Working Sex (5 page)

The hustle began on the table. Whenever someone gave you more than a $1 tip, you turned all attention toward him and tried to sell him a split. One split equaled $35 equaled fifteen minutes, which you devoted to selling him the next drink. It was a dream of eternal postponement. Lawyers were my special niche. They had the best sense of irony. Sitting there in my thrift-store jacket and boa with my legs spread, I was a study in cubism: lips mouthing well-bred earnest truisms about postcolonial theory, hand guiding their hand up under my skirt. And at these times, my pussy often got wet.

These are some of the songs we played on the jukebox:

“Bad Girls”

“The Tide Is High”

“Heart of Glass”

“Shame”

“Ring My Bell”

“Superfreak”

“Heaven Knows”

 

 

During the years I worked in the club, I didn’t have a regular boyfriend. Outside the club I rarely had sex. For a while, a man who called himself John came in at ten once a week,
bought me a magnum, and tipped me $75. In the back room, these were our dates. On our first night together, during the very first split, John said, “I have a hobby.” His hobby was cunnilingus. John knelt on the floor and I lay on the couch, lifted my long lace-tiered skirt, and pretended I was pretending to come. During the day, I worked for trade unions doing theater with old people. My life at that time had become completely improbable. But at times like these, I believed.

Like everyone else who worked in the clubs, I was always trying to leave. Girls saved money, quit to travel in Europe or start their own business, then came back broke three months later. A few months after the exhaust fan went up outside my window a friend got me a job teaching college. English Composition, Greek and Roman Literature. I didn’t have any degrees, claimed that my records were lost in a fire at a university 10,000 miles away in New Zealand. I taught under a false name with a false social security number so I could collect unemployment insurance under my actual name while I was teaching. Meanwhile, the college itself was defrauding the state and federal government by enrolling fictitious low-income students, then billing for tuition grant reimbursement. The idea came straight out of Gogol’s
Dead Souls
, one of the books on our syllabus. Two years later, the whole thing got busted.

I
’m hesitant to use Burt’s name like this, publicly, in a story, but certainly he knew better than to give us, a house of whores, his true name. Didn’t he?

Burt Starr didn’t know us. He knew Irene, who he had sung at, that one time Goodnight, Irene while shifting in the foyer, waiting for his date. Irene was really Emily, who he didn’t know. Emily, a sweet, stuffed-doll of a name, a Holly Hobbie name for this ravaged, tough woman, older and scrappy with messed-up teeth and a bunch of kids. This woman had left Emily behind. She was truly Irene to me, so I guess I knew
her, knew everyone, as well as Burt Starr did. As well as any of the men knew any of us.

The foyer held a sliding-door closet, and if Burt had been bored, curious, and left alone for a moment he might have placed his hand on the panel and glided it open. Inside was a dirty costume shop, the floor tumbled with stilettos, Irene’s favorite shining gold dagger of a heel. There were the odd pair of dominatrix boots, should one of the many men who rang our enterprise, voices tremulous with shame and desire inquiring about the possibility of humiliation, actually book a fucking call. They didn’t. They just jerked off on the telephone, straining to keep their voices even with their dicks in their hands. Eventually they betrayed themselves in a gasping gulp of a moan, and it was a race to see who could hang up first. There was a man who came through once, and I got him. Under his khakis and button-ups he wore a purple leotard, hose, and a cheap, thin belt pulled tight around his waist. He wanted me to insult him, which was easy. I lay back on the bed, clothed, and made him march in clumsy catwalks around the room. I seemed bored because I was. I mocked him a bit, and when he came on the linoleum he had to clean it up. It was a good call, easy and more interesting than the average, but when I sat at the kitchen table later the unlined fabric journal I’d bought in Chinatown open to a sheer-white page, I had nothing to say about it. I’d never be
a writer. If I couldn’t glean a story out of a weird scene like that I was hopeless. Empty. I collapsed on the couch with the other whores and watched talk shows through the cigarette smoke. The dominatrix boots were slumped in the far corner of the closet, unused.

The closet held a cardboard box containing a jumble of sex toys, bulbous pinks and lavenders, fleshy curves, electrical cords tangling with bits of whip. The toys, the dildos in particular, carried a toxic sheen on their skin, as if they
were
skin, sweaty skin. It was gross to behold. Nobody much used the sex-toy box.

