Working Sex (21 page)

I had a college degree.

This is all true.

It was 1995, the hottest summer on record, or so somebody told me at the time. It’s a fact I’ve never bothered to check. They were carrying dead seniors by the dozen in a phalanx of stretchers from the nursing homes on Touhy Avenue. I lived in a squat above a garage a bullet away from the project buildings. I could make out the top of the Sears Tower from my porch. I had a roommate and during the day we would go to the slab along North Avenue Beach and lie there like seals, diving into the water every twenty minutes or so until the sun went down. We lay on the warm concrete watching the sunset and then the stars. “Life is good,” he said.

Sunday afternoons I danced between films at the Bijou. Twenty minutes of porn then one boy on the stage, one boy in the audience. The men pulled their penises out, stroking themselves, sliding a dollar in my pants with their free hand. The Bijou smelled of bleach. I climbed over the seats barefoot.
I was like a spider, crawling along armrests and chair backs, never touching the ground. I stayed away from the older men. They had been around too long. They were looking for a good deal. I paid special attention to a fat boy who sat in the second row. He was probably my age. His hair was flaxen and I worried that nobody loved him the most. I was projecting my own feelings. I sat on his lap, squeezed his shoulder, kissed his neck. I wanted to be capable of loving him for more than a few minutes but I wasn’t. He gave me a dollar and I hugged him, pulling his nose against my naked chest. “It’s okay,” I said.

There were rooms above the Bijou. Offices, a movie studio. The manager kept a picture of me in his desk drawer. He asked me to act in a bisexual porn movie. I said I didn’t mind. I was put in a room and given five minutes to get a hard on. This was my audition. The room was giant and empty with slanted beams holding up the roof and great windows looking across Old Town. I jerked off, paging casually through the porn next to the bed. The director burst in with a Polaroid camera. “Yes,” he exclaimed when he saw my hard-on.

The pay was $300. I was told it was very important to be nice to the woman. She was a queen. I wanted the money but I was ambivalent about the film. What I really wanted was to be tied up. I wanted to be humiliated on tape. I wanted women with strap-ons to grip me by the throat and slide inside of me.
I wanted to be wrapped in cellophane, like a present, unable to move. That was the kind of film I wanted to be in. But I didn’t know how to say that at the time and people who don’t know how to ask rarely get what they want.

I danced at the Manhole on lights-out night. I was four feet above the floor on a square pedestal. I had to be careful not to step over the edge. Hands came from everywhere, palms stretching below my balls, fingers trying to find my asshole. I couldn’t see past the elbows.

“Stop it,” I said softly. The music was so loud, nobody heard me.

It was my heroin year. I shot bags next to the couch and slept on the living room floor. I missed a night at Berlin. Then I missed another one. Summer was over. We stopped going to the beach. It got darker earlier. It was almost Thanksgiving. I dated Stacey, a Barbie-doll stripper with a bad coke habit and implants that didn’t take, they felt like twelve inch softballs inside her breasts. She made $400 a shift. She knew about bars in Cicero that never closed. She crashed her car and the barmaid asked if she spilled her drink. Her other boyfriend was a police officer. “He’s very violent,” she told me. “He wants to put his gun in your mouth and ask you some questions. He broke the lock on my door. Do you want to come over?”

After Stacey I dated Zahava. Zahava came from a good Southern family. She had been a pom-pom girl. She had been
to finishing school. It seemed like she was always happy. She was the only person I knew with good posture. She wanted me to go to law school. I turned her on to heroin. Years later she would tell me I was the first bad thing that ever happened to her. Zahava said I was handsome. I told her when you’re a stripper you don’t worry about your appearance. You always feel attractive when people are willing to pay to see you naked. It was the biggest lie I ever told. I stared at the other strippers, the bricks in their stomachs, trapezoids like baby mountains. It made me nauseous to think about. I wasn’t good enough looking to dance at the Vortex but they let me in for free. I was low-rent and I knew it. I had an eating disorder and long hair. The only advantage I had over anybody was that I knew how to dance.

I never made the movie. I was in a small room with dark wood floors on top of a big house in Evanston near the lake. I took a hotshot and passed out with blood streaming from my nose and foam gurgling at my mouth. Just like Toni a year earlier. My friend turned me over so I wouldn’t choke on my own vomit, then he left me to die.

