Brothel

by J. Boyett

  Affronted, the john said, “Bitch, who’s fucking paying you?!”

  “I think you have an inflated idea of how exorbitant my fee is. You give me a million dollars, plus go scrub up in the shower for a hundred years, and I’ll pop it in my mouth for maybe half a second.”

  The john turned red and his breathing got heavy; his face literally swelled, and Mal, curious, wondered if she was going to get hit. “You cunt,” he gasped. Somewhere on the psychological plane she had done something to him which bore only an accidental relation to her real-world actions. Then he did it! He slapped her! A little cuff across the mouth with the palm of his left hand. Because they were in such close quarters, he wasn’t able to put much force behind the blow. Mal’s eyes widened and she burst into laughter. “Oooo!” she exclaimed.

  This enraged the john, and he slowly and laboriously reared back to get better leverage. Mal reflected that it was a lucky thing he wasn’t trying to strangle her; the big lug probably would have managed that. He drew back his left hand, glaring down at her with hatred. Mal grinned and waggled her eyebrows. “Don’t fuck up, now,” she advised.

  He backhanded her, this time getting a respectable slap in. Mal felt her teeth cut the inside of her lip, and she tasted blood. Laughing harder, she cried, “Hey, Ken! Get in here and whack this asshole for me!”

  Had he been waiting just beyond the door? Ken burst in immediately, brandishing the spiked bat. He danced over to the edge of the bed, and then, after executing a twirl he had seen many times in Conan the Barbarian, he brought the spiked bat firmly down on the john’s ass, business-end first.

  The john had only been staring at Ken in amazement. Once punctured, though, he first gasped, and then let out a howl.

  Mal laughed. Ken studied the pierced john. “You want me to take it out?” he asked Mal.

  “You’d better,” said Mal, “otherwise I’ll be stuck under the big galumph forever.”

  The john looked back down at Mal and took a time-out from yowling and weeping to sob, “You bitch!”

  “Tsk tsk,” said Ken, and wiggled the nail around. Judging from the john’s reaction, this was excruciating. “Don’t make me rip you a new asshole.”

  “Come on,” said Mal, still amused, “leave him mobile. I don’t want to be suffocated.”

  “Well, the spike is kind of wedged into his butt.”

  The door to the marijuana room flew open and Joyce and her john rushed in, wrapped in blankets. “I heard—” began Joyce, and then the pair lurched to a speechless halt before the grisly tableau. “He didn’t buy the speech,” Ken said. “Spell must not’ve worked.” The pierced john upped the ante, volume-wise. “Take it out!” begged Joyce’s client.

  “Yeah,” Mal agreed, shoving against the guy’s bulky shoulders, “let’s get a move on.”

  “Oh, well,” said Ken, regretfully. He yanked the nail out, eliciting a little yelp from the john. Now Ken held the spiked bat like he was standing in the on-deck batter’s box, ready to pounce. “Nice and easy now,” he said. “You just hop off the nice lady now, big fellow, and no monkey business.”

  “You leave him alone!” cried the uninjured, tear-streaked john.

  “Sure, so long as he doesn’t hurt anyone,” Ken said. He sounded very reasonable. Joyce’s breathing had gotten rapid and shallow, and she remained speechless.

  The john eased himself off of Mal, sniffling and yelping and groaning, and got shakily to his feet. Mal slid off the bed and made a beeline for her clothes; Joyce couldn’t remember ever having seen Mal grin like that before. The wounded john was trying to pull up and fasten his pants with trembling hands, the blood flowing from his ass staining jeans and underwear.

  Ken stood in front of him, spiked bat at the ready. “You tell anybody and we’ll tell your mom,” he nonchalantly said. The john sniffed.

  Seeing the blood drip from the nail, Joyce felt a wave of nausea. She realized that, given the positions of the two boys and the way Ken was holding the bat, if he were to swing now he would get the john in the head. Maybe not in the temple or anything. But in the jaw, maybe. She found her voice, albeit only enough to say, “Jesus, Ken.”

