by Asa Akira
The man introduced himself as Bill.
“Totally not his name,” I thought as I followed him inside. The rest of the apartment was just as mirrored and gold as the entrance. He showed me the office, explaining, “She’s not here right now, but Mia takes all the bookings,” and the “massage room,” which was a bedroom with a massage table and some candles.
“So, how open are you?” he somewhat discreetly asked.
“Pretty open.” I smiled.
“When can you start training?” He smiled back.
“Whenever. I go to school during the day, but I can always skip.”
“That’s okay, most of our clients like to book in the evening. You charge them two hundred fifty dollars. A hundred goes to us, one-fifty to you. How far you want to go is up to you, but they do expect a release, if you know what I mean. Do you want to train tonight?”
“Sure.” I thought of Kevin downstairs, but how long could training take, anyway? He could wait. I’d rather beg for forgiveness later than go downstairs now to tell him I was gonna be another hour.
Bill started to untie his robe.
“Wait!” I blurted out. “You mean—with you?” Surely this man wasn’t going to make me train on him.
“Yes,” Bill calmly answered. “I can show you some basic massage techniques you may not know.”
Everything became too real in one second. In my mind, I would be “massaging” hot businessmen—not sleazy Filipino guys named “Bill” with soft hands who wore silk robes and lived in gold apartments. I didn’t wanna see this guy’s penis, much less touch it.
“Actually, my boyfriend is downstairs waiting for me. Maybe I should come back some other time,” I backpedaled.
“It won’t take long,” Bill said, smiling calmly. “You can even tell him to wait up here if you want.”
“It’s okay, I’d really just rather come back without him.” Maybe I meant it, maybe I was lying. I would decide later.
I left the apartment and rode down the elevator as I thought of what to say to Kevin. Did this man even run a business at all? If I had “massaged” him, would that be it? Was he the only “client”?
Kevin was still mad, smoking a cigarette when I approached him.
“Well?” he asked.
“I got the job. It’s legit. I’m gonna think about it.” I casually said as I walked toward the subway station.
We didn’t say a word all the way back to his house. He made me a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, my favorite, and he never brought it up again.
In some ways, I think Kevin knew me better than anyone. But maybe that’s just the kind of thing you can only say once someone’s passed.
14 (and a half)
Dee
“If I were a stripper, my name would be Candy.” I had been thinking about it for a while.
“Mine would be Crystal.” Dee apparently had been, too. “We’re so old . . . you know we are almost sixteen? Next thing you know, we’ll be thirty.” This was a conversation familiar to both of us.
I would go on to strip one day, but Dee took another route completely: law school. Eventually she’d drop out and move to Brazil, but she did go.
Sitting on our favorite stoop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, we were passing a blunt back and forth. This is what we did with most of our time—smoke blunts. I loved weed, but I only smoked socially, when I was with my friends. Eventually, after years of being too high to get up to look for the remote control, I realized I actually liked being sober better. In five years, I’d go on to quit smoking altogether. Not Dee. For her, everything was better with weed. She woke up in the morning and smoked a blunt walking to the subway station on her way to school. She smoked blunts in between classes. She smoked blunts after school, and smoked blunts on her evening dog walk before bed. To this day, she doesn’t do anything unless it consists of a pregame blunt before, and a celebratory blunt after. Blunt in between preferred.
By definition, we were potheads. But that didn’t mean we didn’t do other things, too. Acid, Ecstasy, angel dust, my mom’s Ambien—thankfully, we never liked coke. We partook in recreational drugs almost every weekend. In particular, we loved Special K—ketamine, K, liqs, animal tranquilizer. We’d buy bottles whenever we could afford to, cook the liquid up into a powder, and scrape it up and into our noses. We loved to snort it lying in my bed together, staring at a certain hole in my bedroom wall—as the high spread throughout our bodies, the hole would get farther and farther away.
Dee is my best friend in the universe. We haven’t lived in the same country for over seven years now, but it doesn’t affect her place in my life. I knew her before either of us had ever even smoked a cigarette for the first time. We were thirteen, and although we were in different classes, we took after-school music together because we were both failing. We were the only ones in the class. It turned out we got along, and soon we’d skip the class and go eat pizza together after school instead. We liked the same kinds of boys, music, and TV shows. We were both only children. We both moved to the United States a couple of years ago, and we both were middle-class kids on scholarship, living among trust fund babies. We lived close to each other—her in the Lower East Side, me in SoHo—so we’d take the same bus home in the evening.
From that year on, we were inseparable. We were always the two girls in a group of boys. Wherever I went, she went. Whatever boy she was dating, I was dating his best friend. Sometimes we’d switch. When highschool came around, we were sent to different schools, but we remained as close as ever.
“Where do you wanna spend the night?” Dee asked, ashing the blunt on one of the steps. “Devon is getting some acid tonight if we want. We could drop it at his place and walk fifty blocks back to my house if you want.”
So it was decided. We would spend the night at Dee’s.
Across the street we saw a man wearing our favorite outfit—baseball hat, North Face jacket, and some Air Force Ones on his feet. Dee and I looked at each other.
