by Yasuko Thanh
Because the truth was I had a boyfriend who wore Armani, who’d spent my trap on a new sports car. The truth was pimps didn’t retire, square up with their ho, and live happily ever after, and it was unlikely that my dream of co-owning a legitimate business with him would go anywhere. But Avery never disagreed with this goal, even as he neglected to explain the logistics of how we’d reach it.
There was no accidental quality about how he didn’t work me to the bone, dog me as other pimps did their women. Other hos sat in the Korner Kitchen bragging about who’d been beaten the hardest, who’d stayed out the longest. I refused to enter the contest for that evening’s Ultimate Victim. I appreciated Avery even as he was using me. I loved his silly sticky notes, the way he looked hunched over a Sega game controller, engrossed.
A reactionary person is like a foot blister, and thin skin, unable to withdraw from the source of its pain, has two choices: bleed and fester or grow calloused, hard. The shoe, though the cause, isn’t morally responsible. I couldn’t watch shows or read articles that depicted prostitutes as being unfeeling or downtrodden by men.
It felt too true. As did its opposite. How could I be “hard” when I was obsessed with love and being lovable? An obsession rooted in childhood. And in the same way I’d worked to excel academically and athletically, I now earned money to garner attention.
Manipulating someone’s weakness for personal gain is wrong. Still, in our world, to be pimped with kindness and decency amounted to the closest version of love we had. Avery wasn’t the monster society thought he was, and neither was I.
I tried to read Evelyn Lau’s work—she was a retired sex trade worker who’d gone on to become a successful writer—and I threw the paperback across the room.
* * *
—
Avery could change a windshield, detail a car. A decade earlier, before becoming a pimp, when I was barely out of kindergarten, he’d worked square jobs. His hands showed the creases and calluses of someone who’d fixed things under a hood. He could install a stereo system. This edge, his edge, would carry us out of the game.
I knew that, with my help, he could become the kind of person he deserved to be. Proud of himself.
I was too naive to understand that staking myself on his success could be used against me. If I’d bothered to think about it, I’d have seen what I had in common with the lobsters we threw in a pot, who never felt the boiling water until it was too late.
I could see him running his own shop, chatting with his employees in his garage with his arms crossed and his feet planted solidly on the ground. I’d do the paperwork. Avery said I was better at anything to do with paper. Money, forms. And he was right—he could barely spell, and would read magazines by looking at the pictures. I worked out five times a week, read library books on psychology, psycho-spirituality, gardening. Who needed a formal education when I was writing every day and making $150,000 a year?
* * *
—
Frances was three years older than I was. She turned twenty-one shortly after my eighteenth birthday. She was as tough as she was tender and as thoughtful as she was streetwise. She was my best friend. And like me, her gift of the gab had made her especially good at the upsell. We often worked together, performing doubles at the Golden Crown, a place that, no matter how dirty, always had clean linens.
Sometimes when tricks would ask what “someone like me” was doing on the streets, I’d say, “Because nowhere in the Western world is being a poet a paid profession,” repeating something I’d read. Probably in a book Frances had given me.
She’d introduced me to J.D. Salinger, loaning me her mother’s copy of Nine Stories. We’d shared our thoughts on his writing, and I’d given her my poems to critique. I wrote quatrains. Free verse. Villanelles in a binder with loose-leaf.
But one night Frances seemed out of sorts. She’d drunk enough wine from the Korner Kitchen that she wavered in her step and her cheeks had turned scarlet. Especially the scar under her right eye, which would have been as ugly as a garden worm on anyone but her.
We sat down with a trick on a bed at the Golden Crown. “Now that we’re in a private place we can explain your options. Like a menu at a restaurant,” Frances chirped in an unnaturally high voice. “And then, the sooner we can take care of finances, the sooner we can have fun.”
