Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  The next camp is responsible for what I like to call the narrative of the jocose young porn star. Camp 2 is firmly a part of the sex industry and claims that it all began because they wanted to get laid so they picked themselves up, zipped closed their suitcases and moved to Southern California with their mouths open. Simultaneously, plucky Iowa-corn-fed hookers around New York are always giving anonymous interviews about the lavish lifestyles they lead, pulling in ten grand for a weekend of private jets and high fashion and—well, I don’t know what rich people do. Put steak on lobster? Maybe inside of lobster? In other words, the more outspoken sex workers (or at least the ones with journalist friends) boast of the thrilling and well-compensated lifestyle of someone professionally good at sex. These people likely also suspect they are tolerable on cocaine. They are wrong.

  As for the third camp, they’re similar in kind to camp 2 but there’s an important distinction: camp 3 is pervaded by an impenetrable cloud of pseudo-intellectualism. For them, it’s not about steak and lobster parfait; it’s about a yearning, a quest for some elusive abstraction. Camp 3 are those millionth-generation feminists who graduate from a small liberal arts school, move to New York to be writers or interns at literary magazines or muses, but wind up prostitutes because apparently the more you know about continental philosophy, the more you can charge. These are almost exclusively English majors and art history enthusiasts who get their toes wet on sugar daddy social networking sites and then transition into full-time hooking which then transitions into the keeping of anonymous blogs about decadent masked parties in the dead of night in Venice and cavernous exposed-brick Lower East Side apartments with thirty-foot ceilings filled with books about the Hapsburg Empire and expensive wine while disaffected lounge covers of Joy Division spin on vintage turntables forever. The only difference between anonymous pseudo-intellectual prostitute bloggers and smug assholes who never had an original thought are student loans. Ultimately, what really separates these individuals from camp 2 is they’ve convinced themselves they’re actually doing this for progressivism.

  —

  Of the three main theories of who goes into sex work and what they do while there—whether it’s that all sex work stems from abuse or that all sex work is like a huge orgasm party with no STDs ever or the same thing I just said only more cerebral—none of them are particularly compelling. I don’t think all sex workers are victims of abuse, I don’t believe all porn stars love their jobs or the industry and I absolutely don’t buy that anonymous sex writers on the Internet are injecting glamour into women’s rights by sucking dick for money and blogging about it. Of course, there are plenty of reasonable, well-adjusted people who become sex workers. Unfortunately, reasonable people will never be the majority anywhere—or at least won’t hire good publicists.

  I have known a few sex workers. One was a smart, capable writer, quite talented and completely ordinary in her neuroses. Too ordinary, in fact, to elaborate on here. Another was a pseudo-intellectual call girl obsessed with herself and her modicum of (already incredibly niche) notoriety. The last was an ancient, wheezing pole dancer in the darkest, dankest strip club in Denver.

  The pseudo-intellectual was a bony, ghoulish prostitute who talked exclusively about sex and her own accomplishments. I met her through a mutual friend at a bar. She took herself so gravely serious that I was shown naked pictures of her and prompted to write down the address of her blog within fifteen minutes of meeting her. Regarding those naked photos, I guess her photographer friend saw some merit in harshly lit portraits of topless women drooling fluid but I don’t really go to bars for that. I go to bars for drinking. Smoking outside. Sometimes Erotic Photo Hunt. She did seem sincerely proud to have participated in the creation of art, which I guess suggests a level of sophistication the average fluid drooler lacks, so maybe that was ginkgo or ginseng or something running down her chest.

  —

  The stripper is the heart of our story. I found myself brought to a staggering conclusion about humanity beneath her podium one Friday night with three friends. At this point I was attending college in New Mexico and we had driven to Denver for a concert. The show got canceled but we went anyway because my life had no real substance and it was nice to just do things in different places.

