Part One
Part Two
He ventured next to a more upscale establishment, The Jasmine Touch.
Sippy was met upon entering by a fetching young Asian girl, her jet
black hair in a Louise Brooks cut, her slim figure sheathed in a red
cheongsam as warm with gold dragons stitched into the silk garment, its
thigh slit revealing a slender, yet shapely, leg. She gathered him by
the arm, led him down a hallway to a massage room where he undressed
and donned a white terry cloth bathrobe before heading to the steam
room. While taking the steam, Sippy enjoyed some hydration as the
girl brought him a pot of ginseng tea on a tray with a small bowl from
which to drink. He showered and dried. When he returned, the massage
room was filled with a subtle scent of lavender and the ambient
strains of Chinese music, more “new age” than authentic.
“You want banana or cherry?” asked the girl after the flipover.
“No understand,” said Sippy, hoping that she meant that Slurpees were
included in the amenities.
“Banana,” said the girl and she made a circle of her thumb and
forefinger, pumping them up and down in front of her mouth, a
pantomime of fellatio.
“Cherry,” said the girl and through the circle of her thumb and
forefinger she plunged in and out the forefinger of her other hand, a
pantomime of coitus.
“I would like both banana and cherry,” said Sippy. The girl smiled.
She slipped out of the dress. Sippy noted that she wore Hello Kitty
panties. There ought to be a joke somewhere in there, he thought.
Her dress and undies neatly stacked upon a chair in the corner, Lily
expertly wrangled his erection and lowering her face, placed her lips
ever so gingerly on the glans and then rolled down the condom that had
been hidden in her mouth so swiftly that his penis was enveloped
before he even realized what she had done. Then she set to work. She
moved up and down Sippy’s lower body, her breasts caressing his
thighs, as she tongued his shaft and finally began sucking him off
with real conviction.
“Ohhhhhhh, sweeeeeetheart,” moaned Sippy for the only thing he could
think of as the animal stormed and raged was the proverbial golf ball
through the garden hose. Crescendo. The condom shot forth like a
champagne cork.
“You asshole!” yelled the girl wiping the bright scarlet splooge from
her eyes, “[something in Mandarin]! Shit, shit shit! [something
derogatory in Mandarin]! You are disgusting! Oh, I must get this out
of my hair!
[something unspeakably vulgar in Mandarin]!”
Lily fled the room, sheathed in a very different red. On his way out,
Sippy snagged the abandoned Hello Kitty panties as a trophy.
* * *
Oh! He was crowing! Such victories he’d won which now he saw fit to disclose.
“Sippy,” I said. “You’ve really stepped over the line!”
“Doc, how can say that? Isn’t that what you do here all day long in
this dang card room? How many times have you boasted to me of all the
suckers you’d fleeced?”
“There’s a big difference,” I began, “between the sheep who come here
willingly, knowing in advance that there’s a damn good chance they’ll
lose their wad and those women who make their living providing a
service, doing honest work for an honest dollar. And I’ll tell you
something else, Sippy Cullen. These are women are mostly new to this
country and because they may not have sufficient English to call the
police, they are most vulnerable to predators. Predators like you,
Sip.”
“Oh, it’s not like that, Doc. I’m not doing any real harm.”
“You’re cheating them, Sip, pure and simple. And I’ll tell you
something else. Because they can’t rely on the police, they have
other ways of protecting themselves. Not always legal, not always
pretty. Get me?”
“Jiminy Christmas,” said Sippy, “You mean like ninjas or those Yakuza dudes?”
“Wrong culture but gangsters of some sort, usually dime-a-dozen
thick-necked goons with gaudy tattoos. Many of these places are
‘connected’ to shady organizations.”
“Really?” he said, quietly.
“Sippy, you have got to give up this game. It can only end badly for you.”
“Okay, Doc.” said Sippy, “I know you’re right.”
I had misgivings. Sippy Cullen had proven himself not always a
forthright fellow and there was something in his eyes that said that
the boy’s gotta have it.
