A SIMPLE PROSTITUTE
Original Copywrite©DavidLewry2002
I met someone; it was a long time
ago now, as though he was from another life, as though my grown fetus passed
through the genes of one memory to another for I can barely remember, even
remembering. It seems that I was in fact another being when I knew him.
Yes, it was he I knew as “the prostitute”; one may stab a guess that he was a she or perhaps he
was me, either way, I am ill concerned with your understanding, so long as there
is some. When one thinks of a prostitute, one imagines almost instantly that it
must be a woman standing on a street corner or blocking an alley lined with our
suffering homeless and fellow street addicts.
However this is slightly different when I imagine the prostitute – I see a different truth
and not what someone has passed on to me, as such, through what they call
experience and consciousness whether that be vicarious or otherwise learned.
My initial prejudices and images have been shattered by the take I wish to render
upon your subconscious. I, like you, once saw only the female strutting up and
down the seedy street of broken dreams, pagan gods, and false ideas.
In every picture drawn or painted, there is both a life existing in the picture and a
separate always connected one behind the shaky frame with steely fragile fingers
putting the image to the paper or canvas. It is, as this document you read,
which I have strung together in often seemingly disconnected format; a story
told yet untold, just as that which lives within the hand taking the pen through
destiny –it is all here whether I know it or not and definitely whether you are
aware or not.
Just as in life. We are all often surprised.
Imagine for a moment; there is a fight on the street between 4 different people. Inside each
of these individuals, there lies a different reason or story yet on the surface there is but one apparent motivating factor for the violence, the pain, the suffering, and the anger. The truth however, is something quite formidable and opposing that each of these human beings is suffocating on their own fear despite appearances.
This is true for our cherished prostitutes.
The street and story shall appear the same yet each street and every story are not what at first they appear. I leave you now for it must find its soul within these pages and I must no longer keep from it the proper place in my history…
It was not a hundred years ago, as one may imagine, but far closer to the here and now than the “I” of today, who sits perched atop a self-righteous peak of self-deprecating dribble.
I peer into my reflection, shone in the rearview mirror and it is there upon the back seat
staring me down. The life, which I had been taught to dread with instant fear, disgust, and shame in recognition; I had learned well, building my shame upon itself the way I had while performing the tasks of this other life. I had been told this was not a life at all, but a miscarriage in the highest form of the
word.
I believed and allowed this belief to slowly push me under the tide of self-loathing with the
weight of an anvil atop my head; with the weight of any number atop my skin.
For those who taught and told us the shame, which it required, knew nothing of its purity or
of its sheer nobility in the truth of mankind as we have created. They but scratched the surface of the painting, seeing only the canvass as empty once the liquid colors had been removed. Had they continued to scratch, they too would have found its truth so cleverly, simple staring deep and through the doubt lingering in their putrid, cold hearts.
Filled only with fear, they continued to shame us all and we continued to allow them to dictate our stature because of our natural and honest sense of loss.
It’s been 18 years since the beginning of our story and perhaps through necessity it will never end. I am sure of its continuance to some extent and in some manner for it is not unworthy of an ending laced within the solidity and fabric of humanity.
At least within mine…
As with most beginnings, it too was born of necessity and since there is no end to necessity there will be no end to this story in a conventional sense. I shall simply illustrate as best I can; the core, the reality of the pain, the depth of pleasure, and the ever present truth of existence found therein…
I was 19 years old when the thoughts first crept into the frontal portions of my mind from vivid dreams and
fantasy; finally appearing as possibility, culminating slowly within the actual.
Internally, times seemed desperate though looking back I can see they were not on the outside; if one was to examine them closely as I have done since, in almost every day which has passed. At the time however, they appeared thus to me and herefore they were. I am of the disposition that could be best described as
extreme, drastic, penchant for the dramatic, or melancholic; perhaps a combination of all of these would be closest to the truth not to mention my flexible moral core on certain things from a previous life of being abused.
I was inclined to react with severity and harshness in my surroundings and circumstances. I had
been known to ignore the need for help from others; choosing instead to forge full speed like the proverbial bull in a china shop.
The time saw an increase in my financial needs but a decrease in time available to develop these means
“appropriately”. I wanted a better life and knew that an education would be needed to gain some sort of edge on the market or at the least allow me to fake knowledge long enough to gain somekind of “career” that would allow for financial freedoms; those I had never really imagined, let alone knew of fully. Icould not affordthe life I wanted on my measly salary as a security guard and store detective so I devised a plan for increasing my income.
I met Katherine in the building where I worked nights; she was wealthy and in need of all those little subtle
things I could give her just the way I was at almost twenty years old. It started slowly, but within a few weeks became a ruse of sex, booze and money.
She was willing to give me everything and in the end I gave her more than she could ever repay. I gave her a part of me that did not know it was even for sale; and because I was young and unaware, I dove deeper and deeper despite the growing feelings of sickness that had begun to creep into the peripheral of my sight
upon the world.
At first it small; a couple hundred here and there, then a thousand or two for tuition and it increased rapidly from there. I had more than I knew what to do with when all I wanted initially was to make enough for a few extras and survive.
