After the whole sabbatical thing in Sedona, after the beautiful Ukrainian girl evaporated like a good dream, I was lost. I got back on the dating apps, and it was a goddamn desert. The Ukrainian had set the bar so high, so sexy, so beautifully broken, that everything else paled in comparison. I thought maybe I’d missed my last real chance at something that wasn’t completely rotten.
Then, scrolling through the usual gallery of sad-eyed single mothers and sun-damaged divorcees, I reached into Prescott. And there she was. An absolutely beautiful Filipina woman. Way younger. I thought, what the hell, just for poops and giggles. Let’s see if the old man still has it.
I was aggressive in my approach, like I didn’t give a damn, like I had nothing to lose. But there was a charm to it, a kind of honesty. I made her laugh, and that became the center of the whole goddamn performance. The more we talked, the more I wanted to win her over. That old, stupid part of me, the one who still wants to win, he just kept stirring the pot. Back and forth, back and forth. And yeah, the old man still had it.
I finally got her to meet me. And my God, she was a little hotty. You could tell all the local cowboys were lined up, waiting for their turn to ride this not-yet-divorced philly.
We walked around the courthouse square in Prescott, the same place where Billy Jack kicked the shit out of all those rednecks in the movie. The whole town felt like it was still stuck in 1955. We ended up at a brewery. She liked that I was taking care of her, that I was listening to her story.
And Christ, what a story it was.
Apparently, she’d been a real prize back in the Philippines. The kind of girl men write bad poems about. And then, one day, a fat American sailor washed ashore and saw her. He did what fat, lonely American sailors do: he bought her things, gave her attention, tried to purchase a piece of her time.
She was disgusted by him, she said. But she played along for a while, until she finally had to be honest. “You too fat,” she told him. “Me no interested.” A clean, simple, brutal body-shaming.
She figured that was the end of it. But the poor, love-struck bastard, he got it in his head that he could earn her. He went back out to sea and worked out three times a day. Lost all the fat. Came back to the Philippines four months later, all muscles and handsome, a sculpted monument to his own desperation. He’d transformed his body for her.
And with that, he won her over. In his short stay, she finally opened her legs for him. Five minutes, she said. For him, it was the best five minutes of his life. He was star-struck, convinced he was in love. He asked her to marry him, to come to the United States.
It was the Golden Ticket. The one she’d been waiting for.
So they moved this beautiful, tropical flower to Prescott, Arizona. A redneck, jack-booted shithole of a town, known for its biker bar, Whiskey Row, and a collection of other dives filled with off-duty alcoholics and guys with fried turkey legs for brains. A very white, very small world that isolated her completely. He ran a carpet store he’d inherited from his parents.
He got her pregnant. Twice. The result? The two ugliest goddamn boys I’ve ever seen. They looked just like him.
And of course, it didn’t take long for the muscles to disappear and the fat to come creeping back. And then, she said, he couldn’t perform anymore. His penis had gotten lost somewhere in the soft, doughy flabs of his new, comfortable life.
So there she was, playing the part of the stay-at-home trophy wife. Trapped. Trapped with two ugly kids she had to pretend to love, and a fat, impotent husband whose dick had long since surrendered to a life of quiet desperation. A mountain of pure, animal sexual tension was building inside her, and the hormones, Christ, the hormones were a hell of a lot stronger than the bullshit vows she’d made in some forgotten church.
She knew she didn’t want to be there anymore. So she started cheating, of course. A red-headed cowboy, a couple of other rotten lovers she’d fished out of the local redneck gene pool. When the fat man finally found out, he did the only thing a man with no balls can do: he kicked her out of the house.
And that’s when I found her. Desperate. Not just for money, but for something more. Desperate for a man who could pay the bills, and desperate for a man who could remind her she was still a woman and not just a goddamn zookeeper in a suburban prison.
Maybe a little bit of both.
And at that particular junction in my life, I was capable of both.
We’d go back to her place in Prescott. It wasn’t even a one-bedroom; it was a sad little studio, a shithole with no place to cook, furnished with a few milk carton containers and a single twin bed that I had to fold my six-foot-four frame onto like a goddamn praying mantis. She’d gotten a job as a cafeteria girl at a nursing home, slinging slop for the nearly dead.
I’d watch her get ready for her shift, naked in front of me. I’d wait until she was all dressed up in that sad, pathetic uniform, a soldier getting ready for a war she’d already lost. And then, right before she left, I’d come up from behind, pull her uniform pants down, and have my way with her right there, standing up. A quick, hard, joyless reminder of who was in charge. It was the start of a submissive little game she seemed to enjoy, or at least accommodate.
When it was over, I’d leave a hundred-dollar bill on the counter.
She needed the cash, and I lived forty minutes away. She called it prostitution once, with a little smirk on her face.
But she never gave back the money.
Then I brought her back to my place in Sedona for a sleepover. I couldn’t talk her into moving in with me; she always had to be close to those damn ugly kids of hers. But I’d get her for a couple of days at a time. That was the deal.
I’d cook her my Thai chicken, the spicy kind that makes your eyes water and reminds you you’re still alive. I’d wine and dine her, pouring the good stuff, and then I’d pretty much molest every inch of her body, repeatedly, several times a day. It was a kind of desperate, hungry work.
I took her up my social trail, Baldwin Butte, to the very top of the world. She got overly drunk on cheap wine, almost fell off a goddamn cliff trying to find a place to piss. You could see the desperation in her, the hunger for some kind of adventure, any kind, to make her forget the sad little life she was living back in Prescott. We made love out in the open, on top of that rock, with the whole damn world spread out below us like a dirty map. I wouldn’t call it love. But we had our moments. She told me this was what she wanted. All of it.
