Black Roses, A Song as Short Story

Manic Depressive Erotic Fiction Inspired by Trey Songz’s “Black Roses”

My name is Ken and I’m a 28 year-old manwhore. Yes, you read that right, I’m a manwhore. I have two degrees with high honors from Ivy League colleges, but instead of wondering whether I wake up and save the world or solve unemployment, I’m standing here in front of this full length mirror. I live in an apartment that’s three-times the size of the one I grew up in, and I pay five times the cost of rent that my mother always paid late when I was growing up. This is an amazing, yet wholly flawed life I live.

Roughly seven years ago, Marsha — a ruggedly attractive executive for a freight transit company and proudly former both chain-smoking and alcoholic 45-year old bisexual mother of two in Piscataway, New Jersey — proclaimed me a “big dick baller” and it was the greatest moment of my life. As I stood in front of this mirror, I stared down at my honey-brown “big dick” with auburn freckles that remained turgid against my left-handed tugs. As my body stiffened, I drew in a massive breath through my nose, into my lungs, and out through my back, remembered how awesome that moment was….annnnd, release...

On that late night seven years ago, I came fast and hard, with what appeared to be eight frothy liquid ounces of semen. I orgasmed all over what Marsha had remarked, as we earlier ate strawberry macarons filled with raspberry creme from the French bakery on the corner, was her attempt at creating a firm, tight stomach. Her attempts at avoiding a spreading midsection had been ravaged by a Caesarean section birth for Elliott, the 16-year old soccer prodigy whose innocent, toothy and smiling face was staring at me from her nightstand as we made love. As well, there was the forceps birth of 24-year old Donald, whose Down syndrome-addled murmurs I could faintly hear as I closed my eyes while squeezing out the last spurts of life’s essence from my body.

When I crumpled aside my pay-for-play conquest, and closed my eyes, I smelled the sweet mixed scent of salt and Obsession. Until I was here, naked, in front of this mirror, this day, while the sun rose over Northwest New Jersey, was the last time I wondered how in the hell did I get here?

I’m a sad boy from Seattle. I was the weird black boy in the public school lunch room in middle school with spindly arms and legs, tortoise-shell glasses too large for my comically square head and a penchant for wearing t-shirts for bands I only knew as being cool from late night infomercials, to school. I was a masturbating fool back then, too. The best relationship I had in life was the one I had with my right hand as I bought this burned DVD called “Spank Bank” from my older cousin Wayne. It contained a collection of three VHS-taped films of past-her prime Marilyn Chambers getting it in on Showtime at 2:45 in the morning on three different summer nights from the summer when he turned 21 and was able to afford buying a VCR for his bedroom TV from a job as his neighborhood’s lawn mower.

Too many details, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. This is my story, and this is how it demands to be told.

So, back to that whole manwhore thing. Me ending up in this job actually comes from one of the worst moments of my life, and slowly watching my life spiral out of control for two decades since that point. Eight years into this decline, I started hate-fucking bored housewives and awkward desperate women for cash as a well-paying diversion. Now, I’m four years removed from a fantastic job as an HTML programmer for a global cool-kid website, and I accept Paypal, and have the Square app on my iPhone. As well, on rare occasions when the independent manwhore hate-fuck industry finds me overseas in a roof-top deck hotel in Dubai at the behest of a female Malaysian pop star I sat with while helping her dissect frogs in the eighth grade (small world, right?!?!?), I’ll go one further. In those cases, I’ll accept money orders. Moreover, while I’m there, I’ll also accept blowjobs on the house from down on their luck yet buxom, silver-haired, waif-like, olive-skinned and adventurous 57-year old Parisian hotel maids. The fact that they had a threesome with Ike and Tina Turner after Live In Paris at the Olympia in 1971? Yeah, that’s the cherry on top of the pie. What can I say? It’s a life.

As much as it may seem as if I’m proud of all of this tomfoolery, I’m not. This is all false bravado. Ultimately, male prostitution fell into my life because, back to this story I’ve been failing at telling, I invalidated a sacred oath. In breaking that pact, I’ve had to deal with the fallout of my own poor decision-making for the last two decades.

If I fancied myself a songwriter, I’d start a song about this whole terrible ordeal with, “When I was four by four, I loved Eleanor.” I was 16 and she was 17, and it was one of those hot summers where your arms, legs, back and palms of your hands get burned by the vinyl piping on the cloth seats in the back of your mother’s Oldsmobile Alero. Eleanor was white, and I was black. In my wet dreams, Eleanor looked like Farrah Fawcett. In reality, Eleanor was the color of the creamy ranch dip they give you for chicken nuggets at Popeye’s, with a thick head of brunette hair cut and styled with heavy bangs and curls. She had thin lips painted with Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker, and hated wearing makeup. Also, her tongue always tasted like that one time when you accidentally drank too much sour milk but you couldn’t get the flavor out of your mouth. There were other girls I definitely liked more in my high school class, but she was the only one who liked me back. Thus, in having an utter lack of motivation to want to do any work in attracting women, I chose her.

The day after we officially started dating, we made out and she gave me the handjob that was the first time anyone else’s hand but mine had touched my cock. A day later, she excitedly told me her mom and dad invited me over for a barbecue dinner. Given that she licked my cum off her hands, I figured the least I could do was bring along a too-expensive bouquet of red roses to the event.

