BARBED WIRE
Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee
(contact paull@istar.ca)
also available at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire
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C O N T E N T S
ISSUE 2
-Message From the Editor
The Bottom Line: Sex Sells

- The Sandalistas
They're young and middle-class, they like the romance of third world liberation movements, they sport fashionably tattered jeans and requisite Birkenstocks, but they spend less time on revolutions than on foreplay, says Jeff MacDonald. 

- Stallone
Meredith Low sits alone in a darkened room with the grunting, monosyllabic silver screen pugalist and realizes that he's not quite her type.

- Untouched
Paul Levine doesn't want to pay to have a young woman squirm naked on his lap, so what's he doing at British Columbia's only legal lap-dancing establishment?
 
- Home Improvement
Ed Wrench shows that while it may be true that you can't fight city hall, there's nothing to stop you making the lives of the bureaucrats there as miserable as they've made yours. 

- Lost and Found
Alex MacKenzie picks up other people's discards for a new section consisting of found objects, letters, and images.

- My Favourite Job
Ridge Rockfield used to be a garbageman at a mental hospital. 
 
- Genki desu ka? - Part Two
The continuing saga of Chuck Blade's detainment at Tokyo customs. "Soooo, you a bad foreigner,very bad foreigner," he's told. (Haven't read Part 1? - click here)

- Don't Throw out that Penguin
Wes Robertson provides an object lesson for book discarders everywhere as he struggles to free himself of almost 500 of his precious collection.

- Flipper
Internet armchair "deviants" are at the receiving end of a carefully crafted hoax designed exclusively to appall, reports Alex Mackenzie.

- Why I'm Better than Robots
Adrian Mack watches a woman hump her couch through a pair of binoculars and discovers that the universe does have a certain order after all.

Message from the Editor
The Bottom Line - Sex Sells

The Barbed Wire hit tracker - that registers the numbers of visits to the articles at this site - counted over 700 visitors to the launch issue last month. This is an extremely unscientific and inconclusive poll as we have no idea if anyone stayed to actually read the articles, how many people downloaded the issue to read later, or who just sweep by on route to a more click happy site, barely registering the immense significance of the content on offer here.
If we do go by the numbers, though, there's an undeniable conclusion to be drawn. While there was plenty to be learned from the pieces on childbirth, Japanese immigration authorities, British Columbia rednecks, and Elton John, the articles that really got the index fingers pumping the mouse buttons were the pieces on fetishes and people who have sex with animals. Disturbing as it may seem, sex sells.
The writers for this, the second issue of Barbed Wire, seem to have taken some note of this phenomena - since a disproportionate number of the articles for this outing deal, in one way or another, with some aspect of sexuality.
There are obvious examples, like the visit to British Columbia's only legal lap dancing establishment or the Internet hoax involving the "story" of a chemically deformed child who is subjected to cruel molestation by her older brother. Then there are those stories that, while not entirely concerned with any particular aspect of getting off, provide us with scenes of the authors themselves in various states of sexual arousal. While Chuck Blade's - Genki Desu Ka? Part 2 - has him keeping his libido in check as he wards off a prostitute in Bangkok, My Favorite Job finds Ridge Rockfield achieving his first workplace orgasm (at a mental hospital), while Adrian Mack's Why I'm better than Robots has him juggling the focus on his binoculars as he spills his seed on the window sill. Appalling really.
Then just when you thought things were cooling off with Meredith Low's piece questioning Sylvester Stallone's animal magnetism, she forces us to imagine him in his oiled buff body screwing Sharon Stone in the shower. And I had thought that Wes Robertson's piece on throwing out books was entirely smut-free until I realized that, in the spirit of Honey, I Fucked the Dog, he's got a thing for penguins.
To be fair, there are a minority of pieces that have decided not to appeal to our base instincts, that avoid going for the lowest common denominator. Jeff McDonald piece on fickle third-world revolution supporters makes the not insignificant point that Sandalistas spend less time on revolutions than on foreplay, while Ed Wrench's rather chaste piece on his dealings with city hall contains enough sexually related expletives to warrant only the smallest cause for alarm. And if you think the last place to find erotica is in the garbage, you've been looking through the wrong garbage - as Alex Mackenzie clearly points out in his new section consisting of found objects, letters, and images.
While there have been hundreds of visitors to the magazine in the last month, only a small handful have chosen to comment on what they have read - leaving us to assume that what were doing is of such an incredibly high caliber that those who might disagree are deterred by the force of the mammoth intellect at work here.
A few brave souls have dared to speak their minds. One of the more interesting responses we received was from a collector of Barbed Wire who obviously hadn't read the magazine at all and who stated: "I recently acquired a role of wire believed to be "G.C. Baker Flat Barb". It is rusty and not the best condition. Do you know a patent date?"
Someone else, who obviously had read the magazine, sent us an email entitled God's Price on Sin which reminded us of bible passages designed specifically to set a group of heathen's like us on the path to righteousness. It seems that thelordgodjesuschrist had, in his infinite wisdom, the foresight to anticipate Internet magazines when he first scrawled his ramblings a couple of thousand years ago.
We would like to officially recognize the person known as david.getchell@paonline.com who requested an email subscription to the magazine, the first and only of its kind. I contacted David offering to feature him in our Subscriber of the Month section but he didn't get back to me. He was probably too busy reading the magazine.
If this sordidly sexualized issue really brings in the readers we may be making a permanent shift in editorial direction. I figure that since this webzine is free and receives no income from advertising, we may be able to at least double our profits by dealing exclusively with sex.
We welcome contributions for future issues to paull@istar.ca as long as you keep in mind that we have low standards and if you don't meet them your submission will not be published. Feel free to throw your story ideas in our direction if you're uncertain about their suitability.
We also welcome your feedback. Please address all correspondence to paull@istar.ca

Paul Levine 
Vancouver, Canada 
June 1997


The Sandalistas

By Jeff McDonald

Here we go...another piece of information demanding your attention. You're only going to give me five seconds so this better be good. Ya know, you should really do something about that attention deficit disorder...if you can't spend a few seconds reading this, how are you going manage a whole three minutes on foreplay the next time you have sex?
All isn't lost...your disorder might mean less fornicatin', or whatever you like to do, but it could also qualify you to be a revolutionary, or at least a supporter of shifting revolutionary movements in Central America. Events of the past few years show an inability for North American solidarity types to focus on one cause for very long. They go where the action is - seems like if there ain't a popular struggle that makes the news, the sandalistas go elsewhere.
That's right, they are the sandalistas. It's a play on the Sandinistas, that revolutionary band of merry Nicaraguan women and men who overthrew the repressive Somoza regime in 1979. With a Central American blend of Marxism, liberation theology, and community-based self-determination, they ruled Nicaragua until 1990, when they were defeated in democratic elections. The revolution was over, and the impressive gains in literacy, health, education, and land redistribution from wealthy to poor stopped in their tracks.
Also gone were the sandalistas, the international supporters of the revolution so named for their propensity to wear Birkenstocks no matter where they go - even in war zones. Most of them were middle class white North Americans and Europeans, educated, probably a little bored, who liked the idea of spouting some of the revolutionary dogma learned in poli sci classes combined with cheap beer, cheap Marlboros, and good beaches.
With them went a lot of international aid and non-governmental organizations who were working with the people there. Behind, they left people to struggle in a small country ravaged by the US-backed contra war and economic sanctions.
So where did the sandalistas go? First to El Salvador, where a moderately interesting war was raging; the Faribundo Marti Front for National Liberation gave the Salvadoran military a good run for it, at times controlling large areas of the countryside and parts of the capital until the UN brokered a peace accord there in 1992. Then to Guatemala, which became cool after campesino leader Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize that year. Kind of a drag that a series of peace accords have been signed over the past couple of years, making Guatemala ostensibly more stable. But fortunately for the sandalistas, another conflict popped up nearby in Mexico - the Chiapas uprising that began on New Year's Day, 1994, where the Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional surprised the shit out of everyone, including the Mexican army, with an uprising led by the now near-mythical Subcomandante Marcos. Vancouverites active in Central American solidarity and human rights work say a lot of internationals and aid organizations are now leaving Guatemala for Chiapas.
"Most international resources go to Guatemala, because things are still bad there, but now that peace accords have been signed there's fear that international solidarity people will leave because they only have a very romantic notion of what a revolution is," says Tara Scurr, who works for the Vancouver-based Christian Task Force on Central America. "They're now going to Chiapas because it's in a state of war and Marcos is a romantic, daring, dashing figure. Chiapas is now a hot spot for foreign revolutionary types. New groups are starting there and more aid is going there."
Scurr says many internationals treat Central America as a sort of Baskin-Robbins conflict-of-the-month.
"It seems like its just a game for people, you know, this is fun, this is different, I can help change something but a lot of it doesn't recognize the ability that we foreigners have to just leave, just get on a plane and go home and forget about it. I think it's irresponsible, but people leave when things are no longer black and white. In Nicaragua, when corruption was exposed in the Sandinista government, the sandalistas didn't want to stick around and deal with the complexities, the contradictions and hypocrisy that surfaced in the revolution. The excitement of wanting to export the revolution to other countries. By the time the Chamorro government took over in 1990, lots of them were leaving for El Salvador, Guatemala, some back to North America."
Guatemalan people and groups who struggle against government every day - labour leaders, women, teachers, journalists, human rights activists - know about sandalista attention deficit disorder, says Scurr.
"They know how fickle the international community is, so they're not counting on their support. They're planning for the day when that support is no longer there based on what happened in Nicaragua and El Salvador."
In one sense, the legendary Che Guevarra set the tone for the revolving revolutionary door. He was his subversive self in Guatemala, Cuba, Bolivia, even the Congo. The difference is that Che was risking his life, as opposed to going somewhere just to hang out in cafes, world-weary brow furrowed in profound thought as you self-importantly write in a journal, expressing your connection with and understanding of the struggles of people in the developing world by not washing your clothes or hair and wearing jeans tattered just so.
Kaitlin Johnston is another Vancouver activist who agrees that Nicaragua was all but dropped like a bad habit by the international community.
"It wasn't very fair. For ten years, people supported the organizations there, but abandoned them overnight when it became more difficult to do the work. We like to help the people in the country as long as they vote the way we want them to. When the Sandinistas were voted out, we left, even though we said we wanted the Nicaraguan people to have self-determination. It all starts with the romantic ideal of being involved in a revolutionary movement. I think typically it's somebody from an upper middle class background getting involved because of guilt, even though they don't recognize it as guilt. Then they get caught up in the romance of it, and they go from movement to movement without understanding what revolutionary movements are based on."
For the sandalistas, participation seems to depend on what's hip, which is pretty much the case with us sheep-like North Americans in general. We follow trends, we're looking for the next rush, our attention spans are measured in bauds per second. Revolutions take too damn long to develop, and are based on social, political and cultural factors too complex for people who can only get off if there's a good guy in white and a bad guy in black. Lay it out like a Clint film, and we're there. Layer it like a Lowrie novel, and we head for the exits.
The media, not surprisingly, plays a huge role in North Americans' perceptions of what's going on in Central America, and even though most lefty solidarity types probably think the media only affects all the other media-illiterate dolts, but not them, trends are trends; stories about Central America appear with the same frequency that the Reform Party wins seats in Quebec.
Kim Bolan, a Vancouver Sun reporter who has written about Central America, agrees that the media shapes which countries get support and which ones don't.
"With some Central American countries that were in the news, it's like they've now disappeared off the face of the earth. A few years ago I could get quite a bit in the paper about Guatemala. Then there's a peace accord and suddenly they don't care about what's going on down there. I used to be able to get paid assignments to go down there, but not any more, as if the problems have gone away. In some ways the problems are worse."
You can now get a T-shirt with Subcomandante Marcos flipping the bird, but how many of the kids buying them have a clue about what's going on in Chiapas and why? Pop culture gives us icons, but has no time for analysis.
And what do we do about it? Let's not rush too quickly to Chiapas, grave though the situation is there for the landless and rightless campesinos. Let's remember that the tragic conditions under which people live in Cenral American, those that lead people to solidarity work to begin with, haven't changed much, even with the signing of peace accords and no matter what the United Nations and the mainstream media would have us believe. Let's do some of the same work here in our own communities as we do down south; many of the same problems flourish in our own backyards. Let's make strong, enduring links between communities here and in the south. Let's look a little deeper than the icons, and see if we can train ourselves to pay attention for longer than it takes for the graphics to download on an average website.
And let's not abandon Cuba when Castro kicks.

