Free All or Nothing by Jesse Schenker Page B

Fred and I started talking to two girls who were tall, blond, and gorgeous. They spoke perfect English and looked like two girls who had grown up in California, but they were actually from Sweden and told us they had studied Swedish massage. We gave them the name of the hotel we were staying at on Las Ramblas, the city’s boisterous and downright sketchy main drag.
    That night there was a knock at the door. Fred and I looked at each other in surprise before opening it. There stood our two Swedish friends. “We want to practice our technique,” they told us.
    After they left several debaucherous hours later, Fred and I decided to go for a walk. It was late, ten or eleven at least, but we were high and restless and the city was just starting to come to life. After getting hustled multiple times by some guys playing three-card monte on Las Ramblas, we arrived at a nightclub. As soon as we walked in a woman standing just inside the entrance asked, “Do you want Ecstasy?” We said yes, and she immediately grabbed me, pulled my body to hers, and started kissing me. Before I knew what was going on she slid a pill under my tongue and then did the same thing with Fred. After a few minutes we were gone, off together in some distant universe.
    We stumbled out of the club hours later, still high, and walked to the end of Las Ramblas until we saw a marquee reading LIVE SEX SHOWS . We didn’t know what this meant, but we had to check it out. A woman who had to be at least seventy-five years old checked our IDs, and after we paid she stamped our hands and pointed down a long, narrow flight of stairs. Finally we entered a big open room with a stage and a bunch of chairs. In the first row of chairs sat Japanese businessmen who were all holding cameras.
    Fred and I sat down, having no idea what to expect. After a while a woman walked onto the stage and took off all her clothes, then got on all fours and started touching herself. We were only two feet from the stage and couldn’t believe our eyes. The woman then came out into the crowd and started touching us, kissing my ear and playing with Fred’s hair. Finally she stopped in front of one guy and started dragging him up onto the stage. At first he protested, but it was obvious that he was part of the act. He eventually went up onstage, and the woman started blowing him right there in front of us. The Japanese guys seemed totally into it, but Fred and I were pretty freaked out. After a few minutes the two of them started fucking, and when he finished, everybody started clapping on cue as if they were watching a performance of West Side Story.
    The whole time this was going on women started coming around and trying to seduce the men in the audience. One woman came up to me who had to weigh at least 250 pounds. She looked like a linebacker for the Jets. I was getting turned on from watching what was going on onstage, but I didn’t really want to have sex with her. “I just want a blow job,” I told her. The woman grabbed me, threw me over her shoulder, and carried me off. She threw me into a chair and started pulling my dick out of my pants. Suddenly the old woman who had checked us in was standing in front of me, shining a flashlight in my face. “Give me the money,” she yelled. I handed it over, and she left the other woman to her job. Suffice it to say, it was worth every penny.
    The rest of our time in Barcelona was spent tapas hopping along Las Ramblas, indulging in local beers and delicious seafood—mussels and anchovies that had, amazingly, come out of a can. I had grown up believing that any food from a can was automatically gross, but in Barcelona it was completely different; this was high-quality stuff, drowning in the best Spanish olive oil.
    By the time we arrived in Madrid for our flight home, we had run through the last of our refills of the pills and were dope-sick again. Having no idea how we’d survive the eight-hour