Chapter 15
Marvin is tall, slender and black, but he dislikes being referred to as black. Sometimes he passes for Mexican, but when he's spending his time with a white lady friend (his term, not mine) he often tells her he's colored. He says, "I'm as liberated as the next person and I don't have any hangups. It's expedient for me to say I'm colored to some women. Also lucrative."
Life started out for Marvin in a ghetto. He was the oldest of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. He liked school and became an avid reader at a very early age, and liked history in nonfiction and writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck and Lance Horner when it came to fiction.
Early on, Marvin decided he wasn't going to spend the rest of his life in the ghetto, but he didn't set out to get what he wanted by being a stud. "I was planning to go to law school. When I became entangled with a dear, sweet lady who had money. She taught me that there are other ways to make it in this world. That woman dearly loved to fuck, and she gave me some very nice things, including cash. When she died, my heart was broken. I considered going into a monastery for several months after her death. Then I met another dear, sweet lady."
For the past several years, Marvin has been making it a practice to meet dear, sweet ladies. Conventions are a marvelous place to find them, he confided. But he's no one-shot stud. Instead, he makes the acquaintance of well-heeled women and takes them to bed. After that he learns their marital status. "Not that married women aren't enjoyable, it's just that I prefer widows. Spinsters are all right, too, if they're wealthy."
After the convention is over, Marvin accepts the invitation his lady friend has offered. If she lives close by, he'll drive to her town in his Jag. If she lives miles and miles away, he flies and has the car driven out at a later date. He might spend a month or a year with his lady friend, but never more than a year. Marvin has what he refers to as "The Good Life."
Luke was born in Arizona and brought up in Nevada. When he was eleven years old, he was accosted by an old man in a Reno theater. "All the old dude did was play with my peter, but he gave-me a five-dollar bill."
A year later, Luke was riding his bike out in the mountains when he saw a couple of girls walking along the road. He stopped and talked to them and they told him they'd like to take a ride on his bike. He took them both about a mile down the road to a sheltered spot that he knew about, because he'd camped there with a bunch of boys. "I fucked them both, taking turns. They said I had to pay them something, so I gave them a quarter apiece. That was all I had with me at the time.
The girls weren't much older than I was."
He said, "After that, I got to thinking about life and fucking and money and things. That old man gave me five dollars, but I had to give those two girls money. I didn't understand it."
Unlike Marvin, Luke wasn't enraptured with school. The few books he read were westerns, and he seldom finished them. As he grew older, girls began paying a lot of attention to him, and by the time he was sixteen, he thought he had the mystery of why he'd had to pay girls but a man paid him for sex. His blond good looks attracted other men, and most of them paid him for sex. "But the girls didn't. I understood it was some kind of misunderstanding, that money thing. But I liked being with girls more than I liked being with men, so I kept on fucking every girl I could, and paid for the expense of taking them out on dates with money I made from the men."
Luke's luck changed when a friend of his mother's came to visit for a week. "She was about forty, not very pretty and too fat for my taste, so I didn't hang around the house much that first day or so. She was thinking about suing her husband for divorce and she kept talking about it and talking about it but never going to a lawyer and doing something about it.
"One afternoon when my mother went to the hospital to help out-she was a volunteer worker in the mental hospital-I happened to think of something I wanted in Maggie's room. I thought she was out on the patio, but she was in there with a banana rammed up her cunt, frothing at the mouth as she rolled around on the bed. I damn near fainted. Like I said, she wasn't much to look at, but I was sixteen years old and horny all the time. So I told Maggie I had something that'd give her a lot more satisfaction than any banana."
Maggie gave Luke ten dollars. He decided that was something more like. After that, he looked around for older women and developed an instinct for sniffing the ones out who were what he called "on the prod." They paid him well, but not well enough. Shortly after he was graduated from high school, he took a job as a busboy in one of the big hotel casinos.
"A lot of man-hungry older women were always hanging around, so I took care of them and saw to it that they bought me nice things."
Before long, Luke realized that a lot of the conventions were almost one hundred percent women. "Church groups, secretaries, organizations that are into the occult, like astrologists, nurses ... I even made it with an old doll who came to a Women's Temperance Union meeting." Some conventions are more evenly divided between the sexes, but a great number of widows come to the ones they formerly attended with their husbands.
Luke isn't as affluent as Marvin, but he makes ends meet, he says in his laconic western drawl. Once in a while he spends a few weeks with a woman he meets at a convention, but if he does, he usually wishes he hadn't. "They get possessive. I don't want to be a puppet on a string. So I generally end up riding after a week or two."
At this writing, Luke is involved with the widow of a Texas millionaire. She wants to get married. He doesn't. She is fifty and he's now twenty-seven. "But of course, there's always the possibility of a divorce with a healthy settlement. Seems like that old business that used to worry me is getting sort of straightened out. A few years ago a man could never hope for alimony."