Viewing the local antiquities

Infinite variety

Kim was old for a whore. She kept her hair pragmatically short and her peaked face was lined, though the body beneath that little black dress turned out to be smooth and firm still. She'd clap her hands and jump up and down when I came through the door to the brothel she ran.

She shows me into the room, and hands me some soap: peppermint oil.

"I'll make you feel like a king."

The only brothel I've ever attended where I could walk from my cube to the shower, then back, unescorted.

After my shower, face down, eyes closed, stripped in the darkened and too-cool room, I hear the door open, then close, then the sound of unzipping and silk slithing down flesh.

I smell of clean peppermint. She annoints me with oil.

Kim is strong: Snapping the cartilage in my fingers and toes, pounding the soles of my feet, shaking the flesh of my thighs, stretching my calves by bending my legs at the knee, digging her thumbs deep into my tight neck. She helps me know how to work at relaxing, and at some point in each session I surrendur, float off into calmness, easily breathing in the moment unthinking:

Then she pauses:

Then she brushes up my calves with her nails, up my thighs, to my glutes, which she circles, caressing, then:

Finally rimmed out, I turn over and pull her down to me. We French: Like Ming taught me, I suck her lower lip's pulp into my mouth, and nibble along it, probe her silvery mouth for her tongue with my own and finding it swiggle around it, pause for her to probe me if she likes, then surprise her by sucking her tongue into my mouth: Then break the suction and move to her breasts, flutter her uncracked heavy nipples erect, then kiss up her neck to French her again. Then break off to snuffle her neck—Asian kissing—then move up to nibble an earlobe. Then French her again. Then:

Her tongue is big, broad, flat, slightly rough: I know from her tongue round my tongue, at my perineum, under my balls at the smooth spot, in my anus.

My routine, then: Saturdays, I take the bus out to her place in the Sprawl; in general, I like a 4:00 time slot, since that falls well with my circadian rhythms, and also the whores are all in, but none are likely to have been taken.

The bus lumbers out into the desert: past new malls, dead malls, chain stores, 99 cent stores, the odd '50s motel with neon, cable in every room, free telephone, all for {30} a night. Desert shacks, abandoned shopping carts, the land stunned, lying flat under the sun.

The hour's ride dovetails neatly with the Viagra's onset, and the heat of the desert helps matters along.

The bus stops right opposite Kim's brothel ("Healing Touch"). I walk to ATM in the strip mall beyond, in back of the steak house, already stiff, and feel myself thrust every step. Having extracted her rate, I step to her door: She shares a storefront with a fundamentalist mission.

Later, the Victoriaville authorities tried to arrest her: It turned out that in her part of the Sprawl, there was no law against whoring, and she brought this to their attention so forcefully that they arrested her for disturbing the peace.

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