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  “You still fucking that coloured waitress, Hank?” she would indifferently ask.

  “Ugh, she’s just a fuck, Sharon. It’s pretty boring between lunch and dinner time, at the restaurant. Can I get something for you?”

  “My God, she’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen Hank. Do you fuck her in your cruddy little office or quick bang her in the dining room?” she would laugh.

  “You’re nuts, Sharon, and it’s getting worse.”

  He really could not understand what Sharon wanted from him. He would have given anything to have relived those simple high school days with young Sharon again. But then, not as sad or as ungrateful as it might have appeared, after almost eighteen years of marriage, he sensed he didn’t exist for her.

  Going back with Hank was no longer anywhere in Sharon’s mind. Unlike the boy on the bus, Hank simply wasn’t there.

  Chapter Two

  She woke up without opening her eyes fearing where she might be. Even with her eyes closed she knew she wasn’t alone in another series of strangers’ beds. She didn’t want to do it, but it was difficult to deny the beautiful memories of her Ethiopia lover. You tell yourself, this is the last time, but it never is, she half-awake sensed his dead weight arms around her, as she had the night before, dancing salsa with one more slick stranger in the scum sullied disco, one of several where she would voluptuously dance the nights away. Disoriented from the night’s drinking, she was devoid of meaningful sensation, and in her still half asleep state, as she lay in the sunken bed, she remembered bending and rubbing her silken tight ass against her newly selected dance partner, and she could still feel all his hardness. He was just one of many dance partners that night, and other similar nights, and she didn’t care who they were as long as they were young and muscular, and always black, remnants of Ethiopia. She was white pure gold among the mostly Jamaican-Americans who did resemble Ethiopians. Sometimes she went to these clubs with her husband David who would stand by the bar and watch his wife pick them off one by one as if to rate their serpentine manhood. None of the men she asked to dance with would deny her.

  Her father’s not so subtle insistence that she marry a white boy made Robin not want to, though eventually she conformed to her father’s wish by marrying lilywhite boy David Calder. Ever since middle school when she first became aware of social issues confronting America, she too conveniently adopted the soundness of the solution, to resolving the racial quagmire of prejudice and integration, was to “marry them”, as she especially was fond of saying. But, lucidly, when the time came, she married David Calder, of Northern European extraction, who was far removed from any racial dilemmas.

  “You marry a black guy and I’ll bring no more chickens home for you to eat,” was the way Pioneer Bank CEO rich Daddy Robert Sargent had honestly put it to his daughter.

  Robin recognized Daddy’s comments as racist, but who wasn’t now days. More than the political incorrectness of his words, her concern focused on the not so subtle insistence, bordering on incest, of Daddy’s resolve to choose the husband who was to fuck her.

  “Do you think she’s screwing black guys,” Mr. Sargent would ask his mild-mannered wife Helen during Robin’s high school days.

  “Where would she find them,” would be Helen’s reply.

  Unexpected events, especially the peculiar way she wound up being married to a man she didn’t love, a fate destined by her Daddy’s manipulated demands for a white boy husband, made it psychologically forbidding for her to have any correspondence between what she might have instinctively desired and what she settled for. Like all the nice girls who live in the sanity of always being protected from harm, she too secretly wanted to partake of a lewdness and of indiscretions, and yes, of sins that would put some fun in an otherwise tranquil life. Two years in Ethiopia as a Peace Corps Volunteer had intriguingly exposed the dark side of her illiterate propriety, when all of primitive Africa with all its immoral pleasures shattered the unconscious repressions of Robin’s simple American educated mind and it suddenly became a wild jungle. The rebelliousness that smacked of naughtiness that she happily discovered in Ethiopia, far, far away from Daddy, taught Robin that there was no such thing as ugliness in the briefness of life, and that anything goes. She thought herself lucky to have understood the beauty of defiance at an early age.

  “When you’re near me all darkness disappears and I can see so much clearer,” when depressed, her mind romantically would recall her Ethiopian lover, defying the repressed stubborn thorn that was Daddy in her wounded heart.

