Les aventures érotiques d'janitor-Reviews of Romance Books I've Never Read Installment

In an earlier installment of my erotic adventures as a janitor, readers might remember that I was reprimanded by my supervisor due to some comments I made to a tenant about lust-crazed beekeepers, fuzzy slippers, toupee-wearing miscreants and regurgitating ventriloquists but as you also know, I had only the young woman's best interests at heart. Her safety was in question, from where or from whom I'm not sure for she shut the door in my face before she could finish her sentence. Obviously, her distress was so great she could not even wait for any of my self-defense advice and fearing the worst, I have been patrolling the hallways ever since, making sure to slip a handwritten note under her door to let her know I was on the job 24-7, minus the trips to the doughnut shop, bathroom breaks in the drain of the furnace room and the odd nap behind the recycling bins in the garbage disposal area. Rust never sleeps, nor does recycling but humans do need to catch a few winks for after all we're not made of paper, plastic or aluminum, except for my roofer friend, Ed Smeeley Jr. (author of the soon-to-be-published-once-he-gets-the-money-for-Xeroxing self-help and inspirational book, Shingles of Wisdoms), who has an aluminum hip joint replacement, which he claims squeaks only when he's climbing ladders, stepping on mice (inadvertently or with great determination), searching eBay for collector commemorative Pope plates or masturbating into eavestroughing.
In fact, as luck would have it, it was while I was catching a few Z's behind the row of recycling bins that an erotic windfall would fall my way. Just as I thought my erotic adventures had tapered off to barely a trickle, much like an elderly fellow with prostate trouble trying to urinate in a public bathroom, a loud bang, like someone dropping something very heavy (a toaster oven? a body? a pair of roller skates? a fetal pig? a partial set of Encyclopedia Britannica bought on impulse from a deal offered at the supermarket), awoke me from my slumber. I waited for the fading footsteps before I crept from my sleepy hideaway and checked the recycling bin where the noise had come from. Well, the gods of eroticism had decided to shine down on me that day for lo and behold, there in the bin was a bagful of Harlequin Romance novels, a few racy covers facing up at me in all their lurid glory. Obviously, if my erotic encounters had to be curtailed, at least until my boss forgot my previous and, may I say completely misunderstood indiscretions with the more-than-willing love-starved tenants, I could feed my sensual appetite with these novels until I was back in business again. So without further ado, I commence with my first book review for these erotic journals, as I cast my critical and randy eye upon this book that I've never read.

The Dimitrakos Proposition  

First off, I'm a sucker for a foreign name. Stick that name in the title of a novel and you've got a captive reader, even if I do fall asleep halfway through the first page. Nevertheless, the title of this book insinuates intrigue, exotic locales and yes, propositions, although what kind of propositions remain a mystery, even after I didn't finish this book and in fact, dropped it in the bathtub a couple of times. Nevertheless, there are plenty of nefarious and erotic plot lines to sink your dentures into and it all begins with the rich international industrialist, Fred Dimitrakos. Born of a wealthy Greek family who, thanks to his great-grandfather, Norbert Dimitrakos, cornered the market in the frozen spanakopita business and nuclear missile guidance systems, Fred has everything a man could want, but does he, really? For Fred Dimitrakos is a deeply unhappy man. Hunkered down in his family compound on the island of Kitiakos, once the mustache-growing capital of the Mediterranean, Fred oversees the family business but his constant traveling has alienated his once-ravishing but now mole-covered wife, although she hides it well under her many layers of black cloaks, dresses, thick beard and kerchiefs. And when I'm talking moles I don't mean those pesky ones that dig up your lawn and turn your annual backyard barbeque into one never-ending series of lawsuits over broken ankles and bratwurst grease burns (even though the martinis and not the moles were probably more to blame), but those hideous brown and occasionally hair-sprouting spots that live only on unattended human skin. Add to the equation a hermaphrodite daughter and an ungrateful son whose only ambition is to be a dry cleaner/parrot breeder and who has a nasty habit of sniffing used vacuum cleaner bags while playing with his testicles and you can understand how Fred Dimitrakos is hungry for a new kind of love.
It is on one of his business trips to Paris that he meets the enigmatic and tempestuous Giselle, a raven-haired beauty with alluring crows-feet that bespeak both experience, wisdom, sensuality and too long between Botox treatments. They parry back and forth at a nuclear warhead and spinach pie business meeting (she is the heir to a nuclear warhead family fortune), and it's not long before the two of them are engaging in their own Last Tango in Paris but without the butter and the oinking. Instead it's goat bleating and feta cheese. And instead of a tango it's really more of a Watusi.
The author is quite adept in describing both the tumultuous feelings of the characters caught in their various conflicts and their subsequent fornicating although her prose leads one to believe they're making love rather than rutting like a couple of goats in deep mud watched by a group of men whose trousers haven't been washed since the Turks invented the ottoman. Take this passage for example:

