Kill Kill Faster Faster (2 page)

I
owned Flowers’s cunt.

I owned it.

I could make it do anything. It was never like that shit, Jane Brody writing about human sexuality in the
New York Times
, or Dr. Ruth or Dr. Judy on the radio.

I owned it.

I would just put my fingers up her cunt, touch the top, you know, push up there, and, after a while, move my fingers down, touch the bottom, put pressure down there.

Then I slide my fingers up, around, touch the wall, come back down, you know, lick there, you know.

I didn’t have to stick my cock in.

I would, but I didn’t have to.

I could do it with my hand. She came like a man. Her cunt would erupt. There would be like a gurgling sound, and there’d be like palpitations. Liquid would come. She had a smell. Man, I dug it. When I buried my nose down there and I smelled that smell, I couldn’t get enough of it.

It’s the street, man, it’s the fucking street.

It done it to me.

I been shot.

The bullet caught me in the back, by the kidney. It spun me around.

Beware, motherfucker, someone coming after you, wants to do you dirty.

A robber at your door.

What’s he aim to take? What can he take? Your life? Big fucking deal. Your life ain’t nothing.

A predator lurks.

He’s waiting.

He’s waiting for me.

Springing.

Through the door he come before it can close behind.

I make no bones about it.

My daughters scared, terrified, them lying in bed in their room, listening to me and their mother making love, Kim screaming, them not knowing what it was, coming, running, afraid.

I am out of control, man.

My body is shaking.

My mind is not working.

My days are numbered.

There is that red haze.

I owned Flowers’s cunt.

I used to ask her, later on, when I was completely fucked, I used to ask her, Am I in a love affair with you or what? And if I am, what the fuck you think you’re doing fucking with me like you are? You’re fucking with me, right?

It’s the not knowing that eats you up. You been there. You know. Right?

Nobody treats me that way. Nobody, I told her. Not like that.

Fuck you, she says.

Fuck you.

Right back.

We all have our own little temptations. That I have fallen is no fault of my own. I’m weak. People say how I’m like so strong, so bad. Bad boy. Women draping over me. Oh, Joey, you look so young. Prison must have agreed with you, ha-ha.

But I’m not young.

I’m old. I’m an old soul.

Flowers called me old man.

She called me knucklehead.

She called me coolman.

She say, Look out.

Women say, Ooh, look out. He’s dangerous. He’s angry. Careful of Joey One-Way.

One night, it was our last night together, we was in a hotel, me and Flowers, I accuse her, accuse her of slumming with me, fucking with me, being into me for the sex, for the danger, like she think she better than me.

I’m just playing with her, but she must have thought about it all serious like, took me at my word, because she get all quiet, slip into the bathroom, take a piss, I can hear the tinkle, start dressing for me.

That night, by this time, it’s very late. By right she should be home with her husband, Markie Mann, man who got me out of the lockup after all them years, but she’s in the hotel bathroom, getting ready to fuck me.

The door is open a crack. I can see her. Fleur. Flower in French.

I call her Flowers.

She comes out. She must have been thinking about it, what I say, it must have been eating at her. She strike a pose. She says, You say I’m slumming with you and you may be right, maybe I am slumming with you. But you like it like that, don’t you? You like what I can give you. You like the restaurants, the hotels, the clothes from Agnes B., the scotch I pour you, the Armagnac, the meals with good French cheese. You like being out of the joint, fucking a beautiful woman.

Like that’s the criterion.

But she right. She right.

It was an hour before dawn. It was still dark outside. There was no light. Not outside. Not inside. I got up. I had no choice. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t lie there no longer. I was fucked, man. I was fucked. Waiting, knowing, waiting for the cops to arrive. Next to me, all around me, in the big room, big as a fieldhouse, I could hear the men in rows, snoring, men on cots, heads thrown back, necks exposed, like with a straight razor you could do considerable damage.

The night before I been prowling the street.

What I done to her?

The night before I been prowling the street, pacing the city, Friday night, nowhere to go, back and forth, I see sitting in a row, Indian file, outside the parochial school on Avenue B, a long line of old women bundled, waiting, Friday night, lined up for food to be given out the next morning, all night long waiting there, even in the cold.

Me checking out the old dope scene, just for old times’ sake, just see the scene, C and D, coke and dope, don’t do nothing about scoring.

That’s what I’m telling myself.

There was a guy smoking a cigarette in front of a shop on Seventh Street between First and A. The halfway’s on Third. A very attractive young girl, maybe seventeen, was coming down Seventh from the opposite direction. The guy with the cigarette put what’s left of the butt down on a garbage can lid, let it burn there for a second, watching the girl come. She passed. He kept watching her. His eyes stuck.

