The Obstacle Course

by JF Freedman

  Ruby’s apartment was down the block, on the second floor of one of the old brownstones.

  “You drink coffee?” she asked me, as soon as we were inside.

  “Yes …” I started to say “ma’am” again, but caught my tongue.

  “I got some from this morning I can heat up. It’ll take the chill off till I can fix something up for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Can’t leave somebody just standing out there in the rain,” she said. “It ain’t your fault you’re white.” She laughed. “Some of my best friends are white. My man friends, that is.”

  Her apartment was little, but nice and cozy. One room and a pullman kitchen, her bed in a corner, covered with a chenille spread, the same kind my grandmother has.

  “Where you from?” she asked, shaking the water off her coat before hanging it on a floor lamp that had some other clothes on it. She felt my jacket. “Take that off and let it dry. Here, give me it.”

  I took it off and handed it to her. “Dumb white kid, doesn’t have the sense to get in out of the rain.”

  She shook it, water spraying onto the carpet. “‘Ravensburg,’” she read off the jacket. “You from there? Out to Prince Georges?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re a distance from home, ain’t you.” She put my jacket on a wooden hanger and hung it from the windowsill. “You want another cigarette?” she asked, offering me the pack from her purse.

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  She shook two out and handed me one, along with the pack of matches. She stuck hers in her mouth and waited for me to light it for her. When I did she touched my hand, holding the match steady to the end of her butt. I got a funny feeling when her hand touched mine. She definitely was sexy, especially with the fake-satin dress, dark stockings and high heels, and all the makeup.

  “You take milk and sugar in your coffee?” she asked.

  “That’s how I like it,” I told her. I thought of saying “I like my coffee black and strong, like my women,” which is something guys say all the time for a joke, but I wouldn’t have said that to her in a million years. I was already nervous enough, alone with some colored woman in the middle of Washington, D.C., who had her own apartment.

  She grabbed a handful of my shirtsleeve when she handed me the coffee.

  “You’re wet as a hound dog,” she said. “How long were you out in that?”

  “Since it started. I was trying to hitch a ride but I couldn’t get one.”

  “You better take ’em off. Here, give ’em to me.”

  I stared at her, wide-eyed I’m sure, feeling goofy. She wanted me to take my clothes off in front of her? Shit I reckon, she wouldn’t have to tell me twice. She was close to my mom’s age, but she was still sexy. I started stripping down lickety-split.

  She opened a closet door and rummaged around. “The bathroom’s down the hall. You can put this on.” She handed me a man’s old flannel robe. “Better take it all off.”

  “That’s a nice dress you’re wearing,” I complimented her.

  “Thank you.” She smiled in a kind of a smirk as she inhaled mightily from her cig.

  I was eating what she’d cooked up—greasy red beans and rice and moldy cornbread she’d had left over in her icebox. She wasn’t much of a cook, judging by the quality of this food, she looked like the kind of person who hardly ever eats in, but I was hungry, and beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. She herself wasn’t eating anything, just smoking and watching me.

  My clothes were drying off in her oven. I’d stuck them in there when I came back from changing, it’s a trick I learned from my grandma out in the country. They’d be wrinkled when I took them out but at least they’d be warm and dry.

  “Can I have some more?” I asked, my hunger overriding the crumminess of the taste. She gave me a sour look before picking my plate up and carrying it to the stove, where she scooped up a spoonful of seconds and dropped it down in front of me.

  “Thank you,” I said, even though I could tell she’d wanted me to do it myself.

  She took a sip from her glass of wine. When we’d sat down she had poured herself some wine into a jelly glass, then looked at me.

  “You want some?” she’d asked.

  “Okay,” I’d said.

  “Can you handle it?”

  “Oh, yeah, I drink it all the time. I don’t mean all the time, but I drink it.”

  I drank some from my glass.

  “Hey, take it easy with that,” she cautioned me, “that ain’t Coke you’re drinking.”

