I once had an ex give me road head on the LA freeway coming back from Napa in 1982. I’d brag that I didn’t even have to pay for it, but it turns out this girl drank Dom Perignon like it was Perrier, so in no way was that true. Worst blowjob I ever got in my life, too. But it’s one off the bucket list.

It also gives me a nice place to go when I’m stuck in a traffic jam on Lakeshore – and there’s always fucking traffic on Lakeshore. Bunch of foreign fucking yuppies rich enough to afford waterfront property in the Six, but not rich enough to hire someone who actually knows how to drive, much less in the shitshow that is a December squall.

I’ve lived in this city for forty years. Never in that time have I ever taken winter for granted. Even my show cars have seasonal tires. Had seasonal tires. I’ve seen too many of the ten-car pileups we tend to get the moment the first snowflake hits pavement to ever get complacent. So we’ve established that.

So here I am, sitting in the driver’s seat with a view to more assholes than under a tandem outhouse, and I’m thinking back to a hot summer, a muscle car and a frizzy redhead gobbling my cock – don’t ask me her name, I don’t remember. I’ve got about half a chubby down there, which is pretty impressive given my age. And then it hits.

I know what it is the moment I feel a tightness in my chest. My doctor told me in 2015, he said Hugo, you have to stop taking those little blue pills, they’re no good for your heart. I told him that all the girls I dated were twenty years old and they expected me to put out – the prick didn’t laugh.

I took his advice anyway, took a “retirement” and moved to promotions, and it probably saved my life when the “me-too” witch hunters came calling a couple years later. But it didn’t fix the damage already done.

I slam on the brakes – stupid, it’s the last thing you do when the road’s all ice. I try turning into the median, but I can’t feel my fucking fingers so I turn into the next lane instead. The shit’s bumper-to-bumper… a lot happens in very little time. You get the idea.

Now I’m squashed between my dash and a Mack truck, and my heart’s beating like it’s going to tear its way out of me. I have never hurt this bad in all my life, but I look over the dash and I see people moving on the highway and it hits me, I made it. I’m alive.

I distract myself from the pain with thoughts of Ginger and her enthusiastic mouth, but when I close my eyes I can’t remember what she looked like, either.

And then I’m gone.

***

Hugo Caine
1956-2022

No ‘dearly beloved’ or ‘sorely missed’. I guess I should be glad that some of my cheap-ass former friends decided to put this spread together. I guess it was inevitable that no church would take me – just having my body there would probably boil the font water – but there are worse places than my house to have the memorial.

Producing records in the eighties and nineties was big business – even in this country. I could boast that I worked with a bunch of big clients who are either dead now or doing pizza jingles. I got to fly to our parent company in California once a year. But any honest man in the industry would say the best part was the trim – everyone wanted a piece of what we had, and those who had great legs and dirty minds knew what they had to do to get it.

This has nothing to do with the house, you understand. You couldn’t afford property like this in the city even back then, so when I heard I could get a McMansion on the shore for half a year’s salary, I jumped at the chance. It’s drafty in the winter and the commute nearly killed me, but you know what? I got mine.

All that space is driving home how few people actually showed up. Most of my professional acquaintances lost my number after I sold the studio. I guess I wasn’t any more use to them. It wouldn’t have killed them to ask how I was every once in a while. I was the best man at Johnny DaCosta’s wedding, and he couldn’t even be bothered to show up for my funeral.

I see Virginia Kowalski staring out the window into the middle distance, like she’s trying to look deep instead of figuring out how much acreage comes with the house. She was my first girlfriend to move in with me after I came out here, and she figures since I never married she has a claim to the house. Dream on, Ginny.

Honestly, for such a small turnout, I’ve fucked a lot of the people in this room.

Like Stephanie, who was the one who got me into BDSM, or so I told her. She was really just a rope bunny, but if you’ve never stuck your wick into a girl who’s hogtied in front of you, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Fiona, from back when I thought I might be into Asians. We made it a year, but she had all kinds of opinions about what she liked in the bedroom and in the playroom both. It kind of defeated the purpose of dominating her.