The first time I took her money, I began to almost immediately take her shit right alongside it. It would be an
insult here, a put down there until the pot grew and she began to tighten the reigns around my sex. My body grew chains; bound to her prison I became, recognizing the fortress that held my shackles every time her voice crept up from the depths of her already dwindled soul to my every fragile ear drums.
My own voice was cut off before my lips were able to find their place in the system of speech to form any kind of protest. I spoke to her through bitterness, destroyed her with my deprivation of what she needed. Only to inevitably give more, when finally I felt a bottom to the depth of my own need and gave to her despite the
loathing I felt at the thought.
I would retreat farther with the lashings of her tongue onto my heart. I sank deeper into her wallet until everything I felt and resembled was no longer of the self, but a thief and the whore I had slowly become.
She was able to reinforce my worth, as the money always preceded more restriction to my life and the soul
while she crept inside my mind filling the emptiness until shallow and hollow I became. Though she did not know at the time nor did I for that matter exactly what was happening and that she opened my mind and eyes to the life I would soon choose to live with reckless abandon.
I had no intention of staying nor did I plan on leaving just then; it was the promise of a car and the “easy life” which sent me packing. She would not give herself to me nor would “I” to her in any sense of freedom; it seemed she would not care if I left.
She described me as some guy to her friends and when I was supposed to not hear her words, I
was no one, so I left. The final words, which acted like a razor blade to my tolerance, were these, “He’s no one, just a toy…”
On the final day – her ice broke and the tears she spit forth were as genuine as I had seen in my life. In that instant and not for a second before, she knew what she had done; she recognized what we both had become.
I did not cry for her, as I held nothing, but contempt for the both of us; truth is, I could not cry. I did not
miss the tears either, for they knew nothing of despair. My soul was free once again and I was overjoyed with the fresh sun and wind across my skin, which I had not felt in weeks that had turned into months behind a veil of a dark so pure and unfeeling. I had no illusions of what we had and despite my focus on fantasy I could not abide by her dishonesty with me or mine with the world.
My endeavors to only feel pleasure took me deeper and deeper until I met my first actual
“client” where I spent most of my time; the gym.
He was 50 years old, though I never asked and he never offered the information nor did he
offer me his real name. I liked the level of truth in our relationship from the start.
There were no misunderstandings, no messages but lies, no games to acquire what we wanted – we
simply knew. He wanted a 20 year old and he was willing to pay money, a lot of money to get what he wanted.
I was 20 and I was willing to take his money for whatever he wanted me to do because the first
time he paid me double just because I was so willing. Even though I felt tweaks of negative energy building in me, I knew nothing, but the pleasure and the money I was attaining. There was a voice speaking in my ear, “This is what you deserve…”
He took me to special parties where I would or could be paid up to 3 times as much as he paid for doing multiple acts with multiple people at the same time or one after the other if the timing was right.
I had it all for a 21 year old kid in college and as my drug use increased my want for more
clients increased until I was going to parties and giving myself away to everyone in the party in the hopes that they might pay me.
One day in the gay bath house, returning to my room after taking two men in a common area, I
passed by a mirror and caught my own eyes.
I had not realized how long it had been since I looked at myself; 6 months, 12 months, maybe 24 but I could not recall with certainty. I knew only that I could not recognize a sense of self any longer. My face seemed to belong on another, my eyes were void of any resemblance of the softness I had once known, and my body felt absent and separate from me. I had scrambled through more than a year of “fun” and it is no wonder now that the pain began to creep its way from inside my heart, up through the hard wiring of my brain.
At first the cloud crept on all sides, threatening to swallow the center, closing in on the illusion of beauty I had constructed in the few hours of reprieve from self. I sat terrified and motionless, sweating in the small room I had rented for the day; I was surrounded by the impending doom that the storm would inevitably bring to my core.
I felt the sky open briefly; a light fired, then glared and the distant sky filled with lightening and the roar of thunder. I felt its power so raw and bone chilling; there was no mistake of its destination or for whom it was constructed and being delivered upon. I sat waiting, already engulfed by the reality of dark that I had created beneath the illusory shadow of pleasure; suddenly I embraced the storm, as it shrouded my mind in misery and emptiness.
Creeping sadness, seeped, slowly slipped into my skin from where it was felt deep within my blood; pumping to and from the frozen heart I had helped create. I longed for it to dissipate once again, but it grew with every piece of me I sold.
A knock came at the door and I let him in and then another…and another.
In each new day I’d found a way to ensure its remaining, adding to my misery and stealing
from my spirit the very sustenance it needed to make itself whole and break free from its prison. The voices inside my head raged and in short order I swallowed more and more substances to ease the tumultuous sea of emotion which had begun to toss white caps across my being.
I toiled at quitting, but the simplicity in which I had found my gain was far too alluring for this tired, whipped dog to make such a drastic change for no tangible reason at the time. I was used to pain, madness, chaos, despair, and rage; despite the recognition it felt like the world was simply catching up to where I was already
waiting.
