Spent (19 page)

45

“L
enny Bruce married a
stripper,” Adam said as we walked down Hillhurst in Los Angeles in the pouring rain. I'd never dated anyone who wore elbow patches before Adam.

“Lenny Bruce died of an overdose in his hallway,” I said.

“That's not the stripper's fault.”

I'd met Adam at an AA meeting. He asked if he could interview me about sex work for his podcast. “You're an interesting person,” he said. He was an intellectual show-off who tried out his jokes in the meetings whenever he talked. Struggling alcoholics complained about being jobless and suicidal, on the brink of relapsing, while Adam tinkered on his Blackberry.

His gold-flecked green eyes darted around the packed French restaurant. He checked his watch. A frazzled blonde led us to the one available two-top near the window.

Hours earlier, I'd seen my regular client, Blake, who had Parkinson's. I told Adam about him and how he used to be a competitive swimmer but the progression of Parkinson's made him shake and whisper. I told Adam all about my client Dennis who brought me lots of pink, squiggly rubber bands to wrap around his cock. I offered him cock rings, but he liked his grubby rubber bands.
During the last ten minutes of our session, Dennis would vibrate if I so much as touched the hairs on his thighs
. He'd beg me to stop if my hands touched his legs. I wanted to be completely honest with Adam about what I did with clients, and what I didn't do.

“Do you think you're helping people?” Adam asked.

“I hope so. People are terminally lonely,” I said.

His knee jerked and bounced.

I took small bites of warm breadstick dipped in thick, soft butter.

“No show tonight?” I asked.

“I'm as available as you are,” he said. He tore a piece of soft bun and dipped it in the butter.

“Most days after about four?”

“My life just got really complicated.”

“It's not complicated at all. I'm throwing you the rope of love. All you have to do is grab on,” I said. My hand drifted under the table to his thigh. The noise in the room got louder.

“I'm allergic to ropes,” he said with his mouth full. The rain fell softly outside. The windows steamed up.

Our steaks arrived. I wanted to tell Adam that although plenty of men paid me to touch them and go away, I still wanted intimacy and passion. I wanted to tell him that sex work was my secret place to be. It was my
fuck you
. It was my reckless act of despair. It was my,
I don't need you. Never did
. I could feel wanted and get paid, yet still walk away unscathed. It helped me pay my bills, be defiantly self-sustaining, and stay absolutely alone. I found refuge in clubs where I could hide in the dark, weigh my options, sit on my hands, and not get high. I could pull the cash and expose the most hidden parts of myself without risk. This made me desirable. This made me powerful. I built a seasoned hustler persona and body to match. I learned to make easy conversation about a variety of subjects: football, books, politics, art, music, and movies. I practiced acting sweet and palatable even when fear and rage surged through me. I learned to be strong and unyielding while I spun upside down and landed in the splits. I exercised the “no” muscle.
No, I won't meet you later. No, I won't fuck you. No, we're not dating
. I never, ever dated a client. I wasn't giving blowjobs, but Adam always asked me anyways.

But the more I told him, the faster he fled. “Your honesty is suspect,” he had said. Adam peeled my skin back and stripped me in a way the clubs hadn't. I choked on my vulnerability. I loved him fiercely and courageously and stupidly. I embarrassed myself. Onstage, he drowned in his own echoes. He tried out his material on me and he became the hostile, bitter man his audience expected him to become while I became a trembling, jealous bully that surprised us both.

“Look,” I said. “I want to be considerate of your feelings, but I don't know what they are.” I bit into my salty steak. I had always lied about my job, for fear of being left—for fear of compromising. I wanted to be honest. I wanted to be closer to him.

“What?” He motioned to our waitress. Honesty felt like the knife in my hand, cutting through my defenses.

“What are they? Your feelings. What are they?” I squeezed my knife tight. My heart stuck in my throat like a hot stone.

“Can I get some sparkling water please?” he said. The waitress brought Pellegrino and two ice-filled wine glasses.

