

Browse column O ne of the many advantages to living in Russia is that you can pop into any apteka -- and even most kiosks -- and grab yourself any of the three leading erectile-dysfunction pills, Viagra, Cialis, or Levitra. No unnecessary expensive doctor's visit, no wasted time. Just erections-on-demand, as they should be. The only real question that concerns your flaccid consumer is, "Which pill works best?" This issue, with spring arriving and Snapper Season just around the corner, I decided to investigate the erectile-dysfunction pills first-hand. Everyone has heard of Viagra, and most men I know have tried it at least a few times -- usually to ensure performance in case of heavy drug or alcohol intake, or else to convince their life partner that they're still attracted to her. "Gosh honey, look how rock-hard I am! And all because of you! Each time is just like the first time with you, honey!" The easiest way to conduct this "Viagra Challenge" would be to simply pop each pill on different nights and try them out on different girls. But there would be nothing particularly revealing about getting a Viagra-induced erection with a hot young prostitute, or even a girlfriend for that matter. No, what this Viagra Challenge needed was something that Car & Driver puts its machines through in their consumer tests: extreme, rugged, unbearable conditions. And that meant only one thing: I'd have to test-drive each erectile-dysfunction pill on a grotesquely aging whore. A prostitute so old and washed-up that she hasn't been able to work the Leningradskoe Shosse tochkas since right around the time that Yeltsin shelled the White House. A whore so far past her expiration date that she's lucky if she lands a bit part in a bestiality porn, getting banged by a Great Dane named "Rex" for lunch change... In order to ensure some kind of fairness, I set a base rule: each prostitute that I test the pill on must be 40 years old or over. She must be the khruschyovka of the prostitution world, born into the world at a time when the Zaporozhets was considered a sporty car, and gold teeth were a sign of prestige. But even that wasn't enough. What if the pill worked too well? I needed to put up another obstacle to the erection, to make sure it really was dysfunctional. Therefore, on the day of each trick I decided I would pop prescription amphetamines -- time-released Ritalins. The good thing about amphetamines is that they lower your inhibitions, making it a little easier to consider fucking a beat-up whore than if life was going at its slow "reality" rhythm. The bad thing - if you can call this "bad" - is that amphetamines turn your dick into what my friends and I used to call "the walnut": a shriveled, tiny, sweaty, disfigured stump, a remnant of what once was, turning the bone into a tail bone. That made the Viagra Challenge genuinely tough. I figured if I pop a Levitra and test-drive it on, say, a haggard 45-year-old prostitute while grinding on a mild overdose of prescription amphetamines, I'll be performing the sexual equivalent of test-driving a 2006 Toyota Landcruiser in the Pankisi Gorge: the only way to know how well the product really works is to test it out in the most extreme conditions imaginable. A Whore Too Far It's not easy to find a 40-plus prostitute in Moscow, but they're out there on the on-line whore-to-door service sites. I popped triple the dose of time-released Ritalins, and wound up spending way too much time tracking down a total of about eight 40-plus prostitutes, including a fat 55-year-old woman whose gray and dyed-blond hair was piled atop her flabby head, and who, in the advertisement, was shoving a bright red dildo up her grayish vagina. It didn't seem possible. Can you actually fuck a woman that old? Do they really do this? The first whore I called was named Masha. She was listed as 40 years old. She had black shoulder-length hair, a kind of chiseled face, thin wearied lips, and a not entirely awful body, judging by the doctored photo - though from my experience I guessed it was one of those barrel-like torsos with flabby breasts. She only charged 1000 rubles. That's 30 dollars! I'd never fucked a prostitute for so little in Moscow - this presented a true Viagra Challenge. Masha told me by phone that she worked out of an apartment "10 to 15 minutes from Alexeevskaya metro." She had an accent, perhaps Caucasian or southern Ukrainian. "I'd like to come over now," I told her. It was 5pm on a working weekday. "You need to call one hour in advance," she said. "Okay, so I'll make the appointment now and I'll come over