Viewing the local antiquities

The original title for this work was "Whoring," but that seemed too raw, even in a blog that seeks out concrete, factual language.

So before I sought a readership, I changed the title to Viewing the local antiquities. The phrase—an unremembered quotation?—has an Eighteenth Century feel, doesn't it? The light touch that sons of English gentlemen would use, on the Grand Tour, writing the letter home before an evening of whoring. And "antiquities" does suggest the oldest profession.

Just now I googled on "local antiquities", and came up with this quotation, from the Gutenberg Project's edition of Oliver Wendell Holmes's One Hundred Days in Europe:

The whole group to which Goldsmith belonged came up before me, and as the centre of that group the great Dr. Johnson; not the Johnson of the "Rambler," or of "The Vanity of Human Wishes," or even of "Rasselas," but Boswell's Johnson, dear to all of us, the "Grand Old Man" of his time, whose foibles we care more for than for most great men's virtues. ... I was very sorry to find that No. 3, where he lived, was demolished, and a new building erected in its place. In one of the other houses in this court he is said to have labored on his dictionary. Near by was a building of mean aspect, in which Goldsmith is said to have at one time resided. But my kind conductor did not profess to be well acquainted with the local antiquities of this quarter of London.

If I had a long future before me, I should like above all things to study London with a dark lantern, so to speak, myself in deepest shadow and all I wanted to see in clearest light. Then I should want time, time, time. For it is a sad fact that sight-seeing as commonly done is one of the most wearying things in the world, and takes the life out of any but the sturdiest or the most elastic natures more efficiently than would a reasonable amount of daily exercise on a treadmill. In my younger days I used to find that a visit to the gallery of the Louvre was followed by more fatigue and exhaustion than the same amount of time spent in walking the wards of a hospital.

So, not antiquities, viewed, but viewed antiquities: Viewed "in clear light" but from a distance. As the sons of English gentlemen were the first mountain climbers, so they were the first tourists.

Gentlemen who were from somewhere else, detached: Above all, able to leave.

Notes
See also The leaf of the domain tree.

"Your shoes are just like mine" 

I met my first whore the day after Christmas, 1996. I was so naive, I'd tried to make a reservation twenty four hours in advance.

I knocked and after a pause the security chain unrattled. The door opened inward. She stood and looked up at me. Her eyes were dark brown. She didn't blink. She was quiet, her hair up in a glossy chignon. Her look, like a student in one of the lower professions: nursing or pharmacy or hotel management. She wore blue jeans and a blue and white striped tank top that pushed her breasts up and together. Mei-Ling was the name in the ad. Her rate was $180 Canadian for one hour, two services. "Do we have to have the TV on?" I asked.

Her apartment was dim and the curtains were drawn. She turned off the TV and the phone and serviced me twice, the lights on the answering machine by her bed blinking red.

I laid back naked back on the bed; she tugged off her jeans and top, and took the barret out of her hair. She sat to my side facing my feet and her breasts hung down to my face. I said "Tell me if I suck too hard" and gathered a mouthful. Her nipples felt rough against my tongue. There was a crack! from the kitchenette and she startled but I steadied her with a hand on her flank and kept sucking. Her flesh tasted sweet; salty; soapy: cuntal: like the skin of Lans neck when I snuffled her neck the way Asians kiss. I gave a tug to her panties: she stood, shucked them, sat down and I settled a palm under the round of a buttock and suckled a whole tit and let go: plop, then the other then back. Under my fingers her skin felt smooth and warm and seemed dusty, like a child's skin after a day at the beach. I ran my palm up her spine and cupped her head gently and pushed toward my dick. She got a condom out of its foil and fitted it over me.

She firmed me between her two fingers then bent shoulders and head down. She held me like a stalk between her two fingers, put her mouth warm round the tip of my dick and plunged her head down, sucked, and slurped up and plunged, sucked, and slurped up. My cock tingled so I tugged her head off me and let myself soften, then ushered her down again. I hardened as soon as she grasped me. I heard a slick sound as she pushed her pursed lips over the latex and felt the tip of my dick slide on the roof of her mouth, then she angled her head so I slid down her throat and she sucked, slurped, bobbed her head down and then up. I reached her hair back to see but let go: her hair slapped my belly like chain. I clutched at the bedspread with both hands. She sucked and I came and while I still throbbed she still sucked me. She pulled her head back. Her fingers still grasped the base of my dick.

"You can wash in the bathroom."

