Ladies' Man (27 page)

There was silence for a long, long thirty seconds.

"I dunno, I just feel lonely," she said.

"There's nobody to hang out with?"

"No."

"Huh."

Another pause.

"I feel like you're dying to get off the phone."

"No! No! I just woke up. I'm still in dreamland."

"Do you wanna get together?"

"Uh, I can't today. I got to go downtown."

"Do you wanna make a time to get together?"

"Yeah, yeah sure."

"You don't really want to."

"No. I do! I do!"

"I don't feel it I feel like I'm forcing you."

"No. No, look, I told you I just woke up."

"I feel like you're fucking with my head."

"How am I fucking with your head?" Like I didn't know. Dear God, get me off the phone.

"I don't understand why you don't wanna see me."

"I
do
wanna see you," I complained. "When do you wanna get together?"

"I'm not
stupid
, Kenny. Are you afraid I'm gonna hurt you?"

That was a laugh. "It's not that."

"But it's something else?"

"I dunno. Look, I'm fucked up. I'm, I dunno, I can't…"

"I feel head-fucked."

I was squirming so much I felt like I needed another shower.

"I feel teased. All you talked about last night was how you need people and how you were lonely and how the answers are here and now. What was that, a come-on?"

"No! No! I meant it, but…"

"But you just woke up, right?"

I felt like I couldn't breathe. Like I couldn't open my eyes wide enough. I got up with the phone and started pacing, itching.

"I felt like we made a real connection last night."

"We did! We did!"

"Then why don't you want to see me?"

"I do! I do!" I wanted her dead.

"What are you afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid of anything. I just… Look, I'm really fucked up. I gotta go." I winced. Please let me hang up. "I'm fucked up."

"Maybe you should think a little about how you fuck other people up."

"Yeah, I'm sorry. I gotta go." I couldn't hang up. We listened to each other's breathing.

"You really suck, you bastard." She hung up. I felt like a bug exposed by someone lifting my rock. I also felt relieved. I didn't want to think about what she said. I didn't want to think about anything. It was one-thirty.

By two o'clock I was in Times Square again. I felt like going down there was the act of a bad boy. It was wrong but I wasn't down there because I loved it, I just didn't know where else to go.

I walked down Seventh Avenue scanning the marquees. I took a massage parlor flyer from some big shivering spade with yellow eyes and huge fossilized fingernails. He wore a stocking hat pulled down almost over his eyes and a green beat-to-shit corduroy jacket that wasn't doing dick about the cold. His lips were the color and thickness of cocktail franks. He kept slapping his fistful of orange flyers against the thumb of his opposite hand and shoving one in front of every guy that crossed his path.

SOPHISTICATED SISTER

The flyer had a photo of a chick with long hair and big tits standing nude next to a globe. She was holding an open copy of
Civilisation
by Kenneth Clark. She had a Barbara Streisand beak, nipples as big as tops. She was winking at me.

LUXURY FOR LESS           $10 SATISFACTION COMPLETE

NO RIP-OFFS          GIRLS OF ALL NATIONS

Within the next two blocks I collected flyers from four other places: My Aunt's Crib, Lady Godiva, Taras Bulba, and Casa Bio-Jo, each handed out by a desperado scarier-looking than the last.

There were no good movies to see.

The wind was kicking ass. I hunched down trying for a no-neck take against the cold and trotted into an Orange Julius. It was a narrow corner stand with a Formica counter and a glass-walled view of Times Square. I did up some coffee and a Drake's Cake, one elbow on the counter, not really hungry, not really anything. No movies, not hungry. I just needed some kind of release. I wanted something to happen, to get off. I was on the lam again. Reaching into my pocket to pay for my coffee I pulled out Sophisticated Sister. Girls of All Nations. No rip-offs. Ten dollars, complete satisfaction.

There you go. But I didn't think I could swing it. That scene might be pretty freaky and who the hell knew what color dick you woke up with next morning. Just to check out what I would be saving myself from I started walking to the address on the flyer, three blocks away off Sixth Avenue. It was a narrow office building jammed between a coffee shop and a Thorn McAn shoe store. In front on the sidewalk was a stand-up sandwich board like a Danger sign for an open manhole, SOPHISTICATED SISTER—a silhouette of, a nude chick with crossed legs lounging in the crescent of a moon. Now I thought that was pretty classy; but still, you never knew; you didn't fuck graphics and the neighborhood was pretty dead.

