by Aya De León
* * *
Half an hour later, Borbón had answered all the questions that the reporters had about her hurricane relief efforts, plus several veiled questions like: “Will you be returning to your Manhattan townhouse after this?” Which was really code for: “Are you still living with your New York Congressman husband Kevin Wolinsky, or are you living separately?”
“We’re done here,” Borbón said. “And I don’t want you snakes all hanging around to eavesdrop. Clear the room.”
Dulce’s heart beat hard as she slipped into the line of reporters and camera operators filing out. Zavier was chatting with a young woman in a Team Borbón T-shirt.
The white woman who had been sitting on her other side during the press conference drifted over to Dulce, but she kept her eyes on Zavier.
“Who’s your colleague?” she asked Dulce. “The stripper journalist he mentioned, back in New York.”
“Nobody you would know,” Dulce said.
“So . . .” the woman asked. “Can I get your card?”
Dulce recalled Zavier’s caution.
“I’m out of cards,” Dulce said.
“No problem,” the woman said. She offered her name and the outlet she wrote for, then stuck out her hand to shake.
“Nice to meet you,” Dulce said.
“And you are?” the woman asked.
“I was sitting next to you for half an hour,” Dulce said. “And you had no interest in meeting me til now? Why? Because I might know a sex worker who might talk to Borbón?”
“Your generation is killing the profession,” the woman said. “With your identity politics and your personal lives on social media.” She shook her chest facetiously, and spoke in a high, mocking tone: “ ‘I’m a stripper so that qualifies me as a writer. Here’s a bikini photo.’” She dropped the fake voice. “Here’s a newsflash for all of you: writing makes you a writer, not showing your tits.”
“I guess Delia was right to only speak to another current or former sex worker if regular journalists are shady bitches like you.”
The woman’s eyes opened wide.
“That’s on the record,” Dulce said and walked away.
* * *
Once they got outside, Zavier murmured in her ear: “We’re headed back to the hotel. Don’t say anything in the carpool, ok?”
During the drive, Dulce’s anxiety was boiling. Was this even gonna happen? And if Borbón really did give her an exclusive, would Dulce be ready to out herself publicly as a former sex worker? She wished Marisol were here. She would know what to do.
* * *
“So,” Borbón asked. “What kind of sex work?”
The two of them sat on opposite sofas in a luxury hotel. In daylight, the place was still beautiful, despite the lack of running water. By night it would be illuminated by candles.
What kind of sex work? Dulce felt tongue-tied, trying to remember the woke term she’d learned at the Vega health clinic. “Um . . . full service,” she finally said. Girls at the clinic said “prostitute” was kind of a slur. “Ho” was like the n-word. Only cool if people in the group said it to each other.
“Where did you work?” Borbón asked. It was more like Dulce was being interviewed. Interrogated, really.
“New York City,” Dulce said. “The Bronx, mostly.”
“You still in the business or no?” Borbón asked.
Dulce hesitated. “Before the hurricane, I sometimes had . . . like sugar daddies. But not working for cash. In the Bronx I used to have a pimp, but I got help to get out. From Marisol Rivera at the Vega Clinic.”
Borbón’s face lit up. “You know Marisol?” she asked.
“She picked me up off the street after I got beat up,” Dulce said. “When there wasn’t room in the shelter, she even took me up to her apartment. I never coulda got out without her.”
Borbón sighed. “She’s a special lady,” she said. “All heart. If you know her, then you’re legit.”
Dulce nodded. She didn’t really have a recorder, but she pulled out her phone.
“I don’t want this recorded,” Borbón said. “We can go paper and pen. Old school. Let me know if I’m talking too fast.”
Dulce nodded and brought out her notebook.
“Actually, this first part is off the record,” Borbón said. “These fucking journalists think they’re so goddamn liberal, but their contempt for sex workers seeps into their writing like toxic waste. They don’t even know.”
Dulce nodded.
“Okay, on the record now,” Borbón commanded.
