Working Sex Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  the fisherman

  porn piece

  smile you’ve just been dominatrixed

  trick

  yeoman johnson

  the ballad of burt starr

  devices: a short play

  Scenes

  Prologue

  The Beginning

  The Middle

  The End

  Epilogue

  staged

  sugar & me

  pimp

  bella

  college graduate makes good as courtesan

  campus sluts forever!

  I. BRIGHT COLLEGE DAYS

  II. PHYSICAL FITNESS, MENTAL FITNESS

  III. THE IMPORTANCE OF TRADITION

  IV. SO WE COMMENCE

  an interwiew with gloria lockett

  boys stink

  meeting rita

  the night plays like pingpong in my head

  degrade

  jimmy

  golden

  advice

  my first porn film

  dear john

  hello

  anacam

  SEPTEMBER 4, 1997

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1997

  SEPTEMBER 10, 1997

  SEPTEMBER 13, 1997

  SEPTEMBER 17, 1997

  SEPTEMBER 28, 1997

  OCTOBER 3, 1997

  OCTOBER 7, 1997

  OCTOBER 8, 1997

  NOVEMBER 21, 1997

  NOVEMBER 25, 1997

  NOVEMBER 30, 1997

  DECEMBER 7, 1997

  JANUARY 2, 1998

  FEBRUARY 11, 1998

  FEBRUARY 27, 1998

  MARCH 10, 1998

  MARCH 17, 1998

  APRIL 11, 1998

  MAY 12, 1998

  JULY 26, 1998

  SEPTEMBER 14, 1998

  OCTOBER 28, 1998

  DECEMBER 16, 1998

  my stripper year

  songs

  PRESENT PENICATIVE LYRICS BY VAGINAL DAVIS

  ABSORBINE GYLLENHAUL LYRICS BY VAGINAL DAVIS

  THE MALADJUSTED RULE LYRICS BY VAGINAL DAVIS

  house call

  my pride and broken buzzers

  whoreanomics

  Acknowledgements

  about the contributors

  about the editor

  Selected Titles from Seal Press

  Copyright Page

  This book is for the ones who blazed the trail.

  introduction

  Annie Oakley

  One time in the olden days when I was working at the peep show (gateway drug to prostitution) a man came in who’d made the rounds of most of the girls but never seen me. I walked into my side of the scrubby booth known as the Victorian Parlor (complete with ye olde lounge-style lawn chair) and started the lame boob-rubbing moves that were always the prequel to the removal of my shirt. The guy wasn’t interested and motioned for me to knock it off and come closer to the glass. He had some greasy piece of paper that he was fiddling with. It looked like it was about a thousand years old and had been used to wrap a hamburger. He unfolded it and pressed it to the glass for me to squint at.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked, looking at me intently and already rubbing his crotch through his jeans. It was some kind of clipping from a magazine, folded so many times that only mere molecules of the photo were left in between the web of white creases. I couldn’t even muster a guess.

  “It’s the Partridge Family school bus! I want you to pretend like you’re driving the Partridge Family school bus!” Not naked, not speaking lewdly about Danny Partridge, just with my feet on the glass and my hand on the invisible gearshift, making motor sounds. It was an easy $20 for five minutes of my time, and eventually he got passed off onto Carrie, a nightshift girl who really did drive a school bus during the day. Jackpot.

  That’s the story I used to trot out when people would ask me what was the weirdest customer experience I’d ever had. Which was always the first question they’d ask upon finding out what I did for a living (if they didn’t immediately change the subject), followed closely by “How much do you make?” The Partridge Family guy wasn’t even really the weirdest, but the real answer would’ve been a lot less interesting, and clearly people were digging for the entertaining. It made the job sound funny and light, like I spent the whole day indulging harmless adult children (hey . . . wait . . . ). The kooky specificity of a Partridge Family bus fetish let them off the hook somehow, reassured them that their own weird desires were at least not that weird, and freed them from having to imagine themselves in the customer’s role. Titillation without incrimination. This is the kind of story that Americans most want to hear from people who work in the sex trade, and consequently this is the kind of story that most often gets told, when anything gets told at all.

  There are a few different ways one’s story is allowed to be entertaining: funny, sexy, tragic, scandalous. Repentance, marriage, college graduation, lurid death, or a piece of investigative journalism are the favored endings. The rigid boundaries of archetype, be they happy hooker or downtrodden whore, are a kind of invisibility. They are one-dimensional. Should the story twist to the side you’ll see nothing at all. Once marked by telling the story, you are branded for life. Your credibility is gone, you are forever seen in the context of the work. You don’t get to go back to being a civilian. Who needs that kind of shit? People remain silent. This silence, this invisibility, is the linchpin upon which rests the glorious suspension of disbelief that is at the core of nearly every transaction in a service economy. It’s the intellectual sleight of hand where one denies oneself knowledge of the essential personhood of the provider of a service or the maker of a product so as not to impede one’s enjoyment of the product or service. In this way one avoids being implicated in the boredom, poverty, or ugliness of the work of the service provider. In late capitalist America under the rule of market logic, suspension of disbelief becomes almost a survival skill.

