(1981, Humboldt)

     I’m watching "The Love Boat" in the living room of the house we still live in after Dad left. "Fantasy Island" comes on afterwards. Mom got skinny because she stopped eating and joined a volleyball team. That’s where she met Chuck, a hunky postman and she moved him into our house. He’s got the same exact mustache as Tom Selleck and wears tight, light blue terrycloth shorts. He mostly spends time in the garage building stuff. He gets up at 5am to deliver mail and always comes home and naps from about 3pm until 5 or 6pm and you don’t want to wake him up.

            Mom and Chuck drink yellow liquid with three ice cubes. They’re fighting. She said something. I don’t know what, but a plate of spaghetti hit the wall near her head. There’s no laugh track. Was it a plate of spaghetti or was only a heavy glass ashtray? There were lots of things flying in space towards Mom. Sometimes they hit her directly.

            The first night it happens I go to bed and close my eyes. I hear them upstairs, directly above me, arguing. There’s a loud thud. I know this sound is my mom’s body being slammed against the bedroom door. I hear her say, “Chuck, please stop.”  But he doesn’t. His feet stomp on the ceiling above me.  He is throwing things or hitting walls.

            The wind blows tall thick Redwoods outside my bedroom window. Sometimes a branch snaps and there’s a creaking sound like limbs being broken in the wrong places. I like the outside sounds better than the inside ones. I think about crawling out the window and grabbing the tire swing and slowly lowering myself down. But, this isn’t TV.

            The next sound is feet running in long heavy steps above me. They are his.

            “If I can’t sleep, no one’s sleeping!”

He turns on all of the lights and the TVs on full blast. He turns on the stereo and blares Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler.”

            Next, my mom appears in my room and sits on my bed.  She has a cut on her lip that’s bleeding. She holds a Kleenex on it. I’m not sure if she is sitting with me to seek refuge from him, or if she wants to protect me from him. She looks worried and pats my leg. Tells me she loves me.  I’m confused and think maybe she’s on my bed because she doesn’t want me to escape because I’m her prisoner. Or maybe she wants to sleep with me in my bed.

             Eventually, the lights are turned off and they pass out upstairs and the wind still blows the Redwoods outside. I’m awake, so I turn on my black and white TV in my bedroom. I watch the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in an elaborate white wedding dress walk down an isle in front of a sea of fancy guests. She stands with a man with a noble nose and decorated jacket. The woman is slim and delicate with soft light feathered hair. The train on her dress is at least twenty-five feet long.  I watch them say vows and kiss in stiff, elegant formality.  The woman is golden and delicate and I want to look exactly like her. I study her hair. This was Lady Diana and Prince Charles on July 29^th 1981. I was eleven.

            (A few months earlier)

           When Dad left, Mom turned to jelly and collapsed. She was standing at the front door of our house one minute then sunk down to the floor the next. My older brother picked her up, carried her into the living room, and put her down on the soft brown couch where she wailed. I’d never heard her sob like that before, with drool spilling out of her mouth. She stayed like that for a long time.

            Dad went to a fleabag hotel on Broadway with some chick named after a donut: Eclaire.  Then he bought a cabin half hour away in a town that had one church and one grocery store. He took my brother with him. When I went to visit him on certain weekends, I cleaned the store in exchange for all the candy I wanted. I missed my brother, even though he was always in trouble for selling pot and doing drugs. We fought a lot but when he moved in with my Dad we stopped fighting as much. Dad bought him a sparkly brown truck and he wasn’t around much after that.

   The morning after the fights, I watched Mom put beige liquid makeup on her eyes before she went to work.  I followed her around and spelled words out loud for my spelling test. “Restaurant, “ she said.  I got it wrong three times before I finally got it right. All of her suits were color coordinated. She belonged to every woman’s organization there was in our small town. She attended luncheons. She served as president of AAUW. She was in the DAR. She was treasurer of her class, and she was in a sorority. She rarely missed a day of work. She cooked and cleaned and was pretty and delicate and strong. And. Her husband beat her.

            And. She loved him.  “He’s the love of my life," she said many times.

           I loved him too. He paid attention to me and liked the same music I listened to.

    There were nights I’d sneak out of the window when the yelling started. I'd call the cops and walk up the side of the house and watch while my mom convinced them in her women’s organization voice that everything was perfectly okay. They talked quietly to her but then left. Mom went back into the house, but I walked further down the hill, next door through my neighbor’s garage to my best friend, Arlene’s house. Her mom, Anne had been a second mom to me my whole life. She would be tipsy but awake.

            She said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s just water off a duck's back.”

            But I didn’t believe her. I thought she just wanted me to go away. It was a school night. I walked all over town in the moonlight and crept back into my window in the morning like nothing had happened.

            “How do you feel about golden showers?”  Willy asked. I’d never peed on Willy before. He liked to suck my butt like a Jolly Rancher until I had stubble burn on my crack so bad I’d have to smear Vaseline on it for a week afterwards but golden showers? Not him.

            “I feel great about them,” I replied.

            “Can you drink a Coke before you come over?” He asked. I don’t drink Coke, Diet Coke, 7-UP, Mountain Dew or anything sweet or fizzy. I’m more of a carrot-celery-grapefruit juice type. I cringed.

            “Not on such short notice,” I said and gulped from a liter of room temperature water.  It’s all I had with me.

Willy’s good money; he’s cute for a customer and he’s nice guy about my age with a cleft chin and beauty mark on his lip.  He’s not a bad dresser, either.

             The cab honked outside and I thought about how quick cabs respond in San Francisco compared to New Orleans, where, if you get in the way of their Po-boy, they can’t be bothered to show up.  In the cab I polished off the water on the long drive to the Sunset where the fog was thick and the air smelled like the ocean.

            Willy’s been my client off and on for ten years. He came into the Market Street Cinema in 1998 when he had a pager and was working as an escort. I’ve known him for a long time yet I hardly know him at all. Doom floated around my ribcage. I’m always anxious in the moments before I do these jobs.

            The last time I saw Willy was a few months back. He had a friend staying at his place with him: a tranny from London. Her suitcase was open against the wall and slinky dresses and shoes spilled out onto the floor.  He showed me pictures of her from the Asia SF website. She was a gorgeous Malaysian number with huge fake tits. “Do you mostly date trannys?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he’d said.

“Do you ever date men?” I asked.

“Let’s not write your thesis on me, okay?” He didn’t like to discuss the complexity of his desire; he just liked to act it out. Like most men, processing emotions was taxing to him. So, he busied himself with licking my butt while we watched tranny porn. I noticed a small brown glass bottle the size of lighter that he held to his face.  It looked like poison delivered by an apothecary in Romeo and Juliet.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Nitrous,” he said.

