Chapter 9
When I arrived at work Angie told me that Robin had called in sick. I was relieved, in a way, but it also made me feel even guiltier. "What the hell am I going to do for a waitress?" he was moaning. "Shit-I can't do it myself, I promised to take my kid to the circus. And I don't know anybody else.. . "
"Why don't you ask Robin if she has any friends who could fill in for her? She seems to know lots of people who are always looking to pick up a few bucks, and most of them are regulars in here. They know the menus and prices and procedures and everything."
I smiled to myself and held my breath as Angie called Robin back. Cash-register bells sounded in my head when I heard him say, "Shirley? 741-0632? Okay. I'll try her." I memorized the number just for the record and anxiously awaited the outcome of Angie's call. When he told me Shirley was on her way, everything was all right. I was in the black; on the hunt again, and hungrier than ever. Janet had been one thing. Robin had been another. Shirley, from all I knew of her, would prove to be yet another.
When Shirley arrived half an hour later I was helping Angie serve some customers. The place was starting to fill up, so Angie stayed around to make sure Shirley knew what she was doing. She actually looked much more together than I'd ever seen her. Her hair was clean and neatly brushed and newly waved; her pale, vaguely primitive-looking face was tastefully made up with muted strawberry lipstick and a hint of blue eye shadow; and she wore a black satiny pants-suit belted at the waist with a scarlet sash. She was a little more hyper than usual, and I suspected she'd got a hold of her methedrine. Although I looked for uneasiness in her-since she was, after all, coming to work for a man she'd been ripping off-I couldn't find any.
She came back to the kitchen first thing. "Hey, Jim! Howya doin'? Rattlin' those old pots and pans?" She said it in a half-friendly, half-jibing way, as though she liked me okay in my place, but the only thing I was good for was rattlin' those pots and pans.
"I'm doing all right, I guess," I replied covering a liver steak with a pot-top as it fried on the griddle. I leaned and motioned her toward me.
"What's up?" she asked curiously.
"Nothing much, maybe. But there's something I've got to talk to you about before you leave."
"What?" Her dark eyes narrowed and faint frown-lines crossed her forehead.
"Later." I went to the refrigerator for beef patties.
The night was busy and chaotic, what with an unusually heavy clientele for a Tuesday and an inexperienced waitress. Shirley threw me a few perplexed frowns as the evening wore on, but on the whole she was too busy scampering back and forth to think much. That was fine. All I'd wanted to do was plant a seed.
At twelve-thirty a large group of people left together, and the place was empty except for two young folk singers in the front just finishing up pastrami sandwiches. Shirley made her way wearily back to the kitchen and leaned against the doorsill taking her apron off. "It's a good thing Angie suggested that I put this on," she said, eyeing the messy ketchup and grease stains down its front. "This is one of the two or three decent outfits I have left, and I'd hate to have done this to it." She chucked the apron behind her into a hamper. "I guess we're about done for the night." She pursed her lips and turned serious. Her gaze was not quite as penetrating as Robin's, but it was cool, wary, and analytic.
"I may as well come straight to the point, right?"
"I suppose so." She was more disturbed now.
"Angie's been a little concerned lately about how much he's paying out for food and how much he's taking in. He's let his books get behind for a few months, and a couple of days ago I told him I'd bring them up to date for him." She looked surprised. "I'm not just any old dumb cook, you know." I smiled acidly. "I can add and subtract and multiply and divide, too." She was plainly taken aback at the firmness of my voice; as though she'd really never realized I was a man before. "And what I began to suspect was that more food-not a whole lot, but enough to make a noticeable dent in the profit margin of a place like this-was being bought than was being sold. In other words, that there was a leak."
"You mean somebody's stealing?" She'd decided to take the offensive.
"I wouldn't put it that way if I were in your place."
"What the hell are you talking about."
