Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs Read online

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  1

  My legs are mostly for decoration.

  I spent the day flirting online with a girl who looked very much like a guy, in a wheelchair.

  After much to-ing and fro-ing she sent me an unasked-for, very frightening close-up of her bush.

  I jumped when I saw it.

  The surrounding body was tasty enough but her head looked suspiciously male. She said she had already met six men, one of whom “ran out the door when he saw me.”

  The only one I did fuck … (her phrasing not mine) turned out to be a homeless man who stayed the night.

  He fucked me twice that night and once the next morning.

  Like it was an accomplishment.

  Her mind was refreshingly depraved and certain sex seemed imminent but I wanted to speak to her on the phone first to satisfy myself that the big unkempt bush wasn’t concealing a dick. Her legs were now completely fucked, she said.

  So much so, that even kneeling was no longer an option. She had actually tried to kneel after I alluded to spanking her on all fours. Not possible. Not anymore.

  This implied that it had been possible at one point but perhaps since her condition was progressive the option had expired. She sent a picture of said legs in thigh-high stockings, and to be fair they looked pretty fucking good.

  I can wrap them behind my head.

  This put me in mind of a yoga teacher I had once had the pleasure of fucking who was lithe enough to fold her legs so far behind her head she looked, as I lunged into her, like she was listening to exquisite music emanating from her knees. Balled up like that I was able to rock her back and forth on my impaler. Dead legs might be even more flexible.

  Oh and by the way, I know you’re slumming.

  Somehow this observation forgave me in advance for any future misdeeds. Meanwhile I scrutinized her photo for an Adam’s apple. Her face was more masculine than I would have liked but her skin was pale and clean and she was very shapely and obviously up for an adventure. And it didn’t look like any children had emerged from that hedge. I had already decided I wasn’t going down on that. Not without a compass … or a Sherpa. I decided to refrain from masturbating.

  I’d save it all up for the disabled girl’s tits.

  After all, the fuller my balls the less chance there was of a soggy erection when faced with the combined unknowns of atrophied legs, jungle-bush, and man-face. But then as soon as I generously agreed to travel all the way out to her place in Astoria, she canceled in favor of the homeless man. This was galling of course because I had wanted to believe I was doing her a favor but now I was being told I’d have to wait my turn? I began to get seriously turned on by the sheer twisted logic of it all. She was going to make me beg for permission to charity-fuck her. A text woke me the next morning.

  I just sucked him off and swallowed his cum before he went to work.

  The dirty cunt.

  That should have been me.

  Mind you, I wouldn’t have stayed the night. But he was homeless so he had no choice. He was obviously using her. He had to be. Hang on, he had a job? Surely that was a lie so he could get away quickly after spending a free night in a real bed. Or did he exist at all? Either way I decided I would now have to come on her face and her tits.

  When we finally met in a café near PS1, the sheer mechanical effort involved in wheeling herself over the threshold in what seemed to me to be a very cumbersome-looking wheelchair punctured any fantasies I might have been nursing. It didn’t help that she was wearing a bulky coat that hid her shape and lent her the appearance of a very thin, deeply unhappy young man, complete with light mustache.

  He ran out the door when he saw me.

  I too could have left there and then but I didn’t. I consciously decided to go through with it. I even turned on the charm because now that she was seeing me for the first time in the flesh, there was a chance she might, through some self-destructive subtext of her own, reject me.

  The possibility of being refused sex by an androgynous paraplegic after spending two hours subjected to the indignities of the New York subway system was not something I wanted to encourage. This resulted in me being actually relieved when she said: “You’ll see what I mean,” referring to the layout of her apartment.

  I was in.

  But her apartment presented another challenge in that it was disgustingly disheveled. There were cobwebs everywhere. How long did it take for cobwebs as large as these to form? Years? Decades? And how difficult would it be to clear them? Housework had to be difficult in a wheelchair but one swipe of a cloth and they were gone. I chose to believe they served some sort of gothic aesthetic. That the reason they blossomed all over the apartment and clung to every corner and ledge like Halloween was because they were intentional and not the result of years of apathy.

  While I was still inspecting the living room she had already wheeled herself into the bedroom. Mercifully her attitude was that of an able-bodied beauty. Her self-assurance in this regard was impressive. Either that or she chose to plug the gaping fissures of self-doubt with false confidence. I did not get the sense that there were drugs involved.

  It was necessary to lift each leg separately out of the wheelchair and position them on the stale-looking bed strewn as it was with all manner of domestic detritus: Q-tips, clothespins, two spoons, and a shoe. Had I seen pictures of this I probably wouldn’t have agreed to meet. And even now it should have been enough to send me scrambling for the elevator but no, I had decided to go through with it. Once we extricated her legs from her jeans I saw she was wearing the same style of woolen thigh-highs that had once looked so stunning on Marian.

  They mocked me now from these lifeless legs. Closing my eyes I tried to kiss her with only my tongue in the hope that if my lips were peeled back I wouldn’t be able to sense the peach fuzz of her mustache.

