Chapter 9
At first Wiffie didn't fully trust Hamp and his declarations of never-ending love. His reasoning about resigning from FBCC and leaving her in such an embarrassing predicament seemed less than logical; his leaving her in the lurch while she was pregnant (though he hadn't known of her delicate state at the time; it hadn't been confirmed by a physician until the morning of her expulsion) seemed, at best, unkind.
Yet there was something so sincere about Hamp that his continued protestations of love touched her, inspiring trust and forgiveness. She knew that he made little money; he had told her so himself. And yet he had taken her to a fairly expensive Italian restaurant for dinner, though she had insisted that Check Full O' Nuts would be just fine. And he had seemed genuinely concerned when she told him of her pregnancy. "Let's get married," he said immediately.
Marriage was unthinkable at the present time, of course. But it was kind of Hamp to be so gentlemanly and proper about the whole thing.
"I'll have the baby and give it up for adoption," she told him as they dawdled over their veal scaloppini. "I can't keep it; it would be unfair to the child."
"Why not get married?" he insisted for the umpteenth time.
"We're just too young. You know that. Even if we could afford it, it wouldn't be right. I'm not ready to be a mother."
"Are you ready to give your baby-our baby-to some stranger? Not knowing what kind of life the kid's going to live?"
It was a good point. And finally, after much discussion, they settled on the only practical solution; abortion.
Wiffie cried when they talked about it. Oh, the baby didn't seem real to her yet-not human; not really-but there was something so revolting, so cold about the idea of an abortion. Not murder, perhaps, but something almost as bad. In the end, however, she agreed that it was the only reasonable course of action, and Hamp promised to set things up for the operation.
"There's a cop who moonlights as a shopper for the Anti-Smut Society," he explained. "I've heard him talking about getting an abortion for his daughter, who was running around with a Negro. I'll tell him you were raped by a black nationalist or something; that ought to get him to part with some advice."
Sure enough, the cop came through; he gave Hamp a phone number. When Hamp called, a male voice answered, and Hamp was told that Wiffie would have to wait at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street at eleven a.m. on the following Tuesday. "She's got to be alone," the man said.
"But I'm the fa-her fianc‚. I mean. I want to go along and make sure she's safe."
"Look, fella, we know what we're doing. And we always insist on the girl being alone. Take it or leave it."
After a moment of thought, Hamp took it.
When asked about payment, he explained that Wiffie had several hundred dollars in savings bonds that had been given to her by an elderly aunt some years before. "Well, tell her to bring whatever she can with her-in cash. It's got to be at least four hundred bucks," the man said. Hamp agreed, and that was that.
The two men had picked her up in a Ford van. "In the back," one of them had told her, and Wiffie had sat on the floor of the truck as ordered. She had been unable to see where the van was going, so when they arrived at a nondescript brownstone in a run-down neighborhood, she had no idea where it was that she'd been taken. Indeed, she was too nervous to care.
They took her upstairs and into a small apartment. One of the men-the older one, apparently the abortionist-took her four hundred dollars in twenties, then told her to go into the back room and strip. A few moments later, he came into the room and instructed her to lie down. "Over there," he said, pointing to a battered leather psychiatrist's couch next to a window covered by Venetian blinds. With a certain amount of fear and a greater amount of embarrassment, Wiffie did as she was told. It seemed like a less than ideal setting for an operation; hardly sanitary, and certainly un-like any doctor's office she had ever seen.
The abortionist went out of the room and returned a few moments later bearing a tray of medical instruments. He walked over to a washbasin in one corner and washed his hands carefully, then negated the effort by wiping them on a dirty towel.
"My assistant will give you something to put you under," the man said curtly. He then sat down on a stool at the end of the couch and directed Wiffie to raise and spread her knees. "Slide your ass down toward me," he said, and Wiffie did so with trepidation. The man stared at her cunt for a moment, then proceeded to stroke her clitoris.
Wiffie was startled, and tried to pull away from the offending hand. "Relax," he told her. "Just take it easy. It makes for an easier job if you're lubricated."
