Dirty Old Men [And Other Stories] (Zane Presents)

by Omar Tyree

  Then he started calling my events corny. So we got into the shit for a minute, talking about who made what, and who was willing and able to pay more for shit.

  That’s when Carol said, “So, I got the man with the big bucks.” She was fucking with her friend Catherine across the table.

  The shit didn’t faze me, because I made my own money on the regular, while S had to wait for a damn paycheck from the newspaper. And there were several times when I had to loan his ass money in between checks. But I didn’t bring that shit up; we were boys!

  Catherine finally chilled us all out when we got our drinks. “Ah, guys, can I get my drink on without getting a damn headache from all this unnecessary arguing?”

  I mean, imagine the nerve of that loud-mouth bitch saying that? But I understood it. She wanted some attention, too. So I dropped the issue with S and squeezed up on her.

  “My bad, lil’ momma. Let’s get these orders on. And I’ll take me some barbecue spare ribs over here.” I was teasing her in front of the waitress, and making her feel good.

  Catherine smiled and said, “I’m ready to order my food.” Then her ass went right ahead and ordered steak. Well, I wasn’t gonna let her order more than me on my bill, so I ordered the same steak and a salad.

  S looked like he was still confused on his side of the table. In the meantime, Carol looked over at me as if she was jealous that I was holding her girlfriend. And Sean basically didn’t know what the hell to do with her. She was too fast for his slow ass.

  So when they finally decided on what they wanted to eat, I started teasing them both to spark shit up at the table again. I mean, my boy needed it, man. His conversation was bone dry.

  “So, y’all want fish and chicken breasts, hunh?” I fucked with them.

  Then Carol gave me this evil-ass eye and said, “Well, I don’t have no fish over here, baby.” She was obviously defending the scent of her pussy.

  And I can’t even lie, man, that shit got me going. That girl had more spunk in her than what I thought. So I kept fucking with her.

  “There’s a breast over there though.”

  She came right back at me. “And there’s a dick over there, too, and in more ways than one.”

  Shit! Fuck Catherine! That girl Carol had my dick hard. She had these cat eyes that just did something to you when she stared. So I looked at S to see if he was reading the shit right. He had a damn tigress sitting over there next to him, and I don’t think he was ready to handle her.

  So I said, “Well, as long as you know I got one over here. And it’s on this side of the table.”

  Finally, Sean woke his dead ass up. “What are you trying to say, man?”

  I was just making sure he knew what time it was. That damn girl had the heat up in there! I was ready to fuck her across the table myself, skinny or not. But she wasn’t that thin, just wasn’t as thick as her girl.

  I told S, “I already said what I’m saying.” That nigga needed to recognize what he had over there, before I took her ass from him. And Catherine didn’t really have shit to say anyway. It was all about Carol now, for both of us.

  Sean said, “Well, I’m holding mine over here, too. And you know what they say, the ones who talk more feel like they need to. But I’m packing strong over here without all the extra noise.”

  I actually liked that damn line. So I smiled and nodded at him. Carol looked all satisfied and shit across the table herself. And Catherine finally had something to say about it.

  “Well, excuse me, big boy,” she told Sean.

  He was winning some cool points back. So then I got loose with the shit. I took a sip of my drink and asked, “So, how do we all like our sex, from the front or from the back? Because I hear that from the back gets you in a lot deeper.”

  I was sending my messages straight to Carol to let her know that I had a lonnnng dick over that table. And she smiled and chuckled at the shit. But I was fucking up the chemistry with Catherine with all that.

  I peeped her looking across the table at Carol with one of them “bitch, cut it out looks.” But Carol ignored her ass and kept smiling.

  “Shit, can I at least eat my food before y’all start talking all this extra shit?” Catherine complained. She was mad because no one was fucking with her.

  It was too late to lie at that point. I wasn’t interested in Catherine. I wanted to fuck her girl Carol something fierce. Then S started talking about how many drinks I had, as if I was drunk, but I wasn’t. I knew exactly what I was doing.