at 6pm." "No, you need to call me back in one hour and make your appointment for one hour from that call." I laughed. "Why not just one hour from now?" The old sovok rules were even transfered to sovok-era whores. "Call me back in one hour," she said, and hung up the phone. I was kind of shocked. You'd think she'd need the business, occupying as she does the lowest rung on the prostitution ladder. What did it mean? Was it something I said or did? My voice tends to get higher and more child-like on amphetamines...did that annoy her? I shook it off and moved on to a prostitute who called herself "Natalya Vladimirovna." I'd never seen a whore use her patronymic before - it must be for fetishists, designed to give authenticity to her age. Natalya Vladimirovna had frosted blond hair, big red lips, nice round breasts that seemed firm from the photo of her lying on her back, and smooth legs. In fact, she looked almost too good - and at $70 for a one-hour visit to her apartment, she better be good. "Natalya Vladimirovna?" I said, calling her. "Yes." Her voice was sharp and annoyed. "Um, I saw your ad and I'd like to meet with you." She sighed. "Seventy dollars one hour, one hundred twenty for two. You must come to my apartment. What would you like? Classic? Anal?" "I don't know, maybe both," I said. "Your ad says you're at Taganskaya?" "Well, between Taganskaya and Proletarskaya," she said. "That's good for me. I'd like to meet as soon as you can." "We can meet at 8:30pm," she said. She told me her address - it was actually nowhere near Taganka, let alone the Proletarskaya metro area. An unnecessarily inconvenient bait-and-switch. "So I have just one question, are you really 40 years old?" I asked her. "Yes, I'm 40." "Because you really don't look 40 in the photo I saw. You look very good for your age." "What the hell did you expect me to look like, an old woman?! I'm only 40! That's not such an old age you know!" "I'm sorry, I meant that as a compliment," I said, taken aback. There was silence on the phone. I couldn't believe it - I was fighting with an overaged whore, when all I wanted to do was fuck her, for no pleasure of my own. "So, I'll be over at 8:30pm." She grumbled affirmatively, and told me to call when I reached a supermarket near her building. Just to confirm, I said, "Tochno?" "Tochno," she snarled sarcastically. I bought a Levitra pill for 450 rubles from the apteka just up the street from me. Levitra is a small orange pill - while Viagra is a larger blue pill, and Cialis is a small yellow pill. The same people who branded the Orange/Red Rose/Tulip revolutions branded the erectile-dysfunction pills, and for whatever reason, it seems to work. Beyond the color, there were some vital differences. I had read on the 'net that Levitra's one main advantage was that it kicked in within 15 minutes, unlike Viagra, which takes at least 30 minutes, or Cialis, which supposedly took an hour or more. I tried timing my Levitra dose as close as possible to my ETA at the whore's apartment. But timing it was impossible - her building was easily a 25 minute walk from the metro, in blustery cold, with almost no way of crossing the wide, busy prospekt. I really felt like shit, and I was freezing my ass off, wondering how or whether I'd ever find her goddamn building, especially since the residential buildings were hundreds of meters off the main road, in darkened courtyards... In Moscow, you always forget how large a scale you need to use when figuring distances. During my Long March, our new sales apprentice Branko called me on my mobile to let me know that he was enjoying a free meal that was intended to be served to me, in a nice warm bar in the center of Moscow. I had given up that meal...for this! That was when the first real wave of regret started to hit me, and I asked myself, "What the hell am I doing? I'm trekking through a Moscow shithole, trying to score a rank, mean old whore whom I don't want and who doesn't want me, drugged up on Levitra and Ritalin just for the amusement of my readers... Oh shit, I'm going to have a dark epipheny here..." Besides, the whole joke is that I'm nearing 40 myself. Here I am, treating 40-year-old whores as if they're gargoyles, when in fact they're really my peers. Not just age-wise, but in other ways as well. I've set up a future marginally more secure than your average 50-year-old whore. I reached the appointed supermarket and called Natalya Vladimirovna on her cell phone. She had switched it off. I called again, but it went straight to her voice mail. She had turned her cell phone off. I