I had a real crush on Naomi, but she was going with a guy on the school’s football team. Everyone knew he was diddling her, but the closest I got was making out with her while watching Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine in Two Mules for Sister Sara at a drive-in. She let me feel her up and finger-fuck her. Next day I heard the jock was going to kick my ass. I backed off because Naomi said she wanted to go with him, which was a relief for me. I saw the guy naked showering after phys ed. He had muscles in his hair. A real intellectual who liked slapping guys on the ass with a wet towel. I didn’t hang around school much and I started avoiding it even more when I found out a guy who could scare the peas out of the Jolly Green Giant wanted to kick my ass. But I still wanted to dick Naomi. If the moron caught up with me, it wouldn’t be the first time I got my ass kicked, but it would sure as hell be for the best reason.
“Listen up, we have a special this weekend,” I told the crew. “I got some rubbers that glow in the dark and have bumpy ribs on them. They’re two bucks apiece. Tell the guys that not only will they protect them from the clap and syphilis, but even the most hardened whore will be begging for more.”
Everyone groaned. Hernández, a Mex kid whose family moved here from Tucson, was the first to give me some lip. “You’re always pushing condoms or some other screwy thing, Zack. Last week it was porno comic books. None of this stuff sells worth shit.”
“They’re shit to you, but I work off of volume,” I told him, my voice displaying the contempt we entrepreneurs feel toward the little people. “These extras add up in the long run, increasing the bottom line.” That was actually a lie. I had a closet full of junk that didn’t sell, but I was waiting for the big one, the item that would take off and make me big bucks. It was just a matter of trying different things until something connected. Like pulling the handle of a slot machine—one day all three bullion bars line up and you hit the big one. Only difference was I used my brain. When you were pulling slots, the brains were all in the machine.
I let Naomi out last, leaning toward her and placing my hand on her thigh as I asked, “Elvis and Mary Tyler Moore are in Change of Habit. Want to see it with me tomorrow night?” God had invented drive-in theaters to give kids a place to make out. I heard half the babies in this country were conceived during dusk-to-dawn movie nights.
“Can’t. Bobby’s taking me to a team party. Besides, he would stomp you if I went out with you.”
“Let me take care of muscle head.” I gave her thigh a squeeze. “I just want to show you a good time.”
She leaned closer to me. “Tell me something.”
“Yeah.”
“How come you get a bulge in your pants every time we’re alone for thirty seconds?”
She jumped out of the car, laughing.
I pulled away from the curb, transmission slamming into gear, and hadn’t gotten a hundred feet before Tony waved me over with his baseball bat. Shit.
He waited on the sidewalk with a couple of his buddies, little pricks hoping to grow up and pack a gun someday so they could be big pricks.
“I hear you been welshing on me, Riordan.”
Tony had his baseball cap pulled down low and hit the bat against the side of his shoe like he was wearing cleats and knocking dirt off of them. The accusation that I was skimming and not giving him his full cut had scared the crap out of me the first time I heard it, but it was Tony’s favorite line and he pulled it on me at least once a week. Now it only pissed me off.
“Aw, Tony, I wouldn’t do that to you, man, you know that, not after everything you do for me. Hey, man, look what I’ve got. These rubbers are from France, they glow in the dark.”
He squinted at me like it’s the first time he ever saw me. “How come you ain’t in the war? You’re not one of those fucking peaceniks, are you?”
Tony was like that lately, asking everyone he bumped into why they weren’t in uniform. He’d been real patriotic ever since the draft board gave him a 4F for high blood pressure.
“Man, I’m too young to be in the army. And if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t go anyway. Let the gooks fight it out themselves.”
“Yeah, sure, and when the Commies rule the world, guys like you will suck the dick of Ho Chi Hitler.”
I parked the Olds in front of our apartment house and climbed out. I usually spent my time checking the crew but I wanted to come home and check my closet of goodies. Not even Lardino liked the glow-in-the-dark rubbers and I wanted to see if I had anything else to try on the street—again.
Our place was on the second floor. It had only one bedroom and Betty insisted I take it. She sacked out on the couch in the living room. It worked out better that way because I actually used the apartment, even ate there once in a while, but I rarely saw Betty. Vegas was good for her—it was a twenty-four-hour town and she was a twenty-four-hour girl. She worked nights at a lounge in the Dunes and only came home to sleep during the day. She never brought a man home. I knew she dated, but she had too much class to let a man stay the night at our apartment, not to mention the lack of privacy. A guy like Hop was different—she lived with him and considered him her husband. Once in a while she’d come home with a bruise on her face because some guy had hit her. I didn’t go for hitting a woman. I carried a two-foot plumber’s wrench in the Olds. Rather than a piece of lead pipe that would get me arrested, I could always claim that it was just a tool. If I ever caught some geek knocking around Betty, I’d lay that wrench across his teeth.
I started up the stairs when Naomi’s mother, Suke, sounds like Suekey, came out from her apartment. She dealt blackjack at the Horseshoe. Naomi never mentioned what happened to her old man. Most of the kids I hung out with were like me—their father was a name or a memory.
“Lo-key, please come help me. I need strong man.”
Nothing got a man—or a boy’s—adrenaline pumping like a woman talking about his strength. Even if she pronounced his name a little pidgin. And it wasn’t just any woman—Suke was just as attractive to me as Naomi. She wasn’t as pretty as her daughter, was a little fuller of figure, but she had a cute little china-doll figure with small breasts, a slim figure, and tight buns. And again, the irresistible eyes. Unlike her daughter’s, they were small and secretive, her eyelids like temple doors. I had to admit I went for women from the mysterious East.
I followed her into the apartment, toward the cubbyhole-hallway at the intersection of the living room and the doors to the bathroom and bedroom.
“What ya need, Suke?”
“No light.” She showed me a new lightbulb. A glass light cover would have to be removed to change the bulb. She had a flimsy wooden stool beneath the light.
“No problem.” I started to get on the stool and she stopped me.
“Stool too weak for you. You hold stool, I screw.”
“Okay …”
I knelt by the stool and held it with both hands. She put her hand on my head to steady herself as she climbed onto the stool. My blood instantly heated from the smell of jasmine and the warmth that radiated from her.
She stood upright on the stool. Her short, thin-strapped black dress only came halfway down her thighs, exposing her copper-toned bare legs, which were firm and smooth and shined as if she had nylons on. When she reached up to fiddle with the little screws that held on the glass cover, her short dress went up and I saw her black panties covering her crotch. I didn’t know if it was my shaking hands or the shaky stool, but she lost her balance and started teetering.
I stood up, grabbing her bare legs. She fell against me and slid down. I kept my hands around her and she slipped through them, my hands going up her bare legs and into her dress until I had a handful of bun in each hand by the time her feet hit the floor. She looked up at me, her mysterious eyes barely open. Her little breasts were pressed against my chest. She said something, I wasn’t sure what. My hands were burning, brain frying. The smell of her jasmine perfume stole my mind. I squeezed her buns. She stood on tiptoes and pulled my head down with her hands.
Her lips were hot and wet and tasted like sex as she pushed her tongue into my mouth.
When she pulled back, I was almost breathless and just stared at her, my throbbing penis ready to burst. A shoulder strap had slipped down and her breast was exposed. I felt its sexual message down to my toes. She smiled and kissed me again with her wet lips as she pulled down the other shoulder strap. I put my hand on the exposed breast but she pulled it away and led my head down to it. I kissed her breast and tasted her nipple with my tongue. The guys at school were all breast men, the bigger the better they said, but I always thought that anything more than a mouthful was a waste.
I was shaky and scared and needed to release. My dick pressed against my pants so hard it hurt.
Suddenly her hand went down inside my pants and she grabbed my penis. “Nooo!” I cried. I leaned against her as the volcano in my pants erupted.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Boys can have many times.”
She led me into the bedroom and to her bed. She quickly pulled her dress over her head and stood before me, breasts naked, wearing only bikini panties. I fumbled off my clothes, all except my underwear. I was a cherry, nervous as hell, and had already pre-ejaculated.
