Tablets, I say to her, running my hand over the swell of her bare haunch as she turns over on her back. Her breasts flatten and settle, the nipples as big astoll house cookies, staring wall eyed in opposite directions like Homer Simpson’s eyeballs. Laptops are getting passe. Young kids like tablets or smart phones. Samsung or Apple. They’re all made by the same greedy bastards in China anyway.
What about you? She says.
Well, you know me. I don’t go for the new stuff so much as most kids.
Yes, I can see that, she says.
I’m not a Facebook kind of guy. I don’t want people to know everything about me.
I pass my hand over her belly as she speaks of her grandson in Florida. She wants to retire in Florida. She knows people there. My hand wanders down the modest swell of her belly, past her ancient Cesarean scar pointing like an arrow to the thick rug of salt and pepper shrubbery down there. I’m slowly combing it through my fingers and trying to imagine how she would look with hairy legs. I think that would be interesting. She looks down her chin to see what’s going on. The way she talks about the kid, I would imagine I’m only about 5 years older than her grandson. I wonder if she was thinking of him a couple minutes ago when I was humped over her on my knees, holding her wide open, hoisting her feet up by the ankles over her shoulders and I was giving it to her hard enough to make her wheeze each time it went in. I love that this old brass bed of hers has real bed springs that squeal in rhythm with you when you’re going at it righteous. I love the slappy sound of her breasts flying up and down in time with the bed springs. It’s like the greatest drum solo in the world. What do women think of when young men are seriously banging them? Enthusiasm? I don’t have the courage to ask.
I would never fuck a girl that way. Never. It would shitlessly scare them. Not just cause its rough, but because it’s intimate that way. It’s personal. Girls don’t always like personal. Maybe that’s why they shave their pussies. There is a world of difference between a girl and a woman. When you’ve had a woman, you can’t go back. Not just a woman, but a beautiful woman at the moment in her life when she’s gloriously going to seed. Her wild verdure, Saw grass ass and Milk weed tits. Wild oats and wild wheat; gloriously gone to seed and my root sunk deep in the raw of her.
The room we lie in is her room; quiet and small, lived in and fragrant. But also with a feeling of the best things having already passed away before I showed up. It’s a place where a couple might go to pass the time while waiting for the next act of their lives to begin. This room is at the top of a walk up stairs in a two story house. For me there is always that feeling of anticipation as I climb the cheap wooden planks, hold the wooden railing of nailed up white washed two by fours; knock my booty call on the door wondering what she’ll be wearing, or not, when the chain rattles and it spreads solicitously wide. It’s become such that the feeling of wooden planks under my feet and wood rail under my hands is enough now to give me a boner just walking the boardwalk at the beach.
After a year of habit, the habit of walking upstairs, the habit of the opened door, disrobing her is as easy as making a sandwich. It’s understood. She keeps nothing on but her white gym socks, because her feet get cold easy but which she also does for me because it gets me hard. She likes to warm the soles of her feet against my thighs under the blanket on cold afternoons. Thick white pure cotton socks with rows of thick cotton ridges; elastic tops with a thin blue band and a tiny hole in the tip from her horny toenail, and the taut outline of her toes which she curls tightly when she’s diving deep in her pleasure. When I’ve got my busy tongue down there and she’s moving her feet over my ass with those socks it feels so totally choice. When I can feel she’s getting there, I grab one of her feet and hold on to her toes through her gym socks because she talks to me with her toes. I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. Always the same way, right just one second before she loses it and screams for Jesus, on each foot she lifts up only her big toe like an alarm and a second later she rams her pussy up hard against my mouth and lifts her back and that’s when I suck her clit between my lips and thrum it with the tip of my tongue while she totally goes brain dead. If I keep doing it slow I can make that last for her. I don’t make noise when I come. I just sort tense up and sigh. She jumps up and yells the horniest shit. I love her for that. Girls don’t know how to do that either, just let it out, thrash and yell crazy shit. They’re thinking about themselves and how they look. Only a woman comes the way a woman comes. Period. I want to record that yell with my cell phone. I want that howl for my ring tone.
You know there’s naked and then there’s soul naked. Taking your clothes off is one kind of naked. Merely naked. But what you see on a woman’s face right when she’s in the act of coming hard core is pure naked. That’s Soul Naked. Soul Naked is what we’re talking about. Helpless. The defenses down. The emotions bare. Stripped down to where you can’t hide what’s inside you when you’re totally open. And that shook up look on her face while she’s coming down, that’s buck bare Soul Naked too. I live for that sweet soul naked. If you want to see that for real – you have to fuck a real woman. Full grown woman. Full blown woman. Forget girls.
I like her best when she comes back sweat slicked and unshowered from the gym. She waits on the shower for me to join her because I’m strange and gross in that way. I want all of her, I want her smells. Before she turns the water on I shove my nose in her armpit. I shove my nose up her crotch. I lick her sweaty crotch clean. I’m not like other young men. I’m a strange beast at a time in her life when she longs for the strange things.