  The sex industry is a huge industry. Think of all the venues: Internet porn, magazines, phone sex, dirty movies, strip clubs, peep shows, and hookers from the street, upscale agency, or the ad in the back of your edgy local weekly. Estimates put the U.S. sex industry at around $12 billion annually and growing rapidly, and the number of people presently employed in it at upwards of six million. To say nothing of those who have been a part of it in the past. What are the implications of the invisibility of such a huge segment of the population? What does it say about us as sexual consumers that we prefer our product to be anonymous? In a probably accidental rare moment of lucidity, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop observed to ABC News that the sex industry “is making billions of dollars a year, is spreading to cable television and to the Internet, and yet their employees are considered to be throwaway people.” When you refuse to recognize someone’s humanity, you don’t have to worry about their working conditions, their safety, their health, their ability to make a decent living. Thus the cops, pimps, club owners, and minimoguls at the head of petty fiefdoms like the Girls Gone Wild porn empire get to run the industry with little outside interference or regulation. Not only is this bad for the people who work in the industry, but are pimps, police, and Joe Francis who you really want to trust with the shaping of the national libido?

  Sex workers telling stories, humanizing ourselves through the sharing of experience and insight, punctures the bloated dream of consumption without consequence. It puts a real face on the mythological creatures that are the subject of so much fantasizing and demonizing. It moves us from a weird landscape populated by the iconography of people’s fears and desires to a tangible, relatable reality; and only from there can we begin to be taken seriously as people deser
ving of safety, agency, and respect.

  at one point when I was taking a break from the sex industry, I became a housecleaner. My friend and I worked together, cleaning up after grown adults and fomenting cheerful resentment. It wasn’t long before we knew who among our clients had an alcohol problem, who refused to have sex with her husband, who wore a padded-butt mangirdle, who was trying his hand at the newspaper personal ads. Nobody ever told us these personal details, nobody ever really told us much besides when to show up and what to use on the floors. A lot of stuff becomes obvious quickly when you’re observing people to whom you’re invisible—and when you occasionally go through their drawers. The point is, the help always knows more about the boss than the boss knows about them. Sex workers are in a unique position to observe. The work takes place in a freakish crucible of the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The fact that, by and large, we are relegated to a simple mascot position in public dialogue about these dynamics is a critical mistake.

  Occasionally an academic will be thrown our way to spend a year slumming for a story, or someone will publish a memoir, but more frequently self-representation is a luxury we are denied. How would we represent ourselves if given the opportunity? In ten years of working in the business and meeting other whores, the one thing that’s become apparent is that none of us can agree on a take on any aspect of the work. Even within ourselves, feelings and convictions can shift several times over the course of a night. Sometimes you see the best of people and yourself, and everything seems so easy and attainable, and the money feels like it’s rolling in for free. Other times it’s the worst job you’ve ever had and you can’t believe the ugliness of humanity and you want to get out and never come back. The sex industry encompasses so many variations on how to get to the punchline of ass showing (domination! hooking! lap dances! let me count the ways!) and so many kinds of people who get into it for such different reasons and with different options for getting out. The possible experiences in the sex industry are so complicated and contradictory, there is no way to describe it without a multiplicity of voices. Working Sex includes pieces that clash not just in content but also in form. Experienced or experimental, poetic or pornographic, angry or academic, the pieces complement each other, and through their differences begin to articulate a fuller picture of the amazing humans who populate the mysterious landscape of this business.

  the fisherman

  Amber Dawn

  You can sit in a whorehouse and breathe, until the stink of cigarette smoke and fried delivery food, of rubbing alcohol and latex and cheap scented candles, of hairspray and afro sheen, of cock and cunt everywhere disappears, and you think you are breathing fresh air.

  You can talk with the girl wearing only a bra and panties while she dumps Cover-Girl foundation over her stretch marks (from childbearing), two scars (botched boob job), and knife wound (compliments of her man) about matters of the heart and decide that she is definitely, yes definitely, giving you sound advice.

  You can help that same girl lift a drunken man off of the bed and carry his sloppy body out the door into the parking lot. You can watch her rifle through his pockets for money before leaning him up against the hood of his own car.

  You can wear her clothes when she feels like being nice to you. Dresses that are nothing more than a tiny tube of shiny fabric. Dresses so small that either your ass is halfexposed or your nipples are popping out.

  You can levitate six inches from the floor, held up by clear plastic stiletto heels and the ability to ignore aching feet.

  You can do all of these things and not really feel like a whore. You can even jerk off a few men who close their eyes and say nothing to you. Afterwards you can rub the money in between your index finger and thumb not yet realizing that, indeed, you are a whore.

