.

 

Weekend: Avenue B

Meeting a woman and talking about getting taken from behind, and so on.

Saturday I met with a woman on her way back to Arizona after a lousy run in NYC, named Sue. She is a natural light blonde, well spoken, and very sharp and well dressed; she weighs about twenty-nine pounds and peers out at the world with bright, searing eyes.

When men come to the East from the Southwest or California, they often ask, shocked, "are all the women on the seaboard brutes with mustaches?" These men were trained on women like my friend, thin women who look like sunflowers. The men speak to those women at barbecues and car shows, and in the parking lots at massive organized sports events, then come to New York or Philadelphia, to witness our softer, pasty bodies, raised in lamplight on saltwater, dressed in grays. The mens' muscular hearts sink.

On a coffee shop on Avenue B, Sue described her last boss, a powerful senior executive at a massive advertising firm, a woman who never leaves the office or refuses a phone call. My friend said, "I thought about it, and you know what she needs to be better as a manager?"

I looked across the table. I was drinking an herbal tea, because I've stopped drinking most caffeine, and ordering decaf at 24 opens me to mockery. Sue sipped from a glass half her height filled with milk, sugar, and a few ounces of brownish coffee.

"A sense of compassion?" I said.

"That too, but this woman needs fucked. She needs a man to come into the office, bend her over her walnut desk, and fuck her skull out. Until there's nothing but a stain."

I thought about this. "Would she stop working, even for a moment?"

"No," said my friend.

"So it would be like this?" I asked, and began to smack the back of my hand while pushing my face forward, simulating being taken hard from behind. "I'll--smack--have--smack--to--smack--call--smack--you--smack--back."

She giggled. "Yes. Just bent over and reamed, by a muscular guy. You could arrange for it, and she would suddenly be chirpy and cheerful and you'd know they'd sent the guy over and he'd done his job. She might even be a good boss." Sue thought for a moment. "Maybe I could start a clinic."

"Women with powerful careers but no time for love come in," I said, "and look through one-way glass at men lifting weights, and get their pick. It would be very empowering."

"There are some rooms," said my friend, "where they enter and the men come in and--" She began to smack herself in the head, like I had. "Than you God--smack--I'll be a better boss now--smack."

People in the shop looked over at her.

She thought for another minute, then said, "There's money in it, I could start a business. I have business smarts. I'd love to be a..." She considered the word. "Procurer."

"All those women are here, not in Arizona."

"No, to hell with this city," Sue replied. "My ticket is for Thursday."


[Top]

Ftrain.com

PEEK

Ftrain.com is the website of Paul Ford and his pseudonyms. It is showing its age. I'm rewriting the code but it's taking some time.

FACEBOOK

There is a Facebook group.

TWITTER

You will regret following me on Twitter here.

EMAIL

Enter your email address:

A TinyLetter Email Newsletter

About the author: I've been running this website from 1997. For a living I write stories and essays, program computers, edit things, and help people launch online publications. (LinkedIn). I wrote a novel. I was an editor at Harper's Magazine for five years; then I was a Contributing Editor; now I am a free agent. I was also on NPR's All Things Considered for a while. I still write for The Morning News, and some other places.

If you have any questions for me, I am very accessible by email. You can email me at ford@ftrain.com and ask me things and I will try to answer. Especially if you want to clarify something or write something critical. I am glad to clarify things so that you can disagree more effectively.

POKE


Syndicate: RSS1.0, RSS2.0
Links: RSS1.0, RSS2.0

Contact

© 1974-2011 Paul Ford

Recent

@20, by Paul Ford. Not any kind of eulogy, thanks. And no header image, either. (October 15)

Recent Offsite Work: Code and Prose. As a hobby I write. (January 14)

Rotary Dial. (August 21)

10 Timeframes. (June 20)

Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out. (April 10)

Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red Valley. (April 7)

Welcome to the Company. (September 21)

“Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?”. Forgot to tell you about this. (July 20)

“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. An essay for TheMorningNews.org. (July 11)

Woods+. People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing? You're a nerd. Explain it immediately. (July 10)

Reading Tonight. Reading! (May 25)

Recorded Entertainment #2, by Paul Ford. (May 18)

Recorded Entertainment #1, by Paul Ford. (May 17)

Nanolaw with Daughter. Why privacy mattered. (May 16)

0h30m w/Photoshop, by Paul Ford. It's immediately clear to me now that I'm writing again that I need to come up with some new forms in order to have fun here—so that I can get a rhythm and know what I'm doing. One thing that works for me are time limits; pencils up, pencils down. So: Fridays, write for 30 minutes; edit for 20 minutes max; and go whip up some images if necessary, like the big crappy hand below that's all meaningful and evocative because it's retro and zoomed-in. Post it, and leave it alone. Can I do that every Friday? Yes! Will I? Maybe! But I crave that simple continuity. For today, for absolutely no reason other than that it came unbidden into my brain, the subject will be Photoshop. (Do we have a process? We have a process. It is 11:39 and...) (May 13)

That Shaggy Feeling. Soon, orphans. (May 12)

Antilunchism, by Paul Ford. Snack trams. (May 11)

Tickler File Forever, by Paul Ford. I'll have no one to blame but future me. (May 10)

Time's Inverted Index, by Paul Ford. (1) When robots write history we can get in trouble with our past selves. (2) Search-generated, "false" chrestomathies and the historical fallacy. (May 9)

Bantha Tracks. (May 5)

More...
Tables of Contents