  I had originally planned the trip around two shows, one on a Friday night and one on a Saturday night (to justify the six-hour drive) and we figured we’d stay out all night in between or sleep in a cheap hotel room. We found out Friday morning that the first night’s show was canceled because the singer of the headlining band was having throat (cocaine) problems. The driver of this road trip had consequently wanted to stay behind until Saturday because he’d ordered a fancy cattle guard off eBay and was enthused to ornament his Land Rover. I insisted we go a night early.

  I was insistent, sadly, because I was suffering under terrible heartbreak, having just been dumped by my boyfriend of a year, the aforementioned Mormon (though we’d eventually get back together). He’d broken up with me a week before school started despite our plans to live together. He had decided instead to live in a Volkswagen van parked just off campus, which is a pretty gutting punchline about my appeal. Within four days of our breakup, I spotted him emerging from the dorm room of a shockingly pert freshman. I was devastated: she had the body of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and the face of a Sephardic Julia Roberts. Thanks to her predilection for cutoffs and bikini tops, I wanted to flee and get into some mild trouble in another state. I was persuasive enough that my friends and I pulled into Denver around ten thirty that Friday.

  We didn’t know anyone, we didn’t know anywhere to go and it was before the ubiquity of smart phones, so we had no idea where we were or what was around us. Luckily, the driver was a bit of an enterprising social butterfly and pulled over to the first bar belching college kids onto the street. He promptly made some friends and learned that it was pledge week so all the frats were dry. He then got us directions to a house party. We showed up and no one recognized us so they assumed we were seniors and led us to the keg. Sometime later, we realized we were at the wrong party.

  We eventually made it to the actual party and I ended up being the only girl in a group of about sixty frat boys. I was sitting alone, smoking sullenly, not drinking, thinking about the Mormon and trying to figure out what made me so insufferable* that he’d rather live in a Volkswagen van than live with me. I happened to be smoking an imported German cigarette (*unrelated) that one of my road trip companions had given me. A frat boy came up and asked what I was smoking and I answered, “Botschafters,” and he said, “Pretty exotic. But not as exotic as these,” and then with a stunning lack of irony, placed a tin of raspberry-flavored Camels on the table. He proceeded to tell me about his father’s leatherworking business, which I guess explained the origin of his fringed suede vest and also made him overqualified for even the most brutal, harrowing, malevolent hatefuck in history.

  After we had taken our fill of sixty white frat boys doing keg stands, chanting “Skeet skeet skeet” while others watched Dave Chappelle in the living room and laughed at what they perceived to be hilarious jokes about the fecklessness of black people, I demanded we go to a strip club. I’m not entirely sure why I suggested the strip club but I was nineteen and thought it would be a fun distraction and frankly, when you’re nineteen, sometimes you want to be the girl who suggests going to a strip club because it makes you seem cool and unthreatened and therefore desirable. People can be pretty stupid this way.

  After driving for a long, long time, we came upon a few places that looked like strip clubs from the outside but were twenty-one-and-over clubs. We pulled over and asked for directions a couple times but no one could direct us to anything specifically eighteen and over. We ended up procuring a phone book and calling around while driving aimlessly because college kids are actually deeply uncreative when it comes to behaving badly. They mostly just drink and fuck and discover things like Bret Ea
ston Ellis and psilocybin, which they grow out of if they’re decent in any meaningful capacity.

  We got to the place around one in the morning. It was the only storefront in a near-abandoned strip mall. I don’t remember much else about our surroundings because it was dark. We found the place, actually, not because it was marked in any eye-catching way (STRIPPERS. WATCH THEM.) but because there was a man in a really big shirt cooking hot dogs on a grill hitched to the back of his truck and selling them for a dollar. The billowing smoke led us to the entrance of the club.