She came and put her arms around me and rubbed her naked breasts against my chest, then pulled down my shorts. I stepped out of them and tried to steer her onto the bed, but she slipped from my grasp and pushed me down on the bed, on my back. Working at the top of my head, she started kissing me, licking my neck, going down to each of my nipples. I thought breast-fucking was only what guys did to girls, but I was wrong. When her erotic tongue teased my nipples, I felt it down to my toes.
Her tongue continued down my stomach, then to my penis, still limp. She held it up and kissed under it, running her tongue over my testicles and sucking my balls, then coming up and putting my whole penis in her mouth. As she sucked on my penis, it started to stiffen and get bigger. It grew in her mouth until she couldn’t hold it all. Her mouth slipped off my erection and she grinned at me. “Boys good for many times.”
She slipped off her panties. I tried to pull her down and mount her like I had once seen a guy do with a girl in the backseat of a car at a drive-in, but she pushed me back down and straddled me, kissing me as she rubbed her cunt against my hard-on. She was soft and wet and I slipped in easy and started pumping and I gasped as her strong legs tightened their grip on my penis.
“You want to fuck daughter, but mother better.”
10
I loved Las Vegas. Not just the Strip but even Glitter Gulch downtown, which was a whole lot seedier than the Strip. Vegas really had stolen the title of the biggest little city in the world from Reno, which had become a poor cousin. To me, Vegas was like Hollywood, bigger than life, but even better because Betty told me that there really wasn’t any place called Hollywood, that it was just a cheap and dirty street in Los Angeles and “Hollywood” was really movie studios and thousands of people scattered all over the L.A. basin. I guess the thing I liked most about Vegas was the vibration—you felt it everywhere you went, driving down the Strip or Fremont Street, walking through the casinos, in restaurants, hell, even getting gas at a self-service convenience store. The vibration came from the sound of money. There was no place else in the world where money made a louder noise than in Vegas. Some of that noise came from a guy Betty said was my father.
During the first couple of years Betty and I were in Vegas, Howard Hughes was always in the news because he was buying up the town. He even bought Harold’s Club in Reno. People called him “the man who owned Las Vegas.” But they also said things about him that weren’t as flattering. He stayed at the top of the Desert Inn like some kind of spider spinning webs with his money. Everyone had a Hughes story, and all of the stories were about how weird and crazy he was. It made me wonder whether being crazy could be passed from father to son.
Betty had finally broken down and told me how he ran us out of Vegas when I was only a few months old. She made me promise never to say anything about him being my father. I would have gone up and told the guy off for what he did, but I kept my mouth shut because Betty was scared of him and she was doing good in Vegas. She was in her late thirties now, still pretty but a little worn. She still went twenty-four/seven, but there were a few lines on her face and sometimes her feet hurt from being on them all night.
But no matter how much I told myself I didn’t care, the fact I passed by the Desert Inn almost every day and knew a guy who was my father and who owned the place lived there, sometimes stuck in my craw. I told Naomi about it, after swearing her to secrecy. “No father’s better than a crazy one,” she told me. She had only a hazy memory of her own father, who cut out when she was three, and it was more a feeling than an image of the man. “Violence, yelling, my mother crying, that’s what I remember about him and I don’t want him back in my life.”
Yeah, well, at least she had that.
Like I said, I loved the Strip. I was too young to gamble, but kids could walk through the clubs to get to restaurants, shows, and hotel rooms, and I’d do that just to hear the music of the casinos, the spin of the roulette wheels and wheels of fortune, the shuffle of cards, and the jingles and jangles of the slots. So much money, so many people, and everyone having a good time—except for the sore losers.
And the celebrities—all the ones you’d want to see, guys like Elvis and Wayne Newton, Jimmy Durante, Sammy Davis, Jr., but the King of the Strip was Frank Sinatra, though you either worshipped the guy or hated him. My favorite Sinatra story was the one about a casino manager who knocked out Sinatra’s two front caps. After Howard Hughes bought the Sands, Frank, who had been the top bill at the place, got pissed because he wasn’t getting the respect he thought he deserved and Hughes wouldn’t return his phone calls. Frank wasn’t the kind of guy who controlled his temper.
