JJ doesn’t come around the Lollipop, like he didn’t come around the Butterfly. He sticks to the big joints - the Mardi Gras, the Metropole - where you don’t notice so much who’s where doing what because there’s so many people that everyone blends into the crowd; or the afterhours like upstairs at 366 8th Avenue where it’s dark enough for a nigga to not be noticed no matter what he’s doing.
Other pimps look to be noticed, but JJ’s all on the soft side with his grey flannel and his whispers, all on the downlow. Even so, even though I don’t see him except when I’m hanging out at the Mardi Gras or the afterhours, everybody knows about him and me.
They know I got my name from him, that we’re connected. They know even though he’s not pimping me, they know they don’t have a chance to either, cause he’s got my back, he hipped me to what was the what when I first showed up and he’s still looking over my shoulder, keeping a big brother, cock of the walk eye out for me.
That thing in the motel?
…with Lockey
and
Lightfoot?
…and the broken window?
That was nothing.
That was just
a mistake.
That wasn’t supposed
to happen.
I’ve got the Ice Man, too. So, the guinea wiseguys like Junior and Joey Two Shoes, they know they can only go so far. The Ice Man’s looking out for me.
I’m covered. I’m a year past my expiration date, yeah sure, but that just means I’m untouchable now. I’m cool like that.
This entry was written by , posted on January 28, 2010 at 2:57 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, Butterfly, Lollipop, pimps, Robbies Mardi Gras, wiseguys. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
What the hell, I thought, looking at Junior laying there on the floor rubbing himself, and remembering how he’d needed a firm tongue up his ass that one night, pussy can’t taste any worse than all the other things I’ve put in my mouth. I got off the couch and walked into the bedroom.
“Hey. Hello? Bored out here…” I sat at the end of the bed playing with Joey’s toes, working my hands up his leg, I took a deep hit off the joint in my hands and passed it over to him.
Joey looked at Piper for permission. She smiled and nodded. I kicked my shoes off.
“Do her first.” He locked eyes with me, like he was watching for my reaction, like we were the only two people in the room, and this was the only room in the world. Like there wasn’t a room full of men a few feet away, watching and listening. He locked eyes with me while he held the joint to Piper’s lips with one hand and started pulling on her nipples with the other. Getting them hard again. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you Piper-cub?” he said to her, all the while, looking at me.
“You don’t have to if …,” I was half way up her leg before she finished the sentence, “you don’t want to, JJ.”
We do everything together. Sex’ll be just one more thing. Like the princess she always wanted to be, Piper lays back and lets me do all the work. I run my hands up her short muscular legs. She’s so tiny, I can reach her whole body from wherever I am. My fingers reach into her pubic hair, naturally blond and softer than mine. My thumb finds her button and rolls it around gently. I slide my body up one side of her. Joey watches from the other side.
Her breasts are larger than mine, soft and pink and the nipples look sore. I put one hand on each and feel their weight, their silkiness, brushing my thumb across one nipple, gently. She lets out a little gasp and I lower my head to take it into my mouth. Turning it over with my tongue, flicking it around, nibbling only a teeny bit. Joey takes my hand and slides it back down between her legs. Piper inhales the smoke from the joint, moving her hips up to meet my hand. I feel around, tentatively at first, now bolder, parting her warm lips with my fingers. She starts to rock with me. I move my mouth to hers and take her tongue inside me. She tastes of pot and Joey’s Two Shoes’ semen.
“Fuck her, fuck her hard.” His mouth is right at my ear, his breath damp and a little sour. My finger is deep inside her, probing. I open my eyes and see Joey stroking himself as he watches us.
I slip a second finger inside her and pump. She rides my hand and we kiss. Sucking each others tongues and ears and necks. Her hands find my tits and pulls at my nipples.
“Eat her pussy,” he murmured, pushing my head down, shoving me off of her face.
Men are crude, but I wasn’t in a position to be offended by anyone’s choice of language.
I glided down between her legs and like that, the magic was gone. It’d been kinda fun. The coke and the vodka, the porn and Piper, not having to be at work. It was all fine. Fun even, until I found myself face to face with another woman’s chocha. Wet and red and smelly from being in a leotard all day and fucked all night.
And I remembered the audience in the living room. There was no way out of this; I’d never live down the humiliation if I chickened out now. I dove in and licked and sucked and prodded and nibbled like I thought I’d like it done to me, if I actually liked having it done to me, which I didn’t. I heard the glass crack of an amyl nitrate ampule and felt, more than heard, Piper suck the pungent odor in. Her body tensed, all of her contracting, then releasing.