  Such is the state of Sharon Margaret Murphy, thirtyseven years of age, purple glitter lipstick, asking herself, “Shouldn’t this feel more dirty?” But Sharon is only six days new to Eve’s Escape Massage and Steam. And during those six days Sharon mostly paraded around in borrowed outfits, watching the other younger girls break and turn. Really though, more important than any of this, Sharon has Chloe to paint her toenails and flat iron the bad perm from her hair, Chloe to share soda and Cosmo quizzes and stories about men and demons from the past. Sharon has Chloe to make prostitution feel like one big slumber party.

  Now there is one characteristic inherent to a slumber party—that after some time the dawn will come. Today, Sharon’s sixth day in the profession, the dawn came in the form of Chloe stumbling back into the staff room, wrapped in only a towel, her lipstick moved from her mouth to a smudge across her chin. Her blond bombshell clip-on ponytail a limp mess, like roadkill, in her left hand. Sharon’s eyes grow wide with concern. Chloe flashes a quick smile; she is not looking for sympathy.

  “Lookin’ pretty tight, Chlo. Like you been fucked raw or somethin’,” says Tia Lee without turning away from the The Jerry Springer Show.

  “I can’t do it,” Chloe says, “I’ve been in there two hours already. And he wants to extend again.”

  “Who?” asks Sharon.

  “The Fisherman.” Tia Lee lazily points the remote at the TV, turning up the volume.

  “He’s got money still,” Chloe says.

  “I ain’t going in there,” Tia Lee states flatly. I already saw him once today. I had to pretend I couldn’t speak English just to get out of that room. Tell him to go back to the fuckin’ sea. Or send her.” She waves the remote in Sharon’s direction.

  “What’s wrong with him?” asks Sharon.

  “He’s got coke dick,” says Tia Lee flatly. “And he talks, you know what I’m saying, ‘tight pussy wet pussy pink pussy chocolate pussy my fingers in your pussy pussy fuckin pussy’ the whole time. Caress says he pissed on her this one time. One minute she is pulling it, right, then the next he is just fuckin pissing everywhere. Sick shit if you ask me.”

  “Come meet him!” Chloe grabs Sharon’s wrist and starts to pull her from the sofa.

  the Fisherman sits on a wicker chair that is too small to hold a man his size. Naked but for a white hand towel thrown over his groin. Curls of black hair cling to his chest like algae to rock. The salt smell of sweat floods the room.

  “I have to go home now. I brought the new girl to see you,” says Chloe. “You be nice to her, okay, treat her like a lady.” Chloe picks up a billfold from the nightstand. “So you’ll be staying another hour then?” she asks. The Fisherman starts to tug himself under the towel. Scratching his nose with his other hand, he takes a series of quick short breaths. His eyes seem to be going in two different directions, one on Sharon and the other on his billfold. “I’ll just get the money out for you,” Chloe pulls out two brown bills, slow and deliberate for the Fisherman to see she’s not pinching an extra hundred.

  “Only half an hour,” he says in a gurgly voice as his towel drops to the floor. He shakes his near-erection in his hand. “I’ll tire this old girl in no time.”

  “Okay,” says Chloe. “I’ll just give her two hundred to start off with. That’s fair.” She holds up the money, then places the billfold back on the night table. She smiles weakly as she gives the money to Sharon, and the room darkens as she closes the door. Sharon notices all the table lamps have been moved to the floor. The lighting throws the Fisherman’s shadow up the wall onto the ceiling.

  “Come here,” he says. Sharon takes a step forward.

  “Take off your dress.” Sharon pulls herself out of the tight Lycra dress.

  “You don’t wear a bra?” the Fisherman asks, eyeballing her puckered nipples.

  “Most of the time I do,” Sharon starts to explain.

  “You’re not wearing one now because you want me to think you’re a dirty slut.” He nods deliberately as says this.

  After years of being made to watch bad pornography with ex-boyfriends, Sharon is aware that there is only one possible reply,

  “That’s right. I am a dirty slut.”
>
  The Fisherman flops his dick in her direction and she comes to him. She grabs a condom from her purse, and with some effort, stuffs his limp dick into it. Sharon has never blown bagged limp dick before. She tries to compare it to something. A mouthful of water balloon? No. A bag of melted Smarties? Hmm . . . No. Maybe a sock monkey’s arm. She decides that she prefers hard over soft. Soft is too hard to control. It goes wherever it wants, butting up against her back molars, picking a fight with her tongue. The Fisherman pushes on Sharon’s head.

  “All the way in,” he groans. “Get it nice and hard for me. You want the big cock. Tell me how much you want it.”

  “I want it,” Sharon mumbles, holding the Fisherman’s dick in between her teeth as she speaks. Her forehead, now a receptacle for his sweat, slaps against his stomach. Her knees become one with the cheap shag carpet. She watches the clock from her peripheral vision, the second hand barely moving. And just when her gag reflex makes her eyes start to water the Fisherman’s dick solidifies. Suddenly, he is standing upright. Knocks Sharon onto the floor.

  “Get on the bed,” he says, stepping over her. Sharon, dizzy from the ebb and flow of sucking cock, scans the dark room for a bottle of lubricant. The Fisherman slaps the mattress with one hand, his other hand clutching his balls.