Sex Work

by Frédérique Delacoste

  As my children grew older, I became more involved in their lives and my own expanded. I began doing volunteer work in the community and found people who thought the way I did. I found support for my ideas. I also discovered I loved women. My life was full and content. Even sex was not as frustrating.

  Then we were transferred to the south.

  I remember kneeling in front of the Blessed Mother’s statue that first evening in our new city, and sobbing. A few weeks later, on our twelfth anniversary, my husband and I went out to dinner. I remember sitting across the table from him, thinking, “I have nothing in common with you.”

  It took me a year to work up the courage to leave.

  When I eventually left, I discovered that I had not the faintest idea about living alone and taking care of myself. Alcohol and pills entered my life. It took at least one joint to work up the courage I needed to go into a bar. The men I met just wanted sex. Free sex. I went along with that, but not for long. In the meantime, a woman I had grown to love while I was still married came to visit me. Our first night together, we got high, laughed and talked about old times. The second night, we made love. Then she left. I didn’t know what to do. I was far too timid to go to a gay bar, even high.

  I was a registered nurse and worked in a methadone maintenance center as a nurse/therapist. Just as the magazine articles about prostitution had fascinated me, tales of the streets and street life now caught my attention. In my vulnerable state, it did not take me very long to become romantically involved with one of my male patients. I began stealing drugs for him. My man ended up in the penitentiary, and I was once again on my own.

  I found my way back to the north, and ended up back in the bars. I began turning tricks, not so much to make money, but to avoid giving away sex. I met a woman who was street wise, beautiful, shot drugs, and wanted to be with me. I was in love. She introduced me to heroin, and, for the first time, I developed a physical dependency.

  Linda and I lived together in a house I had bought just to get her under my roof. Once I became addicted to heroin, there were two habits to support and we needed more money. My criminal activity increased and, in time, I was arrested. After I was released from jail, we needed fast money, badly. I was no longer employable as a registered nurse, and besides, the money was too slow in coming. We sat down one day with the phone book, looking for massage parlors, and found several. Linda’s cousin and I went out the next day to check them out.

  The parlors weren’t located in the best section of town. At the first one, we climbed a dark, dismal stairway to the second floor where we found a hulk of a man sitting at a desk. He glared as we approached him. There were five or six scantily clad women lounging in a variety of poses on couches and chairs. They all smiled as we entered. The man instructed us to fill out an index card with our names, addresses, and phone numbers, and said that he would call us.

  The next parlor was further uptown, on a street laden with bars. Again, we climbed to the second floor of a seedy looking building. This time we were told to return that night at 11:00 to see the manager.

  We went back to the street and entered a pick-up place. I perched on a bar stool, and soon, a man began playing with my leg. A voice said, “Watch it.” I turned to the door and saw a monster-sized cop. I slid off the bar stool, and told Lindas cousin I was heading home. She decided to stay and try her luck at another joint. She called us later that night from jail. She had been arrested.

  I returned to the parlor at 11:00. I was told to go down a hallway — even darker and more dismal than the stairway — and into a back room to take off my clothes. In the room I found a bed made up with a single sheet and a towel. The walls were covered with mirrors. What little plaster was exposed was painted black and red. I stripped down to my panty hose and blouse. The manager knocked on the door, told me to remove the rest of my clothes, and left. When he returned, he laid down, after removing his clothing, and told me to sit down, indicating the edge of the bed. He told me to do anything I liked. I remember looking at him questioningly, but got no further instruction from him. I shrugged my shoulders and began handling his genitals. I gave him head. He tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I had done fine, and that I should report for work in the morning. I was so relieved. Since my release from jail, Linda and I had no source of income except welfare checks and the few tricks I was able to turn. I did not want Linda to whore. My skin crawled at the thought of her being touched by a man.

  I turned up late on my first day in the parlor. As soon as I got home the night before, Linda and I got high, and we continued until morning when we ran out of drugs. I had to wait for her to get more so that I could make it through the day. I guess that by the time I arrived at work, the women really weren’t expecting me. They looked surprised when I came into the room.

  I was sent to a dressing room, with a dresser, a bald light bulb hanging overhead, and hooks on the wall for street clothes. As many as six women at a time used this room — which measured only about eight by ten feet — to change clothes. Next door was a laundry room with washers and dryers that ran continuously. The parlor never closed, and we were frequently on the floor for sixteen hours without a break.

  Apparently I was taking too long in the dressing room, because a beautiful black woman was sent after me. They thought I was shy, or afraid. In fact, I was so high I couldn’t move very fast and I was unnecessarily repeating a lot of motions.

  I made it to the front sitting room and took the last seat on the couch. The women engaged in small talk until Daisy, who worked the desk, observed a John through a strategically placed mirror outside the steel, electronic door. When Daisy called, “Customer,” a flurry of activity ensued. Women sat up straight, applied lipstick, pulled up or pulled down clothing, smiled on command, and struck seductive poses — all in a matter of seconds.

