by J. Boyett
Well, he was well-satisfied, Ken was, and he heaved a big, satisfied sigh and moseyed back to the living room. It was hard to sit in there, what with the jackhammering sound vibrations clogging the air, it was physically painful. But he managed not to turn down the volume. He let the Funkadelic album play out, one track after another, but he had “Moon River” programmed to repeat itself. As the song began for the sixth time, Ken became aware that the front door was being beaten upon. There was no sound, as such, at least not that Ken could discern; the music was way too loud for anything like that to get through. Rather, it was as if an extra set of steady, rhythmic vibrations had snuck into the room, and begun tickling the lobes of his reptilian brain. He opened the door to find two bemused cops, who asked him to turn the music down, please. He complied, with both stereos. Growing impatient, they asked if he’d mind turning one of them off completely. Ken sacrificed the Funkadelic, figuring that not only would the cops be slower to arrest someone listening to “Moon River,” but also that it was a song they themselves would want to get away from. After checking his eyes for redness, they gave him a final, funny look, and asked him to keep it down for the rest of the night. They didn’t ask if anyone else was around, or venture into the back of the duplex, where the girls had already finished wiping themselves off and were now sharing cigarettes with their clients. The smoke nearly suffocated Mal and Phil in their little closet, so they opened the door and, fumbling into their underwear, hung out with Joe and Sherry for a few minutes, before Joyce and Gregory joined them and they all drifted to the living room.
The guys paid up—three fifties each—with good-humored grins, saying, as they headed for the door, that it had all been worth it, and they were so totally going to come back. Of course, why should they give a shit about paying? It wasn’t their money, it was their moms’.
The girls cheerfully told Ken that he’d get his cut after they’d scrounged up some change—no one had any little stuff at the moment. He smiled and nodded and said that was fine as long as in the end he actually did get paid, then got four bottles of Miller Lite out of the fridge and passed three of them to the girls.
There was a sofa, two armchairs, and a loveseat, but all four of them sat sprawled on the nasty carpet, leaning back against the furniture, pulling on their beers. Joyce was happily aware of the assload of money in her pocket. Then she laughed and said, “Hey Ken, you tell Melissa about your little side project yet?”
Ken shook his head somberly. “Naw. Discretion, remember? You tell her anything, the very next day it’s all over the cheerleading squad.”
Sherry gasped. “You mean you haven’t told your girlfriend you’re a pimp?!”
“Now, Sherry,” he explained. “You know it’s hardest for the children to understand these things. Is it such a crime for me to want to protect her from life’s ugliness, just a little while longer? At least until I can get her trained to suck dick really well?”
“Your fault for being a cradle-robber,” sniffed Sherry.
Mal eased a cigarette out of Sherry’s pack, not bothering to ask first. “How is my old alma mater?” She cupped her hands over the flame of a lighter she’d found on the floor. “I drove by on Monday and all the whippersnappers were hanging around in front of the place. Too early to go home, too late for lunch. I figured it was a fire drill.”
“Monday?” said Ken. “Monday was a bomb threat. Melissa told me.”
“Oh, yeah? Just a prank call, or did they really blow the place up?”
“Does it matter?”
“I went to school there, too,” said Sherry. “It wasn’t all that bad. I mean, it sucked. But they’re all the same, aren’t they?”
Joyce had to take all that wonderful cash out again and just look at it. Holding it in her hands, she grinned and said, “Man, the thing is, I never came like that before. I mean, fuck the money. But I’m never going to fuck for free again.”
Mal smiled back at her, took a drag off her cigarette and a swig of beer. “I never have,” she said.
5.
That very night they decided to switch to screwing in the afternoons, since all of them finished classes early and this way their evenings would be free. Joyce and Sherry, of course, did not have jobs, while Mal had recently quit hers, at Kentucky Fried Chicken. “So I’m free from about two every day,” she said. “I’ll let you know how my schedule changes when I find a new job.”
Joyce laughed and Ken dropped his jaw. Sherry glanced around, trying to figure out what was going on. “Are you kidding?” said Ken. “You just made a KFC’s weekly paycheck! Cash!”
