Chapter 2

It was half way through the salary months. Three more months and I would be on my own financially. It wasn't like the money was pouring in, but things had improved enough to make me think I would do okay, and even keep my two employees.

Three months anniversary to the day of my captivity was New Year's Eve. Old rodent visited briefly. He paid me after I paid him, giving him the paperwork to prove his returns.

"You're doing a fine job," Fast Eddie said. "Any other improvements you let me and your uncle know. Keep up the good work. You'll find a little extra in your pay envelope. A little Christmas bonus courtesy of your uncle." There was that grin again, burying the chuckle he would probably let loose in the privacy of his limo.

I looked inside the white business envelope and counted out double the usual, two thousand dollars. I thanked him profusely and escorted him to his car waiting outside, driver leaning on the front hood taking a smoke. The driver quickly dropped it and was at the back door to let the rodent into his plush black Lincoln Continental limo.

It was nearing midnight, and Bradley's not being the place to be to celebrate the occasion of the passing and gaining of a year, it was dead. I was staring transfixed by the bounty in the envelope. Suddenly the door opened and in walked Hazel and Connie hand in hand. After only a week working, Connie had Hazel's heart strings. Though they seldom worked together, it was a habit for Connie to hang out later with the older transvestites, picking up on their craft. But he was bored with their cool, and enjoyed conversations with Hazel better. They were living together, and to tell by the rosy cheeks and demeanor they both displayed, loving each other at the heart, and lower, too. And their minds too. They sat at the bar on bar stools. I ran into the cooler and pulled out champagne. It was Dom Perignon. What the fuck, it was an expense I didn't have to worry about. I unwrapped it and popped the cork with the loveliest of noises, a low robust exhaling of air. I poured the effervescence. With a "Happy New Year," we touched glasses and drank, and it was good. The champagne. The company. Extremely good.

After several minutes of quiet sipping, me admiring the beauty of my two employees, Hazel decided to get something off her chest. With Hazel you could tell she was holding something back. It was like she needed to take a piss. Then she would let loose as bravely as could be with some brazen truth or other.

"Connie and I want to try something," she said energetically.

"Don't let me stop you," I said.

"Well Jack," she took a sip of the delicious champagne. "Connie and I were thinking that... well... um... you see Jack, Connie, she's a... she's a poet, and... well... and I can play drums and bass and guitar... so I was thinking we could do some performance. You got the stage and everything... and you said you wanted to get some feedback... some thoughts on improvements... so... maybe with a sound system and some lights and maybe an effect or two we could do some cool shows here. Get the name around. Attract business, you know."

"Let me think about it," I said as I reached down into the pay envelope and counted out eight fifties, four each from the bonus money to give to them. "I got a little extra from my boss, so I thought I'd spread around his gratitude."

"Wow," said Connie. Not a boy to mince words. At least not in conversation. "You sure?"

"You two go play. What the hell are you doing here?"

"And you all by yourself on New Year's Eve? No way," said Hazel sweetly.

When New Years officially happened she gave me a kiss on my lips nearly as delicious as the champagne. And Connie gave me a kiss, to which I wasn't as open. We had a three way hug and I sent them on their loving way, promising to give thought to Hazel's proposition.

I didn't see Hazel until Thursday night, four days later. By that time I had written out ideas for equipment for the stage. I asked her to add to it with anything she might want. I told her I wasn't knowledgeable about P.A. systems and such and asked her to research it further. Her happiness, as were any emotions she felt, radiated from her face. She kissed me with gratitude. Don't get me wrong, Hazel was a beautiful and desirable girl, with curves definitely in all the right places. I often admired as discretely as possible how her ass moved when she walked out into the tables, or how her tits bounced and her nipples occasionally stiffened when she walked back to the bar. But Hazel and I shared a different sort of relationship. Even beyond employer/employee we had become friends. Besides, I wasn't comfortable with the idea of pursuing her what with her working for me. If anything happened it could only dampen what I hoped would be a long term relationship. And with the beautiful women frequenting the bar, the real women that is, though it was not always easy to tell, I knew I wanted to be free to pursue any opportunities that might come my way.

