“But I need a really tight fit.”
“Yeah, well, I got a needle you could thread.”
The scab’s face crumpled, and he’d already spun on his heels to storm away when the anger in Big Mamma’s eyes turned to dollar signs. It was bad business being cruel to the clientele. “Wait a minute,” she said, extending a hand, grasping the scab’s knobby shoulder. “Big Mamma’s just had a long day, baby. I know Regina is your regular girl and all, but I got another girl, a real pretty one. She’s a hundred dollars ’cause she’s done a few movies, you know. You might not have heard of her, but you will. She’s a limited offer, you see. Up and coming. Calls herself Temptation, and I can promise you, she ain’t gonna be whoring these streets for much longer.” Big Mamma drew near then, her breath hot and scented with Tabasco. “Best part is, this girl’s got a pussy so tight, you’ll think yo’ dick is in a hydraulic vise.”
The scab’s eyes lit. He had fifty dollars clenched in his right fist, ready to pay for his usual girl, but now he had to dig deeper, had to empty out his wallet and gather every nickel and dime in order to come up with the ninety-two fifteen that inevitably sealed the deal.
“What’s your pleasure tonight, sweetie?” Big Mamma said then, her eyes filled with a smile. Kelly always got a smile from the ladies; there was something about him.
“I’m lookin’ for a pussy ain’t got no bottom.”
“Hot damn,” Big Mamma had boomed, her voice sonorous, large as she was and textured with a bit of a husky scratch. “I know that’s right,” she added. “Can see that much right through yo’ pants.”
Kelly had grinned. It was always the subject of admiration. No one knew that his balls were on fire any time he had to walk any distance. Big Mamma hadn’t known his back was calling for a bed that very moment just to get off his feet, to get the weight strung from his groin supported by something other than his legs.
“I gotta tell you that’s a sweet sight. And I hear you lookin’ for a job.”
“You offerin’ to pimp me out too, Mamma?”
Big Mamma chuckled. “Better than that, baby. See, that crazy white boy you run with was in a couple days ago. He stays in this place, you know; got him a thing for brown sugar. I don’t know how the talk got started, but he was goin’ on and on ’bout you, ’bout how big you was. Now I don’t know ’bout yo’ boy. He might got a thing for black dick, too . . .”
“Big dick,” Kelly interjected. “Don’t matter if it’s green, purple or blue, though as black goes, he’d charbroil himself to a crisp if it meant he’d grow bigger.”
Big Mamma had smirked. “Well, anyway, a couple of my girls you’ve been with corroborated the boast. Make a long story short, he was askin’ ’bout my girlfriend’s club; said you was perfect for the male review over there.”
“Male review? I ain’t no stripper.”
At this point, Big Mamma presented him with a business card. “Maybe,” she said, her eyes affixed to the bulge. “Maybe, baby, you should be. ’Cause right through yo’ clothes, you lookin’ good ’nough to eat, and Silvia’s got an opening.”
Kelly took the card.
“Savage Thugs Male Review,” he read. His eyes rolled up to latch with Big Mamma’s. “There’s one hell of a hook.”
“No, baby, the hook’s in your pants, and ain’t no shame in usin’ our God-given gifts to make a little money.”
Kelly stared at the card, his mind spinning, his need for a job expanding like a dark and threatening thundercloud filling up his mind.
Big Mamma’s next words were very far away when he heard them. “Now, ’bout that girl with the endless pussy.”
That night Kelly had pounded the whore, as if to break her back, as if to drive her through the foam-rubber mattress and the floor beneath it, as if to split her with the log of himself.
The whore was called Trix; Big Mamma had said it was because her pussy knew every trick. Indeed, she’d shown Kelly one such trick the moment he’d entered the dank, little room with the lone window, through which the purple-hot radiation off of a nearby neon sign was seeping. Maybe the sign spelled “Pussycat,” but the part Kelly could see through the grimy glass was simply “Pussy,” and he’d just finished reading it when Trix offered him a drink from a long-necked bottle of Heineken that she’d been warming in the tunnel of herself, that she extracted slow and easy, uncapping it then and bringing the drinking end to her lips.