"Oh," she said, in breathless surprise as he used his walking stick to trace the outer-edges of her black lace panties.
"Glyka mou," he commanded as the fires of hell burned through his loins. Her brazen dark golden eyes gazed up at him in anticipation as the liquid heat pooling between her thighs promised a soon unstoppable tide.
"I can't believe you want me again already," she murmured, the heat of her pelvis causing her to move on instinct alone. She felt no support for her buckling knees as her body hummed with an awareness that she found both disconcerting and exciting, like a hunter stalking a wary doe. But was she the hunter or was she the doe? More likely the doe since she had a better sense of smell but only time would tell.
"Yineka mou!" he barked. "Hot, hot, hot," he rasped, his long thick erection like a lance swaying slightly at the first sign of the gathering storm and then he fell upon her with scant ceremony and the voracious hiss of all-male satisfaction. Her glistening pink femininity lay fully exposed and she felt her nipples tightening much like the laces on a pair of shoes as you mount a long steep flight of stairs.
"Koukla hara mou!" he grunted, his hard-packed urgency pushing and stretching her inner sheath and she could feel him stiff and pulsing like an alien invasion in her pelvis region. She bit down on her knickers to stifle her screams and he loomed over her, his boxers stretched tightly over his manly face and jawline. They were both now flushed with the hunger of their flesh as she gripped and scratched the bronze satin of his broad back and he lifted his athletic hips to surge deeper into her depths until there was only fizzing fireworks of passion and then the shuddering groan of completion followed by a few spasmodic jerks, their eardrums thumping like an angry concierge who has just discovered that someone has peed in the bidet of a Tuscan villa while she was on duty.

Whew! You've got to hand it to author Lynne Graham for such spicy prose. It's enough to give you acid reflux and an orgasm simultaneously. I remember my last orgasm as if it were yesterday, instead of some twenty odd years ago with a darling girl named Mitzi, a bottle of Crème de menthe and a misplaced artificial leg behind an animal shelter where the throes of our passion were fortunately drowned out by the barking and mewling of despondent and unadoptable beasts. After we had found our "completion", albeit still fully clothed and me, inexplicably, with an empty and greasy KFC Family Meal bucket lodged on my head (such are the curious ways of love), we lay together gasping for air like two trout on a riverbank, freshly caught and slowly suffocating in the sunshine, gills pulsing with pleasure and pain, our heads resting on the polymer leg and I brought up a little in my mouth from acid reflux but it was a good bring up rich with nutrients and the scent of our lovemaking and not the kind that floods your mouth with unwanted and unforeseen stomach contents and minute particles of undigested food that lodge in your teeth. Still, I have few bones to pick with the author about some choices of words, uses of metaphors and similes and the unclear motivations behind some of the characters' actions.

Number one, I don't like the idea of the male organ described as a lance. Especially one that is swaying. In the old days of damsels and knights when lances were all the rage and you could catch a good jousting match on ESPN pretty much 24-7 (much like curling today), a knight who let his lance sway was in effect saying, go ahead, stick a pole in my guts and watch me twitch and bleed to death in the horse-dung peppered dust while the victor makes out with Lady Guinevere over my unspooled intestines. Well, that's not for me and I tend to think of my "lance" or "sword" (enough with this penis=weaponry imagery), as more of a wind sock, sensitive and attuned to whichever the way the wind blows, and thus picking up on erotic vibes, not to mention helping planes to land and take-off in busy airports around the world. It flaps, it flops, it stiffens, it sags, it's unpredictable, much like the weather and the act of love itself. If you don't have a wind sock for a penis then I feel sorry for you but will feel no sympathy when you're lying dead in the street, your "lance" now broken and your body being devoured by raccoons and/or hobos. 

