It was not quite ten o’clock when Al arrived at Nudelli’s luxurious villa in the heart of Key Biscayne. He recognized the red Porsche convertible that was parked in the driveway and instinctively made his way to the 6,000 square foot pool-house. He knew his boss, a keen swimmer, would be in the sixty-foot pool under the personal supervision of his coach, Sindy, a former lifeguard from Wet’n’Wild in Orlando. Al liked to see Sindy, not least because she was usually naked and there was always a lot to see. He was a non-swimmer himself, but it might have been worth getting into the water just to have Sindy encourage him to learn in her own special way. From time to time she would dive gracefully off the granite deck, chase the naked Tony underwater like some fabulous dark dolphin, and then get underneath him to lick and nibble his penis. Most people thought Nudelli was called Naked Tony because of his surname, but Al knew different. Al knew that it was mostly because of what Tony and Sindy got up to in the pool. Sindy told Al that she got the idea from reading a book about the Roman Emperors, and in particular the life of Tiberius. Al wasn’t much of a reader, but that was one book he just had to take a look at, and they were every bit as depraved as she had said. Sindy was tall, black and beautiful and merely looking at her gave Al a hard-on. Tony called her his Angel-fish.
Al walked into the pool-house.
‘Morning Al,’ smiled Sindy.
‘Morning Sindy.’
Just about the first thing Al looked for after he had looked at Sindy’s pubic hair and then her tits was Sindy’s orange juice. Tony didn’t swim a prescribed number of lengths, or even a set period, but only for as long as it took Sindy to finish him off in her mouth. If Sindy was drinking orange juice it meant that she and Tony were done.
‘Party over?’
Sindy toasted Al silently with half a glass of juice and then sipped at it teasingly. Al’s eyes stayed on her lips and the juice.
‘Want some?’ she said, offering him the glass.
‘Ah no, thanks, ah, Sindy.’
There was no way Al was going to put his lips anywhere near that glass after what her mouth had been doing.
‘Sure? It’s um... freshly squeezed. Y’know what I’m sayin’?’
‘Sure. I ah... just had breakfast.’
‘Hmm. So did I.’ Sindy swallowed thoughtfully. ‘Rather a lot as it happens. Tony must be taking extra zinc or something.’ Giggling at Al’s very obvious discomfort, Sindy tapped him on the nose with one of her long, scarlet fingernails and called out to the weary looking man crawling slowly towards the poolside: ‘OK, hon, I’m outta here. You OK? Want me to help you out?’
‘I’m OK. And you helped me out enough already. Thanks, baby. I’ll call you.’
‘Later.’
Al watched Sindy’s bare ass all the way back to the changing rooms and shook his head in quiet desperation.
‘I should learn to fuckin’ swim,’ he said.
‘You said it, Mary Joe.’
‘Mary Joe’ was what Tony always called Al whenever the subject of Al not swimming came up, after Mary Joe Kopechne, the girl who drowned at Chappaquiddick when Ted Kennedy didn’t. ‘Mary Joe’, or sometimes ‘Pussy’.
Nudelli sank beneath the surface of the water and kicked his way toward the pool steps. Al had to admit, Tony looked good for a man of his age. His shoulders and chest were broad and he still had all his hair which was a Cary Grant shade of silver gray. Nudelli enjoyed the comparison.
‘Hand me that robe, will ya Al?’ Nudelli said, surfacing again and coming up the steps.
Hung too, thought Al. Like a horse. It looked like Sindy had her work cut out. For an older guy Tony sure had a whole lot going for him. Al collected a towel robe off the back of a white rattan chair and handed it over. Nudelli slipped it on. As he sat down he jerked his head toward the wet bar.
‘Fix yourself some breakfast if you want,’ said Nudelli, putting on his glasses and selecting a large Cohibas from the rosewood humidor on the etched glass table. ‘There’s fruit and coffee, all kinds of shit.’
‘Thanks, I already had some.’ Al started to laugh as he remembered the story he had prepared for Tony’s amusement.
‘No coffee?’
‘Yeah, coffee, thanks. Here let me get it.’ Al walked over to the wet bar, picked the Cona jug off the hot-plate and poured two mugfuls. ‘Well, I say breakfast,’ he said, bringing over the coffee. ‘Weirdest fucking breakfast I ever ate. And that includes the ones in Holland.’
Nudelli puffed the cigar into service and flicked the match onto the surface of the pool confident that the pool man would scoop it out later on.
‘How’s that?’
‘Ever since I was a kid I have to have a bowlful of Wheaties for breakfast.’
‘I remember,’ said Nudelli. ‘When we were in Vegas last year you were a real pain in the ass about it.’
‘The breakfast of champions.’
‘Don’t start on that bullshit. If there’s one thing I hate in the morning it’s an advertising slogan. It’s like finding a turd in an unflushed toilet bowl.’
‘So this morning I come down to the kitchen and Madonna’s in there with the kids and it’s like, y’know. Fuckin’ chaos is what it is, right? And all I want to do is have my bowl of Wheaties and then get the fuck out of there before I have a cerebral hemorrhage with all the fuckin’ noise there is. Anyway, I get the bowl of Wheaties and sit down at the table and look around for the cream and there isn’t any left in the jug. No problem. I can see that she’s got her hands full what with the new baby n’all. I’m not above fetching my own fuckin’ cream from the icebox. Trouble is that there isn’t any in the icebox either and so I start to cuss. What’s the problem? she says. The problem, I tell her, is that there is no fuckin’ cream to put on my Wheaties. I’m sorry honey, she says, I guess we must have run out. The kids drink it like they’d never heard of Coca-Cola, which is good because they need the calcium. I can see we’ve run out, I say, but what am I going to do? You know it screws up my whole day if I don’t leave the house with a bowlful of Wheaties inside of me. You know what she did?’
‘Surprise me.’
‘She’s walking around breast-feeding the baby, right?’
‘Jesus, ya can go to the zoo if you wanna see that shit.’
‘The next minute she plucks the tit from the kid’s gums, leans over my fuckin’ shoulder and squirts a couple of ounces of breast milk all over the Wheaties.’ Al quickly mimed the action he was describing.