Chapter 18 – My Tenure as a Punter
Following wild alcoholic nights where I end up in questionable situations, I often make false promises to myself that I’m gonna quit drinking, change my life, take all the money I would spend on drinking and use it to take homeless guys out to dinner as well as a bunch of other sweet little lies that have never and probably will never materialize. The shitfaced day following the shitfaced night on the town at Sanlitun in Beijing where the Liberian drug dealer had offered me free sex with his prostitute sister because he “trusted me” had been no exception.
Shaking, sweating and throwing up when I was finally able to roll out of my dorm room bed sometime in the early evening, I suddenly felt like I was back in college going through my weekly Sunday booze withdrawals. After rinsing off in the shower and brushing my teeth, I wandered downstairs and looked around the main room of the hostel. There’d been a decent amount of people partying and having a good time but I didn’t much feel like talking to anyone. So, I decided to go for a walk towards an area called Qianmen.
While lurching along Qianmen Walking Street in a zombie-like fashion, I found myself feeling quite distant from my surroundings. I remember a few of my thoughts during this time being quite misanthropic as well – particularly when, upon seeing a blind man feeling his way down the street, wishing I’d had a sack of marbles to dump in front of him so I could watch him slip on his ass and bust his head open.
Despite these malevolent feelings, I was appreciative of my fellow yellow men for keeping up the trend of wearing t-shirts with vulgar things written on them. My notes indicate that I’d encountered non-English speakers wearing ones saying “Happy Fucking New Year,” “I Am Great In Bed” and “Fuck School” on that particular day.
Aside from the glint of joy brought to me by those anti-social T’s, I remember what I’d been feeling that evening as one of the darkest, anxiety-ridden hangovers I’d ever had. I didn’t feel like doing anything – didn’t feel like sleeping, didn’t feel like being awake, didn’t feel like being around other people, didn’t feel like being alone, didn’t wanna eat, didn’t wanna drink. I craved nothingness. I craved oblivion. I didn’t wanna think or feel anything. And as far as I know, that level of serenity can only be achieved by taking the big sleep. And deep down I didn’t really want that either. So, to cope with this unnerving sensation that’d overcome me, once I’d passed my original destination of Qianmen, in no direction in particular, I just kept walking and walking and walking.
Beijing and other northern Chinese cities are famous for their “hutongs.” A hutong is narrow street or alleyway that’s flanked on each side by traditional courtyard residences called “siheyuan.” Oftentimes, one hutong is connected to another which is connected to another and entire neighborhoods are made up of these skinny winding alleyways. To an outsider who is not familiar with a hutong, entering one can feel like being dropped in the middle of a maze where almost nothing’s in English and every building looks the exact same. You might not find your way out for hours.
On the evening of my despair, since I’d been feeling so shitty and could do nothing but keep walking, I decided to wander into some random, dimly lit hutong somewhere within a couple miles of Qianmen walking street. After about fifteen minutes, judging by the looks I’d be getting from people I’d encountered in passing, nary a white boy had e’re been seen stumbling ‘round them there hutongs. Nevertheless, I kept on keepin’ on.
Up ahead in the distance, cutting through the darkness, I saw a shimmering light. It was pink and neon and formed in the shape of the word “MASSAGE.” It flickered like a bug zapper, emanating sleaze with each glaring twitch as I was irresistibly drawn to it like an insect in the night. During my initial approach, the storefront had been on my left. Never breaking my stride, I glanced in the window and saw a pair of sluttily dressed young sluts and an old lady sitting in front of a television on a couch affirming my inkling that the place was no ordinary massage joint but instead a good place to get my joint massaged.
I walked past and pretended I wasn’t interested. After a couple more minutes of pacing along, the self-deception became less and less credulous with each step I took. Eventually I stopped lying to myself, turned around and approached it from the other way. But again, I couldn’t work up the balls to go in and ended up sketchily walking past for the second time. The taboo of my desire proved to be too much for me to come to terms with. Even though I’d banged a hooker for free the night before, I’d still never paid for sex and was quite skeptical and afraid to assume all the stereotypes and stigmatism that come with doing so.
Following another minute of ignoring my master’s call, I froze amid my cowardly gait and started jumping up and down in frustration the way Cameron Fry had in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when contemplating whether or not he should stay at home by himself being miserable all day or join his hooky-playing buddy for an afternoon of shenanigans. Once those few vacillatory moments had come to pass, let’s just say that I ended up deciding to go meet Ferris.