Had I a partner in my life, perhaps then I’d find escape from this path to ruin. Perhaps I’d be a different person and forget this jaded past, falling into a deep state of necessary and protective love…
Yet all was forgotten when they called and scratched upon the wide open door leading to my sex. I answered with silent anger, repressed sorrow, and hollow selflessness for I dreamt that I would never speak of such things again or visit those streets so cold.
When the bath house found no reprieve, I searched and walked the common parks looking for a
twenty here or a ten there, but knowingly just wanting to be taken because that was where I could forget all that happened and all that was. My mind was breaking or far too broken to care. I walked and I walked; the cold of winter,the heat of summer, there were my foot prints across the park and back again…
And then a chance encounter led me to an opportunity with a splendid woman, though I was sure to remove any ounce of "chance", despite becoming “the one” in her eyes with haste, inevitably, I tore her apart…
She was beautiful and held a spirit unlike any other this world had shown to me. From the moment I met this child of the outer worlds, I imagined loving her, though I knew it was sickness at the time due to being enamored deep within the life of lust, money, and shame.
Her eyes sank deep into my heart on the day we met again, sometime after our first years before. Though time had flown by, my sick love for her did not wane or leave or falter. It intensified through the previous years of deprivation of all manner of love.
I knew with a knowledge passed on directly from the gods living in my head –that my new life
was beginning; one of total darkness, which I needed in order to allow myself the proper suffering I had earned and ultimately deserved.
My old life was unimportant and would – if she only knew keep her from me, as forgotten lore
in the necessary pile of erased memory; the trap door would open when she became too close and I no longer had the ability to live a different life from that which was my destiny.
The day we sat and talked for hours, both of us lost in different ways – shaking from the sheer enormity of
what we could not speak, searching the coffee house for an escape route that would be absolute yet finding none.
The undercurrent was charged with dynamite; the sheer power set the world around us
into orbit, ran the electricity of the whole city and made blind those who sat too close. I too was blinded by it; so blind in fact, that I clung to my blindness and hung myself from the pillars of the past, which I imagined, had
been buried so deep in the shady drawn pictures of my perfectly broken memory.
Now I am of the knowledge that she in fact would have loved me despite my indiscretions for
as I have said, in not so many words, she seemed immortal.
I spent myself, exhausted and beaten there at her mercy; always lingering, haunting me
was the deep and incessant knocking at the back of my brain every day in her company.
The false happiness drowned out the heavy crashing until it seemed as though it had ceased, but in the moments when I was not feeding off of endorphins provided by her constant tragic beauty and terrifying stress, I collapsed into myself and wanted to die more than I ever wanted to live.
No matter how many men I took into me, she pushed me further to the edge of despair than any
other human being ever could.
A year, months and days went by in which I felt nothing at all; but in our second year my
deception found its own way out despite the minds working overtime to keep my secrets. I swam in the truth and half-truth of my recurring nightmares. The pounding ceased but only for moments now so I attempted to drown it out with the sweet smoke that I had longed for in its initial disappearance.
The reunion of two lost lovers did not abide calm or a sense of quiet; the pounding and raging
thunder grew in intensity when the smoke was unable to billow from my lungs and mind.
I became forced to uncover my darkness and show it to the world; my world as I had imagined all along, created
an unforgiving and overwhelming loss inside the mind, heart, and soul.
I am unsure as to whether my secrecy led to her bitterness or the secret itself that clung to the center of her mind like a pecking raven on a road side carcass. She was willing to love me after the dust had settled around our feet, but through the uncovering of the secret, I regained my activity within the darkness of that old
world.
Somehow she was not dismayed, but I had hurt her more deeply than I had known and the trauma
was so deep she could not allow me escape, hence she feigned acceptance and wowed me in a veil of fake tolerance. She loved me sicker than I ever could, despite the pain; it led to the intensity in which she bore her love deeper into me, ensuring the shackles were tight and taught against my bones.
I loved her as sickly as I could, but in ways that seemed impossible for my body was always
elsewhere; our own passion destroyed cities without a blink. Yet unfortunately I had no trust for her or for me and this led to love’s complete and absolute destruction within the confines of my heart, protected by the mind as it was.
Upon a stone’s throw in the miles of time we had I gave up hope for me, but never for her, as
it was I who felt the dark shadows of the life the minds created. I began to find my joy with the dollars raised in sexual indiscretion again while mocking her so called love and terror filled nights and days she threw upon me without thought or care.
I did not return to a time when I settled on heights far above reality; I now found myself
seeking with desperation and it waited with open arms to reel me deeply in and once entombed, I swam in it. I loved, sure, but it was her tight grasp around my heart that convinced me readily, “love was dead in the world.”
The deeper down the scale I went, the further up the mountains of bones I rested; the twisted broken hands of death clamped around misery, forming into a sculpture that I saw; quickly my illusions were all I had.
She drowned me quickly and with great purpose; at first it was a relief to be without my pathetic secrets and to
be overwhelmed by someone else’s misery was refreshing. Yet with the speed and intensity of her coupe de tat; I did not stay long and as quickly as she came, she died leaving me far more desperate than I imagined possible. When she was alive and picking at my bones, I thought that was the worst it would ever get and the particular way of her scavenging felt like days of old…
I sit now; imagining that I am somehow ready to face the next woman with the honesty I’ve
longed for all my life.
