Girls (14 page)

When the song is done she leans her head back and gives you a peck on the lips. Then, completely at ease, she slips her free hand around the back of your leg, holds you tight to her.

The singer has changed outfits again. Now she wears a purple velvet catsuit with stiletto ankle boots. Over it she wears a kind of rubber harness that supports a line of giant metal spikes that run along her spine. The ones in the middle stick out more than a foot.

She walks up to the edge of the stage. She is dripping with sweat. Leaning down to the front row she says, “Are there any young boys here tonight?” A range of kids in the front row go crazy. She picks out two of them and invites them up on the stage. One is scrawny, about fourteen or fifteen with purple hair. The other is better muscled, a little older, possibly a little Asian, but still by no means a man. As the song starts she makes a motion to pull their shirts off. With no more prompting than that, the boys help her, rip their shirts off over their heads and throw them to the audience.

She starts singing. “something something something YOUNG BOYS something something something!” You are not alone, you are not the only one who can’t make out anything but those two words. But those two words are all you need to make out to know what the song is about. Perhaps those two words are the only two words you’re supposed to understand.

And then you notice the strangest thing. This is really turning you on. This is the highlight of the show. You’re not bi (no, you’re really not, you’ve thought about it — perhaps even tried it — it’s not that it disgusts you, it just doesn’t excite you), it has nothing to do with that. It’s just exciting you in a way the fake lesbian show never could. It excites you tremendously to see that woman up there groping these young boys, clutching at them, grabbing their hair and pushing them onto their knees and shoving their faces in her gyrating crotch as she sings.

They love it, of course. They are a little awkward, a little self-conscious, but they still grind up next to her, on either side of her, even there and then are already wondering if she’ll take them backstage after the show and fuck them, even there and then are already thinking about what their friends are going to say, about how they’ll tell the ones that weren’t here about this. They would love to be used by her.

And it isn’t just you. You look around for the other men your age and they too are mesmerized, they too have stopped pawing the girls that brought them here. And it is not just them, the entire crowd is going crazy, wilder than they have yet. Even though they’re so young, they still recognize this is a special ritual. Even though they’re so young, they still recognize this is some-thing unique. It reminds you of a long and bloody boxing match between a popular champion and an unpopular challenger, a long and bloody boxing match where the challenger at last grows woozy in the final round, at last begins to stumble, and the crowd begins to shout with one voice, “Finish him.” A long and bloody boxing match where, by the end, even the women are shouting for blood. It is just like that. You and everyone there wants to see her gorge herself on those two boys, satiate herself with them, pleasure herself with them, use them. If she had men up there with her, handsome men with perfect bodies but men, people closer to her own age or a little older, it wouldn’t be the same thing. Even if she actually stripped down naked and fucked them right there on the stage as she sang, it wouldn’t be the same thing. You certainly wouldn’t be interested, would turn your attention to groping the young girl you are with. And the rest of the crowd, while they might be young enough to still be excited by that kind of display, they wouldn’t be excited in the same way, to the same degree. They would know it just wasn’t the same thing.

This turns out to be their final number, this is what this band chose for their finale.

As you file out with the crowd, as the aspiring model pulls your head down to her and says quietly in your ear, “I don’t have to be home until two,” you consider how different it would have been if the singer had been a man. About how if it was a man up there and he pulled two high school freshman girls out of the audience and pushed them onto their knees and shoved their heads to his crotch, the two cops near the door would have stopped the show. About how, for some reason, that would have been public indecency.

Then again, you think as the cold night air hits your face, a man wouldn’t have worn those spikes down his back. A man wouldn’t have been afraid of the strange girls getting behind him, of them doing something he couldn’t see. If it was a man up there with two underage girls, he wouldn’t have been worried about that, he wouldn’t have been worried about losing control.