Not that many came. Or any. I was not practiced at pursuing the opposite sex. So I left it more to chance. But being rather mediocre in looks didn't make for any attraction. Until the shows began.

The first night Hazel and Connie mounted the stage, lit up beautifully in blues and reds, Don, the handsome man, and his entourage of beautiful women and leather clad lads, were in the audience as were most of the transvestites. Both Hazel and I had invited them to the premiere of Bradley's cabaret.

Despite being busy serving the fairly large audience of transvestites and beauties and rockers, I noticed the girl to Don's left was giving me the eye. She was a stunning blonde. Full breasts pressed against her tight blouse low enough to display ample cleavage. Her skin was a soft white. Her face, nearly as made up as the neighboring girl/boys, was startlingly beautiful, her deep red lips a cute cupid's bow. I thought at first it was wishful thinking. A man often projects his hopes and lusts on such a beautiful and sexy face, hoping beyond hope that he was the manly stud he always wanted to be. But her eyes persisted in catching mine. And when they caught, she would smile a sexy smile. A couple times I even saw the tip of her tongue sneak out the side of her mouth and cross her lips. Those times I nearly toppled. I finally approached her.

"Can we talk?" I asked, leaning down, breaking through my beating heart and short breath to whisper coolly in her ear. She nodded. She stood, taking my hand. I gulped down a thick wad of shyness while leading her to the empty bar. Like her breasts, her ass was soft and full, and she was long legged and her tight pants did nothing to hide their perfect shape. She sat down at the bar. I went around to the other side to get her a drink and to hide my rising erection.

"Rachel." said the blonde.

"Jack."

"I really like the show." Her voice was forceful and committed. It was clearly a New York voice. Brooklyn I thought with how she transformed vowels.

"What do you think of the place?" I asked.

"It's got potential."

"A lot more low brow than what you expect."

"Not at all. You should see some of the after hours clubs they got running now. Real dives. But it don't matter. It's the vibes. It's the clientele. It's whatever you bring to the place. Like a diamond in the rough, sparkling sure, but with a whole lot more facets waiting to sparkle. Potential."

I had expected the warm warbling voice of the blonde bombshell circa 1955. Hers was not. But the harshness of her timbre and her Brooklyn squawk cut through her extraordinary beauty to give her face, her persona, a more comfortable normal human quality. I watched the layers of beauty shed to reveal the real girl. "After-hours clubs. I've heard about them, but I've never been."

"It's just like another bar with dancing and shit. You want to go?"

I had been leading her to ask. It had been four months since I had gotten away from this cage. Having a luscious creature be the one to lure me out sent tingles all over, especially at the base of my torso.

It was the quickest close ever.

When I closed the metal grid, it was the first time I had locked it from the outside.

A late winter freeze was blowing down 10th from the north. Luckily she had called a cab ahead of time. Actually she had three come pick us up, the entourage, the transvestites and us, and the last one was waiting. We bumped cross-town to 3rd below 14th and stopped in front of a gray metal door. We hopped out and went inside. Another bar.

I would seldom partake from my own rows of liquor bottles, but at the after-hours club I was thirsty. Jack and water for me, and for my lovely company a Dubonet on ice with a squeeze of lime. I drained mine as she sipped hers. She set hers down and took my hand, guiding me to the small mirrored dance floor. It was wonderful watching her full, luxurious, sensuous body move to the music. She enjoyed it too, spending more than half the time dancing with her reflection. But then she would spin near me and I would feel the mild bulge of my constant tumescence slide across her soft but firm derriere or along her lower belly which jutted out just enough to stir me. I bent my knees for my crushed up erect flesh to make contact with that door to the portal my flesh so wanted to enter. The enzymes released by my immense desire made me dizzy. I felt I was in a tube of a chamber, no walls or windows, but a flowing flashing libidinous mist. I wanted this woman more than I had wanted anything. I wanted her to be hot and panting naked beneath me as I held her to my naked self and studied her soft skin and her curves and my loudly demanding erection piercing her and finding the golden palace of sin inside. When the song ended, we embraced and kissed and rubbed against each other at our hottest contact points, ignoring the next disco song. After a brief but exhilarating battle of tongues, she eased off, and I watched her sexy behind undulate back to the bar and her Dubonet. I ordered another drink, which lasted at least twice as long as the first.