Unfortunately, I have embattled many more lovers with the difficulties of my past in total absent minded, weakness giving in to the lie I created for myself long ago and today, uncertainty that it is a lie until the mind reveals more particles of the truth once the initial passion of connection has ceased.
I am fortunate however, that today, the obsession to fill my life with relationships for the sake of having them has been lifted by God. Looking back I recall the feeling of desperation in me over causing more and more pain. Leaving a wake of destruction in my path that I cannot abide by any longer, so instead, I choose being alone
while I work side by side with the God of my understanding letting Him drag me kicking and screaming to a new future where the only constant is something other than pain.
I find within myself the reason of being, as God reveals it to me; if only I can collapse and destroy the veil of deceit that has been created inside my head and swallow whole the death of the old bringing new birth.
I can see the truth of me where those days and deeds of the past have not disappeared, but the
sense I have today, is that I needed them close to the breast in order to see clearly today. I’ll use them to build a house of stone atop soil of solidity instead of sand and mud, which had been my choice for so long.
I was the prostitute you see on the corner.
I was that whore you slung sharpened arrows upon.
I was your every wish and command.
Yet I was a student and teacher as well; a child of the very world and God you have come to worship.
I was these things as every other.
I have bled through the skin of my own hands and as much from the hands of others. The cuts
I have made far outreach the depths of those that have reached me from the outside. I shall sleep no longer in the darkness of the world. I shall bring the self with dirt smeared across my face and body when I sit before any God and I will not shy away from the shame I rightly deserve nor will I live within it.
I will accept what is mine to take.
What of fate? I do not know of such things; I only know how I am going to meet it. I will stare it down through
eyes no longer blinded by the teachings of those simple minded academics, frightened healers, or terrified political automatons. I am no longer deceived; I am now beyond the possibility of deception by them. How could I go forth along the road of disenchanted souls when I was once their disenchanter as well as their mother and father.
No longer could one in my skin pass around the torch of shame to others as though I am unworthy of it. I set those disasters in motion with the pressing of my tongue in speech and cock in sexual enterprise. From these pages truth springs forth, but not before it will see the light of darkness and touch upon the very fabric
of the lies it once protected.
In absolute solitude I am destined to die if truth ceases to flow from heart, to mind and
out through my lips.
A simple prostitute I shall remain; long past the days where the cash was left on my
night table and the scent of seedy mixture lingers in the thick, empty air.
I am sure, I will find other ways to sell my garment covered sex and linger in another part
of town and in me, that which is said to be so vile, will cease to be because I have seen the basic truth of life –we are all for sale and we all have a price. In everything we do, we wish for gain or seek the pleasure in its finding. Look not upon those cold dark streets with such violent anxiety for within this very
darkness, your existence creeps right along with mine…
From the lips of my old friend Hank, “early to bed early to rise only it was quite late to bed, but fuck it,
I’m here now begging for you to take me far away; to a place in my dreams deep down below the pain, where the only rays of light can break through. I become hung up, needing to cry blood yet as the tears flow into some form of a beginning they cease almost immediately with new tasks at hand bent on the destruction of the self.
Their pointed fingers stab, coming to bear on the souls of soulless men.
We give back what we’ve stolen after a time; solace escapes us now. We are running like a dog
chasing after the storm; the clouds, lightening striking, crashing thunder like waves against the rocky shore of the heart.
For the soul to feel any pain it must be devoid of reason once again. The conceptual day dreams floating through my mind block all receptors; perhaps I float through them instead drowning in the sorrow of a million lost people. Their pain becomes my own, yet with no fused connection I become useless in such a void. I lose
sight of myself, dying as I am in every passing moment while seeking clarity when none exists but what they show and tell me of this world.
This man, your man, hurts to his bones; he can feel his sorrow and I can too. I must assist in any way I can, but
he is elusive. Perhaps to become his sorrow in order that I may understand his life and live where he is living. I must take this pain from him yet deaths door it does leave me empty again; free to live again, but for how long we know not these things only this desperation.”
Until my other old friend Henry joins the fracas of the mind, “Yet in this moment of contemplation I have found
that goodness enshrines his tragedy and it is such a wondrous goodness at that. I will not wait a moment longer for my destiny, which is here and now alongside a slowly fading past– the present taking over a life once fed to the dogs in order to consciously disappear into the realm of our hungry ghosts.
I live with the present while in the same moment remain somewhat detached from it for in uncertainty it cannot find a home in my heart. I must and do become all things held within his pain, joy, hopes, and dreams so that he and I may escape our connected death in the promise of new life.”
The afternoon becomes our hiding place from waking to a mind scrambled like the eggs I whip in
bowl. Somewhat free now; a wondrous moment of clarity creeps in from the peripheral of madness’, dark confusion. I cling to it, as the drunk to a bottle sucking back one after the other until saliva runs dry from an imagined cock sliding deep down my throat. I shake the images, but they settled in; I am alone in my kitchen gagging on something I had not felt in many days, months and even years.