I took his butt, man.

I took it. Pick it up, and start smoking it.

See what I’m saying, what I’m driving at?

There’s nothing I’m below.

He reach for it, nothing there, probably thought it fell on the ground or something. But I was smoking it, thinking about her, Fleur, flower in French, my baby.

I
got out of jail ninth of September 1996 after serving a jolt of seventeen and a half years of a fifteen-to-life, walking out of the Auburn reformatory in Auburn, New York.

People call me Joey One-Way. They call me that because in the joint I used to say, There’s only one way I’m getting out of here, and that’s in a box.

I warned Flowers. I warned her. Stay the fuck away from me, girl. Please. Stay away.

I told her I was going to write about her, but I told her, I’m only going to take one aspect of you to write about.

What aspect is that? she asked.

Your cunt, you cunt.

Violence is all around me. What made me so fucking violent? So angry? What is that?

I try to go straight, man. I try. But there’s no way. The red haze has taken over.

Not for nothing I don’t see nothing. God save me, O my brothers. God save me.

This is what happened to me in the lockup. This is the God’s honest truth. There was a lot of shit going down in there. A lot of power and racial shit, blacks, whites, browns, what have you. A lot of slip-sliding, side-stepping, apricot-brandying.

In the lockup, whites are worst, man, hands down. The white man in the joint is the low end of the feeding chain. Not for nothing, the craziest, most irrational, most desperate fucks are the white men.

I’m a white man, man. I’m a white motherfucker. I’m a tough-ass, don’t-mess, kick-your-coolie, take-it-in-the-ear, take-no-prisoners, tough-ass, white-butt, swallow-me-whole motherfucker, man.

And I’m not just spouting shit to convince myself neither, motherfucker. I’m not trying to convince you. So don’t be saying that shit at me. Don’t be thinking it! I’m in your face, cock-sucker.

One day in the shower room, I ain’t been there in the lockup too long, but I been warned, I been warned, they coming for me. I heard there was some kind of auction on the yard, and I been auctioned off for a couple of packs of cigarettes and now the dirty white boys, the buttfuckers, they coming for me and they want me to know they coming, no bones about it, and they want me to know I am theirs, which I do.

This is the story I tell Fleur when she ask. This is what I tell her. It is like a seduction dance. This is how it was when I was the fresh meat, my love.

She commiserate, sweet thing. She tell me she know all about it, she been there, done that. After all, she tell me, she been in prison in Marseilles.

Surprise, surprise.

I look at her, see what I see, but when I look deep, I don’t know what she know. I know she telling me the truth, but I don’t know what she went through being in prison in France. Did they serve her pate? You know what I’m saying?

What I know is what I know, and what I know is they was coming and nobody was looking out for me, and I didn’t ask nobody to look out for me and I didn’t look for nobody, everybody out for themselves and no one was asking, survival of the fittest. I’d been doing my best, talking tough, but only when necessary, keeping to myself, trying to stay out of the general flow of it. You hear the rap, you seen the movie. You know. You gotta do something crazy to keep them off you, man. Make them think you one crazy motherfucker. Then once you do that, then everybody stays away, cause they think, that dude…you know, he crazy, man, he crazed. Still and all, I’m living in fear. Pure fear. And I’ll tell you another thing, I never told nobody, I never breathed a word, not to a soul, what I done, killed a sister, that my wife, my Kimba, was a sister. You better believe I never told nobody that. They woulda been writing on my tombstone dead by dawn. Bet your bottom dollar on that one, bro, them black men woulda been the ones coming for me, woulda grabbed me by the short hairs, and hold me up to the light. Why you marrying a black woman, brother? You got deep-seeded trouble with black women? You don’t like black women? You marrying a black woman so you can kill her? Is that it, bro? You trying to inflict you white ass on a black woman, brother? Is that it?

So I’m in the shower, and I don’t mind saying like I said, I’m scared, I’m scared all the time, and I’m watching my ass all the time, and a bunch of these greasy-haired nancy boys, these fucks, these buttfuckers, they come for me. They’re not there for nothing, they’re there for me, they come to do me specific. Two or three of them grab me and the head buttfucker, no questions asked, just bend me over and sticks his cock up my ass. Plenty of grease up here, he says, make me stand right up straight on the end of it, pain, shock, fear, make me suddenly jerk my hand away where one of his partners in crime got me by the wrist, and I reach underneath, between my legs, and I grab the guy who’s got his cock up my ass by the balls, at first almost like a caress, and he respond real low and sexy and breathy, That’s right, and I just yank as hard as I fucking can, and I mean I
yank
, and I tear his balls out by the fucking roots, breathy, you hear what I’m saying, by the fucking roots!

