Jesus Was A Convicted Felon

Note: I was going to post this weeks ago, but, I got swept away by a parade of nonsense. The struggle is real.

This week is Easter, which excites me. I love Easter (or, as we Jews call it “The one who got away day"). Not because I am an atheist, but because I love Biblical violence. For a lover of such a thing, it doesn’t get much better than the global celebration through chocolate and bunnies of the execution, death, and alleged resurrection of the convicted felon known as Jesus Christ.

The story of Easter is one of my favourites, so, in honour of this, I have dredged up a Easter phone sex tale for this most holy of weeks.

This was a number of years ago now, and I was manning the phone sex lines on Easter Sunday. I wasn’t sure what kind of day it would be, considering it was a holiday…

“I’ve been up all night, doing crystal meth,” said a voice, very proudly, from the other end of the phone. 

Obviously, it was gonna be a good day. 

This was a morning call. The man calling, Gabe, informed me that he was naked in his kitchen, as he had some special plans. 

“I’m making an enema!” 

“”Are you, now?” I asked, as though he was a child, planning on making a holiday craft of some sort.

“I’m making it with milk, and peanut butter and chocolate syrup….and gyrhfhfhrh…”

“Wait, what was that last thing you were sticking in your ass?”

“Peanut butter..”

“Yeah, you said that already. What was the last thing?”

“I’m making an enema!”

The mystery ingredient will never be known. Anyways, he was really feeling it with the creativity that morning, and was using anything he could get his hands on to make his ass smoothies. 

Why he felt the need to make an enema, I’m not so sure. Meth can really bung you up, in terms of constipation….or maybe it was a glorious celebration of the Lord. 

When I was 17, I dated a guy who cooked crystal meth. That shit gets made in bathtubs from ingredients garnered at the hardware store by boys who wish that they were Sean Penn. 

I also once dated a guy who made shitty LSD. This is the reason why I don’t find movie stars interesting. Why would I be delighted by people who preen and pretend for a living when there are real deviants to adore?

One time I had to use an enema. I was on day 8 of a bowel stalemate, and I finally broke down and went and bought an enema. At the time, I was living in a rowdy party house, and, on the night I chose to use the enema, there was a party happening. This meant I had to try to shoot saline up my ass while trying to fend off a never ending stream of drunken people who wanted to piss like racehorses and puke in the sink while I tended to my southerly woes. Talk about a clench.

Speaking of which, Gabe was no big talker in the enema department…in no time at all, I was hearing him rocket fuel his ass smoothies all over his kitchen floor. I could hear the contents hitting and splattering on the linoleum. For some reason, I pictured my grandma’s kitchen, and remembered the buttercup yellow designs I saw so frequently while growing up.

Gabe didn’t laugh when he expelled onto the floor. He instead let out war whoops, as though he were a young Native brave charging into valiant battle.

And then his dog came into the kitchen.

Anyone who has known a dog can likely guess what happened next. Dogs are known to enjoy poo…their own, and others, so, before long, I was treated to the sounds of canine tongue lapping linoleum.

I asked Gabe what kind of dog he had, what its name was, being an animal lover and all. 

Her name was Katie and she was a golden retriever.

How the fuck did a depraved meth user end up with a golden retriever named Katie? Did he steal her from the last old lady whose corpse he raped? 

I bet Katie smelled like Vidal Sassoon shampoo and had eyes that when you looked into them, you felt Jesus’s love for all of mankind expanding in your heart. 

These actives continued for some time, when, all of a sudden….Gabe went quiet. Then, he said in a most solemn of voices….

“This is really fucking gross.”

And than he hung up.

This is what they refer to in Narcotics Anonymous as “a moment of clarity.”

My most favourite part of the Easter story is Gethsemane. After the last supper, Jesus asked his disciples to pray with him. They fell asleep. It was the night before his crucifixion, and he was all alone in the garden. He asked his father to take away the cup of poison, of wrath that he was about to drink. God didn’t, instead, he sent Jesus an angel to comfort him. Jesus accepted what was going to happen. He surrendered to the higher power because he had no choice. His pain is what made him, what helped him to transcend beyond being a man, into something beyond himself. His agony has been called exquisite, and it can make grown men weep. 

Once, when I was really high, I had a very vivid hallucination that I was an asteroid, falling from space, burning up in the Earths atmosphere. As I broke apart , I became a part of everything on the planet, I was connected to everything. I was destruction, and I was the beginning. Alpha and Omega, linked together.

