The story you are about to read is true. I have set it out candidly and have included every pertinent piece of information accurately, to the best of my ability.
Feel free to judge and define me solely on the basis of the actions that I am describing myself here as having committed. I can’t stop you, so go ahead. You’d probably be right, anyway. It all implies a certain moral degeneracy in my character.
***
I was in Riga, Latvia, visiting some family. I am from there, in a roundabout way, though not too distantly. No matter. That’s nothing to do with my story. I was looking for a good time, as any youthful foreign male traveling alone in Eastern Europe is wont to do. I picked up a Riga This Week – “Your Favorite City Guide” - for free from the lobby of the fabulous Hotel de Rome, where I was not a guest.
This magazine is roughly analogous to Time Out in London, or Zitty in Berlin, or any another publication that is circulated in any given city to make visitors and residents aware of what the city has to offer in terms of restaurants, casinos, nightclubs, cigar shops, rental car agencies, and so forth. I’ve kept this particular issue as a souvenir. It was the Riga This Week, #56, for July/August 2002. Feel free to check out the website too, if you doubt the authenticity of this story: < www.rigathisweek.lv >.
I leafed through it as I sat on a bench in the park beside the Freedom Monument in the center of town. I was drinking Aldaris, the Latvians’ favorite national brew, from a plastic one-liter bottle that I bought at the Central Market for probably fifty cents. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. “Fantasy, Erotic Massage Salon” offering “fantastic realization” given by “certified personnel with medical education”. Open 24 hours. Matisa Street, 31/2, if you want the precise address. I checked in the attached map section and plotted a route in my head.
I killed the bottle and the rest of the day.
***
I probably walked for three quarters of an hour before reaching the address. It was already almost dark, and this was during the summer, so it must have been around midnight. The exterior of the apartment block looked like Eastern European standard from the 20s or 30s, rendered decrepit after a World War and fifty years of Soviet occupation. Pretty sad, pretty normal, pretty un-pretty.
***
Excitement had given way to anxiety. I decided to suppress it with alcohol, and so ducked into a late-night café I spotted a block away. I think Aldaris is about like 5 percent, but I was too nervous to even feel it. In retrospect, I think that the lady who served me there may have had an idea about what I was up to. Matisa 31/2 wasn’t exactly in a tourist area, and I was clearly foreign. And she couldn’t have failed to know about the little business that was operating just a stone’s throw down the street. But at the time, I was too preoccupied with the immediate future to think about things like that.
As I was sitting in there, slugging the half-liter beer as fast as I could, trying to psych myself up, Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” came on the radio. Yeah, the same one that was on the soundtrack of one of the Batman movies. For some reason, they all like to listen to American music over there. It was playing softly, coming from a crummy hi-fi behind the counter. To this day it is the song I most associate with the whole event being described here for you. You can laugh, but it perfectly and perversely fits the mood.
***
I called the number that was listed in the Riga This Week from a telephone booth near the entrance of apartment block on Matisa street, number 31/2. I nervously looked up and down the dark street. Half because I’d been the victim of violent crimes in places like this, half because of what I was there to do.
Some older-sounded lady picked up. I asked for English, and she told me to wait. Seconds later, I was talking to “Julia (‘ee-YOU-lee-uh’),” who basically spoke English. She told me to wait in the courtyard and someone would be right out.
After the phone call, I put my Lattelekom card back in my wallet and tried to look casual as I walked into the dark courtyard. After a moment, a lady, probably in her early 40s (but you never can tell with these Eastern Europeans – she could have been much younger) came over to me and led me through a door. She was businesslike.
***
The door opened into the well-lit hallway on the ground floor. It led into a waiting room of sorts, with a television, a coffee table, a large couch, and a few chairs. This place had evidently been renovated. Apparently, they did good business.
The older lady took a seat beside an end table with some kind of cash-box on it. I sat next to her. She asked me to pay (I can basically understand Russian...mainly because I lived in Moscow for two years and Riga for three; I studied German at school, but I picked up a lot of the local vernacular off the street). Russian is a very special language. The men, when speaking, can sound so gruff, so belligerent, callous, angry, masculine. At the same time, listening to Russians sing is like hearing a choir from heaven. Listening to a Russian woman in bed is an experience like none other. Especially when they whisper.
After I put down my 15 Lats (roughly 30 USD) – which bought me exactly one hour - the ladies walked out. I had my choice of any one of four girls who were displaying themselves on the sofa of the lobby for me. They were all about my age – young – and very cute. But the decision wasn’t hard. I did what any red-blooded American bag of testosterone would do: I chose the blond.
