by Patrick Mann
“Who’s asking?”
“His cousin, Littlejoe.”
The bartender squinted through the cigarette haze at him. “Oh, yah,” he said in a throaty purr, as if his voice had been left too long in a solution of tobacco and whiskey. “I di’n’t see you. You’re kinda small.” He laughed to himself in a velvety series of chuckles. “No offense, pal. Uh, Mickey is, let’s see. He’s over at the other joint right about now. If you don’t catch him there, try back here after he makes a night deposit at the bank.”
Joe nodded, favoring the bartender with a severe frown. Nobody made jokes about his size. But, shit, he couldn’t stop for a fight now. He needed to find Mick and hit him up for a ten or two. He left the bar quickly, pacing along Christopher, past Hudson, pressing west toward the distant elevated road where the West Side Highway ran.
The second bar was far raunchier than the first, which was still east enough to be considered a sightseeing stop on the tours of more daring visitors from uptown. The second joint was a real bucket of blood, originally a sailors’ joint where they traded off stolen merchandise to be retailed in fake Army-Navy stores around town: Japanese cameras, transistor tape recorders, small, expensive items, often still in their original packaging.
Joe cased the front of the place without finding his cousin. He moved toward the back room, where, later in the evening, orgies were staged for the insiders. New boys in town were broken in. Old boys, newly on the loose after a bust-up, would advertise their liberated state there.
“Hey, Littlejoe, man.”
Joe turned to see a friend of his, Sam, sitting at one of the tables with two older men. Sam was barely twenty, but he’d already done time, not only in training school but in state prison. It was there that he’d gotten so peculiar about making it with big men. He’d been so badly broken in at prison—nine guys gang-buggering him till he needed four stitches before the bleeding could be stopped—that he had a deathly fear of big men. The two at his table were. Joe was not.
“Hey, Joey, man, what’s shaking?”
Littlejoe shrugged. “You see my cousin, Mick?”
“Nah.” Sam’s face was small, neat-featured, pretty and dark, like one of those wop angels they used to paint on church ceilings, but very, very serious. Something next to his right eye twitched at Joe. A signal? What? “You ready to go, baby?” Sam asked.
Joe nodded. He got the message: Sam needed to be rescued. “Let’s go, sweets,” he said. “I got the engine running.”
Sam got to his feet. One of the two bigger men, in his forties, placed his palm on Sam’s skinny chest and shoved hard. Sam toppled over backward, taking the chair with him.
“Siddown,” the man yelled. “You’re with us, you cheap hustler.”
“I’m his date,” Littlejoe said. He watched Sam getting back on his feet again. Would he have to tackle this big goon?
“Shit you are.”
Joe nodded solemnly. He reached over to pick up the fallen chair as if righting it on its legs again. Instead, he swung it up from under with such force that when it broke against the man’s front teeth blood spurted from his mouth and nose. The other man turned pale, and got up and ran out.
“Thanks, Littlejoe.” Sam’s eyes were darting nervously around the darkened back room. His normally serious face looked especially grave. This wasn’t really his scene, and he knew it. One by one was his scene, gently, not with force. “He may be laying for you outside, the other guy.”
Joe shrugged. “Let’s go find Mick.”
They walked back to the bartender, asked him where the owner was, and received the news that he’d left for the bank already. That meant Mick had at least one, maybe two gorillas with him. No sense bracing him for a touch until he was alone again. Give him half an hour.
“I need bread,” Littlejoe said conversationally. They were strolling along Christopher, moving back east at a leisurely fashion. The sidewalks were filled with male couples like them, except that Sam and Joe weren’t touching each other. “Gonna ball Lana tonight, man, and that broad don’t ball without I lay a few solid blasts on her.”
Sam shook his head sadly. “I hate to see you in a relationship with that,” he said. “You’re a pal, man. That Lana is an animal. You know that.”
“Ever meet my wife?” Littlejoe asked. It seemed to end the discussion. They stood at the corner of Washington Street and watched a heavy refrigerated meat truck trundle by. The driver in the cab waved at them. Joe had never seen him before, but Sam waved back.
