Rufus gave her capacious ass a loud slap. "What you worryin' about. Who pay the rent?"
"I need you around, Daddy. I get lonely for you."
He sat down on the sofa, but sprang up, hand gripping his crotch. "Why don't you throw this shit out. Almost took my ball off."
"Oh, no, Daddy. I guess you need Ambrosia special massage."
"Yeah, I don't want no infection."
She began to rub him, pressing her tits against his body. With a sweet smile she looked up and said, "Got a couple line for your little Ambrosia?"
"Sorry, baby. Sold out today."
I went back under the hat. There were still several bulges in the sweat band. Tightwad.
"Come on, sugar," she purred. "Just one?"
"I can't give you what I don't got." He turned away from her.
She fell back into the couch; its spears did not bother her. Rufus said, "Look, bitch, I don't got it. You keep on, and I’m goin’.”
"No." She pulled him down onto the sofa. His hands went to his testicles before he landed.
She said, "I need somethin' cause I get bored, Daddy. I be talkin' to Emma today, and I say, 'You know, I love my man Rufus, but I get bored sometime,' and she say, 'Yeah, I know what you mean, cause before Ramses go to the joint he away a lot, course not as much as now, cause he in the joint,' and I say, 'Sometime I like to go out of my mind,' and she say, 'I know what you mean, cause I feel just like that before Ramses go to the joint'. . ." More and more of Ambrosia's animated face came into my view as Rufus nodded off.
"Rufus, you listenin' to me?"
His head jerked back up. "Course, sugar. Let's go to bed."
"OK, lover. I got to use the bathroom for a minute."
She pranced down the hall, buttocks rippling. Rufus turned the TV to professional wrestling. She finally returned in a nightgown, hair braided, glowing like a Buddha.
"What the fuck you do to your face?"
"Vaseline, Daddy. Keep me young and pretty for you."
"Girl, stay young and pretty some other night."
"Every night, sugar," she said, leaning over to kiss him.
He pulled back and wiped his face. "Don't get that shit on me."
Soon we were in the bedroom. She made him sit on the bed while she stood before him and slowly peeled off her nightgown. She was a mammal among mammals. Her breasts descended to her navel, but were firm and full and extended to the sides almost as far. Her dark, flat nipples were about a water bug's length in diameter. Her shoulders and arms were fleshy and strong, and her belly plump. Her bush was as full as any Afro I'd seen on the street.
She turned so Rufus could see her from every angle. From profile she showed the hairpin line to her pelvis, advertising her ass while tucking her belly under for better protection, a superior configuration I've seen only on black women. She held herself as if she loved being a big, full-bodied, sex object; I doubted that even someone as exceptional as Ruth could match her as a reproducer.
Rufus stripped except for his hat, which he pushed back on his head. He took his face below her waist for a little taste. I had heard this never happened among this tribe. His hair and her muff locked, indistinguishable. I didn't move; ending up with Ambrosia would maroon me forever. Not that her vapors were unpleasant. Not at all. In fact, the musk pouring from her vagina was a world apart from anything I had ever sensed, even from Ruth.
Ruth had intoxicating hormones. But Ambrosia was history. Hers was not simply a sexual essence, it was more like a chemical missing link. Like our pheromones, hers told the whole story, from the beginning. I could smell beyond humanity to the little primates, first venturing out of the trees. I could smell the first four-legged creatures, and the amphibians rising desperately, determinedly, from the water. I could certainly smell fish, and the primitive marine creatures, back to the first multicellular organisms, and then the first unicellular ones, darting around in the primordial ooze, the soup where it all began. Rufus wasn't just eating pussy, he was finding his Roots.
Ambrosia was frighteningly impassioned, growling and thrashing and inciting Rufus with breathless talk of his prowess. She screamed and her body convulsed, her thighs locking around his head while her fists pummeled the bed. I ran under the hat for safety. "Oh, Daddy, you killin' me!" A few minutes later she was sufficiently revived to say, "Fill me up, lover. Fill me to the top."
