Hunting Eros Read online

  Hunting Eros

  OVAL

  L

  et me begin by saying, The Universe -or God if you will ('cause I won't)- fucking hates me. This realization came to me at the heels of another, more pertinent revelation; that at a certain point bad luck stops being bad luck, and starts being a signal from The Universe that it’s placed a bucket of aromatic excretions balanced pecariously, menacingly, above your door. Now, I am fully aware that the universe is an unfathomably large, unthinking, unfeeling machine which does not know I exist and never will, but I choose to use the term because it has become apparent to me that there is some malevolent force which transcends my own personal idiocy and irresponsibility and treats me like an all-too-tender testicle trapped inside a pinball machine, tumbling slapped and smacked in its flashing metallic innards. I'm serious. The amount of bad luck I have had to endure is nothing short of supernatural.

  Some would try to find comfort in platitudinous rationalizations like, “well at least you still have your health.” Yes, I know, as is the case with talent, that there will always be someone out there more unlucky and unfortunate than I am. Sure, somewhere out there, there is a homeless, penniless, quadruple-amputee leper with Down syndrome but that does not fucking invalidate my suffering. The latest slap to the face I've had administered by The Universe began as I stood on the precipice of youth, about to be pushed into the chasm of adulthood. It was at that critical junction in age where virginity –that ugly epithet applied to those who, for one reason or another, dared not burden women with the quelling of their lascivious urges- stops being something acceptable and starts being something of shame, a fragment of your person to be veiled behind half-truths or whole lies.

  I had had it. I’d had it with the constant failed attempts at trying to find a fucking mate ("fucking" used in this case as both an intensifier and a verb), and I’d had it with still being technically a virgin (which incidentally, as far as types of virgindom go, "technically" is among the least worst). So I stooped to the level of hiring an escort.

  You may, as I have many times subsequently, ask, why? Why would somebody decide to become part of an industry -and an industry it is- where women are judged with monstrous callosity and are treated like a made-up meat slab you can stick your fun-time totem pole in? Why would someone spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars in exchange for an hour of palpable awkwardness and an opportunity to empty themselves soullessly? Why would someone willingly submerge themselves into the pool of cess where sadness grows like algae? The simple answer is: because it's easier.

  By treating sex as a commodity, you avoid all of the complications attached with courting women. There is no need for fancy dinners; no need for foced romantic gestures, countless hours of straining to impress, weeks or months of waiting for her to “be ready,” and other such necessary bureaucratic requisites before sex. More importantly, it is faster. My birthday was approaching and thus my status as a “young” was about to expire like the condom packet in my wallet I had bought when I was infinitely younger. Most, if not all, of my friends had already “done the deed,” as the modest stupidly call it, and I would have considered it a personal failure (one to add to my formidable collection) if I was unable to take the “I” out of “virgin” before my fast-approaching birthday.

  The notion of hiring an escort was not new to me. I’d thought about it, toyed with the idea, mulled it around calculatingly. I had even gone as far as to try it once, when times were thin, and frustration thick. My only previous dalliance with an escort service taught me the hard way to never order by phone, and always demand a picture. That former, disastrous encounter left me with balls as blue as my wallet was light. Consequently I turned to the internet as my sexual sensei this time around, guiding me through the path towards carnal enlightenment. I went diving head first into the murky depths of the internet's seamy underbelly in search of a fitting girl. She had to be attractive, she had to be compatible, and more importantly, she had to be accessible; I would've felt impossibly self-conscious and performance-affectingly nervous if she was too much out of my league (though a perusal of the offerings in my area showed that wouldn’t be a problem).

  With the internet being the kinky cesspool that it is, such a person was not hard to find. I came across a girl by the name of Candy. I wondered, when parents are naming their kid, and the best they can come up with is “Candy” (which, to their credit, I believe was an abbreviation (also, fake)), what do they think their kid is going to end up doing for a living? How many congresswomen or doctors or millionaires have a name like Candy?

