Bill Starr - Meanwhile, Back at the Sex Farm

“I couldn't see that far,” I said.

“I'll bet you'd like to walk up and get your prick against her little bare ass,” she said.

“She was wearing pants. I could see far enough to tell that.”

“I wonder what she's like? Don't you ever wonder about people you see? Don't you ever wonder when you see a girl if she's hot and how many men she's jazzed and if she goes down on them all? Things like that bother me.”

“Why the hell don't you ask her?” I said. “If it bothers you so much, find out about it.”

“I suppose you think I won't do it.”

I tried to stop her, but she walked up to the girl. She touched her arm and the girl turned around quickly.

“I beg your pardon,” Ruth said, “but I'd like to know if you French.”

The girl looked closely at Ruth's face. She smiled without comprehension.

“Do you like to suck cocks?” Ruth said.

The girl made an ugly noise in her throat. She smiled and shook her head and reached into her purse for a pad of paper and a pencil. Ruth took the pencil and the pad and then she wrote a question about a street. The girl pointed in the direction we were walking and held up four fingers. Ruth smiled and said thank you with her lips and then we walked away.

“I'm sorry about that. I feel awful,” she said.

“You don't have to whisper,” I said. “She can't hear you. What are you sorry about?”

“She looked so nice with the wind blowing her dress. And then she's like that. It isn't right.”

“Not being able to talk doesn't make her any less nice. And it probably makes her a better fuck.”

“I want to get drunk,” Ruth said. “I want to get drunk as hell and be jazzed.”

“We're going to the movies,” I said.

In the theatre Ruth was quiet for a long time, and I was really surprised when she slid her hand through the arm of my seat and began to feel around my pants. When she got my prick in her fist she just hung onto it, and first it got hard and then it got soft again, and she just held it like that until the picture was over.

There were two busses a day to where we wanted to go, but one of them left at eight-thirty in the morning, which is a hell of a time to start for any place. The other one left at three in the morning and made the trip in four hours, so we decided to take that.

Ruth's things hadn't been unpacked. I put a few of my own things in a bag and sent the three bags to the bus station and then we tried to decide what to do with the evening that we still had ahead of us. Ruth counted on her fingers some of the places where we could go, including one place where I had never been, but where they had, according to Ruth, a peep-show circus that covered about everything you could think of. She said that even the rooms with the regular customers had peep-holes. A hell of a whore house, I thought. I told her that I didn't feel like going to that kind of a place that night. If we were going out I wanted to go someplace where the entertainment wasn't so damned exotic. I really wasn't anxious to go out at all, especially if it meant going somewhere to drink, because when I thought back and counted them I realized that I had already taken a good many drinks that day. I have to watch that. If I'm not careful I find myself taking in a great quantity of alcohol without ever getting really drunk, and I don't like that at all because I have a lot of things I want to get finished before I die.

“Do we have to go out?” I said.

“I want to go out.”

She wanted to go out. I looked around the place to be certain that all the windows were closed and everything was the way it ought to be.

The food at the place Ruth picked out for dinner wasn't as good as the name of the place. The chairs were leather and chromium and the walls were covered with murals that didn't mean anything. There was a four piece outfit playing salon music, and that got on my nerves. It didn't help any to remember that Joe Marshal, who had done those murals, had been a pretty good friend of mine. He had been living on nickels for about a year when he got a chance to do that job, and he didn't want to take it then, but everybody told him not to be an asshole and that it wouldn't kill him. Of course it wasn't anybody's fault, but when those things were finished Joe was around town drunk for a couple of days and then, the next thing we heard about him was that he had fallen on a picket fence and driven a picket into his mouth and that was the last we heard of Joe Marshal.

I messed the food around in my plate. Ruth kicked my shin.

“That man over there,” she said.

“What about him? He looks like a stuffed shirt.”

“I know him,” she said. “He's a doctor.”

“If you know him don't tell me about him.

All I need to know about somebody is that you know them.”

“He has some pictures of me. They're not very nice pictures. He took them at a party.”

I put down my fork.

“Will you talk to him about them?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“What do you say about pictures like that?”

“I mean, will you try to get them.”

“By pretending to be your husband, perhaps? 'Sir, I'll trouble you for those photographs of my wife's moment of indiscretion.' I don't think so.”

“Please, Bill, try to get them,” she said. “You're a lot bigger than he is. You can probably get them without any trouble.”

“How many of them are there?” I asked.

“I don't know. He'll know, and if it's done right I don't think he'll keep any back. I'll go powder my nose to make it easier for you.”

She disappeared. I just sat there at the table until she came back.

“He wants to talk to you,” I said.

Ruth walked to the table and the man stood up, smiling, and she sat down there. I forked my food around and thought of what a guy Joe Marshal had been. Pretty soon Ruth was back.

“You didn't talk to him at all,” she said.

“I didn't have to talk to him to know that he wouldn't just hand them over.”

“He wants us to go up to his house now and he'll give them to me.”

“Us? What the hell do you mean, us?”

“If you're not going to finish your dinner we can go up right away.”

I took the check and Ruth and I went to the man's table and she said my name and his name. We went out of that place, then, the three of us, and got into a taxicab.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

I got out of the cab and went into the place next to the restaurant and bought a pack of cigarettes. They were still there when I came out, and that surprised me some. I got in the cab and we started off.

“Did you say you wanted to be dropped off at Uncle's?” Ruth asked me.

I looked at her. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, drop me there.”

The cab stopped after not very long.

“I'll be back in time to get the bus,” Ruth said.

“That's fine,” I said. “You'll be back in time to get the bus.”

I didn't go into Uncle's when they went on. Nobody was in Uncle's that early in the evening. I hadn't done any bowling in a long time, so I went down the street and went into a place and bowled until it was late enough to go someplace else.

I was back in Uncle's when Ruth got there. It was after two when she got there, and I had begun to wonder whether she would get there at all. She was drunk when she came in, and she was carrying a big bunch of roses.

“Look what he gave me to have on our trip, Bill.”

“I don't suppose you remember what you went up to get, do you?” I said.

She had an envelope in her purse, and the negatives and some prints were there.

“I don't think he kept even a single print,” Ruth said. “And you'd never guess where he had them. Guess, Bill.”

“Oh, he had them shoved up his ass, I suppose.”