Hop Alley

by Scott Phillips

  Though the building was nearly perfect for the purpose it generally served, several eccentricities of design made it a less than ideal place to live. Among these was an outdoor johnny that could be accessed only by a ladder from the rooftop, for no access to the rear courtyard was provided from the interior of the building. The arrangement’s only advantage was that it allowed me to exit the property via a gate behind the outhouse into an alley that ran between my property and the livery stable, though reentry via the gate was impossible.

  It was nearly three when I drove my carriage out the door of the stable, bearing a bottle of nerve tonic, in case milady was still mad at me from last time, and foolishly dressed for the warmth of a spring day. When I reached Golden at 4:20 I was sorry for that, as there was still snow on the ground at that elevation, and the air on the drive up had chilled my face to what I imagined was a deep, salmon pink. I drove to a neat, two-story brick building among a row of similar structures, climbed down, and tied my animal to the post outside it, ignoring the clucking of a pair of passing women as they looked back and forth between me and the house with equal measures of disapproval. One of them muttered something that sounded like “harlot,” and I turned to face them directly. In my hand I held a garland of bluebonnets I’d stopped to collect on the way up; I separated two blooms and brazenly proffered them to the horrified ladies, treating them to my most disarming and ingenuous smile.

  “Bel après-midi, n’est-ce pas, mesdames?” I said, and they hurried on their way, sputtering at the vile and dissolute ways of the heathen French. I strode to the door, lifted the upcurled trunk of its brass elephant knocker, and dropped it to our rhythmic signal: one, two, three, then half a rest before four and five. Priscilla opened the door and looked me up and down with mild contempt. Dressed and coiffed with her habitual demure elegance, she looked as fresh-scrubbed and wholesome as a minister’s wife on her way to teach a Sunday school class on chastity.

  “I suppose you’ve come all the way from Denver looking for a piece of ass,” she said.

  I had no answer to that question. The truth wouldn’t have been gallant and she would have seen through a lie, so I handed her the bluebonnets. She raised an eyebrow and frowned, but when I showed her the bottle of laudanum she moved aside to let me in.

  Fifteen minutes later we were in her squeaking iron bed, hammering away at it like we’d only just met. She heightened my arousal with throaty cries that crescendoed and decrescendoed slowly, though whether expressing either real passion or a simple desire to gratify my amour propre only she knew. After such a long period of chastity the physical sensation of intercourse was nearly overwhelming, and shortly I discharged with a slightly piquant sensation what felt like a pint and a half of spunk. I resolved before withdrawal never to go that length of time again without a proper ejaculation. After we’d lain there for a while she spoke.

  “You know I’ve been going to church, Bill?”

  I sat up and took pains not to laugh. “You’ve seen the light?”

  “Don’t be smart. I just go to be sociable.”

  I thought about the biddies on the street and wondered what churchgoing ladies in Golden would welcome her in their homes. “Which church is that? The Methodist or the Baptist?”

  “I take my carriage into Denver and go to the Presbyterian services and let it be known that I’m a widow. Last week some of the ladies invited me over to a tea.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Well, for a bunch of ladies taking tea after church services the talk got pretty vile, I’ll tell you that.”

  Now I did laugh. “How vile could it get?”

  “I’m getting to that. One of the ladies was talking about a fellow from Denver who abandoned his wife for a banjo player.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Well, this fellow apparently traveled the country as a sort of saltimbanque, he’d go into saloons and do a little tumbling, then he’d play his banjo and pass the hat.”

  “This is the fellow who left his wife?”

  “No. The one who left his wife, left her for this banjo player here. Two gents, if you see what I’m getting at? So one of the ladies at tea manifested the same misunderstanding you did just now. But the more we explained it to her politely the more confused she got. And finally Mrs. Halliwell, the lady whose house it was, explained to her that the nature of the rapport between the two men was of . . . of love. Of a physical kind.”