left a nice message, then a second more urgent message. It was clear she had decided to blow me off, perhaps because I had offended her with my comment about her age, or perhaps because she simply had a change of heart and decided to watch a movie on ORT. I called once more to leave a really nasty message about her age, but that would have depressed me even more, trashing a washed up whore. It would be like running over road kill for thrills. There was no choice but retreat. The Levitra was still making my heart race... I had to find an aging whore! When I got home, I called up three aging whores unsuccessfully before finally getting one to pick up the phone. It was Katerina, a fat-rolled 45-year-old whore with the size 8 breasts. "Da." "Hi, I'm calling about your ad. I'd like to come over tonight." "Impossible, it's too late, call back tomorrow!" And she hung up the phone. And that was it, my first day on the assignment. I couldn't believe what had just happened to me: in the middle of the highest-quality whore-garden in all of Europe, I couldn't get laid by the dross, the weeds and fungi of Moscow's whore market. I thought they'd be wailing with joy and offering me incentives to see them - like their daughters, for example. But the simple fact was the old prostitutes just didn't give a fuck about whether they turned an extra trick or not. I would never have thought so, but the truth is that it's a million times easier, and probably even cheaper, to score an 18-year-old prostitute freshly plucked from a Moldovan village than to score a 50-year-old whore suffering from bed sores. Who'd-a thunk! The Michelin Woman I waited two days to give my heart a rest, then popped my counter-acting medicines, caught my breath and managed to secure a 45-year-old prostitute named Ella. She had a kind of late-60s Soviet coif of dark-reddish hair with Corinthian curls and cutesy bangs, a rectangular face with a small, bright strawberry-shaped mouth, and a "big-boned" figure. That is to say, fat, again, like so many women in this country past the age of 40. Ella's "dispyacher" arranged to send Ella out to my apartment in as soon as 45 minutes for just 2000 rubles, a steal in whore-delivery terms. I bought another Levitra, raising eyebrows from my apteka pharmacist, then showered and ate some pasta with jarred pesto sauce. The skinny on Levitra is that eating before use supposedly doesn't affect its potency, as food does with Viagra. It was 10:30 pm when Ella finally arrived, and I was already starting to crash from the Ritalins. I had no desire, and the sight of her made this non-desire implode into a vortex of mild nausea. Ella was shorter - and much thicker - than I'd expected, built sort of like the Michelin Man with her rolls of fat visible through her erotic clothes. Her heavy eye-paint couldn't hide the webs of wrinkles and crow's feet. "Am I older than you thought?" she asked me. "Are you shocked?" "No, it's okay, you're just what I wanted," trying to keep from staring at her the way a kid stares at a cripple. "Oh? Good," she said, taking off her boots. She wore black nylon trousers and a black blouse with see-through arms. I sat on my couch, wearing only my underwear and my pink Royal Hawaiian Hotel bathrobe. Ella kneeled on the floor at my feet and, laughing uneasily, opened my bathrobe and started to rub my legs and chest, making small circles. "Do you like this? I was a professional masseuse at a clinic in Minsk," she said proudly. "Where are you from?" I asked. She hesitated. "Moscow," she said. "Why, you don't think so?" "You seem to have an accent," I said, though I couldn't place it. She insisted she was from Moscow, then went for my crotch. My dick was still limp, but something was stirring, to my amazement. Her hands were strong. "Let's take our clothes off," she said. I liked the way she didn't waste time - some whores can be exhausting. I watched her take off her pants, stripping down to her rynok black fake-lace underwear and garter. Then she took off her blouse and her bra, and... Well, have you ever seen the movie About Schmidt ? The Kathy Bates scene in the Jacuzzi, when Jack Nicholson literally screams from the site of those rotten rolls of flesh, those long, flat boobs whose large nipples angle straight downward, like large deflated balloons?... Yeah. Then you know what I mean. Ella pulled out a pack of condoms and a roll of tissue papers, then kneeled again at my feet. I looked at those condoms, and thought, "There is no way in Hell I'm going to fuck her. I mean, how will I do it anyway? Fuck her missionary style? On