Shaft had no idea how many women he’d been with. Sometimes, usually when he was with one of them, he’d try to figure out how many there had been. That’s often what he thought about when he was with a woman—her legs open, him deep inside, his mind trying to recall all the others that had come before her.
Shaft knew that he couldn’t remember all of them. He remembered faces. He remembered names. He remembered bodies, and smells, and tastes, and the way one had moaned, or how another had gasped for breath at the moment of climax, but for the most part John Shaft couldn’t remember most women as an entire being. Instead, they were each like a puzzle with too many pieces missing to know what they really looked like.
Sometimes it bothered him, this fact that he had screwed so many broads, and he couldn’t even recall most of them. Hell, he knew the exact number of people he’d killed. But he didn’t know the number of women he’d balled.
To be sure, there were a few that he remembered. They were the ones that made an impression on him. The ones that were important enough in his life that he made room for them in his memories. There’d been the girl he lost his virginity to—Wonder Wanda. He’d been fourteen, and she’d been older, though he never knew for sure how much older. Two years? Maybe as many as five?
Shaft knew plenty of guys that had lost their virginity to Wonder Wanda. That was her specialty—her hustle—she was a cherry popper. She’d given plenty of boys in West Harlem their first taste, but as far as Shaft knew, no one got a second. And no one got it for free. Like so many others in the neighborhood, she’d figured out a way to get by. She wasn’t a trick, or anything like that—at least not like some of the other ladies that sold their bodies. No, Wonder Wanda was different.
He’d never admitted it to anyone, but he’d been in love with Wonder Wanda since the moment he’d first seen her. Shaft tried to make time with other chicks, but he wanted Wanda bad enough, and to lose his virginity bad enough that he did what a lot of other guys he knew had done—stolen a bunch of food from the local grocer, and traded it for some pussy. That was her thing—Wanda traded what she had for the food she needed to feed her younger siblings. Anyone who tried to pay her in cash got turned away. And anyone who was suspected of not being a virgin didn’t get any. Wonder Wanda liked them inexperienced and awkward, fumbling around her body, coming too quickly, and appreciative that she’d help them get past one of the inconveniences of adolescence.
Shaft had stolen an entire pot roast, some vegetables, and a loaf of bread. “No one’s ever traded this much,” Wanda told him.
Maybe that’s why she gave him a second taste for free, when she never gave anyone a second taste, let alone of a third or a fourth. She told him once that she’d never been with anyone as much as she’d been with him, and that he’d been the only one to get some without offering something in return. Not that he didn’t have anything to give. Shaft was too young to realize it at the time, but he’d been the closest thing to a real lover Wonder Wanda had ever had. Everyone else just fucked her.
Wonder Wanda moved away while Shaft had been locked up in juvenile detention for the first time. He never saw her again.
Shaft could still see her face in his mind as if he’d just seen her an hour earlier. And yet he couldn’t remember the names or faces of so many of the others. He couldn’t even remember the name of the woman lying beneath him at that moment, her legs wrapped around his waist. His mind was clouded by too much Johnny Walker Black Label, not that his poison of choice was what kept him from knowing the name of the woman whose hips thrust in unison to his.
Shaft liked to get laid, but for the most part, with a few exceptions, that’s all he liked. Conversations bored him. Museums and art galleries held no interest. Going to the movies was something you did by yourself. Most important, he didn’t like getting to know new people—especially women. Getting to know someone meant getting invested in them, and he couldn’t do that ever again. Not after the last time.
So, he just got laid, and tried to avoid all the bullshit that came with sex, like caring and remembering. Fucking felt good. Caring and remembering led to pain. He’d endured enough pain.
He wondered what “the shrink” would say about that. She was one of the few he remembered. Dr. Monica LaSalle, a high profile psychiatrist that had been one of his clients.
Monica had hired Shaft to get the dirt on her husband, whom she suspected had been having an affair. Cases like this were no-brainers for Shaft, and he’d earned a reputation amongst Park Avenue white women whose husbands had developed a taste for something darker. These women would hire Shaft to get the proof they needed to divorce their husbands, and then some of them ended up in bed with him. Shaft figured it was their idea of revenge, inspired by their husbands dabbling on the dark side, and maybe even that movie Behind the Green Door.
Shaft could tell whenever he bedded a white woman that had been adventurous enough to watch the porn flick where skinny Marylyn Chambers had taken in every inch of Johnnie Keyes. All that hippie, free-love bullshit had provided a lot of white women the excuse to experiment sexually in the late 1960s, but Behind the Green Door had changed the game—even more so than Deep Throat. It made big black studs the fantasy du jour of white women who either wanted to feel something of substance between their legs, or had deep-seeded issues involving slavery.
Everywhere he went, Shaft seemed to meet some white chicks who had seen Behind the Green Door, and was looking to get screwed by some gangly spade with cheap-ass jungle make-up on. Shaft had no desire to don a loincloth or warrior paint on his face, but he could screw them just fine because he liked to screw.
The problem became the fact that he’d taken a few too many of these easy divorce cases, become the revenge fuck of vindictive white women, and started to feel more like a gigolo than a private detective.
Monica LaSalle had been one of those vindictive women. She also happened to be a psychiatrist. Most of his clients had been her clients. After several rounds of revenge against her husband, she had started talking to Shaft. At first it was pillow talk, but at some point it felt less like he was laying in bed next to a naked woman, and more like he was on some shrink’s couch.
He wondered how he’d gone from getting laid to getting his head shrunk, and it didn’t sit well with him. He didn’t want anyone telling him that his sexual desires were really a cry for help, or whatever the fuck it was she’d said to him, between talking about abandonment issues and arrested development. Shaft sent her a bill for his services, stopped fucking her, stopped fucking the other angry Park Avenue wives, and went back to doing whatever it was he did by screwing so many women he didn’t remember—including this most recent one.
Soon enough she would climax, or he would, and then they could both roll over and go to sleep. He wouldn’t even have to forget her name, because he’d already forgotten.