“The shower’s ready for you,” I say.
“I just took a shower, but after those stairs, I could use another,” he jokes.
His voice is smooth. When he unbuttons his starchy, long sleeve shirt, my eyes go straight to an extra set of nipples. And while I’ve seen many men and a lot of nipples, this is the first time I’ve seen one man with four. I avert my eyes. In this business, it’s not a good idea to register shock when a client undresses. I over-smile instead.
I remove my dress and underwear slowly, like in the movies. Dragonfly Jay disappears into the bathroom, emerging a few minutes later. I tell him to lie face down on the massage table.
The more days I devote to the temple, the less time I spend writing and applying to teaching gigs. It’s hard to write with a dick in your hand.
I stretch Dragonfly Jay’s long, hairless arms between my greasy hands and rub from shoulder to palms. Tranquil drum music fills the room. I slide around the table until I am between his legs. I lie on top of him naked, my belly against his tailbone. My arms are splayed on top of his, as if we are flying. I rub his thighs, calves, feet, and back with gusto. I look at the clock. Twenty-five minutes have passed, so I reach between his legs and touch his balls, lightly—a tease. I slip off the table and whack a golden bell with a wooden stick. It sounds like a soft gong. I massage his head, and my mouth touches his earlobe.
“Ready to turn over?”
“Sure.”
“Would you like a pillow?”
“That’d be great.”
I drip golden oil onto Dragonfly Jay’s thighs like warm maple syrup onto a gingerbread pancake. I stand by his head and reach over his eyes to tweak his accessory nipples. I’ve read about this birth defect. Usually people get just one extra nipple, but Dragonfly Jay has two. He’s special.
“Do you have sensation in these?”
He opens his eyes, two dark pools. “Yes, but not as much.” His eyes meet mine. His expression is soft, like the towels folded in the corner.
“You could have a lot of fun with these,” I say. “You could pierce them.”
I circle the table again and climb on top of it, crouching between his legs, squeezing them.
“I’m not that adventurous,” he says.
I wonder if he’s married, and if so, does his wife suck his extra nipples? Or does she shy away from them?
Time crawls around my throat. The gray door is locked shut and burgundy curtains shrink the room.
I trickle oil along his cock and press it between my palms, like I’m praying. It jumps. I rub his inner thighs to build up the tension, then stroke slowly. He moans. Curly black hairs fall onto gold sheets and stick to my oily hands. I sigh, knowing I will find them later on the floor and sweep and sponge, but I’ll miss a strand or two that will slide into dank corners. When he comes, my legs are under his legs and my boobs are pressed against his thighs. His back is arched, his four nipples hard little cherry pits.
I slither off the table and dunk hot towels into the Crock-Pot of lavender oil. The towels signal it’s over. I place them onto his belly, wipe away his come, and then hide the used towels under the table.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, after placing a pillowcase over his eyes. He will doze while I shower, then it will be his turn to cleanse. Exactly fifty minutes will have passed.
Under the hot water, I scrub the oil from my ribcage with orange, liquid soap and scoot tiny stray hairs into the drain with my toes. I hear soft crying from the next room. I drop to my knees and wash and wash and wash.
47
I’m not the type of girl anyone has ever wanted to rescue. Perhaps that’s the reason stripper and hooker memoirs disappoint me. They end all neat, tidy, heteronormative, and buttoned up. They end all Pretty Woman and diamond-ringed and Pottery Barned, with the damaged girl who finally found Mister Perfect. Mister P fixes her up and buys a house and a puppy and she writes thank you letters on monogrammed stationary.
I don’t relate.
I’m not the type of girl who wants to be rescued, but, if I were the brittle girl who longed to land softy in Disney arms, this would be my ending:
You’ve got soaring self-worth, and you’ll never strip again. You’ll never even think about it. You’ve swept the part of you that was for sale under the welcome mat in front of your reformed-whore digs. The transactional psychosexual hard drive of your mind has been erased. You tell yourself this as you cut out your stripper heart. You toss it down the garbage disposal where it howls and you hope Mister P doesn’t hear the sound of stripper heart being massacred in your remodeled kitchen.
Down the drain: the night in the San Francisco club where you stripped and fucked a young coke dealer with neck tattoos and a motorcycle helmet for five hundred bucks, just because you felt like it.
Down the drain: The time the man’s wife ate your pussy for half an hour while he watched. And you came. Afterwards, you went home to your boyfriend and fucked him.
Down the drain: the hundred lies you told about where you were, what you were doing, who you were with. And those acts that stoked the fire in your pussy that is very hard to put out? Down. The. Drain.
You tell yourself none of it happened. You scratch it away like some other skin. The friends who stood shoulder to shoulder with you in clubs and hotel rooms for years? You erase them.
You walk away with French manicured hands and your husband’s American Express card in your purse and forget how your pussy gushed when a wad of sweaty hundreds was shoved into your fist while undulating on a man’s boner—while he fantasized about the tip of his cock between your slick lips, probing you like a strobe light, in you, making your spine vibrate.
You deny that you were drunk on their desire for you.
You sprinted out the exit. Left the titty bars in your stripper wake, saved from the big bad sex industry wolf—your self-regard restored. You’ve found love in the right places. You carry the correct handbag. You are draped in complicated fabrics. You’re Snow White now. You’re white, you tell yourself. Wiped clean.
And Mom, Mom is proud. We visit, we bake; there is no rush to tell me about the photographs. She calls every other day. “Everything is in bloom! You should see the squash in the boxes. Even my lilies are doing well this year, and the yard is just covered in cherry blossoms and apples. My golden chain is so heavy with blossoms, it looks as if it might just fall over.”