I stood across the street. I had two choices. I could go home, call Kristin and make like a human being or I could sink from hip deep to chin deep in the bullshit. An angel sat on one shoulder, a devil on the other. Two crew-cut guys walked in together. They were probably sailors because they walked like tough penguins with a side-to-side bowlegged step, elbows out, arms dangling as if they were in shoulder casts. Sailors were the lowest anyhow when it came to that kind of shit. The coffee shop was closed. I pretended I was on stake-out, hidden mike taped to my finger. That was bullshit. The dead nuts was that I felt like a creep because I knew there was no way I wasn't going to go upstairs for a slice of moon pie, and the longer I stood in the cold like a re-tard the harder it was going to be to head on in, so I
hung out the Gone Fishing sign in my brain and walked across the street. Kristin never had a chance. Or, more to the point, I never had a chance.

The elevator opened right into the reception area. A
chick about forty, in crucifix earrings and with long dark hair, sat at a counter in front of me. Behind her was a sitting room. Three girls in cheap pastel: night-gowns sat chatting on chairs and couches. A Danish modern coffee table centered the room. The walls were wood paneled. It looked like the waiting room of a ghetto dentist I had been fingering a ten spot for the last half-hour.

"You been here before?" She glanced up from the
Post
and a take-out coffee.

"Uh-uh." I held out the ten, blowing air softly through my cheeks to slow down my guts.

"It's twelve forty the first time, ten forty after that This is a private club and the extra two dollars is your membership fee." She talked nice and calm and she had the
Post
open to the editorial page. I felt a little safer. I wanted to tell her about Pinnacle. Maybe she was going to be in my class.

"Hey, no problem." I dug out my wallet and forked over fifteen, I got change, a hot-pink membership card and a ticket off a roll like I was going on a ride. I went into the waiting room, my ticket in hand, and sat across the room from an old guy with a humongous belly, his hat on his knee. He scowled, his face red and beetle-browed. He reminded me of Brezhnev. Across from him, a guy about fifty, small and pleasant looking, was smiling his ass off, trying to catch my eye and exchange winks. I walked back to the lady at the desk. "What am I supposed to do with the ticket?"

"Just give it to the girl you want."

I took a seat on a vinyl-back chair and casually checked out what was. A big broad-shouldered blonde with a Frankenstein forehead sitting in a red nightie; a tall skinny, black broad trudged across the room in a full-length wrinkled white nightgown, one hand on the small of her back and the other clutching cigarettes and a lighter. She had bags under her eyes as if she just woke up and was about to get that first cup of coffee. And then there was number three, tan, with frizzy orange hair combed out from the brown root center into a halo of corkscrew curls. She had double the beak of the girl in the flyer and it was broken to boot. She wore a pale blue baby doll, which clashed with her hair, and was scarfing down a cheeseburger laid out on greasy wax paper in her lap. A
Daily News
was open on the coffee table in front of her. That was for me. That was real. A fourth girl walked out of a bathroom carefully carrying a plastic washbasin filled with water and vanished around a corner.

From suspended speakers an FM radio station softly played Sam Cooke's "You Send Me." Two more girls walked into the waiting room and slouched into chairs. "Donna, how was Miami?" the broad-shouldered blonde asked one of the new arrivals, a chubby girl wearing pom poms and an open housecoat over a plain white nightie. They didn't seem like hookers to me.

They looked more like ambulatory patients lounging in the common room of a woman's hospital and us guys sitting there were waiting for visiting hours so we could see our wives.

"Miami was nice." Donna did her nails with an emery board.

"What were you down there for, two weeks?"

"Ten days. I just laid on the beach and read. It was nice."

"You look good. You got tan."

"Hey look…" My girl tapped the
News
in front of her. "They got a Star Trek store now."

The old smiling guy turned his head from girl to girl as they talked, like he was watching a tennis match. The fat beetle-browed guy didn't move.

"You can buy Mister Spock ears there—aw God my son would love that He's into Mister Spock."

The girls and the old guy laughed.

"You know, he's got this Mister Spock haircut now.
He looks so cute… oh, I should take him to this store."

I waited for her to finish her lunch. I yawned as I
stood up and wandered over like I was going for a
Sports Illustrated
to kill time. I stuck out my ticket. She wiped her hands, looked at it like it was a parking viola-tion, wiped her lips on a paper napkin and thumbed her nose like a boxer.

Tearing the ticket in half, she put the stub in her purse and rose, motioning for me to follow.

We entered a small room around the corner from the front desk. A double bed was covered with a black drop cloth as slick and shiny as sealskin. A small night table held a dish of foil-wrapped condoms, a jar of Vaseline, Kleenex, a hot comb, a curling iron, Right Guard, baby powder and K-Y jelly.