Annie. We were together for about five weeks, she ran like the wind when she found out what I was into. It’s kind of sad that she’s here.

Melody, who’s let herself go since 2001. She was a tattoo artist, and wanted me to get a motorcycle just so she could get herself off with the motor running. Weird, even by my standards. We broke up before she found out I was scared of the damn things.

Alan, the A&R man from my old label. Not a gay thing, I just sold him my Lambo sight unseen a couple years back and he believed me when I told him it was pristine. What a dumbass.

I don’t remember that one’s name. I had her in the back of a car in 2014, and she squirted so much that I never got all the stains out. It might have even been in the same Lambo I later sold to Alan. I don’t remember her having all those wrinkles. Shit, I remember all of these people being a lot younger.

And Rachel. I met her at her birthday in 2006. She wanted to be a DJ. We were together for three wonderfully, imaginatively perverse years. She’s my go-to when I want to remember fucking a girl on the hood of a Corvette – and I’ve fucked a lot of girls on the hood of a Corvette.

Okay, three girls. But come on, that’s more than you have.

Like most of my conquests, she’s moved on since. She’s still seeing the plain slice of toast that she met working tables at a restaurant – a few years younger than her, but also her boss at the time, because my girl always had her eyes on the prize.

My tastes have always been drawn toward the touch of the younger kind, but for approaching forty she looks not bad. Her skin’s still as pale and tight as I remember. She’s cut her hair shorter than I typically like, but it suits her, even if a few strands of gray are poking through.

And she’s still firm where it matters, in that plump little behind that I subjected to so much in our time together. You know what they say: The bigger the cushion, the deeper the pushin’.

That’s Spinal Tap, isn’t it. Fucking Spinal Tap. I must have got asked “Does it go to eleven” a hundred times a year since 1986. Fuck those guys.

“How did you know him again?” says the boyfriend.

“He took me under his wing when I was starting out,” she explains, “Sort of my mentor.”

That’s right, I remember. I once mentored her from behind while she was strapped to the very table where he just set down that flat glass of ginger ale.

This place is familiar to her but not comfortable. She’s met the other women here in passing, but they’re not friends. It’s a club in which they’ve announced their membership by coming here today.

Now to be clear, these girls all knew what they were getting involved with. I liked them young and wild, but I made it clear that if they misbehaved or didn’t respect my authority, they could expect to be punished. And none of them could have missed that I really enjoyed punishing them.

I had my own rules. The big one was, leave the talent alone – and I worked with Shania in her prime, so you understand how much temptation there was. As a sort of corollary to that, I didn’t go looking for girls any time I was working, as even then that could have put me in deep shit with the label.

Finally, after Annie I added that I had to tell them about my interests by no later than the second date – if they got scared off early, at least I wasn’t wasting my time.

It was harmless. Mostly.

To his credit, Rachel’s boyfriend is perceptive enough to catch her discomfort.

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want.”

He’s probably looking for someone to give his condolences to. Tough luck, kid, the closest I’ve got to a next-of-kin is my brother Marcus, and that lazy fuck won’t get here before Tuesday.

“I need to find a bathroom,” she tells him, and goes downstairs.

I guess he doesn’t find it odd that she knows how to get around in the house of someone she worked for. Then again, she used to work for him, so maybe he expects this sort of thing.

There’s a handful of people milling around downstairs. I don’t remember seeing any of them naked, so they’re probably family. Most of them look badly in need of a smoke, but they don’t want to lower the property value.

“Are you Delilah?” asks a combed-over twerp who’s probably my cousin Ed. Delilah must be the one from the car seat.

“No, I’m Rachel.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I wanted to meet Hugo’s girlfriend. Do you know if she’s here?”

Rachel shakes her head, she’s never met Delilah and couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. Ed shrugs his skinny little shoulders and tells his lemon-faced wife that they can be home by five if they leave now.

Side story - I once had Rachel eat an entire bag of lemon candies. She hadn’t even done anything wrong, she’d just asked what she had to do to get out of cooking dinner. She thought she’d get one over me, but by the next day she still couldn’t talk and I got a nice roast chicken, so it’s fair to say I won that one.

