by J. Boyett
“You’re going to ask Mal, aren’t you? That’d make the most sense. Anyway, if you were actually considering doing it in y’all’s dorm room, you must be planning to invite her.”
“I wasn’t ‘actually considering’ anything, Ken, because we were just fooling around.”
“Bullshit. You’re in.”
“Not necessarily. Anyway, we haven’t talked about your cut. I won’t put up with a bunch of exorbitant nonsense.”
“I’ll be ecstatic with a very low cut. But you’re so in.”
“Fuck off. You don’t know me.”
“Again, bullshit. I triple-dare you.”
“Ken. . . .”
“I triple-dog-dare you.”
“Ah, shut up.”
They weren’t making any effort not to be heard by the nearby booths. A stern bald dry-faced man of late middle age, a real pillar of the community, some kind of farmer-cum-deacon, appeared at Joyce’s shoulder and glowered at her: “Now listen here. If you’re going to come and eat around decent people I wish you’d shut your filthy—”
“Fuck off, sour grapes,” she said, and flicked her hand scornfully at him. Ken burst into jeering, exaggerated laughter, pointing his right index finger at the man. “Busted!” he cried. The old guy could not hit a girl. He might have hit Ken, had Ken not been gripping a steak knife, pointed up, in his left hand. The man stalked off. Ken leaned across the table to slap Joyce a high five. “You are so in.”
“Not yet I’m not.”
“You’re so in and you don’t even know it.”
“I don’t know. Probably not. God, this is crazy.”
Now a blushing manager appeared, also trying—albeit less successfully—to be stern. He explained that there had been several complaints and that he was sorry to have to ask them to leave. Joyce and Ken commiserated, meanwhile shoveling food into their mouths as the increasingly flustered manager kept explaining that, no, they really did have to leave right away. Once their plates were clean they got up and the manager followed them to the register, where Joyce had trouble counting out the money. The trained and stabilized part of herself blithely knew that this couldn’t happen, but from her soul’s crow’s nest she saw better; she’d already dared herself.
2.
When Joyce entered the dorm room black-haired Mal was perched in the windowsill smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the new-laid dark. Their windows faced the boys’ wing across the barren courtyard, but Mal was looking toward the street. “Ken drop you off?” she asked. She was damp and scrubbed, fresh from the shower; she wore a white T-shirt so stretched-out and shapeless as to be modest, even though she had on nothing else but panties.
Joyce lit a cigarette. She looked at the Cat People poster Mal had hung up—Mal got a kick out of old film noir movies. “I’m an attractive woman. I might’ve been out on a real date.”
“Were you?”
“No. I was with Ken.”
“You’re predictable.”
“Well, I did Geoff in the bathroom at Vino’s last week after his gig. Was that predictable?”
“From you?”
“Fuck off.”
“You’re predictable when you’re around Ken.”
“It only looks that way because he’s so totally unpredictable, and so I fade in comparison.”
“No he isn’t.”
“You want to hear something unpredictable we came up with tonight?”
“Shoot.” Mal lit a new cigarette off the old one.
Joyce took a drag to stall for time. Her belly was buzzing. There was no telling which way Mal would go, and when Joyce announced the idea she had to be ready to either laugh it off, or else lay serious plans. She eyed a big black scar in the plastic mattress from where she had once fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. “Well, we were thinking about setting up a brothel.”
Mal looked at her. “Do what?”
“A brothel. A cathouse. I suggested setting it up right here in the dorm, but Ken talked me out of that, it’d be too indiscreet. So then we decided on his apartment. It’s right near campus and all, it’s real convenient.” She kept a hint of a smile on her face and watched Mal closely for the cue as to what kind of smile it should end up being.
Mal gazed into space, lifting the cigarette to her mouth again. “So is Ken the protection, or is he getting someone else?”
Shit. They really were going to do this. “It’s just him,” Joyce said.
“Do you trust him?”
“More or less.”
“He’s kind of a little guy.”
“Yeah, but he says he’s going to have a spiked bat.”
“A what?”
“A spiked bat. He says that’s a bat with a rusty nail sticking out of it.”
