“She’s mine!” she hollered at the men around her. She pulled up the back of my skirt and kneaded ma cheek. I swayed still, but I was more than content with the attentions. She continued to rub my ass before we clasped our faces together, to the obvious glee and erroneous din of the many men folk around us.
Before long, we felt a number of hands at our backs, pointing us towards a door to another room. In there was the large, polished table I had heard of. We were both instantly pushed against its side and the hands and mouths instantly became upon us both.
Gosh, this be a frisky bunch, I thought. Lydia pulled herself up backwards onto the table and grabbed at my shoulders pulling me away from my suitor. She dragged my load onto the sheen of the table top and asked for a quietened hush whilst we performed. She grandstanded with a bravado I hadn’t seen in her before.
“I can safely say that tonight will be all of your nights, gentlemen. So if you would all grant us the courtesy of doing our turn, then you can all have your wicked way with us . . . in time. Just be patient.” Lydia took my hand once more and raised me to my stockinged feet. “And for those who are extra patient, you will get to see myself interact with my friend here in the act of physical lovemaking. So do, gentlemen . . . be ever patient . . .”
I tried to compose myself through the dance as the whiskey flowed through my bloodstream and filled my head. We continued with our lewd posturin’ and Lydia brought me off with her fingers as we stood side by side and leered at the soldiers below us. I’m sure I peeled too quickly, as something sent the throng of men in our vicinity into a lustful rage and they all came upon us. Lydia pleaded and insisted that we finished our turn, to which she turned her attentions upon myself. She lay me on my back and straddled herself over me, covering my face with her desire and playing to the baying crowd, requestin’ what she should do to me. Jackets adorned with badges and signs of bravery and daring escapades of which I had little knowledge of were tossed to one side, leaving tunics and ties askew. She rubbed her crotch over my face as she called for a nearby stud to join us on the table.
“Fuck her right here!” she ordered.
“Yes, Ma’am . . .” I heard him over the din.
Before long, myself and Lydia took on the throng of flesh before us. Soon, I found a searching hand which first kneaded my breast but settled on clasping my hand tight. It was my Lydia, in a similar overwhelmed state to me. I squeezed her hand in response as my below was filled with soldier and the weapons of other men hung before me, invitingly. I took each of them into my mouth one by one as each of the men pounded my crotch until they were completely spent and were happy to put their swords back into their sheaths, drained of their ejaculate.
The garrison took us to count on all charges, giving us a thorough search before leaving us on the battlefield, spent, torn and defeated. They chuckled amongst one another, returning to their flowing supply of pillaged Scotch from the smugglers, captured in the bay waters every week. They laughed and bellowed inconsiderately in the background about how they had duly conquered us.
The wagon was called and we headed back to the Dew Drop. We chose to lay with one another on the straw-covered floor, by the baskets of salt and the hung, cured meat. We held each other in our arms, our toes buried in the folds of one another’s skirts to keep warm in the Summer night’s chill. We yearned for nothing but sanctuary and a nice long soak together, even the hard mattress in Lydia’s room to finally collapse on.
4 July 1862, San Francisco
The sky crackles and lights up in multi-coloured sparkles. We are celebrating our independence from the British. I stand outside the Dew Drop with Mamma Carter. The hustle and bustle of life goes on around us. Some celebrate, some need not care. Some are looking for their next taste of opium and some just the next taste of someone like me. They look in wonder and curiosity, these figures who have lain with me in the more recent past. I can see them wondering about the etiquette of approaching me outside the safe confines of the Inn. Mamma Carter puts a big fat arm around me and hollers the first few bars of an out of tune blues number,
“You aint got no hold over me, ma sugar . . .”