                                                                     photo by m violet

             At home, in LA, I’ve been doing a lot of golden showers lately. The last client, Mike didn’t ask for it. He just wanted to do as he was told. He was going through a divorce and liked to tell me about his therapy sessions. “The things I like are causing problems. This is causing problems, Mistress.” After I used a beaded ass toy on him for 45 minutes, I led him into my bathtub naked.  “Is this a problem?” I asked then I peed all over him. “Why do you have to take me, Mistress?” he asked.

            Submissive clients always called me when I was upset about the man I was dating- the one who broke up with me whenever he felt squirmy. The moment he’d pull away, another man lurched forward who called me “Doctor.”  I’d wear a tight white dress, he’d hand me the thermometer he brought me to stick in his ass while he stuck rubber bands around his cock and jerked off.  This particular man could hardly stand to be touched by me. I ran my fingers along the hair on his thigh. “Please stop. It’s too much,” he’d say.

The thing is, clients sensed my suffering and wanted to slide around in it for an hour. I didn’t want to be numb anymore so I let them.

            I used to give handjobs and get so numb I’d dig my nails into my thighs and made little white crescent shaped scars, but not now. The things I do stay with me:

            The thing that confuses me isn’t my acquiescence to client’s wishes. It’s desire: The man I desperately wanted to touch me was flighty; men I didn’t desire paid me to touch them. It’s a horrible lonely spin cycle.           

            Perverse things never stay perverse. They become routine over time. Like Willy’s butt munching routine and Veggie man. Veggie man wore a suit. He always came in to Crazy Horse on Market Street with a bag from the farmer’s market.

             “Look what I brought you tonight,” he’d said and whipped out a bulky yellow squash and carrot that he wanted me to rub on my pussy for him, stick them in my underwear. Put inside me. Then I moved to another club and never saw him again.  But Veggie man stays with me. I can’t get rid of him now.

There are things that you don’t get over. And why should you?

            Once, in San Francisco, I wandered into a hotel room full of Arabic teenagers. When they answered the door, we were all stunned that I’d shown up after they'd given me their room number What am I’m doing here? I thought and left. I climbed into a cab and cried all the way home to Aerosmith's "Dream On."

           When I arrived at Willy’s place, I walked around the side of the building down some stairs and knocked on his sliding glass doors.

            “I like your hair lighter. You were blond when I first met you,” he said. My hair was red with highlights now.

            “Thanks.” I walked inside, stiff with snakes in my chest.

            “Want something to drink?” he asked. His apartment was very small: A dinky one-room studio with a tiny bathroom and a kitchenette. His only furniture was a bed and white plastic card table, which had a stack of twenties for me on top.  I counted the money and stuck the $350 in my purse.

How can he afford me? I thought. I could understand guys with inertia and excess cash, but the ones who lived in shit boxes always made me curious. They had money for hookers, but lived in squalor.

“Coke. If you have some,” I said. He shot me a bewildered look.

 “Coke to drink.  Not the powder. Coca-Cola,” I said.

“I don’t have any. Cranberry juice?” I nodded and watched him pour cranberry juice into a glass. I took a large gulp and looked for a surface and found a precarious corner next to his computer. I noticed his CD’s.

“Hey, you have my band’s CD,” I said and was complimented by the gesture. I relaxed.

“I got it at the Bottom of the Hill,” he said.  I took off my clothes. I removed skinny jeans, a sex pistols t-shirt, and high black patent leather shoes with a plaid panel.  I was going to a rock show later.

            The porn playing this time was not tranny porn. The women were large, muscular body builders with engorged clits who spread their legs on carpeted stairs. They measured their great clits with big, white plastic rulers. There were clunky close-ups that showed them measuring out at about 2 inches long. They had eighties hair with lots of Aqua Net and they both wore neon orange bikinis. One of the women stuck a vacuum-like plastic contraption on her pussy that sucked her clit to make it even larger while the other one flexed her muscles for the camera and made love to a vibrator.

            They had porn smiles: the clenched teeth of the working class, grinning on command. I had that smile pasted on my face now. It’s not that I didn’t like Willy. It’s just that I’d shown up lonesome and didn’t want to be touched.  That’s the thing about compliance and doing a job for a good client. I’d been dumped and I wanted to scream and smash windows not fondle his cock. There was a hideous feeling inside of me and it was spreading. No matter whom I was with, I was alone.

            Willy let it rip with the whole nitrous thing.  The cat was out of the bag. He held the brown bottle to his nose with one hand and inhaled deeply, several times. His other hand held my ass in place on the bed where he did the jolly rancher bit. The nitrous made his head sway as if he melted into a limp lizard. The porn played through all the way and started again. Time crawled by in the murky studio apartment where anything could happen. Willy could die. Willy could O.D. I could scream.

“I’m ready to piss on your cock,” I said. There was no clock in this room.

Microwave.

Negative.

 The only clock was on his computer.  I leaned in to see the time: Thirty minutes down.

“Where? The kitchen floor?” he asked.

“No.” I led him to his bathroom that was so small and dark, my back was against the wall while I straddled him on the toilet and peed on his cock. It’s easier to do it that way, crouched down-facing the toilet. Peeing on faces gives me performance anxiety. The best way is to drag them into the bathtub-make them lie down, pee on their whole bodies, then make them shower. Or not. Make them stay urine soaked. Make them jerk off that way. Smash bottles. Light fires. Slash tires. Keep the knife in so the air doesn’t escape.

I looked him in the eye. “Do you like me pissing on you?” I asked.  But he seemed far away; his expression was lost in the nitrous zone and his body fell slack. He didn’t rinse off. I sat on his face while the tanned body builder porn chic did her thing with the toy that sucked air from her clit and enlarged it. Out came the ruler again.

“How are their clits so enormous?” I asked.

“They take testosterone,” he said. The connection between his desire for tranny’s and his desire for testosterone-shooting dames made sense to me. But why I was there remained a mystery to me.

            Willy sniffed more nitrous and I watched him curl inside. I hadn’t been touched since I’d been with the guy who dumped me. The thought of that made me queasy. 

            I couldn’t get Willy hard or get him off.

  How was none of this enough: the porn, the golden shower, the naked girl’s ass and the nitrous.

None of it was working.  I blamed myself. If only I was mesmerizing enough. Pretty enough. I tried harder. I massaged his cock with the same Vitamin E oil I would use on my ass later but there was no excitement just a dead longing in his eyes that matched mine perfectly. 

                                                                                                                                                                      Photo by m violet

I looked at the clock on the computer.

“Don’t worry about getting me off,” he said.  I got dressed.

“Are you going out tonight?” I asked.

