Chapter 4
Rick lay on his back on the bed, smoking and staring up at the ceiling, wondering if he'd screwed ten or eleven women in the past three days. They were coming so fast and furious, he'd forgotten. He went over the affairs in his mind, counting on his fingers. For some reason it was important he know the exact number. Why, he didn't know. Maybe it was because he was trying to set a record. What was the fuck record? he wondered. Has anyone ever kept a record? Who had the most fucks? What woman had taken the most cock? Interesting! Perhaps he should do some research. Hell, it might turn out to be a book. Book? Hell, he'd never write it, just like he never completed a single story idea that popped into his head. Well, mustn't think about that, nothing depressing this morning. Besides, he didn't have to write-he had plenty of money. He had to smile. He'd made exactly two hundred dollars with his eleven women. It gave him pleasure when they paid for his cock. But not all eleven had paid. No, it was ten women he'd had. The eleventh didn't count-she blew him. Ten women, and he still had one to go. He leaned on an elbow and glanced at the door. What in hell was she doing in the bathroom anyway? He'd just about got it in her when she pushed him away and disappeared into the bathroom. She'd been there for twenty minutes. Cripes! How many showers can a person take?
Well? it was a relief in a way. All she did was talk. What is it with women? They couldn't keep their mouths shut for five minutes. Gab, gab, gab! Every fuckin' one of them. Especially the manicurist he'd met at the hotel's barber shop. She was built all right: great tits, nice legs, kissy mouth, flashy eyes; she was fond of film actors, marshmallows, champagne, and steaks, in that order ("I did Gary Cooper's nails once. You know what they said about him, don't you? No? Hell, I thought everyone knew. His whang, biggest thing in Hollywood. ... Wish I had some candy. I love marshmallows, plain, not with peanuts all over 'em. But my favorite food is steak. That and champagne. I read once where Vera-Ellen ate nothing but steak and drank only champagne. So I tried it. It's great for the figure. Little expensive. But that's me, I'll spend a fortune on things like that. Isn't that awful? Wonder whatever happened to Vera-Ellen. You never heard of her? She was a film actress. Great dancer. She was in that movie with Fred Astaire and Rosemary Clooney-oh, I forgot the name of the movie. Her name was like this: Vera, hyphen, Ellen. Cute gimmick for a name, huh?") and she had the chutzpah to charge him for the manicure after he made it with her in the hotel room. ("You've got nice hands, believe me, I know, I've held thousands of hands. George Raft, Rock Hudson-whoo, boy, now there's a face. Tony Curtis-he keeps getting better-looking with the years. And, oh, is he nice. Yeah, I've done the big ones. Did you ever have your palms read? No? You should. Very revealing. Believe me you should try it.") Shut up and fuck. What's with this cunt? Talk talk, talk!
Rick sat up and rested his head against the pillows. Then there was that redhead, the schoolteacher on vacation. Trim figure, and another talker; she was anxious for marriage. ("I'm really not what I appear to be, I mean what you might think I am. Really, don't laugh. I want you to know you're the first man I let pick me up. Why, they'd be shocked in Brooklyn Heights. It just happened I saw you look at me, and you appealed to me. You've got such nice eyes, so direct, so sure, so penetrating. You took my breath away. I checked with the waiter. He knew you. He said that you were a nice fellow and that you spent time here at the hotel to get away from it all even though you lived only a few blocks from here. That made me feel better. More-well, safe.") Sure, sure, schoolteacher, and you figured this was Beverly Hills and the waiter told you I had dough and, wham! like wow! this could be jackpot time, huh? Be great to wire back and tell 'em to stick the schoolteacher job because you went and snared yourself a nice young, rich husband. ("Staying cooped up in this hotel isn't my idea of living. There are other things to do, like seeing plays, attending concerts, going to the ballet. I love to socialize.") Well socialize, cunt! Spread those legs! ("After all this is my first time in L.A., and there are so many places-I understand the Greek Theatre is a lovely-") Stop talking and fuck! ("-place to visit. I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I'll do it just this once, because I don't know, you're different, and I really believe you're sincere.") Yeah, Red, only you're over the hill and too damn anxious and you talk too goddamn much!
