by Yasuko Thanh
Instead, make him park, then you both take a cab to the hotel. If he won’t take a cab, don’t do the date. Two or three or five hundred dollars isn’t worth risking your life.
Go only to those hotels where you have protection. Parsa, the desk guy at the Golden Crown, keeps a baseball bat behind the counter.
Once in the room, never lock the door, never turn out the lights, never turn your back on a trick, which includes doing it doggy style, not that I would, because only nasty hos have sex rather than fake a lay, which cannot be done doggy style.
To fake a lay:
use two condoms
KY slathered between
lodge your hand in your ass cheeks, right against your perineum
guide his cock into the hole you’ve made.
Don’t close your eyes,
accept food or drink,
leave a plate at a restaurant, even if you must go to the bathroom.
He could arsenic you,
put sedatives in your vermicelli.
I could go on, but I think you understand that the quicker you realize everyone’s a predator waiting to stab, poison, bludgeon you, the sooner you’ll stay safe.
I wasn’t unhappy being a prostitute. Like breathing, or eating, or getting out of bed each day, working the streets was simply what I did.
People told me to smile more. “You look sad all the time,” they’d say.
“That’s just my face,” I’d respond. I meant it. Even on some nights when I swore that if someone offered me thirty bucks or “a real good time” again I’d pop them one. Or when people stopped by my corner and wanted to chat. Jesus Christ on a stick. I wanted to tell them, “If you walked into a bank you wouldn’t stop and chat with the teller for ten minutes. And if she didn’t give you more than the time of day you wouldn’t call her a cold bitch and ask Why are you girls so heartless?” I couldn’t explain that “I’m on my J-O-B.” They didn’t get it. Why can’t you be human and chat? God. Pissed off? Yes. But sad? I told myself I didn’t feel sad at all.
* * *
—
I was about to head home for the night when a muddy white Honda Civic pulled into the parking lot. I walked down the alley on Helmcken Street, and when the guy unrolled his window I stuck my head in. Empties littered the backseat, which was covered by a purple and green Mexican blanket.
“You looking for some company?” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Why maybe? You know you want to.”
“It depends.”
“On?”
“How much.”
“The minimum for a nice time is one-twenty.”
“What does that get me?”
“My hotel’s only five minutes away.”
“A blow job?”
“We don’t discuss anything like that here.”
“But I can get a blow job, right?”
I stepped back, lighting a smoke. “See, prostitution is not illegal. But soliciting for the purpose in a public place is.”
“Can you tell me in the car?”
“Just park and we’ll get a cab to my hotel. It’s only five dollars away.”
“But I have a car.”
“There’s no parking down by the hotel, silly.”
We flagged a cab and had gone less than a block when I saw the lights of a police car behind us. The cab pulled over. In the months to come I’d find out the trick was a cop, but that night the police pretended to arrest us both. They handcuffed him on one side of the car and brought me over to the other side.
A female officer arrived and seemed excited about getting to know me.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Really?” Smiled. “What’s he like?”
“He’s dreamy.”
“What’s his name?”
“Why don’t you ask him? He’s hiding. In my purse.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Hands on the car. Spread your legs.”
She dumped the contents of my handbag onto her hood as if to find him in there. They booked me into Willingdon, the youth detention centre in Burnaby.
* * *
—
The beds were laid out in two rows; that we were sleeping dormitory-style had something to do with renovations, the guard had said.
“Didja know C.J.?” A heavy-set girl with black hair had pressed her face so close that her breath touched my cheek. To distract her I turned to the stainless-steel counter above the sinks and started lining up my beauty products, ones the police had allowed me to put in a small bag to bring with me while they were searching my room.
“C.J.,” she hissed again. “She’s from Vic.”
“From juvie,” I said. “Yeah, I know her.”
“She told me you beat her up.”
“As if.” C.J. was huge. She was also my friend.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
She watched me wash my face. My hands shook, but the splashing motions disguised it. I was an expert in hiding things. Still, my fist down in the basin, my eyes closed—this was foolhardy. I opened my eyes quickly and dried my face off.
Then I lay down on my assigned bed. My back was to the girl but I could sense her standing there, looking down at me.
“You’re a fucking hooker,” she said. “That’s stupid.”
I looked up to see her resting her hands on her big fat gut. That’s when I realized. She wasn’t fat; she was pregnant. Very, very pregnant.
“What makes you so special?” I asked. “How are you going to take care of your baby?”
Her jaw dropped, her hands fell. I was going to add Go plan a B&E. Leave me alone, but the look in her eyes made me regret what I’d said. I rolled onto my side, away from her.
Then I felt something land in my hair. Wet, heavy, warm.
One by one, each of the girls in the dormitory took a turn spitting on me.
The rest of the night unfolded quietly. Before falling asleep I thought about the girls on the track, how different they were from that fat pregnant girl, how girls like her didn’t see us the way we working girls saw ourselves. It had never occurred to me before that no one else would ever appreciate our greatness.
