Private Showings: Sex Non Stop

INTO SEX NON STOP
The wide-spanning entrance opens out in the shape of a great, pink Valentine’s Day heart to the sidewalk. Neon-limned cupids are posed back to back on top of the heart, with one of each riding the hump that curves toward the cusp, with expressions on their faces like those on yelping cowboys kicking spurs into crazy horses. Their bows that stay drawn shoot flickering, neon arrows down the wall of the heart in a circuit of bulbs, tripping on each bulb into silver light until they meet at the bottom, where they point to a series of steps leading into the emporium. A placard at the entrance states in the English I, XXX, can read, as well as in several other languages, what waits for me inside:

OUR LADY FOR ALL YOUR SEX NEEDS

Certainly, there must be more than one lady in a place like SEX NON STOP. I just have to laugh at that misspelling ... but it is as if the placard had been set up to speak only to me; and I do need only one lady.

And, sure enough, I have found you here.

A life-sized, cardboard figure of you stands next to the placard. A sign beneath your feet reads: THE DO ME GIRL. Your lightsome body cast in a wisp of a gown split at the thigh, your full mouth in a glossy red, lipstick pout; your eyes holding a shine like beads of neon, your flaming red hair running down over your shoulders and breasts appear to me like a monument to the discovery of heat from fire⎯and especially with that sign of red light over your head, a stamp of letters that spell out:

XXX

As they say, we were always meant for each other.

Excitedly, I hurry to the ticket booth next to the heart of the entrance. The smallest man I have ever seen waits for me here. He has a hunchbacked body with a block of a head, with a ledge of a beetle-browed forehead jutting out over his face of rheumy eyes and flabby lips. I approach him. He regards me sourly, clears his throat, and sniffs as I go through the pockets of my raincoat to search for notes in this foreign currency that baffles me, drunk as I am with the thrill of seeing you, and with this champagne as heady as the thought of watching you use your lust. I believe that I have finally found a bill, and I will hand it over now to the small man ... but he is eyeing the bill curiously and furrowing his eyebrows.

He starts talking rapidly to me. I try to make out his words. “Ce,” something, “nay, nay ... paw,” oh, I hear that word, “exact!” he finishes, emphatically. “Paw...” again, “Duh,” and now “too” from those gross lips. I shrug to indicate to the small man that I do not understand him, just that one word, “exact.” He snorts again. Instead of the money, he holds up to my face a special card that I usually carry at all times on my person. The fleshy nude woman on the card, I know her well: those generous breasts, the ample buttocks, the ridiculous posture that thrusts her belly out so her arms dangle alongside her fat thighs. I could never understand what was so funny about the broad caricature on this card, now staring me in the face.

But the small man certainly seems to understand. He laughs heartily at the card. “Par-fay, par-fay,” the keeper of the ticket booth to you giggles. “Dirty French postcard, we. Feelthy, feelthy.” Humoring him, I smile and pat at the pockets of my raincoat, to indicate that I am searching for the money to pay for entrance. I pull out the right bill this time, and I wave it to him. He shakes his head exactly three times, smacks his lips as he gathers up my card, and places it in the chest pocket of his shirt. He jabs his thumb down on a button before him, and the buzzing sound of a clogged bell rattles from the black padded door in the middle of the big Valentine’s Heart next to him. “On-tray, on-tray,” he shouts to me. “Go Ahead!”

I am befuddled. Go in without paying? I look around confusedly, hoping no one else is watching this scene. “Go. A. Head!” he repeats, sternly, and jabs down harder on the button, again and again, so that I must obey and stumble through the black padded door, to a landing at the top of the concrete stairs.

I take these stairs. They are winding down into this narrow gray corridor with white streaks and splotches on the walls with flaking paint. I step into an expansive basement room with a ceiling of exposed industrial pipes and tubes. Under a stale fluorescent light, the room smells of deep earth and of stagnant water stuck in old plumbing. I notice three doors along the wall in front of me. Each door has a sign: Boy/Boy, Boy/Girl, Girl/Girl. A patron passes out of one of the doors; he wears a serious face, and he knits his hands together intensely as if he were fretting over a lost set of keys. He mutters aloud what sounds like “Moan, Do, Moan, Do, Moan, Do,” and he scurries down to another door, and enters. For some reason, seeing this man makes me want to whisper “In Vino Veritas, I do, I do,” again, so, I do.

I, XXX, now go through the door labeled Girl/Girl.

I find myself inside a cramped, dank screening room with several rows of seats, their spring-loaded bottoms cocked up like alligator jaw clips. On a dais at the end of the aisle, a big cube of a television throws out a field of static that sprays the room with blinks and ripples of light. I look around the Girl/Girl room. No one else is in here yet to disturb my vigil in honour of you. I choose to sit in the front row, right next to the aisle. I slouch down into a seat, pressing the bottom down with the weight of my backside.

