Thank You, John, page 10
★
At home, my mom and nephew were, mercifully, fast asleep. This was a relief. Around the two of them, I wanted to appear imbued with the joyous, elusive magic of Santa Claus, loaded with gifts and mystery. We’re not precisely sure how you’re doing it, I wanted them to think, but we sure love you for it! Bianca, ensconced in her room, didn’t notice my arrival. I’d talk to her, but after I cleansed any trace of John off me.
I caught a whiff of John’s cologne as I took off my jacket. I pressed my face into my coat and my scarf to find the source—not there—then lifted my hair to my nose. Bingo. The further I undressed myself the more I could smell John on my skin. Sometimes I’d leave the strip club smelling of cigar smoke and a cocktail of body sprays. I’d find traces of someone else’s glitter in unexpected places. Inside my socks. My armpits. My underwear. But I’d never felt contaminated the way I did right then. It was so singular. I knew exactly where the smell originated and knew exactly when it had transferred onto me. I began to cry. Because I had left my house a woman who had done many things with her body for money but never something so extreme. Never sex. And I had returned reeking of a woman who had.
In the shower I scrubbed until my skin was flushed. I filled my palm with body wash over and over and circled the loofah in between my legs. The anxiety was back. I shouldn’t have done this, I thought. I have ruined my life. I have ruined my chance of ever finding love. No one will ever know the full me again. I can’t get the stench off. I feel sick. What if the stress of this secret kills me? I hope no one saw me at the mall. Please, god, tell me no one saw me.
I cupped the back of my head with my damp palms. My thoughts were all over the place: how I had been ostracized as a teenage dancer, my ex-girlfriend from that era talking bad about me behind my back, how my friend’s massage business had all but become her perceived identity. I thought about my dad’s whole life of physical labor. My mom so often working two jobs. How much their bodies suffered for financial need. I wanted to weep. My body felt used. Soiled. I felt pathetic. I liked to believe this was fated, but why, of all the destinies available, was mine sugaring? My mind turned the wheel of the kaleidoscope. I thought of the cash, I thought of no debt, the fact that I wouldn’t have to return to Penthouse. I wrote the first line of a story in my head, “I met John during my Wednesday night shift at Penthouse.”
★
After my shower, I cracked Bianca’s door and was assaulted by her stench. Corn chips and hair oil. This smell was familiar. This was home. “Are you awake?”
With Bianca’s permission, I tiptoed to her bed, mindful not to step on all the discarded clothes and snack wrappers. I shoved a pile of (clean?) laundry out of the way and made a spot for myself on her bed.
“Drumroll, please!” I said. As my sister pattered her prickly knees, I slung the IKEA gift card at her. “Two hundred and fifty bucks!”
“New dresser, I’m coming for you!”
Bianca already had a six-drawer dresser packed full of too-tight clothes. It also served as her TV stand and a place to hold all her dishes. “What are you going to do with this old one?” I asked.
“Move it over to that wall,” she said pointing to the left.
“You won’t have any floor space.” I meant this literally. Her room was small. If she had two dressers and a queen-size bed in there all the furniture would touch. “You won’t even be able to open the bottom drawers. They’ll be blocked by the bed.”
“I’ll just use the top ones,” she said, like this was obvious.
I shook my head and considered telling her that she needed to downsize. Adopt a minimalist mindset. That was something rich people did. One in, one out. But I had more important things to talk about. If there was anyone I could share the explicit details of my night with, it was my sister.
Boys flocked to her. She was always confident in her body and sense of self, so she explored her sexuality freely and began calling herself a “slut.” Bianca used the word proudly, in response to classmates using the word to put her down. A self-declared victory in a prudish world that treated any real fun like a sin. My sister and I didn’t grow up with any religion in our home, but the culture all around us communicated the same notion that sexuality was shameful. She didn’t buy into it. The mainstream never represented her anyway, so she didn’t feel as constricted as I did by it.
