Dirty Old Men [And Other Stories] (Zane Presents) (3 page)

“They all right,” he mumbled to his friend dejectedly. He didn’t even want to look at the girl anymore. What was the point in looking at candy he couldn’t have? His dreams were deferred yet again.

“So what’chu been up to, man?” his friend asked him. They were both nearing fifty.

Harold stood up. “I’ll tell you when I come back. I gotta use the restroom.”

“Big, stupid, big mouth,” he mumbled as he moved along.

In the background, he overheard a group of younger guys who were strategically planning out their moves.

“That’s the new one, ain’t she? Get her over here to make a drink. Yeah, she
bad.
”

Motherfucker!
Harold continued to grumble as he walked.

Then he stopped and said to hell with it. He turned and faced the thirty-something guys who were quickly filling up the bar and lounge, and he gave them some worthwhile advice.

“Look here. I’m gon’ tell you guys like it is. While you got them young fine girls out here running around, have fun while it lasts. And always protect yourself. But once you get my age with one woman.”

He shook his head and didn’t bother to finish his sentence. Instead, he asked
them, “Any one of you wanna trade places with me for a couple of weeks?”

The younger men looked around at each other and broke out laughing.

One of them replied, “Nah, that don’t sound like no good trade-off to me, man.”

Harold stood there and stared at them for another minute. “Well, it don’t hurt to ask.”

He took one last long look across the bar to the new girl, who was now smiling at another customer. She was giving her new customer the same juicy treatment, with her titties all up in his face.

Yeah, she do that to everybody,
Harold told himself. And her gorgeous smile was all he needed to wake up his barrel and bullets downstairs again. So he walked into the bathroom and into a private stall, where he pulled out his proud, hard, brown Johnson, and proceeded to spray up the toilet seat and the walls, while trying unsuccessfully to hold himself steady.

“Shit!” he told himself, as he wiped down the toilet seat and the walls with a handful of toilet tissue. “At least I don’t need no Viagra.”

Then he laughed his ass off to stop himself from crying. A young girl could do that to an old-ass man; make him break down and cry for her sweet, young affections. And he didn’t feel guilty about it either; it was only a fact of nature.

“Clarence, I swear to God, I need a
huge
favor from you,” Brenda Pittman stated with urgency. “I hate to ask you for anything like this, but if I don’t pay my past due car note by Friday, they’re gonna repossess my car.”

She was standing outside the campus grounds of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, decked out in ass-hugging blue jeans with a tight, titty-popping orange T-shirt. She was a fifth-year senior at age twenty-three, and the world always seemed to be falling down around her. She had called her friend Clarence there to meet her near campus that night to discuss her latest trial and tribulation.

Clarence Marbary, a divorced father of two in his late forties, listened to her with poise and understanding outside of their cars as the sun began to go down.

“Well, why don’t you ask your parents for the money?” he asked her calmly, wearing his light-blue button-up, uniform shirt and dark-blue slacks.

Brenda sighed and looked increasingly frustrated. “Clarence, my parents are all tapped out. They didn’t want me buying a new car in the first place. But you know how Florida is. I can’t get around without a good car down here, and my old car wasn’t accountable. It kept breaking down on me. It cost me more money to fix it than to drive it.”

Clarence grinned. “Well, a new car is gonna cost you more to own it. Your job paying you enough to afford it?”

She frowned. “I mean, I can afford it; that’s why the dealership let me have it. But I still have to pay for my apartment and school bills,” she explained. “But this is my last year. I graduate in May.”

Clarence looked over her apple-green RAV4 and imagined a car note in the range of three-hundred dollars.

“How much you owe?” he asked her.

She smiled. “Six hundred and fifty.”

Clarence winced. “
Six-fifty?
”

“I mean, I’m trying to pay off the new bill, too, or I’ll end up behind for next month,” Brenda responded. “But I promise to pay you back for it in a couple of months. You know I’m not going anywhere.”

Clarence looked the college undergrad over and thought about it. She looked good, smelled good, and would probably feel good and taste good, too. It was easy for him to imagine it. So he began thinking with the wrong head. But then he thought better of it.

The young woman just needs a little bit of help,
he pondered.
We all need help at some point, to get ourselves established in life.

Clarence asked her, “But happens if you fall behind again?”

“Honestly, I can’t afford to. I have to stay on it,” she told him.

Clarence took a deep breath and decided to do it, but for one time only.

“Okay, but look, I can’t afford to do this too many times for you. I got my own kids to help raise and send to school.”

She got excited. “Oh my God, thank you so much, Clarence. I didn’t know who else to turn to.”

Then she stepped forward and hugged him in between their cars.

Oh my goodness!
Clarence told himself, taking in her fresh, intoxicating aroma, while experiencing the firmness of her curves. That got him thinking with the wrong head again. He was relieved when she quickly pulled away from him.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she repeated, overjoyed. “So when can you get the money to me?”

“I’ll have to write myself a check for it tomorrow. I can do it right after I get off from work, at three.”

Brenda grinned. “Okay. So I can meet you tomorrow then, after four?”

When they drove off in their separate cars, all that Clarence could think about was the tremendous hug she had given him.

