‘You ready, boy?’ asks Sunny.
‘Ready for what?’ I ask.
‘Real Money.’ Sunny smiles.
That week I deep-fried about a billion chickens. I made seventy-eight dollars after taxes. That’s chicken scratch. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I know I’m ready for some Real Money.
Sunny tells me he’s got rich, generous, horny friends. These friends, he explains, will pay good money to party with a boy like me. I can make the Real Money and have all the pussy I can shake a stick at. Not that I’m anxious to shake a stick at any pussy, but he certainly got my attention.
I started having sex when I was thirteen, and I took to it like a well-watered carrot in fertile earth. I’m fluent in Sex. I take direction well. I love making women feel good, and I’ve learned the importance of a slow hand, a sweet mouth, and paying attention.
I hear destiny calling my name.
3.
MY HYMEN & A WEDGWOOD EGG
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
—LILY TOMLIN
FRANNIE POPPED my professional cherry. She was my first sex job, and she turned me on to a lot of work. It’s a word-of-mouth business, and between her word and my mouth, I did very well by Frannie.
Driving my motorbike down the palm tree streets that line the colossal estates, I feel right at home: an exiled caterpillar reborn a badboy butterfly. I’m rich and big in this world, an All-American success, rising from Dumpster fisher to humpster of the rich and famous.
I park my bike down the street as instructed, and steal, nerves jangling, through Frannie’s reargate, past the fountain sculpture of a fat angel, and into the former servants’ quarters that’s now Frannie’s World.
Sunny had instructed me like a black queeny ’Enry ’Iggins:
Don’t be late.
Don’t rip anybody off.
Don’t speak unless spoken to.
Be clean.
Say as little as possible.
When in doubt say even less.
The customer’s always right.
If something seems weird it probably is.
GET THE MONEY UP FRONT!
Sunny made me look him in the eyes and repeat: GET THE MONEY UP FRONT! He calls the customers tricks. It’s my job to trick them.
* * *
Marie, a senior girl, is teaching me about the hypnotic power of cunnilingus. I’m fifteen. I’m in love with Gina, my sweet-hearted girlfriend who’s finally letting me go both down on and into her. I’m also friends with Sheila, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks girl who heaps massive affection on me if I’m good to her, which is easy cuz she’s funny smart and nice. I know if the girls find out about one another, the whole thing’ll collapse. So I make sure they don’t. I like the secret life. It makes the sex more exciting. The silence is familial and familiar.
Very soon the synapses that fire like copulation cannons during fornication become synonymous with love. Replace happiness with pleasure. The whole thing is great training for being a chicken.
I tramp up Frannie’s stairs in my testicle-hugging elephant-bells and painted-on GRUNT T, hoping for the best and expecting the worst. Will I be a loverstudguy or a houseboy? There’s desperation in my strut.
Entering Frannie’s too-blue bedroom with the four-poster bed, stuffy flowerprint couch, and print of what I now realize was Monet’s Water Lilies, I tremor like a scared little new boy sent to do a man’s job.
Frannie’s mophandle, pipecleaner, stickfigure thin. Roasted chestnut hair cut in a stylish post-pageboy. Huge ruby ringed by diamonds on her long spindle of a finger. Kindling twig arms. Perfectly manicured nails the same color as the red wine she imbibes in thin persistent sips. Designer sweatpants and over-priced sweatshirt that swallows her whole. Tony sunglasses resting on bony sandstone cheekbones. Exotic sandals engulfing emaciated X-ray toes.
Frannie’s neither the nightmare nor the wet dream. She’s just Frannie, perched like an anorexic bird in the plumage of her couch, motioning to the Louis Quatorze dressing table with the inlaid mirror where a crisp new hundred-dollar bill luxuriates. My heart skips rope. I try to look Bondcalmsuave as I pick it up and pocket it. It feels good hot on my thigh, a prize for the desire I arouse, cold hard cash evidence that I’m somebody cuz somebody wants to pay to have sex with me.
