. Maybe she was coming down with something.
"You want to stay? Stay," I said, not interested in giving in to her in case she was in a mood for moping.
"I go with him, okay?" Ramona said to Annie. "And I bring him back to you later."
"I might not be here when you get back," Annie said, examining her nail polish.
"Well, I hope you won't be here," I quipped. "I hope you'll be home in bed, and I don't mean alone."
I didn't wait for her to answer but took Ramona's arm more firmly and walked her out of the bar.
"You are not nice to your wife," she said. I grinned at her. "I'm not nice to anybody."
"No man is nice to a woman."
"I can be nice."
"For dollars."
"And you? What can be nice for, Ramona?" She shook her head and her hair swung. She seemed very much aware of her appearance and beauty now that we were out on the street. It was as though she had a sixth sense, her radar was picking up the long glances of the men who passed us as we walked. The conversation we were making was just a stage prop to keep things oiled during our stroll. Whether we talked or not really didn't make any difference to her, or to me, either, for that matter. We were making a preliminary foray, testing each other to see what we could accomplish.
"Tell me about Paulo," I said. "You know him long?"
"Long enough." Her mouth pursed with a flicker of distaste. "He loses his temper. Too hot. And I lose much business because of him. We do not get along well, I don't think."
"Is that why he wants to get rid of you?"
She laughed aloud at my directness. "He does not want to get rid of me." She grabbed hold of her voluminous skirt and shook it as though shaking a bouquet of flowers to ease out the petals. "It is I who wants to get rid of him."
I could believe her. She spoke of Paulo without respect, without fear. The indifference told me that she had laid down the law to him and that he had knuckled under, which was, and always will be, bad news between whore and pimp.
"You will find me nice, rich men," she said, "because you are young and cold-hearted. That is what I like."
She glanced at me sideways. "I have seen you for the past few days and I like the way you operate. Like a barracuda, you will do much good business for me and I will make it worth your while. You will see that."
The narrow, dusty streets, baking in the sun, seemed to absorb Ramona's words and blow them back,, dryly, to my ears. I felt sure that she had a great career ahead of her with me. It was just a question of time, of getting into the right circles where the money was, waiting to be spent for her flesh. I felt fortunate that it was the kind of holiday weekend which would give me an opportunity to filter through a great variety of people. Soon we were flowing with the crowd that moved in the direction of the Plaza del Toros.
We joined the current of noise and festivities as though we were two people down from Los Angeles for the weekend. The only difference was that I had my eyes open and so did she.
When we reached the area of the arena, Ramona said that it would be a good idea to go inside.
What happened was that I spotted a grey-haired man in a pale blue suit, starched and navy tie, who looked like an old-time actor. He was carrying a small bouquet of roses and heading toward the reserved seat section, but moving slowly, cautiously, good-naturedly responding to the occasional jostles, but mainly avoiding being touched by strange hands.
Some sixth sense told me that there was my man and I followed after him, even though the tickets I had bought were for a different section of the arena.
Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw that Ramona had taken my cue and was coming along without question, even though she also realized that we were not headed for the place where we were supposed to be sitting.
I waited until I saw the gentleman settle himself and then moved into the row just in front of his.
By this time, Ramona had caught up with me and was right behind. I sat down, precisely in front of him, and Ramona sat down next to me, neither of us glancing back at our target.
It wasn't long before the couple holding their tickets approached us.
"I'm sorry, sir," said the man who looked like a schoolteacher, very mild-mannered, with sandy hair and complexion. "I believe these are our seats."
"No, I don't think so," I said, without consulting my tickets."
He looked uncertainly from my face to the number of his ticket. "I don't think I've made a mistake."
The woman beside him fingered her purse uncertainty as she took in Ramona's appearance through jewel tipped sunglasses.
"It must be your mistake," Ramona said. "We always sit here."
"There must be someone to settle this," said the schoolteacher. "May I see your ticket, sir?"
"I don't have to show you my tickets," I said to him. "I know these seats like I know the palm of my hand."
Ramona said, "Oh, let them have the seats, darling," in a loud voice and turned now to the gentleman behind us. "We will find someplace else to sit. I am sure of it. Or else we will manage today without seeing a bullfight at all."
It was incredible how she spoke directly to the man in the pale blue suit without seeming to be speaking to him. Her voice had an offhand, yet beseeching quality, quite alluring.
From the side of my vision, I saw the older gentleman smiling at Ramona and being enchanted.
"Yes," she continued, "we must let these Americans have the seats. They do not come here often and I would not want them to miss such a spectacle."
The schoolteacher was taken aback and began a system of apologies that brought blushes to his sallow cheeks. It was obvious that he would have been willing to give the seats up to Ramona if he had not had his wife with him.
Ramona touched my arm. "Let us go, darling. We will spend the afternoon elsewhere."
It was too much for the gentleman in blue. He leaned over and said, "If you will be so kind, may I ask you two to join me here?" Ramona gave him a slow smile as though she were seeing salvation for the first time that day. I stood with admiration overwhelming me as I watched her face melt into feminine warmth with the most magnetic qualities.
"We do not wish to make you uncomfortable, sir," she said to the older man, "but you are so kind."
"Please, it will be my privilege," he continued, taking her bait. "Do join me. I am alone, you see, and there is so much room. It will be no inconvenience at all. Please."
With seemingly great reluctance and at the same time with seemingly great gratitude, Ramona accepted.
We left the two Americans to their rightful seats and went up to join the man who had already plunged himself into the vortex of Ramona's charm.
Of course she sat between him and me and soon the two were in conversation seemed to know a great deal more than I had expected.
She spoke easily and with the savoir faire of a world traveler. The gentleman opened to her ready conversation. It was obvious to me that she had already appealed to the lonely place in his nature, all in a matter of minutes.
I settled back, took out a dark, thin cigar, clipped its end and rolled it between my teeth, feeling a great flood of satisfaction in Ramona and in my future with her. Already I sensed her to be a stepping stone in my career that would take me far and I was looking forward to the money she would bring me from this gentleman so that I could buy myself an appropriate wardrobe.
We stayed for three bulls, at which time Ramona contrived to be discomforted by the weather. She did it in such a charmingly graceful way that the gentleman hardly realized how she had maneuvered him into offering her a ride back to his hotel.
What does it matter what his name was? You might know it if I said so here. You will have to take my word for it that he was very rich and very pleased by the good things in life, such as Ramona.
We rode away from the bullring in a grand car with the deep, glove leather seats that I had dreamed about as a kid. I felt both bitter and amused at how the quality of my dream -had changed. Originally, I had thought of driving it myself with some beautiful girl such as Ramona beside me. Now here I was, in the back seat, stretched out diagonally, chewing on my half-smoked cigar and paying little attention to the conversation up front. All that interested me was the tone and how it was growing gradually more intimate.
I had thought we were going to a hotel but it turned out that the gentleman had a vacation house in the hills, a low, neat place that meandered in a graceful spill of rock and wood, as though it had grown out naturally from the hillside.
He pulled round to the back of the house and when I got out, I stood and looked across the vista, southward, toward where Encinado lay. I could see patches pf white on distant mountainsides which I had once upon a time thought was snow but had learned were flocks, grazing lazily. How self-satisfied I felt as I heard that pair of Voices, hers and his, diminish as they entered the house and left me out there without ceremony.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I was startled to hear footsteps behind me after a while and turned to see the gentleman standing there alone and smiling and obviously interested in talking to me about something of importance.