…there is a hollow empty thud
upon my catacomb door and I am shaken awake once again…
ago now, as though he was from another life, as though my grown fetus passed
through the genes of one memory to another for I can barely remember, even
remembering. It seems that I was in fact another being when I knew him.
Yes, it was he I knew as “the prostitute”; one may stab a guess that he was a she or perhaps he
was me, either way, I am ill concerned with your understanding, so long as there
is some. When one thinks of a prostitute, one imagines almost instantly that it
must be a woman standing on a street corner or blocking an alley lined with our
suffering homeless and fellow street addicts.
However this is slightly different when I imagine the prostitute – I see a different truth
and not what someone has passed on to me, as such, through what they call
experience and consciousness whether that be vicarious or otherwise learned.
My initial prejudices and images have been shattered by the take I wish to render
upon your subconscious. I, like you, once saw only the female strutting up and
down the seedy street of broken dreams, pagan gods, and false ideas.
In every picture drawn or painted, there is both a life existing in the picture and a
separate always connected one behind the shaky frame with steely fragile fingers
putting the image to the paper or canvas. It is, as this document you read,
which I have strung together in often seemingly disconnected format; a story
told yet untold, just as that which lives within the hand taking the pen through
destiny –it is all here whether I know it or not and definitely whether you are
aware or not.
Just as in life. We are all often surprised.
Imagine for a moment; there is a fight on the street between 4 different people. Inside each
of these individuals, there lies a different reason or story yet on the surface there is but one apparent motivating factor for the violence, the pain, the suffering, and the anger. The truth however, is something quite formidable and opposing that each of these human beings is suffocating on their own fear despite appearances.
This is true for our cherished prostitutes.
The street and story shall appear the same yet each street and every story are not what at first they appear. I leave you now for it must find its soul within these pages and I must no longer keep from it the proper place in my history…
It was not a hundred years ago, as one may imagine, but far closer to the here and now than the “I” of today, who sits perched atop a self-righteous peak of self-deprecating dribble.
I peer into my reflection, shone in the rearview mirror and it is there upon the back seat
staring me down. The life, which I had been taught to dread with instant fear, disgust, and shame in recognition; I had learned well, building my shame upon itself the way I had while performing the tasks of this other life. I had been told this was not a life at all, but a miscarriage in the highest form of the
word.
I believed and allowed this belief to slowly push me under the tide of self-loathing with the
weight of an anvil atop my head; with the weight of any number atop my skin.
For those who taught and told us the shame, which it required, knew nothing of its purity or
of its sheer nobility in the truth of mankind as we have created. They but scratched the surface of the painting, seeing only the canvass as empty once the liquid colors had been removed. Had they continued to scratch, they too would have found its truth so cleverly, simple staring deep and through the doubt lingering in their putrid, cold hearts.
Filled only with fear, they continued to shame us all and we continued to allow them to dictate our stature because of our natural and honest sense of loss.
It’s been 18 years since the beginning of our story and perhaps through necessity it will never end. I am sure of its continuance to some extent and in some manner for it is not unworthy of an ending laced within the solidity and fabric of humanity.
At least within mine…
As with most beginnings, it too was born of necessity and since there is no end to necessity there will be no end to this story in a conventional sense. I shall simply illustrate as best I can; the core, the reality of the pain, the depth of pleasure, and the ever present truth of existence found therein…
I was 19 years old when the thoughts first crept into the frontal portions of my mind from vivid dreams and
fantasy; finally appearing as possibility, culminating slowly within the actual.
Internally, times seemed desperate though looking back I can see they were not on the outside; if one was to examine them closely as I have done since, in almost every day which has passed. At the time however, they appeared thus to me and herefore they were. I am of the disposition that could be best described as
extreme, drastic, penchant for the dramatic, or melancholic; perhaps a combination of all of these would be closest to the truth not to mention my flexible moral core on certain things from a previous life of being abused.
I was inclined to react with severity and harshness in my surroundings and circumstances. I had
been known to ignore the need for help from others; choosing instead to forge full speed like the proverbial bull in a china shop.
The time saw an increase in my financial needs but a decrease in time available to develop these means
“appropriately”. I wanted a better life and knew that an education would be needed to gain some sort of edge on the market or at the least allow me to fake knowledge long enough to gain somekind of “career” that would allow for financial freedoms; those I had never really imagined, let alone knew of fully. Icould not affordthe life I wanted on my measly salary as a security guard and store detective so I devised a plan for increasing my income.
I met Katherine in the building where I worked nights; she was wealthy and in need of all those little subtle
things I could give her just the way I was at almost twenty years old. It started slowly, but within a few weeks became a ruse of sex, booze and money.
She was willing to give me everything and in the end I gave her more than she could ever repay. I gave her a part of me that did not know it was even for sale; and because I was young and unaware, I dove deeper and deeper despite the growing feelings of sickness that had begun to creep into the peripheral of my sight
upon the world.
At first it small; a couple hundred here and there, then a thousand or two for tuition and it increased rapidly from there. I had more than I knew what to do with when all I wanted initially was to make enough for a few extras and survive.
