Take the A-Train

We were stoned on hash brownies and mellow as a long Miles Davis riff one jazzy night in my apartment in Washington Heights that hot, wet summer when Jenny tore up my bed. We were stoned and unraveled, high on the road less traveled. Yeah, we were undressed and unimpressed with becoming what we were expected to become; Suits and Skirts, rakes and flirts, cogs in the American money machine. We fell out of school and into Bohemia, trying it on for size. Gettin' wise. Otherwise occupied. Naked and Fried.

Jenny, skinny white scrap of wanting, wasted on weed, seedbed of my own absurd antic ambitions lay slitty-eyed watching the day dim as the arc of dying sunlight struck the crumble of my ceiling into high relief, yellow as my dad's teeth, old plaster and smoke, the landscape of a past and distant world seen from miles high and as unreachable. Lying down, looking up and slowly spinning, grinning I reached for her, searched for her, beached myself on her, a ship blown off course by a storm at sea.

After sex, after crashing, thrashing upon her shore, after the thunder and the lightning of release, after the hundredth consummation of our infatuation, after spending myself, rending the sheets, sending her seething into her own tempest, tempting her, teasing her, finding and filling the place where God divided her and being delivered onto the sand hand-in-hand by the receding waves of our perfect, passionate, storm we lay on my musty bed wrapped in each other's sweaty embraces, breathing the musk and trippin' in the dusk as the night slipped up on us, bound us in its velvet ribbons and whispered, "Come, come whoever you are...."

We were hungry. For food. And too blissed to bother, too tired to piss, too into our animal selves to roll out of the bed/cave and crawl out to the hunt. One desire sated, another yawned, its maw yammering for filling. We were all appetite that summer, all appetite and no final satisfaction. Eating each other the way young lovers do. Burning the candle at both ends. In both ends. Finding all the fits our bodies allowed, if not allowed by convention (especially if not allowed by convention). Distracted by our fitting and our fitness, finding fullness followed by the ringing hollowness of hunger; wanting all of life and locked into a closed loop of lust and longing, blinded by the incandescent flash of the spark struck off our sudden, simple equation: I go into you X times.

My fridge was as empty as my stomach. Even if you're broke you can't starve in New York City and I wasn't broke, just scratchin'. So out into the concrete jungle we had to go, boned and exquisitely stoned we had to go. We had to go to Joe's Pizza on Carmine St. down in the Village that stayed open all night, that smelled like onions and beer and sweat on a night like this, that hummed like a fluorescent light and drew moths like us to its flickering flame. It was an old-school kind of dive with jazz and dark booths and something secret in the shadows.

"Come on, get up. Let's go to Joe's," I mumbled as I pulled myself slowly out of the hash-sex-funk, punch-drunk and stumbling into my pajama pants, red Converse and sleeveless Yankees sweatshirt. I watched Jenny crack her eyes, wipe her mouth and crawl to the edge of the bed. Willowy little slip of a woman that she was, she looked more junior high than college junior, but she was legal and had the plastic to prove it, both ID and Amex. I was taller than her by a head and a half. That's why she could wear my t-shirt like a dress -- it came to her knees. It draped loosely on her and fluttered, just catching on her nipple tips and hip horns, the handles I used to lock her onto me when we did it doggy.

Jenny was bony as death, living on sex and pills and happiness. She was all sharp angles and stretched fabric of flesh; slat ribbed and flat chested, pointy and jointy. A man could hurt himself if he took her the wrong way. And I mean taking her physically or emotionally the wrong way. I'd seen her burn a boy to the ground for making assumptions about her intelligence or her strength or her willingness to wrangle. That was why I loved her then. That she'd given herself to me above all others when she was doing pre-med at Columbia and I was a charity case brother struggling at City College gave me a fat head and another frequently fat head swinging down below. I was cock of the block that summer.

She slipped her tiny feet into dark green galoshes and threw the long, waxed-cotton duster I found at the Salvation Army around her shoulders, snapped it up the front, shook her long sun-blond hair over her shoulder and asked, "What time is it?"

"Shit if I know, or care," I replied. "Here, put the keys and Metro card in your pocket and let's get the fuck downtown. I'm starvin'."

