The Perils of Praline (18 page)

Cindy-Lou and Delilah stood up, gave angry huffs and drifted over to join the others on the Smart Car.

“Everything’s wonderful Praline, we’re celebrating!”

“Well, that’s great. I’m a little busy now—”

“Busy? It’s the middle of the night what could you be—” she gasped. “Are you having sex? Don’t tell me. I’m a good Christian woman and I don’t want to know about such things. All right, tell me a little bit, but don’t be graphic unless absolutely necessary.”

Praline chose not to explain that he was watching his new friend Jason being devoured by four young men in an alley. “Mama! I’m not gonna talk to you about sex.”

“Why not? I talk to you about sex. Which reminds me, Spliff did the funniest thing in bed the other—”

“I really do have to go, it’s late and I’m busy.” Or rather, he’d like to return to being busy.

“All right, but don’t you want to know what we’re celebrating?”

Praline gave up. There was nothing to it but to let his mama tell him what she wanted to tell him. “Did you and Spliff get your crop planted?”

“Crop? What crop?”

“I’m sorry, I mean…did you make your deposit into your retirement account.”

“Oh no, honey, better than that. I sold a story to
The National Inquisitor
!”

“Well congratulations!” Praline said, but immediately wondered what kind of a story the scandal sheet might buy from his mother. “Is it about hairdressing?”

“No, silly, it’s about you. The headline is
Mother of Teenage Hustler Speaks!
Don’t you just love that?”

“Mama, I’m not a teenager. I’m almost twenty-one,” Praline pointed out.

“Well, no one wants to read a story called
Mother of Almost Twenty-One-Year-Old Hustler Speaks!
It’s just not the same.”

“But Mama, you lied and you weren’t talking to a policeman. You were talking to a journalist. You broke a commandment.”

Praline was very disappointed in his mother.

“Oh, God will understand. Hell, if anyone understands what makes a good story God does. Besides, I’m sure when God says he doesn’t want us to lie he means he doesn’t want us to get caught lying.”

“Mama, in the future, when you sell untrue stories to
The National Inquisitor
they really ought to be about you.”

“It is about me. I’m mother of teenage hustler.”

“Only about you,” Praline said pointedly.

There was a long pause and he could tell he’d hurt his mama’s feelings. Finally, she said, “Why, you’ve never spoken to me that way. California
has
changed you
,
and not for the better.”

At just that moment, Delilah yelled out, “I have condoms!”

“Mama, I really do have to go.” It was like being
at
a birthday party and Praline was about to miss the opening of the gifts.

“All right, darling.” Regaining her composure she went on, “Now the story won’t be in the grocery store until next week. But they’ve already put it up on the Internet if you want to take a peak. I’m sure when you read it—”

“Bye, Mama!” Praline hung up and, disengaging himself from his jeans, hurried over to the Smart Car. Standing there awkwardly, Praline tried to decide how exactly to jump back into the orgy.

When having sex with one person, Praline focused on the things he might like to do to them or the things he might like them to do to him. Faced with an orgy, he was overcome by possibilities. He was stymied even. Then, suddenly, he was put in mind of a scene in his step-daddy Spliff’s favorite show
Star Trip: Interloper
in which they played three-dimensional chess. An orgy was just like three-dimensional chess. Complicated, challenging and strategic. Captain Lucas Bonair
had risen
to the occasion and so would Praline.

Attempting to peel Kelly and Cindy-Lou off the pile so he could get closer to Jason, Praline only succeeded in gaining their attention. They picked him up and Kelly carried him over to the wall of the nearest building. Pushing him up against the bricks, Praline looked over his shoulder and saw that they’d gotten hold of a couple of Delilah’s condoms. Praline’s dick stiffened. Well, he could get fucked for a while and hook up with Jason a little later, he reasoned. Though he actually didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter, since the last thing he intended to do was pitch a fit in the middle of an orgy.