Looking into the square glass alive with static before me, I am now bored. I remove a rolled-up copy of an adult comic book I had purchased at the airport when I arrived. I open the magazine to the page where one of the frames contains a drawing of a female ghost (lightsome body, gown split at the thigh, filaments of red hair), hovering over the graveyards in a cemetery. A circle of mourners brandish torches to her with flames that play across her blank eyes like the spirits of sight long gone. Taut and muscular, the men in this circle are zipped in leather jumpsuits that are as black as the bars of the cemetery gate, and each wears a pair of mirrored, wraparound sunglasses, all focused on and duplicating the image of the ghost above. They chant Latinate words to the apparition that I cannot translate: something like “a more,” “a more.”

Wearily, I sigh. I roll the comic book up, stick it into the right side pocket of my raincoat, and return to the static, return to saying, under my breath, “In Vino Veritas, I do, In Vino Veritas, I do.”

I say “I do” one last time, and the static vanishes from the screen. I hear the whining of the video machine unreeling the tape. A title appears on the television:

GIRLS DO GIRLS

The title fades off, and I now see the word

STARRING

and your name, the screen name that I always view you under, faithfully, because you are always more than happy to bring lust to use with slickened coats of sweat, your body glowing from the heat rising off the sand on the beach where you stage your most moving acts I saw when we first me. I heard your groaning sighs through the waves of the ocean behind you. The sun tanned the bodies of you and your celebrants, then shined through the venetian blinds of the beachhouse where you mounted your circus of an orgy. On beds with silken sheets, in steaming whirlpools, on black-and-silver carpets you joined together in every way I could hope to imagine. You never disappointed me, or cheated me, in your performance of sheer physical grace. You shared yourself with your celebrants—becoming one in the same. I now reach past the rolled-up comic book in the pocket of the raincoat for the flask of champagne. I swallow a mouthful. I sense that you will visit me here in body, soon, as I could never visit your gravesite on the plains of the prairie, though my mind would still see snow frozen into a brittle shell of white ice that stretches across the plains, into the horizon on the distance. The same color as the ice, the headstone I see blends into the white ground, so it does not stand out from the other monuments in the cemetery, in your hometown—the final marker that memorializes how you never did rate highly in this town, compared to how I know you: This headstone I see does not carry your real names—the name much like men give to assorted pleasures: to jewels, to candies, to spices, to scents. To elements of weather. And you were named after a beautiful and dramatic element of weather that defied those vile names coming out of loud, big mouths that stank worse than the names from the book of their God: “harlot,” say, or, “slattern.” Hating the sight of your body that lived in the use of lust, your tormentors might as well have chiseled their names for you on the bullet in the chamber of the gun with the muzzle you would taste in your mouth, a cold and bitter metallic flavor on your tongue and lips that once felt the moist and the warm. As their God listened to their prayers, you listened to these names they gave you as you pulled the trigger of the gun so they would burn straight through you. In self-martyrdom, you offered up your

head of an airblown cascade of brown hair. Now, the camera shows me her lean, tall body, sheathed in a black leather bra holding her globed breasts firm, and black latex slacks drawn snug over her narrow hips and long legs that cross with her leaning forward toward the focus of the eye of the camera. She introduces herself as the hostess of this video ceremony dedicated your memory. Waving her hands with sculpted red fingernails to accent her points about your famous beauty and your lust that came to use, she speaks of you in the voice of pillow talk, in the present, as if you had never died. Her sly grin, her winks touch me deeply inside, as if a slice of the sun that graced your body on your beach scenes were warming me against the chill of this sanctum down in SEX NON STOP.

The hostess now leaves the screen. White letters on a black backdrop announce a title:


NONE TOO SOON

You are shown sitting alone in a wooden chair-desk in the middle of a rank of identical, empty chair-desks in a deserted classroom inside a school. Your face is lowered into your arms, folded together upon the small polished ledge that serves as a desk, fastened onto the side of the chair. The tresses of red hair that I, XXX, usually see around your face have been gathered up for this scene into a knot of a bun, topping your bowed head. Your uniform has you in a starched white blouse, a loose plaid skirt, white knee socks over your legs and down into your feet, in pitch-black shoes with a polish to them. You are sniffling as if you are crying. I, XXX, am touched to hear you crying in sadness like this⎯even if that stray cough just there, a clearing of your throat, undermines your acting⎯especially knowing how these cries will soon swim into the very mouth of lust in use.