***
Now, this could just be egotism talking, but I think there’s some truth in this. I had to point to whichever girl I wanted. I’m sure they get all kinds of old, gross foreign tourists and businessmen in there all the time. But I’m the Captain of a collegiate rowing team; I didn’t feel bad about ‘imposing’ myself on one of them. Of course, this was something they were being paid to do, so by definition, it seems to me, it couldn’t be that much fun for them. But I daresay – now, stop me if I’m being a little over-the-top with my chauvinism here – that at the very least, none of the girls were exactly dreading that I would choose them.
I don’t know why I have included this observation. Must be because I am an egotist.
***
The blond girl – if she ever told me her name, I’ve forgotten it now – got up at my signal and led me into one of the private rooms. I was about to undress (that’s what you do at these places), but she stopped me and told me to go and wash first. It was sensible, and I wasn’t offended – it must have been standard procedure.
Remember now, I had been told that I would only have one hour. What’s that work out to, anyway? Hmm. Fifty cents per minute? At any rate, I didn’t know if my shower time was included in that time or not. So I took the fastest, most frantic shower of my life and was back in the room.
The blond took considerably longer to prepare than I did. I was impatient to get started, so the wait seemed longer than it actually was. I stripped to my boxer-briefs and, after piling all of my clothes on a chair by the door (I had some misgivings about leaving my wallet out like that, but it couldn’t be helped), I had a chance to examine the room. It was lit by a pair of incandescent lamps. I also remember the leopard-print sheets. I’m not joking. And a massive paper fan with Chinese lettering and dragons on it that practically covered the whole wall behind the king-size bed. There was a stereo on the dresser. The room looked tacky enough to be a set on some Spanish sit-com.
Now, you have to remember that I wasn’t sure about exactly what my 15 Lats were paying for. That is, I didn’t know how far the girl was supposed to go. I had never done this, exactly, in Latvia before (though I’d done some other similar things that may or may not have been illegal in that country), and so didn’t know what to expect.
When she entered the room, it actually startled me. I had been thinking. Mostly about how awesome this was and about how brave I was to actually go and do it by myself. I was nineteen years old.
She had just showered too. Her hair was wet. She took off her robe, folded it, and set it on a chair. She hit <Play> on the stereo. The music was all sort of New Age. Heard some synth’ strings. Some sitar. Soft tribal-sounding stuff. Woodwinds. Russian rip-offs of Sting songs. Later on, some Egyptian-sounding stuff.
I was initially very tense. She didn’t speak at first. If she did, it would have been in Russian. The girl broke out the Johnson-and-Johnson Baby Oil. It was the last thing I noticed before she told me to take off my boxer-briefs and lay facedown on the bed. She actually said in English: “Lay down, please.” The accent was so heavy that it was obvious that she had been coached only in a few English phrases because, evidently, that was the language spoken by most of the clientele (pathetic foreign assholes like me).
***
So the blond bid me assume the ‘erotic massage’ position. I laid on my stomach on the bed, naked. A moment later, I felt her weight on the mattress. I couldn’t see anything she was doing from where I was, obviously, so I actually wound up keeping my eyes closed most of the time.
It all started innocently enough. All I had to do was lay there. That’s all I did. She smeared oil all over her hands and my back. Her hands were very strong. She did my neck. Between my shoulder blades, deep. My ribs, hard, squeezing the meat. I listened to her breathing. I’m certain she was consciously breathing extra-hard so that I could hear it.
Then she moved to my left arm. My hand was still a little tense. Maybe ten minutes in. Possibly because of the language barrier, she said nothing but rather picked up my arm and gently shook my wrist until I realized that she was telling me to loosen up. I was actually touched by this gesture. She was clearly in control. The expert.
She got between all the fingers, massaged my palm. Using her hands, she began caressing each finger in a way that I highly suggestive of getting a hand job – only it was, of course, the wrong appendage. She kept it up until it started to hurt the knuckle just a little bit.
Even so, by the time she moved to massage my other arm, I’d forgotten about sex completely. Or, perhaps more accurately, I wasn’t interested in it anymore – at least it had ceased to be my overriding concern. Nevermind that she was naked, and that I was naked, and that we were on a bed. Between her breath, her warm hands and the things she my doing to my body with them, the soft sheets, and the tunes, I felt more ready to fall asleep than anything else.
That was before she went to work on my legs. She worked her way up both legs one at a time, starting at the feet, moving to the calf, then the back of the knee, the thigh, and ass. The strength of her hands did not fail.
Then there came a pause. My eyes were still closed, but I heard her applying oil to herself. It took a moment as her thoroughly smeared her whole body with the stuff.
When she was finished and I was still in a restful bliss, she handled my shoulders, somewhat roughly, in such as way that I unmistakably understood that I was to flip over onto my back. And from them on in, I kept my eyes very much open. And I wasn’t tired anymore.