Icelys
Michèle Larue
Translated by Noël Burch
Warm ocean air wafted over Icelys’ round shoulders and broke in wavelets down her bare back. In her yellow, thigh-hugging bicycle-racer’s tights, the beautiful mulata was walking downwind on Avenida Zanja, in the direction of Havana’s Chinatown. Two women hobbled past her in the opposite direction, laboring under the weight of their embonpoint. As Icelys squeezed between the two mountains of flesh, she just missed stepping into a pot-hole in the sidewalk, likely to be fatal to wearers of platform soles like hers. She remembered a line from a funny old film she’d seen at school. Memories of Underdevelopment: “Cuban women’s thighs have been ruined by kidney beans!” If she stayed in Cuba, she’d get fat for sure. The fear of not having enough to eat, the latent anguish, the stress that made her turn up the stereo and get high on decibels, the dread of becoming a shadow, a shadow of herself, on this island where the women were offered up to foreigners like fish in a bowl, the sudden flash of lucidity gave her a shot of adrenaline.
“Pss-pss!”
A line of workers against a wall were lusting after her plump buttocks. Further along, more young men, their arms under the hood of a car in front of a makeshift garage, stared wide-eyed as she passed.
One bare-chested mechanic wiped his hands on a grease-stained rag, snatched a blood-red T-shirt from the handlebars of a bicycle and shouted after her: “Que calor, eh, mi vida!”
Breasts held high, Icelys sashayed along in the white light of noon. What was the matter with those hard-up guys, always bugging her like that, trying to get a rise out of her!
“Too hot to walk,” the boy observed, giving his pals a wink as he fell in step behind her.
A dialogue ensued, like ping-pong with blindfolds.
“A can of beer under a palm-tree, beautiful!”
“I got a date, man! Think I’ve been waiting for you to get my kicks?” she answered without turning around.
The boy in the red T-shirt offered to take her to the beach, Santa Maria del Mar, on the other side of the tunnel at the end of the bay. But Icelys wasn’t interested in Cuban men. She had just one thing in mind: living in Bologna. It had been an obsession with her ever since she’d started seeing the Italian. Just an ordinary tourist who’d chatted her up one hot night in a bar in old Havana. He wasn’t much to look at, but he was going to be the one who would save her. No spring chicken either, fifty, maybe sixty. But an attentive companion, understanding, ideal.
She continued proudly on her way, the mechanic still tagging behind. He was ready to take her anywhere she wanted, he said, and it wouldn’t cost her a penny. She shot back: “Riding on a bicycle carrier isn’t my style!”
“What? You don’t believe me? You just passed my Lada, the green one there, half up on the sidewalk!”
“That heap doesn’t have any tires!” Icelys retorted, getting into the spirit of the game.
She crossed an untended garden, stepped over a fat tree-root protruding from the soil. The ground breeze swept a leaf with a purplish gloss ahead of her. Icelys thought she recognized an image of her lips fluttering over the asphalt. Fate was giving her a sign. Skittering across the sidewalk, the leaf flitted about the platform soles of the boy following her. His foot crushed the violet ribs just as Icelys turned into the small, dilapidated courtyard. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and rang the bell on Oreste’s building. Her pursuer stood undecided on the sidewalk, then retraced his steps, gnawing his fingernails.
What the garage mechanic could not know was that this young woman had plucked, powdered and generally curried her body merely to receive a phone call, that she worked at the cardiovascular hospital where the whole surgery clinic throbbed to the beat of her love affair, and where all her fellow-nurses admired her stubborn battle for a travel permit.
> Seated under the ceiling fan in Oreste’s living-room, Icelys thought she could see the end of privations, the day when she would fly away. She dreamt of supple fabrics, fluffy woolens, snowflakes blanketing the Dolomites in winter, while Oreste moved about the room, feet dragging in flip-flops. She began to wonder what he was up to, laying a pair of socks on a chest of drawers, opening a wardrobe, coming back empty-handed. Oreste was well past forty but el Viejo, as he was called in Chinatown, was a wonder. His reputation in bed was unrivaled. This was due to a lethargic temperament according to Mercedes, Icelys’ mother, purveyor of neighborhood gossip in the solar where they lived. That Oreste! A bachelor father who pampered his three little daughters, Three Graces by different mothers, all easy enough to marry off with their silken hair and slender bodies.