I looked at him questioningly and open. I liked him, liked his money, his success, his nonchalance, his loneliness, his interest in Ramona.
"You know," he said, "I would like to be alone with the girl."
I lit my cigar and inhaled its acrid smoke. "Why not? I think she would like to be alone with you, too."
"For the night."
"For the night," I echoed.
"Well, what do we do about it?" he said, good-naturedly.
I shrugged, "I suppose you find me transportation back to town and that will be that."
"Only that?"
He was wiser than I had originally thought, or maybe Ramona had already laid the cards out before him. I could not be confident about what she had said, however, and decided to test the ground before I plunged in with my financial proposition. And he, too, waited to hear what I would say, until we both grinned at each other, then laughed, then shook hands.
"I will give you a hundred dollars," he said, "until noon tomorrow."
A hundred dollars from him was like two cents or less.
"You looked more generous than your offer," I said, easily with continuing goodwill. "Why don't you make it five hundred and I will leave you to your pleasure."
"A bargain driver," he continued to laugh.
"You are young still and ambitious and I admire your efforts. But how many women are worth five hundred dollars a night?"
"Mine is."
"Ah, I agree-to you."
"And if not to you, sir, then why have you gone to all this trouble?"
He was really playing with me, I sensed, and it stimulated me to play back, knowing that I would be satisfied with a hundred but figuring that I could get at least two-fifty, if not the whole fir, if I simply continued to banter.
"Wouldn't it be wise," I said, "to save us both some time. Give me the five hundred, sir, and spend the time with her rather than with me.
"I like your spirit."
Was he relenting? I couldn't tell. Yet I continued to play the ball between us, enjoying the procedure as much as I knew I would enjoy the proceeds. "I will give you a hundred and fifty," he said at last.
I didn't feel that he had gone his limit, though, and continued to press my plea for five.
He looked me deeply into my soul, it seemed. "Is she really worth that much to you?" - "That much and more."
"Two-fifty."
I put on an expression of mock amazement that he would bother to press the issue over a mere two hundred and fifty dollar difference which now stood between us.
"Do you really want us to cheapen her value? I asked. "You will enjoy her more for five hundred. I guarantee it."
He put his hands into his jacket pocket and looked out across the same vista I had been observing and said, "For over five hundred, young man, you yourself will have to be part of the bargain."
I felt my breath stop short. It had not once occurred to me that this man's interest had been in something other than Ramona. Now I realized that what was of value to him was the girl, of course, but even more than that, his own personal tastes.
"What exactly do you want?" I asked, staring suspiciously at the man.
He sighed and looked over the mountains. "I am older than you, my tastes are more, let us say, developed. I am what might be called a voyeur. In other words, yes, I want to fuck Ramona. But first I want to see you fuck her. I want to see you sucking her cunt and I want to see her sucking you. Do you understand me?"
"You in no way will touch me or try to have sex with me?"
He shook his head, "No, I am not a homosexual, but I do enjoy watching other men fucking women. I will watch you and Ramona and then I will have my way. For one good night of this, you will get your five hundred dollars."
Dollar signs were dancing in my head as I thought about this proposition. I wondered if I would be able to get it up with another man watching me fucking and sucking. I hoped that I could perform well enough to merit all that cash.
We struck a bargain then. We went inside and word was sent to Ramona to appear in this large bedroom whore the man and I were.
I started to unbutton my shirt.
Ramona reappeared by the time my shirt was completely removed. She had taken off her clothing and wore a pale yellow kimono, saffron yellow, which turned her eyes yellow as a cat's. The material clung to her body. It was easy to see that she was naked underneath, for her breasts tilting upward were pointed at their tips and hard now. Suddenly, I was glad I had never slept with her. Everything this afternoon was going to be quite a surprise to me, quite an education. I might never get to college but this other curriculum would be more useful to me. And I found my intellectual needs suddenly stimulated along with a more basic desire.
I watched Ramona looking at my body and thought that I saw a great deal of personal appreciation on her face. I guess I was much easier on her eyes than Paulo and that she didn't mind letting me know her enjoyment.
"Come in, come in," the gentleman said to her. "Come kiss this sweet boy."
He had a way of talking that reminded me of the movie scripts but it was in keeping with his nature and stimulated me.
Ramona came into my arms and I felt her tits pressing against my chest. There was something very exotic about it all. The strangely sexual woman in my arms, the sophistication and wealth of this gentleman, the smell of jasmine in the air.
My cock was responding to the whole aura very well. It had sprung to life in my pants and my balls were itching. The strange eroticism was blurring my vision and my loins ached with anticipation and a growing sense of urgent need.
Romana caressed my flesh, her head sunk over my chest and she began to suck on my nipples. She licked them and took little nips out of them. Her other hand wafted down my body and unbuttoned my pants. For a moment she fumbled but soon the hand was wrapping itself, snake-like around the hardness of my prick.
I moaned softly into the mass of her black hair. Her tongue licked its way down my body, licking down to my bellybutton and paused there for a minute to ream out the little knot of flesh.
I closed my eyes as desire was fanned by the butterfly of her lips. With her hands she pulled my trousers down to my knees, her hot breath all over my flesh sent goosebumps up all over.
Her hands began to massage my buttocks and I closed my eyes with the incredible sensuality of this contact. I leaned my head back and just let Ramona do all the work.
And a good job she was doing, too. All her experience with men really paid off. Her lips were attaching themselves to the head of my cock, and one skillful hand was fondling my balls.
Her sharp little tongue was fluttering about my cock. It was poking at the piss slit, slithering all up and down the length of the cock.
She covered half of my cock with her mouth. It was taken down into her mouth deeply and wetly and she began to bob back and forth all over it. I wondered what she was thinking now, with my cock halfway up into her mouth.
I wondered if she was enjoying the taste of my cock flesh, if the pre-come dripping out of the head of the prick tasted good to her.
With that experienced mouth of hers, she could have made me come in a matter of seconds. Especially when she started to suck. Hard.
Nobody had ever sucked me that well before. It might have been the situation, the setting, but my flesh was just tingling with desire.
I wasn't to come, then, though.
I heard someone tell her to stop. I opened my eyes and looked at the man who was paying for my orgasm.
He was stark naked and had a huge erection. For an older man he had a very well put together body. It was obvious that in spite of his wealth and the luxurious life he led, he had not let himself go to pot.
His cock was almost bright-red. It looked as though he might have put lipstick on it or something. I found myself staring at him. He had one hand sort of moving up and down the red, hard cock.
"Very nice," he said, his voice deepened with lust, "but I don't want you to come in her mouth. I want to see you fucking her cunt. Before you do that, however, I want to see you eating her out."
Ramona and I positioned ourselves for the next course. She lay down on the bed and put her knees up.
I began working on her. I started with her firm breasts. I started to massage and press them, my mouth came down over her nipple and sucked it. I sucked for quite a while, going from one nipple to the other, sucking deeply from the brown eyes.
I moved down towards her crotch, her glorious black bush. As my head left her tits, she replaced it with her own hands and she moaned and groaned and felt herself up.
Her tits were flapping all over the place, and slapping down against her arms.
My hand touched her burning cunt. She spread her legs a little further and wriggled around on the bed.
The man came in closer for a better look at what I was doing. He was only about a foot away as my mouth sank down onto her cunt. He watched as my tongue came out and made contact with her clitoris.
