Cogan's Trade
door.
    “After that,” Frankie said, “after that I can’t see herno more on Wednesdays. Only weekends, and Jesus, every time I go there I expect they’re gonna put the old man in the car with us, we go out. So, I start hanging around with the wrong type of guys. And I meet a couple guys, and one of them knows Johnny, and I meet Johnny, and I start doing a few things for John. And you know something? I was still in love with that crazy kid. I probably would’ve married her. I dunno if her old man would’ve let me fuck her, I was married to her. Maybe Fridays and Saturdays. Long’s I got her home by midnight. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Then I got hooked and they try me, I was in the can the whole time, and they all come to the trial, him too, now and then, and I got the time, there. Sandy and my mother and Janice and everything. Ten years. What’s ten years? I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I was, I wasn’t even twenty-one years old. Somebody says ten years to me. What’s that mean? That judge, you know what he said? If you continue in this path, young man, you’ll be in serious trouble before you’re through.’ Then he gives me ten years. Serious trouble. That’s probably when they cut your nuts off and make you eat them.
    “So they’re taking me away, fuckin’ old deputy, his uniform’s got soup all over it, and they’re all crying, my mother’s crying, Sandy’s crying, Janice’s crying, she’s havin’ fuckin’ hysterics. I should’ve told her, go out and throw the bumper around, always helped me when you wouldn’t come across and I sure can’t help you now. And the deputy, he wouldn’t let them talk to me and I was still punchy, I was on his side. I just got ten and I never even got a hand-job off this broad and now I got to go through this? Pissed me off. I said to him: ‘Get me out of here.’ And she’s gonna do this,she’s gonna do that, it was awful. So, I was in about three months, Sandy comes to see me. Janice’s married. It don’t mean anything.”
    “Broads’re different now,” Russell said. “You been in too long. This broad, this broad means it. You can tell. She’s gonna do it, and then the guy that’s with her when she does it, he’s gonna have to explain a lot of things, and that I can’t do. You can’t do it either. She needs a good leaving-alone.”
    “I can make up my own mind,” Frankie said.
    “She wouldn’t give me a chance, for God’s sake,” Russell said. “ ‘We gonna do it again?’ Absolutely. Just gimme a minute or so, get it up again. ‘I can do that,’ she says, and she blows me. Well, you know, I haven’t been out that long. I’m still pretty eager. And, I knew what was gonna happen. But I didn’t tell her, and she got herself a pretty good mouthful. Which she kind of gags on, naturally, and she sits up and wipes her mouth off and she looks at me and she says: ‘Thanks a lot, you bastard.’ I say, I said, ‘Look, I didn’t know. I mean, you act like you know what you’re doing.’ ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Yeah, you probably think I like the taste of come.’
    “So I told her,” Russell said, “Goat-ass always did. Fuckin’ guy couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Said it kept him young. ‘I never liked it myself,’ I tell her, ‘but he did, and I don’t know.’ So she says: ‘You turd. You’re all turds aren’t you, you turd. There isn’t one of you that’s not a turd.’ And there’s this big song and dance. We’re lying there and, it’s a really nice apartment, got all these African masks on the wall and everything, and she’s bitching and moaning, the first time wasn’t any good either, it’s never any good, she keeps on hoping, and it turns out, it’s not even her place we’re in. Ithought it was her place. It belongs to this guy she’s going with, the stereo, all the rest of it, it’s all his. He’s in school. He’s gonna get himself some kind of thing and then he’s gonna do

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