“Everyone has their own preference and we are not here to judge, are we? Our clients are the lifeblood of this house, after all.”
Madame Boduiane was leading me down the noisy second floor hall of the dorms where clients were screeching and whooping so loudly that I could hardly hear her shouting over her shoulder. From behind a door, we heard a loud sizzling which preceded a scream which was followed by the smell of burning hair. I held on to the straps of my backpack and smiled with wonder. I licked the humidity from my lips. Madame’s heels clomped against the ground as she walked, causing a seismic quake of jiggles to echo out from her ass and her lower back, down her thighs and into her arms. The clients were the lifeblood, and she was the heart: radiant, powerful, commanding, knowing the exact formula for proper giving and taking.
She stopped and opened my new dorm, then handed me the key and a towel. “Don’t worry, we’ll start you off with the basics: massages, shavings, wrappings, or story time. I like to let my workers form their own training program and go at their own pace.” We hugged and she left me to my quarters.
From my window in the south wing, I could see the sign painted over the entrance: It read: “Massage” Parlor, the quotation marks a mockery to the police themselves. This house was walking right up to the edge of legal permissibility, hopping across the line and shaking its tits wildly. I took off my backpack and noticed that the house was a living organism, alive with feeling. I touched the wall and it sunk in a little like a sponge, oozing with emotional residue that stuck to my finger like honey. A welcome contrast to the brittle, dry, unbending infrastructure of my hometown. I took out my journal and pencil and erased the name of my hometown from every passage. Then, I took off my shoes and pressed my feet into the floor. The floorboards reached up like little suction cups, and grasped me. This house was oozy and gross and disturbing and so audaciously rich in emotion. Moans and rattles and gutteral cries vibrated throughout its frame. The house was a big mood, and it was completely unafraid of itself.
...
Three months in, I had hit my stride. Madame recognized that I was a natural shape-shifter, able to deliver on a wide variety of different roles and characteristics, at the will and desire of our clientele. I enjoyed the diversity of the job. Some clients wanted me to clean out their fingernails, others wanted me to wear the mirror mask and talk in their own voice as they sexually dominated me. Some wanted to recreate their entire lives over the course of an hour, searching for some existential meaning of it all. Humiliation was actually not as common as many think, as it turns out that the world is humiliating enough already. Many people spent hours in the therapist's office downstairs before they came to me, just trying to determine what they actually wanted. The proposition of “anything at all” was, indeed, terrifying for people. Many of the most concerned clients just wanted me to continue to be their therapist, to agonize with them over their own uncertainty. Agonizing and existential dread came easy for me, and by month three I had even worked my way up to silent eye contact.
Commonly, there were men who fell in love with their own creation. They somehow thought that I was the person they paid me to pretend to be. This was the case with Charles, who liked to pretend to be my boyfriend. He would look at me like I was a sad puppy, lost in the rain. He would brush my hair from my face (which he, by the way, had brushed into my face earlier in the hour), squeeze my hand, and say “You know, it doesn't have to be like this. Come with me, out to Montana, I’ve got a ranch out there and the sky is big and beautiful. We could be happy.” Then, he would sing me an old farmer’s lullaby about a brave horse and it’s loyal saddle. Charlie always wanted a sob story, and when I didn’t give it to him, he assumed even worse. He pitied me, that’s what got him off. Later, he would pay me to scrub his foot with a loofa so he could suck the juices out of it.
Charlie’s countryside requests were sincere, he wanted to take me away from that house. Many of them did. They would leave offerings of dead rabbits, sometimes salted in their own saliva or tears, etc, at my front door. I would always boil the meat thoroughly, removing the human remains, and have our cooks make up a delicious rabbit soup. The house would take in the steam from the boil and everything would smell wholesome and cozy.
At night, after my clients were gone, I would go to the walls of the house and rub my sweat into it. I would breath, and the walls would breathe with me, and I would whisper into the wall: “I’m with you and I ain’t going nowhere.”
©2020 by Shelsea Ochoa. All rights reserved.