15

I spent the afternoon moping around. That night, I decided to join Milo at Bla Bla, a restaurant-bar on the Rue Princesse on the other side of the river. We ate marinated pork chops and ordered one drink after another. We raised our glasses to our deceased loved ones, and soon we were honoring the departed we barely knew. I lost count. After dinner, we managed to make it up the stairs to La Terrasse, a cross between a rooftop nightclub and a Lebanese diner. A roomful of expats, rich Malians, and dolled-up whores was packed around the bar. The alcohol was flowing like water while the crowd’s raucous laughter went sailing into the humid night. Milo had brought some very pure cocaine, which had become rampant in Bamako. We did a line in the john and then a second. I was feeling better, but I knew it wouldn’t last. My grief would ambush me as soon as the coke wore off.

A thunderstorm broke out. Rain pounded the tin roof, while the wind bent the trees all around us. Lightning flashed, and each time it lit up the sky, I made eye contact with a curvy woman sitting across from me. Her short dress was so tight, it seemed to be on the verge of ripping at the seams. The young woman next to her looked bored to tears. The radiant one smiled at me, revealing a perfect set of teeth. I raised my glass in a toast to her enormous breasts, which jiggled every time she moved. Milo had had enough. He stood up and staggered over to the bar to pay our tab. When he came back, he slipped the bag of coke into my pocket.

“You need this more than I do,” he said.

I offered to drive him home, but he refused.

“You’re as drunk as I am, Solo. I’ll take a cab. You should too. Just come back for your car tomorrow.”

Milo took a deep breath, spotted the exit, and made his way through the crowd, which opened up miraculously. He looked like Moses parting the Red Sea. Now that the bar stool next to me was free, the woman with big tits made a dash for it. She extended a hand. Her fingers were full of cheap rings.

“Hello, what’s your name?” she asked in a high-pitched nasal voice they all use at this hour in the night, the voice that sounded like she’d just inhaled helium. I replied and she gave me what was probably her stage name: Samantha. I couldn’t drag my eyes off her cleavage. She asked me to buy her a drink. I signaled the waitress and Samantha ordered a beer. We launched into a meandering conversation. Thanks to the alcohol, we quickly became good friends. She was Guinean, and because I was feigning interest, she proceeded to recount her life story. Her kid was with her parents in Conakry while she earned her living by the sweat of her brow. Her fiancé, who sounded more like a pimp than a bashful lover, had recently dumped her for another girl who was probably younger and more profitable. Basically, it was the classic tale of joy and misery. I checked my watch. It was two thirty. I was drunk. Too drunk.

“How about we have some fun?” I asked Samantha.

She agreed and glanced at her friend, who hadn’t moved from her stool.

“Tell her she’s welcome to join if she wants.”

Samantha went excitedly to ask her friend while I paid the bill. I left a generous tip, and when I turned around, my two beauties of the night were waiting for me—the voluptuous fatty and the thin timid one.

~ ~ ~

In the taxi, I wasn’t feeling so hot. My head was spinning like a merry-go-round, and my stomach was roiling. I let Samantha take charge. She gave the driver an address, and he nodded. Evidently, he knew the place. The thin one cozied up and began stroking my cock through my pants. I felt bad about getting hard so quickly. Through the grimy window, I watched as Bamako slipped away. I didn’t want to bring these girls back to my place. That would have debased Drissa’s memory. Not once during our time together did I ever invite a woman back to the house. We had an unspoken understanding. The house was just as much his as it was mine. The bitterness swelled in me as I thought about Drissa. To put him out of my mind, I reached for Samantha’s velvety thigh. She smiled at me through a lock of synthetic hair that had fallen over her face.

The taxi parked in front of a Chinese hotel in the Hippodrome neighborhood. These establishments had been multiplying for some time. They had the reputation of being places of real debauchery. The Chinese laborers who worked on all of the city’s construction sites came here to dump their wages between the thighs of local whores or girls smuggled in from their home country.

In no condition to negotiate, I paid an exorbitant amount for the fare. I made my way, propped up by a girl under each arm, to the entrance, which was illuminated by a red lamp with decorative writing. Several young Malians on mopeds—also Chinese—were chatting in front of the doors. It was obvious: Mali was in the throes of becoming an offshoot of the Middle Kingdom. We passed them, and one of the guys made a remark behind our backs, which I didn’t understand. It set off a thunderous round of laughter. Samantha turned around and gave them the finger. I couldn’t say exactly how, but we ended up in a large shadowy room. An acrid stench of morning sweat hung in the thick air. A cruddy bar was in the back. A few guys leaning against it were watching an old soccer match on a wall-mounted TV. Some other men were playing mahjong. They all looked up when we walked in.

“Hi, gang,” I said. My mouth felt thick.

They looked away and resumed their respective activities. Samantha asked me for money to pay for a room. I gave her a ten-thousand-franc bill.

“Book the fanciest suite in this picturesque establishment!” I said emphatically.

The skinny girl cackled like a hyena. After taking care of the formalities and buying a few beers, Samantha led us into a dark hallway lit by bare crimson lightbulbs. We passed a succession of plywood doors through which I could hear the sounds of abused box springs, feigned gasping, and deafening moans of ecstasy. Samantha pushed open one of the doors and flicked on the lights. We walked into a room furnished crudely with a bed, graying sheets, and patched mosquito netting. The girls started disrobing, and the smell of their cheap perfume filled the air. Apparently they had no time to lose. I walked with steadier steps to the adjoining bathroom. The corners of the shower were streaked with black mold, and some darkish muck was seeping into the drain. A cockroach scurried across the toilet seat. Tough luck. My drunkenness was going to shit.

“Just pull down hard on the flusher when you’re finished,” I told the bug.

I walked back into the room, and Samantha started slinking toward me. She wasn’t wearing anything except a small chain around her large hips and another around her ankle. Her heavy breasts flopped with each step.

“Is something wrong,” she asked me nicely. “You don’t like the room?”

I grasped one of her quivering tits.

“It’s perfect,” I said, smiling.

After paying them, I took out the baggy of coke and drew three lines on a chipped mirror left by God knows what John who had been there before me. We snorted the powder, and the girls undressed me in no time at all. The skinny one—who went by the name of Cindy—folded my clothes neatly while Samantha vigorously washed my cock with fresh water from the cruddy sink. The bug had the courtesy to leave, and my dick was now throbbing inside Samantha’s somewhat rough hand. Once the sanitation business was taken care of, we maneuvered to the bed with our uncapped bottles of beer. I lit a cigarillo while Cindy and Samantha, lying on their bellies, took turns sucking me off, taking sips of beer in between.

A hopped-up blow job, I thought as I watched a couple of geckos run across the cracked ceiling. I stuck my dying cigarillo butt inside the neck of my beer bottle. It made a little crackling noise as it drowned in the backwash. The girls put a condom on me and offered the usual compliments about the size of the allegedly coveted object.

And so I fucked them both. I finished with Samantha in doggy position. Her magnificent ass reached toward me while Cindy massaged my balls. The world was capsizing, and I was hanging on desperately to those wide hips while my latex-garnished dick appeared intermittently in the perfect circumference of her cheeks. I was fascinated with a trickle of sweat gliding down her spine. It formed a little damp pool in the small of her back. She moaned with pleasure. It was a lie, but a white lie. I knew it, and she knew that I knew it. I finally came, releasing a squirt as hot as lava. I imagined my jizz was black and sticky like oil. Then came Samantha’s big number, the grand finale. She screamed with pleasure, her face turned toward me, her mouth agape, and her wig in disarray.

In situations like this, it’s all a matter of protocol.