Best Sex Writing 2010 (7 page)

There was a time when maybe I cared too much what the studio audience thought, pursued and dated women as if I was packing someone else’s penis. Those women deserved a man who was more secure and didn’t need to advertise to the world, “Look Who I Can Bang!” Totally lame. I remember going out with a knockout, so smoking my friends would high-five me whenever her back was turned. She was, and remains, a remarkable woman of depth and awesomeness. And for some reason, she was really attracted to me. Anyway, we were making out, and there just wasn’t that desire on my part. But she was into it, and her abandon surprised her. It turns out she normally went for the athletic type, with gelled hair, abs, and a superhero jaw. Basically, the anti-
moi.
But recently, she was really into my type. Which I found out was, more or less, dumpy, plump, sarcastic dork. No wonder I hadn’t been paraded around to her more shallow friends for approval—I was of no value to them. But I was to her, and clearly she was arriving at conclusions I would shortly thereafter share.

It took a woman who loved bravely to teach me a liberating lesson. Life is too few breaths, and it’s wise not to waste them on romantic fool’s errands. Love the curves, love the legs, own your want. This is what real men do. Not that I wouldn’t return Megan Fox’s phone calls. I’m a nice guy like that.

 

 

I was looking for size 12 heels, which are not easy things to find, even in San Francisco. There is the drag queen store, the Foxy Lady, but I was committed to finding the shoes at a discount store like Ross. All the queens call that place Cross Dress for Less. It’s my favorite store. All my kitchen stuff is from there. And they have that section over by the underwear with miscellaneous items like yoga mats and headphones. My mother goes to the East Coast version of Ross, which is called T.J. Maxx. Our shared retail addiction is one way that we kindle our relationship.

Because of work, I go shopping at Ross about once a month. My clients have an appetite for new ideas. I love the guys who are exploring. About a year ago, I rewrote my Internet ad so that it specifically appealed to these kinds of guys. I thought of it as outreach. I used phrases like “nonjudgmental” and “open to the fantasies that grip you.” Remember that Burger King commercial?
The one with the jingle “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce; special orders don’t upset us…” It was kind of like that. As a guy in this business, you’re surrounded by thousands of ads in which the escorts reduce themselves to a handful of stock ad copy, passing their bodies off as fast cars worthy of worship and frequent waxing. I was never interested in being that kind of car. I always saw myself as a Toyota Camry: attractive but not showy; reliable and practical. This is an indication of how deeply entrenched I am in the capitalist machinery. I’m a Camry. I say this voluntarily, I am a Camry.

It’s certainly better in the age of Internet advertising. In the old days, when guys ran print ads, each word was extra money. Those print ads were haiku. Three lines of text. Something along the lines of:

In any given ad, a potential client could be triggered by a single word: “athletic” might mean that the escort would be willing to reenact a client’s childhood trauma of nearly drowning and being resuscitated by a lifeguard’s hour-long certification training in CPR. The word “service” might mean that the escort was straight and possibly married at some point, with small children in some other state. A man’s children are sexy only when they reside elsewhere. The print ad format created a social dynamic wherein the escort became a projection screen for every fear and fantasy the client could possibly have. It was all so open-ended, the way someone’s identity was compressed into fifteen words.
He sounds like an ex-con. Maybe he’s a nice kid putting himself through
college.
The whole enterprise was a giant guessing game.

The Internet has mitigated this situation somewhat. On the Web, escorts have more room to spread out. Surprisingly few take advantage of this liberty. It’s the sad dilemma of democracy: we as a people have all this leeway and we do nothing with it. Even on a website where one is afforded five hundred words of text, you see the same clipped language, the same numbers and stats and meaningless phrases like “no attitude.” Why would someone say they had no attitude? It’s like saying you don’t have an ego. You do. The question is not whether you have an attitude or an ego. The question is whether you’re a conceited prick. Attitude and ego are conditions, not unlike the weather. Can you imagine the tourist bureau of a vacation spot bragging that the island has “no weather?”