  Taferra was dead now, so what more could she have done at her age but to live the pleasures of her uninhibited youth? She would smile with disdain at her easy life of booze and infinite shopping malls, all made possible by Daddy’s money. She had dropped out of the pure white clouds of the Addis Ababa high plateau into his African arms, expecting nothing more than the brief romance of sensual abandonment to be felt more intimately, more physically than any fantasy on banker’s row. Alone, now, back in the good old USA, she searched for that magical instant that she knew would never unfold again, for Taferra was dead.

  “She likes to rub the salsa in the nude,” David had once greeted one of Robin’s young acquiescent studs recently arrived from Kingston. He had dared to ask Robin for a dance and though David pretended he didn’t mind, he understood that she was back in Addis.

  “Your genius is definitely dancing your ass off on the voodoo floor, my dear,” he would bitterly try to embarrass her. His words fell on empty pities.

  He would contemptuously laugh pretending he didn’t care which one of the undulating shimmy boys she would later fuck that night. After her nightly raids away from home in search for sex in the hot and furious African primal dances, he had given up on her and her insensate lies that had deadened his feelings for her; he couldn’t have cared less about whom she fucked. Bitterly he hated her for the way she dumped endless humiliation on him, and she hated him because he was the wrong man for her. They had nothing more than vitriolic sympathies for each other and their touch was always frigid.

  *

  Oh Lord, let the night last one more minute, don’t let me wake up like this, Robin ached the pain of loneliness, hoping the morning’s light would bring a different day. Let me stay one more moment in his arms, and with that memory, she turned toward the body next to her, and almost shrieked in horror.

  God in Heaven, what an atrocious thing it was. Eyes wide open now, Robin saw a big black guy with a short kinky black-grey beard in deep sleep, stretched out next to her lovely flesh, likewise nude. He was completely naked and stunk of redolent puke. With eyes in shocked delirium from too much vodka, Robin tried to imagine Taferra but she couldn’t.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she said and ran out of the room.

  *

  She thought that her downfall began when she was caught shoplifting inexpensive underwear in Macy’s department store on Fashion Island in Newport Beach. Caught red-handed, pink panties in her Dior bag, her face got red and she was glad that the ladies intimates were in the basement where few men shopped. Displaying vivacious liveliness, she cleverly outwitted the sixties year old lingerie manager with an endless rationalization of lies, and an arrogance born of wealth powered by a large number of displayed credit cards. But the shame of being caught in an act of bass-class petty crime felt heavy on her mind and she could never unload it.

  “I don’t know what came over me to steal cheap underwear,” she later told Myrna of the embarrassing story at Macy’s, and Myrna laughed, knowing that Robin was not a petty thief.

  They were having coffee, sitting in a small and cosy booth, just the two of them, in one of those obscure, unpretentious little strip mall coffee shops that still served their coffee in porcelain cups and saucers that pleasure the intimacy to warm friendships. In a Southern California sunny mid-morning, quiet in the wide open spaces well defined by wealth, two old friends,
to the exclusion of no one, met for a cup of coffee, and to speak and add more words to the million tales already said between them. In the subtle tradition of life, it’s the unending stream of words between two people that makes for lasting friendship. Just a cup of java to unload and kill some time.

  “God knows David and I were struggling at the time, and not because of lack of money. I always had tons of money because Daddy was there for me, and I was married to a white guy, to Daddy’s thrill, so I don’t know what came over me. We had just gotten back from two years in the Peace Corps, and we were stupidly trying to make it on our own. We fucking challenged ourselves to make it on our own and pretended that money was scarce, even though Daddy was ever present, there a millionaire, but God, Daddy or otherwise, I definitely could’ve afforded underwear,” a blush of modesty surfaced on her cheeks.

  “Were you commando that day?” asked Myrna.

  “I don’t remember,” said a pissed Robin.

  “I mean it could’ve been that you were cold and you wanted to cover your ass and not because you didn’t have any money …”

  “Myrna, you’re beginning to piss me off. It’s times like these I wish I smoked.”