She tried to relax, but the feel of the rough fingers caressing her organs, and the sight of the bald head with its rim of unkempt gray hair circling the skull, was too much for her. She heard the man's deep breathing, and detected a sniff when he leaned close to her opening, and was almost thankful when the assistant-a twentish man, rather effeminate-pricked her arm with a hypodermic needle and sent her off to sleep.
When she woke up, Wiffie noticed first that the room was darker than before. There was no light coming through the Venetian blinds; night had fallen, and the only illumination in the room came from a bare fifty-watt bulb over the washbasin.
She lay still for a few minutes, conscious of a slight ache in her loins. She looked down; she was still nude, and there was blood-some of it dried, some fresh-on the towel that lay beneath her buttocks. She felt a momentary need to vomit, but it passed quickly, and she put her head back down on the couch and groaned.
At the sound of her voice, the abortionist entered and flipped on the overhead light. He came over to her and bent down, inspecting her crotch and smiling as he noted the only moderate amount of blood on the towel. "Well, you're not bleeding to death; that ought to cheer you up." There was an edge of contempt in his voice.
Wiffie lifted her head from the couch, but felt dizziness come over her and lay back once more. "Do you think you could cover me with something?" she asked. "I don't feel very comfortable, being naked like this."
The abortionist smiled; it was an ugly smile, and it frightened her. Then he chuckled, and there was cruelty in his tone. "You came for an abortion, not for comfort, you little whore."
"I don't understand." Wiffie's voice betrayed her fear. "Look, I paid you four hundred dollars. Why can't I have a sheet or a blanket or something? And when can I go home?"
"Oh, all right, you can have a sheet." The abortionist turned his head and shouted toward the door. "Harry, get us a sheet." Then he resumed talking to Wiffie in a normal tone:
"You can go home when I say you can," he said. "You're not ready yet. Anyway, we have to get the rest of your payment before you can leave."
"But I gave you four hundred dollars!" Wiffie cried in disbelief.
"Yes, but our normal fee is a thousand. We did the job for four hundred because you seemed young and in trouble, and we didn't want to deprive you of the chance to enjoy a decent life. However, we do expect a little something extra to make things worthwhile for us."
"What do you mean?"
"You'll see." The man laughed harshly again. "Just take it easy. You'll find out soon enough."
The assistant came in with a sheet, and the abortionist told him to wrap it completely around Wiffie. Then the older man went to a cabinet and took out a roll of heavy nylon cord. While his assistant held Wiffie down, they tied her arms to her sides and her feet together, then strung the remainder of the cord around the wooden legs of the couch. Wiffie tried to scream, but the younger man's hand covered her mouth just in time. And when they finished tying her to the couch, she was gagged. "Take it easy, now," the abortionist told her. "You're not going anywhere, so you might as well get some more sleep."
She lay like that for almost eighteen hours. She wasn't allowed to get up to wash or defecate; by the time the men united her, she had urinated twice (involuntarily; she had kept her bladder full till the last possible moment each time) and, in one attack of fear, she had soiled the sheet with a sudden spasmodic outburst from her aching bowels. When evening came on the second day of her confinement, the two men untied her and took her into the bathroom. The younger one held an open switchblade knife in his hand, and warned that a scream would cost Wiffie her life.
They watched while she showered. She kept her back to them, wishing there were some way she could hide her buttocks as she was attempting to hide her breasts and pubic fur. There was something so degrading about washing this way; it was awful, rubbing her vaginal opening with a soapy hand to wash away the dried blood and urine, and knowing that they watched as she reached around to soap her anus with its dried excrement, feeling their gaze on her back as she soaped each breast in turn and raised her arms to lather and then rinse her underarms.
As she dried her body with a harsh towel, she felt a hand reach around her and grab a breast; she pulled away and heard a contemptuous laugh. She tried to feign indifference when strange fingers reached between her thighs and touched her vulva from behind, and she did her best to stifle a sob when one of the fingers pushed inside her, causing a twinge of pain.
When she was dry, she scrunched up her shoulders and walked with knees together as they accompanied her back to the room; she begged for her clothes, but the two men only laughed again.