“You look like you could use a pizza,” I said.  He was skinnier and paler than before. I thought about lecturing him about Hepatitis but I didn’t.

“You’re not the first person to tell me that lately,” he said.

            I gave him a hug and walked out of his house into the windy, damp San Francisco night. I stepped into a taxi and it drove away from Willy’s place and into the fog. I scanned for crashes and fires, but it was a quiet, cold night on Market Street.

I’m going to miss this. I was riding in the backseat of a taxi towards Downman Road with an iced coffee from Café Beignet cooling my hands. My bulky pink stripper bag full of shoes and costumes was balanced between my knees.

When I don’t come here and dance. I’ll miss it.

The sun was fading and the air was so humid that sweat soaked my t-shirt and socks through. I was on my way to Visions, the Mac n Cheese of strip clubs, where I’d throw my legs over my head on the gold pole and dance on stage then collect damp singles in my black garter for nine hours. My toes will throb. 

Visions has a bad reputation, but I love that shit box. I’ve never touched any dick at all or been asked to there but people seem to think that’s the norm. It’s a club that caters to local guys: truckers, construction workers, fishermen and maybe that’s why it’s looked down upon, but I’ve made consistent green there over the past year. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: a seedy titty bar out by the railroad tracks.

When I walked into the locker room at Visions at 5PM on a sweltering Friday in mid-July, I peeled off my wet clothes in favor of a light sky blue skirt that’s not really a skirt; it’s a napkin. I stood in front of a big silver fan that blew stale smoky air on my greasy face.

I don’t know how much longer I can do this.

It’s my third night in a row working till 3AM. My thighs burn from over use. My neck pain is back. Usually, I take a day off in between shifts, but on these work trips I try to stay focused on the job so I can leave with a chunk of change to dig myself out of the monthly hole: late rent, car insurance, my damn cable bill. 

My stripper days have been numbered for ten years, but I’m making more money than ever in my entire stripping career.

 I’ve been seriously lucking out on this trip. I’m the Bret Favre of strippers. The Bret Favre when he was injured and at the top of his game, but it was necessary that he quit. It’s not that he wanted to. I’m Bret Favre in a black g-string and push-up bra when Minnesota played against the Saints. I’m winning but not without sustained injuries.

“Hey, it’s that bitch with that hair."             

Chloe's one of my favorite local strippers and that’s her endearing nickname for me. She’s got a cigarette in one hand and a Miller in the other. Between her thick Louisiana country drawl and her drunkenness, I barely understand her.

“I don’t know about this luau,” she said. “They're drunk and their not spending.” She's a redhead with long thin legs. She chain-smokes.

“The worst kind of crowd, huh?” I ask.  She mumbled something to the air in front of her and walked back onto the floor.

New Orleans is dead in the summertime. It’s also hurricane season. So to encourage business, Visions had a Luau.

The girls in the dressing room were all wearing blue and pink plastic flower leis and straw skirts and posed for pictures. I got dressed in a hurry in a corner because there were no empty lockers. It was packed and loud and the girls were already sloppy drunk. I stuck a turquoise flower comb in my hair and walked out to survey the scene at Visions: a loud, smoky den, promising cockroaches, pulled pork, tits and beer.

Where else am I going to make this kind of cash?

All four bartenders were working and the bar was packed with fat local dudes drinking a scary, pink, half-price rum drink, which explains why my shoes stuck to the floor when I walked.  

There was a buffet set up on top of one of the pool tables:

Silver plastic trays displaying deviled eggs, pulled pork and mini-muffaletta sandwiches.  I grabbed some grapes and popped them in my mouth and watched two guys eat orange cubes of cheese and play the slot machines.

I need strangers to hold me and tell me I’m intelligent, beautiful and wonderful because, I don’t believe it.

I checked in with Johnny my favorite DJ who’s always quitting smoking. He played “Just Like Putty” by Jimmie Vaughan.

Johnny doesn’t give a fuck about top 40 or hip-hop. He’ll play Ike Turner and The Dead Weather back to back.  He was chewing Big Red Gum when I walked up to him to check in.

            “You quit smoking again?”

            “And how,” he said. “Candy, you’re up in three girls,” he said.

            “I’m feeling Stones and Hendrix,” I said and walked away. He knew this meant “Emotional Rescue” and “Bold as Love,” for my stage.

        After my set, I’ll walk both bars. Judging from the amount of guys sitting, I calculated it would take about 25 minutes and if every guy gave a dollar or two, I’d pocket about eighty bucks right away. That’s the beauty of Visions. You always get paid on stage. Guys get thrown out if they don’t tip the girls on the bar.

            A curvy tall blond who always dances to Michael Jackson (“PYT”) and Madonna (“Dress You Up”), wears a black flower in her hair and a white man’s shirt as a costume danced before me. She’s got an apologetic smile and great, thick legs and she does this thing with her boobs, where she uses her pectoral muscles to move them up and down, one at a time.  After my set, I had to follow her on the bar but she was taking her time. I was mad because the longer you’re on the bar, the longer you’re not getting lap dances, your just making singles. I like to hurry up and get on the floor, walk the bar quickly and make a bit of eye contact to spark a connection so I know who to grab when I’m off stage. The blond was drunk. She was chatting. She was doing her boob thing. She crouched down in front of guys. I stood there, waiting. Pissed.

Instead of putting my hands on my hips and giving her a dirty look, I moved in closer, felt her tit with my right hand and smiled at the guy in front of her.

“I’ve never made out with you,” she said, bewildered and drunk. She smiled big. I grabbed her by the back of her pony tail.

 I kissed her for a while, tongue and all.  She tasted like sweet alcohol, which wasn’t something I was used to. The guys at the bar in front of showed us a few more singles. Big spenders. We moved on to the next few guys to do our kissing thing. And, the blond could kiss.

I haven't been kissed in a month, I thought. The kiss that happened a month ago was a mistake. I was devastated, dumped, angry and insanely lonely. I would have kissed an alligator. The last person I'd kissed had whiskers that rubbed my chin raw and it felt like intimacy was supposed to feel like but it made me sad. I’d come from a session with a submissive who sniffed nitrous while I gave him a golden shower and we watched body builder porn with those testosterone women who measure their engorged clits.

 After that session, I wanted to be touched by someone who wasn’t paying me. My friend was there, in a hotel, playing Etta James in the dim light. He danced with me and we made out. We did more too, but it happened so fast, it’s like it never happened. It shouldn’t have happened. I do that.

The blond pointed to the guys in front of her, “Not them, they’re too country,” she said. I trusted her local instincts and danced for the guy in front of me on my own, grabbed the bars above me and twirled around and bent over at my waist. When I’m bent in half, I can touch the bar with my palms.