  I watched Carol sip her down drink across the table, and I asked her how many drinks she planned to have that night.

  “As many as I want. I’m not driving, Catherine is.” Then she licked around her straw with her pink tongue.

  Got’ dammit! I looked back over at S, and this slow-game nigga didn’t have a clue! That’s when Catherine shoved me and said that she had to use the bathroom.

  I at least tried to give the girl a hug to let her know that she was still a good-looking woman, and sexy and all that. But she broke from my arms in a silent tantrum. So I raised up my hands in surrender and let her go to the bathroom.

  When I was all alone with my man and this tigress I had tried to hook him up with, I realized that I was getting in the way. We couldn’t both fuck her. Or could we?

  So I asked them both, “Are you two liking each other over there yet?”

  I wasn’t sure if Sean even liked the girl, since he was so damn quiet. Did she scare his ass off or what?

  He said, “Hey, man, she’s a nice catch. I give her a two thumbs up and a high-five.”

  Now you talk about sounding corny. That’s the shit that came out my boy’s mouth. At that point, I knew he wasn’t gonna get any pussy from her. His game was mad weak. I even started to say something about it. But I changed my damn mind. I could still at least hope for my nigga, you know. So I nodded to them and left the table to get another drink from the bar, and to clear my head and listen to the music for a minute. You can’t have every woman. But I was hoping that my man could somehow figure out that Carol was hot, and take advantage of that shit.

  Nevertheless, when I returned to our table when the food arrived, it seemed like S had a falling-out with the girl. He didn’t even want to look at her.

  Catherine was back to talking shit about how late the food was, and how come we didn’t receive our steaks first after ordering before them, and a bunch of other shit that nobody wanted to hear. She was all out the loop, and Sean and Carol got busy eating their food without another word.

  So I asked S, “What are you thinking about over there, man?”

  He turned and asked Carol to answer my question for him, and I realized that I was right. He had fucked something up as soon as I had left him alone at the table. But the truth was, he couldn’t handle the damn girl. He was not in her league.

  So she shook her and said, “Guys’ egos are so damn fragile. I can’t stand that. I mean, be a fucking man about it! If a girl don’t like you, she don’t like you.”

  God damn! I thought to myself. She was a much bigger and badder tigress than I even imagined. I felt sorry for my boy. But what could I do but laugh it off?

  “Well, what happened after I left the table?” I joked.

  “He got his little feelings hurt,” Carol answered again. She was pouring salt in my man’s wounds. That gave S no choice but to go hard on the girl. And that wasn’t even his style.

  He told her, “You know what, you’re the kind a woman who really makes a man want to fuck you hard. And I mean that.”

  “Don’t you wish,” she teased him.

  He said, “You wish I’d bend your ass over backwards across this table.”

  I started laughing my ass off. We were all laughing in there.

  “Yo, slow down, man. We just met these girls,” I joked again.

  “She asked for me it, man.”

  And he was right. She was asking him for it. He just didn’t know how to give it to her. But I did. O
nly I was being paired up with her damn girlfriend.

  So we all killed the noise and started eating our food. Then out of the blue, Catherine opened her dumb-ass mouth and said to S, “Damn, you’re tearing up that fish.”

  I started laughing again, not because of her tease, but because I knew how Sean thought. And if I know my man, he was already thinking about getting the hell out of there, wishing he had never come. Neither one of them girls were his type.

  “I feel you, man,” I told him. It was an inside joke. S was ready to eat and run and make it back to Felicia. That’s what he always did when things didn’t go his way. That girl was like his damn security blanket.

  The next thing I knew, Catherine asked me, “You feel him how?”

  I mean, nobody had been paying any damn mind to her. She didn’t have much of a personality. Even S had more of a personality than she did. At least he knew who he was and what he wanted to do. But Catherine was confused, man, and dying to be held by somebody who could understand her rude ass.