“Then resourceful Odysseus spoke in turn and answered her: ‘Goddess and queen, do not be angry with me. I myself know that all you say is true and that circumspect Penelope can never match the impression you make for beauty and stature. She is mortal after all, and you are immortal and ageless.’”
— Odyssey
5:214

The wildest friend, the one you once saw walk up to a boy of about five or six who’d been left alone for a minute and say, “Did you know your mom’s fucking hot?” that one, that friend. He’s always the one who falls the hardest. He’s always the one who disappears the most completely when he finds a woman that will put up with him.

After the collapse of the Russian economy, wealthy men began to travel to Moscow for one reason nobody expected. The prostitution.

It wasn’t that the Russian prostitutes at that time were particularly young or particularly beautiful or particularly skilled. It also wasn’t because there were so many to choose from at a time when three out of four adolescent Muscovite girls said they aspired to be prostitutes. It was because literally thousands of women who had been previously employed in jobs requiring high levels of training and intelligence were suddenly forced to turn to prostitution to survive, a unique situation due to the combination of the rapidity of the economic shift with the time and place at which it occurred.

As a result, everyone discovered this quality was just as marketable as youth or beauty or skill, perhaps even more so. A plain, thirty-four-year-old, former heart surgeon, for example, would find that her blowjobs were worth the same as those of a beautiful, nineteen-year-old former bus driver.

It was this experience, available nowhere else in the world, that was apparently worth a special trip to Moscow for so many wealthy men, the experience of paying a woman with a Ph.D. to let you blindfold her, tie her hands behind her back, and cum in her mouth.

But how did the men know they were getting what they’d paid for? What proofs were offered, what guarantees? What was the equivalent of the chicken bladder full of blood placed in the cervix of the pubescent teen sold for the twenty-third time as a virgin? Were there academic credentials forged for this purpose and this purpose alone? What if all the women claiming to be former international lawyers were impostors? What if there were no architects forced to become whores?

And when we bought a second place, an apartment in the city, you decorated it yourself and you said to me, “You have to see it, it looks great — when are you coming home?”

The word “work” is derived from the Middle English
werk.
This in turn comes from the Anglo-Saxon
werc,
which, it is thought, is an adaptation of the Indo-European base
werg
from the Greek
ergon.
This word was used in all the same ways we use “work” today but also applied to one additional situation.
Ergon
was also used to refer to what men did in battle.

Likewise our modern word “charm” comes from the Latin for song, incantation, or inscription,
carmen,
which was taken in turn from the Greek
charma
meaning “source of joy.”
Charma
gave the Greeks all the words one would expect, like, for example, their word for “rejoice,”
chairo.
But it was also from this word that the Greeks derived the word
charme.
In modern English
charme
best translates as “combat.”

All of which makes one wonder — no matter how impossible it may seem in a time when ancient Greek was lost — if Shakespeare was aware of this when he had Macbeth, shortly before he is killed by Macduff, coin the term “charmed life.”

And so we want faster cars, faster boats, faster jets, faster computers — anything more powerful than everything else. And we continue to want them even after we learn that there’s nowhere worth going except where we left and that the faster we go, the further away from there we get.

You might have had a dog once. You might have liked him a lot. And he probably liked you even more. You might have played with him every day. You might have taught him all kinds of commands. He might have made you smile whenever you came home no matter how shitty your life was. He really might have been willing to die for you without hesitation.

But sometimes when you fed him, you couldn’t help thinking that maybe this was what your whole relationship was based on. That if somehow he decided where and when and what you ate, you would be the one sleeping on the floor, the one balancing the bone on your nose until he said, “OK,” the one sitting up on your haunches when he said, “Beg.”

If you had a dog once, sometimes this was something you couldn’t help thinking.

You will be staying with an old friend after your second divorce. It will be night, cloudless, moonless, you will be at his house in the country down by his boathouse. You will be sitting out on his pier hanging your legs over the edge, drinking beer from the bottle. It won’t be cheap beer but it will still come in bottles. You will be like a couple of boys but for the fact that somewhere in the back of both your minds you will be vaguely worried you might lose a shoe to the lake, might get some kind of stain on the seat of your pants. There really will be a blanket of stars.

