Gigolo Johnny Wells

by Lawrence Block

  And now the woman was smiling. “So lonely,” she said. “Just me and the bastard kid. I could use some company.”

  The robe fell open again. This time the woman didn’t draw it shut. Johnny saw big breasts, huge boobs tipped with large red nipples. He thought the woman’s body was the most exciting thing he had ever seen in his life. He stared hard at her, devouring her with hungry eyes.

  She didn’t laugh this time. She reached out and took him by one arm and drew him into the apartment. He didn’t resist. He had no desire to get away now.

  “Inside,” she murmured throatily. “I have nosey neighbors. Inside.”

  When they were inside she closed the door and turned to him. Once again she opened her robe and once again his eyes roamed over her warm female body. They traveled from the full breasts down over a slightly rounded stomach to her thighs.

  “I bleach my hair,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  He didn’t mind.

  “Now you can tell me,” she said. “Did I get my figure back or didn’t I?”

  His eyes answered her.

  “You’re a nice boy, Johnny. A nice boy. You want to touch me a little?”

  He couldn’t move. Her hand caught his and pressed it to her breast. He felt the rounded warmth of it and his heart raced. He cupped the breast in his palm and fingered the nipple. When he played with it, the nipple grew stiff and stood out from her breast like a toy soldier standing at attention.

  She moved his hand downward.

  Downward —

  When his fingers were touching the soft warmth of her she shivered with delight. Her own hands became active, fumbling with his dungarees. She touched him.

  “Nice,” she cooed. “So big and so strong. Did you ever have a girl before, Johnny?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m going to teach you, Johnny. I’m going to teach you everything there is to know. Oh, you’ll like it, Johnny. You’ll like it so much you’ll scream. It’s the greatest thing in the world, the greatest thing there is. And I’m going to show you everything about it, all of it. I’m going to make a man out of you, Johnny my boy. Oh, God!”

  She gave a quick shrug and the wrapper fell from her shoulders to the floor. She stepped backward, moving away from him and he started to lunge after her. He wanted her so badly that he could taste it. Before he’d had sexual desires, vague cravings that were hard to define. They were nothing like this. He had to have this woman or go mad.

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait.”

  He stopped.

  “Now watch, Johnny. Look at me. Look at my body.”

  She began to move and he watched, dumbfounded. She turned this way and that, showing him each part of her body in turn. She turned her back to him and he looked at her taut buttocks, aching to take them in his strong hands and squeeze until she screamed. She faced him again and bent her body backwards, her feet placed wide apart on the floor. He stared at her.

  “Now you,” she said. “Take off your clothes, Johnny. Take off all of them. Even your shoes and socks. And do it slowly. I want to watch you.”

  He felt self-conscious doing a strip tease for her but he didn’t have the strength to argue. He was wearing a striped jersey. He tugged it loose from his blue jeans, then pulled it over his head and dropped it to the floor.

  He stopped then, feeling the heat of her eyes on him. They were burning into his chest.

  “So pretty,” she said. “Smooth and hairless. You should see my husband. Hair all over his chest. He looks more like an ape than a man. Hair on his back and shoulders. Not like you. Not beautiful like you.”

  He colored.

  “More,” she said “More.”

  He undid the belt of his jeans, then unbuttoned them. She had already taken care of the zipper. He stepped out of the jeans and left them in a heap on the floor. Again he had to stop. She was eating him alive with her eyes.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “So beautiful, Johnny. I could get hot just looking at you. Not an ounce of fat anywhere. My husband drinks beer all night. He’s got a belly the size of the Empire State Building. Not like yours.”

  He looked at her again and saw her breasts. He wanted to have them in his hands again. His hands were sweating, itching to touch her.

  “More, Johnny.”

  He kick off his tennis shoes, peeled off his sweat socks. Then he rolled down his shorts and stood nude before her. He was not embarrassed now. He was too excited to be at all embarrassed at the moment.

  “You never did it before,” she was murmuring. “I’m going to be the first with you, my young lover. Oh, I’m going to be good to you. I’m going to be perfect. And you’re going to be good for me, little Johnny. Little? What am I talking about? There’s nothing little about you, is there? Not at all. Big and strong. Come to mama, strong Johnny. Come with me. Come on.”

  He took her arm and they walked through a hallway to the bedroom. She pointed to a closed door on the way. “The kid’s room,” she said. “The little bastard of a kid I didn’t want. That big bastard of a husband had to get drunk. He couldn’t be careful what he was doing, so I’ve got the kid. I ought to bring him into the goddamned bedroom and let him watch.”

  They reached the bedroom. She brought him inside, closed the door, and melted into his arms. She was several inches taller than he was and he pressed his mouth to the side of her neck and kissed her. All of her body was pressed tight against all of him and the contact was electrifying. He felt her firm meaty breasts against his chest. His desire mounted higher from the contact with her sweet warmth.

  “The bed, Johnny.”

  It was a double bed. She pushed the covers aside and stretched out on the top sheet on her back. She moved the pillows out of the way. “We don’t need pillows,” she whispered. “I’ll be your pillow, Johnny. All soft for you.”