 Afterwards, I remembered what my mom said to me when I was little, and I asked her what “God” was….she said it was everything, all the molecules that held the universe together, that you didn’t have to pray to it or signal it in any way, you were already a part of it. 

I wonder is Gabe if recounting the enema story in a rehab centre somewhere. I hope Katie ran away and found a good home..that bitch deserved better. 

I stopped taking drugs because I realized that the illusions that they gave me came at way too steep a price.  They blunted the edge of everything, which feels nice, like being a baby in a house with parents who proofed everything way too much. You can fall and fumble and not catch the rough edge of anything. But, you need to feel those edges, if only so you don’t push into them too hard. 

Sometimes though, when I’m chanting or meditating, or just feeling lost, I can close my eyes and become the asteroid again, breaking apart, falling to Earth…returning home.

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Trace Evidence Left In The Fire Swamp

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”

-“The Great Gatsby”, F. Scott Fitzgerald

A guy called me and told me , very matter of factly, that he had a quicksand fetish. I think he was so matter of fact because that’s the type of swagger people develop when they have been laughed at or mocked in the past for liking weird things. 

This guy didn’t even give me his name. I’ll call him Bob. 

I misheard what Bob said at first. I thought he said he was into quicklime. If you read detective novels, or watch police procedural shows, you will know that quicklime is a powdery white substance fictional villains use on bodies to destroy the identity of corpses. 

In reality, calcium oxide does the opposite. It would actually help preserve the body, not destroy it. We’ve all been duped. 

Regardless, Bob corrected me and told me he liked quicksand. I breathed a little sigh of relief that there would be no corpsey cadaver sexy funtime hour, and then promptly became confused. 

He had a role play in mind. I would be a girl in leather pants whose car breaks down at the side of the road (a great place for all vintage pornos and horror movies to begin). 

In this scenario, my phone doesn’t work. Or I have no phone…and there is no one around….and I don’t know how to fix a car…and I’m dumb and helpless, so terror will visit me, which I deserve, let’s face it. 

So Bob is lurking about, scaring me, and, since I am playing the part of useless twat in hot pants, I get scared and run into the woods. Did I mention my car broke down by the side of the woods? Marsh lands, specifically. Ain’t that just the luck?

I run, and I stop to catch my breath and gauge where the man who is terrorizing me may be. I can’t see him. Maybe I’ve escaped. Good, I can go back to my broken down car with no phone on the deserted road. 

Wait a second….what’s this?  What?! WHAT?! My feet are sinking! Oh no…is this…quicksand?! Quicksand?! Oh my heavens! Oh my word! Help! Help, I say. 

Oh those stylish leather pants I just had to wear will be the death of me! Literally! 

I hear a rustling in the bushes. I look up. Bob is crouched, watching my folly. And…what’s this? He’s jerking off! He’s jerking off to my folly! 

Despite my distain and disgust, I appeal to him for assistance. I reach out towards him and beg him to help me out. He won’t, that rogue. 

Just than he yells out “You shouldn’t have ignored me at that party, bitch!” 

Um….Uh…..Sorry? Yikes. Much like quicksand, this story is deeper and murkier than I had at first thought. 

I sank further and further down into the quicksand. Bob periodically yelled out something about what a bitch I was and how no one would save me. Bob came, letting out a sudden yell as he did so. 

“That was great”, he said after wards.

“That was weird”, I replied. “What’s with the quicksand thing?”

Bob scoffed, like the answer should have been obvious. 

“The Princess Bride,” he said.

Oh. OH! Okay…still not making heaps of sense here. 

For those not in the know, in “The Princess Bride”, there is something called the “Fire Swamp.” Specifically, there is a scene in the Fire Swamp where Wesley and Buttercup are walking through the Fire Swamp. Well, Wesley is carrying Buttercup’s fine ass through the Fire Swamp. He puts her down, and she is sucked down suddenly into a pit of lightning sand, which is one of the three primary dangers of the Fire Swamp (the other two being fire spurts and rodents of unusual size.) 

Wesley dives down into the pit of lightning sand to save Buttercup. They emerge together, suddenly, both gasping for air. It’s weirdly erotic and intense. It’s like they are cumming together.

This guy is obviously a member of the millennial generation, because he gets a hard on for nostalgia. Of course, he takes it much further than just wearing a Goblin King t-shirt. 