Just recently, I’d written a flash story about a memory of Bianca, who, at thirteen, ushered three boys into her bedroom while wearing, unironically, a Winnie the Pooh nightgown:
Though the dress appeared innocent her accessories told a different story. From wrist to elbow her arm was a full ROY G. BIV rainbow of jelly bracelets.
It was 2002. Jelly sex bracelets were all the rage. Teens swapped the bands for sexual favors and each color and variety (solid, glow-in-the-dark, glitter) had a secret meaning. As far as I knew Bianca had collected one in each shade aside from solid black, which was the dirtiest of them all—intercourse. This, she was sure, made her the sluttiest possible virgin.
As Bianca prepared to triple-up on lime green (finger fun) and purple (kissing), I stood in the hallway with my hands on my hips glaring at her.
“You better not tell Mom,” Bianca warned me.
“Or what, ya big slut?”
“I’ll tell everyone we know you still play with Barbies and that you’re a prude, closeted lesbian.”
“I remember that day,” she said now, fondly. “But I don’t remember the nightgown.”
I laughed but was quickly brought back to reality when my sister ran her finger up the bridge of my nose. “Goddamn,” she said. “John didn’t tell you that you need to pluck your unibrow?”
“No,” I said, aghast. “He didn’t.”
We set up for our usual system. The aesthetician wore a camping headlamp and sat pretzel-style with a pillow in her lap. Because the treatment was free, the customer forfeited her right to complain. Once arranged, my sister plucked my eyebrows and asked, “So, tell me, what was it like to bang a dude again?”
I was happy to answer her question. I hadn’t slept with a cis man in five years, so of course this was on her mind. I, too, had been thinking about it, worried the sex would hurt, or I’d be terrible (I probably was). But, as I undressed in the hotel bathroom, I found myself most terrified of the possibility of John murdering me. I braced myself throughout the entire experience, but after surviving the night relatively unscathed, I realized that John’s anatomy had nothing to do with how violating the sex felt; it was the idea itself that felt violating. I had arrived at the agonizing moment in which selling someone access to my body was the best way forward. But if the person I was sleeping with was safe, then what did it matter if they had a dick in the face of what I was doing?
“I don’t think it’s a big deal,” my sister said, trying to soothe me. “I’ve fucked so many dudes that I didn’t even like. I wish I’d been paid for it.”
Bianca had a point. I’d slept with people I borderline despised. And for what? The experience? Aside from cash, John was no worse than the first boy I’d ever given a blow job.
“Remember José?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Bianca said, laughing. “Yuck.”
In the summer of 2005, when I was thirteen years old, I had been dangerously close to entering high school without experiencing even a closed-mouth peck. My relationship with my body was still fraught, but after two years of eating nothing but Lean Cuisines and low-fat Yoplaits, I was—for the first time in my life—considered thin. While this had greatly helped in my ability to make “cool” and “pretty” friends, I knew that to establish concrete social cred with them, I needed a few sexual experiences under my belt. My favorite Alanis Morissette song mentioned going down on someone in a theater, and to feel closer to my idol, while upping my social status, I pinky swore with myself that before freshman year I would receive my first kiss and go down on someone. Preferably in a theater.
That summer I was consumed with studying the art of oral sex. I turned to a few sexperts for help, but my sister and her friends were lazy teachers and would say things like, “It can’t be taught with words, you’ll figure it out by doing it.” Left to my own devices, I would stroll to the corner gas station and flip through magazines advertising sex tips on the covers. I read articles like “The 14 Best Blow Job Secrets No One Ever Told You” and “Oral Sex Guide: What Women Really Want!” over and over while between magazine racks. My weekly allowance was three lousy dollars but, in pursuit of my goal, I spent that money on two-packs of flavored condoms and oranges, avoiding eye contact with the store clerk. At home I’d practice what drove men wild on my hairbrush and strengthen my tongue on a split orange.