We staggered down the hall, spun down the five flights of stairs and out into the thick-aired night. No breeze. It was as hell-hot outside as in the apartment. It's never really dark in NYC, but sometimes in the middle of the night it is almost quiet. We could hear the city rumble from deep inside itself when the immediate street noises were gone. New York would wake up hungry, too, and the whirlwind of consuming would begin, the buying and selling of souls that we abjured, that we hoped to avoid, that we were probably doomed to be swept into anyway, though our slinking in the night world was a strategy to slip-slide around the maelstrom. A slip-slide glide can cause delays, as it says on the subway in the winter. We delayed the world as long as we could.

The tunnel behind the rickety, green wooden doors that leads into the 190^th Street A train station was long and damp and cool and empty, but the station was sweltering like the stations always are in the summer. The air so thick and hot that anything short of standing still would wring you into a sweat. Jenny unsnapped the duster as we waited for the train and flapped it. Down on the tracks a determined rat poked into every crevice. Otherwise, we were alone with the stink of steel, garbage, urine and carborundum deep under the earth; hot like approaching Hades and sinning like we belonged there. Far down the tunnel a faint light glowed, then grew with the shriek of the wheels.

The A train slowed into the station, the driver as stiff and unseeing as a dummy propped up in the first car. The train stirred a little hot breeze and blew scraps of trash around the platform, smoothing the damp t-shirt onto Jenny's matchstick body. We aligned ourselves with the door of the first, not surprisingly empty, car and, at the bell and swish of aluminum panels, slipped into the car where, if anything, it was even hotter that outside.

"Stand clear of the closing doors, please!" commanded the canned man-voice. The Voice of The Man, as I thought of it, stating the obvious to cover his ass, over and over all day and night on almost every train at every station. How many times had that sentence been broadcast? I wondered if the guy got royalties. Still do.

We sat right up behind the driver's box and, with a jolt that threw us a little on top of each other as the slippery Fiberglas seats accelerated out from under us, were sucked into the dark tunnel in our own little, brightly lit, shiny tin can. I was still stoned and hungry and half awake. Jenny slouched against me as the rocking train dragged itself from station to station. The detritus of the day littered the car. A Daily News lay abandoned on the seat opposite. An empty Coke bottle rolled the length of the car and back as we stopped and started.

Somewhere around 145^th Street Jenny turned languidly and took my stubbly face in her little hand. She twisted her mouth up to mine and kissed me. She was soft, yielding and tasted of sex. I cupped her head in my hand and returned the kiss, gently sucking her thin lips, stirred to mild passion again as her mouth fell open and she let me probe into her with my tongue. Then she surprised me.

She swung her leg over mine and straddled me, letting the duster spread like a tent over us both. Jenny's knees were on the seats on either side of me, her green boots dangling. Her long hair fell forward, tickling my skin. Our heat was amplified. The car rocked as she nuzzled at my mouth. The lights flickered. The squeal and rattle of the train receded as my focus narrowed to the world within our little tent. I was hard in my PJs. I could feel her warmth radiating as she held herself above me. My hands naturally moved to touch her but were outside the tent of the duster. I wrapped my arms around her, feeling the buttery texture of the old waxed cotton coat, nearly as smooth and supple as her skin.

But she pushed my arms away whispering, "No, baby, let me drive."

I gripped the front edge of the seat on either side of her legs. And just as well because when we pulled into the next station the stop nearly threw us forward in a pile. She drew her hands up, dragged her fingernails between my cornrows and smiled with a nasty, smoldering lust in her eyes. The several straphangers waiting on the platform that flashed by as we slowed had gotten into other cars, thankfully, so we were still alone.

The train lurched forward and Jenny reached between us to pull down my pajamas. I rose up enough to free them and she grasped my cock, now full again, and pulled on him, laying him neatly on my belly, straight up. She raised the t-shirt and I could see the tuft of yellow furze that graced her mound of Venus below her hollow middle. Slowly she lowered herself until her sex was split over the length of me, like a big kiss. Still wet from before, Jenny began sliding up and back along my cock, getting us both lubricated. I held on.