I am also a millennial, and I also get seriously jazzed for nostalgia. While I was pretending to find my demise in the rapidly sinking earth, I was actually thinking about “The Never Ending Story”, specifically the scene where the young brave Atreyu’s beautiful white stallion Artax succumbs to the dreaded “Swamp of Sadness”. I had to use a lot of willpower not to shout out “Artax, you’re sinking!” while roleplaying. 

I was also reminded of the part in “The Wizard of Oz” when the Wicked Witch of the West is melting, and she exclaims, “Oh, what a world, what a world!”

This generation loves nostalgia out of boredom and fear. There isn’t a great deal of interesting art being made so, we’ve regressed. There is a lot of shit being made, but, it’s all very safe and dull.

For example, the reason that “The Ghostbusters” remake sucked so hard is that it was obviously politically motivated, whereas the original was just fun and interesting. It had no agenda except to be a good story. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with being a good movie that brings people joy for generations to come? When you make a movie that obviously is making a political statement first, you drain the joy out of it. You make it a university lecture on gender politics that people are attending because they need the credit. So, people go backwards to find the things that were just fun and enjoyable. Movies they didn’t have to sit up straight to watch. 

When I was looking at scenes from “The Princess Bride” on Youtube, and reminiscing fondly about the movie, I made the error of scrolling down to read the comments. There were a bunch that just banged on about how the movie was sexist. Right. Okay. Sure. Call me when you become interesting, generation.

There is obviously darker shit at work here with Bob, which is that one, this is obviously a revenge fantasy for the “bitch” who didn’t talk to him at the party, and two, this is, let’s face it, a snuff fantasy.

He never specifically said I died, but, the obvious outcome of being sucked into a pit of quicksand would be death. 

I have had snuff fantasy callers before. I had a guy who wanted to strangle me to death in a hotel room once. I haven’t had a lot of snuff callers, but they are memorable. There are phone sex companies that cater specifically to violent and snuff based fantasies. I considered joining them. I thought maybe the money would be pretty good. Maybe that sounds callous, but, I entered this business for mercenary purposes. 

I looked at the websites profiles however, and it seemed too disturbing, even for me. There were profiles of girls proclaiming to be crack whores that you could readily abuse and destroy. I was concerned that even though it wasn’t real, that I would somehow get affected by being exposed to that level of violence. 

I never found out who the girl was that Bob was so angry at for ignoring him. He wasn’t much of a talker. I’ve had revenge callers before as well. Men who have outright stalked women that had scorned them. It’s sad and scary. 

I guess though, if you have violent thoughts, acting them out on a phone sex line and feeling the release of it that way is better than acting upon the urge itself. I’m not a violent person, but, I know what it is like to have rage and hatred course through your veins like fast acting poison. 

I’ve mentioned in past posts that I was raped and almost killed by a former boyfriend. I used to have violent fantasies about hurting him. I know I would never do it, I know it is natural to feel this way, but, I never dreamed that there would ever be a point in my life when I would feel that way about another human being. I imagined that with one swift act of vengeance the past would finally stop being a burden to me, and that feeling was intoxicating.  Living with that feeling was extremely uncomfortable, yet there was something about it that made me hold onto it for a long time. It was like a dagger in my gut I just couldn’t pull out for fear I would bleed to death from the wound. 

There’s a big gulf between thought and action. Thinking doesn’t make it so, and doing means it can never be undone. But…I wouldn’t say that violent thoughts don’t do something to your mind. Your brain is a physical specimen, it shifts with the ideas that roll around inside of it. Something is altered, even when these thoughts leave. 

Edmond Locard was the pioneering doctor behind forensic science. He created Locard’s exchange principle, around which all forensic science rotates. This principle says that someone who commits a crime cannot leave a crime scene without leaving something behind and taking something with them. Thus, trace evidence. 

There is nothing wrong with thoughts, even violent ones, as long as they don’t punch through that wall that separates them from reality. But, take it from someone who knows-if you plan on indulging in them, be prepared to clean up the crime scene left over in your mind. 

"Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.”

-Paul L. Kirk.

I, Love Doll

“I’m sorry. Can you just repeat what you just said. You want to do what with me?”

“Cuddle.”

Excuse me while I die inside.  

Do you want to slam me in the asshole until my rectum becomes a screaming cave filled with a hidden lake of your jizz? Done.

Would you like to throat pound me until I puke on your balls? I’m there yesterday, baby (and all last week).