Frannie seems to be going through all the motions of being a rich woman, but there’s something not quite all there about her. She doesn’t say much. She wants me to talk. She’ll hint later in our relationship that something happened to her. Something horrible and weird. Something that would make you be not quite all there.
It’s a vacancy I would grow very familiar with in the world of industrial sex.
As Frannie listens to me I wonder why this pretty rich baby would hire a whore. A seventeen-year-old boy whore at that. Months later I’ll ask her about the horrible weird thing she hinted at, trying to get my mind around the whole thing. She’ll look at me sharply and snap, ‘I don’t pay you for that!’ I’ll feel like dirty vermin. But I’ll be a professional. I’ll assassinate the part of myself that cares.
Whatever.
My mom’s driving the family’s faux-wood-paneled station wagon. I’m fifteen, riding shotgun. We’re having a pleasant chat, about nothing really, thisandthat, just easy talk. My mother’s been through quite a bit of liberation by now. Her consciousness has left the kitchen and is on its way up the stairs to the master bedroom. What it will do there is anyone’s guess.
She and I are transitioning from son-husband, mother-wife, to real friends.
I don’t know exactly how we got here, but we’re talking about girls I’ve had sex with. Mom’s curious, I can tell. She wants to know, in a sweet, inquisitive way, if I like it. I tell her I like it very much. I ask her if she likes it. She phumphs.
But the can of worms is open. I can see the worms wiggling around inside the can, and I’m not about to pass up this opportunity to get them out and play with them.
Frannie wants to know about all the girls I’ve been with: their breasts, their legs, their bottoms, their vaginas, their clitorides, how they smell, what noises they make, how they like it: Spare no detail, and use all the naughty words. It’s my theory that she really wants to be with a woman, but I’m not about to tell her that. Don’t want to queer a good thing.
Frannie doesn’t know my professional hymen is still intact. And I don’t tell her. She instructs me to take my clothes off. Many many many times in my chicken career, women want me naked while they’re fully clothed. Some people don’t like being naked. I do.
When I catch myself in the mirror, seventeen-year-old hardbody stomach, pitprop legs, zero body fat, and power hands, I’m seduced by the glitter of my own flesh.
On the first day of my rookie season, Frannie gives me excruciatingly explicit directions in her droll monotone, detailing exactly what she wants me to do and how she wants me to do it. I’m ready. I was born for this work. I want to be good so bad I can taste it.
Frannie slips her slippers off, hunkers undercover, then wiggles out of her pants. Never removes her sweatshirt. She lies on her back, eyes clamped, legs closed tight, in the corpse position.
I crawl in under from the bottom of the bed, a manchild-beast creeping between her legs, the Silence like a sweet kissing cousin. Then I pleasure her as I love myself in the old-fashioned way.
Just as she ordered, to the letter.
I’m playing the part of a hundred-dollar-an-hour lover-studguy. Only after a while I’m not playing the character – I am the character. Feels good to pleasure the mysterious and rich Frannie. I do it for a very long time, whispering underbreath what a sexynaughtyfilthybaby she is.
As per her request.
* * *
‘Do you and Dad ever do oral sex?’ I ask.
‘Oh, no … no, no …’ My mom shakes her head.
‘So, you’ve never done sixty-nine?’ I ask.
She looks at me as if I’d said, �
�How many brillig did the flipper orangutan?’
‘Do you even know what sixty-nine is?’ I ask.
‘No, not really,’ says my mom.
My mom’s never been afraid to say she doesn’t know, and I love that about her.
‘Simultaneous oral stimulation of the genitals.’
I read that somewhere.
I can see my mom putting it all together in her head like a mathematical equation. Simultaneous + Oral + Stimulation + Genitals = 69.
‘Oh, no no no!’ Mom’s emphatic.
‘Ma, you really gotta get out more, you’re missing the party,’ I say with a smile. She gives me the smile back.
Little do we know.