As summer passed, I abandoned the idea of meeting someone organically and asked my sister, a girl with men lined up around the block, to scout a person who would please let me give them head. While I would’ve preferred a girl, I told her, I was desperate and open to anyone. A pimply boy named José was the only person who agreed to do the favor. He was a fifteen-year-old sophomore who’d actually been interested in my sister, but he was also desperate and open to anyone. For further Alanis effect, I asked my sister to drop us off at the closest movie theater, Century 16, where we each bought a matinee ticket to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As soon as the lights dimmed, José asked me to make out. I shook my head no. I didn’t want to waste my first kiss on a stranger. “I’m just here to go down on you,” I told him.
“That asshole told everyone at school my blow job was ‘whack,’” I said to Bianca.
“Well, look at you now,” my sister said, beaming. “A professional.”
★
As I lay on the couch that night, I thought about José. Specifically, about the fact that our “date” had taken place at Century 16. A movie theater that had since become the site of the 2012 Batman Dark Knight shooting. I had not been at Century 16 the night of the attack; I was, however, familiar with the location—as were many people I knew—and in the days following the shooting I would scroll through GoFundMe links for my old classmates, my sister’s coworkers, my friend’s boyfriend. Each of whom had been badly wounded. Each having received emergency surgeries and were (what came as no shock to many of us from Aurora) uninsured and unable to afford their hospital bills.
The shooter’s trial took place three years later in the Spring of 2015 when I was twenty-three. Six months before I met John. For three months I did not look away from the trial coverage: “Jurors Hear Audio of Screams During 9-1-1 Call.” “5 Chilling Pages from the Aurora Mass Shooter’s Diary.” “Shooter Describes What He Saw and Felt as He Entered the Aurora Theater, Began Firing.”
I felt like I knew too much, yet I couldn’t stop myself from clicking another link, watching another news story, reading another article. I soon knew every move the shooter made the night of the attack. How he had stood outside the theater, peeking through the cracked, emergency exit door, thinking, Am I really going to do this? How he had called a crisis hotline as a last attempt to stop himself. How the call had been disconnected, so he walked in, guns blazing. I saw diagrams of where he threw his tear gas grenades. And then I saw diagrams of where every bullet made contact. I began dreaming about the shooting over and over, and the more I knew, the more gruesome, more precise the dreams became.
This would eventually blur into my waking life. I could be sitting in class, someone would reach for their backpack a little too quickly, and I’d picture the shooter standing at the doorway, aiming an AR-15. I would pace the halls to shake the image away, confused as to why I felt so distressed. I had been safe at home when the shooting happened, so why such a visceral response? I stopped feeling safe in public places. Images began to override my own thoughts.
I had no money to see a therapist or any health insurance. I found a place where interns saw clients on a sliding scale, but the waitlist was hopeless. I turned to Google with questions like, How to stop intrusive thoughts? and How to stop thinking about a traumatic event? I read through articles citing exposure therapy and decided to conduct my own experiment. My plan was to be somewhere very safe, somewhere I could be sure of this safety, and then I would confront my fear in a banal way. For me it was looking at the scariest photos of the shooter I could find. I chose my mother’s couch (mostly that was my only option), turned on all the lights in the living room and kitchen, wrapped myself in a blanket, loaded the CBS article “Powerful Photos Released from Aurora Theater Shooting,” and, like the exposure therapy articles had cautioned, prepared myself for my body’s reaction to the perceived threat (accelerated heart rate, tremors, sweaty palms). When it began, I repeated reassurances that I was okay. “It is September of 2015. The shooting was three years ago. I am safe. He is in prison. He cannot hurt anyone again.”
Eventually, after repeating this exercise for weeks, it worked. I stopped seeing the shooter everywhere I looked. I stopped dreaming about that night.
Now, as I stared at the living room ceiling, thinking about that theater and José, I thought, too, about John. How my mind had been running in circles all night after seeing him. If I wasn’t diligent with navigating the anxiety, my brain might get stuck. I knew that sex work (and John) could haunt me, regardless of whether I kept it a secret from everyone else. “I am safe,” I whispered to myself. “I am at home in my mother’s apartment. I did not get hurt at the Marriott. My body is safe. My body did not change tonight. My value is not gone.