top of those rolls? Or from behind? How will it go in? Ugh, oh god, no way..." Ella told me to relax as she performed her simple massage technique, cupping her hands and rubbing them in small circles over my muscles. Then she pulled down my underwear and started to jerk me off with a firm grip. And, well, I'm not sure what this means or says about me, but...the Levitra worked. As lightly-nauseous as I was, I found myself the proud owner of a 4-alarm hard-on. The walnut was gone in 60 seconds. Ella started to kiss my legs, then my balls (something I can't stand -- what's exciting about having your tenderest part kissed or sucked by some total stranger whose motives are not entirely clear?), then she rolled a condom on me and began to give me head. It was, technically, a pretty adept blowjob -- but every time I opened my eyes, I couldn't believe what I was looking at: a 45-year-old woman, wearing what I now realized was a cheap wig, sucking my dick. I tried to recall if I had ever been with even a 30-year-old woman in my life, let alone a 40-year-old... I couldn't think of one, and didn't want to. Instead, all I thought of was my 18-year-old girlfriend, wondering if she'd dump me over this, and wondering when the time would come in my life when I'd be grateful to have an Ella. I also thought, watching her, "Wow, so 45-year-old women also give head. And they give head pretty much the way 25-year-old girls do -- the same motion, the same slurps and sucking sounds." That seemed like valuable information for reasons I couldn't explain. Ella wanted to get up and fuck me, but I nudged her head back down, and tried to think of a happy place. Finally, after a grueling 20 minute blowjob, I was able to cum... Ella had me lie down on another couch and started to massage my body. "I was a professional masseuse," she said. "I finished with a higher medical education, a gynecologist by profession. I never worked as a gynecologist because of circumstances. Work and life took me to massaging," she said. "Here in Moscow?" She hesitated. "Well, no, I'm not from here," she said, very suspiciously. I hadn't ever encountered this kind of suspicion from a prostitute before -- all the ones I'd interviewed either blabbed until their tongues turned white, or, in rarer circumstances, were simply too bitchy and angry to talk. "I should be careful," she said. "Why do you want to know where I'm from? Are you going to write something in the comments section of the web site?" "Write a review of you? People do that?" "Of course, look at the site," she said. "No, I won't write a bad review," I assured her. "I'm just curious, I want to know what you do, how you started. So you were in Minsk before coming back to Moscow?" "I'm from Khabarovsk, in Siberia," she said. "Do you know it?" "Yes, but I haven't been there," I said. "You have North Korean workers there, right?" "No, Chinese, lots of them. Khabarovsk is my hometown, maybe that's why I speak differently. I met my husband there - an army officer. We got married, and then he was transferred to Belarus, to the border units. Eventually we wound up back in Minsk. We lived there for 11 years. I had a good life there, everything was good. I was a masseuse, we had an apartment, a dacha, friends... I only moved to Moscow in January." "What happened?" She paused again, kneeling beside my couch and rubbing me. "My husband..." "You divorced?" "He did awful things that - okay, let's not talk about my husband anymore, ladno?" Ella smiled. "That's all I'll say. Let's talk about happier things." She rubbed me some more, then asked me if I wanted to know anything else about her, only not involving her marriage. "How did you land in this kind of work, in prostitution?" "I had to leave Minsk, and I had nothing. Moscow is the only place that has money. A woman my age, with nothing at all, in Moscow... I answered an ad, and now I'm doing this. It's not so bad, actually. It pays my rent, I have spending money. They help pay for my apartment, they take care of me. We have a dispatcher. Of course, it's not work I'm proud of. I never expected, really, to be doing this..." "Have you been doing it a long time?" "Oh no! I just started in January. I'd never worked in this field before. I never imagined... It can be difficult, but you know..." She started to grow sad. "Yes, difficult." She rubbed my dick again, and tried to suck it. "Let's not talk about me. Davai, I want to do the full act now." "Oh no, I can't," I said, pulling away. "Yes, you can," she said, and started to suck on my flaccid unit. It might have been possible with