In the old days, picking up the ladies was easy. Working for the Citys' third largest brokerage gave you built-in kudos. All I had to do when I spotted my target was crack open a few bottles Dom Perignon and offer a glass to everyone around her, except her. If she male companions, banter with them abd make doubly sure they get some. Let her stew for a about a minute, wondering if she's got pimples or something. Ninety seconds tops. Then, hey, suddenly you notice her, how could you have missed her, offer her a glass, and you're in. Pour on the attention and the Champagne. Champagne was definitely the key... you had to keep it flowing. And when it was time, all I had to do was just slide up to her, flash my perfectly lined veneers with award winning smile to match, and say “I’ve been tested and it came back negative, but I have these anyway", and show her my box of trojans. When you're the dogs bollocks, it's that easy. Often, I even got away without a glove.
Then the bloody bubble burst. We all knew it had to happen eventually... just thought we'd be smart enough to see it coming and jump at the last minute. We laughed when Peter pulled out and went to Stockholm. His Swedish girlfriend was like the blonde ABBA bird... I do her any day... but still, Stockholm !? I should have followed him, an got his girl to boot.
Now it's got a lot harder. After the burst, we became lepers.. all us Essex boys. No one would touch us with a barge pole. No one was interested in the kind of high risk high pressure dealing that we did... the only business that we knew. They wanted to go back the old traditional old boys clubs that had "built the country"... relationships built on a gentlemans honour and trust. "And frankly", as one interviewer had put it bluntly "it's not your fault, but you were just born in the wrong class for the business, and I should never have got a licence in the first place". Fuck him... fuck thm all. The bastards. I did think about joining al-fucking-qaida and showing them how to break "the business".
But you probably don't get laid in alqaida... you probably have to give them all you money.. and your life. Fuck that!
Being a free-lance loan and mortgage broker was the same game, only for less dough less kudos. At the end of the day it was the same shit. Buying money cheaply, and selling it off for a lot... usually to people who had no other options. And charging them an arrangement fee too. As they say, a new sucker is born everyday.
But I still couldn't understand my declining success with the ladies. Yeah, I was reaching the big four oh, and maybe I grew a beer belly and my dark hair has thinned and become salt and peppery. But I could still keep cracking open them bottles of twenty pound Chales Rougemont champ. And my eight thousand pound guaranteed for life veneers were still sparkling. And no problems in the lower department. I’m still a fine specimen of manhood. Hell, I make myself horny thinking about me. So why am I being left to pound my own spud more often? Even changed cologne and deodorant. Thought I'd try this Lynx stuff which they keep showing on the telly.
Last month was the last straw for me though. Went to Hard Rock Cafés' seventies-eighties night, following my usual rotation. After being rejected by all sort of women... some of them didn't even want the champ.. what the hell was the wrong with these country bumpkins. Jesus mary and joseph. I decided to go for broke. I hadn't had a shag for a few weeks. So I approached this mature woman. I’m being kind, she must have been in her mid-forties. I did the usual champagne routine, and things seemed to be going according to plan. So I showed my pearly whites in the most alluring smile I could manage and gave her, The Line. Maybe it was too soon... maybe my desperation was showing... I don't know. She laughed. She, laughed at ME. Fucking bitch. “Do I look like I’m THAT desperate?” She asked in between guffaws. “If I ever get that needy, I just put out a personal ad or join an online dating service!”. She walked off leaving me steaming. Later that night, I had to slap the salami. And I fantasized a hundred ways of brutalizing her.
But the bitch did give me an idea. I looked in the personal ads in all the local papers; calling any woman I thought I might have a chance. It worked. After the first day, I was getting replies to my messages. These ladies were indeed desperate. I had a date set up for every night with a different bird. And they all fell for The Line. I was back in business.
Tonight was going to be a good night. As soon as I read this babe’s ad, I had to masturbate right then and there. The ad read:
SLOB (Single Latin Oriental Black – what a combo!) Looks 22 – but old enough to teach you a thing or two. 38-32-36. 5’5”. I am on a protein diet therefore looking for a beefy man. If you like spicy cinnamon candy and willing to give your all call 555-6660 and leave a name and number.
I called after I cleaned myself up and had another woody when leaving the message.
She called almost an hour later. Her voice dripped warm honey.
