The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  And again.

  And again.

  At twenty years of age, twice was not unusual. Three times was not unknown. Four had occurred once, with Celeste in fact. And here I was going for six. Wait a minute, I thought: she’s going for six. Darcie was the one doing it. I stopped.

  “Something wrong, honey?” she asked.

  “Do you get paid by the come?”

  A pause. “That’s nasty,” she said.

  “Because?”

  “Because I get paid by the night. And if I don’t like the guy I don’t even show up. I’m not a whore. I’m a compensated companion.”

  The distinction escaped me, but even so it was wrong to fuck a woman for an hour and a half and then insult her. This was not so much a matter of ethics—in eros there is none—as much as simple manners. Besides, I had not meant an insult, merely a clarification. I found her hand, brought it to my lips, and kissed it. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “This kind of thing is new for me.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Compensated companionship.”

  “You’re apologizing?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think words are enough?”

  “Words caused it.”

  “Maybe you can think of something better.” With that she shifted her head and shoulders away from me and her bottom toward me so that my lips grazed the soft convexity of her breast. In the dimness of the room I could see nothing more than shapes. These grew more distinct as she raised her torso so as to press herself against my cheek, her nipple seeking my mouth. “Go ahead,” she said. “You want to. It’s okay.”

  It occurred to me abruptly, in the way it occurs to someone who suddenly discovers he prefers a warm climate or hates beer, that I had never been a breast man. Aesthetically, perhaps. A woman’s breast could be lovely, a statement of such poignancy it could make me stop in my tracks, but as an igniter of passion it was useless. In an era when female beauty was measurable by the cup, I seemed to have been a reluctant drinker.

  “Take it,” she said. “You know you want it.”

  But I didn’t know anything of the sort. Until her nipple found my lips. Something old, older than memory but still fresh, a sensation of unspeakable, ineffable longing, took hold—my lips tracing the circle of her aereola, flat and smooth within and bordered in Braille around, my tongue surrendering in circles like a lost boy in search of something long misplaced—until I found it.

  “Bite me,” she said quietly, firmly, decisively. “Bite me, Russy. Go ahead. You won’t hurt me.”

  I sucked.

  “Your teeth, Russy. I need to feel your teeth.”

  I bit tentatively, then felt her hand on my head, forcing it down onto her breast, the soft flesh pillowing my face, cutting off air until I shifted a half inch.

  “Like you mean it, Russy. You want me to be happy, don’t you? You want me to feel it, don’t you? You want—that’s it. That’s the way. But harder. Hard-er.”

  As hard as I bit she wanted me to bite down harder, to twist her nipple in my teeth, torturing it while she moaned as she had not all night and took me half-hard in her hand and stuffed me into her, expertly, easily, efficiently. In a matter of what seemed moments she came, really came, no sham, no pretense, no script, and took me with her, after which I stayed on her breast like an infant, totally without consciousness, without identity, without shame. I had been waiting for this all my life, and had not known.

  28.

  In the morning I woke in precisely the position I was in when I fell asleep. Maybe I had never sought soft women, maybe I was afraid of what I had never had. Maybe Sigmund Freud was laughing his head off. I didn’t care. I was in heaven and, to my great confusion, if not dismay, in love. Not only hadn’t this happened before—even my feelings for Marie-Antonetta were no match—but the object of this passion was twice my age, bleached her hair (which was now plastered down around her face like a collapsed frame around a portrait of dissolution), rented by the night—and snored. As quietly as I could I lifted myself off her marvelously cushioned tit—the real thing: implants were not in common use—and tiptoed around the bed, Shushan’s bed. According to the few words we had exchanged before we fell off together into a sleep so deep it was liquid, she had been “seeing” Shushan for eight years—or, not to put too fine a point on it, since I was twelve. As I passed her pillow her hand snaked out and grabbed mine.

  “You don’t get it, do you?”

  I sat down beside her, leaned down and pressed a long soft kiss on her brow, getting for reward a mouthful of long, straw-stiff platinum hair. “I don’t get what?”