I walked back out to watch Rufus rear up on his knees, his pencil-thin penis poking out from his withered thighs. He made Ira look like a prize bull. When he mounted Ambrosia, her reaction was so extreme that I had to wonder if she was responding to Daddy's dick or Daddy's rent payments.
"Bless my soul!" Rufus said a few minutes later, and rolled away. Ambrosia fell asleep immediately. I expected we'd be on our way, but Rufus dropped his head to the sheet beside her fecund crotch.
I slept well, though I had vivid dreams of the Serengeti. Sunlight was filtering through the soot-covered windows by the time Rufus woke up. He started to dress. Ambrosia awoke. She propped herself up on her elbows and cupped her breasts provocatively. "Mama got a present for you cause you so good last night."
"Gotta go, sugar. I got business."
Suddenly she was furious. "Stop callin' me sugar. Probably call every whore you fuck sugar. Don't you know my name?"
Rufus was moving around in front of the cracked bathroom mirror, searching for an image of his entire face. "Sure, sugar."
"When am I gonna see you?" she said petulantly.
"When I come back." And we were out the front door.
It was a beautiful day, cool and crisp, with Rufus's head providing just the right amount of heat. The gutters in this part of town were lush with chicken bones and skins, cigarette butts, dog shit, condoms, sputum, and much more. I could hear the happy hum of thousands of my larger cousins at harvest.
Rufus was popular. "What's happenin'?" he said to scores of people he passed. "How you been?" to many others, and they invariably answered him with the same words.
Ragged men wearing clothing stiff with dirt staked their claims to empty doorways with stuffed shopping bags. In front of one building sat a teenager on an upturned wooden box, annotating a copy of War and Peace. I was astonished. When we passed him I walked out to the end of the hat. The pages were covered with little circles; he was picking out every letter j.
The character of the neighborhood soon began to change. There were no more abandoned buildings. Bag ladies joined the men. The streets were cleaner; this was a whiter, voting district. Courting behaviors became more subtle. Men did not accost women or whistle or hiss at them; they just looked slyly. Women of the ghetto occasionally smiled at the obscene compliment, but these wealthier, whiter women showed nothing but contempt for the men who admired them.
We were in the university neighborhood. I knew this not because of classroom buildings, libraries, or youths with books. It was the three Iranians who had chained themselves to a fence, surrounded by signs insisting America free them from the tyranny of the mullahs.
They called out to us. Rufus turned. "You get what you deserve, swami. Don't go takin' American hostages. Don't go bringin' that shit into the USA or we bomb your ass." I wondered what Ira would have said.
Street activists came thick now. On the next block two overweight women in flannel shirts sat at a bridge table covered with pamphlets. Their sign read, Pornography is Violence Against Women. They chanted lifelessly, "Stop porn, respect women! Stop porn, respect women!" One of them rose and approached us with a yellow petition.
Rufus said, "You kiddin'? Bitch like you be violence against pornography. What size head you got? I'm gonna buy you a bag."
There were two scrawny men with closely cropped beards at the next table. They did not bother to ask Rufus for his signature. The woman with the sign-up sheet for the local tenants' union also let us go by.
Then a man about Junior's size, black, with a shaved head, came right at us. He had a tattoo carved into his right bicep that said Attica 19
70. Even Rufus tried to sidestep this one. But he took Rufus's arm and said, "Yo, brother, put your name to the list here. The brothers upstate need vocational trainin'."
I told Rufus to give him what he wanted so we could get out of there. But Rufus looked at the list and said, "Who you tryin' to shit?"
"Say what?"
"I look like some lily white fool? Put my address down so the con know which door to use their vocational skill on when they get out? Shit."
In a moment I knew I would be in the bloodied gutter. But the Attica man broke into a smile. Two of his front teeth were black. "Yeah," he said, and released Rufus's arm. His face again became stern as he turned to intimidate approaching pedestrians.
Then came a block of ridiculous causes, epitomized by Jews for Jesus—the human version of Roaches for Raid. It made me think. Entomologists draw a distinction between two routes of insect development. In incomplete metamorphosis the larva grows into a nymph and the nymph into an adult. The nymph is essentially a small adult, lacking only certain details. Isn't this true of black humans? Adolescents loiter, jive, strut, and take drugs like adults.
