Sex and Bacon (20 page)

I don’t know my coworkers’ bodies anymore. We spend hours with each other, and none of us appear to have assholes. Nobody farts, or if they do, they don’t guffaw and make a proud announcement. I don’t know who’s on her period, or where anyone is in her cycle. I don’t know who has fat knees or a bounteous ass or tight abs or bruises or scars from needle marks or surprisingly lovely, arched feet. I don’t know what’s beautiful about each woman now. Nobody knows what’s beautiful about me. Everything human about us is deliberately hidden, tucked away, lied about, or ignored.

I am desperate for scent—I track it doggedly in a vain attempt to gain olfactory information, like a truffle pig pushing its snout deep into moss. I thought I smelled someone’s hair once as I stood over her, both of us peering at her monitor as she showed me a shortcut to a specific client’s document template. I breathed in sharply, transfixed. It was thrillingly chemical—perhaps a dandruff shampoo like my dad used, the kind sold in blue bottles, marketed as medicine. But the excitement lay in the chase: Could I possibly smell her head sweat
underneath
the shampoo? The stink of unwashed hair is such a specific, personal scent—it’s as individual as pussy odor, and I knew it, and I was suddenly inflamed, sniffing desperately, knowing I only had a few seconds before I’d have to back away to my own computer to duplicate her instruction. Then I realized I was inhaling the tiny bottle of Wite-Out that sat, opened and forgotten, on her desk.

It hadn’t been her hair at all.

I never thought I’d miss the smell of Lenore’s sausage-and-onion flatulence. But I do.

IN MY FLUORESCENTLY
lit word-processing pit of women, surrounded like a fortress by the private offices of men, we act like none of us fuck. Like we never have, and never would, and never wanted to. We can talk about each other’s children, but we can’t talk about sprawling in rumpled sheets next to a loved partner, fierce and exuberant, wanting to carry his baby, to be his knocked-up bitch. We do talk about husbands, but only matter-of-factly as if they were geriatric aunts or discreet, effeminate uncles. I don’t mention my boyfriend, allowing them to assume that my nights are spent alone, drinking cup after cup of herbal tea and reading starchy novels, like any other seemly old maid.

When we’re forced to leave our word-processing keep to use the restroom, we scurry. We tuck our asses in and under instead of allowing them free, bouncing play. Our boobs are strapped down. And when we pass men in the common hallways we either show our teeth submissively, shucking and jiving like house servants, or we avoid eye contact and speed up, shying away from the gravitational pull of their male bodies like comets. It’s as if all the fuckery has been sucked out of us, leaving us dry and sexless and efficient as smooth-crotched Barbie dolls in the elastic-waisted pantyhose that bisect our bellies in cruel red slashes. After doing our business in the ladies’ room, we hurry back to our abbey breathlessly. It’s better to be cloistered with the other women, safe in our cubicles, gazing into the solitary hearths of our monitors. It’s less risky.

None of them know I fuck women, that I could spread their thighs and feast on their cunts like a vampire, sucking their labia into my mouth and sliding cool fingers inside them.
²
None of them know I’m hungry for the scent of their sweat, that I would lick it from their skin in salty beads if I could. It’s not that I find any of them attractive—it’s that in such a sterile environment, I feel rabid and feral, wild for the taste of blood, full of need and thrust and demand. I’d fuck any one of them the same way I’d bite big chunks of flesh and skin and bone from their bodies. I’d take anything I could from them that was human and febrile, warm and alive and real. I’d bite it or suck it or drink it down in hot gushes of sluice, bending them over their desks and howling like the animal I am. I am salt and spit and come and shit and piss and blood and skin—we all are, and just once I’d like us to stop pretending to be cerebral adjuncts to our computers and admit that we’re all disgusting and wonderful human monsters full of devilish desire.

I consider a fair amount of mischief, when I’m not staying home drinking herbal tea and reading novels.