Angry when the Sands casino boss cut off his credit line, he went across the street and signed to perform at Caesar’s Palace, then he came back and had a confrontation with the casino manager to rub it in. Frank called the guy a few names and got popped in the mouth. Hey, maybe the tourists loved Sinatra, but the little people on the Strip had had it with him. Pretty soon the posters went up that said that the guy who popped Sinatra ought to be mayor.
11
I used to hang around the parking lot in back of the Desert Inn in between checking on my crew, sometimes sacking out in the Olds to get some shut-eye. I woke up in the dark one night, it was just before Thanksgiving, not that the holiday meant anything to me—Betty worked holidays because people were more generous with their tipping. I had gotten out of the car to take a piss near a Dumpster when a security guard opened a service entrance door. Headlights and engines went on and three vehicles, an ambulance and two limos, lined up at the door. Other men came out and then a man came out on a stretcher. The guy on the stretcher was naked except for a hotel towel thrown across his midsection. He was skinny, no, more than that, he was wasted, emaciated, a dried mummy almost, skin stretched taunt from bone to bone. His skin was so pale, he glowed in the dark. He had long unkempt hair and a scraggly beard. I couldn’t help but stare at his sunken cheekbones and eyes that were dark sockets, his fingernails and toenails so grotesquely long and curled.
No one noticed me standing by the Dumpster except the dude himself. When the attendants paused before lifting the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, the guy’s eye caught me and he turned to stare. For a moment I was jolted by recognition, not that I knew the guy, but a feeling that I should know him.
Then he was gone, hustled into the ambulance, a flock of other guys jumping into limos, and the motorcade took off like it was carrying the president or somebody.
I hailed the security guard as he was closing the service door. “Who’s the roadkill?”
“You just saw Howard Hughes, kid, the richest man in the world. He’s leaving Vegas. He’s been here for four years, almost to the day, and damn near owns the whole state.”
“Wher
e’s he going?”
“With that guy, who knows. Probably to hell.”
Suke taught me more about sex in a month than the regulars at the Pink Lady had learned over a lifetime. People related in different ways and Suke was a sexual animal.
“Lo-key, all men too impatient,” she told me, as I eagerly jumped on her naked bones. She pushed me to the side. She was small built, but every ounce was muscle. “You have to talk to woman with hands and lips before you pump like dog fucking leg.”
She had me start at the top of her head, coming down the side of her cheeks, my lips caressing the soft skin of her neck and under her ear, down the lush valley between her breasts, running my tongue over her nipples, slipping down to tease her bellybutton with my tongue, working my way down the insides of her thighs and to the soles of her feet before my head disappeared in the pink between her legs. She taught me to lick her vulva and go back to her lips so she could taste her own femininity, going back slowly to the pink and the sweet little button there.
“Work it slow,” she told me, moaning with pleasure as I wet-kissed her neck while my penis spoke to her womanhood.
After a month, I considered myself quite a stud.
“You very good,” Suke said. “Your cock not as big as Naomi’s Bobby but you know how to use better.”
“You fucked Naomi’s boyfriend?” I was shocked.
“Only once. He love himself too much to give a woman good pleasure. But he hung like horse.”
12
“The big spender wants your personal attention,” the bar service manager told Betty. He jerked his head toward a guy sitting alone at a cocktail table.
The guy was big, with hulking arms and legs, a big round face, bald pate, and thick neck. Still solid, some of his pumped-up chest had slipped down to hang around the belly and hips as fat. He wore a thick gold chain around his neck, flashy gold Rolex, and a big gold ring with a ruby on his pinkie. His powder-blue shark-skin leisure suit was the kind of thing guys wore who wanted to imitate the Rat Pack. It matched the yellow silk shirt open at the neck, showing a puff of black hair like a furry cravat.
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