THE OLD MAN
If you glanced over at the sleek cherry-red Jaguar stuck like every other car in the middle of a traffic jam on the Fourteenth Street Bridge -and everyone caught in the tar pit of rush-hour traffic heading across the Potomac was rubbernecking to catch a glimpse of the Jaguar and what was going on inside the car -you would see a fiery flash of red hair whisking up and down like a dust mop just behind the steering wheel while the man who was driving kept a grimace of pain, or embarrassment, or pleasure spread across his fat face like Nero fiddling. Gradually, the motions of the red hair slowed, and once, it rose up completely from the steering wheel. It was attached at the scalp to a pale girl with dark circles under her eyes, high cheekbones, sparklingly wet ruby-red lips and spidery false eyelashes. She looked less like a whore from the streets of D.C. than a very tired girl of thirty-six who did not appreciate the car's air conditioner blowing cold air directly on her face as she went about her work.
"I'm not paying you to stop," the man said. The skin on his face seemed to have been pulled back tight, as if he'd once had a botched face lift. His hair -white, sparse, and blue in parts-began in a neat ridge at the very peak of his head, combed greasily back. Buttressing jowls supported the gothic arches of his various chins, and you might wonder if you could guess his age by counting those chins, like the rings of a tree. His cheeks and upper lip were spotted with sweat, which he wiped at with his fingers. His small, dark eyes were pushed by the puffy bags beneath them into squints. He'd apparently been sewn right into the dark suit he wore -it looked like it could never come off without undoing the sleeves, the pants legs, and then piece by piece, the rest of the material. It was his exoskeletal armor. The girl coughed, clutching her throat. "Something's caught in my throat, I think it's a hair." Her voice hit notes that most baritones would be proud of -it was far huskier than her small, fine-boned china doll face, powdered dead white, would suggest. She shook her wispy mane of red hair, with curls as large as malt liquor cans, and pursed her lips as if tasting something sour. The coughing continued.
"I don't know how the fuck you'd get a hair with this thing on," the man said disgustedly. He glanced down briefly at his crotch. Laying like a fat wobbly slug from between folds of blue pin stripe: his rubber-enshrouded penis.
Between coughs, the girl gasped, "These days you got to be careful."
"I'm not paying you to be careful." The redheaded girl began rubbing up and down on her throat-the man noted that it was similar to her hand-job technique. Her voice became garbled with hawking phlegm and intermittent coughs. "Sorry," she said. Tears were coming to her eyes. She began chanting the word ahem, over and over as if it were some manta to cure throat problems.
"Shit," was all the man said. Someone honked their horn from the car in back. Traffic was again moving across the bridge; the old man pressed his foot gently down on the accelerator. The girl had risen completely up in her seat, and was now leaning against her door, the side of her face pressed against the window as she continued to hack away. Her dress was sheer, lollipop red, covered with tiny fairy sparkles. The man would later find sparkles in his underwear and worry if this was a sign of some venereal disease.
His name was Winston Adair, and he worried constantly about the state of his penis-it was the center of his being, and it was one of the few parts of his body that had not become elephantine and bloated over the years. While procreation had never been his goal (although he had sired two sons and countless bastards that may or may not have survived birth), he enjoyed putting his member in whatever female orifice was for hire and available. Winston Adair had gone to fat in the past twenty years, but it only added to his imposing presence: he looked like a man who carried the excess luggage on his body like an arsenal. People who saw him wondered if he was as wide as he was tall. The streetwalkers who saw what he liked to call his Washington Monument tended to view it more as the part of the balloon where you blow. And the redheaded streetwalker coughing next to him in his Jaguar was not inflating the balloon at all. As they crossed the Fourteenth Street Bridge to the George Washington Parkway, he reached across the seat and grabbed her by the wrist, keeping his left hand on the steering wheel. She looked like she wanted to say something along the lines of “You're hurting me," but the coughing stopped her. She was trying to hold the coughs in, trying to swallow them, but they burst through her nose when she kept her mouth shut.
"Goddamn you, cocksucker, I paid you twenty-five bucks for those lips, and you're not getting out of it." Winston was always surprised by his voice in situations like this -in court he could sound like Clarence Darrow, but with a hooker he always sounded like a young naive boy. He turned the car in the direction of the Iwo Jima Memorial. When he was twenty-one, he'd been with a whore who seemed as tall as the bridge the3, were standing under, and she had a face that could stop a truck. She was less black than a coffee yellow, as if she'd been sick for months and had just recovered. She'd had a slight dark mustache on her upper lip, but he was so horny at that point he would've fucked a hole in the ground. And fucking her had been like sticking his dick in a muddy hole. He imagined he was doing that when he humped the whore, his penis sliding in and out of a dark hole, loose pebbles tumbling against his sensitive skin-they screwed on the muddy bank, and he felt the ooze sliding like exploring fingers beneath his testicles, her yellow brown rump slapping noisily into the suction cup of earth and water.
