Take me down, Take me down.
Oh won’t you please take me
home.
The silence in the whorehouse makes itself present again and so I quietly sing aloud. I mimic Axl Rose’s scratch that is repeating in my head, a mental hiccup from earlier when we had entered dark European bars in search of girls who would not understand that we are unimpressive. I was with Tyler, whose tall, thin mom had paid for this trip, and Ben whose tiny tanned Mom thinks that he is in New Jersey visiting his father. Now with 193 days before the millennium, it is only Ben smoking cigarettes with me in the small bar while Tyler is in the back being entertained. Or entertaining. I am still a little stoned and I wonder if the computers will crash when December commences, and if the world will end before I get the chance to go bald and hold a baby daughter in my arms and feel a universe away from where I am sitting this morning on a stained red velvet couch in a whorehouse in Prague.
I am trying to think of things other than Tyler and his girlfriend Kelly, who I had loved and who had let me dance with my hands on her ass in my first year of high school. A third of the dozen unchosen prostitutes that sit at the small bar to our left are mocking us. It is a lopsided staring contest where they try to make us laugh at their flirtatious gyrations while we project witty machismo and stay detached. Playing my role is coming at a greater cost as the red numbers on the “Budweiser Countdown to the Millennium” display flutter backwards. It is June 17, 1999. It’s been 20 minutes since I suggested a stop into the brothel that looked like a strip club, 15 minutes since Tyler walked down the hall to wherever it is that you have the sex you paid for, and 10 minutes since one of the hookers grabbed my crotch and made a joke about my dick size. I think about my dick size, and about the butterfly affect that Ben had explained to me in one of his fits of untapped intellectual passion. I wonder what sort of terrible ramifications this joke will have when I am 25, whether this slight ripple will turn me into a coke-snorting stock trader referring to my crotch as a “rod,” and giving my coworkers hi-fives after fucking the newest intern in the broom closet. I watch the fat hooker chew her nails on a barstool and hate Tyler for making me sit here.
For 15 minutes, Ben and I have avoided the issue at hand like slasher flick victims. All frantic efforts at evasion that make us trip over ourselves. I think about when Ben told me about Tyler and Kelly, how Tyler had fucked her in his SUV after their first date. The waiting room’s quiet becomes stifling and so I do my best Ivan Drago in the direction of the fat girl and I tell her that I must break her. There are scattered chuckles among the bored women and I am pleased with my talent for pop-culture reference. I am pleased because I like when other people laugh at my jokes and especially the ones that they don’t get. I think about when my parents laughed at an inside joke between me and Tyler concerning a slang word for condoms and I miss my parents. The tall, redheaded hooker in black laughs longer than she should and I suspect that she has seen Rocky IV many times, and that she thinks Drago and I are hilarious manifestations of simple-minded America. She is laughing at me and I wonder how many of these women would have done more with the circumstances into which I was born. I look in the mirror behind the bar and know that they would not be sitting in a whorehouse and that the redheaded one with the sharp eyes would have graduated from Harvard by now and been one of those over achievers that make me embarrassed to exist.
Ben doesn’t smile at my reference to Rocky and asks if I think that the women are really Russian. We’ve already covered the origin of their accents and I know that he’s circling back, recycling like I do when I talk to a strange girl for the first time. It is the inability to make your bullshit seamless and he’s better at it with girls. I am better at it right now and I hate him for both.
I decide to join the people of Anheuser-Busch in counting down to the end of the world that my Aunt is sure will arrive in … 193 days, 20 hours, 39 minutes and 46 seconds, 45 seconds, 44 seconds … I don’t believe that the world is going to end but I can’t imagine Thanksgiving dinner if it doesn’t. I cannot imagine how her ten-year-old son will look at her when they come out of the powdered-milk-stuffed bomb shelter to find football on TV and drunken neighbors asleep on their lawn. I watch the red numbers unwind and remember my childhood fantasies about the tragic and heroic ways that I would die. How I had wanted to die in a boxing match like Apollo Creed, and fall to the ground in slow motion while my friend roared a drawn out “NOOOOO!” and a Whitesnake power ballad played in the background. I remember the bully who had stalked me in fifth grade and how I had imagined him killing me, and the parade that they would throw for me in the streets at which all the pretty girls I had ever loved would cry. Ben cracks his knuckles and I know that there will be no mourners if the world ends. That even if I die heroically after being chased by shadowcast horseman through the center of our town, that everyone will be too involved in their own apocalyptic demises to mourn for me. As I listen to Ben break the silence I know that my Aunt is praying for my soul in Pennsylvania.
“We could never do this, I don’t think, what he is doing” is how Ben puts it and my eyes begin to move quickly and scream in my skull. I have not anticipated this because this is what happens when I can’t put something important to words.
“It’s just weird that’s all. That he’d do this,” is how I sum it up and for a moment things are fine and I think that I’ve said something that is vague enough to be true. I am reasoning that it is clear why we’ve abstained. That I have a much younger sister, and Ben a pretty mother who he loves, and who Tyler and me joke that we would like to love. Ben and I have respect for ourselves and so we clearly would never, and Tyler shouldn’t be. Especially to Kelly, who had been my horizon and who had let me touch her ass while I danced with her in front of everyone in the green Christmas gymnasium. She kept me awake that night and Tyler should know better than this.
