Red Lights for Six Nights
By
Carl Reader
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Carl Reader
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All characters in these stories are purely fictional. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.
Chapter 1
That sunny afternoon he stared out the tall clear windows at Philadelphia International Airport at the Boeing 767 and in his mind there was only one thing the stiff shining jetliner could be: a penis. Divorce had broken his heart, and he was going to the whores of Amsterdam to make sure it hadn’t broken his cock along with his mind, so now his ride was a cock. If love sickness could be cured by sexual indulgence, he was going to find that cure. As he stared at the plane, he reminded himself that he tended to internalize pain, blame himself for his failures, but now he was determined to externalize his pain, expunge it, get rid of it through sex with whores. Staring at his plane as a cock was the first stage of his sleazy experiment, of externalizing pain, an experiment that would end with him pleased by millions of compliant whores, he hoped.
The jet was a cock, plain and simple, outside of him but in his power. It was his cock, he mused, stiff, shiny, huge, eager and erect. It sat throbbing at the gate, much grander than the 767 inches of its name, a long pulsing silver tube with wings glinting in the sunlight, eager for the action of flight and sex, outside of him but a part of him egging him on. He imagined it must have waited there for him for hours like that, impatient for him to figure out what it was, eager to penetrate the sky and go where he could put it to good use, once he reunited with it. His cock wasn’t shrunken inside his pants now, but outside and huge, and it acted as though it was impatient with him and all the emotional baggage inside him. It was telling him he was a dope for having a broken heart, and that he should let all that go and follow it instead to ram it into whores. It was straining to split apart the legs of the clouds and head out with him to Europe, show him what a jackass he had been, for it was far more eager than his heart was and it seemed aware that his heart might drag it down with his morbid depression. When he thought this way, the sight of the sky and clouds above made him horny to hitch on his throbbing jet and ride it, a little bit eager for his adventure now. The plane, his new cock, sat there like a randy puppy forced to stay, or like a frothing race horse in the gate, eager to rush into the most perfect place on earth, Amsterdam. For days he had felt apprehensive about flying out of Philadelphia at 8 p.m. on a Monday night to spend six nights in the scorching-hot red-light district of Holland’s most famous city, but still, because of security concerns one year after 9/11, he had gotten to the airport four hours ahead of time, as though he was the eager one instead of that horny plane. He sat nervously looking at the impatient silver jet, an extension of himself, and wondering what in the world he was doing there waiting for his pretentious and condescending huge cock to force him on Europe. He was still sunk in his emotional abyss, but the 767 called on him to become as hard and stiff and happy as it was.
He fidgeted at the gate behind the big glass windows, looking out onto the runways, looking at all those stiff swift metal birds sticking it to the sky. His 767 simply sat there, waiting to explode, as other glinting jets floated down to land in the distance like graceful, exhausted, satisfied dancers, home after their adventures in Amsterdam. His thoughts intruded and he remembered that he had thought he would never be out on the street again looking for sex, a 767 in his pants, especially at this advanced age, but there he was putting himself through a self-imposed regime of sex therapy after a divorce, going on a fuck vacation to have intercourse with prostitutes because he was still too sad to have it with anyone else, being still in love and abandoned by love, but it was the only thing he could think of that might help him. He thought there had to be something wrong with that, to be so mired in old love that he couldn’t love anew, but he was determined to break out of it with the help of whores. He had thought his days looking for love were over, but then there had been the breakup in Montana, an evisceration coming from the one he loved the most, and suddenly he was alone and humbled and unable to change, here watching planes land and practically telling his 767 to calm down, cool its jets, the whores were waiting for them, once he got his mind straight and could function well enough to climb onboard. The jet had other ideas and was attempting to force him along its path with its pulsing impatience. He thought Amsterdam was the antidote to this mess, but now he was talking to his horny plane and thinking of it as his cock and it was being a little too impatient to thrust him into the sky and he was wondering if he had chosen the proper course of remedial sex. All this baggage he was carrying on might weigh down the plane to sea level, instead of re-introducing him to freedom from pain and pleasure in love.
“Flight 208 to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam will begin boarding shortly.”
He was going to solve the common problem of being rendered impotent by lost love in his own unique way. It had been a year since he had been dumped in the west, since she had gone away on a business trip with her boss while he was fixing up the big, old log home they had purchased in the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains. This was to be their dream home in the west, but soon after they bought it the nightmare began. One night while she was out screwing her boss, while supposedly away on business, he was awakened by a strange feeling and looked out on the lawn to see a big black bear in the yard in the moonlight under the tall Ponderosa pines. Then he didn't get her call until after midnight, which meant she had been involved all the hours leading up to the call. That bear was destroying their backyard, ripping apart their apple and plum trees to get to the fruit, while her boss split her in two. The bear became of symbol to him of how his life was going, once that late call came after midnight and he knew she was screwing someone else. It was torture to be alone in the big log house with the bear outside while knowing what they were doing in South Carolina on business, that she could have hot sex with someone else when he had sacrificed all his all ways and personal pleasures to be with her. It was almost a year-and-a-half to the day after they moved in Montana, after she told him of the affair, that he had left her alone in the log house in the Bitterroots and fled home to Pennsylvania to work out his own now screwed-up psyche. She had told him she was in love with her boss, a small man with feminine moves and a slight lisp, a humorous little whippet with yellow chipped teeth and bad skin. Him? She was having sex with that pimple? What an insult to him. If only she had fallen in love with a young stud, he would have understood. But him? The pimple? He felt sorely lacking as a man if she fell in love with a pimple, although he knew he was getting older. It had been a year alone without her, with no desire to be with anyone else, his heartache for her not yet gone, so he had decided to visit Amsterdam and go to its red-light district to find out if he was still a functional man and could still ride his silver, shining cock to pleasure. At this point, he doubted it, but the jet was giving it its best attempt to convince him otherwise.
