Dirty Old Men [And Other Stories] (Zane Presents) (25 page)

“It feel like it
popped!
” Sugar insisted. “Wait a minute.”

“HUNH!” Georgie responded non-sensibly. He didn’t care what she had
to say at that point. He was ready for his rocket ship to blast off to the moon, so he could howl like a wolf.

“The condom
popped!
” Sugar let out again.

Georgie finally comprehended her plea. In the nick of time, he pulled his penis out of her, and shot fresh, hot sperm all over her back, ass, and long legs.

“AHHH, FUCK!” she yelled, feeling his seed splatter all over her. She stood up straight and cringed, running back to the bathroom.

“SHIT!” she continued to curse, locking the bathroom door behind her.

Georgie didn’t know what to do. First, he backed up and fell across the bed to work the cramps out of his legs. He stretched them in every direction, trying to find the best position to relieve the pain.

“Arrgghhh!” he growled, twisting and turning on the bed.

Once he had found a safe position to relax his thighs and ass muscles, he inspected his penis and found the popped condom pushed down on his shaft with blood on it.

“Oh,
shit
,” he panicked. “Was your fucking
period
on?” he asked. It didn’t smell so good to him either. He failed to notice the stench while he was stroking her. But there was no answer, only shower water running from inside the bathroom.

Ignoring the pain he felt in his cramped muscles, Georgie climbed back to his feet and moved toward the bathroom, only to find that the door was locked.

“Hey, let me in there,” he demanded, with urgent knocks on the door. He wanted to wash himself up as quickly as possible.
What if the girl had AIDS?

The stripper continued to ignore him, with the shower water still running.

Georgie knocked urgently on the door again.

“Hey, I need to wash up, too, in there.”

“All right, wait a fuckin’ minute!” the young stripper yelled from behind the door. “I’m taking a
shower!
”

Georgie barked, “Well, I need to take a damn
shower,
too.”

Sugar went back to ignoring him. His ass would just have to wait.

Realizing as much, Georgie leaned up against the wall next to the bathroom and waited there anxiously. He shook his head and grumbled, “Got’
dammit. Damn, she stink.” He looked over at the girl’s bag and thought about taking his money back.

But I gotta wash this shit off first,
he reasoned. The putrid smell seemed to get worse as he continued to stand there.

He squeezed his nose shut with his left hand and breathed out of his mouth. “I thought her ass just
took
a fucking shower,” he grumbled.
How could she smell this damn bad after washing up?

One thing was for sure, Georgie couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there. He felt embarrassed and in need of a lecture.

“This is what the hell I get,” he told himself. “So take it like a man now.” And he waited there to wash himself up, while still thinking about taking his money back.

But she might make a big got’ damned scene while I’m in the bathroom,
he imagined.
What if she even called the cops in here? And I still have to go back to work tomorrow.

Ultimately, he decided to finish his night without any further turmoil. So he planned to wash himself up, drive the stripper back to wherever, drop her stinky ass off, and go on back to his life, with a checkup at the health clinic.

“I’m gon’ leave these damn strips clubs alone for a while,” he mumbled.

When Sugar finally walked out from the bathroom, with another towel around her body, she scowled at Georgie. “I told your ass to wait a minute.”

Georgie didn’t want to hear it. He stepped into the bathroom and closed and locked the door himself. Then he commented through the locked door, “You didn’t tell me your damn
cycle
was on.”

“It’s not. That was just
you
, pounding me like a fucking maniac. I told you I was too tight for that.”

“Yeah, whatever. It don’t smell too good out there either,” he told her. “What’s your excuse for that? You took a shower.”

Sugar heard him and thought about it. She couldn’t deny the stench lingering inside the room. She shook her head and mumbled under her breath, “Fuck you, motherfucker.” Then she hurried to get dressed before he could finish his shower. She planned to leave his ass there and get herself a taxi home. That’s exactly what she did. She already had her money. And that ugly-ass old man didn’t mean a damn thing to her.

“Fucking pervert,” she yelled toward the bathroom as she walked out and slammed the door.

Georgie had counted on that. He didn’t want to drive her ass anywhere anyway.

“Good riddance,” he mumbled inside the shower, hearing the hotel room door slam.

Later, without returning his key to the front desk, Georgie pulled out of the hotel in his silver Jetta and spotted Sugar climbing into a yellow taxi at the front entrance.

“Yeah, at least she found her own ride back home,” he told himself. “And now I gotta get a damn checkup for AIDS, or whatever else she may have.”

Less than a week later, George Tatum was diagnosed with chlamydia, otherwise known as a sticky-drawers, penis drip, acquired after intimate contact with a woman’s yeast infection. It was a minor sexually transmitted disease that could be cleared up after a dose of strong medication and two weeks of abstinence.

The worst part for Georgie was being asked whom he may have gotten it from.

“The wrong damn woman,” he told the doctor inside private quarters. That was all he was willing to reveal.

The doctor told him, “You may want to let her know, so she can get herself checked out.”

“I already
did
let her know. I told her what it smelled like in the room. That’s why I knew that something was wrong before it even showed up in my system. But it takes a full two weeks for the AIDS test to come back, hunh?”

The doctor nodded. “We’ll let you know when we get the results back. In the meantime, you see why it’s important to know everything you can about your partner. Causal sex can be clearly dangerous, and as you’ve found out, condoms are not always foolproof.”

“Oh, you don’t have to tell
me
twice,” Georgie commented. “I’m too old for this shit.”

