Gigolo Johnny Wells

by Lawrence Block

  It certainly wasn’t that the woman was pretty. She wasn’t bad, but he had a better-looking woman on the couch next to him. And he’d made love to many better-looking women in his time.

  He guessed that it must be the idea of watching something forbidden. Something like that, maybe. It was hard to tell, but that was his guess.

  Sheila moved beside him.

  He saw her face in the half-light. Her mouth was tense with desire and beads of perspiration dotted her forehead. He could smell her as well. She used a great quantity of a very expensive perfume but that wasn’t all he smelled.

  He smelled her.

  “Johnny — ”

  “Come here, baby.”

  She came to him and he drew her down, pressed his face between her breasts. For a moment it was as if there were two Johnny Wells, one of them on the couch with Sheila Chase and the other standing off at a distance watching and snickering at him. The standing-off one had plenty to snicker at, he had to admit.

  Here he was, an experienced guy, a guy who’d been around plenty. Here he was lying on a love seat with another man’s wife while the other man was with a cuddly little call girl. Here he was watching a picture of two people making it and getting interested himself.

  Well, what of it?

  He didn’t care about a lot of things now. He didn’t care who or what Sheila Chase happened to be. He cared only that she also happened to be a woman, and that at the moment he needed a woman, and that she was handy.

  That was plenty.

  So he bit her and heard her cry with pain and passion both at once.

  “Johnny — ”

  He looked at her.

  “The line from the picture,” she moaned. “The line the girl says to him right before they do it.”

  He waited.

  She quoted the line. It had been strange to see those words in print on the screen, and it was even stranger to hear them come tumbling from her lips.

  He gave her just what she asked for.

  On the screen, the man and the woman finished their first bout of lovemaking. The man is lying flat on his back, scratching himself with one hand. The woman is lying on her side, looking down at him.

  Subtitle: LET’S DO IT AGAIN.

  They both stand up. The camera moves for a side angle as the woman bends down, finally crouching on her hands and knees.

  The man moves behind her.

  Shot of woman’s face, passionate.

  Subtitle: NOW!

  Shot of the man’s face, smiling hugely.

  The man does it to her.

  Finally the man and woman finish.

  “I’m ready again,” Sheila said.

  “You’re always ready.”

  “I’m burning up. But it’s the damnedest thing I don’t want to stop watching the picture.”

  “Neither do I.”

  She was grinning. “I told you it was exciting,” she said. “You didn’t think it would be. But it is. It’s exciting as all hell.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “You too?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sighed. “And now I want to make love. I want to keep watching the picture, but I also want to make love. Two drives, each in a different direction. Profound, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  He knew what she meant. He had thought that one session on the love seat with her would take his mind off sex for a while, but the picture was having too great an effect upon him. Once again he was caught up with desire for her. And the picture was still exciting. He didn’t want to take his eyes off it if he could help it.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to watch the picture,” she said, “and I want to make love.”

  “How?”

  “You won’t be able to see the picture,” she told him. “I will, but you won’t. I guess that’s the price you pay in return for the five hundred dollars. See what I mean?”

  He saw what she meant.

  “It won’t be too great a sacrifice,” she said. “You’ve seen most of the movie already. Now I want you to kiss me while I watch the rest of it.”

  “I get it.”

  “You know what I want you to do?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And it’s fair, isn’t it? I don’t want you to miss the show but there’s no help for it. I’m paying you, after all. Lots of money. Five hundred dollars.”

  “I understand.”

  The man and the woman had finished, and they were now both cavorting in the water. The camera examined them in the distance but there was not much to see.

  Then a young girl came into camera range. Now the young girl is undressing and the camera is watching her. She is a very lovely young girl and seems to be very young. She wears no makeup and her breasts are small.

  She is nude now and the camera is busy examining her body.

  Shot of the faces of the man and the woman. They are looking at the girl and they seem interested.

  Shot of man’s face alone.

  Subtitle: SHE’S A PRETTY ONE.

  Shot of woman’s face.

  Subtitle: WE COULD HAVE FUN WITH HER.

  The two of them swim madly for shore. They clamber up on the bank and run for her.

  Shot of the girl. She does not seem to know what to do. The expression on her face says that she is frightened but she makes no move to run away.

  Shot of man’s face.

  Subtitle: NOW WE’VE GOT YOU!

  The man grabs the girl from behind and holds her around the waist. She struggles but cannot get away. The woman moves in front of the girl and takes the girl’s breasts in her hands.

  Shot of woman’s face.

  Subtitle: I’M GOING TO HAVE FUN WITH HER.

  The woman suits her actions to her words.

  The camera has a good time watching this most unusual display.

  Shot of man’s face.

  Subtitle: IT’S MY TURN NOW.

  The man and the woman succeed in getting the unwilling girl down upon the ground.

  The man falls upon the girl and begins to make love to her.

  The camera watches.

  He was walking.

  It was night, a very black night, and he was walking. Five fresh hundred dollar bills were in his wallet. They had not been there before.