Now an outburst of a voice from a mean woman disrupts the cries you give to the soundtrack: “Stop that crying, I say, stop it! I won’t have it!” You raise your moistened face (free of the spots of rouge, the powder base, the red lipstick you wear in your other productions) from off your desk and into the depths of what appears, in a camera shot aimed from behind your bun, to be a rippled black flag engulfing your view. The camera pans upward with your head along the expanse of the black cloth until the viewpoint is taking in the cross bone white features of this stronger woman who shouted at you, fixed in place above you. A veil begirds her head like the collapsed wing of a crow, and a strip of white cardboard covers her forehead.

She is berating you: wicked young girl, failure, source of shame to all. You try to swallow back your sobs, but your tears will not quit, and she continues to try to put a stop to them with those mad words from her parched lips: “Stop it this instant! I told you, no crying here!” Your tears have cursed you; they have stirred this agent of the black into punishing you. “Get up out of that seat,” she says. You wince at her voice. “Stand when I tell you to!” You bow your head to her and, meekly, obey. The woman in black digs her hand underneath her sweeping cloak and removes what appears to be a lengthy ruler, only, not of wood but of hard black rubber. She shouts down your sobs again: “You will turn around now and bend over. You will listen when I tell you not to

cry, so I work to draw you perfectly. She will start on me again, if I am not
obedient young lady you must want to be. Now, turn around.”

“No, I’ll be good,” you tell her, in that halting, slovenly, curiously distant voice you project in all the scenes that I, XXX, would play in my room, over and over. The woman in black ignores you, and orders

us to draw the bust of you. I labor on the drawing in this chair-desk so hard that I begin to feel the furniture dig into my sides with its iron brace, the ridge of the desktop nudging into my forearm, all holding me to the task. My face becomes like her face⎯blunt, constricted⎯as I sketch the outline

of the underwear she is revealing as she bunches up your plaid skirt to just below your waist. Sliding her chalky hands over the stretch of cloth, she comes to the elastic band around your waist and pulls it back off your skin; now she releases it with a snap on your skin. You give a jolt, and you cry louder. “Stop crying,” she exclaims. “Do you not understand what I am saying?” She winds the elastic band around her thumbs and, with a tug, jerks them down your elegant legs, the legs I, XXX, love
the bust. I see you the first thing in the morning. Your face is simple and kind. For some reason, I sense that the bust of your head and your face is promising me a different teacher for me in the future, someone more sympathetic than the one who stands above me now, studying the drawing of you beneath her. The flow of the stone in your head, its smooth contours, suggest a flight into clear air . . . not the smell of must and stale incense in the black cloth of the veiled dress behind me. The beige stone is uplifting, not like her dress that is so black that I can almost feel the weight of the color as I force myself to concentrate harder on the drawing.

I am pressing the pencil to paper, but I make the lead slip on a fold of the silky veil you wear; no, I am thinking, and these pencils do not have erasers. I have to suck on my thumb to wet it⎯and with her looking at me, staring down at me⎯so I can now rub it hard on the mistake, though I know she has already spotted the error. The line blurs into your face, smudging the whole head now. This starched collar around the neck of my uniform blue shirt itches like mad, but I would never scratch under the collar, or else I would leave smudges on that too. I had better not cry⎯I will not cry this time⎯because the drops would land on you, and smear you totally into a blotch. And she watches me, saying nothing, she is so near to me that the cloth of her dress touches me, though she herself does not touch me. Because of the silence in her presence, I can no longer pretend that nothing is wrong. I will speak to her, before she speaks to me. Yes, the other uniformed children will hear, but, I have no choice in this room. (This room. This room where I spend so many black days. Even when I go outside, I never leave this room.) So I look up into the bloodless face curtained in black. I gaze into the scowl to say, “I guess it isn’t too

good girl,” she mutters. “I told you to stop your crying.” By now, your playacting at this game of bad student/hard teacher has been given up to your nature, the way your body invites the use of lust. You spread your legs wider to allow her two fingers to massage over your

snatch the drawing from beneath my

fingertips probe deeper, now, the camera switches to your heated

face before my eyes, and now she jerks the drawing of you backward, so her other hand can grab at the corner and, in one movement, rip the paper in two. The other children stop drawing, so they can watch her tear the two pieces of the drawing into four pieces, the four pieces into six, and the six pieces into . . . I lose count: she will not stop tearing, she has been seized by a force that drains her curtained face, she never seems to stop tearing into

you moan for the soundtrack, and your body twitches, your hands clutch at the sides of your desk. Her tongue laps gradually over your bared skin, now down further so she can poke her tongue in. She places her hands on your haunches, and her thumbs on your

bottom of the floor as the pieces of the drawing flutter down, and land there. She seems to be tearing the very molecules of the pencil lead in the composition of your face, digging them out and mauling them in her tearing

hands
cry at her, cry her away, so my eyes do not have to look at my black

ruler out, she points it so she can enter you. She works the ruler so smoothly that you raise yourself up to welcome the pleasure of the feel of the rubber inside you, and you look back at her to urge her on. You circle your hips to let the ruler slide in to fill you, and the tool