“You scare me,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

The only thing I thought was
fuck
. I watched his rough lips, his chubby hands, his goddamn greedy nipples—the gateway to his hard cock.
So many afternoons we spent watching the sun burn after four as the sky turned orange-pink. We fucked. We fucked. We fucked.

The rain stopped.

Fuck
. I wanted to shield him from the scary bits, from the hideous parts of myself that no one could ever love. But I didn't want to live in my secrets either. I shoved the sweaty money in my pockets. I came and went. I put gas in my car and paid my rent.

“You're going to have to give me some time,” he said. I put down my knife and fork, propped my face onto my right palm and stared out the steamy window, beyond naked.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. He gestured to our pretty, thin-boned blonde waitress for the check. I turned red, embarrassed. He checked his phone a few times. He paid, stood, and we left.

As he walked towards his car, I realized there were things I didn't tell him in my quest to be totally honest; like the time he called me from Montreal while I had a client handcuffed to a bed, his ankles tied together with scratchy twine and a dildo in his mouth. I told my client, “I have to get this,” and left him tied up to take the call out on the balcony. There was a slight breeze and a full, orange moon, sinking, like a pumpkin just out of reach. His voice made me so happy I could cry. “You sound so far away,” I said.

“I'm not that far away.” I floated away on his words, breathed in the strong jasmine, and finished my session, feeling something again.

Then, he started calling to disinvite me to his shows. Pulled out of plans last minute. He wouldn't call for days; his texts—when he bothered—looked like Facebook updates for his fans.

I, of all people, should have known that happy endings don't last.

46

I
climb the fifty-five steps
to the front door of the tantric temple wearing a soft jersey tube dress, leopard-print leggings, and flip-flops. My uniform suggests comfort and allure. It carries the cotton promise of bare shoulders, kundalini poses, and sun-kissed highlights. One shoulder bag is stuffed with freshly folded towels, sheets, pillowcases, and running shoes still moist from the five miles I jogged around the reservoir; the other holds a fifteen-dollar bottle of organic grape seed oil, a package of baby carrots, Trader Joe's spicy hummus, and my computer. I've eaten my egg whites. I smell like vanilla soap and fabric softener.

At step forty, the same number as my age, I pause. I consider tossing the towels in the trashcan below and sprinting away through the alley. I finished grad school, but I've got no book, no teaching job, no agent. I continue up the stairs. My rent isn't going to pay itself.

A civilian might think that the services described on the temple's website—“tantric body work,” “sacred temple body work,” “body of bliss”—sound like yoga classes, but these are euphemisms for oily massages with happy endings performed by naked chicks wearing feathered earrings.

On the last wooden step, the knot in my neck starts to throb from the climb, and I breathe in heavily. This is the fourth day in a row that I will jerk guys off from 10:00
a.m.
till 10:00
p.m.
in increments of fifty-minute hours. I drop the bags and fish for my keys to the temple, which is really a modest loft on a residential street in Silver Lake. I look up at the sky.
It's almost over
.

I unlock the front door and step inside. The woman who hired me is standing in the communal kitchen holding a large knife. She cuts a papaya into chunks and crams them into a glass blender with a brown-green paste.

“Good morning,” she says. “You have Dragonfly Jay in twenty minutes.”

All the clients are assigned nicknames so their real names aren't displayed when we check the temple iPad for our appointments.

“Dragonfly?” I ask, wondering how he earned that name, but the blender whirs and she's already on the phone.

Before the temple, in
New Orleans, I was introduced to a woman who gave hand jobs in L.A. She gave me her manager's personal email, and her manager agreed to meet me at a trendily overpriced restaurant on Sunset Boulevard for dinner.

She had short wavy hair and olive-green eyes. Her long legs were muscular, and she wore a strappy leather vest that exposed her boobs. I notice they're organically small, unlike most strippers I've worked with. I asked questions while she sipped Pellegrino out of a wine glass.

“What goes on in sessions?”

She laughed like a giddy bird.

“Every session is different.”