  “You asshole,” added her boy. He kept plenty far back from the rogue pimp, though.

  “What?” A stranger might have bought Ken’s hurt expression (Joyce’s bewildered john did buy it, in fact). “I read the speech! I made sure everyone was quiet during it! So what the fuck?”

  Joyce could only repeat, “Jesus,” shaking her head.

  Mal made a derisive noise as she slipped the T-shirt back over her head. Then she grinned at Joyce and with a jolt Joyce saw for the first time that Mal’s mouth was bloody. “Fuck him, Joyce. He was hitting me, so I called Ken to take care of the piece of shit. Don’t you know that’s what pimps are for?”

  The uninjured john snapped at her: “Well, if you’re so upset, how come you’re fucking laughing now? Huh?”

  Mal looked at him coolly. “I’m not laughing,” she said, “I’m smiling. And I didn’t say he upset me. I just said he hit me.”

  Joyce continued to shake her head at Ken, who said, “Well, jeez! I’m sorry!” He threw his hands up in an I-couldn’t-help-it gesture, and in the process swung the bat and hit the wall with a whack loud enough to make everyone but himself and Mal jump. “He was beating on her so I whammed him.”

  “It’s true,” Mal said to Joyce. “The guy’s a pig.” The johns didn’t protest; Joyce’s was busy fussing over his buddy, who was whimpering and struggling to shut up and control himself manfully.

  Joyce sighed. “Well, I guess we’ll have to give them both freebies, anyway.”

  Mal was kneeling to tie her shoes. Now her hands froze, and she looked up and locked eyes with Joyce, all traces of a smile suddenly gone. “No,” she said. “My job is to lie down and get fucked and I did that. I’ll be damned if I’m going to give this loser a hundred-percent discount because he beat on me.”

  “Yeah,” said Ken, eyeing Joyce as if she were a little nuts. “No fucking way I’m going to go without my commission the one time I actually do my job.”

  They ushered the sullen, shaken boys out, which wasn’t too hard. Getting paid was only slightly more difficult—the doubly-assholed john made some indignant noises about it, but Ken standing there with his spiked bat proved to be an effective motivator. For her part, Joyce waived her client’s debt, preferring to pay Ken’s commission out of her own pocket.

  Mal skipped out to her car and left as soon as she’d received her payment and given Ken his tiny cut, ignoring his protests at the lack of a bonus.

  11.

  Joyce still hung out with Sherry occasionally (and Bryce along with her—that guy got more boring every day); but Mal she didn’t see a whole lot of, once everything had been called off. With the money Mal made stripping, she’d moved out of the dorm and gotten an apartment; she had a roommate, some tattooed chick. Sometimes Joyce thought she ought to ring old Mal up, invite her out for a pizza in the student center, just because it was a good idea to keep in touch with people. And because she was curious. Did Mal still fuck any of the old guys, herself? Did she feel elegaic, embarrassed? Relieved? They sometimes passed each other on campus, or bumped into one another in town, and they usually stopped and talked a while, Mal with that distant expression. But Joyce never properly invited her out. Maybe Mal lived in a whole different dimension—maybe that was all horseshit.… Joyce was a little scared of Mal. Was she human in the same way Joyce was? Was there a secret trauma, the singularity at her vacuum core?

  Mal rarely spoke to anyone. But the work, dead as it was, naturally followed her around. There was some sniggering on campus, but she was glacial. One guy, though, gave her a lot of shit. She couldn’t remember his name, but he was the one who’d manipulated his urethra as if it were a puppet’s mouth. He sat with some other frat boys behind her in Astronomy, and they would spend all period nudging each other and whispering and (though they would have called it “laughing”)
giggling. The seating was tiered, and whenever the prof turned to face the whiteboard they would throw spitballs and folded-up notes down at her. She never changed her seat, nor read their notes. No one would sit next to her after a while.