  When we walked in, we all felt that illicit thrill one experiences upon entering one’s first strip club, falling into the low green lights amid KISS songs and disco ball revolutions. After we paid and got a ticket for one nonalcoholic beverage of our choosing, the first thing I saw was a breathtakingly beautiful young stripper on a podium. She looked like Aaliyah, with the same enigmatic almond-shaped eyes and straight dark hair concealing half her face. She was wearing a white catsuit unzipped and hanging around her hips. Her breasts were distractingly, memorably perfect, shaped and weighted so divinely that it took me a few moments to notice she was sobbing. She leaned over and began scraping up dollar bills as two men with cigars jeered at her like comic book villains. It was at this point I had a sickening feeling. I wondered if I wanted the next two hours of my life to take place there.

  My friends went off to find a podium with empty seats and I went to the bathroom which, incidentally, featured mirrored floors. Because of the angle and situation of the stalls, you could pretty easily see into the vagina next to you. Fortunately, no one was using the toilets for their intended purposes, as both mirrors on either side of my stall revealed the grim reflections of labia on towering Lucite heels, groups of strippers leaning precariously over each other to snort lines off toilet tanks. I stood in the stall for a long time trying to stave off panic because I was thinking about the Mormon and how he’d probably be disgusted with me if he knew I was in such a shithole. I was also confused that these strippers weren’t the cartoonish visions of sexuality with which I was familiar from television or the plucky fallen angels I knew from movies. Rather, they were what would happen if you stuck a pin in those and deflated them. Kind of dissolving and fundamentally tired. I had to get out of the bathroom.

  I found my friends holding court at the podium of an ancient stripper with bleach-choked hair and an oppressed look. My three male friends were all sitting in a row and I took a place at the end, beside the driver. This is when I witnessed the stripper’s shtick: she’d crouch down, facing the patron. She’d then lay his hands on the platform, palms up, placing each breast in each respective palm while she looked at him seductively. She smelled like an ashtray fire put out with an entire bottle of Crystal Palace and said her name was Amber. I’m pretty sure it was the first time any of them had ever touched fake breasts. I was curious too because they looked so heavy and the skin seemed stringy around them. I’m also pretty sure her name wasn’t actually Amber. That’s another thing I learned from her: strippers have a utilitarian attitude when it comes to truth.

  I watched her go through the line of my friends. The first two were baby faced and innocent and looked unsettled by the whole thing. When she got to the driver—the ostensible leader, he was more charismatic and less compassionate than the others—she laid his hands on the table and leaned into them, her unnervingly blank gaze locked on his . . . then, with her veiny, humongous breasts in his hands, she abruptly glanced sideways at me and said to him, “This your girlfriend?”

  The driver arched his lip in disgust (he was an asshole) (but: fair) and said, “No. She’s . . . not really . . .” and, like it agonized him to have to explain, “my type.”

  The old stripper studied him for a long silent moment and then she tilted her head and looked to her right, like she was consulting the depths of that side of her brain. She got lost thinking and stared upward at the dark ceiling with a dense but contemplative look, overwhelmed by the vastness of the universe and humbled for it.

  After a little longer she finally spoke, still with this leaden ponderous look, and said, “But . . . is there really such a thing as a type?” and then all four of us just sat back bathed in the swirling disco ball glow and “You Shook Me All Night Long” stopped playing and the dollar bills hovered in the air all around as we thought to ourselves, Holy shit, is there? Is attraction arbitrary? Are “types” and “ideals” just social constructs? But before we could beg her to expand, she just added in this piercing coke whine, “Where the fuck is Crystal? I’ve been up here for four fucking songs.”

  To make a long story shorter, we then spent a silent, surreal evening in a thirty-dollar-per-night hotel in a bad part of town and the show on Saturday was all right. We drove home after, all pretty sick of each other by the end of the weekend and not speaking. I remember being half asleep in the backseat of the car and thinking about the Mormon. Since the breakup, I’d been feeling so isolated and terrified no one would ever love me again, which at that moment I realized was just defeatist. You don’t date by type and love is as much a learned trait as it is something that exists instantaneously. Most important, someone will always want you. That’s what truck stops and shot bars are for. The stripper, Amber, had somehow managed to dislodge my fear of dying unloved and alone.

