Killing Johnny Fry

by Walter Mosley

  “How does your cock feel?” she asked.

  “Bigger than it‘s ever been."

  “Tell me you love me."

  “I love you,” I tried to say but the words got stuck on a sob in my throat.

  At that moment, she pulled the dildo out, and my rectum went into a painful spasm.

  “Keep fucking, Daddy,” Sasha ordered.

  I tried to do as she said, but the pain threw off my equilibrium. I jammed myself into her and then stopped, pulled out again, went in again, came out and stopped. By then she had sopped her dildo with thick oil again. When she pressed the thing back into me, my beat came back—hard.

  “You need that to keep you fucking me fast,” she said smiling up at me.

  “Yes Mama, yes Mama, yes Mama, yes,” I chanted.

  And for a maybe three minutes I experienced pure sex. My body was slick with sweat. Hers was too. There were pains in my back and left foot, but I couldn‘t stop bucking on top of that woman unless someone was to knock me off.

  When my beat went off again, and I began to cry out in a language I knew but did not understand, I thought that she‘d moved her dildo around to stop me from coming. I was expecting the broad, painful sweep, but instead Sasha said, “Stand up quickly."

  I obeyed, teetering a little on my feet.

  With her teeth Sasha ripped off the head of the colorless condom. She held the base of my cock with her left hand and used the right to massage the shaft. Almost immediately I felt the orgasm begin. My rectum tightened and the dildo popped out of my ass. When I began to ejaculate, Sasha squeezed the head so that the thick white fluid came out in a powerful stream, as if I were urinating.

  I screamed out in pain and ecstasy. Sasha loosened her grip and the come flowed out onto her face and breasts.

  “You come so much,” she said, and I howled trying to come up with words to excite her as much as she did me.

  The tremors were still going through my abdomen when she lifted my cock and sucked my tight balls into her mouth. She was rough with my testicles, and I thought it would hurt so much that I‘d lose my erection quickly. But then she put her finger up my rectum and pulled violently on my cock again. Within seconds I was having another orgasm, this one so powerful that I was afraid that the light in my mind would return and the headache would come back to finish killing me.

  I fell down next to her on the sofa and hugged her close to my chest. My shoulders jittered and the tendons in my neck thrummed.

  “You come a lot,” she said in my ear before sticking her tongue in there.

  I tried to speak but the sensation was too great.

  After a moment or two, I said, “I never came like that before."

  “Never?"

  “No."

  “Has anybody used a dildo on you before?"

  Mel and Sisypha came to mind with her question. I had so identified with him that for a moment I almost answered yes.

  “No,” I said at last, “never."

  “Just before you came the second time, your prostate got real big. I could tell that you were gonna let go another big load."

  What could I say? A week ago, if I‘d heard a woman talk like that, I would have run away. But now I could feel the stirrings of yet another erection.

  For a while after that, we didn‘t say anything. My right hand and her left played with each other. She was gentle with the bruised hand. Now and then a big truck would rumble down the street. There was a light on in the building across the way.

  I thought about my call to Joelle, telling her that I loved her. That act felt in perfect balance with me lying there with Sasha.

  “Did Inch tell you what happened?” she asked.

  “Yes."

  “What did you think?"

  “When he came downstairs, he was so Upset that I was sure he‘d killed you. So when he said that you‘d had sex, it didn‘t seem so bad."

  Sasha grinned and moved Up to kiss my lips.

  “We‘ve been fucking since he was twelve and I was fifteen,” she said. “He says that I make him but I don‘t. He always comes on to me, and I tell him no. Then he says okay and gets us both drunk. Then . . . well .

  “So you like it too?"

  “I love sex,” she said with a sneer.

  The phone rang. It was a cordless phone on the floor just next to the chaise longue. Sasha picked it up nonchalantly. That was a few minutes before three in the morning.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Oh. Hi, Martine . . ."

  Martine Mocking was the neighbor who lived between our floors, a black woman who was my age and worked for a theater producer on Broadway. We‘d never said more than hello, how are you in all the years we‘d been neighbors.

