Working Sex (17 page)

O
kay, I’m just going to be blunt about some basic rules. You should try to avoid doing drugs with clients. On the surface, it seems like a good idea on several levels. Free drugs with nice enough people and the promise of a multiple-hour session because that’s how it goes when drugs are involved. How do you resist a $400 payday after three hours with someone who’s just given you a free tab of ecstasy, someone who really loves you in that moment and wants to look at you and maybe even cry? But this is the thing, you’ll end up fucking them without a condom because if you have any sense you also popped a
Viagra, knowing that they wanted to get fucked and these days, chemistry being what it is, why leave things to chance? I don’t care what people say, when it’s X and speed, condoms are simply impossible. People don’t like to admit that because it’s part of the puritan stuff they’re trying to escape from. That’s why safe-sex billboards don’t work for tweakers and fags. They become part of the din of the world that they’re trying to escape. More parental voices in the choir. Or, for those of us who are way more rigid and judgmental than both our parents put together, those billboards give us more material, brand new pieces of verbal self-harassment.

I once met this guy in Palm Springs on a very emotionally messy work trip where I saw eight people in six days or something like that. He had this mansion in a gated community and basically he wanted to put toys up my butt while he smoked cigarettes. Which was fine. Then a few years later I saw him again up here in San Francisco and he said he’d switched and was bottoming a lot. He had been seeing an escort that he’d really fallen in love with who’d fucked him for the first time in years, and I was thinking, yeah, you got fucked bareback, that’s what that means. This guy got fucked bareback and released himself from a lot of years of shame about how irresponsible he was for having the audacity to enact his jerk-off fantasies, intact, without bleeping, which are what condoms are, a kind of bleep.

He, and I should just give him a name, but I’m a hooker and won’t use the real name because a) I’m a total professional, and b) I don’t remember it at the moment. I’d have to search my AOL account for it. I’m an electronic packrat. My grandparents had their house condemned in rural Virginia because they had too much old furniture in their backyard. Rats in pianos. For me, it’s more about an unruly hard drive. Anyway, I’m going to call this man Paul.

I got to the hotel, the Hyatt I think, yeah, because I remember that there were two towers and that hotel is notorious for architectural confusion. You get a room number like 2641 and it doesn’t mean the 26th floor, it means the sixth floor of the second tower. Or is it the Hilton that’s so daunting?

Paul wanted to do a tab of ecstasy and I was in one of my liberated moods, justifying it, thinking
I really shouldn’t be such a prude, I really need to let go of all my good-boy tendencies and airs.
It’s so out of line with my performance of myself, it’s so disjointed, this constant pressure to have my teachers write glowing things on the back of my report card. Those things were way more important to my father than my actual grades. Dad wanted to see that the teacher had taken the time to write in blue cursive, “Your son is such a joy to have in class! So willing to help! So kind to his classmates!” Clients have a website where they write those kinds of
comments about escorts but I don’t even want to get into that right now because I feel like I’m getting ahead of myself.

We take the ecstasy and I secretly take a Viagra in the bathroom because I know that my dick turns into mush on ecstasy. Like a pile of steamed mushrooms on a plate in a Chinese restaurant, useless to a man who’s flown all the way up here to get fucked and feel loved because he’s getting his prostate battered. His lover doesn’t do that anymore. I think one of his lovers died at some point. Isn’t that a safe assumption? There’s all this other stuff going on with these people. You walk down the street and people are just graveyards, really. I used to smile at everyone and think that being cheerful could make the world a better place and now I see all sorts of spirits swirling around their bodies. Little blue fish swimming laps around their heads, knives sticking out of their cheeks, skin rashes and burns like planes have landed on their bellies. I guess I always sensed this stuff but now I see it. You have to be careful with other people.

This man told me he loved me half an hour into me fucking him. He couldn’t believe that I was staying hard. He said that the escort he’d fallen madly in love with couldn’t stay hard and so they’d just cuddle and cry and talk about Italy. That’s a little much for me at this point with someone I’m only going to see maybe once a year. In the old days I would have been right there with him, leaving bits of my
kidneys and liver everywhere—not indiscriminate, but open (really probably too open sometimes).