Complete metamorphosis has an additional state, the pupa, which is completely alien to the adult it becomes. Compare hirsute, unkempt Jewish teenagers espousing Thanatotic causes with the carefully coiffed careerists they become. My guess is that the trauma of seeing their own pupae is why Jews and butterflies can't touch the reproductive success of blacks and roaches.
I KNEW THE Gypsy's address from the envelope of the one hate letter she'd sent Ira, and Rufus had brought me within four blocks of it when he made his first wrong turn. I jumped from the back of his hat, slid down his smooth leather pants, and bounced on the sidewalk. I was sad to see the old felon strut off.
Without a hat to hide under, I was blinded by the intense sunlight, and certain that every foot in the city was coming after me. The sign at the curb said that the street sweeper, a bristly monster which made the vacuum cleaner look like a cotton-candy machine, would soon arrive. I couldn't stay in the gutter.
I sprinted along a groove in the hot sidewalk, and jumped behind a garbage can in front of the nearest apartment building. The building of the block were all contiguous, so this part of the trip was easy.
When I reached the end of the corner building, I realized that I would have to wait there until late at night, when the traffic cleared. I burrowed into a crack in the concrete, where I was warmed from the evening chill.
Pedestrians passed:
“…but he wouldn't listen, and he's the fucking boss, and now equities are off fifteen percent. On my record! I need a drink..."
“…she's such a jerk-off. Two days late. Big deal. And she drops me a whole grade. What a retard..."
"…I don't care what you think. Do as your mother says..."
“…but if I blow him he'll give me the part. At this point in my life, what's one more blowjob..."
“…coke, weed, speed, acid, dust, crack, yellows, reds, you want it, we got it. Hello there, missy..."
"…the bitch want a hundred dollars to show me the color of her drawers. Shit. I tell her she could leave by the window..."
"…Mama's sorry she was so late, but that big mean boss of hers made her stay late and do some typing. My little Fifi must be stuffed like a kielbasa. Here’s your spot, sweetheart. That's a good girl."
This monologue didn't recede like the others. I was slow to understand. Suddenly a deluge of hot, acrid piss engulfed me. I felt myself lighten as the crack started to fill, and then, as hard as I gripped the crags of concrete, I began to float. Soon I'd be up to street level, taking Fifi's stream directly in my face, helpless when she turned around to admire her work.
But Fifi ran dry just before I surfaced. That's a good girl. As the concrete slowly absorbed, I settled back down into the crack. The piss turned cold on my body and left a stench I would wear for days. I climbed up to watch Fifi depart, the shitty brown of the white miniature poodle's ass twitching to the click of her manicured claws. The thought of her, and the fat-assed bleached blonde in sweat pants holding her spangled tether, running through the woods just ahead of a pack of laughing wolves, did my vengeful heart good.
Traffic didn't die until after midnight, and then I made it easily to the Gypsy's apartment building. I had expected a rent-controlled dump; this was a fancy place, with a large, ornate lobby and a doorman in livery who sat inside the double doors, head against the marble wall, asleep. I passed him and walked across the mailboxes, where I found that she lived in apartment 8B.
That was too far to climb, so I went into the elevator. I knew I was in for a wait, but I needed the time to figure out exactly what I was going to do when I got to her place.
The Gypsy. Esmeralda Kosar. The story of her introduction into Ira's life was considered an essential piece of local lore when, as a nymph, I first entered the cabinets.
Ira had been on the phone. "Lenny? Ira. Listen, you're not going to believe what happened tonight. I went to the Lefkowitz Mahoney party. I'm talking to Mrs. Lefkowitz—a real cow—and some clod hits her arm. Dumps red wine on my beige suit. The one I got at the Bernstein's clearance sale last year. Right in the crotch, if you'll excuse my French.
"I tried blotting it, using soda. No way. And listen, this is when it happens. This woman walks over, stares at my crotch, and says, 'So, you're a feminist. I like that.'