The first time I took her money, I began to almost immediately take her shit right alongside it. It would be an
insult here, a put down there until the pot grew and she began to tighten the reigns around my sex. My body grew chains; bound to her prison I became, recognizing the fortress that held my shackles every time her voice crept up from the depths of her already dwindled soul to my every fragile ear drums.
My own voice was cut off before my lips were able to find their place in the system of speech to form any kind of protest. I spoke to her through bitterness, destroyed her with my deprivation of what she needed. Only to inevitably give more, when finally I felt a bottom to the depth of my own need and gave to her despite the
loathing I felt at the thought.
I would retreat farther with the lashings of her tongue onto my heart. I sank deeper into her wallet until everything I felt and resembled was no longer of the self, but a thief and the whore I had slowly become.
She was able to reinforce my worth, as the money always preceded more restriction to my life and the soul
while she crept inside my mind filling the emptiness until shallow and hollow I became. Though she did not know at the time nor did I for that matter exactly what was happening and that she opened my mind and eyes to the life I would soon choose to live with reckless abandon.
I had no intention of staying nor did I plan on leaving just then; it was the promise of a car and the “easy life” which sent me packing. She would not give herself to me nor would “I” to her in any sense of freedom; it seemed she would not care if I left.
She described me as some guy to her friends and when I was supposed to not hear her words, I
was no one, so I left. The final words, which acted like a razor blade to my tolerance, were these, “He’s no one, just a toy…”
On the final day – her ice broke and the tears she spit forth were as genuine as I had seen in my life. In that instant and not for a second before, she knew what she had done; she recognized what we both had become.
I did not cry for her, as I held nothing, but contempt for the both of us; truth is, I could not cry. I did not
miss the tears either, for they knew nothing of despair. My soul was free once again and I was overjoyed with the fresh sun and wind across my skin, which I had not felt in weeks that had turned into months behind a veil of a dark so pure and unfeeling. I had no illusions of what we had and despite my focus on fantasy I could not abide by her dishonesty with me or mine with the world.
My endeavors to only feel pleasure took me deeper and deeper until I met my first actual
“client” where I spent most of my time; the gym.
He was 50 years old, though I never asked and he never offered the information nor did he
offer me his real name. I liked the level of truth in our relationship from the start.
There were no misunderstandings, no messages but lies, no games to acquire what we wanted – we
simply knew. He wanted a 20 year old and he was willing to pay money, a lot of money to get what he wanted.
I was 20 and I was willing to take his money for whatever he wanted me to do because the first
time he paid me double just because I was so willing. Even though I felt tweaks of negative energy building in me, I knew nothing, but the pleasure and the money I was attaining. There was a voice speaking in my ear, “This is what you deserve…”
He took me to special parties where I would or could be paid up to 3 times as much as he paid for doing multiple acts with multiple people at the same time or one after the other if the timing was right.
I had it all for a 21 year old kid in college and as my drug use increased my want for more
clients increased until I was going to parties and giving myself away to everyone in the party in the hopes that they might pay me.
One day in the gay bath house, returning to my room after taking two men in a common area, I
passed by a mirror and caught my own eyes.
I had not realized how long it had been since I looked at myself; 6 months, 12 months, maybe 24 but I could not recall with certainty. I knew only that I could not recognize a sense of self any longer. My face seemed to belong on another, my eyes were void of any resemblance of the softness I had once known, and my body felt absent and separate from me. I had scrambled through more than a year of “fun” and it is no wonder now that the pain began to creep its way from inside my heart, up through the hard wiring of my brain.
At first the cloud crept on all sides, threatening to swallow the center, closing in on the illusion of beauty I had constructed in the few hours of reprieve from self. I sat terrified and motionless, sweating in the small room I had rented for the day; I was surrounded by the impending doom that the storm would inevitably bring to my core.
I felt the sky open briefly; a light fired, then glared and the distant sky filled with lightening and the roar of thunder. I felt its power so raw and bone chilling; there was no mistake of its destination or for whom it was constructed and being delivered upon. I sat waiting, already engulfed by the reality of dark that I had created beneath the illusory shadow of pleasure; suddenly I embraced the storm, as it shrouded my mind in misery and emptiness.
Creeping sadness, seeped, slowly slipped into my skin from where it was felt deep within my blood; pumping to and from the frozen heart I had helped create. I longed for it to dissipate once again, but it grew with every piece of me I sold.
A knock came at the door and I let him in and then another…and another.
In each new day I’d found a way to ensure its remaining, adding to my misery and stealing
from my spirit the very sustenance it needed to make itself whole and break free from its prison. The voices inside my head raged and in short order I swallowed more and more substances to ease the tumultuous sea of emotion which had begun to toss white caps across my being.
I toiled at quitting, but the simplicity in which I had found my gain was far too alluring for this tired, whipped dog to make such a drastic change for no tangible reason at the time. I was used to pain, madness, chaos, despair, and rage; despite the recognition it felt like the world was simply catching up to where I was already
waiting.