Joey cracked another ampule, for me. I inhaled deeply and reached out for his cock. Sucking his cock. He’s kissing her. The audience cheering. The world spinning. My head expanding until it almost explodes. And contracting too fast. The amyl nitrate. My heart racing. Please, please, don’t let my heart explode. Everyone’s watching. I kinda like Eddie, but I don’t know how to talk to the nice guys….
The effect fades as quickly as it came and I worry about how I look to others.
Is my hair is messed up? Is my makeup smeared?
Do I look fat from this angle?
How I looked was like a whore.
Piper would always be the good girl. I was always the whore. It was never going to change.
That night in Little Italy when she walked into Stevie G’s restuarant, drunk? When she pulled a gun out of her pink leather clutch–the one that matched her pumps–and held it the head of the idiot bartender who wouldn’t serve her because she was already insanely drunk?
That was my fault.
Myron called me at home, angry. “Go fix this!” he says
“He’s an idiot Myron. Just tell him to give ‘er a fucking drink,” I say, “and she’ll put the gun away.”
“Fix it. You fucked this up, you need to go down and fix it.” Myron says, and slams the phone down. When I get there, everybody, except Piper, looks a little tense. The bartender is ghost white, standing frozen in a corner of the behind the bar.
“I knew you’d come,” she says, smiling, slowly batting her eyes at me. “They won’t give me a drink, J. I just want a little drink is all.” She hands me the gun–I don’t even have to ask. I order two vodkas from the idiot bartender, one for her, one for me.
When anyone else tells this story, anyone but me or Piper, I’m the one they’re mad at.
When Piper disappeared on a three day drunk, surfacing in some sleazy spade bar on 133rd Street, that was my fault too. When she got so fucked on ‘Ludes she kept sliding off the chair? My fault.
She was everybody’s darling, no matter what. She lived in a fancy doorman building on 55th Street and 8th Avenue. It didn’t matter that the building was chock full of pimps. I lived in a run down tenement in the East Village. It didn’t matter that half the tenants had been born in that building. No matter what, I was trash. It’d been like that since we met at the Butterfly.
Everybody loved Piper.
She had Myron, Joey Two Shoes, the Fat Man and me.
I just had her.
We never talked about
that night.
This entry was written by , posted on January 25, 2010 at 3:18 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, partners in crime, wiseguys. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Junior’s is the first face I see when we get to Joey’s. We lived together.
No, that’s not exactly true. Junior lived on my couch. Briefly.
Having Junior there was like waking up to fresh flowers every day - nice to look at the first day or two, but that’s about all and after a week it’s just a vase full of dirty water and dying organic matter. He’s on the rug, watching dog porn and rubbing himself –nothing’s changed, it’s pretty much all he did when we lived together he lived on my couch. In a little while he’ll head to the bathroom, jerk off into a towel and hang the towel back on the rack.
That part drove me crazy. Getting out of the shower, grabbing a towel and… “Junior! You motherfucker! Get me a clean fucking towel!”
We’d been together. Once. Before he moved in.
Thing was, cocaine makes men feel like sexual giants, like they can fuck all night. Okay, maybe they can, but not in any way I’ve ever found satisfying. There always needs to be something “extra” in the mix. Like a single girl and the usual holes are not enough and sex becomes something devised by Rube Goldberg rather than Mother Nature. You need extra hands, extra stimulation and sometimes you need an extra person or two. Junior’d needed me to do all the work, follow instructions, move this here, put that there, left, right, inside out, upside down, tongue here, okay, okay, now, now, wait, now…okay.
Sometimes, once is more than enough. But, he was still pretty, goddamn it, and he was connected. So I’d let him stay. On the couch.
Two Shoes and Trigger the Greek bookie hovered over the pile coke on the table. The more the Greek sniffed, the worse the spasms in his leg got. Hence, the nickname. Tonight, he was threatening to wear a hole in the carpet. There were two actors, A. was famous–but just for the moment, Eddie was not, a few unidentified wiseguys on the couch and a few unidentified guns on the table.
Piper brought the bottles into the kitchen and mixed us a couple of drinks. Vodka. Ice.And a splash of Seven-Up for color.
“Here,” I dropped the bullets between the guns, “we took ‘em off a cop at work.”
Joey looked up from his cocaine. “Five?”
Piper grabbed him by the arm, laughing and pulling him into the bedroom. “Stop it now. Come with me Daddy and let me tell you what a bad, bad girl I’ve been.”