  I told her, “I feel what he’s talking about. He’s my boy. I know what’s on his mind right now.”

  Catherine looked across the table at Carol again. She had been wanting to get at her all night. It was only a matter of time. And Carol was still smiling, having a good-ass time with the shit.

  Finally, Catherine snapped at her. “Bitch, what’s so damn funny?”

  “Whatever the hell I think is funny.”

  “Unh-hunh, you out here trying to be cute again.”

  “Oh, I don’t have to try to be cute. I know what the hell I look like. It’s your bitch ass who needs some attention. Just look how you dress.”

  I was sitting there, thinking, Wow! The beef was on, for real. Then Catherine tried to reach across the table and grab Carol by her fucking hair. I moved on reflex to stop her. Sean moved to stop her, too.

  And that was the end of our damn night, dog. Them bitches started cussing each other out across the table and making a big-ass scene in there. And I had to admit that I was partially at fault. But what the hell could I do? Shit goes like that sometimes. I didn’t know them chicks had beef with each other like that. S and I just wanted the same damn girl.

  So after the night was ruined, S probably held true to form and called Felicia back up for his usual as soon as he climbed in his ride, and I walked to my own car, up the street and around the corner.

  I told myself, “Shit, if I ever bump back into that girl, Carol, it’s on!” I was planning to lock that motherfucker down! She’s my kind of woman. And I wasn’t concerned about that boyfriend shit she started talking. She was only saying that for Sean’s ass.

  But I mean, it was a fun night. That’s what going out is all about. Sometimes you don’t know what the hell is gonna happen. And you’re not supposed to. You just learn to go with the flow.

  SEX EDUCATION

  “Oh, yess! Oh, yesss! Come on with it! Come on!”

  “It’s coming, girl! It’s coming! Hold on tight! Hold on!”

  “Oh, yeah! Oh, yeeaah…”

  Nine-year-old Marcus Gamble sat outside his father’s locked bedroom door at their condo in the Skyway section of Seattle, Washington, at close to midnight, listening to his father and his female companion make nasty noises from inside.

  Marcus had first noticed the noises a few months ago, when he had moved in with his father; the loud moans and squeals had unnerved him at night. He thought his father was killing someone. But once he had gotten used to the desperate cries of adult pleasure, he learned to believe that his father was giving women what they wanted. So whenever a new female companion would drop by the house past his bedtime, Marcus knew there was only a matter of time before his father would have his company moaning and groaning from inside of his locked bedroom.

  The boy then became interested in comparing how loud each woman could get. He ranked the present woman a six out of ten, with a ten ranking as the loudest. And whenever the bedroom noise would settle back down after reaching a high point, Marcus would sneak back to his own bedroom and close the door, as if he hadn’t heard a thing. But he had heard it all, and he had heard it clearly enough to memorize it.

  Inside the master bedroom, Derrick Gamble climbed out of his extra-long, king-sized bed, and stood six feet tall and seven inches. He had a slim, wiry basketball-player frame with square shoulders.

  “Girl, you really know how to work it there,” he complimented his female friend. She remained stretched out and naked across his massive bed.

  “You’re not bad yourself.”

  “So, can I expect a couple of encores every now and then?”

  “We’ll see,” she teased. “But like you said, you don’t have any rings on your finger, and I don’t have any rings on mine.”

  “I heard that,” Derrick commented. “Well, any time you want me to break them walls in, let me know.”

  His lady friend laughed. “Ah, yeah, I’ll be sure to remind my ‘walls’ every now and then that you said that.”

  “Yeah, you do that,” Derrick told her. He walked into the master bathroom to discard his condom in the toilet and to wash up his private parts at the sink. Then he muttered to himself casually, while taking a piss, “Man, I love Seattle.”