I licked all around it, and I bit at it gently, teasing that button to pleasure.
I sucked her cunt lips into my mouth and then began to lap at the flowing, thick juices her cunt was giving out.
The heady aroma of the female in heat was making my balls twitch. My cock was throbbing and I didn't know if I would be able to stand the pressure which was increasing by the second.
I could hear the heavy, lusty breathing of the man. I looked sideways from the cunt I was lapping and I saw that he was jerking himself off with a real conviction.
I pulled my mouth out of Ramona's cunt and asked him, "Listen, do you want to mount her now?"
"No," he said. "I will fuck her after you. First I want to see you both in the excess of passion."
Ramona was almost at that point as it was and I knew that I couldn't possibly get any harder without turning to stone.
I spread her legs a little further apart and then I moved in for the kill. I mounted that woman, slowly, my teeth grinding together.
I put the swollen head of my cock to the entrance to her cunt. I didn't fool around, I shoved in to the hilt, no holds barred.
Ramona was wild with passion, with lust, she arched her back and tried to take all of my cock into her.
We fucked each other like - rabbits, she returning every thrust of mine with a thrust of her own. I drew it out for as long as I could, but she started to come right away. She clawed my back with the excess of her passion and the cries and moans emanating from her mouth set me into a fury of fucking.
I pounded into that cunt, my hands underneath her buttocks, squeezing and drawing her to me, as if I would devour her with my cock.
I started to come, my- prick throbbed wildly and began to shoot gobs of the thick sperm into the recesses of her cunt.
The .divine madness swept me away. I forgot that we were being watched. I forgot that we were being paid, the only thing that mattered was the driving force of my cock, the sweet wetness of her cunt.
All that mattered was to fulfill the great and overpowering urge of my manhood.
When we were finished, I pulled out of her.
The man didn't waste any time. I sort of felt sorry for Ramona having to take another hot cock into her so soon.
But, after all, she was a whore and she had probably taken more than one after another plenty of times.
Her breathing was crazy, his movements almost violent. He practically wrenched her knees apart and he flung himself on her chest.
It was really fantastic to watch him humping her. His buttocks flew in and out of the air and I could even see his hard, big cock slithering and pounding away at Ramona's juicy cunt.
He started to scream and he rammed her even harder. He was coming. He shoved it up with all his might, as if he were dying from the pain of it.
His come oozed out of her hole along with my come. He must have come for ten minutes, though I probably exaggerate now from a bad memory.
But it was something to see.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was after dark when Ramona and I were driven home in a different car with a different chauffeur. We had left the man but, somehow, I felt that we were going to see him again, Ramona and I, somewhere, somehow. Besides which, I wasn't going to let a good thing like that go.
The two of us sat in the back of the car, Ramona far away from me.
I said, "You didn't come up there. You know you didn't."
"So I didn't," she said. "I'm accustomed to that, you see."
"Why?"
"The old story. The customer always comes first. I take care of myself later."
"Alone?"
"No, I find myself a lover."
I had a vision of her in dark alleys with some muscled sailor that she would pick up and fuck for free, just because she needed to. I decided right then and there it wasn't going to be like that between us.
"I'll take care of you," I said, "when we get back."
I saw her profile turn slowly and she was looking at me intently through the dark. "You're going to do that?"
I was surprised at her surprise. "Of course."
"Why?"
"I care for your feelings, Ramona."
"Not possible."
"But it's true. I want my girls to be satisfied."
"Oh, you break all the rules." Her voice had a quiver of emotion.
"What rules?"
She sighed and didn't answer me.
I leaned across and took her hand in mine, feeling an affection for her because of the five hundred in my pocket, more than anything else. "I want you to be happy," I said.
"How can I do that?"
"With me."
"Some life you must lead," she mused, "if you satisfy all your girls."
It occurred to me that she thought I must have more than Annie in my stable, and, I thought, well, that was a good idea. If I could get another couple like her, I would be rich in no time.
When we reached the center of town, we got out of the car on some fairly well-lit street, jammed with pleasure seekers. I knew that she could make another bundle for me this night, if I insisted. But I didn't - somehow feel the inclination for it. I had no intention of working Ramona like a truck horse. She was too valuable and I felt that it would be smart to preserve her for others with lots of cash, rather than squander her abilities on the masses.
"Take me to your room," I said. "I'd like to see where you live."
She shrugged. "It's not so nice there. You wouldn't like it."
I didn't care whether I would like it or not. I just had to see her surroundings, maybe learn a couple of things about her nature, and I insisted.
"All right," she said, "but remember this is your choice, not my suggestion."
I assured her that I would not offer any opinion, that I only wanted to see.
We walked a number of blocks and finally reached a smallish house with some stores in the front that sold tourist-type mementos. She took me around to the back and into the small apartment behind the store.
When she put on the light, the first thing I saw was Paulo, lying fast asleep on the many-pillowed cot. His snores were incredible.
She looked from him to me and smiled a secret smile. I could not tell what she must be thinking, nor could I figure out what she and Paulo actually meant to each other, if they lived here in these close quarters together.
The room was really bare. There were a few rush chairs and rush mats on the floor. No pictures on the wall, some articles of makeup on a rickety table, her clothes hanging in a shallow closet with the wardrobe, making a commotion of color in the otherwise drab, pale brown room.
I had promised her not to offer her an opinion but I didn't like the idea at all that she would be coming home to Paulo every night. If he were around, then she would be splitting her loyalties between us and that wasn't going to do me any good at all.
So I said, "He has to go."
Ramona shook her head and said, "Paulo never goes. Paulo stays."
"You love him?"
"I love him not."
"Then Paulo goes."
She looked at me as though I did not know what I was saying.
I went to the cot and shook him by the shoulder. He pushed me away in sleep as though I were a fly trying to disturb the bull, but I kept at it, shaking him and shaking him until finally the snores stopped with a phlegmy rattle in the throat. He turned over, blinked open bleary eyes, snuffled a couple of times, and wet his lips.
He looked like a whale lying on his back in his underwear, sloppy shorts that went down almost to the knees.
He was incredibly hairless and the oily blob of his body was barely human.
"What time is it?" he said.
I told him, but I don't think the information sank in.
He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, made no effort to sit up right away, but looked from me to Ramona and from Ramona back to me, and said, "What are you doing home?"
I had the wild idea that he must be somebody's father. Only it was hard for me to believe it. There was no resemblance at all between Paulo and Ramona and I knew I must be making it up, my brains addled from the mysterious drink I had had earlier.
"Come on, get up. Get out of here," I said.
He laughed. "Get out of here? Me? Why?"
"I need the bed," I said.
"Oh."
This he understood. Someone needing the bed was a universal language between pimps and whores. One always got up and out when somebody needed a bed.
He struggled off it and stood, wavering for a minute or so on his stumps of legs, scratched his head and his shoulders.
"You are satisfied with my love?" he said to me, meaning Ramona, of course.
I wasn't going to be too quick to let him know my enthusiasm.
"She does nicely," I said.
"Of course she does nicely," he said, slapping his chest. "Who trained her? I trained her. I, Paulo, trained her, my friend. And you are taking the benefits. You are a lucky, lucky man."
The more he tried to sell Ramona to me, the more insecure I felt that he was doing me any kind of favor.