Jeff McDonald likes revolutions and cheap beer, but he doesn't own a pair of Birkenstocks.


Stallone

By Meredith Low

I am sitting in a movie theatre, dark as always. Except this is in a town in East Java, Indonesia. I am the only solo female, the only white person. I am on furlough from my posting in a non-electrified village, where the closest thing to Western food is an ersatz donut, which I can't eat. I eat fried noodles with rice for breakfast every day. Here I can get Chee-tos. I would never buy them at home, but here I sit with my bag of fluorescent orange snacks. Given the options available - Kung-fu movies from Hong Kong, Indonesian hero films - I decide I have to see something in English.
I've been yelled at all day, but in a fairly friendly way. The rickshaw drivers holler at me like I'm the fare who would send their kids to college. I probably am. It's depressing, there are hundreds of them, lying around, waiting for somebody to come along. They call "Hello," which is the only English they know. I speak Indonesian by now, enough to chat with them, if I stopped, but I just call back in the local dialect, Javanese. I say "Hello," of course, which is the only word I know in that language. This completely floors them - they yell at each other, and stop yelling at me. "Hey, the white chick speaks Javanese!" They yell more Javanese at me, but I've bought myself enough time to walk away, on to the next bunch. I rarely see anyone actually riding in a rickshaw. I walk everywhere.
I'm starting to feel a bit strange, eating precious Western food, staying across the street from McDonald's. Feeling homesick for my village, I have the best fried noodles I've ever tasted from a little vendor stall outside my shabby little hotel. Where I am the only woman staying alone, the only Westerner, the only white face. I lock my door tightly, even though I can't imagine coming to any harm from Indonesians. But still I don't feel safe. I read Headhunter by Timothy Findley. A really big mistake. Children tortured, birds killed, visitations and voices. But it's my only book. Not hearing any English for a few days makes me hungry for language. I have vivid dreams and wake up feeling tired.
I've been saving the movie for my last night of the long weekend. Unfortunately it's The Specialist, with Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone. I figure it can't be that bad, it's a shoot-'em-up in the finest tradition. I'm wrong. As the film rolls, I become embarrassed, I cringe, I slump down in my seat. I want to scream at Sharon Stone, "Put some clothes on!" I've been walking around Indonesia covered to my ankles and elbows and collarbone to seem modest. Now I understand why some people look me up and down as if they expect me to whip off my shirt and show them my satin push-up demi-bra with erect nipples showing through. Maybe this film is just showing me what my paranoia needs to see. I am totally alienated and a little nauseated by the violence - although I suppose it some of my unease could be due to the Cheetos.
Most of the film is so very bad it's forgettable - except for the hotel suite being blown off the building and the two guys falling down with it and the whole thing making Towering Inferno look like a work of art. But the sex... it happens in a hotel room, first on the bed, and then in the shower. Stallone is oiled up, huge, buff, and scary. He controls and cradles the woman's body. That's how I think of it, "the woman." He holds his hand behind her head while he thrusts at her standing up in the shower. They maneuver like pretentious modern dancers. There is absolutely no joy, no passion, not even any lust. It makes me think of sex as achievement, as what? I can't picture either character laughing at themselves, at anything. I sat there, horrified, afraid that when the movie was over and the lights came up everyone would look at me and imagine that this film represents my world, my sex life, my preferences. How else could they imagine the world I live in?
A few years later I am sitting in my Vancouver living room. Furniture by Ikea, art by the developing world, ambient sound by traffic. When I am alone I always find it hard to call it a night and go to bed. I like the time alone, while the rest of world, I imagine, is sensibly getting a good night's rest - or happily otherwise engaged. Me, I stay up far too late watching talk shows and old movies. Tonight it's Rocky. I remember seeing it years ago, probably when it was first shown on TV. I don't think I liked it much. I don't remember watching the ending - maybe it was past my bedtime, maybe I was bored. Boxing has never been a favorite sport. I survived all the Rocky sequels without ever seeing any of them straight through. (Wish I could say the same for the A-Team). I even avoided that great rite of passage for my high school years, First Blood on video.
But now, in my less intensely discriminating adulthood, I take another look at Rocky. I am amazed by the acting, by the sweet intelligence of the story. I finally understand why this character became a phenomenon. He's just not good enough for the big leagues and knows it. He's not a player, and yet he knows what he wants. I am totally unprepared for the sexuality of this film. He takes Adrian out and confesses his inadequacy, his fears, while sliding alongside her wobbly skating. She is interested, she looks at him with cautious desire. You can see her try to figure out his angle, the mockery that must be coming to her. Plain, mousy women who have the temerity to admit their passions are taking a risk. He wheedles and begs her to go out with him, then to come up to his apartment. He asks her to make herself comfortable, to stay, to stay with him a little longer. He takes off his jacket, so that he's wearing just a tank top. He grabs his chin-up bar in his kitchen and leans, he shows her his body.
He makes her - and me - totally uncomfortable. He's too un-self-conscious. He's too big. He's too strong. He is too clear that she's the one he wants. He's too hopeful of her. She's breathless and confused, in that way I completely understand. Confrontation by a man who shows desire nonplusses me, disarms me. I have nothing to say. I can't even respond for a while. Even if I also desire, I just stand there, and then maybe try to back away, just to catch my breath. And, in the movie, as Adrian tries to leave, he asks to take off her glasses and hat, showing her face, more naked than any oiled buff body could ever be. He asks, she doesn't say yes or no, he says she doesn't have to kiss back if she doesn't want to, and he kisses her. His presence is so physical, I can almost smell it. Her desire is so strong, I can feel it.
In Indonesia, I saw my own alienation on the big screen, acted out by pumped-up, greased-up stars performing motions of connection, and it shocked me. It was more shocking to see my intimacies on the small screen, lived by smaller-than-life characters. Sitting in a dark room with Sylvester Stallone I remember the power of being wanted, the creative power of desire.

Meredith Low isn't anxiously awaiting another Rocky sequel.