the Levitra, but if it was, frankly, I didn't want to know. There was no way I was going to fuck her - I wanted her out of my apartment. I was crashing from the mix of post-orgasmic depression, Ritalin exhaustin and the Levitra fibrillation. She didn't put up too much of a fight. She asked me to call her again, and told me she looked forward to "completing the act" with me, assuring me it would be fantastic. After she left, I sat around my house drinking cheap Moldovan wine and staring mutely at my walls. I felt a vague, steady nausea - the real puking-nausea, not the Sartre kind - and wondered if this had changed me. I was mildly depressed and exhausted, despondent over the fact that I was barely able to get Ella's story, wondering what it was all worth. But for the purposes of the Viagra Challenge, I had to admit, the Levitra worked. RESULTS: Levitra performed well under extreme conditions, and it worked fast. My erection had enough horse power to carry me through a blowjob to its completion, despite the rugged, brutal terrain. Banging Miss Daisies It was Sunday night, and I'd spent the entire day flying again on Ritalins, a day I wasted in a blur. It was time to take my second 40-plus whore. But I ran into the same problems. Some whores refused to answer their phones. Some told me, at 5pm, that it was already too late. I called the 1000r Masha at Alexeevskaya metro, and she gave me the same spiel about calling her in an hour to arrange an appointment an hour from then. When I called her again, she told me she doesn't work Sundays, and hung up. Unbelievable. I finally hit the jackpot an hour later - a 45-year-old lesbian double team. One had short red hair, a plain face and a formless though not horrifying body - the other, from the photo at least, had nice breasts, curves and a scary face heavily painted, with frosted hair teased in all directions, almost like a Siberian drag queen, like Divine, only presumable female and much thinner. They invited me to their apartment, "just a five minute walk from the Begovaya metro station." I had popped a Cialis on my way over, after buying it at a nearby apteka for 680 rubles (about $25). Cialis supposedly takes an hour to kick in, but once it does, it lasts for two days. I had only taken Cialis once in my life, about two years ago, during a brutal all-nighter that involved copious amounts of absinthe, vodka and blow. When I got home late that night, I committed the crime of "dialing while under the influence," inviting a sleazy Chuvash girl up to my apartment at 5 in the morning. She was a genuine nymphomaniac who was Hep-B positive, but since I was vaccinated and safe, and in spite of my stupidity, I never caught it. The Cialis didn't work that night - I was too drunk, and too disgusted by her new short masculine hairdo. The Chuvash girl left early, while I was passed out on my bed, and a girlfriend at the time called me at around 11am inviting me to go to an airshow with her. That was when I learned the power of Cialis - in the crush of the crowd at the airshow, where we were constantly herded into barriers and lines, I started popping these embarrassing chubbies a full 12 hours after popping the Cialis. The hard-ons wouldn't go away, so long as the crowd was crushing. A few people turned around sharply to see what was poking into them... "Heh-heh, sorry 'bout that ma'am! Sir! It's not me, it's the, uh, ekologichesky chisty air out here. Yessirree, doesn't get healthier than the podmoskovie town of Zhukov! Just breathe it in!" ...The old whores' apartment was a wretched, freezing 20 minute trek from the Begovaya station, past some kind of junkyard, where each address number on the street represented about 3 minutes of walking distance, and I had a lot of numbers to go. They lived on the 7th floor of a 12 story Brezhnev-era building. The one with the short red hair answered the door. She was wearing a bathrobe and tapochki, and looked very displeased to have to be working. I heard voices in the apartment - it had a russkii remont feel to it, with cheap white walls and white doors that seemed perhaps 2 years old, but looked about three times that. She led me into a bedroom off to the right. It had a large couch-bed folded out with ornate blankets on top, a dresser with cheap hair sprays and cosmetics, and a TV playing the X-Men film. We heard voices - the doorbell rang, and a woman walked in. "There are four of us who live here," my woman told me. "Do you want one girl or two?" I was jittery from the Ritalins, although the Cialis didn't hit me hard like the Levitra did. "I don't