Fran Ross - Oreo

“In there, turning a trick with one of her regular johns,” said Lil, indicating the room of the voices.

Oreo realized that this was the first word she had heard any of the prostitutes speak in solo. She also realized that the regular john across from the john might well be her father. Wouldn’t that be a blip? thought Oreo. She did not know which was more incredible — the possible coincidence or how badly she had to pee.

She went into the bathroom while Lil waited outside the door. In a few minutes, she had stripped except for her mezuzah, sandals, and brassiere (which she had always thought should be called a mammiere, since she had never seen anyone try to protect her arm with one). She left the mezuzah on for irony’s sake, the sandals for comic effect, and the bra (or ma) because she was going to be taking advantage enough of Kirk without adding unrequited lust to his handicaps, an unavoidable state of mind, she felt, once he got hind sight of her perfect twin roes (Song of Solomon 4:5), to say nothing of Parnell’s reaction and — who knew? — a couple of the girls’ besides. Oreo reached into her handbag and pulled out a protective device she carried with her at all times. She wedged it into her wedge. She was ready.

Oreo goes to the mat

Parnell kept straightening the wrestling mat with the toe of his boot — on the theory, Oreo guessed, that anything he did with his hands he was really doing , but whatever he did with his foot was beneath notice and therefore no one could accuse him of performing useful labor. Parnell took Kirk to his corner and whispered in his ear, rubbing his back and giving his behind the athlete’s homosexual underhand slap/feel of encouragement. The women shifted impatiently in their chairs, every once in a while casting at Oreo what she took to be Aristotle’s glances of pity and fear leavened by De Sade’s anticipation of unmentionable acts.

As agreed upon by both parties — Oreo with a nod, Kirk with two floor-pawings — Parnell snapped his fingers three times as the signal to begin. Oreo stood quietly where she was, in the center of the mat. Kirk came out of his corner with his nose wide open. As he advanced, his stallion did an impressive caracole right, a no-slouch caracole left, then majestically reared its head. He threw the unresisting Oreo to the floor, stretched her legs wide in the ready-set position of a nutcracker, took aim, tried to jam his pole into her vault and — much to his and everyone else’s surprise — met with a barrier that propelled him backward and sent him bounding off the nearest wall.

The look of astonishment on Kirk’s face as he gave the dullard’s flat-eyed stare to his bruised cock and muscles would warm her heart’s cockles for all the time she was alive, alive-o. The puzzlement of Parnell, the hoaxing of the whores — oh, Oreo could do nothing but smile her cookie smile.

The barrier Kirk had come upon (but not come upon) when he tried to pull a 401 (breaking and entering) was a false hymen made of elasticium, a newly discovered trivalent metal whose outstanding characteristic was enormous resiliency. Elasticium’s discovery had been made possible by a grant from Citizens Against the Rape of Mommies (CAROM), an organization whose membership was limited to those who had had at least one child (or were in the seventh to ninth month of pregnancy) before being attacked (usually by their husbands, an independent survey revealed). CAROM’s work was a clear case of mother succor (and thus an aid to rhymesters). Vindictiveness would soon lead CAROM’s leadership to share false hymens with the world (“Maidenheads ®are available in your choice of Cherry pink, Vestal Virgin white, or Black Widow black”), but Oreo had been able to get hold of a prototype because of her acquaintanceship with its inventor, Caresse Booteby.

À propos de bottes , Parnell helped Kirk off the floor with the toe of his boot and sent him back to the mat, as if to say, “I don’t know what happened, but it shit-sure ain’t gon happen again.” It did. Kirk lowered his boom and boing -ed off Oreo’s indehiscent cherry as if it were a tiny trampoline — which indeed, in effect, it was.

By now, the nine prostitutes were having a finger-popping time, whooping and hollering with uncontrolled delight. Parnell was hoarse from screaming at them to quiet down, polyped from screeching yet another set of futile instructions to the thwarted Kirk about the solution to Oreo’s architecture. Poor Kirk’s sexual charette availed him nothing. His back was lacerated from racketing against walls and furniture (once he had hit the black bottom woman’s empty chair and had bounced on the floor like a dribbled basketball). After each encounter, totally confused and uncomprehending, he fanned the head of his angry-red penis, occasionally patting it in consolation for its failure. The battering his quondam battering ram was taking was making Oreo feel sorry for him. He was lathered with sweat from his efforts, his great heart about to burst. Oh, the heartbreak of satyriasis.

Oreo got up, tired of playing this game. “He’s exhausted, fagged out— oysgamitched ! It takes a better man than him to break my cherry,” she taunted. “Why don’t you send this gelding back where he came from?”

She knew that her words would enrage Parnell — the choler of a master whose pet has been maligned. Parnell rushed at her. This was the part she had been waiting for. Ducking his pimply right cross, she dealt him the humiliation special — a quick fō-han-blō , a lightning bak-han-blō . He dropped to the floor, more out of surprise than compulsion. The blōs had been meant to sting, not fell. The women made no move to help Parnell. They were immobilized, as if permanently, a frieze on an Attic temple.

Parnell shook his head in disbelief. “I’m not jiving now. Woman, I am gon break your natural ass.”

“No shit?” said Oreo as he started to get up. “Don’t talk so much with your mouth,” she advised, quoting one of her grandmother’s favorite lines, and she gave him a pendulum tō-blō to the lower jaw to make sure he would not. The slight crepitation she heard she at first feared was Parnell’s mandible mealing. When she saw what had made the sound, she was even more horrified by what she had done: she had broken one of her sandal straps. “Oh, drat and double phoo,” said Oreo. She dealt Parnell an el-bō-krac to the ear out of frustration. They were her favorite sandals.

So far Parnell had not touched her. He groped toward her like a man in a dream’s slow motion running after a silent, insidious double-time train, a train he must catch before the something that is gaining on him engulfs him. She eluded his grasp. She was making her domination of Parnell into a contest the integrity of whose outcome she would consider compromised if the oil from the whorls of one of his fingers was seasoned with the salt of her light film of sweat. Her mezuzah flew, her bra osmosed moisture, her sandal flapped, lofting zephyrs of air that cooled her Maidenhead as she went through her repertoire of WIT: sarcastic blōs from hed to tō , the irony of a fut in the mouth, facetious wise- kracs, kik -y repartee, strīk -ing satire — in short, the persiflaging of Parnell.

When she had amused herself sufficiently, she straddled the prostrate pimp, arched his neck backward in a modified hed-lok , and addressed herself to the nine prostitutes. “How many of you would like to step on Parnell’s boots?” she asked.

“Who?” they chorused.

She had forgotten that she had made up the name Parnell and now did not want to know his true name. “Him,” she said, ducking her head and maintaining leverage on Parnell’s chin.