“How much bread you need, man?” Sam asked then.
“Double saw?”
“Too heavy.” Sam had been reaching for his hip pocket. Now he stopped and watched morosely as the trucks rolled by. “I got two fives to my name,” he said glumly. His usual mood of depression seemed to deepen.
“More’n you usually hold. Where’d you score?”
“That Hertz truck lot near Twelfth Avenue,” Sam said. “I blew a guy twice. You never saw anything like it in your life. Little redneck cracker from Georgia or Alabama, your size, horny as a bull. I go down once for a finnif. I’m ready to move along and what the hell, he’s up again, just as big but twice as swole. You know, it had a head on it like a tennis ball, man. Some guys get that way the second time. So, what the hell, another finnif. I’ll split with you, Littlejoe. You saved my ass real good back there. I don’t forget favors.”
Joe shook his head. “You gotta stop working the trucks,” he said. “Those bastards will rip you in two some day just to see what your guts look like. They’re all crazy, those drivers.”
“I don’t make it with big guys. Just the short ones.”
They crossed Washington and headed east. Littlejoe wondered what his mother would make of someone like Sam, a nice Italian boy, face like an unsmiling angel, giving head to Jimmy Hoffa’s finest patriots along every West Side truck route in the Village. Not that Sam liked it especially. But it was steady money.
“There he is,” Joe said, pointing, as Mick and two huskies pulled up in a cab and started inside the more respectable of the two leather bars.
“Eh, cugino, come si dice?” he yelled.
The heavy-set Mick stopped, turned, and saw Littlejoe. “Eh, Giuseppe,” he called. “Who’s that, Sam?”
As they reached him, Joe pumped his cousin’s hand. “You’re just the friend I’m looking for, Mick, baby.”
His cousin was older by ten years, taller, and heavier without being fat. He came from the dark side of the family, olive skin blackened by the summer sun, blue-black hair glinting under the street lamp, white teeth bared in a welcoming smile. “How much?” he retorted.
“What?” Joe asked, blinking.
“Cuanto?”
“I need twenty, Mick, pay you back the first of the month.”
“When your welfare check comes in?”
“Naturally.”
“Which check?” Mick said, laughing. He pounded Littlejoe’s shoulder so hard he rocked his frail frame. Then, turning to one of his bodyguards, he said: “This boy has moxie, Frank. He’s got three addresses and each month he collects three welfare checks. Plus unemployment, right, baby?”
“I do okay.” Littlejoe was embarrassed. No one knew his finances, not these gorillas, not Sam, who was only a casual friend, not a close one. He hated the idea of his big-mouthed Maf cousin making fun of him in public. But Mick had already drawn out his wallet, and was peeling off two twenties.
“Here, piccolo Giuseppe,” he said. “I hope that Lana woman of yours enjoys every cent of it.”
Joe almost, but not quite, cringed. It was no one’s business about him and Lana. If he liked someone, why did all of Christopher have to know about it? But they did already, he reminded himself. He’d never kept Lana a secret. He was proud of her. Not like that cow he was married to. One of these days he was going to divorce Tina and really marry Lana. He considered himself married to her already, in the sense that one stoned night they had held a mock wedding with equally st
oned friends.
“Thanks, Mick. You’re a pal.” Joe pocketed the two bills.
“It’s only good business, baby,” his cousin said. “Lana is inside my joint right now. You’re gonna blow the whole thing back into my cash register anyway.” He gave Littlejoe a wink and went inside, his bodyguards moving easily in front and in back of him.
With Mick gone, the street was suddenly much quieter. Joe turned to Sam. “Coming in?”
The small, dark boy shook his cherubic head. “I don’t like to see you with that animal,” he said, his face deadpan empty.
“Come on. I’ll buy you a blast.”
Sam’s head continued shaking. “No thanks, Littlejoe. Be good.” He started to leave. Joe reached for his arm and held him. “Lemme go, man.”
“No, listen, Sam, I got something to talk to you about.”
Sam turned back. “What?” His voice was sullen.