Dulce picked up her pen.
“I just want to begin by apologizing to all my sisters who do sex work for denying the truth all those years. I just thought I could sanitize my past, you know?” Dulce scrawled as fast as she could, and Borbón waited for a moment. “Stripping is legal. It’s stigmatized but also kind of glamorized these days. Selling sex? Not so much.”
Dulce laughed and nodded. Like the rapper Nashonna might not get that same respect if she’d worked full-service.
“I just thought I’d be able to get away with it,” Borbón went on. “I guess in the age of the internet, there’s always some asshole who can find a platform to take a woman down. I know I could have just kept denying it. But I thought of the women I had danced with. They also knew I did full-service sometimes. We all did. None of their lives had turned out as good as mine. What would it be like for them if I kept lying? I felt like I was turning my back on them. I decided to speak out.”
“Takes a lot of guts,” Dulce said.
The older woman nodded. “So I, Delia Borbón, do officially acknowledge that yes, I was a stripper, and exotic dancer, whatever, for years. And those clubs were like . . . what is it Tyesha from the clinic called it? Sharecropping. The more you worked, the more you owed to the venue. Some days you could make enough stripping. But other times, you couldn’t. I was facing eviction one of those days, and a customer offered me a lot of money for a blow job. So I did it. Mostly I just danced. But there were always customers who wanted more. I knew the managers wanted us to offer more. I gave maybe a dozen hand jobs. Only two or three blow jobs. Just when I was really desperate for cash. I never did, you know, full sex because other girls said it was harder to do that and get back to dancing without a shower. Plus, they said it was hard to get them to use a condom. So there you have it. One of the three guys whose dicks I sucked has a big mouth and no loyalty or discretion.”
Dulce was writing as fast as she could, and realized that she would need to ask a question. Something bold. Something a non-sex worker might not think of.
“What are you most proud of from those days?” Dulce asked.
Borbón’s grave face split into a smile.
“Same thing as now,” she said. “I’m proud of my hustle. I was determined to chart a path out of the hood.”
Dulce nodded as she wrote.
“But not to turn my back on where I came from,” she said. “I just had bigger dreams than my parents or what the teachers could imagine for me.”
Dulce chose her words carefully: “How has this exposure affected your marriage?”
“Kevin knew,” Borbón said. “I never lied to him. I think he benefitted from the lie. Marrying an ex-stripper makes you edgy. Marrying an ex . . . I don’t even know what to call myself. I never used the word prostitute in my head.”
“Marrying someone who sold sex?” Dulce suggested.
“Yeah,” Borbón said. “Marrying someone who sold sex isn’t edgy, it’s distasteful in this society. It’s not distasteful to pimp women so hard in strip clubs that they have to sell sex. It’s not distasteful that becoming a mother is the biggest risk factor for female poverty. It’s not distasteful that there’s no economic safety net. It’s not distasteful that women are so underpaid and mistreated on jobs, from blue collar to administrative to professional, that selling sex looks like a better option. It’s not distasteful that women are so frequently raped and sexually harassed that it seems
like a step up to get paid for sex. Everything in society is set up to pressure women into compromising ourselves, one way or another, but then when we compromise, we get blamed and slut shamed. That’s what’s distasteful.”
Dulce scrawled frantically.
“Do you need me to repeat any of that?”
Dulce did. They spent a few minutes getting it down on the page.
Borbón looked down at her long gold nails. “I’ve met women who are proud to sell sex,” Borbón said. “Or feel empowered by it. But that wasn’t my story. I wasn’t proud, I just needed the money.”
“You don’t have to answer this,” Dulce said. “But you know your fans are wondering how Congressman Wolinsky is responding to the news.”
Borbón shook her head. “It’s been harder on Kevin than he expected. It’d been so long, and we thought I had gotten away with the lie. The crime of omission. We’re not separated, but yeah, he did leave unexpectedly to go to Washington, to take a little break.”
“What’s next for the two of you?” Dulce asked.