  “I’m supposed to take care of you, sweetie.”

  “Russ or Russy.”

  “Uh, uh. You’re too sweet for that. I’m going to call you sweetie and if you don’t like it you can jerk yourself off. You are so, so sweet.” She lay her hand in my crotch in such a way that at once she claimed ownership and let me know any such decision was mine.

  This kind of affection, at once possessive and liberating, was something I was not used to. It made me uneasy. Was this too part of being a compensated companion? Even more perilous, was it real? “I need coffee,” I said. “You want some?”

  Abruptly, and with a verticular grace I could not have expected in a woman so horizontally lithe, she was instantly on her feet beside me by the bed. Even shoeless she was tall—how could I have missed that?—and so generously proportioned she seemed to overflow herself, like the head on a beer when it rises above the rim of a Pilsner glass. Her upper arms hung soft, maternal, her breasts stretched long until they rounded out perfectly like water-filled balloons, upon the face of each a distinct nearly phallic nose, itself encircled by a deep pucker like a science-fair volcano, her middle a cake fresh from the oven and partially collapsed upon itself. Supporting this architectural amplitude were two impossibly slim legs, thin almost, shapely as saplings footed in nine-inch beds—we probably could wear each other’s shoes—though her feet were much narrower, long toes ending in nails lacquered so brightly in red they seemed like ten tiny stop signs. On her inner thighs were tattoos in blue, though they appeared black on her pale skin: on the right Semper, on the left Fidelis, and printed upside down, either as a reminder to Darcie or a caution to anyone who might find himself so intimately positioned. “I make you coffee, stud,” she said in such a way that I felt close to melting. Compensated or not, no woman had made me coffee or anything else warm since before memory. It was rare that I let a girl stay over on Eastern Parkway, rarer still for me to stay over at a girl’s—most still lived with their parents. When it did occur I would take them out to breakfast at the luncheonette on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Nostrand, where the countermen, envious of what for me was a form of post-orgasmic torture, would offer me the compliment of a wink.

  So it was that I remained in bed while through the wall, the one with the Jimmy Ernst black-on-black, I could hear Darcie preparing breakfast. I may have dozed off, or perhaps I was merely in that state that is somewhere between sleep and acuity, a kind of super sensitivity to what normally remains beneath the surface but upon which our lives depend. In this state it became clear to me that unless I took action I would remain a cosseted prisoner of this suite in the Hotel Westbury on Sixty-Third and Park, well-fed, well-read, well-fucked, well-loved even, but ultimately a lost soul, protected and insulated but robbed of that freedom we like to think defines humanity as both species and ideal. Resolving thus to take back my life, no one was more surprised than I when Darcie nudged me awake with a cup of fresh coffee, a glass of orange juice and an English muffin dripping with melted butter and oozing raspberry jam, to discover that in my half-sleep I had hatched a perfectly realized, highly detailed, and extremely aggressive plan.

  “After you eat, sweetie,” she said, “I’m going to eat you.”

  “You are?”

  “Like you’ve never been done before.”

  I had never seen a woman leer. It was thrillin
g, like being smacked with something delicious, the shock mitigated by the smell, the taste, the promise. “How’s that?”

  “Down to the bone.”

  Darcie was as good as her word. Certainly she had a lot more experience than the girls I normally saw, who seemed to view oral sex as something between an obligation and a rite of passage, but she also loved what she did, sliding me so deep inside her I was at first afraid she might choke, and only when she kept me from withdrawing did I realize this was another league, the National Sexual League, another country, the United Sex of America, or even another sexual planet, Venus for sure. Who knew what it was—who cared? Then, when I could feel myself on the approach to orgasm, which obviously she could feel as well, she stopped, pulled away, and in one deft motion presented the full amplitude of her bottom. She was not a natural platinum blonde, but a natural coquette, wiggling her ass with such assurance, such clarity of purpose, such ease, that I moved quickly to get off my back to mount her, until I felt her hand on me, guiding me northward, and slowly insert it, corkscrewing her bottom as though it were separated from her body, a perpetual motion machine that worked while the rest of her remained perfectly still.

