A homunculus with a shaved head and a harelip was busy changing dollar bills into coins, seated on a barstool like some diminutive, disfigured Buddha behind bulletproof glass. Every time the door to the street swung open, whenever the bouncer was showing in a new customer, they were both bathed in red light from the neon sign on the marquee that also had drawn me from the other side of the street, like a magnet. "Welcome to Pussyland!" the Buddha intoned. "The finest meat on Manhattan, I guarantee you that, my friend..." He had said that many a time before, and showed absolutely no emotion when I politely answered: "Thanks, I'm sure you're right, my friend..." A dancing, nude woman surrounded by merry musical notes was stamped on to the golden coin. Carefully, the little man had explained that these coins were the legal tender in Pussyland. Whatever you wanted to pay in tips to the girls in the peep-show cabins, on the other hand, was up to you, as he put it, with a poker face.
The coins were the 'open-sesame' for Aladdin's cave, but if you wanted to rub the magic lamp, cash had to be supplied as well. Men were slinking their way along the walls, with faces turned away and hands deeply buried in pockets full of coins. It was clammy, but it was not as hot as out on the street. Through a sexshop with dildos and magazines, and then hallways with private cabins, solo cinemas with video screens, and after that, a strip bar where you could sit with a drink resting right on the stage. Only there were no dancers up there, just a disco ball spinning around itself under the ceiling, watched indolently by a dozen dudes who didn't utter one single word to each other, while Madonna's "Like A Virgin" blared into the room. Continuing up the stairs, my rubber soles sank into a thick, spongy carpet of some indeterminate hue. A long hallway with red walls, straight out of a Freudian wish-fulfillment dream, but with a different kind of energy going on, another tension in the air. Maybe because real living women and not mere flickering video images, were concealed behind the peepholes. Unmistakably, in all cases, that fug of sperm, perfume, females, sweat and disinfectant. Closed my eyes and inhaled it as if it were the very same scent I had followed all the way from the hotel and down 8th Avenue. A red lamp was lit above the occupied cabins. On the way in between the many illuminated lamps, I overheard fragments of conversation, coughing, knocking sounds, little yelps, moaning ("come on bitch, yes, yes, YEEES!") and explosions of laughter behind locked doors. An older black man was mopping the floor in a vacant cabin. He was wearing a Walkman, moving his head in time with his own music, far away from the pulse of lust, the soundtrack of Pussyland. Finally, a door without either a lit lamp or a cleaning attendant. I held back my breath and stepped forward into a stale darkness, sucked clean of oxygen and light, almost blind for a moment, listening to the roar of blood in my head and the tinkering of coins between my fingers. Caught sight of the glow seeping in beneath the shutter, a little low stool in the middle of the floor, a couple of crumpled Kleenexes and a solitary condom, heavy with a milky-white substance, kicked away into the corner - and there the slit for the coins, just like on a one-armed bandit. I threw in the first coin, with a slightly quivering hand. Jackpot, the shutter hoisted itself up, mechanically. Ten inches from my nose, a cunt was hovering. A swarthy cunt with almost purple labia surrounded by jet-black, curly hair. Female hands with long red fingernails descended to part open the lips and reveal the pink meat: a tropical fruit sliced open like in some Bountyland ad. But this was Pussyland. This was real. And I stared, dumbfounded, at the unveiled sex, utterly incapable of removing my eyes. Until the rest of the body lazily pulled itself back and sank down onto its knees beneath a pair of big and heavy breasts. A black woman, around thirty, stuck her face right up to the opening, in a rustle of Rastafarian braids, and with a fragrance of incense encompassing her. Blinking with false eyelashes, grinning with chalk-white teeth between full lips: "Hey baby, was this something for you - heh-heh-heh?!" It was she from the street, now naked and without either the shiny handbag or the PVC go-go boots. It was all the girls from the street, amalgamated into one body and talking with the same voice - directly to me. And I could feel an acceptance; an understanding that I'd never experienced before. Could feel that there was no need to be ashamed, that she was doing this for my sake, and that we could help each other - mutually - tonight. Bills flew from the pocket up into her hands. Relaxed and squatting, she counted them, without removing her glance from my eyes for more than a few seconds at a time. I threw some extra coins into the slit to prevent the shutter from crashing down right away. "That's right, honey - I know you need me", she mumbled from her stage, from where I vaguely heard voices and glimpsed the contours of other men's torsos in a half-circle around the parading girls. "My name's Jackie", she whispered, a hint of cigarettes and raspberry chewing gum on her breath. Brushing my forehead with her fingertips, she sent an electric shock from the hair roots to the tip of the toes. "If you're good to me, I'll be good to you, OK?!" And of course, Jackie, that's alright- I'll do anything you want. But, can I say you are sweet and beautiful? May I say that I... love you? More bills changed hands. "Uhm," she moaned from deep down in her chest. Laid the neck back, let the tongue play across her lips, massaged the tits and pressed them up against my face, until my nose got buried tenderly in a cleavage smelling of spicy sweat, talcum powder and perhaps a dash of Chanel no. 5. Now above me, she blinked again and smiled, got up from her kneeling position and turned her ass toward my face. "Lick me in my ass, white boy, lick my black ass!" The red nails bored their way into the cheeks, as she drew them aside. My tongue tasted the small, furrowed wreath, which quivered slightly, tightening and relaxing by turns, sucking me closer to the fulcrum of darkness. We were both breathing violently and she turned around, moist and glistening. "Touch me, come inside me, right here", sounded the affectionate command. The crack opened up vertically, right there in between the brownskin thighs, were I gasped for air, fumbling around with one hand for more coins while managing to find myself, hard and throbbing, with the other. Now with the pants down around the ankles, flushed with fever, a crazy man in a confessional booth, believing that all sins were absolved with a petition to beauty: an offering to an unknown, heathen goddess from Africa. "Come on, boy, come on," she egged me on, pumping with the groin. Until I couldn't dig up any more coins with dancing girls and merry notes from the pocket, until I came with a gasp and felt the cunt slide away from my face. The shutter sank down slowly and creakingly, leaving me alone in the dark with a taste of bittersweet secretions on my tongue. Heard her clearing her throat and laughing in a muffled way on the other side of the steel plate - heh-heh-heh. With the mouth down near the crack of light, I called into her: "I'm sorry, I don't have any more coins, Jackie." She ticked out a Morse code signal with the nails: "That was really mean of you. I was just about to come, you bad boy!" Said in such a teasingly lenient way that it didn't hurt, that I wasn't ashamed at all, even though I had promised to be good to her. "What's your name, darling?" I told her, while I wiped myself off and buttoned up my pants and allowed the pulse to fall back to its normal rate. I came over here all the way from Europe just to see you, Jackie. I'll be in town for a few more weeks and I'm staying in a hotel close by. "Listen - if you're bored some day, you know, then give me a call," she said after pausing to collect her thoughts. "Maybe we can figure something out¼" A slip of paper with a telephone number scribbled down was pressed in through the crack: "Take care of yourself, sugar!" Probably she was already drying herself between her legs with a rag or checking her makeup in the mirror, preoccupied and professionally, ready for the next man in the box. "This is one dangerous city for little white boys." When I opened the door, the old, black cleaning assistant was standing outside with mop, bucket and Walkman, bopping to the rhythms on the tape. I was embarrassed - maybe he'd think that I'd made all that mess? Ready to meet the accusing gaze, certainly, and maybe even to get bawled out, I suddenly noticed that his eyes were dead, turned away from Pussyland's nude goddesses and in toward their own cavities, as milky white as the sperm in the condom on the floor.
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