And then, it had happened.
Just as he was coming, trying to yank his penis out of that whore because he'd been told you didn't catch the clap if you didn't come inside them, he felt something other than her fingers, and her damp receptacle, something other than the cool mud of spring beneath his scrotum.
Something small and hairy and ticklish. Tiny. Crawling. Up his balls. And then several of them. Perhaps a dozen. Before he saw them and screamed, he saw the look on the whore's face, the thick-lipped smile, the eyes turned inward on themselves exposing the whites to him.
The fucking whore knew.
She knew.
She'd met him under the bridge because she knew this would happen. Winston, aged twenty-one, glanced down at his shriveling penis. They covered his penis, his testicles, his thighs. Mud dauber wasps.
"Fucking bitch!" he screamed, slapping the redheaded girl with all his energy. The back of her head hit the window with a sharp crack. The girl's eyes, bogged with tears, didn't even seem to register pain from this. She was still coughing.
They were parked along the drive up the Iwo Jima Memorial. The girl's hands were scraping skin off her throat; she began inhaling deeply, but Winston didn't hear any air coming out. The whore knew, the fucking whore knew. Winston Adair grabbed the girl by her hair, twisting his fingers into the ringlets.
He pulled her face over his penis.
"Maybe if you get to work it'll help." He pressed her lips against the tip of the wagging condom, and miraculously, her lips parted, and the redheaded whore from Fourteenth Street began sucking. They looked like small jewels at first, parts of a necklace come loose. They were a sapphire blue in the twilight shade beneath the bridge, and he'd really thought that maybe they were the whore's, that they'd fallen off when they were rocking back and forth in the cool mud. But then he saw their small legs, and their long slender wings. And the pincers extending from their diamond-shaped heads. Mandibles opening and closing, opening and closing, Antennae touching his shriveling penis.
And then the pain had begun, somewhere in the back of his head at first, which he thought was awfully funny considering where the wasps were hanging out -a pain like a long sharp needle being thrust in his ear, poking around, twisting.
It took a few seconds before the pain localized to his crotch. His fist was tight in the girl's hair as he remembered, but he felt a sharp pain, and looked down. The girl kept her head in his lap, her eyes wide with terror, gasping, sucking in air, breathing in, breathing in, breathing in.
But not breathing out.
She gazed up at him as if she had never seen a human being before. She looked like a Polaroid of a whore, not the living, breathing thing. Winston noticed that his penis was a pinkish red color from her strenuous sucking. It felt sore. But not as bad as when he was in his twenties.
Winston noticed that the condom was no longer covering his penis. When the girl stopped breathing in, she stopped breathing altogether. Panic hit him in the gut like a tank of bad chili-he felt imprisoned in his tight suit-a spoonful of urine leapt out of his penis before he could bring it under conscious control.
“You bitch, don't you die!" He pulled her jaw back-it wanted to bite down on his fingers-he reached back into her mouth. It felt like dripping jelly, it felt like the inside of a rat's belly, it felt like a fucking mud dauber's nest. He could feel the slippery edge of the condom that she'd sucked down her throat. Lady, if you could figure out a way to save and keep this thing implanted down there permanently, you could revolutionize safe sex.
Twice, the condom slipped through his fingers. And then, praying for a miracle -who the hell are you praying to? – the third try, he managed to catch the rubber on the edge of his ragged middle fingernail. He hoisted it up.
When it came as far as her tongue, he yanked the condom out and tossed it onto the dashboard.
He shook her, holding her indelicately by the shoulders. But it wasn't so bad, those wasps biting him, really chowing down on his gonads -it hurt like an atom bomb, but that wasn't the worst of it. You forget pain as you get older, you forget the feeling that you've just stuck your Washington Monument into a garbage disposal when you screw enough women. You forget it in the face of other things. Worse things. But at twenty-one, the worst of it was the whore laughing. The worst of it was looking down between her legs, and seeing where those wasps came from.
The worst of it was seeing that the mud dauber wasps were coming out of the woman's vagina.
The redheaded girl coughed, opening her eyes. Her eyelashes dripped with tears. Mucus flowed in a thick stream out of her nostrils. She wiped at her face. She sniffed. When she breathed in, she breathed out.
She was alive.
And she spoke.
She spoke with a man's voice, a man with a thick French accent. A man with whom he'd done business once upon a time. Before Winston Adair could get the fuck out of his cherry-red Jaguar, away from the whore with the man's voice, she whispered to him:
"Breeder."