know," I said. "Could you bring in the other, what's her name?" "Marina." As if on cue, the one with the painted gargoyle face and the teased up gray-blond hair entered, wearing see-through nylons and a garter. This was Marina. She snapped at Vika to switch off the movie ("but he said he liked it" "put on some music, will you?!"), then started rubbing my hair and my hands, pitying me for how ice-cold they were. On the wall, I noticed a framed photograph of Marina in lingerie, blowing a kiss to the photographer. "You're so tall," Marina said, rubbing my hair. I hadn't shaved, and I looked haggard, but I was a client. "Where are you from?" "America." "No, it's not possible. You don't look American." I knew what she meant: you look like a hachik. "Poor American is cold. We need to warm him up, right Vika?" "So where are you from?" I asked. Vika sighed. "From Vladimir. All of us came from Vladimir." "Did you know each other and come out together?" "No, we met here through the agency. They just put us all together." "How many rooms is the apartment?" "Two bedrooms. It's okay, it's fine." The view from the window was that sad, depressing view you have when you live in the big residential settlements - darkened 15-story buildings with dim lights illuminating every other window. Vika sighed. "So which one of us do you want?" she asked. "Um, both of you," I answered. It had to be this way. They were only $50 each, and it made for better copy. And besides, nothing turns me off more than lesbian sex - if amphetamines make my dick into a walnut, then lesbian sex makes my dick literally burrow into my pelvis. "I want both of you, and I want you to do lesbos, ok?" "Of course, dorogoi," Marina said, rubbing my arms and hands. Right then, another old woman with long blond hair and a wrinkled face walked into the room. She excused herself, pulled a few things out of the dresser, and left. "So, don't be shy, let's get undressed and start," Marina said, laughing. We all took off our clothes and I threw myself onto the bed, on my back. Vika, whose body was simply without features, like her face - pale, dollops of mayonnaise, formless and squat though not exactly fat - immediately went for my dick, kissing around my groin, while Marina started rubbing my chest and sucking my nipples. It might have been a turn-on - might be a turn-on in some later period of my life - but it was just plain fucking weird. It was like something you'd expect to happen in college, a racy two-on-one with a couple of dorm sluts...but they were middle-aged, really middle-aged. Marina's hair had gray roots which showed, and it reeked of deeply-embedded cheap cigarette smoke, like an old carpet in a cheap casino; the flesh on her face was sagging and creased, her lips pulled down. I closed my eyes hard. They quickly changed roles; Vika now sucked on my nipples, while Marina started giving me head. I was limp, completely flaccid. Walnut-scrunched. I was sure that the Cialis was too weak to overcome this nightmare. But Marina was a fighter. She did this tongue-flicking thing on my dick for so long I wondered if she had a little motor in there. She tugged on it, stroked it, sucked it...she went for my balls, my taint, and sucked again. This went on for ten, fifteen minutes. There was no need to get them to do lesbos, and they didn't seem to necessarily want to either - the point was, I couldn't get hard anyway. But Marina was a fighter. She doubled up her efforts. She started to moan, blowing me with increasing conviction. Nothing happened though. I started to think it never would - and while that might be funny, it would also ensure that they wouldn't open up to me afterwards. Incredibly enough, after about 20 minutes of relentless stimulation, signs of life started to stir. Once my dick peeked out of its shell, Marina grabbed it by the neck and pulled it out into the daylight. To my horror, I even began to enjoy it. Marina started to moan loudly, a husky old moan whose significanceI tried to ignore. Within five minutes, I could feel myself getting on the monorail to an orgasm. I had my eyes closed, thinking of someone else, when suddenly, I felt a shifting of bodies, felt something close over my dick, opened my eyes, and saw...MARINA SITTING ON MY DICK! I quickly shut my eyes as she lowered herself down and started to fuck me. I couldn't look - I didn't want that image burned into my mind. Vika stroked my legs and balls while Marina rode me. After about five minutes of this, she rolled me over on top of her. I kept my eyes closed - Marina reached to try to kiss me, but