This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of Down in the Dirt magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
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As the 1980’s approached people were flooding into Texas from the north to work in the oil fields. Billy left Houston for New Orleans three weeks after his house burned to the ground. He got his health card and a negative tuberculosis test from the Orleans parish and started work at the Chez Mon Ami. He could cook like hell, Cajun style, and nobody cared if he was seventeen or seventy, from Texas or Timbuktu. Plus he could parlez-vous with the Creoles from his mother having been French.
Stephanie Tyler had gotten him the job after his parents and sister died in the Houston fire. Neither of them could stand the thought of Billy going to live at any kind of foster home. Stephanie and Billy had been neighbors growing up, first in Port Arthur and then in Houston when the oil company moved their offices. “His mother was a Saucier,” Stephanie told Guy Palermo, who owned the Chez. “She went to school in Paris or San Francisco, somewhere out west like that.” A few days later Billy was at the new place getting it ready for opening day.
He and a rag-tag crew of Haitians had done a bang-up job on the restaurant’s opening night. The owner invited the staff over to his house to watch the return fight between Leon Spinks and Muhammad Ali.
The show started with a featherweight title fight where the champion actually wore a crown of feathers into the ring. Thirty seconds into the fight and, Bam! Down goes Little Red Lopez, flat on his face. He was up at the count of eight and Guy said “He’s a goner,” but then the announcer was saying to look out because Little Red was a slow starter and had never been stopped. “I give anybody 10 to 1 Malvarez takes that skinny son of a bitch out in less than two rounds.”
Billy said “It’s a bet. How much?”
Guy looked amused. “How much you got to bet, Mr. High Roller?”
“Hundred against your thousand?”
“Done.”
Between rounds they gave Little Red smelling salts in his corner and he wobbled out on shaky legs for round 2. All of a sudden he crashed a right to the challenger’s chin and laid him out like a junkie drops a drug habit going cold-turkey.
Guy handed Billy 10 hundred-dollar bills. “Hell, I knew the skinny bastard was tough, but he looked dead in the first.” He pulled out a money clip from his back pocket. “This next kid from New York is pretty good. Anybody want to take Galindez and give me 2-to-1?” There was mumbling all around the room, as they showed clips of the light-heavyweight battlers’ previous fights. Nobody wanted to bet against the Argentine champion. Stephanie came over to see Billy’s money, gave him a kiss on the mouth, and sat on his lap, natural as could be. Leftovers from the restaurant lay around in an assortment of pots and trays, everyone munching. She had on a short skirt and a t-shirt with the restaurant’s name where the men were sure to read it even if they didn’t know French.
On the television the light heavyweight champion Victor Galindez was having trouble with a skinny Jewish kid named Mike Rossman, who made every move straight from the pages of an old-time pugilism textbook.
With Stephanie in his lap Billy really didn’t give a flip who won the fight, especially with the roll of bills in his pocket that he had just won on the Little Red Lopez fight. Next thing he knew he was kneading her thighs and one of his fingers slid between the slippery rose petals under her panties. “Hey tiger, hold on,” she said.
“Flirtin’ around the restaurant’s one thing,” Guy said, “But if you gonna do a seeyus number like that, you need to get a room.” He laughed and added, “And I don’t mean the coat room back there.”
“C’mon outside, honey,” Stephanie said. “I’ve got something to calm you down.”
Stephanie and Billy’s big sister used to talk in the next room when they thought everyone had gone to sleep. Stephanie’s parents sent her to a boarding school one year and when she got back she said to Billy’s sister, “I told him to stop, but then when he put it in I just started coming.”
“Did it hurt?”
“No, we’d been kissing and I was soaking wet.”
Billy’s sister had a lot of boy friends after that. When the house burned down the police asked about them, were any of them the jealous type? “No,” Billy told them. “They were just guys from the neighborhood.”
Valerie was the newest manager in the group that had been running restaurants since the old days when the Cajun chicken shacks were just starting to compete with Colonel Sanders. One of the original owners had been busted for pot but otherwise the whole group was a legend untainted in the eatery business. Valerie cast a reproachful eye at Stephanie but then someone from the back said, “I’ve got $500 even money that Ali stops that kid on cuts.”