And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the hell I was going to make it work, not with my own plans of moving to Scottsdale already in motion. But that’s how good she was at playing the part. She was so good that I was actually thinking of taking her along with me.
Not in any real, meaningful, love-and-forever kind of way. No. But she let me train her. She let me mold her into this perfect, submissive lover, this beautiful woman who existed only for my pleasure. And I was hooked on the idea of having her in my life every day.
Like a toy. A perfect, beautiful, broken toy that I could play with until I got bored and decided to find a new one.
Eventually, it was time for me to move to Scottsdale. I tried to talk her into coming with me, but she played the mother card, said she had to be by those kids.
“Fine,” I said. “Fine.”
It wasn’t heartbreak. It was just a quiet, nagging irritation that my own brand of manipulation hadn’t worked this time. So I had to let her go. Cut the line.
But she kept in contact, of course. They always do. I’d been in Scottsdale for about three months when the phone rings. It’s her. She’s in town.
And the reason she’s in town? Some new guy, her new boyfriend, had helped her fix her truck. A real knight in shining armor. And now she was driving all the way down from that Prescott shithole to give him his reward: a “lovely night.”
The whole damn world is just a series of transactions, isn’t it? One man fixes the truck, another one gets the call. A beautiful, rotten, and perfectly balanced economy.
I wasn’t irritated. Not at all. A man gets to my age, he understands the basic, ugly math of the world. It always boils down to survival and money. She needed her truck fixed, so she found a man to fix it. A simple transaction.
But I also knew she was still addicted to my particular brand of poison. I knew she missed the long, ugly, beautiful dances we used to have in the bedroom.
So I joked, my voice all gravel and amusement. “You’re not going to see him first,” I said. “You’re coming here.” A demand disguised as a joke.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, a little pocket of silence where she was doing her own calculations.
“Yes,” she said, her voice quiet.
“I’ll only take you for a little while,” I told her, “before you have to go meet your boyfriend.”
Another pause. “Yes.”
I gave her the address. I figured it was just phone role-playing, a little bit of dirty talk to pass the time. I hung up, chuckling at the whole goddamn thing.
And then, an hour later, lo and behold, there was a knock on my door.
We played that game about five more times. It became a ritual. Every time she’d drive down to Scottsdale to see her boyfriend, she’d make a pit stop at my place first. An hour, sometimes longer, depending on how much of a hurry he was in.
Her boyfriend would start calling, his voice all tinny and impatient through the phone, whining about their goddamn dinner reservations. I was making them late. One time, I had her answer it while I was still inside her. Had her talk to him, tell him she was “running a little behind,” her voice all breathless. That was a special kind of twisted, a perverted little dream I didn’t even know I had.
But games like that, they get old. Eventually, I found other broken toys to play my mind games with. And I guess her boyfriend got tired of paying all the bills for a woman who was giving away the merchandise for free down the road. And she, of course, would never leave those damn ugly kids.
In the back of my head, I knew the truth of it. Once a cheater, always a cheater. It’s a brand, burned right into the soul.
So I eventually took off, moved to another town, moved on to other women, other messes. We still keep in touch, of course. A “like” on an Instagram photo, a happy birthday on Facebook. The usual electronic ghosts you collect when you’re too much of a coward to just let the dead stay buried.
She’d say hello sometimes, a little ghost on Instagram, a flicker from a life I’d already buried. And you could see, right there in the glossy, filtered pictures, that she’d found herself a new man. A white boy with retired money, the kind of guy who was going to take her in his big, dumb RV to “see the world.”
I saw a picture of them once on this tandem bicycle, a goddamn tricycle for two. They had on matching outfits, matching helmets. It was the most disgusting, passionless, suburban thing I’d ever seen. But I have to admit, she looked happy. Or at least, she was playing the part well. My own hard, handsome looks kind of matched his, but she, with her soft, beautiful skin… it just clashed. It was a picture of two different worlds colliding, and one of them was getting eaten alive.
She got married. Sent me a message. She was excited, she said, that I used to be a Mormon, because now, she was a Mormon. We started talking about temple callings and ceilings, all that holy bullshit. Then she confided in me that her new husband wasn’t always that committed, that she was worried they weren’t going to make it. The same old story, just with a different god watching over the wreckage. I fed her some line about the Lord having his ways, told her not to worry, and then ended the hour-long texting session by using a clean nylon sock to remember the wild, beautiful, godless version of her that was now dead and gone.
She popped up on my Instagram feed today. Still a beautiful woman, in a way. A rounder face, a little more weight on her. She looks like a mom now. They’ve managed to scrub all the raw, honest sex right out of her. She still looks the same, but nothing’s really changed, has it? All her pictures now are taken outside a Mormon church. Lord. All her outfits are buttoned up to her neck, covering her arms, hiding the holy temple garments.
The kids? They never grew out of their ugliness. And her new husband, he just stands there in the pictures, looking blessed and completely neutered.
The illusion of happiness was strong. You could almost smell the fresh-cut lawn and the quiet, simmering desperation right through the phone.
I take a deep breath, the kind you take before you dive into a dirty memory. And I just think about her. The woman from Prescott.
She was a goddamn force of nature once. A sex goddess, a submissive creature who loved every dirty orifice of her body to be explored. For a little while, she was the one who could physically replace the beautiful Ukrainian ghost. I could never love her, not really. But Christ, she was alive.
And now? She’s been converted. She’s traded her wild, beautiful, honest sexuality for the safe, quiet, boring promise of a Mormon heaven. The excitement of her life, that raw fire, it’s been surrendered. What she was once is no more.
It’s like finding a hot, red Ferrari, the kind that begs to be driven hard and fast, and then just putting it up on blocks in a dark garage, letting the tires go flat and the engine turn to rust.
What a goddamn waste of good meat.