I walked in and she threw a look at me that I couldn’t deflect. She looked like she was expecting me. She looked down her bulbous nose and sized me up. I saw how she saw me, white and weak. Flimsy. Like a soda cracker. And she was grotesque like maggoty meat, like that bucket of hot dogs that I’d used for bait but left in the garage when I was nine. She was thick, every part of her, parts that I or any decent woman would have tried to hide. Or have removed. Girls are supposed to be skinny and delicate and she was so unapologetically thick. Her fuzzy teeth were orange under the red lights. She never stopped grinning. And as she balanced herself on that bar stool, something heavy and invisible was steaming out of her and filling up the room. I started to choke on it.
She was a collage of contrasts. Her skin was green. Her immaculate red hair was in a style like Jackie O. used to wear. She leaned back on the barstool with her knees spread. The dress hanging off her thick shoulders bulged like two abcesses where it should have been flat or at least smashed down. Her nose belonged to an obese woman, broad and swollen and so upturned that she might have been part pig. The sunny yellow dress with purple flowers that tangled their way around her form hung like a peep show curtain between her knees. It billowed in and out like it was breathing. Yeast and vinegar drifted across the room and up my nose.
Her appearance was both shocking and repulsive but what scared me were the eyes.
They were like mineshafts, the two empty holes that took up most of her face. There, in the place where her eyes should’ve been were these two light-swallowing chasms. I stood across the room teetering over their edge. They were like black holes. They were like wormholes. They were infinity over naught. I could not understand what she was, but she had pinned me there and she wasn’t gonna let me go. I breathed deep and hard and feared that someone had noticed. But I couldn’t turn my head to see.
Her sexuality was thick like the rest of her. Thick and shameless. The smell had already gotten into my clothes. She threw back a drink, a shot of something that I wouldn’t know about. She smiled at me and I threw up in my mouth. She wanted to fuck me. She blinked and I ran. I left her in my bed and went to my job at the hotel.
I was a maid. I cleaned up people's sex.
Evidence of other people's fucking is supposed to be offensive and it’s usually more work to clean up. The sheets twisted around themselves. The chairs rearranged or overturned. Every last towel crumpled up on the bathroom floor. It’s supposed to be offensive and the other maids complained about it. Something is wrong with me though, because I found it erotic, and dampeningly so. I liked these rooms. I pulled the air in slowly to savor what was left of the sex. I surveyed the room to gather how it must have went. I imagined how he pushed her back onto the bed, flung her dress up, ripped her panties at the seam and drove his hand into her pussy. She always had perfect creamy thighs with no stretchmarks or blue veins like mine. And when she was dripping, he would grab her by the hips, pull her to the edge of the bed and slam into her with a force that made her scream. It made us gasp. Our eyes rolled into the backs of our heads. Her shivering hand slid down her stomach and he yanked her head back by her hair and bit her throat. These rooms made me think twice about Oscar, the guy who stocked the linen closets.
I needed a cigarette.
I hoped for these rooms. I loved where they took me. But the feel of real skin with its sweat and texture was unbearable. I couldn’t wait to get it over with. I couldn’t wait to get them off of me. But more than that, I hated their faces. It was easier to ignore what was far away but their faces were always right there, twisted and whimpering, heaving with their tongues curled. Real sex was repulsive. But by the time their tongues curled, you couldn’t just stop. Ohbabyohmygodohitfeelssooogooood. You had to wait it out, pinned there with my fingers tearing into the skin on my hips and my teeth clenched. Once I even cracked a tooth. You had to wait it out, but then you could slip out from under him and scald it off in the shower and be sure he’d be asleep by the time you got back. And in the shower you had the time and privacy to examine all the things you hoped he didn’t notice, the cellulite, the scars, the little blue veins. Real sex was humiliating. I envied the prostitutes and whores I cleaned up after with their pubic hair and their aggressive hips and their lack of apology.
Outside, Oscar was already smoking. He was ten years older than me, at least, with brown skin and brown eyes. I had driven him home a couple of times to his spot in the projects. I liked the way he looked at me, sometimes biting his lip. I was sure to throw my hips a bit when I knew he would be watching. He followed me inside and then down the hall into my next room and shut the door behind us. You’re not supposed to do that. If Mary, my supervisor, came around and saw us in that closed room we would have both been fired. I’d never been fired before. The room was a suite with a king sized bed and a stocked minibar. They had checked out already. No one would be coming back. I worked with my back to him. He sank into the arm chair with his legs stretched as far as they would reach. I stripped the bed and threw the bundle on the floor. He watched as I stretched, pulled, bent and lifted. His watch terrified me. I stopped and turned to confront him.