The 767, still aglow in the golden sunlight, looked as impatient as ever, as though love might rocket from its cockpit prematurely rather than force itself out the rear. He hoped the whores would help him forget, and calm his rage and fan his sensuality to what it had been years ago, when he had been as hot as the plane. Hurry, the 767 said to him again. I'm ready to fuck. Are you? He had thoughts of both suicide and murder on his mind, but he had successfully avoided both so far, although still twisted as only the callousness of betrayal and love can twist you. The things I thought of doing to him ... He was hopeless monogamist. He could only love one woman at a time, but he and Candy had felt the worst limp boredom of monogamy. That was all right for him, as long as he had love he could be limp. Love is the only antidote to loneliness. But now it was gone, since she decided to do something about boredom and forget love and pop the pimple. You're an old man, with too much of the past weighing you down, and it's too difficult to carry it along with you in a young man's game, he thought as he got on the plane and it seemed to shudder with the weight of his presence and the anticipation of pleasure. So, finally, he was on his way to the most glamorous sex-hole in the world, the red-light district of Amsterdam, where hearts are mended and damaged cocks are revived. He'd try the game of sexual self-medication with his whores, whoever they would be. What choice did he have? The straining 767 was right. Get moving. Time for therapy and forgetfulness, simple rank sex with paid strangers to heal the wound and forget the past.
The plane took out its impatience on him on the takeoff, prematurely knifing up into the sky with near-sickening speed while his heart bobbed up into his throat, nearly choking him with the suddenness of its entry into the clouds. The flight was scheduled to arrive in Schiphol Airport at 9:45 a.m. Tuesday morning but was moving so quickly through the sexual sky that he thought it had to finish before then. His 767 intended with a sick vengeance to make it there on time, to satisfy him on schedule. The jet climbed faster and faster into the sky, its engines stroking them forward. Flying at night meant a night without sleep for him, with all this thrusting and groaning and waiting for the supersonic ejaculation keeping him awake. Sleep was much valued at his age, it being the walking cane of his emotions, without which he might simply fall apart before he had a chance to put himself back together again with the whores. He had planned ahead and gotten a room at the Cordial Hotel on the Rokin before leaving, knowing a few hours of sleep after his arrival his first day in Amsterdam would allow him to go to the whores that night refreshed, fully functional and ready to rediscover his manhood. How optimistic he was. What plans he had made. He thought he would find a way to let go of Montana at this advanced age, rediscover the wild energy of his youth, and visit two whores a night like the roaring young indifferent god of sensuality he had been thirty years ago. That was his goal. Two whores a night. He had always said he was the exception as a man, that he was different and age wouldn’t affect him. He was an athlete and therefore a sexual athlete who still could do a hundred pushups at once, but he had some miles on him. Despite all the muscle he still had a balding pate with a ring of gray hair around it and a lined mug, although women said he was handsome. Almost for the first time in his life, he was feeling his years, despite the ability to fall to the floor and do those hundred pushups. In his mind, he was ancient, since he felt ancient, alone and worthless without the love he had left in the Montana wilderness. When he had settled in his seat on the 767 and strapped on his seat belt, almost immediately the flight attendant, a dour middle-aged woman without a smile, had told him he would have to move for weight and balance reasons. That was certainly insulting, for she had a weight problem herself. He was 5-foot-10 and two-hundred-forty pounds, but lots of that was muscle, and he had the stray thought that he should prove it to her by throwing her down in the aisle, spreading her legs and giving her a good pounding. He didn't think that two-hundred-forty pounds would make too much of a difference in such a powerful plane, but the flight attendant was insistent, cold and obviously anti-sex. All right, I'll move and you can forget about our liaison. He had hoped he could sleep on the flight and not be too utterly exhausted to go to just one whore that first night, and his hopes were elevated when the attendant moved him to a row of three empty seats where he could lift the armrests and lie down on his side across the three seats. She did not lie down next to him, but sauntered away with a fat ass, displaying to him that large, loose bottom with purpose. It was pitiful to think this way, planning everything to be with whores, but now his dim prospects were looking up, if ever so slightly with his three seats and the possibility of sleep. He would have the most beautiful and wonderful of whores, the goddesses of the streets, just after he closed his eyes and slept and rediscovered the ancient spires of Amsterdam. The whores were his only prospects at this point. Even his hotel had been chosen because it was close to the red light district, at 62-64 Rokin. With the din of the engines all around, he thought of thirty years ago when he had gone to his first whore in the red-light district. It was his first trip to Amsterdam, days he wanted to recapture, and as he thought of it, he laughed. It had been a joke played along with fellow travelers, going to the whores, but the joke had been on him in the end as she jerked him off and he came before he even had a chance to enter her. He had tried to have intercourse with her after the hand job, but it didn't work, since he was already soft. So much for youth, he thought, when such things could be shrugged off as laughable. Now it would be different and difficult to shrug off something like premature ejaculation. It was hard for him to come now at all, let alone too soon. Age made it difficult to end intercourse successfully, although organ stiffness was no problem. He would have to fight to perform in bed with the whores, to finish well and come, so he had to conserve himself with the balm of sleep at thirty thousand feet.
