Mississippi Blues

I heard Mr. Mitchell's car coming up the drive, and I knew what it was about. I was 18 now. Pop sighed. Momma cried, like she'd done all day. One more time, she tried, "We can't let her go down there with that man, please. I'm begging you, please. Let's move."

Truth was, we couldn't move and she knew it. My poor old dad owed Mitchell more than money. We lived on his land in his house and drove his car. Things hadn't gone our way in several years.

Mitchell first came up the drive to fetch my sister Allie when she turned 18. She left home three months later and the only thing we heard from her was a postcard from New Orleans that said, "Don't worry about me, but I am not coming back to Bay Springs or Mississippi -- EVER!" Now it was my turn. For what, I didn't quite know. But it made Allie cry a lot.

"Addison," pop yelled from the kitchen, "Come on in here, honey."

Outside I heard the car door close and went into the kitchen.

"Listen, you got to go with Mitchell and just do what they want. Otherways, I am going to jail and you and your mama would end up in the poorhouse or worst. There's just no other way."

Mitchell knocked. Mom cried and hugged me hard. Her tears wet the side of my face as she whispered, "I am so sorry, child, so sorry. I tried to get him to take me, but he says I am too old" in my ear.

Pop let Mitchell in. The men made small talk, then I heard Mitchell tell pop, "We'll take good care of her. Ain't nobody gonna hurt her. I'll see to that. I'm sorry to do this to y'all, but business is business."

Momma held up her Bible and started to say something. Mitchell just said, "Come on" and in a daze, I followed him out to his car.

At his place, the only tavern in town, we pulled into the back lot.

"See Wanda in the kitchen," he said as he held the door open for me, "She'll help you get settled. We'll start in about 20 minutes."

The kitchen was hot and smelled of frying hush puppies and oysters. A woman wrapped up in an apron with several towels hanging off her frowned at Mitchell when she saw me.

"Wanda, don't start," he said and he walked off into an office and closed the door. A sign that said "Manager" bounced against it.

"What's your name, honey?" Wanda asked.

"Addison McConnor."

"You working the hole, tonight, Addison. It ain't pretty, but the tips can be good. I done it before, but they want a little white girl in there, not this old black body."

She stirred a pan on the stove and said, "Your sister made some good money in there. C'mon, I show you."

I followed her through the kitchen to a stairway. Beneath the stairway was a small door. She opened it, reached in to turn a light on, and motioned me in. Inside was a pile of towels and a pillow. One of the walls had a opening about four inches wide and a foot high slit up and down it, with lengths of black tape as padding around the slit. Someone had written "Gloryhole" in big red letters on the wall above it

"I'll get you some water and lemons before you get started, honey. Now listen, on the other side of that wall," she said, pointing out the slit in the wall, "is a booth in the men's bathroom. What these men are gon' do is come in here and put their things, you know, through that hole for you to suck on. That's why they call it a gloryhole." I almost fainted. No way. This wasn't happening. Allie never talked about it. Momma didn't warn me. I'd done some things with some boys from school, and even put out for a few, but I never put my mouth on their ... penises ... was the only word I could allow myself to think. And now total strangers expected this?

"I showed your sister how to use some olive oil to help out. I'll get you some," Wanda said, disappearing back into the kitchen.

I looked around. Looking out the slit, I saw a typical restroom stall.

Wanda came back with a zucchini squash, a ketchup bottle and some water with a few lemon wedges floating atop the ice.

Holding the bottle up, she said, "This is olive oil. I warmed it up for you. It don't taste too bad. Now when a fellow hangs his meat through here," she said as she held the zucchini at the top of the slit in the wall, "you get some of this olive oil on your hand and use your hand in front of your mouth when you go up and down on him. Like this ..." Wanda made the fingers of her other hand into an "O" and slid them along the zucchini, then put her mouth on the end and slid it into her mouth. "You see what I mean? You ever done this before?"

"No."

