They let us go. They did frisk Johnny, as an afterthought, but I think it was his doing, this robbery. It was no accident. Shit, to look at him you'd never say he was worth robbing. A real bum. I think he had set it up. He had approached his acquaintances and asked them just to go through the motions of robbing him too. To see what I had.
They didn't touch the cross, didn't hit me or take the notebook. But they weren't noble robbers, by any means. They took an interest in what hotel the key was from. Even though I was all in a fog – the narcotics and alcohol had not dissipated – I caught on and told them some brazen lie. They realized I was lying, but what could they do.
No, they were a bit more experienced than the four in Kharkov, the four including me. Otherwise they wouldn't have thought of the key. This was not their first time at the business, absolutely not their first, although, had I been a plainclothesman, I would have handcuffed them easily and simply; their behavior was painfully amateurish. I know those tricks. My experience as a thief covered six years, from the age of sixteen to twenty-one. After twenty-one I became a poet and an intellectual.
Johnny and I left. I was infuriated with him. He had obviously set this up, the sneaky bastard! Apart from everything else, I was hungry, and I told him so. He continued to drag me down all sorts of dark alleys, where he held discussions with other equally shady characters, received something in his palm, and walked on. My requests for food were ignored.
"Stingy bum, loathsome zhlobby character!" Trudging along behind him, I cursed him in Russian and in English. He knew perfectly well that I was hungry. My barbaric English was understood everywhere, and almost nowhere was I asked to repeat myself. But he didn't want to buy me any food. I was really infuriated with him, fed up. It was beginning to grow light.
At last it appeared that he had finished his shady panhandling and could occupy himself with me now, or else he hadn't wanted me earlier but wanted me now, but anyway he suddenly began kissing me again, his lips seemed to want to swallow my lips and me myself. I didn't want him at all.
"Loathsome zhlob!" I said to him, shoving him away. "Loathsome zhlob, get away from me, go fuck yourself, get lost. I'm going home, skinflint, American zhlob!"
I said it in Russian and said it in English, what I knew of it in English. He laughed and would not let go of me. Near the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Broadway we began to wrestle; a joke is a joke, but he was strong and would not let go of me. We wrestled and wrestled, and crashed down on the pavement. This was right at 1515 Broadway, on the side of the building that faces Forty-fifth Street. It's the building where I always get my welfare check. We went crashing down, he brought me down on top of him and began to kiss me.
"Blockhead," I screamed, "let go, fuck off, get lost!"
But he kept after me all the same with his beard and his lips. Already people were walking to work – admittedly, not many – and they gave us a wide berth. On seeing the people I came alive like an actor, but not only that, Johnny had loosened me up, excited me, I wanted to fuck, and at the same time I wanted to scare these people walking to work. I went for his cock.
He was a bit frightened. "What are you, crazy?" he asked me. "Do people do it in the street?"
I don't know whether they do or not, I couldn't care less. I wanted to get at his cock, right here on the filthy Broadway pavement. I tried again to unzip his pants. The women walking to work scuttled away from us in fright. He jumped up and grabbed my hand.
"Come with me!" He jerked me viciously, then smiled and added, "Russian crazy!"
I went, I forgave him for being a zhlob and a sneak; I can't stay angry very long.
I don't remember the building we went to. I remember only that the inside was very respectable and there was a doorman. Johnny tiptoed me past the doorman, who was sitting with his back to us, and we made a dash for the stairway and cautiously started up.
"If he's taking me to rip someone off, that suits me fine," I thought coolly. "Even if we land in jail, I'll learn both English and Spanish, I'll make contacts, and I'll come out dangerous and mean."
I wanted to know which apartment. We were panting but kept going up and up. There were not only apartments but also organizations of some sort, judging by the substantial signs. Suddenly the doors stopped. Ahead was the empty stairwell and a dead end. Johnny threw off his baggy dirty jacket and flung it on the floor. With the gesture of a cordial host, he pointed me to the floor and sat down himself, began to take off his T-shirt.
"Let's make love, you wanted to make love. It's okay here, not in the street," he said.
I was exasperated. I had already set up plans, and he…
"Afterward," I told him. "I want to do a robbery, I thought we were coming here to rip off an apartment. Why did you trick me?" I said.
"I didn't trick you," he said. "You wanted to make love."
Again he pulled me by the hand. Well, gentlemen, what else could I do? It may have been six in the morning. I went to him…
Under the baggy, dusty street-bum clothes he turned out to have a beautiful figure with a round, neat poopka. In his pants he had seemed fat-assed and awkward, but he was well-proportioned and had nothing to spare This place in the stairwell was hot, we were both naked, and although I was very tanned except for the stripe from my panties, he was so black that my tan made no difference; I was practically white in comparison with him. Although he was much shorter than Chris, this bum and punk had a huge cock. One glance at his cock and all my disappointment and dissatisfaction vanished. Evidently I was, in fact, a pederast. I grabbed his cock, and it would be no exaggeration to say that I hastily rammed it down my throat. He was very ardent, this stingy Johnny, I didn't have to cajole his huge cock for long. He shortly flooded me, and to some extent himself, with a whole load of spurting semen. Such a huge cock! Look what nature hath wrought, I thought, slapping his cock against his belly, laughing and playing. He lay there, content.
Then he set me on his chest and began to kiss my member. He had fine large lips; their area, the area of the viscid surface with which he touched my delicate plaything, was large. He did his job very ably. Little by little he drove me out of my fucking mind, although it took him a great deal of time. He worked honestly and above the norm, more than making up for his stinginess with money:
He loved this work, he sucked my pale cock into him, and then my cock floated back out of him on waves sweet, soft, and warm, so warm – he had lips like waves in the southern seas, large and warm. I was so swept away that for the first time in many months I forgot convention, ceased to feel like an actor on stage, in brief, relaxed and luxuriated. And he didn't tire of it. He went on and on…
Fearing that I would nevertheless drop out of the game, lose my hard-on – I was still sick – I decided to concentrate and come. I summoned to my aid an Elena whom someone was fucking. I imagined her in all three dimensions, being fucked by someone repulsive, but despite my best efforts it didn't help worth a damn. Then I returned to reality, began to enter into what Johnny and I were doing, but this didn't advance me on the path to orgasm either, for some reason it seemed natural and normal to me. And then I remembered a painting or photograph that showed a lonely masturbating woman of about thirty years old. May Johnny forgive me, but at the awareness of her inside-out cunt – when I saw, as if with my own eyes, the ill-polished red nail on her little finger, with which she was chafing the upper part of her genital slit, saw the small yellow stain in the crotch of the panties pulled down on her high laced boots, the pathetic little rag-scrap panties of a lonely aging woman, saw the wrinkle or two on her little breasts – I came.