The closet was there mostly to hang our street clothes in, and this would have been most interesting, most helpful, to Burt Starr, had he peeked, but he didn’t. Irene’s hoodie with her son’s Hyannis High School football team logo on the front, worn with a pair of stretch pants from 1988. The pajamas Karen wore rolling into her economics classes at Harvard—flannel things marred by cute beasts, worn with rundown sneakers. Karen was tired. She ran the house and went to school full-time. She was twenty-three, an entrepreneur. You would see her in either whore clothes: a tiny black dress, cheap material, a ruffled frill, black lingerie peeking through everywhere, or these bunny pajamas. Karen was actually Penny, which was funny, Penny being a much better whore name than Karen, but where do you go from Penny. It would
have to be Bambi/Candy/Brandi terrain, and Karen was the boss, after all. She needed a sensible, boss-lady name. Karen.

One wire hanger held Tanya’s brown UPS uniform; the boxy shorts, the starched, button-up shirt with her name tag, Linda, pinned to the breast. Another held Rita’s jeans and T-shirt. Rita’s real name was Lauren or Laura, maybe Laurel.

Veronica’s hanger would be of most interest to Burt Starr, as it was Veronica getting pretty in the bathroom for him, Veronica buttoning herself into a floor-length dress, all swirling flowers and gold buttons. She yanked it from the closet as Irene buzzed him in, setting the wire hangers jangling like wind chimes, and locked herself in the toilet to get ready. This was a big call, important. Veronica’s street clothes swayed in the air above the sex toys: faded jeans chopped at the knee, tentacles of frayed threads dangling. A pricey Polo shirt with her initials embroidered into the cloth, MET, Mary Elizabeth Thibodeau. A baseball hat was hung backwards on the hanger’s hook. Black, new, the brim still stiff. It read DYKE in hot pink letters. I had only just bought it at the gay pride parade and MaryLiz had stolen it from me. I let her. She needed it more than I did. With my short short hair and boyish body I easily read as lesbo in a way MaryLiz did not. MaryLiz’s wardrobe was dull designer Connecticut good-girl clothes, her tits blowing up some girly top. Her hair was long and tawny. MaryLiz had chest cleavage, and her red pumps served up toe
cleavage; if she bent over in her hundred-dollar jeans you’d get some ass cleavage as well. She needed that DYKE hat.

When Burt Starr called it was as if someone in the house had been selected for the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes winnings. We only had to wait and learn who the check was made out to.
Burt Starr?
Rita asked theatrically into the phone. Her eyes rolled frantically around the room, making sure we were all paying attention. We were. Okay Mr. Starr, who would you like to see today? I was frozen at the table, my pen stuck in the grip of my fist, the tips of my fingernails stabbing my soft palm. The journal below scribbled with some uninspired notes about my most recent trick, a college student from Korea. I wracked my brain, but there was nothing to say about it. Nothing to say about a fuck? How could this be. I let my pen drop.

Burt Starr.

Burt Starr? Irene whispered, stuck in her tracks, on the way to the toilet with a full bladder, her bare feet rooted to the carpet. Tanya muted the television and stubbed out her cigarette. I felt a squeeze on my shoulders; it was MaryLiz above me, spun around from the salad she’d been preparing on the countertop. Her hands were cool on my bare shoulders, damp and smelling of lettuce. Yes, Rita exhaled the word on a breath of disappointment. Veronica can see you at three. MaryLiz’s squeeze on my shoulders turned violent. She
hopped up and down behind me, the slap-slap of her feet the only noise in the quiet apartment.

MaryLiz was my girlfriend. She was the only one in the house whose name was a costume to me:
Veronica.
Veronica, I would purr and tease. Veronica, Share Your Soup With Me? Veronica, May I Borrow Your K-Y? Veronica, Play Scrabble With Me? Every request was a wink. Not that MaryLiz would. Share her soup, her K-Y, play a board game with me. She wasn’t that kind of girlfriend. A nice one. She was the other sort. I was her first girl everything: first one she ever fucked, ever dated, ever lived with like that, in a lesbian way. Not true for me. I had more experience, but it didn’t matter. I had fucked a couple of girls, been whipped into sex frenzies I liked to think were love. They had been brief affairs and I’d moved on quickly, as there was another girl on the horizon—at the bar or at the consciousness-raising rap group, on the dance floor or at the rally. But with MaryLiz I’d hit a snag. All motion ceased. She moved me into her house and now it was where I lived. She recruited me to her occupation and now it was where I worked. She slowly shut down the sex, and it was okay, had to be okay. We were women, feminist women surviving the sale of our sex all day, and if we refused each other at night it was understandable. Something wasn’t right with MaryLiz, with me and MaryLiz, but our days at the whorehouse, opening up and shutting down
various parts of ourselves, kept me too exhausted to look at it. Opening our crotches while shutting down our heads, keeping hearts pried open to the other workers while letting them clang shut on the johns, mediating the streams of humor and rage coursing through us. It was our job, more so than the basic sex we performed or delivered; this was the real work, this careful protecting and revealing of all our tenderest places.