"It shouldn't be too hard for you to figure out. I'm in a better position to spot this particular bit of chicanery than Angie is, since number one, I'm the night cook, and you always eat here after he leaves; and number two, I tend to remember things like what I cook on a given night. A strange habit, perhaps. But to be quite blunt, I made a steak and a salad and an order of french fries for you last Wednesday that never showed up on a check and was never paid for. Same thing with a bowl of stew and a salad the week before. I know you're not the only one Robin's been playing this little game with, but you're her closest friend, you eat here most often, and I assume that you are, as we might say, the chief beneficiary."
"I'm not admitting that any of this is true, but if it were, so what? What would you do? Call the cops? Tell Angie about it? Give me a spanking? Face it, Jim. By New York standards a meal or two a week is petty bullshit. Anybody who doesn't steal at least that much can't keep his head above water in this ratrace."
If I hadn't overheard her conversation with Robin I would have been thrown by that reply. "Is it petty bullshit if Robin loses her job for stealing?"
I'd touched a raw nerve and Shirley admitted it. Her hands dangled helplessly at her sides. "No, it's not." She thought for a second. "But that'll only happen if you blow the whistle. Look, I've got seventeen dollars in tips here . . . " She emptied her pockets onto the cutting board. "That'll pay back some of it. And I'll give you whatever Angie pays me, too. I'll go back and fix up the last few checks so everything's square, and when I get some more money-you just tell me how much-I'll give it to you and you can write out checks as though I'd bought something. Unless . . . "
"I'm not sure that'll be sufficient. But-unless what?"
She cocked her head and looked at me with a new eye. "Unless we can work out some other arrangement."
"like what?"
She smiled indulgently and looked down at her body. Her tits rolled gently under the satiny cloth of her pants-suit and the nipples poked little ridges in it. Almond-brown, I remembered. "Why don't you use your imagination?"
I laughed easily and finished cleaning up the griddle. "Are you suggesting that I might be bought off with your body?"
"I suppose that's the most obvious possibility, isn't it?"
I took off my own apron and walked over and threw it past her into the hamper. I looked her up and down with a kind of patronizing amusement. "That's a pretty strange offer, but not unintriguing. But what makes you think your body is worth that kind of compromise on my part? I mean, you're asking me to become an accomplice to your little game."
"A game that is now at an end," she said firmly. She undid her sash and dangled it suggestively in her hand. "It's not so much my body as what I do with it. As you can see, I'm pretty skinny." I couldn't see nearly as well now as I once had. The flowing lines of her pants-suit made her look less bony than she really was. But I believed her about what she could do with that skinny body, and it turned me on to have her offering. This was so easy. Too easy, I thought. I became suspicious. Not paranoid, but just suspicious enough to watch my step. After all, I really had no way of knowing whether Robin had told her about the night before.
"On the other hand," I said, "I'm not going to be sticking around in this job much longer. It's not as though Angie was going to be my employer for life. In fact, I'm quitting in the next couple of days. I have some personal business to take care of out on the Coast, and I've been letting it slide for months."
"That's convenient," she replied, pushing off the door-frame and laying her sash up on the cutting board, brushing a tit casually against my arm as she leaned past me.
"Why convenient?"
"Because that means you won't be around to push me for seconds and thirds and fourths." She stared at me frankly. "Let's get down to brass tacks. I can sense you want to make a deal." She took a step back and grabbed her pants-suit at the waist and gathered the material up in her fists until it was tight from her crotch to her shoulders and every line of her body stood out starkly; even the rounded bulge of her cuntlips and the shallow slit between them. "You can come back to my place right now and I'll give you the best night in bed you ever had. You'll promise not to tell Angie, or anybody else, about the food business. We'll cut that out. And that'll be it. Okay?"
I moved to her and ran my palm down into her crotch. She spread hejr legs and squatted on it a little and smiled. "Done," I said.
We cleaned up the restaurant in a hurry and walked the eight blocks downtown to her place. We didn't say much on the way. She was satisfied and not at all uptight, and I was trembling in anticipation. I wanted to ask her whether she'd ever been a hooker, but somehow it didn't seem right.