Upon my opening the door to the place, they seemed quite surprised to see a white guy but had no doubt whatsoever about why I’d been there.
“Nihao,” I shakily greeted. “Massage?”
“Massage?” the middle-aged mamasan lifted one hand and formed a circle using her thumb and index finger before repeatedly penetrating it with the index finger of her other hand. “Yes? Massage?”
“Yeah,” I said while nodding.
“Three-hundred.”
“Three-hundred renminbi? No way.”
That’s the equivalent of fifty bucks. My high school buddy Richard who’d been living out there said I shouldn’t pay more than a hundred-and-fifty.
“You foreigner,” she searched for the words while pointing at my crotch, “you too big for Chinese girl. Ouch! Hurt! Too big. You.”
I laughed at the patronization, bent down, put my elbow against my dick, leaned back and made a loud elephant sound alluding that my dick was as big as a trunk.
“Yes,” she reiterated, “you very big. Too big for Chinese girl. Three-hundred yuan.”
“C’mon. Don’t do me like that. One-hundred-fifty.”
She scoffed at the insult. Turns out I couldn’t get her to go any lower than two-fifty. Then again, I didn’t try very hard. She could probably sense how despondent I was and knew I wouldn’t put up a fight. This is also probably why she thought she could get away with assigning the uglier of the two chicks to take care of me so she could keep the better-looking one visible to potential customers who’d been passing by. That, however, I wasn’t having any of.
“No, no, no, no. Not her.” I told the frail butt-face with the bowl-cut who resembled Moe from The Three Stooges to sit her bony ass back on the couch. “I want her,” I pointed to the other chick who was a bit chunky and had bangs rivaling those of a paste-eating kindergarten student but a redeeming set of massive T’s I felt would be fun to slap around and watch jiggle. “Yeah, I want you.”
The mamasan adhered to my request and the sweet painted lady of my choosing led me over to some tiny closet of a room where there’d been just enough floor space to open the door next to what appeared to be a hospital bed with dingy, stained and torn sheets set atop it. After we’d crammed in just enough for this China doll to get the door closed, she turned to me, put her hands on the sides of my head and pulled me in for a kiss which really wasn’t what I’d been in the market for. Her mouth tasted bad and it was pretty disturbing for me knowing the source of the foulness. It made me feel like I’d just blown about ten Chinese guys by proxy.
After a minute or two, she started talking at me in her language, put her hand on my chest and gently pushed me toward the bed. Before I could sit down on it she started undoing my belt and proceeded to pull my pants down. When the elastic of my boxer shorts was pulled past the tip of my erect dong, as if it were spring loaded, my meat flopped back up and slapped off my stomach. My hired date put her hand over her mouth and giggled before saying the only English phrase she knew.
“Oh my god – so big!”
She’d been wearing some sort of tube top that had a skirt extension at the bottom. As we stood face to face, she rolled up the skirt revealing black tights with nothing underneath. She grabbed my hand and put it on her pussy which I began to rub as she started jerking me off. A minute or two later, she laid me on the bed, rolled down her top, pulled out her tits, strapped a condom on me – using her hands and not her mouth, unfortunately – and then proceeded with the fellatio which tended to be heavy on the scrotum-sucking. It gave me a slight comfort knowing that which I’d been tasting while making out with her had only been the salty, bitter flavor of nutsack and latex and not that of dirty, diseased dickhole.
Following a few minutes of the boring but safe knob-slobbing session, she popped my rod out her gullet and again spoke to me in her native tongue. She could’ve been calling me a brain-dead, limp-dick retard for all I know. I shrugged and she laughed. By virtue of body language, I deduced she’d wanted me to stand up. So, I did and she took my spot on the disgusting bed.
While on her back, she again rolled up her skirt then pulled her tights down to her knees, leaving her legs bound together which she’d kept positioned straight up in the air and again said something I couldn’t understand. Figuring she wanted help removing her tights so she could spread her legs for me, I began to pull them towards her ankles and she slapped my hand away. Once I’d stopped, she talked at me in Chinese while reaching down under her thighs and pointing towards her pussy hole which had been obscured by a stereotypically Asian clump of unkempt pubes, telling me to just stick it in.
After fighting my way through the thick brush, I weaseled my willy in her wazoo’s next-door neighbor. I started off slow and then sped it up. As she squealed, I pounded away for four or five minutes, blew my load and then kept fucking her for another two or three minutes with a jizz-filled condom, doing my best to get my money’s worth. Ultimately, I ceded to the fact that no amount of angry thrusting I could do was gonna make that experience worth the two-hundred-and-fifty renminbi I’d paid for it and reluctantly pulled out the troops.