Mal shrugged. “More than that.”
“So why would you go back to fast food?”
“What if I get sick of fucking?”
“Sorry. This is a dude you’re talking to. Does not compute. And anyway, so what? Name one job that you wouldn’t get sick of doing after long enough? By the way, I know it’s harder for girls to have orgasms, and lots of guys don’t even know there’s a clitoris, and blah blah blah, but there’s no way you’d get sick of fucking before you’d get sick of fry lamps. Anyway, bearing in mind that one fuck equals a week’s wages, if you just bite your pillow and do it fifty-two times, you’ll be able to retire for a year, no worries.”
“I’m worried about the stability of our little venture.”
“Stability? Dude, fucking may be the only thing you can guarantee. The oldest profession? Hello? It’s not like the demand’s going to die out. Shit, I’m thinking of fronting some cash myself.”
“Mm. See, that’s what I’m talking about.”
“What?”
“It’s not so much the stability of demand that makes me antsy, as it is of management.”
Joyce butted in: “Ken was just kidding, Mal.”
But Ken was grinning as if this were the perversely perfect cap to his perfect pimping debut. “Naw, that’s okay,” he said. “She’s got good reasons to worry about me. But I promise to, you know. Not do anything to make it not be fun anymore.”
Part of the reason they’d agreed to hold the sessions in the afternoons was that, as fun as opening night had been, they didn’t expect it to be like that all the time. Unless they got the same three nice guys every day (which wouldn’t happen—the johns would run out of money, Ken would become so disgustedly bored that he’d be forced to do something nasty in order to shake things up, and Joyce would insist on changing boys anyway because Ken would goad her into it by calling her a chicken), unless that happened, then at some point there was bound to be a dickhead in the mix, some jerk who would ordinarily be able to enrage them merely by hooting at them from a passing car, but who would be able, there, naked in a room with them and engaged in that most vulnerablizing of games, to leave them shattered for a good few hours. He’d grin and snarl and say “Flip over, whore,” or something like that, and they’d yell at him, he’d yell back, Ken would come in brandishing his spiked bat, she’d demand payment even though he hadn’t cum, he’d have something to say about that, and she’d storm off. Since the girls were sure that at least a couple such days must be in the cards, it made sense to get each session over with early. Otherwise, there would be a shadow hanging over every entire day.
What they’d failed to foresee, though, was that scheduling the debauchery for the middle of the day in itself made things less fun. An atmosphere of revelry was simply more difficult to attain between three and five in the afternoon. Joyce began to think that they probably ought to change the hours back. She was going to approach the others about it on their third day of fucking, but then, before the johns showed up, Sherry started gushing about this great new reality TV show she’d found, and about how glad she was that they were fucking in the afternoons, since otherwise she’d never get a chance to watch it. As usual, Sherry had to content herself with babbling to Joyce, since Mal and Ken pretty much ignored her, even going so far as to converse with each other instead, which rarely would have happened under normal circumstances. Joyce, faced w
ith Sherry’s breathless enthusiasm, didn’t have the heart to rob her of her new nightly ritual, and so she kept her mouth shut.
Joyce started to worry about the word “cock.” She worried she’d been saying it too much. Not that she’d noticed any such thing, but recently Ken had developed an impression of her in which he flung the word “cock” around brassily. Joyce had been bewildered, but it’d put Sherry in stitches and had even made Mal laugh, in such a way as to suggest that the imitation was pretty spot-on. So Joyce had brayed along with them, and secretly resolved to watch her mouth.
By the fourth day of screwing, Joyce had met neither the monster lurking in her future, nor Prince Charming (she figured a cathouse was as likely a place as any to find Prince Charming). At the moment her current mark, Floyd or something, had his pimply back to her, hunched over, deeply concentrating on something. Joyce suppressed a sigh. She wanted to ask him if there was anything he needed help with, but was warily reluctant because she wasn’t sure she remembered his name. Could it actually be Floyd? It couldn’t, could it? Was that still a real name? They were naked in the marijuana room. She was stretched out on the mattress—fully-sheeted, she’d made sure. Floyd or whoever had rolled off when, in the middle of a garlicky kiss, she had tugged the elastic waistband of his boxers down past his bony hips. He’d snapped them the rest of the way off himself, and had been huddled there on his side ever since, hunkered down in a vaguely ominous way. Joyce cleared her throat and simply said “Hey,” unwilling to risk calling him the wrong name, especially a wrong name like Floyd. “Hey, baby. What’s up?”