Secondly, what is this strange language that Dimitrakos is speaking? I know from my extensive language studies at the local doughnut shop that it certainly isn't Greek that he's grunting out in the heat of the moment. Is the author laying subtle clues for us about his real origins? The alien invasion that Giselle is feeling in her pelvis--could that signify an actual alien being mating with her and planting its alien seed in her womb in order to breed a new species and create a race of half human/half alien creatures that will be used for an intergalactic sex slave market? Is this why Dimitrakos is wearing his boxer shorts over his strong, handsome face--a camouflaging of his actual bulbous, pulsating and heavily-veined head? And if that's the case, I would've thrown in a few tentacles and barbed reproductive organs for a more realistic approach. All I can say is Lynne Graham, you better step up to the plate because leaving these questions unanswered will only turn your eager big league erotic reader into a meager neurotic minor leaguer with a dry mouth and flayed strips of hot dog skin glued to his pallid and concave chest in frustration. On this topic, if we're talking some kind of interplanetary sexcapades, then goddamnit, be a man (even if you are a woman romance writer) and just come out and bloody well say what the hell is going on. It would certainly spice up the novel a bit more instead of having the reader try to decipher these little innuendos that do nothing for the plot nor the erotic juices that should be free-flowing from the page to the eye and then from the eye to the groin. There's a chain of command here, Lynne Graham. Use it!

Finally, and I have to thank my friend, Ed Smeeley Jr., roofer, loving divorcee and life coach, for this insight and I quote, "What kind'a woman would want to get involved with a married guy who has a hermaphrodite daughter and a vacuum cleaner bag sniffing son. I mean those things aren't just everyday anomalies, they're in the family DNA.  If the lovely lady in question has any hopes of a future with this Dimikakas fellow and might want a kid or two of her own to raise and help her to shave and sort buttons and boil chicken feet in her old age, she's gonna haft'a think twice before reproducing with this fool. Good chance their children will turn out to look like dust bunnies with multiple male and female sex parts not to mention hairy and/or lint-covered breasts that, I have to admit, wouldn't look too bad on a centaur, but that's not the point. I mean she'd want a kid you wouldn't be embarrassed about taking to school and, well, you show up with a dust bunny with horse's hooves and hairy tits and sporting a penis and a vagina, maybe even two or three, and some of them maybe even stuck to its hairball of a forehead and well, odds are there go your chances of being invited to the PTA casino night fundraiser in the gymnasium or the bridge tournament at the Sunshine Travel Lodge & Motel convention room where the first two drinks are free and if you're lucky, you might meet yourself a desirable little filly and spend the night 'cause there's ten percent off the $39.95 room for bridge tournament attendees." Ed Smeeley Jr., you are a genius is all I can say because where I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt to this already far-fetched plot line, good old Ed cleared up a few points with his astute comments and really called into question the whole frozen spanakopita, nuclear warhead, international industrialist and alien sex slave themes that the author bounces off one another as if they and the characters were on trampolines. If only Ms Graham had injected a little nude trampolining, well then, maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion.

I could go on and on about the further intrigues (and indignities) that this book spits out with all the finesse of a watermelon seed from a post three-hour root canal patient's mouth, but that would ruin it for you. Here are a few teasers though, sure to fuel the fire in the loins of your mind (mind loins, I call them), and guaranteed to tantalize your erotic yearnings, a kind of amuse-bouche for the taste buds of the groin. I don't want to give away the entire thing but Fred Dimitrakos, after considerable mating episodes with his mistress, finds that they are selling missile guidance systems and nuclear warheads to opposing countries. And one of those countries, to add insult to injury, also happens to despise spanakopita. Now there are two things you should never bring up during a dinner party or while fornicating and one of those is politics. The other is how a festive jello mold should be introduced to a less-than-formal table setting but I don't want to open that can of worms right now. So, Fred and Giselle call it quits and Fred goes back to Greece to his mole-covered wife and freakish but loving kids, but not before he learns that Giselle is pregnant with his child. Dimitrakos refuses to have anything to do with the son born of this dalliance and instead, back on the island of Kitiakos, begins an affair with the daughter of the quality-control foreman at the frozen spanakopita factory, but she, in turn, begins a romance with Fred's hermaphrodite daughter after having discovered she likes her bread buttered on both sides, so to speak, and then things really get complicated.