  “Oh no, honey,” Sasha said. “That was just Cordell from down below you, he was coming . . . Uh-huh, yeah. He comes really hard, and a lot too . . . Uh-huh. All down between my tits and to the floor . . . Thick and black . . . I know it‘s funny but all black men are like that, huh? . . ."

  It was odd lying there next to Sasha listening to her gossip about sex with me to a woman I hardly knew but whom I saw at least twice a week.

  “I don‘t know,” Sasha said. “Let me tell you."

  She got on her knees and reached out for my cock (which had been stiffening while she talked). She held it and squeezed.

  “There we go,” she said smiling at me. “I can just barely touch my fingers . . . uh-huh, it‘s very thick . . . Let me see . . ."

  She leaned over and took the head of my hard-again penis into her mouth.

  “Just a little salty and very smooth,” she said and then she put her mouth on me again.

  It felt so good that a moan escaped my lips.

  “Did you hear that?” Sasha asked. “He loves sex . . . I know you‘d never think it by looking at him. Hold on a second. He wants me to suck his cock a little."

  Instead of that, she looked up at me and shoved the tip of her tongue into the slit of my urethra.

  “Oh God,” I called.

  Then she took the whole thing into her mouth and down into her throat. It felt hot and slick in there, as if I were inside her vagina. I pressed my hips forward and she began to fuck me with her mouth.

  I tried to keep quiet, but it felt so good. She kept going up and down for a minute or so and then she leaned back, pulling on my slick cock and grinning into the phone.

  “It‘s all slick now,” she said. “ . . . what? . . . Okay, I‘ll ask him. Martine wants to know if I can fuck you now while we‘re still on the phone."

  Her hand was moving very fast and light on my thing. It felt so good that I couldn‘t get the words to come out from my lips.

  “He says okay, Martine,” Sasha said.

  I expected her to lean over to the table and pull out another condom, but she didn‘t. She just straddled my hips and came down, enveloping me in one motion.

  “Oh God yes,” I cried.

  “It‘s just so thick,” Sasha crooned into the phone. “My pussy has never been stretched so wide.” She was going up and down slowly, alternating between biting her lips and smiling. “Oh yeah, yeah. It‘s hard as rock . . . Uh-uh, it doesn‘t bend at all. . . Uh, uh, uh. That‘s him pushing it up inside me. Oh yeah, yeah . . . Every time he does, I have a little orgasm . . . Oh yeah. I sure am.” Then to me, “Martine wants to know if I‘m gonna jump off and eat your jism when you come.” Then into the phone, “It had a tangy flavor. Yeah, yeah, drink it down."

  For a while she fucked me sitting straight, going up and down. Then she leaned over me, rocking back and forth. The whole time she talked to Martine, telling her how everything tasted, felt, and smelled.

  She was looking lovingly into my eyes while saying, “ O h yeah, you took the dildo up in your ass. Didn‘t you, baby? Didn‘t you?

  “At first he struggled, but I made him take it."

  By then my groans were coming quickly, and I was thrusting up as hard as I could. Sasha put the phone next to my head and gripped my
shoulders so that she could fuck hard and fast. She began yelping.

  “Sasha,” the phone squeaked in my ear. “What‘s happening now?"

  “She‘s fucking me hard,” I told Martine. “She‘s holding on to my shoulders and can‘t hold the phone."

  “Is she coming?"

  “I think so. I think so."

  “Is she taking your whole cock?"

  “Yes,” I said. “I can feel her ass slapping down on nay balls."

  “Oh God,” Martine said. “And what are you doing?"

  “ I ‘m trying to get as deep inside her as I can. I‘m fucking her."

  Hearing me talk must have excited Sasha more, because her cries got louder.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Martine.

  Silence.

  “Tell me what you‘re doing, Martine."

  “I have three fingers of nay right hand inside my, my pussy,” she said. “And I‘m massaging the clit with my left."

  “Are you coming?"

  Silence.

  “Are you coming, Martine?"