“Business. I heard you were very cool with a cannon.”
Sam frowned. “So what?”
“You holding a piece now?”
“I’m on parole, man. They jug my ass if they find me packing iron.”
“I got an idea how we can make big money.”
Sam’s face went sour. “I know those ideas. One of them got me two to five.” He shook off Joe’s hand. “If I’d been carrying heat it would’ve been seven to fifteen for armed robbery.”
“I said I had an idea. It don’t include getting caught.”
Sam’s eyes widened for a moment; then their lids lowered. “None of them do.” He moved off along Christopher. Littlejoe watched him disappear into the crowd. Jail had taken all the joy out of Sam, permanently. He found himself wondering how hard it could be if he too landed in jail. Could it be worse than Nam? Nobody tried to frag you in jail. There was a lot of asshole banditry, but, Christ, they had that in Nam, too.
He entered the bar and moved into the back room. This was a classier place than Mick’s other back room. The orgies here were refined. The impromptu shows had a little class, a few laughs. And women were allowed back here, as long as they came with a man. He spotted Lana at once.
She had gotten up on a table and was singing a song whose words didn’t make sense, maybe because she was drunk and couldn’t remember them. Two men were seated at her feet, clapping time for her. Every once in a while she would flex her long foot in its spike-heel slipper and shove the toe under one of the men’s noses. “Kiss, kiss,” she lisped.
Then she resumed her song, something about a man who played a piano in old Hong Kong, but the music never made any more sense than the words. Littlejoe started toward her. She had decided to strip now. She was a tall girl, almost six feet in height, which Joe loved, and she was slender, poured into a gold lamé dress that sparkled in the dim light and barely covered her shoulders and breasts. She pulled one shoulder strap free and her left breast popped out, firm, lush, big, with a nipple as hard as a bolt screwed into her rather small areola.
People at other tables were clapping now and yelling encouragement. A woman against the wall had tucked two fingers in her mouth and was producing a shrill wolf whistle in time to Lana’s sinuous movements.
Littlejoe stopped a table away.
He didn’t mind her theatricality. After all, that was what she was all about. A lot of people badmouthed her for the way she dressed, that spun-sugar wig she flaunted, with its long back flip and bangs, those huge upcurling fake eyelashes flecked with glitter, the dark eyeshadow, the dark lipstick, rouged out to make her mouth bigger than it was, the hectic spots of color on her cheeks. But that was Lana. Take her or leave her.
She had worked her other breast loose and was stroking it admiringly. People began to hoot and yelp like dogs. She was wriggling up out of her golden sheath now, pulling it down over her hips while she writhed and mouthed nonsense words to the rhythm of the clapping.
Her navel came into view and, an instant later, the top of her muff, flaxen and flat, like an expensive linen towel. She turned and stuck out her ass at the crowd, slowly unveiling it with a back-and-forth bump in time to the clapping. “Kiss, kiss.” Then she turned back and her penis, engorged, arose from between her legs like some primeval sea monster searching for its mate.
The crowd went wild. Littlejoe glanced proudly around him. He had no idea how many of the people here tonight had known Lana was a man. A few. Himself, of course, included.
5
Even at midnight, the apartment on East Tenth Street was hotter than the street outside. Or so it seemed to Joe.
The damned trouble, he told himself as he lay beside Lana on the old king-sized mattress shoved into a corner of the living-room floor, was that they had no cross-ventilation. Few of these tenements had been built to let air flow through from front to back. Or, if they had, over the years greedy landlords had so chopped and walled them off into cheap little apartments that the air had long ago stopped moving, stopped clearing out the stink, stopped cooling people on hot August nights like this one.
It was, nevertheless, not a bad little pad for what he wanted. He needed it as an address for the welfare people and as a place to bring Lana after he’d gotten her high. He’d been pretty selective as to whom he brought here. This wasn’t just any of his welfare pads. He’d even brought his mother here. This was where he crashed in the Village, even though it was a little too far east for the real action.
“Unreal,” Lana muttered, rolling over on her back and snuffling.