The cast-off son, Melvin Botchner (he changed his last name from Le Peigne de Queue to avoid any anti-French feelings once he began his own frozen food dynasty), is soon out-selling his father in not only the spanakopita department, but branching out into calamari and something of his own invention that he calls "cock's comb wieners." In as much time as it takes to produce a urine sample behind a flimsy curtain in a busy hospital, Melvin has driven his neglectful father's business into the ground. The two finally meet in a showdown, Giselle looking on in a pair of stunning anaconda skin boots and after a lot of poignant and telling emotional stuff is said between father and son along the lines of "I should've made your mother abort you the minute I heard she was pregnant," and "You're just a fading old spanakopita fart-bag with sagging testicles and nasal hair so thick it's a wonder you get any oxygen up there," there is a fight to the death between the two at the Acropolis in Athens (the one in Greece, not the Acropolis Greek Restaurant in Athens, New York, which I think would've made a far better setting as the other is much too obvious and you can pretty much see it coming the second the author starts describing Fred Dimitrakos's erection as a Doric column three chapters back). Who wins this battle of the frozen food father and son titans? What happens to the sensual Giselle and will she ever parade around proud and nude again in her anaconda skin boots, stopping traffic wherever she goes, whether it's in Paris or a Des Moines Costco parking lot? I leave these questions for you, dear reader, to discover for yourself as you plunge into the torrid romance and eroticism of The Dimitrakos Proposition. For me the jury is still out on this one. I felt aroused but as if I were pulling my own erotic plow through fields of turgid prose and although I don't mind doing a bit of work myself, sometimes a man wants to put down his plow, wipe his brow, drop his trousers and let the propositions come to him for a change.

