“ ‘Don’t try to move, Jake,’ she said, smiling down at me.
“ ‘My name’s not Jake,’ I told her.
“‘You’re Jake with me,’ she answered. ‘I don’t care what color you are. All you chaps are Jake with me.’ ”
“She sounds like a real democrat,” Penny interrupted. “Despite her aristocratic background.”
“That’s what I thought.” XX resumed his tale. “Certainly, she wasn’t a snob. But she did have other faults. And perhaps that’s why our love was doomed from the first. You see, she was a nymphomaniac, and I was a eunuch-to-be.”
“But you weren’t a eunuch then. Your love could have been beautiful. What happened?”
“I was a victim of the war against intolerance. As Brett told me after it happened, I gave more than my life. That was true. I gave up the power to love. Can any man live without the power to love? It was rotten. I kept a stiff upper lip, but it was such a rotten way to be wounded!”
“Tell me how it happened.” Penny’s voice was trembly with sympathy.
“Lady Pratt Gashley went that white lady social worker one step better, that’s how. She was sold on the ethnic of the Negro and all that jazz. What happened was that we made love. It was grand. For me and for her. Grand. Lying in bed, drinking Spanish wine sweet and warm from the winebags, spurting it into our mouths, occasionally varying it with calvados, listening to her talk about all the chaps she’d been to bed with before me—-yes, it was good. The sex was good. But Lady Pratt had one misgiving.”
“What was that?”
“The size of my sex. ‘It is too large,’ she would say. ‘It is so large that it gives credence to the canard about the Negro male having abnormally large organs. Something must be done about it. Surely a chap with your awareness doesn’t want to conform to a concept formulated by the enemies of tolerance.’ At first I tried to ignore her arguments. ‘Obscenity thee!” I would say. ‘Obscenity thy mother and thy father, too. My rod and my staff are thine, but by being thy rod and thy staff, do not think you may alter them.’ But she kept at me.”
“I don’t understand. What did she want?”
“She wanted me to have myself circumcised.”
“Well, they do say it’s healthier,” Penny pointed out.
“Ha! That’s a laugh. That’s what she said. And also that it was more sanitary and that it was really an economic deprivation not to be circumcised. ‘Up thy obscenity,’ I would reply. ‘Thou art carrying on like the daughter of an unwed pig. Thou art talking like a mother-obscenitying illegitimate child.’ But in the end she prevailed. She was acting out of love, you see. And I could not hold out against her love for I could not help returning it. So finally I agreed that the circumcision should take place.”
“It’s a simple operation,” Penny observed.
“Too simple. Lady Pratt took me to a doctor friend of hers. He gave me a spinal, a local anesthetic. Lady Pratt, since she was a nurse, assisted. I was quite conscious, and we chatted throughout the operation.”
“What did you talk about?”
“The civil rights movement. Perhaps that’s why it happened. Perhaps if we had talked about something else, I would not today be half a man. ‘The movement must develop more Negro leader chaps,’ Lady Pratt said. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘We need more professionals. More architects and statesmen and lawyers and doctors.’ At this point Lady Pratt’s doctor friend looked up from the scalpel he was sterilizing. ‘More doctors?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied as he grasped my member and poised to deliver the stroke of circumcision. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we must force them to raise the medical school quotas for Negroes. Surely a dedicated white integrationist like you must see that,’ I told him. ‘You’ve fought for housing, fair employment, integrated schools, voting rights, so surely you must see the need for raising the quotas for Negroes in medical schools. Don’t you?’ He brought the scalpel down with one clean stroke. ‘No,’ he replied ‘I’m afraid I don’t. Oops! I’m afraid my hand must have slipped.’ He apologized profusely, but it was no use. That one stroke had made me a bona fide castrato.”
“Well, I can certainly understand why you’re bitter against white people,” Penny said. “But what about Lady Pratt? What happened to her? Didn’t she stick by you in your hour of need?”
“No. It was too much for her. The last thing she said to me was, ‘Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together. I’m so sorry, old chap.’ And then she left for Pamplona. The last I heard she was badly gored by a toreador during a sex orgy.”
“Don’t be despondent,” Penny tried to console him. “After all, the sun also rises.”
“Maybe it does, but I don’t. What’s left just dangles. As Lady Pratt might have said, ‘It’s a bloody shameful place to be wounded.’ Anyway, all that’s behind me now. When she left, I washed my hands of all those helpful white liberals. I joined the black supremacists. I became XX and I’m proud to be XX.” He braked the car to a halt. “We’re here,” he told Penny, indicating the rundown brownstone house on the rundown street in rundown Harlem. “Get out.”
Penny did as she was told. XX led her up the steps and into the vestibule of the house. A Chinese maid greeted them. “Madame X will be with you in a minute,” she told XX.
“How come the maid’s Chinese?” Penny asked before she stopped to think.
“We couldn’t have a Negro maid, could we? That kind of type-casting is for Hollywood.”
“I see. And who is Madame X?”
“She runs this place. She used to be known as Mama Macri. But when she joined our movement, she discarded her slave name and took the title of Madame X.”
“Oh. What sort of place is this?” Penny wanted to know. “And why have you brought me here?”
“It’s a brothel,” XX explained. “And you have been brought here to work. It is the only occupation suitable to an inferior white woman. How do you feel about that?”
“ ’Tis a pity I’m a whore,” Penny sighed fatalistically. But at heart she knew that there were aspects of her predicament which really appealed to her. At last, she told herself, she would experience the sexual relationship. After all, if she couldn’t manage to have her virginity violated in a whorehouse, then there was certainly something wrong with this sexiest of all possible girls in this sexiest of all possible worlds!
CHAPTER EIGHT
PENNY WAS a prisoner in the bordello, and yet in the sense that her own eagerness for experience coupled with her curiosity made her a willing accomplice to her fate, she was not a prisoner. She was in the clutches of a black white slave ring, but if those clutches turned out to be the embraces of love at last, Penny had no desire to escape them. To some girls it might have seemed a fate worse than death, but to Penny it seemed that she had finally received her passport into Henry Miller’s promised land.
Madame X arrived to take her in hand, and XX departed, never to be met by Penny again. The Madame, a horny-looking Aunt Jemima type—or, to put it less chauvinistically, an ebony Molly Goldberg sans accent —escorted Penny into the main lounge to “meet the girls”.
So Penny said hello to Phyllis Up and Fay Down and Ophelia Tietz and Mimi Mee and Berta Control and Ida Lovett and Joy Gurley (Whose last name had once been “Brown,” but who had changed it for fear of giving ethnic offense) and Uta Rust and Lascivia Levine (alas!) and Zas Zas Vavoom and all the rest. After which Madame X escorted Penny to her room and introduced her to her roommate. “Penny, this is Puppy,” she told the darling girl.