by AnonYMous
She smiled, embarrassed by her own idea.
It was so unlike her to suggest something like this. Neither of us spoke. I was afraid to discuss the details of such an arrangement in case it disintegrated under the weight of realistic scrutiny. I called for the bill, happy to pay now that there was a possibility of casual sex. Ill-defined figures waiting for tables parted to let us out. We strolled with no destination in mind. There was the thing about Marian. Even when I hated her I wanted to fuck her.
I was imagining that body naked. Those tits. I enthusiastically led the way to the subway station in the hope that I might have an excuse to kiss her good night.
But when we got there she twisted sideways to prevent me from hugging anything of value. All I got was a cold, hard cheek. Dating from time to time? But from what time to what time? It was just more bullshit to keep me fluffed. It was more enjoyable for her to keep me on probation. One misstep from me and she had the right to throw up her hands and walk away forever. It was like being under one of her glass vitrines, airless and scrutinized. She had already decided we’d never have sex again but it would never be said out loud.
That would be too merciful.
“Let’s think about it,” she said, accepting a cheek-peck.
I thought about nothing else.
* * *
I further insulated myself against the long lonely nights by corresponding with CamGrrlJameson. She had contacted me through my website and after rummaging my snout in her digital feed I couldn’t help but notice the marketing potential of having a cam girl read passages from my book to her thousands of regulars. I also couldn’t help but notice her beautiful little ass and her perfect tits. She was much more homely than I would have expected from such a genre.
In fact she was very charming and verging on demure.
Jameson and her peers were doing the same thing in front of webcams that women generally did in our culture. Shaking their covered tits to excite male interest before exposing them for monetary gain. Once a rapport (and a price) was established you were invited to participate in the ultimate goal: The Private Chat. This was where you were encouraged to pay extortionate per-minute rates to “hang out” one-on-one with an increasingly naked girl who masturbated with a dildo.
But leading up to the private session she needed to be polite and amenable even to those who weren’t paying. Getting annoyed at the guy who kept asking to see your tits might put paying customers off. The more you seemed to love the idea of being on camera and fingering yourself in front of strangers, the more money you’d receive. Which would be fine if you made serious money but Jameson said she made between $50 and $200 a night. Yes, she was getting paid to masturbate, but even so. To me this meant she had to be getting something else out of it. All that attention was a form of low-level fame. She said she couldn’t wait to get back to it after the Easter break. Her kids were getting in the way. Apparently her four-year-old boy had been “an asshole” since the day he was born.
You can’t divorce a kid, she said.
I couldn’t believe how good her body looked after three kids.
But she plummeted in my estimation when I heard how little she was willing to fuck herself for. It seemed to indicate that she had to be doing it for some sort of validation. But was it really that empowering to have fat old men in Florida wanking off to the sight of you naked? Most of her customers were in Florida. Statistically that was where most webcam users resided.
Her ex-husband tried to use the fact that she was a cam girl to show she was an unfit mother. She in turn used the fact that he had repeatedly punched her to show that he was an unfit father. There was video footage of him doing it. He countered by saying there was a BDSM element to their cam work and as part of their “performance” he regularly whipped, spanked, choke-fucked, and yes, punched her. Her defense countered by saying there was a difference between rough play during sex and being punched in the face. It was also announced, in front of a full courtroom, that he had ejaculated on her face without consent.
This she believed was what won her the case.
A facial was no big deal as far as Jameson was concerned but the female judge seemed to think it was indicative of a wider lack of respect. In the eyes of the law, coming on her face without consent was worse than punching her in the face with consent. It was interesting that Jameson knew how to play this card. She gambled that spurting sperm on a mother’s face would be deemed more villainous than throwing punches at it. Video footage of both types of assault were played for all to see. It must have been an interesting day in court.
She’d been on a few dates and when she told one guy she was a cam girl he freaked out. And she was on the verge of fucking another guy until he took his jacket off and revealed a Nazi tattoo on his forearm. She had been “ready to get some” until that moment.
“Plastic dicks will only get you so far,” she said sadly. “If you get the train to White Plains I’ll pick you up at the station.”
In her soccer mom SUV.
“You can sleep on my couch,” she said.
I would have given anything to watch her camming and coming. Apart from money, that is. She said her ex-husband couldn’t be relied on to keep to a schedule. He sometimes turned up unexpectedly to pick up the kids but she never knew when. He usually came the same day so I’d need to be able to jump on a train with little or no notice.
They had been married fifteen years.
It had originally been his idea that she start stripping so they could make extra cash. He had intended for her to strip in bars and clubs but Jameson preferred to do it online. As an experiment she posted a topless picture on Girlsnexxxtdoor and it got so many hits she felt confident enough to appear live. But then Jim insisted they appear together. Jameson had already set up a separate account featuring some of her more tasteful nudes and this proved to be the more popular site by far. They had some success together but her solo effort received thousands of visitors.
Visitors who were willing pay for a “private chat.”