Untouched

By Paul Levine

I have the kind of body that induces flashbacks in holocaust survivors. My frail, emaciated torso bobs uncertainly on my spindly legs. My freakishly oversized feet, rarely cooperating with the commands issued by my brain, are constantly jamming themselves into cracks in the sidewalk, other people and each other. I have an undiagnosed neurological condition that causes me to involuntarily lurch out and smash any fragile objects within a three foot radius. My hair is thinning and my face relaxes into a penetrative gaze that scares small children and old people. My voice is the debased, mongrel tongue of two conflicting accents - blunt British and carefree Canadian - resulting in vocal utterances grimly unfathomable by the most attentive, well-traveled listener. Yet, through all this, I do manage to muster a degree of charm, a measure of animal magnetism, a certain lure to representatives from all the sexes. I know because I've seen the rumblings as I go about my business in the outside world. I've seen the cashiers, eyeing me with my groceries, lingering at my cupped hand that they seductively drop my change into, coin by nasty coin. I've seen the bar-hopping maidens sneaking peaks at me as I order a drink, giggling at my precocious small-talk, undressing me with their lurid gawking. They're out there, they want me, and for the smallest moment I'm willing to entertain their prurient notions as I imagine us stealing away to a car, a back room, an alleyway, for a graceless and panicked, frothy and frenzied anonymous fuck.
What stops me, though, besides my dog-like devotion to my present long-term lover, is the plain fact that strangers bother me; the only useful piece of advice I ever got growing up was not to talk to them. They enter my world totally unannounced, they sparkle with unpredictability, they're brimming with strange, new ideas, and they insist on superficial summaries of my life. I don't want them touching my life and, regardless of their personal hygiene habits, I don't want them touching me.
There are those who would disagree with me on this point, who would relish the idea of being on the receiving end of a grope from someone they don't know, who failing a properly timed chance encounter with an ideal groper, would be actually willing to pay for it. I'm not talking about prostitution here. I'm talking about its sanitized, suburban cousin - the lap dance. It's the pornographic utopian fantasy made flesh: a room full of scantily clan nymphs willing to squat on your groin in their g-strings and grind you into an orgiastic frenzy. I personally don't want some young woman - cursed with cooker cutter porn features, who thinks she's embarking on a dancing career, who needs the money because she's undereducated and under-employed - wrapping her legs around my torso. But as a broad-minded, liberal culture watcher, I feel it's only right that I witness for myself the spectacle of her wrapping her legs around someone else's torso.
Across the US and Canada there are numerous venues that provide the opportunity to have a semi-naked young women squirm on your lap for a modest fee. In British Columbia, such activities are banned but only in establishments that serve alcohol, the local lawmakers assuming that there's no market for porn without booze. In New Westminster, Vancouver's old whore of a rotting suburb, the main drag plays host to an establishment that has our civic masters seriously rethinking their original assumptions. A renovated movie house from when the "Royal City", the former provincial capital, was in its heyday, the Paramount Theatre sits proudly like a hemorrhoid on the butt of New Westminster's main drag, its marquee blaring out promises of the delights inside in the same large plastic letters formerly used to announce film screenings. BCs ONLY LAP DANCING ESTABLISHMENT. SHOWGIRLS. EXOTIC CIRCUS ANIMALS. HOT OIL WRESTLING. Clearly the owners of the club are enjoying flaunting themselves and the legal loophole that allows them to exist, and I'm sure that those who enter the doors are already titillated by the prospect of participating in activities that are just marginally within the law.
Perhaps for a sense of giddy nostalgia, and no doubt designed to make entering the Paramount mildly inconspicuous, the method of access is exactly like entering a movie theatre: you walk up to the ticket booth, pay approximately the price of a movie, an usher tears up your ticket and you walk in. What you walk into is a disconcertingly bright room full of black leather couches where the theatre seats used to be, exotic dancers jostling on the stage where family fare was once projected, and young immodestly dressed women occupying positions in the aisles formerly held by popcorn sellers. The details of the interior design are clearly inspired by the sets of a thousand porno movies. The message is clear: you are in a porno movie, you are a stud, you can have anyone you want, take out twenty bucks and take your pick.
To aid in your selection, the women circulating the aisles will not permit anyone to suffer the indignity of sitting alone in his leather loveseat for more than a few seconds before they squeeze in next to you and strike up a conversation. I wasn't quite ready for this, having planned to blend into the scenery and view the proceedings from a safe distance. Unfortunately, there was no scenery to blend into and the only places to sit were the leather couches. My accomplice and I barely had time to reflect on our predicament before two lap dancers approached us, sat down and started chatting.
"Listen," I said, "me and my friend here just came by for a drink. We're not really looking for anything else."
"A drink, eh," the dancer said skeptically. "You guys must really like pop or something".
As I silently kicked myself for not quite properly anticipating the logistics of peering in on an alcohol free lap dance emporium, a waitress approaches. She's a much older, imposing woman who's job description clearly does not require any obvious sexual allure. "Would you guys like drinks?" she asked. We order cokes. "And how about a drink for the girls," she says. Trying our hardest to ignore the preposterousness of loosening up with a round of pop, and still trying to blend in, we agree to buy drinks for the dancers. "That will be $15.25," says the waitress as I rifle through my wallet. "Each," she adds glancing at my friend.
The dancers continue to make small talk trying to warm us up for the twenty dollar special. A couple of couches away I can see a 30ish guy in a Miami Vice style suit sitting cardboard-stiff on his couch with his hands clearly displayed at this sides (there's a no-touching rule in effect) as a young naked women mounts his lap and starts to bob and swirl with an "oh, baby, you're the one for me" glaze on her face. On his face is what I take to be the look of a guy who wishes his friends could see him now, being fawned over by an unattainable fantasy babe. On his feet I notice he's sporting a pair of white high top running shoes, the laces untied and fluttering in the commotion.
"I know what you want," says the dancer sitting with me.
"What's that?" I ask innocently.
"You want me to do a lap dance with you." She pauses for maximum drama. "And I WANT to do one with you."
I feel somewhat regretful that my very presence in an establishment designed exclusively for lap-dancing puts her in a position where she has to assume I'm here to participate. I want to tell her that I'm not into porn, although I don't mind watching other people consume it. I want to tell her that my idea of a fantasy mate is someone who's watching me watching other people consume porn. I want to tell her I'm not some sad, deluded shit out for a downmarket, ego-fueling fantasy. I want to tell her that I think that men who pay women for sexual favours should seriously question why they have to fork out cash for it, that they should look a little deeper into their emasculated little selves and question why conciliatory, deferential women are catch of the day. I want to tell her I don't like being touched by strangers, that I instinctively recoil when friends try to hug me. I want to tell her that I've got no problems with naked women but I can only see frustration in being dry humped in an old movie theatre and that the alleyways around the Paramount must be littered with guys in suits and running shoes jerking off into the gutter.
Instead I say: "Listen, I'm a bit of a voyeur. I like to keep track of how other people spend their leisure moments. I just came here to check out the place. How much will it cost me to sit here and talk to you?"
I can't blame her but she looked at me like I was some kind of obscure fetishist. "I only make money for dancing," she said.
I make conversation by asking her about herself but it's clear she's skeptical about my intentions and still convinced I'm looking for a lap dance. I can tell she's trying to make her best guess as to what my ideal fantasy dancer would have to say.
I notice she has an accent and I ask her about it. She tells me she's from "Switzerland Czechoslovakia". I let that one slide and ask her what she did there. She pauses. It's clearly a chore for her having to talk. After a thoughtful pause, she tells me she was a dancer. I ask her what kind. "Aerobics," she says.
A silent moment passes. She looks at me. "Most guys want action but you are a talker," she says. I feel like she finally understands but then she fixes her gaze on me, her face drops and she looks at me rather seriously, desolately. "You don't want me to do a dance for you?" she mock-sobs like I'm in serious danger of breaking her heart.
"That's right but I'd be happy to continue talking," I say, feeling sadly like a Christian Missionary chatting to a heathen. She excuses herself and is quickly replaced by someone else, another generic beauty, sporting lacy underwear and fishnets. I realize that I'm not going to be permitted a moment alone here at the Paramount.
"Hi, I'm Chastity," she says.
"Is that your real name?" I ask.
"Er, if you like," she retorts.
The drinks waitress returns and she's clearly unhappy that we've sat here for so long without paying for a lap dance. I decline another drink and she asks if I want to buy one for the dancer sitting next to me. "I don't think she's thirsty," I say.
"She's thirsty all right," barks back the waitress.
"No, I don't think she is," I reply.
"How about a five dollar drink?" suggests the waitress.
I decline and the waitress jerks away angrily. I turn to the dancer next to me. "What does drinking pop all night do to you," I ask. "Do you get a bit of a sugar buzz or are you constantly making trips to the bathroom?"
She's not happy with my line of questioning. "Look, don't you want me to dance for you?" I decline and she leaves.
My friend and I are left with a woman he's been chatting with, who's willing to take us both at face value, who seems relieved to have a break from the farce. She's tells us that she's 17 years old and that she used to work at Blockbuster Video but the pay here is better. She says that she enjoys helping people enact their fantasies, that she's quite proud of her body and likes showing it off. She's attractive, she's intelligent, and she likes to talk. But I still don't want her to touch me.
Having spent over $50 between us, having made absolutely no contact with an anonymous female pelvis, and disturbingly bloated on one too many soft drinks, my friend and I empty out into the New Westminster night. Untouched.

Paul Levine doesn't want anyone to give him money to wrap his legs around their torso.