My family isn’t just hiding from my exes in the basement. They know about the secret room, just behind the wall they’re busy holding up. What I got up to in there and with whom – it doesn’t matter to them. But they’re guarding what’s left of my reputation as best as these idiots can when none of them know the code to the door.

I should have guessed. I could never keep Rachel away when she wanted something.

But the cousins aren’t as sweet on her as I was. They see her approach the hidden door and they form up, trying to look like they’re doing it inconspicuously.

Rachel gets close to the piss-faced bitch and whispers, “Do you have a pad?”

I didn’t think her lips could get any more pursed, but she manages. “I’m afraid I don’t have that problem anymore. Perhaps you could ask one of the younger ladies upstairs?”

Shaking her head, Rachel keeps going. “I came down here to use the bathroom, and I can feel something… leaking.” She’s quiet, but there’s a lot of emphasis on the last word and the three closest cousins turn a little green. “I don’t want to go back upstairs in case-“

“How about I ask one of them, eh?” Piss-face realizes she’s not going to get any help from her husband or his family and takes the out.

No sooner has she taken to the stairs then five middle-aged men realize that they’ve been left with a menstruating woman, and decide together that maybe dealing with my exes is the less terrifying option.

In case you’re wondering, yes – I have surfed the red tide. I don’t recommend it, but it was another checkmark for the old list.

And Rachel, that brilliant little minx, has the room all to herself. She doesn’t have to wrack her brains to remember the passcode: 6-2-7-8-3-7. I can’t claim to be creative – it’s “Master” in telephone cypher.  

“Rachel? Are you okay?”

See, that’s my girl in a nutshell. Smart as a whip, but she doesn’t think things through. Her acting like she’s on the rag scared off everybody – except the one person she doesn’t want following her right now.

She’s standing there with the handle to the now-unlocked door in her hands, a little too late to pretend she’s gotten lost. This I have to see.

“Hi, Bertie. Look, there’s something you have to know about my old boss. He was… very secretive about his personal life. Back when I worked for him, he used to disappear for hours in this house. I had the code for this room in his contacts, but I never went inside. You want to take a peek?”

Oh, bravo. Her boyfriend doesn’t look a hundred percent convinced, but it’s a good line for being made up on the spot.

“You don’t think it’s disrespectful, doing this at his funeral?”

“I think this is my last chance to find who he really was.”

I get it now. She wants ‘closure’, as if me bottled up on the mantle wasn’t closure enough. I don’t understand this generation’s need for ‘ending life’s chapters’ and that bull. If you hate your job, get another one. If you’re bored with a girl, get another one. There’s always more to life until there isn’t. I’m speaking with some authority on this subject.

The room doesn’t have any windows, and it’s spooky pitch black when Rachel opens the door. She has to grasp around to find the switch, and the look on her boyfriend’s face when she finds it warms my incorporeal heart.

Those poseurs at the Oubliette call theirs the Red Room, it’s supposed to look plush and sexy to lure in the experimenters and the casuals. Me, I know what I want. Knew.

So for me, it was concrete floors (heated), recessed spotlights and so many chains looped to the ceiling that the girl of the week thinks she’s going to look up and see a giant steel spider.

I picked up a couple of furniture pieces, but they’re fucking expensive and take up a lot of space, so mostly I’ve gotten by on bondage and imagination. I don’t advertise my implement collection, but I’ve got a bunch of “toy boxes” I can stack when I need the space.

The boyfriend peers into one of these and picks out a clear acrylic paddle, I called it the “Invisible Ass-assin” because it’s transparent and hurts like a bitch. He takes a few practice swings with it like he knows what he’s doing. My estimation of the kid goes up a bit.

He asks her, “Do you think I would have gotten along with this guy?”

“No.”

For him, this is just some kinky museum, but almost everything they touch or look at has history for her. She’s felt the Ass-assin. She’s been suspended from those chains.

