Repo Men by Eric Garcia Read Free Book Online Page B

mugs onto our table with practiced ease. Before she could read off our tab, I grabbed at her hand and somehow connected. Holding her delicate fingers between my meaty paws, I turned my bloodshot eyes up into her baby blues and asked, “Darling, sugar, honey—would you sleep with me?”
    “Only if you were the last guy on earth,” she said.
    “But then you would?”
    “Of course,” she said. “A girl’s got to have sex, too.”
    Given the right situation, I think I could have loved that woman.
     

    I have only loved six women in my life, including my mother, and I married five of them, excluding my mother. But I could have loved many more. The cashier at the Downtown Deli, that co-ed who walks her Saint Bernard past the building every morning at 9 A.M. , that sexy anchor-woman on channel 18 with the bob hairdo and pouty lips. I have a great capacity for love. I know this because that’s what my therapist told me the two times I agreed to attend marriage counseling with my fourth wife, Carol.
    “We got your tests back from the lab,” said the man with a degree on his wall and the cojones to charge me three hundred dollars an hour for butting in on me and my wife as we fought and bickered, “and I would say that you have a great capacity for love.”
    I beamed. “So that’s the end of it? Are we done here?” I had work to do, organs to remove.
    “No, we’re not done here,” said Carol, agitated.
    “Then what’s the problem? You heard the man—I have a great capacity for love.”
    “The problem,” Carol answered, “is that you’re not living up to your potential.”
     

    By the time we found the “place” in downtown San Diego, we were sober, a real bummer. Dawn was fast approaching, and sex with strangers for money didn’t seem so exciting without the rush of alcohol to smooth over the moral potholes. We searched in vain for a liquor store, but the squares had all closed up hours earlier; we were unfortunately under our own control for the rest of the morning.
    Harold went first. I was nervous, I guess, for my first time with a professional. I mean, I’d done it all over the state of New York—even some in Pennsylvania and Jersey—even some while in a moving vehicle—but never with anyone older than me and never with someone as…knowledgeable as a prostitute was sure to be. What if my technique was wrong? What if I’d been doing it backwards all these years?
    So I waited outside and read a Vanity Fair someone had left in the lobby. The operation was set up as a massage parlor, an old trick that I thought had lived out its usefulness long ago. Seemed odd to me that they’d still have a front like this inside the city limits, as San Diego had just instituted their Red Light District less than a year before—all bets off, sexually speaking—but I guess old habits die hard. The décor was strictly economy-class: fluorescent lighting, pressed wood, quarter-inch-depth industrial carpet.
    The johns were streaming in and out of the place like horny worker ants coming to visit their queen. Doors opened and closed every few minutes, muffled moans echoing down the halls and about the small waiting room. This was a place for soldiers, from what I gathered, mostly Navy boys, but not exclusively—the clientele obviously ranged all over the armed services. I even caught a glimpse of a few familiar holographic insignias, but didn’t say anything for fear that the Marine Corps soldiers would make me do push-ups or lick their boots right there in the lobby. A whorehouse is not the ideal location for emasculation.
     

    Harold wobbled out through a sliding door twenty-five minutes after he went in, and I congratulated him on his stamina. “Didn’t happen,” he said, a little frown creasing his lips.
    “She didn’t go for you?” I asked.
    “I didn’t go for me.”
    Harold had encountered his first experience with the world of “sexual non-performance” long before I ever would, and I couldn’t