On the father, not a wrinkle, not a single white hair. Face as smooth as a coffee bean. And a sister who sent him regular sums from Florida. Icelys remembered the benefactress, her bristling hairdo, and everything that came out of those huge suitcases of hers when she showed up in Havana: kitchen robots, blonde wigs, Italian moccasins for her brother. When it was time for her to go home to America, she took a dozen religious statues in her luggage, sacred stones hidden in a flowered tureen or rolled inside an African dress. Was it by virtue of their supernatural powers that the effigies of her saints had gotten through customs? Fifty pounds of ritual objects. Was her brother so busy with his womanizing he couldn’t dust off his sister’s altar from time to time?
Watching el Viejo busy himself about the room, she remembered some gossip she’d heard: there was supposed to be something special about Oreste’s sex, a thing which could really satisfy a woman. Icelys was intrigued by the effects this gimmick evidently produced on the women she glimpsed as they emerged from the bed, faces swollen from love-making whenever she arrived too early on Saturday mornings; women Oreste had taken dancing the night before. She nibbled the inside of her cheeks, lowered her eyes and there, in the crotch of her cycling tights, saw a dark spot on the yellow Lycra. A golden butterfly was gathering nectar on her bulging pubis. She felt embarrassed and swiveled her chair to one side. The faint throbbing of her thighs must have produced a draft, for the shadow was fading. Whistling under his breath, Oreste was hanging up his shirt to dry on the gas-pipe behind the refrigerator. He flattened the sleeves and patted down the starched collar. Graceful in his immaculate tank-top, he poured rum into a porcelain thimble and held it out.
“The call will come soon, mamita, I can feel it.”
At length the phone rang, and the master of the house nodded his condescending permission: she could pick it up. Armed with her Italian lessons, the young woman leapt in with a heartfelt Come vai? But her fiancé would hardly let her get a word in edgewise. She was so churned up just to hear his voice that she wept for joy when he said he would invite her to Bologna the following summer, and only pulled herself together long enough before he hung up to tell him how much she missed him, Caro mio, amore mio!
No sooner had she put the phone down than Oreste took a seat on a chair facing her. He put his hand on her knee and warned her about the cold weather in Italy: one would have thought she was planning to emigrate to Siberia.
“It’s not just the temperature that’s wrong, muchacha. Over there, people live shut away in their houses. They pass you in the street, walking fast and looking worried. They don’t share anything with their neighbors, can you imagine that? No way to borrow anything from someone who lives across the hall . . . And what’s this Italian got that’s so special, mi vida?”
She told him how kind her fiancé was to her, what fine European manners he had. Then she began running over the list of presents he’d given her.
“A backless dress with yellow stripes . . . You’ve seen it, I wore it to your last wedding . . . My silver bracelet, here, look: with my name engraved on it. A color TV for Mamma . . .” Oreste’s hand crawled slowly on the yellow Lycra while Icelys enumerated her presents on her fingers.
She lost count . . . Her cheeks were suddenly flushed with heat and her voice distorted by lust as she came straight out and asked to see his specialty, his “girl-trap”, the mysterious something that gave the women who went with him that languorous gaze. Oreste blew his nose in a little white handkerchief and gazed at her as he folded it carefully: “If I show it to you, you have to try it out.”
Icelys’ laugh was a bit too loud. Ever since she’d first sat thinking on that chair, watching her host move slowly around the room, she’d had a hard time controlling herself. She dropped to her knees. Her hands were to Oreste’s fly, but she hesitated to tackle the buttons, looked up at him, imploring him with her eyes. Oreste was sucking his upper lip with an abstracted air, then finally conceded in a haughty tone: “OK, you can touch it, but after that, you try it out.”
At the bottom of the shaft, perfectly visible on either side of the central nervure were embedded five or six tiny balls that rolled under Icelys’ fingers.
“Seashells which possess certain special qualities,” he revealed to her in prophetic tones. “I was a teenager when the Chinese urged me to have these implants. I must have been about seventeen or eighteen. Most of the younger fishermen have had it done just like me. This way, a man can give a woman extraordinary pleasure!”
“Did it hurt?”
“I couldn’t have sex for three days, but it was the result that mattered! Come on, angelito mio, get undressed . . .”
Quickly Icelys peeled off the yellow Lycra. Straddling Oreste’s knees, one hand around his neck, she pulled away his white underpants, impaled herself and began moving up and down.
