“I’m waiting for my boyfriend—I mean my ex-boyfriend—here. He owes me money.”
The thought of Beatrice’s ex-boyfriend made me nervous. I chugged her beer as if it were mine.
“I’ll pay you back for this,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“So where did you learn all that French?” I asked.
“I used to live in Paris. I was a maid for this wealthy family.”
First I saw the lights, then I saw the shiny wheels. He pulled up on his motorcycle like some evil spirit from the crypt. He was a heavily tattooed white boy. The kind of person I hated most. They reeked of privilege and they were always the first to throw down. They’d say they’d never hit a girl but I wasn’t a girl to them. I was some kind of genetic mutation, a fucked-up Y chromosome. He walked right up to Beatrice without a trace of hesitation. He put his thumb on her chin and moved in, kissed her like a snake. I could smell the disgusting mix of beer and his saliva. He hadn’t noticed me yet. It was a good sign or so I thought.
“So where’s my money?” she demanded. Her voice had changed. It wasn’t the sweet paper-thin voice I remembered. This voice was loud, sharp and bossy.
“I got it, baby. It’s right here.” He moved her hand toward his package. I cringed. She slapped him across the face, hard. I knew shit was going down and I wanted to get the fuck out of there but I was frozen. It was as if someone had hit the PAUSE button.
“Oh,” he said. “So it’s like that, huh?”
Beatrice spit hard on the ground and stamped out her cigarette. He grabbed her by her perfect black hair and held her down.
“So you think you can talk to me like that, huh?” He was very close to her face. I was terrified for her.
“If you want your money, you’ll have to get it yourself you stupid cunt.”
He looked over at me. “And who’s this?”
Beatrice let out a tiny shriek. “Don’t touch Ian,” she screamed. He hadn’t let go of Beatrice yet but he was staring me down.
“What are you going to do about it?” he asked me.
I had a blade in my pocket and if I wasn’t stuck on PAUSE I’d grab it and rip this motherfucker to shreds. I somehow found the strength to reach into my pocket and grab the blade. I lifted it up so he could see it.
“Oh, you think you’re a tough guy, huh?” he said.
“Ian, don’t…just don’t, okay…?” Beatrice screamed. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to listen. I wasn’t going to die over this. He turned to look at Beatrice, stroked her shiny hair and breathed in her face.
“You really are a little money-grubbing bitch,” he said. I was ready. I came at him full force, held the knife up to his big thick neck. He laughed.
“You wouldn’t hurt me,” he said. “Uh-oh Bea, your little dyke boyfriend’s sticking up for you. How sweet.”
I was ready to fuck this guy up but it was too late. He’d knocked me onto the ground and I took some pretty mean punches. My lip was bleeding and my eye was definitely black.
I don’t remember what happened next except that when I came to Beatrice was there and my head was on her lap. We were still in Union Square and the sun was just barely peeking through the trees.
“Are you okay, Ian?” she asked.
I nodded but my neck felt like it had been struck by a hammer and my eyes stung.
“You took a fucking beating,” Beatrice said.
“Yeah, well I’m not going to run with your crowd anymore,” I said.
I biked home hard and fast. My legs felt twisted and my bones ached. My face felt like it’d been smashed to pieces. I carried my bike up the five stories to the apartment. I unlocked the door to find Sadie sitting in her favorite spot. She calls it “the parlor.” She says it sounds very Southern and sophisticated. She was polishing her toenails, her leg hiked up onto the table, wearing pink spandex leggings and a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt that she had cut and tailored into a halter top.
“Damn, Ian, you look like a fucking car wreck. What the fuck happened to you?”
I mumbled about some fucking asshole trying to kill me but my face hurt too much for me to raise my voice.
Sadie walked over to the freezer and pulled out a bag of frozen peas and placed it on my left eye.
“Thanks.”
Sadie laughed. “I used to get to black eyes all the time when I lived in Harlem. Guys used to think I was a girl. I guess I passed and when they reached down my skirt, they realized I wasn’t. Once they know you’re a guy, all bets are off. So, they’d never hit a girl, but I guess I’m not a girl to them.”
“Yeah, me neither,” I said.
“So what are you doing today? You can’t work like that can you?”
I sighed, slipping out of my jeans and down to my boxer briefs.