Home Improvement

By Ed Wrench

This is the story of how our roof deck renovation project, to be built and to host its first barbecue party during my 2 week vacation of June 94, but which instead became a long drawn out 2 year battle with the bureaucratic powers that be in the Permits & Licenses Department of a city not unlike your own no doubt. I apologize for the length of this piece but after a thorough editing all of what remains is necessary for the story, and all of it is true! Some names have been changed or altered for various reasons not excluding legal ones as well as to protect the innocent, if there are any here.
It all started like a random act of violence you hear about on TV where people get shot up at a MacDonalds or some US Post Office sorting warehouse. There I was one beautiful summer day in June 1994 washing the window panels of my skylight on the back porch of my house when into my extremely small backyard walks this thick necked mid-thirties balding ex jock/weight lifter wanted to be a cop but was even too stupid for them six foot six inched monkey man. Who else but the BUILDING INSPECTOR!!!
Frank Dickhead was his name, becoming a royal pain in your ass, not to mention being an intimidating, stupid, bullying, all round dick, is his game. This guy is a real piece of work. He trespasses into my yard, barely grunts out his name, and immediately starts in on me about this that and the other about existing details of the house, of which none of it as far as I can tell is any of his business. At the time I'm trying to process all this, like who is he again and what, and before I know it he's passing me on my back deck and proceeding up to the roof deck. Just at the corner of the roof deck, he pulls out a manila card from his clipboard and then as if he were staring down the barrel of a pistol squeezing off a round at a target (like my head) he staples this thing to the side wall of my roof deck. It read STOP WORK in red. There, we'd been assaulted. Shoot first and ask questions later, that was this guy's style. And the questions did come, most of which were irrelevant.... In the end, I'd been bureaucratically raped, then told it was my fault and there wasn't anything I could do about it, because after all you can't beat City Hall.
It just so happens I live half a mile from City Hall so I blast down there right away figuring I can get this all straightened out within an hour and get the roofers back to work. WRONG-O! Nothing is what it seems it ought to be to anyone in the Permits & Licenses Department. Lots of questions are made about things that are not involved, and made with a presumption that they can do what it is they are doing, just because. Trying desperately to get my roof resurfacing completed before a rainy weekend, I pleadingly bargain with the woman in the planning department to just tell me exactly what I have to do, and she does. Essentially I need some plans and a survey.
I return home to get an existing survey and some rough plans made in the design of the roof deck project, and quickly get back to City Hall. I draw a new number and get a different Customer Service Representative (eh?) from the last one. I explain what happened and where I'd gotten with the first Customer Service Representative (yes mame) to which she tells me that's not right plus the survey is too old, and then she starts asking a bunch of questions. After the same crap, ie. the run around about everything that isn't of any importance, and then, but only after you beg, new instructions on what to do. I repeated this ACID TRIP at City Hall over 4 more days. To make a long story short, by the end of the week I had a zit on my chin the size of my nose and what it was I needed to do next had not yet been quite fully defined. But on the plus side I had some literature outlining the required documents and plans to submit an application for, and what we would ultimately someday hopefully eventually obtain, a Development Permit or (or in my case AND) a Building Permit permit. The very next day a manila card is pasted on my front porch. It read LEGAL NOTICE in red. Assaulted again.
That was the first week of my holidays. We were getting nowhere and very slowly at that. I had to unleash the big guns. I promptly sent in the wife. She kicked ass at City Hall! She put those Customer SLUG Reps in their place with a performance public verbal lashing of one particular Rep that was a real bitch and that kept constantly sighing like doing her job was really putting her out. I backed up the wife entirely. I stood behind her and smiled sardonically while my wench really laid into her. Ha ha I warned them! For me, the next week consisted of me quietly having a nervous breakdown, hiding out from the out of doors, working like a demon designing plans on the computer. Very soon, my wife began running into the same kind of confusion that seemed to be associated with the number of persons, all of whom have their own opinions, who became involved with the case as it moves along its merry way. There were discussions about whether we needed a Development Permit and whether we needed a survey or not. Basically because nobody was really sure what to do they erred on the side of caution for them and greatest expense for us, ie we needed both.
Meanwhile during this period the weather forecasts were predicting some pretty heavy rain showers, typical in June here, so I've got the whole exposed roof and newly constructed facade draped in two enormous tarps which are precariously tied down here and there and with a tent pole feature to force water to run off without risk of leaking, gushing more like it, into our home below. During one particularly stormy night the wind was so blistering and rain so plentiful and forceful that I had to go up on the roof deck several times in the middle of the night to disperse pools of water that had built up on the tarps. Also during this time there was a labour dispute brewing at City Hall. So after three weeks without a roof and no end in site to the saga that was unfolding with City Hall, I had the roofers come and finish their job. A couple of industry insiders told me that what is completed will usually get passed, you'll just have to go through the hoops afterward. Goodie, this way I'll be able to get my house insurance renewed too.
Nearly a month into it, I arrange for a survey, have it done, and get the documents. It was reasonably priced as surveys go, but for the $375 they made a fatal mistake on the height of the building which would have been disallowed by the City. Fortunately enough I happen to notice this. I call and have surveyor check his notes. Three days later we get the new corrected version, apologies not included. The next day another manila card is tacked onto the front porch. It read LEGAL NOTICE in red. This time I saw red. I was so pissed off about this monkey building inspector trespassing on the property to attach notices to the outside of my house. I was tired of being assaulted! It was time to hit back, and hard. We got all the plans together and submitted the Development Application. CA-SHING, there goes another $176. The very next day we wrote the mayor to complain about the completely lacking cooperative spirit and downright rudeness of the City's employees and the intimidating and threatening tactics they use in the course of their employ. We also tell him that in order to protect our assets we have completed the resurfacing of the roof.
City Hall goes on strike and the mayor's pussy-assed we're working on that reply letter doesn't come for two months. And then the very next day, a letter from the City comes REJECTING our application (which we actually knew would happen due to some technicality that one of the Reps told us about) and outlining how to APPEAL the decision. Mid September 1994 we filed our appeal, and a Board of Variance hearing was scheduled in two more weeks. I did some pre hearing lobbying, gave the sales pitch, and told them want they wanted to hear. The hearing went off without a hitch. I was first up, the City guy presented my case and endorsed it, and I showed a couple of before and half assed after pictures.
Eventually a letter came from the Board. It informed us that four months after that first day that set off this whole bloody process, we had our Development Permit. All right, finally things are going our way. Now we just have to get into the other line for the Building Application & Building Permit.
We were a little wearied and feeling a lot less cooperative by this time. There was certainly no hurry about the process so we delayed phoning the Building Inspector, required at this junction, to determine how to proceed. Eventually I call Frank Dickhead out for a mid January 1995 visit to the site to inspect the framing for the roof deck improvements, then I could get started in the spring. Naturally he doesn't arrive on time and when he does arrive I'm not there so my wife deals with him - lucky for him, because I'm thinking of bribing him with a bottle of Jack Daniels across the back of his head. I arranged to have my builder present to witness the framing inspection, but as it turns out all he witnesses is a huge incident between Frank Dickhead and my wife. Apparently Frank wouldn't go through the house to the roof deck but rather insisted, against my wife offering entrance through our home several times, on going around the house. So my wife waits out back on the deck and Frank never arrives. After several minutes she goes looking for him and finds him planted at the side basement door. Keeping in mind his ultimate purpose today is to inspect the roof deck, old focused Frank insists that he has to get into the basement right fucking now before any roof deck inspection will be done. Faced with another difficult City employee situation the wife reacts with reason, which again produces a great deal of confusion for them, even more for Frank, and stupid as he may be he must have figured out that he'd definitely been outwitted, and by a woman at that. Apparently he went a bit ballistic and he got pretty inflated. My wife was not afraid however, she told him to get off the property! His demeanor changed immediately and he suddenly offered to inspect the roof deck without a basement inspection but it was way way too late, he'd pissed her off, and she stuck to her guns...Ultimately, and I'm very proud to say it, my wife kicked the building inspector off the property!
Of course she relays these events to me after a particularly long and hard day at the office. As I recall she started out with the oldie but goodie "I have good news and bad news". I asked for the bad news first (I don't remember if there was any good news) which was her telling me she'd kicked Frank off the property. Well I don't know what she expected me to say but I CONGRATULATED her. After I got the whole story about how belligerent Frank got, which I confirmed with the builder, I got belligerent, but I had a trump card. I rattled everyone's cage that afternoon. It was after 4:30pm but before 4:45pm I managed to leave raging telephone messages with Frank's supervisor S. Weeney and the shop committee chairman of his union, the BCGEU, making heavy emphasis on Frank's "extremely intimidating behavior" and intimating at sexual harassment. I also actually got through to the Mayor's Office where I must have raved on for at least twenty straight minutes before the very nice, and legitimately, sounding women interrupted me with an "whoo". She told me of a person newly appointed to a new position aimed at improving the delivery of customer service from the Permits and Licenses Department employees. Evidently they were aware that the dickheads working for them are dickheads. I took his address and resolved to write him about the whole shit but I wasn't finished raging on the phone so I called the Director of the department. It was after 5:00 pm and when Mr Parrot answered his own phone I buried him. I told him I was in the Labour Relations scene and was used to conflict but that Fucking Dickhead was a reprehensible representative for the City, and that he was unfocused, uncooperative, unhelpful, and over inflated and intimidating, all of which lead up to the sexual harassment innuendo that was so beautifully played I almost spunked right there on the phone. Then I laid out my demands... The first was that there was no way Frank was setting foot on the property again, and that any unsolicited visitation by him would be treated as a trespassing and would be met with vigorous action by me. Parrot asked if this was a threat, to which I simply explained I couldn't possibly be expected to be held accountable for anything that might happen to someone who was on my property unbeknownst to me. So a guy named Jack Albeit got assigned to case. My only other demand was that he personally involve himself in speeding up the processing of our Building Permit as the whole process was far too drawn out and there was no published pamphlet on how to maneuver through it, and that no one in his department would put themselves so far out as to possibly be helpful, suggestive, or at least pleasant in doing the sweet bugger all they're already doing for you.
So Jack Albeit comes out one day, I'm there, and the first thing he asks me after shaking my hand is what was the problem with Frank. He was an older guy and I thought he'd be a little more tried, probably tired too, but reasonable maybe, so I told him I didn't want to get into it but that I was hoping for a little more cooperation and helpful advice. He was more reasonable. He commented on the design and made suggestions about how to deal with other areas I hadn't figured out yet, ALBEIT, he needs some details about the railing system, details that he says may require hiring the services of an engineer or architect to determine to exact specifications. Jesus! Hey it's a railing system, how complex can it be, could you really need an engineer or couldn't you just build a stonewall strength one and call it even. His boss, S. Weeney, Supervisor - Permits & Licenses Department, sends a letter, just to put it in writing, restating the vague details needed and adding some bit about the work being more dollars worth than I indicated on the Application. As for the vague details I can tell him with complete certainty that the railing system is going to be fucking solid enough to prevent his ass from falling two stories to his death if he were to lean against it, which couldn't be said about the existing railing at the time. Clearly I too had to write a letter but I wouldn't want to put that in print so I send a polite letter instead providing very general details about the railings but mainly taking issue with the overvaluation of the work being done.
March 1, 1995
Dear Mr. S. Weeney, Supervisor - Permits & Licenses Department
As per your attached letter of February 13, we are providing you with details of the guards and handrail system, enclosed. 
With regard to the estimated cost quoted in the letter, we differ. To date we have receipts for materials, labour and taxes for less than $2000. Quotes for additional work total no more than $1500. That is a total of $3500, quite a long way from the $7000 quoted in your letter. We have been lead to believe that this $7000 figure includes the costs of resurfacing our aged roof. We do not understand how the cost of the roof resurfacing is now considered part of the project. As no building permit is required to resurface a roof, and since our roof desperately needed resurfacing and would have been done regardless, we fail to see the relevant connection. If, however, you are able to direct us the pertinent by-laws or policy that would help us understand how the roofing costs have now become part of the project, and how our actual receipts for $3500 are somehow incorrect and should really be $7000, then we will be happy to pay the additional fee.
Of course this never happened, likely because no bozo in his right mind would ever bother to attempt to wade through volumes of reference-like directories to find some really well hidden rule that just so happens to cover such an instance where the roof resurfacing would in fact become part of the permittable project and therefore part of the continuing bureauocratic conspiracy saga, and which would ultimately require us to cough up another 35 bucks for the permit. Like if that was ever gonna happen. Weeney was no dope, instead of investing a lot of time into finding out how to put the screws into us further, he simply did exactly absolutely nothing. Nothing happens for a couple of weeks until a letter arrives signed by U. Laki, Deputy Director - Permits & Inspections Division, threatening to tear the place down if we don't get moving on this. Of course we really were dragging our feet, so I felt compelled to write him a nasty letter, basically telling him to fucking butt out...well not quite that eloquently put unfortunately but one can't stick their neck too far out when the other guy holds the axe.
March 31, 1995
Dear U. Laki, Deputy Director - Permits & Inspections Division
Thank you for your irrelevant letter of March 28, 1995. Upon receiving it, I was dismayed to find that it was not the anticipated response to our March 1, 1995 response to your department's February 23, 1995 request for more information on the guard and handrail system. 
However, I was amused to find that it conformed with the other letters received from the Permits & Licenses Department in its boldly stated "facts" which are misinformed and riddled with irrelevant legal jargon, and its presumptuously made, albeit extremely lame, threats. The obvious indication to me is that little - if any - communication is taking place between members of the same department involved with the same case.
Needless to say, I never received a reply back from Mr. Laki, yet I believe his letter pissed me off so much that I'd all ready written to my good buddy and his superior the Director of the department Parrot, before he would have had time to respond. Either that or he also opted for the simply do absolutely exactly nothing about it line, which was fast becoming what was clearly policy for officials within this department, or at least one would be begining to think that by now. Hey, it may seem like I'm stretching it here folks, but believe me, I AM giving them the benefit of the doubt here, they all might just be complete and utter morons after all. Whatever the case, and I wouldn't waste my time wondering, I had by now been sufficiently irked and it was time to let fly.
April 7, 1995
Dear Mr. J. A. Parrot, Director - Permits & Licenses Department
On March 30, 1995, we received a letter dated March 28, 1995 from Mr. R.L. Laki. It is painfully apparent from the content of this letter that it is not a response to our letter of March 1, 1995. Instead, Mr. Laki's letter only serves to illustrate that he is misinformed about the facts and progress of the case, and that he is clearly not meticulous about the accuracy of facts and details of letters to which he affixes his signature. I refer to a number of gross errors, starting with the misspelling of my name, the reference to contact Mr. Frank Dickhead for more information, and the threat to "REFUSE this Building Permit Application" unless a building permit is obtained "ON OR BEFORE APRIL 17, 1995" - a date that is 60 days less, as specified on the back of the building permit application, than the permissible time limit. 
This letter is an assault!. It is an insult to my intelligence, and it should be an embarrassment to Mr. Laki, yourself, and the City. I find it tragically ironic that Mr. Laki expects us, we who have demonstrated ready and timely compliance to all of the City's requests and demands, to obtain a building permit in the span of 18 days when the Permits & Licenses Department has now taken over 30 days to respond to our letter containing information that they themselves have requested!
On March 30, 1995 at 1145 I called and spoke to Mr. Weeney. I asked him when we might expect a response from his department to our response of March 1, 1995 to his department's request of February 13, 1995 for further information. I referred him to Mr. Laki's letter, which he had on hand, and pointed out that this certainly wasn't a response, to which he agreed it was not. He said that he would look into it further and get back to me. To date, I still haven't heard anything.
I should remind you that the stop work order was issued on June 1994. Since then there have been numerous unreasonable and unjustifiable delays in the processing of this case, all of which has been documented and all of which can be clearly attributed to the bungling incompetence of various civic employees of the Planning, Permits & Licenses, and Inspections departments of the City, of whose names I have collected and added to a ever growing list. I believe we have demonstrated an extraordinary level of undeserved patience and restraint, but this generous attitude of ours has now evaporated. At this time I am both begging you and offering you this last chance to do the right thing and resolve this without any further delay, issue us our building permit, before we are forced to go to the media and our lawyer.
Never got a response from that letter either, but things did start to move along thereafter, a bit, well without any further hassles at least. Jack managed to find a few more albeit's around the site but they were simple fixes and required no extra money on our part. It would still be well over a year before we made it through the final hoop, at which time we were feeling pretty hooped ourselves, but after nearly 26 months to the day, we eventually got our Building Permit - long after we'd built it and after many celebratory and victory barbecue parties along the way.
It seems that if there was any lesson to be learned from this experience, it must be this: You gotta be a bigger, nastier, motherfucking hotheaded prick cunt pain in the ass than any of the pion authorities at municipal hall, otherwise you'll get no respect. Words to live by if you ask me. And I've been sticking it to the City ever since this fiasco, on, about and over any and every issue where I can wedge my big fat never stop talking head all the way up their ass and give more than a little pain back. Ahh, this is more than any man can ask for, a never ending project to keep my tiny idle hands busy doing devil's work on the laptop from a comfortable chair on my roof deck on the most gloriously sunny dog day afternoons.