Her loft was one huge open room on the third floor of an old warehouse. The neighborhood wasn't residential, and I found myself a little uneasy walking the dimly lighted, deserted street. I expected a barren pigsty, but was surprised to be ushered into a fully furnished-almost over furnished-space with newly scraped pine floors, newly washed windows lining the front, and lit by two elegant Tiffany lamps-originals or excellent imitations.
"I went on a cleaning binge today," she told me as she went to the refrigerator and pulled out a couple of beers. She motioned me to a water bed half again as large as Robin's. It was covered by a World War II parachute canopy. "Also, a friend just laid a little bit of really dynamite Turkish hash on me, which I'm going to proceed to smoke. Want some?" She dipped her fingers into a masonry cookie jar and came up with a few shavings of what looked like close-packed brown dirt, which she transferred to a pipe that sat on a glass topped coffee table toward the front of the room.
"I'll try it," I replied, pushing the edges of the parachute aside and kicking off my shoes to wade into the bed. There were half a dozen fat candles on a shelf at the head. I found some matches and lit them up and took a deep breath and relaxed. This was really going to be something. If Robin and her boyfriend and ten cops didn't break down the door the next ten minutes.
When Shirley joined me under the canopy she brought not only a small brass water pipe with a thin rubber hose and mouthpiece, but also a bottle of rubbing oil. The hashish bits glowed in the bowl of the pipe and reeked an odor of flowery midsummer fields. "I thought you might like a body rub," she said softly as she handed me the pipe. She opened the bottle and set it . down. "Do you want to take off your clothes, or shall I?"
"I'll let you do it" I choked as the first drag of hashish seeped down into my lungs and attacked them with jolting strength.
She leaned over and reached for my shirt buttons. "I can see you don't do dope too much," she laughed. When she got my shirt undone and I pushed up onto my elbows so she could slip it off she paused for a second. "This is really weird, you know. I mean, I've made it with a lot of guys for a lot of reasons in my time, but never anything like this. Well-I guess I've done it to eat, and that's what this comes down to." She cocked her head and looked at me curiously. "Does it surprise you to hear that?"
"Not particularly. If I was a girl Yd sure as shit end up a full-time whore."
She shook her head as she folded up my shirt and went for my belt buckle. "No you wouldn't You just try being a full-time whore sometime and see."
I could tell she was good and ripped already. I'd heard that the more you smoked, the easier it was to get stoned, and she seemed to be living proof. Even my brief experience with the night before seemed to help. With my fourth or fifth drag on the pipe I found myself on an elevator speeding right out of the universe. "After
Shirley you ought to give it up," I told myself suddenly. "You'll never get a better one than this."
By this time Shirley was hauling my pants and underpants down together, glancing approvingly at my cock as it rolled around bloatedly on my belly, and laying them next to my shirt beside the bed. The pipe went out and she went to refill it. When she got back she handed it to me and reached for the oil. "You smoke while I rub." I propped myself up on a couple of pillows and closed my eyes and puffed lazily. She dribbled a thin stream of oil down my chest and caught it with her hand and smeared it up and around, over my shoulders, down my arms, seeking out the lines of my muscles and seducing them to relaxation.
"The rewards of sin are great," I found myself thinking. "It's only the dangers that keep people from sinning all the time. How many are clever enough to avoid the dangers? Am I one?"
The phone rang. Shirley cursed and answered it. All she said was, "Yes? Sure. Right now? No. I'm tied up. For the night. Okay. Fine. Goodbye."
Alarm bells went off in my head. Could she just have told somebody I was with her, that they could get me now? I wanted to ask her who it had been, but if my dim suspicions were correct she'd have a good lie ready anyway, and so far the word "blackmail" hadn't been spoken. So it was smartest just to let it ride.
When she was done with my upper body she moved to my feet and worked upward. She had a phenomenal touch. She seemed to know just what my body needed. By the time her fingers probed up into the crevices of my crotch I was limp and panting. She teased me expertly, running rings around the base of my cock, grazing light over my abdomen and raking through my crotch-hair, coming ever so close to my cock, but not actually touching it. I grinned up at her acknowledging her expertise. She grinned back down as though it was to be expected. Then she clasped her oily hands over my cock and it slithered between them like a slippery, drunken snake. It was as though she had my whole sexual being right there between her palms, beneath her fingers, and she was intent on massaging it to orgasm. "You want to get off like this."
