Chapter 51 Attention

Is this thing on? Ok. Strange, I don’t normally get to see myself on video. It doesn’t really look like me. So, anyway, let me read this so that I get it right. I am subject 103. I’m male, 57 years old, 5′ 11″, 211 lbs, heterosexual and widowed. I confirm that I am taking part in this sociology study of my own free will and that the material in this tape can be used anonymously for academic research. Your advert said that you wanted to hear from people with strong sexual preferences; well, I have one of those. These days it’s my only sexual preference. This is hard to say, even to a camera. I like hand-jobs from whores. I know how that sounds: selfish and pathetic but that doesn’t stop it from being true. It’s not all that’s true. I used to enjoy making love with my wife. But that was as much about the love as the sex. And even then, if I’m really honest, fucking never matched the gob-smacking impact of a good hand job. My dad bought me my first one the week that I started as a conductor on the buses, back in 1967. “One good job deserves another,” he’d said. Then he’d added, “And say nowt to your mother.” Like I was going to go home and say, “Mam, you’ll never guess what me and Dad did today.” Daft pillock. My first time wasn’t a very sophisticated affair. Back then it was called getting a hand-shandy. I got mine from a blousy woman who smelled of beer and fags and who wore enough make-up to paint the Queen Mary. I sat beside her in the pub on the Dock Road with me Dad sitting opposite me, while she tossed me off with one hand under the table and supped her half of stout with the other. I sat there trying to look like nothing was happening while all the while I wanted to shout and groan and swear. It didn’t take long but it was long enough for me to know that I wanted more. I know everyone thinks that the Sixties were swinging but round our way there was no such thing as free love – you paid up front. It put a dint in my pay packet but it kept a smile on my face. I may have been ignorant but I wasn’t stupid. I’d seen mates pay and get the clap. I didn’t want to wear a rubber – it was like wearing Wellington Boots back then – so I got into the habit of hand-jobs. ’Course, nowadays it’s all blow jobs and that, but this was years before Linda Lovelace showed how deep her throat was. And besides, most of these girls, you wouldn’t want to go near their mouths; you know where they’ve been. I got tired of the buses after a year or two and did a spell in the Fleet Air Arm on the Ark Royal based mostly out of Malta. I was on joint Brit/Yank shore patrol, in the Gut in Valletta, cleaning up the mess when things got ugly. I saw a thing or two that taught me to keep it in my pants unless I knew I was in safe hands so to speak. Before Malta, I thought brothels were like saloons in the Westerns, something grand but tacky, not some crumbling dive filled with drunk sailors and young women with old eyes. I came home in ’73 and courted Patricia Mahon, a nice girl who’d lived down our alley since she was a kid. The third time we went out together I took her to the Gaumont to see “Don’t Look Now” because she’d said she liked ghost stories. We sat in the big seats in the back, where it was dark and we could cuddle. I’d expected a bit of kissing and that but nothing more. Except it turned out that the movie was quite sexy and Patricia Mahon, while still being a nice girl, had learnt another use for the handkerchief the nuns had made her carry at school. While Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland where at it on the screen, I was getting the most exciting hand-job of my life in the back row of the cinema. Patricia and I never spoke about sex. Not even after we were married. We just did it a lot. Then we had the kids and we did it less. Then she got ill. The thing is, even when she was ill I’d get hard. My cock has no conscience but I do. I was celibate a long time. After my wife died of the cancer, I knew there’d never be anyone else. At least no one I wanted. And I knew I’d get sad and twisted without a woman’s touch. So, when things got tough, I went back to the whores. Of course it’s all changed now. The girls don’t hang ’round saying “fancy a nice time, Deary” any more. These days the whores have websites with photos and lists of services and how much everything will cost. I prefer older whores. I’d not want some slip of a girl, young enough to be me daughter, touching me like that. And I like them to be English. Not that I’m prejudiced or anything, but you read about how some of these girls from Russia and Thailand and the like are here against their will and I don’t want that on my conscience. I shopped around a bit in the beginning but nowadays I go to the same few girls when I’m in the mood. They know what I want and they don’t make a fuss. One of them even makes a decent cup of tea. Still, it’s not the tea you want to know about, is it? You want to know about the sex. Well, there’s not much to tell, really.