“You have a bet,” Valerie said to the man coming in from the back room. She reached into her purse. “Guy, can you spot me a hundred?”
Billy and Steph stepped outside while the Spinks-Ali bets were figured. When they were outside, Stephanie lit a reefer, took a drag, and handed it to Billy. She reached down between his legs. “I saw it pressing against your jeans when you got up. It looked good, really good!”
She reached out and stroked his chest. “You must work out a lot. Valerie said you were a fighter, Golden Gloves” Billy nodded. Her arm was around his neck, and then her soft warm tongue was all the way in his mouth. He was pushing her out towards the alley-way where he saw tree cover. The pot wasn’t calming him at all, only making his hormones race faster. “Back there,” he said. “Or else in your car.”
“You like it dangerous, huh? How old did you say you are?”
“Next month I’ll be~”
Stephanie put her hand over his mouth. “Shush! There’s a motel down the highway just a mile. You have that roll of hundreds and I made good tips today. You want to party with me instead of watching the fight?
“We’ll split the room?”
“Deal.” They shook on it.
When Billy first put it in Stephanie’s legs flew up and she cried out his name as they rolled and thrashed around on the ocean of the Motel Vendredi waterbed. Between bouts she said, “You make it hurt so good down there. There’s nothing better than a hard young guy.”
Billy asked her if she had a boyfriend. “Screw him. I can tell he thinks he’s too good for me. Lately he’s been telling me I should get my mind off sex.” She laughed without any humor at all, handing him a joint she had just rolled and lit. “Best thing about a high-school guy, he’ll never tell you that.”
Billy shook his head at the pot and she put it out in the ash tray. Her hand was between his legs, making him hard again. “I can’t believe how long it is,” she said. Next she was arching her back to take it all in. As she rocked and swayed she closed her eyes and her face looked as if she would cry. Later she said, “Spend the night with me, okay?”
“Sure. I got nowhere else I need to be.”
“I’ll take you to my place in the morning, make you breakfast and we’ll eat together like a family.”
“Sounds good.” They lay there a while in silence except for the hum of the air conditioner.
“How did you know to bet on that fighter who wore the crown of feathers?”
“Little Red Lopez trains in the desert, runs ten miles a day. He takes care of business.”
“What about Malv~ the other fighter?”
“Valerie knows the bar tender at the club where he parties. He’d been out every night last week, so I knew he wouldn’t last.”
“Valerie likes you. You’re a nice kid.” She draped her arm across his shoulder. “I know you were afraid, you know, that they’d send you away. Your sister was Valerie’s best friend back in Port Arthur, they were tight.” Stephanie smiled and watched Billy’s face.
“I was gone the night of the fire.”
“Past is past.”
“I was in Galveston for the weekend.”
She put her finger to his mouth. “It’s okay, nobody thinks you had anything to do with it. You wouldn’t be working with us if we thought that.”
“I can talk to Valerie and see what she can do about getting you into a school that doesn’t suck too bad. She knows people. Her little sister goes to high school half-days, works in the afternoon. It’ll be okay, New Orleans isn’t as strict as Texas.”
“Laissez les bonnes temps roulez,” Billy said.
“Yeah, let the good times roll. You know that song, where Jerry Garcia says, ‘Houston, too close to New Orleans?’”
“Yeah, Truckin’.”
“He got it backwards, don’t you think?”
“I don’t have anything against Houston. Anyway, I’m staying in New Orleans, come hell or high water.”
She asked him if her teeth bothered him. One of them was chipped and dark, and made her look sexy like a vampire does. He said no and she told him, “I was a thalidomide baby, and this was my only symptom, so I’m pretty lucky if you ask me. Do you want me to talk to Valerie for you?”
“Okay.”
“For your part of the deal, you can help me ‘keep my mind off sex.’ And we’ll take care of business like that Little Red Lopez.” She pulled him tighter and they drifted off to sleep.