  —

  I sat in the backseat of the Land Rover and all I could think was there probably wasn’t one person for everyone and all it took for me to realize such a thing was one person wondering it aloud with some honesty. I slipped into sleep and for the first time since the breakup, felt some contentment. Soon after, we crossed through Colorado into New Mexico where there exists an enormous, sprawling migration corridor and we smashed into an elk. We were all fine, but the impact did tremendous damage to the Land Rover’s front end, damage that the cattle guard (sitting on the driver’s doorstep) would have prevented.

  To this day, I really cherish that moment between me and Amber. The opportunity to interact with her was a strange one that I’ll always appreciate and that someone so different but just as dull or just as perceptive as anyone could offer real insight. I look back on the whole weird, crushing, distressing affair and think to myself that I was childish to be so afraid—and also that it was lame of Crystal to be such a bitch and leave Amber hanging like that.

  SEX AND GOD

  I don’t recommend having sex with Mormons. I should qualify that, though, because I have pretty glowing things to say about the physical relationship I had with one. In fact, the sex itself was almost uniformly fantastic. I’m not really sure why that is, but I’m guessing it’s because they’re so outdoorsy and athletic, from all the milking cows or panning for gold. Though I don’t actually know a lot about Mormons, what I do know is sex with the one I dated was great but all the other aspects that came along with it presented a problem. Mormons have a lot of guilt. And they get wasted after like three drinks.

  As I’ve mentioned, I dated a Mormon guy for a few years and it didn’t work out. Nowadays when people ask me why it fell apart, I usually shrug in a really hammy way and answer, “You can take the boy out of Salt Lake City, but you can’t take the Salt Lake City out of the boy,” mostly because I love canned statements and am intellectually dishonest. It’s also stupid because he wasn’t from Utah and most times people will just look at me in confusion and say, “Is that where he’s from originally?” and I say, “No,” and look away until they change the subject. What happened between the two of us was a lot more complicated than just a location or abstract concept being inside of someone. Tangentially, the decision to homeschool is a serious one and you should make certain that it’s the best thing for your child.

  Here’s the thing: I do have a soft spot for religion and courtesy and nice paintings of saints looking bummed and compassion and presents on Christmas and all that. There’s something really lovely about religious ceremony; heretical assholes like myself don’t have any elab
orate initiations or big parties where we get lots of money, so I guess I want someone who’d insist on giving that experience to our offspring. Not believing in God or karma or a higher power or prevailing goodness is great because you can basically behave however you want, but on the flip side, your rites of passage aren’t imbued with religious dignity and are instead a few grim billboards along the road that is increasing distance from youth as you hurtle toward solitary death.

  For example, at sixteen, nonbelievers get a license. At eighteen, we’re given the opportunity to enter a convenience store thinking we’re going to purchase a pornographic magazine, until we find out it costs like ten fucking dollars and fuck that noise because it’s all over the Internet for free. Turning twenty-one is obviously no big deal because you’ve already been shitfaced most good days of your life since turning fourteen and it’s not like they start letting you drink and drive. Then there’s renting a car or getting a 401(k) or spending most nights suppressed under the frigid certainty that maybe you shouldn’t have spent so much time hating your twenties (and imagining wrinkles) because it turns out that’s the highlight of adulthood and it’s a free fall from there.

  In response, I seek out guys who have complicated relationships to whatever the almighty means to them. More plainly, if I had to sum up “my type,” it would be a man with Christian values who doesn’t believe in God. And brown hair. This has only worked out badly.

  Luckily, the Mormon and I weren’t meant to be together and broke up after a year. It was a perfectly acceptable college relationship with a mostly clean break and I figured things out in Denver and that would have all been great if we didn’t get back together after a month. As I have mentioned, he spent the interim with this freshman who had an astonishing body. When we got back together, he was pretty overcome with guilt at having gone astray or already tired of using condoms, so he asked if I would accompany him to Mormon church so he could speak with the bishop. For guidance.