  They were his to keep. They were his in reward for having participated in the most sickening display of promiscuity he had ever heard about, not to say had anything to do with. They were his, and he had worked hard for them.

  He wanted a drink.

  The movie ended, and that was just a signal for the rest of the festivities to begin. The festivities had been odd ones. Someone had given him something to drink, something which contained a powerful stimulant, and the stimulant had gotten him through the evening in one piece.

  In the course of the evening he had made love, not just to Sheila, but to every woman around at least once. He had made love in manners not even he had had any familiarity with. He had made love in ways that were sickening and disgusting, but he had done everything they had wanted him to do.

  Now he was exhausted

  He walked down Fifth Avenue alongside of the park. He thought how late it was and wondered why he didn’t hop into a cab and go home. Home? The hotel, then. He didn’t have a home. The Ruskin was the best substitute available.

  A cab cruised hopefully by but he didn’t bother to hail it. He kept walking.

  Because it occurred to him that there was no point in hurrying to get home. No point at all. What was there when he got there? Just a bottle and a bed — cognac to drink and a bed to curl up and sack out in. That was incentive enough generally, but after what he had been through it was not incentive enough.

  Nothing was.

  He had arrived. He was a real gigolo now, reputation established, good clothes, money in the bank, the manners of a gentleman.

  A gigolo

  And what the hell good was
that? For that matter, what the hell good was he? What the hell good was Johnny Wells? The answer was simple.

  No good.

  No good at all.

  I ought to kill myself, he thought. Not because my problems are too much for me. Not because I’m desperately unhappy. Just because there is no point in going on. Just because I’m bored stiff and I’m going to be bored stiff for the rest of my life. How many years left? Twenty or thirty or forty or fifty or sixty?

  Too many.

  Too many years.

  And the years would all be the same. The same damn routine going on and on forever. Oh he could relax now and then, take things easy. He could travel or knock off for awhile, or something. There were loads of things he could do.

  They all added up to nothing.

  A big fat nothing.

  And suddenly he realized he was only nineteen years old … that was it, he remembered; nineteen, definitely … and his life was ended. He had pulled himself up out of a gutter and made something of himself, just once. Oh, not during his gigolo period, which had returned, but during those brief days when he had known a great deal of innocent peace, hard work, simple happiness with Linda. He had put the lie to those who said teen-agers could never make a go of marriage. He had, and Linda had, and now neither of them were alive any more. She was dead, and he wasn’t a man any more, he was simply a nineteen-year-old kid who had been living way over his head in a world full of knees in the groin and fingers in the eyes. Nothing … he was reduced to nothing!

  Nothing to do and no place to go and nobody to see. Nothing at all — and that, all in all, was the reason he ought to kill himself. It was simply that there was nothing left to live for, and wasn’t that reason enough?

  No, it wasn’t.

  Because there was nothing to die for, either. Right away, when Linda died, he could have killed himself. Then there might have been a point to it, a reason for it.

  But he hadn’t had the guts then. And now there was less point to dying than there was to living. So he might as well go on, because there was nothing else to do.

  When another cab came by he hailed it and hopped into the back seat. He tried to relax while the cab headed for the Ruskin, tried not to think about Sheila Chase or her sickening husband or anybody else at the party.

  It was hard forgetting them.

  It wasn’t any easier back at the Ruskin. But at least he had the cognac. It let him forget a great many things.

  He drank himself to sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  THE DRINKING DID IT.

  It will do it every time. Drink enough, often enough and the world is going to fall in on you. It doesn’t matter who you are. It happens every time.

  It happened to Johnny. To Johnny Wells, the golden boy who could do no wrong.

  It happened to him like a ton of bricks.

  Too many nights passed in a fog of alcohol. Too many days passed the same way, and too much money went out while no money came in. When the money goes that way you can bet that the end is not far away. It might have taken a long time, because there was quite a bit of money, but it didn’t. The money didn’t last that long because he was too drunk to hang onto it.

  He managed to get rid of almost all the money at once. It happened in a rather interesting way, and it was funny, if one finds such things amusing.

  He woke up one day at eleven in the morning with a tremendous thirst. His hands were shaking and he felt like a mangy dog. He knew the cure, however, because he had been there before. This was nothing new to him. It was just a repetition of the way he woke up every morning, the way he felt every morning. His hangover was the only friend he had and he would have been lost if one morning he had awakened without it.

  He knew the cure. He reached out for the brandy bottle which was always by the side of the bed. There was enough in it to take the edge off, which is what he wanted to do. He brought the bottle to his lips and drained it in a single swallow. Not all of the brandy wound up in his mouth. Some of it slopped over his face and wet his beard. He hadn’t shaved in several days and his beard was long already, a thick covering of stubble that kept him looking like hell.

  The brandy helped

  It did part of the trick, anyway. The headache did not entirely disappear, but then it never did. The headache was always with him in one degree or another, a constant reminder that he needed a drink. Because he always needed a drink, from the moment he woke up in the morning until the moment he passed out at night.