Ed Wrench finds making other people's lives miserable makes him less miserable


My Favourite Job

By Ridge Rockfield

Once upon a time, I was a garbageman in a nervolous hospital. I had keys to the locked wards, and I once let a "patient" escape, although it wasn't intentional. What gave me a chill was the sight of the restraint board in one corner of the nurses' station, and beside it, an oxygen tank. On the chalkboard, Mr. X would be down for electro-convulsive therapy on Wednesday. The idea that shock treatment was administered in these sunny rooms filled me with heavy dread, yet I had a guilty longing to witness it for myself.
It was my weekend job during the school year and, for one fuckless summer, a fulltime job, although it hardly qualified as either "full-time" or a "job." The hospital was set on several acres of leafy grounds, with buildings scattered about the property. A tunnel connected them all, and on Saturday and Sunday mornings I would roll a garbage cart back and forth through it as I made the rounds collecting bags of trash. It was supposed that it took four hours to collect all the garbage in the hospital, but if I hustled, I could bag it all in 90 minutes and be out the door with a quick step to my car.
The kitchen produced the most garbage. The cans were heavy with sickly sweet food waste, and one yellow skip that had to be slopped out was always full of a congealing mess of gravy, rotten fruit, and limp lettuce. The kitchen was industrial: oversize mixers and huge soup tureens churned and cooked the food. I hardly ever saw anyone tend these machines: they seemed to cook by themselves like fat eyeless robots.
I hauled the garbage to a compactor at the back of the main building. The room had a locker and a sink. I could doze there and not worry about being woken. Occassionally I would find a Playboy or a Penthouse and I would put these aside. I jerked off once, and achieved my one and only workplace masturbation. Once I disposed of a boxful of flurouscent light tubes by feeding them one by one into the compactor where they exploded with a satisfying pop. On days when Mrs. L., the supervisor, was present, I slowed to a crawl and carried out each task with medieval exactness to fill the four hours.
The elevators were locked, and a key was needed to open the doors. This I carried around my neck. In the old ward, the one with the screened-in summer verandah and the caged stairwells, the elevators were painfully slow to open and close. One day, I opened the elevator and a patient slid in and made good a slow and unexciting escape. On one of walls someone had written in felt-tip: "Escape is the New Word of the Week."
I had one bag of garbage to retrieve from the security ward. A guard had to buzz me through a double set of locked doors which led into a short beige hall. Small cells lined each side of the hallway. The doors were shut and a small thick glass window was set in each. Occasionally I would encounter a"patient" pacing the hall. They looked normal enough but there would be some detail -- like wearing the detachable hood from a ski jacket -- that said, "I'm hearing voices."
It only took a minute to fetch that one bag of garbage, yet I always felt lucky to leave. People were eating themselves alive there, and I thought I might start on that diet myself. A painting found in a common room and rendered in green toothpaste and torn-out grey hair didn't look all that different than my attempts at painting in an "abstract" style.
That summer was slow. Highschool was finished and I was alone. I collected what I thought was a good paycheque and went to the cottage on weekends, longing for something. I was going to university in the fall, but it seemed as if that day would never come. A lethargy was on me, yet it wasn't the dullness of grey skies and rain. The blue sky weighed on me: it was limitless, and I was nothing, empty as the sky and as directionless.

