I Bet Your Girlfriend Is Frigid!

Roughly eight years, on a foggy late fall evening, while walking back home with my boyfriend at the time, we kissed goodbye around my house. Visibility was poor and the street was empty, so we were sure it’d be fine. It turns out that my dad was watching us from the window. Which would have made for a maybe awkward, kind of funny, conversation for any 17 year old. But I am a guy.

He asked me if I came home with anyone, I lied, he said he saw someone and so, I lied some more. I eventually came out to my mom a few days later, somehow thinking she’d be the more reasonable one of the two. I remember her crying the entire day that day. She told my dad and, like with my formerly crooked teeth or legs, they knew something had to be done. And my parents had never been people that, when faced with a problem, don’t look for a solution. As such, it was decided, that very day, within thirty minutes of my dad coming home, that I need to go to a psychologist.

I half-heartedly agreed, but hoped that my therapist would hear me out for five minutes and then summon my parents in. She instead suggested I go to church, pray more and at the end, after telling her that I’m an atheist, and I don’t have a problem being gay, she told my parents that I should talk to a man instead of her, since I could maybe bond with him better (or, me speculating, homosexuals are obviously deeply sexist, and that’s actually why they don’t even want to fuck women).

Step two, came a few days later, when we went to see an endocrinologist. This was an ancient “professor”, the fat kind with hair in his ears and bushy salt-pepper eyebrows, who decided that my testosterone level was too low and that I should get shots. I wonder whether now, after having taken T for over a year and also in my early teens, I could even father children. I suppose it’s just as well if I’m gay.

My father was doing what he could, but probably just thought of my “problem” as a phase. He mentioning in passing that, he too had had a trifling little affair with his older brother, but assured me that while fun, he eventually got thing straight after having his first woman at the back of a melon truck. My mother however, whom I had thought far more liberal, was having a much harder time and thought that, like in nineteenth century novels, I should be taken to see prostitutes to get it all over with and see what I had been missing (it might have been all that Tolstoy she had been reading).

Since finding a melon truck in the middle of winter in Bucharest would be challenging and also because I didn’t have an older brother to take me to “the whores”, she eventually settled for the next best thing: My dad would drive us to a massage parlour. I knew fairly little about the plan until the day of its execution. I got told some vague talk about “trying things out” and we were off in a car before I knew it, on our way to what turned out to be a non-descript house along one of Bucharest’s most uninspired communist arteries, in what looked like a fairly ordinary neighborhood.

Except for the white house we walked into... The living room was flooded by neon light and had a big fake-leather sofa, smack in its center. The tiles on the floor were white, the cheap kind, with unconvincing grey patterns that were supposed to imitate marble. I walked in, trying to find someone and also to push the packet of condoms and cash, that my dad had handed me in the car grinning complicitly, deeper into my pockets. The matron came out and my father also walked in, catching me in between like a sort of pincer. I had been outmanoeuvred and so I smiled at the lady politely, like the good boy I was supposed to be, trying to play it cool, but panicking a little inside.

She asked me to have a seat and a offered me a drink and assured me that she’ll be getting the girls out momentarily. And do you suppose I wanted a whisky or a gin at this very moment, on the cusp of losing my virginity to a woman? No, I wanted a goddamn Fanta. So my drink arrived and so did the girls. Along the entire length of the room, something like fifteen women lined up for me, all in different stages of undress. I had to make a choice, pick one (one could get more presumably, but really, since dad would be paying?).

As I sank in the couch looking undecided at the lot, wishing for something with alcohol, my dad made one of his trademark dumb jokes, about my glasses fogging up (I must have looked quite flustered), which everyone besides me found hilarious and started laughing wildly in the room. And really, if there have definitely been men who’ve been taken by their father to prostitutes, I’m probably one of the few who got to be the butt of a joke as well.

As the laughter grew fainter, I made up my mind to get a girl dad would approve of. With that in mind, I picked one with fairly large breasts, natural looking and a bit droopy (clearly real!) and with that, the worst part was over. I don’t know how much it cost or what they talked about next since I went upstairs with my girl and she explained the rules to me in our room. I was to undress, take a shower, come back and lay down in bed naked, belly down. I would get a relaxing massage for the first half hour and then we’d get to the hot stuff.

As I went out to the end of the corridor to take the shower, I was relieved to not see anyone else. (Such good planning! I think the Romanian government could learn a think or two about planning from brothels that are incentivized to keep their male patrons from ever seeing each other.) In the room, I took my clothes off and followed the whore’s instructions, laying down on the tacky heart-shaped bed with red bedsheets. We’ll now be contemplating whether sex work is dehumanizing, by me repeatedly calling this woman “the whore”. It’s really just because I don’t know what her name was, if indeed she told me, and anyway she probably used a fake name for this kind of thing (right?!).

The first part of the massage was pleasant enough, although she for some reason insisted on using her breasts on my back, which I suppose some people are into, but for me, they were just big bags of fat that did a pretty shitty job of relieving that piled up tension between by shoulder blades. No, tension would soon be relieved manually, in part two. The whore got me to flip over, and whether this is true I can’t be quite sure, but I do seem to recall a faint gasp of horror from her at seeing my still limp dick. But on the other hand maybe not. Given that the matron had asked my dad whether he needed help, it stands to reason that older men, who might have plumbing difficulties would also come by from time to time. She sure acted like a professional, wasting no time but grabbing onto me firmly and got to work.

I must have been fairly shocked at this because she at one point had to take my hands, who were laying lifelessly by my sides and pull them onto her breasts. This, I thought was when she started being suspicious. After all, plumbing is one thing, but just laying there on the bed, arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross? Odd.

Her two big advantages were proving especially fortuitous since she had a special trick with them, having me put my dick in between, which with lube, was actually quite nice all in all. What was less nice though, was her prickly pussy that I was feeling rubbing against my left leg. I felt this to be quite unprofessional after all, like someone not wearing a tie at work. Not that I’d wear a tie myself, but if you do though, make sure it’s tied properly. By that logic, if you’re going to shave, make damn sure that it’s not going to prick the customer, right?

After I was done, she expertly pulled out a roll of tissues (just like at home!) and got everything cleaned up. The condoms lay forgotten in my pants and we looked at each other’s faces properly for the first time. I guess this is when curiosity got the best of her, for the whore now wanted to talk, specifically ask, about how I had even come to be there. She excitedly asked me to let her guess things, because she’s very good at this sort of thing. Relieved to not have to spin up some lies, or worse, the truth, I gladly let her go on:

— “I bet you have a girlfriend!”
— “How did you know?”
— “You know, I can understand you, you know. You don’t have anything to worry about. About this, I mean. It’s normal for men, you know, to want — to need, this. Sex, I mean. You don’t need to feel guilty.”
— “I well… I’m not…”
— “Let me guess. You girlfriend, she’s a good girl isn’t she? I can see you’d go for one like that. She’s… well, she’s frigid, isn’t she? I bet she is!”
— “Oh wow, yeah, you’re right! She’ll never…”
— “She never wants to do anything! I thought so! And then you told your grandpa who brought you here! I knew it! Well, don’t worry about it! And don’t feel bad. It’s just how it is! Why, even for my husband, he needs it too. It’s just natural.”

As I walked back to the car, I thought about keeping the condoms and money and telling my father that I’d had used it. But I’m such a bad liar and gave it back to him and said, to his utter disappointment that it didn’t really work out. That it was… okay… but didn’t really change my mind. He was unhappy, cursed loudly and suggested we get a proper whore for me to fuck. I raised my voice back, said I’d had enough and we drove back home in silence.