Frances noted the trick’s dubious expression and said, “Don’t worry about the place. We’re the main attraction.” Room 102 had Astroturf on the floor. It extended along the short hall that led to the washroom, where we put the first $120 he’d given each of us into our shoes for safekeeping.
She readied a washcloth at the sink and then let out a long, unladylike burp. I was going to ask her what was wrong but decided to wait until after the date.
Back in the room, I watched Frances cover the trick’s penis with soapsuds, touching it only through the washcloth. Then, straining to keep her gaze focused, she unrolled a condom on his half erection.
“Don’t light a cigarette,” she ordered him, sinking back on her heels, semi-naked, her thighs open, breathing heavily through a wrinkled nose. “Listen. It’s your money. If you want to spend your time smoking.”
He looked at her, puzzled. “I started by giving you a hundred and twenty each. And it’s been just five minutes—”
“Oh, come on. Chop-chop.” Frances weaved, trying to plant her lips on his cock. “Lie back.” She bobbed up and down, her lips pursed like a fish.
Chop-chop? I raised my eyebrows. Frances wasn’t tipsy, she was drunk.
“C’mon, Michelle, let’s go,” she said, using my street name. “He’s not even trying.” She faltered on the edge of the bed, her eyes hazily focused on the door.
She’d found out about a new wife-in-law the week before, and ever since she’d been drinking at work. I figured it was the stress. But I was on the verge of being fed up. We used to be a team. Now I had to weigh her liabilities against her assets.
I calmed the man down, telling him to feel sorry for Frances. “She lost a baby, miscarried last week,” I whispered. I appeased him by saying little things about how unloved we as prostitutes felt in general, and how when a man seemed neither interested nor stimulated it felt even worse. My tactic in these situations was always the same: talk fast and keep talking. Pump their egos. Make it so that walking away would make them feel big. Bigger than killing you.
In the cab back to the track Frances told me she’d had seven abortions and that she couldn’t have another.
“I know,” I sighed. I’d heard it all before.
Frances sighed too, and patted her belly. “I’m pregnant again.” She closed her eyes. For the moment she appeared content.
How many times had I thought about the vast possibilities of our future? I’d forget about Avery and Frances would forget about the man who’d beaten her so badly she’d locked herself in a bathroom and tried to slit her wrists to escape the pain. We’d pack our bags and hitchhike east, living off the kindness of truckers, sleeping our way where we needed to go. Or we’d buy one-way tickets to South America, fall in love with poetry-quoting leftists, and die fighting corrupt government. Or run away to the hills of California, where she’d grown up, and live freely, without clothes or disguise. Frances would give birth in a commune and I’d become old and wise, spouting adages like rivers. We knew each other inside out and could finish each other’s sentences.
Much later, when Frances went missing I filled the pages of my journal with all the things I used to say to her over coffee in the Korner Kitchen as we waited for a cab back to the track from the trick hotels on Hastings. I told my journal what was on my mind, recorded the troubles I was having, and, rereading, tried to make sense of it all. The way Frances had. Tried to supply myself with recommendations and advice the way she’d always been able, in an uncanny way, to reflect my best thoughts. Coming from her, my half-baked ideas made sense. But what I seemed unable to do was offer myself the understanding and compassion Frances had alwa
ys given me.
* * *
—
In the years to come there’ll be occasional unconfirmed sightings. Avery swears he’s seen her on the Surrey track. Fellow working girls say Hastings, or Broadway, or a drugstore aisle buying toothpaste. One night a woman calls for me on the Korner Kitchen pay phone. “No, she didn’t leave her name or number,” said the working girl who answered. “No message.”
* * *
—
Gina, my wife-in-law, licked a dollop of mayonnaise off Avery’s index finger. I sat on the couch at the Mansion after-hours across from her and downed champagne, thinking how I’d like to tighten my fingers around her neck.