  One day, as she walked into class, she found Dick Puppet lying in wait for her just inside the doorway. He blocked her way and beamed down at her, grinning with perfectly straight, yellow teeth, as if his parents had gotten him braces but he had never bothered to use his toothbrush. “Hey, baby,” he said. “Remember me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You were memorably forgettable.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “See?”

  He kept up his dopey grin. “I got some friends want to meet you.”

  “You mean those boys with the dicks bigger than yours?”

  His grin faded momentarily, but then he recovered, saying, “You ain’t seen their dicks.”

  “Sure I have. They’re sticking up out of their shirts.”

  He laughed—haw! haw!—like he thought they were making witty conversation at some sophisticated cocktail square-dance. She shouldn’t have made a joke, she knew. Technically, having done so meant that they were bantering now. “Come on, baby, let me introduce you. You ought to give us a two-for-one deal.”

  “Oh, please. You’re going to haggle with me?”

  “Come on, baby, everybody likes money, don’t they? Why you want to work at McDonald’s or some shit when you got that beautiful pussy right there?”

  “You got a little piece of tobacco on your front tooth.” While he was going haw! haw! she pushed past him. She hadn’t sounded anything but tired.

  Whether he really expected to fuck her again or not, he didn’t leave her alone. Whenever their paths crossed—on campus, in the grocery store, in the movie theater—he would hoot and whisper things to the guys he was with, and giggle. Then, one day, he did it when they were alone together.

  She was walking to her car, which she’d parked in a secluded little parking lot a block from Ken’s apartment. When she rounded the corner of the overgrown fence and stepped through the gate, she saw none other than Dick Puppet, just getting out of his truck. It wasn’t a set-up—his astonished gaping was too genuine. He quickly switched to a leer. “Hey, baby,” he said. “What a coincidence. Must be in the fucking stars, huh?”

  She looked him up and down, then checked for bystanders. She turned back to him just as he was saying, “Hey, baby. You want to skip class, baby?”

  She continued to stare evenly at him, thoughtfully chewing the bubble gum she was using to quit smoking. After she’d considered for a moment, she said, “How much money you got?”

  The question stumped him for a second. Then he said, “Uh, like, fifty bucks.”

  “You want a blow job?”

  He tried to read her expression, but no one could have done that. “You serious?”

  “You got fifty bucks and a dick?”

  He switched tactics: “Fifty bucks for a blow job?”

  “Jesus. What do you care? It’s your momma’s money, ain’t it?”

  “Well. Okay, shit. Where at? Just back at that same old apartment?”

  “No. I don’t do anything with those people anymore. Right here’s fine.”

  He was flabbergasted. “In the parking lot? Outside?”

  “You dumb-ass. In my car, I mean.”

  Dick Puppet was watching her face closely, like he thought something was fishy. “How about my truck?”

  “Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what kind of shit you’ve got in there, and I don’t trust people who throw spitballs. Plus your truck’s right out in the open in the middle of the parking lot. We get arrested for public lewdness, your momma going to bail me out, too? My car’s parked right up facing the wall.” When he still looked hesitant, she added, “Either we do it in my car, or you can go back to playing games with your boyfriends in Astronomy.”

  The “boyfriends” thing got him. “All right, all right,” he said. “Your car, whatever.”

  She nodded curtly and walked to her car, pulling her key ring out of her jeans pocket. He followed, silent at last, and went to stand uncertainly on the passenger side, waiting impatiently with his hand on the door handle while she unlocked her side, tossed her backpack in the backseat, got in, shut and locked her own door, and reached over to unlock his. He got in and sat down, slamming the door, acting like he was supposed to be there. Mal looked at him. She swallowed her gum. It had lost its flavor, anyway. He looked at her, grinned, and put his hand on her inner thigh. She didn’t tell him that she’d only agreed to a blow job and to fucking move his hand. She turned in her seat to face him, and, still with that eerily blank face (which was what made him desire and hate her so much), she put her hands on his shoulders, and pulled him toward her. He tried to dive for her mouth, but she ducked her head out of the way and his face ended up between her right shoulder and her neck. “Unzip my pants,” she said, “while I get a condom out of the glove box.”