  He stretched out beside her, not sure just what he was supposed to do next. He kissed her and his mouth was forced open by her probing tongue. The tongue sank between his lips, past his teeth, and lit little fires all over the inside of his mouth. Her arms clutched him very tight and their bodies were pressed together. He was blinded by desire.

  “My breasts,” she moaned. “Kiss them, Johnny. Kiss them and play with them.”

  He bent over her and took a breast in his hands. He brought it to his mouth and pressed his lips to the warm sweet flesh. She didn’t use perfume but she had something that was better than perfume. She smelled like a woman aroused to go. It wasn’t a smell he recognized but he knew its significance at once.

  His lips raced over her breasts. He kissed the nipples and her whole body began to shiver and shake.

  “Kiss them, Johnny. As hard as you can —”

  He kissed each nipple in turn, taking each tiny turret between his lips and working hard on it. He bit her experimentally once or twice and was rewarded with a small gasp of passion.

  “Now touch me. There, that’s right. God, that feels good. Oh, you don’t know how good it feels. It’s wonderful. It’s the nicest feeling there is. Touch me some more. That’s right, oh, God, it feels good it —”

  His heart was beating like a triphammer and his brain was spinning dizzily. He was going to have her now. He was ready, she was ready, and —

  She took hold of him. “Oh, touch me,” she breathed. “But not with your hands, it’s nice with your hands but that’s enough now, enough with the hands, touch me with this! Oh, come on, come on Johnny baby, that’s right, oh, yes, oh yes, oh that’s right, that’s the way, oh God!”

  He fell on her, aching for her, and her breasts cushioned his fall. He had trouble for a moment but her hand helped him, following the directions on the accompanying printed sheet and neatly joining plug A to socket B.

  Once the connection was made it damn near electrocuted both of them.

  Her mouth was at his ear, kissing him, mumbling words of encouragement and endearment to him. Her thighs were locked around his hips in a death-grip that was lif
e itself and her arms were taut as bands of structured steel around his chest.

  They moved.

  They moved together, and his body learned movements it had never known before. All at once he knew everything he was supposed to do and he did it flawlessly. She was an unobtrusive teacher, showing him things as they went along, teaching him little tricks that sent his blood boiling and that urged him on to bigger and better things.

  He moved again and again and the world raced by them. It got better and better and he thought he was going to die from the sheer pleasure of it. It was like nothing he had ever dreamed of, nothing he could possibly have imagined. It was the most wonderful thing he had ever experienced, the most wonderful thing in the entire world.

  It got increasingly better, until the height was reached by both of them at once. Together they exploded. Her legs squeezed him and nearly cut him in two. Her nails raked his back and drew blood. He never felt the pain.

  He bit her shoulder. His hands were on her buttocks when it happened for them and he squeezed them so that they were black and blue for three days.

  And she never felt the pain either.

  Then it was over. Slowly the world came back to normal again. He lay with her for a long time, unable to move, and she didn’t mind his weight. Finally after what seemed like at least a month, he moved away from her.

  She sighed.

  “Johnny,” she whispered. “God. Johnny.”

  He didn’t say anything. She stood up and slipped her slippers on, reached for another nightgown.

  He opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t do anything. Just stay there. I’ll be right back.”

  His eyes questioned her.

  “It’s all right,” she told him. “Just stay here. I have to go in the kitchen for a minute.”

  “To feed the kid?”

  “To hell with the bastard,” she snapped. “No, not to feed the kid. I’m going to bring you some milk. A whole goddamned quart of it.”

  She brought him the milk. And then they went back to bed together, twice more that morning, and she taught him things most men never learn if they live to be a hundred. He left her apartment exhausted, but a man.

  He came back frequently after that. Always she had a glass of milk for him when he walked in the door and another after he made love to her.

  On his third visit he learned that her name was Joan Barber. She had not volunteered the information before that and he had never thought of asking her. It didn’t much matter to him what her name was.

  Eventually she took to giving him a dollar or two when they were together. She handed him the money without saying anything and he took it without thanking her. He figured that that was the way their relationship was. She wanted him, and she knew that he didn’t have much money. So she slipped him a dollar now and then.

  For four months he saw her two or three times a week. They made phenomenal love during those four months. He learned a great deal — enough so that he could tell quickly what girls were ready for him and what ones were not. He managed to find four who were, during the time he was seeing Joan Barber. One had been a virgin before he got to her.

  He changed that.

  After four months his visits had dropped off to twice a week at the most, occasionally only once a week. Then one morning he went to her apartment and she wasn’t there. He checked the next day and found out that she and her husband had moved to another apartment in another section of town.

  He never saw her again. He didn’t much care. As far as he was concerned she was just a broad, pure and simple. His first one, as it happened, but just a broad.

  Chapter Two

  HE LAUGHED, REMEMBERING the first time with Joan Barber. Christ, what a green punk he’d been! Well, there had to be a first time for everything. And that had been the first time for him. There was a lot of water over the dam since then.

