Authors: Lawrence Block
Thirty (17 page)
Liz gave me a good tonguing. She could have faked it easily enough and the lamb would not have known the difference. Unless he asked to smell her breath afterward or something. She could have just come close and he would have had the same trip, but either she felt it was easier to do it than to fake it or else she was enough in the mood to want to, because she really gave me the treatment.
A funny bit—I remember lying there giving a real Oscar-winning performance of a girl torn with passion, and what was going through my mind was the thought that this was really a great muffing I was getting, and wasn’t it a shame I couldn’t turn on to it and enjoy it? But I couldn’t. It just wasn’t sex, it was a performance, and I was too busy playing a part to feel anything. I think she could have done it forever without really getting to me in any substantial way.
Of course after enough time had gone by I managed to have a nice theatrical orgasm for Lamb’s benefit, and he came storming out of the closet, and we all played our parts the way we were supposed to. He made us lie down side by side on the bed while he inspected us in turn, holding our labia apart and looking inside, even sniffing inside, rolling us over, looking between the checks of our asses.
Liz said later it was like being searched for a heroin stash by a police matron.
Finally, after he had done all of his little things, and after we each gave him a little hand-and-mouth action, he screwed me while Liz gave him a rim job.
He had a surprisingly large cock. I have to get out of the habit of expecting that large men will have large ones and vice versa, or that sexy men will be well hung while nebbishy shrimps will be small and shriveled. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation at all as far as I can see. Anyway, the Lamb had a whang on him that the Lion would have been proud of, long and thick as a walking stick. He didn’t last too long, but with all that preparation, how could he?
He finished, and then he huffed and puffed a little—I still can’t help always expecting these old farts to drop dead at the crucial moment, and I know sooner or later it has to happen—and then he chatted embarrassingly with us about what sweet girls we were and how much he enjoyed being able to talk with us, and then he got dressed and handed us each an envelope. Fifty bucks for each of us, as she had said. And then he went away.
We were in Liz’s apartment, on East Fifty-fourth. Small but very comfortable, and a building with a doorman and an elevator and such things to keep burglars from taking a poor girl’s life savings. Two small rooms, a living room and a bedroom, and a sort of kitchen. We were in the bedroom, logically enough, and about half-dressed.
“He’s a character,” Liz said.
“You know something. They all are. Every one I meet is at least a little bit nuts.”
“That’s for sure. You going out again?”
“I don’t know. What time is it?”
“Almost six.”
“I made a hundred dollars already. A couple of quarter tricks earlier, and now this. I suppose I should make a few more dollars. I really should, I could hustle and make another hundred but I just don’t feel like it.”
“I know what you mean.”
“But I really should.”
“You got a money problem, Jan?”
“That says it, all right.”
“An emergency or something? Or have you got a man who expects a lot?”
I considered and rejected the West Indian pimp. “No man,” I said.
“Thank God for that. I didn’t think you were the type. Some of these girls are crazy. I mean they’re really crazy. What they go through to earn money, and then they give it all to some son of a bitch who what does he give them but abuse. I’m sorry but I don’t see the point.”
“Neither do I.”
“You take a girl like Barbara Jo, she’s the little red-haired kid who sometimes calls herself Barbara Jo and sometimes BJ?” I nodded, knowing who she meant. “She gives me a lot of shit about how I don’t know what love is. Now nobody should have to listen to lines like that, right? I don’t know what love is. But she, she’s the authority. She ever talk to you about her man?”
“She wanted me to meet him. I told her I had a man of my own.”
“Very intelligent, Jan. Very smart. I happen to know a little about this man of hers. His name is Maurice. He’s a shriveled-up little spade about the height of a fireplug with this comical wrinkled-up face. I swear what he looks like is a monkey. It’s comical to see him with Barbara Jo, who’s little herself, but when you see him walking down the street with a pair of six-foot blonds it’s too much. He looks as though he’s walking a pair of Great Danes on leashes.
“I’ll tell you something about her Maurice. He has I think it’s eight girls now, all of them hustling like mad and dealing back every time to Maurice. And in return for this Maurice doesn’t even throw them a friendly fuck from time to time, pardon the language.” Pardon the
language!