  Her buffoonish name notwithstanding, she seemed nice enough. She was a purported nineteen-year-old, and based off her pictures, a petite Asian girl with strikingly slender curvature, succulent spritely peaches, skin of infinite softness, and a somniferous set of shimmering legs. Her pictures were not studio-produced, touched-up fabrications; they were cell-phone shots, which strengthened the prospect of their veracity. Although her eyes had been blotted out with a big black bar, as though he NSA thought their redaction integral to the security of the nation, her body communicated what her eyes would have. A sultry tilt of the waist, a hand positioned just so, legs but mere suggestions of the possibilities; all amounted to one phrase, enunciated with perfect grace and sonority, “Pay to fuck me!”

  The problem with Candy was that she was about an hour and a half away, a vast stretch of winding road, the distance of which shriveled in stark contrast to the distance I was willing to travel. Having already gotten her phone number from her website, I dialed with uncertain fingers as a surge of nervous anticipation flooded me. After three rings, a soft, wispy voice answered.

  "Hello?"

  "Um, hi... is this Candice?" The question was uttered in a weak tremulous voice which I quickly noticed, hated myself for, and resolved.

  "Yeah,” an artificial giggle, “this is Candy,” she corrected me.

  A moment passed as I tried to think of a circumlocutory way to state my intentions. I needed to ask her in a way which would suggest what was sought but also be vague enough for me to be able to pass it off as something else should I have been talking to the wrong person.

  "So I was just wondering if you were doing anything tonight." Pleased with my linguistic contrivance, a smirk began to creep up my face, until she responded with an even more abstruse question.

  "Do you think I'm going to do anything?"

  This got me nowhere. She could either be offended that a stranger was asking such a question or she could have meant it suggestively. Her inflection suggested the latter.

  "Um, ahem, do you happen to have a website?" I continued, still treading carefully.

  "Yeah..."

  Frustrated that this conversation was inching fast nowhere, I sliced through the awkward quiet with a direct, precise query. "I would- I’d like your company tonight" I said through a grimace invisible to her.

  Silence.

  "Heh. Okay, yeah" She said and giggled infectiously, as I secretly hoped that her giggle was the only infectious thing about her.

  We made our arrangements and agreed to meet at midnight in a place I prayed was only ironically titled, Cheap Hotel. Later, the preparations for my enticingly erotic expedition began. I took a shower and groomed myself fervently, like a caffeine-fueled, metrosexual with OCD.

  The body was now ready, but the mind had yet to catch up. Inside the nooks and folds of my brain were images of my expectations for the night. I imagined a wild sexual romp with me usurping the role of the main character. Most of it was based off of the large amount of pornographic material which I've seared into my brain over the years. This jumble of flesh colored images –and the promise that they would soon be a reality- gave me an excited rush and released the butterflies from their little cag
e in my stomach.

  The sense of effervescent anticipation I had felt just a moment ago was shoved out of the way by that pernicious emotion which has dogged me for most of my life like a shadow: anxiety. Whenever Professor Anxiety showed up to the party, more often than not he would bring along his two hundred pound pet orangutan, Fear.

  The uneasiness crept down my spine and spread itself around with an animalistic fervor. The time was nearing when I would have to man-up and head out the door. I hoped that once I came back home, I would be different –idiotically thinking the apocryphal myth that “losing your virginity turns you into a man” was true. Little did I know how fate would grant me my wish but in a sick and twisted way, like a monkey's paw would. I left home still feeling the butterflies flapping their velvet wings against the lining of my maw. Prof. Anxiety was in control now, but I had a flask-shaped rifle with me that could take out the son of a bitch with one shot. Bang. I was ready.