6
Massages with Mommy
John, I was soon happy to discover, was a deep-sea creature of habit. After that first night at the Marriott, our arrangement sank quickly into a routine. We were months into the arrangement and there had only been two wrenches thrown into our relationship. The first by John when, during our third pleasure session, he could no longer hold erections while wearing condoms. This, blessedly, resulted in “home runs” being taken off the table.
I was making $1,200 for this exact routine: Once a week John and I would undress ourselves separately on opposite sides of our hotel room and meet at the foot of the bed where I’d come down on my knees and give John a few minutes of what he called “a blow jobby.” John often spoke in a baby voice during sex and would say absurd things like, “Not that I’m counting, but you just set my world record for weeks-in-a-row getting a blow job” (three), “I’ve never had my balls sucked. You’re popping my cherry,” and “Thank you so much, sweetie. I know this is icky.”
I had been taken aback by John’s use of the word icky. It was apt, of course. It was icky. It was the ickiest sex I’d ever had. And emotionally, these were some of the ickiest moments I’d ever lived through. But I was still surprised by John’s recognition. It was the most honest thing he’d ever said to me. A tenderness bloomed inside my heart, but then promptly died when John added, “Now, suck my dick on the bed.” This was always the next part of our routine.
From there, we would have a long, wet, sloppy kiss. During which I often thought of two Labradors slurping water from a bowl. When John was ready, he would pull out a bottle of K-Y jelly, signifying that it was time to use our hands. This was (one of) the worst part(s), because it included John’s wrinkled fingers touching my body.
Whenever I’d researched the question What is the sex like with your sugar daddy, I never found the answers I was looking for. Even responses on my tried-and-true Reddit thread were nondescript. Sex with older men is great! the babies always seemed to write. They know what they’re doing. They know where to find the clitoris. They know what a clitoris is.
I found it far-fetched that none of these girls loathed the sex with their sugar daddies. No one even claimed to feel neutral about it. There was no fear on the threads. No disgust. No moral juggling with themselves. I wondered if this was some attempt at claiming empowerment. That there was some cultural agreement made that for sex work to not be gross or victimizing, it had to be the total opposite. The sex had to be so good. Or sex workers themselves had to love having sex enough that they couldn’t believe the luck of monetizing off doing it. If you love your job, you never work a day in your life, kind of thing.
If someone had ever asked me, What is the sex like with your sugar daddy? I would’ve said it was hard, gross, painful, embarrassing. That each week I’d lain in those sheets pretending I’d been dunked into Novocain. How I had been grateful for my mind’s iron resolve but felt terrified of the damage this might be doing to my mind-body connection. I worried these pleasure sessions would taint my ability to be present in sex ever again. That being touched from here on out would sit in my body as a violation. To combat this, I’d write out conversations between my brain (we need this to thrive) and body (I still hate being compromised in this exchange) and refused to ever have a real orgasm with John. I would simply time how long he had been touching me, and when a believable number of minutes passed, I’d fake a moan and shiver, and move us quickly into the next, and final, part of our routine—the hand job.
After each meeting was over, I’d sit in my car in the parking lot, and I’d count the money John paid me bill by bill. I’d smell the cash, press my finger into their bank-pressed stiffness, making the experience of getting paid as visceral as possible, so my body understood why we had done it.
The second wrench was thrown by me. That spring, I’d requested that John and I start skipping dinners and instead “just meet up for some fun.” I’d blamed this change on being swamped with schoolwork, but the reason was more complex.
One afternoon, a lecture in my Crime and Poverty class just so happened to be discussing the criminalization of prostitution. “Why do you think these women risk their lives for this kind of work?” the professor had asked, before pausing for us students to consider. If I hadn’t thought my classmates would shame me, I might’ve shared that, for me, the consistent income of sex work was incredible. With sugaring I could now chew my food with all my teeth, pay my university fees out of pocket, fill my gas tank, and all the while, still have the capacity to see life beyond it. I was not living in survival mode anymore. I could not imagine going back.