“Hey, viejo, this gimmick of yours is a lazy man’s gadget!” she complained after she’d pumped about thirty times. “You’re not making much of an effort, are you? Getting off on your shells is a lot of work!”
Still as a snake basking in the sun, eyes half-closed, Oreste stroked the young woman’s voluptuous thighs. When she tried to stick her tongue into his mouth and give his lips a greedy bite, he merely took her chin in two fingers. She came like a fury, waggling her hips. El Viejo had his eyes shut and sucked air between his teeth with a whistling sound.
Icelys ran home to her mother and washed her yellow Lycra. She hated herself for this act of adultery vis-à-vis the Italian. She reproached herself for betraying the trust her cardiovascular colleagues had placed in her, not to mention her mother, who’d throw her out of the house if she knew.
The next day, returning home from night-duty, she bumped into Oreste’s old mother, leaning on the arm of a man in white she’d never seen before. The two old people were saying goodbye to her mother, who had a weird expression on her face.
Mercedes had just received a visit from a babalao, a holy man of the Santeria. She’d wanted to know if the relationship between her daughter and this Italian from Bologna would ever end in marriage. The babalao had laid a raffia mat on the tile floor and spread out his fortune-telling gear. Pebbles, seeds, and shells that he threw into the air several times, like jacks.
Not knowing the results of the lottery that had just been held on the floor of her house, Icelys was on tenterhooks. She guessed her mother’s nervousness had to do with the visit from the two cronies, and feared a catastrophe since the woman who had just left was the person in the world who knew most about the little secrets of Oreste’s life and body.
And now her mother was pronouncing her Italian fiancé’s name. She was convinced the whole affair was ill-fated, advised her daughter not to put all her eggs in one basket, to look for another foreigner who could get her out of the country while she was still young and appetizing. Icelys remembered the two women she’d seen the day before, behinds blown up like balloon tires. She said to herself if this marriage fell through, she’d take it out on food. When some tourist took her to a fancy restaurant, she’d gobble up all the goodies reserved for foreigners, filet mignon, lobster and pargo, the tastiest fish in the world according to her grandmother who’d eaten som
e in 1955 in honor of the birth of her daughter, Mercedes. Choking back her tears, she asked her mother: “You don’t think the Italian’s going to send me the plane ticket he promised?”
“Hija mia, the shells have spoken!”
Pre-Party
Thomas S. Roche
It’s just a little meet and greet before the event; you know, get relaxed, get acquainted, get a cab – nothing big.
Everyone’s already dressed when they arrive, but of course as always Jessa’s the last one to suit up. She’s spent the whole day slicing crudités and assembling complicated hors d’oeuvres and other comestibles she’s studied in the pages of esoteric European magazines, which is essentially what she rushes into the bedroom to do when everyone starts to show up. The main exception is that in this case the comestible to be assembled is her.
Justin’s left on the couch in his tight leather pants, high boots and wifebeater, making kinky conversation with Tara from the kinky headshop and her girlfriend (or girl friend? He’s not sure) named Raven or Blackbird or something, Sherry from the local leather group and her boyfriend what’shis-name (whom Justin isn’t entirely sure he likes), Mike from the gay bar and his new boyfriend from Denmark or Holland or Sweden or something, Jens or Jurgen or Jan. They’re all strapped to the nines, Mike in the leatherboy uniform, Sven in slick rubber, Tara in a PVC WAC uniform, Sherry in a corset and miniskirt, Boyfriend, kinda lamely, in a black leather duster, short-haired, butch-of-center Raven in PVC pants and halter and thigh-high boots – she’s got an overcoat in the hall closet. They’re all sipping cocktails and nibbling canapés; nibbling, for most of them, because with clothes this tight there’s not really anywhere for most of it to go.
The cocktails, however, they manage to find plenty of room for. For the first ten minutes of Jessa’s “quick” shower – she’s notorious – Justin freshens the cocktails, but pretty soon the bottles have found their way over and everyone’s freshening their own; the conversation gets raunchier and before too much longer Sherry’s been dragged over Mike and Sven’s laps and the two of them are trading off giving her hard spanks while she giggles and then softly begins to moan.
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