“Because he can’t, the little brown jerk. He can’t get hard, this top stud. He can come if you suck him for a month or so, but without getting hard. That’s what BJ gets for her money. That’s how come she knows all about love, and I don’t.”
“Well, girls like that are crazy.”
“Yeah. But you’ve got a money hangup where you don’t know if you should quit after you make a hundred dollars in a day. What’s the problem?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Right, and I’m too nosy.”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Whatever you say.”
Why keep it a secret? For what? I put out one cigarette and lit another and started talking about it. It all came out in a flood. Diarrhea of the mouth, once I started. I couldn’t stop. She was the right kind of listener, not getting in the way or anything.
When I was done she said, “Well, the important thing is to get you an abortion. I know this doctor, he’s really a doctor, not a butcher. Believe me I know about some of those. I’ve had what, four abortions. You would think I would learn what’s causing it, wouldn’t you?”
“Why don’t you take the pill?”
“And get cancer?”
“Jesus, everything gives you cancer. Smoking, soda pop, the stuff they put to keep the bread from getting moldy. Everything in the world gives you cancer.”
“I’ll tell you something, I think the world itself is getting cancer.”
“Maybe. But I’ll take the pill.”
“If you’re going to take it, Jan, take it all the time.”
“Yeah, that’s a point.”
“Anyway, he’ll do this for three hundred dollars. He’s good and he’s clean and he’s safe, and if there are complications afterward you can call him and he’ll come. That’s what kills girls, bleeding afterward and they can’t reach the abortionist and don’t have the brains to call somebody else or go to a hospital. Although I think of hospitals as places to go if you don’t care what happens to you. You wouldn’t get me into one unless they already had the priest for me. Are you a Catholic by any chance?”
“No.”
“Neither am I. Just an expression, having the priest for me. Look, do you have three hundred dollars? Then your troubles are over.”
“Except then I won’t be able to make the rent.”
“So when the landlord comes around you’ll ball him.”
“The landlord is a corporation.”
“Same thing here. That’s some hunk of rent you have to pay. Look, get the abortion first and then you’ll worry about it, right?”
I suppose she’s right. I’m seeing her tomorrow and then we’ll arrange a time and place for the abortion. The thing that bothers me is I’m sure I won’t be able to work afterward for at least a few days and maybe a few weeks. I don’t know how long it takes before one’s plumbing is back in working order. Are all abortions the same?
That’s obviously a stupid question. There are obviously at least two kinds of abortions, the ones where the girl lives and the ones where she doesn’t.
Cheerful thought.
Today’s the day.
I know it’s stupid to be afraid. So I’m stupid. I can’t help it. Somebody’s going to reach up me and cut something out. Of course I’m afraid.
And I’m reaching the point where I start wondering about the kid. The one that’s getting cut out in a few hours. I wonder which fuck caused it and whose kid it is. Whose kid it would be, that is, if it were going to get the chance to be a kid.
I’ll tell you something, my kid that I’ll never get to tell anything to, I’ll tell you this much. You’re not missing a hell of a lot. The game’s not worth the candle.
What bothers me more, frankly, is the question of what kind of abortion I’m going to have for three hundred dollars when the going rate is supposed to be something like three times that figure. According to Liz, this is a class doctor, but if so why am I getting a bargain basement abortion? She says he’s an occasional John and gets a kick out of aborting hookers. I suppose that’s possible. There’s nothing too odd or unusual for it to be some man’s personal kick.
Actually if he bungles the job and I die I think I’m ahead of the game. If nothing else it would certainly take some of the pressure off. Because I don’t see how I’m going to be able to make the rent. It’s due the first of the month, which is like three days from now. I’ve got three hundred for the abortion and another hundred and a half, and I won’t be earning anything for a week after that. (Maybe I could at that. Such a high percentage of tricks are simple blow jobs that I could probably keep body and soul together without using my snatch at all. Not the first day, of course, but pretty soon.)