  Luckily I was able to hoist an erection and more importantly maintain it. Responding enthusiastically to my manual ministrations she came easily and frequently and loudly. I began to feel as flattered as I should have been from the start. I read once that Norman Mailer would sleep with women uglier than himself because it was nice to feel like the pretty one for a change. I had hoped I’d feel like a pale beauty being molested by a beastly ogre but since I was using both hands to get her off it was hard to convince myself of this. I was, however, feeling confident enough to tell her exactly what I wanted her to do with my dick.

  It was obvious she wasn’t as worldly as she claimed.

  To my delight she orgasmed repeatedly when I squeezed her nipples very very hard. At first I hadn’t wanted to go so hard on them but she squeezed my finger and thumb with her own to indicate that she liked it much much harder. Reacting to her moans and breathlessness I was virtually jerking her nipples off like stiff little dicks.

  She also came very loudly when I spanked her pussy.

  I couldn’t tell if she enjoyed this more aggressive treatment because she was losing sensitivity to her encroaching disease or whether she just liked it rough. Maybe she needed the extra velocity to feel anything through all that vegetation. She told me proudly that she hadn’t trimmed it in fifteen years. Maybe she felt she was a more successful seductress for not having to try.

  He ran out the door when h
e saw me.

  When I first saw her I forced myself to stay seated. I joked that she should laminate a menu of potential excuses from her dates to choose from. And it should look like it belonged to the café. The fact that she found this funny endeared her to me. It was humble and charming. The waitresses were ridiculously beautiful. Traditionally beautiful like eighties models. And they were so attentive to me when I first arrived I blushed in advance knowing that I would soon be seen with a girl in a wheelchair.

  Looking back at her on the bed after I’d already come explosively (I felt a hot spurt hit the underside of my own chin), she was now sitting up and pontificating about how the female orgasm had been co-opted by the patriarchy. This was prompted by a sticker on her bedroom door that I’d read aloud in an attempt at making conversation as a prelude to leaving: CHRIST OUT OF MY CROTCH. It wasn’t the sticker I was drawn to so much as the door.

  Now that she was sitting up the inert legs sunk under her into the mattress, and I was reminded of something I couldn’t quite place. I had the sense of not being able to tell if it was a prediction or a memory, but as I feigned interest in what she was saying it came back to me.

  A film called Freaks from 1932. There were moments in it when I was concentrating on the plot only to be rudely reminded by a wide shot that the story was being narrated by a torso. “… and just because I came doesn’t mean we’re done …” she was saying.

  This was happening for real, right there on the bed in front of me in an apartment in Astoria. She was leaning so far forward her lame legs were concealed; the effect was that only her stockinged feet were visible. It was now imperative that I get out before I said something regrettable. After all, I’d done it. It was over. I had successfully researched my sexual equivalent of Down and Out in Paris and London. All I had to do now was nod as convincingly as possible and edge toward the door. I imagined the neighbors unable to eat their evening meal so disgusted were they at the sounds emanating from their handicapped neighbor’s apartment.

  She was loud but I was even louder.

  I hoped I wouldn’t have to meet anyone in the elevator and be forced to imagine their thoughts: So that’s what a guy who has sex with a girl in a wheelchair looks like.

  I couldn’t pretend she’d been servicing me and that I had just been passive because she had been the more vociferous of the two of us for at least the first hour. In other words I was the type of guy who made a paraplegic come. But standing there nodding at her as she slowly disappeared into her mattress I began to get that old familiar sensation that the girl I’d just had sex with was feeling underserved.

  That she wanted to go again.

  But we would not be repeating the experience. As promised, I left her a signed copy of my book and after consuming it in a day she texted her review.

  IT WAS SO HONEST, I FOUND IT UNBELIEVABLE

  —Girl in wheelchair

  Behold my doorway.

  The portal though which so many of you would be unsouled.

  When I first broke up with Marian I had a dream where thousands of girls thronged the streets around my building and jostled up the stairs to my door. In the same way the million-strong Persian army was lured into the Thermopylae Pass, I would bottleneck and bang New York’s female elite.

  My website received a steady flow of messages from women interested in finding out more about the mysterious underground author. It was like a customized dating site where I was the only guy listed. And since they’d read my book and hadn’t objected to the content I was forgiven in advance for behaving like a cunt.

  In fact, it was expected of me.

  I began insisting we meet in my apartment, ostensibly to preserve my anonymity but in reality because it brought them that much closer to my bed, itself a literary phenomenon consisting as it did of eighty cartons of my self-published book with a mattress on top. I sent them photos of my shabby chic apartment along with one rather flattering (read “youthful”) selfie wearing a raffish bowler hat and a fake Victorian villain mustache. Also attached was a confidentiality agreement I found online. If they were considered worthy of an audience with Anonymous they were expected to bring it with them already signed.

  Among the many hopefuls was a professor of poetry studies at Columbia who was keen to pick my brains about my adventures in self-publishing. Having already stalked her Instagram and deemed her worthy of fucking I wondered if I might solicit her opinion on, and maybe even an endorsement of, an idea I had for a book.

