The Last Don - Mario Puzo [201]
Dante and Losey had a powerful common urge. They were both dandies interested in their looks, and they both had a similar sexual drive for the domination of women. Not so much erotic but as an expression of power. They took to spending time together when Dante was in the West. They went to dinner together and cruised the nightclubs. Dante never dared to bring him to Vegas and the Xanadu, and it was not to his purpose.
Dante loved to tell Losey of how he was first the abject extravagant courter of women, and the women were imperious in the power of their beauty. And then how he enjoyed the imperiousness by maneuvering them into a position where they could not escape the unwilling giving of sex. Losey, a little contemptuous of Dante’s trick, would tell how he would break women down from the very beginning with his extraordinary macho presence, and then humiliate them.
Both of them declared that they would never force a woman to have sex who did not respond to their courtship. They both agreed that Athena Aquitane would be a grand prize if she ever gave them an opening. When they roved around the L.A. clubs together and picked up women, they would compare notes and laugh at those vain women who thought they could go to the utmost limit and then refuse the final act. Sometimes the protests would be too vehement, and then Losey would show his shield and tell the women he would bust them for prostitution. Since many of them were soft hookers, the threat worked.
They spent evenings of camaraderie, orchestrated by Dante. Losey, when not telling the “nigger” stories, tried to define the varieties of hookers.
There were first the out-and-out prostitutes who held one hand out for money and grabbed your cock with the other. Then there was the soft hooker who was attracted to you and gave you a friendly screw and then, before you left in the morning, asked you for a check to help pay the rent.
Then there was the soft hooker who loved you but loved others too and established a long-term relationship studded with gifts of jewelry for every holiday, including Labor Day. Then there were the freelance nine-to-five secretaries, airline stewardesses, shop clerks in fancy boutiques, who invited you up to their apartment for coffee after an expensive dinner and then tried to throw you out on your ass to freeze in the street without even a hand job. These were their favorites. Sex with them was exciting, fraught with drama, tears, and subdued cries for forbearance and patience, which produced a sex that was better than love.
One night after they had dinner at Le Chinois, a restaurant in Venice, Dante suggested they take a stroll along the boardwalk. They sat on a bench and watched the human traffic go by, beautiful young girls on Rollerblades, pimps of all colors pursuing them and shouting endearments, the soft hookers selling T-shirts decorated with sayings incomprehensible to the two men. Hare Krishnas with begging bowls, bearded groups of singers with guitars, family groups with cameras, and reflecting them, the black ocean of the Pacific, on whose sandy beaches isolated twosomes crouched under blankets they believed disguised their fornication.
“I could lock up everybody here for probable cause,” Losey said, laughing. “What a fucking zoo.”
“Even those pretty young kids on skates?” Dante asked.
“I’d just bust them for carrying pussies as a dangerous weapon,” Losey said.
“Not many eggplants here,” Dante said.
Losey stretched out on the beach, and when he spoke it was with a fair imitation of a Southern accent.
“I think I’ve been too hard on my black brethren,” he said. “It’s like the liberals always say, it all springs from their having been slaves.”
Dante waited for the punch line.
Losey linked his hands behind his head and pulled back his jacket to let his gun holster show