Working Sex (8 page)

 

W
ith a few notable exceptions, people do not get into the sex industry for reasons that have anything to do with desire for sex, any more than a person enters janitorial work out of a love for cleaning. The exchange between worker and customer is a complicated negotiation of need, illusion, denial, boundaries, and specific neuroses; but central to the exchange is cash. By keeping the debate about sex work focused on
sex,
and not
work,
the true nature of the issue is obscured. The arguments rage around ideas of obscenity, appropriate and inappropriate sexualities, representations of femininity, notions of morality: Important issues in their own right, but in the context of the sex work debate they function more as a smoke screen that keeps us from confronting what’s really going on. In this framework women are sluts instead of workers, or victims instead of cognizant
participants in an economy. The real question here is,
why are our options so lame
? What are the economic realities that make the sex industry the most viable choice for many people?

That’s where feminism comes in. That’s where outrage becomes appropriate. The wage gap, welfare “reform,” sexist and racist hiring practices, the decline in the real value of the minimum wage, lack of universal access to healthcare or rehab services, and the widening disparity between the rich and poor: These are the things that undermine the social fabric and degrade the status of women more than me tramping around in heels could ever hope to. We have to ask ourselves, what is so compelling about blaming naked women for their own oppression? What kinds of confrontation are women avoiding by interrogating each other rather than actual power structures?

 

t
he club is filthy, I’ve said this. It is not a value, it is a fact. Factual also is the tag on my plaid schoolgirl skirt which I sweep up from the edge of the stage as the song ends. It reads Made In El Salvador. The food chain evoked by this tiny rectangular piece of information is staggering; I see the diagram of it laid out before me like a View-Master slide, bright and three-dimensional, obscuring all vision for a second and then clicking away. Factual is the beige-walled dressing room, Formica countertop and lack of privacy. I am
at home here. Peacefully the linoleum peels up around the seams, fades entirely near the toilet. I pack up my makeup, waxy-smelling lipsticks. The fluorescent light hums and it is a cellular occurrence. It sings: $523, $523, $523. The club is factually filthy, but the filth is also a benevolent prop, which has been arranged by mothering hands for the purpose of me arriving there and finding: $523.

G
irls don’t turn me on! And I am especially not attracted to the femme types who want to swish-swish around my dick. No thank you! I don’t want a pair of soft lips smearing cherry red lipstick all over my balls and I’m sorry but four high heels kicking in every direction when you’re both cumming at the same time, that’s irresponsible. Look at my friend Kathleen in Montreal with her last so-called “Revolutionary Femme on Femme Frenzy.” They were
ten
rubbing titties and trying to 69 each other all at once on her parquet kitchen floor. . . . All she can remember is a five-inch metal-spike heel coming straight
at her left eye. And that was the end of her revolution! No, no, no . . . girls don’t turn me on and I am especially not attracted to femmes.

At least, that’s what I kept repeating to myself as I sat on the throne that night desperately trying to shit a log or two in preparation for my four-hour shift. I’d been working as a model for over two months at Cybersluts, a sleazy Internet porn site owned and operated by fags that provides encounters of the first, second, and third kinds to thousands of horny men every day.

My job at Cybersluts was quite mundane: Stroke my little baby dill with one hand while providing a few—
kitchic, kitchic, kitchic
—ecstatic keyboard interjections with the other, and every ten minutes or so shove something up my butt—a finger, a bingo marker, just about anything to spice up my worldwide affairs.

And that explains my valiant efforts on the toilet. Guys didn’t like to spend $1.99 a minute to watch fingers covered in shit coming out of my ass so Be Prepared was my work motto. But on that night, I just couldn’t concentrate on the deed. My hands were shaking, my feet tapping, my lips twitching, and even more revealing, my nostril wings were moving to the beat of Whitney Houston’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”

I tried to calm down, tried to reassure myself that this was just a momentary feeling, that it would go away as soon
as I returned to the chat room, as soon as I’d take just
one
little moment to fully inspect that suspicious woman who had just struck me so intensely. I’ll check her nails, I told myself. I was too disoriented to notice earlier but for sure she’s got some of those long acrylic ones with French manicure that all the girls around the joint are getting and
that,
without a doubt, would make me lose my crush in a flash. I was agonizing on the toilet, still unable to shit anything more than a Glosette raisin so I figured I should just try again later and “Allez-Hop!” back to the chat room.

Sugar was her name. She’d just finished her shift and was slowly packing up. Still naked except for some red-hot lacy panties, she was taking forever to put her clothes back on. I was too rushed to let my hormones fully get in the way but I nonetheless couldn’t resist taking a second look at her: Petite, femme, and delicate, she was a stunning piece of wonder woman with no less than eight hard inches of thick silver heel.

You can imagine I was pretty scattered trying to attach my garter, my transparent bra, struggling to get into my fishnet stockings and frilly baby doll all at once. “You’ve been working here for two months. I’m surprised we haven’t crossed each other,” she said while finally putting on her jeans but with this sexy black tank top featuring a red chili pepper with the inviting line Eat Me!

The conversation from there went on and rapidly evolved from the personal to the political. We complained about Sandy Bitch, an older drag queen working our chat room who was famous for her show, which consisted of sticking a 14-inch by 5-inch dildo all the way up her ass. Sugar and I talked about how her anal acrobatics made work for us more difficult, made us have to deal with obnoxious men coming into our room, requesting
we
too shove gigantic dildos up our ass. We wondered if Sandy Bitch realized there were no advantages for her to engage in such spectacular acts, that she would still get paid the same amount as us, $25 an hour, and that there were no awards given annually to the Most Dilated Drag Queen Asshole in Cyberspace.