Paulo had no reason to do anybody favors and it certainly was not his nature to be generous. I was uneasy.
Nevertheless, I let Ramona make some thick black coffee and drank it in the hope that it would shake me up a bit.
Paulo slowly pulled on his pants and his shirt and agreed that he should go out and leave Ramona to the bed. He believed that she would be taking in a great deal of business this night, under my direction, and he was anxious for her to do this, to please me, to convince me that she was the world's biggest bargain.
I had five hundred dollars in my pocket and I thought it wasn't a good idea to walk around with all that cash. I didn't much want to be in Paulo's company with all that money, either, in case we started a fight and my pants pocket got ripped and the money came out.
I was thinking all kinds of thoughts in order to imaginatively find a way to protect myself, if the necessity arose.
Paulo went to Ramona, patted her cheek. "You are a good girl," he said.
She grabbed him by the wrist and pushed his hand away. "Not for you."
"Yes, for me, Ramona, my love. You will always be a good girl for me, too. Have patience. You will come to love me again. You know it."
"Never."
She shook her head and the blonde mass of hair swung about, half covering her face. I could see the profile growing angry, as though Paulo were a match that lighted her temper.
I wasn't in the mood for a fight between them. Actually, what I wanted to do was go to sleep and forget the whole fucking mess.
But they continued at it between them. Their altercation reminded me of what went on between Annie and myself some nights when we happened to run into each other inadvertently at home.
I got between them, unwillingly.
"Paulo, go out for a walk," I said. "It's getting to be time."
"You see," he said, "for you, she will take customers. For me, she spends her energies in fighting and arguments.
I heard for the first time something sincere coming out of Paulo. So that was it. They got on so poorly that Ramona had little chance to spend her time and interest on business. Yet, if she fought with him, she had to be involved with him. A girl like Ramona, once indifferent, would turn her back and walk.
But I saw that she wasn't interested in doing so. Something in her wanted to fight with him.
"I do not work for you?" her voice accused Paulo with a shrill note. "I do not rub off my skin for you?"
"For me, you are a lazy pig," Paulo said. "For him you work, yes. For me, no. Never."
"I, a pig? I? You bear." She flounced away from him.
"Come on, quit it," I said loudly. But they were too involved to hear me.
"You like sleeping on my bed," she continued, "snoring like a monster while I'm out working my feet off. And what do you give me for it? Insults."
The next thing I knew, Paulo had lunged for her with his tremendous strength ignited by rage. There was no stopping him. His arm went around her waist in the circle of a bear hug. He began to slap her face, tangling his fingers in her hair.
She was not intimidated and kicked with all her force, but even so, this made no impression on him until, finally, he flung her onto the cot.
At that point, I leaped for Paulo, got him around the neck from behind and yanked him backward. His spine was not supple and he came sliding against me. I felt the pressure of his weight like a landslide, but I didn't want to fight with him. That was not . my purpose. I felt no anger toward him directly. I just wanted to quiet things down.
"Come on, get the hell out of here," I yelled at him, "or we'll never do any business at all."
Breathing hard, he straightened out his clothes, putting on his clothes, putting on his shirt with absentminded motions.
"I go, I go," he said. "She is yours. Take her. Keep her. She is poison, a curse to me."
He slammed out of he room.
When the door had closed, I turned and looked at the girl. "How long have you been with him?"
"Three years," she said.
"And you love him."
"I hate him. I despite him."
It was the same old story I had heard from Annie and I knew that as long as Ramona felt such furious feelings as these which were making her quiver, she would be irrevocably tied to Paulo by a chain that I could not break. I had to distract her, show her another world, make her realize that she could live without him and enjoy it.
"I'm going to move you out of here," I said. I had the idea of taking Ramona back to the States, also, if I could figure out a way to do it.
When we got back to the room, Annie was not there, fortunately.
"You sleep in- that bed," I said, pointing to my own.
"Oh, it's so clean and nice in here," she said with surprise. Again I was surprised at her surprise. Annie, regardless of what transpired between us, had a certain housekeeping inclination. Wherever we went,, she made home. I suppose more for her sake than for mine.
"Are you hungry?" I asked.
"Very hungry."
I had forgotten about food until this moment and I realized that I was hungry, too.
I went outside for food and also to be alone for a few minutes to collect all the loose threads. It had been an active day for me, a day of accomplishment, and I wanted to sort everything into good order so that I could move ahead with the greatest dispatch. And I realized that it would be wise for me to intercept Annie if I could tonight, tell her what she needed to know about the day's happenings and impress upon her how important it was to be friends with Ramona.
And so I forgot about the food temporarily as I proceeded back to where the life was in town, in search of Annie.
I knew all her haunts and so I went from one to the other. What had happened to her in the past couple of years suddenly struck me with full force. She had taken on some weight around the face and her jawline was puffy. Not fat, just softer. I supposed that the heavy starchy dirt we were on contributed more than its share to that implication of sluggishness which she carried.
"You know what I'm going to do with you tonight?" I asked.
"What, dear?"
I put my arm around her waist. "Buy you some new clothes."
She blinked at me as though I had lost my marbles.
"Clothes, huh?" she said. "What's the matter with my clothes? I thought you liked these."
I had nothing against her attire, really. She looked pretty good in her white, ruffly blouse and black, flaring skirt. Rather Spanish. And if I had not known Annie before hand, I would have had no argument with her attractiveness. The thing was that I felt that she could do much better by herself and, therefore, by me, and that's what I was after.
"I know what you think," she said as we strolled down the street together. "You think I'm not as pretty as that blonde one you have now. Okay, maybe I'm not. So what are you going to do about it, Ben? Bleach my hair?
Add a couple of inches to my legs? I know of an operation that can make you taller.
"Everyone is my friend, Ben. See that one there? The one with the striped jacket? He's my best friend of all."
She reached into her cleavage and took out a rolled bill. "See what a good friend he is?"
I took the twenty and put it into my pocket on top of the five hundred roll. As we passed the man in the striped jacket, he looked from Annie to myself in a way that said he'd never seen us before in his life. That was how it went for Annie. The guys probably never even looked at her face, but they would recognize her if she walked past them on her hands.
I didn't want to continue that vein of conversation, however. I was determined to shape Annie up, to get her the clothes, even to let her get a couple of nights' sleep, to get her back into training, recall the youthfulness that had been her best quality.
I steered her into a store that was open at night for tourist trade and bought her a red and white dress that went well with her dark complexion and hair. Her hair had been long and she wore it in a braid sometimes. It looked neat that way and I rather liked it. As we came out of the store, I told her to put her hair in a braid as soon as she could.
"You really do have ambitions for me, Ben," she said, pausing on the sidewalk and looking at her. "What's gotten into you?"
"I'm expanding," I said. "Pretty soon we'll incorporate."
My sense of humor didn't strike her funny and she made a small expression of contempt that told me to shut up if I wanted to talk like that.
"You know what you're going to do tonight, Annie?"
"What am I going to do tonight?"
The bitterness, the sarcasm, the irony, the withdrawal, didn't make me hesitate for a second. My poor Annie was like a fish out of water, floundering around, looking how to get back into the waves.
"I'm going to take you home. You're going to go to sleep. There'll be no work for you for the rest of tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night, or the day after. What do you think of that?"
"I think you're bats."
"Thank you."
