Meeting Gustavo
Monica Garza's austere, coprolite-like walls, covered with aquarelles of men in tutus and women's swimwear, are sound-proof, and Gustavo must intuit or presume this since, once inside, his voice climbs in pitch in a way it wouldn't in any other of her condo's rooms. In the little kitchen, for instance, he nearly whispered. The tutu- and women's-swimsuit-wearing men in the paintings look as powerless as hatchlings, just as powerless as they were (or are) and altogether dependent on Monica; whose presence Gustavo can feel in the watercolors (as their maker, yes, but also as a potent and unseen power in the scenes themselves) and, although these weedy men are only adumbrated impressionistically (in sensuous strokes of pale paint) their servility is immediately obvious; displayed in their salmon-pink faces no matter how bearded, no matter how blurry.
Goddess Monica (as intuitive or more as her new plaything and remorselessly mischievous) sees Gustavo gazing and says, in an acerose voice, "Don't worry: you'll join the gallery soon enough, Gus. I get around to painting ALL you little prissy misses sooner or later. All of them have been where you're at, too: looking at the maids that came before them and thirsting for the shame and embarrassment they see in the faces of these losers on this Hall of Shame."
Monica seizes and squeezes Gustavo's arm and, with her other hand, scratches slightly at the dermatoid face of a watercolor with a long and painted nail, asking, "Do you recognize this guy, for instance? Just asking gives the answer away I bet!" and the identity of the painted man is indeed obvious... as soon as Gustavo looks... and in spite of the vagueness of the face and the less-than-anatomically-accurate rendering of the body. The hair, achieved with two touches of the brush's bristles, in slightly unalike shakes of mud, could only be the algae-like mane of the only other maid in the condo at the time. The man in the tutu in the watercolor is me.
In the painting, my head is not unlike a clump of oily waste that my hair (some ruderal blemish) arises revoltingly out of, and, as I enter the room, minding Monica's instructions, I can tell Gustavo is wincing, remembering me as the maid who answered the door earlier and let him into Monica's home.
Day surrenders to night quite quickly and, in the "Maids Quarters," Gustavo tells me that he thinks his oddest inclination was to kiss and lick the popliteal fossa (or knee-pit) of any and every woman he was enamored of, "Especially," he adds, "when the woman's legs are nylon-clad and just a little clammy." This body-based and simplistic fetish so totally eclipsed all other penchants, apparently, and rendered all other sexual impulses, healthier or not, moot, "distressing me so much," he says, "that I thought something like this would be my only recourse: an attempt to intentionally develop an even mightier, but less limiting, fetish or 'erotic mode' or whatever."
So, he explained, he chose this world. The world of maids unpaid. A world, in fact, where maids paid for the "privilege" of serving.
All of it is much more than an inclination, fetish, penchant, impulse, or "erotic mode" for me, and, I suspect, will become more than any of those for my new sister-in-heels as well.
"Did you ever get rid of the knee thing?" I ask.
"Not at all. Just learned that things don't work that way. Have you seen Monica's by the way? They're unbelievably sexy!"
I remember going to NBA games with my dad as a teen and admiring the dancers' legs and say, maybe to encourage Gustavo, like we're in AA together, "I get it. Knee-pits. Yeah. I get it. No reason to abandon that entirely, I don't think, as long as it's not the only thing you ever think about. And trust me; there's no chance of that here."
Uniforms
French maid attire fabric kind of cascades on Gustavo's body in an angelic way. It only ever kind of sags on mine, hinting at my cozy, suburban past. I am both jealous and aroused. Gustavo's uniform (unlike mine) has no real "neck" but instead a kind of wide, lacy opening around the skin some inches beneath his bare, beautiful, swan-like shoulders. His "cleavage" is also on display, as is the majority of his feminine back.
My maid's dress, on the other hand (although it's a pretty shade of pink whereas his is a more traditional little number in black and white) has a tight, sometimes-strangling turtleneck and exposes very little of my very pale skin; which is, I admit, much less attractive than Gustavo's. I remember a girl in school with a large knobby bulb of a nose who always wore long-sleeved clothes (even in summer) to hide her really rather bad and suspicious-looking-mole-speckled skin (which was pale and pimply and always glossed in this thin sweat that looked more like oil, making her seem less hygienic than she was) who I had had an odd erotic obsession with. I masturbated to her pictures in the previous years' yearbooks almost everyday, wanting to eat out her pussy (which I imagined as a feral and unkempt mess) more than anything else in the world.
Gustavo and I
Gustavo's shame is constant and severe, and no desire remains in him for anything else. Least of all would he want his life to become, quote, "Normal." Rather, he wants the near-total abjection he feels to be total, and publicly broadcasted, so that there'd be no way to run from Goddess Monica (ever) even if part of him wanted there to be. Gustavo wants his name, his face, his personhood, to be a kind of cultural shorthand for what he thinks of as his "emasculated, servile sissy slavery." His hunger for fame of this kind is now as great as his original hunger for humiliation: an insatiable appetite that increases with each feeding like a heroin addict's.
Amanda Pasture began to exert her authority over me when we were twenty-two and twenty (respectively) and attending a small community college's only creative writing class. Amanda started with her feet, which she'd remove from her slip-into-and-out-of shoes and (under our desks) press them against my soon-throbbing cock, taking notes or writing creatively; looking altogether innocent of anything and unengaged in anything other than schoolwork.