Coma Girl’s my nickname for Frannie. She doesn’t move a muscle. Doesn’t make a sound. I know she’s excited because her body does all the things excited women’s bodies do: the swelling, the excreting, the hardening, and the melting. But she never moves a muscle.
She touches me on the ear with a finger, the signal for me to lie on my back while she crawls up on me, chest to chest, eyes tight shut. She wriggles so she’s right at the tip of me. I wrap a hand around the hard bones of her whippet-thin ribs.
Oh God, what am I doing? My power fades and I droop limply. I want to go home now. I can’t do this.
Change the record, boy!
A Beverly Hills babe’s paying you a hundred dollars for sex. You’re the loverstudguy. A smile slides across my face, and I’m the star of my own sex movie as I hear the soundtrack in my head—
‘Oh, baby … give it to me, you nasty little baby … you love it, don’t you, honey? Oh, baby, baby, baby.’
Suddenly the sixty-minute boy is back on the job.
Frannie grindgrindgrinds until her breath is short; then she hitches shallow gasps, followed by a couple of quick convulsions.
Then she disappears under the covers.
I’m supposed to close my eyes and count to ten. I close my eyes. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi … and when I get to ten I open my eyes. Frannie’s gone. Dread and anxiety have replaced her. Soiled, unclean, and filthy, I’m overwhelmed by the need to flee. Without even washing Frannie off me, I whip on my clothes, grab the twenty-dollar tip she left beneath the Wedgwood egg, and bolt out the door, head down, guts rumbling.
I kick my bike started, and gun it too hard, trying to get the roar to drown out the voice in my head that says how nasty I am. As I slam into gear and skid away, my rape aches. I shove it all down, and store it in my meat locker so it can feed on me later as the hole in my bucket gets a little bigger.
4.
SUPERFLY & PUPPYLOVE
You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.
—OSCAR WILDE
A HUGE BILLBOARD of the Marlboro Man roping a cow while sucking on a cigarette looms over the Hollywood Employment Agency on Sunset Boulevard. Sunny told me to show up in my grunt T with my nuthugging elephantbells at three o’clock on yet another perfect California Tuesday. I didn’t know it at the time, but Frannie was a test for me, and this is my reward: an invitation to the Show.
I walk through the door marked HOLLYWOOD EMPLOYMENT AGENCY. It’s a plain brown wrapper of an office, generic as a can of BEANS with beans printed on it. There’s no art on the walls of clowns or sailboats or a kitty hanging from a limb by his paws with HANG IN THERE! written under it; no Muzak Sound of Music; no watercooler to schmooze around; only one nearly invisible couch with one magazine on it and one desk with one phone and one secretary, who has a face you forget even as you’re looking at it.
I announce myself. I’m told to sit. No one else is in the waiting area. I pick up the magazine. It’s one of those women’s magazines with helpful tips on how to store leftovers and quizzes to see if you’re compatible with your painintheassbastard husband. I try to read it, but I can’t seem to penetrate its glossy surface.
What are you doing? Get the hell out. Now. No, man, you’re the loverstudguy, you’re here to get the Real Money. More pussy than you can shake a stick at. This is evil. Go call your mother and tell her you want to come home. Yeah, right. She told you to get lost, point-blank. They want to give you money for being hot. Shut the hell up and be an American.
* * *
‘What do you want me to be when I grow up?’ I ask my mom when I’m four. The question takes her by surprise. She stops being a housewife and thinks about it.
‘I don’t know,’ she answers.
By the time she was twenty-eight my mom had four children under the age of eight to wrangle into a smooth running unit, but every day she makes a point to spend time with each of us. They hadn’t invented the phrase ‘quality time,’ but my mother was already spending it with her kids.
‘What do you want me to be when I grow up?’ I ask my mom again, in the great tradition of four-year-olds who’ve asked the same question over and over and over for thousands of years.
‘I think you should do whatever makes you happy,’ says my mom.
Mr Hartley has a professional tan, a gray suit, and a desk neat as an anal-retentive pin. He looks like he really could be an employment counselor. He certainly doesn’t look like a chicken pimp.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ says Mr Hartley.