"Well, Ben, what am I supposed to think? You're so damned erratic. We never see each other. You don't give a shit about me, only about the money I bring home to you. You don't love me. I don't think you ever loved me. We're married and we're strangers."
It was all true, but we had never talked about it, not openly like this, not directly, not even by implication.
I put my hands into my pockets and looked straight ahead, rather than at the girl beside me who was in the process of ruining herself, eating herself alive with bitterness.
"I wanted to be different, Annie. But remember one thing. This whole damn business was your idea originally."
"Oh, sure it was."
"You don't want to remember," I continued, trying to keep my voice level. "Who took us over to Fourth Street back home? Who went out in New York and came home with two five-dollar bills?"
"Ben, you think I wanted to do it?"
"Yes, I think so," I continued scientifically. "I think you have it in the back of your mind that it was fun to be a whore, that you were going to have good times and come out of it all clean and prissy."
"I never thought that."
"You mean, you just don't want to admit it to me or to yourself?"
"Oh, what difference does it make?" she said, tiredly. "We're not back there any more. We're here, in the middle of nowhere and there's nothing either one of us can do about it. So why not settle down and be practical?"
"That was exactly what I had in mind," I said, strongly. "To be practical, Annie. Not to waste you, your talents or your youth. There's a lot of money to be made in this world. Why don't we do it fast and then clear the hell out of this racket?"
"You never will, Ben. You're cut out for it."
I swiveled my head around to her. What did she mean, cut out for it?
"That's right," she said, looking at my quizzical expression. "You were made to be a pimp. Everything in you hates women, holds them in the highest contempt. You think women are worthless and those of us who agree with you dance at the end of your string, Ben. You have the personality of a pimp and you might as well settle down to it and give up whatever dreams you may be harboring of any other career."
Maybe it was true, but I certainly didn't want to hear it. Not from Annie who had known me before. Not from Annie, the only person who possibly might have been able to see something different in my nature.
"Okay," I said, not wanting to continue the conversation. "So you're tired tonight, and dejected. I'm a little depressed myself, if you want to know," I said, making it up because I wasn't depressed at all. I was elated with possibilities concerning Ramona.
Yes, all the while that I was arguing with Annie, I felt another road inside me opening up the path to glory. It was this hope, this expectation, which really prevented me from being vulnerable to Annie's accusations and analysis of my character. I didn't give a shit what she thought of-me. I didn't give a shit whether she was right or wrong about me. All I knew was what we had to do right away and that was to hang on to the gold ring that I had plucked this afternoon at the bullfight arena.
I stopped off at one of the stands and bought enchiladas, tortillas and some drinks.
Then, as we continued the last lap back to our apartment, I told Annie about Ramona, that she would find her in the apartment and that she would do everything in her power to be friends with the other girl.
"How can I be friends with her?" Annie said. "She's my rival."
"If you're not friends with her, dear," I said, "there isn't going to be any rivalry to speak about. One of you will have to go."
It was the hardest verbal slap in the face I had ever given her and she took the blow quietly.
"You'd do that, Ben. I know you would," she said in a soft voice which was almost a whisper. "You'd kick me the hell out. You'd dump me, wouldn't you? For that blonde."
It wasn't the blonde, but I couldn't explain it. It was the taste of success that had added this extra layer of callousness to my nature.
"You said I ought to be practical, didn't you, dear?"
"Yes, I suppose I did," she mused, "but you don't know what I mean by being practical.
You haven't the faintest idea."
"I know what I mean by being practical," I said, raising my voice. "Getting rich."
"Oh, sure. Make piles and piles of money on that cunt you've got with you now. You do that, Ben. I'll leave. I won't even go back with you now."
She stopped dead in the middle of the street and waited for me to tell her that I was sorry, or that I didn't really mean what she thought I meant.
I looked at her and for the first time conjectured about the possibilities of parting with Annie of taking on the blonde and letting Annie go.
I said to her, "Would you like that, Annie? Would you like me to give you fifty bucks so you can go back to the States and forget whatever there is between us?"
"What's between us, Ben?"
"I thought we were married, dear."
"Oh, that's a laugh."
I was getting tired of all this circular talk. I knew that Annie really didn't want to leave me and I wasn't quite prepared to let go of her, either, not now that I had visions of her shaping up and bringing me in a few hundred a night, too.
"Let's quit this crap," I said. "Come on home."
She began to walk again beside me. But we weren't talking now. Each of us was a hundred miles away from each other as we thought our own thoughts.
Finally, I said, because I had to have the security of it, "Annie, you're not going to pick a fight with her, please."
"No, I won't, Ben. If she doesn't with me."
"She's too smart for that."
"You really like her, don't you?"
Did I hear jealousy in Annie's voice so soon? I suppose that I did.
"All I want is a nice, happily family," I said. "You'll never have that."
"I'm going to do my damnedest, Annie, and don't louse me up."
"Okay." Her face twisted with contempt. "I'll love your little blonde friend and she'll love me, and together we'll both love you."
"That's exactly what I want."
"Sure you do, Ben."
"Well, look, I want you to remember one thing, Annie. In a couple of months we can go back home. And the more money we have, the better it's going to be for both of us."
The anger and the contempt and the defensiveness dropped away from her face. Suddenly Annie was seeing another world, a world she had forgotten, a world that had been good to her once.
"Are we, Ben?" she said, softly now. "Are we really going home? Do you mean it?"
"Yes," I said.
We went back to the room after that. I felt my own anger rise at the impending rebellion which I would have to face and deal with, when I wanted all to go smoothly.
Ramona, settled and secure, smiled at Annie with serene confidence. Then, with a flicker of an eyelash, she turned Annie off, made her invisible.
"This is a good room. Very comfortable," she said to me. "I am glad to be here."
Annie refused to be ignored. She thrust herself forward. "That's nice," she said, "but what makes you think you're going to stay forever?"
"Not forever, darling," Ramona said in a languid voice. "Just long enough."
"It's time to go to sleep," I interrupted, intent on ending a fight before it began. "We're all tired."
Even though everybody was dressed, I went to switch off the lights.
But the minute I got them off, Annie flicked them on again. "Not so fast," she said. "You're not getting away with this, Ben. I don't care what I am to you, but you're still my husband and that whore has to go."
Ramona put her hands on her hips, put her head back and burst out laughing. The sounds covered Annie with insulting contempt.
"I have known girls like you before," she said, between laughs. "You will have to learn to relax and know your place."
It was obvious that Ramona meant that Annie's place with me was second to her own.
Annie could no longer contain herself. She leaped forward. I saw her fingers go into Ramona's long hair.
Immediately,, they turned into two wildcats, tearing and clawing at each other, screaming, biting and kicking, hopelessly entangled.
Rage thundered up inside of me. I understood the quality of their rivalry and particularly of Annie's desperation. But I couldn't let them take control of the situation. I had to run the show, or nobody.
I dived between them, got my elbows against their chests and pushed them apart with all the strength I had.
They went flying in opposite directions. I knew I had hurt them physically. I saw the shock and hurt on Annie's face, but Ramona was used to this treatment and she lunged forward again.
I caught her as she came flying toward me, swung her 'around, dashed her onto the bed. She bounced a couple of times and came up again like a spring.
"Quit it!" I called to her, "or I'll break your bones."
It was Annie's turn to begin laughing now but her laughter held a hysterical edge. "Whore! Whore!" she called, her voice a shriek. "You'll die in the gutter!"