They released me three days later, on an undertaking that included a red zone—a four-block no-go surrounding Seymour, Nelson, Helmcken, and Richards streets. My trial was set for July, three months away, during which time I wouldn’t be able to work the high track. Many pimps would have fired their woman, or abandoned her for the duration of her red zone. But Avery let me stay home, supporting me with the money his other women earned. It never crossed my mind that this was a business investment. I thought, This is something. Something real, like love.
* * *
—
He used to say we’d be together forever “unless I kill you or you kill me, and baby, believe me, I would do time for killing you.” I thought this was romantic. Some months earlier, while living at the Robsonstrasse, I’d been working day shifts. One afternoon at home I was wearing a sweater from Holt Renfrew, given to me by a trick. I didn’t like its beige colour, but I was fond of cashmere and I liked that it had the label of an expensive store sewn into the collar. I don’t remember what started the fight, but suddenly I was hanging by my neck from the living room wall, Avery’s hands around my throat, and what I remember most isn’t feeing hurt, or hate, or even a change in the idea that Avery loved me, but simple amazement. A bone-deep surprise to discover that people did this to each other. My cigarette burned uselessly in my hand as I hung by my neck in Avery’s grasp, the smoke spiralling. I could have butted it out in his eye. At the time, it didn’t occur to me. Instead of burning Avery, the cigarette’s cherry singed my sleeve. It wouldn’t be until the next day that I’d notice the hole in the sweater, the one that had somehow made me feel respectable. I sat down in an armchair to stitch the edges back together with the wrong-coloured thread.
It was easy to split myself in two. Shadow and self. I�
�d been doing it my whole life. Being hurt at the hands of a loved one was not an option for my alter ego. When assaulted she had a knack for rationalizing away her own victimhood. While I may have curled into a ball and cried, my alter ego did not, simply by refusing to look at her injuries. The denial of her own suffering helped her support the illusion that she was in control.
Love, she thought. Love the sinner, hate the sin. The Hamar people, she told me, say that women with scars are as strong as lions. They practise ritual beatings, and the bonding that occurs between aggressor and victim, the scars left behind, serve as proof that someone cared enough to hurt you.
Sometimes the beatings came every month. In the early days, my foreknowledge helped me accept them—knowing they were about to happen, their predictability like the rising sun, somehow freed me from my fear of them, of the results.
Avery hated the thing inside him as much as I did. What “made” him “explode” he said, controlled him, not the other way around. Telling myself that Avery had a mental illness, true or not, meant that instead of anger or self-pity I felt compassion for him.
“I know I’m bad. But I want to change. I want to be good. Good the way you’re good.”
I’d do anything I could to help him. He needed me. Anything it took.
I could see his pain. “I’m afraid,” he confessed. “I don’t want to be a failure. In your eyes.”
He cried in my arms, and I couldn’t have felt more tenderness toward anyone.
“You are good,” I repeated, stroking his hair. He needed my love, my understanding, my faith in him. “You are good.”
And despite his violent tendencies, Avery did make me feel loved. He made me feel special by telling me stories of his abusive childhood and broken home, secrets he’d never told anyone else.
He was not a closed man or a private man or even a reserved man. Still, no one knew his secrets. Or no one but me. Whatever else my pimp was, his rules of engagement were clear. He awarded me attention and affection. For the first time in my life I was the axis around whom someone’s life revolved. My old habits—the counting, the ritual touching—fell away in his presence. In return, all I had to do was pay him.
* * *
—
He moved with the grace of a dancer, his perfectly proportioned limbs, not overly muscular, carrying within them a kinetic intelligence, whether he went to the gym or not. He wore G-string underwear in a variety of colours: silver with gold stars, electric blue Lycra, teal with snaps at the sides.
Sometimes I braided his hair into tiny squares that spiked from his head like electrical wires.
I’d pull on each one. “Loves me, loves me not.”
We could go to Safeway together, rent movies, ride his motorbike, and not argue for hours. We didn’t need to act at being domestic: we were in love. He bought me diamond tennis bracelets while his other women went to work in leggings and plastic shoes; I wore the equivalent of what people spent on rent in a year. Avery took me dancing. I ate lobster whenever I liked.
He infused me, woke me up with his drawing in and pushing away, his telling me he loved me and then what I needed to do to win it, as if it were a race: Stick it out longer than any of the other five girls. Make him more money. Be more down. Help him with his—our—goal by procuring even more girls. That way we’d reach the finish line faster; the $500,000 we’d need to retire.
When I thought of Jay, or even Luna from school, I couldn’t remember who I’d been with them. That life seemed like the leftovers of a meal, scraped clean off the plate, tossed out without a thought.
I usually took a cab to work, but sometimes Avery drove me on his motorcycle, the wind against my bare legs, the summer air on my shoulders, the accelerating pace of the pavement beneath my knees when we rounded a corner. I loved the heart-thumping speed of the bike, the tremble of metal between my thighs, my quickening breath because of it.
Yet when we had sex, I couldn’t kiss him. We’d quickly developed beyond a normal pimp–ho relationship, but our sex was mechanical. In my dreams I saw him unbuttoning my blouse and letting his fingers linger. I saw myself riding him, sucking his cock, telling him what to do and how I liked it. In real life I lay beneath him like a plank, silent, fighting the thought that to enjoy was to take part in evil—to expose a vulnerability that, even while naked, must stay hidden. To enjoy was to break open, break apart, make it easier to be taken away in pieces.
