The Book of a Thousand Sins Read online

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  ISBN: 1-936383-14-4

  Copyright © 2010, 2014 by Wrath James White

  Cover art copyright © 2010, 2014 Suzzan Blac

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  Printed in the USA.

  He Who Increases Knowledge

  I never believed in God and if I had I’m quite sure my response would not have been to prostrate myself before him and offer myself up as his eternal slave. I doubt that I’d have been so awed as to renounce all reason and autonomy to become his unquestioning, submissive, yes-man; and offer him my throat to crush beneath his heel and my backside to kick like one of his many mindless cattle. The very notion offends me. I might have sought to study him, after he’d been captured and caged. Run him through a few IQ and physical dexterity tests before vivisecting him and examining his organs through a microscope with thin slices of his brain laid out on slide trays. Worship? No, I would want to own him; claim his power for myself. Pretty soon, I was hoping there really was a god, actively searching for him. If such a being existed, there was hope that I could usurp its power.

  It was this search for God that led me into the sciences. I studied everything from bio-chemistry and quantum physics to astronomy, psychology, and socio-anthropology. I sought him in petrie dishes, in electron microscopes, in radio telescopes, in chemical and mathematical equations, in ancient crypts and burial mounds, and in the minds of men, but he eluded me. I then took all the traditional routes. I went to churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues. I went to sights where miracles were said to have taken place. All I found were more deluded sheep following a shepherd who was nowhere in evidence. Until the day I was led, as if by fate, to a whorehouse in Mexico.

  A man I’d known for some years had come to me with a tale I’d heard many times from many men but had never found so thoroughly convincing as I did upon hearing it from him. He told me that he’d found heaven . . . between the thighs of a woman. He told me that he’d touched God.

  Big Willie was 6’5” 235lbs of muscle-bound lady-killer. Every common epithet used to describe a notorious womanizer applied to him easily. The same women who called him a no-good-dog still called him every night. His friends lived vicariously through him, recounting his infamous exploits while seated on bar stools and knocking back 40ozs. “Pimp” and “Player” were titles he wore with pride. It made no sense to me at all to hear him talking like this.

  “I found an angel. Her pussy is paradise!”

  “Okay, so which deluded little slut might this be?” I asked, not just skeptical, but downright hostile. I had listened to stories of his various conquests since our days in high school together and I no longer found them amusing. I felt as if he told me these things merely to feed the jealousy he knew I already had for him. My entire sexual history was barely a weekend in his life. But then, I’d never heard him lavish such praise upon a woman after he’d already slept with her. Generally he would become obsessed with some woman or other but then once he’d had her he would immediately loose interest. Once she was demystified and revealed as a mere mortal, his disappointment would become immediately apparent. I often wondered if perhaps Willie was looking for God too, but just taking a different approach in his search, seeking him in the flesh. Perhaps Willie sought the goddess?

  As unusual as it was to hear him talking about a woman like this, I did not regard his comments as anything more than the inevitable downfall of any man, even an unrepentant pussy hound like Willie. I assumed that he’d simply fallen in love—that this man for whom passion was a sport had finally found his competitive equal. It was only when he began to elaborate that my curiosity was piqued.

  “Man, I’m tellin’ you, this ain’t what you think. It ain’t like I’m in love or nothing. I’m tellin’ you, this woman’s pussy is like the gates of heaven! I was fucking her and man I was like teleported straight to paradise! I saw the face of God! I could feel the entire universe!”

  “In some bitch’s pussy?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Well, what a fool I have been! Here I was looking in churches and books and all the time all I had to do was find the right piece of tail!”

  “Bro, I’m not bullshitting you. Her pussy is like some kind of portal to another plane of existence! It’s true! She works in this whorehouse in Tijuana and everybody down there knows about her. She’s like a legend! They even pray to her! Women send their husbands to the whorehouse to fuck her as part of a religious ceremony. They call it getting “the blessing”. There’s even some big controversy with one of the local churches down there because they want to take her out of the brothel and put her up in the church, make her a saint and put her up on the altar. They want to make her part of the communion! But the brothel owners don’t want to lose her because of the money she brings in.”

  “You have got to be full of shit.”

  “Bro, I ain’t even creative enough to come up with some shit like this if I tried. You’ve got to come down there with me and see for yourself.”

  So I went. On the slim chance that it was true I had to go see. I knew it was ridiculous, but I was intrigued. We lived in Los Angeles so it was only a short drive to Tijuana. We jumped in the Mazda Civic hatchback and made a run for the border with images of the sainted whore dancing through our minds.

  The den of holiness and iniquity where the holy slut lay on a bed with legs akimbo, was a dingy little place that featured a live sex show in the basement in which women demonstrated one of the acts that had made the city famous, fucking a donkey. The upstairs lobby was littered with last ditch whores who wreaked of infection and disease. Many of them were missing teeth and had black eyes or busted lips and a profusion of other scrapes and bruises, mostly on their knees and elbows. Many of them were smoking crack pipes and shooting themselves up with heroin right there in the lobby as they sat on battered lice-ridden couches waiting for the next trick. They all had vacant eyes and hopeless expressions like prisoners at a death camp. This was the end of the road for the world’s oldest profession. The place where whores came to die. I could only wonder what the hell had brought Willie here.

