Amazing Amy

When I was a kid I played with wooden trains. I was a train fiend. I drove them on wooden tracks and through wooden tunnels. In and out. In and out. That was always my favorite part. The train going in and disappearing for a moment or two and then coming out of the tunnel. It excited me. It made me happy. I was a simple child and loved simple things and gratuitous pleasures.

Amazing Amy. That is her name on the website. She has a tunnel. But instead of wooden trains, she takes those made of flesh and blood. An organ of blood vessels and muscles with one eye and not the face of those trains I once played with on the Island of Sodor. In and out. In and out. Her husband films. He sometimes talks to her while these trains are traversing her tunnel. In fact, to be accurate, she doesn't have just one tunnel. She has three capable tunnels. Her husband is sort of like the conductor and he conducts these cycloptic trains until they cry salty years of gratiutous ecstasy.

I have watched Amazing Amy for two years. Whenever a relationship failed. Whenever I was down on my luck. I would get drunk and go home and watch her take trains like she was Grand Central Station. My dream girl. My ultimate fantasy. My train would pretend as though it were in one of her tunnels. Beating through the fog of reality. I have lost count of how many times I rode those tracks.

She lives somewhere in West New York. Some blue collar community. She is not wealthy I can tell by the furniture she films on. By the backdrop wall art. Things you get at Walmart. By the drop-tile ceiling. The stains on the carpet. The pet toys scattered about. The cheap linoleum kitchen floor she once licked up. By her tacky tattoo of a spider in a web on her lower back. By her gauche wedding ring, her fake tan, or her cheap shoes that are hoisted up in the air on either side of the latest lucky fan like buoys in an invisible ocean of sin.

The fans are the trains. The website says if you message her husband, you might be invited to come over and meet Amazing Amy. Only meet is spelled "meat." A clever play on the word, but appropriate, considering. The website says that Amazing Amy likes police men. She likes Army men. Firemen. Clean-cut types. Married men. Muscular men. Men who don't flake out and who show up. Men who have suitably-sized engines, though all engines are welcome to traverse her tunnels, it goes on. There must be no STDs. You must have paperwork attesting to this fact or you will not be permitted to enter. You must not choke, spit on, slap, or degrade Amazing Amy in any way she wishes not to be degraded. You must also accept direction from her husband as he films and sign a waiver of consent to have your image exploited for her profit, without compensation. Time with Amazing Amy is your compensation.

I suppose now, in retrospect, I was a pervert when I was a kid and I didn't even know it. Those trains were Freudian phallus symbols and the tunnels, well, we've explained that suitably well enough. I wonder if there is some study somewhere of boys who played with trains and what they grew up to be. I watched Amazing Amy hundreds of times. It was better than getting a hooker, I told myself. It cost nothing, but time or sleep. It was better than cheating on a wife or a girlfriend with someone with a pulse. It was just me and my imagination and when I was done a feeling of peace washed over me that I wouldn't otherwise have. She was a stress relief. A puff of an imaginary joint. A psychological breath of fresh air. I suppose I was like a drug addict shooting up some drug. Until my train passed through that imaginary tunnel, I would not be able to relax. And every few days I had to repeat the process.

I wasn't married when I finally wrote an email to Amazing Amy's husband. It might get annoying that I call her Amazing Amy over and over, but you just don't call her Amy, which would suggest she is somehow ordinary.  She is like Teddy Ruxpin or Strawberry Shortcake in that way. You wouldn't call them Teddy or Strawberry, respectively. They are trademarked. She is trademarked. She is a product. I don't know how much money she and her husband make living in their warped sexual world, but the website counts views and each video she has posted, over a hundred to date, have hundreds of thousands or millions of views each and the website pays her something per view because ads run on the bottom or sides of the screen. I imagine there are men in Saudi Arabia or Japan watching her as I watch her. Perhaps, the same video at the exact same time. Maybe unwittingly in unison we whack away idle time. Maybe we choo-choo on cue.

