Bill Starr

Meanwhile, Back at the Sex Farm

Chapter I

I knew that I should leave that place now and go somewhere else, because it wasn't any good that night. The trouble was that it wouldn't be any better anyplace else, and I knew that too, but I didn't want to stay there any longer. Part of it was that I was getting a little drunk and drunks always depress me; and part of it was that I wasn't getting anywhere near drunk enough. The real trouble was not the people and not the talk, although god knows they were both pretty bad that night, but just that I was seeing too much sense in everything. I was beginning to wonder again what in hell had happened to my life when I wasn't looking, and where everything had gone. It was one of those panicky moods that used to send me back to my room and my typewriter to put a few eternal verities on paper, as though if I didn't get it said I might forget it, but I had found out that when I did that I was usually too drunk to write, and when I read it over the next day it never was what I had wanted it to be. After I had tried that a few times I didn't do it any more, and every time now that somebody tells me that so-and-so does his best work when he is drunk I can be damned certain that so-and-so isn't worth reading. Trying to write when you are drunk is like climbing into bed with a cunt when you are too drunk to get a hard on; if anything at all happens in either case you are lucky, and if you end up with something pretty good you always know that if you hadn't been drunk it would have been better. So I knew that I wasn't going back to my room to work. I was just going there because there wasn't any better place to be.

Uncle Gino was at the bar when I went through on my way out of his place, and he said hello to me the way he always did when I was going out. He never spoke to anybody when they came in, but when they were going out he seemed to notice them for the first time, and if you weren't on to the trick you stopped and talked to him, and because he talked to you over the bar you usually bought at least one more drink. I don't know how many extra drinks he sold in a night that way, but he must have sold some, because he never gave up that trick so far as I know. None of the regular trade paid any attention to him, of course, and I went on through the bar without stopping and went out to the street.

It was raining worse than it had been earlier in the evening, and I stopped by the doorway to turn up my coat collar. Then I saw her standing there. It was Ruth, and she looked as though she had been standing there for hours.

“Toby threw me out,” she said.

“Get the hell out of here. I'm not having any,” I said.

“It's for good this time. He locked me out and won't even let me in to get a toothbrush.”

“I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything. To hell with it. You knew about Toby when you went with him. I don't want to hear your hard-luck story.”

It was raining so hard that the water was running off my hat in a stream. Water was dripping down the back of my neck too, and when I pulled my collar closer it was clammy on my skin. I looked at Ruth standing there in that puddle, and I wondered how long she had been there waiting for me to come out of Uncle's.

“I haven't got any money,” she told me. There isn't any place I can go.”

I stepped back in the doorway where there was some light, but all I had left was about forty-five cents in change. Poppa wouldn't cash a check, either.

“To hell with you then,” Ruth said.

She started to go off down the street. I looked after her for a minute, and then I followed her.

“You'll have to go someplace else tomorrow,” I said. “I don't want you around my place longer than that.”

I had a feeling that I was doing something very foolish to let her stay there even for the night, and if I had waited there in the doorway a while longer I probably wouldn't have gone after her that way, and the whole thing would have been finished and over with, the way it should have been when she left me to live with the fairy, but now that I had told her she could stay that night I couldn't change my mind. We walked over to the street car line, and once on the way she put her arm in mine the way she had always done, but she took it off almost at once. We didn't say anything, not then nor while we were waiting for the trolley. When the car finally came we got a seat near the back and Ruth tried to look out of the window and I read the car ads until we got to my comer.

The landlady had put up some clean curtains for me; except for that, the two rooms were just about the same as they had been when Ruth had been there. She took the newspaper that I hadn't read yet and spread it on the floor in the corner and hung her coat so it would drip on it, and it was all just like it used to be. All but us.

I never have more than one pair of bedroom slippers at a time, but I had some old tennis shoes that I could wear, so I gave the slippers to Ruth and handed her the robe out of the closet. She put it over her arm and touched it with her fingers.

“That was the color I wanted to get you,” she said, “but I never got around to it. Did you buy it?”

I told her yes, but I didn't tell her it was because it was the one she had pointed out to me in the window one day. She lifted the robe to her nose and smelled of it.

“It smells like you,” she said.

“For god's sake, cut out the act and change your clothes,” I said.

I sat down on the chair and pulled off my wet shoes and socks. Ruth picked up my shoes and went to the closet with them. She found the shoe trees she had bought me once.

