Wherever you think this is going, it isn’t there…
In the early 2000s in a lab at Yale University, some bright sparks, between them, participated in a mutually negotiated transaction that involved the exchange of money for sexual gratification. The money could be used to buy food, as indeed, it later was by the female participant of the transaction. She received the money from a male as an inducement to have sex with him.
I guess he figured he would rather get his rocks off than have a banana. The food that the “money” could buy was bananas. The coin was a plastic token. The male “earned” the plastic token by solving a puzzle. Both the male and female were prisoners. Both the female and male were Capachin monkeys.
Between them they invented prostitution. I ain’t saying who instigated it. I ain’t pointing no fingers. I ain’t apportioning no blame. All I’m saying is that they invented prostitution. It caught on pretty quickly.
Hundreds of thousands of years later, in 1997, I lived in a low rise block of apartments on 19th Street in Santa Monica, California. It was a great place to live back then. It was Santa Monica’s ripped backside. I imagine it has been gentrified by now. The hole in the wall burrito joints gone. No more tinfoiled radish with your meal. No more Indian corn bike doing the rounds. No more Paisa bars with gum plastered sidewalks. It was pretty cool back then. A real melting pot.
My direct neighbour was a guy called Jeff. Our doors opened 2 feet apart onto the low walled yard. In the block next to us was a duplex with two Mexican families. Good folks with hordes of kids. Jeff was an addict. Alfredo worked at the fish market. He used to come home with bucket loads of tuna. We would share cervezas and ceviche and chew the fat. Jeff would skulk in his apartment and only come out in the small hours. Freddy would say “what’s happen con Jeff?”
Jeff was an addict. Anything would do, but his go to was crystal meth, vodka, and wank lines. In those days there were numbers you could call, premium rate, have somebody talk dirty to you whilst you beat off. Prostitution had evolved. Technology has a tendency to facilitate that. Jeff once showed me his phone bill. He had managed to knock up about 15k in one month. That’s some serious dedication to the cause.
The people that “manned” the phones didn’t think of themselves as “prostitutes”, and neither I guess do the people who fuck each other for “money” for the “films” they show on the Internet. I put all of them words in quotes, cos none of them are really the right word anymore if you stop and think about it… How the times change.
The other day I saw something really weird at the supermarket. It was in the small hours, and the place was pretty dead. This bum was rubbing himself off against one of the robocashiers. I just figured it was none of my business and went to the self-checkout…
Anyways, I go back a few days later, and, wouldn’t you know it, all the robocashiers had been retrofitted with Tupperware tits and plastic snatches. Three different types of dildo. All of the motherfuckers had started moonlighting as hookers. Weird thing is, the customers just all carry on as normal. Just wait in line with their groceries whilst the guy in front of them is dropping his load.
I went to the self check-out. The fucker started making suggestive comments – “nice plums”, you know, that kind of thing. Eventually came right out and asked me if I wanted it to talk dirty to me. Jeff’s burnt-out carcass was blocking the next lane.
Patrick Johnston is a UK-born writer and former professor of psychology and neuroscience. Living nomadically, he writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that fracture memory, myth, and absurdist noir. His work has appeared in The Louisville Review, Love and Literature, Blood & Honey Review, Argyle Literary Journal, and The Bookends Review.
Modern Flash Fiction 