Death Money (9 page)

Open wide girl
,

Let your fantasy take you away!

Jack wondered if Billy had managed to sneak a drink at the track.

“Perfect!” Billy declared as the song ended. “They said there was a Korean stripper in from Seoul. A real knockout. Goes by the name Soomi.”

“Good for
them
. We’ll wait in the car,” Jack said, still worried about Billy’s drinking.

“You kiddin’ me?”

“C’mon Billy, that’s all just titillation.”

“Well, you got the
tit
part right,” Billy said sardonically.

“It’s crass, Billy,” Jack said.

“It’s
ass
, brother. Trust me, I won’t get you in trouble. You promised that lawyer lady you’d be a good boy or something?”

Jack smiled but didn’t dignify Billy’s poke at Alexandra with an answer.

“Okay,” he relented. “But just one beer.”

“One’s all we need, bro.” Billy grinned. “And it ain’t the beer I’m thinking about.”

The entire trip took about twenty-five minutes. They parked under the overpass as the minivan stopped down the block from a big flashing sign that announced
BOOTY
. Silhouettes of naked dancers flanked a smaller sign with the words
GENTLEMEN’S CLUB
.

“Yeah Booty’s!” Billy cheered.

“You been here before?” Jack asked.

“Just once. One of my customers threw a Christmas party here.”

A huge black bouncer guarded the door, a bald, six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound load of hurt. He could have been a lineman for one of the local football teams. “Booty” rang a bell in Jack’s head as he tried to recall something from old police blotters, something about Bronx mafiosi
and Latin Lords drug dealers teaming up to take over the area’s vice rackets. Jack imagined that, like most jiggle joints, Booty’s was mobbed up.

A few blocks away, he could hear the rumble of a Metro North train, and in the far distance the lights of the George Washington Bridge twinkled. Farther south, he could make out the façade of Yankee Stadium. In the darkness, he realized they were near the Highbridge section where he’d been earlier in the morning.

“The homies nicknamed this place
Chino
’s,” Billy said, “because of all the Chinese waiters and market guys from Hunts Point who used to come here.”

They watched the old men enter the club and, against Jack’s better instincts, followed them. The black bouncer barely noticed them, just another bunch of little
Chinamen
.

T. A. P.
tits. ass. pussy
.

B
OOTY’S WAS DEEP
and wide. In a past life it might have been a garage or an auto repair shop. Now one of the long walls had been mirrored, in front of which a narrow runway, like a catwalk, supported the prancing of the dancers. There was a pole at either end. Under the dramatic play of track lights above, the scene was like a raunchy off-Broadway musical.
Way way off-Broadway
, thought Jack.

Along the opposite wall was a long bar where you could get a tiny slice of pizza with your second overpriced drink. Some twenty little tables in two long lines filled the rest of the space.

There weren’t that many Chinese from what Jack could
see in the otherwise dim lighting. There were a few other Asians—he couldn’t tell what kind, Filipino or Cuban maybe—but most of the patrons on this cold night were black and Latino, many wearing Yankees or Knicks caps and sweatshirts.

Jack waited by the bar across from where the runway began and ordered a beer just to hold his spot there.

Billy made his way to the area where the old men sat, at the other end of the runway. He ingratiated himself by buying them a round of the joint’s watered-down beer with the cash they’d helped him win. He ordered a Jack Daniel’s for himself, also probably watered down.

“Gangsta’s Paradise” played over the loudspeakers, and the girls on the runway—two white, one black—continued dancing. They wore dangerously high heels, G-strings, and barely there bikini tops. They stole glances at themselves in the wall mirror that was angled to reflect full-body views as they swayed and gyrated under the stage lights. They knew their poses well, letting their breasts dangle just right,
perfect
, with their lower parts beckoning whenever they bent over.

The men nearest to the runway got their dollar bills ready.
More, gimme more. Yeah, right there, baby girl, culo, clika
.

Flesh trade
, Jack thought,
they got that terminology right
.

The girls worked through their simulated pornographic poses. One of the white girls humped the end pole while sucking on a long red blow job lollipop.

“
Hom lun
,” one of the old men chortled in Cantonese.
Suck cock
.