I grabbed Annie by the arm, yanked her to the door and pushed her out of the room, slammed the door shut in her face. Then I turned and faced Ramona.
"You ought to know better than to fight with her," I said. "You have the experience."
"I? I? I know nothing. She is a stupid bitch and ugly. What do you want with her? Get rid of her."
"I'll get rid of you first," I said, not meaning it.
"Then I go. I go now. Who needs you?"
"Go, then. Go back to Paulo, you love him and you will die in .the gutter, you fucking broad. Now get the hell out!"
I was feeling the strength of my own conviction, realizing in a practical way that Ramona's beauty would be more trouble to me than help. I had to let her go, even though I didn't want to in the worst way.
"I go with pleasure," she flaunted her bruised bosom. "I make my own way in the world. I don't need men to take my rightful money from me."
She didn't even bother with her clothes as she went to the door.
I let her go, feeling chagrined, but not regretful, really. She was a wild, untamable thing. Paulo couldn't manage her. I wasn't going to try. What it would take out of me wouldn't be worth it in the long run.
The door slammed a second time and I was alone with the shambles of the room and the five hundred dollars for consolation. She had done a good day's work for me and I was willing to end the bargain right there.
I was standing in the middle of the room, fingering the roll of bills in my pocket, when the door opened and I heard Annie creep back in.
I kept my back turned to her as she moved around, straightening out the overturned things. After a while I went for the bottle, took a couple of slugs and lay face down on the bed with my chin propped on my forearm, thinking.
"Forget about it," I said to her after a while. "We're going back to the States soon anyway. It'll be a new life."
I had a taste of the big time and tainted my blood with a money lust such as I had never before experienced.
My ambition soared. I knew I would knock down all barriers and reach the pinnacle of success somehow.
I had no contacts in the United States and followed my nose, so speak. My instincts would have to lead me through many experiments until I found the circle in which I wished to travel.
Instinctively I headed for New York, that place of opportunity for all things and the cash register of the world.
Annie, who was basically as conservative and practical as I, pleaded with me not to squander our remaining funds on an expensive place to live. But I objected, thinking that the minute we settled in some place nice, I would phone the gentleman in Mexico and let him know my whereabouts. I felt confident that he would come to me and, in time, introduce me to the people who would do me the most good.
It turned out, however, to be impossible to get the kind of apartment I wanted. The rents were high but that didn't bother me. What got in my way was the fact that I had no visible means of support, no conventional security to offer, no credit rating. I was an outsider, a Bohemian, a member of the lunatic fringe. Maybe the renting agents recognized me for what I really was, after all. This knowledge grated. I vowed to myself to become bigger and better than all of them, and to buy my own apartment house on Park Avenue one day, where no one would have the last word over my say-so.
In the meantime, though, I had to make quick cash, just to keep things moving. I wasn't eager to face the prospect of starvation so I took a couple of rooms in an old building high in the hundreds off Broadway.
It was a lively neighborhood with everybody out on the streets. Music blared from the record stores and the air smelled from spiced meats. The autumn weather had cooled everybody off and people were comfortable after an obviously death-dealing summer. Annie made acquaintances. So did I. While she was out getting business, I would lean against a car fender and talk with the guys who knew, without my telling them, how I made it from day to day.
But I didn't hang around the streets to waste time kidding around. My eyes were open for beautiful girls.
I met Naomi outside a five and dime. We literally ran into each other. She was carrying some rolls of wrapping paper and they went flying as we clashed. But she wasn't annoyed with me. She only laughed at the upset and the two of us bent to pick up her scattered purchases.
Her skin was the color of coffee with lots of milk in it, and smooth as the surface of liquid. ?
She was wearing a wig, I knew. It was a deep mahogany color, really artificial, yet provocative, and her large eyes were full of life, friendly and exuding warmth.
She was my kind of girl.
When we had her all arranged with the packages again, I didn't let her go but walked beside her down the street. She didn't seem to mind my company, rather welcomed it. We talked about nothing in particular, the weather, New York. I told her I had been out of town for a couple of years and she felt envious of that. She hadn't been away since she'd come to the city from the Islands, and yearned to go back.
"Well, go then," I said. "What keeps you here?"
She shrugged and laughed that warm, easygoing laugh I would come to love.
"Ever hear of money?" she said.
I understood. I should have known from the beginning. Everyone in the world seemed to suffer from a lack of greenbacks. Naomi no less than the rest of us.
"You look like a girl who should have a fortune," I said, meaning it.
"Thank you. Thank you." She was not at all taken in by my compliment but amused by it, willing to accept any good words I would give her as one human being to another.
"Would you like to make some cash?" I asked. "What do you do?"
It was an invading, personal question, but I had to ask it. Now or never.
"This and that," she said evasively. "I do all kinds of things."
So there was my answer. I had an opportunity to offer Naomi more than she was getting, if she wanted to take advantage.
"Come on, I'll buy you a cup of coffee," I said, "and we can talk."
"Why not?"
So we went into one of the small, greasy spoon restaurants that dotted Broadway and went to the back, had coffee and corn muffins and talked about nothing, really, just getting to know each other. Me, handing Naomi a vision of what the world could give her, if she wanted to open up to it.
"You must be kidding, man," she said, after some of my glowing terminology had faded.
"You just don't appreciate yourself, Naomi," I said. "A gorgeous girl like you, why should you die here in New York?"
"I agree with that, certainly. But you must have stars in your eyes. I mean, a girl can earn something, sure, but not all that much."
I swept aside her skepticism, told her I was used to raking in more than she could think of earning in a month by herself.
"All right," she said, finishing her coffee. "Why shouldn't I take you up on your generous offer?" She spoke lightly, not taking me seriously yet. "If you can show me the cash; I'm willing to show you the action."
It seemed like such a clean, sensible business deal, I felt relieved, glad to have an intelligible woman without crazy emotions around for a change. And I went back in search of suitable business for her with a high-flying heart.
By seven o'clock that evening I had rounded up four prospects that I intended to present to Naomi in her apartment at hourly intervals as a starter of our new arrangement. By three a.m. that morning I had one hundred and fifty dollars, of which I gave Naomi half to encourage her.
She lived on the top floor in seven rambling rooms that had been in her family, it seemed, for generations.
The old furniture had an aura of history about it. It was quite a comfortable place to be, certainly a good place for customers to make themselves at home and enjoy the great and many endowments of this wonderful, fleshy creature.
I had expected that we would be alone, just Naomi and I, till dawn, when I would go back to my own pad and sleep. But we weren't there more than a half hour when the door opened and in came two other girls, both of them darker than she, but equally beautiful, young and interested to hear about Naomi's new fortune.
I sensed that she had contacted them and told them that she was on to a gold mine, if they wanted to share it.
I couldn't have been more delighted.
Within the space of twenty-four hours here I was looking at a brand new stable of opportunities, each willing and eager, and good-natured, it seemed, to do their best for me in return for what I would consider a fair share.
Naomi's face, all smiles, testified to the fact that I was generous and the girls, encouraged by this sign, were eager to get into my good graces.
I sat in a deep, old, reading chair with my legs stretched out, while each of the two newcomers sat on an arm of the chair, stroked and petted me, called me by name, kissed me from time to time, squeezed my prick and generally made a party with me as the guest of honor.
Now this was exactly the way I had seen things from the very beginning. This was my rightful place among women and I felt quite cozy and comfortable and natural with these loving chicks showing me every favor.