  She butt-lit another cigarette and watched me eat, squinting through the smoke.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she proclaimed, “ain’t many men get me cooking dinner for them.”

  Good, ’cause you’d kill them, I thought. “It’s real good,” I told her out loud, being polite, even though we both knew it was about half a cut above canned dog food, “thanks a lot.” I finished off the wine in my glass and reached across the table for the bottle to pour myself another.

  “You better watch how you drink that wine, it’ll knock you flat on your ass.”

  “That’s okay,” I assured her, “I’m used to it.”

  “Yeah,” she snorted, “you look like it.”

  “I am,” I protested, “I drink wine all the time. Beer, too.”

  I took a swallow to show her how natural I was at it. It felt good going down. I was feeling good all around, sitting there with her in her cozy warm room, eating the heavy, greasy food and drinking the wine.

  “That’s a pretty dress you’re wearing,” I told her again.

  “You already done told me that, Roy.” She knew my name, I’d given it to her when she’d asked, it seemed like the polite thing to do, since I knew hers.

  “How come you’re all dressed up?” I asked. “Are you going to a party?” The wine was making me a little lightheaded, but nothing I couldn’t handle.

  Her laugh was really deep, like it was coming from her toes.

  “I wish,” she said. “Ain’t no partyin’ tonight for me. Not with this damn rain.”

  “Is that what you wear to work?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked that, since it wasn’t any of my business, but I was curious and the wine had loosened my tongue. “What kind of work do you do?” I knew she wasn’t some white lady’s maid, not dressed up like that. She was too restless for that kind of drudgery work, plus she had an uppity attitude no white woman would tolerate for five seconds, but I didn’t know what other kinds of jobs colored people did.

  “You joking?”

  “No,” I said, cautiously, her tone of voice informing me that had been the wrong question to ask.

  “For real?”

  “Why? Should I?” I felt stupid, because it was obvious from her question that I should know what she did, and I didn’t.

  “I’m a prostitute, boy. Didn’t you know that? This here’s my working clothes,” she said, fingering her dress.

  “A prostitute?” It came out dumb, slurred.

  “Hooker? Whore? Prostitute? You never heard those words?” She exhaled a big puff of smoke at my face. I couldn’t tell if she was smiling at me friendly-like, or putting me down.

  “I know what a prostitute is,” I said, defensively. What did she think I was, ten years old? “I just didn’t think that’s what you were, that’s all.”

  She smiled again and sipped some wine. “I see.”

  “It’s just … I’ve never known a prostitute. A real one.”

  “Now you do.”

  “Yeah.” I thought about that for a minute. “You really are one?”

  “I wouldn’t lie about something like that,” she said.

  “No, I guess not.”

  I lit up a cigarette to cover my awkward feeling. Leaning back in my chair, I squinted against the smoke, looking around the room.

  “This is a very nice apartment, Ruby,” I exclaimed, trying to change the subject. I was nervous as hell. Here I was, in
a colored prostitute’s apartment, wearing nothing but an old flannel bathrobe, and getting high on wine. It was the dream me and every teenage boy I knew had ever had, and it was scaring the shit out of me.

  “I’m glad you like it,” she said. She slipped her shoes off and spread her legs out, her dress riding up on her thighs. I couldn’t help but see where her stockings were attached to her panty girdle. I don’t know if she knew I could see that far up her dress, but she probably didn’t care. I did, though. She was making me hard.

  I took a nervous drag off my cigarette. “How come you brought me over here and all?”

  “My plans for the night, such as they were, were shot down because of the goddamn rain outside, and you looked like you could use a meal and a friend.”

  “It’s a nice place,” I said again.

  She sipped her wine, staring hard at me.

  “I ain’t never been in a Negro’s house before,” I went on, “we got lots of y’all living nearby us but I don’t know any, personally that is.” I knew I was talking way too much but I couldn’t shut up.

  “Different worlds,” she commented, saying it like she could give a shit.

