by J. C. Allen
And so, getting to work—up, down, twist, repeat—I let my mind wander with reckless abandon.
I thought of how much I hated my big brother, the man who had put me here, the man responsible for my current spot. Chuck.
I thought of how much I envied Crystal for any number of reasons. How she could handle this job with so much aplomb and “grace” if one could have any as a hooker. How she could laugh her way through, even if I suspected to some degree she wasn’t as fulfilled in this role as I imagined she projected to be.
I thought of how much I wanted to get back to my book and see what Dawkins had to say about the existence of God. Hell, I would have taken going back to that romantic vampire novel, just to remind myself if the two lovebats fell in love with each other before the sun rose.
And, strangely enough…
I thought of the big, blue motorcycle adorned with a realistic flaming paintjob and sporting a long, jutting front tire and the rider who seemed to be avoiding any prolonged glances at the road ahead of him. The rider with his thick beard, his taut forearms, and the kind of confidence to look at me that suggested he saw me as more than a blowjob slot machine. Put money in. Get cock sucked.
On a hot night, hating myself for looking so sexy and working hard to focus on anything except what I was doing, I felt like I could relate.
There wasn’t anything about this job I wanted to look at head on.
And then, the “worst case” happened.
The man suddenly wiggled and moaned. I felt his cock pulsating in his mouth. In the hopes of getting a tip—God, what in the hell—I continued furiously stroking and sucking on his cock, knowing this was the moment of peak pleasure for the man.
“Stop, stop, stop,” he begged finally, grabbing my hair too gently for him to be someone with any sort of confidence or assertiveness. I pulled back and put my actress persona back on.
“You liked that baby, huh?” I said with a laugh, one meant to mirror his laugh. There wasn’t anything funny about what I did, but if it made him feel good, that raised the chances of a tip.
“Oh my God,” he said, catching his breath. The poor guy—relatively speaking—looked like he had just had the weight of going sexless for five years off of his shoulders. “Thank you.”
I never got used to it, but it still left me feeling good to hear those words. At least one of us had gotten something out of it.
And, fortunately, I also got something out of it as the guy gave me an extra $20.
I knew I’d never see all of it—Rock took a “cut” to cover “our overhead”—but at least it would keep me in the good graces.
Sometimes, in these moments, I became tempted to make a joke, like “Come again!” It was often one of my few defenses against totally falling into the insanity of my job.
But this session, my mind had wandered too much. So I simply said, “Thanks,” pointed him to the highway, and got out, making my way back to the street lamp.
A few hours passed. By the time 10 p.m. hit, I’d had about three clients total—in addition to my first target of the night, Mr. Thank You for the Blowjob, I got one man who wanted to ram me from behind in the car—at least he didn’t request anal—and another who got off on public sex.
Well, I was a hooker, and Rock did insist that we do everything, but before that, he insisted we not get our asses thrown in jail. The last thing he needed was one of his small-timers getting thrown in jail and ratting out for a lighter sentence or mere probation. Granted, all of us preferred jail time over probation followed by execution at the hand of one of his men, but I suppose it made good business sense for him to avoid unnecessary run-ins with the law.
Shortly after 10, I heard the distant sound of a motorcycle cutting off. It reminded me of the man I’d seen earlier in the day, he of the gruff face, the taut forearms, and the long beard, but in my line of work, reminders were usually things to be avoided. The last thing a woman needed was to believe something nice might come back around—because the minute she hoped so, something evil or dark usually appeared.
A few moments later, though, something interesting happened.
A man came walking on our corner, and I swore it was the man who had driven by on the bike—which would make sense if he had parked some distance away.
Granted, the far likelier scenario was that he was going to the nearby tavern, one of the few places open on a weekday here until 2 a.m. It was just the hole-in-the-wall place clubsters and bikers liked to visit. I didn’t get a lot of bikers interested in hookers, probably because they could pull in their own fair share of men.
A part of me, in fact, contemplated approaching the man on my own, which would definitely have gone against business norms. At the risk of sounding conceited, men came to me—plus, there was just something to be said about being cautious with who you approached. A man approaching me knew what I wanted, but I never knew what the men I might approach wanted.
I saw him coming down my side of the street, and without a doubt, he was looking at me. It occurred to me he might be thinking the same thing—perhaps he recognized me from earlier and wanted to say something.
But as he got closer, I could see he was not slowing down or altering his path just enough to speak to me.
So, instead of engaging him, I kept my eyes down, returning to Dawkins’ book.
“Not every day you see someone reading this late.”
I looked up in surprise. The man had spoken to me.
Granted, he was moving on still. He wasn’t stopping. I think he wanted to make it clear that he wasn’t interested in purchasing my services.
Yet… that made me appreciate him even more. He didn’t just see a hooker.
He saw me.
And that he saw me reading… well, yeah, it meant he was looking at his phone, but who cared?!? He noticed something like that!”
“Got to keep the mind going somehow,” I said with a nervous grin.
He paused in his tracks, about ten feet away. He looked at me, as if about to say something. He got a sound out that sounded like the start of a sentence, but then paused.