There we were, our hopes set aside. Avery had wanted to be a dancer in music videos. Not only could he dance, he could sing. He serenaded me in the privacy of his car driving down Cambie Street’s tree-lined boulevard, Blood, Sweat and Tears playing on the stereo.
Our dream was to move to a small town. Buy land and a trailer. Start a business there, something down to earth. was where most Local prostitutes wanted to end up in West Vancouver or the British Properties or Shaughnessy. But not me. I didn’t want to end up anywhere—least of all surrounded by society’s symbols of success. It was never wise to think too much about the future, but I did. All I wanted was space. A little land, room to write. A kid or two. And if our lives felt a little like driving to our destination in the dark with no headlights, then it also felt like the stars were following us, brighter because of the dark.
Bridge of Helplessness and Chamber of Flames
Frances and I wound through the drunk, designer-clad couples that spilled from Richard’s on Richards nightclub. Frances had come to my place once to braid Avery’s hair into cornrows. She didn’t bore me like other hos who talked about what car they planned to buy next. We talked about cooking and the artistry of her hairstyles, not which salons sold the best product. We were approaching the corner when we saw the jumper. The woman clutched her balcony railing in the crook of her arm, wavered four storeys above the sidewalk, balanced on one leg. The wind lifted her hair off her back, making her look, for a moment, like an angel in flight. She swung her other leg over the street, then did a little dip as if testing the water of a swimming pool with her toe.
As if this was the most ordinary thing in the world, Frances passed me her smoke, turned her hands into a blow horn, and called, “Come on down. I’ll buy you a drink!”
“Yeah, me too!” I added.
Yuppies pressed each other off the sidewalk and onto the street for a better view. The crowd blew into their hands, hopped from one foot to the other, bored like people at a lousy movie. Where were the cops? On a Friday night the usual order of things was a cruiser every second car—they’d picked a crappy time to grab Chinese food.
“I’ll bet she’s drunk,” came a voice from the crowd.
“Squaw,” said another.
“Come on!” Frances called in her loudest voice. “Come down from there, now!”
The woman’s pointed foot swept over the crowd like a ballerina at the barre.
A nice-looking dude in a suit lit a smoke. Then he said, “Jump already.” A clubber from Richard’s. Why’d he say it? Was he sore because he had no girl to go home to? Or because he’d had one and lost her? Anger wanting a victim? Maybe before now he didn’t even know he had it in him.
Then more voices joined in. They grew in volume. I shook my head, unable to believe the scene that was unfolding.
“Jump, jump, jump!”
Four storeys above, she swayed.
“Jump, jump, jump!”
Who were these people? I looked around and didn’t see devils. Just ordinary individuals who, in between chanting for this woman to jump, talked about other things; I heard snippets about Did’s Pizza and would the Canucks make it to the playoffs?
Lori, a working girl we shared the corner with, appeared beside us. “Is she going to do it or what?” she said, drumming her fingers on her crossed arms. The commotion was making us all lose business.
Frances yelled, “Come down! This instant!”
The woman did. By letting go. She released her grasp on the railing and fell through the air as silently as a stone, and when she hit the si
dewalk her legs, arms, and shoulders seemed to fold neatly on top of themselves, like a bedsheet.
For a second no one spoke. Her fall, her crumpled body, had cast a spell. Everyone’s breath hung like a white stain against dark night air. Then the silence was broken by someone asking, “So is she dead?” She lay unmoving. Whatever spell her fall had cast disappeared and people rushed in to form a circle around the body. Someone took off his coat and threw it over her.
A man nudged her face with the toe of his shoe. “Too bad,” he said. “She was nice for a squaw.”
“I’ve got to sit down,” I said.
Frances and Lori followed me into the Korner Kitchen.
As usual, the coffee shop was full of girls with black sable coats and designer purses and compacts brought out over tables whose tops were graffitied and cigarette-burnt and whose undersides were dotted with chewing gum. They fixed lipstick and powdered their noses next to bar types who wore their Movado watches on the outside of their shirt cuffs. Someone was yelling for off-sales.
I sank into the softness of a booth. I wanted it to swallow me, absorb me, take me away. I needed the safety of four walls, the familiarity of the tufted seats, the glass pane separating me from what had happened outside. But the rigid red vinyl against my back prevented me from imagining I was anywhere but here—in a cheap diner on the track where on any given night a girl was crying into the pay phone; another, in the bathroom pissing blood from a beating the night before; a third, sitting in one of the horseshoe-shaped booths at the front adjusting her waist-length hair to hide a black eye. Groups of women with brand-new breasts discussed the pros and cons of enlargement surgery, said things like “Yeah, now I got no feeling in my nipples. But, you know, whatever.” Or rolled in the aisles like professional wrestlers, one woman vise-gripping another in her long, lean, tanning-salon-perfect thighs before grabbing a sugar canister and bringing it down on the other’s head to the cheers and hollers of men who enjoyed telling others they hung out at a place where shit hit the fan and cat fights had more hair, bare flesh, and exposed breasts than a porno.