You will have been discussing work, there will be a silence. There really will be crickets and the odd bullfrog, the odd splashing noise from somewhere out on the lake. “Bill,” you will say, “how have you done it? How have you managed to stay with Karen? I mean, you’ve been married since you were twenty for Christ’s sakes!”

There will be another pause. “She likes eighteen-year-old blondes,” Bill will say at last.

You will laugh. He’s kidding. “You’re kidding,” you will say. But then you will look at him and you will see he’s not kidding. He’s not smiling, he’s just looking out over the lake. He will take a sip from his beer.

“Come on! Really?! Karen?” Even in your surprise you will manage to find space to imagine Bill’s wife finger fucking a younger girl. Karen will still be very attractive. “What about trust? What about being honest with each other? Aren’t you supposed to say something about that?”

“Oh there’s all of that too,” Bill will say, drinking again, “you have to have that too — you have to be completely honest with each other from day one — that’s why she’s comfortable with us sharing someone — that’s why she’s not threatened, she’s known who I was from the beginning — Christ, on our very first date we ended up talking about strip clubs somehow — I think she was comparing bridal showers to bachelor parties or something — and she asked me if I liked them. I said, ‘yes,’ and told her why. And she was fine with it. If she hadn’t been there wouldn’t have been a second date. And if I’d lied to her, told her what I thought she’d want to hear, then there shouldn’t have been a second date. Every lie you tell, the next one comes a little easier.” He will look at you then and you must seem surprised, like you’ve just been told that, in fact, there is a Santa Claus, because he will add, “Look — I’m not saying we wouldn’t have lasted this long without that, I’d like to think we would have and still without cheating on each other, but I can’t say for sure. All I can say is that it’s worked for us.”

There will be the sound of light footsteps on the end of the pier. You will both turn around. Bill’s son will be there, eleven years old. “Dad, Mom says dinner’s ready.”

“Thanks Billy,” Bill will say. You will both get up and walk to the house. Bill’s son will start to take Bill’s free hand but then, perhaps because you’re there, think the better of it.

He will watch both of you take a swig of beer and then ask, “Dad, can I try some?”

Bill will chuckle, look at you. He will swish the bottle around and drain it until it’s almost empty. Then he will hand it to his son and say, “OK — here, you can finish it. But don’t tell your mom, OK? She’d be mad at both of us. . . .”

Billy will start to drain the bottle but then spit out what little he has taken into his mouth. “Eew!” he will say. “Eew! That’s gross! Why do you guys drink that stuff?” he will ask.

“You’ll see one day,” Bill will say, “one day you’ll like it too.”

At dinner Karen will catch you staring at her. “What?” she will ask, good-naturedly. “What? Do I have something on my face?” She will pick up her napkin and daub at her mouth.

“‘They sat down on the ground and lamented and tore their hair out, but there came no advantage to them for all their sorrowing.’” —
Odyssey
10:567

And one time in college you arranged for a friend of yours to lose his virginity. It was at a party in your house and the friend of a friend of a girlfriend of yours, some girl you’d never met and never saw again, pointed to your roommate and asked you who he was.

“That’s my roommate!” you said. “Why, you wanna meet him?”

And she said, “I dunno — maybe — maybe later.”

And you said, “Wanna sleep with him?” She was cute, you were joking. And the friend of your girlfriend, some girl you knew and did see again, hit you playfully and said, “Stop it — you’ll scare her off!”

But later on that same night when you were both even more drunk, she came up to you by herself when you weren’t with anybody else either and said, “Yeah I do.”

So you took her upstairs to the room next to yours, a single room whose occupant happened to be away for the weekend, and you told her to get undressed and get in the bed and wait and you closed the door. And you opened the door again and said, “Oh — and leave the lights off, otherwise he might get scared and wanna talk to you or something.”