MY FRIEND, THE GENTLEMAN SHOPPERJonathan Ames I have this friend who every couple of months calls me up around two a.m. and says, “Alexander, do you want to go shopping?” He says it like that to hide what he really means, which is: “Alexander, do you want to come with me and search for the whores who line the dark side streets near the Lincoln Tunnel?” He’s usually embarrassed when he makes these calls, because after every time we do it he swears that he will never go with a whore again. But every couple of months the phone rings late at night and I know it’s him. He can’t stay away, he loves the thrill of shopping too much. He says that with all the whores on the street that he feels like he’s in a candy store or toy department of women. And he is very kind to the whores he carefully chooses and likes to make small talk and offer them tissues to wipe their mouths after they’re done. I know he does that because I’ve been in the back seat and he’s even offered tissues to my whores. One time when we went out, before they started using condoms, his whore wagged her head no to the offer of the tissue and instead leaned across him and spit his sperm out his open window. She got out of the car and he sat there in shock. 1 couldn’t think of anything to say to comfort him and after a while we drove away. I turned around, looked out the back window, and saw a truck pass over the splotch in the road that was his sperm. I thought of it being in the tire’s tread and being carried far out into New Jersey and beyond, spread over highways everywhere, his DNA merging with the dashed lines of the Jersey Turnpike. |