  Customers came and went all day, and I remained unchosen. When a man was buzzed in, he approached the desk, exchanged a few words with Daisy, and pulled out some money. Then he turned to us, and we smiled and struck poses. I learned all of this by observation. No one gave me any verbal instructions, although I was sent in on a few sessions that first day to watch. The john would select a woman, who would lead him to a large, gaudily decorated room. Large mirrors were standard, walls were painted in dark reds, blues, greens and black, and there was plenty of gilded trim on walls, mirrors, and bathroom fixtures. Most rooms included a large, raised bathtub, used for the most expensive sessions, which lasted an hour. Standard sessions began at fifteen minutes for a hand job at twenty-five dollars, or half-and-half (a fuck-and-suck session) at forty dollars. Prices and times varied according to the desires of the customers. The longest session available was one hour, included the use of the tub and a half-and-half, at one hundred dollars. English sessions (s/m) were strictly tailored both in cost and content by the desires and pocketbooks of the customers. Only certain women did s/m sessions, and I was told early on that I would be good at it. I think it was because I looked so angry.

  I remained unchosen well into that first evening, until a very high young man was buzzed in. All of the other women were busy with customers. He sat, or rather, fell to the couch beside me, and I began talking to him. Before I knew it, I had him talked into a hundred dollar session. I became the favorite of the “drunk crowd” after that. I wasn’t afraid of them and found I could talk them into just about anything.

  Several months after I began working, very early one morning, an extremely intoxicated man was buzzed into the room. He ended up spending the rest of the night with me and subsequently became a regular customer. I had several regulars by this time and even was occasionally the “top booker.” My trips to the street were far less frequent, but life at home was getting worse and worse.

  Linda said that her lack of interest in sex was due to her increasing dependence on heroin. I suspected it was due to my sexual involvement with men. When I would try to quit my work, she would pick a fight, and I would end up getting b
eaten.

  Money was a constant problem. There was just never enough. If I made two hundred or two thousand a week — and it varied that much — the money disappeared. That’s how we arrived at Christmas of that years with no money. Our Christmas dinner consisted of a half pound of ham and three scrambled eggs. We were both sick — dope sick. Linda said that if we weren’t together, we’d each be having a merry Christmas. She always said that it was our racial difference that caused us problems. I knew that it was drugs. I was in such denial that I remember wishing for Santa Claus to magically appear before morning with a tree and train. He didn’t, of course, and I never felt so stuck in my life.

  The months lumbered on. I lost my house because no mortgage payments had been made for over fourteen months. We moved to an apartment and I began seeing my early morning visitor on my own time. I lived with constant paranoia. Eventually I was fired from the parlor. I was taking too much time off work and coming in beaten. This is a very difficult period for me to put on paper, although I talk about it a lot. Losing my house was deadening. When I bought my house — during a period of sobriety in 1980 — I was the proudest woman around. I had so many hopes for Linda and me. Losing my house meant losing all hope that she and I would work out our life together.

  After I was fired, I managed to land a nursing position with a temporary agency. I was also seeing my john three or four times a week. Money was better than ever, but life was hell. My john was paying the rent, buying the groceries and giving me two hundred dollars each time I saw him. I was on methadone, which meant that my physical need for heroin was no longer a factor. Linda and I fought constantly about that fact. I was being beaten regularly and made several feeble attempts at suicide.

  There was one counselor at the meth clinic whom I would call whenever I had been brutally beaten. She said, “When you’ve had enough, you’ll do something about it.” And I did. It took months, but I did leave.

  Prostitution

  Rosie Summers

  Today I watched a black bird come down to the broken tree in front of me and stare at me for more than five minutes while I tried to begin this article. She stood so close, and cawed for so long, I believed she wanted to tell me something.

  When she left, my eyes stayed on the tree trunk, and its ridges and brown wrinkles looked so much like a woman’s labia. There was even a long, oblong hole in it, with the sky and the clouds showing through.

  Almost everything in nature — the tiny, prickly hairs on plants; soft, huge mountains in the distance; and the way that plants can respond by moving if you stare at them long enough, reminds me of women’s bodies. Is there something important about women, who carry life in their bodies and who are so much more orgasmic than men, that our society has almost been able to hide?

  I remember being a New York City prostitute, and coming home every evening to my East Village apartment to chain smoke cigarettes and sing the aching, lonely kind of pain songs that rock and roll radio stations still play. These are songs that’re sung by male voices — not women’s songs about being broken hearted and dumped — but aching, searching kinds of songs about being alone in the city or alone on the road.

  The neighbors recognized me as a woman who was probably crazy and also probably a whore, and they’d pass me on the narrow staircases without greeting me. Several times, though, I thought I heard people talking about me when I passed the other apartment doors.

  Every morning I’d get dressed in my Chanel No. 5, heels, and short dresses. My expensive shoes would be so high and so difficult to walk in that after hobbling down the stairs, I’d flag down a taxi to go to work.

  Although I worked in a massage parlor with other hookers, I experienced as much hatred there as I did in the outside world. Whenever I heard the phrase motherfucker, I listened real hard, because I came to think of that as my nickname.