Ridge Rockfield has self-administered several drug therapies - but for him nothing beats depression.



Genki Desu Ka? - Part 2

By Chuck Blade

"So you wish to come back to Japan?" the Senior Immigration Officer asked before I had even sat down. As I looked up he was smiling. Actually he had never stopped. In fact his grin had broadened so that his face now took on the appearance of being a pair of black horned rim glasses and a set of buck teeth away from that delightful American caricature of the Japanese used for propaganda purposes in GI cartoons during WW2. His balding head was cropped with military precision. He was a short stout man named Suzuki. I mechanically repeated my story while he waited ever so patiently with his hands folded in front of him, head tilted to one side, smiling a smile barely concealing an expression that knew he had me dead to rights.
" Please, write for me your itinerary while you were in Tokyo." I let the paper and pen sit on his desk briefly and wondered how I was going to convince an Immigration Officer whose vacation time was limited to one week a year, his Golden Week, and, if he left the country at all, it was on some "Three Cities In Seven Days" charter tour with dozens of other Japanese whose idea of vacationing consists of hotels and sightseeing buses. He motioned with his hand palm up towards the paper. Halfheartedly I picked it up and made my second error; I lied. I panicked and thought the account of my time spent in Tokyo wouldn't hold water so I mentioned how I had also spent time visiting a friend in Osaka, something I had never done. Without a nanoseconds pause he sprung his trap. "Osaka!" He belched in mock surprise. Now his questions were coming rapid fire not giving me a chance to finish answering completely. This attempt to phase me was working quite well as I tried to backpedal and explain that my time in Japan was not defined by the number of temples I visited or Kabuki plays I saw but I was getting defensive and he sensed it. It was also obvious he was enjoying himself watching me squirm. I resorted again to the letter my girlfriend had written in the desperate attempt to gain some advantage.
As he glanced at the letter he asked for a list of names and numbers of people I knew in Tokyo. In my wallet was my phone list of friends who I trusted to have the presence of mind to cover for me if a phone call was made. He wasn't giving me a moments advantage and it began to look like he would only release me when he was sure I was on my way out of the country. Fumbling for my private phone list I considered this man Suzuki, my prosecutor, judge and jury. Here was a man who obviously relished his work. I didn't doubt this short official ended his days work in the bars with his staff drunkenly recounting the catches of the day like a bunch of boasting fisherman all having a good laugh about the stupidity of these foreigners. When he staggered home he dutifully handed over his paycheck to his wife being careful to conceal the vomit stains on his blue blazer after having upchucked his sake and sashimi on the JR Line: this is not an uncommon sight on the Tokyo trains in the evenings. His incredulity seemed unshakable but I was still determined not to become one of Suzukis foreign fish stories.
To my shock I noticed I was still carrying a phone card I had purchased in Tokyo, tucked away in a flap with my phone list, that had its electromagnetic strip hacked into. These could be purchased in certain neighbourhoods from Iranian street vendors. I thought I had gotten rid of my illegal phone cards and as I tried to conceal it the foil strip, that replaced the electromagnetic one, must have briefly caught a ray of light and reflected back into Suzukis eyes that were now fixed on my wallet. "May I see your wallet please ?" I handed it over still clutching the stack of cards that concealed the phone card. "Those cards in your hand please." " Soooooooo you a bad foreigner . Very bad foreigner." He was fanning the card now and continued remonstrating with me as if I were a child. He called in a co-worker and got him in on the fun. Now Suzuki was in his glory. He toyed with me and threatened arrest while his buddy stood there making the motions of being handcuffed, laughing like a hick. They began speaking to each other in Japanese. Suzuki then picked up the phone and started to make a call. I pleaded with him not to call my girlfriends mother because we had been living together secretly and it would shame her to discover this and bring unnecessary problems in their family. He brushed this off as if it were no concern of his.
I sat there helplessly waiting, not knowing who he might be calling, hoping that whoever took the call would be alert, lie convincingly and help me get through this situation. Just to keep things comfortable for me he decided to speak in Japanese. I glanced up at the supporting cast who saw me looking so he taunted me again making like he was being handcuffed and smiling that idiot grin of his. I was having serious doubts about the reputable hospitality of the Japanese. These two just couldn't help making it personal and, feeling as though it was somehow over for me, I considered my options for a getaway. It didn't look very good. If I was able to hurdle the counter at Immigration, with the staff in hot pursuit, it's not likely I'd get past the bottleneck at Customs. I'd have to snatch the plastic envelope off the desk otherwise I'd never get out of the country. This left me feeling like I should do something. I asked to know who he was calling. Without looking at me he pointed to my girlfriends mothers name. I'd wish I'd stayed in Bangkok.
My bizarre arrival in Thailand turned tense when I stepped off the bus and followed my directions down an alley which took a sharp left turn, narrowed and darkened, then took a sharp right turn and narrowed and darkened further so that all that I could make out was a vast dark courtyard reeking of fermented sewage. Somewhere back in the stinking dark was the guesthouse I had been directed to. Everything was locked up, it was two o'clock in the morning, and as I turned around to go back to the street I knocked something over with my dufflebag sending a squealing panic through a pack of rats that were dining on something close by. Running over each other trying to duck for cover one rat headed towards the opening directly behind me. After a bowel slackening split second of fear I hopped up on a rise of concrete and watched a rat the size of my arm below the elbow race by. I decided quickly that it would be best to wait the night out in one of the bars on the main drag.
I sat down at the end of the bar, in Buddy Beer, one of half dozen open air bars crowding less than a block of Kaosan Rd. Standing on the street the pumping music blended into a collage of Classic-Metal-Techno-Soft-Rock which, when heard individually would have been annoyingly inappropriate with the scene in the street, turning the moment into a beer commercial, but listened to simultaneously matched its frenzy perfectly. This was a place where the naive or the careless newcomer get robbed. Here in the bar I wondered how long it would take me to get marked, for someone to come across and make their play, or attempt some kind of con.
It was almost three o'clock and the street was still crawling with cars, fruit vendors, tuk-tuk drivers and pedestrians. The ceiling fans did little to cool the humid night heat. The young women working in the bar eyed the remaining few drunkards coldly. A girl no older than thirteen cleared the tables dodging passes from the foreigners. A drunken German weaved up to the bar and gurgled some incomprehensible noises by way of conversation. All I could make out was beutfl weemen' followed by an expansive gesture with his arm that through him off balance. This guy wasn't conscious enough to pull anything. I was feeling pretty conspicuous lugging my dufflebag to and from the washroom.
When I left Tokyo the temperature had begun to drop into the low teens . I was overdressed for the heat now and sweating heavily. The coffee wasn't helping with body heat matters. A group of prostitutes came into the bar each accompanied by a hip young stud in baggy shorts and sandals. One blonde haired Adonis was talking intently to one woman all the time eyeballing me at the bar. She turned around and gave me a slow look as her mouth gradually broadened from a smirk to smile. She was a little older than the other girls and her figure was fuller and more womanly . She wore an ultra low skirt which showed off finely shaped brown legs. When she saw me looking she wasted no time in coming over. Her student stud positioned himself at the other end of the bar pretending not to be interested. I was almost talked into going with her if it hadn't been for the heavy odor of stale sex coming off of her and her continued glances over at recent fuck-boy. It looked like a set-up although her hand was doing some effective bargaining below the bar. While her fingers dextrously worked away she told me she was from Laos and had come to Bangkok to earn money prostituting some of which she sent home to support her family. Her price was 1500 baht and she was anxious to close the deal because she was here to eat a late meal turn one more trick and then call it a night. I wasn't really interested but was enjoying the seedy encounter nevertheless. I negotiated the price down to 500 baht. The drunk german had seated himself, after a considerable effort, at the bar and watched the encounter between her and I, winking when our eyes met. After inhaling a plate of bloody eggs and toast she lost interest in me and turned to herr Shultz. After some discussion they went off together. Blonde-boy guzzeled his beer and followed them out.
I was brought back to my senses by Suzukis sudden fit of activity.
END OF PART TWO
continued next issue...

Chuck Blade has never paid for sex in Thailand, although he has meet some skillful negotiator