He dozed a little, and thought of home. He had told his cat that day
he was sorry he had to go to the kennel for a week. The cat was
crying in his carrier as he was driving him there, and it broke his
heart. "I'm sorry I have to do this, Deon, but I have to get
myself together. You're already together, and never have any
problems, so you'll be okay for a few days. Trust me."
It was
true. He told himself it was true to make himself feel better. Deon,
aka Gray Cat, endured everything with indifference. Two trips in a
cage across the country, out to Montana and back a year-and-a-half
later. Old houses in the town slum where he couldn't go out for fear
of cars. Four other cats in the house. That bear in the backyard. He
also told his dog, Max, that he was sorry to put him in the jail of
the kennel. The dog had endured the same two 2,500-mile trips, the
small houses, the bears and the cats and the rats who betrayed the
man. The man felt bad to be letting both of them down, but he needed
his therapy. In a way, as he talked silently to his animals while
high in the clouds, he realized how stuck in the past he was, how
necessary this trip was because it was all about misplaced loyalty,
how his extra unwanted pounds of loyalty were holding him back far
more than the extra pounds around his waist. He could not let go of
Candy because he still felt loyal to her, despite all she had done to
ruin his life. He was a loyal person. She was not. He realized he
felt guilty from loyalty to be leaving Gray Cat and Max alone in the
kennel - and Candy alone in Montana. He believed he should be taking
care of them all, rather than going off whoring, something a
responsible man in middle age did not do. But he was no longer a
responsible man, she had taken that away, so how could he be loyal
and feel guilty about whores? He had lost his house, his job, his
relationship, his love and a piece of his soul. All of that was gone.
So why be loyal now? How could he be responsible when there was
nothing left to be responsible about? He tried to get comfortable as
the engines hummed loudly all around him, thrusting through the sky
to the whores, who were all he had left. The whores were the sirens
bathed in red light who would help him forget loyalty with raw
fucking.
He had spent some time that day watching planes crisscrossing the sky, and now he was in one of them, unable to sleep. He had felt the best while driving to the airport in Philadelphia after dropping off the animals, wondering if any of the planes dipping down out of the sky and other adventures toward the airport were his. All of this was about being free and functional and disloyal. Each step he took in letting go made him feel better, and one of those anonymous planes out of all of them writing white across the sky would help. It was a beautiful, clear day, and he wore polarizing sun glasses to ease the southern sun's effects on his eyes as he sped down Route 95 toward the airport, wondering what the girls would be like in the red-light district once one of those anonymous planes took him there. The clouds were a panoply of scalloped white, with the sun a white misty disk behind them and the tiny anonymous planes rising up and dipping out of them in an endless display of aerial sexual acrobatics. He was leaving, finally leaving, and he dreamed of abandoning his passion and loyalty to Candy as well. How disgusted he was with her. Not only had she betrayed him after he had sacrificed all for her - home, family, friends, job - not only had she deliberately destroyed their relationship, but she had ruined her boss' marriage, another woman's life and a boy's life, a boy of eight, his son, whom the pimple had abandoned for sex with Candy. Much of what the man had was now property of the pimple. The pimple slept on the bed the man bought. The pimple lived in the house the man had fixed up. The man could help himself get over all this with whores, but the pimple’s son would be a victim his whole life and would perhaps one day find himself traveling to Amsterdam, or someplace worse, as therapy. Perhaps the man would see the eight-year-old boy there, as desperate to be with whores as he was.
He wondered if they were going to eat on this flight, for he needed to be carnal, not intellectual, with blood and lust dripping off of him. The din of the engines and the discomfort kept him awake. He would have liked to make the past different, but that was not possible. He could feel himself getting excited at the prospect of food, just as he would later be excited by the mouths and touches of whores. He sat up and watched the wing in the dark, with wisps of cloud crossing over it. At least he could reconstruct himself, with the help of the whores. The boy was on his own. He had felt fine on the drive to the airport, which flew by since he went so fast, over 70 miles per hour, in his old eternal Toyota, but on the plane now he still felt worn out. He wondered when the excitement would come. He had had a long day already, leaving his apartment in the mid-afternoon, since traffic was sparse then and he had to start the trip sooner than he wanted to for security reasons. He went faster and faster. The security line in the airport had stretched out at least fifty yards down a long hall, he remembered, as the jet throbbed through the sky. As he stood in the line, a man in a flannel shirt, jeans and a baseball cap carrying a small bag talked to him about the fish business, and it had bored him.
"I haven't been home here in fifteen years," he said. "I sell fish."