I then stood up and so did she. She packed her rack back into her tube top, used a couple Kleenex to wipe off her fur-burger, pulled up her tights and rolled her skirt down over it. She then got down on her knees, pulled off the condom and used a wet wipe to clean me up. She then began pinching my wang between her thumb and index finger at the base and working all urethral leftovers up to and out the tip. When she decided she was done, I pulled up my pants and – being the noob that I was – awkwardly gave her a hug to show my appreciation. I could tell she thought it was weirder than hell.
I then stepped back into the main room where the mamasan and the bowl-cut bitch had been sitting in front of the TV. Along with them had been some old Chinese pervert who I’d say had been in his mid-sixties. He stood up and, before the chick I’d just banged even left that miniature cunt-stinking closet, he walked in there and the door shut right behind ‘em. He must’ve been a regular. Perhaps it was his nutsack I’d been tasting on the girl’s tongue.
As soon as I left the place, the existential anxiety I’d been feeling prior to porking returned in full-force. I went off to try and rid myself of the hollowness by filling my body with greasy McDonald’s poison, but it didn’t seem to work. Although I’d gotten some tang and had a full stomach, I went to bed that night completely empty.
As it happens, this costly salami-slipping in Beijing had been a line-crossing event for me. I’d become “one of those guys.” You know – a john, a mark, a trick. A low-life hooker-banging scumbag. And of course, it didn’t end with just that one. My experience with that skankin-ass ho was just the beginning. It was the dawning of an unfortunate epoch in my life, the start of a whole year-and-a-half that I’d spend as a punter.
Certainly, I must clarify that I wasn’t saving up every penny I made in some piggy bank that had the words “TIM’S WHORE-FUCKING FUND” scribbled on the side of it. Nor was I even banging whores that often. Far from it actually – maybe less than ten total during that time period. But just because I didn’t do it a lot doesn’t mean that it didn’t pose a problem for me.
I don’t like seeing prostitutes because the sex is faker than a high-class hooker’s tits. It’s not earned. There’s no “thrill of the chase.” I’d show up at these houses of ill-repute knowing exactly what I’m getting and, without exception, I’d be getting exchanges that are cold and unenjoyable which, time after time, stripped me of what little self-worth and self-confidence I had to begin with. So, essentially, what I’m most mad at here is not that I’d done it once just to have that experience “under my belt” as they say – after all, I love trying new things – but that I kept making the same mistake over and over thinking it would be different, thinking it would give me some sort of fulfillment and relieve me of the anxiety that’d been eating away at me. But it didn’t. If anything, it made me feel much, much worse about myself.
Nearing the end of my tenure as a punter, I was in Thailand and had been reading some pervert’s blog, reviewing all his favorite places to get his jimmy whacked in the greater Bangkok area. Among “blow job bars,” places that specialize in anal and places that require you to bang two chicks simultaneously, for me at the time, the most appealing type of venue he described had been “soapy massage parlors,” particularly one he recommended called Biwa Massage. So, I decided to go check it out.
After taking a train to what I thought had been the nearest stop, I got off and ended up walking for two hours before I reached my destination. I didn’t mind because I’m so vainly insecure that I rationalized the long distance trek would make me look more muscular for the whore I was about to get jiggy with as if she – whoever she was – could’ve given any sort of a fuck about my physical appearance in the slightest.
Completely drenched in sweat from traversing the steamy mid-afternoon Bangkok heat, I could finally see the sign for Biwa Massage peeking its head up along the side of the highway leading to Suvarnabhumi International Airport. The structure that depravity calls home had been quite large. It was about the size of your typical American cineplex. As I approached the looming monstrosity – this testament to Babylon – I remember thinking to myself, “How many hookers can they jam into this behemoth of a building at one time? And of all the hookers they were able to jam in there, how many of them were getting jammed at that very moment?”
After navigating my way through the packed-ass parking lot, I pulled open the door that’d been made of blacked-out glass and was hit with a refreshing burst of air conditioning. To my left had been a restaurant area where a lot of middle-aged businessmen had been dining and/or boozing it up with some extremely attractive women who’d been dressed to the hilt and to the right was a giant human fishbowl. My instincts led me to the right.