This was the moment I usually greeted Tom, the bartender. Tom stuck his hand under his shirt where his heart was and vibrated the hand it for me. A faux beating heart.

 When I’m topless and sitting on their laps, it’s like oxygen in an ashtray. It's a need that swells up in me.

At 1:45AM, my manager, Rick said, “You leavin?”

“My feet hurt, but I’ve got more money to make,” I said.

“Yep. That’s a conundrum,” he said and slapped my ass cheek with his right hand.

 The thing is, Rick wants me to stay later. I make Visions a lot of money. I paid out over $200 and left with over $800 cash.

Similar to felons like my brother-who has spent years in jail and prison and can’t assimilate into the mainstream world, I worry that I’ve gone too far. That this has been my world longer than anything else. That I'm doomed to a stripper limbo.

How will I cross over? I think and drift into the sultry hot night and hail another taxi.

It’s been two months since I've worked at Rick’s Cabaret (The Bruiser) and I’m afraid they won’t let me on the floor. I’m nervous. That’s why I tear at my own flesh until I taste blood, usually the inside of my lip but sometimes my cuticles. 

The sun is down in the French Quarter but it’s still easily 89 degrees at 7PM. It's like walking into a sauna of piss and Red Bull vomit as I head down Bourbon. Usually, there’s a long line of tourists in front of Acme Oyster House, but not since the oil spill. Someone's singing The Eagles' “Witchy Woman,” at the Karaoke Bar on the corner. I've always loved that song. My parents had the eight track tape and played it nonstop on camping trips to Redding.

I duck into The Bruiser and head towards the elevator. I scurry into the dressing room and scan for managers. The coast is clear.

Last time I worked here, the manager gave me stink eye, then called me into his office.

“When we hired you we didn’t know you had all those tattoos,” he said.

New Orleans is stuck in the 90’s, both fashion wise and music-wise. So tattoos are seen as biker trash here; dreadlocks and septum piercings are cutting edge. I dance accordingly to Courtney Love’s version of “Gold Dust Woman” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.”

While being scolded, I'm surprised by the corporate nature of The Bruiser. They provide a W-2, however, if I touch any surface in the office, I'm afraid I'll get a cocaine buzz. I crossed my arms.

“Ramone hired me,” I said. Ramone’s a pasty French asshole who wanted me to work dayshift. I’m not a dayshift girl. I only strip at night.

When I was here two months ago, Ramone came into Penthouse Club while I was working alongside his girlfriend. When he saw me there, he kissed my ass: “I’d rather have you at my club. You can work whenever you want,” he said. But the next time I came into The Bruiser, they called me into the manager’s office for the tattoo showdown:

            “We’ll let you work tonight, but if there are any complaints about your tattoos, you’re gone.”  Never mind there were several girls on the floor with tramp stamps out in the open.

    When I worked that Monday night back in May, a guy drove eleven hours from Texas to see me at The Bruiser and we ate salads at 3AM on Frenchman. I made $782 cash that night. Eating with clients isn't something I usually do, but the guy was in the midst of a divorce and we'd become friends. After we ate, I strolled to Bourbon Street in the steam and thought about what it was like to be in love, and that frequently, it felt like wasps in my ribcage and like he was always on the brink of leaving.

The moon was full and the air was not as humid as it is now.

It’s mid-July in the Quarter. This time, I’m welcomed by the management. They’re happy to see me. One of the floor guys flirts with me. The DJ laughs with me. They don’t scold me about my tattoos. The hazing is momentarily over and I’m able to enjoy my job.

There’s a new pole on the stage, but it’s wobbly. It’s one of those poles that doesn’t hook into the ceiling.

It just stands in the middle of the stage, naked and waiting to be broken.

The girls at The Bruiser are all on Adderall. I can tell because their pupils are plump as black jellybeans.  I drink sugar-free Red Bull and it makes my skull tingle but keeps me awake. I summon the confidence to bust through the crowd. I strut and hope I'll be embraced. There’s mostly groups of guys with women.

I start with her: A blond, curvy woman in her 30's from Alabama. She’s an elementary school teacher. I ask her about the man next to her, who’s not her husband; he’s just her friend.

“It’s Chuck’s 55^th birthday,” she says.

Chuck has white hair and a bright smile that lights up the dark, smoky den. When I mention LA, he says, “I do a show with Larry King every year.”

           “Oh Yeah? A show about school teachers?”

            "I'm a Principal," he says and shows me his right arm, which is missing a hand and forearm. It’s cut off at his elbow where there’s a small piece of flesh, like a fin, and he moved it for me. It reminded me of a windshield wiper.

            “I didn’t notice," I say, which was true. I crawl over the blond woman and onto his ample lap.

            “I heard you’re celebrating a birthday so I should give you a VIP dance.”  He stood up, grinned and followed me up the stairs to the couches where dances are $60/ song topless.

            “So, what happened to your arm, birthday boy?” I ask and wait for the next song to start.

            “In 2000, I was training for a triathlon in Alabama and got attacked by a bull shark. I’ve done over 60 triathlons, and I go on Larry King and talk about safety and swimming in the ocean. I was swimming and the shark took a bite and then grabbed my arm and dragged me onto shore. For some reason, he swam right up on the beach and died there, with me underneath him.”

                                      sharkattacksurvivors.com/shark_attack/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=291&p=1340

            “Poetic Justice,” I say and remove off my bra and wriggle around in front of him to Gary Numan's "Cars."

Chuck Anderson was so excited to be alive that I couldn't help but absorb his glee.

Each year there are 50 to 70 confirmed shark attacks and 5 to 15 shark-attack fatalities around the world. More people are bitten by New Yorkers than sharks in the US every year.

            “I have implants,” he said. I laughed.

Supernova was on stage. She’s a 45+ year-old dancer. She won’t work when the moon is full. She’s blond and skinny, with so much plastic surgery, her lips are bloated banana slugs and her cheeks are puffy as a chipmunk. I wonder if Supernova knows she looks freakish. She's one of the friendliest dancers at The Bruiser and she dances to 80's hits like Van Halen which endears me to her. 

            “Really. Touch this,” he says and points to his right tricep. “They used implants to fill in the flesh that was missing,” he says. In fact, his arm felt like my boobs, soft like water balloons. Then he vibrated his arm for me and laughed with his whole stomach.

            “Do you think I should tell women on the first date or second date?” 

            “Depends on the woman,” I said.

            “Happy Birthday. Glad you made it,” I said. The dance is over.

            “Be grateful,” he said.

Chuck Anderson was more normal than most of the women I danced with and more emotionally well-adjusted. He wasn't drunk or on Aderall. He seemed thrilled to be alive and his tenacity inspired me.

