Eastern Bodywork: Everybody Knows This is Nowhere

[GSD]

Too true. Too true.

 

[Gladiator]

thx, mr. chandler

 

[Gblade]

Plans were made and abandoned and I was left standing alone in the rain on Park Avenue. My two-tones couldn't help me anymore - they were made to look good, not to keep feet dry. Sadness was everywhere around me and I was nowhere at all.

When it rains, Manhattan goes from good to bad. What was a nice stroll yesterday is today an obstacle course of umbrellas and scaffolding, of ankle-deep puddles and taxis that pass too fast to get out of the way and splash you with the filth of my dirty old town from neck to knees.

It's a round world, baby, and if you're reading this you know I'm talking to you. You can only hide from what you feel inside for so long, you can tell yourself lie after lie after lie but one day you'll have lied so much you stop believing yourself and then the truth will make you fall to your knees and beg for love when just yesterday sex would have been enough.

From 30th to 39th Street between 5th and 8th Avenues, the neon lights twinkle in the blacked out second floor windows like the diamonds in Juliet's eyes when she drank the hemlock and took the plunge. On every block the lace curtains call to me like the desperate dirge of police sirens, mocking my disgrace, my disgust, my dead little soul.

Time is always short, precious, limited. When you want an hour you have 45 minutes. When you need 45 minutes you get 30. When all you need is 30 you take whatever you can.

I hurry through the rain to...where? Something will appear, something always does. 39th Street...the fog clears...a sandwich board says "body work." I stop without thinking. Like breathing, like the beat of my heart, like sleep it comes without a thought, without conscience or consciousness it comes and takes me and I follow because it's in charge and I am not.

I ignore the buzzer and try the door and of course it opens and of course I enter. Second floor. Lace curtains on the door. Skeleto-muscular diagram in the window. Lace curtains say something, lace curtains mean this is a spot, a place where the rub is followed by a tug. I push through the door knowing that when I do I am committed, I am not leaving until I satisfy the need that eats away at my humanity a little bit every single day.

A dirty little place, it is, four massage tables tossed into an office with cheap new floors, curtains hung on rods for makeshift stalls that are a winking nod to privacy but nothing more. She says her name is Linda. She's thirty-something with an athletic, slim body in a pair of sweats and a polo shirt. Her face is pleasant. An arm reaches out of a stall to my right to pull the curtain fully closed, like I give a shit what's going on with some other dude's junk in there.

An open door to the left - an exposed bulb and a toilet. She takes me into an empty stall. One side is an actual wall - the office-standard cabinets are still mounted there with boxes and crap atop them from someone's hasty New York real estate exit. The curtains are hung with shower curtain rings.

I take 45 minutes for 40 bucks and I hand her the house and take off my clothes and lie down. Through the curtain I hear Chinese conversation, and the guy on the next table snores.

Linda comes back in and asks me hard or medium and I say what I always say and she covers me with a gray towel and starts. I hear the handjob in the next stall vividly, the distinctive rhythmic slapping...it stops after seconds. I wonder what kind of man comes 10 seconds into a handjob.

Linda pushes and prods and it hurts my back but fuck me fuck me fuckme I fucking like how it feels and I say nothing. Guy next door mumbles in Chinese and the girl answers in a courteous high-pitched singsong voice like a mockingbird with arsenic on its claws and absinthe on its wings.

The rain pours down the street outside like a river flowing to the sea but the river doesn't want me and the sea has better things to do. More oil, more pushing, more hands hands hands hands.

The hot wet towel comes and then the pillow and I flip. Two female voices next to me speak in broken English. One girl is new on the job. The other is teaching her. Fuck it. Drop in ceilings and fluorescent lights above me that will not be used today. Linda shuts the lamp in the stall and rubs my chest. I touch her firm ass and my cock likes it and tells me to keep on going keep on keep on keep on going til I get what it needs.

Linda oils my hard cock and I reach under her shirt. I push the padded bra aside with my white hand and touch her little breasts and hard little nipples and I come and come and come and come.

She brings water and I put my shit back on and hand her two more twenties as I drag my ass down those stairs. For today, that will do. For today, that's enough.

39th Street is a river and I float, I float like a cork on the ocean until it takes me away from here. And I am gone, but I remain, I remain, I remain alone.

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