Not all of them paid. He left it up to them. Most assumed he charged, like that brunette he'd met at the cocktail lounge with enormous sunglasses shielding her eyes. She said she was twenty-eight, but forty-eight would have been more accurate. She was the inquisitive type; her kick was to stick her fingers in her pussy while they were having dinner in his room and make him smell them, all the while carrying on small talk. ("Why'd you pick me? I'm old enough to be your mother. Well, maybe not that old, but I'm a few years past you. What is it about me? All the young guys flip for me. I don't understand.") You're an easy lay, that's why, you smelly cunt. I don't have to fight you, or talk you into it like I would some young pussy. I need it easy, babe, see? I need to fuck myself out, see? They've got to be old because-because-? Why? Because it's easy. That's why because! No other reason. Oh, maybe because I'll learn a little something. Shit, you've been around, maybe you've got a new kick for me. Anyway it delighted him that she paid him twenty-five dollars. Just took it out of her bag and left it on the bureau and silently left.
And that rich bitch brunette he'd met in the lobby. She was married to a producer-she told him that while she undressed her overly perfumed body. She was thirty ("going on forty"), born in Savannah, had been married three times, had been to bed with forty different men, could only name five offhand, only one of whom she really loved (her present husband, who she cheated on because he had hot nuts for some cheap bleached number in New York-if she ever met up with that cunt, Jesus, would she murder the bitch-but he was rich and he had a cock the length of her arm and she'd been through the divorce courts too many times and, hell she didn't mind so much now, now that she got a little on the side herself).
Well, here comes number eleven.
He watched her close the bathroom door behind her and timidly walk to the bed. Suddenly the cunt was timid! Forty-year-old woman still playing girly games. Can you imagine that! He watched her shiver, then crawl under the covers.
"Brrr, it's chilly," she said.
He blinked his eyes.
"My hair," she said, feeling it, "It's the water here in Los Angeles. It's so hard." Again he blinked.
"Ugh! I washed it last night, but you'd never guess it this morning. You know-" Perhaps if he taped her mouth?
"-I was telling my girl friend-her name is Peg....We both drove here from Portland. Peg, I said, we'd better bathe in bottled water." She laughed a high girlish laugh. "Can you imagine what that would cost us?"
Rick shook his head.
"Look at you, so nice and tanned." Her hand tickled across his chest. She looked with an affectionate, somewhat wistful gaze at him. "How I envy you your southern California sun. Wish I could live here. But Oregon is my home."
Maybe if he stuck his cock in her mouth she might stop talking.
"I've been with the Handon Ford Company for so many years it would be stupid for me to leave for a lower paying job. I make pretty good money."
It was the source of his deepest regret that he had made eyes at her in the first place. She was much too skinny, her tits were no bigger than fried eggs, and she had bad skin; but worse, she talked more than the other ten put together. He fingered his testicles impatiently. She looked down at him. He smiled at her, reached for her arm, and pulled her to him.
"Hold on, Mr. Anxious," she giggled, pulling away.
He hated it when she patted her red hair; it reminded him of someone.
"Boy, don't be in such a rush!"
The nerve, he thought. She was playing it like a great beauty-like she resembled Liz Taylor. "Look! Are you or aren't you? I mean ... shit."
Her hand reached out and clasped his mouth. "Don't use foul language! I can't stand men who use foul language."
He gave out with a long, frustrated sigh, then lay back, his arms behind his head. Eventually she ran her hand over his chest. The blankness went abruptly from her eyes as another thought came to her mind-a thought she no doubt was about to voice.
"You know they always kid me about all the showers I take. I'm clean ... real clean. I like to stay clean. I read once where a psychologist said something about it being a person's hang-up taking lots of showers. I mean, that the person was constantly cleansing himself of sin. Well, maybe that's true, I don't know." Her voice trailed. Without being aware of it she let her hand run over his arms and chest. Her eyes went blank for a second, then filled with lust. Suddenly her voice got husky. "You've got a marvelous body. You work out?"
He nodded.
"Mmm, thought so. You know, you remind me of someone. I thought that the second I met you."
Wouldn't she ever stop talking?
"I know," she snapped her fingers. "Grush. Mr. Grush in the rental department. Yeah. You two look exactly alike. Course, he's older." She cocked her head, sucked in her cheeks and, looking exactly like Phyllis Diller, smiled, and asked, "How old do you think I am?"
"Fifty!" he snapped.
Her face dropped. A second later she smiled. "Kidder. No, come on, guess."
"I don't know," he said impatiently.
"Guess. I love it when someone guesses my age. Go ahead and guess."
"Twenty-nine." A safe number.
"Nearly," she giggled. "I'm thirty."
On one tit!
"You?"
"Nineteen." He watched her face turn red and grow solemn.
"That young." She looked at his nakedness, her gaze ending at his thighs. "You, uh," she swallowed hard, "sure got a large, uh-for somebody so young."