Guys on ecstasy have a hard time shooting their loads, so you don’t have a clear endpoint, the way you do with guys who are just tripping on shame and release. You shoot your load and they start dabbing at you with a white hotel washcloth like you’re a wet countertop and if that doesn’t make you want to go home then you’ve got low standards.

I used a condom with him, with Paul. Is that what I called him? Is that what you think his name is? Paul. I knew I was going to fuck him and the risk is so much lower when you’re a top, and it feels so much better and if I’m on ecstasy it’s going to be a challenge to stay hard anyway and I do feel this warm sense of love for him right now. Back then, all this was going through my head. It’s a kind of calculus, figuring out what to do. He was probably getting barebacked by that escort and other guys, too, so even if I wasn’t particularly at risk for HIV, there could be other critters up there, things a pill or a shot can’t banish, unsightly warts and herpes and things that live on and on beyond the moment. And you add up all the itching, you consider the discomfort, later, of being in situations where people you’re with are guessing that you have a wart on the head of your dick but not saying anything. You add up all those moments for the rest of your life and you put it all on the digital scale you use to weigh quarter
ounces of pot and you write it all down, then ask yourself is it worth it for a better sensation on your dick? ‘Cause condoms are really about tops feeling better. The difference in sensation is more of an issue for the top.

And if you’re not attached to having someone shoot cum in your ass, you’re better off. I mean, there’s the whole male pregnancy thing, lots of guys want to please everyone, lots of guys just don’t want to jostle the Grand Mystery with a single word. Those guys shouldn’t do drugs with their clients. That’s the bottom line from Uncle Kirk. If having someone you just met shoot cum up your ass makes you feel like a better person, if it gives you this glow of being pregnant and taking on the legacy of an entire generation of men, if that cum is more than an ending, if that cum is more than a relief and a grade on the report card, if you feel like you need that handwritten note from the teacher, if you want your dad to rub your head and tell you how proud he is, these are all good reasons not to do drugs with a client.

F
or a hot, dead-broke nineteen-year-old girl, it’s cheaper to go out than to stay at home. And that’s exactly what I did. Three dollars a day was just fine for bus fare, but I still needed food and textbooks. Bummer. I already had my own bizarre societypunk social life, a nightlife full of transvestite strippers, transsexuals, rockabilly hustlers, and visiting rock bands. The best thing about visiting rock bands to me was the food that the asskissing promoters would provide backstage. With leather thigh boots, a vinyl miniskirt, bleached hair, and a tight starved slim bod, I could get in backstage at just about any rock show. While
some of the girls were trying to get in the pants of bands like the Clash, I was trying to sneak off with their untouched crackers and wheels of brie. Once I even managed to get backstage with a visiting Japanese band, the Plastics, who got sushi and rice balls delivered to them.

I had already found out about a swingin’ singles club through a girlfriend. We could attend as escorts, drink and snack for free, and even get $30 every time we left with a “member”! The members were all slightly low-rent businessmen, so when I
did
fuck one it was hard to get much takeaway cash. Anyone will buy a willing young girl dinner, a vacation, a line, or a drink . . . as long as she stays with them. But walking-away money was different, and I badly needed to figure out how to get it. Fuck the escargots, slap me a twenty! I felt like screaming in frustration time and again, but the naive college-girl part of me just didn’t know how to hustle businessmen for hard cash.

One night I went out on the town in one of the many hot outfits I’d borrowed, slapped together, or snuck out of the local thrift store: a yellow raw silk dress from the ‘60s, Italian vogue-style, tight across my butt, low cut so the swell of my small tits could burst out, but with enough support so that they stuck up and could be shoved together artificially, the spikiest pumps ever walked on by a human from the sex boutique in London, fishnets, and a black
leather double-wrap disco belt with brass buckles to bind me into the outfit even tighter.