  I’d never felt such welcome, the warmth of her drawing me slowly into her, centimeter by lubricious centimeter, and though later I compared this to the constricted butt-fucking I had engaged in with a couple of girls who pretended they liked it but needed a quarter pound of Crisco to get me half in, while it happened all I could think of was a future opening before me whose end I could not imagine but which would be wholly justified by the means. After I came Darcie allowed me, shrunken, totally spent, to ease out of her, and then, like a beneficent nurse or a mothering bitch, wrapped her lips around me and cleaned me so thoroughly I would not need to bathe. Then she cupped my chin in her hand, brought my face close to hers, and laughed.

  “I’d kiss you, sweetie, but I taste like shit.”

  How could I not kiss her? In a matter of moments she was dressed, and gone. Thus sorted out, every kink unbent, I went to work.

  29.

  It was Thursday, which meant I had only one full day to prepare, because I had asked Justo to let Auro Sfangiullo know I would be visiting Dolce Far Niente on Friday at two.

  The accountant arrived just in time to meet Darcie walking out. I can’t say who was most embarrassed: Darcie, who smiled brazenly at Justo before giving him a kiss on the forehead—she was a head taller; Justo, who looked like I had stolen something from a dead man—his eyes widened, then narrowed, then widened again; or myself, who suddenly realized, the big head seeing what the little head had ignored, that I was fucked both ways. If Shushan were by some miracle among the living, a fact against which every passing hour was proof to the contrary, I had been screwing his woman, compensated or not; if Shushan was a corpse, I was pretty close to having robbed a fresh grave. That there was uncertainty either way afforded little solace. With neither death nor life proven, I was compelled to carry both burdens. It was like being a bisexual without a date on a Saturday night: twice as lonely.

  Justo sat down opposite me on one of the green-leather couches, lit a cigarette and said... nothing.

  “I guess you’re thinking ill of me,” I said, hoping at least to get this over with.

  “Me?”

  “No,” I said, pointing upward. “Him.”

  “Him I don’t know about,” Justo said. “I know about me. First of all, until I learn different you’re the boss. Being the boss comes with certain perks. Darcie, that’s just a small one. Which, by the way, you can swap any time you want. You can have hot and cold running pussy up here, just in case you don’t know. Black, white, oriental, fat, thin, young, even older. Shushan, he was kind of partial to Darcie, but she’s not exactly your showroom quality late model, right? A lot of miles on that broad. But this kind of decision isn’t for me. I’m just the accountant.”

  “Accountants don’t have opinions?”

  “Not if they’re smart. Shushan let me know it early. I don’t buy the beans or sell the beans or even get to steal the beans, and for sure I don’t spill them. I just count them. Shushan wants to know what he’s got where, I tell him. Likewise, what he owes, what he’s owed. There’s reason in that. Chinga, if I’m involved in doing the business I can’t watch the business. Besides which, I’m not built for busting heads. I’m built for...”

  “Yes?”

  “For giving the boss information.”

  “Because you know all the details?”

  “I’m supposed to,” Justo said, grinding out his Old Gold in the ashtray already full of scarlet-tipped butts. Old Gold was a brand that had a coupon stuck to the back of every pack. When you had collected enough coupons you could redeem them for a wallet or a toaster or a radio.

  In a little while a hotel maid would come in to straighten up. They always came around ten. Every day I gave the woman a fiver, which at that time was real money. You could eat a whole meal in a nice luncheonette for a buck. The money came from a big pile in my pocket that Justo had left me the first night, a thousand bucks. He called it “walking-around money,” though there wasn’t anyplace I could walk. “Maybe you should fill me in,” I said.

  “You ask, I’ll answer,” he said. “If I know.”

  “What did my father do for Shushan Cats?”