“They're just where they were when I left,” she said. “I knew that you wouldn't use them if someone didn't make you.”

“There's some stuff of yours on a shelf in there. I put it away in a box. You can take it with you tomorrow.”

Ruth watched me as I undressed and put on the extra robe. I was trying to be casual about it, but I kept remembering that she didn't come and touch me and interfere. I was conscious of my prick dangling down there, and I was conscious of my hairiness, and I put on the robe as quickly as I could. Ruth didn't say anything. She just watched me, and when I had the robe on and went to the closet to hang up my things she started to take her own clothes off. They were very wet, and everything clung to her so even when she had her slip on I could see almost every line of her body. I gave her a towel, and I should have gotten out of the room while I was still able to control what I was doing, but for some reason I didn't. I stayed and watched her rubbing her skin pink.

She looked just the same; her body seemingly slim, but with wide hips and heavy tits that jiggled with her ass when she walked or when she moved suddenly; her belly dark with a streak of hair down through the center of it. I looked at her cunt and the black froth of hair that grew around it. She was just the same, all as I remembered her. She looked up and saw me looking at her.

“Do you remember the first time I was here?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I wasn't a bit afraid. I was a virgin, too. But it was only afterward I was afraid. After you had fucked me and I forgot what it was going to do for my poetry and my soul and found out what a prick meant. Then, after a while, I was not afraid any more. And now I'm afraid again.”

There didn't seem to be any answer. Perhaps she didn't expect any. She lifted the towel above her head to dry her hair, and the movement pulled her tits up, making them flatter. They were colored from being rubbed with the towel, and the nipples stood out sharp and straight. She flung her hair back over her shoulders with a quick motion of her head, and then she hung up the towel. She stood in front of the bureau combing her hair with my comb, and I could remember a hundred times before when it had been just like that, with the two of us there, and everything almost the same as it was just then. She hadn't been away very long. Two months. Two thousand years.

“Bill,” Ruth said, 'let's go to bed now.”

“I'll need one of the blankets. I can use the pillows on the couch,” I said.

“You're acting like-Do you have to be such a prick to me?”

“I know. I'm acting like a child. Let's not fight about it. I don't feel like fighting about anything.”

“I didn't expect punishment from you.”

“I have the clap,” I said.

“If it were really that…” Ruth said. She came to the bed where I was sitting and sat down alongside me. She put her hand on my thigh and sat there with her legs crossed at the ankles and looked at me. “Let's not be silly, Bill. I want you to fuck me.”

Her legs were flattened and spread at the thighs, and the whole side of her body felt warm even through the robe I had on. I looked at her belly and the spreading hair that ran to a sharp V between her legs. A few scattering black hairs were on the inner sides of her thighs, and you could find them almost halfway to her knees. My guts burned, I wanted so much to screw her, and I couldn't kid even myself about that. I remembered Toby, the pansy, and I wondered what it had been like with them; if he had fucked her if he had even tried to fuck her, or what had happened. When I thought of that and thought of all she had been wasting on that crummy fake, I wanted more than before to fuck her myself. It might have been because he was a pansy, and it might have been because he was a fake; whichever it was, when she went off with him it had left me feeling the way you feel when music you like is stopped right in the middle. If something isn't done about it you don't feel right for a long time.

Ruth was moving her hand up and down on my leg, spreading her fingers and closing them on the muscles. I was getting a hard on, and she could see it, but she didn't try to put her hands either on my prick or under my robe. And after a minute she stopped touching my leg and lay back on the bed with her own legs apart just a little and her hands held up by her shoulders with the palms up. I sat and looked at her. I looked at her teats falling, each one, to the side and outward, and I looked at her armpits that she never shaved, and I looked up between her legs, at her cunt. I stood up and I took off the robe.

My prick wasn't hard yet. It stood out in front of me looking angry and big, but it still had a long way to go. Ruth looked at it and at me, and she put one hand out for it. I climbed across the bed, and when I got close enough her hand touched it. I sat leaning on one hand and Ruth just touched my prick. We both watched her hand moving over it and under it, and while we watched it lifted up until it was erect.