I pulled my head away and buried them into her deflated breasts. That same vague gagging nausea started to well up in my stomach. I fucked her for about 5 minutes - I take no pride in saying this, but I think she really enjoyed it. She started to push me into her, to heave and moan loudly. I couldn't tell whether to laugh, to feel shame, or to feel nothing. Like my friend Ricky Ramirez would say, "They're just fuckin' people man, who gives a fuck." Moreover, her pussy was not what I expected -- it was fairly tight, warm and wet, not wide, dry and brittle. I decided that it was time to fuck the other - for one thing, there seemed to be something wrong about the way Marina was enjoying it - it was as if I was complicit. I pulled off of Marina, told Vika to lie down... she did the whore swipe, licking her palm and lubing her vagina...and I entered her. Her pussy was also rather nice and warm. I started to fuck her a bit faster and harder, but she didn't have any kind of passionate response. This was how I wanted it - totally devoid of any sexual interest, far less intimate than masturbating. Meanwhile, Marina was now behind me, moaning oddly and trying to get a piece of the action. The old bag started rubbing my balls and ass, then kissed my back. She kissed down lower...and a little lower...and I swear, I'm sure, as I was fucking Vika, Marina dug her mouth into my crack and proceeded to rim me. I instantly squeezed my ass, forcing her to pop her head out. What is it with my ass? Isn't all that hair there nature's way of saying "Warning: Toxic Zone! Do Not Enter!" A few minutes later, Marina tried slipping a finger in. I think I squeezed in time to prevent the finger, but she maneuvered it in just as I was going to cum, so I didn't have a lot of control over my butt muscles. Later, I felt a little weird when I walked home, so I think the sneaky bitch beat me to it, just for a few seconds. Maybe that was her way of punishing me for not paying proper attention to her. ...Afterwards, Marina left to make me some tea, and I lay on the bed with Vika. "So how long have you been in Moscow?" I asked her. "Six months," she said. "You never lived in Moscow before this?" I asked. "No, always Vladimir." "What did you do in Vladimir?" "I was a prodavschitsa ." Wow, jackpot! I actually fucked a prodavschitsa ! And she looked like one too! "What about Marina?" "We all used to have work," Vika said. "Marina worked in a warehouse selling wholesale goods. All of us worked, but there's no way to make money now." "Were you ever married?" Just then, Marina entered with the tea. "I was married, yes, and I have one child," Vika said despondently. "I also have two children!" Marina said. "The eldest daughter is 25, and she has two kids, so that makes me a grandmother!" So I had actually fucked a babushka and a prodavschitsa . "My parents divorced when I was seven," I said. "When did you divorce your husband?" "When my eldest daughter was eight," Marina said. "A long time ago," Vika said. "What about you, do you have a wife and kids?" Marina asked me. "No, never married, no wife and kids. I've had what you call 'grazhdanskii brak ' a couple of times, but it never worked out. And I don't really want children." "How old are you?" Marina asked reproachfully. "Almost 40," I said. "And never married? No kids? It's going to be too late for you now, Mark." "It's already too late for him," Vika agreed sadly. "Did you do this...prostitution... in Vladimir?" I asked, moving the focus back to their lives. "No, none of us did. We never thought we'd be doing this. We just started six months ago. We took a bus out to Moscow, all of us separately." "How did you find each other?" "We work for the same agency. We found an ad in the paper, understood what they wanted." "What happened in Vladimir?" "No money, no work. We lost our jobs, all separately." "I have to support my children and grandchildren," Marina said, suddenly growing sullen. "I'm doing this for them. They have nothing. Their husbands don't support them, my ex-husband..." "Is it difficult to get used to this work?" Vika nodded her head, and Marina suddenly got serious, lifting her head from my legs. "It's very hard, of course. Each time is like the first time, Mark." Vika explained, "Every time it's as if we have to get used to it all over again. We haven't got used to it, you see, not at all." "You just meet a guy and sleep with him right away," Marina added. "It's not the way we do things, the way I lived my life. You don't know the man, you just sleep with him after meeting him for 10 minutes. It's