I’VE SCREWED UP
the eye contact thing on a number of occasions. I blame the fact that the men in the offices that surround the word-processing pit are the same ones that paid me to dance for them, dominate them, and touch their pricks for so many years. I know what these fat-bellied white men look like-with the little candle-stumps of their penises in their hands. I know what they smell like when they’re sitting nude on a towel, masturbating in front of a stranger posing carefully in seven-inch heels: shit and baby oil. I know the fermented-bean smell of their ball sweat. I know that they take their bloated paychecks and they spend them in dirty little shacks just outside of city limits, paying women like me to spread our pussies for them.

So it’s hard for me to pretend to be flustered when they walk past me in the hallways. I’ve made the mistake of making eye contact, and of refusing to move aside for them, forcing them to sidestep as I pass. I’ve looked at them the way I’ve looked at my customers for a decade: evaluating them, noting what I see, then dismissing them. It’s hard to take their authority seriously when I know precisely how degenerate most of them are. I know that if I donned a padded bra and a G-string, most of these men would happily degrade themselves in my presence, rolling in their own waste and devouring their own ejaculate from shit-slicked fingers. How many men in ties have I watched jamming filthy plastic butt plugs deep into their own rectums? How many of them have implored me to beat their asses, step on their cocks, slap their faces, spit on them? How many have dribbled little yellow curds of come onto themselves in my presence? How many of them have returned to their wives afterward and made them feel unloved and unwanted, because they feel entitled to a younger stranger in Kabuki makeup by the very virtue of being able to pay for her time and brief tolerance?

So no. I guard my eyes. When I imagine whispering filth into their ears and making the equivalent of my entire paycheck for an hour’s contemptuous work behind a closed office door, I distract myself. I am no longer working as an adult entertainer, I remind myself. I am a writer now. It’s better now. I have more self-respect now. Don’t I?

But I cannot pay my bills with what I make, and sitting still under bright lights in an office all day hurts my body and my mind grievously. I remember dancing onstage in New Orleans, flying around the pole, shaking my ass and laughing hard, kicking over drinks and plucking $20 bills from my customers’ fingers like daisies. I remember the music, the nasty bass thump scooping me up and lifting me from the hips, making me feel graceful and elegant and absolutely in control, a throb radiating out from my pussy like a halo of light. I remember feeling beautiful all day long.

And I think that’s -what I miss the very most.

THE FOOD MY
office coworkers eat is mostly starch, crammed hastily into greedy mouths with keyboard-dirty fingers. They eat fast and look guilty chewing as quickly as they can to swallow the lumps of food before anyone notices. There are many jokes about breaking diets, food going directly to hips, and “I really shouldn’t, but. . .” It’s like living in a Cathy cartoon. These women won’t sit down and eat a piece of meat with a salad on the side, but they’ll graze on Betty Crocker quick bread and grocery store bakery cake and cookies and doughnuts bought in big plastic clamshells and Halloween candy from communal bowls all day long, washed down with a slurry of bad coffee and powdered creamer.

Predictably, the only talk about our bodies as women is negative and derogatory. Our collective desire to lose weight is taken for granted. When I mention my plans to go to the gym after work, my coworkers bow their heads in penitence, saying they “should” go, but don’t, and that they “need” to, because of the unmanageability of their bodies. “You’re so
good”
they sigh spitefully, rolling their eyes, as if I’m some kind of apple-polishing Goody Two Shoes accruing gold stars to their detriment. “You must be losing so much
weight.”
Then they eye my body curiously. My coworkers seem confounded by my refusal to join in the general discussion of diets, “good” and “bad” foods, “problem areas” (hips, ass, thighs are the usual culprits), and by my reluctance to participate in group bingemg behavior when sugary snacks appear. Yet, I’m not thin. Why would I bother denying myself sweet treats and exercising for so little payoff?

Nobody assumes I’m going to the gym because I like going, or because after sitting trapped behind a desk for eight hours, the only thing that unkmks the muscles in my neck and shoulders and back is an hour of hot, sweaty movement. Nobody assumes I go because I love taking care of my body or because I like being strong and flexible. To my coworkers, the gym is punishment that must be endured for the crime of eating “bad’ foods, and the body is something that must be regulated and chastised, like a disobedient pet. I suspect my coworkers view themselves as essentially separate from their bodies—as if they’re the superegos to their bodies’ rebellious ids, as if they exist as brains and personalities living in fleshly containers that may or may not be to their liking, like gamers developing rich, complex online existences and referring contemptuously to “meat space.” But after ten years of living in my body as a performer, a dancer, and a model, I can’t make that division. I
am
my body. My body is me. We’re all on the same team—brain, heart, muscles, everything. And my team doesn’t like nasty grocery store bakery cakes or flaccid, underdone spice cakes or cookies that taste of grease and corn syrup and salt. So I don’t eat them.

