Квентин Тарантино - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - The First Novel By Quentin Tarantino

Nevertheless, the details of the escape itself were more or less accurate. However, since Cliff was damn near positive he was never gonna leave the jungle alive, now that he had, his survival proved to be a mite inconvenient. When it came to what he was going to do with the rest of his life, Cliff knew fuck all.

First things first, he wasn’t in any hurry to return to the United States. So once he was discharged, he thought he’d visit Paris. And it was from hanging around Paris a few months, eating cheese and baguettes and drinking red wine like it was Coca-Cola , that he was first introduced to a profession that before the war he was completely ignorant of: “ gentleman of leisure.”

A profession more commonly referred to as “pimp.” Like a lot of American men of Cliff’s era, the whole concept of pimping was completely foreign to them. They understood the concept of a madam who ran a brothel. But in Paris, Cliff met these French fellas called le maquereau , or Maqs for short (pronounced in English as “macs”). These French fellas dressed sharp, hung around in bars all day, and put women on the street to sell their pussy for money, who then gave the money to the maq. To an American male at the time, the idea of a woman selling her pussy, then giving the money to a man, was a mind-blower. But these French fellas had it all worked out to a science. Due to Cliff’s good looks, he’d been manipulating women to do things against their best interests his whole life. Getting them to offer up the pink, that was easy. But to get them to sell the pink, and then give him the cash? Man, that was manipulation on a whole other level. If he could figure out how these French fellas were doing it, this was something he could do when he got back home. So Cliff got to know a couple of these cats.

“What does the girl get out of the arrangement?” Cliff asked. The French fella explained it to Cliff like this:

“The women pay you to take care of them. And you do take care of them. You protect them. From customers, cops, hoodlums, and other women. You take them out and you show them off. Yeah, they give you money, but you spend a lot of the money on them. You could just give them a cut of what they make, but that’s not romantic. And eventually they’ll wise up, and when they wise up, they resent it. But if you take the money they make and spend a lot of it on them, buying them stuff they like, dresses, perfume, jewelry, wigs, pantyhose, magazines, chocolate, and take them to places they like to go, restaurants, bars, cinemas, dancing, they forget it’s their money. As long as they do what Daddy says , Daddy takes care of them.”

“There’s gotta be more to it than that?” Cliff asked.

“Do not underestimate the desire for a woman to have a daddy take care of them,” the French maq said.

“Nevertheless, you’re right,” the maq admitted. “There is more to it than that. There’s one thing more important than anything else. For instance, finding the right type of girl is important. But even as important as that is, there’s one thing more important.

“There are a lotta guys out there who can turn a woman out, but to keep them turned out ? That’s the mark of a true maq. And then turn out multiple women, and keep them turned out? That’s a real motherfucking maq. And to do that, it requires you to do one thing above everything else.”

“What’s the secret?” Cliff asked.

“Simple,” said the maq. “Fuck ’em good. Fuck ’em real good. And fuck ’em real good real often.”

Cliff smiled, but the French fella assured him, “Hey, that’s harder than it sounds. You can’t fuck ’em like you fuck your girlfriend. You can’t fuck ’em like you fuck your best friend’s girlfriend. You can’t fuck ’em like you fuck your father’s mistress. That’s fucking for fun. This is work. For work, they fuck customers for money. For work, you fuck them for money. And trust me, they’re harder to please. If you want to keep ’em in line, you better fuck ’em good, and you better fuck ’em a lot. Which means you’re gonna hafta fuck ’em when you don’t wanna fuck ’em. But even when you don’t wanna fuck ’em, you hafta fuck ’em, and you hafta fuck ’em good. And the more bitches you have, the more fuckin’ you’re gonna do. More bitches means more fuckin’. No sleepin’ on the job. You get lazy even four goddamn days, that bitch is gonna wake the fuck up. The spell will be broken. And when the spell’s broken, it’s not like, Okay, I guess that was that; see ya later. When the spell’s broken, that bitch fuckin’ hates you. And that bitch doesn’t just hate you, that bitch wants to see you dead. And maybe she tries to kill you. And maybe she tries to steal your shit. And maybe she calls her father, maybe she calls her brother, or maybe calls the boyfriend she had when she was a little girl and asks him to save her. And now it’s him coming after you with a knife, or her brother coming at you with a pistol, or her father coming at you with a fuckin’ shotgun.

“Or she takes the pussy you taught her how to use, to recruit some joker to kill your ass.

“In other words, a maq ain’t got no days off. There ain’t no fuck-free holiday for a true maq.

“You fuck her, and you keep fuckin’ her, you can never stop fuckin’ her, and you can never stop fuckin’ her good.

“You can’t be bored, you can’t resent it, nobody gives a shit if you’re in the mood. You’re her man and you take her there every fuckin’ time.

“And the key: different positions. You don’t hafta fuck her better than any other man, you hafta fuck her different than any other man.

“You wanna know what she gets out of it? That’s what she gets out of it. And you know what, it’s a good fuckin’ deal. She takes care of you, and you better fuckin’ take care of her. Yeah, she gives you money, but, mon ami , you’re gonna fuckin’ earn it.”

Cliff understood. He understood really well. He also understood he didn’t want to work that hard. He’d rather drive a car into a brick wall at sixty miles an hour (like he was later paid to do) than fuck a bitch he didn’t want to fuck. It’s like that old expression, the only people who don’t like riding horses are cowboys.

So once Cliff realized he wasn’t cut out for being a pimp, he returned to the States and bummed around America for a few years, eventually finding his way to Cleveland, Ohio. While there, he looked up an old chum from high school, Abigail Pendergast. Abigail was a peroxide beauty who was one of the mistresses of the Mafia-connected hoodlum Rudolfo “Patsyface” Genovese.

Cliff Booth and Miss Pendergast were sitting in a Gay Nineties pizza joint, with sawdust on the floor, checkered tablecloths on the tables, music coming from a piano roll inside a player piano, and a 16mm Charlie Chaplin movie projected on the wall.

As Miss Pendergast bit into a pizza slice and gooey mozzarella dribbled down her chin, she twisted around in her chair to ask the waiter for a napkin. That’s when she spotted them: Pat Cardella and Mike Zitto, sitting at the bar, sipping beers, and making faces at her table.

Oh shit , the platinum-blond bombshell thought.

She turned to her date, who, since he didn’t eat the crust, had polished off his pizza slice in two and a half bites.

She leaned to Cliff across the table, “We’re not alone.”

With a mouthful of gooey pizza pie, Cliff asked, “What?”