He didn’t reply. A real charmer. Then again, that was the whole point of getting a whore, was not needing to charm anyone. That didn’t give him the right to bore her to death, though. “Hey,” she repeated. “Anything I can help you with?” Then, when he didn’t say anything, she added, “I am a professional, you know.”
Floyd or whoever grunted in response. Or it could have been a word of some kind. “Excuse me?” said Joyce.
“Just a second,” he mumbled. He didn’t seem to be in a bad mood, or any mood at all.
“Okay,” Joyce said dubiously. “I mean . . . if you’re sure it’s…?”
“Hang on,” he said. “Just let me get this on.”
“Oh, that!” Joyce exclaimed. What a dummy. Of course! “Oh, I can help you with that!”
“No, I can do it. Just a second.”
“Aw, come on,” she said. Then, in what was supposed to be an alluring sing-song: “I can make it fu-un.”
“No! I don’t want you to see it.”
Both her smile and belly froze. “Why not?” she demanded.
“Because,” said Floyd or whoever. Despite his distant mildness, there was a new stubbornness in his voice. Maybe he was just embarrassed, but Joyce had been stupid for having forgotten to look him over: a visual check on all penises was one of their rules. Condom or no, she didn’t want some herpetic cock knocking around in there.
“Let me see.”
“No. I’m almost done.”
“Let me see it. Now. While you’re still bareback.”
“Jeez, what’s the problem all of a sudden? Hold up.”
“Let me see it!”
“Fuck off!”
But she’d already hopped around him and pulled his scrawny arms and hands away. He offered all the resistance of a half-reanimated corpse, and once overpowered he averted his bulging froggy eyes, his zitty chinless face.
Joyce looked at his cock. It lay there like a dead fish on the floor of a boat. Peremptorily and primly, like a nurse, she lifted it, checking its underside, rolling back the foreskin, fingering through the pubic hair as if she were on a lice safari. Everything seemed decent. A discolored patch gave her pause, but she quickly determined that it was only a birthmark. So what had been the big deal? Why had this goober put up such a struggle? Then she grasped the obvious: Floyd was flaccid.
She looked up at him. “Aw, were you embarrassed to let me see you like this?”
Floyd or whoever did not answer, but Joyce could see his eyes had welled up, and now a tear spilled out onto his cratered cheek.
In spite of her cynical affectations and aspirations, the sight of boys crying sent Joyce into a near-panic and caused her chest to go all airless and gaspy. “Uh-uh,” she said, clutching his shoulders and pulling herself to him urgently. “Don’t you worry, honey.”
Floyd or whoever wiped the tears away with the back of his fist. “I’m going,” he said, and made as if to rise.
“Uh-uh!” repeated Joyce, pushing him down again. “Now, you listen, sweetheart. There is just no fucking way. You hear me? No fucking way. Now, we are in the back room of the house, which means we don’t have to worry about anybody else traipsing through, which means we can take as long as we want. You hear? Now, I’m willing to go extra innings on this, free of charge. All right? Are you with me?”
Floyd or whoever thought it over. Finally, he nodded.
Later, an exhausted Joyce followed her ecstatic john out of the marijuana room, her good deed done for the day. Once Floyd or whoever had skipped out the door, she plopped onto the armchair and joined Mal and Sherry for a beer. Ken was on the floor, laboriously practicing his scales on an out-of-tune guitar. “How’d y’all do?” Joyce asked the other girls.
“Don’t ask,” said Mal. “How about you? You were in there so long, I thought he’d knocked you up and you were having the baby already.”
“He just needed guidance. What do you mean, don’t ask?”
“I had some frat boy. Big muscly fuck. You saw him.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he turned out to be a real comedian.”
“He made fun of you?”
“Shit no. He was more like a real old-fashioned sort of comedian. Like a ventriloquist.”