The libidinous tube of aether slowly evaporated. There was Don and his entourage and a few new rocknroll faces. Again I watched as young people would sit with him and then quickly depart. From one cage to another similar one. It made me more comfortable. It made me want to return to my own cage. Might as well, I thought. Once she had finished her Dubonet, I took her hand and escorted her outside. The first aggressive move I had ever made with a woman. It proved encouragingly to be successful.

The first night was a long sensuous ecstatic copulation. From six a.m. until opening at noon we shared our common desires with nary a nap. Her legs, her tender belly, the flesh of her breasts, the texture of her nipples, her soft cream face reddened by the exquisite delight, her vulnerable hole, dark wavy hair revealing her true roots surrounding the tender needy place where my manhood, electrified to its core by those damp hot slippery ever changing walls, danced the dance, pranced the prance of joyous penetration. Fucking a most luscious and responsive woman. She looked good, she smelled good, and she felt good.

She shared my bed for weeks. She ended up working as my new waitress, dislodging any ethical or moral ground vis a vis loving the employee. But the thing was it was not love. Not knowing the nature of love up until then, I thought it resembled love. But what it was was lust, at least on my part. To be in the presence, either naked and touching and conjoining or pouring her the drinks and exchanging money for her customers, of this extraordinarily beautiful and voluptuous creature was reason enough to sustain a relationship. Perhaps driven by her extreme libido to flight, she soon took wing to newer climes.

But she left behind much to my life and the life of the bar. As far as the bar went, she attracted new clientele through her old Brooklyn friends as well as the local working class youth barely learning to drink at a bar who loved to ogle the beautiful sexy friendly waitress.

And with the slow spread of the word on Bradley's through the collegiate universe of Hazel, she being the shy type with few friends to which she could share the Bradley's experience, and probably needing the extra impetus of being a performer, the place was getting gradually and significantly busier. Once a new group discovered the place, a bunch more customers would be added to my clientele. An individual from that group would bring another group, and so on. I was happy with the diversity. It proved lucrative. But what tied all these groups together was the attraction of strong drink for cheap. The only way cheaper to get drunk in Manhattan was to buy yourself a bottle, but that was far less social.

By the end of our relationship and for awhile afterwards, she brought in more of a crowd for the weekend performances than Hazel. She proved an actress of incredible power and mesmerizing presence when, late at night near closing time, she performed recitations of nasty, brutal, lusty text with a sexy charming allure. She would bump and grind and shimmy out of her outfit until naked spouting character monologues, mining every double entendre or blatant obscenity to its deepest darkest hottest wettest core. Then she would take over the waitress tray to allow Hazel to step up with Connie and vis versa.

Her bravery and brilliance encouraged the transvestites to take the stage with their own outrageous stories, performances, taunts and jibes. Weekends, always being interesting if modest events, were becoming quite exhilarating successes. And word spread. And I began to hear of performers once outside the crowd at Bradley's who wanted a stab at this weird place. Professionals. Which meant a cover charge. Was I worried? A little. Except I now had an angel.

