On the concrete bench next to me Lou says beer and night get him horny. His eyes snap at any piece of ass walking by. “Not any piece,” he says all loud and blustery. “Just the ass that squats to pee.” He starts stroking himself and gets up, saying he got to have some woman, and beer sprays from his mouth. Maxie says he needs some woman too. They say “woman” ’cause they won’t get anything calling it pussy. Cuddles stands next to Lou, holding him up then pushing him aside. “Forget about the woman,” Cuddles says. “I just want some snatch.” He poses like a hero out of some spy flick or war movie. I listen to them laughing and cackling, but I don’t say nothing about women or anything else.

“Listen, if we all put our money together—”

“What money,” I say. “I just blew what I had on the beer.”

“See, I told you he was small,” says Maxie.

“Shit.”

Cuddles says he got ten dollars left. “And I got ten,” says Lou. “Twenty’s enough.”

“Ain’t a bitch in town for that amount,” I say. Nobody answers. Every time we start cutting up on beer or herb or cycling around, somebody gets horny and we end up talking about bitches and chasing leg.

“Drink up,” Cuddles tells me.

“Let’s blow back to the garage,” says Lou. “Then the road to heaven.”

We split up, riding double.

“Hey, Lonny,” Maxie goes. “Don’t hold so tight.”

“Sorry.”

I feel bad not having any money, but that’s all right with the guys. We don’t go to a house or a place with rooms. We ride uptown, along Broadway, near 79th Street where Cadillac headlights dim and slow to a cruising speed. Ten blocks further you see the bitches in miniskirts, all legs and face and not much chest, which is fine with me. Maxie pulls to a curb where Lou and Cuddles are leering at somebody. I stay at the bike while Maxie walks over to them. Suddenly she’s laughing out loud like they was the funniest thing she’s ever seen. She waves her hands away and goes back to her pose in the door of a bakery that’s closed for the night. Maxie goes ahead a half-block further and approaches another and another one until he comes running back to us.

“Any go?” Lou asks for all of us. Me included.

“Yeah, some bitch around the corner at Ninety-first. You guys down?”

“Yeah,” Cuddles says and looks at me. I say yeah, too.