He really didn’t want me… but he wanted to engage me.
There’s a funny thing about being an unwilling hooker—when you become wanted for nothing but your body, you get more aroused when your presence is wanted than your body.
I opened my mouth to fill the air, but just like that, he was gone.
My shoulders sank, deflated. At least I was right. At least he had gone to the bar, but he was likely to emerge with a girl, and even if he didn’t, he’d be so drunk that the spirit of this encounter would be gone.
I had to resort to hoping that someday, sometime in the future, we could meet up again under similar circumstances. I had to hope if that happened—an awfully big if—we would have more than two lines going between us.
But for now, my hope was just fake, like most of Crystal’s.
Crystal and I didn’t see each other more than twice over the next several hours. Our shift ended at four in the morning, a good eleven hours after we started. I think it goes without saying that we didn’t get a lunch break or a scheduled 15-minute break.
In that time, I gave nine blowjobs and five rounds of intercourse. Of those five, one was a virgin whose father was paying—he insisted on watching, which earned uncomfortable looks from both myself and his son, but he was the one paying—and another two insisted on anal. In other words, it was a little bit above a normal night, but I’d seen much weirder.
As a general rule I refuse access to the “back door” when it was requested, but most of the regular Johns who came our way already knew that, provided they were willing to pay, nothing was off limits. Rock always promised “you pay, they’ll play.”
Granted, I would luck out every now and again and wind up with a customer who didn’t know about Rock or his whores’ policy, and on those occasions I could usually get out of taking it up the butt. The fine Private John from earlier, in fact, was pretty much the b
est case scenario—my mind could easily wander with the stroke and suck technique of giving head. It was rather obvious he didn’t know what more could have been done.
Of the two who insisted, however, one was already in the know—I could tell by the “don’t fuck with me, bitch” look he gave me the moment I tried—and the other, obviously a case of the “who’s Rock?” variety, cut to the point on his own with words that, while not unusual, were cutting and caustic all the same.
“You a whore or not?”
He hadn’t said it in malice or to be cruel. I could look back on it and perhaps tell the story of how he was oh-so-cruel and demeaning and go on-and-on wailing, but it would have all been a lie—just another pitch along the same lines of “I don’t do anal.” A lie was a lie, and when you were caught in a lie you had to own up to it. Period.
Still…
“You a whore or not?”
He’d said it with six twenties and three tens fanned out in front of him and an expectant look on his face. It was fifty bucks more than Rock usually had us charge to let Johns fuck us in the ass, but, since he obviously didn’t know Rock and it wasn’t like I was carrying a menu with our rates on it, I certainly wasn’t about to tell him that.
After all:
“You a whore or not?”
Of course I’m a whore. It’s my job, you fool. I’ll feel no shame in the morning for taking something extra for the trouble! Haha!
“Oh, wow, sugar! For that kinda scratch, you know I’ll be whatever you want me to be!”
At least my ass couldn’t taste latex.
Sure, in some circumstances, anal was great. But some circumstances meant “private moment in a hot, steamy shower with plenty of lube and a battery-powered ‘friend’ or a well-endowed man.” They did not mean “let me awkwardly move into your back seat, oh wait, don’t let me bang my head, and can you lean forward some, oh this is so hot, so hot, if I say it enough it’s so hot.”
Needless to say, my ass was sore and my pride was pretty heavily bruised.
And what was amazing was, even though that sucked, I actually felt something tonight I hadn’t felt for one of my Johns in… well, ever—pity.
I was feeling strangely guilty about the virgin-kid’s whole ordeal. It was bad enough to have to lose his V-card to a whore, worse yet that he had to go through with it with his old man ogling his every move and telling him everything he was doing wrong. “Awkward” didn’t even begin to describe it. I refused to put myself in his shoes, it was gross enough to just think about crossing that barrier without having to actually cross it. I did, however, wonder what the hell else that kid had to put up with at home.
The “funniest” part of it all was that even as his dad told him to do things, it was clear that the dad knew not a damned thing; everything that, according to him, “wasn’t right” felt pretty right to me. If not for the clear relationship between the father and son, I would have sworn the father was the virgin, trying to pretend he knew shit and the son was the experienced one.
Strange as it sounds I didn’t feel the least bit ashamed to admit to the kid in private that, if it weren’t for his pops making it a royally bizarre experience, he would’ve actually made me finish. No, seriously—maybe it was a bad sign I’d felt connected enough to the kid to nearly reach that point, but miracles do happen.
The kid stammered at this, flabbergasted at my words and turning an absolutely adorable shade of red, and, making sure that his father couldn’t see, I slipped half the money he’d paid me back into the kid’s pocket.
“Here,” I had said as I set the two twenties in the depths of his jeans and punctuated the act with a casual brush against his still semi-hard penis through the material. “Use this to show a girl you like a good time. I promise she won’t be disappointed if you get to seal the deal.”
The kid shuddered, likely cumming a second time in his pants, and I gave him a polite and sensual smile to see him off. For all that the kid had experienced and gone through, I knew I had likely just made his year, if not his life.