"My old lady fed me vitamins," he smiled crookedly at her. "Go ahead, grab it. Shit, it won't bite."
"Your language. Please!" she frowned.
This one has to be bananas, he thought.
Gingerly she ran her hand through the wiry patch of black pubic curls, then clasped his penis. It quickly blooded to life. She stared, fascinated by the jerking rod.
"Y-you're clean, aren't you?"
He frowned. "What?"
"I asked if you were-clean!"
"No! I just dipped my cock in mustard!"
"Well you know what I mean. A girl has got to be careful."
His jaw muscles clenched and he sighed in disgust.
"Don't be angry. It's just that, well, my girl friend came down with a-she cleared her throat,"-a social disease," she whispered, looking over her shoulder. "If you know what I mean."
"Look! I don't have clap or-"
Involuntary her hand shot out and covered his mouth. "You don't have to come right out and name it," she whispered wide-eyed.
"That cuts it!" Rick swung his legs off the bed and leaped to his feet. "Okay, get dressed," he ordered.
"What?"
"You heard me. Get dressed and leave."
"But-but why?"
"I'm tired of pussyfooting it with you. You're a nut. Hear? A goddamn goofball! And you talk too much. You run at the mouth with nothing but crap. What the fuck am I, your goddamn psychiatrist? Beat it!"
She glared at him. "Well! I never!" Then she turned from him and reached for her clothes.
Impatiently, angrily, he watched her dress.
"I never in all my life met up with the likes of you. You darn kids. I should have known better than to get tangled up with a teen-ager. Such terrible language, such hostility, and only because I asked a simple question." She was muttering as she stepped into her dress.
Her hair, almost the color of his mother's was her best feature, he decided. Without the hair she had absolutely nothing. But then, none of the women he'd had in the past seventy-two hours had much, yet they all had two things in common, they were twice and three times his age, and almost all of them reminded him of his mother. Was that saying something, or wasn't it? Like, wow, what the hell was he doing? He stared at the woman, wanting her to leave now, right now, right this second. There was that hair, that red hair so much like his mother's, and the fragrance of her perfume was strong, and that, too, reminded him of his mother. Amidst the stillness in the room he could almost hear his mother's laugh. "These are some friends of mine who dropped by for a drink." Damn it, she'd taken on a whole fuckin' group. The whole bloody gang. His own mother!
"You should see a doctor!"
He turned to the voice and could almost see his mother before him in this woman who was taking her goddamn time to dress.
"Just hurry it up," he snapped, "you old whore!"
"Well!" She stepped up to him, her eyes daggers. "You young punk! You can't talk to me like that. Who do you think you are?"
"Whore!" he shrieked.
She drew in her breath and backed away against the wall, suddenly, obviously afraid.
"Goddamn old cunt!" His eyes were blazing slits.
Her terror-stricken face stared at him, her rosebud mouth working flabbily in terror. "You-you're sick," she mumbled. Her hands grabbed for her purse, then fumbled at the door handle.
Suddenly Rick saw the door swing closed. He was alone. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands folded in his lap. He caught his own reflection in the bureau mirror. He stared. What am I? he asked himself. A nothing, he answered. A face in the mirror, focal point of nothing but an awareness of his own confusion, despondency, frustration, and fear. The steady ticking of the travel-alarm clock made him become aware again of time. Looking at the clock, he saw that it was nearly twelve. He'd been on a three-day orgy and the women had all been his mother. That's what it was all about. In my mind I've been fucking my own mother! It was getting to be an obsession!
The sun stood as though on guard at the picture window looking out over the hotel pool; and beyond the bright sunlight just a few miles away-Laguna. Why did he suddenly think of Laguna? What was the matter with him? Taking his vengeance out on a strange bird-like woman. Cursing her, frightening her half to death. For what? Why?
He suddenly felt very alone. The cold steel shell he'd built up around him appeared to be cracked. He thought he'd learned how to live an unloved existence by living without feelings-obviously it wasn't working for him. Nothing was working for him. His mother had chosen men, any man in preference to him; it was as simple as that. He knew it all along, but having caught her at it, having it erupt like this all at once, was eating at him. He had to get away from the woman completely. But where? There was no one he could go to. He couldn't do it alone-that he knew. He desperately needed someone. If only he had a good friend, someone he could stay with, but he didn't. There was no one.
Hey ... hang on! There was one person!
Turning from the window, he walked to the closet and quickly dressed. Fifteen minutes later he checked out of the hotel and was driving on the freeway heading for Laguna-and Paul Harris.