  Willie could have any woman he desired. He had a way with women that went beyond his rugged handsomeness or chiseled physique. He knew all the right lies to tell. Women looked into his soft brown eyes, followed the movement of his heart shaped lips, and believed every word that came out of him. Willie could make a woman feel like the most beautiful woman on the planet. Yet for some reason he had chosen to pay for sex with prostitutes that would have made the elephant man lose his appetite. The only thing that struck me more oddly than Willie having been there was the site of the long line of respectable looking gentlemen of every age from sixteen to ninety waiting to get into a room somewhere in the back of the establishment.

  Every now and again a man would step out of the room and genuflect with one hand while zipping his fly with the other, then the next man would cross himself and enter for his turn. Everyone in the line seemed to have a look of solemnity and piety and many of them carried bibles. This was some weird shit.

  “Willie, how the hell did you find this place?”

  “A cab driver brought me here. I told him I wanted some pussy and you know, I thought he’d bring me to a dance club or something. He tells me that
he knows where there’s some pussy like nothing else in this world. So I said, well fuck yeah! Take me there! Next thing I know we’re darting through dark alleys at like 80 miles an hour and we wind up here.”

  “Okay, so why didn’t you just turn around and leave when you found out what the place was?”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  I looked at the long line of men waiting to get into the room. They looked more like they were waiting to enter a confessional than a whore’s bed. My curiosity was roiling like a furnace. No, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to uncover the mystery. I had to find out what was behind that door.

  Another man came out with his eyes glazed as if in a religious rapture. I grabbed him and asked him what he’d seen. His eyes stared straight up at the ceiling and did not even turn my way. When he didn’t reply I shook him and repeated my question in Spanish. His eyes swam slowly towards my face, pupils as wide as marbles.

  “¿Qué viste?” <“What did you see?”>

  “¡Vi a Dios! ¡Vi la eternidad!” <“I saw God! I saw Eternity!”> he replied.

  “¿Quién es ella? ¿Quién es aquella mujer allá adentro?” <“Who is she? Who is that woman in there?”> I asked.

  “¡Es la puta de Babilonia! ¡María Magdalena!” <“It is the whore of Babylon! Mary Magdalene!”> he replied again, nearly swooning as he spoke in a tone that could only be described as reverent.

  The whore of Babylon, the woman who’d been afflicted with seven different demons whom, according to the bible, Jesus had exorcised with a mere touch. The woman who’d watched as Christ was executed and who’d been the first to witness his resurrection, over two thousand years ago. These peasants believed that she was still alive, or had been resurrected herself, and was now throwing her legs up for money in the filthiest brothel in Mexico.

  I searched his eyes and the eyes of those who stood around me, mumbling prayers and clutching bibles and crucifixes to their chest as they waited to be perhaps the one-hundredth man that day to fuck the same ho, and I could see not one shred of doubt in them. Whatever lay beyond that door, it had convinced them all. This was either the crowning example of man’s absolute superstitious idiocy or the most profound leap of faith I’d ever seen. More than likely, it was both. I kept thinking about a quote I’d heard years ago: “The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.” I’d seen nations, entire cultures comprised of the latter. It should not have surprised me at all to find a brothel filled with them.

  There was no way I could have left at that point. I let the man go and watched as he stumbled past me, out the doorway, and off into the shadowy street, already growing dim as the sun set and twilight slipped into darkness. He shouted something as he staggered down the street with his head pointed heavenward. Loosely translated it was something like: “I have been saved! I have seen God!” Whatever it was that Willie had experienced in that room, between that woman’s thighs, it was not, it seemed, an isolated occurrence.

  What he had told me about the locals treating the place like a house of worship was by far an understatement. Even children walking by stopped and crossed themselves. As the man who’d just left the tiny room made his way down the street people rushed out to touch him for good luck. How a prostitute could become an object of worship was completely beyond my comprehension. I had to know what it was about her that could cause such a reaction in these people and even in my own friend.

  I‘d spent nearly every year since high school chasing miracles and messiahs around the country. I dropped out of UC Stanton one year before achieving a doctorate in Science and Philosophy just to pursue my quest for God and have never regretted it a single day. I have seen bleeding statues of the Virgin Mary. I have seen infants worshipped as the resurrected Messiah. I have seen stigmatics bleeding with the wounds of Christ. I have seen Buddhist monks levitate and voodoo priests possessed by demons. Still, this was the most bizarre religious experience I had ever had and it had not yet even begun. Ignoring the I told you so look on Big Willie’s face, I took up my place in line and watched as the men kissed their crucifixes and hugged their bibles while waiting in line, in a whorehouse, to pull a train on a living saint.

  Nearly an hour had gone by before it was my turn to enter the little room. The man who’d gone before me was kind enough to hold open the door for me. The first thing I noticed upon entering the dingy little room were the candles. White candles by the dozens filled the room casting shadows everywhere. The second thing I noticed was the smell. The overpowering odor of semen and stale pussy hung in the air like a fog and fired in my nostrils like a mentholated nose drop, causing my nose to run and my eyes to water almost immediately. The source of the malefic stench lay unmoving on the bed with her blank weeping eyes, white with cataracts, staring vacantly at the ceiling.

