Whipping Post

There are times when you should drive without music to become intimate with the noises of your vehicle, to recognize when it, as mama and sissy say “sounds funny.”  This should be done on the highway and in the city where stop-n-go traffic occurs.  A vehicle is like a woman.  That’s why they’re assigned female pronouns.  You have to take care of her, vehicle and woman respectively.  Keep her oiled.  Running smoothly.  She requires regular maintenance.  So I make sure to drive without the radio playing.  

    But not always and not this morning.  Had the radio on and a song that played reminded me of another woman who I had to take care of to keep her smooth, a high maintenance woman too.  Don’t know why I used the past participle had because I still take care of her.  Not because I want but because, using the present tense verb, I have to as determined by a judge in TX.  So the past was sown and the reaping is the present.  

    The first seed was sown when I saw her at a “gentleman’s club” - it’s a titty bar - where she worked as a cocktail waitress and there ain’t a job in the world that’s so definitively defined.  These waitresses dress provocatively to provocate the men into giving generous tips and generous is a profound understatement.  Unlike the dancers on the stage at least they leave something, even a snippet - large areolas?  how much you wanna bet her nipples are inverted?  Pubic hair, at least an airstrip, or bald? - and they smile at you so shyly like you’re their first ever crush and they bend over unnecessarily when they put your drink on the table just to give you a provoking flash of cleavage provoking you to guess her cup size.  They engage with the naive language of a virgin.  Provoke you into understanding that she’s pristine.  Clean.  Hymen intact.  Of course.  But see how sweetly she smiles?  How demure the dip.  How chaste the seemingly impromptu placement of her hand on your shoulder.  They always make sure to walk away so that they provoke you with the posterior.  Sashay away.  

    She sashayed her way to my table where I sat with a couple of other soldiers in my platoon.  She didn’t take care of her hair.  Don’t misunderstand me.  It looked and smelled clean but it was long without style.  She just grew it and washed it.  Like Lady Godiva.  Almost roquebrune in color and damn near mermaid fashion in length.  Fitting.  She seemed to swim her way from one table to another and from one table to the bar and from the bar and back to another table always sashaying and swimming and shocking with electric estrogen the tempered waves of testosterone.  Tempered because we would not engage in conduct unbecoming and there was no uncoming to our table, coming with her mermaid hair and her disturbingly green eyes emphasized with glittered shadow and heavily mascaraed lashes, too heavy, I thought, a burden on her natural beauty.  Not skinny.  Slim.  Not fragile.  Trim.  Clearly taking advantage of her unblemished youth.

From glossed lips came Here ya’ll are, gentleman - because we were in a gentleman’s club, wink wink - and from wallets came bill after bill in cold hard cash.  The breadth and depth of her were provocations.  She should not be allowed to sashay such attributes.  Such Lawrencian assets.  She was a secret whore in Victorian times.  Her contradictions rhymed and contradicted.  Aroused and insisted that I gaze after her every sashay. She was a bend-over-to-kiss her thing.  An inhalation whenever she approached, a catching of breath while she remained, an exhalation at her departure.  

The second seed was sown on my second visit and the third on my third and the fourth on my fourth and each visit made be blind blinder blindest to the woman stripping on stage.  Killing imagination with full exposure.  Bodies steadily losing sublimity.  With each visit we engage with exhalations.  Her fresh breath engaged with my whisky breath.  Her feline green eyes engaged with my brown and these engagements castrated me.  Plain ol’ me with plain ol’ brown eyes and plain ol’ brown hair and all of this plainness didn’t have a chance against her uplifted strangely sterile sexuality.  

There was a certain . . . capture, a particular . . . rapture that made it a hard struggle to remain gentlemanly flaccid.  There was certain and particular hard night when I proposed that she sacrifice her next free night to entertaining me only.  She said that she wasn’t for hire.  Didn’t perform private lap dances.  I said that I didn’t want her to dance.  I wanted her to eat.  With me.  At my expense.  Our clashing was Will vs Anna and Anton vs Ursula and Gerald vs Gudrun.  She was of Chatterley and I was of Mellors and she might’ve been the virgin and I might’ve been the gypsy.  Insertion and extraction.  Withdrawal and penetration.  Our breathing seatbelted by our lungs.  

Eventually the belt was unfastened.  The breathing freed.  For more than six months we lived together and for the state of TX that was enough to make us legally man and wife.  Common law marriage.  And so she was entitled to all the support as if we had made it to the altar, sworn our vows before God.  And so I continue to support her.  Work overtime to support her.  Have no right to her body her affection her attention.  She has every right to a portion of my paycheck.  So I remain tied to a whipping post.  You must know the song.