  Sasha was sitting halfway up, actually crying, actual tears coming from her eyes as she slammed down on me again and again.

  “Yes, I‘m coming,” Martine shouted.

  “It‘s me down there fucking you,” I said. “That‘s my fat cock up inside you."

  “Oh. Oh. Oh,” came over the phone.

  Sasha screamed.

  My body went stiff, and Sasha jumped off me and hurried to grab hold of my erection. I could see her licking the come as it cascaded off the head of my cock. The whole time, Martine was moaning and calling out in one-syllable words and sounds.

  “Oh that‘s right, baby,” I said, and both Sasha and Martine groaned in pleasure.

  Sasha kept licking my dick well after the last drop of come was gone. Then she rubbed it against her cheek, closing her eyes with the feeling.

  “I‘m going to give the phone back to Sasha now, Martine."

  Picking up the phone, Sasha smiled and said, “Thanks for calling, honey . . . Okay I‘ll tell him."

  She disconnected the call and snuggled up beside me and said, “Martine said thanks for such a wonderful time.” Then she turned her back to me, and we fit together like spoons.

  I reached down and positioned my half-hard erection, then entered her.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh."

  “I want to go to sleep with my cock inside you,” I said.

  She shuddered in response.

  For a while I got very hard, and Sasha pressed against me. But finally we both fell asleep. I awoke only once in the night when I fell out of her with the most excruciating wave of ecstasy moving between my shoulder blades.

  That night I dreamed about a beach. I was much younger and naked, walking along the white sand shore. There were large fish jumping out of the water, and bright-colored birds, flamingos, soaring across a cloudless sky.

  I wondered how I ever got to such a place. I knew that I had always wanted to be there, naked and young. But I also knew that I was never supposed to arrive; instead, I was meant to wander endlessly in the jungle that called to me at the edge of the sands.

  I sighed in the dream and awoke on the chaise longue alone. The candles had all been extinguished and Sasha was nowhere to be seen. Tacked to the front door was a note she‘d left.

  My Dearest Cordell,

  Thank you so much for your uninhibited passion and your spirit. The whole night my heart fluttered next to you. And even after you were asleep you stayed hard. I tried to go to sleep myself but first I had to have another orgasm while you slept and stayed hard. I‘ve never been with a man I enjoyed so much and I hope that you will see me again.

  I‘m off to work.

  I love you

  (really),

  Sash

  My mind had taken a turn somewhere. I appreciated Sasha and her kind words, but as soon as I was down in my apartment, I forgot her.

  It was just shy of noon.

  I showered and shaved and put on my gray suit with a black silk T-shirt instead of a collar and tie.

  I took a taxi to the Stowe Gallery on East 63rd Street.

  A very prissy young man named Roderick glanced through Lucy‘s photographs and said, “Not for us."

  He didn‘t offer any explanation or criticism. He didn‘t say he was sorry or suggest any other gallery that might be interested. He just said, “Not for us,” and, when the phone rang, “I have to get that. Good day."

  I stopped at a Galaxy Coffee Shop franchise on Madison. There I took out a plastic pencil and began to write in a small bound book of blank paper that I‘d carried around in my briefcase for years. I‘d bought the journal in a shop in Provincetown six years earlier, thinking that I‘d write down my feelings. I carried the book everywhere, but the words always eluded me. Many a time I had sat in a coffee shop or restaurant with the book opened to its first blank page—but no words had ever come.

  That day was different. I started writing immediately about the children of Sudan. It wasn‘t so much prose that I jotted down as notes to myself about what to do with those children. How could they be used to explain something that these gallery owners didn‘t know? How could those children, their plight, open a door for them to pass through?

  By the time I got to the Nightwood Gallery, four blocks away, I had completely redesigned my approach. With Roderick I‘d just laid out the portfolio and stood back, expecting him to be moved by the subject of the pictures if nothing else.

  But now I was ready to fight for my client.

  The person I met at Nightwood was Isabelle Thinnes, the owner. She was a white woman in her sixties, well-preserved, tall, thin, and aristocratic—definitely a WASP. Her long gray hair had strands of black shot through it and was tied into a feathery bun at the back of her head.