Then Kelly had shown her a trick, undoing and bunching down his pants, unveiling his magic wand. It was enormous and growing still, longer than her beer bottle by far and easily as fat. Black and arterial, and swinging as he walked, slapping the left thigh only to bounce over and slap the right, only to bound back again. It wasn’t until the trickle hit her breast that Trix realized she’d forgotten to swallow her beer and the gap of her mouth was spilling the stuff down her chin and chest.
Then Kelly was right there in front of her. He watched her eyes travel up and down the organ again and again, never seeming to fully discover it. In the effort to wrap her mind around it, her entire being became so fixed upon it that she seemed to stop breathing, and the only movement about her was the rapid up-and-down scanning of her eyes. One might have mistaken her state for that of a petite mal seizure. But Kelly’s penis always provoked an intense reaction.
In those long, staring moments, it owned her.
She scarcely even realized Kelly was attached to it, or that he’d taken the beer from her and was drinking. Her eyes followed the meat when he sat, as he took a thick rubber band from around his wrist, where he’d been wearing it as a bracelet. Perhaps she saw his makeshift cock ring glide into place as he pulled himself through the loop. But the bulging arteries fattening by the second seemed to be her chief concern.
It was longer than she was thick.
It was deeper than the well of her by far.
And though the moments leading up to it were a blur, she knew for certain when Kelly put her on her back and put himself inside. It was the most delicious hurt she’d ever experienced, a genuine pain that brought tears to her eyes.
It was a battering ram pounding down the door of her cervix, making her feel more full than a stuffed Thanksgiving Day turkey. Every time Kelly pressed to his limit, her mind’s eye filled up with a livid white, which spilled out to blind her physical eyes as well. Wild images danced in the blizzard of pain and ecstasy, and far away she could hear herself screaming, crying out, and she could hear the grunts and groans of a man in rut. He was booming curses and blasphemies and unintelligible things, and inside her uterus he was screaming as well, bucking and shifting and lighting every part of her up.
Trix imagined this was what it would feel like should her aborted children rise up from their graves, whole and fat and bloated, goring her in their effort to wedge themselves back into the only safe place they’d ever known. It was what she deserved, that pain; it was what all whoring, murdering mothers deserved.
But where was Kelly?
His organ was there, stabbing deep, so very deep.
His body, the anchor off of which the appendage hinged, was there also.
The man, however, was far, far away, so distant that he couldn’t hear the slant in the whore’s voice change, too deep inside himself to realize the woman’s insides were tearing. Kelly was so vacant behind his staring edge-of-orgasm eyes—eyes still teary from the high school showers, eyes still shell-shocked at the sight of his best friend’s pink lips stretched around the dark cherry of his bone—that he didn’t feel the whore’s claws raking down his back and across the ovals of his ass, drawing blood as her nails broke the skin and dug up the meat, as the long nails on several of her fingers broke.
Then, like with the breaking of a dam, it all flooded his ears: the woman’s screaming, groaning, and his own, and the bruising smack his pelvis made crashing into hers, and the slosh of his reaming penetration. Flaring his lip and gritting his teeth, he bellowed out a booming grunt as he loosed a flood as well.
> And then he could feel the ache in his own pelvis, the sting in his abused genitals. And he could feel the scratches, the places where her fingernails had broken off and were still stuck in his flesh. Unsheathing revealed the crimson color that coated his still-rigid meat. A shift revealed the space between himself and the prostitute, the dark color where the foam bed had been soaked, more a shade of brown-approaching-black than red.
Even as Kelly was falling, tumbling backward off the mattress, the prostitute was reaching for him with bloody fingertips, with nails broken down to the quick.
Her vagina yawned, made a raspberry sound as the swirl of his excess and her blood seeped, as her pursuit of him caused her to sit upright. “Don’t go!” she shouted. The look in her eyes was full and famished all at once—full with the mad electric arcs of orgasmic pain, famished from never having been so completely fed before. “Oh God, give me more, I need more.”
Kelly, however, was still tumbling, rolling off the mattress and over the mess of his discarded clothing. He collected the items as he encountered them. And then the whore was screaming, “Damn you, don’t leave!”