  Myrna reached across the booth table and took Robin’s hand which felt cold.

  “Did you ever go commando when you were in Ethiopia?” said Myrna.

  There was a long thoughtful delay while Robin considered her response.

  “I did it a few times when I first got there and it felt great to go primitive. But then I found out that most poor Ethiopian women, of all ages, but mostly older women, maybe grandmas, but who could tell, were going commando all the time, so it was no big deal.”

  “It must’ve been messy when they were having their periods,” said Myrna and they both let out a hearty laugh.

  “It was mostly older women who went commando, Myrna.”

  “Come to think of it: that’s why cities are built next to rivers or by the sea,” said Myrna.

  It wasn’t funny, and betrayal rushed into Robin’s eyes. She loved Ethiopia and the Ethiopians, and that was a terrible thing to say about Ethiopian women who were very beautiful and didn’t need anyone’s approval on how to dress.

  She almost came to tears, Myrna noted.

  “Fuck it, Robin. No big deal; it was a long time ago.”

  “Then how come I can’t get it out of my mind?”

  “Have you told this stupid story to anyone else? Does Dave know?” and Myrna laughed the question to lessen its importance.

  “You mean about the Ethiopian guy …”

  “No, I meant about the shoplifting.”

  “No, no, I could never tell this to David. You know what a tight-ass he is. He would never forgive me.”

  “About the Ethiopian guy, or about the panties?”

  “Same thing,” laughed Robin.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about right now,” said Myrna.

  “Big, black guys with big dongs,” laughed Robin.

  “All these years and you’ve never told him?”

  “Nope!”

  “Have there been many?”

  Myrna was just as curious as any human being. No response.

  “Big, fucking David Calder; he thinks he’s so important because he’s a banker. A little man in a big bank, that’s what he is,” Myrna said about Robin’s husband. She wanted to cheer up her friend. “If it weren’t for you he’d be nothing.”

  “There was a time when I could’ve told him my secrets, but no more.”

  “Change is good,” said Myrna.

  *

  The daughter of a self-made millionaire and founder of Pioneers Bank, Robin grew up with a cheerful lack of anxiety or concern. Both her mother and father were contented people who spoiled their daughter with worldly goods and kisses. Kindly Robert and Helen Sargent led a soft, sweet life, heirs to expensive comforts. They easily lolled in the limelight of their sprawling wealth. Robert was the son of an immigrant French bank accountant, Bernard Sargent, who had been transferred from the Grenoble branch of the Toulouse Continental Bank to its small branch in Chicago at the turn of the Twentieth Century as its manager. A dour and determined man, he hated fun-loving Chicago, full of the braggart Irish politicos who ruled the city, and convinced his superiors back in France to move the branch to Los Angeles, “the future of America,” he had rightly predicted. When the Continental Bank of Toulouse went belly-up during the 1930s, Bernard begged and borrowed and bought the LA branch of the bank and immediately changed its name to The Pioneers Bank of California. The bank flourished at the same rate as California and Bernard with tenacious humility quickly dropped ‘of California’ and The Pioneers Bank became Pioneer Bank and totally his baby. It was this baby that only son Robert inherited from his Rhone-Alps immigrant French father.

  When their one and only child was born, Robert hovered sweetly over proud wife Helen and their baby daughter and glowingly said, “She looks like a little robin in her feathered nest.”

  From a little girl, Robin wanted to be a poet and to her parents’ great joy she was a prolific writer. Her poems and stories were rich in imagination, full of inspired everyday reality for a young person of her age. She wrote about love, the universe, and above all else, she wrote about poor people, especially the homeless people of California, and India, and Africa of whom she had read so much about, and of whom from a distance she greatly sympathised and loved. In her stories, the poor were loyal to their promises while the rich were always duplicitous. When she got to high school, it was an easy jump from the homeless poor of the world to the many more millions of closer at home impoverished blacks, or aka African-Americans of Watts and East LA, and the vague South of Stephen Foster’s ‘darkies’.