By 11:30PM, I was dizzy and had a headache. Smoke settled into my skin, hair and lungs, because people smoke cigars and cigarettes with reckless abandon in New Orleans.

Tomorrow I'll have gray, puffy circles under my eyes from the smoke and I'll look in the mirror and think, I’m a middle aged stripper.

I will promise myself this: I’ve got to retire; come out to New Orleans for one week a month and stack dough and quit with at least 50K in the bank.

Instead of sticking it out until 3AM, I cruised for a cab with my cash around midnight.

I thought about my ex, how he brought some woman named Jessica to Desert Hot Springs three weeks after he broke up with me. I wondered how he could move on so quickly. Probably he was screwing her while we were dating. The wasps returned in their terrible swarm.

“I feel like I’m always saying goodbye to you,” I'd said. He was going to Montreal then Ireland. This ended up being the truest thing I would ever say to him. 

My feet throbbed and and my neck hurt from flipping upside down on the pole. My thighs burned as I walk up the stairs, exhausted but grateful.

I was dumped over the phone by the man I’ve been dating for several months. I’d never had such an abrupt, hostile break up. He just hung up like a pissed off fourth grader. Said he didn’t want to talk anymore. That he’s done. Then he never spoke to me again. 

 My friends assumed there’s something dishonest about his abrupt, mean behavior.  Perhaps he simply fell in love with someone else, or at least started fucking someone else. It would make reasonable logical sense to jettison the stripper for a nice girl with a headshot. Being discarded abruptly sort of feels being like being hit by a train:

A woman was carrying a one year-old girl when she was struck by a train in the North Chicago train station.

I wanted a different ending so I emailed. I called. I tried to get him to talk to me; I considered him a friend. We could part amicably. Wrong.

Warning bells and lights were going off and the train blew its horn when the woman crossed.

I wanted badly to cut his heart out and feed it to vultures, because it would be great material for my comedy act, and I could upstage him, but instead, I gave the saddest man in West Hollywood a hand job for a couple greenbacks.

After the crash happened, she was declared dead at the scene. She was 34.

Seriously, I wasn’t in the mood. But when I’m not in the mood, my clients can't get enough of me.

Whenever I’m broke and need the money, I wait by the phone for clients to book appointments, there’s nothing but crickets.

When I’m anxious and depressed, my phone rings nonstop.

This particular night, it was Bill from New York, who lives in West Hollywood near Sweetzer. I hadn’t showered and I was nearly out of massage oil, but I showed up anyway, half an hour late.

A tall white guy in shorts waved from a balcony from an apartment building. He had a wine glass in his hand. He buzzed me in and met me in the lobby. He could have been anywhere between 25 and 40.

“Do you want to ride the elevator or take the stairs?” he asked. My shoes were at least six inches high.

“Elevator,” I said.

The button lit up when he pushed it. We waited a couple minutes.

“The stairs are faster, he said,” then the elevator arrived. We stepped inside. I’ve been to many generic hollywood apartment buildings like this with too many cooking smells from too many kitchens. His apartment was at the end of a hall. It had a balcony overlooking an empty courtyard.

Once inside, I put my purse on the table. He stood next to me and leaned into me, close, and tucked his head in the space between my chin and collar bone. His hair was soft and red.

“Do you live here alone?” I asked. He didn’t move his head. I held him and put my hand on his head. It was a big place with at least two bedrooms. He moved into my skin where the train had hit.

                                                                                    Santa Fe Train Pic by Patrick O'Neil.

“Yes, but I have a daughter,” He said.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Albequerque,” he said.  His blue eyes were steady and clear. I hoped he couldn’t tell that I hadn’t showered.

“Is that where you’re from?” The easy chit-chat of the heavy hearted served as smoke to hide the fact that I didn’t want to be there. But, I was too sad not to be there.

“I’m from New York,” he said.

“Why’d you move here?” I asked. He picked up a glass that had red wine in it. He drank.

“I got a job on a horrible reality TV show.” He watched me remove my jacket, throw it on the table next to my purse and keys.

 There were empty goblets of red wine on stark white tables. TV screens and computers were on in every room to fill the void. 

He handed me some twenties, which I counted and tucked into my purse. Two hundred.

In the room with the bookcase there was a baseball game on the TV. He kept hugging me, like I was the last human on Earth. He led me down a hallway.

“Are these your photographs?” I asked. There were black and white photos against the wall.

“These ones are,” he said pointing to two photos: a woman on a beach with her black hair blowing in the wind behind her as she stared out ahead and one of the ocean with the title “Catalina.” They were lovely melancholic prints framed tastefully.

“Is that what you do?”

“Not anymore,” he said.  He’d accepted the reality TV show paycheck but he wanted to take moody photographs. It was the collective soul-sucking, LA tragedy.

His bed was huge and everything was soft and white. Neat bed frame and white comforter, expensive down pillows, to cushion the blow of profound disappointment.

He had Freckles. He watched me get undressed. I massaged his back and his cock, but, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get him hard.

“Been drinking a bit today?”

He wanted to eat my pussy so I let him for a couple minutes while the baseball game played on the huge TV. I was afraid that I tasted like depo provera chemicals, the birth control that's a shot. He looked up.

"You just got sad. What happened?" He said.

"I went on birth control for someone I'm not with anymore. It makes me bleed black and I hope you can't taste it. It's kind of chemical-tasting."

“I just want you here,” he said.

The realization that he didn’t know me at all and this was the first time he’d ever met me and he would never know my real name-hit me hard. He turned onto his belly. I massaged him with the oil and lay my body on top of his, and moved fingers through his hair, brushed my lips against his ear. 

“It’s okay,” I whispered in his ear. “It happens to everyone in LA.”

“Don’t worry about getting me off,” he said and fell asleep.

I’m in San Francisco and it's windy and cold right now compared to the oppressive heat of LA.

I lived here for over eleven years so every neighborhood holds memories. There were times where I did a lot of damage to myself and to others.

At a meeting in the Castro this morning, I ran into my friend Kelly who nearly died of the flesh eating disease ten years ago.

 “We made it out alive,” she said to me. Kelly’s a truck driver now and is in a solid relationship with a great girl. She has all her teeth and is healthy.

In the early 90’s, she and our friend Stacy used to buy drugs from my girlfriend, Beata. Kelly leaned over and grinned when she told me how it went down:

 “Me and Stacy would try to get Beata to front us. The thing about fronting is, you have to pay double next week,” Beata would say and didn't front them.  Our friend Stacie died of the flesh eating disease from shooting dirty heroin ten years ago. Her body rotted off her bones in a hospital. But my friend Kelly survived and got clean.

