I bid my farewells and headed out with my head down and twirling my keys around my fingers, thinking, when a voice jilted me.
“Duff?” It was Lisa. It was late and Lisa was way too much work this time of night.
“Hi.” It was all I could think of.
“I miss you,” Lisa said. She looked down at her new Doc Martens. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“I don’t either, Lis. It looked to me from the other night that you found somebody new.”
“You hate me because I’m interested in a woman.”
“Nah, I don’t think it’s that.” I tried to choose my words carefully. “It just seems to me that you found someone new and I ought to move on.”
“Do you have to be so closed minded?”
“I don’t have a lot of experience with this type of thing, Lis.” I never wanted to be in a conversation less. “Look, I got to go, take care of yourself.”
I didn’t wait for her to say anything else, which seemed a little cheap, but sometimes there’s nothing left to say. The situation had gotten to maximum weirdness, and I think I had some hurt around losing a girlfriend. That was then multiplied by the fact that it looked like I lost her to another woman. That wasn’t revolting, but it didn’t fit neatly into any particular category on the hard drive of my mind.
I was turning left on Main heading toward 9R when the headlights in the rearview took me away from Lisa. My buddy in the Crown Vic was back. He stayed with me, didn’t accelerate or slow down until I pulled into the Blue, and then he kept right on going up Route 9R.
20
Not having a home computer meant using my work computer. Considering the vast majority of these websites were pornographic, that meant that I would have to wait until everyone had gone home for the night. No one would suspect anything about me staying late because I was so far behind on my work. Of course, burning the midnight oil looking at porn sites with a spider theme wasn’t going to help me get my records up to snuff, but that was beside the point.
At five thirty, the only people left in the clinic were Monique, Trina, and myself. Monique had a women’s group to run and Trina was covering the front desk. That meant I was pretty much alone to surf the net.
I had no idea where to begin, so I just started.
Spiderweb. com wasn’t pornographic; it was a seldom-used search engine and it didn’t look any more exciting then a poorly constructed search engine would be.
Webster. com had something to do with dictionaries.
Web. com had to do with an Internet access company.
Spider. com was a motorcycle parts business.
Webbies. com was a site for computer geeks.
Daddylonglegs. com was the first porno site. It was dedicated to the men who love long-legged women, preferably in fancy hosiery. The woman on the front page was naked except for very sheer stockings and a garter. The stockings had the seam running up the back and she was wearing impossibly spiked heels as she bent over to touch the floor. I’m guessing she dropped a contact lens or something.
The left side of the page featured links to live webcams, white hosiery, black hosiery, fishnet city, body stockings, and message boards. I took a surf through and saw some interesting-looking women with interesting- looking outfits, but nothing that looked like it could possibly have anything to do with Shony. The message boards were filled with messages to the models from lonely men with far too much time on their hands, who somewhere along the way got way too wired on what women wear on their legs.
Daddyslonglegs. com was a very similar site, as was Dadslonglegs. com and Daddylongleggs. com. Who were these people? I mean, a good-looking woman in stockings is nice to look at, but don’t these people ever leave the house?
Next came a long series of sites that combined the word “sex” with spiders, webs, and websters. Some were pay porno sites, some were sites featuring amateur models, and some were sites for clubs. There’s a funny thing about pornography. I think most men enjoy it; some will admit to it and some won’t. I’ve always thought it was like Mexican food-I really liked it in small amounts. If I eat Mexican food a couple times in a week, it starts to taste crummy. With porn, looking at it once in a while was okay, but too much or too often and it loses its flavor.
Apparently, not everyone thought so. I’ve had clients who lost jobs, relationships, and went bankrupt because of it. Probably like people who get hooked on crack, porn addicts remember how turned on they got the first time and they keep chasing that feeling.
I was forty-five minutes into looking at women and couples in every position I ever dreamed of and some I hadn’t. It wasn’t the least bit exciting, in fact it was kind of a drag. I had worked my web through about 40 percent of Jerry’s report when I came across a site called www.Xcracksterweb.com.
The page opened with a slowly spreading black spider’s web. There were no graphics or photos, just a spider’s web that continued to grow. When I looked closer, I saw that the web was coming from a tiny spider that spread its web until it covered the entire screen. After a minute or once the web covered the screen, red lettering that said, “If you’re over twenty-one and not offended by depictions of sex, enter here.”
I clicked on the enter link and the screen went bright white. A large red-and-gold banner began to fill up the top of my screen. It said “Crack Hos for U.” Then a series of photos appeared of women, most naked and most engaged in a variety of sexual positions with different men. There were extremely graphic shots of oral sex, anal sex, sexual intercourse-you name it, it was there. In every shot, either the woman or her partner had a crack pipe in their hands.
The photos were not just graphic, they were degrading in the sense that the woman depicted were engaged in sexual activity with crack being held up to them as a reward for what they were doing. The men in the shots were mocking the women while having sex with them.
Crack addiction and prostitution are strongly linked. Selling your body is an almost instant way to get money and why women addicts often turn to prostitution. Men usually turn to crime, not because they object to selling their bodies, but because the market for male hookers is small and made up almost exclusively of gay men. The prostitution we’re talking about here isn’t the Julia Roberts Pretty Woman kind. We’re talking repeated episodes of oral sex in a crack house with the payment being a single rock of crack. That high wears off in about ten minutes and then it’s back to more oral sex. A woman in a group session once tearfully told me that she had done over two hundred acts in a single twenty-four-hour crack binge.
Along with child abuse, it was the most disturbing thing to hear about on my job. I hated both of them for the lifetime of damage they inflicted upon people. The fact that there were actually people who wanted photos of this shit was more than disturbing. I understand pornography’s attraction and I understand fetishes, but the evil that had to be in someone’s heart to find this stuff arousing was despicable.
The background of the website was covered in a spider’s web motif. The top of the page had a smaller version of the same “Crack Ho” banner with a little spider sitting on top of the “o” in “Ho.” On the bottom of the page, there was a menu of links to other pages on the site. The pages included girl-girl action, group scenes, all oral, all anal, streaming video.
Looking at this shit made me feel like I needed to wash, but I felt like I was on to something, so I kept on. The all-anal page was the toughest, but it also proved to be the most interesting. On the third page, I recognized Melissa, the youngest of the three women from the jail group. I clicked on the photo to enlarge, and there was no doubt it was her. I looked closely and sure enough, she had the small web tattoo. I went back and studied all the photos, and all the women had the tattoo.
Knowing crack addiction as I did, it was obvious what was going on. Whoever set this operation up knew they could get crack addicted women to do just about anything if they got crack for doing it. It sickened me.
After I had worked my way through the rest of the site, I clicked on the “streaming video” link. I came to a page that informed me that this part of the site required payment or a password. I didn’t want to put any money into the pockets of whatever scum profited from this, and I figured I had learned enough for tonight. I’d visit Jerry and see what he could tell me about the site and how to get into the other section without a password.