My coworkers have no idea that I made a good income for a decade portraying sexiness and erotic availability. Like most women who have never worked in the sex industry, my coworkers assume men fantasize about Victoria’s Secret models and other instances of corporeal freakishness held up as praised examples by the three-headed media/fashion/diet industry Cerberus, because advertisers make more money from us when we’re miserable.

But if there’s anything I learned from my customers, it’s that when folks pay for sexual entertainment, they want a woman who loves her own body, first and foremost. They’d rather jerk off to an average girl in a great costume ‘who radiates pride and confidence than they would a supermodel, and for all the oppressiveness of the sex industry the one thing you can’t accuse it of is elitism. The adult industry tells a lot of unforgivably ugly lies about women, female desire, and erotic love in general, but it also taught me to walk with my back straight and my head up. My big ass and thick thighs paid my rent for a score of years—not because I was ashamed of them, but because I brazenly displayed them. And of course I wasn’t to every customer’s taste—but that’s where the egalitarianism of the industry comes in, because every girl is going to be attractive to a certain population of buyers if she simply allows them to admire her and reinforces that desire by demonstrating her own belief in herself. In such a massive industry, there’s room for a wide variety of entrepreneurial gumption.

It also helps if you’re willing to sell your pee and your saliva. I’m not saying the industry isn’t disgusting—I’m saying it’s
equally
disgusting, that it’s an Kqual Opportunity Kmployer of filth. I’m saying if you
want
to pee in a wineglass for rent money, you pretty much can, as long as you value yourself enough to drive a hard bargain for your golden nectar. And parenthetically, I find peeing in a glass for $150 much less degrading than working for minimum wage. I’d rather serve someone a piping hot glass of urine for a fee I’ve negotiated on my own behalf than a double grande caramel mochaccmo with whipped cream for an employer who holds me in utter contempt and pays me just enough to stay exhausted, over-worked, and demoralized.

I’m fully aware of the absurdity of having learned to love my body by working in such a legendarily woman-hating industry. I hate that I had to show my tits in order to learn to love them, that slapping a price tag on my pussy taught me to respect my own physical value, not only as a female, but as a living, breathing human being worthy of nourishing food, loving care, and respect. It’s a damn paradox, and I feel like I’m skating dangerously close to the kind of bullshit pro-adult-industry “sex positive”
rah-rahism
I despise. So I want to say this again: The sex industry is mostly very, very fucked up. It pushes us apart from each other and teaches us to use each other as objects, instead of seeing each other as real, living, complicated human beings. But it’s also got little islands of okay-ness in the midst of all its horrible, alienating lies —and one of them is that it’s hard to hate your own body when it has become your best friend and strongest ally in your pursuit of a livable wage. When even your waste is valuable, you’re forced to acknowledge—and respect—your own inherent physical worth.

You have to take wisdom where you can find it. Wouldn’t it be ideal if we learned to love our bodies as children and grew up with unshakable inner confidence impervious to even the canniest advertisers’ lies? What if we didn’t have to whore our bodies to discover their value? What if we just
knew
our bodies deserved love and care? What if we woke up feeling beautiful and treated ourselves like beautiful creatures all day long and woke up the next morning and did it again? How would our lives be different?

I’m guessing we’d eat a lot less store-bought junk food. And that far fewer of us would choose to tolerate the insidious torture of a forty-hour work week spent, cramped and aching, behind a desk.

1.
I never sold my shit to a customer. The most I did in that department was to scribble skidmarks in the cotton gusset of my panties with brown eyeliner pencil, then sell the besmirched panties to a man with a yearning for the taste of solid waste. FYI—the trick with that is to turn the panties inside out andwipe your ass with them first, so they have a realistically assy smell.