This is not that ending, but here is mine:
The dark bars appear in dreams. I feel them burning holes, trails, sweating through my clothes, forming colonies that climb up my throat and hips, rising heat in my crotch, bursting the threats loose with their pushing. They erected great tents in my blood.
I left the club. It never left me. At the grocery store I see a man’s neck and have an impulse to climb up his leg and lick his ear. I watch him open his wallet, and I count the bills out of habit. He looks me in the eye. He looks away, but I keep staring at the cash. Eighty dollars. A hundred. I fight the urge to bend over at the hip and swipe it.
The smell of coconut lotion and bubble gum makes me see red lips, chest, brown nipples, belly jewels; the girl who clenched her asshole onstage to the beat of the music. The one with her locker next to mine whose pupils were big as planets. She made twenty-six hundred dollars one night. A dancing asshole. If only I had a dancing asshole. Vanilla, bubble gum, coconut lotion, dance dollars.
The Disney endings are not only written by high-priced gazelles from low places; I’ve read the same endings in male hustler memoirs. The letdown endings are toweled off and group-therapied. The boys enter fancy rehabs and private schools like a big, fat, outdated, Americana-glazed donut dipped in bullshit-lie.
This is not that. I’m forty years old, still stripping and giving handjobs to pay my rent. I have no clue how to leave this industry and enter the work force. This is the work force. The way out is the w
ay in is the way out.
I thought this would end in the dark, fighting for my life in Los Angeles, three bucks in my pocket, climbing the pole in a seedy bar in Hollywood. Or, I’d get arrested again. I completed the diversion program and graduated grad school and am no closer to a teaching job. This is where I am: I’m still doing this. I will climb out, the window is open a crack, but I don’t know when.
Here in Los Angeles, in the sunlight, my days begin in dirt. I run around a still body of glistening water and swoon at puppies and lazy ducks. It’s time to go to work. I sink into leopard print pillows while the sun stabs golden light on my bare legs. I sit, wait, write, and my phone vibrates. I light up. I whisper to the man on the phone and watch a pot of brown rice simmer. I tell him the address and the door code. After our session, he will be given a password and a nickname and that will be his all-access pass.
Acknowledgments
This book began years ago as shitty, earnest fiction at Antioch’s MFA program where my gracious, brilliant mentors pushed me to write nonfiction. I’d like to thank Rob Roberge, an amazing mentor, writer, and friend for his advice and example. I’d like to thank my other mentors at Antioch as well: Dodie Bellamy and Leonard Chang for their feedback and encouragement, and Jim Krusoe at SMCC for demonstrating humility and patience. I want to thank the Citrons for sharing their courage, writing success, and struggles for seven years of lonesome post-grad school Sundays, especially: Xochi-Julisa Bermejo, Jonathan Berzer, Melissa Chadburn, Seth Fischer, Aaron Gansky, Rachel Kann, Trish Paulson, Tisha Reichle, Tina Rubin, Diane Sherlock, and Judy Sunderland. Write On, Citrons!
Thank you to the folks at Rare Bird Lit for giving Spent a birthday and always having my back: Julia Callahan, Angelina Coppola, Tyson Cornell, Alice Marsh-Elmer, and my dreamy editor Seth Fischer.
I’m especially grateful to my wonderful friends who believed in me and this book when I didn’t and who offered hope and tenacious encouragement: Greg App: the King of Pleasure, Katya Askar, Shannon Barber, Bella Blue, Laura Bogart, Gayle Brandeis, Hank Cherry, Chiwon Choi, Brittany Davis, Gina Corso, Joe Donnelly, Steve Erickson, Evonne Esparza, Marilyn Friedman and her Writing Pad, Jennifer Grant, Marya Gullo, Silas Howard, Laura Jackson, Linda Jeffers, Bill Jones, Josh Klausner, Heather Luby, Kate Marayama, Anna March, Josh Mohr, Lexie Montgomery, Marty Morgan, Mary Moses, Ruth Nolan, Patrick O’Neil, Lucy O’Reilly, Billy Pitman, David Rocklin, Zoe Ruiz, Jill Soloway, David Spalding (my favorite brain with eyes), Anna Joy Springer, David Henry Sterry, Romy Suskin, Marya Taylor, Michelle Tea, and Lidia Yuknavitch.
Los Angeles offers a tremendously talented writing community to which I am deeply indebted. Although some people may not be named here specifically, many are very much a part of this book. Speaking of my writing community, I’d like to especially thank Steve Almond, Steve Da Jarnatt, and Jerry Stahl for being exemplary writers and great men. I’m also grateful for Dieter Hartmann for his generosity and to Kevin O’Quinn for his initial edits. Thank you Sy Safransky and Luc Saunders at The Sun. It will happen. Wink. Thank you Radar Lab and Squaw Valley Community of Writers for the opportunity to dig in. Big hugs to the Write Girls, especially Brande Jackson and Rachel Kaminer, who taught me to always tell the teenage girls they are amazing because they may have never been told that until now. Tell them.
I am grateful to The Rumpus for their sweet, undying enthusiasm and support, especially Isaac Fitzgerald who has championed my work from the get-go and the amazing Rumpus Women, especially Julie Greicius for holding the rope on the other side of the stream and yelling, “Jump!” I’d like to thank Stephen Elliott and Cheryl Strayed for being brilliant and amazing and kind.
Thank you New Orleans for mothering me when I was broken and for providing the opportunity to work alongside so many complex, bright, beautiful women at Penthouse Club, Ricks Cabaret and Visions.
Thank You, Humboldt County and my family members who still reside there, especially Chuck DeWitt for showing me that we can change the most frightening, awful parts of ourselves and for showing me that change and being that change in the world.
Thank you for loving Mom and showing her mercy, because without mercy, this book would not exist.
Thanks, Mom.
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