"Huh? Kinda short, nice-looking. Everybody else is pretty formal, but she's in this floral hippie dress. But she got away with it.
"Wait. Then she says, 'Get me a drink, would you. These heels wear me out.' She's holding them right in her hand! 'They're supposed to make our asses look nice. What do you think, are they worth the trouble?' I couldn't believe it. What? I didn't say anything. Oh sure you would. That's easy to say now.
"She tells me her name and says it's the only one in the book, and she leaves. Just like that.
"What do you think, should I call her? Or is she nuts?"
Lenny probably figured this promised grand entertainment, so he insisted Ira call her. The following Saturday she made an entrance the likes of which our colony had never seen.
She walked into the middle of the living room, dropped her brightly colored cloth bag, pirouetted, and said, "My, how very clean." There was subversion in her tone, in her eyes.
Ira stood off to the side. "Thank you," he said uneasily. It was clear right away that she was out of his league. No one in the colony had any idea why she was here.
She reached down and took off her shoes. "Let me see. It needs to look more lived-in." She threw one onto the sofa, the other onto a chair.
"Please don't do that. You were just walking outside."
"No, not nearly enough. Let's try this." She pulled her dress up over her thighs so she could unhook the garters and roll off her stockings; one she draped over the couch, the other over a chair.
Ira opened his mouth in protest, but nothing came out. He retreated a step.
"No, still not enough." She reached behind her neck and unfastened her dress, then slid it off. She was naked to the waist, as proud of her adolescent buds as Ambrosia was of her full udders. The Gypsy spread her dress out on the sofa so that it looked half-upholstered in flowers. She sat down, in garter belt and panties, and drew her feet up. "Now, that's much better, don't you think?"
Ira didn't venture an opinion, because he was already hiding in the kitchen. She laughed. It took her an hour to subdue him on the living room floor, undermining the order of his apartment and his control over his life.
Under her spell, he soon begged her to move in. She thrilled him. She could anticipate with her dark intuition just how far she could bend him without breaking him. He relished the bending.
Why did she stay? The guess was that it was a lark that went on too long. Then it became an exercise in sexual power. Staying saved her a lot of money, and she was poor. And who knows, maybe she even developed a fondness for the wretch.
After riding up and d
own for several hours, the elevator finally stopped at the eighth floor. It was very late, so I walked right down the hallway and under the door into 8B.
I knew immediately that I had made a mistake. The place was immaculate, reeking of cleansers and disinfectants. There was no sign of insect life: even the bacterial population was low. There was no clothing on the furniture, no food on the counters. I had misread the damned mailbox, and now I had to go all the way back to the lobby.
I sat at the elevator door for hours before it opened. During the morning rush I buried myself in an overstuffed chair in the lobby. The mailman made his deliveries. Then I again crossed the polished chrome boxes, feeling exposed and vulnerable in the light of day. An elderly lady, opening the box beside me, yelled "Shoo!" and banged the metal. I slipped through the slot into someone's L. L. Bean catalog. When I was certain she was gone I came out and finished my run.
8B did say Kosar. But there was another plastic tag in the same slot, almost totally obscured by the Gypsy's. I felt the letters under my feet; they spelled McGuire.
So the Gypsy had again wangled her way into someone's apartment. Defiance was so integral to Esmeralda's relationships with men that McGuire could only have made her submit to the impeccable household order if McGuire was immune to the puissance of pussy. It had to be Ms. McGuire.
As I waited for the elevator, I thought about strategy. Because there was no Blattella community, McGuire would be my sole ally. But the more I thought about the burden she had chosen to assume the harder it was for me to picture her. Nor had I ever fully understood the Gypsy's arrival to or departure from Ira's life. Could I revive her feelings, whatever they were, and get her back to him? I was beginning to fear I had set myself up for another defeat.
I finally got back to the apartment. This was a strange couple. McGuire came from a Danish modern, steel and glass world. In the bookcase were the Gypsy's dog-eared volumes of Ouspensky and Gibran, but McGuire had relegated them to a corner of the bottom shelf; the books at human eye-level were thick and had flat blue covers with gold sans serif tides.
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