"You want me to?"
"It's up to you. You're the boss as far as I'm concerned." I had the sudden, strange feeling that she'd just really said, "You're the John." That made me a little uncomfortable for a second, but then I thought, "That's what you are, and you'll never be any more. If you could buy this you would, but you can't. So you're more and less than an ordinary John. You're more because you're not paying, because you're smarter; and you're less because you can't pay, and so you're stealing instead." I realized I had a lot in common with Shirley when it came to satisfying basic appetites.
I drifted along for a while just soaking up the sensation. I'd never felt anything so good in my life, and it would go on all night if I wanted it to. "Why don't you see how close you can get without getting me off?"
Shirley seemed pleased at the idea of a challenge. She stroked thoughtfully at my cock for a little bit, as though feeling out its particular ways, and when she seemed satisfied that she had the combination she wrapped a fist around it and reached under to goose my balls with her other hand.
She took me racing dizzily right up to the brink in seconds, and then, just when two or three more strokes would have done it, she stopped and let go. My rod quivered and stuck up rigidly.
"How about taking off your clothes," I suggested.
"I was wondering when you'd get around to that" She got up on her knees and stripped the pants-suit oft quickly. I suspected she was afraid I'd be turned off at how skinny she really was. She sat with her arms folded across her stomach as though to cover the visible skeleton of her rib cage.
"How'd you like to sit on my face?"
The invitation seemed welcome. She presented her rear end to my face as she took up my cock once more, this time grasping it between her palms? reaching her pinkies down to search for the pleasure-channels at the roots and stretching her forefingers up to massage the underside of its head.
I wasn't sure I could hold out with her cunt in my face. I licked the outer lips and sniffed the intimate female odors and parted the lips with my fingers to bare her clit, still flaccid but seemingly eager for attention. It stuck up like the tip of a tiny baby's finger wrinkled by long immersion in water and squashed easily to the touch. I put my tongue to it and she gave a short, low hum of appreciation.
I ran my hands over her ass while I ate her and she milked my cock with long, preparatory pulls. Then I touched a fingertip to her ass-hole. It was, like her cunt and in fact the whole of her crotch, a rich, dark honey color, more tan than pink, and her sphincter was wide and smooth and lined with a pretty daisy pattern of creases. It flared automatically to the touch and my fingers sank to the hilt in it with no resistance. That was a click. She pressed back against me, wiggling my tongue harder on her clit and wagging her ass down hard onto my finger. "Jesus Christ," I thought. "This has to be one of the most fuckable ass-holes in history!"
She brought me rushing right up to the gates of climax again, squeezing my shaft hard, digging her fingertips into it almost enough to hurt, stroking right down to the core. I hung in breathless suspense as my lower body started that race-horse humping and that eerie, tingling sensation took over my genitals. I was reaching for it, reaching hard, racing, struggling, and there it was.
As though she could read my body, Shirley stopped again at the crucial moment. But this time she kept her hands clasped around me and I pumped a few weak streams of barely-cloudy fluid out to settle in the juncture between her hand and my cock. She smeared the secretions around daintily and then, with a lingering caress, let me go again. I pulled my head back from her cunt a little and gritted my teeth and inhaled deeply. The fresh oxygen boosted a new surge of sensation out of my groin.
"I don't know how much longer I can take this," I chuckled.
"I don't either. Why don't you turn over and I'll do your back the way I did your front?"
For the next twenty minutes I came down slowly. Shirley proceeded as before, pouring a puddle of oil into the hollow of my backbone, and then rubbing my back and shoulders, going next to my feet and working up from there. By the time her fingers kneaded my buttocks and slid down to circle the rim of my ass-hole and grease my balls, I was once more in a state of dreamy relaxation, ready to climb the peaks again. She wiggled a finger a little way up my ass, pressing down to feel along the root of my cock through the thin membrane that separated them.