  I nodded again.

  “And the poor thing just wouldn’t understand. I think there were several of them that didn’t, quite, either, but this one kept asking and asking until finally Mrs. Halliwell broke down and explained that the one stuck his pecker in the other one’s mouth.”

  I was thinking right then that I’d have given a thousand dollars to hear that Mrs. Halliwell explaining to her poor demure friend about cocksucking. “She said ‘pecker’?” I asked.

  “I think she said ‘manhood.’ Anyhow, having said it, Mrs. Halliwell brought up the fact that it’s illegal, putting your mouth on someone else’s reproductive parts.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said, though I knew it was most places, and probably here as well.

  “Yes, it is. The law went after these two fellows and not just because the one deserted his wife.” She took a deep breath and paused before expelling it. “Mrs. Halliwell, who was enjoying our ill ease, shocked the other ladies by saying there were women deviates who practice a form of the same vice. Pussy-licking. Well, if you don’t think that got them all indignant. Most of them thought she was having us on. So it got me thinking.”

  “About me tonguing your pussy?”

  She got red and looked off toward the doorway. “I don’t know of anybody else who does that. I’d never even heard of it until you did it to me that first night.”

  “I thought you liked it,” said I, knowing perfectly well she did.

  “I do.” She was quite flushed now. “But it’s not natural, is it?”

  “Sure it is.”

  “But it’s not. Where did you learn it, anyway?”

  “A lady whose husband wouldn’t. He thought it was unnatural, too.”

  “Well. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it. But I feel so ashamed, just lying there and feeling lips and a tongue on it. Think of what else goes on down there.”

  I shrugged. “If you want me to quit it, I will.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve just been thinking, is all.” She sat up, as though just remembering something. “And where exactly have you been all these weeks without a word?”

  “In Denver, taking pictures. You could stop by and see the studio sometime if you wanted.”

  “I meant why’ve you not been by to see me?”

  She sounded genuinely puzzled and a little wounded, and I wondered if she possibly could have forgotten the vicious tongue lashing she’d given me the last time I’d stopped by for a quick one. Among other things she’d expressed a wish never to see me again, a wish I’d promised to fulfill. I’d meant it, too, but I hadn’t counted on the effect of weeks of celibacy on my stability and resolve, or on the contents of my scrotum. I’d had no desire to patronize the whores on Market Street, and the sin of Onan, which practice had been my sole sexual release for so many weeks, never provokes a sufficient volume of ejaculate to properly evacuate the nuts. (I remain convinced that the inevitable putrefaction of that residual semen is the cause of what we used to call in the army “blue balls.”)

  “You told me not to come back, ever,” I said.

  She slapped her hand down on my chest, playfully, but hard enough to hurt. “I was mad at you, you stupid man. That doesn’t mean I truly didn’t want you to come back,” she said, in an absurdly coquettish tone for a naked woman speaking to a man who has recently had to extract one of her shortest and curliest poils from between his incisors.

  I was about to dress and make my excuses, hoping to avoid another screaming fit, when a loud rapping came from the door downstairs: one, two, full rest
, three four, full rest, five, six, and seven. Priscilla went rigid and sat straight upright, eyes wide and nostrils flared.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked her, and she hissed to quiet me down, then crept to the window on her knees. She lifted the corner of the curtain, then turned back to me in a panic.

  “Isn’t this Wednesday?” she asked.

  “It’s Thursday,” I said, and she covered her mouth up with her hand. She kept shaking her head and crawled back to the bed. From outside came a cry, a man’s voice. “Cilla!”

  I went over to the window and peered through the edge of the lace curtain. Downstairs at the door stood my friend and landlord Banbury. He stood patiently and didn’t act as though her failure to answer promptly was anything unusual. He consulted a pocket watch and continued to stand, facing the street.

  “Well, for Christ’s sakes, it’s just Ralph,” I said with some relief, tempered by a growing realization of the complexity of the situation facing me. “I thought he came over on Tuesdays and Fridays.”