Had I a partner in my life, perhaps then I’d find escape from this path to ruin. Perhaps I’d be a different person and forget this jaded past, falling into a deep state of necessary and protective love…
Yet all was forgotten when they called and scratched upon the wide open door leading to my sex. I answered with silent anger, repressed sorrow, and hollow selflessness for I dreamt that I would never speak of such things again or visit those streets so cold.
When the bath house found no reprieve, I searched and walked the common parks looking for a
twenty here or a ten there, but knowingly just wanting to be taken because that was where I could forget all that happened and all that was. My mind was breaking or far too broken to care. I walked and I walked; the cold of winter,the heat of summer, there were my foot prints across the park and back again…
And then a chance encounter led me to an opportunity with a splendid woman, though I was sure to remove any ounce of "chance", despite becoming “the one” in her eyes with haste, inevitably, I tore her apart…
She was beautiful and held a spirit unlike any other this world had shown to me. From the moment I met this child of the outer worlds, I imagined loving her, though I knew it was sickness at the time due to being enamored deep within the life of lust, money, and shame.
Her eyes sank deep into my heart on the day we met again, sometime after our first years before. Though time had flown by, my sick love for her did not wane or leave or falter. It intensified through the previous years of deprivation of all manner of love.
I knew with a knowledge passed on directly from the gods living in my head –that my new life
was beginning; one of total darkness, which I needed in order to allow myself the proper suffering I had earned and ultimately deserved.
My old life was unimportant and would – if she only knew keep her from me, as forgotten lore
in the necessary pile of erased memory; the trap door would open when she became too close and I no longer had the ability to live a different life from that which was my destiny.
The day we sat and talked for hours, both of us lost in different ways – shaking from the sheer enormity of
what we could not speak, searching the coffee house for an escape route that would be absolute yet finding none.
The undercurrent was charged with dynamite; the sheer power set the world around us
into orbit, ran the electricity of the whole city and made blind those who sat too close. I too was blinded by it; so blind in fact, that I clung to my blindness and hung myself from the pillars of the past, which I imagined, had
been buried so deep in the shady drawn pictures of my perfectly broken memory.
Now I am of the knowledge that she in fact would have loved me despite my indiscretions for
as I have said, in not so many words, she seemed immortal.
I spent myself, exhausted and beaten there at her mercy; always lingering, haunting me
was the deep and incessant knocking at the back of my brain every day in her company.
The false happiness drowned out the heavy crashing until it seemed as though it had ceased, but in the moments when I was not feeding off of endorphins provided by her constant tragic beauty and terrifying stress, I collapsed into myself and wanted to die more than I ever wanted to live.
No matter how many men I took into me, she pushed me further to the edge of despair than any
other human being ever could.
A year, months and days went by in which I felt nothing at all; but in our second year my
deception found its own way out despite the minds working overtime to keep my secrets. I swam in the truth and half-truth of my recurring nightmares. The pounding ceased but only for moments now so I attempted to drown it out with the sweet smoke that I had longed for in its initial disappearance.
The reunion of two lost lovers did not abide calm or a sense of quiet; the pounding and raging
thunder grew in intensity when the smoke was unable to billow from my lungs and mind.
I became forced to uncover my darkness and show it to the world; my world as I had imagined all along, created
an unforgiving and overwhelming loss inside the mind, heart, and soul.
I am unsure as to whether my secrecy led to her bitterness or the secret itself that clung to the center of her mind like a pecking raven on a road side carcass. She was willing to love me after the dust had settled around our feet, but through the uncovering of the secret, I regained my activity within the darkness of that old
world.
Somehow she was not dismayed, but I had hurt her more deeply than I had known and the trauma
was so deep she could not allow me escape, hence she feigned acceptance and wowed me in a veil of fake tolerance. She loved me sicker than I ever could, despite the pain; it led to the intensity in which she bore her love deeper into me, ensuring the shackles were tight and taught against my bones.
I loved her as sickly as I could, but in ways that seemed impossible for my body was always
elsewhere; our own passion destroyed cities without a blink. Yet unfortunately I had no trust for her or for me and this led to love’s complete and absolute destruction within the confines of my heart, protected by the mind as it was.
Upon a stone’s throw in the miles of time we had I gave up hope for me, but never for her, as
it was I who felt the dark shadows of the life the minds created. I began to find my joy with the dollars raised in sexual indiscretion again while mocking her so called love and terror filled nights and days she threw upon me without thought or care.
I did not return to a time when I settled on heights far above reality; I now found myself
seeking with desperation and it waited with open arms to reel me deeply in and once entombed, I swam in it. I loved, sure, but it was her tight grasp around my heart that convinced me readily, “love was dead in the world.”
The deeper down the scale I went, the further up the mountains of bones I rested; the twisted broken hands of death clamped around misery, forming into a sculpture that I saw; quickly my illusions were all I had.
She drowned me quickly and with great purpose; at first it was a relief to be without my pathetic secrets and to
be overwhelmed by someone else’s misery was refreshing. Yet with the speed and intensity of her coupe de tat; I did not stay long and as quickly as she came, she died leaving me far more desperate than I imagined possible. When she was alive and picking at my bones, I thought that was the worst it would ever get and the particular way of her scavenging felt like days of old…
I sit now; imagining that I am somehow ready to face the next woman with the honesty I’ve
longed for all my life.