In the early nineties, I was in school and lived in the East Bay. I was an artist’s model and a terrible waitress. I was living with a married man when I met Beata at our dealer’s house in the Mission. She lived with her girlfriend. She was an outrageous flirt and a charmer and knew a lot about music. She played an acoustic guitar. She had huge grey eyes that held an infinite sadness. And. She always had enough meth to go around.  I didn’t know at that time that Beata was dealing crystal to our friends. I found out much later.

Today, I walked around 14^th and Noe, and found the Victorian apartment where we were in love. In those days we had answering machines in our homes. There wasn't any texting. We didn't have cell phones. We wrote love letters on post-it notes and stuck them on mirrors.

We carved our initials into the sidewalk along with “Agore Amour” which meant “Out of body love experience” in Latin,  or so I thought. Also in the cement were the initials of her two roommates who were lovers: L for Lisel plus J for Joe, her delicate, German girlfriend who talked me into auditioning at The Century Theatre on Larkin Street, my first (ever) attempt at stripping.

Lisel was a bright, brown-eyed artist from New York.  She had Italian looks; short dark hair and we’d walk to Harvest Market for vegetables. She died of a heroin overdose a few years ago. Today, 18 years later,  all of our initials are still carved into the sidewalk. The street looks the same except for some fresh coats of paint on the shabby Victorians.

As for the "out of body love experience," I barely survived it. I didn't have the stomach.

I'm here in SF because the man I was dating had some comedy shows and I wanted to go. I drove with my sponcee (in AA) who's an Aztec dancer. She's in a ceremony for the next 24 hours. I caught a ride. I had plans to go to the man's show, but he shut down and ran away instead, so that’s over now. The key is to not pull the covers over my head and lock myself away or hurl myself into the arms of strangers. I’m conducting an experiment. I’m going to feel the fuck out of this.

I walk down Noe street and see the same flower guy on 14^th and Noe who sells flowers out of those plastic white buckets: Yellow Tulips, white lilies, long thin Iris.

In 1995, When I tried to stop doing speed, I had a psychotic episode and took a serated knife to my wrist and ended up at Davies Medical Center on a 72-hour hold.  A nice young bald man stitched up my wrist and wrapped me up nicely, in gauze. Then I was taken into the other part of the ward where I sat for hours with a new age therapist. He asked me, "Do you want to go home?" I never went home.

I couch surfed for three months.

Now I'm walking up the hill where I’m staying, near Buena Vista park that's been renovated. There is a nice paved walkway now where there used to be some dirt and pebbles. This park has been a place where gay men have sex in the bushes in broad daylight. I don't know if the renovation has changed that quirk. I hope not.

I remember girls and guys I've loved in this city and the people who loved me back for a time. There was a man who wanted to marry me once. It was during the most horrendous time in my life, when my mom was dying of cancer. That's when we began dating. He loved me hard and true. I've walked around SF with that man a couple times but now he's playing guitar on big stages around Europe. He threw me the rope of love and I caught it until I couldn't hang on any more.

I've thrown the rope of love too, but the man used it for a swing and flew away, maybe into a lake of his own reflection.He was like Proteus:the more I reached for him the more he changed shape and slipped from my grasp.

I'm going to a rock show tonight with a friend instead of obsessing about Proteus. I'm not in the business of throwing ropes today. I'm walking around San Francisco in the cool sun and letting it embrace me but I can't get Kelly’s laughter out of my mind, saying, “We made it out alive.”

    The drive to Cocoon is about twenty minutes from my apartment, off the 210 east near a racetrack on Clark Street in a shit hole called Arcadia, which could easily be Bakersfield or Torrance. Clark Street is past some railroad tracks and there’s nothing else but some warehouses and a parking lot.  If there’s a connection between railroad tracks and strippers, it may have something to do with hobos.

 I left Cocoon a year ago when the place was under new owners and the managers began gouging girls by extracting fees from our tips based on an arbitrary set of rules-that changed every night-so I left with a migraine and my cash and never came back, Except, I always come back.

Photo by Romy Suskin.

  It’s a Friday night and the sun’s still out. The security guard’s a lazy kid with a few extra pounds around his waistline and he’s compulsively texting as I stand in front of him.  He asks to see my ID and pretends to look through my stripper bag for: guns? Meth? Alcohol? He finds an apple, a bag of raw almonds and gold and black sequined 6” heels; the stuff of sober strippers from Nor-Cal.

I’ll be turned away, I think.

A tall, slim tattooed Indian guy with a dead gaze shows up. “Tess, Right? Full sleeve tattoos? Where’ve you been?” I'm surprised he remembers me. I have jacket on which covers the tats.

            “Working in New Orleans,” I say.  Which is true, but I’ve also been giving hand jobs to guys around town on the side, making my splash on sites like Eros and Redbook. I've been doing some Domme gigs for a transvestite named “Sweetie” in Riverside; Getting handy with butt plugs for a gaggle of  Marines and Airforce guys in Double Tree hotels near LAX. 

It makes sense. 

            I’ve worked at the  local titty bars. Cheetahs, which is like a group home for whiny suicide girls. After stripping for seven hours, I’d walk with under two hundred bucks and drive a couple of tanked strippers home. Cheetah’s is incestuous. I'd listen to the girls cry over the boys they were fucking who happened to be my friends from AA. There's too much hunger and too few clients at Cheetahs. The Russian thugs had money but never liked me. They liked tiny blonds. Hustling dances felt like extracting teeth  just for mere  survival money. I had to pull out all the stops. I’d started running again, but no matter how far I ran, or what diet I tried, my body kept aging and I kept stripping.

            “Come sign some paperwork,” the Indian guy says. I'm to be pleased but a boulder crashes in my stomach instead.

I'm here again and doing this.

 No audition, I think.

 I recognized a couple girls from Pleasures, the club that got shut down in Pasadena when I was in the hospital with Typhoid Fever. They thought it was spinal meningitis. I was quarantined and in grad school. It was winter.

 A thick chick with chocolate brown bangs and bad teeth glared at me and whispered to the girl next to her.  A blonde girl with a tiny waist and wide hips named Page ran up and hugged me. She finally got busted and fired for being underage a year ago. “You turned twenty-one,” I said. Page starred in my masturbation fantasies for months. There was something obscene about the way she spread her legs on the pole with a permanently stoned expression on her face.

Strippers circle the same clubs and end up in the same places to act out the same emotional damage. But, no matter the damage, Page could follow me anywhere forever and I’ll always be thrilled to see her.

I signed the pile of papers, liability stuff that released the club of any responsibility. For example, if the dancers give hand jobs or blowjobs in the VIP section, get caught and hauled to jail, it’s the dancers fault and the club accepts no responsibility. There’s no discussion of said paperwork just a creepy lonely best described by Lorrie Moore: “It’s every man for himself out here.”