“That stinks.”
They both laughed but the man laughed because he thought the fish salesman had the smell of whores on him, when it turned out to be the ocean. The fish salesman thought the man was laughing because he said he sold fish. Their conversation was that nervous and silly. The fish salesman was from Philadelphia originally, and he knew Pineville, where the man lived alone in a small apartment and worked as a reporter. The fish salesman had been away for fifteen years before coming back to visit family in Philadelphia. The fish salesman lived in Seattle and Alaska and seemed very anxious to get back there. The man and the fish salesman complained about the length of the line, while they fidgeted and joked and the man tried to determine if the fish salesman truly smelled like whores or if it was halibut or his imagination. A highly made-up young woman of great energy in a black pants suit with fresh wavy black hair and make-up and large brown eyes behind the man also fidgeted as she listened to their conversation. Everybody was fidgeting, since it was just after the terror of 9/11 and they all feared being blown up in mid-air. Then she broke into the conversation suddenly and without introduction, complaining with a whine about the line, too. “It’s shit,” she said. “Real shit.” Talking was better than fidgeting, the man guessed, although when it was this boring it was nearly the same thing.
"Do you believe this?" she asked again, gesturing to the four-thick line ahead of them that stretched out fifty yards. "I don't know if I'll make my flight. What shit."
"Where are you going?"
"Houston. What shit."
She said she worked for PECO, the energy company, and said "What shit," again, and oddly, the mention of shit made him want her, since it reminded him of her lovely round ass. She was as painted as any whore, and she might have been as suspect, with those bad nerves of hers and her affinity for scatological expression. The line moved quickly. When they passed through security she was stopped. The alarms went off. Suspicions confirmed. She had to take off her shoes and undergo a wand search, during which she looked very annoyed and the man got even hotter. The clasps on her pants set off the bells and whistles, and he nearly volunteered to remove them. Seeing her there with her hands up and her shoes off, surrendering and being wanded, that set him off into passion. He waited for her, watching her, as they wanded her, and when she walked up to him he asked what had set off the alarm and she lifted up her shirt too high to show him her bare belly and the clasps on her tight black pants and her curving hips and the bottom of her bra. A tease. She was just a tease. His breath caught. Then she covered her belly, his eyes caught on her breasts and stuck there, and she said "Have a good one. Shit ..." and walked off, still a jangle of nerves. He felt like a minor idiot for the silly way he had stayed to talk to her and gawk at her and had gotten hot over her and had been paid only with a glimpse of her stomach and her bra.
All women were fair game, since he had been unfairly gamed, he thought. All were whores. His 767 agreed by taking him so eagerly to his goal. He was the problem, he was sick in the head. As soon as he remembered the tease on the plane up in the air, all he wanted to do was sleep. His eagerness transformed to fatigue. The next night he would be with the whores, and he needed more than ever his energy, his sickness told him, and he should not waste it on teases. He wanted to be ready when the red lights shone down on him. He stared straight ahead in the early part of the flight after moving to the empty row of three seats, numb, and he felt so empty nothing could have moved him. The farther he fled away from love, the greater the empty space inside of him and the greater the need for love. He was actually going on a fucking vacation to combat that, him, a responsible good citizen, a mature middle-aged man. It was as though he had been shucked out, his internal organs gone, to think of doing such a thing. It was dark and silent and lonely inside the plane and he was simply empty, even of thoughts, in that first hour on the plane. He told himself he shouldn't sleep until later, so he would sleep soundly. He checked to see if his headset worked. It did, and on screen was the latest Woody Allen movie, the one in which he was a washed-up director obsessed with his former wife, who was now a Hollywood big shot who hired him to direct a movie. He couldn't differentiate between a job offer he got from her to direct the movie and his feelings for her. It might as well have been the man on the screen. In the movie, the director developed an hysterical blindness after calling her a "quisling." A traitor. Candy was a traitor. Traitors and teases. He thought that appropriate for his situation, but oddly he was not as bothered by the thoughts of Candy as he usually was. His terminal loyalty was waning, he hoped, as he was about to cheat on her as she had on him. What a joke that was. He was only cheating on himself, his values. She had long ago done that, and now he was simply forgetting her in any way he could and freeing himself and trying to have some fun after a year of misery. What was wrong with going on a fucking vacation? He said to the flight attendant he'd have the chicken when the meal tray came by and he still lay prone on his side. He had not wanted to be with anyone in the year since they had broken up, and each woman he had tried somehow failed him, bored him or disturbed him, but as he looked around the plane, the women all looked wonderful to him. All women were fair game, all whores. He ate quickly. He had fantasies of them, the businesswomen in dark suits and the girls in jeans and the fat elderly mothers in loose gowns, undressing them one by one, as he ate. That was what he was after, fantasies and the freedom to have sex. He was going to the whores for dreams. He would be loyal to that concept, the concept of whoring for personal redemption, but to nothing and no one else. The chicken wasn't bad. His emptiness was.