“Well . . . okay. That’s a pretty good deterrent. But if he ever actually hits anyone with it, show’s over.”
“Yeah. That’s, uh, that’s kind of what I said. To Ken.” She wanted to scream at Mal: Are you nuts?! I grew up going to Methodist Youth Group and you grew up going to a Baptist one! Our parents pay for everything! We’re in Conway! But at the same time she was thrilled. Terrified, too. “Like, of course the whole spiked bat thing would be kept in reserve. For emergencies. You could kill someone with a thing like that. Especially if it’s actually rusted.”
Mal shrugged and ashed her cigarette. “So Ken’s the pimp, huh. What about the girls?”
“Well, we want to keep the numbers low. As in, two would be plenty.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“But also, two’s minimum. If I’m one of them, that is. I would just feel really uncomfortable doing it alone.” She laughed. “I guess that’s pretty silly, huh?”
Mal didn’t answer. “If you’re one girl, then who’s the other?”
“As a matter of fact, Mal, I was going to ask you.”
“Okay. How much are y’all talking about charging?”
“We hadn’t discussed it just a whole lot. I think the last number we said was a hundred dollars.”
“A hundred-fifty.”
“Jeez. That seems pretty expensive.”
“A hundred-fifty. Trust me. They can afford it. They’ll pay anything, and there’s nowhere else for them to go in this white-flight suburb. And what do they know about cheap or expensive when it comes to pussy? What do you know about it, for that matter? Or me? What other prices are there to compare it to? I could go on the internet and look up the going rate for a prostitute in Mexico City, or in the Netherlands, or at the Mustang Ranch. But there’s nobody in the world who can tell me the going rate in Conway, Arkansas because it hasn’t gone yet. Not out in public. A hundred-fifty.”
“All right . . . shit, that’s pretty good money. Like, just four times a month and you’d get six hundred dollars.”
“Tax-free, too. If we work a little harder, we can buy ourselves cars. Is Ken going to be a problem about money?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is Ken going to be a problem about money? Is he going to all of a sudden insist on, like, a twenty percent cut or something?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s in it for the money.”
“Of course he isn’t. He’s already rich. He’s in it for the same reason he’s in anything, to stir up shit. But we might get a couple weeks into it and then him decide a fun way to stir up shit would be to demand half the money or something stupid.”
“Well, I would never vouch for Ken, exactly. But I think he’d only do something like that if he was really bored, and I figure it’ll take even him a pretty long time to get bored with being a pimp.”
“Fair enough. But y’all didn’t actually talk about numbers?”
“He said he would be ecstatically happy with even a tiny cut.”
“Then I won’t agree to more than five percent. And I’ll try to talk him down from that. Not that his job isn’t worth more. If we were coming up with this shit on our own and hiring some guy I’d offer him a lot. But not Ken, he’s al
ready going to be having too much fun. I bet he’d do it for free.”
“Okay. I’ll let you handle the, like, negotiations.”
“All right.” Mal blew out a cloud of smoke. “Anything else?”
“Um. Well, no. I can’t think of anything. There is the whole recruitment thing. But Ken’s handling that, too.”
“Fine. We still have plenty of time to hash that sort of stuff out.”
“All right. . . . I guess that’s it, then!” Joyce lay stretched-out on the bed and laughed delightedly. “Holy shit, Mal. Holy shit.”
Mal grinned over at her. “We’re going to make a lot of money.”
“Jesus, we’re going to do a lot more than that.”
“We sure are.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God! Oh my God.”
“Be cool, kiddo.”
“I am so totally fucking cool. Dude, I am bad-ass.”
“That’s right.”
They looked at each other and grinned like little girls at a slumber party, clutching pillows to their flat chests and planning elaborate future weddings.… Then came a gentle rapping on the door to the bathroom, which connected their room to Sherry’s.
3.
“You did what?” said Ken.