There was this one time early on I didn’t call ahead and she met me at the door with her hair all up in cheap gray plastic curlers held in place by springy brass clips with plastic tips. Like my mom. Just like my mom. I swear to god. I don’t what it was, but sweet Jesus – it just skinned me. Skinned me alive. I manhandled her, stumbled her across the room in pink bunny slippers and a ratty old bath robe of thick soft cotton. I shoved her down on her back across the brass bed with brute selfishness, too urgent to even bother taking my jeans all the way down. All the while the plastic curlers rained off her head like little bombs on the hard wood floor beneath the squealing old bed; plop plop plop. Her head dangled over the edge of the bed, desperately clutching at the rumpled sheet together with my face nuzzled hard behind her ear trying not to tumble off with me whaling away on top of her. It was over in a minute, I couldn’t even try to last. Those hair curlers, they just ate me up. I was ready to marry her and buy her a house, I wanted her so bad. She rolled me off, sat next to me with her robe ripped open and her hair hanging in her face, yelled at me, sulked, lit up a cigarette and lectured me perfunctorily about women’s rights and respecting women. But she didn’t tell me to leave. I just said yeah yeah yeah, you’re right of course because I was feeling scared she’d throw my ass out for good but an hour later we were back humping in the shower together. She knew I didn’t mean anything bad – because she saw my naked soul; we were eyeball to eyeball when I came all rammed up inside her as deep as I could shove and I came stone soul naked so hard my nuts hurt. She looked into my soul. I stole one of those curlers I’d joggled loose. I still have it. I bought her a nice expensive robe for her birthday too. She knows. I’m a really very good boy.
We can’t last. What will remain is the oily smell of the room which will haunt me whenever someone fries up bacon and eggs. The floozy tobacco smell on the cloth of my clothes when I leave. The easy smoke that curls towards the ceiling fan from the rough leafy brown cheroot between those skillful warm hands at rest.
She’s been lying beside me right now, looking through me in the late afternoon blues. She yanks a Kleenex – ppfft! – from the box and stuffs it up between her thighs like a little flag of surrender because my stuff is drooling out of her.
She renews her chatter about her grandson graduating high school next month and wondering what she should get him. What would be a good tablet?
My hand passes over her lolling breast, then wanders down between her sagging thighs which have the beginnings of wrinkles, and tosses away the wet Kleenex.
The hair between her thighs is mixed with gray. It can’t be colored, or at least no one does. The gray down below is like opening an inner sanctum, an expression of trust, a confession of hidden truth. This is who I really am, say the hairs. The hair is shamelessly unwaxed, thick and wiry. I love the rough, beard strands like the weeds of her secret seedy meadow. I love the animal feel of it against my eyebrows when I’m tongue fucking this big breasted mammal. This languidness, looseness, this pliant disintegration mixed with a bit of stiffness in the joints, makes my lover so easy to seduce. I offer her a massage, a foot rub, anything will do, and her clothes melt away with an unctuous eagerness contrived to make me feel masterly over her.
I don’t know, I say. Anything by Sony is always good. Apple is over rated. Samsung is cheap and pretty solid. It’s all the same cheap junk from China anyway. Not Japan or even Korea anymore.
China is where Japan was when I was a little girl, she says. Her hand travels down between my naked thighs and makes me jump. She smiles, feeling the unspoken shift of power from me to her.
Her fingers wander over my junk, affectionately more than sensually. This belongs to me, say the hands. What do you mean, I say.
Japan used to make all these cheap tin shit toys you’d get in dime stores like Woolworth’s. You’d play with it and cut your finger it was so awful. You’ve never heard of Woolworth’s have you? After WWII Japan was bombed into the ground and just rebuilding. All their stuff was so cheap –
Huh!
– Do you like that, darling boy? I’ll remember that. Anyway. So if it said ‘Made in Japan’ on the bottom, well that was a big joke. It meant crap. Made in Japan, that’s what you’d say about something crappy.
Japan is the best these days.
Time changes everything, she whispers. Have you been to New York?
No I say, feeling myself relax into those excellent fingers down there.
I grew up in Manhattan.
Yes, I say. To what I don’t know. I’ve stopped listening.
She curls her fingers into an obliging soft little pipe and I thrust into them until I’m hard again. We know each other’s moves like an old vaudeville act. The bed springs make little squeaks that fill the room with rhythm.
The chenille bed spread we lay on is a kind of thin, tightly woven cotton cloth, sloppy died red with a couple of drying stains in the middle. Two so far, but the afternoon isn’t over. The cloth is very soft and thick like a baby blanket. It has crisscrossed rows of cotton tufts like little caterpillars you can feel when you’re changing positions, when your face is being shoved down hard into them, or your ass being rubbed up squeak squeak squeak against them with warm meaty weight squashing on top of you.
Darling menial, she says.
She lets go of my dick and rolls over on her back, looking up at the ceiling. I’m about to climb on board but she crosses her legs against me. I don’t know what she wants.
Huh?
You look like an elevator boy, she says.
What’s an elevator boy?
Sometimes you still see them in big hotels in foreign cities. He opens and closes the doors for the people in the elevator. He rides with them to their floor.
It sounds boring.
It is. Except that in an age without service, all the rich women imagine what it would be like to take a handsome menial servant to their room, someone so much lower than themselves. Order him around and then fuck the daylights out of him. And then you toss him back to his wretched little elevator alone, all fucked up.
If I were an elevator boy, would you bring me to your room?
Oh, hell yes. Twice on Sunday.
She holds my stiff sticky dick in her warm fist and uncrosses her legs.
I should have stayed in New York, she says.
Why didn’t you?
I was going to marry this man who worked on Broadway, writing plays. He’s a big name now. But you wouldn’t have heard of him.
She mentions his name and she’s right, I’ve never heard of him.
Why didn’t you marry him?
He was a Jew. My parents wouldn’t let me marry him.
Because he was a Jew?
Yes.
That’s messed up. Seriously.
I’m glad you think so, she says.
She takes her hand away and I feel some of the shine go out of me. Times change, she says, and I feel her going away from me.
She rolls over on her side, giving her back to me. Lost. After a very long time she speaks and her voice is cracked and old—
—what are you good for? she says.
© 2014 C. Sanchez-Garcia. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.