When a blonde pretty boy at the after-hours club I was trying to talk my way into said I should be in movies, I wasn’t in any position to snub him. I gave the guy my number and hoped he’d call. He had an unusual look for my usual sleazy surroundings: blonde, tanned, dressed like a tennis champ, toting a gym bag, and named Jesse. I was impressed. I’d never been popular in high school, so I’d never fucked a real wholesome-looking man before.

When Jesse called he sounded a little mentally disturbed. He seemed to be having problems with some girl who was a bitch one minute and his girlfriend the next, and a rental car he couldn’t afford. He told me he made porn movies. None of this clashed with his tennis pro image in my mind. Since I’d never met a tennis pro or a porn star, it was all unknown territory. He tried to set up a date, but I didn’t care. I figured he would just come over to my apartment and fuck me. Sometimes three different men a day might come over and screw me, just by coincidence. They were always guys I liked. I’d usually get dinner, some casually dropped money, an egg roll, whatever.

When Jesse came over, I was dressed in the most slutty outfit I owned: garter belt sticking out of a micro-mini, spike heels, more make-up than any nineteen-year-old should ever
need, and a see-through white men’s tank top. We got down to business right away. He had a big dick. He ripped off my panties and started matter-of-factly pounding, no adolescent fumbling from him. He kept turning me around like he was almost bored, ramming me from the back doggie-style, hands gripping my tits, slapping my ass, me spread eagle on my bed while he chewed nonchalantly on my pussy, on top of him, on my back again. I was raw and sore but amazed at the same time.

While he fucked, he talked.

“You’re nice and tight now, nineteen is a good age. Women lose it when they hit twenty-one, they have to work really hard to stay in shape. They go here, in the thighs, your thighs are nice and tight.”

It was more like I was a used car he was examining rather than a thrilled summary of my virtues. He ragged on about some other aspects of his job.

“Some of the women I work with are really disgusting. I’m a star. If I tell the director I just can’t fuck a girl, she’s out. Dirty loose pussy hanging out on some old broad, girls who don’t wash. . . ”

For the first time I learned the connection between porn and the underground scene. He knew my runaway cousin, and even had magazines with her looking fat and sad, choking on his dick with her huge mottled tits hanging out. Her
former pals, two teensy punk rock sisters, Jerry and Jane, were among his favorite actresses because they could pass for being about twelve, and he could lift them up and throw them around while he was fucking them on film. The same girls who came to punk clubs, who later resided on Clara Street Alley, were also in the now loftily named Adult Business. Need-unwitting stardom.

When he left he offered me $200 to make a porn film with him. Two hundred bucks was an incredible amount of money, and I already knew I wasn’t going to be any Miss America. Fucking someone I’d already fucked for free seemed safe. His stunted emotional development and wholesome act made him seem safe. It would have been easier to get emotionally involved with a tree.

On the big day of the filming, we clambered on the train and rode to an out-of-the-way suburb. This was Harold’s neighborhood. A chubby, middle-aged guy with glasses let us into his stucco apartment. This was Harold. The first part of the filming was my favorite part, primping. I had latex rubber-look underwear from Woolworth’s, a short tight black dress, purple lipstick, spikes, and ratted-out hair. My idea of real cinema glamour.

Jesse wasn’t talking to me much by then, and I was sleazily trying to conceal the beginning of a herpes outbreak. For the video loop, I was supposed to be a hooker, he a cowboy
customer. He had a cowboy hat to add a fine touch to the believability. He would give me money, and then fuck me, eat me out, and have me suck his dick, which would be so fun that I’d give him back his money at the end.

I wobbled on my spikes while Jesse walked into the scene. I forgot about Harold as he filmed away. I took money from Jesse, and quickly removed my dress. I tried to stay in my latex underwear for a minute because it was new and looked perfect, and I felt it should be recorded on film. Pretty soon I took those off too, though, and we started the scene where Jesse had to eat me out. I had a terrible fear that Jesse would see that I had herpes. I wasn’t afraid of giving it to him, I didn’t really like him. I was afraid that after all that talk about girls with dirty unwashed pussies, I wouldn’t get to make the porn movie, and wouldn’t get paid.