Is Amazing Amy a religion that we all worship? Is she and her husband another Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker? She posts her videos every Sunday morning. She takes collections. In addition to being compensated per view, her collection plate is an online web pay service termed "tips" rather than tithe. I wonder if I should give Amazing Amy 10 percent of my income. I wonder if anyone does. I wonder if some Arabian sultan of something gives her part of his oil revenues. I think of Amazing Amy on her back heaving and writhing in routine ecstasy as this rich Arabian pays her money he made from dead plants and dinosaurs who unwittingly lived a million years ago in paradise not knowing that one day they would be funding Amazing Amy's sexual escapades that the website claims is sexual liberation and in no way prostitution.  

They say that Amazing Amy is not on birth control in at least thirty videos and the procession of unprotected trains impregnate her and there is always an "Oh, shit" moment in the climax. I don't know if this is a lie or it is truth. I don't know if Amazing Amy has kids. There is no biographical tab on the website to learn more about her. I don't know if her husband has a day job or if she has a day job or if she drives children to school who were conceived in such a lascivious way. I don't know if her children might be old enough to know what their mom does for a living or for kicks, or if the IRS receives tax payments on money she claims from the profits of dead plankton and brontosauruses. I don't know anything about Amazing Amy other than she is amazing in her ability to rid herself of any semblance of morality for those twenty or thirty debauched minutes when she is on that red leather sofa, or the dining room table, or pinned against a fitting room wall, or on the green felt of a pool table, or on the clean white sheets of some upscale hotel.

There is no dialogue other than the sound macaroni and cheese being stirred and the visceral grunts and casual demeaning language typical of any thirty-something couple emulating a porno they once saw in college to spice up their humdrum mating ritual that already satisfied its instinctive requirement to reproduce. Sex after the want or possibility of children is in fact like a child playing with trains on a track that goes nowhere. That is just one big circle pieced together on a play table. It requires a great deal of imagination to be stimulated or, contrariwise, a significant lack of consideration.

I suppose that is what happened to me. At some point after a sufficient number of children were made, I lost the imagination with my wife to play in that way and every magazine and TV talk show says that sex is important so it must be important. It is about need and purpose. The psychological desire to be wanted and to want. But my intrinsic biological purpose as a male already had been satisfied three times over. I suppose that is why I watched Amazing Amy. There was a little voice inside me, a fire, that whispered and smoldered and possessed me with the desire to procreate still outside of my marriage and even after it ended with random women. To plant my seed where it had not been planted like a no-good Johnny Appleseed. I suppose that is what I wanted to do to Amazing Amy. I wanted that "Oh shit" moment with her just as much as I once wanted to be a New York Yankee.

The email was sent and it had been sent for a month or so and every Sunday I would wake up to the Sunday services of Amazing Amy being pummeled by some lucky lottery winner and speaking in tongues as her mascara ran down her cheeks and her body convulsed in ecstasy. I'd watch her writhe and thrash about and be twisted and bent up and contorted by some stranger, some fan, who usually had a crewcut and dog tags or a Jesus cross that beat against his muscular chest. He usually had some sort of hokey tattoo. Some barbed-wire or tribal thing. Some family crest. Some tiger who looked confused as to how he got there and what he was doing. Then I got a reply from Amazing Amy's husband, who I had no idea what his name was until that very moment. Jeff. I've always hated the name Jeff and I can only think of one worse name, which is very similar. Judd. I don't know why Jeff and Judd are such stupid names to me. But Jeff sent me a questionnaire, which I promptly filled out, and he asked for a few pictures of me naked. It took me several hours to take naked pictures of myself. One of the truly great things about being married for ten years is that you don't have to take naked pictures of yourself anymore. But I wasn't married and there I was standing in a full-length mirror I went out and bought at Walmart just to get a full shot of me. Sucking in my stomach. Flexing my chest to appear more like those other Rambos. All those fit married cops who came before me. 