  The large, black madam, who wore a nurse’s uniform and white shoes, would lean back against the icy blue walls and direct the conversation.

  “That motherfucker thinks she some kinda good whore, but I saw her lick that old man’s dick for five dollars. She ain’t no big money.”

  “Shit. Barbie? She ain’t no money.”

  “Shit. If I was a man, I wouldn’t spend no more than five dollars on that whore’s pussy, neither.”

  Nobody who isn’t locked up puts up with constant oppression, and the clever madam balanced her insults with kindness. Sometimes when I’d be walking back to the massage room, intent on giving some man pleasure (and intent on it, I believe, because I wanted to be loved) I’d hear other conversations.

  Madam: “That poor Barbie. I feel sorry for her. She’s adopted, you know.”

  C, my only enemy, who would be talking in a husky voice and making poor-baby eyes at me: “You’re just kind of an orphan, ain’t you baby?”

  Madam: “Shoot. If I was her mama, I wouldn’t give her up for nothing.”

  C: “Must’ve been a pretty little baby.”

  I’d skip off to the massage room, feeling loved for that entire trick, but then sometimes I’d come back to the other side of mind-bending, the cruel side.

  Me: “Somebody’s been calling me up all night, and scaring me by threatening me!”

  Madam: (Aside) “And that’s the only call that motherfucker ever gonna get, too.”

  I felt cut off from people, although I had sex with five or more men every day. At night, instead of counting sheep, I put myself to sleep with fantasy machine gun dreams. I’d shoot first the madam, and then all the tricks I could remember, until I fell asleep.

  “Was she any good? You don’t like that girl, do you, Mister Jones?” It was painful to have my insides used by someone and then a few minutes later to hear another prostitute loudly talking him into disliking me, so he’d like her better.

  “That whore ain’t givin’ out no good pussy. Mister Jones complained,” the madam’d sometimes say. The trick was always mister, but we were always either that whore, that bitch, or else baby or honey.

  After having had so many men inside me, poking in me without liking me, I began to get nervous and to do odd things. Several times I drove to visit a trick who paid me only twenty dollars and who lived seventy miles away from where I was, by then, walking the streets. Every time he laughed at me, enjoying himself for having made me come so far.

  Before I went to see him, I stopped in a diner, and in that small town, my walk, my short dress, my nervousness, and my being out of doors so long after dark, marked me as a hooker. I set off a sort of giggling hysteria in a group of men, who started excitedly talking about me and making jokes. “I wouldn’t touch her with a ten foot pole!” one of them said. And then, unless my pain has distorted my memory, he took a long mop pole and came up closer and waved the pole around at me, a woman who had been used to the point where she wasn’t “pretty” any more.

  He knew that any one of them could have slept with me that night, and that’s what made me something to hate. When I was on the street, I sometimes was subjected to men amusing themselves by honking for me, and then screaming or making ugly faces when I came close to the car, then racing off. Maybe it was because I looked men in their faces, which is something non-prostitute women train themselves not to do, and which I don’t do now, but I remember men on the street insulting me. I remember the New York City gay man staring at me a long time, and then loudly telling his friends, “Honestly, the things some men will buy!” And, as I write this, I suddenly remember a man in San Francisco who spat at me.

  * * *

  In the desert of New Mexico, there’s a women’s commune where the women dress mostly in glass Indian beads and turquoise, and live in teepees. When they have gatherings, women slowly climb up the cliffy, sky-surrounded mountains to chant and to sing to Mother Nature. They travel in beat up old pick-up trucks that have crystals and charms dangling from their rearview mirrors, and they come from adobe towns with Indian and Mexican names, towns that are famous for mystical visions.

 
In the summer women sit naked in peyote circles, and each woman sings out her life, even if it takes her hours.

  My name is Rosie, And I know every man. I know their bodies, and they say they know mine. But I’m like the wind on a hard, stormy night. I’m like the sun and the skies. I’m someone whom men will never know, I’m someone who’s pulsing with life I’m someone who’s filled with joy.

  * * *

  Picturing it, I see him lying on the massage table, and reaching out to touch my breasts. First I see the textured, green body suit, protecting my body like my body protects a sigh, which it does not express. He pulls at the body suit, and gets it to hang down from my waist. Then he reaches out, and begins to squeeze my breasts.

  Where do I go, then? Do I go into my fantasy — he is a woman with a dildo, who’s going to be fucking me — or do I actually travel here, somehow, into my future, to give myself strength?

  The man pulls my body suit down farther while he’s still sucking on my breasts. His hands are white against the green suit, and they squeeze themselves under the stocking, and finally under my underpants, into my vagina.

  He follows the ritual until he climaxes. “You were very good, Barbie,” he says, and he reaches out to touch my vagina, and give it an extra, free squeeze. “That’s a good little thing you’ve got there,” he says. “You try and keep it clean.”

  * * *

  I belong to a women’s theater group, and for several weeks in a row, I arrived with a new five minute play about prostitution.