Found in Translation

In my inbox, a missive from a man I had exchanged emails with earlier in the year, smart, claims to be in good shape (runs), articulate, well-spelled.

I promptly confuse him with someone else. Fortunately, my comment to him about thinking he had quit the hobby (the someone else had posted a little board drama about focusing on his personal life, especially after the STD scare ) wasn’t a big deal.

In the spirit of the Third Way, I reply that I am no longer seeing gentlemen on an hourly basis, only long dates. Back he comes – he has just last week flown in a young lady from Minneapolis, dinner, dessert (points off for “desert”), breakfast.

Now we’re both speaking the same language. Call it Whoredu. Like Urdu, but spoken by mostly aspirational ladies, a couple of native ladies and a few select men mostly living in urban centers. I had honestly not expected to encounter it in Midwestern Region, and here I am confronted with, not a native, but an earnest student, showing off his ability to locate the pencil of my aunt. (Here’s what I speak – English, French, Japanese, ASL, well enough to discuss the weather but not well enough to talk about God. Whoredu is coming slowly but I think I’m a natural.) Doctor-fucking-Livingstone, I presume?

I ring him, speeding along through Indiana as is my wont, putting on the cruise to avoid racking up another $200 a year on the insurance. His voice is an orange, round and heavy and a little rough. I tell him very clearly and in small words that I am only looking for men I genuinely want to be with, where the gift is genuinely to compensate for time lost from my other life. Il comprend, wakarismashita, forefinger flicking upward. He mentions that part of what he enjoys about ladies on the side is exploration and fantasy. My mental robot indicates that an untranslatable sign has been given. For once, I catch it the first time instead of realizing later that I have, somewhere back at the beginning of the conversation, missed something vital to comprehension.

“You sound like you might have something specific in mind when you say “fantasies”…?

His tongue unlocks, suddenly he is fluent, there are naughty nurses giving private exams while the doctor has stepped out and hot teachers making students stay after class to rewrite essays and slutty business women coming back from the ladies’ room one more button undone than they started with, panties in their hand for him.

“Do I get a ruler?” I giggle engagingly and listen.

A grammatical misstep from lack of familiarity, he tells me he’s getting hard just thinking about the role-playing, native Whores know this is crass, don’t touch the fruit in a British market stall. I let it slide, tourist, and then there’s a bing! on the magic words

tease

and

denial.

Do I want to set up an elaborate role-play with emails and phone calls in character, meet my little tourist, chaperone him through the fun of roleplay (no-one’s played this particular type of game with him yet), quietly mention the etchings in the back room, very rare, sir, but some scholars like to… Feel the way down the passage where I think he’s heading, mild D/s and perhaps the intercourse is adjectives, complex-compound sentences, the subjunctive clause, not the topical noun in the present tense at all?

Damn right I do.

I have grown powerful through conceptual mastery, and I tell him I want a picture of him. I let him know at the last minute (mostly unintentionally) that no, sorry, tomorrow won’t work but how about another day? We settle on a day for a get-to-know-you lunch. I raise the price 25% from Be-My-Real-Friend because Tourist is not cute in his picture, he wants a lot of time and planning, and I will have to be both responsible and creative. I am ready to walk away at the slightest provocation, Gillette, Z, Juno, C, LFM, Beautiful Girl holding a seat at their table, Gentle Readers waving phrasebooks, travel essays, a magazine for the train, these great pills that totally did the trick.



I hope he will be as nice as he was on the phone, better-looking than his picture--it’s truly awful, he can’t possibly be worse...knock wood, merde, gambatta kudasai, fingers touching lips L-U-C-K.