Don't Throw Out That Penguin

By Wes Robertson

Until this year, I had never sold, thrown out, or given away a book. This would have been obvious if you had ever visited me: in the house where I used to live I had four full bookshelves on display, six boxes in storage, and another 40 or 50 books and magazines in dangerous, unstable piles covering my bedside table and desk. This collection had been accumulating since elementary school, through twelve different houses and apartments, a four - year English degree that took eight years to finish, six full - time jobs, five computer upgrades, and two cars. I was so familiar with it that I could usually find any book I wanted within five minutes, even if it was in one of the storage boxes, or at the bottom of a pile on my desk, or under my bed. If it took longer than this, I would get panicky, and have to sit down and read a Tintin to calm down. But I always eventually found the book I was looking for.
Most of the time there was no pressing reason to find a book - it was more of a compulsion to follow a reference or a mental image to its source. For example, I would see a cruise ship leaving the harbor, and would then have to go home and find the amazing cutaway in Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day? of a ship at sea (with sea - dog Captain Salty in command) that for a long time made me think I wanted to be an engineer (I'm a sucker for a big, detailed cutaway view of almost anything). Or I would take a taxi somewhere, and then have to re - read the scene in Catcher in the Rye where Holden asks the touchy New York City cab driver where the fish in Central Park go during the winter ("They don't go nowhere, for Chrissakes! They're fish!"). The smallest incident could send me racing for the bookshelves, on the hunt for a related passage or line that somehow mirrored, enhanced, or enlarged the experience.
Then, a couple of months ago, my girlfriend and I bought a condo. It's a great place, in perfect condition and not much smaller than the house I was in before. However, for various reasons space is at much more of a premium here, and when I realized that it had room for at most only two medium - sized bookshelves, I had to read Tintin's The Secret of the Unicorn AND most of its sequel, Red Rackham's Treasure, before I was calm enough event to have a fit. I then spent a number of days in denial, thinking that somehow I could squeeze more books on every shelf by stacking them horizontally, or layering the bookshelves two deep along the walls. I didn't even consider getting rid of some books, any more than I would consider lopping off my ears because a hat wouldn't fit. Eventually, though, I realized that there was no way around it: I would have to winnow my collection down by at least a third, and I would be able to keep less than half of those remaining on the shelves. I think I was riding my bike at the time the full ramifications really hit me, and in a spasm of mental clarity it almost seemed like a welcome and timely challenge. That's what too much oxygen will do to you.
A couple of weeks later, with moving day fast approaching and my oxygen levels back to normal, I had not touched one book, though I had packed almost everything else. The situation was becoming critical. So I went for another bike ride, hoping to recapture the carefree optimism of two weeks before, and somewhere between Max's Deli and the airport I had the bright idea to start with the books in storage. My thinking was that if they were in boxes already, I probably wouldn't miss them much. Well, in less than an hour I went through all six boxes, but found only two books I was willing to discard - a pamphlet on organic composting toilets (don't ask, I don't know), and a ridiculous self - help manual called "Assertiveness for Managers" (meekness was not a problem for any of the managers I've worked for). There were about 370 books in these boxes, so I had achieved about a 0.5% discard rate. It was obvious that there was room for improvement. I then came up with some rules to help me, some of which I present here in the hope that they will help others who find themselves in the same difficult situation.
First, I tackled the problem of groups of books by specific authors. I had over twenty books by or about some of the ones I liked best, many of which I knew could be discarded - but which ones? Multiple copies of the same title were the first to go, though it was a battle deciding which one to keep. I usually settled on the one I had read first, especially if it brought back any good memories. I find some books are like songs that way - - I re - read them and they transport me back in time to when they were completely new, and everything about my life was different. It's a weird deja - vu sort of feeling, and I wasted a lot of time flipping open books at random hoping for a hit of it.
Next I wondered, should I keep the biographies? Only if I had actually read them, I jokingly decided - and was surprised when this eliminated them all. I guess I don't like biographies as much as I thought. That massacre successfully accomplished, I moved confidently on to the sticky issue of what to do about books that I don't like, even if they are by authors that I do - like Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees. I decided that in most cases having an author's full oeuvre was more important than my opinion about an individual book - but despite this I couldn't keep Across the River, it was so awful it was embarrassing. One thing about these rules: you have to allow for exceptions.
Having discarded about fifty books by specific authors, I moved on to dealing with groups of books about specific topics, or within specific genres. We all have our particular interests and obsessions, and our book collections are often where they are most clearly reflected. For example, one look at my shelves and you will quickly learn that I'm into spy literature, first - person Holocaust and W.W.I survival accounts, hard boiled detective stories, 70's thrillers like Jaws and Day of the Jackal, and novels about naval warfare in Nelson's day. And despite all that, I'm actually still a reasonably happy and peaceful person!
Once I get interested in something, I naturally start to see books about it everywhere I look. I've also found that I am not be able to help buying these books; in fact, they almost seem to collect themselves, flying off the racks and attaching themselves to my sleeves like velcro. In this way, topic - based collections can grow very fast, and they're also very difficult to cull, because each book becomes part of a larger whole. The only answer is to grit your teeth and get rid of entire groups of related books, those based on interests you no longer have. For example, I had built up a collection of twenty or thirty books about UFOs, some from the 1960's, and none of which I've read or even looked at since my early 20's. They're all gone now. I like to think they were abducted by aliens.
Next came textbooks. It should have been easy to get rid of these; after all, why keep a textbook from a class that you've completed? Most normal people sell them when the term finishes. Well, I'm the same person who still had my class notes from first year Chinese, kept on the off chance that there could still be a pop quiz at any time. Even now, over thirteen years later, I have occasional high - school exam day nightmares (you know, the ones where you discover you can't leave because you're not wearing any pants). But beyond this, I rationalized keeping the textbooks on the grounds that they are some of the most compact and accessible repositories of knowledge on specific subjects that there are, and that I had only kept those on topics of real personal interest, like astronomy, psychology, or history. In the end I knew they would have to go - and they did, along with my Chinese, Calculus, and Oceanography notes. They filled an entire green garbage bag. My garbageman is now well on his way to completing a general Arts degree.
Although they are similar to textbooks, anthologies were much harder for me to get rid of. I think the main reason is that reading an anthology from high school or early university brings me back to a time when I was reading many great authors for the first time. One of the best examples is my beat - up old grade eleven Story and Structure anthology (born in 1966, same as me), which first blew my mind on stories by Hemingway ("A Clean, Well - Lighted Place") and Joyce ("Araby"). And as a bonus, after each story there are eight or ten thought - provoking "Questions For Further Study," such as the following rather intimidating one following Graham Greene's "The Destructors":
7. On the surface this is a story of action, suspense, and adventure. At a deeper level it is about delinquency, war, and human nature. Sum up what the story says about human nature in general.
If I were in charge of these things I would pass a law that all novels would have to have questions like this at the end. Especially ones by Margaret Atwood. Anyway, after much thought, I kept only those anthologies that brought back that great "first time" feeling, and got rid of the rest at a garage sale. The people who bought them said they needed big books with lots of pages to start fires at their cottage.
By this time I had arrived at the huge pile of books which I had always meant to read, which others had said I should read, and which I felt obliged for many, many reasons to read - but which I just could not read. These books had completely defeated me, leaving me feeling stupid, tired, and embarrassed just to see them. The pile included anything by William Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, and Walt Whitman, as well as Finnegan's Wake, Tristam Shandy, The Brothers Karamazov, and a number of other "classics" too embarrassing (and incriminating, given my English degree) to relate here. I had always kept them around in the hope that someday I would mature sufficiently to like them, or at least be able to finish them. But that time has never come, and I'm almost 31. I terminated over a hundred of these books with extreme prejudice, and it felt great.
There were other books in my collection which I knew were useless, but which were so quirky, rare, or together formed such perfect or strange configurations, that I just couldn't get rid of them. For example, I have slim, same - sized copies of the constitutions of the U.S. and of the Communist Party of Russia, which I pervertedly like to keep side by side in a kind of bibliographic "détente." I have a full - color program Prince Charles and Diana's wedding in 1982 which I am sure is worth lots of money to someone, though I don't have any idea who. And I also have a strange book called "Your Prostate" which was published by self - taught "medical expert" John Tobe (also author of Milk: Friend or Fiend?) in 1967. It lays the blame for prostate cancer directly on ornery wives who won't provide their husbands with sexual intercourse "whenever he desires it or whenever the mood is upon him." For some reason this is always a huge hit at parties (which you must admit is rare for a book).
Finally, there were my kid's books, to which I am addicted more than any other category. I find that there is something additionally psychedelic about books which I first experienced before I could even read - every page is at the same time strange and familiar, and brings back at taste of the weird voyeuristic thrill that books gave me as a kid (and sometimes still do). And, since the traumatic incident in 1985 where my well - meaning mother gave away most of my original kid's books to charity, I have dedicated myself to rebuilding the collection, which included The Five Chinese Brothers, Katy the Snowplow, Curious George Gets A Job, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and many others. Every time I go to a bookstore I find another one, and every time I buy a book as a present for a child, I buy two copies - one for me, one for them.
There were of course many more decisions to be made than there is room to describe here, such as: Are atlases from 1965 still useful? Should coffee table books be kept on the coffee table? What do you do with books lent to you by friends who you never see any more? But thanks to strict application of my growing set of rules I was able to meet my targets, and sold, threw out, or gave away almost 500 books. It took a long time, though - I only finished the whole ordeal with days left before the move. Then made the mistake of keeping all the books I meant to discard in open boxes, in plain sight. This led to casual browsing while passing by on the way to and from work, and therefore to many books being reconsidered and put back onto the "keep" pile. I eventually had to get my roommate to return all the fugitives to their boxes, tape them up, and accompany me to the used bookstore, where I agreed to an insultingly low price and left as quickly as I could. It felt like I was leaving a beloved pet at the vet's to be put down. I just hope they didn't feel any pain.
So now I have far fewer books on my shelves, but I have to admit that it's less troubling that I thought it might be. There have been two or three occasions where I've had to race down to the storage locker and rummage through the boxes to find the book I was looking for, but this doesn't cause me any hardship. In fact, it's kind of fun - sort of like going down to the wine cellar for a special vintage. The only problem is that once I'm down there I start going through every box, and it may be two or three hours before I reappear. I have to remember not to do that just before dinner. Only once have I realized that the book I was looking for (Psychosomatic Disorders Explained) was one of the casualties of the move. I was upset for a few minutes, but then realized that the problem was probably all in my head, and fully recovered my composure within pages of starting Tintin In Tibet.
I'll conclude with the three things I've learned from this experience. First, even if you don't think you can throw out a single book, you probably can, as long as you set yourself some rules. It also helps to go for lots of long bike rides. Second, I've learned how revealing a book collection really is. My collection and I quite literally grew up together, and in many ways it is the face of my thoughts, reflecting my deepest interests and obsessions far more clearly than the one I look at in the mirror. This is why I no longer let anyone into the study. Third, I've figured out that it isn't the dog - eared, yellowing Penguin paperback that I bought ten years ago for a buck that means anything to me; it's the combination of the book, the words themselves, and of who I was when I first read it that make up the "real" book. The Penguin is just what you keep on the shelf to remember the "real" book by. So by all means throw out all the books you've never read - chances are you never will. But don't throw out that Penguin.