  All through high school, Robert and Helen tried hard to remind Robin of her French heritage but it was soon apparent that she had become obsessed in what they thought was an adolescent, confused way of thinking, one hundred and eighty degrees in contrast to their own values of proud French inheritance.

  “Hopefully she’ll find her way,” confidently Robert would periodically remind Helen.

  “Well, she’s fixing her own bed and let her lie in it,” Helen, the stringent realist would insist, irrepressibly confused by Robin’s intransigence.

  “She would make such a wonderful doctor; she has such wonderful bedside manners,” her father would bemoan his feelings in sadness and sorrow.

  “Don’t be fooled, Robert; your daughter is a little bitch,” Helen would lovingly say.

  They loved their one and only daughter and neither wished to abandon their one and only heir to their vast family banking fortune because of silly adolescent beliefs.

  All through high school, Robin kept her literary thoughts to herself fearing that if she showed any sensitivity to social problems in class she might be thought of as a geek, or worse a socialist. Ask any honest teenager and she’ll tell you that such is the curse of American high schools that they crush their students into stressed out cool dudes and babes full of awkward hang-ups. Manipulated by a strained environment into almost open hostility, well fed young men and women at the prime of their lives shun their intellectual instincts in favour of purposeless, bogus adoration of meaningless high school football. Stupid fucking Neanderthal high school football played nowhere else on earth other than in tough America. Fear of not being accepted, of not being part of the in-crowd keeps ambitious young people dumb-silent for four years and then more. Very few, if any, American high school students want to show that they might have a mind that’s different from the opinions expressed by their teachers who faithfully mimic the opinions of the media least they lose their jobs – permanently! And all the school malignant counsellors meekly advise that it is desirably normal not to want to be different, and the beloved gym teachers smile their speeches on how sports build character. Teachers of literature and
thought have no chance against the wisdom of coaches of American high schools.

  So it was with Robin, a most abnormal girl, superior in all things intellectual and beautiful, squeezed on all sides to fit her high school counselling normal. She was beautiful, with sensitive blue eyes that gave way to a deep crystal clear sea of enormous promise in their sparkle. Her intelligent mind loved all creation and her heart daily became one with nature all around her from the moment she opened her eyes. She was in love with life which smiled back at her. Throughout her high school years, a baby’s unspoiled complexion framed by thick, sun-yellow long hair emphasized her sensual woman’s pink lips and beautiful face. She was impeccably campus beautiful as were her three friends: Sharon, Kitty, and Myrna. Yet, during all four high school years she was needlessly wary of being grouped with the geeks. And every time she entered a classroom, she did her damnest to be counsellor normal, though male teachers did stare; she prayed that she might not be called on, though she knew that she knew the answers to most questions.

  *

  Absolutely devastated by four years of a typical unchallenging American educational experience in Magnolia High School, unravelled Robin never really recovered her energy even after four years of college, two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, and a marriage to a very handsome ex-Peace Corps Volunteer, David Calder, who likewise served with her in Ethiopia. Though the two years in Ethiopia suggested defiance to normalcy, they were no more than an adjunct to her compliant American way of life. Disobediently to her upbringing, she fell in love with an Ethiopian but the affair was much too bold for Robin’s white conforming soul. Her personality had already been shaped to be submissive to the morality of her class and culture. Overwhelmed by her familiar past she dumped the Ethiopian and returned to her kind in the safe arms of David Calder, a man of her kind. Unfortunately for David, Robin was the wrong woman and ultimately it lead to a wrong marriage. For two years she loved an Ethiopian who managed to liberate her personality from its infantile binds and bring happiness into her life. But her Ethiopian affair led to nowhere because she and her lover were two people whose cultural gap was wider than the Rift Valley. In effect they were two people of different color and she was incapable of overcoming her racist upbringing. She had been deceitful to both David, her American withdrawn lover, and Taferra, her honest Ethiopian lover, neither of whom could focus beyond her beautiful face.