This would be the 7th the place I started stripping since my Mom’s last cancer in 2007.

            “You have to change your name,” the Indian manager with black eyes said. “There’s another Tess.”

Names are important for strippers and hobos. A name can be a hex. Lucky is the perfect stripper name, but it’s always taken so I never get the name “Lucky.” Like hobos, strippers believe in the magic weight of names and can change them as needed. We’re drifters who never go far from the railroad tracks.

I’d been “Angel” in Pasadena when my mom was dying and I never made more than $180 with “Angel” at Pleasures. I chucked the name “Angel” at the stuffy, dive strip club run by Mongols called “Nicolas” out in Commerce the night the Mexican chicks stole my money and my Dior sunglasses.  They hated me and I was one of two white girls there. I didn’t speak Spanish and felt like something horrible was about to happen every time I entered “Nicolas.” Usually I got yelled at.

I sampled other names; variations that sounded like “Angel.” I tried “Angelina” and “Rachel,” but they didn’t stick. Needing new magic, I settled on the one syllable “Tess,” Raymond Carver’s wife, a literary reference to remind me where I’m going. 

 The manager stared past me and into the mirror. I’d never seen eyes that black.

“Candace” I said. “Candace” is a variation of “Candy, “which I’ve used in New Orleans. I have an armful of candy tattoos. I made a lot of cash with “Candace.” It’s playful with a flirty hiss at the end that implies tennis and cheerleading camp. It’s Candy plus Ass, which is never bad.

Club Cocoon is flat, dark and red. It has a wall with partitioned seats where the lap dances occur along the side in cubicles that imply corporate cubbyhole but are more like horse stalls.  On the floor are round black plastic tables and plush velvet chairs that face the stage. The stage is too small but it has a platform and a nice long pole. Dancers can be topless on the platform. When I worked at Cocoon before, we couldn’t let the guys touch us during a dance, but I noticed groping in the stalls.

The guy I’ve been dating pulled away and it feels like rejection punching me in the face. I haven’t eaten today. Food is dirt. I haven’t slept. I haven’t showered. The flirting has come to an abrupt halt. Plans were made then destroyed. It’s like being devoured then thrown up.  He’d rather eat ice cream than feel close.

My stripper name should be “Ice Cream.”

Its complicated by the fact that I’m prancing around in a blue lace bikini offering my body to whoever walks into Cocoon tonight.

I walked up to the same DJ and the same bald bartender that were here a year ago. They asked one question, “Where’ve you been?” like a bad dream.

The lighting is so dim and red it shaves off ten of my thirty-nine years and barely shows the zit on my forehead. The woman who’s the new ‘Tess” is a spindly blonde girl who’s drunk and grinning, but there’s nothing happy there. She’s standing at the bar in a red bikini with her arms above her head, dancing or falling over, but it’s nothing like surrender. It’s angry, reckless.

I wonder if her man pulled away today too and I want to take her away from the bar, but I don’t. Tess grabs a man in a sports jacket by the hair and yanks hard, “Where are you going?” It’s the best question I’ve heard all night. I want to scream it into the mirror behind the stage. I wanted tell her, “I’m not going anywhere,” but I know better.

If Tess was in the street she would be killed by an oncoming car and not care. She would laugh at the sight of her own blood.

John is here. He’s unhappily married and likes to know things about all the dancers. He getting drunk and he holds onto me and tells me he loves me about ten times. I think he believes it. So, I take his money and hold him and look at pictures of his 5-year old daughter. I tell him he’s a good father. I hug him for a long time because I don’t know what else to do. I’m by far the only sober person in the building.

The man I want is ignoring me tonight while strangers grope me for money.  

A cute fat girl whispers in a guy’s ear. There are negotiations made. Connections. The main difference between stripping and a marketing lunch at The Four Seasons is the lighting and dress code.

There is one beautiful girl here and I watch her all night. She’s a redhead with a flower in her hair and pale skin, a smile that trump’s Marilyn Monroe, and lethal curves. She’s got a childish high voice, hinting at a little girl, not a woman at all. I would take her home in a heartbeat, except for that voice. She has the kind of butt that jiggles when slapped and she’s dancing for two Mexican drug dealers in the VIP section. They’ve got a pile of singles the size of bricks and they’re tossing them up in the air, making rain. 

I join her on the platform and dance for the two men who sit with their arms crossed in front of them. When I sit next to the older one, I touch his back. He looks at me like he’s going to shoot me in the face and points at the middle of the floor, where he wants me to dance, away from him. When he talks to me later, he will offer to film me in his porn and I will decline.

 Around 1AM, I check my phone for the fifth time for a sign. Nothing.

There are bees in my ribcage from too much coffee and it’s too muggy to sleep in New Orleans.

 The blisters on my ankles have all popped and the band-aids slip off from the sweat when I’m on stage. I strut through smoke until I’m waved over to a group of guys and soon I’m being passed around like peanuts at a Tupperware party. This week, it’s a Doctors convention and they have some play money to write off.

If your husband or wife is a Doctor and they’re going to a convention, you need to know this:

They are having an affair with their assistant.

They are groping naked chicks in a strip club.

They are drunk and possibly in a blackout.

They are having an affair with the person at work they talk to and go to conventions with.

I got into an altercation with two of them while on stage during my three-song set on “The Bruiser“ at Ricks.

“It’s not easy to get up here and do this. Stop acting like a petulant five year-old,” I scolded. I waggled a finger. I tried to convince the floor manager to throw them out, but the floor manager was a small pale teenager who liked me but not enough to risk a punch in the nose by two drunk doctors.

I felt the psychotic stripper shame.  I thought of sending the two drunk doctors some drinks but I didn’t.

I need a night off.

Last night, I met a Doctor named Todd who wore a linen shirt and sat with his extremely drunk blonde wife. They were both Doctors. Her name was Michelle and she spread her rubbery legs while I danced on her for Todd.  I pulled her hair. I licked her neck. She gave me the green light so Todd said, “Let’s go up to the champagne room.”

Champagne room: It’s on the second floor with it’s own bar and little private rooms with black beaded curtains. I’d never done a VIP at Ricks. It’s five hundred fucking dollars for 30 minutes in a private room with a pole.

Todd’s arms were well muscled and he had a canker sore on his lip. He was a surgeon specializing in gastro intestinal cancers like the one my mom died of, so we talked about the whipple surgery and life expectancy of bile duct cancer patients while I sat naked on his lap and sucked on his wife, Michelle’s nipples. 