“We told her she was in.” They were at Wendy’s, sitting at a red plastic-mold table beside a scuffed Plexiglass window. This was the Wendy’s at the end of Burger Row, not the one by Wal-Mart. Although Burger Row’s source was in the middle of Conway’s downtown, here, a mere mile or so later, they were already nearly at its mouth, at one of the last fast-food joints before the blue road spluttered into a brief surf of white shining car dealerships and then opened into an expanse of half-inhabited green and brown, the town gone. “We told her it was cool.”
“Whoa, hold up. Not only did you tell her—Sherry—tell Sherry she was in, but you told her it was cool? Hang on now. I beg to differ.”
“Ken, this is not a big deal.”
“Cosmically speaking, it’s not. Sucks for us, though.”
“It’s fine. Look, she’s pretty. She fucks. She’ll do.”
“Maybe we should name the place Dumb Bitches R Us.”
“Hey now. Don’t you forget who two-thirds of those bitches are. And especially one third.”
“Yeah, you and Mal. Y’all’re the dumb bitches who told Sherry she could join.”
“Will you stop being a whiny little bitch? You said two was fine, security-wise. So I got two, Sherry and Mal.”
“Oh, man. Did you just say that? Two! Two! You and Mal! Not you, Mal, and Sherry, which, if you’ll notice, is three.”
“Oh.”
“Uh-huh. Man. That’s it, the name is now definitely Dumb Bitches R Us. Don’t worry, I’ll count myself as one of the bitches.”
What had happened the night before was this: Sherry had opened the door and entered while still knocking, pretending to tip-toe with her back bent and her shoulders hunched up, laughing and waving her hand in front of her face and saying, “Gee, it sure is smoky in here!”
She bummed a cigarette from Mal, explaining that she’d taken up smoking as an appetite suppressant. (“Couldn’t hurt,” shrugged Mal.) “Because,” Sherry continued, “we’ve got to stay attractive.” She leaned forward at the waist and swung her upper body from side to side, first towards Mal and then towards Joyce, one hand on her hip, the other raised and level with her head, the cigarette still burning between her fingers. “Don’t we, girls? All of us do.”
“What do you mean, Sherry?” calm, cool Malinda calmly coolly asked.
“What do you mean, Sherry?” calm, cool Malinda calmly coolly asked, thought Joyce.
Sherry rolled her eyes. “Uh. I totally heard you guys. I was using the toilet. The one we share. If y’all were going to be all Norad about it, you should’ve made sure no one was on the pot.”
They wrangled with Sherry over whether they’d allow her in. “It’s just a matter of numbers,” Joyce lied. “If we have too many people, it won’t be safe.”
“Hello!” said Sherry, and flung out her hands. She had forgotten she was holding her cigarette—it went spinning to the floor with a spray of orange sparks, and Sherry cut herself off as she scrambled to retrieve it. Once upright, she sternly pointed the cigarette at Joyce, like a schoolmistress with a pointer. “Hello! Haven’t you ever heard of safety in numbers! I don’t remember ever hearing of safety in—you know—absences!”
They couldn’t just say, “It’s not that you’re unsexy”—her blonde hair was better-kept than Joyce’s, her blue eyes matched her sweater, her cheekbones were enviable—“it’s just that you’re kind of a stupid annoying big-mouthed faker and we don’t want to play with you.” Besides, Sherry had flipped her hair and grimly pronounced, “Anyway. If I’m not in, then I’m telling. So there.” And, as Mal had said, “Well, if otherwise you’re going to tell, you’re in.”
Now, at the Wendy’s, Ken cussed glumly.
Joyce looked through the window and across the four-lane street at a car dealership, all festive chrome and flags. She picked at her small dry spud, reminiscing about when they used to have a self-serve potato bar, and you could scoop on gallons of oily cheese sauce and pounds of bacon bits. She’d been a kid then, and unworried about her ass. Nowadays your meager portion was doled out behind the counter, and they’d hardly given her enough cheese sauce to moisten the potato enough for it to be gag-downable. “Quit messing around,” she said. “If you bum me out, I’ll drop the whole idea. And then you’ll be alone with Sherry.”
“And Mal.”
“Yeah, but she won’t laugh at your dumb jokes.”
“She’d fuck me, though.”