“Okay. I guess I’ll just, like, sit here and wait patiently for you to get around to whatever the fuck you’re talking about.”
“He was a ventriloquist and his dick was the puppet. He made his little urethra-hole move like a mouth while he did a comedy routine in this high-pitched buzzy voice.”
In the second before Joyce started to laugh, Sherry gave her a disgusted look and said, “Isn’t that gross?” Joyce said, “You mean he uses his hands?”
“Of course he uses his hands.”
“What was his routine like?”
“Oh, you know. What would you expect from a dickhead like that? ‘Hey, baby, you got your snakebite kit? I sure hope so! Huh-uhuh-uh-uh!’ That kind of shit.”
Ken looked up from his twangy guitar. “But, hey, that’s not bad.”
“Shut up, Ken,” Joyce said cheerfully.
“Sherry had a good day,” Ken said. “Ask her. Sherry fell in love.” Joyce looked at Sherry as Ken tauntingly said “Oooo” and Sherry blushed and squirmed, struggling to hold back a smile. With a shock Joyce realized that Ken might be right, as far as Sherry was concerned, anyway. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Sherry said. “Of course I’m not in love with any of the boys we’re fucking, don’t be stupid. He was just nice, is all.”
“He was pretty nice,” Mal agreed. As usual her face was clear, and seemed free of dissembling. “Unless he was faking.” Sherry shot Mal a grateful look.
Mercifully for Sherry, the conversation then moved away from her john, who was named Bryce, and whom she reckoned she might really be in love with. He’d shown up at the same time as Floyd or whoever and Dick-Puppet, but he hadn’t known them. Sherry, Joyce, and Mal leaned against a wall while the johns sat on the sofa, looking confused, as Ken stood over them, holding that dumb spiked bat, reading that weird speech. Bryce was the one in the middle, though Sherry didn’t know his name yet. What a dork he was. His body was a skinny bundle of sticks. On top of his neck was balanced a very round, pale head, like a big ball; his red hair was slicked down and somehow plastered to his scalp, so as to accentuate the roundness. He had a beaky nose and nonexistent lips.
His watery blue eyes were small and uncertain behind the thick lenses of his black square-framed glasses. He wore a long-sleeve gray-black-and-blue button-up shirt, tucked into the tight blue jeans that hung loose on him, with a brown belt that matched his brown pair of nice walking shoes. Finally, Ken had finished his silly speech, the johns had stood up, and Ken had introduced everyone, announcing all six names. Sherry had stepped forward and, taking Bryce’s hand in hers, said, “Dibs.”
In Ken’s bedroom she’d spoken to him in whispers, and he’d responded to her discretion with his own low tones. Delighted, she’d run her finger down his red treasure trail. “Is this really your first time?”
He’d seemed decently embarrassed. “Yes.”
“How come you decided to come to the brothel?”
“It was sort of a spur of the moment thing. That guy Ken just asked me. Half the reason I came was to see if he was being for real.”
“Uh-huh. What about the other half?”
“I thought that I ought to get some experience. So that when I meet the girl of my dreams, I don’t embarrass myself.”
“That’s a nice idea.”
“I don’t know.” He’d gulped, but otherwise maintained his composure. “Now I’m thinking maybe I should have gotten the experience earlier. Because what if you’re the girl of my dreams?”
“Aw,” she’d said. “You’re doing just fine.”
Bryce appeared to be the nicest john they’d ever had, and Sherry considered it a triumph that she had scooped him up. Afterwards, she’d urged him to come back, and he had said he would try. Then she’d whispered that she would try to get him a discount—a big one. But that, she’d warned him, was super-secret.
6.
For a week all the johns were assholes. Mal got Dick-Puppet again, plus a guy who got rowdy when he was refused a lap dance. “I don’t do shit that makes me feel stupid,” she explained calmly. He made a stink for a while, but when Mal told him that he could take it or leave it, he sullenly allowed himself to be fucked. Mal didn’t much care what they were like, as long as they paid; and they all did, with nary a whine. Ken’s spiked bat had turned out to be as persuasive as he’d promised.