Borbón laughed. “A friend of mine suggested couples counseling,” she said. “I don’t know. I guess if things don’t smooth out, I’ll consider it.”
Dulce thought about Zavier. What would it be like, now that he knew she was a former sex worker? “What would you tell men whose partners have been involved in the sex industries?” Dulce asked.
Borbón looked out the window, then turned back.
“It’s really just like loving any woman,” she said. “Men are taught that a good woman is pure and doesn’t take up too much space or talk back. That she can be controlled. That her sexuality is a force for him to own. For him to use and enjoy. And that’s bullshit. Every woman out there was sexually alive before you met her, and thank God. Female sexuality isn’t a flower that gets irreparably crumpled after a woman has sex. It’s a surging force of nature. Before I married Kevin, my sexuality was alive and kicking. And I used it in the service of my own pleasure, but also for my own survival and to get ahead. And other people took advantage of me and exploited me, and sometimes I participated in my own exploitation. And that’s part of the story, too. How I learned to have this power and not let anyone exploit it. And that’s all part of what makes me a powerful woman. And Kevin is fucking lucky to be married to someone like me. And if he doesn’t respect what he has, then to hell with him!”
Borbón laughed, then put her hand on Dulce’s shoulder. “Okay, that last part really is off the record.”
“Good,” Dulce said. “Because I couldn’t keep up.”
Borbón chewed one of her gold nails. “I feel like that’s the end, but I want to give another line. Some sort of ta-da!”
“What would you say to the man who exposed you?” Dulce asked.
Borbón blew her breath out. “Two things,” she said. “First of all, it said he was in an unhappy marriage at the time. Motherfucker, I would never have gone to your wife and talked about what a pathetic whiner you were. Coming into the club, spending your money and begging me night after night for a blow job. Only getting one because you happened to hit me up when my rent was overdue. And second of all, to every woman who’s ever made a sexual decision she regretted. That decision did not diminish you. It added to your personal experience. You get to upgrade the system based on what you learned. If it harmed you, you get to heal from it. Nothing about your humanity is ever beyond repair.”
Borbón nodded, and Dulce finished writing out the phrase: “nothing about . . . your humanity . . . is ever . . . beyond repair.”
“What do you think?” Borbón asked. “Did that sound okay?”
“Are you kidding me?” Dulce asked. “That was amazing. That is about to inspire a whole generation of young women.”
“You are the best, mamita,” Borbón said, and flung her arms around Dulce.
Unexpectedly, they both began to cry.
Borbón waved a hand in a circle in front of her face to indicate her ruined makeup. “This is totally off the record,” she said.
Dulce laughed through her tears. “For me, too.”
* * *
“Sooooo,” Zavier said when she came back down to the hotel lobby. “You kind of came in to that press conference as my assistant and totally scooped me and every reporter in the Western Hemisphere.”
It was raining heavily outside. They stood around in the lobby waiting for it to let up a bit.
“I never been so fucking disoriented in my life,” Dulce said. “I lived through a goddamn natural disaster, and then I was talking to my biggest idol like we were just hanging out on the block or something.”
“So, at the risk of seeming like I’m trying to jump on your bandwagon,” Zavier said. “I would love to give you some advice, and some help.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “You better help me. I haven’t written anything since high school.”
He laughed. “That I can help you with. Piece of cake. But the other thing I think you need to know is that you have to be careful that you don’t become the story.”
“What do you mean?”
“If people can’t get a comment from Borbón, then the story is that she gave her exclusive story to you. People are gonna want to know your name, your history, which publication you’re writing for.”
“And which publication am I writing for?” Dulce said. “I don’t even know.”
“You can probably take your pick,” he said. “If I were you, I’d get on the phone with different outlets and get them to bid for your story. And then negotiate.”
“I don’t know how to negotiate with outlets,” Dulce said.
“I can help with that, too,” Zavier said. “Be a sort of agent on your behalf.”