“God, even your legs are tore up.”
I nodded. The sunlight was seeping through the drapes, making shadows across Sadie’s heavily painted face. When Sadie and I went out together people sometimes thought we were a couple, boyfriend and girlfriend. We liked that, because it meant we were passing. The man at the deli would say, “Sir, you’re lucky to have such a beautiful woman in your
life. Treat her right.” I’d smile and say, “Of course, man. Of course.”
There was a knock at the door. I walked over to my bed and hoped Sadie would get it.
“Hello,” I heard Sadie shout through the peephole.
It was J.T. J.T. lived on the floor below us with his butch dyke girlfriend. We called him J.T. because he was young-looking and he reminded us of Jonathan Taylor Thomas from that show “Home Improvement.”
“What do you want now, mister?” Sadie asked. I could smell J.T. from my bed. He smelled of beer and dirt and sometimes urine. He was always scratching like the sick junkie he was. Not a heroin user but a T addict. T is pure poison if you don’t get it from someplace reputable. J.T. bought his on the street. There was a man called Doc who’d come around and you could buy a vial of what he said was testosterone for twenty bucks a pop. It was T all right but that wasn’t all it was. It was street T, probably cut with Drano or some other sick shit, and the needles were never clean. You could count on that.
“You got a couple of bucks?” J.T. asked Sadie.
“I thought you’d come to ask for a cup of sugar. I don’t have a couple of bucks,” she said.
J.T. stormed through the apartment to my room where I was lying in the dim light. “Got a couple of bucks, Ian?” he asked. “Rent’s due this week.”
I sighed. “You don’t want rent money. Fucking be honest with me. Say ‘I want to buy some fucking junk for my arm,’” I answered.
J.T. scoured the room, found my jeans that had been tossed on the floor and dug through the pockets.
“What the fuck are you doing? I didn’t say you could go through my shit.”
He had found my wallet and was skimming through its contents. There was exactly two bucks in there.
“You got two bucks,” he said. “I’m gonna borrow it. ’Kay?”
It was a rhetorical question. He already had taken the money. “Hey, dude, what happened to your face?”
“I’m trying to get some sleep, J.T. You got the money so just get out of here, okay?”
He stormed out the door and was gone. I thought about Molly, how she was probably married with one and a half kids by now. She never thought about that dyke from high school who was still so fucking stuck on her. She thought about white picket fences and playdates and PTA meetings. It was all pretty sad really. I thought about my five-year high school reunion. Was I going to go? I had wanted to but now the possibility of ever having anything with Molly was gone. What was the point? I could go and stare at her, shake her husband’s hand, maybe even have a man-to-man talk with him about cars or the price of oil but what would be the point?
I woke up at five thirty. It was raining outside. Sadie was watching “Soul Train” on the television and dancing around. She was wearing her Roller Derby outfit with the white roller skates that had pink and gold hearts on the sides. I was thinking about Beatrice. I was thinking about trying to find her.
“Wanna take a walk?” I asked Sadie.
“I can’t,” she squealed. “It’s raining. I’ll melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.”
I got dressed and grabbed my bicycle. I walked downstairs and headed down to 42nd Street.
The club was packed. Men were getting out of their Wall Street jobs feeling lonely and horny. I walked straight to the dressing room and banged on the door. The young-looking girl appeared again.
“Looking for Venus?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s not working. She’s got fines now. She’ll have to pay Dottie a hundred bucks if she wants to work again.”
“Do you know where to find her?” I asked.
“We got information sheets with addresses and phone numbers but most of the girls lie on them. I know I did.” The older woman from the other night put her fat hand on my shoulder. It felt heavy. I was still sore.
“She lives on Bleeker Street, number eleven-sixty-six,” said the lady. “If you see her, tell her to come in to work.” I nodded.
I rode off into the rain. My hair was soaking and my shoes squeaked at each turn of the pedal. When I arrived I walked up the front steps and hit her buzzer. No one answered. I buzzed again. Still no one. I walked out the door, sat on the stairs underneath the overhang. I reached into my pocket. Her number was there but it was smudged by the rain so I couldn’t make it out. I knew the first three numbers were 4-1-7. That’s all I knew.
