Mat Johnson - Drop

With the rain going, nobody else arrived. Listening to it hit the roof, I sat in the passenger seat next to Bill. He smoked with the window down and his hand hanging outside, his knuckle hooding his cigarette. When he pulled it in for a drag, the water dripped from his fist onto his shirt.

‘This is my old neighborhood,’ Bill told me.

‘Yeah? You used to live in West Philly?’

‘I used to live right there,’ Bill said, pointing. ‘You can’t really see it from here, it’s behind St Mark’s. I used to go to school’ the hand shifted, ‘there. I used to buy my groceries from … there. I used to jump on the back of the trolley into Center City … there.’

‘I live here now.’

‘Yeah? Nobody I know does anymore. No more jobs.’ The man could take half a fag down with one puff. ‘Y’know, it hurts, really, seeing it like this. I’m not the crying type or nothing, but it hurts. It’s hard to deal with.’ Of course it hurts. It’s pain. Nobody’s feeling happy. Maybe you never should have left. Maybe we never should have come here. Maybe everybody should run so far away they don’t have to see any of it any more. Leave it vacant like half the homes that line the street already are.

I walked back to the main cabin and sat next to Cindy, and she rolled her eyes at me. ‘Why you talking to that honky?’ she asked as she got up for the bathroom. When its door locked, I walked to the trash. There were a few cold fries at the bottom of her lunch bag. Nice and chewy in my mouth.

The women’s checks bounced. The temp place messed up, didn’t switch enough to the proper account. The brothers were protected from the error because we always went to the agency to pick up our pay in person instead of waiting for them to mail it out (we were usually broke first). We felt bad for them, but excited and lucky, too. It was decided we should honor the good fortune by getting drunk.

‘I know this jawn, it’ll be perfect. They sell forties for four dollars. They got a little show going on, you ain’t seen nothing like this shit. It ain’t the type of place you tell Lynol about. And the cover’s hardly nothing,’ Clive told us. Reggie said he wasn’t going up in no North Philly gangsta bar. ‘Don’t worry about it, this jawn is cool. I’m telling you,’ Clive insisted. I sided with Clive until Reggie relented, then we were off to Sodom with a tour guide. I was going to get wrecked tonight.

It was dark, it was humid, we were at the front steps of an abandoned row house. Clive knocked on the front door four times and a small wooden window opened up at eye-level.

‘I got three coming in,’ Clive said into it. The window stayed open silently for a moment, then there were sounds of the door unlocking. I was suddenly tired. I wanted to go home to my hovel where the only danger was myself. There were too many locks for anyone to have on one door, endless clicking and absurd disengaging until it finally opened to let us in one at a time.

There had to be three of them on the other side, grabbing us with their thick hands and feeling us down. The smell was as strong as the musk in the lion’s den at the zoo, just not as nice: sweat, the overriding heat of too many bodies in an enclosed space, sperm cold and liquid and going bad on the floor like sour cream, perfume that lays cheap over stank like sugar on shit. No windows, no light but the sparse colored illumination coming from the top of the stairs. A gutted row house, no furniture or separating walls. Space without obstruction except for the black outlines of folding chairs, some with people sitting in them. Shapes that seemed old and accepting of the situation. A few alone but others with female bodies on them, slight liquid movement in the dull darkness. Once we had been searched the guard said, ‘Stay here’ and walked over to the stairwell, shining a flashlight beam along the angle of the steps three times. Another three light flashes down and we were given the clearance to go up.

‘Give ten dollars to the man at the top,’ the guard with the flashlight told us. It was too dark to see his face.

On the second floor we were searched again by a tall, overweight bald brother who rose from a lawn chair to do so. ‘Gimme twenty dollars,’ he said. Even in that light I could see Clive flinch, but he pulled the money out, so me and Reggie followed.

There were women in the room. The round brownness of their bodies blended into the shadow, their shapes revealed only by their movements and the reflection of the few muted lights upon the sides of their wet flesh. There were men. Seated with the expressionless silence of subway riders. The smell was strongest on this floor, its source. Clive started walking to the back of the room and we closely followed. The floorboards hummed with the music, plaster dust fell from the walls to its rhythm. I almost tripped over a patch of plastic lawn grass raised on a platform four inches off the ground; a lady was dancing on it. Leaning away from the mini-stage, I brushed the knee of a woman sitting on a man’s lap. She was leaning forward, her back to him, her hands on her thighs as if she was peeing. I excused myself but she didn’t look up, concentrating instead on the small round circles she was carving into his lap.

We stopped and seated ourselves at a loose cluster of chairs. It began to register that the women in the room were topless, some apparently naked. The surrealism of the nudity of strangers, of their panted breaths.

‘What do we do now?’ Whatever it was I was getting it done and getting out of here.

‘Five dollars, y’all. Five dollars and they grind on your lap for a whole song. Five dollars more for anything extra. Try to get them just when the music starts so you can get your booty worth.’

The room was small, thin, and long and filled with couplings of seated men and the women who pushed their asses into them. Slow-moving crotch riders grinding slurred versions of the beat of the room. Clive waved a folded five-dollar bill to an incoming shape until he had a woman before him. The bill caught between her teeth, her legs spread over his lap, one hand on the back of the chair and another at his groin.

‘You got any money?’ Reggie asked me.

‘A little. I got like ten ones. Fifteen maybe.’

‘I got ten.’

‘I ain’t trying to spend it,’ I told him.

‘Shit, you here.’

‘Yeah, but I’m trying to eat on that.’

The woman on Clive’s lap thrust her tailbone into him like she was trying to slam her asshole through to the chair. She stared at the top of his head like she was landing blows. A young one, long hair that even in the dark looked like a wig, her thin upperbody flanked by the bulbous weight that exploded past her waist and kept going down. She looked like a cousin I had, from Delaware, the one who went to college for accounting. Song over, she stood up, almost getting away before Clive found the next five in his pockets. Past him a woman was holding an old man’s dick in her right hand, his leg the pivot of the flurried flapping of her arm. He raised a wrinkled hand to her face and she kissed it quickly, then lifted her gaze to the ceiling until he slid his claw back down. Old man, old clothes, wearing a hat as if people still wore them any more. I wanted to save her, then him, somehow, from something, but then they kept going, flapping and moaning.

Reggie had a woman on him. Her calf rubbed against mine with the rhythm of her dance, but she didn’t seem to care. Ladies without partners circled the tight space, weaving slowly between the chairs, waiting for one of the seated men to pull on their arms so they could earn some money. Some wore small black G-strings from which hair climbed out. One woman, older and large, wore thick white underpants that glowed in this darkness. Cottonal Y-fronts, I recognized. Must have got them in the West Indies; they didn’t sell them in America. I bet she was comfortable.