And as she tried to stand, a red stream broke from her groin, zigzagging and splitting into wild tributaries down her thigh. Pitching to one side, falling half on her face, she found that she couldn’t walk, and so she crawled, still reaching, still screaming for more. “Please, please, damn you . . . make me feel good . . . make me feel . . . make me feel.”
Kelly and Sheila’s lovemaking was done, though Kelly still was playing the missionary, hoisted up on all fours, with Sheila beneath him on her back. The angle was good in that it hid the scars up and down his back. But neither Trix’s nor Josh’s scrapes were the first to mar Kelly’s hide. Sheila’s own digs were there, fresh trails and faded ones, and if she knew the difference between the marks she put on him and the ones she didn’t, she never said so.
“Before you, I could never feel,” was what she did say, speaking into the mic jutting from Kelly’s groin, where she’d slithered down to undo the knot of the cock noose she’d tied. As she worked, she kissed and nibbled his choice parts.
“Are you alright?” He’d been as gentle as he could, but still he had to worry.
“Gonna be walkin’ funny down at Roy’s tonight. Hope I don’t drop nobody’s order.”
“I’m sorry,” he said as his brows knitted together and the skin of his forehead creased. He was indeed sorry—sorry for things that she knew, and sorry for so many she did not.
“I’m not,” she said. “I’d rather stop walking than stop fucking you.” The knot came loose at last, and she kissed the tender flesh where the loop had left its imprint.
“I don’t understand you. It hurts, don’t it?”
Kelly turned onto his side on that note, and Sheila, still playing the snake, slithered up his leg, coiling herself into his arms.
“It hurts,” she said, with the sunset light soaking and saturating them, making the entire room the same orange as the glint that lit her eyes. “But before you, I never had an orgasm.”
Kelly sighed.
“I wish it didn’t have to hurt.”
“I wish I didn’t have to go to work, so we could do it again.”
Kelly forced a smile, but it wouldn’t sit right on his face and soon slid off and into the shadows between them. “Guess somebody’s gotta work ’round here.”
“I love you,” Sheila said between the circuits her tongue made around one of Kelly’s nipples. “You make me feel,” she said. “When I’m with you, I feel everything.” Her lips sealed upon the small, hardening nipple. “And you taste good,” she said through a grin.
“I know,” Kelly whispered, hauling her close, more breathing the words into her ear than speaking them. “I taste good ’nough to eat.”
When Sheila was gone, Kelly loaded up on aspirin and began his trek to Silvia’s club, down on Seventh Street. This was not his first trip to the nightspot. It was his fifth, and each visit had been like walking in a dream—and each time he told himself that soon he would wake.
His first meeting with the four-hundred-pound diva that was Silvia had instantly shown the truth in Big Mamma’s assumption. Silvia’s eyes had sparkled diamond light at the sight of the pronounced speed bump beneath his fly, at the whiskers the fabric formed straining to contain him.
“Show it to me, sugar,” she’d said. “Show Silvia that beautiful thing she done heard so much about.”
As his fly hissed open, Kelly had told himself that the whole scene was unreal. And when Silvia’s fat, hook-nailed index finger traced his arterial length from stern to bow and her eyes—full of hunger and dollar signs and hungry dollar signs—lifted to reach for his glassy stare, the way her words found him was more like lip-reading than hearing.
“Sweetie pie,” shaped the large, ruby red lips that hung on her face, “you got the job.” But he hadn’t wanted the job. And still he drifted, dreaming on his feet.
As Silvia read the arterial tracks of his penis like brail, the world spun into a blur, and only a lone fact emerged clear as crystal. Everything and everyone was indecent because of the meat God had strung between his legs, and Kelly hated every inch. All he wanted was a regular nine-to-five, but here again, his dick was towing him down a far darker and more perverse path. Kelly told himself it was a dream, but come daylight, in the real world, there were no decent jobs to be had, and indecency promised to keep the lights on and the roof over his and Sheila’s heads. And no, he couldn’t let her ask her father for money, because he was the man—her man—and besides, her father hated him.
