Choke Read Free Page A

tales.
    We’re all here. Alive and unwell.
    This is the twelve-step world of sexual addiction. Compulsive sexual behavior. Every night of the week, they meet in the back room of some church. In some community center conference room. Every night, in every city. You even have virtual meetings on the Internet.
    My best friend, Denny, I met him at a sexaholics meeting. Denny had got up to the point where he needed to masturbate fifteen times a day just to break even. Anymore, he could barely make a fist, and he was worried about what all that petroleum jelly might do to him, long term.
    He’d considered changing to some lotion, but anything made to soften skin seemed to be counterproductive.
    Denny and all these men and women you think are so horribleor funny or pathetic, here’s where they all let their hair down. This is where we all go to open up.
    Here are prostitutes and sex criminals out on a three-hour release from their minimum-security jail, elbow to elbow with women who love gang bangs and men who give head in adult bookstores. The hooker reunites with the john here. The molester faces the molested.
    Nico brings her big white ass almost to the top of my dog and bangs herself down. Up and then down. Riding her guts tight around the length of me. Pistoning up and then slamming down. Pushing off against my thighs, the muscles in her arms get bigger and bigger. My thighs under each of her hands go numb and white.
    “Now that we know each other,” I say, “Nico? Would you say you liked me?”
    She turns to look back over her shoulder at me, “When you’re a doctor, you’ll be able to write prescriptions for anything, right?”
    That’s if I ever go back to school. Never underestimate the power of a medical degree for getting you laid. I bring my hands up, each hand open against the stretched smooth underside of each thigh. To help lift her, I figure, and she twines her cool soft fingers through mine.
    Sleeved tight around my dog, without looking back, she says, “My friends bet me money that you’re already married.”
    I hold her smooth white ass in my hands.
    “How much?” I say.
    I tell Nico that her friends might be right.
    The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don’t know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.
    In the modern Oedipal story, it’s the mother who kills the father and then takes the son.
    And it’s not as if you can divorce your mother.
    Or kill her.
    And Nico says, “What do you mean
all the other women?
Jeez, how many are we talking about?” She says, “I’m glad we used a rubber.”
    For a complete list of sexual partners, I’d have to check my fourth step. My moral inventory notebook. The complete and relentless history of my addiction.
    That’s if I ever go back and complete the damn step.
    For all those people in Room 234, working on their twelve steps in a sexaholics meeting is a valuable important tool for understanding and recovering from … well, you get the idea.
    For me, it’s a terrific how-to seminar. Tips. Techniques. Strategies for getting laid you never dreamed of. Personal contacts. When they tell their stories, these addict people are frigging brilliant. Plus there’s the jail girls out for their three hours of sex addict talk therapy.
    Nico included.
    Wednesday nights mean Nico. Friday nights mean Tanya. Sundays mean Leeza. Leeza sweats yellow with nicotine. You can almost put your hands around her waist since her abs are rock-hard from coughing. Tanya always smuggles in some rubber sex toy, usually a dildo or a string of latex beads. Some sexual equivalent of the prize in a box of cereal.
    The old rule about how a thing of beauty is a joy forever, in my experience, even the most beauteous thing is only a joy for about three hours, tops. After that, she’ll want to tell you all about her childhood traumas. Part of meeting these jail girls is it’s