tattoos. More ice to dull the sensation. Katherine finally manages to relax. Don’t touch yourself down there for a few days, the guy says as he later releases her from the table, the pearl now fixed in place, this foreign object peering out all shiny and precious from between the lips of her sex, this adornment, this jewel inside her jewel.
Judy is right. Men do like it.
A Japanese executive takes her to his suite on the top floor of the Madison-Stouffer. All Puget Sound and the islands beyond are spread out, a Cinemascope vision, beyond the bay windows. Apart from the Sky Needle, there is no way you could be any higher in all of Seattle. He strips her, places her against the tall windows, flattens her against the glass, spreads her legs, an offering to the sky outside, she has to close her eyes for fear of vertigo, only the plate glass separates her nudity from the void outside and the ground fifty or so floors down. He licks her rear, caresses the thin pale hair at the small of her back, her breasts are squashed against the glass, he slides his head in between her parted thighs, advances his tongue and inserts it from behind into her gaping cunt. He licks the pearl, chews her bud until the orgasm races through all five foot ten of her from top curls to toes. Later, he offers her an expensive jade necklace after inserting it one piece at a time into her vagina, then pulling it out with deliberate slowness, every piece bathed in her juices which he proceeds to clean with his tongue.
Her daily existence becomes a Sadeian procession of humiliation and pleasure.
One man asks her to pummel his body, harder, harder, I want it to hurt, before he can get hard. She concentrates on all those in the past, the betrayers, the abandoned, to focus her anger and strikes him with repeated fury. When the blood begins to flow from his nose and lips, she panics and flees, without payment.
She signs on for a porno loop. Three black men fuck her in the arse in quick succession while she stands bent over a wooden table. The filmmaker only has a super-8 video camera and never turns to film her face. For days afterwards, the pain endures and she hurts when walking. They’ve actually torn her. To think she once shuddered at the thought of Caesarians. She heals. For another pervert, she accepts to be tied up in a cave where she is administered an enema by a pocked, butch dyke, while he noisily jerks off. She wallows in the expelled liquid, rubs her skin, bathes in the shit-infested waters surrounding her on the black rubber sheet. She allows a one-legged grizzled and bitter Vietnam veteran to fuck her with his stump. While he moves the bone inside her bowels, he loudly sings
The cycle of inevitable degradation continues.
Like a penance.
One night, in dire need of junk, she’s at the bar of this swank hotel, looking for passing custom when Steve Gregory walks in. Silk suit and all attitude.
“Christ, baby, you’ve let yourself go,” he says. “But, you see, it’s destiny, we meet again.”
She smiles feebly.
“I need cash, Steve,” Katherine says.
“You need a fix, more like. If you stay here, you’re not even going to get spare change, Eddie.”
He ponders one moment.
Her brown eyes beg.
“Come to the car,” he says. She follows.
He drives out of town. Parks in the darkness, near the Boeing fields. Slips his hand under her blouse. Feels her up.
“Still nice and firm,” Steve says. “That’s the nice thing about smallish tits, they seldom go flabby. That’s an asset you’ve got there, honey.”
He opens the glove compartment and hands her the junk. She shoots up. It’s good quality stuff. She listens to the stars out there, allows the river of ice to invade her whole body. It’s too strong, like a whack to the heart, she’s obliged to put her head on his shoulder.
“I’ll take care of you, Eddie,” Steve says.
He doesn’t even want to fuck her anymore. She’s beyond it.
“See, I know this very private club down in New Orleans,” he tells her, caressing her cheeks with genuine care and concern as she dozes on. “I think we’re going to make a great team, you and me, Eddie. A great team. You’ll like it there, the food is just too much and it’s never cold. You’ve never told me if you like sea food? Do you?”
She assents with a shake of her head, his fingers move through her hair, playing with the tired curls. “Goodbye Seattle,” she whispers. She likes it when men play with her hair. Yes, she does.
Katherine dreams.
Of New Orleans. A city she has repeatedly been told is wonderful. Fragrant. And deliciously evil.
Yet another place her lover insisted he would take her to and no, he hadn’t. They had not embraced in an assortment of fancy New Orleans hotel rooms which had once been slave quarters and where cockroaches roamed free. And never would. A city of cemeteries, storms and bewitching music.
Her pale skin shivers as a last ferry leaves the harbour for the journey across Puget Sound to the scattered isles.
New Orleans.
Katherine finally sleeps. The pain goes away.
GINCH by Michael Perkins
YEARS AGO YOU probably would have recognized Parker Coleman’s name. Parker Coleman – wasn’t he one of the movers and shakers who put together the Woodstock Festival? A record producer? One of four guys Bob Dylan slugged in 1968?
Parker popped up everywhere in the sixties; it was a decade he always claimed he invented. Certainly he exploited it better than almost anyone else I’ve heard of under thirty. Parker was a Zen hustler with a beard before the words “hippie” and “businessman” were joined together by
You might say that Parker saw us coming, because he was always paddling the other way. So he made money in the sixties, and he got a lot of ginch – his word for fuckable women.
Ginch. Think about it, because it will tell you everything you need to know about Parker’s attitude toward women. His Kansas accent, overlaid with the street black’s drawl he’d picked up, stretched the middle of the word like a rubber band.
Since his reputation as a cocksman was nearly as great as his reputation as a hustler, Parker had ample opportunity to select candidates for his private stable of ginch from among the finest examples of concupiscent American womanhood. There always seemed to be two or three twenty-two-year-old deep-breasted, deep-fried long-legged blondes dressed in eye-popping T-shirts trailing him as he moved from appointment to appointment, usually in a limousine. It was boom time.
Then one morning Parker woke up in a rented house in Topanga Canyon, and the sixties were over. National Guardsmen at Kent State shot the shit out of them. The seventies dawned gray and cold, and Parker’s tired Aquarian customers – a generation of big-eyed Keane children – went home to catch some Zs. When they woke up, they began looking around for jobs.
Parker had overextended himself financially. When his customers disappeared back into the middle class from whence they’d come, he was wiped out. An overnight has-been.
Decline is somehow more uncomfortable to bear in California than in colder places where people work for a living, so Parker returned to his native city of New York and took a loft on Varick Street in Soho where he could meditate and try to figure out his next move. It didn’t take him long to come up with the idea of making pornographic movies: low investment, high return, and ginch to boot.
In short order he had established himself as the boy wonder of porno films. Small distinction, perhaps, but his own. He cranked them out in his loft like home movies, which is what the loops you see in porno theatres basically