  The drive, like my life until that point, was largely uneventful. By the time I reached the highway, most of the road was empty save the occasional truck. The address of the place was put in my phone’s GPS, and although it told me the trip would be a long one, it seemed much longer than it sounded. One thing I noticed early on was my curious lack of excitement. I was just about an hour away from performing the act which had long eluded me and there was not a shred of elation to be found. In the past, whenever that happened, it was always an omen of either A) misfortune B) disappointment or C) a miraculous screw-up on my part. Time would prove it to be D) All of the above, in the great multiple choice test of Life.

  We had agreed to meet at midnight but I, predictably, was there early (it was in fact the only occasion in the past six months that I had been early to). The hotel was easily found and one look at the place proved conclusively that there was nothing ironic about its moniker. Cheap Hotel was exactly what it sounded like: an inexpensive hotel of the shabbiest grade. The place seemed to have been built by either the most half-assed construction crew in the county, or a pack of well-trained vagabonds, not quite at the shantytown level but not too far off either. It was a tatty building, with the second story added as an afterthought to the first. The walls were painted a tired dark green, and the brassy golden railings stood feebly alongside the walkways. The sun was starting to droop, and it cast an ill brown-orange on the chewed-up construct. Intermingling with the air was a tang, an olfactive aura of desperation and failure. The walkways were empty and the rooms themselves showed no sign of habitation. It was Hell’s embassy in America.

  Still in my car, I gave the escort a ring but was met with nothing but silence. An insidious doubt crept into my psychology. Worries began to sprout from every corner of my mind. A text message and two more calls were met with the same sorry silence. The moments bloated and bulged at their seams and the thought of having another drink from the flask I had relocated to my trunk flew through my mind like a wisp of elegantly curling smoke. Unable to convince myself that it was possible for me to face the escort in a state of sobriety I quickly resolved that having a drink was not an option, but a necessity.

  Upon stepping out of the car, the bitter autumnal chill hurled a series of windy curses. On my way to the trunk, I noticed a pair of young women sitting on a step by the base of the stairwell, and from the way they were looking at me, It seemed like they had been observing the entire time. Not wanting to draw attention to myself, direct eye contact was avoided and I hastily got my little silver container of anxiolytic ambrosia and got back in my car. After sitting down, I realized that the two girls had been in my line of sight the entire time, obscured by the many shadows. Feeling like a germ in a petri dish under a microscope, nerves began to flare up so I reached over for the bottle and took a big thirsty gulp.

  I never quite understood why people claimed to like the taste of alcohol, particularly hard liquor like vodka. To me it seemed that alcohol didn't have as much of a taste as it did a sensation; a horrid, burning sensation that seemed to caustically eat away at everything it touched. That particular gulp felt as if The Human Torch from The Fantastic 4 was ramming the barrel of his unsolicited “flamethrower” down my throat.

  Secretively, I stole a glance from the two girls. One was chatting away while the other continued looking in my direction. Judging by their appearance and the nature of the location, they were most likely escorts as well. One of them -whose mouth jabbered in a way that suggested she was talking about a subject she was very much invested in-was short and had a wider figure with duo-toned blonde/bright-red hair. The other girl was considerably more appealing. She had long, satin brown hair, falling softly towards her slim shapely shoulders, and a pretty, well-proportioned face which made her look slightly younger than her counterpart. Her body was athletic and sultrily waifish, what vulgarians might deem “tight.” It was discernable despite her posture, slouched forward with her arms tucked in for warmth. They were both dressed uniform taught spaghetti-strap tops and sweat pants as loose as they probably were, interesting choice of attire, considering the biting cold.

  After another thrust of The Human Torch's fiery phallus, I called Candy but again to no avail. Looking at the two girls chatting and sitting forward with their arms nestled snugly in between their legs and breasts (a place I would have loved to be in at that moment) I had the vagrant idea that they must have been friends of Candy, looking out for potential clients or threats or something, so I decided to approach and start a conversation, with the goal of extracting from them the whereabouts of the elusive whore.