The after-hours was an actual mansion in Shaughnessy, hidden by maple trees and a gated driveway in a neighbourhood of Spanish villas and imitation Tudor castles. How did I get here? Avery, taking us both out at the same time. A man got his respect when he kept his women in line, and nothing showed it more than taking them out as a pair, like cufflinks, he said. So why did it bother me? We knew what was what and what was real—he just had to spend more time with her because she wasn’t as strong as I was, had so many insecurities.
“I love your new extensions, Gina.” I smiled. “I’ll bet hardly anyone can tell they’re synthetic instead of real hair.”
Gina’s last pimp had cut off her hair in punishment. I should have felt sorry for her, but my sense of injustice at having to share my man in the first place made that impossible. She’d brought it on herself. How could she have tried to kiss him when her breath had smelled like condoms?
Avery slammed down his glass. I’d been doing this all night long, fucking with her, and this was the final straw. He grabbed my elbow and wrenched me outside.
The patio flagstones held onto the heat of the day and felt warm under my bare feet, but the air, cold and dry, rested on my shoulders like the hands of a distracted masseuse.
“What’s your problem?” Avery hissed. “Can’t you see what I’m trying to do here?” He flicked ash from his cigarette into a planter. “We’ve been through this.”
“What about me?”
“Yeah? What about you?”
“You haven’t even danced with me.” I sobbed quietly. “Maybe I wanted to dance, too.”
“I don’t think you should have any more to drink tonight,” he told me.
I lowered my head, sure everyone was watching through the long, tall windows. Gina would see; everyone would know that I’d been put back in his pocket.
Through the glass I glanced at pimps reclining on sofas, hos snacking on plates of curried goat. Up the spiral staircase were bedrooms with massage oils, dildos, collars, and chains. A man was leading two women into one of the rooms, spilling red light into the hallway.
I wondered if Avery had ever taken Gina up there, their giggles fading as he closed the door behind them. Once, in anger, I’d even asked him, “How do you guys fuck? I mean, literally. She’s six and a half feet tall.”
For the past few months I’d been painting elaborate pictures of what she might be like in bed, trying to put myself in his position, imagining what he found unique about her. Then I imagined myself, how it might be, could be, the next time he spent the night with me. Could I outdo her?
Not while scared of caressing his cock, not while lying there flat as a surfboard.
All I ever did was lie there. I had no idea why I couldn’t engage with the act, even when I wanted to. When I was alone in the hotel room, waiting for Avery, the idea of sex could be so lovely. But once he showed up with his suit bag and eel-skin toiletry clutch I’d begin thinking of the slickness with which Gina and he became one, the painless way their bodies fit together with the ease of puzzle pieces, and I’d be overcome by feelings of personal failure that invaded our already infrequent love-making.
That night, after Avery dropped Gina off at home, he turned to me in the backseat. “Why are you sabotaging my game? How many times do I have to explain? I’m working for our money.”
“You’re acting like I’m a tip,” I said, “and not your main at all.” I was still drunk enough to put up a fight, to dare try.
At a red light I hopped out of the car. I heard his tires screech behind me but I didn’t look back.
He must have parked and gotten out, approached me from behind. But I heard no footsteps.
He knocked me to the ground. “Have you been wasting my time?”
I got up and then stomped toward Nelson Street. It could have been any street; it didn’t matter where I was stomping to, just away.
* * *
—
We lived in hotels until I was eighteen. I never did buy new luggage. We moved into a brand-new condo building in the Fairview Slopes neighbourhood, ten minutes from the business district over the Cambie Street Bridge. We were the first tenants. I loved having my own place, not having to pay for it at a reception desk each night. Avery hung his suits in the closet, lined his cologne bottles against his bathroom mirror, making the house a home even as he was still shuttling back and forth between the hotel rooms of my wives-in-law. I had my own bathroom, off the bedroom, and ideas about how I wanted to decorate: I’d start with an Asian motif—lacquered screens, teak chests, medicine cabinets with many drawers.