* * *
Much like a gambler, Sippy knew his luck would have to run out sooner
or later and, as the animal seemed unsated, the urge to assail just
one more spa was so compelling that Sippy rationalized that another
outing would incur minimal risk, but no one could possibly have
foreseen the terrible exactions of his comeuppance. As it happened,
The Paradise Health Spa, nestled unassumingly between the Formosa Nail
salon and Poppa John’s Pizza would become his Waterloo. He was
greeted by a woman in a blue smock who introduced herself as Lily.
“Would you be interested in the four hand special?” she asked, “Most
beneficial for relaxing muscle and will promote healthful blood flow
through your body.”
“Four hands?” asked Sippy, “that mean two ladies?”
“Yes,” said Lily, “two therapists will perform deep tissue massage on
your body. This special would also include a table shower before the
massage”.
“I don’t know what that is,” said Sippy, “but I will give it a try.”
Sweeeeeeeeeeet! two-on-one and that’s a dream come through! he
thought, as, Cleo and a second woman in a pink smock, both protected
by clear plastic lab coats, lathered his body with rich suds and
rinsed using shower heads which extended from the wall just above his
body as he stretched out on a padded vinyl-covered table. They
scrubbed diligently every inch, literally, from head to sole, and if a
client entertained the notion that there were certain taboo locations
on the body which they would avoid, he would be mistaken. The two
attended the sensitive and secret places with unswerving zeal. Three
times they washed completely Ol’ Sippy who afterward felt exuberantly
tingly, freshly minted. Now the animal was revving up.
On the massage table the women plied with warmed lotion his back and
legs, their hands, petite yet applying steady pressure, crisscrossing
in a subtle choreography. He could not discern which hand belonged to
which woman and gradually he felt as though there must have been more
than two pairs of hands working him. This is really paradise, he
thought. Suddenly, he was flipped over and pinned to the massage
table, rendered immobile, before he even realized what they had done.
Just as swiftly, he was gagged with a small towel. He could count at
least six Chinese women holding him down, most in blue smocks and some
in pink, and there may have been more women beyond his limited field
of vision.
“Mei-Mei,” said a woman with long light brown hair as she reached
behind her and opened the door. An elderly Chinese woman entered,
padding softly in fuzzy pink bedroom slippers, a pink bathrobe wrapped
around her small gaunt form. Next came a young girl, not quite of
high school age, bearing a tray that held something which Sippy could
not make out.
“You have been a very bad man,” spoke the old woman into his ear. The
animal still purred, his cock remained hard and one of the women held
his erection at the base so it rose perpendicular from his supine
form. The old woman now began taking ultrathin acupuncture needles of
varying sizes from the tray and inserted them with great precision
into Sippy’s lower abdomen. Even though he could barely feel a
pinprick as each needle penetrated his skin, his anxiety level rose
and soared. Finally, from the tray she took a sounding probe about
twelve inches in length, which to Sippy looked like the largest needle
he’d ever seen, and she brandished it above the head of his penis so
that he could comprehend with ever increasing terror what she was
about to do. A few dabs of lubrication and she inserted, slowly,
slowly, the sounding probe into his urethra He started feeling woozy,
his mind slipping into absurdity. Jiminy Christmas, he thought, a
penis kebab. Halfway in, she removed several of the acupuncture
needles, then plunged the probe to its limit. A sudden scorching
white light leaped across his brain pan and his mind went black.
* * *
“Okay. Well,” I said. “In a way it makes sense. If acupuncture can
cure, then it can also harm ...”
“Dang you, Doc! You’re not listening!” shouted Sippy. He stood in
front of my booth where I worked at draining the ale from a semi-clean
glass. It’d been five days since his ordeal. Upon regaining
consciousness he’d found himself slumped in a heap in front of his
apartment door. Still naked, his clothes had been dumped next to him.
Only a few hours had elapsed and no neighbors had noticed the inert
Sippy Cullen displayed au naturel in their communal hallway.
“Sorry, Sip. I was ...” I began. I had been deflecting as now it
hit me that I’d been too sanguine, too lackadaisical, in dealing with
the man and failed to foresee these repercussions. I needed, somewhat,
to back up, regroup my thinking. “That was a message - they were
telling you they know where you live.”
“How ...?” he asked.
“Oh, I imagine it was a simple as looking in your wallet for your home
address.” I said, “You had it with you, right?”