But I didn’t die. Firemen came the next day. They were strong and good. They strapped me to a chair, carried me down three flights of stairs. “Where’s your family?” the owner of the house asked as they hauled me past her. “What’s your parents’ phone number?” I didn’t tell her. It was the first
good decision I made that year. I was paralyzed for eight days and the nurses let me piss all over myself. When I was discharged from the hospital I walked with a limp. I told people I fell down a flight of stairs. Eventually the limp went away but it took time. And it took time to learn how to eat. I lost thirty pounds.

I didn’t strip again. Or shoot heroin. I got a master’s degree. I moved to a ski resort and the customers would sit at the bar unbundling their scarves. I wore black pants, a white shirt, and a patterned vest like all the other employees. We looked like dancing monkeys. Every day someone would stare at the mountains while I refilled their cup. “I wish I could trade places with you,” they would say, maybe dropping a dollar into the plastic pitcher sitting empty on the counter’s edge.

E
veryone wants to be able to sing along to the new songs I’ve written with my Berlin-based, proto-Marxist, postpolitikal art rock band Ruth Fischer. Ruth Fischer was the famed feminist forerunner, and head of the German Communist Party of the 1920s. This new project began late 2005, and is a supergroup collaboration between me and the members of the German art kollective Cheap, and the Albanian folk group The Super 700s.

T
he john invited me in. He fell back against the wall, then collecting himself said, “Follow me.” The stairway led to a living room with red carpet. This room was well lit and made the carpet look very bright, almost throbbing. It seemed to pour over the top step on its way downstairs. I glanced around the room, checking out the place. When entering this kind of situation, I become very wary. Everything becomes a clue as to who it is I’m dealing with. Clear plastic podiums sat spaced at intervals around the edge of the room. On them were gold, black, and white ceramic figures: the front view of a
muscular torso, the back view including buttocks, and a pair of women’s hands. There was a single print on each wall, behind glass and framed in bright red plastic. I hadn’t seen prints like these since the early ‘80s. They were all of women, wearing wide-brimmed hats and red lipstick. The first was smoking a cigarette from a long holder; the second was wearing long black gloves and appeared to be straightening her hat; the third was blowing a kiss; and the fourth had long red nails which were laced together, supporting her chin. I was surrounded.

Proudly, he took me on a tour, tripping, stumbling, and holding himself against walls for support. I was shown his bedroom. The walls and ceiling, although covered with textured wallpaper, were both painted with black gloss. The cupboard doors entirely covering one wall and a shelf running the length of another all got the same treatment. On the shelf I could make out a plastic figure of Jesus beside what looked like a bible. Black carpet started at the doorway and had a chrome strip to cover the join. Several screws were missing and it bulged in the middle. The door was stopped open by a brick. I presumed the whole floor was covered with this black carpet but I could only see it in patches, through the bunches of unwashed smelling clothes.

The bed sheets had probably once been black, but over time had faded to gray. From the ceiling hung the wire frame
of a lampshade with a dusty red scarf draped over it. Beside this, directly over the bed, was a sling with chains too thin to really support anybody. From the doorway I could just see under the edge of the bed. There were several pillowcases, the same color as the ones on the bed, apparently stuffed with more clothes. Maybe these were the smelly ones and the scattered ones were clean. I could also see, spilling out from the other end of the bed a few superhero comics, a porn magazine, and a stray cock ring.

We moved on, back through the living room and into the kitchen. Where the red carpet stopped, cream patterned linoleum took over. This room clearly didn’t have the same aesthetic as the other rooms, and I guessed it hadn’t been decorated since he’d moved in. Maybe he thought it didn’t count. It was like a million kitchens I’d seen worldwide, with the obligatory gray/cream color scheme. I think it wasn’t actually meant to be part of the tour, but was included so he could top up his drink. He got this from a selection of bottles beside a microwave. The fridge had three magnets on it: a Dalmatian, a glitter-covered pair of ruby slippers, and what looked like pink neon swirling handwriting. I think it was the word Fabulous. Tucked under this was a note that read “call mum.”

There were cupboards but they barely registered as distinct from the wall behind them or anything else in the room. The handles were brass-looking disks, like miniature
versions of a door handle you might find in a castle. The nerve center of this room appeared to be a glass fruit bowl area. In it were four brown bananas, small change, a comb, a stick of chewing gum, and a notebook. Behind this, propped on the marbled Formica counter, was a bulletin board covered in pictures of glamorous women, porn stars, and polaroids of men (whom I guessed were previous prostitutes he’d hired), mounted like animal head trophies. The john took my arm and led me back through the living room again and into an adjoining bathroom.