And while she’s busy reliving that, she’s missed the fact that I’ve redecorated since the last time she was down here. The boy goes quiet, squinting in the low light. See, I found this poster a couple years back when I was looking to sell some of my industry stuff.

Most of my album art got sold or put into storage when I shut down the studio. A few are on the walls around the house, mostly the really famous stuff that makes me look like a big shot. This one was called “Reflections”, but you won’t find this image on the cover of any of your vinyl. It never ended up leaving this room.

In the photo she’s standing full frontal, tight black sweater and heels, with nothing in between, facing the mirror to stare at her freshly spanked ass. She’s backlit, her face in silhouette. But he doesn’t have to see her face. He recognizes the posture and he recognizes her legs – I bet he even recognizes her bush.

I had a friend of mine who does boudoir photography take it as what I called a “proof-of-concept”. Rachel was hesitant about getting naked for the camera, but she didn’t freak out half as much as my friend did when I showed him why we didn’t need any makeup – we even stopped the shoot a couple of times so I could put a bit more colour in her cheeks.

Now, the boyfriend probably didn’t know that story. But the results are plain to see.

She sees it too. “Bertie-“

“You did tell me that you used to date. I probably should have figured it out.” He tries to turn his head, but it’s not an image you can just ignore. “Why didn’t you tell me the rest?”

“Because I don’t want to re-live it. I was in a bad place when I met Hugo. I thought I had it made, but it turned out that I was just something else he wanted.” She sighed, and met Bertie’s eyes. “You can’t stop looking, can you?”  

“I’m sorry. You look fantastic.”

“I know. I had some body image issues when I was in my twenties and I like to think Hugo was trying to help in his own selfish and perverted way. Here, come sit.” She guides him toward a spanking bench that faces the opposite wall. The leather underneath them is cracked, its finish worn, but it holds.

Time hasn’t been kind to any of the furniture down here. There’s no way I’d have ever given Rachel the satisfaction of knowing, but she was the last girl to ever visit the playroom. And I’m not talking about her little exploration behind her boyfriend’s back in 2016.

Our last night together, I had a party with a bunch of industry pals. Not a mixer per se, but they were the kind of people that Rachel had been bugging me about meeting since we shacked up. They also knew about my hobbies, so we didn’t have to be coy about it.

I had this blood-red China dress – a cheongsam, they call it - specially made, cost a fortune, but it made her ass look like two ripe cherries. She loved the look of it, but she’d never worn latex before and she didn’t realize how hard it was to move in. And then I told her that if she’s going to mingle she might as well be serving drinks.

The inevitable happened, she went ass over teakettle with a handful of champagne flutes, and she couldn’t get back up because the dress was so tight. So there she was, covered in pricy booze, rolling around on the floor like a greased pig in front of a bunch of people who can’t tell whether to laugh or help her up.

I came to her rescue and said that after the cleanup we were going to go downstairs and have a ‘talk’ about all the broken glasses. My guests, they’re in the know, and I heard a few ‘oohs’ and ‘uh-ohs’ from the peanut gallery. So I played it up, I told them the little lady and I would be back in just a minute.

It was just a show, really. I was going to tie her up, maybe give her a few lashes, just enough to show through the dress. But I’d barely hit her and she starts crying. She’s cried before – we all know I play rough – but she was full-on bawling and she wouldn’t stop. The playroom wall’s insulated but I was worried they could hear us through the ceiling.

I let her off, and I said she could rejoin us after she calmed down. She didn’t come back, and I didn’t think anything of it.

I found the dress on the floor the next morning. There was no sign of Rachel. She finally got her fill of me, I guess.

They’re still just sitting there, leaning on each other over the faded bench. Still young and horny, surrounded by toys they’ll never afford, and nobody knows where they are or has any reason to be looking for them. It kills me to see it – so to speak.

I really could have had something more with her, couldn’t I?

In the off chance that you care, I had never decided what to do with the house in case the worst happened to me. The bank probably ended up with it, it was mortgaged to Hell and back. The new owners are going to be in for a surprise.

Oh, but I did leave that poster to Rachel in my will. I’m not a monster.