I never had one of those ads, which seem to be written by people with no sentences at their disposal whatsoever. English as a third or fourth language. All of that said, I am reluctant to set down the exact text of my ad because I’ve built it up into this mythic, messianic sacred text. Like it’s not on the goddamn Internet at all; rather it’s on a scroll that you unroll with the help of two clerics. At the risk of being overly simplistic, I’ll say that all I did was use complete sentences. We live in an age of fission. All around us, the language is being split into tiny, marketable pieces. Three-second chunks of information—visual media is edited in such a way that we’re all careening toward epilepsy. Meanwhile, the sentence is an old friend. The sentence is a familiar revolution. I trust the sentence.

Okay, I’ll give you a few of the sentences, but I’m changing the text, because I’m still out there working. I am not writing about some quaint indiscretion of youth. This is how I make my living. Here’s a short piece of my ad:

The new clients who came to me after I ran that ad were hungry men. They were a varied lot, but they had a few things in common. Many had been through unsatisfying experiences with other escorts who didn’t accommodate their peculiar fantasies and in some cases shamed them for asking in the first place. Another thing these clients had in common was a sense of devotion. They’d carried these secrets for many years, enacting their fetish lives in private. They’d kept bags of lingerie hidden in a shoebox in the basement. They’d hidden porn videos under floorboards. They’d gotten ashamed and thrown everything away, only to regather a new set of taboo items. To me, they were heroic, like the people in
Fahrenheit 451
who memorize books to preserve literature. Erotic freedom by any means necessary.

I’m thinking of one client in particular—Ray. Most clients use their real names, I’ve found. You can tell when a client is using a made-up name because it’s more generic than their actual name. For instance, when a client named Ethan picks a fake name, he picks Joe. When an escort named Joe picks a hooker name, he selects Ethan. That says it all.

Ray was staying at the St. Francis in this really big suite. Visiting from Texas, although I wouldn’t find that out until several sessions later. You know that stereotype about how clients want to tell you all their problems, so much so that you don’t spend
very much time having sex? The sex worker as talk therapist? It’s complete bullshit. It makes non–sex workers feel less threatened by the concept of sex for pay. Like when the government invades a country and launches a media disinformation campaign so people think the troops are just there keeping the peace, when really they’re carrying out midnight raids and razing apartment buildings and shooting civilians point-blank. I grew up in a military family. I know that’s what really happens because the men in my family are all emotionally unavailable. That’s what happens when you murder small children in the name of God and country. Veterans are a trip as clients. I don’t even want to go into that right now. I want to stay with Ray.

Ray and I communicated solely by email before meeting. He hired me for an overnight and often I like to confirm those sorts of appointments by phone, just to make sure the guy’s for real. However, I got such an honest, gentle vibe from Ray’s email that a phone call wasn’t necessary. In addition, I really love the surprise of seeing who’s behind the hotel room door. I know sex workers who require the clients to send them pictures and ask for stats and all of that. They don’t like suspense. They want to know what they’re getting into. For me it’s a deeper practice to arrive with very little to go on. The clients who don’t give you any hints at all—no phone voice, no age, nothing. Those are the guys I end up learning the most from. Especially if they’re not traditionally handsome. Maybe they’ve got some extra weight, maybe their skin has red patches, maybe they have a micropenis. If there’s some characteristic that renders them defective in the eyes of the culture, it makes me more excited to play with them. Like when a firefighter gets a call for a five-alarm blaze. It’s exciting. It’s a challenge. I feel like I’m being of service in a larger context, that I’m transmitting ancient sex wisdom to people who need it badly
and are cut off from it. That’s a grand assessment, certainly. No grander, I would argue, than saying you’re a man of God. No grander than stepping forward to teach our nation’s children. No grander than signing up to bear arms so that you can preserve civility itself. I take my job seriously.