  His stomach reminded him that he was hungry. He sat upright on the bed, kneading his stomach with strong fingers. He guessed that it was about seven o’clock. It was late April and the air was warm out. He got up from the bed and left the room. He didn’t even bother shutting the door after him. There was nothing there for anybody to steal.

  He hurried down the stairs, taking them two at a time again and passing in rapid succession the smells of alcohol and garlic and cabbage. He left the building and felt in his pockets for a cigarette. There was only one Lucky left in the pack. He took it out and put it between his lips, then crumpled the pack and flipped it into 99th Street.

  A cleaner New York is up to you, he thought scornfully. Cast your ballot here for a cleaner New York. And did you make New York dirty today?

  Nuts, he thought. He found a pack of matches in another pocket, yanked one out and scratched it into flame, cupping his hands for the light. He sucked smoke into his lungs and exhaled. He left the cigarette between his lips and headed down the street, his hands plunged into the pockets of his dungarees, his body loping easily as he walked.

  Food.

  A meal.

  Money.

  And their source: a woman.

  He remembered the last woman and grimaced distastefully. She’d been old, with breasts that sagged to her waist. And she barely had a waist. It was almost as wide as her hips.

  And that wasn’t all that was too wide.

  He hawked and spat. The woman wasn’t the worst of it: She lived in a ratty apartment on Amsterdam and her brats were squalling away in the other room while they were going at it. The whole place reeked of cooking smells. And afterward, when she’d had the decency to go to sleep so he could go through her pocketbook, all he’d gotten for his trouble was a lousy five bucks.

  That was the trouble with being broke, he thought. If he had enough dough saved up he could buy himself a front — a decent suit, a couple of shirts, a good pair of shoes. When you could come on fairly strong you weren’t stuck with the neighborhood and old broken-down wives of longshoremen and truck-drivers. You could go where the good pickings were.

  59th Street, for example. He ran into a guy named Bernie a while back, a smoothie who dressed sharp and had a line you could hang your wash on. Bernie told him about the bars on 59th Street just south of the park. The classy East Side broads went there when they had an itch and needed somebody to scratch it for them. You sat down at the bar and ordered a drink. They’d give you the eye and you’d carry your drink to where they were and they’d slip you money for the next round. Then you played footsie and kneesie until the gal made up her mind that she was warm for your form and ready to play.

  And you didn’t go back to a dump on Columbus Avenue. If the broad didn’t have a husband, or if the husband was out of town, you went to the broad’s apartment. You banged the broad in a bed with silk sheets and you lapped up twenty-year old brandy between sets. And the broad might not be classy, but she wouldn’t be a mess. She’d have the best beauticians in the world taking care of her, and she’d look good even if she didn’t have much to begin with.

  He spat again. On top of that, you made money in the deal. Twenty bucks for a night was the minimum and Bernie said he got as much as fifty or a hundred from the right broad. And you didn’t have to go through her purse for it. She slipped it to you just as cute as could be.

  That wasn’t all Bernie had had to say. Sometimes a broad would go nuts over a guy and want him around steady. Then he’d move in with her and she’d buy him hundred-dollar suits and twenty-dollar shoes and pick up all the tabs, with a little spending money thrown in. And the broads weren’t necessarily pigs, not by any means. Or eighty years old. A friend of Bernie’s had managed to latch onto a twenty-nine year old divorcee with red hair and a trim shape and the biggest pair of boobs in captivity. A good face, too. And she was keeping him. She’d even given him a Thunderbird to drive her around in. The car was in his name, too. It was his to keep, even if they split up.

  Johnny threw his cigarette into the gutter. He could stand s
omething like that. You could get sick of living on the bottom all the time. To hell with the skim milk. It was too damned thin. It was about time he started lapping up some of the cream.

  But first he needed money.

  He walked the streets, looking for the woman who would buy him a meal. He wasn’t looking for just any woman. It had to be one who was ready to play. Not just a broad who would let him give her a toss in the hay, but one who’d pay for the privilege.

  He found her on Broadway between 100th and 101st Streets. He saw her coming the other way walking toward him, and he stopped walking toward her and leaned up against a lamp post, one foot crossed over the other and his arms hanging free and easy at his sides.

  She looked at him. At once he raised his eyes to meet hers. He gazed very intently at her. He did not smile. He simply stared at her, telling her with his eyes that he knew everything there was to know about her and that he was ready to give her everything she needed.

  He could tell that she understood the look. She was frightened at first — he saw that instantly — but the fear died quickly enough. She returned his glance, and her eyes said that she was accepting his challenge and ready to meet it. There was anger in her eyes, and fury, and hatred. But more than anything else there was desire.

  He made his move with the simple assurance that was the product of long experience. He stepped forward, a false smile in his face, and called to her.

  “Hi! I just got here myself. Didn’t expect you’d be on time.”

  No one watching would have realized that they had never seen one another before in their lives.

  She only hesitated for an instant. Then her face relaxed into a smile that was as painfully artificial as his own. “I’m glad I didn’t keep you waiting,” she said. He held out his arm for her and she took it. They started walking down Broadway together.

  “That was cute,” she said. “Very clever.”

  He shrugged.

  “How could you tell? You must get your face slapped ten times a day.”