I had to park on the street back behind the firehouse, but at least it was a safe neighborhood. I tucked in my shirt, combed my hair with my fingers, grabbed my binder, locked the car, and headed up to Howard's.
Howard's was a kind of place you don't see much these days, I didn't know if it was a deli or a convenience store or a soda fountain or a bar, but probably all of the above. It was there when I was a kid, just the same. In the front was a counter and a few tables, like a diner, and people used to hang out in there drinking coffee, before, you know, Starbucks and all. They used to have sandwiches and sometimes French fries or even mashed potatoes and meat loaf. Then in the back they sold stuff, some groceries, instant coffee, fingernail clippers, peanuts, towels. Old Diane Howard still owned the place but you didn't see her there much any more. Her grandson Scott mostly ran the place. I hadn't been in the place for a while but Scott was, well, Scott was a fat slob. He didn't pay much attention to business but really there wasn't much to pay attention to. He used to keep the coffee reasonably fresh, grudgingly making a new pot every few hours, and he would eventually wipe off your tabletop after you finished drooling on it. A bell would ring when the door opened and if he was in the mood he'd come out and see what you wanted. The place wasn't worth robbing, their merchandise wasn't even worth shoplifting, and he didn't worry much about it.
I was going there because they had bands sometimes on weekends. There was beer in the refrigerators and people would come in and buy a beer and dance. The band set up in the corner with traffic on the street behind the musicians lighting the scene with eerie headlights weaving through some dusty Venetian blinds every few seconds. My band used to play there sometimes, and I had to put some dates on the calendar. It had been half a year since we'd performed there; they had stopped having music for a while due to the expense but things were picking up again now, least that's what I was hearing from the other players.
When I came into the place it seemed to me it smelled like sweat and, actually, like sex, that smell of pussy and cum and also sweat. I knew they were not very attentive about throwing people out, it got a little wild in there sometimes, and I had heard it was turning into a kind of hookup joint, but listen I play the guitar, I've played in singles places and pickup places, and I have a few stories of my own which I will not be repeating to you here.
Scott was not behind the counter or anywhere to be seen. A rather tall blond woman was standing near the counter and two guys were talking to her, joking and laughing. She seemed to be flirting with them, which was a mystery to me; neither one of them looked like much of a catch. One of the guys was short and wiry with no teeth, wearing a plaid shirt and work boots and jeans. The other was probably a jock in high school gone to seed, about five ten, t-shirt, three-day beard, gimme cap. He had teeth but not much else going for him.
The woman was not bad. She would not have attracted your attention on the street but in this context she seemed like a kind of regular wife, wearing a sort of snug v-neck t-shirt that did not reveal anything but clung to a roll of pounds around her waist. Her hair was back in a barrette. They did not acknowledge me in any way when I came in.
"Scott here?" I said.
"Yeah, he's in back," one of the guys said. So I moseyed into the back room.
It's like an old drug store or novelty shop back there, some of that stuff has probably been on the same shelf for fifty years. But when you need a fingernail clipper, you know where to go. Scott was not there to be seen. There are two doors off that room, one is a bathroom and that door was open, so I knew he wasn't in there. The other was his office and I didn't want to knock on his office door if he had it closed. Booking a band is a sensitive thing, it depends on what mood you catch the person in. No use annoying him from the start.
I stood around for a few minutes, looking at the junk on the shelves. I didn't hear any sound from the office and figured I'd be back later for the booking. There's no hurry, you just put a date on a calendar and come back and play in a few months.
I exited to the front room, where the scene had changed. Now the blond was kneeling on the vinyl seat of a diner booth with her pants down and her ass up in the air, and the little guy was fucking her like a son-of-a-bitch. Ba-bam ba-bam, he was really giving it to her with his pants down almost to his knees. The bigger guy was leaning over the back of the seat squeezing her tits and playing with them.
Again, they did not seem to notice, or at least to care, that I was there. I could hear the squish-squish of her pussy as he rammed his dick into her, and she was starting to pant a little. There was a wheeze in her breathing and she seemed to be getting what she wanted. The woman raised her head and torso like the Cobra position in yoga and the bigger guy leaned over and began sucking her nipples, pinching the one he wasn't sucking, while the little guy gave her a hard happy fucking from behind.