  “It ain’t that I don’t want to, I just don’t. I’d like to, though, I don’t have nothing against anybody, personally.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  There was an awkward silence; awkward for me. To fill it I asked, “Are you married?”

  She put out her cigarette. “Hell no! Marriage is for suckers. I tried it once, that cured me for good.” She stared at me. “You all right?”

  “Sure, I’m fine.”

  “I shouldn’t have given you that wine.” She stood up and took my hand. “Sit down here, you’ll be more comfortable.”

  She pushed me down on her couch by the shoulders. Then she sat down next to me, put an arm around me, and kissed me, a good full kiss on the mouth. She had very soft lips, and her breath tasted good from the wine.

  My cock was sticking straight up under the old flannel robe.

  It felt really good, kissing her, but this was all happening too fast, especially when she reached under the robe and grabbed onto my pecker, which was as hard as a turbine.

  “My, my, my,” she said then. “You certainly are old enough. Yes you are.”

  I was scared shitless. Partly because I was afraid I might catch some disease, which you hear about people catching from whores all the time, but mostly because I wasn’t ready for this, not with some colored prostitute who was almost as old as my mother. Not with a woman who’d know right away I was a virgin and didn’t know jack-shit about what I was doing.

  “Hey,” she said, looking me in the eyes, “you don’t have to worry about a thing. I’ll take care of it.”

  I wet my lips, trying to get the cotton out of my mouth. “How much do you cost?”

  “I’m usually fifteen a pop,” she told me, “but for you, this first time, since I like you so much, I’ll just charge the five you got, and throw in that fine home-cooked dinner, too.” She started stroking my dick, real gentle-like. She sure as hell knew what she was doing, she had the expert touch. It set me on fire—I started moaning despite myself.

  “The boy likes it,” she laughed. She pulled me to my feet. “The man.”

  “You ain’t using that on me, no way!”

  We were lying in her bed together, the one that had the chenille bedspread like my grandmother’s. I’d carefully taken the rubber out of my wallet, unwrapping the foil package like it was some kind of religious icon. It had been in there so long it had made an impression in the leather, perfectly round.

  “How long you been carrying that relic around?”

  “About … a year, I guess.” It was almost two years; I’d swiped it from Doc Goldberg’s the beginning of eighth grade.

  “Shit, these things don’t last forever, don’t you know that? It’d turn to dust soon’s you put it on, and then I’d be in the family way, and we don’t want that.” She chucked it in the waste-basket. “I got goods we can use. Part of my job.”

  With her clothes off she wasn’t built all that good. Pretty lumpy, to be honest. Her tits were saggy and so was her ass, and she had a roll of fat around her waist. It didn’t matter, though; I was in bed with a naked woman, a naked colored hooker no less.

  We kind of shuffled our bodies around each other. I felt awkward, not knowing what to do. As our bodies touched in different places her pussy hair rubbed up against my pecker. I’d never seen a woman with that much pussy hair. She had a muff on her that was football-sized, no exaggeration, a mass of hair thick and large and black, with the consistency of bailing wire, that practically came up to her bellybutton. What I’d seen of naked girls was strictly the white variety, and I knew none of them would ever have this much hair on their privates, even when they were grown women. Peg in my dad’s car hadn’t had half this much.

  “How old are you?” she asked. She was stroking me lightly on the dick some more, the most incredible feeling I’ve ever had; it felt like I was about to explode and shoot a gallon of come clear to the ceiling. Nothing I’d ever done to myself could compare to what she was doing to me.

  “Fifteen,” I bleated in answer to her question. I cleared my throat. “I just had my birthday.”

  “Yeah, you’re old enough,” she said. Her fingers kept fondling my cock. I was squirming around; I couldn’t help it. “Old enough to be a man.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I didn’t know why I said that, I knew how much like a kid it sounded, but I was nervous as hell.

  “This is your first time, isn’t it?”