Up to this point they received money while they had sex together. But there was a much bigger demand to watch her insert dildos in herself and even more if she inserted the type of dildo that received Wi-Fi commands. Prostitution is defined as selling a sex act for money. Stripping didn’t come under this heading since it was a visual experience. Even lap dancing was still considered adult entertainment because no physical sex act took place. Lap dances aren’t legally supposed to culminate in orgasm, not just because it’s illegal but because the money stops once the guy comes in his pants. But now that digital commands could be sent to a dildo buried in a girl’s twat you could text her brains out.
The host website took 80 percent and there was no vetting process. They didn’t care. If you attracted a million followers it was as good for them as it was for you. All they needed was a valid driver’s license to prove you were over eighteen. There should be no visual evidence of a pet, i.e., a dog leash or cat litter. Or of a child, i.e., toys or diapers.
Jameson lived in a three-story house. Her children were restricted to the first floor. Whenever she was online she cranked up the stereo on the second floor so that the events on the third went unheard. She had a very homely look about her. Her voice was wonderfully soothing in an American sweetheart sort of way, and she had a great sense of humor.
She told me this joke over the phone.
A man is being interviewed for the LAPD and just as the interview ends the HR guy hands him a gun and says: “Everything looks good here but I just need you to do one more thing for me.” The man agrees enthusiastically. “I want you to go outside and shoot five black guys and a rabbit.”
“Sure,” the man says, “but why the rabbit?”
“Excellent attitude. You’ve got the job.”
And she had a great laugh.
She was thirty-six but looked much younger. And to look at her body you’d never think she’d had three kids. In fact it was after the third kid that Ji
m began urging her to strip. I didn’t get the sense that he wanted her to do this for money or that they were hard up but more that it was an attempt to inject some thrill into their sex life.
Anyway he began to get jealous because she was getting all the attention even when they were both on screen. He was seen more as the human dildo. Not surprising really since almost all the customers were straight males.
She looked so wholesome. The sort of proper girl you’d fantasize about seeing naked. I felt drawn to her as one would to a mother. Maybe it was the big tits and the sheer openness of her attitude. I found the whole encounter intoxicating. When I first found out I let an entire pot of sweet potatoes burn on the stove because I couldn’t contain the information and cook at the same time. I told Jameson I was impressed.
“Why? Because I fake orgasms for a living?”
“So you hate what you do?”
“No. Mostly, I hate that I don’t do it enough. But that’s misleading.”
This showed a sophistication I hadn’t expected from a cam girl. It showed she was willing to open not just her legs but her psyche to me, which was flattering beyond belief. Here was a girl who had thousands of male worshippers willing to answer my questions. Why? At first I thought it was a scam to get more guys interested in her but she had already shared quite a bit of personal information with me.
“… and to be fair I’m not always faking it … sometimes I completely love it.”
So there she was waiting for strangers to tell her what to do, basically masturbating and getting paid for it. I found myself getting jealous, not that other people were ogling her but jealous of her ability to attract that kind of paid attention. After all it was a form of approval. Paid approval and the pleasure she had to be getting from it on so many levels. Not to mention that she was putting her kids through school. She was paying her rent. She was avenging her husband. (“He’s an awful person.”) It had to be addictive.
“Plus I know he’s looking and that always gets me off.”
Now it all made sense.
FROM CROW’S FEET TO CAMEL TOE SHE’S ALL WOMAN
#TheOxygenThiefDiaries
At first I was thrilled to see her name in my inbox but the businesslike tone of details on my Facebook page indicated I was only one of many people invited to the open house at her workshop. It was insulting to be blank cc’ed. And unnerving because I had until that moment forbidden myself from looking at her Facebook page for fear of what I might find there. Namely, pictures of her with men or any indication of something similar. But after convincing myself there would be nothing more emotionally taxing than an informational poster or a map of how to get to her exhibition, I summoned the courage to click on her page.
And there she was.
Gazing out at me from the letterbox format with some of her pieces evenly spaced on a shelf in the background. Her eyes looked marshy to me. From crying? She seemed sadder. Dazed, but smiling heroically. I cried because this was obviously my doing. She was the repository of my misdeeds. Not only did I owe her the opportunity to punish me, I owed her my happiness too. In the email, under the invite, there were two lines meant for me only. I don’t hold out much hope, it’s a long way to come for something so goofy. This was so guilt-inducing I shivered. And yet it seemed to indicate that what she was going through had to be at least as bad as what I was having to endure if not worse.
I don’t hold out much hope
My newly acquired capacity for crying was frightening. I could cry on top of crying. Like retching after having already puked. I heard someone say that crying is prayer in liquid form.
Later that same day I got a text. WHAT THE HECK!! I’M BEING SLOWLY DRIVEN MAD
My first reaction was to run across the Manhattan Bridge, scramble up Park Slope to her apartment, and gather her to me when she opened the door. I’d protect her. From what though? Me? How could I shield her from what I’d already done to her? By staying away. And then I began to wonder if the text referred to me at all. I remembered her saying her upstairs neighbor moved furniture around in the middle of the night. She might have been referring to this. Her next text did little to clarify the situation.