We must have been near 116^th Street when she took my cock in her hand and guided me into her. It was a long, slow decent that she made as her insides stretched to accommodate me. I felt each ripple of flesh bump along my cockhead as she slid deliciously down. Jenny whimpered and nuzzled her face into my neck, hunched over me and, then with her hands at my lower back, pulled herself down onto me with effort. I could do nothing but hold the seats and watch the dark tunnel walls slip past.

Jenny got herself socketed all the way down and tight then let the train do the work. For several station stops we just held on as the thrust and jangle of the train jostled our bodies together. It was like nothing I'd ever felt before. The completely unpredictable and random gyrations of the motion of the train were transmitted through the juncture of our bodies, were magnified where my cock was sucked deep into her. Each jolt and shudder was telegraphed directly through my dick as I strained to hold my place. Jenny just lay on me mewling into my neck as she climaxed quietly again and again.

When the little Chinese woman got on the car at 59^th Street I hoped to God Jenny looked like she was asleep. The woman sat halfway down the car and stole a couple of curious glances our way but like a good New Yorker she avoided eye contact. I wasn't so stoned that I hadn't thought we could get in trouble like this, just swept along with Jenny like I had been all summer. I could feel a dribble of pussy juice tickle its way down and around my balls. The Fiberglas seat was getting even more slippery.

As we jolted through the 50^th Street and Times Square stations I prayed no one else would enter our car and I tried to look innocent with what looked like a passed out white girl draped over me and an approaching orgasm that had me wanting to jump out of the seat, slam Jenny down on her back and pound her silly no matter who was watching. I occurred to me that the Chinese woman was probably going all the way to Canal Street, several stops past ours. I couldn't hold it any longer, though.

Although I kept a straight face and looked pointedly at the opposite window and the underbelly of the city flashing by, I was trembling with desire, straining to keep from erupting despite the incredible jolts of pleasure striking through my prick like touching the third rail. Jenny just lay there absorbing the pleasure, quivering in delight, smothering the occasional exclamation of joy in my neck.

There's nothing like the sound of a woman in ecstasy to trigger an orgasm in me and finally there was nothing I could do but come. I clenched the seat edge and my buttocks and felt the bolts of my jism fly through my dick. I was as stiff as steel from toe to head and it took everything I had to keep from thrusting upward into her. Jenny squeezed me with her legs and her cunt and groaned deep in her throat as she felt me empty myself deep, deep in her. It was probably the best orgasm of my life.

I coughed to cover the explosive shout that the orgasm wrung from my throat. I couldn't bear to look and see if the Chinese woman was watching. Jenny kept massaging me with her cunt as I quickly deflated, but I could hardly catch my breath.

"Jesus, girl, Jesus," I breathed, "What the fuck you trying to do, get me arrested?"

"I would never press charges, Loverboy, you know that. I can't be away from you for a minute." She looked at me then with the circles under her eyes, gaunt from dissipation and too much pleasure and I could see the price she was paying for her summer of living dangerously.

The train rumbled into the 4^th Street station and I jostled her roughly, hissing, "This is our stop, this is our stop!"

I pushed her up and quickly pulled up my pajamas. She stumbled upright and jerked the duster around her, hugging it closed and looking panicked. I grabbed the pole, heaved myself up and hustled her out into the station, not looking back at the Chinese woman. That car was going to smell like rut all night.

We walked the block down 6^th Avenue toward Carmine in the still sweltering night. Suddenly I saw the end of our affair coming toward us like a train distantly in the tunnel. I could hear the crashing and squealing of its disintegration faintly but growing louder. I felt the sadness welling up and the beginning of a bitter anger.

My sticky cock was flopping in my pajamas and I was walking down 6^th Avenue in the middle of the night with a stoned, slumming white girl who was either going to get much sicker or snap out of it and go back to her privilege and power. Either way I would not be in the picture. I'd be back to bootstrapping myself, smiling at the Man and scratchin' just like always.

She was giggling as we neared Joe's. I bent down and asked, "What the fuck's so damned funny?"

Jenny whispered in my ear, "I've got cum in my boots..."