Les aventures érotiques d'janitor-Chapter 2

I was sitting with my neighbour Litvack the other evening, enjoying some of his homemade wine from a time-tested recipe he picked up in the penitentiary and resting my tired dogs up on the rust-pitted engine block of a 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Some kind of spiders had set up webs inside the cylinders and intake manifold and over my big toe I could see the odd bug wrapped inside a spider cocoon, either already having its lifeblood sucked from its body or being prepared for dinner. We were enjoying the fetid summer breeze channeling down the back lane, carrying with it the alluring smells from the poultry factory and tossing the remains of our hair and scattering our dandruff to the wind like the ashes of a cremated family member, as we sat on the dangerously slanted back porch of his rooming house, the moon a toenail sliver in the sky above us.
"What'sa matter, hard day at the office?" Litvack asked, taking a swig from the 40-ounce plastic Pepsi bottle that he ages his wine in.
"Well, the life of a janitor is not easy, that much I'll say, but what is even more tiring are all the erotic adventures that befall me."
"What, you jerking off in the furnace room again?" Litvack laughed and then gobbed up some phlegm, which he deposited in a half-eaten Pizza Pop that his inflatable sex-doll wife had laid out for us along with some Cheez-Whiz slathered in the stringy troughs of some sad looking celery sticks.
"Well, now that you mention it, I've found my erotic encounters have fallen off a bit lately. You might say I'm in a bit of an erotic slump."
"Erotic slump! Jesus, you've only been on the job a week and the only pussy you've got is when some flea-ridden cat rubbed up against your leg."
"That's not true. How about that internal organ harvester who unplugged the vacuum cleaner for me?"
"You call that erotic. She was ninety years old and last time I checked, unless Depends have become Victoria's Secret lingerie I'd say you're batting 0-for-three and the pinch runner is masturbating on third base because he knows he'll never come home this season."
"Oh yeah! That from a guy whose wife could double as a life raft."
"Hey, watch what you say about the little lady," and with those words Litvack cast an uneasy glance at the rubber sex doll that was propped up against some piled milk crates a few feet away, her mouth open in surprise, either from the last remarks or just because she was born that way. It's hard to tell with these mail-order brides. It's a language barrier thing.
"No offense," I said, suddenly feeling bad. "And these appetizers she's prepared are delicious."
"You hear that, honey," Litvack called to her. "Try some more of those Cheez-Whiz and celery things. Those celery sticks came from the dumpster out back of a TGIF. You know, those people order those goddamn Bloody Caesars and then they don't eat the celery sticks. I grabbed whack loads of them from the trash. Okay, maybe they suck on them a little or something but saliva can actually help keep a vegetable fresh and hell, they're still plenty good as long as there's no chew marks on'em. That's free celery for the taking. One man's trash is another man's canape is what I say."
"I couldn't agree with you more. Just yesterday I enjoyed an entire plate of pork dumplings out of a lobby trash bin and they were soft as a lover's lips and as teasing as a pig in a wedding dress."
"Now you're talking. So, tell me your troubles, lover man. I can cure whatever ails you or that weasel you keep in your pants that's gnawing, gnawing, gnawing to get free. A guy with my experience makes Casanova look like a clown."
"Rodeo or circus?"
"What?"
"Rodeo or circus clown? Which one do you make Casanova look like?"
"Damn, I never thought about that. I'm guessing circus clown. After all, those rodeo clowns always getting gored by bulls and kicked by broncos and stuff, I'm figuring they're not in too good of shape. Hard to maintain a hard-on once you've been gored a couple'a times and have hoof prints indenting your forehead. Even with Viagra. You tend to spook easily and get a little skittish at the first signs of trouble or nude activity. But those circus clowns well, they're always getting a bit of that back tent action and with those big shoes the ladies always think, well, if the shoes are so big the penis must be the same."