I wondered what that meant. I wanted to talk about money.

The temple keeper glanced at the tuna tartare as if she's never skipped a meal or fretted over the cost of dinner. When her salad arrived, she closed her eyes and held her hands in prayer. I watched her, ashamed of my need for cash, because in New Age circles that meant I wasn't abundant. In fact, I was scarcity walking, a pariah, an open mouth needing to be fed.

I snatched up the salty fish and popped it in my mouth. She opened her eyes.

“What exactly do you do in the private rooms?” I asked.

“It's a sensual, sacred bliss massage, ending in a hand release,” she said, already bored with the subject.

She had just returned from a yoga retreat in Belize and would much rather giggle about her Belizean boyfriend than talk shop, but all I could think about was making some dough. I needed her to like me. I needed her to trust me enough to grease me up and slip me into the temple so I could stop posting ads on Backpage.com and inviting strangers into my home, where they used my shower and soiled my towels. I needed it so I wouldn't have to hydroplane on bald tires while driving to Camp Pendleton with five bucks in my bank account just to jack off a couple of hostile, drunk Marines on a bed the size of a tampon; so I wouldn't find myself alone when a client pinned me down and shoved his tongue down my throat after I said, “This is going further than I want”; so I wouldn't have to yell in an apartment with claw marks on the walls when I made a client come too fast and he demanded his money back and no one knew where I was. So I wouldn't get arrested again.

At the temple, there were always girls working in other rooms and clients were screened using LinkedIn and Google.

“How much do we pay the house?” I blurted out.

“Eighty dollars for the hour session.”

The temple took forty percent of every massage. Clients paid $200 an hour or more, depending on the length and type of massage. This was one swanky jack-off joint.

The women I work
with are dancers, musicians, and transcendental meditators—yoga-sexy former strippers who choose silent retreats over Lady Gaga and Burning Man over camping trips. They tend to reject mascara and bras and don't stay any place for very long. They belly dance, fire breathe, and stilt walk. They talk about chakras and hum. They aren't worried about the LAPD snatching it away because they've never been handcuffed and shoved into the backseat of an unmarked white van in a hotel parking lot after agreeing to give some guy a handjob for $200. They actually believe they're helping men find their higher selves by smearing their balls with coconut oil and making them come.

I quickly learned the temple provides many flavors of handjob. There are handjobs that involve ringing bells, handjobs accompanied by humming, handjobs with guided meditation, and handjobs after deep breathing. Dragonfly Jay has booked a standard “body of bliss” session. For $200, it includes eye gazing, a little light hugging, and…fire breath! Fire breath is a yoga practice in which both hands shoot in the air as if to surrender and breath is held and then spat out in short, violent bursts. It's supposed to activate kundalini energy, which, in New Age yogi terms, is a powerful, dormant, libidinal force located near the tailbone that is supposed to lead to greater orgasms when awakened.

I jerk dudes off in a dark room behind a heavy, gray sliding door. I make a ritual of keeping this room sparkling clean. I sweep dried flowers and balled-up hair from dusty corners and spray the sink with Lysol, pour bleach into the shower until the fumes coat my throat.

I started fetishizing ritual in Catholic school when I would kneel on wooden pews and gaze up at stained glass windows in awe of Jesus' six pack and skinny thighs. I sang songs about blood and lambs while adults in pressed slacks accepted the hot body of Christ.

Here the altar is a shelf adorned with dozens of candles, and instead of Jesus, a statue of the elephant-headed Hindu God Ganesha glares at me from his orange perch. I lift Ganesha and wipe the scarf he sits on with a wet sponge. It leaves a dark smudge.

In the stripper world, I was the queen of Ziploc bags. I'd color-coordinate my clean costumes, then organize them in airtight sets—animal prints in one, pink and white in another, black alone, rhinestone ropes and bracelets separated from fishnet shirts to prevent snags. This compulsion was passed down to me from my mom, who used to organize every single drawer by color and held her chaos together with labels, files, highlighters—the soothing routine of order.

With my client due any minute, there were still candles to place in tiny glass holders and oils to heat in the Crock-Pot. I had to move quickly. I kicked a white tub of antibacterial wipes underneath the massage table so it was hidden from view. I thought about dirty toenails, eczema, sweaty butt cracks, and hairy balls that smell like soggy bread. I looked at my watch and removed my leggings.

My client calls as
he climbs the stairs to the front door. I turn on the shower and fold the towels into perfect, soft rows, placing them inside a basket. The familiar knot in the left side of my neck aches. On the porch, Dragonfly Jay looks like President Obama: a svelte salt-and-pepper attorney with an elegant, chiseled face and erect posture.

“Hi, I must be Athena,” I tease and wrap my arms around him, taking care not to get lipstick on his white shirt. I take his soft hand and lead him into the back room. He removes his polished black shoes outside the door.

“The shower's ready for you,” I say.

“I just took a shower, but after those stairs, I could use another,” he jokes.

His voice is smooth. When he unbuttons his starchy, long sleeve shirt, my eyes go straight to an extra set of nipples. And while I've seen many men and a lot of nipples, this is the first time I've seen one man with four. I avert my eyes. In this business, it's not a good idea to register shock when a client undresses. I over-smile instead.

I remove my dress and underwear slowly, like in the movies. Dragonfly Jay disappears into the bathroom, emerging a few minutes later. I tell him to lie face down on the massage table.

The more days I devote to the temple, the less time I spend writing and applying to teaching gigs. It's hard to write with a dick in your hand.

I stretch Dragonfly Jay's long, hairless arms between my greasy hands and rub from shoulder to palms. Tranquil drum music fills the room. I slide around the table until I am between his legs. I lie on top of him naked, my belly against his tailbone. My arms are splayed on top of his, as if we are flying. I rub his thighs, calves, feet, and back with gusto. I look at the clock. Twenty-five minutes have passed, so I reach between his legs and touch his balls, lightly—a tease. I slip off the table and whack a golden bell with a wooden stick. It sounds like a soft gong. I massage his head, and my mouth touches his earlobe.

“Ready to turn over?”

“Sure.”

“Would you like a pillow?”

“That'd be great.”

I drip golden oil onto Dragonfly Jay's thighs like warm maple syrup onto a gingerbread pancake. I stand by his head and reach over his eyes to tweak his accessory nipples. I've read about this birth defect. Usually people get just one extra nipple, but Dragonfly Jay has two. He's special.

“Do you have sensation in these?”

He opens his eyes, two dark pools. “Yes, but not as much.” His eyes meet mine. His expression is soft, like the towels folded in the corner.

“You could have a lot of fun with these,” I say. “You could pierce them.”

I circle the table again and climb on top of it, crouching between his legs, squeezing them.

“I'm not that adventurous,” he says.

I wonder if he's married, and if so, does his wife suck his extra nipples? Or does she shy away from them?

Time crawls around my throat. The gray door is locked shut and burgundy curtains shrink the room.

I trickle oil along his cock and press it between my palms, like I'm praying. It jumps. I rub his inner thighs to build up the tension, then stroke slowly. He moans. Curly black hairs fall onto gold sheets and stick to my oily hands. I sigh, knowing I will find them later on the floor and sweep and sponge, but I'll miss a strand or two that will slide into dank corners. When he comes, my legs are under his legs and my boobs are pressed against his thighs. His back is arched, his four nipples hard little cherry pits.

I slither off the table and dunk hot towels into the Crock-Pot of lavender oil. The towels signal it's over. I place them onto his belly, wipe away his come, and then hide the used towels under the table.

“I'll be right back,” I say, after placing a pillowcase over his eyes. He will doze while I shower, then it will be his turn to cleanse. Exactly fifty minutes will have passed.

Under the hot water, I scrub the oil from my ribcage with orange, liquid soap and scoot tiny stray hairs into the drain with my toes. I hear soft crying from the next room. I drop to my knees and wash and wash and wash.