I made drinks for the boys, settled next to Eddie on the couch, and to the background TV sounds of girls giving head to German Shepherds and horses, we watched through the open door as they undressed each other and made love, laughed, smoked, slept, got high, fucked some more. From our spots in the living room we watched them and we laughed, got high, smoked, slept, got high and laughed some more.
I liked Eddie. He was sweet and handsome. He paid attention to me like I was a regular girl. But, he was no one, going no where. Eddie’s only juice was being friends with Joey.
And the only way to Joey, was going to be through Piper.
This entry was written by , posted on January 21, 2010 at 1:23 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, partners in crime, porn, wiseguys. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I left Times Square and its business of naked and boozy in the mid 80s, but like a ballplayer past his prime with just one shining season - I still live there. It was the most vibrant time of my life.
I kept records of everything–diaries, journals, calendars and phone books going back to 4th grade. Everything except the ten years that were Times Square; almost none of those records survived. Maybe they never even existed. According to Social Security one of those missing years I earned a total of $8 on the books. Eight dollars? I was off the grid before I even knew it existed.
Having no records and an unreliable vodka soaked memory, I sometimes doubt what I think I know. Then they invented the Internet and filled it full of everything–facts, locations, dates, newspaper stories. I found out that Louie the Ice Man had been a big deal wiseguy, a really big deal. And he’d come home from prison this year. Home, just a ten minute drive from where I am today. Thirty years from where I was.
I started to fantasize about being back with Louie. I’m older, and not as cute, but maybe just a little something something to pay the bills while I write about the days when I’d do just about anything to pay the rent. I remembered Louie as sweet. And generous.
I became obsessed with the Ice Man all over again.
If I’d known how big he was, would I have taken more advantage? Probably not. I just wanted to drink and be loved and being with him made me feel wanted. If that was as close to love as I could get, that was okay by me.
He wasn’t mean. He didn’t make me cry. He never hit me. He called me to tell me he was going to prison, instead of just disappearing. He didn’t have to do that, he could’ve just left.
I found court papers, deeds and addresses online.
I showed up at his house a few weeks ago. It’s a little too close to the roar and grime of the highway, the building, slightly run down, the neighborhood, less than inviting. I’d imagined a brownstone or a private home with a lawn. And a gate. Even though I’d been looking at photos of this street for a week on Google Maps, staring at the front of this building. I recognized the air conditioners and the vertical blinds. Still, I expected the photos to be wrong, I expected something…better. There are no names on any of the three buzzers.
I buzz all three bells and stand in the center of the driveway. Totally unprepared and naked in a whole new way. With no makeup, an over-sized thermal t-shirt, sweatpants, sneakers and three extra decades. Decades. This is not my most alluring outfit.
A thirtysomething pokes his head out the third floor window. Yeah? he says. I’m looking for Louie the Ice Man, I say. Only I use Louie’s real name. I don’t say Ice Man.
Is that okay? Yelling out his name on the street like that? What am I thinking? I never would have done that 30 years ago. I knew better then.
Thirtysomething says the Ice Man lives on the second floor.
An small woman in a bathrobe peeks through the curtains at the second floor window. She’s old. I wonder, Is he living with his mother since he came home from prison? Then I remember the thirty years. Louie was in his 50’s then, he’s in his 80s now. His mother, I’m sure, is dead. This is either his sister. Or his wife. Either way, she was young and pretty once. Either way, I’m not welcome. She shoos me away with her hand, clutching her bathrobe closed with the other and never opening the window.
I consider leaving a note in the mailbox. Hi, remember me? I gave you blowjobs 30 years ago, surely you remember? Just stopped by to see how you’ve been. What? I don’t want to start giving random blowjobs again. I didn’t have the energy to dress up like someone’s goumdada back then, and even less so now. What is there to talk about when what I remember is how he liked it when wore my glasses while I sucked his cock. I didn’t want to know that I have a nicer apartment than he does, or maybe this is a decoy apartment. And just like that, without even seeing him, already I’m making excuses the way I made excuses for them all back then.
I get back in my car. I wish him well. He was what I’d needed then to make myself feel safe, but the old lady who shooed me away is right.
I don’t belong here anymore.
This entry was written by , posted on December 25, 2009 at 12:52 am, filed under the diary and tagged 2009, dirty boys, Times Square, wiseguys. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
courtesy Miss Loisy
I was never really beautiful, or classy, never learned to play the girly girl. I’m not the kind of girl men want to protect.
