The Voyeur’s Motel

Ma’am, just get the bikini wax already! is a voyeuristic tale of two people who know each other but no longer live together and observe each other from window to window. It’s inspired by the book The Voyeur’s Motel, which tells the story of a man who bought a motel to spy on his guests.

A voyeur is motivated by expectation; in silence he invests infinite hours hoping to see what he hopes to see.

Gay Talese

Ma’am, just get the bikini wax already!

After dispatching the girl (dispatching her, as if she were a box of fruit or an order of chicken breasts), I put on the red bow, the only garment I’ll wear this morning.

From the building across the way, the man stares at me while sipping coffee and adjusting his cap. It looks like a baseball game: catch my balls quick, right, left, play, sip.

I return his gaze while holding my breasts like two dragon eggs (my daughter says my tits are two manifestations of the cow, and I remember I barely breastfed her as a baby—hopefully she’s not messed up about that) and the guy leaves.

He brings a giant roscón bread and uses it as a peephole. He focuses on me with his flour-and-guava-paste contraption, licks the center, the edges, and bites with his eyes open. He kisses like that too—I know him. He lived with me and I know he fucks quick, always missionary style, like a boy scout who learned to count without the numbers 4, 6, and 9.

From here you can see his love handles and incipient double chin. Sir, go on a diet! I’d tell him if I still had him here. He’d perhaps say: Ma’am, just get the bikini wax already! Ma’am, close your legs and get out of my roscón! That’s how it was—we were never good at listening to each other. For us it was always about looking and discovering each other without the truth beyond the window.

At home everything was the usual—falling into routine. Recognizing in his nudity the passage of time. Closing the windows and suffocating in so much humanity falling by gravity, transiting and abandoning the body. Fucking stopped being fun and we recovered everything in experience…