“What, baby?”
Littlejoe liked it when Lana was stoned out of her skull and nine-tenths asleep. He’d brought her home in something like a fireman’s carry, her long, slender body half draped over his shoulder. He might be a head shorter than she, but he knew how to handle weights, always had. She lay naked now in the darkness, only a faint glow coming through the grimy front windows from the street lamps three floors below on Tenth Street, her lovely breasts firm and young. He stroked her face for a moment. She needed a shave again.
Joe grinned to himself in the darkness as he stroked Lana’s long, slender flanks. Sam had called her an animal, and he was right, of course. She was like a racehorse, a thoroughbred animal, fast and a little wild. He understood why people like Sam hated people like Lana. There had been a whole change among the gays in the last few years as they came out of the closets, a change to being natural like the blacks. The slogans were almost the same: “black is beautiful” and “gay is beautiful.” One promoted Afro hair and looked down on skin-lightening and hair-dekinking as a form of slave mentality. The other, among gay males, led to dressing like men, perhaps a bit freer and more creative than most, and looking down on drag queens.
Well, that was Lana. The bitchiest drag queen of them all. And Littlejoe had her.
Maybe drag queens were on their way out as part of gay life. Maybe not. In any event, it was too late for Lana, with her silicone-injected breasts. She had lived the life so long now that she was comfortable only as a woman.
“Real dumb,” she murmured and rolled away from Joe’s stroking.
“You okay, baby?”
She had taken on quite a load even before Joe had found her in the back room of Mick’s Number One bar. And it hadn’t been till maybe four stingers later that she’d been willing to pull herself together and go home with him—or, rather, let herself be carried away.
“Last of the big-time unreal spenders,” she said very distinctly now, spitting out the words with an excess sibilance that told Joe she was angry.
“Yes, baby.”
“Couldn’t even spring for a whole, entire cab,” she went on viciously. “’S’matter, didn’t your welfare check come in, Daddy Warbucks?”
“Next week, baby.”
“Carrying me through the Village like a common baggage.” She had started to sniffle. “Unreal little jerk-off.”
“Now, baby.”
“If you loved me,” she said, suddenly whirling to face him, “you’d think enough of my reputation not to expose me to e
very insane prying eye in the Village.”
He saw that her mascara was running in black rivulets from under her eyes. Because she was lying on her side, the black was running sideways from the corner of her lower eye into the hair around her ear. He watched, fascinated, as the mascara from the upper eye began to run over the bridge of her rather large, aquiline nose.
“If you really loved me,” she was saying, “there’d have been a cab. How much, I ask you, does a cab cost? Can it possibly be more that one of those insanely overpriced stingers that Mafia cousin of yours sells? Um?”
“No, baby.”
“What is he charging these days, three whole dollars a whole entire blast?”
“That’s about right.”
“Everybody knows the drinks cost, like, unreal, because nobody goes there to drink. They go there to look up my asshole. The old tunnel shot. I really showed it to them tonight, too.” She shifted from a sob to a giggle and wiped her eye, smearing the wet mascara into a blotch like a black eye.
“If you honestly loved me,” she went on then, in a calmer voice, shifting out of her high register into a throatier one, “you would somehow get it all together for a change and help me with my problem, wouldn’t you?”
“What’s that, baby?”
“What’s that?” Her voice slid up an octave in irritation. “You of all people have the insane nerve to ask what my problem is?”
“Oh, that.”
Littlejoe lay in silence for a while. She was back on that again. He’d checked it out with friends. Even if you could get them to do it for you in the States, say at Johns Hopkins down in Baltimore, it still cost about three grand. That included the whole thing, castration and the making of a cunt. If you had to take your problem to Casablanca or Stockholm because the doctors in Baltimore said no dice, it cost less for the surgery and hospital but you had the air fare thrown in. So it always came to about three grand. And what for? Some whim of Lana’s? Who needed the whole thing?
“You’ll love me when I’m a real woman all over,” Lana said then, her voice dropping to a point where it was lower than Littlejoe’s, and very arousing to him.