  By then the cheap vodka had disinhibited me to the point where I was unselfconscious about wandering over towards them. They saw me coming whereupon they stopped talking and gazed at me appraisingly, trying to judge my intentions. The walk to them was thankfully a short one and at the halfway point I waived and offered a disarming smile.

  "Hi," I said as they eyed me understandable leeriness.

  "M-hi" The older, chubbier one replied after an uncomfortable delay.

  "Erm,” for a moment the comforting mist of the ethanol lifted, giving way to some nervousness, but soon it reformed, stronger than ever. “I was just wondering if you guys knew someone named Candice from around here." They looked at each other quizzically and both replied in the negative.

  "No, but is it someone you were planning on... meeting? Are you waiting for her?" the older one asked, careful to not reveal too much.

  "Well, yeah, sort of. I just thought you two might know her if you're from around here."

  The younger girl leaned over and whispered something into her friend's ear and said, "No, we don't. Sorry."

  I thanked them and trudged back into my car.

  Several more attempts were made to communicate with The Cunt, as Candy the escort shall be referred to hereinafter. These failed communications were followed by another attempt to dull the quiet misery of the situation with another pull of putrid stinging potion –I could almost taste the regret. Tired of sitting alone in my car, desperation rising with each tick of the clock, I was in want of some company, someone to pass the time with. Glancing over to the two girls at the base of the stairwell, they had ceased paying attention to me and continued their emotive conversation. Following the same procedure as before, as if rehearsed a million times, I made my way towards them. Both looked inquiringly at me while I sat down next to them uninvited (artificially bolstered courage enabled this otherwise impossible act).

  "Hey. I was just waiting and I thought I might as well have someone to talk to." I heard someone say in a voice too cool and confident to be my own. "What are your names?"

  A little wearily, the older one answered for both of them. "My name's Jessica and she's Alice." The girl now identified as Alice acknowledged it with one graceful hand gesture, the prim wave of a beauty queen. "What's yours?"

  Failing to see a reason why I shouldn't, I gave them my real name. "Renton. My name is Renton. Nice to meet you two." I said through a buzzed, wide smile; a smile which seemed t
o lower their defenses.

  "Nice to be met!" I heard one of them say.

  "So what brings you two out here? It’s freezing!" I asked them, motioning to their huddled posture.

  "Oh we're just waiting for someone. So are you here to see an escort?" Jessica said, skipping a beat. It took me aback somewhat; I couldn't help but chuckle at her forthrightness.

  "Mmm... is it that obvious?"

  Alice smiled, revealing a lineup of criminally white teeth. "Yeah, pretty much."

  "So you guys must know something about that whole business. Are either of you... you know." A dangerous question like that had to be asked in exactly the right manner, otherwise you risked ending up with a big red handprint on the side of your skull.

  "I am. She isn't." Jessica told me pointing to her friend.

  "Oh, really?” A beat. “How old are you guys?"

  Again, Jessica responded for the two of them as if in accordance to some predetermined speaking arrangement. "I'm twenty-two and she's seventeen."

  "Seventeen?" I exclaimed incredulously, studying Alice; all the contours of her face and body, which seemed to have grown in glory. A hot and wrong thrill bubbled up from the pit of my core. A sudden venom more potent than any alcohol coursed through my veins. From the moment I saw her, an immediate, but suppressed, attraction was sparked and the fact that she was seventeen, and ergo inaccessible, made her all the more desirable. She was the forbidden fruit, one whose taste could only be imagined, and she was there, within my reach! I had only to grab the branch and shake it, but a moment of reflection and a modicum of restraint tied me down, brought me back to reality. She teased her hair back as I gawked in secretive awe.

  I was unsure if what was causing such woeful explosion of yearning for someone of her age was a byproduct of the alcohol, the frustration with Candy, some disproportionate mixture of the two, or an inherent Humbertian singularity, symptomatic of a different condition.

  "Wait, so if you're seventeen and not an escort, why are you hanging out in a place like this?" I asked, fully aware of the question's intrusiveness.