The Heavenly Table

24

ALTHOUGH BLACKIE TRIED to promote his new place as the “Celestial Harem of Earthly Delights,” it was hard for anyone to accept Virgil Brandon’s goat shed as being anything close to an exotic playground; and, to his dismay, it quickly became known simply as the “Whore Barn.” Too, it wasn’t quite as successful as he had initially hoped. He had planned on the girls having more johns than they could handle, but it turned out that the soldiers at Camp Pritchard were kept on a fairly tight leash, at least through the week. Mandatory classes on the horrors of venereal disease also put a damper on business. The physician who conducted the classes, a Dr. Eugene Eisner, scoured the county looking for the most ravaged victims of gonorrhea and syphilis he could find to parade and sometimes even treat in front of the recruits. He often had to pay them out of his own pocket, but he didn’t care; the look on the soldiers’ faces as they watched him knock the clap snot out of some hilljack’s pizzle with a rubber hammer was priceless. Since Eisner, who was also an ordained Methodist minister, believed that such diseases were a useful, even God-sanctioned deterrent against sex outside the marriage bed, he didn’t condone the use of condoms. As he had told various colleagues over the years, he would rather die than help promote anything that allowed the promiscuous to continue their licentious lifestyles with impunity. No, with the rubber hammer act, he was trying to achieve a more permanent psychological effect, something a man would automatically recall every time he thought about sticking his prick in some casual acquaintance. As he boasted at the little gatherings the general occasionally held for privileged members of his staff, half the men who sat in on his lectures took vows of chastity at some point or other, even those who were already betrothed. As one captain quipped to his buddies, the crazy bastard’s enthusiasm was “infectious.”

However, if someone had asked Jasper Cone, he would have said that business was booming for the pimp. Ever since Blackie and the girls had set up shop in Virgil’s shed, he had been watching them at night from the weedy perimeter of the lot. At times he wondered why he tortured himself so. In addition to walking around half-numb from lack of sleep, the insects nearly ate him alive, and he sometimes witnessed things that sickened his stomach, not an easy feat when you consider that this was a man who spent hours every day mucking about in shithouses without the slightest qualms. Too, wasn’t it useless to pine over something you could never have? Because of his size, Jasper hadn’t had an erection since before he quit growing around the age of seventeen, not a full-blown one anyway. “Not enough blood in your body,” Doc Hamm had told him a couple of years ago. “Even if it was to happen, you’d probably pass out before you could do anything with it.” But though he knew the doctor was right — he had grappled with his cock enough times to know it would never stand at attention — he still had desires; he could feel them coursing through his body whenever he came upon a woman, whether it be on the street, or in an outhouse during a surprise inspection, or looking through some neighbor’s carelessly curtained window late at night. He was to a great extent like a man without a stomach who nonetheless can’t resist spending all of his free time hanging around a chophouse buffet.

Along with unrequited lust, another part of Jasper’s fascination with the Whore Barn was just being able to see how the women operated. There had always been a prostitute or two in Meade — old Midge Daniels with her varicose veins and flabby honkers, and a colored girl named Jellybean who lived over on White Heaven — but they did their dealings behind closed doors. Here, everything was out in the open. The number of men who went in and out of the tents astounded him. The weekdays were sometimes slow, but on Friday and Saturday nights he often counted seventy or eighty. Young bucks, too, determined to get their money’s worth. Jasper had heard that you couldn’t wear one of those woman things out, but, Lord, that was a lot of pounding when you added it all up. And there were other things to be had, too, besides just what the pimp called a “straight fuck,” which, even to the virginal Jasper, began to sound a little boring after a while. For an additional dollar, the blonde would speak strange words in a foreign accent, and the skinny one would dress up like a schoolgirl, while the ugly one, if properly aroused, would swallow a man’s spunk just for the hell of it. No wonder she was so fat, Jasper thought. Just the other night when that wagonload of boys from Monkey Town tore into her, she must have slurped down a quart of the stuff. Oh, yes, it was such a clamoring, festive, noisy place, with the lighted lanterns hanging between the posts, and the pimp serving drinks at the little plank bar, and the bodyguard taking the money and keeping the lines moving in an orderly fashion. They even had a jug band playing on the weekends, a trio from Kingston that called themselves the Ginseng Gang. True, there was sometimes trouble, like the other evening when they had to pistol-whip the big-boned country boy from Clarksburg off the one called Matilda. For one reason or another, he’d decided that he was going to make her moo like a cow, and when she refused, he went a little crazy. You could still see his handprints around her throat the next night in the campfire light. But the way Jasper figured it, at an average of three dollars a shot, the Whore Barn was making more than enough money, no matter how much he heard Blackie bitch to Henry on slow nights about the clap doctor out at the army base cutting into their profits with his rubber hammer trick.