Free 1975 - Night of the Juggler by William P. McGivern

while watching Samantha’s cold black face as if it were hostile terrain he must try to cross to find sanctuary.
    She knew about his brother, a junkie with a big habit, whose whining and desperate appeals for help lay across Manolo’s spirit like a draining poultice. Manolo, at twenty, was two years older than his sick brother and had been told countless thousands of times by their dead mother to take good care of his little brother and hold his hand crossing the streets. All the streets of life. . . .
    “But you and me made a nice business deal, and it didn’t have anything to do with your brother,” she said.
    “He makes me cry, and I can’t stand it.”
    Oh, Jesus, Samantha thought. Coke and Biggie flipped Manolo over onto his back, locking his arms behind his head with their huge black hands. Manolo was naked except for a pair of clean white sweat socks, and the overhead lights coated his slim body and small but shapely private parts with shimmering silver reflections.
    He’s really something, Samantha thought, staring with frank interest at his vulnerable body. What a super trip she could make with him, toying with him like an elegant little doll. Manolo had curly brown hair, the dimpled face of a cherub, and skin as soft and finely textured as pure silk. But none of this sweet stuff was for the ladies. Manolo was strictly for cockbirds.
    Samantha—who had been christened Maybelle Cooper in Mobile, Alabama, and educated in New York—sat down on the bed beside Manolo and let her fingertips stray across the velvetlike skin of his stomach.
    Manolo shivered unpleasantly; the touch of her flesh against his revolted him; it was a perverse, unclean feeling, like flowers acrid with rot.
    Coke Roosevelt lighted a big cigar and blew smoke into Manolo’s face.
    “Staff of life, faggykins,” Coke said in a soft but rumbling voice.
    “He means, like bread,” Biggie Lewis said. Manolo was not afraid of Biggie. He knew Biggie wanted him, but if Biggie hurt him, he’d lose any chance of getting him to go down on him. But Coke Roosevelt didn’t want him and might enjoy hurting him to prove it. Samantha wanted him, too, but there was no leverage for Manolo.
    “What’s the most you tricked in one night, Manolo?”
    “Eight, maybe ten times.”
    Samantha looked at him thoughtfully. “This may set Women’s Lib back a ton, but I’m giving you a break. You got two nights to get that six hundred and ninety dollars. Don’t make us look for you.”
    “Thanks for shit nothing,” Manolo said sullenly.
    “You talk nice to Samantha,” Coke Roosevelt said to him. “If you don’t, I’ll twist off that little spic cock of yours. But knowing where you like to put it, I’d do the job with a pliers.”
    “Go fuck yourself,” Manolo shouted, and spat in Coke Roosevelt’s face.
    “Stop it!” Samantha said.
    Manolo spat at Coke Roosevelt again, and then he screamed in pain; Samantha had tugged sharply at his pubic hair, a gesture more reflexive than sadistic, expressing the casual tyranny of all ghettos, pain and violence employed as impersonal proof of power.
    “When I tell you to stop it, you stop it,” Samanatha said to Manolo.
    Samantha, her manner absent and distracted, drew her fingernails across Manolo’s stomach; his reaction was spasmodic and helpless, a shuddering contraction of the muscles in his loins.
    “Manolo, there’s a convention of florists at the Plaza this week, and a lot of them cats are only a couple of degrees from flaming fags. Pick yourself some pansies. Maybe work Central Park the next couple of nights, find yourself some passion fruits.”
    Her fingertips continued to stray across the velvet surface of his stomach. She was amused but irritated at his deliberate refusal to respond to her efforts to arouse him.
    He knew what she was trying to do to him, but he was angrily determined to frustrate her. Manolo lay perfectly still and turned his face away from her. He made no attempt to struggle