I found the aptly named Heavenly Exit online. I had long accepted massage parlors and escorts as my true sexual home. I have no direct magnet of handsomeness. I can get some women to glance my way, and I have been married twice before to fairly good-looking women.
But I've never been the seducer I dreamed about. Paying for sex has been easier, simpler. It's been my way from the first time I got fucked, with a silver toothed Mexican prostitute in an Arizona whorehouse.
I stopped at HE as it was called on my way home, leaving early from my nearby place of work as a writer for XYZ business news. The lies we tell to sell Wall Street to Main Street. That's the real prostitution.
That first time there, I got Candy, a big boned woman with brown hair and green eyes and a brutish body of sun-tanned skin and animal tattoos. Her breasts were plump, round and easily grabbed. She was efficiently cordial and easily spread her legs for the $250 I offered. She quickly dressed after wiping off the leftovers of our meeting. "Thank you and do come again," she said without irony.
I went back the following week and left to another "come again" farewell.
The third time, Miki was at the front desk. She said Candy was not there. I didn't want to try a new girl and risk not getting fucked. I'd learned that I might have to come back a few times before a girl feels like putting out for a new customer. Some are like that. Some, like Candy, are not.
I walked out into the August summer sun and headed to my car parked around the corner from a building that was home to Heavenly Exit as well as to a karate school, a Chinese take-out and a liquor store that offered free pickles with every purchase of a bottle of red wine.
But I turned around and went back. Why not try the woman with jet black hair and rosy cheeks and almond eyes? Her large breasts poked through the light-colored blouse. At least if I got hold of those breasts I might feel better. I had long lost interest in my wife. We hadn't had sex in three years. Our
good days were behind us. There would be none ahead. The insults swallowed in the beginning became vomit. I couldn't keep it down any longer. The problems people have at the beginning are the ones that are still there at the end.
"Are you available?" I asked.
"Yes," she said.
The rooms were down a thinly carpeted hallway that smelled of foot powder and lavender. The walls inside were bare and painted white. A single floor lamp held a red-light bulb that threw maroon shadows on the ceiling. The massage table covered in thin white sheets had an opening to put your face in. A radio station played 70's music--Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney --through a floor speaker in
the corner. A chipped maple wood table in the other corner held bottles of oils, towels and a fragrance candle of Sandalwood.
"Are you police?" Miki asked a question in her Asian accent.
"No."