"Well, that's not me, I mean being gored and having hoof prints in my head and being uncomfortable with nudity, except at the Dairy-Freeze, but I'm beginning to think that with all the eroticism wafting through the condo hallways like an unrefrigerated head cheese, the tenants might be getting too much of a good thing. Here I am, Mr. Janitor Man with my ring of keys and mop-handle calloused hands and the scent of industrial cleaner emanating from my sweaty body along with a little Fantastik that I like to spritz on my face and I think, can there possibly be an end to these good, erotic times and will I just become as everyday and mundane as a shoe tree? Or sock drawer? Or broken salad spinner left on top of the microwave? I feel like I need a little something more, a little something to keep my erotic personality at its peak and keep the tenants guessing and wondering, 'how does he do it?' and 'what's he going to do next?' and 'how can a man with such voluminous folds and flaps of flesh possibly be so adept at love making?' I just want to make sure they don't take my eroticism for granted and likewise I want to keep them turned on and tuned in to the art of janitorial love."
"I know what you're saying," Litvack said as he took a bite from the same Pizza Pop he had only moments before hawked phlegm into. "And I've got one word for you. Tattoos."
"Tattoos?"
"Tattoos," Litvack said after a few enthusiastic chews. "Here, let me show you," and with that, Livack rolled up his sleeve to show me a blue, blotchy image on his bicep of a man's head where none of the features were discernible and where ever an eye or ear could be made out, it was all misshapen from where the ink had run. "Did this one myself while I was in the joint."
"Who is it?"
"You don't know? Jesus, it's Leo Gerstenzang for fuck's sake."
"I don't...I don't know who that is," I said, the reluctance of my admission wavering in my voice.
"Oh, Jesus, Haltiwanger, I thought you were an educated guy. Leo Gerstenzang, the goddamn inventor of Q-Tips. Everybody knows that."
"Why do you have a tattoo of the inventor of Q-Tips on your arm?"
"'Cause he changed the way the whole goddamn world thinks about ears and ear cleaning, that's why. And when you change the way people think about those things you kind'a change the entire course of modern history, don't'cha think? I mean, you got waxy buildup in the ear canals, before you know it no one can hear properly, diplomatic relations go down the drain, bingo, World War III. Fuck, Haltiwanger, do I have to explain everything to you? What university did you say you went to? The university of shit-for-brains?" Litvack cracked open a third 40-ounce Pepsi-bottle of homemade wine and took a good, long pull, one bleary eye open and staring upwards as if it were trying to incinerate the moon with its reddish and hard gaze. "Listen, give me a ball-point pen, a safety-pin and fifteen minutes and I'll have you fixed up in no time."
"I don't like tattoos. Or at least I don't relish the idea of getting one. I hear that it hurts."
"Ah, it's nothing. Like getting pecked by a hundred or so hungry chickens after a hard morning of laying eggs. A child could do it."
"That might be so but I'm neither a chicken nor a child. There must be another way."
"Well, you could go the fake tattoo route. You know, those kind you apply with warm water."
"Yes, that's it," I replied. "That's exactly what I'll do," and I got up, staggered a few steps, fell off the back porch and whacked my head against a stack of hubcaps. I remember as I hit my head upon them thinking, that's a nice uniformly stacked pile of hubcaps, it's so unlike Litvack to be so neat and organized, and then it was lights out for me for a few seconds or so. Litvack produces a complex but highly potent vino. Rumour has it he learned to make it in a prison toilet bowl.
"You okay?" he asked me. I stood up, a little unsteady and waved him off. Litvack's wife looked on at me with her usual surprise and even from where I stood I could hear her body hissing.
"Your wife's losing air, I think."
"I know. She's got a goddamn leak. Every time we do the dirty deed she's flat as a pancake afterwards. You don't have a bicycle pump and a patch kit I could borrow maybe?"
"No, sorry." And with those words I weaved my way home, stopping to retch here and there in some mangled-looking shrubbery. I'm not sure if it was the wine or the recycled celery.