Kelly went first, which was good because he was the smaller of the two. He began slowly, dipping just the end of his dick into Praline’s ass. Then he
sped
up, going deeper with each thrust. Praline’s breathing became rough, and he couldn’t help but moan and push his ass back to meet Kelly’s thrusts. Then, abruptly, Cindy-Lou pulled Kelly off him, lined his dick up with Praline’s ass and pushed into our sex-dazed hero. While his sphincter muscles contracted around Cindy-Lou’s pole, Praline glanced to his left and saw that the other two had Jason pushed up against the wall and Delilah was about to enter him.

Finally, Praline got to see Jason’s prick. It was short, but thick. Praline thought it was adorable and sexy at the same time. The kind of penis you might find on an animated character if Hollywood ever got around to making animated porn, which they really ought to since he’d download
Boy Story 4
in a heartbeat. Momentarily, he was distracted by the thought of his childhood toys screwing each other like mad, then snapped back to reality. Somehow he had to get over to Jason and touch—

Just then Delilah reached his hand around Jason and began to jerk him. Praline closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them Jason was watching. They stared at each other as they were fucked and something happened, something Praline didn’t quite understand. While Delilah pounded into his friend, grinding him faster and faster, Praline kept staring into Jason’s dark chocolaty eyes. The look they shared was so powerful, so much more important than anything—and then suddenly Jason groaned and began to spurt onto the brick wall. Once, twice…and then Praline was coming, the orgasm grabbing him, squeezing his entire body.

Jason looked away first. Praline felt hurt somehow, rejected. He barely noticed as Cindy-Lou came on his ass. He turned around and gave a half-hearted smile then looked over and tried to catch Jason’s eye again, but Jason wouldn’t look at him.

Kelly had a distraught look on his face
;
the orgy seemed to be ending and he hadn’t gotten off. He masturbated frantically, but the desperation clouding his face made it clear it wouldn’t be happening. It was the kind of sexual disaster that the real
Dirty Talk
girls would spend half a show agonizing over. “I went to an orgy and didn’t come,” Kelly would say over a Mocha Latte.

“Oh, you poor thing,” Delilah would respond. “That’s never happened to me, of course, but I can well imagine the devastation.” And on it would go like that for twenty-two minutes.

Inside, Praline felt the way Kelly looked. He was disappointed that he didn’t get to have sex with Jason. Of course, that was silly. He could think of lots of reasons to have sex with Jason but none of them were really important. So there wasn’t any reason to be disappointed.

Except that he was.

With his breathing returning to normal, Praline began to hunt for his clothes. Nearby, Jason pulled on his jeans. He gave Praline a tentative smile. “So much for celibacy.”

“You had fun then?” Praline asked.

“Absolutely. That was a blast.”

Having instigated the orgy, Praline should have been pleased that Jason had enjoyed it. But he wasn’t. In fact, he felt a little sad. He worried that he might be coming down with that disease Clayton had. Post-Coital Tristesse. He nearly gasped. That would be terrible.

“What are you thinking about?” Jason asked. “You look…thoughtful.”

“Oh, no. I’m not thinking about anything,” Praline said. His mama warned him about thinking. It was bad for the skin. “So, you had fun?”

“I just said I did. Why do you keep asking me?”

“You know, you didn’t have to do that. You could have said no.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to sit in the car,” Jason said and Praline had to admit that would have been particularly awkward. “Relax. I had fun. You wanted me to have fun, didn’t you?”

“Of course, I wanted you to have fun.”

“Great. Everyone had fun.”

Praline needed to change the subject, and so he bit the bullet and said, “Um, Jason there’s something really important I have to tell you…”

“Yeah, I felt it, too.” Jason said, with a shy smile. “At the end. That was the best part of the whole thing.”

Shit, thought Praline. He wanted to agree, to say he totally felt it, and, yes, coming at the same time as Jason was the best part of the whole orgy and maybe they could get together later when their penis
e
s stopped being sore from this go-round and actually have sex with each other. But it just didn’t seem right to start something like that before he’d fired Jason.

“Actually, what I have to tell you is that Madison gave me your job and told me I should fire you or make you the intern. It’s up to me.”

Jason’s face went hard and he glared at Praline. “You fucked her husband while she watched, didn’t you? I told you to just say no.”

Praline shrugged, “What can I say? I’m not good at no.”

Jason steamed. “You’re an opportunistic little slut, that’s what you are.”