Basically, when it comes to phone sex with me, I am a collection of holes and fantasies strung together with connective tissue and money. Aside from the taboos of the company, I am game, set, match, most of the time. 

Cuddling, however, is probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to phone sexing. Fairly close second is kissing. I can handle kissing for a short while, especially if I just get all porno about it, jamming my tongue down someones throat and all that beastliness. But if it’s too intimate, I get uncomfortable. One time a guy asked me to make kissing noises into the phone, and I actually gagged. 

So the cuddle requester was a man named Mike. He was shy, polite, nice to talk to. He was from Saudi Arabia, and was living in Washington, where he was studying business. He didn’t have an especial passion for business, he just didn’t want to live in Saudi Arabia, and he was smart enough to do well in school.  He wanted freedom, and America seemed like the place to obtain that.  

The first time we called, we talked for quite a while about all sorts of things. The profile he called was Asian. I am not actually Asian. But for a certain amount of cash, I am a bleached blonde half Cambodian named Denise.  I picked Cambodian as her nationality because I’m fascinated by the country and its history, and the anonymous woman whose image I claim as my own resembled Khmer women. Even I fetishize that which I sell as a fetish object. 

The topic of race came up, with Mike being from a foreign country and all. We talked about not being white and how weird white people were. It was one of the oddest conversations I’ve ever had, and the weirdest part of it was that I actually felt like I was helping alleviate some of Mike’s obvious loneliness by “relating” to him as a non white person. It was a comforting lie, like a freshly starched pillow I placed under his head to help him sleep better. 

He told me he hadn’t really experienced overt racism since he came to America. Some uneasiness and ignorance due to him being foreign, especially considering that he was Middle Eastern. But, he was happy in America, he wanted to stay. 

When we finally got down to the physical stuff, he wanted to spoon and cuddle and hold my hand and all that shit. 

“ I’m holding you from behind, and I’m kissing your neck, and your ear, and I;m running my hands through your hair…do you like that?”

“Uh huh.”

“So now I’m holding your hand, and I’m feeling your pulse in your wrist. Do you like that?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“ Now I’m touching your back, and working my fingers into your back muscles, massaging you, do you like that?”

“Yeah.”

“ I’m slowly working my way up your back, to your mid back, higher, to your shoulders, to your neck…do you like that?”

“Assume I like everything unless I say otherwise”

“Okay. My hair smells like mint. Do you like that?

And on and on it went…for hours. I’m not exaggerating. It was agonizing and annoying. We did get down to penetration eventually. It was all slow sensual shit, very one speed fucking. Barely fucking…it was making love, which I hated. 

Mike became a sort of girlfriend experience guy for a little while. He would call often, and tell me he had been thinking about me all day and that he missed me. 

I asked him one day if he dated, if he had any prospects. He told me no, that he was a virgin. 

I’ll be honest, his confession did not surprise me. But I wasn’t gonna embarrass him and be an asshole about it, so, I just gave a nonchalant “oh, really?” response to to his admission. 

“Have you ever…met a virgin before?”

I refrained from saying “yeah, I know some children” and instead said:

“Yes. In fact, I used to be one myself. For 16 years.”

“Do you think it’s weird that I’m a virgin…considering I’m 23?”

“No. You walk amongst us, I’m aware of that fact. You know, most people lie about how much sex they are getting, or if they are getting any at all. The ones that brag the most usually are doing it to mask the Sahara desert like conditions of their sex life.”

It’s tough for Mike especially because he just came from a country and culture where people are encouraged to be sexually chaste. Now he lives in a world where twearking sells baby food (it doesn’t, but, why not?) 

A former client who lived all throughout the Middle East used to tell me all about the underground BSDM and sexual culture that existed there, but, it wasn’t a place that many people could or would gain access to, especially if you were shy, like Mike. 

I asked Mike how far he had gone, sexually speaking. He hadn’t gone anywhere. There was a girl he went to school with who he liked and befriended. He had been hoping that they would hook up at some point, but, whenever they had gotten alone, he had been staunchly friend zoned. 

“Have you ever thought about hiring an escort?”, I asked. 

“Yeah…I have. What do you think about men who do that?”

