Pussy-Licker: Confessions Of A Soft-Porn Scribe
In the small-town Yorkshire literary world, success and failure can be linked in complicated ways... with unpredictable outcomes. As Wade Welton discovers.
Sex speaks in tongues, and it speaks every language ever devised.
He's walking towards the company Forms Library, head crammed to the seams with erotica, like a misshapen shopping-bag over-filled with lumpy groceries. What character-name to choose this time? Dick Galore, or perhaps Dick Cox? He tries out story ideas as he walks. Like this one... Dick stands patiently in the Supermarket Check-Out queue. He reaches the voluptuously-contoured cashier who zaps his purchases one by one across the barcode sensor - Muesli, Pasta Spirals, De-Caff, Bean Sprouts... 'Wait' he says, 'I've got one more item.' He zips down his fly and slides the biggest baldy-feller in town onto the sensor (and we're not talking 'Kojak' here). She wrinkles her delightful nose, and regards it suspiciously. 'What is it, fruit or vegetable...?' she lisps.
'You sly old dog' says Quinley Osgood, interrupting the fantasy.
'Uh - I'm just going to the Forms Library' mumbles Wade in an embarrassed confusion of receding weirdness. As though the Supervisor is reading his (dirty) thoughts even as he thinks them.
Osgood leers in an unpleasantly intimate way, and winks grotesquely. 'Saw your latest story.' He leans over and hisses wetly in Wade's ear. 'V-e-r-y good. Excellent stuff. Anyone with a healthy hormone level would react in the same way. I'm impressed, Mr Welton. I'd very much like to see more of your... er... work.' He's heavy-breathing now, like an over-excited 0898 caller, his flabby gut undulating like rough sea beneath his pale blue shirt.
'It's very kind of you to say so' he mutters, his eyes doing their best to avoid contact. Thinking, for ten years I've been writing secretly, in hidden corners of the factory at lunch-break, or late into the night at home. Ten years of poems, sensitive literary short stories and essays for artfully serious small-circulation little magazines. And no-one gave a damn. Four tales in 'Erotic Stories', and suddenly, everyone wants to know.
'I'd be as happy as Michelle Pfeiffer's knickers if I could write stuff like that' glows Osgood. 'I'm a fan. Let me read more, alright? Good man.'
Wade Welton slouches on down the corridor. Osgood watches him go. Wade must be in his late-thirties, poorly maintained too. Painfully inoffensive. Below average stature. He wears khaki overalls, ringed with printer's ink and grease from the shop-floor where the printing machines whirr louder than a Heavy Metal drum solo. Osgood shakes his head, s-h-e-e-e-i-t, who'd have guessed it? Old Wade Welton, last bachelor of this parish, Mr Dullsville himself. You never can tell!
The Forms Library is unnaturally quiet after the noise of the factory. There are tiers of insulating shelves bulging with numbered A4 buff envelopes, each one containing job details and information, colour samples and art-work from customers. As he enters, Wade sees Scab, the cockatiel. Rachel is feeding the bird bite-sized portions of her salmon sandwich which it seizes in one claw and then attacks with its vicious beak. Both librarian and bird usually ignore him during his infrequent visits here. A flighty pair. Rachel all mouth and no-'O' Levels. But this time she watches him. What could he call her in a story? Miss B Haven, Dolores Del Lay, or Randy Raquel? She has soft-porn eyes, but hard-core lips. He smiles a little agitatedly and moves in between the shelves, rippling along the file of numbers. He glances back. There's a magazine on the table, between her coffee-ringed cup and the cockatiel cage. His heart sinks as he recognises the issue of 'Erotic Stories'. His name is there, on the contents page.
'Wade, you have hidden depths.' Rachel is sliding in beside him, smiling in a way that a Porn writer would probably describe as 'coquettish'. 'I didn't know you had it in you. But they always say the quiet ones are the ones to watch.'
He swallows nervously. 'I'm looking for the West-Wind job-file. Query concerning the company logo.'
'I've often wondered' her long slender fingers are walking cool and insistently across his thigh. 'The stories you write, are they based on... real-life experience?' His tongue is suddenly a reef-knot of tension. Scab is preening contentedly. Her fingers have disengaged his overalls and are now making contact with his zip, sliding it inexorably downwards. 'You must be a very... passionate man' she whispers, forcing him backwards up against the shelves, pouting her lips like a goldfish gulping at lungfuls of air. Her hand is on his cock. He inhales with a desperate gurgling sound. But despite himself he's responding to her titillation, warming and swelling in her fist. Blood surging from head to penis so fast he sees stars. 'It would be great to be your inspiration for a story. Will you write about me, Wade, will you, will you?'
