Pimping My Ride - Part 8

My having been sodomized by the police and firemen at the impromptu orgy on Venice Blvd, or wherever I wrote the other day that it was, seemed to make the whores feel I was one of them, or at least not to mind my being privy to their complaints about their various children, boyfriends, and husbands, which the Afro-Americans among them mischievously pronounced hubbins, possibly in the same spirit that many Afro-Americans will pronounce ask as axe.

Jeantelle, who was white, and from a small town in the San Joaquin Valley in which inbreeding was apparently epidemic, actually had three husbands. She’d married the first, her first cousin, at 12, and become the mother of triplets at 13. Her young beau abandoned her in frustration a few weeks before their first birthday when he found himself unable to remember all three names — Robin, Maurice, and Barry. I surmised he hadn’t been a huge Bee Gees fan, but of course we’re talking about an entirely different demographic.

Jeantelle had married again at 15, though undivorced from her first husband, after her parole officer talked the local high school into allowing her to enroll. This second husband had beaten her, so she’d poisoned him. and had her brother and cousin bury him in pieces in the foothills. Once again without bothering with divorce, she’d married her first pimp, Arturo, in Las Vegas on a slow Thursday night in April just for something to do. When she claimed with palpable pride to be wanted in six states for trigamy, Sha’quaw’naa snorted dismissively and said ain’t no such thing, her view being that no matter how many spouses a person had, the worst he or she could be accused of was bigamy.

Jeantelle expressed the view that the only big Sha’quaw’naa knew anything about was her own big ass, whereupon Sha’quaw’naa asked how Jeantelle would like her own, bony white, ass to be cut, whereupon the two of them began hammering on each other with their platform shoes. A cook had to run out from the kitchen and fling a bucket of hot grease on them to get them to stop. It was pretty embarrassing, but I suspect far less embarrassing for me than painful for the two combatants, who wound up leaving us in an ambulance, in which I can only pray they didn’t renew hostilities en route to the emergency care facility.

At 51, Sulene was by far the eldest of the girls, and the only grandmother. She attributed the longevity of her marriage to Bud, a human resources specialist at a local aerospace corporation I’d better not mention, to mutual trust. It was right around the time that corporations were ceasing to think of themselves as having personnel departments, and beginning to speak instead of their human resources departments. For me, the phrase has always evoked visions of corporate surgeons harvesting the vital organs of middle managers to replace those of senior vice presidents through whose livers too much gin or single-malt Scotch had passed.

It had actually been Bud’s suggestion that Sulene become a whore; he found the idea quite sexy, and liked her to tell him when they themselves had relations about how the “johns” she’d been servicing were much better-endowed than he. That she was actually one of the most popular of the whores owed, in her view, to the fact that many men despised their mothers or stepmothers, and secretly yearned to degrade them incestuously. Sulene marketed herself as a surrogate, commonly wearing an apron over her halter top and hot pants, and for an extra $25 per “trick” would address the “john” not as hon, but by the diminutive or nickname of his choice, Skip and Jimmy being two of the most popular.

Roselle, who I enjoyed thinking had been named after a past commissioner of the National Football League, related that her own “hubbin”, Tayshawn, had no idea that she was a whore. She told him she was attending night classes in preparation for a career in human resources. The other girls turned on her in much the same way that my fellow employees at the Jack in the Box drive-thru restaurant in Santa Monica had turned on me when they discovered I was in college, and thus assured of a glittering future.