the porters' lodge

The college porters gathered en masse Tuesday nights post-ten for raucous pursuits of an intimate nature. In the dull light of the lodge they bared their backs to each other and dealt deck after deck of cards in games of staggering complexity and whose rules not a single one of them knew in even the vaguest sense and which continued through the frenzied and random momentum of the game alone, the cards answerable to nil but their own continued movement. They drank college wine from deep in the stores and got wild on it, kneading and gnawing the varied fleshes of the handful of lady porters who took to all fours and crawled the room evocatively like the mammals they were, their pocked doughy arses and genitalia in burgundy the source of great intrigue as they toiled past institutional furniture clutching glasses and smoking heavily, their knees raw from the coarse shag of the carpet tiles, cheeks ever reddening beneath glassy eyes, ladies who stripped of blue uniform trousers and heavy soled shoes were middle aged and nubile and profoundly accommodating to the weekly adulterous desires of their male colleagues, their hard faces softened by the lamplight over which a college flag had been carefully draped. The ten, twelve male porters that formed any one such occasion would wrestle, the balls of one in the hand or armpit or neckline of another, would grunt and thrust and pump and pulse, and feel the sticky spilt wine upon the hair of their chest and pubis, and collapse breathless and spent in unruly embrace with headaches of sheer thrill. It climaxed with ritual, the women taking leave and a lone male porter entered by the rest, and all fought hard to be the recipient of the ancient will of the college that for these very rituals took genital form. By midnight the revelry was over and the porters returned to their duties or to their homes as was the custom, the lodge left immaculate in their wake, the cards secreted once more.