As the bell rang to end the round and she returned to her corner, Rosemary happened to glance up and see Anthony waving to her from the club’s entrance. The lousy prick. He didn’t even have the nerve to fire her himself. She’d been treated with more class in the backs of Hondas. She resisted the urge to give him the finger and instead turned her attention to Ben the insurance salesman, her “manager.” This jerk had already stripped off his jacket and shirt, leaving his tie hanging listlessly between his sagging hairy pectorals. He reached for her again and she could smell the Jaegermeister he’d spilled on his chest. When she put up a friendly hand and asked him to slow down, he tried to pull off her bikini top.
The men in the audience began to stomp and shout, “GO FOR IT!” She had to slap Ben’s face to get him to stop.
“Don’t make me do that again.” She smiled.
But after the next round, old Ben was coming at her again, trying to throw her down and get on top of her. The men in the audience were on their feet, cheering louder, their voices like storm troopers’ boots on a tarmac, “FUCKHERNOW! FUCKHERNOW! FUCKHERNOW!”
They were all the same. All trying to strip her of whatever pride and dignity she had left. It was enough. Something inside her snapped. She grabbed Ben’s flabby arm, and using his sluggish weight against him, she performed an old-fashioned judo flip, pulling him over her shoulder so that he landed on the canvas with a loud
“OH C’MON, BEN!” someone shouted from the audience. “HOSE THE BITCH!”
Rosemary flashed her best little-girl smile and then dropped onto Ben, straddling his marshmallow stomach with her strong tawny legs. Miriam the redhead handed her a can of shaving cream and Rosemary began squirting it onto Ben’s chest and face. He tried to squirm away but she pressed down on him with her full weight and used her legs to pin his arms to his sides.
She quickly moved up to his face and began to smother him, thrusting her pudendum down on his mouth and nose so he couldn’t breathe. He tried to throw her off, but he was too drunk to do more than struggle like a spider under a paperweight. Now the men in the audience did not cheer so loudly.
Smiling more ferociously by the moment, she turned around and went to work, ass to his face, as she opened the top button of his plaid slacks and squirted shaving cream down the front of his underwear. The momentum had shifted in the last few seconds, and the other men in the audience were now laughing and urging her to abuse Ben in any way she saw fit.
She looked up to make sure Anthony was still watching from the entrance before she fired another shot of shaving cream down the front of Ben’s pants. More laughter. But then she stunned them all into near-silence by reaching in after the shaving cream and pulling out Ben’s flaccid penis. Oh yeah. Tits are great. Pussy’s better. But let no woman expose the shrunken totem pole to ridicule.
She began yanking on it. One yank for Bingo, who’d put her out on the street. One yank for Anthony, who’d promised her the moon and left her in the gutter. And one yank for his vicious old man, coming by to kick her in the head when all she needed was a job. Yank this. Ben began to groan like he was in great pain.
The other men in the club groaned along with him and soon someone at one of the front tables saidwhat they were watching was rape. Damn straight, thought Rosemary. Ben’s penis grew taut and his body began to convulse.
“Lose the bitch, Ben!” they were shouting. “Kick her off.”
But it was too late. Ben’s left knee began to tremble and his face closed in on itself. He was coming in public. As his body gave one final jerk, Rosemary leaped to her feet and pranced around the ring, flicking drops of foam at the men in the front seats.
“Here he is,” she sang with her brightest smile yet. “Mr. Premature Ejaculator. . . Here he is, your ideal...”
Ben rolled onto his side and covered his face with both hands.
Her fists raised triumphantly, Rosemary climbed from the ring and saw Anthony still standing at the back of the club, his mouth hanging open a little. She walked right up andkissed him hard on the lips. Not a lover’s kiss. More the kind of kiss one mob guy would give another before killing him. She grabbed his hair and pulled his head back.
“Terry was ten times better than you,” she whispered.
She spun away and went out the side door into her dressing room, her cheeks bouncing in her bikini bottom.
Anthony slowly smoothed his hair and then smelled his palm, as if trying to figure out what she’d left up there.
44
“WHAT THE HELL WAS that all about?”
It was ten minutes after Rosemary did her little performance at the club. I was in her dressing room, still trying to decide what she’d rubbed into my hair.
“What do you think it was about?!” she said, throwing a red high-heeled shoe at me. “You have your father come back here and threaten me? And fire me from a job I need to feed my child? Is that how you keep your promises?”
The shoe had sailed past my ear and broken against the far wall, the heel separating from the sole. I picked up the pieces and tried to put together what had happened in my mind. My father must have come back here and tried to scare her off, thinking Teddy would find out I was cheating on Carla. Now I had my work cut out for me. I had to convince Rosemary that everything was still the same between us.
“Look, I don’t know anything about what my father said.”
“How can I ever believe you again?” She untied her bikini top. “First you say you care about me. Then you use me like a common whore. And then you break your word.”
“You make it sound like that’s never happened before,” I blurted out.
“But I expected better from you!” she screamed.
And what made it hurt was that I did too.
She picked up a quart bottle of Evian water and threw it at my head. It bounced off my shoulder and splashed on the Gianni Versace shirt I was wearing.
“Hey, come on!”
“Anthony,” she said. “I didn’t think it was possible, but you broke my heart again tonight.”
Her bikini top fell off. Her breasts looked like they were about to open fire on me from across the room.
“Rosemary, I’m sorry. This was all a mistake. My father doesn’t know about the understanding we have.”
“Anthony, do not insult my intelligence,” she said in that arch way of hers. “All I want is for you to keep to the terms of our agreement.” I started to say something, but she cut me off. “I don’t want to hear any more about affection or see your stiff prick. I just want half the cash you’re making from this fight. Because you couldn’t have done it without me.
She pulled off the bottom of her bathing suit and stood there, naked and intimidating. This is what they called a tough broad. If she’d been a man, she would’ve had a crew ten times the size of Teddy’s. The water she’d thrown at me was soaking my skin and raising goose bumps on my chest.
“Listen,” I said nervously. “I was just over at Frank Diamond’s suite at the Doubloon nailing down the schedule of the payments. Everything’s just about set.”
Though now I had to figure out how to cut her off a slice of the money I’d have left after I’d paid off Danny Klein and Teddy.
“I can even get you a job at the fight, to put you on the payroll,” I explained. “It’s a lock. It’s guaranteed.”
“Well, that’s one thing you’ve got right, Anthony. Since I’ve got insurance.” She came toward me like a