I peeled off the dripping condom and slung it into the wastebasket. I soaped off my dick and my balls and toweled myself. I walked naked out into the room; naked in front of someone I'd only met an hour ago. She was on the bed on her back with her head on a pillow. I pushed her thighs open and laid down on my belly between them and suckled. Heat and her cuntal stubble prickled and smeared on my belly while my cock dragged hard on the covers. She put a pillow under her head. I walked with my knees either side of her belly while I stiffened myself and offered my dick to her lips. She reached for a condom and put it around me. Kneeling, I looked down seeing her nostrils flare and her cheeks hollow and her lips around me, feeling her mouth's spit swirl as she sucked me. I took her head in my hands and halted her, then pulled her head onto my dick then off it again first slowly then faster then halting, and did again until I was harder.

I sat back and put a hand under her ass and nudged up. She got onto all fours and I got behind her. Her dark hair swung down. I could see her neck and the wings of her shoulders and the S of her spine and the swell of her buttocks and the backs of her legs and her round heels on either side of me where I knelt, and she waited, and I found where she was and put myself in her.

I pushed up and in. I had been semi-soft but I found myself hard. I clutched the rounds of her ass and when I dug out the right angle I found she was tight. I heard the soft slap of my thighs at her cheeks and looked down and saw her flesh shake. Her face hit the pillow and I saw the dark wings of her hair swing as she slung her neck down and pushed her ass up. I leaned over her back and reached down her belly to finger her twat and brushed stubble but she said "No fingers" and I was off-balance anyhow so I straightened and kneeling I planted my hands on her ass while I crammed myself in her. She cooed when I crammed myself in her. I heard our soft slapping, seeing my fingers sunk in her cheeks, soft as I squeezed them together and crammed myself in her. I heard her cunt squelch as I crammed myself in her. The tip of my dick got sweeter and sweeter and sweeter: sweeter and I groaned and I burst and I froze and I sighed and I held myself at her, back where I knelt. She reached back and up and fondled my balls and I was still coming, she found the loose folds between them and tugged down on the hairs, gently.

I thought that was courteous.

I sagged back on my heels and the pale yellow condom drooled off my dick as I softened.

"You can wash in the bathroom."

When I came out she was putting on her coat; she'd taken a call while I sucked her tits for the first time. My jeans and shirt and socks were piled on the seat of a chair in the kitchenette. Dishes in the strainer; a soy sauce calendar in red and gold from Chinatown. I kneeled and laced up my suede snowboots.

"Your shoes are just like mine," she said.

Winter, and the smell of boiled cabbage in the elevator and the halls.

Little blue pills 

Once acid; now Viagra. The Viagra pill is bigger, and doesn't have an aftertaste that makes me shudder. But each pill takes the same forty minutes from ingestion to feeling the hit; I don't know whether comes from expectation, or from how my digestive tract takes to process.

But there's still the problem of killing forty minutes; last time, I went and got my hair cut, and Tony commented that the back of my neck was flushed.

Acid, now, never did bring me engorgement; there was too much else demanding my attention. But the two pills still work the same way: A confidence game, where, since the pill licenses you to believe, you do. If you think you won't ever have a bad trip, you never do. And if you expect an erection, you'll get one.

Just warm enough all over, feeling my cock swelled against my pants' friction, I knock at the door and look to the spyhole with my prepared expression of relaxed anticipation.

Hard-soled footsteps, rattle of a doorchain—

"Yes, but—" I thought as she chanted "Come on my face, come on my face…"

Since I was face down panting into the pillow. With one hand, she pumped two fingers in and out of my up-angled asshole, while jerking me off in time with the other, after the "oil massage."

Well, she wasn't a native speaker. Poor Pink!

She gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolates as a marketing ploy, and her brothel soon after closed.

Do I submit when she rims me? Perhaps. No more so than whenever one surrenders one's pleasure to another.

I'm on all fours. The air conditioning cools the backs of my thighs.

I shove my face hard down in the sheets and angle my ass up where I think her tongue will first land, but she gives me a surprise: She reaches between my legs and palms my balls. First. I feel my beard tense as she raises her hand, palms them, lifts them slightly, tests them—for freshness?—by squeezing, then tugs my sack gently down just as her tongue plops onto my anus.

Soon, Kim rocks back and dries my crack and balls with the rough towel the house left carefully folded at the foot of the bed.

Face down in the pillow, I wait.

She gets back to work.

How long before I decide to turn over?