She straddled me. Her whole body was smooth and gleaming with oil. I could practically see the reflection of my euphoric face in her skin. I’d had to have been a corpse for her appearance not to have affected me, to say nothing of the tactile stimulation. And the girl was legitimately beautiful. Someone you’d notice on the street and wonder about. And here she was. She was probably not much older than me. Could possibly even have been younger.
I wasn’t sure if I was really allowed to do anything back, so I played it safe and just laid there, soaking it all up.
She moved her whole body rhythmically. Swaying sensually. Her smooth, warm, oiled breasts pushed heavily against my thighs, my penis, my chest, my face. She rubbed her chest all over me.
Then she started brushing her pelvic bone against the inside of one of my thighs. I felt the bristles of her shaved pubic hair scratching my skin. Then she began to grind herself heavily on my leg, an inch from my dick. I felt the folds of her skin wiping moisture – maybe just oil, but maybe not – on the sensitive inside of my leg. Her moans gave the action a musical accompaniment that was much more enjoyable than the soft sound coming from the stereo. She was riding me, after a fashion.
That’s when she finally held my dick in her oiled hands. So I realized that the whole thing was to culminate in a hand job. By the way, something about that oil seems to release three times the heat of normal friction. She moved her fingers slowly at first, but they sped up in synchrony with my breathing.
Now, the second her hands touched my dick, I should have nutted all over the two of us right there. Anybody else would have. She was surprised – and possibly impressed or disappointed – that I didn’t. And soon it began to become apparent to both of us that it was taking too long. But something in my head was somehow holding that stupid piece of meat back.
Suddenly, there came a knock on the door, fairly gentle, but insistent. It distracted both of us for a second. Evidently, it meant that our time was just about up.
Then she redoubled her efforts, really getting into it with both hands. Maybe because an unsatisfied customer wouldn’t bring his business back. Maybe because it was a personal issue of self-esteem with her. Maybe she just wanted to see me bust because it would be fun for her. Maybe just because that was her job. Looking at me, looking at the dick. She was incredible. All rubbing and twisting around deftly. Squeezing here just so. Jerking. Never felt anything like it, before or since.
The point is: she did more than what should have been necessary, and she did it very, very well. That much I can say for certain.
I was concentrating like hell on cumming. But I just couldn’t do it. So it wasn’t for lack of either of us trying. But no matter how insane the level of physical stimulation, I could not ejaculate.
***
Naturally, I used my mind to conjure all sorts of things to trick me, basically, into thinking that she was a robot. I had to believe it in order to consummate the whole operation. I’ve come to realize that for me, that is absolutely the only way.
I tried everything. Like: Oh, I can’t see it from here, but there’s a panel in the middle of her back; I can’t believe they can make such great androids these days; there’s no heartbeat in there; you can tell her skin is just plastic; sure am glad they’re letting me test out this prototype; nary a glitch with these new units; the tension of a secret is always highest just before it is revealed, and any second now...
My thoughts were frantic.
But no dice.
No goddamn dice.
***
And shortly the knocking at the door resumed – much harder this time, and for a longer duration. What could I do? What could the blond do?
She sighed and looked at me. Rolled her eyes at the intrusion, perhaps in solidarity with my position. I’m not sure if she meant to reassure me that it wasn’t my fault, or that she shared my frustration. But in the end it was my problem and not hers, and our time had run out.
She stopped. She put her robe back on. She turned off the stereo and exited the room. My breathing returned to normal.
***
Maybe she just thought I was nervous. I wonder what she would have thought of me if she knew the real reason.
***
I got dressed and walked back into the lobby area. A couple of the girls smiled at me, and I tried to look satisfied. Had the blond told them that I didn’t cum? The older lady was there too. Could she have been the one who knocked? That old Super Mario Brothers movie was on T.V., dubbed over in a single, gruff, male, Russian voice. I was familiar with the voice; as inexplicable as it is ludicrous, the same guy apparently did all the voice-overs for all imported U.S. entertainment media. I was offered tea and a cigarette. Took both and left shortly thereafter.
I walked out of that place blue-balled like a motherfucker, and with no good reason at all. Wasn’t the first time that something like that had happened to me, either. Naturally, I tried to kid myself about it later. Like: “oh, well, I must have been nervous,” or “I had just had that beer.” But there’s no way I could convince myself to believe my own reassuring but disingenuous explanations.
It’s amazing how far psycho-pathological reasons go toward explaining sexual dysfunction. Of course, I already knew the real reason. And if you are whom I think you are, then you do too.
***
Who likes being a techno-sexual?
***
Please classify me as a chauvinist, a sick puppy, a pathetic loser, an exploiter of the proletariat, a callous sexist, or whatever other categories of scum to which you think my action recommends me. I’ve been through it all myself, and I’d probably agree with you.