  She was little more than a skeleton with wrinkled and mottled flesh wrapped loosely about her brittle bones. Her hair was all but gone save for a few white follicles clinging stubbornly to her crinkly liver spotted scalp. Her mouth was a hollow crater devoid of teeth and with gums that had shrunk back against her jawbone. Her withered breasts drooped like two empty bladders from her chest and were draped on either side of her ribcage. Her ancient thighs were a maze of varicose veins from which shriveled skin sagged loosely like gooseflesh. Between them was a raw and angry gash, a worn and shriveled vagina that looked like an infected hatchet wound, leaking a steady stream of semen from the countless dozens of men who had visited her this day, if not from the hundreds and possibly thousands who had visited her over her lifetime. Her labia hung like dried and wrinkled curtains of jerked beef from the ghastly orifice that so many men had come to worship.

  I stepped closer to the bed and leaned over the impossibly ancient woman who looked more like a mummified corpse than a living person. I whispered softly to her some stuttering greeting. There was no reply. I raised my voice slightly and shook her bed. Still, she did not move or respond in any way. Her skin looked as dry and brittle as an autumn leaf, yet when I reached down and pinched her on the thigh, it felt tough and oily like a wallet I’d once owned made out of eel skin leather. She still gave no indication that she was even aware of my presence. The woman was catatonic. Her brain was completely gone. I lifted one of her tiny hands and felt for a pulse. It was faint but present and you could see her bird-like chest rising and falling ever so slightly as she inhaled and exhaled. At least she was alive.

  How could Willie have fucked this half-dead thing?

  I looked back down between her thighs and could see a faintlight emanating from the hairless slit. Her vaginal fluids seemed to have a chemical luminescence. I tried to approach the experiment with clinical detachment, but the unctuous cocktail of fluids still weeping from her loins made the very thought of entering her a repulsive and abhorrent prospect. Still, I had come for revelation, to capture God in a bottle, and if this was the vessel he was hiding in than I had no choice but to go in after him. If all those other guys could do it than so could I. In the interest of science, I dropped my pants and mounted her.

  I wasn’t really too fond of missionary position, but I thought it might have been somewhat blasphemous to bend her over doggy-style. I took myself in hand and masturbated to semi-erectness, imagining tit-fucking Tyra Banks while Pamela Anderson licked my balls and tried my best to ignore the putrescent odor emanating from the brainless vegetable I was about to fuck. As soon as I squeezed my near flaccid penis into her I knew what Willie had been raving about, what all those superstitious peasants had been so awed by. I was awed by it too. My manhood surged, growing massively erect as all the blood from my body seemed to suck down into it. My very consciousness seemed to have relocated to the tip of my swollen cock. But there was no way I could have been conscious. I had to have been dreaming. Because what I was experiencing was beyond anything imaginable.

  Entering her was like falling from a great height. No, it was like hurtling through space at th
e speed of light. I saw worlds rush by as my dick slid into her sopping wet snatch. My head was filled with images that belonged to nothing on or in sight of earth. It exploded with colors that I’d never seen before and that I could not describe to you now. It was just like Willie had said. I’d entered a dimensional doorway and I was as far from earth as the sun is from the nearest quasar. The harder I pumped into her the faster the universe flew by. The experience was exhilarating. It was like fucking on the head of a comet! My body was on fire with sensation. My every nerve ending was electrified! Soon I found myself at the very end of the universe, looking at it from some perspective beyond space, outside of existence. What I saw was astounding.

  An amorphous semi-organic organism that seemed to be composed of living energy, stretching to infinity in all directions, so impossibly vast that the entire universe nestled within it. As I watched, entire galaxies emerged from it and others dissolved down into it. Planets formed and life emerged while other planets winked out of existence and were re-assimilated back into it, broken down and recycled into new planets. It was like a program stuck in an infinite loop of wanton destruction and recreation.

  I somehow found myself in some type of telepathic connection with it or rather I became aware of the connection that had always existed. I was in touch with its mind and there was not a single discernible thought. It was all thought merged into a screaming cacophony of white noise, an endless riot of thought with no order or cohesion. The voice of the entire universe in one inarticulate stew, incomprehensible except for one powerful drive—survival, continuance! But it was not concerned with the survival of any one person, or species, or world, or galaxy, but simply that something survive, that something continue, that life in some form continue to exist. Endlessly it recycled one species and created another from its ashes, an endless continuum of emergence, evolution, and inevitable extinction leading back to the emergence of new species, new planets, new solar systems, and galaxies. This was the very force of creation, the source of all life. I had found God and it was all voracious appetite and mindless creation. Not a being but a force. A force that could not be pleaded with or appealed to. A force that did not share any of the concerns of mankind. A force that could never be captured in a book or in a laboratory or in any one man’s mind or heart. This was the face of infinity and no finite being would ever be able to fathom but the smallest iota of its depths.