Damn, she felt good,
he noted. He smiled all the way home imagining much more.

At the Tallahassee International Airport the next morning, Clarence overheard his coworker Maurice boasting about his latest conquest in bed to the younger guys. They were all preparing for work inside the employee break room.

“Man, I’m talking ’bout, this girl had no
idea
what I was fin’ to put on her. But ’bout time she knew it, it was too damned late,” he bragged. “I had her ass moaning in tongues.”

The younger coworkers laughed in unison. Maurice always had some engaging story to tell. Opposite Clarence’s clean-cut, no-thrills image, Maurice Benson wore plenty of old-school gold chains, new-school tattoos, and all types of attention-getting clothes, including alligator shoes, colorful Coogi sweaters, and several derby hats for afterwork hours.

“How old was she?” one of the younger workers asked.

Maurice looked the tall and slender young man over and answered, “About your age, twenty-four, twenty-five.”

“Ain’t you fifty-something?” one of the other young guys inquired.

Maurice stared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean? You think my dick don’t get hard no more?”

“I’m just saying, that’s a little young for you, ain’t it?”

“Not if she’s legal. No woman is too young, if she’s legal. That’s the advantage I have as an older man now.” He said, “But you younger guys got a good five to ten years before you end up arrested. So what you need to do is start dating older women and try to get some money up out of it, like a gigolo.”

Clarence heard that and shook his head. In his opinion, Maurice was forever talking nonsense. The man had six children from four different women. So, how could he ever consider himself an expert on relationships? The man needed to get his delinquent house in order.

Maurice caught Clarence’s twisted face of skepticism. “What, you disagree, Clarence?”

“To each his own, man.” Clarence wasn’t up for a philosophical discussion on dating. He simply wanted to get to work.

As the early day began with floods of passengers showing up at curbside with their luggage, a young college girl showed up, wearing a Florida State Seminoles T-shirt with a pair of stand-at-attention breasts.

Jesus Christ!
Clarence thought to himself on sight.

He looked around at a few of the other men to read their responses to her. They were all stunned into submission and hesitation. But Maurice wasn’t. He stepped right up and grabbed two of her three bags.

“You’re heading back home from school?” he asked her. That much was obvious.

“Unfortunately,” the young woman answered. She was light-brown with a face full of freckles and wild, reddish-brown hair. And all the guys wondered if her ass was as shapely as her titties. They couldn’t tell through her baggy, maroon sweatpants.

Maurice listened to her and looked concerned. “Well, what’s going on? You don’t wanna leave?”

“No, but I
have
to,” she answered. “I have to hustle up some more money to pay for next semester. But there’s not that many jobs that pay enough here.”

Maurice nodded in agreement. Tallahassee wasn’t exactly work town USA. He asked her, “Where are you from? You got more jobs back at home?”

She nodded, while he took her photo ID to find her flight information at the computer station. “Yeah, I’m from Atlanta,” she answered him. “There’s a lot more jobs there, but I didn’t want to stay home. You know, I wanted to get away for college.”

“Yeah, you didn’t want all your people in your business every day either,” Maurice commented with a chuckle.

She laughed with him. “Exactly.”

Once he printed her ticket and tagged the two bags, he said, “Well, let me get that last bag for you and walk you inside. I don’t mind.”

She looked pleasantly surprised and gave him the bag. “Oh, thank you.”

“What are you studying?” he asked as he walked her inside the airport toward the security checkpoint.

As soon as Maurice left their station with the shapely college girl, the other skycaps gave themselves a knowing look.

“There goes another one,” one of the younger guys assumed with a grin.

Clarence listened to them in wonder. Then he smiled and told himself,
I got one like that myself at Florida A&M,
thinking of Brenda. But then he caught himself and shook it off.
Yeah, but I can’t think of her like Maurice would. That’s just plain wrong.

When Maurice rejoined them, they all wondered if he had found a way to get the girl’s phone number.

“Well, what’s the news?” the first young guy asked him.

Maurice chuckled. “Rule number one; you never book and tell. Always leave it up to the imagination.”

That made all of the guys laugh out loud at their station. Maurice had been booking and telling forever.

At quitting time at three o’clock in the afternoon, the second shift was arriving at the airport for work, and Clarence felt guilty about his excitement. Maurice even noticed.

He read the youthful energy of his mild-mannered coworker as they walked toward the parking deck.

“What got you all skippy today? You got something tasty cooking after work?”

That assumption made Clarence feel guiltier. Was his excitement that obvious? Why was he that excited anyway? He was only giving a girl a loan.

He searched Maurice’s probing, old eyes and responded, “No, why you ask me that?”

Maurice paused and started chuckling, like the sinister old man that he was. He loomed like a villain in a popular comic book series. He made Batman’s Joker seem real.

“You must think I’m a damn fool, Clarence. I know when you got something going on. It bleeds out of your pores. Then you start asking me questions and shit. ‘Hey, man, what do you think about this? What do you think about that?’”

Clarence objected; he didn’t appreciate his insinuation. “Man, I didn’t ask you
shit
out here. You making things up.”

Maurice kept his cool. “Not yet. But you
want
to. I can
feel it,
” he teased.