  There was nothing to do about it but drink. One time he had remembered Ricky, and in a moment of pure desperation had presented himself at the nearest army recruiting office. He figured they could take custody of his mind and body for three years. Maybe they could straighten him out. It was a cinch he couldn’t do the job himself.

  But they took one look at him, laughed aloud, and booted him out on his tail.

  So now he didn’t try to fight it any more. His bottle of brandy was empty. He dressed in a hurry and checked his wallet. It, too, was empty. He had to go to the bank again. It seemed as if he was going to the bank every goddamn day of the week. He hoped the bank was open. He was broke, and he couldn’t even take a goddamned bus to the goddamned bank, and he had to walk it. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view, the bank was open.

  By this time he was heartily sick of the bank, and heartily sick of making trips to the bank, and sicker still of having an empty wallet and a monumental thirst for brandy.

  So he waited patiently in the line, looking out of place among dozens of clean-shaven happy-looking people, and when he was first in line the clerk looked at him as if he was wondering what Johnny could possibly be doing there.

  “How much is my bank balance?”

  The clerk asked him if he had an account.

  He got mad, and he snapped at the clerk, and finally he managed to get across who he was and yes, he did have a cruddy account in the cruddy bank, and how much was in it, you dumb stupid son of a bitch?

  The clerk finally supplied the good news that Mr. Wells had on deposit slightly in excess of twenty-seven hundred dollars. Another clerk confirmed that this intoxicated pig was indeed John Wells, and Johnny, sick of the whole thing, drew out his entire account.

  It was quite a bit of money.

  He tried to go through it like a drunken sailor. He went over to Ninth Avenue, where the bars were all in a row and one worse than the next, and he went into the first bar he came to and ordered a double brandy. He downed it in a single swallow, slapped a ten dollar bill on the top of the bar and told the soiled barkeep to keep the change.

  Then he went to the next bar and repeated the process.

  Now, when you have twenty-seven hundred dollars in your kick, it takes you a long time to spend it on liquor. Even at ten bucks a drink, you would have to hit two hundred seventy bars before you were broke.

  It didn’t take him that long.

  Because a man who spends ten bucks on a drink attracts a certain amount of attention. Johnny attracted one hell of a lot of attention, and two fine young citizens followed him and waited for the right moment and then gave him a length of lead pipe in back of one ear.

  He went down cold, and when he woke up several hours later with the worst headache and hangover of all his wallet was gone forever. He wasn’t particularly disturbed about the money, but the wallet was that alligator billfold he had stolen from Mrs. Nugent, and in a sense that was where the whole thing had started. He was sort of sorry to see the wallet go. He kind of liked that wallet, for sentimental reasons.

  It took them four days to kick him out of the hotel. They liked him, and they were sorry to see him go, but you don’t let a penniless drunk stay in your hotel indefinitely unless your name is Harry Hope. He went out with his suitcases in hand, and he pawned the suitcases and their contents and got himself a few more drinks.

  And that was that.

  He traced a regular route, from the Hotel Ruskin to a run-down flophouse
on West 47th Street, from that place to a hotel on Bleecker Street, from Bleecker Street to another worse dump in Hell’s Kitchen. His taste for brandy died when the money was gone. Brandy was too expensive. Wine was cheaper, even if it did have a more deleterious effect on your system. It got you just as drunk and the price was lower.

  It was only a matter of time before he wound up where he had started. Only a matter of time. It made sense to get back to the old neighborhood — the way he was going he was destined to wind up on the Bowery and he didn’t want that. Something kept him from hitting the Bowery. It sent him to the upper west side again, where it had all begun, where the whole mess started not that long ago.

  How long? A couple years? He didn’t know anything about time any more.

  Time doesn’t matter when you’re drunk enough.

  The upper west side made sense. There were still a few friends in the area and once in a while he could make a touch. Ricky slipped him ten bucks, which helped tremendously. Beans blew in from Chi another time, back to try his luck in New York again, and gave him twenty. Long Sam was good for a dollar now and then when he wasn’t in the can.

  And finally he got a job.

  It wasn’t a real job. It put a roof over his head and a few bucks a week in his hands. He worked as an assistant janitor in a brickfront dump, carrying out the ashes and picking up the garbage. It was the type of job only a drunk would take, and it was perfect for him. He put in a few hours a week, stayed drunk whether he was working or not, and nobody bothered him. He didn’t have to worry about rent money because the room was his in exchange for the job. He hardly ate at all so food was no expense. A couple of bucks a day for wine was all he needed, and he could usually manage to scrounge that up.

  There were always ways. If he couldn’t make a touch, he could steal something and hope he didn’t get caught. Or he could go back to his old job, but with a difference.

  Men this time.

  He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it when the man offered him five bucks to come up to his room for an hour. But he needed a drink, and beggars could not be choosers, so he went.

  This happened once or twice a month. It was always a quick five and sometimes ten, and he was low enough by this time so that he didn’t get sick thinking about it. There were too many other things to get sick thinking about, and he couldn’t afford the luxury of squeamishness.