I should’ve walked away from her then. If I was a smart man, maybe a smarter man, that would’ve been my cue to exit stage left, get in my car, and drive home.
But I had a buzz, looked at her soft skin, skin that I had never touched or tasted, and found myself anchored by my own desires. Found myself being a man in need of a new sin.
We ended that conversation when Pedro came back to check on us. He cut me a sly stare like I was a man named Humbert trying to seduce a nymphet named Lolita.
Arizona bought the next round, ordered in perfect Spanish; her accent had turned as authentic as Pedro’s. That made me look at her a different way, try to dissect her features, see if she had some Jennifer Lopez in her bloodline. I couldn’t tell. America was so amalgamated, the racial lines so blurred that anybody who looked any way could be anything.
Pedro smiled and talked to her while he made our poison, kept talking in Spanish, while he glanced at her cleavage. Then he was gone.
I asked Arizona, “You’re part Mexican?”
“Filipina and black. Not necessarily in that order.”
“Filipinas speak Tagalog, not Spanish.”
“I speak five languages. English. Spanish. Tagalog. French. Ebonics.”
She was curvy but small. The Jack she’d sipped had her light-headed. It showed in her tone, in how her eyes went in and out of focus. I asked her how far she had to travel to get back home. She said she was crashing somewhere on the other side of Hollywood.
I said, “Would hate for you to get a DUI.”
“I can handle my liquor.”
I told her she was more than welcome to crash at my apartment. It was a lot closer.
She looked at me, knowing.
A man bought a woman a drink in a bar as an investment of things yet to come. A woman bought a man a drink to cancel those things, to keep it on the fair exchange level.
I didn’t know where we stood.
She said, “Can’t you recruit you a bed-warmer up in here?”
“These scallywags are all after the ballers. Black woman don’t think about you until you walk into a place looking like you’re rich or have a white woman. And you better not have both.”
She laughed at that. She didn’t agree, but she laughed.
She said, “I was supposed to go hook up with someone when I left here.”
That was the game. Truth begets truth. I lowered my wall, she lowered hers. I admitted I wasn’t a virgin, then she admitted she wasn’t Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny’s house. She was on her way to a scheduled booty call.
“Your body ... your arms.” She reacted like most women, stared at my arms the way men stared at loaded guns. “Like ... muscles etched in ... in ... in chocolate.”
“You ain’t seen my muscles.”
“Maybe you should show me.”
“You like chocolate?”
“Love chocolate.” She licked her lips like she was addicted to the taste. “Love chocolate. Love mature men. Love mature men in nice suits and nice shoes.”
Our stares became tropical.
She touched my leg. “Cuff links, silk tie, shoes, suit, that tells a lot about a man. Tells me who he is or who he wants to be.”
I touched her skirt, rubbed the leather over her inner thigh with two fingers. “Same goes for a woman.”
We abandoned our drinks and she followed me out the front door into the bright lights and traffic in this part of the big city. Music followed her sugary walk, John Lee Hooker was back to singing, telling me that his woman left him early one morning and the blues had healed him, sang that the same blues could heal me too. Carlos Santana was cosinging with his guitar.
Outside, a brother was hustling incense and oils with names like Black Sex, Bootylicious, even had Pussy; the Afrocentric sister next to him had every knockoff perfume ever made.
Arizona said, “It’s cold as hell.”
“Yeah. Unseasonably cold. Weatherman said it’s gonna be that way a few days.”
“Been gloomy all week. Freezing out here.”
Cold as hell in Southern California meant you might have to put on a T-shirt and socks with your shorts and sandals. Tonight, by L.A. standards, it was fur coat weather.
Back Biters was situated in a rundown strip mall, between Geral dine’s Fish and Grits and Luther’s All Nite Washerette. Outside the pool hall stood a wall of chain smokers living in nicotine clouds. A few feet away there was