She had a fresh boob job and maybe her nipples lost sensation cause she seemed bored. She decided to sit on Todd’s cock and was wearing a sundress so it looked innocent enough should any security guy or cocktail waitress pass by. Who am I to stop a woman from fucking her husband? I sat behind her and felt her up. She didn't mind.

 Todd told me a story: “My dad fell off a ladder and broke two ribs. When we did a cat-scan, they found a mass on his pancreas. He had early stages of pancreatic cancer. I operated on him myself and removed it,” he said.

“I figured if he was gonna die, he was gonna die in my hands,” he said.I related to this. My mom died by my hands.

I let Michelle kiss me some more. I missed my mom.

A guy drove over eleven hours to see me at Rick’s Cabaret.

He said I’d changed his life when we talked a month ago at Visions.

He said he filed for a divorce because of our talk.

On the eleven hour drive from Texas to New Orleans, my client’s passenger had alcohol poisoning so they had to pulled over a few times so the friend could hurl on the side of the freeway.

 Next day: May 4th

I tried to leave New Orleans.

I showed up at the airport this morning and stood in line, but my name wasn’t listed on my departing flight to Los Angeles.

 “What do you mean I’m not on that flight?” I asked a shiny black woman who just got back from her fifteen-minute break, according to her.

  “What’s the date on your ticket?” she asked. She opened a drawer, pulled out a pen.

The date was a week from today. Idiot. I used to book flights for my personal assistant gigs. Now I couldn't even book my own. She stared at me.

“Are there any seats left?” I asked.

"The only seat is a first class ticket for $752," she said. I stepped away from the counter.

I called my Dad at his office, where he has always been from 6:30AM until 5 every day, for the last forty years.

“I’m in New Orleans at the airport. I made a stupid mistake. I booked a ticket for the wrong day. Will you help me?"

“Yes. I can put in on my card. Who do I call?" 

Wait. The Dad answer has always been No. Today, the Dad answer is Yes and for some reason, this made me cry. There were lines of travelers all around me who booked the right flight with their luggage. They watched me fall apart. I sensed their disgust.

My Dad left when I was ten. He’s a Republican, Christian, attorney.

I’m a stripper. A radical, liberal, over-educated escort. A muff-diving, Domme disappointment.

There’s a lot of silence between us and a lot of debate. We agree to play tennis where he slaughters me on the court.

“I have the cash, Dad, just nothing in my account,” I said. What I mean is, asking for help feels like death.

“I’ll use my card. Give me the number.” Delta claimed there was never a payment accepted for a ticket. I called them three times.

The plane left without me on it. My relationship with my father in a nutshell:

 I call my Dad.  He says he will show up. He tries to help me, but it doesn’t work out. I manage.

I ask the man I’m dating for help because he had mentioned that he had tons of frequent flyer miles; enough to travel the world twice, I recall. 

Hey. In a bind. Need a favor. Can you talk?

Yeah.

I booked a flight for the wrong day. I’m trying to get home. I only have cash. Can I use some miles and pay you for them?

They’re on American.

I’m standing in front of American right now.

I’d rather give you money. I want to use my miles for something big.

Guys I date in a nutshell: I want something they have no intention of giving me. This is both intoxicating and bone crushing, depending on my progress.

I never expect the guy to be hip or under forty. When they show up, they’re usually 50 or 60, married and fat with big brown and red moles on their protruding bellies and grisly hair in their ears.

This guy Arron, had been texting me for a couple days for an appointment. I waited for him to show up in the courtyard, near the loft where I take the guys up to the forth floor. He hinted at BDSM and wanted to talk about it in person. They sense it about me; that I’m open to kink. It must be how I present myself in my ads with all the tattoos in the open.

 I was on the phone with my motorcycle shop. They said my bike needed a new battery and it would cost more, when a thirty-year old hipster sat down next to me.

“I must be Tess,” I said. My usual ice breaker. The hipster lit a cigarette. He had a beard and some faded full sleeve tattoos. Heavy silver jewelry. A briefcase, blackberry and an I phone. Vans.

“I bought a Ducati from a guy then immediately crashed it,” he said. After he finished the smoke, he followed me into the elevator and up to the 4^th floor to room 405. Down a skinny hallway.

“Mind if I smoke some pot?” he asked while he took off his shirt, inside.

“Smoke away,” I said. I took off my clothes and watched him light up a joint. I stood a few feet away. I don't like smoke.

“I always want more of everything,” he said.

“Sounds familiar.”

    I was coming up on fifteen years of sobriety. And although the obsession to use drugs and alcohol are behind me, the obsession to change how I’m feeling is still something that drives me. I exercise obsessively. I chew my lip until it bleeds.  I plan my next sugar binge.  I daydream about being somewhere else, with someone else, anywhere else than right here.

It’s strange when they’re peers. It''s odd to take money from a guy who dresses like me and rides motorcycles; A guy who gets wheat grass shots at the same place I do; A guy I would consider dating under different circumstances; If I wasn’t already dating someone that I’m into. Someone with lots of years sober.

He told on himself. They do that with strippers and escorts. The bra comes off and the secrets flow out like smoke.

He ‘s been lying to everyone in his life, it turns out. He’s supposedly sober. I was pretty sure I knew his boss after hearing about his job. The lines between us intersected, turning this massage client inside out and demolishing the wall between client and friend. The line between newcomer and seasoned AA chic. I thought of sending him on his way, but the fact remained: I needed the three hundred bucks.

Guys seek out women on the Internet because of a sexual impulse; but it’s about something else. It’s a clandestine arrangement where they can hide out and confess. I’m the opposite of a priest; but I played the role of one. I listened. Then, he asked for my advice, which was weird.

I told him that compartmentalization isn’t something that you can sustain. I told him about secrets and how I always used to hide what I did from my lovers and now I’m free and clear about what I’m doing for money and what I’m not doing for money. I have a personal life and a professional life and the two are separated by gossamer thread. I have to be grounded in reality and in my sobriety. I don’t live in my fantasies. I can't afford to.

  I’m not confused about who I love.

 I’m not currently invested in scaring anyone or protecting anyone from who I really am. I’m free. I think. But I say,

 “The only way out is to just get sober again."

He had bite marks on his neck and a cut on his ear. He had a huge hickey on his hip. He lives with his lover. He showed me pictures from his I phone. She's beautiful, young.

 “fighting or fucking?”

  “Yep,” he said.

I teased his cock while he took a conference call and I charged him for that time.

When he left, I remembered how long it took me to get the courage to tell my secrets. I heard somewhere that when you’re stingy with your feelings, they grow cold.  I don’t want to be cold or unfeeling anymore. It’s boring and lonely. But, how do you know when you’ve gone too far? And why do feelings feel like death?

How will I know if I’m emotionally scarred and if that happens, will it already be too late?