I was already half an hour through my shift, and we were still bitching and bitching and bitching and getting closer. . . . A customer who went by the screen name of Mister Big noticed my lips were moving and asked if there was a party going on. “No,” I said, “but Sugar is here and she’s really, really pretty!” Well, I should have expected the obvious to follow “Hey, why don’t you girls give us a show?” and before I even had the time to die, a very excited Sugar grabbed me by the arm, started to jump up and down screaming “Oh yes, yes, yes, Janou! Let’s do a girlie show!” What could I say? “No, I am not attracted to femmes!” while
I have pre-cum flooding through my G-string? “Okay,” I said, trying to look professional and in control, “but first I need a stiffener so you go get me a root beer!”

Well fuck the pop! There was only one thing on my mind when she came back in the room and you can be sure
en Tabarnak
it was her ass! She probably had some plans along the same lines ‘cause she pulled this black velvet blanket out of her satchel, spread it on the couch, and lay down on her stomach with her big bum sticking up like Mount Royal.

I didn’t want to act like a dog and bite in right away so I started out cute by giving her a few nice, sweet, and gentle kisses on the neck. Oooooh, she liked that! Shivering skin, dramatic spasms, her spine moving like a snake, everything that’s always turned me right off in a girl was now turning me right on. And Sugar was such a girl that in comparison I felt like a big sweaty, clumsy, goofy football player.

Eventually it got time to show some serious initiative and my true assets. I have a tiny wee-wee but I got quite a nose. If you don’t feel anything when I got my nose up your ass, then it’s time you get a new one ‘cause it’s dead! So I slowly slid my nose down down down the road to the brunch. First thing I did when I got there was to give it a few discreet sniffs, just to make sure. When I got the okay from the olfactory nerves, then I started licking her up and down the crack. And let me tell you that I didn’t have to say,
“Sésame Ouvre-toi!” Her cheeks opened up like automatic doors at No-Frills. I probably spent the next 15-20 minutes with my face in heaven. It was a tough gig, though, getting inside to my favorite part.
Eh Marie-Madeleine,
her hole was so tight I wondered if her shit came out like spaghetti. But once I got my tongue through . . . once I got my tongue through, it was like eating a cherry blossom except that the chocolate was inside.

Well, all good things must come to an end and at some point Sugar shot her load and said “Goodbye!” Nothing lasts forever—that’s basic physics. But with every end comes a new beginning—that’s paganism 101. A few minutes after Sugar left, I rushed to the washroom to finally shit my heart out. And as I sat again on the throne repeating to myself “Girls don’t turn me on!” I wondered which, of the half dozen femme ones working our room, was up next on the schedule.

I
t’s funny to live your whole life thinking you can do anything or be anything you want because your mami and papi in some way or another taught you that. In between their long shifts working as waitresses or cooks, eating shit with a smile for people who never worked a day in their lives, they modeled such dignity that it stuck with me. Even here now, as I recall the many effects of colonization present in my childhood, I can honor that somehow in the battle they taught me a spirit of survival that never considered death. Thank you,
familia.

When I was seven, I dreamed of being eighteen—going to
high school, preparing for my future and going to the prom like the white girls on TV. Stupid. In reality, I’m eighteen sitting in dirty hotel rooms with men up to three times my age, pretending I’m sexy in a body that don’t yet even know what sexy is. I never even went to more than a week of high school. Leaving home at fourteen, raised by the streets and by me, believing only in the protection of my dreams. I learned quick to rest with the fact that you do what you have to do.

I hate rich people. The way they look at you, the way they talk, the way they walk through the world like the whole thing belongs to them. The way they’ll just about knock you off the sidewalk in the city and move up into anyone’s neighborhood, yet they grab their purses tightly when you walk by and treat you like you don’t belong there.

Sometime I would sit up in those rich men’s houses with their marble steps feeling like any second they would realize who I really was and kick me out, afraid I’d steal their shit. Which I did, but in return they got my body for an hour or two, so I don’t think they ever felt robbed. I would sit with them in restaurants, half dressed, pretending I knew what things were on the menu, knowing my only tool of power in the situation was their hard little dick under the table. I think the way I was made them feel like they were rebelling. At the same time they were correcting the way I talked, they were imagining taking me back
home and how shocked and mad their parents would be. Whatever it was, I didn’t really care, because I got my shit.

It got old, though . . . pretty soon I felt played out. I couldn’t even find the dudes with money anymore. I never had a pimp, well, only the pimp that is working for an amerikan dream that will never quite fit in the hands of people like me. Wait, I lied. I had another pimp once, an older Italian man. He picked me up right at my front door in a Lincoln Continental one day. It didn’t take me long, even being young and impressionable, to realize it didn’t make sense to make your money touchin’ and fuckin’ nasty dick, only to have to give it back to some motherfucker whose nasty dick you have to touch and fuck too. It seemed stupid, like working for free and for what? Oh yeah, that’s right, for “protection.”

Let me tell you something, none of those johns ever pushed for more because they knew I wouldn’t hesitate to fuck them up. I never had to tell them that. I showed every one of them by the way I wasn’t afraid to look straight at them, and for whatever reason, whether fear or genuine respect, they never challenged it. See, when you tell most anyone that they have to pay for something they want hella bad, like, say . . . pussy, for instance, they’ll believe you. It’s about how you present the goods. If you hustle like you believe your shit is gold, they’ll believe it too. If you look them deep in the eye like you can see every inch of how bad they want
it, they will melt in your hand. You know why? Because wanting things makes people feel weak. And when people feel weak for something they can somehow “obtain” they’ll do anything. But, when a motherfucker can smell your hustle because they got one too, that’s when you got a problem. And that’s when you watch a man drive away with your dignity; still confused, only half realizing what he’s just taken, but it’s already too late. That’s growing up though.