  A former professional basketball player for the Seattle SuperSonics before the organization moved to Oklahoma and renamed the club The Thunder, Derrick had gotten used to entertaining scores of women. However, the women he had gotten used to in Seattle were stress-free as compared to those in his home of New York or in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta—where he had played ball in college, and for the Wizards and Hawks, respectively. Derrick had an accidental son with a woman in his first professional season with the Washington Wizards. Then after he had become involved in a series of controlling, stressful relationships with women on the East Coast. Derrick settled into the Seattle area during his three-year career with the ’Sonics. He fell for the tranquil spirit of the women out west.

  “They’re just so cool about everything out here,” he told anyone back east who would listen to him.

  More than anything, the women out west allowed Derrick to be himself, unapologetically. And they seemed to be all inclusive; black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Canadian, and every mixture in between. So he dated them all equally, sleeping around as if it were still the free-love hippy era of the 1970s.

  Derrick then invested in a coffee shop, inspired by the Magic Johnson example in Los Angeles with Starbucks. And when the SuperSonics franchise began its struggle over a new arena, ownership, fan support, and city finance disputes, Derrick felt secure enough to retire from the game and settle into the Seattle area for good. He was no more than a support player by that time anyway. He found a lot more excitement in running his popular coffee shop near downtown Seattle.

  Then out of the blue, his son’s mother called him from D.C. and decided that it was too much of a hassle to raise their fast-growing son on two separate coasts.

  “Well, I’m not moving back to D.C. I like it out here in Seattle,” Derrick argued.

  “Well, look, you may have to take him out there with you for a while then, because I have some things I need to focus on. I can’t do it with him stressing me about his father all the time, especially since you’re not traveling with the team anymore, where he can get a chance to see you at the games like we used to do.”

  Derrick then realized that his son’s mother still wanted to run the streets, while their son demanded more attention from her. So he would ask to see his father instead. And at first, Derrick balked at the idea of taking on his son long-term. But then he figured he would have more peace of mind that way, without having to argue with the woman on update phone calls. He grudgingly agreed to take his son for a year to see how he’d like it. However, Derrick refused to change his lifestyle for his son, and that included heavy dating. Besides, Marcus was a boy, so he would have to learn that his daddy liked women; and plenty of them.

  So there they were, father and son
, in an elaborate condo with non-stop female company from the Seattle region. And Derrick didn’t apologize for any of it. Getting girls was how he lived.

  The next morning at his coffee house, Derrick was at it again, flirting with one of his many female customers.

  “So, how many espressos do you need to stay up at night?” he teased from the counter.

  The young blonde tossed her hair out of her face and giggled. “Well, I can’t really say. I guess it would all depend on my energy level that night.”

  “And what would raise your energy level?”

  “Mmmm, who knows? Maybe a tall cup of dark coffee,” she flirted back.

  “With a little bit of cream and sugar in it?”

  She grinned into Derrick’s medium-brown face. “Yeah, but just with a little bit of cream and sugar, not too much.”

  “Yeah, you don’t want to lose all of the strong, dark flavor, right?”

  “Exactly,” she agreed with a chuckle.

  At his towering height, Derrick was hard to miss. And even though he couldn’t do every woman who entered his shop for coffee, beverages and pastries, the fantasy of a six-foot-seven-inch, black man’s dick, enticed many of them to continue to frequent his establishment. Derrick presumed as much and led their fantasy parade to the tune of very good business, as well as abundant pleasure after work hours.

  Before he could get out another word in flirtations with his pretty customer, Derrick’s cell phone went off. He looked down at the foreign number and grimaced.

  Who is this? he asked himself of the number.

  “Excuse me a minute,” he told the blonde. “I’ll be right back with you.” He then stepped inside the storage room for privacy.

  “Hello,” he answered.

  “Yes, can I speak to Mr. Derrick Gamble, please?”

  The woman sounded very professional.

  “This is Derrick Gamble. Who’s calling?”

  “This is Elizabeth Hammond, the principal at Renton Elementary School, where your son Marcus attends. And we have a very serious issue on our hands at school that I need to talk to your son about.”