A guy once told me I was the perfect mistress. I understood all the rules, I never balked, I never asked for more. I don’t know how true that is, but what I have always been, what I still am, is a stand up broad–meaning a) I know how to keep my mouth shut and b) I know when to keep my mouth shut.
For me and the Ice Man, it was all about my mouth. I kept my mouth open when we were alone - and closed when we weren’t. Louie the Ice Man made sure I had “cab fare,” even though I’d never asked for a dime. He paid me to keep his secret, but I’d've done it for free just to say I was with him.
I’d been keeping secrets since I was a kid. My own as well as the various & sundries who’d wandered in and out of my private places while I was still too young to know that not everything was my fault. That some times don’t tell anyone, absolutely anyone, promise? is exactly when you should run screaming it down the street for everyone to hear. Immediately. Loudly. Repeatedly. But after you’ve kept that first secret, how do you not keep the next one? They pile up, crushing your insides, not leaving room for anything else until they’re piled so high, you simply cannot see out anymore.
Everybody at the Butterfly knew if you were looking for a top-flight blowjob, Carrie’s mouth was the place to park your penis. We looked enough alike to pass for sisters, and even though she was the prettier sister, it wasn’t her looks that got all the attention. All the visiting dignitaries–wiseguys, loansharks, hit men, fences–everyone wanted to take a turn at bat in the dark warmth that was Carrie’s mouth.
I’d picked up a few tips from Bridget, even though she swore to Myron she never gave blowjobs. Looked him straight in the face at the end of the night waiting for the payout, Florida orange lipstick smeared across her face and hands and swear she was a good girl. She was a good girl. A very good girl. Carrie was in it for the fame and adulation, but Bridget expected cash.
As far as Bridget was concerned the trick to a good blowjob, or at the very least, an easier one, is a little sleight of hand. A good spit covered hand.
They think they can tell the diff, she says, they wanna say they got the deep throat offa ya, but in the dark, wet and warm, is wet and warm, baby. You wrap a wet hand nice and firm around his cock and you’re in control, baby. And that’s the thing. If he wants to control everything, let’m give himself a freakin’ hand job. You get yourself a firm grip on that cock, you got time to do the ‘finesse,’ ya know? Like focus on the head, the ridge, and do some tongue tricks that that particular cock will appreciate a lot more than just being rammed down your throat until you gag. A blowjob is all about the hand, baby, it’s all about the hand.
Bridget made bank with the customers, but the visiting dignitaries–wiseguys, loansharks, hit men, fences–they all wanted to take a turn at bat in the dark warmth that was Carrie’s mouth.
So, when the Ice Man chose me, I felt like I’d arrived. I was finally all I ever wanted to be. A mobster’s moll. A gangster’s gal. I may not’ve been Miss America, but at least I was Miss Congeniality. The Ice Man chose me over Carrie. She could have the fame, Bridget could have the money, I had the power. I was the one he took out in public.
Public. Public consisted of every fabulous, famous and infamous fag bar in town. He owned some, other mobsters apparently owned the others. If his mob buddies owned anything but titty bars and gay bars, I certainly didn’t know about it. We drank at glittering piano bars with elegant men who toasted those glamorous women with something extra tucked between their legs. Wherever we went, by midnight, everyone needed a bit of a shave.
But, let’s get one thing straight, there are no fag wise-guys. Fags don’t need blowjob queens, at least not of the girl variety.
Blowjobs in the car, in the back room of this gay bar or that gay bar, whenever he wanted it, my mouth was there. Whatever made him happy and moved things along so I could get back to the cocaine and vodka was okay by me. I kept a secret we never discussed. My cock-hungry reputation squashed any suspicions. The money guaranteed my loyalty and made me feel kept inside of used. We made each other legit.
We were co-dependent before the it was popular.
The thing I wanted in a man was some element that would keep everyone else away. Crazy, violent, huge, unpredictable, powerful, rich, respected, feared. It didn’t matter. As long as being tagged by him meant that everyone else would steer clear. Given a choice, I’d pick the biggest bad in the room. The world was unsafe and while I couldn’t get a powerful man to care about me or for me the way Piper could, I could remain in his orbit, his aura, take his strength by proxy and make myself safe that way.
For however long we would last, he could have all the glittering fag bar nights he wanted and still be a man because he had me, and I could breathe a bit because I had him.
This entry was written by , posted on December 21, 2009 at 12:56 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1980, Butterfly, dirty boys, Times Square, wiseguys. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
onlythejodi