wets my red face, fevered with a hatred that blinds me with tears. Through the snot and salty drops, I see nothing but the blackness, her face has disappeared as if swallowed up by the black cloak she wears. The black, gelatinous shape quivers, as words come out of it: “We are you crying? What are you cold? Do you have a cold, are you sick? Do you have a virus? We don’t want you in here, do we class? The class doesn’t want you here if you are going to make us sick. If you can’t do your work because you have a virus, then you had better leave. You are not going to cry here. If you are going to cry,

do me, oh baby, oh teach, yeah, do me, do

it in the hallway, where you belong. You and your virus can just leave here, so just you leave!” Bowing my head, I feel my body

slacken. The woman in black appears satisfied as well. Exhausted, she falls backward and steadies herself by catching hold of a desk behind her. She still stares at your exposed body, glowing with the heat she has drawn from you. You straighten up, and swivel around, to smile at her. Now, you walk languidly to her, lay your hands on her shoulder, and kiss her fully on her panting mouth. “Now, I’ll show you how to do what I learned today,” you tell her, and, for the first time in the scene, she smiles at you. All along, you two lovers have been playing a game. The shot fades out on you two hand in hand, walking out of the room into the

hall of this theater, I, XXX, knew I would find you here, and

none too soon⎯over the calamity we survived. These halls: where we no longer waste our energies on passion in those acts that would now kill us in a plaguesome genocide outside the parameters of the family. In these halls, we are guarded by overseers who are benevolent in their strictures, those rules ordained by X VIRUS X whom we ignored and disobeyed in our vain adoration of the flesh, and who has now, thankfully⎯and none too soon⎯brought down this punishment outside these halls. Outside these halls, the X VIRUS X permeated our culture as the deserved reward for our free ways when we were without halls. Without halls, we were victims of our youth and freedom. Inside this city of halls, we are sheltered in a fortress of an antiseptic oasis, the hallowed symbol of our cleansing; yes, thank you X VIRUS X for allowing us to walk these hallways upon halls of halls into halls as one family without aberration⎯and none too soon. Inside these halls, we praise the X VIRUS X for doing away with those deluded prodigals of useless lust who gorged themselves on fruit that proved to be so much wax. Inside these halls, we praise X VIRUS X for allowing us to grow as a family inside, in straight ways, in a city of health where we walk resplendent in spotless black clothing as one family all, as we follow halls under orders without corners, for finally we regained our health here in halls like prototypes of the greater heaven that awaits us when we die, without the slow spread of open sores on us. For this, we thank X VIRUS X and those creators of X VIRUS X for releasing the purifier into the fetid culture⎯and none too soon⎯to make holy war on those of our kind who sought to defile us through their grotesque acts. All thanks to X VIRUS X for bringing about the construction of this grand halidom by the benevolent nurses who guide our continuous family through these halls of our making, our existence, our heaven on a diseased earth⎯and none too soon. We thank these leaders who have brought us the beauty in the uniform: for in sameness, there is beauty, as to be always clothed, there is beauty, in blessed sameness like the brick that lays out our hallways upon halls these halls we always walk. Always unwavering, we walk. With neither deviation nor choice, we walk. Spared of the purgative of the judgment of X VIRUS X, we walk. Always, with our family, we walk these halls that have been ordained pure by X VIRUS X. These halls: we will never leave here in our lifetimes. We will walk them, in our black clothing, with our eyes straight forward, like the brick halls, never losing sight of her picture that graces the walls of the halls. Her picture: her face most white, a face as pure as clear soap that wipes us free of the X VIRUS X of the world outside us, abandoned to itself. Her picture: framed in the black form of her nursing uniform, in flowing and seamless cloth like the uniform we all wear, all the same in our beauty⎯and none too soon⎯now revealed in the firm loving steady gaze of the picture on the hall wall as we walk through this structure in health and purity down our halls, knowing that BIG SISTER IS

watching you bring your lust to use. What was the word they called you, something like “slattern”? Because you were open when so many others were closed? No, I, XXX, forget words like “sleazy” or “decadent” or “disgusting” when you perform in your scenes. But of course, that is one reason I, XXX, have watched you: to forget words. For that last act, you deserve another drink of this fine champagne from my flask. When you do what you do, I, XXX, always look forward to what is ahead.

The inviting face of the hostess of ceremonies reappears in a close up. She bats her eyes, and speaks her lines as if each word on her tongue tasted of peppermint.

“Every girl wants to do all she can, to make the grade,” she explains. “But every girl has to earn that Can-Do Spirit. She has to show she knows all the right moves first.”

Her face leaves the screen, for the title:
TRY OUT TIME