Killing Johnny Fry

by Walter Mosley

  The pancakes and bacon were sitting in front of me. I hadn‘t even noticed Nina‘s presence. My cock was hard under the table. It felt like Brad‘s gun.

  I had a hard-on for Johnny Fry. I wanted him to die even though I no longer hated him. The feeling now was one of lust. His blood was singing to me. He needed me to kill him; that was the only way he could be forgiven.

  I ate again with gusto. Nina appeared three times to fill my water glass.

  I almost told her about my stolen pistol and my rock-hard dick. But I kept my silence. I kept my silence, and it kept me safe.

  It was only then that I realized that Sisypha‘s drug had taken hold. I was thinking in symbols and metaphors. I was concentrating on what was most important to me. This was her thinking drug at work.

  As I was walking out of the door, Nina the waitress ran up to me.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  “Uh-huh?” I turned to look at her, realizing that my eyes had been become intrusive; my mind was in overdrive and I must have looked insane.

  “You didn‘t pay,” she told me.

  “Oh?” I said trying to look away. “How much do I owe?"

  “Twenty-six dollars and forty-one cents."

  I handed her two twenties and said, “Keep the change."

  “That‘s too much."

  “It‘s not nearly enough,” I told her, approximating sobriety with my tone if not my words. “Not for someone like you."

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I saw in her face real concern for me. I reached out and touched her cheek, noting that she didn‘t pull away.

  “I‘m fine,” I told her. “Wonderful."

  Back in my apartment, I took out the junkie‘s gun and put it on the kitchen table in front of me. I opened the box of ammunition, pouring the cartridges across the surface, then I honed my mind in on Johnny Fry.

  I thought about him being a white man making my girlfriend his plaything. I wondered if that mattered at all. I hadn‘t thought much about it before. But now I tried to come to some kind of understanding. Was I the victim of some kind of racism? Did Johnny Fry get off on the fact that he could take a black man‘s woman and make her cry out his name and to profess passion for him that she felt for no other man?

  The idea seemed silly.

  Did he deserve to die? Oh yes, he definitely did. And I was the one who should kill him.

  Could I do it? Yes again. His blood would bring out hilarity in me. I‘d laugh all the way to the graveyard and then I‘d climb up and dance on his tomb.

  With the gun in my pocket, I took a cab up to the Westside, where I walked some blocks to Jo‘s apartment building. I stopped at every trash can along the way, making a small deposit in each as I went.

  “Go right up, Mr. Carmel,” Robert the doorman said when I walked into Jo‘s building.

  The drug had worn off, mostly. I had no thoughts except one as I rode up in the elevator. It seemed to me that the exhibitionist side of Jo‘s relationship with Johnny Fry would have them fucking in that lift while Robert or any of the other doormen watched. He would hike up her dress and press her against the wall, stick his long thing up in there, while she writhed and moaned, pretending to be shy, pretending not to want it. From the console at the front desk the doormen could turn on the sound so they could hear her begging for more cock while he asked her who was her man?

  She answered the front door in the nude. She was naked but not sexual. I thought at the time that she was trying to tell me she would be as honest as she possibly could. That was Sisypha‘s thinking drug making a slight return.

  I kissed her gently, expecting nothing in return, but she surprised me, not for the first time, by returning my kiss with a tender embrace that felt both feathery and strong.

  “Come on in, L,” she said. “We have three hours."

  “Why only three hours?” I asked, though I wondered what we would do with all that time.

  “Johnny is coming over after you leave,” she told me, looking into my gaze with a crazy kind of certainty. “He‘s waiting down the street for us to finish. I called him while you were coming up the elevator. He‘s going to take me in the bathtub and urinate all over me, then fuck me, then sodomize me, and after that, I‘ll do things to him."

  “Why have me come here at all?” I asked. “He seems to be the one that you need."

  “I‘ve told you what I will do with him,” she said in a monotone. “And I‘ve told him what I plan to show you. He went crazy with jealousy when I laid it out. He cried and said that he wouldn‘t let it happen, but he needs it as much as I do.” Toward the end of this little speech, she was sneering.

  “And what do you plan to do with me?” I asked.

  “Come in the living room and take off your clothes,” she answered.

  I did as she said. I didn‘t feel shy standing there nude in her living room. My penis was completely flaccid. The one thing I was sure was that Joelle and I would never have sex again.

  Jo looked down at me and smiled.

  “Does my honesty turn you off, L?"

  “We‘ve both been through a lot, honey,” I said. “And I think we both know that this is over."

  “Only if you want it to be,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “You have your lover waiting down the street."

  “He‘s fucked me Monday through Friday for six months and we‘ve still been together,” she said.

  It was amazing to me that she seemed and sounded like the same woman I had known for years, even though she was saying things I would never imagine coming from her mouth.

  “Is that what you want?” I asked.

  “Sometimes he‘d stay with me until just before you arrived,” she replied. “Sometimes, when I‘d go for a Sunday run, he‘d fuck me in the park while you waited up here."

  “I don‘t get it, Jo. Are you trying to hurt me?"