Oh, everything will work out. I know it will. Liz keeps insisting she’ll lend me the money, and alternately invites me to move in with her until I get back on my feet. I hate to borrow from her but I also hate to give up this place. I know it costs more than it’s worth and more than I can afford and all that but I still like it.
I guess I’ll stay with her after the operation, though. I gather it’s a bad time to be alone. If anything does go wrong (I keep telling myself nothing will go wrong, but myself doesn’t even begin to believe this), you want to have someone else around to call for help.
Also they say it’s a dangerous time emotionally. You can have a perfect operation and be recovering very nicely and you get hit by this fantastic wave of depression and do yourself in. I don’t find this hard to understand. I’m pretty depressed and I haven’t even gone in yet.
How frustrating! This fucking book (and looking through it, that’s exactly what it is, a fucking book, since that’s what most if not all of the entries seem to be about) is habit-forming. A week or two can go by without an entry, but when I want to write something and the book’s not around, that’s something else again. I go into insulin shock.
The abortion was a breeze. (I suddenly get the lovely image of a column of cold air tunneling up my cunt and aborting me, the abortion as breeze.) It was not nearly the horror I kept anticipating, and it was over and done with quickly, and then I napped for an hour and he examined me and sent me on my way, along with a couple of bottles of pills.
I stayed with Liz. Stayed there until today, as a matter of fact, which is why I’ve been having withdrawal symptoms over the damned diary, which I couldn’t get to.
There were all sorts of things I wanted to record, but that’s the thing about a diary, if you don’t put them down at the time the impulse gradually diminishes, and by the time you have a chance you wonder what it was about, the whole thing that was fresh in your mind.
Of course Liz went right on tricking during this time. Even the first day, when I had to stay in bed. The couch in the living room is a Castro, and she opened it up and turned a couple of tricks on it while I lay in bed in the bedroom and listened to the springs squeaking and wondered whether I was going to live or die. After the first day I wasn’t stuck in bed anymore and I would sit drinking coffee in the living room while she balled her tricks in the bedroom.
There was something interesting that happened that would have gone into the diary but it has become very vague in my mind since then, so the hell with it.
Liz paid my rent. She insisted, and I didn’t argue very hard. She says I can pay her back once I’m back on my feet. Once I’m back off my feet is more like it. I can’t earn any money on my feet.
Anyway, I’ve been on them since yesterday. I took far too long to go back and work the bars again. It didn’t have anything to do with the abortion, I don’t think. I don’t see how it could have. The doctor said four days before resuming relations, and I took twice that length of time, and there were no complications and no pain, so I obviously was stalling.
Yesterday I made eighty dollars. I took my tricks to Liz’s place. Her idea. You really have to have a place to take these men, and having a hotel you can get into easily the way I did is not the answer. A lot of men just don’t like the idea of going through the aggravation of checking into a hotel, and then they’re in some sterile hotel room and they don’t care for it. I can understand this.
Liz wants me to move in with her. I guess we’re pretty close, and there’s a sexual thing between us that seems fairly strong. Although except for that one phony baloney trick where we put on an act, we haven’t really done anything.
While I stayed there of course we slept together in her bed. And naturally we would cuddle and touch a little, and sometimes sleep in each other’s arms.
Hey! The first person, first and only person, that I have literally slept with since Howie!
As far as living with her goes, I am tempted. It would be nice to have someone around. And Liz is someone I could stand living with.
But I also like this place, damn it. It’s ridiculous for the amount of time I spend here to be paying almost four hundred dollars a month. I could move out. I’d lose the month’s security, but the hell with that. It wouldn’t matter.
Or I could keep this place and split the rent on Liz’s apartment so that I could spend the night there occasionally and use it as a place to take Johns. But if I did that I’d be spending a fortune on rent. It just seems ridiculous to spend that much money on rent.
Actually if there were a two-bedroom apartment in Liz’s building that we could both take, that would be perfect. Or, and this would be even better, now that I think about it, if there were a small apartment in her building that I could take by myself. Because her place isn’t really big enough for two girls to bring dates to at the same time, and also because I think I would like a certain amount of real privacy. A place to sit and write in this book, for example. And have whatever thoughts I want to keep to myself.