When I arrived, Ray greeted me warmly, extending his hand to shake. Very few clients shake your hand. Some grab you and kiss you right away, but nobody shakes your hand. Every now and then a client will want to meet you in the lobby. Usually they want to make sure it’s a match, or they feel safer meeting you in a public place. It makes it easier for them to back out at the last minute. Ray had none of these hang-ups. I’m just giving you a frame of reference. Ray was a hand shaker in world full of quick-to-kiss men.

I sat down on a loveseat in the living room area of his suite. He appeared to be around fifty years old, just a few years shy of the client median age.

“Can I offer you anything?” he asked.

“No, I’m fine,” I said. This is my automatic Southern response. Then he’s supposed to tell me what he actually has to offer. Then I refuse again. Then he tells me what he’s having and would I care to join him. As a Southerner, that’s when it’s okay to accept a drink from a stranger.

“I’ve got wine and beer, soda and bottled water.”

“I think I’m okay.”

“I’ve got a bottle of white wine already open.”

“That sounds lovely.”

He poured me a glass of chardonnay. I’m sure it was expensive. The nuance of fine spirits is entirely lost on me. As an alcohol drinker, I cut my teeth on Sun Country wine cooler from two-liter bottles. We’d be lying on hillsides overlooking dirt roads out
in the county, passing the bottle around. Just about everything tastes expensive to me.

Ray had these massive blue irises that were too big for his body. Babies have those sorts of eyes and then their faces catch up. He had a sweet Texas lilt—in the South, many men and women have the same gentle vocal mannerisms. The desire to please crosses gender lines. Ray was no exception. As we talked during that first visit, whenever I said something remotely agreeable, he’d say “Aren’t you kind to say that” or “Bless your heart.” I felt like I was ten years old, serving triangular finger sandwiches at my mother’s luncheon. It’s delicate when you first meet someone for sex. You want to ease into familiarity with them, but you don’t want to be so chatty that you kill the mysterious sexual energy that exists between you.

After about half an hour of conversation, Ray abruptly pulled out a bag of nylon hose and Lycra shorts and dress socks. Via email, he’d said he wanted a witness, that he wanted to show me what he’d been doing over the years. It’s tricky, when someone offers you the raw components of their desire. You ought to be supportive, but you don’t want to be a cheerleading mom about it either. They’re going to the underworld, for Christ’s sake. Your job is not to gush over their watercolor and tape it to the refrigerator door. Your job is to go to the underworld with them.

Ray showed me the bag. “This is my passion, right here.”

I could see both men’s and women’s stockings, tight athletic clothing and the like. He had a penchant for the enclosure offered by elastic fabric. It didn’t seem like he wanted to kiss yet or interact physically, so I asked him to do a fashion show for me. I put it in more masculine terms. I asked him to show off for me. I told him I wanted to see him slowly take every single piece of clothing off, fold them neatly on a chair, then put on every single
piece of clothing in that bag. I was just hazarding a guess, but as it turns out, this was precisely his fetish—the pileup of stretchable layers, one upon another. As he stripped down, I could see his hairy back and his short stocky legs. He had an enormous cock, the kind that doesn’t grow too much in an erect state. I had a boyfriend with a cock like that once and he ruined me for getting fucked by anyone else for several years. It took willpower for me not to jump Ray right then, grease him up and slide his cock into my ass. Ray needed me to suspend my interest in his penis and bring all my focus to his wardrobe. A cardinal rule of gay male escorting is Don’t Give Them Bottom Energy Unless They Specifically Ask For It. So I sat back and admired him in all his overgrown splendor.

He narrated his assemblage of clothing, which amused me and turned me on. I love a dirty talker more than anything. It’s a skill I’ve never really developed. I’ve tried and I just feel silly. So when someone goes for it, assigning in-the-moment language to their behavior, I’m all for it. It seems like a huge blind spot in a sex healer’s skill set, the gift of dirty gab, but I make up for it with other forms of fearlessness.