His plane was doing better with the trip than he was. It sped along through the sky effortlessly, while he could barely sit up. After dinner and the movie, he lay down again to sleep across his three empty seats in the middle of the 767. He was thinking about all this and could achieve no more than a daze as he calmly told himself over and over to rest and conserve his energy as the plane took him nearer and nearer to his goal. His thoughts of rest prevented it. You need sleep, old man. You’ve strapped on the 767 and will have to fight to keep up with it. He tossed and turned as best he could, but only succeeded in making himself sore in several places. He moved his wallet out of his back pocket, which made him slightly more comfortable, since it no longer was digging into his hip, and deposited it in his inner coat pocket. Sleep was still impossible. He was entering into what he hoped was a permanent daze, content with that. Hours passed that way. The plane was a huge long thin humming tin can of death and sex enveloping him with that endless din, drumming about his past. He barely knew where he was, since he thought so much about what had happened to him. He barely felt the 767 descending, and then they were in Holland with a bump. He must have slept and not known it, he told himself. The plane set down, startling him and finishing off its excitement with a thud. He gathered himself and his things and got off the limp 767, groggy but calm, functioning automatically. He looked back at the jet, and it was as eager as ever, recovered immediately, despite finishing its lust, hardly the worse for the wear of the trip. The man was stumbling. He ached. He was hungry and tired. He barely looked around the airport before finding a train ticket to the center of Amsterdam and his hotel. The train ticket cost 2.70 euros, which he had since he had changed money in the Philadelphia airport. He was always obsessively ready. The train going into town jostled him as the plane had, but not sexually, as he rode through the dark outskirts of the city, the new industrialized part made less attractive by the gray and rain of the day. It was miserable and cold out, not exactly a tropical vacation for an old man looking for whores. The train was as tireless as the plane, and his ride did nothing but drain him further. The whores were near, they were near, he knew, with a whiff of them on the cool fresh air occasionally darkened by diesel smoke.
Suddenly, at the sight of the beautiful center of the city, he revived. He could just make it out through his window on the train. He hurried off the train and down the platform and after walking through Centraal Station, he stepped out into a magnificent scene of wide streets crammed with people and lined by ancient red brick buildings, the day windy with huge clouds in an immense sky over top of the rising spires and gables. The buildings stood in proper lines on both sides of the street, as they had for centuries, watching visitors come to heal their hurts. His heart soared again and the day cleared as though touched by god’s hand, with the sun peeking out and the sky blue expanding, and the clouds were running away on the wind, scattered by spirits. All was action and energy and the street opened out to a broad horizon of city life, and movement was everywhere, in the streets, on the canals, in the air. He felt a thrill and remembered from previous trips the scene he saw now. In memory, at least, he was young again, and he felt the warmth spreading through his loins again as a good wine spreads through the head. All that life of Amsterdam never waned in its energy, like the 767, whenever he came here and walked out of the station, as though born again each time. What a way the city opened up. It pulsed. It allowed life to be lived. As soon as he saw the streets, he couldn't get enough of them and the magnificent buildings and the massed swirl of people and traffic and clouds. He stared at it all, a tourist with hope. A great city, Amsterdam. A great idea, freedom. A great culture, born from a long history. How many years it had been since he had been anywhere great? He dragged his bag behind him on wheels, and he, too, felt he was rolling along, despite the gray skies and misty rain and fatigue. He could do this, make himself heal with whores. He remembered his hotel's name incorrectly, though, and that made him aware he was still groggy from the flight. He asked for the Dorian instead of the Cordial at the hotel information booth along the Damrak. He hurried back out into the streets and found his hotel anyway, while looking around agog at everything. He remembered the address to be at 62-64 Rokin and then he remembered the name Cordial when he saw it on the sign over the sidewalk before the hotel that was near a Vodafone shop.
On the way walking up the Damrak, he had stopped and paid ten euros to exchange a hundred dollar bill with a young English woman behind a plastic window on the street. It was too much of a commission, but he was paying dearly for everything he was getting that day. He didn't care, for he had known that would happen. Energy came and went by way of money. Holland was the place where capitalism was invented, and who believed today that all things didn't have a price, even sanity? Redemption didn't come for free. So, in a daze, he thought who cares about the material things of life? Paying for things lets you see a value in them, and living in a daze for six nights with whores he was sure would put him into a condition of clarity about value. He checked in to the Cordial after greeting the desk clerk, a middle-aged, heavyset man who smoked constantly, and then he went up to the fourth floor on the bumping, noisy red elevator. He had barely dropped his bag on the hotel room floor before he slipped out of his clothes and into the tiny narrow soft single bed against the wall. Despite everything he had tried to do to rest on the plane, despite the energy of the city he tried to tune in to, he was exhausted beyond movement. His bed found him at precisely the right moment and enveloped him instantly in the blackness of the inside of a glove.
As planned, he would get long hours of rest before heading out for the red lights and whores. Now if he could just pull off the healing balm of commercial sex after having real love for years, after loving and living with someone he cared too much about for ten years, he would be on his way. He had to knock Candy off her pedestal of love by squirming in the muck of the red-light district.
That might be the most exhausting thing of all to do. Poking his head out from under the covers and looking out the big window of his hotel room at the high, billowing clouds, he saw his plane rising into the blue again, tiny now but tirelessly heading off to a new destination with new tasks for other neurotics. He closed his eyes to sleep. He had to. Even his plane was cheating on him, having an affair with the sky again without his permission, but if the plane could cheat, so could he. The plane would be back, it would be back to help him, when he strapped it on that night and headed out into the district with all the power of a jet in his pants.
