Erotica Artist Ch. 05: Fantasyland

And so I returned to my quiet, solitary life with no regrets. I had my glorious penthouse apartment and an undemanding job that paid my bills, I had my running and swimming routine, I had a fifty page per day reading schedule and my regular writing that had me churning out thirty five thousand words of porn every month, minimum, in addition to the reviews I wrote still for Al Bloomer. I was busy, I was active, I was content. I felt as if my life was in balance, finally.

I could sleep as late as I liked, spend the first hours of my day reading and writing, put in my shift at the warehouse and be out jogging by ten in the evening. Then a glorious hour, three times a week, in the university pool, hot-tub and steam-room, before coming home to a cool drink, some music, and another hour or two at the typewriter, or perhaps writing and reading in bed.

On some evenings I would experience such pleasure, lying in bed and perhaps listening to the rain on the windows as it swept over English Bay, knowing I didn't have tp be up early in the morning, that I wondered if my life could be any better, as isolated as I was.

I often felt the same on my weekend afternoons, lying all alone reading and writing on my sun-drenched deck. My world was totally self-contained and insular, but it was free. Every hour of the day, except for the four or five or sometimes six I spent at the warehouse, was mine to do with as I pleased.

Sometimes it would be close to dawn before I wrapped up my night's writing and jerked off in preparation for sleep. What a way to earn a living! I could often hear my neighbors stirring already, preparing for the day-shift, while I snuggled down in my solitary bed. And my final thoughts, as I sank into my sensuous daze, would be of the austere life of my childhood, the bone-chilling cold as I was roused from my dreams for the hellish life of school.

Only occasionally, as the months passed, did I feel pangs of loneliness. I thought fondly of Nicole, thankful that my porn-writing career had earned me a few weeks of bliss with her and grateful that it had helped me afford my current life of balance and sanity.

I was even more thankful that in its way it had helped me escape the biggest trap, the grossest con, the soundest jail-cell of them all, beside religion: romantic longing. Just let me meet women who are willing, for Christ's sake, I thought. Women who aren't interested in commitment and marriage and twenty years or more of the drudgery of child-rearing. Let me meet women who love freedom!

But if I was no longer the callow youth of the Kirsten days, or the ever-accommodating pseudo-angel of the Dawn Webb era, why, oh why, by the end of the year, did I give up my productive isolation and my hard-won freedom and enter whole-heartedly into a situation as unpromising, as negative and disheartening as the one I endured with Dawn? Why did I do this so willingly, with the key in my own hand, eager to turn the lock on myself?