  “Don‘t you ever get tired of lying, L?” she replied. “Don‘t you ever want to throw off all the shit you put out twenty-four hours a day?"

  I smiled and sat down on the sofa.

  “It‘s funny?” she asked.

  “No, not funny, Jo. It‘s just that you have things to say that you‘ve done. Your uncle. Johnny Fry. The guy with the ties. All I have is the fact that I wasn‘t raised in San Francisco but in Oakland. It‘s a lie that doesn‘t mean anything to anyone but me."

  “I have videos of me and Johnny,” she said.

  That made me think of Sisypha, and the thought of my new sister made me smile.

  “He got me talking about you while he fucked my ass,” she said.

  “I don‘t want to see your pictures, Jo. They won‘t do anything for me."

  “I got something that will,” she said with a sly smile on her lips.

  “I‘m not taking any pills or anything."

  “Bring your heels up on the cushion,” she said.

  I didn‘t see any reason to argue. My life with Jo was over. I knew that this would be the last time we got together. I knew that I would be leaving her to Johnny Fry in less than three hours.

  She sat down below me and sucked my balls in her mouth. She ran her tongue around them and moaned so that I could feel the vibrations in my sex.

  I remember that the feeling was pleasurable, but it didn‘t excite me at all.

  “You have great big balls, L,” she said. “I love them. I always have. I used to want to suck on them, but we didn‘t have that kind of relationship. You were pretty straightforward until you saw me and Johnny."

  I almost said something but decided against it.

  “Does that feel good?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said noncommittally.

  “That night I met Johnny at Brad Mettleman‘s party, he whispered in my ear that he wanted me to suck his balls,” she said. “That‘s exactly what he said. I thought it was just to shock me, so I told him to come to my place. I said that I‘d send you home and suck his balls afterward. I was sure he wouldn�
��t come. But he did. I told him to take his balls out, thinking that that would shut him up. But he took out that great long cock of his and held out those balls like golden apples for me."

  The whole time Jo was talking, she was also nuzzling my testicles with her nose, taking them into her mouth now and again and humming low so that I felt it.

  “I sucked them really hard, and he told me to do it harder. That‘s when he had me. That‘s when I knew that he was going to master me. I just kept on sucking until he said he was going to come. He made me keep on until he came all over my art books and my couch. I laid back on the floor, and he stroked his dick, dripping the last drops on my face."

  I could hear the passion in her words and her breathing. I looked at her, and she smiled.

  “I didn‘t let him know how much he had me, though,” she said. “I told him that he thought he was so tough. He didn‘t know what tough was, I said. I went into the closet and took out a belt that my uncle used to make me carry whenever I came to his house. When he wanted to punish me, he‘d ask for the belt, and I had to have it, or my family would go for a week without money.

  “Johnny laid me across the top of the couch and hit me in ways that even Uncle Rex hadn‘t known. I begged him to stop, but I didn‘t mean it, and he didn‘t stop. He kept on whipping until I was a heap in the corner.

  “Then he fucked me and I fucked him. He stayed with me that whole first week."

  I didn‘t want to allow myself to be excited by her story but there was something about the intimacy that I had never known with Jo before. It was one thing to feel close in a friendly way, to be in love. But what she was telling was what should never be said between lovers. She was opening up her insides to me. I could see her beating heart, her blood and skin and bones.

  I remembered that she‘d claimed to be sick for two weeks after the party. I‘d come to her place once, but she stopped me at the door, saying that even the slightest noise set off her migraine.

  I thought of him chasing her through the house, flicking that ancient strap and making her scream.

  I moaned out loud like a beached walrus.

  Despite my resolve, my cock had raised to half-mast.

  “Do you feel what I‘m telling you, L?” Jo asked.

  I groaned again and tried to pull away. It was wrong for me to feel so good about being cuckolded like that. I tried to get away, but she gripped my balls and said, “Stay still, L. You wanted to know and I‘m gonna show you."

  She wrapped something around my scrotum, above the testicles. It wasn‘t very tight but cinched close enough that it wouldn‘t fall off, either.

  “Slip down a little bit, baby,” she cooed. She was another woman. I was another man.

  I scooted down, and she pressed something small into my rectum, something that had a string coming from it.

  “I want you to feel how I feel, what I crave,” she said. “Not little schoolgirl kisses but knotted up intestines and screams in the darkness."

  She took my cock into her mouth and groaned a feral note.

  I felt fever overtake me and then shivering cold.

  “Sometimes when you‘d call me to say good night,” she said. “Johnny would come up behind me and shove his cock in while I was talking. You‘d be telling me about some translation detail, and I‘d be saying about some fabric ad campaign, and Johnny would be driving that dick all the way in and grinding at me. Sometimes I‘d ask you to hold on and I‘d put the phone on hold and holler and come. Sometimes I‘d lick the come off his dick while you read me some paragraph or sentence in French."

  I didn‘t want to, but I began to rock back and forth into her mouth. She screwed up her face while taking me down her throat. Then she‘d lean back with a long slick of saliva dripping from her lips.

  “I never told him no about anything and I made him degrade me and punish me for all the years I stayed quiet."