She's descending with each syllable, talking to his chest, his stomach, and down until her face is as close as a fly-button to his crotch. He feels her warm breath stirring him. She kisses the big purple-red glans, then runs her tongue along its shaft. He watches in stunned disbelief as she mouths him. Can feel the damp touch of her lips as she moves in to engulf him, blowing hot and cold, taking over half of his length between her luridly lipsticked lips. Her grip soft and wet around the cock-head. Her tongue flicking and probing into the slit at its tip. He groans deep within himself, and can't help lurching his hips forward, torpedoing deeper into her throat... BUT WHAT IF SOMEONE COMES IN NOW!?!?
She begins working her head back and forth, up and down, slowly at first, the organ disappearing from sight entirely, then emerging spit-drenched and glistening. He fidgets a little, goggling with amazement, getting a heightened terrible ecstasy from watching his pulsing cock piston into her receptive mouth. His eyes watering. Her eyes closing as the tremors begin to hit him. The heat at the base of his prick burning with a fire that spasms from the tail of his spine to the tip of his glans. And suddenly his love-juice is pounding up against her epiglottis. He ejaculates, emitting a strangled curse, a sigh and a wail, in a rapid one-two-three order. And Ms Manmuncher gulps with obscene enthusiasm...
'Which particular aisle did you get this particular item from, sir?' asks the Check-Out girl, handling the pulsating pussy-pylon with professional detachment, 'it doesn't seem to register on the sensor. Perhaps I should call the manager?' She runs a red nail-varnished finger up and down its length in an exploratory fashion, listing commodities in her head by way of comparison - cucumber, Cumberland sausage? No - those new aerosol cream dispensers? She smiles with sudden inspiration, and encircles the humongous schlooong covetously, moving her hand up and down. Slowly at first, but increasing her speed with each stroke...
-- 0 --
It's drizzling as Wade Welton trudges from his flat towards the Community Centre that evening, and he's still fuming. Sexual harassment. A clear case of uninvited interference. Had he made any indication of wanting his trousers removed, and for Ms Manmuncher to do... that, to him? No. She'd just taken it upon herself to force her attentions on him. It was completely uncalled for. She'd treated him as little more than a sex object. They were all the same - Rachel, Quinley Osgood, none of them understood.
But the Literary Group are more perceptive. They see beyond the superficial. They'll understand. He forces a wry grin of anticipation.
They've already begun as he blusters in. Two men. Four mid-thirties to middle-aged women. And himself. The Local Scribes. Bernard Garforth is reading a long dialect poem about the gaslights in Halifax Meat Market, which Wade's flustered entrance interrupts. Bernard glares, his eyes set into his face as close as an Alsatian's testicles. Wade shuffles to find a seat as the group aim megaton scowls of disapproval at him. Only Wendy Woolwich ventures a half-smile of welcome. She wears a long paisley dress to go with her long black hair, and 'Diary Of A Chambermaid' ankle-boots. She always smiles secretly, shyly, but attractively. She understands the need for a woman to retain a demure sense of the unapproachable. He approves. Sitting back, rain-moist but comfortable, to listen with feigned interest to the rest of Bernard's verse.
Next, it's Wade's turn. He reads his latest poem, "Sunflower Car", a scorching abstract piece resonant with Beat Generation imagery, but it doesn't go down too well. So he tries his more reflective "Enter The Trousers Of Memory", but they remain unmoved.
Then, the slug called Gerald Mandrake-Smythe snarls 'is that the best your prosaic petty little mind can come up with tonight, Weston?' Gerald had two letters critical of the Government's policy in Syria published in the local newspaper. This gives him illusions of literary importance. He's pencil-thin with the kind of dark wavy hair once common to bit-part actors in old Elstree Movies, shiny hair slick with brylcreme. He coughs imposingly, then reads "Motorbikeabelia" - a rather slight surrealistic knock-about, and they love it. Gerald sits back with a sneer on his face, and a complexion that reminds Wade of nothing so much as badly-chewed bubblegum.
'The problem, Weston, is that you've squandered your talent' he gloats triumphantly. 'You've prostituted your ability by descending to cheap pornography that denigrates women.' He's smirking now like the little boy who's Mother uses new biological 'WHIZZ' to whiten his shirt in a TV ad.
'No. It's not like that' Wade blusters, feeling his colour rise. 'From the first piece of erotic fiction I wrote I drew up a list of rules for myself, the first of which is that none of my stories exploit women. They only explore the psychological motivations and...'
'Your so-called stories deal explicitly with copulation and all manner of deviation in a salaciously unsavoury manner.'