Little Feet Going Nowhere

Sam Waterford, a male prostitute, and his pimp wife, Marie, find themselves uniquely aware of a fundamental change in human nature which begins spiraling frighteningly out of control.

When I was an innocent little boy, Alice B. Sheldon, a woman who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree Junior, wrote The Screwfly Solution, a grim short story about how aliens that wanted to inhabit earth might realistically deal with its current inhabitants, in much the manner that biologists have dealt with insects, not be poisoning the critters and hence fouling the environment, but by hijacking their reproductive process for the purposes of eradicating the species.

Although the story was not so well-done, and reviewed here, Alice B. Sheldon the idea was so compelling I wished to do my own take on it. In selecting a viewpoint character who would be in a position to see the process and begin figuring it out, I needed a protagonist that would be sexually different from the ordinary. I chose a fellow named Sam, who I met at an athletic club where I trained when I was still boxing and Sam trained women in “boxing,” women that were more interested in him than the lesson, women who only had patience for the first 15 minutes or so, and would then hastily leave, with Sam, who left his car on the lot as he drove off with them. As I left after my two-hour training session, Sam would often be returning, walking away from the car of a smiling woman, headed back into the club to meet his next appointment—a woman, who was more interested in him then the boxing, who soon left with him, his car still on the lot…

Okay, you get the picture. I interviewed Sam, who me and the other guys nicknamed “Dope-Dick Jones” about his profession, with a promise to not use the material for a decade or so. That was in 1998. So, in 2012 I did my own version of The Screwfly Solution, from Sam’s perspective. My sister, upon viewing it, thought it was my male fantasy. On the contrary, it was Sam’s nightmare that I inserted into this sci-fi story. You see, Sam did not like being an escort, but his wife was his pimp, and he was in love with her…

I will be serializing the first two thirds of the most politically incorrect last day on earth story ever written, here, a bookmark a day, as I try and wrap up the year’s last half dozen books.