On the other side of the glass, sitting on a set of velveteen steps on display for all to see, had been about thirty Thai women all made-up, wearing swanky stilettos and fancy dresses with numbers pinned to them. On the outside looking in had been more middle-aged suits – all very Japanese-looking – peering in and picking numbers or pointing out which of the selection they wanted to defile. I took a seat among the rest of the deviants and began the decision-making process.
Admittedly, I’m a pretty shallow person and picky with women based on looks – especially when I’m gonna be paying money to sleep with ‘em – and not too many of the chicks behind the glass had looked all that appealing to me. Although there’d been a couple “unoccupied” chicks that would’ve been able to put lead in my pencil, most of the desirable dames seemed to already have been spoken for. It was then that I recalled reading on that pervert’s website that some people call as far as a week in advance to make reservations, leaving all the model-caliber babes booked up and not available for walk-ins.
As I sat there trying to make up my mind, the back door to the fishbowl opened and some little pocket rocket with a pair of cannons strapped to her chest entered the picture. I assumed her return to the line-up had meant that she’d just been “used” and I don’t blame the guy who’d chosen her. She wasn’t no model or nothin’, but she had a pretty cute face. And she was wearing this tight black and yellow striped dress that hugged her thin waist and clung to the big old set of ass cheeks right below it as they took turns going up and down with each step she took. The combination of her choice in attire and the way she moved made me think of her as a giant bumble bee – a giant bumble bee who I decided I wanted to give me some honey.
After I told one of the employees the number of the person I’d planned on treating like an object over the next two hours at the price of somewhere between fifty and seventy-five dollars, the guy fished her out the bowl and she came to meet me. She told me her name which I wasn’t too interested in then led me to the room where we’d be conducting business. It had two chairs with a little table in between them facing a television as well as a bed and a massive rectangular bathtub. She turned on the faucet in the tub and added soap bubbles before turning the knob on the tube and putting on some Thai soap opera. She told me to have a seat and have a drink while we waited for the thing to fill up.
When the tub was full, she told me to take off my clothes and get in. She too shed her attire, tucked her hair into a waterproof shower cap and joined me a few moments later. As we sat facing each other from across the tub, her jugs jiggled as she began to scrub my feet. Then she scrubbed my calves. Then my thighs, my Johnson, my tummy, my tits and my neck. She then directed me to stand up so she could shampoo my hair. While spraying me down and using her hands to wipe the remaining suds off of my chest, she stopped and began to look at me funny.
“Nice face,” she said, “nice body,” she added, “why are you here?” she concluded.
I shrugged.
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-six.”
“Oh my god, so young.”
“Well,” I asked in return, “how old are you?”
“I thirty-four.”
I had nothing to say at the moment, but a nerve had been struck. You know you’re fuckin’ up and selling yourself short when even a hooker asks why you’re there to fuck her.
“Dry off now,” she pointed to the bed. “You go.”
I did as I was told and watched her bathe herself from the bed which had much cleaner sheets than that miserable Beijing massage parlor. After she was all fresh and dried, she came over to the bed and went through the motions of lovemaking until I signaled the end by ceasing to thrust. We then went back to the tub and she once again cleaned the both of us from head to toe.
Unless you pay extra, you only get to bone once during the two-hour session. After only forty-five minutes of “fun,” I didn’t feel like boning again but I didn’t feel like leaving just yet either. So I sat on one of the chairs in front of the television watching the strange woman as she applied moisturizer to every inch of her body which must’ve been entirely arid from the constant bathing and drying.
“How many times a day do you do this?” I asked.
“What you say?” she said while greasing up her gams. “I sorry.”
“No English?”
“English not so much. Japanese more. Many customer Japanese.”
“How many customers do you have per day?”
“Uh, different every day. Sometime four, sometime six, sometime more, sometime less.”
“And the customers…not young like me?” I pointed to myself. “Old man? Customers – all old men?”
“Old man very much. No young.”
“Where are you from? Where is your home?”
“Isaan.”
Of course, they’re all from Isaan.
“Do you work every day?”
“Yes.”
“And for how many years have you been doing this?”
“Many years.”
For hypothetical purposes – even though she was probably younger when some pimp had paid off her poor-ass family to take her away to the big city from the farmlands of Isaan – I guessed in my head she’d been getting stuffed for bills since she was twenty-years-old. So fourteen years – let’s say two-hundred-and-fifty days a year to stay on the conservative side here – two-hundred-and-fifty days times fourteen years multiplied by five guys a day. That’s over seventeen-thousand times this woman – somebody’s daughter, sister and maybe even mother – has been fucked by dudes for money.