During that summer we scoured flea markets, warehouse furniture outlets, home electronics stores. Only many years later would I realize the value I’d come to place on these excursions together. Couples bought living room sets when they intended to spend their lives together. No one bought a new bed if their relationship wasn’t going to last.
We set the black leather couch diagonally against the corner of the room where it contrasted with the white walls. I put a brass magazine holder at one end of the couch and a brass planter stand holding a marble ashtray at the other. Against one wall I’d arranged a torchiere lamp, a Kenwood stereo, and a six-foot potted palm. Three square windows on the south-facing wall had small plants in each, silhouetted by sunbeams. On the spotless grey carpet was a mirrored coffee table anchored in its precise centre by a vase the colour of jade.
We began taking biannual trips to visit my family on Vancouver Island, catching a ferry to Victoria in the morning and returning that night. My parents and I hadn’t reconciled so much as declared an uneasy truce: we spoke of nothing that “mattered.” And the occasions when I chose to visit—my birthday, Christmas, cheery occasions in the first place—helped keep the mood light and upbeat. Avery would bond with my father and charm my mother, who would laugh at his jokes. Neither of them knew, of course, what truly lay between Avery and me.
PART II
TEA OF OBLIVION
Realm of the Dead
The Greek word enantiodromia refers to the way things change—the tendency for night to become day, for everything, given enough time, to turn into its opposite.
One night I had a bad date, no more or less violent than others I’d had before, and I went home thinking no more about it. Back at the condo there was no sign of Avery. Fine, I’d take a bath; I wanted one anyway, with lots of bubbles, nice and relaxing, and candles on the edge of the tub. I ran the water and had begun undressing when tremors started to rack me.
The man’s face had, without warning, jumped back into my head as the bathwater was running. Panicked, I checked the lock on the front door. Then, running on instinct, I stopped the bath, pulled the coffee table into the hall and pushed it against the door, rolling the stereo there too, thinking it would help block the entrance even though it was on wheels. My thinking was primal. I was trying to barricade myself, convinced the bad date was en route to find me.
The panic slowly subsided along with the bath bubbles. But it didn’t disappear entirely.
Over the coming weeks it reared its head anywhere and everywhere, often when I least expected it—while brushing my teeth, measuring coffee into the machine, in a deli with a bag of pierogies in my hand. I’d begun to dread going to work with an intensity I’d never felt before, my fear of being killed th
e outcome of an unlived life.
Out of the blue I thought, I’ll be dead one day.
The absurdity of this, of the phrase itself—Be dead? The two states were mutually exclusive—would knock the wind out of me. Life had no purpose. Existence meant nothing in a world where I could lose six friends in a year.
Two had been murdered, one had OD’d, one had shot himself, and two had been diagnosed with AIDS. Those two weren’t dead yet, but in 1989 all we knew about AIDS was that it killed. Up until then I’d managed to banish my fear of violent dates, of becoming HIV-positive, through my alter ego. Whose name was Michelle, my street name.
Michelle shared my personal work ethic, but unlike me she didn’t dwell on things. Not death. She told me I overanalyzed. According to Michelle, there was no time for reflection, only for fighting.
She robbed dates, she upsold them, she took advantage anywhere she could. She was ruthless, calculating, and frighteningly efficient. She was tougher than me, and in that vein more willing to accept the things I feared—arrest, disease, violence, murder—for the sake of love.
It didn’t matter to Avery whether I received a criminal record; he viewed arrests as part and parcel of the trade. The last time I’d been arrested I’d even been sentenced to therapy by the court, but Avery cared as little about my sentence as he did about my tough, violent dates.
Avery saw women as stepping stones; Michelle saw men as tools; both measured people by their munificence. Avery manipulated Suko’s overprizing of love, and Michelle manipulated tricks’ loneliness; both played people’s hopes for profit.
Suko knew tricks weren’t worth the intensity of her hatred, but in her fear of losing Avery, she allowed Michelle, like a mistreated hound, to protect her owner.