Paul was playing a five-a-week gig at some place uptown, so he was in better shape than he was the last time I had seen him. The band wasn't union, but they were doing all right, and he had some money in his pockets and he was wearing a clean shirt. He told me all about it over his gin, and he was sorry to hear that I wasn't playing around any more.
I stuck to the sherry. Paul could drink an enormous amount of gin, though, and when we left the bar we were both feeling about the same. He kept talking about a new record Miles had just made, and he talked about it so much that we went down to the Music Shop to buy it, and before we got out of there I had bought more records than I could afford. Then Paul wanted me to go home with him and listen to a couple of old Coltrane records he had picked up some place.
I had never known before where Paul lived, but it was where I had expected: in an old tenement down in the heart of town. It was pretty shabby on the outside and next to an old factory. In between there was an alley and the whole length of it smelled of piss. Paul's side of it wasn't so bad as the side next to the factory. He said that a lot of winos used the place as a sort of urinal and that in the middle of the summer it was worse. I didn't notice the smell after the first few minutes, and I suppose that the people who lived there got used to it the same way you would get used to the view from a Swiss chalet and didn't notice it at all.
Paul played his Coltrane records for me, and then we played the records I had just bought, and he got a pint bottle of gin from someplace, but I still knew enough not to mix it with the sherry, so he did all of the drinking that was done. He began to show it pretty much, and he wanted to lie down; so he lay down on the couch with the bottle and the glass on the floor beside him and rolled his eyes at the music while I played the records, and then there was a girl in the room.
“My little sister, Patty,” Paul said. “Patty this is my friend, Bill.”
The girl must have been his half-sister. She was a lot lighter than Paul, and they didn't look very much alike. Paul had close, kinky hair and a flat nose and thick lips, and the girl wasn't like that. She said something to me that I didn't get because of the music, and she picked up the gin bottle, but after she had smelled of it she changed her mind about wanting a drink. She sat down and listened to the records, and Paul talked for a while and then he fell asleep.
There's only one reason why it's called jazz music, despite all the stories they have about itinerant river musicians called jabbo or jass, and even the people who don't know what it's all about can sometimes guess that. I don't suppose they could ever have gotten away with calling it fuck music, but anybody who doesn't know what jazz music is about is socially, more than musically, ignorant. For that matter, as long as we're on the subject, when I was a kid out in Chicago a shag wasn't exactly a dance.
I was speaking of Paul's sister. She sat listening to the music with me, and sometimes I would change the records and sometimes she would, and then she asked me if I would like to dance. I don't dance well, but I said I would like to dance with her. We put on a record that we didn't particularly want to listen to and we danced through that side and the other side of it. Patty danced up close to me, rubbing her belly against me and sliding one of her legs between mine, and when she moved up with my leg between hers she would do a step that squeezed my thigh and rubbed her pussy against me. I was holding her with my hand low on her ass, and I could feel her muscles working there when she socked it up to me. When the second side of the record was finished I had my hand on her ass and was feeling it, and she was rubbing around and feeling my prick with her belly. Paul woke up and flapped one hand at us like a flipper and grinned with all his teeth. He poured himself about half a tumbler of gin and drank it and then fell asleep again.
I pulled Patty onto one of the chairs with me and commenced feeling her up, and she was willing enough. She got her hand into my pants and slid it around until she got my cock in it and she started to jerk me off. The trouble with that was that it was back seat stuff, and not very damn comfortable with all her weight forward on my knees. I looked at Paul on the couch, and Patty looked at him and called him. He didn't make a move, and even when she got up and shook him he only groaned a little, so we knew he was happy and wouldn't wake up for a long time, and Patty and I went upstairs.
“Didn't I see you out at the Owl Club once?” I asked.
Patty had her dress and her slip off, and she was dancing a shuffle step wearing just her pants and her slippers. The pants were white, and she looked darker in them than she did when she had the dress on, and she looked darker when she wasn't in the same room with Paul because he was almost black.
“I used to be in the show up there,” she said, “but I never saw you.”
“I've seen you. I know you better with your clothes off.”
“You never saw me like this at the Owl. The cops made us put on pasties after the first night,” she said.
She shuffled up close to me and practically threw it in my face. I pulled her pants down and then she backed over to the bed and took them off. Her legs were round and smooth-brown, and she had a small scar on one thigh where she had been vaccinated.
“That was a hell of a job at the Owl,” she said. “Nine to three every night and then another hour while the boss chased me around his office. I never had enough sleep.”
“Is anybody liable to walk in on us?”
“Not a chance,” she said.
Just the same, I locked the door before I got onto the bed with her.
“You sure are a worryin' man,” she said. “I don't see how a man can be hot and worry at the same time.”
“He can't; that's why I locked the door.”
“Nigger gets hot and he doesn't have any worries. You get worried and you can't get hot. Funny world,” Patty said.
“Shove that stuff,” I said, “or I'll shove this.”
Patty looked at my prick and then grabbed it.
She fell on top of it, jerking me off and pushing her pussy against my balls, and she tied my legs up with hers and squeezed them. I clawed for her cunt and got one finger into it.
“You got a girl friend?” Patty asked. “A regular girl friend that you fuck all the time?”
“I've got one that fucks everybody all the time.”
“That's too bad,” Patty said. “I thought you might come around and see me sometimes.”
“For god's sake, are you always like this? You're getting ahead of yourself.”
“I don't need ten days free trial to tell a man that can fuck. The way you go after what's down there is all I need to know about you.”
I pushed her off of me and I held her up to me and felt of her with my whole body. I took her tits and shook them, and they were smaller than Ruth's but they felt good to my hands. Patty was more restless than Ruth; she couldn't be still while I was feeling of her, and she put her own fingers in her cunt when I took mine away from there.
“Your jelly roll is going to be stale,” she said. “We will both be old and gray if you don't put it to work pretty damn soon.”
“Freshen it up a little. I jazz better after I'm Frenched anyway.”
“I don't French,” Patty said.
“The hell you don't. Maybe you didn't yesterday, but you do today. Wrap your mouth over it.”
She opened her mouth when I got my prick close enough to it, and there wasn't any more play about her not doing it. She sucked it hard and she chewed it hard, and I almost gave her a shot before I knew it, because her tongue and the inside of her mouth was rougher than Ruth's. I didn't know whether to shoot while she was sucking my cock or whether I wanted to wait until I was jazzing her, but she took care of that by stopping in a minute and lying back with her legs open. I was so near to shooting that I had to wait a few minutes before I got on her, and she lay with her cunt toward me and petted it and worked it open and shut with her fingers until I was sure that she was going to make herself come before I ever got my cock in her.