My head began to spin as I came to realize the disturbing extent of Thailand’s human-trafficking industry. I pulled out a little extra cash from my wallet, left a tip on the table, thanked her for her time and walked out of the place feeling like I was ready to throw up.
Three weeks later, I was in the Thamel neighborhood of Kathmandu shopping for a sleeping bag to take with me to go trekking in Nepal’s Annapurna region the following day. While walking around and comparing prices from shop to shop, I encountered a massage parlor, decided to drop the task at hand and wander inside for a quick hand job. I had no intention of fucking a massage hooker in Nepal because I doubt they have government-regulated STD-testing requirements for employees as all whorehouses in Thailand do. And HIV is not the type of souvenir I wanted to bring home with me from the Himalayas.
So, I go into this place and it’s dirty and it’s sleazy and the two Hindu chicks behind the counter in the lobby know exactly why I’m there. I pick the type of massage I want from a list they’d handed me – I decided on the oil massage – and then which of the two women I wanted to take care of me before lighting a cigarette and walking up a flight of busted-ass steps to a tiny room with a bed even scuzzier than the one in the Chinese place I’d began my pay-as-you-go sex romp a year-and-a-half beforehand.
With my clothes off, laying on the dirty bed from which I could probably have contracted some serious dick-burning VD’s, the woman – perhaps in her late-twenties – had returned to the room and asked me to put out my cigarette so she could start with the massage. Not knowing what to do with it since there’d been no trays and I’d just been ashing on the floor like a fuckin’ asshole, I reached out and handed it to her to deal with. She left the room, threw it in the sink in the hallway and returned right afterwards.
Some Nepali women are very beautiful – especially all the young, liberal ones in the Kathmandu area who wear designer clothes and make-up, watch their figures and look real nice when they go out to bars. Unfortunately, this massage chick was not one of those girls. She was decently cute in the face which included a Bindi on her forehead, but her body was not so nice – particularly the sloppy gut which’d been concealed beneath a multi-colored sari.
“Lay on your stomach please,” she directed.
I did as I was told and she started on my back. Five minutes into the worst, most half-assed, going-through-the-motions massage I’ve ever gotten, she told me to flip over. After then dumping oil on my stomach and legs then rubbing it around and pretending that that qualifies for a massage, she started touching my penis.
“Do you like sex?” she asked.
“Yes, but I don’t want sex here.”
She kept oiling my dick which started to fill with blood.
“Do you like mouth sex?”
“Yeah, but not from you.”
“You like hand?”
“Yeah, keep doing what you’re doing.”
I soon had a full-on boner and she was jerking it up and down with rough calloused hands that told me she must do some farming when she’s not hooking.
“Show me your tits,” I pointed to her chest. “Can I see?”
She pulled her jugs out the neckline of her low-cut shirt which was a bit weird but also a bit nice because that way I didn’t have to look at her Homer Simpson-style stomach. I grabbed onto the breast nearest me as she increased the speed of her tugging.
“Mama!” I heard the voice of a child call out from the staircase leading up to the room.
“Who the fuck is that?” I asked.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she told me to relax while continuing to play with me.
I heard the other woman talking to the child in their rural-ass dialect.
“Maaaaaaaaaa-ma!” he or she called out again, sounding much closer than the time before.
“What the fuck’s going on?” I sat halfway up.
“No, no, no, lay down,” she put her hand on my chest and gently pushed me back to the bed.
I could hear footsteps coming up the dusty old wooden stairs. Seconds later, the door creaked open and in walked the other woman from the lobby, holding a two or three-year-old boy in her arms.
“Mama,” he said to the woman whose tit was in my hand as my penis remained in hers.
I shot up outta the bed and started cussing while rushing to put my clothes back on. The jerkstress directed her business associate to vacate the room then looked back over at me.
“No, you lay down,” she pointed to the bed. “It okay, you lay down now.”
“No this is bullshit! Why did she bring your kid in the room? That’s fucked up.”
“It okay,” she reassured. “You lay down.”
Since I still had half-a-boner, I didn’t take much convincing. At that moment, blowing my load took precedence over the general disgust I felt about myself for being there, that woman as a parent and the sex industry as a whole. Unable to resist, I laid back down, replaced my hand on her tit and let her caress me down until my kids had been swimming in my belly button.
When I walked outta there, I felt so jittery I wanted to jump in front of a bus. But obviously, since I’m writing this story, I didn’t do what I felt like doing. I instead promised myself I’d never pay for sex ever again for the rest of my life. I guess only time will tell just how serious I am about that pact.