  She shook her head. “Thursdays and Mondays, now.”

  “No use getting into a knot about it. I’ll go let him in.” I was already half dressed and buttoning my shirt.

  “Are you crazy?” she said, trying to whisper but betrayed by her anger into half shouting.

  “What else do you want to do? Turn him away? Have me stay here and listen from the wardrobe while you make the two-backed beast?” I moved toward the door and when I took the knob in hand the pitcher containing the bluebonnets shattered on the wall next to the jamb, dousing me with water.

  “Son of a bitch!” That was said loud enough for Ralph to hear, at least the last, explosive word of it, and I made my way quickly down the stairs.

  She was close behind me but she stopped cold when I opened the door. “Evening, Banbury,” I said.

  If he was surprised at the sight of me in his lover’s doorway at the hour of their regular weekly assignation, he maintained his aplomb. “Sadlaw,” he said, as nonchalant as if we had come across one another on the street.

  “Come on in, I was just on my way. Cilla took today for Wednesday.”

  “I see. Perhaps I ought to come back another time.”

  “As I said, I was already on my way.” Peering around me he saw her on the stairs, her dressing gown hurriedly wrapped about her shoulders and her feet accusingly bare, her auburn hair winding damningly down past her shoulders. His grin grew tighter and I shouldered my way past him with a faint apology. I heard her door closing and the sound of shouting, followed by those of a heavy object hitting a wall or the floor and glass breaking. Her curio cabinet, most likely, and certainly at her own hand; whichever of them had upended it, though, it would be Banbury who bought its replacement after the fighting had given way to tearful apologies, declarations of love, and finally to urgent copulation, likely as not right there on the downstairs canapé. I climbed aboard my buggy, sorry for their trouble but happy to be temporarily drained of the source of my own.

  I STOPPED AT the dining room of the Wentworth House Hotel for a dinner of steak and fried potatoes, then made a visit to the Occidental Hall to have a glass of beer and see the miners and prospectors get themselves fleeced at the gaming tables. I watched one prospector in particular lose spin after spin on the roulette wheel, dropping a dollar or more on each try. His face was dotted with fresh scabs that suggested he’d tried to save money by shaving himself after a long abstinence, and he grew slightly more crestfallen with each successive failure of his luck to change. I watched the operator, too, and the cruel glimmer in his eye each time the wheel slowed and refused again to hand the wretch a small win, defying the laws of probability; fortunately for him the prospector’s familiarity with mathematics was probably limited to the simplest arithmetic. After a while it stopped being funny, and I left the poor fellow to it and hoped he wouldn’t lose his entire fortune trying to prove a point about luck.

  TWO

  THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD

  The next morning was cold and overcast and useless for printing, and I went about my morning activities in an agitated state. This was made worse around midmorning when Augie Baxter turned up at the door with his sample case and an air of obsequious bonhomie that suggested bad news. I led him into my office and sat him down, and the boy brought us coffee in china cups.

  “Sales are down,” he acknowledged as I eyeballed my earnings. “Even atrocity pictures aren’t moving like they used to do. I bet we didn’t sell ten of your scalped buffalo hunter in the last six months.”

  According to my statement only seventy-three dollars and thirty-five cents were owing to me for the six months covered, less than what I still owed him for views of Paris and Rome and the land of the Hottentots I’d ordered on his last visit.

  “I don’t suppose I’ll be making an order then, this time.” I handed him the statement back.

  “Wait.” I turned back to find him rifling the sample case. “Let me show you something before you say that.”

