There’s a certain kind of loneliness that festers when you move to a new shithole. I’d just landed in Scottsdale, fresh out of the Sedona fog, and the quiet was starting to get too loud again. I had a “partner in crime,” sure, but she was an on-again, off-again affair, a beautiful, unreliable engine that was usually in the shop. I was living in a nice little two-bedroom condo down by McCormick Ranch, right next to the pool, a perfect, respectable cage for a man who was quietly going insane.
And in that quiet, sun-baked boredom, a little perversion started to bloom. A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest little flower of an idea. Craigslist. Under “Health and Services.”
The ad was a masterpiece of subtle depravity. “Discreet massage for women,” it read. “Experienced hands. Relax and unwind.” A few other pieces of quiet, professional-sounding bullshit. And then the hook: “Send your age in the subject line. Picture required.”
Christ. The response was a goddamn flood. The kitty cats came crawling out of the woodwork. My inbox filled up with subject lines that were just numbers – 35, 42, 28, 51 – and attachments. One by one, I’d open them up, like a lonely pervert unwrapping his Christmas presents. And you could see it in their eyes, even in the shitty, low-res photos. Somebody’s wife. Somebody’s girlfriend. Somebody just… lonely. A whole goddamn digital catalog of quiet desperation.
So I pulled the trigger. Bought a cheap, foldable massage table off Amazon for a hundred bucks, some smelly almond oil that promised “relaxation,” and I contacted the prettiest one of the bunch.
She was a cop. A goddamn police officer, training for some Miss Athletic Arizona pageant, some beautiful, sweaty meat market. Perfect.
She came over at night, after her workout. We were both nervous. You could smell the fear, mingled with the faint, honest scent of gym sweat. I played the part. Dim lights, maybe some shitty music. “Undress,” I told her. “Towel around you. Face down on the table.” The whole beautiful, phony ritual, just like in the movies.
And the next thing I knew, there was a beautiful, naked, and completely vulnerable female body lying on a cheap massage table in the middle of my living room.
And I gave her a great massage. I really did. I had this move, this “chakra massage” bullshit I’d cooked up. You work your way down from the neck, pushing all the blood, all the energy, all the quiet, desperate hope, down towards the core. Towards the delta. Elbows on the butt cheeks. Fingers tracing the quiet, electric lines of the inner thighs. Slow. Careful. Testing the boundaries. A quiet, beautiful, and completely dishonest negotiation conducted entirely in the language of touch.
Then the flip. Cover her eyes with a cloth. And there she is. The full frontal. A beautiful, terrifying, and completely honest landscape.
She let me do whatever I wanted. Her partner, the poor bastard, apparently wasn’t getting the job done. She became a regular. Eight, nine times. And yeah, eventually, the beautiful, messy, and completely predictable escalation happened. Off the table, into the bedroom. A quiet, necessary upgrade in the facilities.
She liked it so much, she gave me a referral. Not someone I could date, God no. But someone she wanted me to… service. Her lieutenant. Another cop. She came over, got the premium package. Two hours on the table. No bedroom needed. Just a long, slow, and completely exhausting session that left her a beautiful, twitching, and completely satisfied puddle. And as I watched her get dressed, I had a quiet, beautiful, and completely honest revelation: I didn’t want to date these women. I just wanted to own them for an hour or two. A clean, simple, and completely honest transaction. Hip lock property.
My little black book started to fill up. Repeat customers. A female sheriff, married, of course. A lonely swim instructor with sad eyes and a beautiful ass. Teachers, Christ, so many teachers, all of them wound tighter than a goddamn drum. A twenty-two-year-old girl, fresh off a breakup, looking for a different kind of healing. A little midget, maybe four-foot-ten, covered in jewelry and piercings and tattoos, a beautiful, angry little firecracker in her twenties.
The most unique one was Cassandra. She came over, and she looked like someone you could actually have a conversation with. After the hour was up, after the usual beautiful, ugly business, she looked up at me from the table and said, “Well, it’s not fair that you’re not taken care of.”
We never became lovers, not really. But there was a shift. An understanding. I saw her maybe ten, fifteen more times. Sometimes I’d go to her place. House calls. More convenient. More… intimate.
And one night, I’m at her house, and I see a picture on her entertainment center. And I recognize the background. “Oh my God,” I said. “You’re you. We chatted on Plenty of Fish when I was in Sedona.”
“That’s right!” she said, laughing. “We were supposed to go out when you came to Phoenix.”
A beautiful, hilarious, and completely insane little coincidence. The universe, that old, drunk bastard, he really does have a sense of humor. She was a little dark, though. A quiet, self-destructive streak. Dating some Brazilian asshole at the time. Eventually, she moved to Kansas and got married. Another beautiful train wreck heading down the tracks.
It wasn’t a huge operation, my little massage parlor. Fifteen clients, maybe. A quiet little side hustle. But managing the rotation, juggling the appointments while also trying to have a real dating life on the side… it got complicated. There were close calls. I remember one afternoon, I had a woman on the table, deep in the middle of a session, and there’s a knock on the door. Unexpected. Panic. I peek through the peephole, and it’s another client, showing up early, or on the wrong day, I don’t remember. “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” I whispered to the woman on the table. We scrambled into the bedroom, locked the door, and just waited, two naked, terrified animals, listening to the knocking, praying she’d just go away. A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest moment of pure, unadulterated farce.
So what’s the moral of this whole goddamn story?
We’re all perverts.
Yeah. That’s it. Underneath the clean shirts, the respectable jobs, the quiet, polite bullshit, we’re all just animals, looking for a warm body in the dark.
And maybe, just maybe, the ones who admit it, the ones who put the ad on Craigslist, maybe they’re the only honest ones left in the whole goddamn zoo.
You can judge me. You can call me a degenerate, a misogynist, a beautiful, ugly, and completely fucked-up piece of shit. Go ahead. But at least I’m honest about the game.
And besides… it was cheaper than dating. A hell of a lot cheaper.
