Linger Awhile

27 Justine Two

30 January 2004. When I stuck my tongue in that guy’s mouth it made him crazy but he liked it and his johnson stood up like a man. But he didn’t want to go all the way and he started fighting me when I went for his neck. I was strong enough to take charge but I was feeling funny, I was having flashes of dark and wet and I wanted a strong male gripping me from behind while my eggs spilled out oh yes. Hold on, I said to myself, this is no place to spawn, you’re a movie star. Walk, don’t hop, you’re as human as anybody else. Or almost.

This was in a kind of alley full of little shops that sold books, maps, prints, posters, antiques and so on. People coming and going while I leaned against a wall for a little while till I got myself straight. That was Cecil Court. When I came out of there I was in a big bright street full of cars and people: St Martin’s Lane. There were cafés and coffee shops with people eating and drinking and I thought I might try that but I didn’t have any money. So I kept going until I passed a place where people were going in and lining up for tickets and then a store with opera music coming out of it. Kept going till I came to a corner and turned into a dark street where I saw a man coming toward me. I did my fainting thing and when he caught me I gave him a big wet kiss and it flew him to the moon. This time I kept my mind on my work and when I got to his neck I bit him good and started a nice flow. Oh boy there’s nothing like getting it the natural way, no tubes or technical stuff. I didn’t empty him, just had a nice top-up and he was feeling good about it the whole time so we had a little poontang party in a doorway. He wasn’t able to get out of a sitting position so I sat on his lap and that worked fine. His cap fell off and some people passing by dropped money in it. I also took a little from his wallet for expenses but I gave back the wallet and helped him zip up his pants, then I kissed him goodbye and left him sitting there smiling and shaking his head. When I was half-way back to the corner I heard him yell, ‘Oh my God!’ but I didn’t turn around. Maybe he was married and he felt guilty all of a sudden.

Then I did feel hungry for regular food so I went back to a café I’d passed earlier, Gaby’s Deli in the Charing Cross Road near Leicester Square. I was picking up street names because when I didn’t see signs I asked people where I was. Gaby’s had a yellow awning that said HOT SALT BEEF, FALAFEL, SALADS. A sign by the door said LONDON’S BEST VEGETARIAN FALAFEL & SALAD IN PITTA. And above the awning the name in big silver three-dimensional letters with Est. 1965. The place looked busy and it smelled good when I opened the door so I went inside. I had a salt beef on rye and a bottle of beer. They didn’t have Coors or Corona so I had Maccabee because I thought it might be a Scotch beer but there was Jewish lettering on the label. The salt beef was nothing special but the beer was good. It was warm in there and the place was full of everybody’s smells. There were a lot of foreigners talking in their different languages. The lights were too bright and the voices were too loud. The man and woman at the table behind me, maybe they thought they weren’t talking loud. He was saying in his English accent, ‘There’s no reason to fake it if you can’t come, you don’t have to put on a performance for me.’ ‘I wasn’t faking it,’ she lied. Jesus, the things these people worry about. Where I come from the women don’t have time to fake it because the men are all done in ten seconds or less. But Gaby’s was OK — people talking and laughing and a couple of men giving me the eye. Well, I thought, it’s a long hop from El Paso but London isn’t so bad.

There must have been a couple of pounds of salt beef in my sandwich and I was still working on it with my second Maccabee when this guy comes in and sits down facing me. Worn-out looking character in his sixties, white hair but he might have been a redhead once. ‘Justine!’ he says.

‘How come you know my name?’ I said.

‘What is this,’ he said, ‘amnesia? I brought you into the world, for Christ’s sake.’

‘In a pig’s ass you did,’ I said.

‘Why aren’t you in Golders Green?’ he said. ‘You’re looking a little strange too. Are you on something?’

‘Look, Buster,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about or how you got my name but if you’re coming on to me I have to tell you that this salt beef and the beer are really weighing me down and I don’t feel much like spawning right now.’

‘Spawning!’ he said. ‘What are you, a salmon?’

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘You wanna see my warts?’

‘Some other time,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re on but you’re a little bit too weird for me tonight. I’ll see you around.’

‘Not if I see you first,’ I told him. When he left I was remembering his scrawny white neck. The salt beef and the beer were going round and round in me so I paid up and just made it outside in time to barf in the street which didn’t get me any applause from the passers-by. I went back to Cecil Court hoping to find somebody to take the bad taste out of my mouth and there was Mr Scrawny from Gaby’s looking in the window of a bookstore. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you’ when I tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Sorry I wasn’t more friendly back there in Gaby’s Deli,’ I said. ‘Let me make it up to you.’

‘No problem,’ he said, ‘but I’ll take a rain check if that’s all right with you.’

‘Well, friend,’ I said, ‘it ain’t, so I’ll just have a little taste of your neck if you don’t mind.’

‘But I do mind,’ he said, too late because I already had my teeth in him. ‘Well,’ he said just before he passed out, ‘this’ll teach me to let Irv Goodman give me a bottle of Scotch.’

I was still trying to get a good flow going when I realised he was empty. I guess these old ones run dry pretty quick.