Attempting Normal (6 page)

I don’t do prostitutes. I am not a hooker guy. I have had two experiences with prostitutes. Neither of them was fun or sexy or hot or anything but disturbing. They happened sometime in the late eighties when I was a struggling comic living in Boston.

I was staying at my girlfriend’s apartment near Symphony Hall. The neighborhood was dicey late at night, in a crackhead-and-hooker kind of way. I remember on one occasion I got up to move my car from one side of the street to the other at six-thirty in the morning and this woman walked up to me looking very drug-frazzled and soul-hungry in a very skanked-out and evil way. She grabbed my crotch and said, “Do you want a date, baby?”

It was that kind of neighborhood.

One night I had been out doing a show. Afterward I got all hopped up on blow and booze and made my way home at about three-thirty in the morning. The woman I was living with was out
of town. After I parked the car a sketchy-looking guy wearing a fedora walked up to me and said, “Coke?”

“I’m good,” I said.

There was a woman walking behind him, short, too much makeup, maybe Latino. She said, “You want a date?”

At that moment, not a rare moment, I was consumed with self-hatred and really high. That is the magical combination that brought me to “yes.”

“How much?” I asked. I had never paid for sex in my life.

“Thirty,” she said.

So this was not a high-end escort situation. This was a dirty street hooker situation.

“Okay, what do we do?”

“Where’s your car?”

“I live right here,” I said.

Bringing her into the house that I shared with my girlfriend was like polluting our home with the evil essence of street.

We walked up four flights. She was wheezing after one. “How many more flights?”

“A few more,” I said in the middle of my own steep shame ascension.

We got into the apartment. She was catching her breath.

“What do we do?” I asked like a moron.

“You have the money?”

I handed her thirty dollars. She put it in her purse and started to breathe normally.

“Is this your first time?”

“Paying for it? Yes.”

“Well, don’t worry, baby. Lie down and take your pants off.”

I lay down on the bed. She kneeled between my legs and hunched over me and started giving me head. It was just ugly. It wasn’t working for me. There was too much shame, weirdness,
and coke so I asked, “Can you take your shirt off or something?”

“It’s ten more bucks.”

I pulled a ten-spot out of my wallet and handed it her.

“Okay, here’s ten dollars.”

She took her shirt off and put my hand on her breast and said, “Do you feel a lump in there?”

“Really?”

She continues to go down on me and I’m feeling her breast for lumps. I guess you get what you pay for because it was definitely not sexy and I did feel a lump. It was horrifying. I had a moment where I thought maybe she should be paying me for the examination.

“Uh, yeah, there’s something there.”

“I know, right? I have to get that checked out.”

“Yeah, you should definitely get a second opinion.”

She’s sucking my cock on and off throughout this exchange. Then the phone rings and it’s my girlfriend leaving a message. We hear it in the room. I’m lying there with my cock in the mouth of a woman whose possibly cancerous breast is in my hand, a woman I’m paying to have sex with on our bed, and I hear, “Hi, honey! I guess you’re sleeping. Just calling to say I love you and I miss you.”

“Is that your girlfriend?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That’s nice.”

I couldn’t have imagined that such a perfect storm of shame and self-hate was possible in one scenario. Somehow I was able to finish because once I set my mind to something I can usually follow through. It was a very sad orgasm. My dick was crying.

When I’m done she of course tells me she doesn’t usually do this, that she works with computers. Then she asks if she can take
my cigarettes and condoms from my dresser and all the loose change. I say sure. I thank her, let her out, and I immediately go into the bathroom and I scrub myself like I am dirty under my skin.

I really tried to believe that she worked with computers.

My second hooker story was a similar situation. This one is a little more poetic. I had moved to Somerville, which was, at the time, a malignant suburb next to Cambridge, but once again found myself in downtown Boston. I had just finished a set at Nick’s Comedy Stop. It was two-thirty or three in the morning, the magic hour, apparently. I was partying with some comics at a bar that let us stay after closing, just a block from the infamous Combat Zone in Boston, a nasty few blocks of depravity and dirty fun. I’m in my car, in the Zone, driving home, festering, high, and hating being me. I see this hooker walking that walk down the street and I think, “Ugh. All right, I’m going to try again.”

I pull up and she gets in the car. I’m coked out of my mind. I ask her how much and she says thirty dollars. So, again, I’m dealing with a very high level of escort here.

“Thirty bucks for a blowjob?”

“Yeah.” She has a bit of grit and gravel in her voice. It is the far end of the night. Who knows what she has been through already. How many cars? Cocks? I give her the money.

“Okay, where do we go?” I say nervously, coked.

“Just pull around the corner up ahead.” Layered beneath the rasp in her throat is that undeniable and annoying New England accent.

So I pull around the corner, park, and ask, “What now?” I am still not experienced with street hooker etiquette or process.

“Pull down your pants.”

I do. She places a condom over my coked, frightened cock,
which, at that moment, is frantically trying to retreat into my body. Rightly so.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Then she looks at me and says through her phlegm, “I don’t usually do this. I’m just in town for my father’s funeral.”

I think, “Huh?” That is just too deep to take in. Maybe this is her way of grieving. It ripples my mind with sadness.

Just as she is about to start working on me, two squad cars come out of nowhere and surround my car. Their headlights blind me. I panic and say, “What do I do?”

“Well, I think you should pull up your pants. I’ll deal with this.”

I do what I can in the moment.

She gets out of the car and goes into some shtick with the cops. Talking about how I saved her from her boyfriend who was beating her up. I can’t immediately tell if they are buying it.

A cop comes around to my window. I open the window. He shines a light in my face. This is a time in Boston when they list busted johns in the paper. It is not the kind of press I am looking for.

“Where do you live?” the cop asks.

“Somerville.”

“Why don’t you go there.”

“I will. Thanks, officer.”

My heart was pounding with cocaine and fear as I drove down the expressway. I was relieved. I couldn’t believe he let me off. There was enough coke and alcohol in my system to bust me for DWI, never mind the two lines of blow I usually saved for breakfast in a bindle in my pocket. Once I got out of the Zone and down the road a bit I looked down and saw that I had not really pulled my pants up properly. They were halfway up and my underwear was still down. The head of my dick was sticking out of the top of my pants, with a half-unrolled condom hanging off it.
It was mocking me, reprimanding me. It was angry and disappointed with what I almost put it through, not to mention ashamed.

That was the last time I ever paid for a prostitute. It only cost me seventy bucks to discover that I am not a prostitute guy. And my consolation is that I helped two women: one to confirm her fears and hopefully get to a doctor; the other, apparently, to process the death of her father.

We do what we can.

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My dad sent out this Mother’s Day card to my brother’s wife. My brother forwarded it to me because we tend to forward each other our dad’s brainskids of weirdness in the rare moments when they are documented.

Let me set the scene: It’s one of those formatted “fun” emails. It’s laid out like a greeting card. It has an owl in the upper left-hand side, sitting on a branch, against a wood-grain backdrop, and it says:

My dad is a doctor. I don’t even know what
bawalah
means. If you have forgotten, this is a Mother’s Day card.

Again, this is a Mother’s Day card.

In case you aren’t reading carefully, he just quoted himself in this card. For Mother’s Day, of course.

Happy Mother’s Day!

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