A romantic head cheese scenario complete with vino, tomatoes and lusciously-sliced pig's head in aspic, its unrefrigerated aroma known to cause people to swoon in its presence. But left too long in the open air, this head cheese can soon turn to dead cheese in a matter of minutes so beware the ignored and overheated head cheese. It is the smell of evil itself, its erotic elements quickly lost and replaced by a decomposing puddle of brain and eyeball matter, not unlike something Satan likes to drink before bedtime or bathe in to help his psoriasis.

The next day I awoke with an erotic bounce in my step and a new sense of promise imbued in my janitorial duties. For with the idea of tattoos planted firmly in my head, and by firmly I mean like a great oak in a park under which children play, dogs pee and the odd wino goes to sleep and never wakes up (when an acorn falls from thirty feet, hits you in the skull and you don't even blink chances are you're probably dead), I saw only hope and determination in what the erotic future might bring. So I guess you could say it was pure fate, or maybe destiny, I don't know which and I always confuse the two, much like I confuse the numbers nine and six, especially when I'm playing bingo and craning my neck this way and that and lose out on winning a free tie caddy and limitless French fries at the snack concession, for on that day as I was in the garbage room heaving the contents of overloaded recycling bins into the dumpster, I came across two packs of unused My Little Pony and Barbie tattoos, pink, iridescent, sparkly and eye-catching. Though they were made for children (more specifically, little girls), I had no doubt of their attractive powers once they were adorning the arms, calves and yes, even the neck of my manly janitorial body. I wasted no time in retiring to the furnace room where the water supply was plentiful (albeit at 140 degrees centigrade so a tattoo application could soon turn to a third degree burn making the process, ironically, more painful than actually getting a tattoo in the first place) and when I re-emerged twenty minutes later I was sporting not one, not two, but twelve tattoos, strategically placed to highlight my deeply buried muscle structure and camouflage my various skin rashes. Confidence flowed through me like a snake in the tall grass where some picnickers have decided to play Frisbee. Or a heavy-set man on a mall scooter driving through a yard of preschoolers at full speed.
Fortunately I was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that day as I was vacuuming the third floor hallway of the east building so all my tattoos came into play, catching the halogen spotlighting over each condo doorway, the various Barbies and array of pink, white and purple ponies seeming to dance with each flex, twitch and flabby fluctuation of my body. If these tattoos didn't do the trick then obviously the tenants of this building must be brain dead, I thought. They and I would be put to the test much sooner than I expected.
For as I was almost finished sucking up the dirt, dog hair and inexplicably, corn niblets on the third floor carpeting, a door opened and a beautiful young Japanese woman stood there in her bathrobe and fuzzy slippers (I mean the good fuzzy, not the trashy googly-eyed, bunny-eared and pink-tongued variety like my meth-head sister-in-law wears in the trailer park whether she's smoking some rock or berating her garden gnomes for peeing on the astro-turf) and asked me if I could help her. Actually, I couldn't hear what she said originally over the sound of the vacuum cleaner so I shut the machine off and cocked an appraising and sympathetic, if slightly ringing ear.
"Do you know who I should contact about the apartment?" she asked "I'm staying here while my friend is away and I'm just, just wondering who I can talk to about some problems in the condo."
I struck a bit of a pose I'm not too ashamed to admit, leaning in such a way on the vacuum cleaner handle to both show-off my multitude of tattoos and create a body posture sure to ripple my atrophied muscles. I could tell she was not immune to my charms as she pulled her bathrobe closer together at the neck, a body language move I knew to be both inviting and inquisitive while simultaneously feigning disinterest and confusion. The tattoos were working I thought. The art of seduction was in my favour.
"Well...well...well," I stammered and then continued, "I guess you could always try the strata council or speak to my boss, if you want. What's this about? Maybe I can help." I could only hope she could see the pair of pliers in my back pocket and know that when it came to maintenance, cleaning and problem solving I meant business. If a pair of pliers don't inspire confidence I'll be a monkey's uncle or an uncle's monkey, I'm never sure which. Either way, if a monkey and I were to go head-to-head in a pliers usage contest, I'm sure I'd win easily, even with the monkey throwing its feces at me.
"It's a problem with the stove and also some questions about security," she said and I almost didn't hear her, so mesmerized was I, my eyes buried deep in the soft surface of her fuzzy slippers. It was like my eyes were at play in the field of the Lord's lint trap but I quickly snapped out of my reverie. Now the mention of stove troubles piqued my curiosity and though I don't have a lot of experience with this appliance I do know my way around Sterno cans and a hotplate but when she mentioned security issues I was all ears and at that moment I finally understood what Litvack had meant and silently thanked the inventor of Q-Tips myself since it was only that morning that I had de-waxed the old canals for a moment such as this. Now readers of this blog may know that I am a master of self-defense as evidenced in my previous two-part series dealing with every conceivable debauched and depraved assault from crazed beekeepers to those driven to crime by excessive library fines not to mention liquored-up juvenile delinquents, beady-eyed hobos with painted clown faces, people who claim to speak Assyrian while reaching for your wallet and animal husbandry scientists whose semen-stained smock coats from artificial insemination experiments gone awry are only an indicator of their deep and twisted diabolical natures, so I felt in this one area I could help the poor young lady in her predicament.
"Listen," I said, sounding both confidential and erotic at the same time, not an easy task when you're wearing filth-stained janitor's pants. "The stove is not really up my alley but security is my middle name. Actually Orville is my middle name but I don't want to get into that. I once killed a man for making fun of it, well, I didn't actually kill him as much as just admonish him and then he hit me in the face and I spent a little time crying in the bathroom of a Dunkin' Donuts, but what I want to say is if you're having any security problems, any threats on your life or anyone having designs on your fuzzy slippers or claiming they're a hairdresser and want to comb your hair but they're wearing nothing but flip-flops and a dollar-store bandanna around their toupee, I can help."
"Oh, no, it's...it's nothing like that," she said, backing up into the apartment, almost as if inviting me inside although her perplexed face said otherwise. Perhaps I had unleashed too much eroticism in one big wave and I could see her eyes darting from one Barbie and My Little Pony tattoo to the next. The one on my forehead (a blue pony with a rainbow mane and tail) might have been overkill but I'm never a man not to take risks or have any regrets.

This is the pretty much the tattoo I wore on my forehead minus the background rainbow and cloud cover. I have since learned this pony's name is Rainbow Dash and she is responsible for weather so I can only imagine she is failing at her job given the amount of clouds gathering over Pony Town. Apparently she has a pet tortoise named Tank so he must be ex-military and I hope I can find a tattoo of him too because placed together, perhaps on my chest or lower back, the combination would undoubtedly knock eroticism right out of the ballpark. I'm not sure if those are wings or blue sausages attached to her back but either way there is a phallic implication that'll make you forget all about the storm clouds brewing on the horizon.