I drove mom’s Alero what felt like across all of Seattle to a house secluded by enormous evergreen trees and on top of a hill that really overlooked nothing special. It was one of those homes that wasn’t opulent, but smelled expensive. You know, that mixed scent of fresh Minwax in the foyer, industrial grade bleach that only maids at hotels use to clean toilets in the bathroom, boiled potatoes, mayonnaise and garlic-rosemary chicken doused in Italian dressing cooking on the grill. I’d never seen radicchio until that night, and ate it out of the salad quickly a) because I didn’t want to look like I didn’t know what this red vegetable was and b) I’m black, so I didn’t want Eleanor’s parents to think she bought home a nigger from school.

The meal ended, and while Eleanor and her mother were grabbing apple pies and vanilla ice cream, Stu, Eleanor’s ex-minor league baseball pitcher turned insurance salesman father shook my hand. Stu looked like what Simpsons character Ned Flanders would look like if he used anabolic steroids in the ‘80s, took up drinking screwdrivers in the ‘90s and discovered golf in the 2000s.

“Know why I’m shaking your hand young man?” his voice boomed, words sounding like Charlton Heston as Moses in the Ten Commandments had invaded his larynx. “No sir,” I said, my temples sweating from both nerves and the heat.

I’ve NEVER forgotten the words he said, and every morning, they crash down on me with the weight and painful force of one million angry men brandishing knives and desperately wanting to end my life on the spot.

See, I think my daughter loves you. She’s 16 and when she’s 18, she says she’s going to join you in college at Harvard and you two are going to double major in Economics and Political Science and take over the world. I have to shake your hand because if, by chance, you do this, you’re going to change my child’s entire life and ensure that me, my wife and our whole entire family are proud of that little girl in there who busted her two front teeth out of her head at six playing catch with daddy in the backyard. If you must know, I’m expecting you to care for her, starting right now, the same way that I cared for her on that night. She lost her two front teeth Kenny, so I bought her ice cream every day for two weeks, and when her teeth grew back in crooked, I’m the one who bought her braces, too.

So, before you two even go to college, get married or anything else, know that on some level, because I know my daughter loves you differently than she loves me, I know that I’m not the only man she loves anymore. So, I shake your hand and stare directly into your eyes to tell you that I’m going to trust you with a heart, mind, body, soul and spirit that I had a hand in nurturing. If you tear apart the work that I did, I swear to you, we’re not going to fight or anything, but I am going to be highly disappointed, because by that point she’s going to be too old to be able to come home and have daddy feed her ice cream and buy her braces to protect her in the future.

Of course, within three months of hearing that, I dropped the ball. Well, it’s not so much that I dropped the ball, but that my balls, well, I allowed my balls to make a decision that undeniably altered the course of my life.

There was this Dominican girl named Marjorie who joined our school late in the first semester. She wore a hearing aid and dressed in long white t-shirts, adidas track pants and black Timberland work boots like she was a male extra in a Bad Boy music video. She also had the most exquisitely maintained baby hairs that seemed perpetually glued to the sides of her head. She was in the school chorus with me, and we were doing Mike Reno and Ann Wilson’s “Almost Paradise” as a duet for our Winter Chorus performance.

“I like niggas, and you ain’t just the only nigga here, you a kinda cute nigga, too” Marjorie said, winking her right eye at me as her Brooklyn, New York accent rattled around in my head and arousing my pleasure centers. Couple that sound with the smell of cK one perfume that wafted from her neck, and when after school one day she invited me over to her Boeing airplane engineer of a father’s condo to practice the song, I was low-key excited.

However, Eleanor texted me after first period to meet her at lunch that day, and as we wolfed down ham and pineapple Hawaiian pizzas together, she reminded me that the coming weekend was our six month anniversary and that her parents were away from Friday to Monday morning. “This is THE time” she said, intimating that we were going to have sex, and that we were going to lose our virginity to each other. However, Eleanor wasn’t Dominican, and my brain still was wrapping itself around all of the wonders of just what that wink meant.

I never made it to Eleanor’s that weekend. I went to Marjorie’s dad’s condo later that night, and discovered wine coolers, vibrators and the fact that Marjorie lost her virginity at 11 to a 21 year old guy who now was an all-star National Basketball Association point guard, in the same evening. I mean, Marjorie did say that she “liked niggas,” and this sad black boy from Seattle was definitely that. I used a grand total of six condoms, and failed to fuck Marjorie for anything more than 20 total minutes that night. While “drunk” off of generic brand wine coolers, she carefully put her favorite cock-shaped purple vibrator in my hand, and I watched this Dominican girl get all of the way off in front of me.

Four days later, it was Tuesday. As the eighth period bell rang, Marjorie slyly followed me into the locker room as I was running late to gym class. She grabbed me by the dick and seductively licked my cheek as the door slowly closed behind us. As we exited the same door and Marjorie re-applied her jet black lip-liner around smudged electric purple lipstick, the bell rang to end the school day. Eleanor was waiting for me, her dad’s third basemen’s glove hanging from the side of her backpack. Though she had no concrete proof of what had happened, she knew she had seen a horrible thing she could not unsee. She walked up to me, and as our eyes locked in manic depressive glances, she slapped me in the face. “Kenny,” she said, in a dispassionate voice, as the tears flowed down her cheek. Marjorie, not shocked by any of this, laughed and said, “Girl. What you crying for? You’re not gonna be happy. I mean, I love me some niggas, by that nigga right there, he ain’t shit.”