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‘You’re not going to find her here, cocksucker.’ Coco was in a bikini top and plucking pubic hairs from her moustache patch.
They both knew that I started living upstairs only because I was friends with Adi, that only the visa girls were supposed to live upstairs. I thought that Coco must’ve come here like Adi, fucked and fucked and fucked in small rooms.
I started walking toward the washrooms. Lani ran up and blocked me. She turned me around. I smelled her rancid breath, salted skin.
‘You think Gio wants you?’
Her spit sprayed my lips.
‘He can’t even look at you!’
Coco came up and joined Lani the bitch. ‘Who gets your money, huh? How much you give him?’
‘How much you give, Mira? How much you give downstairs?’
‘I bet she sucks his crap dick so she doesn’t have to give thirty.’
‘She’d suck a pig!’
I hadn’t ever given my money to anyone but Adi.
‘What? Tongue only comes out when there’s cock?’
‘Why are you so fucking mean?’ I finally said.
Lani passed me the butt of her joint. I took it from her and sucked the burnt end. Lani and Coco returned to their preening. The sides of my throat felt like they were glued.
I don’t know how or why I stayed with John for so long. I was fifteen. Maybe I was just new to the game. I broke it off for good the night John told me he wanted us to be together forever. He said he’d felt a space open up in him the very first time he ever saw me. He told me that he always wanted to know me. Forever, Mira. He actually said those words. And that possibility of eternity made me remember all the things I’d ever done with him when I’d thought I was okay, when I’d thought I was being myself – when I realized that I was acting like an automaton. Thank god he used condoms.
I’d let him lick me for hours. John went down on me even when I was bleeding. He always wanted to be between my legs. He liked it even
when I wasn’t clean. He made me spread my legs, saying, ‘Please, please.’ He wouldn’t take no even if I really didn’t want it. Sometimes it was the first thing he’d do when I came over. He’d get straight down on his knees, pull off my underwear and stay there for an hour.
It started taking me longer and longer to get into it, to get any kind of feeling down there. Sometimes I imagined that it wasn’t John’s head. I pretended it was some guy I didn’t know, that I was sitting at a table and some stranger was reaching under there, eating me. A few times, I even imagined that John was Ezrah.I knew John didn’t care about my fantasies. It got to the point where he was like, ‘I just want to be your dog, Mira.’
But I didn’t need a dog. I cared for him, sure, and there were times when we had fun. John told me everything about him and Michael growing up, how their families lived down the street from each other near the slaughterhouse, and how they used to have these contests to see who could get closest to a dead cow. Once, some guy stopped and let Michael touch the still-warm skin of a carcass through the fence. That was when Michael said it was barbaric, John said, and stopped eating hamburgers.
Sometimes neither of their families had heat in the house, and there were times when they couldn’t wash for a few weeks because the shower was too cold. John’s mom kicked him out when he was eighteen because she just wanted him to get a job. No one in either of their families had ever been to university. John lived on the street for a while after high school until Michael convinced him that he wanted to go to university. John didn’t make it past the first year. He didn’t like all the reading, he said. But Michael had stayed, on loans, for three and a half years before it got to be too much.
‘Michael hated all the bureaucracy,’ John said. ‘I mean, all the fucking administration. He had to pay to take his exams. Total bullshit. And then it was like karma or something, seriously. The day after he quits school he meets the guy who’s exporting our tapes at a bar … ’
‘That’s how you guys got into porno?’ I interrupted.
‘We don’t call it porno, Mira,’ John said, offended.
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s erotic entertainment. Porno is illegal.’
‘It is not!’ I said, laughing at him. ‘There’s porn in every single video store, in every single country, in every single city, on every single screen! How the fuck is it illegal?’
John looked at me skeptically. Sometimes he could be so dumb. John used to talk about the theatre company he wanted to open to produce the plays that he and Michael wrote. John sometimes let me read his stuff – it was always typed out with no breaks between the words. I didn’t understand all of it, but I sort of liked it. John was actually funny when he wrote.
‘Ilovethe/manwhotakesthebusinhisunderwear/andswears/ thathewillneverhaveawife/ortellalie.’ That was the name of his first play. It was about a man who falls in love with a woman he always sees on the bus. It turns out she’s the head of the big electricity corporation that has just turned off his heat.
John could talk about his writing forever. He always held it to his chest after I read it and asked, ‘You liked it, you really liked it?’
I told him I did. But I would’ve rather read Michael’s stuff. If I ever asked John what Michael wrote about, John wouldn’t tell me. He said that Michael’s plays were genius, though, because Michael was a genius.
