Cas was right. It's a disease. She was right to cut the ties, when she found me in the garden shed with sweet Susan the baby sitter, in flagrante. I offer no excuse.
It doesn't feel like a disease, though, when I'm in the throes, my senses drenched in the seashore scent of my latest conquest. It feels like I'm on the edge of a revelation, like this is the fuck I've been seeking all my life, the one that will make everything clear, new, beautiful and real. When I burrow into that mysterious place between her thighs, I'm not just looking for pleasure. I'm seeking some kind of truth, or at least that's how it seems, like this is the time that I'll break through that barrier. I catch tantalizing glimpses of brilliance, just out of reach, shining like the grail in some celibate knight's vision. That's me, on a quest for the ultimate knowledge. Except of course, I'm not celibate.
When the papers came from her lawyer, my transgressions sucked dry by legal language ("extramarital liaisons"), my kids stolen by some judge's whim, I took off. My business -- electronics OEM -- can always provide an excuse for a trip to Asia. My meetings in Bangkok consumed a day and a half. Since then I've been here in this sleazy coastal resort town two hours from the capital.
I've done it all, in the past two weeks, tried everything. The lithe Thai beauties who twine like snakes around the poles, in all the bars and clubs along the walking street. The buxom, pushy Russian girls, with their milky complexions and succulent nipples, ripe to the point of bursting, eager to empty both my cock and my wallet. The lady boys, as slender and graceful as their sisters, even more feminine, in fact, the prick erupting from their hairless, perfumed loins as much a shock to them as to me. I've sampled the exotica on sale here, the dwarfs and the cripples, the grossly obese young woman who nearly smothered me in her lush, unutterably soft flesh. I've been whipped and returned the favor. So far I've managed to resist the fifteen year old boys, but just last night a youth of terrifying beauty who claimed to be nineteen drained me in the men's room of one of the go go places. An acrid mixture of urine and camphor stung my nostrils as I pumped my come into his agile mouth. And in that transcendent instant, as always, I felt myself on the verge of understanding.
I'm taking a break from throbbing music and naked skin of the indoor clubs. I perch on a bar stool at the edge of the pavement, watching the parade of tourists and touts ambling by.
I'm tired. The twins I fucked earlier, in a red-lit, window-less room above one of the bars, drained me with their convincing enthusiasm for my body. Nee and Nu were indistinguishable, two toffee-skinned tarts who claimed to be eighteen but might have been anywhere from fourteen to thirty. One sat on my face, the other on my cock. Nee (or was it Nu?) made short work of my hard-on; I exploded into the condom with just a few minutes of massage by her muscular pussy. Nu, though (or maybe Nee?), humored me, letting me lick her bare twat and breathe her low-tide scent for as long as I wanted -- until I hardened again, earning laughter and admiration from my two playmates.
Sitting here, I can smell the exposed mud flats beyond the row of rickety buildings that shields the walking street from the sea. Fifty years ago, I've heard, this was a quiet fishing village. The men harvested the bounty of the gulf. Their wives raised children, prayed to the Buddha, left flowers and rice for the older gods. Then came the soldiers, with their insatiable hunger for flesh, looking for that brief instant of communion to erase their pain -- the little death that helped them forget the constant threat of annihilation. Bars and brothels mushroomed, appearing like magic. The Thais are an accommodating people.
The soldiers are gone now, but the hunger remains. Men from a dozen countries stroll along the pavement like sunburned, hairy ghosts. And I've become one of them.