It had been a long time ago when I had taken Ruth to that room and given her the first jazzing she'd had, and a lot of things had happened since then. She had learned almost everything there is to know, and since she had been with Toby I supposed that she had learned even more than that. For a while, when I had first known her, she had fucked for Art's sweet sake, or something like that, but it hadn't taken her long to find that you can fuck just for what is in it, and she was better after that. Everybody I knew who had ever fucked her said that she was a hot lay, and what was better, an easy lay, so I decided at last that she was just a natural, and I didn't have to listen to her quoting Eliot so much after that when I was trying to get her legs apart. And even if she let every man she knew jazz her once in a while there was something that made it pretty good to be together, and when we finally got that straightened out everything had been all right with us until this affair of Toby.

I watched Ruth's face now while she played around my cock. From the way she was looking at it I knew that it would be in her mouth in a minute. The first time I had jazzed her she wouldn't suck my prick, and it had taken me several days to get her to do more than just hold it in her mouth while I shoved it back and forth. Then, when she did start to suck it the first time, she had been so worried that I might shoot it in her mouth that it wasn't as much fun as it should have been. But I was careful about that, and once she decided that she liked it there wasn't any stopping point. Then one night she had come home with her change purse full of half dollars and the knees of her stockings dirty. She didn't have any reason for it but boredom, but she had gone along the streets like a whore and propositioned every man she came across, if she liked one it was easy for her to get them to walk down an alley with her. She had even gotten a big Irish cop she came across, too, and that was the part of the story that seemed most amazing to me, because he didn't threaten to run her in if she didn't give it to him for nothing, but paid his fifty cents just like everybody else. The way she told it it was very funny, and when she told it you could really almost see the cop standing with the front of his uniform trousers unbuttoned and Ruth on her knees in the dirt of the alley, leaning against his legs with her mouth closed over the end of his cock, and I always thought that someday I would put that into a story, if I could ever find the right story for it.

The end of my prick was oozing, like clear, white blood spilling from a cut. Ruth had the stuff on her hands, and she was rubbing it onto my prick and onto my balls and then onto her own belly. Every time that she squeezed my prick some more of it spilled out, and there was always some left. She rolled close to me and put her face down on my thigh, and then when she squeezed my prick the stuff dripped down her face. It ran along her cheek, and she turned her head to make it run to the corner of her mouth. Her tongue shot out after it.

“I'm awfully glad you're normal, Bill,” she said. “I never thought of that when I was with you, but being with Toby scared me.”

“A little home in the country,” I said. “Maybe we could raise chickens and have a patch of radishes.”

“I want you to know about something, Bill. He couldn't fuck me, and he wouldn't let me have anybody else that I did want. All I could do-do you want me to tell you about it?”

“This is a hell of a time to talk about your little fag. Why don't you go back to him? Go right now.”

“I'm not going back with him. I'll think of something else to do tomorrow.”

“Balls.”

“I had to dress up like a man, and then he did something to me. I didn't even feel like a woman. It wasn't the same. It wasn't at all like when you jazz me.”

“My god, do we have to talk about that now?”

Ruth looked up from under my prick. She sat up then, and shrugged me away when I tried to push her down on her back.

“Wouldn't it be the same if I stayed with you now? Would anything be changed from what it was before I went with him? Would it?”

“It's just that I've never had anybody run out on me to live with a damned fag,” I said. “I've become a sort of a bad joke to myself.”

Ruth lay down again the way she had been, and she held my prick in her two hands and petted it. She rubbed her nose along the side of it and put the end of it up against her nostrils, smearing them with its wetness.

“My nose is shiny,” she said.

She wrinkled her nose and looked cross-eyed down at the tip of it and tried to touch it with her tongue. She rubbed the stuff off on her arm, and then she lay there and rubbed her mouth with the end of my prick until her lips had the stuff on them too. She did it carefully, using my cock like a lipstick, and painting her mouth all over with it.

“Did you ever see a man do that?” she asked. “It's awful. I hope you never have to see it. You'd want to hit somebody if you did.”

“I never hit anybody any more,” I said. “I don't want to see it, though. Did Toby have his boy friends in?”

“They were there all of the time. It seemed as though it were all of the time. I thought it would be fun to watch, but it wasn't, and I had to dress up like a man and be part of it. It wasn't fun.”

“I thought he wouldn't let you have anyone else,” I said. “Wasn't that what you said?”

“He wouldn't let me go out with anybody who could fuck. Only those damn fairies. They aren't people like anybody else. They're something apart from everything and everybody in the world.”