‘Well …’
Rule number four: Say as little as possible. Just look like ya gotta big dick, boy – Sunny’s voice rings in the bell jar of my head. I try to construct a well-endowed look on my face, but I’m afraid I look more constipated than hung.
‘… I go to Immaculate Heart College, and I’m a soccer player.’
That’s as close to large-penised as I can get.
Mr Hartley nods his head and studies me like I’m a Negro buck for sale at a slave auction. I’m surprised he doesn’t put his hands in my mouth and examine my teeth. But I don’t resent being evaluated like a slab of beef; I take it as a challenge to prove I’m prime cut.
‘I just want to assure you … that I’m extremely enthusiastic about working.’ I lean in and smile as I imagine having sex with Mr Hartley’s wife, and doing it better than him. ‘And I will do an excellent job.’
Mr Hartley’s caught off guard for a second, and I can see he’s the kind of guy who probably isn’t very good at sex. Odd that he’d find this job for himself. But the power in the room has shifted, and I have it.
‘Are there … any things you’re … uncomfortable with? For example, will you … work with men?’
Hmm. Maybe he thinks I was flirting with him. I imagine myself with a man in my mouth. Being in a man’s mouth. I’m uncomfortable.
‘Well, actually, I’m not really interested in working with men,’ I say.
‘Are you sure? Because I can get you a lot of work with men, and you wouldn’t have to do anything except let them pleasure you.’
Pleasure me? Doesn’t sound like pleasure to me. Makes me want to fly the chicken coop.
‘Hey, if you’re not comfortable with that, no problem. Our policy is very strict; we don’t ask anyone to do anything they’re not comfortable with. We’ve found our clients and our customers are served better this way. So tell me what you’re comfortable with.’
What sexual acts am I willing to perform for money that will keep me in my comfort zone? The voice that’s never wrong is screaming at me to walk and never look back. But I can’t move. My brain and my legs are playing tug-of-war and my brain is winning.
‘I guess the only thing I’m not comfortable with is men,’ somehow comes out of me.
Once I accept the fact that I’m willing to have sex for money, basically everything becomes possible, except that which is not a possibility. And the only thing that seems impossible is having some man sexing me.
‘Okay, here’s how it works.’ Mr Hartley’s all smoothed out, his engine purring. ‘We give you a pager. We ask that you keep the pager on you at all times, because this is a first-come, first-served business.’ He smiles, proud of his little joke. ‘When we page you, we ask that you
call us back immediately. Sometimes the job’ll be right away; sometimes you’ll get up to a week’s notice. When you call in, we give you a time, an address, a contact, a dollar amount, and any unusual details you need to know. Once you accept a job, you must perform the job. We’re very strict on this point. If you accept a job and do not perform the job, you will not be called again. No drugs, no alcohol. You’ll be paid in cash; the customer pays us separately. If you make arrangements with the customer for another date, you must inform us. Failure to do so will result in being immediately dropped from our client list. Is all this clear? Do you have any questions?’
I think for a minute.
‘I have one question,’ I say. ‘When do I start?’
When I’m seven I enter an essay contest. The subject is ‘Why I Love America.’
Here’s what I write:
‘I love America because she is the greatest country on Earth. In America you can do anything you want if you respect the law. President Johnson is a great president. Governor Wallace is a great governor and I respect him very much. I love America because everyone is free to respect one another, and any man can be the president. I respect my teachers and my parents. And I respect Alabama. And I love her, too.’
Now there’s a guy who looks like he has a huge penis. That’s a look I need to cultivate, all full of I-don’t-give-a-damn and look-how-big-I-am. As the secretary gives me a pager, I study the guy waiting in the waiting area of the Hollywood Employment Agency. Tight black hair, tight black skin, tight black T, tight black pants, tight black eyes. When I catch his eye I smile. He does not smile back. I make a mental note not to smile so much, because when you don’t smile it makes you look like your penis is bigger.
Chicken Page 3