Wes Robertson enjoys the company of penguins.


Flipper

Presented by Alex Mackenzie

The following story is a collaboration between myself and the fair editor of this invisible mag written some years back. Both of us were just beginning to delve into the area of listservs and e-mail, and like so many others who have come since, we immediately sought out the most subversive materials we could get our hands on. One list, called "deviants", consisted of a group of people who claimed to be - you guessed it - deviant. They would exchange tales of a generically taboo nature, constantly trying to one-up each other with the atrocities they had either experienced or heard tell of. 

Well, to put it simply, these people were the furthest thing from deviants, and resembled more of a deviant fan club, living out their fantasies to strangers at the other end of the pipeline. 

Quickly growing bored with their uninspired contributions, we decided to put our heads together and come up with a "true" story that incorporated as many areas of unacceptable behaviour as we could muster, written to sound "real" as opposed to "well written", and hoping that some people would actually buy it (responses we received to the piece are included). To be honest, I have re-read it so many times now that the whole thing sounds a tad silly, yet it has nonetheless grown into a sick classic of some kind. 

We refer to it simply as "the flipper story". Enjoy and/or be sickened....
The Flipper Story
I have a very personal story that I have never told anyone until now, mostly because my family would kill me (literally) if they knew. Or at least my brother would. He's a fucking psycho and I hate him. Anyway, my mother was one of those unlucky ones doctors gave that fuckin' thalidomide shit to when she was pregnant with my baby sister. She came out with one flipper arm and legs that didn't work. As she grew up we discovered that she couldn't speak and that she had hearing problems.

I was only nine at the time and it was my sister's third birthday. Mom had left her alone for the first time with me while she was out getting a birthday cake. So my sister starts crying and I go into her bedroom to check on her. I immediately get a big whiff of shit that really stirs me up. I always liked to be there when mom was changing her - that smell was so rich. So I didn't mind changing her diaper. The shit was smeared right up her ass and down the backs of her useless legs. I grabbed a kleenex and started to wipe her down. But instead of cleaning the shit off her, I started to rub it all over her. Up the small of her back and over her shoulder, onto her tiny little flipper arm. She just looked at me and gurgled. I think she liked it. My dick was rock hard and my little balls were swelling as I started to rub my asshole and run my other hand up and down my sister's shit coated flipper. I immediately jerked around and sat down hard on it. I felt a sharp pain like a punch against my asshole so I pulled away and jumped back on again, this time her arm went right into me. At first it hurt, but then as the pain dulled, it started to feel good. I rocked gently, I rocked up and down gently as her flipper went deeper and deeper up my ass. I grabbed my dick and came immediately (my first time!). My sister was starting to cry again and I could hear my mother's car pulling up in the driveway. I quickly grabbed a handiwipe and cleaned the shit off her as best I could and pulled up my pants.

My sister is now in her late teens, and still cannot speak. None of the family ever found out, and hopefully never will. My sister still wears diapers, but I never get the chance to change her anymore.

THE RESPONSES FROM THE LIST:
- This is above and beyond the most deviant piece I've read from this dull group. Any more?

- Some stories are better left untold......and I think this is one of them. I hope to hell this is a figment of your productive imagination, if its not and is a true story you should be on the deviants board of directors. Thanx for sharing it though, I for one enjoyed reading it, and to get a reply from me is really doing something as I am a thalidomide victim, and it takes forever to type with these horrible unwieldy flippers. I've worn all my front teeth down by typing with a stick in my mouth, so its flippers or nothing.

- Whoa! I saw your deviance contribution...very inspired.

- Hopefully, she never will, you twisted motherfucker.


UNRELATED ADDENDUM:
THEY CALL HER FLIPPER: A fully-clothed woman pulled from the ocean three miles off the Florida coast has been detained for psychological evaluation. "She said she couldn't live on land anymore and had adapted to living in the water," a Coast Guard spokesman said. "She didn't want to come in." The woman, who refused to give her name, said she was in the middle of "transitioning" to life in the sea and had "just come up to get some air" when a boater spotted her treading water and called for help. The woman said she'd been in the water for three days, and survived by eating seaweed. (UPI)

The authors of the flipper story feel nothing but sympathy for those with drug-induced birth defects who have undergone the indignity of coprophiliac incest.



Why I'm Better Than Robots

By Adrian Mack

For at least one day of every week I trawl the city for uninvited glimpses of nipples and panties. On these days, I calmly inform my roommates that I'm going to the office and though they know I'm unemployed they never question this since they are well aware of the portent contained in those words. Occassionally, I'll take one of them with me and they will wonder at the sleazy allure of the netherworld that I've uncovered. We'll go to the City Centre Mall on Cambie Street with its nexus of open staircases, escalators and glass balustrades that was designed, I'm convinced, in a somnambulent fit of sex magick in the middle of the night. This is where the bad girls of St. Patrick's Catholic School come to unwittingly reveal themselves and where I am constantly forced to wonder what, why, how the Vatican contrived to affront common sense on such a magnificent scale.
"Brother Franciscus we must squash lust in the classroom - it's a most urgent problem."
"I think I have the answer! I've come up with a couple of designs - here's a short A-line skirt in plaid with optional pleats. This white knee-sock will complete the effect and provided that nobody bends over or uses an escalator then the temptations of youth will once and for all be sublimated into healthy activities such as mixed softball tournaments, swim meets and picnicking. The Lord is bountiful."
The Lord's bounty is contained in a hem fluttering to disclose a plump, pantied ass circumscribed by the space between me and it and the split-second window of opportunity it requires to see. And on that note, my timing in these matters is, after years of this atrocious behaviour, sublime. Of course, I'm bound to loiter in one spot for an awfully long time calculating all of my possibilities but once time, space, motion, chance and the economy converge to launch some poodled-up Legal Secretary in a mini onto the Sky Train platform at Main and Terminal then I will be there to zoom in with a speed and accuracy that one thousand years of Artificial Intelligence Research and the infinite resources of the American Military could not match. I may be a reprobate but I'm still more skilled than a Robot - who wouldn't be allowed to peer up someone's skirt anyway, I reckon, if Isaac Asimov's Three Android Directives are to be believed. RoboCop could do it but he's half-human and therefore locked in a perpetual struggle between his program and his nature which means that while he's taking out the New Detroit Criminal Element in accordance with an unyielding strategy of moral logic, he's also thinking about naked women. (Actually, he's thinking about his wife but this is a whitewash - a sentimental conceit designed to extract a dramatic coup-de-grace from his terrible situation. No, if RoboCop is anything like me then he's really thinking about knickers and breasts. Thousands and thousands of them.)
This brings me to the simple axiom that explains my behaviour: Men seek liberation. They can't have it so they construct secret lives. These secret lives are committed either in shame or, as in my case, a kind of Romantic Agony. And if this is the case, the agonized romantic is compelled to couch his obsession in a poetic idiom which begins with the use of the word "obsession" in place of the word "deviance". He then harvests it for all manner of cod artistic mutations which invariably leads to an overweening interest in French cultural icons who seem to lend taste and style to such driven amoralism.
If Serge Gainsbourg can sing about screwing his fourteen-year-old daughter, he thinks, then I can stare at someone's pudendum through a pair of binoculars - especially if I write an article about it, afterwards.
I was staring at someone's pudendum through a pair of binoculars one beautiful day, from my apartment in the West End. I bought the binoculars because I'd discovered a woman across the courtyard who was given to episodes of dining-room nudity. I eventually came to know her schedule so well that our lives became a frantic symmetric that continued for three months before climaxing with a hair-raising event that still, after all this time, beggars my imagination. Placing one foot on her sofa and the other on the floor, she humped the back of her couch for a full thirty minutes until her leg scissored off the floor, chopping at the air while her back arched and a galvanic orgasm forced from her an Ian Gillan-sized yowl fit only for the ears of the damned. Twenty-five feet away, tottering on one leg myself and with a taste in my mouth that all successful urban voyeurs will recognize as aluminum sherbert, my erection had quivered itself to an explosive conclusion. A hands-free, binocular crafty-wank, as a matter of fact. My first one.
She moved out a few days later. Distraught, I turned to the Hotel across the road where Persian Royalty, a woman with a neck brace and some hairdressers on a junket kept me entertained in a similar, if less spectacular, fashion.
Riding the bus home one day, I was diverted by the sight of a Chinese schoolgirl with one foot casually resting on the seat in front. This provided me with a rare glimpse of anterior St. Patrick's rarebit - adolescent trim barely concealed by a fine patina of white silk - but I was not consoled. My sense of devotion had been lost and would only be revived by something Promethean, like an actual physical encounter with the Couch Humper whose absence had cast a pall over everything. Something Promethean.
Given the extent to which this tale has already tested credulity, let me run down the events of the subsequent year:
The Couch Humper moved into my building. Through a circuitous series of events we eventually became friends. I resolved to make her fall in love with me, in a cheeky nod to the conventions of Film Noir. She did. Then she moved to Victoria and, with sweet irony, gave me her couch.
Another year passed and I told her the entire story, which delighted her. She's now married to an American Billionaire and her name, if you fiddle with it, is a variation on Candy Ass.
The moral here, or amoral if you like, is that the universe does have a certain order after all. God's fingerprints cover everything if you have the forensic aptitude and courage to find them. I got to meet my Arch Pervert, providing me with the notion that I am an extraordinarily lucky man and, more importantly, that I can do whatever the hell I like with impunity and grace. And so I will brook no argument to anything I've revealed here.
Incidentally, despite plenty of opportunity, we didn't fuck. That would have been tasteless.

Adrian Mack likes the taste of aluminum sherbert



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