  No one was more astonished than I to learn that the majority of my readers were girls under twenty who regarded the murk in which I slithered to be the stuff of romantic fiction. Often recommended on Amazon under the heading “if you liked that you might like these” were books of romantic poetry with pastel covers and one particular novel about a man who, on learning his wife has Alzheimer’s, takes it upon himself to reignite their relationship daily by wooing her anew. And because everything he achieves one day evaporates the next he has to continuously work his ass off to win her affections.

  How romantic.

  For her.

  Tellingly, the most popular male equivalent featured a girl whose clitoris is located in her throat. I thought about mashing up the two stories: a woman with Alzheimer’s wakes up each day complaining of strep? Anyway, it was while exploring the intersection of The Notebook and Deep Throat that I stumbled on what I thought might be the title of my next book.

  Beowatch.

  Relocating the Old English epic poem on the beaches of California, I’d introduce hentai-style, orifice-raping sea monsters to tentatively clad swimsuit models in a genre-breaking, post-apocalyptic romantic comedy with a message: the message being, Anonymous is a fucking genius. My name would be even more widely unknown than before.

  Drinnggggg

  Her ass was so big it was visible from the front.

  Okay so sex was off the table but a quote from the professor who’d written her thesis on Seamus Heaney’s revered translation of Beowulf would still make all the difference on the dust jacket of my reboot. She had just settled into my couch when another worrying issue arose. She was only an adjunct professor. Even I knew adjunct was just another word for pretend.

  I needed the real thing if I was going to get a quote.

  A huge ass attached to an imposter.

  Never mind, maybe I could still get into her students’ pants if she let me in front of them. I thought of all those young, bookish, bespectacled, upturned faces awaiting the arc of my ejaculate. But then she did something that made even that prospect unattractive. She began to pitch me her book.

  “In the same way photography captures images, I want to harness the humble paragraph to do the same thing.

  “I call it Paragraphy. It’s pronounced Par-ug-ruff-fee. Here, you see?” She showed me an example on her phone.

  TIED TIGHTLY AT THE TOP, THREE TINY ORANGE CERAMIC DEER STRAIN AGAINST THE RESTRICTING SIDES OF A CLEAR PLASTIC BAG. THIS OMINOUS INCARCERATION COULD HAVE BEEN FOISTED ON THEM BY SOME ANTI-SANTA OR THEY MIGHT BE ORNAMENTS FOR SALE. ONE DEER IN PARTICULAR HAS BEEN CAUGHT MAGICALLY IN MID-PUNCH LEAR-LIKE IN HIS FUTILE ATTEMPT AT PUSHING BACK THE INEVITABLE

  “Paragraphy,” she read, “is more personal than photography. In the same way we all have our own idea of what a character in a book looks like, Paragraphy invites the viewer to create their own visual understanding of the content.”

  She described a world where large-format books containing limited edition prints of typographically crafted Paragraphs adorned the living rooms and gallery walls of the culturally informed.

  I felt conned. I’d been maneuvered into a very uncomfortable position on my own couch. As she paused to let me absorb the brilliance of her idea, I was able to confirm she was not worth the effort so I pounced on her.

  It was easier to pretend to want her and be rejected than to find a way to get rid of her. Apart from some adolescent kissing and hugging I was enthusiastically rebuffed.

  She was more
embarrassed than angry, flattered on some level maybe. Or she didn’t want to be seen as easy. But most likely she didn’t want the subject changed.

  “We should take things slow,” she said.

  The more gallant I appeared now the greater the insult when she never heard from me again. I was about go beyond the call of duty and pretend I gave a flying fuck about her Par-ugh-agghhh-raphy when my phone shuddered on the table.

  It was Alice.

  I’m heading out now … be there in 40 minutes.

  It was almost midnight. We had arranged to meet the following day at noon but she was coming over now? Could she have misunderstood? I received another message; a mental text sent from somewhere inside me: Lose this cunt and replace her with Alice.

  “I’m so sorry. That was one of my sponsees. He’s only got five days sober and it looks like I’m going to have to …” I paused here to look deeply concerned into my phone before continuing. “I’m really sorry but as you say maybe we can pick this up the next time?”

  When she finally understood that she was being asked to leave she reluctantly put her phone away. You could say she was Lear-like in her futile attempts at pushing back the inevitable.

  “I’ll send you the link,” she said, laboriously hoisting herself off the couch.

  “You’re not afraid I’ll steal your idea?”

  She glowed.

  Apparently I was impressed by her idea and I wanted to fuck her.

  “I trust you,” she said.

  How malleable I was going to be.

  When she finally figured out how to open the door I had to resist pushing her through it.

  Meanwhile more texts arrived.

  I’m half way over the Williamsburg bridge.

  Alice had indeed mistaken noon for midnight but I laughed it off like it was something I did all the time.

  Hahahahahaha

  I might have asked if she thought it a little too dark to be midday but the JPEG she’d sent earlier in the week wearing a garter belt and thigh-high stockings muffled any misgivings I might have had about her sanity. Or mine.