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| Priceless |
| by Jan Steckel |
| The economy is too tough for Erica to get her hands on any new porn. She has enough United Mileage Plus Visa miles to buy economy plane tickets for herself and her husband to anywhere, and enough American Express Rewards points for a free night's lodging in a Hilton. She can still get literature at the library or trade in her old books for used ones at the unfriendly, unhelpful, downright nasty used bookseller in her neighborhood. She can trade her old CDs and tapes for other used CDs. She can even get a complimentary video once a month from Blockbuster. What she can't get on the cheap, what she can't find used or free, is porn.
Print porn, maybe, but used print porn is a little disgusting what with the imagined traces of jizz all over it and all, unless it's lesbian, REAL lesbian, not that made-for-straight men shit. Maybe she could get some crappy 1970's erotica for used-book-store credit, but the good stuff? Hard to find used. She tries sitting out on the pavement with her hand out like the neighborhood homeless guy, saying "Money for erotica? Money for erotica? I'm out on the street and I got no erotica. Just need five bucks for a night's erotica." All that gets her is propositioned by five men in three languages. She makes a list of some budget ways to get hold of used or borrowed porn: 1) Start a porn-swapping club with perverted friends. 2) Arrange group viewings of videos with really close perverted friends. 3) Tell relatives when they buy their new digital video camera that she wants their old camcorder. Pay in potato salad or baby-sitting or something. Tell them she's thinking of going to film school. Then make own porn at home. The last one sounds promising. The porn-swapping thing strikes her as too boundary-crossing, and group viewings are too, ew, yuck. Like that time she walked into the Lusty Lady peep-show strip joint because she heard it was woman-owned and woman-run, and found out that the floor and the door-handles were all, like, crusty. She borrows her uncle's camcorder. She makes a video of her husband wearing her black Angora sweater and a metallic knit miniskirt. His cock makes a clearly outlined bulge in the clingy silver material. "Is my dick too long for this skirt?" he asks the camera, rubbing his nipples through the black fur of the sweater. He slowly lifts the tiny skirt, grasps his cock reverently and joyfully like a man in prayer, and jacks off until he comes. She enjoys it while she's filming, but the video doesn't do anything for her when she views it later. She closes her eyes and listens to it instead of watching it, but not even the sound of his gasping and groaning gets her wet. It takes her three days to realize it's because it doesn't smell like him. In the winter no one who doesn't hug him might notice that he bathes only on alternate days, but in the summer he gets rather ripe at thirty-six hours. Luckily, she finds his body odor a frank turn-on. The musk of sea-salt, ammonia and pheromones that wafts from him can always arouse her. She is in the habit of greeting him by nuzzling her nose into his armpit, sniffing deeply, and exclaiming "Aaaah!" in exaggerated delectation. She enters their bedroom late at night, after he has been sleeping there for an hour or two with the door closed. The unmistakable odor of warm wet puppies fills her nostrils and her heart with inexplicable tenderness. She would testify under oath that his groin smells exactly like an exotic hothouse flower. Somehow she always thinks of orchids, though she doesn't know that orchids have any scent at all. It is probably semantic confusion with the prefix orchio-, from the Greek word for testicle. Be that as it may: when she buries her nose in the well-worn crotch of his jeans, she could swear that she inhales the essence of a strange, pale and lovely flower. It is a flower that shrinks closed in the daytime, widening fully only at night. It is pollinated by a single nocturnal species of giant moon-moth attracted by that particular perfume. The moth flutters its proboscis over stamen and anther, gently stroking until the blossom opens completely, delivering up its nectar -- for free. |
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| Nov. 2007 |
| 99 |
| ***BIO*** Jan Steckel: I'm an Oakland, California Writer, a former pediatrician, and a bisexual activist. My father says at parties, "This is my daughter Jan. She used to be a pediatrician, but now she's a pornographer." My poetry chapbook THE UNDERWATER HOSPITAL (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) is available on Amazon and from Zeitgeist Press at www.zeitgeist-press.com. I've published a hundred short stories, poems and nonfiction pieces in venues ranging from Scholastic Magazine to Instant Pussy, and my writing's been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. You can find out more at www.jansteckel.com. |