“I’m just a kid,” I said. It was more like a squeak.
“I know,” he said. “I can see that.” The humiliation flushed my face.
“I can’t do this,” I said, feeling exposed as the fraud I knew I was.
“Come ‘ere,” he said. I couldn’t say anything. The terror had taken my tongue. I waited for something bad to happen. It was the moment just before, when you see it coming but there’s nothing you can do about it.
“I can’t,” I managed as a whisper. “I have to make this bed.” If he had touched me I think I would have thrown up. If he’d touched me, he’d have felt my body’s throbbing panic.
His eyes pinched. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He stood and shook his head and left the room. As he walked past me he grabbed my right hip and shoved me toward the bed just hard enough to make me lose my balance.
“Cunt.”
I was cold. I didn’t stop shaking until I got in my car to go home.
We, the maids, had thirty minutes to do each room. We stripped it like vultures erasing the evidence like a crime scene clean-up crew. The twisted sheets were rolled into a snarl and disappeared down the laundry shaft. The used condoms were flushed away. The room was restaged. This is where I learned to make a bed, straight and tight, creating the illusion, day after day, that nothing real ever happened here. That every day was the same as the one before and the one after. That every event is erasable. That a bleached white sheet is a pristine denial. It took me longer than most of the other maids. I tended to be a little perfectionistic.
At home, the green-skinned sausage-lipped woman from the bar is still there. I don't see her but as the light blue uniform dress drops to my ankles, her hot salty scent rushes upward and clouds around my head. I inhale slowly to capture it. I don't touch her. I run from her into the shower where I scald her skin. I reach down my throat and heave her out of me. I carve out exit wounds and watch her trails slide down my arms and legs until and I am exhausted and collapse, still dripping and red, into my unmade bed.
Flash back to summer of 2007.
He took me on a picnic.
Imagine that! A wicker basket full of cheap wine, a soft blanket, everything a girl could want. Cheese, fresh raspberries, a pack of condoms.
It was romance.
We lay the blanket down in an unkempt field set upon a terrifically green desolate landscape.
We had been together, on and off, a little shy of a year and a half. Of course we had had sex plenty of times. But the mood here was different.
It was sensual. It was meaningful.
We laid the food and drink out upon the blanket while we sat barefoot on the soft summer grass. He fed me raspberries and whispered into my ear. The exact words escape me but I do recall that I became quite moist.
It was hot.
He ran the tips of his fingers softly down the line of my jaw, down the stretch of my neck, to affectionately caress the tender skin just above my collarbone.
He leaned in and firmly kissed the cleft of my chin, my lower lip, the deep dimple of my upper lip. His lips parted and his tongue emerged to outline the oval of my panting mouth. I gasped as he darted it firmly into mine, examining my upper teeth, then my lower, flicking and tickling the roof of my mouth. I tried to bring my tongue together with his but he pulled back, eyes squinting in the mid-day sun as it illuminated his face from the east.
‘Let’s make love.’
His words danced on my slightly intoxicated mind.
We slowly undressed and made love in the tall grass surrounding us, leaving the blanket upon which the food lay, unmolested by our sweat and flailing limbs.
Afterwards I lay on my stomach while he picked damp blades of grass off my slick back and weaved them into necklaces for us. The centerpiece of the jewelry, the charms, being each others earlier exchanged apartment keys. It was a huge step for our relationship, solidifying a commitment beyond that of even the most private sexual fantasies.
That being trust.
He placed it around my neck and wound the ends together into a clasp. Then did the same for himself.
Looking back I wish I could have said something striking. Something meaningful. Words to set the world on fire. Prophetic words perhaps fit for a modern day bible of worshipping scientific and metaphysical recognition.
But a profit I’m not…just a manipulator.
‘Let’s do it again stud.’
This is what I came up with.
Without a further word he climbed on top of me, his weight pressing me deeper into the cool sweet earth.
As he maneuvered himself inside me I felt his tongue tracing the outline of the grass blade indentations left upon my back.
‘What are you doing baby?’ I playfully quizzed through short gasps.
‘Painting…on your…back.’ He managed to pant while building up to climax.
And as he delivered the final insertion, distinctly more persuasive and erect than any previous thrusts: ‘It is…so beautiful…like…a…canvas.’
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Home
Users
Stories
Resources
About
Passage
Comments (2)
History