“Yeah. I checked it and nothing was taken. Except ...”
“So take it to heart. They could have done much worse.”
“... and the woman, “ he said, “she called me a bad man ...”
“I won’t sugarcoat this, Sip,” I said. “You made some bad decisions,
some incredibly reckless decisions, without a shred of regard for some
of your fellow human beings. Surely even you knew that body fluids
are considered biohazard. You weren’t just unethical - you put them
at risk.”
“But dang it Doc,” he said, “sure, I skipped out on paying for
services but that blood could just be wiped off or cleaned up. I
don’t fucking deserve what they did to me. You say they could have
hurt me much worse but you don’t know. They took away my life as I
knew it.
“Sippy,” I said, “you’re alive and intact. Just make amends and get
on with your life.”
“That blood vessel blowout should have bummed me out.” Sippy said,
“but here I thought ‘Mr. Cullen you just take positive steps and get
your act together.’ Dang it, when life hands you lemonade then make
lemon cake! And that’s what I was doing - boosting myself with my
bootstraps and just for a few moments in my life I felt in the game,
riding the crest of the wave ... like I was someone ... like I was
really someone ... it was like I stepped out of that old life - the
life where I schlepped the equipment for the players ... those guys who
were actually in the game ...and where I was constantly bombarded
with the sex boasting and the jock jabber in the locker room ...
taunted by the sort of life I could never have ... and all of a sudden
I could be this new person ... a normal person with a normal life ...
or something more ... I wanted to attack life and chew it up in
man-size portions ... to drink up the whole dang world in big gulps
... to really leave a footprint ... my life should have been so much
more ... but it never was ...”
He swallowed, suppressing a sob.
“And in your eyes, Doc,” he continued, “ ... in your eyes I was always
that no-moxie munchkin ... the snuffler in the backroom ... the guy
what missed the gravy boat ... and now fuck it all! I may be
sidelined for the rest of my life. In the game for a few plays and
then sidelined, benched like a chump in a slump.”
He was trembling, noticeably.
“And you know what they took, Doc?” he continued, “they took away my
drive. They killed the animal. I can’t get it up anymore and I’ve
tried everything. Looking at any image no matter how extreme don’t
juice my fella. Talking to Barb at the 7-11 don’t give me any kind of
buzz no more. I tried little blue pills I borrowed from Old Man
Bigelow up the hall and nothing happened. I can’t even fantasize and
my dreams are dullsville. I never had much before, but I had porn and
now porn is a closed door. There’s a hella big sucky black hole
that’s was my life. Did I really deserve that from them women? I
just want what everyone seems to have. Doc, I ask you. Am I so much
less deserving than anyone else?”
Ah, Sippy, I thought, you wretched man, you were never the one and
never going to be the one to paint the town red. And maybe it’s just
your lot in life to be sidelined from the game which in the end is
just a trifling thing. But, you’ll learn that eventually. We’ve all
had setbacks, especially you, Sippy Cullen, but you always had porn to
fall back on. Now you don’t have the one thing that made tolerable
your sad sack existence.
All the things that I could possibly tell Sippy would be of no comfort
to him at this moment. He swayed, emotionally exhausted, unsteady on
his feet, his rant spent.
“Sippy, there are times I don’t know anything at all,” I said. “Sit
down and I’ll buy you a pint. A big pint.”
He tottered, collapsing into the seat like a dead weight.
* * *
Now you’ve heard the story of Sippy Cullen. I’ve told it straight, no
digressions, no trick endings, a direct and unvarying trajectory with
only one possible outcome. Several days afterward, I made my way to
the Hong Kong Palace restaurant. Inside I asked for May and was shown
the back office where sat an old Chinese woman wearing a black tunic
and slacks and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers. Thank you, she said, for
helping us stop this problem. He has made a first payment of
compensation. I asked if he would recover. Possible, she said, but I
hope not. My girls were so shook up, they will not come back to work.
They must be tested. Tested again in six months. The rooms
rehabbed. I said he had become unhinged. All his life a harmless
midge and just the slightest injury derailed his sense of what is
right. She spat on the floor and gave me the cold eye. Do not tell
me your troubles, Doc Sigerson. I have my own.