Oh, man, he howling. The man he writhing and howling, and all bloody between the legs, his nuts hanging in my hand, his scrotum. He collapses on the floor. Everybody’s looking, staring, nobody saying nothing, waiting to see what I’m gonna do. The guy’s screaming. Man, you gotta love agony. Agony in others is a first love. That’s the thing. That’s cool. Can’t help your enjoyment, man, the guy’d just been fucking you brutal up the ass, now lying at your feet, rolling on the floor, crying, you know what I’m saying, and when he fell to the tile floor it was like a relief on my sphincter, daddy, you hear me when I tell you, like someone took a cork out my ass, I don’t know why, and I just relax, I just let go, I let fly, and I shit him. I shit him, right square on his ugly fucking buttfucker face, where he deserve.

In my own defense, I’d had to take a shit anyway. All that time, when I was standing in the shower before it all came down, I was washing myself, I was thinking, man, I got to get out of here and take a shit, but I hate it when you’re all wet and the toilet paper get all soggy and stick on your asshole, so I decide I’m gonna hold it till after, and then this guy comes in, this pale white-skinned buttfucker nancy boy with his cock in his hand, all purple and red and stiff and skinny-minny, and he think he slick and he bungie-hole me, he do, him lying on the tile floor between my legs now, whimpering, Oh, oh, my balls, my balls, what you do to my balls, sweet Jesus! and it just come over me and I just let go my sphincter on him. I shit him right then and there.

Shit went in his mouth, up his nose, in his eyes. The release was like pure pleasure. Seeing all that nasty there on his face, the guy gagging and retching and coughing, I bent right down there over him, and I kneeled over him and I talked to him in whispers, take my revenge, tough guy, and he could hear me even through the pain and shit, and I scoped out his friends, and I pinched his fucking nostrils while I stared at them, like a fucking sado lover, get his attention, look down at him, make him look in my eyes, make him come better, rise to the heights, you know, pinched them flaring nostrils off, and I clamped my hand over his slash mouth like we was into rough sex, the two of us, the stink of my shit getting to him, saints be praised, you know how it is, you know what they say, my shit don’t stink, and out of the blue, just like that, he start to throw up, you know, retch, and heave real violent, deep from within, his fish-white belly going up and down, doing a dance, heaving, so I almost feel bad for him, almost feel compassion, you hear what I’m saying? As far as I was concerned, I had made my point, the hardboys, his posse, no one making a move, me thinking they know who I am now, I home free, and I got up, I took pity, yes I did, I got up, feeling magnacious, and begin to walk away from the poor fuck lying on the floor at my feet covered with my shit and his throw-up.

And at the door of the shower a big tall black guy who been watching, a big tall guy leaning on a mop, he been watching, and it finally dawns on me, it because of him the dirty white boys ain’t made a move on me and he stops me, he says to me, Don’t walk away from that shit, man. You walk away from a situation like that, that man come back at you, he kill you. You don’t last till six o’clock.

I look at the guy talking to me. He got sort of like gentle liquid eyes. Brown, soft, kindly. And I see what he say to me is the truth, come from the bottom of his heart, from what he knows, from his well. He looking at me, deep at me, making a connection, not wanting me to miss what he telling me.

So I take what the black man say to heart, and I turn back to finish what I started. The nancy boy’s still on the floor, his pants down around his ankles, a puddle of blood under his ass, his cock hanging crooked on his thigh, foreskin all aquiver, a poor little pathetic pink dunce cap, limp little cock, you call that a cock, motherfucker?, shrunken up, no good no more to nobody. His buddies looking at me, looking at the black guy.

I stare back at them. This time there ain’t gonna be no loving. I clamp his mouth shut, I pinch his nostrils tight, shit and vomit, aroma of stink-stink, and I hold it, and I clamp it, and I pinch it, him choking, him gagging, him sucking that shit and upchuck down into his lungs, gurgle, gurgle, fighting for air, fighting for breath, gurgle, aspirating like nobody’s business, gurgle, no one saying a word, not one thing, all silent, his best buds, his good pals, his fellow buttfuckers, watching it happen, doing nothing, just watching. Gurgle. Gurgle. The man shudder. He bellow. Shudder again.

His body arc.

Then that’s the end. He expirate, whatever.

Everybody look at him, look at me. No one says nothing. Walk away.

Made my rep. Made me.

After that everybody know Joey One-Way.

Only one way I getting out of here, bro, is in a box.

Everybody respect me when I say that.

Say, Right on, dude.

Joey, man.

Joey.

O my brothers.