“He’s cute.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“Let’s get a closer look.”
We put out the blunt, got up off the stoop, and crossed the street. As we got closer and closer, something seemed off about the man—he seemed to be talking to himself. Closer still, and we saw under his North Face jacket was a ratty sweatshirt and jeans. His shoes, which were once a drawing point, were old and filthy. And what was that scent? The nearer we got to him, the more it smelt like piss.
As we passed by him and caught a glimpse of his face, covered in dirt, and a mouth without teeth, we both looked down at the ground as we realized he was a homeless crackhead. Not even a hot one.
We kept walking, ashamed of our poor judgment. Neither of us admitting to the situation, we continued to another stoop in silence.
That night we dropped a tab of acid each in Devon’s bed. We watched cartoons and laughed our asses off, before deciding on taking our much-anticipated walk.
Walking back to Dee’s house was everything we had hoped for. I felt like I was in a winter wonderland. My legs shook like Jell-O; my eyes played tricks on me. It’s kind of frightening, how much a drug can really alter your reality. Although I was aware I was tripping, everything around me was just different, in the most pleasant way. The cold didn’t bother us; we both glided down the fifty blocks, a little over two miles, with our jackets open.
Getting into her building, the fluorescent lights hit us—and the lighting/temperature/atmosphere adjustment got me feeling weird. We awkwardly stumbled into Dee’s apartment, even more awkwardly said hi to her parents, and jetted for her bedroom. Laughing over nothing, Dee pulled out a Baggie from her purse with another tab in it. “Should we split it?”
We should have looked at the clock right then, because then we would have known it was already midnight, far too late to be dropping anything. We also should have known that we were tripping pretty hard already, and taking more would only work against us. The thing about acid is
that it’s such a huge commitment. You will absolutely not sleep for the next eight hours, and you will definitely, 100 percent, utter the words “When am I gonna stop tripping?” by the end. Sure, it’s fun to see the world through a kaleidoscope. For the first five hours. Those last three tick by in slow motion.
So we didn’t look at the clock, we didn’t use our better judgment, and because of our impaired vision, it took us probably another hour to split the tab with a razor Dee found in her makeup drawer. As soon as we dropped it, we started tripping harder. We went from giggling schoolgirls to autistic zombies.
“Why did we do that?” Dee looked at me in horror. As the words came out of her mouth, her face turned into a leopard. The next eight hours would be shitty.
We tried to watch cartoons. It was unavoidable, though—we were each descending further into our own internal hell.
“Let’s just try to go to sleep,” I suggested, wanting to be alone. I knew she felt the same.
We got into our respective beds, both of us in the fetal position, facing away from each other. I closed my eyes tightly so that I wouldn’t have any more visuals. The acid didn’t let me escape so easily—I saw patterns on the insides of my eyelids.
“My room is so fucking dirty,” Dee would periodically say through her tight jaw. “I can’t stand it.”
I had to pee. But my body was so uncomfortable—my own skin was so foreign-feeling, I didn’t have it in me to get up to go to the bathroom. My back ached from every muscle in my body clenching, my skin felt itchy, and my mouth tasted weird. Besides, what if her parents were still awake? I wasn’t presentable.
Then my underwear started to feel wet.
No. No. This isn’t happening. Did I just piss myself?
Too embarrassed to say anything to Dee, I got up to go to the bathroom. Her parents were asleep already, to my relief, because halfway to the bathroom I had to get on my knees to crawl. I opened the bathroom door and climbed onto the toilet as I pulled my pants down.
What the fuck. Dry.
Not only had I not pissed in the bed, but once I did sit down, I didn’t have to go anymore. I flushed the toilet, to keep up what I thought was a façade, and crawled back to the room.
I repeated this eleven more times throughout the night.
A few hours into cradling ourselves to silence, Dee got up to turn the computer on. “I’m playing music,” she whispered.
She put on 50 Cent’s “Many Men,” and I thanked her almost immediately. I had never heard the song before; it was right when 50 Cent was really starting to blow up.
The song ended, and came on again. Dee had put it on repeat. It must have repeated a hundred times that night. The mellow beat, the almost lullaby-like chorus, put me into a trance, where I wasn’t convincing myself I had wet the bed every ten minutes. Eventually, it rocked us to sleep.
The next morning we woke up and walked over to Chelsea’s house to smoke weed.
“Last night was weird,” I told her.
“I think that was the last time I’ll ever do acid,” Dee added.
I agreed.
“The weirdest fucking part,” I added after a few minutes, “was that fucking guy we saw. We saw a bum and thought he was a hot guy!”
Chelsea laughed.
Diary, 2012–2013
January 30
It’s a little late but it’s a new fucking year. I’m quitting cigarettes tomorrow. Also, no more pizza. I’ve been ordering two large thin crust pies for myself everyday at 11 a.m. since I got back from Vegas seven days ago (was there for the AVN Awards and convention, so naturally, I was starving the whole time), and it’s time to get back to the routine. It’s nothing but smoothies and salads from here on out.