  I thought about lying; but that would’ve been stupid, and anyway she knew.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That’s good.” She looked me square in the face. “Do you think you know how to give a woman pleasure?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. I knew with teenage white girls that wouldn’t go all the way, but I didn’t know about real women who did.

  “You’ve got to have a slow hand,” she told me, sounding more sexy and mysterious than she looked or felt. “Yes,” she said, as my hand started stroking her nipple: “like that.”

  We wound up not using a rubber after all. Since it was my first time, she informed me, I should do it right, nothing in between—and she was clean, she told me that, too, she swore it, hand in the air and everything, she’d been to the doctor that very afternoon. Clean bill of health. She couldn’t afford catching a disease, not in her line of work. She normally made her customers use rubbers, but because I was popping my cherry, she went on, playing with my cock the whole time she was telling me this stuff, she couldn’t catch anything from me, so it was cool.

  The truth was, she didn’t have one. She must’ve run out or something, because I’d spied on her as she rummaged around in the medicine chest in her bathroom, while she was “getting ready for me,” as she’d put it. I didn’t complain; she could’ve told me she had a dose of the clap and I still would’ve fucked her anyway, hot as I was.

  One thing she wouldn’t let me do, once we got down to business, was kiss her on the mouth, like we’d been doing on the couch. (“You ain’t paying for kissing, boy, kissing’s for lovers, not customers,” she’d said, pushing me away roughly.) Actually, we didn’t do too much of any kind of making out at all, once we got going. She played with my dick for a little while, rubbing it kind of mechanically. I got the impression she wasn’t feeling all that romantic, that it was part of the job, which it was, her being a prostitute and having lost business because of the rain and everything. None of that mattered, though, because just being in bed with a naked woman and having my cock rubbed was almost more stimulation than I could handle.

  After a little bit of that she rolled over on her back and I climbed aboard. Almost as soon as she put me inside of her I shot the mightiest load of my career, I kept coming and coming, for a whole minute it seemed, it was like everything inside me was coming out of the tip of my cock.r />
  “Damn, Ruby,” I gasped, “that was fantastic. Really.” I knew she didn’t want me to but I tried to kiss her anyway.

  “Glad you enjoyed it,” she answered curtly, avoiding my lips while rolling me off her and climbing out of bed almost before I was finished spasming out the last squirts.

  It should’ve felt more romantic, I thought as I lay there on the soiled sheets, sweating like a race horse. But maybe it wasn’t supposed to with a whore.

  “Your clothes should be dry by now,” she said.

  “Well, looky here,” Ruby said, pulling the five-dollar bill out of my billfold, where I’d hidden it under my student bus pass. “You forget something?” she taunted, holding it up in front of my face.

  “You can’t go into somebody’s wallet, that’s thieving!” I yelped, grabbing for it. I was almost dressed, putting on my last sock and shoe. Almost home free; but not quite. “Gimme my money.”

  “No way, sweetheart. This be mine.”

  “You said five.” I needed that money, for cab fare home.

  “’Cause that’s all you had—so you said. I took pity on you and you lied to me. That ain’t nice, Roy,” she teased, pointing an inch-long red nail at me, “to lie to a woman and then fuck her. My price is normally fifteen, remember?”

  “I need it to get home on,” I whined.

  “And what’s wrong with your thumb?”

  “Around here?”

  Her eyes narrowed like a cat’s. “What’s that mean?”

  What a dumb fuck—I shouldn’t have said that, I’d known it as soon as the words came out of my big mouth.

  “It’s dark, there ain’t gonna be hardly any cars on the road. Not any that’ll pick me up,” I added. Hell, it was the truth, speak it.

  “Be grateful for what I gave you, boy. It was still a cut-rate price. Now beat it out of here, I’ve got to get my beauty sleep.”

  She opened the door to her apartment. “Feel free to come back any time, and bring your friends. Ruby does not discriminate who she fucks, either by race, creed, or size of dick.” She laughed. I didn’t.

  “I could send it to you,” I offered, grasping for straws. “I could send you the whole ten.”