This, I think glancing at Ben whose face is red. He cracks his knuckles.
This thing that frat-boys do and say “whatever happens in Prague stays in Prague” and high-five each other. This anecdote that we will laugh at during Tyler’s bachelor party and chalk up to being kids and fun. I think about a National Geographic special I had seen about prostitution in the animal kingdom and how Jesus had run with hookers in his day and then I think about Kelly again and when I loved her freshman year and the way she had looked and the way she had made me look and I feel ashamed of Tyler. I feel ashamed that he is my friend and that he will be my friend for years because we fit together in groups and because we both like the Karate Kid trilogy. I think of the kids I had met at camp in Kentucky. The ones who had tried to save my soul and who I hated for it and who would shake their heads and say a prayer if they saw me here, getting teased by hookers. I imagine myself calling Tyler when we are both 43 and trying to save him from eternal damnation because I will tell him, Jesus ran with them but he never paid them. And then I think that maybe it will be Tyler saving my soul. (valium) How Tyler will come and tell me stories about his successful marriage to Kelly, and his moment of clarity that dawned while he was having sex with the pretty Spanish hooker in Prague while out in the whorehouse waiting room a fat hooker transformed my life’s trajectory.
Ben stops cracking his knuckles like he is about to speak again and so I make a funny face at the tall, redheaded hooker in the black dress who is no longer interested enough to giggle and whisper to her friend. She is tracing and untracing a triangular scar on the side of her neck below her ear. She lost a great deal of flesh due to something thin and sharp and I imagine the mean pimp who cut her. I imagine that she had tried to withhold money from him in order to start a boutique with her sister, and that he had found out about her plan and sliced her with a 12-inch bowie knife, the kind that Rambo carries around. She is old and I feel good that I am not in a room with her, and that I am withholding my support for this violent industry where women get stabbed for something as small as saving money. I think of the redheaded girl in America who had been the first to let me touch her chest, and her strip club-owning father, and the fact that she had received breast implants for her 16th birthday. I wonder why she let me touch her chest and the scar on the red headed hooker’s neck makes me shiver.
There is a sound again, a businessman from somewhere in Asia talking at the bar to our left. He is a small businessman and he is confident in his gestures. He has been drinking with the same woman all night, a tall blonde who is not wearing a shirt while he is swallowing his morality. I look at the Asian businessman and think that maybe he’s not from Asia. That maybe he’s Asian American, and maybe he’ll be my boss in five years and I’ll have to laugh with him about the time we crossed paths in a whorehouse in Prague, and then I’ll pretend like I partook in the business of whorehouses five years before so that he’ll think I’m on board. Maybe after work one Friday he’ll take me on a late night trip to Vegas and expect me to get a hooker with him and I’ll pay for one and then sit in the back room and talk to her like Richard Gere talked to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and I’ll hate myself for being like Richard Gere. I compulsively equate myself with movie characters. On my first day of kindergarten I imagined I was a young Rocky Balboa and today with 193 days remaining until the end of the world I am Richard Gere.
I hear the businessman speak and he’s not Asian American. He probably won’t be my boss because they have lots of businessmen in those countries and I never want to go to Asia anyways. I light a cigarette for closure. I’ve been trying to start smoking for the past couple of weeks. I’ve decided that it makes me look like Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan has meaning to me. I think about “Fourth Time Around” and how it made me swell when I danced with Kelly at the freshman dance. I think about how I danced with both hands on the ass of the only girl that I’ve ever loved because it was what couples did and I am wincing and I am swelling again. I look at the small breasts of the tall redheaded hooker in the black and I think about Kelly and Tyler and how she wouldn’t break up with him if he told her that he slept with a hooker. How she’d still love him if he said “I slept with a hooker because you were not physically present when we were in Prague and you’re not as good at fucking me as hookers are anyways.” I think about the college basketball game with Ben and my Dad, when Ben had whispered that he had almost forgotten to tell me that Tyler fucked Kelly in his SUV, and how it had knocked the wind out of me and made the basketball game look like a dance choreographed by a blind man, and how my father had called the game a cluster fuck and it had made me hurt worse. I’ve been finishing my cigarettes quicker lately and the filter is burning my lips before I even think about how I look.
“Are you alright?” I was wiping my eyes and Ben noticed. His face is no longer red. He is looking at me the way that he looked at me when he told me that Tyler fucked Kelly, when he knew something was wrong and didn’t want to know it and …
“Yeah, fine, are you?” I’m bad at poker and he’s laughing at me a little. He’s not acknowledging that there is something wrong with what is happening here. That the redheaded hooker had not been cut for trying to save just a few dollars for her sister. I try to think if I had said no to getting a hooker first, too quickly, if maybe he had wanted to rent one too and instead he had to baby-sit me, whose dick the fat hooker had summed up with a limp pinky finger. I think that he and Tyler will talk about this and call me a queer and not keep in touch with me and laugh at my e-mails and not tell me about Tyler’s bachelor party and good because fuck them because he is acting like he doesn’t know that these things come back for you and that in 193 days and 20 hours and 19 minutes and, and 23 seconds we are all going to pay for our sins, and that all the wicked men who had fucked hookers will …
“Yeah, fine, I thought you were crying.” He quietly looks away and I realize that we will never speak about this whorehouse again.