“Well, considering what I do to make money, I can’t really judge. Not that I would anyways. I say go for it, but, I’d advise you to be safe. Go to an agency, pick a hot girl you really like. Don’t pick someone up off the street. A good agency will make sure that the girl isn’t diseased. Use a condom, regardless. Not the drug store ones either, those ones tend to be too thick. Go to a sex shop and get something safe but ultra thin. Ask the people who work there what ones are best. Tell the escort you are a virgin. They’ll love you. You won’t be weird and demanding, they’ll take care of you.”

“What about…what about pocket…pocket…”

“Pocket pussies?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I don’t have a dick, but, I feel if I did, I would own a few of them. The problem with some of them is that you cum inside them and them have to clean your own cum out afterwards, which is not ideal. But, I’m certain you can find masturbatory aids at a sex store or online that don’t humiliate you afterwards. You ever been to a sex shop?”

“Not really.”

“Go! You must. Don’t be shy. The people who work there are paid to help you. You’re helping them!”

“What about a…a doll?”

“I have a caller, King of The Dipshits, who had a blow up doll, and he loved her. He really did. Her name was Alexa, and he had to patch her up a lot with duct tape, the brute. He was sad when she died. I’m guessing you’d probably want a Real Doll, one of the custom high end ones”

“Yes. I’ve looked at them online. “

“The only downside is that they are really expensive. But, you can get cheaper models, they just aren’t as custom, so you can’t add tons of extra features, but, it’s a Real Doll, they all look good, so, who cares? Some things are worth the money. You know what though? If you want to buy a cheaper one that isn’t a Real Doll, I say go for it, just to give it a try. If it doesn’t work out, you just jerked off with a sex toy that you don’t care for, no harm, no foul. Just get some good lube, water based or silicone, oil based isn’t good for you.” 

“The only issue I have is that sometimes my family comes to visit me, and I wouldn’t know where to put it.”

“That…could be very difficult. You need a place you can hide her, that’s for sure. Could you shove it into the closet?”

“Maybe..”

“Or, keep the crate that she comes in, and put her in the crate in a storage locker when your family comes. Do you have a car?”

“Yeah.”

“Transport her in that."

Okay, so, having a sex doll is weird. Making sweet love to something that doesn’t have a pulse is strange. That’s not how biology works, buddy. But, if there is one thing I know to be absolutely true, it is that all humans are weird. And, humans are lonely. Humans want to fuck. Humans want companionship. Humans want to feel intimacy. Sometimes the lack of that makes them even weirder. Sometimes they do weird things to alleviate the loneliness

Mike comes from a culture where his virginity is acceptable…even preferred. In North America, virginity is shameful. 

Sex can be great. It can be explosive and intense and life altering. However, what few people will admit to is that is can also be dull, humiliating, alienating, and unsatisfying. It can expose your weaknesses, and make you feel inferior. Just because you are having it, it doesn’t mean it is a good thing. Sometimes, not having it at all can be a better option. 

Vanity Fair magazine wrote a profile on the company that makes Real Dolls and its founder.  Of the Real Doll customers, they wrote,

 “ Some are grieving over the loss of a spouse and can’t fathom dating. Others are perhaps disabled, disfigured, or so terrified of women that they can’t even look at them. But they all like the idea of having a human-ish presence around rather than watching them on a screen, drawing their sorrows, and withering away completely alone.

But not all customers are painfully shy sad sacks. There is no “type” who buys the company’s dolls and other silicone products. They include futurists, art collectors, truck drivers, scientists. housewives, couples seeking to enhance their sex lives, lawyers, surgeons, a nursing association, a dental school, men with prostate cancer who can’t get an erection but miss cuddling, burn victims, and wounded vets."

I can’t help but be reminded of one of my all time favourite books, “The Velveteen Rabbit”. It tells the story of the titular rabbit who yearns to be real. He is loved by a boy, who takes the rabbit everywhere. Over time, the rabbit becomes shabby and threadbare. The boy comes down with scarlet fever and is sent away. Everything in his nursery is ordered to be burned, including the rabbit. 

As the rabbit awaits the blaze, he becomes overcome with loneliness. Memories flash through his mind of his beautiful life with the boy. He cries a real tear. As it falls to the ground, it blooms into a flower with a fairy inside. The fairy kisses him. She tells him that the love the boy had for him made him real, and now, he would be real to everyone. He is transformed into a real rabbit. 

 Love is the thing that makes us real. The love we give and receive completes our life and makes us whole. It can come from all sorts of places, even a love doll. It is a lonely world, and love makes the arduousness of this life’s journey worth it. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, as long as you have it. 