  I sat across from her in the gallery at a desk that had a green, white, and black marble top. I put the portfolio down and placed my hand on it, letting her know that I had something to say before she saw the work.

  Isabelle and Brad Mettleman were good friends, and so she was willing to hear me out. But this brash gesture caught her up short. Suddenly she was forced to wonder who this man sitting in front of her was.

  All of this I could see, or believed I could see, in her eyes.

  “Before you look at this work, I have to tell you something, Ms. Thinnes. The pictures you see here will affect you. They are of children, most of whom are probably dead by now. You will see the death in their living eyes. You will know that there was no saving them. They are victims of their own people and of the neglect of the rest of the world. You will see them carrying guns and dolls and standing in front of burned-out buildings and on fields of slaughter. There‘s a lot of smoke in these photographs, smoke rising from broken-down hovels where these orphans live, smoke from explosions, smoke clouding the eye of reason in anyone who lived in this world.

  “But none of that matters."

  “No?” Isabelle said, her intelligent, blue eyes trying to decipher my meaning.

  “No,” I said. “You can find pictures like these anywhere. Maybe not as well presented, maybe not with the same impeccable eye that Lucy has. But there are pictures of dying children on TV every night and all over the Internet. In one photograph you‘ll see here, there is in the foreground a doe-eyed girl-child who can hardly stand, she is so hungry and frail. Behind her an American flag is fluttering proudly in the wind. Now, who knows why the flag was there? Maybe it was a camp that we built to help the children. Regardless, your clientele will see it as an indictment of them. They haven‘t done anything to help those children, and anything America has done is too little and too late."

  “You‘re not doing a very good sales job, Mr. Carmel,” Isabelle Thinnes said very seriously.

  “That‘s not the sale, Ms. Thinnes. That‘s just the setup. You and I both know that this is business we‘re talking here. Art business, yes, but business still and all.

  “I believe that Lucy C
armichael is one of the most important young photographers to hit the New York scene in the last decade, but that doesn‘t mean a thing if the pictures don‘t sell."

  “You‘re blunt, Mr. Carmel,” the gallery owner said. “But I can‘t say that you‘re wrong."

  “That‘s why,” I said, “I‘ve had Lucy form a nonprofit corporation that is to receive half the profits from the sale of these photographs. I know that the standard cost for the work of an unknown like Lucy would be twenty-five hundred dollars. But in this case I want to charge six thousand."

  “Six thousand!"

  “Yes. Because for every picture sold, three thousand dollars will be donated to the Lucy Carmichael Foundation for the Children of Darfur."

  “So you‘re saying that these photographs will cause guilt in the people who see them—"

  “And then offer them a way to assuage that guilt,” I said, finishing her thought.

  Ms. Thinnes peered at a point above my head, her face devoid of any discernable emotion. Then, suddenly, she broke out into a smile.

  After that, showing her the photographs was a mere formality; the sale was already made.

  Within the next hour, she‘d agreed to represent Lucy for a fifty fifty split after the monies that had been deducted for Lucy‘s foundation. I would be paid by taking a percentage of Lucy‘s share. Ms. Thinnes promised to have the papers ready by Saturday. We shook hands on it.

  As I was preparing to leave, she said, “Excuse me, Mr. Carmel."

  “Yes, Ms. Thinnes?"

  “Why haven‘t I heard of you before? I thought that I knew every photographers‘ agent in America."

  “I‘ve worked with and for Brad for some years, ma‘am. It‘s only now that he‘s so busy that I‘m getting out in the field."

  “You‘re very good at it,” she told me.

  There was a look of real admiration in her eyes.

  I‘d worked as a translator for twenty years and no one had ever shown me as much regard or respect.

  “Thank you, Ms. Thinnes. I really appreciate that . . . more than you can know."

  When I got to Jo‘s house, she was wearing a formfitting buttoned-up white blouse and lime-green cotton pants. Her fiery brown skin looked lovely against those light colors.