The walls were the same blond wood paneling as the waiting room. On the wall nearest to me were three brown plastic coat hooks and an oven timer.

"You ever been here before?"

"Uh-uh."

"Okay, take off all your clothes and I'll be right back." I stripped down to my shorts and sat on the bed. What if rival Mafia factions in a war over massage-parlor ownership blasted this place to shit? What if they stopped paying police protection and got raided? What if I couldn't get it up?
That
was the question.

She returned with a yellow plastic basin of water. "Take-them off too, honey." She nodded toward my shorts. I draped them over my shirt, tensing my stomach for maximum ripple. She slipped off her nightie. She was a little on the chunky side with bruised thighs.

She handed me the bowl, and I held it under my cock while she washed it with warm water and Phisohex. Her hands and the water felt soft and good. As she washed me I noticed a chrome-and-red-vinyl exercise bench against the wall.

"Am I supposed to do sit-ups?" I nodded toward the bench.

She laughed. "Nah, that's for in case the guy doesn't want to do anything in bed… then we can say we're doing health things… I don't understand a hundred percent myself." She put down the basin. "So, what you have in mind?" hands on her hips.

What did I have in mind? The question stumped and embarrassed me. "I don't know. I didn't think that much in advance."

"Well, how much you wanna spend?"

"That twelve forty I already spent." Don't get burned.

She shrugged and took the bowl from me.

"Okay, I'll give you a blowjob." She paper-towel-dried my prick. I didn't think I would come with a blowjob.

"How much for a straight fuck?"

"I can't answer that, honey. That's solicitation. Just tell me how much more you can go for…"

"I'll spring for another five."

"We can dp half and half without a rubber for an extra five… Okay?"

"What's that, sixty-nine?" I didn't want to eat a whore's pussy for free.

"No, no. First I blow you a little, then we fuck.. Okay?"

"Sure."

"Pay me first, then well get it on."

I paid her and hoisted myself up on the high bed.

"You know, I know Leonard Nimoy," I lied,

"Who?" She frowned, sitting on the bed.

"The guy who plays Doctor Spock. I heard you talking out there."

"Oh yeah?" She didn't seem impressed. I didn't know why I made up that bullshit. Sometimes I embarrassed myself.

"I might have a little trouble getting hard. I'm nervous."

"Don't worry, lotta guys do… once they're in they're okay though."

She dipped her mouth to my prick, sucking and flicking the underside. After a few seconds she stopped. "I can't do great head today… I had root-canal work yesterday and my whole side is still sore." She tenderly touched the left side of her jaw. "I'll try though." She went back to work. She stopped again; "Ah…" She grimaced and brought the plastic basin up to the bed and spit blood into the water. She blew me another thirty seconds, stopping to spit blood two more times. "Okay?" She nodded to me while absently pulling my dick. She went to hit the oven timer on the wall.

"Aw, don't do that." I winced. "I'll be done in ten minutes. I promise."

She shrugged, got on her back and I grabbed my prick to put myself in. "Shit!" she hissed. I froze. I didn't know what I did. She clenched her teeth in anger for a second, then relaxed. "No, no, honey, don't
ever
! put yourself in. Let me do it. Every guy grabs his prick and rams his fist right into me. Every goddamn time. I'm purple down mere." She hissed again, gingerly touching herself. My guts were flip-flopping. I felt nauseated.

"Sony, I didn't know."

"That's okay." She put me in, and as we fucked she kept me in a sight vice with her thighs so I couldn't go in real deep. I was aware of my promise to be ten minutes and felt as pressured as if the timer was ticking. Like a schmuck I tried to put the moves on. She had a lead-lined uterus and I was wiggling and juking, like "Here's something you never got at home." I was arched over her, afraid to lay down, skin on skin. A section of paper towel was clenched in her fist, held near the serrated edges, tensed and ready like the rip-cord of a parachute. I knew the minute I came she would tear it off the roll. Forget it. I couldn't come and I asked her to shift to a handjob. I laid on my back again. She jerked me off with one hand while holding a Kleenex like a screen two inches from my prick to catch the drops. The Kleenex was blocking my view and I tried to watch in a small mirror on her night stand. Through the wall I beard some guy whining, "No, don't do that! Then you get me all
excited
! No! That's no good!
I told
you!" It sounded like the old guy from the waiting room. I could tell her arm was getting tired and by sheer will power and heavy fantasizing I forced myself to come.