The second girl, a bootylicious black princess, played with a pink dildo as she spread her legs open to a bow-and-arrow pose, pretending to jam herself.

“
Eww hei
,” another of the old men said in Toishanese.
Fucking pussy
.

The other white dancer, near the first pole, went from a pile-driver pose, which exposed her bottom, to crawling on all fours, which brought a chorus of
wooo
s from the crowd.

The music pounded on.

The men seated farther back folded their dollar bills into little airplanes and hurled them like darts toward the stage. As if on cue, the three dancers pulled aside their G-strings, momentarily revealing shaved and waxed labia and anuses to the delight of the men. The music amped up even more, and a crew of pink-wigged waitresses made their rounds.

The old men nursed their beers and waited for the Korean girl.

The dancers gathered up their dollar bills and changed places on the runway to give the other customers an equal-opportunity viewing. And to suck up more money. After another ten minutes, the song changed to “Waterfalls,” and the dancers gleefully squirted each other’s privates with water pistols shaped like phalluses. There was another set of lewd poses—standing doggie, reverse cowgirl, missionary spread—as the girls on the ends spun around, rubbing their crotches and butts against the long, hard poles, wearing only their G-strings now.

Jack figured they’d been there almost half an hour.

A new rotation began as an Asian girl stepped to the front end of the runway and started her routine at the first pole, farthest from Billy and the old men. Jack could see they were eager for her to dance her way to their section.

The pop/rap beats changed to a rendition of “Sukiyaki.” Jack frowned at the racial overtones playing out but
couldn’t take his eyes off her. The Korean girl named Soomi sexy-strolled around the pole amid a chorus of low moans from the men nearest her. Soomi was a knockout, drop-dead sexy gorgeous, a perfect voluptuous body on a Victoria’s Secret frame, almost six feet tall, strutting atop sequined
fuck-me
high heels. She wore a tiny glittering G-string and a transparent brassiere that showcased her large budding nipples.

Someone yelled “Kimchi!” and she giggled.

She had a pretty Asian face framed by long black hair, an exotic-fantasy look that captivated the mostly non-Asian audience of lechers and perverts. Jack didn’t count himself among them but couldn’t help admiring her beauty, and even though he’d expected it to be this way in places like this, he was still turned off by the bestial behavior of the men in this so-called
gentlemen
’s club.

Soomi continued her routine by bending over and adjusting her platform heels. There were more hoots as Billy came over to Jack, licking his lips at the closer view.

“She got a butt like Jennifer Lopez,” he crooned. “Lips like a blowhole, titties bouncing like Jell-O!”

Jack shook his head, took a pull from his bottle of warming beer. Billy was mesmerized, hypnotized, like all the men, gunned down by Soomi’s raw, visceral display of her shaved womanhood.
Like a prime cut of sashimi
, considered Billy,
more yellowtail hamachi than red toro. Brown eye, in the other men’s eyes
. She offered a sweet smile to the men seated near the runway who were laying money at her feet. She paraded in front of them, kicking the bills toward the mirror wall, removing her see-through bra in teasing stages.

“Sukiyaki” remixing over the speakers.

A few gyrations, shaking her JLo booty, and she had her bra off, tossing it mischievously at the mirror.
Million-dollar breasts with puffy nipples
. She saw in the glass how beautiful she really was.
A blessing
. A squadron of dollar airplanes crashed into the mirror wall near her. She spread her feet apart, bent over, waved to the crowd between her legs, her long black hair pooling onto the stage. Then she slowly straightened up, turned, and braced her back against the glass wall. She spread her feet wide again, cupped her breasts in her hands, and stroked her nipples with her thumbs until they were hard and stubby.

Crumpled balls of paper money plopped and bounced onto her end of the runway. Soomi pulled up the shiny front patch of her G-string, and more dollar bills appeared at her feet. She wiggled the string so that it nestled into the folds of her fleshy labia. This provoked another round of moans from the front row. Billy winked at Jack, folded a few dollar airplanes, and went toward the front section.

Jack could see him pitching them in Soomi’s direction as she slid to the floor and did a slow doggie crawl, slapping the assorted scatter of dollars toward the mirror. Billy wadded up a few more dollars and tossed them, like hand grenades, toward the other dancers.
Just like Billy
, mused Jack,
trying to keep everybody happy
.

