Free The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry Page B

plus he was very liberal with drugs, there was always lots of coke and just about anything else you wanted, and it was totally safe, the guy was a guy the cops would never touch, probably not even if he chopped up four or five people with an ax, he was protected .
    So Buddy had done it a few times, with the other male model. Mel had given them a couple of hundred apiece and hadn’t asked them to do any more than sort of model naked. Buddy had described him as real nervous but nobody to be scared of, just a little weirdo with lots of money. They assumed he was gay but he didn’t come on or anything, just followed them around with his little movie camera.
    Then about the third time he asked if maybe they knew any young ladies who might be willing to participate, he didn’t mean hookers either, he could get plenty of them just by dragging Las Vegas Boulevard a few times, he wanted high school girls who were basically proper girls but maybe liked a little excitement now and then or wanted to make a little money for college. So without even telling her Buddy had shown Mel a few pictures of her, a teen fashion spread she had done for Neiman’s, and Mel had been immediately interested.
    Buddy had said come on, do it, maybe you won’t even have to be naked, the guy’s real shy, plus it’s two hundreddollars a session just for walking around. Pepper immediately liked the idea, the thought was kind of exciting, after all Denny took hundreds of pictures of her and didn’t pay a cent, plus living off her mother and fucking her constantly. Why not do it and have the money to spend?
    Except even before she met Mel she had a sort of intuition or something that he was going to fall for her, he sounded at first like a guy who was just a pretzel waiting to be twisted, why not twist him a little?
    So she said okay, but tell him it’s three hundred and I’m not showing him my cunt, which freaked Buddy, he was so rich anyway he didn’t have much imagination about things like that, they sort of had a fight about it because Buddy said come on, you should at least do it once before you start raising the price, you might scare him off, he’s actually kind of nice, why make him mad? Then it came out that Victor knew the guy. At one time they had played bridge together, they belonged to some club in Palm Springs or something, the point was Buddy was nervous that his father might find out and Mel was nervous about the same thing, didn’t want Victor to suddenly get wind that he was making home movies of Victor’s kid. Buddy just wanted her to be polite and not cause any trouble, it sort of made her realize that Buddy was just gonna be temporary even if he was super good-looking.
    Also they had never had a big test of wills, she sort of was interested in finding out what Buddy was made of and discovered that he was made of toilet paper. She proceeded to wipe her ass with him and of course she got her three hundred and even made Mel cough it up in advance, before he had even seen her in the flesh.
    Mel wasn’t exactly a pretzel, it was apparent from the way he looked at her and the way he spoke that he was an on-the-ball guy, but still the first time she modeled he was so nervous that when he stood still you could see his legsshaking. He didn’t even ask her to be topless, much less bottomless. All he got for his three hundred was that she walked around in her underwear for maybe ten minutes, looking at things in his house. The house was great, very tasteful, she had expected something pretty vulgar but on that one she guessed wrong. Mel was into Japanese design, he had an elaborate garden with a fishpond and a little bridge, plus all sorts of ferns and four or five little Japs to keep it all watered and green. Also he had a big collection of Japanese ceramics, which she had to admit were beautiful, and scrolls and other very tasteful stuff.
    It was too bad his legs shook but otherwise he couldn’t have been more polite and gentlemanly,