  No silence could have been louder than in the moments that passed while Justo lit another Old Gold, sat back on the couch, and removed his eyeglasses to wipe them with a white handkerchief from his outside breast-pocket. When he got the lenses pristine he pulled a long comb out of his inside breast-pocket and drew it methodically through his slick black hair, from forehead to the nape of his carefully barbered neck, then from each temple back around to the same spot. His hair so hugged his scalp it seemed to be painted on, and gave his beaky, angular face an eagle’s look, alert, aggressive, reserved.

  “Are you going to have a shave as well?” I asked. “Because, despite what you might believe, I don’t have much time.”

  “Because of Arnold?”

  “Because of Arnold, yes, and because probably as I sit here watching you prevaricate—you know that word?—our friends the Tintis are probably carefully dismantling the business that pays your salary, and provides me with the possibility, as you put it, of hot and cold running pussy. So say what you have to say.”

  He took a breath. “We’re all concerned about the Tintis,” he said.

  “All?”

  He shrugged. “Me, Ira, Mrs. Ira, Terri, for sure Darcie too. And of course every bookie in Brooklyn and in the Manhattan territory, plus the brothers, and the chinks, to say nothing of everyone associated in one way or another with the fish market. It’s a big problem.”

  “We’ll deal with it,” I said, projecting a confidence I did not precisely feel. “But first I want to know about the little problem.”

  “Meyer Newhouse.” For emphasis Justo stubbed out his second butt, half-smoked. “A fine man, Mike. Let me start with that.”

  “Thank you, though you probably know more about him than I do.”

  “You know what happened with the NYPD, right?”

  “I was there. My father and I lived in the same apartment.”

  “I paid your rent yesterday,” Justo said. “Just in case you’re concerned.”

  “I have ten days before it’s due.”

  “Shushan likes to pay early. Sometimes the mail to Brooklyn, it’s like a foreign country. But you don’t have to worry. I took care of it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not at all, boss. It’s my job. What exactly do you want to know about your old man?”

  “When did he start working for Shushan?”

  A shrug. “He joined the payroll in fifty-seven, March I think—I’d have to look it up—but for some time before he was more or less freelancing. Shushan needed a tough Jew, he called on your father. And he was one tough Jew.”

  “To do what?”

  “Sometimes just to show up.”r />
  “To show up?”

  “You know, somebody was making trouble, Mike would show up. Somebody was leaning on a friend, Shushan didn’t like to have to intervene personally unless there was a real necessity. This was a time we started reducing the payroll, because we didn’t need feet on the street. But it wasn’t like today. We still had guys. I mean, big guys. But he’d send Mike. I mean, your father was my size. Mike would... show up.”

  “And...”

  “If necessary, lean back.”

  “My father was an enforcer for Shushan Cats?”

  “Nah,” Justo said. “First of all, what did Shushan have to enforce? Nobody was going to bother our bookies, not with Shushan having a writ from Auro Sfangiullo—”

  “A writ.”

  “A permit, like. Or a license. Maybe more like a blessing. It wasn’t in writing. Just everyone knew not to even think about challenging Shushan because he was tight with Sfangiullo. They had an agreement between them. This business, Shushan used to say it should be called disorganized crime. Most of the time everyone is at everyone else’s throat. They’ll fight like cats over a piece of mouse you practically can’t see. Who controlled what was always in flux, still is. But in some cases, like with the Fulton Fish Market and the bookies in Brooklyn and some territories in Manhattan, the boundaries of territories were as clear as on those Hammond globes. Outside of that and a few similar situations, chaos. What can I tell you? Gangsters aren’t geographers or statesmen or anything rational. And the people at the top of the pile encourage it. You know why? Because if the lower levels are fighting among themselves they won’t think of attacking the top layer and supplanting them. So when you hear about the so-called highly organized, super-disciplined Mafia, you’re reading the usual newspaper stuff, fiction. In this business, unless you have a writ, the only thing that counts is feet on the street. Shushan had a writ. Where was I going with this?”