I don’t like heights, flying, fast buses, blood leaving my body, twinges in my guts, palpitations, motorbikes, hangovers, computers getting smarter than me, the size of my stomach…
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My balls say goodbye to filling my penis when I stand on a high balcony. The vertical distance from my eyes to the far concrete makes my testicles prickle – an uncomfortable, but not painful gnawing edges into the dark middle of my ball sack and lets me know jumping off would kill me. In the worst hangovers I’ve had I’ve argued with this nibble to stop, to stop me from throwing myself off. To stop the temptation and let my balls go back to living the life they want to. But, like the rest of me, my balls have to die too.
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A Korean whore at the pedestrian crossing looks at me. It’s that usual crafty whore’s look that is directed at my eyes, but tunnels its way down to between my legs. It’s not me sending it there – like a Medusian grin, it goes to where she’s intended. Of course, her smile needs back up. I can smell her crafted, rude cosmetics. Her hair is crimped with gassy neon, in gorgeously stained soft focus behind her. She’s made herself a decadent belly that looks happy and willing to be muckied, not fat, but somehow swelling under her skimpy top. Her skirt, with a delicate silver chain hanging around it, is several inches short for the weather – whatever the weather. She wriggles in her body like the pavement is sizzling. And, she’s loving her cheekiness, an imp with an eye for a cock. Bless her and all her purposes – I mean it.
I respond with an involuntary twitch from my upper right lip. It satisfies her that she caught me I guess – I tell myself, arrogant idiot that I am, she didn’t though. So, I squeeze, slightly my eight-month pregnant wife’s hand. Then the whore pats my daughter’s head while looking at me with her eyes compressed another way which say:
‘It’s okay – what could you do? It’s just your balls after all.’
She leaves me alone after what was a second of play with me and looks at my daughter’s face peeking from the blue waterproof hood that she wears with so much diligence at the slightest mention of rain.
‘Ah – so handsome!’ the whore says in her enthused whine of English.
She turns to her friend – another version of herself – and repeats:
‘Look – so handsome!’
The other whore giggles out a Korean phrase in which I hear the words ‘handsome’ and ‘pretty’ stretched across more intonation than I could get away with. Realising her mistake she faces my daughter with a ripe smile:
‘Ah – so sorry – not handsome. You pretty girl! So cute!’
The ‘cute’ is dragged over a few hills and valleys of pitch which take over a second of vocal noise to perform. My ‘cutes’ take a fraction of that time. I ask myself if I could ever say ‘cute’ like she just did. I resign myself quickly that I couldn’t – not in earnest anyway.
I wonder why she went for ‘handsome’ not ‘pretty’. My first Freudian choice is that it’s because she just went from looking at me to my daughter. I swiftly reprimand myself for relishing the chance and realise its unlikelihood. Even my wife only accuses me of ‘handsome’ when I need it. It’s not a description of me that could’ve entered the whore’s head.
I then decide that it’s her usual word for the gamut of beauty. She must use ‘handsome’ more than she uses ‘pretty’. I eye her again and tell myself she has little need for ‘pretty’ – what can she do with such a word? ‘Handsome’ came out because it was ready – a knee-jerk word for her.
Then I figure it could be my daughter’s face with her blonde hair tucked into her tight blue hood. Maybe the whore just thought she was a boy. She used the ‘handsome’ word she spills on her middle-aged potentials onto my daughter too. I’m not feeling too keen on this one – the whore using a word she uses to get cocks to spend money to describe my daughter.
Anyway, why the hell am I getting all psycho-semantic about a whore’s clumsy description of my daughter? Did I ever used to rip up words like this? What’s with all my dissecting a foreign word flicked thoughtlessly from a whore’s tongue? Why am I so hung up on this?
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There’s only one answer: I don’t like heights, flying, fast buses, blood leaving my body, twinges in my guts, palpitations, motorbikes…