“That’s not fair. I had no idea she’d give me your job.”

“Oh, you just fucked her husband for the fun of it?”

“Have you seen his ass?”

Jason ground his teeth. “He has a nice ass, I’ll grant you. But I managed to resist it. Why couldn’t you?”

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Jason,” Praline said as sincerely as possible. “But everything happens for a reason.”

“Yeah, this happened for a reason. You!”

“What I meant was, when God closes a door he opens a window.”

“You’re shitting me, right? You just fired me from my job and now you’re telling me to look for the silver lining?”

“You’ll always find it,” Praline said with certainty.

“Look, I don’t doubt that something good will someday happen to me, possibly even someday soon, possibly when it happens you may think it happened as a result of your firing me. But I want you to know, it isn’t going to happen because you fucked our boss’s husband and got me fired. It’s going to happen because I work hard and I’m smart and I don’t give up. And none of that has to do with anybody opening a fucking window.”

“You don’t have to yell,” said Praline, noticing that their conversation was beginning to draw the attention of
The Dirty Talk
girls who were trying to comfort the still upset Kelly.

Jason turned angrily and stormed down the alley. Praline hurried after him, so upset by the situation that he barely noticed the four suburban looking white guys coming toward them. Briefly, Praline considered the possibility that another orgy was about to start. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The tallest of the four gave Praline and Jason a dirty look and hissed, “Faggots.”

“Just keep walking,” Jason said. “Keep your head down and just keep walking.”

“What did you say?” asked Praline, though he had heard him clearly.

“Oh shit,” said Jason.

“I called you faggot,” was the reply.

Without thinking Praline said, “Why thank you, sir. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

All four of the guys laughed. “That ain’t no compliment, you idiot. You’re a dirty faggot.”

“Praline, let’s go,” suggested Jason.

“It’s a compliment if I say it is,” replied Praline. He noticed Jason looking nervously down the alley and realized that
The Dirty Talk
girls had disappeared into the night. He knew he should just shut his mouth and slink out of the alley with Jason, but he just couldn’t. “Do you know what the word faggot means?”

“Yeah, it means fucking pervert,” spit the one who looked like a blubbery baby.

“Faggot means sticks,” he explained. Even though it was a tense situation and he was craving an ice cream sundae in the worst way, Praline was thrilled to paraphrase a research paper he’d written for his linguistics class. “Sticks that were used to get a fire going. Except during the Inquisition, instead of sticks they used gay boys to get the fire going whenever they burned witches.”

Actually, the teacher had taken exception to that explanation, insisting it really had more to do with a British term for crazy old ladies, and had given Praline a B- on the paper. Still, he preferred his explanation.

As he explained, the mouths of the four young men dropped open and their eyes drooped, which was probably their continence when anyone attempted to teach them something. Abruptly the tall one seemed to wake and asked, “And you’re proud of that?”

“I am,” declared Praline. “Thousands of years of oppression and we’re still here.”

The four guys looked at each other and burst into laughter. Then, as though some signal had passed between them, they moved toward Jason and Praline. The blubbery one got hold of Praline, while the other three grabbed Jason and the tall one began punching him in the stomach.

Doing the down-low in high places.

Watching three guys punch Jason in the stomach was about the worst thing Praline could imagine. He had to find a way to make them stop. All his life he’d been told he fought like a girl, and he had to admit it was completely true. He did fight like a girl. And now, whether he liked it or not, he’d have to use his rather effeminate pugilistic skills to get them out of this situation.

Lifting up his right knee as far as it would go, Praline jammed his foot straight down onto the foot of Blubbery Guy behind him. Blubbery Guy screamed and let him go. Praline turned around and grabbed him by the hair, then brought his knee up into his face. Which, by the way, hurt Praline’s knee like hell and should not be tried at home. Fortunately, Blubbery Guy began crawling around screaming, “My noth! My noth! You bwoke my fuckin’ noth.”

As he approached the three guys beating up on Jason, Praline had no idea what to do. The tallest of the three reared back to throw another punch into Jason’s stomach. Praline grabbed Tall Guy by the arm and spun him around just as though they were square dancing. Finally, after making sure he was dizzy enough, Praline released him into the brick wall.