I stood at the counter watching. Because, wouldn't you? After a couple of minutes the bigger man reached down between her legs and started rubbing her clitoris and her panting turned to, I don't know, weeping maybe, nearly shrieking. Her head went back farther and she looked at the ceiling except with her eyes closed and began hammering her hips back at the greasy little guy behind her. He grabbed a handful of her hair and pounded her even harder and they came together loudly in that diner booth.
Everything stopped pretty suddenly, the sound, the movement. The three of them were laughing softly, not like this was hilarious or crazy or weird but, just, it'd been a good fuck. The little guy put his softening dick away and the blonde stood up and pulled her clothes back in place.
She pulled up her pants first and snapped them, with her tits hanging out. She looked over at me with a not-sorry smile and said, "Sorry about that."
"No prob," I said.
At that moment Scott came out of the back. He glanced at the blonde's tits and the two guys and then me. "What's up, Doc?" he said, laughing at his amazing sense of humor. My name is Doc, actually.
"Just come by to get some dates on the calendar," I said.
"Oh yeah, good," he said. "Come on back."
At that moment the door opened and a girlfriend of mine walked in. Well not a current girlfriend, but a very recent one. About a week ago she had decided to break it off, after a month or two of declining interest on her part. She had professional ambitions and also a husband who was getting suspicious, and I had reasoned, reasonably, that she found it unseemly to be hanging around with a musician with no money, a shitty car, a rented room. Or maybe my jokes just weren't funny any more, you never really know, do you? I could tell the feeling was gone, and then she suggested we stop seeing each other. Well we're big boys and girls, these things happen. We had had a lot of good times together, going places, doing things, good sex, for close to a year, I'd say. Chrissie had short brown hair and a kind of rough complexion, reddish skin but it was a nice look, an outdoorsy look. She was petite, slender and firm, wore tight button-shirts and skirts, nothing fashionable but she was attractive in her petite and humble way. Like the blonde, she wouldn't stop traffic but she was cute.
"Hey," I said, "What you doing here?" The blonde by now had pulled her top down to cover herself and though the place smelled even stronger of pussy and cum there was no real indication that anything had just happened. Except maybe their mischievous grins, but around here that could mean anything.
"I just needed to pick up some stuff," she said. She did not seem glad to see me, and I was glad I already had an excuse to leave the room.
I followed Scott to the back. The papers on his desk also looked like they could have been there for fifty years. Everything had a kind of smell of dust that I you don't encounter much any more, old moldy dust, antique dust. Scott found his calendar which had a fold-out with a naked girl on the top, and we flipped through the months and put the band down for a couple of Saturdays. I had my calendar too and marked it correspondingly. We bullshitted about business (slow, of course) and he told me about another new band in town that wasn't half bad and people seemed to like them. He was making sure I didn't ask for more money, we both know the game. When the deal was done I said good-bye and went back out to his back room, which, come to think of it, I have never seen any other person in that room. You wouldn't actually go there for fingernail clippers.
I came out to the diner to find Chrissie scrunched up on a chair jammed against the wall, holding her legs up with her arms while the little guy knelt on the floor licking her pussy. Her eyes were squinted and she did not see me; she was in her own world. She had her panties in one hand, skirt around her waist, and her shirt was unbuttoned -- she had small breasts and often went without a bra, including, apparently, today. Her nipples were dark red and hard, and her little tits were pressed together to form a kind of cleavage or crease at least. She held herself compactly in a small space on the chair, with this guy going to town on her.
The kneeling man lifted his head and said to the other, "Here, you eat her for a while, I want to suck her tits." He stood and the larger man knelt between her legs. I could see his tongue running up and down the slot between her legs, covering the whole length of her sopping pink flesh from her asshole to her clitoris. She was squirming lustily in the chair, which was a plastic seat on a steel frame like you see in diners and waiting rooms.
The little guy leaned over her and took the nearest breast between his lips and began sucking it hard. He was balding a little on top, displayed as he bent over. I wondered if the fact that he had no teeth made this a better experience for Chrissie -- he could do things I couldn't do. When he took his first suck her eyes popped open and she looked right at me. It was a moment frozen in time. She was like a laboratory specimen pinned to the chair with two workers analyzing, dissecting, probing, stimulating, all folded up with her legs in the air. In that first instant she looked embarrassed to see me, but that melted away in a second as another wave of lust swept over her, and her expression changed to defiance. Like she was saying, see, I don't miss you. She closed her eyes again to enjoy being the center of attention.
The bigger man said, "Look out, I want to fuck her."
"I can still suck her tits, can't I?" the little guy said.