I wasn't married anymore, but I told Jeff I was happily married. I told Jeff I had three kids and I was a police officer in my town and a war vet to boot. I told him I won a Purple Heart in Afghanistan. I told him this because that is what Amazing Amy likes. I would have told him anything he wanted to hear. I was in decent shape and I wasn't worried about that part of it, nor about my train being up to snuff, but I wondered if of all the fans in the world who sent these emails vying for time with his beutiful wife, who sent pictures and submitted the very same questionnaires, would I be selected. Was my resume impressive enough?

It wasn't long until I got word that Amazing Amy had chosen me. It came like news that I won an Academy Award or the Nobel Peace Prize or the Powerball Lottery. Jeff said Amazing Amy would like to see me if I would like to "meat" her. He said they'd be at some casino in Buffalo the following Saturday. If I could drive up, that would be great. I would be the first of four guys that night, or I could go last if I preferred. Amazing Amy felt that since I was a vet and had won the Purple Heart she would let me choose, he said. She is as patriotic as they come and supports our troops. I replied that I'd be there and I'd like to go first completely not cognizant of the unsavory nature of our arrangement and are agreement of terms. It was as though we were deciding who was to go first to some casual appointment. Like getting a haircut. Or being fitted for new shoes. I was wrapped up in the church of Amazing Amy and I thought nothing of making plans to be there on my scheduled time as though I was getting my oil changed. I did, in fact, get my oil change prior to going. I sat there at Walmart in one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs and I wondered if anyone in Walmart knew who Amazing Amy was. And I wondered if my face would be in the video or if it would be completely concealed as it usually is. Occasionally in the videos you see someone's face, but usually you just see Amazing Amy's face and trains and tunnels and whole lot of choo-choo.

I was happy waiting for my oil change. If you could see security film of me, I kept glancing up at the camera as though he were an old friend. I was fixing my hair. I was smiling. In a few short days, I would be at the altar of my new religion. I would be baptized in Amazing Amy's lady juice and she would christen my train and consummate our union. Holy mother of God! Bless me Father for I will sin. Plenty of times I heard her moan holy-sounding things as those men crucified her over and over and over while her Judas husband watched in sheer delight, saying the same sort of thing to her like someone at a dog park says to an obedient golden doodle.

I suppose my mood changed a bit when I went to my doctor's to get the expedited blood work which cleared me for all sexual activity with Amazing Amy. My doctor didn't care why I needed paperwork saying I didn't have any STDs, he had no idea it was my passport to the paradise of her unholy holes. But I thought of it when they pricked me and when they drew blood, that this process was what all those other men must have similarly done once upon a time. They must have been in the same sorts of offices reading old Sports Illustrateds and Popular Mechanics and knowing their time was soon to come. Listening to the same terrible office music. Lady Gaga. Taylor Swift. Fleetwood Mac. That sort of thing. They were once where I was now, but where are they now? Now that their dream had been realized and they were given their hour in Heaven. This was the ceremony that would lead to inevitable enshrinement in the fleshy halls of the Amazing Amy Hall of Fame. Only the MLB Hall of Fame takes in unworthier men.

I was in a reasonably good mood still as I was driving. The trip to Buffalo is 5 hours from where I live. I drove it to Niagara Falls twice before, both times with ex-girlfriends I may as well had thrown over. It didn't work out with either of them and the falls never impressed me as much as I thought they would. I checked in at the casino hotel on Friday night and got a little excited knowing that the next evening I would bat lead-off against any semblance of morality I ever had. Banging the woman I found to be more desirable than anyone I had ever seen on Earth. The video would get hundreds of thousand of views if not millions and men from all over the world would watch me and Amazing Amy, imagining that they were me as I had many times before of men I cannot possibly tell you anything descriptive about. Men that came and went at the direction of Jeff the choo-choo conductor who considers himself some kind of artist and his wife an actress, or rather his canvas and oils, his clay. This one will buy them a boat. Or her a new Land Rover. Or him a Harley. She is probably getting her nails done about now, I thought. Her nails always looked perfectly manicured and painted. I imagine that was important to her and more consideration was given as to the color of her nails than the man she would fuck.