Ruth rubbed my prick from one side to the other over her mouth. She pushed it up by her nose and brushed it with her eyelashes, brushing the end by fluttering her eyelids.

“You don't sound very sympathetic to them,” I said. “That's just the way they are, like people being white or black. You like niggers, don't you?”

“That isn't good logic. I can't get used to hearing you call them niggers, either. If you like them so much, why don't you call them black people?”

“You wouldn't understand that. That isn't good logic either. And I don't like them so much. I just like them better than whites. I'm not exactly a negrophile.”

“Then I'm not exactly unsympathetic to Toby's friends. I don't like them, but one night when Toby came home after a truck driver had beaten him up I felt awful. I thought I loved him that night, just because of that.”

She had gotten a loose lash into her eye, and she stopped to work it out. When she had it out she began again to touch her lips with my prick, but her lips were open more, and the end rubbed on the inside of them, and against her teeth. She took her hands away and held my cock with her mouth. She put her fists on my belly, with her fingers curled under, and then worked them the way a tom-cat works his claws when he has a she under him. She wiggled her lips; then she put her tongue under the end of my prick and pushed upward. It felt good for a minute, but then it was like being caught in a slicing machine. I yanked my cock away from her mouth, and the dent marks of her teeth were there on the end.

“What the hell are you trying to do?” I said. “Is that something Toby's friends do?”

She licked the marks, and then she kissed them. She took the end in her mouth again and made her lips very wet and moved it around in them.

“I forgot,” she said. “It's because your prick is so much more like a prick. Those others didn't seem real.”

She was sitting up again, but when I pushed her back she went down. She held my cock in her hands and then put it in her mouth and then held it in her hands again.

“Is that what you did?” I asked her. “Did you go down on all of Toby's fag friends?”

She nodded her head, and she looked as though she thought I might be going to hit her.

“They thought it would be fun to jazz just for the novelty, but it didn't work with them. After they tried it once they weren't interested in that, but they wanted me to suck them off. Some of them couldn't even get a hard on when I did that. Like Toby: if I had my clothes off and looked like a woman he couldn't do anything.”

“Stop talking about Toby. Jesus Christ, you make me sick,” I said.

She knelt on the bed and took my cock in her mouth, this time all of it, and not just the end, and I watched her sucking it. She pulled my hair with her fingers, and she pulled the skin of my scrotum, and she moved her head up and down while she was sucking. Sometimes she took it out of her mouth and put the end against her face, and it kept getting redder and redder until it was almost blue. Her tits hung down with the tips like big drops of blood ready to drip from them. I put my hands under them and slid them up and down; the nipples were smooth sliding on the palms of my hands, and Ruth sucked harder when I did that to them. I couldn't get it out of my mind, the thought that probably as late as that afternoon she had been going down on a bunch of pansies.

“What in hell did they do that you could stay with Toby for so long? Do they give honey when you suck them off?” I said.

“Do you want to know?”

“No,” I said. “I want to shoot in your damn little cock sucking mouth.”

I put my legs around her and I dragged her down and held her head. Then I shot, all of it, until she was choking and sucking and swallowing all at the same time. When it was over she was gasping for breath.

I got up and got a glass of water. Now that what I had had to drink at Uncle's was wearing off I was thirsty and I was hungry, and the water was too warm, no matter how long I let it run. I took a glass of water back to the bedroom for Ruth. She was lying with her head in the pillows, and at first I thought that she was crying.

“Do you want to go out and have something to eat after a while?” I asked her.

“I'd never be hungry enough to put those wet clothes on,” she said. “You go. I'll stay here.”

I looked out of the window at the rain pouring into the street and running black along the curbs, and I decided that I wasn't hungry enough to go out into that. I sat on the bed and Ruth moved over to let me lie down next to her. When I did she held my prick in one hand and started to talk to me.

“I found out something about Toby,” she said. “You know those caricatures he does on tablecloths and at parties? I found out that he practices them first, and if you want him to do one he hasn't practiced he can't do it.”

“Shut up about Toby. I'm sorry I acted that way.”

“That was all right,” she said. “But will you be able to get another one so we can jazz?”

“Don't you ever think of anything else?”

“I do afterward, but right now I can't.”

I rolled onto her. My legs were between hers, and she was still holding my prick. She put it against her cunt. It wasn't hard at all, but it felt good to have her hold it there and rub it in her hair.