very difficult, very painful..." Marina started to sniffle. She put her head down. I couldn't tell if she'd started to cry. "I'm sorry, excuse me," she said, and buried her head into my legs. "Let's not talk about this anymore, okay? Let's talk about happy things, not about this. It's too heavy." "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm just curious, I ask a lot of questions." "You want to ask questions more than you want to have sex," Marina quipped, then reached for my dick and started to stroke it. "I'm not ready yet," I said. "Oh come on," Marina said, trying to kiss it. "And really, why didn't you ever get married? It's too late now, Mark. Because all the woman around your age are all married or divorced, and girls from the younger generation, you can't get along with them. For example, Alesha, he was 32 and he was dating my daughter who was 22. He was going to marry her, but he'd complain to me that he and my daughter had nothing to talk about. All she wanted was to go to discos. So he wanted me. He fell in love with me and wanted to marry me instead. It happens sometimes," Marina added proudly. "So did you marry him?" I asked. "Ha! No, I'm not going to do that again. But you - you won't find anyone, it's too late. Age difference doesn't work out. Although, there was a Dutch man who wanted to marry me when I was 33. He was 52, a very nice man. He wanted to take me back to Holland with him. The day he came to propose to me, I fled into the forest until he left." "Do you regret that?" I asked. She shrugged - she seemed more proud than anything. "We all have regrets. It happened. What was I going to do in Holland anyway? I'm Russian, this is my motherland." I think she meant what she said. Marina really didn't seem to regret not marrying the Dutch man. She lived somewhere beyond regret, while he, if he ever indeed existed, only proposed to her in order to bolster her Vladimir tragedy credits. Marina liked telling these stories of men who were interested in her - they set her apart from Vika the prodavschitsa , who was mostly dull and quiet, more inclined to watch television than to reminisce about past romances. In fact, she didn't seem to have any to tell. TEST RESULTS: After our talk, Marina attacked my unit, moaning as she sucked it. "No Marina, I can't go twice, it's too soon," I said. "It's not that you can't, it's that you're lazy," Marina joked. "Come on, one more?" "No, really." The frightening thing was that I could feel something stirring -- I could have gone again. Even after her story, even after knowing she was a grandmother. The Cialis was put through a far rougher test than the Levitra, and it passed with alarmingly airborne colors. Indeed when I got home, I had to drain my unit twice just to keep it from whistling at me for more. All through the next day, the Cialis had me. If Cialis had any drawback, it was that it made me too aware of my dick. That was not something I needed, not after the Munch-like sexual experiences I'd just been through. A New Winner There was no point in testing Viagra. I have put Viagra through the test many times - and it has never let me down, no matter how close to overdosing or alcohol poisoning or just plain old and nerve-dead I became. Indeed the existence of Viagra really made me proud of America - that we really can solve problems without pain, by merely popping a pill. Fuck elbow grease and the old-fashioned way. Like all Americans, I want to solve my problems with the least amount of effort, study or inconvenience. The problem is that idiotic Americans not only restrict their own drugs' availability to themselves, but even when it's available, the cowardly little Puritans are still afraid to take it. Less than 15% of the estimated 30 million American men who suffer from impotence have even tried one of the three pills - and doctors say that the main reason most won't try it is because they're "embarrassed to ask." That's because, well, they're embarrassed to admit there's a problem. Pretty much sums up the American electorate, doesn't it. My own conclusion is that while the Levitra performed pretty much like Viagra - lasting the same, giving one of those He-Man ultra-hard-ons, the Cialis really surprised me the most, and seems to get the most bang for your buck. My next plan of action: to take a whore - an attractive, young whore - for a night, pop a Cialis, and punish her well into the next day. There is nothing a whore hates more than a john who wants a second round. Unless that whore happens to be a 45-year-old grandmother, that is... Print Share article