I had a drink at the hotel bar and all I could think of was Jeff telling the guy to pullout when it was too late to pullout and then declaring like he was an actor on General Hospital that she wasn't on birth control and she was probably pregnant. Thirty or forty times I heard the same routine. Amazing Amy made no effort to pull away and she stuck to the man who was inside her like she were glued, grinding on his lap to milk every drop, grinning deviously, looking at her husband and biting her bottom lip. It was obviously so hard to misbehave and this was how she misbehaved. Or maybe it was all part of the act, but it made me think of Pinocchio because I wondered where all the kids went. Maybe there was some Paradise Island and they were smoking cigars and turning into donkeys. But maybe she actually was on birth control or she couldn't have kids. And maybe that is why Amazing Amy invited so many men to "meat" her. She could never satisfy her biological itch to reproduce no matter how many men did their part and how often she did hers. And this was more than corporeal, more than simple healthy lust in moderation, it was nature in a constant state of pleasurable dissatisfaction.

My head began to swim after a few more drinks. I thought a lot about my ex-wife and how unfair I was to her. She found happiness with someone else which made me happy, but the guilt remained of me playing trains in other tunnels when hers was perfectly well and good. I felt pathetic to dwell on it when she was somewhere not thinking anything of it, or me, so I ordered another drink as though that would fix things. I traveled 5 hours and it took 6 drinks to get what felt like a conscience. A full-blown conscience which felt like a wraith-like entity that haunted my soul. It felt like it was growing in me like cancer grows in others. But mine wasn't a gift from birth or some naturally occurring phenomenon. It wasn't something I was taught by do-good parents. It was something that germinated in me slowly over the years. With every terrible thing I did to every beautiful person I ever knew and to myself, it piled up. I had to stop wallowing in shame. I had to stop eating shit. 

I think I saw Amazing Amy and Jeff her conductor husband arrive when I took a stroll around the casino and walked past the front desk which was a busy hub of worker bees. She was the Queen Bee passing through like she was Marilyn Monroe. They were obscure celebrities, but never recognized clothed. Jeff not at all. A man followed them lugging in their bags that I imagined to be filled with sex toys and lubricants. Amazing Amy was wearing big black sunglasses and a tight black dress and heels. She was thin and beautiful, but assuredly she wore black to make herself appear thinner. The person I presumed to be her husband looked a little like Kid Rock and followed her and they disappeared into a gold elevator which led to the rooms. They were business-like. Casual and methodic, simple and deliberate. Maybe I was drunk, but the prospect of realizing the dream of being with her suddenly seemed less of a desirable event and more of a dreaded appointment. A root canal. A colonoscopy. It occurred to me that some things ought to remain as dreams and your soul will only let you debauch yourself so far.

That night I dreamt that I was swallowed up inside of her. It started with me going to the door. The room number staring me back in my face. Room 448. Jeff opened the door and didn't say a word. He just stepped aside and smiled and welcomed me by waving his arm as though he parted the way for me to enter. The entire room was gold. And on a gold bed with her legs wide-open there lied Amazing Amy on clouds of rustled Egyptian cotton sheets. And from her glorious aperture a beam of light the likes of which I've never seen shot directly at me and arrested me of any will I might have had to resist the temptation of her. And I, traipsing forward, stumbled in a trance, undressing the whole way as though my clothes were armor I foolishly shed, until I finally got to her, perilously vulnerable. She was wearing nothing besides those big black sunglasses, but as I got closer to her she took them off and her eyes were similarly lit with blinding light and I could not help but to stare. It was as though I was staring at the sun. Two equal suns. Or one proportionately parted. And as Medusa made rocks of men, Amazing Amy made a rock of me and I climbed onto the bed enslaved by her desirous body and my lust for it. Then I entered her, only it wasn't in the way in all the videos I watched, or in the way trains enter tunnels. My entire body collapsed into magic genie vapor and I was sucked into her cavernous vagina which was cold and forlorn as an abandoned mine shaft in an old TV show where a kid would fall and be trapped for 30 minutes or so until rescued by Lassie or their Pa. And I could hear the echo of her laughing and there were children inside of her. Cold, dreary dead children that never got to be born at all but who grew. Children that were taken care of with a pill or a vacuum hose.