Chapter 2
It's dangerous to play with memories. Before going out on his first night in Amsterdam, he did so. He looked at the map of the city given to him by the woman who charged him too much of a commission when he exchanged money. He wanted to remember the city from his previous visits and see in memory what had been, but most of all he wanted to remember how he had been in the old days, before he was old and rejected and broken, knowing he was treading on dangerous ground in thinking of how he had been with the whores in his youth. He would be comparing himself now to himself then, and he was afraid the comparison would not stand up, so to speak.
To dull the effects of the comparison, he looked over a map of the city, rather than go to the places he had been. On the map, he found the streets he had known on his first trip to the city thirty years ago, when he first went to the red-light district. He looked up Nicolaas Maas Straat where he had stayed in a rented a room in a house from an elderly family. A kindly overweight woman and a thin smiling worn-out man they were. He saw the Stadhouderskade on the map and the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk and the Van Gogh and tried to follow with his eyes on the map the streets he took walking from the center of town out to the edge after nights whoring as a youth. He had forgotten there was the old church in the middle of the red light district, the Oude Kerk, but he remembered it now when he saw it represented on the map with an icon of an erect steeple. After all, it had been thirty years and in that time even erections can be forgotten. He remembered, too, those quiet, dark nights wandering the streets around the church, the red and blue lights bubbles in the mist, and all those wonderful girls ...
Women were dangerous when mixed with churches, he thought. Putting
the map aside, he remembered how dangerous Candy was. She suffered
from anxiety syndrome, after a violent rape as a young woman. She
took Xanax like candy and often wandered off in several
personalities, like Chinese food, sweet and sour, twisted by the drug
dependence, either extremely sweet or obnoxiously sour, depending
what was coursing through her veins. Once, when they lived in
Pennsylvania and were in love, he had been sick with a 105-degree
fever. Angry with him because he was sick, she refused to walk his
dog Shu. "I'm not worried about Shu at all. He's the least of my
worries," Candy had said when he hollered at her in a hoarse
voice for letting the dog go out alone, for he always, always,
always, ran away and she always, always, always did things her way,
even if she knew bad results would come. Shu was killed by a car in
the middle of the highway when he ran off alone. He would never
forget the phone call from the man who found him. Shu could never go
out by himself, since he always ran away and sat in the middle of the
highway, and this man had said he had been sitting in the middle of
the highway when the car with three teenage girls struck him. With
the dog’s death, her anger came back to haunt her. Feeling sorry
after the phone call, as she always did, she placed flowers on the
grave he dug for Shu afterward in the rain in the woods behind their
house, surprising him that she could feel anything at all for the dog
she got killed. She said he looked so lonely walking around with only
Gray Cat following him that she insisted they get another dog. They
got Max two weeks later from the kennel. She had been terribly guilty
about getting Shu killed, but she never learned her lessons and could
never learn to control her anger at ridiculous things, like blaming
him for being sick, and they suffered for it. She never learned from
incidents like this. When his mother was dying and he returned home
from an evening of watching her, Candy locked him out of his own
house. Exhausted and depressed, he had to drive the thirty miles back
to his mother's house to sleep, since she was so angry at his taking
care of his mother and ignoring her that she had to prevent him from
entering his own home. Her personality was a totally irrational
seesaw of anger at the rape and her past and niceness from guilt, and
she constantly waffled between the two, and no wonder he suffered
even now from it. She constantly confused her past with the present
and him. Now she had put the final blow on him, telling him she loved
somebody else, for the memories of her past had told her her true
love was horrible, the past would always tell her such things as long
as she looked at the past as a crime. He had left Montana, weeping as
he drove through the mountains, and come home to Pennsylvania,
utterly confused about what his life would be alone. So now he needed
the whores.
He folded the map and put it in his backpack in case
he got lost walking around the city. It was very dangerous to play
with memories. A friend once told him it was better to be lonely than
with somebody crazy. He had tried so hard with Candy for nearly ten
years to understand her. It had been over a year since she had told
him she was having an affair with her boss at the pharmaceutical
company where she worked. Since then, he had not been able to make
any serious attempt to be with anyone else. A woman friend from his
youth who wanted to become intimate suddenly died in her sleep from
asthma one night, which put as final an end to that as there could
be. So now he did the frivolous to recover from all that. He went out
late that afternoon, intent on finding new feelings with whores and
forgetting memories. It was all that was left to him.
He stopped in a New York Pizza place and had a surprisingly good piece of pizza, replete with pineapple on it, for 2.70 euros. He was avoiding the issue of going back to the red light district, his jet lag and depression and anger still draining him after thinking about what Candy had done to him and remembering how carefree he had been the first time he came to Amsterdam thirty years ago. The comparison was striking. Now the women he knew either cheated on him or died, and it changed him, as time and such things do.