Wanda sighed and looked down at the floor. "Well, they gon' be half-hard when they stick it in there. You put the thing in your mouth and suck it just like your pussy does when you got one in there. Please tell me you at least done that."

"Yes, a few times," I admitted.

"Damn Walt Mitchell. I told him not to get you involved in this. He ought to get one of them street girls outta Jackson or Meridian, but he cheap. Anyway, you just pretend your hand and mouth is your pussy and treat them men right and they might slip a little something extra through there. Maybe even paper money. Leave the light on. They gon' want to look through there and see your pretty blond head."

Mitchell was suddenly standing behind Wanda. "Everything ready to go? The meetin' is almost over and they're going to want drinks and food and glory soon. Looks like they only about 20 of them tonight. You'll probably get half," he said, looking at me.

"Don't you worry about no food. You know it gon' be ready. I don't know how you can you put this poor girl through this ..."

"That's enough, Wanda." Mitchell snapped, and looking down at me, "You just be ready, and I hope you are as good as your sister. If she hadn't ta run off, you wouldn't be down there now. Everbody liked her." He walked back into his office.

"Now use your olive oil. And here," Wanda said as she handed me a small pail. "Spit it in here."

"Spit what?" I asked.

"The stuff they gon' squirt, honey. Try to catch it all in your mouth. They like that. Spit it later. Then rinse your mouth. That's what the lemon and water is for."

I hadn't even thought about that. Did people do that? I'd felt the slimy stuff -- "jizz," some of the boys at school called it -- oozing out of me once after Alton Sims had taken my virginity, and another boy had pulled out and squirted strings and a puddle of it on my belly. It was the slimiest stuff I'd ever tried to clean up. Every time I wiped some up, it seemed like it spread and there was more and more. Now it would be in my mouth?

I started to ask Wanda, but she was walking back to the kitchen. She stopped and said, "Close that door. We don't want them waiters and busboys gawking in there." She came closer and half-whispered, "And don't suck off any of them, even if they offer a tip. They ain't in the club."

She pushed the door closed and I was alone. Tears started. The stair treads overhead didn't leave any room to stand up, so I sat on the pillow and waited. I cried and prayed. I'd gone to church this past Sunday, and most every Sunday before that and hadn't done anything to deserve this. I tried to imagine my sister in here. She made money doing this, apparently, but she never gave a cent to our parents. We could have paid off Mitchell, if the money is as good as Wanda said. She kept it all and then ran off with it. I couldn't do that. I'd give it to Pop.

The sound of muffled clapping signaled that what Mitchell had referred to as "the meeting" must be over. Chairs scraped, men laughed. The bathroom door opened and the crowd got louder, then quieter again as it closed. Footsteps echoed in the bathroom, but the man didn't come to the stall with the hole. He went to a urinal and started relieving himself. The bathroom door opened several more times. I couldn't stop looking, but was terrified at what I'd see. After some shuffling of feet, the door to the stall opened up and a man in a business suit walked in.

Looking down into the slit in the wall, he said, "Looks like Mitchell has the gloryhole open again."

I watched as he took his shoes off. He undid his belt and unzipped his pants and took them off, folding them onto something I could not see off to my left. He pulled his white Y-fronts off, too, and laying them on the floor beside his shoes, shuffled up to the wall until, just like Wanda said, he hung his half-hard penis into my little crawlspace. It was the first one I had really seen up close and in the light. With the two guys I'd done it with, there'd been some hasty unzipping of pants, and my dress bunched up on my stomach prevented me from seeing anything down there until there'd been the mess to clean up.

I still couldn't believe this was happening. Did people really do this? I didn't see I had much choice. I squirted some of the oil on my hands and rubbed them together like I'd seen this guy giving a massage do once. I arranged the pillow so my knees would be on it and knelt in front of the wall. I touched the man's penis with my hand. It jumped.

"There we go," the man on the other side said, "It's alive." Someone in another stall snickered.