But there they all were, alone, sitting or lying there crying and carrying on in some obvious pain and confusion. Ghosts I were afraid to touch. They were like those kids on Paradise Island after the debauchery of smoking cigars, smashing windows, drinking beer, and playing pool. Braying in panic. There wasn't anything I could do. There were dozens of them. Some babies. Some infants. The rest, hapless toddlers. Floating in pools of murky water. Laying on sandy jagged rocks. Crawling across rocky shores with the broken glass of bottles cutting their toes and knees. And they were all looking at me as though I had come to save them, as though I were their Jesus, but all I could do was keep walking further and further into her because it was all so damn overwhelming and I was so powerless. And it got darker and colder.  But then finally I awoke. My phone chimed and someone from some unrecognizable number asked if was ready for tomorrow. They called me "stud."

It was Jeff. Yes, I replied. I'm here. I'm ready. Good, he replied. See you at 10. Bring your paperwork. Amazing Amy probably had a full Friday night. She was probably lying in that hotel bed with a bag of ice on her man cave waiting for room service. It was probably swollen and sore like a catcher's mitt catching 9 innings of Nolan Ryan fastballs. It was hard to say who it was she saw tonight. Whose baby batter she collected. Or how many and how much. Her husband kept a tally on the website and the last time I checked she was at 2,021 men, which I remember because the number matched the year. By now she was likely closer to 3,000 and I wondered what number I would be as though it mattered. I recall that it is a great feat in baseball for a player to make it to 3,000 hits. It makes someone Hall of Fame-worthy. Is there a similar hall for someone like Amazing Amy?

The next evening I dressed and readied myself for the big event. The Super Bowl of sex. All the excitement drained from it because of too much thought or the sudden arrival of a conscience. My personal Jiminy Cricket. All I had was dread, but still enough curiosity remained that I knew I would go. It morphed from a dream to something I had to do, to get it over with. Like climbing some mountain or swimming a body of water. To put it behind me. Even the horrifying nightmare was not enough to deter me from going. I wore all black. Black shirt. Black pants. Black boots. Black underwear. It felt as though I were about to meet Bonnie and Clyde. To discover that they weren't folk heroes at all, but rather two ruthless killers who kill for pleasure and who have no regard for life, not even their own. I thought about the spider tattoo she had on her spine. The tramp stamp. The spider was in a web. It was a black widow. My mind raced and I thought of the possibility that she and her husband could be real killers. I would see it on the news if I didn't go. When they were finally busted. They left a trail of bodies all over the country. They could be the most prolific serial killers the world has ever known. Of dead men who were cheating on good wives. Or maybe they weren't people at all. They were demons collecting souls. That is why they haven't been caught. 3,000 random men can come up missing and no one would suspect anything.

I took the elevator to their floor and made my way down the hall. I could smell the sex oozing out from under the door. When I got to the door I stood there for a moment. I was transported back in time and I was a kid again. I was sitting on the living room carpet and my mom was telling me to put my trains away and to go wash my hands for supper. It was the last time I would ever play with trains and I didn't even know it. I realized that all the train ever does is go around the track in an endless circle and it seemed like such a terrible waste of time. My dwindling interest in them had subsided and they were replaced with G.I. Joes, or He-Man, or Transformers. It was a progression, not a regression. I do not know what became of my trains. They simply went away.

