jack
The Legendary Troll King
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by buttfucking the grocer and sucking off the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Valerie counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Valerie did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. Jack "Vap" Venooker."
The "Venooker" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming Vap. But whenever Mr. Jack "Vap" Venooker came home and reached his flat above he was called "Vapgnome" and greatly hugged by Mrs. Valerie Kilmer's Dick-Venooker, already introduced to you as Valerie. Which is all very good.
Valerie finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Vap a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Vapster. Her Vap. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Vap.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Valerie, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the Jack "Vap" Venookers in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Vap's "squirmy rooter" a dildo that had been his father's and his grandfather's. It was the only thing that had ever made her come, and he used it on her regularly. The other was Valerie's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Valerie would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Vap would have pulled out his dildo every time she passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Valerie's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of diahrretic brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. Kind of like a hair suit, only more hideous. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Valerie ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Mrs Dick-Venooker.
"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown turdlike cascade.
"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
"Give it to me quick," said Valerie.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Vap's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Vap and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a squirmy rooter cover simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Dildo. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Vap's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that cover on his dildo Vap might be properly anxious about the depth in any company. Grand as his squirmy rooter was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Valerie reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. Just the way Vap liked it when they played "library policeman." She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
"If Vap doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island glory hole girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"
At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Vap was never late. Valerie doubled the velvet dildo cover in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Vap stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Vap stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Valerie, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Valerie wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Vap, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Vap, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."
"You've cut off your hair?" asked Vap, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Valerie. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Vap looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Mrs Kilmer'sdick-Venooker. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Vap?"
Out of his trance Vap seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Valerie. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Vap drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
"Don't make any mistake, Val," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Valerie had worshipped, masturbating in public, long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Vap!"
And them Valerie leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
Vap had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull cloth seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
"Isn't it a dandy, Vap? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the dildo a hundred times a day now. Give me your squirmy rooter. I want to see how it looks on it."
Instead of obeying, Vap tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
"Vall," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the dildo to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on. And then get down on your knees and suck my cock, you owned bitch"
The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Valerie did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. Jack "Vap" Venooker."
The "Venooker" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming Vap. But whenever Mr. Jack "Vap" Venooker came home and reached his flat above he was called "Vapgnome" and greatly hugged by Mrs. Valerie Kilmer's Dick-Venooker, already introduced to you as Valerie. Which is all very good.
Valerie finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Vap a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Vapster. Her Vap. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Vap.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Valerie, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the Jack "Vap" Venookers in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Vap's "squirmy rooter" a dildo that had been his father's and his grandfather's. It was the only thing that had ever made her come, and he used it on her regularly. The other was Valerie's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Valerie would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Vap would have pulled out his dildo every time she passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Valerie's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of diahrretic brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. Kind of like a hair suit, only more hideous. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Valerie ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Mrs Dick-Venooker.
"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown turdlike cascade.
"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
"Give it to me quick," said Valerie.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Vap's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Vap and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a squirmy rooter cover simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Dildo. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Vap's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that cover on his dildo Vap might be properly anxious about the depth in any company. Grand as his squirmy rooter was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Valerie reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. Just the way Vap liked it when they played "library policeman." She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
"If Vap doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island glory hole girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"
At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Vap was never late. Valerie doubled the velvet dildo cover in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Vap stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Vap stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Valerie, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Valerie wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Vap, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Vap, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."
"You've cut off your hair?" asked Vap, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Valerie. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Vap looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Mrs Kilmer'sdick-Venooker. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Vap?"
Out of his trance Vap seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Valerie. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Vap drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
"Don't make any mistake, Val," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Valerie had worshipped, masturbating in public, long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Vap!"
And them Valerie leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
Vap had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull cloth seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
"Isn't it a dandy, Vap? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the dildo a hundred times a day now. Give me your squirmy rooter. I want to see how it looks on it."
Instead of obeying, Vap tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
"Vall," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the dildo to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on. And then get down on your knees and suck my cock, you owned bitch"
The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
