With this ring, I thee lust

Poncho V. Ilia

CHAPTER ONE

When I was fresh out of Cape County High School, Julie asked me why I didn't enter the Miss Mackerel contest.

"Julie," I said, balancing a tray of dirty dishes, "you're shitting me." "No," she said, "it would be good business."

I was working as a waitress for Julie in Julie's Seafood Restaurant, Old Town. I was just eighteen.

"You've got the figure for it," Julie said. "Good tits. Nice ass." She was a plain spoken gal, Julie was. I liked her. She talked my language. "You were Homecoming Queen, weren't you?"

I had been, but when she said it I had to smile and then I spent the next few minutes thinking about how I became Homecoming Queen, by spreading my legs for not only my current steady but for that big, black stud who ran fullback on Cape County High's championship football team and for-well, that's a story worth telling and since this is supposed to be the true confessions of me, it's as good as any as a place to start.

One tiny bit of background, however, before we get down to the nitty gritty and talk about one of my favorite subjects, screwing. My father was and is a no good sonofabitch who then and now exists on a combination of lying, welfare, unemployment and stealing. They have a saying in Cape County. When Juby is out of jail, watch out for your water pumps. Juby special-ized in water pumps. You know, in Cape County, city water systems are limited to the County Seat, Old Town, and one of the beach towns. Elsewhere they get their water by pumping it up from the ground with an electric pump which, tank and all, costs about two hundred bucks and which, sold as hot merchandise, can bring' in about fifty bucks. Juby had a good hacksaw and he could run it in the dark of night, whip the two pipes in two with his hacksaw and be off with the water pump in less than five minutes.

Juby had another speciality, which I'll mention later. I believe in not putting the really shocking material right up front, since it might sear the pants off any ready who stumbles onto my little account.

O.K., being Juby Gore's daughter got me assigned to a particular place in Cape County, the general area of low life. I didn't give a shit at first. I once told a goddamned social worker, who was trying to get me lifted out of Juby's house, "Look why shouldn't I give the old fart a little? He feeds me don't he?" That was when I was young and innocent. And, whoops, I'm hinting at the shocking material which I was going to save.

So I was Miss Low Life of Old Town, which is as corny as it's name. An old town, indeed, with the blue-fucking-bloods to go with it, although they fall generally Ђ into the old southern catagory of being too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash. You had to be third generation Old Town to be accepted in that burg and I was white trash come in with my father's generation. Juby came in on a shrimp boat, being a Florida cracker, and found that state's unemployment payments to be great and stayed living in a tar paper shack on the beach road with my mother, who he never got around to marrying. She was a good old gal, sort of stupid, I mean, she was, like, retarded, but she didn't pass it on to me or my two brothers. Like, I think, her problem was brain damage at birth, so that she was a slow, smiling zombie in my life and I remember her best going about in a old house dress, clean but ragged, smiling and singing hymns while Juby had his hand under the dinner table finger fucking me and grinning at me across the table.

But I was going to tell you how I came to be Cape County High School's Homecoming Queen. The Queen was elected by popular vote.

I was already pretty popular with certain elements of the school. I liked 'em big and strong and the football team was a good one that year. I was going more or less steady with Bill Murphy because he was the only young stud I'd found with the staying powers to give me my whees. Most of them I'd tried would shoot off inches away from my muff and leave me stranded up there on a cloud of the hots. Bill was hung like a Shetland pony and he knew how to make a girl feel good. We'd make it every time we had a chance and once we almost got caught in the janitor's closet at the school knocking off a standing up piece between classes.