  Jo moved in such a way that I knew she wanted me on the floor. I couldn‘t deny her, any more than I could deny the glistening, straining erection she held.

  “You see this?” she asked holding up a black disk with a red button at its center.

  Before I could reply, she depressed the button, and an electric shock went through my testicles and up into my rectum.

  “Do you feel that?” she asked me.

  My limbs were stiff and the muscles along my back were contracting, making me arch up from the pelvis.

  “Do you feel it, L?” she asked again, giving me no relief.

  I tried to nod; I don‘t know if I managed it. But she released the button.

  “Look,” she said.

  I looked down, seeing her golden-brown skin against my darker hue. Then I noticed that my erection was an inch, maybe two, longer than I had ever seen it.

  “Do you feel it, L?” she asked again, again pushing the button and releasing the current on me and in me.

  It was a little less this time, or maybe I was getting used to it. She licked her tongue against the head of my cock, causing a crooked arc of electricity between her mouth and me.

  “Feel that energy going through you, L? That‘s how I felt all those years with my uncle; all those years I kept from going back. It was sweet torture. I could have stopped it but I didn‘t. First I was worried about my family, and after that, after that, I just, I just didn‘t know the way home."

  She climbed up on my cock and fucked me, turning on the juice at odd moments that I couldn‘t predict. She felt the current too. It went through me right up into her. Something about the shocks kept me from coming even though I felt it deep inside. The electricity was going all through me, pulsing through my middle and up the shaft of my elongated cock.

  I felt like I was coming but I couldn‘t. I couldn‘t stop fucking either. And all the while Jo, a woman I realized now that I‘d never known, kept asking me if I felt it.

  “Do you feel it, baby? Is this what you wanted to know?"

  That went on for over an hour, until finally she got off me and pulled on my dick with both hands. Because she used both hands, I knew the shocks wouldn‘t come. Something in me relaxed, and I experienced an orgasm that was more powerful than any single feeling I had ever known. Five minutes later my body was still jittering and twitching.

  “That‘s what it has been like for me, L,” she whispered. “That‘s why I can‘t break it off with John Fry. He makes me feel like that, and I need it, I have to have it or I‘ll die."

  I tried to say something, but the shocks were still in me.

  A few minutes later, Jo got up and went to her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

  After a while I went to her door but found it locked. So I gathered my clothes and dressed slowly, hoping that Jo would come out to say good-bye. But when my shoes were tied and she hadn‘t shown, I went out of her apartment and her life.

  Down on the street, I sat on a bench next to the wall that separated the traffic from the park. I had my hand on the pistol in my pocket. Every now and then, I shuddered from the memory of her shock treatments.

  I did feel what she showed me, and I knew that it was too much. I had to leave her, because I couldn‘t beat her or do to her what she had just done to me.

  I looked up and saw Johnny Fry walking toward her building.

  “johnny,” I called.

  He stopped and recognized me. I waved him over, and he came.

  “Hello, Cordell,” he said. “How are you?"

  “I feel like a rat that just swam across a river,” I said. “Alive but weak and not sure why I did it."

  Johnny sat down next to me.

  “She needs me, Cordell,” he said.

  A spasm went through my spine and I shifted on the stone bench.

  “Yeah,” I said. “She needs something."

  “You‘re a good guy, Cordell, but Joelle has a really dark side. I don‘t know what you guys were doing Up there, but you haven‘t seen the half of it. She‘s a demon on wheels. You‘re lucky you got somebody like me to take her of
f your hands."

  “So you say,” I said. “So you say."

  “Are you telling me that you want her when you know everything about us?” he said. “You know, sometimes I was with her from Sunday night to Saturday morning. If you guys had children, they‘d all be mine."

  “That has nothing to do with me, Mr. Fry.” I was enjoying his attempt to turn me from Jo. He was at the disadvantage, and that was fine by me.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “Do you still plan to try and be with her?"

  “I have no plans, John. She told me that she was gonna show me something and then you were gonna piss on her and fuck her in the ass."

  “You have no right to talk about her like that,” he sputtered. “No right. She‘s got something beautiful in her. She‘s becoming something wonderful. You have no right to talk about her like that."

  “But you have the right to fuck her while she‘s talking to me on the phone. You have the right to come on her lips while I‘m going on like a fool in French or Spanish."

  “You don‘t understand how we feel,” he said.

  I took out the pistol, holding it in the flat of my hand.

  Johnny froze when he realized what I was holding.

  “I understand,” I said. “I understand what you think. I got this gun to shoot you with. I took it from Brad Mettleman, thinking that you should die because you made me inconsequential . . ."

  Johnny grabbed the pistol and pointed it at me.

  He jumped to his feet and cried, “You stupid motherfucker! You don‘t know what it means. I should shoot your fuckin‘ ass right here in the street. You stupid asshole. You dumb fuck. You don‘t have any idea what it f-f-feels like to be with her—the real her. You don‘t know what she is. She‘s like the sun. She‘s, she‘s, she‘s . . ."

  I put my hands up. I wanted to smile, but the depth of Johnny‘s feelings actually touched me. He was in love even if Jo was not. He was lost in the web of her uncle‘s abuse more than she was.