Massage

Standing on a street corner, waiting for a woman who would never come, I finally saw just how far I’d fallen.

A sex party in a Bushwick loft, with velvet pouches, topless acrobats, and a crowd that works in public radio.

A tour of the rub-and-tug establishments of my past, from the grim to the almost classy.

My relationship to money and desire, and the ingenious, self-defeating system I built to get the former without risking the latter.

A Saturday afternoon, a Village Voice, and a pay phone: the mechanics of my first paid sexual encounter.

Too much is never enough?

The elaborate fictions I constructed to make sense of behavior that made no sense — brave explorer and pathetic loser, coexisting without reconciliation.

This is the story of my second first paid blowjob. It began with a massage, and she wanted my cock in her mouth…

A granular deconstruction of the ritual of visiting massage parlors — from the craving, to the wave of inevitability, to the Blackberry full of taxonomies.

I’m a skeptic of almost every bodywork modality, but Georgia’s hands were persuasive.