!!!!!!!!
That was it. Nothing else. No wink to inflect the tone. No annoying emoticon. Nothing. Was it an admonishment for not responding? Or was it the sort of thing you sent before committing suicide? On the way home with my packed-up cart parked beside me I pored over the possibilities on a bench in Washington Square Park. I had abandoned myself to the act of crying when two teenage girls seemed to just materialize on either side of me.
“Would you like us to pray over you? To our Lord Jesus Savior?”
I blinked at them.
I would have felt more comfortable if they had tried to sell me drugs. I waited for the shrieks of cynical laughter, but they couldn’t have been more serious. Kneeling beside me, right there in the park, they began to pray aloud.
“Lord Savior, please bring peace to our brother’s soul and if it is your will, Lord, ease his suffering.”
Ping.
I miss you to pieces … big misshapen pieces.
Even I couldn’t call this a coincidence.
Well, not immediately.
I wanted to just call her and initiate arrangements for our wedding but after the initial flush of euphoria subsided I asked myself, Why? Why would it be any different than before? She’d already done this so many times. Hooked me back in only to find that what she meant was she just wanted to “hang out.” Still, I was glad she was actually saying something tangible.
It meant she was feeling the same sense of loss as me.
Didn’t it?
I hid the text, and my glee, from the visiting angels.
I wasn’t about to give them a cute story they could tell their brethren that Sunday.
* * *
“I admire your balls.”
A ridiculously fashionable journalist from a supposedly cool underground magazine stopped to say she wanted to do a piece on me. She talked about the death of the bookshop and how self-publishing was the future and how cool she thought it was that I was “out here doing this.” I wanted to respond that I admired her tits but the moment had passed and it would have been unnecessarily provocative. Plus she didn’t have great tits.
The theme of the next issue was obsession.
“We’d want to put you on the cover.”
The amount of people who stopped and made these sorts of promises was staggering. From the security of their day jobs they masqueraded as film producers, artists, musicians, directors, and actors. Most of the time they didn’t even sound like they believed it themselves. In a way we were both pretending. I’d pretend to believe she was a journalist if she pretended to believe I was a writer.
“Sure,” I said, waiting for her to buy a book.
“Great,” she said, waiting for me to give her one.
Awkward silence.
“Oh by the way, when is Aisling bringing out her book? My editor wants to interview her.”
Did she really think I was going to contact that cunt?
“Oh yes of course, I’ll ask if she’s interested.”
The rest of that day was dreadful. I felt so pointless and lonely and old and beaten. I kept thinking I had cancer. There was a crick in my neck that felt like a lump and I couldn’t massage it away. It seemed like there was no point in planning the rest of my life until I knew there was a rest of my life.
Being out there on a sunny day was forgivable, enjoyable even. People didn’t need to be embarrassed on your behalf. But in January the book was the only thing between you and begging. It wasn’t just the absence of cash that stung, it was the implied comment on your choice of career. If no one wanted to buy your bullshit book you were obviously not going to make a living at it. And having established that, it was safe to assume no one would want to buy your second book either. A shipment of which was halfway across the Pacific Ocean in the hold of a container ship bound for
New York where it would spend three weeks in customs before being delivered in five hundred boxes, each containing sixty books, on four separate pallets to the sidewalk outside your apartment. If you couldn’t sell the few books on your table what the fuck were you going to do with ten thousand more?
Potential customers-readers-critics hugged themselves as they passed. I fantasized about leaving all this behind and bringing Marian to Ireland with me.
Oh how we’d cry and sigh and laugh and blush and after long silent meaningful windswept walks on frosty beaches gathering firewood for our cottage hearth we’d rest our tired eyes on each other gasping at our good fortune.
We might even have a kid.
Why not? It’d be the ultimate depth charge to drop into the world. A human dirt bomb. A leaving gift. It might actually be fun to watch my son fuck with you all. I had never really thought of it like that before. I was too busy making sure I would never have to be father to the sort of slithering soulless gargoyle I was at fifteen. But what if I could equip him with the ability and resilience to do all the damage I could no longer inflict?
“Son, I can’t go out into the world and fuck with people anymore, but you can.”
Or better yet, a daughter. A beautiful devious daughter to exact revenge on the planet. A highly trained undercover operative dropped behind enemy lines. This advanced the case for having a child with Marian. If my genes weren’t too insistent the likelihood of the resulting progeny being attractive was very strong.
My mind in the body of Jane Birkin.
There’s no Kevlar for that.
Daughter of an Oxygen Thief.
But that was before Marian read Chameleon in a Candy Store. I had hoped that the best way to encapsulate everything I felt about her would be to just send her my second book and let her see for herself. This would achieve two things. (1) She’d approve the content thereby preempting any fears of legal proceedings and (2) I’d woo her back into my bed. Her review was nothing if not succinct.