The shorter one of the two, called Myrna, had a somewhat high-pitched voice which, from time to time, burst into song of a lulling nature. The other, a rangy gal, with a quieter disposition, made sure that my glass of whiskey was never empty. She called herself Mindy and the word came out as if there were a 'w' on the end from some slight speech impediment which gave her mouth a sexy aspect. I sensed that she had a most educated tongue that would work wonders upon some lucky customer's cock.
All in all this was a far cry from the roughshod days of Mexico. Again, I felt glad and lucky to be back in the States where I belonged and where my future glowed just at the horizon, waiting for me to reach it. I had no sensation then that this future would be like a carrot in front of a donkey, always moving back two paces as I stepped forward one to meet it. No, I felt contact with my inner truth. I belonged to the milieu of women and would make the most of it.
Naomi, Myrna and Mindy, all equally lovable, yet each in her own way had ambition, too. As I said before, Naomi wanted to go back home. Myrna would have liked to get on the stage or with some music combo, and Mindy wanted, of all things, to go to college and learn to be a librarian.
I had no quarrel with any of their ambitions. In fact, I agreed that the best way for them to materialize their dreams was for them to help me materialize mine and we would all, in the end, wind up happy and satisfied.
Now it was up to me to go out and get the men.
How can I write here the frustration of the following few days? The indescribable pressure of having the goods, the girls, without having the customers with bankrolls equal to the merchandise value. I was in possession of a gold mine without the gold and I felt like I would go crazy.
There was no finding anyone in the neighborhood where I lived, nor did I have much hope about scouring the bars or cruising the streets with my block. This endeavor was not going to settle down into a ten-dollar-a-night trick situation. I had outlived those days and would never return to them. It was the big time, now or never.
So I took a chance on a long shot and called the man in Mexico.
He wasn't there any longer but the houseboy gave me a forwarding phone in Los Angeles which I called immediately.
He recognized my voice and was glad to hear from me.
I put my cards on the table.
"Well, yes," he said. "I have friends in New York, but I don't think they're looking for five-hundred-dollars-a-night bills," he chuckled. "What are they looking for?"
"The most for the least, like anybody."
"That's not for me," I said.
"Well, don't be discouraged," he continued blandly. "You never know when you'll meet."
"Don't hang up on me yet," I said. "I think I'd like to try, at least. Whom should I contact?"
He gave me the names and phone numbers of some people in that area of Park Avenue where I, myself, had wanted to live. I felt instantly encouraged. I thanked him and told him I'd see him any time he came to the city. Little did I know how soon that would be. The name he had given me was Jake Barnes. It was first on my list and had a certain emphasis that I could not exactly define, a certain aura of promise that made me dial that number first. , But getting to Jake Barnes was like trying to make an appointment with a busy medical specialist. " I had to deal with first the houseboy, then a secretary, then finally made an arrangement to be there the next day at three in the afternoon.
My spirits soared. I was on my way. The-next morning I went out and bought myself a dark grey suit and a blue shirt. The image that looked back at me in the triple-way mirror said that I looked pretty damned good and nothing at all like the pimp I was.
I proceeded along to the address on Park Avenue.
You know how it is when you step into the center of New York luxury. You kind of lose your mind with greed.
I hadn't collected my brains into a neat package before a tall woman with an oval face, her hair parted in the center and falling down to her shoulders, came through the doorway to greet me in the front living room where I was standing, because I didn't have the patience to sit.
"Hello," she said, "you're Ben Brown."
"Yes," I looked at her and waited, wondered what she wanted.
"I'm Jake Barnes," she said and smiled. She came toward me and extended the most feminine and graceful of hands.
Well, I should have known. My friend in Mexico was a homo. Why shouldn't his friends be? I smiled directly into her deep green eyes.
"Can I help you?" she said.
"Can I help you?" I answered. "That's what I'm here for."
There was no mistaking my meaning, particularly since I had left a message as to who had given me her number.
"So I still have friends on earth," she said, with an easy, friendly smile. "That's good to know."
"You have a friend in me," I replied. "I'd like to be your friend, anyway."
"All right. I think that's a lovely idea, Ben. We'll get started right away. I'll make a party this evening. You bring your friends. I'll bring mine."
And that was that.
I left her, raced back uptown to deck my girls out in the best of finery. There was going to be a blast tonight. I would make contacts, the girls would make contacts, and we would all wolf down the pie in the sky. Shit, was I happy!
I scattered bills among them like confetti, sent them all out to buy clothes. When they came back, I was quite satisfied with their choices. Each in her own way looked gorgeous, desirable, luscious. Each was worth the price I was going to place upon her ass, worth maybe more.
I bundled the three of them into a taxi and we went back down to Park Avenue to step over the threshold into the big time.
Jake Barnes was doing right by me, I saw the minute we entered the apartment. There were men and women, maybe six, all of them obviously as well-heeled as she. People with charming manners on the surface, accustomed to luxury, to having their own way, orgy-seekers, sex-crazy without being sex-lost. I watched with satisfaction as eyes rolled over the wares that I had brought with me.
I guess no one had expected the likes of Naomi, Myrna and Mindy, my three graces. The girls circulated with a certain bounce and good nature that seemed to tickle the prospective clients. Jake had a piano and Myrna could play. It didn't take long before the room was an intimate place, filled with smoke, things to eat, lots of laughter and I saw a good deal of feeling up.
I sought out Jake and said, "Well, which one would you like?"
She handed me a long-stemmed glass with champagne punch in it.
"I take my time. I'll let you know."
"Well, I have someone else cached," I said. "Why didn't you bring her?" she said, without looking at me.
"I save the best for the last, of course. A special something for you, friend, just in case."
"Well, tell me about her at least."
What was it in me that wanted to groom Annie and lift her up to the level of the woman beside whom I was standing? I don't know. I suppose there was a deeper core of ambition in my soul than even I recognized at the time. I had dreams of making Annie the permanent mistress of Jake and drawing a nice salary on a weekly basis, steady, secure, with no muss or flying feathers.
Meanwhile, my three beauties had been snapped up and absorbed. The dancing had begun. I saw hips and behinds undulate. The girls knew how to dance, knew how to dance close in a tantalizing way, instinctive amongst them. Watching it got my dander up. I felt a certain yearning in my prick to get in somewhere, somewhere neat, somewhere good and clean, somewhere lively, somewhere different.
And I began to muse upon the matter and prospect of fucking Jake Barnes myself. If she cared anything at all about men, anything at all.
Only I wasn't going to push the heterosexual angle and spoil my chances. It was my job, after all, to cater, not to impose. And I wanted most of all to please Jake. She seemed an endless source of goodies to me.
As I said earlier, I can't use real names in this history but Jake Barnes was someone famous as a kingmaker in a particular area of the business world. Apparently she had managed to inherit all the right stocks and all the right companies. People came to her because she could do things for them, which told me that there were many who owed Jake a favor but that they could not pay her in the coin which would satisfy her most.
Only I could do that.
We strolled out of the noisy room into one of the many bedrooms of the apartment. I followed Jake, who went to a phone beside the bed.
She said to me, sitting down on the mattress, "Why don't you call your ace in the hole, Ben? And have her come up here."
I wondered, as I looked at Jake, if I could depend upon Annie to come across on such short notices. I hadn't seen her for some time. I certainly had had time to clue her in as to my latest goings on. Well, I thought, I might as well take the chances.