Angela was Rachel's best friend, but that didn't prevent me from falling in love. Angela revealed to me, at first through the sips of friendship, and then, when the coast was cleared by Rachel, the full on swallows of love partners, what love was and what lust was. Make no mistake about it, Angela was a beautiful woman. The more I gazed at her the deeper the beauty. Whereas Rachel was nearly flawless and her flaws only distracted from her allure, each flaw I discovered in Angela made my love for her more thorough, more palpable, more pure. A mix of many races, she came out a mocha color. Mixed blood made her strong, resilient and wise. Wisdom gave her keen eyes in a face full of curiosity and full of resolve. There was a frailty though. A sensitivity reflected in her face and her body, how she positioned her body. Her body was accomplished muscles and not a lot of fat. And it was bent a little, her shoulders bowed a little to that which she had to face in her twenty-five years of life. A foster kid. Some of the pain she experienced in her unpleasant encounters with strangers who she was thrust into watching them playing fathers and mothers and doing a bad, sometimes a perverse nasty, sometimes a mean nasty, job of it would flash in her eyes.

Maybe my peaceful nature, as lackluster as it may have been, was her bond to me. We were very different. Her difference fascinated me and made me listen. Her thoughts were often challenging. She had the type of paranoia that reminds one of the maxim about it being true. What if it's true? They are after you. Is it paranoia?

Our lovemaking was sublime and generous. It was deep, deeper than any physical penetration. We were shaken by our oneness.

But it was our conversation, just sharing experiences, that first played the strings of my heart, a slow and gentle and intensely beautiful ballad. We first met at the after-hours club one Saturday night. Rachel, Angela and I were sitting together. This was the first time Rachel sat at a table with me. Usually we sat at the bar or danced or I sat at the bar and watched her dance or sit with Don and his entourage. It was my first inkling of the value of their friendship. When they talked they shared their Brooklynese with the grace of a harmonic duet. Listening to them highlighted the humor and roughness of their accent. When Rachel went off to dance with her incredible reflection, Angela and I talked. Once we broke through our strangeness to each other, we found talking easy. And listening. I didn't have a lot to say, but she did. From her lips to my ear was a diverse parade of insights. Only the lustful tug of Rachel, sending me into that libido cloud, could draw me away from our conversation.

After seeing her again at the club a couple Saturdays later, and continuing our far reaching discussions, it had become all one type of moment: her and the club at the table while Rachel danced and schmoozed. So when she walked into Bradley's Monday afternoon, wearing the quotidian outfit of an office worker, black suit and white blouse, and sat at the bar with me her bartender, it was a completely different experience. I did not recognize her for a beat or two. But when she smiled at me, I smiled back. My angel. I poured my very best old blended scotch, splashed in some water and gave it to her. On the house of course.

"I really like you, Jack," she said quietly, touching my hand, holding my hand.

"I really like you, too, Angela," I said. She knew Rachel had flown off to roost on a different, perhaps better branch. She must have known. She must have seen her walk out under a different man's arm. I did not notice her there at the club at that late moment. I did not notice anything except the departure of my sex kitten. With of all people, Anders. How do you compete with a hunk like that? You don't. She wanted it big and hard and all I had was soft and pleasant to give, with the occasional hard yet tender.

Angela leaned forward. I leaned forward. We kissed, squeezing hands tight enough to not let anyone or anything break us apart.

"You want to work here?" I asked.

"I do," she said, and it did not bother me the reverberations of that phrase. Married at the bar to the barmaid. "I want one thing from you. Promise me you'll keep listening to me, and even if what I say seems a little harsh you'll listen to it and give it thought and maybe do something about it."

"About what?"

"About the bar you've got here. About what's going on. I don't want to get too far into it now. I don't have the answers now. Mostly suspicions. But if I do become a bit of a gadfly, will you listen?"

"I guess so."

"Promise?"

"Promise." We kissed again. "Promise."

"Good. I love your naiveté, Jack," she said with a sad gleam in her eyes. She would be saddened further by naiveté's loss, her crusading and thus unavoidable duty to totally fuck it up. I do not think I changed her. I know I made her happy. But I do know she changed me. She had planted a chrysalis in my brain which she would keep healthy until the butterfly of awareness, of a previously absent cognitive ability, broke through and transformed me. I should have noticed when she talked of her day job and revealed bits and pieces of it which illuminated the place of work as being suspicious in its intentions. She had an agenda, a cause. Amelioration was her battle cry.