I skipped dinner and stretched out on my bed in my shorts and let the air conditioner blow on me. I woke up shivering, figure that one out, when Lester banged on my door. I let him in and he flopped in a chair and waited for his breath to come back. He had gone out for dinner and walked through all that heat, and looking at him made me glad I stayed around the room instead.
We talked about this and that, one thing and the other, and ultimately reached Topic A. I launched into a long story that was kind of loosely based on something that happened with Aileen, except that in this version of the story we didn’t worry about being faithful to Gregor, who was a Cuban refugee dentist in the latest version. I don’t know if Lester believed it or not. I don’t think he cared enough to worry whether it was true or not. When you sit around swapping sex stories to keep from dying of boredom, nobody really gives a shit if they’re true or not. Just so they’re sufficiently interesting and/or horny to keep you awake.
“You know something?” he demanded, when I had carried Carmelita and myself to the heights of rapture. “When all is said and done, no woman really knows how to give head.”
I made a noncommittal noise.
“You agree with me, Chip?”
I said something that sounded like Rowrbazzle. Because it was one of those questions like Have you stopped beating your meat? Whatever you said, you came off either more ignorant or more informed than you might want to.
Lester talked for a while, sort of saying but not saying that he was afraid he got more of a kick out of the queers than he wanted to, and hinting that if he did have a woman available on a steady basis he might miss the Greyhound Terminal set, water on the knee and all. I just made grunting sounds, which was all the situation called for. One thing I’ve noticed is that when you want to talk something out and get it right in your mind, all you really want the other person to do is be there with his mouth shut. It’s a way of talking to yourself without feeling a little flaky about it.
He dropped the subject when Jimmy Joe came in unannounced and stuck his head in front of the air conditioner.
“Hey,” he wanted to know, “am I interrupting anything?”
“We were talking about sex,” Lester said.
“That’s the trouble. Everybody talks about it and nobody does anything about it.” And he sat down on the carpet and joined the party.
Bit by bit they all filtered in. Keegan first, and then Flickinger himself, standing at the door with a stupid look on his face and a bottle of gin in each hand. He came in and said he felt like company, and why didn’t we all join him in a drink? No one could think of a reason not to. We drank gin on the rocks out of water tumblers. Keegan smacked his lips, wrinkled his nose, frowned, and said he wanted a little less vermouth next time around.
That reminded Flick of a story. I knew it would, because I had heard the story twice before, the two times I got drunk with him. Every last one of us had heard that goddamned story but nobody wanted to ruin his evening by saying anything about it.
You know, somewhere in this world Flickinger must have a drinking buddy who has the same kind of memory as Flick does. And I can just imagine the two of them sitting up night after night, lapping up the sauce and telling each other the exact same stories every single night. And each time Flick would think he was telling the story for the first time, and each time the other juicehead would think he was hearing it for the first time, and the two of them would go on and on, repeating like a decimal until the world came to an end.
Flick finished his story, finally, and poured everybody another drink whether they needed it or not, and got that look on his face that let you know another story was on its way. Before he could get his mouth in gear, Keegan said, “Why isn’t Solly at our little party?”
He wasn’t looking for an answer. He just wanted to throw a question in Flickinger’s way. But no sooner were the words out than the door flew open, and there, drunker than the five of us put together, was Solly himself.
“Well, it’s about time,” he said. “Wondered where you all went to. Knocked on this door and that door and thought you were all gone, and you’re all here. Goddamn good thing, too. Never forgive yourselves if you missed this.”
“Somebody give him a drink,” Lester suggested.
“Brought you boys a present,” Solly said. He stuck out his hand and just left it hanging there, waiting for someone to put a drink in it as Lester had suggested, but that’s the trouble with indefinite orders; we all waited for somebody else to give Solly a drink, and Solly’s hand just stayed out in the air for a little while before he remembered where he had left it and brought it back.
“A present,” he repeated, and got his hand back, and stuck it out into the hallway and brought it back in again, only now there was a girl’s wrist in it, with a girl attached. A redhead with a see-through sleeveless blouse and a flaring white miniskirt that ended less than an inch short of indecent exposure.
“This is Cherry,” he said, and started to laugh. “Jesus Christ in Marlboro Country, but if this here is cherry then I’m an unkey’s moncle.”
He tried to say it straight, and muffed it again, and fell apart laughing. Then he tried again from the beginning.
“This here is Cherry,” he said. “Her name. She wants to get checked out for dendivorous insects. No, what she wants is to get laid and relayed and parlayed. Screwed, blewed, and tattooed. She wants to take on everybody who’s game, and I thought of my old buddies, and I thought, shit, what else do you do for kicks when it’s a hundred and ten in the shade?”
Cherry was just standing there with a simple smile on her face. I guess that was the only kind she was capable of. She did look simple. There was no getting around it. She looked great, with a face that was reasonably pretty even if you didn’t fall heart-stoppingly in love with her, and with a body that would have made you willing to have her around even if the face had been horrible. But there was something in that face, some quality that was part stupidity and part vacancy, in the sense that if you opened up her head you would find a sign saying that part of her mind was on a sabbatical in Europe or something. So she stood there looking dumb and desirable, and that’s exactly what she was.
The rest of us were saying encouraging things like Hey and Wow and Sounds good and No crap. And Solly put one of his hands on Cherry’s little behind and gave kind of a shove, and she took four or five little running steps into the room. Solly followed her inside and closed the door.
“Now show the boys what you got there,” he said. “Get your clothes off, Cherry. Hurry it up. Any of you bastards got a deck of cards? High goes first and so on in order, and the same order for seconds and thirds, and after that we’ll worry about it.”
“Seconds and thirds?”
“Look at her. How often do you get a shot at something like that? You guys, I don’t know, you guys get so little ass that when you jerk off you close your eyes and pretend you’re jerking off. You think one shot at Cherry here is going to be all you want? Jesus, look at her!”
I don’t know who he was talking to, because I’m pretty sure we were all looking at her. It seemed to me that she looked awfully young, but that happens with simple people. They don’t have the sense to worry about things.
She took everything off, and she stood there with the same smile on her face, and I thought, well, take a good look at this one, Chip, because this is the one you’ll never forget, the first girl ever for you, and nothing can stop you now.