Joyce nearly spat out the Mr. Pibb she was sucking up the straw. Ken grinned. Would Mal ever be down for that? Despite everything, there was something similar about those two. Ken had never expressed any such intentions towards Mal, but, as Joyce had insisted, he was unpredictable. Take that time they’d snuck into the Honors lounge to sit on the nice couches and watch the big-screen TV. No one was supposed to be up there except Honors students and their escorted guests, but fuck it; there had been no one else around, and she and Ken had watched Seinfeld. They started fucking with each other, and pretty soon he was grabbing her tits and squeezing them while she tried to swat his hands away. Joyce had never been aware before of any sort of chemistry or sexual tension between them, nor was she aware of any chemistry, exactly, now. Ken was just grabbing her tits, laughing and making a game out of it. Joyce told him to quit it, and slapped at him, but she had to giggle and laugh because if she revealed that she was really serious, she’d be a spoilsport. She refused to crack before Ken did. But Ken would never crack. And so he got to spend twenty minutes groping her big tits because he refused to acknowledge that they were serious. Brilliant! She was determined to learn everything.
Over the next couple days Ken prepared the brothel. There wasn’t much for Joyce to do. Mal and Sherry asked her, with some trepidation from Sherry, about how the johns were being recruited. She took their queries to Ken, who laughed and gave her a theatrical wink. “Oh, yeah. Y’all don’t worry about that.”
Joyce smiled icily. “No bullshit, Ken.”
“Oh, no, no, no.”
“No sick shit, Ken.” She had a sudden vision of the three scantily-clad girls strutting in to find their respective fathers—step-father, in her case—reclining on beds of Turkish pillows, or bean bags: trembling, nude, and unsuspecting. But she could not mention this scenario, lest she inspire Ken. “I’m for real. You go all unpalatable on me, and I’ll walk.”
“You never have before.”
“This is different. This is genitals.”
“Dude, don’t worry. I am so smooth, and I associate only with other smooth people. Like you, for instance. Forget about Sherry for now. Anyway, it stands to reason that the customers I procure will also be smooth.”
“Shut up and listen for a second. Bear in mind that our ideal boy is one who hasn’t ever
gotten laid, and who doesn’t think he ever can get laid. Not guys who really can’t ever get laid. No psychos. No really fat guys with runny noses. And I’m sorry, I feel like a bitch for saying this: but no harelips. Also no hunchbacks.”
“You prejudiced piece of shit. You white-bread, cheerleading piece of Estée Lauder shit.”
“Clairol, motherfucker.”
“Clearasil, maybe.”
“Fuck off, apeface. Look. Skinny guys. Guys in glasses who never make passes. Cowlicks: acceptable. Acne scars indicating a confidence-crippling zit-clogged past? Good. Actual confidence-crippling acne in the here and now? Bad.”
“Hey, don’t worry, I’m on it.”
“When you pick out a john, just remember to ask yourself one key question: ‘Would I fuck this guy?’”
“Done. You’ll find a bunch of really fey skinny dudes with limp wrists and scarves, all of them wondering what the hell they’re supposed to be doing with you.”
“Don’t screw this up. It’ll be a lot funnier if we actually go through with it than if we all just barf and go home.”
“All right. But I can slip in a couple of interesting ones, yeah?”
“Jesus! No one interesting! ”
The day before they opened for business, Ken invited all three girls to his place and gave them the tour in a wide-eyed mock-grandiloquent manner. Joyce was amused—Ken rarely failed to amuse her—and she followed Ken through his half of the duplex with a smirk. Mal was expressionless. Sherry took her cue from Joyce and just kept grinning, whether Ken was making a joke or not.
First he took them to his bedroom. “I’m basically leaving everything like it is. Except I’ll change the sheets after y’all fuck on them. Whoever fucks in this room will owe me a six-percent cut. That’s, like, nine dollars, I guess.”
He took them to the back bedroom. Because it faced the backyard, this had been his pot sanctuary. Now there was a stained Salvation Army twin mattress in the middle of the room. It wasn’t even lined up straight with the walls. “I was just going to leave it like that,” he explained, “not even put sheets on it or anything. Whoever works in here owes me two percent.”