I moved my face close enough to it to smell it and was repulsed at first. It smelled like nothing I'd ever smelled before, but it wasn't gross or sweaty. I took the tip in my mouth. It tasted different from anything I'd ever had in my mouth, too. I put my hand on it, in front of my lips just like Wanda said and moved them up and down his shaft. He got harder and longer, and the taste of olive oil spread across my lips.

"Ooooh, yeah," said the man, a little too loudly.

He reached a pretty big size and then stopped getting bigger. I kept going back and forth on it, hand followed by mouth. I changed hands when the oil got thin on my left one. My mouth started getting tired, so I took it off and just used my hand for a few strokes. I put my mouth back on him in a few minutes and he started pushing in further, trying to get as much of his penis as he could into my room and through the hole I was making with my hand and mouth. I used my hand to push all the way to his body a few times, and suddenly, he grunted while my mouth was all the way on him and I felt the penis jerk. A new taste filled my mouth. Before I could stop it, my head jerked backwards, as I wasn't ready for that. I watched in horror as another white string squirted from the hole at the end of his penis, this one landing in my right eye and stringing down the front of my dress. I put my mouth back on him and let him squirt the rest in my mouth. I tried to catch it so I could spit it in the bucket like Wanda said, but some of it slid down my throat. I wanted to cry. I felt like the lowest human on the face of the earth. The stuff in my eye burned, but the sticky string stretching from my throat to my stomach was worse. I could feel it going all the way down.

The man backed up and gave his penis a final yank. Another white string squirted a little ways, then fell to the floor. I reached for a towel and wiped my eye and cleaned my face and dress. The taste in my mouth was awful. I sucked on a lemon and had some water and quietly spat it all in the bucket. Tears still ran down my face, especially from my right eye.

The man was hurriedly putting his clothes on. He tossed a bill -- a dollar bill! -- through the opening. "Good job, little missy," he said as he left.

The door didn't even close. There was already another man there. He was in jeans and looked to only be about 25 or so.

Mitchell's comment about "... twenty of them" came back to me. "I might have to do that 19 more times?" It was almost more than I could stand. But he did say I might do half, and if they all give me a dollar, that would be a good deal of money to make in one night.

The new man unzipped his pants and pulled them down to his knees and waddled up to the wall, his penis entering right at my eye level. I reached out my tongue and gave the underside of his penis a lick and rubbed more olive oil on my hands. His penis kept growing out straight. I looked at it closely. It had more veins in it than I had imagined. I didn't think they'd have veins visible at all. I put the end in my mouth and and hand in front of my lips and started sucking on him. He muttered beneath his breath and I couldn't understand it all, but I did pick up "... go you Jezebel ... " It didn't take long until he was pushing harder and faster through the hole I made with my hand and my lips. So I pushed back harder and he let out a big "Oooh God," and squirted a powerful series of jets into my mouth. It was a lot more than the first man, and once again, though I tried not to swallow it, I could feel a string of the sliminess as it went down my gullet.

That was the worst part of the whole night, the feeling of being used by a total stranger and the slimy string down my throat. I inevitably swallowed some of every man's "jizz." And I took money for it. "Jezebel" was right.

So the evening went. I finished off 11 men that night. I hated every minute of it. Between men five and six, some of that white stuff came roaring back up from my stomach. I puked in the pail, but when I looked around, there was already another half-hard penis waiting for me. I ended up with $9, more cash money than I had seen in my life.

Mitchell gave me a ride home. He didn't say much until he dropped me off. "You did good. See you next week."

Momma hugged me when I came in. "Did they hurt you, Addy?" She didn't know about the tips or exactly what I did for them. I'd hid the money in my pocket inside my dress to keep Mitchell from getting any ideas. I hid it from Momma now.

"No momma, they didn't really hurt me," I said. But I couldn't tell her what they did to me. She wouldn't believe humans could be so low.

A few more nights like this one and I can go to New Orleans, too, or maybe Houston, and get a job or a husband.