I didn't knock on the door. Had it opened, I would have went inside. But it didn't open and the cricket on my shoulder told me to go away. I turned around and walked back down the hallway to the elevator which carried me to the hotel bar where I had a drink that multiplied like wet Gizmos eating after midnight. There were several men in the bar looking at their watches. They looked like nervous undercover policemen. They had crewcuts and they wore wedding bands. They looked around suspiciously and checked their phones every ten seconds or so. They were on deck, I imagined. My phone chimed and it was Amazing Amy. She asked where I was and told me she was looking forward to seeing me. She just called herself "Amy," which seemed to cement her fall from grace in my mind. I thought about a pithy reply. A good one-liner. A real zinger. I looked at my watch and it was after my scheduled time. Three minutes after ten. I would be in one of her tunnels if I had gone in. Spelunking in an orifice that was no stranger to spelunking men.

I couldn't think of an adequate response, so I didn't reply at all. I suppose I became one of those "flakes" she said she detested on her website. Those men who develop a last second conscience just in the nick of time. Or cowardly cold feet. I really wanted to say something back to her, something witty, but maybe I did in saying nothing. My kid wouldn't be scraped out of her uterus, or doused and burned with saline, or killed with a pill. I suppose standing on the doorstep of a dream made that dream much less desirable. 

A few seconds later one of those guys I spotted in the bar looked at his phone and his eyes got big and he dropped a ten dollar bill on the bar and quickly headed towards the elevator. I knew what it meant. He got called up to bat for me in the big game. A baseball game was on the bar TV so I was thinking aboundly in baseball metaphors. I relaxed and smiled, finding an interest in two teams I couldn't care less about, content and finally at peace. I thought about all the guys who played the game over the years and how few of them ever made it to the Hall of Fame. So I suppose, despite the few unworthy inductees, it was a prestigious place after all. But prestige is merely a perception and my perception had radically changed. Amazing Amy and all the porn stars along the way were suddenly far less to me than what the few good women I had been with were. It is the difference between diamonds and dirt. Porn stars were a novelty to me. A distant dream on a far away planet. That is until Amazing Amy who would argue that she is not a porn star but rather a sexually liberated entrepreneur, perhaps even a diety, invited me to "meat" her.

A short while later, around the bottom of the fifth, a beautiful brunette sat down next to me and ordered a Maker's Mark on the rocks. The bar crowd was dwindling and I was in a pleasantly somber mood. It was nearly 11. Her eyes were the color of the drink. She said her name was Ashley and I smiled and we shook hands. She asked what I was doing in Buffalo and I lied. One lie wouldn't hurt. The story was far too complicated to explain and I don't know that I'd ever admit to it to anyone other than a therapist. It suddenly seemed so absurd and depraved to me. But there existed in this good stranger the light of life that no one could diminish. There were no frat houses in her. No FOP galas. No Marine Corps balls. No graveyard of souls. She was married and divorced and had two kids back in Indiana of whom she proudly showed me pictures. She also loved Kurt Vonnegut. She had no tattoos and her soul was intact. When we went back to my room, we watched an old movie and ordered room service. I would see her again. That much was a certainty before it ever was. And sometime, maybe years later, I might realize I never would have met her had I saw Amazing Amy that night, but I also never would have met her had I not been in Buffalo to see Amazing Amy in the first place. So I suppose I will have Amazing Amy to thank. I might think of sending her a very cordial card of gratitude.

Pornography bored me from there and I lost interest in Amazing Amy and whoever else I considered to be worth my time. I never saw her again. She disappeared like those trains and tunnels that I never missed at all. She taught me one lesson, as everyone in life should teach you at least something or else meeting them was a waste of time. She taught me of the amazing fact of how apt and eager we as a species are to regress when we should all be about perptually progressing; how we casually mistake enslavement for freedom and freedom for enslavement; how we embrace degeneracy over morality and darkness over light; and how broken roads are roads less traveled, but roads nonetheless.