Unfortunately, I have embattled many more lovers with the difficulties of my past in total absent minded, weakness giving in to the lie I created for myself long ago and today, uncertainty that it is a lie until the mind reveals more particles of the truth once the initial passion of connection has ceased.
I am fortunate however, that today, the obsession to fill my life with relationships for the sake of having them has been lifted by God. Looking back I recall the feeling of desperation in me over causing more and more pain. Leaving a wake of destruction in my path that I cannot abide by any longer, so instead, I choose being alone
while I work side by side with the God of my understanding letting Him drag me kicking and screaming to a new future where the only constant is something other than pain.
I find within myself the reason of being, as God reveals it to me; if only I can collapse and destroy the veil of deceit that has been created inside my head and swallow whole the death of the old bringing new birth.
I can see the truth of me where those days and deeds of the past have not disappeared, but the
sense I have today, is that I needed them close to the breast in order to see clearly today. I’ll use them to build a house of stone atop soil of solidity instead of sand and mud, which had been my choice for so long.
I was the prostitute you see on the corner.
I was that whore you slung sharpened arrows upon.
I was your every wish and command.
Yet I was a student and teacher as well; a child of the very world and God you have come to worship.
I was these things as every other.
I have bled through the skin of my own hands and as much from the hands of others. The cuts
I have made far outreach the depths of those that have reached me from the outside. I shall sleep no longer in the darkness of the world. I shall bring the self with dirt smeared across my face and body when I sit before any God and I will not shy away from the shame I rightly deserve nor will I live within it.
I will accept what is mine to take.
What of fate? I do not know of such things; I only know how I am going to meet it. I will stare it down through
eyes no longer blinded by the teachings of those simple minded academics, frightened healers, or terrified political automatons. I am no longer deceived; I am now beyond the possibility of deception by them. How could I go forth along the road of disenchanted souls when I was once their disenchanter as well as their mother and father.
No longer could one in my skin pass around the torch of shame to others as though I am unworthy of it. I set those disasters in motion with the pressing of my tongue in speech and cock in sexual enterprise. From these pages truth springs forth, but not before it will see the light of darkness and touch upon the very fabric
of the lies it once protected.
In absolute solitude I am destined to die if truth ceases to flow from heart, to mind and
out through my lips.
A simple prostitute I shall remain; long past the days where the cash was left on my
night table and the scent of seedy mixture lingers in the thick, empty air.
I am sure, I will find other ways to sell my garment covered sex and linger in another part
of town and in me, that which is said to be so vile, will cease to be because I have seen the basic truth of life –we are all for sale and we all have a price. In everything we do, we wish for gain or seek the pleasure in its finding. Look not upon those cold dark streets with such violent anxiety for within this very
darkness, your existence creeps right along with mine…
From the lips of my old friend Hank, “early to bed early to rise only it was quite late to bed, but fuck it,
I’m here now begging for you to take me far away; to a place in my dreams deep down below the pain, where the only rays of light can break through. I become hung up, needing to cry blood yet as the tears flow into some form of a beginning they cease almost immediately with new tasks at hand bent on the destruction of the self.
Their pointed fingers stab, coming to bear on the souls of soulless men.
We give back what we’ve stolen after a time; solace escapes us now. We are running like a dog
chasing after the storm; the clouds, lightening striking, crashing thunder like waves against the rocky shore of the heart.
For the soul to feel any pain it must be devoid of reason once again. The conceptual day dreams floating through my mind block all receptors; perhaps I float through them instead drowning in the sorrow of a million lost people. Their pain becomes my own, yet with no fused connection I become useless in such a void. I lose
sight of myself, dying as I am in every passing moment while seeking clarity when none exists but what they show and tell me of this world.
This man, your man, hurts to his bones; he can feel his sorrow and I can too. I must assist in any way I can, but
he is elusive. Perhaps to become his sorrow in order that I may understand his life and live where he is living. I must take this pain from him yet deaths door it does leave me empty again; free to live again, but for how long we know not these things only this desperation.”
Until my other old friend Henry joins the fracas of the mind, “Yet in this moment of contemplation I have found
that goodness enshrines his tragedy and it is such a wondrous goodness at that. I will not wait a moment longer for my destiny, which is here and now alongside a slowly fading past– the present taking over a life once fed to the dogs in order to consciously disappear into the realm of our hungry ghosts.
I live with the present while in the same moment remain somewhat detached from it for in uncertainty it cannot find a home in my heart. I must and do become all things held within his pain, joy, hopes, and dreams so that he and I may escape our connected death in the promise of new life.”
The afternoon becomes our hiding place from waking to a mind scrambled like the eggs I whip in
bowl. Somewhat free now; a wondrous moment of clarity creeps in from the peripheral of madness’, dark confusion. I cling to it, as the drunk to a bottle sucking back one after the other until saliva runs dry from an imagined cock sliding deep down my throat. I shake the images, but they settled in; I am alone in my kitchen gagging on something I had not felt in many days, months and even years.
…there is a hollow empty thud
upon my catacomb door and I am shaken awake once again…