She reached down between my legs and pulled my cock through so that so that it pointed straight down like a dog's tail. I knew I was going to have to fuck her soon. She cupped my balls in one palm and worked them with her fingers, resting her forearm in my ass crack to rub her wrist over my ass-hole. She moved around to straddle my back and pressed her pussy to it-a slithery hot damp place that oozed around with maddening seductiveness. Her other hand wrapped around my rod and stroked it
This time the shuddering of my body came hard and fast. I was like a firecracker with a short fuse. I couldn't take the heat. I wanted to plant the immense load of come that threatened to break free in her cunt.
I stirred to indicate she should get up. She flopped onto her back and looked upside down over her head at the candles on the shelf. She stretched and rubbed her cunt absently, making sure the lubrication was spread around and giving her clit a little encouraging treatment along the way. "How do you want it?"
I climbed up over her and knelt, resting my ass lightly on her stomach and gathering up her loose tits in my hands. I threw them around and nipped at the nipples with my thumbs and forefingers, and watched them rise and grow hard. "How about with you on top? That way you'll really be able to show what you can do."
"Good choice. That way it'll be easier for me to get myself off. If you don't mind."
"I'll really get off if you really get off," I told her. "I guess the most exciting thing for me is to see a woman really excited." I wanted to add, "For years and years I never believed that women got off or could get off on sex at all! So help me prove that I'm really wrong! I'll come so hard you'll think you got caught in a flash-flood!" But of course that isn't the kind of thing one admits to either to a victim or to a hooker. Whichever one Shirley was.
The billowy silk of the parachute canopy was like a warm and friendly cloud as I rolled over onto my back and floated on the plastic-covered ocean of the water-bed. And I was like a sky-diver leaping from a high-flying plane with a pack of silk on my back that had to burst and catch air and hold its symmetrical mushroom form if I was to hang from the harness and swing like a child from the ropes and shove my thumbs into the harnesss-straps that crossed my chest the way a fat and happy gambler hooks his thumbs into his suspenders at the end of a winning night and drift down through the atmosphere and land safely on a grassy patch of Mother Earth.
"Okay," Shirley grinned, her wide mouth flashing fine ivory at me from inside the frame of her luscious, promising lips. "This little box here . . . " She slid two fingers down into her cunt as she got into position over me and spread it in a V that jiggled her clit in its crotch. ". . . is about to give you the ride of your life. Take it from Mama Shirley. You'll never take it from anyone else."
More of the "John" feeling. Well, I could live with that. In fact, I was beginning to enjoy the idea that I was one of "Mama Shirley's" clients. It struck me that maybe she was a whore by nature; that that was what nature had meant her to be; that she could be a great whore if only people would allow that there was such a thing as a great whore. "Hold that thing up there for me, will you? And I'll just come along and squat on it."
She pushed herself up to a squatting position and giggled as she tried to get her balance on the uncertain footing of the water bed. She spread her forked fingers in an even wider V-sign and the redder, richer honey of her cunthole opened its smoothly sculpted trough to me. She inched forward in funny little waddles until the end of my cock was fitted to her groove and the viscous oil of her juices pasted pleasure to my cock.
This was really living. This was going all out. All the scales of life were in balance and time was stopped in an eternal moment of breakneck racing. I was closer to the present than I had ever been before; so close that everything that was real seemed real. I was with a woman who could not be tricked even though I had tricked her. I was "just another trick" for her, and that was what set the balance right. I remembered watching her eat the food that had paid for this night, laughing and joking with her friends, acting just as if she wasn't stealing anything-acting so well that she probably didn't believe she was really stealing.
And perhaps she hadn't been. If she hadn't been, I wasn't now.
I laughed at all the shallow-minded bitches who had crapped on me for fifteen years and more. They'd followed their straight, conventional ways, and lived their straight, conventional lives. They'd never know the thrill that I knew now; the thrill of total satisfaction at the payoff of a bet that bet their lives; the thrill of the long-shot coming in and the belly-laugh that marked the cleverness of the fix. They'd cook breakfasts and send kiddies off to school, pick crabgrass from lawns and buy their husbands golf clubs for Christmas, but they'd never end up in a parachute-canopy getting what they really wanted between their legs.