It was early, still light out. He headed to the new side of town to
see the things there again. He spent time at the Singel canal
admiring a brown church he didn't know by name and looking at people
and places and watching the yellow leaves fall into the canals from
the trees. While it was still afternoon, he crossed back over to the
old side of town, where the whores were, and found the Voorburgwal,
just as day was fading. The lights were on for the sex shows. Some of
the red lights in the big windows lining the streets were on, too,
but the windows were empty of whores. Things looked just as he
remembered them from years ago. Narrow streets with uneven brick
sidewalks lining both sides of the canal. Barges in the water. One
sex show was ready for business, a man outside on the brick pavement
barking for passersby to come in, but as he walked by he still didn't
see any whores in windows or doors. That was all right. He was too
frazzled to think or do much, frustrated by memory, angry, lonely,
loony, empty, hungry, disgusted. His daily regimen of one hundred
pushups was keeping him going, but he needed to eat more. The slice
of pizza hadn't been enough. He went into a nice, three-storey,
glass-fronted Chinese-Indonesian restaurant along the canal called
the Oriental City. It had tiers of tables on the floors behind the
glass, three layers of them. He was going to be good to himself,
treat himself. He sat upstairs on the second floor, still drenched
from the rain, looking down at the shining sidewalks outside and the
umbrellas and the people like dark shadows bent over and coping with
the weather. He wondered who the whores were among the crowds in
those shadows. He saw women on bikes with umbrellas and black men and
many Orientals, and cars inching through all the live flesh, afraid
to hurt it. There was no way to tell the whores from anyone else, but
he felt a thrill just looking at the women. He ordered wonton soup
and sliced pork, along with a Heineken draft, from a Chinese waiter
who never smiled and spent little time with him, rushing away after a
few words of broken English. He looked around for people of interest.
A woman journalist, dark and Jewish with brown small glasses and a
black and white dress, was interviewing a Muslim in a blue suit about
his religion a few tables away, pretending to be interested in why
there was terrorism in the world. Since he had nothing to do, he
listened in. He was a journalist, too. Maybe he could learn
something. The Muslim man, his herringbone overcoat draped over an
empty chair beside him and his blue shirt without a tie, was talking
about how the radicals were taking over the funding the rich Saudis
and Kuwaitis were funneling into the Islamic communities all over
Europe. That was where the money was coming from to fund terror. The
woman wrote this down carefully, and he went on and on about every
topic under the sun concerning the glory of killing for nothing, but
then she just couldn't listen to the crap the Muslim brought up about
women. He said Muslims know their women didn't go with other men
because of the way they dressed. If covered up, they were immune from
sex. She put some hard questions to him, challenging him about why
that made any difference if love was involved. They went back and
forth, softening and hardening their positions, and he hoped they
noticed he was eating pork and drinking beer. All of these fools were
too serious, arguing about nonsense they made up in their heads, or
had implanted there by someone else who was an even bigger idiot, a
priest or rabbi or cleric. They didn't deserve respect, simply
because they were passionately dishonest and never examined what they
thought or were taught to think. He knew he had to maintain a quiet
distance, let the ignorance of the world exist and pass by unimpeded.
As always, seriousness is the most dangerous of things, excluding
perhaps memory or trying to live in the past, because from the
outside sexual betrayal feels the same as terrorism.
He waited
until after six, long after finishing his dinner, before he went out
on the streets.
Hesitant to look too hard for them, he couldn't
find too many whores at first, and he was very depressed to be doing
this, for his heart still belonged in Montana with the woman with the
sugary name. He forced himself to walk on over the uneven sidewalks
to shop for sex, his heart feeling as though it was caught in a steel
trap. He felt annoyed and above all this, having lived and loved
someone seriously for almost ten years, but still he felt a thrill
but suppressed it out of guilt. He tired to convince himself there
was still fun left in the world and in him, that the red-light
district could be a giant eraser of feelings, of sexual terrorism.
All he had to do was pay his money and he could do whatever sex
things he wanted to do to a woman here. There were red and blue
lights on all down the Voorburgwal, reflected in the canal with the
trees yellow from autumn. He told himself he should be careful to do
as well as he could and not fuck the first whore who beckoned to him
from her window, like a school boy or a sailor. He would be
discriminating, judicious, and do this tastefully. He felt a tingle,
although still drained of energy, the weakness of depression with its
teeth in him. He considered going back to the Cordial to compose
himself and calm his cowardice with more rest. His hands were
shaking. He set off purposefully and walked all over the Voorburgwal
and Achterburgwal, down behind the Oude Kerksplein, barely glancing
at the girls, unable to make a decision and not wanting to make one.
There was an incredibly endowed African whore in a doorway just
across from the old church. She had a very well-proportioned body
with immense breasts that fairly screamed as pillows. He still
couldn't decide, despite the obvious allure of her. Many men were
around her door, most of them simply gawking and making rude comments
about her. He watched her for awhile, a little current of electric
passion in his loins at the exotic and exaggerated endowments of her,
and then he walked along farther, back toward the Achterburgwal, to
the alleyway near the Cafe Pleinzitch where so many beautiful whores
had been the last time he had been here. He thought he might find his
memory eraser there.
And, suddenly, there she was, catching his eye as though a statue that had waited for his glance for decades and then was brought to life by it.