  He handed me a single view, which I placed into the stereopticon. Pressing my eyes to the lenses I was treated to the sight of a naked woman leering at the camera, one hand demurely resting at her shoulder and the other stimulating her unusually hirsute genitalia. The look of wanton depravity on the woman’s face and the artless explicitness of the pose set this view apart from the typical nude views sold in the back rooms of saloons and cigar stores and whorehouses, or, for that matter, from the ones I’d taken years before of Maggie. I was sad at the thought of those images I’d left behind in Cottonwood and apoplectic at the notion that someone might have found them, might at this moment be pulling them from a similar sample case somewhere for under-the-counter sale to slack-jawed, masturbating yokels unworthy of her glance.

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “I was just showing you, is all.” He took the view back and replaced it in the case’s hidden compartment. “I sell a hell of a lot of these extra-dirty French views out of the cathouses, and if I could get a few of some local gals who don’t look like they’re about to keel over from the last stages of the clap, in some real inviting poses, I could sell even more. I’d really like to start vending them under the counter in some of the finer galleries, like yours right here.”

  “Good luck,” I said. “You won’t be the first one who’s tried.”

  Augie noticed the boy standing in the doorway before I did. “What do you want?” he asked with some belligerence.

  Poor Lemuel cowered and shrank into the corridor, extending his hand to me. In it was an envelope. “Fellow just brought this by,” he said. “Urgent message for you, Mr. Sadlaw.”

  He scurried out as I opened the envelope, which bore neither postage nor return address. Inside was a single sheet of stationery bearing the engraved flag of the Denver Bulletin, reduced to fit the page.

  Sadlaw,

  Meet me at the Charpiot Hotel at noon for luncheon.

  R. Banbury

  I shoved the envelope and the letter into my desk drawer. It was a quarter past eleven. “Sorry, Augie, I’m being summoned. You’ll have to come back later.”

  “Fine, I’ll head on down to Market Street and have a look at some of those whores.” His eyebrows rose and fell dementedly, and he seemed to expect me to be impressed.

  “You go and have yourself a good time,” I said.

  “I’ll leave you these and come back for your order tomorrow.”

  I nodded as he pulled the samples and a catalogue from his case and set them on my desk, though I had no intention of making an order with so many sets of views unsold in the display cases.

  AFTER INFORMING MRS. Fenster that I would not require any lunch, I descended to the street and strolled to my engagement at a leisurely pace, not particularly concerned about punctuality. The sky had remained low and dark gray, the day as cold as it had been at dawn, and I regretted not having put on a heavier coat. I arrived at the Charpiot shortly before noon and didn’t see Banbury in the dining r
oom. I told the maître d’hôtel whom I was meeting and was informed with a disdainful sniff that Mr. Banbury took his luncheon in his private suite of rooms on the third floor.

  The corridors and the staircases of the Charpiot were finely wrought, with imported carpets and flocked velvet walls, and though I was dressed with more care than usual I still felt like the ashman misdirected through the parlor. I was certain that the staff and guests I passed on the way to the suite saw me the same way, and somehow certain also that Banbury had planned this humiliation as punishment for defiling his inamorata, though I knew this was absurd, since he’d been well aware of my connection to her for some time.

  The door of the suite was ornately carved like that of a church, and before I had the chance to knock it opened and a liveried servant led me to a dining room as sumptuous as the one downstairs. It was so gloomy outside that even with the curtains wide open the candles were burning, and I despaired of getting anything useful out of my afternoon sittings; Banbury waited at a small table, one eye covered with a bandage stained orange-red with blood. He had already begun to eat his soup and was mopping it up with a crust of bread as I took my seat. “Glad you could come, Bill,” he said.

  “Thanks for the invitation,” I said, and started in on my soup.

  “There’s no hard feelings about Priscilla, just so you know.” As if to mock the room’s baroque elegance he was in his shirtsleeves and what was left of his hair fanned out in all directions as though toweled dry and then neglected by the comb. “Not toward you, anyway.”

  “I heard you two going at it when I left.” A glass of red wine stood next to one of water, which I drained. An elderly man with a waxed moustache appeared at my side and filled it again from a crystal pitcher.