I took some of my money and bought a modest house down in the flats. I put my gun into a gun safe and became a legitimate businessman. I never robbed anyone after that. I didn’t allow drugs into my house. If a client brought in drugs, he was booted out by my doorman. I set aside a room for lifting weights. Putting together some of the books I’d collected in my back alley travels, I added to the collection. I was the literary kingpin of the male hustling world. Some of my men even borrowed books from me. It made me feel good that they might be learning a thing or two.
Eventually I bought this house in Stone Ridge. I never heard one complaint from anyone on my team. We lived, fucked, showered, ate, and played together. Once in a while an outsider would come in, some plumber or whatever. You could always see the judgment in their faces. Sometimes we’re judged more harshly because someone thinks we’re homosexual than because we sell sex. The fact is, we’re almost all straight. We just stopped protesting it too harshly. We give women what they want, but it doesn’t happen that often. We stripped at bachelorette parties and that was about it. But in the heart of Mormon land, there wasn’t much call for that, either. Bottom line, women will rarely pay for a man’s body. Men, however, are greedy, horny, vulgar pigs.
“Oh, yeah. That’s right. That’s good. Give it to me, boy. Give me your big, fat schlong. I can taste your meat already. Oh God, I can barely get my fist around it. Give it to me, slave. I am your master and I command you to give it to me.”
Whatever. I’d learned to filter out the monologues of my clients. Tonight, though, I knew that nurse had gotten to me. It was all I could think of, and I didn’t know why. Nurse Warrior didn’t say anything so unusual, nothing that hadn’t been flung my way before. She was a priggish, pompous, superior bitch. In other words, no different than any other woman who’d looked down her nose at me.
“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus.” The hardcore religious guys always liked to invoke God and Jesus when performing carnal sins. This guy was no different. He’d wanted me to come to his cheap motel room, which I did because he was paying me a bundle. I kept raising the price hoping he’d go away, but he kept meeting my price. I was hoping to get this over with in a hurry so I could go home, drink some bourbon, and mull over the events of the day—namely, Oaklyn Warrior and her self-righteous denunciations. “Oh, God, what a fat tool you’ve got. My mouth is watering. I can’t wait to taste your pecker.”
So I gave it to this fundamentalist idiot—I could tell he was a fundy by his buttoned-up, starched shirt and his haircut like a bowl—while images of the shapely nurse drifted in and out of my head like insistent rainclouds.
She was shapely. Well, maybe not so much in the rack department, but that didn’t bother me. She had finely molded legs, made even finer by her two-inch, sensible heels. She resembled a Persian princess with her cappuccino skin, her Roman nose sculpted so precisely, the better for her to flare her nostrils at me. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was flirting with me.
But I knew she was just another one of the critics whose voices I’d given up silencing.
I hated her scientific, practical mode of thought. She looked at me through a smokescreen of archaic beliefs. I wasn’t going to back down and lose my pride over who I was. My existence was interwoven with my shitty past, my lousy childhood, my father who went along with the men who drove me out of town like a common head of cattle. My reality was intertwined with my memories, my passion for martial arts and birds of prey, my hatred of CGI fantasy movies. My past made me who I am.
Nurse Warrior’s science could inform humanity a great deal. But it didn’t tell us why we should give a shit about the flight of a peregrine falcon, the fluorescent glow of a jellyfish, why a certain child lives when another perishes under the weight of nasty, twisted parents. Nurse Warrior made the mistake of thinking science was the most rational guidebook to the shining truth. Science was all right for some. But it shouldn’t be the crowning tyranny through which all reality was viewed. There was much more to it than that.
“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God, that was good.”
I went into the bathroom to wash up, thinking some more about the nurse. Was she really going to steal Deloy Pingree away from me? She’d do it just to spite me. I wouldn’t put it past her. Deloy Pingree was a star performer for those who liked the boyish innocent type. In honest truth? Deloy was a boyish, innocent type, a guy who liked to arrange flowers, to bake cakes, to coordinate Toys for Tots drives. To put up Ariana Grande posters on his bedroom walls. Yeah, he really did that, though he was nearing twenty years old. I thought he’d make a splendid dentist, and I wasn’t going to stand in his way if he wanted to go.