  He licked her neck, a big sloppy swipe, and whined, “Why I got to unzip your pants for a blow job?”

  “Because I want you to.” She stretched out her left arm and opened the glove box, and began fishing around inside.

  “Well, if we’re doing what you want, how come I got to pay?” Nevertheless, he crammed his hand down into her crotch and started fumbling about. “Shit,” he muttered, “your pants’re too fucking tight!” His voice was too loud, so close to her ear. For no reason, he bit her on the neck hard enough to draw blood, and Mal gasped in pain and decided he would pay for that. She took the gun out of the glove box and pointed the barrel down at his dick. “Hey,” she said in a normal speaking voice. “Look at this.”

  Feeling the gun barrel press through the denim against the head of his erect penis, he withdrew his face from her spitty, bloody neck, looked down, and yelped. He jumped up a little, but she ground the gun down harder into his crotch to hold him still. He stared down at it, breathing dangerously fast. “Hey,” she said, and when he still didn’t look up at her she cocked the gun and said, “Hey, asswipe. Look at me!” He did. It was amazing, the change in his face. His lips had parted, he’d gone pale, he was starting to sweat, the sound of his breathing filled the car. “Be quiet,” she said, her voice still low but full of command. “Breathe quieter or I’ll shoot your dick off.” He didn’t exactly comply, but he was obviously trying to. Mal had never seen anyone so scared, not even Sherry.

  He licked his dry lips with the tip of his dry, trembling tongue. “Come on,” he said, “give me a break. I was just fooling.”

  She leaned back against her door, considering her captured specimen. “I want you to know,” she said, “I don’t give a shit if you respect me, and I don’t mind if you and your boyfriends keep throwing spitballs at me in class. I just wanted to tell you, just once, so you’d know, how stupid you looked, that one time, when you were pretending your dick had a mouth.”

  He stared at her, concentrating, the way a person terrified of flying will stare at the wing of a plane all the way across the ocean. Doubtless he would later think of all sorts of things to say to her, but by then she would be gone.

  Mal tried to form her words as carefully as possible, to say exactly the right thing. “I just wanted you to know,” she said, “that I’m more dangerous than you.”

  Now she brought the gun up, tracing it languorously up from his dick to his belly button, sternum, throat, chin. “Open your mouth,” she ordered him mildly. When he hesitated, she pressed the barrel against his chin and hardened her voice: “Open it!” Now he obeyed, and she slipped it in, pushing the muzzle so far back in his throat that he gagged and retched and pleaded with her with his eyes. She sat up straighter, arching her back, and brought her face very close to his, feeling sexy again. “From now on,” she purred, “every time, every time you get a hard-on, I want you to think about this, my gun in your mouth, my gun on your cock, and see if you can stay
hard.” Then, suddenly, she sat back again, pulling the gun out and banging it carelessly against his teeth. She kept it trained on him. “Get the fuck out of my car,” she said, sounding bored now.

  He obeyed quickly, if clumsily. Once he got the door open he fell out backwards and scooted frantically away on his ass, then froze after five feet, staring up at her in terror.

  Mal had been about to drive off; but now it occurred to her that she might’ve fucked up. She studied this wilted boy on the other side of her gun, and watched the dark stain spreading out from the crotch of his pants. Maybe she’d pushed him too far. Maybe he’d gone past the breaking point, and maybe tomorrow, or the next day, he’d gun her down in Astronomy. It was possible. Guys who’d been jilted far more gently did the same thing all the time. Looking at him now, it occurred to her that the safest thing to do might be to kill him.

  But oh well. You can’t always be safe. And what was she supposed to do, shoot him right here in cold blood? She figured that would be even riskier in the long run than letting him go. The logistics would be too difficult. So she reached over, slammed and locked the passenger’s door, started her engine, and drove off. And, as it turned out, he didn’t kill her at all. Instead he just dropped out of Astronomy, and, when they happened to bump into each other in town, he acted like he didn’t see her, and turned and walked the other way.

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