The doctor nodded. “Yes, but you still need to try and convince the woman to get checked out as well. She could do a lot more damage to her reproductive track, if her infection is not treated. So you think about that for me. Think about it for
her.
All right?”

Georgie nodded and didn’t argue with the doctor. But he didn’t plan on hunting Sugar back down at the strip club. If she was smart, she would get herself checked out on her own. Then again, she was still relatively young, and she had been living on her own for four years. Maybe she hadn’t been taught the importance of staying in touch with a gynecologist for monthly checkups.

Georgie walked out of the doctor’s private clinic and thought to himself.

What if the girl don’t know what she’s supposed to do? But would she listen to my ass if I tried to tell her?

“Shit,” he expressed out loud as he reached his car in the parking lot. “I thought you had to be inspected to even
work
in a strip club. But I guess
not.
”

He climbed into his car and wondered exactly how he would map out a conversation with the young stripper who had burned him. And hopefully, she wasn’t carrying AIDS as well.

Damn,
Georgie mused as he drove in silence.
This is the reason why we’re forced to live right. It’s crazy out here. And I’ve been crazy right along with it.

Henry Morgan headed home from another hard day’s work at the
Richmond Journal
newspaper in Virginia, where he slaved as a low-level ad salesman. He was forty-seven years old, slightly overweight, balding, and separated from his estranged wife. He had two children in their mid-twenties, and three young grandchildren he barely made time to see.

Henry continued to feel self-conscious and distant after his inability to send his two kids to college upon their graduation from high school. His daughter, the oldest, found a few grants and student loans to attend Virginia State for the first few years, but she had not secured enough funds to finish a four-year education in social services. She then joined the work force as an administrative assistant in downtown Richmond before she became pregnant by her unemployed, off-and-on boyfriend of three years.

Henry’s son, the youngest, had not even tried to attend college. He ended up impregnating two different girls over one long, hot and restless summer.

The family’s continuation of economic shortcomings soon created a rift between Henry and his wife, with constant battles over money, until they could no longer live in the same house together.

“You need to do either one of two things,” his wife told him before their split. “
One
, you need find a better
job
that pays you more for your time. Or
two,
you need to learn how to do the one you
have
better than what you’ve
been
doing it.”

Henry chose option
three
and moved out into a studio apartment, where he was more able to focus and live in peace. Nevertheless, he thought constantly about how differently his life could have panned out, if he had found the courage to search for better employment.

But I like the newspaper business,
he told himself. The newspaper industry
was filled with great perks, including invitations to nearly all of Richmond’s local events. He had even gotten his two-toned, Ford Expedition truck at half its value due to his relationships through the paper. And as he drove home that night behind the wheel of his vehicle in silence, he continued to weigh the pros and cons of his loyalty to the local newspaper.

Halfway home, he received a call on his cell phone. He looked down and read an unrecognizable number. He frowned and answered the call anyway.

“Hello.”

“Hey, it’s Tasha. Where you at?”

It was the young woman he had met during a recent car show promotion. Fresh images of her black jeans and tight white T-shirt immediately popped into his mind. Boy, did he admire her hot, young body. Her figure had more dangerous curves than the cars that were at the show. So Henry began to flirt with the girl through several X-rated phone calls made over the past couple of weeks.

“I’m coming back home from work,” he told her. “Where are you calling from?” It wasn’t the same cell phone number he had called her on before.

“My phone needs charging, so I’m calling you from my girl’s phone,” she explained. “You gettin’ off work at eight o’clock? I thought you work in the morning.”

“I did a little overtime tonight to get a few things finished for tomorrow’s paper.”

“Oh, you did a little
overtime,
hunh? Are you tired then? What are you doing now?”

Henry heard a giggle in the background and didn’t like it. He wanted to keep his conversation with her private.

“Ahh, like I said, I’m going home. But call me back a little later, once you’ve finished charging your phone.”

“But I wanted to talk to you now. My charger’s back at home.”

Henry heard more giggles in the background. “Well, it sounds to me like you’ve got yourself some company,” he hinted.

He hoped she would get the point; he didn’t feel comfortable talking to her around other people.

“Okay, hold on,” she told him. A few seconds later, she added, “Okay, we can talk privately now.”

“And what do you want to talk about?” he asked her bluntly. With his thoughts on his family at the moment, he didn’t feel up to having flirtatious conversations with the young woman. Or at least not that evening.

“Umm, remember all that you was telling me about, you know, eating my pussy and stuff? Umm, when you wanna do that?”

Henry was shocked by it. And it wasn’t that it was a new subject for them. He had indeed bragged about what he would be willing to do as an older man that some of the younger men would balk at; her timing was just wrong. Nevertheless, she created an unexpected rise out of him.

“Ahh, you know, it doesn’t really matter to me.” He wasn’t backing down from it, but he wasn’t exactly stepping up to the plate either. It would ultimately be her decision to take things to the next level. In Henry’s book, flirting and fucking were two separate things. And he had flirted with plenty of women, but he had not taken them to bed, even after the separation from his wife.

Tasha asked, “What about tonight? Can you come get me?”

Now that got Henry excited. She had him speechless for a moment.

“Tonight? Well, ahh—”

She cut him right off. “Yeah, I’m horny as hell right now. Do you smoke?”

She continued to speak to him in rapid fire. Henry struggled to keep up with it.

“Yeah, I still have the bad habit of smoking,” he admitted.

“You smoke weed?”

Henry paused.
That’s what it is! She’s been out smoking with her friend, and now she’s calling me up high and horny, and ready to do something about it.
But he didn’t necessarily view that as a
bad
thing.