Casino Moon

43

ROSEMARY WAS STILL FURIOUS at ten-thirty when she came out to do her last show at the club.

The cycle was complete. Every man she’d ever known had let her down. Her father had died, leaving her and her mother broken and mired in poverty. Her husband, Bingo, decided he loved heroin more than he loved her and had probably passed on the weakened immunities that killed their second daughter. And here Anthony had broken his promise to provide for her after she’d helped set up Terrence. Sending his father back to menace her. These deals you made with yourself. They were never worthwhile.

Just to make matters worse, the club had added a special feature tonight, inviting male members of the audience to join her and the other Foxy Boxer in the ring. A drunken insurance salesman who called himself Ben stumbled between the ropes, wearing a pair of green-and-pink-plaid pants, a navy blazer, and a bright yellow necktie with naked mermaids on it. Rosemary forced herself to smile.

What was it about men? Did their brains release a secret enzyme that rendered them unreliable once they reached a certain age? The bell rang and the match began. She had to tell Ben to wait in her corner. He was just the manager, there to give her a rubdown between rounds. But he followed her out to the middle of the ring anyway, reaching around to squeeze her tits. She gave him a playful shove back into the corner and got down to the humiliating business of wrestling another woman. Miriam the busty redhead was making a big show of scratching and biting tonight. Rosemary had to keep throwing her into the ropes just to get away from her.

As the bell rang to end the round and she returned to her corner, Rosemary happened to glance up and see Anthony waving to her from the club’s entrance. The lousy prick. He didn’t even have the nerve to fire her himself. She’d been treated with more class in the backs of Hondas. She resisted the urge to give him the finger and instead turned her attention to Ben the insurance salesman, her “manager.” This jerk had already stripped off his jacket and shirt, leaving his tie hanging listlessly between his sagging hairy pectorals. He reached for her again and she could smell the Jaegermeister he’d spilled on his chest. When she put up a friendly hand and asked him to slow down, he tried to pull off her bikini top.

The men in the audience began to stomp and shout, “GO FOR IT!” She had to slap Ben’s face to get him to stop.

“Don’t make me do that again.” She smiled.

But after the next round, old Ben was coming at her again, trying to throw her down and get on top of her. The men in the audience were on their feet, cheering louder, their voices like storm troopers’ boots on a tarmac, “FUCKHERNOW! FUCKHERNOW! FUCKHERNOW!”

They were all the same. All trying to strip her of whatever pride and dignity she had left. It was enough. Something inside her snapped. She grabbed Ben’s flabby arm, and using his sluggish weight against him, she performed an old-fashioned judo flip, pulling him over her shoulder so that he landed on the canvas with a loud thwacck!! He lay there for a few seconds with his eyes glazing over, like an immense useless baby.

“OH C’MON, BEN!” someone shouted from the audience. “HOSE THE BITCH!”

Rosemary flashed her best little-girl smile and then dropped onto Ben, straddling his marshmallow stomach with her strong tawny legs. Miriam the redhead handed her a can of shaving cream and Rosemary began squirting it onto Ben’s chest and face. He tried to squirm away but she pressed down on him with her full weight and used her legs to pin his arms to his sides.

She quickly moved up to his face and began to smother him, thrusting her pudendum down on his mouth and nose so he couldn’t breathe. He tried to throw her off, but he was too drunk to do more than struggle like a spider under a paperweight. Now the men in the audience did not cheer so loudly.

Smiling more ferociously by the moment, she turned around and went to work, ass to his face, as she opened the top button of his plaid slacks and squirted shaving cream down the front of his underwear. The momentum had shifted in the last few seconds, and the other men in the audience were now laughing and urging her to abuse Ben in any way she saw fit.

She looked up to make sure Anthony was still watching from the entrance before she fired another shot of shaving cream down the front of Ben’s pants. More laughter. But then she stunned them all into near-silence by reaching in after the shaving cream and pulling out Ben’s flaccid penis. Oh yeah. Tits are great. Pussy’s better. But let no woman expose the shrunken totem pole to ridicule.

She began yanking on it. One yank for Bingo, who’d put her out on the street. One yank for Anthony, who’d promised her the moon and left her in the gutter. And one yank for his vicious old man, coming by to kick her in the head when all she needed was a job. Yank this. Ben began to groan like he was in great pain.

The other men in the club groaned along with him and soon someone at one of the front tables saidwhat they were watching was rape. Damn straight, thought Rosemary. Ben’s penis grew taut and his body began to convulse.

“Lose the bitch, Ben!” they were shouting. “Kick her off.”

But it was too late. Ben’s left knee began to tremble and his face closed in on itself. He was coming in public. As his body gave one final jerk, Rosemary leaped to her feet and pranced around the ring, flicking drops of foam at the men in the front seats.

“Here he is,” she sang with her brightest smile yet. “Mr. Premature Ejaculator. . . Here he is, your ideal...”

Ben rolled onto his side and covered his face with both hands.

Her fists raised triumphantly, Rosemary climbed from the ring and saw Anthony still standing at the back of the club, his mouth hanging open a little. She walked right up andkissed him hard on the lips. Not a lover’s kiss. More the kind of kiss one mob guy would give another before killing him. She grabbed his hair and pulled his head back.

“Terry was ten times better than you,” she whispered.

She spun away and went out the side door into her dressing room, her cheeks bouncing in her bikini bottom.

Anthony slowly smoothed his hair and then smelled his palm, as if trying to figure out what she’d left up there.