Strange how few good moments of life were needed to justify the rest.
Shirley's cunt fitted over my cock like a glove. As soon as I felt the groove behind the crest of my cock-head passing through the narrows of her bone-shield and breaking into the open bay beyond, all the illusions of misery that had kept me prisoner of my genitals exploded into freedom; the free-falling release of the deep-plunging earth-diver. The muscles of Shirley's humping cunt extracted all my pain. The knowing flesh of an inspired hooker took me rambling. Scarred on my face by endless repetitions of rejection, I yielded to the molding surgery of the erotic, and found myself a handsome man. Not Bob or Jim or a blackmailer or a poor pitiful son-of-a-bitch depraved beyond humanity, but myself all the same.
I was really doing all right. The collar of cunt on my cock was real, and the cunt-flesh that gripped and jerked me was real, and so was the clit that strove to hook forward and down to fawn on the top of my shaft. I could see it. It was a baby's finger, now firm and rosy, a finger that reached out to touch. To touch and take and give. To fuck as though fucking were a high art. To forget the whole stupid tangled mess of society and wander off down a forest path where two were alone and no one was watching. What would happen? People were too timid to guess. But Shirley, the amateur whore, the best kind of professional, was showing me.
Robin's cunt had been like an animal because I'd fucked it like a piece of furniture. She had been sub-human. But Shirley's cunt was like an animal because she became all animal and she became all cunt. She gave her genitals what they wanted. They knew what it was, and when they got it, she had all she wanted.
Shirley's cunt was a hand and a mouth in its power and control and sensitivity. Its insides rippled up and down as the currents of suction coursed through them, dancing across the surface of my cock with the gleeful abandon of a mad seductress. There was nothing as completely close as this rapid-fire flesh-to-flesh signaling.
Two ships passing in the night had their blinkers on and they were heaving to. Their engines idled and a balmy breeze pushed them southward in a light chop. The moon was bright overhead. Flying fish took to the air and skimmed over frothy waves, escaping the sharp-toothed jaws of predators lurking in the life-giving medium below.
The crews made ready their ropes. In the wheel house the mates chattered amiably and sipped coffee.
Shirley and I came together in a little island paradise of tacit understanding. She sought my orgasm no less than I sought hers, and I did the same. When she hooked me I knew I'd been hooked right. I reeled dizzily in the vacuums of man-become-cock, turning, slowly turning inside-out, throwing myself away like the spent first stage of a rocket. It was all there; the sight and smell of the woman squatting and impaling herself, the ecstatic excruciation radiating from her fiercely primitive features, the weight of her body borne on my thighs and shoulders, the flapping brush of her almond-nippled tits on my chest, the feeling that came to me from down below in my own body of the struggling-toward-satiation of an appetite far greater than hunger or thirst.
It took a particular woman to do this. It took a living body. It took a woman who knew what the hell to do with her cunt. Until I found a woman like that, I really didn't know what to do with my cock.
Shirley's cunt felt like a bird descending on me with flying talons and flapping wings. Bird! Ha, ha ha. I'd never known why women were called birds before.
Then she was a loping cat on top of me; loping in place. At a slow, graceful gallop she ran along with my rod stuck up between her legs. It was just a thing stuck up there to give her pleasure while she moved through space over time; just a sweet lollipop for a little girl to chew on. An all-day sucker. Hah!
But still, there she was with strain painted deep in her features and the capture of the prize complete. There she was with the sacks of her tits plunking down onto my chest. Her musculature worked like a well-oiled machine, and there she was pulling close to me as the heartbeats of idling engines propelled us together. There she was as the lines were cast and strong hands seized upon them and the hauling began. There she was as our hulls clanked together, sending melodic waves radiating through metal and air and water, metal echoing metal, cunt-to-cock, bashing and banging and blasting and spurting and drinking and hitting the apex of sanity.