I waited about an hour, and just as I was standing up, about to mount my bicycle, she appeared. She sort of floated like above the water. Her eyes were so clear, her hair was so wet. Her red bra strap peaked out from underneath her white T-shirt. She kinda just stood there for a minute, looking me over, making sure it was really me.
“Ian. You’re here.” I nodded. My body felt heavy and exhausted. I wanted to go inside. She walked up the stairs.
“Are you coming with…?” she began.
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
Of course I had every intention of following her. I’d been waiting out in the rain for nearly an hour now. I wasn’t about to just up and leave. We walked through the door. The building smelled musty and sort of like linoleum. If you live in the city you know that smell. It also smells like food, an undiscernable smell like foreign food but you don’t know where it’s from. We walked up the creaking steps to the seventh floor. It felt like it took forever. It was probably only a minute.
She paused by the door. She was breathing heavily. She pulled a cigarette from the pack with her teeth, which I always find to be extremely hot. She lit it and slid the key into the lock like she knew what was up. She turned the lock and the door flew open.
The apartment was dark. The floors were made of wood. There was a dim light on in the kitchenette. She bit her lip and exhaled. There were maps on the walls, maps of other places. Places I’d never been. Paris, Barcelona, Egypt. The walls were a deep yellow, the tarnished color of a room that had been smoked in for years, centuries. There was peeling wallpaper in the kitchenette.
“I’m trying to pull back this awful wallpaper. There’s a fucking vault of information underneath. Newspapers. They had put newspapers under the wallpaper. They are old. Like very old. From the early immigrant days when people came over from Ellis Island. The days when people still liked a good story….” Her voice trailed off.
I didn’t care about wallpaper or maps anymore. I wanted her. I wanted her legs spread on the bed like a quilt. I wanted
to take her in my mouth like a juicy orange, a warm vowel. I wanted to push her tiny body against the wall and grind into her cunt.
“Want a towel?” she asked.
“Okay.”
She went into the bathroom and came out with a small blue towel. First I dried off my hair, then I took off my jacket. I dried my shoulders and then I felt her in back of me. She had grabbed the towel. She was pulling at the pockets of my jeans. She was taking them off. I stood there in boxer briefs and a wifebeater. She leaned over and pulled off her jeans. She was soaking wet. She grabbed the towel and dried her skinny legs, then her hair; then she pulled off her T-shirt. She stood there wearing a bra and panties, shivering. Her body was covered in goose bumps. I thought I saw her smile. I could have been wrong. I was nervous. I was still sore but I wasn’t thinking about that anymore.
I’m in control. I’m in control,
I kept telling myself.
She slid onto the bed. She was lying on her back. She was waiting for me. I hesitated before walking over to her. I slid on top of her. We fit like puzzle pieces. She smelled like graham crackers. I bit her bottom lip. It tasted like a mandarin orange. She took my tongue in her mouth. I was ready for her. I tugged at the sides of her panties. They slid off. I fiddled with the back of her bra. I couldn’t get it off. I felt like an amateur. She laughed. She grabbed hold of my hands and helped me take it off. She threw it on the floor. She was shivering and naked and pale. Her lips glistened red like Dorothy’s shoes. I pushed down hard on her pelvis. I felt my body shake. I slid my hand down, rubbed her clit slowly. It felt warm. I licked my first two fingers and slid them into her. I felt the little hills and canyons on her insides. I felt her melt into me, grind onto my hand. I kept fucking her. She was getting wet.
When I moved down to taste her, her pussy glistened like a waterfall. I slid my tongue against her clit and continued to fuck her with my fingers. She slid her hand down, tried to touch my breasts. I had bound them earlier. I moved her hand away. She tried to slide her hand down my boxers but I had forgotten the penis. I moved her hand away. I fucked her furiously with my fingers and tongue; she moaned and purred like a small cat.
“Ian,” she said. “You feel so good.” I smiled.
I rubbed my fingers along her small breasts, moved toward them, licked her nipples, felt my weight shift onto her again. I ground against her. She made a tiny sigh. I felt her wet pussy engulf my fingers like a hungry mouth. She thrusted and ground against them in a frenzy, until, in one smooth shift of energy, she let out a loud moan and her pussy lips quivered. I slid my fingers out of her and rubbed my entire palm against her moving cunt.