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

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Jimmy Went To 'Nam

“The dead know only one thing…that it is better to be alive”

-Full Metal Jacket

“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” 
―The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

This happened a while ago. And I’ll never forget it.

It was a few years ago now…maybe 3 or 4. I was working for a dispatch phone sex service located in New Jersey. This meant that a secretary would call me at my home in Toronto, and tell me what the caller wanted ahead of time. I had 6 characters (college age white girl, black girl, Asian girl, transsexual, MILF, dominatrix) they assigned me when I got hired to pick from. I’d pick the character, and the secretary, after processing the clients credit card information, would patch me through. All the secretaries had accents and sounded like Janine from “Ghostbusters”, like they were shouting through their noses from across a football field. 

One fateful day, I got a call, as one does while working a phone sex line. I was living in a shitty, dirty, room in a run down party house with a bunch of people who hated me. I was a hard core agoraphobic and my cat was my best friend. I had become a phone sex worker after being inspired by watching Spike Lee’s “Girl 6”. 

The dispatcher told me that the caller wanted me to be a young buxom blonde who was sexy and bubbly and talkative and fun loving. I thought that the caller wanted a vapid party girl, some hair flipping, giggly airhead. 

I was, like I so often am, terribly wrong. The callers name was Jimmy. He was maybe in his late 50’s or early 60’s, and he didn’t want a giggly airhead.

Jimmy had served 4 tours of duty in the Vietnam War. That comes to roughly 4 and a half years of time in combat. 

I’m from Canada, so, until Jimmy, I had only ever met a Vietnam vet once, in Detroit. He was a homeless man with a dope vintage coat that I had the exact replica of at home (take that, style). 

The Vietnam War is a faraway thing for me, it’s a time and place that is totally constructed from movies of varying quality, CCR and Time photojournalism. 

Jimmy had been drafted. He grew up on a farm, and had the extreme misfortune of being young, male, and able bodied at a time when the country he was born in was willing to throw him to the dense jungles and the merciless Viet Cong.

No one, especially in hindsight could have blamed these men for draft dodging, but, I was assured by Jimmy that this wasn’t an option. The shame of fleeing was intense, both for the men and their families…especially when so many young men came home in coffins. It was deeply dishonourable, and better to die for an unjust war than run.

So Jimmy went to ‘Nam. Jimmy went and fucked every whore in sight. He, along with his fellow soldiers, fucked as only doomed men could fuck.

Jimmy caught the clap more times than he could remember. The treatment for the clap was something he referred to as a “router treatment” that seemed to involve snaking a tube into the urethra. It was deeply unpleasant. His squad leader kept asking him why he wouldn’t just use the condoms that were issued to all soldiers. Jimmy said that no one used the condoms that they were issued, except on their feet. The condoms kept their feet dry in the oft wet jungles, and everyone feared trench foot the most. The clap was fine, but trench foot was truly the worst. 

Jimmy was proud to say that he left Vietnam with perfect feet. 

There were constant rumours about “The Black Clap” a version of the STD that made your dick rot off. If you caught the Black Clap, the legend claimed, you would never be allowed to go home. You’d be be sent to a sort of leper colony for the dickless and brave. 

The Black Clap has always been a military rumour, but Jimmy and his soldiers didn’t know and didn’t seem to care. 

I asked Jimmy once, out of the blue, if he had ever burnt down a village. 

He told me, quietly, that yes, he had. I asked him why. He told me because he was ordered to. That’s all it was, orders. So, Jimmy and his platoon burnt villages, killed the livestock of the people who lived there, yelled, and brought angry aimless terror to people of the land they were sent to save from the horrors of communism. 

Jimmy learned Vietnamese when he was a soldier, but he couldn’t remember it now. He was never sure if he even really understood it back than, or if it was some made up bastardized version of the local tongue filtered through the chaos of combat. 

Jimmy smoked a lot of weed back than, which, on the one hand eased the anxiety that comes from knowing that you could potentially get stalked and killed by a Viet Cong at any given moment, but on the other hand greatly increased your chances of being stalked and killed by a Viet Cong at any given moment. 

When his time with the army was over, Jimmy went back to the U.S, to sunny California. He walked into a bar the day he came back, and met a buxom blonde. She was the first person he talked to when he came back home. They got married. She was the love of his life. 

A little over ten years before Jimmy called me, his wife died of cancer. They didn’t have children, only each other. 