Dulce blinked at him.
“What’s in it for you?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Do you want a cut?”
“A cut?” he asked. “De ninguna manera. I’m just helping you out as a friend. Some of these reporters are sharks. They’ll try to take you out for drinks and steal the story right out from under you. I might help you with editing, but I’m one hundred percent clear that this is your exclusive story.”
“Cool,” Dulce said. “I trust you. I wouldn’t even be in this amazing position without you.”
“I can’t believe you thought I’d take a cut,” Zavier said. “I’m a colleague, not a pimp—” He stopped suddenly. “Shit,” he began. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to—”
Dulce looked him straight in the face.
“I had a pimp,” she said. “In New York.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “You don’t owe me an explanation.”
“I met him when I was fourteen. He was the worst thing ever to happen to me. He’s dead now. That might have been the best thing ever to happen to me.”
“Dulce, I really like you,” he said. “I was hoping that after this interview we could maybe pick up where we left off. But now it feels weird. Like I’m trying to make a move because I know about your past.”
Dulce shrugged. “Everything is weird,” she said. “We’re in a fucking disaster zone, eating food out of cans. The phone service comes and goes. I’m sleeping in a room with you and three strangers. We have a camping lantern and I piss by candlelight. There is no normal right now.”
“My aunt was a stripper,” Zavier said. “I wasn’t supposed to know, but I heard her and my mom talking one night. I definitely figured out that her husband started as some sort of sugar daddy. I don’t know. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Dulce blinked at him. Was he trying to play her? With some fake I understand hustle? Maybe. But maybe not. She didn’t like the not knowing. So she would let him help her negotiate to find a publisher for this story. Help her write it. Get her back to the US. Maybe she’d even fuck him. But trust that he understood this part of her past? De ninguna manera.
* * *
The rain had gone from pouring to sim
ply raining hard. They needed to get going or they’d be stranded after curfew. Zavier offered his waterproof bag for her notebook and she gratefully accepted. The two of them headed out, each crouching against the rain, walking fast.
Halfway to the Lumineer Hotel, the light was fading. The rain finally softened to a drizzle, and without the sound of the downpour they could talk again. Both of them were soaked to the skin, but the evening was warm. It would have been a pleasant rainy stroll if they hadn’t needed to make curfew.
“So do you want to publish this under your own name?” he asked.
“Do I have a choice?” she asked.
Zavier shrugged. “If it was me, I might come up with a fake name.”
Dulce grinned. “I like it.”
They brainstormed ideas on the bridge into Old San Juan.
“You could be Lolita Lebron,” Zavier suggested.
“I’ve heard of her,” Dulce said. “Was she an actress?”
Zavier shook his head. “A militant,” he said. “She shot a congressman for Puerto Rican independence in the fifties.”
Dulce’s eyes widened. “Oh, we’re going the militant route,” she said. “I could be one of those four sisters in Santo Domingo I learned about in high school. The Butterflies. First book I ever read by somebody Dominican.”
He grinned. “The Mirabal-Reyes sisters.”
“Yeah but my dad is Cuban,” she said. “So I need some Cuban roots, too.”
“Celia Sanchez,” Zavier suggested. “She was part of the Cuban revolution.”
“That’s it, then,” Dulce said. “Celia Mirabal-Reyes. Maybe Celia M. Reyes for short.”
* * *
By the time they approached the hotel, it had stopped raining and was nearly dark. Dulce wrung out her hair. Her tank top and shorts would dry eventually.
At the Lumineer, the reporters were sitting around eating canned food and drinking from canteens. Zavier immediately went to the part of the lobby with cell reception to call his editor.
The moment he left her side, one of the TMZ reporters came up to Dulce and asked her for the time.
“I don’t know,” she said. “My phone’s not working.”
“So crazy here, right?” he asked. “We were eating beef jerky all day yesterday. But we got real food today. Wanna come get some dinner? We have actual salad. Meat that isn’t dried. I can get you a plate.”