"Don't be afraid," I said. "Just tell me, was it an insane beekeeper, a regurgitating ventriloquist, a former Tiddly Winks champion fallen from glory with too-tight elasticized socks and a chip on his shoulder, a ne'er-do-well who fell down a well as a child and no one came to look for him and eventually he scaled the walls only to be raped by squirrels in his weakened state and is thus taking out his vengeance on anyone who resembles his mother or a plaid-pant wearing galoot whose only interest is in your bazoombas. Or gazongas as they say in your culture."
"Uh, that's okay, I'll just...just..."
I didn't hear the end of her sentence, not because of ear wax buildup (I'd already attended to that problem earlier as I've explained), but because she shut the door in my face. Obviously I'd misjudged the potency of my erotic tsunami and vowed in the future to tone it down a couple of notches, both in the tattoo and self-defense departments. There's a fine line between tooting your own horn and blowing taps for your penis as the sun sets on the battlefield of love and I realized I'd have to learn to strike that uneasy balance and temper my erotic powers. Still, I chalked this one up as an encounter that, with a few less My Little Pony and Barbie tattoos, would no doubt result in a future tryst between this charming girl and myself and we would make mad, passionate love and then try out some self-defense moves naked and when the stove caught fire while cooking our frozen jalapeno and cheese poppers, we would laugh and beat out the flames with her fuzzy slippers. I took heart that eroticism was still alive and well in this condo complex and could hardly wait until our paths would once again cross, although I was sure by that time I'd have two or three more erotic adventures tucked under the belt of my vacuum cleaner attachment fanny pack that I adapted for the purpose myself to hold the various specialty nozzles that mark my work as that of a professional.
Later that day as I made my way home, I walked by a construction site where a worker yelled at me, "Hey, nice tats you faggot." I barely gave him the time of day (since I wasn't wearing a watch nor am I one of those people who can tell time by the position of the sun). Still, I thought, if he only knew all the women these tattoos had attracted maybe he'd saved his derisive comments for himself, especially when he got home from a hard day of pouring concrete and was masturbating frenetically and despairingly into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch while listening to phone messages from collection agencies. I don't know why I think he pleasures himself into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch except he just strikes me as that type of person. As for why I specifically chose that cereal, I was always fond of it in my youth and I'm just figuring this as a little product placement to generate some extra cash. So, to the people who make Cap'n Crunch, if you're reading this consider this one a freebie. After this though it will cost you.
Later that evening my landlady called me to the rooming-house phone and I bounded down the staircase expecting it to be some condo tenant wanting to arrange a little erotic rendezvous in the janitor's room. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it was my boss on the line and although I imagine you could call him an erotic guy, despite the excessive ear and nasal hair, he wasn't really what I had in mind when I had applied the tattoos earlier that afternoon. I had been thinking more about the fairer sex at the time, even if they too had an excess of hair sprouting from their head orifices for that could be a very tactile erotic experience and I was working it out how I could let him down gently when again, I was surprised.
"Listen, Haltiwanger, I've had some complaints at the building," he said. I was flabbergasted. Who would possibly complain about, number one, my fine janitorial work and number two, the deep levels of eroticism I brought to the condo complex?
"I don't understand," was all I could stammer.
"Okay, I'm not going to fire you, yet, but you've gotta stop talking to the tenants. One lady in the east building said you were babbling something about bees and ventriloquists and being raped by squirrels and combing her hair while you're naked with a banana on your head..."
"Bandana. I said bandana and not on my head but on the head of some toupee-wearing miscreant who wanted to steal her fuzzy slippers."
"Okay, we're not even going to talk about it. I don't want to know what goes on in that twisted brain of yours but if you don't stop talking to the tenants I'm going to have to get rid of you. The head of the strata council had a few calls and I've calmed him down so just don't open your fucking mouth when there's people around. Nobody around, in the stairwells or furnace room, fine, go ahead, talk to yourself as much as you want, although try to keep it to a whisper. Screw me up again and you're out the door. And somebody said you have some kind of kid's sticker on your forehead so get rid of that too before you show up for work tomorrow."
"The head of the strata council!" I said. "That wouldn't be that guy up on the fourth floor of the west building...what's his name...Eugene?"
"Never the fuck you mind who he is, just do what I said and everything'll be alright."
"Will do, boss," I replied but inside my mind I was already putting together the pieces of the puzzle and this Eugene guy was at the centre of it all. I knew he was jealous of me and had been plotting my demise for a while, taking care to strew all manner of debris on the carpeting outside his door to see if I picked it all up with the vacuum cleaner and generally laying traps for me to trip me up and make me look bad to the tenants and strata council. I would have to deal with him later, when my erotic adventures were not so pressing but in the meantime I would have to walk softly and carry a big mop (and maybe a spray bottle of Windex in my back pocket). I felt this would in no way put a damper on my erotic adventures but I would definitely have to be more discreet about my little tête à têtes. Ah well, it's all part and parcel of being the virile and tattooed guy that I am but still I must say uneasy lies the head that wears the erotic crown in the kingdom of the janitors.