So the next night found Kelly at the back of the club watching the strippers do their thing for the ladies. He watched from between panels of draped curtains, hidden so that the ladies would not see him. It was a lady’s club, no men in the audience, and as for his soon-to-be-a-part-of-the-show status, that much was a surprise not yet ripe. Watching from behind the gyrating shadow of a sea of lecherous females, he observed how scorching hot the cycling spotlights (red and orange, yellow and blue) seemed to be, blazing down upon the oiled hard-bodies. He watched how the men sweated as they strutted, stripped and slung their moneymakers. He said to himself, “Not me. I’ll find something else before it’s my time to get on stage.” But the truth was that he’d always been on stage, on display, beneath those burning-bright lights. Eyes were always on the meat.
He’d have taken anything. Dirty work would have been fine: hauling trash, cleaning toilets. Backbreaking work was okay by him, too. Anything was okay so long as it wasn’t cock-shaking work. But sunup found no one hiring and the line at the unemployment office flowing out of the building.
Then it was time for sizing at Silvia’s.
He stripped naked and let them all gawk at his measurements. He was going to be some kind of a jungle man, a black Tarzan, wearing a leopard-skin thong specially cut for his dimensions. And while the costumers did their thing, having to step back at times just to admire the meat they were dressing, the other Savage Thugs, his soon-to-be brothers-in-arms made comments about the new he-man. Big as they were—and these men were all handpicked for the fact that they were huge—he was the titan:
Hercules in a bathhouse with strong men . . .
Christ at the supper table with the saints . . .
Satan in the ninth circle of Hell, grinning mutely at all the sinners.
And at rehearsal, he showed them that he knew how to move his ass. Dancing wasn’t his thing, but the Savage Thugs Male Review wasn’t really a dance camp. Bass lines pounded, and the beats shook the club from its footers to its eaves, but it was the rolling pelvises, pumping hips and jumping, bucking, swinging penises that got these ladies’ hearts to racing.
It was an everything-comes-off kind of club, and it was Kelly’s night to go on stage. The leopard loin pouch with the floss-sized back had come in, and was in place, like a spotted fur sock in the front, with a string running the gauntlet of his crack in the back.
He
’d been given a dirty magazine backstage to jerk off over, to get warmed up with, but Kelly was such a shower that he didn’t need to get warm for his meat to turn heads. Inside the pouch, as in all the costumes at the club, a rubber C-ring was sewn in place. Silvia knew big men’s bodies, knew what they needed to show best. Kelly could feel the rubber ring, a size too small perhaps, pinching his package, a hair uncomfortable, but a welcome distraction from the ache in his gonads and the rattling of his nerves.
Kelly had tossed back a few drinks and way more than his daily dosage of painkilling aspirin, and in his belly the soup of it was bubbling, making him light-headed.
And then hands shoved him through the curtain, pushed him out and onto the stage, where the spotlights were roving to find him. The lamps were hot, as he’d known they would be: like the neon lights that flipped their burning purple heat in the Summer Street whore’s boarded window; like the burning yellow bulbs blazing above the sink in his best friend’s bathroom: like the noonday sun that beat down on the desolation of the ghetto when Kelly was trekking around looking for a job. And not least of all, the heat on stage was like the white-hot fluorescents that had blazed above the shower spray all those years ago while he’d been pinned to the tiles screaming.
The stage was a three-ring circus, with Kelly sweating in the center. To his left, Randy—a coal-black South African import—was writhing on the floor beneath a vibrant cyan light, which made his ashen complexion appear deep purple. His ass shined, and his pelvis pumped with vigor; he was fucking the stage, but there was no hole. On the right, in the fallout of a yellow lamp, a young hip-hop type named Ty had his fat penis flayed over the top of his low-hanging jeans. Having stepped down off the stage (which was only a six-inch rise), he was mixing with the front row, allowing the ladies to help him show off the fact that it took two hands to fully grope the rope of him.
And there was Kelly, bathed in liquid-red luminescence, bulging in his animal-print loincloth, feeling the tremble in the floor and the electricity in the air as the audience’s attention shifted, as lips were licked, and whoops and howls began to spread like the ripple a pebble makes when cast into still water. Kelly was that pebble, and the audience that lake, and the ripple would not stop now until every woman had been touched and transformed.
Voices From The Other Side Page 25