She was a dark-skinned woman with shining eyes in a side street, her skin dark-tawny like butter mixed with chocolate. Her teeth were perfectly white and eyes were almost perfectly round and wide. She caught his attention immediately, as a work of art on the tawdry streets. He stopped in his tracks, his tingling sensation increasing to lust. All it would take to have her was money, as though a great work of art could be consummated with mere money. He remembered some of these ladies of the street could be truly beautiful and kind, and here was one. His heart beat irregularly, the bane of an old man seeing a gorgeous young woman. She was striking, with long dark shining hair streaked with white highlights and a slender body with beautifully enhanced breasts and large, deep brown eyes that pulled you in. He watched her carefully, wondering if he was truly seeing what he was seeing, the astonishing beauty of her. She posed in her doorway in a bikini top and red silk panties that covered little, and she had a wonderful bright smile of red lipstick, the kind of smile that warmed your groin. He hesitated, thinking she was the best he had seen so far, but still questioning himself. Could he do this? When he turned to walk back to her door, an overweight man in a padded coat beat him to her, and he felt like shouting out for him to get out of the way and for her to wait for him. The overweight man negotiated a price with her and they entered her tiny room and disappeared when she closed her door and pulled the curtains, shutting out the red light all but at the edges of the curtain. Disappointed, remembering he who hesitates is lost and foolish, he headed back to the wonderfully endowed black African whore, checking each window with a red light in it on the way for someone who could interest him. The women puckered their lips or gestured to come in but he walked by. He walked quickly toward his new memory of the black whore across from the old church, thinking he would need someone so endowed to get him excited after hesitating and failing with the perfect whore with the café complexion.
The African was deep in negotiation with a dozen Germans for group sex, in the midst of raucous talks, with the Germans laughing and pushing one young member in their group after another toward her doorway. The boys were all laughing white teeth and flying blond hair. It reminded him of what he and his friends had been thirty years ago. The whore had already agreed to two boys at once, and they stood meekly by her as she gestured for more boys to join in on the fun. Suddenly, four more young Germans walked quickly by her and went through her doorway and into her room. Two more were pushed in by the boys laughing outside. The door closed and the remaining Germans hung around outside laughing and yelling and singing a drinking song, screaming at their friends inside to perform. Just like Germans. Eight Germans at once didn't appear to faze this woman, who appeared to have prodigious talents and readily agreed to the hordes of the Germanic invasion. She would be more than a match for the eight boys.
Unable to forget her, he headed back toward the beautiful caffeine-dark whore, bouncing though the district with the energy of a man who had been without the ability to decide but was now able to make up his mind, his a cock now willing to decide for him. Her door was still closed when he walked by the second time. He didn't wonder she was so busy, with the way she looked and with the way her watery eyes invited you, even in memory. He waited for a while at the end the street for her, and then he walked around a little bit more, examining the red lights and the contents for sale within. When he came back, another man was exiting her door, but he didn't care at that point. He wasn’t going to kid himself that he was the only one for her. He stood outside her door wondering still at how beautiful she was, while she straightened out her hair, and then when she turned with surprise at his stare, he walked toward her. She opened the door immediately.
"Do you want to come in?"
He knew he had to say something, but was choking like an adolescent and forced himself to compose his voice to an even tone.
"I think so. How much?"
"Fifty euros for a massage, a suck and a fuck."
It was just that simple and this dark creature outlined in red and blue lights would be his.
"All right. Fifty euros."
It was also just that simple, but he didn’t know how simple it would be once he was inside.
How modern it sounded to him to be saying "euros," and how wonderful it was to pay out something so exotic for a creature so strange and beautiful. It was new currency, almost as exciting as a new fuck with a stranger. He had dealt in guilders with these girls previously and it had always seemed stodgy and proper. Now it was hip and exciting. He stepped up inside her doorway and walked into the room a few steps, noticing the bed was small and clean, with a white towel over a red-flowered bedspread. There was a sink against the wall and a mirror by the bed and posters of women in seductive poses on the walls all around, which turned it into a Disneyland of sensual characters. He was certainly surprised to find himself doing this, even though he had planned it and could no longer resist it. She took over the conversation, which was lagging at that point due to his confusion.
"It is fifty euros for a suck and a fuck in one position," she said happily. "It is twenty euros more for more positions. Do you want to fuck in more than one position?"
He certainly did. Her looks made him shiver and desire thousands of positions with her.
"I think I do."
“What is ‘I think I do?’”
“I’d like to fuck you a thousand ways.”
She laughed, pleased at her seduction, and he gladly gave her the money, seventy euros. He wanted to do this right, have as much fun as possible with this gorgeous creature, find the high water of sex after drowning in its depths for so long. She had smooth skin and perfect teeth, youth still keeping her beautiful, despite her profession. With her high heels on, she was as tall as he was, and she spoke with the sweet high voice of youth.
"Where are you from?” he asked her.
"Brazil.”
That explained the caffeine color of her skin.
“Have you been there?"
"No."
Being from Brazil made her a mulatto, that creamy buttery look of a
mixed background.
"Where is your wife?"
He was taken aback at the sudden mention of Candy. How did she know about her? How could she possibly know? Was he that easy to read?
"Oh, we broke up. I have no wife anymore."
She looked confused.