But even with that in mind, I didn’t think I’d done a great service. I hadn’t saved a child in Africa or cured cancer. I wouldn’t say it didn’t have any value, but I had to be real—I’d gotten a young kid, probably 18 or 19, laid. That was it.
“You a whore or not?”
I was, and that John had gotten me an extra fifty. Well, he had given me an extra fifty, but it was highly unlikely I was ever going to keep any worthwhile percentage of that fifty.
There was no point in trying to hide it from Rock. He had ways of making sure that every dollar we took off the street found its way back into his hands, where it would cycle through the total funds raised by the Black Falcons. Eventually, if Rock and his higher-ups were feeling particularly generous, there might—emphasis on might—be an envelope with a sloppy ‘M’ thrown across its surface in green Sharpie with something to the tune of thirty bucks that I got to call mine for the week.
It was laughable, really. My parents would have given me a bigger allowance back in the day. McDonald’s would have given me a better bonus, even if the bonus only came in the form of discounted food. The financial firm I would have wound up?
Thirty bucks was what the supervisor threw at you when he wanted you to go get him a coffee worth five dollars.
And so, after eleven hours, nine blowjobs at about fifty bucks a pop and five rounds of intercourse at one hundred each—with a little extra from a couple and a little removed for the new kid—the eleven hours tallied up to about a thousand bucks even, given or take a couple twenties here and there.
And that was a slow night!
The worst part of it was, in an effort to “corner the market,” Rock had deliberately set low prices to attract customers. Some of the higher offerings went for eighty and one-fifty on oral and penetration, but even then, my hourly usually exceeded three digits an hour. Crystal made way more than I, which to the uninitiated, made prostitution sound like a dream job.
Well, there was just one major problem.
Taxes.
And I didn’t mean to Uncle Sam—I meant to Rock.
If I got lucky, after a given week, I might have seen a hundred bucks. Maybe.
Oh, sure, Rock paid four our room, board, and all sorts of other things, but there was zero chance in hell that Rock was taking a justified amount for those expenses. He was basically leaving us just enough to say that he was paying us, and not a penny more.
So be an entrepreneur, the uneducated would say.
So be six feet under? I would reply, knowing how Rock operated.
I cursed Chuck’s name again. I used to keep track of how I would get back at him, but I’d given up that ambition long ago. He was just…
I hated him. But there wasn’t really anything I could do about it. Not when the end of another day had come, signaling our renewed hustle to a bus that was either the last one of the night or the first one of the next day, depending on what frame of mind I wanted to use.
As we walked over, Crystal exhausted and myself mentally drained, I tried my best to just forget what had happened over the last half-day. I didn’t remember most of what I did, so this wasn’t hard anyways.
Nevertheless, three images remained in my head.
The first was surprising—that biker who had driven by on the flame-embedded motorcycle.
The second was pleasant—that same man complimenting my reading, which might have been the most pleasant thing anyone had commented on in months, probably years.
The third, though, was neither—my brother.
I cursed his name again.
5
Derek
“Got to keep the mind going somehow.”
I replayed the… girl’s words in my head.
Oh, she was a hooker, alright. To pretend she wasn’t dressed as she was, on a street corner by herself, at that hour of the night, meant that she was either a whore or a performance artist, or possibly both.
But
no actual whore ever spoke about keeping the mind stimulated. No whore would ever have been reading anything other than Instagram posts on the street corner. No whore would have quipped at me with such a soft and sweet voice like that.
It was, I was almost sure, the same girl I’d passed by a few hours before. If it wasn’t, this city had a lot nicer prostitutes than I ever had imagined. I might have had to reconsider my stance from what I’d told Rooster.
Except I just couldn’t…
I couldn’t.
From the time I’d killed my bike to actually starting to walk, it had taken me probably three different variations of the vision to get moving. Maggie had appeared twice just on the bed, but once, this time, her eyes were red, haunting me and taunting me. It made me realize that these visions were probably not going to get better any time soon.
And, honestly, because of that state of fucked-upness, I could never let myself be with a woman. No woman deserved to have that.
Not even a hooker.
Not even a girl likely forced into whoredom.
Instead, I decided to get really, really, really fucking drunk.
Thus, in the quiet din of the bar, a place where sharks came to play pool, where alcoholics came to drink, and where the lonely came to lose their money to both the sharks and the bartender, I sat at the edge of the bar, my back to the kitchen, my eyes facing the entrance.
One could never be too careful in these spots. Rock had cronies everywhere, and while no one was stupid enough to attack me without a well-thought out plan, there were no boundaries when it came to well-thought out plans. It could happen here, it could happen at the Saviors’ shop—although that would’ve been suicidal with the manpower we had—and it could have happened at my house.
It was a funny way to live, knowing I could die at any moment.
If the pavement didn’t beat the Black Falcons to it when I crashed from driving stupidly, that was.
As I sipped a drink of gin, I found myself contemplating, of all things, that damn hooker on the corner of the street.