I’m also committing to keeping a journal.
The last time I had anything like this was when I was in highschool. In the back of my diary, on the blank sheet between the last lined page and the back cover, I wrote down the names of all the boys I had hooked up with. If I hooked up with them multiple times, they would have a tally next to their name, a scratch for every time we messed around.
David
Perry
Josh W
Zach
Tyler
Etc.
On the lined sheets I wrote about my sexual escapades, starting from my very first French kiss on the school bus in fourth grade, to losing my virginity when I was thirteen, to getting fucked spread eagle by highschool seniors on rooftops alongside my girlfriends. I wrote about trying Ecstasy when I was twelve, but how it had failed to work because we split the one pill we had five ways. I wrote about shoplifting sprees, huffing Dust-Off in the school bathroom, and tagging along with boys on graffiti missions in the middle of the night.
My mom found my diary and read it one weekend when I had told her I was going to stay with Dee. The truth was that I had gone up to New Jersey with a boy to a three-day outdoor rave. I stopped taking her calls, and when she called Dee’s mom, she knew I was up to no good. I came home to her sitting at the dining table crying, asking me where she’d gone wrong as a mother.
“Are you using condoms at least?” she sobbed in Japanese.
“Obviously!” I screamed back in English.
I was lying.
That was the day I stopped documenting my life.
Sorry, Mom.
January 31
Already smoked again. But so far so good on the no pizza thing.
February 3
Woke up with pizza crumbs in my bra. I disgust myself. Anorexia starts tomorrow, since there is still some left.
I guess I may as well smoke a cigarette now and start everything fresh tomorrow.
February 5
I’ve decided it’s unhealthy to just stop smoking cold turkey. I’m cutting down to three a day, and then eventually two a day, then one . . .
It’s Super Bowl Sunday. I hate football. Almost as much as I hate commercials.
February 6
It’s hard to hate on Mondays when it entails having sex for money.
February 7
Shot a scene with Jordan today. He talks too much. He kept saying “I don’t want to be a big star. I don’t want to be doing this when I’m fifty years old.”
It was kind of a buzzkill. But his dick felt good.
P.S. Three-cigarettes-a-day thing is working out! Think I’ll cut down to two soon.
February 9
Holy fuck. I was getting my makeup done at Nichole’s today when her roommate Krissy came out of her room to chat.
I’m pretty sure my life has changed.
She was telling me about a cleanse she’s been doing. It’s basically anorexia; she ingests nothing but water for seven days. During the cleanse, every morning she gives herself a coffee enema.
“It’s exactly what it sounds like—an enema using coffee. You just fill the bag with diluted coffee and hold it in for twenty minutes. It’s good for detoxifying your liver and kidneys.”
She had me at enema.
As I type this, clenching my asshole and holding the coffee inside me, I can feel the effects of the caffeine coursing through my body. I drink coffee every day, can’t even speak without my first cup in the morning, but this is different. I can literally feel my energy going up by the minute.
I have an extremely addictive personality. Throughout my life I’ve been addicted to opiates, coffee, cigarettes, exercise, and possibly sex (still pending). When I find a food I like, it’s all I eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I meet a guy I like, and I want to be by his side twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
I think I just found my new thing. Gonna google if there are any negative side effects!
February 11
Got woken up at three in the morning by this text from Spiegler:
“This just in! What’s something 9 out of 10 people enjoy?
“Gangrape.”
February 12
It’s officially been a whole year since my last car accident.
; What a long way I’ve come. I should do something crazy to celebrate.
It took me two years to get my driver’s license.
I resent all Asians-can’t-drive jokes, or even women-can’t-drive jokes. In New York City, we don’t drive. We just don’t. Our public transportation system is so good, it gets us to our destinations in a shorter amount of time than a car would. Additionally, parking is so inconvenient, that even if you are lucky enough to find a spot on the street, you’re still likely walking another five to ten blocks to wherever you’re ultimately going.
I moved to California at the age of twenty-five. For the first six months I lived here, I didn’t drive. Relying on drivers and the occasional taxi (which, by the way, are crazy expensive in L.A.), I was miserable. Growing up in New York, I wasn’t used to not being able to leave a place exactly the moment I wanted. I’d finish shooting my scene, and then have to wait another thirty minutes before I could leave to go home.
So I bought a car. I didn’t know how to turn it on, and I couldn’t drive it off the lot myself, but I purchased a Prius. My friend Van, who I was living with at the time, had to drive it home for me. In this car, I would learn to drive.
“I can’t fucking do this. I don’t know why I bought this stupid thing,” I cried on my first attempt. Van and I had been circling our residential neighborhood at twenty miles an hour. If I could give one piece of advice on learning to drive, it would be this: Don’t learn from your friends. You will fight.
I googled “learn to drive in Los Angeles” and found a driving school in my area. When I got in the car, the instructor looked at me funny.
“So why don’t you know how to drive?” he asked. I explained I was from New York, and he nodded like he understood. I asked him if I was his oldest student. He assured me I wasn’t, but his face told me I was.