Soomi smoothly shifted into a bow-and-arrow pose, spreading her legs into a horizontal V. With her free hand she pulled back on the G-string again so that it spread open her glistening lips. After a few moments, she rolled over and turned to the men on the other side. Come-hither smile on her face. She pulled the string back and forth again.
Everybody gets a peek
. Horny men with gaping mouths and astonished faces.

More. Gimme more
.

The money rained down on her. She smiled, scanned the crowd, gave them a cute wave of her hand. Glancing at the old men, Jack saw them looking lustfully, longingly, in her direction. Jack knew that with their old eyes, and seated at the far end in the dim light, they were only getting a general impression of Soomi, not yet the intimate view they were hoping for. They patiently waited for her to make her way to them.

Soomi did a spread
V
, her womanhood facing the other way now. When she turned her rear toward Jack, looking back at him over her shoulder, he locked eyes with her. In that odd, frozen moment, he felt he saw a sister, and she a brother or an ex-boyfriend she’d left behind.

Soomi never looked his way again. She did another five minutes of standing doggie and reverse cowgirl with the long lollipop in her mouth. When the music signaled the new rotation, she skipped the end pole. Instead, she went back along the mirror wall, gathering up her dollar bills, stuffing them into what was probably a knockoff Prada bag. She quickly disappeared with her booty bag into a restricted dressing room that the club provided for the dancers.

Jack could see the disappointment on the old faces. They’d waited forty-five minutes and had only gotten a cheap, distant glimpse. Maybe the sight of all the jiggling flesh made them feel like young men again, Jack thought, but at the rate of twenty bucks just for a lap dance, none of them were, in Billy’s words, going to
score some pussy
here tonight. Billy might be able to afford the imported ladies at Angelina Chao’s, but these old men would probably wait until the junket brought them back to Chinatown and the
cheap whores,
yau leng yau peng
, at Fat Lily’s.
Temporarily young again for one-third the price
.

“Bitch is dissing her own people,” Billy groused into Jack’s ear.

“She’s Korean,” Jack answered. “Not Chinese.”

“You know what I mean,” Billy bitched. “
Asian
. She too good for them?”

Jack, even as cynical as he’d become, didn’t see it that way. Behind the sexy smile, what he’d seen in her eyes was sadness and shame.

They were just lonely old men, Jack figured, seeking their young memories in the wrong place.

“She looks like an angel,” Billy continued. “But she’s an evil gold-diggin’ bitch. C’mon,
fuck
this.”

Jack could see the old men were already getting up from their end tables, heading in the direction of the toilets.

“Let’s go,” Billy said. “We got better places to spend our fuckin’ money.”

They went out past the big bald bouncer and headed back to the car at the underpass. Looking back, Jack saw the bright signage that continued to shine out
BOOTY
.

Fat Man’s Place

T
HE MINIVAN LED
them south past Yankee Stadium to somewhere off the Grand Concourse, to a seemingly deserted street. Fay Lo’s was the Fat Man’s place, and Billy wanted to stay close enough to hook up with the group as they entered. He pulled up just past the corner as the minivan parked down the block from what looked like a closed diner-type
restaurant. The sign above the graffitied roll-down gate advertised
CHINA Y LATINA COMIDAS
.

Jack imagined a Chinese Cuban, chino-Latino connection. Of the Chinese, the Chinese Cubans were here first, in the Bronx. Jack was sure there were fewer
chino–puerto ricanos, chino dominicanos, chino mexicanos
than there were Chinese Cubans.

It had taken them the better part of three hours, a circuitous trip through two boroughs and the county of Westchester, to finally arrive at Fay Lo’s. It was close to midnight, the black sky now deeper than Chinese
mok
ink.

They caught up to the men as they entered a dimly lit alley next to the diner. The driver pressed a doorbell and looked up at a little camera recessed into the brick wall. There was a buzzer sound, and the driver pulled open the door, waving the men in past a big Chinese door goon. He stopped Billy, who pleaded, “We’re all together!” A Toishanese chorus of “He’s with us!” from the old men confirmed it, and the big goon let them through.