Jimmy had taken to calling phone sex services. He called my service looking for someone who sounded like her. I was the one he chose. 

He would talk to me, but than he would talk to her too. He would reminisce with her. He would ask me, “do you remember this…?” And I would say, “yes, of course.” And we’d laugh together like we were sharing a memory. 

He never cried. He never got upset. He was just happy to talk to her. 

The first time I realized what he was doing, I cried when I got off the phone with him. I cried because it was so sad, and so moving to me that he had found a way to soothe his grief. 

At the time, I was feeling the effects of the rape I had experienced, and have written about in previous blogs. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing the effects of PTSD, which is something Jimmy and I had in common, unbeknownst to me. 

PTSD is what happens to you when you encounter a malevolence that you are not prepared for. We all know that evil exists. It’s another thing to have evil find you specifically and try to destroy you. When evil is no longer an abstract thought and becomes a reality that you are experiencing, it changes you on a molecular level. It’s so shattering that it can be difficult to reconfigure yourself and your relationship with the world around you, or even with yourself. 

This is why soldiers can have such a time reentering society. They have just come from the hellscape of the battle field, and now they are expected to leave that behind and resume living alongside people for whom the battlefield is just an abstraction. Good luck with that. 

I was a really shitty person when Jimmy called me. I’m not going to blame my trauma entirely for this, because I chose to become shitty in some ways. Talking to Jimmy was the nicest thing I did for anyone. And, I was getting paid for it, it wasn’t something I was doing altruistically. I just happened to sound like his dead wife. 

I doubt I really even sounded like her at all. I bet I was just good to talk to for Jimmy. It was just coincidence. 

Around this time, something else happened that changed me. I was out one day, taking my daily, quick, paranoid trip to the store. I was waiting for a light to change when I heard a woman’s voice saying “excuse me?”.

I turned, and saw a woman a few feet away from me, and saw she was holding a laser stick. People could hear her, and were walking right past her. I sidled up to her and asked if I could help her. She needed help crossing the street to get to the streetcar stop. I took her arm and helped her. Her eyes were very clouded and sunken in. I would guess that she was born blind. She smelt nice and her skin was soft. She needed help, but there was nothing to pity about her. She had no sight, but she was still living her life more fully than I was. 

It wasn’t some grand humanitarian gesture, but, it was the nicest thing I had done in the longest time. It gave me a glimpse into a side of myself that I could let live if I really wanted to. 

Vietnam’s history is a treacherous one. Colonized by the French for over 80 years, they fought for a decade to expel them (along with the Imperial Japanese), only to face a 20 year war that saw their land and their people literally raped and terrorized by foreign armies and their own country men. Agent Orange was dumped upon their lush lands and a 12 million gallons of the dioxin, an extremely toxic biological weapon, was placed into their soil and the DNA of all that were exposed to it, causing decades of mutations and environmental issues. 

Despite this legacy, as well as the adjacent tyrannical rule of Pol Pot in Cambodia, a country that hugs the borders of Vietnam, for 20 years, Vietnam has rebuilt itself. The North and South were reunified following the Vietnam War. It has diplomatic relations with almost every country in the world, belongs to the WTO and the United Nations, and is one of the world’s fastest growing economic centres, and poverty rates have been reduced significantly since reforms were introduced in the 80’s. No small feat for a country that is only one of four one party socialist states in the entire world.

Unfortunate sons got shipped off to a war in a country where they put a toxin into the land that ruined the soil and made the natives babies come out twisted like monsters. But those people put businesses on that haunted land and made money and created lives for themselves regardless. They would not be defied by those events of the past. By those pictures frozen in time on the covers of magazines. They would not let that be them forever. That might be the Western world’s image of them, but it is not the image that they have of themselves. They saw a future, and showed the world what they could see. 

Maybe that is why Jimmy was always so happy when he spoke to me. He could see something I couldn’t. He was a smart guy, he was a fan of science. Maybe all I could see was a man who had suffered tragedy, but he could see himself differently. Maybe he could see his whole life inside his own mind’s eye and knew about infinity and the parallel universes of the past, present and future and  he could see her, alive, at some point in time, and time stretches,  and he found a way to save her from time itself and brought her back to where he is now, and so she really was here, with him, and he knew she would never die as long as he was alive and could remember her. He could always jump back and save her and they could always be together in some sort of way. 

How could anyone ever be sad when they can do something like that?

"“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.” 

-The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien