Good Vibrations Magazine

I must confess to a deception. Not one of gravity but a deceit none-the-less. I am not the true author of these essays.

Though I wish I could claim the sheer audacity of thought, the words you have been enjoying have been those of one John Thursday. You will find his picture below.

I first made his acquaintance while staying in the Hotel de Seine on the Rue de Seine waiting for money to come in to make a motion picture. The investor had become elusive. I spent the days sitting in my room waiting for the phone to ring or walking the streets of Paris in the role of flaneur.

I heard his voice before ever meeting him. He was walking down the stairs of the hotel singing his own words to the tune of “My Favorite Things”.

Kisses on nipples
And knowing what loose is
Blowjobs with whipped cream
Girls squirting their juices
The pastor’s sweet daughter all tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

I popped my head out of my room but all I saw was a hat disappearing to the floor below.

A few days later I encountered him whistling the same song. He had his back to me, hands in his pockets, sauntering. The same tune echoed down a narrow alley, dark as twilight though it was mid-day.

I gave chase, following him through an unmarked door, down a dank staircase to a makeshift bar in a lost part of the city’s sewers.

At one of the concrete tables sat a gypsy woman of such unparalleled beauty I stood entranced. How paralyzed I become when faced with the thing I want.

But not John Thursday, he walked up to the gypsy woman, unzipped his fly, and placed his prick right into her drink.  “Pardon me,” he said. “I’m a bit thirsty.”

The gypsy woman looked at him then back to her glass. She reached her fingers underneath, pulled his Johnson from her drink and placed it in her mouth. “Tastes like gin,” she said.

He smiled, zipped himself back up, and with a tip of his hat turned back to me. “Works every time.”

He was a man who cared nothing for civility or propriety. I admired him.

I didn’t see him again until one night walking along cobblestones. The street-level windows were all shuttered except for one where a sliver of light came through. I stopped and peered in.

There was a man and a woman naked and vigorous on torn sheets. I turned away when what should I hear but:

Moms in black corsets with blue satin sashes
Aunty’s that punish with ten leather lashes

“What’s going on in there?” he asked and pulled off his hat to get his face closer to the shutters. “Oh how now, would you look at that. Looks like our man has some skills.”

My sense of decorum nearly had me blush. John Thursday pushed his head harder against the shutters

“That’s right my man, keep giving it to her. You’re almost there. Slower, slower, wait for it, wait for it, and…..scene.” I swear he wiped his brow and exhaled.

Girls in short dresses come out in the spring
These are a few of my favorite things

”Where were you going?” he asked me.

“I was giving them their privacy.”

“If they had wanted that they would have closed their shutters.”

I must have rolled my eyes cause he said, “Oh, drop your bourgeois pretensions. Let me guess, you only honor love, the sex part well… But you’ve missed the bridge. I am interested in eroticism.

“And eroticism is, above all else, exclusively human: it is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination. The erotic is not just animal sexuality; it is ceremony. It is sexuality as metaphor.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah, don’t be too impressed. I stole that whole thing from Octavio Paz. But I believe it. And I’ll tell you something else I stole from him. Sexuality, the original, primordial fire, raises the red flame of eroticism, and this in turn raises another flame, tremulous and blue: the flame of love.

“You’re skipping steps. You have to go through eroticism if you want to get to love.”

A week later I was standing against the railing of my huge open window when I saw a woman walk by in an apartment across the way. She appeared to be dancing. She noticed I was watching her.

She pushed her window open and gave a coquettish wave. I waved back. Then she danced a little for me. I danced back. She laughed. She blew a kiss. She danced then pulled the hem of her little black dress up exposing her upper thigh to me.

Ah, I thought, this is Paris. She called out her name. I missed it but called out mine as well. She smiled. Then, all at once, the woman lifted her dress and showed me all of her treasures. I was in love.

She waved for me to come over to her building. I dashed into the street and waited outside for her to come open the large door leading to the building’s courtyard. The woman found my haste amusing.

She was older than she had seemed from across the way, and sexy, with light red hair and swish to her walk accentuated by the little black dress. I was tensing with anticipation.

As she walked she placed her hand on her chest and said in a thick accent, “I am Cara.”

“I’m Judah.”

“No,” she shook her head. “Callga.”

“Callga,” I said.

She shook her head with annoyance this time and leaned back against the dirty wall. “I am call girl.”

“Ohhhhh,” I said and with ten thousand bourgeois apologies excused myself. I mean, how could I pay for sex? I didn’t need to pay for it. Hell, I couldn’t even afford it. And I wasn’t about to exploit her like that.

And who should be there on the street as I exited but John Thursday.

“What happened?”

“She’s a call girl,” I said, as if that explained everything.

John Thursday smacked me across the face, pushed the door of the apartment building open and disappeared down the tunnel calling, “Mademoiselle! Mon Cheri!”

Back at my window I could see him in the apartment. I wished to be him. And seeing me sitting there, the old call girl disappearing below the window sill, old John Thursday belted out some more of his tune.

When her jaw bites
When my knees sting
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad.