Working Sex (2 page)

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.

 

t
he 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.

Aware that the condom’s lubricant has been completely sucked off, and equally aware that she is so repulsed by this bloated man, perspiring brine and beached upon the bed, that her vagina has sealed itself shut, Sharon searches the
room once more, then gives in to his urgency. She lies down and spreads her legs.

“Pussy,” says the Fisherman as he rolls on top of her. Then, as Tia Lee forewarned, the pussy mantra begins: He describes different colors and shades, states of pussy being, pussy synonyms, and three word subject-verb-object sentences, the subject always being pussy, such as pussy squirting juice, pussy eating cock. Except that Sharon’s pussy wasn’t eating anything. Sharon’s pussy spat out the Fisherman’s waning erection minutes ago. She reaches down and tries, unsuccessfully, to redirect him. Holding it in her hand she waits for it to come to life once more. It doesn’t. Still, the Fisherman marches on to the beat of the pussy. Sharon does not ponder the strength of imagination that allows the Fisherman to feel that he is giving it to her hard and nasty. She does not decide that he is a liar, or a fool, or practicing some sort of bastardized tantric meditation. Instead she opts to join him. To abandon this ship of failed erections and half-hour time slots and dive into the deep blue of her mind.

It is an uneasy transition from reality to fiction. Although Sharon finds herself briefly in daisy fields and flying through space, she keeps returning to her soggy and dismal position beneath the Fisherman. She looks up at his face, sees a ring of dried blood around his left nostril, and shivers. She closes her eyes and tries to sing to herself. Sadly, the theme song
from Flipper gets stuck in her head. Then, from somewhere, a slow and heavy tempo descends upon her. A rock anthem from the not-too-distant past beckons her like a pied piper of disassociation. There is no resistance, she gives herself to the dark rhythmic guitar and precision drumming . . .

Everything seems different. Now the shadow of him moving repetitiously on top of her is a dance of dark and light, of purples and greens upon the ceiling. Her legs, spread so wide, now span the entire room, knocking down walls, kicking holes in the roof, letting the stars fall in to the room. And there is Chloe, flashing beautifully behind Sharon’s eyes. And when there is Chloe, Sharon feels her pelvic muscles tighten and her back arch. The Fisherman, still held in her left hand, has managed to flop his way inside her inner lips. Her clit aches from the friction. Sharon wonders,
Maybe this is what it’s like to fuck another woman.
The sweet and painful wanting between her legs. The weight pressed against her body. Images of Chloe come faster than Sharon can manage. She touches the Fisherman’s skin, and it is soft, and it is hers. A mix between a moan and a gasp of shock leaves Sharon’s lips. She tries to recover, desperately inserting images of Jon Bon Jovi and Rambo’s glistening brow. But Chloe is unmoving. Chloe with the tiny baby hands and squeak-toy laugh. Chloe whose lips move as she reads her books of poetry in the staff room. Chloe who squeezes Sharon’s arm when she
is excited. Chloe going round in her head like a chant. Like the Fisherman’s pussy mantra.
Pussy
. . .
Chloe
. . .
pussy
. . .
Chloe
. . .
pussy
. . . Without the money and the clock ticking and words like whore and trick, they are just two people held captive by unrealized desire, doing whatever they can to break free.
Pussy
. . .
Chloe
. . .
pussy
. . .

S
auntering into an international magazine store recently, I caught a glimpse of a row of a dozen magazines with covers graced by scantily clad females posing in provocative positions which would tend to signify, by the conventions of almost any civilization on earth, pornography. I took a few steps back and looked up at the store’s sign to check that I hadn’t wandered into a dirty bookstore by mistake. But no, it was indeed a regular retail outlet selling mainstream periodicals. When exactly, I though to myself luridly, did the world become so smutty? I felt my cheeks flush. Could I, Bruce LaBruce, international pornographer, be blushing?

Well, actually, let’s not forget that I am, according to the title of my premature memoirs published a few years back, The Reluctant Pornographer, which may explain my ambivalence toward the notion of pornography taking over the free world.

Let’s get one thing straight, or at least as straight as an intercontinental homosexual icon can manage: I don’t watch porn. I don’t collect it, I don’t keep tabs on the latest porn stars and their exploits, I don’t even incorporate it into my sex life. One reason for this may be that like many gay men I tend to live my life as if I were a porn star anyway, so passively watching it becomes almost redundant. Another reason may be that I encounter enough “found pornography” in the regular world, those quotidian ad hoc images which can be utilized as jack-off material: black gangbangers, clothes scissored off, operations in the emergency room of Trauma: Life in the ER, for example, or Eddie, the hot, one-legged house member of Big Brother lying shirtless in bed, or, in a pinch, even good old-fashioned men’s gymnastics. I find these images, or the amateur pornographic self-portraits that everyday people send me over the Internet, much more sexually stimulating than your average adult entertainment video.

But wait a minute—I’m a porn star. Or at least, as someone who has made a number of sexually explicit avant-garde films in which he has performed oral sex and sodomy, I’ve
been stuck with the epithets “porn star” and “pornographer.” Shouldn’t I be steeped in a world of split beaver, gang bangs, and leather slings? And shouldn’t I be immune to the moral ambiguities engendered by such staples as bestiality, rape fantasies, and snuff?

It’s a strange phenomenon that since I crossed that dark threshold into the adult netherworld, that ethereal region inhabited only by those who have dared to commit their sexual practices to celluloid or videotape for public consumption, I’m not supposed to blush or get embarrassed or presumably feel any other normal human emotions, especially visà-vis sex. For me, nothing could be further from the truth. Although I consider myself merely an artist who works in pornography, it’s still a world that I’ve had to negotiate through, and I’ve discovered it’s not one in which you can survive for long without a normal set of human responses, and yes, a strong moral compass. With so much emphasis lately on the mainstreaming of pornography and on the blurring of the line between art and porn, very little attention is being paid, particularly by those who are indulging in it, to the depth and darkness of the sexual imagination and the implications of toying with the dark side. The multibillion -dollar porn industry, which nonetheless still operates as a kind of dirty little secret, is nothing less than an adjunct of the collective unconscious, and to bring it to the surface, to
mainstream it, may be unleashing something we’re not prepared to handle. Think Pandora’s box.

Back in the last decade, when gender studies and postmodern courses on desire introduced academics to the milieux of sex trade workers and pornographers, there was a tendency to overvalue these phenomena and to confer iconic status on their denizens. Some academics I knew in fact literally segued into various sex trades as part of their research, often with disastrous results. The making of pornography or the practice of prostitution unavoidably becomes a demystifying experience whereby one learns quickly that there is nothing particularly noble or glamorous about getting fucked for money. As I stood on the set of my first “legitimate” porn movie and found myself obliged to walk over and wipe the ass of one of the performers who was experiencing a little anal leakage, I didn’t feel particularly glamorous. Once a participant in the sex trade, you must also be prepared for the inevitable wall of moral disapprobation that you will at some point run up against, a cold disapproval that may come from the most surprisingly liberal sources. Factor in all the other annoying occupational hazards—STDs, emotional instability, the ubiquity of drugs in the industry—and you may find yourself longing, like Kim Novak in
Bell, Book and Candle,
for a life a little more humdrum.