"Why don't you leave me alone with this?" I said, tapping the receiver, "and I'll see what I can do for you, okay?"
"Fine. Suit yourself," she said, ambling out of the room and pulling the door closed behind her.
I dialed home with my fingers crossed that Annie wasn't out walking the streets at this hour, where she ought to have been, anyway.
I was lucky. She lifted the receiver and said, "Hello," in a listless sort of way.
"Annie," I said, "if you ever did anything for me, you have to do something for me now."
"I always do for you, Ben. What the hell do you mean?"
"Listen," I said. And I explained to her about Jake Barnes, explained how I wanted things to be, what I wanted Annie to look like, and how she should present herself when she came over.
"Oh, Ben, I don't know. You're getting crazier and crazier."
"Stop acting like a midtown wife. You've been around enough. You ought to know."
"I know plenty."
"Well, then, pull yourself together. This is the time, kid. Now don't screw it up for yourself."
"All right, tell me exactly what you want me to do. I'll try."
"That's the spirit," I paused. What the hell could I tell her to do, though?
"Well, Ben, what are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking about first things first. You've got nothing to wear."
"What do you want me to wear?"
"Something sexy, of course, but not flamboyant. Do you get my meaning? Something slick, something with class, Annie." I wondered if I was talking into deaf ears. "Do you have anything simple to wear? Simple and dinging? You still have a great body, kid, and I want you to come up here and flaunt it like it's worth a million, which I think it is."
"Ben, I didn't know you still have such faith in me." Her voice was all sarcasm, irony and lack of hope.
It wasn't the mood I wanted from her. "Annie, if you blow this thing tonight, I swear it will be the end of us. I mean it.
She must have caught the note in my voice, the no-nonsense voice. "I'll do my best. I always do my best."
"I know, kid. Now hurry up."
"When is that?"
"Soon. Soon."
"Okay," I sighed. "Suit yourself, but make it snappy."
I cradled the receiver with a great deal of trepidation. I wondered whether or not Annie was going to fail me this night. This night of nights. I couldn't have it, couldn't see her louse me up and yet I was depending upon her. It was I who had set the structure up in this way to make things dependent upon Annie's attitude. Why had I done it? Was I looking to slit my own throat? Did I have faith in her deeper than I realized? I couldn't say. I could only wait and see.
I went outside, looked about, hunting Jake Barnes till I found her on the far side of a set of swinging doors that led into the kitchen.
She was alone with a tray of small sandwiches.
"I'll bring them in for you, if you like," I said.
She smiled. "I have a staff for that, Ben. Don't worry."
I grinned at her. She grinned back at me. "Well?" she said.
"The girl will be here."
"You want to tell me a little bit about her?" she said, leaning against the closed door of the refrigerator. "I'd like to hear. I'd like to prepare myself for the blessings raining down upon me from heaven."
It was amusing to hear Jake go on in her urbane way. I realized she'd been through a great deal in her life and that very little could really touch her where she lived. Certainly, I thought to myself, Annie wasn't going to be the girl that would boggle Jake Barnes' experienced eyes.
But I began talking about Annie as I remembered her before we went off to Mexico. I described what she looked like, the smallness of her, the dark hair, the physical fitness, her swimming, her honesty, her spontaneous attitude toward life. And as I talked and described the ghost of the woman I was living with, describing my wife's shadow, I felt a small niggle of yearning in my heart.
Not for myself, really, but for Jake Barnes, and for Annie and for all the people who somehow managed to miss the right boats in life.
"She's all that, eh?" Jake said, picking up one bit of a sandwich and biting into the end of it. "I can't imagine such a cornucopia of good things."
"Oh, you'll see for yourself," I said with a bravado of confidence.
"You sound attached to her."
I am.
"Is that how-it is, is it? Do you become attached to your girls, do you love them?"
"Well, I love this one," I shrugged, wondering if I was telling the truth, feeling, somehow that I was lying on the surface but telling the truth somewhere beneath it, that I really did love Annie in some quirky way. -felt, anyway, a kind of loyalty to the memory of Annie as I had known her before I'd laid her.
"Has she been with women?" Jake asked directly.
"No, not a one."
"Never?"
"Never."
Jake sighed. "I'm going to be laying a virgin.
A whore virgin. That's it, something. Something new. Maybe I'll like Ben. Maybe I really will."
"Maybe she'll like you, too," I replied, banteringly.
Jake flicked her gaze from the sandwich to my face. "Doesn't make any difference whether she likes me or not."
"Sure it does."
"No."
It was my moment to remain firm and in vocal disagreement with Jake's attitude toward life and sex, particularly sex, particularly the romance which might possibly come With sex if one wanted to let one's self go with abandon into the dream.
"I tell you, Jake, the reason I'm having Annie come up here is that I think she could learn to like you."
Jake's face went all curious in a deep, searching way. "Is that what you were thinking of? Affection?"
I listened to the way she turned the word over in her mouth as though it were made out of gall and lemon.
I decided to deflect her attitude, change it, give it the kind of positive, uplifting thrust which, in the long run, I realized, would be Annie's value to Jake, more so, I thought, than her ass.
"Why don't you wait and see?" I said, "and then you'll know how to trust me."
She laughed in her throat as though I were some kind of child talking about Santa Claus.
But things went alright that night anyway. Everybody got their rocks off pretty good and everybody had a great time.
Annie came over and played all night with Jake. They really got along a lot better than I thought they would.
Annie has this natural thing about women that I never knew about and neither did she.
She was swell with Jake and Jake even asked her to stay over that night and the night after that and the night after that. It turned into a regular thing with them and now they're living together in that apartment on Park.
She never thought that she would end up there but it was like I always told her. If she stayed with me she would get to the right places and know the right people.
I couldn't have been happier for her. I know she was my wife and all and I know that she was supposed to stay with me but to tell you the truth I really didn't care about that any more. I was happier knowing that she stopped cruising and stopped fucking around with! all sorts of sick people.
She was taken care of now better than she could have been with me and I knew that she knew it too.
The girls stayed and worked for me though.
They knew where the good action was and I was their main man from that day on.
I catered to an almost exclusive clientele from then on and none of my customers have ever complained.
Those girls really know how to take care of business and they really know their work. The customers keep coming back time and time again and they can't get enough of the good treatment that my girls give them.
They love that meat and I give them all that they want.
I treat the girls good too. I don't do like some of the pimps that treat their stable like shit and then expect a big turnover every night.
I treat them with respect and compassion as if they were in a normal line of work. As if they worked in an office and had a union and everything.
I mean I know they're hookers and that the rest of the world looks down on them but my attitudes have changed since the time that I came to New York.
I really have a thing now about really being nice to the stable and I know that they will be nice to me when it comes to making the Johns happy and giving them all that they want.
I don't care what they do after they are through hooking. They don't have to see me until it's time for work. I don't pry into their private lives like most of the pimps do and I sure as hell don't take advantage like the normal super Macho pimp.
I'm basically very cool with them and they are very cool in return.
That's the only way to be these days or else you get fucked over from every side. You get your ass handed to you from the girls and from the customers and if you're not careful you get the Mob on your ass as well.
Pimping is the only way to be these days and I know that for a fact. The sexual liberation and all the other things that are going down will never take any business away from me because every guy wants a hooker at one point or other in their lives.
