Viewing the local antiquities

You are a spoke. She is a hub.

Doubt comes after certainty.  


"Your email?"



"'wor'"

"'wor'!"
"You will kill me."

"Nemo!"

"Nemo is a litle fish."


"I will go get another condom"




"You're nice."



"You came last night."


"If you want advi'—Men do not come here to relax. They come here for an orgasm. Go to the beach. Go have a coffee. Sit in Victoria Square and watch the men and women and dogs."

As others see us 


"I like it when you suck my balls, and maybe now you will do it for longer."

That's what I imagine telling Angel the next time we meet. My smoothness will give her another reason to call me her baby.

So, this morning, I shaved my balls, as had been my habit in the past when I had money.

My system is to have ready:

• newspapers


• blunt scissors


• a little round bathroom mirror like they sell at Target


• a razor (electric)


• A tensor lamp

After showering, nude I put the newspapers down on the floor, near a plug: sit down with my back to the wall, propped up the mirror in front me, plugged in the lamp, and pointed the lamp at the mirror. I'd call it a miniature surgical theatre—the bright mirrored light, the readied flesh—were it not for the absence of meat-locker cold and the lack of edged instruments.

So with my back against a wall, I spread my legs wide to get elbow room, look down, pull taut the long tuft of hair that hangs straight down, and snip through it as close to the skin of my sack as I can with the scissors. Each hair tents my loose skin as I tug.

Pull, snip, pull, snip, pull: A small pile of curly hair grows on the paper between my legs.

Then I switch on the electric razor and, flipping open the sideburns trimmer, try for a number one cut all around. Since the hair is too short to grasp, I have to stretch the skin of my sack tight between two fingers, then raze it, with and against the grain. A mild erection helps tighten the skin of the shaft, and I raze that, then work looking into the mirror: raze my inner thighs: raze either side of my asscrack.

What an effort! A woman would laugh at me. But next time, I can give Angel another reason to call me her baby besides my suckling: my smoothness.

Finally, a #1 cut: My balls are covered with fuzz, although I left Bush at the top of my dick. Generally, I look down at myself from above: I see myself erect, sticking out, and don't see—as I now see in the round mirror—the scale of the whole package: a little unerect nubbin: a stalk poking from a puddle of flesh: my balls weighting my sack down, filling it out: my buttocks flattened against the paper: chafed where I sit all day in my cubicle chair: the line of flesh leading down my perineum to the creased arms of the secret star of my anus, which I note with relief is not brown.

There's a little red smear on my thigh; the mirror shows me red droplets on my sack. Since it's a Monday, I have time to heal before I visit Angel again.

Notes
Google finds two theories on why men shave their balls.

Theory A is that smooth is somehow erotic; these are the guys doing Nair and waxing themselves.

Theory B is that long is somehow erotic; that removing one's bush makes one's shaft seem longer.

No theory for me. I just like having my balls licked. It's a peaceful, warm, oceanic feeling, like being bathed, or transcendance. Trustful, too, besides being exceedingly lewd.

Especially when combined with a rim job.

So, shaving my balls means more sensation and pleasure for me: My whore's tongue will caress my sack's skin; and with all that hair gone, she's likely to give me more service.

Theories A and B are sentimentalities that don't, mercifully, apply with whores. Because she will have seen so much, she's unlikely—barring edge cases and the outré—to be impressed by putatively erotic surfaces or dimensions. That's one of the nicest things about dealing with whores: Theories go away, subsumed in the contractual relationship.

Because of the storm, Annie is late getting in, so when I call to confirm, her booker and I reschedule for five. I slip my steamed glasses into a pocket, and open the phone booth door: Blind sleet stings my bare face. Ste Joseph is up on the mountain: No bookstores are near to kill time in, an hour won't get me back to my house, and with the Viagra, I need to keep fasting; no café.

So, head down, stiff-legged, I trudge, plowing the first path through the drifts on the sidewalk, white tinted pale orange by the sodium lamps; right on Bellevue, right up the mountain. Sleet pocks and splatters the shell of my parka.



The streetlights are haloed. In the dusk, yellow windows: In the warmth, people chatter, sip, laugh, smoke; or so it must be from the tilt and the blurred glint of what must be faces, arms, hands. My parka's well insulated: I'm feeling heat in my face, at the back of my neck.

Back at the booth, I call in again.

The dim hall is pale pink with bronze sconces throwing fans of gold light.

Positioned in front of her peephole, having wiped the melted snow from my face with my hands in the elevator, having cleaned my glasses using my shirttail, I reach into my pants to adjust myself vertically:

And knock.



Branches sag with their white loads against the black sky. The plows have been out. I walk home in the street. A dragon rears up in the mist, resolves to a snowplow, steel blade striking sparks from the curb, throwing aside a snow spume; the driver's head alert in the cab.

Car with chains mutter and clank.

My boots squeak on the crushed snow.

The snow brightens yellow in front of me: I look back over my shoulder: A bus—

I run ahead to the stop, step up the wet black ridged rubber stair, show my pass, and enter: the warmth and the light and the bundled-up girls in their long knitted scarves and chignons and their musical chatter:

Home.





THE FOUR SEASONS: Spring, summmer, fall, winter.

"Too big": What I thought right away when the mama-san led her out, answering my glance with "She good. You like her." So I thought the house would do the right thing by Jennifer's regular.


"Everyone wants air conditioning."

She blows air on my anus but doesn't offer the specialité de maison. And when she's turned me over and barely started to suck me—


she scrambles to fit herself over me, squats just in time, and thwacks heavily five or six times, moaning.


Naked, she faces the air conditioner, having turned it to high, fanning her boobs with both hands. I feel the blast of chilled air.

"You should have said a hand job first, then sex."

Downstairs, out the door: A painless extraction.