"You won't be needing them for a while," the abortionist told her. He took a length of cord and stepped behind her, pulling her arms toward him and tying her wrists behind her back. When he was finished, he led her to the couch and made her lie down on her back. He pulled her legs open and forced her feet over the sides, tying each ankle to a couch leg with the sturdy cord. "Now you'll pay the rest of that fee," he muttered. Wiffie watched in terror as he unzipped his fly.
She struggled to break her bonds as she saw the man advancing toward her, his penis hanging limp through the open fly. He slapped her across the face and shoved her back down on the couch, then straddled her waist and pulled her torso up.
"Give it a good hard suck now," he told her, pure cruelty in his tone.
Wiffie whimpered in protest.
"Suck it!" the man demanded. He slugged her, and blood began to run from the left corner of her mouth. Stunned, she did as she was told, placing her lips around the knob of the now semi-erect organ.
He made her lick it, and each time she was slow in following his instructions, he would hit her. Soon she was obeying every command as soon as it was given, in an effort to avoid being beaten to a bloody pulp. She let her tongue slide over and around the cock's head, her saliva mingling with dribbles of semen from the organ's tip. When the man pushed forward, shoving the organ deeper into Wiffie's mouth, she sucked on it as hard as she could, thankful that his excitement was momentarily sufficient to protect her from another punch in the face.
Suddenly, out of the corner of one eye, Wiffie saw the young assistant kneeling behind some kind of tripod. When the first burst of a flashbulb blinded her, she pulled back from the abortionist's groin in shock and incomprehension.
His mood broken, the man slapped her across the face, bloodying her nose. At the same time, he moved his knees from either side of her waist and shifted down between her legs. He hit her again, this time stunning her, and as she lay there only half-conscious of what was happening, she felt the hard, saliva-drenched prick push into her, tearing her young insides and filling the void of her recently aborted womb with searing, almost unbearable pain.
The fucking went on forever, it seemed. She wished he would have his climax and pull the monstrous thing out of her; that he would drag his unwelcome shaft from her aching cunt and leave her alone to sob out her revulsion and pain. But the minutes went by, and the pain increased with each savage thrust of the still firm prick. He fucked her, fucked her, fucked the very shit out of her until finally she screamed with the unbearable horror of it all. Her scream was cut off by a vicious clout and the stabbing of the man's penis even deeper into her pain-racked hole.
He came, a while after that, but he was not the last. There were a number of other men when the abortionist had finished with his pleasure; five or six, perhaps-Wiffie was so stricken with pain and fear that she didn't know for sure. They came in from the front room one at a time, handing money to the abortionist's assistant, then stripping off their pants and plunging their organs into the frightened, bloodied girl. Some weren't satisfied with a mere fuck. They insisted on beating her, with hands or belts or canes or folded lengths of heavy wire. One even turned her over and screwed her from behind, using some chilly paste from a dark brown bottle to lubricate his condom-encased member so he could penetrate her virgin rectum. The substance burned, and the dreadful scorching, coupled with the pain of anal defloration, caused Wiffie to black out.
From then on, she was conscious only half the time. She would come to, feel herself being ravished, then surrender mind and body to the welcome escape of unconsciousness again, grateful to escape the reality of the innumerable fists and pricks.
When the last man finally came and withdrew, Wiffie just lay whimpering and wishing she were dead. She didn't protest when the abortionist's helper moved in with his camera and began to photograph her bloodied vulva; when he dilated her vagina with a transparent plastic tube and attached a special camera to it, she just closed her eyes, winced as the object grated against the tortured membranes, and began to weep in long, almost panting sobs. She was thankful when, eventually, she was untied and allowed to get into her clothes, then leave the apartment for the Ford van. The men hit her on the back of the head just before they let her go, and when she came to she found herself lying in a vacant lot on the familiar Lower East Side, not far from third Street and Avenue C.
She made her way to Peter Frenum's apartment, hoping he would be there to comfort her. He was home, and as he undressed her and put her into a bathtub filled with hot water she thanked him half-coherently. She passed out with her head resting against the hard ceramic of the tub.
Afterward, Peter dried her with a soft Turkish towel, being careful not to touch her bruised and aching vulva. He carried her to the sleeping alcove, where he dressed her in a pair of his pajamas and put her to bed.